Primal Scream (7 page)

The North

Sunday, January 7

A snowy owl flitted through the somber gloom. Gray and murky twilight gripped the plateau. Into this vague immensity trudged two men, while meteors flashed across the dark northwestern sky. The indistinct glow of first dawn smudged the horizon to their backs, then gradually turned into a broader band of light. The hunted man was naked and fleeing for his life, facial features swollen around terrified eyes, the skin of his legs frostbitten and bleeding from the ice crust beneath knee-deep fresh snow. His senses keen to everything civilization steals from us, the hunter not too far behind was on the track of blood. Black mountains stretched away to all compass points, and wind whined through them with the sharpness of a knife. From somewhere to the north a prowling wolf howled as the snowy owl dropped, with talons spread, to pluck prey from the hoary woods.

Winterman Snow was on the hunt.

Like the owl and the white wolf, he was all white, too. He wore a white parka with a white hood, buried in the hole of which was his pale face. Gloves, and pants, and mukluks, and snowshoes were also white, so the only color about him was the RealTree camo on his Deer Hunter bow, and the soft-yellow fletching of arrows visible over his shoulder.

Saint Sebastian
, he thought.

The image of it was ever in his mind, linking this shadowy world of the present with the even more shadowy realm of his people's past, back when nature and super-nature merged hi life and art, creating a mythic wonder in which men and animals as kindred spirits traded both secrets and bodies. That was the time of salmon, cedar, the potlatch, and totem poles, when all fish bones were returned to the rivers so they could swim to the Salmon House for reincarnation, fog brooding over tree-quilled slopes untouched by man, while twenty war canoes sailed off with thirty men apiece, chiefs clothed in sea-otter skins and warriors dabbed with red ocher sprinkled with shining sand, heading for headhunter battles from which they would return with baskets filled with the heads of enemies slain.

Like yours, Saint Sebastian
, he thought.

Snow could hear the silence and feel the solitude. Mother Nature spoke to him through voices of the night. He knew the name of every creek, lake, and peak in this lone land. Not the empty names that white men had given them to honor then- own, but Indian names which honored the nature of what they described. Rivers and mountains and wilderness had a language, too, and his mind caught the echo of what they said. He felt their hate for what the white man had done to the land, just as he felt his people's hate for what had been done to them, after both they and all they held sacred were signed away without their consent so prosperity would accrue to the newcomers with their new order of things, not to ancient dwellers with their ancient ways. It was the same hate he felt for what the white did to him.

Saint Sebastian.

And Reverend Noel.

Though he hunted like his ancestors, Snow's was no Indian bow. This compound bow like Rambo shot in one of his he-man films had a machined-aluminum handle bolted to Magna
glass limbs, tipped with wheel-
like Synergy III eccentric cams or pulleys. Whereas longbows and recurve bows release energy stored in their limbs to propel the arrow, a compound bo
w stores its
maximum or peak weight in the cams, then "lets off" half its draw weight after mid-draw so the archer can
aim
lo
nger with less effort. Draw 40 l
bs @ 50
% let-off and you will hold 20 l
bs, for mathematicians. This Deer Hunter had a thirty-inch draw of sixty pounds, modified to forty pounds (with holding weight of twenty pounds) so the arrows Snow fired would stick from his prey like those in the painting of Saint Sebastian behind the reverend's desk.

Saint Sebastian.

Martyr to the bow.

The sun crept over the eastern rim to spew a flood of light. The teeth of the jagged horizon bit deeply into the bloody disc. A thousand tints of gold blazed around the solar ball and washed west across a sea of icebergs from the Rockies to the coast. Mountains soared around the plateau like white giants bald with age and cloaked hi mist, spiking peaks above veils of vapor, sudden warmth sucked from their glaring skins. The quick, unerring eye of the hunter tracked dark footprints over the dazzling snow from where he stood to movement in a spiny thicket beyond. There, where the hunted man sought sanctuary
in
the dregs of fading night, dawn cast shadows behind the white trees by shooting rays of sunlight at him similar to the metal arrow the archer pulled from the quiver on his back.

