Apparition Trail, The (15 page)

Downstairs, the cupboards were still filled with sacks of flour, tea, and salt — even a bottle of spirits. It didn’t look as though anyone had looted the place — which was in keeping with the Indians’ strange sense of right and wrong: they would happily steal a horse, but would refuse to take food from a larder, even when hungry.

Giving the main floor one last scrutiny, I found no evidence of spilled blood, bullet holes, or spent cartridges. There were gouges aplenty in the walls, table and lower stairs, but they didn’t look like the tomahawk slashes I’d found on the melodeon. They looked more like scrape marks than axe chops.

I also noted in my report book that several scraps of clothing of different sizes were scattered about; it almost looked as though they had been torn off the persons wearing them, yet none were bloody. I also noticed two other oddities: a large dent in the thick metal of the cast-iron stove, and a peculiar puncture in the wall next to the front door. The hole was as wide as the circle one can make with thumb and forefinger, and quite deep — too large to have been made by a bullet. When I stuck a finger in to feel its shape, my finger went all the way in.

Slipping my report book back into my pocket, I decided to smoke and think. I took the pipe out of its case, screwed mouthpiece into bowl, and filled the bowl with tobacco. I lit it with a Lucifer match and took several quick draws, coaxing the tobacco into a cherry-red glow.

“‘Allo in there!” said a man’s voice from outside. “Are you Corporal Grayburn of the Nor’ Wes’ Mounted Police?”

I stepped out through the front door onto the covered porch and saw a young man standing at the edge of the clearing that surrounded the house. He was a strapping lad in his late teens, with long dark hair and a face and hands tanned by the sun. He wore a workman’s shirt, trousers, and moccasins, and his waist was wrapped with one of the bright red sashes that the Metis use to carry loads while portaging. I didn’t recognize him as a riverboat passenger; I guessed that he must be one of the traders from the fort. He held a piece of paper in one hand.

“I ’ave a telegram
pour vous
,” he said.

I beckoned the lad forward. He was at least thirty feet away, but even at that distance I could see his eyes widen. “Oh
non!
” he exclaimed, making the sign of the cross upon his breast with his free hand. “I dare not, or I will vanish like the others.
Monsieur
must come ’ere, instead.”

I sighed in exasperation. I’d just proven him wrong by walking into the house and emerging unscathed, but Metis superstitions run deep. “You can see with your own eyes that there’s no danger,” I scolded, pointing at the house behind me with my pipe stem. “Bring me the telegram at—”

It was no use. Instead of doing as I had bid him, the fellow bent down and placed the piece of paper he held on the ground. He tarried only long enough to place a rock on it as a paperweight, then fled into the woods.

I shook my head, understanding now why the McDougall house hadn’t been disturbed. The locals obviously held it in superstitious dread.

I strode out to the edge of the woods and picked up the telegram. It was from Superintendent Steele, and, like him, was brisk and to the point:

CASES SIMILAR TO J. M. CASE REPORTED ACROSS NWT: SETTLERS NEAR BROADVIEW, WOOD MOUNTAIN & BATTLEFORD; CPR ROAD CREW AT TRACK’S END NEAR CALGARY; PASSENGERS & CREW ON FERRY AT CLARKE’S CROSSING, & 4 MEN & 1 SGT. FROM MAPLE CREEK DETACHMENT WHILE ON PATROL ALONG INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY LINE. REPORT YOUR PROGRESS AT ONCE.

I stared at the telegram, the pipe in my hand forgotten. Steele’s message was cryptic, since he’d sent it by telegraph via a civilian operator, but I knew instantly what it meant. People were disappearing from widely scattered locations all over the prairie. Even our own North-West Mounted Police, it seemed, were not immune. Both Steele and I had assumed that the McDougalls’ disappearance was a single, isolated case, but apparently it was not.

I wondered if anyone I knew was among the men who had gone missing from my former detachment. I’d kept my own company while I was stationed there, but there were among the detachment men whom I respected and liked.

