‘No fuckin’ way,’ said Joe, which was just what Ray had thought.
The Flores woman was using a thick oak for cover. Still searching the forest for the source of the arrow, Joe called back to her.
‘Miss Flores, you got any idea who that might be?’
Something darted behind a wind-tipped hemlock, the old tree resembling an animal more than vegetation, its body seemingly poised to rise up on its roots and stride through the forest. The moving figure revealed itself to be a big man, his head misshapen, the bow clearly visible in his hand. Ray didn’t think: he just fired. There was an explosion of bark from the hemlock, and then Joe was firing too. The man retreated fast, limping some yet still nimble, but Ray was pretty certain that one or other of them had winged him. Ray had seen him stumble awkwardly on the third or fourth shot: upper body, maybe the right arm or shoulder. It was only when he and Joe stopped shooting that he realized the Flores woman had been shouting. Against the fading echo of the shots, and the ringing in his ears, he heard the word ‘No!’
‘The hell do you mean, “No”?’ asked Joe. He had emptied his rifle, and was reloading from a prone position, lying on his back while Ray provided cover for him.
‘I don’t want him hurt,’ said Flores.
‘Miss, I signed up to get you to that airplane, and get you safely out again,’ said Joe. He finished reloading and scanned the trees. ‘I did not sign up to get myself killed.’
The arrow seemed to materialize in Joe’s left leg. One second he was just lying there, preparing to say something else to Flores, and the next the three-blade head had punched its way straight through his thigh, and Joe’s mouth was wide open in a scream as the blood began to spill, the wound already hemorrhaging massively. Ray had never seen so much blood pump so quickly from a man. He moved to help as Joe rose up and a second arrow hit him low in the back, and Ray knew instantly that Joe was going to die. He coughed up a great spray of red as Ray crawled to him and, using his friend’s body as cover, began shooting into the forest, hoping to hit something, anything. Joe just grunted as the third arrow struck his back. This one must have pierced his heart because his body shook hard once beneath Ray and then went still.
But that final arrow had given Ray an opening. He’d seen the figure again, just as the arrow was loosed, and now he had a target. He got the man in his sights and was about to pull the trigger when a hand yanked his head back and the shot went wild. Ray took a punch to the side of the head. It wasn’t much of a blow, but a trailing finger caught his left eye, the pain blinding him for a few seconds. He lashed out, and felt his fist connect with lips and teeth. When he looked around, the boy was lying on the ground, his mouth red from a split lip.
Ray turned the rifle on the child.
‘You move and I’ll put a bullet in you,’ he said, but it wasn’t the boy who moved. To his right, Ray saw Darina Flores rise to her feet and begin walking in the direction of the old yellow birch behind which Ray had glimpsed their attacker. She was calling out to him, calling a name.
‘Malphas!’ she said. ‘Malphas!’
The boy crawled away from Ray. Once he was safely distant, he got to his feet and followed the woman, blood spilling from his damaged gums. He did not look back.
That was when Ray made his decision. He tore off his orange vest and started to run.
We were still in the fort when the first sounds of gunfire reached us. They were coming from the west, as best we could tell. The compasses had ceased to function effectively shortly before we came within sight of the fort, and they now offered differing and constantly changing views on where magnetic north might lie.
I explained to Liat that we were hearing shots, and we joined Jackie outside the fort.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Louis.
‘Hunters?’
‘That’s a lot of gunfire, and at least some of it is coming from a handgun.’
‘You want to wander into somebody else’s gunfight?’
‘Not particularly. I just wonder who’s shooting, and at what?’
We waited. The gunfire stopped. I thought that I heard a bird calling, but it was no birdsong familiar to me. It was Angel who recognized it for what it was.
‘That’s a woman’s voice,’ he said.
We looked at one another. I shrugged.
‘We go in,’ I said.
Ray Wray had no idea where he was running to, or in what direction. He couldn’t see the sun, and he was panicking. He kept waiting for the fierce tearing pain of a three-bladed arrow cutting a path through his flesh, but it did not come. He came to an uprooted deadfall oak, and collapsed behind it to catch his breath and find his bearings. He watched the forest. It was very still. He saw no sign of movement behind him, no misshapen head taking aim, no bow flexed and ready to send a shaft his way. He still had his rifle, and about thirty rounds of ammunition, as well as his pistol. He also had water, and food, but no compass. He glanced at the surrounding trees and tried to judge the moss growth upon them: forest lore dictated that it would be thicker on the north side, but it all looked pretty much equal to him. He might as well have tossed a coin.
Once again, he checked the way that he had come, and saw nothing. He wondered if the woman and the boy were dead yet. What was the name that she had called? Malthus? Malphas, that was it. The Flores woman had known the name of the man who killed Joe, sticking him with hunting arrows like a bad child torturing an insect with pins. Maybe Joe’s death had been a big mistake, in which case it was just one part of the larger error in agreeing to go into these woods in the first place. At least Ray still had the down payment that the woman had handed over for their services. If there had been time, he’d have searched Joe’s pockets for his share as well, but what he had was better than nothing. He took another look at the nearest tree, decided that the moss looked thicker on the side facing the direction in which he had just come, and prepared to head south.
