Seaweed Under Water (26 page)

Out on the Sound, seagulls rose into the air. A massive freighter inched across the horizon. Closer in, a single Orca ploughed the waves. I closed my eyes and saw Tess, dead.

The chief took a pipe out of his pocket, put it into his mouth, then took it out again and said, “Time we got moving, Silas.”

I restarted the engine and we went on. When we reached the reserve lands below Boss Rollins' house, I parked in the usual spot.

We got out of the car. The sun was straight overhead; my shirt was sticking to my back. I led Chief Alphonse across that five-wire fence. Below the trees, another foul-smelling greenish fog hovered above the ground. The fog thickened as we went deeper into forest. My throat tickled and my eyes watered. A smoker, Chief Alphonse was also sweating profusely. He started to cough. I stopped to give him a breather.

The chief stumbled into me from behind and tried to speak, but his face was purple. He leant forward, retching and coughing like a man in end-stage TB. Hands on his knees, he was still trying to tell me something when he collapsed face down on the earth. I turned him onto his back and was giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, when harsh laughter echoed.

In that once-sacred wilderness, a spectral figure emerged from a patch of shrubbery. An almost transparent shroud-like garment hung from his shoulders; rope-like muscles and tendons ridged his emaciated body. This sudden apparition scared the hell out of me. The creature's thin lips twisted into a horrible smile before it dissolved like ectoplasm in that green enveloping fog.

The chief's eyes had opened. His face no longer purple, he was white to the lips instead, but he was awake, breathing on his own, because the stinking fog had evaporated, along with that ghost. As visibility improved, the circular stream-fed pool came into view. I helped Chief Alphonse to his feet and we went to take a closer look at the spirit canoe.

The chief seized my arm, because something was dodging toward us among the trees. It was the apparition. Silently, acting like a sleepwalker, or someone in a trance, the spectre came up, apparently without noticing us, and paused beside the pond. After giving the spirit canoe an approving glance, it resumed its erratic progress between the trees. The chief and I followed it to the logging donkey.

Anger replaced creeping dread as the spectre reached inside the furnace and dragged Denise Halvorsen out by her heels. Limp, her face and uniform smudged with soot, she appeared lifeless.

“I've seen enough,” I said, dry-mouthed and hoarse. “Let's grab him now.”

“We can't grab him,” the chief said, still marvelously unperturbed and unhurried. “You can't grab a ghost.”

“That's not Denise's ghost. She's real.”

“No she isn't,” the chief said. “And look at that creature's hands.”

Each hand had six fingers. I'd been nervous to begin with; this revelation spooked me even more. We saw Denise's inert body manhandled off the platform and carried off. Chief Alphonse and I followed, but lost sight of them in another rising fog. When we reached the pool, there was no sight of the spectre, or of Denise. The spirit canoe was destroyed, its manikin crew gone.

Chief Alphonse grabbed my arm and said, “It's a trick. We're at ‘the Gorge,' but it's the wrong one.”

Immediately, I understood. That whole area was a small representation of the Gorge Waterway where it passes below the Tillicum Road Bridge. The pool represented a placid version of the giant whirlpool created by every turn of the tide.

Just as we arrived back in Victoria, I thought to call Bernie Tapp and told him to meet me at the Gorge.

≈  ≈  ≈

We left the car on Tillicum Road. Chief Alphonse led the way to the banks of the Gorge. Sitting on that high grassy cliff above the water, I sensed as never before the spirits that haunted this place. The ceremonies and rituals celebrated here by my ancestors were rooted in the surrounding rocks and trees, in the very waters of the Gorge itself. Moreover, these ceremonies would be repeated in perpetuity.

The tourists that sometimes walk in this area had gone for the day; Chief Alphonse and I had the place to ourselves. Clouds obscured the moon. The tide had turned and small twigs, leaves and bits of driftwood drifted in lazy circles in that deep pool below the bridge, as the millions of gallons of water filling Portage Inlet drained back to the sea through this narrow channel.

The chief asked knowingly, “Are you scared?”

I looked at him.

