23. Plots and Plans
The storm blew itself out, the wind slowly falling while we listened for any more unnatural sounds. Eventually, Steve said, “The sun should be up.”
Roland laughed hollowly. “As if the sun comes up here.”
“Pa,” Steve began, but then didn’t seem to know how to follow up. Instead, he took his coat from above the stove and began to put it on.
“Are you going outside?” I rose to my feet. What if the thing was still out there, what if it lured him away or attacked him, or…?
“It seems quiet, and at least the wind has died down.” His blue eyes met mine, and my heart lurched. “I want to take a look.”
“You shouldn’t go alone.” I had no desire to set foot outside, but I wasn’t about to let him face…whatever…without someone else at his back.
As soon as we were prepared for the outdoors, we cautiously opened the cabin door. The clouds had blown away, and the southern hills were outlined by a weak grayish tinge. Utter silence reigned, and it struck me that this was a place without life. No birds, no insects, nothing but five humans dwarfed by the immense wilderness.
Steve shut the door and stared at it. Short scratches marred its surface, and one of the logs that ran the length of the cabin had a single deep gouge trailing along it.
Feeling almost light-headed, I put my gloved hand to the rime-coated log. It was frozen hard as iron; I couldn’t imagine what might have had the strength to make such a mark.
“What did this? What’s happening to us?” I murmured.
Steve’s arms came around me from behind. I leaned back into him, grateful for the comfort. I wished we’d met somewhere else, in some other place and time. Somewhere away from this horror.
Somewhere away from my brother.
The disloyalty of the thought lashed me with guilt, but I couldn’t deny it. I wanted to tell Steve the truth, for him to know…
What, the real me? Even I didn’t know that, after so many years of pretending. I was whoever Doug told me to be, changing with every new swindle.
“I’ve been having strange dreams ever since we came here,” he said, leaning his head against mine.
“So have I,” I confessed. “I thought I heard Bessie—my dead sister—before last night. But I convinced myself it was just my imagination.”
“Damn. For how long?”
“Once on the steamer. Then more often, after we met Clarke.” I swallowed. “I thought I was hallucinating, or losing my mind. I told Doug, but he didn’t believe me.”
“I’m sorry. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have believed you either, before last night.” He paused, then sighed. “You’re probably wondering about the crying baby we heard.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“No. I do.” His body slumped a bit against my back. “When I was seventeen, I fell in love with a girl the same age. One thing led to another, and soon she was expecting a baby. I wanted to do right by both of them, but her family…let’s say they had their sights set higher in terms of a husband. She was sent away to have the child in secret, so it could be given up for adoption.”
The pain in his voice was clear. I turned so I could look up into his face, putting my own arms around him. It wasn’t much of an embrace, with all of our bulky clothing in between, but it was far better than nothing. “I’m sorry.”
“I received a letter from her months later. It was a boy. He…he didn’t survive.”
God. I hugged him tighter, knowing I had no words to ease his grief.
“I couldn’t help but think I should have tried harder,” Steve went on after a moment, his voice thick with unshed tears. “If we’d run away to get married as soon as she told me…maybe I could have done something, or found a better doctor. Maybe our son would have lived.”
I wanted to protest, but I knew it wouldn’t change the guilt he felt, no matter how irrational such guilt might be. Instead, I held him until his breathing calmed, then asked, “Should we try to make it to Dawson? I know it will be dangerous, but we can’t just stay here.”
“I might be able to fashion some more snowshoes,” he said after considering it for a few minutes. “But I don’t think Pa could make it.”
“Another creek, then. The one Tommy Tatum was looking for.” And was hopefully at right now, sitting around a fire with his friends. Yet another thing I didn’t want to think about, so I pushed it away.
“That’s more do-able. Two of us could go ahead, even, get help, and come back for the others. A dogsled could make the difference between life and death.”
“The dogs didn’t want to come here,” I recalled with a shiver.
“Yes, well, they’re smarter than humans sometimes.”
