Amy Cross

THE PURCHASE

Prologue

“Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

Climbing out of the car, wincing a little at the pain in his back, Doctor Jack Levant looked toward the cabin and immediately noticed a few key details. Thirty years in the field had taught him to work fast.

From the cabin’s design and layout, he could immediately identify its construction as early-to-mid nineteenth century, which meant that it was most likely home to one of the prospectors who’d flooded this part of the country. The fact that the cabin was nestled in a valley, so far from the usual trade routes, made it a working station rather than a trading point. The construction looked ramshackle, as if it had been hurriedly put together by, perhaps, a small team. Possibly just one man. And the lack of any other buildings in the area – for miles around, in fact – made him think that this had been home to someone desperate, someone who was willing to go to a place that everybody else had written off.

All of this, he’d worked out in less time for him to straighten his posture and swing the car door shut.

“Doctor Levant,” a breathless female voice said, as footsteps hurried closer. “I’m so grateful to you for coming all this way. I know your time’s very valuable, but I promise I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t have something to show you.”

“It’s not every day that one’s student discovers a perfectly preserved Rattier cabin in Marsh territory,” he said with a faint smile, before turning to Catherine Chandler. “I looked at the photos you sent. Allow me to be the first to offer my congratulations.”

“It was mostly luck, really,” she said, reaching out to shake his hand.

“Of course, but luck can make or break careers.” He shook her hand briefly, before stepping past her and starting to make his way across the muddy open space. “Without luck, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ve got a good two or three years’ worth of work out here. Research papers. Conferences. If you don’t make a PHD out of this place, I’ll be sorely disappointed.”

“It’s amazing that the site has never been touched before,” she said, hurrying alongside him. “One in a million. It’s also amazing that the bodies have barely been disturbed.”

“Bodies?”

“Four of them. We’re still in the early stages of our examinations, but I think it’s three male and one female. And they’re—”

“Prospectors, of course,” he said, interrupting her. He could see Chandler’s fellow students working at various locations around the cabin’s perimeter. “Possibly a family, although that’s rather surprising given how small this place looks. I’d have thought it might have been home to a loner, striking out in the hope of getting some gold. Not that there was ever much gold in this region, so I’m thinking it was a chancer. Or a madman.”

“The bodies are in quite unusual positions,” Chandler continued as they stopped in front of the cabin. Turning, she pointed toward the front of the building. “There’s one male inside, and then a male and a female outside together, and then a third male a little further away.”

She pointed toward the northern side of the site.

Levant looked, but at first he saw nothing of note.

“In the tree, Sir,” Chandler added.

He looked up, and finally he saw a human figure hanging from one of the branches. Some form of noose appeared to be tied around his neck.

“How is he still up there after all this time?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“A combination of unlikely factors,” she explained. “The rope isn’t actually a rope at all, it’s some kind of chain. Environmental conditions have drastically reduced the damage to the body. And there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of wildlife around here.”

“So you’re telling me that the poor bastard’s been hanging there for a century and a half?”

“It would seem that way.”

For a moment, Levant could only stare at the body. In all his years of field work, he’d never seen anything quite so bizarre. He was almost jealous of Chandler’s luck, and he was starting to think that perhaps this site was too valuable to be entrusted to a mere student. He didn’t want to seem arrogant, of course, but he was coming rapidly to the conclusion that he and he alone would be properly suited to the task. Even if it meant Chandler had to wait a little longer for her PHD.

“Fascinating,” he murmured. “Evidently you’ve stumbled upon quite a tableau. One can’t help but wonder who these four poor wretches were, and how they ended up meeting their end out here in the wilderness.”

“This part of Marsh territory was struck by a particularly cold winter back in the late nineteenth century,” she pointed out. “No-one knows how many prospectors and settlers died, but the estimates range from a few hundred to as many as one and a half thousand. There was a three-month period that’s still referred to by the locals as the Ice Winter. It’s quite possible that these people died during that winter. It’s said that in some areas there was up to five feet of snow. Roads were impassable. Whole towns got cut off for months.”

“Interesting,” he said, before making his way over to the cabin. Reaching the window, he peered inside and saw two students examining a dead body that was sitting upright in a chair.

“Male,” Chandler said, stopping next to him and observing the scene. “Mature. No younger than twenty, I estimate, and probably at least a couple of decades older. There’s a whiskey bottle next to him, and look, part of his skull has been destroyed. There are shards over in the corner. There’s also a knife in the back of the chair.”

“So there is,” Levant replied, looking down and seeing the handle of a knife poking out.

“There’s that broken window pane, too,” Chandler pointed out. “I can’t help wondering when that happened.”

“This man wasn’t a prospector,” Levant said. “You can tell by his clothes. They’re too fine.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“So he was just visiting.”

“There’s a cart,” she explained. “It’s right over here.”

For a moment, Levant could only stare at the skull of the body on the chair. A few scraps of skin still clung to the bone, and a surprising amount of hair remained on the scalp. The skull’s remaining jawbone section was hanging low, although Levant knew it was impossible to determine if it had been in that position when the man had died. Perhaps it had slipped due to the processes of decomposition. Overall, around two thirds to three quarters of the skull remained intact.

“You mentioned a cart?” he said finally.

“That’s where the other two bodies were.”

He turned to her.

“This way,” she said, and she led him around to the side of the cabin, where another student was taking samples from the front of a medium-sized wooden cart.

“Well, look at this,” Levant muttered as soon as he spotted the two withered corpses on the back of the cart. “Your mystery site just became a little more mysterious, Ms. Chandler.”

“One male, one female,” she explained as they stopped in front of the cart and looked at the bodies. “They appear to have been… I don’t know, entwined somehow when they died. Embracing, perhaps. There’s no sign of any clothing. I’m leaning toward the idea that they were perhaps placed on the cart after they died.”

“Why would that be?”

“I don’t know at this stage.”

“You need to figure that out.”

“I know. There’s quite a lot of discoloration, especially around the necks. I’m not sure yet whether or not that’s relevant.”

“Star-crossed lovers, perhaps?” He raised a skeptical eyebrow, before turning and looking toward the body that still hung – after so many years – from a distant tree. “This cabin was the scene of a robbery,” he declared suddenly. “It’s obvious.”

“A robbery?”

“One that went tragically wrong. The clues are all there, if you know how to put them together.” He turned back to look at the bodies on the cart. “These two, together with the man in the tree, were obviously thieves. They most likely came to steal from the occupier of the cabin. The man inside disturbed them. He killed two of them and then he punished the third by hanging him. Then, doubtless injured after the tussle, he sat down inside and died due to a self-administered shot to the head.”

“There’s a rifle,” she told him, “but it’s propped against a wall.”

“Perhaps it flew from his grip.”

“And propped itself neatly?”

“Stranger things have happened. It had to land somewhere.”

Chandler thought about this for a moment, and finally she furrowed her brow.

“Do you really think the whole thing could be so simple?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t have said it,” he replied archly, “if I didn’t believe it.”

“There are other possibilities,” she suggested. “I think it would be rather rash to leap to a conclusion so quickly.”

“You’re absolutely correct,” Doctor Levant said, “but I’ve seen countless sites of this nature and almost all of them turned out to have been sites where robberies had taken place. This was a wild and lawless part of the country back in the old days, Ms. Chandler. You mustn’t let your modern sensibilities cloud your judgment. Although this site was occupied just a century and a half ago, it’s like a whole different world. A barbaric world.”

“Of course,” she replied, a little timidly. “I know you’re probably right.”

“I’ll bet you, a dollar to a penny, that this the site of a robbery that went horribly wrong.” He stepped toward the cabin and stared at it for a moment, and then he turned back to her. “I mean, think about it. What else could possibly have happened here?”

One

149 years ago

“No! Damn it!”

The left-rear wheel bucked and then slipped on a patch of stone, almost tilting the entire cart over.

Straining with every last ounce of strength, Garrett held onto the chain and pulled. Snow was falling all around and he was already knee-deep, and he knew that – if the cart tilted much further – it would be lost forever, along with its cargo. His whole journey would be ruined, he’d be broke, and there’d be nothing left to do except sit down and die. He adjusted his grip on the chain as he felt the weight shift, and he knew it was only the snow that was keeping him from sliding onto his face. His shoulders were burning with pain, his arms felt as if they were almost coming out of their sockets, but he clung to the chains for dear life because he knew that the cart was all he had left.

“I will not fail now!” he snarled through gritted teeth. “I still have work to do!”

Finally he cried out.

He had nothing left to give. The cart was tilting more and more, and any second now either the weight would turn or the chain would break or his arms would be ripped away from his shoulders. Still he refused to give in, and he pulled and pulled as the cart leaned further to its side and threatened to tumble down into the ditch. Letting out several impromptu grunts, Garrett began to feel the chain slipping a little more in his great gloved hands. He was clenching his teeth so hard now, he thought they might shatter, but he thought of Mary and of everyone back home, and he knew he had to give his all. For them. For her. For the chance of making this journey, and of fixing everything. Most importantly, for the importance of his work.

A knife slipped from his belt buckle and fell into the snow. Garrett didn’t even notice as the knife – its blade smeared in fresh blood – slipped beneath the surface and disappeared from sight.

“They need me!” he hissed. “They can’t do without me!”

Suddenly the cart shuddered, as the wheels shifted under the great weight. Garrett clung to the chain harder than ever. He waited to see the cart fall down into the ditch, but instead he saw the top section tilt the other way, and then there was a loud thud as the wheels settled and the chain fell slack.

Garrett waited, not daring to let go, but he didn’t understand what had just happened. The cart had been doomed, tipping further and further, yet suddenly it seemed to have righted itself. Finally he set the chain down and stepped closer, and to his surprise he saw that the wheels had somehow slipped a little further and had settled on a miraculously flat and bare patch of stone. Exactly how that had happened, he could not begin to judge, but he felt a rush of relief as he realized that disaster had been averted.

Sighing with relief, he closed his eyes and made the mark of the cross against his chest, and then he turned to go and fetch the chain again. At the last moment, however, he spotted a section of wood poking out behind one of the wheels at an unusual angle, and he stepped closer and crouched down to take a closer look.

As soon as he saw the splintered end that jutted out from near the side of the cart’s under-section, he knew that he had a new problem. The support for the entire frame was damaged, and there was no way that the cart would survive the sixty miles that lay ahead. He could fix it up with the right tools, of course, but at present he had no such tools. The cart had been saved from toppling into the ditch, but in so doing it had suffered damage that might yet cripple the journey. Garrett knew that the cart wouldn’t last much longer.

Getting to his feet, he took a step back and tried to figure out a solution. Could he somehow strengthen the damaged section? Could he find some other way of transporting his cargo? He looked for a moment at the great section of cloth that covered the items in the rear of the cart. At the edges, where the sheet wasn’t quite tied down, the fabric flapped in the wind, while pockets of snow had gathered in the various creases and folds. He thought for a moment of what was under the sheet, but he immediately understood that simply carrying the cargo on his back was no good. Maybe he could have done that back when he was a young, strong man, but now he was nearing fifty and his body was too far gone.

He needed to fix the cart somehow.

Sighing, he turned and looked around. Night was settling in, and he was hopelessly behind schedule. He’d tried to save time by taking a different route home, by going off the map’s trails and going direct through the valley. It had seemed a good idea at the time, but now he was miles from anywhere and he was starting to wonder whether he’d made a fatal mistake. He didn’t know the land out here in this part of the region, and he couldn’t exactly turn around and head back to the other trail. As he stood with snow falling all around, he found himself remembering some words of wisdom imparted many years ago by his father.

“Out there in the wilds,” the old man had said, “one mistake can kill a man. It doesn’t even have to be a big mistake. One little error of judgment, and that can be the end of you.”

Had the moment finally arrived? By taking this unknown trail, had he made the one error that was going to cost him his life? He thought for a moment of Mary waiting back home, and of how she’d start to worry once he’d been gone a few more days. He thought of her begging men to journey out and search, and he thought of her holding out hope for his return. How long would she wait? A month? A year? He knew that his body would likely never be found in such a barren, remote place, not unless wolves came past. For a few seconds, the prospect of his imminent death stretched out before him and he realized that his father had been right. One mistake, that’s all it had taken.

Dropping to his knees, finally exhausted by his years of labor, he suddenly felt all the fight drain from his body. The years piled onto his shoulders and in an instant he began to realize that he was an old man now. He’d been getting on with his work for so long now, always struggling along alone, and perhaps he’d given too little thought to the fact that he was getting weaker. But who would do this work once he was gone? He’d trained no-one, warned no-one, told no-one the importance of his task. He’d taken the burden entirely without help, barely even explaining much to Mary. Now, as he signed and allowed his tired shoulders to arch slightly, he began to feel as if he could no longer go on. Somehow, someone else would have to pick up where he was leaving off. Someone else would have to perform the good work.

“Dear Lord,” he whispered, “I beg you, make sure that somebody else takes up my load once I am done. Have him be stronger than me, and more able. Better. I have failed you, and my only excuse is that I am an old man and I am tired. Still, that is not good enough. I should have done more. Amen.”

And then, as he was about to close his eyes and accept death, he saw a flickering light.

He squinted slightly, convinced that he was mistaken, but instead he realized that there was a light out there in the distance. Not even that far, either. He took a step forward and watched as the light of a fire continued to burn somewhere off in the snow, and then he realized he could see a faint dark smudge near the trees. At first he didn’t dare to believe that he could be so fortunate, but as he tilted his head he was able to make out the shape of the smudge and he realized that perhaps another miracle had come to save him. There was a cabin at the bottom of the valley, with a fire burning inside, and it was no more than half a mile away.

Getting to his feet and grabbing the chain, filled with a sudden renewed burst of strength, Garrett set off again, pulling the cart through the snow and praying that the damaged support would last until he reached the cabin. All thought of surrender and defeat was wiped in an instant from his mind. Now he knew that he simply had to drag the cart to the cabin, and that there he would be able to get help.

Two

Stuart Munver opened his eyes as soon as he heard the sound of a cart approaching.

He’d spent the past couple of hours playing with his lady-box, squatting next to the fire that burned in the hearth. This was his usual entertainment in the evenings after a hard day’s work, but now his enjoyment was interrupted as he remained perfectly still and listened to the sound that was slowly getting louder. He told himself that he was wrong, that there was nobody else for miles and miles around, that there wasn’t even a marked trail in the area. Finally, however, he set the lady-box aside and got to his feet, and as soon as he looked out the window he saw a dark shape no more than twenty or thirty feet away, dragging some kind of cart through the snow, coming closer and closer.

“What the…”

For a moment, Munver could only stare in wild-eyed astonishment, but then he burst into action. He pulled his pants up and secured the belt at his waist, and then he kicked the lady-box under a chair and grabbed his rifle. He checked that the weapon was loaded, and then he hurried back to the window and crouched down, so as to get a better look at the new arrival while hopefully not being seen himself. He knew all too well that thieves and bandits operated in the area.

He saw a man, bent double and pulling a heavy loud, struggling desperately through the bad weather. There was just the one man, of that he was sure, and his gaze quickly settled onto the cart. There clearly wasn’t much cargo under the blankets and sheets. Whatever was under there, however, was obviously worth money if a man was willing to risk his life by dragging it through the wilderness. Munver actually licked his lips with a sense of anticipation as he tried to imagine what could possibly be so important and valuable. Gold would be too heavy, and no-one in their right mind would be dragging antiques out this way. Munver, never a particularly smart or imaginative man at the best of times, couldn’t imagine what could possibly be on that cart. All he knew was that he wanted it.

But now the visitor was getting much closer, and Munver realized that he had to decide what to do next. He could go out there and shoot the man, of course, but then he wouldn’t be able to learn anything from him. He could talk to him for a while and then shoot him later, when necessary. That seemed like as good an idea as any, although he then realized that he should perhaps be wary of this new arrival’s intentions. What if he was, indeed, a robber? Living out here all alone in the cabin, Munver hadn’t met another person in months now, and he was naturally a little wary. He quickly decided, then, to be cautious but friendly, and to be ready to shoot the bastard at any moment.

Getting back up, he stayed as much out of sight as possible as he watched the man coming closer. And then, finally, the man dropped a heavy chain and stepped away from his cart. For a moment, the man bent over as if he might be about to collapse, but then he straightened himself. He was a big, broad-shouldered man, the very opposite of Munver’s rat-like appearance, and Munver immediately felt a little inadequate. Big, broad-shouldered men had a tendency to bully Munver and to treat him like an idiot, and he didn’t much like that. He’d headed out to the wilderness to get away from people like that. His face twisted into the beginning of a sneer, and he tightened his grip on the rifle.

Well, this time he was in control. This time he wasn’t going to take any shit.

Figuring that it’d be as well to take charge of the situation, Munver made his way to the cabin’s front door. As he reached out for the knob, he realized that his hands were trembling, so he hesitated for a moment and told himself that he couldn’t afford to show fear. This took a little longer than he’d anticipated, and he waited a good couple of minutes as he tried desperately to calm his racing thoughts. Then he grabbed the knob with all the forcefulness he could muster and he made sure to turn it firmly, the way a strong man might, and then he pulled the door open. Trying his best to look tall and menacing, he stepped out into the snow.

Immediately he gasped and stepped back, and then he looked down and saw that he’d forgotten to put his boots on. He’d stepped out barefoot into the snow, so he turned and took a moment to slide his feet into his boots, and then he stepped back out and raised the rifle, only to see that the stranger was standing just a few feet away, silhouetted against the snow and the darkening sky. Watching him.

“Hey there,” Munver said, not quite daring to aim the rifle directly at the new arrival. “Don’t often see another person out here. What’s your business?”

He waited, watching the man’s arms in case there was any sign of a weapon. After a moment he glanced around, watching the tree-line in case the man perhaps hadn’t come alone. Was there a whole gang of raiders watching from the shadows. For a moment, Munver imagined himself trying to win a shoot-out, but then he decided to look back over at the man.

“What are you doing here?” Munver called out. “I’m armed!”

The stranger stared for a moment longer, before starting to trudge forward through the snow.

“Greetings, friend,” the man said, extending a hand toward him. “The name’s Richard Garrett. I’m sorry to intrude, but I’m in something of a bind and I was hoping you could see your way to helping out a fellow in need.”

Munver’s face twitched slightly.

“I left Lordstown a couple of days ago,” Garrett explained, “and I’m afraid I didn’t anticipate just how bad this weather was gonna get. Whoo-oop, there’s a lot of snowstorms round these parts of late.”

Munver hesitated, before reaching out and shaking the man’s hand. As soon as he did so, however, he worried that it had been a mistake, since the man’s hand was almost twice as large as Munver’s.

“Nice night,” Garrett continued, shaking his hand firmly. “I honestly didn’t know that anyone was living all the way out here. I thought this was way too far off the beaten path. I’m sure glad to have run into you, though. I’d gladly trade you some whiskey, in exchange for letting me warm myself by your fire for a few hours. I also need to repair my cart, and I’m hoping we can come to some sort of arrangement so that I can borrow some nails and maybe some wood.”

“Wood?” Munver said, not really understanding what the man wanted.

“Yeah.” Garrett paused, and then he allowed himself a faint smile. “You know, the stuff you get from trees.”

“I know what wood is,” Munver said defensively. “What do you want it for?”

“It’s a long story,” Garrett replied. “I hope you don’t think I’m being forward, but I sure would rather tell it inside by the fire than out here in the cold. That’s if you don’t mind helping out a fellow who’s in need.”

Three

“Nice little place you’ve got here,” Garrett said as he stepped into the cabin, although he was immediately struck by an unusual, fusty smell that motivated his next question. “You live here alone?”

“No,” Munver replied, before realizing that the lie was foolish. “I mean, yes. I mean, only because I want to. I came out here to…”

His voice trailed off.

“To strike it rich?” Garrett said, turning to him as the fire continued to burn in the hearth. “You have my respect, Sir. You’re obviously enduring a very harsh winter. I hope you find gold soon, or whatever it is that you’re after. Although I have to say, my understanding is that you’re a long way from where the other folks go. From what I heard, there’s no gold around here.”

“Oh, there’s plenty here, alright,” Munver replied, still holding his rifle. He couldn’t resist the urge to brag a little. “I met a man a while back, he swore he knew where I could find the last unmolested source of gold for a hundred miles. There’s no point going where everyone else goes, that’s what he said. There’s no point being part of the crowd. He’d only tell me where to go if I gave him some money, so I gave him everything I had and in return he drew me a map.”

“You find anything yet?”

“Well, not quite,” Munver said, trying to smile but not really managing. “I’ve only been here a few years, though. It takes time to get these things worked out.”

“I’m sure it does,” Garrett replied with a nod. “I’m sure it does.”

As he said those words, he glanced down and saw some empty metal pans on the floor. He’d been to prospector cabins before – successful prospector cabins – and he recognized the signs of failure when he saw them. His initial impression of Munver was that the man wouldn’t be able to find gold even if he was whacked round the head with a solid bar.

“It’s out there, alright,” Munver continued after a moment. “I know that. The man told me.”

“I don’t doubt you.”

“He sold me the knowledge.”

“And who exactly was this man?”

“A prospector.”

“Why didn’t he want to come out here and get the gold himself?”

“He said he already had too much.”

“And you met this fellow in a bar?”

“He needed money for a drink.”

“I see.”

“He was telling the truth, though,” Munver continued. “I ask him that straight out. I asked if he was telling me the truth, and he swore he was. He said there’s lots of—”

Stopping suddenly, Munver realized that perhaps it wouldn’t be wise to brag too much. After all, the old man in the saloon had told him – and only him – where to find this secret source of gold. He was now the only person who knew the information, he’d been promised exclusivity on the knowledge, and he didn’t want to share it with any strangers.

“I don’t know,” he murmured, affecting an air of indifference. “It’s vague. There’s probably no gold.”

“I hope there is,” Garrett replied, “and a lot of it, too. Who knows? Maybe this time in a year, you’ll be the richest man in the world.”

“Oh yes,” Munver said, and he began to giggle at the thought of such an idea. “I’d sure like that. I’d like it a lot. I mean, it’s bound to happen. I’ve just gotta keep looking. I was lucky, I found this cabin when I came out this way. I don’t know who built it, but they’re obviously long gone. I’m sure glad of it in this weather.”

Garrett was still looking around, still trying to make sense of the place, to work out who and what he’d run into.

“Have you worked out yet how you’d spent your money?” he asked, to take up a little more time.

“Oh yes,” Munver continued excitedly, lowering the rifle and stepping forward. “First thing I’d buy is a really big house, and then I’d get myself a wife, and she’d be young. Then I’d buy the finest clothes in the world, and I’d wear them every day. And a big pocket watch. And then I’d ruin Walter Graft and take his wife away from him.”

“So you’d have two wives?” Garrett asked. “A new young one, and this Graft woman?”

“No, just one,” Munver stammered. “Just her. You don’t understand.”

“And who exactly is Walter Graft? Or do I not want to know the answer to that question?”

“You probably don’t know him,” Munver said, “but he’s a nasty man. He runs a lot of businesses back where I come from, and most people are too busy licking his boots to see that he’s all wretched and mean. He trots around like he’s the finest man in the world, and he always used to make fun of me, but I’m going to show him that he was wrong. I’m going to show everyone.”

“I’m sure you are,” Garrett said calmly.

“I’m going to get the prettiest wife you ever saw,” Munver continued, warming to his theme now. “She’s going to be an orphan, so I don’t have to look after her family too, and I’m going to have lots of sons and raise them up so they’re just like me and they’re going to be stronger and smarter than Walter Graft’s sons. And my wife’ll be prettier than Walter Graft’s wife. Her name’s Angelica Graft and people say she’s pretty, but I’m going to get a wife who’s ten times as pretty. That’s even though Angelica Graft’s the prettiest woman ever and—”

“Would you mind shutting the door?”

“What?”

“To keep the heat in. From the fire.”

“Oh.” Munver paused, before realizing that the man had a point. He turned and shut the door, and then he looked back and saw that Garrett was warming his hands by the fire.

“You were saying?” Garrett muttered.

“I… I don’t remember.”

“About some woman. A pretty lady named Angelica—”

“Angelica Graft, yes,” Munver stammered. “She’s so fine. Sophisticated, even. One time, in the street, she looked at me and smiled.”

“Is that so?”

“I swear! I wouldn’t make it up, not something that important.”

A little breathless now, Munver thought back for a moment to the day Angelica Graft had spared him a smile. That had been the happiest day of his life, but he knew there’d be happier days to come. Just as soon as he could get home with all his riches and steal Angelica away from her wretched husband. In fact, Munver figured that maybe he wouldn’t need a young orphan wife at all, because maybe he could marry Angelica. That thought made him drool a little, and a sliver of glistening saliva dribbled from the left corner of his mouth.

“I don’t mind admitting,” Garrett said, as the flames cast a dancing glow on one side of his face, “that I’d gotten myself into a bad situation out there. I made a few errors of judgment, you might say, and I ended up wondering whether I was going to be able to get home at all. I’m not there yet, of course, but I’m sure glad to have stumbled into you. I think you might have saved my life tonight, Mr. Munvey.”

“Munver,” Munver replied. “It’s Munver, not Munvey. Munver, rhymes with…”

His voice trailed off.

“Uh, I don’t know what it rhymes with,” he added finally, “but it’s definitely Munver. Definitely not Munvey.”

“Of course, I’m sorry. My mistake.”

