October Skies

by Alex Scarrow

  Rose had headphones on. She could hear only what the directional mic was getting. To her it sounded delightfully creepy. A light breeze was teasing the firs and spruces around them. The swaying branches produced a chorus of conspiring whispers in the background.

  ‘Why do you think there are so many weird sightings and urban myths around these woods and mountains?’ Julian asked, cutting into the silence.

  Grace measured her quiet reply. ‘We got a lot of history here in Blue Valley. I guess when you got a bunch of history, you get a bunch of boogieman stories.’ She smiled. ‘We ain’t so used to having a lot of history around us, not like you Brits are.’

  Julian nodded and smiled.

  A branch snapped out in the darkness and Julian jerked nervously, spilling coffee from the mug he was cradling in his hands.

  ‘Uh . . . Grace, what the hell was that?’ He swallowed anxiously, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing like a fisherman’s float. Rose smiled at the grainy-green display in front of her.

  Jules plays the fool so naturally.

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Grace calmly, ‘just dead wood falling. It happens. Relax.’

  ‘God, I hate woods,’ he gasped with a cloud of vapour. ‘Anyway, you were saying?’

  Grace nodded. ‘History. We got a lot of it here; Indian history, followed by settler history. You know Emigrant Pass isn’t that far away from us.’

  ‘Emigrant Pass?’

  ‘It’s the one and only way through the Sierra Nevadas. At least, it was back in the 1850s when something like half a million people were migratin’ west,’ she continued. Rose listened intently to her dry throaty voice; a mesmerising monotone of Midwest vowels, back-woods charm and a lifetime of Marlboros.

  A perfect voice for storytelling.

  ‘They called the route a number of things back then; the South Pass trail, the Emigrant Trail, the Freedom Trail . . . I guess you’d know it best as the Oregon Trail. It was the route settlers were taking across the wilderness to Oregon. There wasn’t one fixed trail though. It was a bunch of different east-west routes that mostly followed the Platte River towards the Rockies. Those trails criss-crossed each other, each one promising some kinda shortcut that beat the others. But no matter how much they all twisted and turned, they all came together in the end. They converged at one critical point.’

  Grace pulled out a cigarette and lit up. The flame of her lighter flared brightly across Rose’s view screen, and then it flickered out a moment later.

  ‘Emigrant Pass. Half a million stories came through that gap in the mountains.’ She pulled on her cigarette, her lips pursed and lined like a puckered tobacco pouch. ‘And they was superstitious people back then. Many strongly religious types, devout types, you know? Like the Mormons, for example.’

  Julian nodded.

  ‘You ever hear the saying “seeing the elephant”?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘It was a myth that grew up along the trail. All the hazards of that journey, the terrain, the weather, disease, crooks, Indians . . . it somehow all got rolled up into one frightening mythological beast - the elephant; the size of a mountaintop, or a storm front, or the size of a broken cart wheel. If you caught a glimpse of the elephant ahead of you in the distance it was meant to be an omen, an omen to turn back right away, and go no further. And you sure as hell did that and thanked God you saw the elephant from afar, and not up close.’

  Julian looked out into the darkness. Rose instinctively panned the camera away from him in the direction he was looking - towards the tree line across the clearing. ‘Do you think we’ll see anything tonight?’ he asked.

  Grace laughed - a loose rattling sound like a leather flap caught in a wind tunnel. ‘Maybe we’ll see that elephant, eh?’

  Julian turned round to look at the park ranger, then turned to look directly at the camera, his mouth a rounded ‘O’, those brows quizzically arched and his eyes wide like a nervous child’s.

  Rose giggled silently. Jules had the kind of comedian’s face the camera loved.

  CHAPTER 2

  Friday

  Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

  Julian was woken by his aching groin.

  Oh great, I need a piss.

  He realised that he was going to have to step outside the tent.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Shit and bloody bollocks.’

