Gallagher stopped cutting. His mind jumped from the journal to the mental-hospital records about Mayor Powell’s great grandfather to what Many Horses had said in his second dream: I was eaten not by fire, not water nor earth, but by man.
‘No!’ he cried.
‘Oh, yes,’ the priest said. ‘Caleb begged Father to go to the farm and save the squaw before it was too late. Father D’Angelo got six of his loyal parishioners, including the chief constable who I would guess was the Cartersburg librarian’s—Nyren—great-grandfather.
‘According to Father’s diary, it was snowing hard by the time the horsemen reached the Danby temple,’ McColl continued. ‘A dwarf and a strongman were packing crates in a wagon. They said they were leaving before they were sucked down into Joshua’s mad plan. They said Joshua and a score of his followers had gone off into the snowstorm after the squaw. Father D’Angelo, his men and Caleb Danby followed the tracks in the snow up Lawton Mountain to a cave where Joshua used to hold seances when it was warmer.’
Another strand of the parachute cord gave way. Six cords to freedom, Gallagher thought. A second candle snuffed and smoked. McColl stopped, squinting into the gloom.
‘Monsignor?’ Andie said. ‘What happened?’
‘It must have been a grisly thing to behold,’ the priest said. ‘Father wrote in his diary that he already knew what Hell would be like from what he witnessed and did that night in the cave. By the time they got there, Many Horses was dead. Joshua had slit her throat because she would not give him the secrets. He was in a frenzy. He had already cut off several pieces of her skin the size of wafers. Joshua was exhorting his followers to eat and drink of the squaw so that they might know their immortality.’
Andie shook her head in revulsion. ‘That’s why Lamont Powell cut out his teeth and his tongue before he killed himself.’
McColl acted as if he had not heard her. ‘Joshua’s followers had entered some kind of ecstatic, violent state brought on by the elixir when Father D’Angelo and his men stormed the cave. During the melee, Father D’Angelo got Joshua’s knife away from him and stabbed him in the heart. And the moment Joshua died, it was as if a fog lifted from the minds of his followers and they confronted what they had done.
‘They realized that if what had happened in Lawton that night ever came out, the town, the church and all its people would become as cursed and reviled as the Donner party,’ McColl said.
He glanced at Gallagher just as another strand let go. Andie called him, ‘So they decided to cover it up?’
McColl nodded. ‘What choice did they have? The mayor, a famous Civil War Veteran and a Manhattan socialite, had become drug addicts, spiritual fanatics and ghouls as well as accessories to murder under the influence of a sideshow messiah. The constable and five other parishioners had turned vigilante. The parish priest was a hot-blooded killer. Everyone present was fouled by the deaths of Joshua and the squaw.
‘So they dragged Joshua’s body back down the mountain and buried him in the root cellar under the temple,’ McColl continued. ‘Everyone swore themselves to secrecy for the common good. Several people, including your great-great-grandfather, Andie, were for burying the squaw with Joshua and burning the journal and the things they found in the leather bag she carried—a pipe, some stones, this lock of hair.
‘But Father D’Angelo would not hear of it. He buried her himself in sacred ground. He told the others with him that night that they were all responsible for her death. And they had the duty to preserve the relics of her story so that if the truth ever had to be revealed, Joshua’s followers could not disprove his guilt. No one trusted any one person to hold the journal. So it was divided.’
‘And passed down from one generation to the next,’ Andie said. ‘With each generation knowing less and less about what really happened.’
McColl did not answer. He dropped the lock of hair into a pouch before picking up Ten Trees’ pipe and studying it with great relish. Behind him, Danby’s hand moved ever so slightly.
Four strands to go, Gallagher thought. Unless McColl kept talking, he could not saw toward freedom. He watched for any sign that Danby would move again. But the giant lay still.
Gallagher thought about McColl’s admission that he was a sinner just like D’Angelo, probably a murderer just like D’Angelo. He played with that idea against why the priest would want the journal himself. And then it hit Gallagher. The priest was not interested in preserving a cover-up. It was about salvation.
