October skies

CHAPTER 66

1 November, 1856

Ben scrambled through the snow, tripping and tumbling into virgin drifts that had fallen since he’d last headed this way, over a week ago. It felt like a lifetime had passed since he and Sam had stumbled upon the place, along with Preston and Vander. He was sure he was heading in the right direction, though — uphill and drifting to the right. He passed the twisted and dying trunk of a leafless cedar, a tree he had unconsciously registered on that day as they’d been foraging for firewood. The greying afternoon pall beyond its splayed black branches and twigs urged him to hurry on: time was running out. The short day had already been showing signs of waning as he’d stumbled out of the camp; there was perhaps just another hour of light to make use of.

Keep your wits about you. Preston’s out here somewhere.

Perhaps he was already at the hunter’s shelter.

Doing what?

He could only guess, but he was certain that was where Preston was headed. His mind played snapshot images of the man preparing to kill once more; donning some crudely made demonic disguise to drive his people into a heightened frenzy of fear and panic.

Ben stopped to check once more that the long barrel of his Kentucky rifle wasn’t plugged with snow, that it was ready to fire immediately should he stumble upon Preston.

‘I need to be ready for him,’ he muttered.

He struggled another fifteen minutes in the direction he hoped the shelter lay and then a recognisable slope in the ground rose out of the gathering gloom. He scaled it as quietly as he could, dropping down to his haunches as he reached the brow and looked down into the dip, towards the shelter. He breathed as quietly as he could, his rifle raised, squinting down the barrel, and fully prepared now to fire at Preston on sight.

But there appeared to be no movement down there. It was silent and still.

He took several cautious steps down the shallow slope towards the shelter, listening intently for movement coming from within it.

Nothing.

He moved across the clearing, his gun trained on the ragged flap over the entrance. Every now and then the slightest innocent stir of movement in the woods — a breeze, the sloughing hiss of snow off a branch — triggered a panic-ridden three-hundred-and-sixty-degree whirl from him.

Stay calm.

There was no sign of Preston here, not outside. And not the slightest sound from within. He was about to concede that his suspicions had been ill conceived, that the Mormon leader might merely have left the camp to seek solitude, perhaps to pray — when his eyes flagged an incongruous detail. It took another second for his mind to understand what they had picked out. He strode towards the shelter.

Along the wall, hanging from lumber nails, was that curious assortment of skulls, cleaned and bleached white by the hunter’s hand long ago. They hung in no particular order, in no particular pattern, the hunter’s trophies, a proud proclamation of his skills as a trapper and a hunter. Close to the wall, he could see what it was that had caught his attention, not so obvious across the clearing but much more so now.

He spotted a faint outline against the weathered wood of the wall, and a single nail protruding. One of the larger skulls had been removed.

When?

He tried to recall whether there had been this gap in the row the last time they had come up here to this desolate spot. But his mind, like everyone else’s that day, had been on the bodies.

He took a step back and felt something brittle crack beneath his feet. In the muted silence the noise startled him. Under several inches of new snow that had drifted against the bottom of the wall, the toe of his boot had found something hard and sharp. Ben knelt down and quickly brushed the powder aside.

His hand found a small pile of flecks of bone and jagged shards. For a moment he wondered whether the missing skull had dropped and shattered on the ground. It seemed unlikely. The ground was a soft cushion of decaying needles, cones and snow. There was nothing more of the skull to be found.

He realised that someone must have had to work it loose from the nail, dislodging crumbling fragments of bone.

‘Where’s the rest of it?’ he muttered quietly amidst a fluttering plume of evaporating breath.

You need to go inside.

Ben looked warily up at the sky through the bare web of branches. Darkness was coming. He had no oil lamp to illuminate his way inside. If he dared go in and investigate further, he decided he had better do it now before too much more of the light was gone.

He moved cautiously towards the entrance. Girding himself with a deep breath, he swept the canvas flap aside. The meagre daylight seeped into the exposed interior, and he waited for a moment, allowing his eyes to adjust before stepping down. He was familiar with the layout from last time: a crude workbench to his right, a stack of traps, rotten pelt bales and paraphernalia against the rear wall, to his left the flimsy wattle and daub partition leading to the cot and the bones of the hunter.

His first step across the soft, peaty ground found the same brittle flecks of bone that he’d encountered outside. He looked down and saw more jagged pieces of bone around the workbench. He looked at the bench itself, and saw it was dusted with more fragments, whittled pieces.

Ben fleetingly recalled visiting the cell of an asylum inmate who carved the most exquisite chess pieces from the bones of a sow, donated by the kitchens every Friday — ham-shank broth day.

‘My God,’ he whispered. He felt his scalp prickle and the hair on his neck rise as his nebulous suspicions found firmer footing. Here was evidence that something had been crafted in this place recently. Ben tried to recall how the young Paiute had described what he’d seen in the woods.

A giant head, a skull, with horns… a body of bone and spines.

He looked at the workbench and the floor and could now clearly visualise Preston feverishly at work by the light of a solitary oil lamp, fashioning a mask from the giant skull of a bison, or a stag. And all the while reassuring himself over and over in the muttered voice of a man utterly insane that he was engineering God’s will for the good of his people.

And yes, he thought, a mask of bone would be enough, wouldn’t it?

The mere fleeting glimpse of such a crudely fashioned mask amidst the bedevilling half-light of this forbidding place, and the low visibility of a gusting snowstorm, would certainly be enough to convince someone already terrified, someone already believing in such things as angels and demons, that something awful was in these woods.

There was no sign of such a thing here. Which he supposed could only mean that Preston had already been and gone.

What do I do now?

Presumably, he was already on his way back to the camp. He could try to pursue him and intercept him before they got back. Just the two of them, alone in the woods — one shot, and this could all be over.

If Preston’s followers didn’t lynch him first, Ben could show them the trapper’s hut, the skull mask. He could explain to them that the medicine Preston had been taking had sent him mad. He could tell them of the confession the elder had made, which Dorothy had heard and planned to tell the others… he could tell them all those things, and perhaps it would be enough.

If I hurry…

He emerged from the shelter with relief, filling his lungs with the clear, cool breeze outside. He exhaled a large cloud of fetid air, purging the dank, coppery odour of rotting vegetation and dried blood.

Ben cast a hurried glance towards the subtle mound across the clearing; the grave of Sam and Dorothy lying side by side, now only a faint hummock beneath the thick blanket of snow. Beside their graves was Mr Hearst’s; he’d been laid to rest not by his own people, but by Keats.

He wished Emily was standing with him right now. He wished he could show her the grave — that she could see both her brother and mother at rest side by side, properly buried, marked and prayed over. Instead, he imagined her last vision of them was an endless loop of sudden, barbaric butchery that dutifully played a performance for her time after time, night after night.

‘I have to go,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll save her from this madness, Sam. And come the spring, I’ll take her out of this place with me. I promise you that.’