THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  Katie was watching Sam. His face looked as if the flesh had been sucked from behind the skin, his eyes focusing somewhere outside the room.

  Sam spoke softly, as though trying the words for the first time. “In the trees.”

  Craig narrowed his eyes and continued. “You were on the chairlift station below the area of the incident at the time of the death, Mr. Hunt. Did you hear or see anything unusual?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure? Take your time.”

  “I was sick.”

  Hawk was scribbling as Craig continued.

  “So did you leave your station at all while you were taken ill?”

  Sam swallowed. “Yeah. I left it for a bit.”

  “To go where, Mr. Hunt?”

  Sam’s world was shrinking. If his worst fears had been stalking him, circling him in the dark, they were on him now, pulling him low. He left to go into the trees, for Christ’s sake. Into the fucking trees. And what were they going to make of that?

  A murder. A dead kid. In the trees. This wasn’t happening. But three people looking at him like they’d paid money to stare assured him it was.

  He raced to find an exit from this nightmare. The guy in yellow. He would tell them he’d been in the trees. What was he going to say? I blacked out at the time you’re talking about, and I woke up on my back in the pines? Nothing suspicious so far, eh, Mr. McGee?

  He looked at Katie, who seemed smaller than usual. Sam wanted to shout Help! at her, to have her cradle him in those soft arms and make these big guys in their big dark anoraks go away. Their rustling massive presence in the room was like an assault.

  But she was waiting to see what he would say. She knew everything that happened to him today. He’d told her. He’d wanted to tell her, because this time the burden of fright and dark fancy was more than he could carry alone. If he was going to lie now he would have to do it in front of her. Not an option. He swallowed.

  “Into the trees.”

  If he expected Craig McGee to spring forward and cuff him he was wrong. The policeman looked unmoved.

  “What were you doing in the trees, Mr. Hunt?”

  “Beats me. I blacked out. I woke up there.”

  Craig nodded as though that were a perfectly reasonable explanation, as though Sam had said he went for a soda.

  “Good alibi, huh?” Sam said weakly.

  “You’re not under suspicion here, Mr. Hunt,” Craig lied.

  Katie looked relieved. For a moment the ugly thought had crossed her mind that Sam was going to lie. What then? What would that have meant? All this had to be just a hideous and woeful coincidence.

  Craig looked at Katie and back at Sam. “Are these blackouts common? Do you have a medical condition?”

  Katie jumped in. She could see Sam was on a spit being roasted. “Sam fainted about a week ago for the first time when that avalanche explosion thing happened. The doctor thinks he had a virus. We’re kind of worried, if you want the truth. This isn’t fun.”

  “No. I can imagine, Mrs. Hunt. You must both be very concerned.”

  Sylvia lying on the bathroom floor. Sylvia, whose blackouts were not blackouts but faints from the pain she was concealing from her husband. Sylvia, who told him she’d just fallen and hit her head. Yes, they must be very concerned. Craig breathed deeply through his nose and dragged his wailing soul back from that bathroom.

  “What do you remember when you woke up? What time was it, for instance?”

  Sam leaned forward, his legs wide apart, his hands clasped between his legs. “I think it was around one.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like were you hurt? Were you bleeding or showing signs of having maybe been hit?”

  “No. Nothing like that. I was just on my back in the snow.”

  Katie looked away from Sam to the two policemen. “How old was the kid?”

  Daniel spoke quickly, beating Craig. “We can’t divulge anything about the victim, ma’am.”

  Craig overruled him. “Yeah, well, you’ll see it on the breakfast news. He was eighteen years old, Mrs. Hunt. And he didn’t die very quietly or gracefully.”

  Katie crossed her arms and rubbed her elbows. “Shit.”

  “Where did your footprints lead, Mr. Hunt?”

  “What?”

  “In the snow. When you woke. Did they lead from the station to where you woke up, or did they suggest you’d been somewhere else?”

