by Muriel Gray
Craig stood inside the entrance, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and when they did, he was sorry to have been blessed with sight.
They were words that had been stored in his heart. They were chiseled into his brain, and to read them was like running a finger over braille. Solid words. Words that had dimension as well as sound. Words that were not of this time or any time man should know. They were more than vowels and consonants, pauses and breaths. They flitted like scurrying things from his tongue and the earth shifted as they tumbled out.
And Sam knew. He knew so much as he spoke them. The Isksaksin had to be held between the teeth to pronounce these living words. They were not sounds the human mouth made in its normal function. Gritted teeth, aching jaw. It was all part of the knowledge that Pitah Annes had learned. He had spoken the words but knew that his descendants would lose the skill. It was he who decreed they should fashion the bone from his skull into this tool for talking when he breathed no more to make the sounds. It was he who carved these words onto the hearts of his descendants.
But he was not able to tell those descendants what these words would bring. Sam Hunt paused before the last word and hissed a breath through his gritted teeth. Then he spoke it.
It fell from his parted lips like a gravestone toppling.
The shaman opened his eyes and looked ahead. The Trickster was in his blond-trapper skin, smiling, ice-blue eyes full of anticipation.
Waiting.
Waiting to give solidity to its unclean, corrupt hate.
And Sam Hunting Wolf waited, his heart a machine that was going to burst its casing.
Then he felt it coming.
From the pit of his stomach he felt a growth. It was a rapid sensation of being coated from the inside with something so thick and dark and hot that by the time he opened his mouth to scream, letting the amulet drop to his chest, it was growing in his head and had silenced his mouth with its searing viscous presence.
Then the darkness came upon him and he felt that hiss of ecstasy from the Trickster when it knew its power was returning, its fuel from the spirit of this shaman: the power to grow into its hideous and unholy self. The power to slash and rip and kill.
But as the darkness took him and the power flowed from his mind toward the thing that was already changing before him, Sam realized that this time he was still conscious. Still able to see and hear. The thing that was him, Sam Hunting Wolf, his spirit, his spark of life, was aware and alive in a bubble of thought within his own soul.
He felt calm and at peace as the fuel that the monster needed seeped from him.
And then, in that peace, he saw what was coming. Felt what was happening to this body he had all but departed.
The Trickster was growing in size, its form defining itself. That writhing darkness was becoming brittle and solid, forming itself into the grotesque, deformed killer that it had decided to be so many centuries before. Gaping black jaws slavered a sticky bile from beneath a snarling snout that was pitted and diseased with crawling black vermin. Its body was almost formless, a hunched mass of shining black segments, shifting and oozing as they moved with the power of the dark, angry motor that drove them.
All the demons that man had drawn and painted and feared were found in this form. It was a composite of terror, a patchwork of fear. A totem that was alive.
Its huge razor talons sliced into its own dark flesh as it flexed them, and a black and green slime trickled from the wounds, followed by glistening worms that fell onto the rocky floor and writhed with life of their own, opening and closing round mouths that were dark circles of needle-sharp teeth.
The Trickster stretched and arched in its pleasure at finding form, and an icy sheath that was growing over the black, putrid skin crackled as it moved.
But Sam felt that other thing coming. It was splitting his body. The cells that made up his tight brown flesh were rebelling, both against their owner and nature itself. For he was changing in size. He saw it in minute detail, each precious cell bursting and growing, doubling and doubling again, until the thing that was Sam Hunting Wolf was nothing like Sam Hunting Wolf. Nothing like a man at all.
But in this place, this bubble whose membrane was no more than his concentration, he could see things, understand things. Was this the pure place that he had worked so hard to make?
For he saw now what was coming, and it was something so dark and so ancient that it could have no name in the tongue of man. Its fuel was not from Sam. He knew that. And he understood why Moses had perished. It had fed on his father, for its fuel was the evil of man.
It was the darkness in all men’s hearts made flesh, and it was feeding now. The Trickster was writhing, waiting to be fed on its host. But its tendrils were stretching out around it.
Above the tunnel, only a few hundred yards from the source of this great darkness, was all the fuel it needed.
“OK, everyone. The course this morning is the giant slalom.”
Baz used his best instructor’s voice for this crowd of rich bozos, raising it above the clanking of the old Wolf chairlift that was moving slowly along above them on its frozen cable.
This was a dumb place to have a race, this little-used trail, but the weather had made them retreat around to this side of the mountain, where there was at least no chance of an avalanche. Desperate measures, and he could see Eric Sindon was as unhappy as he was.
He hated celebrity skis. Always an accident as some asshole tried to ski close to the celebs, and he always scraped it up.
The patrol had been working since just after dawn to try and make the area safer, fencing off anything that could lead to these jerks disappearing into litigation valley.
“You have to keep inside those orange snow fences whatever happens. If you don’t, you’re gonna end up sliding down there, over some rocks you can’t see from here, right down onto the railroad line. And who wants to come home from a ski trip with a leg broken by a freight train, huh? Tell that to your boss back in the office.”
A sour bald man looked at him. “We are the bosses, kid. Get on with the bullshit.”
