by Blake Crouch
They stood by the bay window, one of them kneeling, hit.
As she thumbed back the hammer, she heard the hiss of compressed air. Barbed electrodes clung to her parka. Then she lay twitching and screaming on the floor.
1893
SEVENTEEN
M
olly Madsen sat in her bay window, watching snow pour down onto Main, sipping from a bottle of wine of coca. It had stormed all night. She’d even startled from sleep once, awakened by a slide razing the forest below town.
An untrodden lacquer of powder lay between the buildings, and on the hillside, she could see the cabins—stoves and hearths aglow, smoke trickling out of chimneys. Here came the first passerby of the day, a petite blonde plodding through the snow. That pretty piano player. Molly had grown accustomed to staring down into the saloon, watching the young woman play. Sometimes, late at night, with the street gone quiet, she could even hear the music from the hotel suite.
Footsteps approached from behind; strong hands settling on her shoulders. She finished peeling one of the oranges from the basket Ezekiel and Gloria Curtice had left at her door the night before, offered him a wedge, her suite redolent of citrus.
“I was thinking, Jack. Could we take a trip to San Francisco in the spring? I’m so tired of all this dreadful snow.”
“That’s a lovely idea.”
She squeezed his hand. Jack gazed down at her, eyes luminous with adoration, said, “Remember the first time I saw you? I was walking down the street on a San Francisco evening, when I passed this spectacular creature. I doffed my hat, smiled.”
“Did she smile back?”
“Oh no. This was a lady, by every account. She simply nodded, and I thought, I have to know who that woman is.”
“So what did you do?”
“Followed her to a ball.”
“And then?”
“We danced. We danced all night.”
“Do you remember what she wore?”
“An evening gown the color of roses. You were the most exquisite thing I’d ever seen. You still are.”
“I’m so happy, Jack.” Molly rose from the divan and stepped around to her husband. Even after all this time, he seemed utterly unchanged from the man she’d married in 1883—short blond hair, boxy jaw, ice blue eyes, even that same spruce tailcoat he’d worn the night of their first encounter. “Let me show you what I want for Christmas,” she said, reaching back to untie her filthy corset, letting it fall to her feet. She pulled her chemise over her head, tossed it at the wardrobe, and climbed into bed. “Jaaaaack.” She whispered his name like a prayer, fingers already fast at work in that swampy heat between her thighs.
EIGHTEEN
O
n their way to Packer’s mansion for a Christmas brunch, Ezekiel and Gloria Curtice eyed the steep treeless slopes that swept up on both sides of the trail, listening for the first hint of the breaking snow that would precede a slide. Lying in bed in their fire-warmed cabin, they’d heard them going throughout the night, like the thunder of distant cannons. Stephen Cole sent up a prayer for protection as they moved into the treacherous gap between the mountains, their webs sinking through a foot and a half of powder with every step. When they emerged from the avalanche path, the party stopped to rest near a spring that erupted out of the rock.
Ezekiel and Stephen packed down an area of snow so they could sit without sinking. Then the preacher dipped an Indian earthenware vessel he’d brought into the spring, offered the first sip to Gloria.
“No thank you. I’m afraid it’ll chill me down even more.”
“Zeke?”
“Naw, Preach, you go ahead.”
They sat in the cold and awesome silence. Ezekiel pulled off his fleece-lined gloves, took out a hip-flask tin of Prince Albert tobacco, set to work loading his pipe.
Ahead, the terrain flattened into a high basin, with a lake in the middle that in the summer turned a luminescent green, as though the lakebed were made of solid emerald, with the sun underneath it. Even then, no one could stand the water for more than a minute, leading the residents of Abandon to bestow it with the most extreme temperature designation in their arsenal—“fucking cold.”
Gloria tucked in the blond curls that had escaped from her sealskin cap, shivering despite having bundled herself in two petticoats, two pairs of stockings, one of Ezekiel’s heavy woolen jackets, and an enormous pommel slicker.
