by Blake Crouch
Abigail began to cry.
A half hour later, she flipped on the headlights.
Rain fell through the beams.
She kept looking in the rearview mirror, watching for another pair of high beams to punch through all that darkness, the Suburban jittery and bouncing like it might shake itself to pieces. She’d never driven such a rough road, and twice she took a turn too fast, nearly launched off the shoulder into the canyon.
After eight miles, the bumps smoothed out, and she could keep the speed at a steady thirty-five miles per hour.
A mile later, it turned to pavement, and she gunned the Suburban to forty-five.
Her ears popped.
She crested a hill, and below in the rainy gloom, a collection of lights appeared, and a green road sign flashed by:
WELCOME TO SILVERTON
POP. 473
ELEV. 9318
She veered through a hairpin turn, straightened out onto Greene Street, drove over a bridge that spanned all twenty feet of Cement Creek, and eased onto the brake pedal.
To her immediate right stood the San Juan County Courthouse, gold-domed and surmounted by a clock tower.
Ahead, streetlamps lined either side of Silverton’s main thoroughfare, each illuminating spheres of slushy rain. It was a quarter past seven on a raw Thursday night, and with the buildings dark and scarcely a single occupied parking space as far as she could see, it seemed the town had already gone to sleep.
She drove a few blocks past rows of refurbished Victorian-style buildings that would have looked like something out of a Western, if not for their ostentatious paint schemes—Silverton Clinic, Fred Wolfe Memorial Carriage House, a Church of Christ no bigger than a trailer, Silverton City Hall, Wyman Hotel, Pride of the West Restaurant, Rocky Mountain Funnel Cakes and Café, Blue Raven Fine Arts, Outdoor World.
The saloons and brothels had long since been replaced with trendy coffeehouses, galleries, ice-cream, candy, and gift shops. There was even a photography studio where they would doll you up like a cowboy or a whore and take your portrait, so when you went home, you could show your friends you’d been in the real West.
The West for tourists, she thought. You could probably order an appletini from one of the bars and stand a good chance of not being shot between the eyes.
At the corner of Greene and Twelfth, Abigail pulled into a parking space in front of the Grand Imperial, a three-story white-brick hotel with lavender trim, red brick chimneys, and topped by a row of shed-roofed dormers.
She killed the engine, climbed down onto the street, and glass fell out of the window when she slammed shut the Suburban’s heavy door.
Beyond the ticking of the engine and the splatter of icy rain, Silverton stood silent.
Looking through the windows, she could see into the lobby of the hotel, where a clerk read a paperback behind the front desk.
As she started toward the entrance, she heard the groan of a revving engine.
At the north end of town, headlights appeared.
1893
EIGHTY-FIVE
M
ilton wiped his mouth and shuddered. After a day of deadpan drinking in the Blair Street saloons, he’d just aired the paunches into a snowbank, noting bitterly to himself that he’d never touched liquor prior to coming west.
As he staggered up Twelfth Street toward the boardinghouse, even the glow from all that rotgut wasn’t sufficient to ward off the loneliness or the early-evening chill.
The lights of Silverton had begun to wink on.
He passed a butcher shop, a grub house, a pharmacy, a Chinese laundry, and was thinking of his wife and son back in Missouri and choking on guilt, having had his thorn sucked that morning by a whore named Maribell, when he tripped over something and tumbled into the snow.
He sat up and scratched the ice out of his beard and shook his head in an attempt to right the spinning world. When at last he did, he found himself sprawled near the entrance to the Grand Imperial Hotel.
It took some doing, but he managed to regain his feet.
“Son of a bitch.”
He stared down at what had toppled him—some bindle-stiff whore in a white cape, either drunker than he was or stone-dead, lying facedown in the filthy snow.
Voices washed out, distant.
“You a diploma doc?”
“I’m the best chance she’s got of . . . This a whore?”
“I don’t know. What’s it matter?”
“I don’t treat whores. Find Dr. Stout. He makes the rounds on Blair—”
“I’m not certain she’s a—”
“You know how many dead prostitutes he’s seen since Christmas Eve? Five. Had to pump the stomachs of seven. They all take to suicide this time of year. Morphine. Carbolic acid for the more desperate.”
“She ain’t poisoned. She’s frozed.”
“Or maybe she’s poisoned and froze.”
“She needs your help, whichever the—”
“Should it come to my attention she eats cock for her bed and supper, you can double the amounts on my fee bill.”
“All right. She gonna die?”
“More than likely.”
A man stood hunched over at the foot of the bed, chewing on a stogie, and even through skewed vision, she could see his smooth-shaven face glistening with sweat, his arm jerking back and forth, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms red to the elbows, the air pungent with the charred reek of friction—steel grinding through rotted bone.
“Goddamn it, she’s coming to.”
A washrag covered her face and she thought she would smother.
She came around, thinking of the little girl lost in the slide, and the first thing her eyes locked upon was a small man sitting at her bedside in a rocking chair and snoring, the wiry black hairs of his unkempt beard trembling with each exhalation.
She lay in a twin bed with a wrought-iron frame, positioned between two windows in a bare-bones room—hardwood floor and floral-patterned wallpaper adorned with three awful paintings.
