— a voice utterly without malice, broken with emotion, pleading.
‘Please… Emily… please.’
Emily began to cry at the sound of his voice.
‘Sam? You said us. Who else is there with you?’ asked Ben. The answer came after a few seconds. ‘She belongs with us. There is God’s work still to do back there,’ the voice replied. ‘You belong with us.’
Emily screamed at those words. ‘Don’t want to go back!’ She grasped Ben’s hand. ‘Please don’t make me go back!’
‘Let go of him!’ the voice hissed angrily.
‘No!’ Ben shouted back. ‘She’s coming with us.’
There was a rustle of movement to their right, followed by the deafening boom from Broken Wing’s musket and the startled flutter of departing birds from the branches above them. Ben spun round to look towards where the end of the Indian’s musket still pointed. As the thick haze of powder smoke around both men cleared, Ben anxiously peered into the darkness ahead, expecting to see a slumped form.
But there was nothing to be seen.
‘Sam?’ he called out. ‘Sam?’
‘Sam is gone,’ the voice hissed back.
In an instant Ben realised they were in trouble. The musket had been discharged and nothing hit.
He turned to Broken Wing. ‘Take them and go!’
The Shoshone hesitated.
‘RUN!’ Ben barked to the others. ‘Run for the river!’ Broken Wing hurled the empty musket to the ground and pulled his tamahakan out, ready to bloody its small, jagged blade. He pulled Mrs Zimmerman roughly to her feet and pushed the woman ahead of him. Turning to Ben and Emily, he beckoned to them urgently.
‘Lam-bert… come!’
‘Emily,’ said Ben, ‘go with him!’
She shook her head. ‘No, I want to stay with you,’ she cried, anxiously reaching for his hand.
‘Go!’ he shouted angrily, shaking her off. ‘Now!’
She was about to turn and run when the low bough of a squat spruce lurched to one side, sending a shower of snow to the ground.
It stepped out into the open.
Emily gasped at the sight.
A tall, thin figure, he stood before them, coiled ready to leap forward and disembowel them at any moment. Strapped to one hand were several long serrated blades, whittled and sharpened from bone. On his body, the ribs of a host of unidentifiable creatures had been stitched to a hide shirt with careless and unskilled haste. The head was half the skull of some larger creature, perhaps an ox or a stag. It appeared that Broken Wing’s shot had found the target, shattering one side of the skull. Behind the jagged half-mask of fractured bone, he could see the blood- flecked face of Samuel Dreyton staring out.
‘Sam!’ Emily shrieked — recognition, relief and fear mixed into her shrill cry.
He took one small, uncertain step forward. ‘Emily.’ His young voice cracked with emotion; not the evil hiss of some demon, but the voice of a troubled young man. The side of his face that Ben could see was pulled into the tight grimace of someone fighting to hold back a flow of emotion.
Emily suddenly shook uncontrollably. ‘Oh no! I… I remember! ’
‘I killed him, Em,’ he admitted, his voice choked with a sob. ‘I killed Saul. I had to… he would have killed you… he would have killed me. I… I had to, Em.’
‘You… cut,’ she whispered, her eyes wide, replaying that day once more, ‘y-you… cut… and cut… and cut… and cut
…’
A tear rolled down Sam’s cheek. ‘H-he deserved it. Saul and Eric-’
‘You d-did those… th-things… those… things to Mr Vander?’ she gasped.
He nodded. Ben thought he saw the slightest hint of revulsion and regret in his face. ‘Yes, I did,’ he uttered. ‘And Preston too.’
‘Oh, Sam,’ Emily whispered quietly.
‘I did it for you, Em. For me, too.’ He took a step forward and she whimpered in fear, recoiling from him.
‘It’s me,’ he pleaded tearfully, stretching out his hand to her. Her eyes were drawn to the serrated blades strapped to his hand, clogged with dry blood and shreds of tissue.
She screamed.
It was a brittle, high-pitched scream that tore to pieces the cushioned silence of the wood. Emily wrapped her arms around Ben, terrified of her brother. Sam’s face changed in that instant — the last sign of the boy replaced with the listless, bland face of a killer.
‘Emily!’ Ben looked down at her. ‘Run!’
She let go of his hand and took a dozen uncertain steps towards Broken Wing and Mrs Zimmerman.
‘RUN!’
She turned and fled towards them.
Ben faced Sam. ‘Sam?’
The face he could see behind the fractured bone was still and lifeless.
‘Not Sam, not any more,’ it whispered and advanced several steps towards Ben.
From behind him, Ben heard Broken Wing call out. ‘Lammbit! Come!’
Ben waved. ‘Go! Dammit! GO!’
The creature in front of him eyed the long-bladed knife Ben held in his hand, and smiled.
‘Sam,’ he said quietly, ‘let her go. Broken Wing will take her to the Shoshone; they’ll care for her there. She’ll be safe.’
It shook its head. ‘Not Sam. I am the angel,’ it added, one hand gently patting a canvas sack that hung from a belt. Ben heard the soft clink of bones as it swung gently.
‘In that bag, Sam? Is that something Preston had? Is it what was in his chest?’
The creature managed a smile. ‘I chose to leave him. I chose Sam.’
Ben could hear the crack of a branch echoing from the trees behind him. The others were getting away. The longer he could delay Sam here, the more chance they’d have.
‘You are Sam,’ he replied. ‘Take off the skull… take off the bones.’ He pointed to the canvas sack. ‘Undo that… let it go, Sam. These things are affecting your mind, making you something you’re not.’
It stood there in silence. The one eye Ben could see was no longer glancing distractedly over his shoulder at the others. They were out of view now.
‘I know you, Sam. Before the bad things happened, you and I… we were friends. And we can still be, if you take all these bones off and leave them behind you.’
The creature cocked its head curiously. ‘Sam is telling me he once liked you,’ the voice hissed. ‘Wanted to be like you.’
Ben glanced at the long, viciously jagged blades attached to the hand as the fingers flexed and the sharp serrated bones clinked together.
That’s going to cut me to bloody pieces.
‘Sam, listen to me,’ he uttered, his mouth dry. ‘Something very wrong has found its way inside you — inside your head. Something bad. But we can make it go away.’
‘Sam is not listening any more,’ it hissed. ‘He needs to rest.’
Ben looked at the eyes; one he could see clearly, the other twinkled through the skull’s dark orbital socket.
‘I can cut you up like I cut all the others.’ It took another step towards him.
‘Stay where you are!’
Its twinkling eye appraised him silently for a moment. ‘You seem like a good man.’
Ben left that unanswered, Keats’s blade held out in front of him, watching the creature ease forward another step. Only three yards separated them now.
‘Stay where you are.’
‘You seem like a good man, with love in your heart.’
