by Blake Crouch
Billy said, “Y’all go on. I gotta talk to Mrs. Curtice alone.”
“About what?”
“Gonna trust me or not, Bess?” As Billy closed the door, Gloria stood up, the fire nothing more than a few orange coals.
“Is he dead? Will you tell me that before you shoot me down? Is that Zeke’s blood on your . . . Oh God!” She’d noticed his cowhide custom-mades. “You’re wearing his boots!”
“I can’t shoot ye, Mrs. Curtice.” Billy jammed the long barrel of the Walker down his pants and pulled a rusted buffalo skinner with a stag-horn grip from a sheath under his frock coat.
“Please,” she said as he came toward her.
“Got no choice here. You set still, and we’ll do this quick.”
The front door opened. Billy tucked his knife into his coat, looked back over his shoulder.
“I thought I told you—”
“Something’s happenin,” Bessie said. “Oscar and Randall are ridin around yellin for everyone to come outside.”
“What for?”
Gloria could hear the shouting now, saw two men on horseback loping up the path toward the cabin.
“Somethin about Indians. Come on, they’re callin for you, Billy. Want you to ride up to the pass with some a the other men, help head ’em off.”
2009
FORTY-FOUR
A
bigail’s watch showed 2:49 A.M. as the sprawling menace of Emerald House appeared through the falling snow. They’d killed their headlamps after leaving the switchbacks, and it had proved exceedingly difficult plowing their way through the basin in the total darkness of the storm. At the lake’s edge, a hundred yards from the big Douglas fir trunks of the portico, they collapsed in the snow.
“I’m dying here, Lawrence.”
“I know, me, too.”
“I don’t think I can walk much farther.” Aside from her heart beating in her ears, the only other sounds were the lake lapping at the bank and the distant drone of wind tearing over the peaks. “I still think we should just hike back to camp, get my cell, try to—”
“I told you we won’t get service in the canyon.”
“But maybe up at the pass—”
“In this storm? Are you kidding?”
“Then let’s just get the hell out of here, Lawrence. Go for help.”
“It’s twenty-seven miles back to civilization, and you just said you didn’t know if you could walk any farther. In this weather, we wouldn’t reach Silverton until Thursday morning at the earliest, and that would be hiking nonstop, hauling ass, assuming we didn’t get lost or take a fall climbing down the icy south side of the Sawblade. Look, I brought the Tozers out here. Now that Emmett’s dead, June’s my responsibility, and I’m not leaving her in that mansion with Stu.”
Oh, now you’re responsible, when it might get us killed.
“Then what do you want to do?” she asked.
He struggled to his feet, reached down, helped his daughter up out of the snow.
“I want you to follow me and keep quiet.”
They stole up to the west wing of Emerald House and Lawrence boosted Abigail into the same windowsill they’d attempted to escape through several hours earlier. Once inside, she watched her father hoist himself onto the sill, then gave him a hand stepping down into the kitchen on his sprained ankle.
Together, they slipped through the French doors and eased out into the corridor—just a gaping black hole that made Abigail temporarily forget the awful pain in her tailbone.
“I can’t see,” Lawrence whispered, “so just go slow, and make sure you don’t trip on anything. We make the slightest sound, it’s over.”
“Is the floor safe?”
“Nothing is.”
They proceeded with meticulous caution, testing the floorboards with every step to avoid a potentially fatal creak of weak wood.
The darkness never let up, and without the aid of headlamps, they had to trail their hands along the wall to ensure a straight trajectory down the corridor. Abigail followed a few feet behind her father, and she kept looking back over her shoulder, plagued by the unrelenting premonition that someone was creeping up behind them.
When Lawrence stopped, she said, “I don’t like this. I wanna get out of here right now.”
“Look.” Thirty feet ahead, a dim splotch of light shone onto the marble floor of the foyer. “It’s June,” he whispered.
