The Wrath of Angels

by John Connolly

  Andrea joined him. She pulled down the collar of his jacket to expose the wasp sting, and hissed in sympathy.

  ‘That looks bad,’ she said.

  She slipped her pack off and found the tube of antiseptic lotion in the small first-aid kit. Carefully she applied it to the sting.

  ‘You’re not allergic to wasp stings, are you?’

  ‘You know I’m not. I’ve been stung before. They don’t affect me badly.’

  ‘Uh, this one is really big, and it seems to be spreading.’

  ‘I swear, I can feel it in my spine.’

  ‘I have some lorazepam in my suitcase,’ she said. ‘That should help. You might need to see a doctor if it doesn’t start going down.’

  In the distance, one more thin shape among the trees, she could see the man watching them.

  ‘How long have we been following him?’

  ‘I don’t know. My watch has stopped.’

  ‘Stopped?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  They compared watches. The time on Andrea’s watch showed five minutes later than her husband’s, but Andrea always set her watch five minutes fast. Both watches had stopped at the same time.

  ‘That’s weird,’ said Chris.

  ‘This is all weird,’ said Andrea. ‘And it’s going to be dark soon.’

  Her voice cracked slightly on the word ‘dark’. She was holding it together, but only barely.

  ‘We could go back the way we came, but what good would that do?’ he said. ‘We’d be back in the same position that we were in earlier. We have to trust him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s what people do when they have no choice.’

  ‘He means us harm.’

  ‘Come on, not this again . . .’

  ‘I’m telling you. And I’d swear he’s leading us in circles.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I don’t know it, but I feel it.’

  She saw the stranger’s head tilt slightly, as though he had heard what she said. She couldn’t get over how dark his silhouette was. Even when the light had been good, she’d been unable to tell how he was dressed, or discern the lineaments of his face. He was like a shadow given life.

  ‘What’s he doing now?’

  The man’s gestures had changed. He was pointing to his right, jabbing a finger in that direction. Once he was sure that they’d seen what he was doing, he raised the same hand and waved them farewell, then disappeared into the trees, away from whatever he had been pointing at.

  ‘He’s leaving,’ said Chris. ‘Hey, where are you going?’

  But the man could no longer be seen. The shadow had been absorbed by the greater shade of the forest.

  ‘Well,’ said Chris, ‘we may as well go see what he was pointing at. Could be a road, or a house, or even a town.’

  Andrea adjusted her pack on her back and followed her husband. Her eyes kept returning to the patch of darkness into which the stranger had vanished, straining to penetrate it. She wanted him to be gone, but she was not certain that he was. She sensed him waiting in there, watching them. It was only when her husband spoke that she realized she had stopped walking. She willed her feet to move, but they wouldn’t. She wondered if this was how vulnerable animals reacted when faced with a predator, and if that was why they died.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Chris. ‘Wherever he was taking us, we’re almost there.’

  The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. Her skin prickled. He isn’t gone, she wanted to tell him. We can’t see him, but he’s still out there. He’s led us somewhere, but it’s nowhere that we want to be.

  The slightest of breezes arose. It was almost a blessing until they smelled the stench carried upon it. There were birds in the air now: crows. She could hear their cawing. She wondered if crows were attracted by dead things.

  ‘It’s stronger now,’ said Chris. ‘It smells like a rendering plant. You know, paper mills smell real bad. That could be what’s causing it: a paper mill.’

  ‘Out here?’

  ‘Out where? We don’t even know where here is. We were so lost we could have traveled to Canada and not realized it. Come on.’

  He reached out for her hand again, but still she did not respond in kind.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You stay here, and I’ll go see what’s up there.’

  He moved away from her, but she grabbed at his pack, holding him back.

  ‘I don’t want to be left here alone.’

  He smiled. It was his other smile, the indulgent, patronizing one that he gave her when he thought she was failing to grasp something very simple, the one that made her feel about nine years old. She thought of it as his ‘man smile’, because only men ever used it. It was ingrained in their DNA. This time, though, it didn’t make her angry, just sad. He didn’t understand.

