Witch's Canyon

by Jeff Mariotte

  The Trail’s End was like most other motels. Inexpensive and anonymous. Most of the vehicles scattered around the parking lot when they pulled in hadn’t been there in the morning, when they left. Their room was decorated with an over-the-top cowboy theme. It had two beds covered in western-print bedspreads, with the legs of the beds standing in old, worn-out, painted cowboy boots. The dresser on which the broken TV sat had cow-horn drawer pulls, while the single nightstand between the beds had miniature lassoes instead, along with phone books on an open shelf, a Bible and the Book of Mormon in the drawer, and a telephone and clock radio on top. The closet door was mirrored, and there were six hangers inside, the kind that fit into little hooks that the pole slid through, so people couldn’t steal them to use at home. Boots and ropes and cattle danced around on the wallpaper.

  The cowboy motif didn’t carry through to the bathroom. There was a flat counter with a tissue box and what looked like an ashtray laden with little packets of shampoo and conditioner, along with a single bar of soap and a coffeepot. Behind the coffeepot, a bucket held sugar, creamer, and plastic stirring sticks. There were also a standard toilet and a tub with a plain white shower curtain.

  All the comforts of home, if your home was a Super 8 or a Motel 6.

  Sam’s pretty much was. He guessed that motels had won their way into the hearts of Americans by offering low prices and a kind of sameness, so whether you were visiting Niagara Falls or the Rocky Mountains or Graceland, the view inside the room would be more or less the same, once you got past the regional differences in decor.

  Unless you were a Winchester.

  When they stayed in a motel, they kept the Do Not Disturb sign out at all times. The walls quickly became papered with news clippings and printouts from the Web, most dealing with unsavory topics that might frighten your average motel housekeeper. They traveled with a police band radio, guns and knives and other assorted weaponry, electromagnetic frequency readers and infrared thermal scanners, a laptop computer and a printer, and enough miscellaneous equipment to make the unschooled suspect terrorism or worse. Any room they occupied turned almost immediately into a command center for their spook-busting operation, and when every surface was covered, they started setting stuff up on the floor.

  They had hardly spent any time in this room yet, so Sam could still see the walls and furniture when he walked in and clicked on the light. Most of the gear they would have set up in the room had been hauled in and left on the floor. Without discussion, they both went to work, as they had so many times before. Sam got the laptop booted up and online, with the printer connected and ready to go. Dean turned on the radio and found the frequency of the local sheriff’s office. As the room filled with the buzz and crackle and unique shorthand of cop talk, he started cleaning and reloading some of their guns.

  Sam plugged into the LexisNexis database, which gathered news items from newspapers, radio, TV, and the Internet, and ran a search for Cedar Wells. Most of what came up had to do with the Grand Canyon, although there were also some stories about a logging controversy when a nearby mill had been bought out and shut down. Beyond that, he found a small handful of stories about the killings, mostly breathless tabloid tales that made the whole thing less believable instead of more. If he’d seen some of those before coming out, he might have recommended not bothering to make the trip.

  Scanning a few of them, however, he found references to someone named Peter Panolli, who claimed to have witnessed one of the murders, back in 1966. The article had been published in 2002. “Dean, check the phone book for me.”

  “Yes, boss,” Dean said wryly. “What am I checking for?”

  Sam spelled the last name. “Peter,” he added. “See if he still lives in the area.” He kept reading through the largely useless articles as Dean flipped pages in the background.

  “Got him,” Dean said a minute later. “Cedar Wells address. Peter Panolli, M.D.”

  “He’s a doctor?”

  “That’s what it says.”

  Sam checked the digital readout on the clock radio: 9:30. A little late to be considered polite, but etiquette was far from his first priority at the moment. And doctors had to be used to getting calls at all hours, right?

  He turned away from the laptop and snatched up the motel phone. “Read me the number.” Dean did, and Sam punched the buttons.

  The voice that answered didn’t belong to the doctor. It was too young to have been around in 1966, and too female to be anyone named Peter. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” Sam said. “I’m sorry to call so late. I’m looking for Dr. Panolli.”