“Don't be,” he said. “We can't see anybody, but we're not alone. Part of what we once were is here with us, along with what's still to come. The powers that protected our ancestors will protect us.”

Apart from the headlights of cars, flashing intermittently as they crossed the Tillicum Bridge, the night was now almost black. Onshore winds brought more clouds from the west. It began to rain and the night grew even darker. At a few minutes before midnight something moved among the rocks on the waterway's opposite bank. Looking closely, I saw a small figure darting across my line of sight. “It's a young boy,” I said, as the figure went from view beneath the bridge abutments. “What's he doing out at this time of night?”

Chief Alphonse showed his teeth.

A police cruiser pulled to a stop on the Tillicum Bridge. Bernie Tapp appeared. Backlit by the cruiser's emergency flashers, he leaned against the bridge's concrete railing and peered down at the strengthening whirlpool. More police cars arrived, along with ambulances and a fire truck. Uniforms dispersed along the bridge to block traffic in both directions. The rain increased, trickles of mud slid down the banks. Trees shook their branches in the first faint breezes of a gathering storm. Soaked and shivering, the chief and I moved beneath a shelf of rock. High above, somebody handed Bernie a searchlight; he aimed it into the rapidly expanding whirlpool and along the banks of the waterway, where the child was captured in the light's conical beam. This time we saw him clearly, if fleetingly: he was wearing a cone-shaped grass hat and a long kilt-like garment.

Clouds thickened, thunder roared. The ground beneath us shook as lightning struck the bridge. The earth rumbled, and the boy fell tumbling into the whirlpool amid a landslide of pebbles, mud and small rocks. We saw him go under. The Chief, his hair blowing in the wind, was trying to tell me something, but the uproar drowned his words. The child reappeared, on our side of the water this time. Running toward us, I saw that he was not a child. He was a powerfully built dwarf, about a metre tall, with wet grey ragged locks hanging to his shoulders. His face and upper body were painted with black and white horizontal stripes—exactly like those spirit-canoe manikins.

Amazement became shock and horror as he pointed with a six-fingered hand: A large dark object was floating toward the bridge on the quickening tide. A police searchlight zeroed in on it, till the object drifted out of sight beneath the bridge. Moments later it reappeared. A searchlight found it again. Then another searchlight illuminated it, till it was lit like day. It was a canoe, with a high raised prow. Boss Rollins was manning a steering oar in the stern. We saw Denise Halvorsen, slumped across a thwart in the bows. Sagging behind her was the idiot, Donny. Neville Rollin's mummified corpse was propped upright beside Joe Bickle.

The dwarf opened his mouth to laugh, revealing blackened stumps of teeth and a long black tongue. Chief Alphonse, braver than I, reached out to touch him, but the dwarf drew back into darkness and dematerialized. The air stank of sulphur.

The chief put his mouth to my ear and shouted, “This is what it must have been like years ago, when Billy Cheachlacht was praying to Camossung. The same night that Boss Rollins stayed underwater for an age and came up with a dwarf. Billy Cheachlacht told us the air stank like rotten eggs that night too. Spooky, hellish lightning strikes were falling all around.”

The whirlpool was spinning faster every second. The hole at its centre grew wider and deeper. The canoe began to spin. Boss Rollins dropped his steering oar, picked up an axe and hacked a hole in the bottom of the canoe. As it filled and began to founder we realized that Denise, Donny and Bickle were still alive. Tied to the canoe as securely as Neville Rollins' skeleton, they struggled to escape.

I stood poised on a high rock ready to dive in, only the chief grabbed my arm and shouted something I couldn't or didn't want to hear. The outer rim of the whirlpool was now an enormous circle of greenish-white foam. Denise and the others were up to their waists in water when the canoe slid into the vortex and went under. The stern half of the canoe reappeared almost instantly on the whirlpool's outermost rim. Neville's grinning corpse was still aboard when the canoe smashed against Camossung's Rock.

Chief Alphonse was still hanging on to me. I shook loose and for what good I thought it might do for Denise dived into the whirlpool. Underwater it was cold, black, full of solid objects that pummelled my face and body and legs. I found it impossible to swim against the current and was drawn under and down to the bottom where something heavy fell onto me, driving the last bit of air from my lungs. I was drowning, at the last of my strength, when that
something
dragged me into the eye of the vortex.