  The campfire would be no more than glowing embers now and both Grace, with her reassuringly large hunting rifle, and Rosie were fast asleep, tucked away in their own tents. He really wasn’t that keen on the idea of wandering over to the tree line for a necessary piss. But Grace had warned them to pee well away from the tents, as the smell of urine could confuse a bear - could be construed as territorial marking.

  ‘Oh, come on, you wimp,’ he chided himself.

  He wrestled his way out of the bag, fumbled for the torch and then, having found it and snapped it on, fumbled for his glasses.

  ‘Two minutes and you’ll be back in bed, snug as a bloody bug.’

  He squeezed out of his tiny tent and panned the torch around the clearing, Grace’s parting words for the night still playing around with his over-active mind.

  Did you know grizzlies can run as fast as a horse? Oh . . . and the smaller ones can climb trees?

  Julian grimaced. ‘Yeah, thanks for that, Grace,’ he hissed, watching the plume of his breath quickly dissipate in the crisp night air.

  He stepped lightly across the clearing, navigating his way over the lumps and bumps of long-dead and fallen trees. The beam of his torch flickered like a light sabre through the wispy night mist, picking out the uneven floor of the clearing, carpeted in a thick, spongy layer of moss. He was surprised at how much it undulated and guessed that perhaps some time in the past someone had been logging here, but never got round to finishing the job, leaving an assault course of rotting trunks and branches for him to awkwardly clamber over.

  He made his way to the far side of the clearing and came to a halt on the edge, staring uneasily at a tangle of brambles and undergrowth leading up towards a wall of dense foliage - the start of the wood.

  He turned to look back at the tents.

  Sixty feet . . . is that far enough away?

  He decided it would have to do. There was no way on earth he was actually going to step through the dense web of undergrowth ahead of him and into the woods. No way.

  This is good enough.

  He unzipped, feeling a sudden gotta-go rush that he couldn’t contain any longer, and, with a long groan of satisfaction, he let rip. His torch picked out the steaming silver arc and he watched with detached interest as the jet of piss stripped away - like a pressure hose cleaning a graffiti-covered wall - the delicate blanket of moss on a rounded log in front of him.

  It wasn’t until he’d shaken off and tucked away, and then played his torch more thoroughly across the small arc of exposed dark wood, that his curiosity was piqued enough to take a step forward.

  The exposed wood was curiously smooth, not natural. He reached out with his fingers and ran them along the surface. It was old and evenly curved. He rubbed a little further along the exposed arc, moss rolling off effortlessly into little doughy balls under his fingers. By the torchlight he could see the remains of a rusted metal band, dislodged dark brown flakes tumbling from it. He ran his torch down and noticed several unnaturally straight ridges in the mossy surface, converging on a bumpy hub. He rubbed the moss off one of the ridges to find the smooth, weathered form of what quite clearly was wood once turned on a lathe.

  A spoke?

  He straightened up. ‘That’s a wheel. That’s a wagon wheel.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Friday

  Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

  ‘See?’ he said, waving at the clearing.

  Grace and Rose looked around. Through the morning mist they could see it was about a hundred yards in diameter, and roughly elliptical in shape. The floor of the clearing seemed to be one
large, rumpled, emerald-green quilt draped delicately over the messy floor of a child’s bedroom.

  ‘Whoa . . . the whole clearing’s . . . ?’

  ‘One big camp.’

  Rose panned her camera round in a slow, steady loop.

  Julian stepped towards a rounded hump, knelt down beside it, and rubbed away the covering moss, exposing the spokes of another wheel. ‘Another wagon,’ he said, and surveyed the clearing. ‘There must be several dozen wagons buried here.’

  Grace’s eyes narrowed. She pulled off her ranger’s cap and tucked a loose tress of silver hair behind one ear. ‘My God,’ she said, blowing cigarette smoke out of her nostrils. ‘A whole wagon train, up here in our mountains. Sheeesh . . . been walking these woods for years’ - she turned to Julian - ‘never knew this was here.’

  Rose looked at Grace. ‘This is quite a find, isn’t it?’

  Grace nodded silently. ‘Hell, could be another Donner Party.’

  ‘Donner Party?’

