20. Gone
Avoice called to me from outside the cabin.
At first, it was just a sigh on the wind. “Colin.”
I pulled the covers up over my head to blot it out. It wasn’t real. It was just the wind.
“Collllin. Let me in, Colin. It’s so cold out here.”
That wasn’t right. Bessie died in fire, not in snow.
A little worm of guilt began to gnaw on my heart. Growing as it fed.
“Help me!”
I could do it. I could change everything. Save Bessie and make all the years after dissolve, to be lived over again. The right way this time.
I got out of my bunk and went to the front door. For once, the cold didn’t seem to reach me. Instead, heat radiated from the cabin wall, touching my face like a caress.
I opened the door. Instead of the vast arctic night beyond, I beheld a wheat field. And in the midst of it, the broken body of a derailed train, its wooden boxcars on fire. The flames stretched up to the sky, dark smoke boiling up.
“Colin! Help!”
Between the doorstep and the train, framed against the raging inferno, loomed a rough wooden pole with a caribou skull mounted on it. The eye sockets glared at me accusingly while Bessie’s voice issued from its empty mouth.
* * *
“Anna’s gone!”
Eleanor’s frantic cry shocked me from sleep. I jerked awake, heart thudding as if I’d run a race, sweat sticking my union suit to me even with the deep cold.
Cold. It was too cold. Had the fire gone out?
“Wake up! Anna’s missing!” Eleanor shook me roughly, and I blinked the last of the sleep from my eyes.
“What’s this?” Roland asked, pushing himself up on one elbow. In the light of the kerosene lantern, he was nothing but an indistinct shape in the lower bunk, Steve stirring above him. “Anna?”
Eleanor’s hair hung down in its nightly braid, her expression frantic. “I woke up and went to tend the fire—the door was standing wide open, with snow blowing in! I closed it, then came back in here and realized Anna isn’t in bed.”
Fear froze my bones. “Did she take her coat?”
Eleanor ducked back through the calico sheet. “No. Or her boots. Oh God…”
Was she sleepwalking like Doug had? I hastily slid out of bed and hurried to the front room, pulling on my outerwear as fast as I could. Roland and Steve joined me, Doug emerging last.
“Maybe she just went to the latrine,” he said with a yawn.
Of all of us, he should have been the most concerned, given his near-miss with frostbite. “Without her boots?”
Eleanor pulled her coat on over her nightdress and union suit. “I’m going with you.”
“Someone needs to stay and make sure the fire doesn’t go out,” Steve objected. “And she’s going to need immediate medical attention. It makes more sense for you to stay here and prepare to treat her for frostbite.”
Tears sparkled on Eleanor’s lashes. That, more than anything, told me how serious the situation was, as I’d never seen her lose her composure before. “Please, bring her back,” she whispered. Her throat worked as she swallowed, then she went to her medical bag and began sorting through it.
“We will,” Steve said firmly. His father didn’t say anything, face pale with fear as he lit a lantern.
I couldn’t imagine what Roland was feeling. If it had been Steve out there, lost in the snow in the middle of the night…
But thinking of Steve made me think of Doug’s plans, which fueled the worm of guilt still chewing away quietly inside my chest. I pushed all the thoughts away; now was not the time to be distracted, not with Anna’s life depending on our quick action.
Outside, snow fell thick and fast. Any footsteps Anna had left behind were already obliterated under the heavy blanket of white. The wind whipped down the valley, cold as a dead heart.
“We should split up,” Doug said. “We’ll cover more ground that way.”
Steve went to search the area near the mine, then peered down the shaft, in case she’d fallen inside while sleepwalking, though surely the hot coals from the night’s fire would have waked her even if the fall didn’t. Roland limped the other way, along the creek, while Doug and I turned in the direction of the forest, our paths diverging as we split up to cover more ground.
We shouted Anna’s name, over and over again. The cries of the other men became more and more muffled as I pushed farther into the woods, past the field of stumps where we’d cut down trees for fuel. Branches creaked and rubbed against one another, occasionally dumping snow as they bent far enough beneath its weight for gravity to temporarily relieve them of their burden.
My lantern seemed to barely put out any light, in comparison to the endless night around me. We were so far away from anything else—anyone else. There was only the trees, the snow, and my increasingly hoarse cries of “Anna!”
Then a loud knock sounded in front of me.
I froze. “Anna?”
No voice answered. But a few seconds later, there came another knock, this time to my left.
Just the trees creaking. Some strange effect of the deep cold.
The knocks came again: to the right, in front, faster and faster, all around me.
I took a step back, then another. Ahead of me, the spruce trees began to thrash in a motion unrelated to the wind.
As if something very large was making its way through the forest, coming right for me.