Walking Alone

by Bentley Little

  WALKING ALONE

  Short Stories

  Bentley Little

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  Baltimore, MD

  2018

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  MILK RANCH POINT

  (1984)

  He rode in around sunset, coming over the Rim from the direction of Prescott. He rode straight in his saddle, unmoving, and his horse, a great gray stallion, made its way surefootedly down the steep cliff, following the remnants of the old mule trail.

  Townspeople came out of their homes to see the stranger. It was not often that they had visitors in the fall, particularly this close to snow season, and they were curious. They could see, even from this far away, that the man carried with him some sort of light, and they watched that light zigzag across the face of the Rim in the darkening dusk. The light was hidden for a few moments by the pines as he reached the bottom of the Rim, and they stood still, waiting, until it reappeared at the edge of the meadow in front of the forest.

  The man rode slowly toward the gathered crowd, stopping just beyond the stables at the edge of town. He nodded slightly, his hat dipping. “Hello,” he said.

  The sheriff stepped forward. “Hello, stranger.”

  A thin smile flickered across the man’s features, barely visible in the half-light. “I’m not a stranger,” he said. “Name’s Clay.”

  The sheriff nodded. “All right.” He stepped up to the horse’s side and offered his hand. “I’m Chilton. And this,” he said, gesturing toward the assembled crowd and the smattering of buildings beyond, “is Randall.” He stared up at the man. “You looking to stay the night?”

  He shook his head. “Just passing through.”

  “That’s just as well.” Chilton smiled. “We got no hotel.”

  “I’d appreciate a meal, though, if someone’d be willing to stake me.”

  The sheriff looked around. “I think we can find sump’n for you.”

  The man dismounted, and the crowd dispersed as Chilton led him into town, most of the people heading back to their homes for the night. A few of the men accompanied the sheriff, talking low amongst themselves and eyeing the stranger as they walked toward the mercantile. Clay ignored them, as did the sheriff.

  “We don’t get many visitors this time of year. What brings you out our way?”

  “Heading north,” Clay said simply. “Got family there.”

  “North?” The sheriff looked suddenly toward his fellow townsmen, a few of whom muttered in surprise. One man conferred with his friend then took off down the street as if rushing to tell someone the news. The sheriff tried to laugh and only partially succeeded. “Maybe you’d better stay here for the night. You look like you’ve been travelling quite a while. You could probably use a soft bed.”

  Clay stopped his horse, looking from the sheriff to the men accompanying him. “What’d I say?” he asked. One man turned away, another stared at the ground. “What’s up north?”

  “Nothing,” Chilton said, again trying to laugh.

  “Why don’t you want me to go there?”

  The directness of the question seemed to take them by surprise. “You came in from the west,” one man said non-sequiturially. “We thought you was going east.”

  “Why don’t you want me to go there?”

  The man stepped closer. Clay could see his long beard and longer hair beneath the fur cap and the bundles of pelts. “None of your damn business,” he said. “Just stay away.”

  “What’s out there?”

  “Nothing,” Chilton said.

  “What are you afraid of? Apache? You been having Indian trouble?”

  The sheriff grabbed the reins to Clay’s horse. He looked for a moment as if he were about to say something, then his features collapsed into resignation. “Come on. We have to get you something to eat.” He started walking.

  Clay let the matter drop.

  ****

  They fed him beef— real beef—and some type of grain mush. After, someone brought out a bottle and they passed it around. The talk was harmless—town business mostly—but he saw several of the men exchanging surreptitious glances as they spoke.

  And he noticed that he was the only one making any kind of dent in the bottle.

  He put the whisky down and looked directly at each of the men, glancing from one face to another. There were six here now, all gathered around the lone table at the back of the mercantile, and each of them looked away as he met their eyes.

  He took the lantern from the post behind him and placed it in the middle of the table. “All right,” he said. “I know what you’re trying to do here. I want you to tell me what this is all about. Why don’t you want me to go out tonight?”

  “We’re not—” the sheriff began.

  “Cut the bullshit. What’s going on?”

  One of the men at the far end moved forward in his seat and leaned over the table. “You can go tonight,” he said. “Just don’t follow the trail north. Go east awhile, then head north.”

  “Why?”

  A cold wind blew from between the cracked boards. The lamp flickered, casting strange shadows on the unshaven faces of the townsmen.

  “Stay away from Milk Ranch Point,” the sheriff said softly.

  Clay looked again at each of the men. The fear showed clearly in their faces now, drawing skin tight over cheekbones, causing little rivulets of sweat to drip from under hats onto bearded faces. He adjusted his own hat. “What’s at Milk Ranch Point?”

  The men were silent for a moment. “People have heard things there at night,” the sheriff said finally. “People have…seen things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Don’t you have no respect?” said the man who had spoken earlier. “Can’t you leave well enough alone?”

  The sheriff nodded toward the other men at the table. “Look at them,” he said, and Clay saw the terror in their eyes. “We’re not making this up. We wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t so.”

