The Walking

by Bentley Little

  Bureau's case, and request that I be in charge."

  "I--I can't accept that responsibility."

  Rossiter nodded. "I had a feeling you might say that." He tossed the file back on McCormack's desk. "But don't come crying to me if you never learn the truth."

  McCormack met his eyes, said nothing.

  The agent waited a moment for a response, then started out the door.

  "You know where to find me if you change your mind."

  McCormack wanted to say something, wanted to stop

  Rossiter from leaving, but in his mind he saw the stacked waterlogged bodies of the men and women they'd been able to dredge from the lake.

  And he was afraid.

  He stared at the door for several minutes after it closed.

  Maybe, he decided, he didn't really want to know the

  He mined on the paper shredder next to his desk and, picking the folder up off his desk, fed the pages of the file through, one by one.

  The world had changed.

  Territories were turning into states, and the wild untamed West was being crisscrossed by tracks and trails and roads. In the cities, telephones now allowed friends and relatives to speak across great distances by means of a mechanical device.

  People weren't afraid of magic anymore.

  Science had made magic commonplace.

  William did not like this new world, and when he went into the cities to trade or buy goods, when he traveled to Phoenix or Albuquerque or Salt Lake City, he felt uneasy with the casual acceptance of what before would have elicited gasps of astonishment. Even the former charges of heresy and blasphemy and consorting with the devil seemed preferable to this bored resignation, and he found himself mentally condemning the cheapening of the miraculous.

  Science had usurped the role of witches. Men could now perform their own miracles. In Denver, he had heard discussion of a scientist named Darwin who postulated a "surviva/of the fittest," who apparently believed that nature provided what was needed and discarded what was not, "natural selection" determining which animal species survived.

  Perhaps he himself had helped ensure the extinction of his own kind by isolating them, by providing a haven of safe shelter. They were no longer needed, no longer performed any useful function. They simply existed, and with out a larger purpose, they had broken away from the main thrust of life on earth, had become a still, dying pond on the side of a great rushing river.

  He lay in bed, staring up into the darkness, needing to move his bowels but unwilling to walk out to the privy in this cold. It was at night when these doubts always came to him, and they seemed to be coming more and more frequently.

  This was not how he had imagined it would turn out. His intentions had been noble, his motives pure, and in those long ago days when he'd been expelled from the last town and was riding west, searching in vain for a world that did not exist, he had even deceived himself into thinking that he was an important man and had come up with a great idea that would change the lives of his people forever.

  Time had put the lie to that, however, and he now regretted that he had ever come to this place, that he had ever attempted to found a town.

  That he had ever met Isabella.

  Yes. He regretted that most of all. She was the source of his problems, and if he had never met her, everything would have turned out differently.

  He rolled onto his side, his muscles strainin and complaining He winced as he struggled to sit up. He had got ten old and feeble. His powers were as strong as ever. If anything, they had increased with age. But his body was wearing down. He could no longer walk without pain, and if he did not weave himself a strengthening spell, his hands shook when he held something even as light as a pen.

  Isabella had not changed.

  He glanced down at her, lying next to him in the old brass bed. She remained as youthful as ever, her skin as smooth as alabaster, her face still informed with that wild beauty which had so captivated him on the trail outside Cheyenne all those years ago. Asleep, the covers pushed down below

  her breasts--round and perfectly formed, exposed to the crisp night air, nipples jutting up proudly--she was still the most amazing-looking woman he had ever seen.

  She was not like him, he knew. She was something different, something more.

  Something evil.

  It had taken him a long time to admit that to himself. Even after she had run off most of his original group, even after the others had died, he had still not wanted to ascribe to her the blame. He loved her. Or thought he did. And with that love came not only an instinctive desire to protect her, but a willful blindness to her failings that prevented him from seeing what had been obvious to so many others.

  And when normal people had moved into the region, when she had started the purges and persecutions, when she had built the stakes, he had still refused to acknowledge what was going on, though in the dark private hours he spent alone without her company, he agonized over it all, wondering if the Isabella he saw was the real Isabella or just an idealized image that clouded his view and kept him from the truth.

  The last ten years had been hell, as farmers and settlers who came to homestead in the surrounding country were systematically killed or driven off, methodically terrorized, with magic and without, and he had stood by helplessly and ineffectually as Isabella's reign of death spread across the land. Many of the witches went along with this. At least in the beginning. They approved of Isabella's approach, supported it. They and their families had been persecuted for most of their lives, and they relished the opportunity to get back at those who had done so by doing the same, tit for tat. Some did not approve, however, and those dissenters who remained, rather than sneaking away in the middle of the night to take their chances elsewhere, grew increasingly

  cowed and silent, intimidated by Isabella's growing autocratic rule.

  He had been intimidated, too.

  Isabella opened one eye, looked at him, and the lascivious tilt of her eyebrow reminded him of what they had done earlier in the evening, acts his poor body was paying for now. She smiled at him. "Is everything okay, dear?"

