Witch's Canyon

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m Dean,” his brother went on. No last name, but at least he didn’t lie or use an alias, which was rare for him. Maybe the fact that she was a widow had given Dean hope. Not for a relationship, Dean didn’t tend to do those, but at least for a fling. “This is my brother Sam. Little brother,” he added.

  “I’m Juliet,” the woman said. She dabbed at her cheeks and nose with the tissue and offered a tentative smile. “Juliet Monroe.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Juliet,” Sam said.

  “We’re on our way to Cedar Wells,” Dean said. “Do you live in the area?”

  Juliet nodded. “Not far from there, really. We have a little ranch, just outside of town. Or I do, I guess. It was really Ross’s dream, but I bought into it too. It’s so beautiful around here. I was always a city girl, but Ross convinced me that it was a good move for us. Now I’m trying to sell the place—it’s too lonely out there by myself—but I’m not getting a lot of offers.” She tried on a surer smile, and it looked like it belonged on her face, brightening her eyes, swelling her cheeks. “You guys wouldn’t be in the market, would you? I’ll throw in the livestock for free.”

  “Us?” Dean tossed a private smirk at Sam. “No, no, we’re kind of…we’re on the road. A lot.”

  “I didn’t really think you were the types,” she said. “A ranch can really tie you down.”

  “I’m sure,” Sam said. “Anyway, we’d better get back on the road, before all the good hotel rooms in Cedar Wells are taken.”

  Juliet laughed at that.

  “What?” Sam asked.

  “It’s just…good hotel rooms in Cedar Wells is a funny concept. Kind of like saying you want to rustle up some good road kill before dinner.”

  “Not the most happening burg?” Dean asked.

  “Not even close. Unless your idea of happening is Friday night bingo at the church and the occasional loose bull on Main Street.”

  “By which you mean a real bull,” Sam guessed. “And not the kind of loose bull you find around politicians and actors.”

  “Or actors who become politicians,” Juliet said. “But yes, the bull around here is the real kind, so watch where you step when you go looking for those hotel rooms.”

  “Is there anyplace to stay in town?” Dean asked.

  “Sure,” Juliet replied. “It was just your choice of adjectives I was commenting on. There’s the Bide-A-Wee Motel—”

  “Sounds adorable,” Sam said.

  “Some of the roaches there are bigger than my cattle,” she said. “Or that’s what I’ve heard.”

  “Anyplace else?”

  “I’d probably stay at the Trail’s End, if I had to stay somewhere.”

  “Trail’s End. We’ll look for it.”

  “You can’t miss it,” she assured them. “You can’t miss anything in Cedar Wells, unless you blink. It’s all on Main, and Main isn’t that long.”

  “There really is a Main Street?” Sam asked.

  “You bet. And Grand Avenue too. It’s paved for three blocks, then dirt.”

  “And this place isn’t paradise on Earth for you? I’m shocked.”

  “Like I said, I’m a city girl. It was fine when I had Ross—he loved it all so much, I enjoyed just seeing it through his eyes. But when you have to drive into Flagstaff for a decent half-caf mochaccino or a conversation that doesn’t begin and end with the weather…” She sighed. “It gets a little old.”

  “I bet,” Dean said. “We’ll get out of your hair, Juliet. Thanks for the warning about the giant cockroaches.”

  “Thank you for checking on me,” she said. “If you’re in town long, maybe I’ll see you at the Wagon Wheel.”

  “The Wagon Wheel?” Sam echoed.

  “You’ll see it.”

  “She was nice,” Sam said when they reached the black Impala and were safely out of her range of hearing.

  “She was hot.”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t see it.”

  “More your type than mine, I guess.”

  “She was hot,” Dean reiterated. “Trust me.”

  “So it’s good that we investigated.”

  “Took a few minutes away from our real business,” Dean said. “But I’m okay with that.”

