The Walking (32 page)

"What are you going to do when you get there?" Claire asked. "Just stand there and stare at the lake? Wait for your ESP to kick in and suddenly explain everything?"

"I don't know," he admitted, and he realized that something deeper might be at work here. Claire was right. He had no plan and, logically, no reason to visit Wolf Canyon.

There was nothing he could learn empirically from viewing the site where the town was buried. But the impulse to go was strong, and what he had taken for an idea logically conceived was really closer to an imposed thought, an illogical plan that had grown from a casual notion to a definite desire. He still felt as though he had come up with the idea himself, but he also felt like a piece of metal being drawn to a magnet against its will.

"why does this woman have to go with you?" "I don't know," he said again. And he didn't. Claire was silent.

"Trust me on this," he told her. "I don't know what all is

happening, but..." The words trailed off as he realized that he didn't know what he wanted to say.

""But what?"

It feels right," he said finally. "I may not know what I'm doing or why, but I know that it's what I'm supposed to be doing."

"You're scaring me."

"I'm scaring myself."

Claire breathed deeply, trying to calm down, a stat icky sound that only emphasized how far away she was right now. "You really think that Bob went there?"

"Yeah!

What are you going to do if you find him?"

"I don't know."

"Shouldn't you have some sort of plan? What if? She sighed. "Shit.

Who knows how to deal with something like this? If someone had told me a month ago that we'd be back together and some kind of curse was killing off everyone connected to a dam in Arizona where your zombie father was headed... I mean, Jesus Christ, Miles. What have you gotten yourself into here.

"I didn't get myself into anything. It came to me. I didn't want it to happen. I didn't ask for it."

"I know, but how are you going to... right it? What are you going to do to get your father to stop walking around and die? With a vampire you put a stake through its heart. With a werewolf you shoot it with a silver bullet. But there isn't anything concrete like that here.

There's just a ... a big jumbled mess, and there's no way to sort it out, and there's only you and some woman against... God knows what."

"I know," he told her. "But I have to find out. I can't make a plan because I don't know what I don't know. I just have to investigate and roll with whatever comes."

A welcome wry edge came into her voice. "Part of you is enjoying this, though. Admit it, Miles. You always secretly dreamed of some big exotic movie-like case that you could crack."

"I'm too scared to enjoy it. BUt you're right. Maybe that keeps me going, keeps me from giving up."

"Just be careful," she said softly. "I don't want anything to happen to you. I love you."

"I love you, too. And I'm always careful." "Did you bring your cell phone?" "No. Damn. I forgot."

"Call me anyway when you get there. Use a pay phone. I'll probably be home by then, but if not, call this number.

Make sure you call me either way."

"I will," he promised.

"I love you," she said again.

"Me, too."

They said their good-byes and hung up. The sound of the handset dropping into its cradle with a quiet plastic clap had a note of finality to it.

He turned away to see Janet carrying a box out from the hallway and setting it down on the coffee table.

They looked at each other, met each other's eyes.

Janet glanced down at the box. "It's my uncle's magic stuff. Should

I?

"Bring it," Miles said. "Who knoWs what we'll need?"

Claire took off work early, stopped off to buy some groceries, then headed straight home. She always kept the drapes in the house closed when she was gone, and she put the twin sacks of groceries on the kitchen counter, then opened the front shades to let in some light.

And nearly jumped out of her skin.

She let out an involuntary cry, lurching back and stumbling into the couch. The homeless woman standing next to

the window and peering in at her was grinning crazily, both palms pressed flat against the glass. She licked the window, leaving a trail of blurred spittle.

Claire knew instantly who this was--the woman Miles had met at the mall before Christmas--and that frightened her far more than if it had just been some random loony who had wandered into her yard. How the woman had found her house she did not know, but she had no doubt that it was intentional, and that added another layer of fear onto what she already felt. She had not seen the old lady while walking in. Had she merely been unobservant, or had the woman been hiding from her, crouching in the bushes?

She refused to let herself be intimidated. Despite her embarrassing first reaction, she gathered up her dignity and strode purposefully out of the house, confronting the woman on the front lawn. "Who are you and what are you doing on my property?" Her voice, thank God, carried exactly the edge of authority she'd intended.

"He's gone there, hasn't he?"

"Who? Who's gone where?"

"Bob's son. He's gone to Wolf Canyon."

Claire's mouth felt dry. She was in way over her head. She stared into a wrinkled, dirty face that seemed both blank and crafty.

Whatever this was, it was far beyond her comprehension, and the scope and range of a creature or demon or power that could reanimate Bob's corpse and the dead body of a man in Utah, kill dam workers across the country and lead this homeless woman to her house left Claire feeling small and helpless and overwhelmed. She was terrified for Miles even more than for herself, and although every instinct in her body was telling her to run, to lock herself inside the house and dial 9-1-1, she stood her ground. "Who are you?" she asked again.

"May. I'm here to help you." She leaned forward confidentially. "I'm one, too. Like Bob."

Nothing was making any sense. Either she was getting stupid in her old age, unable to make those large connective leaps necessary to communicate for the first time with people she did not know, or the elements of this conversation were so far off the scale that making coherent sense of them without a shared blueprint was pretty much impossible. "You're one of what like Bob?" she asked.

"A witch."

Now it was making more sense.

She still could not completely reconcile Miles' ordinary down-to-earth father with a mystical power-wielding sorcerer, but it explained the collection of powders and nostrums, the mystery of his walking dead body. And if she was going to buy into this witchcraft thing, she might as well take it all the way and subscribe to the notions of good magic and bad magic; white magic and black magic.

Bob would obviously have been a good witch.

But why had he never told this to Miles... or anyone else, for that matter? And how had he kept it a secret all those years? In her mind, she saw him waiting until his children were asleep, then chanting paeans to Satan.

