46
Wolfe’s Folly was silent as night fell, and the only movement came from the shifting of the shadows thrown by the trees upon it, or so it appeared until one small shadow separated itself from the rest, moving against the direction of the wind. The crow circled, cawing hoarsely, then resumed its perch with its brethren.
The passenger had no memory of his original name, and little understanding of his own nature. The plane crash, which he had caused by breaking the arms of his seat, freeing him to attack the pilot and co-pilot, had left him with significant injuries to the brain. He had lost the capacity of speech, and he was in constant pain. He retained virtually nothing of his past beyond fragments: scattered recollections of being hunted, and an awareness of the necessity of hiding himself, instincts that he had continued to follow ever since the crash.
And he remembered, too, that he was very good at killing, and killing was his purpose. The co-pilot did not survive the crash, but the pilot did, and the passenger had stared at his face, and one of those shards of memory had glittered in the darkness. This man had hunted him, and therefore the pain in the passenger’s head was his fault.
The passenger had pushed his thumbs into the pilot’s eyes and kept pushing until the man ceased moving.
He stayed in the wreckage for a number of days, feeding on the candy bars and potato chips that he found in the co-pilot’s bag, and drinking bottled water. The pain in his head was so terrible that he would black out for hours. Some of his ribs were broken, and they hurt whenever he moved. His right ankle would not support his weight at first, but in time it healed, although imperfectly, so that he now walked with a slight limp.
The bodies in the plane began to stink. He pulled them from the wreckage and dumped them in the woods, but he could still smell them. He used a broken panel from the plane as a spade and dug a shallow pit in which to bury them. When the snacks from the plane ran out, he salvaged what he could, including the emergency kit and a gun that he found among the pilot’s possessions, and started exploring the wilderness, which was how he came upon the fort. He built a temporary shelter for himself inside its walls, and he tried to sleep, even as the girl prowled the woods beyond.
He thought that he might have seen her on the first night after the crash, although he could not be sure. There was a face at the cockpit window, and he might have heard a scratching upon the glass, but he was unconscious more often than he was conscious, and his waking hours were spent in a kind of delirium. The presence of the girl was just another splinter in that cloud of memories, as though his whole life had been part of an intricate painting on a glass wall, and that wall had just exploded.
It was only later, when he began to recover his strength, that he recognized the reality of her existence. He watched her at night as she circled the plane, and he thought that he felt her anger and her desire. His senses were troubled by it just as they had been bothered by the stench of the pilots. Rage was her spoor.
She grew bolder: he woke on the third night to find her inside the plane, standing so close to him that he could see the bloodless scrapes on her white skin. She did not speak. She merely stared at him for a single, long minute, trying to understand him even though he did not understand himself, and then he blinked and she was gone.
That was when he decided to leave the plane. He still could not walk far on his wounded ankle, and when the fort had presented itself to him he had been grateful for it, more so when he found that the girl would not cross its threshold. There he grew stronger. He hunted during the day, while the girl hid herself away. At first he wasted his shots on squirrel and hare until his hunter’s instincts led him to a young doe. It took two shots to kill it, and he field-dressed it with the knife from the emergency kit. He ate what he could, and cut the rest into strips to dry; to keep pests away, he covered them with fabric ripped from the seats of the plane, and the deer skin helped to keep him warm as the winter drew in.
In the quiet of the fort, the Buried God began to call to him.
He heard its voice imperfectly, but it was familiar to him. It came to him the way music might come to one who had been struck deaf but retained enough of his hearing to discern muffled chords and rhythms. The Buried God wanted to be released, but the passenger could not find him. He had tried, but the voice was coming from too far away, and he could not understand its words. Sometimes, though, he would stare into the depths of the still, dark pool near to which the plane had come to rest, and he would wonder if the Buried God might not be down there. Once, he reached into it, sinking his forearm up to the elbow, straining his fingers in the hope that his hand might be grasped by whatever waited below. The water was frighteningly cold, so cold that it felt like a burning, but he kept his arm submerged until he could stand it no longer. When he withdrew it, the water dripped slowly from his fingers like oil, and he gazed in disappointment at his numb, empty hand.
He began paying homage to the Buried God. He dug up the bodies in the forest and removed the heads, along with some of the major bones from the arms and legs. It was the beginning of the shrine’s creation, the altar of worship to an entity he could not name but whom he understood to be his god. He created impressions of false deities from his fractured memory, carving them from wood with a knife, and he mutilated them in the name of the other.
He was still weak, too weak to explore farther, or seek civilization. He should have died that winter, but he did not. He even wondered if he could die. The Buried God told him that he could not. When spring came, the passenger began to explore his domain farther. He found an old cabin, its walls built from thick logs, but its door long gone and its roof collapsed. He began to restore it.
