THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  And there it was, between the trees. No more than a dark man-sized mound on the light snow that had dusted the areas under the lodgepole pines.

  Sam walked forward and stepped from the white track into the gloom of the trees. Calvin’s face was twisted and grotesque, frozen in a contortion of agony, and the bloody penis that hung from his dead lips was almost comical, like a joke cigar. Sam turned away, the blood draining from his head, threatening to make him swoon.

  He had slept.

  Sam had slept by the fire and now Calvin was dead.

  He knelt down by the mutilated corpse and touched the old shaman’s face lightly.

  “Fly in the sunlight, Soaring Eagle. The Grandfathers await you.”

  Sam unfurled Calvin’s good hand, clenched in a claw of pain, and placed the medicine bundle there. He bent and kissed the tortured face of his shaman tutor, then stood and walked toward the tunnel to make his preparations. It would take many hours. He must begin.

  As Sam entered the dark arch, the snow outside stopped for a moment as a high wind blew a small parting in the clouds. For half a minute the moon shone onto the snow-covered landscape, bathing it in blue light like the ghost of daylight. Then the clouds reunited and the flakes began to spill again.

  In among them, unseen by any living thing, riding the air with the same delicate grace as its white companions, a small eagle feather fell to earth like a tear.

  61

  “Margaret?”

  The voice on the end of the line confirmed it was indeed Margaret.

  “I need your help. I know you’ve just opened up, but can I bring Jess into the museum for a few hours, ask you to look after her?”

  Katie was twisting the cord of the phone around her wrist in an unconscious physical imitation of the twisting stress that was winding around her guts. She nodded at whatever the voice was saying, and then replied, “Yeah. There is something wrong. Billy’s gone.”

  She pulled the door closed behind her with a foot hooked around the edge. Both arms were occupied with holding Jess and everything Jess would need. The hounds were on her before she got to the bottom step.

  “Mrs. Hunt. How do you feel about the police looking for your husband…”

  “Mrs. Hunt… over here, please…”

  The whir of cameras.

  “Mrs. Hunt. Has your husband been in touch at all…”

  The two cops who’d watched with their big arms folded over their big chests stepped forward at last. “OK, guys, let the lady through. You can’t obstruct the highway.”

  She hurried to the car, fumbling for her keys. One cop strolled behind and stood beside her. “We have to know where you’re going, Mrs. Hunt.”

  She looked at him with distaste, Jess copying her mother but stretching a chubby fist out to the man as though she held something in her fingers he might want.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Well… no, but…”

  “Then if you want to know where I’m going, earn your pay. Follow me.”

  Mercifully, she located the car keys, opened the creaky old door of the Toyota and bundled Jess in. As Katie drove off, the blue car that sat outside all night stayed where it was, and a patrol car waiting around the block did as she suggested, earning their pay.

  “Oooh. My poppet! Come here and let your Auntie Margaret eat you up!”

  Jess did that oscillation in the air with her arms and legs that meant she was pretty pleased about a whole lot of stuff. Margaret took her in her arms and looked at Katie.

  “You told the police?”

  Katie shook her head.

  “Why?”

  “I want to find him myself. I don’t need any more press guys chasing my tail, looking for headlines.”

  Jess wriggled and moaned.

  “Come on, then, poppet. Let’s go look at the train. Huh? You like that?”

  Margaret looked at the mother of her burden. “She loves that train. Will we take her upstairs?”

  “Sure.”

  The women and the baby climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the balcony, Katie lost in her white-hot thoughts, searching through endless mental files to imagine where her son might have run to.

  Margaret chatted, grinning at Jess as if the words were meant for her.

  “I only opened because of the Celebrity Ski, you know. Remember how many we got last time? Dozens. Even sold nine copies of Indian Tribes of the Rockies.”

  They stopped by the glass-cased model of the Corkscrew Tunnel and Margaret leaned forward to the big red button. “OK, sweetheart. Do you want to press the button for Auntie Margaret and make the train go?”

  Jess looked down at the model that without fail had always made her scream with delight, then looked silently and solemnly up at her mother. She opened her little mouth into a great big mouth and started to bawl.

  Margaret made a mock face of friendly surprise and, holding Jess close, looked over the little girl’s shoulder at Katie. Her boss looked crumpled, defeated, old. Margaret hitched the wailing Jess higher in her arms and spoke in that kind, soft voice she used for children, this time for Katie.

  “Let me take her down to the office. You need some space.”

  Katie didn’t respond but watched gratefully as Margaret walked carefully down the stairs again with the screaming child and disappeared into the back room where she kept her cherished kettle and toaster.

  Nothing was the same. Even Jess didn’t like the train anymore. Katie was too tired for tears.

  She knew Billy had gone after Sam, but where was Sam?

  Katie crouched down beside the model and pushed the red button absentmindedly. The tiny train started its shuddering journey over the spiraling track, in and out of the hollows cut in the papier-mâché mountain. There was the front of the train pushing its way out of the upper tunnel, and there was the end of the train looking like it was going the other way.

