31. The Train
Isat frozen, staring as the thing rebuilt itself. The bones—we should have burned them, or thrown them in the pit. Of course a malevolent spirit that built itself a body from the ancient dead once could do it again. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
And now it was too late to do anything about it.
“Get behind us,” Steve said, and tried to push Eleanor back. The movement caused him to gasp in pain.
Even if his ribs were miraculously healed that instant, we couldn’t hope to outrun the thing. The caribou skull turned slowly toward me, antlers reaching for the sky. I was about to be killed by something I’d dragged from the earth with my own hands.
What did it want? Doug said the same thing as he did—to sleep in the earth, surrounded by gold.
The gold we’d taken from the ground.
The words of a madman, but also our only hope.
“The packs—take out the gold in them!” I ordered.
While Steve and Eleanor stared in confusion, I snagged the nearest pack, which turned out to be Steve’s. My gloved hands couldn’t work the buckles; I tore my gloves off with my teeth, even though the freezing air instantly bit all the way to the bone. I flung aside clothes, food, everything, until I reached the pouch of gold dust at the bottom.
With all of my strength, I flung it in the direction of the mine shaft.
It arced through the air, and the creature’s head whipped around, following its course. The pouch hit the edge of the pit, bounced off, and vanished inside.
“Doug said Clarke took some gold with him,” I said, my heart rising. “That was his mistake. We need to leave it all behind if we want to get out of here and live.”
Eleanor’s eyes widened in comprehension. She opened her own pack and dug through her things, before flinging her pouch of gold into the mine after the first.
“I packed some mammoth teeth—toss them in as well,” Steve urged.
I did so. The creature watched avidly, then backed away, retreating closer to the edge of the forest. My wild plan was working.
I didn’t dare hope, not yet. Instead I went to the bone pile and began chucking them into the pit as well. Away from the heat of the burning cabin, my fingers went numb, but I didn’t have time to retrieve my gloves. Eleanor joined me, helping me wrestle mammoth tusks and making sure we didn’t miss so much as a tooth.
When we were done, we retreated to Steve’s side. I beat my hands against my thighs, trying to get blood back into fingers that now felt like blocks of wood.
Would it work? Would we be allowed to leave now?
“Put all you can back into the packs,” Steve said in a low voice, moving to do so even though it must have hurt him. “If it lets us go, we go fast, and we don’t look back.”
I found my gloves and struggled to pull them back on with fingers that no longer wanted to obey my command. But as I did so, the creature took a menacing step forward.
“Eleanor!” it shouted in her father’s voice. “Bring me my medicine!” Then in Bessie’s: “Colin, save me!”
No. No, what was it doing?
“We don’t have your stupid gold!” Steve shouted. “Leave us alone!”
It’s only response was an infant’s scream.
What more did it want from us? We’d thrown down the bones, given back every ounce of gold we possessed…
Except we hadn’t, not all of it. The bracelet, which Doug had hidden beneath the floorboards of the cabin, was still there.
I turned to the burning building, my mouth dry and my heart pounding. The flames roared from the roof, devoured one wall, and spread to another. Smoke poured into the air, lit hellish orange from below.
I couldn’t go in there. I couldn’t.
I looked down at Steve, then at Eleanor. At their pale, terrified faces. The creature meant to tear them apart, just as it had Roland, Anna, and Bill.
The old Doug I’d known, before his instincts turned murderous, would have abandoned them to their fate and hoped to escape while the creature was distracted with them.
Abandoning others to their fates were what we did. We swindled everyone we could in one place, then moved on to the next, leaving them to deal with empty bank accounts and broken lives. I’d let Bessie down; why not let everyone else down, too? Even Doug, here at the end.
I was done with that. If there was even the slimmest possibility of saving Steve and Eleanor, I would take it. No matter the cost to me.
I met Steve’s eyes, their inquisitive blue tainted now with fear and pain. “I love you,” I told him.
Then I ran toward the flames.
* * *
The heat of hell blasted out through the open door, flames licking at the ceiling beyond. The wall behind the stove was entirely engulfed; it was only a matter of time before the cabin collapsed completely.
I dropped to my belly, as the smoke seemed to be escaping through the upper part of the door. The floor inside was finally warm, all the rime melted away by the inferno overhead. Smoke stung my throat, so I tugged my scarf higher to block out as much as possible. Terror threatened to lock my muscles into place, but I pictured Steve’s face, and Eleanor’s.
I began to worm forward on my stomach.
Smoke billowed and flames roared. A train’s whistle cut through the cacophony, and the floor rumbled at its approach. I crawled on, toward the bedroom where Doug had concealed the bracelet and the claim certificates.