Garrett crouched down and reached his hands a little closer to the flames. He took a moment; not because he wasn’t sure what to say next, but because he wanted to affect an air of authority, of calm. He figured that would play well with a man like Stuart Munver. He’d felt bad, intentionally getting the man’s surname wrong, but it had been necessary. Dominance was now firmly established.

“I have always had the greatest of respect for men who set out to make their fortunes,” he continued finally. “Too many men prefer a nice safe desk job, with a nice safe salary, but this country will be fine so long as there are always men who are willing to go out in search of something bigger. And, I suppose, so long as there are always new frontiers to explore. I shudder to imagine how things would go if all the world were known. If there were no longer some place a man could take off to, if he grew sick of civilization.”

“It’s a tough life prospecting out here,” Munver said, straightening his back in an effort to seem a little taller, “but someone’s got to do it. I’m no coward.”

“You certainly are not.”

Munver grinned at the compliment, but then his gaze fell upon the window and he saw the cart waiting outside in the snow. His grin remained in place, but he was once more wondering what could be under the sheets and canvasses that covered the cart’s rear, and he could no longer keep his curiosity in check. Whatever was in that cart, he reasoned, might well be enough to make him rich. His heart was pounding.

“Looks like you’ve got a heavy load out there, Mr. Garrett,” he said finally, still looking at the cart. He licked some of the saliva from the corner of his mouth. “Might I ask what you’re transporting?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Garrett replied. “Just a purchase I made a few days ago in Lordstown.”

“Lordstown?”

“It’s a small religious community about seventy miles from here.”

“You went there?”

“To make a purchase, yes.”

“A purchase, huh?” Munver said. He couldn’t take his eyes off the cart, and after a moment he licked his lips again. More drool was getting ready to run. “Must be something pretty important, to make you carry it all the way out here like this in such bad weather.”

“I had a horse, but it died,” Garrett explained. “It just dropped dead a little way outside Lordstown. I decided I could drag everything the rest of the way, or at least to the next town. That seemed better than turning back to Lordstown. I’d have been fine with my plan, too, if the weather hadn’t taken a turn for the worse, and if I’d stayed on the proper trail. I tried to take a short-cut, and that was a mistake. Almost a fatal one.”

“So what exactly is it?” Munver stepped over to the window and set his rifle aside, leaning it against the wall as he peered out at the cart’s covered load. His heart was racing. “What have you got under there?”

“Like I said, it’s nothing.”

“But what is it?”

“A long story.”

“Yeah, but what exactly is it?” He turned to Garrett. “I’m just wondering, that’s all. Just making conversation.”

Garrett paused, meeting his gaze for a moment before turning to look back down at his hands as he continued to warm them.

“I don’t right reckon I can explain it all,” he said finally. “It’s nothing important, and I’d rather not go into the matter. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

“Of course,” Munver said, before turning to look back out again at the cart, “but…”

His voice trailed off. He wanted to ask again, but he knew he wouldn’t get much of an answer. His visitor seemed like he wanted to keep the cart’s contents to himself, and Munver had never been much of a persuader. He watched the cart for a moment longer, and then he turned to see that Garrett seemed lost in thought at the fireplace. If this man wanted to hide the cart’s contents, then it must be carrying something even more valuable than Munver had initially thought.

“I’ve just gotta go out and check something,” Munver said finally.

“I can help you.”

“No!” Munver gasped, raising a hand quickly to stop Garrett. “Stay right there!”

Garrett, still crouching in front of the fire, furrowed his brow.

“I mean,” Munver continued, “you should get warm. Yeah, you need to warm yourself. I’ll only be a moment, and I don’t need any help. I’ve just gotta go and take a check on something I was doing before you arrived. It’s something real important.”

“I see.”

“So wait right there and I’ll be back.” Munver headed over to the door and pushed it open, before turning back to look at Garrett. “You’ll stay by the fire?” he added. “You promise?”

“I won’t leave this fire until my hands are nice and warm,” Garrett replied. “How about that?”

“That’s okay,” Munver said, although he felt a little uncertain. He hesitated, but he didn’t want to say too much more, in case he started to seem suspicious. “Just stay right there. You promise, so you have to. I’ll be right back.”

With that, he headed outside and shut the door.

Garrett, still crouching by the fire, continued to warm his hands for a moment, before glancing over at the nearby chair and spotting a small box next to one of the legs. Reaching out, he picked the box up and saw that it was comprised of several sections of cowhide sewn crudely together. He turned the box around until he spotted a hole cut in one of the sides, and he saw that some kind of hair had been stuck to the hole’s edges. The name Angelica Graft had been written in untidy handwriting. He tilted the box, and slowly a slimy white-yellow liquid began to ooze out.

“Disgusting creature,” he muttered, before tossing the box back under the chair, getting to his feet, and turning to look at the door.

Four

Hurrying through the snow, Munver ducked down as soon he reached the cart and then he glanced back at the cabin to make sure Garrett wasn’t following. Once he was satisfied that he wasn’t being watched, he made his way around to the other end of the cart and, while staying low, began trying to unfasten the straps that kept the load covered.

He’d thought he could just hurry out, take a peek, and then race back inside in less that a minute. He’d thought it would be easy. In fact, he’d already been outside for several minutes now and he was starting to worry that Garrett might get suspicious. Then again, he’d made Garrett promise not to leave the fire and Garrett seemed like an honorable man, so he figured he could take a little longer. As the snow continued to fall, however, Munver was really struggling to deal with the straps, and he was starting to worry that he might never get them loose. Yet he couldn’t help thinking about the riches that were within his grasp.

He was finally going to get his lucky break.

Although he didn’t know what was under the cart’s covers, he’d already decided that he could sell it for a substantial sum. After all this time searching for the gold he’d been promised, he’d found nothing at all. Every day he went out at dawn with his pans, following the routes that had been drawn out by the man in the bar; every evening he returned to the cabin with nothing to show for his efforts. He’d even begun to feel a little dejected and defeated, but now he realized that great wealth was going to come from a slightly more surprising source. He could barely contain his excitement as he struggled to pull the covers away and get to his fabulous haul.

“Come on,” he muttered under his breath, trying to get the work done before his fingers turned numb in the cold. “You can do it.”

But he couldn’t.

Not for several minutes, nor for several more minutes after that.

Despite anxious glances back toward the cabin, Munver saw no sign of Garrett coming out to check on him. Figuring that the older man must still be warming his hands, just like he’d promised, Munver figured that he had a little more time to get the covers off the rear of the cart. His fingers were hurting with the cold now, and he wished he’d brought some gloves out, but he was in too much of a hurry to stop and change his approach. Snow was falling heavily now, and some had managed to melt and dribble down the back of Munver’s shirt. Finally, he managed to get one of the straps loose, and he quickly hurried around to the cart’s other side and got to work on the next. This was easier work, since he’d learned from his first attempt, and after another thirty seconds the covers came loose and the wind immediately whipped them up and blew them aside.

“What the—”

Startled, Munver stepped back as he saw the two frozen, naked human figures in the rear of the cart.

A man and a woman, they were, locked in a partial embrace. Their skin was icy and pale, with ice crystals glistening in their hair. The man was resting on his left side, turned to look at the woman who rested on her back. With a hand touching the woman’s hip, the man seemed almost to be in a caring, concerned pose, while the woman’s dead eyes were wide open and she was staring straight up toward the darkening evening sky. She seemed unaware of the man’s worries, as if she found the sky and the emerging stars infinitely more interesting.

After a moment, Munver stepped closer and craned his neck to get a better view of the woman’s face. The area around her upper chin looked to have been somehow scraped away, exposing not only her gums but even the roots of some of her teeth. This left her with a striking grimace that suggested she’d died in agony. There was a dark patch on her left cheek, perhaps blood, and now Munver noticed that her right eye was open wider than her left. For a moment Munver could only stare at the woman’s frozen face. His mouth opened slightly. He wanted to ask if she was okay, just in case somehow she was still conscious.

“Happy now?” Garrett asked.

Gasping, Munver stumbled back, tripped, fell, and then saw Garrett standing just a few feet away.

“I believe I said that I didn’t want to talk about it,” Garrett continued, grabbing the sheets and struggling against the wind to draw them back over the bodies. “I would have appreciated it, Mr. Munver, if you had respected my wishes.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Munver stammered, struggling up from the ground. “It just blew off.”

Garrett cast a glance at him, a glance that indicated deep skepticism, but then he busied himself with the task of getting the straps back into place. He was clearly annoyed, and Munver didn’t dare say anything.

“In case you’re wondering,” Garrett said finally, sternly, “no, I didn’t kill them. And no, I didn’t know them. And no, I didn’t steal their bodies. I have documentation signed by officials in Lordstown, confirming my purchase of these two unfortunate souls and my absolute right to transport them wherever I like. They’re mine. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone, nor do I need to.” He pulled the first strap tight again. “If you have any further questions, Mr. Munver, I’d invite you to bend over and bellow them directly up your own ass.”

Munver could only stare with a growing sense of horror as Garrett continued to work on the covers. The tops of the two figures were now hidden, but Munver stared at the protruding lower halves. The man’s legs were turned to one side, while the woman’s were spread quite a way apart. As he looked at the woman’s feet, Munver noticed several deep scratches that appeared to have been inflicted before she froze. Finally, even the feet were covered, and Garrett muttered to himself as he put the last strap in place.

He grabbed a bottle from the rear of the cart, then he stepped back and took a deep breath as he watched to make sure that his work was finished.

For a couple of minutes, the two men stood in silence, staring at the sheets as they rippled in the ever-growing gale. In even that brief period of time, the sky seemed to darken noticeably, to the extent that it was now clear that night had begun to take its grip on the valley. Snow fell, rustling gently as it hit the ground. Wind rattled a few loose panels on the cabin’s roof.

“Well,” Garrett said finally, “I hope you’ll agree with me, Mr. Munver, that there’s nothing more to be said about any of this. Nothing at all.”

Turning, he began to trudge back through the snow, heading toward the cabin, leaving Munver still standing next to the cart and staring at the covers.

As the other man’s footsteps faded into the distance, Munver’s eyes widened slightly. Even though the bodies were now covered, he could still see them in his mind’s eye, and he couldn’t help thinking back to every detail that he could remember. He’d barely even heard Garrett’s non-explanation; instead he was frozen in place and his mind was rushing as he tried to understand what was happening. He’d expected to find something valuable on the back of the cart, something he could sell. He’d begun to dream of heading home and shoving his new-found wealth in Walter Graft’s stupid ugly face. The fantasy had been swift and rapid, but it had taken root deeply and now it was gone and Munver was left once again with nothing.

This made him a little angry.

Yet again, the world had denied him his due. How could a man be dragging a cart around, making all that effort, with nothing on the back except two corpses? Corpses weren’t worth anything, that was something Munver knew for certain, unless there were bounties on their heads. And he was pretty sure there were no bounties on these particular frozen heads. No, these were two worthless dead bodies. They were so worthless, in fact, that they couldn’t even be chopped up and sold to a butcher for use as food. The cart was probably worth more than the bodies, and even that was broken. Slowly, clenching his fists, Munver began to realize that he’d been screwed out of another opportunity.

And that arrogant, smug Mr. Garrett hadn’t seemed to care.

“Why do I never get a break?” Munver sneered, before turning and looking over at the cabin, and seeing the glow of the fire in the window. “You think you’re going to come here and take some of my heat, do you? Well think again.”

He paused for a moment, and finally his rage boiled over and he kicked the side of the cart as hard as he could. Then he let out a gasp as he felt ripple of pain in one of his toes.

Five

“This is all I can pay you for board tonight,” Garrett said as he set the bottle of whiskey down on a table in the cabin. “It’s not much, but it’s good stuff. I’ll split the bottle with you.”

Standing in the doorway, Munver stared at him for a moment. He still felt angry, of course, but he didn’t dare show that anger. What if he ended up in a fight? He’d never had much luck there, as his crooked nose and missing teeth attested. Far better, he supposed, to bide his time a little. Besides, he might be able to find out why this man was almost killing himself on a journey to transport two dead bodies. Was he insane, or was there more to it?

Besides, in kicking the cart Munver had nearly broken his big toe. He was in no condition to scrap.

“Shut the door,” Garrett said again. “The wind.”

“Sorry.”

Munver limped inside and shut the door, as Garrett opened the bottle.

Glancing across the room, Munver saw that his lady-box had been moved. For a moment he felt a little embarrassed, but then he told himself that Garrett had most likely simply kicked it.

“So,” he said, trying to sound calm and carefree as he leaned against the wall, “where are you headed?”

“Tulston,” came the gravely reply.

“And where have you been?”

“I already told you. Lordstown.”

“Is that where you picked up the… things?”

“I told you.”

“And you’re allowed to do that?”

“I am.”

“Seems odd to me.”

“Are you a man who concerns himself much with rules and laws, Mr. Munver?” Garrett asked. “Do you have a permit for what you’re doing out here? Is your name known to any courts, back where you come from?”

Munver opened his mouth to reply, but then he held back.

Garrett reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, which he set on the table before taking a sip of whiskey straight from the bottle.

“See for yourself, if you must,” he muttered bitterly . “It’s all legal.”

He drank again.

Munver shoved his hands into his pockets and tried to look as if he didn’t care, as he ambled across to the table and looked down to see a document from the Lordstown Sheriff’s Office. He’d never been much of a reader, but Munver had to admit that the document looked very official, with lots of printed sections and annotations and signatures. There was even a fancy stamp. Munver picked the piece of paper up and pretended to read it at some length, even going so far as to murmur his approval at certain sections. In reality, as he set the paper back down, he still had no idea where the bodies had come from or why Garrett had purchased them, but he was too shy to confess his illiteracy.

“I can’t see how dead people are worth much money,” he grumbled. “How much’d you pay?”

“None of your business.”

“Who did—”

“That’s none of your business either.”

“But if—”

“Be careful,” Garrett growled, before taking another glug of whiskey and then wiping his mouth on his jacket sleeve. Stepping over, he picked the piece of paper back up and returned it to his pocket. “I only showed you that document so that you’d see I’m not a murderer. The rest of it’s my business and mine alone. A man has a right to keep things private, you know. I’m not hiding anything, but I’ll defend my right to privacy to the death. I’d advise you to ask me no more questions on the matter.”

“Of course not,” Munver replied.

“Drink.”

Garrett held the bottle out, and Munver took it gladly. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he could handle a light tipple if he needed to appear friendly. He took a sip but surreptitiously spat most of the whiskey straight back into the bottle, and then he thumped his chest with his left hand.

“Now that’s good whiskey!” he exclaimed.

Garrett murmured something and walked to the window, where he stopped to look out at the darkening yard. The sun had almost set now and everything looked a dark shade of blue, except flakes of snow that fell real close to the window.

“Do you have wood?” he asked after a moment, still looking outside.

“Some,” Munver replied. “What exactly do you need?”

“Enough to make some repairs to the supporting beams on one side of the cart.”

“And how much is that?”

“Don’t you know anything, man?” Garrett sneered.

“I’ve got plenty of wood,” Munver said. “You can have it. If you can pay for it.”

“I’m paying you in whiskey, aren’t I?”

“I’m not sure that’s quite enough.”

“And you have nails?”

“Oh,” Munver said with a giggle, “I’ve got nails. Lots of ’em.”

“It shouldn’t take long,” Garrett replied. “I’ll be out there at first light and then I should be gone within an hour or two of that. I certainly won’t detain you long in the morning.”

“Don’t worry,” Munver said. “I haven’t got anything important to do.”

“Not going out to search for gold tomorrow?”

“No.” He paused, before realizing that maybe the answer was a mistake. “I mean, yes.”

“Haven’t made your mind up yet?”

“I’m going.”

“I won’t get in your way.”

Munver grinned, but suddenly he saw Garrett’s reflection in the glass and he realized that he’d been watched during the whole conversation. Even now, Garrett stared at him with relentless intensity, and Munver finally took a swig of whiskey purely in order to make himself seem more normal. Once he was done, he lowered the bottle and saw that Garrett was still staring at him. Reminded of all the people who used to stare at him in town, he felt a flicker of irritation in his chest.

He forced a smile.

Garrett’s gaze didn’t shift an inch.

“Here,” Munver said finally, stepping forward and holding the bottle out to him. “You should have some more.”

Garrett turned and took the bottle, and then he drank until whiskey began spilling out over his chin.

“You really like that stuff, huh?” Munver said nervously.

“Show me a man who doesn’t like whiskey,” Garrett said, wandering over to one of the chairs and setting himself down with force, “and I’ll show you a man I don’t like.” He took another long swig and then let out a heavy gasp. “So what’s your story, friend? How did you end up out here all alone, with no-one around you for miles and miles, following a map you bought from someone in a bar?”

“There’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing,” Munver said defensively.

“I never said there was. I just wondered how you ended up doing it, is all.”

“I told you, I met a—”

“I know that part,” Garrett said with a sigh. “You met a man in a bar, and he sold you a treasure map for the price of a drink.” He chuckled. “And now here you are.”

“I’ll find that gold. You wait and see.”

“You got any family anywhere?”

Munver paused, before shaking his head.

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“When I’m rich, I’m gonna—”

“Buy yourself a wife. I remember.” Garrett smiled. “And some fancy clothes. Why, Mr. Munver, I’m sure you’ll clean up just fine.”

“What does that mean?” Munver asked. “Clean up how?”

“Never mind.” Again, Garrett seemed amused. “You must get mighty lonely out here. Before I showed up this evening, when’s the last time you spoke to another human being?”

“A while ago. I don’t recall.”

“This year?”

“Maybe.”

“Only maybe?” Garrett broke into an out-and-out laugh. “Is there really no-one out there missing you, friend? Not even a dog?”

“I never had a dog,” Munver said seriously.

“I bet you didn’t.” Garrett took another long drink from the bottle, before setting it on the nearby table. “You could use one up here, though. To keep you from going crazy.”

“I don’t go crazy,” Munver replied, tapping the side of his temple. “I’m strong up here, you see. I’m a tough egg.”

Garrett chuckled and took another swig from the bottle, while glancing briefly at the foul little box under the chair.

Munver caught the glance, but quickly reassured himself that it must have been accidental. Still, something about Garrett was really starting to annoy him. The man reminded him of all the sneering, snobbish people he’d hated in town. He’d headed out to make his fortune, with the aim of one day returning all rich and mighty, and showing those assholes that he was a big man. Now here was Garrett, reminding him of everything he’d so deliberately left behind. Slowly, even though he’d never dare to use it, Munver clenched his right fist and tried to figure out how he was going to get rich from this visitor. Because if there was one thing he knew for certain, it was this: he, Stuart Munver, was not going to be denied.

Six

“Of course I was there!” Garrett roared a few hours later, as soon as he’d finished taking another swig from the whiskey bottle. “How dare you even ask a man of my age if he fought! I was a young man during the war and I stuck at it the whole way through! I’m no coward! I wasn’t a lickspittle, either. I was always pushing to the front.”

“Which side were you on?” Munver asked.

“Which side?” Garrett stared at him for a moment, as if he found the question preposterous. The crackling fire lit one side of his face, while the other side was bathed in darkness from the window. “Well, which side do you think, man? Can’t you tell from my accent? Think very carefully before you answer, by the way.” He narrowed his eyes as he continued to watch Munver, and now he seemed extremely keen on a response. “Which side do you reckon I fought on?”

“Uh…”

“The right side, of course.” He laughed a sudden, abrupt laugh that scared Munver a little. “Whoo-oop, for a moment there I thought you were serious.” He chuckled. He’d already decided that Munver was basically harmless, but he was starting to find the man’s simplicity rather amusing. “Which side, indeed. Thank you for the laugh.”

“Okay.” Munver paused. He realized he was supposed to understand, but he couldn’t quite pick up the clues. He certainly didn’t want to admit that he was confused. “I see.”

“That war made me the man I am today,” Garrett continued, leaning back in the chair. He’d been getting louder and more garrulous over the past few hours, as the drinking had continued, but now the edge was coming off a little and he seemed tired. “By the time I finished fighting, I was a foot taller and six inches broader at the shoulders. When I went home, my own family barely recognized me. I was scrawny when I went to fight, but when I returned I was built like a brick shit-house.”

“Like a what?” Munver asked, perched on one of the other chairs.

“It’s a phrase,” Garrett said, his voice slurring slightly as he set the bottle back on the table. “Don’t you know anything? Drink some more of this and try to keep up with the conversation.”

Munver took the bottle and pretended to drink, while watching as Garrett turned his head and looked toward the window. Snow was still falling outside, and after a moment Garrett murmured something that seemed to be about shovels and the need to dig out a path in the morning. Nothing about his tone indicated that he expected an answer; rather, it was as if he was content murmuring away to himself.

“Was I in the war?” he added finally, closing his eyes. “What kind of a stupid question is that? You’re lucky I don’t beat you down for asking.”

“I once heard Angelica Graft talk about the war,” Munver said. He always enjoyed any chance to say that woman’s name; in some strange way, the mere mention of her made him feel as if she was becoming part of his life. “She said it was so hard, not knowing which way things were gonna go. She said it was the uncertainty that got to her the most, but she said she never doubted who’d win.”

He waited, but Garrett’s eyes were still closed.

Was he asleep?

“I said, Angelica Graft used to talk about the war,” Munver continued, hoping to determine Garrett’s state a little more clearly. “A fine woman, she is, with intelligent opinions. I learned a lot from listening to her. She’s as clever as she is pretty. It’s not just me who says it, either. Everyone knows.”

Munver waited, but after a few more seconds he realized that Garrett was breathing very slowly now. Having drunk almost half the bottle of whiskey already, the older man seemed to have slipped into inebriation and was dozing happily by the fire. The only sound now was the crackling of the wood in the hearth, and Munver barely even dared to breathe in case he suddenly caused Garrett to stir.

Finally, slowly, Munver looked down at the lady-box on the floor. He knew he should leave it well alone, but he’d mentioned Angelica Graft a few times over the past half hour and her name always drove him into something of a frenzy. He glanced back at Garrett, to make doubly sure that he was asleep, and then he slowly picked up the lady-box and shuffled over to the far corner, away from the light of the fire.

He looked back again to check that Garrett hadn’t woken, and then he lowered the lady-box to his waist and began to unbutton the front of his pants. It took a moment for him to get the front open, and then he reached in and took hold of the base of his manhood.

And then he froze.

He’d performed this exact routine many times. In fact, the lady-box came out two or three times every evening, but this time he hesitated as he realized that he might have another option. His mind was racing, and finally he very slowly set the box back down and turned to look at the window. The only sound – still – was the crackle of the fire, and Munver stood completely unmoving for almost a full minute before daring to make his way over to the front door. As he crept, he felt a sense of great anticipation building in his chest.

After looking back one more time at Garrett, he then opened the door and carefully slipped outside. He shut the door, and then his footsteps could be heard crunching away across the snow until they faded into the distance and all that could be heard was the fire.

Garrett continued to doze in the chair. The long journey, combined with the effects of the whiskey, had sent him into a great slumber, and he was dreaming now of his life back home with Mary. In the dream, he was back in the drawing room, back before all of this madness had begun. He was explaining the next purchase to her, telling her that it was absolutely necessary, and she was struggling to understand. Bibles stood stacked on a table between them, and Garrett was reading from them in the hope that a little scripture might help. This part was less dream and more memory, but soon the changes began to set in, and Garrett dreamed that Mary was surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of corpses. Even as his face remained still – save for an occasional flicker as he furrowed his brow – his dream was becoming a nightmare.

Now the dead were chasing him. Their arms were longer than they should be, great long limbs that creaked as they stretched to grab hold of his body. He tried to pull away, but there were too many hands and they were coming from every direction. He could hear Mary screaming, but he couldn’t see her; after a moment he heard her cries change, as if something was blocking his throat. As soon as he tried to turn and rush to her aid, however, he realized he was being dragged down by the corpses. He yelled at them, promising them each a coin if they’d just let go, but they told him in return that he was too late. That he’d failed the Lord.

As the nightmare became worse and worse, Garrett’s sleeping face began to twitch a little more frequently.

A moment later, the front door clicked open and Munver carefully peered into the room.

Once he was certain that Garrett was still asleep, Munver slipped into the cabin and crept over to the area where he usually skinned and cooked his food, and then he very carefully took a candle from a shelf and carried it to the hearth. Not even allowing himself to breathe, in case he woke Garrett, he leaned down and lit the candle against the flames, and then he crept to the door and slipped back out, pulling the door shut as he went.

Still in the chair, Garrett continued to dream about all the dead bodies filling his home, and about Mary screaming far off in the distance. He was begging the corpses to show mercy, he was offering them all the coins in his possession, but they told him – with one voice – that all his work had been for nought. Godliness had broken down and the ground was collapsing beneath Garrett’s feet. He felt a great hollowness in his soul as thousands of dead hands clawed him down into the abyss, and all he could do was scream at them that he’d give them each a coin if they’d just stay dead. This same desperate cry was repeating over and over.

“I have coins for you all!” he was screaming in his mind. “Why do you forsake me now? Take your coins! Mary! Come to me, Mary! Where are you?”

As the nightmare continued, Garrett’s face twitched and he let out a faint murmur.

A moment later the door opened again and Munver crept back into the house. The candle’s flame had been extinguished by the snow, so he bent down and lit it again in the fireplace before heading back to the door.

Suddenly Garrett murmured again.

Munver froze and looked over at him, and then he felt a wave of relief as he saw that his visitor was still sleeping.

This time, as he stepped outside, Munver used a piece of wood to shield the flame from the bad weather, and then he slowly shut the door again.

