Witch's Canyon

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Gee, you think?” Dean pulled the car awkwardly toward the curb and got out. Sam was out his door before the vehicle stopped moving. Dean caught up to him as they reached the steps. The air smelled like bear—or like animal, anyway, since Dean wasn’t too sure what a bear actually smelled like in person. Muskier than Mrs. Frankel, but not as manurelike as a zoo.

  They climbed the steps. Sam opened the screen door, and they went through; the bear had left the front door open. “Was he raised in a barn?” Dean asked.

  Sam ignored him. Dean didn’t blame him a bit. Sam paused and leaned inside the open doorway, holding onto the jamb with both hands. “Hello! Is anyone here?”

  No one answered. He released the jamb and stepped inside, Dean following close behind him.

  The bear had not been as tidy as he might have. In the front room, a couch was overturned, its cushions spilling onto the carpet. A small table had stood in front of it, but it was splintered now, with only one leg remaining whole. Mud and claw marks marred the off-white carpeting.

  “Why do I feel like Goldilocks?” Sam asked.

  Turnabout being fair play, Dean ignored him. “Anyone home?” he called.

  Still no answer. They walked through the house, which had the taut, tentative feeling of a home that was still occupied. An empty house had its own stillness, but this place felt unsettled.

  In the kitchen they found out why.

  She was probably fifty, still fit, and when the bear caught up with her, she had been wearing a green terry-cloth bathrobe and fuzzy pink slippers. Her hair was blond and damp, maybe from a shower.

  The animal had mauled her. It probably swiped her only once with its giant forepaw, but that caught her at the collarbone and tore her head and neck almost completely off her body. A few bits of skin stretched between her neck and shoulders and the remainder of her torso. Blood pooled around her, with shards of bone and cartilage standing in it like islands in a sea of red.

  Dean regarded her for a long moment, finally deciding she wasn’t going to tell him anything he didn’t already know. “Sammy,” he said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “I think we need to talk to that bear.”

  TEN

  In order to let Ross realize his ranching dream, Juliet Monroe had given up a middle management job at a big industrial design firm back in Chicago. The job had paid well, but provided few of what she called “spiritual benefits,” a classic case of having been promoted out of what drew her to it in the first place—the challenge and creativity of rethinking the form and function of toothbrushes and toilet plungers, lamp shades and lasagna dishes. Instead she found herself in a world where only numbers mattered, how many plungers could be moved through Target, Kmart, and Costco, how a few pennies might be shaved from manufacturing costs or freight charges. Given that scenario, she was happy to leave it behind.

  Money was not yet a problem, but looking down the pike she could see where it would become one, especially without Ross and his nearly infallible stock-trading instincts. It was like standing on the shore and watching an oncoming tidal wave, knowing it was big enough to swamp her but not quite able to determine how to escape it. There were no industrial design firms here in the wilderness, or many jobs at all outside of low-wage service or retail positions. If it became necessary, she would hunt for one of those, but until then she had focused her ambition on selling the ranch and returning to the city.

  And one other project. Juliet had read studies showing that people married later and later these days, and that single people were too busy with careers and social lives to take the necessary steps to eat well. She included widows and widowers in this category, because although finding the time wasn’t a problem for her, sometimes finding the motivation was.

  But living on the ranch, she had learned the pleasures of truly fresh foods. Grass-fed beef that hadn’t traveled any farther than the processing house in Williams. Organically grown vegetables and potatoes from her own place or a neighbor’s. Eggs fresh from the chickens. Not only was it all healthy, it was environmentally friendlier than supermarket food because it hadn’t required long-distance travel.

  The single people she had in mind, however, lived mostly in urban areas. Her idea was to create farm-fresh meals for one, that could be prepared and then flash-frozen or even delivered fresh, ready to be warmed for a few minutes in an oven or microwave.

  To pull it off would mean creating a network of farms and ranches near major cities, establishing the kitchens that would do the food prep, the methods of delivery, the retail channels. It was a huge undertaking.

