Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  "Breakfast!" Katt called from the kitchen.

  DeClercq's eyes slid down the pole to the pail of sand.

  Mixed with the sand was something else.

  Maple leaves.

  Realm of Madness

  Richmond, British Columbia

  Wind off the river whipped flying snow through the bare limbs of the maple trees to build white pyramids up the dyke. The storm swallowed up the Jeep parked on the levee and obliterated tracks from it to a padlocked gate in a spiked fence around the maple garden in front of the Quonset hut on the slough. The hut being smaller than the concrete bunker under it, the vanishing tracks angled around the perimeter to a door over the quagmire out back. A padlock secured the windowless hut in which subterranean stairs descended into the bunker. From one step to the next dripped a trail of blood. Halfway down the stairwell, a bolted door sealed off the underground dungeon surrounding the realm of madness the Headhunter called home.

  When psychosis was florid, the psycho came home to Mother.

  Like tonight.

  Now.

  Candle pots slung in macrame webbings burned in the stygian dark. The webbings dangled from chains fastened to the ceiling. Black smudge curled from candle wicks protected by small glass umbrellas from blood draining out of the heads. The blood collected on the floor. The heads hung suspended at eye level by the ceiling chains hooked in their hair. The candles highlighted the heads from below, smearing yellow up the chins and under the noses, then up the brows above the eyes. Shadows masked other features, sinking sightless gazes into fathomless pits, and blackening mouths, cheeks, and foreheads to crowns. Strands of hair glistened above like spun gold, while drops the color of molten gold dripped from neck stumps.

  A single set of footsteps echoed around the vault as Sparky and Mother splashed from one dead head to the next.

  "Delicious, child. A good night's hunt. I love how this one bit through his tongue. See how the tip hangs by a thread from his lip?"

  "His lips aren't as pink as yours, Mommy."

  "And this one. Beautiful. Take in the fright. Note how facing imminent death turned the roots of his hair stark white."

  "His hair isn't black like yours, Mommy."

  "Hush, child. Forget the past. Let it be. Mother's waiting in the flesh to satisfy your needs. You have no need for the tzantzas in the box. Their lips and black hair are merely substitutes. Now that you have me, what need have you for them? Did you not stroke my hairin town tonight?"

  "Yes," replied the solitary voice in the dungeon vault.

  "And did you not kiss my lips with the passion you fought in New Orleans?"

  "Yes."

  "And was that dungeon not as secure as the House of Pain and here?"

  "Yes."

  "And was the glow of the torchlight not as gold as this?"

  "Yes."

  "And did the light not wink at you from the erotic rings?"

  "Yes."

  "And did you not bury yourself in me?"

  "Yes."

  "And did I not exorcise dread from Ecuador?"

  "Yes."

  "And did it not feel good to scream and scream and scream?"

  "Yes."

  "A primal scream to sunder the knots twisting you up inside?"

  "Yes."

  "And do you not find the talking cure binds you to me?"

  "Yes."

  "And does love for me instead of hate not make you feel better?"

  "Yes."

  "And do you not find the tighter we are, the safer you feel?"

  "Yes."

  "And is Mother's love and protection not all you ever wanted?" "Yes." "And do you not see your hate for me was the flip side of love? 'I do. I love you, Mommy. Mommy, you fucking cunt.''

  "Yes."

  "And did I not say, 'Let it out, Sparky. Scream and scream and scream. Are you your father's spawn? Or do you belong to me? If you're mine, prove it tonight in blood?"

  "Yes."

  "And have you not proved your love for me in blood four-fold? Bringing me your father's head to taunt and humiliate?"

  "These aren't Daddy's head."

  "Nor are the tzantzas in the box mine. Black hair and pierced lips made them me. And shrinking me down to size vented your hate."

  "Why hate Daddy?"

  "Because he abused me. And that abuse made me hurt you."

  "Abused you how?"

  "He used me, Sparky. He made my body his spittoon. Like my father did in France. 'Shhh, Suzannah. Come in here, cherie. Now let me take off your frills so Papa can love you.' That's why Mama shipped me off and how I met your father. He caged me in the cold and dressed me like a whore, then sat by the fire ogling me. I like you cold. It makes your nipples hard. Now turn around. Bend over. And spread it wide. Good girl, Suzannah. Get your master hard. The bigger s and harder I get, the more you'll love it. "

  "Why hurt me?"