Over by the hearth, Garrett’s nightmare was becoming more vivid. His head turned slightly and he let out a low groan. In the nightmare, he was being pulled apart by dead souls, and they were all screeching that they had no use for his pathetic little coins.

Seven

Trampling across the snow, struggling to keep the flame alive despite the piece of wood he was using to provide cover, Munver tried to use his body to provide a little extra protection against the strong wind. He had to turn several times, shielding the flame from gusts that blow in from every direction, and once or twice he almost fell. The flame flickered and came close to being extinguished, but somehow it never quite died. This awkward dance continued for several minutes, before Munver finally managed to get all the way over to the back of the cart.

The candle was still burning.

Still taking great care to maintain the flame, Munver climbed up onto the cart’s rearmost section, from which he’d already removed the covering to reveal the dead woman and most of the dead man.

Wind was howling all around in the darkness, whipping the snow into a frenzy, but the side of the cart at least afford some extra protection.

On his knees now, Munver shuffled between the woman’s legs and then bent down, holding the candle’s flame close to her frozen nether region. He could feel the warmth from the flame against his wrist but, as he waited, he began to realize that the woman’s flesh wasn’t un-thawing as quickly as he’d hoped. Truth be told, he’d expected that the process would be more or less instant, like melting an ice-cube. He had no idea how long Garrett would stay asleep, but he wanted to have his fun and then get back inside before he got caught. A lady-box was one thing, but for this one night he intended to have a real woman. He didn’t mind her being dead, but he needed her not to be frozen.

Stuart Munver was not a smart man, but he was by no means a simpleton. Nevertheless, he had assumed that if he thawed the woman out – or at least thawed part of her out – he could use her however he wished. He was by no means insensitive of the woman’s wishes; rather, it never occurred to him in any way that what he planned was wrong. She was dead, so it never occurred to him that she would care. Had this possibility been drawn to his attention, he would certainly – though reluctantly – have refrained. Instead, he was unburdened by any doubts and all he could think about was the fact that the woman’s thawed nether region would feel much more real and warm than the lady-box. It would feel, he assumed, like Angelica Graft.

Shivering now in the cold night air, having forgotten to put his jacket back on, he nevertheless stared intently at the frozen mound of skin and curled hair. The process was taking much longer than he’d hoped and, when he reached out with a finger and checked the skin, he discovered that it felt just as hard as it had done earlier. He looked back toward the cabin, just to make sure that Garrett hadn’t stirred, and then he returned to his mournful, hopeful vigil. As he did so, however, he couldn’t help but mutter a few cuss words.

Soon.

Soon he’d get to feel the inside of a real woman.

He’d be able to close his eyes and think of the eventual moment when – one day – Angelica Graft would be his. He’d have the most beautiful woman in all the world, and her wretched husband would be dishonored. The old bully deserved that and more, and Stuart Munver would be the one to give him a good pasting.

Yet as the minutes passed, Munver had to acknowledge that the dead woman’s nether region showed no inclination to thaw. Nothing seemed to be happening. He tapped again, and he quickly winced as he found that there had been no obvious progress. He held the candle closer, only to singe the side of his hand and have to withdraw. He tried a couple more times, at different angles, only to suffer the same result. Finally, with no other ideas, he balanced the piece of wood across the woman’s crotch and carefully set the candle in place so that it could be left to burn unattended. He’d have to go back inside for a while, of course, and keep an eye on Garrett, but then he’d be able to come back out in a while and check on the candle’s progress.

Surely the dead woman’s bits would thaw soon.

As he turned to climb off the cart, however, he spotted something glinting beneath the dead man’s hand. He hesitated, telling himself that all he’d seen had been a patch of ice, but then he saw the glint again and he realized that it had a different, warmer shade than the body’s whiteness.

He leaned closer and peered beneath the hand, and to his surprise he saw what appeared to be some kind of coin. Reaching out, he tried to slide the coin out from the hand, only to find that it seemed to be wedged fast. He pulled again and again, filled with an increasing hope that perhaps he’d found something valuable. He used his nails to scrape at the frozen hand, digging like a dog, but this failed to work. Frustrated, he started pulling again. Finally one of the fingers snapped clean away and he was able to wriggle the coin around until it slid out.

Holding the prize up, he furrowed his brow as he realized that it was unlike any other coin he’d ever seen. He turned it around, but it definitely didn’t seem to be from the local area. There was some text on the coin’s surface, perhaps some numbers too, but these were too difficult to make out and – besides – he figured he most likely wouldn’t be able to read them even if they were clear. Still, the coin was nice and large, and heavy too, and he felt that it had to be worth money. He held it in the palm of his hand, as snow continued to fall, and he began to feel more and more hopeful that his lucky day had finally arrived.

Someone’ll give me plenty for this, he told himself, beaming at the thought that he might finally have secured a stroke of luck. I’ll be rich. Walter Graft can go to Hell and Angelica Graft will be mine.

Still grinning at his good fortune, he reached out to pull the covering back over the two bodies, but at the last moment he realized that this would be a terrible idea. The covering might catch fire, and then the bodies would burn, and then Garrett would awaken and all manner of chaos would break out and the opportunity would be lost. No, covering the flame would be a bad idea indeed. Feeling very proud of himself for being so smart, he carefully pushed the covering aside before climbing fully off the back of the cart and heading back to the cabin. As he scurried, he kept close to the wall, like a rat.

Eight

Richard Garrett’s eyes sprung open and he gasped as he leaned forward in the chair. Clutching the armrests, he stared straight ahead for a moment as he adjusted to the realization that he’d been dreaming. His heart was racing and it took a few seconds before he lost the sense that he was being dragged down by thousands of clawing hands. Finally he was able to push the dream aside, and he felt a rush of relief. Then, sensing a presence nearby, he turned to see Stuart Munver halfway through the door and frozen in place.

“Nothing,” Munver said quickly.

“What?”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

Garrett opened his mouth to question him further, but he couldn’t quite get the words out.

“I wasn’t!” Munver hissed.

Garrett’s brow furrowed.

Munver pulled the door shut and smiled, hoping to look innocent. The effect, however, was the reverse.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he continued, take a step to the side. “You looked so peaceful there, resting after your long day, that I thought it best to let you sleep. I was being considerate, you understand?”

“Have you just been outside?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You have snow on you.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You have snow on you, man.”

“That’s just from when I was checking the door.”

“Checking it?”

“To make sure it works.”

“And does it?”

Munver hesitated. “Seems to,” he said finally.

Garrett stared at him for a moment, before leaning back in the armchair and taking a deep breath. The fire was still crackling in the hearth, and the warmth gave Garrett comfort. He knew he should be more suspicious of Munver at this particular moment, but in truth the nightmare had left him exhausted and he needed a moment to regather his strength. Besides, hadn’t he pegged Munver as being a pathetic waster earlier? A moron? There was no reason to alter that judgment. He took care to breathe slowly and steadily, following a technique that Mary had once had to teach him, and already he was beginning to rally. Still, he was unable to keep from thinking back to the nightmare in brief snatches, reliving the worst moments.

Reaching up, he felt for the small silver crucifix that hung from a chain around his neck.

“The snow’s really coming down out there now,” Munver said.

“I don’t think this storm is going to pass any time soon,” Garrett muttered darkly, still touching the crucifix. “I hear that this is the coldest winter that any man around these parts remembers. I hope that is true, for I cannot imagine anybody having ever survived worse.”

“It’s not so bad,” Munver replied with a calculated shrug. “I suppose weaker men might struggle, but it’s okay if you’re tough. Like me.”

Garrett cast a skeptical glance in his direction.

“Were you dreaming?” Munver asked.

Garrett stared at him. The flames cast great, dancing shadows under his eyes.

“You mumbled a little, that’s all,” Munver continued. “I didn’t hear what you were saying, though. Don’t worry about that. You seemed troubled, though.” He paused for a moment, trying to pick his next words carefully. He knew that his attempts at subtlety often didn’t work too well. “Were you dreaming about your cargo? If so, perhaps it would benefit you to speak of it.”

“To speak of what?”

“Those bodies out there, and why you’re transporting them.”

“My purchase is none of your business.”

“But—”

“And my dreams are none of your concern,” Garrett said firmly, although he still felt a little too weak to rise from the chair. This surprised – and perturbed – him. “If I made any sounds, or if I disturbed you in any way whatsoever, you have my full and heartfelt apology. I would not wish to cause any discomfort for you here in your home.” He paused, before looking around at his surroundings. “Tell me, man,” he continued, “do you have a copy of the Bible?”

“Well, uh—”

“The Bible, man!” Garrett snarled. “Fetch one!”

Munver dared not move.

“I see,” Garrett said with a heavy, growling sigh. “You have no copy of that most holy of books, do you?”

“Well, no,” Munver said, struggling to come up with an explanation. “I mean, I’ve read it before. Bits of it. I meant to bring one up here, but I reckon I just… forgot.”

“For some reason,” Garrett replied, eyeing him up and down, “I do not find that difficult to believe.”

With that, he gripped the arms of the chair more firmly and began to rise. His backside made it no more than an inch from the seat, however, before a crippling pain shot through his hips and he gasped as he sat back down. The pain throbbed now, rumbling deep in his body and threatening to return at any moment. He let out a few choice cuss words, committed himself to great strength, and then tried again, only to experience the same painful failure.

“Are you alright there?” Munver asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I said I’m fine.”

Munver eyed him with suspicion for a moment.

“Food,” Garrett growled. “What do you have?”

“Not a lot,” Munver replied. “Some beans.”

“Heat them.”

“I don’t rightly know that I have so much I can share.”

“I am a man on a mission for the Lord,” Garrett replied through gritted teeth. “Evidently you live a godless life up here, Mr. Munver, so it would perhaps do your soul some good to offer me a little assistance. The Lord might just look favorably upon you if you perform some service for him, even if it’s by proxy. I do not propose to eat you out of house and home. A few spoonfuls of beans is all I ask for.”

Munver hesitated, before nodding.

“Well, yeah,” he muttered, “I guess…”

“And while you prepare them,” Garrett continued, “let me have a little peace. I’m starting to develop a headache.”

“It won’t take long,” Munver replied, before heading over to the far corner and crouching down to get some food ready. Grabbing a knife, he set about opening a rusted old can.

Sighing, Garrett leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. He took a moment to gather his thoughts, and then – despite a ripple of pain in his back – he leaned forward into the light of the fire and puts his hands together in prayer. Even now, he was not entirely sure how to begin, except that after a few more seconds he realized that perhaps he was merely afraid. He had been ignoring the severity of the situation up until now, but his failure to rise from the chair made him confront the truth.

“Lord,” he whispered, speaking low in an effort to avoid being overheard, “I am now and have always been your humble servant. I beg you, grant me the strength to complete this one final journey. The two poor souls out there in the snow deserve…”

His voice trailed off for a moment.

Over on the far side of the room, Munver was making a lot of noise as he scraped muck from one of his saucepans.

“I am guilty of pride,” Garrett continued. “I should have nominated my successor by now. Instead, I ignored the signs of my weakness. I assumed I could go on forever, or at least for a good while longer, but now I see that I must work to find someone who can take over my work.” He opened one eye and glanced briefly at Munver. “Not him,” he added.

He opened the other eye and looked at the window. Snow was still falling, but beyond that he saw only darkness. He knew that the bodies were out there, naked under the cart’s covering, undignified in their poses.

“I have to get them to the burial place,” he whispered. “They have their coins, so they are safe for now. I beg you, Lord, grant me the strength to complete the journey and to bury those two poor wretches, and then to appoint my successor in this most important work. Once I am done with those tasks, I shall not debase myself by clinging unduly to life. If my time is to end, then so be it. I trust in your judgment and I shall not question it.”

Munver brought over a saucepan half-filled with beans, and he crouched to place it on the fire. As he did so, he glanced at Garrett and waited, hoping to hear some of the older man’s prayer.

“I beg you,” Garrett continued, apparently oblivious to Munver’s proximity. “If I am not permitted to complete my work this time, the consequences can only be terrible. I must get my latest purchase home.”

Nine

“There’s only one time that Angelica Graft properly looked at me for any length of time,” Munver continued a while later, as he sat cross-legged on the floor and scooped more beans into his mouth, “but I’m sure she at least glanced at me a few other times. She definitely knows that I exist.”

“Perhaps she smelled you,” Garrett muttered testily, stirring his bowl of beans and waiting for a scrap of appetite to return. Finally he forced himself to take a spoonful of beans into his mouth.

“One morning I was sitting by the side of the road,” Munver explained, “and I saw Angelica coming my way with several ladies in her company. Why, I got to my feet and brushed myself down, and I bowed most humbly as they all walked past. Ladies like that, you know. They like a man who—”

Before he could finish, he was shocked to hear a loud, anguished snarl burst from Garrett’s lips, and he watched as his visitor bent forward in the chair as if in great pain.

Not knowing how he should react, Munver merely watched as Garrett remained bent over.

Finally, slowly, Garrett opened his eyes. The pain had been sudden and shocking, and he knew that it could no longer be ignored. He’d already begun to suspect that his body was failing him, but here was the confirmation and now his mind was racing as he tried to work out what he should do next. It was bad luck that, at this awful moment, he found himself stuck alone in a shack with an idiot, but he supposed he’d have to make do with what he’d got. His own comfort mattered not; what mattered was his work.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice tense with pain after the agony of having tried to swallow the beans, “do you by any chance have a pen and some paper?”

“No,” Munver replied, “I do not.”

“Do you have anything to write with and on?”

“No.”

“I thought as much,” Garrett said, and now it was evident that he was still in pain. He was holding the bowl of beans with one hand, but with the other he was touching his belly. “If I should die out here on the road,” he continued, “it is imperative that Mary should receive two messages from me. One to inform her of my great respect for her long service as my wife, and the other to inform Father Briars of the emergency steps he must take to contain the threat of coinless souls.”

Munver stared at him, unsure as to whether or not he’d finished.

“I’m not entirely sure what you mean,” he said finally.

Garrett turned and stared at him for a moment.

“No,” he murmured angrily, “I don’t suppose that you do.”

Munver, not understanding quite what was happening, decide to smile, and then he scooped up some more beans. Sauce was dribbling down his stubbled chin, and after a moment he tried to lick some of it back into his mouth.

“So tell me this, then,” Garrett continued. “If I were to give you two messages, and if I were to impress their inestimable importance upon your person, would you be capable of taking those messages to the people I described?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Munver replied.

“Could you deliver two messages for me?” Garrett snapped. “Reliably, and in good time?”

“I don’t see why not,” Munver said, “but there’s no-one around here to deliver a message to.”

“If they were around here,” Garrett sighed, “I could deliver the messages myself. I mean that you must go on a journey, on my behalf.”

“I wouldn’t get far in this bad weather. It’d be suicide.”

“You’d have to wait, then. And memorize the messages, along with the details of the intended recipients. Then, when the weather cleared, you’d have to follow my precise instructions and take those messages without further delay to two specific addresses. Upon your arrival, you’d have to…”

His voice trailed off as he stared at Munver’s confused expression, and in that moment he realized that this particular plan had no hope of success.

“Never mind,” he muttered. “I shall not need you to deliver any such messages. I shall find the strength in myself to continue my journey, come morning. The Lord shall be with me, I am sure. He shall prop up my weary frame and drive me onward. I shall complete my work for him.”

“Well…” Munver thought for a moment. “That’ll be nice.”

He looked back down at his bowl of food, but already in the back of his mind his thoughts were consumed by the gold coin he’d taken from the back of the cart. He knew he couldn’t just blurt all his questions out, but he desperately wanted to know just how much the coin was worth. Already, a plan was forming in his mind. Come morning, he’d assess the weather. As soon as the storm cleared sufficiently, he’d strike out from the cabin and head to the nearest town and sell the coin, and then his days as a prospector would be over. He could go home, show off his newfound wealth, and secure the lust of Angelica Graft.

Lost in these thoughts, he spent several minutes trapped in a kind of trance, until finally he stirred and looked back over at Garrett.

For a moment, Garrett seemed to have fallen back asleep, but then his eyes flickered open. He certainly appeared to be struggling in his attempts to stay awake, and Munver preferred not to disturb him. After almost a full minute, however, the older man’s eyes opened properly again and he seemed – for now – to have won his battle with sleep.

“Why do you stare at me like that?” Garrett asked.

“I wasn’t staring,” Munver replied, forcing himself to look down at the bowl and scoop up the last of his beans. “I don’t know what I was doing. Daydreaming, I suppose.”

“The heat from this fire is perhaps making me drowsy,” Garrett said. “I feel almost as if I shall melt right here in the chair. Perhaps the cold would do me better, to wake me up.”

“There’ll be plenty of cold soon,” Munver pointed out. “If I were you, I’d enjoy the fire and—”

Suddenly he froze for a moment, and his eyes opened wide with a burst of realization.

“Melt,” he whispered.

“What was that?” Garrett asked.

“Melt!” Leaping to his feet, Munver sent his empty bowl flying across the room. “She might have melted by now!”

“What in tarnation are you talking about?” Garrett asked.

“Uh… Nothing.”

Munver looked at the door, then back at Garrett, then at the door again, then once more at Garrett.

“It’s just,” he continued, his mind spinning as he tried to think of an explanation, “I need to go and check something outside, that’s all. It’s real important.”

With that, he hurried to the door.

“What are you doing, man?” Garrett asked impatiently. “There’s nothing out there but snow and wind.”

“I won’t be long,” Munver mumbled, fumbling to get the door open. “Wait right there. You promised before, you have to stay by the fire. Wait there and I’ll be right back. I just have to go and check on the…”

He hesitated, frozen for a moment by the struggle to come up with an explanation.

“Horses,” he managed to say finally.

“Horses?”

“Pigs.”

“What?”

“Rain covering!” Munver blurted out. “I have to go and check on the rain covering!”

In a state of high excitement now, he hurried out into the snow, letting the door swing shut in his wake.

Garrett stared at the door, trying to work out what could possibly have worked his host up into such a ridiculous condition, but then he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes and told himself not to worry. The man was clearly a lunatic, he reasoned, and it would be all too easy to get entirely lost in the task of untangling a lunatic’s plans. Besides, he preferred to be alone right now as he continued to struggle for a little more strength. He knew that despite his growing weakness, he had to fix the cart in the morning and then he had to set back out on the road to resume his journey. For a moment the task felt utterly impossible, but he told himself that somehow he would find the necessary resolve. He would get to where he was going.

Suddenly his eyes opened wide, and in that moment he realized he’d heard the distant thump of somebody climbing up onto his cart.

Ten

“Damn it, what are you doing?” Garrett gasped as he shoved the door open and stumbled out into the driving snow.

Clutching his belly, still feeling constant ripples of pain that threatened at any moment to burst out and consume him, he struggled to make his way around the side of the cabin. Whereas a moment ago he’d been slumped in the chair, barely able to summon the strength to keep his eyes open, now he was filled with a righteous mix of anger and fear and pure blind fury. He knew he’d heard Munver messing about with the cart, and the thought of that man interfering with the purchase was enough to send Garrett into a frenzy.

“Stop!” he called out, but he was surprised to hear that his voice was hoarse and frail. “For the love of God, man, stop whatever it is that you’re up to!”

Stumbling, he barely managed to keep from falling down into the snow. He stopped and leaned against the side of the cabin, and in that moment the pain in his side began to tighten a little. Looking ahead, he was just about able to make out the shape of the cart, and then he saw a faint shape moving about at the rear section. His worst fears were now confirmed, and this realization spurred him to set out again, forcing his way through the snow and the pain until finally he reached the side of the cart and he once more had to steady himself.

Now he could hear Munver constantly scrabbling about on the cart’s rear section.

“I swear,” Garrett muttered as he pushed through the snow, “if you—”

Stopping suddenly as he rounded the corner, he was horrified to see Munver on his hands and knees on the cart’s rear, with his pants pulled down and his plump buttocks raised high in the snow.

Too shocked for a moment to react, Garrett spotted a faint light in Munver’s hand. He tilted his head slightly, trying to understand what he was seeing. Perhaps his fury blinded him, or perhaps he simply could not believe what was right in front of his eyes, but it took longer than it should for him to realize that Munver was mumbling away to himself while holding a candle to the frozen woman’s nether regions and scraping his fingernails against the mound between her legs.

“It’s not fair!” Munver hissed. “Why’s it still not soft?”

Suddenly letting out a furious roar, Garrett lunged forward and grabbed Munver by the scruff of the neck before hauling him back and throwing him out of the cart. Crying out again, he slammed Munver down against the snow and stared wide-eyed in horror as the pitiful figure wriggled and squirmed and tried desperately to pull his pants back up.

“What are you doing?” Garrett shouted, as snow continued to fall all around them. His weakness had been blasted away by a resurgent fury, and he felt for a moment as if he could tear Munver apart with his bare hands. “Tell me right now, or I swear I’ll kill you!”

Munver still hadn’t managed to get his pants up, but he was sobbing now and seemed to be in a state of panic.

Turning back to look at the frozen bodies, Garrett saw that the candle had tipped over and that the flame had been extinguished. A section of wood had been placed as a kind of cover, and a sense of dread and disgust began to rise through Garrett’s chest as he finally understood exactly what Munver had been attempting to achieve. Revolted to the point of nausea, Garrett reached out to steady himself against the rear of the cart, and he began to consider exactly what punishment he should mete out. It took only a second or two for him to realize that there was only one real option. This pathetic runt of a man had to be put to death.

Gritting his teeth, he turned to face Munver, but at the last moment he stopped as he saw the damage to the frozen man’s hand.

No.

Impossible.

Please, no.

For a few seconds, not daring to believe what he was seeing, Garrett stared at the spot where a finger had been snapped away. Then, ignoring the pain in his gut, he clambered up onto the rear of the cart and took a closer look. When he saw that the gold coin was missing, something in his eyes immediately changed. It was as if he had seen Death itself staring back at him.

Slowly, he turned and saw that Munver was finally on his feet, and that his pants were back up.

“Where is it?” Garrett asked.

“Go to hell!” Munver shouted between sobs. “You can’t just grab me like that! You’ve got no right to be—”

“Where is it?” Garrett screamed, scrambling off the cart and rushing at him, grabbing him by the throat and then swinging him around before slamming him against the cart’s side and eliciting a pained squawk from the man’s lips. “Where is the coin you took?”

Munver tried to answer, but his throat was being squeezed to tight and all he could manage was a pained splutter.

“Where is it?” Garrett yelled, before stepping back and then punching Munver in the chest, snapping a rib and sending him screaming down onto his knees in the snow. “Give it to me now, before it’s too late!”

Clutching his injured chest, Munver stared straight ahead as he tried to overcome the agonizing pain. Before he had a chance to respond, he was hauled back up and pressed back against the cart, and he saw Garrett’s furious face leaning toward him.

“You have no idea what you’re fooling with!” Garrett said firmly. “Give the coin back to me right now!”

“It’s mine now,” Munver spluttered. “It’s payment for my hospitality and—”

Garrett snarled and punched him again, this time higher in the chest, then he hauled him away from the cart, spun him around, and punched him so hard in the face that several teeth flew loose as Munver fell down against the snow. Worried that this would not be enough, Garrett listened for a moment to his grovelling cries and then he punched him again, harder this time.

“Now!” Garrett roared, before turning and looking at the two frozen bodies. He watched them for a moment, particularly the man, and then he turned to look down at Munver.

Clutching his mouth as blood splattered onto the snow, Munver was whimpering as he tried and failed to get up.

“Fine,” Garrett snarled, “I’ll find it myself.”

Munver screamed as Garrett knelt on his chest, then he continued to scream as he felt his clothes being torn from his body. Garrett was searching for every pocket, for every space where the coin could conceivably be hidden, but finally he realized that there was nowhere left to check so he looked back at Munver’s bloodied face. He felt no pity, only pure, unbridled hatred and disgust.

“Where is it?” he roared.

Munver let out a pained sob. Not words. Just an anguished moan.

Garrett punched him hard in the chin, cracking more teeth and sending a spray of blood from his lips.

“Where is it?”

Munver’s sobs were more like convulsions now, although after a moment he managed to pull one hand free and use it to plaintively thump against Garrett’s chest.

Garrett pushed the hand aside and then punched Munver again, breaking his nose.

“Where’s the coin?” he shouted, before turning and looking back toward the cart.

The dead man and woman were still in place, still entwined in their embrace.

Turning back to look at Munver, Garrett saw blood streaming from the man’s nose.

“Where is the coin?” he snarled.

He waited, but Munver was sobbing too loudly to make any sense.

“Where is it?” Garrett yelled, and then he punched Munver again, this time on the other side of the face, then again on the chin, then again on the side of his forehead, this time with enough force to crack the eye-socket.

Munver let out a pained wail, like the sound of a dying animal, but Garrett merely stared down at him with an expression of pure hatred. He raised his fist again, ready to land another strike, and then at the last moment he realized that Munver seemed to be trying to speak.

“Drawer,” Munver gasped. “Drawer. Don’t hurt me. It’s… I swear, it’s in the drawer.”

“What drawer?” Garrett shouted.

“Cabin. Drawer. Don’t hurt me no more. Please.”

Garrett’s fist was still raised, and for a moment he considered ending the miserable wretch’s life. A few more blows in the right spots, he figured, would more than do the trick, and he considered it would be a public service to rid the world of such an awful specimen of humanity. Finally, however, he realized that he might yet need his help, so he got to his feet and then he grabbed Munver’s shirt, using it to haul the bloodied man up from the snow. He glanced at the bodies and saw that they were still on the back of the cart, and then he turned back to Munver.

