October Skies

Table of Contents

 

 

 

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

 
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.

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.

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.