by Muriel Gray
He pulled his head up off his arm, as though those pale blue eyes were boring into him again, and took a sharp breath of freezing evening air into his lungs to clear the vision. It was snowing down in the valley now. The yellow lights that had started to twinkle into life in the distance were obliterated now by the thick cloud dumping its white load. Home. He had to get home.
Sam stood upright, gripped his poles and pushed off over the cornice. He dropped onto the icy trail and got his speed up with a path straight down the fall line. The wind ripped at his face as he flew down the mountain, alone on the trail, and the sound of his skis slicing into the snow was all that accompanied him.
He burst through the trees onto the wide part of the trail that snaked beneath the stark pylons of the Serendipity Chair. Sam was surprised to see it still running. It was well after four how and those guys closed it at three forty-five on the dot. What was weirder was that there was a solitary figure in the chair, swinging his way up slowly toward Sam, poles clutched over his lap and swaying one ski lazily beneath him like a pendulum. That made Sam turn his skis side-on to the hill and sweep to a halt in a wave of snow the height of his waist.
Not a patroller. Just a skier. A man, by the look of it. What were they doing down there, letting a member of the public up the hill so late? The tortured, confused portion of Sam released him for a moment, and he slipped back into Silver Ski Company employee mode.
He waited for the figure to reach him, to check the guy hadn’t hopped on the chair without someone knowing he was there. It had happened before. Some girl from Germany last season had sneaked onto the quad from the unmanned halfway point and got stranded thirty-five feet up in the dark when they switched it off from the base, not knowing she was there. She nearly bought it with hypothermia, and would have for sure if the guy driving the night trail-basher hadn’t got out for a leak and just heard her cries over the roar of his engine. Big changes after that. You count them on and you count them off, and no station is left unmanned while the chair is still running. So how come this guy got through when it was nearly dark? He’d find out. The chair was getting close, clanking its solitary passenger over the tops of the trees toward the expanse of flat snow between the pylons.
Sam waited, leaning forward on his boots, taking the opportunity to get his breath back after the effort of the run.
The chair stopped. Now, there is one lucky guy, thought Sam. A few minutes later and he’d be long gone down the Serendipity trail. Sam pulled himself up and moved off down to where the guy was swinging in the air.
Strange, though, that the guy was sitting so still and quiet. He didn’t raise a hand to Sam or look behind him to see what was up. He just sat there waiting, and something about him looked like Sam had seen him before. The suit. That was it. As he drew nearer, even in the half-light, Sam recognized that old black suit with red and navy flashes on it. What a dinosaur from the seventies that was. They’d never heard of Day-Glo or fuchsia and peppermint back then. Every ski suit had been black, navy or red and they were awful. And the one this guy was wearing was just like the one the Reverend Jenkins used to wear. Exactly like it.
Two more turns and he’d be right underneath him. The hat was the same as the Reverend’s too. An orange hill-walker’s woolen affair with a tiny pom-pom that clashed horribly with the suit. And the skis were the same. Beat-up Dynastars. And the gloves. And the blue scarf that was wrapped around the lower half of the man’s face obscuring all but his bespectacled eyes. And the spectacles. All the same.
Sam stopped sharply about twenty yards from where he was going. His heart was racing. Not from the skiing, but from the black things that had started to form in his mind again. It was crazy. The Reverend Jenkins had died eleven years ago. Mouth cancer. This was not him. It was a man dressed like him. But it was not him. Sam panted to control himself.
Go and help the man. Stop this lunacy, and go and help the man. He pushed forward again, although every nerve in his body told him not to, and skied up to a halt on a spot in front of the man’s chair where he could speak to and see him comfortably. The chair hung, swaying gently now, about fifteen feet above Sam. He cleared his throat, and held a gloved hand up to cup his mouth.
“Are you OK, mister?”
No reply. Sam peered up at the figure in the gloom, waiting to see what he would do. He knew the man was looking at him; saw his spectacles glint as his head inclined slightly toward Sam. He tried again. “Do the chair attendants know you got on?”
Nothing.
“Hey, mister! Can you hear me up there?”
