October skies

He closed the leather-bound book and placed it in the small travel trunk on the ground beside him. He had dragged that out, along with his other meagre possessions, just before his shelter had been pulled apart for its materials. From within the trunk he took out the photographic portrait of himself and his mother, taken the day before he set sail for the Americas. For a moment he caressed the plate with his fingers.

‘Sorry, Mother.’

He suspected he wouldn’t be bringing this book home for her to read and The Times to publish, after all. He put the photograph back in, snapped the lid shut and locked it.

Keats called across to him. ‘You keepin’ a watch, Lambert?’

Ben stirred, aware that he had momentarily abandoned his duty. He turned to look across the clearing. ‘Their meeting’s over. They’ve mostly headed back to their shelters.’

He looked again at them, bemused that their efforts at building a defence were not being prevented. Half a dozen faces watched them from afar, guns at hand. The snow falling this morning had disguised what they were up to; the noises might have been construed as the sound of them packing up. But now, with an unburdened sky, and clear air between them, Preston’s men looked on. They His train of thought stopped dead in its tracks.

Disguise.

‘Where’s Preston?’ Keats called out, but Ben ignored him.

Oh my God — a disguise.

He recalled Mrs Rutherford’s faltering description — a description Preston had clearly wanted his people to hear. A description that sounded terrifying coming from the woman’s trembling lips.

Made of bones.

‘Lambert? If you ain’t watchin’ you can give us a goddamn hand!’ Keats called impatiently, as he, Bowen, Hussein and Weyland pulled the remnants of a wagon chassis out of a bank of hardened snow.

A disguise. There would be proof of it, surely?

In that moment, Ben was convinced that evidence of Preston’s bloody guilt would be up in the hills, in that place, evidence everywhere: blood-spattered tools, clothes, drips and smears over the snow, screaming out his guilt as loudly as it stained darkly. It was Preston who had decided unequivocally that the trapper’s shelter be left well alone.

My God… yes!

Ben stood up and reached for his gun.

Keats looked on, confused. ‘Lambert?’

He didn’t want to stop and explain what he was up to. There wasn’t time. He had seen Preston head into the trees and could only imagine the insane bastard was on his way up to the trapper’s place to ready his appearance. Darkness was coming soon and he could imagine Preston appearing with the twilight, as the avenging angel of an enraged God, exhorting those frightened people of his to attack them. Eric Vander’s body would be fresh in their minds; the likeness of themselves, their loved ones, their children, superimposed on the man’s contorted face.

I can stop this.

He strode quickly across the small, enclosed space of their stronghold and clambered over the rear wall of their pitiful barricade, keeping low as he scuttled away across the clearing, to avoid being spotted by any of Preston’s men watching from the far side.

‘Lambert!’ Keats called after him. ‘Where the fuck are you goin’?’

Ben reached the tree line and glanced back. It appeared that his scuttling departure had gone unnoticed by the distant men. Keats, however, was shouting all manner of colourful profanities at Ben for running away like a coward.

He looked up at the thick mesh of fir branches and the rising incline of the ground, dark and forbidding in the deep shadows of such a pale and lifeless afternoon, and reassured himself again: There’re no demons or angels out there — just a madman.

That wasn’t the comforting thought he’d hoped it might be.

He crawled up into the tree line. A few moments later, the clearing behind was lost from sight and he was alone in the snow-dampened silence of the wood.

CHAPTER 64

1 November, 1856

‘Speak to me,’ Preston whispered hoarsely.

He pushed through a waist-high thicket of thorny briar that scratched at his hands as he stepped through into the small glade. Almost a week’s worth of snow had transformed it from a grisly butcher’s shop to a virgin-white, sylvan idyll. There remained no exposed sign of the frozen slick on the log or the violence that had been perpetrated here.

He walked forward across the snow, resting his hand on the log and brushing aside the fresh powder until he saw the jet-black slick of Dorothy’s blood. He felt a solitary tear roll warmly down his cold, sallow cheek and instinctively checked that he was alone before allowing his grief to emerge with an audible sob.

‘Why Dorothy?’ His voice broke with grief. ‘Why Dorothy? Why Sam?’ he cried. ‘Why do you punish me like this? Haven’t I done everything you asked of me?’

His words faded into the stillness and remained unanswered.