by Blake Crouch
He says, “Oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“Nothing, it’s…everything’s fine.”
“I’m so glad we came on this vacation,” Jessica says, but she’s turned into the Viking Goddess, the ice ax run through her throat, blood pulsing out of the side of her neck and making a sound exactly like a lawn sprinkler.
Ron tries to stand, thinking if he can walk outside into that clear morning light and climb into his Benz, Jessica will be there. He can make this real.
“We have to stretch this out,” he says, but the light passing through the windows has already begun to erode, the darkness encroaching so fast he can no longer see across the table, and then he’s back in the snow cave, curled up against the freezing wall, and so despairing, he believes he’s gone to hell, recalling from his collegiate reading of Dante’s Inferno (as if his subconscious has retrieved the most horribly perfect memory shard just to fuck with him) that the innermost circle of the underworld is built of ice.
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Ron rises up slowly out of the trench.
It has stopped snowing, the sky blackish-cobalt, infected with stars.
He thinks he hears voices on the far side of town, but as he spins slowly around, he sees nothing but dark houses, smoke the only movement, trickling out of chimneys.
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The snow comes to his knees.
He jogs through the powder, staying on the west edge of town where backyards border a stream that has all but frozen over, eyeing the dark windows of the houses he runs by.
The stream curves him back toward Main as he approaches the north edge of town, and ten minutes after striking out from the snow fort, he moves past the city park and the torched Benz, the frame of the SUV having cooled just in time to allow for the collection of a delicate half-inch of powder.
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The sign reads, “Road Closed Due to Hazardous Driving Conditions.”
Ron swings a leg over, briefly straddling the yellow gate.
He falls onto the other side, engulfed by snow, stands up and brushes his clothes off as best he can, his fingers stiff, on a welcome descent from excruciating toward a beautiful numbness.
Beyond exhaustion, he sets off at the fastest walk he can manage, while in the east, the sky lightens above a skyline of jagged peaks—a warm lavender that chokes out the stars.
He trudges on through the predawn silence, crying, thinking, Jess is dead.
Passes another sign: “Aspen 23.”
The road climbs at a five percent grade, and he stops, breathless after an hour of walking, looks back, sees the valley the town rests in five hundred feet below where he stands.
He inhales a shot of cold, thin air. The spruce trees on the left side of the road droop with snow. Off the right shoulder, the mountainside falls away in a series of cliffs and steep forest, a thousand feet down to a frozen river.
He hears a distant growl.
The way the echo carries, it sounds like a vehicle coming down the mountain, but the lights—four of them—race up the road out of Lone Cone.
In the calm, subzero air, he studies the tone of their motors, the velocity with which they travel over the buried highway.
Snowmobiles.
He starts running, gets ten steps, then stops, looks back down the road—a narrow plane descending into Lone Cone, his tracks as clear as day.
Up ahead, the road makes a sharp left turn with the contour of the mountain.
Nothing to do but run, his arms pumping again, the momentary adrenaline charge making up for the loss of air.
The whine of the motors sounds like a swarm of giant bees closing in as he reaches the curve in the road, the noisy snowmobiles dropping into silence as he puts the mountain between them and himself.
He looks back over his shoulder trying to—
A horn screams.
He turns back to face a huge orange truck, ten feet and closing.
Ron bee-lines for the left shoulder and dives into a snowbank as the plow rushes by, burying him under sixty pounds of snow as the blade scrapes the powder off the road.
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Ron lies on his back, suffocating in darkness, clawing at the snow and on the verge of losing consciousness.
His hand breaks through, fresh air flooding in, accompanied by idling snowmobiles and nearby voices.
He pulls his hand back into his chest, wondering if he’s been seen, enough of the snow on top of him pushed away to glimpse a piece of the morning sky and an overhanging fir tree.
Two helmeted figures walk into view, Ron praying he won’t have to fight, his fingers so numb he can’t even feel them holding the ice ax.
The two figures gaze up the mountainside for several minutes.
One of them shrugs.
Then they walk back into the road, out of view.
He can hear them talking, can’t pick out a single word.
After a while, the snowmobiles wind up and speed away.
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By midmorning Ron has covered three miles. It should have been easier traveling on the plowed highway, but his legs hurt so much the improvement is negligible. The exquisite pain makes concentrating difficult, and sometimes he forgets to listen for the distant, insect-whining of the snowmobiles.
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At eleven a.m. he crawls up the highway, the pavement sun-warmed under his swollen, frostbit hands that have turned the color of ripe plums.
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Ron lifts his head off the road, the surrounding snow so brilliant under the midday sun, like diamonds, he can’t see a thing but brightness.
He might have been hallucinating, but he feels reasonably sure that something’s approaching, can’t tell from which direction or the size of the incoming vehicle, realizes that a part of him (gaining greater influence by the minute) no longer cares if they find him.
