Once Upon a Time in Hell (17 page)

Indeed it was. Branches of Regret, now back to his original size and shape, a wooden effigy of an Indian Chief, stood a few feet from us, dripping blood red in a circle around his massive feet.

"It has been a long walk," he said, "but I am glad to have found you again." 

E
LISABETH
F
ORSET WOKE
to the sound of gunfire.

"Oh for goodness sake," she sighed, tugging herself out of bed and into her clothes.

She didn't make the same mistake as the day before, to hell with layers of petticoats and dresses. If a day began with the firing of rifles you had to assume the worst and she had no intention of facing that in anything less practical than trousers, boots and a shirt.

"What's going on?" she shouted as she stepped out of her carriage and into the passage way beyond. A crowd appeared to have built alongside the Land Carriage and the windows were filled with angry faces and waving hands. Refusing to make eye contact with any of them until she at least had a vague understanding of what had put them in such a foul temper, she made her way along the corridor and banged on the door of her father's carriage. There was no answer so she let herself in. There was a time and a place for propriety and it wasn't when there was an angry mob outside your door.

Her father was bundled in his bunk, a pair of wax earplugs firmly wedged into his ears.

She shook him by his leg and he awoke with a start.

"Dear Lord!" he shouted. "What's wrong?" "No idea, father," she admitted, "but we appear to have gathered some unfavourable opinion during the night. She looked across to the other bunk, it was empty. "Father Martin must have arisen early."

"If he did he went to bed late too," said her father. "I haven't seen him since last night."

"That's rather worrying."

The whole carriage shook as the crowd outside pressed against it.

"Not as worrying as that," said Lord Forset. "What the deuce is wrong with them?"

The corridor outside was filling with the Order of Ruth, who very much wanted to know the same thing.

There was a creaking sound and the roar of the crowd got louder. Billy, who slept in a bunk in the engine, had made his way across the roof of the train and descended now from one of the vents in the roof.

"We've got trouble," he said.

"Clearly," Elisabeth replied. "Can you offer any more clues than that?"

"They want to speak to Father Martin. I guess they think he's the closest they have to a spokesman for God."

"He's not here," said Elisabeth, pointing to the empty bed.

"I haven't seen him since late yesterday," said Brother William, stepping into the cabin. "I was talking to him about the stories people were spreading about the Devil in the mountains.

They seemed to unnerve him."

"What on earth do they all want?" asked Forset, looking beyond the young novice to the crowd outside. "They're not happy about the fact that they've heard nothing from the town," said Billy.

"People sacrificed a lot to get here. The town's only supposed to be here for a day and so far only a handful of people have been able to get inside it."

"Well, naturally," said Forset, "I sympathise with that. I slept in my clothes in the hope that I might wake up somewhere more interesting than my blasted cabin. But why does that make them angry at us?"

"We're travelling with men of God," said Billy. "I think their rather twisted logic is that if anyone can tell them what's going on its them."

"I shall talk to them ." announced one of the monks, the aged Brother Clement. "In Father Martin's absence I'm the most senior."

"The eldest," said Brother William, looking at the frail figure. "Yes. I'm not sure that's a wise idea right now."

"My dear child," said Brother Clement, pushing his way past the rest of the order and heading towards the door. "I am a man of peace and I am sure that will be respected."

He opened the door to the carriage and held his arms up before the crowd.

"Please!" he shouted. "Please quieten yourselves. I can't hear a thing if you're all shouting at the same time."

"This is a terrible idea," said Elisabeth, both her and Billy moving up behind the old monk.

"We want to know what's going on!" someone shouted from the crowd.

"Don't we all," muttered Lord Forset, shuffling up behind his daughter and Billy.

"I have no more idea than you," announced Brother Clement. "Though I am sure that this is all part of Our Beneficent Lord's plan, a test of patience to see who is truly worthy of the gift of a glimpse of Heaven. Given your current behaviour I'd say most of you were likely to be struck off the list."