“I can hear you, Shammy.”
Sam’s heart stood still. His hand dropped from his mouth to his side, letting the pole that was attached to his wrist bang uselessly against his boot.
The figure in the chair shifted forward slightly, leaning on the safety bar. He raised an arm and pointed a finger at the man below him. “You didn’t hear me when I shcreamed for you, though, did you?”
Sam’s mouth was opening and shutting now, his lower jaw trembling with the unauthorized movement.
“I know why you let me die like a dog without shaying good-bye. Don’t think I didn’t know, Shammy. Did you think that your dirty, filthy fornication with Darshcy had been a shecret?” The figure that could not possibly be the Reverend Jenkins laughed a coughing, slick and wet-sounding guffaw.
“One fuck from a shtinking Indian and she was heartbroken. Nothing to you, Shammy, eh? You didn’t want to know after the deed. But she cried for you every night. You knew that. And that’sh why you shtayed away, washn’t it?”
And he would never have cursed, the Reverend Jenkins. No, no. Not if he caught a finger in a car door, not if a coal fell from the fire onto his slipper, not even if his lascivious daughter had won herself an afternoon of clumsy, pointless sex with someone he thought of as his son. Never.
The figure put a hand up to its face. “Well, you misshed yourshelf, Shammy.” It pulled away the blue scarf. Beneath the spectacles and the bridge of the nose was a void. There were upper teeth and part of a lower jaw, but the flesh was eaten from the cheeks all the way back to both ears. The obscenity grinned at him with its diseased half-face. Bits of the remaining blackened flesh moved around what was left of an ulcerated and rotting tongue. “Yesh, you misshed yourshelf, boy.”
Sam opened his mouth to scream and found nothing there. The horror grinned at him, laughing in its wet throat. The message of panic from his brain that didn’t reach Sam’s mouth in time to scream reached his legs instead, and he threw himself forward with a lunge. The skis did the rest, and in seconds he was accelerating down the fall line with the sound of that wet cackle dying behind him.
“Billy! Pizza, honey!”
Jess was in bed. It had taken a while but the wriggling, laughing little bundle had eventually given up the good fight against sleep and was safely folded into her Care Bears comforter. Katie was ashamed that she was about to feed herself and her son a revolting frozen cheese-and-pepperoni-smeared disc of dough. She cooked nice things for all of them when Sam was home, but she didn’t know when he would be home, because he wasn’t here like he should have been when she got back and he hadn’t called. Tonight it was going to have been beef Stroganoff. She’d bought the ingredients after they’d been to the doctor’s, going to three stores until she found all the right things. But that was before she got sick at the museum. Before she picked Billy up and saw his painting. Before everything. So it was frozen pizza for supper.
Billy waddled through to the kitchen and climbed up onto one of the old pine captain’s chairs at the table. Katie slid the pizza onto a china dish, dipped her finger in a bit of the melted cheese, put it in her mouth and did an impersonation of the Seller’s pizza mom. “Mmmm hmmm. Does that ever taste good!”
A weak smile from the boy at the table. “Yeah. That’s funny.”
She ignored the slight, put the dish down and went to the drawer to get a knife. “You want Coke or milk with that?”
&nb
sp; “Milk.”
“Milk, please.”
“Milk, please.”
There was a scratching and whining at the door. Billy looked up at his mother with huge black, pleading eyes.
“Go on, then. But no feeding him while you eat.”
Billy jumped up and skipped to the door to let Bart in. The husky bounded in, licked Billy like he was a candy and then shook his cargo of snow all over the floor, his master and his mother. Billy laughed. Katie’s heart lost about twenty pounds of weight with that sound, and she bent down and hugged him as he hugged his dog. Billy had seemed a little better since that cry in the car, but she’d watched his face as they came in the door, his eyes roaming the room looking for Sam, and she had nearly wept. He had actually looked frightened. Billy had relaxed when he realized that his father wasn’t home, and she’d thought her heart would break.
Bart panted around excitedly as Billy climbed back into his chair and finally settled for a place beneath the table at Billy’s feet. Katie served a mushy triangle to her son, cut herself a slice and sat down beside him.