  “What’s out at Milk Ranch Point?”

  Chilton sighed. “Things happen,” he said slowly. “Sometimes a calf is born lame or born with two heads or…something is wrong with it.”

  Clay nodded. “Yeah.”

  “And you have to put them out of their misery.”

  “Yeah.”

  The sheriff’s hands fidgeted nervously on the table. “Well, sometimes that happens to babies, too.” He reached for the bottle, took a swig. “Sometimes a baby is born…wrong. It don’t have a hand or one leg’s shorter than the other or…”

  “So, you put them out of their misery,” Clay said. “And you bury them at Milk Ranch Point.”

  The sheriff shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’re a God-fearing town. We don’t believe in killing. But…” He paused. “Sometimes there’s a young’un born that…well, you just know he’s not gonna make it. He’s some kinda mistake.”

  “What do you do with someone born like that?”

  “Food here’s kind of scarce,” the sheriff said. “Sometimes we don’t have enough for—”

  “What do you do with them?”

  The sheriff took another drink. Some of the other men looked away.

  Clay nodded. “You leave them there. You leave them up at Milk Ranch Point.”

  “We don’t kill them,” one man said defensively.

  Clay looked at him. “They just die. Of natural causes.”

  Sheriff Chilton nodded.

  Clay stood. “Thanks for the food,” he said. “But I gotta get going. It’s getting late.”r />
  The sheriff pounded his fist on the table. “Damn it! Didn’t you hear what we said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You going east, then?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell do you think—”

  “Look,” Clay said. “What you do in your own town’s none of my business. I don’t care what you do with your unfit babies.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “I also don’t care about your ghost stories. I don’t care if some old woman heard noises up on Milk Ranch Point.”

  “It weren’t no old woman.”

  “I don’t care.” Clay picked up his saddle from the floor next to his chair. “I have to go. Thanks for the grub.”

  The sheriff grabbed his arm. “Now hold on—”

  “Let go of me,” Clay said. His voice was low, threatening. His coat swung open, revealing a holstered gun that glinted in the lantern light.

  The sheriff let go. He watched Clay walk out of the mercantile and saddle up his horse, still feeding out of the trough out front. “Go east,” he said. “Then go north.”

  Clay nodded absently. He pulled a candle from his pack, shoved a long stick into it and lit the candle. He hopped onto his horse and stuck the stick in a special hole drilled into his stirrup. “Goodbye,” he said. “Thanks for everything.”

  He headed past the sheriff’s office, past the blacksmith shop.

  And turned north.

  ****

  The trail started to climb around a half hour out of town. The forest was thicker here than it had been to the west, aspens and oaks mingling with the ever-present pines. The trail wound slowly up a long ridge, switch-backing gradually up the slope, and Clay wondered if this was Milk Ranch Point. He should have asked someone to point it out to him so he’d know when he was there.

  The stallion stopped suddenly, halfway up the ridge, its head cocked and its ears pricked. He patted the animal’s neck. “Hey, boy, what’s wrong?”

  From somewhere above came the cry of an infant.

  Against his will, Clay felt a wave of cold pass through his body. He shivered, giving the horse a quick kick in the side. “Come on, boy. Let’s get a move on.” The horse bucked and balked, but he held firm on the reins and the animal continued its ascent up the trail.

  The moon was well across the sky by the time he reached the top. Clay stopped to give the stallion a rest as the trail leveled off, dismounting. He knew this had to be Milk Ranch Point, but it was not the flat brushless mesa he had expected. He was still in the same heavily wooded forest he’d been travelling through since leaving Randall.

  There was a rustle in the bushes off to the right.

  He reached for the reins as his eyes followed the sound. “Come on, boy,” he said softly. He mounted the horse.

  There was another noise directly below the animal.

  A soft squishing sound.

  He clicked his teeth, and started the stallion slowly forward along the trail. The sounds were everywhere now, all around: low cries, plaintive yelps, quiet rustlings. Suddenly there was a high-pitched screech, and the horse bucked up onto its hind legs, throwing Clay to the ground. He could see even in the dim moonlight that the stallion had stepped on something soft and round—

  —and alive.

  The horse took off the way it had come, galloping as fast as it could back down the winding trail toward Randall. Clay stood, holding his throbbing head, and promptly fell back down.

  The noises were close now and getting closer, low sounds in the underbrush growing louder as things crawled toward him. He groped around on the partially wet ground for his candle. He found it and pulled a match from his shirt pocket, lighting it.

  There were hundreds of them, all moving toward him on disfigured limbs, making strange noises as they emerged from the bushes next to the tall trees. He could see them in the flickering candlelight: blank stares on their idiot faces, malevolent grins on their deformed mouths.

  He felt a wet tickling on his right hand and pulled it back, crying out. A hideously disfigured baby was trying to suckle on the skin of his hand. He attempted to stand up but couldn’t, his equilibrium still off balance, and he grimaced with repulsion as more of the infants attached themselves to his skin, their grotesque lips puckering.