Baz bit his bottom lip briefly, managed a weak smile and continued.
From the trestle table where the contestants were bibbing up, Pasqual shifted uneasily. She was sore. The man she’d fucked last night was a fucking disgusting animal. But he would pay. Oh, shit, he would pay.
She’d laid famous guys before and enjoyed the kudos from the gossiping ski bums spreading it around town. But this was ugly. This time it had grossed her out.
I’ll get you back, buster, she thought. In ways you couldn’t even imagine.
The dark thing pulled all the black energy toward itself, sucking it in, making the earth tremble as its power grew with each dark force it sucked from a mortal.
There was the murderous thought from Pasqual Weaver’s head about cutting a man’s penis off, making him scream, suffer, watching the agony on his face. The fantasy of the thick blood, the stench of his death. It sucked the thought in and grew.
There was the man she was dreaming of, thinking about how he would like to come in a dead woman’s anus. How would that feel? The pleasure. The dark, delicious evil of it. Make the bitch suffer first. Make her know it was going to happen. Watch her.
Growing. Growing.
The man just there was cradling the thought of torturing his wife with the knowledge of how he would hurt their son. How he made the terrified young man take his punches, made him bleed in front of her, her precious faggot boy, made him beg for his money and his mercy. Tell the cow exactly why her son wasn’t ever coming home if he left. Make her weep. How the money he gave the wretch, the money that paid for their pool and their ski trips and their third house in France, came from selling arms, so that Arabs could blast the balls off each other’s stinking asses.
Sucked it in. Growing ever bigger.
That woman. Here came her thought about the cripples she was skiing for. How she hated them. She was repulsed by their twisted limbs and th
eir ugly faces, and she wanted them crushed and pulverized so they would never get in her face again. Some had children. It was too much. Tear their babies from their wombs, these ugly monsters. She would ski until she dropped if only she could stop them living, stop them breeding. Kill kill kill them all.
Such a delicious, nourishing thought. Fueling the darkness like gas on a barbecue.
And as the thing that was Sam grew with every thought, the energy was making the body strong. It was growing its own talons, its own huge jaws, a body that was so distorted a thing as to be almost a molten liquid. And Sam knew that the thing he had become was bigger, stronger, darker and more malevolent than the Trickster. It was an evil without purpose. Elemental and wild. No vengeance, no motive or malicious intention. A deviant purity that was so deep and black it bordered on white.
The Trickster was afraid. Sam could sense it. There was a vapor of fear from its foul bulk, and the essence of Sam Hunting Wolf rejoiced in the creature’s uncertainty. It writhed and crackled in discomfort before the darker force, but it was not about to flee. It waited.
And Sam knew what it was waiting for, and he prayed inside his bubble of a soul. Prayed for the strength that would stop its trick.
It started with a tremble, and then Baz saw that it was more. The snow was undulating. Like a white sheet with snakes trapped below it, it was moving and writhing and squirming up the slope toward the crowd at a speed he could barely follow.
He stood like a fool, unable to shout or speak or move.
But what could he have shouted? There were no words to describe what he was seeing. His brain tried to understand, but it was beyond a ski-patroller.
And even before his instinct kicked in, the shapes in the ground had reached them, and the earth was beginning to shake like a gold prospector’s sieve.
The screaming started at once. From the pylon, icicles began to fall, and as he watched, a woman looking up at the shaking wire was speared through the eye, falling to the ground as a jet of blood spurted from the burst white globe.
The snow was opening below them like mouths. But this was no quake. There were forms in the snow. Snaking forms that were ripping the earth open and shaking the rock to the core. The chairs on the cable were starting to bounce and swing, and as he stood immobile with terror in the chaos, a pylon creaked and fell in a lazy arc like a pine being felled.
Four people took it, splitting the head of one man like a soft fruit. The other three were crushed in a tangle of limbs and metal resembling a child’s puzzle. But the chairs that held screaming passengers plummeted to the ground in a less complex mess of broken limbs and smashed bodies. It was easy to tell human from steel. Bones protruded from the shiny material of cheerful ski suits, and the snow was host to the blackness of their occupants’ blood.
From the snaking white ground a boulder burst through and split like a loaf, its huge weight dragging across the bodies of two fallen figures as gravity tried to pull it back into the splitting earth. Baz could just make out the ripped, screaming face of one celebrity as it was pounded and mashed by the rock. Rock that seemed to have more life than the momentum of a quake would grant.
It was almost comical the way the ground was swallowing up the skiers. Arms held high as they fell into the crack made by… those snaking things. What the fuck were those snaking things?
He was a spectator. Pasqual moved almost in slow motion, but then, everything had slowed down to dream-pace to Baz, and he watched his screaming boss turn and try to run uphill. The shapes beneath the ground heaved and twisted and she stumbled into a crevice. The gap opened and closed like a mouth, and her leg was snapped from its thigh with a thick sound.
As she screamed, a deep and bellowing wail that was from the pit of her stomach rather than her throat, Baz opened his mouth and vomited. He straightened up, and without a command from his conscious mind his skis started off to the left of the moving earth, crashing him through the orange barricade to the safety of the unpisted slopes.