The next time he manages to raise his head, he’s staring into the grill of a Dodge Ram, hears the sound of a door swinging open, glimpses heavily-scuffed cowboy boots stepping down onto the road.
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The exchange of light and darkness as the firs scroll by and the sun blinking at him between the trees has the same discombobulating effect as a strobe light.
Ron pulls his forehead off the glass and looks across the cab at the grizzled driver—long, gray hair, a beard as white as a sunbleached skull, black sunglasses, and beneath all that ancient hair, a face so gaunt it does more to underscore the bones beneath.
He looks over at Ron, back at the road.
Ron whispers, “Where are we going?”
“Huh?”
“Where are we going?”
“What were you doing laying in the middle of the road, son?”
Ron feels exceedingly strange, a degree of weakness worse than the recovery following the three marathons he’d run in his twenties combined.
He wants to answer the man, but with the lightheadedness, he fears he might say the wrong thing, if there is a wrong thing to be said, so he just repeats himself: “Where are we going?”
“You were in Lone Cone last night?”
Ron sits up a little straighter, strains to buckle his shoulder harness.
“Yes. My wife and I.”
“Where’s she?”
Ron blinks through the tears that well up instantly in his eyes.
“You ain’t saying nothing,” the old man says, “but it’s plenty.”
They ride on in silence.
Another sign: “Aspen 10.”
“Used to live in Lone Cone,” the old man says. “Beautiful place. Moved up the road a ways fifteen years ago. Couldn’t take another winter solstice. I ain’t saying it’s wrong or right, or hasn’t had something to do with keeping that town like it is, but for me…I couldn’t do it no more. Every year, there’s talk of quitting the blot altogether. Probably happen someday. God, I miss that town.”
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The truck stops under the emergency room entrance of the Aspen Valley Ho
spital, and the old man shifts into park.
“I can’t go in there with you,” he says.
Ron reaches down and unbuckles his seat belt, puts his hand on the doorknob.
“Hold on there a minute, son.” Ron looks up at the old man, who removes his shades and stares back at him through one bloodshot, jaundiced eye, one perfectly clear and perhaps a size too large—glass. “It ain’t often someone manages to slip away.”
“I just left her.”
“Wasn’t a thing you could’ve done, so you might as well start letting that go. But what I’m trying to tell you is this. Twenty years ago, a woman got away. She went to the Aspen police, told them everything that was done to her, how they murdered her husband, and you wanna know what happened?” The old man points a long, dirty finger into Ron’s shoulder. “She died in prison four years ago. Convicted of drugging her husband and setting him on fire in their car while on vacation in the peaceful town of Lone Cone. You can’t go up against a whole town, son. You hear what I’m saying? They’re already preparing for you to come back with law enforcement making crazy claims. Don’t do it. Don’t ever go back there. You walk into that hospital and tell them you and your wife got lost in the mountains, and you barely made it out.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s the only chance you got.”
Ron opens the door, climbs down out of the enormous truck.
As he turns back to close the door, the old man reaches across the seat and slams it shut himself.
The truck’s knobby tires squeal as it roars away from the hospital.
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Ron stands once more on the corner of Main and 3rd.
He squeezes his wife’s hand, says, “I’m gonna go in here for a minute.”
“I’ll walk down to Starbucks. You’ll come meet me?”
It feels good stepping out of the maddening August heat and into the theatre—a hundred and fifty-two years old according to the plaque on the brick beside the entrance.
Ron passes through the lobby, through the archway, and climbs two flights of stairs on his tired legs.
He doubts he’s plopped himself down in the same seat he occupied that night, but the view down onto the stage looks exactly like the dreams that still plague him.
Below, a janitor emerges from underneath the balcony, pushing a mop bucket down the center aisle.
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“Excuse me, sir?”
The janitor looks up from his mop bucket, says, “You’re not supposed to be in here.”
“The door was unlocked.”
As Ron arrives at the base of the stage, the janitor’s eyes fall on what remains of Ron’s left hand—everything lost to frostbite but the thumb.
Ron places the janitor around seventy, the man small and wiry. He asks, “How long have you lived here, sir?”
“Forty-five years next month.”
“No kidding.”
“Look, I gotta finish up here.”
“Could I just ask you one little favor?”
“What’s that?”
Ron’s heart pounds under his Hawaiian shirt, his mouth gone dry.
“I want to see the golden bear.”
“What the hell are you talking—”
“The brazen bear you bring out every winter solstice.”
The janitor smiles and shakes his head, leans against the mop handle. “You’re one of those people, huh?”
“What people?”
“Once or twice a year, some conspiracy freak comes along asking about the winter solstice celebration, and didn’t this town used to—”
“I’m not asking, and I’m not a kook. I was here, sir, twenty-nine years ago, December twenty-second, Twenty-Aught-Four.”
“You must be con—”
“I watched from the balcony while you roasted my wife inside the golden bear.”