  Sam hadn’t thought of that. “Christ, I don’t know. I didn’t think to look. I panicked and ran back to the hut.” He struggled to remember. Good question. Fucking good question.

  “Can I ask where you were on Tuesday night, Mr. Hunt?”

  Bad question.

  Sam had to think. So he thought, and when he remembered he wished he hadn’t. Sweet Jesus. Another blackout. But the one he hadn’t mentioned to Katie. “I was stranded in Stoke Tuesday. Couldn’t get home for the storm.”

  “Were you with anyone who can verify that?”

  “No. I spent the night alone in the company ticket office.”

  Sam thought how an innocent man would make a fist and bark at the cops, “Now quit this shit, what are you guys getting at?” But he had the feeling of a thick silt shifting in his stomach. This was a strange and hostile land and he’d lost his compass.

  Craig stood. Daniel, still smarting from the betrayal, looked up at him with a scowl.

  “OK, folks. Thanks for your time. Sorry to have troubled you.”

  Daniel closed his notebook and got up, his face telling the tale that he thought his staff sergeant had gone crazy. He looked across at their interviewee and Sam knew Daniel Hawk thought he was looking at a murderer.

  Katie was as surprised as Hawk, but she struggled to conceal it in case they changed their minds. She got to her feet to show them out.

  Craig smiled at her, then at Sam. “I might have to get back to you, Mr. Hunt. We’ve got a whole heap of people to talk to.”

  Katie pursued them as they headed out. Craig paused in the doorway.

  “By the way, my officer here tells me you two grew up on Redhorn together.”

  Sam nodded from his chair. Katie looked at Daniel with interest. “Really?” she said pleasantly.

  “You still use the name Hunting Wolf when you go back, or do they know you by Hunt? Just in case we have to make any routine enquiries.”

  Sam turned away, looking into the fire. He spoke quietly. “I don’t go back.”

  Craig had not been prepared for what he read in Katie Hunt’s face. She didn’t know. Sam hadn’t told her who she’d married. Her eyes were blazing, her back still to her husband, as she fought to keep herself under control. Craig was sorry for her, but the revelation was useful. He buttoned the wind collar on his jacket and left the room, his companion following like a thundercloud.

  The front door closed quietly and Katie stood for nearly a full minute before she turned and faced Sam, and the truth that their lives were changing in a way she didn’t understand.

  It was a seven-minute drive to the detachment from Sam Hunt’s house. They did it in silence. Hawk pulled up to the door and waited for his staff sergeant to get out.

  Craig stayed put. “You think he’s guilty.”

  Hawk shifted forward, resting his chin on his arms as he leaned on the wheel. “Nah. I think it was the butler.”

  “Karen thingumybob relieved him at one-thirty. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The boy died around twelve-thirty to twelve forty-five.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You saw how that kid died, Hawk.”

  Hawk wasn’t as far behind as Craig thought.

  “He could have been wearing some kind of protective clothing. Hidden the weapon and the blood-soaked garment somewhere before coming back down to the station.”

  “Having swung through the trees?”

  A quizzical look from Daniel. Craig opened the door to get out. “No f
ootprints, Hawk. One set belonging to the patroller, some deer tracks and the signs of the skis entering the woods and crashing. That’s it. Nothing else. Not one damned boot print for hundreds of yards.”

  Daniel looked ahead. “He’s involved.”

  “Maybe. Tell me how or why and win the candy.”

  Craig slammed the door shut and went inside. Daniel sat for a second, then drove the car around the back of the building to park.

  The woman reporter was by the trash cans. She approached the car as he stopped, and opened the door.

  “Not now, lady.”

  She got in and Daniel sighed. Her action let a gust of cold air in with her that nearly took his face off.

  “You’re wasting your time. You’ll get a story when the staff sergeant makes a statement.”

  The woman looked at him through pale eyes and smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you. I know your name, Constable Hawk. Constable Daniel Hawk.”

  “Neat detective work. Considered a career in the Mounties?”

