The Purification Ceremony (28 page)

    The killer’s smoke became my ally. I saw my escape, but the way was fraught with danger; to get to the broken bone I’d have to go away from the fire out into the snow. But there was no recourse, so I got to my knees without further thought and hopped forward to the edge of the deer skins. I sensed a wolf to my left take two steps in my direction. “Live or die,” I told myself. “Live or die.”

    With one great effort I thrust my body up and out. I came facedown on the side of the bone, feeling the jagged edge slice into my cheek. The scent of the sudden burst of my blood was blown to the wolves. They snarled. One howled. It was her, the alpha bitch; she knew I was wounded. She didn’t know how. She didn’t care. All she knew was that I was bleeding in the snow outside the heat of the dreaded fire.

    I got hold of the bone with my teeth even as the first wolf attacked from my right, then jackknifed my body, swinging my bound feet at it, feeling my heels thud against fur and the animal manage one rip at me before darting back to safety. No time now. I bent in two again, barely aware of the snow numbing my exposed skin. I rolled over and over and got back onto the deer hides.

    I spit out the bone and worked myself around to get it into my hands. I set the jagged edge into the rawhide and began sawing, only to slip and gash my left arm above the wrist. The blood ran freely down my arms, but I held tight to the bone, repositioning it on the lashes even as the increased volume of the blood scent reached the pack and the she-wolf howled as if to say time was on her side.

    “You believe I’m dying today, bitch, but I’m not,” I said, grinning wildly into the darkness. “You, on the other hand, might want to think about it.’:

    The fire retreated to the tip of a single branch as thick as my wrist.

    Twenty-five yards behind me, there was a scratching noise in the snow. I glanced over my shoulder to see the beta animal — a scrawnier, meaner version of the pack leader — gather his legs and charge. Frantic, I sawed one last time at the hide, feeling it catch, cut and break through. I rolled over and toward the wolf even as he leapt, teeth bared. I drove the tip of the broken bone into his throat.

    The impact blew me back and down. The wolf bit at my arm reflexively, not understanding what I’d done. His teeth tore a ragged gouge below my elbow before he entered his death throes and released me. He squirmed and bucked and whined.

    His nails scored my stomach before he flipped over between me and the fire. He clawed furiously at the white bone showing at his throat. His muzzle, now peppered with bright, frothy blood, jawed at the air and then stilled.

    I got to my knees in time to witness the alpha bitch utter a low-toned growl, then race forward from about fifty yards away. The others spread out and came on, too. I grabbed the closest deer hide to me with my left hand and threw myself forward across the dead wolf toward the fire. The dried fat on the back side of the hide exploded into flames even as I grabbed the last remaining burning branch. I tried to stand but couldn’t; my ankles were still tightly bound. I would fight on my knees.

    She dashed in at me from an angle. And I waited until she dipped her head, preparing for her attack bound. When she did, I stabbed forward with the glowing branch. She came up fast and hard and into the burning tip with her eye. Her screams as she writhed away into the darkness were from another realm.

    I turned and slashed with the branch at the first of the three subordinate wolves coming in behind me, then flung the flaming deer hide onto its back. It howled and spun in circles, trying to rid itself of the fire that now fed on its fur. The other two wolves jumped back at the apparition of their burning brother and turned tail after him when he fled, smoking, into the night.

    I froze next to the dead wolf, listening, looking, waiting for the forms to attack again. But the strange quiet was gone.

    There was only the normal sounds of the woods at night: the soft bumping of branches in the stiffening breeze, the hoot of the owl, the rush of the river, the rustle of dead leaves. Above me, the clouds had broken fully. The full moon bathed the forest in a gentle light. It was all familiar and comforting. Yet against and within all of this I noticed something that had the quality of a deja vu; it was an insistent, oscillating force that seemed to permeate everything around me and contained both good and evil in equal measure. I understood that it had always been there, but that I had never noticed it before.

    I broke down then, sobbing at all that I’d been through. A trembling took hold of me. My stomach contracted and I threw up the food I’d eaten in the cave not more than an hour before.

