Miles' heart lurched in his chest. "Garden?"
No answer.
He shouted it out: "Garden!"
All three of them stopped walking, looking around, calling, but there was no sign of their companion.
He was gone.
"Garden."
It was his daddy's voice, his daddy was here, and Garden stopped walking, turned, and looked into a long, high crack in the cliff side.
"Garden."
The voice was weak, barely above a whisper, as though his old man was trapped or had been here some time without food or water. It made no logical sense--he had left his daddy yesterday in Apache Junction--but he would recognize that voice anywhere. He stepped over the jagged rocks and into the cleft, angling sideways for several minutes until the fissure opened out.
"Garden."
It occurred to him that he was being intentionally led away from the others, and he wondered why he didn't call out, let them know where he was going was his mind being clouded?
--but these thoughts occurred to him at a remove, as if from afar, and the thought that was in the forefront of his mind was that he needed to find his daddy and get him the hell out of here. His daddy had probably followed him from Apache Junction, wanting to warn him away from Isabella, but he'd been too late, and he'd somehow ended up here, trapped.
Or captured.
Garden slowed his pace, suddenly wary of what might lie ahead. For the first time he thought seriously about going back, getting the others, doing a proper search, but then he heard his daddy's voice again.
"Garden."
And he pushed forward between the high dank walls until he was face-to-face wit ha dummy.
The figure propped in a sitting position against the step like rock ahead had obviously been intended to look like his daddy, but the resemblance was not even close. The head was the right shape but made of stuffed cheesecloth. The eyes were buttons and the rest of the face was painted on: a piggish nose, a goofy gap-toothed smile. The clothes on the dummy were of a style his daddy had once worn but had not owned for decades. There were no hands or feet.
This, however, was where the voice originated, and as he stood there, staring at it, a slight breeze whistled through the 'narrow chasm and, filtered through the unseen contents of the cheesecloth head, again whispered his name.
"Garden."
A chill passed through him. This was not right. Everything suddenly shifted into clear focus, and though he felt pressure on his mind, a strange insistent pulse that promised him everything was okay, this was the way it was meant to
be, he knew that he had been tricked to get him away from Miles and the others.
He reached into his left front pocket, feeling for the flattened frog that the old woman had given him for protection, but the pocket was empty. There was no hole in the material, and he checked his right pocket, but it was empty, too.
The frog had disappeared somehow, pushed up perhaps through the friction of movement to fall out of his pants unseen as he'd walked. He was filled with a dizzying sensation of panic.
Miles. he screamed. "Miles!"
He yelled at the top of his lungs, and the repeated word seemed to echo up the narrow space to the canyon rim, but he was not sure how far in he'd come, and didn't know if they could hear him at all. Because another sound was competing with him, a low guttural rumbling that came out of the earth itself, a sound he recognized but could not quite place.
Water.
He knew it now: the roar of a flood, the rush of a wave. The cleft began to fill with black brackish water. It seeped up from the rock beneath his feet at first, but almost instantly it began pouring in from both directions--the way he'd come and the way ahead. He was alone in this space with that hideous dummy, and it floated up on the tide toward him even as he attempted to find a handhold, a foothold, something that would enable him to climb out of this space before he drowned.
"Garden."
The dummy was still speaking his name, and when he looked down at the painted face, its smile seemed more malevolent than goofy. The right button eye, hanging by a thread, began flipping up and back, propelled by the streaming water, in chilling approximation of a wink.
There was no way to climb oat, no way to get up the ,-:-.
352 narrow cliff, and the water was now flooding in fast. The black liquid smelled strongly of sulfur, and he gagged, keeping his mouth closed, trying not to swallow any of it.
Maybe he could just tread water, float on the rising tide, wait until the chasm filled up completely and then exit through the top. : ....... "Garden."
The winking dummy now looked nothing like his daddy. Even the shape of the head was distorted. The dark water had stained the cheesecloth, and it looked more like a figure out of a nightmare. The dummy pressed against him, bobbed up, then sank and disappeared.
A second later, handless arms wrapped around his legs, feeling soft and spongy and frighteningly alive.
"Help!" he screamed.
And was pulled down into the water.
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.