Witch's Canyon

by Jeff Mariotte

  The summer that Dean had been fourteen and Sam ten, their father had taken them on a long hike into the Rocky Mountains. They’d been staying at a cabin in Colorado for a week, and it seemed almost like paradise to Dean. Blue skies, a swift creek running past the place where trout could be caught, a meadow on the other side of the creek, reached by crossing a rustic wooden bridge, that bloomed with thousands of wildflowers.

  The thing that had prevented it from actually being paradise was that Dean was fourteen, and would rather have been meeting girls and playing sports and sleeping in than continuing what seemed like lifelong boot camp. Dad hadn’t offered that option, though, and Dean went where Dad went and did what Dad said.

  On this particular day Dean, Dad, and Sam shouldered heavy backpacks containing rations and equipment for a three-day stay in the wilderness. Dad had packed them both, and said Dean’s weighed eighty pounds and Sam’s sixty. With their respective burdens, they struck off into the higher elevations. They walked all morning, stopped for a quick lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and raisins from Dad’s pack, then kept going. The meadows thinned and disappeared altogether. Deciduous trees were left behind. Eventually there were only scattered firs on hard, rocky slopes. The air was thin and cool.

  Most of the way, Dad kept up a running patter, telling his sons lessons he had learned in the Marines or since their mother had died, on his hunting trips. He told them about the loup garou and the Manitou, Assyrian ekimmu, Greek keres, about mummies, golems, zombies, and much more. He described the tests and traps and traditions they would one day rely on. He had already taken the boys on several hunting trips, of course, but he told them that he was preparing them for the day when they would go without him.

  Finally, as the day grew late, the side of the mountain they were on shrouded in shadow, he told them to take off their packs and sit. They obeyed, as they usually did.

  Dad didn’t remove his backpack. He remained standing. “The main thing I want you boys to learn from this,” he said, “is never to trust anyone. Even me. Always verify what you’re told. Taking a few minutes to check might save you hours later on. It might even save your life.”

  “What do you mean, Dad?” Dean asked. An awful thought had already risen up in the back of his mind, and he realized that he hadn’t paid much attention to the route they took to get here, counting on Dad to know the way back.

  “I mean, neither of you checked your backpacks before we left. You just trusted that I put in the things you’ll need out here.”

  “That we’ll need?” Sam asked.

  “You boys sit there for one hour,” Dad said. “By then it’ll be almost dark, and you’ll need to make camp. Tomorrow you can head back to the cabin—if you remember the way. I don’t expect I’ll see you until the day after, or maybe the day after that.”

  “But…” Dean started to protest, then held his tongue. Dad tested them. That was what he did. He taught them and he tested them, and so far they had failed this particular test. He wasn’t going to make it worse by complaining.

  “Dad, you can’t—” Sam began.

  Dean cut him off. “Zip it, Sammy. We’ll be fine.”

  Sammy zipped it, and Dad headed back down the mountain. Dean figured he’d be able to follow their tracks back—unless Dad took pains to erase them, which was the kind of thing he would do.

  When he was gone, both boys opened their backpacks. The top layer looked legitimate—rolled-up tarps that might have passed for tents under a cursory examination. Beneath those, though, Dean’s held a box of baseball cards, some cans of pork and beans but no can opener, a couple of bricks, a plastic bag full of wadded-up paper, and miscellaneous other objects of absolutely no use in the wilderness. Sam’s was similarly packed. Neither one of them had a match, a sleeping bag or tent, a compass, or any accessible food. They had water in separate canteens, strapped across their chests and clipped to their belts, so Dean wasn’t worried on that score.

  But it was getting dark, and they would soon be starving and sleepy.

  “What are we going to do?” Sam asked. He was only ten, so Dean tried to cut him some slack, but if the kid started to blubber, he was going to toss him off the nearest cliff.

  “I’m going back down the hill,” Dean said. “Try to get as far down as I can before it’s dark. Inside the tree line it’ll be warmer, and maybe we can find some berries, or a rabbit or something, for dinner.”