The door started to open, so we quickly stepped apart. Doug came out and frowned at us. “What are you doing, lollygagging around? It’s time to get to work!”
I gaped at him. “What do you mean, work?”
He rolled his eyes. “The mine, Col. We’ve wasted enough time sitting around; we need to get back to digging.”
I couldn’t believe my own ears. Neither could Steve, apparently.
“What’s wrong with you?” he exclaimed. “There’s something out here, mimicking voices, taunting us with things it couldn’t possibly know! You were there—it tried to get inside the cabin, for God’s sake.”
“So?” Doug asked impatiently.
I found my voice. “Anna is dead. And have you forgotten the arm we found the first day?”
“Bear attack. It happens.”
“Bears don’t talk in the voices of the dead!”
Doug was on me suddenly, shoving me back against the cabin wall with shocking strength. “We came here for gold, little brother.” His breath blew hot on my face, his remaining teeth bared in a snarl. “It’s right there, beneath our feet, and I mean to take it.”
“Get away from him!” Steve pulled Doug off of me, then gave him a shove. “What’s wrong with you?”
The glare Doug gave him bordered on hatred. Then he turned his head and spat; it froze in midair and clinked when it hit the ground.
“Go to hell.” He looked at me. “What about you? After everything I’ve done for you, are you going to side with him?”
Why was he acting like this? “You’re not thinking rationally. We’re in danger here. We need to make some sort of plan to leave, to find help.”
His eyes seemed to assess me, staring deep into my soul…and finding me wanting. “I should have expected as much,” he said. “Coward.”
Then he turned and headed for the mine.
* * *
“I can’t leave without Anna,” Roland said, when Steve proposed our plan to make for the next creek. “It’s my fault she was here at all. I can’t just abandon her…her body.”
Steve knelt before him. “Pa, please. We can’t just stay here to die.”
“Anna wouldn’t want you to throw your life away,” Eleanor said. She stood at the table, as close to the stove as possible to keep the dough she kneaded from freezing.
“She wished I died in the avalanche,” he countered bitterly. “And don’t say she didn’t mean it.”
“I’m with Steve,” Eleanor said into the awkward silence that followed. “We need to at least try for another camp. And we need to do it as soon as possible. The weather is only going to get colder from here.”
“I won’t go.” Roland shook his head. “Anna didn’t love me, but I loved her. I’m not leaving her to be chewed up by wolves or ravens or some other damned scavengers.”
“All right,” Steve said, defeated. “I’m the most experienced snowshoer, so I’ll prepare a pack today and leave tomorrow. I’ll bring help back, and we’ll all search for Anna together.”
My stomach clenched at the thought of him out there by himself, vulnerable. “You shouldn’t go alone.”
Steve met my gaze. “I know, but if that thing comes back while I’m gone?—”
Eleanor paused in her bread making. “I can swing an ax, if need be.”
If it broke into the cabin, in other words.
“My arms are longer—I have better reach,” I said reluctantly. We couldn’t lose Eleanor’s nursing skills, and Roland was wounded. As for Doug…
I didn’t understand what was going through his mind, but with a sinking heart I realized I no longer trusted him to make the right choices.
Not to say many of our previous choices had been “right.” Or even legal.
But I owed him everything. He’d been the one to find me by the burning train, blood pouring down my face, unable to move. He’d led me away, asking what had happened.
Upon hearing my confession, his shock turned to resolve. “Dad will kill you if he finds out,” he said. He meant it in the most literal way possible.
I believed him. I still did, so many years later. To say our father had been difficult to please would be understatement. He figured in my memories as a looming, dark figure, always angry. A harsh taskmaster, who loved nothing and no one in this world except for our little sister.
Perhaps because she was a girl, though he treated my mother with the same contempt as the rest of us. For whatever reason, Bessie was exempt from his wrath the moment she was born.
If he’d learned she was dead because of me…
The lie Doug spun that day saved my life. A few months later, as Dad’s grief pushed him further and further into violent madness, Doug came up with the plan to leave, as well as how we’d earn our keep once we were far away.
