Shadow Falls: Badlands (21 page)

“There, there. There, there.” Slowly, he rocked her back into a slumber.

Once he was sure she was sleeping, Miles gently put her on the ground. He dragged Elsibeth away and covered her body up with sticks and leaves before going back for his sleeping sister.

When he picked up Alyson and stroked her sleeping face, he heard footfalls. They were coming toward him in the woods from the direction he’d just come from—from where he’d taken Elsibeth’s body.

He turned. A young man holding hands with a young woman, their clothes simple and plain, emerged from the woods and were walking towards him. To Miles, they looked like farmers. As they looked up, they seemed as surprised as he; they both exclaimed in a language he didn’t understand.

French
, Miles thought.

“Comment allez-vous?” the young woman asked, her voice sounding full of concern.

Miles shook his head and, as if on cue, began bawling. His crying startled baby Alyson, who began crying as well. “I don't understand you,” Miles sobbed through his very convincing crocodile tears.

“Anglais,” the young French man said to the girl, motioning toward miles.

“Oui,” she responded before whispered something to him. He nodded before swiftly heading back into the thick woods.

The French girl then held out her hand to Miles. “Allez,” she invited him.

The settlement had been no more than an hour's walk, and when baby Alyson had grown heavy, the French girl took her and carried her in her arms, all the while singing softly to her in a hushed and soothing voice.

Once they arrived, the French girl gave Alyson back to Miles. “Arretez-vous,” she told him, motioning with her palm out for him to wait. They stood outside what was obviously some kind of a church.

Moments after going inside, she came back out with a man. The familiar collar around his neck immediately identified him as a man of the cloth.

“I am Father Henri,” he said to Miles in reasonably clear English.

Miles had already anticipated his next move. He wrapped his arms around Father Henri's neck and burst into tears.

“They came out from the woods and killed everybody!” he shrieked. Judging from Father Henri's horror-stricken face, the priest perfectly understood the significance of this statement.

The French priest took the children inside the humble wooden church, and as Miles entered he saw over his shoulder the French boy, who seemed to pretend to not notice the French girl.

You two have a secret,
Miles thought. Within minutes other women from the settlement arrived at the church, bringing food and blankets for the children, hovering over Miles and Alyson with bowls of warm soup, fresh bread, and milk. Chattering away incessantly in French, they stroked his hair and, due to the language barrier, Miles was gratefully spared from having to repeat the lie. Father Henri was the only one Miles could find who was conversant in English.

It was much later, while in the church’s one-windowed back room, that the good priest explained this fluency as he tucked Miles into a fresh straw bed.

“I attended seminary in England,” he said. “I have been lucky in my lifetime to see many beautiful places—Africa; the Far East. I came here to this new world because I was called by a higher purpose. Maybe you and your sister were, too.”

He nodded toward Alyson, who slept soundly in a wooden box that had been fashioned into a crib. Father Henri patted Miles’ head and gave the kind of smile—one full of solace—that only a priest could give. He rose, taking the room’s one candle with him, but paused before leaving to look back at Miles.

“Although it may not seem so now, maybe fate has big plans for you.”

After Father Henri shut the door, Miles got up and tiptoed across the darkened room to the makeshift crib where Alyson slept. He reached down with both hands and pulled the blanket up to her neck when his touch, a familiar one for a change, woke her up. Her eyes opened to see Miles; she cooed softly as he stroked her cheek with his finger.

From his own pocket came a kerchief, monogrammed with his father’s initials. He unfolded the small bundle to reveal the eyeballs that had, until recently, belonged to his father—the ones that he personally removed.

Delicately, he picked up one of the still sticky orbs between and held it up to his weary sister.

“What do you see? Alyson? What do you see?” he quietly asked. “Because if the visions within are the same things that Father saw, I’m afraid the world will soon be coming to a most difficult and violent end—and I believe you and I will play some kind of part in allowing it to happen.”

*****

CHAPTER 20

M
iles stood at the edge of the settlement for hours, staring into the woods until his eyes went vacant and glassy. He kept it a secret: the woods talked to him. Not a single person questioned his strange behavior. Miles had done the same thing nearly every day for seven years, ever since he had arrived here with Alyson.

Almost everyone kept silent about Miles because of the circumstances that had brought him here—the brutal deaths of his family and the four-dozen members of their traveling party. Nevertheless, a select handful in the settlement considered Miles a bit strange. When called upon, Miles was a hard worker and carried his own weight, often toiling in the vegetable fields for hours without a single complaint; still, many felt compelled to gossip—albeit in hushed voices.

One man remarked to his wife that Miles had cried once for his slain parents—the day he arrived—but never again afterwards.

In fact Miles had shunned intimacy with anyone at the settlement, including Father Henri, who made every attempt to be a surrogate father to the boy. Miles chose to be distant, even refusing to learn the native language of his hosts—thus ensuring that the only ones he could communicate with were Father Henri and his now nearly eight-year-old sister, Alyson.

Miles was now seventeen, and had grown into a strapping young man. So, when he chose to go off into the woods for days by himself, nobody stopped him.

During Miles’s ventures, Father Henri would sit, sipping wine through the night with a watchful eye to the woods, anticipating Miles’s return. Though he was unsure what the boy was doing, he was concerned. He had imagined on several occasions that Miles had been journeying back through the woods to the scene of the massacre. And while he himself had not ever gone, the day after Miles arrived, a small party of the men from the settlement made the trek to the spot Miles described in an attempt to find any other survivors.