  “But we’re supposed to stay here for an hour,” Sam protested.

  “That’s what Dad said. He also told us our backpacks held supplies for three days. You want to believe everything he says, or you want to eat tonight?”

  “Eat, I guess.”

  “Then let’s get going.”

  They ended up getting back to the cabin just after dark on the next day—hungry, tired, and mad. But, Dean had to admit, having learned a valuable lesson.

  He tried to apply that lesson now, listening to Harmon Baird’s story.

  The old man had been right about two particulars.

  He had known which house was under attack, and that shooting the attackers put an end to them. Dean had verified both by going into the house and confronting the young soldier.

  Sitting on Sam’s bed in their room at the Trail’s End, though, he told a story that would be difficult to verify. If Dean hadn’t seen what he had—both throughout his life, and specifically since arriving in Cedar Wells—he wouldn’t have believed a word of it.

  “I’m ninety-one years old,” Baird began, once they had turned up the heat in the room to a level he found comfortable and brought him a Dr Pepper from the soda machine. He had taken his hat off, and his head was nearly bald, just a few wisps of hair spreading across pink, tissuelike skin. “So I’ve already lived through two of these, what you call murder cycles. I just think of them as the forty-year.”

  “Forty-year what?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing. Just forty-year. Ain’t like I talk about it to other folks, and I know what I mean when I think it in my own head, right?”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “Damn straight it is. So like I say, I’ve lived through two before. This one marks my third time. First one, I was just a sprout, of course. But I saw it happen. Saw my own father cut down with a tomahawk. My aunt shot in the back. My neighbor—this was the worst—my neighbor tied behind a horse and dragged, facedown, until all the skin was flayed off his front side.”

  “Yeesh,” Dean said. “That’s harsh.”

  “Harsh it was, young man,” Baird agreed. “But it left an impression, I can tell you that.”

  “Bet it did.”

  “Forty years later, as I reckon you know, it all started up again. This time I knew what was happening, because I saw the same sorts of attacks I remembered from the first go-round. Attacks by Indians and soldiers dressed in clothing and uniforms that had stopped being worn before the first set of murders. People who were there one second and gone the next, like you were opening and closing your eyes. And animals who changed their forms from one second to the next, who became people, people who became animals. It was all so familiar, and so terrible, seeing it happen a second time.”

  “What did you do?” Sam asked.

  “Well, I fought back as hard as I could, that’s what I did. The first time, none of them came for me, else I wouldn’t be here now, most likely. But the second time? They came for me, all right. Nine times I was attacked. I used my rifle and my pistol and an ax and even a flaming log, in one case, to fight ’em off. I had seen what they could do and wasn’t about to let ’em do it to me. Some of them I killed, if that’s what you can call it, and others I just chased off. They like to have turned to easier prey, after tanglin’ with me.”

  The old man rubbed his left eye, hard, as if trying to pry it out of its socket. Then he scratched at the end of his nose, leaving red marks. “I had married by then, and they did get my lovely Betty. I only left her alone at home for a short while, long enough to run into tow
n for supplies and ammunition. I left a gun with her, too, but somehow they got her anyway, split her open from collarbone to breast. I buried her in the back and went out lookin’ for whichever one had done that, but of course they can’t really be followed.”

  “Why not?” Dean asked. “Don’t they leave tracks?”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes the tracks just trail away into nothing at all. Sometimes they change into other tracks. They don’t really come from anywhere, you see. They…what’s the word?” He snapped his fingers with a dry clicking sound. “They materialize, that’s it, they materialize out of nowhere, then they do their dirty work, and then they vanish again.”

  “You’ve seen this?”

