The Walking

by Bentley Little

  Several other vendors knew Liam, and two of them were more than willing to talk, but neither of them seemed to have heard anything or noticed any unusual behavior on his part recently.

  It was nearly three o'clock when Miles made his way dejectedly back out to the car. He knew no more now than he had when he'd first arrived.

  The whole day had been a waste, and he wanted to just go home and take a nap. But instead he stopped by the hospital, and he held his father's hand and listened to his unintelligible whispers and lied to the old man that everything was going to be all right.

  Derek Baur woke up knowing that he would die today.

  He'd dreamed the night before about Wolf Canyon, and in the dream the people in the water had been his family: his parents, his sister, his brothers. He hadn't thought of Wolf

  Canyon for year; decades, and that should have tipped him off that there was something amiss, but the premonition was not so logical, was not tied to a story line or a series of images or a specific dream scape. It was not something he had been told, not sOmething he had concluded or deducted. He just knew. And he was ready.

  He'd turned eighty-six last March, and his wife, his friends, even his son, had all died years before. He was the last, and he had long since given up all pretense of interest in this life. There was no longer anything he enjoyed, nothing he looked forward to. Death was the only thing left.

  How would it comes Derek wondered. Gently, in his sleep? Violently?

  Or somewhere in the middle, like a heart attack or stroke?

  He had given a lot of thought to the subject, and he had concluded that there was no pleasant way to die. In his midfifties he had almost choked to death on a piece of steak in a restaurant, before Emily had pounded him on the back and dislodged the obstruction in his throat.

  Though the entire incident had lasted only a few seconds, to him it had felt interminable. Time was subjective, and he had realized ever since that while a death might be considered "quick" if measured objectively by the clock, to the victim it might seem to take forever.

  So while he was ready to die, he did not relish the process. He rolled over, pulled open the drape. Outside, the Michigan landscape was covered with snow. In the rest home's parking lot, the cars looked like a row of igloos more than motor vehicles.

  He was still staring out the window when Jimmy, the new attendant, brought in his breakfast. And he had not moved by the time the attendant returned to collect the tray and untouched dishes a half hour later.

  "Not hungry, Mr. Baur? I'm gonna have to report you, yOU know."

  Derek did not even bother to respond.

  Why eat when he was going to die?

  He would be glad to put an end to this existence. He was not mistreated here, but he hated the rest home, hated the indignity of it and the cold feeling of having paid caretakers rather than family sun'ounding him.

  At least he could still get around---even if it was with the aid of a walker. Plenty of other residents in the home, many younger than himself, could not even get out of bed and were stuck full-time in their rooms.

  He would have taken his life long ago if that had beth his situation.

  Of course, most of those people didn't have any way to take their own lives.

  He spent the morning staring out at the snow. Sometime before noon one of the doctors came in to speak with him-apparently Jimmy had made good on the threat to report him and since Derek was not in the mood for a lecture or lengthy discussion, he agreed with everything the doctor said and promised to eat his lunch. Jimmy returned soon after with a food tray, looking smug, and Derek ignored him. He ate his lunch and was once again silent as the attendant took the tray, leaving him alone. After a short, painful trip to the bathroom, Derek relocated himself to the room's chaff and spent the afternoon looking through magazines. Waiting.

  He wondered how it was going to come.

  There was no doubt in his mind that he would die today. He was not a religious man, but he knew there were things in this world that he did not understand Wolf Canyon

  --that he would never understand, and he trusted the knowledge that had been supplied to him. He waited for death to arrive.

  But sleep arrived before death and as the magazine slipped from his fingers, as he felt himself beginning to drop off, he wondered if he was going to wake up again or if this was it.

  He did wake up. He awoke from another Wolf Canyon dream, one in which he was trapped in a house as the waters rose, his feet stuck to the floor as if they had been set in cement, resisting his efforts to pull them free and escape. He jerked awake just as he was starting to swallow water and drown.

  He opened his eyes to see Joe, the night attendant, standing in front of him with a dinner tray. "Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Baur, but it's suppertime. You want to eat here at your chair today?"

  Derek nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He was surprised to be alive, and for the first time he questioned whether his premonition was correct. Maybe he wasn't going to die yet. Maybe his mind was just going.

  He picked at his food, then pushed the tray aside and, after another trip to the bathroom, settled back into his bed, staring out at the snowy landscape until he fell asleep.

  The room was black when he awoke--pitch-black much darker than he had ever seen it--and he wondered for a moment if he had gone blind. The darkness was uniform, with no light anywhere, and only by reaching over to the nightstand, feeling for his watch, and pressing the button on the timepiece to illuminate the numbers, did he know he still possessed his sight.

  He felt for the curtain, pulled it aside. He understood that the lights in the home were all off. But where were the lights outside?

  The streetlamps were out and the house across the road was dark. There was no noon. It was as if every possible source of illumination--save for his watch--had been extinguished.

