The Walking

he'd have to deal with if people knew that not only was

John Engstrom's body still extant--but was still walking. Or would be walking if it wasn't strapped down.

Clan had called for help from the coroner in Salt Lake City, from the coroner in Las Vegas, from Dave French, a friend of his who taught pathology at the university here in Cedar City, but no one had been able to offer any advice. They were just as stymied as he was; only he had o actually make a decision and take some action. Finally, out of desperation, he had contacted the FBI and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. The FBI's medical personnel were probably more used to dealing with bizarre deaths than anyone on the planet. And while he had doubts that any diseases were at work here, the CDC was sending someone out anyway. It couldn't hurt to have more than one opinion.

Clan moved away from the autopsy table and busied himself making sure all of the necessary surgical implements were on hand and in place. As embarrassed as he was to admit it, he dreaded coming into this room.

Familiarity had not bred complacency, and after a week of this he was more frightened of the corpse than he had been at the beginning. He kept the radio permanently on, tuned to a country station, because if there were no other noises here, he would hear the sounds of Engstrom's legs: the subtly creaking strain of the straps, the arrhythmic tick of shifting muscles against the metal tabletop.

The lights remained on, too. He'd had more than one nightmare this week of returning to work, opening the exam room door, and flipping on the lights to find the body gone. Or standing right in front of him, freed of restraints, hands outstretched and ready to kill.

Both the CDC doctor and the FBI agent were supposed to have been here five minutes ago. Clan was about to leave and wait in the outer office, unable to find more busywork and unwilling to remain in the same room with that twitch thing cadaver any longer, when the swinging doors to the exam door opened and two men wearing scrubs and surgical masks came walking in.

"Dr. Dyson, I presume?"

Clan nodded, not sure which man was speaking.

"I'm

Dr. Hovarth from the CDC." The shorter man in

I front nodded as he approached the autopsy table. is this Dr. Brigham from the Bureau."

Clan exhaled as an almost physical wave of relief washed over him. He had not realized how much the pressure had been weighing on him. This opportunity to pass the buck and hand over his authority made him feel much lighter.

The three men shook hands, and Clan gave them a quick rundown of what had happened. They'd both read the reports and documents he'd faxed to them, and he skimmed over that portion of the story, but he went into detail about the past week here in the coroner's office, the minor tests he'd performed, the stubborn consistency of the so far unexplained reanimation.

Hovarth wanted to start on the autopsy immediately, and i, Clan deferred to his judgment. He had been reluctant to cut because the corpse.." still seemed like it was alive.

That was the truth. Even surgeons operated on people who were unmoving, under anesthesia, and he himself had never even cut into a live body before. The prospect of opening the chest of a dead man whose legs were still moving made him extremely queasy. "I'll lead,"

Hovarth said. Brigham nodded. I'll assist."

That meant that Clan would only be backup and proba i bly wouldn't have to cut at all, just observe. For that he was grateful.

They washed up, put on gloves, turned on the video cameras and tape recorders. Hovarth moved the instrument tray next to the table and began a running commentary as he first

measured the body, carefully examined its exterior, then picked up a scalpel. The muscle movement did not seem to faze him, and he did not even hesitate as he made the first incision and inserted a catheter.

Clan stood next to the CDC doctor, saying nothing, hearing the muffled thump of blood in his head, feeling the discomfort of sweaty palms against latex gloves.

The blood was drained, but there was no discernible change in the movement of the corpse's legs. Beneath the straps, the muscles still strained in alternating order: left foot, right foot, left foot, right.

When the chest had been opened and Hovarth began removing organs, weighing them and bagging them, those restless limb muscles mindlessly continued to exert themselves. The sight caused chills to surf down Dan's arms. It was the most unnatural thing he had ever seen, and even in this lighted room, surrounded by state of-the-art medical equipment and two other doctors, he was frightened.

"We're going to amputate the legs," Hovarth said finally, after the cranium had been opened, and the brain tagged and bagged. The body was little more than an exposed empty husk, but still the legs worked.

They had a quick discussion as to what would be done with the limbs, who would get to study them. As per procedure, samples of the organs would be taken by both Hovarth and Brigham while the organs themselves would remain frozen in the custody of the coroner's office until such time as all three agencies agreed on disposal, but the legs were different, and Clan quickly made it clear that he thought the best idea would be for the CDC to take one for examination and for the FBI to take the other. After a short back and-forth, Hovarth and Brigham agreed, and Clan found in the supply closet two plastic airtight receptacles big enough to hold Engstrom's legs from femur to phalanges.

Here, finally, the other two doctors exhibited some trepidation.

Hovarth's hand as he installed a new blade on the ' roto-saw was not quite as steady as it should have been, and as Brigham examined the legs and drew cut lines on the tensing skin, he looked uneasy.

Amp rag left leg at groin," Hovarth said into the recorder before starting up the whining saw and drowning out all hope of hearing anything else.

The saw sliced through skin and flesh, muscle and bone. Clan haft expected to hear screaming, to see Engstrom start thrashing around beneath the restraints, or to perhaps break the restraints like Frankenstein and lurch to his feet, but nothing like that happened, and the unwired jaw and un sewn eyes both remained open and dead.

The left leg was severed, Hovarth trimming off the last of the bottom skin.

The leg was still moving.

It was the freakiest thing he'd ever seen, and Dan's first impulse was to cut the amputated limb up into little pieces or burn it in the incinerator. But in his mind he saw little cut-up leg pieces moving independently of each other, still informed by some strange sentience, saw a charred bit of bone wiggling amid ashes.

Unattached to a body, the leg slid out from under its restraints and fell to the floor, where it lay on its side, bending and unbending at the knee, moving itself in a circle on the linoleum as it vainly attempted to walk.

It was his responsibility to place the leg in the receptacle but it took all three of them to subdue the limb, pick it up, and finally lock it in the plastic box. Clan placed the container in the freezer along with the other organs. The leg was still kicking against the side of the plastic, and he hoped to God that freezing would at least slow it down, if not stop it entirely.

He walked back to the autopsy table.

Then they did it all over again.

It was nearly three o'clock, six hours after Hovarth and Brigham had first arrived, that everything was finished, the table scrubbed down, the camera and recorders turned off. Dupes were made of the video and audio cassettes as the three of them retired to Dan's office, had a drink, exchanged paperwork, and discussed the autopsy. Hovarth admitted that he had never seen anything like this before and that he was at a loss as to how to explain the postmortem activity. It was the repetitive nature of the animation, the fact that it was so focused and precise, that Brigham found most intriguing. He had no clue as to how it was occurring, but that specificity implied a reason, a purpose.

Neither man expressed any doubts as to the cause of Engstrom's death-the cancerous tumors were so far advanced and metastasized that they all agreed it was a miracle he had lasted as long as he had--but the cause of his afterlife was beyond speculation. They left having resolved nothing, Hovarth and Brigham both promising to bring to bear the extensive resources of their respective organizations and to schedule a conference call within the week.

The CDC took one leg, the FBI the other. The remainder of the body was his, and it was really and truly dead. As simply as that his problem was solved. Clan typed up an autopsy report and released what was left of John Engstrom to the mortuary specified by the family.

He watched the mortuary attendants wheel out the bagged body-or what was left of it---on a gurney. He recalled the feel of the moving muscles under his palm. He had laughed at the sensation this morning, alone in the exam room, but he could not recall now why he had done so.

He shivered. It wasn't funny.

There was nothing funny about it at all.

It was on his desk Monday morning. Ddivered anonymously, as these things always were.

The name printed on the file sticker was WOLF CANYON, roN. McCormack stared for several moments at the manila folder before opening it. The last time he had received one of these, two years back, it had been to inform him that Todd Goldman, his right-hand man and liaison with local law enforcement on Wolf Canyon, had killed himself.

Wolf Canyon.

He was the one who'd been in charge of the investigation. Or what was officially referred to as the "investigation." For there'd been no real effort to determine what had happened. No one was interested in finding out why the residents of the town had not been evacuated or, indeed, who was responsible. The priority had been to maintain secrecy, to keep the existence of the community quiet and to make damn sure that no one outside---particularly no one from the press---got wind of the fact that the United States government had been not only harboring but actively supporting a community of witches.

The phrase "plausible deniability" had not yet been coined, but the reasoning behind it had been in place for quite some time, and that was their goal: to ensure that if word somehow did leak out about Wolf Canyon, everyone above a certain level in the chain of command could plead ignorance. The fact was, in those early days of the Cold War, a sitting president could not afford to be seen as the patron of a band of godless witches. The heathen commies were bad enough, but supporting a secret society of spell casters here at home, with tax dollars, in the Grand Canyon State no less, would have been grounds for impeachment.

The operation had been a complete success. Not only had no one found out about the witches--not even the men from

the dam project--but neither the press nor the general public had ever learned about the drownings. No one connected with Wolf Canyon had ever spoken publicly, had even leaked enough to bring about congressional hearings, closed door or otherwise. This dam had held.

He himself still had questions. Despite the fact that he'd led the investigation, he had never fully satisfied himself as to whether the drownings had been accidental or intentional. Their true mission had been to hush everything up, not ferret out the truth, and they had followed their assignment to the letter: they had seen the site, examined the bodies, spoken with the workers, and quietly closed the books. It was not inconceivable that someone somewhere within the bowels of the Eisenhower administration had learned of the existence of Wolf Canyon, judged it a political liability, and determined that the town had to be destroyed, its people silenced. It was rather unusual to have two dams built so closely together, and though the reasoning sounded plausible, he could also believe that there had been an ulterior motive, that the decision had been made to neutralize what could have been a political atomic bomb in those Red-baiting times.

Hell, maybe Tricky Dick had even been involved.

So, over the years, he'd put out unofficial feelers, curiosity taking the place of circumspection as he rose through the ranks, letting it be known to trustworthy individuals in the various agencies involved that he was interested in any news related to Wolf Canyon. ,

Now another folder had been delivered, and McCormack sorted through the document copies provided. His mood darkened as he scanned the material. As before, there was nothing concrete, everything was circumstantial, but the connections to Wolf Canyon lent it all an ominousness that would not otherwise be there.

He read one death certificate and autopsy report.

The truth was, he had never really believed in witches. Oh, he had believed that they believed they were witches, but as far as magical powers and mystical potions and all of that hocus-pocus mumbo jumbo, he'd thought it was a load of crap. It was a remnant of the seventeenth century, not something that anyone would take seriously here in the latter half of the twentieth.

At least that was what he'd thought until now.

He was not so sure anymore.

Several weeks ago, Russ Winston, one of the undersecretaries at Interior, had been killed here in D.C." in his own garage, in what had been characterized for the press as an "unusual" manner. In reality, it was far more than that. He had been torn apart, and both his son and grandson had told investigators that the perpetrator was a small creature, a hairy toothy thing that had lain in wait for Winston and had disappeared immediately afterward.

A monster.

Monsters and witches. These were the elements of children's fairy tales, not things that should be taken seriously by a government agency. But the government was taking them seriously and once again was doing everything within its power to shield the public from information that it felt its citizens would not be able to handle.

He had known Russ Winston from Wolf Canyon. He'd interviewed him as part of the investigation. Russ had been one of the shift supervisors, and he'd been sharper than most of the others, more helpful, more observant, which explained why he'd made something of himself in Washington. Over the years they had kept in touch in that superficial way casual acquaintances do, but neither of them had ever talked about Wolf Canyon again, and McCormack now wished that they had. He'd always been under the impression that Russ felt guilty about the drownings, that he'd blamed himself and never really gotten over it. That was one of the reasons

McCormack had never brought it up on the rare occasions that the two of them spoke. But he wondered now if the undersecretary had known more than he'd let on and if his guilt was based on knowledge rather than misplaced blame.

The other casualty was a man from Utah, an accountant who had died of cancer. There was nothing connecting the accountant to Wolf Canyon, but a local coroner had brought in the CDC and the FBI because the man had continued walking even after his death.

Apparently, whoever had left him the folder thought there might be a connection.

He did too, and McCormack perused the provided information, ncluding two newspaper articles, one from a local Utah paper and one from a tabloid. There was a leg, apparently, that was still animate. The Bureau's top men were examining it now. Southern Utah was not that far from Arizona and Wolf Canyon, and it wasn't much of a stretch to think that there might be a relation.

Was this Stuff real?

The Soviets had always been rumored to be studying ESP and psychokinesis and Kirlian photography and all that. If there was any troth to psychic phenomena, perhaps the United States should have followed suit. Maybe they should have let the Pentagon have a crack at Wolf Canyon, used those witches as a resource, instead of just burying all trace of their existence beneath a man-made lake.

But whether as a result of accident or policy, it was. too late now.

He called Greg Rossiter, over at the Bureau. Rossiter had some experience with this paranormal shit, and whether it was true or not, he'd set himself up as an expert. He'd recently obtained black-budget funding to install a new database, cataloging unsolved cases by possible supernatural explanation, which would have made him the laughingstock of the FBI if not for the fact that Rossiter had actually put

to rest a host of unsolved murders dating back decades, proving fairly conclusively that they had all been performed by the same murderer and that that murderer was a vampire who had been hiding out in the Arizona desert. He had been part of the party that had dispatched the monster, and while there'd been no body, there'd been enough circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony to substantiate his claims. Not everyone believed Rossiter's vampire story, but enough of the higher-ups did that he had been promoted out of Phoenix and was now working here in Washington. McCormack knew him from countless seminars and workshops, and though Rossiter was not one of the people to whom he'd put out feelers regarding Wolf Canyon, McCormack thought that it might be time to bring the agent in on this.

Rossiter arrived after lunch, and after a quick informal greeting, McCormack handed over the folder and asked for his take on the information presented. Rossiter sat down and sorted through the documents. He looked up. "I know that area," he said. "Arizona. My old stomping grounds."

"Keep reading."

McCormack stared out the window at the traffic on the street below. The only sound in the office was the muted rush of the ventilation system pumping in heated air and the occasional sound of pages turning as the agent read through the folder.

When Rossiter finally finished, he stood up, and McCormack could tell from the way he began pacing around the room that he was excited.

"What's the background on this? And what's your interest? There are Bureau papers here, so you obviously have some contact feeding you information, but why? And why call me in?" :

McCormack gave him an abbreviated rundown of the "Wolf Canyon Disaster," as they'd been prepared to call it if any information leaked to the press. He explained how the town had been set aside as a community where witches

could avoid persecution, and how, when the town was flooded after completion of the Wolf Canyon Dam, it had not been completely evacuated and sixty-three people had been killed. He'd been with the Justice Department and had been assigned to head the investigation by the Attorney General himself. No news of what occurred had ever leaked out, and he'd closed the investigation after two weeks, ruling what had happened an accident, but there'd been more to that situation than met the eye, and he had retained an interest in it ever since, keeping tabs on Wolf Canyon news for all these years.

"Let me guess," Rossiter said. "You're still curious because you were never allowed to reach any real conclusions. Your job wasn't to investigate, it was to deny complicity, to prepare a report that would exonerate all branches of government from any wrongdoing in connection with those deaths."

McCormack looked at him, said nothing.

"I understand that you can't talk. "that's okay by me. It's probably what's gotten you where you are today. But let me tell you that from what you've told me and from what I read in that folder, that wasn't just some town populated by wackos who thought they could ride broomsticks and consort with the devil. There was something powerful at that place, and it's still viable and it's reaching out." He shook his head. "I know what a lot of the brass thinks of me, I know I'm not exactly everyone's idea of a model agent. But I also know what I' we seen, what I've experienced firsthand. I know what kind of things are out there. It's not a black and-white world we live in, and if the Bureau doesn't get with the program, we're going to find ourselves falling even more behind than we are already. We need to actively investigate incidents like this, not just sweep them under the rug and invent some bullshit explanation that will appease

the powers-that-be. We need to start coming up with strategies to deal with these situations."

"What are you saying?"

"I want to go out there. I know the local law enforcement, and I know the area. As you may or may not know, I made my bones in that part of Arizona, and let me tell you, there are some strange things going on out there. I think I could find out what you want to know."

"That's an excellent idea. In fact, to be honest, it's what

I hoped you'd say. It's why I called you in. I wanted you to look into it."

Rossiter looked at him skeptically. "I need your help, you

"My help? Why?"

"Because you can authorize this. Make a call to the Bureau chief and specifically request that I head a task force or an investigative team.

With someone from Justice asking for it, it'll happen."

McCormack balked. "Why can't you just go on your own? The Bureau's already studying the leg from that accountant. It's an open case. Get yourself assigned to it."

"First of all, I can't just assign myself to cases. They have to be assigned to me. Second of all, I'm not exactly the most respected member of the FBI team at this point. In case you hadn't noticed, despite my documented success, despite what I was told and what I was promised, I am on a very short leash here. I can't exactly write my own ticket." He leaned forward, and McCormack saw excitement mixed with ambition on the younger man's features. 'l'hat's where you come in. I need legitimacy. I need someone who'll go to bat for me.

Someone above reproach. Someone respected and powerful and influential who'll back me on this."

"I don't..."

"You don't what? You don't want to get involved? You are involved.

And if you ever want to find out what really

happened--what's really happening--you'll sponsor me. This is a rare opportunity. In your position, this isn't going to make or break you.

Win, lose, or draw, you'll come out of it the same. You're so close to this that your perceptions arc skewed, but believe me, this isn't the Oklahoma City bombing. This is not a major case. It's a forty-year-old closed investigation in which some of the peripheral participants have recently died. No one'll give a damn if you quietly authorize a new investigation into events after the fact."

" McCormack licked his lips, which were suddenly dry. "I don't know."

"What's not to know? You called me in to ask me about this, and I'm giving you my opinion. You should use your authority to open a new investigation, concurrent with the

Bureau's case, and request that I be in charge."

"I--I can't accept that responsibility."

Rossiter nodded. "I had a feeling you might say that." He tossed the file back on McCormack's desk. "But don't come crying to me if you never learn the truth."

McCormack met his eyes, said nothing.

The agent waited a moment for a response, then started out the door.

"You know where to find me if you change your mind."

McCormack wanted to say something, wanted to stop

Rossiter from leaving, but in his mind he saw the stacked waterlogged bodies of the men and women they'd been able to dredge from the lake.

And he was afraid.

He stared at the door for several minutes after it closed.

Maybe, he decided, he didn't really want to know the

He mined on the paper shredder next to his desk and, picking the folder up off his desk, fed the pages of the file through, one by one.

The world had changed.

Territories were turning into states, and the wild untamed West was being crisscrossed by tracks and trails and roads. In the cities, telephones now allowed friends and relatives to speak across great distances by means of a mechanical device.

People weren't afraid of magic anymore.

Science had made magic commonplace.

William did not like this new world, and when he went into the cities to trade or buy goods, when he traveled to Phoenix or Albuquerque or Salt Lake City, he felt uneasy with the casual acceptance of what before would have elicited gasps of astonishment. Even the former charges of heresy and blasphemy and consorting with the devil seemed preferable to this bored resignation, and he found himself mentally condemning the cheapening of the miraculous.

