Apparition Trail, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

approved yet. Nor will the new division be given official approval until I’m convinced of its necessity.”
    I stared from one officer to the other, a growing sense of relief dawning upon me. They hadn’t found out my secret, after all. I’d been called to Regina on an entirely different matter. Yet if I told them my tale, I was likely to wind up in a lunatic asylum. I chewed my lip, uncertain how to proceed.
    “Go on, man,” Steele prompted me. “Tell us the whole story, from the very beginning.”
    I’d been sleeping heavily on the night that I had the strange dream. I’d been on picquet duty the previous three nights, and had been at the point of exhaustion when my last round of duty finally ended. With heartfelt relief, I’d crawled into my bed at three o’clock in the morning, too tired to remove my undergarments, which, after three days of near-continuous wear, could have used a wash.
    The dream had started ordinarily enough, but soon developed the clarity and minutiae of detail that were the hallmarks of a premonitory dream. In it, I’d been standing outside a cave, from the interior of which came the insistent barking of a dog. It growled at me in the voice of the Sergeant, ordering me to crawl inside the cave.
    I did so, and felt something round beneath my hand, as cold and slimy as a rain-slick cobblestone. I looked down only to discover, to my horror, that I was crawling across human bones, some of which still had wet, greyish chunks of flesh attached.
    I realized then, in that peculiar clarity that comes upon one sometimes in dreams, that the dog was ordering me to my doom. I tried to back away but couldn’t — the bones moved under my hands and knees like shifting sand, and I only managed to turn myself about in a circle.
    My wild scrambles somehow brought me closer to the rear of the cave, to the spot where the dog stood. It was a massive hound, larger than any I’d ever seen. I’d been wrong about it being alive — it was dead. The eyes were glazed and its fur matted, and fleas leaped away from the cooling corpse.
    Fear filled me then. I was trapped in a cave filled with dead things and I no longer knew in what direction the exit lay. I only knew one thing: if I didn’t get out, I would die. Heart pounding, I scrambled about on all fours, trying and failing to find an escape.
    Then my right hand slipped on one of the skulls, momentarily covering its empty eye sockets. In that instant, everything went dark, as if it were my own eyes that had been covered. At first I was as terrified as a babe in the night, but then I had a childish thought: if I can’t see the skulls and the dog, they can’t see me….
    That was when Sergeant Wilde threw a splash of cold water on me. I awoke with a start to see him glaring down at me, my blanket tangled about me.
    “On your feet, Corporal,” he growled, waving a piece of paper above my blinking eyes. “The Indians are causing trouble again. We’ve got orders to roust those copper-skinned heathens.”
    I wiped away the water that was dribbling down my cheek and sat up, disengaging the blankets. My flannel undershirt was sopping wet, and I was annoyed at having been awakened so soon from my first opportunity to sleep. By the faint light coming in through the cracks in the barracks wall, I could see that dawn was breaking.
    “Why me?” I grumbled, looking around at the occupants of the four other bunks, all of them blissfully snoring. “Why not one of the others?”
    “Corporal Grayburn!” he barked. “I’ll have none of your guff. Another remark like that and you’ll be up on charges.”
    I quickly buttoned my lip. Discipline is strict in the North-West Mounted Police; a single angry remark to a superior bears a five-dollar fine. I didn’t want to risk a whole week’s pay, especially on Wilde, who wouldn’t recognize a proper insult when he heard one.
    Wilde was a fierce, hot-tempered man. He stood more than six feet tall, with broad shoulders and