THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  The words came softly from Sam’s lips, and between them the fire roared with new life.

  52

  Alberta 1907

  Siding Twenty-three

  He cradled the big man in his arms like a baby. Hunting Wolf lay quietly, his head resting in the thin crook of Henderson’s elbow, and looked up at the sky. The snowflakes were huge and flat, pirouetting in tight columns where the wind interfered with their descent. Hunting Wolf smiled weakly, remembering the stories his mother had told him about the Snow Spirit shaking its bundle and making the white pebbles in its pouch turn to crystal flakes flying down to cover the land. But he’d flown above the clouds in winter with his guide, seen the clouds below empty their heavy loads and knew there was no Snow Spirit, no pebbles.

  He could almost believe, watching them now, that these were special flakes, falling from only a few feet above his aching head, created specially for this ragged white man and for him, a ragged Kinchuinick. They fell on his brow and melted quickly as he turned his gaze from the sky to the tortured white face of Henderson.

  “He was with you. All the way here. Did you feel him?”

  Henderson shook his head, and Hunting Wolf lifted a weary arm, pointing into the tunnel. The men lay only feet from its yawning mouth, and Henderson did not need to turn to see what his exhausted companion was pointing at.

  “He is back in the mountain now. Waiting.”

  The Scot made a down-turned arc with his thin lips, the action of a man trying not to cry. Hunting Wolf felt the thin body that held him heave and shake as Henderson controlled himself enough to speak.

  “They come, Hunting Wolf. The men.”

  The Indian nodded. “No matter. It will be done soon.”

  Henderson looked down on this handsome brown man wrapped in his black coat. Henderson summoned his resolve and controlled the contortions that betrayed his fear.

  “I go in. Stop this.”

  Hunting Wolf looked at him as he would at a slow child. A faint but not unkind smile moved on his lips. “How, Henderson? How will you stop it?”

  The curse of language. That disease from the Tower of Babel that so cruelly separated these men was often unbearable to the Scot. How he longed to unburden his terrors, his anxieties, his plans and lunatic schemes to this man. But his grasp of Hunting Wolf’s tongue was so meager that he knew he would sound only like a simple fool. How to tell him what had occupied his every waking thought since yesterday? The Catholics believed in it. He had seen them do it once. Of course he scorned their idolatry and detested the sumptuous and excessive theater they called worship.

  But the part of that theater they called exorcism, that had started to occupy his thoughts ever since he had crafted the crucifix for Hunting Wolf’s son. He had held the wooden cross in his hands and felt something like power from it. The power, perhaps, only of his own faith, briefly revisiting him after the desertion that always came with that thing that stalked him. But was it not simply the power of faith that Jesus used to drive out demons?

  And this demon, this cunning, spiteful abomination, surely it could be driven before the same power that had cast out its brother imps.

  Hunting Wolf had called him a white shaman. If it were true, then his medicine was the cross of Jesus Christ. The minister who had left Edinburgh would have blushed at the thought of descending to this peasantlike belief. Exorcism was, he had always believed, another tool of the misguided Church of Rome to subdue its ignorant followers and keep power by encouraging superstition.

  But that was then. A time when he believed the painted demons in the stained-glass windows of his church, writhing and screaming in Hell, were only figments of man’s fevered and guilty imagination. But now?

  Now he would believe anything.

  Henderson gently let Hunting Wolf’s head down onto the snow and wrapped the coat tighter around his shoulders. The chief looked up at him with heavy eyes, pupils dilated. Henderson picked up the mahogany-and-ivory crucifix that lay beside him in the snow, and held it up for Hunting Wolf to see.

  “This stop him.”

  The chief made no movement, merely looked at the cross, then back up at the minister with those drowsy black eyes. Then as Henderson started to get up, Hunting Wolf put out a hand and held the thin man’s wrist with a surprisingly rough grip.

  “He is older than that. Much older.”

