Figures of Fear Page 12

  ‘The forests belong to those who used to live in them, sir, ever since. Every tree has a human spirit in it, that’s what the Ojibwa used to believe. Every tree is like somebody’s shrine. And what was your brother going to do? Fell them, fell them in hundreds and thousands. What would you do, if somebody came to the cemetery where your grandparents were buried, and tore up their headstone, and dug up their graves?’

  ‘Mr Shooks—’

  He waved me away with a pale, long-fingered hand. ‘Your brother got what was coming to him, don’t try and tell me different.’

  ‘Mr Shooks, you’re talking about forestry here. Economic rejuvenation. My brother was doing everything he could to save a very profitable species of pine. It was almost wiped out by the white pine blister, as far as I understand it, but he was going to plant a highly resistant strain that was going to turn northern Minnesota into the timber centre of the western world.’

  ‘Forest conservation isn’t all about money, Mr Ballard,’ said John Shooks. ‘There was human life in Roseau County well before the Ice Age, and Native Americans were living in these forests more than seven thousand years ago.’

  ‘So what are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you that the forests don’t belong to the state of Minnesota. They belong to the spirits who live in the trees.’

  I looked at him for a long time, and then I beckoned to the bar girl for yet another Jack Daniel’s.

  ‘Do you know what I think, Mr Shooks?’ I told him. ‘I think there’s a place waiting for you at the Zipple Bay Home for the Seriously Weird.’

  After John Shooks had left the North Star Bar, I drank about nine whiskeys too many and when the bar closed at two a.m. Alma had to help me into my sheepskin jacket and my flap-eared tartan cap while I was staggering on one leg and falling repeatedly into the forest of coats in the cloakroom. When the barkeep opened the door to let us out, the cold hit me in the face like somebody throwing a bucketful of crushed ice. Alma kept me steady while I stood on the crunchy rock-salted sidewalk, swaying backward and forward and trying to find my horizon. The town square was deserted. The snowplows had come churning through it in the dark, but since then the snow had been falling softly and steadily, and now everything was white, with only a few random footprints to show that Roseau was inhabited, and even these were quickly filling in.

  On the roof of Wally’s Supermarket an illuminated sign told me that it was 2.06 a.m. and that the temperature was minus eleven degrees centigrade.

  ‘You need to drink about a gallon of water and get some sleep,’ Alma advised me.

  ‘I need cuddling,’ I told her. ‘I need a warm pillowy bosom.’

  ‘Come on, one foot in front of the other. You can’t stand here for the rest of the night.’ I looked up. The sky was intensely black, as black as if there was nothing there at all.

  ‘Did you ever see anything so fucking black?’ I said. ‘Tell me, Alma, did you ever in your whole life ever see anything so—’ I stopped, and frowned at her. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything. Let’s get you back to your hotel.’

  ‘I heard you say something. I distinctly—’

  ‘Listen, I didn’t say anything. You’re drunk. Let me get you back to your hotel and tuck you into bed and then you can—’

  I turned around, almost keeling over as I did so. I had heard something. I could feel something. Somebody had whispered close behind my back, and when I say close they must have been close enough to touch me. Yet there was nobody there. Nobody at all.

  ‘How do you do that?’ I demanded.

  ‘How do I do what?’ Alma was growing impatient now.

  ‘Is that some kind of – what do you call it – ventriloquism?’

  ‘Come on, sugar,’ she said, tugging my arm. ‘I’m freezing my buns off out here. If you want a cuddle I’ll give you a cuddle. But for Christ’s sake let’s just get you to bed.’

  Another whisper, even closer. I didn’t turn around this time because I knew it had to be Alma. I couldn’t work out what she was whispering: it wasn’t quite distinct enough. But for some reason it sounded deeply unpleasant and perverse.

  ‘Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?’ I demanded. You know what it’s like when you’re seriously drunk: you can get para-noid about almost anything.

  ‘What are you talking about? Just move.’

  ‘I just want to know what kind of stupid stunt you’re trying pull here, you know? All this—’

  Whisper – whisper – whisper.

