by Blake Crouch
Scott finally pulled over onto the edge of a meadow and parked beside a dinged and rusted Bronco that had long ago ceased to be one discernible color. But despite its state of disrepair, it had somehow managed to drag a trailer up the road. Abigail climbed outside after Emmett and June, heard the chatter of a stream.
They huddled between the vehicles, their breath steaming, the air redolent of spruce.
The driver’s door of the Bronco squeaked open, and a man stepped down into the frosted grass. He was tall, his beard thick save for a few bare spots, his walnut hair drawn back into a ponytail.
Scott said, “Meet Jerrod Spicer, my trustworthy assistant. He’s an excellent outdoorsman, so you should know you’re all in capable hands.”
Jerrod let slip a yawn, said, “Sorry. Still waiting for the coffee to kick in.” He walked to the back of the trailer, unlocked the doors. “Gunter, Gerald, time to go to work.”
Abigail smiled when two llamas stepped down into the meadow and began munching on the grass. She approached them, reached out to pet the black one, but it pulled away, affronted by the familiarity.
“I’d rethink that, Abigail,” Scott said. “Gunter spits.” He opened the back hatch of the Bronco. “Now if you’ll step over here, we can start getting you all fitted for your packs.”
As Abigail watched Scott cinch down the llama packs, she heard a car coming up the canyon. A moment passed, and then a hunter green Ford Expedition appeared around the bend. It veered off the road and pulled up onto the meadow, a rack of sirens mounted on top, SAN JUAN COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT emblazoned on the driver’s and passenger’s doors. A woman climbed out and approached the group, which had gathered by the llama trailer. She was petite and pretty, with bright, friendly eyes and long brown hair split into braided pigtails.
“Morning,” she said, and tipped the brim of her Stetson. A sheriff’s star had been embroidered into her black parka. “Y’all about ready to shove off?”
“Yep,” Scott said, pulling the strap to tighten the hip belt of his pack.
The sheriff pointed to Scott, said, “I see you’re taking a fly rod. You wouldn’t mind letting me have a peek at your fishing license?”
“Not at all.” Scott walked down to the sheriff and pulled his wallet out of his fleece pants. He flipped it open. She nodded.
“Y’all look like you’re headed in for the long haul.”
June said, “Well, we’ve got a ways to go. . . . How far did you say, Scott?”
“Seventeen miles.”
“Yeah, a seventeen-mile hike into this old ghost—”
“What’s your name, Sheriff?” Lawrence asked. “I feel like we’ve met before.”
“Jennifer. And yours?”
“Lawrence Kendall. Get down to Durango much, Jennifer?”
“Not if I can help it.” She cocked her head. “Where’d you think we’d met?”
“I don’t remember, but you look familiar.”
“Don’t think we have, and I’m pretty good with faces.” She addressed the group: “Well, I assume you all purchased backcountry insurance.”
“They did,” Scott said. “I’m the guide. I insisted they buy it.”
“Where you taking them?”
“Grizzly Gulch.”
“I thought she said you were headed to a ghost town. There are no ruins in Grizzly Gulch, at least that I know of.” She leveled her gaze on him, unblinking.
Abigail watched Scott. His Adam’s apple rolled in his throat.
“Actually, we’re going to Abandon,” Emmett said.
Without averting her eyes from Scott, the sheriff asked, “And what are you planning to do there?”
“Take some pictures. My wife and I are paranormal photographers. Depending on what we get, we may do a show in San Francisco this winter.”
The sheriff said to Scott, “No call to lie to me if all you’re gonna do is take pictures.”
He nodded.
“That is all you’re planning on doing?”
“Of course.”
“And you’ve got the permits to visit Abandon?”
“They do.”
The sheriff looked at June and Emmett. “Could I see them, please?”
Emmett reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope, which he handed to the sheriff. She thumbed through the papers.
“Wow, a group permit. They don’t give out many of these.”
Emmett said, “We’ve been trying to score one for three years.”
The sheriff gave the envelope back but lingered a moment longer, her brown eyes passing over each member of the group as if taking some kind of mental inventory. “I hope y’all have a real safe trip,” she said, then tipped her hat again and strode back to the Expedition.
As they watched her climb in, crank the engine, and continue on upcanyon, Abigail caught something, but it was subtle, and she instantly let it go. In a day and a half, she’d remember this moment, wish to God she’d paid it more credence. What she saw was a glance between Scott and Lawrence—just two seconds of eye contact that looked something like relief.
THREE
T
hey spent the first two hours climbing out of the canyon on a trail that switchbacked through a forest of old-growth Engelmann spruce. Abigail found herself near the back, between Emmett and Lawrence, trying to come to terms with the emaciated air.
At a break in the trees, she peered down and saw the road they’d taken out of Silverton, just a twisting brown thread eight hundred feet below. The sound of the stream had faded into a sustained hiss. The next time they stopped to rest, she’d lost the stream altogether and there was no wind, only the thud of her oxygen-starved heart banging in her ears.