Left side facing the man in the bush and shoulders in line with his quarry's spine, Snow kept his bow hand loose so not to choke the weapon, then nocked the arrow on the string he hooked with the first three fingers of his right hand. Bow arm extending toward the target, he drew back the arrow to anchor the string at the corner of his mouth. As the pulleys tipping both limbs flipped toward him, the cables parallel to the string whispered taut with tension. The archer aimed "bare bow" without a sight, positioning his dominant eye directly over the arrow to mark the line of flight, judging the elevation required to hit the target by instinct, and relaxed his fingers to let loose the shot. The slingshot effect of the bow "picked up" the peak weight stored in both cams and hurled the arrow at the naked man.

Shhhhewwww
. . .

Frozen to his soul by the terror of the moment, Cy Flint could not believe this was happening to him. Arms churning and legs struggling through the freezing snow, his face flushed from this desperate trudging away from certain death, his teeth chattering from stark fear and hypothermia, his breath gasping raggedly like a whipped dog's, he knew he must keep moving moving moving on, as only the dead and the earth could remain fixed in this white hell.

Shhhhewwww
. . .

Cyrus Flint was one of Seattle's cultural elite, a nature artist whose overpriced prints graced mantels of Yups and Boomers from coast to coast, his
Polar Bears
and
White Wolf at Dawn
commissioned by the first lady for the White House. When Cy heard Disney had airlifted a log cabin here to film
King of the Mountain
in Canada this spring, leaving it for several months to weather a Skeena winter, he'd offered to paint the promotion bill in exchange for two months of bush work alone until the film crew arrived.

Helicoptered in yesterday with all his supplies, a detour required because the Mounties had imposed no-fly restrictions around Totem Lake, Cy had spent the afternoon sketching wolves that wandered across the plateau, before snuggling in for the night with a snifter of brandy by the fire.

A fire requiring wood to see him cozy through till dawn.

So, before retiring, Cy had poked his head outside to grab some maple rounds, and that's when—
crack!
— a fire log smashed down on his skull. When Cy came to, he found himself crucified naked to the floor, paints from his art supplies used to smear a Catholic cross on wood planks near the fire, spikes hammered into the floor at the tips of both cross arms, Cy's arms stretched out and wrists tied to the spikes, wondering vaguely why he was facedown instead of faceup, until hands behind grabbed his hips and raised his butt in the air, hands so large the palms covered the spread of both cheeks, as fingers curled underneath to meet above his groin, while thumbs flanking his anus . . .

Cy screamed . . .

And cried . . .

And screamed again.

If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one to hear, does it make a sound?

All Cy could think about was
Deliverance
, with him in the role of Ned Beatty which firelight played out on the walls, Cy grasping he'd fallen into the clutches of some mad Canadian hillbilly or worse, oh God, he wished he'd stayed in the civilized States, this shadow play a horror the imagination saves for godforsaken times like this, the shadow behind riding Cy's rump as it wrenched on the reins of his hair and cursed, "Take it, Reverend," between grunts.

All night long.

Rape on rape.

Until Cy was cut free and shoved out into the snow with the cryptic warning, "Run for your life. May Saint Sebastian be with you."

Shhhhewwww
. . .

The arrow streaked into the evergreens whitened by snow, zipping over Cy's tracks like some cruise missile reading the terrain, the broadhead winking as it passed from sun to shadow to sun, the shaft gone stealth where cam kept the sun from splashing off, then
Shhhhewwww
. . .
Thhhunk!
it sliced through Cy's arm and pinned him to a bare-limbed tree.

His gasp was quick and sharp.

Blood crisscrossed the snow as he struggled to rip free, an ordeal as arduous as the sundance performed at Totem Lake, this thrashing that which seizes a man when life is in the act, then
Thhhunk!
a second arrow pinned his leg below.

Blood bubbled warm from the wounds, and pain sapped his strength.

Cy tried to turn, but the arrows held him fast.

Shhuugh . . .

Shhuugh . . .

Shhuugh .
. .

Snowshoes approached behind.

Freaked out and teetering at the last extremity of fear and despair, gibbering Cy ground his tongue in the gears of his teeth.

The shadow sliding up the bark near his face had a raised arm, the dark fist of which slashed a long blade in a wide arc toward the back of the neck of the nature artist.