  Chris came to her, and gave her an awkward hug.

  ‘We’ll see what he was pointing at, then make our decision, okay?’ said Chris.

  ‘Okay.’ Her voice sounded tiny against his chest.

  ‘I love you. You know that, right?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re supposed to tell me that you love me too.’

  ‘I know that as well.’

  He gave her a playful poke in the ribs.

  ‘Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.’

  ‘A cocktail. With champagne.’

  ‘With champagne. Lots of champagne.’

  Hand in hand, they walked to the rise.

  12

  As predicted, the evening news bulletin contained a lot of information about Perry Reed and his activities, both business and personal. At 10.40 p.m. the night before, while I was still mulling over what I had just been told of airplanes and lists, Henry Gibbon and Alex Wilder, two close associates of Reed, king of the far Northeast’s used auto dealers, were stopped by police and DEA agents as they drove their respective vehicles from the parking lot of a biker bar ten miles east of Harden. When the cars were searched, the trunks were found to contain a combined total of $50,000 worth of OxyContin and heroin, which came as a surprise to Gibbon and Wilder as a) they were not heroin dealers; and b) the trunks had been empty when they parked the cars. In addition, Wilder’s car contained substantial quantities of child pornography on a number of USB drives, and a cell phone with more than a dozen suspected providers of child prostitutes among its saved contacts. Both cars were registered to one Perry Reed of Harden, Maine.

  At one a.m., a fire swept through the auto lot at Perry’s Used Autos in Harden, aided by high winds and thirty gallons of ethyl alcohol as accelerant, destroying his entire inventory, all of the buildings on the lot, and the titty bar adjacent to it.

  At 3.30 a.m., Perry Reed was arrested following a search of his house that produced a large quantity of discs and USB drives containing twenty-five thousand pornographic images of children, and a cell phone programmed with numbers identical to those found on the phone in Alex Wilder’s car. In addition, police discovered an unlicensed Llama pistol with pearl grips and a chrome finish, a pistol that would, following examination, be found to have been used in the shooting dead of two men in an apartment in Brooklyn the previous year, and possibly the severe beating of their female companion whose head injuries had left her in a persistent vegetative state. Their numbers, too, would be found on both Wilder’s and Reed’s cell phones, and Perry Reed’s prints would be found on the weapon, having been lifted from a coffee mug in his office and transferred to the gun before it was planted, a fact that was obviously unknown to the police and, indeed, to Perry Reed.

  One of the detectives was later heard to comment that Perry Reed was officially in more trouble than any other single human being he’d ever encountered in the course of his entire career, closely followed by Alex Wilder, with Henry Gibbon a distant third. The arrests were credited to an anonymous tip-off, and everyone seemed pret
ty satisfied with a good night’s work, with the possible exception of Perry Reed who was pleading innocence and demanding to know who had burned down his auto lot and titty bar, but since Perry Reed was now facing the likelihood of a lifetime in prison, nobody cared very much what he thought.

  ‘Very unfortunate for Perry,’ I said to Angel later that night, as he and Louis sat in a booth at the back of the Great Lost Bear, the same booth in which I had spoken to Marielle and Ernie the night before. Both men were drinking Mack Point IPA from the Belfast Brewing Company, and making Dave Evans feel uneasy for reasons that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Angel and Louis were from New York, although that wasn’t why they made Dave nervous; neither was it their homosexuality, Dave welcoming anybody to the Bear who didn’t spill beer, insult the staff, or try to steal the bar’s bear head mascot.

  But Louis killed people, and Angel sometimes helped him, and, if they didn’t openly advertise this particular service, then the air of potential lethality that hung around them both was usually enough to convince the more sensible of citizens to keep their distance. I sometimes wondered how like them I was becoming: they had set up Reed and his associates, but I had formulated the plan. A moral philosopher might have said that I was becoming like those whom I fought, but he would have been wrong. I was my own unique form of monster.

