THE TRICKSTER Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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  THE TRICKSTER

  Muriel Gray

  For

  Hamish MacVinish Barbour

  and Hector Adam Barbour.

  With love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks are due to these:

  Hamish—the ideas bank that is constantly robbed yet never calls the police. Jane Anne Purdy for her uncomplaining research. Michael Fishwick, Jane Johnson and Bruce Hyman for their support. Paul Morris. Co-Co Powderface. The Banff detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The “snakes” at the Canadian-Pacific freight yard; Golden, for the ride up front. Nora Webber, Rocky Mountaineer, for the trip through some tunnels. Dr. Isabelle Cullen for being pedantic. M & J Barbour for Grianan. And Betty, Adam and Fraser Gray for lots.

  1

  Alberta 1907

  Siding Twenty-three

  When he screamed, his lips slid so far up his teeth that the rarely exposed gum looked like shiny, flayed meat. Hunting Wolf’s eyes flicked open and stared. There was a semicircle of faces above him. Silent. Watching.

  For a moment he stayed perfectly still, allowing himself to regain the feeling of being inside his body, that dull ache of reality after the lightness of the spirit’s escape. Then the numbing cold of the snow beneath his naked back stabbed at his skin, and mocked him with the knowledge that he was firmly back in the realm of the flesh.

  Sweat was still trickling down his breast, beads of moisture clinging to his brown nipples like decoration, and he stared up at the gray, snow-laden sky in hot despair.

  The faces looked on. They would not step forward to touch him or help him in this state. The shaman’s trance was sacred and they had no way of knowing when it would be over.

  But it was over now. He had looked into the thing’s face. Oh, Great Spirit, he had. And the filthy darkness, the bottomless malice he had seen there, had been nearly impossible to bear.

  The white men gathered by the mountain were insane. He had seen that, too. Their madness, their folly.

  And what could he do?

  The shaman got up from the ground with a swiftness that surprised his audience of watchers, and walked away. The faces regarded him for a moment, and then, one by one, followed.

  2

  How many times had he done this, for Christ’s sake? Joshua Tennent had pulled freight back and forth through the Corkscrew Tunnel for nearly three years, and just because of one foolish, possibly imagined incident, he found himself nearly shitting his shorts like a toddler every time that black arch yawned in front of him. He felt panic mash his guts.

  He’d guessed Martell would make fun of him, he could tell by the way he had shifted eagerly in his seat as they’d climbed up the approach to Wolf Mountain. Joshua had hoped the lump of lard would doze illegally until they reached Silver, but he’d been alert and beady-eyed for miles. Those two serpentine tubes of blackness lay between them and town, and the conductor wasn’t in the mood for regulation-breaking sleep.

  Joshua thought it best to ignore the bastard. Martell wasn’t the first to twist the knife and he wouldn’t be the last. Concentrating on smothering his fear was labor enough for now.

  The conductor peeked across at his white-faced engineer, as he slapped the shoulder of the third occupant of the cab, a sullen brakeman called Henry. He gesticulated grandly toward Joshua, his two rodent-like eyes narrowing into slits of mirth.

  “Look, Henry. Hoghead’s got the shits again ‘bout goin’ through the Corkscrews.”

  The brakeman disregarded both the slap and the remark, answering only with a barely perceptible upward movement of his head, the reverse of a nod. Martell was undeterred. This shift had bored the balls off him, with the brakeman sitting motionless and silent in front of him. And this engineer had nothing to say either.

  Wesley Martell didn’t much like to be left alone with his thoughts: too much track gazing and those thoughts had the habit of chucking up things he’d rather not meet again. Especially on a night haul, when the lights of the train illuminated a few yards of the track ahead, making it dance and gyrate on the edge of darkness like something alive. No, he’d rather talk. Talk was life. Silence was a kind of death, and he’d had enough silence on this journey.

  Back at the depot, Joshua and his tunnels were the butt of an endless running joke among the local crews, and Martell was damned if he wasn’t going to use anything he could to get a little spark into this seven-hour bitch of a shift, so he took his shot.

  Joshua was still, quiet, and white. He had it coming.

  “Better keep a hand on that throttle, engineer. Think I saw something movin’ in there.” He threw his head back and wheezed out a guffaw.

  He laughed alone, but Henry turned his head slightly toward Martell before returning to gaze vacantly out the window.

  Joshua could feel his hands turning clammy. It wasn’t hard to ignore that guy. Ever since he’d confided in some brakemen from Toronto what had happened to him that day in the Tunnel, he’d taken a ribbing that was now so obligatory it had practically entered the Canadian Railway Operating Rules Book.

  What was hard, and getting harder every time they came through, was trying to resist jamming on the dynamic brake handle and jumping out of the train cab into the snow before the three men and those hundred cars of grade-one coal were launched into the gaping black mouth.

