October skies

Prologue

The two little girls, playing in the meadow by the stream, were the ones who saw it first: a pale form moving along the edge of the wood, just inside the tree line. They saw it at a distance, moving slowly; appearing, disappearing, reappearing amongst the foliage, a chalk-white stick-man with no face and two dark holes where his eyes should be.

It turned to gaze at them for a moment, swaying slightly as it studied them intensely across the stream surging with recent snow-melt from the peaks above and the tail end of a hard winter.

This was more than enough for the two girls. They turned and ran. As they stumbled up the incline of the meadow towards the edge of town, they thought they heard the thing scream after them — a sound both frightening and pitiful.

They ran across the small town, down the closest thing to a main street, busy with the mid-morning, mid-week trade, to their home, whimpering in broken, garbled sentences, each talking over the other, that they had seen a skeleton walking in the woods.

The skeleton was next seen by Jeffrey Pohenz a short while later. Jeffrey, a willowy teen, was outside by the back door of the trader’s store, enjoying a crafty ten-minute reprise from hefting bags of cornmeal, leaning against the wall and savouring the unseasonably early warmth of sunshine on his face.

His mind was elsewhere… on a particular promise made to him by a certain young lady last night. Anticipation of that was making the day at work drag interminably; his concentration was shot to hell.

Of course, when he saw the skeleton suddenly emerge from a cluster of trees and thick tufts of untamed briar just across the yard, littered with broken and being-mended chassis and wheel spindles, the thought of this evening’s exciting promise was instantly dismissed. Like some creature from Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of hell, it shambled towards him with a lurching clumsiness, bony arms and hands glistening brightly in the sunlight, reaching out to him.

Jeff decided not to dive through the back door into the store and run the risk of getting entangled with the clutter of goods within. Instead he ran around the back of the low wooden building towards the busier thoroughfare at the front, stumbling out into the dusty open space and tripping over hard-baked wheel ruts that only a few days ago had been mud, churned into grooves and ridges by large steel-rimmed wheels.

‘Jesus, help me!’ he screamed as he scrambled to his feet again. ‘There’s a… there’s a… there’s a skeleton man round the back!’

The nearest people to Jeffrey were bemused at the sight of the mop-haired, lanky teenager stumbling over his own clumsy feet and bellowing with fear.

Jeff turned to look back at the side of the wooden fencing around which he’d just sprinted, expecting to see that shuffling bone-white creature emerge.

‘Oh, Jesus, it’s… it’s…’

Gordon Palmer, a loader who worked out the front, shook his head at Jeff’s delinquent craziness. The boy was prone to goosing around at work — a practical joker rather than a real grafter.

‘What’ve you seen, lad?’

Jeff looked up at him. ‘A skeleton! It just charged out of the woods at me!’

Gordon straightened up, sensing that maybe this time the boy might not be playing the fool. It could be some goddamned Nez Perce. He’d heard that tribe sometimes wore chalk-white body paint on raiding parties.

‘What exactly did you see?’

Jeff pointed to the wooden wall leading round to the rear of the compound. His finger wobbled uncertainly. ‘Just there… I swear I saw someth-’

And then Gordon saw it for himself.

The skeleton staggered forward, one bony hand held out and running along the wooden slats of the wall for support, for guidance. Gordon’s first impression was identical to Jeff’s, identical to the two little girls’.

But then his eyes picked out other details on the shambling form: the tattered scraps of clothing, fluttering like ragged pennants on a washing line, boots tattered and torn and held together by strips of vine or leather.

‘What the hell…?’ he muttered, his terror replaced with horror of a different sort.

Jeff, standing beside him, now began to pick out those same details and realised his error.

‘Oh shit. It’s a man.’

Other heads in the thoroughfare had, by now, turned and witnessed the thing as it took several tentative steps forward, finally stumbling, as Jeff had done, on one of the deep wheel ruts. It fell forward, landing heavily on the hard, ridged ground and then curled up into a pitiful foetal position.

‘Somebody get this poor sonofabitch some help!’ Gordon shouted as he rushed forward and knelt down beside the thing. Closer now, he could see this quivering pale creature in rags had once been human but could barely be described as that now. Looking at the gaunt, starved-to-within-an-inch-of-death face, the deeply recessed and shadowed eyes, he saw an emptiness that would haunt him for the rest of his life and flavour the way he would tell this story to his children, and their children.

Those were the eyes of someone who had glimpsed the Angel of Death himself.

He leaned closer to the man. ‘We’ll get you some help. Some food and water,’ he whispered, suspecting it was already long past doing the poor wretch any good. Those empty eyes met his and Gordon swore for a moment that he saw the flickering flames of hell in those wide, dilated pupils.

My God, he may die right here.

Gordon reached out and gently held one of this poor man’s bony claws. The loose folds of skin on his hands reminded him of the turkey-wattle skin of an old man.

No man should die without a name.

‘Can you tell me your name, sir?’

The man’s thin, leathery lips parted, revealing impossibly long teeth, gums withdrawn by malnutrition. He struggled to say something — little more than a mucous-clogged rattle.

‘Tell me again,’ whispered Gordon, his face just inches away now. He could feel tiny, rapid puffs of fetid air against his cheek.

The man tried again, panting with effort, managing just the faintest whisper that sounded like rustling wings.

‘My name is… Ben…’

The Present