Science had usurped the role of witches. Men could now perform their own miracles. In Denver, he had heard discussion of a scientist named Darwin who postulated a "surviva/of the fittest," who apparently believed that nature provided what was needed and discarded what was not, "natural selection" determining which animal species survived.

Perhaps he himself had helped ensure the extinction of his own kind by isolating them, by providing a haven of safe shelter. They were no longer needed, no longer performed any useful function. They simply existed, and with out a larger purpose, they had broken away from the main thrust of life on earth, had become a still, dying pond on the side of a great rushing river.

He lay in bed, staring up into the darkness, needing to move his bowels but unwilling to walk out to the privy in this cold. It was at night when these doubts always came to him, and they seemed to be coming more and more frequently.

This was not how he had imagined it would turn out. His intentions had been noble, his motives pure, and in those long ago days when he'd been expelled from the last town and was riding west, searching in vain for a world that did not exist, he had even deceived himself into thinking that he was an important man and had come up with a great idea that would change the lives of his people forever.

Time had put the lie to that, however, and he now regretted that he had ever come to this place, that he had ever attempted to found a town.

That he had ever met Isabella.

Yes. He regretted that most of all. She was the source of his problems, and if he had never met her, everything would have turned out differently.

He rolled onto his side, his muscles strainin and complaining He winced as he struggled to sit up. He had got ten old and feeble. His powers were as strong as ever. If anything, they had increased with age. But his body was wearing down. He could no longer walk without pain, and if he did not weave himself a strengthening spell, his hands shook when he held something even as light as a pen.

Isabella had not changed.

He glanced down at her, lying next to him in the old brass bed. She remained as youthful as ever, her skin as smooth as alabaster, her face still informed with that wild beauty which had so captivated him on the trail outside Cheyenne all those years ago. Asleep, the covers pushed down below

her breasts--round and perfectly formed, exposed to the crisp night air, nipples jutting up proudly--she was still the most amazing-looking woman he had ever seen.

She was not like him, he knew. She was something different, something more.

Something evil.

It had taken him a long time to admit that to himself. Even after she had run off most of his original group, even after the others had died, he had still not wanted to ascribe to her the blame. He loved her. Or thought he did. And with that love came not only an instinctive desire to protect her, but a willful blindness to her failings that prevented him from seeing what had been obvious to so many others.

And when normal people had moved into the region, when she had started the purges and persecutions, when she had built the stakes, he had still refused to acknowledge what was going on, though in the dark private hours he spent alone without her company, he agonized over it all, wondering if the Isabella he saw was the real Isabella or just an idealized image that clouded his view and kept him from the truth.

The last ten years had been hell, as farmers and settlers who came to homestead in the surrounding country were systematically killed or driven off, methodically terrorized, with magic and without, and he had stood by helplessly and ineffectually as Isabella's reign of death spread across the land. Many of the witches went along with this. At least in the beginning. They approved of Isabella's approach, supported it. They and their families had been persecuted for most of their lives, and they relished the opportunity to get back at those who had done so by doing the same, tit for tat. Some did not approve, however, and those dissenters who remained, rather than sneaking away in the middle of the night to take their chances elsewhere, grew increasingly

cowed and silent, intimidated by Isabella's growing autocratic rule.

He had been intimidated, too.

Isabella opened one eye, looked at him, and the lascivious tilt of her eyebrow reminded him of what they had done earlier in the evening, acts his poor body was paying for now. She smiled at him. "Is everything okay, dear?"

He forced himself to smile back and settled onto the pillow.

"Everything is fine."

His perceptions had been slowly changing, each new act of violence eroding his confidence in his wife, but Isabella's true nature was not brought home to him until the next day.

He spent the morning alone in the house, as he too often did these days, but when Isabella did not show up to make his lunch, and when another hour, and another, passed without any sign from her, he decided to go out and search. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, and while he still could not read Isabella even after all these years, his hunches had never failed him.

She was not in town, not in the bar or the mercantile or the library or the haberdashery. He did not sense acknowledgment of her among any of the houses in town, and he saddled up his horse, strengthened his tired body with a spell, and headed out on the road north.

He found her up the canyon, near the mine's abandoned first shaft, playfully disemboweling a small girl with a long serrated knife. The girl was completely silent, either shocked into soundless ness by the horror of her predicament or rendered mute by magic, and only the wild thrashing and gyrations of her mutilated body bespoke the unbearable physical agony to which she was being subjected. It had been some time since a raid had been conducted against a settler, and older scars on the girl's face and legs led him to believe that

Isabella had been keeping this child alive for some time to use as her plaything.

A baby girl.

Isabella turned to look at him, smiled, and pulled out the blood's heart, biting into it. The thrashing stopped.

Until this point he had always been able to make excuses for her. But the sight of her joyously playing with this innocent child shocked him.

She was not merely a witch overzeaiously protecting herself and her people from possible harm. She was a monster.

Something evil.

He realized now what he should have realized long before: that she was the one who had killed Jeb and drained his body.

She was the vampyr.

Except she was not exactly a vampyr. He had read up on such things in the aftermath of his friend's death, and aside from the fact that she did not age and apparently had the ability to drain fluids from a body, she did not possess any other vampyric charactdristics. She did not need blood for sustenance, nor was she incapacitated by the day and invigorated by the night. She had no fear of crucifixes, and she loved garlic.

No, Isabella was something else, and what disturbed him most was the knowledge that no matter how long they'd been together, she was a complete mystery to him.

As far as he knew, she was the only one. In all their years together, she had never made mention of missing any people from her past--aside from that story about the brothel in Kansas City, which he had never believed. She'd never appeared to be homesick for a family or any other community, had never indicated that she was waiting for someone else to show up.

He thought of the monster he and Jeb had found in the canyons. \020He thought of the Bad Lands.

Maybe she was the last of a dying breed. Maybe the beings that had populated this country before the coming of men had become extinct and she was the only one left, surviving by her wits.

Darwin again.

Everything seemed to come back to Darwin these days. If he had had the power to go against her, he would have killed her there-on the spot. He would have stopped her heart or melted her down or set her ablaze, but he did not have her strength, had never had her strength, and she knew it. She dropped the small broken body on the rocks, and he turned away from the mine, sickened, galloping back the way he'd come. He returned alone to the town, holing up in the house.

Isabella came back many hours later, clean, fresh, and visibly happy.

They said nothing to each other about their encounter, and he knew that she was counting on him not to take any action.

They did not speak during supper or after.

He went to bed alone.

Once again he awoke in the middle of the cold night with a desperate need to relieve himself. Although he had gone to sleep alone, Isabella had in the interim crawled into bed with him, and her head lay on the pillow next to his. One of her hands gently cupped his genitals. He sat up, looked down at her, and the expression of perverse contentment on her face twisted his guts into a knot. Originally, he had not intended to do anything about what had happened. Upon returning home, a sort of moral paralysis had descended upon him. But now, thinking about what she'd done what THEY'D done

--and seeing her asleep in bed like this, her guard down, vulnerable, he suddenly had the strength to do what needed to be done.

He killed her as she slept.

He killed her, but she did not die.

He put the pillow over her head, held it there, and when he had done so until his arms were aching, he pulled the pillow up.

She was still breathing, still asleep.

And she was smiling.

The chill he felt was not from the outside air seeping in between the cracks of the windowsills, nor from the rheumatism that had permanently settled in his bones. He backed away from the bed, his hands shaking, his mouth dry. He kept waiting for her to sit up, to open her eyes, to acknowledge the attempt he'd made on her life and retaliate in some way. But she remained unmoving, asleep, and only that sly smile on her face let him know that she was aware of what he'd done..

He placed a quick spell on the bed and everything in it, a binding spell, and he rushed around the room looking for a weapon, determined to go through with what he'd decided.

He used her own knife to cut off her head, the long serrated one with which she'd disemboweled the girl. Blood spurted, flowed He stemmed it with toad powder, he separated the head from the body, but still she lived. The eyes blinked open; the arms moved up to casually scratch her disassociated cheek.

She was playing with him, he realized.

She looked at him and shook her head, the unconnected head rocking back and forth on the pillow, its raggedly severed veins flopping from the open neck like live red worms.

He was covered with blood, as were the bedsheets, as were the blankets, as was the floor He had never been so frightened in his life, and it was the knowledge in her eyes that was the most unnerving. For he had intended to kill her quickly and cleanly so that she would not know what happened to her, so she would not be aware of his betrayal.

But it had not worked out that way, and her eyes remained wide and seeing, watching each of his awkward fumbling attempts to murder her.

Knowing that she was aware of what he was doing filled him with a strange and terrible dread, a terror unlike any he had known before.

With a cry he grabbed the edge of the pillow and yanked it, tossing her head on the floor. He sliced her body in half, said a quick and dirty spell, then stumbled out of the house, breathing deeply, trying to fill his tired old lungs with the clean freshness of cold night air and to move the taste and smell of blood from his mouth and nos.

He had planned to keep her death a sret, at least for a little while, and then attribute it to natural causes. But the disruption in power must have ben sensed because a dozen people were standing outside his fence, dressed in nightcaps and bedclothes. He scanned the faces of those present, pecting to confront the wrath of those who had gone along with her purges. But what he saw instead filled his heart with joy. Relief. Gratitude.

They were glad she was gone, thankful that he had killed her.

He staggered down first steps, through the small yard, out the gate, and into the arms of Irma Keyhom and Susan Johnson.

By the time he reached them, his eyes were so full of tears that he could not even see.

They did not wait for morning. Several of the men accompanied him back into the house.

Matthew, Joshua, Cletus, and Russell carried out the two halves of the body, chanting spells to ward off malevolence, spells to protect themselves. William carried her head, have thing dusted it with invested bone meal in order to render it

inanimate, and though his emotions were churning, he had no doubt that he had done the right thing.

By this time most of the town had gathered out front, and they followed silently as the men carried what was left of Isabella up Main Street and out into the wilds of the canyon. The road became a wagon trail, then a horse path as it led farther into the darkness, farther from town.

William felt as though he should explain what he'd done and why, but he did not know what to say, and the truth was that words did not seem to be needed. The people of the town understood somehow, and he sensed nothing but support when he scanned the crowd.

They continued into the darkness.

-The cave was up the canyon in the marshy area by the ferns.

He had intended to entomb her there from the beginning. The cave was far from town but still in Wolf Canyon, and it was remote enough that her body would probably never be discovered. His intention was not to keep her corpse from harm, but to keep her from harming others. He had no faith that she was rendered completely disabled by death, that her power had died with her body, and he wanted to make sure that he did everything he could to ensure her permanent incapacitation.

Leading the way, he slogged through the muck and weeds that adjoined this particularly slow-moving section of the river. Underneath an overhang of rock on which grew clumps of green fern shaded from the sun and fed by a trickling spring located somewhere at the top of the cliff, the cave entrance yawned, a low, narrow opening in the rock that disguised a much larger chamber inside. One by one they entered and someone conjured a sand fire for light.

"We will leave her here," William said. "Place the halves of her body at opposite ends."

He felt movement in his hands, a repugnant unnatural

squirming that startled him into dropping her head. It hit the powdered dirt with a quiet thud, rolling over until the blank staring eyes were looking up. He'd been half expecting something like this, but it still took him by surprise. He stared down at the head, not wanting to pick it up again, afraid to touch it. The eyes blinked, the cheek muscles twitched, and he knew that neither bone meal nor spells were strong enough to block her will.

He backed up a step. The men carrying the halves of her body had dropped them at the opposite sides of the cave, and they had joined the rest of the people near the fire. All eyes were on him. William heard a whisper, saw Isabella's mouth move. Her eyes shifted to look at him, then took in the rest of the crowd. The temperature suddenly dropped, a chilling of the air that was strong enough to dim the fire.

Despite the absence of a connected body and lungs, Isabella's voice issued loud and clear from between the moving lips of the severed head:

'Thou shalt not leave when the waters come. I curse thee. I curse thee and thy descendants, and I shall feed upon thy souls to avenge my death. And woe to anyone who cometh between us, woe to those who bringeth the waters..."

She continued to talk, a litany of dark promises that seemed to have no end. William shivered. It was not the curse itself that sent a chill down his spine. It was the words she used, the formality of her speech and the archaic vocabulary. It made him realize emotionally what he had until this point understood only intellectually: she was different, she was not like them. She was far older than he, and stranger in her makeup than any of them could have possibly imagined.

"... And when I am reborn from the lives of thee and thy descendants, I shall be stronger than thou could st have

ever imagined. Armies will bow before me. As it was foretold, so shall it be..."

Marie and Ingrid and several of the others were already backing out of the cave, attempting to leave without drawing attention to themselves.

The utter silence of all who witnessed this scene told him better than could any words the fear they felt, the impact Isabella's curse was having upon them.

William looked back at the others, then reached down, picked up a rock, and smashed her head.

The voice stopped, and the only sounds in the cave were the echoes of her final words. The large chunk of sandstone he had dropped completely covered her face, but the veins of her neck protruded from one end and her wild hair ringed the rock's upper third. Blood was spreading outwards-ping into the sand, bubbling down. William said a few words, increasing the intensity of the fire. Using all of the knowledge and skill he had gained in his nearly seven decades on earth, he bound her to this place, warding off intervention from others, containing what eve self was left of her. "Get out," he ordered everyone. "Leave. Wait for me by the river."

He rejoined them twenty minutes later, drained and dizzy. They sealed the tomb, all of them working together to cause a landslide that covered the cave entrance, and by the time the sky above them was lightening with the dawn, they had left the cave behind and were trudging back to town.

In the years left to him, he tried to put the incident behind him, tried to avoid thinking about Isabella at all, but that was impossible.

She was too entwined with his life, too tied up in the history of this place, and even avoidance of those

locations most associated with Isabella necessitated thinking about her.

Was her spirit still here, in the canyon, in the house she had died? He did not know because he made no effort to contact her. Nor, to his knowledge, did anyone else. Such contact could be dangerous, as they were too well aware, and even in Wolf Canyon the magic that had been practiced so freely began to be utilized less and less as they adopted prohibitions on themselves in an attempt to avoid a repetition of the recent past.

The town faded. Several people left, and no new citizens arrived to take their place. The days of persecution seemed to be gone. Wolf Canyon had outlived its most practical purpose. Looking at it now, looking at it objectively, he saw that it was fear that had brought them together in the first place, fear that had enabled them to forge some semblance of society in this wilderness, not a sense of community, not genuine camaraderie. His dream of a utopian village where those of their kind could live peacefully and happily with each other, away from the evil and corruption of so-called civilization, had been only that--a dream. The foolish wishes of an arrogant and overreaching young man.

Still, some stayed on, and many of them had kids, and gradually the flight was stemmed, the population leveled off.

Others settled into the surrounding countryside, hard scrabble ranchers and family farmers who were not driven off or terrorized but were greeted as neighbors. Whether or not these new people were aware of the fact that Wolf Canyon was a town populated by witches, William had no way of knowing. He had given up all claim to authority after killing and entombing Isabella, had not even voted when the town chose its first democratically elected mayor and sheriff.

He had lived for too long, and when his health began to

seriously fail, he felt only a profound sense of relief. He was more than ready to go.

On his deathbed, he had a vision, a glimpse of the future, something that Isabella had claimed to experience quite often but that had never before come to him. There was no one by his bedside. One of the town's women checked in on him every day, brought him meals in the morning, but he had made it clear that he needed no companionship, that he wanted to be left in peace.

The vision was of a man-made lake, with a wall of smooth stone that rose hundreds of feet to the top of the canyon walls and reined in the waters.

He understood now the import of Isabella's curse. For the town was buffed beneath the waters and he knew that the witches down there, were doomed, drowned, fated never to leave thanks to her imprecation.

Several families had left since Isabella's death, and he knew that they had all assumed this invalidated her curse, since she had decreed that no one would be allowed to leave. But meanings were often elude: sive, and he realized now that she had made sure whoever remained in Wolf Canyon at the time this lake was created would be killed.

He wanted to let the others know, wanted to evacuate the town and place a spell of avoidance around it that would discourage anyone from living here ever again so that Isabella plans could never come to fruition.

But he could tell no one.

His breath caught in his throat. He started to choke, stopped breathing.

He died alone.

And when he left life behind and crossed over to the other side... She was waiting.

Cedar City was located at the foot of a series of green mountains. Or mesas. He couldn't tell which, with the low clouds planing off the tops to a uniform flatness. It was colder than in California and drizzly, and the high desert vegetation was all a dark blackish green that suited the day.

Miles stepped off the small shuttle plane and ran through the mist to the small building serving as the airport terminal. As he should have expected, no rental car was waiting for him, and he called Avis to confirm that one had been re served. He had no choice but to wait at the airport until his vehicle was delivered, and he sat down on one of the stained uncomfortable chairs facing the window. He pulled out the piece of paper on which he'd written the two addresses he'd found last night and unfolded the street map of Cedar City the woman at the counter had given him. The city was small, the streets easily found, and he had no choice but to fold up the map and stare out at the drizzle as he waited for his car.

Ten minutes later, a red Pontiac Grand Am pulled up to the curb in front of the airport door, followed by a beat-up pickup. The bald, sad-looking man who emerged from the Grand Am had on a white shirt and an Avis name tag, and Miles quickly gathered up his map and briefcase and hurried outside. There was a form to sign, the sad man took down his driver's license and credit card number, then gave Miles the key to the car and ran back to the pickup, hop ping in. The Wuck roared off, splashing water, and Miles

tossed his briefcase on the passenger seat and headed downtown.

He hit it on the first try.

Janet Engstrom was a haggard-looking woman who was probably much younger than she seemed. She lived alone in the front apartment of a single-story complex across the street from the college. Perhaps he should have called In'st, but since he had not, he simply walked up and rang the bell.

"Are you Janet.Engstrom?" he asked the woman who answered the door.

She nodded warily. "Yes." I'd like to talk to you about your uncle."

A shadow passed over her face. "My uncle's dead. I'm

SO "

She started to close the door.

"I know. That's why I'm here."

Something in his voice must have caught her attention, because she paused.

"His body's missing, isn't it?"

"No." "

"No?"

"We buried him on Sunday."

Still, she did not close the door completely, and Miles took that as a good sign.

"Can I come in? I'd really like to talk to you."

"About what?"

"Your uncle. I've come all the way from Los Angeles."

"You're not a reporter?"

"No," he assured her quickly. "Nothing like that. I just want to... talk."

"You know," she said matter-of factly

He nodded.

She met his eyes for a second, then glanced away and stepped aside to allow him entrance. The interior of the apartment looked simultaneously as though it had been lived in

for quite some time and as though she had never fully unpacked after moving.