  Juliet thought it could be done, though, and had been devoting most of her time these last few months to working on it, one step at a time. While doing all the planning and calling and long-distance networking, she had also been working in her own kitchen on recipes that would be nutritious and tasty but could provide meals in bulk.

  Tonight she had been planning on trying a dish of chicken parts on a bed of potatoes, garlic, onion, and vegetables. But Stu’s story about the massacred cows made her uninterested in meat of any kind. Instead, she figured she would put a couple of frozen mini-pizzas in the oven—proving her point about single people and their quick meals—and save the chicken parts for another day.

  It was just after four o’clock when she heard Stu’s boots clomping up the steps outside. She wondered if he was ready for some lemonade. He lived in town, a twenty-five minute drive away, and sometimes stayed for dinner. Juliet was happy to feed him, most times. She liked having a man who smelled of sweat and hard work in her kitchen as she cooked.

  When she saw his face, though, she didn’t think he looked like a man who wanted lemonade. “I think we ought to call the sheriff, Juliet,” he said, his voice tight with emotion.

  “What is it? Stu, what’s—”

  “Time I got back out there, after I talked to you before, there were more of the cows butchered.”

  Her stomach churned at the news. “Who’s doing it?”

  “What’s doing it, more like, and I just can’t tell you. Whatever it is, it’s fast and quiet.” He sat down at the kitchen table without being asked, pulled his hat off, and rubbed his head briskly. “And one more thing, ma’am. It’s just plain mean.”

  “How…?”

  “It just tears those animals up for no good reason. It’s not eatin’ ’em. It’s…well, it’s just murder.”

  Juliet had a cordless phone on the kitchen counter. Although the counter was a plain wooden butcher-block type, and dominated by an old steel watering can that usually held freshly cut flowers during the spring and summer, the appliances on it were modern. On unsteady legs, she crossed to it, picked it up, and pressed Talk. She held it to her ear, expecting to hear a dial tone.

  Instead she heard dull silence.

  She punched End and Talk again, but nothing changed. The display showed that the battery power was strong. “It’s dead,” she said. “Wait here, I’ll try another one.”

  Leaving Stu in the kitchen, she rushed to the bedroom. The phone there was an old-fashioned corded one, which she had always kept on a nightstand beside her bed—even though long experience had taught her that the only calls she got late at night were wrong numbers, or her brothers back in Illinois calling with some kind of trouble, as when her mother had died suddenly a few years back. She lifted the handset. No tone.

  “It must be the line!” she called. As she hurried back into the kitchen, she added, “This storm must have—”

  “Ain’t the storm.” Stu’s certainty unnerved her.

  “Are you sure? Sometimes the lines here go—”

  “There’s something out there, Juliet. I don’t like even thinkin’ like this, much less saying it, but when I was out there in the pasture, movin’ the stock, I had this sense. Pricked up the hairs on my arms and neck. It was…hell, I’m no philosopher or anything, I’m just a ranch hand. But I’d swear it felt like I was walking through a soup made of pure evil.”

  The metaphor brought a
smile to Juliet’s face, even as she recognized the inappropriateness of that particular response. She caught her expression midway and erased it. “That’s…I don’t know, Stu.”

  “It sounds crazy as hell,” Stu said. “I can barely believe I said it. I’m just telling you what I felt.”

  “And you think that has something to do with the phones being down?”

  “Couldn’t tell you why. But yes, I do think that.”

  Cell phones didn’t work out here in the middle of nowhere—the ranch was located in a canyon that blocked the signals. Ross had talked about getting a satellite phone for emergencies but had never done it. Even her Internet access was on dial-up, so without phones the ranch was completely disconnected. “I guess we can drive into town,” she suggested. Stu drove back and forth from home in an old pickup that the ranch owned, and she had her Pathfinder as well.

  “I guess we got to,” Stu agreed. “You have a gun here?”

