The Walking

by Bentley Little

  Rossiter reached the parking lot and promptly sat down, his legs folding naturally into a lotus position as he lowered himself onto the gravel.

  That's what his voice Sounded like. Rossiter was still talking, but his mouth closed as his but locks touched the earth. The disturbing noise stopped, and Rossiter looked up at the sky.." and froze.

  Miles thought of Medusa, the gorgon, who, according to

  Greek legend, would turn to stone any man who looked upon her.

  Was that what had happened here?

  What exactly had Rossiter seen?

  Miles was not sure he wanted to know.

  He looked down at the agent's unmoving form. Behind him, from the road, he heard tires on dirt, the sound of a car engine.

  "Someone's coming," Janet said. Her voice was small and uncharacteristically squeaky.

  Miles turned. A car pulled into the gravel parking lot, slowed to a stop. "I know that car," he said. "It's from my

  It was the longest trip of her life.

  Even without May chattering nonsensically in the backseat, Claire would have been anxious and unable to sleep. Ordinarily on a long drive, the rhythm of the wheels lulled her and she dozed. But the homeless woman kept alternately muttering to herself and making sudden absurd pronouncements, making for a long and stressful trip. ::..

  Claire stared out the windshield.

  Hal was a progressive rock fan, and he had an endless supply of tapes that he played throughout the night: Triumvirat and ELP and Yes and Gentle Giant and PFM. She herself was more of a smooth jazz, New Age kind of listener, and after a while she found the sheer number of notes and the tortured time changes of the music wearying. She longed for something soothing, relaxing, but this was Hal's car, and he was good enough to drive her, and she didn't say a word.

  She prayed that Miles was okay, that nothing had happened to him, that he had not found Bob.

  Or Isabella. "

  They drove through the darkness, and by morning they were on a two-lane road that the map said led to Wolf Canyon. May said so, too, but Claire was not sure how much she trusted the navigational skills of the old woman, and not until the water was in sight was she sure that they had reached their destination.

  Approaching the lake by a dirt trail that ended in a parking lot, they saw two vehicles and a group of three people looking out toward the water. Something in their manner, in their posture, suggested both defeat and terror, and as they drew closer, Claire saw that one of them was Miles.

  Before him on the ground sat a preternaturally still man dressed in a suit and staring upward at the sky.

  "Hal " -she started to say.

  " "I see," he responded grimly.

  For the past several miles the sky had been overcast, a strange tempestuous swirl of black-gray cloud cover that reminded Claire of tornado weather. There weren't supposed to be any tornadoes in Arizona.

  The car pulled to a stop, skidding in the gravel. Miles caught her eye through the passenger window, and she rushed out of the vehicle and hugged him. His return embrace was clutching and heartfelt, the bear hug of a man who had not expected to see anyone he knew ever again.

  "I love you," she said

  She pulled back and looked up at him as another door slammed. The relief was evident on his face when he saw Hal, heard his friend's booming "Imagine seeing you here!"

  Miles started to respond, but then his eyes widened as the back door opened and May stepped out. "Oh, my God," he said.

  "I found her," Claire explained. "Or rather, she found me. She was waiting for me when I came home from work.

  That's why we're here." Claire took his hand in hers, squeezed it.

  "She has some things to tell you, Miles. I think you'd better listen."

  The homeless woman stood next to the open car door, looking out at the lake as if searching for something. "May!" Claire called out.

  She glanced up and ran over, dirty skirts flying, leaving the car door open behind her.

  "May?" Miles said, as though he'd heard the name before. "Lizabeth May?" The old woman stopped in front of him, smiled.

  Miles looked stricken. "What is it?" Claire as.

  He shook his head.

  "Hello, Garden," May said, nodding to the young man standing next to Miles. She smiled. "Dreams," she told Miles. "We should always listen to our dreams. They teach us."

