Abandon

While Lawrence helped June out of the tube, Abigail bent down to touch the inky water—freezing cold, barely the temperature of fresh snowmelt. When the beam of Lawrence’s headlamp passed over the surface, she saw that the lakebed consisted of white crystals. Tiny translucent fish swam among them, eyeless in the dark.

They sat on the rock shore of that lake, caught in eternal night, sharing sips of water and pieces of a granola bar. Abigail’s head dropped and her eyes closed.

“Wake up, Abby. We have to keep moving.”

She sat up, rubbed her eyes. “How long was I asleep?”

“Five minutes.”

“Where’s June?” He pointed to a breakdown on the far side of the lake, where a section of the ceiling had fallen. June crawled around on the rock.

“She’s acting strange, huh?” Lawrence said.

“Her husband was murdered in front of her. You forget that?”

They followed the shore to the breakdown and joined June on the shattered rock.

“What I’m thinking,” Lawrence said, “is that maybe these rocks and boulders are blocking the opening of another passage. Help me move some of this.”

“No,” June said. “Leave it be. That’s a bad place.”

“Sorry, but I don’t see another easy way out of this hall.”

Abigail and Lawrence began picking up the rocks they could handle, tossing them aside. As she worked to clear the scree, Abigail realized she’d already begun to lose her sense of time. It seemed possible they’d been in this cave for an entire day.

As she lifted one of the larger rocks and dropped it on the growing pile, the waft hit her.

Abigail stepped back. “You smell that? It’s like . . . rotten eggs. Come give me some light, Lawrence. I may have broken through.”

Lawrence moved one more rock, the opening now spacious enough for them to climb through. He shined the light inside, said, “Damn, it’s just a tiny—”

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

They 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.”