Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  "Delicious!" Mother cried in glee from deep within the Headhunter's head.

  Bomb Shelter

  Vancouver

  Don't buy a new dress

  Don't hire a baby-sitter

  Don't pay for parking

  and

  DON'T ATTEND!

  Rather, stay at home and read a book and have a ball.

  The Friends of the Vancouver Public Library request the pleasure of your participation in a "novel event." Don't pay for a ticket, a baby-sitter, and parking and get all dressed up to attend a glamorous public function in shoes that don't quite fit. Instead, sometime on Saturday, January 13, send us a donation (it's 100% tax deductible). Then snuggle down with your bunny slippers in your favorite cozy chair and get into your novel, knowing that just about all the proceeds from this fundraiser will go to supporting the efforts of the Vancouver Public Library.

  My kind of party! he thought.

  Stamping his feet and hugging himself to ward off the cold, DeClercq stood in the concourse of Library Square, perusing the notice taped to the door of the staff entrance promoting The first edition of the Stay Home and Read a Book Ball as he waited for someone to answer his insistent pushing of the intercom button. He had no intention of wearing a dress and he didn't own a pair of bunny slippers, so he pondered whether all the Friends of the Library were women, and if not, how the gender-centric ad got approved in such an oh-so-proper P.C. institution, and what was this just about all the proceeds . . . but that was the cop in him.

  Answer the door, dammit!

  The wind roared in the concourse like a Colosseum lion.

  The teeth of its bite bit into his bones.

  The glory of ancient Rome survives in Vancouver, B.C. At the heart of this city with a downtown grid of tall, narrow, glass-faced buildings spreads a coliseum to rival Nero's sport. The only Christians fed to lions and gladiators clashing for a thumbs-up from the crowd are in History & Government on Level Six, unless you count novelists flayed by artless critics on the ground floor. The building, too, has suffered its share of rebuke, trashed by the Tinker Toy elite as "reflecting an ancient culture not relevant to a modern world-class city, blah, blah, blah." A full downtown block in girth and eight stories high (nine including the subterranean level), the Coliseum, opened in 1995, is a $100,000,000 offspring of the "free public library" launched with a $250 grant from the city council in 1887.

  Now, that's inflation!

  The security guard who released the door was six foot four in a blue uniform stretched as tightly around his bulk as Batman's get-up, with a ponytail cascading to his bottom and hands so huge they could tear the Mad Dog apart. Special Collections on Level Seven must recently have

  scooped a hell of an acquisition.

  The guard's name was Moe.

  Moe used a security card strung around his beefy neck to pop internal doors. The staff elevator conveyed them up to Level Four, shared by Business & Economics and Science & Technology. Popping a door between the staff area and the public shelves, Moe blazed a trail through B & E to the escalator and elevators dividing this half from that of S & T.

  "A lot of shelves," said DeClercq.

  "Twelve miles," said Moe. "We got a million books and room for a million more."

  "Must have been some move."

  "Six hundred truck loads. First book to arrive was the World Bibliography of Bibliographies. I got all the facts."

  "Security here dull?"

  "It's got its moments. Fingers took a punch at me today. This time of year we get a lot of street bums in to keep warm. Fingers is this blind guy madly in love with Eve. Eve's the sign on the women's john. All signs in the library are tactile and braille for the sight-impaired. The washroom signs are triangles for men and circles for women."

  "How Freudian. Who thought that up?"

  "It's code of the state of California."

  "Of course," said DeClercq.

  "Tonight I get a complaint that Fingers is back. I go to the women's john, and sure enough, he's standing there fingering the circle on the tactile sign. He's mumbling to Eve that Casanova is his middle name. I walk up and tell him to leave the sign alone, and he takes a swing at me for trying to steal his girl."

  Sex in the nineties, thought DeClercq. Anything goes.

  Science & Technology covers pure sciences such as astronomy, mathematics, and zoology, and also applied sciences like medicine, forestry, and engineering. Here is where you find information on patents, construction, cooking, car repair, computers . . . and gardening. Waiting for the Mountie behind the service desk sat an owllike woman in Coke-bottle glasses with silver hair tucked in a bun reading Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. Nothing was more comforting to DeClercq than dealing with someone who fit the stereotype.