In the vicinity of June’s headlamp, shapes began to materialize out of the darkness. Abigail could see Emmett’s widow sitting on the floor on the other side of the staircase, her back roped to a timber that had fallen out of the ceiling, her hands pinioned, shoulders heaving with grief.
Abigail spotted Emmett’s body, not ten feet away, at the base of the steps. It was impaled on a thick banister. She braced against the image, forced back the bile rising up her throat, made herself move on to the next moment. There was madness in the details, in the lingering.
Lawrence whispered, “Where’s Stu?”
Abigail shrugged, quietly unzipped her jacket, and pulled a wallet from an inner pocket. She fished out a dime, knelt down. The coin made a soft and delicate purr as it rolled across the marble, spinning out just a foot from June’s right leg.
The woman looked up, the bulb of her headlamp making it difficult for Lawrence and Abigail to see her.
“Hurry,” June whispered. “He’ll be back any minute.”
FORTY-FIVE
T
hey crept across the icy marble of the foyer, and when they reached June, Lawrence withdrew Isaiah’s sheathed dagger from his ski pants.
“You okay, sweetie?” Abigail whispered, her words reverberating through the foyer like prayers in a vast cathedral. It was hard to see June’s face with any clarity in the sole, fading light of her headlamp.
“My left leg’s cut pretty bad,” June said, on the brink of tears. Abigail touched her shoulder as Lawrence sat down and began sawing the knife through the climbing rope that bound June to the rafter.
“How long’s Stu been gone?” Abigail asked.
“About ten minutes.”
“We didn’t see any new tracks leaving the mansion.”
“No, he’s still inside. He heard something up on the third floor, went to check it out.”
“What’d he hear?”
“Sounded like wood breaking from down here. It was loud. What happened to you guys?”
“Isaiah and Jerrod are dead,” Abigail said. “It was . . . Look, I’ll tell you that story later. Does Stu still have night-vision goggles and a gun?”
“Yes.”
Lawrence unwound the climbing rope and tossed it aside. “Can you stand up and turn around for me? I’ll cut these off.” The blade sliced easily through the nylon restraints. “June, I think it’d be a good idea to switch off your headlamp.”
The three stood close together in sheer darkness.
After a moment, June spoke, her voice breaking, “I keep looking over there at him. Keep thinking he’ll get up, come over to me. Or that any second, I’ll wake in our apartment, reach over in bed, feel the warmth of him in the dark. But he’s cold now, isn’t he? Do you think I could go over and sit with him? Would that be all—”
“You hear that?” Abigail said.
“What?” Lawrence asked.
“Listen.” From some remote part of the mansion came a sound like a muted jackhammer, and it took Abigail only a moment to place it. “Stu’s firing his machine gun.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Lawrence said. “Scott’s back in town, dead. Isaiah and Jerrod are dead somewhere up near the pass. What the hell’s he shooting at?”
The machine gun went quiet. High above, in one of the upper corridors, came the thump of slow, heavy footsteps. Abigail peered up—they all did—but there was nothing to see in that expansive vacuum of light. She reached down, grabbed hold of June’s hand as the footsteps stopped.
No one whispered.
No one breathed.
Somet
hing crashed into the floor of the foyer, and Abigail and June nearly crushed each other’s hands.
They stood in stunned silence, no one daring to move.
Lawrence finally turned on his headlamp.
“Dear God,” June said. The light beam traced a widening lake of blood across the floor to its source—the destroyed head of Stu. He lay unnatural and broken on the section of marble exposed to the skylight, his face torqued away from them.
“You think Stu accidentally fell?” Abigail said. “Or jumped? Remember what Isaiah said about him? How he’d fallen apart since the war?”
“He drank half a bottle of vodka after you left,” June said.
Lawrence shook his head. “Look, his gun’s gone. Night goggles, too.”
“So maybe he left them on the third floor.”
Lawrence started toward the west wing.
“Wait!” Abigail whispered. She caught up with him. “You aren’t seriously going up there?”
