Harry didn’t move. He felt Erin’s presence behind him, and it was only when she put her hand on his shoulder that he realized he was trembling.
‘There’s no problem, is there, Mr Dixon?’ said Bryan, and his tone made it clear that there was only one right answer to the question.
‘No, there’s no problem at all,’ said Harry.
He stepped back to admit Bryan. The boy picked up his bag and gun and stepped inside. He greeted Erin with a nod – ‘Mrs Dixon’ – and the food on the table caught his attention.
‘Pot roast,’ he said. ‘Smells good.’
Erin had not taken her eyes off Harry. Now they looked at each other across the Joblin boy, and they knew.
‘I’ll show you to your room, Bryan,’ said Erin, ‘and then you can join us for a bite to eat. There’s plenty to go around.’
Harry watched her lead him down the hall to the spare room. When they were both out of sight, Harry put his face in his hands and leaned back against the wall. He was still standing in that position when Erin returned. She kissed his neck and buried herself in the scent of him.
‘You were right,’ he whispered. ‘They’re turning on us.’
‘What will we do?’
He answered without hesitation.
‘We’ll run.’
21
The wolf was in agony. The injury to his limb was worsening. In his earlier pain and fear, he had traveled far from the place of his pack’s destruction, but now he was having trouble walking even a short distance. Somewhere in the depths of his consciousness, the wolf recognized the fact of his own dying. It manifested as a gradual encroachment of darkness upon light, a persistent dimming at the edges of his vision.
The wolf feared men, dreading the sound and scent of them, remembering still the carnage they had wrought by the banks of the river. But where men gathered, so too was there food. The wolf was reduced to scavenging among trash cans and garbage bags, but in doing so he was eating better than he had in weeks. He had even managed to take a small mongrel dog that had ventured too far into the woods. The wolf could hear the noise of men calling and whistling as he tore the dog’s throat apart, but the prey’s body was light enough to clamp in his jaws and carry away. He took it far from the sounds of pursuit, and consumed it until just fur and bone remained.
But the wolf remained hungry.
Now it was night, and his nose was twitching. He smelled decaying meat. He came to the place where the scent was strongest, and found that the ground was soft and broken.
Ignoring the ache in his wounded leg, he started to dig.
II
TRAPPING
‘We! Lord,’ quoth the gentyle knight,
‘Whether this be the Grene Chapel?
Here myght about midnight
The Devel his matynes telle.’
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
22
Prosperous looked like a lot of Maine towns, except that those towns lay mostly Down East and were kept wealthy by tourists who didn’t balk at spending fifty dollars on decorative lobster buoys. But Prosperous was well off the tourist trail, and its stores and businesses relied on local trade to remain solvent. Driving down Main Street I took in the antique streetlamps and the carefully maintained storefronts and the absence of anything resembling a chain store. Both coffee shops were small and local, and the pharmacy looked old enough to be able to fill out prescriptions for leeches. The Prosperous Tap reminded me of Jacob Wirth’s in Boston, even down to the old clock hanging above the sign, and the general store at the edge of town could have been dropped into the nineteenth century without attracting even a single sidelong glance.
That morning I had done a little reading up on Prosperous in the library of the Maine Historical Society in Portland before making the journey northwest. Prosperous’s home ownership rate was as close to 100 percent as made no difference, and the median value of property inside the town limits was at least 50 percent higher than the state average. So too was median household income, and the number of residents who held a bachelor’s degree or higher. Meanwhile, if Prosperous had any black residents they were keeping themselves well hidden, and it was the same for Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans. In fact, if the census figures were correct, Prosperous had no foreign-born residents at all. Curiously, the number of residents per household was much higher than the state average as welclass="underline" nearly four, while the average was 2.34. It seemed that kids in Prosperous liked to stay home with mom and dad.
There was one other strange fact that I discovered about Prosperous. Although its percentage of military veterans was roughly proportional to its size, none of the townsfolk had ever been fatally wounded while serving their country. Not one. All had returned home safely. This extraordinary feat had been the subject of an article in the Maine Sunday Telegram following the return of Prosperous’s last serving soldier from Vietnam in 1975. The town’s good fortune was ascribed to the ‘power of prayer’ by its pastor, a Reverend Watkyn Warraner. His son, Michael Warraner, was the town’s current pastor. While there were various Catholic, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian houses of worship in the surrounding towns, the only church within the town limits was the tiny, and peculiarly named, Congregation of Adam Before Eve & Eve Before Adam, and it was of this flock that Michael Warraner was apparently shepherd.
Which was where things got really interesting: Prosperous’s church, which was stone built and barely large enough to hold more than twenty people, had been transported to Maine in its entirety from the county of Northumbria in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Each stone of the church was carefully marked and its position in the structure recorded, then all were carried as ballast on the ships that brought the original congregation to Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1703. From there, these pilgrims journeyed north to Maine and, over a period of decades, eventually founded the town of Prosperous and rebuilt their church, which had been placed in storage for the duration.
The reason why they left Northumbria, and took their church building with them, came down to religious persecution. The Congregation, as it became known, was an offshoot of the Family of Love, or the Familists, a religious sect that emerged in sixteenth-century Europe. The Family of Love was secretive, and reputedly hostile to outsiders to the point of homicide, although that may just have been anti-Familist propaganda. Marriage and remarriage was kept within the sect, as was the precise nature of its followers’ beliefs. As far as I could make out, the Familists believed that hell and heaven existed on earth, and there was a time preceding Adam and Eve. In the seventeenth century, the majority of Familists became part of the Quaker movement, with the exception of a small group of Northumbrian members who rejected a formal rapport with the Quakers or anyone else, and continued to worship in their own way, despite efforts by King Charles II to crack down on nonconformist churches in England. All officials in towns were required to be members of the Church of England, all clergy had to use the Book of Common Prayer, and unauthorized religious gatherings of more than five people were forbidden unless all were members of the same family. The Familists were among those persecuted in this way.
But it seemed that the sect proved hard to suppress. The Familists learned to hide themselves by joining established churches while continuing to conduct their own services in secret, and they maintained that charade during the worst years of the crackdown on nonconformism. Also, as intermarriage between families was common, they could easily circumvent the rule about religious gatherings.