  Moe bid him adieu and vanished.

  "Thanks for staying after hours. I'm Chief Superintendent DeClercq."

  "We aim to serve. I'm Charity Cox."

  "The Franklen Collection." "The collection, ironically, is scattered about."

  "Specifically, Pacific Planter for 1955."

  "Let's check the Q.R. file."

  Call him a Luddite, but DeClercq yearned for times past when libraries centered on books. The Coliseum was wired for the brave new world ahead, with seating for 1,200 readers and 800 computers, evidence of which was everywhere. Terminals to the left of him and terminals to the right; and fiber-optic vertical risers extending from the communications unit on Level Seven to switching points on the other floors. Virtual reality was closing fast, and he wondered if he'd see the day when the library checked out CD-ROMs of Monroe and Madonna and Harlow and other sexual fantasies for the plugged-in to take home to bed in their virtual-reality suits with a Suck-U-Lator attached to each wirehead's penis, gender-centrically speaking.

  Stay Home and Have a Ball.

  A fund-raiser indeed!

  But what really concerned him was the virtual abattoir. A serial killer like the Headhunter had grown out of mental trauma, some incident so horrific the mind was unable to cope, resulting in psychotic or psychopathic warp. With virtual reality applied to games like Doom, soon every mind will be able to live similar trauma at home. Locked in a slaughterhouse as "real" as any on Earth, chainsaw killers will buzz butt as wireheads run shrieking through slabs of bloody human meat hung on hooks. Many will overload from the terror of it all, an experience like dropping acid in a waxworks Chamber of Horrors, resulting in psychotic or psychopathic warp. In the near future computers will generate psychos for ViCLAS to hunt.

  Glory be, the Q.R. file was a card catalog.

  "The quick reference file cards what's not in the database," said Cox. "It's an index to continuations in the Doc Room beyond. Continuations are publications by organizations, and are alphabetically shelved in boxes by name of the group, not their newsletter. Here it is. Pacific Planter. The voice of Green Thumbs."

  She led him through a gate in the service desk to skirt ranks of "green stripe books" in the Reference Room beyond and U around to the Doc Room behind the Q.R. file. Rows of blue boxes lined metal shelves labeled University Docs, U.S. Federal Gov Docs, Canadian Gov Docs, and Foreign Gov Docs.

  "No Vancouver city docs?" he asked.

  "We file the hand that feeds us under Foreign Gov Docs," said Cox.

  Librarians' humor? he wondered.

  Continuations lined the shelves to the right. Cox found Pacific Planter under G for Green Thumbs and took down the box for 1955.

  "Anything else?"

  "No," he said.

  "Then, if you don't mind, Moe can see you out when you're through, and I'll go home to read."

  In your bunny slippers? he wondered.

  He thanked her and took the box.

  A building within a building, a rectangle in an ellipse, the Coliseum is a library turned inside out. The classic library layout is readers at the center and books around them. Here, the inner rectangle housed the books, and wrapped around it was an oval-shaped Reading Gallery which gave
the building its Roman look. The, gap between the inner core and outer arcade was spanned by open "suicide bridges" that reached ten feet across the skylit atrium. As DeClercq carried the box across, he peeked over the rail, a thirty-nine-foot plunge from halfway up.

  How long till some fool takes a swan dive?

  Seated in the gallery at a cherrywood desk, a huge Diahann Carroll gazing in at him, DeClercq gazed out at the Ford Theater and Sunset Boulevard.

  His eyes dropped to the intersection of Homer and Georgia below as a cop car turned the corner Al Flood might once have patrolled.

  The trees on Georgia were maples.

  Maples had brought him here.

  "We found the location in the July 1955 Pacific Planter," Elvira said. "Shall I show you the article on the bomb shelter?"