    The convulsions finally stopped, but the shuddering went on. It became more violent, and I realized I was chattering, too, and probably going into shock from exposure. I needed to warm myself or I’d die.

    I set my feet against the dead wolf and freed the femur bone and cut my ankles free. Needlelike pain shot through my feet when I stood, but I accepted it. I wrapped one of the deer hides around my waist as I would a bath towel and caped a second about my shoulders. The lower trunks of the pines around the shelter were thick with dead limbs, and within minutes I had the fire roaring again and my toes were returning to life.

    For several moments I considered trying to ride out the five hours until dawn beside the fire, but the madman’s vow to kill everyone on the estate demanded that I move. I tended to my wounds first, pressing snow into the gash on my cheek until the bleeding stopped, and then binding my left forearm with a charred strip of my shirt that had been blown clear of the fire. The teeth wounds on my shin and shoulder were superficial, but oozed. With luck they would not infect before I could get to Arnie.

    I took a rock and cracked it against the bone until a piece broke free, exposing a sharper edge. With it I sliced some of the hide into six long strips about a foot wide. These I wrapped in double thicknesses around my feet, then lashed them to just below my knee with narrower strips of hide. From there to mid-thigh I similarly fastened a single thickness of the hide. I cut in two the deer skin I’d been using for a skirt. I rewrapped one of the pieces around my waist — a short skirt I could run in. I hacked a slit in the center of the second piece and put my head into it. It fit like a smock. From a third hide I fashioned a long, hooded robe that I cinched at my neck and girded at my waist. I cut two smaller pieces of hide and secured them to my hands for mittens. I broke off the back portion of the deer bone, then set a pine branch up into the marrow channel and wrapped the connection tight with hide. A flimsy spear, but better than nothing.

    I was about to leave when I noticed my leather-and-quillwork pouch lying in the snow, torn from me during the fight. The woman’s photograph lay beside it, scratched and bloodied. I wanted to despise her, but I couldn’t; I’d felt the love he had for her and understood that somehow she’d been transformed from innocent victim to talisman in a psychotic’s twisted scheme of vengeance. I tucked the photo back inside the pouch, then retied it around my neck.

    I looked at the wolf already going rigid in the charcoalcolored melt by the fire ring, knowing well that wolves tend to avoid humans and only in rare instances attack them. I wondered at the swirl of pulsing energy I’d sensed after the rest of the wolves had fled. What dark corner of what plane of existence had this man tapped into with his bastardized ceremonies and the hallucinogens in his pipe? And what were the other forces he commanded that I had not yet witnessed?

    I stopped to stroke the wolf’s dense fur. “Watch over me,” I whispered.

    Then I stood, took a bearing on the log-landing where Patterson had dropped me off that first day and set off.

    The drugs that the killer had made me smoke no longer ruled my head; they had settled and become the lenses through which I viewed the world.

    The moonlight filtered angularly through the forest canopy and bounced off the snow of yesterday’s storm now firming in the frigid air, now casting the landscape before me in a troubled glow. The dark jade and hammered-iron shapes of the trees clawed at the light, broke it, made it their own.

    But I ran through that fractured terrain, a rising sea of snow billowing about knees, with a growing sense of my place in it. My ancestors believed that nearly everything could change both its shape and its mind. From my perspective — a 1990s woman with an MIT degree in computer engineering — their universe was unpredictable, unreliable, frightening. They had survived in what must have been a psychologically brutal environment, where nothing was as it seemed, by becoming equally unpredictable, able to change mind and intent at a moment’s notice. I was learning.

    By the time I reached the log-landing, frost from my breath and my sweat caked my eyebrows and lashes and rimmed the hood of the deer-skin cape. I paused in the light of the setting moon to study the tracks there. Man prints and the metal tread of the snowcat. They’d been out here looking for me yesterday afternoon, leaving just as the storm passed.

    I got water from the little stream to quench my thirst; then I heard gunshots far in the distance. My heart sank. He’d had at least an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half, head start.

    Could he already be at the lodge? I sprinted forward into the dark hours, feeling my way toward the estate by the ribbed, frozen track the machine had left under my feet.

