October skies

He looked up from the journal on his lap. His measured handwriting contrasted with the deteriorating childlike scrawl of Ben’s on the previous pages. The snow across the camp was melting in the warm light. It was warm enough, in fact, that he sat on a cushion of blankets in the open, with his shirt off, taking some small pleasure from the heat on his pale back.

The snow still remained in deep, slushy piles, but in the places where it had not been so thick, dark muddy patches showed.

There is a smell here in this place that I cannot take any longer, he wrote.

Across the mottled ground of mud and snow, the bodies lay rotting and bloated, both oxen and human. The meat from the beasts had turned too bad to eat.

He saw faces in the dirty slush that were once families he knew; faces that had once had names — Jeremiah Stolheim, Sophia Lester, Aaron Hollander — but were now swollen and purple and anonymous.

The angel killed so many of them. He came back here to this place and killed them all. I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He wanted to make an example of them.

Sam’s hand stopped scratching words across the page. There were things sitting before him, in front of the temple, carefully stacked beside the campfire like logs. His eyes momentarily rested on them; grisly things that his hand refused to transcribe on the page.

The angel’s rage had been complete.

The deeds that had been done on his return to the camp… Sam had managed to erase, or at least dull, most of those memories from his mind: the screams, the panic of slaughter. All that remained now, rotting in the melting snow, was the aftermath.

Now he is gone, I can see with my own eyes the bad things he did to the bodies. I see with my own eyes the heads carefully placed in a pile. I see with my own eyes the cuts, the gashes, the fear in those bloated, dead faces.

I see now what the angel is.

He looked towards the temple. The lumber frame, no longer supported around the base by dense, tightly packed drifts of snow, had sagged to one side, everything askew. Inside, the angel was sealed away in Preston’s metal chest.

There had been a night, one particular night late in December, as he dined alone on frozen meat in the musky darkness of his shelter, when his wretched grief and the angel’s tormenting voice had proved too much for him. He had pulled the canvas sack from his belt, staggered into the temple and as the shrill and suspicious voice screamed accusations at him in his mind, he had opened the chest and dropped the sack inside.

Sam hadn’t dare venture within the slanting shelter since.

He knew if he did, he’d hear it whispering to him to be let out again.

I think I understand what the angel is now.

It is the darkness in our hearts, made a thousand times worse.

It made sense in a cruel, unforgiving way. It made sense to him that, guarding those precious plates on which God’s true message was inscribed, were those bones. He realised now that they were a test of purity… and intent. As a magnifying glass could be to the sun’s rays, so those angel’s bones were to a man’s soul.

Sam’s grief at losing Emily, his rage, had been turned by the angel into a storm of wrath, visited back here in the camp on those poor people who had remained.

I see now that it was a good thing Emily left me. That she escaped with the Indian and Mrs Zimmerman. I fear if she hadn’t, I might find her head stacked here amongst the others.

He looked up at the sky, clear and blue, promising an unbroken day of warmth. Today, he decided, was the day he was going to leave. Another night alone in this forsaken place and he imagined madness would finally take him completely. He looked at the space left on the last page of this journal, Benjamin Lambert’s journal. This last page was dark with new ink, a bottle he’d discovered a few days ago whilst scavenging through one of the other shelters.

I have read all of Benjamin’s words in here. Of all the bad things the angel did, killing him was the worst. He was my friend. He was a good man.

Sam wondered how different things might have been if the angel had chosen Ben to come to. His heart had seemed purest. It was a cruel joke, he considered, that the person most worthy of doing the Lord’s work, most pure in heart and capable of making good of the angel’s influence, was the one person who had no belief at all in God.

Sam had a wish.

I wish I were like Ben. I wish I could be him.

A solitary tear rolled down his hollowed cheek and dropped onto the bottom of the page, dotting his last scribbled line like a full stop.

He looked at his words, The testimony of Samuel Dreyton, and realised in that moment that perhaps he could have something of what he desired. Samuel Dreyton could die, as perhaps he should, and Ben could, in a way, live once more.

Sam realised his freshly written words should be the first thing to go.

He ripped the page out of the journal and tossed it into the muddy, slushy snow.