Witch's Canyon

by Jeff Mariotte

  Sam felt incredible guilt over Jessica’s death, because he had dreamed it during the days before it happened and hadn’t warned her. He couldn’t have known, of course, that the dreams were anything but that. And no warning he could have given would prevented an attack by a demon they had not identified or defeated at that time.

  Dean believed that his own guilt had a more solid basis. Their dad had gone missing, and Dean had essentially bullied Sam into leaving Jessica and Stanford to go looking for him. Bringing Sam back into the game like that, he thought afterward, might have stirred up the demon in some way, and the demon had responded by attacking the woman Sam loved, just as it had attacked their mother.

  Dean finally decided there was plenty of blame to go around. The only way to live with it, to go on in spite of the lives they hadn’t been able to save, was to keep up the fight, to save as many as they could and to kick as much supernatural ass as possible.

  “There it is!” Sam said, yanking Dean from his memories. “Trail’s End. Your side.”

  Dean saw the sign now too. One of the spotlights that were supposed to illuminate it had burned out, but he could still make out the monument sign beside the road, with the name painted on in Old West style lettering above a reproduction of that famous painting of a weary Indian sitting on an equally weary horse. A pink neon vacancy sign sputtered just beneath the horse’s tail. That Indian always made him sleepy, which he supposed was the whole point here. He bit back a yawn and turned into the driveway.

  The motel consisted of a dozen or so adobe cottages arrayed in a U shape around the paved drive. Lights glowed in the office, a pink cottage closest to the street on the left. The other cottages were a natural tan color, with dark doors which had numbers affixed to the walls beside them. An empty pool surrounded by a tall fence dominated the center of the driveway, and a few scraggly plants stood beside the fence. Inside it, weeds broke through the sidewalk, almost to the pool’s edge.

  “Think it’s too fancy for us?” he asked. “We can always go back to the roach motel.”

  “I didn’t bring a tux,” Sam said. “But I think they’ll let us in.”

  Dean brought the car to a stop outside the office. “Best behavior now,” he warned. “Don’t embarrass me.”

  Inside, he had to bang on a countertop bell twice before anyone showed up. A door behind the check-in desk finally opened, and a man who had probably been old during the Eisenhower presidency hobbled in, using an aluminum cane. “Help you boys?” he asked. His hair had long since fled, and the crevasses in his face looked as deep as the canyon the brothers had so recently left.

  Dean put a fake ID card on the counter—one of dozens he kept in the Impala’s glove compartment. “I’m Dean Osbourne,” he said. Giving fake names had become second nature. He identified himself as Dean Winchester so seldom that sometimes he had to ponder for a moment to remember his real name. “National Geographic magazine. We’re doing an article on the communities around the outside of the national park, focusing on Cedar Wells. Sam Butler here takes the pictures. Got a room we can have for a few days? We’re not sure how long it’ll take, but at least that.”

  “National Geographic, eh?” the old man said. He showed them something that might have been a smile, or maybe a leer. Either way, it was terrifying. “Used to read that when I was a boy. Showed boobies.”

  “There’s an Internet for that now,” Dean said. “We’re more interested in local history, legends, and of course the people who make up the community today. You probably know some stories.”

  The man nodded his oversized, liver-spotted cranium. Dean hoped he didn’t unbalance himself and fall over. “Stories? Oh, I know some stories, all right. Got some good ones too.”

  “We’ll definitely get you on tape, then,” Dean promised. He jerked a thumb toward his brother. “And Sam here will take your picture. He might want you to show your chest, though, so watch out for him.”

  The clerk shoved a piece of paper at Dean, with X’s where he was supposed to sign. “Room 9,” he said. “Two beds. TV’s busted, but it has one of those little refrigerators.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Sam said, ignoring Dean’s crack about the old man’s chest. He snatched the key as soon as the guy put it on the counter. “Thanks.”

  Outside, Dean headed for the car, but Sam started across the frozen parking lot, going directly toward the room. “This time, I get first dibs on the beds!” he called over his shoulder. His tone was as icy as the blacktop. Driving over, Dean clicked off the Rush tape. He had Sabbath’s Paranoid stuck in his head now, and he hoped there was nothing to that except the names he had given inside the office.

