The Purification Ceremony (24 page)

    As I made my way through the darkness, leaving the Metcalfe lodge far behind, I admitted that in many ways she never did hold my hand like that again. It was our first good-bye.

    Funny, I could feel her fingers when I left the east-west road after two miles. They stroked my palm and became the fingers of Emily and Patrick: Emily’s reaching for me the day I moved out of the house under court order, Patrick’s waving slowly from his bedroom window.

    I took a compass reading. I headed true north toward the ridge I’d climbed with Nelson the afternoon before. Another half hour and I reached the stream where we’d lost the track. I lay on my back in the gloom before dawn, tugged off my boots with the snow pelting my face and wriggled into the chest waders. I repacked my knapsack. I entered the stream, breaking through the ice that had formed at the edges, working my way into the flow. The water squeezed at the waders, numbed my feet and created in the furious manner of its passing the sense that I was abandoned now by the worlds within and behind me.

    I sloshed forward with my heart pressed into every rib in my chest. In the gathering light, I held the gun in front of me, barrel ahead, to part the branches that overhung the stream. I believed that at last I understood what pattern there was to the killer’s movement. The ripple prints and the air-bob prints were made not by two people, but by the same person shedding hunting boots for waders.

    In the chest-high waders, he could use the watershed to travel without leaving sign, then switch to the air-bob soles to make his stalks.

    The Sticks and this stream were routes of entry into his hunting ground; the Dream and its tributaries were his escape routes. Unless the wind was out of the west, as it was now. Then the pattern was reversed. If I was right, I would not encounter the killer on the way to his camp; he would head south along the Dream, his nose into the wind. I would have the chance to invade his camp while he set about his crazed purpose miles away.

    Full daylight had come by the time I reached the Sticks River. The swift current nearly spun me around several times in the first hundred yards and I moved to the shallows despite the difficulty I had cracking through ice to make headway. I slid my feet around the submerged slick rocks and over driftwood that jutted from the ice like gnarled hands. The roar of the river covered any noise I made.

    Where I could, I hugged the bank so I might peer downstream unnoticed. Twice, deer broke from the flat in front of me, startled to scent and then witness my half-drowned form. At nine-thirty the water went white; I was approaching the confluence of the Sticks and the Dream.

    I had almost been within sight of the killer’s camp the very first day of the hunt, when I’d tracked the monster buck and failed to get a shot. On the map, the island where the rivers joined appeared to be no more than ten acres. Nelson had described it as piece of rock. But when at last the island came into view, it was thick with young poplar. At its center was a granite outcropping, jutting from the pale-trunked trees like a man’s bald pate appearing from thick side hair and a beard. I swallowed at the sense it all made now. According to Micmac tradition, the joining of rivers is a place of tremendous Power. I could feel the mixing of energies, but beyond what the waters generated there was something more, something unstable, something deadly.

    The cold had penetrated deep into my muscles, and my knees ached so badly I was almost in tears. But I dared not leave the security the water afforded me. I hid myself in the roots of a tree washed sideways and lodged between two boulders at the point where the Sticks collided with the Dream. I laid my rifle in the branches. I used my binoculars to peer the sixty yards across to the island. There were footprints in the snow coming down to the far shoreline.

    Slipping from my hiding place, I waded along the bank until I found his tracks exiting the water. They were fresh, maybe a half hour old and heading south. I was safe. I took a step and immediately tripped and floundered in the shallows. My right foot was tangled in something below the waterline. I reached down, doing my best to ignore the way the freezing water numbed my bones all the way to my shoulder, and tugged at the rope until it freed itself from my foot. A heavy-duty yellow nylon rope connected to a grappling hook. I looked around and found where the hook had scarred the thick exposed roots of a big pine on the bank. I had to lean with all my weight to get the hook set. The rope stretched taut above the water all the way to the island.