  “After Betty was killed, I didn’t go back into the house. I buried her and then I went out into the woods, because I’d seen ’em coming from there. I lived in that forest for days, as much animal as human I guess, trying to learn where they came from, if they had a leader, that kind of thing, you see? And what I found out was that they weren’t there and then they were, and there wasn’t any kind of sign you could see, anything that would tell you when or where they might materialize. One appeared right in front of me one night—almost on top of me—and I wondered what would have happened if he had appeared exactly where I happened to be standing instead of an inch away. Didn’t ask him, of course, I tore his head off with my ax. That worked as good as shooting, seemed like. They ain’t all that sturdy anymore, is the thing. They’re strong, but they’ve been dead and they seem happy enough to go back to it.”

  “So we were on the right track,” Sam said. “They are the reanimated dead.”

  “All we gotta do now is figure out who’s reanimating them, and maybe why, then,” Dean said. “And put a stop to it.”

  “Which isn’t exactly right back where we started,” Sam said. “It’s just back in the same neighborhood. Mr. Baird, do you know of anyone who would have a grudge against Cedar Wells? Anyone who might be behind these attacks?”

  Baird gripped his right elbow with his left hand and clicked the index finger of his right hand against his small yellow teeth. “I moved away from town after that second forty-year. Nineteen and sixty-six, that was. There was an element coming to town I didn’t much care for—besides the dead folks, that is. And I couldn’t see staying in town without Betty anyway. I didn’t go far away, about fifteen miles as the crow flies, longer on the roads. But I kept track of the dates, of course, just in case it happened again. I was ready, I’ll tell you that. Knew what I had to do, too. I had to come back to town and try to stop it.”

  “And you’ve been doing that,” Sam said. “Which is why you’ve been spotted around some of the crime scenes. But what we need to know is, who do you think is behind it in the first place? There had to be someone who started the cycle of murders every forty years, and if we can find out who, we might be able to put a stop to it forever.”

  “I guess I didn’t tell you up front,” Baird said. “The first time, in ’twenty-six? My family worked on a big cattle ranch, and lived there, too. The attacks that killed my pa, my aunt, and our neighbor all happened on ranch property. My ma, afterward, she was convinced that the ranch had something to do with it all. That something had happened there that brought this evil down on the place. She wouldn’t have anything to do with it after that, moved to town—even though I told her the killings happened in town, too, that the ranch wasn’t alone in that regard, no way, no how.”

  “Do you believe her now? Do you think the ranch is behind it all?”

  Baird grinned. The effect reminded Dean of a cartoon vulture eyeing a particularly tasty morsel. “Heck, boys, I don’t know. I don’t care much for Cedar Wells or the ranch or any of it. The only reason I’ve stayed alive and come back for the forty-year was that I hate those ghosts or whatever they are more than I hate everything else. I’ve thought on it and thought on it, though, and I suppose the ranch might be where it all started.”

  “Can you take us there?” Dean asked him.

  “Oh, that old ranch was sold years ago. Split up into smaller parts, developed into housing areas and whatnot, I don’t know. Whatever might have been there once, it’s most likely plowed up, cut down, or paved over by now.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Howard Patrick unlocked the door to his realty office on Main Street, stepped inside, and flipped on the switches that not only illuminated the overhead fluorescent fixtures but also the Christmas tree, animated Grinch, and electric menorah he kept in the front window from December first to January fifth every year. If he could have found an electrical Kwanzaa display, he would have put that in too, particularly since he and his wife and two kids had taken to celebrating Kwanzaa four years before, in addition to Christmas, wanting to instill in the kids a firm sense of their African heritage—but mainly because he wanted his business, Kaibab Realty, to be all-inclusive. Everyone needed a place to live, and he wanted to be the guy who helped everybody buy or sell theirs.

  On the way to his desk he stopped and turned on the radio, to a satellite station that played nothing but holiday tunes. Johnny Mathis came on singing “The Christmas Song,” and Howard smiled. He liked comfortable things; the comforts of a well built home, a fat bank account, family, and the comfort of a familiar song. He tapped the thermostat’s Up arrow and the furnace kicked on.

