October Skies Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  The Present

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  Author’s Note

  He listened to the howling wind outside, knowing that it was bringing with it many inches of snow that would be covering the entrance to the shelter. But it was a warm shelter, so much better than the hastily erected lean-tos down the hillside in the clearing. A good place from which to do work.

  Yes.

  A good place to become something more. He looked around at the tools hanging from lumber nail hooks; sharp tools, unused for many decades. On the floor beneath them nestled an ancient-looking flintlock weapon, from another time, perhaps even a previous century - no good to anyone now. The tools, however, he could use.

  You are strong.

  The voice inside him made him shiver with delight.

  I hope so.

  He looked down at the canvas sack of bones; daring to pull open the threaded mouth of the bag, he glimpsed the small cluster of dark-coloured, almost black bones inside.

  You came to me.

  Yes. I chose you.

  Preston.

  You are a good man.

  I try so hard to be.

  Alex Scarrow lives a nomadic existence with his wife Frances and his son Jacob, their current home being Norwich. He spent the first ten years out of college in the music business chasing record deals and the next twelve years in the computer games industry. Visit his website at www.scarrow.co.uk.

  By Alex Scarrow

  October Skies

  Last Light

  A Thousand Suns

  October Skies

  ALEX SCARROW

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Orion

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Alex Scarrow 2008

  The moral right of Alex Scarrow to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise

  circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar

  condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 1 4091 0670 8

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Mum and Dad, a small offering of thanks for everything.

  Most of all . . . thanks for the writer genes - they’ve come

  in very handy. This one is for you.

  Acknowledgements

  As with my previous two books, there’s the matter of a thank you to a small group of beta readers who have helped me turn a first draft into a novel. I think a pretty decent one this time.

  A big hug of thanks to Robin and Jane Carter and John Prigent for giving both drafts an extensive walkthrough; to Mike Poole for some very well-targeted comments, and my oldest brother Scott, for pinpointing some pretty key issues in a concise way. This was a bloody hard book to pitch right, the hardest for me yet, if I’m honest.

  My thanks also to Dad for his encouragement. That came when I needed it most.

  And of course, the biggest helping of gratitude goes to Frances, who with every book I write carefully moves those commas to where they should actually sit. (Truth be told . . . I punctuate as if I’m doing a William Shatner, pausing dramatically, and putting a, comma often where, it shouldn’t, really, go.)

  I also need to thank my new little laptop for doing such a good job, not crashing and trashing some important files like the previous little bugger did. Also to thank Starbucks in Borders for many coffees and chocolate chunk cookies - without those two ingredients, this book would not have been written.

  Finally, thanks to my agent, Rowan Lawton and my editor, Jon Wood, for direction and guidance.

  Prologue

  The two little girls, playing in the meadow by the stream, were the ones who saw it first: a pale form moving along the edge of the wood, just inside the tree line. They saw it at a distance, moving slowly; appearing, disappearing, reappearing amongst the foliage, a chalk-white stick-man with no face and two dark holes where his eyes should be.

  It turned to gaze at them for a moment, swaying slightly as it studied them intensely across the stream surging with recent snow-melt from the peaks above and the tail end of a hard winter.

  This was more than enough for the two girls. They turned and ran. As they stumbled up the incline of the meadow towards the edge of town, they thought they heard the thing scream after them - a sound both frightening and pitiful.

  They ran across the small town, down the
closest thing to a main street, busy with the mid-morning, mid-week trade, to their home, whimpering in broken, garbled sentences, each talking over the other, that they had seen a skeleton walking in the woods.

  The skeleton was next seen by Jeffrey Pohenz a short while later. Jeffrey, a willowy teen, was outside by the back door of the trader’s store, enjoying a crafty ten-minute reprise from hefting bags of cornmeal, leaning against the wall and savouring the unseasonably early warmth of sunshine on his face.

  His mind was elsewhere . . . on a particular promise made to him by a certain young lady last night. Anticipation of that was making the day at work drag interminably; his concentration was shot to hell.

