The tree behind him was massive and old, some of its roots as thick as the boy’s body, its great, spreading branches, now entirely bare, as twisted as arthritic limbs. At the base of its trunk was a vaguely triangular hole, perhaps the lair of a weasel or other small mammal, widened over time by the actions of nature. Beside it lay a broken branch about three feet in length. It was as thick as his wrist, and sharp at one end. The boy gently scuttled backwards until his feet were in the hole. It would be a tight squeeze, but he could make it. Once inside, he could hide from the girl and, if she found him, he could keep her at bay with the stick. The blow from the rock might not have stopped her entirely, but she had clearly felt the force of it. The stick might be enough to torment her and make her keep her distance. All the boy knew was that he could run no longer, and here he must make his stand.
Back, back he went, until the edges of the hole were biting into his sides. There was a moment when he felt sure that he was stuck, incapable of going forward or back, but he wriggled his flabby body and the hole seemed to suck him in. Once inside he stayed quiet and still. He could see nothing except the patch of forest beyond, and even that was growing dimmer as the darkness drew in, but he caught sight of the girl’s form as she passed into view. She was crouching as she walked, her upper body slightly extended, her fingers curled like claws. He thought that he heard her sniffing at the air, and her head turned so that she seemed to be looking straight at him. He held tightly to the stick, ready to thrust the point at her if she came. He would aim for one of her eyes, he decided. He wondered if the stick was strong enough to impale her on the ground. He had a vision of her struggling against it like a dying moth. It made him smile.
But she did not approach him, and instead moved on. He realized that he had been holding his breath, and let it out in a gasp of relief. The sound of the God of Wasps subsided a little, for which the boy was grateful. After a few minutes he shifted position, trying to make himself more comfortable. He used the stick to test the limits of the hole and found that it was bigger than he had anticipated. He could not have stood up inside it, but there was room for him to stretch out his legs. If he curled up a little, he might even be able to sleep, but he would not sleep, not with the girl outside, roaming, searching. To pass the time, and keep himself amused, he sorted through his memories, the great rush of them that had returned to him when he heard again the voice of the man who had tried to destroy him, the hated detective. His time would come: once the boy had found more of his own kind, and grown big and strong again, he would take the detective, this man whose nature even the boy did not understand, and in a deep, dark place he would discover the truth about him. First, though, he would kill the detective’s woman and his child, just as his first woman and child had been taken from him in blade and blood, but this time the detective would be forced to watch as it happened. There was a circularity about it that appealed to the boy.
The woods grew black, and he heard the scurrying of night creatures. Twice the darkness before him was lit by the passing luminescence of the girl, and he heard her calling to him, coaxing him into revealing himself. She promised to show him the way out of the forest, swore that she would guide him to safety, if only he would play with her for a little while. He did not answer, and he did not move. He stayed where he was, and prayed to the God of Wasps to sacrifice a little of the night so that dawn might come more quickly.
He did not remember sleep coming. There was no instance where his eyes briefly closed only for him to realize what was happening and jolt himself awake. There was only wakefulness, and then sleep. When he opened his eyes again he was slumped against the inside of the tree. It was still dark outside, but the texture of the night had changed, and the woods were silent. Something had caused him to wake, though. He was aware of a disturbance, a sound from close by. He also desperately needed to pee, and he was very, very cold.
The boy listened. Yes, there it was again: a scuffling, a digging. An animal, maybe, some mammal hunting for buried prey. It was coming from nearby, but he could not pinpoint the precise source. The noise echoed inside the tree, further distorting his perception. With it came the warning buzz in his head as the God of Wasps called to him in a voice that he still could not yet fully comprehend.
It was coming from his right, he decided. Now he could hear the scratching of claws against the tree trunk. He leaned over, his ear close to the wood, his face barely six inches from the ground. What are you, he thought. What are you?
A small hand exploded from the dirt between his legs, and gripped his face. He felt fingers on his skin, digging deep into his flesh. One found his open mouth and he bit down hard upon it, severing it entirely, but the grip did not weaken. A jagged nail dug into his right eye, and a fierce, intimate pain insinuated itself into his skull. The presence in the dirt rose up still further, now not just a forearm but a head, and a torso. The girl’s sickly light infected the gloom as she ascended, her right hand forcing itself deeper and deeper into the boy’s face, her left pushing against the ground for leverage. He struggled hard, tearing at her dead flesh with one hand while the other scrabbled in the dirt until he found the stick. He raised it as high as he could before stabbing down, and felt it enter the girl’s body. She spasmed, and he struck again, but he was sinking now, and he sensed collapse all around him. The girl was no longer forcing herself up: instead she was dragging him down, deep into that lonely place in which she herself had been interred, with its ceiling of roots and its walls of dirt, where the beetles and the millipedes scuttled over her bones.
The stick caught in the dirt and snapped. The earth rose to the boy’s chest, then his neck, and finally his chin. He opened his mouth, but the earth silenced his final scream.
And the girl had her playmate at last.
