Apparition Trail, The Read Online Free Page B

then I saw my own handwriting upon the uppermost page.
    “Your summons to Regina was due to this report, made by yourself on—.” The Commissioner paused to glance at the date in the upper left-hand corner. “On June 1, 1883.”
    I felt a slight frown crease my brow. I wondered how the events of more than a year ago might be relevant to the matter at hand. I’d been stationed at the detachment of Maple Creek in 1883, at what was then the end of the CPR line. The railway navvies were working hard that summer, laying better than four miles of track a day as they pushed toward the Rockies….
    “The Piapot incident,” Steele prompted. His callused, suntanned hands gripped the brim of his Stetson. “And your premonitory dream.”
    The Commissioner shot Steele a look, and the Superintendent fell silent under the sudden glare in his grey eyes. When they turned back to me, the Commissioner’s eyes held that same measuring look I’d seen earlier.
    “Sir?” I asked.
    I knew exactly what Steele was referring to, but I still couldn’t see the connection between my strange experience of a year ago and my impending discharge. I avoided Steele’s eyes and concentrated instead on the mechanical brass clock shaped like a shaggy buffalo on the Commissioner’s desk. As it softly chimed the hour, the tiny perpetual-motion device inside it caused it to rear up and kick its hind legs. One of the hinges inside it was squeaking a little, and there was on tarnish the buffalo’s horns and hooves; like me, it needed a good polish. These deficiencies would have driven my father to distraction, for he always insisted that machinery be well oiled and gleaming.
    “Superintendent Steele wants to form a special division within the force,” the Commissioner said, in a tone of voice that was carefully non-committal. “It would be a hand-picked troop made up of constables drawn from our existing divisions, and special constables recruited from the civilian population. Each man must fulfill the peculiar qualifications that Steele has set out — qualifications that he believes you possess.”
    This left me completely at a loss. “Sir, I … I don’t….”
    The Commissioner held up a hand and I fell silent. His eyes bored into me as if I were a man charged with a crime and he the judge who would decide my fate. Then he glanced down at the paper on the table in front of him. “Your report of the incident suggests that you weren’t surprised by the death of Sergeant Wilde. In it, you state that you had a premonition of his death.”
    “It was just a dream, sir,” I sputtered.
    It was a lie, of course. The dreams that contain premonitions of the future are always especially vivid for me, and every detail remains etched in my memory for years thereafter. Yet was I to recite these details now? If I did, they would think me some kind of fanciful lunatic.
    “It was wrong of me to make mention of my dream in the report,” I said. “It wasn’t very professional. I—”
    “You never did fully explain the circumstances of the Sergeant’s death,” the Commissioner continued.
    The blood ran cold in my veins. For a brief moment, I thought the Commissioner might harbour a suspicion that I was somehow responsible. For all I knew, I might be. I had no ready explanation as to why the Sergeant had died and I had lived.
    Except for the dream….
    “I want you to tell us every detail of what happened that day,” Steele said in a steadying voice. “The things you didn’t put in your official report. And put your mind at ease, Corporal: you aren’t the first man I’ve heard a fantastic story from. There have been many incidents, of late, that defy explanation. There’s something strange afoot on the prairie — something that’s been growing this past year. That’s why I’m forming Q Division.”
    “Q Division?” I echoed.
    “ Q — for query,” said the Commissioner. Then he glanced sidelong at Steele. “The request has not been