At midday, they crossed a stretch of open country, the grasses dry and yellowed, littered with achromatic midsummer blooms of columbine, lupine, and Indian paintbrush. Abigail could see a subgroup of the San Juans—the mountains tan in direct sun, gray in the shadow of clouds, with rags of old snow high on the peaks. The sky shone neon blue.
Scott led them to the entrance of a broad valley. They came into a forest of ponderosa, plenty of space between the trees, sunlight pouring onto the pine-needle floor of the forest. As they climbed, the occasional spruce appeared among the ponderosa. The pines dwindled. Then they moved through a pure stand of spruce again. Abigail realized they hadn’t been following a trail since breakfast.
In the early afternoon, they arrived at a small lake, and Scott told everyone to shed their packs. Abigail leaned hers against a rotten stump. Without the weight, she felt like she might float away. She knelt down on the shore and splashed water in her face. The arctic shock of it stole her breath. She sat on the grassy bank and drank from her water bottle. Tall spruce trees rimmed the bank, and the surface of the lake sent back a perfect reflection of the trees and the sky. The water glowed a deep green. She looked through it down to the lakebed, saw a cutthroat motionless among the pastel-colored stones.
Jerrod came over and brought her a bagged lunch—sandwich, apple, Clif Bar.
“How you holding up?” he asked.
“Feel like I’m breathing through a straw, and my hips hurt from the pack.”
“I’ll adjust the straps again before we leave. You’re doing very well.”
She shielded her face from the sun and looked up at Jerrod. She liked his face. She could tell that beneath the beard he was handsome, taller than Scott, even more well built. But she wondered about the scars, two bare patches curving up from the corners of his mouth in the shape of crescent moons. Staring at him, she wished she could see his eyes again. They seemed different—she’d noticed it at the trailhead before the sun came up and drove everyone into sunglasses. They reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, their density and depth, like they bore some great burden beyond the intake of the present.
Jerrod left to take Emmett and June their lunches. Abigail unwrapped her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. She ate, watching the llama
s graze the bank.
They made camp at eleven thousand feet in a glade just spacious enough to accommodate five tents. They were only a few hundred feet below the timberline and the forest had transitioned into a withered-looking collection of blue spruce and alpine fir, crippled by years of extreme winters. Scott insisted that everyone change out of their wet clothes to avoid hypothermia. Within half an hour, they raised the tents. The guides showed everyone how to inflate the Therm-a-Rests and arrange their gear inside the vestibules.
With still a few hours of light left, Abigail emerged from her tent, bundled in long underwear, fleece pants, a vest and parka. Emmett and June stood watching Jerrod construct a campfire ring from a pile of rocks. Lawrence snored in his tent. Scott dug through a giant compression bag filled with what Abigail could only hope was real food, not that granola-bar shit.
She walked up to him, said, “I need to use the ladies’ room. What do we do about that?”
“I haven’t unpacked the toilet yet.”
“Really? You have a portable—” His grin stopped her.
“You’ve never spent a night out in the woods have you, Abigail?”
“No.”
“Well, no worries. There’s a bathroom behind every tree.”
She smiled seductively and raised her middle finger.
Abigail found a bit of privacy behind a blue spruce. The air nipped her bare ass. The ground steamed. She glanced at her watch—6:30 P.M., still on Manhattan time, and it made her homesick to think of Viv and Jen. Any other Sunday, she’d have just finished working out and showering, in a mad rush to meet them for cosmos at the Zinc Bar. But so far, this trip had been nothing like she’d expected. The thin air, the cold, ten fucking miles, and the hardest still to come. She thought she’d be in her element out here, but she hated everything—the Clif Bars, the smelly, bitchy llamas. And there was something about the light beginning to fade and no warm bed to climb into that depressed the hell out of her. I’m a city girl. If there was ever a question. While she squatted there, she gazed back down the valley. That open country they’d crossed several hours ago lay golden in the late-afternoon sun, and as she pulled up her pants, she saw it. A few miles below, perhaps at the lake where they’d stopped for lunch, a column of smoke rose out of the forest. As she walked back toward their campsite, she felt glad to have seen it, relieved to know they weren’t completely alone out here.
FOUR
A
bigail leaned against a fir tree. Down in the gully, Scott worked his way upstream, just past a fork in the channel. She watched him sidearm cast, the bright green line sailing in an S over the rocks, glistening like a spider-web in the late sunlight, delivering the fly into a small pool. He’d hiked up his fleece pants, and he fished shirtless in a fly vest, knee-deep in the water. Abigail descended quietly to the bank, stood for a while listening to the stream’s drowsy prattling.
“Aren’t you cold?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said without looking back. “But there’s a secret to it.”
“What’s that?”
“Not caring.” He suddenly raised the rod. It dipped. A trout shot out of the pool and splashed into the main current, Scott holding the rod high now, the line taut, the bamboo arcing toward the water. He brought the fish out of the stream, a twelve-inch cutthroat, its crimson gill slashes palpitating in the fading light. Scott carefully unhooked the fly, then swung the fish against a rock. It shivered out. He slipped it into a canvas bag.
She said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you jerk on the rod before it moved?”
“Yeah. I’m impressed you noticed. See, by the time you feel the tap, it’s too late. He’s already checked it out, realized it’s bullshit.”
