John Connolly - The Wrath of Angels

‘God bless you,’ he said. ‘You mind taking an old man for a walk?’

I said that I didn’t mind at all. I helped him to put on an extra sweater, and a muffler, then his coat and gloves and a bright red woolen hat that made him look like a marooned buoy. I found a wheelchair, and together we set off for a stroll around those dull grounds. He lit up once we were out of sight of the main building, and happily talked and puffed his way to a small ornamental lake by the edge of a fir copse, where I sat on a bench and listened to him some more. When he eventually had to pause for breath, I took the opportunity to steer the conversation in another direction.

‘A long time ago, when I was a teenager, you told my grandfather and me a story,’ I said.

‘I told you both lots of stories. Your grandfather was still here, he’d say that I told too many for his liking. He hid under his bed from me once, you know that? He thought I didn’t see him, but I did.’ He chuckled. ‘The old fart. I kept meaning to use it against him sometime, but he upped and died before I could, damn him.’

He drew again on the cigar.

‘This one was different,’ I said. ‘It was a ghost story, about a little girl in the North Woods.’

Phineas held the smoke in for so long I was convinced it was going to start coming out of his ears. At last, when he’d had time to think, he let it out and said, ‘I remember it.’

Of course you do, I thought, because a man doesn’t forget a tale like that, not if he’s been a part of it. A man doesn’t forget hunting for his lost dog – Misty, wasn’t that her name? – in the depths of the forest, and finding her all tangled up in briars with a little barefoot girl waiting nearby, a girl who was both there and not there, both very young and very, very old, a girl who claimed to be lost and lonely even as those briars started snaking around the man’s shoes, trying to hold him there so that the girl could have company, so that she could draw him down to the dark place in which she dwelled.

No, you don’t forget a thing like that, not ever. There was a truth to the tale that Phineas Arbogast told to my grandfather and me, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He had wanted to tell the story, to share what he had seen, but some details needed to be changed, because one had to be careful about such matters.

‘You said that you saw the girl somewhere up near Rangeley,’ I said. ‘You said she was the reason why you stopped going up to your cabin there.’

‘That’s right,’ said Phineas. ‘That’s what I said.’

I didn’t look at him as I spoke, but I kept my voice soft and there was no accusation or blame to my tone. This was not an interrogation, but I needed to know the truth. It was important if I was to find that plane.

‘Do you think she roams, this girl?’

‘Roams?’ asked Phineas. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What I’m wondering is if all of the North Woods is her territory, or if she just sticks to one small area? Because my feeling is that she’s linked to a place, that maybe she has, well, a lair , for want of a better word. It could be where her body lies, and that’s where she returns to, and she can’t or won’t stray too far from there.’

‘I couldn’t say for sure,’ said Phineas, ‘but I guess that sounds about right.’

Now I looked at him. I touched his arm, and he turned his face to me.

‘Phineas, why did you say that you were beyond Rangeley when you saw her? You weren’t anywhere near Rangeley. You were farther north, past Falls End. You were deep in the County, weren’t you?’

Phineas looked at his cigar.

‘You’re spoiling my smoke,’ he said.

‘I’m not trying to catch you out. I’m not blaming you for altering the details of the story. But it’s important that you tell me where you were, as best you can, when you saw that girl. Please.’

‘How about a story for a story?’ said Phineas. ‘Suppose you tell me why you need to know?’

So I told him of an old man on his deathbed, and a plane in the Great North Woods, and I told him what linked Harlan Vetters’ search for a boy named Barney Shore to the discovery of that plane: the ghost of a girl. The plane lay in her territory, wherever that might be, and despite Harlan Vetters’ story about malfunctioning compasses and lost bearings, I believe he did have some notion of where exactly that plane rested. Perhaps he had chosen not to share the location because he didn’t trust his son, not entirely, or because he was dying and confused, and couldn’t keep all of the details straight in his head.

Or maybe he did share that detail, but only with his daughter, and she had held it back from me for reasons of her own. She didn’t know me, and it could be that she wanted to see what I’d do with the information she’d already given me before she entrusted me with that final, crucial element.

When I was finished telling my tale, Phineas nodded his approval. ‘That’s a good story,’ he said.

‘You’d know,’ I replied.

‘I would,’ he said. ‘Always have.’

His cigar had gone out, so engrossed had he been. He lit it again, taking his time with it.

‘What were you doing up there, Phineas?’

‘Poachin’,’ he replied, once the cigar was going again to his satisfaction. ‘Bear. And maybe mournin’ some.’

‘Abigail Ann Morrison,’ I said.

‘You got a memory almost as good as mine. I suppose you need to, given what you do.’

Now he told the story again, and it was more or less as he had told it before, but the location was changed to deep in the County, and he had a landmark to offer.

‘Through the woods, behind that girl, I thought I saw the ruins of a fort,’ he said. ‘It was all overgrown, more forest than fort, but there’s only one fort up in those woods. Wherever she hides, wherever that plane lies, it’s not far from Wolfe’s Folly.’

It was growing colder, but Phineas did not want to return to his room, not yet. He still had half a cigar left.

‘Your grandfather knew that I was lying about where I saw that girl,’ said Phineas. ‘I didn’t want to tell him that I’d been poachin’, and he didn’t want to be told, and it was none of his business if I was crying for Abigail Ann, but I wanted him to understand that I’d seen the girl. He was the only person I could tell who wouldn’t have laughed me away, or turned his face from me. Even back then, people in the County didn’t care to hear the fort being brought up in conversation. She still comes to me in my sleep, that girl. Once you’ve seen something like that, you don’t forget it.

‘But you were also part of the reason for changing the location. I didn’t want to be putting fool ideas into your head. We don’t talk about that part of the woods, not if we can help it, and we don’t go there. If it hadn’t been for that damned dog, I’d never have gone there.’

I had brought a copy of the Maine Gazetteer , and with Phineas’s help I marked the area in which Wolfe’s Folly lay. It was less than a day’s hike from Falls End.

‘Who do you think she is?’ I said.

‘Not ‘‘who’’,’ said Phineas, ‘but ‘‘what’’. I think she’s a remnant, a residue of anger and pain, all bound up in the form of a child. She might even have been a little girl once: they say there was a child in that fort, the daughter of the commanding officer. Her name was Charity Holcroft. That girl is long gone. Whatever’s left bears the same relation to her as smoke does to fire.’

And I knew that what he said was true, for I had seen anger take the form of a dead child, and heard similar stories from Sanctuary Island at the far edge of Casco Bay, and I thought that something of my own lost daughter still walked in the shadows, although she was not composed entirely of wrath.