The Purification Ceremony

by Mark T Sullivan

  “We’ve got to keep a close eye on the shunt for evidence of spinal fluid,” I heard him tell Cantrell. “If we find it, it means his spinal column would be open to infection, which threatens his brain.”

  “Jesus.” The outfitter ran his stubby fingers through his beard. He looked haggard and beaten and in need of a deep sleep.

  “We’re not there yet,” Arnie said. “I just wanted you to understand what we’re up against here. I’ve got him on antibiotics, but I don’t know if I have enough for six days.”

  “What about cutting the broadhead out?” Cantrell asked.

  Arnie grimaced. “If the tip of the broadhead is just touching the spine, then we’re better off leaving it as it is and trying to make him comfortable. I try to cut it out, I run the risk of opening a spinal column that was intact.”

  “And what if the broadhead’s in the spine and there is fluid coming out?”

  Arnie rubbed at his forehead. “A close call. Maybe you try to cut it out, irrigate it and provide drainage. Maybe you don’t. It’s a no-win situation. Either way, he’s going to get much worse before we get him out of here.”

  So what do you want from me, Doc?”

  “A watch schedule,” Arnie said. “Someone must be with him around the clock. I’ll be here, too. But I’ll need sleep in case he crashes and I have to operate.”

  “Done. No one’s leaving the compound anymore anyway.”

  I’d been listening to it all with my eyes shut. I opened them to find Kurant listening to the conversation and taking notes. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t believe I’d considered sleeping with him. Then again, I thought, no man is an island. No woman for that matter, either, though I can believe that a woman must at some level be an atoll, a ring of islands connected by reefs. Our outer shores take terrible beatings, but we offer shelter in the lagoons we create at our center.

  I allowed myself a wry smile at the thought. And then, whirling out of my subconscious, it hit me. And I sat up straight and looked over at the enlarged topographical map of the Metcalfe Estate. I walked over to the map and stared at the little sliver of brown in the thick swath of blue. I shivered in understanding, knowing for certain now where the killer was camped.

  NOVEMBER TWENTY-FIRST

  I WENT OUT from the cabin three hours before dawn, skirting the pines on the lakefront. Six new inches of snow had fallen. The air had warmed. The snow was wet. I kept to the shadows thrown by the gas-lights mounted on the corners of the porch of the main lodge and headed for the storage shed next to the icehouse, where the bodies of Patterson and Grover lay.

  The corroded bolt to the shed wailed when I drew it. I waited five minutes after the noise cut the night. No movement in the house. No sounds but the whispers of snow. I got inside and flipped on my flashlight. Rubber chest waders hung on a nail above the snowmobiles. I took them and lashed them across the top of my knapsack. I would need them where I was going.

  The knapsack rode awkwardly now with the top-heavy weight of the waders, but I shrugged off the discomfort and went out into the stormy night. I shut the door and drove the bolt home with a second cry. A baton of light flared in my eyes. I held up my hand to block the blaze. “Who’s there?”

  The light dropped toward my waist. Lenore stood on the bottom step of the back porch, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She was still in her hunting clothes from the day before. Her features had retreated, leaving her bone-exposed like an animal after a severe winter.

  “I can’t sleep. I saw you come by the window. Where are you going?”

  “To find the killer’s camp.”

  Lenore took several steps toward me. Her expression was grim, her color unnaturally pale. “Earl’s stoned on those drugs Arnie gave him. He moans and sweats.”

  She paused and the faintest smile crossed her trembling lips. “He calls my name. Not the others’. Mine. Lenore. But he can’t hear me and I can’t help him.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was beyond her now, already going deep into the forest of my mind. “Please don’t tell them where I’ve gone.”

  “I don’t know where you’re going,” she replied honestly. “But if you do find it and they are sleeping, remember my husband and… cut their throats.”

