by Muriel Gray
Henderson closed his sweating fingers more tightly around the crucifix and slowly brought it up in front of him. His voice was surprisingly steady. “In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord…”
Henderson faltered, aghast at what he was doing. Horrified at the duplicity of it. He was no Catholic priest. But he believed. Surely he had that much. And Christ would be with him. Henderson shouted, his voice booming in the hard space, bouncing back at him as if mocking him.
“I CAST YOU OUT!”
The animal cocked its head slightly. A human gesture of curiosity. It was looking at the cross without alarm. Then a laugh. That choking, gurgling noise from Hell’s sewers. And the whisper.
“And who is this… Jesus Christ?”
Henderson took an unsteady step back, the cross still held high in front of him. The hare hopped forward, still looking at the crucifix.
“Is this his totem, this Christ?”
It was almost a friendly enquiry. Except that the deep, dangerous voice of the animal was like syrup poured on rotting flesh. The stench of its malicious undercurrent was overwhelming.
There was a comical insanity to his situation that made a hard knot of hysteria grow in Henderson’s throat. He stepped back again, nearer the entrance and the light.
“What does it command, this Christ spirit? The wind? The earth? The water?”
It hopped toward him, once more closing the distance that the trembling minister had instinctively tried to lengthen.
James Henderson’s head was light with terror and confusion, and as he blinked down at this abomination he began to imagine the sight of himself from outside his body. He saw what anyone would see were they to step through that arch of light and come upon him. A tall, thin Scottish minister, dressed only in a dark woolen vest, thick black trousers and rough cotton shirt, with the cross of Christ held high before him, standing comically brandishing it at a tiny hare. What in God’s name was he doing? The arm that held his cross shook.
And then the memory of the dead and mutilated men came to him, the unbearable depravity of those deaths. His anger grew and slowly his arm stopped shaking. He growled down at this nightmare and held his cross tightly. “He is no spirit, you foul demon. He is the son of God.”
From the animal a laugh began that was so internal and intimate that Henderson questioned whether it happened only in his own head.
“The son of God!”
It spoke the words with relish as it laughed on and on, and with that laugh James Henderson felt his last hope trickle from him. His faith. He could see almost straight into the heart of the corruption for a moment, see its amusement at this spirit it knew nothing of, and with terror he understood Hunting Wolf’s words.
Older than Christ. Much, much older.
Had no one awakened it from its centuries of deviant slumber to tell it the Good News? Did Christ’s message not reach back to these ancient creations? He was lost, adrift with doubt and desertion. His Christ. The spirit that demons quaked before in his world was a stranger to the demons of the Indian. How could that be? How could that be if He truly was the son of God? Henderson slumped to his knees and began to weep.
“Oh, Jesus. Sweet Jesus.”
The hare stopped laughing and seemed to sniff the air, and from its very core there came a deep bubbling sigh of delight. The hiss of a whisper again, this time with an air of purpose.
“Ah, Jamesss. Our friend sleeps.”
She ran after him, gasping with the effort as the deep snow sent her tumbling with its hidden holes and branches. But panic kept her moving, her mother’s heart beating in panic for her only remaining child. The only thing she had left.
“Walks Alone! No!”
She watched his tiny frame leap nimbly over a fallen trunk and dart behind another tree. Great Spirit, why was he pursuing the man Henderson? The boy was running in the tall white man’s tracks, and she, like a fool, was running behind like a wolf after a hare.
She would not lose her son. No. Not after Snowchild. She would die first. And she sensed great danger. What instinct had made her follow Walks Alone as he pretended to go out for firewood? A mother’s? Perhaps, she thought with a tiny spark of hope in her aching heart, a wife’s.
How she longed for Hunting Wolf. But it had been Walks Alone who had made her doubt him. She had a son to protect. She had been strong in making Hunting Wolf go, making him a fugitive. Though she longed for him still. Ached for him. But she would not lose her son: she would follow him to the edge of the world.
