by Blake Crouch
They’d been moving along this way for five minutes when Abigail yelled, “I’m getting claustrophobic!” She couldn’t see Lawrence’s light, felt trapped in total darkness, the warmth of her own breath blowing back into her face when she exhaled against the rock.
Something grabbed her ankle, but there wasn’t enough space to turn her head.
June whispered, “They’re all around us, Abigail. They won’t stop talking to me.”
Lawrence yelled back, “I hear something up ahead!”
They pushed on, the ceiling scraping the top of Abigail’s head, her left leg beginning to bleed again, the crawling murder on her tailbone. I can’t breathe, she thought. Then, Yes, you can. It’s just in your mind. She had to tilt her head to the side and flatten her shoulders in order to writhe her way through. What if we get stuck? I can’t even move my limbs enough to turn myself around. This would be a horrible way to die.
June cried, whispering in the darkness behind her, and Abigail had started to tell Lawrence to just turn the fuck around when she heard it, too—white noise.
The bulb of his headlamp swung toward her. “You’re almost there,” he said. Where the tube ended, less than a foot of space remained between the floor and the ceiling. Abigail squeezed her way through, and Lawrence grabbed her by the arms, helped her find her footing.
“Where is this?” she asked. Lawrence turned and let his light run up the sixty-foot walls of an immense hall. “Oh my God.” They stood at the edge of a subterranean lake, fifty feet across, two feet deep. On the other side, a four-foot waterfall plunged into a pool out of a fissure in the rock. The pool over-flowed, fed the lake, the lake flooding into a hole that chuted the mineral water into the depths of the mountain. The hall resonated with the crush of the waterfall, and the sound made Abigail think of her favorite spot in Central Park—the fountain at Cherry Hill. If you sat close, it was loud enough to drown out the city noise.
While Lawrence helped June out of the tube, Abigail bent down to touch the inky water—freezing cold, barely the temperature of fresh snowmelt. When the beam of Lawrence’s headlamp passed over the surface, she saw that the lakebed consisted of white crystals. Tiny translucent fish swam among them, eyeless in the dark.
They sat on the rock shore of that lake, caught in eternal night, sharing sips of water and pieces of a granola bar. Abigail’s head dropped and her eyes closed.
“Wake up, Abby. We have to keep moving.”
She sat up, rubbed her eyes. “How long was I asleep?”
“Five minutes.”
“Where’s June?” He pointed to a breakdown on the far side of the lake, where a section of the ceiling had fallen. June crawled around on the rock.
“She’s acting strange, huh?” Lawrence said.
“Her husband was murdered in front of her. You forget that?”
They followed the shore to the breakdown and joined June on the shattered rock.
“What I’m thinking,” Lawrence said, “is that maybe these rocks and boulders are blocking the opening of another passage. Help me move some of this.”
“No,” June said. “Leave it be. That’s a bad place.”
“Sorry, but I don’t see another easy way out of this hall.”
Abigail and Lawrence began picking up the rocks they could handle, tossing them aside. As she worked to clear the scree, Abigail realized she’d already begun to lose her sense of time. It seemed possible they’d been in this cave for an entire day.
As she lifted one of the larger rocks and dropped it on the growing pile, the waft hit her.
Abigail stepped back. “You smell that? It’s like . . . rotten eggs. Come give me some light, Lawrence. I may have broken through.”
Lawrence moved one more rock, the opening now spacious enough for them to climb through. He shined the light inside, said, “Damn, it’s just a tiny—”
Abigail shrieked.
Lawrence looked in again, jerked back. “Oh Jesus.”
“Is she alive?” Abigail whispered. “She looks very alive.” The breakdown had covered a recess in the wall, and inside, a young woman leaned against a flat-topped rock, her left arm draped over a colony of gypsum flowers, their crystal blooms curling between her fingers. She was naked, slender but curvy, her head resting in the crook of her arm, as if she’d just sat down and gone to sleep, her left hand coated in wax.
