Angel, Louis and I rode in Jackie’s truck. Liat followed behind in her rental. It was a private road, but one routinely used by locals and hunters. Still, Jackie had secured all the necessary permits, just in case, so we were right with the paper company, the warden service, and probably God Himself.
‘You didn’t want to ride with your girlfriend?’ asked Angel from the back.
‘I think she was just using me.’
‘Right,’ said Angel. He allowed a perfectly timed pause, then said, ‘For what?’
‘Funny,’ I replied, although there was an uncomfortable truth behind Angel’s joke.
We passed a couple of trucks and old cars parked by the side of the road: hunters, the ones who had set out before dawn and would return to town by early afternoon if they’d shot anything. Most hunters liked to stay close to a road, and within five miles of Falls End there were a lot of edges where deer came to feed. There was no reason to go very far into the woods, and so we were unlikely to encounter hunting parties where we were going; at least, not the kind that hunt buck. The road was narrow, and at one point we had to pull over to allow a company truck loaded with logs to pass us. It was the only such vehicle we met along the way.
We reached the point where the road made a definite dog-leg east, and there we pulled over. There was still frost on the ground, and the air was noticeably colder than it had been down in Falls End. Liat arrived a minute or two behind us, just as Jackie began unloading our supplies and Louis was checking the rifles. We had a 30.06 each, as well as handguns. Liat had no rifle, but I didn’t doubt that she had a gun. She kept her distance from us, watching the woods.
Jackie Garner seemed bemused by her presence.
‘She’s deaf, right?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s why you don’t have to whisper.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ He thought about it, but kept whispering. ‘How’s a deaf woman going to get by in the woods?’
‘She’s deaf, Jackie, not blind.’
‘I know, but we gotta be quiet, don’t we?’
‘She’s also a mute. I’m no expert, but people who can’t speak tend to be quieter than the rest of us.’
‘Suppose she steps on a twig, and makes a noise. How will she know?’
Angel joined us. ‘What are you, some kind of Buddhist? If a tree falls in the forest, I can tell you now that she won’t hear it.’
Jackie shook his head in frustration. We were clearly missing the point.
‘She’s coming with us, Jackie,’ I told him. ‘Live with it.’
We didn’t plan to be in the woods after dark, but Jackie had still insisted that we bring a groundsheet each. We also had plenty of water, coffee, chocolate, energy bars, nuts, and, courtesy of Jackie, a bag of pasta. Even with the addition of Liat, we had enough to keep us going for a day or more. There were also waterproof matches, cups, one lightweight saucepan, a pair of compasses, and a GPS unit, although Jackie said that we might have trouble getting a signal where we were going. We divided the equipment and supplies between us, and set out. There was no further discussion. We all knew what we were looking for, and what might be out there. I hadn’t shared what we suspected of Malphas’s possible nature with Jackie, and so Jackie had been skeptical that anyone who had survived the crash might still be out there. I shared something of his point of view, but I wasn’t about to bet my life, or anyone else’s, on it.
Jackie led, Louis behind him, then Liat, Angel, and I. Jackie’s concerns about Liat were unfounded: of all of us, it was she who stepped the softest. While Angel and Louis, unused to the woods, wore leather boots with thick treads, Liat, Jackie and I wore lighter boots with only slight ribbing, the better to feel what lay beneath our feet. Treads could mean the difference between stepping on a branch and bending it, or breaking it entirely. For now we also wore orange vests, and baseball caps with reflective strips. We didn’t want some overenthusiastic hunter to mistake us for deer, or raise the suspicions of a warden if we encountered one. Thirty minutes in we heard gunshots to the south, but otherwise we might have been entirely alone in the woods.
The going was relatively easy for the first couple of hours, but then the terrain began to change. There were more ridges to climb, and I could feel the strain in the backs of my legs. Shortly after midday we startled an adolescent buck from a copse of alder, his antlers little more than extended buds, and later there was a flash of brown and white to our left as a doe moved quickly through the trees. She spotted us, seemed to pause in confusion, and changed direction, cutting away from us until we lost sight of her. We noticed the trace of bigger bucks, and there were places where the stink of deer urine was strong enough to make one gag, but those were the only large animals we saw.
