When the shaking finally eased, he went into the washroom and washed his face with hot water. The heat helped, but only momentarily. The chill inside him just wouldn’t go away. The whisper—that awful voice—remained as well, but it was quiet now, almost silent.
He ran off contact sheets once the negatives were dry and sat down at Grant’s desk to pore over them. He was ready to call the cops, to hand over what he had, but first he wanted to look at that monstrous face once more, to find out why it seemed familiar. The magnifying glass began to shake in his hand as he realized what he was looking at.
The three black men were there—Pilione and his two big companions—but the monster wasn’t in any of the pictures. There was a blurry one of Pilione, suspended in the air, but nothing was holding him up. Another one—very blurry, this time—showed Pilione’s two big companions rushing … nothing.
The photos he’d taken of the killings showed only the three victims—moving around as though fighting an invisible foe. Their killer wasn’t in a single one of them.
Jim broke into a cold sweat.
It was impossible. He’d seen that monster. It had appeared in a cloud of smoke, killed the three men, then vanished again. It had been real—Jim had no doubts about that whatsoever. But according to his pictures, the thing had never existed. It just wasn’t there.
The camera doesn’t lie, he thought.
He shivered again.
Okay. The camera doesn’t lie. The monster he’d seen tonight didn’t exist, because it didn’t appear in any of the photos. He had to have hallucinated it. Except …
He stared down at the contact sheets.
Then what the hell killed those men?
The whispering grew stronger in his mind as though it knew the answer, as though the name it repeated was a talisman that would explain all if lie could only make it out. But listening to that voice in his head was too much like eavesdropping. He could hear the sound of it, but the sense wasn’t intelligible.
Jim had the uneasy feeling that if he ever did decipher its message, he wouldn’t live long enough to regret it. As it was, it was making him feel crazy. It made him want to strike out at it, at something, at anything.
FOURTEEN
He was trapped again in the cold place, lost in its dark and its silence, his enormous body folded in upon itself in a fetal position as he attempted to conserve what little warmth it still held. But the cold lay within as well as without—there was no escaping it—and the darkness was thick and constant. The silence was absolute.
There were few distractions.
Mostly he lived in his memories, which formed an endless streamof-consciousness parade that wasn’t always pleasing.
He didn’t like remembering his childhood and the basement where his brother took him and made him pull down his pants so that his brother could press his hard sex up into him.
He didn’t like to see the teenager he’d been, already so obese and unwanted, always in the shadows, playing with himself as he peeped in windows, getting beaten up when he got caught.
He didn’t like it when his wife was there, screaming at him because she’d discovered what he was doing with their daughter. Why couldn’t his wife believe him when he told her how much their daughter loved it? They all loved it. All the little children loved it. They all loved him.
The little children.
He liked thinking of them best. He liked the memories where he stood, towering over them, love in his eyes as he smiled at their pale little faces, with eyes squeezed shut and wet with happy tears, little bodies trembling with eagerness as he showed them what he wanted from them, showed them what he liked to have them do—with each other, but mostly, oh, mostly with him. He would rearrange them in his mind—their little faces, their little limbs, their little torsos, their little sexes—just as he used to do before the cold dark claimed him.
He liked doing it better here. It wasn’t so messy. There wasn’t all the blood. Their precious little hearts didn’t stop beating. Instead they lived on and on and on, no matter what he did to them.
But mostly there was only the dark and the cold, and the memory of the harridan-sharp blade of his wife’s anger cutting at him while his daughter, his precious little daughter, stood there staring, so frightened of him—frightened of him, of all people—when he loved her with all his heart and soul.
When she came to mind, he’d call out to her. He’d call and call and call. He could hear his voice escape from the cold dark, carried on the back of a midnight wind, looking, looking, always looking for her, because, of all the little children, he’d loved her the best.
She’d been had, though. She’d told secrets she’d promised to keep, so she had to be punished. But he still loved her—that was why he had to punish her. She had to learn her lessons, she had to learn never to tell, so that they could be together again.
Surely, she could understand that? Surely, she could see that it would only hurt for a little while and then they’d be together again and she’d love him even more because she’d know then how he’d been right, how they were always meant to be together.
But she never answered. Whenever he thought he’d found her, she’d just run away. Or she’d pretend she didn’t know who he was. Like he wasn’t her father. Like he couldn’t recognize his daughter now that she’d grown up. But he knew her by her blonde hair and the clothes she wore. She always looked just the way he’d have dressed her if her mother hadn’t taken her away from him.
It was no good her denying who she was. He always knew. But it made him angry, her denials. So angry. He wouldn’t mean to cut her so deeply that all the blood came spilling out and she hung there empty in his hand, just this dead thing that wasn’t his daughter. He knew she wasn’t, because he could still feel her out there, someplace else, still hiding from him when he dropped the bodies on the pavement and the cold dark place called him back.
