Soul Catcher

Frank Herbert

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Smashwords Edition

* * * * *

Digital edition © 2012 by Herbert Properties,
LLC

Originally published in 1972 by
Frank Herbert (G.P. Putnam’s Sons).

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ISBN-13: 978-1-61475-043-7

Cover design by Kevin J. Anderson

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Soul Catcher

Frank Herbert

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DEDICATION

For Ralph and Irene Slattery, without whose
love and guidance this book would never have been.

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Table of Contents

Soul Catcher

About the Author

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Soul
Catcher

He was Katsuk, the core from which all
perception radiates. And his victim was David Marshall, the 13 year
old son of an Undersecretary of State, an innocent chosen from the
white world for an ancient sacrifice of vengeance.

When the boy’s father arrived at Six Rivers
Camp, they showed him a number of things which they might not have
revealed to a lesser person. But the father, as you know, was
Howard Marshall and that meant State Department and VIP connections
in Washington, D.C.; so they showed him the statement from the
professor and the interviews with the camp counselors, that sort of
thing. Of course, Marshall saw the so-called kidnap note and the
newspaper clippings which some of the FBI men had brought up to the
camp that morning.

Marshall lived up to expectations. He spoke
with the measured clarity of someone to whom crises and decisions
were a way of life. In response to a question, he said:

“I know this Northwest Coast country very
well, you understand. My father was in lumber here. I spent many
happy days in this region as a child and young man. My father hired
Indians whenever he could find ones who would work. He paid them
the same wages as anyone else. Our Indians were well treated. I
really don’t see how this kidnapping could be aimed at me
personally or at my family. The man who took David must be
insane.”

***

Statement of Dr. Tilman Barth, University of
Washington Anthropology Department:

I find this whole thing incredible. Charles
Hobuhet cannot be the mad killer you make him out to be. It’s
impossible. He could not have kidnapped that boy. You must not
think of him as criminal, or as Indian. Charles is a unique
intellect, one of the finest students I’ve ever had. He’s
essentially gentle and with a profoundly subtle sense of humor. You
know, that could just be our situation here. This could be a
monstrous joke. Here, let me show you some of his work. I’ve saved
copies of everything Charles has written for me. The world’s going
to know about him someday….

***

From a news story in the
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
:

The most intensive manhunt in Washington
history centered today on the tangled rain forest and virtually
untouched wilderness area of the Olympic National Park.

Law enforcement officials said they still
believe Charles Hobuhet, the Indian militant, is somewhere in that
region with his kidnap victim, David Marshall, 13, son of the new
United States Undersecretary of State.

Searchers were not discounting, however, the
reports that the two have been seen in other areas. Part of the
investigation focused on Indian lands in the state’s far northwest
corner. Indian trackers were being enlisted to assist in the search
and bloodhounds were being brought from Walla Walla.

The manhunt began yesterday with discovery
at the exclusive Six Rivers boys’ camp that young Marshall was
missing and that a so-called kidnap note had been left behind. The
note reportedly was signed by Hobuhet with his pseudonym “Katsuk”
and threatened to sacrifice the boy in an ancient Indian
ceremony.

***

The note left at Cedar Cabin, Six Rivers, by
Charles Hobuhet-Katsuk:

I take an innocent of your people to
sacrifice for all of the innocents you have murdered. The Innocent
will go with all of those other innocents into the spirit place.
Thus will sky and earth balance.

I am Katsuk who does this to you. Think of
me only as Katsuk, not as Charles Hobuhet. I am something far more
than a sensory system and its appetites. I am evolved far beyond
you who are called hoquat. I look backward to see you. I see your
lives based on cowardice. Your judgments arise from illusions. You
tell me unlimited growth and consumption are good. Then your
biologists tell me this is cancerous and lethal. To which hoquat
should I listen? You do not listen. You think you are free to do
anything that comes into your minds. Thinking this, you remain
afraid to liberate your spirits from restraint.

Katsuk will tell you why this is. You fear
to create because your creations mirror your true selves. You
believe your power resides in an ultimate knowledge which you
forever seek as children seek parental wisdom. I learned this while
watching you in your hoquat schools. But now I am Katsuk, a greater
power. I will sacrifice your flesh. I will strike through to your
spirit. I have the root of your tree in my power.

***

On the day he was to leave for camp, David
Marshall had awakened early. It was two weeks after his thirteenth
birthday. David thought about being thirteen as he stretched out in
the morning warmth of his bed. There was some internal difference
that came with being thirteen. It was not the same as twelve, but
he couldn’t pin down the precise difference.

For a time he played with the sensation that
the ceiling above his bed actually fluttered as his eyelids
resisted opening to the day. There was sunshine out in that day, a
light broken by its passage through the big-leaf maple which shaded
the window of his upstairs bedroom.