After three hours, we stopped and made coffee. Despite the cold, I was sweating under my jacket, and I was grateful for the rest. Louis dropped beside me.
‘How you doing, city boy?’ I said.
‘Yeah, like you Grizzly Adams,’ he replied. ‘How much farther?’
‘Two hours, I reckon, if we keep making this kind of progress.’
‘Damn.’ He pointed at the sky. There were clouds gathering. ‘Doesn’t look good.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
Jackie finished brewing the coffee and served it up. He gave his cup to Liat, and drank his own by pouring it from the pot into a small thermos. He separated himself from the rest of us, and stood on a small ridge looking back in the direction from which we had come. I followed him up there. He didn’t look happy.
‘You okay?’ I asked.
‘Rattled, that’s all,’ he said.
‘By what we’re doing?’
‘And where we’re going.’
‘In and out, Jackie. We’re not planning on settling there.’
‘I guess.’ He swished the coffee around in his mouth, and spat. ‘And there’s the doe we saw.’
‘What about it?’
‘Something spooked it, and it wasn’t us.’
I stared out at the forest. This wasn’t first growth, and so the foliage was still thick.
‘Could have been a hunter,’ I said. ‘Even a bobcat or a lynx.’
‘Like I said, maybe I’m just rattled.’
‘We could hold back, see if anyone comes,’ I said, ‘but there’s rain on the way, and whatever hope we have of finding that plane depends on good light. And we don’t want to be stuck out here for a night.’
Jackie shivered. ‘I hear that. Come dark, I want to be in a bar with a drink in my hand, and that fort far behind me.’
We returned to the others. Liat approached me. I couldn’t have mistaken the questioning look on her face, but she still mouthed the words, just to be sure: What is it?
‘Jackie was concerned that something might have spooked the doe we saw earlier,’ I answered, loud enough for Angel and Louis to hear. ‘Something, or someone, following behind us.’
She extended her hand. Another question: What do we do?
‘It could be nothing, so we keep going. If there is someone following, we’ll find out who it is soon enough.’
Jackie poured the rest of the coffee into his thermos, packed away his little Primus stove, and we moved off, but there was a palpable change in our mood. I found myself checking behind me as we walked, and Jackie and I would pause on the higher ridges, seeking movement on the lower ground.
But we saw no one, and at last we came to the fort.
49
My first thought was that Fort Mordant was less the thing itself than the memory of it made manifest. The forest had done its best to blur and disguise its lines as though to discourage closer examination: its walls were covered in poison ivy, like waterfalls of green tumbling over precipices, and hemlock and common juniper had taken advantage of storm damage to mature trees by using them as nurseries. Cairns of stones, perhaps remnants of the original clearance of the land for the fort’s construction, had become shadowed by moss, lending them the aspect of funeral markers
. Somewhere nearby must have been the actual graves of the fort’s original occupants, but I suspected they were long lost to the woods.
In that, I was soon to be proved wrong.
Mordant itself bore some resemblance to the only other such fortification I’d seen in the state: the old Fort Western in Augusta, although on a smaller scale. There were guard towers at each corner, about two stories high, with horizontal slit windows looking over the forest. Inside, although their roofs had long since collapsed, it was possible to see the remains of buildings on three of the four inside walls, with only the wall containing the main gate left free. One had clearly been a stable, because the stalls were still visible, but there was also plenty of room for the storage of supplies. The building opposite seemed to consist of one long single room, and had probably served as a barracks for the men. On the wall facing the gate was a smaller building, but here the division of rooms was obvious: quarters for the commanding officer and his ill-fated family.
‘There,’ said Jackie. He pointed into the smaller bushes, and when I looked at them from his angle I could see the rough path through them.
