Dorothy got into the van the next morning looking like a cat that had swallowed a canary—a big canary. Something was up. I could hardly wait to ask her. She was wearing khaki pants and hiking boots, a light dress of about fifty colours tied around her waist, an army shirt, and a purple baseball cap. There was a big silver canteen slung over one of her shoulders. She sat at the back of the vehicle and kind of looked at me like she wanted me to sit with her. So I did. Once we were rolling east of Drumheller, past little Greentree Mall and some schools, she spilled the beans.
The night before, she had sneaked over to RCMP headquarters. Some of the officers had been returning from a long, hot day searching in Horsethief Canyon, and word was out that Corporal Lance “Lanny” Sutter had been sent in from Calgary. Dorothy crouched down low and made her way around the building to Constable Lougheed’s office at the rear. She gambled that he might have his window open, to let in some of the fresh night air. She was right: it was wide open. And there were voices.
“Not a single sighting of him, sir,” said Lougheed.
“But he’s seven feet tall! How can we lose him?”
“The badlands is a big area, sir.”
“So is Calgary, and if he were in Calgary we’d have him by now.”
“Yes, sir, things are always bigger and better in Calgary.”
“Was that sarcasm, Lougheed?”
“Of course not.”
“How about that bone you found? Anything on it yet?”
“Not much, sir.”
“Not much? Have you tried to match it with profiles of children who have disappeared in this area, or elsewhere in Alberta?”
“There’s no need for that, sir.”
There was a pause.
“No need?”
“We doubt, sir, that it even belonged to a child.”
“We do?”
“Well, it’s the right shape and size, and the right weight, but once the paleontologist on site took more than a glance at it she knew that there was something funny about it. In fact, she knew it wasn’t human. Our people agreed, too. We’re sending it to Toronto for more testing.”
“Toronto? Everything is always bigger and better there, I suppose.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, here’s what we have: a seven-foot killer on the loose who has vanished into the sands, and the leg bone of a child that isn’t the bone of a child at all.”
“That’s not quite all, sir.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he seems to be able to cover his tracks very well. It’s like following a ghost. But we did find one footprint.”
“As in…a single footprint? How do you leave one footprint?”
“By being very clever, I’d say, sir. And wanting to toy with your pursuers. It was at the eastern end of Horsethief Canyon and it was pointing east, too.”
“You mean, back towards Drumheller?”
“And Rosedale and Wayne and Dorothy and all those little tourist places east of town. He might be heading that way. We have no evidence he’s been there before, and he’s apt to seek new ground. But that’s all speculation. After all…we only have one footprint.”
“Yes. That isn’t much to build a theory on, is it?” Sutter paused again. “Any real idea about what’s going on here, Lougheed?”
“Not a clue, sir. But I do know something.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll catch him, if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Well, if you do catch up to this maniac, on that historical horse of yours, it might be the last thing you do.” He paused. “By noon tomorrow I want it announced that there will be a curfew on all children in the Drumheller area. None of them out after dark. Got that? This guy has a thing for killing kids.”
At that point the boss peered out the window right over Dorothy’s head.
“Don’t believe in air conditioning, Constable?” he said, and Dorothy could smell his breath.
One minute later, after he’d pulled his head back in, she was scurrying around to the front of the building and hightailing it home, her head buzzing with new information. The Reptile was still very much on the loose. And if he was going anywhere, it was east of Drumheller…exactly where we were going.
“So, we might not be heading out of danger at all,” said Dorothy in a low voice, “we might be going right into it.” She sounded pleased, and of course she had no intention of warning Newcombe. He was in full swing behind the wheel of the van, pointing out the sights to us, and Ophelia was just thrilled with the way he was describing them, so they didn’t even clue in that we were whispering at the back. At least, not at first. Just after Dorothy finished, the other guys noticed us huddling and started to crowd around. That was when Newcombe peeked into his rear-view mirror.
“Something you care to share with the rest, Miss Osborne?”
Dorothy is a quick thinker. “No, sir,” she said. “I was just adding a few things to what you were saying and didn’t want to disturb you. Please go on.”
