Destroying Angel Read online

  I followed her gaze. “What is it? What do you see?” When she didn’t answer, I pressed. “You haven’t been going inside again, have you?”

  “What? Oh, no. Of course not.”

  But I think she is. I think Annabelle Kimball has been talking to the angel again.

  Back in July, our sixth day in the valley, I think, Annabelle got lost in Witch’s Warts. It was maybe an hour after lunch when Sister Nannie came running, crying something in a Swedish accent so thick I couldn’t understand a word. I grabbed her and told her to slow down.

  “You must come. Is Sister Annabelle. A man take her, yes! You hurry.”

  By that time we’d built a primitive stockade 120 feet on a side and had taken apart all but one of the wagons, combining them with wood hauled from the cliffs to build the first of four cabins we planned to construct over the summer. We’d completed the first dugout, where I’d ordered the supplies moved, and it took me a few minutes to find my gun and fetch Maude and Laura from the creek, where they were washing clothing.

  “Who is he?” I asked Nannie as the three of us followed her from camp, trotting along with our skirts gathered up and without bonnets to protect us from the sun. “The Lamanite?”

  “No Lamanite, no. Not he.”

  My pulse quickened. “A white man?”

  “No white man, no.”

  “Slow down, wait!” I looked back to see Maude and Laura struggling to keep up.

  When we reached the sandstone fins, I grabbed Nannie and spun her around. She blubbered something in Swedish.

  “Calm down.”

  “This is where it is! This is where it happens!”

  She said something else in Swedish. I slapped her. Nannie grabbed her cheek, eyes wide. She stopped talking.

  “I don’t have time for this, so listen up. Either you answer my questions or I’ll send you in there alone. Do you understand?”

  Nannie nodded. Her lower lip trembled.

  “Good,” I said. I spoke more gently. “Now tell me what you were doing in there.”

  “I follow her. I hear her talk to someone. I follow her in, and then I see him take her.”

  “What do you mean? Where did he bring her?”

  “He not bring her, he take her.”

  Laura let out her breath, and Maude gasped. They’d caught up, and Maude was wheezing with the effort. She grabbed Nannie’s wrist and said, “You mean a man is making an attempt on her virtue?” When Nannie nodded, Maude turned to me and said, “Shoot him! Find him and put a bullet in his—”

  A scream from inside the maze cut her short. The four of us started. I gripped my gun, my heart pounding. I’d forgotten to check to make sure a shell was loaded into the chamber. I did that now.

  When I’d satisfied myself that I was armed, I found Annabelle’s footprints in the sand, and then Nannie’s smaller set of prints, going and then returning with a longer stride, as if she’d been running. No boot prints from a man. He must have been waiting inside, then. But why? And how had he known Annabelle would wander in? Not many people dared to go inside alone. Already a young boy had followed a lizard into the labyrinth and been lost for two hours.

  We tracked Annabelle into the labyrinth and then stopped in a sandy clearing where the footprints disappeared. I looked around, confused, but then heard Annabelle cry again. The sound came from a giant hump of stone that rose from the ground like the back of a giant beast. We scrambled up the stone, a little like lizards ourselves, but when we got to the top Annabelle was still nowhere in sight. The cries came from beyond the top of the hump. Holes pitted the surface, eroded by water, their bottoms dry and sandy. The crying came from a deeper, narrower pit on the far side.

  We found Sister Annabelle in the pit. She was not alone.

  Jacob let the diary fall on his lap. A hump of sandstone. Sinkholes pockmarked its surface. A deeper, narrower sinkhole. It sounded like Taylor Junior’s secret hideout. In fact, it had to be the same place.

  An evil spirit. It had trapped Sister Annabelle inside and now, generations later, led Taylor Junior to the same spot, where he hid from law enforcement and the vengeance-seeking saints of Blister Creek, who would have killed him on the spot. The spirit had helped Taylor Junior, had—

  No, Jacob decided. He could explain the correlation. Sister Annabelle had stumbled into a sinkhole while exploring Witch’s Warts. More than a century later, Taylor Kimball Junior had found the same sinkhole. But it wasn’t a coincidence. Taylor Junior had spent weeks scouting out the labyrinth, looking for just such a hiding place.