No. That was not Bob.

She didn't really know Bob, though. If this woman was telling the truth--and Claire thought she was--none of them had really known him.

"Is he at the lake?" May asked. Claire found herself nodding.

"He won't know what to do by himself. Bob never taught him."

"Never taught him what?"

May flipped up her dirty dress, grinned. "I'm not wearing any panties!"

Claire sighed. Great. Like too many homeless people, this woman obviously had some serious mental problems, and she was going to have to sift through the old lady's words

to determine what was truth and what was delusion--not an easy thing to do when the subject was the supernatural. "Miles--" Claire began.

May snapped her fingers. "That's his name! Miles!" "Miles thinks his father walked to Wolf Canyon. His father is dead, but he's still walking around and he escaped from the morgue several weeks ago."

"He's going back. They all go back when they die. Or I should say, we all go back when we die. It's part of her curse."

"Whose curse?"

The old woman cackled. Yeletype firetrap. Teletype firetrap.

Buttfuck Cornelius of love!"

Jesus Christ.

'qsabella," May said, suddenly lucid once again. "She cursed us after she was killed, before she was buried." The old lady smiled at Claire.

"Your house is pretty. Can I go in?

"No." She was starting to get a headache.

"Isabella promised to come back."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. Could you start from the beginning? Who are you? Who is Isabella? what the hell does any of this have to do with Bob and

Mi"

A small wind kicked up, a surprisingly localized gust that swirled about her yard, kicking up leaves and picking up dirt, but leaving the rest of the street and the other yards untouched. May stood at the center of the miniature tempest, her hair blowing wildly, as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. It occurred to Claire that she was causing this, that it was an attempt on the old woman's part to get Claire to invite her inside the house. The wind coalesced into a funnel-like dust devil, and pushed its way through a hedge and into the yard next door. She watched it retreat down the street. A Land Rover drove by, oblivious.

Despite the increased dishevelment of her appearance, May seemed suddenly saner, more grounded and rational. "Wolf Canyon," she began,

"was a town of witches founded by a man named William Johnson in the mid-1800s. Like many religious and ethnic groups at that time, witches were persecuted. We were hung, drowned, burned at the stake, and William followed the example of the Mormons, who had headed west to establish their own community."

She smiled widely, reached both hands behind her, started furiously scratching. "Ass itch! Ass itch!"

Just as suddenly, she was all seriousness. "William met and married a woman named Isabella. Isabella was a witch, but she was more than a witch." May's voice dropped. "She was evil. She started taking over the town, molding it in her own image. Those who disagreed with her were punished. She drove some away, others were mysteriously found dead. Finally, they had all had enough. William was old by this time, but his powers were still strong, and he killed her while she slept. He cut off her head, and the people buried her in a cave up the canyon.

Before they sealed the cave entrance, her head started talking, and she cursed the people of Wolf Canyon. She vowed to return, stronger, and to wreak vengeance on all other witches, to destroy them all. She said that no one would be allowed to leave Wolf Canyon and that everyone in the town would be engulfed by a wall of water and killed."

May stared off in the distance, almost as though she were in a trance, and Claire shivered.

"Bob and I were born in Wolf Canyon, though we left early. I don't even remember the town, only what my parents told me of it. Isabella's day was long gone, and no one believed by then that her curse would come to pass. Plenty of people had left and returned and left again, and nothing had ever stopped them. But our parents told us of Isabella,

warned us of her, and we grew up afraid, fearing and dreading her resurrection and revenge.

"We met each other again after they built the dam. I was living in New Jersey then. I had a husband and a house and a dog and a good life.

And then I felt it. I felt the screaming of all those souls as they were drowned, as the dam waters flooded in and Isabella's curse came true. I left my husband, left my house, left my dog, and went back to Wolf Canyon. I was drawn there. We were all drawn there, all of us who had escaped the waters, and I met Bob on the shore by the dam, and we both saw the same vision and we talked about what was happening.

There were dozens of us, all standing by the water's edge. She was calling to us from down there, laughing at us, and we understood that she had waited a long time for this and that she would wait even longer. She would wait as long as it took for her to escape.

"We made a vow then to right her, to never let her out. We kept in touch for a while, but then we stopped, like our parents had before us, and maybe that was part of her curse, too. We started new lives, and most of us avoided all thought of Isabella, all mention of magic. Some of us... some of us became..."

May shook her head, tried to smile, looked for a second as though she was about to say something crazy, then continued on soberly. "Several months ago, it started again. I felt the pull, and I dreamed about Isabella, and I realized that she had grown stronger. She had taken from those of us who'd died over the years and had remained down there, hoarding her power, waiting to use it until she was strong. She was going after the dam builders, too, the ones who had flooded the canyon with water, and she was killing them off one by one, using her powers to find them and hunt them down. She was getting strength from them, as well, even though she was still stuck underwater, in the cave."

May grew silent, and Claire waited for more, but there was no more.

That was it. Now the old lady did smile, and Claire understood that her craziness was the way she dealt with the tremendous mental strain that she was constantly under. Schizophrenia might be somewhere in the mix, but May's outbursts were also part of her defense mechanism, the means by which she coped with the knowledge she was forced to possess.

That didn't make things any less unnerving, but at least it explained the homeless woman's bizarre behavior in a way that was somewhat comprehensible.

"Dirty face in a rain chair!" May screamed at the top of her lungs.

She looked up into the sky. "Down by feathers of silence!"

Claire looked at her. If May's experiences at Wolf Canyon could transform her from a New Jersey suburbanite to... this, what was going to happen to Miles?

That was Claire's real concern, and once again she looked into the old woman's eyes and felt nothing but fear--a feeling she saw reflected right back at her.

The two of them stood on the lawn, facing each other. A car drove by.