The Wrath of Angels

  They were sitting in the drawing room of her apartment, which took up the entire top floor of an expensive condominium in Yorkville. A pair of Andrew Wyeth paintings hung at either side of the marble fireplace: beautiful, tender studies of autumn leaves from his late period. Epstein wondered if, as their lives came to a close, all artists found themselves drawn to images of fall and winter.

  Two teacups sat on the table between them. Mrs Wildon had brewed it herself. She lived here alone. She was not a particularly beautiful woman, nor had she ever been. Her features were plain at first glance, her face unremarkable. Had he not been distracted by her husband at their earlier meeting, Epstein would still barely have noted her presence, if he had noted it at all. Even here, in her own home, she seemed to blend into the furniture, the wallpaper, the drapes. The pattern on her dress echoed the textures and colors of the fabrics, rendering a chameleon quality to her. It was only later, when he had already left her, that Epstein understood this was a woman who was hiding herself.

  ‘He thought very highly of you,’ said Mrs Wildon. ‘He came back that evening more animated than I’d seen him in years. I thought it was all foolishness, his stories about angels, his fascination with the End Times. It wasn’t harmless, because it was too odd for that, but I tolerated it. All men have their eccentricities, don’t they? Women too, I suppose, but men’s are more ingrained: it’s something to do with their boyishness, I think. They hold onto the enthusiasm of childhood.’

  She didn’t sound as though she thought this was a good thing.

  ‘It got worse after he met you, though,’ she said. ‘I think you fueled his fire.’

  Epstein drank his tea. The accusation was clear, but he did not look away, or express sorrow. If this woman wanted someone to blame for what had happened to her children, perhaps her husband too, then he would accept that role as long as she told him what she knew.

  ‘What was he looking for, Mrs Wildon?’

  ‘Proof,’ she said. ‘Proof of the existence of life beyond this one. Proof that there was an evil beyond human greed and selfishness. Proof that he was right, because he always wanted to be right about everything.’

  ‘But there was a moral component to his work too, was there not?’

  She laughed, and as her laughter faded it left a sneer on her face. Epstein realized that he disliked Eleanor Wildon, and he did not know why. He suspected that she was a shallow woman, and he allowed his eyes to take in his surroundings once more, seeking evidence in the furniture and paintings and ornaments to confirm his opinion. Then he saw the small framed photograph of two young girls on a shelf of Lladró porcelain, and was ashamed of himself.

  ‘A moral component?’ said Mrs Wildon. The sneer held for a second or two before melting, and when she spoke again she was walking in other rooms, living another life, and her voice came from somewhere far away. ‘Yes, I suppose there was. He was making connections between killings and disappearances. He spoke to retired policemen, hired private investigators, visited grieving relatives. When good people died in unusual circumstances, or vanished and were never seen again, he would try to find out all that he could about them, and about their lives. Most were just what they appeared to be: accidents, domestic situations that tipped over into violence, or just the misfortune of meeting the wrong person at the wrong time and suffering for it. But some . . .’

  She stopped, and bit her lip.

  ‘Go on, Mrs Wildon. Please.’

  ‘Some he believed were being committed by one man, who moved through the northern states, both in this country and yours. There were police investigators who thought so too, but they could never make the connection, and it was all – what do you call it? – “circumstantial” anyway: a face in the crowd, a half-glimpsed figure on a video screen, nothing more. I saw the pictures. Sometimes there was another with him: a horrible-looking man, bald, with a swelling just here.’

  She touched her hand to her throat, and Epstein started.

  ‘Brightwell,’ he said. ‘That one’s name was Brightwell.’

  ‘And the other?’ asked Mrs Wildon.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Wildon had hinted at some of this in cryptic messages to Epstein. He was a man with a love for the gnomic and the hidden.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ she said, ‘as he was the one who killed my children.’

  She said it so matter-of-factly that Epstein was convinced for a second that he had misheard, but he had not. Mrs Wildon took a sip of tea, and went on.

  ‘What interested my husband was that these men, or people who looked very like them, seemed to turn up, their features no different, in old photographs and reports of crimes from thirty, forty, even fifty years earlier. There might have been a woman too, he thought, but she wasn’t involved as much, or was more careful than the others. He wondered how that could be, and he came up with an answer: they were not men or women but something else, something old and foul. Such nonsense. I’m sure I used that word with him – “nonsense” – but it still frightened me. I wanted him to stop, but he was so single-minded about it, so convinced that there was a truth to it.

  ‘And then they took my girls, and they buried them alive in a hole in the ground, and I knew that it wasn’t nonsense. There was no warning, no threats against our family if my husband continued to stick his nose into their business. There was only retribution.’

  She put her cup down, and pushed the saucer away from her.

  ‘It was my husband’s fault, Mr Epstein. Those others, whoever or whatever they might be, killed my little girls, but my husband drew them down on us, and I hated him for it. I hate him, and I hate you for the encouragement that you gave him. You all share the blame for leaving my daughters to suffocate in a pit of dirt.’