They found bodies torn to bits and a field full of both four-legged and winged scavengers eager to fill their bellies with the carrion.

The obscuring clouds of blowflies and the decay of the corpses sometimes made it difficult to tell man from woman. As they went from wagon to wagon, the results were the same, appearing just as Miles had described.

They even found a victim who had died not by animal attack but by his own hand. Maggots crawled in his head from the self-inflicted wound, wriggling through the emptied eye sockets in his skull.

Between them, the men could not decide if this one man had been lucky to take his own life or a coward for not trying to save the others.

They returned to the settlement and reported their findings to Father Henri. The priest asked the three men to never speak of what they had seen, and certainly not to Miles. They all agreed it best be left to fade past memory.

But fade it could not, Father Henri feared. The strange boy he had partially raised was returning time and again to, the priest suspected, somehow commune with spirits still haunted the boy.

And even if he had known himself to be even partially right, Father Henri feared he would still be unable to prevent whatever was waiting to happen.

***

Once again, Miles stepped through the thicket and walked across the overgrown grass to the remains of his parents’ wagon. The seasons had ravaged it until all that remained was a rusted, rotted hulk sitting amid tall weeds.

There was no illusion in Miles’ mind. He looked out at the skeletal remains of the other wagons in the Majestyk’s party and did not see the vibrant faces that rode them when they were almost new. He saw the wrecks for what they were: splintered remnants of the past that, with time, would continue to fade until dust.

There was no nostalgia for this place, none whatsoever. It was not the memories that brought Miles here, but the blood in the ground. The bones of the dead had long since been dragged away—the flesh consumed—but the blood of the sacrificed innocent that had absorbed into the earth acted like a magnet to Miles’ soul.

And over the years, as he grew older, this pull grew stronger until it became ever-consuming force.

The face he wore around Father Henri and the others was a mask. They had proven very useful, providing food and shelter during his time of need—but that time was quickly coming to an end. He had chosen early on to not develop close relationships with those who would not live long enough to warrant the necessity.

And as dusk began to set, he stood in the field and imagined the history of the thousands of lives before his family’s that had been taken here: people who had been held down on the ground while their still beating hearts were carved out of their chests by high priests wielding razor sharp obsidian knives; those who had been buried or burned alive, including children. The young were especially valuable sacrifices because they were thought to be pure and unspoiled, and the more they cried and wailed during their slow, torturous death, the better the omen.

From his pocket he took his father’s kerchief, now slightly yellowed and wrinkled from age. What was inside, however, seemed as pristine as the day he’d obtained it. Gently, he picked up his father’s eye—the one he had kept. He had given the second one to Alyson, who had shunned it for reasons Miles still did not understand.

He gazed into the eye to see what had been impressed on, and traversed by, its visual pathways—to see that which his father had before the journey to the new world; these same visions, Miles was convinced, contained the keys to unlock not only his destiny, but that of every man, woman, and child in the mortal world.

But hard as he tried, he could not bring forth the visions from the long-dead eye. The images his father had seen—which he knew his sister, Alyson, had seen as well—eluded him now, as they had his entire life. Frustrated, he wrapped his fingers around the eye and took a deep breath. He pulled every ounce of strength from within his body; his arms shook and his legs caved under him. Miles fell, the eye rolling from his hands on the ground just inches away He struggled for breath; his heart pounded with furious intensity against his chest.

He sobbed in the grass. Despite the land’s undeniable pull, what was behind that pull continually eluded him. Inside his father’s eye was the portent of what was to come—the very thing he sacrificed his family and the families of those he brought with him on the Majestyk.

With the knife he used all those years ago to remove those eyes from his dead father’s skull, the same knife that his father had used on him to slit the palm of his hand, Miles drew a pentagram in the dirt and placed himself inside. He picked up the eye and again focused his mind on the orb until the ache in his brain pounded so hard it forced him to his knees. There he stayed with his head hung low.

He had never experienced a moment like this one, where the feeling of utter failure totally drowned him. “I’ve failed you,” he spoke out loud. Cupped in his hands, the eye rolled to its side so that nerve pointed back toward Miles.

“Why do you cry?” a voice asked, startling Miles. He looked up. Silhouetted against the setting sun was the figure of what appeared to be a man coming toward him.

In the woods, Alyson walked the path back from the creek toward the settlement and carried a basket of freshly washed laundry. Behind her rose the tuneful voice of Odile, the French girl who had found her and Miles seven years ago in the woods. Over the years, Alyson and Odile had become close friends. It was Odile who taught Alyson her native language—though Miles did his best to counter it with a fair share of English—and the two girls had slowly grown into confidants.

From Odile’s mouth came an old folk song, one about the plight of a washerwoman who ran off with a man who didn’t love her. Alyson began to laugh.

Her chuckle caught in her throat.

Miles is in danger! Go! Now
her head told her.

Before she could give it any thought, she let the basket of clean wash fall to the ground and ran into the woods.

“Alyson!” Odile called after her, a little confused and very much concerned.

As the figure approached, Miles felt a sense of utter fear in his stomach not felt since that night his father dragged him away from the camp and into the woods.

The night of his
transcendence
, as he often thought of it. He had never forgotten the feeling of being trapped inside the pentagram while his father chanted.

And now he again faced the unknown.

In the last seven years, the voices—the ones that spoke to him from the woods—always seemed to guide him, to assure him that he would soon take his place in the changing of the world.