The Walker on the Hills (Jed Horn Supernatural Thrillers Book 3)

by Peter Nealen

  Charlie chuckled a little. Tall Bear turned a cold stare on him. “Something I said funny?” he demanded. He was apparently finding Charlie's mouth a little tiresome. That wasn't terribly surprising; most of us found Charlie a bit much, too.

  But the mohawked Hunter was shaking his head and smiling, though not in a mocking way. “No, relax big man,” he said. “It's just that you need to be careful. It can be real, real easy to fall into the 'God is on my side' trap. The Devil uses that little trick all the time.” He finally got up, looking at Tall Bear instead of the same patch of grass, his eyes clear, if a little distant. “No, there are two sides to this war, and we're not one of them. Humanity, I mean. We're the prize, the conquest, the conquered or the liberated. We have to pick which side we're going to stand on, not the other way around. We're Poland. We can join the resistance, looking forward to the day of liberation, or we can join the kapos, and go down with the Devil when it's all over.”

  I think it was the most somber and cogent point I'd ever heard Charlie make. Usually he's so busy being a loudmouthed joker when he's not actively dealing with a case that any philosophizing that goes on in that bristly head goes completely unnoticed.

  Tall Bear just stared at him for a second. I think the big deputy was more floored by the fact that Charlie had said something so serious instead of mocking him than by the actual substance of what he'd heard. But at the same time, I could see the wheels turning, as he nodded slowly.

  I was developing quite a liking for Frank Tall Bear. He thought on his feet, and he wasn't prone to stampede when faced with mind-shredding horrors that modern society insisted didn't—indeed couldn't—exist. He'd make a good Hunter, provided we could pry him away from the sheriff's department when this was all over.

  Provided we all survived.

  Before the conversation could progress much further, a truck door slammed. We all turned, a few hands getting awfully close to handguns. We might have put a little time and distance between us and the awful events of Ophir, but everybody was still a bit jumpy.

  But it was just Blake, painfully levering himself out of the back seat of my truck. He stood shakily for a moment, cracked his neck, and walked over to the picnic table. He sat down without a word, folded his hands in front of him on the table, and just looked at them for a moment.

  “Well,” he said finally, his voice low, “I owe you all a story.” Nobody said anything, and he paused for a long moment, as if gathering his thoughts.

  “I caught wind of a wannabe sorcerer poking around the West about a year and a half ago. He wasn't one of the flashy ones; he was playing it smart, keeping his activities quiet. After following him for a while, I started to suspect that he was behind a few disappearances, but I suspect he mostly targeted vagrants and the homeless if he needed sacrifices or human raw materials. The only reason I even found out he existed was because he started asking questions on a forum that I tend to keep an eye on. He was asking about the specifics of some particularly arcane rituals, the kind that used to tend to get the person conducting them burned at the stake. Granted, that was preferable to what would have happened to them and everyone within the surrounding county if they'd been successful, but most people won't let mere details like that get in their way if they smell power. Evidently, this guy was one of those.

  “Of course, at the time, I didn't have enough information to tell who it was. He was just an anonymous name on a generally anonymous message board. I didn't have the expertise to dig in and find out where the posts were originating from—still don't. But I knew a couple guys who did. Unfortunately, apparently this guy did, too; he was posting from someplace different most of the time, re-routing his address so that he couldn't be found.” It was a real problem. As Blake had pointed out, most of the time we caught our quarry because, just like criminals caught by cops, they started getting flashy. Most of them have a tendency not to believe that anyone is going to take what they're up to seriously (at least until they start murdering people), so they don't worry about hiding it. If they did start acting smart, it could be very hard to track them down before it was too late.

  “Eventually, I got a break. Somebody on one of the more active boards announced that they were meeting with him. I knew who that guy was already; I'd had a run in with him, but nothing big enough to take any sort of...permanent action on. Tried to scare him straight. Apparently he hadn't learned his lesson. But I knew where he was, and I knew his meeting places, so I got in the truck and headed out.