  “A gun?” Neighbors had told them to get a rifle when they moved in, for mountain lions or snakes or wolves, none of which she or Ross could have imagined shooting. They wanted the ranch to make money, but the reason they had come to this part of the world was to feel closer to nature. They were transplanted urban liberals. Shooting animals was not in their makeup. People had told her to get a dog, too, but since the death of their collie Rusty they hadn’t been willing to get another pet. And wasn’t she surrounded by death these last few years? What was with that? “No, no gun.”

  “What I thought,” Stu said. He glanced about the kitchen as if somebody might have left one lying around. “Let’s go, then.”

  He tugged keys from his jeans pocket and screwed his hat back onto his head. Juliet hadn’t been outside nor planning to go, so it took her a couple of minutes to gather herself, pulling on a sweater and a heavy coat, leather gloves and a knit cap, against the snowstorm that gathered strength out there. Finally she grabbed her purse. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get the sheriff.”

  They went to the truck. Stu opened the passenger door for her, demonstrating old-fashioned male politeness, and she climbed up into the cab. He got in behind the wheel, closed and locked his door, and pushed the key into the ignition. Turned it.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried it a second time, with the same result.

  “Damn it,” he said. “Got me here this morning with no trouble.”

  “You think the battery’s dead?”

  “I don’t see why it would be.”

  “Let’s take the Pathfinder, then.”

  Stu hesitated with his hand on the door handle, peering through the snow outside as if trying to see what might be waiting out there, between where the truck was parked in the drive and the SUV’s haven under a covered carport. “Let’s hurry,” he said.

  They both swung their doors open at the same time, dropped to the gravel driveway, and dashed through falling snow to the carport. On the way she yanked her right glove off with her teeth and dug for her keys in her purse.

  When they reached the carport, she stopped short.

  All four tires on the Pathfinder had been shredded. Bits of rubber were strewn all over the concrete floor and out into the driveway. “Oh,” she said. Nothing else came to her, not even a curse. Just that single, inadequate word, barely more than an exhalation given a little bit of voice.

  “This ain’t good, Juliet.”

  She swallowed and found her voice again. “No. No, it’s not. I mean, we can drive out on rims if we have to. But—”

  “It’s been here. It’s trying to keep us here.”

  “It looks like it’s succeeding.”

  “Try the engine,” Stu suggested. Then he bent down, glanced under the hood. Even from a standing position, Juliet could see pools of liquid on the concrete, with bits of wire and tubing in it. “No, don’t bother. It got to this one, too.”

  Juliet felt the chill that Stu had described, and it had nothing to do with snow blowing down her collar. She hadn’t seen the cows, and ranch cattle were destined for eventual slaughter anyway, and that whole thing had seemed a little abstract to her.

  Seeing the vehicles disabled, though, and the phone lines…these things indicated some sort of malevolent intelligence that seemed to have it in for them. It wanted to keep them on the ranch, and that couldn’t be for any good reason.

  How had he put it? A soup of evil?

  It hadn’t made sense at the time.

  Now it did. And it was perfect.

  Perfect, and horrible.

  ELEVEN

  The bear had loped around the house, headed for the forest behind it. Sam and Dean made a breakneck tour of the house to verify that there were no other victims, then dashed outside. Tracks in the snow confirmed the animal’s direction, and that it hadn’t changed course. Beyond the backyard, as far as they could see, were trees. Nothing but trees.

  And somewhere among them, a killer bear.

  Sam flung his left arm out, blocking Dean before he could tear off into the woods after it. “What?” Dean said.

  “That thing was huge,” Sam said. “We’re going to need some firepower.”

  “Right.” They both reversed course, headed for the Impala. Or as Sam sometimes thought of it, the mobile armory. He’d have been happiest with a bazooka, but he settled for a sawed-off, double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun with a pistol grip. He cracked it open, fed in two shells of buckshot, and pocketed a dozen more. Dean chose a .45 automatic handgun, a Smith & Wesson that was just like—possibly even the same one, given its scarred grip—the one Dad had trained them with. Sam noted that he put a couple of extra magazines in his pockets.