She sat down hard on the couch. The features on her face remained immobile, cemented into place, but Miles saw tears welling in her eyes.

"You know," she said again.

"Yeah." He sat down next to her. "I know."

The first tear escaped from the invisible barrier that had been holding it back, and a slew of others followed, rolling out from beneath her long lashes and streaming down the sides of her face.-He reached over to wipe them away, but she pulled back and stemmed the tide herself, using a thin, graceful finger to clear her cheeks.

"Are you okay?"

She nodded, a movement that started another cascade of tears. "It's... it's just that it's been so long since I had someone I could talk to, since..." She looked up at him, tried to smile. "You saw the Insider article?"

"That's how I found you. I'm a private investigator."

Her body tensed, and she moved back on the couch, away from him.

"No, that's my job he explained quickly. that is what I do. It's not why I'm here."

"Why are you here?"

"I want to find out about your uncle. I want to find out about my dad." He took a deep breath. "The same thing happened to my father."

The expression on her face was complex, a look that was at once pained and relieved, frightened and sympathetic, angry and understanding. "I knew you knew, and I thought there was something personal about it. I could tell. That's why I let you in. I had a feeling about you." She looked at him, cleared her throat. "So what happened? Your dad died?"

"Yeah." Miles nodded. "He had a stroke in November, just fell over in the supermarket. They said he would never fully recover, but I was led to believe that he could still live

for quite a while--just in sort of a diminished state. So I hired a home health-care nurse, who basically took care of him when I was at work, administered his medications and all that, did physical therapy." He was silent for a moment, thinking. "It happened out of the blue. I came home from work one day and the nurse was gone. She'd barricaded the door of my father's room with furniture, and he was inside.

Walking." "

"In a circle?"

"Yeah. Around the perimeter of the bedroom. And the bed and dresser and stuff was moved into the middle of the room. Not because he'd pushed it there but because he'd bumped into it, forced it over while he walked. I could see the marks on his body where he'd hit the edges of the fur "So what happened after that? What did you do?" "I called the coroner's office. A friend of mine works there. He eventually stopped the walking with some kind of muscle relaxant and took my... took the body. He wanted to study it, find out what was causing my dad to keep moving even though he was dead. They kept him at the morgue, kept his body filled with drugs and, I think, strapped down, but well, one day he disappeared. The coroner was looking for him, I was looking for him, the police were looking for him, and we all assumed that he'd walked away, but we couldn't find him. Couldn't find a single trace of him.

"Then yesterday I saw the article in the Insider. And here

Janet's reaction was a non-reaction. She seemed to shut down at the conclusion of his story, and when it was clear that she wouldn't be asking any questions and that she wasn't planning to say anything herself, he prodded her. "Your turn."

"It's a long story."

He smiled. "I've got time."

She nodded solemnly. "Okay." She licked her lips. "You want something to drink? Water? Coke? Wine?"

He shook his head.

"I think I need a drink first." She stood, walked into the kitchen, emerged a few moments later with a stemmed glass filled with red wine.

She sat down again, then cleared her throat and took a loud swallow.

He waited patiently.

"I loved my Uncle John," she said finally. She swirled the wine in her glass, looked down at it. "He started walking before he died, actually. You probably read in the article that he had cancer, and he did, so I guess he was like your dad in that he was bedridden and had a lingering illness. Maybe that had something to do with what happened to them. I don't know. But three days before he died, he started walking. Around his room, like your dad. He hadn't been able to get out of his bed or move at all, really, for the past week, and then all of a sudden he was pacing like a lunatic." She paused, took another sip of wine. Then another here was something weird about it, too.

About his movements, I mean. It was almost like he was a puppet or a robot---"

"Like something was controlling him," Miles said. "Exactly."

"I thought these thing."

"Well, this went on for three days, and I didn't know what to do. I wanted to tell someone, but I didn't know who to tell, and I was scared. Then I came home from work on the third day, and he was outside, walking around the house, wearing only his old pajama bottoms.

Some of the neighborhood kids were throwing things at him, mud and stuff, and I chased them off, then ran around the back of the house. I thought he was delirious, and I wanted to get him back

inside." She shivered, thinking about it, and finished her glass of wine. that's when I found out he was dead."

Miles nodded. He understood completely. The memory of touching his father's cold rubbery skin was one that would remain with him for the rest of his life.

Janet shrugged. 'that it, really. The police came, and the coroner.

They took him away, did an autopsy, and... that's all."

He smiled gently. "See? That wasn't such a long story."

She smiled hesitantly in return. "I gave you the abridged version."

Miles thought for a moment. "So he didn't keep walking after they took him away?"

"I guess not." She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "I mean, I didn't really ask. I suppose I didn't want to know. He was still moving when they took him. It took several policemen -several big policemen--to capture him and strap him down in one of those what do you call them? Not a stretcher but..."

"Gurney ?"

"Yeah. They strapped him to a gurney and that's the last he'd stopped walking the time ybffburied him." She nodded.

"Was it an open casket? Did you see him?"

]anet breathed deeply. "We had him cremated so... so he wouldn't come back. We just buried his ashes."

"Are you sure it was him?" Miles prodded gently. "I mean, you didn't actually see his body after the autopsy?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. They said.." they said we wouldn't want to see him. They said, well, that there wasn't much left that was identifiable."

"Who suggested that he be cremated? Was that your idea?"

"No," she admitted. "It was suggested by the mortuary. But, under the circumstances, I thought it was a good plan.

I'd already had nightmares of my uncle digging his way out of a grave and walking through the city to find me. Cremating him would take care of that possibility." She met Miles' eyes. "You think he walked away, like your dad, and they pawned off some other body on me?"

He shrugged. "It's a possibility. I'm not saying it happened, but I'd feel a lot more secure about it if you'd actually seen his body to make sure it had stopped moving."

There was an awkward pause. Janet stood. 'q need another drink. You want something.

"Maybe some water," Miles said.

She returned a few moments later with a tumbler of water and her refilled wineglass. "You know," she said, handing him his drink,

"there's one thing that I've been thinking about. Something that stuck in my mind."

"What?"

"His last words. Or the last words he spoke to me. I was feeding him his dinner. He could barely talk at that point, his voice was just a whisper, and I had to lean close to hear him. After that, about an hour or so after I cleaned him up, he started walking. And he never spoke again."

"What'd he say? what'd he tell you?"

'The last thing he said, before he started walking, was, "She's here."

"

" "She'? Who's 'she'? .... "I don't know. Maybe he was just delirious, seeing things that weren't there."

"But you don't think so?" She looked at him. "No." She's here.

Eeeee-eeear = Miles recalled the noises his father had made in the hospital, the desperate, incomprehensible pleas that had been so earnestly addressed to him. She's here. Was that what Bob had been trying to say?

"I've thought about it a million times since they took him away. I've gone over it in my mind, but it doesn't make any sense to me. I don't understand it. I know he was trying to tell me something, but I have no idea what it was. There certainly wasn't anyone else in the room with us, and no woman has shown up since then, unless you count the Insider photographer. I've been waiting, hoping--or maybe not hoping--that whatever he meant would be revealed to me, but.." nothing."

She's here.

There was something ominous about the phrase, and Miles gulped down his water. He was pretty sure that that was what his father had been trying to say, and he recalled the panicked urgency of Bob's stroke-slurred voice. His father had been afraid.

"Did your uncle seem, well, scared when he told you that?"

Janet nodded. 'that why I haven't been able to forget it, why I keep going over it in my mind. I can't help feeling that it had something to do with his.." walking."

The homeless woman in the mall, too, had warned him of a "she"

She's going after the ddnin builders, too.

He wanted to understand, but nothing made sense to him, no facts he could put together, no conjecture he could make that would provide an identity for this woman?... girl? witch? goddess?

"Did your uncle leave anything behind?" he asked Janet

"Any diaries? Any item that might give us some clue?" "Like what?"

"Like witchcraft paraphernalia."

She stared at him. "How did you know?"

He smiled wryly. "I found some stuff in my dad's safety deposit box. I have no idea what it's for or how to use it, but I could tell that it was supposed to be used for magic.

There was a dried, flat frog, a bunch of powders, some roots in bottles." He paused. "And a necklace made out of teeth. Human teeth."

"My uncle had a box in his closet. I looked through it, but it scared me, so I put it in a plastic garbage sack and haven't looked at it since. It's in my hall closet. You want to check it out?"

Miles shook his head. "Maybe later."

"There's no necklace, but there is some kind of arm bone with feathers attached to it. And, like you said, a bunch of powders and potions, I guess."

"No diary, though, huh? No book?"

"My uncle wasn't one for keeping diaries."

"Neither was my dad."

They looked glumly at each other.

"Do you know anything about this witchcraft stuff? Did your uncle ever talk to you about it? Do you remember... anything?"

She shook her head slowly. "What about your parents?" "Dead."

"Any other relatives?"

Yeah, but they're pretty distant. I mean, I was the one closest to him. If he was going to tell anybody, he would have told me? "Well, what about friends.

"I don't know."

"Where did he work? when and where was he born? If I have some background information, I can check up on him, build a profile from there."

"I know he was born in Arizona."

"Arizona?"

"A place called Wolf Canyon."

A shiver feather-tickled the back of his neck, moved down his back, spread into his arms.

Wolf Canyon. It was all circling back to that.

Miles realized that he did not know where his father had been born, and while he had never thought of it before, he understood now how strange that was. Would Bonnie know?

He was tempted to call his sister and find out, but he had a feeling he already knew what the answer was.

He played a hunch. "Did your uncle say anything about dreams he was having before he died? Recurring dreams about"--a tidal wave and the end of the world?"

Miles nodded slowly. "Yeah."

"I've been having dreams, too, he died. Not a tidal wave, exactly, but water.

"Me, too," Miles mentioned. "What's it mean? What is it? Janet sounded as though she were about to cry.

"I don't know, but there's more to come." He motioned toward her empty glass. "You might want to get yourself another drink. I have a lot of things to tell you."

He started from the beginning. Marina Lewis and her father. Montgomery Jones and the other men on the list.

Brodsky and Hec Tibbert. The homeless old woman in the mall. Liana on the fence.

And, at the hub of all this activity, Wolf Canyon.

When he was through, they were silent for a moment, staring at each other.

"So," she said slowly. "This town, Wolf Canyon. It was--"

"---covered by a lake."

"You think that's where your father walked to?"

Miles nodded. "I'd bet on it. And your uncle too if he escaped and they lied to you about it."

"But why?"

He took a deep breath. "I don't know. Let's go there and find out."

He called Claire at work to tell her what he'd learned and to let her know that he was going to Wolf Canyon. She was not happy to hear it, and when he said he was going with a woman whose uncle had met the same fate as his father, he could feel the tension over the phone. He thought of asking her to come along, but he didn't really want her to and he kept his mouth shut. She wasn't involved in this, not directly, not by blood blood and he wanted to keep her as far away from Wolf Canyon as possible. Whatever-was out there was dangerous, and he would not be able to live with himself if, through negligence or selfishness or stupidity, he allowed something to happen to her.

"What are you going to do when you get there?" Claire asked. "Just stand there and stare at the lake? Wait for your ESP to kick in and suddenly explain everything?"

"I don't know," he admitted, and he realized that something deeper might be at work here. Claire was right. He had no plan and, logically, no reason to visit Wolf Canyon.

There was nothing he could learn empirically from viewing the site where the town was buried. But the impulse to go was strong, and what he had taken for an idea logically conceived was really closer to an imposed thought, an illogical plan that had grown from a casual notion to a definite desire. He still felt as though he had come up with the idea himself, but he also felt like a piece of metal being drawn to a magnet against its will.

"why does this woman have to go with you?" "I don't know," he said again. And he didn't. Claire was silent.

"Trust me on this," he told her. "I don't know what all is

happening, but..." The words trailed off as he realized that he didn't know what he wanted to say.

""But what?"

It feels right," he said finally. "I may not know what I'm doing or why, but I know that it's what I'm supposed to be doing."

"You're scaring me."

"I'm scaring myself."

Claire breathed deeply, trying to calm down, a stat icky sound that only emphasized how far away she was right now. "You really think that Bob went there?"

"Yeah!

What are you going to do if you find him?"

"I don't know."

"Shouldn't you have some sort of plan? What if? She sighed. "Shit.

Who knows how to deal with something like this? If someone had told me a month ago that we'd be back together and some kind of curse was killing off everyone connected to a dam in Arizona where your zombie father was headed... I mean, Jesus Christ, Miles. What have you gotten yourself into here.

"I didn't get myself into anything. It came to me. I didn't want it to happen. I didn't ask for it."

"I know, but how are you going to... right it? What are you going to do to get your father to stop walking around and die? With a vampire you put a stake through its heart. With a werewolf you shoot it with a silver bullet. But there isn't anything concrete like that here.

There's just a ... a big jumbled mess, and there's no way to sort it out, and there's only you and some woman against... God knows what."

"I know," he told her. "But I have to find out. I can't make a plan because I don't know what I don't know. I just have to investigate and roll with whatever comes."

A welcome wry edge came into her voice. "Part of you is enjoying this, though. Admit it, Miles. You always secretly dreamed of some big exotic movie-like case that you could crack."

"I'm too scared to enjoy it. BUt you're right. Maybe that keeps me going, keeps me from giving up."

"Just be careful," she said softly. "I don't want anything to happen to you. I love you."

"I love you, too. And I'm always careful." "Did you bring your cell phone?" "No. Damn. I forgot."

"Call me anyway when you get there. Use a pay phone. I'll probably be home by then, but if not, call this number.

Make sure you call me either way."

"I will," he promised.

"I love you," she said again.

"Me, too."

They said their good-byes and hung up. The sound of the handset dropping into its cradle with a quiet plastic clap had a note of finality to it.

He turned away to see Janet carrying a box out from the hallway and setting it down on the coffee table.

They looked at each other, met each other's eyes.

Janet glanced down at the box. "It's my uncle's magic stuff. Should

I?

"Bring it," Miles said. "Who knoWs what we'll need?"

Claire took off work early, stopped off to buy some groceries, then headed straight home. She always kept the drapes in the house closed when she was gone, and she put the twin sacks of groceries on the kitchen counter, then opened the front shades to let in some light.

And nearly jumped out of her skin.

She let out an involuntary cry, lurching back and stumbling into the couch. The homeless woman standing next to

the window and peering in at her was grinning crazily, both palms pressed flat against the glass. She licked the window, leaving a trail of blurred spittle.

Claire knew instantly who this was--the woman Miles had met at the mall before Christmas--and that frightened her far more than if it had just been some random loony who had wandered into her yard. How the woman had found her house she did not know, but she had no doubt that it was intentional, and that added another layer of fear onto what she already felt. She had not seen the old lady while walking in. Had she merely been unobservant, or had the woman been hiding from her, crouching in the bushes?

She refused to let herself be intimidated. Despite her embarrassing first reaction, she gathered up her dignity and strode purposefully out of the house, confronting the woman on the front lawn. "Who are you and what are you doing on my property?" Her voice, thank God, carried exactly the edge of authority she'd intended.

"He's gone there, hasn't he?"

"Who? Who's gone where?"

"Bob's son. He's gone to Wolf Canyon."

Claire's mouth felt dry. She was in way over her head. She stared into a wrinkled, dirty face that seemed both blank and crafty.

Whatever this was, it was far beyond her comprehension, and the scope and range of a creature or demon or power that could reanimate Bob's corpse and the dead body of a man in Utah, kill dam workers across the country and lead this homeless woman to her house left Claire feeling small and helpless and overwhelmed. She was terrified for Miles even more than for herself, and although every instinct in her body was telling her to run, to lock herself inside the house and dial 9-1-1, she stood her ground. "Who are you?" she asked again.

"May. I'm here to help you." She leaned forward confidentially. "I'm one, too. Like Bob."

Nothing was making any sense. Either she was getting stupid in her old age, unable to make those large connective leaps necessary to communicate for the first time with people she did not know, or the elements of this conversation were so far off the scale that making coherent sense of them without a shared blueprint was pretty much impossible. "You're one of what like Bob?" she asked.

"A witch."

Now it was making more sense.

She still could not completely reconcile Miles' ordinary down-to-earth father with a mystical power-wielding sorcerer, but it explained the collection of powders and nostrums, the mystery of his walking dead body. And if she was going to buy into this witchcraft thing, she might as well take it all the way and subscribe to the notions of good magic and bad magic; white magic and black magic.

Bob would obviously have been a good witch.

But why had he never told this to Miles... or anyone else, for that matter? And how had he kept it a secret all those years? In her mind, she saw him waiting until his children were asleep, then chanting paeans to Satan.

No. That was not Bob.

She didn't really know Bob, though. If this woman was telling the truth--and Claire thought she was--none of them had really known him.

"Is he at the lake?" May asked. Claire found herself nodding.

"He won't know what to do by himself. Bob never taught him."

"Never taught him what?"

May flipped up her dirty dress, grinned. "I'm not wearing any panties!"

Claire sighed. Great. Like too many homeless people, this woman obviously had some serious mental problems, and she was going to have to sift through the old lady's words

to determine what was truth and what was delusion--not an easy thing to do when the subject was the supernatural. "Miles--" Claire began.

May snapped her fingers. "That's his name! Miles!" "Miles thinks his father walked to Wolf Canyon. His father is dead, but he's still walking around and he escaped from the morgue several weeks ago."

"He's going back. They all go back when they die. Or I should say, we all go back when we die. It's part of her curse."

"Whose curse?"

The old woman cackled. Yeletype firetrap. Teletype firetrap.

Buttfuck Cornelius of love!"

Jesus Christ.

'qsabella," May said, suddenly lucid once again. "She cursed us after she was killed, before she was buried." The old lady smiled at Claire.

"Your house is pretty. Can I go in?

"No." She was starting to get a headache.

"Isabella promised to come back."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. Could you start from the beginning? Who are you? Who is Isabella? what the hell does any of this have to do with Bob and

Mi"

A small wind kicked up, a surprisingly localized gust that swirled about her yard, kicking up leaves and picking up dirt, but leaving the rest of the street and the other yards untouched. May stood at the center of the miniature tempest, her hair blowing wildly, as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. It occurred to Claire that she was causing this, that it was an attempt on the old woman's part to get Claire to invite her inside the house. The wind coalesced into a funnel-like dust devil, and pushed its way through a hedge and into the yard next door. She watched it retreat down the street. A Land Rover drove by, oblivious.

Despite the increased dishevelment of her appearance, May seemed suddenly saner, more grounded and rational. "Wolf Canyon," she began,

"was a town of witches founded by a man named William Johnson in the mid-1800s. Like many religious and ethnic groups at that time, witches were persecuted. We were hung, drowned, burned at the stake, and William followed the example of the Mormons, who had headed west to establish their own community."

She smiled widely, reached both hands behind her, started furiously scratching. "Ass itch! Ass itch!"

