The Wrath of Angels

49





My first thought was that Fort Mordant was less the thing itself than the memory of it made manifest. The forest had done its best to blur and disguise its lines as though to discourage closer examination: its walls were covered in poison ivy, like waterfalls of green tumbling over precipices, and hemlock and common juniper had taken advantage of storm damage to mature trees by using them as nurseries. Cairns of stones, perhaps remnants of the original clearance of the land for the fort’s construction, had become shadowed by moss, lending them the aspect of funeral markers. Somewhere nearby must have been the actual graves of the fort’s original occupants, but I suspected they were long lost to the woods.

In that, I was soon to be proved wrong.

Mordant itself bore some resemblance to the only other such fortification I’d seen in the state: the old Fort Western in Augusta, although on a smaller scale. There were guard towers at each corner, about two stories high, with horizontal slit windows looking over the forest. Inside, although their roofs had long since collapsed, it was possible to see the remains of buildings on three of the four inside walls, with only the wall containing the main gate left free. One had clearly been a stable, because the stalls were still visible, but there was also plenty of room for the storage of supplies. The building opposite seemed to consist of one long single room, and had probably served as a barracks for the men. On the wall facing the gate was a smaller building, but here the division of rooms was obvious: quarters for the commanding officer and his ill-fated family.

‘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.





50





Ray 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 f*ckin’ 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.’

Ray backed off. He wanted to threaten her, just as he had threatened the boy, but his guns were no good to him here.

‘Get away from me,’ he said.

‘I’m lonely,’ said the girl. Her mouth hung open, and a black centipede crawled from between her lips and scuttled down the front of her dress. ‘Don’t leave me.’

Ray kept retreating, the gun leveled uselessly on the girl. His feet caught in twisted roots, concealed beneath a layer of dead leaves, and he had to glance down to find his footing. When he looked up again, the girl was gone. He turned in a slow circle, and saw her skipping through the shadows. He thought that he heard her laughing.

‘Let me be!’ he shouted. He fired a shot in her direction. He didn’t care if she fell or didn’t fall; he simply wanted to keep her at bay. She was circling him like a wolf closing in on wounded yet still dangerous prey. What was it Joe had said? This was her place. If he could just get out of her territory then she might prey on the woman and the boy instead.

She seemed to pause for a moment, and this time he took aim. The bullet struck her head. He saw something explode from her skull, and her hair blew back as if caught by a gust of air. His vision blurred, and he realized that he was crying. This wasn’t meant to happen. He wasn’t supposed to be shooting at a little girl. He wasn’t supposed to be here at all.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I just want you to leave me be.’

He fired again, and the girl shook her head violently, but still she circled, drawing ever closer to him, before she retreated abruptly into the trees. He could still see her, though. She seemed to be tensing herself for a final attempt at him. He decided that his best chance lay in emptying the gun into her, in the hope that the ferocity of his response might finally send her back whence she came. He watched her buck as the first of the bullets hit her, and this time he felt only satisfaction.

A weight struck Ray in the chest, and he heard another shot, although it did not come from him. He fell back against the trunk of a tree and slowly slid down the bark, leaving a sticky trail of blood as he went. His rifle fell from his hands as he sank to a sitting position, his hands splayed by his sides. He looked down and saw the wound in his chest, the redness of it spreading like a new dawn. Ray’s hands hung over the wound, and he sighed like a man who has just spilled soup on himself. His mouth felt dry, and when he tried to swallow the muscles in his throat refused to respond properly. He began to choke.

Two men appeared before him, one tall and black, his face and head hairless but for a neatly-trimmed graying beard at his chin, the other shorter and scruffier. They seemed familiar. He tried to recall where he had seen them before, but he was too busy bleeding out to concentrate on faces. Behind them appeared three other people, one of them a young woman. The black man kicked away Ray’s rifle. Ray stretched out a hand to him. He did not know why, except that he was dying, and dying was like drowning, and a drowning man will always reach out in the hope of finding something to save him from sinking.

The black man took Ray’s hand and gripped it, as the seconds of Ray’s life melted away like snowflakes in the sun. It was the girl, Ray realized: she knew that she wouldn’t get him, so she let these others take him instead. By firing at her, he had fired on them, and now they had killed him for it.

‘Who is he?’ said one of the others, a big, bearded man who looked out of place among these others, yet more at home in the woods.

Ray tried to speak. He wanted to tell them:

My mother gave me my name. The kids used to laugh at me in school because of it. I never had any luck that wasn’t bad, and maybe my name was the start of it.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I was looking for an airplane.

