Apparition Trail, The

by Lisa Smedman

  The passengers muttered. Despite the weight my uniform lent my words, they obviously didn’t believe me — not fully. The Metis were a suspicious lot, especially now that their leaders were urging them to open rebellion. They had no love of the police.

  Then Chambers stepped forward out of the darkness. “I saw it as well,” he said. “The gambler drew his weapon and tried to kill his wife. It would be this innocent woman who lay dead before us if this brave officer of the law had not intervened.”

  I turned, surprised, and nodded my thanks. Chambers touched the silver handle of his umbrella to his hat in acknowledgment.

  The murmurs of the passengers had changed in tone. They nodded, staring now at the body with the same look that jurors will give a condemned man.

  “Will one of you please fetch the captain?” I asked. “And the rest of you, please move on. There’s nothing more to see here.” I leaned down and grabbed a blanket that had already become soaked with blood and flipped it over the body, covering the gruesome remains.

  Reluctantly, murmuring to each other and casting looks back over their shoulders, the crowd obeyed. Chambers shooed the last of them away, then vanished into the gloom himself.

  The child began to cry again. Four Finger Pete’s wife adjusted its blankets, jiggling it gently in her arms and speaking softly to it in Peigan. Wiping away the blood that had finally stopped flowing from her nose, she pressed a cheek against the child’s brow to check its fever.

  Suddenly realizing that I still held the hymnbook, I handed it to her. She at first shook her head, refusing it, but accepted it when I opened it a little to show her the bank notes inside.

  “For medicine,” I said, choosing simple words that a woman with only limited English would understand. “For your child.”

  Her dark eyes widened, then filled with tears. Embarrassed, I looked at the child in her arms instead. It was too dark to see much, but I could tell that the child was a girl, about a year old, with her mother’s Indian features and her father’s pale blonde hair. The child’s eyes were mere gleams in the darkness as she stared silently up at me. Strange though it might seem, I had the feeling those eyes were taking my measure, as an adult’s might do.

  I tore my gaze away from the child. “Don’t worry — I’m not going to arrest you,” I told Four Finger Pete’s wife. “It’s bad enough that your child has lost her father. I don’t want to cause her to be bereft of a mother, as well.”

  She shook her head. “Pete not her father.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see.”

  Some other man had fathered the child, then — which could very well have been the reason why Four Finger Pete treated his wife so unkindly, and cared so little for the girl’s welfare. I shook my head sadly. Despite his wife’s infidelity, it was no excuse for brutality.

  The captain arrived then, tousled as if roused from sleep, and I was kept busy explaining what had happened and discussing what would be done with the body of Four Finger Pete when we arrived at our destination the next morning. The gambler’s wife shook her head mutely when we asked if Four Finger Pete had any next of kin; I supposed it would be up to the traders at Victoria Mission to bury him, now that Reverend McDougall was missing and there was no one to conduct a Christian burial.

  Once that was decided, it was time for me to write a report: not to Q Division, since there was clearly nothing paranormal about the shooting of a husband by his wife, but a regular police report of an accidental death. Before I retired to my cabin to set pencil to paper, however, I made sure that the version of the incident told by Four Finger Pete’s wife — whose name, I only learned now, was Emily — would match my own. I repeated for her what I had told the other passengers: that Four Finger Pete had drawn his weapon, and that it had accidentally discharged.

  When I was done, she stared solemnly at me. “Thank you,” she said. “I say that. And I also say this: you good man. Do not stay this land. Do not stay here, or when Day of Changes comes, you will be made go.”

  I stared at her, wondering if I had understood what she had just said. She spoke only broken English, and I did not speak enough Peigan to ask her what she’d meant. Nevertheless I thanked her before proceeding to my cabin.

  It never occurred to me to ask who the child’s father was, but I doubted that Emily would have had the nerve to seek the affections of another man while her husband was still alive. I guessed that she must instead have been ill-used by Four Finger Pete, perhaps given over for the night to one of the men he’d lost a hand of poker to, or prostituted to a trader in exchange for whisky.