Just as suddenly, she was all seriousness. "William met and married a woman named Isabella. Isabella was a witch, but she was more than a witch." May's voice dropped. "She was evil. She started taking over the town, molding it in her own image. Those who disagreed with her were punished. She drove some away, others were mysteriously found dead. Finally, they had all had enough. William was old by this time, but his powers were still strong, and he killed her while she slept. He cut off her head, and the people buried her in a cave up the canyon.

Before they sealed the cave entrance, her head started talking, and she cursed the people of Wolf Canyon. She vowed to return, stronger, and to wreak vengeance on all other witches, to destroy them all. She said that no one would be allowed to leave Wolf Canyon and that everyone in the town would be engulfed by a wall of water and killed."

May stared off in the distance, almost as though she were in a trance, and Claire shivered.

"Bob and I were born in Wolf Canyon, though we left early. I don't even remember the town, only what my parents told me of it. Isabella's day was long gone, and no one believed by then that her curse would come to pass. Plenty of people had left and returned and left again, and nothing had ever stopped them. But our parents told us of Isabella,

warned us of her, and we grew up afraid, fearing and dreading her resurrection and revenge.

"We met each other again after they built the dam. I was living in New Jersey then. I had a husband and a house and a dog and a good life.

And then I felt it. I felt the screaming of all those souls as they were drowned, as the dam waters flooded in and Isabella's curse came true. I left my husband, left my house, left my dog, and went back to Wolf Canyon. I was drawn there. We were all drawn there, all of us who had escaped the waters, and I met Bob on the shore by the dam, and we both saw the same vision and we talked about what was happening.

There were dozens of us, all standing by the water's edge. She was calling to us from down there, laughing at us, and we understood that she had waited a long time for this and that she would wait even longer. She would wait as long as it took for her to escape.

"We made a vow then to right her, to never let her out. We kept in touch for a while, but then we stopped, like our parents had before us, and maybe that was part of her curse, too. We started new lives, and most of us avoided all thought of Isabella, all mention of magic. Some of us... some of us became..."

May shook her head, tried to smile, looked for a second as though she was about to say something crazy, then continued on soberly. "Several months ago, it started again. I felt the pull, and I dreamed about Isabella, and I realized that she had grown stronger. She had taken from those of us who'd died over the years and had remained down there, hoarding her power, waiting to use it until she was strong. She was going after the dam builders, too, the ones who had flooded the canyon with water, and she was killing them off one by one, using her powers to find them and hunt them down. She was getting strength from them, as well, even though she was still stuck underwater, in the cave."

May grew silent, and Claire waited for more, but there was no more.

That was it. Now the old lady did smile, and Claire understood that her craziness was the way she dealt with the tremendous mental strain that she was constantly under. Schizophrenia might be somewhere in the mix, but May's outbursts were also part of her defense mechanism, the means by which she coped with the knowledge she was forced to possess.

That didn't make things any less unnerving, but at least it explained the homeless woman's bizarre behavior in a way that was somewhat comprehensible.

"Dirty face in a rain chair!" May screamed at the top of her lungs.

She looked up into the sky. "Down by feathers of silence!"

Claire looked at her. If May's experiences at Wolf Canyon could transform her from a New Jersey suburbanite to... this, what was going to happen to Miles?

That was Claire's real concern, and once again she looked into the old woman's eyes and felt nothing but fear--a feeling she saw reflected right back at her.

The two of them stood on the lawn, facing each other. A car drove by.

From down the street came the sounds of kids playing basketball on someone's drive way court. A helicopter flew overhead.

"We need to go back!" May moved forward, grabbed her by the arm.

Claire tried unsuccessfully to pull away. She could smell the woman's fetid breath. "We need to go with Bob!"

With Bob. You mean Miles, Claire almost told her, but she was not at all sure that the old lady was confusing Bob with Miles. She had the feeling May meant exactly what she'd said.

Miles, too, thought his father was walking back to Wolf Canyon.

Once again, she felt small and insignificant, caught up in larger events she could only partially understand.

She pulled herself out of the homeless woman's grip, felt a strange tingle in her arm. Was all of this the result of some dead witch's curse? That seemed to be the case, and in a weird way, that gave Claire hope. The ultimate source of everything appeared to be a single entity with a single agenda, and that was easier to right than the nebulous force Miles seemed to think he was up against.

Perhaps May was right. Perhaps they could help Miles. "Wait here!"

Claire ordered the old woman, and May nodded in acquiescence, mumbling something unintelligible to herself.

Claire hurried inside and used the cordless phone to dial Miles' firm.

She asked to talk to Hal, keeping track all the while of the woman in her front yard. She gave her name to the receptionist and, after a few seconds' silence, was put through to Hal.

"Claire!"

"Hi, Hal."

"It's great to hear your voice again! How the hell're you doing?"

"I'm fine."

"Glad to hear it, glad to hear it. I was so happy for Miles when he told me you'd gotten back together--" Hal broke off in mid-sentence, clearing his throat embarrassedly, suddenly aware that he may have said more than he should. She smiled. "Yeah, well..."

He sounded worded. "You' really not back together? That was just wishful thinking?"

"No, we are."

"Whew! Scared me for a minute. You know Miles; I thought that maybe his plans were rushing ahead of the

|

"No. We're. I don't know what we are, to be honest with you. But we're together again."

"Well, I'm glad you're back," Hal said.

'l'hanks," Claire told him.

"So what can I do for you? Miles isn't here--"

"I know. That's why I'm calling. He took two weeks' leave in order to go to Arizona and find out what happened to his dad."

'l'hey found Bob's body? Howbme he didn't tell me?"

"No," she said. "It's not that." She paused, sighed. "Some i thing's going on. And the reason he didn't talk to you about it was probably because he was afraid you wouldn't believe him."

"Try me"

"All right." She dc bed for Hal the events as Miles had told her and as she herself had seen--Bob and Liam Connor and the woman in Utah---ending with May's mysterious visit and their intended trip to Wolf Canyon. She looked outside, saw the homeless woman grinning at her through the window, palms against the glass.

Hal whistled. "Heavy shit."

"Yeah. I know you probably don't believe any of it--" "Don't count me out. Miles was asking me my feelings about the supernatural a few weeks ago, and I told him then and I'll tell you now: my mind is open.

I don't automatically disbelieve anything."

Claire hesitated. "I don't know exactly how to bring this up, but do you think you could come with me?" She lowered her voice. "I don't want to travel by myself with that woman. She's crazy and she scares me. She said she's a witch, and she obviously has mental problems besides.

"I'll pay," she added quickly. "Whatever your going rate is. I'll hire you to-"

"Fuck that shit. What do you think I am, a stranger?

have enough sick leave built up. I can take a few days. How long do you think it'll be?"

"One day there, one day back. Two days, probably. Three at the most."

"No problem. I'll get myself together and come right over. Where are you? Miles' place?"

"Don't you have to clear it with someone first? ......

"NO"

"What about Perkins? Isn't he going to be ticked?"

"Are you kidding? His head's a fecal-containment sys term. He will not even notice I'm gone. Besides, if worse comes to worst, Tran'll cover for me."

"I'm at my house," Claire said. She gave him the ad dress. "Do you have a cellular phone you could bring?"

"It's my American Express," Hal told her. "I don't leave home without it."

Or' See you in an hour, then?" much sooner. I don't imagine you want to spend too time alone with that fruitcake."

"No," Claire admitted, looking out the window.

"I'm on my way."

Then

Isabella was not forgotten.

Leland Huerdeen stood in his yard at the edge of town and looked north toward the flat buttes that defined the east west boundaries of the canyon. It had been nearly twenty five years since Isabella had been entombed, and she still cast a long shadow over life in town. Not a day went by that one of her misdeeds was not remembered by the older men, that children did not scare each other with the possibility of her return, that all of them did not tread warily past the abandoned house which had been hers and William's.

Somewhere up there, Leland knew, was Isabella's sealed cave, and though he was not sure of its exact location, like everyone else in town he knew the cliff in which it was situated, and he always sped past the spot on the rare occasions that he passed through that area.

His father, Grover, had been one of the early settlers in Wolf Canyon and the only haberdasher the community had ever known. Leland had taken up the family business several years ago, and though his father was still alive and still managed to block occasional hats for close friends, he had effectively turned everything over to his son.

Hats and Isabella.

Those were the two things his father talked about these days.

Times had changed. Hardly anyone in town used magic anymore, and people kept the-k powers private, secret.

Though it wasn't official, had probably never even been discussed, the decision had been made to disavow the past, to pretend as though this was an ordinary community filled with ordinary people where nothing unusual ever occurred. That was all Isabella's doing.

As his father had told him many times, the woman had corrupted the paradise that they had all come together to build. "I was one of the first to see old Jeb Freeman after she'd drained the life out of him, and that's a sight I'll never forget," Grover had been saying as long as Leland could re member. "Jeb was a powerful man, and someone that could do that to him, leave him nothing more than an empty shell, was someone to be feared indeed. We didn't like Isabella, none of us did, but after that we were afraid of her. She still had William hornswoggled, too, and some of the others eventually went in with her.

But I never did. I knew what she was."

There was a litany of sins that his father never failed to recite, and Leland had grown up with a fear of Isabella and her seemingly unstoppable powers. Now he had a son, Robert, and his father wanted to indoctrinate the boy as soon as he was old enough to speak, to instill in him the same fear of Isabella's revenge with which he himself had been filled.

"Why didn't we ever leave?" he'd asked when he'd grown old enough to think on his own. "How come we're still here? Other people left. Why don't we?"

"Because this is our home," his father always said fiercely. "We carved this home from the wilderness, and I'm not about to let any monster drive us away."

There were rumors that some had seen her: visions in the canyon late at night that terrified horses into running and sent the roughest ranchers into paroxysms of fear. They all knew where the cave was, and a special effort was made by all to avoid that area. It was one of the wider sections of the canyon, several miles across, and though the route was

longer, people these days traveled on the other side of the marsh, near the west bluffs, rather than take the old path past the blocked cave entrance.

Leland moved away from the fence, looked down at Hattie's sunflowers, just beginning to poke their heads up toward their namesake after staring at the ground all through the early weeks of their existence.

He was supposed to travel to Randall tomorrow for material, a hard hundred miles that covered a lot of diverse territory, not all of it nice. But the truth was that the only part of the journey which concerned him was the trip out of the canyon.

The trip past Isabella's cave.

It was foolish and childish, but he still had the sense that she waited in there, watching, that she could somehow see through the rocks that covered the cave entrance to where he passed by--even though the new trail was miles away. It was as if there were a line across the width of the canyon, and anytime anyone crossed it, she knew.

He'd had a dream the other night that he'd been on the road to Randall and his horse had kicked something in the trail that turned out to be Isabella's head. The hair was filthy and filled with spiderwebs, the skin rotting, the eyes gone, but the bloody mouth worked perfectly and the head flew up into the air before him and began to shriek.

Though he knew it was probably just his father's doing, he still couldn't help feeling some trepidation at the thought of passing by the dreaded place after a dream such as that.

Leland walked into the house, yelled to Hattie in the kitchen that he was going over to see Samuel and visit for a while, have a smoke.

"Supper's gonna be on soon!" she called.

"I'll be back in twenty minutes!" He looked at his pocket watch and headed out the door. She said something behind him, but he didn't hear what it was and it didn't really matter. Even if he was late, she'd hold supper for him.

Magic was still good for a few things around here. Samuel Hawks was sitting on his porch, smoking his pipe, looking after the slowly setting sun, which would be below both the clouds and the rim of the canyon in a few more minutes. He nodded to Leland, motioned for him to come up and sit a spell.

A spell

Samuel's wife Maureen was watching the Engstrom's baby John while their next-door neighbors went to the market and a loud constant crying could be heard from inside the house. Samuel reached back behind him and shut the window as Leland took a seat on the swing next to his friend's rocker. "Thought you was leavin'" 'romorrow."

"Be back when? A week?"

"About that." Leland took out his pipe, packed down some tobacco, lit it. "Watch Hattie and Robert for me?"

Samuel chuckled. "Hattie don't need no one watching out for her. That li'l woman can take care of herself." He glanced over. "Which way you headin' out?"

"To Randall? There's only one way."

Samuel said nothing, looked north toward the buttes.

Leland cleared his throat, turned toward his friend. "You saw something out there once, didn't you? Over by Isabella's cave?"

Samuel nodded slowly, was silent for a moment. He took a puff on his pipe. "Wudn't nuthin' specific, you know.

Wudn't no specter or Spock. I don't know what I told you before, but it was more something' I felt than saw.r=

"I thought you said you saw something"

"I did, I did. But that wudn't the scariest part is I guess what I'm lryin' to say. It's what I felt not what I saw that scared the bejeebers out a me."

"So what'd you see? Tell me again."

Samuel smoked in silence for a bit, and Leland thought

his friend wasn't going to respond at all, but finally he sighed. "I was gonna go fishing upriver, past that sycamore grove. It was spring, I think, and it wudn't even night, although I think it was a little cloudy." He paused, puffed. "I got spooked around that swampy area.

Mighta all been in my head, but I thought I heard noises, and I stopped for a moment and..."

He shook his head.

"What?"

"I felt her lookin' at me. It don't make no sense, but it was like for a minute she was lookin' through me, too. Everything looked brighter.

Or darker. Something. Anyway, it felt like I was seem' through someone else's eyes, but I knew it was her lookin' through my eyes.

Then I felt like she was lookin' at me again, and everywhere I turned I felt eyes peerin' at me, hidden in that swampy water, behind the grasses, up on the cliffs. It scared the hell out a me, I tell you.

Then I saw it, over by the bottom of the canyon wall, next to a pile of old rabble that had to be coverin' her cave."

"What?"

"A shadow. But it weren't like any shadow I ever seen. It was kinda human-shaped, female if you want to know the truth, but it din't move right. It sorta twisted in on itself instead a walked. Creepiest damn thing I ever saw. It twisted toward me, and I just hightailed it out a there. Never did go fishing. And I never been back up that part of the canyon since." He looked meaningfully at Leland. "If I were you, I wouldn't go there, neither."

"I have no choice. My materials are in Randall, and until they build a train track to Wolf Canyon, I have to pick them up myself."

There was another long silence as they both smoked, looking up at the darkening late afternoon sky.

'There is another way to Randall," Samuel said. "Go south out a the canyon, take the new road from Rio Verde.

It'll add an extra day to your trip, but believe me, it's worth it."

Leland did not respond.

"It's worth it."

Leland walked home feeling even more uneasy than he had on his way over, although perhaps that was what he wanted, the reason he'd gone to see Samuel in the first place.

Supper was ready when he arrived, and he hid his con ceres for Robert's sake, eating in silence, letting Hattie talk to the boy and answer his nearly continuous questions. The person he should discuss this with was his father, but he already knew what Grover would say, and despite the comfort he himself would receive from such a discussion, he thought it better not to worry the old man. He'd talk to his dad about it once he returned from Randall. If he returned from Randall. Now he was just being stupid.

He left early the next morning but not as early as he'd originally planned. The days were getting shorter already, in anticipation of fall, and when Hattie got up to make breakfast, the sky outside was still dark. It was almost an hour's ride to the section of canyon near Isabella's cave, but he didn't want to take any chances and be caught there before the sun arose, so he dawdled, playing for time until there was a definite lightening in the sky above the eastern walls.

There was no problem on the way out. In spite of all his worries, he inexplicably found himself occupied with the mundane thoughts of haberdashery while passing through the dreaded section of canyon, and by the time it registered that Isabella was entombed somewhere on the far side of this marsh, he was already past the line of her cave.

He spurred his horse on, quickly galloped until that area of the canyon was hidden behind a curve of the landscape.

The rest of the trip Qver was uneventful, his day and night in Randall were f'me, and he easily found everything he needed.

He miscalculated the timing on his trip home, however, and before he'd even reached the mouth of Wolf Canyon, he realized that it would be dark well before he reached the marshy area in front of the buried tomb. He briefly considered making camp and starting from here in the morning, but Hattie and Robert were expecting him today, and he didn't want to worry them. He'd also been away from his business for six days, and he couldn't really afford to be gone even as long as he had been. He needed to get back to work.

Besides, he'd be traveling along the opposite wall of the canyon, just as he had on the trip out.

Leland had never been formally taught in the magic arts, growing up in the post-Isabella days, but he instinctively wove a spell of protection around himself, something that, while not perfect, would at least afford him some defense on his journey.

He'd brought with him a lantern, but in the cavernous open space of the middle canyon the light illuminated only the section of trail immediately before him, throwing all else into even deeper gloom. He wanted to put down the fear he felt to imagination, but the horse seemed spooked and jittery, too, and as they traveled farther into the darkness, into the increasingly cold night, it became ever more difficult to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary. He thought of Samuel Hawks........ It was more something' l felt.

Leland felt it, too, and though he knew he would never be able to describe it, he understood now what his friend had meant. For the horror that enveloped him, that seemed to seep inside him to his very bones, was the most terrifying thing he had ever experienced. The air itself seemed wrong, the texture of the breeze unnatural. All of his senses were assaulted, and he saw shapes in the blackness, heard soft sounds that should not have been here, smelled wafting odors unlike any he had ever come across, and he tasted in his mouth the foulness of the grave.

And then she appeared.

Her cave was miles away, on the east bluffs, but, as he'd somehow known, hers was a boundary that spanned the entire width of the canyon, and she appeared to him as he tried to cross it on his way home.

At first it was just a light, not greenish like most spirit illuminations but red, like blood. It hovered above the marshy weeds and cattails and slowly solidified into a figure that was almost but not quite human. He kicked his horse, yelled at it, tried to will the animal forward, but his mount refused to budge, as if held under a spell. The red figure floated toward him, wailing terribly in a cry that was somehow translated by his brain into images:

--Hattie dead and dismembered, lying amid the expelled contents of an outhouse.

--Robert nude in the sand, legs spread, screaming, his lap and the ground beneath it covered with blood, his genitals being gnawed on by Grover's head, which was bodiless and sporting raccoon legs.

The figure's own head dislodged from its ethereal form, turning black in the process. He had thought nothing could be blacker than the canyon at night, but the head was, and despite the darkness, it retained all of its horrible features. He could see clearly the face of a beautiful woman, long flowing hair on a face that was the most exquisite he had ever seen.

And the most evil.

The laugh that issued from the lightless jet lips sounded like the tinkling of bells.

Leland leaped off his horse and ran. If the steed was stupid enough to remain, so be it, but he was not about to sacrifice his life because of the incapacitation of a pack animal. He ran down the trail toward town, carrying the lantern, but with all of his supplies and materials still in saddlebags on the horse. He heard a wail, but screamed himself to cover the sound, to keep the images out of his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the black head and the red body reconnect.

He had never run so fast in his life, and he expected at any moment to be grabbed from behind or pushed over or even levitated into the air.