Even then, I think he was chasing the horizon. If Bessie had lived, he would have been gone soon enough on his own. As it was, I followed him because I owed him everything, and because there was no reason to stay.
And because his plan let me leave my old self, my guilty self, far behind. Every few months I was born anew, another name, another past, which would soon be discarded in its turn.
Such a life required a certain amount of recklessness…but Doug had always been smart about it.
Digging in a mine by himself, the day after we’d heard impossible voices out of nowhere and something tried to get into the cabin, went far beyond reckless.
He’d left his by-now well-worn copy of Secrets of the Yukon on the floor beside the chair he’d sat in all night. Desperate for any insight to his thinking, I took the chair for myself and picked it up.
I’d never looked over it before, but it seemed to be a perfectly ordinary guidebook, ostensibly written by a miner. There had been smaller strikes in the area, and other boomtowns before Dawson. None of them large enough to inspire a rush, but a few men had come away with money in their pockets, including the book’s author ML Chambers.
The guide covered the potential trails to the Yukon, the hazards, the peculiar style of mining needed to penetrate the permafrost. As I flipped idly through, however, I noticed Doug had underlined a few passages.
…besides disease, there are many other ways to perish, avalanche among them…
…foul gases collected in the drift mine, making it difficult to breathe…
…all four men died from the cold…
Tension radiated across my neck, as if an icy hand lay upon it. I kept flipping, more and more frantically. Every passage Doug had underlined related another way to die in the frozen wilds.
Why would he do that?
He’d seemed very sure we wouldn’t have to worry about Tommy Tatum spreading the word of our claims.
I stood up, throat tight, pulse sickly. Everyone else looked at me in surprise at the sudden movement.
“I should, uh, talk to Doug.” I cleared my throat. “Talk some sense into him, I mean.”
Steve half-rose. “Should I come with you?”
That was the last thing I wanted. “No. He might be more likely to listen if it’s just the two of us.”
“That’s a good idea,” Eleanor said. “I don’t want to have to treat him for frostbite again.”
I pulled on all my layers and went to the mine. Doug worked the windlass, adding another pile of gravel to the dump. He turned as I slogged up, his eyes almost fever-bright.
“I want to talk to you,” I said. “In private.”
“All right.” He went to the ladder. “But you need to come down and work while you do it.”
* * *
The air below was foul, thick with smoke and sulfur. There was no standing up past the initial shaft, and I awkwardly half crawled and half crouched to the tunnel’s end. Doug seemed to have no such trouble, moving as assuredly as if he’d been born to this dank, underground place. The wan flames of our candles added to the stifling air, providing only a faint and uncertain light to work by.
We both picked up shovels. I drove my blade into the muddy gravel. As dark and cramped as it was, at least it was above freezing, and so a respite from the unrelenting cold.
“Steve is going to make for another camp tomorrow,” I said after a few minutes of digging.
To my surprise, Doug actually stopped and lowered his shovel. “He can’t.”
I put down my shovel as well. “Something is very wrong here—can’t you see that? Those voices, the whatever trying to get in…why aren’t you worried?”
There—the thing that made the least amount of sense. Inexplicable events were happening; anyone rational would be afraid.
I didn’t think Doug was rational anymore.
“We came here for gold.” He crouched, hands loosely wrapped around the haft of his shovel. His candle flickered, sending shadows racing across his face, turning his familiar features into something almost unrecognizable for a second. He’d lost weight, all the softness melting away and leaving him a thing of angles and bone. “We’re not leaving until we have it.”
I wanted to grab him and shake some sense into him. “It won’t do us any good if we’re dead!”
“We knew Bill was dead, and that didn’t stop any of us.”
“Maybe it should have.”
We’d reassured each other it must have been a bear attack, that it happened because he was alone. Put aside any doubts, because our desire for gold overrode all else.
God. We’d swindled ourselves, hadn’t we?
Doug shook his head scornfully. The candles glittered yellow in his eyes.
