"There will be women who identify with Spann. She did something to take back the night. I don't think men realize the anger in us. Remember that fellow last year who caused a bar fight between two women by two-timing them? When patrons tried to stop it, he waved a Magnum around, then stuck the gun down the front of his pants and accidentally blew off his cock and balls. To women it wasn't a tragedy of poor guy, but a cause for jokes like 'You can have him,' 'No, you can have him,' as if said by those two-timed."
"I agree," Robert said. " The world would be safer if every punk with a gun blew his genitals off."
"To many Spann struck a blow for us."
"I think that's why it's called the battle of the sexes. What Amazons who voice that forget is Spann also killed them."
"That's why I'm here. I brought the missing link." In her hand Carlisle waved an audiocassette. "This was among the monologues George Ruryk taped in his sessions with patients."
They sat around the horseshoe desk and listened to the tape:
". . . but what I remember most of all is those rings piercing her lips.
"Suzannah's lips.
"Suzannah was my Mother.
"It was Mardi Gras time in New Orleans ..."
". . . we arrived from Canada, after she killed Dad, by poisoning him to watch him die before cutting a hole in the lake. ..."
"... I watched her walk toward me through the penis of the keyhole. Have you ever noted a keyhole's phallic shape, the knob at top for the rod of the key and shaft below for the teeth? As she neared, candelabra in hand, her head and feet, then breasts and knees, then stomach and thighs disappeared, until all that filled the penis was her thatch of pubic hair. ..."
" '. . . Are you your father's spawn? Or do you belong to me? Prove you're mine. Unlace me, Sparky. Then kiss your Mother's lips.'
"I began to screech, and weep out of control.
"Daddy! Where are you, Daddy? Help me, Daddy! Please!'
"('i'm here, Sparky, i am you.'), I heard him say inside me. ..."
". . . two-faced Janus head with back-to-back devils' tongues curving up to lick the jungle air.
"Don't look away, babe. I got the hots for you. Just walk right into me and let the animal loose. Come on—
"and eat me, child. Take your Mama awaaay!
"With a growl Selena clutched my arm. ..."
The tape finished.
Silence engulfed the room. Then Carlisle said, "Katherine Spann was a deeply repressed psychotic homophobe. Homophobes fear and hate homosexuality. Her homophobia was induced by her mother forcing incest cunnilingus on her amid horrific dungeon torture sessions. Suzannah was getting back at her for being Alfred's child. An unwanted child her husband had forced her to bear, which was conceived during sexual abuse while he was posted to remote RCMP detachments in the north. It was in the Arctic that Suzannah poisoned him, hiding the body under the ice with his daughter as a witness."
Robert tapped the background article on him in the morning paper. It mentioned his friendship with Alfred Spann, and that Men Who Wore the Tunic was dedicated to the corporal. Read between the lines, it hinted that Katherine Spann was like a surrogate daughter to him, the result of his own daughter, Jane, being kidnapped and killed by terrorists.
So many stories.
So many links.
"Alfred Spann was my mentor in the Force. From him I learned how to police the north. He loved the wilds, and sought postings near the Northern Lights, including here in B.C. beside the Alaska panhandle. Before Alfred 'vanished' on Arctic patrol, I met him and his family in Montreal. Suzannah was French and sexy. The Bardot type. And Kathy was the darling of her father's love. I recall the baby crawling on the floor. 'Robert, do you see it? Something in her eyes. Have you ever seen eyes sparkle like that? Sparky, come to Daddy.' She crawled to him."
"Sparky?" said Anda.
"Sparky," he repeated. "That was Alfred's term of endearment for her. Montreal was the last time we met, when he entrusted me with Wilfred Blake's gun. He said, 'Keep this for me until I return.' Then he went missing on patrol, and Suzannah took Kathy away to New Orleans. I next saw her when I came out of retirement to command the Headhunter case, and found to my surprise that she had joined the Force."
"Now we know," Anda said, "what happened to her in the years between."
"Father killed. Dungeon tortures. Acid in Ecuador. No wonder her psyche fractured during such a fragmented life."
"You understand how dissociation of consciousness works?"
