Destroying Angel (18 page)

“Don’t let him go!” I said.

I ran back to the half-collapsed tent. While the other three women beat at him, I rummaged through his saddlebags until I found the bullets for his pistol. I loaded rounds into the Colt with shaking hands, then flipped the cylinder shut and left the tent.

Van Slooten had regained his feet. He held Maude’s stick of firewood and sneered at me through his ruined teeth where I had knocked two of them out. Blood streamed down his face. Laura was in the way, and I couldn’t get a clean shot. He charged at me.

Laura ducked out of the way. Van Slooten lost his balance and fell to the ground. I pushed past the other women and approached the fallen man, who looked up at me and slurred something unintelligible as I pressed the barrel to his forehead. He tried to regain his feet. I pulled the trigger. The gun roared and bucked in my hand. Van Slooten’s head rocked back, and blood sprayed out the back of his skull. He didn’t move. The gunshot rolled across the desert. Somewhere in Witch’s Warts a crow cried its alarm.

For a long moment we stood gasping.

“Sweet heaven,” Laura said. Drops of blood freckled across her face. “What have we done?”

Annabelle stared dumbly at the dead, naked man and let the ladle fall from her grasp to land with a thud on the sand. She turned away suddenly, face gray, and clamped her hands over her mouth.

“It’s over,” Maude said. Tears streamed down her face. Then, again and again, “It’s over, it’s over.” Her voice rose to a hysterical pitch. “It’s over!”

Laura and I grabbed her to calm her down. No women popped out of their cabins and no children looked out from the remaining wagons, but I knew that every person in camp had heard. I needed to get control before they disobeyed my order and came out to see this horrible, bloody sight. “It’s over,” Maude said one last time, her voice soft now.

“Yes, it’s over.”

Or so I thought at the time. But van Slooten wasn’t our real enemy. It was still out there, lurking in Witch’s Warts, doing to our souls what the federal marshal had tried—and failed—to do to our bodies.

Jacob lowered the diary. “What are you driving at?” he whispered.

And he still didn’t have his answer about what Rebecca was doing down at Grandma Cowley’s house at Yellow Flats. He glanced at Fernie, sleeping by his side. She’d stopped him at the point when Grandma Cowley entered the tent to kill van Slooten, asked him to read without her after she fell asleep.

“It’s too much,” she said. “I can’t stomach it. You can read it and tell me about it in the morning.”

He wished now she were awake. The diary left a shadow in his mind, the sort of dark, creeping dread that made him want to turn on all the lights in the house and double-check the locks, make sure the windows were securely latched.

Daniel moaned on the floor. Jacob started to climb out of bed, when the boy abruptly stopped struggling with his sleeping bag and his breathing turned slow and regular. Jacob leaned back with a sigh of relief and opened the diary again.

December 21, 1890

Annabelle Kimball gave herself to Lucifer’s angel this afternoon. By the time it finished with her, everything had changed. I should tell you first what happened in the past two months.

Pox hit the camp in late October, the day after I finished writing about Frederick van Slooten’s death. The younger Johnson boys caught it first. Sister Leticia brought the children to me at breakfast to show me their pink tongues and the rashes on their backs and arms. I ordered them quarantined.

The boys grew sicker, and by the third evening the younger child was delirious, burning up. The older had recovered strength and his rash began to scab over. By the by, five other children fell ill, plus Sister Laura.

I thought about going for help. Panguitch is the closest town, but there is no road in that direction, just a series of hills and mountains that might be impassable. Better would be Cedar City, which lay in the direction from which we had come, but even that would be two days by horse. By the time I returned, the illness
might have passed. I stayed on my knees for an hour before retiring for bed. I begged the Lord to tell me whether to go or to stay.

He sent His answer while I slept.

I woke the next morning feverish and chilled. A terrible, burning itch spread down my back and started again at the ankles. Swollen balls formed at my throat and armpits, so rigid and painful that I screamed when Sister Maude touched them.

“You’ll stay in bed,” she said.

“How is Laura?”

“Never mind her.”

“And Annabelle—”

“I’ll deal with Sister Annabelle. At least for the next few days, until you recover.”

“We don’t have enough firewood, not since we left the cliffs in such a hurry.” I swallowed, an act so painful it felt like liquid fire pouring down my throat. “We have to go back.”

“You’re doing nothing of the kind. Do that and you’ll kill yourself. Rest. I insist.”

I obeyed. It was a week before I got out of bed.

Nobody died in that first wave, not even Timothy Johnson, who’d caught the earliest and one of the most severe cases. Instead the pox rolled through the camp family by family, each bout lasting a week or longer. By December it had mostly played out, and I thought we’d escape.

But the last case was the worst of all. Poor Walter Kimball was only three, too young to understand the pain. Annabelle tied his hands in mittens to keep him from tearing at his skin to get rid of the itch. The illness tormented him day after day, the pox still spreading even as other children began to recover, their fevers
breaking. Annabelle called me last night to give him a blessing—the women are giving blessings freely now, ignoring our lack of the priesthood—and I was shocked at how thin and pale he was. His ribs stood out, and his cheekbones were sharp and fine.

