The Walking

by Bentley Little

  "Garden."

  A chill passed through him. This was not right. Everything suddenly shifted into clear focus, and though he felt pressure on his mind, a strange insistent pulse that promised him everything was okay, this was the way it was meant to

  be, he knew that he had been tricked to get him away from Miles and the others.

  He reached into his left front pocket, feeling for the flattened frog that the old woman had given him for protection, but the pocket was empty. There was no hole in the material, and he checked his right pocket, but it was empty, too.

  The frog had disappeared somehow, pushed up perhaps through the friction of movement to fall out of his pants unseen as he'd walked. He was filled with a dizzying sensation of panic.

  Miles. he screamed. "Miles!"

  He yelled at the top of his lungs, and the repeated word seemed to echo up the narrow space to the canyon rim, but he was not sure how far in he'd come, and didn't know if they could hear him at all. Because another sound was competing with him, a low guttural rumbling that came out of the earth itself, a sound he recognized but could not quite place.

  Water.

  He knew it now: the roar of a flood, the rush of a wave. The cleft began to fill with black brackish water. It seeped up from the rock beneath his feet at first, but almost instantly it began pouring in from both directions--the way he'd come and the way ahead. He was alone in this space with that hideous dummy, and it floated up on the tide toward him even as he attempted to find a handhold, a foothold, something that would enable him to climb out of this space before he drowned.

  "Garden."

  The dummy was still speaking his name, and when he looked down at the painted face, its smile seemed more malevolent than goofy. The right button eye, hanging by a thread, began flipping up and back, propelled by the streaming water, in chilling approximation of a wink.

  There was no way to climb oat, no way to get up the ,-:-.

  352 narrow cliff, and the water was now flooding in fast. The black liquid smelled strongly of sulfur, and he gagged, keeping his mouth closed, trying not to swallow any of it.

  Maybe he could just tread water, float on the rising tide, wait until the chasm filled up completely and then exit through the top. : ....... "Garden."

  The winking dummy now looked nothing like his daddy. Even the shape of the head was distorted. The dark water had stained the cheesecloth, and it looked more like a figure out of a nightmare. The dummy pressed against him, bobbed up, then sank and disappeared.

  A second later, handless arms wrapped around his legs, feeling soft and spongy and frighteningly alive.

  "Help!" he screamed.

  And was pulled down into the water.

  Garden was gone.

  They backtracked, looked behind boulders, looked into offshoot ravines, calling out his name, but he was nowhere to be seen, and finally Miles said, "She got him."

  "Maybe he just pussied out," Hal suggested.

  Miles looked at him.

  "All right, it's not that plausible. But it's possible."

  "He disappeared," Claire said. "One minute he was there, then I turned around and he was gone." She looked at Miles. "So what do we do now?"

  His head hurt. If there was anything to his witch blood theory, they were up shit creek because he was the only one left. While Isabella may not have been aware that he'd been granted insight into her motives and intentions, she obviously knew they were here, and she was playing with them, slowly and deliberately picking them off, one by one.

  "Do you still have the things May gave you?" he asked.

  Claire held up her hand to show the bracelet of weeds. Hal withdrew the small fetish from his pocket.

  "Good. Keep them with you. They've protected us this far, maybe they'll see us through this." He took a deep breath. "We're going on.

  We're almost there."

  "Whatever Garden had didn't protect him," Hal pointed out.

  Miles looked at him. "It can't hurt."

  Hal hefted his revolver. "Excuse me if I place more of my faith in this."

  "If you really think that'll do any good against a dead hundred-year-old monster who's been resurrecting witches and killing people all over the damn country, be my guest." Hal raised an eyebrow, Spock-like. "You have a point."

  Miles smiled--and it felt good. His face had been tense, and this brief touch of gallows humor loosened it up. "Come on," he said. "Let's try to move quickly.

  "And stay close," he warned. "We need to keep each other in sight at all times."

