October Skies (43 page)

 

‘Speak to me,’ Preston whispered hoarsely.

He pushed through a waist-high thicket of thorny briar that scratched at his hands as he stepped through into the small glade. Almost a week’s worth of snow had transformed it from a grisly butcher’s shop to a virgin-white, sylvan idyll. There remained no exposed sign of the frozen slick on the log or the violence that had been perpetrated here.

He walked forward across the snow, resting his hand on the log and brushing aside the fresh powder until he saw the jet-black slick of Dorothy’s blood. He felt a solitary tear roll warmly down his cold, sallow cheek and instinctively checked that he was alone before allowing his grief to emerge with an audible sob.

‘Why Dorothy?’ His voice broke with grief. ‘Why Dorothy? Why Sam?’ he cried. ‘Why do you punish me like this? Haven’t I done everything you asked of me?’

His words faded into the stillness and remained unanswered.

‘Eric and Saul . . . were not pure of heart, I know that now.’ More tears rolled down his cheeks and settled into the dark bristles of his beard. ‘But Dorothy was a good woman. She gave herself to you, gave herself to me.’ He wiped his face with one grubby sleeve. ‘Gave me a son and a daughter, both of them such good children.’

He looked up at the grey, tumbling sky. ‘I had to sacrifice them. You know that. I had to. Dorothy had doubts . . . doubts that would have spread amongst my people and destroyed them.’

Preston sobbed. Overhead, the startled flutter of wings from the topmost branch of a tree punctuated the silence. The bird flapped noisily across the clearing and away over the trees.

‘I loved her! And my children! And I gave them up for you!’ Preston dropped to his knees, for the first time in his entire life feeling utterly alone.

God has turned His back on me.

He closed his eyes, accepting a truth that drained away the very last of his will to live any longer.

I am not the one He wants to spread his new gospel.

‘I’ve angered you, somehow,’ he whispered. Unspoken, he sensed he knew what it was - the plates, those sacred plates of Joseph Smith’s - were not his to have.

Have? Perhaps ‘steal’ would be a better word.

‘No!’ he cried, ‘I didn’t steal them! I . . . I thought it was Your will that they came to me! I thought it was Your wish that I take them!’

Preston’s vague memory of a dark night and a deed done with the help of two other men came from another life, another time. The true memory had almost completely gone and had been replaced with a far more palatable one in which divine inspiration had brought to him two wayward men, Eric and Saul, carrying with them a gift from God of which they had no understanding. Only he had understood the true value of the book of metal plates, and the small canvas sack of bones they carried.

And yet, here it was . . . the truth he had almost managed to hide from, to forget, coming back to taunt him. They - the three of them - had stolen from God . . . and now His angel was here, Nephi . . . risen from the canvas sack and fully formed, ready to implement God’s wrath.

Preston felt tears of shame and fear roll down his cheeks. ‘I . . . I’m sorry! I . . . I’m so sorry I took those things!’ His broken voice echoed off the silent trees around him.

The bones, the remains of Nephi, had never whispered to him as he’d confidently announced they would. They had never risen as the angel sat with him and read to him from the plates in a language he could understand. And yet, impatiently, Preston had made a start . . . his Book of New Instruction.

‘Oh God, forgive my arrogance!’ he whimpered. ‘But I had to begin the work. I had to. My children needed guidance. I thought you were steering my hand! I thought . . .’

He pulled a knife out of the pocket of his long coat and unsheathed it. His eyes still closed, he felt the cold, sharp edge of the blade in his hands. ‘I’ve done wrong. I’ll take my life right now . . . if you will spare them.’

He waited, eyes closed, sensing a freshening breeze on his skin, the whisper of the branches stirring, and knew it was the draught of something approaching.

I hear it.

He remembered a voice of wisdom from one of his many turbulent visions.

Never look on the face of His anger . . . or your soul is doomed for eternity.

His eyes remained firmly clamped shut as the breeze intensified and the trees swayed. He thought he sensed the ground beneath him vibrate with the footfall of something large approaching the glade.

It’s near.

He heard the crack of branches splitting, being pushed aside by something large and powerful. All of a sudden, he was certain it was there in the glade with him, standing before him. His eyes remained tightly shut.

Do not look.

Preston had no need to open his eyes, though. In his mind he already knew what it must look like: a presence as tall and as wide as a building, crackling and shimmering with the raw energy of God’s rage. In his mind, he saw a giant skull-like head, the horns, the spines of bone towering over him.

‘T-take me,’ he whispered, his thin lips trembling, awaiting a powerful swipe that would empty his stomach onto the ground in front of him.

‘Spare the others . . . p-please.’

There was stillness in response. He could hear only the deep, panting breath of the giant apparition in front of him, sensed its giant form swaying, looking down on this pitiful human who thought he was pure enough in heart to channel the word of God to mankind.

Preston could see that now. It was his heart, stained by arrogance, that had condemned him and perhaps condemned his people too. He wondered if the angel had hesitated like this before emptying Saul, before gutting Eric; whether it had listened dispassionately to their tremulous pleas for forgiveness before finally, cruelly, ripping them apart.

Preston realised poor Emily’s eyes must have been open in this glade; she’d seen this apparition, and in that moment was eternally doomed. Her mind emptied by the horror of it, leaving behind the breathing carcass they had been tending this last week.

My God, poor girl.

A violent and messy death right now would be preferable to that. An eternity of torment to a moment of agony - seeing his insides steaming on the snow beside him as his consciousness ebbed away. This death, certainly no more than seconds away, was going to be a hard death, but infinitely preferable to the fate his daughter had suffered.

Poor, poor Emily.

‘End my life,’ he whispered. ‘It’s worth nothing.’

