THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  The floor was definitely sticky, and there was the unmistakable crunching of thin ice on a puddle, as if something wet was down there that had partially frozen. Saul’s senses started to alert him to something he could not place, and did not wish to. He fumbled for the wooden latch, finding himself panic slightly when he failed to locate it the first time, then breathing hard with relief when his fingers found the big hinged slat that opened the door. He pulled it up, threw the door open and blinked in the light, narrowing his eyes to peer into the newly illuminated interior.

  It was a full thirty seconds before he screamed. Thirty seconds in which Saul Campbell realized many things. The first thing he realized was that the cold object he had touched on the table was a piece of meat. A large piece of white-skinned, fatty, bloody meat, about seven or eight pounds in weight, his cook’s eye told him, and meat that had pieces of fabric sticking to it.

  The second thing he realized was that the silvery-gray wooden floor of McEwan’s cabin was indeed stained with huge splashed patches of something dark. Something wet and sticky and half-frozen.

  But it was the third thing he realized that made him scream, since the other observations took on new meaning. McEwan’s head, neck and one shoulder lay in a black puddle by the wall, the mouth pulled back into a rictus, a white knob of spine protruding like a handle from the severed neck. The upper half of his torso was half-concealed beneath the bed, and part of a leg showing behind the stove suggested that the other half might be found there.

  Saul’s scream was thin and reedy, and as he fled from the cabin he stopped making the piping shriek only when he gagged and retched, finally vomiting into the snow as his legs gave way and pitched him forward.

  His throat was burning with the acid of the bile and from the gasping breaths of a runner as he flailed up the icy trodden trail to the tunnel.

  Duncan Muir watched the cook’s approach with the others, and when the hysteric arrived and fell at their feet he fought back the moisture that was rising to his eyes in fear. Behind them in the rock, the tunnel entrance yawned like a mouth, and below them their cabins between the trees waited silently in the snow for their return.

  37

  The wipers heaved against the snow, each sweep testing the strength of the motor. Billy watched them scraping back and forth as his mom drove slowly in silence. His straight hair poked a few exploratory tendrils out from his woolen hat, and he toyed with one that hungover his eye.

  Katie was still wrestling with the urge to ask Billy big questions. She had to believe in what she had. Any other way led to an abyss that was too deep, too dark and terrifying to even contemplate peering over its edge. Billy shifted in his seat, and she used the tiny movement as an event to kick-start a normal conversation.

  “OK over there, Billy Boy?”

  Her son nodded, not looking at her. Where was the boy who sang terrible pop songs in the passenger seat, and whose childish chatter about his day couldn’t be silenced at any price? She swallowed and braced herself to be cheerful, but her voice still sounded unnatural and high when she continued.

  “Miss Root showed me your painting.”

  Billy stared straight ahead. She glanced at him as she steered the Toyota down the busy main street toward Mrs. Chaney’s.

  “What was it about, Billy?”

  He tugged harder at the strand of hair and looked away from her, out his window. Where was she taking this? She was asking him things she didn’t want to know about. The abyss beckoned.

  “It didn’t look like a very happy painting.” They stopped on a red light and Katie turned to face him, her hands off the wheel reaching to touch his slumped shoulders and the little unoccupied hand that rested limply on one thigh. “Talk to me, lamb.”

  He looked at his feet but didn’t shake off his mother’s warm hands. “It was a prism. We got taught prisms.”

  “And was the one you painted Dad’s prism?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Just was.”

  She stroked his hand gently. “Is my prism like that? All dark, like you painted?”

  He shook his head.

  “So why is Dad’s like that, then?”

  A car hooted behind them. Damn it, the light was green. Katie withdrew her motherly hands, changed into drive and moved off. “Huh, sweetheart? Why is it like that?”

  Billy’s chest was rising and falling now, as though he were struggling with something. He said nothing for an age, until Katie thought of repeating the question. But he beat her to it and replied in a small broken voice, “ ‘Cause something big and dark’s got inside my dad.”

