doesn’t look like a permanent dwelling, and those pictures on the wall were put there recently. Where does he spend the rest of his time, and why would he hole up in this place anyway if he’s made a permanent home somewhere else?’
I looked to Liat, but she had turned her back on us. Now she beckoned us to join her as she examined something carved into the wood, light against dark.
It was a detailed representation of a young girl’s head, two or three times normal size, her hair long and curling from her scalp like the bodies of snakes. Her eyes had been cut deeper and larger than the rest of her, the ovals of them so big that I could have placed my fist in them had they not been filled with teeth, the roots of them impaled in the white wood. There were more teeth in her huge mouth, except these ones were root-out, giving them the appearance of fangs. It was terrifying in aspect and effect.
‘If you’re frightened of something, where better to hide than a fort?’ I said.
‘A fort with no gates?’ said Louis.
‘A fort with bad memories,’ I replied. ‘A fort with blood in its walls and its dirt. Maybe a fort like that doesn’t need gates.’
‘He was frightened of a little girl?’ Louis sounded skeptical.
‘If what I’ve heard about her is true, he had good cause to be.’
‘But he stayed out here, even though he was scared of her. I guess that plane must be real important to him.’
Liat shook her head.
‘Not the plane?’ I said.
She mouthed the word no.
‘Then what?’
She made it clear that she didn’t know. In the fading light, and the shadows of the old fort, I almost missed the lie.
Almost.
50
Ray Wray was running.
He wasn’t sure how it had all gone so wrong so fast, but he knew now that he and Joe had been out of their depth right from the start. They should have backed away the first time that the kid and the woman had come near them, except Joe owed them and they were calling in the debt, and Joe had given Ray to understand that these weren’t the kind of people on whom one reneged. He was just grateful to Ray for tagging along, even if Ray wouldn’t have been anywhere near those woods if he hadn’t been so desperate for cash.
They’d made good progress from the start. The kid might have been spookier than a haunted house on Halloween, but the little bastard could move, and there had been no complaints from the woman about the pace that had been set, either on her own behalf or the kid’s. While Joe had the map, and a good sense of where they were going, it often seemed to Ray that it was the woman who was guiding them, and not the other way around. When Joe paused to check his malfunctioning compass, the woman would simply keep on walking, the kid trotting behind her, and when Joe and Ray caught up with them there was no need to alter direction.
Ray figured they were less than a mile from the fort when the first arrow struck. His first thought was, Indians! which was absurd and unhelpful but there was no understanding the workings of the human mind. Even as he hit the ground, and heard Joe swear, he’d found himself giggling, and it was only when he looked up and saw the arrow buried in the trunk of a white pine that he stopped laughing and began considering that he might die out here.
Joe was a few feet to his left, trying to find the source of the arrow.
‘Hunter?’ asked Ray, but he asked more in hope than expectation. They were still wearing their orange bibs. There had been some discussion about it, but Ray and Joe had finally taken the view that, with a woman and a kid in tow, it was better to be safe. It would have to be one dumb-ass bow hunter who’d shoot an arrow at someone in orange.
‘No fuckin’ way,’ said Joe, which was just what Ray had thought.
The Flores woman was using a thick oak for cover. Still searching the forest for the source of the arrow, Joe called back to her.
‘Miss Flores, you got any idea who that might be?’
Something darted behind a wind-tipped hemlock, the old tree resembling an animal more than vegetation, its body seemingly poised to rise up on its roots and stride through the