Newcombe smiled. And resumed his travelogue.
Actually, the places we saw that morning were pretty interesting. First we came to a little village called Rosedale, and we spent some time there trying to walk across this steel footbridge that was built a long time ago for miners. There was a bit of wind, and this thing was swaying. It just about made you ralph up your dinner to walk out onto it, but of course we had to take a crack at it. Dorothy calmly strode across like it was nothing. Funny thing was, we’d read on a plaque nearby that in the old days it didn’t even have sides on it, so it would have been twice as hard to walk across—more like a high-wire act than a stroll on a bridge. That would have been something!
Because Dorothy was just whipping all the way over to the other side and the guys were having trouble getting even partway out, I took it upon myself to make our team look a little better. Despite feeling the pukes with just about every step, I staggered all the way across. The bridge swayed each time I set my foot on it. When I got to the other side Dorothy was bent over, with her hands on her knees and her head down.
“What?” I said. “Trip over upset your tummy?”
She glanced up at me. There was a weird sort of glow in her eyes. When she looked down again, I looked too. There, in the sand, were some footprints leading to the bridge. They looked like they’d been made by cowboy boots. Large cowboy boots…very large.
“Whoever made those marks must have been a big man,” said Dorothy.
“Possibly.” Something was making me uneasy.
“How big would you say?”
“I have no idea.”
“Way over six feet, Dylan?…Seven feet…do you think?”
I told myself that what she was thinking was pretty far-fetched. We walked back, me trying to put those footprints out of my mind, she thinking she might just get her chance to chase down a cold-blooded killer. As we approached the other side, Rhett was looking at me, and he had a big smile on his face. I guess Dorothy’s comments were bugging me more than I knew.
“Look like you’ve seen a ghost, Maples. Maybe the barf ghost?”
I tried to give him a smirk but I don’t think it was very convincing. As we stepped off, I looked down and felt a little relief.
“There aren’t any footprints on this side,” I whispered to Dorothy.
We got into the van and headed out. Once we were moving again, I started feeling a little better. Dorothy was obviously imagining things.
About ten minutes farther east, Newcombe pulled over at probably the most bizarre land formation I’ve ever seen in my life—that’s after fourteen years of looking. They’re called hoodoos and that rhymes with voodoos, and that makes a lot of sense. That’s because they’re freaky. To me, they’re what rocks might look like in hell. Very cool. You are driving along the highway and you look north of the road and these things appear, some of them two or three times as tall as a human being, weirder than anything Harry Potter could dream up. And they’re real! That was what was hard to believe at first.
To be more specific, they looked like the giant toadstools from Alice in Wonderland. Made of sand and rock, they were pillars with flat plates on top, like hats. We got out and started walking among them. The sign said they had been formed by ten thousand years of wind and water erosion. The softer rock that made up the pillar part had eroded and a hard, sandstone layer just above them hadn’t, so it had formed a cap, “acting like an umbrella” sheltering the softer rock below. In time, it said, each hoodoo would collapse.
“Hooooooo! Dooooooo!” shouted Bomber running among them. “We need some tunes! Some gangsta rap!”
I doubted that Bomb had ever listened to gangsta rap in his life. But he was right. We could have used some radical music to go with this place. Who needed the Reptile when you had this? But the hoodoos made me think about why he had come here. If you were a weirdo with a dark view of things, this would be perfect.
“Look at that,” said Dorothy, quietly, pointing off into the distance. She had spotted one that was very tall, twice as tall as any of the others, and as slim as a knife; its cap was huge and off to one side. “People call it the Devil’s Tower.” I thought she was going to make another Reptile comment, but she didn’t. She didn’t have to.
Our next stop going east was at the site of one of the 140 mines that had once been in this valley. The shaft tunnelled straight into a dark hill for about a kilometre. It was black and kind of sinister looking. You could enter one of the miner’s houses, too. It wasn’t even the size of our bathroom at home. There was a letter there that he had written to his wife back in Europe. “I miss you so much my heart aches to have you near me,” it read. “Once you are with me in our new home I will never again leave you…. Your loving husband.”