FORTY-SIX
E
mmett’s plunge had effectively destroyed the central staircase, so Lawrence and Abigail worked their way back toward the kitchen to the west-wing stairwell.
They climbed to the third floor and stood for a second time in that bullet-shredded corridor, Abigail feeling trapped in some kind of repetitive fever dream, coming back again and again to this nightmare world.
Their headlamps passed over the doors, the wood-paneled walls, the mounds of snow where the ceiling had failed.
Lawrence limped a few steps into the corridor, stood there listening.
They proceeded on, over the pockmarked wood where Isaiah had fired up at them through the ceiling, skirting that hole where Abigail had punched through and nearly fallen to her death.
They reached what was left of the central staircase.
“I don’t hear a thing,” Abigail whispered.
“Me, neither. Look at that.” He pointed to where several dozen brass shell casings had rolled against the wall. “What was he shooting at?”
They walked on, their headlamps aimed toward the end of the east-wing corridor, an occasional snowflake drifting down through the ceiling, a speck of bright white in their light beams.
“Maybe he did jump,” Lawrence whispered. “Got fueled up on vodka and freaked out when he heard something. Emerald House shifts constantly. It’s full of noises. Or it could’ve just been an animal. Another coyote.”
“Should we go back, then?” Abigail said.
“Yeah, I think that’s a good—” Lawrence took a sharp breath.
“What?” Abigail whispered. “You’re scaring me, Lawrence.”
“Something just stepped out from one of the rooms at the end of the corridor.”
She clutched her father’s arm. “Where’d it go?”
“Toward the sitting room, I think. It was just a shadow, and it moved so fast.”
“Okay, let’s not do this, all right? This is stupid. Like in horror movies when people walk into haunted houses by themselves for no good reason. I wanna go—”
“This isn’t like that, Abby. Come on. We have to see.”
“No.”
“Then go back down to the foyer and wait with June, but I’m not leaving until I—”
She tightened her grip on his arm, said, “I’m not going anywhere in this place alone.”
“Then I guess you’re coming with me.”
Lawrence continued slowly down the corridor, Abigail clinging to her father like she was eight years old again.
They came at last to a decimated sitting area at the corridor’s end, heard nothing but the wind moaning outside in low, dissonant tones like some demonic choir. Snow billowed in through the window frames, having already buried the bookshelves and even drifted into the fireplace.
As Abigail swept her headlamp over the ravaged furniture, the listing chandelier began to tinkle.
Lawrence was already turning to go back, but before following him, she shone her headlamp into the far left corner.
“Jesus Christ!”
“What?”
“Lawrence!”
A man crouched behind a rat-eaten divan, his knees drawn into his chest, rocking slowly back and forth and shivering with cold.
“Are you with them?” he whispered, and Abigail felt so completely paralyzed that her knees gave out and she sank onto the floor, trembling with pure fear, adrenaline raging, heart red-lining, even before she saw Stu’s machine gun in his hand.
1893
FORTY-SEVEN
M
olly Madsen sat in the bay window, eating the wedge of chocolate cake from the Curtices’ Christmas basket and looking down at the commotion on Main Street. It had been years since she’d seen this many people out on the town at once—entire families webbing north through deep snow, many still buttoning their slickers and coats and pulling on their mittens, a ubiquitous look of fear and confusion on all the faces.
Molly heard footsteps out in the hallway, followed by a soft knock. She rose from the divan, crossed the room barefooted, and opened the door. A young blond woman stood in the hallway, enveloped in a white woolen cape.
“May I help you?” Molly asked.
Lana noticed that under the sheer bed linen, draped like a shawl over her shoulders, Molly was naked.
On many occasions, Lana had glimpsed her sitting in the bay window from the street below and thought her pretty. In proximity, Molly Madsen looked hard-wintered, pupils dilated from laudanum. Her five-year self-imposed confinement to room 6 had turned her skin the sun-deficient gray of a dead tooth, and though her pitch-black hair dropped to her waist, you could see her scalp on top, where her hair had thinned and become laced with silver. Seam squirrels—lice—crawled under the hair on her arms.
