Headhunter

by Michael Slade

  Blake held up the cap.

  "Nae much of a trophy, is it, Cree? Nae like my scalp would have bin. Aye, that brings you pride among your people, taking a gray-haired scalp."

  Then once again he stopped talking. Blake shook his head. He rubbed his temple. He licked a final drop of blood from the bristles of his moustache.

  "Well, boy, you renegades made a mistake. You made a very bad one. It was nae killing Colebrook. And it was nae killing the others. Your mistake was in prodding Herchmer to put me on your tail."

  Suddenly Blake lashed out with the Enfield, striking the Cree in the mouth. With a sickening crack Iron-child's front teeth exploded in a spray of shattered enamel. His screams of shock and pain ran up and down the Rocky Mountains. Then Blake grabbed him by his braided hair and yanked his head up off the ground.

  Iron-child choked on the fragments of teeth as the Mountie spat out his words.

  "Herchmer says I'm excessive, lad, but you'll nae find a bad mark on my record. Cause, Cree, the Mounted Police need me much more than I need them. When there's a job of tracking, you know who they call on? And if they hadnae sent me away last year after that mess in Manitoba, they'd have had Almighty Voice just like they'll have you.

  "A legend is born, lad, when a man beats the probabilities of life. And I'm the one that gets the ones that ought to get away. Believe me, Cree. The legacy of this Force will be the legacy of me!"

  Blake let go of the Indian's hair and threw him back on the ground. Then Iron-child heard the hammer snap as the policeman cocked the Enfield. He watched as Blake once more stood up and began to rub his temple. He saw the pistol rise. He saw the bore of the muzzle. He saw the sunlight glint off the metal of the barrel.

  "Dead or alive," Blake said, "it's all the same to them. But believe me laddie, it's nae the same to me."

  Then Wilfred Blake pulled the trigger and shot Iron-child between the eyes.

  The blast from the shot rang up one side of the valley and down the other.

  Blake listened. Then he drew the Enfield muzzle close and sniffed gunsmoke into his lungs.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . drip: sounds ran through his head.

  After several minutes, Blake turned from the body of Iron-child and trudged through the snow across to the unhitched dogsled. He unpacked its contents, rearranged what he did not need, then he built a fire, filled the kettle with snow and put it on to boil.

  While the sled dogs fed on dry moose meat, Blake ate biscuits and pemmican. Eventually he brewed some tea, hot and strong, and filled his pipe with tobacco. He sat in the snow drawing deep puffs of smoke into his lungs while he waited for the throbbing to cease.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

  It wouldn't go away.

  What bothered him most of all was that each time the nightmare came, its aftermath took longer. And the dream was occurring more often. Always when he was alone. And always on the hunt.

  That worried him.

  This time it might have cost him his life, for the nightmare's echo had distracted him right when he required his wits. For almost a quarter century, Blake had lived with the occasional bout of malaria—but this was different. This was far more severe. First the nightmare, always the same. Then on and on, the throbbing. Then the echo daydream.

  If only that damn echo would come, then the throbbing would cease.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

  He'd have to wait it out.

  But the pressure in his head was worse, and getting worse each minute. A crushing weight was sending streaks of red pain whirling around his skull. With every beat of his heart, darts of agony like nails were rammed into his temples. Please, he thought, suffering, please let the echo come!

  Drip . . . drip . . . thump . . . drip . . .

  Blake buried his face in his hands . . .thump... He slammed the heel of his palm against one of his temples . . . drip . .. Then he bunched his fists, threw back his head, and let out a gut-tearing scream.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . drip . . .

  Suddenly Blake leapt to his feet. He had an uncontrollable urge to move. He kicked the fire savagely, sending sparks and flaming brush exploding across the snow. He trod to the unhitched sled and whistled for the dogs. Running from all directions, they came bounding through the drifts. As he attached the train to the sled, the huskies jumped on one another in play, tangling the traces and back-bands and collar-straps into knots and interlacings. Spanker and Cerf-vola began fighting over the lead.

