Apparition Trail, The (38 page)

“When I got there, the stone was gone.”

I nodded, enthralled by her tale. I could guess the rest, but listened patiently while she concluded her story.

Stone Keeper sighed. “I knew there was only one thing that I could do: enter the medicine tunnel, and allow my child’s body to take the shape of the spirit that was within her. With four strong legs, perhaps she could run far enough to reach the Manitou Stone.”

Chambers looked across the fire at me. “Do you understand what she’s saying?” he asked, staring intently at me across the fire. “That’s why Iniskim’s astral body was sighted here at the ford, on the day she was stillborn. When the medicine woman restored her body to life, it disappeared — the ‘ghost’ was led out of the astral plane and back to Iniskim’s body. If Iniskim reaches the Manitou Stone before the Indians do, White Buffalo Woman will escape to the astral plane. The Day of Changes will be delayed until spring — and no settlers need be transformed!”

I nodded, realizing that my guess about the Indians needing Iniskim to lead them to the Manitou Stone had been wrong. Even as I spoke to the chiefs inside the shaking tepee, they were already well on their way to finding the Manitou Stone, by testing their transformative magic and plotting out the ley line with each successful transformation.

They didn’t want to follow Iniskim to the stone. They wanted to
prevent
her from reaching the stone by capturing her before she reached it. This done, they would transform her back into human form and cause the Day of Changes to occur.

One thing puzzled me, however. Two weeks had gone by since I stumbled out of the tunnel at Head Smashed In, and nobody had seen Iniskim, despite the fact that both our patrols and the Indians from four different tribes were scouring the prairie for her. Even Iniskim’s own mother didn’t know where she was.

There was only one place she could avoid such an intensive search. She must be under the earth still, inside the tunnels.

I wondered if Indians had continued transforming people into buffalo not just to plot the ley line, but also in the hope that, as the shaggy beasts ran through the underground tunnels, they would sweep Iniskim up with them and bring her back to the surface again.

We had sat in silence for several long moments, and my hand became chilled. I noticed that the buffalo-chip fire was going out. The image of Stone Keeper fluttered like a moth as the last wisps of smoke rose into the air.

“If I find Iniskim, I’ll do what I can to protect her,” I promised. “You have my word on it.”

“Thank you, Thomas,” she whispered. “I hope you will live long enough to keep that oath.”

A sense of unease gripped me. “What do you mean?”

“Your illness,” she said. “It has returned. You are dying, Thomas.”

She named the disease, using the Peigan word for it, but I understood it as plainly as if she were speaking the Queen’s English: cancer. It was a word that had haunted me for six long years, ever since my diagnosis and operation. Over the past few weeks, I’d refused to acknowledge the true cause of the ache in my stomach, telling myself it was only a prolonged bout of tyhpo-malaria. When the pain grew too fearsome, I’d drowned it in Pinkham’s and soldiered on. Yet all the while, I’d secretly known the truth, deep in my heart. Now I prodded my tender stomach with hesitant fingers, searching for the return of an all-too-familiar lump. Was the tumour really back?

Chambers stared at me. “Is it true?” he asked. “Is that why you carry a bottle of Pinkham’s with you?” To his credit, he did not draw his hand away from mine, despite the risk of contagion.

I nodded, unable to speak. My eyes were watering; smoke must have drifted into them. I tried to shake off the sense of impending doom that was settling over me, but to no avail. To put it bluntly, Stone Keeper’s pronouncement had terrified me. I knew that, this time, I would succumb. There would be no second chance. After my operation six years ago, the doctors told me that they could not repeat the procedure. I wasn’t strong enough to endure the strain of a second operation: when my heart had briefly stopped under the anaesthetic, only by a miracle had it started beating again. If the cancer came back, the doctors could not operate to remove the tumour: a second dose of ether would kill me.

“I’m still capable of carrying out my duties,” I answered Chambers at last, swallowing hard. I glanced at the ghostly figure of Stone Keeper. “And of doing what I can to save the girl in … whatever time I have left.”