  ‘Alma, if you have anything you want to say to me …’

  We weaved our way across the town square, leaving footprints that looked like one of those dance-instruction diagrams. I stumbled once or twice, but I was so drunk that I was beyond the normal laws of gravity, and I didn’t fall over.

  Whisper – whisper – whisper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said something. You whispered.’

  ‘I fucking whispered?’ she retorted. ‘Why the hell should I whisper? In this town, everybody’s asleep by seven o’clock. That’s if they’re not in the boneyard.’

  We reached a snow-covered bench right in the middle of the square, under a snow-mantled statue of Martin Braaten, the city’s founding father, and sat down. My brain was going around like a carousel, dipping and rising, music playing, lights revolving. I couldn’t remember what I had eaten for supper that evening, but whatever it was, it was going up and down in my stomach like a spotted carousel horse.

  Alma said, ‘You’re so different from Jack. It’s hard to believe you were brothers.’

  I gave her a little shake of my head. ‘I was always the city brother and he was always the country brother, that’s all. I loved concrete sidewalks and traffic. He loved the woods, and nature. Birds, bugs, mosquitoes and slugs. Even when he was a kid. He was like Daniel Boone and James Audobon and The Last of the Mohicans, all put together. I miss him, though, Alma. I feel like I’ve lost an arm.’

  ‘I miss him, too. He always gave me such respect, you know. Most men wouldn’t know what respect was if it was tattooed on their ass.’

  The snow was falling on her hair. She looked almost beautiful, her eyes shining, her shoulders glittering with snow, like a fairy.

  ‘You deserve it,’ I said solemnly. ‘You deserve respect.’

  She looked away and nodded. And as she nodded, I heard that whisper again, although it was more than a whisper this time; it built up from a whisper into a sudden rush, and something flashed past my cheek, so close that I could feel the wind of it, and there was a crackling sound like somebody wrenching the leg-joint off a Thanksgiving turkey, and Alma’s head flew off her shoulders and bounced on to the snow-covered concrete, her face still amazed, rolling past the fire hydrant and into the gutter and lying there, steaming in the sub-zero cold, while her headless body sat next to me on the bench, with blood jetting out of its severed neck, warm still, can you believe it, all over my hands and my sleeves and even spraying into my face.

  I can’t remember if I shouted, but I remember ducking off the bench and rolling on to the snow and looking wildly around me to see what had hit her. But there was nobody standing behind the bench. There was nobody anywhere in the square at all.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I kept repeating, lying on my side in the snow, my breath smoking in terror. ‘Jesus Christ Almighty.’

  I cautiously climbed to my feet, holding on to the bench to steady myself. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what had happened. There was blood spattered everywhere, all over the bench, all over my face, loops and squiggles of blood all over the snow. Alma’s body remained where she was sitting for almost half a minute, and then she suddenly collapsed like a puppet with its strings broken. I skipped and jumped away from her, and my heart was banging so hard that it hurt.

  Again, I looked around, and it was then that I thought I saw something flickering out of the corner of my eye. I tried to focus on it, but it was gone, like thos
e imaginary black cats you can see when you’re really tired.

  I ran back to the North Star Bar, or loped, rather, like Groucho Marx. I banged on the door and shouted, ‘Help! For God’s sake! Help me!’ And while I waited for the lights to be switched on, and the alarms to be switched off, and the bolts drawn back, I turned around and there was Alma’s head still lying in the snow, staring at me in bloodied bewilderment, as if she couldn’t understand why I had left her there.

  The sheriff’s deputy had a bristling ginger moustache and a lazy left eye and he chewed gum incessantly. He also had the biggest ass that I had ever seen north of the thirty-fifth parallel. His name was Norman Sturgeon. We sat in the cocktail lounge of the Roseau Rose Motel, on textured brown vinyl seats, and he asked me the same questions over and over, not because he was trying to wear me down, but because he obviously couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

  ‘You were sitting on the bench under Martin Braaten and her head flew off?’

  ‘That’s right. It just – flew off. Just like that.’

  ‘And you weren’t having any kind of altercation with her, nothing like that?’

  ‘Even if I had been, Deputy, how could I have knocked her head off?’

  ‘I’m not saying you did, sir. I’m simply doing my best to find out what happened here.’