Nothing like that happened, however, and by the time he was out of breath and had to stop, choking and wheezing next to a paloverde tree, there was no sign of anything unusual either before or behind him.

Even the lantern seemed to illuminate a larger area of ground, and the night seemed neither as black nor as cold as it had by the marsh.

He stood there for a moment waiting, looking back, expecting to see at any moment his horse emerge from the gloom, but there was no sign of the animal, no sound, and it occurred to him that the steed had been a sacrifice.

He started toward town, as quickly as his sore muscles and tired lungs would allow. This was it, Letand decided. He might be his father's son, but he was not his father, and home or no home, he was going to go back, get Hattie and Robert, pack their things, and as soon as the sun came up, get the hell out of Wolf Canyon as quickly as he could. Forever. He never wanted to see this place again.

Miles had flown to the East Coast and the Midwest, but he had never before been in this part of the country. He was surprised at how cinematic the Southwest was, how closely it resembled those magnificent vistas of western movies. He liked driving through this country, he found, and despite the sparse vegetation and almost complete absence of human habitation, he could see himself retiring here, buying a couple of acres and building a little house.

The ride was long, and they were awkward with each other at first, but when the radio faded out they were forced to talk, and somewhere between Kanab and Page their conversation grew comfortable.

"Who's your favorite Beatle?" Janet asked as they drove through the eroded, Georgia O'Keeffe-like hills that were a prelude to Lake Powell.

"What?"

"That's supposed to be the best Rorschach test around.

You can learn everything you need to know about a person by finding out who their favorite Beatle is. Isn't that what they say?"

"John," he told her.

She smiled. "Good choice."

"Yours?"

"Paul. But I like men who like John."

He glanced over at her. "I'm seeing someone, you know. That's who I

called from your apartment." \020"I'm not hitting on you. I'm just saying that, as a general role, I get along better with men who like Lennon. And since we have a long trip in front of us, that's probably a

She laughed.

They talked of trivialities, kept the conversation light. By unspoken consent they avoided discussing what they were doing. It would have made the trip too long, put on them an undue pressure that might dissuade them from completing their journey. They needed to get away from that for a while, and they let the talk drift from movies to television to other equally innocuous topics.

By late afternoon they reached the turnoff. A small brown road sign announced: WOLF CANYON LAKE--22 MILES.

They had not seen another car for the past hour, had not seen a town since Willis, the little city in Arizona's Central Mountains where they'd gassed up, gone to the bathroom, and gotten oversized drinks from a surprisingly modern Jackin-the-Box.

He felt uneasy being this far away from civilization-from help

--and he wished he had brought his cell phone, but who knew if it would even work in a godforsaken area like this?

They grew silent. The road to the lake was two lanes, like the highway, but the lanes were smaller and the lines more faded. The asphalt itself seemed washed out, and huge holes in the pavement that had to have been years in the making made Miles swerve from side to side.

They came out of a series of small sandy hills into a flat barren floodplain, and far ahead, on the side of the road, black against the pale sand, he could see a man walking toward some low cliffs. He recognized that walk, even from this far away, the unnatural rhythm, the unvarying speed, and his heart lurched in his chest .... Janet saw the figure, too. "Is that She did not finish the sentence and he did not answer. They were coming up fast now on the figure.

This close, his eyes confmned what his gut already knew.

It was Bob.

His father was striding purposefully along the gravel shoulder, not trying to attract attention to himself but not trying to hide, either.

He was simply walking forward, head fixed, arms unmoving. Miles did not know what to do, whether to stop or slow down, and in a panic he ended up speeding past. The wind from their passage blew Bob's hair and caused the clothes to flap about on his frame.

Miles slowed the car afterward but did not stop, and he looked over at Janet, who was white-faced and staring at him. He knew she was thinking of her uncle. He was remembering the alien ness of his dad's movements, the complete influence inability his actions, to communicate with his father or in any way

He did not want to stop the car, he realized. He couldn't do anything for Bob, and the best tack would be to either follow alongside him, or wait for him at the lake to see what he would do next.

Miles chose waiting at the lake. He did hot relish the idea of slowly accompanying his father down the road. Why was his father walking to the lake? What was going to happen when he got there?

He kept driving, glancing at his father in the rearview mirror until they were off the plain and into the far bluffs and the ragged walking figure could no longer be seen.

They passed others on the road, six of them, men and women, scattered over a stretch of miles. All dead. All walking.

Janet's voice was low, subdued. "It's like in New Mexico," she said, .,There's this little church outside Santa Fe

that's supposed to cure people. It's built on what they call 'miracle dirt," and every Easter, Catholics from all over make a pilgrimage there. You can see them walking up the highway from Albuquerque. They walk hundreds of miles just to touch the dirt and pray at the church."

She looked out the car window, shuddered. 'that's what they remind me of. People making a pilgrimage."

"Dead people making a pilgrimage." ...... "To Wolf Canyon." .::..

They looked at each other, and Miles felt an unfamiliar tingling in his midsection. It was a strange sensation, and he thought for a second that he was having a heart attack, since there seemed to be a strange sort of flutter beneath his breastbone. But then it was gone, and he put it down to fear and stress. Perhaps this was considered a "panic attack." Hell, if anyone deserved to panic, it was him.

The land sloped down, and ahead they could see the lake, shimmering in the sun. The pavement ended, the road devolving into a narrow dirt trail defined by twin tire ruts that zigged and zagged for no discernible reason through the sparse desert vegetation toward the water. Aside from the occasional saguaro or paloverde tree, all of the plants here were low and pale gray, and the rental car bounced along between them on insufficient shock absorbers before finally reaching a dirt parking lot that abutted the northernmost cove of the lake.

To his surprise, an old Jeep was pulled next to a long wooden rail made to look like a hitching post. Miles parked several car lengths away, then shut off the ignition and looked over at Janet. "We're here."

"What do we do now?"

"I don't know," he admitted.

Janet unlocked and opened her door. "I guess we should get out and look around." She glanced over at Miles. "Before they come.

The two of them got out of the car and walked around the front of the vehicle to the railing. Stretched out before them, Wolf Canyon Lake continued almost to the horizon, bounded on the sides by a series of high rocky hills and sandstone bluffs. It had been overcast in Cedar City when they left, and Janet had not brought sunglasses. She stood squinting against the reflected glare on the water. Somewhere under there, Miles thought, was a ghost town, and he found himself wondering if there were still bodies down there, if not all of the corpses had been retrieved.

Maybe the bodies at the bottom were walking, too. Like his father.

Maybe that's where his father was headed. But why? She's here.

He looked south toward the far end of the lake. He could not see it from this spot, but he assumed that was where the dam was.

She's going after the dam builders, too.

Nothing quite made sense. There were huge gaps in his knowledge, and if he could fill in those gaps he might reach some understanding of what was going on, but until then he was in the dark, able to guess at some of the more obivous elements of what was happening but completely unable to see the larger picture.

"Let's walk down," Miles said. He stepped over the low railing and held Janet's hand to help her across. The two of them started down a barely discernible, gently sloping path that led to the water's edge.

They were at the end of the path, standing on the sandy lake shore, when Miles discovered they were not alone. He saw movement in his peripheral vision, and when he looked to the right he saw a young man sitting on a rock next to the water--a satchel, rolled-up sleeping bag, and scuba gear spread out on the sand beside him. This was clearly the

As the man stood up and looked at him walked

"Hey, Miles said. How is it going? "

"All right."

This close, he didn't look all that young. He had short hair and was clean-shaven, which gave his face a youthful appearance, but there were bags under his eyes and a haunted look in his features. Miles estimated that he could be anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five.

"You here to do some diving?" Miles asked, gesturing down at the scuba gear. "Water looks kind of dirty to me." "You can see once you get down there."

"Oh, I'm sorry." Miles motioned toward Janet. 'his is Janet Engstrom.

I'm Miles Huerdeen."

"My name's Garden. Garden Hawks." The young man qooked from Janet to Miles. Their thoughts must have registered on their faces because he said: "You know, don't you? That's why you're here." "Know what?"

Miles asked. "About the Walkers."

Walkers.

Even the word sent a shiver down his spine temporary bubble of unreality that had surrounded him, that had allowed him to keep the truth of why they were here at bay, popped. Next to him, Janet drew in her breath, her eyes

Garden nodded. I -thought so." He smiled wryly. "It's good to know that I'm not the only one. I thought I might be going crazy."

"What... ?" Janet stammered. "How did you know?"

"My gram pa down there."

"My father's on the way," Miles said. "We passed him on the road in." group of them have arrived since I got here this morning. I sat in my Jeep and watched them."

"What did they do?"

Garden shrugged. "They walked into the water."

"That's where your grandpa is?"

"Yep. He's down there walking." The young man looked at Janet. "What about you? Are you just here with him, or... ?" He left the sentence unfinished.

"It's my uncle," she said. "He died and kept walking."

"Is he here?"

"We don't know," Miles answered for her. "We didn't see him on the way, and he was supposedly cremated, but..."

He shrugged. "We don't know."

"I see."

An awkward pause followed.

Garden looked down at his scuba gear, looked up at them. "Do, uh, you guys have a plan?"

Mile shook his head slowly. "You?" he asked, though he already knew the answer.

"No. I was just going to play it by ear."

It was Janet who asked the question they were all wondering: Does any of us actually know What's going on?" There another awkward silence

"Well, let's start with what we do know," Miles said. He glanced at Janet, then turned toward Garden. He told his story. Afterward, Janet told hers.

When they were finished, Garden nodded. He looked down at his scuba gear, out at the lake, then took a deep breath. "My gram pa went down twenty years ago. It was pretty much like your situations. He got sick from fever, started walking, died, then went into the water. We lived nearby here, in a side canyon, and he kept walking around and around the house--for weeks, wind, sun, rain, didn't matter. There was only me, my daddy and my uncle, and we didn't know what to do. My uncle and my daddy, I think, took turns watching him, but this went on for weeks. He

wasn't dead yet, but then he did die, sometime while he was walking, and I remember being so afraid of him. I didn't think he was going to kill me or anything, I was just... scared. Can't really say why.

Anyway, I went to bed, and I beard my daddy and my uncle talking aboutmjust like you said--a box of my gram pa magic powders and potions and stuff. I never saw it, though.

"When I woke up in the morning, he was gone. We followed his trail to the lake and got here just in time to see him walk into the water. My daddy yelled at him, but he couldn't hear, and he just kept walking into the water until he was gone.

"We never came back to the lake, pretended like it didn't even exist, but I never forgot about it, and when I grew up and went to college, I took a diving class. I think you can guess why. I came back on my break, told my daddy what I wanted to do, but both he and my uncle were against it.

"I went diving down there anyway." Garden licked his lips, obviously unsettled by the memory even all these years later. The water was dirty, muddy, but I saw him. My gram pa was walking. And he wasn't alone. There were several people walking. Through that ghost town down there at the bottom." He shivered. "I guess they lived there."

Miles shook his head, impressed with the boy's bravery. "You've never been back since?"

"Nope." Garden looked down at his diving gear. "Not yet."

"Where're your dad and uncle now?" Janet asked.

"My uncle died a few years back. My daddy lives over in Apache Junction, but I didn't want him to know I was coming here, so I didn't tell him anything. I lied and said I was going hunting over at San Carlos for the weekend."

"All these years you never told anyone? None of you?"

Garden shook his head. "Who would we tell? What would we tell them?

There was an old witch woman who lived here back then. Mother Lizabeth we called her. We were going to tell her originally, but for some reason we never did. I tried to look her up when I first got here this morning, but her shack's gone and I didn't see any sign of her." He scanned the surrounding land. "Everyone seems to be gone." Who else?

"No one in particular. Here used to be little pockets of people living around here in the canyons, on the hills. Maybe this is a recreation area or something now and they kicked them all out, but it just seems strange, like the place is abandoned."

"Like it's cursed," Janet whispered.

Again the wry smile. "I didn't want to be the first to say it, but, yeah, like that."

"What made you come back now?" Miles wondered. "Today? The same time as us?"

Garden shook his head. "I don't know," he admitted. 'l'here wasn't anything calling to me, if that's what you're asking. I didn't see any omens or anything. I guess, well, I guess it's because this is the twentieth anniversary of my gram pa of his going down there. Not to the day maybe, but almost." He looked out at the lake. "I've also been dreaming about this place lately, about the water, and probably that had something to do with it, too."

Miles thought about his father's dream. In the nightmare, his dad had been rooted to the floor of the kitchen while a tidal wave crashed over the house. Was that what it had been like for the last residents of Wolf Canyon? Had they stood there, frozen in place, as a wall of water released from the upper dam bore down upon them?

Miles looked around. Where was the upper dam? To the left of their cove, a river snaked away from the lake, up into the hills, and he supposed that the other dam and its attendant lake where somewhere in there.

"We've had dreams, too," Janet said. z95

Miles nodded.

"About water and drowning."

Garden's voice was quiet. "I drowned in my dream." "What does that mean?" Janet asked. "Are these premonitions? Does that mean we're going to drown here?" She looked fearfully toward the water. "I don't think so," Miles said. "But you don't know."

"Not for sure. But that's not what this feels like to me. My father's dream was almost like a recollection of the past, like the flooding of Wolf Canyon as seen through the eyes of someone that was there---even though it took place in our house. But my dreams are different.

They're not that literal, not that realistic, and I don't think they have anything to do with a specific event. It's more like a coded message, like something I'm supposed to interpret, only I don't know how."

Janet nodded, apparently understanding, though his meaning was far from clear even to himself. She faced Garden. "Do you really think your grandpa's still down there? You don't think he's rotted by now?"

Garden met her eyes. "No," he said. "He's there. And I'd put money on that."

Miles had no doubt that he' was right, but the idea frightened him. He looked over the water. He did not like the lake. Even now, even on a warm weekend, it was deserted. Unlike Powell, Roosevelt, and the other lakes they'd passed, Wolf Canyon boasted no sunbathers, no swimmers, no skiers, no boaters, no jet skiers. Water in the desert usually attracted people, but Wolf Canyon seemed to repel them. The bank opposite, instead of featuring cottonwood and jojoba and the usual desert fauna, was barren, sporting only occasional clumps of dead orangish-brown weeds.

Apparently, the only other creatures at the lake were the

"Walkers," as Garden called them, the witches who had returned to the underwater town.

Like And hisSeVeralfather miles behind them, the new Walkers. How close was Bob? Miles wondered. He excused himself and quickly dashed up to the parking lot. There was no sign of his dad, but two of the other Walkers had arrived. He could see them striding purposefully through the low brush. One, a woman, bumped into a saguaro but did not seem to notice the cactus' spines and continued walking, though at a slightly different angle, toward the lake.

Miles hurried back down to the others. there are two of them coming.

They're almost to the parking lot."

Janet put a hand on Garden's arm. "Do you really think you should be going into the wa terT She motioned toward his scuba gear. "Who knows how many of them are down there?"

"I'd already decided not to go down," Garden admitted sheepishly. "I was getting ready to put my stuff away yhen you guys showed up."

The day was starting to fade. Afternoon was giving way to twilight, and a portion of the sun had dropped below the western hills. The sky above was still light, but a large section of the western shore and surrounding countryside had been thrown into shadow. Through the half gloom came the two Walkers, not slowing because of the incline, not sliding on the sand, but marching relentlessly, surefootedly, toward the water.

Miles heard Janet's frightened, exaggerated breathing next to him, but other than that the three of them were silent, and they watched the corpses--a man and a woman" head straight into the lake.

"Why are they going down there?" Janet asked. "what do you think they're doing?"

"Walking," Garden said. z97

The three of them carried Garden's satchel, sleeping bag and diving equipment back to his Jeep. Another Walker was already heading down the road toward the parking lot.

"You still planning to sleep out here tonight?" Miles asked, putting down the sleeping bag.

"Not next to the water, but yeah." He gestured. "Near the picnic tables probably. What about you?"

"I guess. There don't seem to be any hotels around here."

"I suggest we stay together," Janet said. "I don't think we should separate. Not at night."

"Circle the wagons," Miles said, nodding.

They discussed the sleeping arrangements and other practical considerations, trying to stay away from the real subject, the fact that they had no idea what to do and were simply hanging around pointlessly, waiting for something to happen.

Just before dark the last of the Walkers came striding through the small parking lot.

Bob.

The succession of feelings that passed through Miles made him feel like a frightened child----only he had never experienced anything this intensely as a child. He stood there, stunned into inaction, watching as his dad, the man who had brought him up, the man who had shaped him into the person he was today, the man who had lived with him all those years, brushed against a cactus, stepped on sagebrush. "Dad!" he called. I

His father did not turn his head, did not pause in his walking, but continued forward, down the slope, into the water, until the water was up to his knees, his chest, his neck. He did not float, did not swim, but appeared to be anchored to the muddy lake floor as he walked.

A moment later, there was no trace of him left.

He was gone, but Miles stared at the spot where he had disappeared into the lake, and he continued to stare until the

day's light was completely gone and the skY was as black as the water.

Greg Rossiter took the week's worth of vacation days he had coming to him and flew to Phoenix

He knew it was wrong, knew it was stupid, knew that in his current position he could not afford to be a hot dogger anymore, that he had to be a team player. But old habits died hard, and he had not gotten where he was by playing by the rules.

He had gotten where he was by ignoring them.

he would once again be the one to crack this thing wide open, would be able to claim all the credit for himself, and would doubtlessly take yet another step up the Bureau ladder.

But what was this case?

He didn't know. Not exactly. A man in Utah had become a reanimated corpse, an Interior Department undersecretary had been murdered by some type of monster in his own garage--and forty years ago, government engineers had flooded a town of witches after constructing a damn.

Whatever it was, it was big. Not as big as what had happened in Rio Verde maybe, but plenty big enough, and if what he'd gathered from reading between the lines of McCormack's secret re oort was true, things might be coming to a head

He approached the dam from the south, passing through Rio Verde. It brought back memories not all of them good ones, and as he drove by the Chinese restaurant on his way toward the center of town, he considered stopping by the police station, dropping in on his old pal Sheriff Carter for a surprise visit. Rossiter smiled to himself. Such a tweaking would be fun--he knew Carter had no desire to see him ever again--but as much as he would like to hang around and annoy that fat bastard, he had to get to the lake. He had no idea if anything was happening there, or if it was, whether he was late or early for the fireworks, but he needed to go there first and assess the situation.

Maybe on the way back.

Outside Rio Verde the highway followed the river, and twenty miles north the road split, one heading through the desert toward New Mexico, the other winding up a series of plateaus and bluffs to the lake. The road curved around a cliff face, then narrowed to a single lane as it crossed the dam. His was the only car, and Rossiter drove carefully, aware of the inadequate railing that separated him from the water to his right and a precipitous drop to his left. On the other side of the dam, the road was dirt, and it ended at an empty gravel parking area ringed by warped and weathered picnic tables.

He got out of the car, stretching, and walked to the edge of the lake, looking back toward the dam, up the shore, then across the water.

