John Connolly - The Wrath of Angels

Jackie led, Louis behind him, then Liat, Angel, and I. Jackie’s concerns about Liat were unfounded: of all of us, it was she who stepped the softest. While Angel and Louis, unused to the woods, wore leather boots with thick treads, Liat, Jackie and I wore lighter boots with only slight ribbing, the better to feel what lay beneath our feet. Treads could mean the difference between stepping on a branch and bending it, or breaking it entirely. For now we also wore orange vests, and baseball caps with reflective strips. We didn’t want some overenthusiastic hunter to mistake us for deer, or raise the suspicions of a warden if we encountered one. Thirty minutes in we heard gunshots to the south, but otherwise we might have been entirely alone in the woods.

The going was relatively easy for the first couple of hours, but then the terrain began to change. There were more ridges to climb, and I could feel the strain in the backs of my legs. Shortly after midday we startled an adolescent buck from a copse of alder, his antlers little more than extended buds, and later there was a flash of brown and white to our left as a doe moved quickly through the trees. She spotted us, seemed to pause in confusion, and changed direction, cutting away from us until we lost sight of her. We noticed the trace of bigger bucks, and there were places where the stink of deer urine was strong enough to make one gag, but those were the only large animals we saw.

After three hours, we stopped and made coffee. Despite the cold, I was sweating under my jacket, and I was grateful for the rest. Louis dropped beside me.

‘How you doing, city boy?’ I said.

‘Yeah, like you Grizzly Adams,’ he replied. ‘How much farther?’

‘Two hours, I reckon, if we keep making this kind of progress.’

‘Damn.’ He pointed at the sky. There were clouds gathering. ‘Doesn’t look good.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

Jackie finished brewing the coffee and served it up. He gave his cup to Liat, and drank his own by pouring it from the pot into a small thermos. He separated himself from the rest of us, and stood on a small ridge looking back in the direction from which we had come. I followed him up there. He didn’t look happy.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

‘Rattled, that’s all,’ he said.

‘By what we’re doing?’

‘And where we’re going.’

‘In and out, Jackie. We’re not planning on settling there.’

‘I guess.’ He swished the coffee around in his mouth, and spat. ‘And there’s the doe we saw.’

‘What about it?’

‘Something spooked it, and it wasn’t us.’

I stared out at the forest. This wasn’t first growth, and so the foliage was still thick.

‘Could have been a hunter,’ I said. ‘Even a bobcat or a lynx.’

‘Like I said, maybe I’m just rattled.’

‘We could hold back, see if anyone comes,’ I said, ‘but there’s rain on the way, and whatever hope we have of finding that plane depends on good light. And we don’t want to be stuck out here for a night.’

Jackie shivered. ‘I hear that. Come dark, I want to be in a bar with a drink in my hand, and that fort far behind me.’

We returned to the others. Liat approached me. I couldn’t have mistaken the questioning look on her face, but she still mouthed the words, just to be sure: What is it?

‘Jackie was concerned that something might have spooked the doe we saw earlier,’ I answered, loud enough for Angel and Louis to hear. ‘Something, or someone, following behind us.’

She extended her hand. Another question: What do we do?

‘It could be nothing, so we keep going. If there is someone following, we’ll find out who it is soon enough.’

Jackie poured the rest of the coffee into his thermos, packed away his little Primus stove, and we moved off, but there was a palpable change in our mood. I found myself checking behind me as we walked, and Jackie and I would pause on the higher ridges, seeking movement on the lower ground.

But we saw no one, and at last we came to the fort.

49

My first thought was that Fort Mordant was less the thing itself than the memory of it made manifest. The forest had done its best to blur and disguise its lines as though to discourage closer examination: its walls were covered in poison ivy, like waterfalls of green tumbling over precipices, and hemlock and common juniper had taken advantage of storm damage to mature trees by using them as nurseries. Cairns of stones, perhaps remnants of the original clearance of the land for the fort’s construction, had become shadowed by moss, lending them the aspect of funeral markers. Somewhere nearby must have been the actual graves of the fort’s original occupants, but I suspected they were long lost to the woods.

In that, I was soon to be proved wrong.

Mordant itself bore some resemblance to the only other such fortification I’d seen in the state: the old Fort Western in Augusta, although on a smaller scale. There were guard towers at each corner, about two stories high, with horizontal slit windows looking over the forest. Inside, although their roofs had long since collapsed, it was possible to see the remains of buildings on three of the four inside walls, with only the wall containing the main gate left free. One had clearly been a stable, because the stalls were still visible, but there was also plenty of room for the storage of supplies. The building opposite seemed to consist of one long single room, and had probably served as a barracks for the men. On the wall facing the gate was a smaller building, but here the division of rooms was obvious: quarters for the commanding officer and his ill-fated family.

‘There,’ said Jackie. He pointed into the smaller bushes, and when I looked at them from his angle I could see the rough path through them.

‘Deer?’

‘No, a man did that.’

Angel, Louis and Liat moved into the fort, their weapons ready. Jackie and I remained outside, but Jackie’s attention was torn between the fort and the way that we had just come.

‘You’re making me nervous, Jackie,’ I said.

‘The hell with you, I’m making myself nervous.’

‘Would you rather be in there?’

Perhaps it was our knowledge of its history, but there was a deeply unsettling ambience about the fort. Despite its decay, there was a sense of occupancy about it. That trail between the forest and the gate had been regularly used.

‘No, I would not. I’ll take my chances out here.’

There was a whistle from inside the fort: Angel. Louis was above whistling.

‘At least if there’s trouble, you can lock the gate and hide inside,’ said Jackie.

‘There is no gate. If there’s trouble, we’re all taking our chances out here.’

Angel appeared at the entrance.

‘You need to take a look at this,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay with Jackie.’

Louis and Liat were in the commanding officer’s living quarters. The ramparts on the rear wall overhung the interior, creating a natural shelter that had been augmented by a tarpaulin fixed into the wood with nails and supported by two metal bars driven into the ground. I smelled excrement, and urine. A layer of insulating material had been attached to the walls, again held in place by sheets of plastic, to provide further warmth. On the ground was a sleeping bag, along with a half-filled five gallon container of water, a small gas camping stove, and canned food: beans and soups, for the most part. It might have been the temporary home of a down-and-out, or the hardier kind of hiker, were it not for its location deep in the Maine wilderness, and the decorations upon the walls. They were family snaps, but not of any single family: here were a man and a woman and two young girls, all blond, and next to them a man and woman on their wedding day, older and darker than the people in the preceding picture. Around them were photos and drawings culled from newspapers and pornographic magazines, cut and collaged to make new and foul illustrations, all anti-religious in nature, the heads of Christ and the Virgin Mary and Buddha and figures that I couldn’t even identify, Asian and Middle Eastern in origin, transposed onto naked bodies bared obscenely. They were concentrated in one corner, for the most part, above a makeshift stone altar adorned with shattered statuary and old bones, animal and human intermingled. Some of the bones looked very, very old. Among them were a handful of tarnished military buttons. If I were to guess, I would have said that someone had dug up the remains of the soldiers who had died here.