Chapter 9

Gathering up an armful of books, Kendal hurried back to her room and wrapped herself up in a thick down comforter. She’d suddenly caught a chill.

She opened The Atlas of Cursed Places and flipped through the pages until she came to the chapter on Mount Hood. Beneath the title, there was an old sepia photograph. In it stood a short, stout man, a beautiful, dark-eyed woman, and four small children. Rising up behind them was Mount Hood. There was something about these people. It was almost as though she recognized them. When she looked at the mountain behind them, she could see a sharp, snarling face near the peak. She definitely recognized this face. It was the same one she saw on her phone. She wrapped the blanket more tightly around her shoulders and began to read.

Gold was discovered in Oregon before it was found in California, and the yellow metal created a fever like no other sickness had created before. Many of the pioneers who arrived in Oregon in the early 1850s were bent on speculation, including Nellie Bly’s husband, Samuel Bly.

The details of their story were faithfully recorded in Nellie’s diary.

In the fall of 1853, he and his family set up camp along Quicksand River, a river known to swallow horses and men whole. The river had once run clear and clean, but Mount Hood’s eruption decades before had filled the river with rock and ash.

Samuel Bly was convinced there was gold buried beneath the ash. Months went by—but no gold. That’s when he heard rumors that a man had struck it rich panning in an unknown creek that flowed down Mount Hood. It was fall by then and getting cold quickly. But Samuel wasn’t about to give up. He loaded up his family, and they made their way to the base of the mountain.

Soon their supplies began to run out, and Nellie tried to convince her husband that they should leave and head toward a new settlement that had formed near the coast. But the rage of prospecting possessed Samuel Bly. Even when the snow began to fall, even when they ran out of food, he refused to leave Mount Hood.

Her family near starvation, Nellie Bly took off hunting one day, tracking a mule deer, when a wet, heavy snow forced her to take shelter in a cave. After starting a small fire, she discovered a cache of gold. Nuggets the size of a man’s fist, hidden beneath burlap bags that had been eaten away by mice.

It wasn’t she who had discovered the gold, but someone else, someone who had hidden it there but hadn’t returned.

She put just a few pieces of the gold into her pocket, hoping that it would be enough to lure her husband off the mountain and to buy her children shelter and food.

“Here,” she cried, throwing the gold at her husband’s feet when she returned to camp. “Please, now let’s leave.”

Her husband picked up the gold and kissed it.

“Where did you find this?”

“Does it matter?” Nellie asked. “Do we matter anymore to you? Please, let’s just leave. We can come back in the spring. But the children need food and shelter. We need to leave before the next storm.”

Samuel refused to leave until she showed him where she had found the gold.

“It belongs to someone else,” she reminded him as he filled his pockets.

“It is ours now. All of it is ours.”

As he spoke those words, the mountain rumbled, stirring up an avalanche. Nellie ran out of the cave and down to their camp, discovering that one of her children was buried alive and that the other children were desperately trying to dig her out.

Nellie began to dig too. When she finally reached her youngest child, the child was near death, her lungs struggling for air. Nellie breathed life back into her child, making a promise with God, with the mountain, that she’d leave the gold behind if only her child would live.

When her husband returned to the camp, she begged him to return the gold, she begged him to leave, but he refused. In the middle of the night, as she listened to her youngest child cough, Nellie Bly filled a pack with the gold and snuck away from her husband and climbed the mountain to return it in hopes of saving her child.

She had only started up the mountain when she saw the light of a lantern behind her and knew her husband was tracking her through the snow.

She climbed higher and higher up the mountainside, her heart thudding against her chest and the weight of twenty pounds of gold pounding against her back.

Snow began to fall, but she didn’t stop climbing. She knew that getting rid of the gold was the only way to save her family.

Finally, she found a deep crevice and began to feed the gold into what looked like a mouth. One piece of gold after another, like feeding a hungry child.

Her husband discovered her throwing away the gold and, in a rage, lunged for her. But she moved out of his grasp, and he slipped on the icy ledge along the crevice. He fell into the deep hole . . . 

There was more, but Kendal was too spooked and too tired to continue. Her eyelids felt heavy again, like they had when she first saw the snowboarder. It was as though someone, or something, some force, was willing her to sleep. Before she knew what had happened, she began to dream. She dreamed that the mountain was trying to swallow her whole. She could see its sharp rocky teeth and felt its black serpent tongue wrap around her waist. It tried to suck her into a dark, cold, empty place.