‘Deer?’
‘No, a man did that.’
Angel, Louis and Liat moved into the fort, their weapons ready. Jackie and I remained outside, but Jackie’s attention was torn between the fort and the way that we had just come.
‘You’re making me nervous, Jackie,’ I said.
‘The hell with you, I’m making myself nervous.’
‘Would you rather be in there?’
Perhaps it was our knowledge of its history, but there was a deeply unsettling ambience about the fort. Despite its decay, there was a sense of occupancy about it. That trail between the forest and the gate had been regularly used.
‘No, I would not. I’ll take my chances out here.’
There was a whistle from inside the fort: Angel. Louis was above whistling.
‘At least if there’s trouble, you can lock the gate and hide inside,’ said Jackie.
‘There is no gate. If there’s trouble, we’re all taking our chances out here.’
Angel appeared at the entrance.
‘You need to take a look at this,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay with Jackie.’
Louis and Liat were in the commanding officer’s living quarters. The ramparts on the rear wall overhung the interior, creating a natural shelter that had been augmented by a tarpaulin fixed into the wood with nails and supported by two metal bars driven into the ground. I smelled excrement, and urine. A layer of insulating material had been attached to the walls, again held in place by sheets of plastic, to provide further warmth. On the ground was a sleeping bag, along with a half-filled five gallon container of water, a small gas camping stove, and canned food: beans and soups, for the most part. It might have been the temporary home of a down-and-out, or the hardier kind of hiker, were it not for its location deep in the Maine wilderness, and the decorations upon the walls. They were family snaps, but not of any single family: here were a man and a woman and two young girls, all blond, and next to them a man and woman on their wedding day, older and darker than the people in the preceding picture. Around them were photos and drawings culled from newspapers and pornographic magazines, cut and collaged to make new and foul illustrations, all anti-religious in nature, the heads of Christ and the Virgin Mary and Buddha and figures that I couldn’t even identify, Asian and Middle Eastern in origin, transposed onto naked bodies bared obscenely. They were concentrated in one corner, for the most part, above a makeshift stone altar adorned with shattered statuary and old bones, animal and human intermingled. Some of the bones looked very, very old. Among them were a handful of tarnished military buttons. If I were to guess, I would have said that someone had dug up the remains of the soldiers who had died here.
‘Malphas,’ I said.
‘Why would he stay out here?’ asked Louis. ‘Assuming Wildon and the pilot died in the crash, he was free and clear. He could just go back to doing whatever he was doing before Wildon found him.’
‘Could be that he didn’t want to,’ I said.
‘You think he liked the outdoor life so much he decided to spend part of his time in a ruined fort making collages from pornography?’
It didn’t sound likely. Liat watched us both, following the conversation on our lips.
‘Part of the time,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You said he spent “part of his time” at the fort. This doesn’t look like a permanent dwelling, and those pictures on the wall were put there recently. Where does he spend the rest of his time, and why would he hole up in this place anyway if he’s made a permanent home somewhere else?’
I looked to Liat, but she had turned her back on us. Now she beckoned us to join her as she examined something carved into the wood, light against dark.
It was a detailed representation of a young girl’s head, two or three times normal size, her hair long and curling from her scalp like the bodies of snakes. Her eyes had been cut deeper and larger than the rest of her, the ovals of them so big that I could have placed my fist in them had they not been filled with teeth, the roots of them impaled in the white wood. There were more teeth in her huge mouth, except these ones were root-out, giving them the appearance of fangs. It was terrifying in aspect and effect.
‘If you’re frightened of something, where better to hide than a fort?’ I said.
‘A fort with no gates?’ said Louis.
‘A fort with bad memories,’ I replied. ‘A fort with blood in its walls and its dirt. Maybe a fort like that doesn’t need gates.’
‘He was frightened of a little girl?’ Louis sounded skeptical.
‘If what I’ve heard about her is true, he had good cause to be.’