Then Cy was spinning like an acrobat in the air as blood fountained out of his headless body to splash and stain the snow, over and over and over until he plumped into a drift, cool crystals chilling the flush from his cheek, before a grasp as strong as that of death seized him by the hair, yanking his fading consciousness up to face Winterman Snow.

"White man," the White Man said with contempt, and he spat in Cy's eye.

Vancouver

Vancouver is a lumber town gussied up. It all began with Gassy Jack. Owner of the Globe Saloon in New Westminster, John "Gassy Jack" Deighton earned his nickname from an aptitude for fluent conversation when he was in his cups. The Fraser gold rush over, his bar went bust, so in 1867 he sailed downriver to Burrard Inlet for a new start. Arriving with an Indian wife, six dollars in cash, a yellow dog, and a barrel of whisky, Gassy built a pioneer shack in a grove of maple trees on a strip of firm ground with the muddy beach of the harbor in front and False Creek swamp behind. With half a dozen logging camps and two sawmills serving lumber ships, his saloon had a lock on thirsty throats, as it was a fifteen-mile walk to any alternative source of booze. Soon all wages earned were filling Gassy's coffers, and five paths led to his door in Gastown. First renamed Granville to give it class, then Vancouver after the British explorer who charted the coast, Gastown with five streets joining at Maple Tree Square remains the heart of the city, gazing over which is a statue of Gassy Jack.

George Ruryk's office looked out on the statue and the square. Behind the building was Gaoler's Mews, site of the city's first jail.

DeClercq was shocked to see how haunted the shrink seemed now. When they had worked together on the Headhunter case, he'd been a man of advancing years and growing reputation, a top professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UBC, who favored tweedy jackets with leather-patched elbows, wire-rim spectacles around owl-like eyes, and a Vandyke goatee befitting Freud. Robert's wife Genevieve had suggested he ask Ruryk to apply the FBI's new psych profiling science to the killer, so, because he trusted her opinion, he had. Though the Mounties now had ViCLAS—the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System—to ferret out behavioral and psychological "signatures" in crimes coast to coast, and the Criminal Profiling Unit to read the signatures, something subconsciously drove him back to Ruryk, who had since left the university for private consulting here. Jekyll to Hyde, was that the effect of switching from academe's ivory tower to the real world? Whatever it was, something had changed the psychiatrist profoundly, for more than time had shriveled and shrunk the life out of him, turning his hair stark white as if from fear, while squinting his eyes with the tense gaze of a wretch who can no longer distance himself from the hell of his job.

Haunted cops swallowed their guns.

Haunted lawyers went berserk hi court.

Haunted shrinks did what?

Or were they haunted by what they did?

When you look long into an abyss
, Nietzsche wrote,
the abyss also looks into you.

"Skid road to skid road to skid road," said Ruryk. DeClercq walked in to find the psychiatrist staring out his office window at the rainy square. "A virgin forest turned skid road to move loggers' logs. Then this heart of the city turned skid road by the Depression. Gussied up in the sixties to reclaim its heritage. Then I watch it slowly slip back to skid road."

"A never ending battle," agreed the cop. "A metaphor for what we do," said the shrink. DeClercq joined him at the window to gaze out over the square. A hump in the cobblestones marked the place where Gassy's tavern had stood, surmounted by the statue gf Jack standing on his barrel, and slumped at the base of it was a wino struggling to push down his pants. Across the square was the V-shaped Europe Hotel, Alexander Street angling left along the train tracks and the harbor, Powell Street angling right to the criminal courts and police station two blocks away. Down Powell drove a paddy wagon slick with rain, crossing the square toward Water Street to cruise on, until the cop riding shotgun spotted the wino exposing himself. The wagon stopped by the statue, and both cops got out. They opened the rear doors and approached the bum. One cop gripped him under the armpits while his partner reached under the shoved-down pants; then the latter jerked up his hands, covered with shit.

"Now,
that's
indecent exposure," said DeClercq.

"I know how he feels," Ruryk said, gazing into his own hands.