  Sam hoped those few minutes hadn’t cost anyone’s life. They were going to Cedar Wells to look into a periodic killing spree that Marina McBain, a police detective in New York, had told them about. According to the article she gave them, every forty years the area became the scene of a rash of unexplained deaths. Twenty-nine killings, the last time. And the town had grown since then, the whole region becoming far more populous as the state of Arizona boomed.

  According to their best calculations, December fifth would be the beginning of the next forty-year cycle. Today was the fourth. If their calculations had been off, and the time they spent at the Grand Canyon had meant death instead of life for anyone, they wouldn’t feel so good about their side trip.

  Sam and Dean Winchester both followed in their father’s footsteps, and their father—since the horrifying death of his wife, their mother—had been a hunter.

  Not of animals, or birds. John Winchester hunted monsters, ghosts, demons—the creatures most people only believed in deep down, in their 3:00 a.m. hearts, and that they laughed off when the sun was bright and their spirits high.

  Even then, in the light of day, they talked about spirits.

  They just didn’t really understand what they were talking about.

  Dean shoved the key into the ignition, gave it a crank, and the car’s engine roared to satisfying life.

  Ticking the vehicle into reverse, he glanced at Sam.

  “It is a big hole,” he said. “I was right about that.”

  “You were right, Dean. That canyon is one big freaking hole.”

  TWO

  Ralph McCaig had been born over in Dolan Springs, to a father who had worked at the Tennessee Schuylkill Mine and a mother who mostly drank and complained, especially after the old man died in a mining accident and the pension checks never quite made it to the end of the month. Except for a hitch in the army during the Gulf War, in which the closest he had been to action was a street brawl outside a bar in Frankfurt, Germany, he’d always lived in Arizona’s high country, land of canyons and plateaus, evergreen trees, mule deer, and tourists.

  On the back bumper of his Chevy pickup, which had been new before that war but old by the time he bought it in 1998, he had a sticker that said, if it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot ’em? A gun rack over the rear window held a twelve-gauge and a 30.06, and he had actually used the ought-six once to fire at a BMW that whipped around a blind curve at eighty or more, startling him so much as he relieved himself beside the road that he’d peed on his Justin work boots. By the time he zipped up, scrambled to the truck, and yanked down the gun, though, the Beemer had been nothing but a pair of distant taillights, and he didn’t think he came anywhere near hitting it.

  Didn’t mean he wouldn’t try again in a similar circumstance. He made his living with a small salvage logging operation, so unlike some of his neighbors, his paycheck didn’t depend on the tourist trade. At the moment, he was between contracts, but that wouldn’t last long. The people who hired him were the ones who had to deal with environmental impact studies and logging permits and all the bureaucratic paperwork; all he had to do when they gave the word was gather a crew and go into the woods and take out the downed trees and the slash, or the skinny striplings that would never gain purchase there. Land managers liked neat, clean forests these days, big trees with plenty of space around them.

  Ralph had some money in the bank, the fish were biting at Smoot Lake, and there was enough snow on the ground so he could stick a six-pack in it and every bottle would be as cold as the last, so he was a happy man.

  Maybe a little too happy. As he negotiated the turn off the highway onto Lookout Trail—the dirt track that led
past his place to a lookout tower that fire spotters hadn’t used for a decade or more—he almost lost control of the truck. The rear end caught an icy patch and fishtailed and he barely got it back in line before it smacked into the stump of an oak he had cut down—illegally, since it wasn’t on his land—because its branches had blocked his view of the highway.

  But he did get it under control, and then it was just half a mile to his place. He could do that stretch with his eyes closed.

  The close call had put him on edge, shaken a little of the buzz away. That was unfortunate, since the day had been just about perfect so far. He had been thinking, in fact, that the only thing that would make it more perfect would be if Doris Callender came over for dinner—better, with dinner—followed by a little of what his old man had called “knockin’ boots.” He’d give her a ring when he got inside, see if she wasn’t free. Most nights, she was.

