The Wrath of Angels

378 Pages·2012·1.59 MB·English

by  Connolly John

Table of Contents
Also by John Connolly
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part II
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part III
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
Part IV
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Part V
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Acknowledgements
Also by John Connolly
The Charlie Parker Stories
Every Dead Thing Dark Hollow
The Killing Kind The White Road The Reflecting Eye (Novella in the Nocturnes
Collection) The Black Angel The Unquiet
The Reapers
The Lovers
The Whisperers The Burning Soul
Other Works
Bad Men
The Book of Lost Things
Short Stories
Nocturnes
The Samuel Johnson Stories (For Young Adults)
The Gates
Hell’s Bells
Non-Fiction (as editor, with Declan Burke)
Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s
Greatest Mystery Novels
About the author
John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968. His debut – EVERY DEAD THING
– swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers, and all his
subsequent novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers. He is the first non-
American writer to win the US Shamus award.
www.johnconnollybooks.com
THE WRATH OF ANGELS
John Connolly
www.hodder.co.uk
For Professor Ian Campbell Ross
I
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead
feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.
Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009)
1
A
t the time of his dying, at the day and the hour of it, Harlan Vetters summoned
his son and his daughter to his bedside. The old man’s long gray hair was
splayed against the pillow on which he lay, glazed by the lamplight, so that it
seemed like the emanations of his departing spirit. His breathing was shallow;
longer and longer were the pauses between each intake and exhalation, and soon
they would cease entirely. The evening gloaming was slowly descending, but the
trees were still visible through the bedroom window, the sentinels of the Great
North Woods, for old Harlan had always said that he lived at the very edge of
the frontier, that his home was the last place before the forest held sway.
It seemed to him now that, as his strength failed him, so too his power to keep
nature at bay was ebbing. There were weeds in his yard, and brambles among his
rose bushes. The grass was patchy and unkempt: it needed one final mow before
the coming of winter, just as the stubble on his own chin rasped uncomfortably
against his fingers, for the girl could not shave him as well as he had once
shaved himself. Fallen leaves lay uncollected like the flakes of dry skin that
peeled from his hands, his lips, and his face, scattering themselves upon his
sheets. He saw decline through his window, and decline in his mirror, but in only
one was there the promise of rebirth.
The girl claimed that she had enough to do without worrying about bushes and
trees, and his boy was still too angry to perform even this simple service for his
dying father, but to Harlan these things were important. There was a battle to be
fought, an ongoing war against nature’s attritional impulse. If everyone thought
as his daughter did then houses would be overrun by root and ivy, and towns
would vanish beneath seas of brown and green. A man had only to open his eyes
in this county to see the ruins of old dwellings suffocated in green, or open his
ears to hear the names of settlements that no longer existed, lost somewhere in
the depths of the forest.
So nature needed to be held back, and the trees had to be kept to their domain.