  She thought of Billy and his dollars, that dumb game he and Sam played every minute they had, dogging off domestic chores to spend hours sitting by that railroad.

  She would have given anything in the world at that point just to see the two of them again, stepping into the kitchen, ruddy-cheeked and guilty, those big shiny saucers in their hands like trophies. Anything. Just to have things the way they were.

  The train came around one more time and stopped. Katie punched the button again and watched it make the same journey in reverse, shaking up toward those ludicrously long tunnels that so fascinated her husband and son and, until today, at least, her daughter.

  The tunnels.

  Long dark tunnels.

  Tunnels that could shelter and hide someone.

  By the time the model had completed its second journey of the day and come to a halt at the top of the papier-mâché mountain, there was no one there to clap their hands in delight and press the button to make it do it again. Because there was no one there at all.

  62

  Dawn brought sanity. Or was it madness? Craig wasn’t sure anymore. He was frozen and numb, but his vigil outside that yawning mouth of darkness had been impossible to break. Sam’s chanting had been going on for hours. Stopping sporadically, and just when Craig thought about stepping through that black mouth and checking that his quarry hadn’t fled through the tunnel and off into the night, it would start again. So he’d sat and waited, listening and watching.

  And of course Sylvia had come back.

  It was getting easier to bear. The trick was to look as if you hadn’t seen. That seemed to make it angry, and for that small victory he was grateful. After the fourth or fifth time, he forgot which, he didn’t look, respond or reply. He just let the thing do its sick and perverted business with the image of his dead wife while he bit the insides of his cheeks until they became ulcerated and bloody.

  And then there was dawn, that thin gray light that started to sketch in detail where there had been only rough form. He thought at first that it was another trick, but he was intrigued at its change of plan.
The mound was obviously a body, but it didn’t look as if it was going to be Sylvia’s.

  Craig McGee had walked very slowly over to the trees and waited to see if the horror would rise up to greet him. But there was no black thing moving behind this mound of dead flesh. No clouds of oily depravity. This was what it seemed to be: a dead man, an Indian, mutilated in a way he was nauseatingly familiar with.

  Craig looked away, out over the tops of the pines, to where he knew the mountains were hiding behind the misty snow clouds, and he felt his reason cracking down the middle like ice.

  Sam Hunt. One call on the radio he carried but had switched off and they would be here. They would come and they would have all the goddamn proof they needed to lock away Mr. Sam Hunting Wolf, the most notorious serial killer Canada had ever boasted.

  Here was the body. There was the killer. Here was the policeman.

  So why was he standing alone outside this tunnel, listening to a crazy man chanting his dirge?

  Craig turned and walked toward the tunnel mouth, his fear a hard, hot nugget in his chest. He stopped at the entrance, looking up at those teeth of ice that hung like threats from the rock. He should end this. The knowledge could be locked away again. He could become a sane man, searching for ski thieves and drunks, drinking coffee with hotel managers and having dinner with tour operators. He was in hell, but he had the power in that black radio to get himself back to purgatory at least. Craig put a hand to his shoulder and touched the black plastic box. He fingered the switch and looked deep into the blackness.

  There was a singing noise. High and sweet, the metal tracks vibrating with it. And the chanting had stopped. He stared into the gloom, and when the single round light that had begun as a small thing became a big thing, his body took the initiative from his dazed mind and sprinted out of the way.

  The train took a long, long time to pass, and while it did Craig McGee waited dumbly, hugging his resolve to his breast, waiting to call his men and end this insanity.

  It was the only way. He was mad. Mad to see what he was seeing, to believe what he believed. He knew that now. He would simply keep that madness a secret, the way he had always kept it a secret.

  The train was ninety-seven boxes long, and when it had snaked away, leaving Craig in a snowy silence, the radio also remained silent.

  Because as the last car of coal swept away, in its wake the mangled body of Sylvia McGee twisted and tumbled on the tracks, making the snow bloody with the progress of her tattered remains.

  Getting past those cops had been easy. Billy had slipped out the bathroom window and scrambled along the porch roof. No one could see you up there, and better, you could reach the drooping midbranches of the big pine that hung over the woodpile. Billy had grabbed hold of one and swung himself over the fence, dropping softly down into the neighbors’ yard, followed only by a quiet thump of shaken snow as the branch bounced back up. Piece of cake. He was off through the backyards of Oriole and out into the next street without anyone seeing a thing.

  Although he had been scared, he had also been exhilarated. The wolf hadn’t told him his dad was heading back to the Corkscrew Tunnel. He just kind of knew it when he’d put that coin into his hand. At that moment in the bedroom, he’d suddenly smelled diesel fumes and that metallic, musty smell that wafts out of a tunnel after a train has just passed through. He knew his dad was thinking about where he had to go back to. So Billy was going too.

  He knew the way by road, sort of. Mom had driven him and Jess up there to the viewing platform plenty of times in the summer. But it was miles and miles by road. It would be quicker just following the rail tracks out of town. That way you went right through the middle of the forest instead of skirting way around it.