  ‘Party of emigrants that went missing on the way to Oregon in the 1850s. They were too slow making for the pass and got snowed into the mountains. Not too far from here - about a hundred miles further south.’

  ‘I’ve heard of that,’ said Julian.

  She nodded. ‘Helluva grim story. They went missing over the winter, but were found come spring. What was left of them.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ said Rose.

  ‘Yeah.’ Grace nodded. ‘They resorted to cannibalism. The papers at the time were full of made-up variations of that tale. People scared their kids with the story for generations after.’

  They studied the clearing in silence, their eyes making sense of - telling stories with - the contours hidden beneath a century and a half of growth and organic detritus.

  ‘What we got here,’ uttered Grace, ‘is a heritage site. That means I’ve got to call this in to the National Parks Service.’

  Julian bit his lip in thought. ‘Grace, will you excuse me and Rose for a moment?’

  ‘Change of plan,’ he said quietly to her. ‘Okay, we came out here to basically poke fun at a whole load of gullible straw-chewing rednecks and their stories of abductions and Big Foot sightings and Glowy Things In The Sky.’

  Rose nodded. ‘Yeah. I’m guessing we aren’t doing that now?’

  Julian grinned. ‘Christ, no. That’s the sort of bottom-shelf schedule-filler I’d love us to leave behind. This’ - he gestured at the clearing around them - ‘is like finding the bloody Titanic.’

  ‘But we won’t have it to ourselves for long if she’s calling it in, Jules.’

  ‘I know. Grace is a good ol’ girl and wants to do the right thing. After all, in US terms, this is ancient history. To them it’ll be like finding Stonehenge.’

  ‘That’s my point, though. This site will be crawling with archaeology students and American history lecturers.’

  Julian nodded. ‘But we found it, so surely we deserve the scoop, do we not?’

  Rose nodded. ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘There’ll be a human-interest story here, Rose. A powerfully strong one. And if we can find out who they were and how they ended up here, and if they survived . . . ?’ He looked around at the uneven floor of the clearing. ‘There’ll be all sorts of personal artefacts buried here to give us names. There’s bound to be family these people left behind, descendants today who’ll have a curious family story of their great-great-uncle Bill who travelled west to the promised land and was never heard from again.’ Julian turned to her. ‘I say we drop the stupid bloody project we were doing and instead let’s dig up what we can on this.’

  ‘Errrm.’ Rose tapped her chin with her finger. ‘Didn’t someone commission this stupid bloody project. You know . . . money? A paying customer?’

  ‘Stuff that. RealityUK are a truly shit reality channel paying us a piss-poor commission for this. Not to put too fine a point on it - screw them.’

  Rose looked sceptical. ‘But it’s money.’

  ‘Look, I know money’s tight right now, but I’ll find some other small independents who’ll front some cash for us to work on this. Or better still, I’ll talk to my old contacts at the BBC. I’m still on chatting terms with Sean, and the guys on Panorama. Everyone’s going to want a piece of this.’

  He looked across at Grace, who was squatting down and cautiously examining the wheel spokes he’d exposed.

  ‘We just need a little time,’ he said.

  Rose swung the strap of her kit bag off her shoulder and started to unpack her camera. ‘I should grab as much of this on film as I can, you know . . . whilst it’s still pristine.’

  Julian nodded. ‘You’re right. I’ll talk to Grace. See if I can’t convince her to delay a little before calling it in to her boss.’

  Grace sucked in cool air through her teeth with a whistling sound. ‘See, I’m gonna have to call this in to the park’s manager. Seeing as this is a heritage site now.’

  Julian nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Mind you,’ she sighed, ‘Lord knows what they’ll do with it. Stick a gift shop in the middle of it, I guess; flag it up as a place of interest to hike to,’ she muttered, exhaling a cloud of smoke and vapour and shaking her head. ‘Gotta call it in though.’

  The park ranger shook her head. ‘Sorry, I got to inform someone about this. The proper authorities, you understand? Otherwise, when it gets made public, there’ll be all sorts of souvenir hunters out here pickin’ this place to pieces.’