  Blake left them to their frolic, once the train was secure. He busied himself with breaking camp and packing up the sled. Finally, he trudged over to where Iron-child lay sprawled in the snow.

  The Enfield had blown out an exit wound the size of a navel orange. Blood spread out like a halo from behind the Cree's head.

  Blake grabbed hold of the two hair braids and dragged the corpse to the sled. He tied it securely diagonally with a crosshatch of leather lashings. Then climbing onto the rear runner skates he flicked a whip at the dogs.

  With his head bent low, Cerf-vola tugged at the load.

  The other dogs followed and the sled began to move.

  For hours the huskies panted as they hauled the heavy load, biting frequent mouthfuls of the soft snow through which they toiled. At noon, clouds settled over the mountains; then the upper layer broke to reveal the outer spurs of the Rockies that now flanked Blake on both sides. Blake pulled in on the dog train and brought the sled to a halt.

  This was it. They'd reached it, the Indian's "Bridge of the World." That hinge where the Rocky Mountains front on a thousand miles of plain.

  Blake climbed off the sled.

  Then while moving forward to take the lead for the stretch where a false step could mean a fall to the gorge beneath, the Inspector glanced at Iron-child. He saw the open skull, the shattered brain, the tissue hanging in bloody strands out of the cranium. Blood was dripping into the snow. A trail of crimson drops marked the route that the sled had taken. Drops dripping, dripping, dripping drips, drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

  Blake slammed his fists into his eyes as the nightmare came flooding back.

  Drip . . . thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

  It is not the throbbing that bothers him. Nor is it the dark. It is the bullet marks and knife hacks that slash and scar the walls.

  For he knows this is a Hudson's Bay Company fort along the Saskatchewan River.

  He knows it is a winter month in 1870.

  And he knows this is the room in the fort where they conduct the Indian Trade.

  For close to him are sacks of feed and crates of ammunition. All around the log walls—at least in that half of the room lit by the light of a single candle—are piles of fur stacked up to the ceiling. Buffalo and mink. Bear and otter. Beaver, blackfox, and marten. Off to one side, to trade for these pelts, are blankets, beads and colored cloths, handkerchiefs and ribbons. From the ceiling hangs the carcass of a deer, strung up to age, its head thrown back and its antlers pointing like fingers of crooked bone.

  Wilfred Blake is sitting at a table near the door, his elbows on the tabletop, his chin cupped in his hands. He is watching the wick of the candle drown in a pool of its own melted wax. This candle casts the only light within the Indian Room.

  Wilfred Blake is afraid of the part of the room he cannot see.

  Outside, the pounding is closer now, as it begins to mix with another sound within this room.

  Thump . . . drip . . . thump . . . drip . . . thump . . .

  Suddenly there is a shriek of pain from just beyond the door.

  Blake springs to his feet. He draws the bolt. He throws the barrier open.

  Then he gasps and turns away—for what he has seen is far worse than he has imagined.

  The fort is a five-sided structure with flanking bastions and a stockade twenty feet high. It stands high on a level bank one hundred feet above the Saskatchewan River. The gate is open.
Through the gate. Blake can see the wigwam poles outside, can see a solitary horse far down in the river meadow. On both sides of the water, discolored by smoke and mud, stand rude and white crosses to mark the place of the dead.

  It is snowing.

  Large wet flakes tumble out of the sky and land on the windows of several buildings huddled within the stockade. Blake can see the frightened faces masked by these window panes.

  Blake can see the Indians swarming into the fort.

  The Indians are everywhere.

  Now a Medicine Man materializes from out of the driving snow. He walks to the center of the yard and holds his hands up to the sky. This man is dressed in a deerskin shirt embroidered with porcupine quills and ornamented with hair locks from his enemies. His headdress is of ermine skins; his face has clawed-out eyes. Tears of blood are trickling down his wrinkled cheeks.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump , . .

