October Skies (60 page)

This man has ruined you?

‘Please.’ Julian slowly held out a hand. ‘Lower the gun . . . please . . .’

The gun did feel heavy in his hand now - heavier with each passing second. He lowered the weapon by a fraction. But the voice returned, angry and shrill.

God has no use for you, William.

What?

You’re pathetic.

I’ve given my life to God.

But you are no use to Him now.

Please, let me prove myself to Him.

All right. Kill yourself.

He cocked his head and stared out into the dark, his troubled mind taken aback by the sudden request. A final test of faith, yes . . . he could understand that. With the most important task in the history of mankind yet to do, yes . . . it made sense. It made a lot of sense.

‘Okay,’ he whispered and slowly raised the gun.

‘Shepherd?’ cried Julian. ‘What’re you doing?’

He pointed the gun towards his face. ‘You know I’d do this for Him,’ he said quietly. ‘I told you I’d do anything for Him.’ He placed the short stub of the barrel in his mouth, his lips clasped around it dutifully.

You know I would do this, if He asked it of me.

Kill yourself.

Shepherd obediently placed a finger on the trigger and began to gently squeeze.

Do you see? I’d do it if He wanted. I’m prepared to do anything . . . to die for the Lord, if He wanted it. Do you see that now?

He knew God had once stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son at the very last possible moment; that the patriarch had to have every intention of killing his own child in order to make evident his fealty. Shepherd knew God would stop him too, but only if he could demonstrate his complete sincerity in this test of faith. Shepherd pushed his promise a little further with another ounce of pressure on the trigger.

I’ll do anything . . . do you see now? God was right to choose me. God was right to lead me here.

And another ounce of pressure.

Do you see?

And another.

God? Is this really what You want?

The small, delicately balanced trip lever inside Barns’s pistol answered the question prematurely.

 

I am alone now. I finally worked out how to stop the voice in my head. I put him back in the chest with the plates.

But I am alone.

He looked up from the journal on his lap. His measured handwriting contrasted with the deteriorating childlike scrawl of Ben’s on the previous pages. The snow across the camp was melting in the warm light. It was warm enough, in fact, that he sat on a cushion of blankets in the open, with his shirt off, taking some small pleasure from the heat on his pale back.

The snow still remained in deep, slushy piles, but in the places where it had not been so thick, dark muddy patches showed.

There is a smell here in this place that I cannot take any longer, he wrote.

Across the mottled ground of mud and snow, the bodies lay rotting and bloated, both oxen and human. The meat from the beasts had turned too bad to eat.

He saw faces in the dirty slush that were once families he knew; faces that had once had names - Jeremiah Stolheim, Sophia Lester, Aaron Hollander - but were now swollen and purple and anonymous.

The angel killed so many of them. He came back here to this
place and killed them all. I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He wanted to make an example of them.

Sam’s hand stopped scratching words across the page. There were things sitting before him, in front of the temple, carefully stacked beside the campfire like logs. His eyes momentarily rested on them; grisly things that his hand refused to transcribe on the page.

The angel’s rage had been complete.

The deeds that had been done on his return to the camp . . . Sam had managed to erase, or at least dull, most of those memories from his mind: the screams, the panic of slaughter. All that remained now, rotting in the melting snow, was the aftermath.

Now he is gone, I can see with my own eyes the bad things he did to the bodies. I see with my own eyes the heads carefully placed in a pile. I see with my own eyes the cuts, the gashes, the fear in those bloated, dead faces.

I see now what the angel is.

He looked towards the temple. The lumber frame, no longer supported around the base by dense, tightly packed drifts of snow, had sagged to one side, everything askew. Inside, the angel was sealed away in Preston’s metal chest.

There had been a night, one particular night late in December, as he dined alone on frozen meat in the musky darkness of his shelter, when his wretched grief and the angel’s tormenting voice had proved too much for him. He had pulled the canvas sack from his belt, staggered into the temple and as the shrill and suspicious voice screamed accusations at him in his mind, he had opened the chest and dropped the sack inside.

Sam hadn’t dare venture within the slanting shelter since.

He knew if he did, he’d hear it whispering to him to be let out again.

I think I understand what the angel is now.

It is the darkness in our hearts, made a thousand times worse.

It made sense in a cruel, unforgiving way. It made sense to him that, guarding those precious plates on which God’s true message was inscribed, were those bones. He realised now that they were a test of purity . . . and intent. As a magnifying glass could be to the sun’s rays, so those angel’s bones were to a man’s soul.

Sam’s grief at losing Emily, his rage, had been turned by the angel into a storm of wrath, visited back here in the camp on those poor people who had remained.

I see now that it was a good thing Emily left me. That she escaped with the Indian and Mrs Zimmerman. I fear if she hadn’t, I might find her head stacked here amongst the others.

He looked up at the sky, clear and blue, promising an unbroken day of warmth. Today, he decided, was the day he was going to leave. Another night alone in this forsaken place and he imagined madness would finally take him completely. He looked at the space left on the last page of this journal, Benjamin Lambert’s journal. This last page was dark with new ink, a bottle he’d discovered a few days ago whilst scavenging through one of the other shelters.

