The man had already hefted his hiking pack and was moving to the door as fast as possible.
“I’ve probably said too much. I don’t want any trouble from your police, understand?”
“No,” John said, “It’s not that at all. Look, I
knew
her.”
The man’s face went pale. He sat on the edge of a pew and looked up at the priest. John collected himself.
“Skyla,” John said. “She went to this parish.”
The man continued to stare at him, glancing uneasily from John to the exit.
“Look,” John said. “Can we talk in my office? I promise, you will have my complete confidentiality.”
After a long time, the man nodded, stood, and followed John.
*
The conversation was filled with unusual revelations as the two men shared their individual experiences in detail. John told the man—James was his name—about the strange case of Skyla and her mother. He told him about the incident at the church service, her mother’s disappearance, about the panic and near witch-hunt that ensued after. James listened with a stoic silence.
“So, you said something about seeing shadows,” James said.
Father Thomas nodded and then corrected himself. “Well, I thought I did. Some of the congregation certainly seemed to act like they saw something.”
James looked at the floor as an aura of calm settled over him. He looked across the desk at the priest. “I thought I was going crazy.”
“Oh there’s plenty of crazy going around these days,” John said with a dry grin. “Did Skyla mention anything about being wanted? Followed?”
The confusion on James’s face was all the answer he needed. Father Thomas cleared his throat. “There’s a man,” John said. “Here, in Bollingbrook. He’s… ‘obsessed’ is the best word that comes to mind—with Skyla and her mother. I believe he burned their house. For all I know he killed Skyla’s mother.”
The two men exchanged glances, the look of urgency unmistakable in the hermit’s face.
“I’d like to see the body,” the priest said. “It needs a proper burial and an autopsy if we’re to know who it is, especially if it is as decomposed as you say. I can find a doctor—”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Father.”
“Why not?”
“Look at me. I’m an interloper in a town that has fliers of missing children strewn about. I come in here saying I ‘found’ a missing girl’s mutilated body.”
“Then tell me where it is then. I’ll provide a proper burial.”
“What if it is Skyla?” James asked.
“Well, then I guess the Reverend will have one less thing on his mind,” John said. “But if it isn’t Skyla… well, that’s an even bigger problem, isn’t it?”
The two men sat in silence for a time, each lost in their own thoughts. Outside Father John Thomas’s window, Bollingbrook’s war industry was grinding back to life. Dust and smoke, stirred up by training soldiers and rolling machinery had already begun to rise from beyond a distant spoke-wall, turning the sun orange. He imagined it would be the same scenario as the last raid, a way to protect the trade routes, a police maneuver to make the old general Perlandine still feel relevant. The Church would get to round up a new batch of heretics and The Reverend Lyle Summers would get his quarry: an eleven-year-old girl.
In a year, the vagrants would set up camp again. Occupation was costly, but you would hear no complaints from the industries in Bollingbrook.
A distant locomotive drew a long black trail of smoke across the horizon, delivering another hundred mechanics, soldiers, and potential customers. They would flow out and into the streets of Bollingbrook, collect a stipend up front (compliments of Lyle Summers) then proceed to spend that money right back into the city.
It’s all good for Bollingbrook, right?
he tried to tell himself.
“The city looks like it is preparing for a war,” said James.
John relaxed at the change of topic. He looked out the window. “They think they’re going to raid Lassimir.”
James’s eyes sparkled humorlessly. “That old story again, eh?”
The priest shrugged. “They have a lot of funding. General Perlandine seems to think they can do it. The Reverend Inspector seems to be funding it with deep pockets, so who knows?”
“That preacher,” James said. “You really think he’s after Skyla?”
“I spoke with him.” John let out a slow breath. “And yeah, he is very much after her.”
“Do you think he’d…” The man’s voice trailed off.
“Honestly,” John said. “I’m not sure what he
wouldn’t
do.”
There was another thoughtful silence in the room, long enough that John watched the crucifix’s shadow melt down the wall. James stood up.
“I’ll take you to see the body, alone,” James said. “And if you need to go further on to find the girl before this Reverend Inspector does, I can get you through The Wilds. Either way, I just need to know that she’s alive for the sake of my own sanity.”
John immediately began digging through his desk.
“Julian!”
The page appeared as if he were a summoned ghost at the door. John looked up at him. “Julian,” John said, smiling, holding out a pen and paper. “How good is your handwriting?”
*
They were halfway to the gravesite by the time the police received the anonymous letter Julian wrote. Both men traveled largely lost in their own thoughts. Every so often, the priest would look over his shoulder through the fog-faded trees and see the orange-pink wall of Bollingbrook become smaller and smaller until it was no more than a curious sliver on the horizon.
They kept mostly to the cliff edge, skirting The Wilds at a safe distance. More than once, John felt eyes watching him from the shadows. The grave rose out of the ground between two trees, the only man-made thing for miles. Already moss had begun to overrun the stones that had only been there for a day. The wilds wasted no time reclaiming what was theirs.