  Even among the thousands of sandstone fins, ridges, and columns, there would be few places as perfect as that one, hidden where people would never walk. Deep and narrow enough to hide Taylor Junior from anyone searching by air. Far enough into the maze that he could creep out on rare occasions without being spotted. He’d stashed water jugs and cans of food, a rathole to hide in if something went wrong with the attack on Blister Creek. In fact, for all Jacob knew, the hiding spot might have been scouted and stocked by Taylor Junior and his brother Gideon years earlier, when the Lost Boys infiltrated the temple via Witch’s Warts.

  Besides, with the debilitating filth at the bottom of the pit, it was obvious Taylor Junior hadn’t enjoyed supernatural assistance.

  Satisfied with the rational explanation, Jacob opened the diary again and found his place. The letters, which had marched across the page with the precision of finely set type, now grew sloppy, the words too close together, the margins improperly aligned. The fearful hand of a woman relating a terrifying memory.

  He read on.

  I looked into the pit, and what I saw filled me with a dread that seized my vitals in its grasp. All the strength went out of me and I nearly swooned, as if I had been fasting and stood too rapidly. Even now a dark aura settles on my shoulders as I think about these events, and I can scarcely record what I saw.

  Sister Annabelle lay on her back at the bottom of the sinkhole, more than a dozen feet below us. Her dress was up and…

  Forgive me. It is a perversion even to put these words to paper. But whoever you are—my future judge and executioner, I would suppose—you must know what I saw. It explains so much of what happened later. Why it became necessary to kill a man while he slept. And so my pen records these events in all of their ugly details.

  Sister Annabelle lay on her back with her dress around her face. Her legs were spread and her undergarments were around her ankles. A shadow lay over her. It was a man, but it was dark at the bottom of the pit and he seemed wrapped in a black cloak. I saw him as one sees a figure through a windowpane at night, when the light is greater inside than out. He was thrusting at her, not like a man but like an animal, like a dog worrying at a bitch. Annabelle moaned and tried to push the figure away.

  Maude screamed. She stumbled and would have fallen into the hole, but I dropped the gun and grabbed her with both hands. We fell backward from the pit, and somehow Laura and Nannie ended up falling too, all four of us tangled in a heap. I fought free of the other women and struggled to my feet. I grabbed for the gun and rushed back to the edge of the pit. I had to put a bullet in that man’s head. It was close range, but I didn’t care. Annabelle would have told me to shoot to save her virtue.

  I lifted the gun to fire. One shot. It had to be on the mark.

  But then I blinked in surprise. There was no man with her. How had I thought otherwise?

  What I thought was a figure now appeared clearly as a dark wool blanket. The desert air is so thin that mornings are chill, even in the middle of summer, and I remembered seeing Annabelle at breakfast that morning with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She must have taken it when she walked into Witch’s Warts in search of privacy—to pray, or maybe to clear her head. And then she’d suffered a fit.

  And now the blasted thing tangled around her neck. Annabelle couldn’t get it off, seemed to be strangling herself.

  “There’s no one there,” I called down to her. “Annabelle
, do you hear me? It’s only a blanket. Wake up—what’s the matter with you? Annabelle!”

  She arched her back and moaned. Her fingernails gouged at the sandstone walls, and her eyes rolled back in their sockets to show the whites.

  Laura grabbed my arm. “Do something!”

  In desperation, I raised my hand to the square, like a man might do when calling upon his priesthood, and spoke in my loudest, firmest voice. “Annabelle Pratt Kimball! In the name of Jesus Christ, I rebuke the demon that has taken possession of thy soul. Get thee hence, Satan, and trouble this woman no longer!”

  Annabelle fell still. For a long moment she did nothing but take great, heaving breaths. They turned to shudders and then to sobs. She pulled down her dress and covered her face, weeping.

