by Muriel Gray
Eden looked sad then. “No one be safe if he be left out there with no keeper to put him back where he can’t do no harm. He be the Trickster. Time was we could all trick him back some. You knows the stories. Then we gets to bein’ scared and believin’ in his tricks like my pappy done. And that be makin’ him real strong. No boy. You gonna die Indian, you be doin’ it when the time is right. You go ahead and says his names. It be better he knows who you is and who he is, so he thinks he knows who be puttin’ him back in his cage.” Eden had sat back with satisfaction. “He never get that right. Not once. That be our trick, boy. That be our big trick.”
Sam arched his back in his shaking bed, and abandoning all reason, all hope of survival and sense, he spoke through his teeth.
“You are Sitconski.”
There was a hissing sigh through the room, a pressure released, a new one building and a voice that was like dust talking said, “And?”
Sam was in Hell. Eden had said it, known it. Then he just kill you. He didn’t want to die. Katie. Where are you now, my Katie?
“You are Inktomi.”
“And?”
Sam could hardly speak. His throat was on fire.
“You are Inktomni.”
“And?”
“You are Inktumni.”
He writhed on the bed. His twentieth-century bed that had a pine headboard with an acorn carved in it, and a little notch above his side that Katie had done with a penknife for a joke after they’d done something particularly inventive one night.
His head tossed on the pillows, snug in their pillowcases that he had thrown in the washing machine and Katie had slung over the radiator to dry. All the familiar, ordinary things, now rendered twisted, grotesque and misplaced, bathed as they were in the ancient pollution of this nightmare. He would not open his eyes. He would not.
Even though the satisfied voice of a thing who now knew who it was, was addressing him again.
“Then destroy me.”
“No.”
He thought he heard the carpet tearing and the walls splitting. His bed rocked on its legs.
“DESTROY ME!”
Sam screamed at it. Calvin’s words this time. In that ancient guttural tongue. The Latin of Cree.
“You will destroy yourself!”
The room stopped its agitation. There was a pause and then the mass was growing smaller again. He could feel it. The sheet was a ball of cloth in his fist. Sam could sense the thing controlling its fury, weighing up the childlike opponent that was hiding his face in the covers. There was an age as it waited. The voice came again, calm and in control.
“Will I? Then before that, we must do some more of what we do best together.”
Sam opened his eyes slowly and turned his head to the chair. It was in human form again. Sam could only croak, hoarse with fear. “And what’s that?”
The pale face creased with a laugh that was not a laugh, and it got up slowly and left the room. Conventionally. Through the door.
Two things for him when he came back from the museum. They’d let Wilber go. And the deer. They’d discovered that the deer’s heart had burst open. Craig wondered which of the two pathologists that had arrived from Edmonton had done the work. They had the coyote too, although the way it had died seemed all too obvious.
He sat for a moment at his desk and watched the snow fall through the pencil blinds. No mention on the log from Edison and Patel that Sam Hunt had gone out Tuesday night. They’d observed him go to bed and the lights go out and then nothing till the next morning. But he had gone out. His wife knew. What did he do? Sneak out a window? His car hadn’t moved, so if he got up to Hawk’s, how did he do it?
He needed to speak to Hunt again. He caught sight of the dreary paper Katie had given him, sticking out of his storm-coat pocket. Craig leaned forward and fished it out, slapping it onto the desk in front of him with a sigh.
“A study and history of the occult beliefs of the Stony, Blackfoot, Kinchuinick and Flathead tribes of the western states of Canada, including field studies, observations and transcripted testimonials. By Dr. Aird Lennox and Chief Cecil Bows with the Wind. 1964.”
Catchy title, thought Craig. Bet the film rights have already gone. He sighed and flipped the first page over on its binder.
“To discuss in context the historical beliefs and surviving indigenous religious culture of the Native Canadian, it is important to assess the abstract as well as literal understanding of the word ‘reality’ to the Indian mentality.”