  James Henderson tried unsuccessfully to make sense of the Indian’s words for a moment, then unwrapped the strong, freezing fingers from his wrist and stood up. He looked down at the shaman, and Hunting Wolf read the love in the white man’s eyes. He stretched out a hand and pointed at Henderson’s cross, speaking with more tenderness this time.

  “Does it answer your prayers, this charm?”

  Henderson bowed his head slightly. No was the answer. The cross never answered your prayers. The western Christian man floundered in the love of a god that seemed never to hear, and certainly never acted upon man’s wishes. Indeed, to ask for anything material, anything at all, in fact, other than forgiveness from the God of the white man was considered impious.

  What Indian would continue to love or serve a god that was deaf to his pleas? If a Kinchuinick asked for rain he received it. If he asked for fertility it was granted. How did Henderson’s God become so impotent? And more, how did theologians use that very impotence, that silence, to prove that the God was still there? Tears began to form in James Henderson’s eyes. He clutched the cross as though it were the last piece of his faith and raised his head to the questioner.

  “It will answer mine today.”

  He turned and waded through the snow toward the tunnel mouth, leaving his only companion in this madness lying in the snow watching him with eyes that were aching to close.

  53

  When Craig left at dawn, Katie stood by the front window and watched the news crews gather. A man in a parka was first. He took up position across the street by the Ritchies’ front gate at around seven-thirty and unfolded a little seat. By eight he had been joined by at least eleven others, some with video cameras.

  They’d already tried ringing the bell but she’d ignored it, and if they had her number it was a waste of time. Some of them had mobile phones and she’d watched them punching in numbers, wondering if they were calling her. The phone was off the hook.

  She watched them passively from behind the safety of the net curtain with the lights off and decided she couldn’t even find a space in her bursting heart to hate them. In a while she would phone her parents and warn them about what was going to go down here. June Crosby had been on the phone constantly since the first murders hit their TV screen in Vancouver, but Katie had laughed off her mother’s concerns. Time, though, to tell the truth. She thought of what she might say on that call and her heart piled on a few extra weights. But right now, she just watched the vultures gather outside the window. A mother wolf guarding the lair.

  “They looking for Dad?”

  The voice made Katie jump, and she whirled around with her hands over her breast. Billy was standing in the door to the den, his eyes tiny with the remains of his drugged sleep, the Flames T-shirt he’d slept in as crumpled as his face. She studied that tiny oval face, weighing up his condition, wondering if he was able to handle what new horror waited on his own doorstep.

  And as she looked, Katie saw in her son’s eyes something that had never been there before. He was looking at her with the eyes of an adult. Calm, introspective, mature. It was unnerving her.

  “You OK, sweetheart?”

  He nodded once.

  “Come here.” She held out her arms to him, and he walked slowly forward, docking in the bay that was his mother’s embrace. Katie stroked his head, held his face to her stomach and swallowed. “Things are going to get a bit tough, Billy Boy. You’re going to have to be real strong.”

  “Why?”

  “Well… your dad’s done some bad things.” She hesitated. “We think. Those men out there think so, anyhow. Things he migh
t not be that proud of.”

  Billy’s head snapped out of her grasp and he stood back from her, his eyes ablaze. “He hasn’t done nothing bad! Nothing!”

  Katie stared at him in amazement. The boy that had seen his father standing over the mangled body of the dog he loved, a bloody shovel in his hand, was now staring at her with accusing eyes. How had she suddenly become the traitor? It was maybe time to serve her mixed-up son some harsh reality.

  There was plenty of it outside. She spoke as softly as she could, a useless attempt to smooth the edges of the hideous words she formed. “Billy. He killed Bart.”

  Billy opened his mouth and wailed. He staggered back from her and stood against the wall.

  “Billy!”

  He stared at her for an age, his mouth a tiny O, then suddenly, like a grown man controlling grief at a funeral, composed himself again. He spoke as gently as she had. “He didn’t kill Bart, Mom. He was helping him.” Billy turned and walked from the room, and from upstairs a cry announced that Jess was awake.

