Primal Scream (15 page)

Cabin in the Woods

West Vancouver

In the past when DeClercq had this dream, it was all in silver. But tonight, as his subconscious relived the nightmare again, the Quebec Laurentian woods rioted in color. . . .

Sunshine dappling the maple trees ablaze as if on fire, red and orange and yellow and brown and every hue between, the smell of smoke adrift in the crisp, hazy air, curling from the chimney of the cabin in the woods. The cabin where her kidnappers hold his daughter, Jane. The cabin he approaches with all the stealth a father can muster when it means his child's life. One hand grips the crossbow that almost took him to the Olympics once upon a time. The bolts in his other hand are so lethal they were banned by the Church before the Crusades as too unchristian to kill anyone but Muslim infidels in the Holy Land.

He levers back the drawstring.

He loads a bolt in the bow.

Maple leaves overhead and maple leaves underfoot. The maple leaves through which he aims at the cabin's only door are as red as the one on his country's flag. Beyond the sights of the bow he sees a man in a checked lumberjack shirt exit from the cabin, and follows him visually across the porch, down the steps, and around one side to a wood pile. As Lumberjack bends forward to fill his arms with logs, the bow lets fly the deadly bolt at two hundred miles an hour. Shhhhewww . . . the messenger of death whhhisspers through the trees, striking the man behind the ear to punch through his skull and carry on into the woods.

Lumberjack slumps dead over the pile.

The lever recocks the bow.

Another bolt drops into the trough on top of the stock.

Three men exit to hunt for the first. Single file, they cross the porch and descend the steps. The man in front rounds the corner as the others follow, but stops abruptly when he spots Lumberjack. The man behind bumps into him like a train shunting cars, while the man last in line turns the corner. The bolt shhhhewwws from the maples and whissstles through the air. One, two, three, it drills each neck in line, severing the rear spine, fracturing the one in the middle, before it zips from the mouth of the sandwiched man to clip the man who leads.

Clip, but not kill.

The front man stumbles back to the porch over his fallen comrades. One hand bangs the wall to summon help from inside. Punctured voice box mewling like a goat, he staggers up the steps and weaves toward the door. As yet another bolt shhhhewwws from the maple leaves, the man's head jerks this way in spasm, so the flying spike jabs him dead in the eye.

The kidnapper buckles as a pitiful scream shatters the autumn air, lancing out the door ajar from within the cabin.

"Daddyyyyyyy!"

"Jane!" he cries, and tries to run to her from the maple trees, but his legs feel heavy, so very heavy, as if forged from lead, while he must run fast, very fast, if he's to get from here to there in time to wrench his terrified daughter from impending death. With mounting anxiety he stares down to see what's holding him back, and discovers both feet are planted in the ground. He drops the crossbow and grabs one leg with both hands to tear it free. Unable to budge it, he switches legs and tugs with all his strength, straining until his rooted flesh begins to upheave, clods of earth clinging to the filamented ankle he weeds from soil groaning under the maple leaves, a tug-of-war waged with Mother Nature for his daughter's life.

"Let go of me!" he orders.

"DADDYYYYYYY!" screams Jane.

Now his legs are free and he is lurching forward, dragging half the forest floor toward the cabin. Chunks of sod weigh down his botanic feet, which rustle like snakes through the fiery leaves. Pains of overexertion shoot up and down his arm.

"Daddy's coming! Don't leave me, Jane!"

He lumbers up the steps and across the porch.

He stumbles over the body with a bolt in its eye.

He shoves open the door as a knife is shoved into his gut.

He bleeds freely down his abdomen and legs.

His hands close around the throat of the thug in his way, crushing vessels that feed life to the kidnapper's brain.

Eyes pop out of their sockets to bounce like balls on the floor.

The strangled man's tongue slithers away like an eel. He squeezes until the kidnapper has a toothpick neck.

The face before him turns livid, then drops from sight. His eyes dart frantically about within the cabin, searching the gloom until they pick out the small body on a corner cot, curled up in a fetal ball and sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. . . .