  There was that same, neutral voice. There was no anger to it. She might just as easily have been discussing returning a flawed dress to a store, or a movie that had disappointed.

  After that, she and her husband had drifted apart, like wreckage from a sinking ship separated by shifting tides. She shared his desire to find and punish those responsible for the deaths of their children, but she did not want her husband in the same house with her, in the same room or the same bed. He left their home and went to live in one of the apartments that he owned, and he lost interest in his business affairs, and in his wife, and she in him. They were united only by memories, and a kind of hatred.

  ‘Then, on the night of July 13, 2001, he called me. He said that he had found the man who had killed our little girls, the man from the photographs. He was living in a place outside Sagueney, in a trailer park surrounded by crows.’

  ‘Did he have a name?’

  ‘He called himself Mr Malphas.’

  An interesting choice, thought Epstein: Malphas, one of the great princes of Hell, a deceiver, an artificer.

  The Lord of Crows.

  ‘My husband told me that they had him. They’d drugged him, and there was proof of what he had done, or was planning to do.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘There was a man who occasionally assisted my husband in his work. Douglas something – Douglas Ampell. He was a pilot.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Epstein. So he had been right about the source of the plane. ‘And what proof did your husband find?’

  ‘He was babbling. He was in a hurry. They had to get this man, this Malphas, away before his friends discovered what was happening. He said something about names, a list of names. That’s all.’

  ‘Did he say what he planned to do with Malphas?’

  ‘No, just that they were taking him to be questioned by someone else, someone who would understand, someone who would believe. That was the last time we spoke, but he warned me that if something happened to him, or if I didn’t hear from him again, I was to stay quiet. There was money in trusts, in hidden accounts, and I could sell the house. His lawyers had all of the details. I wasn’t to look for him, and I was to send all of the evidence he had collected to you, and you alone.’

  Epst
ein was puzzled. ‘But I received nothing from you.

  ‘That’s because I burned it all, every last scrap of paper,’ she said. ‘It killed my daughters, and it killed my fool of a husband. I wanted no more part of it. I did what he told me to do. I stayed quiet, and I lived.’

  Now he was certain. ‘He was on his way to New York,’ said Epstein. ‘He was bringing Malphas to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Wildon, this empty woman, this shell of grief, brittle as the Lladró figures that stared down from her shelves. ‘And I didn’t care. My husband didn’t understand. He never understood.’

  ‘Understood what, Mrs Wildon?’

  Mrs Wildon stood. Their meeting was over.

  ‘That it wouldn’t bring them back,’ she said, ‘that it wouldn’t bring my little girls back to me. You’ll have to excuse me now, but I have a plane to catch. I’d like you to get out of my home.’

  Malphas. I found that I had written the name on the open page of the Gazetteer.

  ‘Malphas was the passenger on the plane,’ said Epstein. ‘Ampell went missing on the same day as Wildon. He owned a Piper Cheyenne aircraft, which that week was based at a small private airfield just north of Chicoutimi. The plane has never been found, and Ampell never filed a flight plan. They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, or their cargo. They didn’t want anyone to suspect, but Wildon had to tell his wife. He wanted her to know that he’d succeeded in finding this man, except she didn’t care. She blamed her husband for what had happened to their children: Malphas was just the instrument.

  ‘And Malphas survived the crash, Mr Parker. That’s why there were no bodies in the wreckage. He removed them, or perhaps they survived too, and he killed them and disposed of their remains.’

  ‘But he left the list, and the money,’ I said ‘The money might not have been important to him, but that list was. If he survived, and was strong enough to kill anyone else who had lived, why did he leave the list where it could be found?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Epstein, ‘but it’s another reason to be careful in those woods.’

  ‘You don’t believe that he’s still out there?’

  ‘He had been discovered, Mr Parker. They hide themselves away, these creatures, especially when they’re under threat. Those woods are vast. They can conceal an aircraft, and so they can conceal a man. If he’s alive, where else would he be?’

  46

  Wolfe’s Folly was silent as night fell, and the only movement came from the shifting of the shadows thrown by the trees upon it, or so it appeared until one small shadow separated itself from the rest, moving against the direction of the wind. The crow circled, cawing hoarsely, then resumed its perch with its brethren.

  The passenger had no memory of his original name, and little understanding of his own nature. The plane crash, which he had caused by breaking the arms of his seat, freeing him to attack the pilot and co-pilot, had left him with significant injuries to the brain. He had lost the capacity of speech, and he was in constant pain. He retained virtually nothing of his past beyond fragments: scattered recollections of being hunted, and an awareness of the necessity of hiding himself, instincts that he had continued to follow ever since the crash.

  And he remembered, too, that he was very good at killing, and killing was his purpose. The co-pilot did not survive the crash, but the pilot did, and the passenger had stared at his face, and one of those shards of memory had glittered in the darkness. This man had hunted him, and therefore the pain in the passenger’s head was his fault.

  The passenger had pushed his thumbs into the pilot’s eyes and kept pushing until the man ceased moving.