My name is—





51





We searched the dead man’s body. He had two thousand dollars in cash in his pockets, along with some candy bars and a suppressor for the 9 mm pistol he carried under his coat. He bore no identification. Louis had killed him after he fired two shots in our direction, one of which had missed Liat by inches, and seemed set to fire a third. If Louis hadn’t shot him then I would have, but I felt shame as I stared down at this unknown man, dead at our hands in the depths of the Maine wilderness, all to secure a list of names from a plane that might already have been consumed by the forest.

‘You recognize him?’ said Angel.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘There is something about him.’

‘He was in the ice-cream parlor back in Portland. Louis threatened to shoot him and his buddy.’

‘I guess it was meant to be,’ said Louis.

‘I guess so,’ said Angel.

‘I doubt that he came out here alone,’ said Jackie.

‘Could be he was the one we heard doing all that shooting earlier,’ said Angel.

‘Still doesn’t answer the question of who he was shooting at before he began taking potshots at us.’

The trail left by the gunman was clear to follow. He had broken branches and trampled shrubs as he made his way through the forest. It was not the careful progress of a hunter, whether of animals or men. This man had been running from something.

‘You reckon we’re still heading northwest?’ I said to Jackie.

‘Far as I can tell without a working compass, but I’d lay good money on it.’

‘That plane came down somewhere near here. We have to keep looking.’

‘Jesus,’ said Jackie, ‘we could pass within feet of it and not even see it. We didn’t even spot this guy until he was almost on top of us.’

‘We spread out,’ I said. ‘Form a line, but stay in sight of one another.’

I couldn’t see what other choice we had. We needed to cover as much ground as possible, and we had to do it while there was still light. The downside was that we would now present five targets in a row, like ducks at a sideshow shooting range. So we moved on, looking ahead of us, and to either side, and I forgot Jackie’s fear that we were ourselves being pursued.

The sun was setting when we found the shrine. Behind it, almost lost to the forest, was the plane. There were crows in the trees, dark and still like tumors on the branches.

And before us stood three figures, one already dying.

Darina had seen the man’s head tilt as she called his name. She had no fear of him. They were alike in nature: after all, they had buried the Wildon girls together, neither hesitating as the children squirmed beneath the accumulating dirt, and they both shared a memory of the Fall, the great banishment that had left their kind marooned on a world still forming. The boy followed calmly behind her, picking his way carefully across twisted roots and broken branches. Over and over she repeated the passenger’s name, like a mantra, calming him, reassuring him, even though she could not see him.

‘Malphas, Malphas. Remember.’

And all around her, a murder of crows seemed to echo her call.

She crested a rise, and before her was the plane. It looked like a fallen tree, except that there were no other such trees around it, and its body was perhaps too regular, too cylindrical. By now, it was more than half-submerged, as though the forest floor had turned to quicksand beneath it. Beyond it, a pool gleamed darkly.

But between the plane and where she stood was a crazed jumble of broken religious statuary, of skulls and bones arranged in patterns that had no meaning for her, all contained beneath a framework of mud and wood to protect it from the elements. Of Malphas, there was no sign.

They approached the construction and stood before it. The boy reached out a hand to touch one of the skulls, but she stopped him before he could do so. There was a buzzing in her head, and she felt a kind of awe, the closest she had ever come in her long existence to the fervor of a religious zealot. There was a power here, a purpose. She took the boy’s hand, and together they tried to understand.

A shadow fell across them. Slowly they turned. Malphas, the passenger, was silhouetted against the setting sun, his distorted head surrounded by a corona of fire. The bow was tensed in his hands, the arrow nocked and ready. Darina stared into his eyes, and the enormity of her mistake became clear to her. There was no recognition, no shared nature. She saw herself reflected only in the blank, hostile gaze of a predator. Blood flowed from a wound in his side.

‘Malphas,’ she said. ‘Know me.’

He frowned at her, and the arrow spoke to Darina’s heart. She felt a burning in her chest as the deepening orange of the fading sun was obscured by the deeper red of her own dying. She put her hands close to her chest and caressed the arrow, holding it gently like an offering. She tried to give form to her pain, but no sound came as she collapsed to the ground.

And as she could no longer scream for herself, the boy screamed for her, over and over and over.

The man with his back to us was huge. He wore green-and-brown camouflage clothing, and he held a bow in his hand. To his right, a boy stopped screaming as we appeared, and we watched as the woman beside him toppled to the ground with her hands clutched to the arrow in her breast.