He didn't know what he had expected to see, but he had expected.." something.

Rossiter stared out at the desert. There were no cars, no people, no vampires, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary. The late afternoon air was silent save for a whooshing rumble coming from the base of the dam where water was released into the Rio Verde.

God, he'd grown to hate this state in the years he'd been

assigned here. And two terms in D.C. had not lessened his antipathy one whit. Who the fuck would live in such a hell hole other than moronic rednecks and inbred hillbillies?

He sighed. He'd start at the dam and work his way around.

Already he was beginning to think that he'd made a mistake and acted too rashly. There was no reason for him to have come. Even if there was some sort of power in this place, he couldn't hope to exorcise it just by showing up.

The supernatural wasn't some trained monkey, jumping through hoops on his timetable, showing its face when it was convenient for him.

There was nothing to do about it, though, except continue on as planned, and he looked back at the dam, then started walking along the shore, wishing he had brought some tennis shoes.

At night, low whispers.

Miles recognized the Soft susurration, the barely audible noises he had heard in the house the night before his father had returned from the hospital. The sounds had scared him then, and he was even more frightened now. Everyone else was asleep--Garden in his sleeping bag on the ground, Janet in the backseat of the car--and Miles wanted to wake one of them, wanted someone else to hear this, wanted some sort of verification that it was not all in his mind, but he did not know either of them well enough to impose on in such a manner, and the truth was that he would have felt stupid waking them up merely because he was afraid of some noises. "

The noises were spooky, though, particularly under these circumstances, and somehow he doubted that either Garden or Janet would blame him for wanting company.

He stared into the night sky. The whispers were all around

him, coming from behind the tree, up on the rocks, from the black surface of the lake itself. As before, he thought he could make out words, names: "May. Lizabeth."

He was lying atop the picnic table, Garden's jacket wadded up under his head for a pillow, a dirty blanket from the back of the Jeep wrapped around him, mummy-like, against the surprisingly cold night chill.

"May." ..... What could it be? He didn't know and he didn't want to know. It was what he'd come here for, the reason they'd all been drawn to Wolf Canyon, but now that he was here, now that the answers for which he'd been searching were making themselves known, he realized that he didn't really want them.

"May," the whispers said, and there were other unintelligible words mixed in, backing it up. "May... Lizabeth... Lizabeth May..."

He would be less afraid if Garden or Janet were awake, but he still would not allow himself to cave in and rouse them. Instead, he closed his eyes, rolled onto his side, pulled e dirty blanket above his ears and softly hummed to himself in order to shut out the sounds.

It took awhile, but focusing on not hearing the whispers eventually tired him out. He fell asleep. He dreamed.

He'was back in Los Angeles, at Dodger Stadium, in the middle of the night. The place was empty, all halogens turned off, only the muted glow of city lights under orange-tinged smog offering any illumination whatsoever.

In the parking lot of the stadium was a small plywood shack, a makeshift home made from discarded construction materials. A man stood in the darkness of the shack's open doorway, an old man dressed in chaps and the dusty clothes of a western pioneer. He was smoking silently, and there

was something ominous about the way only his arm moved to bring the cigarette to and from his lips while the rest of his body remained as immobile as a marble statue.

The old man tossed his cigarette into the parking lot, turned, and walked into the gloom. Miles understood that he was to follow. He did not want to do so, was afraid of the man and the shack and the darkness, but he had no willpower of his own, and he obediently fell in step behind the retreating figure.

Inside, the shack was big, much larger than was possible given the confines of its outer structure. The old man led him through a debris-filled room to a table atop which was a lit kerosene lamp and a woman's head in a clear cookie jar. Sliced fruit lay at the bottom of the glass container-oranges, peaches, pears-and the head rested upon the slices, bloodless tendons and string-like veins hanging over the clean edges of the skinless fruit. The man picked up an old rusty spoon and used it to sprinkle sugar into the jar from one of two small saucers on the table. He put in another spoonful of mint leaves from the other saucer, and turned to Miles. "It keeps the head fresh," he explained. His voice was high and cracked, not at all what Miles would have expected. Miles nodded, not knowing how else to respond.

The man picked up the kerosene lamp, walking through another open doorway into a room that looked nearly as big as Dodger Stadium itself.

The flickering light illuminated only the small area immediately surrounding them. Strewn about the dirt floor were naked porcelain dolls with painted breasts and pubic hair. Miles followed the old cowboy past the dolls, stopping before a massive opening in the earth.

Wide enough to fit a car in lengthwise, the pit descended into an inky blackness deeper than any he had ever seen.

"I dug this hole," the old man confided. "It leads to China.

"What did you dig it with?" Miles asked him.

"My mint spoon." Where did you get the spoon? "A dwarf gave it to me."

The conversation seemed nonsensical to him, but there seemed to be real significance beneath its lack of literal meaning. Miles nodded sagely as if this was what he'd expected to hear.

The old man put a cold hand on Miles' shoulder. He pressed his face close, and Miles could smell tobacco and coffee and something else, something sweet and not at all pleasant.

'that's where I put her body," the man said. "When the head's ready, it'll go in, too."

Miles awoke with the dawn, and he sat up, the chill of night already dissipating before the warm rays of the rising sun. Janet and Garden were still asleep, and he quietly pulled off his blanket, sat up, and stepped off the picnic table onto the hard ground

The desert was beautiful in the morning. The monochromatic flatness that would overtake the surrounding land later in the day had not yet arrived, and the rocky hills and cliffs were bathed in sunrise orange, their clefts and indentations shadowed. Tall saguaros, arms upraised and outstretched, stood like surrendering soldiers between the boulders. The sky was cloudless and deep, its gradation of colors spanning the spectrum from orange in the east to purple in the west.

Above the top of the nearest butte, a lone hawk circled lazily in the sky.

The lake itself was black.

It was a trick of the light--it had to be--but the effect was nonetheless disturbing, and Miles was grateful to hear the sound of the car door open behind him as Janet got out and stretched.

Garden emerged from his sleeping bag, awakened by the

slamming of the door, and the three of them looked awkwardly at one another, not sure what to say.

"Anyone bring any food?" Miles asked.

Garden nodded. "I have some Pop-Tarts in the Jeep. Blueberry. Hope you all like them, because it's a long drive to the nearest Denny's."

Miles and Janet waited while he dug through the jumbled mess in the back of his vehicle and pulled out a Pop Tarts box.

The three of them stared out at the lake as they ate. "Any--" Janet cleared her throat. "Any new ones come in the middle of the night?

Walkers?"

Garden shook his head. "Not that I heard."

"If they did," Miles agreed, "we all slept. Silence.

They finished eating. "So what do we do?" Janet asked finally, robbing the crumbs off her hands.

"I don't know," Miles admitted. The problem is, we don't even know what's really wrong. I mean, maybe nothing'll even come of this.

Obviously, people have been homing back here for years, decades even.

Who's to say that it means anything, that something bad's going to come of it?"

"Because," Garden said, squinting at him, "I feel it. And I'll bet you do, too."

He did, and Miles nodded reluctantly. There was a feeling here, an unnamed sense of foreboding that was like a great weight pressing against him. He had not examined it closely, but it was something he'd experienced ever since arriving at the lake, and he realized finally that he did have a plan: wait for something to happen and then react to it.

But what made him think that he--that, any of them could react effectively? Nothing.

All he knew was that they had to try.

"Miles?" Janet said, and he heard a hint of worry in her

voice. He looked over at her, then followed the line of her gaze. A man was walking along the shoreline, an inappropriately dressed man wearing what looked like the black slacks and white shirt of a standard-issue business suit. The dark shades he had on gave him the appearance of a Secret Service agent, and the incongruity of his appearance set off a red flag in Miles' mind. Something about the stranger's bearing bespoke law enforcement, and with a sinking feeling in his gut he thought that they were going to be kicked out, that this area was being closed and evacuated.

The man saw them, apparently catching movement in his peripheral vision, then immediately changed his direction and headed up the slope toward where they stood, looking down at him.

He reached the top fairly quickly and held out a sheathed badge. "Agent Rossiter," he said, identifying himself. "FBI." "Yeah?" Garden said.

"May I ask what you're doing here at the lake?"

"You can ask, but I don't have to tell you. Unless I'm under arrest or something."

The agent turned toward Janet, who looked furtively over at Miles.

Miles sighed as Rossiter's attention shifted to him. He didn't understand Garden's unprovoked belligerence, but Janet's nervousness was a common reaction to authority. Miles stepped in to speak for them. He nodded politely. "Agent Rossiter? I'm Miles Huerdeen."

"Mr. Huerdeen. May I ask why you're here?"

Miles was about to answer, to give some false, harmlessly generic reason, when the sky changed. Shapeless clouds did not move in but simply appeared without preamble, blotting out all trace of blue, filtering the sunlight to a small white lightening above the suddenly dark desert mountains.

There was a ripple in the water, movement that began in the middle of the lake, moved south, then disappeared, like

some Loch Ness Monster surfacing for a moment before diving. They all saw it, and the look on the agent's unintentionally expressive face told Miles everything he needed. "I think we all know why we're here," he said. Rossiter's eyes narrowed. "What do you know?" he asked.

"You first. He'd expected him to get nervous, but to his surprise the FBI agent stated matter-of-factly that he was here to investigate a series of mysterious deaths that had been tracked in Washington and seemed to have as their only connection strong ties to Wolf Canyon, the former government-sponsored colony of witches that was now buried under this lake.

Colony of witches.

That explained a lot, and in his mind pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. He understood now the existence of magic paraphernalia, the supernatural aspects of the deaths. Still, it did not explain the source of all the recent activity. Witches had been killed when the town was flooded, and now retribution was being sought.

But by whom? Were witches living today or were they coming after those who had wronged them from beyond the grave?

He thought of his father, and found it impossible to believe that Bob was involved in all this, that his dad was a witch.

Rossiter nodded. "Your turn," he said, finished.

Miles spoke for all three of them, describing the situation with his father, Janet's uncle, Garden's grandpa. He explained to the agent that he was a private investigator and told him about Liam Connor's list.

"You have a copy of that?" Rossiter interrupted.

"In the car."

"I'd like to see it."

Miles nodded. The sky had darkened further. The ceiling of strange clouds kept thickening. The black water of the lake was un naturally still, undisturbed by wind or bird or fish. The desert warming had not lessened with the disappearance of the sun, however, and the juxtapositon of the Nordic sky and the Arizona temperatures perfectly complemented the goose bumps that thrived on the hot sweaty skin of Miles' back.

"So what's your plan?" Rossiter asked. "What were you intending to do? Why are you here?"

Miles looked from Janet to Garden, unsure of what to say. "I don't know," he admitted. "We were sort of trying to figure that out when you showed up.,

"It's--" the agent began, when suddenly there was a disturbance in the lake, a bubbling of the water accompanied by a high keening sound. They all turned to look, and Miles found himself instinctively moving back, away from the slope.

The water parted, not spectacularly like the cinematic Red Sea but cheesily, like Universal Studios' recreation of the event for its tourist tram ride, the section of the lake nearest them opening in a narrow wedge. Two by two, they walked out of the water, all of the dead who had walked in. The most recent emerged first, including his father, staring sightlessly forward, moving in a march that was somehow more deliberate and controlled than the gait that had brought them here. It was as if the urgency was gone, as though they were no longer striving to reach a destination but had found it and were now operating under different orders. They seemed like slaves, cowed and beaten into submission, and what Miles felt looking at his father was not fear but pity.

The Walkers in front were wearing wet, raggedy clothes, but the clothes were gone on those who came after, and they stepped nude onto the sand, marching not up the slope toward the parking lot but along the shoreline, away.

"I don't see my uncle," Janet kept repeating, her voice a little-girl whisper. "I don't see my uncle."

"I see my uncle," Garden said. "And I see my gram pa There was dread in his voice.

Rossiter said nothing, but Miles noticed that the agent's revolver was now drawn, and though he didn't think that would help, it somehow made him feel better.

More dead men and women emerged from the parted water.

And she appeared. She's here.

He knew instantly that this was who his father and Janet's uncle had been talking about. This was the person the homeless woman in the mall had been trying to warn him about.

She walked out of the water, naked. Her head was streaked with mud, her tangled, stringy hair green with algae, but like the others, her skin had not been eaten away, and she looked remarkably well preserved for being so long in the lake. Her head was tilted at an odd angle, as though her neck had been broken. While she was inarguably beautiful, there was something terribly off about her face, a wildness, an alien ness in her expression that filled him with fear. He did not know who she was, but she had an undeniable aura of power. Isabella.

The name came to him, from where he did not know, but he understood that it was hers. His feeling that she was somehow behind everything solidified.

She turned her tilted head, looked at him And he was at a crossroads in the moonlight, watching through Isabella's eyes as she approached the hanging body of a witch. The woman, a hag with a wild mane of gray hair, had been stripped naked and was dangling from a frayed rope attached to a lightning-struck oak. There was a faint glow about the witch, the remnants of power that were no doubt invisible to ordinary eyes, and this was what Isabella desired. There were no people anywhere near this cursed place, and even the lights of far-off villages had been

extinguished, so late was the hour. She crawled, unhampered and unseen, up the tree to cut down the body, and when it fell, she jumped on top of it. Her lips closed over the corpse's open mouth, and she began drawing in the extant power, at the same time sucking out blood and bile and bits of half digested food. It was the energy Isabella needed, desired, and he felt the strenghtening within her as her body absorbed the witch's dark force, extracting it from the dead body in the only way possible.

And then he was in an Anasazi village, Isabella taking the community's shaman in front of the shaman's brethren as part of a ceremony, draining the body through the palms of the old man's hands, wanting only the energy, but taking the blood as well in order to support the preconceived notions of the audience. Isabella was nude and moaning, allowing the blood to spatter her breasts, her stomach, her hairy crotch. The people watching prayed and chanted, giving thanks, and as she ingested the last of the man's essence, the shivers of orgasm passed through her loins.

Then the village was gone, and he was in a dark hut in which a man of power practiced his arts. The man was kneeling before a statue he had carved, the statue of a god in the shape of an asparagus. On the floor beside him lay dead women, nude and with their legs spread, stalks of asparagus protruding from their private parts. It was late spring, asparagus season, and outside men harvested the vegetables as their wives and daughters, caged in bamboo boxes, squirmed and screamed and begged to be released.

This was a different earth, an older earth, because the la rut outside was unlike anything existing today, the mountains on the horizon too tall and oddly shaped, the sky and the dirt of the fields different in color than they should have been.

Isabella had fed recently, so there was no reason to partake of the man's power. Instead, she knelt with him, the two

of them speaking in unison, praying to this an cent god, then crawling across the floor to where the prepared bodies lay. She crouched before the first dead woman, said the Words, shoved her head between the cold thighs, and started eating the asparagus.

Then he was in a huge black cave with naked men and women and creatures that had never seen the light of day, monsters that had never been drawn by the hand of man, had never emerged from even the most fervid imaginations of the world's most profane illustrators. The floor was mud, dirt mixed with blood rather than water, and Isabella was standing in the center of the cave, legs spread, arms in the air, howling. The men and women were cowed in terror before her, and she reached down, picked up one of the scuttling creatuers and ate it, crunchy slimy albino skin popping between her teeth as she chewed the unholy flesh.

She howled again, grabbed another little monster, ripped it apart with her teeth, and swallowed its essence. She cried out, an inarticulate cry of hunger and pain, and this time she leaped upon a larger creature, a segmented, multi-legged, multi mouthed multi-eyed monstrosity that squealed at her touch and attempted to right her off.

She subdued it easily, bit into the rubbery skin of its back, and killed it. "

She howled. =

And then the visions were over. He was once again here, himself, and Miles looked quickly around. Only a second had passed. He was exactly where he'd been, nothing had moved, nothing had changed. He felt dizzy, disoriented. He was not sure what had happened, but some sort of connection had been made between himself and this woman. He did not know how or why, but she had allowed him to glimpse what? Her memories? Her fantasies? Her plans? Her past? :!;

A quick look at Janet and Gardii and Rossiter told him that none of them had experienced anything similar. What 312 ever the phenomenon was, it had been reserved solely for him.

Isabella had emerged completely out of the water and was walking on the sand. She turned toward him, smiled chillingly And the vision hit.

The dam blew apart, Wolf Canyon Lake draining out in a tidal wave hundreds of feet high, emptying through the mountains and onto the desert below, completely wiping out a small town, the bodies of hundreds of people washing onto the plain.

Destruction spread across the land.

Phoenix was buried under a massive sandstorm that covered the entire Southwest and engulfed Albuquerque and Las Vegas as well. New York was in flames, the teeming streets filled with fleeing people with no place to run. Chicago sank into the ground while the waters of Lake Michigan rushed in to fill the hole. Los Angeles was shaking from an endless earthquake that seemed intent on leveling every manmade structure in the state .... As before, he saw it all through her eyes, and in a flash of insight, he realized that she had lived here at Wolf Canyon.

She had been one of the witches buried under the lake when the town was flooded.

The vision faded.

He staggered backward. Part of him wanted to shoot her, tackle her, but that was a small stupid part and it was overruled by common sense and good old-fashioned fear. Unlike the other Walkers, she was not merely an automaton. She was not following orders. She was the one giving them, carrying out her well-thought-out plans.

Now he understood. Finally he'd discovered a focal point to the evil that had spread out from this spot, that had reached across the country to kill all those people, that had some to do like his father, and 'the relatives and had finally brought them here. i

Isabella.

She wanted nothing less than complete revenge. Her power would grow with each loss of life, until she was unstoppable.

The end of the world would not result of Divine intervention or cosmic accident but from the small bitter hatred of an angry witch.

Miles was shaking. With fear, yes, but also from sensory overload, overwhelmed by the intensity of what he had experienced.

He had felt her anger, the white-hot core of hate that fueled her rage, but what remained with him most was the loneliness she felt, and moral imperatives were as nothing before it, minor distractions to be ignored or tossed aside. He remembered, as a kid, watching the Apollo space shots on TV, and what he recalled most clearly was Apollo 8, when American astronauts circled for the first time around the dark side of the moon. For the entire preceding week, he had attempted to imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes, to visualize what they were seeing, to experience what they felt. Loneliness was what he came up with. Everything they had ever known--water, sky, clouds, dirt, plants, animals, mountains, people, buildings, bugs--was a million miles away, encapsulated on a sphere they saw floating far off in the blackness of space while they were crammed into a small metal room surrounded by absolute nothingness. And when they circled around the dark side of the moon, when their radio transmission was cut off until they orbited back around, they were denied even that, stuck with only each other and the silence of space without so much as a glimpse of their blue globe world in the distance. They were alone, completely alone. i What he had felt when seeing through Isabella's eyes was

a comparable loneliness, a similar estrangement from the currents of life. Only it was somehow worse because it was something he could not understand. Her emotions and thought processes were so profoundly alien to him that he could deduce nothing from them, could make no predictions regarding past or future actions. The only thing he knew was that she could not be dissuaded from the course which she had chosen, that she was unalterably set upon her path and that there was nothing he or anyone else could do to change that.