  The drumming is getting louder, filling the air with sound.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

  Now all the whites are on the ground, crying, moaning, wailing, bleeding, all without a scalp. Then the Indians all stand up at once, erect and motionless—and in that instant Blake knows what has brought them here.

  The Indians have come to bring the smallpox back.

  He sees each face distorting and shriveling in decay, each one a leering travesty of the human form, each fetid apparition melting and flowing like tallow. What was once flesh is now putrid and dripping, now bone-revealing carrion slowly being eaten away. He sees the Indians, dying and disfigured, move to the doors of the houses. He watches as they spit on the handles and smear pus from their faces across the windows, each throat evoking a plaintive cry to take this demon back.

  Then Wilfred Blake slams the door and rams the bolt into place.

  Now the pounding has stopped. Blake sighs. Then the candle sputters and dies. Darkness, blackness. Drip . . . drip . . . The sound is across the room.

  The first smash of a tomahawk cracks through the wood of the door.

  Groping in his pocket, he finds a match and strikes it. Sulphur flashes yellow against the tinder box. Then with the match before him, he starts across the room—into that part he could not see by the candlelight.

  Here the floor is strewn with broken bottles, and kegs, and overturned medicine chests. Glass is smashed; powders have spilled; tinctures seep from lead containers to stain everything in reach. Blisters, pills and fluids mix with whiskey, high wine and rum.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!Tomahawks splinter the door.

  The match dies. Find another! Again the yellow light. And this time he sees the bones and skulls upon the floor.

  Now Blake has a sudden frantic wish to exclude this scene from his mind. He claws his eyes and begins to turn around and around and around. For he has seen the fang marks scratched upon each bone, has seen the skulls sawed open and picked clean of their contents, has seen how those skeletons still collocated show postures of frenzy and panic. The bone tangle stretches for yards in every direction.

  Drip . . .

  The second match frizzles and dies.

  He strikes his last match. He crouches. His fingers examine the floor. Blood, a pool of sticky blood, soaks into the sawdust and planks.

  Drip . . . drip. . . A drip from above lands on the back of his hand. For blood is raining in slow drips from the ceiling of the room. Blake wrenches his head up and shivers at what he sees.

  Then the drumming starts up again.

  The drumbeat comes now from up on the roof beyond a trapdoor in the ceiling, a relentless thumping echoes around in his head.

  The body hangs upside down from the ceiling by nails driven through both feet. The head is missing, the neck severed to expose vein and muscle, artery and bone in a circle of raw flesh. What is left of the man is still dressed in the bright scarlet tunic of the Northwest Mounted Police. And Blake knows somehow that the tunic is his own. Good Lord, he thinks, why must I be so—

  Clink

  What was that?

  Clink

  There it is again!

  The skeletons are all beginning to move. Each bone joins to another. Then another. Then another. Then each skull looks at Blake.

  The Inspector rips open his holster and grasps at empty air: his Enfield is gone.

  With a crash the door breaks open and the Indians enter the room.

  "We've got him now, brothers," one skull shrieks in glee, its skeleton slowly creeping across the floor, its ivory cranium straining forward to reveal razor-sharp teeth.

  A hand of bones grips Blake's leg as the final match goes out. Fangs sink into his thigh. Kicking, fighting, Blake lashes out, stumbling in the dark. His hand brushes against a ladder.

  With a snarl he breaks free, and suddenly he's climbing.

  A skeleton starts after him.

  Reaching up with both hands, Blake pushes against the barrier. It begins to yield, squeaking up on rusted hinges. He swings it open. He gets his head and shoulders through—and then the pounding encircles him.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

  "Nae!" Blake screams aloud.

  For sitting cross-legged in front of him is a naked Ashanti warrior. All he wears are bells and shells and a leopard tail tied around his waist. The black man is grinning through sharp, pointed teeth at the drum that sits before him, for on this drum is a severed head wearing a white pith helmet.

  Blake gasps.

  For the black man beats upon Blake's head with a massive buffalo bone.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .A relentless, monotonous pounding.

