The Trickster. Muriel Gray
he drove slowly behind a big shiny Ford, Sam’s eyes were narrow slits of dismay. Not because his progress home was painfully slow, but because last night, alone on the bench in the ticket office at Stoke, he’d had another dream.
So far, it was the worst. Since his blackout three days ago, every night had furnished him with dreams so distressing and unendurable he was beginning to dread sleep. But last night was the pits. It was almost real.
It had been different in detail of course, but the creature was still there. Still fixing him with its unholy, vindictive, glacial gaze as it set about its grisly business. Always the business with the heart. That was the bit he couldn’t take.
There was more last night though. A lot more. Sam made a dry swallow as he remembered.
The office that smelled of wet floorboards and hot dogs during the day was a different place at night. Fierce heating dried the wood after the last customer had left, slowly evaporating the puddles caused by skiers dragging the snow in on their moonboots. For a while it made the room steamy and sour. But once it had dried, and the cleaners had done their stuff sweeping up discarded sticky backs from the lift passes, the office was a pleasant and inhabitable room, and when Sam had called Katie he was comfortable. There was, after all, something soothing about seeking refuge from the storm in a commercial rather than a domestic setting, appealing to that childish excitement of bedding down somewhere alien and forbidden.
The first time Sam had been in a church in Calgary he felt that way. He was fifteen years old and the luxury of the interior, the cool but ornate splendour, had astounded him. There had been no sense of God to the young Sam Hunt, just a million opportunities for making tiny living spaces in the dozens of marble and oak corners the building boasted. He sat on the hard pew, imagining creeping into that fabulous building when everyone was gone and unfurling his sleeping mat beneath the high, carved wooden pulpit. It was like a palace. What would it be like to run barefoot on that marble floor in front of the minister? Think of the feasts that could be laid out on those huge stone steps, and the dancing that could go wildly out of control in the vast empty space between pews and altar. The pragmatist in him figured that cooking could be accomplished quite safely on the stone-flagged floors, since the smoke would have ample space to rise and dissipate high above, amongst the barrel-vaulting. Sam knew he could live there like a king.
The Reverend and Mrs Jenkins were delighted by Sam’s expression of wonder and awe as he sat between them that day, his black-button eyes roving over the architecture like a blind man seeing for the first time.
They were not to know his thoughts were on a flight of fancy as to how he would live secretively in such a place, instead of an awakening to the glory and love of their God: but they often misinterpreted their young charge. They never really knew him at all.
The Silver Ski Company ticket office in Stoke was no comparison to the Calgary Church of All Saints on Third Street, but as Sam selected a place to sleep, his instincts were the same as those of twenty years ago. All these interesting nooks and corners to sleep in. Areas to make your own.
He had three blankets in the truck and found a long, foam seat cover from the back of the office where the staff took their boots off. More than enough for a bed. He made his nest beside the radiator pipes at the back wall, where he faced the big digital clock above the ticket windows.
Outside, the blizzard battered at the windows, the snow hitting the glass like shotgun pellets. Sam turned off the overhead striplight and wriggled, snug beneath his blankets. The big green digital numbers of the clock cast an eerie illumination on the room, reflecting dimly on the floorboards. They were reading 10.07 when he settled down, his hand beneath his head like a child. Sam had decided he was feeling better. Dreams aside, there had been no further blacking out, and it was that void of consciousness that held most terror for him. Brain tumour? Cancer? All the demons of modern medical knowledge had plagued him like a hypochondriac since that numbing collapse. But it was over now. He was well. Sure of it.
When he woke up after the dream and threw his load, the green digits were reading 10.45. Sam found himself on all fours, hunched like a dog over a pile of his own hot vomit. He was sweating and panting, and the stench of the wet bile beneath him made him retch again.
The memory of it made Sam clutch the steering wheel like a life-line. But it was what came after that was making Sam’s heart thump in his chest like a trapped bird. Nothing. That’s what happened after he woke over his own sick. At least nothing until he woke a second time. At 7.30 a.m. Fully clothed, standing outside his truck.
When Craig saw the guy that stepped out of the car he’d been more than disappointed. Not in his whole term as staff sergeant in Silver had he ever had to call in forensics from Edmonton, and this small bald man in a suit jacket covered by a cheap nylon parka didn’t look much like the cavalry.
That was six hours ago. Craig was going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Doctor Brenner had been working at Joe all day, talking into a tape recorder as he did so, and now he was standing in Craig’s office with a styrofoam cup in one hand ready to pronounce sentence.
Craig was calm as he offered the doctor a seat.
Brenner ran a delicate hand over the pate of his bald head and sat down heavily in the chair by the window.
‘How’s it looking out there?’
Brenner gesticulated with his coffee to the outside world behind him. Craig glanced out of the window.
‘It’s okay. Cold. What have you got for me?’
‘Time of death around 11.30 p.m. Cause of death, a violent blow to the head followed by lacerations to the chest. Further damage, probably after the initial blows, and due to the incisions, indicates massive loss of blood.’
‘Incisions.’
‘Incisions, Staff Sergeant. The cuts he made to get into the heart and remove the genitals.’
Craig looked at him, unblinking, forcing himself to believe what he was hearing. Yes, this was Joe they were discussing. Joe, who should have been in here glowering at Brenner, looking at his watch and making doe eyes at Craig to let him away for his bowling night. But Joe was never going to dog off early to go bowling with a cold beer in his hand again. Right now, Joe was the collection of meat cuts lying four doors down the corridor on a table covered in polythene sheeting, and how he died wasn’t making sense.
No witnesses except maybe whoever drove through the pass after Joe. They were on that one already. It wouldn’t be hard to find the driver that made the tracks Craig saw. It could only have been a truck, and there were three constables phone-bashing every trucking company in the book right now.
‘And the crash?’
‘Happened after death. The lesions and breakages incurred by impact with the falling truck all occurred after he died. The way the blood clots always reveals that. The truck must have been pushed over the edge by whoever carved him up.’
The doctor drained his cup, and met Craig’s horror-filled gaze full-on.
‘What about the mutilation?’
‘Looks like the murderer had plenty of time on his hands. The heart was so tightly compacted up the anus, even with the tiny incision he made to get it in, it implies someone took great care to make sure it would stay there. It’s a big organ. I’m amazed how the assailant achieved it. Must have been a turkey-stuffer.’
Brenner grinned at his joke, receiving nothing but silence, and continued more coldly as he lost his smile, ‘The penis was torn off rather than cut, and it appears to have been in the mouth, although it had fallen out by the time you guys finished hauling the body up.’
‘How do you know it was in the mouth?’
‘His teeth closed on it. Left tissue inside. I reckon if you guys send a climber down there you’ll find his pecker where it fell.’ Brenner stuck his nail into the styrofoam cup, making a popping sound that delighted him sufficiently to make him do it again. ‘Yeah, it’s an X-rated one this, all right.’
Craig