  The wail of a siren jerked Dean out of a deep sleep. Cedar Wells had been so quiet, they might have been camping a hundred miles away from the nearest other humans, instead of sleeping in a motel at the edge of a town. In contrast, the blaring siren was almost deafening.

  Dean sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes.

  “That’s not good,” Sam said. He slipped out of his bed and started dressing.

  “A siren is pretty much always bad news for someone,” Dean agreed. “But we don’t know that it has anything to do with why we’re here.”

  “We won’t find out sitting in this room,” Sam reminded him.

  “Yeah,” Dean said. He liked his sleep. He especially liked to sleep at night. But that was when the bad things generally came out, so he spent more nights than he liked to think about awake and alert. Daytimes were for investigation, nighttimes for battle. He had gone to bed hoping this night’s sleep would be without interruption.

  Wishful thinking, that’s all. He threw back the covers and tugged on his jeans.

  By the time they made it to the Impala—a gift from Dad, 1967, midnight black, newly rebuilt—the siren had faded into the distance. But they knew the direction it had taken, back the way they’d come, through town and toward the Grand Canyon. A full moon had risen late and now hung low and golden over the treetops behind them.

  Dean floored it, and within five minutes they could hear the siren again, outside of town. Another couple of minutes later they could see flashing roof lights flickering through the trees up ahead. Dean almost missed the turn onto a narrow dirt track, but he braked, reversed, and pulled in behind a white SUV with coconino county sheriff emblazoned on the side. Two similar SUVs clogged the road ahead of it, with a white and blue paramedics’ van ahead of those. Trees curtained the sides of the road.

  Dean and Sam got out of the Impala and hurried to a driveway that led to a big white barn. Fifty feet away stood a small house, a single-story cottage with three wooden steps leading to the front door, peeling paint, and a roof that looked like it might cave in at any moment. Cops milled about with big flashlights, beaming them every which way.

  A pickup truck was parked in the driveway, and beside it was the body of what must have been a man, probably not too long ago. The driver’s side door of the truck hung open. Blood had spattered up the side of the truck and onto the driver’s seat, and the man’s arm was hooked up over the step, but his throat was gone, along with the bottom half of his face, and something had opened his chest cavity. It looked like whatever had done that had been hunting for tender morsels, but Dean didn’t spend a lot of time counting organs. He glanced long enough to estimate the damage, then looked away, sickened by the sight.

  You could see a lot of carnage without ever growing to like it. He had. He was afraid that someday it wouldn’t bother him, that he would be desensitized to it. He didn’t want that to happen, because the sight filled him with rage, and that rage spurred him on, kept him in the fight.

  “You need something?”

  A man had stopped in front of them. He wore a white cowboy hat and a sheepskin coat, open, over a tan shirt with a badge on it. Around his waist was a black leather gun belt, and black stripes ran down the legs of his pants. He held a Maglite with its beam pointed at the ground. Cowboy boots and a thick brown mustache almost dwarfed by a
generous nose and hard, inquisitive eyes told Dean everything he needed to know. This guy was in charge.

  “We—” he began.

  “You the boys from the Geographic?” Dean realized he must have looked surprised when the man with the badge added, “Don’t look so shocked, son. Word travels in a small town. Delroy called us as soon as you checked in. Might have called the Bucket first, might have saved the news until he could go over there in person and let people bribe it out of him with free drinks. Either way, you’re almost celebrities, and this ain’t exactly tourist season.” He toed a clump of snow on the drive, kicked it into trees. “Not tourist season at all. Which is just fine with me. Last thing we need’s tourists hearing about this sort of thing.”

  “You’re right, Sheriff,” Sam said. He stuck out his hand. “Sam Butler. This is Dean Osbourne. Sorry for the circumstances, but it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “I’m Jim Beckett,” the man said, shaking Sam’s hand, then Dean’s. He held on like a vise grip. “Sheriff, spokesperson, and sometimes scapegoat, all rolled into one. We don’t have a big department up here, so we have to combine duties.” He eyed Dean, and for a bad few seconds Dean was afraid the sheriff had recognized him from a Wanted notice, since a shapeshifter in St. Louis had framed him for murder. “There’s two t’s in Beckett, son.”