My hand brushed against a glowing hot steel rail, and I snatched it back. The burning wood around me wasn’t that of the cabin—it was a boxcar, on its side and collapsing.
The floor juddered and jerked. We were derailing—no, we’d already derailed, that was why sparks flew through the air and heat seared my lungs. Blood poured down the side of my face, blinding one eye, but I didn’t have time to dash it aside.
I heaved farther into the bedroom, feeling around blindly until my fingers discovered a raised edge on one board. An explosion sounded, oddly muffled—something in one of the other boxcars had gone up, and the fire was spreading fast.
My head spun, and I no longer knew where I was: Nebraska or the Yukon, in a cabin or in a boxcar. Past and present were no longer separate, assuming they ever truly had been.
It didn’t matter. I had to do this. Gripping the floorboard, I started to wrestle it free.
“Don’t leave me,” Bessie said beside me.
She was standing, not trapped beneath flaming wood and crumpled steel. Her simple dress, painstakingly stitched by our mother, began to scorch as fire licked at the hem. Her big brown eyes pleaded with me, and I inhaled sharply, only to be reduced to a coughing fit from the smoke I drew into my lungs.
“You’re not real,” I managed to croak out.
She ignored my feeble protest. “Don’t leave me here! You have to stay with Doug and me. We’re your family.”
“You aren’t real.” I thrust my arm into the space beneath the floorboard and found the cloth pouch Doug had put the bracelet in. I pulled it out, along with the claim certificates, which fell to the floor.
The contents of the pouch didn’t feel like a bracelet, though. With shaking hands, I undid the string tied around the top. The last few links dissolved into gold dust against my fingers as I reached inside.
It had never been Bessie’s bracelet. Just an illusion, or a facsimile. No—a lure, to reel Doug and I both in.
My throat burned from the smoke, and I could barely see through the blood gushing from the gash on my forehead. I forced myself to turn around in what I hoped was the right direction, and crawled back toward the door.
“Why are you ignoring me?” Bessie was in front of me now, though I hadn’t seen her move. The flames licked up her dress, caught in her long curls. A halo of fire surrounded her face, the skin reddening and splitting from the heat. “You left me to die once. Are you going to abandon me again? Are you going to abandon our brother?”
A wave of exhaustion swept over me. The gold dust was so heavy; surely I could put it down for a moment. Close my eyes, lay my head against the warm floor. I could finally just rest.
“Colin!” Steve’s voice cut through the roar of the flames and the cracking of timber. “Colin, where are you?”
I gripped the pouch again. If Steve came inside, he’d be in danger—he couldn’t crawl with his broken ribs, and would surely succumb to the smoke. I couldn’t let him risk it.
I wasn’t going to let him or Eleanor down ever again.
“I’m coming!” I shouted, and began to drag myself forward again. “Stay outside!”
“You killed me!” Bessie howled, so close now I could smell her burning flesh. “And now you’re going to leave me behind a second time, for them?”
Tears streamed down my face, from the smoke and from the old pain in my heart. “No,” I said, hauling myself toward the door. Away from her. “It was an accident—I couldn’t have known the train would derail. And I couldn’t have saved you; it was already too late.” The doorway appeared before me, Steve’s anxious face bright in the light of the flames. “But I can save them.”
Steve’s hand closed on my wrist, and he hauled me out with a cry of pain. Then Eleanor was there, pulling me away from the cabin, into snow melting quickly from the blistering heat.
“What are you doing?” she shouted.
I thrust the pouch weakly at her. “Here—there’s gold in it.”
She acted immediately, taking it from me and running toward the pit. With a furious shriek, she lifted it above her head with both hands and hurled it into the hungry black mouth of the mine.
The cabin collapsed with a rush of fire, sparks swarming above it like a thousand fireflies. Steve clung to me, and I clung back. We’d done all we could, given everything we had. There was nothing left.
The creature walked toward us.
Eleanor went to her knees, hands over her face as if to shield herself from whatever came next. I stared at the monster as it approached, too exhausted to feel anything but a distant sort of terror. The furious flames illuminated it in stark, terrible relief, gilding its antlers as they rose against the sky. The smell of melted permafrost washed over us, rotten eggs and rain-kissed ground.
It made no sound—no cries of the dead, no lures, no traps. Instead it walked past us, past Eleanor, and stood at the very edge of the mine shaft.
Then it began to crumble.
The skull went first, antlers flashing as it tumbled free and into the earth below. The neck followed, then tusks, legs, spines, everything it had assembled to give itself a physical form. Once it was finished, no trace remained above the ground.
We sat in silence for a long moment. Then Eleanor stood up and returned to us. We reached for her, and held one another, warmed by the bonfire that had been the cabin.
In the southernmost sky, the first light of the distant sun touched the horizon.