54
I do not know if all that I have shared with you is true. Some of it I experienced, and some of it was told to me. Some of it, I may have dreamed.
I picked up fragments from Grady Vetters, once he had recovered consciousness. Together we visited his sister at the hospital. She was still deep in her coma. The comatose state into which she had been plunged by the needle had not been alleviated by the coma cocktail of drugs with which she had been treated. In the end, she had not been as strong as her brother, not physically: combined with restrictions on her breathing caused by the position in which she had been left on the couch, the injection had left her with hypoxic brain damage.
Marielle slept, and it seemed that she would never wake again.
We left Jackie Garner’s body in the plane to protect it from animals. Later, the wardens retrieved it, and he was brought back to his mother and his girlfriend for burial. The bodies of the woman named Darina Flores, and the man known as Malphas, were taken to Augusta for examination. What happened to them after that, I do not know.
Liat managed to walk out of the forest, with each of us taking turns supporting her. By the end, she was barely conscious. She refused to look at me, or even to recognize my presence beside her while I was helping her. She had been sent to ensure the list’s safe retrieval, and she had failed. In the darkness, we came upon the road that we had taken into the wilderness. Louis and Angel stayed with Liat while I went to get the truck. Only when I started driving did I notice that Jackie’s totem, the necklace of bear claws that hung from his rear view mirror, was gone, and I wondered when the Collector had added it to his trove: before he killed Jackie, or after?
I took Liat to the local medical center, and explained that she had fallen on an arrow. Stranger things had happened, it seemed, for the doctor on duty barely blinked an eye, and arrangements were made to transfer her immediately to Bangor. I explained that she could neither speak nor hear, but could read lips. I then called Epstein and told him most of what had occurred. When he asked if the list was safe, I answered yes, but nothing more.
After all, it was, in its way.
Shortly before dawn, I drove my own car back up that timber company road, and r
eturned to the forest. This time, I was prepared. I was still two miles from the wreckage of the plane when I picked up the beacon’s signal on my cell phone. Twenty feet from the plane, at the base of a white pine, I found the list. I had not thrown it far from the airplane, just far enough. Some small animal had already nibbled at the plastic, but the package remained more or less intact, the little beacon I had placed inside it blinking redly.
Of the boy who was Brightwell, there was no sign, but days later, while the search of the area continued, and the police began gathering and identifying the remains of those killed by Malphas, one of the boy’s shoes was discovered near the hollow tree trunk of a massive oak, and it was thought that he might have been taken by a bear.
I told the investigators most of what I knew at that point about the airplane, for I was nothing if not adept at hiding truths. Gordon Walsh was among the police who questioned me, although the north of the state no longer fell into his remit. He had been sent to observe, he said, but I did not ask by whom. I told them that Marielle Vetters had hired me to find the plane, for she believed that her father’s silence about its existence might have caused unnecessary pain for the families of those who had been aboard when it crashed, and who still waited for some knowledge of the fate of their loved ones. I left out only the existence of the list, and something of my knowledge of the Collector, although I gave a detailed description of him to the police, and fed them the link to the lawyer, Eldritch. After all, I owed nothing to either of them now. I told the police, too, about Jackie’s final sin, the one that had led to his death. One cannot libel the dead, and lying to protect Jackie’s reputation, or to spare the feelings of those who loved him, would have caused more problems than telling the truth.
Slowly a narrative began to emerge that was, if not entirely satisfactory, then plausible. The Collector had come seeking revenge for the fatal explosion, and the woman and the boy were searching for the plane for unknown reasons of their own, possibly connected to the man named Malphas but perhaps also in the belief that some money remained hidden in the plane. Meanwhile the process of identifying the remains of Malphas’s victims began. Two men, subsequently identified as Joe Dahl and Ray Wray, were added to his list of victims, and I said nothing to contradict that assumption. With so much else to occupy their time, the forces of law and order seemed content to let any holes in my story remain unexplained.
And, in a corner, Gordon Walsh watched, and he listened.
It was Walsh who first asked for more information about Liat, once her connection to what had happened was discovered. I told him that she was eventfully an expert on aviation history, a claim she duly confirmed when it was eventually put to her. As Walsh wasn’t about to try to interrogate a deaf and dumb woman about a subject on which he knew nothing, he let that one slide. Before he left Falls End, though, he made it clear to me that, assuming I lived long enough, he expected to hear, at some future date, a more detailed version of events than the one he had just been offered.
By the time the investigators reached the private medical center where the lawyer, Eldritch, was being treated, they found that he had been released from the care of his physicians into the custody of a man who claimed to be his son, and no trace of him could be found. Subsequently, it appeared that the ruined building that had once housed his office was actually owned by an elderly couple who ran a pawnbroking operation nearby, and their agreement with their missing tenant had rested on a handshake, and nothing more. The damaged building was torn down within weeks, and the insurance money, when it came, was swallowed by their pockets.