  "To get back at him. Look in a mirror, Sparky. Do you not see his genes?"

  "I'm sorry, Mommy."

  "So am I, child. He hurt me. So I hurt you. So you hurt me. Why should he slip scot-free from the vicious circle he began? He hurt me. So I hurt you. So you hurt him. You rape him, and kill him, and cut off his head. He's any man turned around so you can't see his face. Just as any woman with black hair was me. In this light they're all your father's head. See how plump this one hangs like ripe fruit? Pluck the fruit, Sparky, and dry it for me. Grape to raisin. Plum to prune. Shrink your father down to size. The smaller and limper you make him, the more I'll love you."

  Sparky unhooked the head from its chain.

  The psycho carried the bleeding trophy to the next room.

  A candlestick burned within.

  Candle glow gilded grinning teeth.

  Sand bubbled in a hot pot.

  A brazier burnished the tzantza box.

  By the box were artist's tools.

  A scalpel to remove the skin from the skull.

  Needle and thread to sew the skin into a pouch.

  A scoop to fill the pouch with hot sand.

  Thongs to stitch the eyes shut and lace the mouth.

  Rings like those through Mother's lips.

  Mother's lips . . .

  The kiss of death.

  Rings

  West Vancouver

  With the smell of Canadian bacon and maple syrup awaft in the house—you can't get any more nationalistic than that—well, the coffee beans weren't grown here—Robert cleared the breakfast dishes while Katt was in the shower. He wondered if all teenagers thrived in pockets of sound, darting from one to the next while lugging interim music with them, sort of like a junkie with a carry-over fix, kill the racket for too long and they'd go into withdrawal. Maybe not all teenagers. But certainly the one in this house.

  Katt was in the bathroom with the ghetto blaster blaring, Bryan Adams wailing he wanted to be her underwear, Katt singing along she wanted to be his, too, one or two meows from Catnip in the chorus, claws probably scraping the toilet seat to keep time, for all he knew Scratch Bear was in the shower, too, as he struggled to hear the overwhelmed CBC News. He gave up and returned to the Watson chair.

  The hound of the Baskervilles lay sleeping by the cheery fire.

  "All quiet on the Western front?" he inquired of the guard. "Aren't you supposed to be super-sensitive to sound?"

  Napoleon snored on.

  Perhaps a guard cat was needed.

  Especially one that could run the perimeter in a nanosecond.

  Surrounded by the creature comforts of hearth and home, the fire crackling as darkness and the overnight snowfall held hands outside, the chief superintendent concentrated on the developed print of Natasha Wilkes's head. Focusing on the maple leaves mixed with sand in the pail, he sensed it was time to let his mind play ouija board, so he unwilled himself to slip the reins of conscious restraint which bridled subconscious links made by his instinctive id.

  Maple leaves, he thought.

  First his mental ouija pointed
to the funeral. How small Jane's coffin had seemed beside her mother's, the sun setting fire to the fall maples shading the Quebec graveyard. The caskets were lowered deep into the black earth. "Bless this grave," intoned the Catholic priest, sprinkling holy water on the lid covering Jane, ". . . and send Your angels to watch over it and grant this child peace. ..."

  The aftermath of his daughter's death in 1970 had driven Robert from Quebec and the Mounted Police. The youngest superintendent ever promoted to that rank, he had flouted orders by undertaking a rogue investigation into Jane's whereabouts, the upshot of which was five dead murderers in the woods. There was an internal investigation into his conduct. Force protocol being he couldn't have a lawyer, he was represented by Inspector Francois Chartrand. Public sympathy was on his side, and he had a legal defense of protecting his family, and the odds were five to one, so he was never charged but instead retired from the Force.

  Fleeing from ghosts and memories too haunting to face, British Columbia was as far away west as he could run.

  But Jane's ghost followed.

  "I knew you'd come, Daddy. I knew you wouldn't fail me. ..."

