against the trunk of a tree and slowly slid down the bark, leaving a sticky trail of blood as he went. His rifle fell from his hands as he sank to a sitting position, his hands splayed by his sides. He looked down and saw the wound in his chest, the redness of it spreading like a new dawn. Ray’s hands hung over the wound, and he sighed like a man who has just spilled soup on himself. His mouth felt dry, and when he tried to swallow the muscles in his throat refused to respond properly. He began to choke.
Two men appeared before him, one tall and black, his face and head hairless but for a neatly-trimmed graying beard at his chin, the other shorter and scruffier. They seemed familiar. He tried to recall where he had seen them before, but he was too busy bleeding out to concentrate on faces. Behind them appeared three other people, one of them a young woman. The black man kicked away Ray’s rifle. Ray stretched out a hand to him. He did not know why, except that he was dying, and dying was like drowning, and a drowning man will always reach out in the hope of finding something to save him from sinking.
The black man took Ray’s hand and gripped it, as the seconds of Ray’s life melted away like snowflakes in the sun. It was the girl, Ray realized: she knew that she wouldn’t get him, so she let these others take him instead. By firing at her, he had fired on them, and now they had killed him for it.
‘Who is he?’ said one of the others, a big, bearded man who looked out of place among these others, yet more at home in the woods.
Ray tried to speak. He wanted to tell them:
My mother gave me my name. The kids used to laugh at me in school because of it. I never had any luck that wasn’t bad, and maybe my name was the start of it.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I was looking for an airplane.
My name is—
51
We searched the dead man’s body. He had two thousand dollars in cash in his pockets, along with some candy bars and a suppressor for the 9 mm pistol he carried under his coat. He bore no identification. Louis had killed him after he fired two shots in our direction, one of which had missed Liat by inches, and seemed set to fire a third. If Louis hadn’t shot him then I would have, but I felt shame as I stared down at this unknown man, dead at our hands in the depths of the Maine wilderness, all to secure a list of names from a plane that might already have been consumed by the forest.
‘You recognize him?’ said Angel.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘There is something about him.’
‘He was in the ice-cream parlor back in Portland. Louis threatened to shoot him and his buddy.’
‘I guess it was meant to be,’ said Louis.
‘I guess so,’ said Angel.
‘I doubt that he came out here alone,’ said Jackie.
‘Could be he was the one we heard doing all that shooting earlier,’ said Angel.
‘Still doesn’t answer the question of who he was shooting at before he began taking potshots at us.’
The trail left by the gunman was clear to follow. He had broken branches and trampled shrubs as he made his way through the forest. It was not the careful progress of a hunter, whether of animals or men. This man had been running
‘You reckon we’re still heading northwest?’ I said to Jackie.
‘Far as I can tell without a working compass, but I’d lay good money on it.’
‘That plane came down somewhere near here. We have to keep looking.’
‘Jesus,’ said Jackie, ‘we could pass within feet of it and not even see it. We didn’t even spot this guy until he was almost on top of us.’
‘We spread out,’ I said. ‘Form a line, but stay in sight of one another.’
I couldn’t see what other choice we had. We needed to cover as much ground as possible, and we had to do it while there was still light. The downside was that we would now present five targets in a row, like ducks at a sideshow shooting range. So we moved on, looking ahead of us, and to either side, and I forgot Jackie’s fear that we were ourselves being pursued.
The sun was setting when we found the shrine. Behind it, almost lost to the forest, was the plane. There were crows in the trees, dark and still like tumors on the branches.
And before us stood three figures, one already dying.
Darina had seen the man’s head tilt as she called his name. She had no fear of him. They were alike in nature: after all, they had buried the Wildon girls together, neither hesitating as the children squirmed beneath the accumulating dirt, and they both shared a memory of the Fall, the great banishment that had left their kind marooned on a world still forming. The boy followed calmly behind her, picking his way carefully across twisted roots and broken branches. Over and over she repeated the passenger’s name, like a mantra, calming him, reassuring him, even though she could not see him.
‘Malphas, Malphas. Remember.’
And all around her, a murder of crows seemed to echo her call.
She crested a rise, and before her was the plane. It looked like a fallen tree, except that there were no other such trees around it, and its body was perhaps too regular, too cylindrical. By now, it was more than half- submerged, as though the forest floor had turned to quicksand beneath it. Beyond it, a pool gleamed darkly.
But between the plane and where she stood was a crazed jumble of broken religious statuary, of skulls and bones arranged in patterns that had no meaning for her, all contained beneath a framework of mud and wood to protect it from the elements. Of Malphas, there was no sign.
They approached the construction and stood before it. The boy reached out a hand to touch one of the skulls, but she stopped him before he could do so. There was a buzzing in her head, and she felt a kind of awe, the closest she had ever come in her long existence to the fervor of a religious zealot. There was a power here, a purpose. She took the boy’s hand, and together they tried to understand.
A shadow fell across them. Slowly they turned. Malphas, the passenger, was silhouetted against the setting sun, his distorted head surrounded by a corona of fire. The bow was tensed in his hands, the arrow nocked and ready. Darina stared into his eyes, and the enormity of her mistake became clear to her. There was no recognition, no shared nature. She saw herself reflected only in the blank, hostile gaze of a predator. Blood flowed from a wound in his side.
‘Malphas,’ she said. ‘Know me.’
He frowned at her, and the arrow spoke to Darina’s heart. She felt a burning in her chest as the deepening orange of the fading sun was obscured by the deeper red of her own dying. She put her hands close to her chest and caressed the arrow, holding it gently like an offering. She tried to give form to her pain, but no sound came as she collapsed to the ground.
And as she could no longer scream for herself, the boy screamed for her, over and over and over.
The man with his back to us was huge. He wore green-and-brown camouflage clothing, and he held a bow in his hand. To his right, a boy stopped screaming as we appeared, and we watched as the woman beside him toppled to the ground with her hands clutched to the arrow in her breast.
The big man turned and I saw the terrible wound to his head, as though a meat cleaver had been taken to the top of his skull, leaving a crevasse along his scalp. This, then, was Malphas: the survivor, the killer of the Wildon girls. He was completely bald, his ears coming to sharp points, his face strangely elongated and very, very pale despite his years in the woods. He resembled a giant albino bat. Yet though his eyes were dark and alien, and he was already reaching for an arrow from the quiver at his side, it was the boy who gripped my attention, the boy whom I feared more than the man. It was Brightwell in miniature, Brightwell in youth, from his pale moist skin to the growing goiter on his neck that would, in adulthood, blight his appearance still further. I saw his face contort with rage as he recognized me, for how often does a man get to confront his own killer?
All that happened next occurred both slowly and quickly. Jackie, Angel and Liat hesitated before firing, fearful of hitting the boy, not recognizing the danger that he posed. Louis was faster to respond, shooting just as Malphas nocked a new arrow to his bow and dropped to one knee to release it. I heard a beating of wings around us, and a murder of crows rose into the sky. Louis’s shot struck the shrine, but it was enough to distract Malphas, and his