  There are women who believe they have suffered so much they have inured themselves to suffering. Lenore seemed one of those women. I wanted to tell her that if you live long enough, however, you find that the tapestry of this existence is composed of knots of wracking seizures and recoveries. Lenore did not realize the jumbled perceptions that accompany ruthless pain had only just begun to weave themselves around her. That she would have to discover for herself.

  I walked away from her, head down into the storm. I passed the dim frozen forms of the hanging deer on the pole. Their carcasses shifted in the wind. The racks of the biggest ones clacked against each other — it is the sound you hear deep in the woods when the rut comes on and the bucks, driven by forces beyond their control, enter the annual rites of madness. I shivered at the clacking and hurried to get beyond the noise.

  I took a straight route out the logging road to the east-west road. I figured I had at least a three-hour head start before my absence would be discovered. They would not find my tracks because I would take my cue from the killer; I would go to water and move forward into the end of something, leaving no trail behind me.

  The darkness embraced me. There is a resonance to moving with only a thin shaft of light to guide you in such darkness. The night presses and pulses around you. It threatens and soothes, turns the snow under you to pumping mottled cream, like the wings of hawks at dusk. I kept my sanity under the pressure of the darkness the way I’d been keeping it since I’d arrived. For years I’d stood outside myself, able to live with what I’d become by watching Little Crow as if she were separate, a creature in a cage to be studied and, at times, pitied. But in these past few days, and certainly within the past twelve hours, I’d moved within Little Crow, not in retreat, but in exploration, searching for the sign of who I’d been before my mother died.

  In the months after I’d comforted her in her bedroom. Katherine had a stable period. By early spring of the following year, however, it was apparent that she was sliding by inches into a state of alternating realities, of clarity and then of murkiness. We’d find her running her fingers over framed family photographs in the den. She called Bert the postman “Charley.” She asked why Mitchell, dead nearly six years, hadn’t come down to dinner.

  And she got lost on opening day of trout season. I’d gone south along the riverbank that morning, while she said she was going to one of her favorite pools. We’d agreed to meet at ten and move to another section of the river. Ten came and passed. I walked upstream toward her pool. In one of the last patches of snow beside the bank, I discovered her prize six-weight bamboo fly rod and her wicker creel. The water above the pool was high and frothy. I ran along the bank, looking for her tracks. I found none.

  Katherine!” I screamed. “Mom!”

  There was no sound but the rushing water. I was sixteen years old. I panicked and jumped into the river and crossed to the other side. I ran frantic like a bird dog in cover. A half hour later, I found her on her knees in a shallow, turning over rocks to see what sort of nymphs she could find. When she heard me, she looked up and smiled.

  “Honey, I didn’t know you were coming to fish today.”

  It’s opening morning, Katherine,” I said, kneeling beside her. “I’m always with you opening morning.”

  “Opening morning?” she said. “Imagine that! It feels like I was fishing here just yesterday.”

  I reached out and touched her hair. Her scent and the river’s mixed and swirled around me. “Let’s go home now,” I said.

  My father was the one who had to tell her. He took her down to her gazebo in early June. I watched from the window. She fought at first. Her arms flailed and she took on that imperious pose I’d seen her use with visiting lobbyists standing in the muck of
her casting pond. But my father had delivered bad news to a thousand families. He held firm. I could see a brownout of the energy that always seemed to render her skin electric. Her knees buckled and she fell into his arms. I went to the bathroom and threw up.

  Two weeks later, just as the summer began, Katherine resigned her seat in the State Senate. She made light of the event, but it was apparent in her carriage that jettisoning her position had blurred the edges of her being.

  She fished most every day that season. Each morning I awoke to the whip and ring of her fly line extending out over the pond. It was as if she believed that the constant attention to the mechanics that had been her personal Tai Chi since childhood could give her a grappling hook on the shale slope she now lived on.

  And surprisingly, for almost a year, it did. When Katherine took to waters, she assumed the lucidity of a spring-fed stream. Sporadically, when she was doing well, she spoke of writing books or teaching a course at the university in Orono. But by the fall of my seventeenth year, the number of days when her mind turned muddy rivaled the clear ones.

