October skies

Preston’s murmuring continued. Beneath the thin parchment skin of his closed lids, his eyes jerked from one side to the other rapidly. Then with a gasp, they snapped open.

‘Mr Preston?’

He licked his lips dryly — thirsty.

Ben put away his inkpot, pen and journal and reached for a cup of water. He placed a hand behind Preston’s head, the man’s long grey-blond hair lank with sweat, and lifted him to take a drink.

‘Here, some water,’ he said quietly.

Preston’s glassy eyes focused away from the low canvas ceiling, bulging with the weight of snow, and onto Ben’s face. By the flickering light of the oil lamp, it looked like the elder’s irises were fully dilated.

The laudanum.

‘M-my G-God… they… they… they know!’ gasped Preston.

‘Shhhh,’ Ben comforted him. ‘Drink some water.’

Preston refused. ‘Th-they know!’ he rasped again, grabbing Ben’s hand tightly with one of his own, squeezing desperately.

Ben leaned down closer to him. ‘Mr Preston… William, it’s okay.’

‘W-what if… they know! They s-see… they can see… see what I am!’ His voice was dry and soft, a keening whisper that sounded like the wheezing rattle of an old man. Preston stared wildly at him, intently, but Ben wondered what exactly his eyes were seeing — whom he thought he was talking to.

‘I… I… hear nothing from it! N-nothing!’

Preston’s head jerked round to look at the dark space behind his cot, towards the metal chest nestling amongst sacks of oatmeal. ‘Nothing!’ he cried, his voice cracked pitifully.

He turned back to face Ben. ‘Eric! What if they know? What if they know we took it… that we stole it!’

Ben could have replied that he wasn’t Eric. But he decided not to.

‘Eric, what if they know the angel sh-shuns me? What… what’ll I do?’

Preston slumped back in the cot, his head resting once more against the pillow.

‘Just words…’ he wheezed quietly, his voice softening, spent. ‘They’re just words… just my words.’

His eyes closed again. ‘My words,’ he muttered, slipping back into a restless and troubled sleep, ‘not God’s…’

Ben sat and watched over him for a while, fidgeting in his sleep, several times murmuring, but nothing Ben could understand.

He knew the stronger tonics could do that — take the small whispering voices at the back of a person’s mind and turn them into a deafening scream. He was wondering what was troubling Preston in his sleep and had a mind that the answer might lie inside the metal chest just beyond him, when he heard Dorothy Dreyton stirring on the floor and begin to rise.

‘Did he wake you, Mrs Dreyton?’

She said nothing, sitting up and staring wide-eyed at Preston. There was something about her manner that troubled Ben.

‘Mrs Dreyton?’

Her eyes were distant. Without a word, she got to her feet and, stooping low, she pushed the flap aside, letting in a gust of freezing wind that set the flame on the oil lamp dancing, and stepped out into the cold day.

Above the rumpling wind, he thought he could hear distant raised voices; a commotion from across the clearing, and a ripple of disturbance and questioning from the Mormons standing nearby. Something was going on.

Ben stood up, and stooped as he swept the flap aside, squinting at the brilliant all-white glare of the day.

‘What is it?’

A man standing dutifully beside the entrance, Mr Hollander, with a dark beard almost down to his belt, pointed across the clearing. Ben could see Keats and several others moving quickly down-slope and emerging from the tree line onto the open ground of the camp, their guns unslung and held ready, anxiously looking back over their shoulders.

‘Thought I heard someone shout something about Indians,’ said Mr Hollander.

CHAPTER 29

Monday

Central London

Julian found a number of books on the subject in the library’s index. The librarian helped him locate them amongst some shelves towards the back. He thanked the young man and sat down at a table to work his way through them.

He realised he knew absolutely nothing of the Mormon church. He hadn’t even realised that they were otherwise referred to as the Church of Latter Day Saints. It had quickly become evident to him that if he was going to be pitching this project to a commissioning editor or two, it wasn’t going to look good if he hadn’t at least done some token research into the faith of Preston and his followers.

At an instinctive level, he wondered if there was another angle to this story; an angle other than a simple survival story.

What if this was some kind of Jonestown thing?

The idea was as intriguing as it was chilling; that a community led by some charismatic religious nut had been steered into a remote wilderness — by accident or design — and there, every last one of them was talked into taking their own life for some bizarre theistic rationale.

There were several books he’d pulled up on Amazon that looked interesting and he had quickly printed out the details of them, before taking the District Line tube into town.