‘Father D’Angelo murdered and yet performed miracles,’ Gallagher said. ‘You have sinned and you want the same gift.’
Andie saw where Gallagher was going and piped up. ‘You think D’Angelo somehow got his powers from Many Horses, don’t you?’
Night was falling. Nine of the twelve candles had snuffed out. McColl’s face flattened in the waning light.
‘That’s what Father D’Angelo believed,’ he said. ‘It haunted him that after killing his fellow man, he was granted the healing touch. He wrote that the Sioux visited him in dreams. He often wrote, “Who gave me the gift, the Christ or the savage?” ’
Gallagher’s mind flashed on an empty hole in the rectory garden. ‘You believe she did, don’t you, Monsignor?’ he demanded. ‘You’re like Joshua Danby—you believe the power is contained in her bones, her writing, her relics.’
‘I’m a dying man,’ McColl announced wearily. Two different kinds of cancer. Less than twenty months, the doctors figure. And I lost my personal relationship with Jesus many years ago. But relics are a proven way to touch the stuff of immortality. Maybe even to becoming a saint. Maybe even for a sinner like me.’
Two more strands of cord gave way and Gallagher’s fingers itched and tingled as blood returned to them.
‘That’s what my poor, mad, beloved boy didn’t understand,’ McColl said, throwing Danby’s inert form a sympathetic look ‘The last time I saw him was nearly eight years ago in Guatemala. I gave him that lovely knife and sheath he wears. Then, two months ago, he showed up out of the blue at my office. We played our little game. I made him confess to his naughtiness.’
The second-to-last parachute-cord strand broke free. Gallagher’s shoulders relaxed forward. McColl snapped his head suspiciously toward him. Gallagher did not move another muscle. He just held the priest’s gaze steady and true, telling himself, one more strand, one more strand.
Andie called to McColl. ‘Confess to what naughtiness, Monsignor?’
McColl hesitated, then curled his lips with distaste. To engaging in a bizarre, heathen, drug-saturated ritual invented by some South American slut who believed that through it you could experience death and return Terrance killed the slut during a sexual act in which they each throttled the other with the kind of noose you both have around your necks.
‘Terrance was wild at her death,’ McColl went on. ‘He told me he had to see his Angel again. He told me he was going to reclaim what was stolen from his great-great-uncles. That’s the story the surviving Danbys passed down from one generation to another that an Indian’s journal describing a method to consort with the dead was stolen from Joshua. And that Joshua had been murdered by Father D’Angelo for wanting it.
‘Of course, I immediately showed my boy the piece of the journal I had found, on the agreement that he show me whatever he might recover.’
‘But you didn’t show him D’Angelo’s diary,’ Gallagher said. ‘You didn’t explain to him what really happened a hundred years ago.’
‘It was just one man’s interpretation of the events, Mr Gallagher,’ the priest said blithely. ‘As a filmmaker, you can understand that. I offered Terrance what he wanted—advice on how he might track down the other pieces and form his own interpretation.’
‘But you had the list of journal holders from D’Angelo’s diary, didn’t you?’ Andie cried. ‘That’s how he found the people so quickly. You knew, and the stolen baptismal certificates were your way of keeping anyone else from finding the journal. You let those pe
ople be killed one by one. You let him slaughter your own secretary!’
McColl sniffed insistently. ‘I offered guidance. How was I to know his desire for revenge on the town was as strong as his desire for the journal?’
‘You’re as big a monster as he is!’ she shouted. ‘You used him on the town the same way you used him to kill that boy at Hennessy House twenty years ago. You set a maniac loose so you could get the journal for yourself when the killings were done. You planned to kill Terrance all along. Your beloved boy!’
The priest was expressionless for a long, long moment; then he turned stony and distant. He dropped the stuffed leather pouches and a few loose pages of the journal onto the floor. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I will have to kill three.’
‘You’re mad!’ Gallagher yelled.
‘No,’ McColl replied. ‘I am not.’