  The day before my father and I left for deer camp that November was one of her bad days. A friend had offered to stay with her. I went to kiss her good-bye and she grasped my hand as if she’d never hold it that way again.

  As I made my way through the darkness, leaving the Metcalfe lodge far behind, I admitted that in many ways she never did hold my hand like that again. It was our first good-bye.

  Funny, I could feel her fingers when I left the east-west road after two miles. They stroked my palm and became the fingers of Emily and Patrick: Emily’s reaching for me the day I moved out of the house under court order, Patrick’s waving slowly from his bedroom window.

  I took a compass reading. I headed true north toward the ridge I’d climbed with Nelson the afternoon before. Another half hour and I reached the stream where we’d lost the track. I lay on my back in the gloom before dawn, tugged off my boots with the snow pelting my face and wriggled into the chest waders. I repacked my knapsack. I entered the stream, breaking through the ice that had formed at the edges, working my way into the flow. The water squeezed at the waders, numbed my feet and created in the furious manner of its passing the sense that I was abandoned now by the worlds within and behind me.

  I sloshed forward with my heart pressed into every rib in my chest. In the gathering light, I held the gun in front of me, barrel ahead, to part the branches that overhung the stream. I believed that at last I understood what pattern there was to the killer’s movement. The ripple prints and the air-bob prints were made not by two people, but by the same person shedding hunting boots for waders.

  In the chest-high waders, he could use the watershed to travel without leaving sign, then switch to the air-bob soles to make his stalks.

  The Sticks and this stream were routes of entry into his hunting ground; the Dream and its tributaries were his escape routes. Unless the wind was out of the west, as it was now. Then the pattern was reversed. If I was right, I would not encounter the killer on the way to his camp; he would head south along the Dream, his nose into the wind. I would have the chance to invade his camp while he set about his crazed purpose miles away.

  Full daylight had come by the time I reached the Sticks River. The swift current nearly spun me around several times in the first hundred yards and I moved to the shallows despite the difficulty I had cracking through ice to make headway. I slid my feet around the submerged slick rocks and over driftwood that jutted from the ice like gnarled hands. The roar of the river covered any noise I made.

  Where I could, I hugged the bank so I might peer downstream unnoticed. Twice, deer broke from the flat in front of me, startled to scent and then witness my half-drowned form. At nine-thirty the water went white; I was approaching the confluence of the Sticks and the Dream.

  I had almost been within sight of the killer’s camp the very first day of the hunt, when I’d tracked the monster buck and failed to get a shot. On the map, the island where the rivers joined appeared to be no more than ten acres. Nelson had described it as piece of rock. But when at last the island came into view, it was thick with young poplar. At its center was a granite outcropping, jutting from the pale-trunked trees like a man’s bald pate appearing from thick side hair and a beard. I swallowed at the sense it all made now. According to Micmac tradition, the joining of rivers is a place of tremendous Power. I could feel the mixing of energies, but beyond what the waters generated there was something more, something unstable, something deadly.

  The cold had penetrated deep into my muscles, and my knees ached so badly I was almost in tears. But I dared not leave the security the water afforded me. I hid myself in the roots of a tree washed sideways and lodged between two boulders at the point where the Sticks collided with the Dream. I laid my rifle in the branches. I used my binoculars to peer the sixty yards across to the island. There were footprints in the snow coming down to the far shoreline.

  Slipping from my hiding place, I waded along the bank until I found his tracks exiting the water. They were fresh, maybe a half hour old and heading south. I was safe. I took a step and immediately tripped and floundered in the shallows. My right foot was tangled in something below the waterline. I reached down, doing my best to ignore the way the freezing water numbed my bones all the way to my shoulder, and tugged at the rope until it freed itself from my foot. A heavy-duty yellow nylon rope connected to a grappling hook. I looked around and found where the hook had scarred the thick exposed roots of a big pine on the bank. I had to lean with all my weight to get the hook set. The rope stretched taut above the water all the way to the island.