  "Yeah, right." Hal had walked up, and he snorted derisively. He glanced around at the others: the young man and woman, the guy on the ground. "Hey," he said in greetingi. "what's going on?" Claire looked down at the well-dressed man seated on the gravel. She hadn't noticed it before, but his face was a bright cherry apple red. "Is he?

  " i. "I don't know. He just sat down there a minute before you showed up. He was chasing..." Miles shook his head. "It's a long story.

  But he came back all.." red. And then he sat down here and he hasn't moved since."

  She felt his neck for a pulse, found one. "He's alive. We should send somebody out for help."

  Claire turned toward the homeless woman. "May?" "

  "Isabella did this. There's no hospital that can help him now."

  Again, Miles looked stricken. "You know IsabellaT"

  "I know of her. We all did. Bob"--she nodded at the

  young man to Miles' right--"John Hawkes"--she nodded at the woman,--"John Engstrom."

  "You haven't introduced us to your friends," Hal said.

  Miles seemed rattled, preoccupied, on automatic pilot.

  Claire remembered that behavior from the old days: he was thinking, his brain sorting things out. It's what he used to do when he was putting together the pieces of a case on which he was working--something that happened far too often at home, at dinner, in the bedroom, during what was supposed to be their time together. Miles motioned toward the man and woman. 'this is Garden Hawkes and Janet En gslom. Janet's uncle died and kept walking, like my dad. I brought her here with me from Cedar City. The same thing happened to Garden's grandfather years ago. We met him at the lake." He turned around. "Garden, Janet? This is my friend Hal. We work together.

  This is Claire, my... ex-wife.

  And this is a woman I met once at a mall before Christmas.

  Apparently, her name is May. I guess it'll be explained to me why she's here."

  'That's the witch woman I was telling you about," Gar den whispered.

  Mi'les nodded distractedly.

  "So who is he?" Hal asked otioning toward the man on the ground

  "Agent Rossiter. FBI."

  "No shit?" The detective whistled. "You got yourself involved in a big one here."

  "Yeah."

  Come to think of it, you got me involved, too."

  "I'm sorry.

  "Don't apologize." Hal shook his head. "Jesus Christ,

  Miles, when are you going to stop playing Lone Ranger? I learned more from Claire in the one hour before we left L.A. than I did from you the past three months. If we really are friends, you need to include me here. I came all this way,

  and I don't know what the fuck's going on, but this time you can't just tough it out alone. There are other people involved."

  Claire knew exactly what Hal was saying, and she agreed completely, but this wasn't really the time or place, and she could tell from the set of his face and the tightening in his jaw that Miles was closing himself off. She reached out. "What happened to Bob?" she asked softly. "Did you find him?"

  Miles sighed tiredly. "Yeah. I found him." Drawing in a deep breath, he explained what had happened since he'd left California. Hal interrupted with occasional questions, and Miles answered them all, Garden and Janet jumping in for clarification.

  Claire could not help looking out at the lake as Miles told his story.

  Somewhere underneath that black water was a submerged town, where drowned witches had spent the last few decades walking and to which the newly dead had trekked. The fear she felt was palpable, a physical sensation like the temperature or the wind.
<
br />   Miles finished talking, and he held her sweaty hand tightly, as if for support. He was keeping something back, she sensed, and that was what was troubling him. Hal seemed to sense it, too, and she met his eyes and saw, beneath the forced good humor, a reflection of her own worries and concerns.

  "So," Miles said dramatically, turning to May, "I guess it's time to hear what you have to say about all this. I assume you know what's going on. I assume that's why you're here."

  "It is." May repeated everything she'd told Claire, describing how she'd been a New Jersey housewife pulled to Wolf Canyon by the strength of Isabella's will, like a moth drawn to a light. "Of course, I was a witch, too. So I knew all about Isabella."

  "She's a witch?" Janet asked.

  "She is not a witch," the old woman said. "Well, she is but she isn't."

  Garden threw up his hands. "She's not even making any sense!"

