October skies

His hand found a small pile of flecks of bone and jagged shards. For a moment he wondered whether the missing skull had dropped and shattered on the ground. It seemed unlikely. The ground was a soft cushion of decaying needles, cones and snow. There was nothing more of the skull to be found.

He realised that someone must have had to work it loose from the nail, dislodging crumbling fragments of bone.

‘Where’s the rest of it?’ he muttered quietly amidst a fluttering plume of evaporating breath.

You need to go inside.

Ben looked warily up at the sky through the bare web of branches. Darkness was coming. He had no oil lamp to illuminate his way inside. If he dared go in and investigate further, he decided he had better do it now before too much more of the light was gone.

He moved cautiously towards the entrance. Girding himself with a deep breath, he swept the canvas flap aside. The meagre daylight seeped into the exposed interior, and he waited for a moment, allowing his eyes to adjust before stepping down. He was familiar with the layout from last time: a crude workbench to his right, a stack of traps, rotten pelt bales and paraphernalia against the rear wall, to his left the flimsy wattle and daub partition leading to the cot and the bones of the hunter.

His first step across the soft, peaty ground found the same brittle flecks of bone that he’d encountered outside. He looked down and saw more jagged pieces of bone around the workbench. He looked at the bench itself, and saw it was dusted with more fragments, whittled pieces.

Ben fleetingly recalled visiting the cell of an asylum inmate who carved the most exquisite chess pieces from the bones of a sow, donated by the kitchens every Friday — ham-shank broth day.

‘My God,’ he whispered. He felt his scalp prickle and the hair on his neck rise as his nebulous suspicions found firmer footing. Here was evidence that something had been crafted in this place recently. Ben tried to recall how the young Paiute had described what he’d seen in the woods.

A giant head, a skull, with horns… a body of bone and spines.

He looked at the workbench and the floor and could now clearly visualise Preston feverishly at work by the light of a solitary oil lamp, fashioning a mask from the giant skull of a bison, or a stag. And all the while reassuring himself over and over in the muttered voice of a man utterly insane that he was engineering God’s will for the good of his people.

And yes, he thought, a mask of bone would be enough, wouldn’t it?

The mere fleeting glimpse of such a crudely fashioned mask amidst the bedevilling half-light of this forbidding place, and the low visibility of a gusting snowstorm, would certainly be enough to convince someone already terrified, someone already believing in such things as angels and demons, that something awful was in these woods.

There was no sign of such a thing here. Which he supposed could only mean that Preston had already been and gone.

What do I do now?

Presumably, he was already on his way back to the camp. He could try to pursue him and intercept him before they got back. Just the two of them, alone in the woods — one shot, and this could all be over.

If Preston’s followers didn’t lynch him first, Ben could show them the trapper’s hut, the skull mask. He could explain to them that the medicine Preston had been taking had sent him mad. He could tell them of the confession the elder had made, which Dorothy had heard and planned to tell the others… he could tell them all those things, and perhaps it would be enough.

If I hurry…

He emerged from the shelter with relief, filling his lungs with the clear, cool breeze outside. He exhaled a large cloud of fetid air, purging the dank, coppery odour of rotting vegetation and dried blood.

Ben cast a hurried glance towards the subtle mound across the clearing; the grave of Sam and Dorothy lying side by side, now only a faint hummock beneath the thick blanket of snow. Beside their graves was Mr Hearst’s; he’d been laid to rest not by his own people, but by Keats.

He wished Emily was standing with him right now. He wished he could show her the grave — that she could see both her brother and mother at rest side by side, properly buried, marked and prayed over. Instead, he imagined her last vision of them was an endless loop of sudden, barbaric butchery that dutifully played a performance for her time after time, night after night.

‘I have to go,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll save her from this madness, Sam. And come the spring, I’ll take her out of this place with me. I promise you that.’

CHAPTER 67

1 November, 1856

As the last of the sun’s rays shone daggers over the tree tops, and purple shadows like the claws of a giant hand grasped their way across the clearing, Preston emerged from the temple with his dark eyes seeming lost and far away. The whispered prayers of his people quickly hushed to silence as they all looked up at him from their clasped hands.