The Wrath of Angels

he had made, and waited for others to come looking for him, but no one did. He scavenged all that was useful from the man’s pack, and a wallet with $320 in cash, although there was still a great deal of money in the plane, along with a satchel of papers that made no sense to him.

Two weeks later, he made his first, careful sortie back to civilization, his damaged skull hidden beneath the dead hiker’s cap. He bought food, and salt, and some tools, and ammunition for his pistol, all by pointing at the items that he wanted. He looked at a rifle, but he had no identification. He settled instead for a used hunting bow, and as many arrows as he could afford. He could have found a way to lose himself once again in a city or a town, but he was afraid that his appearance might draw attention. He also knew that he was damaged, and managing anything beyond the simplest of social tasks was beyond him. He was happier in the woods. He was safe there, safe with the Buried God, and perhaps, as he grew stronger, he might find the Buried God, and free him. He could not do that from a city.

And so he hid himself in the woods, and prayed to the Buried God, and tried to limit all human contact. He became adept at avoiding the men from the paper companies, and the wardens. The passenger killed another hiker the following year, but only because the hiker came to the fort and found the shrine nearby. Such trespasses were rare, because there was something about the fort that kept people away, or else most knowledge of it had been lost. Similarly, the cabin had lain undisturbed for decades before the passenger found it: because the ground had been cleared to build it, second-growth foliage had sprung up around it, so the dwelling remained virtually invisible.

Only once had he felt truly threatened. He had gone to the plane to replenish his supplies of cash, for he had to prepare for another winter. He had entered the plane through the canvas hatch at the back, noting once again how far the fuselage had sunk. It might take years, but eventually the plane would be lost entirely. He pulled back a piece of rotting carpet and lifted the panel that it concealed in order to retrieve the money.

He was just about to reach into the bag when he was struck by a blinding flash of white pain, as though a shard of metal had been forced through his right ear and into his brain. They came on him with increasing frequency, these attacks, but this was the worst yet. His body went into seizure, and he spasmed so hard that he broke two teeth on his lower row. The cabin of the plane began to close in on him, and he experienced a terrible sense of falling and burning. Then the world went black, and when he opened his eyes again he had somehow crawled from the plane, and the girl was nearby, circling him but drawing closer. She was angry at the passenger for taking the hiker when she had wanted him for herself. He had to get away from her, but his sense of direction was distorted. He reached for his gun, but it was gone, and he suspected that the girl had taken it. She hated the gun. Its noise troubled her, and she seemed to know that it was important to him, that without it he would be more vulnerable. He was forced to keep the girl at bay with stones until, through sheer luck, he managed to struggle back to his cabin, for in his confused, agonized state he was unable to find the fort. There he barred the door against her, and he listened from his pallet bed as she scratched at the wood, trying to force her way inside.

When at last he was strong enough to leave, he found that the door was scarred by the girl’s efforts, and he dug one of her old, twisted fingernails from the exposed white wood. He returned to the plane, and discovered the remains of a fire, and he saw that the interior had been disturbed. The money was gone, although he had retained enough good sense to separate it into three piles, keeping some of it at the cabin and some buried in plastic behind the fort. But it was not the money that concerned him so much as the intrusion, and the imminent risk of discovery.

He stripped the cabin and the fort of his possessions, wrapped them in plastic, and buried them. He hid the shrine beneath a screen of leaves and twigs and moss that he had constructed for just such an eventuality, then retreated many miles to the north where he had built himself a hide. After a month he risked returning to his cabin, and discovered to his surprise that the site was as it had been, and nobody had come to find the plane. He could not understand why, but he was thankful. In the wilderness, he continued his solitary worship, and his solitary search. He subsumed his pleasure in killing because he knew that, if indulged, it would eventually draw people to him.

Until that week, when he had taken the two hikers, and offered up the woman’s remains to the Buried God.

That was why he had returned to the fort, at least for a while. The girl always grew angry when he killed, and it would take days for her temper to subside. Just as with the hiker long before, she was angry because she had wanted the couple for herself. She wanted company. By killing those who strayed into her territory, the passenger deprived her of it, and the uneasy truce that existed between them was threatened. On those occasions, the passenger would take refuge in his cabin or, more often, in the fort, and from its safety he would watch the enraged girl stalking outside its walls, casting her whispered threats to the wind. Then the girl would disappear, and he would see no trace of her for weeks.

At those times, the passenger believed that she might be sulking.

So the passenger left the girl to her fury. He climbed into his sleeping bag in the fort and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come. The Buried God’s voice had grown louder recently, desperate to communicate something to him, but the passenger could not interpret the message, and so the frustration of both grew. The passenger wished that the Buried God would be silent. He wanted peace. He wanted to reflect upon the man and the woman he had killed. He had enjoyed taking their lives, the woman’s in particular. He had forgotten the pleasure that it brought.

He wanted to kill another, and soon.

47

Harlan Vetters and Paul Scollay had headed out on their fateful hunting trip in the afternoon, but it didn’t seem like a good idea for us to follow suit: the plane would be difficult enough to find in daylight, and flashlights would mark our position and progress just as surely as the noise of ATVs. Neither did it seem smart to leave at or before dawn, as the likelihood of encountering hunters was greater. I decided that we would leave shortly before ten a.m., which would give us a clear five or six hours of good light before the sun began to set, by which time we would, with luck, have found the plane, obtained the list, and be on our way back to Falls End without incident.

‘With luck,’ said Louis, without enthusiasm.

‘We never have luck,’ said Angel.

‘Which is why we always need guns,’ said Louis.

We were staying at a motel five miles south of Falls End. Next door was a diner that sold only seven types of bottled beer: Bud, Miller and Coors; Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light; and Heineken.

We were drinking Heineken.

Jackie Garner was back in his room, trying to explain to his mother why he was not joining her for their weekly movie night, especially as she and Lisa, Jackie’s girlfriend, had rented Fifty First Dates for him because they knew how much he liked Drew Barrymore. Jackie, who neither liked nor disliked Drew Barrymore, and had no idea how this neutral position had been transformed into something close to an obsession, had no satisfactory answer to give other than that a job was a job. He had told me earlier that his mother had seemed more like her normal self these past few days, which meant that she was just inordinately possessive of her only son. But it was also the case that Jackie’s mother, who had previously regarded Jackie’s girlfriend as a rival for her son’s affections, had softened her position over the past year. Having clearly noticed that the relationship between her son and Lisa was not about to fall apart any time soon, despite her best efforts, Mrs Garner had decided it was better to have her as an ally than an enemy, and Lisa had come to the same conclusion. The onset of Mrs Garner’s final illness now lent both a poignancy and convenience to this relationship.

The diner was full, and a lot of the conversation revolved around events in Falls End. There appeared to be no change in the condition of Marielle and Grady Vetters. By contrast, judging by the talk in the diner, the focus of the investigation into the deaths of Teddy Gattle and Ernie Scollay had rapidly altered, and Grady Vetters was no longer being treated as a suspect.

‘They got injected with somethin’, is what I heard,’ a big, bearded man had told me in the restroom just minutes earlier. He was swaying as he stood at the urinal, so he resorted to leaning his head against the wall to keep himself steady while he peed.

‘Who did?’