The Wrath of Angels

5

The money was in a big leather holdall behind what Harlan figured was the pilot’s seat. In every film he’d ever watched the pilot sat on the left, and the copilot sat on the right, and he had no reason to believe that this plane would be any different.

Harlan and Paul stared at the money for a long time.

Beside the holdall was a canvas satchel containing a sheaf of papers sealed in a plastic wallet for further protection. It was a list of names, typewritten for the most part, although some had been added by hand. Here and there sums of money had been included, some small, some very large. Also, again sometimes typewritten and sometimes handwritten, notes had been added to some of the entries, mostly words like ‘accepted’ and ‘declined’, but occasionally just a single letter ‘T’.

Harlan couldn’t make much sense of it so he turned his attention back to the money. It was mainly in fifties, used and nonconsecutive, with some twenties thrown in for variety. Some of the wads were held together with paper wraps, others with elastic bands. Paul picked up one of the bundles of fifties and did a quick count.

‘That’s five thousand dollars, I reckon,’ he said. The flashlight picked out the rest of the money. There were probably forty similar bundles of cash in there, not counting the twenties. ‘Two hundred thousand, give or take,’ he concluded. ‘Jesus, I never seen so much money.’

Neither of them had. The most cash Harlan had ever held in his hand was $3,300, which he’d got from selling a truck years before to Perry Reed up at Perry’s Used Autos. Perry had screwed him over on that truck, but then nobody ever went to Perry the Pervert for a fair deal: they went to him because they were desperate and needed money fast. Having that much cash was the closest Harlan had ever come to feeling rich. He hadn’t felt wealthy for long, though, because the money had gone straight to servicing his debts. Now Harlan knew that both he and Paul were thinking the same thing:

Who would know?

Neither would have considered himself a thief. Oh, they’d shaved a few dollars here and there from the IRS, but that was your duty as a taxpayer and an American. Someone had once told Harlan that the IRS factored cheating into their calculations, so they kind of expected you to do it, and by not holding out on them you messed up their system. You caused more trouble by not cheating on your taxes than you did by smudging your return, the fella said, and if you looked too square then the IRS would start thinking that maybe you were hiding something, and next thing you knew they had their claws in you and you were scouring the attic for receipts for ninety-nine cents just to stay out of jail.

But now they weren’t talking about a hundred dollars here and there kept back from Uncle Sam’s purse; this was potentially a serious criminal enterprise, which raised the second question:

Where had it come from?

‘You think it’s drug money?’ asked Paul. He watched a lot of TV cop shows, and immediately associated any cash sum too large to be kept in a wallet with drug dealing. It wasn’t like drugs weren’t a thing here, either: they flowed across the border like driven snow, but they mainly came in by truck and car and boat, not by plane.

‘It’s possible,’ said Harlan. ‘I don’t see no drugs, though.’

‘Could be they sold them already, and these are the proceeds,’ said Paul. He flipped through the bills with his index finger, and seemed to like the sound they made a lot.

A larger object in the cash bag caught Harlan’s eye, and he pulled it out. It was a copy of the Gazette out of Montreal, dated July 14, 2001, just over one year earlier.

‘Take a look at that,’ he told Harlan.

‘It’s not possible,’ said Harlan. ‘This plane has been here longer than that. It’s almost part of the woods.’

‘Well, unless the Gazette delivers to crash sites, she hit the ground sometime around July fourteenth,’ said Paul.

‘I don’t remember hearing nothing about it,’ said Harlan. ‘A plane goes down, you figure somebody is going to notice and come asking, especially if it went down with a couple hundred thousand dollars on board. I mean—’

‘Hush!’ said Paul. He was trying to remember. Something about a reporter, except . . .

‘I think someone did come asking,’ he said at last.

A moment later, Harlan caught up.

‘The magazine woman,’ he said, then grimaced as Paul added, ‘And the man who came with her.’

Ernie Scollay shifted in his seat. His unease was more obvious now. It was the mention of the man and the woman that had provoked it.

‘Did she have a name?’ I asked.

‘She gave a name,’ said Marielle, ‘but if it was her own then she never wrote for any newspaper or magazine that my father could find. She called herself Darina Flores.’

