Witch's Canyon (26 page)

“Still where?” Sam asked.

“In the schoolhouse.”

“The schoolhouse is still there?”

“Sure it is,” Baird said.

Dean braked the car to a sudden stop and slammed his open palm down on the wheel. “We asked you before if the ranch was still there!”

“It ain’t,” Baird said. He didn’t look like he even understood that Dean was angry with him, much less what had prompted that anger. “Ranch has been divided and subdivided, made into a housing project and smaller ranch properties and little ranchettes and what have you. But part of the land is still there, and some of the buildings. Schoolhouse was put in a rocky canyon nobody much cared about because there wasn’t no good grazing back there. You don’t build a school on land that has commercial value, do you? Same reason, nobody else has bothered to build on it, so what’s left of the building is still standin’ there. Least, it was last time I went through there. That’s ten, twelve years gone by, now, but I can’t imagine anyone much goes back there.”

“Can you take us to it?”

“You’re drivin’, Dean,” Baird said. “And I reckon your eyesight is a lot better’n mine. Why don’t you take us to it?”

Sam could almost hear the sparks of Dean’s fuse 242 SUPERNATURAL

burning. “Because . . . I . . . don’t . . . know . . . where

. . . it . . . is.”

“Well, I can
tell
you that.”

“That’s a good idea, Harmon,” Sam said, hoping to intercede before Dean threw Baird into the road and ran over him. “You tell Dean where to drive, and he’ll drive there.”

“That’s right.” Dean’s voice carried the false cheer that he used to disguise sheer fury. “You tell me where to drive. I’ll drive. Okay?”

“Sure enough,” Baird said. “Turn left up here at the corner.”

As it turned out, they couldn’t drive all the way.

Paved road led to within a few miles of the old schoolhouse, and then dirt road—which hadn’t been traveled much lately, by the looks of it—got them another mile or so closer. After that they had to travel on foot, cutting across snow-covered fi elds, climbing barbed-wire fences, all while carrying their weapons.

Baird directed them toward a rocky ridge. When they reached the ridge, they had to scramble up it at a relatively low point. It looked like Kaibab limestone to Sam, like the upper layer of the Grand Canyon itself. From its peak they looked down at a short drop to a wide valley with another, similar ridge maybe a mile or two away. Both semiparallel ridges ran into the distance, where they grew closer and seemed to funnel the valley fl oor into a canyon.

“That there, that leads right to the Grand Canyon Witch’s

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243

after a few miles,” Baird said. “We used to have to make sure the fences out that way was sound because we didn’t want any beeves to get away and fall down the big drop. Some of ’em found pathways down, and that was even worse because then we’d have to go down ourselves and try to herd ’em back up.”

“But you were just a kid, right?” Dean asked.

“Sure. Anybody ever tells you kids don’t work on ranches, you can tell ’em what they’re full of.”

“And the schoolhouse is around here?” Sam said.

He’d been scanning but hadn’t seen anything that looked like a school.

“This is called School Canyon on the maps. You can’t see it from here, though.” Baird started down the slope again, picking his way among the rocks like a mountain goat.

His words took a minute to sink in, but when they did, Sam asked, “You said it’s called that on the maps. Does that mean the locals called it something else?”

“You betchum. We called it Witch’s Canyon.” Dean stopped short, crossed his arms over his chest. “And it didn’t occur to you to maybe mention that name before now? Considering what we’re dealing with?”

Baird shielded his eyes with his right hand, looking back upslope at Dean. “No. No, it sure didn’t. I apologize if that was an oversight, young man, but you didn’t ask me about no witches, and anyhow, it’s just a name, isn’t it? Lot of places around here have names that don’t mean nothing.” 244 SUPERNATURAL

“But it might mean something,” Sam pointed out.

“It’s as solid a lead as anything else we’ve come up with so far. Where’s that school?”

“Follow me,” Baird said. He started down the slope again. Sam followed. After another moment’s petulance, so did Dean.

The canyon floor was mostly tall yellow grass poking up through the snow. Frequent boulders jutted up from the floor, a few scrubby junipers among them.

They trudged down the canyon, and fi nally Sam could see what Baird had insisted all along was there. Almost up against the wall of the ridge they had crossed was what remained of a log structure, its roof caved in, its log walls partially collapsed. Logs stuck out at odd angles. Forget about structural integrity—the place looked like it would fall apart completely if a visiting sparrow flapped its wings too hard.

“That’s a school?” Sam asked.

“It was in better shape when I went there.”

“Hard to believe,” Dean said.

If Baird caught the cutting sarcasm, he ignored it. He approached the ramshackle building, at once anxious and somehow reverent. Sam had the impression that the place had meant a lot to him, once upon a time. It probably hurt to see it in this condition. If it had been within the national park boundaries, it might have been preserved as a historical monument, but instead it had been ignored, left to the not so tender mercies of wind and weather.

There might have once been a door in the doorway, Sam thought, but if so, it was long gone. The Witch’s

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building stood open to the elements. The beam over the doorway had collapsed, so instead of being seven feet tall, the opening slanted down at a forty-degree angle, and even Harmon Baird had to stoop to go inside. He didn’t hesitate, though. Sam fished a pen-light from his coat pocket, clicked it on, and followed him in, with Dean close behind carrying his own fl ashlight.

Inside, it looked more like a home for rodents and bats than a place of learning for humans. The fl oor was covered with dirt and animal feces and vegeta-tion that had been blown through the open doorway, some of which had taken root amidst the ancient benches and desks. Webs clotted the upper reaches, some hanging low enough that Sam had to dodge them or brush them away with his arms. The air was thick with the stink of ammonia and the earthy, fe-cund aroma of manure.

“Looks like summer vacation lasted a little too long,” Dean said.