Lawrence whispered, “Beautiful.” Her hair was long and black and her full lips still held color—deep maroon. She was pink-skinned, blood still in her veins.
“She must have just gotten trapped in there,” Abigail said.
“No, I believe this woman was alive in Abandon in 1893.”
“You’re telling me this flawless corpse is a hundred and sixteen years old?” “Look at the pile of clothes. Those boots. ‘Custom-mades,’ they called them. Those canvas trousers, the shawl. Look like the outfit of a modern-day woman to you?”
“That’s impossible. There’s no decay. She hardly looks dead.”
“I know. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.” He stepped back from the opening and inhaled a few clean breaths of air. “That rotten-egg smell?” he said. “Sulfur gas. Very toxic and probably what killed this woman. But it also preserved her, killing all the aerobic bacteria inside her and around her. That Christmas in Abandon, she was probably doing what we’re doing now—just trying to find a way out. Maybe she saw this nook, decided to rest. Then the ceiling came down, entombed her, sealed her in. In an airtight environment, the sulfur gas had nowhere to go, so there’s no decomposition. Kept her literally frozen in time. Look at her. That’s the face of someone who lived and breathed in the town of Abandon. Bet she had a story to tell. God, she’s lovely.”
June suddenly screamed, “She’s looking at me! She won’t stop looking at me!”
Abigail said, “That woman’s dead, honey. Been that way for quite a while.”
Lawrence lifted a rock, placed it back in front of the opening.
“What are you doing?” Abigail asked.
“If fresh air gets in, she will decay. We should seal it back up, leave her as we found her.”
SIXTY-THREE
T
hey climbed out of the waterfall room through a blind shaft that accessed another passage, spent several hours moving through a network of tunnels that crisscrossed and dead-ended and turned back into themselves. For the first time, Abigail felt lost.
They stopped to rest in a room where the stalactites and stalagmites had merged together in the shape of hourglass columns. Abigail sat up against the cold calcite, staring at her watch—11:03 A.M. They’d been rambling through the cave for five and a half hours. She hadn’t had any meaningful sleep for twenty-nine.
“I really need to rest,” Abigail said. “I’m on fumes here.”
Lawrence said, “These daylight hours are too precious to waste. There’s no point searching for a way out at night. Suppose we walked through a room when it was dark outside that had a daylight hole. We’d never know. So we have to keep going until the sun sets.”
“But that’s another eight hours. I can’t—”
“Abby, do you understand that we have maybe three or four days to find a way out? And that after that, without water, we’ll be too weak to cover any ground? It’ll be over for us then.”
She rested her forehead on her knees and cried.
The constant motion of Lawrence’s light beam wreaked havoc on Abigail’s stomach. Or maybe it was this cold, deep, underground air, the jagged rock walls narrowing over the last fifty yards, the tunnel beginning to slope gradually down. Abigail thought, Great, we’re going deeper into the mountain. She instantly felt guilty for complaining to herself. Bad as things were, the last twelve hours had been infinitely worse to June.
“How you holding up?” Abigail asked. “We can rest anytime you want. Just say when.” June made no response. Glancing back, Abigail said, “Everything all—” Even in the paltry shreds of light that slipped back from he
r father’s headlamp, Abigail could see that there was no one behind her. “Lawrence, she’s gone.”
He stopped, shone his headlamp back up the empty tunnel. “How long?”
“I don’t know. Those were the first words I’d said to her in ten or fifteen minutes.”
“June!” Lawrence screamed. His voice ricocheted down the tunnel, stirred up a single echo, and quickly died away.
No answer.
“Well, come on,” Abigail said. “We have to find her.”
They jogged back up the tunnel. After a minute or so, Abigail thought she heard something.
“Lawrence,” she said. “Lawrence!” He spun around. “I think I heard—”
A scream exploded from the bowels of the mountain. It ended abruptly, but its reverberations went on and on.
Lawrence said, “What the hell?”
“Was that June?” Another scream ripped through the cave, this one farther away. “She sounds like she’s in agony,” Abigail said.
They rushed up the tunnel as the screaming continued, arrived after two minutes of hard running at a split in the passage.