  Funny to think that right now, on the wooden viewing platform up on the highway, tourists would be yelping to each other like excited coyotes at spotting a freight train about to go through the famous tunnels. It was a Kodak moment, all right: with a train as long as this one, the onlookers would see the engine disappear into the first tunnel, then double back on itself, only to appear to be traveling in the opposite direction to its freight before entering the second tunnel.

  Joshua had stopped on the highway once to look at the sign on the platform. It told him in kiddie-speak letters that they had blasted into the mountain ninety years ago, using the spiral design to avoid a wicked gradient through Wolf Pass. There were shitty pencil drawings of pioneers with big hats and mustaches, and a lot of bull about the early days of railway, but at least there was a diagram of the tunnels inside the mountain. You could see exactly how the Corkscrew worked, how it quartered the gradient with those two curly holes in the hill. Joshua had never thought about it much before then, and he didn’t think about it much after either. That is, until he had his fright.

&n
bsp; It didn’t matter how many times he went over it in his head. He’d lain awake at nights in the C.P. bunkhouses and at home in Stoke, trying to figure out why he’d gotten scared. Worst thing was, it was a whole year ago, almost exactly this time last winter, and the scare hadn’t worn off.

  The way he remembered it, they’d come through the lower tunnel, the engine just entering the second, when the End-to-Train unit had gone apeshit. There was a hot box back there, and nothing to do but to stop. With the gradient they had to negotiate coming up before the higher tunnel, the last thing they needed was a car with screaming white-hot axles dragging behind them. Joshua recalled whistling through his teeth with exasperation as the whole damn hulk screeched to a halt and the conductor and brakeman got up from their chairs and stretched their legs.

  The boxes had stopped out there in the gorge, sitting in the thin wintry sunlight, leaving the cab of the engine about fifty yards into the tunnel, and Joshua knew he had to get back there and investigate. Barney the brakeman handed Joshua a thick black rubber flashlight with one hand and put the kettle on the hot plate with the other, saying clearly without words that the engineer would have his and the conductor’s assistance when they were good and ready.

  It was the delay that had pissed off Joshua—the time it was going to take to check it all out and put it right. It had been his homeward shift, taking him back to Beat River and Mary’s bed, a heavenly prospect after five nights in the bunkhouses, lying beside guys snoring like they were sawing logs. He remembered thinking two things. The first was that at least it was lucky the cars had stopped outside the tunnel, and the second thought, like it had come from nowhere, was the living rock. Three innocent words, just sitting there doing nothing, going nowhere, meaning little. But there.

  He took the flashlight and saluted sarcastically to Barney as he opened the cab door and left.

  It was the only time he’d ever stopped in the tunnels, and yes, compared with the cement-lined tunnels that ran under the highways on the east coast, the rock was alive, all right. So much for “a feat of grand engineering.” Seemed like the guys had just blasted the sucker and left. The walls and ceding surprised him with their unhewn crudity, something he had never perceived by the weak light of the cab as they’d passed through the tunnel a hundred times. Ice hung from every crack in thin, savage spikes and sporadically coated the rock face with vast, glistening sheets.

  And everything was dark ahead of the engine. Really dark. The curve of the tunnel meant that you could only see one entrance at a time. In fact, there was a point, right in the middle of the tunnel’s arc, where you couldn’t see any light at all; but he didn’t care to think of that right now. His breath billowed up in front of his face like steam, partially obscuring his view of the sunlit opening ahead each time he exhaled.

  He should have been thinking about how they were going to get to the maintenance yard forty kilometers away without too much damage or time loss: he should have been thinking like an engineer. But he wasn’t. All he could hear, echoing in his head as though his skull were a tunnel, were the words, the living rock, the living rock.

  He hadn’t needed the flashlight for the first few yards, the walls being lit by the cab interior, but by the time he drew level with the first car, Joshua had to use it, picking his way along the track and trying not to fall over the sleepers half-buried in gravel. The arch of sunlight was clear ahead, its illumination extending barely a few feet into the dark, and already he was starting to regret he hadn’t insisted that Barney come with him. He touched the walkie-talkie hanging on his hip, annoyed that it hadn’t crackled into life. Clearly his two crew companions were treating this like a break instead of a breakdown. He was tempted to press “talk” and shout horse’s ass at them as he passed the second car, just to remind them he was there, but realized grimly that it wasn’t irritation making him anxious to summon them, but apprehension. His hand left the radio, unclipped the ear flaps on his cap and let them fall. Joshua Tennent was suddenly very cold.

  It wasn’t so much a noise he heard, more the feeling of a noise. That is, he sensed there was something scraping in the rock above him. Not scraping on the surface, like a bat or a chipmunk, but scraping inside the rock as if the stone itself was shifting.

  But he didn’t hear it. He felt it. The tunnel was not silent: the idling engine hissed and clanked, dripped and cracked at random as he progressed along its metal flanks. Any rustling in the tunnel would have to work hard to make itself heard above the cacophony.

  Even now, he still couldn’t say which sense was being alerted, but the memory of the feeling was pungent.

  At first he ignored it. How could you feel a noise? Walking on, he realized that he hadn’t breathed for about six or seven seconds and corrected the oversight with a cloud of vapor. But why was he on red alert?