“Gag me,” said Rhett, reading over my shoulder. Funny thing is, that sort of thing never “gagged” me. I thought it was sad. I mean, these were dead people. And it sort of seemed like he loved her forever now. The parental units were always going on about the importance of love. But I turned to Rhett and the guys and said, “Gag me, big time.” Dorothy was watching me when I did it and looked like she knew I wasn’t really saying how I felt. How did she do that?
But to be honest, mines weren’t really my thing just then. I’d had a bad experience in one just a few months earlier when I’d almost been trapped underground in northern Ontario with my girlfriend…that is…my friend who is a girl, Wynona Dixon. So, mines kind of freaked me out, and I didn’t want to go into this one. When Dorothy asked me why, I started out by mentioning Wyn’s name. She stopped me before I went any further.
“Who’s she?”
“A friend.”
“A good friend?”
“Well…she texts me. As I was starting to say, we kind of had a funny experience together in Ontario when my dad—he’s a lawyer—was working on a case. It was like something from a book; we found some hidden silver and helped catch a criminal. It was pretty amazing.”
“Bet he wasn’t much compared to the Reptile,” said Dorothy, and she stalked off.
It was getting near noon, and Newcombe wanted us to eat at this place Clark Aberhart had recommended near Rosedale, so we doubled back a bit. It was in a tiny village named Wayne, and to get to it you had to turn off the road, right into some badlands hills, and because the creek there twisted like a snake through the canyon, you had to cross eleven bridges in about five minutes, some of them old and rickety.
This place was right out of the movies. There were two light-brown buildings attached to each other, the taller one called the Rosedeer Hotel and the other the Last Chance Saloon. And I mean saloon. Even though there were cars around and a bunch of motorcycles, it would have made more sense to see a hitching post and some horses. I almost expected Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid to come strolling out the front door.
We went into the saloon to eat. Clark had recommended the buffalo burgers (there were still some herds on farms nearby). The building, put up in 1913, had a low ceiling, big posts, wall-to-wall wood, and a great big bar that seemed to be half the room. There was a jukebox, Calgary Stampede posters, cowboy hats, rifles and guns, snowshoes nailed to the ceiling, a buffalo skull, and country music playing softly. A sign said they sold beer in fruit jars. And, strangest of all, there was a little wooden frame on a wall…around six bullet holes!
But the people were as friendly as could be. The owner even came over to say hello. He looked just like a cowboy, and his handle was Grant Tyson. He told us stories about all the fights that used to happen in the old days when the miners drank beer here. They used to go outside to fight—come back in friends—then go out and fight again.
“We’re ready for this Reptile guy, by the way,” laughed Tyson. “If he wants a showdown, just bring him on!” That didn’t really seem to me like something to joke about.
We had a long way to go to Dinosaur Provincial Park, and Newcombe wanted to be back in Calgary well before sundown for the flight home, so once we had wolfed down the buffalo burgers, we were off. (The parental units are basically vegetarians, but I wouldn’t be a lettuce-eater for all the oil in Alberta—I’m a meat-eater.)
“Had my best horse stolen early this morning,” said Tyson, out of the blue, as we got up to leave. “Went by the name of John Ware. He was tied up, and whoever grabbed him just ripped the reins right off the hitching post. Didn’t even try to cut them. Strange. Never had that happen before.”
Dorothy was looking at me. I could feel it.
Several kilometres to the east, out of sight of the highway, in the heat of a badlands day, a tall man dressed in black was riding a horse as fast as it could go, urging it forward. His legs were so long they seemed to almost touch the ground. A lather of sweat was forming on the horse’s hide, and perspiration poured down the man’s white, skeletal face. He had just stopped for a rest in a little tumbleweed ghost town. He didn’t care about the heat. His mind was set on a plan. He was thinking that at some point he might need a hostage or two.
We moved on from the saloon. The rest of our trip would be about an hour and a half, but just as we approached the end of the badlands, just before the highway climbed out of Dinosaur Valley, we were to look out for a village called…Dorothy.
