by Blake Crouch
Stephen wiped his face and rose to his feet, dusted the silt from his great-coat, replaced his visored felt hat. He approached the town blacksmith, a small, well-liked man named Mason Stetler.
“Mason,” he said, “I leave the town to your care. You’re capitan. I’m going out that door now, and I’m going alone. If you hear a knock in quick intervals of three, know that it’s me, but don’t open it for any other reason. Better paint for war.”
“Mind your hair, Stephen. Got a shootin iron?”
“Yes.”
Someone grabbed Stephen’s arm. He turned, faced Gloria Curtice, her wet, probing eyes still grasping for a shred of hope.
Stephen shook his head and embraced her. “Zeke is with our Lord now,” he whispered. “With your little boy. Be dreadnought.”
Her knees failed. As Gloria collapsed, wailing on the floor, her anguish masked another sound that emanated from the nearby passage—loud but brief, a sharp cry of pain.
Stephen carried a shadowgee, an old Colt single-action Army, and a shotgun up the tunnel. When he stepped out onto the ledge, he extinguished the flame and sat down on the rock. It was a good, protected rincon. The sun had gone away and bled the clouds into a deepening blue that cast the mountains in a gray-metal twilight.
He gazed down on Abandon situated in the gloom of the canyon floor, lifeless and dark, wondering how those six men fared who’d ridden up to the pass.
He wasn’t afraid, enwrapped instead in the clutches of the most peculiar detachment he’d ever known, as if he existed somewhere above himself, watching everything unfold apart from the fear and the anticipation.
Still, a part of him kept listening for gunshots, unsure if the crack of their reports could carry this far from the pass.
Soon it was full-on night. He grew cold, his head exploding now.
Down in the canyon, specks of firelight winked on.
He returned to himself. His hands shook.
As the procession of lights moved through the empty town, Stephen took two shells from the pocket of his greatcoat and broke the breech of the double-barreled shotgun, whispering as he slid them home, “Wilt Thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise Thee? Shall Thy loving-kindness be declared in the grave? Or Thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall Thy wonders be known in the dark?”
The scalp hunters were already to the north end of Abandon, and Stephen watched them turn their mounts toward the chapel, following the tracks of the fleeing townspeople. His lips moved again in the dark, “Oh, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass.”
Joss emerged from the passage and took a seat on the outskirts of the cavern, her hands hidden under her serape, blackened and sticky with blood. If a saloon regular saw her, they might puzzle at Al’s absence. A reasonable explanation would be required.
She’d just set about inventing that lie when the roar of a shotgun filled the passage outside the iron door.
Everyone made a collective gasp, children crying, Mason Stetler yelling for every able man with a weapon to come forward, almost two dozen springing up, crowding the iron door in a ragtag battalion.
They waited.
Joss counted five staccato shots from a revolver. Three shotgun blasts. Then silence.
Stephen dropped two shells into the shotgun and reloaded the revolver from his cartridge belt.
Two heathens dead in the tunnel behind him. Two on the brink.
He was unscathed, but his heart beat so fast, he couldn’t think.
More lights approached, already to the chapel several hundred feet below. He could hear their horses snorting, the sound of hooves breaking through powder.
He took several steps back into the tunnel, his whole body quaking. He closed his eyes, tried to still himself.
The riders closed in on the rimrock.
He exhaled when he saw Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe dismount. They waded through the snow and climbed up onto the ledge, stood just outside the entrance to the mine.
Oatha’s claybank eyed the preacher warily, and as had happened on more than one occasion in the last week, Stephen saw the horse’s brown teeth lengthen and sharpen in the firelight.
Oatha hawked his plug of tobacco into the snow. His lantern hung down at the level of his knees, his face and Billy’s all gone to shadow and grotesque patterns of light, eyes shining, breath vapors clouding. Oatha wiped the tobacco juice from his chin with the back of his glove.
“You know somethin, Preach,” he said. “I’m feelin a little red-eyed toward you.”
“Why’s that, Mr. Wallace?”
“Weren’t no injerns up at the Sawblade. We rode around for—”
Movement in the tunnel drew Oatha’s eye.
He raised the lantern, peered around Stephen, the firelight falling upon one of his fellow miners, John Hurwitz, dragging himself off a pile of bodies, whimpering, his blood running out ahead of him down into the mine.
“The fuck’s goin—”
At close range, the buckshot excavated most of Oatha’s face.
His knees locked, and he pitched backward over the ledge.
Billy had caught only a few pellets in the right shoulder, but as he reached for his Walker, the preacher blew a ragged, gaping hole in the boy’s chest.
Billy sat down on the ledge. He cupped his gloves to catch the steaming handfuls that fell out of him, looking up at the preacher, struggling to breathe, eyes asquint with profound aggrievement.
Stephen threw down the shotgun and pulled the revolver.
“God save your soul,” he said, and shot the boy between the eyes.
2009
FIFTY-SEVEN
A
bigail patted June’s back. “Feel better now?”
June shook her head and spit onto the rock.
Lawrence jogged over from the alcove, asked, “What happened?”
“She threw up.”