  Of course, when he saw the skeleton suddenly emerge from a cluster of trees and thick tufts of untamed briar just across the yard, littered with broken and being-mended chassis and wheel spindles, the thought of this evening’s exciting promise was instantly dismissed. Like some creature from Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of hell, it shambled towards him with a lurching clumsiness, bony arms and hands glistening brightly in the sunlight, reaching out to him.

  Jeff decided not to dive through the back door into the store and run the risk of getting entangled with the clutter of goods within. Instead he ran around the back of the low wooden building towards the busier thoroughfare at the front, stumbling out into the dusty open space and tripping over hard-baked wheel ruts that only a few days ago had been mud, churned into grooves and ridges by large steel-rimmed wheels.

  ‘Jesus, help me!’ he screamed as he scrambled to his feet again. ‘There’s a . . . there’s a . . . there’s a skeleton man round the back!’

  The nearest people to Jeffrey were bemused at the sight of the mop-haired, lanky teenager stumbling over his own clumsy feet and bellowing with fear.

  Jeff turned to look back at the side of the wooden fencing around which he’d just sprinted, expecting to see that shuffling bone-white creature emerge.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, it’s . . . it’s . . .’

  Gordon Palmer, a loader who worked out the front, shook his head at Jeff’s delinquent craziness. The boy was prone to goosing around at work - a practical joker rather than a real grafter.

  ‘What’ve you seen, lad?’

  Jeff looked up at him. ‘A skeleton! It just charged out of the woods at me!’

  Gordon straightened up, sensing that maybe this time the boy might not be playing the fool. It could be some goddamned Nez Perce. He’d heard that tribe sometimes wore chalk-white body paint on raiding parties.

  ‘What exactly did you see?’

  Jeff pointed to the wooden wall leading round to the rear of the compound. His finger wobbled uncertainly. ‘Just there . . . I swear I saw someth—’

  And then Gordon saw it for himself.

  The skeleton staggered forward, one bony hand held out and running along the wooden slats of the wall for support, for guidance. Gordon’s first impression was identical to Jeff’s, identical to the two little girls’.

  But then his eyes picked out other details on the shambling form: the tattered scraps of clothing, fluttering like ragged pennants on a washing line, boots tattered and torn and held together by strips of vine or leather.

  ‘What the hell . . . ?’ he muttered, his terror replaced with horror of a different sort.

  Jeff, standing beside him, now began to pick out those same details and realised his error.

  ‘Oh shit. It’s a man.’

  Other heads in the thoroughfare had, by now, turned and witnessed the thing as it took several tentative steps forward, finally stumbling, as Jeff had done, on one of the deep wheel ruts. It fell forward, landing heavily on the hard, ridged ground and then curled up into a pitiful foetal position.

  ‘Somebody get this poor sonofabitch some help!’ Gordon shouted as he rushed forward and knelt down beside the thing. Closer now, he could see this quivering pale creature in rags had once been human but could barely be described as that now. Looking at the gaunt, starved-to-within-an-inch-of-death face, the deeply recessed and shadowed eyes, he saw an emptiness that would haunt him for the rest of his life and flavour the way he would tell this story to his children, and their children.

  Those were the eyes of someone who had glimpsed the Angel of Death himself.

  He leaned closer to the man. ‘We’ll get you some help. Some food and water,’ he whispered, suspecting it was already long past doing the poor wretch any good. Those empty eyes met his and Gordon swore for a moment that he saw the flickering flames of hell in those wide, dilated pupils.

  My God, he may die right here.

  Gordon reached out and gently held one of this poor man’s bony claws. The loose folds of skin on his hands reminded him of the turkey-wattle skin of an old man.

  No man should die without a name.

  ‘Can you tell me your name, sir?’

  The man’s thin, leathery lips parted, revealing impossibly long teeth, gums withdrawn by malnutrition. He struggled to say something - little more than a mucous-clogged rattle.

  ‘Tell me again,’ whispered Gordon, his face just inches away now. He could feel tiny, rapid puffs of fetid air against his cheek.

  The man tried again, panting with effort, managing just the faintest whisper that sounded like rustling wings.

  ‘My name is . . . Ben . . .’