Magically, the water warmed, visibility improved. Air, entrained in the vortex's giant hollow core, reduced my buoyancy. For a moment I was held upright in a spinning watery tube and was actually able to take a few breaths, before I landed with a thump on the bottom once more. The water mysteriously drained away. I found myself inside a dry, airy, underwater dome.

Was I going out of my head? No, because Denise Halvorsen was inside that dome too, and Denise was real, alive, curled up comfortably on a bank of dry warm sand. When I called to her she smiled and sat up, but Neville Rollins interposed himself between us. I drew back in horror. Disappointed by my cowardice, Denise shook her head. Chastened, frightened out of my wits, I watched Boss Rollins emerge from a cave, along with Tess Rollins and that ghastly painted dwarf. Joseph Bickle appeared with a camera and sat on a rock, taking pictures. Donny's idiot laughter was the last thing I remembered, after I shoved Neville Rollins aside, took Denise into my arms and kissed her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I was lying half-asleep in a strange bed. Somebody remarked pedantically, “Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious explains everything that happened. He taught us that none of us are isolated in time. We humans are part of what we once were, and what we shall be again.”

I opened my eyes and realized that I was in a hospital. The room was dim. Bernie Tapp, Chief Alphonse and the man who had just spoken were standing around my bed.

“We don't need Jung to explain things to us. It just
is
, that's all,” Chief Alphonse said, speaking in his slow, calm, measured way. “Everything that happened at the Tillicum Bridge has happened before. Coast Salish Spirit Questers have been diving into that whirlpool since time out of mind. Sometimes they come up, sometimes they drown. Silas is tough, he didn't drown.”

“Maybe not,” I chimed in. “I'm not real sure that's completely true, at present.”

The three men got up from their chairs and came to my bedside—Chief Alphonse moving more slowly and stiffly than his companions.

The man who had spoken first took my wrist to check my pulse. “I'm Dr. McCall,” he said. “You've been in a bad scrape. How do you feel now?”

“Not bad.”

“I should say not. And don't worry. People emerging from coma are always slightly confused. Make no mistake, Mr. Seaweed. You
are
alive.”

I said, “How is Denise doing?”

Bernie Tapp shook his head.

“We'll talk about that later,” the doctor replied.

“Stop thinking and wracking your brain for once, and go back to sleep,” Bernie said, helping me to sit up straighter and fluffing my pillows.

“Your vital signs are about normal now, Sergeant,” Dr. McCall said, producing a pill. He handed it to me, along with a glass of water, and said, “Swallow this. You'll be out of this world in a minute.”

I hesitated for a moment, until something small and malevolent appeared in my peripheral vision. A grey six-fingered hand was scratching at a windowpane. I swallowed the pill. Felicity Exeter walked into the room before I fell asleep.

≈  ≈  ≈

We buried Denise at Hatley Park. Five hundred uniformed marchers showed up; it's always a big deal when an officer dies on duty. New Westminster's police band piped us into the chapel with “The Flowers of the Forest.” Chief Mallory gave the eulogy; Victoria's chief magistrate read the lesson.

Denise's father had memorized a few words of Kipling, and he recited them clearly and unbrokenly over his daughter's coffin.

You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind,

And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;

You have heard the song—how long! how long?

Pull out on the trail again!

Ha' done with the tents of Shem, dear lass,

We've seen the seasons through,

And it's time to turn on the old trail, our own trail,

the out trail,

Pull out, pull out, on the Long Trail—the trail that

is always new!

After hundreds of strong silent men from as far away as San Diego finished drying their eyes, after eight uniformed pallbearers took up her coffin, Vancouver's police band gave us “Scotland the Brave
,”
and then led us to the tree under whose branches Denise would forever lie. It had rained, earlier. A slow kettledrummer beat the dirge when they lowered her into the damp ground.

Bernie Tapp and I waited until the last kilt had swished through the park gates, and the last faint skirls of “The Gathering of Locheil” had lamented away in the distance.