  He forced himself to smile back and settled onto the pillow.

  "Everything is fine."

  His perceptions had been slowly changing, each new act of violence eroding his confidence in his wife, but Isabella's true nature was not brought home to him until the next day.

  He spent the morning alone in the house, as he too often did these days, but when Isabella did not show up to make his lunch, and when another hour, and another, passed without any sign from her, he decided to go out and search. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, and while he still could not read Isabella even after all these years, his hunches had never failed him.

  She was not in town, not in the bar or the mercantile or the library or the haberdashery. He did not sense acknowledgment of her among any of the houses in town, and he saddled up his horse, strengthened his tired body with a spell, and headed out on the road north.

  He found her up the canyon, near the mine's abandoned first shaft, playfully disemboweling a small girl with a long serrated knife. The girl was completely silent, either shocked into soundless ness by the horror of her predicament or rendered mute by magic, and only the wild thrashing and gyrations of her mutilated body bespoke the unbearable physical agony to which she was being subjected. It had been some time since a raid had been conducted against a settler, and older scars on the girl's face and legs led him to believe that

  Isabella had been keeping this child alive for some time to use as her plaything.

  A baby girl.

  Isabella turned to look at him, smiled, and pulled out the blood's heart, biting into it. The thrashing stopped.

  Until this point he had always been able to make excuses for her. But the sight of her joyously playing with this innocent child shocked him.

  She was not merely a witch overzeaiously protecting herself and her people from possible harm. She w
as a monster.

  Something evil.

  He realized now what he should have realized long before: that she was the one who had killed Jeb and drained his body.

  She was the vampyr.

  Except she was not exactly a vampyr. He had read up on such things in the aftermath of his friend's death, and aside from the fact that she did not age and apparently had the ability to drain fluids from a body, she did not possess any other vampyric charactdristics. She did not need blood for sustenance, nor was she incapacitated by the day and invigorated by the night. She had no fear of crucifixes, and she loved garlic.

  No, Isabella was something else, and what disturbed him most was the knowledge that no matter how long they'd been together, she was a complete mystery to him.

  As far as he knew, she was the only one. In all their years together, she had never made mention of missing any people from her past--aside from that story about the brothel in Kansas City, which he had never believed. She'd never appeared to be homesick for a family or any other community, had never indicated that she was waiting for someone else to show up.

  He thought of the monster he and Jeb had found in the canyons. 20He thought of the Bad Lands.

  Maybe she was the last of a dying breed. Maybe the beings that had populated this country before the coming of men had become extinct and she was the only one left, surviving by her wits.

  Darwin again.

  Everything seemed to come back to Darwin these days. If he had had the power to go against her, he would have killed her there-on the spot. He would have stopped her heart or melted her down or set her ablaze, but he did not have her strength, had never had her strength, and she knew it. She dropped the small broken body on the rocks, and he turned away from the mine, sickened, galloping back the way he'd come. He returned alone to the town, holing up in the house.

  Isabella came back many hours later, clean, fresh, and visibly happy.

  They said nothing to each other about their encounter, and he knew that she was counting on him not to take any action.

  They did not speak during supper or after.

  He went to bed alone.

  Once again he awoke in the middle of the cold night with a desperate need to relieve himself. Although he had gone to sleep alone, Isabella had in the interim crawled into bed with him, and her head lay on the pillow next to his. One of her hands gently cupped his genitals. He sat up, looked down at her, and the expression of perverse contentment on her face twisted his guts into a knot. Originally, he had not intended to do anything about what had happened. Upon returning home, a sort of moral paralysis had descended upon him. But now, thinking about what she'd done what THEY'D done

  --and seeing her asleep in bed like this, her guard down, vulnerable, he suddenly had the strength to do what needed to be done.

  He killed her as she slept.

  He killed her, but she did not die.

  He put the pillow over her head, held it there, and when he had done so until his arms were aching, he pulled the pillow up.

  She was still breathing, still asleep.

  And she was smiling.

  The chill he felt was not from the outside air seeping in between the cracks of the windowsills, nor from the rheumatism that had permanently settled in his bones. He backed away from the bed, his hands shaking, his mouth dry. He kept waiting for her to sit up, to open her eyes, to acknowledge the attempt he'd made on her life and retaliate in some way. But she remained unmoving, asleep, and only that sly smile on her face let him know that she was aware of what he'd done..

  He placed a quick spell on the bed and everything in it, a binding spell, and he rushed around the room looking for a weapon, determined to go through with what he'd decided.

  He used her own knife to cut off her head, the long serrated one with which she'd disemboweled the girl. Blood spurted, flowed He stemmed it with toad powder, he separated the head from the body, but still she lived. The eyes blinked open; the arms moved up to casually scratch her disassociated cheek.

  She was playing with him, he realized.

  She looked at him and shook her head, the unconnected head rocking back and forth on the pillow, its raggedly severed veins flopping from the open neck like live red worms.

