The Wrath of Angels

someone who would believe. That was the last time we spoke, but he warned me that if something happened to him, or if I didn’t hear from him again, I was to stay quiet. There was money in trusts, in hidden accounts, and I could sell the house. His lawyers had all of the details. I wasn’t to look for him, and I was to send all of the evidence he had collected to you, and you alone.’

Epstein was puzzled. ‘But I received nothing from you.

‘That’s because I burned it all, every last scrap of paper,’ she said. ‘It killed my daughters, and it killed my fool of a husband. I wanted no more part of it. I did what he told me to do. I stayed quiet, and I lived.’

Now he was certain. ‘He was on his way to New York,’ said Epstein. ‘He was bringing Malphas to me.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Wildon, this empty woman, this shell of grief, brittle as the Lladro figures that stared down from her shelves. ‘And I didn’t care. My husband didn’t understand. He never understood.’

‘Understood what, Mrs Wildon?’

Mrs Wildon stood. Their meeting was over.

‘That it wouldn’t bring them back,’ she said, ‘that it wouldn’t bring my little girls back to me. You’ll have to excuse me now, but I have a plane to catch. I’d like you to get out of my home.’

Malphas. I found that I had written the name on the open page of the Gazetteer.

‘Malphas was the passenger on the plane,’ said Epstein. ‘Ampell went missing on the same day as Wildon. He owned a Piper Cheyenne aircraft, which that week was based at a small private airfield just north of Chicoutimi. The plane has never been found, and Ampell never filed a flight plan. They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, or their cargo. They didn’t want anyone to suspect, but Wildon had to tell his wife. He wanted her to know that he’d succeeded in finding this man, except she didn’t care. She blamed her husband for what had happened to their children: Malphas was just the instrument.

‘And Malphas survived the crash, Mr Parker. That’s why there were no bodies in the wreckage. He removed them, or perhaps they survived too, and he killed them and disposed of their remains.’

‘But he left the list, and the money,’ I said ‘The money might not have been important to him, but that list was. If he survived, and was strong enough to kill anyone else who had lived, why did he leave the list where it could be found?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Epstein, ‘but it’s another reason to be careful in those woods.’

‘You don’t believe that he’s still out there?’

‘He had been discovered, Mr Parker. They hide themselves away, these creatures, especially when they’re under threat. Those woods are vast. They can conceal an aircraft, and so they can conceal a man. If he’s alive, where else would he be?’

46

Wolfe’s Folly was silent as night fell, and the only movement came from the shifting of the shadows thrown by the trees upon it, or so it appeared until one small shadow separated itself from the rest, moving against the direction of the wind. The crow circled, cawing hoarsely, then resumed its perch with its brethren.

The passenger had no memory of his original name, and little understanding of his own nature. The plane crash, which he had caused by breaking the arms of his seat, freeing him to attack the pilot and co-pilot, had left him with significant injuries to the brain. He had lost the capacity of speech, and he was in constant pain. He retained virtually nothing of his past beyond fragments: scattered recollections of being hunted, and an awareness of the necessity of hiding himself, instincts that he had continued to follow ever since the crash.

And he remembered, too, that he was very good at killing, and killing was his purpose. The co-pilot did not survive the crash, but the pilot did, and the passenger had stared at his face, and one of those shards of memory had glittered in the darkness. This man had hunted him, and therefore the pain in the passenger’s head was his fault.

The passenger had pushed his thumbs into the pilot’s eyes and kept pushing until the man ceased moving.

He stayed in the wreckage for a number of days, feeding on the candy bars and potato chips that he found in the co-pilot’s bag, and drinking bottled water. The pain in his head was so terrible that he would black out for hours. Some of his ribs were broken, and they hurt whenever he moved. His right ankle would not support his weight at first, but in time it healed, although imperfectly, so that he now walked with a slight limp.

The bodies in the plane began to stink. He pulled them from the wreckage and dumped them in the woods, but he could still smell them. He used a broken panel from the plane as a spade and dug a shallow pit in which to bury them. When the snacks from the plane ran out, he salvaged what he could, including the emergency kit and a gun that he found among the pilot’s possessions, and started exploring the wilderness, which was how he came upon the fort. He built a temporary shelter for himself inside its walls, and he tried to sleep, even as the girl prowled the woods beyond.

He thought that he might have seen her on the first night after the crash, although he could not be sure. There was a face at the cockpit window, and he might have heard a scratching upon the glass, but he was unconscious more often than he was conscious, and his waking hours were spent in a kind of delirium. The presence of the girl was just another splinter in that cloud of memories, as though his whole life had been part of an intricate painting on a glass wall, and that wall had just exploded.

It was only later, when he began to recover his strength, that he recognized the reality of her existence. He watched her at night as she circled the plane, and he thought that he felt her anger and her desire. His senses were troubled by it just as they had been bothered by the stench of the pilots. Rage was her spoor.

She grew bolder: he woke on the third night to find her inside the plane, standing so close to him that he could see the bloodless scrapes on her white skin. She did not speak. She merely stared at him for a single, long minute, trying to understand him even though he did not understand himself, and then he blinked and she was gone.

That was when he decided to leave the plane. He still could not walk far on his wounded ankle, and when the fort had presented itself to him he had been grateful for it, more so when he found that the girl would not cross its threshold. There he grew stronger. He hunted during the day, while the girl hid herself away. At first he wasted his shots on squirrel and hare until his hunter’s instincts led him to a young doe. It took two shots to kill it, and he field-dressed it with the knife from the emergency kit. He ate what he could, and cut the rest into strips to dry; to keep pests away, he covered them with fabric ripped from the seats of the plane, and the deer skin helped to keep him warm as the winter drew in.

In the quiet of the fort, the Buried God began to call to him.

He heard its voice imperfectly, but it was familiar to him. It came to him the way music might come to one who had been struck deaf but retained enough of his hearing to discern muffled chords and rhythms. The Buried God wanted to be released, but the passenger could not find him. He had tried, but the voice was coming from too far away, and he could not understand its words. Sometimes, though, he would stare into the depths of the still, dark pool near to which the plane had come to rest, and he would wonder if the Buried God might not be down there. Once, he reached into it, sinking his forearm up to the elbow, straining his fingers in the hope that his hand might be grasped by whatever waited below. The water was frighteningly cold, so cold that it felt like a burning, but he kept his arm submerged until he could stand it no longer. When he withdrew it, the water dripped slowly from his fingers like oil, and he gazed in disappointment at his numb, empty hand.

He began paying homage to the Buried God. He dug up the bodies in the forest and removed the heads, along with some of the major bones from the arms and legs. It was the beginning of the shrine’s creation, the altar of worship to an entity he could not name but whom he understood to be his god. He created impressions of false deities from his fractured memory, carving them from wood with a knife, and he mutilated them in the name of the other.

He was still weak, too weak to explore farther, or seek civilization. He should have died that winter, but he did not. He even wondered if he could die. The Buried God told him that he could not. When spring came, the passenger began to explore his domain farther. He found an old cabin, its walls built from thick logs, but its door long gone and its roof collapsed. He began to restore it.

In March, a man came into his territory: a young hiker, unarmed. The passenger killed him with a spear that