The telegram, according to the date and time recorded by the operator, had arrived in Victoria Mission less than an hour ago. Steele obviously wanted answers, and as quickly as possible, yet I had very little to tell him. The Manitou Stone was indeed gone, as were the McDougalls. Beyond that, I could shed no more light on the case. I folded the telegram and tucked it inside my shirt pocket.

As I contemplated the disappearances, I wondered if the missing men were dead or alive. I was glad that, were I to die in some isolated spot on the prairie, I wouldn’t be dumped ingloriously in the nearest graveyard like Four Finger Pete. As a member of the North-West Mounted Police, I was ensured a proper burial.

A shiver ran down my spine then. How morbid my thoughts had become! Deliberately tearing my musings away from the grim prospect of my impending death, I instead pondered what response to give to the telegram. As I stood sucking on the stem of my extinguished pipe, I heard the chirping noise again. With so many questions crowding my mind, I was at first inclined to ignore it, but my intuition told me not to. So strong was the feeling, I tucked my pipe into my pocket, not even stopping to clean it and pack it away in its case.

This time, I could tell where the chirping noise was coming from: a tree a short distance from the house. As I walked closer to the tree, I saw a peculiar object wedged in a hollow in the trunk. Then the noise stopped. For a moment I wondered if I’d merely imagined it. I used a stick to pry the object free, and it fell to the ground. I heard the strange chirping noise again — once, softly — and I instinctively reached down to pick the object up, cradling it in my hand as carefully as a fledgling bird.

The thing was an amulet of some sort: a ball of leather not quite big enough to fill my hand, strung on a leather thong meant to go about the neck. Half a dozen mottled brown feathers had been stitched to the bottom of the ball and hung from it like a fringe. I could hear the chirping noise again; it seemed to be coming from inside the ball, which was made from a thin strip of leather that had been wrapped around and around some object.

My curiosity piqued, I peeled back one end of the leather and began unwrapping it. As I unveiled the object that lay within, the chirping noise stopped.

The ball didn’t contain an insect, as I had suspected. Instead it contained a strangely shaped stone.

I’d never seen anything like it. Definitely stone — it was hard and heavy — the object curved in on itself like a snail shell. The spiral was ridged, and the stone of which it was formed had a shiny surface like the inside of an oyster shell, but yellowish-green. As I held it in my hand the stone gave one last chirp — a loud, strident sound, unmuffled by leather — then fell silent. No amount of jiggling it back and forth on my palm could get it to make the noise again.

I had no idea what the stone was or what it signified, but I had a hunch that it was somehow connected with the McDougalls’ disappearance. And my hunches were rarely wrong.

I heard a crashing noise in the woods and turned to see Chambers running toward me. When he reached me, he was quite out of breath.

“I’ve found it!” he cried. “The McDougall grave.”

I misunderstood, at first. “Another one?” I asked. “Which McDougall is it this time? Don’t tell me there’s another wife buried in that graveyard.”

“No!” Chambers said. “Not an old grave: a new one. There’s freshly turned earth, down by the riverbank.”

I shoved the oddly shaped stone and its leather wrappings inside my trouser pocket, next to my pouch of tobacco. “Show me.”

I followed Chambers through the woods for some distance. We headed upriver and at last came to a spot where the river had cut a steep bank before shifting its course. We clambered down onto a gravel bar, and Chambers pointed at what looked like a cave in the bluff, an opening as large as a livery stable door. It looked as though someone had been digging inside the cave; a scattering of dark black soil had been thrown out across the gravel bar for some distance.

“I was able to make contact with Abigail McDougall on the astral plane,” Chambers said excitedly. “She came to me as the sound of a woman singing. I asked her to show me where her husband was, and the singing led me to this spot. I’m certain the bodies lie just inside that cave. All you have to do is walk in and dig them up, and the case is solved. What an amazing journal entry this will make!”

I didn’t share Chambers’s certainty. He’d probably heard Emily singing to her daughter, and then stumbled across the cave by accident as he tried to locate the source of the sound. Corporal Cowan’s report had made no mention of a cave — had the McDougalls been killed and buried here, surely our scout Jerry Potts would have been able to follow the tracks of their killers to this spot.

