by Blake Crouch
Abigail fought like hell against it—a realignment, the unraveling of an old stubborn knot.
With Abigail astride her father’s shoulders, she was still a foot shy of any usable handhold.
“I’m just not far enough up the chimney,” she said. “Push me higher.” As she lifted off Lawrence’s shoulders, her headlamp illuminated the closest jug, a few inches from her fingertips. “Almost there,” she said, reaching out and grabbing the jug with both hands. “Got it.”
Lawrence said, “Find a foothold.”
Abigail’s fingers had already begun to cramp, and her feet were scrambling for purchase.
“I can’t find anything. Oh God, I’m slipping! I can’t—”
“Feel that?” Lawrence yelled as he jammed the toe of her right boot into a crevice. “Let your weight rest on your feet now!” Abigail settled onto her legs. “Just take your time. Get your strength back up.” As she caught her breath, Abigail shone her headlamp up the chimney. It appeared to narrow farther up, but the handholds were plentiful. She cinched down the straps of her day pack, then reached over her head for the next handhold—a crack in the wall wide enough to slide her fist into.
She pulled herself up and moaned, the pain in her tailbone excruciating.
“Remember to climb with your feet,” Lawrence yelled up to her. “Otherwise, you’ll tire out.” She tested her weight on a big chockstone wedged in the chimney, decided to trust it, and made the next move, rested for thirty seconds, then made another. As long as she allowed her legs to bear the weight, her arms didn’t cramp. She climbed through a ten-foot section filled with bombproof buckets. Then the rock became wet, then icy, then snow-dusted. The handholds dwindling. Suddenly, she had nothing to grab.
“I’m stuck!” she yelled. “No handholds!”
“Chimney the rest of the way up!” His voice sounded distant, like he’d shouted up to her from the bottom of a well. “Push your feet against opposite walls. Hold yourself up with the pressure!”
She stood perched on a thin lip, half an inch wide, legs trembling with the onset of a paralyzing weakness. “I’m gonna fall!” she screamed.
“Listen to me! Take your right leg, dig it into the wall at your back, and keep the ball of your left foot pressed hard into the wall facing you!”
She tried it, the soles of her boots slipping on the rock. Pushed harder, pain radiating out from her tailbone so intensely, she felt it in her fillings and nearly fainted. She finally regained purchase and inched her way up again, her boots jammed into the rock, taking handholds and footholds where she could find them, chimneying where she couldn’t.
Snow poured down on her, and she heard the shriek of wind just above. Abigail glanced down the chimney, Lawrence’s headlamp just a pinpoint of light seventy feet below, thought of the night he left, all those years ago, her first concrete memory. And she wondered if, as her father watched her climb to the surface, leaving him stranded in the dark, it felt anything to him like it had to her the night she’d watched him walk out her bedroom door.
You marooned us in a deeper cave than this, and you never came back. How do you forgive that? You deserted a four-year-old girl whose world you made turn ’round. You made me feel worth leaving. How do I forgive that? If I don’t come back, Daddy, no one will ever hear from you again.
Her head emerged into the blizzard as she scrambled out of the cave, nothing but a hole on a steep, snowy slope, rimmed by three feet of powder. She checked her watch—12:32 A.M. She’d been underground for twenty hours. Her fingers, arms, and legs were cramping, and she stood high on a mountain, wind howling, in pitch-black, whiteout conditions, with no idea where she was, or how to find Abandon.
1893
SIXTY-FIVE
T
he next morning, they took the air, walking together down Main, the sky midwinter blue, the sun lifting over the east canyon wall and the un-shaded snow already too brilliant to look at.
The fires had gone out in the mercantile and surrounding hillside cabins, so the air smelled cold and crisp, rinsed of woodsmoke.
Harriet looked up at Stephen, squinting, though the bonnet gave ample shade to her eyes. She thought it strange to be with this young preacher who treated her like a grown-up, asked her opinion of things. This had not been her experience with Daddy.
