was obvious: quarters for the commanding officer and his ill-fated family.
‘There,’ said Jackie. He pointed into the smaller bushes, and when I looked at them from his angle I could see the rough path through them.
‘Deer?’
‘No, a man did that.’
Angel, Louis and Liat moved into the fort, their weapons ready. Jackie and I remained outside, but Jackie’s attention was torn between the fort and the way that we had just come.
‘You’re making me nervous, Jackie,’ I said.
‘The hell with you, I’m making myself nervous.’
‘Would you rather be in there?’
Perhaps it was our knowledge of its history, but there was a deeply unsettling ambience about the fort. Despite its decay, there was a sense of occupancy about it. That trail between the forest and the gate had been regularly used.
‘No, I would not. I’ll take my chances out here.’
There was a whistle from inside the fort: Angel. Louis was above whistling.
‘At least if there’s trouble, you can lock the gate and hide inside,’ said Jackie.
‘There is no gate. If there’s trouble, we’re all taking our chances out here.’
Angel appeared at the entrance.
‘You need to take a look at this,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay with Jackie.’
Louis and Liat were in the commanding officer’s living quarters. The ramparts on the rear wall overhung the interior, creating a natural shelter that had been augmented by a tarpaulin fixed into the wood with nails and supported by two metal bars driven into the ground. I smelled excrement, and urine. A layer of insulating material had been attached to the walls, again held in place by sheets of plastic, to provide further warmth. On the ground was a sleeping bag, along with a half-filled five gallon container of water, a small gas camping stove, and canned food: beans and soups, for the most part. It might have been the temporary home of a down-and-out, or the hardier kind of hiker, were it not for its location deep in the Maine wilderness, and the decorations upon the walls. They were family snaps, but not of any single family: here were a man and a woman and two young girls, all blond, and next to them a man and woman on their wedding day, older and darker than the people in the preceding picture. Around them were photos and drawings culled from newspapers and pornographic magazines, cut and collaged to make new and foul illustrations, all anti-religious in nature, the heads of Christ and the Virgin Mary and Buddha and figures that I couldn’t even identify, Asian and Middle Eastern in origin, transposed onto naked bodies bared obscenely. They were concentrated in one corner, for the most part, above a makeshift stone altar adorned with shattered statuary and old bones, animal and human intermingled. Some of the bones looked very, very old. Among them were a handful of tarnished military buttons. If I were to guess, I would have said that someone had dug up the remains of the soldiers who had died here.
‘Malphas,’ I said.
‘Why would he stay out here?’ asked Louis. ‘Assuming Wildon and the pilot died in the crash, he was free and clear. He could just go back to doing whatever he was doing before Wildon found him.’
‘Could be that he didn’t want to,’ I said.
‘You think he liked the outdoor life so much he decided to spend part of his time in a ruined fort making collages from pornography?’
It didn’t sound likely. Liat watched us both, following the conversation on our lips.
‘Part of the time,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You said he spent “part of his time” at the fort. This doesn’t look like a permanent dwelling, and those pictures on the wall were put there recently. Where does he spend the rest of his time, and why would he hole up in this place anyway if he’s made a permanent home somewhere else?’
I looked to Liat, but she had turned her back on us. Now she beckoned us to join her as she examined something carved into the wood, light against dark.
It was a detailed representation of a young girl’s head, two or three times normal size, her hair long and curling from her scalp like the bodies of snakes. Her eyes had been cut deeper and larger than the rest of her, the ovals of them so big that I could have placed my fist in them had they not been filled with teeth, the roots of them impaled in the white wood. There were more teeth in her huge mouth, except these ones were root-out, giving them the appearance of fangs. It was terrifying in aspect and effect.
‘If you’re frightened of something, where better to hide than a fort?’ I said.
‘A fort with no gates?’ said Louis.
‘A fort with bad memories,’ I replied. ‘A fort with blood in its walls and its dirt. Maybe a fort like that doesn’t need gates.’
‘He was frightened of a little girl?’ Louis sounded skeptical.
‘If what I’ve heard about her is true, he had good cause to be.’
‘But he stayed out here, even though he was scared of her. I guess that plane must be real important to him.’
Liat shook her head.
‘Not the plane?’ I said.
She mouthed the word
‘Then what?’
She made it clear that she didn’t know. In the fading light, and the shadows of the old fort, I almost missed the lie.
Almost.
50
Ray Wray was running.
He wasn’t sure how it had all gone so wrong so fast, but he knew now that he and Joe had been out of their depth right from the start. They should have backed away the first time that the kid and the woman had come near them, except Joe owed them and they were calling in the debt, and Joe had given Ray to understand that these weren’t the kind of people on whom one reneged. He was just grateful to Ray for tagging along, even if Ray wouldn’t have been anywhere near those woods if he hadn’t been so desperate for cash.
They’d made good progress from the start. The kid might have been spookier than a haunted house on Halloween, but the little bastard could move, and there had been no complaints from the woman about the pace that had been set, either on her own behalf or the kid’s. While Joe had the map, and a good sense of where they were going, it often seemed to Ray that it was the woman who was guiding them, and not the other way around. When Joe paused to check his malfunctioning compass, the woman would simply keep on walking, the kid trotting behind her, and when Joe and Ray caught up with them there was no need to alter direction.
Ray figured they were less than a mile from the fort when the first arrow struck. His first thought was, Indians! which was absurd and unhelpful but there was no understanding the workings of the human mind. Even as he hit the ground, and heard Joe swear, he’d found himself giggling, and it was only when he looked up and saw the arrow buried in the trunk of a white pine that he stopped laughing and began considering that he might die out here.
Joe was a few feet to his left, trying to find the source of the arrow.
‘Hunter?’ asked Ray, but he asked more in hope than expectation. They were still wearing their orange bibs. There had been some discussion about it, but Ray and Joe had finally taken the view that, with a woman and a kid in tow, it was better to be safe. It would have to be one dumb-ass bow hunter who’d shoot an arrow at someone in orange.
‘No fuckin’ way,’ said Joe, which was just what Ray had thought.
The Flores woman was using a thick oak for cover. Still searching the forest for the source of the arrow, Joe called back to her.
‘Miss Flores, you got any idea who that might be?’