Jeez, this was going to be riveting. He leaned a heavy head on one hand and forced himself to read it. It would probably be of little use, but it wasn’t going to do any harm.
Wilber wanted a drink real bad. It was only ten before noon but he’d had a thirsty morning, what with those cops making him cry like that and telling them over and over again about the bird. He swallowed and looked behind him. They’d dropped him out in the suburbs, by all that staff accommodation for the hotel and ski workers, where there was a hostel for guys like Wilber. But he didn’t want a hostel. He wanted a drink. And he knew the guys in town would get him one. So he waited till the cops drove off, then he started to walk back into town. It was less than a mile.
The sidewalk was lined with big trees here. The houses and shacks hid behind them, like the trees were the reason for the street, and the houses were expendable. Such big trees.
A branch shivered suddenly above him and shook some snow down on his head as he passed beneath it. He looked up nervously, but there was no more movement. He pressed on, licking his dry lips and thinking of how warm the bar would be in the Keystone Hotel, and how cold the beer.
The branches above his head danced again with the weight of something moving through them. This time the snow fell like a waterfall. Something heavy. Wilber made a whimper. Up ahead there was a lane between the houses. It went down to the river, away from these big pines. He started to run. The breath swirled from him in clouds as his thin legs staggered to keep up with his body as it leaned forward into the snow and wind. He gained the lane and headed down it as the branches of the tree at the entrance bent and dipped. There were two men in the lane. One, a kid of about twenty in a big four-wheel-drive car with the engine running and skis on the rack; the other a man in work overalls, a plaid jacket and a baseball cap, leaning on the open driver’s window talking to him. They looked up at this haggard Indian running toward them, gasping and clutching his parka around the neck like a Victorian mining widow.
They looked at each other and laughed: he was being pursued by a small black-and-white domestic cat.
Wilber wasn’t looking behind him, he was just running. Stumbling and slipping, but running as fast as he could. The cat bounded daintily behind him, effortlessly keeping pace. Wilber fell over the hood of the kid’s car, gasping for breath.
“Gotta help me. It be comin’ after me again.” He pointed behind him, at the cat that was nearly there.
The guys laughed, and the man straightened up and crossed his arms. “You owe it money, Chief?”
They both laughed and Wilber scrabbled his way around the vehicle until he was behind the car. The cat jumped up onto the hood, sat down and looked at Wilber through the windshield and the length of the car.
Both men were amused and bewildered. The man walked forward and put a hand out to the cat. “Come on, puss. Stop givin’ the old guy a hard time. He ain’t got any fish. Just smells like he does.”
That cracked up the driver, and he hit the wheel in mirth. The cat slowly turned its head from looking at Wilber and regarded the man who was leaning to pet it.
“Don’t touch me, you ugly cunt.”
The jaws of both men opened, and the hand of the man to whom the words had been spoken stayed frozen in mid-air.
Wilber was nodding like a madman, screaming, “Ya see! Ya see. I told ya!” He looked wildly behind him, and realized he had got it badly wrong. This was not the lane that went down to the river. That was on the next block. This was a cul-de-sac behind
the staff quarters. It ended in three lockups. No way out. A dead end.
The man staring at the cat was trying to find his voice. Maybe he hadn’t heard that. He looked through the glass to his companion, whose face told him he had. He gulped, looked back at the still watching animal and found his voice, albeit a tiny, hoarse voice.
“What you say?” He was nervous, flabbergasted, but excited, willing the cat to speak again and confirm the miracle.
It looked at him with cool amber eyes. “So you want to die with that human excrement, do you?”
Its voice was deeper than should come from anything smaller than a bull and it wasn’t saying very nice things. The man with his hand out decided that if this was an illusion, he wasn’t enjoying it much. Slowly he withdrew his hand and moved back. Wilber was whimpering, scratching at the back window and his face alternately. “It got us now! Lord. It got us for sure!”
“Pump the horn, Kenny.” The man touched his friend’s shoulder and said it quietly. Kenny did as he was told, but only three out of the four beings jumped. The cat looked back at them passively. Kenny broke the spell. This was ridiculous. He opened the door and got out of the car.
