The Fear Trilogy
Page 64
She stumbled forward as the slide locked back, the gun impotent.
Abigail surveyed the aspen grove—no movement, no sound save for the hiss of rain and snow falling on the Glock’s smoking suppressor.
She heard a soft whistle behind her, looked back, saw blood boiling and sucking back into the hole in Isaiah’s chest.
She threw down the machine pistol and began to run.
1893
82
Lana standing by the living room window, staring through frosted glass at the crowd of carolers come to serenade her this Christmas night, their faces awash in candlelight, Silent night, holy night, a figure stumbling up the alameda toward the front door, Darkness flies, all is light, the choir faltering, Feel free to get the fuck off my yard, the carolers dispersing, Lana retreating to the Steinway, seating herself at the piano bench, thinking, My playing soothes him, perhaps some Brahms, the keys tinkling icily as the front door opens, slams, the meter quickening with her heartbeat as his boots pound the hardwood floor, his footsteps and the piquant waft of cactus juice moving toward—
• • •
The stillness shook her from the dream.
Lana opened her eyes—starry and cold beyond reason, the horse standing in snow to its stomach, wind-broke and panting.
She was high above the timberline, between two promontories that seemed vaguely familiar, masses of rock and ice in black relief against the navy sky.
She realized she’d seen them two and half years ago through the dusty window of a coach that summer afternoon she’d first made the long trip to Abandon, though the wilderness had looked quite different then—greened out and only pockets of dirty snow in the shadowed mountain flanks. This was the crest of the main wagon trail, a twelve-thousand-foot pass between a pair of knobs collectively named the Teats.
Having slept with her head drooped the last several hours, she winced from a neck crick as she assessed the moon’s position in the sky, estimating the hour to be approaching midnight. Thank God the horse seemed to know the way, although she wondered how much farther she could push this salado. But what was the alternative? Dismount, unfasten the apron straps, and spread out the bedroll? Star-pitch in six feet of snow?
Falling asleep on the way out of town, her feet had tingled with cold. Now they hung in the stirrups, disturbingly innocuous, a complete lack of sensation that she hoped was warmth.
Her hands ached, which she took for a good sign, balled up into fists inside the mittens to conserve heat. She had a suspicion it was lethally cold, but in the absence of wind, the thirty-below air temperature felt less pronounced.
Lana turned in the saddle, looked back the way she’d come—a smooth snowy slope bright as day under the moon, bruised only by horse tracks that more resembled the delicate indentation of a sandpiper’s footprints on a beach.
Miles away, she could see the opening to Abandon’s box canyon, the town itself hidden from view.
Again she traced the path her horse had taken, following the tracks five hundred feet back down the slope, across a narrow bench, then one last dip toward timberline, where at that moment one of the trees broke away from the forest and moved upslope.
Stephen Cole, she thought.
She attempted to gauge the distance—a mile, mile and a half at most.
He’s following my tracks.
She looked at what lay ahead—it appeared as if the trail descended gradually over the next few miles, then dropped into the forest, where it paralleled the course of what she recalled was a river in the summertime.
Far, far on—ten, maybe fifteen miles beyond this drainage at whose headwaters she stood—something glowed in a distant valley.
Silverton.
It seemed impossibly far.
• • •
Lana darling. Could I steal your attention?
Her fingers rest on the ivory keys, piano bench squeaking as he eases down beside her, his breath heavy with a strange-smelling smoke and soured by tequila, maybe the better part of a jug, though she doesn’t know for sure. He can hold the liquor of three high lonesomes.
Why are you dressed up like a sore toe?
It’s Christmas, John.
Is it. He unbuttons his claw hammer, rising slightly to straighten the tails. I’m not back to stay.
She looks up at him, his eyes turned inward, dreamy with opium, pupils huge black disks reflecting the candles that line the top of the Steinway.
John, you aren’t yourself.
Thank God for that. He grins, something rote drunkenness rarely elicits.