Isabella looked past them, through them, and kept walking, following the others along the edge of the lake.

She didn't know that he'd seen!

His hart began racing. On the edge of despair only a second before, cowed and intimidated by her awesome power, he now saw a ray of hope.

Whatever connection had been established between them, she was unaware of it. Somehow, he had tapped into her intentions without her knowledge.

It was not much of an advantage, but it was something. The fact that she did not know he had gained access to her thoughts meant that she wasn't perfect, wasn't all-powerful. She'd looked in their direction after coming out of the water, but if she'd seen them or noticed them at all, she'd thought of them as little more than bugs or plants, totally irrelevant.

The constant tingling in his midsection faded as she moved between the paloverde trees away from them, angling inland from the shoreline. The other Walkers now seemed to Miles to be driven before her like cattle.

He knew that if anything was going to be done to stop her, they would have to be the ones to do it. How they would accomplish this was another matter. He looked over at the others, wanting to tell them what he'd experienced, but there was no way to convey the scope of it all. Rossiter was still holding his drawn weapon, but he had not fired a shot, and Miles could tell from the expression

on his face that the agent had been stunned into inaction. Janet was staring blankly out at the water.

Garden spoke first. "What the hell was that?"

"I don't know," Rossiter said.

Miles finally found his voice. "Isabella."

They all looked at him. "She's a witch who was here when the town was flooded, and somehow she survived. She's behind everything. She's old, older than we can imagine, and she's angry at what was done to her. I don't know if she was killed and struggled back from the dead or if she was just weakened and put out of commission for a while, but it's taken her until now to build up her strength. She reached out and killed the people responsible for the dam, the people who built it, the people who oversaw it, and she's gathered to her the people from Wolf Canyon, the other victims." He nodded at Gar den. "Like your grandfather." He took a deep. breath. "And my dad. I think they're, like, her army, and she's going to use them to help her--".

What? Destroy the world?

It sounded so stupid and childish and melodramatic.

"--take revenge," he said lamely, vaguely.

Rossiter nodded, but that was the only response. No one questioned him, and the irrationality of that made him realize just how crazy things had gotten. There were plenty of questions to ask. Why were Isabella and the Walkers leaving the lake after all these years? Where were they going from here? Perhaps the others didn't want to know more. Perhaps they understood on some instinctive level that what he'd told them was true, and that was enough for them.

Janet shook her head uncomprehendingly. "Did you see your father?" she asked Miles.

He nodded. "Yeah."

She turned to Garden. "Your grandfather?"

"And my uncle."

"Uncle John wasn't there." Her voice was filled with something like relief. "Maybe we did bury him. Maybe he is back in Cedar City and he's not involved in all this."

"Maybe," Miles agreed. He wasn't at all sure that Uncle

John's fate was so benign, but he wanted to ease her suffering. She did not deserve this. He was sorry he'd brought her along, but he knew that the only reason he could say that was because Garden and Rossiter were here. The truth was, he had had her come along solely because he hadn't wanted to be alone. Now he wished that he had left Janet back in Utah.

Garden was staring at the spot where they had last seen the Walkers heading into the desert, toward the hills. The track of disturbed sand that marked their passing was clearly visible. "What do you think we should do?"

"Follow them," Rossiter said, but his voice lacked conviction and his face betrayed a complete lack of desire to do any such thing.

Miles shook his head. Logically, that should be their plan, but something about it seemed wrong. It didn't feel right, although that seemed like a nebulous objection. "No," he said.

His authority challenged, Rossiter's spine stiffened.

'"they'll get away. If you're right, they need to be stopped.

And we're the only ones who've seen them. We're the only ones who know where they are."

"It's too dangerous," Miles said, and though he didn't know why he thought that, he did

"You coming?" the agent asked Garden.

The young man looked confused, ttmaed from Rossiter to

Miles, licking his lips.

"Fine." Rossiter started off on his own. "I'm not letting them out of my sight." He started down the slope, jogging to maintain his balance until he reached the beach at the bottom.

"Don't!" Miles called after him, and he was surprised by the power of his own voice.

"I have to! They'll get away!"

"Let them. We'll go after them later. We need to talk about this. We need to plan--"

"Nothing to talk about. Nothing to plan. You pussies stay here. I'm going." He was already moving away from shore and was past the first paloverde, heading around the column-like bulk of a saguaro.

"Maybe we should go," Garden said.

Janet shook her head fiercely. "Miles is right. It's dangerous You saw them."

"I saw my gram pa and uncle."

'Tthat's not who they are anymore," Miles told him. He looked Garden in the eye and saw that he was only stating what the young man already knew,

Rossiter disappeared into the deert.

"What do we do?" Garden asked.

Miles didn't know. He knew what felt wrong, but he didn't know what felt right. Isabella needed to be stopped. But he did not know how to do that, and it seemed criminal and irresponsible to stand around here, waiting for inspiration to strike instead of taking action.

"What's going to happen to him?" Janet was looking off toward where Rossiter had disappeared into the desert brash. "I hope nothing."

"But you don't think so?

Miles shook his head. Until Janet had forced him to confront the fact, he had not realized that he never expected to see the agent again. He was surprised at himself for not feeling anything, and once again he realized what a bizarre turn everything had taken, how. off it all seemed.

"Where do you think they're all going?" Garden asked. "Maybe we could call the police. I don't know how strong that Isabella is, but maybe they can be overpowered. Maybe

if we get a group together and confront them we can..."

He trailed off. "I don't know what we can do, but maybe we can do something."

Miles nodded absently. He was listening for the sound of gunfire, expecting Rossiter to catch up with the Walkers and, once cornered, use his revolver. =

But there were no shots, and the optimistic thought briefly occurred to him that the agent was trained in this sort of thing. He might be tailing them without their knowledge. Maybe he would see something or learn something that they could use to stop Isabella.

Hope died in his chest as Rossiter emerged from the brush, shuffling through the sand, hands hanging loosely at his sides, eyes white and wide, his mouth open in a stunned expression.

His face was bright lobster red. The thudding of Miles' heart rose to a drumbeat loud enough to drown out all incoming sounds. Rossiter looked as though his skin had been doused with red paint, but as he drew closer, starting up the slope toward the parking lot, Miles saw that the redness came from a transformation of the skin itself, like some ultra-extreme sunburn. The agent looked up at them and began talking, but the noises that came out of his mouth were like nothing that had ever issued from either human or animal.

Rossiter reached the parking lot and promptly sat down, his legs folding naturally into a lotus position as he lowered himself onto the gravel.

That's what his voice Sounded like. Rossiter was still talking, but his mouth closed as his but locks touched the earth. The disturbing noise stopped, and Rossiter looked up at the sky.." and froze.

Miles thought of Medusa, the gorgon, who, according to

Greek legend, would turn to stone any man who looked upon her.

Was that what had happened here?

What exactly had Rossiter seen?

Miles was not sure he wanted to know.

He looked down at the agent's unmoving form. Behind him, from the road, he heard tires on dirt, the sound of a car engine.

"Someone's coming," Janet said. Her voice was small and uncharacteristically squeaky.

Miles turned. A car pulled into the gravel parking lot, slowed to a stop. "I know that car," he said. "It's from my

It was the longest trip of her life.

Even without May chattering nonsensically in the backseat, Claire would have been anxious and unable to sleep. Ordinarily on a long drive, the rhythm of the wheels lulled her and she dozed. But the homeless woman kept alternately muttering to herself and making sudden absurd pronouncements, making for a long and stressful trip. ::..

Claire stared out the windshield.

Hal was a progressive rock fan, and he had an endless supply of tapes that he played throughout the night: Triumvirat and ELP and Yes and Gentle Giant and PFM. She herself was more of a smooth jazz, New Age kind of listener, and after a while she found the sheer number of notes and the tortured time changes of the music wearying. She longed for something soothing, relaxing, but this was Hal's car, and he was good enough to drive her, and she didn't say a word.

She prayed that Miles was okay, that nothing had happened to him, that he had not found Bob.

Or Isabella. "

They drove through the darkness, and by morning they were on a two-lane road that the map said led to Wolf Canyon. May said so, too, but Claire was not sure how much she trusted the navigational skills of the old woman, and not until the water was in sight was she sure that they had reached their destination.

Approaching the lake by a dirt trail that ended in a parking lot, they saw two vehicles and a group of three people looking out toward the water. Something in their manner, in their posture, suggested both defeat and terror, and as they drew closer, Claire saw that one of them was Miles.

Before him on the ground sat a preternaturally still man dressed in a suit and staring upward at the sky.

"Hal " -she started to say.

" "I see," he responded grimly.

For the past several miles the sky had been overcast, a strange tempestuous swirl of black-gray cloud cover that reminded Claire of tornado weather. There weren't supposed to be any tornadoes in Arizona.

The car pulled to a stop, skidding in the gravel. Miles caught her eye through the passenger window, and she rushed out of the vehicle and hugged him. His return embrace was clutching and heartfelt, the bear hug of a man who had not expected to see anyone he knew ever again.

"I love you," she said

She pulled back and looked up at him as another door slammed. The relief was evident on his face when he saw Hal, heard his friend's booming "Imagine seeing you here!"

Miles started to respond, but then his eyes widened as the back door opened and May stepped out. "Oh, my God," he said.

"I found her," Claire explained. "Or rather, she found me. She was waiting for me when I came home from work.

That's why we're here." Claire took his hand in hers, squeezed it.

"She has some things to tell you, Miles. I think you'd better listen."

The homeless woman stood next to the open car door, looking out at the lake as if searching for something. "May!" Claire called out.

She glanced up and ran over, dirty skirts flying, leaving the car door open behind her.

"May?" Miles said, as though he'd heard the name before. "Lizabeth May?" The old woman stopped in front of him, smiled.

Miles looked stricken. "What is it?" Claire as.

He shook his head.

"Hello, Garden," May said, nodding to the young man standing next to Miles. She smiled. "Dreams," she told Miles. "We should always listen to our dreams. They teach us."

"Yeah, right." Hal had walked up, and he snorted derisively. He glanced around at the others: the young man and woman, the guy on the ground. "Hey," he said in greetingi. "what's going on?" Claire looked down at the well-dressed man seated on the gravel. She hadn't noticed it before, but his face was a bright cherry apple red. "Is he?

" i. "I don't know. He just sat down there a minute before you showed up. He was chasing..." Miles shook his head. "It's a long story.

But he came back all.." red. And then he sat down here and he hasn't moved since."

She felt his neck for a pulse, found one. "He's alive. We should send somebody out for help."

Claire turned toward the homeless woman. "May?" "

"Isabella did this. There's no hospital that can help him now."

Again, Miles looked stricken. "You know IsabellaT"

"I know of her. We all did. Bob"--she nodded at the

young man to Miles' right--"John Hawkes"--she nodded at the woman,--"John Engstrom."

"You haven't introduced us to your friends," Hal said.

Miles seemed rattled, preoccupied, on automatic pilot.

Claire remembered that behavior from the old days: he was thinking, his brain sorting things out. It's what he used to do when he was putting together the pieces of a case on which he was working--something that happened far too often at home, at dinner, in the bedroom, during what was supposed to be their time together. Miles motioned toward the man and woman. 'this is Garden Hawkes and Janet En gslom. Janet's uncle died and kept walking, like my dad. I brought her here with me from Cedar City. The same thing happened to Garden's grandfather years ago. We met him at the lake." He turned around. "Garden, Janet? This is my friend Hal. We work together.

This is Claire, my... ex-wife.

And this is a woman I met once at a mall before Christmas.

Apparently, her name is May. I guess it'll be explained to me why she's here."

'That's the witch woman I was telling you about," Gar den whispered.

Mi'les nodded distractedly.

"So who is he?" Hal asked otioning toward the man on the ground

"Agent Rossiter. FBI."

"No shit?" The detective whistled. "You got yourself involved in a big one here."

"Yeah."

Come to think of it, you got me involved, too."

"I'm sorry.

"Don't apologize." Hal shook his head. "Jesus Christ,

Miles, when are you going to stop playing Lone Ranger? I learned more from Claire in the one hour before we left L.A. than I did from you the past three months. If we really are friends, you need to include me here. I came all this way,

and I don't know what the fuck's going on, but this time you can't just tough it out alone. There are other people involved."

Claire knew exactly what Hal was saying, and she agreed completely, but this wasn't really the time or place, and she could tell from the set of his face and the tightening in his jaw that Miles was closing himself off. She reached out. "What happened to Bob?" she asked softly. "Did you find him?"

Miles sighed tiredly. "Yeah. I found him." Drawing in a deep breath, he explained what had happened since he'd left California. Hal interrupted with occasional questions, and Miles answered them all, Garden and Janet jumping in for clarification.

Claire could not help looking out at the lake as Miles told his story.

Somewhere underneath that black water was a submerged town, where drowned witches had spent the last few decades walking and to which the newly dead had trekked. The fear she felt was palpable, a physical sensation like the temperature or the wind.

Miles finished talking, and he held her sweaty hand tightly, as if for support. He was keeping something back, she sensed, and that was what was troubling him. Hal seemed to sense it, too, and she met his eyes and saw, beneath the forced good humor, a reflection of her own worries and concerns.

"So," Miles said dramatically, turning to May, "I guess it's time to hear what you have to say about all this. I assume you know what's going on. I assume that's why you're here."

"It is." May repeated everything she'd told Claire, describing how she'd been a New Jersey housewife pulled to Wolf Canyon by the strength of Isabella's will, like a moth drawn to a light. "Of course, I was a witch, too. So I knew all about Isabella."

"She's a witch?" Janet asked.

"She is not a witch," the old woman said. "Well, she is but she isn't."

Garden threw up his hands. "She's not even making any sense!"

"Yes, she is," Miles said. "Listen to her."

"Isabella's a predator, a parasite, a creature who lives off her own kind. She feeds off witches, absorbs their power. Yes, she's one herself, but she's also something more. At least, that's the way we figured it."

"And she was killed when the town was flooded," Miles said.

May shook her head. "Oh, no. Isabella was killed way before that. She might even be the cause of it. See, she was around when Wolf Canyon was founded She married William Johnson, the founder himself. No one knew where she came from originally. I guess she just showed up one day, and William fell under her spell. So to speak. But she was a bad influence on him. After she came, there were mysterious deaths and disappearances, murders. The entire town changed. There were purges of non-witches in the outlying areas, trials and executions of witches who did not agree with the way William and Isabella were running things. She was an evil creature, hated and feared, and eventually even William figured that out. No one knows what all happened, but he killed her one night while she was sleeping, cut off her head. They buried her in a cave outside town, sealing it up, weaving spells around it to keep her in. She was dead but her head was still talking, and she cursed Wolf Canyon and everyone in it, vowing revenge. She promised that they would drown and die, and that they would suffer even after death.

"And that's what happened.

"She called them back after they passed on, all of the people who'd had a part in disposing of her body, who had been living in Wolf Canyon at that time. And, from what

we could figure out, she fed off them, using their energies to right her way back. She was strong enough thirty years ago to reach out to me all the way over on the East Coast, and she's been getting stronger ever since. Her power has been growing with each passing year as the children of Wolf Canyon die off and she consumes their energy. Miles nodded. "And when she was strong enough, she reached out to the men who had worked on the dam and killed them, too. Only I don't see why, if they were just doing what she wanted done anyway."

"Because maybe they beat her to the punch. Maybe she's angry that they did what she was not yet strong enough to do. Or maybe not. Who knows? Sometimes there just isn't an explanation."

"Where do you fit in?" Miles asked.

May smiled. "She killed a baby. Back in the town's early days. She thought the population had reached some magic number, and she didn't want it changed: no new people, no one leaving. So when a couple had a baby, she killed it. Her, I should say, not it. The baby was a girl.

The parents left, took off in the middle of the night to escape Isabella's tyranny. Years later, they had another daughter. That baby was my mother. And her parents taught her and she taught me about the town--and what went on there. Your father knew, too. He was born in Wolf Canyon, and he lived there until he was ten or so, until his parents moved to Los Angeles. That was long after Isabella, but long before the lake. I met him at the dam after I'd come out from New Jersey. I walked the shoreline.." and I found your father. I think he'd been called, too. He was here to make sure that Isabella hadn't escaped and was still down there." She nodded toward Garden. "John Hawks, your grandfather, had never left. He'd left the town, but he'd built him a house on top of the plateau." She pointed behind them at a flattened rocky bluff. "He's the one who told us about the

people in town who didn't leave, who couldn't get out, and we all figured it was her, keeping them there so they would be drowned. There were several of us, and we kept in touch for a while. We knew the stories, and we waited to see if she would return. But the years passed, and she didn't, and we drifted apart, drifted into other lives."

"I remember you," Garden said. "We almost told you when Grampa died, but. but we didn't for some reason, and then you were gone."

Claire looked at the old lady. It was as if she'd gotten all the craziness out of her system on the trip over, because she appeared completely lucid.

May shook her head. "Now you say she's come out of the lake. With all of the others." She squinted at Miles. "How many would you say?

"Dozens. A hundred, maybe." He shrugged. Maybe more.

I didn't count."

"You were called, too," May said. She looked intently at Miles.

"So what's the plan?" Garden asked. "What do we do now?"

May turned to face the young man. "We will hunt her down," she said.

Claire felt peach fuzz hairs prickle at the back of her

And we' will kill her once and for all."

Miles stared at the homeless woman, who had suddenly stopped talking and was twirling around with her arms out and her eyes closed, like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy. From where he stood, the immobile FBI agent was directly in front of her, and the sight of the two together hit

May began screaming crazily, looking up at the dark sky and shouting out non sequiturs.

"I was surprised she held out for as long as she did," Hal whispered.

"In the car, she couldn't go two minutes without spouting off some loony nonsense."

Claire gave Miles' hand a small squeeze, then let go and moved forward, trying to quiet May and calm her down.

May.

Lizabeth May.

He remembered the whispers in the night and wondered who had been telling him that name. And why.

He had heard his father's name whispered, and his father had died.

Hal turned to face him. "You should've brought me in earlier, man.

Tran, too. We could've helped you on this. I thought your dad was just missing, I didn't know all this... shit was going on."

"Would you have believed it?"

"Not at first, probably. But I go where the facts take me. You know that." He leaned in, lowered his voice. "And I'd feel a lot better with Tran here than Claire and these other civilians."

Miles had to agree with that.

Except... Except this felt right, and once more he was confronted with the unfamiliar sensation of trusting his feelings rather than facts.

Although, under the circumstances, it didn't seem quite so strange.

"Isabella, huh?" Hal shook his head.

"Yeah."

"Does this super witch have a last name?"

