Headhunter (4 page)

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 Headhunter 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?"

The nurse had asked him calmly not to smoke in the Admitting Hall.

Snapping the cigarette in two and tossing it into a trash can, the man had watched his waddling, bloated wife disappear into an elevator.

"I don't trust hospitals," he said. "I want that clear from the start. Isn't this the place where they left a sponge in some guy?" Again removing his pack of Kools he had shaken a cigarette loose.

The nurse had asked him calmly not to smoke in the Admitting Hall.

The complications had started at 5:21 p.m., not long after Joanna Portman's shift began.

Joanna had found the next five hours draining. She enjoyed working as a nurse in the Maternity Ward, for although a hospital by definition was a place of sickness and death, here she was located at the wellspring of life. She thrived on the feeling of her own rebirth that each delivery gave her. And besides, she liked the mothers. She felt needed, the way they depended on her to see each one of them through.

Mrs. Walker, however, had been a tough one.

For hours the poor woman had been tortured by labor pain, awaiting each coming contraction with terror in her eyes. Joanna had held her in her arms. She had soothed her and calmed her with quiet words of encouragement, and toward the end she had even quoted from the Bible. It had never ceased to surprise her how even with agnostics and atheists that seemed to do the trick.

That night Joanna's nursing shift had ended at midnight. The Walker baby, however, had waited till 4:19. So as usual Joanna had remained and seen the delivery through: when a mother had come to rely on her she just couldn't desert in the crunch.

Never bail out,
she told herself,
until the bomb is dropped. What a day! Isn't it amazing that any of us survive?

It was now 5:15 in the morning. Joanna was sitting on a bench waiting for the Macdonald bus. There was a smile on her face.

Joanna Portman was a petite woman, twenty-two years of age. On shift she wore her hair in a bun, but now she had released it and let it tumble free. A breeze down Burrard Street blew black strands across her face so she turned part way around on the bench back toward the hospital. Founded by the Sisters of Providence in 1894, St. Paul's was a rambling red brick building right in the heart of town. Over the years as the city had grown, additions had been added. Now the plan was to tear it down and build another in its place. Joanna looked up at St. Paul's statue in its alcove below the roof.
Will you still look down and protect me, 
she thought,
once the new hospital's built?

The Macdonald bus arrived and Joanna climbed on board.

Ten minutes later when she alighted at Macdonald and Point Grey Road, a cold wind from off the water slapped her across the face. She pulled her collar up and thought.
It almost feels like snow! 
But that, of course, was ridiculous. After all, this was Vancouver. Lotusland. And it was only October.
Still, it feels mighty cold.
Joanna started walking.

The shortest route to her upstairs suite in a house three blocks away was through Tatlow Park. Normally, she would skirt the side of the tennis courts and cut across the grass until she reached Bayswater Street. From there it was but a quick walk up to the corner of Third.

This morning, however, that route was unthinkable.

For one thing, it was still pitch dark, and what with the newspapers screaming about this Headhunter being on the loose . . . well, she'd just have to resign herself to taking the long way around.

Joanna Portman was less than two blocks from her home when she heard the car, in low gear, coming up behind her.

With it came apprehension.

Easy, girl, 
she told herself, 
let's not get too jumpy. (Jumpy! That's a laugh. I'm scared shitless!)

There was not a single light burning in any one of the old houses that lined the tree-shadowed street.

Well, go on and take a look. You can scream and run if you have to.

So she took a glance, a quick one, over her left shoulder. And then, relaxing, she sighed with relief as the car pulled up beside her.

Friday, October 29th, 2:03 a.m.

The sweet pungent smell of marijuana began to fill the car. The windows fogged. As the young man puffed on the joint, drawing rapidly in order to fill his lungs to capacity, the burning tip of the cigarette pulsed orange in the dark. Then he blew out a stream of gray smoke that swirled around Val's face.

"I think I'm off," he said, his voice vague and far away.

"You know what's wrong with you, Chris? You're never serious."

"About you,I'm serious," he said, moving over on the seat and giving her breast a squeeze.

"Get serious," Val muttered. Then she closed her arms tightly across her ample chest.

The young man laughed and retreated. He took another long drag off the smoldering joint. "This is good shit, Valerie. You don't know what you're missing."

An hour ago they had parked the car at the Simon Fraser Lookout, a pulloff on the University cliff road that marked the spot where the explorer had first sighted the Pacific Ocean. A few minutes later the RCMP had checked them and shone a light into the Volkswagen, so Chris had moved on, muttering something about Trudeau having promised to keep the State out of the bedrooms of the Nation.

Now they were parked on an access road near the Museum of Anthropology. Normally they would have been able to see the building in the distance with its great glass walls sixty feet high, a modern showcase for the totem art of the Pacific Coast Indian tribes. They would have looked out through the windshield on several carved poles that stood in front of the Museum. But tonight a fog rose from the ground and they could see nothing at all.