  Maybe there'd been a blackout.

  A blackout. It made sense, but but it didn't feel right

  He didn't understand why, but in the same way that he knew he was destined to die today, he knew that this darkness had been brought about for his benefit.

  In fact, the two were related.

  Yes, they were. How he didn't know, but he did know that the lights were off because of him, for him, and that his death would take place in the darkness.

  For the first time he felt fear. He was afraid to die, he realized. He did not want to die. Not this way.

  He pressed the buzzer next to his bed to call an attendant. He waited for what seemed like forever, pressing the buzzer several more times in the interim, but no attendant came. He did not even hear the sound of anyone in the hallway. The entire rest home was silent, and the lack of noise seemed ominous to him. Maybe death had come for them all tonight. Maybe everyone else in the building had been killed, and he was the last one left. Maybe the murderer was playing with him, toying with him, before coming in to slit his throat.

  Derek sat up painfully. His muscles always seemed to be at their lowest ebb in the middle of the night. As usual, he'd laid his walker against the side of the bed, and he reached for it, bending awkwardly, trying to grab hold of the cold metal top bar. It took him several moments to find it, and by the time he did he was sweating--not just from exertion but from fear. Something was definitely wrong here, something was fundamentally off. There was no sound in the room, in the building, save his own labored breathing, and there was still no light either inside or outside the rest home.

  He'd changed his mind. He was positive he did not want to die. And while there might be no pleasant way to go, some ways were definitely worse than others. Much, much worse.

  He could still see nothing, but there was a sense of movement in the blackness, and he knew with a certainty he could

  not explain that he was not alone in the room, that there was something in here with him.

  Something not human.

  There was another sound now besides his breathing--the hiss of piss as he peed his pants
in terror. He threw himself out of bed, the walker clutched tightly, and headed toward where he knew the door had to be.

  He expected at any moment to feel a clawed hand on his shoulder, but he concentrated on moving, walking, getting out of here, not allowing himself to dwell on the other possible outcomes of this situation. He wanted to cry out for help, but he was not sure there was any help to be had, and he was hoping that this darkness was just as disorienting to whatever was after him.

  His walker hit a barrier, the wall, and Derek reached out to touch, feeling to the left and to the right until he found a crack, a hinge, and, finally, a knob. He grasped the knob, turned it. Or tried to.

  The door was locked.

  From the outside.

  Was that something that was done every night? He didn't think so, but he wasn't sure. The only thing he was sure of was that he was now trapped in here with whatever was trying to kill him.

  There was a... a slumping sound, the noise of something large moving forward through the room, forcing its weight across the floor toward him.

  He wished to God the room had remained silent. He didn't want to think about what kind of form went with that sound. He wanted only to find a way to escape, a way to get out of here before The bathroom!

  Yes! If he could make it to the bathroom without being caught, he could lock himself in until morning. Maybe the

  monster could break down the door, but his chances were better in there than they were out here.

  The monster?

  He had no problem with that word.

  The bathroom was to the right, and he started toward it. He did not have to face forward as he moved--his walker met obstructions before he did--so he kept swiveling his head around, looking from one section of the room to the other. The darkness was still almost total, but his eyes seemed to be adjusting to the lack of light because there was an area now less black than the room around it, a rounded, shapeless mass that drew ever closer to him and looked somehow as though it was made out of ice.

  His heart was pounding loud enough to drown out that horrible slumping sound. He tried to hurry but Damn this walker, was not able to move any faster than he did ordinarily. His old bones and feeble muscles were unwilling to grant him any favors even in this time of crisis.

  His walker hit the wall. He looked forward, and was promptly grabbed from behind.

  This is it, he thought. The hand that covered his mouth was cold, freezing cold, and hard.

  Ice. "

  He thought of Wolf Canyon.

  Ice, it occurred to him, was made of water. And then the cold hand forced itself into his mouth and down his throat.

  Then

  These were bad times, especially for his kind.

  It was almost as if the old days had returned.

  William talked to the wolves as he traveled, and the ravens. They told him of burnings and hangings that were occurring on an almost regular basis in the scattered settlements of the territories. The stories chilled him. He would have been better off having been born into one of the Indian tribes, where his powers and abilities would be, if not understood, at least respected and appreciated. But he was white-skinned, and as such was fated to live within the world of the fair, that irrationally rational culture that believed only in one unseen, uninvolved God and attributed anything, even remotely supernatural to the work of Satan.

  He traveled by day, slept at night, and tried to ignore the horrible sounds he heard in the darkness, the moans and wails that came from no man, no animal, no wind but seemed to emanate from the land itself.

  There were Bad Places in the territories, places where neither white man nor Indian had settled, where even animals would not live. He passed through these on his way from one temporary home to another, and there was a voice in the Bad Places that spoke to him, a uniform voice that was the same in the Dakotas as it was in Wyoming, a voice he found at once tempting and terrifying, a seductive presence that pleaded with him to give up his sense of self,

  to abandon his small meaningless life and become one with the land.