  He felt it again. It was above him, he was sure of that. Something stirring in the rock above the ceiling. But no, that wasn’t right. It was the rock in the ceiling itself that was stirring, moving above him like iron filings attracted to his magnet.

  Joshua wanted to run then, very badly indeed. But from what? There was no sound, for God’s sake, nothing to hear but the train. If he gave in to his instincts, how would he explain to Barney or the conductor why he ran flailing along the track, stumbling into the sunlight like a fool? He kept that picture close as he walked more quickly toward the tunnel mouth, making himself visualize Barney’s face as he described how a sound “felt.”

  “You bin drinkin’ meths?” he would say for sure. It was Barney’s favorite joke, a joke he used on anything he didn’t agree with, understand or like.

  Enough. He would walk on like an adult and fix that fucking car. The sooner it was done, the sooner he’d be downing a cold one in The Deerbrush, with Mary perched beside him on a stool. He was only three cars away from the sun, and whatever else his heart was saying, his head was saying there is no noise. He had looked back then and been surprised by how far away the lights of the cab seemed.

  All the way back there the rock was still living. Joshua stopped breathing again and stood still. The noise, the feeling, halted with him. He waited. It waited. Then, it happened.

  Like a released pinball, the noise, the feeling, concealed in its ceiling of rock, shot away from Joshua with a velocity that made him dizzy. He knew it was something alive, and he knew it was traveling the whole length of the tunnel’s arc to the other entrance. There was a fraction of a pause, the fraction of a pause you expect when something thrown very hard is bouncing off its wall. The pause before it starts to come right back at you.

  It was darkness, and it was rushing up the tunnel toward him like water forced through a pipe. Again he felt it first, reeling from its shock waves as they pushed him back toward the entrance. But when he saw it, the natural black of the tunnel’s sunlessness being obscured by a deeper blackness impossible to comprehend, he remembered to breathe. As the black tide swallowed up the cab of the train, breaking over it like a wave, he turned and ran, his legs buckling and floundering beneath him. He had to make the entrance. There was no doubt about that at all. Instinct had told his logic to shut the fuck up and run, and instinct was telling him that if that wall of rushing blackness reached him before he reached the light, he would never feel the sun on his face again.

  When he fell out of the tunnel, gulping for breath, the last thing he remembered was the darkness slamming into the entrance, as though the manmade arch described an invisible prison door. He was sure the darkness screamed with fury. No sound again, just a visceral reading of a ripping, hungry scream.

  Joshua was sure he had just preserved his sanity. The brakeman and conductor were not so sure. When they found Joshua, he was lying in the snow jabbering, and the best they could get out of him was the living rock.

  He was taken home by road and was back at work in two weeks. The conductor and brakeman filed a report, recalling that there had been a short power cut in the cab at the time that engineer Tennent had
run. Yes, they had experienced temporary darkness, and yes, that’s probably what spooked him so bad. No harm done. Everybody was safe, and there was a whole new joke to pass around the bunkhouses now that the one about Joe’s bear encounter had worn thin.

  But even now, a whole year later, and after a hundred nudges and grins when Joshua walked into the canteen, each time the Corkscrews loomed he toyed with trading his railway pension for steady work in a hamburger joint.

  Martell was still chuckling as the cab entered the tunnel. “Rock still livin’, Tennent? Can’t hear no breathin’.”

  He wheezed some more in Joshua’s direction, until he realized that neither his brakeman nor engineer were going to respond. Martell was starting to get mad. A man making a joke deserves some kind of answer, even if the joke’s an old one. He’d put up with this silence too long.

  The dark engulfed them, the yellow light from the cab flickering on the irregular shapes of the rough rock walls, but the entrance to the tunnel was clearly visible ahead.

  Martell leaned forward in his chair.

  “Guess you’re keepin’ it shut ‘cause you know that whole livin’ rock thing was a crock of shit, Tennent. That right?”

  Joshua kept his eyes on the growing arch of light.

  “Guess so, Wesley.”

  “Well, let’s us just stop in the upper tunnel and check it out. Clear it up for good.”

  Joshua dared not look at him. He sat motionless, his throat dry.

  “You heard. Hit the brakes. Now.”

  He heard, all right. Why not? Joshua knew it would get him one day. Every time he dreamed of that rushing, hungry darkness, he knew it would get him. Now was as good a time as any.

  Turning slowly to look at Martell, he pulled back the brake and watched the conductor’s florid face as the train began its laborious process of halting.

  Forty-five seconds later, they stopped just inside the mouth of the upper tunnel.

  Joshua Tennent held his conductor’s eyes in a gaze like a mongoose holding a snake. Martell twitched. Maybe the engineer was really crazy. Maybe this was where he went Charlie Manson and they’d all end up being stencils for a cop’s chalk outline. But then again, maybe not. There was face to be saved here, and when all was said and done he was the guy in charge, and crazy or not, Tennent had better understand that, and understand it good.