  ‘I’ve told you. She was sitting on the bench right next to me and I heard this whispering noise and then this rushing noise and the next thing I knew, whack! Her head was rolling across the ground. And her body was still sitting next to me.’

  Norman Sturgeon blew out his cheeks in bewilderment. ‘We’ve checked the square, sir, and apart from me and you and a few dozen people who ran out to see what was going on, and the paramedic crew, well, there’s no suspicious footprints.’

  ‘There was nobody there, Deputy. Nobody. Apart from Alma and me, the square was absolutely empty.’

  ‘So what do you think happened?’ asked Norman Sturgeon.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Something came rushing up to us. Something hit her and killed her, but whatever it was I never saw it.’

  John Shooks was waiting for me outside my hotel. It was a sharp sunny morning and I had to lift my hand to shield my eyes from the snow-dazzle. He was sitting in a 1969 Lincoln Continental Sedan, in highly polished black, wearing tiny little sunglasses and a large fur hat that looked even odder than his hair. As I came past he rolled the window down.

  ‘I want you to know that I’m truly sorry about what happened,’ he said.

  ‘But what? It was unavoidable? What did Alma ever do to upset anybody?’

  ‘She was your brother’s lover, sir. You cut down one of those trees, and you’ve started a blood feud. They’ll come after you and yours, all of your kith and kin, all of your friends, all of your lovers and business associates, until they’ve wiped out anybody who ever had a good memory of you.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘That’s why I’ve come here this morning. I’ve come to warn you to go away and stay away. Never come back.’

  ‘I’m not going until I know what it was that killed my brother and Alma Lindenmuth.’

  John Shooks had a long think about that, and then he climbed out of his car. ‘You and me better have a talk, in that case.’

  We went to the Happy Raccoon Donut Bar. We picked a corner table, next to the window, and John Shooks ordered black coffee and sugared donuts.

  ‘You see this town?’ he asked me. ‘In 1885 it had only four settlers. By 1895 it had grown to six hundred, and four years later farmers raised forty thousand bushels of hard red spring wheat. Telephone lines were strung in 1903, and in the same year the town had its own light plant. A four-hundred-pound sturgeon was taken from the Roseau River in 1907 and had to be hauled up the riverbank by a team of horses.

  ‘Those early settlers worked hard and they suffered all kinds of hardships, but one thing they never did was to disrespect their environment.’

  ‘My brother respected this environment more than anybody. He wanted to preserve it, not destroy it.’

  ‘You know that and I know that. But one man’s preservation is another man’s destruction. In 1924 five college students went camping in the Lost River Forest north of Roseau. They were expected in the neighbouring town of Warroad by dusk on August twenty-first. They never appeared, but six years later their skeletons were found by a fur-trapper called Kevin Dubuqe, still scattered around the ashy remains of a six-year-old campfire. Kevin Dubuqe said it looked as if their bones had been blown apart by all the winds in hell.’

  ‘So what had happened?’

  ‘They had made the mistake of cutting down a tree for their campfire, one of the sacred trees belonging to the spirits of the Ojibwa. They didn’t do it deliberately, but spirits don’t usually make allowances for ignorance. They were attacked and killed by something called a Windigo, or Wendigo.’

  ‘I’ve heard of that, but it’s only a story, isn’t it?’

  ‘A lot of people think that it was created by Algernon Blackwood, the horror writer. But the Ojibwa have their own tales about the Wendigo, going back so far that they can’t remember when the story hadn’t been told. The Ojibwa say that it’s a tall figure wearing white robes, and that it has an appetite for human flesh that beats my appetite for donuts.

  ‘Some say that it follows you through the woods and drives you mad because it’s always up close behind you, but whenever you swing around, there’s nothing there, because it’s dodged behind you again.

  ‘Others say that it swoops down from the sky and catches a-hold of you and makes you run so fast that your feet catch fire. There are newspaper stories about black-charred footprints running right across fields of winter stubble.

  ‘But there’s one thing that all the storytellers agree on. The Wendigo is so thin that you can only see it when it decides to confront you face-on. It can come right up to you edgewise, and you’ll never see it until it’s too late.’