  His desk was made of oak, blond and polished, and it was a good thing it had sides because he hadn’t seen the top of it in years. Paper completely obscured it: listings printed from online, flyers, notes, a couple of contract packages waiting for people to drop by the office to sign, folded newspaper classifieds, and more; once, he found a commission check that had worked its way to the bottom of a pile and stayed there for two months. The only place there wasn’t paper was under his phone.

  After hanging his coat on a hook, he sat down and put his briefcase on the floor by his feet. From it, he drew a laptop, which he set on the desk on top of several random paper objects. He opened it up and turned it on. Another day at the office.

  The first thing he did was to check his e-mail account. More and more business was done online every day. He hadn’t yet reached the point where he could show and sell a house without ever leaving his desk, but that day was coming, he believed. Already online listings replaced the miles and miles of driving to every possible home that had once characterized the job. Clients often came to him with specific properties in mind that they had found on the Web and wanted to see in person once before making the offer they’d already decided on—sometimes with the help of online mortgage calculators.

  Today he had nineteen e-mails in his in-box. Three were spam, which he deleted. Four were personal. The rest were related, in one way or another, to his business. Reading those and trying to respond—growing increasingly frustrated that everything he sent out bounced right back, and when he tried to call tech support he found that call wouldn’t go through either—took an hour and eleven minutes. He closed the window, looked at the clock, leaned back in his desk chair, and stretched his legs out.

  Eight fifty-six. At nine he usually liked to walk around the block, stop in at the Wagon Wheel for a cup of joe and once in a while a doughnut or a slice of apple pie. He’d greet friends and neighbors, leaving them with the impression that good old Howard Patrick was a great guy with whom they should do business whenever they found themselves in the market.

  Time for one quick phone call before he went. He had tried yesterday to get through to Juliet Monroe, because he had a party coming in from California on Monday who was interested in a ranch property like hers. She hadn’t answered her phone, which was unusual for her. He’d left a message on her voice mail but gotten no call back, which was even more unusual. He’d tried Stu, her ranch hand, at his place in town, again with no response. Finally, he dropped her an e-mail, but there had been no reply in his in-box.

  She could have gone out of town, although ordinarily she would tell him if she had any such plans. But even w
hen she did, she usually checked her voice mail. And she was anxious to sell the place, so she’d jump at a chance to show it.

  He had a key, of course, and could show it without her there, but he always liked to have express permission before going into someone else’s home.

  He checked her number and dialed it. Four rings, then voice mail picked up. He listened to the outgoing message, then the beep, and said, “Juliet, this is Howard again. It’s Saturday morning, and this fellow will be here on Monday morning to look at ranch properties. I’ve shown him your listing and he’s very interested, so please get back to me and let me know if it’s okay to bring him around on Monday. Thanks, and have a terrific weekend.”

  People in town sometimes called him “Mr. Terrific,” because he tended to use that word when anyone asked him how he was or how business was or how the family was or how did he like the weather. “Terrific,” he’d say, “just terrific!” He didn’t mind the nickname. It helped instill a positive impression of him, and success in life was about positive impressions. That good old Howard Patrick, good old Mr. Terrific, he’s got a good business going there. He could probably sell my house for me.

  Maybe Juliet had simply forgotten to tell him that she was going away for the weekend. No harm, no foul.

  But then again, something sour was going on in Cedar Wells. Everybody was talking about it, and the whispers had become full-blown exclamations since early yesterday. People were being killed, but nobody knew by whom, or why. And Juliet, living alone on that ranch, would be as vulnerable as anyone. Then there was the trouble with the e-mail and phones.

  Instead of going to the Wheel, he would take his half hour and run over to Juliet’s. Just to put his mind at ease.

  Verify. Never mind trust, just verify. That had been Dad’s advice, Dean argued, and Sam remembered the lessons, too. In a hushed conference, with Harmon Baird waiting outside the motel room door—even there he carried his rifle, but coming through town they had seen other people bearing visible weapons, so no one was likely to pay much attention to that—they had discussed what he’d told them, finally agreeing that they needed to see if he was just blowing smoke or if he knew what he was talking about.