"Sort of," he said.
"Dissociation is our psychological refuge from the memory of traumatic events which overwhelm the mind. It is how we protect ourselves. Thoughts are 'dissociated' when they are divorced from the main body of consciousness, and control over them is not exerted by the main personality. Sometimes horrid traumas are banished from the field of consciousness by repression, the mechanism in our mind that locks thoughts away in the dungeon of the subconscious. The way dungeon thoughts escape is by fooling the jailer, disguising their true source so the memory can break jail. One disguise is hallucination. A hallucination is a false sense impression. The patient sees something that doesn't exist or hears an imaginary voice. In Spann's case that voice was her mother, and Mother waged a war with her for mental control. A break with reality is the symptom of psychosis."
"Mother—Suzannah—ordered her to kill?"
"No and yes," said Carlisle. "Sometimes the stream of consciousness will break across, with the content of consciousness after the break divorced from the content of consciousness before. Imagine a film spliced into a film on a different subject. All relations between consciousness before and after are severed, and neither is aware the other exists. Psychiatrically, consciousness is interrupted by this sudden appearance of dissociated thought that hijacks the main body of consciousness for a while, before the second personality just as suddenly disappears."
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?" said DeClercq.
"The generic term is 'double personality.' We call unawareness between them 'psychogenic amnesia.' That's common in dissociation."
"Sparky was her Mr. Hyde?" said DeClercq.
"Sparky was her psychological bond with Dad. ('i'm here, Sparky, i am you.') 'Are you your father's spawn? Or do you belong to me?' Sparky, like Mr. Hyde, was born of drugs."
"Ecuador," said DeClercq.
"Realm of headshrinking Jivaros."
"Selena had no idea who she was 'turning on.' She tried to seduce an acid-addled homophobe, and in effect made herself a stand-in for Suzannah, which spewed rage up through the volcano of repression to erupt as full-blown psychosis. With one horn of the double dildo sunk in her vagina, Spann found herself with the other horn jutting like a penis. The borderline between female and male is blurred, so acid took the homophobe across the gap of dissociation to become Sparky, Alfred's 'spawn.' As a heterosexual male bonded with Dad, she could rape Selena as a stand-in for Mom, and revenge the childhood sexual abuse she suffered."
"It's almost enough to convince me Kipling got it right," said DeClercq. " 'The female of the species is more deadly than the male.''
"Sexist," chided Carlisle.
"I said 'almost.' "
"I was wrong about the killer not climaxing during the rape. Now we know why no semen was deposited in the Headhunter's victims. Shrinking the head I got right in part. It wasn't the orgasm aid of a masturbating male, but the fetish a female homophobe used to sew shut the menacing maw of Mother's sex."
" 'Prove you're mine. Unlace me, Sparky. Then kiss your Mother's lips.''
"Lacing reversed that sexual abuse, and proved she 'belonged' to Dad."
"Electra complex?"
"If you adhere to Freud. Imagine the psychological satisfaction in raping and shrinking Mom. So that's why the Headhunter struck again and again. According to the papers, you found her father's Red Serge uniform in the bomb shelter?"
"Torn and bloody."
"That's because she wore it while killing 'Mom' as 'Da
d.'"
"Why did the Headhunter taunt me?"
"You were Alfred's friend. You stood in for him. A taunt by Mom at you as Dad set up the next killing. In the realm of madness, symbolism reigns. Fantasy becomes reality. Or perhaps she was expressing Nietzschean will to power. Announcing to the world that she was a victim no more. That she was now master of her existence and no one could stop her."
"The Mounties always get their man," said DeClercq dryly. "We took 'man' too literally and allowed her to be that master."
"She was a psychotic transsexual. A transsexual is one who, though not a homosexual, psychologically identifies with the opposite sex."
"Spann was perfectly placed to frame John Lincoln Hardy for the Headhunter killings. She planted the head she cut off and the knife she used hi his drug shack up the mountain, then, after he returned, took him down. When I reopened the case recently, she made me suspect another Member framed Hardy.