  But now in the middle of that dark, black forest, with the dawn just creeping into the snow-laden sky, all the exhilaration was gone. Billy was just scared.

  There were animals or birds rustling from time to time in the thick deadfall, and he knew he was being watched by eyes that were not human. But it was something worse than that. He could feel the dark thing nearby. It felt different, though. Almost like it was just a bit of the dark thing, instead of the whole monstrous mass he’d seen inside his father that night. It was as if the dark thing had split into bits, like it needed to be in lots of places at once.

  The bit that was near him felt much weaker, much smaller than when it was one thing. But it was still frightening him.

  And as the light grew stronger and his fear increased, it did what he feared the most.

  The air around his head seemed to shift, as though a door in a room had been opened, and as Billy stopped walking, staring into the gloom with glistening unblinking eyes, something in front of him on the tracks started to appear.

  Like mist rising off the river, it was spiraling up from the snow. But it was black, filthy mist, and it seemed like it was trying to look like his father. Billy’s heart stood still as the curls of black badness tried to cover themselves with a layer of flesh. Trying to look like a human. It was horrible. Bits of a face floated over the clouds of moving blackness, then arms tried to appear, the hand reaching threateningly for Billy. His father’s face very nearly came together in one tiny glimpse, mouthing something angrily at him, but it broke up again, the way smoke parts and regroups when a fast car drives through.

  He had closed his eyes then and remembered what Eagle Robe told him.

  I see nothing because you are nothing, he’d said in a shaky voice. And when his eyes opened again there was only the faintest trace of badness left, wisping between the snowflakes like smoke.

  Billy exhaled through his teeth and pulled his fleece jacket tighter around him. He’d been roasting in it only minutes ago from the march along these endless tracks, even though its bobbly fleece was coated in a thick layer of sticky snow. Now, he was freezing.

  Still, it hadn’t been as bad as Eagle Robe had said. He had said it would look like his worst dreams come true and he might be fooled. Who would be fooled by that black misty thing?

  Maybe, he mused, it was making someone somewhere else believe in it. Showing someone else their worst dreams come true. Billy closed his eyes for a second and prayed with all his heart that the someone would know it wasn’t real.

  He took a deep breath, opened his eyes and plowed on through the snow toward his dad.

  63

  Alberta 1907

  Siding Twenty-three

  She walked slowly between the deep ruts in the snow that the dragged poles were making. The horse that pulled their belongings, a few pots and skins cradled in the stretched tepee hides, left piles of orange-brown droppings in its wake that steamed gently in the cold air.

  Singing Tree stepped carefully over one, then looked up at the jagged peaks that were searingly white against the blue sky.

  The snow had stopped. It fell in great heavy thumps from the branches as the silent line of Kinchuinicks passed, loosened from its hold by the sun, and brought down finally by the brush of a shoulder against a low branch or a hoof snapping a concealed dry root.

  Singing Tree could see an eagle circling below one of the peaks. It was a dark shape from below, its wing tips open like the fingers of a hand. But when it turned and caught the air again to soar, its feathers glinted in the brilliant sunshine like a fish in a river flipping over with a silver wink.

  Was it him? She stopped for a second and watched the bird until it disappeared behind a tower of rock. She lowered her head and walked on.

  Singing Tree thought then that perhaps the Great Spirit had created love as a punishment. The pain that it could inflict was unrivaled by any other. He was gone, and her heart felt as if it had grown claws and was tearing its way out of her breast.

  She flinched, longing to dampen her thoughts as she dampened the fire.

  But it should be remembered. The worst of it. It had to be. If they were to forget, to keep the darkness of the events in a silent place in their hearts, then they would forget for the future to
o. Her face became hard and old as she squinted into the middle distance, remembering.

  The white men. How they shouted and gestured and wanted her husband’s blood. But they would not go into the hole they had made in the mountain. They stood instead at a distance from the entrance while the chief of them spoke and made wide sweeping movements with his hands. She had held Walks Alone tightly to her breast, for she had been afraid for him as much as for Hunting Wolf.

  And then there had been the first scream. They had backed away like children from a wild dog, looking at the tunnel in the rock as though it were a mouth that would devour them.

  He had broken free from her. A slippery weasel writhing from her grasp.

  Of course she had run after him.

  Her son had disappeared into the hole in the rock without any of the white men stopping him, even though she screamed at them to hold him. They knew the sense of the words she screamed: it was not that they did not know her tongue, it was that they despised it, as they despised her and her boy along with it. She could see it on their faces as they stood aside and let a mere boy of nine summers run to the scream as though he were pulled on a string.

  So she had followed him. And she had seen it. Seen it all.

  What had her beloved become? It was impossible to reason at such a sight, and even though she had given herself up to remembrance, it was already dreamlike.

  The battle had been so awesome, so repugnant and sickening in its violence that she could barely remain conscious. But through the unimaginable horror, the mother in her had seen the more immediate danger. The rock was alive. It was quaking and it was falling and Walks Alone was running toward that sight that she could not behold. He would surely die under that rock, but she was too far away to stop him.