I let out a long breath. “Steve is going tomorrow. Everyone but you is in agreement. He’ll find the camp Tommy Tatum was making for. He’ll bring back help to look for Anna, and hopefully Tommy and the dogsled so the rest of us can leave.”
Doug snorted. “He’s not going to find Tommy there. Maybe the dogs; it depends on where they ended up. They were probably smart enough to make for the nearest human camp.”
I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to go back up the long ladder, into the cabin, and fall asleep. Wake up and find we were still aboard the steamer that brought us to this forsaken place.
I didn’t want to be sitting here in the smoky dark, surrounded by frozen mud, my brother barely recognizable in the dim light. His empty mouth was like a maw, like he’d swallowed shadow whole, only the gold tooth remaining in his gums.
“What did you do to him?” I whispered through numb lips.
Doug grinned a terrible grin. “What do you think?”
* * *
I drew on all of my years of masking my true emotions to keep the horror from my face when I returned to the cabin. “He refuses to see sense,” was my only report, accompanied by a weary shake of the head.
I distracted myself by helping Eleanor cook, shoveling out the rime collecting on the floor, and any other small chores that presented themselves. When Steve went out to take readings at his weather station, I followed him.
“Barometric pressure is rising,” he said. “I should have clear skies for my journey tomorrow.”
I almost asked if he was certain he didn’t want company, but bit the words back when I realized it would mean leaving Roland and Eleanor alone with Doug.
Just the thought felt like a betrayal. How could I have come to the point of fearing the man I’d spent most of my life following? To whom I owed everything?
I spent the night lying in my bunk, staring up at the wooden slats above me. Doug slept just on the other side, seemingly untroubled, even as our companions tossed and whimpered through nightmares.
“What do you think I did?”
The words haunted me. Only one conclusion fit, if Doug knew Tommy had never made it to the camp, but his dogs might have…
Well. The dogs couldn’t tell anyone else about our claims on Coffin Bone Creek, could they?
Doug couldn’t have murdered a man in cold blood to protect our scheme of making off with all the gold.
Could he?
Unless he’d already planned to murder our companions, rather than simply leave them with nothing.
No one else knew they were here with us. Their names appeared on no documents, and no one had found our camp except for Tommy.
I couldn’t think such things. Not about my own brother.
Except the only passages he’d underlined in his guidebook were all the ways a person could die in this lonely wilderness.
Steve would leave as soon as we ate breakfast. I’d keep an eye on Doug—deep down, wasn’t that one of the reasons I was lying awake, eyes fixed above me? I’d even work the cursed mine with him, to make certain there was no chance of him sneaking off to ambush Steve alone in the wilderness.
Once Steve reached the other camp, there was nothing more Doug could do. Word would spread. Others would know not just of our claims, but of Roland and Eleanor and poor Anna. None of those remaining could go missing without causing comment, and a string of “accidents” would arouse suspicion. We’d seen firsthand the swiftness of miners’ justice; Doug wouldn’t risk ending up at the end of a noose.
Had he been responsible for Anna’s disappearance?
No—she’d vanished in the middle of the night. He’d been asleep in bed above me when Eleanor realized she was gone. Doug hadn’t given us our nightmares, or caused the voices of the dead to call out to us. Hell, he’d come close to frostbite himself the night he sleepwalked. Whatever he might have done to Tommy, he was innocent of hurting Anna.
Shortly before dawn the wind rose, first whistling around the cabin, then increasing to a howl. When the sound of ice pelting the logs beside my head became inescapable, I slid out from under my covers and went to shake Steve awake.
The cold bit through my union suit as if I were naked. My teeth chattered and my feet felt like blocks of ice by the time I crossed the room. Steve jerked when I touched him, as if he’d been in the grip of a bad dream. “Wha—Colin?” He blinked in confusion, then sat up. “What’s wrong?”
“I think your weather prediction was a bit off.”
He got up, and we went into the main room. I paused to stoke the fire and add some wood, but he went straight to the door and opened it.
A curtain of white snow seemed to cut off the world just feet from the cabin. No one could go out in such a blinding storm and hope to survive.