Apparition Trail, The Read Free Page A

of Lydia Pinkham’s Painkiller along, then decided the patent medicine would be impractical to me up here in the air, where I needed both hands to hold tightly to the handlebars.
    As the air bicycle flew east, the pain in my stomach grew. My eyes teared as terrible cramps gripped my intestines, and my legs became so weak that one of my feet slipped off the footrest. The air bicycle shifted slightly and the operator glanced back at me in alarm, but I gave him a nod that I hoped was reassuring. Then I went back to my suffering.
    I supposed that I was suffering from a bout of typho-malaria. If it was dysentery from the miasmic water, I was in trouble. We were nearly three hundred feet in the air now, and still rising. My ears popped a second time. I shut my eyes and clung on grimly.
    “We’re caught in an updraft,” the operator said a short time later. “And it looks as though there’s bad weather ahead. The ride could get a little bumpy.”
    I opened my eyes and saw that the sky was dark with thunderheads. So absorbed had I been in my own misery that I’d failed to notice the change in the weather. I’d assumed that the air felt hotter and stickier due to my debilitated condition, but now I saw a sky that churned as violently as my stomach.
    In the distance ahead of us, I could see the familiar red roofs of the Regina headquarters, its buildings laid out in an open rectangle around a parade square and flag pole. A mile or so down the railway track, a cluster of frame houses surrounded the station, together with the slate-coloured rooftop of the Pacific Hotel and the tiny cottage where the corporal and constable who met the trains were quartered. Nearby were the heaps and heaps of sun-bleached buffalo bones that had given the town its original Indian name: Wascana — Pile of Bones. They were awaiting shipment to the east, where they would be ground as fertilizer. Farther out was a scattering of canvas tents, erected by the town’s newest inhabitants.
    The town lay no more than a few minutes away from us now, but the air bicycle was shaking violently. The right wing dipped, and then the left, as the operator fought to bring it back to trim. Gusts of wind caught at the propellers, forcing them alternately into a blurred spin or slowing them to a chuffing crawl. One instant we plummeted down toward the prairie so fast the balloon above us creaked under the strain, bending like a sausage in a pan; the next we soared up to the heavens on an updraft.
    “Can we make it?” I asked, fixing my eye upon Regina, which seemed hopelessly distant from us now.
    “I hope so!” the operator gritted. “I’ve never seen a storm as bad as this one. It blew up so fast that I couldn’t—”
    A fork of lightning leaped from cloud to ground just ahead of the balloon. So close was it that the thunderclap was almost instantaneous. It roared over us like a train engine, vibrating the frame of the air bicycle and setting my very teeth to chattering. For a moment, I thought the balloon above me had ruptured explosively, but when I looked up it was intact.
    That was when I realized what the balloon was filled with: hydrogen.
    “Can you set us down?” I urged.
    The operator shook his head. “It would be worse if I did,” he shouted back over the wind. “The prairie here is as flat as a billiard table. The balloon would be the highest point on it; the lightning would certainly strike it. We’ll just have to stay aloft and pray that a bolt doesn’t hit us.”
    I nodded mutely and swallowed my fear. It settled in next to the ache in my stomach.
    Another bolt of lightning split the air next to us and, with a booming rumble, the heavens opened up. Fat drops of rain splattered on the top of the balloon overhead. We remained dry for a moment or two, and then rain rolled down the sides of the balloon, dripping onto our heads.
    Regina was getting closer, but so were the lightning flashes. The next one momentarily blinded me, and the thunderclap