  Katie stood silently in the room for a moment, contemplating the madness and confusion that was her life. Craig was right. She knew nothing anymore. The doorbell rang and Katie walked out of the room past the front door, climbed the stairs and fetched her daughter.

  The darkness in his house had been profound when Craig opened the front door and stepped into the foyer. Dawn’s light was thin and gray through the falling snow, nowhere near strong enough to pierce the black that the drawn curtains in the foyer created, curtains he had drawn nights ago and forgotten about. But that was his life now. A neglected shelter, not a home.

  He flicked on the small lamp by the door and dropped his keys on the table. Just a shower and then he’d get back to the detachment. He felt empty and sore, as though something sharp had been scooping out the inside of his head. No sleep, that’s what it was. But he’d worked plenty with no sleep. This was different. He moved through the kitchen and opened the refrigerator in the dark. The door opened and lit up his face. A moldy slice of pie glared out at him. Craig sighed and reached for the freezer compartment. It was solid.

  When he comes it is winter, for he is of rock and ice.

  The words Katie had read out in that serious monotone were still clinging to the hollow thing that used to be his brain. He stared at the frosty white skin clinging to the freezer, making it impossible to open.

  The sight of his form is too terrible to bear.

  He rubbed his face with a hand, trying to erase all the craziness, trying only to think of food and the glorious effect washing would have on his tired body.

  The rock can hold him and the ice can make him.

  Craig slammed the refrigerator shut and leaned heavily against it, his arms straight as rods, palms against the door in the dark. The Trickster. What the fuck was all that about?

  Worse. Why was it nagging at his guts? He let his head hang between his shoulders as he leaned against the big, white, humming machine and let himself bathe in a moment of primitive acceptance. What if he were just to believe what seemed to be screaming for his attention for once? There were no leads in this sick case.

  No reason, no motives, no clues. Not even a real suspect, as far as he was concerned.

  Just what if…

  He stared at the floor, eyes unfocused on the long rectangle lit dimly by the light from the hall, and let his mind loose.

  Maybe it was the lack of sleep, in fact, maybe he was just asleep on his feet. But Craig McGee started to let go of that intangible, delicate thing that tethered him to common sense, and in seconds found himself in a cocoon of something else, something more than concentration. He let himself accept the fact of a thing called the Trickster, a thing so bad it was worse than the worst wittago. He sucked in the fact of the Isksaksin. And he thought hard about Sam Hunt’s face, and how despite his Indian name it was not the face of a hunter but that of the hunted.

  Then stuff started to happen to him. He was in a new area of consciousness. He could feel abstract things in an almost physical way with his mind, and a deep liquid feeling, like an egg breaking inside his stomach, engulfed him.

  A picture came into Craig McGee’s mind. It was the picture of a tall woman getting out of a car. Tall and blond, with blue eyes like ice. The journalist, what was her name? Marlene something? The one that had been in the car with Daniel. He wasn’t seeing the rectangle of light on the linoleum floor anymore. He was looking straight at her, into her face. And as he looked he started to see something else, something he didn’t want to see, behind the woman’s face. It was a dark, swirling thing, like clouds of acrid smoke rising from a filthy garbage fire. And it was right under that woman’s skin. Plain and visible, and so easy to see when you looked.

  Craig realized with a lazy kind of horror that he’d seen it then, at the time. But his mind was a closed thing. Closed, perhaps, for sanity, or maybe closed because until now he’d never wanted to open that door. He’d seen something once when he was a boy, too. A vision of something mundane happening to his mother. Something small and insignificant that was going to happen later. And when it did happen just like he’d seen, he’d been frightened and slammed that door shut again. Just like he had when the wind blew Sylvia’s shells away on that beach in Scotland.

  It was a door he kept closed because he didn’t believe. A door that was kept firmly shut by being a policeman, a man who lives and breathes only facts. And now, with that door wide open, he was sweating at what he was seeing behind the paper-thin skin of that woman. No, not that woman. That thing. That fucking thing.

