October Skies (19 page)

 

Preston’s wounds seem to be healing well, with only small indications of infection. There is some inflammation around one of the wounds, and a little weeping, but one would have expected far worse from the unclean claws of a wild animal. There are some signs of a mild fever - the man’s skin is hot to touch - but his greatest discomfort seems to be pain from the wound. Inside which, regarding the lacerations, the bruising must be quite considerable. I have given him more laudanum, to which he responds well. It is a potent solution, which I prefer to prescribe sparingly.

Too much can lead to a reliance upon it.

Dorothy Dreyton is with me now. As a matter of fact, she lies asleep on the floor. Her vigil is almost constant. She must be at the point of exhaustion to allow herself the luxury of an hour or two to sleep. I wonder if she has the slightest notion that her children have spent more time during the last few days at our end of the camp than they have in theirs.

 

Preston stirred restlessly in his sleep and muttered, his deep voice thick with cloying mucus. Ben guessed that the recently administered opiate was doing its work and had entirely banished the pain for now. But it was also weaving a darker magic. On an unconscious mind it conjured the most lurid nightmares. He had seen first-hand the poor wretches that had found themselves admitted to Banner House Asylum by way of over-using laudanum and other such soothing tonics, tormented by visions and delusions that hounded them in their sleeping and - for the less fortunate - waking hours.

Ben leaned over and stroked his forehead, feeling the warmth and dampness of his pale skin. Lying on a cot in this sorry condition, there was still something very impressive about William Preston, Ben decided; he exuded an air of authority even as he slept. A man like that, in the right place with the right message, could lead a people to do anything.

Preston’s murmuring continued. Beneath the thin parchment skin of his closed lids, his eyes jerked from one side to the other rapidly. Then with a gasp, they snapped open.

‘Mr Preston?’

He licked his lips dryly - thirsty.

Ben put away his inkpot, pen and journal and reached for a cup of water. He placed a hand behind Preston’s head, the man’s long grey-blond hair lank with sweat, and lifted him to take a drink.

‘Here, some water,’ he said quietly.

Preston’s glassy eyes focused away from the low canvas ceiling, bulging with the weight of snow, and onto Ben’s face. By the flickering light of the oil lamp, it looked like the elder’s irises were fully dilated.

The laudanum.

‘M-my G-God . . . they . . . they . . . they know!’ gasped Preston.

‘Shhhh,’ Ben comforted him. ‘Drink some water.’

Preston refused. ‘Th-they know!’ he rasped again, grabbing Ben’s hand tightly with one of his own, squeezing desperately.

Ben leaned down closer to him. ‘Mr Preston . . . William, it’s okay.’

‘W-what if . . . they know! They s-see . . . they can see . . . see what I am!’ His voice was dry and soft, a keening whisper that sounded like the wheezing rattle of an old man. Preston stared wildly at him, intently, but Ben wondered what exactly his eyes were seeing - whom he thought he was talking to.

‘I . . . I . . . hear nothing from it! N-nothing!’

Preston’s head jerked round to look at the dark space behind his cot, towards the metal chest nestling amongst sacks of oatmeal. ‘Nothing!’ he cried, his voice cracked pitifully.

He turned back to face Ben. ‘Eric! What if they know? What if they know we took it . . . that we stole it!’

Ben could have replied that he wasn’t Eric. But he decided not to.

‘Eric, what if they know the angel sh-shuns me? What . . . what’ll I do?’

Preston slumped back in the cot, his head resting once more against the pillow.

‘Just words . . .’ he wheezed quietly, his voice softening, spent. ‘They’re just words . . . just my words.’

His eyes closed again. ‘My words,’ he muttered, slipping back into a restless and troubled sleep, ‘not God’s . . .’

Ben sat and watched over him for a while, fidgeting in his sleep, several times murmuring, but nothing Ben could understand.

He knew the stronger tonics could do that - take the small whispering voices at the back of a person’s mind and turn them into a deafening scream. He was wondering what was troubling Preston in his sleep and had a mind that the answer might lie inside the metal chest just beyond him, when he heard Dorothy Dreyton stirring on the floor and begin to rise.

‘Did he wake you, Mrs Dreyton?’

She said nothing, sitting up and staring wide-eyed at Preston. There was something about her manner that troubled Ben.

‘Mrs Dreyton?’

Her eyes were distant. Without a word, she got to her feet and, stooping low, she pushed the flap aside, letting in a gust of freezing wind that set the flame on the oil lamp dancing, and stepped out into the cold day.

Above the rumpling wind, he thought he could hear distant raised voices; a commotion from across the clearing, and a ripple of disturbance and questioning from the Mormons standing nearby. Something was going on.

Ben stood up, and stooped as he swept the flap aside, squinting at the brilliant all-white glare of the day.

‘What is it?’

A man standing dutifully beside the entrance, Mr Hollander, with a dark beard almost down to his belt, pointed across the clearing. Ben could see Keats and several others moving quickly down-slope and emerging from the tree line onto the open ground of the camp, their guns unslung and held ready, anxiously looking back over their shoulders.