  He emptied the contents of the box out onto the desk. He leafed through the mimeographs until he found Pacific Planter, July 1955. The bomb-shelter piece was on page 5:

  READY FOR WAR, BUT HOPING FOR PEACE

  Maple trees flourish today above Mr. Albert Stone's bomb shelter. Mr. Stone acquired his property at a public auction of land confiscated from the Japanese during World War II—and this he says accounts for its fertility. "The place used to be a truck farm before the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor," Mr. Stone informed this columnist. Mr. Stone is quite a character.

  We stood today in his garden fronting on the mighty sweep of the South Arm of the Fraser River. This writer asked him why he had planted a maple garden above his recently completed atomic bomb fallout shelter. "Is that not a strange juxtaposition?" your astonished reporter asked.

  "Not at all," Mr. Stone countered. "When the commies send their nukes and the Big Hot One is on, this is one old man who's going to be ready. But until then me and my wife's memory will sit in our front garden."

  And that, gentle readers, is what brought your columnist out here today. For among the varied saplings of acer macrophyllum stands the only sycamore maple so far planted in western Canada. It is a hardy little plant and certainly worth the drive on a Sunday afternoon.

  It is perhaps the only acer pseudoplatanus that you might ever see.

  "My wife was from the Ukraine, God rest her soul. She brought that seedling to the West—it was her Freedom Tree. When she died, I moved it. ..."

  The Mountie took out his notebook and jotted down the address of Mr. Albert Stone's garden with the hardy little sycamore maple tree.

  Bushwhacked

  The North

  The dogs ate snow while running.

  Every bush and every tree was dressed in a coat of white. Huge flakes of hoarfrost crumbled under toboggan slats as the sleds slipped silently across the crusted drifts. Huskies pulled the Mad Dog, and malamutes pulled George. Both breeds had thick fur to withstand extreme cold, but short hair so ice didn't cling and weigh them down. Both sweated only through the; pads of their feet, now wrapped in dog shoes to protect them against ice cuts, small boots of leather and canvas pouched on all fours. Huskies are Eskimo dogs of unstandardized breed. Malamutes are Alaskan dogs with a wolf strain. The best sled dogs there are, deep-chested, long-limbed, strong, and stout, with ears pointed forward and tails curled like knights' plumes, they pulled these Mounties single file through the throbbing stillness of a cold Canadian night.

  "Haw!" turned them left.

  "Gee!" turned them right.

  This was how it was when the Force became myth, a fact confirmed by the smiles on both men's faces. With each mile they established deeper rapport, sharing the lead to equalize trail breaking between the teams. Only when dogs passed each other was the whip used, a quick flick in the air to keep them apart. The most powerful dogs were hitched next to the sled to handle "the wheel" on sharp curves when the rest of the team was pulling at an angle. The tug ropes of this pair were tied to the sled bridle ring, not the tow rope proper. Experienced, they knew how to avoid being run over.

  The fastest dogs were hi the lead. The importance of a leader sprang from there being no rein. The leader responded to verbal command, and his actions controlled the team. All dogs knew "Whoa" was the command to halt, but they kept pulling until the leader stopped. When he lay down during halts, the other dogs did, too. His job was to "hold out" the towline, keeping the other six in place, and when, like here, there was no trail, to cut one according to the driver's command.

  The Mad Dog's leader was Sitka.

  Ghost Keeper's was Wrangler.

  So through this wooded white waste came the night patrols, breath trailing behind them like jet streams, surrounded by unbroken solitude and pines blobbed with cream, a long, icy run of rime, frost, powder, and pack, the cold and the darkness, the darkness and the cold, a dreamscape where snow faded into phantoms like Big Foot and other myths.

  The dogs chose their own gait and speed.

  If one slowed, it was urged on by name.

  A two-minute halt every mile was enough to recuperate the teams.

  During a break the solitude was broken, too.

  A howl of unbridled terror.

  From a human throat.

  Shhhhewwww . . .

  Weird and wan, the Northern Lights shimmered above the frozen river as Vern and Bo hauled toboggans across the ice and through the shadows near the bank. Whatever scars might mar the land after thaw, they were smoothed over and hidden behind the white mask of winter. Winter was the season of the infinite here, the longest season of the year. This was a land hushed to its inner depths by merciless cold, the forest dark against the spectral dance of the aurora, the night so still and motionless that the streamers overhead seemed to whisper to Bo and Vern. .