"Jane!" he cries, and struggles across to the cot. His rooted feet drag in maple leaves to scatter about the floor. But when he scoops his beloved child up in his arms and bends to rain paternal kisses onto her angelic head, he finds himself face to flesh with a freshly severed neck. The sobbing issues from a tube in the stump.

Never before has a wail of anguish like his been heard. All the guilt of his damned soul is packed into the shriek.

"Don't cry, Daddy. I'm over here."

Unable to believe his ears, he turns and falls and claws and crawls toward another corner, where a pair of innocent eyes shine brightly in the dark, the groaning roots behind trying to pull him back, as one by one his nails break to inch him forward.

"Thank God," he moans, reaching into the shadows to caress her feet, which sets the eyes above swaying when his hand hits a pole.

Vision adjusting to the dark, he gazes up to find the source of his daughter's voice, and sees a severed head mounted on the pole.

"I knew you'd come, Daddy. I knew you wouldn't fail me," says the hacked-off head.

The head isn't Jane's.

The head is Katt's. . . .

He awoke with a start. Drenched in sweat.

A primal shudder shook him to the depths of his being.

"I knew you wouldn't fail me,"
he repeated to himself, while rubbing the corners of his eyes to reap the sandman's gift.

He wasn't drenched in sweat.

His cheeks were wet with tears.

For the first time in a long time he'd been crying in his sleep.

Throwing back the covers, he swung out of bed. The deep freeze of winter besieging the house chilled him to his bones. Stepping into his slippers, Robert pulled on a robe and, when that didn't stop his shivering, put on a sweater, too. The clock on the bedside table said the time was five a.m. Because it was his habit to rise at the break of dawn, curtainless windows faced English Bay with Point Grey beyond. Come spring, he'd carry a cup of coffee down to his seaside knoll crowned with an antique sundial and a driftwood chair. There he'd sit alone with his thoughts to greet the new day—"Getting your head in shape," was how Katt put it—as the teen slept the sleep of a princess above. Around the face of the sundial, which predated the Age of Reason, was the prophetic warning THE TIME IS LATER THAN YOU THINK. The warning was now buried beneath the shroud of overnight snow, but as he gazed out the bedroom window across the black bay at the red and blue wigwags flashing on the far Pacific Spirit Park shore, the sundial's prophesy preoccupied his mind.

Though he was a rational man who eschewed New Age superstition, irrationality had taken Kate, Jane, and Genevieve from him, so it seemed rationally prudent to check on Katt.

Agnostics are wiser than true believers.

His bedroom, her bedroom, and the living room ran east to west across the southern waterfront face of the house. Katt's room had been his library before she moved hi, so it opened off the living room at the L-join of the central hall. The effect of the nightmare was so strong that he didn't pause at the bathroom sink to wash away his tears, but almost ran directly to the L-join, where he switched on the nearest living room lamp and turned about-face to open and peek in what should have been a closed door.

The door was ajar three inches.

His muscles tensed.

Theirs was a constant war of divergent opinions. Do you crack your egg at the big or little end? Do you eat the tenderloin or other meat first? Is it best to sleep in a cold or warm room? Cold, he said, to snuggle in with fresh air to breathe. Warm, she said, to sleep like a babe in the womb, and not freeze your bum off in the dead of night. This battle ended with a compromise. The thermostat was turned down on going to bed, while Katt turned up a space heater and closed her bedroom door. In this bitter cold, no way would she have broken the seal. Not when giving a single inch would offer him the opening to lord partial victory over her in their never-ending war.

Katt was stubborn.

So was he.

Robert's hand was sweating as he pushed open the door. He couldn't shake the premonition a kidnapper had Katt. The lamp cast a widening yellow oblong in through the door. Spine to spine, the light of knowledge spread across the books, until illumination crept over a lump in bed.

"I'm awake," Katt said. "What a night! Every hour; on the hour, this thing"—she plucked Catnip off her pillow by the scruff of the neck—"had to lick my face in a show of love. I cracked the door so he could get to his litter box, and consequently froze my bum off to boot."

"I assume the blighter's going back?"

"No way!" protested Katt. "You could turn a cutie-pie like this"—she kissed the kitten—"out to die in a frozen waste?"