Through his tears Wilber whimpered a soft no from the back.
Kenny closed the door and threw his older companion a look. “What we got scarin’ us here? A talkin’ cat, huh?”
There was no reply. Kenny lifted his hand up and banged it down hard on the shiny metal of the car hood, an inch away from the animal, accompanying it with a shout. It didn’t move. He backed off, afraid now.
The cat opened its mouth once more, and instead of a voice there was a dull growl, a vibrating, retching noise that was too loud and too low in frequency to come from the animal itself. The men stumbled back as the tiny body of the feline bulged for a moment, then gaped its jaws as a black sticky ooze exploded from its mouth, splattering onto the windshield with breathtaking velocity and force. The ooze hardened, rising into a glistening, crackling, insane form that was black ice.
Black ice with jaws that yawned and split. Black ice with talons that sliced and slashed. A heaving, writhing serpentine materialization of hate that quivered for only a second before it speared the two men through with razor-sharp barbs that ripped and pulverized as they penetrated the flesh.
The older man’s face attempted a scream as the rapier of ice that had slit him withdrew, pulling the hot contents of his upper body with it to spill viscously out into the snow. But the scream never happened, since his head was split in two by a second blow that cut it neatly below the nose. The attempted noise died in the O of the mouth that was left on its own, the decoration on a bowl of flesh whose contents were seeping gray and red brains.
The younger man was dead before he could react. The black glittering talons caught him under the chin, and while the spear of ice held his quivering body, the claws wrenched his head off with one smooth movement. It turned once in the air, then bounced on the roof of the car, rolled down and landed at Wilber’s feet. The Indian was collapsed against the back wheel now, dribbling through clenched teeth, and letting the hot urine that was pissing down his leg run into the snow beneath him.
The abomination let its prey drop and engulfed the car, sweeping over either side, scraping the metal with its hellish fluid yet solid body, and re-forming before Wilber, whose snot was running over a trembling lip. It had a voice, and the voice was the low thrumming of turning slaughterhouse blades, the suppressed screams of the tortured, the triumphant bellow of the demented killer.
44
The cold snout of the dog poked into his face, nudging him twice before leaving him with a sandpaper lick. His eyes opened and he tried to focus as flakes of snow, gray against a gray sky, tumbled down toward his iris. He blinked as one found its target. Where was he? He tried to lift his head from its pillow of snow, but his numb body ached in protest.
“What ya doin’, mister?”
A child’s face peered into his swimming vision. A round boy’s face, red-cheeked and with its hat flaps tied securely under its chin. A child? A dog? The sound of water. He was lying outside in the snow, but where?
He pulled one elbow painfully back into his body, and with an effort that made him wince, lifted himself up on it. By the river. Of course that’s where he was. In the park by the river, just like he’d planned.
A bright red jungle gym and three tall swings stood to his left, redundant in their winter mantle of white. The boy was standing with his hands in his pockets, his dog gone elsewhere to forage, and he watched as Calvin Bitterhand drew his legs up and attempted to stand. There was no helping hand from this little white boy. He watched with the same detachment one might observe a fish flapping on the rocks before being clubbed and bagged, a product of parents who told him that Indians shouldn’t be touched or spoken to. He’d already broken one rule but he was keenly observing the other. Calvin’s boots slipped in the ice beneath the softer white, and he fell painfully on his knee. He winced and tried again. With greater care he committed his weight to both feet and pulled himself erect. The kid spat thoughtfully.
“You drunk or somethin’?”
Calvin ignored the child and swept the snow from his jacket. How long? How much time had passed since he’d stepped out of the sweat lodge, dressed and re-entered its searing heat to fulfill the final part of his prayer for this journey? It should only have been seconds. It used to be seconds. But he was struggling with a body that could barely withstand the weight of its own flesh, and he had passed out as the journey commenced. He was not chilled through, not in that way he had been when he lost his fingers, in the cold that was so intense it was like heat on the skin, so perhaps it had only been seconds. The boy should know.