“Mind if I ask you something, Stephen?”
“Gloria, you can ask me anything anytime.”
Ezekiel blew smoke rings, watched the snowflakes cut them down.
“If I tell you this, can it stay between us? ’Cause nobody else in Abandon knows what I’m about to say.”
“What do you think you’re doin, Glori?” Ezekiel said.
“Trying to ask the preacher something.”
“Don’t go botherin him with—”
“Zeke,” said Stephen, “let her say what’s on her mind. I’m here to help if I can.”
“Glori, wish you’d let it lie,” Ezekiel said, but she ignored him.
“There’s no easy way to say it, Stephen. I used to be a whore.”
“Aw hell,” Ezekiel said.
“And Zeke used to be a outlaw. Killed a few men in his time. We each did enough sinning for ten. We changed. Not perfect by any means, but we’re decent folk now, or try to be at least.”
“I believe that,” Stephen said as he brushed the snow off his visored felt hat.
“Reason I’m telling you this is ’cause I wanna know about God’s punishment.”
“What about it in particular?”
“Something happened a year ago—”
“Ain’t gonna listen to this,” Ezekiel said, and he struggled to his feet and webbed a ways up the trail, where he stood with his back to them, smoking his pipe, watching the basin fill with snow.
“Go on, Gloria,” Stephen said.
“Last January, we were living up in Silver Plume. Had a son, name a Gus. Him and Zeke went out together one morning. They were waiting to cross the street, and somehow, Gus’s little hand slipped out a Zeke’s. Our boy walked in front of a hansom. . . .” Stephen reached over, touched Gloria’s arm. She wiped her eyes. “The horse stepped on Gus and one a them big wheels . . . rolled over his neck. Weren’t nobody’s fault. Not the driver’s. Not Zeke’s.”
“Not yours.”
“Gus died right there in the street.”
“I’m so sorry, Gloria.”
“Now I want you to tell me something, Stephen.”
“I’ll certainly try.”
“I just told you how Zeke and I used to be a wicked pair a souls. There’s this little voice been whispering to me ever since he died, saying that God took Gus from us as punishment for all the bad things we done. That ain’t true, is it? He ain’t that kind a God?”
The preacher’s calm brown eyes seemed to darken. He looked away, and when he spoke again, his voice took on a harder, bitter aspect.
“You’re asking me if we worship a vengeful God?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I’m the person to answer that for you.”
“Why not?”
“What if I were to say that that voice in your head is right? That it’s entirely possible He took your son from you?”
“If that’s the truth, I hate myself and Zeke for what we were. And I hate God for what He is.”
“Then perhaps we shouldn’t continue this conversation, Gloria. I’ll not be responsible for turning someone from their faith.” Stephen used his walking stick to boost himself onto his feet. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more comfort to you.”
“But just last week you preached about God’s unconditional love.”
Stephen reached down, extended a gloved hand to Gloria, helped her stand. “It’s what people need to hear. They want a version of God as benevolent father, ready to protect, eager to provide, but to hold no accounting. I don’t believe in that God anymore.”
; “But you did last Sunday, so something changed your mind?”
“Not something, Gloria. God Himself.” And there were sparks in the preacher’s gentle eyes—deep loss and rage at that loss—as he turned away and trudged up the trail.
NINETEEN
E
merald Lake lay ten feet under the snow beneath their webs. The storm eased as they hiked across, and through a hole in the clouds, a shaft of sunlight passed, firing into blinding white a piece of the serrated ridge that enclosed the basin.
A mansion materialized in the distance, ensconced on the edge of the lake. “Ever time I see it,” Ezekiel said, “I can’t get past what a load a burro’s milk that thing is.”
“It does look misplaced in these environs,” Stephen said.
Packer had named his estate Emerald House—four symmetrical wings of opulence that met in a central block, crowned by a cupola. The top floors had been cedar-shingled, the ground level constructed of stone. Numerous brick chimneys soared from the gabled roof.