‘And this man you mentioned?’

‘He wasn’t the kind to give a name,’ said Ernie. ‘They came separately, and didn’t keep each other’s company, but Harlan saw them talking together outside the woman’s motel. It was long after dark, and they were sitting in her car. The interior light was on, and Harlan thought they might have been arguing, but he couldn’t be sure. Harlan already thought there was something hinky about them both. That just confirmed it for him. The next day they were gone, and the woman didn’t come back again.’

The woman didn’t come back again.

‘But the man did?’ I said.

Beside him, Marielle trembled slightly, as though an insect had crawled across her skin.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He came back for sure.’

Darina Flores was as beautiful as any woman Harlan had ever seen. He had never been unfaithful to his wife, and each had given up their virginity to the other on their wedding night, but if Darina Flores had offered herself to Harlan – a possibility as unlikely as any that Harlan could imagine short of his own immortality – then he would have been sorely tempted, and might somehow have found a way to live with the guilt. Her hair was chestnut brown, her face olive complected, and there was a hint of Asian to her eyes, the irises so brown that they shaded to black in a certain light. It should have been disconcerting, even sinister, but instead Harlan found it alluring, and he wasn’t alone: there wasn’t a man in Falls End – and perhaps a couple of women too – who didn’t go to bed at night with impure thoughts of Darina Flores after meeting her. She was the talk of the Pickled Pike from the moment she arrived, and probably the talk of Lester’s too, although Harlan and Paul didn’t frequent Lester’s because Lester LeForge was an asshole of the highest order who had played loose with Paul’s cousin Angela when they were both nineteen and had never been forgiven for it, although Harlan’s son Grady drank in Lester’s whenever he came back to Falls End, just to spite his father.

Darina Flores took a room at the Northern Gateway Motel on the outskirts of town. She told folk that she was putting together a magazine feature on the Great North Woods, an attempt to capture something of their grandeur and mystery for the kind of people who not only subscribed to glossy travel magazines, but had the money to visit the places described therein. She was, she said, particularly interested in stories of disappearances both recent and not-so-recent: early settlers, any Maine equivalents of the Donner Party, hikers who might have vanished . . .

Even airplanes, she added, because she’d heard the woods were so dense that planes had come down in them and never been found.

Harlan wasn’t sure how stories of folk going missing or resorting to cannibalism would appeal to well-heeled travelers with a lot of disposable income, but then he wasn’t a journalist, and, anyway, the dumbness of people had long ago ceased to surprise him. So he and Paul and Ernie and a few others recycled all the old tales they could recall for the delight of Darina Flores, embellishing the details where required, or making them up entirely where necessary. Darina Flores dutifully noted them down, and bought rounds of drinks on her expense account, and flirted outrageously with men who could have been her grandfather, let alone her father, and as the night drew on, she gradually brought the conversation back to airplanes.

‘You think she might have a, you know, a thing for airplanes?’ Jackie Strauss, one of the town’s three resident Jews, had asked as he and Harlan stood side by side in the men’s room, making space in their bladders for more beer and, by extension, more time with the divine Darina Flores.

‘Why, you hiding an airplane that I don’t know about?’ asked Harlan.

‘I was thinking maybe I could borrow one, and offer to show her around.’

‘You could join the Mile High Club,’ said Harlan.

‘I got a fear of flying,’ said Jackie. ‘I was hoping we could just stay on the ground and do our business there.’

‘Jackie, how old are you?’

‘Seventy-two next birthday.’

‘You got a dicky heart. Any business you did with that woman would probably kill you.’

‘I know, but it’s how I’d like to go. If I survived, my wife would kill me anyway. Better I go in the arms of a woman like that than give my Lois the pleasure of beating me to death after.’

And so the men fed Darina Flores tales both real and fantastic, and she in turn fed their fantasies, and a pleasant night was had by all except Ernie Scollay, who wasn’t drinking at the time because he was on medication, and who had noticed that Darina Flores barely sipped at her vodka tonic, and her smile rose no further than her upper lip, never even coming close to those extraordinary eyes that grew darker as the night drew on, and she had long ago stopped writing and was now listening yet not listening, just as she was smiling yet not smiling, and drinking yet not drinking.