  “Loaded for bear,” Dean said.

  The silence in the forest was almost eerie. The snow on the ground muffled their footfalls. The stuff coming down seemed to Sam like it should have made some kind of sound—rain did, after all, and so did falling leaves. Shouldn’t there be little puffing sounds or something? But no, not a peep. If there were birds around, they were still and quiet, no doubt trying to stay out of the weather.

  Fortunately, the snow wasn’t falling fast enough to fill in the bear’s tracks. They were deep, five-toed, with the rear feet showing more pad than the front. Sam was surprised they couldn’t hear it crashing through trees and brush up ahead, but apparently the bear knew its way around the forest.

  “How long are we going to track this thing?” he asked after about twenty minutes. The sun was invisible behind pewter clouds, but it would be setting before too much longer.

  “Till we find it. You want to quit, you know where the car is.”

  “I’m not saying I want to quit, Dean. I’m only saying we didn’t really come prepared for a long hunt. If that thing’s moving fast, it could take us all night to catch up to it. We’re not equipped for spending the night out here. Won’t do anyone any good if we freeze to death.”

  “Then I guess we should go faster.” Dean picked up the pace even as he spoke, stepping over a low shrub and around another.

  Sam knew his brother well enough to recognize what was going on. Nothing pissed Dean off like failure. They had been taught from childhood that when they failed, people could die. Dean took it a step further, believing that if he was even a little slow in succeeding, people would definitely die.

  Dad had wanted to make soldiers of his boys. In Dean’s case, he had clearly succeeded. Almost everything about Dean said soldier, from the short hair to the solid build, the straight shoulders, the easy familiarity with weapons and combat of all kinds.

  It was internal, too, even more than external. Dean had no sense of romance, of wonder. They dealt on a daily basis with things most people only imagined in nightmares, they saw things that would qualify as miraculous. But the creatures they battled weren’t mysteries or marvels to Dean, they were simply enemies. To him, everything was the mission, the hunt.

  Here in Cedar Wells, Sam had to admit, Dean’s concern had definitely materialized. Which meant that he didn’
t blame Dean for taking this personally. He did, too. He just kept enough emotional separation so he could tell when they were in danger of making things worse by killing themselves. Sometimes he thought Dean wouldn’t mind dying if he could go out in a blaze of glory, as the saying went. In moments of fairness, Sam knew that wasn’t true. Dean didn’t care about the glory; he cared about making a difference.

  Sam had to step lively to keep up.

  “When we catch up to it,” he said a few minutes later, slightly out of breath from the pace, “what are we going to do? Interrogate it?”

  “We’re gonna kill it, Sammy.”

  “But…”

  “But what? You want to make friends with it? That’s not Gentle Ben. Or…or Yogi.”

  “I know that. It’s just that, well, this changes things.”

  “Changes them how?”

  “We’re not looking for the spirit of some old soldier anymore. Not if this bear is involved, too. We’re back to square one.”

  Dean paused, mid-stride, and caught his eye. “Good point,” he said, and continued after the bear.

  “I mean it, Dean,” Sam continued. “We thought we were dealing with one dead guy. But now we’ve got, what, animal spirits?” In his haste he had only brought buckshot shells, not rock salt ones. If it was a spirit bear, he’d be sorry for that oversight.

  “Animal spirits working in collusion with human ones,” Dean muttered. “That could happen. Or maybe it’s a werebear.”

  “In broad daylight?”

  “Yeah, another good point.”

  “I’m full of ’em.”

  “Full of something, anyway.”

  “Dean, I’m all for killing as many unnatural creatures as we can. But right now we have to decide what’s a higher priority, finding this bear or figuring out what’s behind the murder cycle here. I vote for the murder cycle.”

  “I’ve always been bad at prioritizing,” Dean said. “I’m better at the whole killing thing.” He came to a sudden halt. Sam could tell by his body language that something was wrong. Dean stood awkwardly at the edge of a small clearing in the trees, his hands splayed out, staring at the ground.