It was now obvious to DeClercq that this was a bad idea. A decade ago this psychiatrist had profiled a mad killer who left behind bodies and carried off heads. So—given their success in that case—it seemed right to consult him about the flip side of that scenario: a mad killer who had kept or hidden a body and sent police its head. But what he had not factored in was the decade between, for it had been that long since he had last worked with Ruryk, and during that interval something had destroyed the man he knew.

What?
wondered DeClercq.

"I've asked a colleague to join us, if you have no objection. Dr. Carlisle will assume my patients after I retire. Two heads—except in the case of your killer— are better than one."

"By all means," said DeClercq, thankful to have an auxiliary support the burnt-out shrink.

Ruryk pressed an intercom. "Please join us, Andy," the Mountie thought he heard him say.

Bursts of color exploded against the dark paneling where pictures by Impressionists hung on the walls. The prints by Monet and Manet ("Tweedledum and Tweedledee," Katt the Critic opined), and Renoir and Sisley (the two DeClercq favored, after Monet), and Cezanne, the father of modern art (may he burn in hell) seemed no more than indistinct dabbling up close, but took on telling focus if you kept your distance.

Is that what happened to Ruryk?

He got too close to the picture?

The thought went
poof!
the moment the door between Monet and Manet opened, for the art in the frames paled beside that framed by the door.

Genny, Robert gasped.

Dr. Anda Carlisle could
be
his second wife. In her thirties, with vivid green eyes lit by intelligence and something more, with hair chignoned back from full lips and classic cheekbones, and with a body that curved her suit in all the right places, she was the revenant of a joy wrenched from him too soon.

Ruryk introduced them. "Anda Carlisle. Robert DeClercq." The cool touch of her handshake sent sparks along his nerves.

First Macbeth. Now Carlisle. What was happening to him? The onset of satyriasis? The birth of a dirty old man? He saw himself as a figure on a Grecian urn in the Louvre, half human from the torso up, half horse below, lasciviously chasing nymphs through the forests, lubricity evident from the prong that poked from between his legs. "Man, is that guy ever hung!" Katt had exclaimed, wide-eyed.

Katt
, he thought
. It's you.

For suddenly he saw himself sitting in a dark room with all the shutters closed against the light outside, pictures of Kate, Jane, and Genevieve rotting away with him, a musty, cobwebbed shell locking out emotions which had hurt him to his soul, when in stomped Katt to throw open the shutters and draw the curtains wide, demanding he come outside and walk the spring flower gardens with her. Katt was a cancer of beneficence now metastasizing breaths of fresh air into other dormant dungeons of his well-being.

Like his libido.

If he could replace a daughter, he could replace a wife.

And here was Genny reincarnated.

Smiling at him.

"A shrunken head," Carlisle said. "Symbolic of our profession. I hope you brought it with you. This I want to see."

"Sorry," DeClercq replied, producing photos of the
tzantza
from his carry case. "The actual remains are at the morgue." The head shrinkers scrutinized the head shrinker's art, passing the pictures back and forth several times; then Ruryk led the two across to the "cozy corner" of his office, where sure enough, beside the chairs, stretched a comfy couch.

A daydream of Anda reclining naked flashed through Robert's mind.

Careful
, he thought,
or that's where you are going to end up.

A libido repressed for a decade does wicked things to your head.

"From out of the blue someone sends me a shrunken head. No note. No follow-up phone call. Just the grisly trophy. To me that raises three psychiatric questions. Who would hunt a human head? Why would that person then shrink it? And why would the hunter anonymously send me the result?"

Carlisle flipped open a notebook she withdrew from her suit. "Headhunting is a common historical practice. The word conjures up visions of Stone Age tribes in the Amazon basin and Papua New Guinea, but there's hardly a culture in which headhunting has not played a part. The Celts of Europe and Britain considered the human head a supreme source of spiritual power. Wrote a Roman:
When Celts kill enemies in battle, they cut off the heads and fasten them to the necks of their horses. They nail the heads to their houses, like hunters do with wild beasts they kill. They embalm the heads of illustrious enemies in cedar oil and keep them carefully in a chest to show off to strangers, proud that one of their ancestors, or their father, or the man himself refused to sell any of them for their weight in gold.
"

"
I'm
descended from the Celts," said DeClercq with mock umbrage. "From the Gauls of northern Europe Caesar conquered."

