THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  Craig looked around him like he was a robber about to take money from a cash register. No one was watching him. He put his hand into the slit between the files marked by the yellow paper and pulled out what was attached to it.

  A photograph. A yellowing ten-by-eight black-and-white photograph of a corpse. Craig held it for a moment, looked across at Becker’s closed door, then, leaving Hawk’s drawer open, he stood up with the photo held down at his hip and walked swiftly to his own office.

  He closed the door and sat down heavily at the desk.

  How did Daniel get one of the photos from the Stoke file into his own possession? Did he surreptitiously ask for it when they’d been there, or did he perform the unpolicemanly act of swiping it when Cochrane had left the room for a moment? More important, why?

  Craig pushed the photo of the Kinchuinick corpse under the swivel-neck lamp and turned on the light. He’d looked at this already.

  It was the midshot of the body, a grisly snapshot of a mummified head and shoulders down to the chest, the skull grinning up at the photographer with that paper-thin, obscene sliver of dried skin between its teeth. The shot just showed the beginnings of the burst chest.

  Craig looked at it again. Carefully and closely. He ran his eyes over every detail of the picture, looking for something he may have missed when he glanced at it in Cochrane’s office in what seemed like a different lifetime, but was only days ago.

  Then he saw it. Around the neck and on the collarbone. Craig opened his drawer and rummaged for his magnifier. He found it, slid it over what he’d seen and tilted the light.

  It was faint but distinct. There was a mark around the body’s neck that looked like a macabre suntan line, as though the wearer had sported a pendant around his neck that had left its mark on the skin. Except this wasn’t a paler mark where the sun had been blocked from the skin by something solid. The opposite. It looked like whatever had been around the man’s neck had singed the skin like a brand.

  Craig could make out the line on one side of the neck that suggested a thin string or chain, and then just below the collarbone was the faint but distinct mark of an irregular circle. It was like a hoop. Something almost round, with a strangely shaped hole in the middle like a crude letter O.

  He stared at it for a minute, then sat back. Was that it? It was all Craig could see of interest that he’d missed the first time, but it wasn’t exactly earth-shattering. So the victim had been wearing some sort of jewelry when he died. Had he been robbed by whoever killed him? Probably. So what?

  What about it, Daniel? he thought. What was so fucking interesting to you?

  He looked again. The mark was quite distinct when you looked for it. He pulled at his mouth.

  Why would it have left a mark like that? The pathologist hadn’t even mentioned it in the report. No way now of knowing whether it was a burn or some skin-pigmentation disorder caused by an irritant. And what was there about it that had made a RCMP constable steal the photo and write himself a note?

  Craig sighed and touched the yellow note again. It was written hastily in scribbled letters. He could read it, but he was damned if he could pronounce what it said. It made him remember Katie Hunt, how important it was to get there soon.

  Craig got up and put the photo in his drawer, but he pocketed the yellow paper. Maybe Mrs. Hunt would not only know how to say it, but could tell him what the hell Daniel Hawk meant by Isksaksin.

  He was careful this time. They could be just sitting in their fat car on their fat asses in the street, or maybe they could be hiding from him somewhere smarter. That would be more likely, now that they knew he could shake them off. So Sam crouched under the car for what seemed like an age, until the kitchen light went off and gave him a dark cloak of blackness to move under and reach the back door. He hoped it would be open like it always was. Why would you lock your door in Silver? No reason at all. Well, at least it used to be that way, although maybe folks would start to turn their keys, now that human guts were starting to outnumber dog turds as a sidewalk hazard.

  It had wrecked him, the wait to get into his house. He’d watched Katie move around the kitchen like a delicate little animal in its den, and he longed to hold her and tell her he was here in the dark loving her. Once, she’d come to the window and gazed out into the snow as if looking for him, and he prayed she would feel his presence there in the yard, and willed her not to worry.