  He stayed in the wreckage for a number of days, feeding on the candy bars and potato chips that he found in the co-pilot’s bag, and drinking bottled water. The pain in his head was so terrible that he would black out for hours. Some of his ribs were broken, and they hurt whenever he moved. His right ankle would not support his weight at first, but in time it healed, although imperfectly, so that he now walked with a slight limp.

  The bodies in the plane began to stink. He pulled them from the wreckage and dumped them in the woods, but he could still smell them. He used a broken panel from the plane as a spade and dug a shallow pit in which to bury them. When the snacks from the plane ran out, he salvaged what he could, including the emergency kit and a gun that he found among the pilot’s possessions, and started exploring the wilderness, which was how he came upon the fort. He built a temporary shelter for himself inside its walls, and he tried to sleep, even as the girl prowled the woods beyond.

  He thought that he might have seen her on the first night after the crash, although he could not be sure. There was a face at the cockpit window, and he might have heard a scratching upon the glass, but he was unconscious more often than he was conscious, and his waking hours were spent in a kind of delirium. The presence of the girl was just another splinter in that cloud of memories, as though his whole life had been part of an intricate painting on a glass wall, and that wall had just exploded.

  It was only later, when he began to recover his strength, that he recognized the reality of her existence. He watched her at night as she circled the plane, and he thought that he felt her anger and her desire. His senses were troubled by it just as they had been bothered by the stench of the pilots. Rage was her spoor.

  She grew bolder: he woke on the third night to find her inside the plane, standing so close to him that he could see the bloodless scrapes on her white skin. She did not speak. She merely stared at him for a single, long minute, trying to understand him even though he did not understand himself, and then he blinked and she was gone.

  That was when he decided to leave the plane. He still could not walk far on his wounded ankle, and when the fort had presented itself to him he had been grateful for it, more so when he found that the girl would not cross its threshold. There he grew stronger. He hunted during the day, while the girl hid herself away. At first he wasted his shots on squirrel and hare until his hunter’s instincts led him to a young doe. It took two shots to kill it, and he field-dressed it with the knife from the emergency kit. He ate what he could, and cut the rest into strips to dry; to keep pests away, he covered them with fabric ripped from the seats of the plane, and the deer skin helped to keep him warm as the winter drew in.

  In the quiet of the fort, the Buried God began to call to him.

  He heard its voice imperfectly, but it was familiar to him. It came to him the way music might come to one who had been struck deaf but retained enough of his hearing to discern muffled chords and rhythms. The Buried God wanted to be released, but the passenger could not find him. He had tried, but the voice was coming from too far away, and he could not understand its words. Sometimes, though, he would stare into the depths of the still, dark pool near to which the plane had come to rest, and he would wonder if the Buried God might not be down there. Once, he reached into it, sinking his forearm up to the elbow, straining his fingers in the hope that his hand might be grasped by whatever waited below. The water was frighteningly cold, so cold that it felt like a burning, but he kept his arm submerged until he could stand it no longer. When he withdrew it, the water dripped slowly from his fingers like oil, and he gazed in disappointment at his numb, empty hand.

  He began paying homage to the Buried God. He dug up the bodies in the forest and removed the heads, along with some of the major bones from the arms and legs. It was the beginning of the shrine’s creation, the altar of worship to an entity he could not name but whom he understood to be his god. He created impressions of false deities from his fractured memory, carving them from wood with a knife, and he mutilated them in the name of the other.

  He was still weak, too weak to explore farther, or seek civilization. He should have died that winter, but he did not. He even wondered if he could die. The Buried God told him that he could not. When spring came, the passenger began to explore his domain farther. He found an old cabin, its walls built from thick l
ogs, but its door long gone and its roof collapsed. He began to restore it.

  In March, a man came into his territory: a young hiker, unarmed. The passenger killed him with a spear that he had made, and waited for others to come looking for him, but no one did. He scavenged all that was useful from the man’s pack, and a wallet with $320 in cash, although there was still a great deal of money in the plane, along with a satchel of papers that made no sense to him.

  Two weeks later, he made his first, careful sortie back to civilization, his damaged skull hidden beneath the dead hiker’s cap. He bought food, and salt, and some tools, and ammunition for his pistol, all by pointing at the items that he wanted. He looked at a rifle, but he had no identification. He settled instead for a used hunting bow, and as many arrows as he could afford. He could have found a way to lose himself once again in a city or a town, but he was afraid that his appearance might draw attention. He also knew that he was damaged, and managing anything beyond the simplest of social tasks was beyond him. He was happier in the woods. He was safe there, safe with the Buried God, and perhaps, as he grew stronger, he might find the Buried God, and free him. He could not do that from a city.

  And so he hid himself in the woods, and prayed to the Buried God, and tried to limit all human contact. He became adept at avoiding the men from the paper companies, and the wardens. The passenger killed another hiker the following year, but only because the hiker came to the fort and found the shrine nearby. Such trespasses were rare, because there was something about the fort that kept people away, or else most knowledge of it had been lost. Similarly, the cabin had lain undisturbed for decades before the passenger found it: because the ground had been cleared to build it, second-growth foliage had sprung up around it, so the dwelling remained virtually invisible.