Singing Tree pulled her legs from the deep hole and stumbled back into the tracks that the boy was following. They were heading for the white man’s hole in the mountain.
So be it. She ran on, and her voice that continued to shout his name was muffled and deadened by snow and the thick solemn pines.
Walks Alone gasped to regain his breath and whirled around in search of his father. The hole in the snow marked where he had lain, but he was no longer there. The man Henderson must have helped him up. Where would they shelter? He looked toward the tunnel entrance yards away and narrowed his eyes.
There, only feet from the arch, was a man-shaped curve in the snow, black fabric showing through the mound. Walks Alone gasped soundlessly and sprinted forward. The thick snow had all but covered his father’s immobile face, and the boy swept it off, almost crying with relief that he swept it from a warm face. Hunting Wolf was alive.
Alive, but dead to the frenzied shaking that Walks Alone employed on his shoulders. He put his face to his father’s breast rising and falling and wept.
Too late. Too late to stop the black sleep coming over his father again. And what was the filthy thing he feared beyond reason doing with this slumber? As if to answer him, there came a noise from the tunnel that nearly stopped his heart. A human scream so shrill yet deep, of immeasurable suffering and agony, bellowed from the black arch.
The boy’s eyes were wide with terror. He kept deadly still, waiting for more, and when the silence was unbroken he snapped his head back to his father.
Quickly he fumbled beneath the black coat that covered Hunting Wolf’s naked body and found the small medicine bundle and knife that were tied around his wrist with a thong. He fished about in the small leather sack and found the bitter leaves, the ones he had been taught about. Walks Alone placed the leaves on his father’s chest, took the knife from its sheath in two hands and raised it above his head. The prayer. How did it go? Would it work, spoken only in his brain and not out loud? He had to try. There was no more time.
He formed the words in his head, repeating them as if with his tongue, and swayed his head in rhythm to his phantom chant. There was a new noise from the tunnel. A deep scraping roar. Something on the move.
He raised the knife higher and screwed his eyes tighter.
“NO!”
His mother’s tearing scream made him open them with a start. She was yards away, her face a mask of horror. Walks Alone looked at her once, then turned his head back to his father and brought the knife down in a shining arc.
Singing Tree collapsed into the snow, wailing like a wounded animal. The boy lifted the knife and brought it down a second time. The roar in the tunnel increased.
Beneath him, his father’s chest bled from the two perfect surface cuts that described the first shape of the Thunder Spirit’s mark, the herbs at the point of the crude V. And as Walks Alone watched, Hunting Wolf’s eyes flickered and his mouth started to twitch and drool.
The boy looked to his gasping mother, a world away on her hands in the snow, and smiled.
When the hare opened its mouth, wider, much wider than the mechanics of the jaw had been designed for, James Henderson realized he was going to die. A paralysis came over him that was mental as well as physical, temporarily stopping his fear as well as very nearly stopping his heart. He watched almost with wonder as the mouth of the ruined animal split and burst, and the black bile burst out of a body that would have had to have been a hundred times the volume in
order to contain it.
The fingers of Henderson’s hand opened and let his crucifix drop to the ground.
There was no God. How could there be?
No God could let this abomination be.
The black, stinking bile was solid now. Within that strange, dreamlike state of being beyond terror, Henderson knew that the grotesque Kinchuinick totems he had seen, the wooden nightmares of gaping jaws and rolling hate-filled eyes, were sculptures, not fantasy. Here was their model. The ice was forming it. And the rock and the ice and the crawling viscous membrane of scum that held the component parts together combined in one giant creature that now stood on great taloned hind legs and regarded him hungrily with a pornographic stare.
And no one to pray to. An empty universe, deaf to man’s triumphs and failures, where neither good nor bad was rewarded or punished, where life could begin and be extinguished without purpose.