  “For heaven’s sake, don’t just lie there. Get up!” I told her.

  She rose to her feet and reached up for us. I dropped to my belly and stretched down for her, but I couldn’t reach her fingers. And so I had her tie the blanket under her armpits and then toss me the other end. Together, Maude, Laura, Nannie, and I heaved and strained until we had her high enough to get her arms over the edge. And then we dragged her up and out. We embraced her while she cried.

  “You’re safe now,” I said. “We’re here.”

  “I fell,” she said through her tears. “I wasn’t looking and I fell. That’s all, I fell.”

  I stared at her. “But what, in the name of all that is holy, were you doing up here in the first place?”

  “I don’t know.” She turned to me with a haunted expression. “I don’t remember.”

  We retraced our steps out of Witch’s Warts, and when we got back to camp, we didn’t tell the other women what had happened. Annabelle retreated to her tent. When she came out an hour later, she set to work digging the canal and continued until dinner without speaking to another soul.

  That night I didn’t wake up Sister Gretta when it was her turn for watch. I didn’t want to go to sleep. Instead I stared all night at the embers of the fire. I kept seeing a dark shape thrusting obscenely. And Annabelle’s struggles—her writhing, her moaning in fear and pain.

  No, that wasn’t quite right. She had struggled, yes, but now that I thought about it, her cries sounded like a woman in the throes of passion, fighting to control her pleasure so that her husband does not think her licentious.

  I slept better the next evening. Perhaps it was exhaustion, or perchance time had dulled my memory and allowed my levelheaded nature to exert itself. I no longer believed I had seen an evil spirit. The shadow was an illusion. I had spent so much time with these women, alone in the wilderness, fueled by talk about the end of days. My feverish imagination supplied the spark.

  As for Sister Annabelle, she was given to manifestations of the spirit. In Salt Lake, her natural impulse made her talk in tongues and see visions. With a priesthood leader to calm her, this was harmless enough.

  But here, in the harsh desert sun, with no men and no priesthood, in a wilderness that stretched for fifty miles in every direction, desolate and abandoned, Annabelle’s visions induced some sort of madness.

  Again Jacob stopped reading. This time he breathed a sigh of relief. Grandma Cowley wasn’t unreliable after all. She recognized the spiritual hysteria. It was the same hysteria that infected the population of Blister Creek to this day.

  Even Jacob, trained in medical school, trained to think critically, wasn’t immune. Like his first glance at Daniel the other night. What he’d taken for a man on top of his son had been nothing more than blankets wrapped around the boy while he struggled with terrors in his sleep.

  He was about to resume reading, when a cry caught his ear from somewhere in the sleeping house. This time he recognized the sound and location at once. He slipped from the room and into the darkened hallway. The floor creaked underfoot, and what might have been a comforting, familiar sound in the daytime became sinister, like a warning to someone or something that he was coming. His heart pounded.

  I will not see an angel. Whatever it is, there is no man and no supernatural being. It’s my son, suffering a night terror.

  He came up the attic stairs in the darkness and flinched when his hand closed around the cool brass doorknob. His stomach lurched. He reached inside the room and groped for the switch, and the light came on. There was no one there but the two boys. Nephi slept soundly, head tucked into his blankets, a peaceful expression on his face, even as his older brother suffered in the next bed.

  Daniel moaned and shook his head. His blankets lay on the floor this time, and he’d opened the buttons on his pajama top. His bare chest heaved, and his eyes stared at something beyond the walls of the room.

  Jacob hurried to his side. “Shh. It’s nothing. There’s no one here. It’s only a dream.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Eliza was the last to arrive at Krantz’s place. Jacob and Miriam stood on one side of the trailer, speaking in low, earnest tones, while Krantz carried a video camera in from his car. He smiled when he spotted her and came over.

  “You haven’t planted the roses,” she said.

  He glanced at the two pots, still sitting outside his front door where he’d put them last summer, and it was clear from his expression that he hadn’t given them much thought. “They’re still alive,” he pointed out.