“Show me,” he snarled, leaning so close to Munver’s face that he could smell the blood. “Now!”

Eleven

The cabin’s door sprung open and Munver was immediately sent stumbling through, with such force that he tripped and fell and landed against the table, knocking it aside.

Behind him, Garrett stepped through the doorway, not bothering to close it this time.

“Get the coin,” he said firmly. “Give it to me.”

Clutching his injured side, Munver rolled onto his back. His face was a bloodied mess, with blood still flowing freely from his broken nose and from the damage to his mouth, while the area around his left eye-socket showed signs of bleeding just below the skin. His eyes were open, looking around frantically, and then he let out an anguished squawk as Garrett grabbed him by the throat and pulled him back up.

“Where is the coin?”

Stammering and unable to get a word out, Munver pointed in panic at a set of drawers in the far corner. Garrett looked for a moment, before dropping Munver to the floor and stalking over to check the drawers himself.

Pulling each drawer out in turn, he searched frantically while Munver sobbed on the floor. Garrett was muttering to himself now, alternately cussing and asking the Lord for help, but finally he pulled out one of the drawers and saw the familiar gold coin inside. He picked it up and turned it around, checking that it was the right one, and then he turned to head back to the door.

Just as he reached for the handle, however, he stopped for a moment.

Outside, the wind was still blowing wildly, with enough force to rattle the door in its frame.

Finally, with the coin still clutched in his right hand, Garrett turned and made his way over to the window. Whereas for the past few minutes his face had been filled with an expression of pure anger, now there was a hint of fear as he looked out at the darkness and squinted in an attempt to make out the faint shape of the cart. He waited, watching for any hint of movement, not yet daring to go out there himself.

Behind him, Munver picked up the knife he’d used earlier to open the can of beans, and then he slowly got to his feet.

Still Garrett watched the outline of the cart. He’d seen nothing out of the ordinary, not yet, but he felt a growing sense of fear in his chest as he realized that the coin must have been out of the man’s hand for quite some time. At least an hour, maybe longer, and that was more than long enough for…

Munver steadied himself again the side of the chair, while limping across the room with the knife in his hand.

Garrett knew it was time to go back outside, to put the coin into the man’s hand. In theory, that would set everything straight again, and then he’d be able to continue with his plan unchanged. He’d feared a moment like this since he’d first begun his work at the end of the war. He was fine with the process so long as he had control, but this time things were unraveling. What would he face if he went out there now? All through that war, he’d prided himself on being the bravest of men, but that had been when he was facing guns and bombs and enemy soldiers. Now, standing at the window and staring out at the distant cart, he realized he was up against something entirely different, something that went against every natural law that he knew.

And then, just as he began to think that he might be brave enough to go out there, he saw something moving on the back of the cart.

“Gah!”

Munver rushed up behind him and drove the knife into the small of his back, pressing him against the window for a moment before twisting the knife and then pulling it out.

Garrett remained standing as Munver stepped away. He’d barely even registered the attack, or the sensation of the blade slicing into his right kidney. His eyes were fixed on the darkness outside, and on the faint, barely perceptible impression of a figure moving about on the cart.

Finally, as blood began to flow from the wound, Garrett took a step back. He was still clutching the recovered coin in his hand, and he knew he had to go outside and face what was on the cart, to put things right, but now the blood-loss was starting to weaken him further. He took another step back, then another, and then he stumbled and fell down into the chair.

“Go to Hell!” Munver sneered, before coming up behind him and driving the knife into the chair’s rear, sending the blade clean through until it ran once more into Garrett’s back.

Still staring at the window, Garrett opened his mouth and let out a gasp. He could no longer see the cart, of course, but he was certain he’d seen movement just a moment ago, which meant…

He looked down at the coin in the palm of his hand.

Control.

He’d lost control.

He couldn’t imagine what would happen next.

Suddenly Munver stabbed the back of the chair again, then again, and this time the tip of the blade burst out through the front of Garrett’s chest. Beaten and bloodied, Munver screamed as he continued to attack, and in the space of the next minute he stabbed Garrett thirty times or more in the back, striking with increasing speed as his frenzy built. He only stopped, finally, when his arm spasmed and threatened to give way, at which point he left the knife still in place and took a step back.

Breathlessly, he stared at Garrett’s silhouette.

Blood was trickling from Garrett’s mouth, but he’d barely noticed his own murder. Instead he was still staring at the window, thinking about what he’d seen on the rear of the cart. And although he felt great sorrow at the thought of never seeing Mary again, and despite the realization that he had ultimately failed in his journey, he allowed himself at least one consoling thought. He would not now have to go out there into the snow and face the consequences of what had happened. He would not have to witness the horror that, until now, he had only read about and heard spoken of. Someone else could fix the problem.

No.

No, he had to keep fighting.

Suddenly filled with panic, he gripped the chair’s arms and tried to haul himself up, but all his strength was gone now. He tried again, and again, each time struggling more and more until he let out a faint, frustrated groan. All he could think was that he had to complete this one final journey. After that, he could die a satisfied man, but he couldn’t leave this particular task unfinished. Why, anything could happen if the process got out of hand. He gripped the chair tighter and prepared for the final push, for the moment when – despite his pain and fear – he’d force himself up.

And then he felt a hand on his.

He blinked a few times, and finally he saw Mary kneeling before him.

“It’s okay,” she said, with tears in her eyes but sounding so calm and soothing, “you can rest now, my darling. Other men can do your work.”

He opened his mouth to tell her that nobody else knew how the process worked, but he couldn’t get the words out. He could barely even move his lips.

“Hush now,” Mary continued. “I’ll be with you soon enough. Those bodies out there… they’ll find their way. You’ve brought them far enough already. Trust in the world.”

Her smile grew, and then she leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead, and then she was gone.

In that moment, Garrett knew that he was never going to get out of the chair again. He still gripped the sides, but slowly his hands weakened and he allowed himself to slump back, with the blade still running straight through his chest. He tried to take a deep breath, but found that he could not. He tried to open his mouth so that he could offer one final prayer, but this too was impossible. Looking at the window, he tried to imagine what was happening out there right now on the cart, but his thoughts were dissolving. As he slipped away, his last thought was that perhaps the Lord would show mercy in his final judgment. He thought he could smell Mary’s perfume.

I worked only for you, Lord, he thought. It was all for you.

His eyes remained open, even in death.

Twelve

For several minutes, Munver didn’t dare move.

With blood still running from his broken nose, he stood completely still and stared at the back of Garrett’s head. He half-expected the older, larger man to suddenly rip himself up from the chair, to then turn around and rush forward, to dole out a beating of unprecedented savagery. After all, Munver had tried to stand up to bullies before but he’d never had any luck. This time, pure anger had gotten the better of him and he’d been unable to contain his rage; a kind of red mist had clouded his judgment and he’d struck before he could think things through.

Now, as snow continued to fall outside, he was starting to consider the possibility that he’d taken the ultimate revenge.

He began to smile.

Then the smile grew, becoming a wide grin.

Finally, he began to laugh. Not just laugh: this was more of a cackle, the eruption of a long-suppressed frustration. The realization that he, Stuart Munver, had killed one of the pompous assholes who always sneered at him.

Crouching down, his cackle turned into a giggle but then stopped suddenly. How, he wondered, could he be sure that this wasn’t a ruse? He stared at the handle of the knife, still sticking out from the back of the chair. He had no idea how many times he’d stabbed Garrett, but evidently it had been enough times. Then again, he knew better than to assume success. Slowly, then, he began to crawl around to the side of the chair, while taking care to stay a good distance back, and then he looked up and saw Garrett’s dead face with glassy eyes staring straight forward and blood on his chin.

“Are you…”

Munver paused.

“Are you dead?” he asked finally.

He waited.

Garrett’s face didn’t move.

“If you’re not dead,” Munver continued, “you have to tell me. Do you hear? It’s not right to pretend. If you’re not dead, by law you have to admit that. No tricks.”

Again, he waited.

Again, Garrett didn’t move.

Munver paused, trying to think of a solution to his quandary, and then he reached out and grabbed the can that had earlier contained beans. He raised the can and took a moment to aim, and then he threw it forward. The can hit Garrett’s face and then fell away, but once again Garrett didn’t respond at all.

Slowly, cautiously, Munver crawled forward, until he was looking directly up at Garrett’s face. Then he sat up, and then – finally – he reached out and gave Garrett’s shoulder a shove, before pulling back slightly. He waited, and then he allowed himself to believe that he’d actually manage to kill the man who’d beaten him to a pulp. He smiled again, unable to hold back, and then he got to his feet and stepped behind the chair, before grabbing the knife’s handle and giving it a hard, angry twist.

“Enjoying that?” he sneered, leaning down and looking directly into Garrett’s face. “I hope you’re enjoying Hell, Mr. Garrett, because that’s where you’re gonna burn forever. You’re gonna suffer and scream, and while you’re doing that I’m gonna be getting rich. Do you understand? You lost, Mr. Garrett! You lost and I won, and do you know why? It’s because you’re too stupid!”

He twisted the knife yet again, before pulling it out and then stabbing the dead man several more times in the back.

“That’s right,” he continued through gritted teeth, still driving the knife into Garrett. “I bet that doesn’t feel too good, does it? I bet it feels humiliating. Well, it’s exactly what you deserve. You and all those other assholes!”

Once he’d finished twisting the knife, he stepped around the chair and stared down at Garrett’s face for a moment. Then he pulled his fist back and punched the dead man, hitting him several times until suddenly he caught the jaw at an awkward angle. Letting out a gasp of pain, he stepped back and clutched his injured fist, and then he reached down and began to loosen the front of his pants.

“I’ll show you,” he murmured, as his rage continued to grow. “No-one disrespects Stuart Munver. I’ll show you exactly what I think of you.”

After pulling his manhood out, he took aim for a moment and then he began to pee. At first his aim was awry and he shot straight past the chair, but he adjusted and finally he began to hit Garrett’s face. Sneering as he watched the pee splatter against the dead man’s cheek, Munver couldn’t hold back a faint smile as he realized that he was finally taking his revenge. Really, was Garrett that different to men like Walter Graft? They’d both given Munver dirty looks. This was just practice for when he finally got home and gained his revenge on Graft.

“You don’t look so smart now, do you?” he shouted triumphantly. “Who’s the boss? Who’s in charge? Me, that’s who! You’d better believe it!”

Running out of pee, he let the last dribbles fall onto the front of his pants and then he slipped his manhood away, and then he stared at Garrett for a moment. He wanted to degrade the man some more, but he couldn’t really think of anything worse than peeing on him so, finally, he stepped forward and grabbed Garrett’s hand, forcing the fingers open and then taking back the gold coin.

“This is mine,” he explained, “and I’m going to use it to go home and show everyone they were wrong about me. Angelica Graft’ll fall at my feet, she’ll beg me to marry her. I suppose I might, if I’m feeling generous. She’ll have to really beg, though. She’ll have to make me really believe that she means it. I’ll want her to be down on her knees for a while before I’m ready to accept what she’s saying.” He sniffed. “I’m a generous man, though,” he added after a moment. I’m willing to accept her apologies, provided they’re heartfelt, and then I suppose I’ll have to marry her. It’ll only be the right thing to do.”

For a moment, he was swept away by thoughts of prancing through his hometown in a fancy new suit, with Angelica Graft on his arm. Then again, he realized after a moment that she’d have to change her name if they married, that she’d be Angelica Munver. He imagined all the townsfolk watching him with a sense of awe, and he couldn’t help but smile at the thought of everyone having to admit that they’d been wrong about him all along. Soon the fantasy began to grow, and in his mind’s eye he saw himself sitting on some kind of throne in the old town square, while all the other residents – even his parents and his bully brothers – bowed down before him and begged for his mercy and generosity.

“He’s so handsome,” he imagined one woman saying.

“I can’t believe we didn’t see him like this before,” another added in his mind. “We were so wrong. I hope eventually he’ll be kind enough to forgive us.”

“Yeah, I’ll show them,” he whispered. “That coin’ll go a long way.”

As he spoke those words, however, a flicker of concern entered his thoughts. He didn’t know the coin’s value, and now he was starting to worry that it might not be enough. Obviously it was valuable, but he’d been disappointed in life before and now he feared that he was being set up for another failure. He looked down at the coin and told himself that something so shiny had to make him rich, but then slowly he realized that there was one thing that might be even better than possessing this coin.

Possessing two coins.

He turned and looked at the window.

In the distance, out there in the dark of the snowy night, the faint outline of the cart could just about be seen. Munver thought back to the two bodies, and then to Garrett’s raging anger. Was he wrong, or had Garrett – at least once – mentioned the existence of two coins? That would make sense, given that there were two bodies. The hooks of greed were already starting to tug at Munver’s heart as he stepped closer to the window and placed his hands on the cold glass panes, and he was growing more certain by the second that there must be another coin out there, held tight in the hands of the dead woman.

Now that… That would surely be enough to make him really rich.

Thirteen

The wind was really picking up now, and Munver had to push hard to even get the cabin’s door open. He slipped outside, and the door immediately slammed shut behind him, and the thick snow crunched beneath his feet as he waded around to the cabin’s side. He knew he could – and perhaps should – wait until morning, but he wanted to get that second coin now. He wanted to be sure that he was rich.

As he made his way to the cart, Munver felt snow blasting against him, almost as if the elements were trying to hold him back. This only reinforced his determination, however, so he kept going until suddenly he felt something tugging at his right leg. Looking down, he struggled to see much in the darkness, but the glow from the window afforded him just enough light to see something caught around his knee. Reaching down, he found that he’d become entwined in the thick chain that hung from the front of the cart, the same chain that Garrett had used to pull his load.

Muttering a few cuss words under his breath, Munver struggled for a couple of minutes to get free. The chain was heavy, and he really had to twist a little to loosen his leg, but finally he was able to start making his way around the cart’s side.

“They’re gonna look at me like they should’ve been looking at me all along,” he said, trying to warm himself with thoughts of his imminent revenge. “They’re gonna regret the day they ever made fun of me.”

Reaching the rear of the cart, he immediately saw the dead woman’s feet. The candle – now extinguished, of course – remained between her legs, but Munver had no thoughts right now of resuming the thaw. Perhaps tomorrow, although he supposed he’d be on his way from the valley as soon as the storm passed. No, right now he was completely focused on the task at hand, so he climbed up onto the cart and began to lean down, peering between the woman’s fingers in the hope that he might find that second coin.

The first hand revealed nothing, so he turned to the second.

Only now, as the wind continued to howl all around him, did Stuart Munver notice that the dead man was gone.

He stared at the spot where the man’s corpse had been, and he felt a sudden sense of shock in his chest, but there was no doubt about the matter at all. The man, who previously had been on his side with a hand on the woman’s body, had completely disappeared.

Spotting something close to his knee, he looked down and saw the finger that he’d snapped away from the man’s hand earlier, when he’d freed the first coin. The finger remained, then, but the rest of the body was gone.

Munver looked around, convinced that the man’s body must simply have fallen away somehow. He thought back to the start of Garrett’s angry attack, and he tried to work out whether Garrett might have moved the body or hidden it somehow. Reaching past the woman, he pulled the covers all the way back, hoping to find that the man had simply slid to the cart’s forward end, but all he found were a couple more bottles of whiskey. As the covers flapped loudly in the wind, Munver looked over the sides of the cart, then over the back, but still there was no sign at all of the dead man.

“What kind of game is this?” he muttered, trying to make sense of what was happening. “I won’t be tricked. I’m not easily scared, either.”

He tried to understand what was happening, but then he told himself that there was no point. The man’s body didn’t matter anymore, so he crouched down and began to examine the woman’s second hand. This proved more difficult than the first, since her fist was closed, but after a moment he realized he could just about see something glinting deep in the palm of her hand, almost entirely obscured by her fingers. Was it a second coin? Getting a good look was impossible, so he began to try forcing her fingers open.

“Come on,” he whispered under his breath, but these fingers did not crack away as easily as those of the man. They were curled more tightly, holding their prize more securely. “It’s mine, damn it. I want it.”

No matter how he tried, however, Munver just couldn’t get the hand to open and release its precious coin. Exasperated, he worked for several more minutes, and then he sat back and stared at the hand and tried to come up with some other, smarter plan.

And then, slowly, he realized he could hear footsteps nearby, crunching through the snow.

He turned and looked toward the cabin. Snow was falling heavily in the darkness, but there was no sign of anybody moving about. The footsteps had stopped now, but he was sure he’d heard two or three just a moment ago. Could Garrett somehow still be alive? The thought terrified Munver, and it took a couple of minutes before he was able to convince himself that, no, of course Garrett hadn’t miraculously revived. The man was dead, that much was certain.

“Stop getting yourself all spooked,” Munver said out loud, hoping to make himself a little braver, and then he looked back down at the woman’s hand.

After a moment he grabbed the wrist and tried to crack that part of the woman’s arm free, then he shifted around and starting using his knee. If he could break the hand away from the body, he reasoned, he could then take it inside and heat it directly by the fire, and then soon enough the coin would have to come loose. It was a foolproof plan, but it all hinged on him being able to break the wrist and so far he was having no luck at all. Finally, with a plaintive cry of frustration, he pulled back and tried to come up with another idea, and then – filled with a sudden burst of fury – he kicked the cart’s side as hard as he could manage.

“Okay, calm down,” he told himself. “Just you calm down. You’re not gonna let them stop you now, you’re gonna do this.”

He waited, trying desperately to be smart, and then he remembered the saw.

When he’d first headed out to the wilderness, he’d brought only a few items that he could fit into a sack on his back. He’d very nearly not brought the saw at all, but at the last moment he’d figured it might be useful to have at least a few tools. Since then, the saw hadn’t been used at all, but now he supposed it might well cut through the woman’s frozen wrist. For a moment he tried to work out whether there was any reason this plan shouldn’t work, but actually it was beginning to seem like a stroke of genius.

“I knew it,” he said with a grin, as he began to clamber down from the rear of the cart. “There ain’t nothing that can hold me back. It’s fate. Destiny. I’m gonna be rich.”

He almost slipped in the snow, but finally he turned to make his way back toward the cabin. After just a couple of struggling paces, however, he stopped as he saw the silhouette of a man standing just a few feet away.

For a fraction of a second, Munver feared that somehow Garrett had survived the stabbing, but quickly that fear went away. The man before him was quite clearly not Garrett, since he was a little taller and more muscular and also, it seemed, completely naked. Had a stranger wandered through the snowstorm to the cabin? After all this solitude, had two visitors suddenly arrived on the same day. Munver stared, not knowing what to do or say, but then some deeper inclination made him look down at the silhouette’s hands, and he saw to his horror that one of the man’s fingers was quite clearly missing.

The same finger that Munver had snapped off earlier in the night.

“What?” Munver whispered, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what was happening. “No. What? What? There’s no—”

Before he could finish, the figure took a slow, faltering step forward, crunching the snow beneath his feet in the process.

“No!” Munver shouted, pulling away and, in the process, falling back and landing in the snow.

Panicked, he scrambled to his feet and raced around the other side of the cart. Pure, unadulterated fear had gripped his soul and he ran like an animal, scrambling with ever-increasing desperation as he tried to get back to the sanctuary of the cabin. He cried out, he huffed and puffed, but finally he reached the cabin’s rear wall and then he looked over his shoulder to see whether he was being followed.

For a moment he saw no-one, but then the man stepped into view.

Crying out, Munver turned and hurried away, fumbling his hands along the cabin’s frozen wall as he tried to get around to the door. He was starting to whimper now and there were tears in his eyes, but eventually he reached the next side and he grabbed the door. After pulling it open, he stumbled inside and then slammed the door shut again, and then he slid the makeshift wooden block into place. This was as close to a lock as the door possessed, but it at least made Munver feel a little safer as he stepped back and stared at the door with a growing sense of horror.

He hadn’t seen that.

It had been a trick of his imagination, or of the light.

The man, he hadn’t been walking about out there, it was impossible. He was dead.

Then, turning to look at the window, Munver saw to his horror that a human figure was slowly making its way around toward the door. In that moment, fear exploded in his chest, like a plant that went from seed to full bloom in the blink of an eye. He even let out a little whimper.

Fourteen

“No no no no no,” Munver whispered, backing away still further from the door until he bumped his shoulders against the opposite wall. “This isn’t happening.”

He swallowed hard, before looking over at the chair by the fireplace and seeing that at least Garrett’s dead body remained where it should be. That at least was some small comfort, although it left the question of who actually was outside. His mind was spinning, but Munver tried to take charge of his thoughts and he told himself that there couldn’t possibly be anyone else out there.

Looking at the window, he was relieved to see that the man could no longer be seen.

He waited, trying to force the panic back down, trying to tell himself – and make himself believe – that the supposed man hadn’t been there at all. Perhaps, he reasoned, this was some kind of trick set by Garrett, one last little joke at his expense. Well, he wasn’t going to have that, not at all, and after a moment he stood up straight and took a deep breath and told himself that he wasn’t going to run around all scared like a coward.

Suddenly the door shuddered as something tried to pull it open from the outside, and Munver let out a terrified yelp as he ducked down behind the table.

He heard the door shudder again, and then the only sound was the wind outside.

Not daring to move a muscle, Munver peered through the legs of the table and saw that the door was still shut. The wooden bolt was still in place, too, so no-one was going to be getting through. Had the shudder just been caused by a particularly strong gust of wind? That was possible, he figured, and he tried to convince himself that he was just letting himself get easily spooked. He wasn’t quite brave enough to get up from behind the table, not yet, but he did start to feel just a little more at ease as he realized that there might well be a perfectly normal explanation for all the -

Suddenly something knocked hard against the door, then again, and Munver began to whimper as he pulled further back against the wall.

He was so scared now, his whole body was shaking and his teeth were chattering. He’d seen the man’s hand, with its missing finger, and he was starting to try to work out how the frozen man could somehow have come back to life. Even if that were possible, why would he be after Munver?

“I never did anyone any wrong,” he whispered to himself, as tears began to run down his face. “I’m just trying to get by, is all. I ain’t doing any more than that. Everyone’s the same!”

He waited.

He listened.

Suddenly there was another loud, ominous bang at the door, and Munver tried to press himself even more firmly against the door.

“This isn’t fair,” he whimpered. “Why is this happening to me?”

He looked over toward Garrett’s body, and then he spotted the rifle resting against the far wall. In an instant, Munver realized that he could save himself, so he crawled around the side of the table, past Garrett’s chair, and over to the wall. Gasping with relief, he grabbed the rifle and checked that it was loaded, and then he began to crawl back to his previous hiding place behind the table.

Before he could get there, there was another loud knock at the door, and this time Munver turned instinctively, aimed the rifle, and fired.

The blast shook the rifle in his hands and sent the butt slamming into his chin. Munver cried out and dropped the weapon, but then he looked at the door and saw that he’d blasted a small hole right in the center. Despite the pain in his jaw, he listened for any clue that he’d managed to kill the man out there, but instead he merely heard the howling wind. Still, the hole in the door was in a perfect spot to hit someone on the other side, and Munver told himself that he had good odds of having struck his target.

He listened.

And then, breaking the silence, there came another knock.

“Damn you!” Munver hissed, grabbing the rifle and aiming again, but this time not firing. He only had a few shots left, and he didn’t want to waste any of them. Better, he told himself, to wait until he had a good view of the man, and then to blast his head clean off his shoulders. That’d show him.

He waited.

The wind continued to blow, rattling the roof.

“This isn’t really happening,” Munver whispered. “I know how things work, and this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Frozen dead people stay frozen and dead. This is all in my mind. I’ve been up here alone too long, that’s all. This is Garrett’s fault.” He turned and scowled at the dead man in the chair. “You put this fear in my head!” he snarled. “You made me scared, but I’m gonna be brave and you’re gonna rot and Angelica Graft’s gonna—”

Before he could finish, there was another knock at the door.

Startled, Munver turned and fired the rifle again, this time keeping a better hold against the kickback. His aim wasn’t quite so good, however, and he watched in horror as the wooden bolt was blasted apart.

“No!” he screamed, dropping the rifle and rushing forward before the door could swing open. Reaching up, he grabbed the handle and pulled tight, but as he looked up at the bolt he saw that it was completely destroyed.

Why, he wondered, did he always have such bad luck?

The wind was still howling on the other side of the door, causing the wood to shake slightly, and Munver held the door’s handle tighter than he’d ever held anything in his life. His teeth were still chattering and his mind was awash with fear, but he told himself that this was still all just a figment of his imagination. And as the second passed with no further knocking sounds, he began to wonder whether perhaps the worst of the horror was over. Had he been right all along? Had he gone a little mad following Garrett’s death, or perhaps following the savage beating he’d received? Yes, that seemed to make sense.

“Watch yourself,” he remembered the man in the bar saying as he gave him the map all that time ago. “A man can go a little crazy out there all on his own.”

Some of the others had laughed, and Munver had laughed too, but now he began to realize that the man’s advice had been good.

“I’ve just gone a little crazy,” he said breathlessly. “It’s only human. Another man would’ve lost his mind completely. In the circumstances, it’s remarkable that I’m holding together as good as I am.”

He waited, still holding the door shut, and he told himself that there would be no more knocking sounds. And, indeed, there were no more as he stayed in position and listened to the sound of the wind outside. He was braced for the knocks to return, but as the minutes went by he allowed himself ever so slowly to start relaxing just a little. Had the madness passed? His head felt very clear, very sharp, and he wondered whether the storm in his mind had passed.