The big man turned and I saw the terrible wound to his head, as though a meat cleaver had been taken to the top of his skull, leaving a crevasse along his scalp. This, then, was Malphas: the survivor, the killer of the Wildon girls. He was completely bald, his ears coming to sharp points, his face strangely elongated and very, very pale despite his years in the woods. He resembled a giant albino bat. Yet though his eyes were dark and alien, and he was already reaching for an arrow from the quiver at his side, it was the boy who gripped my attention, the boy whom I feared more than the man. It was Brightwell in miniature, Brightwell in youth, from his pale moist skin to the growing goiter on his neck that would, in adulthood, blight his appearance still further. I saw his face contort with rage as he recognized me, for how often does a man get to confront his own killer?

All that happened next occurred both slowly and quickly. Jackie, Angel and Liat hesitated before firing, fearful of hitting the boy, not recognizing the danger that he posed. Louis was faster to respond, shooting just as Malphas nocked a new arrow to his bow and dropped to one knee to release it. I heard a beating of wings around us, and a murder of crows rose into the sky. Louis’s shot struck the shrine, but it was enough to distract Malphas, and his arrow appeared to go wild. He was already rising, preparing to seek cover, when the boy struck. From the folds of his jacket he produced a long knife and used it to slash at the back of Malphas’ right thigh, severing the hamstring. Malphas toppled, and the boy buried the blade in his back. Malphas dropped the bow, and tried to reach behind him for the hilt of the knife, but the movement must have forced the blade still deeper into him, the tip of it slowly, insistently, finding his heart. His mouth opened wide in silent agony. The life slowly left him, and he joined the woman who stared lifelessly at him from her single undamaged eye, his blood mingling with hers on the wood-strewn ground.

But he was not the only one to fall. Jackie called my name, and I turned to see Liat stretched in pain upon the ground, an arrow buried in her left shoulder. While we were distracted, the boy ran, disappearing behind the plane and slipping into the woods beyond.

Jackie and Louis helped Liat to sit while Angel examined the arrow.

‘It’s gone straight through,’ he said. ‘We break it, take it out, and strap the wound up as best we can until we can get her to a hospital.’

I saw the three sharp blades of the arrow protruding from her upper back. The wound would be bad. Those arrows were designed to create massive trauma. Already Liat was shivering in shock, but she still managed to point at the plane with her right hand.

‘I’m going to the plane,’ I said. ‘The sooner we have that damned list, the sooner we can leave.’

‘What about the kid?’ asked Angel.

‘That was no kid,’ I said.

I looked to Louis. ‘Go after him,’ I said. ‘Take him alive.’

Louis nodded, and ran with me as I headed for the plane.

‘That thing on his throat,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘It looked like the same mark that Brightwell had.’

‘It is Brightwell,’ I said. ‘Like I told you: don’t kill him.’

Louis set aside his rifle and took out his pistol.

‘I hate these f*cking jobs,’ he said.

Jackie Garner suddenly moved away from Angel and Liat and began scanning the forest to the south, his rifle raised.

‘What now?’ said Louis.

Angel called down to us. ‘He thinks he saw someone in the woods.’

‘Just get the list,’ Louis told me. ‘I’ll check it out, then go after the child, or whatever you say he is.’

The plane had sunk so far that entering it required stepping down into the cockpit, at least once I’d managed to cut away some of the sticky creepers that were coating the door, which was still ajar, even all these years after Vetters and Scollay had first forced it open. It was dark inside, the windows obscured by the vegetation, and I heard something scamper away from me at the back of the plane and flee into the forest through an unseen hole. I turned on my flashlight, and went searching for the leather satchel that Harlan Vetters had described to his daughter. It was still there, the sheaf of typewritten pages safe inside its plastic covering. Scattered beside the bag were various clipboards, soda cans, and a pair of shoes. I went to the back of the plane, for there was light filtering in from somewhere. The plane lay at a slight upward angle, the nosecone facing toward the sky, the rear submerged in the earth, but what had appeared to be just another part of the upper fuselage was revealed, on closer examination, to be a canvas sheet fixed to the metal. It had probably allowed Malphas to enter and leave the plane easily, if he chose to do so.

‘Charlie?’ It was Louis’s voice. ‘I think you need to come out here.’

‘On my way,’ I said.

‘Now would be good.’

Another voice spoke, one that I knew well.

‘And if you have a gun, Mr Parker, I’d advise you to throw it out ahead of you. I want to see your hands raised as you emerge. If you appear with a weapon there will be blood.’

I did as I was ordered. I emerged from the plane with my hands above my head, the satchel on my left shoulder, and prepared to confront the Collector.