When the talon of ice shot out and pierced Henderson’s chest, his scream was as much for that glimpse of Godless chaos and bottomless dismay as for the agony that seared him and scythed him writhing to the ground.
57
Eric Sindon leaned against the wall by the wine table and scanned the room. There weren’t very many nice people in it. Same at every celebrity ski. It attracted the ones who didn’t give a dog’s ball for charity. They merely had cash and a desire to swan around the hotel with their I’M SKIING FOR THOSE WHO CAN’T badges on, getting on the nerves of the famous people who for once could neither complain nor escape.
He mused for a moment what the count would be in here right now if Saint Peter appeared with the trumpet that sounded Judgment Day. Would this be a room full of good, like the badges suggested, or a watered-silk wallpapered holding area of evil?
He thought of the decent families who dropped their dollars as a matter of course into the charity bins in the lodge restaurant, never questioning their obligation to do so. How come they never came to these bun-fights? They didn’t. But they would line the ski course and hold their children up to get a view of the skiers, and they were always the ones who stopped and spoke kindly to the poor bastards the money was for in the first place; the cripples and the cancer victims who were always wheeled out to see the heroes skiing for their benefit. He had watched those good-hearted people and wished they could see through this crowd of perfumed piranhas pretending to do good.
That guy over there with the Rolex on. What did he do to get his money? Something decent? Some fucking chance. Eric had watched one of the company girls ask him to contribute to the raffle that was an extra to build a conservatory for the hospice in Stoke. He’d watched that mouth spit the words into the girl’s face, “I paid enough for this frigging ticket already, sweetheart.”
That mouth was now being stuffed with pastry and shrimps. Eric had to turn away.
He took a last sip from his glass, put it down on the table and went in search of something to do. His muse was over. Saint Peter wouldn’t find many candidates for Heaven here. If Sam Hunt was really the killer, Eric felt like calling him up and asking him to the party. He’d be in good company. They could all go to Hell together.
The cry of despair had lasted longer than Calvin could bear. Sam was like an animal in a gin trap. He wailed through gritted teeth, his tears unchecked and seemingly endless.
Calvin buried his head in his arms and waited, praying for his young apprentice’s grief to subside.
So Sam had never grieved. Calvin understood. This outwardly strong, handsome man had buried his sorrow for betrayal, for a lost childhood, lost parents, a murdered grandparent and a heart that he believed to be black with guilt, kept it all so deeply buried for over two decades that the sudden exhumation of all that horror was tearing him to bits.
Calvin hadn’t grieved either. He had merely drunk. But as he raised his head and looked across the fire at the contorted face of his beloved boy, he wished he too had time to release the remorse.
But there was no time.
“Sam.”
The young shaman put a hand to his face and drew a shuddering breath, quenching the next howl that was waiting to find a voice. Calvin spoke again.
“Sam. You must return home. Fetch the Isksaksin.”
Sam panted, his eyes closed and his teeth still grinding.
“SAM!” Calvin put aside sympathy and barked his name with urgency and authority.
Gradually Sam’s breathing calmed and he opened his swollen eyes to regard Calvin. He wiped his face with a sleeve and straightened his back. “How can I go home?”
“You must. Go unseen, and return.”
Sam stared at him through puffed eyes, then nodded.
Calvin reached for more wood and found none. It was as though the small matter of Sam finding his way home and back here again, when the whole world was after him, was as nothing. Calvin stood wearily and walked slowly toward the tunnel entrance.
“More wood.”
It was both an explanation and a prompt that Sam should go. The fire was low and time was short.
Sam looked back at the red, flickering embers, and the old man disappeared into the night, betraying his proximity with the sounds of branches breaking and the crunch of feet on ice. He looked into the low fire, took a shuddering breath and his shoulders slumped in weariness. His eyes were sore and heavy with crying and he closed them and put his head on his knees, letting the heat from the glowing wood warm him.
It was so very cold.
Colder than Hell.