The air held a red tint, and her eyes burned.
She felt feverish, her throat raw from the ether.
On the floor beside the rocking chair lay a Kelly pad and a washtub full of crimson water, out of which poked the handles of two knives and a bone saw.
She tugged at the cover and it slipped up her legs, her feet itching despite the fact that they weren’t where they should be.
She glanced at the washtub, back at the bandaged, leaking stubs below her knees.
Her throat made a birdlike sound, and her eyes shone with tears.
A door opened and shut.
She wiped her eyes, glimpsed a tall, smooth-shaven man, his brown hair pushed high off his forehead in wavy, gravity-defying tangles.
He knelt down to inspect the bandages.
“I know this must be a shock for you,” he said, glancing up. Lana felt a surge of modesty, realizing she wore only underpinnings. “You were found outside tonight by that gentleman”—he motioned to the small man still sleeping in the rocker—“unconscious in the snow. You’re in room two oh three, on the second floor of the Grand Imperial Hotel in Silverton, Colorado.”
He stood up, his white dress shirt specked with blood, forearms stained.
“I’m Dr. Julius Primack, by the way.”
Lana’s lower lip quivered. Last thing she recalled was emerging snow-blind from a stand of aspen into a valley, seeing buildings in the distance, smelling wood smoke.
“You know that man?”
She shook her head.
“He saved your life, covered your medical expenses thus far. You have any money?”
She nodded.
“Reason I ask is because there’s more work to be done. Your right arm’s fine, but I need to take that left one off below the elbow.”
She shook her head, began to cry.
“Mortification has occurred. You smell that? It’s already begun to rot. I don’t know how it froze so hard, but it did. I charge fifty d
ollars to amputate an appendage, and if you choose not to make this gentleman pay for the legs, we’re talking a hundred and fifty dollars total. Can you cover that?”
Lana glanced down at her arms, her right a vital pink, her left the blackish purple of a ripe plum.
“Can you pay?”
She nodded.
“You haven’t said a word. What are you, mute?”
Lana opened her mouth wide.
As the doctor leaned in, she saw that his face had been horribly scarred from some long-ago bout of smallpox. He smelled of stale cigar smoke.
“Maybe you aren’t a whore after all. Where the hell’s your tongue?”
Lana lifted her right arm, held her thumb, fore, and middle fingers together.
“You can write?”
She nodded.
He placed his ear to her chest for a moment, then sat up, flattened his palm against her forehead.
“Time is not on our side. That arm isn’t off by daybreak, the infection’ll hit your bloodstream. Then it won’t matter what I cut off.”
Dr. Primack walked over to a dresser and returned to the bed, where he eased down beside Lana and opened his satchel—a black pebbled-leather handcase lined with chamois and brimming with scalpels, a stethoscope, pessaries, a catheter, forceps, a splint, and various bottles containing tonics, bitters, and tinctures.
As he withdrew a brown leather-bound journal, the man who’d been snoozing in the rocker rubbed his eyes and sat up.
“How she doin, Doc?”
Dr. Primack shook his head and pulled a bottle out of the handcase, unscrewed the cap.
“Laudanum,” he said. “It’ll dull the edge on the pain.”
Lana swallowed two mouthfuls, and then the doctor placed a Waterman fountain pen between the fingers of her right hand and opened the journal in her lap to a blank page.
“What’s your name?”
She wrote: Lana Hartman.
“You live in Silver—”
She stopped him with a raised hand, wrote: From Abandon. Preacher locked town in mine. Everyone dying.
He stared hard into her eyes, as if attempting to discern whether the claim was valid or just the raving of a madwoman.
“You stretching the blanket for me?”
She scrawled: I’m not crazy.
The doctor sighed.
“Why’d he do it?”
She shrugged, wrote: Went crazy. Locked gold in, too.
He whispered, “How much?”
Whole string of burros to carry it.
Dr. Primack stood up, said, “Excuse me, Miss Hartman,” and turned to the man in the rocker.
“Milton, could I speak with you in private?”
Lana craned her neck to peek out one of the windows beside her bed. The darkness was riddled and blurred with flecks of light like some syphilitic rash upon the town, the nefarious amusement of Blair Street and its salas and silver exchanges unrestrained even at this hour—pianos, dogs barking, aggressive laughter, breaking glass.
I’m not supposed to die in this town. Please God, she prayed.
The door opened and the doctor walked in, alone.
He came and sat down on the bed and repositioned the pen between her fingers.
“How long have they been locked in?”
She wrote: Since Christmas night.
“Do they have food? Water?”
She shook her head.
“Where is this mine, exactly?”
She was becoming light-headed, and twice the pen slipped from her grasp and she had to start over, make the words legible. She finally wrote: Above town on west slope, I think. Sorry I feel so poorly. Bring my cape.
Dr. Primack looked annoyed as he rose from the bed and lifted the ruined, sodden garment from the board floor beside the dresser. He brought it over, said, “Why do you want this?”
Lana reached for it, her right hand slipping into the inner pocket, grasping the key.
“What’s that open?”