  When Katie glanced at him in horror, she saw two huge tears rolling down his brown cheeks. She pulled the car over and grabbed her son in a bear hug. He cried then, sobbing uncontrollably as Katie held his hot woolly head with one hand and circled his body with the other, patting and rubbing his back.

  Her own tears were threatening to spill, but she had started down a road from which there was no turning, and she decided she was not going to lose her way.

  “Tell me, lamb. Tell me what the dark thing is. Does it make your daddy hurt you?” There. She’d said them. Those impossible words of revulsion and horror she’d never even imagined could be formed on her lips. Does it make your daddy hurt you? How could Sam Hunt hurt anyone?

  She remembered Sam in the labor suite at the county hospital in Stoke the day Billy was born. How strange and silly he’d looked, standing awkwardly over her as he watched her face contort in pain with each contraction, unable to soothe or offer any comfort other than his presence, and the squeezing of her clawed fingers with his big rough hand.

  And then when Billy came slipping and sliding out, a purple-and-white wrinkled scream of a thing, Sam had been transformed, his restless nervousness replaced by a man made of granite, and he watched silently as Billy was freed from the cord that linked him to his mother and was placed at her breast. Katie was panting through her teeth with relief and joy at the touch and sight of their child, and when she looked up at her silent Sam she saw that the man of granite was crying, fit to flood the room. His cheeks were stained with salty tears and his eyes were already puffy and small. She’d held out a hand to him, and he took it.

  “Do you want to hold him?”

  He’d looked at the nurse, who took Billy and wrapped him in a white rigid sheet that did nothing to absorb the goo he was covered in, and handed him to the big weeping man. He held his son’s tiny body in his arms and looked at him as though Billy were telling him something very important no one else could hear. And then Sam had said in a whisper to the baby, “I’ll keep you so safe. So safe.”

  The man who said that to both his children at their birth was a man who had meant it. To ask the grown version of that baby who had communed so closely with his father on his entrance to the world, Does it make your daddy hurt you? seemed an obscenity. But she had asked it and it was done now.

  Instead of the world crumbling with a rumble and a flash as she expected, there was a curious lightness in her chest and throat, as though the weight that had pressed down on her had been lifted with her dreadful words. Katie held Billy tight, waiting for the answer.

  He trembled with a sob. “It wants to hurt us all.”

  And then he wailed like he was being skewered, and she hugged him hard enough to break and told him not to worry, that nothing was going to hurt any of them. But when she calmed him back to a sob and they continued on to pick up Jess, she wasn’t sure that was true.

  There was a tap at the door. Becker poked his head around.

  “You busy, Craig?”

  Craig was not busy. Craig was fretting, avoiding his next meeting, which was with the warden of some faraway national park about poachers he suspected were coming from Silver. Craig was waiting for Hawk to get picked up and hauled into work so he could ask him something. Meanwhile, what did Edmonton’s finest want?

  “No. Come in.”

  The squat man in his
fifties let his body follow his head into the room, and shut the door behind him. “How’s it going?”

  Craig looked blankly at him. Be nice. Remember. “Good. You?”

  “Nice and slow but sure. The motto of all good policemen. You know it well enough.”

  No, he didn’t. It was the motto of an old guy who had authority, experience and could see a big pension coming up on the inside lane. The motto of a man who did the job and didn’t take risks. Uh-huh.

  “I think we have a suspect, Craig, and I’m thinking of bringing him in.”

  That made McGee sit up. “Take a seat.”

  Becker waved a hand, still standing by the door. “No time. This won’t take long. I just had to run this past you.”

  In other words, What you think is not important. I’m merely required by RCMP etiquette to let you know who I’ll be locking up behind your bars. Craig gnashed his back teeth, and the muscle in his jaw protruded through his cheeks as he did so. “Go on.”

  “I guess we both know, you and I, that this is probably the work of an Indian.”

  “No. I don’t know that.”