"Would it matter if she did?"

"I guess not." Hal looked over at Rossiter, sighed. "You know, I can't help thinking about the fact that this bitch con trois an army of zombies and turned an FBI agent into a

brain-dead lobster within a matter of minutes. I don't like the odds here." He quickly held up his hands. "But I'm in,

I'm m, I am not complaining. You are just scared. Damn right I'm scared. Vales grmed. "Wuss boy."

"Not ashamed to admit it. And you're glad I'm here, aren't you?"

"Yeah," Miles admitted. "I am."

"That's a start, bud. That's a start." May was suddenly silent.

Claire was standing before her, holding the old woman's arms at her sides, when she pulled away, blinking as if she'd just emerged from a trance. "How long ago did Isabella leave?" she asked.

Miles looked at Garden, at Janet.

"I don't know," Garden said. "Fifteen minutes." 'Ten or fifteen,"

Janet said. vales nodded in agreement.

"She's far enough away, then." May mumbled something to herself before looking up again. "Talismans, spell casters, potions. Your families were witches, they all had the makings. Did you bring them? Do you have materials with you?"

Miles nodded dumbly. He wasn't sure how he felt about relinquishing authority to a woman who obviously had severe mental problems, but crazy as she was, she'd been involved in this longer than any of them.

He had no choice but to listen to her. 'there a box in the car from Janet's uncle's house."

I'll get it." Obviously happy to have something to do, Janet headed over to the rental car to fetch her uncle's witchcraft paraphernalia.

"May told me to bring your stuff, too," Claire said. "Thank God you didn't put it back in that safety deposit box or

there's no way I would, have been able to get it out. It's in the trunk."

"I have the keys," Hal said. go. May turned to look at Garden.

He shrugged. "I never saw those things. I only heard about them. I don't know what happened to them."

The old lady frowned, mumbled something to herself. Hal and Janet returned with the materials. Miles took his father's stuff from Hal, who then offered to carry Janet's box. Janet shook her head, held on to the carton, and following May's lead, they all walked down the slope to the water's edge, leaving the unmoving Rossiter behind.

By this time the strange sky looked downright fierce. The clouds were not stormy gray but black, deep black, like the water. Though it was difficult to detect movement in so much darkness, shapes seemed to be forming and un forming and reforming in the roiling currents of air.

Feeling his chest tighten, Miles put the box down on the sand, Janet following suit. May crouched down, quickly sorted through the jumble of items and, smiling as if she'd found some long-lost treasure, drew out a rusty spoon. The spoon from his dream.

The tightness in his chest increased.

She picked out a large covered jar, a porcelain doll with painted breasts and pubic hair, a kerosene lamp.

He'd dreamed about all these things, and he felt a cold coil of fear wrap around his heart. Sure, the spoon had come from his father's batch of items, and he might have dreamed about it because he had seen it. But that did not explain the jar or the doll or the lamp. Those things had belonged to Janet's uncle. There was no way he could have known about them.

May set those items aside, then begn sorting through the things he did remember. She drew out the necklace of teeth, the plastic bag containing the dried, flattened frog.

"Wear these for protection," she said. She ran her hands above the necklace, tracing patterns in the air in a manner that seemed oddly sensual and that, in some strange way, spoke to him, though he had never seen such a thing before. She held the necklace out and he took it gingerly. He had no intention of ever wearing such a thing, but she held his gaze and refused to continue until he put it on. Shivering with revulsion, he obliged.

She performed similar hand movements over the frog, took it out of the bag, and handed it to Garden. "Keep this in the left front pocket of your pants."

Garden looked like he wanted to object, but he did not and pocketed the frog.

Janet received a ring of bone, Hal a carved wood fetish, Claire a bracelet made out of some type of dried weed. May herself opened one of the bottles and ingested a pinch of some foul-scented powder.

"Now--" May began. But she never finished. From the dark, swirling sky came a bright yellow lightning bolt that was not accompanied by thunder and did not flash instantly to earth but descended slowly and deliberately through the charged atmosphere and struck May atop the head. She watched it come for her, made no effort to move out of the way. When it touched her hair she fell, the features of her face hardening into an agonized rigidity. She collapsed forward onto the gravel, her arms flailing spastically, her legs jerking in furious counter movement even as the muscles of her face froze.

"Somebody do something," Claire said, but no one moved forward, and Miles grabbed her around the waist and held tightly to keep her from approaching May's electrically charged form.

The lightning retreated as leisurely as it had arrived, heading back up into the roiling sky like a fishing line being reeled in. Claire broke free from his grasp and knelt next to

the now still old woman, putting her hand on May's neck to feel for a pulse. She is dead." '"Miles pulled Claire back. "No mouth-to-mouth."

She didn't object, and Miles understood just how frightened she was.

Claire was a congenital do-gooder, always helping people, always giving of her time and money, doing anything she could to assist someone in trouble. She was also well trained in CPR. If Claire was so easily dissuaded from trying to help May, Miles knew that she had to be truly terrified.

Hal looked from May to Rossiter on top of the slope.

"Iwo down, five to go," he said. "Not funny," Miles told him.

"Asshole," Garden mumbled.

Claire suddenly jerked backward, and Miles was nearly knocked over, thrown off balance by the surprise movement.

"What? he started to say. Then he saw. May.

The homeless woman was vibrating, a uniform shiver that passed through her form yet did not bring life to any part of her body. Her arms and legs remained frozen at oddly cocked angles, and the wide-eyed agony on her face stayed unchanged.

A powerful shudder passed through her.

She stood.

And started walking.

He knew what was happening, knew where she was going. There were only seconds to decide on a course of action, and Miles took charge. "Grab your stuff! We're going with her!" He scrambled about for the spoon and the jar and kerosene lamp, leaving the doll on the sand, unable to carry it. "Water!" he called out. "Bring water if you have it! It's the desert!"

Garden dashed back up the slope to the parking lot, followed by Hal.

May was striding away, her head tilted up toward the sky, while her feet followed the path that had been taken by Isabella and the other Walkers. In his mind was the image of that slow lightning coming down to strike May, Agent

Rossiter reappearing from his chase with a red head and a dead brain, the physical proof of the power they were up against, but Miles knew he was doing the right thing and, running on instinct, he kept his eyes on the dead woman, ready to hurry after her if she got out of his sight..

Garden and Hal came sprinting down to the shore, Gar den strapped with two canteens, Hal carrying a six-pack of

Dr. Pepper.

"Let's go!" Miles shouted. "Follow her!

"Get help," he told Claire, kissing her quickly. "Drive back to a town, bring the police, sheriff, whatever you can fred."

"Oh, no, you don't." She grabbed Miles' arm, holding

" " " ' " him tight.

"I'll go for help," Janet said. "Or I'll stay. Or..." She closed her eyes. "I just don't want to chase after her. Them. I don't want to go with you."

Miles understood. Her uncle was not here, any personal connection she might have had was gone, and she was too emotionally on edge to continue on. He thought she should go with them, thought the fact that her family had come from Wolf Canyon might have a bearing on the situation, but there was no time to discuss the subject, no time to argue or convince her, and he knew that without major reassurances she would not be able to make it.

Miles handed Claire the lamp, fumbled in his pocket. "Here's the car keys," he said, tossing them to Janet. "Get some help. Tell them about the FBI guy. That should bring someone over here pretty quick."

Janet said something in response, but he didn't have time to listen.

May was disappearing behind a big paloverde, and Miles took off after her, pulling Claire with him, yelling at the others to hurry up.

They followed her into the desert.

They stayed several yards behind---just in case. May unerringly took the route left by the other Walkers, maneuvering closely around bushes and cacti with the precision of an amusement park ride on a track.

After leaving the shoreline, Isabella had headed between two low hills and then through a narrow eroded canyon. Though the way was easy at first, it became increasingly harder to walk as the sand became deeper and looser, more dune like

It was also hot. The sky was still dark, but the absence Of sun had no bearing on the heat, seemed to make things more humid and oppressive, in fact. Garden shifted the canteens on his shoulders, taking off his sweat-soaked shirt and tucking it into his waistband. Hal followed suit. Miles would have liked to do the same, but May was moving much too quickly, and he would not have had time to stop, put down the jar, and take off his shirt. He would have lost her. Next to him Claire, still clutching the lamp, used a handkerchief to wipe her brow.

They tromped deeper into the wilderness.

This was a perfect opportunity for them to talk things out, discuss what was happening, settle on a unified approach. But they did none of that.

The noiseless ness of May in front of them and the unnatural quiet of the desert all around made speech seem sacrilegious, intimidated them all into silence, and the only sound accompanying their steps was the heavy breathing of out-of-shape exertion.

Twenty minutes in, Hal passed back a can of warm Dr. Pepper, which Miles and Claire shared gratefully. She finished the last little bit of soft drink, hded Miles the empty can, and he dropped it on the sand to his left. He had no idea where they were or in which direction they were headed, but he had the feeling it might be difficult to find their way back, and he thought they might need a HansclandGretel trail to follow for the return trip.

If there was a return trip.

They passed through what looked like a saguaro forest, an especially dense stand of the tall cacti, and then through a narrow valley so thick with ocotillo that they were forced to walk directly behind May in order to keep her in sight. Around them the land was rising up, gently sloping hills giving way to harsher, higher cliffs.

Miles' legs were hurting, and he could tell that Claire was tiring as well. The Walkers were dead--they would never tire outmand he hoped that they were not planning to march indefinitely, because there was no way the rest of them could keep up.

He had no plan, no idea of what he would do when and if they finally caught up with Isabella. He hadn't even taken along Rossiter's gun, had only some half-assed witchcraft items that May had picked out for protection. Assuming those things worked, what then? Should he jump Isabella? Wrestle her to the ground?

He was suddenly conscious of the necklace against his skin, the coldness of the teeth, and he wondered whose teeth they were, what the purpose of the necklace was, why his father had saved it. And where his father had gotten it in the first place. Had he made the necklace himself?. Had he taken the teeth from corpses or from people that he'd killed?

Despite everything that had happened, he still could not reconcile the father he knew with this underground horror show society, with spells and potions and curses and murders. He saw his father more as a victim than a participant, and though Bob had obviously been in possession of witch . craft paraphernalia and had taken pains to hide this aspect of his life from the rest of the world, it was also clear that he was not particularly familiar with his heritage.

Hell, his dad had had to go to the library to find out the meaning of his recurrent dream. Which made Miles question May's story. She claimed to have known his father, said that the two of them, along with Garden's grandfather, had been born in Wolf Canyon and had known about Isabella and her curse. Maybe so. But there were details that didn't add up.

It happened without warning.

They were following behind, once again at a discreet distance, since the terrain had become more hospitable and the vegetation sparser, when the dead woman stopped walking in the flat sandy bottom of a dry wash.

Abruptly, she flopped onto her stomach, arms suddenly straight at her sides, legs and feet together. Without a second's pause she began burrowing head first into the ground.

Miles, stunned, could not believe what he was seeing. May's mouth was open, and it appeared as though she was eating the sand, using her jaws like a shovel to dig into the soft earth. It was inhuman and should not have been physically possible, but in a matter of seconds, May's face and head disappeared into the ground, followed by her neck, her shoulders, her upper torso, her midsection.

And then she stopped.

He looked over at Hal and Garden, saw expressions of fear and disbelief on their faces that no doubt mirrored his own. Claire's fingers found his free hand, and he squeezed back a reassurance he did not feel.

They waited, watching, holding their breath, but there was no sound, no movement, no indication that May would ever move again. It was as if whatever force had been animating her form had suddenly withdrawn, leaving behind only a dead, discarded body as lifeless as a normal corpse.

Miles approached cautiously, prepared for a sudden resumption of activity, the type of explosive furious movement that always occurred at this point in horror movies. But this was not a movie and nothing happened. He reached May without incident. Her legs were sticking straight up in the air, and he touched one of her rough dirty feet, feeling cold skin, spongy dead flesh. Her filthy skirt had fallen over her legs, and when he looked down he could see her overly hairy crotch.

He looked up at the sky, looked all around. Was this something May had done on her own, some sort of rebellion to kill herself completely, once and for all, to terminate Isabella's hold over her? Or had Isabella compelled May to dig into the sand for a reason, only to have the old woman's body give out at the last minute? He didn't know, but either way May's unmoving form reminded him of nothing so much as a broken piece of farm equipment left to rot in the ground where it had stopped.

Maybe the spell had simply worn off. Or maybe magic had geographical parameters. Maybe Isabella had pulled so far ahead that May was now beyond the reach of her influence.

Maybe.

The tightness in his chest was gone, but the tingling in his midsection was back, and Miles found himself wondering if these were actual physiological responses to the sort of power to which he'd been exposed. He turned to Garden. "Do you feel anything? In your body, I mean. Any unusual physical sensalaons.

Hal butted in. "Aside from the fact that my balls have shrunk to the size of grapes and retracted into my abdomen with fear?"

'"l'hank you for that," Claire said dryly.

"Sorry."

Garden shook his head. "I don't know what you mean."

"Is there, like, a tingling in your gut? Or a tightening in your chest?"

'Tightening of the chest?" He heard the worry in Claire's voice.

"That's the sign of a heart attack."

"I'm not having a heart attack."

"There's no way we could get you to a hospital in time---"

"I'm not having a heart attack!"

"I'm concerned! Is that all right with you?"

They were glaring at each other, but beneath the anger in her expression he could see her concern, and he moved forward to give Claire a quick kiss. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry."

"I'm just worried about you."

"I know."

"I'm not feeling anything weird," Garden said.

Miles nodded. He accepted that no one else was experiencing the same responses he was, but he still could not shake the feeling that these symptoms meant something. For the first time he wondered if--since witch blood apparently flowed through his veins--he himself possessed some sort of extrasensory abilities. It would explain his newly acquired sensitivity, would account for the recent veracity of his gut reactions.

They did not linger in the sandy wash, and there was no discussion about stopping, quitting, turning back. They silently picked up where May had left off, following the trail of footprints, heading out of the wash toward a long low hill in the distance, Garden taking the lead.

They were on their own now, but no wind or rain had yet arrived to disturb the tracks in the sand where the Walkers had passed, and it was easy to follow the trail of Isabella and her zombies. Hal passed back another can of Dr. Pepper.

This is the last for a while," Miles said. "We don't know how far we have to go, and we need to save some supplies for the trip back."

They reached the hill, walked around it. The sand turned to rock, and they were forced to scramble over and between huge boulders. Finally, the ground leveled out and they were confronted with a massive arroyo that blocked their way and spread like a vine through the flatland beyond.

Miles walked up to the edge and looked down. It was a good two stories to the bottom of the gulch, and the footprints of the Walkers went up to the precipice and disappeared. From where he stood, he could see no path leading to the arroyo floor, and he could only assume that they had continued walking and fallen straight down. There were no bodies, of course, and he looked across the gulch, then into it, both north and south, trying to determine in which direction they had gone, but it was impossible to tell from here.

"What are we going to do now?" Garden asked.

"Well, we only have two choices: down or back. It etty dear that they didn't go back." Hal was walking along the edge, and he waved them over. They

"What?" Miles called.

"I think I found a way down!"

He had indeed: a narrow but not particularly steep trail that switch backed down a sloping side crevasse and led them directly into the arroyo. Miles offered Claire his help, but she was more coordinated and in better shape than he was and beat him to the bottom.

There was no sand here, only rock, and it was impossible to tell in which direction Isabella had driven her herd. South felt right to him, though, and Miles motioned for the others to follow. "his way!" he said.

Claire was next to him, and Hal sidled up on the other side. "You know I'm carrying, don't you?"

Miles shook his head. "No, I didn't."

"Well, I am. Just in case. Thought I'd let you know."

It didn't make Miles. feel any more secure that Hal had a gun--he had the feeling that such things had no power here--but if it made the detective feel better and gave him the confidence he needed, Miles was all for it.

Hal, he reflected, was a true friend, and he regretted not opening up to him earlier. Sometimes two heads were better than one, and perhaps they could have avoided this if they'd figured things out before.

Perhaps May would still be alive.

He turned toward Claire. "Are you okay?" he asked. She smiled gamely. "I'm fine."

The arroyo twisted and turned. This was flash flood territory, and he hoped to God it didn't rain while they were stuck down here. The sky was still dark with clouds, and if a rain shower---either natural or unnatural--hit suddenly, they would have very little time to find a way up and out before the floodwaters washed them away. The thought occurred to him that they had been lured down here, that this was a trap, but though he remained on edge, nothing occurred.

An hour or so later, the arroyo opened out onto a flat plain. The land behind them, Miles saw now, was a raised plateau. Before them, on the same level as the arroyo floor, stretched a desert markedly different than the one through which they had passed. There were no cacti here, no bushes, no trees, no grasses. There was only rock. And sand. In the distance, hidden beyond haze and waves of heat, loomed jutting buttes and tall, strangely shaped mesas that made the landscape look like a Dali-esque Monument Valley. Just in front of that, the ground was broken up into what appeared to be a series of tan canyons sunk deep into the earth.

"I think we went the wrong way," Garden said. "I don't think Isabella came this direction."

"No," Hal said quietly. "She was here." He pointed. To their left, bordering what looked like a trail across the flat empty land, were the legs of the dead Walkers, sticking up in the air in V-shaped pairs like a line of huge fleshy scissors. As with May, the men and women were embedded in the ground upside down, and only the bottom portions of their bodies protruded from the hard-packed dirt.

One pair of legs doubtlessly belonged to Garden's uncle, another his grandfather. "

One belonged to Bob. "

A stinging burnt smell hovered in the air, though there was no sign of smoke or haze. Sulfur, Miles thought, but he didn't want to think about what that meant.

"Let's get out of here," Claire said. Her voice was subdued "We need to get help. Police, National Guard... some body. We can't handle something like this on our own, just the four of us."

"I'm with Claire," Hal admitted.

Miles said nothing. He began walking across the dirt to where the witches' legs stuck up from the ground. There was room enough between the double rows for him to pass, and he proceeded down the gruesome aisle, looking from left to right, trying to determine which pair of legs belonged to his father--and which to Isabella.

He had the feeling she wasn't here

Indeed, looking ahead, he saw a single pair of footprints heading out across the hard ground.

Only they weren't exactly footprints.

There were far too many toes, and the tips produced small round holes in the dirt--like claws or talons.

She was in the canyons, he thought, looking into the distance. She was waiting for them there.

She wanted them to come.

The thought frightened him. He didn't know why a creature with her obviously awesome power would wait around, playing hide-and-seek with a small ragtag group of ill equipped ill-prepared pursuers when she clearly had much bigger plans in mind. But nothing about any of this made sense, it had been irrational and crazy from the start, and he had no trouble accepting that she was doing exactly that.

The others had followed him and caught up. Hal tentatively touched the sole of one Walker's foot. Claire had refused to pass between the twin rows of dead witches and had circled around the aisle to the opposite end.