The smoke began to drift sideways on the breeze. Stone Keeper’s face was resting on her hand now, and the remainder of her body had vanished. She looked as though she were fast asleep. Her face was peaceful, as if a burden had been lifted from her shoulders.

I suddenly realized that one question had remained unasked.

“Stone Keeper, who is Iniskim’s father?”

Her only answer was to smile sweetly in her sleep as the last wisp of smoke fled up into the night sky.

I’d asked my question too softly. Stone Keeper had disappeared.

I let go of the white feather.

“Is she gone?” Chambers asked.

I nodded.

Chambers gave me a thoughtful look. I thought he was going to ask about my disease, and braced myself for an unpleasant conversation, but his mind was on other matters. “Why did she call you Thomas?” he asked.

“It’s a name I used to go by. Why? Does it matter?”

As Chambers quickly shook his head, I remembered something else that Stone Keeper had said. She’d given us her true name — and taken ours in return. I wasn’t the only one using an assumed name: Chambers, also, was not who he claimed to be.

“Why did she call you Albert, if your name is Arthur?” I asked him abruptly.

Chambers waved the question away as if it didn’t matter. “It happens all the time,” he said smoothly. “I’ve a brother named Albert. We’re only a year apart. People are always mistaking us.”

I knew that Chambers wasn’t telling the truth. Stone Keeper had seen into our hearts: his name really was Albert — and it had been Arthur’s name on the pamphlet I’d read. This could only mean one thing: the man in front of me had assumed his brother’s identity.

I was rendered speechless by the impossible coincidence. Out of all of the people I might have met in the North-West Territories, out of all of the men who might have been hired by Q Division, the person seated across the fire from me in this lonely spot was someone who had also assumed another man’s identity. Because that man was his brother, he even matched the portrait on the back of the pamphlet.

I found my voice at last. “Does your brother approve of you passing yourself off as him, and pretending to be an expert on psychic phenomena?”

Chambers’s cheeks flushed. “I’m no charlatan,” he said hotly. “I’ve read every publication the Society for Psychical Research ever printed, and I’m an expert in thought transference. Arthur wouldn’t have agreed to let me lecture in the Dominion if I wasn’t. I may be self-trained, but that hardly matters, does it? Not when I can produce the kind of results you just saw.”

I nodded, but silently wondered how much of a hand Chambers had played in contacting Stone Keeper. He hadn’t even been able to see her. Then I remembered that he’d heard and understood Stone Keeper, even though she was speaking in Peigan. That must count for something. Chambers was, at least in part, a “sensitive” like myself.

Chambers couldn’t resist taking a verbal jab in return. “Tell me about the real Marmaduke Grayburn,” he said. “Does he approve of you passing yourself off as a Mounted Policeman?”

I felt my own cheeks flush. “I am a policeman,” I said. “I took Marmaduke’s place well before the training began, and I have served honourably ever since. For five years now, I’ve done my duty to—”

Chambers waved away the rest with a chuckle. He extended his hand. “Let’s agree that we’re both fully qualified to carry out our respective duties, regardless of what our real names might be. I agree to keep your secret, if you’ll keep mine.”

I took his hand. “Agreed.”

He released my hand clasp, and thought for a moment. He held up the feather. “Iniskim has to be below ground still. If we can open up the tunnel—”

I heard a rustling noise, and shushed Chambers with a finger to my lips. Moody rolled over, then threw off his blankets. He rose to his feet, rubbing his eyes.

“Too much tea,” he said with a shy grin. Taking his leave of our camp, he walked a few feet away, into the darkness. I could hear the sound of him passing water, and a moment later, his soft grunt of relief.

Chambers lowered his voice to a whisper. “If we can use Emily’s feather to open the tunnel, perhaps you can find Iniskim, and lead her to the Manitou Stone before the Indians find it. I’ll ride after Steele, and tell him not to destroy the stone quite yet. That will give you more time to find her. We’ve got sixteen days still — as long as you don’t spend too much time in the tunnels, you’ll be back well before the Day of Changes.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that no watch I carried had ever counted time accurately, but there was something else nagging at me — a feeling that something wasn’t right. Not a premonition, but an awareness that came from my mundane physical senses. I heard a low whicker that sounded like Buck, and then a hissing noise, off in the direction where Moody had gone.