Finally, daring to hold the door shut with just one hand, he reached over and grabbed a spoon from one of the shelves, and then he forced the spoon into the slot alongside what was left of the wooden bolt. He gave the door a faint push and found that it held now, so he allowed himself to sit back slightly. The wood shook very slightly, but he knew that was just a result of the gale outside. It had been, what, five or six minutes since the last heavy knock?

Please, he thought to himself, be over now.

“You know what he wants,” a familiar voice said suddenly. It was Garrett’s voice, coming from over Munver’s shoulder. “You have to give it to him.”

Fifteen

Munver stayed right where he was, kneeling in front of the door. It had now been maybe ten minutes since the last knocking sound, and maybe four or five minutes since he’d thought he’d heard Garrett’s voice, but he knew that both those things couldn’t really have happened.

Could they?

It’s not easy, keeping from going mad, he told himself. I’ve gotta stay strong.

He stared straight ahead at the door. Every so often the wind caused the wood to rattle and shake slightly, and this actually made Munver feel better in some perverse way. It was something normal, something he understood, and he took it as a sign that maybe the natural order was doing right. Even the wind itself was comforting, and every blessed second of normality felt like a miracle.

And then, eventually, he heard a faint creaking sound over on the far side of the cabin, and he knew full well that this was the sound of something moving in the chair.

Slowly, forcing himself to face the truth, he turned and saw Garrett’s body still in the chair, still silhouetted against – and looking out through – the window. A moment later, Munver saw the glint of the knife’s handle still sticking out from the back of the chair.

Telling himself that he had to stay strong, Munver stared for a moment at the chair before turning and starting to crawl over to where he’d dropped the rifle. He was still trembling with fear, but he figured that was only natural. He’d been through a lot during that night, and he reckoned he wasn’t going to miss the cabin when he set off in the morning.

“What exactly do you think is gonna happen?” Garrett’s voice said suddenly.

Gasping, Munver grabbed the rifle and pulled back against the wall, and he aimed the gun directly at the chair.

“You know what he wants,” Garrett’s voice continued, “and you’re only—”

“Shut up!” Munver yelled, waving the rifle around but not firing. Not yet. “You’re dead, so shut up!”

At this, Garrett’s voice began to chuckle.

The back of Garrett’s head remained completely still, but the sound sure seemed like it was coming from round the front.

“You’re not real,” Munver said through clenched teeth. “I sure ain’t gonna go crazy now, not when I’m so close to going back and showing them all.”

“You won’t be going anywhere unless you make this right,” Garrett’s voice replied. “Did you think those coins were just decoration? Just an oversight on my part? Didn’t it occur to you that maybe I squeezed them into those cold, dead hands before I ever set off along this road? Didn’t it occur to you that maybe I had a good reason for doing that?”

“I’m not listening,” Munver said, shaking his head. “I’m not letting you into my head.”

“There are some dead folks who stick around,” Garrett’s voice continued. “Or rather, who insist on coming back. I first saw it during the war. A priest told me I had a special inclination to noticing this sort of thing, that maybe if I survived the fighting it’d be a sign that I had a job to do for the Lord. Well, that priest’s long since dead, but I got to thinking that he was right.”

Munver shook his head.

“You weren’t in the fighting,” Garrett’s voice added. “You’d have been too young. You can’t imagine what it was like, having men screaming and dying all around you. It got so bad, I couldn’t tell the difference between wood snapping and a man’s body splintering in half. But somewhere in the middle of all that, I found a new clarity that I’ve carried with me ever since. A new role in life.”

“I can’t hear you,” Munver gasped breathlessly. “You’re not talking.”

“The coins are important,” Garrett’s voice said. “Not to all folk. Just some. I don’t know exactly what the coins are for or where they come from. I’m not saying they meet some boatman on the other side and they need to pay him, although that’s surely how it seems sometimes. What I’m saying is that some certain souls need the coins. It must be something to do with how they lived their lives, and for how determined they are to come back. And me, I seemed to have a knack for knowing where to find these folks. A God-given ability, you might say.”

“Shut up, shut up,” Munver sneered, aiming the rifle and almost firing at the back of Garrett’s head. He only held back because he recognized the absurdity of wasting a bullet on a dead man.

“They’re always poor,” the voice continued. “They always died violently, or in sin. Those are a few of the things they always have in common. Beyond that, I’m not sure. But the Lord has been leading me to them for the past few years, across several states. Sometimes I have to steal the bodies, other times I can persuade people to let me take them. And sometimes, like this occasion, I have to make a purchase and buy them. Then I take them home, and my wife and I have worked out what’s the best thing to do with them next. You can’t interrupt that process, Mr. Munver. I need you to give the man his coin back.”

“None of this is true,” Munver replied.

“Really?” Garrett’s voice chuckled again. “You’re telling a dead man that he’s wrong about death?”

“You’re not really talking to me!” Munver yelled angrily. “You’re all in my head!”

“I don’t know what happens when a coin’s taken from one of them,” the voice said. “It’s never happened before, not on my watch. I imagine he’ll be mighty angry, but maybe you can make amends if you just give it back to him. Of course, you didn’t just take the coin, did you? You did other things, things there might be no coming back from. You’re a disgusting little creep, Mr. Munver, and I’m not sure there are any amends you can make that’ll save your skin. But I’m telling you how you can at least try.”

“No!” Munver said, lowering the rifle and then sticking his fingers in his ears. “I’m not hearing any of this.”

“He’s out there waiting,” Garrett’s voice replied, and Munver could still just about hear him. “He’s not going away. You can’t sit it out in here forever, so what are you going to do?”

Munver squeezed his eyes tight shut and pushed his fingers deeper, harder into his ears. Yet he could still hear Garrett’s voice a moment later when the dead man spoke again.

“You’d better pray that he shows you some mercy, Mr. Munver. If he doesn’t, I don’t know what’ll happen to you but I know it’ll be—”

“SHUT UP!” Munver screamed, opening his eyes, grabbing the rifle and firing twice at the back of Garrett’s head. The first shot missed and shattered a pane in the window, and the second shot hit the side of Garrett’s head and blew a chunk of skull and flesh clean away.

Munver got to his feet and stepped forward, taking a moment to aim a little better, but when he pulled the trigger he felt only a faint, impotent clicking sound.

He tried again, but he was all out of shots, and he knew that there was no more ammunition anywhere in the cabin.

Breathlessly, Munver stared at the back of Garrett’s half-exploded head.

“Better get thinking, boy,” Garrett’s voice said, with a hint of a chuckle in his tone. “Time’s a-ticking’…”

He let out a faint, amused whistle, and then he fell silent.

Munver didn’t dare move, not for several minutes. The wind sounded so much louder, now that it could blow straight through the shattered window pane, and flecks of snow were starting to drift into the cabin and fall to the floor. Staring at the window, Munver watched for any hint of movement, but all he saw were swirls of snow dancing in the gale. The night was still dark, and the cabin’s roof still shuddered sometimes as the wind began to swell, and the door rattled a little in its frame, but Munver barely even dared to breathe. Fear had exploded all throughout his body like a plant earlier, and now that plant’s leaves and roots were all dying, threatening to take the rest of his soul with them.

Sixteen

After several hours, glimmers of morning light began to pick out the edges of the broken glass in the window.

Stuart Munver, who still hadn’t dared move since he’d heard Garrett’s voice, remained standing with his rifle aimed forward. The weapon was no use, not anymore, but it still felt good to have its weight in his hands. He told himself that if the worst happened, if he really needed to fire the rifle, then maybe just maybe one last shot would miraculously materialize for him. Deep down, he knew the idea was foolish, but it was the only hope to which he could still cling, so he clung to it desperately.

The gold coin was still in his pocket.

His eyes hadn’t once moved during the night, save for blinking. He’d been staring at the window, waiting in case a figure appeared on the other side, but so far there had been nothing. He’d been listening, too, to the door behind him, just in case there were any more knocks or any sounds that indicated somebody trying to gain entry. This, too, had failed to happen, although he couldn’t yet bring himself to believe that he was alone.

And then there was Garrett’s body.

Munver hadn’t looked directly at the dead man, not since blasting the side of his head clean away. He was just relieved that the relentless, mocking voice had finally stopped speaking to him. That had been part of his madness, he was sure, and its absence now meant that he was clearly recovering from whatever mania had temporarily gripped him during the night. That was what he told himself, anyway, although he could hear Garrett’s last words still echoing in the back of his mind, still teasing and taunting him:

“Better get thinking, boy. Time’s a-ticking’…”

Why wouldn’t that infernal dead man just shut up in his thoughts?

And then there had been that final, haunting whistle.

As he stood and stared at the window, and as he realized he could just about make out the cart in the rising morning light, Munver realized that it was getting past time for him to head out of the valley. The sun was rising behind the tree-line to the east, casting a faint glow that was only getting stronger with each passing minute. Snow was still falling, but not with the same ferocity as before, and in the past half hour the gale had noticeably weakened. Conditions still weren’t ideal, Munver knew that, but at least it was looking possible for a man to make it out of the valley and then reach the main trail, and from there he was certain he could get to the nearest town. And then…

Then riches.

Wealth.

Glory.

It was all within his grasp. All he had to do was get away from the cabin and reach civilization. And, it seemed, keep his mind clear of all the crazy fantasies that had built up during the night.

Finally, suddenly, surprising even himself – Stuart Munver began to laugh.

The laugh became a giggle, and the giggle became a throaty roar, and eventually he had to step back and lean against the wall. This fit of laughter was taking him over now, causing his whole body to roar, and he laughed and laughed even as he wondered why any of this was happening. He supposed that it must be relief, and slowly he slid down until he was sitting on the floor with the rifle resting on his lap, and he allowed himself to keep laughing even as his belly began to hurt. He knew he probably sounded insane, but he figured there was no harm, not with there being no-one else about. Besides, better to get it out now, before setting out on the long journey home.

“Mr. Garrett,” he said finally, once he could speak again, with tears of joy streaming down his face, “I am so very glad that you turned up here yesterday evening. I know things haven’t quite gone too well between us, but really, I will never forget you. I might even raise a drink to you, once I’m rich and fabulous.”

Taking a deep breath, and feeling a rush of relief, he was still smiling as he got to his feet. He rested the rifle against the wall, then he wiped some dried blood from around his broken nose, and then he stepped over and took a look at Garrett’s face. His shot during the night had blown away about a quarter of one side of the man’s skull, taking an ear and an eye and part of the mouth. As he looked at Garrett’s features, however, Munver couldn’t help but notice two things. One was that the remaining half of the face looked completely undamaged, and the other was that the remaining part of the lips – caught by the ever-rising sun – seemed to be locked in the process of making a whistle.

Munver’s smile faded a little, but only for a moment, only until he remembered that he was due to set off and that with luck he could be a rich man inside of a week.

“Sorry,” he said, patting the side of Garrett’s arm, “but I ain’t got time to bury you. You’ll just have to make do with that chair.”

He brushed some fragments of bone and hair from the dead man’s shoulder.

“There,” he added. “I’ve prettied you up as best I can. It’ll just have to be enough.” He turned to walk away, but at the last moment he remembered one other thing. “Oh, and sorry about pissing on you last night. I guess I kinda got carried away, but you… Well, you deserved it just a little. You’d have to admit that.”

For the next hour or so, he busied himself with the task of preparing for his journey. There was no point taking the pots and pans, he supposed, and he wanted to travel light. He wouldn’t be taking his lady-box, either, seeing as how he wouldn’t need it once he’d seduced Angelica Graft. Every so often, his mind wandered and he thought back to the missing man from the cart, but he didn’t let that situation trouble him unduly. There was some explanation, he was sure, and Munver had never been the most curious of men. Perhaps the man had simply slid off and got covered in snow, or maybe Munver’s brief moment of madness had caused him to hallucinate the man’s disappearance. Smiling as he finished packing for the road, he figured that soon he’d be out of the valley and back in his hometown, and nothing at the cabin would matter one jot to him anymore.

Getting to his feet, he realized he was ready to go.

And then, spotting the saw, he remembered that there was still one final task that he needed to complete. During the night, the idea of going out there and sawing the woman’s hand off had seemed absolutely terrifying. Indeed, it amused him now to think of just how scared he’d been, but he figured the night sometimes did that to a man. Now, with daylight spreading further and further with each passing moment, all the fear had faded away and he reached down and grabbed the saw, figuring that two gold coins would definitely be better than one.

He took one last look around the cabin, marveling at how long he’d spent living alone in such a small space, and then he headed to the door. He removed the spoon and the remains of the wooden bolt, and then he pulled the door open. For a moment, he worried that he might find the frozen man standing outside, but of course that wasn’t the case at all. There was no-one, and Munver smiled at his own superstitious foolishness as he stepped outside, pulled the door shut, and headed around to the cart.

Seventeen

“Let’s be having you then, lady,” Munver said as he set his bag on the cart and then climbed up, saw in hand, and prepared to get to work.

The first thing he noticed, in the dawn’s early light, was that the dead man was still missing. That caused a moment of concern, but only a moment. He quickly reminded himself that soon he’d be long gone from the valley, and that the disappearance of the man’s corpse wouldn’t matter in the long run. No, he had bigger thoughts to think. In some ways, Stuart Munver was like a dog, choosing to not worry about things that didn’t seem to concern him, so he focused on getting into position and then setting the saw’s blade against the dead woman’s wrist.

“Sorry about this, M’am,” he said cheerfully, “but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

He liked that phrase.

He’d heard other man in town say that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, men who were respected. Saying such things now, he felt a little more like them.

Well, soon he’d be even better than them.

“Sure is true,” he muttered. “Yes, M’am, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

With that, he began to saw through her wrist, although he found to his irritation that the blade really wasn’t penetrating very well. He worked for a good few minutes before stopping to check on his progress, and he found that he was barely a quarter of an inch through the frozen flesh. This wasn’t exactly encouraging news, although he supposed that once he was halfway through he might be able to snap the rest loose, but he told himself that in this instance thinking wouldn’t be nearly as much use as doing, so he set himself back to work.

As he sawed, he felt the cart shake slightly beneath his knees, and he heard the wooden joins creaking. After a few more minutes, however, he found that he’d made no more progress than before. He adjusted the saw and tried cutting at a different spot and then – when that didn’t work – he tried sawing directly through the fingers. All the while, he was muttering a growing list of cusses under his breath, and his sense of irritation was getting much stronger.

“I won’t be denied,” he muttered, but he had to sit back for a moment and try to come up with another plan. He began to think as hard as he’d ever thought before, so hard that he began to develop a headache, but he kept thinking anyway.

As he thought, he stared at the dead woman’s frozen hand.

There has to be a way to get that coin free, he told himself. I need it. One coin might not be enough, and even if it is, I want two, damn it!

Finally, slowly, an idea began to form in his mind. If he could get the woman off the back of the cart, he could carry her into the cabin and set her by the hearth, and then he could get a really huge fire roaring. She’d have to thaw then, and the coin would slip free like candy from a child’s hand. The idea made so much sense, he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it sooner, but he was grateful that at least he’d come up with a solution eventually. All he had to do was get the woman into the cabin and then everything would be okay.

He leaned forward.

At that moment, an icy hand reached around and clamped itself over his mouth.

Shocked, Munver stared straight ahead for a moment, not daring to turn and see his assailant. He remained completely still, not even summoning the strength to move so much as a muscle, before slowly he felt another hand reaching out to touch his left shoulder. He could hear a creaking sound now, coming from a little way back, but he told himself that he had to be wrong, that none of this could actually be happening.

If you look, it’ll make it more real, he told himself, even as he started trembling with fear. The frozen hand was starting to move up his face, toward his broken nose. Don’t give in. You beat the madness once. You can do it again.

He gritted his teeth.

He clenched his fists.

Suddenly he heard laughter ringing out; uproarious laughter, filling the air all around. It took a moment before he could pinpoint the source of that laughter. It wasn’t coming from behind. Instead, he looked toward the cabin and saw Garrett’s grinning face through the broken window pane. It was Garrett – despite missing one side of his face – who would laughing so hard, hard enough that his whole torso shook even as he remained pinned to the chair by the knife’s blade. It was Garrett, a man who had died several hours earlier, who now laughed and laughed as Munver stared at him in horror.

Finally, unable to fight back any longer, Munver turned and saw the face of the frozen dead man staring at him.

“No!” Munver screamed, pulling away and lunging past the figure, crashing down off the back of the cart and landing in the snow, then scrambling to his feet and desperately wading toward the distant trees.

Garrett’s laughter seemed to follow him, hanging in the air all around, and Munver stumbled every few steps in his increasingly panicked attempt to escape. After a moment he felt as if the laughter had begun burrowing into his mind, and he had to clamp his hands over his ears in a desperate attempt to silence Garrett’s mocking tones. Even this failed to work, and finally Munver dropped to his knees in the snow. He squeezed his eyes tight shut and bowed his head, but the laughter – though muffled slightly by his hands on his ears – continued unabated.

“It’s not real!” Munver yelled, now trying to use his own voice to push Garrett’s laugh away. “It wasn’t real before, and it’s not real now!”

Yet still the laughter rang out, burrowing into Munver’s heart and soul, forcing him to remain on his knees despite his desperation to get away. He lost track of how long he remained on his knees, but he was starting to feel as if the last of his sanity was dripping away. And then, just as he was certain his mind was about to crack, the terrible laughter suddenly stopped.

Munver stayed completely still for a moment, before opening his eyes. His immediate relief, however, was countered by the sudden realization that an icy hand was resting on his right shoulder.

“No!” he shouted, stumbling to his feet and rushing forward again, racing toward the trees.

Before he could manage more than two paces, however, the laughter returned. Munver puts his hands over his ears again, and then he tripped and fell, landing face-first in the snow. Barely able to get back onto his knees, he screamed as he tried to drown out Garrett’s mocking voice, but the laughter seemed to become louder and louder in response. The more Munver fought back, the more the laughter tightened its grip on his mind.

And then it stopped again.

Munver continued to scream for a moment longer, but then he fell silent again.

The air all around was quiet, but – just as before – a frozen hand was resting on his shoulder, this time on the left side. It was if, every time he tried to run, Munver was being cut down by the laughter, giving the frozen man enough time to catch up. Munver stared straight ahead for a few seconds, seeing the tree-line that remained at once both tantalizingly close and terrifyingly far away, but now he was starting to fear that even reaching the tree-line would not be enough. Even if he made it all the way to the trail, would the laughter still be following him and forcing his mind to the brink of madness?

Determined to at least try, he stumbled to his feet and stepped forward, but of course the laughter immediately returned and Munver slumped back down. This time, since he’d barely moved at all, it took only a few seconds for the laughter to stop and for the hand to return – this time on the left side again – to his shoulder.

The horror was never going to end.

Too exhausted and terrified to try again, Munver remained on his knees for a moment before slowly reaching down and slipping a hand into his pocket. He fumbled for a moment, before taking out the gold coin. As he looked at the coin in the palm of his hand, he realized his dream of revenge was slipping away. Without the coin, he’d never be able to go home and prove himself to all the doubters, and he’d never be able to stand up to all the mocking bullies, and he’d never gain the company of the beautiful Angelica Graft. In an instant, that whole perfect future slipped away and Munver was left kneeling in the snow with the coin in his hand.

Slowly, bitterly, he held the coin over his shoulder.

“Take it,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “If you want it so much, then take it.”

He waited, and a moment later he felt the coin being slipped from between his fingers. Then, slowly, the frozen hand left his shoulder, and he began to hear a creaking sound heading further away, accompanied by the rustle of steps in the snow. The dead woman’s body had remained frozen solid, yet evidently the dead man had – perhaps through force of will-power alone – pushed himself to walk around, albeit very slowly and weakly. And as Munver remained on his knees, no longer hearing Garrett’s hideous laughter, he could not quite bring himself to turn and watch the frozen dead man walk away.

Nothing could be more horrific than the image that was already in his mind.

He remained on his knees for so long, he was actually shivering by the time he realized the creaking sound had stopped. He’d heard a faint bump just a few minutes earlier, as if something had climbed onto the cart. In his mind’s eye, Munver imagined the dead man slowly settling down next to the woman, squeezing his hand around the coin and then putting his arm around his companion, returning to the state in which he’d been when Munver had first pulled the covers away on the previous night. That whole image seemed preposterous, of course, yet it remained in Munver’s mind until he began to realize that he was himself in danger of freezing to death.

Slowly, he got to his feet, telling himself that it was time to walk to the trail. At the same time, however, he couldn’t bring himself to leave without at least looking back one final time at the cabin, so he turned.

Sure enough, the dead man was back on the cart, with his arm once more stretched across the woman.

It’s time to go, Munver realized. You can’t stay here. You’ll have to make your fortune somewhere else.

A moment later, however, he was about to turn away when his gaze fell one final time upon the face of Richard Garrett. The laughter had been over for a while now, but Garrett’s face was still visible through the broken window and Munver fancied that the dead man’s remaining eye was fixed in his direction. He wanted to laugh, to mock Garrett, but all the mischief had drained from his soul. He felt utterly empty, as if there were no point on going on. And the longer he looked at Garrett’s face, the more he realized that he could no longer deny what had happened over the past twelve hours.

He had seen the dead walk.

He had heard the dead speak and laugh.

He had felt the dead touch his shoulder.

All his life, Stuart Munver had lived for glory, for the tangible, for things he could touch and eat and use. There had never been any question, in his mind, of right and wrong, or of any great moral force. Whenever he’d heard people speak of spirits, or of another life beyond this one, he’d smirked at such idiotic ideas. He’d lied and stolen, even killed, with no thought that he might one day face any kind of judgment from his actions. So long as he could get away with things in the here and now, that was all that had ever mattered to him. He had been certain, without ever quite putting the notion into so many words, that the consequences of his actions existed in this world and this world alone, and that beyond death there was nothing but silence and rot.

Now he saw that this was not true.

Richard Garrett had died, yet he had returned to bring torment. The dead man on the back of the cart had been frozen for some time, yet he had risen when wronged and he had sought the return of his gold coin. This he had achieved. Some greater force, beyond anything Munver could understand, seemed to have arranged matters behind the scenes, and had made absolutely certain that a stolen coin had been returned to its owner. Munver didn’t understand all of this, of course. He knew now that he never could. Yet he saw enough to realize that he had lived his whole life in the most heinous manner possible, and he realized that upon his eventual death he would most certainly be judged for every wrong he’d committed.

This realization brought horror to his soul, such that he could see no chance of hope. Even apologies would be hollow and worthless.

He looked around for a moment, trying to work out what to do next, but there was nothing. How could he live the rest of his life like this, knowing full well that in the end he would face the consequences of his wrongdoing? He tried to motivate himself, to think of revenge and of home and of Angelica Graft, but suddenly none of these things gave him any gratification, not anymore. It was all hopeless, all a waste, all just a way of delaying the inevitable moment of judgment. He could not laugh at this, nor could he smile.

And then he remembered the woman on the cart.

He’d tried to thaw her nether region, so that he could have his way with her. At the time, the endeavor had felt exciting, like an opportunity he couldn’t possibly pass up. He remembered the unbearable lust that had filled his body, and the complete lack of concern he’d felt as he’d tried to mount his target. Now the whole thing seemed impossible, and he couldn’t quite believe that he’d been so monstrous. He’d even laughed, before, whereas now he wept, and he knew deep down that no amount of repentance would ever suffice. He had been that kind of man, all his life.

Finally, he realized that there was only one thing he could do.

On unsteady legs that threatened to betray him at any moment, he somehow staggered back toward the cabin. He felt no fear now, for he felt no hope either, and the two went together. Fear without hope was merely certainty. He had meant to find a rope, but then he spotted the chain hanging from the front of Garrett’s cart and he supposed that this would do just as well. He loosened the chain, and then he dragged it back across the clearing until he reached one of the larger trees that marked the start of the forest.

And then he began to climb.

The chain was heavy, heavy enough to slow him, but not heavy enough to stop him. He climbed carefully and methodically, performing his actions almost in an automatic manner. There was no emotion in him at all, save for a haunted understanding that he had misunderstood the entirety of existence so very badly. Having never been a smart man, or at least having never considered himself to be smart, he barely felt like Stuart Munver anymore. He just wanted to get things over with, and to begin his punishment as soon as possible. How could he live otherwise?

Once he was up in the tree, he began to loop the chain around one of the branches, and soon he had constructed a crude noose. He had never made a noose before, so he did not know whether this one would work, but he supposed it would do the job sooner or later so he carefully slipped the chain around his neck. Then he looked toward the cabin one more time and thought of Garrett’s mocking laughter, but he was relieved that all he heard was the faint rustle of snow falling all around.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”

And then, with no further ado, he threw himself off the branch.

Eighteen

Today

“It’s odd,” Catherine Chandler said as the corpse was slowly lowered from the tree, “but the way the chain’s constructed, I don’t think it would have broken his neck.”

“What happened, then?” Levant asked, watching the gruesome sight as the surprisingly well-preserved body was carefully set down on the ground. “Did he just hang there and wait to die?”

Chandler grimaced for a moment.

“Well,” she muttered, “you said it, not me.”