  "Yes, she is," Miles said. "Listen to her."

  "Isabella's a predator, a parasite, a creature who lives off her own kind. She feeds off witches, absorbs their power. Yes, she's one herself, but she's also something more. At least, that's the way we figured it."

  "And she was killed when the town was flooded," Miles said.

  May shook her head. "Oh, no. Isabella was killed way before that. She might even be the cause of it. See, she was around when Wolf Canyon was founded She married William Johnson, the founder himself. No one knew where she came from originally. I guess she just showed up one day, and William fell under her spell. So to speak. But she was a bad influence on him. After she came, there were mysterious deaths and disappearances, murders. The entire town changed. There were purges of non-witches in the outlying areas, trials and executions of witches who did not agree with the way William and Isabella were running things. She was an evil creature, hated and feared, and eventually even William figured that out. No one knows what all happened, but he killed her one night while she was sleeping, cut off her head. They buried her in a cave outside town, sealing it up, weaving spells around it to keep her in. She was dead but her head was still talking, and she cursed Wolf Canyon and everyone in it, vowing revenge. She promised that they would drown and die, and that they would suffer even after death.

  "And that's what happened.

  "She called them back after they passed on, all of the people who'd had a part in disposing of her body, who had been living in Wolf Canyon at that time. And, from what

  we could figure out, she fed off them, using their energies to right her way back. She was strong enough thirty years ago to reach out to me all the way over on the East Coast, and she's been getting stronger ever since. Her power has been growing with each passing year as the children of Wolf Canyon die off and she consumes their energy. Miles nodded. "And when she was strong enough, she reached out to the men who had worked on the dam and killed them, too. Only I don't see why, if they were just doing what she wanted done anyway."

  "Because maybe they beat her to the punch. Maybe she's angry that they did what she was not yet strong enough to do. Or maybe not. Who knows? Sometimes there just isn't an explanation."

  "Where do you fit in?" Miles asked.

  May smiled. "She killed a baby. Back in the town's early days. She thought the population had reached some magic number, and she didn't want it changed: no new people, no one leaving. So when a couple had a baby, she killed it. Her, I should say, not it. The baby was a girl.

  The parents left, took off in the middle of the night to escape Isabella's tyranny. Years later, they had another daughter. That baby was my mother. And her parents taught her and she taught me about the town--and what went on there. Your father knew, too. He was born in Wolf Canyon, and he lived there until he was ten or so, until his parents moved to Los Angeles. That was long after Isabella, but long before the lake. I met him at the dam after I'd come out from New Jersey. I walked the shoreline.." and I found your father. I think he'd been called, too. He was here to make sure that Isabella hadn't escaped and was still down there." She nodded toward Garden. "John Hawks, your grandfather, had never left. He'd left the town, but he'd built him a house on top of the plateau." She pointed behind them at a flattened rocky bluff. "He's the one who told us about the

  people in town who didn't leave, who couldn't get out, and we all figured it was her, keeping them there so they would be drowned. There were several of us, and we kept in touch for a while. We knew the stories, and we waited to see if she would return. But the years passed, and she didn't, and we drifted apart, drifted into other lives."

  "I remember you," Garden said. "We almost told you when Grampa died, but. but we didn't for some reason, and then you were gone."

  Claire looked at the old lady. It was as if she'd gotten all the craziness out of her system on the trip over, because she appeared completely lucid.

  May shook her head. "Now you say she's come out of the lake. With all of the others." She squinted at Miles. "How many would you say?

  "Dozens. A hundred, maybe." He shrugged. Maybe more.

  I didn't count."

  "You were called, too," May said. She looked intently at Miles.

  "So what's the plan?" Garden asked. "What do we do now?"

  May turned to face the young man. "We will hunt her down," she said.

  Claire felt peach fuzz hairs prickle at the back of her

  And we' will kill her once and for all."