  Shhhhewwww . . .

  But it was just an arrow from the bush.

  The razor-head sliced through Bo and carried on, a stealth cruise missile hugging the land. Spews of black blood pumped from his throat as Bo dropped to his knees in prayer, gargling something to the Lord as he pitched forward to kowtow the ice.

  Vern heard the thud behind and turned to see, just before another Shhhhewwww . . . whispered near his ear. The spike end of an arrow poked out the front of his chest, the feathers back there.

  His lung collapsed.

  It sounded like a lone wolf, this "Owwwwwww!" torn from Vern, a pitiful howl that echoed off surrounding peaks, but any bushman who heard the wail of pain would understand—some poor fuck was staring down the jaws of death.

  Vern was flopping about on the ice like a fish out of water. His hand that gripped the razor-head was black with blood, for, except for the hues above, this was a black-and-white world. From the woods along the bank a ghost emerged, all white except for the RealTree camo on his bow and yellow fletching on the arrows in a quiver behind his shoulder.

  The wounded man got to his knees, but collapsed on his chest, howling as the arrow rammed back through his lung.

  Snowshoes passed him, heading for Bo, and Vern saw a white glove tear off his buddy's toque to grip him by the hair, the bow placed on the ice to switch it for a knife. Then whack! the ghost swung the blade and hacked off Bo's head.

  Bushwhacked.

  As a trophy.

  Snowshoes passed Vern again, Bo's head dropping in front of his terrified eyes as the ghost vanished back there. It wasn't a friendly gesture that helped Vern to his knees, the hand that gripped his belt humping him off the snow, the other hand slitting the knife down the crack of his ass, and suddenly—riiip!—it was breezy back there.

  Dog-style was Vern's favorite position for sex, as long as he was on top.

  Which he wasn't tonight.

  Cresting the ridge, the Mounties gazed down on the Shegunia River, near one bank of which a figure climbed off another, gripping the underdog by the lianas wails of dread gibbered. His shriek was cut off as cleanly as his head.

  By the light of the Arctic moon they skidded downhill, applying brake chains to keep sleds from running into dogs. Then they were mushing up the frozen flow of the river as Winterman Snow, heads in one hand and bow in the othe
r, snowshoed up the bank to vanish into the snow-choked woods.

  There was movement across the Shegunia.

  The party of rebels from Totem Lake coming to haul in the weapons.

  Four of them.

  With AK-47s.

  As the Mounties braked to a halt near the headless bodies, they heard the whistle of Winterman Snow streak from the trees.

  Shhhhewwww . . .

  Hellhole

  Richmond

  From the Coliseum of the downtown library DeClercq drove south across the root of the tongue of Point Grey and over Oak Street Bridge to Lulu Island. Miss Lulu Sweet had been the star of the Potter Troupe when it played Victoria, the capital of the new colony, in 1860. Miss Lulu's dancing was most chaste and beautiful, gushed the Colonist. She was fairly smothered with bouquets and loudly encored. When the troupe later played New Westminster on the Fraser River, Miss Lulu asked, "What is that island over there?", and Colonel Moody of the Royal Engineers gallantly replied, "Lulu Island, Miss Sweet."

  That's how hokey names come to be.

  Lulu Island is the delta of the Fraser River, and is sandwiched between the North and South Arms. Around it are twenty smaller islands, but—except for the airport—they're just scenery. The city of Richmond blankets Lulu Island. It got its name, the story goes, when Mrs. Mary Boyd, wife of the initial reeve, opened her dining room for the first council meeting in 1879, and was allowed the privilege of naming the island town for her hospitality. She was born in Richmond, England. Until recently the delta had been largely farms, and one of the most fertile cornucopias around, but little minds dreaming of big bucks rapidly blighted that, and today Richmond is the most godawful sprawl you'll ever see, an instant home to rich refugees jetting out of Hong Kong, while food to feed the people has to come from California.

  Except the South Arm.