“I didn’t even think about the air. It might be bad. Abby, do you feel strange or woozy?”
June stood upright, wiped the sweat from her face, said in a voice that bordered on defiance, “It’s not the air.” She moved away from them, into the darkness, her headlamp flickering across the walls, the ceiling. From twenty feet back, Abigail could barely see her in the fading light of her lamp—just her legs and the illuminated rock around her boots.
June suddenly sank down onto the floor and convulsed violently, legs bouncing up and down on the rock, arms flailing as if in the throes of electrocution.
Abigail ran to her, dropped to her knees, tried to steady June’s limbs, whispering, “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus. June, look at me.”
June went still, her eyes open and glassy and staring straight up at the ceiling, mouth agape, chest heaving up and down.
“Talk to me,” Abigail pleaded. “Please say something. I need to know you can hear me.”
As Abigail reached out to hold June’s hand, the beam of her headlamp struck on something. She froze. The blood in her veins and arteries and the oxygen in her lungs seemed to congeal. She made an involuntary sound, something like a mewl.
The hand of an infant had caught her eye, less than five feet from where she knelt, the bones clearly visible—brown and tiny and perfect, clasping the phalanges of a larger hand. She turned her headlamp away, but it passed over another skeleton, this one adorned with strands of long blond hair that had matted to the skull, and still boasting jewelry—a gold wedding band on the long, brittle phalange of the ring finger and a necklace dangling from one of the upper vertebra into the rib cage.
Lawrence said, “Quinn, you need to come see this!”
June and Abigail got up. They stood in the center of a large cavern teeming with the bones of Abandon—at least a hundred skeletons, most still intact, their clothes having long since disintegrated in the cold storage of the cave, moist enough to support the growth of a hairy white fungus that over-spread portions of the rock like a network of capillaries. The skeletons were of every size and scattered throughout th
e chamber in a vast array of death poses, the scene reminding Abigail of some morbid sculpture exhibit. Her stomach was churning, and she wanted to shut her eyes to it, but she knew that would make little difference. This mine and its occupants would stay with her for the rest of her life, in waking moments, in dreams.
They drifted wordlessly through the crypt. Most of the skeletons were sprawled across the floor, as if they had lain down en masse to die. Abigail saw one curled up in the fetal position in a corner. Another lay beside a small boulder, its skull cracked, pieces of it on the rock floor, pigmented in proximity with the deepest burgundy shade of ancient blood. A pair of skeletons lay along the wall, their humerus and radius bones intertwined, having perished in each other’s arms.
Abigail felt herself coming undone as the images of the dying townsfolk accumulated.
A skull resting in the lap of another skeleton.
On a pair of femurs, the leather binding of a pageless King James Bible.
Between kneecaps, a clear corked bottle still holding an inch of century-old whiskey.
Skeletons sitting up grasping shotguns and rifles and revolvers, the wood stocks badly rotted or gone altogether, others clasping bricks of gold with their browned finger bones.
A handful clinging to the remains of their children.
And under a rusted-out shadowgee, a skeleton with long black hair tweaked both her horror and curiosity at once. On the wide plates of its browned pelvis lay minute femurs and tibias and ribs, a skull the size of an apple, phalanges no thicker than matches, and when she realized these constituted the bones of a mother and its fetus, Abigail broke down.
Lawrence walked over and sat with her. “I know,” he whispered. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“Guys?” June said. “Would you mind turning your headlamps off? I’ve got Emmett’s camera with me, and . . .” She was crying again. “He’d want me to shoot this for him.”
They switched off their headlamps, Abigail hating the darkness, not even the faintest presence of light to adapt to in this pure, unfiltered black. She gave June one minute, listening to the click of the camera echo through the chamber and the distant drip of water. She finally said, “Sorry, but I’m turning my headlamp back on. I’m too freaked-out to just sit here in the dark.” She found breathing easier with her headlamp on. “You must be beside yourself, huh, Lawrence?”
“This is beyond anything I ever dreamed of finding. The gold and the entire town, in the same place, at the same time.”
“It’s gonna be amazing material. This’ll turn out great articles for both of us.”
“I don’t know about you, but I plan to write a book.” Lawrence stood up, offered Abigail his hand, but she didn’t take it, just sat there staring at a coal-oil lantern capsized between two femurs. “Abby? You all right?”
“I don’t know how to process it all. Everything we’ve been through tonight.”
Lawrence hollered through the chamber, “Quinn! Come in here! Have you seen this? We found Abandon! They’re all in here!” Lawrence tapped his headlamp. “Damn, my light’s dying. Walk with me back to the entrance, Abby.”
They crossed the uneven rock, working their way among the skeletons.
“There he is,” Lawrence said, pointing to the bulb of light thirty feet ahead. “Hey, professor, you really need to come in here, see all the bones.”
When Abigail’s headlamp struck Quinn, he was zipping his backpack.
He glanced up at them, said, “I hope it’s enough, Lawrence.”