  By the time Ralph came to a stop outside the old barn he used as a garage, the shakes from his near-accident had faded. It wasn’t that he had been too concerned about crunching the truck, he thought, as much as it was the implication that he’d driven all the way back from Smoot Lake impaired. If six beers threw him off this much, did it mean he was getting old? Forty was closing in fast, after all. If the day came that he couldn’t handle a chain saw or an ax, he really would have to worry.

  He left the motor running and climbed down to open the barn door. The night air had turned cold, and he blew on his hands to warm them. He tripped over a root in the driveway but managed to keep his balance. “Jeez,” he said out loud. “Six beers?” Maybe I’m getting sick, he added silently. Catching a cold. Sure, that’s probably it, no way six brews would hit me so hard otherwise.

  He had almost reached the barn door, where he knew the rusty hasp would give him problems because it always did, when he heard a strange sound. He froze. The woods around here were full of animals, deer and mountain lions and snakes, rabbits and chipmunks, various birds. Black bears too, sometimes, and at first he thought that’s what had made the noise. He hadn’t had a lot of close encounters with bears, he was glad to say, so he didn’t know for sure if they made sounds like that. It had been a kind of irregular chuffing noise, like something that climbed a steep hill and hadn’t caught its breath yet. But liquid, moist. Hearing it made Ralph envision something with loose, floppy jowls and big teeth and strings of saliva dangling from its open mouth, and he shivered, not because of the cool night air.

  The noise came again, louder this time.

  Closer.

  He tried to gauge his distances. To the barn was closer, but there, he’d have to wrestle with that damn hasp, which gave him fits under the best of circumstances. Once he got it unlatched he would have to tug open the heavy barn door, on hinges he hadn’t greased in he didn’t know how long, then pull it closed behind him. And once he got in there, if it was something like a rabid bear, who knew how long it might wait around outside?

  No, the truck was a better bet. Farther away, but if he needed to he could drive into Cedar Wells. And his guns were there.

  Again, the noise. This time it was accompanied by something that sounded like smacking lips. Through the trees on the far side of the drive he saw a shape, vague and dark. But big.

  Ralph dashed for the truck. Hit the root again, and this time it caught his foot, but good, sprawling him on his belly in the dirt. A shard of glass from a broken bottle sliced open his palm. He rose to a half kneel and yanked the glass out, and blood washed over his hand. At the same moment, a stench enveloped him, as if someone had draped a five-day-dead animal across his nose and mouth.

  It had to be the bear, or whatever was out there. If he could smell it, that meant it was even closer. He could feel its hot breath on his neck—or was that his imagination? He didn’t want to turn around and look.

  Instead he gained his feet and charged for his truck. His bloody hand grabbed the door handle but slipped off before he could get it open. He clawed at it again, steel tacky with his blood this time, and it came easily, the door swinging open on its hinges.

  Then the creature was on him, all thick dark fur and gnashing fangs. It swiped at him with a massive paw, knocking him to the ground. He gripped the truck’s step with his left arm, like it was a life preserver that could hold him above the doom that would otherwise surely swallow him, and now for the first time he really saw it, except he couldn’t be seeing it right because it changed, shifted, phased in and out of visibility—now a black bear, now a bear that had been dead for months, decomposed, bones showing through rotted flesh, now altogether invisible but still, horribly, breathing on his face, fat drops of drool splattering against his chin and neck—and it shoved its muzzle right against his throat, fur tickling his nostrils, the stink gigantic, and its huge razor teeth tore through skin, broke arteries and bones.

  Ralph’s last thought was that it would have been good to have knocked boots with old Doris one last time but it was probably for the best that he hadn’t invited her over tonight.

  Forty years before, the first victim had been hunting, alone, deep in the forest. He had fallen easily, and his body was never found; animals scattered the bones, the flesh eaten by worms and insects and scavengers and rot and in one form or another returned to the earth.

  Forty years had passed since the instant of his death.

  The cycle had come around again.

  The killings had begun.