    Now it was as if the island were some great magnetic center and I was being pulled to it; I wanted to invade his camp, understand his Power and leave without him knowing I’d been there. I dug in my pack and got out my drag line and tied a loop about three feet in diameter around the yellow nylon rope. I strapped my gun to the top of the knapsack and shouldered it, then passed my head and arms through the loop; if the current managed to tug me from the lifeline and the river flooded the waders, it would keep my body attached and my head above water.

    That never happened. Through some strange coincidence, the collision of the rivers had, over time, piled up a series of boulders and a sandbar between the shore and the island. I was able to cross in about fifteen minutes without the white water ever reaching the top of the chest waders.

    But by the time I made the far shoreline, my fingers were so cold they barely moved and my feet felt as if they were encased in shattered glass.

    From the water I stared at the ripple footprints he’d made. I turned backward and slipped my ripple-soled boot into his tracks and retreated into the thicket, my mind as alert as it has ever been. There were no smells here save the iron scent of snow, no taste but aluminum at the back of my throat, no noise except the river and the faint rush of blood at my temples. And none of that thick, watching presence I’d sensed twice in the woods.

    The track circled the hill to the east and climbed. I grimaced at the effort required to ease my boots into his prints without altering them and prayed for a skiff of snow to obscure whatever minor changes I’d surely made in his tracks. But for only the second time this week, the air was void of snowflakes. About forty yards up the hill the footprints abruptly stopped before a pile of branches. I tugged at the pile and it slid away to reveal the mouth of a cave about waist-high.

    I’d like to say that I was brave at that moment, but I was not. I made up reasons not to go inside. I made up reasons to go back to the river and to the lodge and, in retrospect,

    I should have. But a voice inside me kept saying I had to go in. I had to see the lair.

    Peering inside, I was surprised to discover that after a tube of perhaps eight feet, there was a cavern into which a weak shaft of light streamed. I crawled down the tunnel, pushing my pack and gun before me. I stood up inside a rock room about fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long and ten feet high. There was a cleanly broken fissure two feet long and six inches wide on the right wall where it met the roof. A plastic tarp had been fixed over the hole to keep the snow out yet let the light in. Below the fissure lay a fire ring; he could pull the tarp, light his fire and let the smoke escape after dark. From my calculations, the fissure faced east; the smoke and whatever other light source he used would not be seen from the shore of the estate.

    Despite the fissure, the room was dim. I got out my flashlight and shone it around. I suppose I expected to find the place stinking of death and in total disarray, a reflection of the terrible mental disorder I had come to believe was behind the killings. Metcalfe, possibly. Or Ronny, his son, the one who’d returned only once. Or something more twisted, someone who was in here hunting us solely for sport.

    But there was nothing ghoulish about the room. I took a quick inventory. Spruce boughs had been hung to give the air the pleasant odor of the forest. Cooking utensils were piled neatly in a corner. A sleeping bag rolled and stored on end. Clothes and boots arranged inside the sort of rubberized duffel bag canoers use. Firewood and kindling split and stacked near the fire ring. Much of the cave floor was covered with deer skins, some new, some old, all of them laid out in a manner I understood was based on some logical system but failed to fully grasp. The effect was that of the mysteriously austere, regimented, yet distinctly hallowed feeling of photographs I’d seen of the interiors of Zen monasteries.

    I went over to the duffel bag and dug through the clothes and odd gear, looking for some clue to the killer’s identity. He had money, no doubt. Everything about the equipment — from the miniature propane stove to the mess kit to the insoles to his boots — was state-of-the-art and expensive.

    But there was nothing that spoke to his character. I was digging around in the bottom of the duffel when my fingers closed on a flat piece of canvas. The green khaki billfold had a stiff backing and was strapped shut with Velcro. Inside there were three photographs.

    The first showed a dark-featured man wearing sparkling-white cotton pants and shirt embroidered with brilliant red thread and adorned with equally brilliant blue, yellow and red tassels at the waist and wrists. He sported an umbrella-shaped hat with similar tassels and a crest of bright orange and blue feathers on top. The man was balanced on one foot — arms outstretched — on the edge of a cliff high above an arid plain. Two women with long black hair and cotton skirts and shawls watched. The effect was chromatic and haunting.