  Clay crawled to his knees and picked up the nearest baby. It had no eyes and a little pig’s snout. He held it next to the candle so he could see, then threw it down. It wiggled back into the bushes.

  He picked up another baby, this one with no legs, and promptly dropped it away from him.

  He began going through them faster, holding them up to the candlelight then tossing them.

  After several minutes, he closed his eyes, breathing deeply. This was harder than he’d thought it would be. He grimaced as he looked at another deformed infant and pulled away in disgust as a different one attached itself to his arm.

  “Your mama’s sorry, Jimmy!” he called. He knew the little things could not understand him, but he kept talking anyway as he continued searching through the infants. It made him feel better. “Don’t worry, son! We’ll find you!”

  And he sat there through the night and the following day.

  SNOW

  (1985)

  Hal Katz awoke early despite the cold, and after showering, shaving and putting on warm clothes, he woke up his wife, shaking her gently and whispering in her ear: “Come on, honey. It’s time to go.” He paid the bill and turned in the room key at the front desk while she got ready, and they were on the road out of Flagstaff by eight.

  It had continued snowing throughout the night, and while the highway was clear, large drifts of snow were piled up along the side of the road. The leafless trees, silhouetted against the morning sun, stood out in sharp contrast to the white blanketed ground. They drove in silence, eating donuts and sipping coffee, looking out at the passing scenery. Suddenly April pointed out the front windshield. “Hey,” she said. “Look at that!”

  He followed her finger but could see nothing. “What?”

  “A snowman.”

  He saw it now. Small, not more than three feet high, it stood on the side of the road, facing their car, one white arm stretched outward in a classic hitchhiking position.

  “That’s cute,” he said.

  They zoomed past.

  She turned to him. “Did you ever make snowmen when you were young?”

  “In Los Angeles?” He laughed.

  “We did.” She stared out the side window, talking softly. “We always tried to make one like Frosty; you know, one that was alive. We tried spells and prayers and magic hats and magic wands, everything we could think of.”

  He smiled at her. “Did it work?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  They drove past Lake Mary and through the one-gas-station-one-restaurant town of Mormon Lake. It was a beautiful day, clear and cold, the sky a brilliant dark baby blue punctuated by billowy white clouds. Ahead, on the Rim, they could see a mirrored flash between the trees as sunlight reflected off the tin roof of Baker Point lookout.

  “Hey,” April said. “Another one.”

  Sure enough, a small snowman sat by the side of the road, facing them. This one was set a little further back than the first and had two arms, both stretched out. As they drove past, they could see two irregularly shaped pieces of plastic set in its face for eyes.

  “Looks like the same person made it,” Hal said. “Same height, same style.”

  “Yeah.”

  They drove for a while in silence, then Hal reached over to put on a CD. Cool jazz. Dave Brubeck. He was soon lightly tapping the edges of the steering wheel in time to the music, and April smiled. “Some people never grow up,” she said.

  He made a face at her. “Die.”

  She shook her head, still smiling. “Like I said…”

  The road curved through a series of low hills covered by an especially thick stand of ponderosas before levelling off and cutting across a wide snow-covere
d meadow. Hal leaned forward, looking through the windshield, as they emerged from the trees. He let out a long low whistle. “Would you look at that?”

  The meadow was covered with hundreds of snowmen.

  Like the two they had seen previously, all of these snowmen were small, under four feet high. Some had faces and some did not, but all had arms. And all of the arms were pointing in different directions. Hal laughed delightedly. “Jesus! Do you know how long it must have taken someone to make all these?”

  “We did that once,” April said quietly. “Made a whole bunch of them. We worked for a week on them. Didn’t make any difference, though.”

  He looked over at her. “What are you mumbling about?”

  “Nothing.” She smiled at him.

  “I want to get a picture of this. Do we have any film left in the camera?”

  April shook her head. “You used it all up at Meteor Crater, remember?”

  “Damn.” He slowed down until they were barely moving and looked out the window at the nearest snowmen. He laughed. “That’s really amazing.”

  He saw something move out of the corner of his eye.

  “What…?”

  A small white shape scurried across the road.

  “Jesus!” He slammed on the brakes. “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “One of those snowmen just ran in front of the car!”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “It was probably just a rabbit.” But she was not laughing at his claim. There was fear in her eyes.

  She saw it, he thought. She saw it, too, but she won’t admit it.

  He put the car into Park, looking around. The only movement on the flat white meadow was the spastic skip-hopping of several small birds far off to their right. His gaze moved along the front of the car, following the path taken by whatever it was he had seen.

  “Come on,” April said. “Let’s go.” Her voice was calm, but he could sense the panic just below the surface. “We need to check into the hotel by one.”

  “Just a minute. I want to see something.”

  He looked around, but there was nothing moving on either side of the road. He rolled down his window to check the spot right next to his door, and stuck his head out.