  “I’ll, uh, make a note of that,” Dean said. “Can you tell us what happened here?”

  “Something killed poor Ralph McCaig,” Beckett said, eyeing the body. “That’s about all I can tell you right this minute. About all I got. Animal, I’d say, but beyond that it’s all guesswork. Maybe wolf, maybe bear, maybe…hell, I don’t know. Bigfoot.” He caught Dean’s gaze again. “I see that in the magazine, I’ll hunt you down.”

  “No problem,” Dean said.

  “No pictures either,” he told Sam. “Not of this mess.”

  “I don’t want to look at it, much less focus a camera on it,” Sam assured him.

  “That’s good. My guys’ll take some shots of it, and of the crime scene, if it’s a crime. But like I said, looks like animal attack to me. Makes it an accidental death.”

  “Doesn’t look like much of an accident,” Sam said.

  “Not on the animal’s part, I guess, but it sure was on Ralph’s. It’s either accidental or death by misadventure, and I don’t want to saddle Ralphie with that.”

  “I’d go accidental,” Dean offered.

  Beckett nodded. “Accidental it is.”

  “Have there been any other…accidents, lately?”

  Beckett put a finger on his lips. “No…I mean, nothing like this. Nothing fatal. Construction worker fell off a ladder, over at the new mall, couple days ago. He broke a wrist, but he’ll be fine.”

  “New mall?” Dean asked.

  “Yeah. You haven’t heard about that?”

  “No,” Dean said.

  “Canyon Regional Mall,” Beckett said. “It’s inside the Cedar Wells town limits, but away from everything else—you must have come in from the park direction, otherwise you’d have seen it.”

  “We did,” Sam said.

  “Well, if you had kept driving another five, seven minutes from the Trail’s End, you’d have gone right past it. Opens up on Saturday. Two department stores, three restaurants, plus a food court, movie theaters, the works. There’s even a damn Baby Gap in there. Just like downtown. Not Cedar Wells’s downtown, but you know what I mean.”

  “A real mall,” Dean said. “All the way out here?”

  “Population’s growing,” Beckett explained. “Arizona’s one of the fastest growing states in the country, and not everybody’s staying in Phoenix. We got a lot of small towns around here, but all those towns are getting a little bigger all the time. Out past the mall there are a couple of new housing developments. The developers of the mall think people will even come over from Nevada and southern Utah for it.”

  “That’s…that’s fascinating,” Dean said. “We’ll let you get back to what you’re doing, but we’ll definitely want to talk to you more later on.”

  “I’m easy to find,” Beckett said.

  Dean and Sam walked back to the car. Dean couldn’t shake the image of the dead man, opened up like a present on Christmas morning.

  “A mall,” Sam said as they walked. “That’s bad.”

  “Why’s it bad? People need a place to shop.”

  “It’s bad because if there are enough people for a mall, there are way more potential targets than we can possibly keep an eye on,” Sam said. “Forty years ago there was hardly anyone living here, and what, ten percent of them were killed? If this killing cycle takes the same percentage of people in the area, we could be looking at hundreds of deaths.”

  Dean opened the driver’s door and stopped there, looking across the roof at his brother. “Then we better figure out what’s going on here, and fast.”

  FOUR

  “Run! Run! Run! Go go go!”

  There were times that the ex-Marine in John Winchester showed up as a wannabe drill sergeant. He had worked his boys hard, pretty much from the time he figured out what had killed their mother and decided to go up against it.

  On this particular occasion, he was running them through an obstacle course he had built—Dean thought it might have been on a farm he’d rented in West Virginia, but they’d moved around so often that his memory of where most things had taken place was jumbled and uncertain. The objective was to scramble up an uneven wooden ramp slanted at about a sixty-five degree angle. At the top they were supposed to turn and shoot a target behind them with a .45 pistol, then jump into open space. On the other side they had to tuck their heads, land, roll, and come up shooting at another target.