A woman’s voice shouted, “WHERE ARE YOU?”
“I can’t tell which one it’s coming from,” Abigail said.
“PLEASE, GOD, JUST KILL ME!”
“This way,” Lawrence said, and he started into the larger of the two passageways.
“I’M SO THIRSTY!”
They moved through a series of grottoes, the screams getting louder.
“I’M STILL ALIVE! PLEASE! FINISH IT! KILL ME!”
Lawrence stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Abigail whispered.
He shook his head. “Thought I saw something in that room up ahead.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. It moved fast. Forget it.“
“I don’t hear her anymore.”
Lawrence shouted, “June, where are you? Help us find you!”
The cave seemed to hold its breath.
“I hate this place,” Abigail said.
They worked their way through a forest of stalagmites interspersed with pillars of bedrock, coming at last into a stagnant room with feathery blue fungi clinging to the walls and moving in slow-motion waves, like underwater sea grass.
Three steps into the next room, Lawrence froze, and Abigail heard him whisper, “My God.” As he sank down onto the floor, his headlamp shone on the expanding pool of dark blood that flowed out of June Tozer’s head.
She lay on her back beside the small boulder she’d used.
“Everything’s spinning,” she mumbled. They knelt at June’s side. Abigail took her hand, laced their fingers. In the poor light, only the volume of blood hinted at the extent of damage June had managed to self-inflict. She groaned, her lips moving, searching for the strength to form words. “I couldn’t . . . stand it. They were all around me, trying to use me. Where’s Emmett?” She tried to call out to him, but his name miscarried in her throat.
“He’s not here right now,” Lawrence said.
“I’ll be with him soon?” she mouthed between wet breaths. “And Ty?”
“Who?”
“Their son,” Abigail said. “Yeah. Ty, too.”
“I wanna hear him laugh again.”
“You will, sweetie.” Abigail was crying, overcome by June’s deathbed desperation—wishful thinking and unanswerable questions begging answers, any semblance of truth be damned.
“He’s always been a little boy in my mind. You think he’s grown up into a—” She choked, then coughed, a mist of blood sputtering through the gaps between her teeth.
“Try not to talk,” Lawrence said.
“Will I still be his mom? I was for six beautiful . . .” She moaned, her eyes closing. Abigail placed her ear on June’s sternum, listening for the rise and fall of lungs expanding, deflating.
“I’m so sorry.” Lawrence wept. “This was my fault.”
June’s chest swelled, Abigail’s head lifting.
Then it fell—down, down—one long exhalation, all air expelled, and never rose again.
SIXTY-FOUR
A
t three in the afternoon, Abigail heard Lawrence say, “There’s light up ahead.”
The two of them entered the largest cavern yet, more than a hundred feet across, filled with enormous spires that rose from the floor. A spring bubbled out of a crack in the wall, speleothem deposits hanging like curtains from the high ceiling. They stood in the luminous shaft that angled down, bathing them in daylight. Forty feet above, a chimney bored through the ceiling, and Abigail saw a distant patch of gray at the end of it.
“Never get there,” Lawrence said. “Don’t even get your hopes up.” He walked over to the spring. “Abigail, bring your empty water bottle.” She went to her father and dug the Nalgene bottle out of her pack. Lawrence held the plastic lip against the rock, and with the bottle halfway full, he strode into the middle of the cavern and held it up to the natural light.
The water was cloudy, sediment already settling on the bottom. He sniffed it. “Potent sulfur smell.” He sipped the water, winced, and spit it out. “Very mineralized. Tastes bitter and acidic. Much stronger than the hot springs in Pagosa. I don’t know if this is even safe to drink.” Abigail gazed up at the window in the ceiling, beating back the despair. This was far worse than traveling through the dark zone, she decided. This was throwing it in your face, a glimpse of the unreachable—heaven from hell.
When they finally stopped for the day, a smothering depression had descended on them. It was suppertime, but there would be nothing more to eat than a nibble from the last granola bar, a sip or two of water. They would sleep in their damp and filthy clothes, in the cold, on a hard rock floor, and when they awoke, it would still be dark.
