Bentley Little - The Walking

Garden was gone.

They backtracked, looked behind boulders, looked into offshoot ravines, calling out his name, but he was nowhere to be seen, and finally Miles said, "She got him."

"Maybe he just pussied out," Hal suggested.

Miles looked at him.

"All right, it's not that plausible. But it's possible."

"He disappeared," Claire said. "One minute he was there, then I turned around and he was gone." She looked at Miles. "So what do we do now?"

His head hurt. If there was anything to his witch blood theory, they were up shit creek because he was the only one left. While Isabella may not have been aware that he'd been granted insight into her motives and intentions, she obviously knew they were here, and she was playing with them, slowly and deliberately picking them off, one by one.

"Do you still have the things May gave you?" he asked.

Claire held up her hand to show the bracelet of weeds. Hal withdrew the small fetish from his pocket.

"Good. Keep them with you. They've protected us this far, maybe they'll see us through this." He took a deep breath. "We're going on.

We're almost there."

"Whatever Garden had didn't protect him," Hal pointed out.

Miles looked at him. "It can't hurt."

Hal hefted his revolver. "Excuse me if I place more of my faith in this."

"If you really think that'll do any good against a dead hundred-year-old monster who's been resurrecting witches and killing people all over the damn country, be my guest." Hal raised an eyebrow, Spock-like. "You have a point."

Miles smiled--and it felt good. His face had been tense, and this brief touch of gallows humor loosened it up. "Come on," he said. "Let's try to move quickly.

"And stay close," he warned. "We need to keep each other in sight at all times."

He started forward, moving over so that Claire was walking in the middle, he and Hal on the outside flanks to protect her, all three of them rubbing shoulders. The jar in his hands felt warm, slippery, and he held it tightly, not wanting it to slide from his grasp and shatter on the rocky ground. Claire, too, was clutching the kerosene lamp tightly, and he considered asking Hal to hold it instead, but the truth was that Hal was clumsier than Claire and more likely to drop it.

Rising all around them were screeches and cracks and hums and whistles, the scuttling of claws and the quiet cacklings of madness. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement off to the sides, between the boulders and the trees, a darting of shadows that instantly stopped each time he looked at one of the spots full on.

He stepped on something wet and squishy that gurgled in a way which sounded both liquid and alive, but he did not look down to see what it was.

The canyon flattened out in front of them, high cliff sides trailing off into low black ridges that faded into sand dunes. The odd-shaped buttes they'd seen from afar were now front and center, and lightning danced in the clouds over dark distant mountains. It was the scene from his vision. Miles felt almost incapacitated by fear. The cave from which he'd viewed this landscape was somewhere close by, off to the right, and he began scanning the dwindling cliffs, looking for an opening in the rock.

He found it.

The cave was much lower than he'd expected, on a small ridge just above the sloping hill of alluvial dirt. It would be easy to walk up there, despite the lack of a path, the shards of stone, and the peculiar spiky cacti, but he didn't want to go. The will and determination that had led him this far seemed suddenly to have deserted him, and he was filled with cold dread as he looked up at that small black entrance in the cliff side.

He tried to speak, but no sound came out. He cleared his throat, tried again. His heart was pounding crazily. "That's it," he said. "Up there. That's where she is." And Isabella emerged from the cave..

"Look!" Claire cried out.

Isabella, her head still held at a noticeably awkward angle, strode forth from the cave entrance and over the edge of the ridge, continuing several feet until she was hovering in the air above the sloping ground. She stared at them, speaking in some strange unintelligible tongue and making elaborate motions with her hands. The look on her face was one of rage and hatred, and out of the corner of his eye Miles saw that the bracelet on Claire's arm was glowing greenly, brightening then dimming, as if it were being bombarded with energy.., and absorbing it.

Claire noticed his necklace at the same time, pointing, and though he couldn't see it, he felt the heat on his skin and that area of his neck seemed suffused with a greenish glow. Hal reached into his pocket, and his wood carving was glowing, too. He quickly put it back.

"I guess we're protected," Claire said.

Hal looked toward Isabella. "Let's get her."

That provided the impetus Miles needed, and the paralysis that had temporarily overcome him disappeared as he grabbed Claire's free hand and pulled her up the sloping ground toward the cave entrance.

Both of them jumped as Hal fired his revolver, the sound of the report absurdly, outrageously loud, triggering a small landslide and inducing a muffled ringing in Miles' ears. He thought at first that his friend had fired at Isabella but almost immediately saw the gray-green spiderlike crab creature that Hal had shot. Off-center eyes stared into nothingness while clear viscous goo spilled from a well-placed bullet hole.

"It was coming after me," Hal said.

Miles nodded. "Just make sure you don't waste your shots," he suggested. l'hat might be what she wants."

Isabella was no longer in the air, she was on the ridge, looking down at them, and when Miles' eyes met hers, she pulled away, moved back.

Was she afraid?

It didn't make any sense, but it seemed that way, and the three of them pressed on, moving up the slope, over the rough, obstacle-laden ground until they ran across the remnants of an ancient trail that led them directly on to the lip of the ridge.

A flash of flesh disappeared into the blackness of the cave entrance.

Had they chased her back into the cave? Or was she luring them on? He wasn't sure, but they were going in. He moved forward, peering into the dimness but seeing nothing. What little light there was in this overcast world died instantly upon entering the cave. They should have brought flashlights. What they needed was... a lamp.

He turned to Claire, handed her the jar, took the kerosene lantern from her.

"Good idea," Hal said.

"Let's hope it works." Hal had matches, and Miles used them to light the lamp before shoving it into the opening in the wall before him.

Just inside the entrance, Isabella screeched at the sight of the light, a horrible sound like the cawing of crows and the breaking of glass.

She retreated deeper into the cave, scut fling backward on legs that were impossibly formed and far too agile. Within seconds she was past the perimeter of the lamp's light. Though the screeching had stopped, Miles heard the clattering sound of hard claws on stone receding into the darkness. "Whatever you do," he told Claire, "don't drop that jar." "Don't worry. I won't."

They walked into the cave. Claire's bracelet and his own necklace were glowing, giving off a greenish illumination that would enable them to find each other in the blackness but that shed no usable light on their surroundings. They were entirely dependent on the flame of the lamp.

Claire latched on to his belt, holding tight as he moved slowly forward.

There were no stalactites or stalagmites, no columns or rock formations. The walls were smooth, black and glassy. Ancient symbols had been painted on the roof of the cave, pictographs in faded white that shifted and changed with the flickering of the lamp and seemed somehow hideous.