  Dean had made it on his third try. But he was twelve, and Sam was only eight. At that age, Dean recalled, Dad didn’t allow Sam to handle real firearms, and for the purposes of this drill all Sam had to do was point his finger and shout “Bang!” Still, Sam didn’t seem to have the strength in his skinny legs to propel him up the ramp, and the spaces between logs were far for him to stretch.

  “You get up there, Sam!” Dad had screamed. Sam wiped snot from his nose, glared at Dad through tear-filled eyes, and tried again. He took a running start, his right hand balled into a fist, index finger extended, hit the log ramp at top speed and launched himself. About two-thirds of the way up there was a gap between logs, then a big log that stuck out past the rest. Sam slammed his knee against that one and let out a yelp of pain, dropping back to the ground.

  “Get up!” Dad shouted. His voice was hoarse and angry. Scary angry, Dean thought. The more Sam couldn’t make it, the more Dad seemed to get upset, like he thought Sam was intentionally failing. Dean raced to Sam’s side as he sat in the dirt, rubbing his knee. He’d split the skin, Dean saw, and was smearing blood across his filthy kneecap. Tears cut pale traces down his smudged cheeks.

  “You can do this,” Dean said quietly.

  “I can’t. I can’t get past that one log.”

  “I know it’s hard, Sammy. But if you do it I’ll buy you a candy bar next time we’re at a store. You like Snickers, right? I’ll buy you a Snickers.”

  Sam eyed him suspiciously. “How are you gonna buy me a Snickers bar? You don’t have any money.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Dean said. “I’ll get you one.”

  Although Dad hadn’t said anything outright, Dean already knew back then that the mission their father had set for himself—and for his sons—set them apart from regular people and their rules. They ate and had a home—a succession of them—and a truck, but John Winchester didn’t have a job like other dads. Still, there was always money for his guns and bullets, knives and other weapons. They had clothing, of course, but also camouflage outfits and steel-toed boots, which couldn’t have been cheap. Dad had decided that what he was about was more important than strict adherence to the laws of state and country.

  Following that example, Dean knew he could acquire a Snickers bar for
his brother without too much trouble.

  “Okay,” Sam said finally. “I’ll try again.”

  “What’s taking so long?” Dad demanded. “Your life might depend on this one day, Sam!”

  That was always Dad’s line when explaining anything he forced them to do. Dean couldn’t actually foresee an occasion that would require them to dash up a crudely constructed wooden ramp, turn at the top and shoot a target, then land hard on the ground and shoot again, but Dad knew better than he did. He gave Sammy’s bony shoulder a squeeze and got out of the way. “Kill it!” he said.

  Sam nodded, backed up a dozen steps, then took another run at the ramp. This time his legs pushed off at the right moment and he flew over the jutting log. Above it, nearing the top, he slowed a little. Dean thought he was turning too soon, thought he would unbalance himself and come back down, this time from higher up with his arm dangerously extended and a pretend pistol in his hand. The number of ways this could be bad was too high to count.

  But although Sam wavered, he kept his balance. A little slower than Dean had, but apparently fast enough to satisfy drill sergeant Dad, Sam aimed his finger and gave a shout, then hurled himself into space, landing on the far side of the gap, tucking his arms in and rolling. He came out of the roll a little unsteadily but on his feet, and pretended to shoot the next target.

  Dean gave a whoop and ran to meet his brother on the other side. He expected to hear congratulations from Dad too, but instead the man stood with his arms folded over his chest, looking at them solemnly. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. He ticked his head toward the next station on the obstacle course, a series of low-strung strands of barbed wire they were supposed to slither under. Easy enough, and beneath the wire strands was slick, goopy mud, so, bonus.

  “Look at this, Dean.” Sam pushed a book—an old journal, in fact, kept in longhand in a spiral-bound notebook—across the scarred library table toward him. Before letting his mind drift into his own distant past, Dean had been studying accounts, preserved on microfiche, of the 1966 attacks from the Canyon County Gazette, a small local newspaper that went out of business in the 1980s. But Mrs. Frankel, the librarian, dug a little deeper to find the journals Sam was now reading, which had never been scanned or otherwise duplicated. The Cedar Wells Public Library was in an old wood-shingled building on Grand Avenue, and at ten-thirty in the morning it was empty except for the Winchesters and Mrs. Frankel.