The room reeked worse than a bunkhouse—spoiled food, oranges, a hint of old perfume.
“You’re the piano player,” Molly said, and when she smiled, Lana saw her lips smeared with chocolate icing and bits of cake stuck between her rotting teeth. “Jack and I have so enjoyed sitting in the window, listening. The music carries quite well. It’s a sure cure for putting me to sleep. Was that Beethoven you were playing this afternoon?”
Lana reached into her cape, pulled out a pencil. She stared at the tan-colored wood of the door frame, trying to conjure words that had for so long existed only in the safety of thought. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d written anything, but it was easier to recall the letters than to amass the nerve to create them, with no words spoken, no direct communication with another human being in three years, since that Christmas night in Santa Fe.
Molly said, “Can’t you talk?” Lana looked up, forced herself to make eye contact. Her gloved hands trembled as she pressed the pencil tip into the wood.
When she’d finished, Molly scanned the tiny writing on the door frame, said, “It’s Engler. Mrs. Jack Engler. Why on earth would I come with you?”
Lana scrawled an answer, overwhelmingly strange to converse with another person, even like this. The piano had been her larynx for so long.
Something awful happening.
Molly read it, said, “Well, I can’t leave yet. Jack should be here any moment, and what would he do if I was gone when he returned? I have to be here to greet him. Do you understand?”
A draft wafted through the hallway, blew open Molly’s shawl, her nipples erect in the chill.
Lana wrote: Leave note.
“What if he didn’t find it? He’d be distressed if I wasn’t here. Jack’s very protective. No, I think I’ll wait in our suite. But thank you for the invitation. We’ll come along when he arrives. Where is this ball being held?”
Lana shook her head, eyes welling up with tears.
“You know, I have the perfect dress for it. A rose-colored evening gown. Jack first saw me in it in San Francisco, knew instantly he had to have me. Would you care to see an albumen print of my husband? You’ve never seen a more handsome man, I assure—”
Lana tried to grab h
er arm to pull her out into the hall, but Molly withdrew into her suite and slammed the door.
FORTY-EIGHT
L
ana refastened her webs in the lobby of the deserted hotel and went outside. The sky was a rusty red, the walls of the box canyon slathered in alpenglow.
Sounds of men shouting resounded through Abandon.
She waded out into the middle of the street, where a path had been beaten down in the snow, fell in behind a young family of four, followed them down Main, listening to the children complain of the cold, begging to go home so they could finish supper and play with their Christmas toys.
Glancing up a side street, Lana saw more people streaming out of the cabins, and someone yelled, “Hostiles?”
They passed the burned-out buildings on the north end of town, torched over a year ago in an autumn fire. The family ahead of her stopped. The father knelt down, drew his children into his arms.
“Why you cryin, Pa?”
“Ain’t.” But he wiped his eyes. “Gotta leave y’all for a spell.”
“Where you goin?”
“Me and some a the other pas are gonna ride up toward the pass and stop what’s comin, make sure don’t nothin happen to this town and all the mas and children in it. But I’ll be back ’fore you know it. Need you to listen to your ma for me.”
“Yes, Pa.”
“Yes, Pa.”
He stood and embraced his wife, and as Lana bypassed them in the deeper snow, she heard the woman say, “I’m scared, John.”
“Don’t be, love. Just pray.”
The web tracks branched off from Main and went up the hillside. Lana passed smoking cabins on the spruce-dotted slope, saw two Italians on horseback rousing families from their Christmas suppers, hollering for them to get dressed quick and head up to the chapel.
The church stood in the distance, one of the first buildings erected in Abandon, though after a decade of scant upkeep, it needed whitewashing, and the windows on the north side had been boarded up since a blizzard had blown them out in the winter of 1890.