"Oh no," Billy shook his head. "That won't go down well."

It certainly didn't. A loud roar of disgust welling up from the crowd and a couple more shots fired into the air.

"There's no good your shouting at me," Brother Clement said. "I suggest you all go back to your tents and pray to God to forgive your actions here this morning."

"He has no idea how serious this is," said Brother William. "I'm going to pull him back in."

But it was too late for that as another rifle shot rang out.

S
COTT
C
LAREMONT WAS
not a bad man. It seemed to him that he had spent a good deal of his life thus far trying to convince people of that. Yes, he had done bad things, Lord knows he had a temper and there had been times when he had let it get the better of him. Like that night in the saloon on the Wisconsin border, when those idiots had made fun of the South. He had been ashamed of his behaviour that night, but the whisky and the insults had set off a fire in his belly that had burned so brightly it couldn't be ignored. Later, when putting as much distance between himself and the incident, whipping his horse into a frenzy almost to match his own, he had said to himself: never again, Claremont, you've just got to learn to control your self.

And he'd tried, most certainly he had. He'd kept his drinking within reason and done his best to avoid the sort of situations that fired him up. Still, life was a damned irritant at times and he couldn't always claim to have kept his cool. It was a sickness with him, that was the truth of it. He had tried to explain as much to his first wife as he'd sat on the corner of their bed, nursing his freshly grazed knuckles. Other people were given leave when they fell susceptible to long-held medical problems, people gave them support and understanding. But not him. Nobody seemed to understand he could often not control his temper any more than a man could control his emphysema or dandruff. It was part of who he was, always had been. He wished it weren't the case but wishing got you nowhere in this world.

He had given it considerable thought on his way to Wormwood. The weeks in the saddle had been conducive to internal examination and he had very much hoped that finding his goal would be the first step on an even more momentous journey: the road to recovery.

He'd heard about Wormwood during a card game. One of the other men in the camp had laughed to hear him admit that, as if it were an act of sacrilege that his journey had begun in a casino. Claremont was by no means sure of that; he figured God was probably a gambling man, that was certainly the impression he got from looking at the world. Anyway, what did it matter where the journey had begun? What mattered was that he had seen it through. He had ridden through all weathers, seen things he had never dreamed of, even when under the spell of the bottle. In Kentucky he had watched as large crabs roamed the grasses near his adhoc camp, the night alive with their snapping pincers as they worked through the undergrowth in search for food. He had ridden out of there just in time, the damned things nipping at his back and carving two deep wounds in the rump of his horse. Then there had been the vulture men of Arkansas, he had been convinced that their hideous croak was to be the last thing he would ever hear as they dragged him to their nests on Pinnacle Mountain. If it hadn't been for his speed on the draw he would have been chick food for sure. Ever since he had arrived at the camp he had heard stories to match his own. He could only imagine how many people had never made it this far.

All of which made the fact that Wormwood wouldn't let them in beyond his ability to stomach. How could it ignore them all after they had come so far, lost so much? Oh sure... some had been let inside, though the more you asked around the smaller that number seemed to be. It was like everyone knew of someone who knew someone else that might have vanished the day before. During the long, uneventful night (when he had succumbed to the delights of the whisky bottle, yes, could you blame him?) he had even begun to wonder if anyone had really vanished at all. Certainly everyone he had made a point of talking too since his arrival was still here.

And now this? He hadn't been at the front of the gang that had stormed that weird train but he'd moved through the crowd, listening to what people had to say. Then the old man had the audacity to say it was their fault? That God had punished them for... for what? Their enthusiasm?

Now that had made Claremont see red, oh yes it had.

But Scott Claremont wasn't a bad man, no sir. He had meant to fire that rifle into the air.

He wouldn't shoot an old man like that. It was the sun in his eyes. One of the crowd jostled his arm. The rifle always did have a delicate trigger.

Scott Claremont was not a bad man.