  The woman’s demeanor shifted into an unfamiliar gear.

  “Do you know my name?”

  “I don’t give a fuck. Get out of the car.”

  Her voice dropped an octave and hummed with a menace alien to the strong but pretty face that mouthed the question.

  “Do you know my name?”

  Daniel was perplexed. If the woman wanted a story, acting like a nut wasn’t the best way to extract it. He stared her down in the freezing car with little success, then jumped when Craig opened the car door.

  “Left my folder, Constable.”

  Craig smiled over at Daniel without looking at his new passenger.

  “How about getting lost, missy?”

  “She was just leaving.”

  The woman extended a pale hand to Craig. He ignored it.

  “Marlene Sitconski. News International.”

  “Craig McGee. Pissed cop about to throw book at reporter.”

  She flicked another look at Daniel and slowly stepped down from the car, her coat pushed aside to reveal two long, willowy limbs in black stretch leggings that disappeared into her snow boots. Craig felt that stirring again. He fought it and this time he won. He won easily, because there was something else about her now that she was so near.

  A tiny creaking slit opened in a door Craig McGee kept locked in his mind and he struggled to shut it again. It was a door that could sometimes show him stuff he didn’t want to see, and he didn’t want to see anything now, out here in the dark lot. He didn’t want to see what he thought he’d glimpsed behind those eyes.

  Marlene Sitconski had a laugh like ice cubes tinkling, and she used it as she walked away from the car toward the street.

  Craig watched her go while a finger of inexplicable fear traced a cold path down his spine, and turned back to Daniel. “The A-Team have arrived from Edmonton.”

  He scooped his folder up from the floor of the car and went back inside, leaving Daniel in the dark wondering why he wished Craig had waited for him.

  25

  Alberta 1907

  Siding Twenty-three

  “What does it want of us?”

  Hunting Wolf smiled with his eyes. “Not of us. Of me.”

  His wife withdrew the crushed herbs from his cheek and surveyed her progress. Three dark, deep gashes cut a pattern diagonally across the man’s face like a macabre imitation of war paint, the lesions now clogged with tiny fragments of leaf and root. Although Hunting Wolf’s face had clearly been clawed, it was as though each cut had been performed with the sharpest of knives.

  He looked up at Singing Tree with affection. “It pains me no longer.”

  “Then I will prepare more of the same. Before the pain returns.” She looked over at Powderhand. “As you talk.”

  The young warrior grimaced and threw his braids behind him with a toss of the head. Singing Tree lifted the wooden bowl of herbs and carried it to the edge of the tepee to mix another poultice. Her husband watched her tiny figure bend to its task and his eyes softened with love.

  Two Young Bears decided it was safe to continue. “Then, what does it want of you?”

  Hunting Wolf looked into the fire smouldering in the center of the floor. “It is a paradox. I am both its enemy and the gate to its release.” He shifted his weight toward the fire and spoke softly, almost to himself. “I pray that the Great Spirit grants me strength to give it nothing.”

  Powderhand looked angry. “It is already released. Those white-faced fools.”

  “You know little of the Trickster, Powderhand. Were you thinking of your stomach or your penis when the legends were told to you around the fire? It seems you were not listening to the elder telling the tale.”

  “I listened.”

  It was Singing Tree who spoke impatiently from her crouch. “The tales were of fun and laughter. I recall nothing of this darkness.”

  It was Powderhand’s turn to snort. “Women’s tales. What do you know of the spirit world?”

  “And what does a mere man, a being who cannot make life, only destroy it, know of this world, never mind that of the spirits?”

  In spite of her anger she looked as if she would cry. Hunting Wolf’s heart stabbed him with the memory they both fought to bury each day. There could be no place for it now. His heart and soul were bruised enough.

  “Wife.”

  She was silenced. Reluctantly. Looking at his face with regret in her eyes that she had spoken of what must not be spoken of, even obliquely. Her husband addressed her gravely. “This is not that spirit of mockery and laughter. This is of another time. Older.”