“What? The gold? Of course, eighteen million is plenty for every—”
“I’m not talking about the gold.” Quinn shouldered the sagging backpack. “I mean knowing what happened to the town. You spent a good part of your life trying to solve that mystery, and I want you to know I sincerely hope it’s a good consolation.”
“For what?”
Quinn stepped into the passage. The door to the mine slammed shut in a thunderous concussion of metal on metal, and its echo seemed to last forever. Then came a sound Abigail had already heard once before—the squeak of that rusted bolt sliding home inside the iron door, then the crossbar dropping into the brackets, then that giant padlock locking back.
1893
FIFTY-EIGHT
G
loria and Rosalyn sat against the rock wall, holding each other and listening to the burgeoning chaos near the iron door, where twenty armed men had gathered after hearing gunshots in the passage. But that had been some time ago. The men were growing antsy.
Someone said, “Time we rain hell on some red niggers.”
“Preacher said to wait until—”
“And what if that fire escape’s already lost his hair? Considered that? Sounded like quite a powder-burnin contest out there.”
“Mason, get up here and bring the key with ye! We done waitin!”
Gloria watched the unassuming smith push his way through the cluster of miners, heading to the iron door.
“What’d you say?”
She couldn’t see Stetler, who was surrounded by the mob of taller men, but his voice rose above the bedlam, far deeper and louder than his size seemed to accord.
“Said we need the key to this door. I do believe that’s the only way to open it from inside.”
“You see a keyhole there, Will?”
“What are you talkin about?”
“Preacher asked for the key, and I give it to him. What’s it matter anyway? This door only opens from the outside.”
“The fuck you do that for?”
“He asked for it!”
“Jesus. He gets himself kilt, how we gonna get out?”
Stetler ran his fingernails over the rippled surface of his bald head, which glistened with rivulets of sweat.
A miner said, “We better find some bang juice and powder. Blow that hunk a iron off its hinges.”
One of the Godsend’s dynos said, “Y’all not see this door when we come in? It’s a inch thick. Amount a powder it’d take to blow it open, be a long chance this whole damn mine didn’t come down on us.”
Gloria turned to Rosalyn, whispered, “I can’t listen to them anymore. Will you stroke my hair if I put my head in your lap? Like you was doin before?”
“Of course, honey. Come here.”
FIFTY-NINE
H
arriet McCabe lay in the middle row of pews, hiding. There had been gunshots a short time ago, but it was quiet now save for the wind. She thought about her mama. Her friend Bethany. Her new doll, Samantha, which she’d had to leave behind at the shack. She was thirsty, hungry, but more than anything, cold and scared.
The sun had gone to bed, and the wind made a long low sound as it pushed against the boarded-up windows, the tiny church swaying and creaking like the hold of a ship, icy air filtering up through the space between the planks.
She shivered under her mama’s gray woolen cloak. Just across the aisle stood a stove in a gap between the pews, a stack of logs next to it, and she’d just decided to light a fire, when the chapel doors flung open. Harriet gasped, brought her hand to her mouth. The doors slammed shut, the plank boards groaning beneath the weight of approaching footsteps.
She rolled under the pew, watched a pair of arctics pass two feet from her head. Toward the front of the church, something thumped on the floor, and Harriet scrambled quietly to her feet, peered over the top of the bench. She saw someone in the shadow of the nave. The man was on his knees, facing the barrier separating the front pews from the stage, his arms lifted, hands open to the simple wooden cross mounted on the wall behind the pulpit.
When he spoke, she startled, his voice loud enough to fill the sanctuary, though faltering and brittle as sandstone.
“It is finished, Lord God. Your good and faithful servant kneels before You to say that Your will . . . has been done.”
He suddenly fell over, his stomach flat against the floorboards.
Harriet thought he’d died, until he wept, softly at first, then outrig
ht sobbing, pounding the planks with his fists. Harriet had seen her daddy cry once before, but not like this. She’d never seen anyone in such soul-splitting anguish.
“Why?” The word exploded—guttural, ragged, raw. He screamed it three times, so loudly that Harriet thought it might shatter the glass of those tall south-facing windows. He got back onto his knees, and when he spoke again, Harriet had to strain to hear the words.
“You say You love truth. Well, here’s my truth. I don’t know who You are right now. I don’t understand how the Creator of love and mercy and compassion, the God who seared my heart in Charleston, can command His servant to lock a town into a mountain. Women! Children! How can a child give You such offense? Are You not the God I think You are? Of David? Of Christ? You are ultimate, whatever Your nature, but I need to know if I’ve been wrong about You. Correct my perception. You know I love You. That I chose a cimarron’s life in Your service, over a woman who still haunts my dreams. If You love me, Lord, if You love me at all, infuse me with a peace that passeth all understanding. Because I need it now. I’m in a bad way. This is my deepest trench, and I may not see the morning. Don’t draw back from me. I’ve destroyed myself for You, and I am so alone.”
He bowed his head, and as he cried, Stephen felt something graze his shoulder. He spun around and fell back, bristling with fear. A little girl stood before him in the darkening nave, her curls pitch-black and her eyes aching with hunger.
“Why you sad?” she asked.
Stephen pulled his cape around and wiped his face with it.