So Ernie tired of the game before the others, and he excused himself and left. He was walking to his truck when he saw April Schmitt, who owned the town’s other motel, the Vacationland Repose, standing outside the motel office, smoking a cigarette in a manner that could only be described as distracted. April didn’t smoke much, Ernie knew, this knowledge based upon the fact that he and April were content to share a bed when the mood struck them, each of them being generally inclined to solitude yet still requiring a little company on occasion. April only smoked when she was unhappy, and Ernie preferred April to be happy as that state of mind was more conducive to bed-sharing, and Darina Flores, falsely affable or not, had put him in the mood for some female company.

‘You okay, hon?’ he asked, laying a hand gently on the small of her back, the heel of it resting upon the swell of her still fine buttocks.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said.

‘You’re smoking. It’s never nothing when you’re smoking.’

‘There was a guy came asking for a room. I didn’t care for the look of him so I told him we were full up.’

She took a drag on the cigarette, then looked at it in disgust before throwing it to the ground, still only half smoked, and stamping it out. She wrapped her arms across herself and shivered, even though it was a warm evening. Tentatively, Ernie put an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him. She was shaking, and April wasn’t a woman who scared easily. Her fear drove any carnal thoughts from his mind. April was a frightened woman. Ernie loved her in his quiet way, and he did not wish her to be frightened.

‘He asked me why the “Vacancy” light was on if we were full,’ said April. ‘I said that I’d forgotten to turn it off, was all. I could see him looking at the lot. I mean, there are only four cars in it, so he knew that I was lying. He just smiled, the ugly piece of shit. He smiled, and his fingers moved, and it was like he was stripping the clothes from my body, and the flesh from my bones. I swear, I felt his fingers on me, in me, in my . . . in my private parts. He was hurting me, and he wasn’t even touching me. Christ!’

She started to cry. Ernie had never seen her cry before. It shocked him more than what she had said, the swearing included, because April didn’t swear much either. He held her tighter, and felt her sobbing against him.

‘Fat, bald son of a bitch,’ she said, gasping the words out. ‘Piece of shit bastard, touching me like that, hurting me like that, all over a fucking motel room.’

‘You want me to call the cops?’ asked Ernie.

‘And tell them what? That a man looked at me funny, that he assaulted me without laying a hand on me?’

‘I don’t know. This guy, what did he look like?’

‘Fat. Fat and ugly. He had a thing on his throat, all swollen like a toad’s neck, and he had a tattoo on his wrist. I saw it when he pointed at the sign. It was a fork, a three-pronged fork, like he thought he was the devil himself. Bastard. Miserable rapist bastard . . .’

‘What?’ Ernie had stopped talking. ‘What is it?’

He had seen the look on my face. I could not hide it.

I know who he was. I know his name.

After all, I killed him.

‘Nothing,’ I said, and he caught the lie, but chose to set it aside for now.

Brightwell. Brightwell the Believer.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Finish the story.’

Darina Flores left after two days with little to show for her efforts but a hole in her expense account, real or imagined, and a store of old tales that were barely on nodding terms with reality. If she was disappointed, she didn’t show it. Instead she passed around some cards with her phone number printed on them, and invited anyone who remembered anything useful or pertinent to her article to call her. Some of the more optimistic men of the town, strengthened by a beer or three, tried calling the number in the days and weeks after she left but got through only to an answering service on which Darina Flores’s dulcet tones invited them to leave a name, number, and message, with a promise to get back to them as soon as possible.

But Darina Flores never called anyone back, and over time the men grew tired of the game.