‘But he stayed out here, even though he was scared of her. I guess that plane must be real important to him.’
Liat shook her head.
‘Not the plane?’ I said.
She mouthed the word no.
‘Then what?’
She made it clear that she didn’t know. In the fading light, and the shadows of the old fort, I almost missed the lie.
Almost.
50
Ray Wray was running.
He wasn’t sure how it had all gone so wrong so fast, but he knew now that he and Joe had been out of their depth right from the start. They should have backed away the first time that the kid and the woman had come near them, except Joe owed them and they were calling in the debt, and Joe had given Ray to understand that these weren’t the kind of people on whom one reneged. He was just grateful to Ray for tagging along, even if Ray wouldn’t have been anywhere near those woods if he hadn’t been so desperate for cash.
They’d made good progress from the start. The kid might have been spookier than a haunted house on Halloween, but the little bastard could move, and there had been no complaints from the woman about the pace that had been set, either on her own behalf or the kid’s. While Joe had the map, and a good sense of where they were going, it often seemed to Ray that it was the woman who was guiding them, and not the other way around. When Joe paused to check his malfunctioning compass, the woman would simply keep on walking, the kid trotting behind her, and when Joe and Ray caught up with them there was no need to alter direction.
Ray figured they were less than a mile from the fort when the first arrow struck. His first thought was, Indians! which was absurd and unhelpful but there was no understanding the workings of the human mind. Even as he hit the ground, and heard Joe swear, he’d found himself giggling, and it was only when he looked up and saw the arrow buried in the trunk of a white pine that he stopped laughing and began considering that he might die out here.
Joe was a few feet to his left, trying to find the source of the arrow.
‘Hunter?’ asked Ray, but he asked more in hope than expectation. They were still wearing their orange bibs. There had been some discussion about it, but Ray and Joe had finally taken the view that, with a wo
man and a kid in tow, it was better to be safe. It would have to be one dumb-ass bow hunter who’d shoot an arrow at someone in orange.
‘No fuckin’ way,’ said Joe, which was just what Ray had thought.
The Flores woman was using a thick oak for cover. Still searching the forest for the source of the arrow, Joe called back to her.
‘Miss Flores, you got any idea who that might be?’
Something darted behind a wind-tipped hemlock, the old tree resembling an animal more than vegetation, its body seemingly poised to rise up on its roots and stride through the forest. The moving figure revealed itself to be a big man, his head misshapen, the bow clearly visible in his hand. Ray didn’t think: he just fired. There was an explosion of bark from the hemlock, and then Joe was firing too. The man retreated fast, limping some yet still nimble, but Ray was pretty certain that one or other of them had winged him. Ray had seen him stumble awkwardly on the third or fourth shot: upper body, maybe the right arm or shoulder. It was only when he and Joe stopped shooting that he realized the Flores woman had been shouting. Against the fading echo of the shots, and the ringing in his ears, he heard the word ‘No!’
‘The hell do you mean, “No”?’ asked Joe. He had emptied his rifle, and was reloading from a prone position, lying on his back while Ray provided cover for him.
‘I don’t want him hurt,’ said Flores.
‘Miss, I signed up to get you to that airplane, and get you safely out again,’ said Joe. He finished reloading and scanned the trees. ‘I did not sign up to get myself killed.’
The arrow seemed to materialize in Joe’s left leg. One second he was just lying there, preparing to say something else to Flores, and the next the three-blade head had punched its way straight through his thigh, and Joe’s mouth was wide open in a scream as the blood began to spill, the wound already hemorrhaging massively. Ray had never seen so much blood pump so quickly from a man. He moved to help as Joe rose up and a second arrow hit him low in the back, and Ray knew instantly that Joe was going to die. He coughed up a great spray of red as Ray crawled to him and, using his friend’s body as cover, began shooting into the forest, hoping to hit something, anything. Joe just grunted as the third arrow struck his back. This one must have pierced his heart because his body shook hard once beneath Ray and then went still.
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