  Singing Tree was chilled by the undercurrent in Hunting Wolf’s voice. She thought of those childhood tales of the Trickster, the wicked fool who was always suffering at the hands of man or nature for his evil and uncontrollable behavior. She had laughed until she cried at the tale of the Trickster being paid back for a deceit by being rendered unable to stop defecating until he was above the trees, sitting stranded on a column of his own waste.

  Perhaps Powderhand was right. The darker tales were kept until the women were occupied with their chores and their children, the tales that would explain away the terror that was gripping them now, in the trap that winter had sprung. As if proud of her fears, the wind blasted the skin of the tepee with an arsenal of snow, shaking the poles that supported the hides like a threat.

  Two Young Bears was still staring at his chief with eyes that implored an answer. He ran a tongue over his dry lips. “But it can be defeated?”

  “It must be defeated. I cannot run from it. There is nowhere on earth I can hide now that it has recognized its jailer.”

  Powderhand and Two Young Bears exchanged glances. Hunting Wolf smiled to himself, although his handsome, wounded face remained set hard as rock. “And if it defeats me, my brothers, it is free to release its chaos into the world.”

  Powderhand drew himself up. “You are the shaman. It is in your hands.”

  Hunting Wolf nodded. “You think also that I bring it, do you not? You think that to leave me here and take our camp back to the reservation would save you.”

  The young man looked anxious, the heat rising to his cheeks. Hunting Wolf made a small gesture with his hand. “I saw as I flew with the eagle, my friend. I meant not to hear your words to the company, but the spirit guided me down to your shoulder as you spoke to them. Understand me. I lay no blame at your feet.”

  Powderhand stood up abruptly, his face blazing now.

  “So you use your magic to spy on us? It seems that is a more simple spell than the one you cannot conjure to rid us of this demon.”

  He pulled his blanket over a heavily belted woolen jacket and left the tepee, a flurry of snow entering the warm circle as he let the flap of hide flutter in the wind after him.

  Hunting Wolf put a hand to his wounded cheek and spoke softly to Two Young Bears. “I am tired now, brother. Follow him and calm his anger, which grows from fear. I cannot.”

  T
he thick-set young man stood, put on his wide-brimmed hat and touched his heart in salute to his chief, leaving the warm tepee with more grace than his companion.

  Hunting Wolf let himself slump back on the piles of skins that made up his bed. He closed his eyes, listening to the sound of the wind and snow against the tepee and the small noises of Singing Tree working in her wooden bowl.

  Powderhand had touched a raw nerve. Why indeed could his magic not send this fiend back to the hell from whence it came? The eagle had shown him the nature of the thing many years before this, a sight which made him shrink in terror even now as he recalled it as a distant, dreamlike memory. And his father, and his father before him, and every descendant since the Kinchuinicks began, had all prepared each other for the possibility of the fiend’s return. Oh, the ugly misfortune that it should have befallen him to meet this abomination that had been spoken of through the centuries. Why not his father? Why not any one of the Kinchuinick shamans that had gone before? How he envied them their lives of peace, the lives they led using their magic and calling their spirits only to perform the simplest of domestic tasks. To save the sick. To heal broken love. To find the buffalo herd. These men were the ones who knew of the Trickster, but only in fireside stories and in the darker, more secretive information passed down among those whose task it would be to face it. But they never faced it. He was facing it now and he was resentful and childlike in the depth of his terror.

  Why had his father made Hunting Wolf know its names? He had been a conscientious student, listening to and memorizing the scanty details that were known of this dark and ancient spirit. He knew the nature of its blasphemous violence. But now, in the darkness of the night, lit only by the circle of fire, he was in despair that he knew little else. Nothing that would save them. For he was certain that it would destroy as nothing else had destroyed before, were it to shake loose the fragile chains that he alone seemed to bind it with and bind it without knowledge as to how he was able to contain such a force.