Now, squatting in the wreckage of a plane in the Great North Woods, Harlan and Paul thought back on Darina Flores for the first time in years, and once the floodgates of memory were opened a torrent of related incidents followed, each inconsequential in itself but suddenly meaningful when taken as a whole in the light of what they had just found: city men and women who hired guides for hunting or hiking or, in one unlikely case, bird-watching, but who seemed to have little interest in nature while being very clear on the areas that they wished to explore, to the extent of marking them carefully in the form of grids on their maps. Harlan recalled Matthew Risen, a guide since deceased, talking to him of a woman whose skin was a virtual gallery of tattoos that seemed almost to move in the forest light. She had not spoken a single word to him during the long hours of a deer hunt that ended with a single desultory shot at a distant buck, a shot that might possibly have scared a squirrel who was halfway up the tree struck by the bullet but posed no danger to the deer itself. Instead, her partner did all of the talking, a garrulous man with red lips and a pale waxen face who reminded Risen of an emaciated clown and never even unslung his rifle, chatting and joking even as he gently overruled his guide’s choice of direction, moving them away from any deer and toward . . .

What? Risen had not been able to figure that out, but now Harlan and Paul thought they knew.

‘They were looking for the plane,’ said Paul. ‘All of them, looking for the plane, and the money.’

But it was Harlan who wondered if it was less the money that interested those strangers than the names and the numbers on the papers in the satchel, as he and Paul Scollay sat by the fire that they had made, the barest flicker of it reflected on that black water. He kept coming back to the list of names even as they discussed the cash and those who had come to seek it. The list made him uneasy, but for no reason that he could figure out.

‘You could use the money,’ said Paul. ‘You know, what with Angeline getting sick and all.’

Harlan’s wife was showing the first signs of Parkinson’s. She was already in the middle stage of Alzheimer’s and Harlan was finding it harder to take care of her needs. Meanwhile Paul was always being chased by some bill or another. There would be hard times ahead as old age tightened its hold on them and theirs, and neither man had the kind of funds that would permit any difficulties to be handled with ease. Yes, thought Harlan, I could use the money. They both could. That still didn’t make it right.

‘I say we keep it,’ said Paul. ‘It stays out here much longer and it will sink into the ground along with that plane, or it’ll be found by someone even less worthy of it than we are.’

He tried to make a joke of it, but it didn’t quite work.

‘It’s not ours to keep,’ said Harlan. ‘We ought to tell the police about this.’

‘Why? If this was honest money then honest men would have come looking for it. It would have been all over the news that a plane had gone down. They’d have been scouring the woods looking for wreckage or survivors. Instead, what did we get but some woman pretending to be a reporter, and a swarm of creeps who were no more hunters or birders than the man in the moon?’

The bag lay between them. Paul had left it open, probably deliberately, so that Harlan could see the money inside.

‘What if they find out?’ said Harlan, and his voice almost cracked as he spoke. Is this how evil is done, he asked himself, in small increments, one foot after the next, softly, softly until you’ve convinced yourself that wrong is right, and right is wrong, because you’re not a bad person and you don’t do bad things?

‘We use it only as necessary,’ said Paul. ‘We’re too old to be buying sports cars and fancy clothes. We just use it to make the years that are left a little easier for ourselves and our families. If we’re careful, then nobody will ever find out.’

Harlan didn’t believe that. Oh, he wanted to, but secretly he didn’t. It was why, in the end, though they took the money, he chose to leave the satchel where it was, with its lists of names intact. Harlan sensed their importance. He hoped that, if the plane was eventually found by those who had been seeking it, they would accept his offering as a form of recompense for their theft, an acknowledgment of what was truly important. Perhaps if the papers were left for them, they wouldn’t come looking for the money.

That had been a long, long night. When they weren’t talking about the money, they were talking about the pilot or pilots. Where had they gone? If they had survived the crash, why hadn’t they taken the money and the satchel with them when they went to look for help? Why leave them in the plane?

It was Paul who went back inside, Paul who examined one of the passenger seats and found that its arms had been broken, Paul who found two pairs of handcuffs discarded beneath the pilot’s seat. He showed all that he had discovered to Harlan.

‘Now how do you suppose that happened?’

And Harlan had sat in the seat, and gripped the broken armrests, pulling them up. Then he’d examined the handcuffs, each set with the key still in the lock.

‘I think someone was cuffed to this chair,’ he said.

‘And they got free after the crash?’

‘Or before. Could be they even caused it.’

They both stepped out of the plane then, and the blackness of the pool was mirrored in the blackness of the forest, and the beams of their flashlights were swallowed up by both. Somehow they managed to sleep, but it was an uneasy rest, and while it was still dark Harlan woke to find Paul standing over the embers of the fire, his rifle in his hand, his aged body tensed against the night.