He sensed it moving around him, from the front, to his right, then behind . . . circling, studying him silently. He felt the vibration of its steps through the ground, the monstrous weight shifting from one foot to the other, and the energy radiating from it.

Heat trickled down his thighs and Preston realised that his shame was complete. ‘Lord, I’m ready to die.’

A gust of wind swept through the branches above with a hiss, the leaves and fir-needles rustling in tacit agreement. He heard the angel shift heavily in front of him, felt the warm blast of breath on his face and smelled the sulphurous, fetid odour of death.

‘S-spare them, p-please!’ his own breath hissed past trembling lips.

It was silent, except for the deep, rumbling, panting breath. Then he heard the angel, deep inside his head, in a dark corner, a quiet, whispered voice.

Prove yourself. Kill the outsiders. Kill them all.

 

‘I’m boarding now, I think.’

Julian cocked his head and listened to the repeated announcement for a moment. Amidst the garbled words he thought he detected his flight number and the phrase ‘now boarding’. There was movement from around the departure lounge and, almost instantly, the beginnings of a queue formed in front of the boarding gate.

‘Yeah, this is my flight. You’ll meet me at Reno?’

Rose sounded tired. ‘Yup,’ she mumbled.

‘Okay then, I’ll see you later on today,’ he replied. Then as an afterthought, ‘We’ve got a lot to talk about.’ It was a probing, throwaway comment. Of course there was much to talk about, and not all of it would be about work.

‘Sure,’ she replied in a non-committal way, ‘be good to have you back,’ she said.

They said goodbye in the same professionally familiar way that they always had before . . . . . . before the other night.

Of course, friendly and laissez-faire as always. He got up, grabbed his bag and ambled towards the growing, ill-defined, meandering queue in front of the gate, pondering that last comment of hers.

Good to have you back.

He found himself replaying that in his head and trying to analyse the tone and timbre of her voice for the slightest clue on how exactly she meant that; how she felt about him. He shook his head at the ridiculousness of it all. Saturday night in that diner, they’d been mildly juiced on the beer, well and truly on a high over the discovery of Lambert’s journal, and yes, they’d flirted a little - that’s all. End of story.

This is getting stupid.

They knew each other well, better perhaps than most married couples. They’d worked out of each other’s back pockets these last few years, on too many occasions wearily propping each other up with black coffee and trench-banter as they pushed a thirty-six-hour shift to rush together a last-minute edit. There had been the unavoidable intimacy of shooting footage from a variety of uncomfortable places, arms, legs and cables tangled round each other for lack of wriggle room. They had shared the exhilaration of seeing their work aired on BBC2, and the disappointment of sliding into the obscurity of various digital channels. They had got pissed together God knows how many times, swapped CDs and regularly derided each other’s taste in music, slept together in the back of a touring Transit van with a sweaty teenage grunge band, and cowered together at the back of an equally sweaty BNP rally.

Not once had they ever flirted with the idea of something more . . . until the other night, that is. Since then he’d been troubled with the notion that he felt a lot more for her than he’d realised. The idea scared him. He enjoyed the security of the tight, solitary bubble in which he had lived most of his life, no one ever getting too close, no one ever hurting him.

Now here was Rose. The thought of folding her in his arms, stooping down to kiss her, feeling the tickle of her hair on his face, the trembling warmth of her body pressed against his . . . terrified him.

This is ridiculous.

‘We need to talk,’ he muttered to himself. A bull-necked man with a shaved head and a Rooney football shirt, standing to his left, shot him a bemused expression.

‘Uh, sorry,’ Julian smiled awkwardly, ‘just talking to myself. I . . . uh . . . do that sometimes.’

The man shook his head and pressed forward into the shuffling queue with his boarding pass ready.

Julian decided enough was enough. The first thing he and Rose were going to discuss in the car on the way back to Blue Valley was whether there was something more between them, and whether they wanted that, or not.

‘Hey!’

Julian felt a tap on his arm and turned round to see a man holding something out to him.

‘What?’

‘You left this on the seat.’

Julian looked down to see the man was holding his BlackBerry.

‘Oh bugger! That was stupid,’ he admitted and smiled dumbly as he grabbed it. ‘Hey, thanks for—’

The man had already turned away, in a hurry to get where he was going. Julian wanted to thank him for not running off with it. He watched the man push his way out of the scrum; just another executive drone in a dark suit, nothing visible but the back of his head, and his raised hand holding a boarding pass. His eyes picked out an incongruous detail - a faint and blurred tattoo across the back of his hand. It looked very much like a fox’s head.

Odd tattoo, he thought, and then his mind was back again on Rose.

 

He had an ideal seat, across the aisle and two rows back from Cooke. It allowed him to keep an eye on him, but remain outside Cooke’s field of vision for the duration of the flight. Important fact: on an eight-hour flight, one can get very familiar with the few faces visible between the headrests; familiar enough to recognise that face for quite some time afterwards, even in an entirely different context - a crowded street, a shopping mall, on a bus, or a train.

He studied the man.

Cooke. He preferred never to use the Christian name of a target, just the surname; it preserved a formal distance. It made a great deal of sense to maintain that distance for a target he would be required, at some point, to finish off.

He allowed himself to relax. Cooke was tagged now. The discreet little pin he’d inserted beneath the BlackBerry’s fascia had a minute lithium battery that kept the thing quietly chirping a signal for months. It was good only for a short range of a few miles, depending on line-of-sight intrusions, but good enough for the job, and perhaps not even necessary in the circumstances. Cooke was behaving as planned and heading where he was wanted - a discreet meeting with Mr Shepherd in some middle-of-nowhere, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it place called Blue Valley.