by Blake Crouch
Harriet took her doll and got up from the mattress and walked over to his bedside. “Hey,” she said.
Mr. Cole lifted his head off the pillow. Even in the low light of the cabin, she could see the wetness on his face, knew what it was.
“What are you doing up?”
“I heard you bein sad. Is the wet because everyone’s gone?”
Stephen wiped his eyes and sat up against the wall, his long legs hanging off the bed, feet touching the freezing dirt floor.
Harriet climbed onto the mattress with him.
“I’m sad for a lot of reasons.”
“Like what reasons?”
“Well, mainly because God told me to do a very hard thing, something I didn’t think He was capable of. Or me, for that matter. But I did it, because we have to obey God. Always. And now, I um . . .” He wept again. “I feel like I don’t know Him anymore. Like He isn’t who I thought He was. And that’s fine. He’s perfect, whatever He is. That’s my failure, to make naïve assumptions about His nature.
“Then the dev il constantly tells me these lies, whispers in my ear that maybe it wasn’t God who spoke to me. That it was actually him, the evil one. Or that this horrible winter, this town, the thin air, the greed—all that took my mind from me.”
Harriet pried open the fingers of his right hand. “What’s that?”
In Stephen’s sweaty palm lay an ornate sterling silver hairpin. He let Harriet hold it. “It’s a hairpin,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“A piece of jewelry a woman uses to hold up her hair.”
“Why you got one?”
He smiled. “Fair question. It belonged to a woman named Eleanor.”
“Was she your wife?”
“No.”
“Is she dead?”
“No, Eleanor isn’t dead. You know, you kind of favor her. She had black curls like yours. Dark eyes.”
“Did she give you this?”
“We were picnicking on the beach late one afternoon. This was ten years ago, second-worst day of my life. I had taken her there to tell her I couldn’t marry her.”
“Why?”
“Because God told me to go to divinity school instead. To spend my life serving Him. It was a windy day and the wind kept blowing her hair loose, so she pulled out her two hairpins and stuck them in the sand. I swiped one when she wasn’t looking. I suppose I shouldn’t have. You know how you hold Samantha at night, and she makes you feel better? Safer?”
The child nodded.
“That hairpin is my Samantha. When I hold it, on hard nights, lonely nights like this, it makes me remember things about Eleanor—her eyes, the way she smelled, the sound of her laugh. And it makes me sad, makes me miss her, but it also reminds me that I was a very happy man once.”
“You wish you stayed on the beach with Eleanor?”
Stephen gathered his hair and tied it up in a ponytail.
“No, Harriet, I don’t wish that, because that would be wanting something in conflict with God’s will. But I’ll tell you what I do wish. Wish we could live twice, take a different path each time. That at the end of all this, when I finished serving God in the West, I could go back to that day on the beach, put a ring on Eleanor’s finger instead.”
“Maybe you can still go back.”
“Eleanor’s married to a lawyer named Benjamin. They live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with four children, last I heard.”
Stephen lay back on his side, his head on the pillow, watching fire shadows move like black ghosts along the walls of his wretched cabin. He managed to cry softly this time, Harriet patting his back, telling him with the simplistic, heartfelt wisdom of a six-year-old that he would wake up in the morning feeling brand-new and happy again, how sometimes her daddy made her very sad and lonely and afraid, but that the feeling always passed, and that it would be the same way for him.
They slept in Stephen’s bed and neither woke until just before dawn, and only because the fire had gone out, turned the cabin cold.
SIXTY-SEVEN
L
ana Hartman had gone without food and water for two full days. She lay against the cold rock floor, watching the sole light source burn in the middle of the cavern—a miner’s friend too weak to reach the gaunt and hollowed faces that lined the walls.
That first night locked in the mountain, the noise had been maddening—miners trying to beat the door down, quarreling, guns firing, children wailing. But most of the miners had left in search of water, and with the cavern quieted down, she now strained to hear the hushed voices—crying, prayers for deliverance, some praising God, others cursing Him, a pair of longhairs debating philosophy, theories concerning the soul after death.