  I put down my coffee cup. There was sugar all around John Shook’s mouth. ‘And you believe this is true? I asked him. ‘You believe this is what really killed my brother, and took off Alma’s head?’

  ‘It’s sunny now,’ he told me. ‘But it’ll be dark by four, and there’s snow forecast. If I was you, I’d put your brother’s passing down to misfortune, and see if you can’t make Thief River Falls by twilight.’

  One of the skills I’d honed during my years as a liability lawyer was an ability to read between the lines, to see the truth through the countless layers of lies. Liability cases were never cut and dried, clients usually proffering just enough information to sway a court ruling in their favour. When I got that telltale feeling, that fluttering down in the pit of my stomach, I knew it was time to dig a little deeper.

  I looked directly into John Shook’s eyes and waited for counsel from my spirit guide – this analogy seemed appropriate with all this talk of Ojibwa and the Wendigo. ‘I think,’ I said, cracking my mouth open in a wide grin, ‘I’ll stick around for another couple of days. Might see if I can get a hunting rifle; see if I can bag a Wendigo.’

  John Shooks’ expression remained impassive. ‘You will die if you stay here, Mr Ballard. Just like you brother and Miss Lindenmuth. It’s only a matter of time.’ He stood up, wiped the sugar from his mouth then wiped his fingers on his coat. ‘I don’t expect I’ll be seeing you again, Mr Ballard. I bid you farewell. Please try and make the right decision.’

  As he ducked through the door of the Donut Bar I suddenly felt extremely alone, sitting sipping coffee in a dingy café in a strange town, no one around that knew my name except a crazy local man foretelling my death.

  A chill tickled the back of my neck and my hands developed a film of glistening sweat. I needed to hear a friendly voice, the dulcet tones of Marie, Tabitha, Conrad.

  She answered after the fourth ring.

  I took a deep breath. ‘Hey, how’s it going?’

  Her reply was terse. ‘Fine. We’re all fine.
The real question is how are you?’

  ‘Listen, Marie, I think I’m on to something. I’ve been threatened by a local guy called John Shooks. He says he knew Jack. He warned Jack to stop cutting down trees but Jack wouldn’t listen. Marie, I think he killed Jack. He’s trying to scare the forestry company into pulling their operation.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Bill, have you told the authorities?’

  ‘Yes. Well, no, not quite. They told me to get out of town.’

  ‘I hope you’re doing what he asked,’ said Marie. Her voice now reflected concern.

  ‘What if it was this Shooks character? I can’t just give up and let him get away with murder.’

  There was a pause. ‘Listen, Bill, I’m not going to yell. I don’t want another fight. Come home and leave the investigation to the experts.’

  I felt prickly. I’d called her for support. For a friendly voice. ‘I don’t think you’re listening. Jack’s girlfriend was decapitated last night right in front of me and I’m sure it was this freak, Shooks.’

  ‘What?’ Marie screamed. ‘You’re going to get killed, you idiot. Then where will we be? Stuck here without a husband. Tabby and Conrad without a dad. You’re always so goddamned selfish.’

  ‘Jesus, Marie, I called you for some support, not a goddamned lecture.’

  ‘Right,’ she snapped, ‘if you won’t come home, we’ll come to you.’

  ‘No, it’s too—’ My words trailed off as I heard the line drop and go dead.

  Goddammit!

  I hurried back into town, straight for the glitzy tackle shop on Roseau Avenue, right across the parking lot from the North Star Bar.

  ‘It’s got a lovely action on it,’ said the clerk, handing me a .338 Winchester hunting rifle. ‘You could take out Bigfoot’s left eye at four hundred paces with that.’

  He checked my ID and then, after making a couple of phone calls to verify I was who I claimed, he swiped my credit card and sent me on my way with the rifle, ten boxes of ammunition and a cheery, ‘Happy huntin’.’

  The next few hours I spent locked in my hotel room familiarizing myself with my new toy. The instruction book was more pamphlet than book, but it seemed a pretty simple device. The bullets went in the top, cock the lever underneath, point it at the target, and blow its head off. Simple. You didn’t need a big manual or course to teach you simply to point and shoot.