  He started forward, moving over so that Claire was walking in the middle, he and Hal on the outside flanks to protect her, all three of them rubbing shoulders. The jar in his hands felt warm, slippery, and he held it tightly, not wanting it to slide from his grasp and shatter on the rocky ground. Claire, too, was clutching the kerosene lamp tightly, and he considered asking Hal to hold it instead, but the truth was that Hal was clumsier than Claire and more likely to drop it.

  Rising all around them were screeches and cracks and hums and whistles, the scuttling of claws and the quiet cacklings of madness. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement off to the sides, between the boulders and the trees, a darting of shadows that instantly stopped each time he looked at one of the spots full on.

  He stepped on something wet and squishy that gurgled in a way which sounded both liquid and alive, but he did not look down to see what it was.

  The canyon flattened out in front of them, high cliff sides trailing off into low black ridges that faded into sand dunes. The odd-shaped buttes they'd seen from afar were now front and center, and lightning danced in the clouds over dark distant mountains. It was the scene from his vision. Miles felt almost incapacitated by fear. The cave from which he'd viewed this landscape was somewhere close by, off to the right, and he began scanning the dwindling cliffs, looking for an opening in the rock.

  He found it.

  The cave was much lower than he'd expected, on a small ridge just above the sloping hill of alluvial dirt. It would be easy to walk up there, despite the lack of a path, the shards of stone, and the peculiar spiky cacti, but he didn't want to go. The will and determination that had led him this far seemed suddenly to have deserted him, and he was filled with cold dread as he looked up at that small black entrance in the cliff side.

  He tried to speak, but no sound came out. He cleared his throat, tried again. His heart was pounding crazily. "That's it," he said. "Up there. That's where she is." And Isabella emerged from the cave..

  "Look!" Claire cried out.

  Isabella, her head still held at a noticeably awkward angle, strode forth from the cave entrance and over the edge of the ridge, continuing several feet until she was hovering in the air above the sloping ground. She stared at them, speaking in some strange unintelligible tongue and making elaborate motions with her hands. The look on her face was one of rage and hatred, and out of the corner of his eye Miles saw that the bracelet on Claire's arm was glowing greenly, brightening then dimming, as if it were being bombarded with energy.., and absorbing it.

  Claire noticed his necklace at the same time, pointing, and though he couldn't see it, he felt the heat on his skin and that area of his neck seemed suffused with a greenish glow. Hal reached into his pocket, and his wood carving was glowing, too. He quickly put it back.

  "I guess we're protected," Claire said.

  Hal looked toward Isabella. "Let's get her."

  That provided the impetus Miles needed, and the paralysis that had temporarily overcome him disappeared as he grabbed Claire's free hand and pulled her up the sloping ground toward the cave entrance.

  Both of them jumped as Hal fired his revolver, the sound of the report absurdly, outrageously loud, triggering a small landslide and inducing a muffled ringing in Miles' ears. He thought at first that his friend had fired at Isabella but almost immediately saw the gray-green spiderlike crab creature that Hal had shot. Off-center eyes stared into nothingness while clear vi
scous goo spilled from a well-placed bullet hole.

  "It was coming after me," Hal said.

  Miles nodded. "Just make sure you don't waste your shots," he suggested. l'hat might be what she wants."

  Isabella was no longer in the air, she was on the ridge, looking down at them, and when Miles' eyes met hers, she pulled away, moved back.

  Was she afraid?

  It didn't make any sense, but it seemed that way, and the three of them pressed on, moving up the slope, over the rough, obstacle-laden ground until they ran across the remnants of an ancient trail that led them directly on to the lip of the ridge.

  A flash of flesh disappeared into the blackness of the cave entrance.

  Had they chased her back into the cave? Or was she luring them on? He wasn't sure, but they were going in. He moved forward, peering into the dimness but seeing nothing. What little light there was in this overcast world died instantly upon entering the cave. They should have brought flashlights. What they needed was... a lamp.

