We skirt downtown, still following Mook’s old route—threading single file along a thin path, Albion about ten yards ahead of me. I don’t know what would have caused a path like this—animals, maybe? Deer, or something? I’m almost on top of a snake when it uncoils and glides away from the path. The thing startles me and I stand quite still, holding my breath, giving it plenty of time to leave before I start clomping again along the trail. Amazing how quickly nature has reclaimed this space, only ten years and everything’s covered with grass and weeds, vines curling the mortar—Albion gets my attention and points ahead: about a hundred yards down the trail, a herd of deer feeds among the concrete stoops of the vanished courthouse, tawny shapes in the distance. Oddly, not every tree that was here perished in the blast. Older trees still stand, but their bark’s been shocked red.
In the Adware, the 10th Street Bridge flutters golden in the rain, its hesitant art deco styling even more like a phantom image of a lost age than it used to be. The mouths of the Armstrong tunnels still gape out of the side of stone, and I suggest making our way a little into the tunnels to duck out of the rain.
I’d rather get pneumonia, Albion pings.
Rather, she points out a verge of Second Avenue that ascends beneath the 376 overpass. She suggests we make camp up the slope, to scramble up where enough of the old road still forms a natural roof. The rain hasn’t let up and climbing the mud’s almost comical, slipping every few steps, but we find enough footing on a scatter of rocks, pull ourselves up with shallow-rooted weeds. The place where Albion suggested we camp is bone-dry. I help her pitch our tent, a cherry-red narrow tube that snaps into form like fabric flexed into concrete. Albion takes off her mask, checks her dosimeter—still clear. We’ve been hiking for over five hours, now, and this is our first real rest.
“Are you hungry?” she says.
“Starving, actually—”
I don’t remember lying down, let alone falling asleep, but Albion’s sorting out silver food packets when I startle awake.
“You were out,” she says. “Snoring—”
“How long?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe. Not too long. Do you want Tuscan-style veggie lasagna or roasted red pepper fettuccine?”
“Oh, ugh. The lasagna, I guess—”
Albion pours water into the foil reservoir in the dinner packets, cracks the spine along the ridge—a heating element—and stirs. She hands me the steaming lasagna and a wooden spoon, almost like a miniature little trowel.
“This is for you, too,” she says, giving me rehydrated chocolate pudding.
“Delicious,” I tell her. “You’re a great cook, adding water to this stuff. Actually, this pudding’s not too bad. I’d just eat this stuff, normally. We should have some of this around the house—”
Albion wants to finish the last leg of our hike before dark. “Another couple of hours there and back,” she says, “then we can relax until we head out tomorrow morning. How are you holding up?”
“I’m all right,” I tell her. “More humid than I thought it would be, and everything aches. My feet. I think I have blisters on my blisters—”
“Just a little longer,” she tells me.
We continue along Second Avenue—Albion hasn’t told me why we’ve come here, why we’ve come back to Pittsburgh like this, but this far along Second it’s clear she’s leading me to the Christ House, that she wants to fold me into something private there. We hike underneath the old rail trestle at the end of Second and take the switchback at Saline, entering the Run. Streets are still here, or the outlines of streets, frames of some of the houses—a few of the houses. Albion leads me through a field, tromping through grass that’s grown knee-high. The wind breathes through the grass—it sways like green waves.
“Here,” says Albion.
I may have missed this place on my own—the Christ House vanished except its outline, cinder blocks and brick and slabs of foundation, but even the outline’s obscured by grasses and the wild growth of weeds. I load the Archive to gain my bearings and the Christ House appears translucent—the charcoal gray wooden siding, the words of Christ slathered in whitewash, Except a man be born again. The last time I saw this place, Mook made the house appear as if it were burning, but even now without the fire the house seems ignited by some inner blaze—something burning cold and black, inexhaustible. I click away the Archive, but now even the field seems damned by what once stood here—the grass seems oily, ill, and the remaining bricks and cinder seem like they’d be corpse-cold to the touch. I walk the perimeter, the house easy to trace.
“Watch your footing,” says Albion.
After a thicket of overgrowth, the earth drops away into a concrete pit, maybe an exposed section of the house’s basement. I’m glad Albion warned me—someone could easily misstep here, the plunge at least ten feet to concrete. The pit was once a series of small rooms, it looks like. Coal rooms? Root cellars? They’re connected by a hallway that still tunnels underneath the main body of the house—I could scuttle down, I think, and still enter the original basement. I once walked that basement, in the Archive, I walked through the darkness, feeling my way along the dank walls and heard the sound of breathing. They kept people down here.
Albion’s removed her gas mask and taken down her hood—her hair’s vivid red in this storm light, blown about, the weeds are lush and gaudy green. She’s standing over in what would have been the house, tracing rooms in her memory.
“Over here is where we sat for prayer meetings,” she says. “Bible study. There used to be a fireplace about here—you can still see the chimney base, those bricks. We set out folding chairs in a semicircle around the fire, but Peyton and I always took a love seat over about here. Whenever Peyton came to these things—”
“She didn’t live here with you?” I ask.
“Peyton was a critical thinker,” she says. “She didn’t like this place, she hated being here. After Bible study, when we were alone, she’d look over my notes and tear apart whatever Waverly had told us. She only came here because of me, whenever she needed to help me—”
Albion crosses the grass to the other side of the house and points out a slab of stone.
“The stairs were here,” she says. “There were two bedrooms downstairs, built as additions out back. We had the second floor divided into six bedrooms, with another two rooms in the attic. It was a big house. Kitty had the master bedroom to herself, but we doubled up in the other rooms, sometimes three to a room. My bedroom was on the second floor, second to the right—”
Albion paces forward, trying to figure the location of her bedroom, one story above the grass.
“About here. Sometimes Peyton stayed with me so I wouldn’t have to be alone—”
“Peyton protected you—”