Shepherd’s eyes flicked from the gun down to the sack of bones beside him. ‘You don’t know what you’ve done,’ he hissed angrily.
This man has ruined you?
Shepherd winced at the voice.
‘If you lower the gun,’ said Julian, ‘please… we can still help each other. There’s a story.’ He pointed at the linen sack on the bunk. ‘There’s a message there… we can help each other.’
Rose nodded earnestly. ‘We can help spread your word.’
This man has ruined you?
‘Please.’ Julian slowly held out a hand. ‘Lower the gun… please…’
The gun did feel heavy in his hand now — heavier with each passing second. He lowered the weapon by a fraction. But the voice returned, angry and shrill.
God has no use for you, William.
What?
You’re pathetic.
I’ve given my life to God.
But you are no use to Him now.
Please, let me prove myself to Him.
All right. Kill yourself.
He cocked his head and stared out into the dark, his troubled mind taken aback by the sudden request. A final test of faith, yes… he could understand that. With the most important task in the history of mankind yet to do, yes… it made sense. It made a lot of sense.
‘Okay,’ he whispered and slowly raised the gun.
‘Shepherd?’ cried Julian. ‘What’re you doing?’
He pointed the gun towards his face. ‘You know I’d do this for Him,’ he said quietly. ‘I told you I’d do anything for Him.’ He placed the short stub of the barrel in his mouth, his lips clasped around it dutifully.
You know I would do this, if He asked it of me.
Kill yourself.
Shepherd obediently placed a finger on the trigger and began to gently squeeze.
Do you see? I’d do it if He wanted. I’m prepared to do anything.. to die for the Lord, if He wanted it. Do you see that now?
He knew God had once stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son at the very last possible moment; that the patriarch had to have every intention of killing his own child in order to make evident his fealty. Shepherd knew God would stop him too, but only if he could demonstrate his complete sincerity in this test of faith. Shepherd pushed his promise a little further with another ounce of pressure on the trigger.
I’ll do anything… do you see now? God was right to choose me. God was right to lead me here.
And another ounce of pressure.
Do you see?
And another.
God? Is this really what You want?
The small, delicately balanced trip lever inside Barns’s pistol answered the question prematurely.
CHAPTER 87
27 April, 1857
I am alone now. I finally worked out how to stop the voice in my head. I put him back in the chest with the plates.
But I am alone.
He looked up from the journal on his lap. His measured handwriting contrasted with the deteriorating childlike scrawl of Ben’s on the previous pages. The snow across the camp was melting in the warm light. It was warm enough, in fact, that he sat on a cushion of blankets in the open, with his shirt off, taking some small pleasure from the heat on his pale back.
The snow still remained in deep, slushy piles, but in the places where it had not been so thick, dark muddy patches showed.
There is a smell here in this place that I cannot take any longer, he wrote.
Across the mottled ground of mud and snow, the bodies lay rotting and bloated, both oxen and human. The meat from the beasts had turned too bad to eat.
He saw faces in the dirty slush that were once families he knew; faces that had once had names — Jeremiah Stolheim, Sophia Lester, Aaron Hollander — but were now swollen and purple and anonymous.
The angel killed so many of them. He came back here to this place and killed them all. I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He wanted to make an example of them.
Sam’s hand stopped scratching words across the page. There were things sitting before him, in front of the temple, carefully stacked beside the campfire like logs. His eyes momentarily rested on them; grisly things that his hand refused to transcribe on the page.
The angel’s rage had been complete.
The deeds that had been done on his return to the camp… Sam had managed to erase, or at least dull, most of those memories from his mind: the screams, the panic of slaughter. All that remained now, rotting in the melting snow, was the aftermath.
Now he is gone, I can see with my own eyes the bad things he did to the bodies. I see with my own eyes the heads carefully placed in a pile. I see with my own eyes the cuts, the gashes, the fear in those bloated, dead faces.
I see now what the angel is.
He looked towards the temple. The lumber frame, no longer supported around the base by dense, tightly packed drifts of snow, had sagged to one side, everything askew. Inside, the angel was sealed away in Preston’s metal chest.
There had been a night, one particular night late in December, as he dined alone on frozen meat in the musky darkness of his shelter, when his wretched grief and the angel’s tormenting voice had proved too much for him. He had pulled the canvas sack from his belt, staggered into the temple and as the shrill and suspicious voice screamed accusations at him in his mind, he had opened the chest and dropped the sack inside.
Sam hadn’t dare venture within the slanting shelter since.
He knew if he did, he’d hear it whispering to him to be let out again.
I think I understand what the angel is now.
It is the darkness in our hearts, made a thousand times worse.
It made sense in a cruel, unforgiving way. It made sense to him that, guarding those precious plates on which God’s true message was inscribed, were those bones. He realised now that they were a test of purity… and intent. As a magnifying glass could be to the sun’s rays, so those angel’s bones were to a man’s soul.
Sam’s grief at losing Emily, his rage, had been turned by the angel into a storm of wrath, visited back here in the camp on those poor people who had remained.
I see now that it was a good thing Emily left me. That she escaped with the Indian and Mrs Zimmerman. I fear if she hadn’t, I might find her head stacked here amongst the others.
He looked up at the sky, clear and blue, promising an unbroken day of warmth. Today, he decided, was the day he was going to leave. Another night alone in this forsaken place and he imagined madness would finally take him completely. He looked at the space left on the last page of this journal, Benjamin Lambert’s journal. This last page was dark with new ink, a bottle he’d discovered a few days ago whilst scavenging through one of the other shelters.
I have read all of Benjamin’s words in here. Of all the bad things the angel did, killing him was the worst. He was my friend. He was a good man.
Sam wondered how different things might have been if the angel had chosen Ben to come to. His heart had