Cold because the fire was out.
Sam’s head arched up off his knees and his eyes blinked in the dark. Not even a tiny red glow lit this deep velvet blackness. Because the fire was out and had been out for a long time. Because the man who had slept alone beside it, for God knows how long, hadn’t noticed its embers cool and die.
“CALVIN!”
He leaped to his feet and screamed into the darkness. An echo threw it back at him like a punch.
Sam stumbled toward the entrance, the arch only dimly described by the reflective white snow outside. He staggered out into the snow between the tracks and yelled again.
“CALVIN!”
The falling snow caught his frantic shout and wrapped it in a thick, deadening silence. There was no echo out here.
Worse.
There was no reply.
“Where’s McGee?”
Constable Bell looked up from the computer with distaste at Becker and the two new guys in suits.
“I think Staff Sergeant McGee has gone back to the Hunt house.”
The reinforcements from Edmonton that flanked Becker caught that heavily barbed reminder of Craig’s rank and exchanged looks.
Becker was tired, but his energy was quickly rekindled with irritation. “Why?”
“Mrs. Hunt called. Left a message that he was to call her back. Guess he just went straight there.”
Becker walked back toward his office without response and the two men followed him.
Jeff Bell muttered “asshole” under his breath and resumed his two-fingered typing. The sooner they pulled in this bastard Hunt, the sooner these goons from Edmonton would be gone. He looked up from the screen. Then, maybe, they could get back to normal. Maybe bury Joe and Dan decently, instead of letting them lie there in the morgue. Maybe get that traveling circus called the press out of Silver and back under the stones they crawled out from.
He sighed, took a gulp of cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup and got back to the dull routine of typing in statements.
Inside his office, Becker was sitting on the desk with his hands out wide, gesturing to the two other men. “I can’t stop him. Not if she asks to see him.”
The younger man looked at him coldly. “The reason you’re here is because officers aren’t supposed to investigate cases in which they have personal involvement. You wouldn’t call this personal?”
Becker moved his hands again. “What can I do?”
“Want me to spell it out, Staff Sergeant? Call him back.
Tell McGee he can’t see Katie Hunt until we’ve found and arrested the wagon-burner.”
Becker shrugged in his discomfort and called through the open door, “Alice. Get the guys outside the Hunt house to go in and pull out McG… Staff Sergeant McGee.” He looked at his audience of two. “He turns his radio off. Phone’s off the hook. The press.”
They looked back at him, unimpressed.
“Well. You asked.”
Craig remained silent, looking into the empty fireplace as though Katie’s voice were coming from there. He’d said nothing all the way through Katie’s bizarre recounting of Billy and his crazy dreams. Now she’d finished, she expected some response. Katie looked at him, studying his ashen face. He looked ten years older than he had last night.
“What are you thinking?”
He looked up at last. “That you shouldn’t give a nine-year-old boy sleeping pills.”
She sighed. “No. You shouldn’t.”
Craig watched her writhe on the spit of guilt he’d unintentionally skewered her with, and softened his voice. “You accept his reason for being frightened by Sam?”
“I accept that he was scared by a dream and not by anything Sam did to him in real life. Yes. Very much so.”
“But not the rest?”
“Come on, Craig. He’s been in shock.”
“Bart was killed, Katie. You were there. Not a dream. We’ve got the dog in a plastic bag down in the morgue, with an evidence number tied to what’s left of it. You’re telling me you believe that Sam was killing the dog out of mercy to save it from… killing itself while possessed?”
Katie got up from the sofa and walked over to the window. The curtains were drawn and she fingered them with her back to the policeman.
“No. Of course not.”
“Then why believe Billy about Sam not hurting him? And why did your loving husband kill the dog if it wasn’t like Billy said? If it wasn’t a demon in there?”
She whirled around at him, eyes blazing. “I don’t fucking know. I’m just telling you what Billy told me. OK?”