She wrote: The mine. You have to get them out. There’s children. Get the sheriff. “Of course.” He took it out of her hand, stroked the key’s long stem, its teeth. “I should operate immediately.”
Lana was crying as Dr. Primack handed Milton the cloth, standing poised beside her left arm.
“I’ll have it off in two minutes.”
She stared at the finely serrated blade of the amputation saw dripping red water onto the bed, the collection of knives laid out on the sheets, the bottle of ether, the Kelly pad under her arm, the washtub glistening red under the electric light.
Though she was fading from the big dose of laudanum, her heart still reeled.
“Go ahead, Milton.”
Here came the cloth, sharp bite of ether in the back of her throat, and then she floated in a warm gray sea, flanked by swirling voices.
“Damn, that was fast.”
“Hold the cloth to her mouth.”
“She ain’t awake.”
“Do what I tell you or get the fuck out.”
Lana smiled, gleaming with morphine, and still in that same bed in that same room in the Grand Imperial, only now it was filled with the natural light of morning and noise from the street below.
She thought, I’ve survived.
Beautiful Dr. Primack stood at the foot of her bed, speaking with another man—round and gray-bearded, holding a bowler against his thigh, a shiny object catching early sunlight pinned to his black frock coat.
When she tried to lift her right hand to catch their attention, she felt the straps binding both arms to her sides.
She made a noise with her throat.
The men quit talking and looked at her. They walked over, sat on either side of the bed.
The older, bearded man ran his fingers through his thinning hair, his dirty nails leaving fleeting white trails in the ripples of his rosy scalp.
“Miss, I’m Sheriff Donaway, and Dr. Primack has explained to me the tragic predicament.”
Thank God, she thought.
“He’s had to take off both legs and arms, and arrangements are being made to transport you on the narrow-gauge to Mercy Hospital in Durango.”
She looked up at Dr. Primack, who watched her with something that might have been mistaken for compassion.
The doctor turned back the cover so Lana could see the bloody, bandaged stubs below both elbows.
The morphine elation fading.
My right arm was fine. You told me it was.
“I understand this is most upsetting,” he said, “but there was nothing I could do. Both arms had sustained severe damage. You’d be dead by now if I hadn’t taken them off.”
She opened her mouth. Why haven’t you told him about Abandon? But it came out as little more than the ramblings of an idiot.
“Try to settle down, Miss Hartman,” the doctor said. “You’re in a fragile state.”
They’re dying.
“Please, Miss Hartman.”
Why are you doing this?
“Can you give her something, Doc?”
“I sure can.”
Dr. Primack hurried over to his hand case, which was sitting on the dresser.
She heard the words in her head as clearly as she used to speak them, but the room resonated with only an ugly, tongueless noise.
“Listen,” the sheriff said, and he placed his hand on her shoulder. “Dr. Primack has also divulged to me your mental condition.”
Bottles clinked in Primack’s hand case.
“You’re going to recover in Durango.”
The doctor was coming back now.
“I have a connection with the asylum in Pueblo.”
Primack unscrewed the cap, tilting the bottle’s open mouth onto a white cloth.
“I’m certain I can get you admitted. They’ll help you there, Miss Hartman. Make the life God has seen fit to afflict you with as dignified and comfortable as can be hoped for.”
Look in his notebook. For Chrissakes.
“You’re luck
y to have fallen under the care of Primack.”
She screamed and writhed, but the restraints held.
“Lana.” The doctor spoke softly into her ear. “I want you to know I’m waiving my fee for the amputations. Now don’t fight it.”
The ether-soaked cloth descended toward her face.
“Just close your eyes and take a long, deep breath.”
2009
EIGHTY-SIX
T
he lobby of the Grand Imperial stood accented by objects, the assemblage of which felt more like a cliché than a throwback to Silverton’s boom years—burgundy floral-print wallpaper, tin ceiling, chandelier, a stodgy black safe near the front desk, a pair of wall clocks, a grand piano, a sculpture of four grinning outlaws on horseback firing their revolvers into the air, and a large-scale portrait of a whore hanging over one of two high-backed leather sofas that comprised the sitting area.
Abigail reached the front desk.
“I need help. Call the police.”
“There’s no police here.”
“What?”
“Just a sheriff.”
“Give me the phone.”
“Are you a guest with us?”
“Are you joking—”
“The courtesy phone is only for guests of the GI.”
Abigail placed the young woman at sixteen or seventeen. She sat behind an expansive antique desk, a horror novel clutched in her left hand. She was sucking a green lollipop that wafted a bizarrely scented amalgamation of apples and whiskey.
Abigail read the clerk’s name tag. “Listen, Tracy. A man has chased me out of the mountains, and he’s coming to kill me. Think we could make an exception tonight?”
The desk clerk laid the paperback down beside a keyboard and withdrew the lollipop from green-ringed lips, making eye contact with Abigail for the first time.
“Fine.”
There was the screech of brakes, and, glancing in the mirror behind the desk, Abigail caught the reflection of the large front window that looked out onto Greene Street, saw an old beater of a Bronco slide into the Suburban’s rear bumper—a slight collision that barely shook the vehicle.