"A Vancouver detective found her cache of shrunken heads and the dual dildo she had brought back from Ecuador. Spann ambushed him and my wife to recover the evidence. She killed Genny and wounded the cop, who fled up the alley behind his apartment. Spann hid the dyke's prong in a garbage can and burned the heads in the tin in the photo I showed you, then went after the cop. She gunned him down, but was hit herself, and ended up hi the hospital before she could remove the dual phallus. Investigators thought it was refuse reflecting the sexual mosaic of the West End, and left it as trash beside the ashes and meaningless rings.
"I sat vigil by her bed till she came out of her coma. 'When you're better,' I told Spann, 'I hope we will be friends. It may be late, but I aim to keep a promise to your father. Just as he was to me, I'd like to be your mentor. I have something for you.' I set Blake's gun on the bedside table.
" 'This belonged to your grandfather. To Inspector Wilfred Blake. Your father left it with me the last time we met in Montreal. Even then it showed, though you were just a child. That determination in your eyes. That will to be somebody. I know you're going to do it. That you'll carry on the legend. Keep on going like you are, and you might—just might—outdo even Wilfred Blake."
DeClercq tapped the background article on Spann m the morning paper.
"After the Riel Rebellion of 1870, Blake was sent alone across the Canadian prairie by dog sled hi winter to report on the state of the West. His recommendations led to the formation of the North-West Mounted Police in 1873. He quit the British Army to join the Force, and almost single-handedly forged the myth of the Mounties. He vanished in the Rockies in 1897, while chasing the lone survivor of the Last War Cry, the standoff mounted against us by Almighty Voice. The same Almighty Voice whose face appears on shirts worn by militants at Totem Lake.
"Unknown to us, Blake was a cold-blooded racist, who used his position to hunt down and kill Indians for sport. I exposed him for the psycho he was in Bagpipes, Blood, and Glory.
"Alfred Spann was the illegitimate son of Blake, conceived just before the inspector vanished. He didn't live up to his father's legend, but he was a mentor to me. Blake's revolver was found near the foot of Windigo Mountain by Members dispatched to hunt for him. Alfred fell heir to the gun which was eventu ally left with me. Now I discover he was a sexual bully abusing his wife and returning runaway native boys a pedophile at the residential school.
"I gave Blake's gun to Katherine Spann, and now we learn this about her. It makes me wonder if something was passed down in their genes, and if that gun is a metaphor for insanity."
"Perhaps," said Carlisle.
"After the Headhunter case Spann served Special X around the world. God knows how many foreign women lost their heads to her. But if the Headhunter killings were homophobic revenge by a psychotic transsexual, how do we account for Sparky turning his hate on males after I brought Spann back to Vancouver?"
"Ruryk," said Carlisle.
"Of course," grasped DeClercq. "Her head got shrunk by the kink shrink."
"Spann was tormented by Mother. The hallucination. She didn't know about Sparky. Psychogenic amnesia. When she consulted Ruryk, he applied his kinky psychotherapy to her. 'External' discipline would bring Mother under control. He made her crawl naked on her hands and knees to him, the same way he made the women who complained crawl, and the same way you saw her crawl as a baby to Alfred. Then the father figure lashed a whip across her back."
"Drugs? Hypnosis?"
"Possibly. You saw George. He was crumbling apart. He fell prey to the psychiatrist's fallacy: getting his own point of view mixed up with those of patients. Here we have a woman suffering severe 'attachment disorder.' A parent loves and bonds. The child becomes attached. We all need that early stability. Mother abused her, so she bonded with Dad. Now Dad hi the form of this father figure abused her, too.
"For years she had battled with Mother for control of her mind. Did Mother ask forgiveness for hurting her child? Did she say she only did it because Alfred hurt her? Did Spann give her mind over to Mother because she craved somebody's love? And did Mother suggest she bond with her by getting even with Dad? Doing to him what he did to Mother which made her hurt her child? First the male victims were random stand-ins. All men were Alfred because they were raped facedown. But in the end, only the abuser himself would do, so Mother ordered Spann to kill Ruryk."
"Did Spann kill men as Sparky or herself?"
