Apparition Trail, The (30 page)

There had also been no further activity at the buffalo jump where I had emerged from the tunnel. The patrol that Superintendent Cotton had dispatched to the cliffs found evidence that the Indians beat a hasty retreat from that spot, and nothing — neither Indian nor buffalo — had been seen in the area since. Despite the fact that settlers were still disappearing, if they were being driven through tunnels in the earth as the McDougalls had been, they weren’t emerging at those cliffs. It didn’t surprise me; I had a hunch that the tunnel’s exit was in some new location now, hundreds of miles away.

The only sensible course of action seemed to be that which we were already taking: searching for Iniskim.

“We’ve got twenty-three days before the next full moon,” I said. “With luck, one of our patrols will spot the albino buffalo calf and she’ll lead us to the Manitou Stone.”

“All well and good,” Steele said. “Unless Big Bear and the others have already found her. If they see our patrols, all they need do is drape a hide over the calf, and it will look like a pony or a large dog from a distance. It’s an old Indian trick; I’ve seen them cover their own horses with hides when they hunt buffalo, and fool the herds into thinking they’re buffalo, as well.”

“Blood knows blood,” Chambers muttered.

Steele and I both turned. It was the first time Chambers had spoken during our meeting. Chambers looked like his old self, with cheeks shaved and hair freshly Brilliantined, wearing an expensive cutaway suit and polished boots. Yet he was quieter than he had been before his brief tenure as a buffalo — less prone to lecturing and more thoughtful. He sat with his hands folded on the table, contemplating them with a quizzical look that suggested that he was still getting used to their human form. His fingernails had cracked like well-worn hooves; even a trim by the town’s barber hadn’t cleaned them up entirely.

After a moment, Chambers lifted his head. “In the graveyard at Victoria Mission, I contacted the spirit of Abigail McDougall. Her singing led me to the cave that her husband had been driven into — the one in which I….”

A shudder coursed through his body.

“It was Emily you heard singing, not McDougall’s wife,” I gently reminded him. “We know that Emily entered the cave with her daughter, and I heard her singing after I spoke to her in the woods.”

Chambers’s hands clenched. “I know what I heard — and whose spirit I contacted. It was Abigail McDougall. I saw her as plain as I see you now: an Indian woman, covered in pockmarks and weeping for her departed husband.”

“Abigail McDougall did die in the smallpox epidemic of 1870,” Steele noted.

I pointed out something that should have been obvious. “The same smallpox outbreak scarred Emily. Surely, she was the one you heard, Chambers.”

The fire in Chambers’s eyes went out. Slumping back in his chair, he lapsed back into a brooding silence. I was sorry to have questioned his abilities, but I felt it my duty to report the truth as I saw it.

I started to apologize, and he shook his head. “I only mentioned the ghost of Abigail as an example of using thought transference to contact the astral plane,” he muttered. “It is Emily’s spirit we need to contact now, if we wish to find her daughter.”

“But she’s not dead,” I protested.

“She must be,” Chambers insisted. “She went into the tunnel, was transformed into a buffalo, and was driven over the cliff and slaughtered. She’s dead.”

“No she’s not!” I shouted.

“Corporal Grayburn!” Steele’s voice cracked like a whip. “Button that lip. I want to hear what Special Constable Chambers has to say.”

I could feel my cheeks burning, and realized belatedly that I had done what a good investigator should never do: I’d let my attraction to a woman get the better of me. I vowed to make no further retort, and hoped that Chambers wouldn’t contradict what I’d written about Four Finger Pete’s demise in my report.

Steele’s voice softened. “Now then, Special Constable Chambers,” he prompted. “Tell me why we should contact Iniskim’s mother.”

Chambers sat up a little straighter in his chair. “If Emily is dead, her astral body is no longer constrained by her physical body. She can wander the astral plane at will. Like most ‘ghosts,’ she’ll be drawn to the person she cared for the most: her daughter. Emily can lead us to Iniskim — or at the very least, she’ll know where the girl is.”