“Where did God take the people?” she asked, and not for the first time since last night.
When Stephen stopped and squatted down, his webs sank another foot in the snow. “Harriet,” he said. “I already told you I don’t—”
Something had moved above them. He glanced up at the second floor of the hotel, saw Molly Madsen standing in the bay window, staring down at them. He grimaced as the ulcer in his stomach flared.
They fought their way through deep drifts blown against the brick building, finally emerging into the lobby of the hotel.
“Go play at the billiard table, Harriet.”
Stephen removed his smoked specs and unlaced his webs, then climbed the stairs. In the dark hallway, he knocked on her door, and when she asked who was there, he replied, “Stephen Cole.”
The door opened. The preacher blushed. Though colder in her room than in the hall, Molly had clothed herself only in a sheer chemise. She stood shivering, breath steaming through corpse blue lips.
“When I saw you on the street, I thought you were my Jack. I’m expecting him any moment now.”
“May I come in? Build a fire for you?”
“Oh. Well. Yes, that would be fine.”
Stephen stepped inside, laid his felt hat on the desk as Molly shut the door after him. Her suite smelled like a night jar, though it wasn’t the filth that struck him as much as the loneliness. It had holed up in this room, over-spread the sad gingham walls, the chipped furniture, its wilting occupant. He knew Molly’s situation—the abandonment and humiliation that had festered and atrophied into madness. He’d visited before, but always from the hall. She’d never invited him in, and in truth, he’d been glad of it.
“The furnace is over here,” she said, leading him to a potbellied stove across from the bed. “Mr. Packer has always provided assistance of this nature. He’s a dear friend and business associate of my Jack, though he hasn’t come around lately.”
Stephen counted enough logs stacked against the wall to heat the room for a day, maybe two. He balled up several sheets of old newspaper so brittle, they flaked apart in his hands. With the fire going, he said, “Why don’t you come sit over here?”
Molly knelt before the open stove, her eyes glazing as she watched the aspen logs blacken in the flames. Stephen grabbed the dusty quilt from her bed and draped it over her shoulders, then unbuttoned his coat, eased down beside her.
“Molly,” he said, “the town’s been vacated.”
“Everyone left? Even Mr. Packer?”
“Him, too, and I’ll soon be leaving, so I was hoping I might persuade you to come with me.”
“What if Jack comes and I’m not here? If no one is here?”
“We’ll send word to Jack the moment we reach Silverton. I’ll even pay for the tele—”
“But that isn’t how . . . I’m supposed to be sitting in the window, looking down on the street. And then I see him walking toward the hotel, and he sees me up here in the window, and he doffs his hat and I smile and he runs up the steps and down the hall and—”
She lost her breath.
“It’s okay, Molly.”
“I will be here when my Jack comes to Abandon.”
“Who’ll bring you food and water? Wood for the stove? Who—”
“Jack will see to these things. He is my husband, after all.”
“Molly,” Stephen said, and the words tempted him: You’ve been in Abandon ten years, this hotel for five, and you’ll die in this room if you don’t leave with me. You’ve got as much a chance of seeing Jack again as those sagebrushers did of making their fortune in this desperate town.
Instead, Stephen stood. “Would you excuse
me for a moment?” He left the suite and hurried down the stairs toward the lobby and the clack of ivory balls. The child had made a game of rolling them, three at a time, into the table’s leather pockets.
The preacher slipped back into Molly’s suite, found her basking in the heat of the stove, staring into the smoldering pile of embers. The room now reeked of wood smoke, a great improvement.
He sat with her again, said, “I was hoping you’d tell me of Jack?”
Her face enlivened, and as she spoke, Molly veered into sanity, Stephen catching peeks of the woman she must have been.