52





I took it all in as soon as I stepped from the airplane: Liat, lying against a tree, her left arm hanging uselessly by her side, her face pale; and Angel and Louis in the clearing below, separated by about twenty feet, their weapons raised and aiming at the rise above that stinking pool of black water.

There, partly hidden by a tree trunk, stood the Collector, the wind causing the tails of his coat to extend behind him like wings but hardly troubling the greased lines of his hair. He appeared to have dressed no differently for an excursion into the wilderness than he would have for a walk in the park: dark pants, worn shoes, a stained white shirt buttoned to the neck and a black suit jacket and coat.

Jackie Garner knelt before him. There was a strange coil of metal around his neck, and silver objects along its length glittered in the dying sunlight. It was only as I drew nearer that their form became clearer. The coil was threaded with razor blades and fish hooks: any movement by Jackie or the man behind him would tear his flesh. Jackie’s body blocked a clear shot at what little of the Collector was exposed: just one half of his face, and his right arm, the muzzle of a gun pressed against the top of Jackie’s head while the Collector’s eyes moved from Angel to Louis and back again. When I appeared, his eyes fixed on me, but even at this distance I could see that they were different. In the past, their bleakness and hostility had been leavened by a kind of dry amusement at the world and its ways, and the manner in which it had forced him to assume the onerous duty of executioner. It was a facet of his madness, but it gave him a humanity that he would otherwise have lacked. Without it, his eyes were windows into an empty, unforgiving universe, a vacuum in which all things were either dead or dying. Here was the Reaper made incarnate, an entity entirely without mercy.

‘Let him go,’ I said.

Slowly, I shifted the leather satchel from my shoulder and raised it for him to see.

‘Isn’t this what you came for? Isn’t this what you want?’

Liat shook her head, imploring me not to hand the list over to this man, but he said only, ‘Is it? If it is, then it is not all that I want.’

He looked at the bodies of Malphas and the woman with the burned face.

‘Your work?’ he said.

‘No, their own. Malphas killed the woman, and the boy with her killed Malphas in reprisal.’

‘Boy?’

‘He has a goiter, here.’ I pointed to my neck with my free hand.

‘Brightwell,’ said the Collector. ‘So it’s true: he has come back. Where is he?’

‘He ran into the forest. We were about to go after him when you appeared.’

‘You should fear him. After all, you killed him once. As grievances go, that one’s hard to beat. The other two, though, you don’t have to concern yourself about. They won’t be coming back, maybe not ever.’

‘Why?’

‘Angels die only at the hands of angels. All gone now. No return, no new forms. Poof!’

I considered what he had just told me. Brightwell had once died at my hand, but Brightwell had come back. If what the Collector was saying was true—

But he was ahead of me. He smiled, and his voice was filled with mockery.

‘Why? Did you believe that you might be a fallen angel, a shard of the Divine discarded for your disloyalty? You’re nothing: you’re just an anomaly, a virus in the system. Soon you’ll be expunged, and it will be as if you had never existed. Your life is being measured now in minutes – not hours or days, not months or years. You’re very close to dying here, because I am very close to killing you.’

I saw Louis and Angel tense, their bodies preparing for the gunfire to come. In response, the Collector jerked on the coil, and Jackie screamed in pain. Lines of blood began to flow down from his neck.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Lower your weapons. Do it!’

Angel and Louis did as I said, but their fingers stayed on their triggers, and their eyes did not leave the Collector.

‘And why am I to die: because my name is on that list you received?’

This time, the Collector actually laughed. ‘The list? Those names were nothing. They were bait, footsoldiers to be sacrificed. They knew the Kelly woman was faltering. They knew she would betray them. She had never been privy to their deepest secrets, and all she had were the names of those she herself had corrupted. Brightwell may have added your name when your paths first crossed, but others ensured that it ended up on Barbara Kelly’s list. It was their hope that its presence on it would convince your own friends to turn against you, that they would cast you out, or kill you. The real list, the important list, is in your hands. It’s older, and it’s the product of many hands. That list has power.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I tortured it from a woman named Becky Phipps before I put her to death. She went hard. By the end, she was confessing in droplets.’

‘Who wanted my name to be put on that list?’

‘The Phipps woman died before I could get that information from her, but she spoke of Backers, all wealthy and influential men and women, but one of them more important than the rest. It was simple human psychology. They knew Kelly was turning, and they planted your name in her head. They told her it was significant information, that their enemies would place particular value on it, and she used it, just as they knew she would. They’ve been watching you for a long time, and they were as curious about you as I was, but pragmatism eventually outweighed any interest in your deeper nature. Now, like me, it seems that they’d prefer a world without you in it. So this is my deal, and there will be no bargaining: you give yourself to me, and the woman lives. So too do your belligerent friends down there. One life for many. Consider yourself a martyr to your cause. Otherwise, I’ll hunt you all down, and I won’t rest until you and everyone you love is dead.’