  Though a scream starts deep in the white man's throat, it never reaches his mouth. A hand now grabs the Inspector's hair and yanks his head around. Blake feels his chin caught in the crook of someone's naked arm, feels his head being jerked back and his jaw being raised. A sudden searing line of fire cuts across his throat, then with a gush a waterfall cascades down the front of his chest. Coughing and choking and gasping for air, Blake shrieks out inside his head, but the sound just echoes around and around unable to escape. His last view is a bloody knife in Almighty Voice's hand.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . th-

  The pounding came to a halt.

  The echo finished; the nightmare gone.

  And once more it was over.

  * * *

  The spell broken, Blake turned his eyes away from the sight of Iron-child's head. He began to take deep breaths counting up to fifty. When that was finished he felt better, and he looked out through the gap.

  The Rocky Mountains stand sentinel over the plains of North America. The mist had now burned away, and stretched before him lay an expanse so vast that every hill and lake and wood seemed dwarfed into one continuous level. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba had all ceased to exist. What remained was one surface of lakelets glittering in the bright sunshine and spread out in sheets of dazzling white and blue.

  Suddenly Blake thought of Jenny, her blue eyes laughing underneath that large, lace-bordered cap.

  Aye, he thought to himself, she's a bonnie lass. Admit it, man, the prettiest in all of the Northwest.

  Her image made him smile.

  And as for him, Blake thought, a child is a serious matter at any point in a man's life.

  Then he walked back to the sled and climbed onto the runners. A moment later, with a flick of the whip, Cerf-vola began to lead the slow and long descent down the mountain side.

  God willing, Blake thought, I might be home for Christmas.

  The Burial Pole

  Vancouver, British Columbia, 1982

  Wednesday, October 27th, 10:45 a.m.

  The first Headhunter Squad was not a squad at all—it was a coordinating center. In fact were it not for Clifford Olson and his murder rampage in the summer of 1981 there would have been no squad at all. But the RCMP had learned a bitter lesson about lack of coordination in that previous case, and so the squad was formed. The first Headh
unter Squad consisted of Sergeant Jack MacDougall and Corporal James Rodale. They met in the Headquarters building at 1200 West 73rd.

  "That was Dr. Kahil Singh," MacDougall said as he replaced the phone. "He's at Lion's Gate Hospital where we sent the bones. The marks on the skeleton's vertebra are a match with those on the floater. That means we've got a killer."

  Rodale nodded. "Where to from here?"

  "I think the concentration will have to be on Grabowski. So far our soil sift has turned up nothing. We can't expect very much if we don't know when she died. I'm having Vancouver Harbor Patrol check their back records to see if something was noticed from the water. And I've got a helicopter on order to infrared the slope. So far the only bit we've got is the tent manufacture. It's Swiss, from Zurich—we're checking all the outlets. Also Interpol."

  "You think she's a foreign national, camping in those woods?"

  "Perhaps," MacDougall said. "Now how about you?"

  "A? far as we can tell, this Grabowski woman was here

  only three or four days. New Orleans wired pictures and they're checking things that end. We don't know what she's doing here and neither do they. We're looking for her pimp. Our best guess at the moment is a john who likes to snuff. One like that knocked off a girl late last week. We're keeping an ear to the street."

  "That it?" MacDougall asked. It was hardly worth a note.

  "I'm afraid so," Rodale answered, shrugging his shoulders. "A pile of unidentified bones and a transient American hooker—that's not very much to go on."

  MacDougall had to agree.

  Thursday, October 28th, 5:15 a.m.

  What a day! she thought. Isn't it amazing that any of us survive?

  The man with the red hair and freckles had brought his wife into St. Paul's Hospital at 7:05 that morning. The woman's water had broken forty minutes before, so the man was apprehensive, this being their first child. One of the nurses had taken him aside and had tried to calm him down.

  "Now, I want this natural," the man had said, reaching for a Kool cigarette and fumbling in his pocket for matches. "I don't want drugs. Or forceps. Or trauma. Do you understand? Who's your obstetrician and where was he trained?"