“What’s that smell?” said John, crinkling his nose.
James paused for only a moment. “Coyote urine.”
The priest recoiled, appalled. “What? Why?”
James looked at him as if it were obvious. “Scavengers.”
He grabbed a stone as the priest stood with his mouth agape watching him. The man’s muscled shoulders tensed and released with a slow rhythm as he removed each stone with a mason’s skill. Finally the thin layer of dirt was removed and both men recoiled at the smell. John turned away at first.
He crossed himself as James used a leafy branch to sweep the excess dirt from the girl’s face—or what there was to be seen of it. It looked at John from beneath a veil of mousy brown hair. Empty sockets gazed at nothing as a lipless grin greeted him. There was a hint of something green and yellow on one side of the torso. John’s stomach did a somersault and he turned away, heaving.
James continued the excavation while the priest collected himself. After wiping his mouth, John looked back at the body, trying to be objective.
“She was tortured,” he said. “There. Where the nails have been removed, that’s probably prior to death. The… hole in the side. Hot iron perhaps.”
He knew what he was seeing as he spoke, but his mind refused to accept it. It was like an instruction manual from the Inquisitions.
“They left her uniform on,” he noted. “Maybe they were in a hurry.”
“Or maybe Bollingbrook has a murderer in its midst,” James added.
“Maybe,” John said. “See the cut marks here? And here? They consecrated the body with scarring and then cauterized it… the throat has been slit…”
“Is it Skyla?” James asked, his face grim.
The priest shook his head. “No. I don’t think it is.”
He pulled a sleeve up revealing another scar on the upper arm. The reddened flesh rose from the surrounding skin in the shape of a cross. James saw it too.
The priest sat back against a tree running his hands through his hair. He looked at James, who was only staring at the corpse. Somewhere deep in the forest behind him a branch snapped. Both men startled, their heads spinning in unison at the direction of the sound. They waited for approaching men bearing guns to take them away. None appeared.
Almost immediately James began to pull the girl by her feet with a crazed urgency. The priest stood, his mouth open.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” James said, not meeting his gaze. “I’m putting the body back where I found it.”
“You can’t,” John said. He heard his own voice as if from a distance, it was almost an octave too high. “You can’t just discard it!”
“Watch me,” the man said as he pulled the girl from the shallow hole by her feet.
John rushed up to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “James don’t, please,” he said. “We have to give her a proper burial. I have to consecrate the ground. This is sacrilegious.” His hand was trembling.
James paused for a moment and looked at the priest’s hand on his shoulder as if it were a bug that had landed there. His eyes traced slowly up the arm until he was looking at John.
“Father.” He spoke slowly. “You do realize that a group of men will arrive within hours. They will be carrying guns and they will see us standing over the body of a girl who has been missing for weeks. They will not ask me questions. They will either arrest me or—if the father is present—he may shoot me on the spot.”
“But it’s—”
“It’s what?” James asked. “It’s for her soul? Do you think she cares if the body decomposes in a hole or in a pond? Do you think that while the iron burned into her insides, she was hoping they would find a nice plot of land for her final resting place? Something under a tree with a flower arrangement, perhaps? Or maybe she asked them sweetly, as they pulled her nails from her fingers, if they could please put in a nice word with Jesus.” He gave the body another tug. “The dead are dead, Father. Meanwhile the two of us, who are alive, are going to be lynched for this.”
“I’ll vouch for you,” John said, his voice desperate. “They’ll listen to me. I’ll corroborate your story. James, you did nothing wrong. Why do you think they will blame you?”
“Because I’ve seen what grief does to people,” James said. “And I don’t intend to stick around to give them the benefit of the doubt. You can dredge the body back out if you want and say whatever prayers you think are appropriate. I’m going to find Skyla.”
James continued to strain as the stiff corpse slid from the earth. He pulled her to the edge of the cliff.
“James,” cried the priest. “Don’t do this. Let me at least give a prayer first.”
He stumbled to where James was standing over the body. With a shaking hand, Father Thomas pulled the tiny cross from around his neck and held it, closing his eyes. The prayer was an abbreviated version, but he worried that James might simply discard the body at any moment. He said “Amen.”
James flipped the girl over like a mannequin and slid her out to the slope. Gravity took over and the body slid neatly down the slick rocks and rested in the water. It was as if she had never been moved.
James walked back to the gravesite. He picked up each rock and tossed it back into the woods, some into the creek, where they made a loud splash.
John watched all this with horrified fascination. In a matter of minutes, his companion had returned the dirt to the grave and covered it with leaves and weeds until it no longer resembled a grave at all. In fact, John would never have known that one had been dug. James took out a canteen and washed his hands in the water, then took a drink. He offered it to the priest, who only stared at it.