  A half-smile from Becker.

  “Sure. We don’t know for certain. But you get my drift.”

  Craig did not reply. That unsettled the man in his office. He dropped the buddy act.

  “Wilber Stonerider. A drunk and a nuisance. You’ve had him in here plenty.”

  Craig groaned. “No way. He’s a harmless old guy. Gets loaded, lays one on whoever’s nearest and gets slammed up till he dries out. How in God’s name did you come up with that one?”

  Ernest Becker looked at Craig with something approaching anger. “We came up with that one, as you put it, by careful police work. You know, we were working our way through all the Kinchuinicks in Silver since your interesting interview with Hunt, and came up with something. The man has no alibi for either murder date, and he seems to know a hell of a lot about Joe Reader’s death.”

  “Like?”

  “The organs. We haven’t released that information to anyone, have we?”

  “You’re telling me Wilber knew about the mutilation in detail?”

  “Not in so many words. But I believe the man is psychotic. The transcript of his interview with Sergeant Lenhoff this afternoon makes pretty interesting reading.”

  “I’m losing you here, Staff Sergeant.”

  Becker changed his mind and sat down. “Look. Stonerider tells Lenhoff that a bird came to him, followed him everywhere, and told him that it would carve him up. That a man’s heart and penis were, and I’m quoting now, the bits that should fuck each other. Seemed to believe this bird was coming to get him.”

  Craig’s eyes widened, mocking, but Becker didn’t catch it. “He said that, did he?”

  “He said that.”

  “And he was specific about Joe’s death, you say.”

  “He didn’t actually mention Sergeant Reader or the murder, but the heart and penis connection are pretty convincing, don’t you think?”

  “Curious, yes. No more.”

  Becker was already regretting this conversation. His face hardened and his voice dropped half an octave as if he were a father giving a wayward son a row. “Well, I happen to think it’s a little more than curious, Staff Sergeant. The man is obviously a fruit, and he sounds like a fruit we should have safely in here.”

  Craig was silent for a time, leaning back in his chair and rubbing the edge of his desk with both hands. “You’re right. We should talk to him some more. But not in custody.”

  “Because?” It was Becker’s turn to mock with a tone.

  “Because those guys out there with cameras and notebooks are just salivating to see who we’re going to pull in. And if you pull in an Indian they’ll go apeshit. Especially if it’s an innocent Indian.”

  “And you, of course, are so sure he’s innocent.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Want to enlighten me, McGee?”

  Oh-ho! No more Craig or Staff Sergeant. Craig rubbed the side of his nose and looked down. He wanted to be nice. Remember? “You think an old drunk like Stonerider could have gotten on to that pass in a blizzard, murdered Joe, then pushed his truck over the Wolf’s Tooth gorge on his own? Then you think he somehow found his way onto the ski hill without anyone seeing him, snuck into a bunch of trees and took out a fit young Californian kid with what looks like a blade the size of a sword, and escaped without leaving any footprints? Jeez, Becker.”

  Becker stared back. He took a conspiratorial line, sounding vaguely excited, as though imparting thrilling information that he shouldn’t give away. “We think he may, just may, have been in cahoots with Hunt.”

  Craig did the unforgivable. He leaned back in his chair and laughed out loud. He laughed like a fairground clown, his sides shaking and his eyes crinkled in mirth. Then he threw his arms out wide and faced Becker with the laugh still on his lips. “Why? What the fuck do you think they’re up to?”

  Becker stood up. He was very calm and very quiet. “I’m sorry for disturbing your busy schedule, Staff Sergeant. It was my duty to tell you we would be arresting a man and bringing him here to your detachment. It is not my duty to discuss the details with you.”

  Craig stopped laughing. He hadn’t done a very good job of being nice. He regretted it, and wondered if it could be fixed.

  The two men sized each other up, contemplating how they could proceed, when the difficulty was wrenched from them. The door burst open.