Chris reached for Val's breast again.

"Hey, listen, Chris. Really, we've got to talk. I do not want to fail."

"Fail?" he said, laughing at her. "You're not going to fail. This is only October. Exams aren't till December."

Chris Seaton was a blond-haired youth, eighteen years old. Val Pritchard had met him at a freshman dance four weeks ago. She had liked his mirthful eyes, his strong, square chin, and the fact he was always laughing. Now she was beginning to realize that he laughed a little too much.

"You know your problem?" she said. "You got laughter anxiety."

"Great. The chick enrolls in first year psychology, attends four or five classes, and she's got me analyzed. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I'm just horny?"

"You're horny cause you're anxious. You got a buried neurosis."

"And you? What's your cop-out for fucking like a mink?"

"You pig! I do not fuck like a mink."

"Oh, yeah. You should hear my tapes. I keep a little recorder hidden in the back seat."

"You don't!" Val said, though she wouldn't put it past him.

"How much money you got? Buy 'em back right now or I send them to your mother."

"You asshole," Val said, and both of them laughed.

It was beginning to get cold in the car so Chris cranked over the engine and kicked in the heater. The defrosters started blowing. The windshield began to clear. And that was how they noticed that it had begun to snow. Large but scattered fluffy flakes were landing on the glass, melting, and slowly slipping down to the hood of the Volkswagen.

"Will you look at that?" Chris said, and he blew out a low whistle.

"I thought it rarely snowed down here on the coast."

"It doesn't. I've lived here all of my life and ... I mean this is mid-October. It's not supposed to
snow."

"Well it is."

"Yeah, I can see that, silly. Come on. Let's fuck."

"Not tonight," Val said. "Let's go back to the dorms."

"Jesus, Val. We always fuck when we park."

"Not tonight, I said."

"Why?" Chris asked.

"Why? Because I want to get some sleep and it's already two a.m., that's why. Because I want to pass my exams, that's why. Because my mother works her ass to the bone up in Quesnel cooking in a restaurant so I can go to university, that's why. I get a little freedom and what do I do? Smoke my bloody brains out and hump each night away. Well I'm not going to fail. Come on, let's go to the dorms."

Chris slipped his hand up between Val Pritchard's thighs.

"
JESUS
!" the girl shouted, and she pushed him away. "Don't I have any say around here?"

Before the youth could answer, she swung the car door open and jumped out into the night.

"Get your shit together, man. And get off my self-esteem!" Val slammed the door shut and stomped off through the curtain of snow.

"Women," Chris muttered.

For several seconds he just sat in the driver's seat, rubbing mist from the inside of the windshield, trying to catch a glimpse of the girl through the tumbling snow. She was heading toward the totem poles, of that he was certain. From there Val would pick up one of the paths that led back to the campus. That is unless she lost her way, walked off the cliff, and fell over one hundred feet to Wreck Beach below. So he opened the door, climbed out, and started after her.

Now it was really coming down. He couldn't see her for the wall of flakes that pressed in around him.
Snow in October. Man, oh man. What a freak,
he thought.

He broke into a light jog so as to catch up to Val.

Cherchez la femme, Chris old boy. Cherchez la big-boobed
fe
-

He was twenty-five feet from the car when Val screamed. It was not the cry of a woman falling; it was a shriek of raw terror. The scream seemed almost to ricochet among the crystals of snow.

Chris decided to turn and run: Val could take care of herself.

But just then he slipped in the snow, skidded crashing into

Val, and the force of the collision knocked both of them to the ground.

Now the girl threw back her head and let out a second scream. Chris almost pissed himself. He took one look at the lines of horror etched into her face and that was enough. The youth scrambled around, clawed the snow, tried to gain his feet. He looked up, himself terrified—and that was when he saw what was hanging in the air.

There was a light at the foot of the totem pole ten feet off to his left. This light shone up to illuminate two vertical support struts that held an ornate crosspiece suspended above the ground. The totem—a Dogfish Burial Pole—was fifteen feet high. The crosspiece was carved with a figurehead from an Indian myth. Hanging between the struts was the body of a woman. Her hands had been nailed to the crosspiece and her head had been cut off. The carved face of the Dogpole appeared to take its place.

Chris' mouth dropped open, but he managed to stifle a scream.

Then he noticed that the body was wearing a nurse's whites. The garment had been torn down the front, revealing a strip of naked flesh from the neck to the hair of the crotch. Blood was trickling down this strip, down the legs, dripping off the feet dangling eight feet up from the ground. The pool of blood at the base of the totem measured four feet across.

"Oh my Jesus," Chris said.

Then he turned away and threw up into his hand.