You went to that hop-alley den, saw your celestial. I can smell the smoke on—
This is engaging beyond all expectations, but they’re holding up the game for me.
How much?
That grin again.
How much?
Down to my last chip, as they say, although it isn’t really a chip in the conventional—
How. Much. Did you lose?
It would appear that Mr. Carson is now the proud owner of our casa.
What?
It was the worst streak of cards any man has ever drawn. Everyone at the table agreed.
You gambled our home?
Well. Yes. But all hope is not lost. The game took an interesting turn.
Lana tugged at the reins and pulled up just shy of the forest, the Teats looming under the brilliant smear of the Milky Way, and saw, not half a mile back, the rider progressing toward her.
She reached down and patted the horse’s neck a moment before booting it on.
• • •
The forest dark save for when she moved across glades, the sky like ragged spiderwebs through the branches, the silk glistening with stars, and so quiet when they stopped, she could hear the pulse of the albino’s tired heart.
She shifted in the saddle, the leather creaking.
The odor of the horse smelled strong in the cold.
She listened, heard nothing but the occasional clicking of her teeth, like Morse code in the night. She touched her heels to the horse and rode down through the spruce.
• • •
An hour later, she passed through a blowdown, the firs all bent over and tangled up in themselves like spilt matches and dusted with fresh snow, the horse threading its way through the felled trees like it had come this way before.
In the forest below, an elk bugled.
The moon low in the sky behind a mountain, the stars teeming, the horse wavering, Lana shivering under her white cape, trying to stave off a sleep that taunted her with the rhythm of the hooves breaking powder.
• • •
The horse would have crushed her, but it neighed two seconds before toppling, and Lana woke, just managing to drag herself away from where its hindquarters crashed into the snow.
She scrambled to her feet and wiped the powder out of her face, found herself standing among aspen, the snow to her chest and the stars obscured, yielding to dawn.
The horse lay on its side, blowing deep, snorting exhalations that weakened as she listened. She wanted to speak to the albino, give the animal some measure of comfort, but she could only squat by its head and stroke its great jowls until its heart quit beating and its big eyes traded their pained intensity for the empty glaze of death.
83
Lana struggled on through the aspen, the numbness extending up from her feet into her ankles, her shins. Even her knees were beginning to burn.
She was passing through a glade and noting the first rumor of warmth in the sky when she heard the snort of a horse.
As she looked back, a branch snapped somewhere in the grove.
The cold was momentarily displaced by fear.
She bounded into the woods, ripped a spruce branch from a sapling, and doubled back into the glade, proceeding on, using the branch to sweep her new tracks smooth, reentering the trees after thirty yards, thinking if she could find a ramada, or throw together a brush shelter of some kind, maybe he’d pass her by.
The voice stopped her.
“Help!”
She turned and peered between straight white aspen trunks back out into the glade.
Where her tracks branched stood a gray-cloaked girl with long black hair, face as white as china in the dawn light, big black eyes shining. She recognized this child, having seen her in Abandon.
“Please, ma’am!” the child called out. “Help me!”
Lana hesitated, something urging self-preservation, telling her to just keep heading down through the aspen.
It’s a child, for Godsakes, she told herself.
A tuft of cloud went pink above her as Lana waded back into the glade.
The child turned and watched her approach, trembling with cold. Lana stopped several feet away.
She gestured toward the woods, trying to ask where her horse was, but the girl didn’t catch her meaning.
“You wasn’t supposed to leave.”
Lana mouthed, “What?”
Parting the manga, reaching into her cloak, the girl said, “God put you and all the other wickeds in it. Papa told me all about it. And he says I gotta send you back.”
Staring down the bore of a large revolver, the child thumbing the hammer, Lana lunged, seizing the slender wrist with half-frozen fingers, the gun shoved up at the sky, the concussive shock of the report rattling her eardrums.
The gun disappeared in the snow and Lana pushed the child down, thinking, He’s coming, and as if the thought itself held the power of incantation, he appeared, wrapped in a lambskin lap robe and moving at a single-foot rack out of the woods on a starred blood bay, the full-stamped saddle groaning in the cold.
