The Walking Page 9

  He explained how he'd moved to Carlsville after his father's very public death back in the appropriately named town of Lynchburg. He'd escaped his father's fate for the simple reason that he had not been home when the mob showed up to the door of their house, and he'd lain low and headed west, traveling as far away from rrginia as quickly as possible. He'd finally stopped running in Missouri, deciding to settle in the beautiful town of Carlsville, where he was fortunate enough to find work as an apprentice blacksmith.

  He was still in his teens then, and he portrayed himself as a young man with no parents who had escaped from a tyrannical orphanage back East.

  The blacksmith, and indeed the entire town, welcomed him with open arms, treating him as one of their own. He was given a room at the stable, took

  his meals with the blacksmith's family, and went to Church with everyone on Sundays.

  He also fell in love with Becky, Reverend Faron's daughter.

  From the beginning, Becky exhibited an interest in him that went beyond the merely solicitous. He found her very attractive as well, and discovered as they talked after church services that he enjoyed being with her. Of course, the fact that she was a minister's daughter meant that he had to be extra careful. He could not exhibit any abilities that were even slightly out of the ordinary, had to pretend not to know things that he knew, not to believe things he believed.

  Becky sensed in him something that no one else did, a darkness, she called it, and she confessed quite often that this was what had first attracted her. She said there was an enigma at the core of his being, a mysteriousness to the seeming straightforwardness of his past that no one in town had caught, and she was intrigued by that. The more time they spent together, the closer they became, and a year after he'd first arrived in Carlsville she revealed that she loved him.

  He discovered that he loved her too. It was not something he'd been looking for, not even something he'd wanted, but somehow it had happened, and soon after he told her, he proposed to her, and they made plans to get married.

  One evening they were lying by the creek that ran through the woods just south of town, talking, touching, looking up at the stars. The conversation faded away, and they lay there for a few moments in silence, listening to the high, clear babble of the creek. Becky seemed more subdued than usual, and he was about to ask her if there was anything the matter when she sat up, facing him. "Do you love me?" she asked

  He laughed. "You know I do."

  "Can we tell each other anything?

  "Anything and everything

  She thought for a moment, then took a deep breath. The hand that touched his was trembling. "I'm not pure," she said. The story came out in a torrent, a nonstop jumble of words that flowed over each other and on to the next like the water in the creek: "I wanted to tell you so many times, but I did not know how and it never seemed to be the right time. My father took me against my will. After my mother died.

  It was only once and I hated it, and he performed penance afterward and we both prayed, but it happened and I'd change that if I could but I can't. No one else knows and I promised him I would never tell another living soul, but I love you and I can't start off our marriage with a lie, and you'd find out anyway, so I thought I'd better tell you."

  By this time she was sobbing on his shoulder. "Don't hate me, she cried, don't want you to hate me."

  "Shhh," he hushed her. "Of course I don't hate you."

  "I couldn't stand it if you hated me."

  "I don't hate you."

  "But you don't love me anymore."

  "Of course I love you." He tried to smile, though it felt as if his heart had been ripped open. He gave her a quick kiss on the top of the head, smelled the fragrance of her hair. "Anything and everything, remember?"

  "It only happened once, and it's over now. He apologized and I pretended to forgive and forget, I tried to forgive and forget, but I didn't, I couldn't, and I've been worried ever since because I knew this day would come. I knew I'd meet a man I loved and he'd find out I wasn't pure. I even thought of what I'd tell him. I had a big story all worked out. A lie."

  "Shhh," Jeb said. "Shhhh."

  She was silent for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice was low. "I thought of killing him." Her eyes met Jeb's. "He knew what he was doing even while he was doing it, and no matter how much he prays or apologizes, it still

  happened, and we both know it, and I know that every time we're alone together, we're both thinking about it. So I've thought of killing him many times, but but somehow can't do it. I still want to kill him, but I know I won't. He's my father.

  She exhaled when she if so, as though a great weight had just been taken from her shoulders. She let out a small harsh laugh. "I never thought I'd admit that to any body."

  He didn't know what to do, so he just kept holding her, and when she started crying again, sobbing into his shoulder, he held her tighter.

  Eventually the crying stopped, and she pulled back, kissed him on the lips. "I love you so much."

  "I love you, too."

  "Now it's your turn," she said.

  "What?"

  She touched his face. "Come on. I want to know your big secret.

  You've been keeping something from me, and I want to know what it is."

  ' 1"here is no big secret. My life's Open book." "With some missing pages." She stood up on her knees, pretended to point a gun at him.

  "Come on, buster: Adroit it." Her face was still red from crying, her cheeks glistening with the wetness of tears, and she looked so sad and lost and alone that it damn near broke his heart.

  So he told her.

  He did not tell her everything, did not go into detail, but he told her that he had powers, that his father had had powers, and that they had both used those powers to help people. He explained that others had not understood, had feared and hated them, that his father had been killed and he himself had only narrowly escaped the same fate.

