Abandon

SIXTY-TWO

S

tarting out proved simple enough. They took the only passage that branched off from the chamber, Lawrence leading with the headlamp, followed by Abigail and June.

They hadn’t walked thirty feet before Lawrence stopped, said, “Well, guys, here we are. First choice of many.” The main tunnel continued on, at least as far as his headlamp shone, but there was also an opening in the rock nearby. Lawrence knelt down, looked through the hole. “A snug fit, but it definitely goes somewhere.”

“Don’t you think we should stick with the larger passageways?” Abigail asked.

“I honestly don’t—” He gasped. “There’s a skeleton in here and a pair of wrist irons. This might have been a prisoner. Yeah, let’s stick with the main passage for now.”

So they continued on, soon leaving all signs of mining activity—holes drilled in the rock for dynamite, rusted cans of black blasting powder, empty carbide kegs, strips of railroad track, drill steels, support timbers—and emerged into a natural cave, ceasing to follow the path of any particular tunnel, moving instead from room to room, some smaller than a closet, others larger than that first cavern, and the rock formations becoming more alien the deeper they ventured. Stalactites hung down from the roof, spilling their corrosive solutions into drip holes on the floor. Abigail ran her hands over walls of breccia—fragments of rock, fossils of bone and prehistoric crustaceans cemented together in sandstone.

An hour in, they came upon a richly decorated grotto. Lawrence’s head-lamp shone up at the ceiling, where stalactites bunched together, row upon row, like sharks’ teeth. In the center, they’d melded into a strange conglomerate that reminded Abigail of a chandelier. Against the nearest wall, they resembled a pipe organ. In a far corner, the long tentacles of jellyfish.

They wandered into a smooth-walled tube, the ceiling just a foot above Lawrence’s head. As they progressed through the elliptical passage, the walls grew farther apart and the ceiling lowered. Soon they had to walk hunched over, then squatting, then crawling on their knees, and finally their bellies, dragging themselves through the flattener on their forearms, just sixteen inches between the ceiling and the floor.

They’d been moving along this way for five minutes when Abigail yelled, “I’m getting claustrophobic!” She couldn’t see Lawrence’s light, felt trapped in total darkness, the warmth of her own breath blowing back into her face when she exhaled against the rock.

Something grabbed her ankle, but there wasn’t enough space to turn her head.

June whispered, “They’re all around us, Abigail. They won’t stop talking to me.”

Lawrence yelled back, “I hear something up ahead!”

They pushed on, the ceiling scraping the top of Abigail’s head, her left leg beginning to bleed again, the crawling murder on her tailbone. I can’t breathe, she thought. Then, Yes, you can. It’s just in your mind. She had to tilt her head to the side and flatten her shoulders in order to writhe her way through. What if we get stuck? I can’t even move my limbs enough to turn myself around. This would be a horrible way to die.

June cried, whispering in the darkness behind her, and Abigail had started to tell Lawrence to just turn the fuck around when she heard it, too—white noise.

The bulb of his headlamp swung toward her. “You’re almost there,” he said. Where the tube ended, less than a foot of space remained between the floor and the ceiling. Abigail squeezed her way through, and Lawrence grabbed her by the arms, helped her find her footing.

“Where is this?” she asked. Lawrence turned and let his light run up the sixty-foot walls of an immense hall. “Oh my God.” They stood at the edge of a subterranean lake, fifty feet across, two feet deep. On the other side, a four-foot waterfall plunged into a pool out of a fissure in the rock. The pool over-flowed, fed the lake, the lake flooding into a hole that chuted the mineral water into the depths of the mountain. The hall resonated with the crush of the waterfall, and the sound made Abigail think of her favorite spot in Central Park—the fountain at Cherry Hill. If you sat close, it was loud enough to drown out the city noise.

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.”