“I don’t think anyone’s used the place since I was young,” Baird said. “The Murphys started dividing up the ranch in the early thirties, after the park started drawing people to the area and the demand for real estate started to grow.”

“It’s almost too bad no one took the furnishings out,” Sam said. “They could have been preserved in a museum or something.”

“Been plenty of schools abandoned over the years, I expect,” Baird said. “Some things can’t be hung on to, just got to be left to rot.” 246 SUPERNATURAL

“I suppose that’s true. Do you have any idea where your teacher would have stored his records?” Baird stood still, looking at the place in the dim light filtering through the door and the openings in the walls and roof. “Mr. Stein, he had him a big old chest made of cedar wood,” he said after a while.

“Used to keep schoolbooks and those old journals of his in it, and just about any other treasure he needed to keep safe. Had a big padlock on it, and he kept the key on him all the time.”

“Where was the chest?” Dean asked.

“Front of the room, behind his whatchacallit.

Lectern. I remember starin’ at it, day after day, sometimes wonderin’ what marvels he had inside, sometimes wishin’ I could hide in there myself.” Sam couldn’t quite determine the room’s original layout. “Where was the front?”

Baird pointed immediately to the worst area in the room, where the roof had completely fallen in.

It looked like part of the canyon that the school-room had been built around. “That’s the front. Right there.”

TWENT Y-NINE

“I guess we start digging,” Dean said. “Wish I brought a hazmat suit.” He turned off his fl ashlight and shoved it back into his pocket. There was enough ambient light for manual labor, if not for reading some long-dead schoolteacher’s notebooks.

He hoped they didn’t unearth any dens of rats in that mess, though. He hated rats.

Hated them a lot.

Sam put his light away, too, and soon they were shoveling through the accumulated debris of the decades, digging their hands into cold mud, decomposed branches, animal dung, and probably the corpses of small creatures of various kinds. They’d need to sterilize their hands after this or risk all sorts of unpleasant consequences.

The task was disgusting, but before long they had unearthed a large wooden chest that had to be the one Baird described. Its hinges and hasp were rusted 248 SUPERNATURAL

through but still visible. Dean kicked at the old lock, still fastened in place, and it crumbled to dust. “You really think anything in here is gonna be legible?” Sam shrugged. “Won’t know until we look.” He opened the trunk’s lid. Dean found his light again and shined it inside.

On top, there was indeed a layer of paper that had gone to pulp. As soon as his fingers touched it, it disintegrated. But underneath, as if that layer had protected the important stuff, were school records, with each student’s name neatly handwritten on the outside. Under that were the journals Baird had described, leather-bound and still mostly intact, although insects had nibbled at the edges. Dean lifted one out gingerly and turned its brittle, yellowed pages. The same neat handwriting filled the pages.

“This has got to be the journals,” he said.

“Looks like it to me,” Baird said.

“There must be twenty of them,” Sam said. “He must have collected a lot of oral histories.”

“A lot of lies,” Baird reminded them.

“But with some truth mixed in, we hope.”

“No promises.”

“We going to read them right here?” Dean asked.

Reading wasn’t his favorite activity by any means, and he had found that people in the past often used way more words than they had to. And funny handwriting.

“If we try to transport them, we run the risk that they’ll fall apart,” Sam said. “Besides, given the urgency—”

“Then I guess we read them right here. Better get started.” Dean sat down in the muck, fi guring it was Witch’s

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already too late to salvage any of the clothes he was wearing. The books all looked alike from the outside, so he didn’t see how to choose where to begin.

It didn’t take long for him to decide that he’d started with the wrong book. He was immediately immersed in some old ranch hand’s account of a particularly dry summer, with grass dying, fi res burning up what hadn’t died, and cattle starving. Unpleasant reading, but nothing that struck him as even remotely supernatural. And the old-fashioned handwriting, while precisely formed, was in ink that had purpled on the yellow paper, hard to read even with a flashlight clutched in his left hand.

He skimmed the pages, looking for any mention of a witch or any event that might have led to antago-nism against the town. There were plenty of small slights—trips into town for supplies that ended in a fight, or someone feeling they’d been overcharged for merchandise, that kind of thing. Dean had learned not to underestimate how petty

people could be,

but he didn’t get the sense that anyone would have launched an ongoing murder cycle because of such minor disagreements.

He reached the end of that first book and picked up another. Sam was turning pages just as quickly as he had. Baird sat with a book open on his lap but his gaze wandering around the room, as if in his mind’s eye he was seeing all the children he had gone to school with in this little room. Dean wondered if the old guy understood the stakes here. Then again, he had armed himself and faced potential danger in 250 SUPERNATURAL

order to help out the residents of a town to which he didn’t feel any genuine attachment anymore. In the long run, Dean guessed, no one had done more than Harmon Baird to try to stop the killings from happening again.

Still, he felt the minutes ticking by as if each one carved a notch in his arm.

When Dean was on his third book, he heard Sam issue a low whistle. “What?” Dean asked.

“I might have something here,” Sam said. “Hang on.” He read further, tracing his finger along underneath the lines in the book. Dean ignored his own book and watched his younger brother’s face cloud over as he read.

After another few minutes Sam stopped and looked up from the pages. “I think this is it. Harmon, do you remember ever hearing about a woman named Elizabeth Claire Marbrough?”

“The Marbrough family owned the ranch before the Murphys,” Baird said, snapping his fi ngers.

“Couldn’t remember that name, for the life of me.”

“But what about the woman? Does that name ring a bell?”

“Not specifically,” Baird said. “Jens Marbrough, I think he was the first owner. My people, they worked for him for at least a generation before I was born, then my folks stayed on when he sold out to the Murphys.”