Lana closed her eyes.
Sleep came in intermittent bursts of nightmare and fever dream. When she awoke, the thunder in her head had increased twofold, and Joss Maddox knelt beside her, stroking her hair. It took her a moment to latch onto Joss’s voice.
“. . . the worst of it. Wish Cole hadn’t met with a skull cracker. Love to hear him defend the behavior of his lovin God. He cares so much for us, this is one antigodlin fuckin way a showin it. You’re hurtin, and you ain’t done shit to deserve this hard fuckin deal. If I could do somethin for you, Lana, swear to holy Christ I would.
“I come to ask if you’d go with me. I’m leavin this fuckin tomb, goin on into the cave, see if I can’t find water, some way out.”
Lana cut her eyes at Joss, the barkeep’s face distended and malformed in the lantern light.
“That a nod?”
Lana moved her head again.
“All right. Here, let me help you up. Hope you ain’t too weak to walk, ’cause I’m too damn weak to carry you.”
Joss lifted the shadowgee she’d stashed with Al’s body, lighted the candle, and set out with Lana into the cave. They progressed slowly, guided by candlelight, soon leaving the man-made tunnels and passing into karst terrain, traveling from room to room, Joss holding the shadowgee at head level to avoid walking into stalactites.
An hour out from the main cavern, they entered a small grotto. Water seethed out of the floor into a rimstone pool, and Lana ran to it, already on her knees and bringing a cupped handful to her mouth.
“Think you might regret that.”
Lana stared down at the spring, tiny bubbles streaming up from cracks in the bottom, the surface appearing to boil. She touched her tongue to it, the water bitter and caustic, heavily alkalied.
“Poisoned them, don’t you bet?”
Still, Lana almost drank it.
She watched the water slip through her fingers as Joss swiped extra candles from the two dead miners.
The hall echoed with the noise of the waterfall, the light too gentle to show its vast dimensions. They stood on the shore of a subterranean lake, its bed of white crystals shining under the rays of firelight that shot out through the perforated can.
The shadowgee clanged against the rock, and the women fell to their knees, bent down, put their faces into the water. Lana coughed up the first two swallows, but when she finally got some down, it was so cold and good, it made her head ache.
They sat on the bank, drinking until their stomachs bulged and Joss had to loosen the button on her canvas trousers.
She said, “Lana, you don’t wanna know what I’d do to have one cigarette left in my dream book and some Mexican common doins—few hot rocks, menudo, bottle a mescal. Keep thinkin I hear someone bangin the angle iron. Tell you what—I’d swear off whiskey for a meal.”
They wandered on inside the mountain, nothing but rock and shadows and firelight, Lana feeling certain that days must be passing for all their time in this underworld.
She was halfway through one of Haydn’s concertos when Joss stopped, turned around, and said, “I think we better try to go back.” The way her voice carried, Lana pictured them standing in a large cavern. “I don’t have clue fuckin one as to our coordinates, but maybe Stephen came back after all or
they got the door open. Hate for us to miss that blowout.”
Lana shook her head.
“What?”
She reached down, touched her feet, grimaced.
“Oh, you’re tired? Well, hell, I am, too. Maybe we should catch forty winks first. Let’s find a decent spot.”
They went a little ways farther, until they found a room where the rock was level.
“Your suite, Miss Hartman,” Joss said. “Hope you find everthin to your likin. Here, we have some rock. Over here, some more rock. Oh, and here’s some more fuckin rock. I hope you like rock.”
Lana smiled.
“Ain’t seen many a those.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
T
he two women lay on the rock, nestled together for warmth and blanketed under Lana’s woolen cape and Joss’s serape. Lana’s headache had eased since she’d filled her stomach with water, but the reprieve of pain only made room for the deep hunger.