    There was an adobe house in the second photograph. The picture was shot in the early morning. A golden light warmed the blue door and the massive oak tree in the yard. Peacocks and guinea hens mingled in the foreground.

    The last snapshot was a portrait of a woman. Brown-eyed, brunette, an oval face, soft, pleasant features, a loving smile turned toward whoever held the camera. My first thought was She’s beautiful. My second: She was familiar. I’d seen her before or someone who looked just like her. But where? I racked my brain, but came up with nothing.

    I put the other two photographs back in the billfold and stuffed it in the bottom of the duffel bag. Her picture I put in the map pouch around my neck, then stood and turned, taken aback to discover that there was an opening about a foot wide in the corner of the far wall of the cavern.

    There are places in this world that are undeniably saturated with dark energies — city alleys, the rookeries of ravens, empty old houses — and I could feel that whatever lay around the corner in the next cavern was one of those places, only more threatening.

    Go ahead, I told myself, you’ve come this far. Finish it. I had to will myself across, careful not to disturb any of the meticulously arranged possessions. I stood before the black space for several minutes until I could goad myself to step forward one last time.

    I was struck first by the scent of candle wax and then by a sick-sweet smoky odor I couldn’t identify, and then, unmistakably, by the smell of decaying meat.

    I flipped on the flashlight to behold a shrine. There was the fresh cape of a deer turned hair side out, stretched in an oval of ash saplings and hung flush to the wall above a rock outcropping. The rack of a ten-point buck hung at the top of the shrine. Below the horns, the feathers of hawks, or owls and of ravens linked together in a half-moon-shaped fan by animal sinew and by tiny wooden beads, black and blood-red and forest green. There were three arrows, the shafts of which were painted bright yellow. The feathers, however, were not fletched in a traditional manner; rather, they appeared to be bunches of eagle feathers loosely bound to the cedar just below the nock. And below the arrows, the skull of what had to be a wolf, boiled free of flesh, dull white. Bright red candle wax ran from the skull’s sockets like tears. Wax from a dozen or more white candles caked each end of the outcropping in thick slabs and had dripped down the face of the rock.

    I shivered and looked over my shoulder, knowing I should leave. Within the empty cavern behind me grew the unmistakable sense of danger. I tried to get my legs to move, but my attention was drawn back toward the shrine. There, below the wolf’s skull, at the center of the outcropping, stood a larger, framed version of the snapshot of the pretty brunette.

    I took two steps toward the picture, saw more, froze and fought off a rising nausea. Arrayed around the photograph were four human scalps. Patterson’s. Grove fs. Pawlett’s. And one other. An altar. A trophy room. Both.

    Without warning, my heart seized the way it had in the forest the day of the hunt when I suspected someone was watching me.

    “Kauyumari said you’d be the one who’d come,” a deep voice behind me growled.

    I started and screamed. My gun, which had been resting against my hip, fell and struck hollowly on the stone floor. I stared at the gun, my escape, gone.

    “Know my name? Know my name?” the voice asked.

    “James Metcalfe?” I said.

    He laughed and said again, “Know my name?”

    “No.”

    “Turn,” he said, satisfied at my answer. “Slowly, or I will deliver you to Tatewari now.”

    I was seeing it all now — her photograph, the shrine, the scalps, the cavern walls, my gun on the floor, my gloved hands — as though I were looking through the wrong end of a set of binoculars; the world appeared far away, small and curved. Trembling, I pivoted to find a cedar arrow straining against a taut string and the flared arms of a longbow, all pointed dead at my chest. The illusion was that a pale gray wolf held the bow; the animal’s pelt had been meticulously cut and sewn so that it clung to the top of his head and over his brow down to his nose like a second skin. The cape hung around his shoulders and melded into a silver-flecked beard and from the beard into a suit of white fleece camouflage. I had the sudden and horrible realization this must have been the last thing seen by Pawlett and Grover and Patterson and whoever had lived below that fourth scalp.