  “Hold on a sec,” she said. He heard thumping noises, and then a muffled shout. “Dad!”

  More thumping sounds, and a minute later an older, deeper voice came on the line. “This is Dr. Panolli.”

  “Peter Panolli?”

  “That’s right.”

  “This is going to sound strange, Doctor, but I just read that you were a witness to one of the killings in the last Cedar Wells murder cycle, back in 1966. Is that true?”

  Panolli let a long pause elapse before he spoke. “What’s your interest?”

  Sam had known that question was coming, and as usual, there was no easy answer for it. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s started again. Right on schedule.” Honesty seemed like the best policy in this case, so he took a breath and continued. “My brother and I are trying to stop it, not just for now but forever. But we need to understand what we’re dealing with. I wondered if you’d take a few minutes to tell us about your experience.”

  “Tonight?”

  “People are dying, Dr. Panolli. Tonight would be good.”

  Another pause, but not as long this time. “Very well. Can you come around right away?”

  “We’re leaving right now,” Sam said. “And thank you.”

  The Panollis lived in a large white house on the edge of town. A wrought-iron fence stood around the property, but the gate was open when they arrived. Driveway lights illuminated the way to the front door, which was made of some heavy, carved wood. A brass knocker hung on it, just below a huge fresh pine wreath, but before either of the brothers could grab it, the door swung wide.

  Sam guessed that the girl who opened it was the one who had answered the phone. She was nineteen or twenty, he speculated, wearing a red cable-knit sweater with a white reindeer emblazoned on the front over faded jeans and thick purple socks. “I’m Heather,” she said with a bright smile.

  “I’m Sam. This is Dean.”

  “Your dad here?” Dean asked.

  “I’ll get him.” Her pale blond hair was shoulder length and loose, and when she pivoted to fetch her father it whirled around her head like a hoop skirt on a square dancer.

  “Cute,” Sam muttered when she was gone.

  “For a kid, I guess,” Dean said.

  Any reply Sam might have made was cut off by footsteps coming toward them from inside the big house. One set was Heather’s soft shuffling, the other heavier, and with an added knocking sound. Sam saw why when Dr. Panolli came into view. He was a big man, tall and broad and with a gut of substantial mass preceding him into the room. He carried a wooden cane, and the cane’s rubber tip tapped the floor with every step.

  “You’re Dean?” he said, approaching Sam and extending his right hand.

  “No, Sam. This is Dean.” Sam took the hand and gave it a quick shake.

  The doctor turned to Dean, shook his as well, and said, “Delighted to meet you both. Welcome to my home. It’s late for coffee, but if you’d like a cup of herbal tea? Or hot chocolate?”

  “No thanks,” Dean said. “We don’t want to take much of your time.”

  “Let’s at least make ourselves comfortable,” Panolli said. He gestured toward a double doorway with a pocket door that was mostly tucked into its slot. “Shall we?”

  Dean led the way, followed by Sam, Dr. Panolli, and Heather. They went into a living room stuffed with antiques, in the way that some antiq
ue stores are stuffed. Threading a line between tables and lamps and tables that had lamps built into them, between a sailor’s trunk and a huge copper urn, around a spindly chair that looked like a stiff wind would break it, much less the good doctor’s bulk, Dean found a couch that looked like it could support some body weight and sat down on it. Sam joined him. Panolli chose a chair on the other side of a glass-topped coffee table—a big chair. Heather perched on the fragile looking one.

  “I hope you haven’t wasted a trip out here,” Panolli began. He pressed on the sides of his head with both hands, as if trying to tame his mane of graying hair. His eyes were hooded, his jowls like a bulldog’s, and his lips rubbery and moist. “I’m afraid there’s very little I can tell you beyond what is commonly known and what has been reported in the press. I was about Heather’s age. A little younger. This was 1966, right? You might not think it to look at me now, or at the town, but there were hippies in Cedar Wells, and I was one of them. I’m not certain we called ourselves hippies yet, that may have come a year later, after the Summer of Love. But I had hair longer than Heather’s, and I wore ragged jeans and protested the war in Vietnam and listened to rock and roll and folk music. Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde had come out that year, and it was a revelation. That was also the year that he had the motorcycle accident that changed his life, and American music, forever.”

