John Connolly - The Wrath of Angels

We were still in the fort when the first sounds of gunfire reached us. They were coming from the west, as best we could tell. The compasses had ceased to function effectively shortly before we came within sight of the fort, and they now offered differing and constantly changing views on where magnetic north might lie.

I explained to Liat that we were hearing shots, and we joined Jackie outside the fort.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Louis.

‘Hunters?’

‘That’s a lot of gunfire, and at least some of it is coming from a handgun.’

‘You want to wander into somebody else’s gunfight?’

‘Not particularly. I just wonder who’s shooting, and at what?’

We waited. The gunfire stopped. I thought that I heard a bird calling, but it was no birdsong familiar to me. It was Angel who recognized it for what it was.

‘That’s a woman’s voice,’ he said.

We looked at one another. I shrugged.

‘We go in,’ I said.

Ray Wray had no idea where he was running to, or in what direction. He couldn’t see the sun, and he was panicking. He kept waiting for the fierce tearing pain of a three-bladed arrow cutting a path through his flesh, but it did not come. He came to an uprooted deadfall oak, and collapsed behind it to catch his breath and find his bearings. He watched the forest. It was very still. He saw no sign of movement behind him, no misshapen head taking aim, no bow flexed and ready to send a shaft his way. He still had his rifle, and about thirty rounds of ammunition, as well as his pistol. He also had water, and food, but no compass. He glanced at the surrounding trees and tried to judge the moss growth upon them: forest lore dictated that it would be thicker on the north side, but it all looked pretty much equal to him. He might as well have tossed a coin.

Once again, he checked the way that he had come, and saw nothing. He wondered if the woman and the boy were dead yet. What was the name that she had called? Malthus? Malphas, that was it. The Flores woman had known the name of the man who killed Joe, sticking him with hunting arrows like a bad child torturing an insect with pins. Maybe Joe’s death had been a big mistake, in which case it was just one part of the larger error in agreeing to go into these woods in the first place. At least Ray still had the down payment that the woman had handed over for their services. If there had been time, he’d have searched Joe’s pockets for his share as well, but what he had was better than nothing. He took another look at the nearest tree, decided that the moss looked thicker on the side facing the direction in which he had just come, and prepared to head south.

He was just getting to his feet when he caught a pale flash of movement behind him. Instinctively, he fired.

There was a little girl watching him from between two white pines, one older and coarser-barked than the other. He could see a hole in the center of her dress where the bullet had hit. He waited for her to fall, horrified at what he had done but she did not move. She showed no sign of pain or injury, and no blood spilled from the wound. She should have been dead or dying. She should have been lying on her back, bleeding out her life as clouds scudded across her pupils. She should not have been standing and staring at the man who had just put a bullet in her.

Ray had heard the stories, but he’d always hoped that they were pure foolishness, tall tales like the yarns of lake monsters and hybrid wolves. Now he knew better.

‘I’m lost,’ said the girl. She reached out a hand, and Ray saw the broken nails, and the dirt upon the fingers. Her eyes were black-gray coals set against the ruined whiteness of her skin. ‘Stay with me.’

Ray backed off. He wanted to threaten her, just as he had threatened the boy, but his guns were no good to him here.

‘Get away from me,’ he said.

‘I’m lonely,’ said the girl. Her mouth hung open, and a black centipede crawled from between her lips and scuttled down the front of her dress. ‘Don’t leave me.’

Ray kept retreating, the gun leveled uselessly on the girl. His feet caught in twisted roots, concealed beneath a layer of dead leaves, and he had to glance down to find his footing. When he looked up again, the girl was gone. He turned in a slow circle, and saw her skipping through the shadows. He thought that he heard her laughing.

‘Let me be!’ he shouted. He fired a shot in her direction. He didn’t care if she fell or didn’t fall; he simply wanted to keep her at bay. She was circling him like a wolf closing in on wounded yet still dangerous prey. What was it Joe had said? This was her place. If he could just get out of her territory then she might prey on the woman and the boy instead.

She seemed to pause for a moment, and this time he took aim. The bullet struck her head. He saw something explode from her skull, and her hair blew back as if caught by a gust of air. His vision blurred, and he realized that he was crying. This wasn’t meant to happen. He wasn’t supposed to be shooting at a little girl. He wasn’t supposed to be here at all.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I just want you to leave me be.’

He fired again, and the girl shook her head violently, but still she circled, drawing ever closer to him, before she retreated abruptly into the trees. He could still see her, though. She seemed to be tensing herself for a final attempt at him. He decided that his best chance lay in emptying the gun into her, in the hope that the ferocity of his response might finally send her back whence she came. He watched her buck as the first of the bullets hit her, and this time he felt only satisfaction.

A weight struck Ray in the chest, and he heard another shot, although it did not come from him. He fell back against the trunk of a tree and slowly slid down the bark, leaving a sticky trail of blood as he went. His rifle fell from his hands as he sank to a sitting position, his hands splayed by his sides. He looked down and saw the wound in his chest, the redness of it spreading like a new dawn. Ray’s hands hung over the wound, and he sighed like a man who has just spilled soup on himself. His mouth felt dry, and when he tried to swallow the muscles in his throat refused to respond properly. He began to choke.

Two men appeared before him, one tall and black, his face and head hairless but for a neatly-trimmed graying beard at his chin, the other shorter and scruffier. They seemed familiar. He tried to recall where he had seen them before, but he was too busy bleeding out to concentrate on faces. Behind them appeared three other people, one of them a young woman. The black man kicked away Ray’s rifle. Ray stretched out a hand to him. He did not know why, except that he was dying, and dying was like drowning, and a drowning man will always reach out in the hope of finding something to save him from sinking.

The black man took Ray’s hand and gripped it, as the seconds of Ray’s life melted away like snowflakes in the sun. It was the girl, Ray realized: she knew that she wouldn’t get him, so she let these others take him instead. By firing at her, he had fired on them, and now they had killed him for it.

‘Who is he?’ said one of the others, a big, bearded man who looked out of place among these others, yet more at home in the woods.

Ray tried to speak. He wanted to tell them:

My mother gave me my name. The kids used to laugh at me in school because of it. I never had any luck that wasn’t bad, and maybe my name was the start of it.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I was looking for an airplane.

My name is—

51

We searched the dead man’s body. He had two thousand dollars in cash in his pockets, along with some candy bars and a suppressor for the 9 mm pistol he carried under his coat. He bore no identification. Louis had killed him after he fired two shots in our direction, one of which had missed Liat by inches, and seemed set to fire a third. If Louis hadn’t shot him then I would have, but I felt shame as I stared down at this unknown man, dead at our hands in the depths of the Maine wilderness, all to secure a list of names from a plane that might already have been consumed by the forest.