T
HE BULLET THAT
killed Brother Clement passed through the bridge of his nose and embedded itself in the ceiling of the carriage, to settle down and rest after a job well done.

"Get the door closed!" shouted Billy, convinced that the shot was only the first of many. Brother William nearly fell as the dead body of Brother Clement hit him but managed to grab the old man and pull him to one side as Billy and Elisabeth slammed the door shut.

The crowd outside was momentarily silenced, scarcely believing what had just happened.

Then they began to roar once more, waves of anger rising up into the air; anger at everyone and everything it would seem.

Inside the Land Carriage, things were hardly more restrained. The Order of Ruth—their numbers dwindling—were loudly at prayer, their calm, reasoned approach to theology now swept away in panic, reduced instead to a primal, fearful appeal to God.

Lord Forset was loading his own rifle, hoping not to have to use it but determined to be ready should he have to.

Billy shouted for everyone to stay low in case the crowd took to shooting through the windows.

"Is there any way to lock the door?" he asked Forset.

The inventor, suddenly realising what a mistake that was, shook his head slowly.

"Then we need to think of a way of securing it," Billy continued. He looked at Brother William. "Your belt."

William nodded and immediately began to untie his cincture. Billy tied one end around the door handle while William secured the other against the door of the compartment opposite.

Now, if anyone from outside tried to pull open the door the taut rope would hold it in place.

"If they really want to get in," said Elisabeth, "the carriage won't hold for long. They can just smash open the windows."

"Yeah they can," agreed Billy. "We just have to hope they're too scared of getting their own heads blown off to risk it." Which was when they looked to the dead body of Brother Clement and it all began to sink in.

F
ATHER
M
ARTIN HAD
spent most of the night walking through the mountain trails. Once his eyes had accustomed themselves to the low light, he had found the going easier than he had imagined.

He had also found it bizarrely relaxing. When he had begun his climb he had been searching for the Devil. Now, hours later he had found something even more precious: peace.

The last few weeks had seen him consistently trapped outside his normal conventions; travelling with the Order, more often a babysitter than a patriarch, and placed in one violent situation after another. It was a pleasure to climb up out of that world and feel the fresh air in his lungs and silence in his ears (for the most part anyway, the camp was in a raucous mood this evening and the occasional raised voice was brought up to him on the back of the wind). He understood the agitations within the camp but didn't share them. He had spent his whole life comfortable in the company of a God who didn't feel the need to prove himself. He was quite happy to imagine the whole affair of Wormwood as nothing more than a test, a reminder that the most important thing about faith was faith itself. That was a Wormwood he could understand and re late to more easily than the showboating Heaven's Gate that everybody else seemed to expect. A symbolic manifestation, a reminder that Heaven was always only a step away, always within reach by prayer.

He sat on a flat rock and watched the sun rise over this miracle in the desert. It made him feel closer to God than he had since he had left the Order's home all that time ago.

"Makes you glad to be alive, don't it?" said a voice from his left. He turned and found himself face to face with the original point of his search. The red faced Devil.

In the flesh, lit by that warm sunrise, he didn't seem quite as intimidating as the gossip of the camp had suggested. He was of average height, dressed in a pair of rough bib pants, almost every inch of his skin etched with tattoos. They seemed, on casual inspection, to be illustrations of animals. His face was pink, yes, sunburned and stained with the blood of recent meals. Not a nice image but not, Father Martin reflected, the face of the Antichrist.

The man smiled and revealed his most bizarre and uncomfortable feature: a set of metal teeth. Father Martin could scarcely imagine the pain involved in having such dentures fitted. Nor could he imagine the reason such surgery would be necessary.

"Don't mind the sight of my gnashers," the Devil said. "I already ate."

Father Martin might have hoped that were a joke but given the reported state of the woman who had been stolen from the camp, he feared the Devil meant it quite literally. Was it possible this thing had actually eaten parts of her?