The priest’s left hand traveled inside his coat. He came out with an exact replica of the machete Danby carried. He took three quick steps toward Gallagher and trumpeted, ‘May God have mercy on your immortal soul!’
McColl raised the blade up over Gallagher’s head just as he felt the final cord binding his wrists give way.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
TERRANCE DANBY WAS A blur of doom in the twilight.
He sprang into a crouch and rushed the priest, kicking over a chair and one of the candles as he came.
‘Time to die, Father!’ he growled. ‘Time to take that boat ride across the river!’
McColl spun and slashed at the hurtling madman. Danby dropped and rolled. The priest’s blade passed an inch over his back. Danby kept rolling, deep into the far shadows of the room. The priest stalked after him.
‘You don’t want to kill me, Terrance,’ the priest soothed. ‘My boy, my boy, I’m Father, the only one who ever understood. The only one who ever will.’
Gallagher got up on all fours and saw the tomahawk lying underneath the overturned chair. He grabbed it and scrambled over to Andie. Neither man noticed. They were low, ready, ensnared in each other’s movements.
‘You’re a liar, Father,’ Danby seethed. ‘You wanted it just like all the others. You figured I was just a Danby and you could treat me like dogshit.’
Danby’s head glowed with death lust. But the blow to his skull had weakened the giant. He slurred and overbit his words. And every time he stepped to his left, there was a hesitation, a pause, as if he had to tell his body what to do next.
McColl must have seen the weakness, because just as Gallagher freed Andie, he stepped right and came at Danby with a vicious overhand strike. But the priest misjudged the depth of Danby’s malady. The memory of thousands of hours of training bypassed the befuddled parts of the assassin’s mind.
The madman lunged forward. His left forearm snapped out and cracked at the priest’s wrist, loosening his grip. McColl’s machete was flung through the air. Danby’s blade trembled at the priest’s throat.
‘My boy, my beloved boy,’ McColl gasped. He stood on tiptoes. ‘Don’t. I’m … Father!’
Danby hesitated for a long beat, then hissed the words slowly: ‘No, you’re not!’
The cut was horizontal and deep. The priest’s head lolled back at a sickening cant and there was a great gout of blood in the air and Monsignor McColl swayed and fell.
Danby tottered, transfixed by the quivering body below him. ‘You’re not!’
Andie plucked up McColl’s machete. She smiled at Gallagher in encouragement. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Before he recovers.’
She circled to Danby’s left around the last burning candles while Gallagher went right, clutching the tomahawk. Danby became aware of them then, coming up from some deep abyss that he had explored and mapped too many times before.
His jaw jutted forward to expose the rank of his yellowed lower teeth. He was hunched so far forward that all Gallagher could see were the whites of his eyes. His bloody knife was poised in the air.
‘Ever fought with a hatchet, brother?’ Danby asked dreamily.
Gallagher said nothing, watching him, aware of Andie creeping closer. Danby went for his boot and came up with a short-bladed knife. He had two weapons now, both of them working the twilight.
‘It should be darkest night,’ he said. ‘And the light should be from lanterns and the bugs should be at ya, biting. That’s how ya have a hatchet fight. That’s how ya the like this, brother. That’s how everything dies like this.’
Danby’s voice had taken on the accent of the Vermont backwoods boy he once was. The muscles in his neck vibrated like piano wire. Gallagher brought up the tomahawk and pointed the blade directly at him. Danby grinned and sidled toward him while his eyes tracked Andie’s progress. He made a sharp feint at Gallagher with the knife. Gallagher tried not to react, but he jerked. Danby laughed wickedly.
He made a second stab and then a third and Gallagher swung wildly. Danby neatly dodged outside the attack, danced in and slashed his left arm. Gallagher leaped back even as Andie screamed at the sight of his blood flowing.
The pain was as if a welder’s torch had stroked through his skin. Gallagher stumbled and fell to his knees, staring dumbly at the bleeding arm, the last two burning candles, the pile of leather pouches and six loose pages of the journal on the cabin floor.