Without opening his eyes, he could sense the
world around his home—the long, sloping lawns, the carefully tended
shrubs and flowers. It was a world full of slow calm. Thinking
about it sometimes, he felt a soft drumbeat of exaltation.

David opened his eyes. For a moment, he
pretended the faint shadow marks in the ceiling’s white plaster
were a horizon: range upon range of mountains dropping down to
drift-piled beaches.

Mountains ... beaches—he’d see such things
tomorrow when he went to camp.

David turned, focused on the camp gear piled
across chair and floor where he and his father had arranged the
things last night: sleeping bag, pack, clothing, boots ...

There was the knife.

The knife stimulated a feeling of
excitement. That was a genuine Russell belt knife made in Canada.
It had been a birthday gift from his father just two weeks ago.

A bass hum of wilderness radiated into his
imagination from the knife in its deer-brown scabbard. It was a
man’s tool, a man’s weapon. It stood for blood and darkness and
independence.

His father’s words had put magic in the
knife:

“
That’s no toy, Dave. Learn how to use it
safely. Treat it with respect.”

His father’s voice had carried subdued
tensions. The adult eyes had looked at him with calculated
intensity and there had been a waiting silence after each
phrase.

Fingernails made a brief scratching signal
on his bed-room door, breaking his reverie. The door opened. Mrs.
Parma slid into the room. She wore a long blue and black sari with
faint red lines in it. She moved with silent effacement, an effect
as attention-demanding as a gong.

David’s gaze followed her. She always made
him feel uneasy.

Mrs. Parma glided across to the window that
framed the maple, closed the window firmly.

David peered over the edge of the blankets
at her as she turned from the window and nodded her awareness of
him.

“Good morning, young sir.”

The clipped British accent never sounded
right to him coming from a mouth with purple lips. And her eyes
bothered him. They were too big, as though stretched by the way her
glossy hair was pulled back into a bun. Her name wasn’t really
Parma. It began with Parma, but it was much longer and ended with a
strange clicking sound that David could not make.

He pulled the blankets below his chin, said:
“Did my father leave yet?”

“Before dawn, young sir. It is a long way to
the capital of your nation.”

David frowned and waited for her to leave.
Strange woman. His parents had brought her back from New Delhi,
where his father had been political adviser to the embassy.

In those years, David had stayed with Granny
in San Francisco. He had been surrounded by old people with snowy
hair, diffident servants, and low, cool voices. It had been a
drifting time with diffused stimulations.
“Your grandmother is
napping. One would not want to disturb her, would one?”
It had
worn on him the way dripping water wears a rock. His memory of the
period retained most strongly the whirlwind visits of his parents.
They had descended upon the insulated quiet of the house,
breathless, laughing, tanned, and romantic, arms loaded with exotic
gifts.

But the chest-shaking joy of being with such
people had always ended, leaving him with a sense of frustration
amidst the smells of dusty perfumes and tea and the black feeling
that he had been abandoned.

Mrs. Parma checked the clothing laid out for
him on the dresser. Knowing he wanted her to leave, she delayed.
Her body conveyed a stately swaying within the sari. Her
fingernails were bright pink.

She had shown him a map once with a town
marked on it, the place where she had been born. She had a brown
photograph: mud-walled houses and leafless trees, a man all in
white standing beside a bicycle, a violin case under his arm. Her
father.

Mrs. Parma turned, looked at David with her
startling eyes. She said: “Your father asked me to remind you when
you awoke that the car will depart precisely on time. You have one
hour .”

She lowered her gaze, went to the door. The
sari betrayed only a faint suggestion of moving legs. The red lines
in the fabric danced like sparks from a fire.

David wondered what she thought. Her slow,
calm way revealed nothing he could decipher. Was she laughing at
him? Did she think going to camp was a foolishness? Did she even
have a geographical understanding of where he would go, the Olympic
Mountains?

He had a last glimpse of the bright
fingernails as she went out, closed the door.

David bounced from bed, began dressing. When
he came to the belt, he slipped the sheathed knife onto it, cinched
the buckle. The blade remained a heavy presence at his hip while he
brushed his teeth and combed his blond hair straight back. When he
leaned close to the mirror, he could see the knife’s dark handle
with the initials burned into it: DMM, David Morgenstern
Marshall.

Presently, he went down to breakfast.

***

Statement of Dr. Tilman Earth, University of
Washington Anthropology Department:

The word
katsuk
is very explicit in
Hobuhet’s native tongue. It means “the center” or the core from
which all perception radiates. It’s the center of the world or of
the universe. It’s where an aware individual stands. There has
never been any doubt in my mind that Charles is aware. I can
understand his assuming this pseudonym.