There was something ominous about that hole, however: I fancied I could feel a chill breeze sighing out of it, even though I stood a good twenty feet away. The trees on the bank above the cave seemed suddenly filled with shifting shadows, and the gurgle of the river behind me reminded me of the blood that had bubbled out of Four Finger Pete’s body after he was shot. As I stared at the cave, the sun on my back utterly failing to warm me, I had a strange dread of entering that dark passage. The feeling was nearly as strong as the premonition I’d had on the day George Johnston had gone up the trail and been killed in my place, but it was different, somehow. I wasn’t certain I would die if I entered that cave, but I had the feeling that I wouldn’t come back if I did — which made no sense to me whatsoever.

Chambers stared at me, hands on his hips. “By Jove,” he said in a bemused voice. “Don’t tell me you’re too squeamish to dig up a month-old body. I’d expected a North-West Mounted Police officer to be made of sterner stuff!”

I wheeled on him, and glared him down. “I’m no coward,” I gritted at him. Ignoring the warning bells that were ringing in my mind, I strode closer to the cave, then knelt to examine one of the clods of earth that lay just outside its entrance. The soil felt moist and cool.

Chambers watched me, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet like a racehorse anxious to begin its run.

“This is freshly turned earth,” I told him. “If the McDougalls’ bodies were concealed here a full month ago, these clods should either have dried up, or been melted away by the rain.”

Despite my assertions of bravery, Chambers must have thought I was making excuses — either that, or his excitement got the better of him. “Very well, then — I’ll do the job myself. I was the one who solved the mystery, anyway. I really can’t see why you policemen were so baffled by it.”

I jumped up and tried to catch Chambers’s arm as he strode into the cave mouth, but he was too quick for me. I started to go after him, but suddenly found myself rooted to the spot by an overwhelming dread. Gritting my teeth, I found myself questioning my own manhood.
Was
I a coward? No, I told myself sternly. I was simply heeding a warning voice — one that the impetuous Chambers refused to hear. The same warning voice that had saved me from an Indian bullet, all those years ago.

Sweat trickled down my temples as my sense of duty warred with my premonition of danger. Inside the cavern, I heard Chambers say: “Oh! Isn’t
that
curious.” I could hear him moving about inside — he didn’t seem to be in any danger. I could still hear his footsteps over the soft gurgle of the river behind me.

No — not birds. The curious stone I’d collected was once again chirping softly. I thrust my hand into my pocket and drew it out, but as soon as I did, the noise stopped. I stared at the stone as it lay on my palm. I’d half expected to see some strange transformation, but the stone was just a stone, as silent as any of those I stood upon. I shoved it back into my pocket.

My tobacco pouch had fallen from my pocket. I picked it up, then pulled out my pipe and refilled it with a fresh pinch of Imperial Mixture. It took two matches to light the pipe, but after a puff or two my hands became steadier.

“Chambers?” I called out. “Have you found anything?”

A distant voice replied: “Not yet. The cave goes quite a way in.”

I waited a moment more.

“Chambers?”

I thought I heard a muffled reply, but couldn’t be certain. I stepped closer to the cave mouth, shivering as I did so.

“Chambers?”

As I came to the very mouth of the cave, I fancied I could hear a curious rumbling sound inside it. The noise was almost like that of falling water, and I wondered if a stream lay within the gloomy depths of the cave. The angle of the bank overhead screened the interior of the cave from the sun; I could see no more than a few feet inside, to a point where the cavern — which had more of the appearance of a mine tunnel than of a natural cave — curved around a bend.

“Chambers!” I shouted into its depths. “Can you hear me? Come out of there at once!”

I puffed nervously on my pipe. Something had happened to Chambers; the feeling was growing upon me by the minute. Was he lying somewhere inside the cave even now, injured and unable to call out?

I felt a pang of shame. I, a police officer sworn to his duty, had done nothing to stop Chambers from entering a place of potential danger. I let him go into the cave alone, just as I had let poor George Johnston ride away up the trail to his death. I must say I didn’t like Chambers much, but dislike should never stand in the way of a policeman doing his duty.