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 fucking 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.