  It was Constable Bell. Craig knew in his guts what he was going to hear. He stayed very still, waiting and breathing.

  Behind Jeff Bell, through the wide-open door that he didn’t knock on, the office was churning like a tidal wave. He could see one of Becker’s men holding Holly, who was crying. He could see three police officers standing in that inert way you stand when you don’t know what to do next. He could see arms flailing and heads being hit with the palms of hands. And he could see worse things in Bell’s contorting face as it formed the words Craig was praying he wouldn’t hear.

  “It’s Dan. He’s got Dan.”

  38

  Eden had once said that if you doubted we were all part of the same thing, you had to ask yourself why every natural scrap of the earth looks like an old familiar face. Sam hadn’t understood as a boy. He did as a man. A rock patched with lichen, a cloud blowing across a peak, a stem of buckbrush bouncing in the rain; they all possessed a face of sorts.

  Sam pushed himself forward to the lip of the small cornice and let his eyes follow the infinity of pink peaks that stretched away to the north. The eerie clanking of empty chairlifts and the odd shout from a distant homebound skier was all that broke the silence. He had chosen the hard route from the top station, knowing that only Patrol would risk it when the sun went down.

  A face in the crowd.

  Big tough Sam Hunt, afraid to the point of screaming of a face in the crowd, and too scared to let his past through and pick it apart. Was he born a coward? Perhaps. But at least he’d been born a robust coward. His two other siblings had died. One born dead, the other mewling its last breath at only three weeks old. He had survived, and until he met Katie he’d wondered why. Moses had made him wonder daily why he bothered to live.

  Calvin had said Moses hadn’t always been that bad, that he went bad when Eden rejected him. But if he had been OK, Sam didn’t remember it. He’d wished he’d never been born so many times it became a comforting ritual to think it instead of a cry of despair. But then came Katie. Katie, his blond saviour, and beautiful Billy and gorgeous, chubby Jess and all the things he’d never dared dream of having back in that cabin on Redhorn. And now he was being proved right again. That those things were not for him. He could practically hear Moses’ drunken wheeze of a laugh from the grave.

  Heh, heh, thought you could be havin’ what them white boys have, didn’t ya? Well, like your grandpappy says, you be born Indian and you gonna die Indian, and now there be a face in the crowd gonna make you los
e your mind. Heh, heh, heh.

  Born Indian. Was there ever a time when he wasn’t ashamed to be Indian? Yes. There had been times when he had been proud. A sense of belonging, of understanding who you were and being glad that you were part of it all. Eden had almost gotten him to believe that Sam was part of a very special family. A family that, if they only knew it, held a power that was as important to the world as clean air and fresh water, for keeping mankind alive and safe.

  But now where were the Indians that Sam had been proud to belong to for that brief moment? Did the Indians who staggered shouting and fighting from the Craigellachie Hotel bar respect anything, except someone who’d get in another beer? And their repayment for that search for oblivion was short lives and a legacy of misery and despair to their children. Brown-faced Canadians who drank and ranted, who hit their kids, or worse.

  Sam’s head buzzed faintly as he stood looking at those darkening mountains. A face in the crowd. He closed his eyes and leaned on his poles, his head resting on one arm. He had recognized it, just like Eden said. What he had to decide now was whether it had happened, or whether he was projecting some weird fantasy from the past into his conscious mind because he was sick.

  But the face had not been human. What did Eden say? A bear in a flock of geese? Exactly right. There was no mistaking it. Other people had been fooled, all right. Only Sam saw what lay behind that milky white membrane that pretended to be skin, and he felt a twist of nausea in his stomach as he remembered what he’d seen.

  Hate. Swirling dark, naked hate, bubbling in its own blackness like viscous oil disturbed in a vat. But it was not a hate that stemmed from anger or fear or jealousy: it was that familiar thing again, a malice that was happy being malice itself, the way a rock is happy being a rock. It was something that lived to hate and loved to hate. And it had looked at Sam for a long time as though it knew him.