She narrated their first meeting in San Francisco and the ball, their courtship, the first time he kissed her, and finally the wedding, straying into the smallest details of the clothing worn, food served, floral arrangements, guests in attendance, everything as clearly recalled as if the event had transpired that morning. Stephen marveled at how thoroughly she described her husband’s face, the tone of his voice, even the smell of him, so by the time she pulled out the crinkled albumen print of Jack, Stephen’s mind had already formed an excellent likeness of the man.
Someone knocked at the door. Molly rose from the warmed floorboards by the stove, crossed the room, and asked who was there.
“Harriet McCabe, ma’am.”
Molly opened the door, looked down at the little girl standing in the hall. “What do you want?”
Harriet’s eyes cut to Stephen, back to Molly. “There’s a man in the lobby asking for you.”
Please God, let her believe the lie she so loves.
Molly staggered back. “His name?”
“Jack Engler, ma’am.”
Molly flushed, glanced back at Stephen. He came to the door, said, “Harriet, I want you to go downstairs and tell Mr. Engler that Mrs. Engler will send for him momentarily. Hurry now.”
As Harriet ran down the hall, Stephen closed the door.
Molly glanced at her chemise, which was stained and threadbare, a pitiful garment. She whispered, “He can’t see me like this.”
Stephen went to the wardrobe, threw open the doors. The dresses and gowns hadn’t been worn in years; all were mottled with gray dust.
Molly chose a corset, much too small, but Stephen fit her into it as well as he could manage, hooked the two bones in front, and laced up the back. “Which gown?” he said. “I happen to like this blue—”
“Jack detests blue.” She detached a peach-colored evening gown with plentiful ruffles from its hanger.
“A lovely choice, Molly.” He pulled it over her head, helped slide her arms into the sleeves. As he swept the dust off her shoulders, he felt as if he were dressing an oversize child.
Her hands shook.
Stephen steadied them, said, “Don’t be afraid. Your husband is down in the lobby because he loves you. He’s come back for you.”
He sat Molly down at the dressing table. Her hair hadn’t been brushed in a long while—thin, oily, so tangled that he hesitated to run bristles through it. So he picked up the silver brush and slid the smooth backside of it down the length of her coarse black tresses.
Molly’s reflection in the cracked mirror sent back the rubble of a woman, and Stephen prayed she didn’t see herself as he did, that God might cause a beautiful distortion of the image her eyes received.
While he pretended to brush her hair, he considered Jack, wondered where this man lived today, and if he ever thought of the woman he’d deserted, this mad, pathetic creature of obsession, wished Jack could see what he’d done to his bride.
“You’re stunning,” Stephen said.
“I don’t have any rouge.”
He pinched her cheeks. “There. You’re perfect now.”
As Molly beamed, Stephen glimpsed the dignity she’d once possessed. He went to the door, cracked it open, yelled, “Harriet! Mrs. Engler is ready to receive her husband!”
Stephen shut the door. Molly walked over, her chest billowing beneath the shabby gown.
She stood three feet back from the door, Stephen behind her.
They listened to the heavy footsteps thumping up the stairs.
Molly glanced back at Stephen, grinning with all the giddy joy of a new bride, thinking of the first day she’d arrived in advance of her husband, in this fledgling camp called Hope.
And all the things she’d wanted to do, places she’d intended to see, children to bear, tore through her mind like an avalanche.
She’d waited so long.
Now he was coming down the hall, and Molly whispered “Oh Jack” as Stephen thumbed back the hammer, raised the revolver to the back of her head, and waited for the knock at the door.
SIXTY-SIX
I
n the evening, Stephen went for water, blessed with convenience in this regard, since the hillside behind his home boasted a spring. The cabin’s previous occupant had raised a simple structure over the rock where the water surfaced, so it could be easily accessed in the winter months.
A lantern in one hand, an empty pail in the other, he webbed fifty feet up the trail, past the privy and toward the shed, the moon so bright that he could’ve left the lamp behind.
He stepped under the tin roof and traded the lantern for an ax that hung from a nail in the clapboard.