  He did not stay long inrie place, not after what he'd done to Jane Stevens' father back in Sycamore. He thought of his mother and remembered how difficult life had been for him as a child, but if anything, settlements in the West were less tolerant than the more sophisticated and civilized cities of the East. The people here were less modern, less educated, filled with the superstitious dread that had afflicted their forefathers, indiscriminately afraid of anything they did not understand.

  So he kept moving, living in Deadwood, in Cheyenne, in Colorado Springs, staying just long enough to make some money and load up on supplies, not long enough to arouse suspicion. He tried to stick to trading and trapping and other respectable ways of making a living, but somehow someone would always find out who he was, what he could do, and he'd end up helping them out.

  These days he always left immediately after

  He was by nature and necessity a solitary man, used to being alone. He was also, like his mother before him, familiar with forces unseen. But often, as he traveled across the great expanses, he was afraid. Moving through this vast country, he realized how small and insignificant he was, how puny and limited was his power, his gift. A heavy, brooding untapped energy lay beneath the surface of this rugged country. It ran in continuous currents beneath his feet, in veins the size of rivers.

  It hung thick in the oppressive silence of the windless air. He could sense it in the huge dark mountains that hunkered waiting on the horizon, in the thick stands of ancient trees, which were home to far more than animals. And the Bad Places... They scared him.

  He'd been traveling west now for over a month, nearly

  losing himself in the mountains, coming through only with the help of the ravens. His supplies were almost gone, but he had some pelts he could trade, and he found a trail through the foothills that connected to a wagon-rutted road on the plain. He followed the setting sun, and on his first night on the plain he could see, maybe one or two days ahead, the small twinkling lights of what looked like a fairly large town.

  He felt nothing beneath his feet, heard no voices, and he slept peacefully next to his untethered horse, not waking up until dawn.

  The town was neither as far away as it looked nor as big as he'd hoped, and William knew by midmorning that he'd reach it some time in the early afternoon. The knowledge did not excite him as much as it should have, however, and he did not know whether his trepidation came from a legitimate premonition or merely reflected his disappointment at not finding a bigger settlement after all this time alone.

  The sun was straight up when he reached the graveyard.

  The witch graveyard.

  It was several miles away from the town, out of sight of even a rooftop or flagpole, far away from the regular cemetery. It had not been fenced and had no headstones to mark the grave sites--witches did not deserve such amenities--but it was clearly a burial tract. Rectangular indentations in the barren soil, sunken from the packing of weather, identified the individual plots. A rusty pick and broken-handled shovel were embedded in the hard ground next to what was obviously the most recent grave.

  William stopped his horse. No weeds grew within the graveyard, he noticed. Nothing grew. The desert bushes and cactus that rimmed the periphery of the spot were all dead and had turned a peculiar orangish brown.

  From the branch of a lifeless tree nearby hung the frayed end of a thick rope.

  "Bastards," William said to himself.

  He dismounted, leaving his horse to graze among the low clumps of pale weeds that grew next to the wagon trail. He could feel the power here.

  Not the wild power of the land, but a familiar pleasant tingle in the air that he recognized as the energy of fellow witches.

  The energy was dead, though. It was like the lingering smell of a campfire that remained in the air long after the flames had been put out, and he felt an odd sadness settle over him even as he enjoyed the warm, stimulating
aura.

  He walked slowly past the unmarked graves, the intentionally anonymous resting places of men and women who had once been vibrant individuals, who had been no more good or evil than the general population, but who had been condemned to death because they possessed abilities that most people were too frightened to even try and understand. It was happening all over, this killing of their kind, and if it-continued, soon there would be none of them left. They would be exterminated in America just as they had been exterminated in Europe.

  He stared down at a recent grave, one that still retained a slightly raised rectangular outline. Was this to be his fate as well? Did his future lie in an unmarked grave in a cursed and segregated graveyard?

  It was what had happened to his mother. He did not even know where she was buried. No one had ever told him.

  He took off his hat, wiped the sweat from his forehead. What kind of life was this? He stared up at the cloudless sky.

  Why had he been born a witch? It was the same question he always asked himself, and as always, he had no answer.

  He put his hat back on and walked over to his horse. Taking the reins, he grabbed the horn and pulled himself onto the saddle.

  As if the graveyard had not been enough of a deterrent, there was an explicit warning posted on a leaning sign next to the road leading toward town:

  WITCHES WILL BE EXECUTED

  William stopped the horse, looked at the sign, then glanced ahead, but the ramshackle huts that marked the outskirts of the settlement several miles down the road were obscured by watery heat waves stretching across the length of the plain.

  He wondered how long the sign had been in place, how many had ignored its warning, its promise, and continued on regardless. What they needed, he thought, was someplace of their own, land in which they were in charge and they made the rules, somewhere away from everything else where they could live in peace and be free from persecution.