  Now it was as if the island were some great magnetic center and I was being pulled to it; I wanted to invade his camp, understand his Power and leave without him knowing I’d been there. I dug in my pack and got out my drag line and tied a loop about three feet in diameter around the yellow nylon rope. I strapped my gun to the top of the knapsack and shouldered it, then passed my head and arms through the loop; if the current managed to tug me from the lifeline and the river flooded the waders, it would keep my body attached and my head above water.

  That never happened. Through some strange coincidence, the collision of the rivers had, over time, piled up a series of boulders and a sandbar between the shore and the island. I was able to cross in about fifteen minutes without the white water ever reaching the top of the chest waders.

  But by the time I made the far shoreline, my fingers were so cold they barely moved and my feet felt as if they were encased in shattered glass.

  From the water I stared at the ripple footprints he’d made. I turned backward and slipped my ripple-soled boot into his tracks and retreated into the thicket, my mind as alert as it has ever been. There were no smells here save the iron scent of snow, no taste but aluminum at the back of my throat, no noise except the river and the faint rush of blood at my temples. And none of that thick, watching presence I’d sensed twice in the woods.

  The track circled the hill to the east and climbed. I grimaced at the effort required to ease my boots into his prints without altering them and prayed for a skiff of snow to obscure whatever minor changes I’d surely made in his tracks. But for only the second time this week, the air was void of snowflakes. About forty yards up the hill the footprints abruptly stopped before a pile of branches. I tugged at the pile and it slid away to reveal the mouth of a cave about waist-high.

  I’d like to say that I was brave at that moment, but I was not. I made up reasons not to go inside. I made up reasons to go back to the river and to the lodge and, in retrospect,

  I should have. But a voice inside me kept saying I had to go in. I had to see the lair.

  Peering inside, I was surprised to discover that after a tube of perhaps eight feet, there was a cavern into which a weak shaft of light streamed. I crawled down the tunnel, pushing my pack and gun before me. I stood up inside a rock room about fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long and ten feet high.
There was a cleanly broken fissure two feet long and six inches wide on the right wall where it met the roof. A plastic tarp had been fixed over the hole to keep the snow out yet let the light in. Below the fissure lay a fire ring; he could pull the tarp, light his fire and let the smoke escape after dark. From my calculations, the fissure faced east; the smoke and whatever other light source he used would not be seen from the shore of the estate.

  Despite the fissure, the room was dim. I got out my flashlight and shone it around. I suppose I expected to find the place stinking of death and in total disarray, a reflection of the terrible mental disorder I had come to believe was behind the killings. Metcalfe, possibly. Or Ronny, his son, the one who’d returned only once. Or something more twisted, someone who was in here hunting us solely for sport.

  But there was nothing ghoulish about the room. I took a quick inventory. Spruce boughs had been hung to give the air the pleasant odor of the forest. Cooking utensils were piled neatly in a corner. A sleeping bag rolled and stored on end. Clothes and boots arranged inside the sort of rubberized duffel bag canoers use. Firewood and kindling split and stacked near the fire ring. Much of the cave floor was covered with deer skins, some new, some old, all of them laid out in a manner I understood was based on some logical system but failed to fully grasp. The effect was that of the mysteriously austere, regimented, yet distinctly hallowed feeling of photographs I’d seen of the interiors of Zen monasteries.

  I went over to the duffel bag and dug through the clothes and odd gear, looking for some clue to the killer’s identity. He had money, no doubt. Everything about the equipment — from the miniature propane stove to the mess kit to the insoles to his boots — was state-of-the-art and expensive.

  But there was nothing that spoke to his character. I was digging around in the bottom of the duffel when my fingers closed on a flat piece of canvas. The green khaki billfold had a stiff backing and was strapped shut with Velcro. Inside there were three photographs.