Then Daryl was once again standing in front of them in the yellow light of the cabin, taking up the whole room with his presence. But somehow, in that moment, he seemed diminished, as if he were fading or shrinking.
“Bill’s out back,” he said quietly. “He’s dead. Stone dead.”
Bill Flood – seventy-two years old – sat upright on a simple wood bench beside the stone-circled firepit, shrouded in darkness behind the cabin, staring out into the deep expanse of Coombs’ Gulch. At first, from behind the bouncing circles of light from the flashlights, he looked like any old man sitting on a bench – someone you might see in a park on a lonely, overcast day, throwing breadcrumbs to ducks in a pond, shoulders stooped, silver hair combed back and kept trim with regular visits to the barbershop, which were usually unnecessary but offered an excuse to converse with others. The firepit was filled with leaves and refuse that spilled over the rock perimeter. Bill sat there, his back to the cabin – to them – and, despite Daryl’s insistence the man was dead, Jonathan still held the expectation that Bill would turn around and look at them with foggy eyes and croak some distant, hollow words from a constricted throat.
They circled the firepit to see his face, but he did not move. He sat still as a statue, frozen in time and somehow balanced on the bench, his frosted-over eyes staring out at dark mountains. They all stood in a semicircle around him, running the flashlight beams over his body, looking for any sign of what had happened and seeing nothing obvious. Their breath formed clouds in the cold night. A chill passed through Jonathan like a frozen spike touching the base of his spine. He followed Bill’s dead gaze and turned to look out into the forest of the night, and there, in the darkness, he saw it.
The world twisted and fractured and opened up like a doorway through time and space. He saw trees reaching through; he saw figures, impossibly tall, cloaked in stars, like an elaborately designed fabric. And in the twisting darkness, he saw the face of Thomas Terrywile appear, formed out of the trees and mountains, pieced together like a child’s puzzle. His eyes were large as the moon, his mouth grinning with a thousand teeth. An image of death veiled with the skin of an innocent boy.
Chapter Twelve
Charles Coombs III claimed the Gulch in 1824 as the Dutch were moving into the northern New York region with mining and timber operations. Coombs was a third-generation heir to a British textile manufacturing empire, but he eschewed his father’s and grandfather’s business to create a great new society, a society of communal living that would allow him to be at one with nature. In effect, he rebelled against his father and family, seeking a new life overseas with a vast amount of wealth at his disposal. He traveled to America, where he became enraptured with the transcendentalist movement, with its focus on the natural world and the perfection of humanity through communing with nature. The presence of and access to Native American tribes and belief systems drove him upstate as he sought out the Iroquois, north of Lake Champlain. He stopped for a period of time in Albany, where he purchased a hotel and created the Society of the New Dawn, drawing a few members at first and then progressively growing as Coombs made trips back and forth into the wilderness, seeking native wisdom and returning with stories, prophesies, and insights he shared with his followers. Although the Society was largely an intellectual endeavor at first, as it grew it began to change. Historians of the United States’ transcendental movement noted that much of Coombs’ teachings did not appear to mirror anything he could have gained from the Iroquois, who, at the time, were consolidating their people – decimated by war and infection brought by European settlers – and looking to abandon New York for the West.
In fact, no one is really sure who Charles Coombs was talking to during his trips into the wilderness. There is brief mention in a fur trader’s journal of an Englishman making numerous attempts to speak with Iroquois leaders and being turned away. At that point, the Native American tribes had grown tired of dealing with European settlers and deeply distrusted them for obvious reasons. Still, Coombs would be gone for months at a time and return to Albany dirty, haggard, half starved and seemingly delirious. But he also came with visions and philosophies, preaching against the rise of industrialism, capitalism and greed. His Society of the New Dawn began to take on religious connotations. He led members in prayerlike rituals that began to grow loud and ferocious, leading to complaints from surrounding city dwellers. Like other groups that sprouted during that time, Coombs and his followers began moving toward a completely open society, one in which families were communal arrangements, marriage was abolished and child-rearing was shared. But his utopian ideals were anchored by something darker. He talked of gods in the wilderness, beings that moved through the trees and haunted the mountains. Supernatural forces that could touch humanity, move the world with an unseen hand. Very few people recorded his teachings; what remains is a compendium of loosely linked, circular ramblings with no apparent underlying mythology. He tried to talk about time but made little sense. He talked about gods, but they were all foreign to any formal religions. The largely Christian population in Albany became concerned.
Following an incident in which Coombs was accused of ‘crimes against morality’, he and his followers were forced to leave Albany or face possible arrest. Coombs took his group, now numbering nearly one hundred and twenty, and fled for the Adirondack Mountains, a place where he said they could