  He turned to Claire, handed her the jar, took the kerosene lantern from her.

  "Good idea," Hal said.

  "Let's hope it works." Hal had matches, and Miles used them to light the lamp before shoving it into the opening in the wall before him.

  Just inside the entrance, Isabella screeched at the sight of the light, a horrible sound like the cawing of crows and the breaking of glass.

  She retreated deeper into the cave, scut fling backward on legs that were impossibly formed and far too agile. Within seconds she was past the perimeter of the lamp's light. Though the screeching had stopped, Miles heard the clattering sound of hard claws on stone receding into the darkness. "Whatever you do," he told Claire, "don't drop that jar." "Don't worry. I won't."

  They walked into the cave. Claire's bracelet and his own necklace were glowing, giving off a greenish illumination that would enable them to find each other in the blackness but that shed no usable light on their surroundings. They were entirely dependent on the flame of the lamp.

  Claire latched on to his belt, holding tight as he moved slowly forward.

  There were no stalactites or stalagmites, no columns or rock formations. The walls were smooth, black and glassy. Ancient symbols had been painted on the roof of the cave, pictographs in faded white that shifted and changed with the flickering of the lamp and seemed somehow hideous.

  The cave narrowed, and they found themselves in a downward-sloping tunnel, a passageway not wide enough for them to walk two abreast.

  "Maybe I should get in the front," Hal suggested. "I have the gun."

  "I'll stay in the front," Miles told him. "You protect the

  They passed alcoves and indentations, offshoot passages, but this was clearly the main tunnel, and Miles moved slowly forward, keeping an eye out for any sign of movement, any An arm shot out of the darkness to his right, clawed fingers grabbing his shoulder. He screamed, squirmed, lashed out, but the hand retreated immediately, as if scalded by something hot, and Miles knew it was the necklace that had protected him. The grunting commotion behind him was Hal laying to shove his way around and past Claire, but Miles said, "It's nothing. It's over."

  "What happened?" Claire demanded.

  "Something tried to grab me."

  He lifted the lamp and shone it toward the area from which the hand had come, but there was only a shallow alcove, empty.

  "Let me in front," Hal demanded. "I'm not letting you be a target.

  You're the one who needs to stay in the mid die You're the one who needs to be protected."

  Miles did not even bother to answer but, with Claire's fingers grabbing his belt, started forward again, holding the lamp out and clutching it tightly, hyper aware of the fact that if it slipped from his grip or was knocked from his hands, they would be trapped here in total darkness.

  He saw more symbols carved on the walls, shapes that he did not recognize but that spoke to him somehow and filled him with dread. The tunnel curved to the left

  --and Miles was looking into a room. Not a cave or

  a chamber or a tunnel but a large square room with slatted wooden walls and wooden ceiling. A single candle the size of a tree stump, placed next to an open black doorway in the opposite right corner, provided sickly illumination.

  "Jesus," Hal breathed.

  The room was filled with dolls. Dolls that looked like clumps of asparagus, dolls that looked like scarecrows and kachinas, dolls that looked like a selection of children's toys ranging from the Victorian era until now. They were made from a variety of materials and appeared to be of all ages, the newest a genderless factory-pressed piece of plastic, the oldest a carved piece of driftwood with an oversize male organ. They were arranged upon the floor, placed together on shelves and ledges, suspended by hooks from the walls. Vines grew over and between the figures, impossibly green for having grown in the darkness.

  In the center of all this stood the corpse of a dwarf, an eyeless, mummified creature with brown skin and rotted clothes and barely discernible features. The corpse held forth one outstretched hand, palm up.

  Claire let go of his belt, grabbed his arm. Her hand was cold and sweaty, and he could feel the tension in her fingers as she painfully squeezed his ann muscles. "Let's get out of here," she whispered, afraid even to speak aloud. Her whisper echoed, grew, became other words, other sounds in the strange acoustics of this room. "I don't like it." She breathed deeply. "I'm afraid."