Steele leaned across the table toward Chambers, his posture radiating enthusiasm. “Contact her, then. Call up her spirit and talk to it. Get her to tell us where Iniskim is.”

Chambers shook his head. “Alas, it isn’t that simple. In order to contact a specific ghost, a link with that person is required. I would need an article of Emily’s clothing, or some other personal effect, before I could attempt to call her.”

Steele mused a moment. “The Peigan woman and her husband were traveling by riverboat. If what Corporal Grayburn surmises is correct — that Emily deliberately entered the cave at Victoria Mission — she wouldn’t have carried all of her luggage into the cavern with her. Perhaps she left something behind on the
North West
or at Victoria Mission. I’ll send a telegram at once, to have both searched.”

I wanted to protest. I knew in my gut that searching for Emily’s clothing and holding séances to contact her ghost wasn’t going to get us anywhere, but I didn’t dare allow myself to lapse into another outburst.

Instead, as Chambers and Steele discussed the prospects of contacting Emily’s ghost, I mentally listed the facts that pointed to her still being alive. When I’d entered the tunnel at Victoria Mission, I’d found Chambers’s torn clothing in its depths, and Iniskim’s tiny dress and moccasins, but nothing of Emily’s. If the woman had been transformed into a buffalo, her clothing would have been torn to pieces. I should have found scraps of her dress and moccasins somewhere on the floor of the tunnel.

It seemed more logical to conclude that Emily had for some reason remained in human form, despite entering the tunnel — but if so, where was she? Had she blundered up one of the tributary tunnels? Was she underground even now, wandering alone through the darkness, wondering if her daughter was dead or alive?

I stared at the map. The red circles on it reminded me of the pockmarks on Emily’s face. I touched a hand to the paper, imagining that my fingers were stroking her skin. I trailed my fingertips over the map in a gentle circle….

I gasped as a sudden realization hit me. Then I peered more closely at the circles of red that marked the disappearances. Each was neatly labelled in Steele’s fine penmanship with a date — and those dates had a definite pattern. I rose to my feet and crossed the room, grabbing the pen and inkwell from the commanding officer’s desk. Returning to the map, I dipped the pen in the ink and began tracing a blue line across the map, joining up the marks according to their dates.

Both Steele and Chambers stopped to stare at me.

Steele swore, and started to grab for my hand. “That’s my only map!” he cried. He stopped when he saw what I was drawing: a spiral. Its ever-diminishing curve enclosed a large blank space at its centre, just north of the CPR line and south of the South Saskatchewan River.

“By God,” Steele said. “I hadn’t noticed that before. What does it signify?”

I stared at the map, wondering that very thing. The line I’d drawn passed through each of the circles, spiralling inward in a counter-clockwise direction as it joined up the more recent disappearances. The only circle that didn’t line up with the spiral was the one at Victoria Mission, site of the earliest disappearance. Then I saw why: had I begun drawing the line at the
X
that marked the stone’s original resting place on the Battle River, the curve would have gone in the right direction. I took the pen and corrected the line.

Steele leaned over the map eagerly. “What about the other end of the spiral?” he asked. “If we can plot its course in the other direction — inward — we can predict where the Indians are most likely to strike next. Then we can prevent them from using their fiendish magic to transform anyone else into buffalo.”

I dipped the pen once more in the ink, studied the spiral for a moment, then drew a few short strokes at the innermost end of the line. I was able to extend the spiral a little further, but I soon saw that it would be impossible to complete it. The problem was that the spiral was far from perfect: its curves bulged outward on an east-west axis. The distances between the loops were uneven, and the curves were irregular.

“This is the best I can do,” I told Steele. “From this point, the line could continue inward along any number of different angles. I can only sketch the line’s direction with any hope of accuracy to the point where it crosses the river.”

I paused, then, and peered more closely at the map. With a thrill of excitement, I saw that I’d just extended the spiral across the South Saskatchewan — the very river on whose banks the “ghost” of Iniskim had been spotted, two years ago.