“Chambers,” I said. “Constable Moody is taking an awfully long time to—”

The night erupted with a thunderous crash as a flash of light lit up our camp. Blinking, unable to see or hear clearly, I caught the muffled sound of horses whinnying in fear. As clods of earth and burning chunks of wood that looked like boards from a crate fluttered down all around me, I saw Leveillee fling off his blankets and rise to his feet, rifle in hand. He whipped the weapon up to his shoulder, shouting something at the same time. I heard only the words, “
Les savages!
” before a figure hurtled out of the night. Then Leveillee’s rifle spat flame — but too late. The running figure came in low and fast, under its barrel. As my ears popped, I heard a swishing noise, like a riding crop whipping through the air. Then Leveillee dropped his rifle and crumpled to the ground.

I scrambled to my feet, my mind feverishly trying to piece together what had just happened. The crate of dynamite had exploded. Constable Moody was nowhere to be seen. A blood-curdling war whoop came from somewhere to my left, and was echoed on my right and behind me. Dark shapes were everywhere in the night. Chambers leaped to his feet, then sprinted away in his pyjamas, Stone Keeper’s feather still clutched in his fist.

Where was my rifle? I dropped to my knees to find it, and heard something whistle over my head. When I grabbed the rifle and looked up, frantically cocking my weapon, Wandering Spirit stood above me, a wicked expression on his hideously painted face. One hand held the feather-tipped coup stick he’d just used on Leveillee, the other, a knife whose brightly polished blade glinted in the starlight. Behind him, a figure wearing a feathered war bonnet struggled to drag away a kicking horse.

I shot Wandering Spirit square in the chest, and saw the flame from the barrel of my rifle lick across the buckskin jacket he wore. The flattened bullet fell to the ground at my feet.

I’d been too stunned by the explosion and the sudden attack to think clearly, but now I realized I had reached for the wrong weapon. Wandering Spirit had been smarter — he’d known his coup stick couldn’t kill me and had come armed with a knife, as well.

Dropping the rifle, I leaped out of the way of the blade’s swishing arc. I shoved a hand into my pocket and dug out my tobacco pouch, but the ties of the pouch were in a tight knot that would not be undone by my fumbling fingers. I looked up and saw the knife jabbing toward me….

The
crack-crack
of a rifle caused Wandering Spirit to glance back over his shoulder at the last moment, and I was able to twist out of the way. I heard a scream from one of the figures near the horses, then another rifle shot and a groan. I saw Wandering Spirit’s eyes narrow in anger, and then heard a bullet whine past my own head. The rifle cracked again, and Wandering Spirit’s lynx skin war bonnet flew off his head and tumbled to the ground. I wondered if Constable Moody had joined the fight. It couldn’t be Chambers — he didn’t even carry a weapon.

Whoever was shooting at Wandering Spirit didn’t realize that he couldn’t be harmed by bullets. I had to act quickly. I dove at Wandering Spirit’s feet, knocking him to the ground.

The warrior was as quick and supple as a snake. In an instant he’d twisted around and had his knife at my throat. I wrenched my head to the side and felt the blade scrape across my chin like a razor. I brought my hand up to fend off the blow — and the knife sliced through the tobacco pouch I still held. It also sliced through the palm of my hand with a pain like fire — but now the buffalo stone was in my hand.

Wandering Spirit wrestled me onto my back, slamming my head against the ground. Amid the sparks that washed across my eyesight, I saw his knife descend. I grabbed his wrist with my left hand, but could only halt its descent for a moment. Panting, a victorious grin on his yellow-painted face, he forced the knife down toward my throat. His other hand held my right wrist, pinning it to the ground.

With one last desperate effort, I wrenched my right hand through his sweaty fingers. The buffalo stone, still clenched in my fist, brushed against the palm of his hand. A look of shock and surprise crossed Wandering Spirit’s face — and then a tremendous, muffling weight crushed my chest. I was buried under something that felt as heavy as a train engine covered in a coating of spongy wool. Limbs thrashed, gouging the ground all around me, and then the monstrosity was standing above me.