  ‘I know,’ said Julian, ‘you’re right, I suppose it has to be done. But give us a little time? Just a week or so? Give Rose a chance to film this site properly, as it is now, pristine. Because . . . even before the Parks Service get a chance to stick up a gift shop and barbecue pits nearby, there’ll be heritage buffs pulling this place apart, marker poles pegged out across it. It’ll look like a bloody building site, with archaeology undergrads and TV news teams tramping carelessly everywhere. ’

  Grace regarded him silently with her steel-grey eyes.

  ‘You know how this’ll go, don’t you?’ asked Julian. ‘Everyone’ll want a piece of this; the Parks Service, state authorities, local press, national press.’

  Grace shrugged. The Parks Service had gravelled over a century-old logging camp to build the Blue Valley camp site. They’d even dammed the Tahoe river to produce a scenic lake alongside it. She knew exactly what they’d want to do with this place.

  ‘Grace, give me a chance to find out who these people were, to find out their stories.’

  Her wind-worn face creased with suspicion. ‘You want the scoop?’

  Julian offered her a guilty smile. ‘Well, yes.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Please. We’ll be so very, very careful. I promise you.’

  She could already see the gift shop in the very centre, several ‘how-it-must-have-looked’ dioramas dotted around, and to one side, a children’s play area floored with that safety rubber tarmac . . . and for guest convenience electricity outlets embedded in the trunks of the surrounding trees . . .

  She pursed her lips.

  . . . And discarded Snickers wrappers for miles around this place.

  ‘I’m a researcher, Grace. I used to work for the BBC. It’s what I do best. I can give faces and voices to the people who lie here, before this place gets trampled.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘what do you think a FOX news team would do with this? If there’s even a hint that these people ended up like the Donner Party, that’s all they’ll focus on. And the likes of the National Enquirer? It’ll just be a sensational story about cannibalism, that’s it. Give me a week, maybe two, and I’ll find out who they were, their dreams, what drove them west, how they ended up trapped here.’

  ‘Two weeks?’

  ‘No more. It’s sat here for what? A hundred and fifty years? Is two more weeks’ rest going to do any harm?’

  She pulled a face he could
n’t read as she reached for her crumpled packet of cigarettes and eased out another.

  ‘We’ll not be up here all that time, either. Just today, and maybe come back for another day in a week or two. We’ll let Rose get all the footage she wants, and I’ll try and see if I can unearth any personal effects—’

  Grace looked at him sharply.

  ‘Gently, ever so carefully,’ he said, throwing his hands up in surrender.

  ‘I don’t want you pulling this place apart,’ she said sternly.

  Julian put on his best pleading, beseeching face - a family dog begging beside a laden dinner table.

  ‘All right,’ she said gruffly as she lit up. ‘You got two weeks.’

  CHAPTER 4

  Friday

  Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

  During the morning Rose diligently filmed the site from all angles. She had Julian doing a variety of walk-through shots. She set up the camera in the clearing, filming him and Grace emerging from the tree line and pretending to act surprised at their discovery.

  Julian was impressed by how dutifully compliant Grace was. A stern-faced schoolmarmish lady who didn’t seem the type to suffer this kind of foolishness gladly, she generously played along. By mid-morning Rose felt she had enough in the can and started taking high-resolution close-up shots of some of the exposed remains.

  As they explored the site, delicately wiping away the veil of moss and peat, it was becoming clear that there was a lot hidden beneath; timbers that had once upon a time made up wagons had not fared well; now rotten, black and jagged like decayed teeth. However, nestling amongst these fragile skeletons of wood, they were beginning to discover a multitude of personal effects that had been preserved surprisingly well.

  In the last hour Julian had unearthed a stash of ceramic items - crockery, much of it still in one piece, stored as it was in barrels of cornmeal. They found the rusted metal remains of a long-barrelled musket, which Grace called a Kentucky rifle, and the remnants of several wooden tool boxes, one complete with a suite of carpentry tools, their metal blades dull with corrosion.