  ‘It was almost like the man wanted to go to jail,’ said Louis, as he mused upon the fate of Perry Reed.

  ‘He did seem to be trying very hard,’ I agreed. ‘I wonder where all of those drugs came from?’

  ‘We borrowed them from some bikers,’ said Angel.

  ‘“Borrowed”?’

  ‘Well, it was more of a permanent loan.’

  ‘Drugs, and a gun, and child pornography,’ I said. ‘Some people might call that overkill.’

  ‘Other people might call it making sure,’ said Louis.

  ‘Well, that’s what I paid for.’

  ‘Remind me how much we’re getting again?’ asked Angel.

  ‘You want another beer?’

  ‘Yeah, I want another beer.’

  ‘Then you can consider it a one hundred percent bonus,’ I said. ‘I don’t quibble. It’s not my style.’

  I called for another round. When it arrived, I drank their good health and passed them a bulging brown envelope. Beatrice Lozano’s husband had delivered it to my door earlier that afternoon. He didn’t speak, didn’t say thank you, didn’t give any sign that what had occurred in Harden might be linked in any way to what had happened to his wife. He just handed me the envelope and walked away.

  ‘I know you don’t need the money, but it’s nice to be appreciated,’ I said.

  ‘Better to have it and not need it.’ Angel slipped the money into his pocket.

  ‘Aimee Price say anything to you?’

  ‘About what happened to Reed? Nope.’

  ‘Smart woman. Eventually she’ll cut you loose, you know that?’

  ‘Possibly. Possibly not.’

  ‘No possibly about it. She strikes me as one of those strange lawyers who seem concerned about the law.’

  ‘Not as concerned as you might think when it suits her needs.’

  ‘Maybe she’s not so strange after all.’

  ‘Maybe not. You want to hear something really strange?’

  ‘From you? If you think it’s strange we should call the National Enquirer, get them to sit in.’

  I took a sip of my beer. ‘It’s about an airplane . . .’

  And as we spoke, Andrea Foster lay dying. There was blood in her mouth, blood on her hands, blood in her hair. Only some of it was her own.

  She lay still, reliving the events of the last days and hours of her life. She hovered above herself and her husband, saw them ascending the incline, making their way toward whatever it was that the stranger had been pointing at. She watched them pause, heard Chris’s exclamation of surprise, then shock. She saw fallen idols – a shattered image of the Buddha, Ganesh covered with blood and filth, a pietà from which the sculpted heads had been removed and replaced with those of dolls. She saw a wall of wood. She saw shadows intersecting: two crosses, the remains of the men who had died upon them now reduced to bones, with more bones piled at the foot of each cross. She saw dead birds hanging by their feet from branches. She saw Chris’s mouth open to say something, his panic clear, and a long tongue erupted from his jaws, a tongue with a point and barbs, and as Chris fell forward she saw the arrow that had pierced him, its shaft a bright yellow, its fletching red and white. He spasmed at her feet, and she held him as the light left his eyes. She had not even had a chance to cry before she heard footsteps behind her, approaching fast, and two blows to the head took away all of her pain for a time.

  Now she lay against timber, the sky above her lit by a pale yellow moon: no roof here, and only the barest shapes of trees. The wall opposite her was pasted with pages torn from books of worship: Bibles and Korans, texts in English and Hindi and Arabic, in symbols and letters both familiar and unfamiliar. All of the pages had been defaced with pornographic pictures. The pages were further smeared with dark stains, some recent, some old, and she knew it to be blood.

  There was an immense pressure on her head, as though her brain was swelling inside her skull. Perhaps it was. Was that what happened if you were hit hard enough on the head? She couldn’t move her legs. She couldn’t speak. She was a trapped soul, but soon she would be freed.

  A shape appeared at the door. He was still only a dark silhouette, a being of blackness. She had not yet seen his face, but his skull was curiously misshapen: warped, like his spirit. If she could have spoken to him, what would she have said? Spare me? Sorry?

