The Wrath of Angels (51 page)

‘There,’ said Jackie. He pointed into the smaller bushes, and when I looked at them from his angle I could see the rough path through them.

‘Deer?’

‘No, a man did that.’

Angel, Louis and Liat moved into the fort, their weapons ready. Jackie and I remained outside, but Jackie’s attention was torn between the fort and the way that we had just come.

‘You’re making me nervous, Jackie,’ I said.

‘The hell with you, I’m making myself nervous.’

‘Would you rather be in there?’

Perhaps it was our knowledge of its history, but there was a deeply unsettling ambience about the fort. Despite its decay, there was a sense of occupancy about it. That trail between the forest and the gate had been regularly used.

‘No, I would not. I’ll take my chances out here.’

There was a whistle from inside the fort: Angel. Louis was above whistling.

‘At least if there’s trouble, you can lock the gate and hide inside,’ said Jackie.

‘There is no gate. If there’s trouble, we’re all taking our chances out here.’

Angel appeared at the entrance.

‘You need to take a look at this,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay with Jackie.’

Louis and Liat were in the commanding officer’s living quarters. The ramparts on the rear wall overhung the interior, creating a natural shelter that had been augmented by a tarpaulin fixed into the wood with nails and supported by two metal bars driven into the ground. I smelled excrement, and urine. A layer of insulating material had been attached to the walls, again held in place by sheets of plastic, to provide further warmth. On the ground was a sleeping bag, along with a half-filled five gallon container of water, a small gas camping stove, and canned food: beans and soups, for the most part. It might have been the temporary home of a down-and-out, or the hardier kind of hiker, were it not for its location deep in the Maine wilderness, and the decorations upon the walls. They were family snaps, but not of any single family: here were a man and a woman and two young girls, all blond, and next to them a man and woman on their wedding day, older and darker than the people in the preceding picture. Around them were photos and drawings culled from newspapers and pornographic magazines, cut and collaged to make new and foul illustrations, all anti-religious in nature, the heads of Christ and the Virgin Mary and Buddha and figures that I couldn’t even identify, Asian and Middle Eastern in origin, transposed onto naked bodies bared obscenely. They were concentrated in one corner, for the most part, above a makeshift stone altar adorned with shattered statuary and old bones, animal and human intermingled. Some of the bones looked very, very old. Among them were a handful of tarnished military buttons. If I were to guess, I would have said that someone had dug up the remains of the soldiers who had died here.

‘Malphas,’ I said.

‘Why would he stay out here?’ asked Louis. ‘Assuming Wildon and the pilot died in the crash, he was free and clear. He could just go back to doing whatever he was doing before Wildon found him.’

‘Could be that he didn’t want to,’ I said.

‘You think he liked the outdoor life so much he decided to spend part of his time in a ruined fort making collages from pornography?’

It didn’t sound likely. Liat watched us both, following the conversation on our lips.

‘Part of the time,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You said he spent “part of his time” at the fort. This doesn’t look like a permanent dwelling, and those pictures on the wall were put there recently. Where does he spend the rest of his time, and why would he hole up in this place anyway if he’s made a permanent home somewhere else?’

I looked to Liat, but she had turned her back on us. Now she beckoned us to join her as she examined something carved into the wood, light against dark.

It was a detailed representation of a young girl’s head, two or three times normal size, her hair long and curling from her scalp like the bodies of snakes. Her eyes had been cut deeper and larger than the rest of her, the ovals of them so big that I could have placed my fist in them had they not been filled with teeth, the roots of them impaled in the white wood. There were more teeth in her huge mouth, except these ones were root-out, giving them the appearance of fangs. It was terrifying in aspect and effect.

‘If you’re frightened of something, where better to hide than a fort?’ I said.

‘A fort with no gates?’ said Louis.

‘A fort with bad memories,’ I replied. ‘A fort with blood in its walls and its dirt. Maybe a fort like that doesn’t need gates.’

‘He was frightened of a little girl?’ Louis sounded skeptical.

‘If what I’ve heard about her is true, he had good cause to be.’