    It was four in the morning by the time I trudged into the yard of the estate. Every light in the lodge blazed. Left on for me, I supposed, a beacon calling to the lost hunter in the night. I smiled, thinking of a good meal and a hot shower, of being safe within the closest thing I had now to a family. I had barely taken ten steps into the yard when I heard the action of a pump shotgun.

    “One mo’ step and it’s your last,” came an edgy voice in the shadows to my right.

    “Phil?” I called. “Is that you? It’s me, Diana.”

    “No shit,” the auto-parts man said, coming out of the darkness. “Woman, you’re damn lucky I didn’t pull the trigger. Where the hell have you been? And what the hell are you wearing?”

    “I’ll explain later. I heard gunfire an hour ago.

    “Phil sighed, the sigh becoming a shudder. His lip quivered. “He’s been here, done his dirty work and gone. It’s crazy in there.”

    “He told me he was going to kill us all,” I murmured to myself, not wanting to ask the next question.

    Phil was ahead of me. “Butch,” he said, and the tears rolled down his cheeks.

    The strength I’d been feeling since escaping from the wolves evaporated. “I’m sorry,” I said.

    Phil stared at his feet. “He was my man since the fourth grade, you know? We changed a lot when we got older. Kind of a hippie freak there in the early seventies, against the war and all that shit. I went Army, but I still loved him, and that fucker with the wolf hat just butchered him.”

    I put my hand on his powerful shoulder and for a second he leaned against it. Then he looked away from me, embarrassed. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his wool jacket. He didn’t seem to know where he was. He didn’t seem interested in where I’d been.

    “Phil, I talked to the killer.”

    He looked at me with bleary eyes. “He talked to us, too. Go on in, tell ‘em all about it. I can’t go in there now. It feels better being out here on patrol.”

    Shouts and moans of disbelief echoed from the main lodge as I crossed the yard. I was so tired I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from at first. The doors stood shut. The windows, too. Then I raised my head toward the second floor, toward the stained-glass windows. The central window, the one that had depicted two stags fighting, was no more. Just tangled branches of lead and broad petals of busted panes, a giant flower of many dark colors.

    I went inside through the kitchen door. The lights were all on, but the room was empty. I opened the door to a room saturated with the aftermath of what must have been pandemonium. Arnie, Griff and Cantrell were on the first landing of the staircase, wrapping Butch’s body in a white sheet. Lenore loomed over Earl on the far side of the room, supporting his head while he sipped from a cup. Theresa and Sheila held each other on the couch in front of the fire. They had the dazed look of survivors five minutes after the car crash.

    ‘It’s my fault,” Theresa sobbed. “It’s all my fault.”

    “No, it wasn’t, honey,” Sheila choked out. “You made a mistake. That’s all.”

    Kurant and Nelson were upstairs on the landing in front of the shattered window. The guide punched the wall as the writer took photographs.

    “How could he live through that jump?” Nelson demanded.

    Kurant shrugged. Nelson turned, yelling the same question this time, looking for some kind of reply from below, when he caught sight of me in my deer-skin suit. I took another step and the room began to whirl. Nelson started toward me in slow motion. Kurant came at me, too, the both of them pointing, talking in a garbled language I couldn’t understand. Blood-red dots appeared before my eyes and I felt myself collapsing inward and down into a comforting blackness.

    I remember my eyes fluttering open to see a blurred image of Griff sitting beside me. He managed a weak smile and told me to go back to sleep, that I’d be all right. And I sank again into that warm blackness, which gave way into a creamy existence the color of the strange quiet that had embraced the woods after I’d driven off the wolves. There Griff became my father, a silent, determined figure passing me in the halls of our home in Bangor to check on my mother, even as I braved the springtime of my senior year in high school. It should have been a joyous time of college-acceptance letters, of proms and confidence.

    But I lived a secret life.

    I spent every morning before school with Katherine, helping her dress for her day, talking with her in her lucid moments about the insects that were likely hatching on the rivers, talking to her in her addled moments like a toddler. Every conversation was tinged with the fear that this could be the last, that I would return to find my mother murdered by a father clinging to a vision of life that had been all but extinguished a century or more ago.