"She killed them as Mother, who now controlled her mind. Mother, too, had used a double phallus on clients in that dungeon in New Orleans. Mother made her shrink Wren's head and send it to you, taunting both Alfred's student and the Force that sent her north where she was sexually abused."
"That explains why the head was mailed before news of the decapitated body at Totem Lake was released to media. Spann heard about it within the Force, and sent the head to what? Confuse us?"
Carlisle shrugged. "Her psyche was breaking down. That's why she saw Ruryk. Not everything in the closing stage will make internal sense. But what we have in the Ruryk tape is the last piece of the puzzle. Spann was a Frankenstein monster stitched together from an array of female and male parts. Ruryk made the same mistake as Selena in Ecuador. He had no idea what he was 'turning on.' "
Anda got up to leave.
"One more question, Doctor? When I return from the north, would you have dinner with me?"
Sacred Land
Hazelton
Redcoat versus Cree.
The Last War Cry.
Almighty Voice, a Plains Cree, was jailed in 1895 for killing a steer. He escaped from the guardroom at Duck Lake, so Sergeant Colebrook rode out to bring him in. When the Mountie found the fugitive days later, the Cree shot him through the neck with a shotgun. It took two years to track Almighty Voice, but the renegade was finally spotted near Duck Lake, where he and three Cree youths were chased onto a bluff and surrounded. Backup arrived and the bluff was stormed, a fiasco that cost the lives of two Mounties and a volunteer. The Cree dug in for a last stand.
News of the standoff reached Regina during a ball to see a contingent off to London for Queen Victoria's Jubilee. Fearing the Cree might rebel in mass, H.Q. sent twenty-five troops and two artillery guns to the bluff. The nine-pound Maxim gun pointing east, the seven-pound Mark II aiming south, both cannons opened fire at dawn. The Cree were blasted with shrapnel until seven a.m., then side by side the guns pounded them with explosive shot. Nothing moved when police stormed the bluff a second time. They found Almighty Voice and two youths dead, but Iron-child had somehow slipped away. Father to Alfred, grandfather to Katherine Spann, Inspector Wilfred Blake rode off to bring him in.
A century later, the New War Cry.
Because he was Plains Cree from Duck Lake, Ghost Keeper understood the standoff at Totem Lake was a lost cause. The rub was to keep history from repeating itself, with Members dead and natives annihilated. These rebels were a motley crew, drawn from many bands north and south of the line, coalescing around myths like Almighty Voice and Wounded Knee. What they lacked was a tie to
the sacred land, for while the sundance was a potent focus to revive native pride and spirituality, it was a ritual foreign to Gitxsan bands, on whose sacred land the circle stood.
After the phone call from DeClercq, Bob George lay on his back in a hospital bed, wondering how to unravel the Gordian knot at Totem Lake, when Herb McCall walked by his door.
"Hey!" George called.
The landowner stopped. "You talkin' to me?" asked the white.
"How's your grandson?"
"Scared and scarred."
"I'm the Mountie arrow-shot last night. Spare time to talk?"
McCall eyed him suspiciously but stepped into the room.
"Have a seat."
The white shook his head. "Say what you gotta say. I have things to do."
"I'm wondering if you and I can work this mess out peacefully. The way I see it, you're in a squeeze. The Gitxsan hate you 'cause you hold their land, and whites hate you 'cause you're costing them jobs and bucks. The land is sacred, so this won't go away. The face on the rebel shirts is Almighty Voice, who's been dead for a hundred years. The way I see it, you got a choice. If I was you, I'd ask myself what's best for me. You can be that asshole who got everybody riled. Or you can be the man of the future in the north, righting the wrong done to sacred land, a savior to native and white alike, who settled past and present grievances, and showed us all how to coexist."
"Bullshit," scoffed McCall.
"You don't understand 'spin.'"
"So how do I become this White Knight?"
"Give Totem Lake to the Gitxsan."
"Are you crazy? Know what that land's worth?"
"Not as much as it's costing local business every day. Nor as much as it will cost your grandkids in the future. About as much as I expect businessmen to donate to buy a better haven for you so they can get on with business."
McCall approached the bed. And turned a chair around. And sat down straddling the back.
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