Dorothy herself knew all about it. In fact, its very existence had given her her name. It was in a flat, tumbleweed stretch near the end of the valley, and it was one of those places you would miss if you blinked. An abandoned grain elevator stood unsteadily near the highway, its red paint weather-worn, and the words “The Alberta Pacific Grain Co. Ltd.” written across it near the top. You could just feel the ghosts there. There was a deserted school with a weather vane creaking in the breeze and a saloon that hadn’t seen a cowboy in many, many years. Newcombe drove among the buildings, his mouth hanging open a little. We came to two churches, side by side, empty. The paint had almost all peeled off. They looked ready to fall down.
“Let’s not go in,” said Ophelia.
But Dorothy had already undone her seatbelt and dashed outside. I couldn’t let her go alone, so I jumped out, too.
“Students!” shouted Newcombe.
The door of one church wouldn’t even move—it seemed to be boarded up from the other side—but the other building’s entrance almost fell in when we shoved it. Someone seemed to have been in there recently. Inside, everything was a mess, just piles of broken old pews and dusty curtains falling down. We stepped carefully. Then we saw some charred wood in a pile, as if someone had recently had a fire in there. On the floor next to it, two letters had been carved into the boards. Dorothy knelt down and brushed away the ashes. “T. R.” it read.
I felt a shiver go through me.
“The Reptile!” said Dorothy, in a sort of freaky whisper.
“No way,” I snapped back. “It could just as easily mean…Tyrannosaurus rex.”
“Same thing,” said Dorothy. She got up and headed towards the door.
Just before we entered the van she turned and cupped her hand over my ear. “He’s following us,” she breathed.
The guys really gave me the gears about her whispering into my ear like that. They were winking at me and jabbing me and that sort of thing. I could have stopped it all by just telling them what she’d said. But I couldn’t.
I didn’t know what to do. If I told Newcombe what we’d seen and confessed that I was getting worried, we’d never get to Dinosaur Provincial Park, never see much of anything on this trip, and worst of all, Dorothy would think I was a wimp. So I kept my mouth shut. And I tried to act normal. Besides, there wasn’t really any evidence for what Dorothy was thinking. She just wanted some adventure, so she was putting one and one together and getting three.
A few minutes later we were in ranch country. Those huge Alberta farmlands stretched out all around us. There were almost no trees, and you could see forever. The giant oil birds appeared again, pecking at the ground.
For a while this Reptile business faded into the distance and we all started talking. Really talking. We settled in for the longest part of the trip. One of the reasons we changed subjects was that I kind of steered things in that direction. I was trying to keep Dorothy’s mind off the idea that we should be hunting a dangerous killer, and I started by asking her questions about her life. By the time we turned and headed south on Highway 36 towards Dinosaur Provincial Park, Dorothy had told us quite a bit about herself.
Turned out her parents had been in the movie business when they first came to Drumheller, and they still were in a way. All kinds of films had been shot in Dinosaur Valley over the years, including some really famous ones. Dorothy knew a lot about them: the first Superman, Clint Eastwood’s killer cowboy flick Unforgiven, the western Draw with Kirk Douglas, kids’ shows like The Boy Who Talked to Badgers, and lots of science fiction stuff. In the late 1990s her dad had written a movie that was filmed in Dorothy. Her mom, who had been an actress, had come with him from Los Angeles. Dorothy was born here not long after that. And that’s how she got her name.
“My parents are kind of weird,” she said.
“Whose aren’t?” I replied.
“Yeah, but mine ended up living here. They fell in love with this place. Mom said she wanted a simpler life and gave up acting. Weird. I never would have. Dad’s a writer, and he wanted to live in a quiet place, too. He always says the valley just spooks him and tells him things, and he adores it. He writes books, a lot of them travel books, and now Mom works with the Alberta government, helping with all the movie shoots that happen in the badlands. But I wish they’d stayed in LA. I sure would have. Imagine, I could have grown up there! I’m going back some day to be in the movies, I hope. I’m definitely not staying here.”