  The bite in his shoulder throbbed as if to remind him that things were tougher than that. After last night, she might not be that glad to see him burst through the door, mad-eyed again, with tales of the dead living, demon paintings and animals that ate their young.

  He hadn’t thought about their last disastrous coupling for hours, but it haunted him again now, alone in the dark, as he lay beneath the family car like a bug. He’d felt her hate last night as he came in her, and was lost in it, confused by it, devastated by it. He knew nothing anymore. Everything had changed and no one had told him the new rules.

  Sam still wasn’t sure why he didn’t want the cops to know where he was. After all, they were just watching him. He hadn’t been arrested. What could they arrest him for? But the nightmare events made him desperate to stay free and mobile. The thought of being in a confined space with nowhere to run from the dark thing that brought that madness was too much to bear. He wanted to move around silently for a while without the eyes of two men noting his apparent eccentricity. And he had to see Katie.

  It was important to move now while it was dark, in case an upstairs light came on that would stream into the snowy yard, picking him out for any watchers like a frightened actor on an empty stage. He got up and, keeping low, reached the kitchen door, opened it and slipped inside. The warmth of the room pillowed against his freezing face and hands, and he stood with his back against the door for a moment, savoring it. It was the second time that week he’d entered his house like a thief, and as he stood in the dark, feeling the heat and smelling the remains of a coffee brew, a huge and unexpected surge of anger rose in his throat.

  Sam Hunt had not expected to feel hounded again as an adult. It seemed to him before he met Katie that he’d been running and hiding for most of his life, disappearing into the forest to sleep on mossy beds, lying in snow holes with branches of evergreen to soften the icy floor, and returning to his home, as he was tonight, with a troubled, churning heart and a dread of being observed.

  He turned around, pulled the blinds in the kitchen, flicked the light on and called out.

  “Katie?”

  He walked through to the hall and heard the sounds of the TV from the living room. They were all in there, Katie on her feet by the time he pushed open the door, Billy in a curled ball on the sofa sucking his fingers, and Jess on the carpet with a mess of objects for her short-term amusement scattered around her in a semicircle.

  Sam locked eyes with his wife and gulped back a grief that was more profound than any he had known when he saw only two cold blue pools of mistrust watching him. She moved forward a couple of small steps, standing slightly in front of the children in an unconscious protective gesture.

  “Where have you been, Sam?”

  He looked around the room at these three strange people. The days when he would have had to beat them off with a stick to get air from the smothering of their welcome were gone forever. New rules.

  “I’ll be in the kitchen. Fix myself something to eat.”

  He left the room. Katie watched him go, looked around at Billy, whose eyes were wide and glazed, staring at the TV without seeing it, and made the decision to stay in the living room. Her numbness surprised her. Part of her had just become deeply tired of following her bruised and beaten husband around asking if he was all right, and she didn’t care for his tone.

  It said follow me and I’ll tell you where I’ve been. For the first time, Katie was not anxious to know; and more than that, she doubted if she could take another lie from him. He was in one piece. He could wait to speak to her. She stood f
or a moment looking at the closed door, then sat back down on the floor next to Jess, who was enjoying the victory of not yet being in bed, and busy deciding which object to put in her mouth next.

  Sam was not hungry, but he hadn’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours, and the weakness in his body demanded attention. He opened the refrigerator.

  Normally its white rubber-coated racks were stacked with cold cuts and cling-wrapped goodies that could be microwaved and consumed by any bounty hunter that came upon them. A big, white, happy confirmation that the Canadian way of life was a good way of life. Now, the lit interior displayed stained, empty shelves, a direct echo of the distress and unhappiness in the Hunt house. Sam’s heart ached at the sight, and he pulled out a carton of milk, shut the heavy door and drank with his back leaning against the humming appliance.

  The door from the hall pushed open and Sam stopped drinking, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The door swung shut again. Sam’s eyes flicked from head-height at the door to dog-height. Bart’s claws clicked across the kitchen floor toward his master. Sam smiled warily down at the fluffy gray-and-white head. “Suckered them to let you indoors again, huh?”

