Authors: Blake Crouch
“Merry Christmas to you,” he said, and started for the door.
Stephen Cole stood under a streetlamp, watching the wind build snowdrifts against the storefront of a vacated barbershop. Across the street, on the second floor of the hotel, Molly Madsen sat in the bay window, looking down at him, her face weakly illuminated by the candle in her hands. He waved, whispered a prayer for her.
He followed the plank sidewalk for several blocks, then turned up the side street that led to his cabin.
His mind brimmed with thoughts of his home in Charleston, South Carolina—the palm trees and live oaks and saltwater marshes, the ocean at sunrise, the faces of his father and mother.
He had come west three years ago because he believed it to be the will of God, had felt compelled to minister to those who lived in these harsh environs.
What he had found were a thousand little towns high in the Rockies, built upon debauchery and greed.
I’ve accomplished nothing
, he thought.
God, show me one life in these mountains that has benefited from my presence.
Overcome, he knelt in the empty street and prayed until his face had gone numb and his body shook with cold.
Stephen rose to his feet and wiped the snow from his hair.
He’d taken two steps toward home when he heard it.
He froze. Forgot that he was cold. Forgot his loneliness.
He just stood there in the darkness and falling snow, a strange warmth spreading through him. Having now heard it, he knew with certainty that all the other times, kneeling at the foot of his bed, sometimes hours in the silence, had been imagination and hoping.
It was simply his own name that he’d heard, but it filled him with such blinding peace that he didn’t question for a moment the source.
When God speaks to you, His voice is unmistakable.
Abigail followed June into the grove. The small woman, swallowed in a red ski jacket, aimed her light at the rubble. Abigail saw a cookstove, cans, rusted bedsprings amid the detritus. Emmett slipped off his camera’s lens cap and began to circle the homestead.
Abigail said, “June, while Emmett’s taking photos, could you tell me how you two got involved with paranormal photography?”
June led Abigail away from the remains of the cabin. They stood apart from the others, separated by a lightning-fried spruce, headlamps off. “Ten years ago, our son, Tyler, was out riding his bicycle in the neighborhood. He was hit by a van. Died in the street.” Abigail found June’s hands in the dark. “Night after the funeral, Emmett and I were in bed, holding each other. We were talking about taking some pills. It’s a pain like you cannot . . .
“So we’re in bed, it’s two or three in the morning, and all of a sudden, I just feel this calm engulf me, like the rush of some incredible drug. The air was thick, a living thing, and I felt like I was being wrapped in it. That’s the only
way I know how to describe it. Most intense and unconditional love I’ve ever felt, and I was smiling, and I looked at Emmett, and he was, too. We were experiencing it together, and we both knew exactly what it was. Ty had come to us. I felt my little boy’s presence just as strong as I feel you standing here in front of me, even though I can’t see you. He saved us, Abigail.
“Next morning at our local coffee house, Emmett saw a poster for a paranormal-photography slide show. We didn’t even know there was such a thing, but having just had our experience with Ty, we felt this conviction to go. Unfortunately, the photographer we went to see was a fraud. I could tell that right away. Most people who claim to be psychic are delusional. The stuff they shoot, it’s camera malfunctions, flash problems, dust particles on the film. But Emmett and I were inspired to buy a camera. We shot four rolls in our room that night—infrared film in total darkness. In the corner above our bed, we captured this fantastic pool of light, like this energy was watching over us as we slept.”
“Your son.”
“Emmett and I had always been artists. It’s why we lived in San Francisco. We threw ourselves into paranormal photography, never looked back. And it’s such a beautiful medium—a perfect intersection of art and history and service.”
“What do you mean by ‘service’?”
“See, it isn’t just about taking photographs of paranormal activity for the aesthetic value. These are suffering spirits who, for whatever reason, haven’t passed to the other side. Most important part of our job is helping them move on. It’s not about the thrills for us, or ‘ghost-busting.’ It’s our calling. If Ty hadn’t died, we probably never would have come down this road. Isn’t it beautiful and sad how these things work out?”
June placed something in Abigail’s hand—a small plastic cylinder.
“What’s this?”
“Emmett shot a roll of film on the hike in.”
“Of me?”
“Of you and Lawrence.”
“Well, that’s . . . Thank you, but to be honest, I don’t know that I want this.”
June squeezed her hands. “Do as you see fit.”
When Emmett finished shooting the Curtice homestead, the party moved on, six pairs of boots brushing through dry autumn weeds. They came down a slope, Abigail feeling guilty, convinced the death of the Tozers’ son had turned them out of their minds, yet knowing their story would make the heartbreaking core of her article.
Shapes took form out of the fog. They stood in the grassy lane, Abandon’s ramshackle buildings on either side, tendrils of mist drifting among them through the blaring silence.
“Let’s start in the saloon,” Emmett said, and Lawrence led them across the street, hopped over a few planks—all that remained of the sidewalk—and stepped gingerly into the shack.