The kitchen door was rapped with knuckles, and for the second time that night she jumped. Billy looked at her with surprise. She tried to cover her moment of fright with a big smile, and got up and opened it. Gerry and Ann.
“Guys! Get in here.”
They stamped into the kitchen, spreading as much snow as Bart but a little more politely. Gerry ruffled Billy’s hair as he took off his coat, and Billy smiled up at him.
“Pizza, huh! That looks good.”
Katie took his coat and waited for Ann’s to come off. “Don’t. I’m not proud of it.”
They fussed around taking more stuff off and finally settled around the table.
“Well, this is a treat,” said Katie in that same voice she’d been inflicting on Billy all evening. Ann looked at her like she’d gone mad.
“Jeez. You don’t get many treats.”
Billy laughed again. Good. Very good. And Gerry seemed very interested indeed that Billy laughed, looking at him and nodding with a smile. That told Katie all she needed to know about her friends’ impromptu visit. Agnes Root.
“Sam home?” Ann asked it innocently, but Gerry never took his eyes off Billy. If he was here to witness the basis of Agnes Root’s concern, he wasn’t disappointed. Billy’s face crumpled at the mention of his father’s name and his eyes dropped to the table as he put the pizza to his lips again. Katie shook her head. Ann nodded in response.
“So how’s it hanging in the schoolyard?” Katie said and bit into a piece of pizza and chewed at it.
Gerry took his eyes off her son at last. “Good. Got through another day without losing a limb.”
Ann sat back. “There’s a lot of buzz about this you-know-what. The news crews have been all over town. Kids can’t help but get excited.”
“Yeah. Exciting.” Katie said it through her mouthful of melted cheese, but it couldn’t disguise the disgust in her voice. Her friends looked at her now the way they’d looked at Billy. Katie could see they wanted to talk. “OK, Billy. Since you’re the oldest son in this house, you win the prize of getting to finish your pizza in front of the TV.”
He looked up, surprised but delighted. “Can Bart come too?”
“Sure. Long as he doesn’t use the VCR and tape over Citizen Kane.”
“Neat.”
He needed no more encouragement, and the three adults watched him and the big dog go in a silence that persisted until they heard the canned laughter of some game show float in from the other room. Gerry clasped his hands in front of him on the table.
“What’s happening, Katie?”
Katie looked at Gerry’s big kind face, then across at Ann’s pretty and worried one, and the floodgates opened. She opened her mouth in a wail that she managed to stifle only with both hands. Hot tears streamed down her cheeks as if there were a hose behind each ear, and she gulped and gasped in her sobbing as Ann stepped down behind her and held her shaking body. “Dear God, I don’t know. I just don’t know. My world’s turning upside down.”
She wept uncontrollably, rocked in Ann’s arms for what seemed like an age. And then the grief and self-pity subsided. Katie shuddered, drew in some halting breaths and pulled herself upright and off her friend’s shoulder. “God. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s up with me.”
“Shush, honey. It does you good, a cry. Do you want some water? Anything?”
Katie wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “There’s a malt whiskey in the left-hand cupboard. I broke it open last night.”
Ann laughed. “That’s what I meant. When I said water I meant malt whiskey.”
Katie laughed through her tears. A strange, shuddering laugh.
Ann had three glasses and the bottle on the table at the speed of light and they watched as Katie took a big mouthful of the yellow liquid and swallowed it with a gasp.
“Better?”
Gerry was leaning forward.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Stop saying you’re sorry.”
“Sorry.”
They all laughed gently. Then they stopped laughing. Gerry put a hand out and placed it on Katie’s. “Can you talk about it?”
Katie looked down and shook her head. “I don’t think so, Gerry. Because I don’t know what there is to say, and I think I’m going mad.”
“Well, let me start. Is it Sam?”
Her mouth did that wide thing again, as she pulled back the corners, trying to control the crying that was starting again. “Sure…” She gasped, controlling the sobbing. “It’s Sam.”