They stood for a moment in silent contemplation of the man’s awful fate. If the makeshift noose hadn’t snapped his neck, he would have endured a long, painful death up there. Perhaps he could have freed himself, but evidently he had not done so; perhaps there had been no way, or perhaps he had been resigned to his fate. Either way, the idea of a man starving to death, dangling from a tree, filled both Chandler and her professor with a sense of dread, and neither of them really knew what to say next.

“He was an ugly bugger, wasn’t he?” Levant continued finally, tilting his head to get a better view of the corpse’s features. “Is that something else, or was his face bloodied around the nose when he died?”

“It looks that way,” Chandler replied, “but I won’t know for certain until I’ve carried out a proper examination.” She stared at the body for a moment longer, before turning to Levant. “So does this do anything to dent your theory about the site?”

“About the robbery gone wrong, you mean?” Levant asked. “It was only a working theory, but yes, I still think it’s rather likely. I might have some of the details a little wrong, but the overall idea is almost certainly in the correct ballpark. This fellow, for example, looks to have been hauled up like a common criminal, using this rather makeshift contraption. That tells us something.”

Chandler crouched down and took a closer look at the dead man’s face. She knew – from all the lectures she’d attended over the years in Doctor Levant’s class, and from all the seminars and books – that she had to stay focused on what was right in front of her. She had to work methodically. At the same time, something in her gut was telling her that Levant’s version of events didn’t sit quite right, as if deep down she somehow knew that there was more to what had happened at the site.

Suddenly a beeping sound rang out, and Levant muttered something as he reached into his jacket pocket and took out his cellphone. He looked at the screen for a moment, and then he answered.

“I’m still there,” he said, sounding a little irritated. “I’ll be going back to the hotel shortly.”

He listened, and then he furrowed his brow.

“Margaret, I can barely hear you,” he continued, “the reception out here is lousy. I’ll call you from the hotel.”

He listened again.

“I didn’t make any of that out,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll call you from the hotel, okay? From. The. Hotel.”

With that, he cut the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket.

“Keep me posted,” he said to Chandler, before turning and walking away. “I shall be very interested to hear about any discoveries you make here, Ms. Chandler. I might even be willing to help you out a little. So much so, I intend to stay at the hotel for another night, so as to make myself useful. You should be very pleased to have my expertise available. This should be a real boon for you.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, but in truth she was lost in thought.

Reaching out, she almost touched the dead man’s broken nose, but at the last moment she held back. Instead, she stared for a moment at a face that looked to have been beaten and bloodied some time before he died. At the same time, there was something almost noble about his expression, and Chandler found herself wondering what kind of person would end up hanging from a tree, all alone out in the middle of nowhere? At that particular moment, she didn’t even know his name.

“Who were you?” she whispered. “How did you end up like this?”

Nineteen

“I found a finger,” Chad Clark said a few minutes later, holding up a small piece of bone that he’d discovered near the rear of the cart. “Or part of one, anyway. Doctor Levant, do you think it just fell off and rolled away?”

Levant, who’d been on his way back to his car but who’d stopped to take another look at the bones on the cart, squinted as he saw the piece of bone in Clark’s hands. He didn’t really want to get involved in the nitty-gritty of the case, but he had to admit that a solitary displaced finger piqued his interest.

“Just that one piece?” Levant replied, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “Seems rather odd for it to have just rolled away of its own accord.”

“I know, but why would anyone cut a single figure off a dead body?” Clark nodded toward the other side of the cart. “There’s an old saw over there. It’s pretty rusty, but do you think maybe it was used to remove the finger?”

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea,” Levant said, “but make sure you bag the finger properly and have it analyzed. Ms. Chandler’s leading this project, I’m sure she’s warned you to follow all rules to the letter.”

“Of course,” Clark said, setting the piece of bone down, “I’ll just—”

“Now, boy!” Levant roared angrily. “Where are your sample bags?”

“Inside, but—”

“What are they doing inside?”

“I put them down when I was—”

“And you just left them there?”

“Well, I—”

“Go and get them, boy! Now!”

Clark hesitated, caught like a rabbit in the headlights, before mumbling an apology and climbing down from the rear of the cart. He tried to force a smile as he picked up the piece of bone, but he couldn’t help noticing Levant’s very deliberate, very audible sigh. Mumbling a few more apologies and promises to do better, Clark scurried into the cabin to fetch his sample bags, leaving Levant standing alone next to the cart.

“Students,” Levant muttered, rolling his eyes as he turned to look more closely at two withered bodies “For every one that’s half-decent, there are another nine who don’t know what the hell they’re doing. It’s a wonder any—”

Before he could finish, his attention was caught by something glinting in the low light. He reached over, struggling to extend his hand far enough, but he was too old these days to start climbing about. Straining even more, he was finally able to move some of the rotten limbs aside, and to his surprise he saw what looked like a gold coin. He scraped the coin along the cart’s wooden board, drawing it closer and then picking it up, and then he examined it in the cold midday light.

“Now this is interesting, he murmured, turning the coin over between finger and thumb. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen…”

For a moment, he could only stare in wonder at the coin, trying to determine its provenance. More than anything else at the site so far, this coin had really attracted his attention, and he was engaged by the fact that he genuinely didn’t know what he’d found. As an expert in many areas, he wasn’t much used to coming across something that seemed so unusual, and he couldn’t help wondering whether the coin might prove highly significant. Certainly it was unusual, being both rather large and rather heavy. Since such matters were an area of particular interest to him, Levant felt a flicker of jealousy at the thought of young Ms. Chandler getting all the credit for what amounted to a major stroke of luck.

Glancing back at the bones, he was about to ponder the unlikely nature of his discovery when – suddenly – he spotted what appeared to be a second such coin.

After checking to make sure that he still wasn’t being observed, he reached over and slid the second coin out, and sure enough he found that it was very similar to the first. He checked yet again that he was alone, and then he quickly looked for any more of the coins. Not finding any, he looked down at the two specimens in his hand and felt a flicker of curiosity in his chest. After all his years of teaching, it had been a very long time indeed since Levant had felt the kind of pure, unbridled burst of intrigue that he felt right now. To stand on the verge of a new discovery made him feel vital again. Young, again.

“Leave the discoveries to the younger generation,” one of his colleagues had told him a while back. “We’ve done our work.”

He hadn’t shown it at the time, of course, but that comment had bristled terribly. Why, he thought, shouldn’t he still make a few breakthroughs? Why should a man – or woman – be shuffled off the stage, just because he or she had hit some arbitrary age that was deemed to be too old?

Nonsense.

A few seconds later, hearing Clark returning from the cabin, Levant had only a brief moment to make a decision. And in that moment, for better or for worse, he chose to slip the coins into his pocket.

“I got the bags,” Clark said as he climbed back onto the rear of the cart. “Sorry again, Doctor Levant. I remember you saying how important it is to always have them with us. I won’t make the same mistake again.”

“I certainly hope not,” Levant said with bluster, although he was already wondering whether he’d done the right thing with the coins. Still, there was no turning back now. He just hoped there weren’t too much crumbs and pieces of fluff in his pocket. “I taught you to be better than that, Mr. Clark. Much better. Any mistakes on your part are a poor reflection of my abilities as a teacher.”

“I know. I’m really, really sorry. I really just—”

“Well, stop making excuses,” Levant continued, well aware that he was blustering more than usual but – crucially – unable to stop himself. Deep down, he was worried that someone might have seen him pocket the coins after all, although he was certain this was not the case. “Get to work.”

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

Levant stepped back and watched as Clark slipped the errant finger bone into a bag, and then he saw him peer more closely at the bodies. He had no idea how Clark had failed to notice the two coins earlier, but they would surely have been discovered soon, and then what? Levant had a strong suspicion that they would have been cataloged and forgotten, ignored by students who wouldn’t have recognized their potential interest. Or perhaps lost. Or, perhaps, even stolen. He reasoned, therefore, that he had done the right thing by liberating the coins. Let the students have their site, there was more than enough for them to work with. Reaching into his pocket, Levant felt the two coins and allowed himself a faint smile as he turned and headed back to his car.

So many of his colleagues mocked him and accused him of being irrelevant to modern study. The coins, he was starting to believe, would put him back on the academic map. He’d show them all.

Twenty

“Hello,” Catherine Chandler said as she knelt down in the cabin, in front of the dead body on the chair. “My name’s Catherine and, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to take a quick look at you. Is that okay?”

She looked at the withered, semi-exploded face that stared back at her, and then she turned and saw a fellow student, Muriel Robson, watching her from the far side of the room.

“What?” Chandler asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re giving me a funny look.”

“Do you always talk to dead bodies right before you examine them?”

“I’m just being polite,” Chandler replied, although she allowed herself a faint smile. “This was a living, breathing human being once. I should introduce myself, at least.”

“Sure.” Muriel hesitated. “And… ask them questions?”

“It was rhetorical.”

“Okey dokey,” Muriel said, turning and getting back to her task of examining the mysterious box she’d found on the floor. “Whatever you say. I still can’t make out what this thing was for, though.”

Chandler looked over and saw that the box looked crude, perhaps homemade, and that it had a slit on one side.

“A child’s toy, perhaps?” she suggested.

“You really think there were children out here?”

“No, but I don’t have any other guesses.”

Muriel leaned down and sniffed the box, and she immediately scrunched her nose as she pulled back.

“Not nice?” Chandler asked.

“It smells like something died in there.”

“A trap, maybe?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It looks homemade,” Chandler pointed out. “It must have served some purpose.”

“Maybe it was used for hiding things,” Muriel suggested. “Or maybe it was some kind of makeshift bird feeder. I don’t know. I’m really stumped.”

Chandler turned back to look at the dead man’s face. For a moment, she stared at the empty eye socket on the undamaged side, and then she looked at the strands of hair that clung to thin patches of skin on the skull. There was just enough extant material to allow her to hazard a guess as to the man’s general appearance, and she imagined a sturdy, late middle-aged gentleman with perhaps a touch of old-fashioned nobility. She reminded herself that she might be wrong about this, of course, but deep down she had her impression and it wasn’t going to get dislodged just yet. Not without some evidence to the contrary.

Reaching over to the table, she picked up a piece of paper that she’d already put into a sample bag.

“Richard Garrett,” she read aloud from the faded page. “Was that you? Were you Richard Garrett? Were you the one who visited the Lordstown Sheriff’s Office and made a purchase of two bodies? And would that be the two bodies on the cart out there?” She turned back to the dead man. “Call me cynical,” she added, “but something about this whole situation doesn’t feel like a simple robbery gone wrong.”

She waited, almost as if she expected the man to answer, and then she set the paper aside.

“Excuse me, Mr. Garrett,” she continued, as she reached out and gently pulled aside the edges of his jacket. “No disrespect intended. I just want to know a little more about you.”

Much of the flesh on the man’s chest had rotted away, exposing great sections of his rib-cage. The bones were yellowish but, for the most part, in fairly good condition. There was what looked like a healed section of damage on one of the ribs, which Chandler immediately recognized as the sign of a battle wound. So this Mr. Garrett had once fought, and given his age and other indicators it seemed most likely that he’d been a combatant in the American Civil War. The wound had obviously healed a long time before death, though, so for now Chandler turned her attention to the knife blade that was protruding from between two other ribs. This, she reasoned, seemed much more likely to have been acquired very shortly before Mr. Garrett went to meet his maker.

“Stabbed and shot,” Chandler whispered. “Someone must have been very keen to make sure you didn’t come back.” She pulled the edges of the jacket out a little further. “Was this cabin your home, Mr. Garrett? Or were you only—”

Suddenly the head turned slightly, and Chandler gasped as she pulled away and fell back. Landing hard on her butt, she shuffled to the wall, staring at the dead body with wide-open, terrified eyes. Her heart was racing, and after a moment she heard movement nearby.

“Catherine?” Muriel said cautiously, still examining the strange box. “Are you okay over there?”

“Yeah, I…”

Chandler’s voice trailed off as she continued to stare at the dead man. His head had definitely moved, but she realized now that it been more of a downward movement, consistent with the body’s weight having shifted. Still, she waited a moment, just in case the head twitched again.

Finally, taking a deep breath, she told herself that of course that’s what had happened. She’d been examining the man’s chest and pulling his jacket open, and she’d merely caused a very slight adjustment in his position. This had been enough to make his head tilt a little, and now she breathed a sigh of relief as she realized she’d allowed herself to get spooked.

Getting back onto her knees, she shuffled back over toward the chair and – at the same time – she smiled at her own foolishness.

“Forgive me, Mr. Garrett,” she said. “You gave me a little scare there.”

Leaning down, she began to examine the knife’s tip more closely. As she worked, Garrett’s head remained perfectly still above her. Even though it had moved, however, its empty eye-socket remained fixed on the broken window – and on the spot where, many years earlier, Stuart Munver had hung himself.

Twenty-One

“Of course, it’s perfectly possible that these things were antiques by the time they ended up in that cabin,” Levant said as he examined the coins in his hotel room, with his phone set neatly nearby. “There are markings, but I just can’t quite make them out.”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like them before,” his colleague, Doctor Doreen Mellors, replied over the phone’s speakers. “When you sent those photos through just now, I was really stumped. The text isn’t Latin or Greek, it’s nothing I recognize. The size seems unusual too. The most I can tell you is that they don’t seem transactional. I highly doubt that they were used as currency.”

“Do you think they were more symbolic?” Levant suggested. “Ceremonial, perhaps? Religious?”

“The size makes it unlikely that they were used in everyday life,” she replied, “but I’m sure they had value. And you say there were just the two of them?”

“As far as I could tell.”

“They’re identical?”

“As far as I can tell.”

“And they were with two sets of human remains?”

“They were with the two on the cart, yes.”

“Interesting.”

“Why’s that interesting?” he asked.

He waited, still examining the coins, and then he turned and looked at the phone.

“Two coins,” Doreen said after a moment, “one for each of the two bodies. I’m leaning toward the idea that they must have been placed there for very specific ritual reasons.”

“Some kind of superstition?”

“You’d be surprised what people believed in some parts of the country,” she replied, “even as recently as a century and a half ago.” There was the sound of a chuckle, although her voice was briefly lost in static. Even in town, cellphone coverage was patchy at best. “We shouldn’t laugh,” she added. “There were some very primitive ideas floating around, and people genuinely believed them. That doesn’t mean they were idiots, it just means that had rather backward-looking ideas about the world. Simple ideas.”

“A coin for the ferryman,” Levant whispered.

“What was that?”

He paused for a moment.

“Jack? What did you just say?”

“Nothing,” he replied, shaking his head as he set the coins down. “Doreen, thank you for your time, but it’s getting late and I think I might need to get to bed soon.”

“By which you mean, you’re going to the hotel bar.”

“There’s no bar in this rundown place,” he muttered, allowing himself to sound a little tired. “No, I think I shall get to bed nice and early, and then I shall go back out to the site in the morning and see what I can turn up. No doubt Chandler and those other idiots have missed all the important stuff. Oh, and Doreen… I hope you’ll remember what I said earlier. I acquired the coins in a rather unfortunate manner, and I wouldn’t like people to talk. Not until I’m ready to make an announcement, anyway.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” she replied. “Anything’s better than letting a bunch of foolhardy students run the roost. We both know how idiotic they can be.”

“We should shoulder some of the blame,” he pointed out. “After all, we’re the ones who taught them everything they know. And I’m sure we were just as bad when we were their age.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said. “I for one was far worse. Mellors out.”

With that, the call went dead, and Levant leaned back in the creaking old chair and stared down for a moment longer at the coins. His conversation with Doctor Mellors had helped clarify his own thoughts a little, but he still wasn’t exactly sure where the coins had come from or why they’d been left on the cart with those two bodies. He disliked the idea that they were ceremonial, since that made them less interesting to him from an academic perspective, but he supposed Doreen might have been right. Still, as he continued to stare at the coins, one other – far more tantalizing – possibility remained in his thoughts.

“A coin for the ferryman,” he said again.

For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he imagined two dead souls standing on the shore of a dark lake, watching as a boat slowly sailed toward them. At the rear of the boat there stood a tall, hooded figure shrouded in darkness. This figure did not move a muscle until the boat bumped against the shore, at which point he stepped off and allowed the two dead souls to approach. From beneath his robes, the figure uncurled a withered, deathless hand, into the palm of which the souls placed one gold coin each. Now that they had paid their toll, they were allowed to step onto the boat, ready for the journey to the other shore, which waited out in the cold darkness of this terrible underworld.

Levant thought of this image for a moment longer. It was childish, he told himself, and utterly uninteresting from an academic standpoint. Nevertheless, he had to concede that such concepts appeared in the mythologies of numerous cultures. From Ancient Greece and Rome to various sites all across northern Europe, Charon’s obol was a common enough idea, although in most cases the coin was placed in the dead person’s mouth rather than in their hand. Had he, he wondered, stumbled upon some variant that had played out in the American mid-west during the nineteenth century? Had these primitive superstitions seemed important to someone in that remote cabin?

“A coin for the ferryman,” he said yet again. “For the journey to the land of the dead.”

Twenty-Two

“Are you sure about this?” Muriel said as she stopped at her van and turned. “You’ll be freezing.”

“I’ve got blankets in my car,” Chandler said, traipsing after her across the muddy clearing. “I’ll be fine. And I really don’t want to waste two hours going back to town tonight, and another two hours coming here in the morning.”

“You don’t have anything to prove, you know. You’re already top of the class and all that jazz.”

“I want to work.”

“You mean you want to impress your parents.”

“This is professional,” Chandler replied, clearly a little irritated at the – quite common – suggestion that she was motivated by a desire to obtain her parents’ approval. “I want to figure this site out. I want to know what happened here.”

“But…”

Muriel hesitated, and then she sighed. The sun was setting now, casting long shadows that reached from the tree-line almost all the way to the cabin itself, and the air temperature was noticeably much lower than it had been during the day. At the same time, she knew there was no point arguing with Catherine Chandler, who’d always had a habit of being headstrong, usually at the most inopportune moments.

“I’ll be fine,” Chandler said again. “There are still a few things I want to get done tonight. And time’s money, remember?”

“Sure, but…”

“But what?”

For a few seconds, Muriel seemed reluctant to say any more, but then she looked past Chandler and stared at the cabin.

“Won’t it be kind of spooky up here?” she said finally. “Alone, I mean? At night?”

“Come on,” Chandler said with a smile, “don’t be ridiculous.”

“I mean it! It’s just gonna be you and four dead people. I know you want to prove that you’re the most dedicated student in the world, but you’re taking this too far. It’s not right for you to be all alone out here. Come back with the rest of us, we’ll all get a drink in a bar somewhere in town, and then tomorrow—”

“I’m going to be fine,” Chandler said firmly, interrupting her, “and besides, don’t you think I’m a little old to be scared of the dark? Anyway, you’re welcome to stay with me. It could be fun.”

“Hell, no,” Muriel replied. “I’m going back to town for a nice hot bath and a nice long drink.” She paused for a moment. “For some of us, this shit’s just a job. A fascinating one, but a job nonetheless. We know when to leave the work behind for a few hours.” She patted Chandler on the side of the arm. “See you bright and early in the morning.”

Chandler smiled and took a step back, and then she watched as Muriel climbed into the van and slid the door shut. And now, as the van’s engine started and her fellow students prepared to leave the site, Chandler had to admit that she felt just the faintest tinge of discomfort. She told herself that she was being stupid, of course, but she really had to force herself to look cheery as the van drove off. Waving and smiling, she watched until the van was out of sight, and then she listened to the sound of the engine fading into the distance, and then her smile disappeared as she found herself standing all alone in a muddy clearing at sundown.

“I’ll be fine,” she said yet again, this time to remind herself. And to cheer herself up a little. “I’ve got work to do.”

* * *

A portable light stood propped on the table in the cabin, casting a bright white glow across the room. Night had properly drawn in now. Chandler remained on her knees next to the chair and continued her examination of Garrett’s body.

“You were quite a long way from home, weren’t you?” she said as she carefully removed a Lordstown ceremonial medal from one of his pockets. “A long way from any recognized road or trail, too. Whatever brought you to this place, huh?”

She glanced up at the dead face.

“My father would have a field day with you,” she continued. “You’re just the kind of puzzle he’d enjoy.”

She peered at the medal for a moment, but she’d seen one like it before. Her theory about Garrett’s war wounds seemed to be correct, and she saw now that he’d been honored by his town upon his return from the battlefields. This made her think that he must, once, have been a noted figure in his community, someone who was looked up to by the people in his town. She didn’t have the right equipment with her at that moment, but she was starting to think that a search of the historical records might well yield some information about this Mr. Garrett, and she liked the idea of perhaps discovering more about his life. And, of course, about how he’d ended up dead on a chair in a remote cabin out in the middle of nowhere.

“Robbery my ass,” she muttered. “So much for—”

Hearing a faint clicking sound in the distance, she turned and looked over her shoulder. The glow from the portable light was almost blinding, making it impossible for her to see much other than the sight of the well-lit cabin reflected in the window. The exception to that was the single broken pane, which showed a view of utter darkness outside.

Listening for a moment, Chandler realized she could now hear nothing but silence. And if she was honest, it was the silence that had really troubled her in the hours since her fellow students had left. The whole area around the cabin seemed utterly devoid of any wildlife, and she’d heard not even so much as birdsong. She had no idea why animals would steer clear of such a large area, although she kept telling herself that there was no reason to worry, that she was probably just over-thinking something that was completely normal.

Still, that clicking sound had been very real, and she was suddenly very aware that she was miles and miles from civilization.

Grabbing her phone, she saw that she had 25% battery remaining and barely a single bar of coverage. She was tempted for a moment to call home, just to hear her father’s voice and to get some reassurance, but then she told herself to grow up a little and to stay focused on the task at hand. She still pulled up some photos, however, and she scrolled through shots of her family in the garden during the previous summer. Soon she’d be back with them, and she couldn’t wait to explain all about her work in the cabin. Soon she’d prove to both her father and her mother that she had what it took to follow in their footsteps.

She allowed herself a brief smile.

Setting the phone back down, she began to turn to Garrett again, only to then hear a bumping sound against the cabin’s exterior wall.

She immediately got to her feet and look over at the closed door. She told herself not to worry, but she also had to admit that her heart was racing. Were there wolves in the area? Bears? Was there maybe a jail somewhere, with bad security? Did random murderous hobos hang around in the forest? All these fears rushed through her mind, but after a moment she told herself that she had to nip this panic in the bud. She took a deep breath, and then she stepped around Garrett’s chair and made her way over to the door.

“Back in a moment,” she told him under her breath.

As soon as she opened the door, she felt the cold outside air and she saw her breath. The battery-powered light in the cabin had actually made the interior fairly warm, but now Chandler stepped outside and felt just how cold the night was becoming. She glanced around, to make sure that there was no sign of anyone or anything nearby, and then she took a flashlight from her belt and switched it on, casting the beam in every direction. Still, she saw nothing, but she closed the door and then began to make her way around the side of the cabin. Her fear was evaporating now, and she told herself that she just had to prove that those two brief noises had been no cause for concern.

Once she’d walked all the way around the cabin, she stopped and shone the flashlight out across the clearing. There was clearly nobody out there, but after a moment the beam caught a smudged patch of darkness on the ground, and Chandler immediately knew what she was seeing.

It was the body of the man who’d been brought down from the tree.

The body hadn’t moved, not so far as she could tell, but Chandler felt distinctly uneasy as she kept the flashlight trained in its direction. For a moment, she almost expected the dark shape to shift slightly, or perhaps for a wolf or some other predator to hurry over and start chewing on the meat. The flashlight’s beam shifted slightly as her hand began to tremble, and for a few seconds she looked at the distant forest. There was still no sign of any kind of wildlife, but in that moment she desperately hoped to see perhaps a deer or even just a bird. Anything, to show that there was life out there.

She shone the flashlight around a little further, still watching the forest, and then she turned back toward the cabin.

Suddenly the beam caught a figure standing far out across the clearing. Gripped by fear, Chandler realized that it was the dead man, with the chain still around his neck. He was leaning heavily to one side, and after a moment he took a slow, stumbling step forward.

Gasping, Chandler turned and hurried around the side of the cabin, and then she stopped and tried to regather her composure.

That wasn’t real, she told herself. You’re just losing your mind.

Panicking and starting to feel out of breath, she continued for a few seconds to try calming herself, and then she realized she had to look again. The man from the tree was definitely dead and there was no way he could have been standing just now, and she knew that she just had to prove that to herself. She’d never expected that her mind would play these kinds of tricks on her, but she figured that it was imperative now that she regain control. She counted to three, then she hesitated, then she counted to three again, and then finally she managed to force herself to step back around the cabin and shine the light across the clearing.

There was no-one standing there.

She felt an immediately rush of relief, but then she looked at the dark smudge on the ground. At first, she told herself that this was the dead body, in its proper position. Slowly, however, doubts began to creep into her mind. Was the smudge as large as it had been before? Was it definitely the body, or could it possible just be a disturbed patch in the mud? She swallowed hard as she waited to understand the truth, for sense and sanity to be re-established, and then she took a step forward, hoping to get a slightly better view.

Her hand was trembling more than ever, causing the flashlight’s beam to sway this way and that, but she was just about able to keep it trained on the dark smudge. And the more she looked, the more she struggled to determined whether she could actually see the body on the ground.

She began to turn, casting the beam wide across the clearing. When she finally saw that there was nobody out there, she felt a huge rush of relief, although this was tempered by the realization that – even if it had only been for one moment – she’d definitely imagined seeing that figure standing all the way out there with the chain around its neck.

She took a step back.

“There’s no-one here,” she said out loud, trying to calm herself down.