  He gazed past Sam and Dean, as if he was looking into his own history. But then his eyes clarified and sparkled as he warmed to his subject. Most people acted like this, Sam had found, if you let them talk about themselves long enough. Dr. Panolli hadn’t needed any catalyst at all, just the opportunity. “What a year for music that was. The Beach Boys released Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson’s masterpiece. The Beatles put out Revolver and quit touring. The Byrds had Turn! Turn! Turn! An incredible time. My friends and I had heard about drugs, of course, psychedelics, but with music like that on the record player, who needed them?”

  “I’m sure the music was great,” Dean said abruptly. “More of a metal fan myself, but—”

  Panolli laughed, making a wheezy sound that Sam hoped didn’t lead to a heart attack. “Now we see who the impatient one is,” he said when he could manage. “I’m coming around to the point, Sam.”

  “He’s Dean,” Sam corrected. “I’m Sam.”

  “Sorry. For some reason, you just look more like a Dean to me. At any rate, I’ll move it along, Sam and Dean. We lived in a house near town, what you might call a commune today. Seven of us, boys and girls.” He met his daughter’s gaze. “Don’t get any ideas, Heather. Those were different times.”

  “I know, Daddy,” she said, with the tone of a teenager who had heard variations on this theme many times before.

  “Early that December—I suppose it must have been forty years ago today, or perhaps yesterday—I was upstairs in the house. No doubt listening to records, and probably reading something by Harlan Ellison or Roger Zelazny or Samuel Delany, the science fiction gods I worshipped at the time.” He smoothed down his hair again, and Sam realized it was just a habitual motion. “Yes, now that I think about it, I believe it was Delany’s Babel 17. But that’s neither here nor there. Only a few of us were home, some had gone to Berkeley for a Quicksilver Messenger Service concert, and stayed over for a Grateful Dead show at Winterland. Or was it at The Matrix?

  “At any rate, it was late afternoon, that time of day when the sun is going down and everything is bathed in a kind of golden light. I heard a scream, and went to the bedroom window with my book in my hand so I didn’t lose my place, and when I looked out, I saw Janet, who we called Marsh Mellow because she was the most peaceful, mellow person any of us had ever met. She had taken some laundry out to hang on the line—I hate to admit it now, but yes, the girls did the laundry and most of the cooking at the house—and she was standing there with a sheet clutched to her bosom, and all I could think as I watched was that I was witnessing something out of history, out of the Old West, the homesteader’s wife in peril.”

  “Why history?” Sam prompted.

  “Because staring at Janet, across the backyard, was an Indian warrior, in full war paint and holding a bow and arrow. Now you might call him a Native American, or a First American, but we didn’t know those phrases then. He was an Indian brave. As I watched, he drew back the string and shot it at her. The arrow must have hit her right in the heart—I learned later that it did, at any rate—because she went down immediately, not moving. The sheet across her chest began to redden, but then her heart must have stopped beating because the blood stopped spreading. I dropped the book, which incidentally I have not finished, to this day, and ran downstairs and outside. But she was dead by the time I reached her, or that’s what I thought. The fact that I didn’t know what to do, how to save her, is what inspired me to practice medicine.”

  “An Indian,” Dean said flatly.

  “That’s what I told the police when they came, and the newspapers as well. Not that anyone ever believed me. But it’s the gospel truth, then and now. An Indian killed Marsh Mellow with his bow and arrow.”

  SIXTEEN

  “An Indian,” Dean said. They were back in the car—Sam driving, this time—headed for the Trail’s End. “This just gets worse and worse. Wouldn’t somebody have mentioned if the old man we’re looking for was an Indian?”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too,” Sam said. It always made Dean nervous when he drove the Impala, so he kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road as he spoke. “But in some ways it ties in. Native American magic makes frequent use of animal totems, right?”