In March, a man came into his territory: a young hiker, unarmed. The passenger killed him with a spear that he had made, and waited for others to come looking for him, but no one did. He scavenged all that was useful from the man’s pack, and a wallet with $320 in cash, although there was still a great deal of money in the plane, along with a satchel of papers that made no sense to him.
Two weeks later, he made his first, careful sortie back to civilization, his damaged skull hidden beneath the dead hiker’s cap. He bought food, and salt, and some tools, and ammunition for his pistol, all by pointing at the items that he wanted. He looked at a rifle, but he had no identification. He settled instead for a used hunting bow, and as many arrows as he could afford. He could have found a way to lose himself once again in a city or a town, but he was afraid that his appearance might draw attention. He also knew that he was damaged, and managing anything beyond the simplest of social tasks was beyond him. He was happier in the woods. He was safe there, safe with the Buried God, and perhaps, as he grew stronger, he might find the Buried God, and free him. He could not do that from a city.
And so he hid himself in the woods, and prayed to the Buried God, and tried to limit all human contact. He became adept at avoiding the men from the paper companies, and the wardens. The passenger killed another hiker the following year, but only because the hiker came to the fort and found the shrine nearby. Such trespasses were rare, because there was something about the fort that kept people away, or else most knowledge of it had been lost. Similarly, the cabin had lain undisturbed for decades before the passenger found it: because the ground had been cleared to build it, second-growth foliage had sprung up around it, so the dwelling remained virtually invisible.
Only once had he felt truly threatened. He had gone to the plane to replenish his supplies of cash, for he had to prepare for another winter. He had entered the plane through the canvas hatch at the back, noting once again how far the fuselage had sunk. It might take years, but eventually the plane would be lost entirely. He pulled back a piece of rotting carpet and lifted the panel that it concealed in order to retrieve the money.
He was just about to reach into the bag when he was struck by a blinding flash of white pain, as though a shard of metal had been forced through his right ear and into his brain. They came on him with increasing frequency, these attacks, but this was the worst yet. His body went into seizure, and he spasmed so hard that he broke two teeth on his lower row. The cabin of the plane began to close in on him, and he experienced a terrible sense of falling and burning. Then the world went black, and when he opened his eyes again he had somehow crawled from the plane, and the girl was nearby, circling him but drawing closer. She was angry at the passenger for taking the hiker when she had wanted him for herself. He had to get away from her, but his sense of direction was distorted. He reached for his gun, but it was gone, and he suspected that the girl had taken it. She hated the gun. Its noise troubled her, and she seemed to know that it was important to him, that without it he would be more vulnerable. He was forced to keep the girl at bay with stones until, through sheer luck, he managed to struggle back to his cabin, for in his confused, agonized state he was unable to find the fort. There he barred the door against her, and he listened from his pallet bed as she scratched at the wood, trying to force her way inside.
When at last he was strong enough to leave, he found that the door was scarred by the girl’s efforts, and he dug one of her old, twisted fingernails from the exposed white wood. He returned to the plane, and discovered the remains of a fire, and he saw that the interior had been disturbed. The money was gone, although he had retained enough good sense to separate it into three piles, keeping some of it at the cabin and some buried in plastic behind the fort. But it was not the money that concerned him so much as the intrusion, and the imminent risk of discovery.
He stripped the cabin and the fort of his possessions, wrapped them in plastic, and buried them. He hid the shrine beneath a screen of leaves and twigs and moss that he had constructed for just such an eventuality, then retreated many miles to the north where he had built himself a hide. After a month he risked returning to his cabin, and discovered to his surprise that the site was as it had been, and nobody had come to find the plane. He could not understand why, but he was thankful. In the wilderness, he continued his solitary worship, and his solitary search. He subsumed his pleasure in killing because he knew that, if indulged, it would eventually draw people to him.
Until that week, when he had taken the two hikers, and offered up the woman’s remains to the Buried God.
That was why he had returned to the fort, at least for a while. The girl always grew angry when he killed, and it would take days for her temper to subside. Just as with the hiker long before, she was angry because she had wanted the couple for herself. She wanted company. By killing those who strayed into her territory, the passenger deprived her of it, and the uneasy truce that existed between them was threatened. On those occasions, the passenger would take refuge in his cabin or, more often, in the fort, and from its safety he would watch the enraged girl stalking outside its walls, casting her whispered threats to the wind. Then the girl would disappear, and he would see no trace of her for weeks.
At those times, the passenger believed that she might be sulking.
So the passenger left the girl to her fury. He climbed into his sleeping bag in the fort and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come. The Buried God’s voice had grown louder recently, desperate to communicate something to him, but the passenger could not interpret the message, and so the frustration of both grew. The passenger wished that the Buried God would be silent. He wanted peace. He wanted to reflect upon the man and the woman he had killed. He had enjoyed taking their lives, the woman’s in particular. He had forgotten the pleasure that it brought.
He wanted to kill another, and soon.