He looked up at the thick mesh of fir branches and the rising incline of the ground, dark and forbidding in the deep shadows of such a pale and lifeless afternoon, and reassured himself again: There’re no demons or angels out there — just a madman.
That wasn’t the comforting thought he’d hoped it might be.
He crawled up into the tree line. A few moments later, the clearing behind was lost from sight and he was alone in the snow-dampened silence of the wood.
CHAPTER 64
1 November, 1856
‘Speak to me,’ Preston whispered hoarsely.
He pushed through a waist-high thicket of thorny briar that scratched at his hands as he stepped through into the small glade. Almost a week’s worth of snow had transformed it from a grisly butcher’s shop to a virgin-white, sylvan idyll. There remained no exposed sign of the frozen slick on the log or the violence that had been perpetrated here.
He walked forward across the snow, resting his hand on the log and brushing aside the fresh powder until he saw the jet-black slick of Dorothy’s blood. He felt a solitary tear roll warmly down his cold, sallow cheek and instinctively checked that he was alone before allowing his grief to emerge with an audible sob.
‘Why Dorothy?’ His voice broke with grief. ‘Why Dorothy? Why Sam?’ he cried. ‘Why do you punish me like this? Haven’t I done everything you asked of me?’
His words faded into the stillness and remained unanswered.
‘Eric and Saul… were not pure of heart, I know that now.’ More tears rolled down his cheeks and settled into the dark bristles of his beard. ‘But Dorothy was a good woman. She gave herself to you, gave herself to me.’ He wiped his face with one grubby sleeve. ‘Gave me a son and a daughter, both of them such good children.’
He looked up at the grey, tumbling sky. ‘I had to sacrifice them. You know that. I had to. Dorothy had doubts… doubts that would have spread amongst my people and destroyed them.’
Preston sobbed. Overhead, the startled flutter of wings from the topmost branch of a tree punctuated the silence. The bird flapped noisily across the clearing and away over the trees.
‘I loved her! And my children! And I gave them up for you!’ Preston dropped to his knees, for the first time in his entire life feeling utterly alone.
God has turned His back on me.
He closed his eyes, accepting a truth that drained away the very last of his will to live any longer.
I am not the one He wants to spread his new gospel.
‘I’ve angered you, somehow,’ he whispered. Unspoken, he sensed he knew what it was — the plates, those sacred plates of Joseph Smith’s — were not his to have.
Have? Perhaps ‘steal’ would be a better word.
‘No!’ he cried, ‘I didn’t steal them! I… I thought it was Your will that they came to me! I thought it was Your wish that I take them!’
Preston’s vague memory of a dark night and a deed done with the help of two other men came from another life, another time. The true memory had almost completely gone and had been replaced with a far more palatable one in which divine inspiration had brought to him two wayward men, Eric and Saul, carrying with them a gift from God of which they had no understanding. Only he had understood the true value of the book of metal plates, and the small canvas sack of bones they carried.
And yet, here it was… the truth he had almost managed to hide from, to forget, coming back to taunt him. They — the three of them — had stolen from God… and now His angel was here, Nephi… risen from the canvas sack and fully formed, ready to implement God’s wrath.
Preston felt tears of shame and fear roll down his cheeks. ‘I.. I’m sorry! I… I’m so sorry I took those things!’ His broken voice echoed off the silent trees around him.
The bones, the remains of Nephi, had never whispered to him as he’d confidently announced they would. They had never risen as the angel sat with him and read to him from the plates in a language he could understand. And yet, impatiently, Preston had made a start… his Book of New Instruction.
‘Oh God, forgive my arrogance!’ he whimpered. ‘But I had to begin the work. I had to. My children needed guidance. I thought you were steering my hand! I thought…’
He pulled a knife out of the pocket of his long coat and unsheathed it. His eyes still closed, he felt the cold, sharp edge of the blade in his hands. ‘I’ve done wrong. I’ll take my life right now
… if you will spare them.’
He waited, eyes closed, sensing a freshening breeze on his skin, the whisper of the branches stirring, and knew it was the draught of something approaching.
I hear it.
He remembered a voice of wisdom from one of his many turbulent visions.
Never look on the face of His anger… or your soul is doomed for eternity.
His eyes remained firmly clamped shut as the breeze intensified and the trees swayed. He thought he sensed the ground beneath him vibrate with the footfall of something large approaching the glade.
It’s near.
He heard the crack of branches splitting, being pushed aside by something large and powerful. All of a sudden, he was certain it was there in the glade with him, standing before him. His eyes remained tightly shut.
Do not look.
Preston had no need to open his eyes, though. In his mind he already knew what it must look like: a presence as tall and as wide as a building, crackling and shimmering with the raw energy of God’s rage. In his mind, he saw a giant skull-like head, the horns, the spines of bone towering over him.
‘T-take me,’ he whispered, his thin lips trembling, awaiting a powerful swipe that would empty his stomach onto the ground in front of him.
‘Spare the others… p-please.’
There was stillness in response. He could hear only the deep, panting breath of the giant apparition in front of him, sensed its giant form swaying, looking down on this pitiful human who thought he was pure enough in heart to channel the word of God to mankind.
Preston could see that now. It was his heart, stained by arrogance, that had condemned him and perhaps condemned his people too. He wondered if the angel had hesitated like this before emptying Saul, before gutting Eric; whether it had listened dispassionately to their tremulous pleas for forgiveness before finally, cruelly, ripping them apart.
Preston realised poor Emily’s eyes must have been open in this glade; she’d seen this apparition, and in that moment was eternally doomed. Her mind emptied by the horror of it, leaving behind the breathing carcass they had been tending this last week.
My God, poor girl.
A violent and messy death right now would be preferable to that. An eternity of torment to a moment of agony — seeing his insides steaming on the snow beside him as his consciousness ebbed away. This death, certainly no more than seconds away, was going to be a hard death, but infinitely preferable to the fate his daughter had suffered.
Poor, poor Emily.
‘End my life,’ he whispered. ‘It’s worth nothing.’
He sensed it moving around him, from the front, to his right, then behind… circling, studying him silently. He felt the vibration of its steps through the ground, the monstrous weight shifting from one foot to the other, and the energy radiating from it.
Heat trickled down his thighs and Preston realised that his shame was complete. ‘Lord, I’m ready to die.’
A gust of wind swept through the branches above with a hiss, the leaves and fir-needles rustling in tacit
