The Walking (15 page)

He preferred to block out that part of his life.

But he had been thinking about Wolf Canyon more and more often lately.

He told himself that it was because he was getting old, because he was surveying his life and trying to sort through it, the good and the bad, to see how the balance sheet of his actions added up. That was a part of it, of course. But something else was involved as well. Something he couldn't quite put his finger on.

And that worried him.

On the way home from work, Russ stopped off at the market and bought a quart of chocolate milk for Cameron. His grandson had seemed somewhat down this past week, and he knew it was because the boy sensed that they would soon be leaving. His father was working again, and it was

only a matter of time before he and his parents would be able to move out of Russ's house and back into a place of their own

Maybe Chocolate milk would cheer him up. Lily was cooking dinner when he arrived home, and he smiled at his daughter-in-law, gave her a quick pat on the back as he put the milk into the fridge. "Where's Cameron?"

"Playing," she said. "He's around."

"If you see him first, tell him I bought him some chocolate milk."

She gave Russ a grateful smile. thank's Dad."

"What are grandfathers for?" He walked back out to the living room and turned on the television to catch the local news. He watched it for a few minutes before becoming disgusted with the anchors' incessant chatter and the parade of soft non stories and switched the channel to

CNN.

Behind him, he heard a thump, and he glanced over his shoulder, over the back of the couch, to see the door to the garage fly open. Cameron dashed out and slammed the door immediately, throwing his body against the door as if to pre vent someone from opening it and entering.

Russ stood, frowning. "What the--?" Cameron's face was white.

"Grampa! ..... He felt a sinking in his stomach, a tightening in his chest as he walked around the couch to where his grandson stood leaning against the door, panting. "What is it?"

'there something in the garage! I think it's a monster!" Tom walked in at precisely that moment, throwing his keys on the entryway table, and Russ quickly called his son over. "Cameron says there's something in the garage." "A monster! It tried to attack me!"

Tom gave Russ an amused kids-saythedamedest-thing look over the boy's head, and pried Cameron away from the door. "Don't worry, sport. We'll find it. Whatever it is."

Russ was not so sanguine. Maybe it was because he'd

been thinking about Wolf Canyon, but he could not entirely dismiss the boy's fears, and his feelings as Tom opened the door and peered into the semidarkness were closer to his grandson's than his son's.

There was a clatter of pop cans from across the garage. Russ's heart leaped in his chest. He looked over at Tom, and his son hesitated a moment before reaching around the side of the wall and grabbing the long handle of a shovel.

"Stay out," Tom told Cameron. "Let your grandpa and me handle this."

He handed Russ the shovel, picked up a broom for himself.

Something made of glass fell and shattered on the cement floor.

The light in the garage was on, but it was a weak bare bulb hanging down from the center of the ceiling, and it was almost useless. Tom tried flipping the switch to open the big garage door and let in some of the fading outdoor light, but there was no response the garage door opener seemed to be broken, i "Keep the door open," Tom ins' ted his son. But stay in the living room. Don't come in."

The boy nodded

"What do you think it is?" Russ asked.

"It's a monster!" Cameron piped up.

"Probably just a possum or a raccoon or something." In the city? Russ wanted to say, but he kept quiet, and the two of them walked slowly forward. They could now see the overturned paint cans and the shattered glass from an old Coke bottle.

Russ found that his face were sweating, and he was having a hard time breathing. He didn't quite know what had gotten into him. He had cleared vermin out of tool sheds and storage compartments a hundred times, had lived in the wilderness with all sorts of creatures during his early days at Interior.

But this, he sensed, was different.

"Maybe a dog got in here," Tom suggested. "Maybe he snuck in somehow when the door was open and got trapped." "Maybe," Russ said doubtfully. But it was not a dog. It was a monster.

They found it on top of the newspapers stacked for recycling, a terrible thing of fur and feathers, a small misshapen creature with the eyes of a man and the teeth of a beast. It was a frightening sight to behold, and it screeched at them, an abomination from hell that began jumping up and down on the papers, gibbering in a way that almost made it seem as though it were speaking a language.

Tom backed up, whirled toward the still-open door to the living room.

"Get out of the house," he ordered Cameron. "You and your mom get out of the house and go next door and call 911."

The boy stood in place, not moving, eyes wide open. "Now!"

Cameron ran to do as he was told, and the door closed, leaving the garage in almost complete darkness. The bulb barely illuminated the empty concrete directly beneath it, let alone the side of the garage where the papers were stacked.

Tom held out his broom, moving gingerly, careful not to make any sudden movements.

"Maybe we should get out of here, too," Russ suggested. "If both doors are closed, that should trap it until the authorities come."

"Maybe there's another exit---" Tom began.

And the monster screamed.

It was a sound like nothing they had ever heard, and both Russ and Tom jumped back, Russ practically stumbling over an old box of books in his way. He turned, was about to hurry out of the garage, when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He swiveled his head to look.

And the creature flew at him.

They did not have enough time to react. Russ tried to right it off with the shovel, and Tom tried to bat it away with the broom, but it was a whirling dervish of claws and teeth and skinny deformed legs, and neither of them could get it off him.

He felt talons slash skin, felt the stabbing of pain, the wetness of blood.

He dropped the shovel and tried to use his hands to pull the creature off, but his fingers could get no purchase, met only insubstantial feather and slippery scaly flesh, and then his wrists were sliced open, and he fell to the ground. Dimly, he was aware of the fact that Tom's broom was beating against his head, trying to dislodge the monster.

Then he saw those human eyes staring into his own, heard a long low chuckle.

And it ripped out his throat.