  Later, I would come to realize how wrong my guess had been.

  Chapter III

  The empty church — A conversation in the graveyard — A most unusual child — Signs of a struggle — Steele’s urgent message — A very peculiar stone — Descent into darkness — Buffalo! —An unnerving confrontation — The peace pipe — Buffalo tracks

  The North West reached Victoria Mission early the next morning. First ashore were two of the riverboat men, carrying the body of Four Finger Pete. As they descended the creaking gangplank, a white bird that had been sitting among the reeds along the shore startled and winged its way into the air. The men carrying the body made their way up the bank toward the settlement, sweating in the hot sun. They were followed by a crowd of spectators, old and young: the dozen or so settlers who lived near enough to Victoria Mission to meet the riverboat, and a handful of traders from the fort, on hand to take delivery of the crates of tea, flour and salt pork that filled the North West’s lower deck.

  Four Finger Pete’s wife followed the canvas-wrapped corpse ashore, carrying her daughter, who was bundled in a blanket. The Peigan woman’s nose was swollen, and there was a purple bruise on one side of her face, but her eyes were free of tears. While the riverboat men made their way to the settlement itself, followed by the curious crowd, she turned and headed in the direction of the trading post. I presumed that she would buy the medicines she needed for her child first, and then attend to her husband’s burial after that. I planned to visit the trading post later myself, to see if the traders had any decent tobacco in stock.

  Just before Emily disappeared into the trees, she turned and looked directly at me, as if I had called out her name. My breath caught in my throat: I wondered if thought transference was at work.

  I lifted my haversack and strode down the gangplank, glancing back with amusement as Chambers oversaw the unloading of his steamer trunks, valises and boxes from his cabin. Just as he had each day of our river voyage, he had changed into a fresh suit of clothing: today it was a Norfolk jacket in brown serge, matching trousers, and boots with button gaiters. He’d replaced his black derby with a brown one; the black band around it matched his black silk tie. I wondered if he’d chosen the jacket because its cut matched that of the red serge jacket that I wore.

  “Go on ahead,” he called out to me. “I’ll catch you up in a moment.”

  I smiled and waved back at him. I had every intention of doing just that. Even though Chambers had backed me up by attesting to my version of what had happened the night before, he was a civilian. He might be knowledgeable about psychical phenomena, but I was the expert on physical evidence. I didn’t want him mucking up what little of it might remain here.

  The riverbank at Victoria Mission was heavily treed, with a trail leading up to the half-dozen homes that made up the settlement. The Methodist church was easy to find; I simply followed the two riverboat men at a discreet distance as they carried the body of Four Finger Pete up to a tiny graveyard that had been hewn from the forest. I waited while they set the body down, watched them speak to the crowd and point at the ground, and saw the settlers suddenly disperse. I guessed that the riverboat men had asked for volunteers to bury the body and had found none.

  I continued down the trail to the church itself. With a peaked roof, it was a one-story rectangular building made from square-cut logs that had been chinked with mud and whitewashed. Alth
ough it was a Sunday, the church doors were closed and the building was silent; the Methodists had yet to send another minister to replace McDougall.

  I circled around the depression in the soil where the Manitou Stone had stood. It was a squarish patch of bare soil, dry and dusty, with a fringe of grass around the perimeter. The sides of the hole had not been disturbed, leading me to conclude that the Manitou Stone had not been dragged away; it must have been lifted straight up. Yet there were no adjacent tree branches to which a block and tackle could be attached. I wondered how the stone had been carried away; from Steele’s report, I understood it to weigh close to four hundred pounds.