  “That one sent roots right through the bottom of the pot.” Eliza was more amused than accusatory. “Need a hand?”

  “No, no, I’ll get to it. Look, there are buds. It’s doing all right.”

  “You need to get those plants out. They’re root-bound, you can tell.”

  “I don’t have much of a green thumb. I’d rather swing a hammer.” Eliza glanced at his home with a raised eyebrow, and he added, “When I have time, I mean.”

  Truth was, the trailer had the same faded appearance it had presented when it housed laborers from out of town five years earlier. He’d repaired the roof, at least, and built stairs to the front door to replace the pile of cinder block that had once stood there. A seasonal wash—currently dry—cut through the backyard, and up to its edge he had planted a little grass that grew in tough, wiry clumps. Krantz went back to the car for electric cords and carried them up into the trailer.

  Miriam and Jacob came around from the other side. “No,” Miriam was saying, “nothing like that. He’s fine.”

  “Kid had a tough go of it,” Jacob said. “First Caleb’s cult, then child protective services. You’re sure there’s nothing?”

  “You’d think, but no, he’s doing fantastic. He’s even stopped hoarding food.”

  “Who are you guys talking about, Diego?” Eliza asked.

  “Yes,” Miriam said. “He’s a great kid. No problems, nothing.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Eliza said. “After everything he’s gone through.”

  “You had nightmares as a kid, right?” Jacob asked her.

  “Sure, doesn’t everyone?”

  “What about?”

  “The usual stuff, I guess—a monster or ghost chasing me through town. I could fly—kind of. It was slow, like swimming.”

  “Anything about the devil or an evil spirit?”

  “No, not that I remember.”

  “And was it worse in Blister Creek? Or did you have the same dreams when we were living in Alberta?”

  “I can’t remember.” She thought about it briefly. “About the same, I think. What’s this about? Are your kids having bad dreams?”

  “Just Daniel,” he said. “Night terrors. He doesn’t wake up, not entirely, but he talks. Last night he said there was a man in the room. Of course there was no one.”

  “What does Fernie say?” Miriam asked.

  “I didn’t tell her. Not this time. She slept through it.”

  “Jacob,” Eliza said.

  “I know, I know, but I can’t. You’ve seen how she interprets her own dreams—don’t you think she’ll put an awful spin on this? Besides, I’m worried it has something to do with the accident.
Daniel was in the car—he seemed to be in shock for several days, and now his mother can’t walk. It might be post-traumatic stress disorder. That can manifest itself in night terrors, bed-wetting, that sort of thing.” He sighed. “Of course, Diego is fine and he’s gone through hell.”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” Miriam said. “It’s not like we’ve done anything special with Diego. He’s a resilient boy. Most kids are. I’m sure Daniel will be fine.”

  Krantz came down from the trailer. “I’m set up, whenever you guys are ready.”

  He had hooked up the video camera to the television so he could show them footage from one of the cameras Eliza and Miriam had installed under the eaves of the temple. The picture was black-and-white, low resolution. For a minute there was nothing. Then a bearded man in a hooded sweatshirt came out of Witch’s Warts and into view beneath the lights placed around the temple, walking directly in front of the camera. The duffel bag slung over one shoulder seemed to weigh him down.

  “That’s the first one.” Krantz fast-forwarded through about an hour of footage, and then the visitor reappeared. “And here’s the second, going back into the maze this time.”

  This time the man looked up and seemed to see the camera where it hung from the side of the temple. He turned away and picked up his pace.

  Eliza caught her breath. It was Taylor Junior. He was thinner than when she’d seen him last summer, standing outside the chapel after the attack, just before he’d disappeared into the labyrinth. His cheekbones stood out, and his eyes—even in the grainy footage—held a haunted look.

  “When was this?” Jacob asked.

  “About two weeks ago,” Krantz said. “I scanned this footage once already and somehow missed it, but then I ran out of memory and was set to record over this batch, and I thought I should take one more look.”