  With proceeds from selling the Montreal house and insurance on Kate's life, he had purchased this waterfront hideaway just before property values went through the roof. The wooded lot was treed with firs, arbutuses, cedars, and maples. Rambling around his lonely estate that first autumn, what struck him was the washed-out yellow of the maple leaves. Without the cold snap back East, they never caught fire.

  Maple leaves, he thought.

  His mental ouija moved to the crest of the RCMP on the cover of his first published book. Military history had brought him to the Force, which was an outgrowth of the British Colonial Army, so to occupy his mind in forced retirement in the early seventies, he'd written the definitive history of the Mounted Police. Men Who Wore the Tunic was its original title.

  The jacket of the book was the color of Red Serge. Title, crest, and author's name were embossed in gold. The crest had a buffalo head at center surmounted by a crown. The bison was circled by the motto Maintiens Le Droit. Flanked on both sides were six maple leaves, one for each of the country's ten provinces and two Arctic territories. Scrolled below was Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  Shortly after publication, the title Men Who Wore the Tunic was obsolete. In 1974 the Mounted commenced recruiting women into the ranks. Katherine Spann was in the first female troop. Her grandfather was Inspector Wilfred Blake, the British soldier dispatched across the Canadian prairie by dog sled in winter to report on conditions there after the Manitoba Rebellion of 1870. Blake had recommended recruiting the North-West Mounted Police, which he suggested should be an amalgam of the Texas Rangers and Royal Irish Constabulary. Because the Plains tribes honored Queen Victoria's redcoats, having sided with King George during the American Revolution, the Riders of the Plains should wear Red Serge. Wilfred Blake—until recently—had been the icon of the Force, and the focus of Robert's second book, Bagpipes, Blood, and Glory.

  But that was another story.

  The Cutthroat case.

  Robert had known Katherine Spann's father back in the fifties, when Alfred Spann was his mentor in the Force, training young Constable DeClercq how to police the north. Alfred was a Mountie attracted to the wilds, and all his postings until he vanished on patrol in the icy Arctic were near the Northern Lights. Katherine Spann was just a baby the last time mentor and student met in Montreal, at which time Alfred entrusted Robert with Wilfred Blake's gun. "Keep this for me till I return," but he didn't.

  Men Who Wore the Tunic was dedicated to Corporal Alfred Spann.

  Robert was still in retirement when the Headhunter raped, killed, and decapitated Greiner, Grabowski, and Portman in 1982. Public panic ensued. By then Frangois Chartrand was commissioner of the Force, so I he brought back the homicide hotshot he'd defended in Quebec years before. Murder was Robert's business. He had the "knack." That rare combination of tactics and intuition found in every supercop. Before there was ViCLAS or crime-scene analysis or criminal profiling, there was him. And just as British cops used to "call in the Yard," flummoxed detachments would summon DeClercq. Troubleshooting the tough cases earned him his reputation and skyrocketing rank, for he was the Mountie who ensured the Mounties always got their man.

  The first thing he did on taking command was form the Headhunter squad. Like all major dragnets, the task force was organized like a pyramid. Such investigations had failed in the past, allowing the Yorkshire Ripper and Ted Bundy (and soon Paul Bernardo) to slip through, so for backup DeClercq borrowed a trick from the past and revived flying patrols. Last century, when Mounted detachments had policed the Northwest by regular patrols, outlaws had evaded capture by learning the Force schedule. In 1890 Commissioner

  Herchmer plugged the breach with flying patrols: Mounties who galloped irregular trails and manhunted independently outside the ranks. DeClercq revived flying patrols to hunt the Headhunter laterally without H.Q. control.

  Force commandos.

  When he was given a list of Members to choose his squad, Robert was surprised to find Katherine Spann had joined after he retired. Intrigued to test how Alfred Spann's kid had turned out, he dispatched her as one of the flying patrols. Not only did his mentor's daughter take the Headhunter down but, six weeks later, shot it out with a renegade cop.

  Blake.

  Alfred.

  Katherine.

  Maintiens Le Droit.