Gerry and Ann exchanged looks. Katie took another swig of Dalwhinnie. From the other room a burst of laughter again, this time accompanied by Billy’s unbelieving yell of “Naw! No way!” and a bark from Bart. It reminded them all why they were sitting there.
Gerry looked back at Katie. It really was a very kind face. “Agnes showed me the painting, Katie. Told me she had spoken to you.”
Katie nodded glumly, head bowed like a naughty pupil as he continued.
“I don’t know what to make of it. I know what she thinks and I know it just isn’t true.”
Katie nodded again.
“I know Billy, Katie. He’s an imaginative boy. I’ve lost count of the times he’s astonished me with some weird and wonderful tale he’s concocted. It’s not out of the question that he’s just taken a bad dream too far.” He paused, looked at Ann, then back at Katie. “But what’s more, I’ve known Sam for ten years, and if I ever met a man with a purer prism than him, then I didn’t know it.”
Katie squeezed his hand. “Thank you, Gerry.”
Ann took her hand away from the whiskey glass and put it on top of the pile that was Gerry’s and Katie’s. “Is everything OK with you and Sam?”
Katie sniffed. “The police were here, asking him questions about the murder. He was there at the time.”
Ann raised an eyebrow. “I had no idea.”
“It was routine, you know. But I found out that his real name is…” She was starting to cry again. Two hands patted hers calm. “… I found out he’s really Sam Hunting Wolf. Can you believe that? He didn’t tell me he’d changed it.”
Gerry was casual. “That’s not such a big deal, is it? We all know how Sam feels about being Kinchuinick.”
“It’s just that I’m scared about what else I don’t know, Gerry. And in ten years I’ve never even thought about it. I never cared. Now I’m scared I don’t really know him.”
“Come on, Katie. It’s a bummer being interviewed by the cops. I know. They grilled me two years ago about that drugs thing the Hendon boy got mixed up in. But like you say, it’s routine. It’s just the strain.”
She nodded and smiled, and lifted the glass to her lips. “I’ll drink to that. Positive thinking.”
They lifted their glasses to join her in that happy toast, when the door burst wide open. Sam Hunt stood in the frame, his eyes wild with something that looked
like terror, his face scratched and bloody where he’d run through the trees when he took a tumble and lost a ski.
Ann put a hand to her mouth, Katie scraped back her chair and Gerry leaped to his feet. And when his big, exhausted Indian friend staggered forward with a groan into the room, everyone realized there was to be no toast that night to positive thinking.
39
Calvin Bitterhand’s eyes flickered open and he steadied himself to avoid falling forward onto the hot stones.
He struggled not to weep, finding himself once more earthbound after the flight that had seemed to last forever. But now he must have water. His gap-fingered hand reached out to the bark bowl and lifted it to his lips. The water was as warm as soup, but it ran down his throat and soothed his monstrous thirst. It must have been a long flight, since the stones were no longer hot, as he imagined, but warm. He needed to heat them on the fire outside the lodge again, but right now he had little enough energy to keep him sitting upright.
To fly, unburdened by the body, with neither the snow blizzards above the mountains nor the blazing sun high in the azure-blue sky causing you harm or discomfort, was a heaven that most men would never attain. But the price was this. An old shell of a body, quivering and aching with fatigue, stained with sweat and near, Calvin knew it, to death. He had not flown like that since his prime days as a shaman, and it told him he was nearly pure again.
He had seen that the dark spirits that were struggling to come through would one day have their time, when mankind had darkened it by their actions and would be destroyed by their own folly.
The spirit was here now and rejoicing in it, growing in confidence, enjoying its stay. He had seen it as it moved among men and women in its inexpert disguise, sometimes shifting into a terrified lowly creature for no more reason than it could, to pacify its bottomless ire that it could not do the same to a man. At least not yet.
But it had found its keeper.
Calvin put down the bark bowl and held his head in his hands. Oh, Great Spirit, a keeper who did not know he was the keeper, or at least would not believe the truth in his heart. That was Calvin’s doing. His responsibility to teach and to prepare, and what was the outcome? How could he have foreseen what was to happen?