I pointed at the spot. “Look here! You see this point? This is the only place where the spiral could possibly cross the river between Saskatchewan Landing and the South Saskatchewan’s confluence with the Red Deer River — the rest of the spiral would all be south of the river, after this point. This has got to be the place where Constable Davis forded the river and saw Iniskim’s ghost.”

Steele clapped me on the back. “Well done, Corporal. I’ll order the patrol that’s searching the South Saskatchewan to make for the spot posthaste.”

Chambers just stared at the map.

“This line,” he mused, touching his finger to it. I hadn’t blotted the ink, and his finger came away wet. He wiped it against his neatly pressed trousers — a sure sign that he was not his former self. “It looks like a ley line.”

“A what?” Steele asked. Like a good investigator, he was alert to every clue.

Chambers looked up. “A ley line. It’s a current of etheric force that exists solely on the ethereal plane, but with links to the physical plane. Ley lines typically flow along and around natural terrestrial formations in the physical world: along rivers, through valleys, and around hills and mountains. Mankind has tried for centuries to direct their flow, with mixed results. Stonehenge is but one example.”

I had no idea what Chambers was talking about, but he was starting to sound like a professor again. Strangely, it no longer irritated me.

Steele asked the obvious question: “What is Stonehenge?”

Chambers smiled. For the first time since being returned to his human form, he was truly enjoying himself. “Stonehenge is a gigantic megalith.” He paused expectantly.

I obliged him: “What’s a megalith?”

“A gigantic structure made of stones placed one upon the other. The pattern was believed to be magically significant by ancient druids.”

I frowned. I had no idea what “druids” were, either, but Chambers was wound up now, and wasn’t waiting for questions.

“The Society for Psychical Research has studied Stonehenge for some time,” he continued. “We believe it to be a gateway that channels etheric flow. Through its many apertures, the flow of etheric force is refracted and redirected, to spread out like the invisible spokes of a wheel, across all of England.”

“What has that got to do with the spiral that Grayburn drew?” Steele asked. His tone was slightly irritated; he was a man who expected answers he could understand.

Chambers stared at the map, his brows furrowed. Then snapped his fingers.

“The spiral begins with the Manitou Stone, and is almost certainly a ley line. The Manitou Stone must work in the same way that the boulders of Stonehenge do: as a channel for etheric force. This energy is being used to augment the powers of the buffalo stone, allowing its magic to be used at a distance. The Indians tested this on the McDougalls, and it apparently worked, despite the fact that the Manitou Stone no longer sat in its original position on the ley line. Had the Manitou Stone been in its proper place, the Day of Changes might have occurred then and there.

“The Indians tried to use magic to move the Manitou Stone back to the place the McDougalls had taken it from, but something went wrong. It’s my guess that the Manitou Stone wound up somewhere other than the place the Indians intended, and that they are searching for it still. In the meantime, they’re trying to initiate the Day of Changes using other, less significant points along the ley line. Hence, the rash of disappearances, all of which correspond to the spiral.”

Steele digested this information, then nodded toward the end of the table, where the spiral-shaped stone lay nested in my tobacco pouch. As he regarded it, his lips pressed together in a grim line.

“The disappearances continued, even after Corporal Grayburn recovered the buffalo stone,” he said. “There must be more than one of the blasted things.”

“That’s true,” I said, remembering Jerry Potts’s assertion that there were many such stones. “But there’s only one Manitou Stone — and only one ley line.”

“So we hope,” Steele said grimly. Then he turned to Chambers. “The Manitou Stone marked the beginning of the spiral, before the Indians tried to move it. Could it have wound up at the spiral’s end point?”

“It may have, indeed,” Chambers peered at the map, then stabbed a finger at the place where the spiral crossed the South Saskatchewan. “The most logical place for it to have wound up is here — at the spot we presume Iniskim to be heading. That’s why she made for it once before: she had a premonition that this is where the Manitou Stone would one day be. It must be the spiral’s end point.”