“I haven’t been in here in awhile,” he said, “so I’m not sure how sturdy everything is. We’d better just start with the Tozers going in.”
Emmett and June joined Lawrence inside. After a moment, Emmett appeared in the doorway, said, “Would everyone please turn off their head-lamps? I don’t want any outside light getting in here, interfering with the shots.”
All the headlamps went dark except for Emmett’s. Abigail stood on the threshold, watching them explore the interior, the beam of Emmett’s light grazing the listing walls and a gnawed-board floor, littered with pieces of broken whiskey bottles, rusted tin-can scraps. The pine bar had toppled over and punched out a section of the back wall, through which the fog crept in, giving the saloon a natural smokiness.
“You can come on in,” Lawrence whispered to Abigail. “Just be mindful where you step and don’t go near the stove. If you look up, you’ll see a hole in the roof. The boards underneath get rained and snowed on. Amazing they haven’t fallen through yet.”
Abigail walked inside, the floor bowing beneath her weight. It smelled of mold and marmot urine and whatever the fog had carried in from the canyon. Emmett and June stood together by the wall opposite the potbellied stove, near an upright piano, half of the ivory keys missing, the rest cracked and jagged, like broken teeth.
Emmett turned off his headlamp, the darkness filling with the click of exposures.
While he shot the saloon, Abigail whispered to June, “Are these spirits ever—”
“Mean?” June laughed. “We get that question a lot. In all our years of work, we’ve encountered only one aggressive spirit. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re just confused, lost, and consumed in their own grief. It’s funny, because once you’re dead, all the beliefs you subscribed to while alive don’t mean a thing.”
Abigail turned on her tape recorder. “Tell me about this aggressive experience.”
“Few years ago, we got a call to clear a church outside Monterey. This spirit had been locking doors, moving furniture around, just making a nuisance of itself. So we showed up, and the preacher was there. This hard-core, fire-and-brimstone type of guy. He said, ‘You tell me when you feel the presence, and
I’ll get rid of it, show you how it’s done.’ I told him, ‘Well, it’s here right now,’ and he said, ‘By the power of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave.’ A chair went flying across the sanctuary, shattered on the pulpit. That preacher ran out the doors. Scared the hell out of him. He quit the church and everything.”
“What do you think it was? A demon? Do you even believe in angels and demons?”
“Angels, yes. Demons . . . I’m not sure. Come to find out, this church had been converted from a nursing home. This spirit was probably tied up from whatever trauma it had experienced there when it was alive. But it certainly didn’t like the church.”
“How do you think it managed to throw a chair?”
Emmett piped up from across the room: “These spirits, when they die, become pure mind. You know what we could do if we had access to even eighty percent of our brain?”
“You talking about telekinesis?
“That’s right.”
“Have to say, I’m surprised by the lack of equipment you guys brought. I did some research before I flew out, expected to see you using thermal scanners and—”
“Geiger counters, ion detectors, an EMF alarm. Let me tell you something,” Emmett said. “That’s a bunch of garbage. All you need is a camera and film, because if you can’t walk into a room and feel it in your bones, you’re in the wrong business, wasting your time.”
When Emmett turned on his headlamp, Abigail noticed that June had been drawn over to one of the windows, where she stared at something across the street.
“Lawrence,” June whispered. “What happened up there?” They all walked over, peered up to where June pointed. Without light, they could barely make out a bay window on the second floor of a building across the street. “Did something happen in that room?”
“Not that I know of. It was just one of the nicer rooms in the hotel. Why?”
“Someone’s watching me from that window.” Even though she knew it wasn’t real, a subtle chill moved down through the vertebrae of Abigail’s spine.
“Can you get us up there?” Emmett asked.
“Never been, but we can certainly try.”
Lawrence walked through the tall door frame, the others following, and soon the party had gathered in the lobby, a long but narrow room with two archways opposite each other, a front desk, and a wide staircase that ascended into darkness.
“This was the only brick building in Abandon,” Lawrence said, “built when the mine was still producing and people thought this town was going to last.” Abigail stepped through the archway on her left, her headlamp sweeping over the shambles of a lounge strewn with Victorian-style furniture and a long-dormant hearth. Draperies hung in shreds from the windows, and a billiard table stood at a severe slant, one of its legs having snapped off.
Abigail drew in a quick shot of oxygen.
Eyes shone back at her, illumined in the beam—the head and rack of an enormous elk, fallen from its mount above the fireplace, stared at her, mottled with mold and decay.
She returned to the lobby, where everyone had gathered at the other archway, this one opening into the dining room. It might have been the best restaurant in Abandon in the early 1890s, but tonight it lay before them in a mass of mangled tables and broken chairs. The three chandeliers had pulled out from their fixtures in the ceiling and shattered on the black-and-white-striped
hardwood floor, the tiny shards of glass and crystal glittering under the lamps, as if the party had stumbled into an ice cave.
“Anyone care for a glass of hundred-year-old bourbon?” The headlamps converged on Scott, who stood behind the mahogany bar, a dusty bottle in one hand.