It hissed through those ice teeth and knew its tricks had arrived. They were here, standing in the tunnel mouth, just as its audience had been the last time. How easy man was to play. Then it hesitated for a moment. What had happened the last time?
The diseased mind struggled to recall the failure.
The swirl of malice canceled its own doubt and began its campaign.
Sam was a sack of sorrow in his bubble. His soul shed tears for the evil that was flooding into the space he had made with his magic. But he was strong. He was pure. There was only love in his heart.
And then it spoke to him.
“Your new family are here, Kinchuinick. See? The white man gets everything the white man wants.”
The words came from the depth of the thing’s filthy black body. The thing that was no longer Sam halted its feeding as if it had been given a signal. He looked with the eyes of his spirit to the place the monster was indicating with its thoughts and he saw them.
Standing in the tunnel mouth, the light making them silhouettes against the frenzied snow.
Katie. Billy. The policeman. The white policeman.
He was holding Sam’s wife by the shoulders and the boy was between them.
There was a sickly, torturous twist in a part of him he had been unaware of. Like the deep internal agony of a cancer. Impossible to locate, impossible to escape from its searing agony. It was his thick bubble starting to tear. He felt a dark shard of hate enter his world of love. It was cutting at him, slicing at him, making that space in his soul the thing he had become needed.
And he wanted to die then. To let go of this tenuous life and float away into oblivion, where this stench of horror would be powerless to sicken him further.
The voice of the Trickster was a knife turning in his pain.
“Her house, not your house. Her son, now his son. You, who are nothing and nobody. A stinking shit of an Indian who kills like a madman and whom she hates as an enemy. She fucks him. And she fucks him and thinks of how she would like to see you die.”
The spiritual membrane that was holding the shaman in his body was tearing again. Sam wailed in his agony and spun in a dark circle of failure. It was over. There was no trick to be played on this nightmare. The trick was on him. He was a human sacrifice. That was the reason that no Kinchuinick knew the secret of the Isksaksin. Who would be the keeper in the knowledge that to be called upon meant certain death?
The line. The boundary. He was the line the Trickster needed to cross into this world. He knew what he had done. The thing that he had called. It had opened him like a box, made that space ready to occupy. That bubble. That was where the Trickster needed to be. In his soul. It meant to possess him. And then… then the world would see what vengeance meant when the hatred of centuries found flesh.
And the hatred was eating his soul.
He stretched his soul and moved the body that was now his. It lashed out at the monster before him, flaying the black flesh of the Trickster with a ragged claw. Pus and bile flowed from the wound, but the abomination opened its slavering jaws and laughed.
He shifted his great flanks and slashed at it again. More laughter.
And then the holes in his great, shining scaly head that passed for ears heard the voice. His son’s voice. The tiny figure stumbling blindly toward the two foul creatures that filled the tunnel. That voice. He could hear it the way one tasted something delicate, something exquisite.
“Dad. Listen to the eagle! The eagle!”
A voice from a dream. Then the talons of the Trickster flexed open with a pleasurable crackling and readied themselves to slash at that young, pure flesh.
Craig McGee acted faster than he had ever acted in his life. He threw himself after the boy, and as his hand connected with the back of Billy’s jacket, the whole weight of the man came down on the boy’s tiny frame.
From the tunnel mouth, Katie Hunting Wolf let go the howl that had been frozen in her throat since she saw the things her eyes would not rela
y to her screaming brain.
The eagle. Listen to the eagle.
Sam shifted in his torn bubble of self, and listened.
The beating of wings. A wind of truth blowing into his mind. There was only love there in the tunnel mouth where the Trickster saw hate. He was flying. He was a bird and he could see from a great height.
It was simple. He was a shaman. He could fly with the eagle. And those who flew with the eagle could see not just the mice in the fields but the secrets of the human heart. Billy knew. He ran with his spirit, saw what it would have him see. Now Sam must look with his bird’s eye. He was above them, and he could see their hearts.
Katie was faithful. Her soul was crying for her husband, for the doubts she had had, for the man she wanted so badly, whom she loved over all things. Craig McGee was tortured and honorable, a man with love that had no place to settle, a white shaman who denied his power, who struggled to be blind, to shut out his light. And Billy. Billy was his savior. Billy was a Kinchuinick Indian.
And with his wings outstretched, Sam saw the trick.
The rock was trembling. The whole tunnel shaking and rumbling. McGee scooped the boy up and ran for the entrance.
The shaman faced the Trickster as his descendants had and knew there was a way. Had they been short of that love? Had they been full of doubt when they faced this thing? That was why they had been sacrificed. They had been abandoned by those they loved, and he had not. Love was the savior. Love made the man pure. Gentleness made him stronger than a fiend. Absence of guilt made him impenetrable.
Slowly he looked into that demon face and started to open the bubble of his soul. The Trickster hissed and shifted and Sam felt its unclean blackness drift toward him in triumph. Entering him. Eating into him. It licked around the edges of his mind, savoring the humanity it was flowing into. And Sam felt giddy in his spirit state as the rush of dark increased.