  THREE

  Main Street proved to be everything Juliet Monroe had promised. Which, Dean acknowledged, wasn’t much. The buildings were mostly wooden fronted, with pitched roofs laden with snow and covered walkways in front. A few were made of brick, and they drove past a bank constructed from big blocks of gray stone. Christmas decorations already showed in many of the shop windows, and the lampposts had been wrapped with red ribbon. Sam pointed out the Wagon Wheel Café, which had a wagon wheel missing two spokes right at the one o’clock position, spotlighted next to a painted wooden sign. It looked to be a standard small town diner, like many the brothers had been in—and occasionally thrown out of—in the last year or so. He hoped they did see Juliet there—he definitely wanted to run into her again.

  Two doors down only a neon open sign glowing in a blacked-out window gave any indication that the Plugged Bucket Saloon was occupied, but Dean guessed that there were a handful of drinkers at the bar, maybe a couple making eyes at each other in a dark booth, and a jukebox well stocked with country music hits that were at least two years old. He imagined he could hear Shania Twain singing “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” from here, although with a Rush cassette pounding from the Impala’s stereo, he wouldn’t have been able to hear her if she was standing on the sidewalk with her full band.

  He reached out and cranked the volume knob to the left. “Any sign of the motel?”

  “We passed the Bide-A-Wee on the way in,” Sam said. “On my side. I didn’t say anything because I thought we’d decided not to share a room with giant insects. Present company excluded.”

  “What about that other one Juliet mentioned?”

  “The Trail’s End? Not yet.”

  Dean scanned the street. A couple of trucks were parked along the sidewalks, but no people were in evidence. “Have you seen a single human being?”

  “Not a one.”

  “You don’t think…”

  “What, we’re too late? Something’s already slaughtered the whole town? If that was the case, I think we’d see bodies, blood in the streets. I think it’s just a small mountain town and people go home early.”

  “Okay,” Dean said. “I like that better.”

  Up ahead, light spilled from a storefront that was set back from the road, with a parking area in front. Swanson’s High Country Market. Here there were people, including a woman with two kids, pushing a shopping cart toward a green Jeep. “See?” Sam said. “Nothing sinister. And if we don’t like the Wagon Wheel, we can stock up there.”

  “Let’s hope it stays quiet,”
Dean said. “I wouldn’t mind if we were wrong for once and there was nothing strange going on at all. It’d be a decent place for a vacation if we didn’t have to worry about people being murdered.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Dean,” Sam said. “Your eternal optimism. Always looking on the sunny side.”

  Dean glanced at his brother. He could see the family resemblance, particularly in the shape and sharpness of the nose, but Sam’s face was rounder, softer somehow. His brother’s eyes were brown, while Dean’s were green. Longer hair, covering Sam’s ears, curled over his collar and accentuated his youthful looks. Sam was four years younger, though, and had spent that time away at college. Dean supposed that by the time Sam reached twenty-seven—his age—those dimples and soft lines might harden, become deep crags, from the stress of fighting the denizens of the dark.

  If, of course, they both survived that long.

  He didn’t like to think about the alternative. But they were soldiers, had been trained since childhood—almost from birth, in Sam’s case—as soldiers, in a war that didn’t seem to have an end. Soldiers needed to be prepared for death so they could take the necessary steps to avoid it. Still, they put themselves in harm’s way, and he, Sam, and their father had done that almost every day since a demon killed their mother when Dean was four, until finally their father died too, a soldier’s death, in battle as he would have wanted. His sons carried on the tradition without him. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  The image of their mother’s death haunted him still—Mom, pinned to the ceiling over Sam’s crib, her body consumed by spectral fire. Dad had ordered Dean to carry baby Sammy to safety outside. From the yard, Dean had watched the flames spread, engulfing the whole house in minutes. Dad had escaped, but alone.

  Sam had been too young to remember it, too young, really, to know Mom at all. Her death came six months after his birth, to the day. But the same fate had claimed his girlfriend, Jessica Moore, after Sam abandoned Stanford to rejoin the battle at Dean’s side. That one Sam had witnessed.