  He was covered with blood, as were the bedsheets, as were the blankets, as was the floor He had never been so frightened in his life, and it was the knowledge in her eyes that was the most unnerving. For he had intended to kill her quickly and cleanly so that she would not know what happened to her, so she would not be aware of his betrayal.

  But it had not worked out that way, and her eyes remained wide and seeing, watching each of his awkward fumbling attempts to murder her.

  Knowing that she was aware of what he was doing filled him with a strange and terrible dread, a terror unlike any he had known before.

  With a cry he grabbed the edge of the pillow and yanked it, tossing her head on the floor. He sliced her body in half, said a quick and dirty spell, then stumbled out of the house, breathing deeply, trying to fill his tired old lungs with the clean freshness of cold night air and to move the taste and smell of blood from his mouth and nos.

  He had planned to keep her death a sret, at least for a little while, and then attribute it to natural causes. But the disruption in power must have ben sensed because a dozen people were standing outside his fence, dressed in nightcaps and bedclothes. He scanned the faces of those present, pecting to confront the wrath of those who had gone along with her purges. But what he saw instead filled his heart with joy. Relief. Gratitude.

  They were glad she was gone, thankful that he had killed her.

  He staggered down first steps, through the small yard, out the gate, and into the arms of Irma Keyhom and Susan Johnson.

  By the time he reached them, his eyes were so full of tears that he could not even see.

  They did not wait for morning. Several of the men accompanied him back into the house.

  Matthew, Joshua, Cletus, and Russell carried out the two halves of the body, chanting spells to ward off malevolence, spells to protect themselves. William carried her head, have thing dusted it with invested bone meal in order to render it

  inanimate, and though his emotions were churning, he had no doubt that he had done the right thing.

  By this time most of the town had gathered out front, and they followed silently as the men carried what was left of Isabella up Main Street and out into the wilds of the canyon. The road became a wagon trail, then a horse path as it led farther into the darkness, farther from town.

  William felt as though he should explain what he'd done and why, but he did not know what to say, and the truth was that words did not seem to be needed. The people of the town understood somehow, and he sensed nothing but support when he scanned the crowd.

  They continued into the darkness.

  -The cave was up the canyon in the marshy area by the ferns.

  He had intended to entomb her there from the beginning. The cave was far from town but still in Wolf Canyon, and it was remote enough that her body would probably never be discovered. His intention was not to keep her corpse from harm, but to keep her from harming others. He had no faith that she was rendered completely disabled by death, that her power had died with her body, and he wanted to make sure that he did everything he could to ensure her permanent incapacitation.

  Leading the way, he slogged through the muck and weeds that adjoined this particularly slow-moving section of the river. Underneath an overhang of rock on which grew clumps of green fern shaded from the sun and fed by a trickling spring located somewhere at the top of the cliff, the cave entrance yawned, a low, narrow opening in the rock that disguised a much larger chamber inside. One by one they entered and someone conjured a sand fire for light.

  "We will leave her here," William said. "Place the halves of her body at opposite ends."

  He felt movement in his hands, a repugnant unnatural

  squirming that startled him into dropping
her head. It hit the powdered dirt with a quiet thud, rolling over until the blank staring eyes were looking up. He'd been half expecting something like this, but it still took him by surprise. He stared down at the head, not wanting to pick it up again, afraid to touch it. The eyes blinked, the cheek muscles twitched, and he knew that neither bone meal nor spells were strong enough to block her will.

  He backed up a step. The men carrying the halves of her body had dropped them at the opposite sides of the cave, and they had joined the rest of the people near the fire. All eyes were on him. William heard a whisper, saw Isabella's mouth move. Her eyes shifted to look at him, then took in the rest of the crowd. The temperature suddenly dropped, a chilling of the air that was strong enough to dim the fire.

  Despite the absence of a connected body and lungs, Isabella's voice issued loud and clear from between the moving lips of the severed head:

  'Thou shalt not leave when the waters come. I curse thee. I curse thee and thy descendants, and I shall feed upon thy souls to avenge my death. And woe to anyone who cometh between us, woe to those who bringeth the waters..."

  She continued to talk, a litany of dark promises that seemed to have no end. William shivered. It was not the curse itself that sent a chill down his spine. It was the words she used, the formality of her speech and the archaic vocabulary. It made him realize emotionally what he had until this point understood only intellectually: she was different, she was not like them. She was far older than he, and stranger in her makeup than any of them could have possibly imagined.

  "... And when I am reborn from the lives of thee and thy descendants, I shall be stronger than thou could st have

  ever imagined. Armies will bow before me. As it was foretold, so shall it be..."

  Marie and Ingrid and several of the others were already backing out of the cave, attempting to leave without drawing attention to themselves.

  The utter silence of all who witnessed this scene told him better than could any words the fear they felt, the impact Isabella's curse was having upon them.