  “That was how I got on the trail of Elliot Ransom. He wasn't much more than twenty, but already up to his neck in a lot of heavy, heavy stuff. He had done his research, and was being careful enough not to attract attention, but I started to get a handle on what he was looking into. Among other things, he was researching blood curses, summonings, and bindings.” He looked around at all of us, and got a lot of blank looks. I was pretty sure I knew what he was talking about, but I hoped I was wrong. I wasn't.

  “Bindings are the permanent attachment of a living person's soul to either a demon or something so old and nasty that it may as well be,” Tyrese explained after a moment. “It's deep, dark, heavy stuff that even most of the knowledgeable, dangerous occult types avoid. The bond is usually not breakable by the mortal party. It's some of the nastiest stuff I think I've ever read about. It also usually involves some kind of blood sacrifice, usually human; it's not easy.

  “The only times I've ever found any references to anyone actually trying it, they were hoping that the binding would bind the demon or Fae or whatever to their will, like a familiar, but it has always turned out the other way around the handful of times it's worked, and always to everyone's regret.”

  Blake nodded. “That's about what I was able to find out. When it first came up, I had no idea what was even being talked about.” He ran a hand over his face. He still looked drawn, drained. He'd been through quite an ordeal, and it looked like it wasn't over yet.

  “I tracked him all over the Intermountain West for most of a year,” he continued. “He was cagey; I had to keep my distance just to make sure I didn't spook him before I was ready to take him down. As it was, I almost lost track of him twice. I saw some messed-up stuff during that time, but was never in a position where I could do anything about it.

  “What I did figure out was that he wasn't working on his own.” He paused, letting that sink in a moment. “There was somebody else advising him, stringing him along. It took a while, but I started to realize that every time he'd get a letter, he'd suddenly pull chocks and move somewhere else or contact somebody new. It was one of the few patterns I was able to see.

  “Then, about a month ago, he got another letter and headed north. He left fast enough I almost lost him again. It got worse when he turned off the highway and went winding through about a hundred miles or more of back roads.

  “When he finally stopped, it was far enough out in the middle of nowhere that I had to creep through the rocks on foot to get eyes on him. That was when I saw who he was meeting. Or at least, I saw that he was meeting somebody. I still have no idea who the other guy is. Tall, gaunt, and bald is about the best I can do. He was dressed in a suit, which seemed a little odd in the middle of the rocks and bunchgrass.

  “I couldn't hear any of what was said; I was too far away. I was also too far away to see what they were doing around the trunk of the bald guy's car. But there was no mistaking the severed head of a girl that Ransom was holding up a few minutes later.” His voice had gotten quiet, haunted. He was staring, unseeing, at the tabletop. “He was chanting something. The bald guy had stepped off to one side. I brought my rifle up, and had Ransom right in my sights when everything got weird.

  “It was like the whole country twisted. Suddenly, for a second, nothing looked familiar. The sky turned black, though the sun was still shining. There were black glass bluffs all around, even where there had been an arroyo a moment before. And it looked like there was a doorway in the middle of the bluffs.


  “A figure walked out of it. I...I still can't describe it. It seemed to change every time it moved. Eventually it settled on a shape, like a man in a long coat with a slouch hat. I couldn't see its face, and I didn't want to. It just pointed at Ransom, said a word, and he dropped dead, the girl's head rolling away from his hand. The bald guy was standing over to one side, muttering, but the thing turned to look at him and he just blurred and was gone. I don't think he actually left, though, because the thing started talking, looking around like it was looking for him. I couldn't understand what it was saying, but I can still hear its voice...” he suddenly grabbed his head with both hands. “Then it looked straight at me. It looked at me and I saw its eyes...that weren't really eyes...I know what it is. I don't know how I know, but I do. I think it wanted me to know.” He was breathing hard now, near panic in his voice. His eyes were squeezed shut.

  “It's The Walker,” he whispered. “The Walker on the Hills is loose.”