For a moment, the theatre stands so quiet, Ron can hear the murmur of traffic out on Main, the janitor staring him down with an oblique combination of anger and fear.
Ron says, “I didn’t come here to hurt any—”
“I told you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you—”
“And I got work to do.”
The janitor turns away and pushes his mop bucket toward the far right aisle that in Ron’s dreams are always lined with white-masked executioners.
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He walks slowly down the sidewalk among the throng of tourists, sweating again after half a block.
The waterfall has dried up, and the sky, so blue and pure all those years ago when he and Jessica first came to town, has faded into a pale and dirty white.
Main Street looks the same, although the two lanes have been divided into four to accommodate the tiny vehicles, and there are traffic lights and automated pedestrian crosswalks now at every intersection. Some of the older buildings have been demolished, but most remain to be dwarfed beneath the five- and six-story apartment buildings.
The “Welcome to Lone Cone” sign boasts a population of just under nine thousand.
Ron glances at the hillsides above town, overridden with condos and trophy homes.
Above them all, a Wal-Mart sits perched on a manmade plateau, and behind it the immense gray peaks stand snowless under the brutal summer sun.
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Ron waits twenty minutes in line for a cup of dark roast, then joins his wife at a table near the window.
“How’s your latte?” he asks.
“Delicious.”
Starbucks world music trickles through speakers in the ceiling like a slow-drip IV.
“Could we spend the night here, Ron? It’s so beautiful—”
“I’d rather not.”
She reaches across the table, holds his hand.
“When we leave here, do you want to show me where you stumbled out of the mountains? Maybe we could stop on the side of the road, say a few words for Jessica?”
“Sure, we could do that.”
“You regret coming here.”
“No, it’s not that. I always knew I would.”
“Must feel strange after all this—”
The knock on the window startles them, and Ron glances up to see the janitor peering through from the sidewalk.
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Ron and the janitor sit on a bench at the termination of 7th Street, on the bank of a filthy pond inhabited by a single mangy-looking duck.
“We thought you’d come back,” the janitor says. “Right after, I mean. Wise you didn’t.”
“Town’s changed,” Ron says.
“Beyond recognition.”
“Does Lone Cone still practice—”
“God, no. People went soft, couldn’t stomach it. Quit believing in the usefulness of such a thing.”
“Usefulness?”
“You hear about the avalanche?”
Ron shakes his head, swats away a swarm of flies that have discovered the sweat glistening on his bald scalp.
“Second winter after we quit the blot, we caught a blizzard. Hardest we’d ever seen. The slide came down that chute right there.” The janitor points to a treeless corridor on a nearby peak that runs right into the town. “Destroyed fifty homes, killed a hundred and thirty-one of us. I still hear them, broken and screaming under the snow.”
“Some might call that divine retribution.”
“I lost my wife and two sons that night. Almost everyone left after that. Sold their land to developers. Then the second homes started cropping up. Chain stores. Texans and Californians.” He sweeps his hand in disgust at the bustling little city, heat shimmering off the buildings and streets. “Until it became this. I keep saying I’ll leave one of these days. Nothing really left for me, you know? Not my town anymore.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“‘Cause you at least saw this place when it was a piece of heaven. When it was perfect. I almost feel a kinship with you.”
“I had to quit practicing medicine,�
� Ron says. “Lost everything I’d worked for. Fucked me up for a lot of years.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“But then I met a beautiful woman. We had three beautiful children.”
“Glad to hear that.”
Ron pushes against his legs, groaning slightly as he struggles to his feet.
“My wife’s waiting for me in the Starbucks.”
“We weren’t monsters.”
“I better get back.”
Ron starts walking toward the commotion of Main.
“They’re gone,” the janitor says, Ron stopping, looking back at the small, sad man on the bench.
“What’s gone?”
“The old ways.”
“The old ways had a dark side.”
Ron turns away from him and walks across the heat-browned grass, trying to remember what the mountains looked like without all the glass and steel.
The janitor calls after him, “So do we, Mr. Stahl, and now there’s nothing to remind us.”
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We are spread across the country now, old and dying or dead already, and we have mostly acclimatized to the absurdity of daily life in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, although occasionally we regress and rant.
To journals.
Our fellow dinosaurs.
To our children who bring their children to visit us in nursing homes.
We go on about how it used to be—the extinct and glorious slowness of life and other artifacts:
The pleasure of eating real food, seeded and grown out of ground proximate to your own doorstep.
Decency.
Community.
Respect for the old traditions.
We tell all who will listen, but mostly ourselves, that we once lived in a perfect little town in a perfect little valley, where life was vivid, rich, and slow.
And once in a while, someone will ask why it can’t be that way again, and we tell them sacrifice. There’s no sacrifice anymore. And they nod with enlightened agreement, that special condescension reserved solely for the old, without the faintest idea of what we really mean.