  The door of the church was not locked, so I opened it and stepped inside. Three wooden pews provided seating for about twenty people; I set my haversack down on one of them so I could wander about unimpeded. At the front of the church was a raised platform, on which sat a preacher’s pulpit. A stack of leather-bound hymn and prayer books lay on a shelf to one side of the platform. The shelf was dusty, but the books were not, suggesting that they had been restacked there recently. Several of the covers were badly stained, as if the books had been thrown in the mud.

  On the other side of the platform stood a melodeon. The small organ had a stool behind it; lying on the floor next to it was a book of Gospel Hymns Consolidated that had fallen from the melodeon’s music rack, and some splinters of wood.

  I saw the reason for the wood splinters immediately: the melodeon had several deep gouges in it, as if someone had chopped it with an axe. A number of the keys were missing, and several of those that remained were stuck in the down position. I could see a chip of stone wedged between two of the keys, and concluded that an Indian tomahawk must have wrought the destruction.

  I placed a hand upon the silent keyboard, my fingers falling naturally into a C Major chord. During the year that I had attended church in an effort to appease my mother, I had been taught the rudiments of the instrument by the minister’s wife. I could still remember the shiver of excitement I’d felt when the church’s massive organ filled the air with strident music as my fingers struck the keys. It was no wonder the Indians feared organ music with such superstitious dread.

  I picked up the music book and leafed through it, noting the strange squiggles that someone had penciled in under the words to several of the hymns. I couldn’t read the script myself, but knew it was an “alphabet” that served to render the Cree language into written form. Translating the hymns must have been a laborious task; I could see that the McDougalls had put a good deal of work into their efforts to convert the local Indians.

  The McDougalls had come to this spot to minister to the Cree in the early 1860s, more than a decade before the riverboats began their service. Back then, they had been the only white people in the area, and the annual trip east to Fort Garry and back for supplies had taken four long months. John McDougall had been just 21 years old then — just a year younger than I had been when I joined the North-West Mounted Police. Like me, he had left Ontario to embark upon a new life in the Territories while still in his early twenties. Unlike me, he had done it in the company of his family, and under his own name.

  Although McDougall was said to be popular among the Indians and had helped to convince them to sign Treaties Six and Seven, he had never returned their Manitou Stone. It had sat in the front yard of this church, a constant thorn in the side of the Cree who passed it on their way into the place of worship. Given the attacks on the melodeon and prayer books, I doubted whether the Indians’ embracing of Christianity had been more than superficial. The thought brought a wry smile to my lips; just as I had done as a boy, they had briefly donned religion like a cloak, then cast it off again.

  I wondered whether Reverend McDougall was still alive, perhaps held captive in an Indian camp with his wife and six children, and whether he was preaching to the Indians this day, which was a Sunday, but it didn’t seem likely that the McDougalls still lived. Patrols had visited every reserve and Indian camp in the area, but reported no trace of the family.

  The dark and silent church had yielded up few clues. I scooped up my haversack and walked back out into the heat and sunshine, and saw that the riverboat men had abandoned Four Finger Pete’s body in the tiny graveyard. I wiped perspiration from my brow; it was already a warm morning and the heat was just going to get worse. I wondered who would be coerced into burying the corpse in this weather. I hoped the chore wouldn’t fall to me; I didn’t relish the thought of being the one to lay to rest a man whose killer I had let go free. If, as Chambers said, our astral bodies really did continue to exist after death in an unseen world that was a shadow of our own, the ghost of Four Finger Pete might be watching me even now.

  I heard movement among the trees that bordered the graveyard, and for a moment imagined a vengeful ghost lurking there. Instead, I saw Chambers picking his way carefully through the bushes and grimacing each time one of them brushed against his coat. He flicked away a twig that had caught on his jacket, then looked up and noticed me. Immediately he clasped his hands behind his back and began walking briskly back and forth through the graveyard, studying the markers there. As I approached, he bent down to take a closer look at one of the gravestones. As he stood again, I heard him muttering under his breath: “Just a sister,” and, “No, not close enough.”

