They stood in stunned silence, no one daring to move.
Lawrence finally turned on his headlamp.
“Dear God,” June said. The light beam traced a widening lake of blood across the floor to its source—the destroyed head of Stu. He lay unnatural and broken on the section of marble exposed to the skylight, his face torqued away from them.
“You think Stu accidentally fell?” Abigail said. “Or jumped? Remember what Isaiah said about him? How he’d fallen apart since the war?”
“He drank half a bottle of vodka after you left,” June said.
Lawrence shook his head. “Look, his gun’s gone. Night goggles, too.”
“So maybe he left them on the third floor.”
Lawrence started toward the west wing.
“Wait!” Abigail whispered. She caught up with him. “You aren’t seriously going up there?”
FORTY-SIX
E
mmett’s plunge had effectively destroyed the central staircase, so Lawrence and Abigail worked their way back toward the kitchen to the west-wing stairwell.
They climbed to the third floor and stood for a second time in that bullet-shredded corridor, Abigail feeling trapped in some kind of repetitive fever dream, coming back again and again to this nightmare world.
Their headlamps passed over the doors, the wood-paneled walls, the mounds of snow where the ceiling had failed.
Lawrence limped a few steps into the corridor, stood there listening.
They proceeded on, over the pockmarked wood where Isaiah had fired up at them through the ceiling, skirting that hole where Abigail had punched through and nearly fallen to her death.
They reached what was left of the central staircase.
“I don’t hear a thing,” Abigail whispered.
“Me, neither. Look at that.” He pointed to where several dozen brass shell casings had rolled against the wall. “What was he shooting at?”
They walked on, their headlamps aimed toward the end of the east-wing corridor, an occasional snowflake drifting down through the ceiling, a speck of bright white in their light beams.
“Maybe he did jump,” Lawrence whispered. “Got fueled up on vodka and freaked out when he heard something. Emerald House shifts constantly. It’s full of noises. Or it could’ve just been an animal. Another coyote.”
“Should we go back, then?” Abigail said.
“Yeah, I think that’s a good—” Lawrence took a sharp breath.
“What?” Abigail whispered. “You’re scaring me, Lawrence.”
“Something just stepped out from one of the rooms at the end of the corridor.”
She clutched her father’s arm. “Where’d it go?”
“Toward the sitting room, I think. It was just a shadow, and it moved so fast.”
“Okay, let’s not do this, all right? This is stupid. Like in horror movies when people walk into haunted houses by themselves for no good reason. I wanna go—”
“This isn’t like that, Abby. Come on. We have to see.”
“No.”
“Then go back down to the foyer and wait with June, but I’m not leaving until I—”
She tightened her grip on his arm, said, “I’m not going anywhere in this place alone.”
“Then I guess you’re coming with me.”
Lawrence continued slowly down the corridor, Abigail clinging to her father like she was eight years old again.
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
M
olly 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 nipples 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—”