Joss said, “We got three candles left. Hope that’ll get us somewhere better’n this. I’m blowin us out for a while.”
Lana heard a puff and the room went black.
It was perfectly silent, cold.
She felt Joss take hold of her hand.
“Believe this shit? I don’t. Guess it beats turnin into a cottonwood blossom, bag over my head, rope around my neck, squirmin before a bunch a damn strangers. You warm enough? Squeeze my hand if you are.”
Lana squeezed.
“Good.” They were quiet for a while, Lana wondering if sleep would come more easily in the absence of psychotic thirst.
“You always been a mute? Squeeze once for yes, twice for no, three times for shut the fuck up, Joss.”
Two squeezes.
“Just curious is all. Take no offense. You spoke recently? Like in your adult life?”
One squeeze.
“How long since you went quiet?”
Three soft squeezes.
“Three years?”
One squeeze.
“That sound you hear is the wheels turnin inside my head, wonderin what the fuck happened to you. Was you met upon by some horrific occurrence?”
One squeeze.
“Somebody hurt you three years ago.”
One squeeze.
“A man?”
Squeeze.
“Cocksuckers, all. Was you a whore?”
Two squeezes.
“This the work a your husband or—”
One squeeze.
“Lemme venture a guess. . . . He caught you steppin out?”
“Two squeezes.”
“Well, as our mode a communication would take about four fuckin centuries to unriddle this mystery, I’ll leave it at this. You’re a sweet human bein and for whatever reason you caught a rough shake, and I’m real sorry and I wish it hadn’t . . .”
The ceiling glowed, both women gasping as the moon edged into view, nearly full and faintly yellowed, the color of ancient paper, their rocky prison shellacked with placid light.
“I shit you not, this is the first piece a luck I ever had.”
The moon’s brief framing in the chimney window ended, and it shrank away, continuing along its predestined path across the sky, stranding them once more in darkness.
Joss held the shadowgee above their heads and stared at the ceiling.
“You lift me, I believe I can scramble up that. Squat down.”
Lana knelt and Joss straddled her shoulders.
“All right, raise me up slow like.”
Lana stood, surprised by how light Joss was—barely a hundred pounds—and the weight soon lifted off her shoulders.
Joss began to climb, holding the shadowgee in her teeth, clawing her way up the rock, the candlelight dwindling.
Lana glanced around at the darkness on all sides.
“Fuck!” Joss had stopped, perched fifteen feet up the chimney, muttering to herself. Then she was moving again, but coming back down, the room re-warming with candlelight.
Her legs dangled through the bottom of the chimney.
She dropped to the floor, took the shadowgee out of her mouth, said, “Look here, Lana. Only one of us can go up. I want you to.”
Lana shook her head.
“No? Wanna know what you got in store if you stay here? Whoever climbs up that chimney’s gotta have the shadowgee to see, ’cause you can’t hold no candle in your teeth. I’ll leave you with three candles and two matches. No matter what happens, I’d say it’s a long chance I ever make it back to this room, which means you gotta find the mine again, where everyone else is at. Your candle has the luxury a blowin out twice. After that, you might as well sit down and wait to die, in darkness and quiet like you never seen, and all alone, just you and your thoughts. Me? I’d much prefer to take my chances with whatever’s on the bright end a this hole.”
Lana shook her head, her chin twitching.
“I ain’t lockin horns with you on this. You know enough about me to know I operate on the smoky end a the spectrum, so this ain’t no easy offer to make. I would suggest you take me up on it ’fore the notcher in me rethinks the situation.”
Lana pointed at Joss and turned her hands over, palms up.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve always survived. I’ll get myself out a this, jam the breeze back to everyone else. Look, I done plenty a awful things, and not many of ’em ever keep me up nights, but leavin you here in the dark ain’t somethin I care to haul around in my head, pokin at what few shreds a conscience I still possess. Savvy?”