“This seems like a pretty cool place to me,” I said.
“Well, since the Reptile showed up, it has been.”
There were a bunch of things about her I couldn’t understand. First, of course, was her fascination with this dangerous killer. But another was her attitude about where she lived—seemed to me it could be a gas living here. But Dorothy was always talking about other places. She had an imagination like I couldn’t believe. She had a story for just about everything, and most of them were pretty dramatic. For instance, when I picked out a spot nearby on the map (I just love maps) named Medicine Hat, she launched into a tale that just about freaked us all out. And she said it was true, too.
Apparently, trains used to be the main way to get around the west if you were going any distance. In the summer of 1908 an engineer named Bob Twohey and his fireman, Gus Day, took a small train east from Medicine Hat towards the village of Dunmore in order to pick up another one and take it southwest to Lethbridge. Just a few kilometres along their journey they saw something terrifying. There in front of them was an oncoming train, with a headlight “like a burning wagon wheel,” speeding right at them along the same track. But as they readied themselves to jump they heard the other train’s whistle sound a warning blast for the curve they had just been on. It was as if the other engineer intended to go right through them. But he didn’t. Instead, he went on by…on a non-existent track that ran beside them. All the coach lights were on and the crew members were silently waving as they passed. Then this phantom train and its ghostly passengers went off into the night towards Medicine Hat.
Twohey and Day, both sturdy, no-nonsense Albertans, didn’t say a word to each other. But two weeks later they met by chance in town and had to get things off their chests. Twohey, it turned out, had just been to a fortune teller, who had told him he would be dead in a month. He had been anxious to take some time off. Somewhat relieved that Day had at least seen the same phantom, he decided to take a holiday.
A couple of nights later, Day and a new engineer named Nicholson met the ghost train again at the same spot on the tracks as they neared Dunmore. Everything happened as before: the oncoming train blew its whistle and its ghosts waved as they passed silently through the night.
Not long afterward, in early July, Day was assigned a yard job at the station, so a different fireman accompanied Nicholson on the trip to Dunmore. A few kilometres out of Medicine Hat, a train appeared on the track again, bearing down on them. Seconds later they crashed head-on at full speed. Nicholson and ten others were killed in a horrific collision. The engineer on the other train, now dead, as the fortune teller had predicted, was Bob Twohey…just back from vacation.
We all sat there listening with our mouths open. And Dorothy just loved it. She even came up with something a little weird about Medicine Hat’s name.
She said it came from a battle that was fought between the Cree and Blackfoot long ago near the local part of the South Saskatchewan River. It was said that the Cree medicine man deserted them in fear as things got tense, and he lost his headdress in the water. When his people saw it floating in the river they believed it was a dark omen. They laid down their weapons and were killed by their enemies. From that day forward that place was called “Medicine Man Hat.”
The guys loved the stories, but I didn’t really appreciate all this spooky stuff, knowing what Dorothy and I knew—or what I was worried might be true. I really didn’t want to be told that southeastern Alberta was a place of phantoms and bad omens.
We whizzed southeast. Outside our windows the long stretches of flat land continued. Occasionally we saw the edges of the badlands, like foothills, inching their way over towards the road.
Dorothy got us playing this game she loved. It’s called “I wish I were…” and you each have to finish the sentence. Bomber said, “A T. rex!” Terry chose “Jackie Chan!” Rhett picked “Bruce Lee,” and I said, very quietly, “Norris Newcombe, the kung fu king.” That just cracked up everyone. Dorothy said she’d like to be the movie star Marilyn Monroe, which was kind of strange, her being dead and all that.
We travelled for nearly an hour and then turned straight east just before we came to the Trans-Canada Highway. In about twenty minutes we started seeing the signs for Dinosaur Provincial Park.
Once we got on the smaller road that led to the park we could kind of feel it approaching. We all started leaning forward in the van, peering out the front windows. It was weird; there was some sort of tension building. I didn’t need a dream to tell me that something was going to happen here. I stood up and stared, waiting for my first glimpse of this legendary land. My heart started pounding. It was like drums were beating.