October Skies (14 page)

It was a sad state of affairs that Julian, a man fifteen years older than her, had politely turned her down. And Jules was hardly Johnny Depp, with a choice of fawning waifs to choose from.

She looked at a segment of digital footage on her laptop - Julian talking to camera. She smiled.

Not so much Johnny Depp as a downmarket Louis Theroux.

Again her mind drifted painfully back to that maladroit exchange, and she cringed.

‘Forget it,’ she muttered. ‘Do some more work.’

She watched the loading bar on the screen near completion. Now that Jules had his sizzling trailer to show off at the meetings he’d arranged, she’d decided it might be a useful idea to research this story from the urban myth angle. This small town - Blue Valley - had more than its fair share of them, according to Grace. Rose wondered if they linked back somehow to this lost wagon train. Inevitably most urban ghost stories tend to originate from a root event, usually quite mundane. She wondered whether most of the interesting tales they’d recorded last week whilst interviewing the locals - stories of shrouded figures, walking skeleton-men and glowing lights in the woods - could ultimately be traced back to survivors of that wagon train.

It was a possibility.

There would have been survivors, surely?

Rose wondered if Grace was around in town tomorrow, or whether she was on duty at the National Parks Service camp site up in the woods. Maybe she’d just drive up in her rental and see, take some flapjacks or bagels up, have a natter and a nibble.

Rose liked Grace. She reminded her of a grumpy old chain-smoking aunt she’d had, before cancer got her.

 

Ben could hear children further away in the woods, their voices echoing distantly through the trees.

‘That’s the Stolheim children,’ said Sam. ‘They’re out collecting firewood too.’

Ben bent over, picked up a fallen branch and brushed the snow off it. ‘There’s a lot of dead wood and kindling in this forest. A hell of a lot easier than foraging for buffalo chips out on the prairie, eh?’

Sam grinned guiltily at Ben’s casual profanity.

‘So, where’s Emily today?’

He turned and glanced back through the trees towards the camp. Several pale columns of smoke rose lazily up into the featureless white sky from within the clearing below. ‘She’s at a prayer meeting in the temple.’

Preston’s people had put a lot of effort into constructing one shelter that was larger than all the others in the camp. From the outside, it appeared to be big enough to allow room for the Quorum of Elders, a committee of twelve, who met several times a day in there. They also used it for prayer meetings and scripture studies for the younger ones. It was their church . . . or temple, as they referred to it, as well as Preston’s shelter.

‘Vander, Hearst and Preston take turns teaching scripture to some of the children directly.’ Sam picked up a branch then turned to look back down at the snow-covered mound of the temple. ‘Vander’s teaching her right now. Teaching her on her own.’

Ben detected something in his voice.

‘I don’t like that,’ said Sam after a while.

‘Why?’

Sam didn’t answer at first, instead busying himself with searching for twigs and small branches.

‘Sam?’

‘Vander once taught me . . . alone,’ he said eventually, more to himself than aloud to Ben, ‘when I was smaller.’

There was an uncomfortable silence. Ben had once experienced a similar faltering conversation with a very withdrawn first-year boy at boarding school. Unpleasant things had happened there from time to time that were best left alone and not raked over. You endured whatever treatment came your way and didn’t cry about it. That’s how the best schools turned boys into men.

At least, that’s what Ben’s father used to say.

‘Ben?’

‘Yeah?’

‘When we make it down from these mountains, in the spring, where will you go?’

‘I shall head for Portland eventually. Maybe I’ll explore a few other townships along the way. Then I fancy I shall spend some months enjoying the comforts of a hotel room in that fine-sounding town and write about the crossing and our adventure here in the mountains and see about getting it published.’

Sam smiled faintly. ‘Will Emily and I be in your book?’

‘Of course! How could you not be?’

Sam smiled. He liked that.

‘And what will you do after that?’

‘Then, I suppose, I ought to return to London. My parents expect me to one day come back, and if not become an eminent psychiatrist, to at least take over my father’s business affairs.’

Ben was resigned to that ultimate fate. It was waiting for him eventually, in a few years’ time. ‘I would miss the freedom out here in the wilderness, though, miss it sorely, but I owe my parents on a promise I made, to come back soon.’

He turned to Sam. ‘What about you?’

‘Preston will lead us someplace where we’re all alone, away from any other people, from outsiders,’ he replied cheerlessly and returned to the task of foraging for firewood, dipping down to pull a long, crooked branch from the snow and brushing it off. He snapped the dry wood with several loud and brittle cracks, tucking the shorter lengths into his bundle of kindling.

Ben resumed foraging and they worked in silence for a while, accompanied only by the crunch of their feet on the snow and the distant sounds of movement and chattering voices elsewhere in the woods.

‘You’re not happy in Preston’s church?’

Sam shook his head. ‘He frightens me.’

‘Frightens you? Why?’

The young man tightened his lips and shook his head. ‘He just does.’

‘Look here.’ Ben stood up straight and adjusted his bundle of kindling. ‘I suppose when you’re grown up you could leave, though, couldn’t you? If you’re so unhappy with them, you could find your own way, couldn’t you?’

Sam shook his head. ‘Not without Emily. I’m all she’s got.’

‘She has her mother.’

Sam looked at him. ‘They’d never let her go, anyw—’

They heard a raised voice ahead of them - an unmistakable cry of surprise or alarm, then other voices, including Preston’s, calling out.