  Dean snapped his fingers. “Like that bear. And the raven. Or the bear-raven, whatever.”

  “The Chippewa bear walkers, the Navajo yee naaldlooshi, the Hopi ya ya ceremony…skin walkers and animal spirits are commonplace in many Native American cultures.”

  “So the reason we can’t find this dude is that he keeps changing into other forms,” Dean said. He couldn’t suppress a shudder. “I freakin’ hate shapeshifters.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “And what about those scalpings?” Dean said. “That could be an Indian, too.”

  “Or not,” Sam countered. There were times his Stanford education proved helpful, after all. “Some historians say that scalping was a European practice adopted by the Native Americans, while others insist it was carried out on both sides of the Atlantic long before Columbus made his trip.”

  “Okay, whatever. Point is, if we’re dealing with Indian shapeshifters, we’ve got to focus in a different direction, right? There’s no point in looking for an old man if he’s not going to stay one.”

  Sam pulled into the motel parking lot. “And it gives us another area to research. We’re looking for a Native American, probably a shaman or medicine man, with a grudge against the town.”

  “That’s just great,” Dean said. “While people are dying, we get to start from scratch. Again.”

  “We’re narrowing it down, Dean. We’re doing the best we can.”

  Sam parked the car right in front of the room, and Dean got out, slamming his door. He winced, and Sam knew he regretted his action, as he did anything that might damage his baby. “I know. I just want to get my hands on someone whose ass I can kick. I don’t care if it’s an old man or an Indian or a troop of Girl Scouts at this point.”

  Sam slid his key card through the slot—even an older motel like this had graduated beyond metal keys—and opened the door. “I think we can safely rule out the Girl Scouts.”

  “I’m not ruling out anything,” Dean said. “Not until we have something to go on better than one crazy old doctor’s memory from forty years ago. He says he wasn’t smoking pot, but I’m not sure I believe him.”

  Inside, Sam plopped onto one of the beds. “He also says he doesn’t remember what happened to the Indian. And I just don’t buy that.”

  “He said he was really shaken up by the attack on the girl.”

  “True, and I believe he was.
But he remembers everything else. He remembers the book he was reading, and the way the sun looked. How could he forget if the Indian ran away, or vanished, or turned into a woodpecker and flew away? He acts like he’s telling everything, but he’s holding back.”

  “Why didn’t you say something when we were there?”

  Sam shrugged. “He’s kept that secret for forty years, he’s not going to tell two strangers off the street. He told us exactly what’s already been in the press. A little more detail, but no new facts.”

  “So you already knew about the whole Indian angle?” Dean asked. He hated it when Sam kept things from him, and Sam could hear suspicion in his voice.

  “I read it online. I wanted to hear it directly from him, to be sure.”

  Dean settled on the other bed. He had been cleaning a nickel-plated Colt .45 when Sam had interrupted him to look up Peter Panolli’s number, and had brushes and rods on the bedspread, with the weapon open and a bottle of solvent on the nightstand. He’d capped the solvent but left the rest where it was. As if he had never left, Dean now picked up a bore brush and started swabbing out the magazine well. Dad always impressed upon them the necessity of taking care of their equipment, and Dean had taken the lesson to heart. “What now, then?”

  Sam clicked on the police band, but it didn’t sound like there had been any more incidents. A yawn took him by surprise. “Now we should probably get some rest, while we can. We won’t do anybody any good if we’re dead on our feet when we finally do catch up to one of these things.”

  “If.”

  “What?”

  “If we catch up to one of them.” Dean was ordinarily optimistic. So far they had caught and destroyed nearly every paranormal entity they’d set their sights on. This one seemed particularly elusive, though, and it was eating away at what little patience he had left.

  Sam didn’t like it either, but he was better about reining in his anger, unleashing it only when he thought it would be helpful. In most respects he was the emotional one, the impulsive one, while Dean kept his feelings in check. When it came to anger, however, Dean could let loose with the best of them.