Danby grunted with pleasure and stepped in, readying himself to finish.
‘Charun,’ Andie called, husky and soothing, with just the trace of a Spanish accent. ‘Come to me. Come to your Angel.’
Danby’s next step was off-balance. He weaved on his feet, confused. ‘Angel?’
‘Your sweet Persephone, Charun,’ Andie said, thrusting her hips and holding her open arms toward him. ‘Come on. We’ll try again to cross the river.’
Danby took two steps toward her and ran his tongue halfway across his upper lip before halting. And a look of recognition crossed his face. ‘You’re not Angel,’ he seethed. ‘You’re one of the little Lawton cunts who used to tease me on the playground when I was a kid! You used to make fun of my mother!’
Andie froze in terror and he lumbered across the room at her, huge and looming; and Gallagher pictured Joshua Danby cornering Sarah Many Horses in the cave before he killed her.
Gallagher grabbed the loose pages of the journal. ‘Danby, don’t, or I’ll burn it all!’
The madman’s great skulled head snapped in his direction.
Andie rushed Danby. She cut him hard and deep in the bulk of his upper back. Danby bellowed in agony, spun and stabbed. There was the low, hollow sound of a fist plumping a pillow, and Andie coughed and looked over his shoulder at Gallagher with a surprised look of despair scrawled across her face.
Danby arched up as if in ecstasy and released his hand. Andie staggered backward into the wall and slithered down it. The hunting knife handle stuck out of her two inches below the right clavicle. She looked at the knife hilt, then up at Gallagher with a drunken expression.
‘Our love?’ she asked.
A harsh and incomprehensible stillness descended over the cabin. The glowing around her ebbed and Gallagher saw the image of the total destruction of himself: a sunken-eyed man alone in the frigid waters of a winter river, desperately casting his line across sterile shallows toward the undercut bank of a foreign shore.
He thrust the free pieces of the journal into the candle flame. Dry and brittle, more than a century old, they burst afire.
Danby was grinning at Andie, enjoying her desperate struggle for life. ‘Are you afraid now?’ he asked her wickedly.
Out of the corner of his eye, Danby caught sight of the burning journal pages and he bellowed in rage and raced toward Gallagher, the machete cutting the air. Gallagher slumped on his knees, showing defeat. His bloody left hand lay over his right, which covered the tomahawk between his thighs. The journal pages flamed out, turned to blackest ash, tumbled and fragmented in the still, rank air.
‘Now Charun will row you across the river, brother!’ Danby ranted.
Gallagher gazed up into his
face and knew death, but was not afraid. ‘Do it, you sick fuck!’
Danby raised the machete with both hands as a farmer might a scythe before ripe wheat. As he reached the apex of his backswing high over his left shoulder, Gallagher spun on his knees, striking up and out with the tomahawk.
The stone blade shattered the low bones of Danby’s rib cage and buried itself to the back block in his lungs. An inexplicable, electric force bolted down the hatchet handle, crashed through Gallagher’s joints and exploded inside him. Gallagher’s vision strobed in shades of ebony and pewter. He heard an owl hoot. He smelled the rot of a river’s backwater.
Danby tried to scream, but all that issued forth was a series of long, moist rattles. The machete slipped from his hand. He buckled to his knees, and then forward on all fours, his body cringing, his head pitching from side to side.
Then he saw the red leather pouches Monsignor McColl had piled before the candle stubs and he reached for them in vain. The tips of his fingers brushed the ash of the burned journal pages and they crumbled to dust.
Danby collapsed onto his side, his soiled fingers splayed in fear and desire, his stone eyes staring through the expiring flame of the last candle before his lips moved one final time in knowing.
‘Persephone!’ he whispered.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
‘I FEEL LIKE I’M drowning,’ Andie choked.
There was surprisingly little blood around the knife handle, which seemed to be acting as a plug to the wound. But with each breath there was an audible bubbling and Gallagher knew her lung was pierced, filling and in danger of collapse.
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