  Miles stared at the homeless woman, who had suddenly stopped talking and was twirling around with her arms out and her eyes closed, like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy. From where he stood, the immobile FBI agent was directly in front of her, and the sight of the two together hit

  May began screaming crazily, looking up at the dark sky and shouting out non sequiturs.

  "I was surprised she held out for as long as she did," Hal whispered.

  "In the car, she couldn't go two minutes without spouting off some loony nonsense."

  Claire gave Miles' hand a small squeeze, then let go and moved forward, trying to quiet May and calm her down.

  May.

  Lizabeth May.

  He remembered the whispers in the night and wondered who had been telling him that name. And why.

  He had heard his father's name whispered, and his father had died.

  Hal turned to face him. "You should've brought me in earlier, man.

  Tran, too. We could've helped you on this. I thought your dad was just missing, I didn't know all this... shit was going on."

  "Would you have believed it?"

  "Not at first, probably. But I go where the facts take me. You know that." He leaned in, lowered his voice. "And I'd feel a lot better with Tran here than Claire and these other civilians."

  Miles had to agree with that.

  Except... Except this felt right, and once more he was confronted with the unfamiliar sensation of trusting his feelings rather than facts.

  Although, under the circumstances, it didn't seem quite so strange.

  "Isabella, huh?" Hal shook his head.

  "Yeah."

  "Does this super witch have a last name?"

  "Would it matter if she did?"

  "I guess not." Hal looked over at Rossiter, sighed. "You know, I can't help thinking about the fact that this bitch con trois an army of zombies and turned an FBI agent into a

  brain-dead lobster within a matter of minutes. I don't like the odds here." He quickly held up his hands. "But I'm in,

  I'm m, I am not complaining. You are just scared. Damn right I'm scared. Vales grmed. "Wuss boy."

  "Not ashamed to admit it. And you're glad I'm here, aren't you?"

  "Yeah," Miles admitted. "I am."

  "That's a start, bud. That's a start." May was suddenly silent.

  Claire was standing before her, holding the old woman's arms at her sides, when she pulled away, blinking as if she'd just emerged from a trance. "How long ago did Isabella leave?" she asked.

  Miles looked at Garden, at Janet.

  "I d
on't know," Garden said. "Fifteen minutes." 'Ten or fifteen,"

  Janet said. vales nodded in agreement.

  "She's far enough away, then." May mumbled something to herself before looking up again. "Talismans, spell casters, potions. Your families were witches, they all had the makings. Did you bring them? Do you have materials with you?"

  Miles nodded dumbly. He wasn't sure how he felt about relinquishing authority to a woman who obviously had severe mental problems, but crazy as she was, she'd been involved in this longer than any of them.

  He had no choice but to listen to her. 'there a box in the car from Janet's uncle's house."

  I'll get it." Obviously happy to have something to do, Janet headed over to the rental car to fetch her uncle's witchcraft paraphernalia.

  "May told me to bring your stuff, too," Claire said. "Thank God you didn't put it back in that safety deposit box or

  there's no way I would, have been able to get it out. It's in the trunk."

  "I have the keys," Hal said. go. May turned to look at Garden.

  He shrugged. "I never saw those things. I only heard about them. I don't know what happened to them."

  The old lady frowned, mumbled something to herself. Hal and Janet returned with the materials. Miles took his father's stuff from Hal, who then offered to carry Janet's box. Janet shook her head, held on to the carton, and following May's lead, they all walked down the slope to the water's edge, leaving the unmoving Rossiter behind.

  By this time the strange sky looked downright fierce. The clouds were not stormy gray but black, deep black, like the water. Though it was difficult to detect movement in so much darkness, shapes seemed to be forming and un forming and reforming in the roiling currents of air.

  Feeling his chest tighten, Miles put the box down on the sand, Janet following suit. May crouched down, quickly sorted through the jumble of items and, smiling as if she'd found some long-lost treasure, drew out a rusty spoon. The spoon from his dream.

  The tightness in his chest increased.