“Well, that’s strange,” Ezekiel said. “Ya’ll see even a whisper a smoke rising from a one a them chimneys? Why you reckon he’d let his fires go out in a storm?”
There were drifts to the second-floor windows, and a snow tunnel with fifteen-foot walls had been shoveled to the portico of unbarked Douglas fir trunks.
They arrived at a pair of oak doors and Stephen rapped the knocker three times. They untied their webs, waited. Stephen banged the knocker again.
Gloria glanced up at the long overhanging eaves, said, “You don’t think he forgot?”
The preacher speculated. “Perhaps he stayed in town last night, not wanting to chance getting trapped in a slide on the way home.”
“Well, we just hoofed it through a blizzard, and I’m gonna by God walk in there, find out if we’re gettin breakfast for our trouble.”
Ezekiel grabbed one of the large iron handles, tried the door. It opened.
“Think we should walk in unannounced, Zeke?” Gloria said.
“Yeah, I do.” He stepped through.
Gloria sighed, followed him in with Stephen, and closed the door.
Every kerosene lamp had burned down save for one at the far end of the first floor, in the kitchen—just a wink of fire from where they stood. Soft gray light slanted through the tall windows that framed the foyer.
“Hello?” Ezekiel shouted. “Anybody on the premises?”
His voice resounded through Emerald House.
They made their way through the foyer and up a cascading stairway, beneath rafters of fir timbers. At the confluence of the four wings, a staircase switchbacked up the heart of the mansion. Between the stairs, a rectangle of weak light fell upon the marble floor, having passed through a skylight fifty feet above.
“Cold in here,” Stephen said. “Hasn’t been a fire in awhile. And shouldn’t there be some servants? If I’m not mistaken, Bart keeps a staff of four or five ladies through the winter.”
He walked to the north wing, peered through French doors into a great room furnished with a chaise longue, sofas, parlor chairs.
The opposite wing encompassed a dining room on a par with a feudal banqueting hall. Ezekiel looked in but glimpsed only the chairs and the long, broad table, naked of tablecloth, silverware, china.
“Our breakfasting prospects ain’t appearing promising. Let’s check Bart’s room. You remember where it is, Preach?”
“I believe it’s in the east wing of the next floor. Overlooks the tarn.”
“What do you bet he bent a elbow in the saloon all night, came home roostered?” Ezekiel said. “Hell, might have to wake him.”
They took the steps up to the second floor, calling out hellos as they started toward Bart’s wing, not a single lamp in operation to illuminate Packer’s extravagance.
Ezekiel suddenly stopped. “Might want to step back there, Glori.”
She looked down at the hardwood floor, saw that her arctics stood in a gooey puddle of blood. She leaped back toward her husband, brought her hand to her mouth to stifle the scream.
“Well, that’s an empty saddle,” he said. “Look. More.” Faint tracks of blood led back to the staircase, up the next flight.
“Bring your revolver?” Stephen asked.
“ ’Fraid not. Didn’t think I’d be needin it of a Christmas morn. Tell you what. I’m gonna go see what in hell’s goin on here.”
“Zeke, no—”
“Glori.” By the way he said her name, with a gravity she’d not heard in years, Gloria knew better than to push the issue. “Ya’ll don’t move from this spot. Savvy?”
As Ezekiel ascended toward the servants’ quarters, he filled with an exhilaration he’d not experienced in some time. It wasn’t fear—he couldn’t recall ever having been plagued by that emotion, even as a younker in Virginia—but an airiness in his stomach, birthed by the anticipation of something he’d always had a taste for, and still did. It reminded him of the rough old days, helling around with the boys. In all honesty, he had to own up to missing aspects of his former self. Much as he loved Gloria and his life with her, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d felt this alive.
Ezekiel reached the penultimate floor, but the blood continued up, sticky little pools of it on the steps and banister. He climbed on, following the drops and spatters to a small cupola that Bart had transformed into a library, the first seven feet of each wall lined with books, the last five sloping up to a hipped roof.