  Hal nodded, whispering himself. "She's right, Miles. This is out of our league."

  "Stay there," Miles told them.

  He pulled away from Claire and, holding the lamp in front of him for additional light, walked slowly forward, careful not to step on any of the dolls. Glass eyes stared blankly up at him as he passed. The flickering flame of

  This close, he could see that a vine had wound around the dwarf's feet and disappeared up the faded, rotted mated al that had once been clothes. The vine emerged once again on the underside of the arm and ended in the dried, outstretched hand. The vine was mint, he saw now, though mint did not ordinarily grow in a vine, and the way it came to an end just beyond the tip of the mummified fingers made it appear as though the small dead man was offering him a branch of newly picked mint leaves.

  He remembered his dream last night, the old man with the mint spoon.

  "A dwarf gave it to me."

  Not knowing if it was the right thing or not, Miles picked the end of the vine, the branch of mint leaves, from the dead dry hand, and put it in the pocket of his shirt. "It keeps the head fresh."

  Cool, clean air beckoned him from the dark doorway in the corner, and Miles turned back toward Claire and Hal. "Come on," he said, and his voice had no echo but died dully. "We're going out that way. Make sure you don't step on any of the dolls."

  He needed to say no more. Claire came first, and she stepped gingerly between the figurines, following almost the same path he himself had taken. Hal gave her a moment's head start before doing the same. Miles waited for both of them to reach him then, single-file, they crossed the rest of the room to the doorway.

  Once past the massive candle, darkness closed in again. They entered another rock tunnel, only this time the wails were rounded, as if bored by machine. There were no alcoves or side passages, just this one straight tunnel. Holding his lamp high, Miles led them forward. The ground began to slope upward almost immediately, and soon he

  was being forced to take smaller steps just to maintain his balance.

  The passageway continued upward, as steep as stairs. They were all breathing heavily, and Miles was about to suggest that they stop and take a break when he saw the sky up ahead.

  Storm clouds.

  He hurried forward, coming finally to the end of the rock.

  They were out.

  Logically, they had to be at the top of the canyon, but when they emerged from between two boulders embedded in a hillside, he saw no trace of any canyon, only those strangely formed buttes, jutting upward not from a f
lat sandy desert but from a huge marsh filled with water weeds and cattails. It was an incongruous sight, like modern buildings positioned next to the pyramids or a luxury resort in the middle of the rain forest, and that only served to heighten the sense of surrealism.

  There was a strange shapeless glow above the marsh, not green like the phosphorescence of their talismans but red, like blood, and it winked on and off several times, as though trying to attract their attention.

  Then it coalesced into something resembling a ball and began floating slowly away, toward the nearest, tallest butte. Beneath the glowing orb, he saw, was a stone walkway, slightly raised, that bisected the swampy overgrown ground. "Let's go," Miles said. Hal groaned. "Not again."

  But Claire was already moving, and Hal followed behind. Isabella was leading them someplace, purposefully luring thatthemweret sOme not yet! cati nc lear of her own choosing, for purposes

  When she had emerged from the lake, when he'd shared her visions, when he'd seen the destruction of New York and Los Angeles and dries all across the nation, Miles had believed her to be at peak power. He hadn't understood why she had not immediately embarked upon her mission but had instead waited around for them. He knew now, though. She needed them.

  Or, rather, she needed him.

  It didn't make any sense, but he guessed it had something to do with his father, with his heritage. Maybe she needed to absorb the power of all of the witches in order to carry out her plan.." and he was the last. Whatever the reason, she was provoking a confrontation, and there was nothing he could do but see this through to the end.

  They moved into the shadow of the butte, and what little sunlight had been filtering through the dark heavy clouds was cut off completely.

  Around them in the marsh they could hear the rustling, slithering noises of unseen creature so The red glow faded into nothingness and only the lamp lit their way, but the marsh was not as large as it looked and the butte was not as tall as it looked, and ten minutes later they were there.