Ice had amassed around the lip of the flat rock where the water spilled over, and when he’d chipped it clear, he set the pail under the trickle and sat contentedly on a dry rock, blanketed, like all the others in this old tailings pile, with an orange flocculent mass.
He’d always assumed it was algae.
A solitary cabin glowed on the east slope above Abandon, though you couldn’t see inside, since the windows weren’t made of glass, but white cotton cloth soaked in tallow. It was a cramped, one-room, saddle-notched affair with a mud and stone chimney, a little porch out front, and a corrugated metal roof that stayed warm enough with a fire blazing underneath it to keep the snow from sticking. Inside and out, it was a spartan dwelling, severely lacking the touch of a woman.
Stephen pulled two enameled graniteware pots off the fire and hustled them over to the rustic table where Harriet sat waiting for supper. He eased down onto the deacon seat and lifted the top from the larger of the two pots.
Steam bellowed out. The slumgullion simmered.
He spooned a serving of stew into Harriet’s bowl, then sliced her a piece of sourdough bread and lathered on several spoonfuls of wild raspberry preserves. One of his parishioners had left the bread and jar of jam on his doorstep Christmas morning. He dipped Harriet’s tin cup into an earthen vessel he’d bought off a Navajo trader, filled her cup with water, then poured himself some Arbuckle’s from a spouted pot, allowing himself a sip of coffee before ladling the stew into his own bowl.
He blessed the meal. It needed prayer.
The stew was horrendous—so wanting of salt and spice that it held all the complexity of dirty water with chunks of gristly elk meat and potatoes and cabbage bobbing on the oily surface.
But his new guest slurped it down without prejudice and even asked for more.
After supper, Stephen prepared Harriet’s bed on the mattress he’d taken from the McCabes’ shack earlier in the afternoon.
For pajamas, Harriet wore her underclothes, Bessie’s peignoir—too long and bunched up around her feet—and a pair of drafty socks sewn from flour sacks. Stephen made Harriet turn away while he slipped a flannel nightshirt over his union suit.
“Would you like a story before we go to sleep?” he asked.
Harriet stood at the foot of his aspen bedstead, looking at the old newspaper that served as wallpaper, tacked to the logs.
“What would that be like?”
“You’ve never had a bedtime story read to you?”
She shook her head, and Stephen realized it owed to her parents’ illiteracy. He got up from his mattress—just a bunch of burlap stitched together and stuffed with pine boughs—and walked over to the railroad tie mounted to the stone above the fireplace, the shelf serving as ma
ntel and bookshelf.
He chose a scuffed, well-used volume, called Harriet over to her bed before the hearth, and tucked her in under the quilts. She lay between Stephen’s legs with her head in his lap, and he read for ten minutes by firelight from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
He closed the book when he thought she’d fallen asleep, but as he tried to extricate himself without waking her, Harriet’s eyes fluttered open and she said, “What happened to Miss Madsen?”
Stephen touched the back of his hand to the young girl’s face. It was soft and cool. He gently wound one of her pitch-black ringlets around his finger. “Molly was very sick,” he said.
“Like scarlet fever?”
“No, in her head. God told me to end her suffering, so I did.”
“How did you?”
“Do you know how a gun works?”
“They hurt you.”
“They can. I shot a bullet into the back of Molly’s head so she wouldn’t be sick or sad anymore.”
“Did it hurt her?”
“It killed her body, but her soul never felt a thing.”
“You gonna shoot me in my head so I go to Jesus?”
“No, Harriet. You’ve got a long and happy life ahead of you.”
She closed her eyes.
Stephen ran his fingers through her hair until she fell asleep.
Harriet awoke. The fire was dying, and though her feet were cold, she could still feel the warmth of the flames on her face. The sound that had roused her from the dream came again. She sat up on the lumpy mattress, looked over her shoulder at Mr. Cole’s bed in the corner against the wall. The preacher had buried his face into his pillow, and he made strange, sad sounds.