Abigail shrieked.
Lawrence looked in again, jerked back. “Oh Jesus.”
“Is she alive?” Abigail whispered. “She looks very alive.” The breakdown had covered a recess in the wall, and inside, a young woman leaned against a flat-topped rock, her left arm draped over a colony of gypsum flowers, their crystal blooms curling between her fingers. She was naked, slender but curvy, her head resting in the crook of her arm, as if she’d just sat down and gone to sleep, her left hand coated in wax.
Lawrence whispered, “Beautiful.” Her hair was long and black and her full lips still held color—deep maroon. She was pink-skinned, blood still in her veins.
“She must have just gotten trapped in there,” Abigail said.
“No, I believe this woman was alive in Abandon in 1893.”
“You’re telling me this flawless corpse is a hundred and sixteen years old?” “Look at the pile of clothes. Those boots. ‘Custom-mades,’ they called them. Those canvas trousers, the shawl. Look like the outfit of a modern-day woman to you?”
“That’s impossible. There’s no decay. She hardly looks dead.”
“I know. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.” He stepped back from the opening and inhaled a few clean breaths of air. “That rotten-egg smell?” he said. “Sulfur gas. Very toxic and probably what killed this woman. But it also preserved her, killing all the aerobic bacteria inside her and around her. That Christmas in Abandon, she was probably doing what we’re doing now—just trying to find a way out. Maybe she saw this nook, decided to rest. Then the ceiling came down, entombed her, sealed her in. In an airtight environment, the sulfur gas had nowhere to go, so there’s no decomposition. Kept her literally frozen in time. Look at her. That’s the face of someone who lived and breathed in the town of Abandon. Bet she had a story to tell. God, she’s lovely.”
June suddenly screamed, “She’s looking at me! She won’t stop looking at me!”
Abigail said, “That woman’s dead, honey. Been that way for quite a while.”
Lawrence lifted a rock, placed it back in front of the opening.
“What are you doing?” Abigail asked.
“If fresh air gets in, she will decay. We should seal it back up, leave her as we found her.”
SIXTY-THREE
T
hey climbed out of the waterfall room through a blind shaft that accessed another passage, spent several hours moving through a network of tunnels that crisscrossed and dead-ended and turned back into themselves. For the first time, Abigail felt lost.
They stopped to rest in a room where the stalactites and stalagmites had merged together in the shape of hourglass columns. Abigail sat up against the cold calcite, staring at her watch—11:03 A.M. They’d been rambling through the cave for five and a half hours. She hadn’t had any meaningful sleep for twenty-nine.
“I really need to rest,” Abigail said. “I’m on fumes here.”
Lawrence said, “These daylight hours are too precious to waste. There’s no point searching for a way out at night. Suppose we walked through a room when it was dark outside that had a daylight hole. We’d never know. So we have to keep going until the sun sets.”
“But that’s another eight hours. I can’t—”
“Abby, do you understand that we have maybe three or four days to find a way out? And that after that, without water, we’ll be too weak to cover any ground? It’ll be over for us then.”
She rested her forehead on her knees and cried.
The constant motion of Lawrence’s light beam wreaked havoc on Abigail’s stomach. Or maybe it was this cold, deep, underground air, the jagged rock walls narrowing over the last fifty yards, the tunnel beginning to slope gradually down. Abigail thought, Great, we’re going deeper into the mountain. She instantly felt guilty for complaining to herself. Bad as things were, the last twelve hours had been infinitely worse to June.
“How you holding up?” Abigail asked. “We can rest anytime you want. Just say when.” June made no response. Glancing back, Abigail said, “Everything all—” Even in the paltry shreds of light that slipped back from her father’s headlamp, Abigail could see that there was no one behind her. “Lawrence, she’s gone.”
He stopped, shone his headlamp back up the empty tunnel. “How long?”
“I don’t know. Those were the first words I’d said to her in ten or fifteen minutes.”
“June!” Lawrence screamed. His voice ricocheted down the tunnel, stirred up a single echo, and quickly died away.
No answer.
“Well, come on,” Abigail said. “We have to find her.”
They jogged back up the tunnel. After a minute or so, Abigail thought she heard something.
“Lawrence,” she said. “Lawrence!” He spun around. “I think I heard—”
A scream exploded from the bowels of the mountain. It ended abruptly, but its reverberations went on and on.
Lawrence said, “What the hell?”
“Was that June?” Another scream ripped through the cave, this one farther away. “She sounds like she’s in agony,” Abigail said.
They rushed up the tunnel as the screaming continued, arrived after two minutes of hard running at a split in the passage.
A woman’s voice shouted, “WHERE ARE YOU?”
“I can’t tell which one it’s coming from,” Abigail said.
“PLEASE, GOD, JUST KILL ME!”
“This way,” Lawrence said, and he started into the larger of the two passageways.
“I’M SO THIRSTY!”
They moved through a series of grottoes, the screams getting louder.
“I’M STILL ALIVE! PLEASE! FINISH IT! KILL ME!”
Lawrence stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Abigail whispered.
He shook his head. “Thought I saw something in that room up ahead.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. It moved fast. Forget it.“
“I don’t hear her anymore.”
Lawrence shouted, “June, where are you? Help us find you!”
The cave seemed to hold its breath.
“I hate this place,” Abigail said.
They worked their way through a forest of stalagmites interspersed with pillars of bedrock, coming at last into a stagnant room with feathery blue fungi clinging to the walls and moving in slow-motion waves, like underwater sea grass.
Three steps into the next room, Lawrence froze, and Abigail heard him whisper, “My God.” As he sank down onto the floor, his headlamp shone on the expanding pool of dark blood that flowed out of June Tozer’s head.
She lay on her back beside the small boulder she’d used.
“Everything’s spinning,” she mumbled. They knelt at June’s side. Abigail took her hand, laced their fingers. In the poor light, only the volume of blood hinted at the extent of damage June had managed to self-inflict. She groaned, her lips moving, searching for the strength to form words. “I couldn’t . . . stand it. They were all around me, trying to use me. Where’s Emmett?” She tried to call out to him, but his name miscarried in her throat.
“He’s not here right now,” Lawrence said.
“I’ll be with him soon?” she mouthed between wet breaths. “And Ty?”
“Who?”
“Their son,” Abigail said. “Yeah. Ty, too.”
“I wanna hear him laugh again.”
“You will, sweetie.” Abigail was crying, overcome by June’s deathbed desperation—wishful thinking and unanswerable questions begging answers, any semblance of truth be damned.
“He’s always been a little boy in my mind. You think he’s grown up into a—” She choked, then coughed, a mist of blood sputtering through the gaps between her teeth.
“Try not to talk,” Lawrence said.
“Will I still be his mom? I was for six beautiful . . .” She moaned, her eyes closing. Abigail placed her ear on June’s sternum, listening for the rise and fall of lungs expanding, deflating.