October skies

CHAPTER 77

Sunday

Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

The words came back to him as his fingers traced the outline of the chest in the peaty soil.

‘Sacred things,’ Shepherd whispered quietly. Scrabbling in the pitch-black dirt by the light of his torch, he imagined himself looking very much like some small forest animal scratching in the earth for its first catch of the day — a pig snuffling for truffles.

A wry smile sloped momentarily across his lips as he tried to imagine what sort of pithy headline Leonard Roth, the Washington Post’s political editor, would come up with if he could see him now. Instinctively, he looked around.

It’s always a possibility.

Some industrious paparazzi might just have managed to successfully track him down out here and be — even now — lining up the crosshairs of a telephoto lens upon him. He quickly dismissed the thought for what it was; unnecessary paranoia. No one knew where he was right now, not even Duncan.

As it needed to be.

‘Sacred things,’ he said again quietly, his breath a plume in the cold morning air. He turned to look at the Day-Glo tents across the clearing; none of the others had risen yet. It was still before seven, and the grey light of pre-dawn was just enough now that he no longer needed his torch. He switched it off, not wanting to attract any unnecessary attention, just yet. He wanted this to be a private moment, to share it with no one else, to perhaps feel that sense of epiphany and revelation that Joseph Smith must have once felt, unearthing these precious things from the Hill Cumorah.

His fingers felt the hard metal surface, pitted, rusted and caked with soil: it was beautiful.

Preston’s chest.

This was the thing he really sought. Getting into the White House, getting his hands on political power to ready everyone for the future — that was all very important. But this… this… putting his hands on the plates, the actual spoken words of God, and interpreting them into modern, American English… this… he thought, looking down at the dark lid of the metal chest, this is destiny.

You seem like a good man.

A voice.

Shepherd froze. It had come from somewhere inside his mind, a gentle whisper at once familiar but also strange; like his own thinking voice, but quieter. He remained still, listening intently for a while, hearing nothing but the gentle ballad of shifting branches.

You seem like a good man.

So quiet, anything but a still mind would miss it. It seemed to come both from within his head and from the chest in the ground.

Open it.

‘Do I hear you?’ he whispered.

There was no reply. He was no stranger to voices. There’d always been voices as long as he could remember. Nasty, spiteful ones, ones that urged him to test his faith and steer into an oncoming truck, ones that teased and mocked him, ones that soothed and encouraged. But this one had a curious cadence to it.

He remained still, emptying his mind, and listened for a while.

But it was gone.

Shepherd craned his neck to look out of the excavated dip. There was still no sign that the others were about to rise. They were all zipped up snugly in their tents, glistening wet with morning dew amidst the lazy tendrils of a cool mist lying in pools across the clearing. Shepherd had risen an hour earlier, with the sky still dark, eager to make a start and unearth those precious things.

He’d had a fair idea where to search; his grandfather’s hand-me-down tale had contained enough detail that he knew the largest shelter was Preston’s temple, and that his people had the larger camp. His eyes had easily picked out the most prominent ridge of humps beneath the moss. It sat almost beneath the twisted form of an old cedar tree, one branch strangled by a creeping vine stretching out over the clearing.

A solitary crow pierced the quiet woods with an impatient caw, as if urging him to get on with his work. He dug his fingers deep into the soil, pulling it away from the sides of the chest. The metal was scarred with corrosion but still robust, still intact.

It’s inside. I can feel it.

His fingers stumbled upon the latch at the front, triggering a tremor of adrenaline-charged exhilaration.

This is it.

Open it.

He took a deep breath, aware that both his hands were shaking. Forgivable, given how long he had been searching for this place, given how many times he had tried to find it over the years, always praying for guidance that God would lead him here. He’d always known the probability of his finding it by chance was one in a million — the proverbial needle in a haystack. But he also knew that one day a group of beered-up hunters, a family on a hiking holiday, some teenagers goofing around, somebody, would eventually stumble upon it, find the decaying remnants of the camp, dig up some long-lost personal keepsake with a name still legible on it. And eventually somebody would end up typing Preston’s name into a search engine.

Shepherd smiled. ‘And here we are.’

His heart thudded at the thought of what lay within the metal trunk before him, and his mind momentarily dwelled on a folly he’d watched on FOX news before coming to meet with Cooke. He had listened to a Catholic priest and an amateur archaeologist discuss with light-headed exhilaration the spreading ripple of anticipation amongst theologians and archaeologists around the world at the promise of a technology that would finally allow the last few Dead Sea Scrolls to be read spectroscopically.

Shepherd smiled at the ridiculous interest those worthless rolls of papyrus attracted. They were nothing but the words of mere scribes, templemen, inconsequential Judaean politicians of the time authoring their manifestos, supposedly with the endorsement of a higher authority. Not the words of God.

Here, before me, however — his heart pounded in his chest — I have the real thing.

The holy spirit, the angel Nephi was here too, ready to read to him from the plates. He was almost certain now that the quiet whisper he’d heard in his mind was that of the angel.

Yes.

I can hear you.

Yes.

Shepherd felt a tear roll down his cheek.

You’re with me now?

Yes.

He realised he was soon going to bear witness to the original, undoctored, unchanged words of the Lord as the angel read to him; it would be almost like peering into the actual mind of God.

It’s going to be wonderful.

Open it.

He slid his fingers under the ridge of the lid and lifted it up. Rust flakes crackled and fell from all four sides as it creaked open, and a dry, stale, not unpleasant, musky odour welcomed him inside.