  Now, there had been shell-shocked silences on this case already. Plenty of them. The shocks just kept piling up with every step. But this one… This one was bad. They didn't get much worse, short of a prince of Hell climbing out of The Abyss.

  “Do I really want to know who or what The Walker is?” Tall Bear asked hesitantly.

  It took a long moment for anyone to answer. Naturally, it was Tyrese, our resident walking Encyclopedia Arcana.

  “Nobody really knows what The Walker on the Hills is,” he said, his voice low. “There are stories about it going back at least a thousand years, and even the oldest ones seem to be referencing even older tales. All anybody knows about it is that it's old, it's powerful, and it tends to spread madness and chaos wherever it goes. About six hundred years ago, near Hamelin, the Order gathered about fifty Hunters to go after it, and not a single one ever returned. Nobody knows what happened to them, either.”

  “Why does Hamelin sound familiar?” Eryn asked.

  “Ever hear of the Pied Piper?” Tyrese asked with a bleak smile. “There are those who think that the original inspiration for the Piper was, in fact, The Walker. Yeah. That's the level of madness we're talking about. Mass murders, mass suicides, entire populations just vanishing...that's the kind of stuff The Walker is known for.” He frowned.

  “What's weird, though, is that there hasn't been a confirmed sighting of The Walker in just over a century. And what you described, Blake, sounds like a ritual designed to break a prison.” He looked up as Father Ignacio shut the door to Ian's truck. None of us had heard him get up. “So who imprisoned it? And how? I've never seen any records that suggest anybody ever managed to do that. You'd think it would be significant enough that somebody would have at least mentioned it. But I've never seen any reference to it, and like just about everybody, I've studied up on The Walker.”

  “You mean like just about everybody who geeks out about this stuff instead of just asking, 'How do I kill it or banish it?'” I said wryly.

  Tyrese didn't say anything more as Father approached. The priest just looked tired. There were dark circles under his eyes, and I thought I saw a couple new gray hairs in his hair and mustache. He sat down at the table across from Blake. “There are only a couple of possibilities that I know of,” he said. “Go on, Blake.” Apparently, he wanted the whole story before adding anything.

  Blake's chin was almost touching his chest. His voice seemed muffled and thick, as he struggled through what he had to say. The man had obviously been through hell, and it had all but broken him. Maybe it had broken him. He sure wasn't the same guy I'd known for all those years.

  “Whatever is going on,” he said quietly, “The Walker's not happy. I think that the bald guy was trying to bind it, and that pissed it off. Maybe. All I know is that it's been chasing him ever since. The flesh golems, the cursed people...they've all been weapons that the bald guy's been using to try to delay The Walker. He's only been partly successful. It keeps getting closer and closer. It's been drawing in some of the Powers of the Otherworld to support it, letting them deal with the curses and the constructs so that it can close the gap on the bald guy. Sooner or later, it's going to catch him.”

  “I'd almost say we should let it,” Charlie said, his voice devoid of his usual humor, “except that from what we've seen so far, that would mean a whole lot more people getting caught in the crossfire. Target discrimination doesn't seem to be The Walker's strong suit.”

  “Never has been,” Tyrese said. “It's probably best described as an avatar of chaos and insanity. Where it goes, things get weird and people tend to die in job lots, usually by their own hand or at the hands of their neighbors.”

  Father Ignacio shook his head. “We can't just let The Walker run around loose. But it's way too big for our little band to deal with. It's a Power; there's no way mere mortals can actually kill it. We could drop a nuke on it, and probably only make it mad. Or we might just make it laugh. It's not exactly rational.”

  “Well, somebody did something about it,” Eryn pointed out.

  “Apparently so,” Father acknowledged, “and, like I said, there are a few possibilities, though it's a fairly short list. If it was somebody local, it's a list of precisely one. And since we're going to need help to deal with this, before we even take a step to continue following this traveling tear in reality, we're going to have to get that help. So pack up; we're going back into the hills. We've got some Friars to meet with about imprisoning an eldritch abomination.”