He checked the horse by the strap and dismounted, limping toward her and grasping his leg where she’d stabbed him, his face wrenched up in some brand of agony.
The child sat up, crying, “She pushed me, Papa. She pushed me.”
Lana knelt down in the snow, hands digging through powder, searching for the revolver.
Her mittened fingers grazed something hard. She grasped it.
The preacher five feet away.
She pulled on nothing but a root as his weight came down on her, the snow and the subzero cold biting every square inch of exposed skin. He turned her over, his eyes slitted mad, gums the color of blued steel, and he worked to pry her hands away from her face, his fingers wrapping around her neck, Lana staring up at the preacher and the purple sky and the child’s inquisitive face.
“Go over by the horse, Harriet,” he said.
“I wanna watch.”
“Now.”
As the child moved away, he began to squeeze.
• • •
What kind of turn?
Her husband smiles, his fingers pattering on the last two keys, right foot tapping the damper pedal.
You remember Mr. Sakey?
Yes.
I hear y’all swapped words two days ago.
Lana brushes a wisp of blond hair behind her right ear.
He bumped into me at the market.
And you called him a fucking capper, took him to task for—
He isn’t your friend. He dragged you into all this, John. Crying now. It’s ’cause of him. You aren’t the same man you were before you made his—
You own a razor tongue, Lana. Ought to know better than to set it loose on a man like Sakey.
I have a truthful tongue. You lost our house.
I’ll get it back.
He reaches into his jacket, pulls out a razor, sets it on the piano.
How? With what money? Think they’re just gonna let you back in the game on credit? They’re probably all laughing at you as we—
I told you. I still got one chip left, and it’s better than any hard chink or banknote.
He shuts his eyes, and she thinks he’s on the verge of losing consciousness, hoping he is, his arm reaching for the top of the Steinway, between candles, fingers closing on a fist-size geode, halved and inlaid with amethyst, a prehistoric egg with purple crystals that flash in the candlelight as he swings it at her head.
• • •
The world graying, purple and black spots blooming like supernovas, blotting out the sky, the preacher’s face, Lana thinking, I’m dying in this glade, her hands tearing open his duster, his frock coat.
“It’ll be over in a minute.”
Her left hand caught in an inner pocket, fingers grasping a piece of metal.
• • •
John squeezing her throat, the world graying, purple and black spots blooming like supernovas, blotting out the ceiling, her husband’s face, Lana thinking, I’m dying, clawing at his eyes.
I’m sorry, Lana. I have to get back in the game.
• • •
The murder of color, gray fading toward black, the preacher apologizing, his tears speckling her face, salting her eyes, and on the edge of perception, a distant woomph, trailed by mounting thunder.
• • •
I love you, Lana.
Oxygen-deprived panic.
Unconsciousness.
Dreaming, John, you need help.
• • •
The pressure on her throat subsided.
Stephen Cole stood up, color returning to the sky, to the man.
She coughed.
He looked away from her, eyes asquint.
It sounded like a barrage of gunshots, and then she realized they were aspen, snapping like firecrackers.
• • •
Her mouth full of warm, liquid rust, choking, and pain beyond her three miscarriages combined, like she’s swallowed lava.
Lana sits up, light-headed.
Alone in the living room, beside the piano bench, walls candlelit, the front of her gown soaked with blood, which still pours from her mouth.
• • •
Lana sat up.
The preacher simply disappeared, exploding back in a wall of powder, and she moved, too, glimpsing sky and snow and sky again, somersaulting, the trees screaming by, saw the horse sawn in two by a jagged aspen, mushrooming into a pink cloud, Stephen Cole ricocheting off a boulder.
• • •
She reaches into her mouth and screams.
• • •
Everything stopped, the air fragrant with crushed spruce and freshly hewn wood, Lana surprised to see the sky, that she wasn’t buried in snow.