  The dog stopped in front of him, sat down on its haunches and looked up into his face. Its jaws were closed and the pale blue eyes looked up at him without blinking.

  Sam Hunt’s smile left his face like a footprint in wave-washed sand. The carton fell from his hand, exploding into a fountain of white on impact with the floor, but the passive husky neither flinched in fright nor bowed its head to lick at the milk swilling at its side. It remained perfectly still and watched the man, who was forming words with a small, tight mouth.

  “No, you fucking monster. Not Bart.”

  The swirling blackness inside the animal stirred in its dark pleasure, rippling under the dog’s skin like an animated disease. When it spoke, Sam could hear in its voice the agony of the animal that was fighting to be let free.

  “Bart’s been a very bad dog, Sam.”

  The foul rasping voice spoke in Siouan, and its timbre was deeper than those small lungs could afford. Cells were bursting in there, sinews snapping and twisting.

  “He’s been so bad he’s going to punish himself.”

  The dog looked up at Sam, and for one tiny second it was Bart looking out of the blue eyes in unimaginable pain and terror, before the black thing wrestled back its control. The dog’s jaws opened and with a movement of almost balletic elegance, Bart rolled on his back and ripped at his belly with glistening teeth. His jaws were surprisingly wide and the wedge of flesh that he tore off with the first bite was thick and substantial, leaving a hole the size of a saucer in which the gray-white of Bart’s intestines could be glimpsed. The dog’s blood spattered Sam’s trousers and ran in thick rivulets from the dark hole onto the floor to mix with the milk like an obscene raspberry float. Sam could not move. His mouth worked like a penny-catching fairground clown, his hands clenching and unclenching, but the rest of his body was immobile. It wasn’t until the third bite, when the dog’s jaws got through to the serious stuff and buried its bloody snout deep in its own guts, that Sam broke free from his shock and jerked into action.

  The wet tearing and growling noises from the abomination on the floor at his feet were threatening to make him vomit, but he whipped his eyes around the room, desperate to find something to end this torment. The snow shovel for clearing the path glinted at him from its place beside the back door. In one bound Sam grabbed it and skidded back to the horror in the pink milk. He held the tool by its shaft like a two-handed sword and lifted it high above his chest. As he brought the shovel down on Bart’s head, the animal was ripping its liver. The blade of the shovel came down harder than Sam could have hoped, slicing clean through Bart’s skull between his ears. An eye burst from its socket and the brains that had told Bart when to bark, when there was a chance of leftover chicken, where the warm spot in the kennel was, and what his beloved Billy smelled like, spilled out into the soft gray fur like porridge. The body was still, and the air around it moved as the darkness leaked away like the steam off hot urine.

  Sam stood with his legs wide apart, panting uncontrollably, hands gripping the shaft of the shovel like a spear. His tear-filled eyes spilled their load and the salty moisture joined the mucus from his nostrils running into his wet open mouth.

  There was perhaps a gap of three or four seconds between Katie opening the kitchen door and the beginning of her scream. But when it started, it shook her body like electricity, her arms waving and flailing at her sides as her mouth made that black oval of noise. She jerked as if shaken from behind, and the piercing intensity of her shrieking deafened him as he stood dumbly over the bloody mess, gripping his weapon.

  Had she not been screaming she would have grabbed Billy as he pushed past her and fell to his knees in the gore. But Katie did not have the power in her body to raise a protective, blocking arm. Billy knelt in the remains of his dog, the blackened blood seeping up the knees of his pants, and with an unflinching face he looked up at his father. The boy opened his mouth and from the back of his throat a tiny, thin wail started that seemed to be unconnected with the calm expression in his eyes. It was the noise of a small creature being tortured. Hopeless, forlorn, unfathomable in its agony. Sam looked from face to face, and the coil of rationality in him that was twisted seemingly beyond repair or recognition snapped.