He didn’t remember how he’d first escaped. He’d been calling and calling for her, so desperate, so needful. And suddenly the dark and the cold lost its hold on him. It was just for a moment, but the dark cold place was gone, and he was walking down a half-familiar street, breathing air, nostrils filled with smells, ears ringing with sound, eyes sucking in a hundred thousand images … .
Just a moment, and then he was back again.
But he didn’t forget—how could he forget the rush of sensation that had flooded him? He worked harder after that, pushing at the dark, trying to ignore the cold, reaching, reaching, calling out for her.
And sometimes he escaped again.
Sometimes all he managed to do was send his dreams out into the city, where they scurried through its night streets, remembering, searching for what was lost, but never finding it. They touched mostly the weak-minded, or children, leaving slight residues of unreasoning fear in their wake.
But sometimes he escaped again. And it started to get easier, each time he did it. He started to feel stronger. It was good, it was so good, even if it was never for long. With black blood he wrote her name on walls—
NIKI, NIKI, NIKI
—because he’d heard somewhere once that names were magic, and everybody knows blood holds power. Writing her name would bind him to her again, he believed. But she never came.
He’d imagine her tiny lips, down there on his sex, so he’d draw them—red, red, oh red—beside her name so that she’d see them and remember how good it had been for them—good for them both. She’d remember how much he loved her and she’d come back to him. But she never came. He always had to go looking for her.
And when he found her, when he tried to embrace the hot fire of life that pulsed in her breast, everything always seemed to go wrong. She’d try to fight him. She’d deny him. The fire would quicken sweetly with her fear, but suddenly he’d have the knife again, and all too soon there’d be blood everywhere, her blood; the heat would flare and be gone, and he’d sense that she was somewhere else. She was no longer in the body that he’d drop on th
e pavement at his feet, but somewhere else, laughing at him, denying him, hiding, always hiding.
He thought it would be an endless circle: He’d call; she’d come. He’d try to hold her, she’d deny him. He’d have the knife; she’d suddenly be somewhere else, leaving him to hold some dead thing in his bands.
It didn’t matter if he was getting stronger, if it was getting easier to escape, if only for such a short time. She was always out of reach, always hiding. Don’t hide from Daddy, I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you for long. Daddy loves you, remember always, Daddy loves when you hold him so, and touch him so, and put your sweet mouth … so … .
But then he heard the call. It rang like a clarion through the endless silence of the cold dark place, summoning him to her. Except when he got there, it wasn’t his little girl waiting for him, but some witchy black man.
You have been summoned by my power, the witchy man said, like someone had put him in charge.
But all he wanted to know was: Where was his little girl?
I command you.
The knife had done its work, and he was back again, in the cold, in the dark, in the silence. But this time it was different. He could feel that something had been broken. The dark wasn’t so black; the cold didn’t cut all the way to the marrow of his bones. There was a whisper of a midnight wind in the silence.
Soon he’d be able to escape again. Soon the cold dark wouldn’t be able to draw him back again. Soon he’d find his little girl, and they’d live happily ever after again, just like in a fairy tale, because she was his princess and he loved her with all his heart, loved her better than all the other little children he’d ever played with.
Soon … soon … .
But first he had to rest. Because somewhere out there, where the cold dark couldn’t touch it, the sun was rising, the day was coming, coming to steal away his strength, but he needed to be strong, because only a strong man could hold onto what was his, and she was his.
NIKI.
The wind caught her name, and it echoed through the cold reaches around him. He smiled in the dark, hugged himself more tightly.
Daddy’s coming, he said, and the wind took those words away with it as well, through the cold dark and into the day beyond.
Daddy’s coming for you, Niki, coming for you and for the son of a bitch who thought shooting a father would keep him from being with his precious little girl. God help him and anybody who thought they could own a piece of his Niki, anybody who thought they could protect her, because that was his job and he was going to show them just how good he was at his work. He was going to show them all.
NIKI.
The midnight wind took her name and chased it out to where the morning sun was creeping through the city’s streets.
Daddy’s coming for you, sweet thing. He’s missed you so-bad, he’s never going away again. We’re going to have such fun again, you and me, just you and me, playing in the dark like we always did, all those games you like so much, going to put your face right down there where it feels so good … .
He fell asleep, dreaming of his little children, only this time they all had his daughter’s face.
NIKI.
A dozen little girls, all the same, smiling up at him, trembling, happy.
He smiled in that cold dark place, heat rising up from his groin to spread throughout his corpulent body. The silence was broken now by the sound of his rhythmic grunting as his hands went down under the massive fatty slab that was his belly, moving up and down, up and down.
NIKI.
FIFTEEN
The fire was burning low by the time John Morningstar returned from dropping his brother off at his car by the Longhouse. He walked silently out of the bush and into the clearing and sat down cross-legged by the fire, directly across from the shaman. An owl called, deep in the forest. Whiteduck nodded, but whether in response to the hoot of the owl or his own return, John couldn’t tell.
