October skies

‘No,’ came a hissed reply. ‘The dirty man is dead now.’ The voice of the thing was changing, from a chilling hiss to something that sounded more human. ‘He had it coming!’ the voice continued to drift, gradually becoming the emotionally strangled cry of a person struggling to hold back tears of rage. ‘He was a bad man, bad all the way through. Even the angel couldn’t stand to be with him any longer!’

Ben looked from side to side, trying to work out where the voice was coming from, but the bewitching acoustics of the wood played tricks with it.

‘He let Eric Vander play his games with all the children.’ The voice laughed without joy, bitter and hollow. ‘Well, I cut it off, didn’t I? I cut his thing off and shoved it into his mouth before he died.’

There was something in the voice that Ben recognised, some signature beneath the visceral snarl of hate that he remembered from what felt like a lifetime ago.

It was a voice he had once taken pleasure in listening to; a young man he enjoyed being in the company of. ‘Sam? Is that you?’

Silence.

‘Sam? Is it you out there?’

There was no reply. A long moment passed in silence. Ben strained to listen to the noises of the wood and then he heard it: so quiet, the whispered one-sided conversation of madness once more, coming from somewhere ahead of them, somewhere behind a dense cluster of twisted and dead vines and brambles, long starved of sunlight and sustenance.

‘Sam,’ he called out. ‘Sam, we’re going to take her away from this place, take her away from Preston’s madness. The man was insane. Whatever it was he was planning to do, it was the product of a very sick mind.’

There was something Sam had once asked of him, an awkward request that, back then, he’d had to turn down.

‘Listen, I’ll take you both out of these woods with me. You and me and Emily. You and I, we’ll both look after her… and we’ll leave all this behind us, in the woods where it belongs.’

The sibilant, whispered conversation was at once quietened.

‘Sam, just come out where we can see you. Put down whatever weapon you’ve made and join us. It’s all over now. Preston can’t get to Emily. She’s safe.’

The silence continued. A minute, two… long enough that Ben was beginning to suspect the boy had left them and returned into the darkness of the wood, when a familiar voice called out.

‘Emily, please come back with us. Back to the camp.’ It was Sam, as Ben remembered him from weeks ago — a voice utterly without malice, broken with emotion, pleading.

‘Please… Emily… please.’

Emily began to cry at the sound of his voice.

‘Sam? You said us. Who else is there with you?’ asked Ben. The answer came after a few seconds. ‘She belongs with us. There is God’s work still to do back there,’ the voice replied. ‘You belong with us.’

Emily screamed at those words. ‘Don’t want to go back!’ She grasped Ben’s hand. ‘Please don’t make me go back!’

‘Let go of him!’ the voice hissed angrily.

‘No!’ Ben shouted back. ‘She’s coming with us.’

There was a rustle of movement to their right, followed by the deafening boom from Broken Wing’s musket and the startled flutter of departing birds from the branches above them. Ben spun round to look towards where the end of the Indian’s musket still pointed. As the thick haze of powder smoke around both men cleared, Ben anxiously peered into the darkness ahead, expecting to see a slumped form.

But there was nothing to be seen.

‘Sam?’ he called out. ‘Sam?’

‘Sam is gone,’ the voice hissed back.

In an instant Ben realised they were in trouble. The musket had been discharged and nothing hit.

He turned to Broken Wing. ‘Take them and go!’

The Shoshone hesitated.

‘RUN!’ Ben barked to the others. ‘Run for the river!’ Broken Wing hurled the empty musket to the ground and pulled his tamahakan out, ready to bloody its small, jagged blade. He pulled Mrs Zimmerman roughly to her feet and pushed the woman ahead of him. Turning to Ben and Emily, he beckoned to them urgently.

‘Lam-bert… come!’

‘Emily,’ said Ben, ‘go with him!’

She shook her head. ‘No, I want to stay with you,’ she cried, anxiously reaching for his hand.

‘Go!’ he shouted angrily, shaking her off. ‘Now!’

She was about to turn and run when the low bough of a squat spruce lurched to one side, sending a shower of snow to the ground.

It stepped out into the open.

Emily gasped at the sight.

A tall, thin figure, he stood before them, coiled ready to leap forward and disembowel them at any moment. Strapped to one hand were several long serrated blades, whittled and sharpened from bone. On his body, the ribs of a host of unidentifiable creatures had been stitched to a hide shirt with careless and unskilled haste. The head was half the skull of some larger creature, perhaps an ox or a stag. It appeared that Broken Wing’s shot had found the target, shattering one side of the skull. Behind the jagged half-mask of fractured bone, he could see the blood-flecked face of Samuel Dreyton staring out.

‘Sam!’ Emily shrieked — recognition, relief and fear mixed into her shrill cry.