She took a deep breath.

She listened.

She heard nothing.

Checking her phone again, she tried to call her parents, just to hear their voices. Shivering slightly in the cold, she brought up her father’s number and tapped the green circle, and then she waited as the phone emitted a series of faint crackles. She desperately wanted the call to connect, but after a few seconds she began to realize that she wasn’t going to be so lucky. Finally the call was dropped, and she told herself that she’d been dumb to even try. Far better to tell her parents about her exciting new discovery in person, when she could dump it all on them at once.

They’d be so proud.

And then, suddenly, she realized she could hear something. She could hear a chain rattling nearby.

Clenching her teeth, she turned and shone the torch back toward the far end of the cabin, and to her horror she found the dead, hanged man standing right behind her.

Twenty-Three

“Hmm, what?”

Startled from a deep sleep, Doctor Jack Levant opened his eyes in darkness and – for a moment – had no idea where he was. He blinked a couple of times, aware that he was in a strange bed, and then he saw the red display of a hotel bedside clock, and he sighed as he rolled onto his back and remembered all the business about driving out to check on a site that a student had uncovered.

Reaching up, he wiped sweat from his brow, and then he remained on his back for a moment as he tried to understand why he’d woken. He had a vague idea that he’d been dreaming, and that the dream had been rather unpleasant, but beyond that he was unable to recall any details. This in itself wasn’t particularly unusual, of course, since he never slept well when he was away from home. Nevertheless, his mind was alert and he could feel a little pressure in his bladder, and he knew he’d have to make the long journey to the bathroom before going back to sleep.

He waited a few minutes more, going over a few matters in his mind, and then he hauled himself out of bed and began to shuffle over to the en-suite.

As he reached the door, his phone suddenly starting vibrating on the nightstand.

Furrowing his brow, Levant turned and saw that the screen was flashing. He didn’t remember setting an alarm, and he certainly wouldn’t have set one for 2am, but it wouldn’t be the first time his difficulties with technology had manifested in this manner. Figuring that he couldn’t be bothered going all the way over to turn the alarm off just yet, he muttered a few curse words under his breath as he turned and resumed his slow journey to the toilet. And then, as he began to pee, he heard the phone fall silent again.

“Some alarm,” he said out loud.

Or had it been the ringtone?

For a moment, he really wasn’t sure.

He began to pee, but a moment later the phone began to vibrate once again.

“Oh, come off it,” he sighed, feeling that familiar flicker of irritation that came any time one of these wretched devices displeased him. “I am not a slave to these things,” he continued, for nobody’s benefit but his own. “I shall not run to switch you off, just because you demand my attention.”

He continued to pee, and the whole process took rather longer than he would have liked. Still, at his age, he supposed that he wasn’t doing too badly. After flushing and washing his hands, he began to make his way back to the bed, just as the phone once more stopped vibrating.

Sighing as he felt another twinge of pain in his back, he plopped down on the side of the bed and picked up the phone. His annoyance at the bright screen was quickly wiped away, however, as he saw that he had two missed calls from Catherine Chandler. He tapped to take a closer look, figuring that perhaps these calls had been from earlier but that he’d simply missed them, but then he saw that the calls had both been within the past few minutes.

“It’s two in the morning,” he muttered. “I’m not going to listen to some drunk—”

Suddenly the phone began to vibrate yet again, and once more Catherine Chandler’s name flashed onto the screen.

Levant let out a long, heavy sigh, and for a few seconds he considered rejecting the call and switching the phone off. Any other student would have received that treatment, but he realized that Chandler – out of all of them – was the most studious and serious. In other words, she was the least likely to be calling for some trivial reason. Finally, despite continuing misgivings, he swiped to answer, and he tapped to activate the phone’s speakers.

“Ms. Chandler,” he boomed, “I am not very—”

“There’s something here!” she shouted, sounding absolutely panicked on the other end of the line. “You have to—”

Before she could finish, her voice was swallowed by a burst of static. Once the static was over, Levant heard only a series of loud, frenzied bumps, as if something was slamming against wood.

He sat and listened for a moment, trying to make sense of what he was hearing.

“Ms. Chandler?” he said cautiously. “What’s going on?”

He listened some more, but the bumps and thuds continued for a moment before suddenly being replaced by the sound of somebody’s panicked, gasping breaths.

“Ms. Chandler?” he said again. “What are you—”

“Help me!” she sobbed, sounding as if she was breaking down completely. “I tried the others but they didn’t pick up! Doctor Levant, I don’t know how but—”

Suddenly she screamed as another, louder bumping sound rang out, followed by shuffling and scraping noises and then a heavy thud.

“Ms. Chandler,” Levant said, now starting to worry just a little, “I want you to calm down and tell me exactly what’s happening.”

“I’m at the site!” she sobbed.

“At the…” He paused, and it took a moment before he realized what she meant. “The site in the valley? What are you doing there at two in the morning?”

“There’s something out there,” she whimpered. “I saw it. I got back in, but now it’s trying to get into the cabin. Doctor Levant, you have to help me. I tried calling the police, but I couldn’t get through. I saw its face, it’s the man from the tree and he—”

Before she could finish, there was another thud, this time accompanied by the sound of wood splitting. Chandler screamed, and Levant sat for a moment and listened to what sounded like utter chaos on the other end of the line.

“Chandler,” he said after a few seconds, “what—”

Again he was interrupted, this time by a brief cry. He heard footsteps, but only for a few seconds, and then a series of loud, heavy thuds, as if somebody had begun knocking on a door.

“He’s trying to get in,” Chandler whispered suddenly over the phone. “Doctor Levant, I don’t know what to do, but you have to send help.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Levant replied, still feeling a little exasperated. “Are you seriously telling me that you’re up there at the site? At two o’clock in the morning? Have you been drinking? Or worse? You’re not high, are you?”

Suddenly he heard the sound of wood being smashed. Chandler cried out, then it sounded as if glass was being broken, and finally the line went dead.

Immediately, Levant tried to call Chandler back, only to be put straight through to her voicemail:

“This is Catherine Chandler’s phone,” her voice said, sounding cheery. “I can’t—”

He cut the call, and then he sat in silence for a moment.

In all his years as a teacher, Doctor Jack Levant had experienced more than his fair share of student pranks. He’d found the past few years particularly trying, as students had begun to use smartphones and video editing software to construct ever more elaborate deceptions. Frankly, he was tired of his students’ drama and he always preferred to stay well away from these things, but at this particular moment he couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps something really was wrong. He tried Chandler’s number again, still being put straight through to her voicemail, and then he sat for a moment longer. Was Catherine Chandler really the kind of person who’d play a prank? Serious, sometimes rather humorless Catherine Chandler, who had been one of his most dedicated pupils?

He hesitated for a moment, and then – despite the creeping concern that he was being made the victim of a joke – he dialed 911.

“Hello,” he said, as soon as a voice answered on the other end, “I hope I’m not wasting your time, but I feel I must report something.”

Twenty-Four

“Idiots,” Levant fumed as he eased his car to the side of the road and cut the engine, next to a turning that led deep into the forest. “I swear, if she’s still alive, I’ll kill her.”

It was almost 4am now, and the night seemed to be at its darkest. Having hurriedly dressed and left the hotel, without so much as a coffee, Levant was starting to feel a little groggy as he leaned back in his seat.

The 911 operator had been unhelpful, to say the least. He’d been able to tell, from the tone of her voice, that she’d been highly skeptical as he’d explained the phone call from Catherine Chandler. The damnable woman had even started picking holes in his story, as if seeking out continuity errors in some cheap movie or book. He’d spent several minutes convincing her that, yes, he really had received a rather alarming call from one of his students, but then the woman had asked where the student was located and he’d struggled to explain. She’d asked if he had, at least, some GPS coordinates, at which point he’d rather lost his temper and had called the woman a few things that, upon reflection, he should have held back.

“Tell some officers to meet me at the turn-off near Sutter’s Point,” he’d said finally, “and I’ll lead them to the cabin. How quickly can they get there?”

A couple of hours, he’d been told. After all, the area was remote and it was the middle of the night and – as Levant inferred – the operator still wasn’t entirely convinced that he was sane. That might have been partly his own fault, he realized now, since he’d been the one to mention the possibility that the whole thing was a prank. Anyway, now he’d arrived at the rendezvous point and the officers were already a few minutes late, so he sat drumming his fingers against the wheel and watching the road for some hint of lights heading his way. He kept glancing at his watch, but time was passing excruciatingly slowly and after just ten minutes he was fit to explode with anger. Finally, he grabbed his phone and tried Catherine Chandler again, only to find that the signal was too weak.

“Bloody phones,” he muttered. “When you actually need them, they never work.”

At 4.30am, half an hour after he was supposed to meet the officers, Levant decided that they either weren’t coming, or that they were going to be too late. He was increasingly of the opinion that this whole farrago was a waste of his time.

Sighing, he started the car’s engine and turned the wheel, setting off along the dark track that led down through the forest to the cabin in the valley. Part of the track wasn’t even a road, and Levant winced as the car bumped over rough terrain that he worried might cause expensive damage. He was cursing under his breath almost all the way, and more than once he began to think that he’d taken a wrong turn. Eventually he reached a point that he thought he recognized, so he kept going while muttering to himself and wishing terrible fates to everyone who’d contributed to his current situation.

After what felt like an eternity, he spotted the cabin ahead. A sprinkling of moonlight just about picked out the cabin’s roof, and the little mess of junk nearby.

He drove across the clearing and parked close to the wooden cart, and then he cut the engine before climbing out of the car. It was only now, as he felt the cold air all around, that he realized he was totally defenseless. He’d initially assumed that Chandler had been joking, and then he’d been under the impression that he’d be accompanied by police officers when he arrived at the cabin. Thanks to a combination of these assumptions and let-downs, however, he now stood staring at the cabin and he had no means by which to fight any adversary. Not that he really thought there was danger out at the cabin, of course, but the possibility still crossed his mind.

Standing completely still for a moment, he listened and heard only silence.

Letting out a loud sigh, partly to try to convince himself that everything was normal and partly to demonstrate his annoyance to anyone who might be spying on him, he made his way around the car and over toward the cabin. He was already imagining the students back at their hotel, giggling at the thought of him out at the cabin all alone, but deep down he hoped that this was what had happened. After a moment, however, he stopped as he saw that several more panes in the cabin’s window had been smashed, seemingly from the outside. He stepped closer and leaned down, and then he peered inside.

Suddenly he saw a face staring out at him.

Startled, he stumbled back, but then he realized that he’d seen the face before. He peered inside once more, and sure enough the face was that of the dead man in the chair. Still, such a sight left him feeling rather uneasy, but as he tried to look past the dead man he found that the rest of the cabin’s interior was too dark.

“Chandler?” he called out, his voice sounding so small and crisp in the cold night air. “What are you playing at? Are you in there?”

Receiving no reply, he turned and looked around for a moment, and then he spotted another car parked nearby. He wasn’t sure, of course, but he supposed that this must be Chandler’s car, which meant at least that she hadn’t been lying when she’d claimed to be at the cabin. This, in turn, made him worry a little more that her panic might have been real, but he refused to surrender quite yet to such fears. Student pranks could be surprisingly elaborate. Instead of worrying too much just yet, he made his way around to the side of the cabin and went to the door, only to find it hanging open.

Looking inside, he saw only darkness and the silhouette of the dead man set against the window.

Reaching into his pocket, he took out his cellphone and activated the flashlight app, and then he cast a glow of light around the room.

The first thing he saw was that the place was a mess. Tables had been overturned, and a battery-operated lamp lay smashed on the floor. This elevated Levant’s concerns a little further, as he stepped inside and looked all around the small space. He still didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but he couldn’t deny that it looked as if there’d been some kind of struggle. As he stepped forward and tilted his phone around, he felt a growing sense of dread in his chest as he realized that his worst fears had come true. Evidently Catherine Chandler had been alone at the site, and evidently she’d been attacked.

“Damn it,” he muttered, hurrying out of the cabin and fumbling to call 911 on his phone. “Bloody fools!”

He waited for the call to connect, but he found he had no signal. He rushed around to the other side of the cabin, and he tried holding his phone in various positions, but still he couldn’t get through to the police. Filled now with a real sense of panic, he looked around and saw no sign of Chandler, and finally he realized that his best bet was to get back to the main road and then hope he could place another call.

He hurried toward the car, but then suddenly he stopped as he heard a distant scream ring out, somewhere far off in the forest.

Turning, he looked across the clearing. The scream seemed almost to hang in the air for a moment, but then he spotted a faint flicker of light far off beyond the tree-line.

“Chandler?” he whispered, before starting to hurrying toward the light and then shouting: “Chandler! Wait!”

He began to run, which was something he hadn’t done in a long, long time. Despite his growing breathlessness, however, he hurried as fast as he could manage across the clearing, and by the time he reached the tree-line he could see the light of a flashlight in the distance, racing through the forest.

He opened his mouth to call out again, but suddenly he realized that something was missing. Turning, he saw that the body from the tree was no longer on the ground. He had no idea why Chandler might have moved the body, but he supposed that it must have been placed on or near the cart, so he put the concern out of his mind and turned back to look out in the forest. Then, cupping his hands around his mouth, he yelled at the top of his voice:

“Catherine Chandler! Where are you?”

As he called out those words, he heard her scream again, but this time she seemed to be trying to say something.

For a moment, he considered running back to his car. He could drive away and fetch help. The idea was enticing, but something deep inside made him stay. A desire to do the right thing, perhaps, or to prove to himself that he was no coward. Besides, the stupid girl was probably just having a bad trip on the latest fashionable drug.

Filled with a growing sense of worry, Levant hurried out into the forest, struggling in the darkness to keep from banging into trees. The ground was muddy beneath his feet, slowing him down, and after a moment low-hanging branches began to get in his way. He was forced to hold his hands up in an attempt to protect his face as he struggled onward and tried to head after the distant, flailing beam of light.

For the next few minutes, he stumbled through the forest with barely any awareness of the right direction. He could feel the ground starting to become steeper beneath his feet, which meant he was beginning to make his way up the side of the valley, but as he looked ahead he only occasionally spotted the flashlight. After a while, however, he heard Chandler cry out, and he was immediately struck by the realization that she sounded much closer now. Somehow, in the chaos, they were reaching one another.

“Chandler!” he shouted, stopping for a moment in an attempt to get his bearings. “Over here!”

And then he saw her.

The flashlight was shaking in the darkness, but it seemed to be not too far away. Filled with the need to get to her, Levant stumbled onward through the forest, pushing against his own exhaustion and against the pain in his knees and back. He almost fell several times, and he stumbled almost constantly, but now the flashlight seemed to have stopped moving and he was steadily getting closer until, finally, he was able to hear a series of loud, gulping sobs in the darkness.

He had to climb up a small, muddy embankment, but eventually Levant clambered over the edge, only to find himself almost blinded by a flashlight aimed straight at his face.

“It’s me!” he gasped, holding his hands up to protect his eyes. “Chandler! It’s Doctor Levant!”

The flashlight was lowered.

Levant blinked a couple of times, trying to get rid of the patches of light in his eyes, but suddenly he felt somebody slamming against him. He was just about able to see Chandler’s anguished, tear-stained face as she grabbed the lapels of his jacket and started trembling violently. She was trying to speak, but her mouth was shaking and she couldn’t get any words out properly as blood ran from cuts on her face and mixed with sweat and dirt.

“Whatever is happening here?” Levant asked, before looking around and seeing only dark trees. “Who did this to you?”

She tried to answer, but again her words were jumbled and incomplete. A moment later she grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back.

“You’re freezing,” he said, before pulling off his jacket and placing it around her shoulders. “You’re going to get hypothermia if you carry on like this.”

She turned and looked around, her eyes wild with fear.

“I’m taking you to my car,” he said firmly, holding his ground, “and we’re going to find the police. They should already be on their way.”

He took hold of her hand and tried to lead her down the slope, toward the cabin, but she dug her heels into the ground and refused to follow. Her teeth were chattering.

“You’re safe now,” he told her. “Try to calm down and—”

“Run!” she screamed suddenly.

“Catherine—”

Before he could finish, Levant suddenly felt something slamming against his back. He tried to turn, but in the darkness something cold and metallic bumped into his face and then slipped down around his neck. As Chandler screamed, Levant reached up and tried to free himself, but instead he felt himself being pulled back as the chain tightened around his throat. Chandler tried to pull him away, tugging desperately on his arm, and then she stepped back, still gripping him tight and struggling to get him away from his assailant.

At the last moment, however, Chandler stumbled in the darkness and fell down a sudden drop in the mud. She landed hard with all her weight on her right leg, causing the ankle to instantly snap and sending her thudding down to the ground with an anguished scream.

Levant could feel the chain pressing harder and harder against his throat, cutting off his windpipe as he struggled desperately to get free. His legs were scrabbling in the dirt, and he could smell the stench of foul, decomposing flesh as he heard a faint snarling sound from over his shoulder. He let out a pained grunt, but already he was starting to weaken as he struggled to breathe and he began to reach out desperately into the darkness, hoping to find something – anything – that he could use to free himself. Before he had a chance, however, his legs buckled and he dropped down onto his knees, and the chain tightened around his neck with such force that his skin began to tear.

His eyes started bulging in their sockets and blood began to run down his face. In the darkness, he was turning a shade of purplish-blue as he reached up and tried one final time to pull the chain away. As he struggled, the chain cut into his throat, unleashing fresh torrents of blood, and a snarling face leaned down and stared into his own, fixing him with a furious stare. Levant managed to look up and, although he could see nothing in the darkness, he could feel a presence staring back at him as the chain cut deeper and deeper and finally severed his neck.

Suddenly the chain pulled back and Levant’s head toppled from his neck. His body fell forward, spraying blood from the stump at its top, and chains rattled in the dark as a deathly figure stumbled past the corpse and headed after its next victim. As Levant’s head rolled down a slope and then stopped against a tree, a flicker of consciousness remained for a fraction of a second, thinking that this was all a joke and that everything would be alright. Then the consciousness was gone, and Levant’s dead eyes stared out into darkness.

Twenty-Five

Catherine Chandler screamed as she stumbled out past the tree-line. Trying not to fall, she inadvertently put all her weight on her right leg, and her broken ankle – with a section of bone poking out through the side – immediately sent a burst of pain coursing up through her body with such force that she fell and landed hard on her hands and knees.

The pain was intense, but she pushed through and immediately forced herself to get up and start limping away from the forest, heading out across the clearing.

Although her right ankle was badly broken, she had to put at least some weight on it as she hurried toward the two cars that were parked close to the cabin. She’d intended to run as far from the cabin as possible but, in the darkness, she’d managed to double back on herself and now she knew that her only hope was to get away quickly. She’d heard Doctor Levant’s cries in the darkness, and she’d turned just in time to see his dead body fall to the floor. Now she was running for her life, and she knew death wasn’t far behind.

Looking over her shoulder, she immediately spotted something moving in the forest, coming after her.

She forced herself to keep running, putting as little pressure as possible on her broken right foot, but after a moment she stumbled slightly and – once again – it was her right foot that bore the weight of her attempt to remain steady. She screamed and fell, landing hard on her knees and elbows, and then she tried to get up again, only for a fresh burst of pain to jolt through her left arm. She had no time to check the damage, however, so she forced herself up and this time she managed to resume her agonizingly slow limp toward the cars.

Reaching into her pockets, she tried to find her car keys, but they were gone. She then started searching through the pockets of Doctor Levant’s jacket, desperately hoping to perhaps find his keys. There was no sign of them, but her hands did fumble against what felt like two large coins.

Forcing herself to keep going, she was now almost halfway across the clearing and she actually began to think that she might reach the cars. She vaguely remembered leaving her keys in the ignition, figuring that it didn’t matter since nobody else was around, but she couldn’t be sure. Were they there, or were they inside the cabin? Still, getting to the car seemed like her best bet, so she stumbled on until finally her left foot slipped and her right foot crunched against the ground, and yet again she screamed as she fell down.

Taking a moment to catch her breath and to deal with the pain, she forced herself to turn and look over her shoulder, and then she gasped as she saw the dead man relentlessly making his way closer, swaying slightly as he walked and almost tripping over his chain as he edged toward her. Barely able to walk properly, possessed by some relentless hidden force, the corpse of Stuart Munver would not stop.

Getting back to her feet, Chandler hurried on, terrified that at any moment the figure might catch up to her and pull her down. The cars were so close now, but the pain was intensifying and finally she had to stop for a moment as she reached the cart, and she allowed herself a fraction of a second to rest before turning and seeing that the dead man was now only a few paces behind. She glanced around, hoping to see Doctor Levant, but there was no sign of him.

Turning, she hurried toward the cars, only to trip against the trailer’s side and fall forward, thudding down against the mud. She immediately began to haul herself up, but then she froze as she realized she could hear a low, snarling groan directly above.

Slowly, she looked up and saw the dead man towering above her.

“What do you want?” she sobbed. “I don’t have anything! I haven’t done anything to you!”

She waited, but the figure merely swayed in front of her for a moment with the chain hanging low from around its neck.

Chandler began to inch back, while trying to pick the perfect moment to turn and run toward the car. For now she kept her eyes fixed on the figure, which stood silhouetted against the slowly brightening dawn sky. And as she stared at the figure in disbelief, she realized that it seemed to be not so much standing, as almost held up in the air. Its feet were on the ground, and it seemed to walk, but its posture suggested that some external force was involved in keeping it up like a puppet dangling from cosmic strings.

“You can’t be real,” Chandler stammered, still trying to work out what she was actually seeing. “Please, just—”

Before she could finish, the figure let out a low, pained growl.

Panicking, Chandler turned to crawl away. She was still wearing Levant’s jacket, and suddenly the two gold coins slipped out from one of the pockets. Feeling a flicker of pain in her ankle, Chandler stopped for a moment, and then she spotted the coins glistening in the mud. She hesitated, before picking them up and staring at them, and at that moment she remembered having seen something similar on the back of the cart. She’d told Chad Clark to catalog them for later study, but she figured he might have forgotten as usual. In which case, how had they ended up in Levant’s pocket?

Suddenly she heard another snarl, and she turned to see the figure lunged at her. She managed to pull herself out of the way, but in the process she realized that the figure actually seemed to be lunging not at her face but at the hand she was using to hold the coins.

“Take them!” she screamed, before throwing the coins at the figure and then pulling a little way further back. “They’re yours! Just take them and leave me alone!”

The coins hit the figure’s chest and fell to the ground. For a moment, the figure looked down at them, but then it turned to Chandler and snarled again. This time, as it lunged at her, she was forced to roll away, although in the process she slammed her ankle against the figure’s trailing chain. Crying out, she tried to get up onto her hands and knees, but the pain was intense and for a moment she felt as if she might never be able to get up again. Then, slowly, she realized she could hear the chain getting closer.

Turning, she saw the figure lunging at her once more.

She tried to pull away, but this time the creature managed to grab the back of her shirt. Crying out, she tried to get loose but instead she felt herself being lifted up. Her right arm became caught in the chain, but she was powerless to keep herself from being slowly raised from the ground, and a moment later she felt the figure place a hand on her throat.

“No, please!” she yelled. “What do you want from me? I gave you the coins!”

She twisted and turned, and after a moment she managed to slam herself against the front of the cart. This wasn’t enough to get her free, but she was at least able to slip her right arm loose and suddenly she spotted a wooden post on the front of the cart. Realizing that she might only have one chance, she slipped the chain over the post and then she slammed her elbow into the figure’s chest, with enough force to send her slumping back down to the ground.

Landing hard on her elbows, she quickly began to scurry away, before spotting the coins. She turned back and grabbed them both, and then she crawled away until she was sure she was safe. Then, turning, she looked back and saw that although the creature was struggling to catch her, its chain was caught on the cart. And no matter how hard the creature tried to break loose, it seemed unable to understand why it was being held back.

Scrabbling to her feet, Chandler limped over to her car. When she tried the door, however, she found that it was locked, which meant she must have left her keys somewhere else. She checked her pockets again, but then she spotted the keys dangling in the ignition and she realized she’d locked herself out.

“No!” she screamed, slamming her fists on the window before limping around and heading to Doctor Levant’s car.

She tried the door, but this too was locked.

Realizing that the cars were going to be no help, she looked out across the clearing. The nearest road was miles and miles away, and she felt as if she’d pass out before she could get there. For a moment she imagined herself unconscious on the ground, far from help, and she realized she might never be found. Her only hope was to stay at the cabin and to wait for Clark and the others to arrive in a few hours’ time. Slowly, she turned and limped back around the cars, and then she stopped as she saw the figure still trying to free itself.

“Are you…”

She stared at the figure for a moment, but she could no longer deny what she was seeing.

“You’re dead,” she whispered finally.

The figure let out an angry groan as it tried again to break loose.

“You’re dead,” Chandler said again, as a sense of hollow horror spread through her body. “You’ve been dead for a long time, haven’t you?”

She kept telling herself that there had to be some other explanation, but deep down she knew that the man had to be dead. Long dead. She’d never believed in anything like this before, but now she understood that somehow a dead man had come back to life, filled with what seemed like an unstoppable anger. And the anger was clearly directed at anyone who possessed the coins.

“Doctor Levant!” she shouted, turning and looking toward the forest. After a moment she cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled again. “Doctor Levant!”

She waited.

All she heard was the dead figure’s continued frustration.

“Why did you do that to him?” she asked, turning to face the figure.

She waited, but there was no indication that the figure had even heard her.