One month after all this had occurred, Epstein came to visit me. Liat was with him, as well as one of those seemingly interchangeable young men-at arms upon whom he relied for his safety. Epstein and I walked for a time on Ferry Beach, Liat and her companion watching us from a distance.
‘Why did you destroy the list?’ Epstein finally asked.
‘What would you have done with it?’ I replied.
‘Watched, investigated.’
‘Killed?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Before or after those people named upon it could act?’
He shrugged again. ‘Sometimes, preventive actions are necessary.’
‘That’s why I destroyed it,’ I said.
‘In the right hands, it could have proved most useful.’
‘In the right hands,’ I echoed.
‘From what I hear, Liat was at risk of death because of what you did. The Collector threatened her life unless the list was given to him.’
‘He wasn’t going to kill her.’
‘You seem very sure of that.’
‘He has a code. It’s a twisted, blasted thing, but it’s a code nonetheless. He wouldn’t have killed her because of something that I did: he would only have killed her for something that she herself had done. I didn’t believe that she was guilty of something that would have brought the Collector down upon her.’
‘I will try to explain that distinction to her. I fear that, if you were to attempt to do so, she might try to shoot you.’
We reached the end of the beach, and turned back. The sun had begun to set as we turned to the north, the wind breathing winter on our faces.
‘What do you think Malphas was doing out there?’ said Epstein. ‘Liat spoke of an altar, a kind of shrine.’
‘Malphas had a dent in his head big enough to hold a book,’ I said. ‘He was brain-damaged. You think even he knew for sure what he was doing?’
‘He certainly had a purpose. Liat said that the altar faced north. A north-facing altar, in a northern state. How far north can one go, do you think, before there is nothing left, nothing to worship, only snow and ice?’
We walked on in silence until we were back at the parking lot.
‘This is north,’ said Epstein, as his young man started the car, Liat standing by an open rear door, their departure now imminent. ‘This place. Planes crash here, and are slowly sucked into the ground. Killers come here, and meet their end. Dark angels spread their wings above its ground, and are brought down by their enemies. And you, you are here. I used to believe that it was you to whom they were drawn in this place, but now I think that I may have been wrong. There is something else here. It called to Malphas, and it tried to hide that plane. It calls to them all, even if they’re unaware of its voice. That is what Liat believes, and now that is what I believe.’
We shook hands.
‘It is a shame about that list,’ said Epstein, and while his right hand clasped mine tightly, he rested his left hand upon both, and his eyes searched my face for any hint that what he suspected might well be true: whatever was in the bag at the bottom of that dark pond, it was not the list. ‘You know, I sent some of my people into the interior to search for it, but to no avail. It seems that body of water is very deep. Let’s just hope that the list rests in a safe place.’
‘I can think we can be sure of that,’ I replied.
They left me then. I faced the north, as though, from where I stood, I might see far, far beyond, deep into the darkness of the Great North Woods.
The woods, and whatever lay buried deep beneath them.
Buried, and waiting.
Acknowledgements
As always, I am indebted to a number of individuals who helped to make this book better than it might otherwise have been. I would like to thank my fellow author, Paul Doiron (www.pauldoiron.com), who, in addition to being a very fine writer, is also the editor of Down East magazine (www.downeast.com), to which I am a proud subscriber. It was Paul who gave up his time to help me understand the ways of hunters in Maine, and for both his knowledge and the pleasure of his company I am deeply grateful. Meanwhile, Drs Robert and Rosey Drummond kindly advised on medical matters, for which I owe them a good Indian meal, and Rachel Unterman and her sister helped me to swear in Hebrew. Thanks, too, to my good friend Joe Long in New York for introducing me to all at Nicola’s fine Italian specialty store in New Yo
rk. To Nick and Freddy Santilli, my gratitude for letting me hold meetings in your office; and to Dutch, thanks for the books. You should visit them. They’re on First Avenue, between 54th and 55th Street. Tell them we sent you.
I am very fortunate to be surrounded by people, most of them women, who are much smarter than I am, and who have taken it upon themselves to look after my odd little books and, by extension, me. I would be very lost without my editors, Sue Fletcher at Hodder & Stoughton and Emily Bestler at Atria, and all who work alongside them: Swati Gamble, Kerry Hood, Lucy Hale, Auriol Bishop, Jamie Hodder-Williams and the fine sales reps at Hodder; and Judith Curr, Louise Burke, Carolyn Reidy, Caroline Porter, David Brown, and the sales teams at Atria and Pocket. My friend Clair Lamb has made my life immeasurably easier by taking on the thankless role of publicist, assistant, and general organizer of all things book-related, assisted by the patently gifted Madeira James, who looks after my website, and, until recently, Jayne Doherty, who has since moved on to sunnier marital climes. My thanks, too, as always, to my agent, Darley Anderson, without whom I would not be in the fortunate position of being published, and his team: Clare Wallace, Mary Darby, Sophie Gordon, Vicki Le Feuvre, Andrea Messent, Camilla Wray, Rosanna Bellingham, Peter Colegrove and, in Los Angeles, my film agent, Steve Fisher.