  He told her he was a witch, though he did not use the word. 20She seemed subdued, her reaction not what he had expected. In fact, he did not know that she had a reaction. She was neither understanding and supportive nor horrified and angry. Instead she was politely quiet, pensive, and though that worded him at first, when she gave him a quick kiss before llaey parted and said, "I love you," he. knew that all she needed was a little time to get used to the idea.

  He felt good that he'd unburdened himself, freer than he had since living with his father, and he fell into a quick and easy sleep.

  The blacksmith awakened him. "Get up!" he whispered. "hey're coming after you."

  Jeb stirred groggily, blinking against the lamplight. What? Who?"

  "Reverend Faron's gathering up a posse, and they're coming to get you.

  They're going to string you up."

  She'd told her father.

  He felt as if his guts had been yanked out of his chest, and only at that moment did he realize how much he truly loved her.

  He'd escaped--with the help of the blacksmith, who understood what he was and didn't care--and he'd been on the move ever since.

  "Maybe it wasn't her," William offered. "Maybe someone else found out.

  Maybe--'

  "It was her."

  Even now the wounds still hurt. Just talking about those memories had dredged up the emotions that went with them, and Jeb found himself wondering where Becky was now, what she was doing, who she was with, what she was like. "I've never been in love," William said sadly.

  They were both walking, William leading his home, and Jeb looked over at him. "Never?"

  The other man shook his head, started to say something,

  then thought the better of it. Jeb waited for him to say something else, but he did not. '

  They continued on in silence.

  They came upon the monster in the late afternoon.

  The beast was dead, its corpse rotting in the sun, but even in death it was a fearsome sight to behold. They were well up the can
yon by this time, fenced in between high rock walls that blocked out half the sky, and they saw the oversize body lying in the dry creek bed well before they reached it. They could both sense the undiluted malevolence of the creature's lingering presence, like the smell of a skunk that remained long after the animal had gone, and the horse seemed to sense it too because William had to talk to the animal to keep it from bolting.

  They approached the body warily. It was easily as big as three men, both in height and width, and was vaguely human in form, but there were claws instead of hands at the ends of the excessively long arms, and what remained of the head was unlike anything Jeb had ever seen. Like the rest of its body, the monster's head appeared to have been deflated, like a balloon, black rotting skin hanging loosely off an interior frame of bone, but even in this ruined shape, he could see that there was hair where there should not have been, eyes and nose that should not have been on any living creature, and far, far too many teeth. Long teeth. Pointed teeth.

  The very air here felt heavy, and Jeb turned toward William. "What do you think it is?" he asked, his voice hushed.

  William shook his head, not taking his eyes off the monster. He bent forward to look more closely.

  Jeb shivered. The canyon seemed suddenly far too small, far too narrow, and he looked up at the top of the rock walls

  to see if there were any more of these creatures about. He didn't feel the presence of anything else here, but he did not trust his own instincts, and he glanced both up and down the canyon.

  "It didn't die naturally," William said. "Something killed it. It looks like its insides were eaten out. Or sucked out through this hole at the top of the back."

  "What could kill something like this?"

  William looked at him. "I don't think we want to know." Jeb wanted to get out of the mountains immediately, but though it was a small range, there was no way they could make it through before tomorrow or the day after, and they were forced to set up camp on a flattened ridge. At least they were out of the canyon. He would have rather walked through the night and taken his chances with the cliffs and the darkness than sleep in that cursed place.

  Whatever could bring down a monster like that could have them for dessert, but they both wove protective spells around the camp and decided to take turns standing watch for the night, prepared to either flee or right at the first sign of anything unusual.

  Jeb's watch was first, but he saw nothing, heard nothing, and, though he kept his senses wide open, felt nothing. The horse, too, seemed calm. As far as he could tell, they were alone in this place, and he hoped that it remained that way. At least until morning.

  He woke William when the moon was halfway across the sky, and the two of them switched places. He knew he had to rest for the grueling trek tomorrow, but he was not at all tired and was not sure he would be able to sleep.

  He was out almost immediately after his head hit the saddlebag.

  He dreamed of a town in which all of the houses were identical and where at sunset a dwarf roamed the community, placing metal spoons on the porches of those who would

  die before dawn. He was living in one of the houses and was awakened in the middle of the night by a mysterious sound and went outside to investigate. But when he walked onto the porch, he felt something cold and hard touch his toes, heard a clattering noise. He looked down to see that he'd accidentally kicked a rusted metal spoon off the porch.

  There was a snickering from the bushes, and when he looked more closely, he saw the face of a dwarf grinning evilly up at him.

  He awoke in the morning feeling urtrested. William had already conjured a fire and was making coffee with some muddy water he'd found in a barely trickling creek a little farther along the trail. They drank their breakfast, packed up, and set out, both of them wanting to escape from these mountains as quickly as possible.