I have read all of Benjamin’s words in here. Of all the bad things the angel did, killing him was the worst. He was my friend. He was a good man.

Sam wondered how different things might have been if the angel had chosen Ben to come to. His heart had seemed purest. It was a cruel joke, he considered, that the person most worthy of doing the Lord’s work, most pure in heart and capable of making good of the angel’s influence, was the one person who had no belief at all in God.

Sam had a wish.

I wish I were like Ben. I wish I could be him.

A solitary tear rolled down his hollowed cheek and dropped onto the bottom of the page, dotting his last scribbled line like a full stop.

He looked at his words, The testimony of Samuel Dreyton, and realised in that moment that perhaps he could have something of what he desired. Samuel Dreyton could die, as perhaps he should, and Ben could, in a way, live once more.

Sam realised his freshly written words should be the first thing to go.

He ripped the page out of the journal and tossed it into the muddy, slushy snow.

‘My name . . . is Ben,’ he uttered, with a voice weak and cracked and sounding like the frail rattle of an old man.

He stood up, painfully thin, and uncertain in his mind whether he’d make a mile from this place before collapsing, let alone finding civilisation once more. He returned the journal to Benjamin’s chest and sealed it with the solemnity of someone burying someone dearly beloved.

‘My name is Benjamin,’ he whispered.

As he stepped out of the clearing and into the trees, he looked back one last time at the browning humps of dead fir-tree branches that had once sheltered people through an unseasonably early winter.

‘My name is Benjamin Lambert,’ he croaked one last time, and set off into the wilderness, heading west.

 

The sky above them was stained grey and overcast as they stumbled awkwardly along the silted bank of the gently burbling river. The water seemed as black as ink and moved smoothly and calmly past them, showing the way out of the mountains, west, towards safety.

‘Shit, I need another rest, please!’ gasped Julian.

Rose eased him down onto the ground. ‘Aghhh! Shit!’ he cried. ‘Leg’s killing me!’

‘It’s broken in several places,’ said Rose. ‘I think I can hear it grating.’

He winced as he lay back in the coarse grass looking up at the sky. It was tumbling with thick winter clouds that threatened to open up at any moment.

‘Yeah, thanks for telling me that, Rose. I can damn well feel it grating,’ he grunted through gritted teeth.

She offered him a pitiful smile. ‘Hang in there, Jules. I’ll get you out of here. You thirsty?’

He nodded.

She opened the backpack. It had belonged to Agent Barns. Inside was a survival pack: foil wrap, a couple of high-protein bars and a flask of water. She pulled out the flask and gave it to Julian.

She caught sight of the linen sack inside and eased it carefully out, opening it to reveal half a dozen corroded plates of metal. Beneath her fingers, she felt the indentations and bumps of unintelligible letters and shapes stamped into the metal.

‘What do you think?’ she asked, passing him one of them.

Julian turned the plate over in his hands, inspecting it sceptically. ‘Some kid’s metalwork project, looks like,’ he snorted wearily, passing it back. ‘A sheet of scrap metal with a few interesting shapes banged into it. I’m going to be honest here . . .’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s not the word of God written in the language of angels.’

‘And this?’ she asked, pulling out the threadbare canvas sack. The bones inside clinked softly.

‘Ten quid says they were once somebody’s bloody pet cat.’

‘They’re old,’ she said. ‘The canvas bag looks like it’s seen a lot of years.’

Julian shrugged. ‘I don’t know. An old pet cat, then.’

Rose laughed. ‘Yeah, maybe. What’re we going to do with ’em?’

‘Dunno. We’ll get someone to take a look. If they’re genuinely Joseph Smith’s scrolls, then I suppose they have some historical value. I’m sure the Mormon church wouldn’t mind having them back.’

Rose nodded. ‘I guess. Ridiculous, though, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘That there are people out there, people like Shepherd, who would kill for a bag of old cat bones and a few pieces of scrap metal.’

Julian laughed weakly. ‘It’s a world full of crazy people.’

She looked up at the sky. The first few snowflakes were coming down towards them, light and carried like pollen on the gentle breeze.

‘Starting to snow,’ she said. ‘C’mon, we better get going. I don’t want to be caught out here overnight.’

‘No.’ Julian winced.

She put the two cloth sacks back in the pack and slung it over her shoulder, then, grimacing at the pain she was about to inflict on Julian, began to help him to his feet.

‘Shit!’ he howled. ‘Ow! Slowly, Rose . . . slowly!’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ she cooed apologetically.

He gasped, took a few deep breaths. ‘Okay . . . all right, I’m good to go.’

‘This river will lead us down to the camp site,’ she assured him. ‘We’ll make it there by evening, I’m sure.’

He nodded. ‘Yeah.’

They proceeded along the silted riverbank, puffing clouds of laboured breath and watching the winter sky above unleash the first tentative snowfall of the season.

Julian managed to conjure a faint, sanguine smile. If it wasn’t for the jarring agony in his leg, this would be quite a pleasant hike. It was peaceful, almost silent except for the gentle, muted hiss of the river, the swish and thump of the backpack against Rose’s shoulder with each staggered step, and something else . . . the soft, reassuring whisper of a breeze through the naked branches of elms and cedars along the riverbank; a whisper that sounded almost human . . . almost like words.