‘But he stayed out here, even though he was scared of her. I guess that plane must be real important to him.’

Liat shook her head.

‘Not the plane?’ I said.

She mouthed the word
no
.

‘Then what?’

She made it clear that she didn’t know. In the fading light, and the shadows of the old fort, I almost missed the lie.

Almost.

R
ay Wray was running.

He wasn’t sure how it had all gone so wrong so fast, but he knew now that he and Joe had been out of their depth right from the start. They should have backed away the first time that the kid and the woman had come near them, except Joe owed them and they were calling in the debt, and Joe had given Ray to understand that these weren’t the kind of people on whom one reneged. He was just grateful to Ray for tagging along, even if Ray wouldn’t have been anywhere near those woods if he hadn’t been so desperate for cash.

They’d made good progress from the start. The kid might have been spookier than a haunted house on Halloween, but the little bastard could move, and there had been no complaints from the woman about the pace that had been set, either on her own behalf or the kid’s. While Joe had the map, and a good sense of where they were going, it often seemed to Ray that it was the woman who was guiding them, and not the other way around. When Joe paused to check his malfunctioning compass, the woman would simply keep on walking, the kid trotting behind her, and when Joe and Ray caught up with them there was no need to alter direction.

Ray figured they were less than a mile from the fort when the first arrow struck. His first thought was, Indians! which was absurd and unhelpful but there was no understanding the workings of the human mind. Even as he hit the ground, and heard Joe swear, he’d found himself giggling, and it was only when he looked up and saw the arrow buried in the trunk of a white pine that he stopped laughing and began considering that he might die out here.

Joe was a few feet to his left, trying to find the source of the arrow.

‘Hunter?’ asked Ray, but he asked more in hope than expectation. They were still wearing their orange bibs. There had been some discussion about it, but Ray and Joe had finally taken the view that, with a woman and a kid in tow, it was better to be safe. It would have to be one dumb-ass bow hunter who’d shoot an arrow at someone in orange.

‘No fuckin’ way,’ said Joe, which was just what Ray had thought.

The Flores woman was using a thick oak for cover. Still searching the forest for the source of the arrow, Joe called back to her.

‘Miss Flores, you got any idea who that might be?’

Something darted behind a wind-tipped hemlock, the old tree resembling an animal more than vegetation, its body seemingly poised to rise up on its roots and stride through the forest. The moving figure revealed itself to be a big man, his head misshapen, the bow clearly visible in his hand. Ray didn’t think: he just fired. There was an explosion of bark from the hemlock, and then Joe was firing too. The man retreated fast, limping some yet still nimble, but Ray was pretty certain that one or other of them had winged him. Ray had seen him stumble awkwardly on the third or fourth shot: upper body, maybe the right arm or shoulder. It was only when he and Joe stopped shooting that he realized the Flores woman had been shouting. Against the fading echo of the shots, and the ringing in his ears, he heard the word ‘No!’

‘The hell do you mean, “No”?’ asked Joe. He had emptied his rifle, and was reloading from a prone position, lying on his back while Ray provided cover for him.

‘I don’t want him hurt,’ said Flores.

‘Miss, I signed up to get you to that airplane, and get you safely out again,’ said Joe. He finished reloading and scanned the trees. ‘I did not sign up to get myself killed.’

The arrow seemed to materialize in Joe’s left leg. One second he was just lying there, preparing to say something else to Flores, and the next the three-blade head had punched its way straight through his thigh, and Joe’s mouth was wide open in a scream as the blood began to spill, the wound already hemorrhaging massively. Ray had never seen so much blood pump so quickly from a man. He moved to help as Joe rose up and a second arrow hit him low in the back, and Ray knew instantly that Joe was going to die. He coughed up a great spray of red as Ray crawled to him and, using his friend’s body as cover, began shooting into the forest, hoping to hit something, anything. Joe just grunted as the third arrow struck his back. This one must have pierced his heart because his body shook hard once beneath Ray and then went still.