  They did not speak much that day, or that night when they camped in a narrow ravine between two tall cliffs. It was as if a spell had been cast on them, even though they had carefully protected themselves.

  The next day they left the mountains and it felt to Jeb as though he had awakened from a bad dream. The feelings that had been following him faded, and even the memory of the monster seemed not as sharp. He recognized the sensation. It was the exhilaration one felt after averting disaster. He had guiltily experienced a variation of it upon escaping Lynchburg and avoiding his father's fate, and he knew that this sudden lifting of dread was due not to any magic but to simple human emotion.

  They'd had two days to think about what they'd come across back in the canyon, and while he himself had not been able to piece together any solutions, William struck him as a more pensive sort, a deep thinker, and he turned toward his newfound friend. "What do you. think killed that monster?" he asked

  William shook his head, and Jeb understood that he did not want to talk about it. That was fine with him.

  The landscape flattened out, and on this side of the mountains it seemed far less desolate. There were trees here. Bushes and grass.

  There were still no signs of people, not even Indians, but other signs of life greeted them--birds circling in the sky, squirrels scampering along the ground, the: far-off roar of bear. Though this was still uncharted territory, they felt as thgugh they were easing back into the known world.

  Their self-imposed silence ended as well, and they began to talk again.

  They spoke of places they'd been, sights they'd seen along the way. Jeb had no destination, was not heading anywhere in particular, but William seemed to know where he wanted to go; his new friend had some sort of plan or specific intent.

  He asked William. "Where are we headed?"

  "South."

  "I mean, where in particular?"

  "Where were you headed when we met?"

  Jeb shrugged. "No place."

  William nodded. 'l'hat is the trouble with our kind, isn't it? We're never heading to something, we're always heading away from something."

  "We have no choice. That's the way things are." William was silent for a moment. "There are other persecuted people," he said finally.

  "People who have made a fresh start here in the West, who have built their own communities, away from everyone else, where no one bothers them. I've been thinking for some time that we could do the same. This is a land of opportunity because it is new and " open, ready to be molded into whatever shape its settlers choose. It is not bound by the models of the past. It does

  ' " not have to conform to any preexisting notion of what society should be. And it is big enough to support all."

  Jeb suddenly understood what he was getting at. "A... town?" he said incredulously. "You're talking about a town of witches?"

  "Why not? There is going to be an entire Mormon Territory Why not at least a town for us?" Smiling, he sidled next to his horse and withdrew from the saddlebag a letter, imprinted with the seal of the government of the United

  States. 'Tve already written to Washington, and Fenton

  Barnes, the man to whom I wrote, has talked to the president about my idea." "The president? Of the country?"

  'The government is worried that the violence out here will scare people away, worried that Mexico will be able to exploit this country's divisions to its advantage. A lot of that violence is directed at us, at the Mormons, at those who are. different, and if they can keep us separated from the rest of the population by giving us our own lands, and thus retain at least the appearance of national unity..." He shrugged. "Well, they think it's worth it."

  "So what does that mean? They're going to give us land in order to start our own town?"

  William nodded. "Yes. Our own town, with our own local government and local laws. We'll be a recognized community, sanctioned by the federal government, segregated and protected by presidential order from the type of persecution we have faced in the past." He smiled, passed Jeb the letter. 'here is the authorization for me to take possession of the land in the name of our people."


  "Where is it?" Jeb asked. "Where is this place?"

  William looked at him. "In Arizona Territory. A place i called Wolf Canyon

  He didn't realize until he woke up on Christmas morning that he had forgotten to even buy a tree.

  Miles walked out to the kitchen, made coffee. All of the decorations were still in the garage, and he had not bothered to put up lights either. He was tempted to pretend this was just an ordinary day, that there was no Christmas this year, but when he turned on the TV and saw carolers singing in the New York snow as part of a prerecorded Today show celebration, he knew he would not be able to do that.

  He had bought his father some presents, and though he had not yet wrapped them, he did so now. Being such a serious Christian, he'd expected Audra to take the day off, but the nurse had promised to come in, informing him that she would merely arrive a few hours later than usual. He'd bought Audra a present, too. Two presents, actually. One from him and one from his father. He wrapped those as well, inexpertly attempting to cover an awkwardly shaped wicker basket filled with various teas and an un boxed faux crystal vase with what was left of last year's festive snowman paper.

  Leaving the nurse's gifts on the coffee table, Miles car fled his father's presents back to his room, filling his voice with a false Christmas cheer that was the furthest thing away from what he actually felt: "Merry Christmas, Dad!"

  Bob awoke with a blink of his eyes but virtually no movement of his body. He tried to smile, but it looked more like a painful grimace, and when he attempted to adjust himself

  and use his one good arm to push himself into a sitting position, the effort only served to list him to the left.

  Miles placed the packages at the foot of the bed, then helped shift his father back into position. He placed the bed controls in Bob's good hand and waited while the top haft of the bed rose into an upright position.