“So how’d you know?”
“Caught him rising to my elk-hair caddis, saw it vanish, pulled to set the hook.”
“No idea what you just said, but it was a lovely thing to watch.”
Scott climbed onto the bank, sat down on a carpet of moss. He opened a small box containing an assortment of flies, Abigail now close enough to read the tattoo that wrapped around his arm above the bicep: MARIA 2.11.78–5.15.04 R.I.P.
She bent down to the stream, cupped a handful of freezing water, and as she brought it to her mouth, Scott yelled, “No!”
She glanced back at him, letting the water run through her fingers.
“Notice something about the rocks along the bank below the fork?” he asked.
“You mean how they’re covered with orange algae?”
“That’s not algae. It’s a mineral deposit, a visual marker for streams with high metal content—zinc, aluminum, lead.”
“So this water’s toxic?”
“Yep. That’s why I’m fishing upstream from that tributary. It probably runs out of an old mine.” He lifted the rod. “So, you wanna give it a shot? See if you can hook one?”
Five minutes later, they stood casting together, Abigail thinking this was like those cheesy scenes in the movies when the guy shows the girl how to work a pool cue. But she didn’t care. As their arms moved together, his body against hers, she thought of her recent string of New York men—beautiful metrosexual train wrecks. Scott didn’t strike her as one of those superficial predators she always seemed to be falling for, and for the first time since leaving New York, she didn’t want to be home.
They sat around a fire, eating trout that had been seasoned with fresh spices and seared on a stone among the embers. There was vegetable soup and a baguette, and over the flames, Lawrence roasted whole green chilies stuffed with cheese. He’d also smuggled in a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. They all agreed—one of the best meals they’d ever had.
After supper, everyone washed their dishes in the stream until their hands had gone numb in the icy water. By the time they returned to the fire, Jerrod had stoked the flames into a big blaze. Abigail leaned back in her camp chair, noting the ache in her legs, the blisters on her hips. When she looked up, she saw the cinders rising out of the flames and through the spruce branches toward the night sky.
Lawrence pulled a flask from the pocket of his fleece jacket and offered it to June. She unscrewed the cap, took a swig, passed it to her husband.
A cloud of smoke gathered around Scott’s head, and he asked, “Anyone else want dessert?”
The whiskey burned Abigail’s throat. She took another sip, sent up a prayer of thanks when the glow settled in, dulling the pain ten hard miles had inflicted on her body.
Lawrence got stoned and slipped into his professorial tone, going on about the history of the ghost town, even reading from the diary of someone who’d lived in Abandon, a woman named Gloria Curtice. But Abigail was too beat, and her mind wandered for the next half hour, only perking up when he told the story of the vanishing, how a man had ridden into Abandon in January of 1894 in search of his missing younger brother, a mule skinner named Brady Sykes, only to find the town empty, not a chimney smoking, the stamp mill silent.
“I’m not talking about empty homes where people packed all their belongings and left. This town of a hundred and twenty-three souls just up and disappeared on Christmas Day.”
Emmett asked, “So what happened to the mule skinner’s brother?”
Lawrence expelled a lungful of smoke. “Did what any of us would’ve done. Hauled ass out of there. Few days later, he did an interview with the Silverton Standard and Miner. Said the whole ordeal had really spooked him, that the town felt strange, haunted, like the dev il had been there. Everyone assumed they’d find the remains of Abandon in the summer, when the snow was gone, but they never recovered a single bone.”
“That’s fucked-up,” Scott said.
“So what do you think happened, Lawrence?” Emmett asked.
“To the town?”
“Yeah.”
The professor sighed, seemed to reflect on the question for a moment, then said confidentially, “I’ve never shared this with anyone”—Emmett and June imperceptibly leaned forward—“but I thi
nk a big spaceship came down, abducted the whole lot of them.”
“Really?”
Lawrence smiled.
“Oh, a joke,” Emmett said.
“Sorry, but you have to understand—I’ve been asked what happened to Abandon probably a thousand times, and I just don’t know the answer. There are some loony-tunes out there who believe the town was taken by aliens or that something supernatural happened.”
“What about a virus?” June asked.
“Bad ones were around in the 1890s, but lead poisoning would’ve been a greater threat to Abandon than an epidemic, what with their drinking water flowing out of the heart of these mountains. But assuming some super-virus struck the town, where are the remains? In the absence of any bones, I guess I can see how a person might look to supernatural explanations.”
“Even you?” Emmett said.
“In all honesty, I do have a theory, but it’s, well, personal, and I haven’t shared it with anyone ever, and don’t plan to now.”
Scott stood, took the water bag hanging from a knob on a tree, and doused the fire.
It hissed, bellows of steam lifting into the trees, cold rushing in.
“Sorry, folks, but tomorrow comes early.”
The others said their good nights and lumbered off to bed. Then just Abigail and Lawrence sat across from each other in the darkness.
She got up as soon as she realized it, said, “Night.”
Lawrence stared at the last unyielding coal, scratching his gray beard.
“Sit out here with me awhile,” he said without looking up.
“I would, really, but I’m cold and tired.”
“Abigail.”