Whiteduck’s features were hidden in shadow, but the dull glow of the coals made his gray braids look like the white clay streaks daubed on a Ghost Dancer’s chest and cheeks. There was always a stillness about him, even when he was moving, but at the moment, John thought that Whiteduck seemed more closely related to the granite outcrops that pushed up through the cedar and pine roots around them, than to any living being.
“Your brother’s spirit is troubled,” Whiteduck said finally.
John nodded in agreement. “He should never have left the reserve. We need him here.”
Whiteduck shrugged. “It is in each man and woman to do what they must do with their life; we can advise, but we cannot command.”
“I know.”
“We must also learn to respect the choices they make.”
By “we,” John knew the shaman was referring to John himself.
“I try,” he said “But when I see all of our resources draining away …”
Whiteduck smiled, his teeth flashing briefly in the dark.
“It is true,” he said, “that our brothers and sisters are our greatest natural resource, Kitchi-noka, but it is also true that the more you try to force them to help you, the quicker you drive them away.”
Kitchi-noka was John’s birth name; it meant Great Bear. It was an auspicious name, for the Kickaha considered bears to be the animals most closely related to human beings. Their totem spirits were renowned not simply for the wisdom they could impart, but for the strength as well.
“My brother told me something strange before he left,” John said after a moment.
“To do with the spirit that haunts him?” Whiteduck asked.
John didn’t show any surprise. It would have surprised him if Whiteduck hadn’t known. So he simply nodded in response to the shaman’s question and went on to relate the conversation that had passed between Thomas and himself in the parking lot by the Longhouse.
“Did he ask you for your help?” Whiteduck asked when John was done.
John shook his head. “I don’t think he truly believes the spirit is real.”
“Perhaps this is something he must face on his own,” Whiteduck said. “Perhaps it will define the man he is to be.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When he confronts this evil spirit,” Whiteduck said, “it will have to be either as a white man or a Kickaha.”
John made no reply, but he poked at the coals with a stick, obviously uncomfortable.
“You believe you should help him,” Whiteduck said.
John nodded. “He doesn’t really know what he’s facing. He doesn’t even believe in it. Going into battle without understanding his enemy … how can he hope to survive?”
Whiteduck said nothing for a time.
“Am I wrong?” John asked.
Whiteduck shrugged. “It is a good thing to understand the ties that bind one to one’s family.”
“But?” John asked, voicing the unspoken conjunction.
“What if I told you that your brother must face this on his own?” Whiteduck said.
“I wouldn’t believe you. You’ve always taught me that the most important thing is to give support to one’s family and tribe.”
Whiteduck nodded. “And if I told you that as chief of our band, it would be far too much a risk to our purposes for you to endanger yourself in such a way? As chief, your first duty is to the band, not to your family.”
“I have to choose?” John asked. “Between the band and my brother?”
Whiteduck nodded again. “The lot of a chief is a difficult trail to follow.”
“You believe that helping my brother puts me at too much risk? That the band could suffer for it?”
Whiteduck nodded. “You are this generation’s hope, Kitchi-noka. The time has come when we must stop speaking, but act. Who else do you know who is as spiritually and physically prepared to lead our people? Who else will the aunts accept without question?”
There was a tightness in John’s chest as he carefully thought things through. Like his brot
her, he had never wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and be the band chief; but unlike Thomas, when Whiteduck first approached him, he had known that if his dreams for the tribe’s sovereignty were to be realized, he would have to do his part. He knew it would require sacrifices. The cost to him was to set his private life aside and live for the band and the cause that would win them a treaty with the white men that could never be broken—not because of the white men’s goodwill or integrity but because the tribe had become so strong that the white men had no choice but to listen to them.
I’m not doing this for me, he told himself. I’m not doing this because I don’t care about Tom. I’m doing this because if I don’t, everything we’ve been working for will mean nothing. Grandfather Whiteduck would have to start all over again and he is already so old … .
“I will do as you advise,” he said. “I won’t put my brother’s life above the good of the band.”
Whiteduck’s teeth flashed in a quick grin. “Spoken like a true chief.”
Then why did he feel like such a shit? John wondered.
“I know how hard a decision that was to make,” Whiteduck said. “You will find, when you become chief and we begin our struggle to regain our land, that you will face such decisions time and time again. They will never come any easier. If they do, then there will be something wrong inside you and you won’t be fit to be our chief.”
John swallowed thickly. “I know,” he said.
“What we do is important for the good of our people as a whole. We cannot let the fate of an individual sway us from our purpose.”
A vision of Tom being rent by some monstrous thing flashed in John’s head. He swallowed again. His throat and chest felt so tight he couldn’t seem to breathe. But he kept a stoic face. He just hoped that when they met again in Epanggishimuk, the Land of the Souls, his brother and their mother would forgive him.
From a Whisper to a Scream Page 14