‘Thought I heard someone shout something about Indians,’ said Mr Hollander.

 

Julian found a number of books on the subject in the library’s index. The librarian helped him locate them amongst some shelves towards the back. He thanked the young man and sat down at a table to work his way through them.

He realised he knew absolutely nothing of the Mormon church. He hadn’t even realised that they were otherwise referred to as the Church of Latter Day Saints. It had quickly become evident to him that if he was going to be pitching this project to a commissioning editor or two, it wasn’t going to look good if he hadn’t at least done some token research into the faith of Preston and his followers.

At an instinctive level, he wondered if there was another angle to this story; an angle other than a simple survival story.

What if this was some kind of Jonestown thing?

The idea was as intriguing as it was chilling; that a community led by some charismatic religious nut had been steered into a remote wilderness - by accident or design - and there, every last one of them was talked into taking their own life for some bizarre theistic rationale.

There were several books he’d pulled up on Amazon that looked interesting and he had quickly printed out the details of them, before taking the District Line tube into town.

Here in the library they had copies of three out of the eight titles he’d listed. Not bad, considering how obscure some of them were. To be fair, it wasn’t as though Amazon was likely to have all of them in stock either.

He started by flicking through a recent edition of the Book of Mormon, quickly becoming irritated with the confusing language and woolly, meaningless terminology. He moved swiftly on to the second book: Mormonism, and Departure from Christian Convention. Without drawing breath, it jumped straight into a detailed theological discourse comparing the tenets of Mormonism with those of conventional Christianity.

He sighed and pushed it to one side.

The third book was called The First Mormon by one J.D. Pascal. The opening prologue of the book dealt with the Mormon church’s founder, Joseph Smith, and the story of how the Book of Mormon came to be written.

An atheist for pretty much most of his life, Julian had never had much time for what he considered the incomprehensible, paradoxical rambling of most writing on religion. A classic example of nonsensical theistic nit-picking being the eternal debate over the daily miracle that was said to occur with every communion; the debate over when the bread actually became Christ’s flesh, whether it occurred in the priest’s hand or on the recipient’s tongue . . . or, in fact, whether it was now meant to be considered merely a metaphor - downgraded from being taken as a literal miracle - because by today’s standards it was too far-fetched.

For Julian, the discussion, at best, was a waste of everyone’s time, up there with ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’

However, despite his irritation with that kind of nonsense, he found this particular account of the birth of a brand new faith utterly fascinating. Joseph Smith’s was a tale of divine inspiration, and profound discoveries in the wilderness of Utah of religious relics and seer stones, of ancient angels from bones, and sacred golden scrolls delivered from God in a long-lost language.

It was pure theatre.

‘My God, this is priceless,’ he muttered, scribbling down notes in his jotter as he leafed through the prologue.

This stuff is fantastic.

He read on with a growing sense of astonishment at the tale, affirmed regularly by the author as Joseph Smith’s direct testimony, and not enhanced or exaggerated in any way.

When he had finished he looked at his watch to find the afternoon had slipped away from him and that he had to make tracks to his meeting with Sean. He returned the books to the librarian to file away and stepped out onto Basinghall Street, to be greeted by the jostling hubbub and rush of pedestrian traffic, flowing like a human river towards Mansion House tube station.

But his mind was on what he’d just spent the last few hours reading - and one circling thought kept bubbling up over and over, making him shake his head with incredulity.

And . . . this is the fastest-growing faith in America?

 

The others, whilst Preston is still convalescing, have been prepared to take instruction from Keats with regard to the setting up of night watches around the clearing. There is a great concern throughout the camp that the Paiute hunting party encountered three days ago might just return and seek revenge for the Indian shot dead by Mr Hearst. I suspect fear of those Indians has driven them all some way towards accepting Keats’s way of doing things. Although Mr Vander and Mr Hearst, being the two most senior members of the quorum, Preston’s trusted lieutenants, are nominally in charge, neither carry the authority of Preston, and on this matter are more swayed by Keats’s greater experience.

Preston continues to recover. A surprisingly strong man for his middle years, this morning he sat up in his cot and managed to eat a bowl of oat stew. When Mr Vander relayed the news of this to the small gathering outside, I heard a hearty cheer. He complained, however, that the wounds were still extremely painful for him with every move. I prescribed another modest dose for the pain. But I’m reluctant for him to take too many more measures of the laudanum.

Preston asked me why Dorothy Dreyton has not been to see him these last few days. I had no answer.

 

Ben looked up from his journal across the heat shimmer of the campfire. This morning the skies were heavy and dark and promised a new inches-thick carpet of snow to rechristen the ground. The women - Mrs Bowen, Mrs Hussein and Mrs McIntyre - were preparing a gruel of stewed oats flavoured with some strips of pemmican, taking turns stirring the contents of a large, steaming iron pot suspended over a bed of ash-grey logs. By the pallid light of this morning the fire looked lifeless and spent, the flames all but invisible. The same fire at night, though, would look like a furnace, casting a reassuring amber glow across their end of the clearing.