“How long I be lyin’ there?”
The boy shrugged, already bored. He didn’t care. “Dunno. Salty just found ya.”
Calvin looked across at Salty, who was lifting a leg to a plastic slide. Good. The boy had not seen him arrive. That would have been awkward. He looked across the river to the backs of the roofs in Silver’s main street. He could eat now. Eat and drink now that his fasting was over. Now that he was here.
He wiped his hands across his face and turned to the boy, who couldn’t care less if Calvin was hungry, cold, dead or alive. Salty would always get better treatment than any human from a child like this. Calvin could see the cold man in the child’s eyes and grieved for what he would become. He looked into those little brown eyes and smiled. The boy hesitated, then smiled back. He could smell chocolate cooking, like when his grandma was alive and she used to make those things with Rice Krispies and put them in little folded paper cups. There was laughter. He could hear it faintly in the distance and it sounded like the way his mom used to laugh before Dad left and they came to live here. It was so lovely and warm and safe.
He had three two-dollar bills inside his glove that his mom’s new boyfriend had given him to go and get some candy. But this man needed them. He didn’t want any candy anyhow. It didn’t taste the way those chocolate Rice Krispie things used to. He pulled the money out of his glove and handed it to the man. It felt good. He wasn’t used to giving folks things.
He stood in the park with Salty licking his bare hand, watching the old man walk away toward town, and the boy heard another tinkling peal of laughter that was so like his mom’s. Or was it just the ice breaking on the river, smashing into shards and bumping and spinning away downstream? It didn’t matter. It felt real good.
She couldn’t look anymore at the little boy that Jess wanted to cuddle. His haunted eyes avoided hers every time she tried to reel him in with a smile. She looked instead out through the window as Jess struggled into her coat and saw her son looking through the passenger window of the Toyota with eyes that were not dissimilar.
She snapped her head back around to the hall. “Thanks, Mrs. Chaney. See you tomorrow.”
“Prompt if you can, please, Mrs. Hunt.”
“Prompt.”
Katie swept Je
ss up into her arms and bundled her out to the car. Billy was withdrawn again. Gerry, waiting at the school gates, had brought him to her car ten minutes ago with a grim smile.
“How’s Sam?”
“Fine. Look, Gerry, I don’t know what to say. How to apologize to you both.”
“Then don’t.” Gerry’s face was full of friendship and love. She wanted to kiss him. Instead she carried on defending the indefensible acts of her husband. “He’s sick. We all know that now. We’re waiting for an appointment from Calgary.”
“And you?”
“Good,” she lied.
“Do you need us at all? We’re around.”
Katie had shaken her head; then, as Billy had crawled into the car, she’d enquired with her eyes how her son was.
Gerry shrugged a little and gave a look that said the same. Agnes Root was watching them from the steps, making Katie uneasy as she drove off.
All she’d gotten out of Billy was that he wanted Bart home. Well, now they were going to fetch him, and maybe it would cheer him up. She strapped a resistant Jess into the toddler’s seat and headed for the vet’s. Just keep on going, Katie. Just keep on going with these familiar family routines and you won’t have to think about it. Any of it. At least that was the theory. The practice was different. How could she stop thinking about where Sam was that night?
Her hand had hovered over the phone so many times this afternoon, to call home and hear his voice. But what if the phone kept ringing? What if he wasn’t there? Did she ever know where he was now, what he was doing?
“Will Bart be OK, Mom?”
“Sure. He’ll be fine. I guess he’s just got a cold or something.”
“Huskies don’t get colds.”
“Whatever.”
They were there. Billy started to undo his seat belt.
“Uh-uh. You stay with Jess. I’ll just be a minute. Get the back ready for him with that blanket, would you?”
Billy sighed but obeyed. She didn’t want him there, in case it was bad news. You never could tell these days. Seemed like they were cultivating bad news in the Hunt house like most people grew geraniums. She grabbed her pocketbook and dashed through the falling snow to the hospital.