Something had happened.

Ben and Sam dropped their bundles and headed towards the exchanged shouts, Ben unslinging his rifle and Sam following suit. They pushed through a tangle of undergrowth and briar poking up out of the thick snow, dislodging clouds of powder from the low-hanging branches above them.

‘This way!’ said Ben, leading Sam up a steep incline, stumbling over buried knots of tree roots, rocks and sapling stalks. At the top the incline levelled off, revealing a small glade nestling below in a dimple of land in the hillside. The glade had been hacked clear of wood - from the look of the old, weatherworn tree stumps that poked up through the blanket of snow, a task carried out by someone many years ago.

In the middle there was a crudely constructed shelter, clearly not the work of any trained artisan; there was no carpentry to be seen. It was a ramshackle structure of stacked boughs, held together with hide strips and the gaps between them daubed with packed mud.

Ben and Sam made their way down the slope towards the clearing to get a closer look. The entrance to the shelter was a low, arched gap in the uneven, knobbly wall, covered over by a tattered buffalo hide. In the small clearing in front of the shelter, frames of wood had been erected. Ben noticed the dried and leathery carcasses of skinned forest hares dangling in an untidy row from several of them. They’d been dangling for a long, long time by the look of it. The hares seemed more fossilised than rotten.

Preston and three other Mormon men stood in the clearing before the shelter, surveying the scene. They noticed Ben and Sam as they emerged into the clearing.

‘Mr Lambert . . . Samuel,’ Preston called out. ‘It appears we’re not the only ones out here in these woods.’

Ben made his way over. ‘What is this? Is it an Indian camp, do you think?’

Preston casually scratched the dark beard beneath his chin. ‘Is it more likely a trappers’ camp?’ he replied, pointing towards a wall of the shelter, lined with an arrangement of different-sized skulls, their smooth yellow ivory boiled and scrubbed clean by somebody long ago, or perhaps merely worn away by the elements. Ben couldn’t identify with any certainty what animals they had once been; one or two of them might have belonged to deer or stags, another might have belonged to a horse or a pony.

‘Actually, it looks like it’s been abandoned for a while,’ said Ben.

Preston nodded. ‘Yes, it would seem so.’

‘Should we look inside, William?’ asked Hearst, one of the men with Preston.

He nodded. ‘Perhaps, to be sure.’ He held out his hand. ‘Your gun please, Saul.’

The man passed him his rifle and Preston pulled back the hammer to half cock and slotted a percussion cap in, the weapon now ready to fire.

‘You men best stay back,’ he said as he stepped towards the entrance. He lifted aside the tattered flap of canvas and called out. ‘Is there anyone inside?’

There was no answer. Ben watched Preston stoop down low and step into the dark interior, admiring the confidence and courage of the man. The others stood in silence, their rifles held ready, listening to the whispering wind in the trees and the hiss of disturbed snow cascading down through shifting branches. From inside the shelter they heard a shuffling of movement, then after a few moments the canvas flapped to the side and Preston emerged.

‘This is some poor soul’s grave,’ he uttered solemnly. ‘By the look of it, quite a few years ago.’

Preston turned round to look at the shelter. ‘He died in his cot, so it seems.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘A lonely death for this man.’ Preston bowed his head. ‘Let us pray for his soul.’

Ben watched the men and Sam remove their broad-brimmed hats and lower their heads. He took his own felt hat off out of respect, and listened to Preston’s sombre words. He finished and the men chorused amen.

Ben nodded towards the shelter. ‘We could use the wood.’

Preston shook his head. ‘We’ll not strip this place for firewood. Let it remain, to mark this unknown soul’s grave. There’s plenty enough kindling lying on the forest floor. Come on.’

He led them away from the clearing, up and out of the dimple. Standing for a moment on a small ridge of high ground and looking through a break in the trees, down the sloping hillside, Ben could see in the distance the large clearing in which their camp nestled. Amidst the churned dirty white of mud and snow, he spotted the small shapes of sluggish movement among the shelters, the tan mass of huddled oxen stirring in the centre and the pall of a dozen wispy columns of smoke snaking up into the heavy sky.

Ben turned to look back down into the dip at the long-dead hunter’s shelter, a forlorn sight, and wondered how it must feel to die alone, and not be missed by anyone.

 

I share this small space with Mr Keats and Broken Wing. I have to admit they have built a very robust and surprisingly snug shelter. There is no room, of course, to stand upright. One enters on hands and knees, and at best, in the very centre of the shelter, may stand, but only if stooped over. At the top, where the saplings converge in a knot of coerced boughs, there is a small gap that frequently needs a stick poked up through it to clear the snow. This small hole in our roof allows for us to burn a modest fire inside, the smoke being very efficiently sucked away through this improvised chimney. Not every shelter, I notice, anticipated this luxury, and I have often seen less fortunate people spilling out of their shelters coughing and spluttering.

I have much to be thankful for, having such experienced and knowledgeable shelter companions. However, I do find many of Keats’s personal habits quite repulsive at such close quarters. His incessant ritual of snorting and spitting, whilst tolerable outside, is utterly unforgivable inside. So much so that I gifted him with one of my own fine linen handkerchiefs - a present from mother. I imagine she would be mortified at the unimaginable material that gets deposited into it every hour of every day. But as a small consolation, now at least my hands are less likely to find congealing, tar-stained globules of mucus on the floor of our shelter.