  No, not sorry. It was not their fault. They had done nothing wrong. They had simply become lost, and in doing so they had become prey. He had lured them deeper into the forest with the unspoken promise of safety and rescue, and then had turned upon them, his arrow bringing her husband down, and his fists and his blade doing the same for her.

  Chris. Oh, Chris.

  She tried to reach for the silver cross around her neck, a present from her mother on the occasion of her Confirmation, but it was gone. He had taken it from her, and in the moonlight she saw it shining among the pages on the wall close by her head, and she picked out the droplets of fresh blood upon it.

  Now she could hear the stranger breathing, and interspersed with his exhalations were her own failing breaths, until the final one caught in her throat, and she began to shudder. Death advanced on her, and the stranger followed, racing to keep up.

  13

  There were no falls at Falls End, and the principal endings there were those of civilization, ambition and, ultimately, lives. Sensibly, the founding fathers of the town had decided that, even in its earliest incarnation, a name like Civilization’s End, or Ambition’s End, or Dead End, might have hobbled the community’s chances of progress, and so an alternative identity was sought. A stream was found to feed into Prater Lake, and that stream began its life on a patch of rocky high ground known as The Rises, cascading down in a manner that might loosely be said to resemble a waterfall, as long as nobody had seen an actual waterfall against which to measure it. Hence Falls End, with no possessive apostrophe to trouble it on the grounds that such additions smacked of pretension, and pretension was for the French across the border.

  That particular stream no longer flowed into Prater Lake. It had simply ceased burbling past the outskirts of the town some time at the start of the last century, and an expedition of the curious and the concerned, aided by a couple of local drunks who fancied some air, discovered that water no longer tumbled from the top of The Rises. Speculation as to what might have caused the blockage included seismic activity, a redirection of water flow due to logging, and, courtesy of one of the drunks, the actions of the devil himself. This latter suggestion was quickly discounted, although it later gave its name to a local phenomenon known as the ‘Devil of the Rises’ after it was pointed out that, seen from
a certain angle, some of the rocks appeared to form the profile of a demonic figure if one was prepared to squint some, and discount the fact that, seen from a slightly different angle, it resembled a rabbit, or, if one moved along just a bit farther, nothing at all.

  The town’s proximity to the Great North Woods, and the area’s reputation for fine hunting, meant that Falls End was, if not thriving, then surviving, which was good enough for most people, especially those who were aware of the difficulties being faced by similarly sized but less fortunately situated towns elsewhere in the County. There were a few modest motels that stayed open year-round, and a slightly more upscale lodge that opened from early April to early December, offering both intimate cabins and stylish rooms to hunters and leaf-peepers with money to burn. Falls End also had a pair of restaurants, one fancier than the other and in which locals ate only on special occasions such as weddings, graduations, anniversaries, or lottery wins.

  Finally, Falls End boasted a grand total of two bars: one, named Lester’s Tavern, that stood on the town’s western edge, and another, The Pickled Pike, that lay at the center of the narrow strip of stores and businesses that constituted Falls End’s beating heart. These included a bank, a coffee shop, a grocery-cum-drugstore, a taxidermist’s, a lawyer’s office, and Falls End Bait & Fish. The latter stocked hunting and fishing equipment, and had recently discovered a lucrative sideline selling fly-fishing feathers to hairdressing salons for use on women who thought it exotic to add rooster feathers to their hair, a development that had occasioned some discussion in Lester’s Tavern, since there were a great many people, in Falls End and elsewhere, who felt that fly feathers had no business being anywhere other than at the end of a line, and should adorn nothing more unusual than a hook, although Harold Boncoeur, who owned Falls End Fish & Bait, had been known to remark that he found the thought of a woman with feathers in her hair wicked sexy. He had not mentioned this to his wife, though, for Mrs Boncoeur favored blue rinses and perms, and thus was not a likely candidate for feathering, nor was she likely to listen with any great understanding to such fantasies on the part of her husband.