  He was breathing rhythmically, a pulse beating in his forehead, as he looked again into that blackness behind the pretend face. The one that had been so close to Daniel. And then his eyes focused again. The rectangle of light on the floor was being broken by a dark shape. There was someone standing in the doorway.

  He looked up very slowly, eyes narrowing in the dark to focus on the silhouette that was now very still in the frame of the open door. Craig McGee’s breath left his lungs. He found air again and spoke without thinking.

  “Sylvia?”

  The figure didn’t move. Craig took his palms from the refrigerator and let his arms fall down at his sides as he turned to face what could not possibly be in the foyer. The figure stepped forward a pace.

  “Craig? Darling?”

  He was sweating heavily now, the salt stinging his eyes. He tried to swallow and failed. The figure moved again, a step closer, coming into the room.

  “Craig. Where have you been, darling? I wanted you to see the baby.”

  That singsong voice. Always on the edge of laughter. Yes, so beautiful, Sylvia’s voice.

  He was unable to speak, but somewhere the lever that turned on the policeman was being pulled by an invisible hand. His eyes tore themselves away from this back-lit shadow and flicked to the side of the wall by the refrigerator where the light switch was.

  “Darling. What’s wrong with you? Look at the baby, sweetheart. He has your eyes.”

  Slowly Craig shifted a pace to his right and raised his hand to the wall. It met plaster and he ran it back and forth over the smooth surface searching for that square of plastic that would light up this mystery.

  “He’s been so good, darling. Not a sound while you’ve been gone. Look at the sweet thing.”

  The sweat was pouring from him now, his eyes swiveling in his head as he tried to see the switch his hand could not locate. Suddenly flesh met with plastic and he banged the heel of his palm against the white switch with a grunt. Fluorescent lights hummed into life, and when their flickering had done she was still there. Smiling.

  He felt his knees give way, but his legs were too rigid to obey the command to buckle. Instead Craig McGee kept his hand on the light switch, and a small noise like air escaping from a pressure cooker left his lips.

  It was Sylvia. She stood smiling at him the way she always did when he came home tired and grouchy. Her eyes said she knew how tired he was. Her lip
s said she was ready to kiss that tiredness away. But that was all there was of the Sylvia he remembered.

  She was holding something very close to her in a posture that was so unlike her. Closed and hunched, as if she held something she thought was in danger of being stolen.

  “That’s it, sweetheart. Look. Look at our baby we made.”

  Craig’s eyes slipped slowly down to her huddled arms, and as he watched she held them out to him, the smile on her face turning sickly, insane, like that of a TV evangelist asking for money.

  He wanted to scream but he couldn’t.

  With her arms outstretched like this he could see that Sylvia was open from breastbone to hipbone. A gaping black hole replaced the area where he’d known the firm flesh of Sylvia McGee to be. There was her heart, pumping away. A liver, the glimpse of some gray intestine. And then nothing but a spacious, ripped and ragged black-red hole.

  And in her arms, the thing she so desperately wanted him to look at was cradled gently and carefully. Black, shining and viscous. A grotesquely swollen oval sac lay in her arms, black growths extending from the glistening body of the mess like fungus.

  Sylvia’s womb.

  She spoke again and this time it was a voice from the cellar, deep and rasping and so full of malice he felt its heat on his soul.

  “Our baby, darling. Isn’t he beautiful? Don’t you do wonderful things with that policeman’s cock of yours? You do know it was your cock that did this, don’t you?”

  It laughed then, horribly and disgustingly, and because it was doing it through Sylvia’s beautiful face Craig lunged at it to silence that laugh. Doorframe met skull and there was no more fight in Staff Sergeant McGee. The house was quiet again. But then, the house was always quiet these days.

  54

  So familiar, this feeling. It was warm and safe, yet he knew it couldn’t last forever. He would be back in the freezing tunnel soon and this delicious state of elation would merely seem the fancy it was. Calvin was with him, their minds dreaming as one as they had often done back in the sweat lodges. Back then they had traveled together to understand so much, and though Sam could never have imagined it, here they were, twenty years later, doing it again.