There were six of them already.

It was not yet a town, not even a hamlet, really, but it was a community, a community of six, and the beginning of a real settlement.

William finished drawing water from the well and carried the bucket back to the house. He poured some in the washbasin, then carried the bucket over to the small kitchen space, where he placed it on the floor next to the sink. He stared out the window at Marie, weaving spells over the vegetables in the garden, and he smiled, feeling good.

They had three houses built. The two women shared one, while the four men doubled up in the other two. He and Jeb lived in the first house they'd built, the smallest house, and though the single room was somewhat confining, they were used to it and would be able to put up with the situation as long as necessary.

Sleeping arrangements were going to change soon, he knew. Olivia and Martin were now a couple and were planning to get married and move in together. That meant they would probably need another house--unless Marie wanted to room with one of the men, which he doubted.

Their first order of business, though, was a barn. The animals were all still with them, bound by magic, but it would be nice if they had some shelter as well. He knew the horses had already been complaining about it, and he had promised the animals that something would be done.

They also needed a dry place to store seeds and tools and some of the implements that were now sharing space inside the homes.

After the barn and the new house?

Who knew? But he was leaning toward a store, a common building where goods could be stored and distributed. The community wasn't big enough yet to really justify such an operation, but more were on the way, and he had the feeling that it soon would be. He envisioned the town as he had first imagined it, with a livery and a saloon, with a library and theater, with a park where children could play and a school where they could learn. One day, he knew, this would be a city, a city with plumbing and law enforcement and all of the amenities of modern life.

And everyone in it would be a witch.

Marie saw him through the window, smiled, waved. He waved back.

The days here were spent working, trying to carve out a life in this canyon. At night they spoke with spirits. There'd been others on this land before, Indians, and though they did not always understand these ghosts from another culture, their presence was still welcome and reassuring.

Particularly after passing through the Bad Lands.

William shivered just to think of it. He knew that settlers called the area around Deadwood the Badlands, but that was different. That was merely a description of geology. The land he and Jeb had come through

Those were bad lands.

It was long after the monster in the mountains, yet still a week or so away from Arizona Territory. They'd been Iraveling almost due south, then suddenly they were walking west, though they hadn't changed directions. They both realized it almost at once, and they stopped.

William looked around, and realized that there were no directions here.

It made no sense. The sun rose in the east and set in the west, and everything could be calculated from that. Only... Only the sun here seemed different. There appeared to be a uniform brightness in the sky, a vaguely defined whiteness that provided illumination but took no specific shape. They could not make out a sun and thus could not determine in which direction it was headed.

Without warning, William's horse reared up behind him. He and Jeb fell back, startled, and the horse suddenly bolted, running away. He called to it, tried to summon it, and they both chased it, but the animal was gone and would not return. The last view he had of his old companion was of the creature tearing crazily across the semidesert in an indistinguishable direction.

Saying nothing to each other, the two of them gathered what they could from the few supplies that had been thrown from the horse's back and silently continued on.

The land grew rougher, the pockmarked plain degenerate thing into numerous finger canyons, and soon they were wandering between walls of rounded rock hundreds of feet high but with passages between them barely big enough for a single man. The narrow canyons wound around in confusing twists and turns, a veritable maze, and by nightfall they had no idea where they were or in which direction they were facing.

The night here, they found, was different as well. There was a full moon out, but they could not see it, could only receive its refracted indirect light from the narrow band of sky above them. Most of the light died halfway down the slriated rock walls, but the remainder filtered into the bottom of the gorge, throwing odd areas into relief, creating shadows where none should exist.

Shadows.

The two of them walked slowly, carefully, saying nothing. The shadows appeared to be moving of their own volition; and though it was hard to tell, an even darker shape seemed to be lurking among them, scuttling from one to another, hiding, a strangely formed being on strange claws that blended with the darkness and whose sounds simulated those 31 of the wind.

They decided not to make camp, but to keep on, to try to find a way out of here. This was not a place where either of them would feel comfortable stopping, let alone sleeping, and they moved forward. Past moonlit silhouettes that should have looked like outcroppings of rock but did not. Past inky pools of shadow that looked both deep and soft, that shifted as they approached and seemed to have weight and heft and some terrible spark of life.

What smack William most about this area was its fundamental wrongness.

If the canyon in the mountains had seemed evil, if the monster they'd found and the thought of a creature that had been able to kill it seemed frightening, that was nothing compared to the feeling generated here. For these narrow interconnected canyons were like an antechamber of hell, and as they pressed on it became increasingly hard to remember that they were somewhere in the un annexed western territory of the United States. Dread weighed upon them from all sides. They continued on, trudging through endless identical passages, and it was as if the land itself was conspiring against them, building itself as they moved forward in an effort to trap them here forever.

And then the canyon opened up, and the bluish light of the moon spilled upon them. The shadows disappeared and with them the unseen creature of darkness that had been hiding in their wake.

But the single shadow that remained on the rounded rock wall ahead was far worse than anything they had seen previously.

It was the shadow of his mother. ' Goose bumps rippled over his skin.

William was not easily frightened, not with the powers he had, but he was frightened now, more frightened even than he had been at his mother's execution, and as he stared at the shadow, it started to move.

"It started to dance. His mother had never danced in public, had never dared to do so, but she had often danced at home, in front of him. It was a form of expression for her, was her favorite way to conjure, and her movements were unique and individual, so specific and stylized that they could not possibly be duplicated by anyone else.

And that was exactly how her shadow was moving now. Jeb was frightened as well, he sensed, but for other reasons. The other man could not possibly feel the depth or resonance of his own fear. William stared.