Abigail and Lawrence sat against the wall in a small room with a low ceiling, a space that resembled fifty other rooms they’d passed through during the last fifteen hours.
“We shouldn’t have left her there,” Abigail said.
“What could we do? Dragging her through the cave with us won’t bring her or Emmett back, will it?” Lawrence switched off his headlamp.
Abigail, desperate to hear his voice, anything to break the uncompromising black-hole silence, said, “You’ve found the remains of Abandon and you now know how they died, but you still don’t really understand what happened, do you?”
“Nope. And Quinn—if that’s really his name—throws a new wrench into the equation.”
“But knowing they all died in this cave?”
“My gut tells me that, like us, they were locked in here. Maybe by Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe. But the fact that the gold was locked in as well kind of refutes that theory.”
Sitting there in the dark, listening to him talk, Abigail felt shards of cold begin to prick her face, wondered if it might be the first sign of frostbite or hypothermia.
“Why do you think Quinn did this to us?” she said. “Any idea?”
“Beyond plain old greed? No. We should probably drink some water.”
Lawrence turned on his lamp, reached for the bottle. At first, Abigail mistook them for dust motes in the light beam, then realized these white things were actually snowflakes.
“Lawrence?” she said. “It’s snowing in here.”
He looked up. “Oh my God, I saw the chimney when we first came in, but it was already dark outside. I assumed it was just another blind shaft.” His headlamp spotlighted the hole in the ceiling, snow floating down through it, melting on the cave floor.
Abigail got up. “Lawrence, can you lift me up there?”
She straddled his shoulders and he stood slowly, his legs shuddering under the strain. “Scoot to the right. You’re crushing me into the ceiling.” Abigail peered up the narrow chimney, wondered how far to the surface, if it even stayed wide enough for her to get there. “Okay, let me down.” Lawrence bent his knees, eased back onto the floor. Abigail said, “I think I can climb up there if you lift me a littl
e farther up the hole.”
“Well, I know I couldn’t do it even if my ankle wasn’t wrecked. And with no rope, only one of us can get out. How would you feel about going alone, trying to find help? I can draw a map on your note pad, get you back to the trailhead. You’d have to find the keys to Scott’s Suburban. I’m not sure if they’re with him or in his pack at the campsite.”
“And I’ll get my cell, try to call for help from the pass.”
Lawrence sighed, relief enveloping his face like the loosening of taut cables.
“You should get some sleep before you go, Abby. A few hours at least.”
The alarm on Abigail’s watch seemed to beep five seconds after she’d closed her eyes. She’d slept for four hours on the cold rock, dreamless and deep. She turned onto her side and faced Lawrence. His breath warmed her face, and in that virgin dark, she caught his scent—a repressed relic from those precious years when he was Daddy, and not the remnants of aftershave, no superficial mosaic of man-made chemicals, but his core, lifeblood odor, and it carried her back even further than the smell of cut grass and school-bus seats and sno cones.
“You awake?” he whispered.
“My alarm just went off. Guess it’s time. You weren’t asleep?”
“Been thinking.”
“What about?”
“Those gold bricks, the greedy people they’ve killed through the centuries, people they’re still killing. But you and the Tozers didn’t come into these mountains for greed. Emmett and June are dead because of me. You’re in this cave ’cause of me. And I’m sorry. Beyond words, I’m sorry. It won’t change a damn thing now, but I need to say it, need you to hear it. I know what a selfish no-good fuck I am. And what you said in the boardinghouse? You were right, Abby. It’s all about me. Always has been.” He cupped her face in his gloved hands. “Take this with you,” he whispered. “If you make it back to me. If you don’t. My leaving . . . wasn’t your fault. Or your mother’s. I left because something inside of me was broken. Still is. I hurt people I love, who love me, and I don’t know why. But my little girl, my beautiful, perfect little girl, I’m so sorry I hurt you, so sorry you got me for a daddy.”