He was just getting to his feet when he caught a pale flash of movement behind him. Instinctively, he fired.
There was a little girl watching him from between two white pines, one older and coarser-barked than the other. He could see a hole in the center of her dress where the bullet had hit. He waited for her to fall, horrified at what he had done but she did not move. She showed no sign of pain or injury, and no blood spilled from the wound. She should have been dead or dying. She should have been lying on her back, bleeding out her life as clouds scudded across her pupils. She should not have been standing and staring at the man who had just put a bullet in her.
Ray had heard the stories, but he’d always hoped that they were pure foolishness, tall tales like the yarns of lake monsters and hybrid wolves. Now he knew better.
‘I’m lost,’ said the girl. She reached out a hand, and Ray saw the broken nails, and the dirt upon the fingers. Her eyes were black-gray coals set against the ruined whiteness of her skin. ‘Stay with me.’
Ray backed off. He wanted to threaten her, just as he had threatened the boy, but his guns were no good to him here.
‘Get away from me,’ he said.
‘I’m lonely,’ said the girl. Her mouth hung open, and a black centipede crawled from between her lips and scuttled down the front of her dress. ‘Don’t leave me.’
Ray kept retreating, the gun leveled uselessly on the girl. His feet caught in twisted roots, concealed beneath a layer of dead leaves, and he had to glance down to find his footing. When he looked up again, the girl was gone. He turned in a slow circle, and saw her skipping through the shadows. He thought that he heard her laughing.
‘Let me be!’ he shouted. He fired a shot in her direction. He didn’t care if she fell or didn’t fall; he simply wanted to keep her at bay. She was circling him like a wolf closing in on wounded yet still dangerous prey. What was it Joe had said? This was her place. If he could just get out of her territory then she might prey on the woman and the boy instead.
She seemed to pause for a moment, and this time he to
ok aim. The bullet struck her head. He saw something explode from her skull, and her hair blew back as if caught by a gust of air. His vision blurred, and he realized that he was crying. This wasn’t meant to happen. He wasn’t supposed to be shooting at a little girl. He wasn’t supposed to be here at all.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I just want you to leave me be.’
He fired again, and the girl shook her head violently, but still she circled, drawing ever closer to him, before she retreated abruptly into the trees. He could still see her, though. She seemed to be tensing herself for a final attempt at him. He decided that his best chance lay in emptying the gun into her, in the hope that the ferocity of his response might finally send her back whence she came. He watched her buck as the first of the bullets hit her, and this time he felt only satisfaction.
A weight struck Ray in the chest, and he heard another shot, although it did not come from him. He fell back against the trunk of a tree and slowly slid down the bark, leaving a sticky trail of blood as he went. His rifle fell from his hands as he sank to a sitting position, his hands splayed by his sides. He looked down and saw the wound in his chest, the redness of it spreading like a new dawn. Ray’s hands hung over the wound, and he sighed like a man who has just spilled soup on himself. His mouth felt dry, and when he tried to swallow the muscles in his throat refused to respond properly. He began to choke.
Two men appeared before him, one tall and black, his face and head hairless but for a neatly-trimmed graying beard at his chin, the other shorter and scruffier. They seemed familiar. He tried to recall where he had seen them before, but he was too busy bleeding out to concentrate on faces. Behind them appeared three other people, one of them a young woman. The black man kicked away Ray’s rifle. Ray stretched out a hand to him. He did not know why, except that he was dying, and dying was like drowning, and a drowning man will always reach out in the hope of finding something to save him from sinking.
The black man took Ray’s hand and gripped it, as the seconds of Ray’s life melted away like snowflakes in the sun. It was the girl, Ray realized: she knew that she wouldn’t get him, so she let these others take him instead. By firing at her, he had fired on them, and now they had killed him for it.
‘Who is he?’ said one of the others, a big, bearded man who looked out of place among these others, yet more at home in the woods.
Ray tried to speak. He wanted to tell them:
My mother gave me my name. The kids used to laugh at me in school because of it. I never had any luck that wasn’t bad, and maybe my name was the start of it.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I was looking for an airplane.
My name is—
51
We searched the dead man’s body. He had two thousand dollars in cash in his pockets, along with some candy bars and a suppressor for the 9 mm pistol he carried under his coat. He bore no identification. Louis had killed him after he fired two shots in our direction, one of which had missed Liat by inches, and seemed set to fire a third. If Louis hadn’t shot him then I would have, but I felt shame as I stared down at this unknown man, dead at our hands in the depths of the Maine wilderness, all to secure a list of names from a plane that might already have been consumed by the forest.
‘You recognize him?’ said Angel.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘There is something about him.’
‘He was in the ice-cream parlor back in Portland. Louis threatened to shoot him and his buddy.’
‘I guess it was meant to be,’ said Louis.
‘I guess so,’ said Angel.
‘I doubt that he came out here alone,’ said Jackie.
‘Could be he was the one we heard doing all that shooting earlier,’ said Angel.
‘Still doesn’t answer the question of who he was shooting at before he began taking potshots at us.’