But that final arrow had given Ray an opening. He’d seen the figure again, just as the arrow was loosed, and now he had a target. He got the man in his sights and was about to pull the trigger when a hand yanked his head back and the shot went wild. Ray took a punch to the side of the head. It wasn’t much of a blow, but a trailing finger caught his left eye, the pain blinding him for a few seconds. He lashed out, and felt his fist connect with lips and teeth. When he looked around, the boy was lying on the ground, his mouth red from a split lip.

Ray turned the rifle on the child.

‘You move and I’ll put a bullet in you,’ he said, but it wasn’t the boy who moved. To his right, Ray saw Darina Flores rise to her feet and begin walking in the direction of the old yellow birch behind which Ray had glimpsed their attacker. She was calling out to him, calling a name.

‘Malphas!’ she said. ‘Malphas!’

The boy crawled away from Ray. Once he was safely distant, he got to his feet and followed the woman, blood spilling from his damaged gums. He did not look back.

That was when Ray made his decision. He tore off his orange vest and started to run.

We were still in the fort when the first sounds of gunfire reached us. They were coming from the west, as best we could tell. The compasses had ceased to function effectively shortly before we came within sight of the fort, and they now offered differing and constantly changing views on where magnetic north might lie.

I explained to Liat that we were hearing shots, and we joined Jackie outside the fort.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Louis.

‘Hunters?’

‘That’s a lot of gunfire, and at least some of it is coming from a handgun.’

‘You want to wander into somebody else’s gunfight?’

‘Not particularly. I just wonder who’s shooting, and at what?’

We waited. The gunfire stopped. I thought that I heard a bird calling, but it was no birdsong familiar to me. It was Angel who recognized it for what it was.

‘That’s a woman’s voice,’ he said.

We looked at one another. I shrugged.

‘We go in,’ I said.

Ray Wray had no idea where he was running to, or in what direction. He couldn’t see the sun, and he was panicking. He kept waiting for the fierce tearing pain of a three-bladed arrow cutting a path through his flesh, but it did not come. He came to an uprooted deadfall oak, and collapsed behind it to catch his breath and find his bearings. He watched the forest. It was very still. He saw no sign of movement behind him, no misshapen head taking aim, no bow flexed and ready to send a shaft his way. He still had his rifle, and about thirty rounds of ammunition, as well as his pistol. He also had water, and food, but no compass. He glanced at the surrounding trees and tried to judge the moss growth upon them: forest lore dictated that it would be thicker on the north side, but it all looked pretty much equal to him. He might as well have tossed a coin.

Once again, he checked the way that he had come, and saw nothing. He wondered if the woman and the boy were dead yet. What was the name that she had called? Malthus? Malphas, that was it. The Flores woman had known the name of the man who killed Joe, sticking him with hunting arrows like a bad child torturing an insect with pins. Maybe Joe’s death had been a big mistake, in which case it was just one part of the larger error in agreeing to go into these woods in the first place. At least Ray still had the down payment that the woman had handed over for their services. If there had been time, he’d have searched Joe’s pockets for his share as well, but what he had was better than nothing. He took another look at the nearest tree, decided that the moss looked thicker on the side facing the direction in which he had just come, and prepared to head south.

He was just getting to his feet when he caught a pale flash of movement behind him. Instinctively, he fired.

There was a little girl watching him from between two white pines, one older and coarser-barked than the other. He could see a hole in the center of her dress where the bullet had hit. He waited for her to fall, horrified at what he had done but she did not move. She showed no sign of pain or injury, and no blood spilled from the wound. She should have been dead or dying. She should have been lying on her back, bleeding out her life as clouds scudded across her pupils. She should not have been standing and staring at the man who had just put a bullet in her.

Ray had heard the stories, but he’d always hoped that they were pure foolishness, tall tales like the yarns of lake monsters and hybrid wolves. Now he knew better.

‘I’m lost,’ said the girl. She reached out a hand, and Ray saw the broken nails, and the dirt upon the fingers. Her eyes were black-gray coals set against the ruined whiteness of her skin. ‘Stay with me.’