Abandon

They came at last to a decimated sitting area at the corridor’s end, heard nothing but the wind moaning outside in low, dissonant tones like some demonic choir. Snow billowed in through the window frames, having already buried the bookshelves and even drifted into the fireplace.

As Abigail swept her headlamp over the ravaged furniture, the listing chandelier began to tinkle.

Lawrence was already turning to go back, but before following him, she shone her headlamp into the far left corner.

“Jesus Christ!”

“What?”

“Lawrence!”

A man crouched behind a rat-eaten divan, his knees drawn into his chest, rocking slowly back and forth and shivering with cold.

“Are you with them?” he whispered, and Abigail felt so completely paralyzed that her knees gave out and she sank onto the floor, trembling with pure fear, adrenaline raging, heart red-lining, even before she saw Stu’s machine gun in his hand.

1893

FORTY-SEVEN

Molly Madsen sat in the bay window, eating the wedge of chocolate cake from the Curtices’ Christmas basket and looking down at the commotion on Main Street. It had been years since she’d seen this many people out on the town at once—entire families webbing north through deep snow, many still buttoning their slickers and coats and pulling on their mittens, a ubiquitous look of fear and confusion on all the faces.

Molly heard footsteps out in the hallway, followed by a soft knock. She rose from the divan, crossed the room barefooted, and opened the door. A young blond woman stood in the hallway, enveloped in a white woolen cape.

“May I help you?” Molly asked.

Lana noticed that under the sheer bed linen, draped like a shawl over her shoulders, Molly was naked.

On many occasions, Lana had glimpsed her sitting in the bay window from the street below and thought her pretty. In proximity, Molly Madsen looked hard-wintered, pupils dilated from laudanum. Her five-year self-imposed confinement to room 6 had turned her skin the sun-deficient gray of a dead tooth, and though her pitch-black hair dropped to her waist, you could see her scalp on top, where her hair had thinned and become laced with silver. Seam squirrels—lice—crawled under the hair on her arms.

The room reeked worse than a bunkhouse—spoiled food, oranges, a hint of old perfume.

“You’re the piano player,” Molly said, and when she smiled, Lana saw her lips smeared with chocolate icing and bits of cake stuck between her rotting teeth. “Jack and I have so enjoyed sitting in the window, listening. The music carries quite well. It’s a sure cure for putting me to sleep. Was that Beethoven you were playing this afternoon?”

Lana reached into her cape, pulled out a pencil. She stared at the tan-colored wood of the door frame, trying to conjure words that had for so long existed only in the safety of thought. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d written anything, but it was easier to recall the letters than to amass the nerve to create them, with no words spoken, no direct communication with another human being in three years, since that Christmas night in Santa Fe.

Molly said, “Can’t you talk?” Lana looked up, forced herself to make eye contact. Her gloved hands trembled as she pressed the pencil tip into the wood.

When she’d finished, Molly scanned the tiny writing on the door frame, said, “It’s Engler. Mrs. Jack Engler. Why on earth would I come with you?”

Lana scrawled an answer, overwhelmingly strange to converse with another person, even like this. The piano had been her larynx for so long.

Something awful happening.

Molly read it, said, “Well, I can’t leave yet. Jack should be here any moment, and what would he do if I was gone when he returned? I have to be here to greet him. Do you understand?”

A draft wafted through the hallway, blew open Molly’s shawl, her ni**les erect in the chill.

Lana wrote: Leave note.

“What if he didn’t find it? He’d be distressed if I wasn’t here. Jack’s very protective. No, I think I’ll wait in our suite. But thank you for the invitation. We’ll come along when he arrives. Where is this ball being held?”

Lana shook her head, eyes welling up with tears.

“You know, I have the perfect dress for it. A rose-colored evening gown. Jack first saw me in it in San Francisco, knew instantly he had to have me. Would you care to see an albumen print of my husband? You’ve never seen a more handsome man, I assure—”

Lana tried to grab her arm to pull her out into the hall, but Molly withdrew into her suite and slammed the door.

FORTY-EIGHT

Lana refastened her webs in the lobby of the deserted hotel and went outside. The sky was a rusty red, the walls of the box canyon slathered in alpenglow.

Sounds of men shouting resounded through Abandon.

She waded out into the middle of the street, where a path had been beaten down in the snow, fell in behind a young family of four, followed them down Main, listening to the children complain of the cold, begging to go home so they could finish supper and play with their Christmas toys.

Glancing up a side street, Lana saw more people streaming out of the cabins, and someone yelled, “Hostiles?”

They passed the burned-out buildings on the north end of town, torched over a year ago in an autumn fire. The family ahead of her stopped. The father knelt down, drew his children into his arms.

“Why you cryin, Pa?”

“Ain’t.” But he wiped his eyes. “Gotta leave y’all for a spell.”

“Where you goin?”

“Me and some a the other pas are gonna ride up toward the pass and stop what’s comin, make sure don’t nothin happen to this town and all the mas and children in it. But I’ll be back ’fore you know it. Need you to listen to your ma for me.”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Yes, Pa.”

He stood and embraced his wife, and as Lana bypassed them in the deeper snow, she heard the woman say, “I’m scared, John.”

“Don’t be, love. Just pray.”

The web tracks branched off from Main and went up the hillside. Lana passed smoking cabins on the spruce-dotted slope, saw two Italians on horseback rousing families from their Christmas suppers, hollering for them to get dressed quick and head up to the chapel.

The church stood in the distance, one of the first buildings erected in Abandon, though after a decade of scant upkeep, it needed whitewashing, and the windows on the north side had been boarded up since a blizzard had blown them out in the winter of 1890.

A crowd was gathering on the steps, and as Lana looked up at the wood cross, black against the copper sky, it began to teeter and she startled, thought for half a second the world was ending.