  His big hands let the shovel fall as he turned slowly and walked toward the back door, opening it and feeling the cold air rush at him. Sam walked out into the night, and the kitchen door banged behind him like a pistol.

  48

  Calvin sat in the window of Rib Experience on Main Street, nursing his seventy-five-cent coffee and watching the madness outside. The RCMP had blocked every road out of town, and the line of cars stranded in the snow poured out their exhaust into the freezing snow-filled air as if they were angry animals bellowing to be freed.

  The cops had been into the restaurant, asking everyone where they’d been and who they were. Of course they’d been real interested in Calvin, but the guy who interviewed him wouldn’t even remember he’d seen the old Indian by now. He would look in his notebook later and find a page of scribbles that didn’t remotely resemble the words he thought he’d been writing at the time.

  But the workings of the RCMP were of little interest or worry to Calvin. He was waiting for something else. He knew it would come. He might as well be warm and comfortable when it got around to him.

  Under the tiny round table a ring of dried, blackened herbs encircled Calvin’s chair, big enough to contain him, but small enough to avoid being kicked by the waitress who came to fill his mug with fresh coffee from time to time. Anyway, her attention had been wavering when she realized that Calvin was going to be a one-cup-lasts-all-afternoon wonder, and for the past fifteen minutes he’d been alone with his cooling mug. She’d have thrown him out earlier, but there had been all the excitement with the cops, and she kind of liked the smell around him. Weird, but there it was.

  So Calvin waited. And when it came he was not surprised, and was prepared enough to hide his fear. The waitress noticed the old Indian guy in the window had a companion she hadn’t seen come in, and was quietly pleased. She went to fill Calvin’s mug and ask the tall, blond man if he wanted to see the menu. He turned his pale handsome face up to her and smiled, creasing his ice-blue eyes. “Just coffee, thanks.”

  “Sure. Regular, espresso, cappuccino?”

  “Regular. Black.”

  “Sure.”

  She walked away with the plastic menu still under her arm, disappointed there would be no rib experience happening at table nine in the window.

  Calvin looked at it with something like wonder. That the waitress hadn’t seen what he was seeing now was the most astonishing thing. How had mankind become so blind, he wondered? What else stalked the earth in such naked form that went unseen by the modern, car-driving, computer-punching, TV-watching populace? He shuddered w
ith a weary sigh as he studied the crude approximation of a human form sitting in the chair opposite him. Beneath the illusion of skin and behind the face there were yawning jaws, and row upon row of filthy ragged teeth, hungry for something they could not have.

  Yet.

  Calvin detected an irritated stirring in its obscene, cloudy form. The old shaman’s composure was clearly not what it had expected. He remembered Sam’s face running down the alley, eyes rolling in his head like a startled horse’s, and thought how this creature must be getting a taste for the fear it could conjure. He let it speak first.

  “Do you like what you see, Indian scum?”

  Calvin turned away, looked casually out the window and sipped from his hot, fresh coffee. When he spoke, it was in the ancient tongue, that long-forgotten form of Cree that only a very few elders and shamans could recognize, and fewer still could use. “No more than I like what I see when I watch the dung that falls from my shithole.”

  Although Calvin was not looking at the creature, he could feel the air moving with its ire. The waitress was back with its coffee, and he saw in the reflection of the glass that it smiled at her with that false face as she placed the mug in front of it. Great Spirit, if she could only see what she had served! Its blackness seemed infinite, pornographic in its lust for itself and everything it wished to consume. He turned to look at it again, knowing what would come next, and he prayed to the Thunder Spirit that he was right, that a Trickster could be tricked.

  It gathered itself, and Calvin knew that somewhere Sam Hunting Wolf’s body would be getting ready, against its owner’s will, to lose consciousness. His heart had started to beat a little faster now at that prospect.

  “Do you know my name?”

  Calvin looked into its blackness. “You have no name. You are nameless.”