It made no sense. Blood on the floor, on the spines of books, entrails draped across the back of a leather chair, but the library was empty, its two hearths fireless and this top floor cold enough to cloud his breath.
Then he noticed the ladder tucked under a long bookshelf, glanced up, saw a trapdoor beside the skylight in the ceiling, almost smiled at the needles in his stomach. Using a shiny eight-foot brass pole with a hooked end, he reached up and unlatched the lock and pushed open the hatch. Then he stood the ladder up, bracing it against the opening, snow already falling into the library.
He climbed fifteen steps before emerging onto a small open veranda, the highest point of Emerald House. The panoramic eyeful of the four wings and chimneys and the surrounding basin distracted Ezekiel for a split second before he saw them—five figures near the wrought-iron railing on the east side of the platform.
Bart Packer and his servants.
Three had slumped over, face-first and half-buried in the newly fallen snow. Two still sat upright, Bart one of them, his face black, purple, and distended beyond recognition from what looked to have been a merciless beating. Their throats had been opened, the snow in the vicinity stained with great quantities of blood. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “Son of a bitch.” It snowed again, but the wind whipping across the roof kept the platform mostly bare. He heard approaching footfalls, spun around.
Stephen climbed through the trapdoor onto the roof.
“Goddamn, son,” Ezekiel said, shouting to be heard over the wind. “Lucky I didn’t have my gun. You’d a been belly-up, coming up on me like that. What’d you leave my wife—” He saw Gloria coming up the steps behind the preacher. Ezekiel rushed past Stephen, stood blocking her view of Bart and the servants.
“You seen it?” he asked her.
“Seen what?”
“Oh sweet Jesus,” Stephen said.
“Glori. Glori, look at me. My eyes. They’re up here.”
“Dead?”
“Had their lamps blown out, I’m afraid, and trust me, ’less you alkalied to it, sight like this, you’ll spend the rest a your life tryin to forget.”
“But you seen it.”
“Awful to say, but I seen worse.” I done worse. “Now I’m madder’n hell you came up here when I said stay put, but I can probably let that slide if you listen to me.” He held her face in his hands. “Look here, Glori. Go on back down now. Go on.”
He watched her descend back through the trapdoor, then walked up to Stephen, said, “Man, where the fuck is your he
ad? My wife almost saw this. Got half a mind to throw your ass off this roof.”
But the preacher stood stone-faced and glaze-eyed, staring at the stiffs and all of that red snow surrounding them. “Who do you reckon would do a thing like this?”
“Bad men,” Ezekiel said. “Looks to have been done with a couple a Arkansas toothpicks. Nasty work. They were probably worried about gunshots settin off a slide, blockin their way out a the basin.”
Stephen started toward the dead. Ezekiel grabbed him by the shoulders, drew him back. “Best to let ’em lie for now, Preach. What can you do?”
Stephen nodded. His hands shook. He tried to steady them.
“Is it any wonder, Zeke, that He hates us?”
“Who?”
“God.”
“Wait. You sayin God hates His own creations?”
The preacher gestured at the carnage. “Wouldn’t you?”
TWENTY
W
hen she opened her only Christmas present of 1893, Harriet McCabe ran shrieking in circles around the ten-by-ten cabin where she lived with her parents. It was by leaps and bounds the most extravagant gift she’d ever received, her mother having skimped on their family’s last three food orders so she could purchase the doll from the general store’s window. Samantha was sixteen inches tall, came with two dresses and a little comb to brush her luxurious red hair.
“Now I understand why we been eatin pooch and splatter dabs for supper, ‘stead a meat,” Billy grumbled, still stretched out and hungover on the lumpy straw-filled mattress.
Bessie said, “I’s fine to make the sacrifice. Look at your daughter, Billy. You ever seen her so happy? Don’t it warm your heart even a little?”
Harriet sat on the dirt floor by the sink—just a washbasin on an upended packing crate—whispering secrets to Samantha.