  Chapter 14

  The slamming of car doors echoed across the narrow valley and gravel crunched loudly under boots. It was deathly quiet up there in the mountains with the engines shut off.

  Father had led us well off the beaten path, even away from the usual hiking trails, nearly a hundred miles from the nearest highway. The last twenty miles had been on a twisting dirt logging road full of switchbacks and hairpin turns. It had been an interesting drive, to say the least. Now we had come to the end of the line, apparently, in a high hanging valley a good six hundred feet above the rushing river below, which was completely hidden by the treetops.

  We were all looking around as we got out of the vehicles. There was nowhere else to drive to; the road simply stopped. But there was no sign of a monastery or any other structure, not even a cave. There was only the rocks, the trees, and the mountain grasses. “Is this place invisible somehow?” Charlie asked. His words bounced around the mountains, the echoes taking a long time to die. Maybe it was the lingering unease of the last weeks, but the silence seemed almost watchful, and even Charlie looked a little abashed at how loud his question had been. It was as if there was an implicit threat attached to disturbing the silence.

  Father Ignacio shook his head. “We're not there yet,” he said, quietly enough that his voice didn't seem to carry beyond the little shelf. He pointed up, in the direction we'd been driving before coming to a halt. “There's a trail. There's no road that goes all the way to the monastery. For good reason. Now come on, we've got a few miles and several hundred feet to cover before dark.”

  Without another word, he shouldered his little day pack and started up the trail. He hadn't had a lot of rest since Ophir, but he wasn't going to let his exhaustion slow him down. Of course, being an itinerant exorcist, living out of the saddlebags on his Harley for years, hadn't exactly conspired to make him soft. Father Ignacio was hard as woodpecker lips, and I already knew we were going to have a rough hike trying to keep up with him.

  Fortunately, my go bag was already sitting in the bed, and it was a simple matter to grab it and my rifle and follow. Eryn hadn't needed to adjust many of her own habits when she'd joined the order; she had been a nurse before she'd married me, and had always kept a go bag of her own in her car. All she'd had to do was add a couple more firearms, holy water, and more ammo. She was actually ready to go a heartbeat before I was. Most of the rest were scrambling to get their stuff, aside from Tall Bear, who hadn't brought that much; he hadn't expected this little road trip from Hell to be quite as in
volved as it had turned out to be.

  It was a straggling file that started up the mountainside after the black-clad, long-haired priest. Tyrese was last; he was pretty used to living out of his car, and so didn't really have a go bag set up. He was still stuffing things into a sack as he jogged up the trail.

  It wasn't much of a trail, either. Barely wide enough for one person at a time, it was a barely discernible dirt track, that disappeared in the rocks several times. It was a goat path, not a backpacking trail. I was starting to think that these Friars really valued their privacy.

  “Just who are these Friars?” Charlie asked, noticeably trying to keep his voice down. “And what are they doing way up here? If they're part of the Order, they're not going to do much miles away from anywhere.”

  “They're not part of the Order,” Father said over his shoulder, without slowing down. If Charlie was hoping that question-and-answer time was going to earn him a breather, he was doomed to disappointment. “They're part of their own, The Brotherhood of St. Macharius of the Mountain.”

  “Never heard of 'em,” Charlie said, puffing a little. We were getting pretty high up. “Are they real friars, or are we going to find a bunch of wannabe mystics in habits with a fancy name up in the high country?”

  “Oh, they're the real thing, all right,” Father replied shortly. “Entirely orthodox. They just have a rare and unorthodox calling that leads them to build their monasteries way up in the mountains, or at least, a long, long way away from civilization.”

  “And what would that calling be, exactly?” Charlie asked, when Father Ignacio showed no sign of elaborating over the next few yards.

  “They are the wardens of some of the worst Otherworldly predators that have walked the Earth,” Father said finally. “Their entire mission is the imprisonment of those that cannot be killed, banished, or otherwise dealt with. Powers, ancient sorcerers who have earned a place in the Otherworld by their abominable wickedness...you name it.”