She handed Lana the shadowgee and tied up her wavy black hair.
“Now I’m squattin down now, and I better feel your fuckin heft on my shoulders.”
2009
SIXTY-NINE
I
t was more snow than Abigail had seen in her lifetime—waist-deep and still dumping. With the headlamp on, her visibility ended after ten feet. Without it, the world lay as dark as the cave she’d crawled out of.
Her options whittled to climb or go down, she chose to descend, and between the twelve-thousand-foot oxygen-deprived air and the energy it took to walk without snowshoes in a meter of powder, she had to stop every few steps to catch her breath.
The slope steepened.
A gust of wind knocked her down.
Twice, she banged her knees into blades of rock hidden beneath the snow.
A half hour out from the cave, the slope terminated at a cliff. Abigail knelt down, shone her lamp over the edge, her stomach knotting as she watched the flakes spiral into darkness. She had no idea how far it dropped, but she resolved that no way in hell would she be going that way.
Instead, she traversed a descending line along the edge of the precipice, her face going numb again, fingers freezing, light-headed from the elevation and the lack of food and water.
Soon she’d left the cliff behind, working her way down a small drainage filled with the murmur of a creek in the twilight of its season, trickling under the snowpack on its path to wider waters. She spied tall, slim profiles in the gloom below. She passed through alpine shrubland, winter-crippled timberline trees, then finally emerged into a forest proper.
The firs drooped under their loads of powder.
A branch caught her hood, snow raining down her neck. She ducked under a canopy of Douglas fir branches that dipped low enough to provide some semblance of shelter.
She pulled off her gloves, dug the ice out of her collar. It was so quiet in the forest, with only the creak of straining fir trees and clumps of snow sliding off branches. She was very thirsty, but she’d refused to take any water or supplies from Lawrence, recalled telling him she’d just eat snow. She scooped a handful into her mouth. Chewed the ice. Squeezed out several drops of water, then spit it out. Her head ached. She’d been cold. Now she was colder.
A howl erupted nearby. It rose slowly and faded slowly, with all the heart-sickness of an elegy. She’d never heard that sound in the wild, and while it tripped all the primal fear triggers in her hard-wirin
g, she still found it lyrical and haunting and deeply sad.
It rose up again, closer now, and from someplace high above, perhaps that shrouded peak she’d descended, a collection of howls answered, their voices sweeping in a lonely cascade down through the forest. Abigail glimpsed something bounding through powder.
The wolf stopped thirty feet away, buried to its neck, ears flattened, hackles spiked, regarding her with its head cocked, as if in wonderment that a human had ventured out on such a night, eyes glinting in points of yellow fire, long incisors shining as it bared its teeth.
Abigail blinked and it was gone.
She got up, pushed on through the forest. After awhile, her watch beeped—3:00 A.M. She realized she’d been traveling downhill for some time, and that worried her. Abandon stood at tree line, but she’d gone well below it now, by as much as a thousand feet.
She turned back and ascended through the forest, taking the steepest line she could find, back up into deeper snow, thinning trees, using saplings to haul herself upslope.
Just before dawn, she passed through an odorless stand of trees stripped to their trunks—an ossuary of burned evergreens, this barkless, coneless, leafless, blackened wood mass-murdered some time ago by an electrical storm.
At timberline, she stopped to rest, beyond exhaustion, legs cramping, nauseated with hunger. She’d sweated out all her water and she made herself choke down a few handfuls of snow as the sky shifted from black into gray—the first progression toward dawn.
She sat shivering against a crooked, twisting runt of a tree, watching the gathering light shape out the wilderness around her. Snow came in spits now, and though the wind had slacked off in the forest, she could hear it moaning through the crags above.
Dawn dropped anchor.
She’d hoped to see the only landmark she knew—those jagged granite teeth of the Sawblade—but the cloud deck had decapitated everything above twelve thousand feet.