  Wounds from the Shootout nearly killed Katherine Spann. In place of her father, Robert sat vigil by her hospital bed and, when she came out of her coma, bequeathed her Blake's gun. Since then, discreetly to avoid hints of nepotism, he'd followed the woman's service abroad with Special X, hunting assassins in India and heroin importers in the Far East. Having proved herself without help from him, Spann had been recently summoned home for promotion as Zinc Chandler's co-commander of Special X Operations.

  Inspector Katherine Spann.

  Men Who Wore the Tunic was out of date because of her. The second edition was retitled Those Who Wore the Tunic. The dedication and crest on the jacket remained the same.

  Maple leaves, he thought.

  Suddenly, his mental ouija tugged in a bedeviling direction. The hackles raised on his neck by the change told him he was closing in on that elusive detail which was vexing his conscious mind. The letters his subconscious planchette spelled were F-L-O-O-D.

  Al Flood.

  Detective.

  Major Crimes Squad.

  The Vancouver Police.

  The cop who filed the photo of Wilkes's hacked-off head.

  The cop killed with Genevieve, DeClercq's second wife.

  The cop who shot it out with Constable Katherine Spann.

  Maple leaves?

  History had advanced more than a decade since the last time he'd opened this drawer, so there was a layer of dust on the single file inside. He carried it from the stereo cabinet back to the Watson chair, then swept the accumulation of years into the hungry flames. Like sand removed from an archeological site, the file gave up the name typed and buried on its labeled tab. Almore Flood.

  Robert cracked the cover and journeyed back in time.

  Quebec he had left behind, but there was no escape from Jane's ghost. Night and day, guilt over her death haunted him, rattling his mind as he had researched Men Who Wore the Tunic. Finally, in a last-ditch effort to lay her soul to rest in the mid-seventies, Robert enrolled in a self-analysis workshop at UBC. The psychologist who led the class was Genevieve:

  "Most of you are here because you feel cursed by your past. Emotions swirl within you which you can't work out. Suppose you have a friend who is messing up his life. Though he is unable to see the solution, you know immediately what he should do. That's because your friend is mired in the quicksand of subjectivity, while you work out his conundrum from an objective point of view.

  "If you feel mired like our hypothetical friend, I want you to write a letter only you
will see to the one you perceive as the source of your turmoil. After you have bared your emotions to paper, imagine the person who wrote the letter is your friend, not you. In this way, by objectifying your subjective conundrum, I hope you'll be able to tell your friend how to solve his problem."

  That night Robert wrote a letter to Jane, begging forgiveness for drawing the kidnappers to their door, and for venturing into the woods too late to save her. "I knew you'd come, Daddy. I knew you wouldn't fail me. . . ."

  "You are Ulysses," Genevieve said next class. "And this is your odyssey to self-awareness. Henceforth, you will keep a journal of thoughts, feelings, and actions prompted by your letter. The letter I will never read. The journal I shall. And hopefully through discussing it, you'll find your Golden Fleece."

  In Robert's case the odyssey was extended, for he and Genny were married within the year. Only when they were honeymooning in Western Samoa did he tell her the Golden Fleece was Jason and the Argonauts, not Ulysses.

  "It's all Greek to me," she laughed, and he loved that laugh so much he didn't spoil it by telling her Ulysses was the Latin name for Greek Odysseus. When you dealt in archetypes, did it matter? Her picture on the mantel behind the Watson chair had been taken in the South Pacific on that honeymoon. Body tanned in contrast to the white bikini she wore, Genny held a conch shell to one ear. Her auburn hair was wet from the sea, and green eyes sparked with mischief as if the shell was whispering the secret of the elusive detail with new meaning Robert sought in the Flood file open in his lap. Flood, too, had taken a workshop with Genevieve. In 1982, during the Headhunter case. Flood, too, had fallen in love with his vivacious teacher. At a time when Robert was falling apart emotionally.

  Flood, too, had written a letter to jump-start his odyssey.

  Seized from his apartment after the shoot-out with Spann, six weeks after she took the Headhunter down.

  The letter was spiked on the metal fastener in the file:

  To Dad:

  I don't know why, but I feel responsible for your death. Perhaps it's because I mouthed off and called you a no-good drunk, and think if I hadn't done that you wouldn 't have flown to Toronto for job upgrading, and therefore wouldn't have been on that plane when it crashed.