  The Present

  CHAPTER 1

  Thursday

  Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

  Julian Cooke squatted down amidst the knee-high ferns, looking up at the thick canopy of pine needles and the stout straight trunks of the Douglas firs around them, before turning to look at the camera.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m running,’ Rose replied.

  Self-consciously he patted down his coarse dark hair and adjusted the round steel-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose.

  ‘There’s a rich tradition of fire-side tales that come from this part of America, the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada mountain range,’ he started, looking squarely at the lens of the digital camera that Rose was holding. ‘They come in all shapes and sizes out here: ghost stories, stories of alien abductions, sightings of Bigfoot . . . sightings of Elvis.’ Julian arched his thick, dark eyebrows and shrugged.

  A trademark gesture. The shrug, the flickering expression of mild disbelief . . . an understated gesture of gently mocking cynicism.

  He sighed. ‘Some of the people I’ve spoken to here will tell you of a giant Indian spirit, as tall as a house yet invisible, moving through the woods leaving broken trees in its path. Then, of course, you’ll get those who talk of a hooded monk, and others . . . a witch, seen moving in the half-light of dusk. I’ve spoken to several people who confidently assure me that a friend has even captured the hooded figure on camera, something that might just happen tonight . . . if we get lucky.’

  His thick Groucho eyebrows arched again behind the glasses and the hint of a tongue-in-cheek smile played across his lips. He held the expression for a couple of seconds, then relaxed.

  ‘How was that?’ he asked, rubbing his cold hands together.

  Rose Whitely nodded. ‘Yup, it was good. A bit on the cheesy side maybe.’

  ‘Bugger. It felt cheesy doing it. I hate these talk-to-camera pieces.’

  She disconnected the camera and collapsed the tripod with a practised efficiency. ‘Well, we need a set-up piece, Jules. At the moment we’ve got more than enough footage of you interviewing the yokels—’ She shot a glance towards the park ranger sitting patiently on a log nearby and sipping her coffee from a Thermos. ‘I’m sorry, Grace, I didn’t mean it to sound like that.’

  Grace shook her head. ‘No offence taken,’ she replied with a gruff, twenty-a-day voice.

  Rose turned back to Julian. ‘Anyway, it looked good. You looked like David Attenborough crouching there amidst the foliage.’

  Julian smiled. ‘Did I?’ He liked that.

  ‘Well, no, not really.’ Rose looked up at the sky. Through the
canopy of leaves and branches, the languid white sky was beginning to dim. ‘I think we’re losing the last of our daylight for shooting.’

  Julian nodded. ‘Yup, I think we’re done.’

  Grace tipped the dregs of her coffee away, screwed the cap on her Thermos and stood up. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘we’ve got an hour of light. Need to find a decent-size clearing to pitch the tents.’

  She bent down and scooped up her backpack, slung her rifle over one shoulder and pushed through the undergrowth. ‘Let’s move out.’

  Julian watched her for a moment, groaning as he wearily picked up his pack and pulled the straps over his shoulders. Rose brushed past him, carrying about twice the load - camping pack, camera and equipment - and grinned.

  ‘She is something of a character, isn’t she?’

  Rose filmed them using the night-vision filter. Julian sat next to Grace, both of them leaning against a moss-covered hump in the ground, looking out across the large clearing at the tree line around them. It was pitch black, save for the faint light intermittently cast by the moon as heavy clouds scudded across the sky.

  They spoke in hushed voices, barely more than a whisper, as Julian interviewed her. And out there, amidst the trees, her microphone picked up the wonderfully atmospheric creakings, rustlings and nocturnal cries of the wilderness at night.

  ‘You ever seen anything out here, Grace? You know . . . whilst you’re out patrolling the woods?’ whispered Julian, the pupils of his wide eyes entirely dilated as he stared edgily out into the darkness around them. The emerald-green grainy composition of night vision lent the scene an eeriness that Rose knew was going to look good - anticipation of something about to happen.

  Grace shook her head. ‘Nope, can’t say I have. Get to hear a lotta things, though. The woods are as alive in the night as they are in the day . . . mebbe more so,’ she replied, her breath puffed out into the cool night air.