We tried to comfort Annabelle, tell her it might still pass. If only the fever would break, he would be out of danger. She nodded, eyes red and weeping. Nannie bawled in the background, looking every bit the child herself.

And so it came as no surprise when Annabelle woke the camp with her screams this morning. Maude and Laura led her away while Nannie, Leticia, and I wrapped the boy—rigid, white, eyes bulging, and a horrid purple swelling at the throat—in white linen.

I found a grassy rise about a mile south, and the women walked there to dig and dedicate Walter’s grave. We carried the dead child between us. Annabelle was unable to help but watched the rest of us work while she shivered, a shawl over her head and a blanket around her shoulders. I dedicated the grave with a prayer.

We were lowering Walter into the ground when Annabelle snapped. She screamed and rushed at us, swearing he wasn’t dead, he was only sleeping. Maude and Laura blocked her path. She clawed at them and forced her way through.

I grabbed her arm before she could throw herself into the pit with her dead child. “Leave me alone!” she cried. Maude and Laura helped me pull her back.

Annabelle tore free again, but this time she didn’t fight toward the grave. Instead, she turned and ran back toward the camp. I restrained the others while she disappeared over the rise of the next hill.

“You stay here and finish this grim business,” I told them. “I’ll go after Annabelle.”

“Be careful,” Laura said. “She’s not in her right mind.”

Annabelle didn’t stop when she reached the camp. A light snow had fallen during the night, now melting in the sun, and I had no trouble following her footprints from camp and into Witch’s Warts. What in blue blazes was she thinking? Was she trying to hide? Injure herself?

Or was it something even more sinister than that?

I found her a few minutes later. She lay on her back, spine arched, hands clutching at the air. Her dress hung up around her face. She bucked and thrashed as if fighting with an invisible foe.

“Annabelle Young!” I cried out. “For the love of—what’s the matter?”

She said nothing, made no sound except for the beating of her limbs against the ground. We were between two sandstone reefs, a narrow, sandy place maybe ten feet across. The sun was out but low on the horizon, and a gloomy pall hung over the place. I made my way forward, thinking I’d slap her, shock her out of whatever paroxysm had taken control of her body.

A cloud passed in front of the sun. I glanced up at the sudden darkness and shivered at the deepened winter chill, and when I looked back, a shadow lay on top of Annabelle. It twisted and curled like a thick, oily smoke. But as I stared, my eyes picked out a shape. The shape of a man.

“Leave her alone!” I cried.

The angel looked up and smiled. I staggered back in shock. It wasn’t a spirit I saw then, but the dead marshal, Frederick van Slooten, a neat hole in his forehead where the bullet had penetrated.

My eyes continued to stare, and the illusion of the dead man’s spirit disappeared. And now it was something else, some man or creature. He lay naked on top of Annabelle, thrusting at her with a monstrous, bent member between his legs. She moaned.

“Leave her alone.” My voice shook.

“Go,” he said, his voice gravelly. “Leave us.”

“I see thee. I know what thou art.” My voice strengthened, and a righteous anger flowed through my veins. “I rebuke thee. Get thee hence and trouble us no more!”

He laughed. “You have no priesthood,” he said. “You have no power, no claim over me. I serve my master, and he has commanded me to take control of these parts. Turn around, Rebecca Cowley, and run for your life. Hide, if you can. When I finish with Annabelle, I shall come for thee.”

My heart leaped into my throat. I almost turned and fled. But I didn’t. I may not have a man’s priesthood, but I am a daughter of God. I ran at him, threw myself at his throat. He let go of Annabelle and faced me with a snarl. We met and wrestled to the ground.

I fought the dark angel today. I defeated him. And when I finished, the Lord anointed me His prophetess.

May 28, 1893

Our husbands arrived yesterday in Blister Creek.

We thought they were dead. After so long alone in the wilderness, with no man to guide us, we made Zion for ourselves, broke and built this land by the sweat of our own brows. The desert has blossomed under our stewardship.

And now the men come.

Jacob stopped reading. He put down the diary and blinked. What did she call herself?

He flipped back the page to make sure. He had turned the page expecting to hear how Grandma Cowley defeated the angel. It was her style to say a thing bluntly and then backtrack and fill in the details.

Except there were no details. Instead the diary skipped from December 1890 to May 1893. Twenty-nine months. There were no pages cut from the diary, nothing but a huge gap from one period to the next.

Turn around, Rebecca Cowley, and run for your life.

Rebecca? Grandma Cowley’s name was Henrietta, wasn’t it? He flipped open the diary and read the woman’s fine cursive: Henrietta Rebecca Cowley. He hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t realized that they called her Rebecca and not Henrietta. And what was that about the prophetess?

His thoughts turned from Grandma Cowley—
Rebecca
Cowley—to the squatter with the same first name, now living at Yellow Flats.