He tightened the noose around Jackie’s neck once again, twisting it as he did so, and Jackie screamed briefly before the constriction reduced it to a pained gurgle.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ I said. ‘Why you, and why now?’

The Collector ground the muzzle of his gun into Jackie’s skull.

‘No, it’s my turn for questions now, and I have only one: why did you send him? Why did you do it?’

I had no idea what he was talking about, and I told him. The Collector pressed his knee into Jackie’s back, contorting his body.

‘This one!’ said the Collector. ‘Why did you send him after my – after Eldritch? To destroy his records? To kill him? To kill me? Why? I want to know. Tell me!’

And then I understood. ‘The explosion? I had nothing to do with it.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I did not do it. On my life.’

‘It is on your life. It is on all your lives.’

I looked at Jackie. He was trying to talk.

‘Let him speak,’ I said. The Collector eased the pressure on the noose, and it hung from Jackie’s flesh by its hooks.

‘I didn’t know,’ said Jackie, so softly that we could barely hear him. ‘I swear, I didn’t know.’

‘Oh, Jackie,’ I said. ‘Jackie, what have you done?’

‘They told me there would be nobody in the building. They told me that nobody would get hurt.’

He spoke in a monotone. He was not pleading. He was confessing.

‘Who, Jackie? Who told you?’

‘It was a phone call. They knew about my mother. They knew that she was sick, and I didn’t have the money to help her. So I got a call offering me a job, and I was given a down payment in cash, a lot of cash, with the promise of more to come. All I had to do was cause an explosion. I didn’t ask any questions; I just took the money, and did the job. But I wanted to be sure that there was going to be nobody in the building when it happened, so I didn’t set a timer. I used a cell phone to detonate it instead. I made the call when I saw that the old man and the woman had left the office, but then the woman went back. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

Nobody spoke for a moment. There was nothing to say.

‘It seems that I misjudged you, Mr Parker,’ said the Collector, ‘although I must admit that I’m disappointed. I thought that I’d finally found an excuse to be rid of you.’

‘Don’t hurt him,’ I said at last. ‘There must be a way out of this.’

‘What will you do?’ asked the Collector. ‘Will you take his place? Will you hand him over to the law? You’re a hypocrite, Mr Parker. You’ve done bad things. You’ve used the ends to justify the means. There have even been times when I’ve considered you for my collection. Have you felt the urge to unburden yourself to the police, to tell them of bodies in swamps, of dead men in bus station restrooms? I do not trust you. I do not trust any of you.’

‘I’ll trade you,’ I said. ‘My friend for the list.’

‘The list? I have enough names in my head to last me a hundred lifetimes. If I killed one every hour it would still be no more than an echo of the greater reckoning to come. Your crusade is not mine. What I want is vengeance. What I want is blood, and I will have it. But take your friend, then. I release him. See?’

He lifted the end of the noose, and let it fall from his hand. Staying low, and still using Jackie as a shield, he began to retreat into the forest, his blackness becoming a part of the greater dark, until only his voice remained.

‘I warned you, Mr Parker. I told you that all those who stood by you would die. It has already begun. It continues now.’

There was the sound of a shot, and Jackie Garner’s chest spat a cloud of blood. Angel and Louis both began to move, but a second shot came, then a third, both exploding inches from my feet.

‘Stop!’ said the Collector. ‘Stop, or the girl is next.’

Liat was closer to him than any of us, but she couldn’t hear anything that he was saying. She was afraid to move, afraid of what might happen if she did.

So we stood, and we watched Jackie Garner die.

‘I can kill her now,’ came the shout from the forest. ‘I have her in my sights. Now walk toward me, Mr Parker, and throw the satchel up. No tricks, no short throws. I get the list, and you all live.’

I held the satchel high by its strap, and threw it hard, but not in the direction of the forest. Instead, I launched it into the dark pool. It seemed to rest on the black, viscous water for too long before disappearing soundlessly into its depths. I saw Liat’s eyes widen, and she stretched out her good hand as though somehow hoping to draw the bag back to her by sheer force of will.

I stood and waited for the final shot to come, but there was only that voice, fainter now as the Collector moved deeper into the forest. I heard a noise above my head, and saw a single raven separate itself from the crows and fly north.

‘That was a mistake,’ it said. ‘You know, Mr Parker, I don’t think that you and I are going to be friends any more . . .’