“Do these belong with them?” she shouted, trying desperately to understand what was happening. “Is that it? Do the coins belong with those bodies?”

The figure snarled at her, but still it couldn’t get free.

Chandler looked down at the coins, but she still couldn’t quite make out the markings. They were like nothing else that she’d ever seen, and – although she was certainly no numismatist – she was surprised that absolutely nothing about the coins seemed familiar. After a moment, she was just about able to make out parts of one word on the first coin’s side.

“Inferno?” she whispered, her mind racing to figure out why that would be relevant. “Infernu? Something like that.”

Suddenly she heard a loud bumping sound, and she turned to see that the figure was struggling harder than ever to get free from the chain. She took a step back, but the urge to run was countered by another, stronger urge to end this madness as quickly as possible. If she ran, the figure might just come after her. If she could stop everything right now and make sure nobody else got hurt, then she told herself she should do that now and ask questions later.

“If these coins belong with them,” Chandler said, struggling to her feet and still trying to keep from putting too much weight on her damaged ankle, “and if they keep getting separated, then… I’ll fix it.”

Limping back over to the other side of the cart, she made her way to the collection of tools that Clark and the others had left, and after a moment she found one of the shovels. Wincing as pain burst up from her ankle, she nevertheless forced herself to limp to the front of the cart, and then she immediately started digging in the soft, muddy ground. Her body was filled with pain, but she’d read plenty of mythology texts over the years and deep down she was starting to understand that the two bodies on the cart clearly needed to be reunited with the coins. Just tossing them onto the bones wouldn’t be enough, and she knew she had to do something more permanent.

She pressed the tip of the shovel-head into the ground, and then she tried to use a foot to push it down further. Realizing that this would be impossible with one ankle broken, she hesitated for a moment and then she began to dig as best she could manage, tottering mostly on one leg while digging as fast and as deep as she could manage with her arms. Every few seconds she heard the chains banging against the side of the cart, but she told herself that there was no point constantly running back to check that the figure was still trapped. She’d only be wasting time, and the most important thing was that she found a way to dig a grave.

Morning light continued to spread across the clearing as Chandler worked. Her progress was slow, and – by the time she was even halfway done – the sun had risen above the distant forest.

Glancing briefly at the figure, she saw that it was still struggling.

“Nearly there,” she muttered under her breath. “Just hold on.”

Finally, exhausted and in agony, she tossed the shovel aside and stared down into the shallow grave she’d dug. Sure, it wasn’t six feet deep, it was barely even three, and muddy water was already starting to pool at the bottom. Still, she figured that the pit would do for now.

Turning, she limped over to the cart and looked for a moment at the two dead bodies, and then she began to carefully maneuver the female to the edge. She could barely manage to think straight as her pain became stronger, but eventually she managed to send the woman thudding down into the mud. The whole process was ungainly, and the woman landed in an awkward position, but Chandler had no time to climb down and arrange her properly.

“Sorry,” she whispered, before grabbing the woman’s foot and starting to slide her toward the pit. It took only a few minutes for her to get the body in place, and then she went back and did the same for the man.

As she pulled the man into the grave, she glanced again at the figure and saw that it was still trying to get the chain free from the cart.

Once the two bodies were in place, Chandler immediately tossed the coins down to join them.

“Is that to pay the ferryman?” she whispered, unable to keep from trying to figure out the puzzle. “You’ve been dead for a while, so why didn’t you do that already? What were you waiting for?”

She paused for a moment.

“Maybe losing the coins meant that your journey was undone,” she continued. “I’m sorry, but now you won’t be disturbed again. I won’t mark the grave, I won’t let anyone ever know that it’s here. You’ll finally be able to rest in peace.”

She began filling the grave. Her arms were burning with pain now, but she knew she had to keep going. Finally she slipped, falling down hard on her hands and knees, and this time she wasn’t sure she could get back up. So she started using her hands to push the dirt into the grave. Even this process was difficult and took a long time, and she had to make her way around the grave’s edges in order to cover the bodies, but at least she was managing to get the job done. In the back of her mind, she told herself she could lead a proper team back some time, to investigate properly. For now, though, she just needed to survive.

And then, suddenly, she heard a loud bumping sound coming from the cart.

She turned, and to her horror she saw that the figure had finally managed to get free.

“No!” she screamed, frantically getting back to work. “I’m doing it! See? I’m doing it for them!”

As the figure stumbled closer, Chandler finished filling the grave, using her bare hands to push as much dirt and mud as possible into the hole. There were still a few patches where the dead bodies were showing through, but she worked to cover those too. Finally, as the figure loomed behind her and let out an angry snarl, Chandler pushed mud onto the final protruding body-part, and then she turned just as the figure’s snarl cut short.

For a moment, the figure merely stood unsteadily against the early morning sky. For the first time, however, something seemed to have checked its fury.

“I ended it,” Chandler said, her voice trembling with fear. “See? It’s over. They’re at peace now. I’ll make sure no-one ever disturbs them again.”

She waited. The figure remained on its feet, although it looked set to collapse at any moment. Its right shoulder dipped slightly, as if the cosmic strings were loosening.

Finally, slowly, Chandler turned and looked once more at the hastily-filled grave, and she couldn’t help but think about the two bodies she’d just buried. She had no idea who they’d been when they were alive, and she realized now that it might be best to not research this site too much. Instead of risking a fresh disturbance, she’d make sure that the site remained untouched.

“It’s over,” she said, slumping down exhausted against the cold ground. “There’s no—”

Suddenly the figure snarled and grabbed her once again by the throat.

“No!” Chandler screamed, as she felt the tight grip starting to block her airway. “I did it! I buried them!”

Unable to get free, she watched as the figure leaned past her and plunged its left hand into the mud. It seemed to be searching for something, and finally it pulled out one of the gold coins.

“What are you doing?” Chandler gasped, struggling to breathe. “What are—”

Before she could finish, the figure moved the coin closer, letting mud from its hand drip down onto her face. Chandler struggled, but now the figure grabbed her jaw and forcing her mouth open, and then it began to slip its fingers inside. No matter how hard she tried to get away, Chandler was unable to fight back – unable even to scream – as the dead man fed his muddied hand deeper into her mouth and finally forced the cold gold coin down her throat.

Twenty-Six

Three hours later

“Okay,” Chad Clark said as his car bounced along the dirt track that led to the site, “I’m there now so I’ll talk to her, and we can meet up back at the campus in a few days. I just thought I should come and help out some more, that’s all.”

“And you’re sure this isn’t because you’ve got a slight crush on her?” Muriel replied teasingly over the phone. “Don’t deny it, Chad. Everyone sees the way you look at her.”

“You’re so immature,” Clark said, and now he could see the cabin ahead. “Speak to you later.”

He tapped to cut the call, and then he steered the car past the tree-line and over toward the cabin. He glanced around, keen to see what Chandler was working on, but so far there was no sign of her. As he finally pulled the car to a stop next to the pile of equipment, he figured she must be doing something inside the cabin, so he unfastened his safety belt and climbed out of the car, before slamming the door shut and then leaning down to check his hair in the rear-view mirror.

Once he was satisfied that he looked good, he made his way past the car and over toward the cabin, although he stopped when he noticed that there was another car already parked nearby.

“Great,” he said with a sigh as he realized that this car belong to Doctor Levant. “Just my luck.”

Feeling a little annoyed that he wouldn’t be alone with Chandler, he nevertheless tried to look on the bright side. He hurried toward the cabin, but he stopped again when he saw to his surprise that the two bodies had been moved from the cart.

He turned and looked around again, but there was still no sign of Chandler. Something felt different, although he couldn’t quite put his finger on what was wrong. Hesitating for a moment, he tried to figure out what was gnawing at the back of his mind, but he quickly forced himself to stop being so paranoid. He told himself that Chandler would only have moved the bodies if she’d had a good reason, so he walked around to the side of the cabin and pulled open the door.

“Hey,” he said as he leaned inside, “I just thought I’d—”

He stopped as soon as he saw the cabin’s empty interior. There was no sign of Chandler at all, and no sign of Doctor Levant, although the dead old man remained in place on his chair, looking toward the broken window.

“Chandler?” Clark said after a moment, as he began to notice that the cabin was in disarray. The table had been overturned, and the battery-operated light had fallen to the ground and lay smashed. “Doctor Levant?”

He hesitated for a moment, before stepping back and trying to work out what could have happened. He didn’t want to panic just yet, and after a few seconds he realized that – for whatever reason – Chandler and Doctor Levant must have headed out to the forest. That wasn’t entirely unlikely, since they might have discovered something nearby that shed light on the site as a whole, although as he looked toward the forest he couldn’t help but note that the entire area seemed eerily quiet.

Stepping back around to the front of the cabin, he reached into his pocket for his phone. He’d tried a few times to call Chandler that morning, but there was only partial, patchy signal at the site. As he brought her number up again, however, he noticed what looked like a freshly-disturbed rectangle of mud on the ground just a few feet away, with a shovel having been tossed aside.

Concerned, he took a step forward.

Suddenly he heard a bumping sound over his shoulder, and as he turned he felt a rush of relief as he saw Chandler staring at him from the side of the cabin.

“Hey,” he said, slipping his phone away and taking a step toward her. “I was starting to get a little creeped out there for a moment. What’ve you been up to?”

He waited, but Chandler simply watched him. There was a curious expression on her face, and her brow was slightly furrowed. Something seemed different about her. She usually stood proud and tall, but now she was a little hunched and her head was tilted slightly to one side. Her arms were hanging loose, too, whereas she usually kept them tucked in her pockets.

“I saw Levant’s car,” he continued. “I didn’t know he was going to be here.”

Again he waited, and again Chandler didn’t reply.

He took another step toward her.

“So what’s the deal with those bodies?” he asked. “I noticed some of the stuff’s damaged in the cabin. Did something happen during the night?”

He waited.

She stared him.

He was about to ask her again, but then he noticed a patch of mud smeared against one side of her mouth. In fact, he was starting to realize that she looked quite disheveled, with a few scratches on her face. Her hair was unkempt, too, and there was some tears on her shirt.

“What’s wrong?” Clark asked, as his concern grew. “Catherine?” He reached out and put a hand on the side of her arm. “Tell me what’s happening?”

She stared for a moment longer, and then she looked past him.

“Catherine?”

He watched the same expression on her face, and then he turned to try to see what she was staring at. For a moment, however, all he saw was the clearing and – in the distance – the tree-line.

“I don’t get it,” he said cautiously. “What is it? Is Doctor Levant here?”

“Your clothes,” Chandler said behind him, her voice sounding throaty and scratched. “They’re funny looking.”

“Huh?”

He began to turn to her.

Suddenly Chandler grabbed his throat and pulled him back, and then she forced him down onto his knees. He tried to get free, but she already had a hand on his face and she quickly slipped a gold coin into his mouth before clamping her her hand tight.

“Now you’re going to get a new body too,” she said with a grin, as Clark tried but failed to get free. He was struggling to breathe, and finally the coin almost choked him as it slipped down his throat. “Welcome back, darling,” Chandler continued, watching as the fear in Clark’s eyes suddenly gave way to a shocked, glassy expression. “We’ve been waiting for this moment for a long, long time.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

149 years ago

The door to the mortuary swung open, and Richard Garrett stepped through into the cold, dank room. Immediately, his gaze settled upon the two bodies that lay on a table over by the room’s far end.

“You’ll be Mr. Garrett, then,” the mortician, Andrew Bold, said, turning from the bench where he was preparing some fresh solutions. A young boy worked next to him. “It’s about time you showed up.”

“The paperwork took longer than it should have,” Garrett replied, making his way over to the table and holding up the document from the Sheriff’s office. “Never have I encountered such officious fools as I find in some of these small towns. Still, at least now everything’s signed and—”

“I don’t doubt that for one moment,” Bold said, interrupting him, before glancing with a nervous expression toward the two bodies. “Everyone wants rid of them. The fact that you’re willing to pay is just a bonus.”

Garrett stepped around the table and looked down at the two corpses. As he’d been informed, one was male and one was female. They’d been laid out naked, and the rope marks were clear around their necks. For a moment, Garrett could only stare at the bodies, and deep down he could already sense that they were of the type that he required. He’d been performing this service for so long, ever since the war had ended, that his gut reacted every time he came close to such creatures.

“I suppose you know the stories,” Bold said.

Garrett didn’t reply.

“I’m not a superstitious man myself,” Bold continued, “but ever since these two criminals were executed, it’s like they’ve been… calling attention to themselves. We even buried them, a few days back, but then things got worse and they were dug up. Something’s still not right, though. Can’t you feel it in the air?”

Still, Garrett said nothing. Instead he was staring at the corpses with a hint of wonder in his eyes.

“I don’t like what you do,” Bold said firmly, “but I understand it. So get on with it.”

“Leave the room,” Garrett murmured finally, still staring at the bodies.

“I think—”

“I told you to leave the room.” Garrett’s gaze was still fixed on the two corpses. “My horse and cart are waiting at the rear of the building. I shall go out that way, so as to avoid being watched by the townsfolk. For the same reason, I shall leave town along the old mining road. I do not like to make a spectacle of what I do.”

“And you’ll take them far away from here?” Bold asked. “We have your word on that?”

“You do indeed,” Garrett replied. “You need not worry. Whatever effect these two souls have had on your town, it is over now. I know what to do with them.”

“And what’s that?” Bold asked. “If I might ask, that is.”

“It is none of your concern.”

“They were murderous in life,” Bold replied. “I don’t know how many they killed, but it must have been at least ten. How they could claim to be in love, I’ll never—”

“I asked you some time ago to leave the room,” Garrett said, cutting him off, still staring at the bodies. “I note that you have not yet done so.”

Bold hesitated, before turning and walked to the door. At the same time, the young boy – no more than eight or nine years old – began to follow.

“The child stays,” Garrett said, turning to look at them.

Bold stopped, and he seemed unsure of himself for a moment before, finally, turning to the boy.

“You are to stay here and assist Mr. Garrett, Peter,” he explained. “I… I’m sorry.”

“Aren’t I expected back at the orphanage?” Peter asked.

“No, not at the moment.” Bold turned to Garrett. “There are some parts of this arrangement,” he continued, “that I find harder to stomach than others.”

“That is none of my concern,” Garrett told him. “I am performing a great service for this town. I would like you to remember that, should you begin to worry about how I conduct myself. What matters is that Lordstown is able to get back to its old ways. Once I am gone, that shall surely be the case.”

Bold seemed for a moment as if he might argue some more, but then he turned and left the room. He pulled the door shut, and a few seconds later there was the sound of a key being turned in a lock, before footsteps faded into the distance.

Garrett, watched by Peter, made his way around to the head of the table, and looked down at the face of the dead man. Then, slowly, he reached down and carefully opened the man’s mouth, before slipping his fingers inside and removing a gold coin. He then stepped over to the dead woman and did the same.

“What are those?” Peter asked, his voice tinged with fear.

“Do you know nothing, boy?” Garrett asked, as he examined the coins. “I suppose I should not be astonished by your heathen ignorance. Out here in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization, you are deeply under-educated in matters of the divine. It has long been said that the dead must buy purchase passage across the rivers that separate the world of the living from the world of the dead. They must each give a coin to the boatman, Charon, in order to pass. That is why such coins are sometimes placed in the mouths of those who are to be buried.”

“But…”

Peter hesitated.

“Then… why are you taking them out?” he asked finally.

“You know who these two people are, do you not?”

Peter nodded.

“Thieves,” Garrett continued. “Murderers. Nobody would have spared a coin for either of them. Instead, their souls would have gone straight to the pits of Hell.” He paused. “But there are those who refuse to accept their fate. And if they are brave enough, and strong enough, they can descend into the darkest depths of Hell, and it is said that there they can find gold, with which to fashion their own coins. If they can then navigate the torturous path to the shore of the river Styx, they can use these coins to purchase passage in the other direction, passing from the land of the dead to the land of the living.”

Peter stepped toward the table, although after a moment he held back a little. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt fear in his heart.

“It is said,” Garrett continued, “that although he is bound to transport such souls, Charon is not bound to accept their payment. Often, he lets them keep their coins, so that they may use them once they return to this world.” He allowed himself a faint smile. “So that they may use them to purchase new bodies.”

A shiver ran through Peter’s chest.

“I first saw this, or something like it, during the war,” Garrett explained. “From that moment on, I knew that it would be my task to seek out these souls upon their return, and to aid them. For they do require aid, you see. They have been through so much. But are they not beautiful?” He reached down and gently stroked the hair on the woman’s head. “They were killed for their sins, but they refused to accept death. Is that not the greatest act of disobedience that any soul can perform? They must have gone through unspeakable horrors in Hell, in their search for the means to manufacture these coins, but they were determined to return to the land of the living. And now, with just a little help from me, they shall thrive again. My wife and I shall look after them, once I get them home.”

“I have to go now,” Peter said, turning to walk away. “I’m sorry.”

“No.”

Peter stopped in his tracks, terrified by the severity of Garrett’s tone.

“I am afraid,” Garrett continued, stepping up behind him, “that you are part of the deal I have struck with the people of Lordstown. They fear these bodies. They know there is something amiss with them. They accepted all my terms immediately.” He slipped a knife from his pocket. “They know that sacrifices must be made.”

“But—”

Suddenly Garrett grabbed Peter and pulled him back. Before the boy could struggle, the knife’s blade sliced straight across his throat, and Garrett held up a small cup to collect blood as it sprayed from the wound. The boy struggled violently, but only for a moment. He quickly weakened, and finally he hung limply in Garrett’s arms as more blood ran into the cup. The whole process was quick. Garrett knew what he was doing, he’d done it many times before, and the boy was soon dead.

Once he was done, Garrett dropped the boy’s corpse and headed back to the table, where he took a moment to pour the blood into the mouths of the two bodies.

“There,” he purred. “Just the first step, but soon you shall live again. I shall take you to my home and you shall be found two new bodies. The journey will take a few days, but you will surely be glad enough once we reach our destination. I truly believe that it is the Lord’s wish that I help you.” His eyes were burning with madness now. “As I have helped so many before you. In the name of the Lord, the great Satan.”

With that, he tossed the cup aside and hauled the dead man up, quickly carrying him out the rear door. He took him to where his horse and cart waited, and then he set the man on the back of the cart before going back to fetch the woman and placing her next to the man. Then he took the coins and set one in the man’s hand an one in the woman’s, to keep them safe during the journey. This was the first time he’d ever had two bodies to transport at once, but he

“I require no payment from you for my services,” he said as he secured the rear of the cart. “Save your coins. You shall need them soon. To purchase your new bodies.”

Turning, he headed around and prepared the horse, and then he led the animal and the cart out of the yard and toward the old road. The darkening sky threatened a great storm, and it had been said that the snow that year was worse than at any time in living memory. Still, Garrett felt certain that he could take a shortcut through some uncharted areas that would cut his journey time by up to a day. He did not notice his horse’s faint limp but, even if he had, he would not have changed his plan. His madness had been forged in the heart of war, but he felt certain that the Lord would protect him and guide him on his journey home as he set off with his precious cargo.

Ahead, gathering clouds portended a great snowstorm.

Epilogue

Today

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she saw something moving in the distance. Whatever it was, it appeared too fast to be a normal person, but its shape was not that of a horse and carriage. Some kind of vehicle was bumping toward the clearing, bearing the word POLICE on its side in large letters.

“How long were we gone?” the man asked, now inhabiting Chad Clark’s body.

She turned to him, and immediately she began to smile, although the smile felt unfamiliar. She was not yet used to the body that had once belonged to Catherine Chandler.

“My love,” she said, not quite recognizing her own new voice, “I do not know, but I think perhaps it is longer than we intended. Look at these clothes. Aren’t they unusual? What wondrous fibers are they made from?”

“I remember screams,” he replied, his eyes filled with wonder, “and pain, and—”

“I remember all of that too,” she said, reaching up and placing a finger against his lips to quieten him, “but it’s over now. We made it back.”

“I remember going to the shore of that river,” he continued. “I remember the man with the boat, and his face was like—”

“Not now,” she said, trying to calm him. “We must be careful. However long has passed, much has likely changed. But we have one another, and that’s all we need.” She placed her hands on the sides of his arm, as the police cruiser pulled up nearby. “And I don’t know about you,” she continued with a grin that was feeling more and more natural by the second, “but I’m very, very happy with these new bodies we have purchased. Now it’s time to get back to what we do best.”

Her grin grew, and then they both turned to watch as a police officer stepped out of the cruiser.

OTHER BOOKS

BY AMY CROSS INCLUDE

Horror

Stephen

The Farm

The Haunting of Hardstone Jail

Asylum (The Asylum Trilogy book 1)

Meds (The Asylum Trilogy book 2)

The Madness of Annie Radford (The Asylum Trilogy book 3)

The Devil, the Witch and the Whore (The Deal book 1)

Like Stones on a Crow’s Back (The Deal book 2)

The Devil’s Blade

Haunted

Devil’s Briar

The Night Girl

Last Wrong Turn

Friend From the Internet

The Haunting of Caldgrave House

The Haunting of Blackwych Grange

The Bride of Ashbyrn House

The Ghosts of Hexley Airport

The Curse of Wetherley House

The Haunting of Marshall Heights

The Ghosts of Lakeforth Hotel

The Body at Auercliff

The Soul Auction

The Border

Eli’s Town

Laura

Annie’s Room

The Priest Hole (Nykolas Freeman book 1)

Battlefield (Nykolas Freeman book 2)

Perfect Little Monsters and Other Stories

The Ghost of Longthorn Manor and Other Stories

Room 9 and Other Stories

Fantasy / Horror

Grave Girl

Raven Revivals (Grave Girl book 2)

The Gravest Girl of All (Grave Girl book 3)

The Library

Beautiful Familiar

Dark Season (book 1, 2 & 3)

The Hollow Church

The Vampires of Tor Cliff Asylum

Dead Souls (book 1 to 13)

Lupine Howl (books 1 to 6)

Dystopian / Apocalypse

Ward Z (The Ward Z Series book 1)

Terror at Camp Everbee (The Ward Z Series book 2)

The Dog

Also by Amy Cross

THE FARM

No-one ever remembers what happens to them when they go into the barn at Bondalen farm. Some never come out again, and the rest… Something about them is different.

In 1979, the farm is home to three young girls. As winter fades to spring, Elizabeth, Kari and Sara each come to face the secrets of the barn, and they each emerge with their own injuries. But someone else is lurking nearby, a man who claims to be Death incarnate, and for these three girls the spring of 1979 is set to end in tragedy.

In the modern day, meanwhile, Bondalen farm has finally been sold to a new family. Dragged from London by her widowed father, Paula Ridley hates the idea of rural life. Soon, however, she starts to realize that her new home retains hints of its horrific past, while the darkness of the barn still awaits anyone who dares venture inside.

Set over the course of several decades, The Farm is a horror novel about people who live with no idea of the terror in their midst, and about a girl who finally has a chance to confront a source of great evil that has been feeding on the farm for generations.

ALICE ISN’T WELL

(DEATH HERSELF BOOK 1)

“There are lots of demons in the sky above London. The problem is, this one came crashing down to earth.”

Ten years ago, Alice Warner was attacked and disfigured by an attacker in her own home. She remembers nothing of the attack, and she has been in a psychiatric hospital ever since. When she’s finally released, however, she starts working as a security guard at an abandoned shopping mall. And that’s when she starts to realize that something is haunting her, keeping just one step out of sight at all times…

Meanwhile, seventy years earlier, a little girl named Wendy is left orphaned after a World War 2 fighter plane crashes onto her house. Taken to a monastery, Wendy is quickly singled out by the nuns for special attention. They say she has been possessed by a demon, and that there’s only one way to save her soul. Fortunately for Wendy, however, there’s someone else who seems to know far more about the situation.

What is the shocking connection between Alice and Wendy, reaching out across the years? Does a demon really lurk in the girl’s soul? And who is Hannah, the mysterious figure who tries to help Wendy, and who seventy years later begins to make her influence felt in Alice’s life too?

Alice Isn’t Well is the first book in the Death Herself series, about a dark figure who arrives in the night, promising to help deal with the forces of evil whenever they appear.

MEDS

(THE ASYLUM TRILOGY BOOK 2)

“Welcome to the Overflow. And remember, all roads lead back to Lakehurst.”

At the edge of a ruined town, a burned-out hospital houses one final, functional ward. There, a small group of doctors and nurses tend to patients who have been consigned to the Overflow. Unloved, forgotten by the people who knew them, these are the patients who will never receive visitors. If something happens to them, no-one will ask questions.

When she starts work at Middleford Cross, Nurse Elly Blackstock thinks she’s getting a second chance. She soon discovers, however, that this particular hospital is unlike any other. In one of the beds, an old man grapples with the horrors of his past, while in another there’s a woman condemned to a life of darkness and silence. Ghosts stalk the corridors, and more ghosts are on the way. And watching over all of this is the hospital’s administrator, Nurse Kirsten Winter, a woman who is desperately searching for someone named Annie Radford…

Asylum: Meds is a dark horror novel about the lengths one woman will go to as she searches for the truth about the voices in her head.

Copyright

Copyright 2019 Amy Cross

All Rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, entities and places are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual people, businesses, entities or events is entirely coincidental.

Kindle edition

First published: March 2019

Content

Amy Cross
THE PURCHASE

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Epilogue

OTHER BOOKS BY AMY CROSS INCLUDE

Also by Amy Cross

Copyright