‘What is it?’ said Harlan.

‘I thought I heard something. Someone.’

Harlan listened. There was no sound at all, but still he reached for his rifle.

‘I don’t hear anything.’

‘Someone’s out there, I tell you.’

And every hair on Harlan’s body seemed to stand on end at that moment, and he got to his feet with the alacrity of a man a third of his age, because he felt it. Paul was right: there was a presence out there among the trees, and it was watching them. He knew it as surely as he knew that his heart still beat, and the blood still coursed through his veins.

‘Jesus,’ whispered Harlan. His breath was catching in his chest. A sense of profound vulnerability washed over him, and in its wake he was engulfed by a terrible despair. He felt its hunger, its need. If it was an animal out there, then it was like none that he had ever encountered.

‘Can you see it?’ asked Paul.

‘I can’t see nothing, but I can feel it.’

They stayed that way, Harlan and Paul, their weapons ready, two frightened old men facing an implacable presence in the dark, until both sensed that whatever was out there had departed, but they still agreed to alternate watches until dawn. Paul dozed first while Harlan stayed awake, but Harlan had been more tired than he thought. His eyes began to close, and his shoulders sagged. He would experience flashes of dreaming before he jerked awake, and in those moments he dreamed of a little girl dancing through the woods, although he could not see her face clearly. She approached the fire, peering through the smoke and the flames, examining the two old men, growing bolder in her approaches until, in the final dream, she was reaching out a hand to touch Harlan’s face, and he could see that some of the nails were broken and the rest were filled with dirt, and he smelled the rotting of her.

He stayed awake after that. He stood to keep sleep at bay.

Sleep, and the girl.

Because that stink had still been there when he woke up.

It was real.

But they took the money. In the end, that’s what it came down to. They took the money, and they used it to make their lives a little easier. When the cancer began flipping Paul’s cells like the tiles on an Othello board, turning them from white to black, he discreetly pursued a range of treatments, some orthodox, some not, and he never lost hope, not even when he put his gun in his mouth at last, because for him it was not an act of ultimate despair but the embracing of his last, best and surest hope.

And Harlan Vetters’ wife was looked after in her own home as the Parkinson’s quickly combined with the Alzheimer’s to create critical mass, and he was forced to move her into residential care. It was the best facility that he could find within easy reach of Falls End. She had her own room flooded with light and a view of the woods, because she loved the woods as much as her husband did. Harlan visited her every day, and in summer he would put her in a wheelchair and together they would head into town for ice cream, and there were days when she would remember who he was for a few moments, and she would hold his hand in her own, and his strength would seem to still the trembling. For the most part, though, she would stare vacantly ahead of her, and Harlan could not decide if that absence was better or worse than the fear that would occasionally animate her features, when everything was strange and terrifying to her: the town, her husband, even herself.

When Paul Scollay’s sister found that her husband had gambled away their savings, her brother stepped in, and money was put into a high-yield account to which only she had access. Her husband, meanwhile, was encouraged to seek treatment for his addiction, spurred on by a conversation that he’d had with Paul during which Paul’s shotgun was conspicuous by its presence.

And because they lived in a small town, they knew when someone was hurting – a job lost, an injury suffered, a child yielded up to the care of grandparents because the mother couldn’t cope – and an envelope would be placed on the doorstep during the night, and a little of the pressure would be anonymously relieved. In that way they salved their consciences, although both men remained haunted by the same strange dreams, visions in which they were pursued through the forest by an unseen entity, ending up at last before the black pool where something was rising from the depths, always threatening to surface but never appearing before they woke.

Rarely, too, did a day pass during those years without Harlan and Paul fearing that the plane would be discovered, and some trace of their presence at the wreckage would be revealed. They were not sure which they feared more: the law, or those who might have a personal interest in the plane and its contents. But those fears faded, and the nightmares came less frequently. The money was gradually spent until only a little of it remained, and Harlan and Paul had started to believe that they might just have committed a victimless crime when the man with the distended neck returned to Falls End.