  “Chambers,” I said as I walked toward him, making a wide circle around Four Finger Pete’s canvas-wrapped corpse. “I have a question for you. Can a ghost have any effect on the physical world?”

  Chambers squatted in front of another grave marker and shook his head, not bothering to look up from the white marble tombstone he was reading. “No,” he said. “Ghosts pass through solid objects — even people — as if they were not there.”

  That offered me some relief, although I didn’t like the reference to ghosts passing through people. I noticed that Chambers had used the same word I had: ghost — and had not “corrected” it to astral body this time. Nor had he answered in his usual longwinded, lecturing manner. He was obviously very intent upon the grave marker — but not so intent that he knelt directly upon the ground. Instead of dirtying his trouser knees, he squatted in a precarious position, reading the words that had been engraved at the bottom of the slab of white stone.

  I stepped around to the front of the tombstone, curious to see what had arrested his attention so. The grave was that of a woman: Abigail McDougall, who had died on April 11, 1871, at the age of 23. Below this information, in flowing script, were the words “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.”

  Chambers laid his hand on top of the stone and stared off into space at a point somewhere beyond me. I glanced nervously in that direction, wondering if he’d seen Four Finger Pete’s ghost, but saw only the church, sitting in its clearing among the trees. There weren’t any unusual cloud formations overhead; the sky was a clear, solid blue. When I looked back at Chambers, his eyes were closed.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. Without realizing I was doing so, I had dropped my voice to a whisper.

  Chambers’s eyes opened. “Trying to contact John McDougall’s wife. Please — be silent.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?”

  Chambers looked at me as if I was an idiot. “Of course she is,” he said. He patted the tombstone. “This is her grave.”

  He must have noticed my confused look, for he elaborated: “Abigail was John McDougall’s first wife — an Indian woman. Her father was an Ojibway, but also a Methodist minister. Even though McDougall remarried a year after Abigail’s death, there’s a good chance she’s watching over her husband still. She may be able to tell me where he is.”

  I was surprised and annoyed that Chambers’s briefing appeared to have been more thorough than my own. I hadn’t known that McDougall had married twice.

  “The dead can see the living?” I asked. Again my thoughts were drawn to Four Finger Pete. I wondered, too, if my father were watching over me now, and what he would think of the strange
direction my career with the North-West Mounted Police had taken. Here I was, standing with a psychic investigator in a graveyard, watching as he prepared to begin a conversation with a ghost.

  “Please do be quiet,” Chambers said. “I need complete silence to concentrate.”

  His eyes closed. I couldn’t resist one last remark, if only to take a verbal jab at him. “So you’re a medium, then? Have you spoken with the departed before?”

  “I am a student of thought transference,” Chambers hissed back. “And I’m trying to put it to work now, to contact Abigail McDougall on the astral plane. I’d like to establish contact before anyone from the settlement comes to disturb us, so please do go on about your job and let me do mine.”

  My eyes narrowed. I was a corporal, and he merely a special constable — a civilian, temporarily contracted by Q Division. I was half of a mind to tell Chambers to go to the devil, but he’d spoken earlier as if Superintendent Steele was a personal friend of his. I didn’t know whether that was true, and I liked to believe that the Superintendent was above taking sides with a man who was in genuine need of being taken down a peg or two, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  I left Chambers to his tombstone and walked down the forested trail that led to the McDougall residence. When I was about half way down the trail, I spotted Four Finger Pete’s wife, Emily, making her way through the woods with her daughter in her arms. She was walking slowly, looking around her as if lost.

  In the light of day, I was struck by the colour of the child’s hair — which was almost white — and the pallor of her skin, which was lighter than my own. The blanket in which the girl was wrapped had slipped down, and I saw her face in daylight for the first time. She had Indian features and wore a buckskin dress and beaded moccasins like her mother, but her eyes were a pale pink. That was when I realized that the child was an albino.