Michael Slade - Headhunter

The noise was a low-keyed godless gibber that seemed to burst forth from no discernible point. It appeared to issue from several sources off to the right side.

Crystal turned to run — when Suzannah grabbed her by the arm. "Look," the woman said.

Continuing her grip on the girl, Suzannah swept the torch in an arc that sliced through the darkness around them. Crystal could see that they had reached a vaulted corridor. The floor was of chipped flagstone, the arched walls and roof of dressed masonry. The corridor stretched away before them into indefinite blackness. To the left there was a closed wooden door. To the right were five black open archways through which came the wail.

"What you hear," Suzannah said, her words sucked away almost the second they were uttered, "is wind off the Mississippi River. What you see is an old smuggler's vault dating from the seventeen hundreds."

As she spoke the woman stabbed the flashlight toward one of the open archways on the right. At the outer reaches of its beam Crystal could just make out the stone-banked channel of a stream.

"You see that underground river? It connects with the Mississippi. It was once used by French pirates, back in the early days. Now its mouth on the river is sealed by a mesh of iron bars."

"Is this what you wanted to show me?" Crystal asked, now embarrassed by her attempt at flight.

"No," Suzannah said, "I want you to see this." She walked over to the wooden door and ushered Crystal in.

"What's in here?" the girl asked, standing in the pitch dark as the woman reached up to light a torch set into the wall beyond the doorway and off to their left.

Crystal choked in fright. Her neck hairs stood on end. Never before had her eyes seen — or even imagined — the instruments that cluttered this hellish room.

"This is a torture chamber!" Crystal shrieked with a spine-jarring shiver.

"Correct," Suzannah said. Then she laughed out loud, her voice hard and brittle.

This vault was a stone crypt, twenty feet by thirty. The chimney of a fireplace ran up one wall like a great gray sucking vein, cobwebs hanging like veils from several of its bricks. Beside this hearth stood a brazier with seven branding irons dangling from its rim. Along the opposite wall there was a medieval rack, its wheels and clamps cast in mimicked shadow by the torch, dark stains discoloring the upper surface and spreading down the sides in thin drip-lines. An Iron Maiden crouched waiting in the far comer with its door gaping open on several hundred spiked teeth. Turning in panic, Crystal saw a gibbet iron hanging from the ceiling — that one wall was covered with whips and manacles and cat o' nine tails — that a skull rack containing seven leering ivory grins hung on the stone surface behind the door — that knives and needles and surgical instruments were laid out in tidy precision on a flat surface to her left — and, worst of all, that Suzannah stood guarding the doorway with her arms folded across her breasts. Reflected torch-light glinted off the metal rings in her crotch.

As the vault began to echo with the dull hideous whine that Suzannah had said came from the wind off the river, Crystal's mind screamed at her, A knife! Grab a knife!

The girl ran to the dusty surface spread with polished, gleaming blades. Then with a butcher knife in one hand and a skinning knife in the other, she turned to face the door.

Suzannah grinned. "Crystal, you are precious! What a scene," she said.

"I want out of here," the girl hissed through tightly clenched teeth.

"Good. Then it works," the woman replied, never moving an inch. "For that is precisely the thought, my dear, that this theater is designed to induce."

"Yeah! What's this place for? You just tell me that!"

"Crystal, Crystal, Crystal," Suzannah said, shaking her head. "This is where I work."

"Work!"

"Yes, work, silly. What do you think it's for?"

"What sort of work would ever need a place like this?"

"The sort of work, sweetheart, that pays a hundred grand in two weeks. The work of relieving guilt."

"Go to hell!" Crystal screamed. "Let me outa here!"

"So what's stopping you? You're the one with the knives."

The girl blinked. For a split second she glanced down at her own hands and the two razor sharp instruments that they held. Then, fearing a trick, she flicked her eyes back to the door. Suzannah had not moved.

"What you see around you, dear — what you seem to be so afraid of — is really nothing more than a million-dollar fantasy — the essence of masochism. These are just a few of the props."

Crystal shook her drugged head. "But why would anyone want this?" She gestured at the walls.

"Ah, now that's the question… and it shows you don't know men."

"Tell me," Crystal said. And she put down the knives.

Vancouver, British Columbia, 1982

Sunday, October 31st, 5:30 a.m.

Twelve years, and he could still get into the uniform. The fact made him feel good.

It was usual for the Superintendent to be at work before dawn, and most mornings he would climb quietly out of bed so as not to disturb his wife, make his way into the kitchen to drip a pot of coffee, then carry a steaming cup of it, strong and black, out into the greenhouse where he would sit among his plants. For it was here at this early hour, alone with his thoughts and away from the sensory input that would come with the light of day, that Robert DeClercq would run the gauntlet which stretched back into his past. With each new day the same ghosts were lined up and waiting for him, all of them with knives. And each morning he would subdue them in that hour before dawn.

Most mornings DeClercq would then pour himself another coffee, dress for the weather and go out through the back door of the greenhouse and down to the edge of the sea. There he would sit very still in the old driftwood chair on a knoll above the ocean, the sundial at his left, and think about the day's work while he awaited dawn. Only when the eastern horizon was ablaze with shafts of glory would he return to the greenhouse, to the wicker chair, and place the clipboard on his knee.

That, of course, was most mornings. Today was different.

DeClercq put the kettle on and ground the coffee as usual, then he went to the closet in the spare bedroom and took his

uniform down from the rack. For eleven years it had hung there, unused and untouched. Finding a soft-bristled brush, he sat down on the bed and with short brisk strokes removed the lint of a decade from the dark blue serge. He pressed his trousers and shined his shoes. Then sitting in the greenhouse with his first cup of coffee, Superintendent Robert DeClercq polished each brass uniform button until it gleamed in the light from the desk lamp. Only then did he return to the spare bedroom and put the blue serge on.

The man who stared back at him from the closet mirror was a man who had not been seen since the Quebec October Crisis of 1970.

Twenty minutes later when DeClercq closed the front door and stepped out into the dark, the chill of autumn was in the air and maple leaves scraped the ground. For a fleeting moment his mind was touched by a sense of deja vu, a pale glimpse of that other autumn many years ago, of dead leaves in a moaning wind moving through the graveyard — but he shook it off sharply and began to climb the driveway. He had parked the cars up near the road after the freak snowstorm. He warmed up the engine of his Citroen, then drove off down Marine Drive and toward the center of town.

Dawn was yet an hour and a half away.

6:35 a.m.

They had set up Headhunter Headquarters in the old Command Building of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Located at the corner of 33rd Avenue and Heather Street, this was a structure of massive stone blocks and acute-angled timbers that very much resembled an Elizabethan mansion. The Maple Leaf was flying on the flagpole outside. Once the Vancouver Headquarters of the Force, the building had more recently found use as an officers' mess and a police training academy. Even more recently it had been gutted, and was now in the process of reconstruction. Gutted or not, however, it still looked from the outside like a Headquarters should. That's more than could be said for the real Headquarters building up on 73rd. It looked like a transistor.