Bentley Little - The Walking

And everyone in it would be a witch.

Marie saw him through the window, smiled, waved. He waved back.

The days here were spent working, trying to carve out a life in this canyon. At night they spoke with spirits. There'd been others on this land before, Indians, and though they did not always understand these ghosts from another culture, their presence was still welcome and reassuring.

Particularly after passing through the Bad Lands.

William shivered just to think of it. He knew that settlers called the area around Deadwood the Badlands, but that was different. That was merely a description of geology. The land he and Jeb had come through

Those were bad lands.

It was long after the monster in the mountains, yet still a week or so away from Arizona Territory. They'd been Iraveling almost due south, then suddenly they were walking west, though they hadn't changed directions. They both realized it almost at once, and they stopped.

William looked around, and realized that there were no directions here.

It made no sense. The sun rose in the east and set in the west, and everything could be calculated from that. Only... Only the sun here seemed different. There appeared to be a uniform brightness in the sky, a vaguely defined whiteness that provided illumination but took no specific shape. They could not make out a sun and thus could not determine in which direction it was headed.

Without warning, William's horse reared up behind him. He and Jeb fell back, startled, and the horse suddenly bolted, running away. He called to it, tried to summon it, and they both chased it, but the animal was gone and would not return. The last view he had of his old companion was of the creature tearing crazily across the semidesert in an indistinguishable direction.

Saying nothing to each other, the two of them gathered what they could from the few supplies that had been thrown from the horse's back and silently continued on.

The land grew rougher, the pockmarked plain degenerate thing into numerous finger canyons, and soon they were wandering between walls of rounded rock hundreds of feet high but with passages between them barely big enough for a single man. The narrow canyons wound around in confusing twists and turns, a veritable maze, and by nightfall they had no idea where they were or in which direction they were facing.

The night here, they found, was different as well. There was a full moon out, but they could not see it, could only receive its refracted indirect light from the narrow band of sky above them. Most of the light died halfway down the slriated rock walls, but the remainder filtered into the bottom of the gorge, throwing odd areas into relief, creating shadows where none should exist.

Shadows.

The two of them walked slowly, carefully, saying nothing. The shadows appeared to be moving of their own volition; and though it was hard to tell, an even darker shape seemed to be lurking among them, scuttling from one to another, hiding, a strangely formed being on strange claws that blended with the darkness and whose sounds simulated those 31 of the wind.

They decided not to make camp, but to keep on, to try to find a way out of here. This was not a place where either of them would feel comfortable stopping, let alone sleeping, and they moved forward. Past moonlit silhouettes that should have looked like outcroppings of rock but did not. Past inky pools of shadow that looked both deep and soft, that shifted as they approached and seemed to have weight and heft and some terrible spark of life.

What smack William most about this area was its fundamental wrongness.

If the canyon in the mountains had seemed evil, if the monster they'd found and the thought of a creature that had been able to kill it seemed frightening, that was nothing compared to the feeling generated here. For these narrow interconnected canyons were like an antechamber of hell, and as they pressed on it became increasingly hard to remember that they were somewhere in the un annexed western territory of the United States. Dread weighed upon them from all sides. They continued on, trudging through endless identical passages, and it was as if the land itself was conspiring against them, building itself as they moved forward in an effort to trap them here forever.

And then the canyon opened up, and the bluish light of the moon spilled upon them. The shadows disappeared and with them the unseen creature of darkness that had been hiding in their wake.

But the single shadow that remained on the rounded rock wall ahead was far worse than anything they had seen previously.

It was the shadow of his mother. ' Goose bumps rippled over his skin.

William was not easily frightened, not with the powers he had, but he was frightened now, more frightened even than he had been at his mother's execution, and as he stared at the shadow, it started to move.

"It started to dance. His mother had never danced in public, had never dared to do so, but she had often danced at home, in front of him. It was a form of expression for her, was her favorite way to conjure, and her movements were unique and individual, so specific and stylized that they could not possibly be duplicated by anyone else.

And that was exactly how her shadow was moving now. Jeb was frightened as well, he sensed, but for other reasons. The other man could not possibly feel the depth or resonance of his own fear. William stared.

The outline of his mother's form was perfect, down to the stray strand of hair that had always flipped up when she danced, and he remained rooted in place, unable to pull his gaze from this unnatural sight.

He muttered a quick spell, words of banishment and words of protection, but the twirling shadow did not disappear. He did not feel safe or protected at all. He felt vulnerable and afraid, weak and helpless.

A hand grabbed his sleeve, and then Jeb was pulling him away, chanting words of his own, words of power that William recognized but could not quite seem to place.

Whatever evil was here, he knew, was doing everything in its power to keep him from leaving. He forced himself to look away, brought to bear the full strength of his energies on repelling those influences that were focused so hard upon him.

There was a lessening of pressure, a definite easing in the strength of the malevolence being directed at them, and they quickly moved around the rock wall, steering clear of

the dcing shadow, heading in the direction they suddenly knew to be south.

Amazingly, they were back in open country, where the stars were in their proper places, the moon was sinking in the second half of the sky, and there was a lightening on the eastern horizon where, in a few hours, the sun would arise.

Before them, in the now unthreatening darkness, illuminated by pure and innocent moonlight, stood a lone horse. William's horse. They hurried toward the small copse of scrubby trees where the animal stood waiting, its pack tilted on its back but still secured.

William unfastened the pack, and for the first time he and Jeb both climbed atop the horse, holding the supplies themselves as the animal carried them swiftly away from this cursed country.

Not until some time later, wheia the horse had slowed from a gallop to a trot, did William hazard a look behind him. All he could see was inky blackness, and he felt cold as he once again faced forward. He had the sense that if they had not left, they would have been trapped in those dark lands forever, in canyons where night never ended and only the shadows were alive.

A little over a week later, they reached a much bigger canyon, a wide, rugged gorge through whose bottom ran a quiet river, where pine trees and actus coexisted along the sandy banks and birds twittered in hidden crevices among the rocks.