The trail left by the gunman was clear to follow. He had broken branches and trampled shrubs as he made his way through the forest. It was not the careful progress of a hunter, whether of animals or men. This man had been running from something.
‘You reckon we’re still heading northwest?’ I said to Jackie.
‘Far as I can tell without a working compass, but I’d lay good money on it.’
‘That plane came down somewhere near here. We have to keep looking.’
‘Jesus,’ said Jackie, ‘we could pass within feet of it and not even see it. We didn’t even spot this guy until he was almost on top of us.’
‘We spread out,’ I said. ‘Form a line, but stay in sight of one another.’
I couldn’t see what other choice we had. We needed to cover as much ground as possible, and we had to do it while there was still light. The downside was that we would now present five targets in a row, like ducks at a sideshow shooting range. So we moved on, looking ahead of us, and to either side, and I forgot Jackie’s fear that we were ourselves being pursued.
The sun was setting when we found the shrine. Behind it, almost lost to the forest, was the plane. There were crows in the trees, dark and still like tumors on the branches.
And before us stood three figures, one already dying.
Darina had seen the man’s head tilt as she called his name. She had no fear of him. They were alike in nature: after all, they had buried the Wildon girls together, neither hesitating as the children squirmed beneath the accumulating dirt, and they both shared a memory of the Fall, the great banishment that had left their kind marooned on a world still forming. The boy followed calmly behind her, picking his way carefully across twisted roots and broken branches. Over and over she repeated the passenger’s name, like a mantra, calming him, reassuring him, even though she could not see him.
‘Malphas, Malphas. Remember.’
And all around her, a murder of crows seemed to echo her call.
She crested a rise, and before her was the plane. It looked like a fallen tree, except that there were no other such trees around it, and its body was perhaps too regular, too cylindrical. By now, it was more than half-submerged, as though the forest floor had turned to quicksand beneath it. Beyond it, a pool gleamed darkly.
But between the plane and where she stood was a crazed jumble of broken religious statuary, of skulls and bones arranged in patterns that had no meaning for her, all contained beneath a framework of mud and wood to protect it from the elements. Of Malphas, there was no sign.
They approached the construction and stood before it. The boy reached out a hand to touch one of the skulls, but she stopped him before he could do so. There was a buzzing in her head, and she felt a kind of awe, the closest she had ever come in her long existence to the fervor of a religious zealot. There was a power here, a purpose. She took the boy’s hand, and together they tried to understand.
A shadow fell across them. Slowly they turned. Malphas, the passenger, was silhouetted against the setting sun, his distorted head surrounded by a corona of fire. The bow was tensed in his hands, the arrow nocked and ready. Darina stared into his eyes, and the enormity of her mistake became clear to her. There was no recognition, no shared nature. She saw herself reflected only in the blank, hostile gaze of a predator. Blood flowed from a wound in his side.
‘Malphas,’ she said. ‘Know me.’
He frowned at her, and the arrow spoke to Darina’s heart. She felt a burning in her chest as the deepening orange of the fading sun was obscured by the deeper red of her own dying. She put her hands close to her chest and caressed the arrow, holding it gently like an offering. She tried to give form to her pain, but no sound came as she collapsed to the ground.
And as she could no longer scream for herself, the boy screamed for her, over and over and over.
The man with his back to us was huge. He wore green-and-brown camouflage clothing, and he held a bow in his hand. To his right, a boy stopped screaming as we appeared, and we watched as the woman beside him toppled to the ground with her hands clutched to the arrow in her breast.
The
big man turned and I saw the terrible wound to his head, as though a meat cleaver had been taken to the top of his skull, leaving a crevasse along his scalp. This, then, was Malphas: the survivor, the killer of the Wildon girls. He was completely bald, his ears coming to sharp points, his face strangely elongated and very, very pale despite his years in the woods. He resembled a giant albino bat. Yet though his eyes were dark and alien, and he was already reaching for an arrow from the quiver at his side, it was the boy who gripped my attention, the boy whom I feared more than the man. It was Brightwell in miniature, Brightwell in youth, from his pale moist skin to the growing goiter on his neck that would, in adulthood, blight his appearance still further. I saw his face contort with rage as he recognized me, for how often does a man get to confront his own killer?
All that happened next occurred both slowly and quickly. Jackie, Angel and Liat hesitated before firing, fearful of hitting the boy, not recognizing the danger that he posed. Louis was faster to respond, shooting just as Malphas nocked a new arrow to his bow and dropped to one knee to release it. I heard a beating of wings around us, and a murder of crows rose into the sky. Louis’s shot struck the shrine, but it was enough to distract Malphas, and his arrow appeared to go wild. He was already rising, preparing to seek cover, when the boy struck. From the folds of his jacket he produced a long knife and used it to slash at the back of Malphas’ right thigh, severing the hamstring. Malphas toppled, and the boy buried the blade in his back. Malphas dropped the bow, and tried to reach behind him for the hilt of the knife, but the movement must have forced the blade still deeper into him, the tip of it slowly, insistently, finding his heart. His mouth opened wide in silent agony. The life slowly left him, and he joined the woman who stared lifelessly at him from her single undamaged eye, his blood mingling with hers on the wood-strewn ground.