"And I'm des
cended from the druids of Stone
henge," Carlisle replied. "My point is the cult of the head was central to
our
cultural past. A Celtic warrior who took home the heads of enemies returned with not only proof of victory, but also the spirits of the dead who became his slaves. That's why the Celts collected and compared 'brain balls.'"

"Jeffrey Dahmer," said DeClercq. "He drilled holes in the skulls of his victims and poured in acid to make them zombie slaves."

"Same motivation. Celtic fantasy permeates New Age throwbacks. And what about men's movement types beating their drums in the woods? Tap a psychotic into both and what's the result?"

"You've done a lot of work."

"I'm hooked by the puzzle. When George informed me why you two were meeting on a Sunday, the mystery in it drove me to the library. If we time-travel forward from the Celts, we find my people spiking heads on Traitor's Gate, and chopping Mary, Queen of Scots, and Anne Boleyn in two. The key, however, lies in what your people did. During the French Revolution and Reign of Terror that followed, aristocrats put to the guillotine watched the blade descend faceup. The executioner would then seize the severed head from the basket and hold it out to the crowd. To the crowd's delight he would talk to some and show them their headless bodies, as the human brain can survive for up to a minute on its cerebral blood-oxygen supply."

"The head lives on?"

"In soma, cases consciousness survives. And that's why headhunting hypnotizes us. In the Age of Discovery we sent forth ships. They returned with tales of savage collectors in far-off lands. Of the Dyaks of Sarawak on Borneo island, who cut off and smoked the heads of their enemies over a slow fire to impress intended brides. Of the Ilongots of the Philippines, who hacked off heads as therapy, which cleansed the hunter of negative feelings of envy, grief, or hate. Of the Iroquois of America, who stripped the scalps from foes, or the totem tribes here, who returned from raiding their neighbors with heads in woven baskets.

"The irony is," Carlisle continued, "that while we condemned headhunting, we were headhunting, too. Seventeen thousand human remains are collected in the London Natural History Museum, including five heads of African bushmen severed as trophies back when they were shot on sight. Blown off and seized by Captain Southey as proof to cash in on Commander Smith's offer of a pint of grog for every kill, the head of Xhosa King Hintsa was taken to and remains in Britain. The head and genitals of the Hottentot Venus are stored in Paris, while New Zealand has a collection of tattooed Maori heads, and Australia saved that of Jimmy Ah Sue, hanged in Brisbane in 1880, to study his criminality. In 1913 the Montenegrins of the Balkans were still headhunting, and for decades the Soviets collected brains—Lenin, Gorky, Sakharov—to gather the anatomical roots of greatness."

Anda closed her notebook on these skeletons in our closet.

"So, responding to your question,
Who would hunt a human head?,
I'd say any psychotic who hears echoes out of our genetic past, or any mad scientist who considers ethics a bore, or any psychopath who seeks the ultimate thrill, for what could be more vicious to J a sadist than a victim aware that its head has just been cut from its body?"

The more intelligent the woman, the more attracted was DeClercq. Anda Carlisle had his barometer rising by the minute.

"But more intriguing," said Carlisle, "is why this head was shrunk. Only the Jivaros of Ecuador were head shrinkers, so perhaps your killer once resided in South America. Shrinking a head warps it into something else, a fetish with psychic links to us thought by Jivaros to have magic power, for stitching the lips shut locks the spirit inside. Psychiatrists, however, use 'fetish' in a special way. To us, a fetish is an object or nongenital part of the body which arouses habitual erotic response or fixation. Query: Is this shrunken head a fetish with subconscious meaning?"

Robert caught a subtle whiff of Anda's perfume. It was the same scent Gill Macbeth wore. He wondered if he was developing a fetish of his own.

"Toes, feet, high heels, jackboots, stockings with garters, panties, jock straps, corsets, leather, rubber, raincoats, velvet, satin, gloves, whips, scarfs, hair, braids . . ." listed Carlisle. "Robert Bloch—the author of
Psycho
—opens
The Scarf
like this:
Fetish? You name it. All I know is, I've had to have it with me. Ever since I was a kid
. . . For me, that captures the essence of fetishism."