He was so thankful to find her there, she could keep a
thousand
cats. He left the tormented thespian "to get her head in shape," and shuffled off to the bathroom to wash his face and brush his teeth. As he reached down to lift the toilet seat to urinate, he noted a scratch across the plastic on one side of the ring.
Darn cat
, he thought.
The damage begins
. He angled along the hall to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee, then carried a cup to the living room to restoke the fire between the Holmes and Watson chairs from still glowing embers. The Headhunter file from last evening was scattered about the hearth, so he tiptoed over photographs like using stepping stones.

Her picture was on the mantel.

Maple leaves
, he thought.

And wondered if this was the connection which had prompted the dream.

The photo of Jane was flanked by those of Kate and Genevieve. The shutter had caught her mid-laugh, head thrown back, so sunlight glistened on her blond curls. The little girl was four years old and happy as could be, playing hi a pile of red, orange, yellow, and brown maple leaves.

"Is she why you're such a good 'dad' to me?"

The question from behind his back took Robert by surprise. He turned to find Katt framed by her bedroom door, ash-blond hair rumpled from restless sleep, one arm cinched around Pinky and the other around Scratch Bear. If Jane had lived longer than her picture on the mantel, Katt could be her in her teens.

"No," he replied. "It's because you're such a good 'daughter' to me."

A streak from the bedroom.

Catnip was underway.

Robert's eyes were fixated on the teddy bears. Katt must have noticed, for she said, "Did I do wrong? They were in the closet, and I was cold last night. I took them to bed to warm me up. I know they're hers." A nod at the mantel. "Do you mind?"

"No," he said, and sat in the Watson chair.

Padding from the doorway to the burnishing blaze, Katt stepped over the Headhunter mess and curled up in the Holmes chair. Pinky and Scratch Bear straddled the overstuffed arms. "Why's this one so beat up? And this one brand-new?"

"When Kate was pregnant with Jane—"

Katt's eyes flicked to Kate's photo on the mantel. It caught Robert's first wife center stage on Broadway, playing Rebecca in Ibsen's Rosmersholm on the night the two met.

"—I went to London," he said.

Catnip shot into the greenhouse, which opened off the living room. It was heated at night for the sake of the plants, so there Napoleon lay on the rug beside the La-Z-Boy. A lazy boy no more once the kitten burst in to play.

"The finest toy store in the world is Hamleys of Regent Street. Six floors, one of which has hundreds of teddy bears. Determined my kid would have the best bear in the store, I spent hours culling them until I found him."

"This one?" Katt said, rocking Pinky.

"No, Kate's Aunt Paula sent that godawful thing. Synthetic pink fur. Beady little eyes. When Jane came home from the hospital, Kate held a battle of the bears. Into the crib went my candidate, and Jane scrunched her face. 'Stiff fur and baby skin. Daddy's Scratch Bear,' dubbed Kate. Into the crib went the pretender to the throne. Jane cooed a drooly smile of soft-caress contentment. 'Pinky wins,' Kate declared, and Scratch Bear was banished."

Katt nuzzled the outcast. "He feels soft to me. I guess we toughen with age."

Catnip shot from the greenhouse with Napoleon on his tail. The kitten scampered toward the kitchen and disappeared. The dog picked his way through the spread-out file to settle by the hearth.

"Every kid should have a teddy bear from birth. I view providing one as a father's duty. A mother fosters security by nursing at her breast. A father instills it by securing the crib. Without a bear the child is left to face the dark alone. With a bear it has a talisman for life. A teddy offers comfort and companionship when we're young and, as we grow, provides an anchor down to our deepest roots. You'll find centered adults often still have their bear. It focuses them on who they are and where they come from. The bear provides a compass when they're lost."

"Do you still have your bear?" Katt asked, poking Pinky.

"No, I lost it somewhere along the way."

"How did Jane die?"

Katt's question burst in like an anarchist with a bomb. In all the time she'd lived with him, she'd never broached the topic. Perhaps because she, too, had been kidnapped as a child. Perhaps because she sensed the past hurt him deep inside. Whatever the reason, this morning curiosity "killed" Katt.