“I guess we start digging,” Dean said. “Wish I brought a hazmat suit.” He turned off his flashlight and shoved it back into his pocket. There was enough ambient light for manual labor, if not for reading some long-dead schoolteacher’s notebooks. He hoped they didn’t unearth any dens of rats in that mess, though. He hated rats.
Hated them a lot.
Sam put his light away, too, and soon they were shoveling through the accumulated debris of the decades, digging their hands into cold mud, decomposed branches, animal dung, and probably the corpses of small creatures of various kinds. They’d need to sterilize their hands after this or risk all sorts of unpleasant consequences.
The task was disgusting, but before long they had unearthed a large wooden chest that had to be the one Baird described. Its hinges and hasp were rusted through but still visible. Dean kicked at the old lock, still fastened in place, and it crumbled to dust. “You really think anything in here is gonna be legible?”
Sam shrugged. “Won’t know until we look.” He opened the trunk’s lid. Dean found his light again and shined it inside.
On top, there was indeed a layer of paper that had gone to pulp. As soon as his fingers touched it, it disintegrated. But underneath, as if that layer had protected the important stuff, were school records, with each student’s name neatly handwritten on the outside. Under that were the journals Baird had described, leather-bound and still mostly intact, although insects had nibbled at the edges. Dean lifted one out gingerly and turned its brittle, yellowed pages. The same neat handwriting filled the pages.
“This has got to be the journals,” he said.
“Looks like it to me,” Baird said.
“There must be twenty of them,” Sam said. “He must have collected a lot of oral histories.”
“A lot of lies,” Baird reminded them.
“But with some truth mixed in, we hope.”
“No promises.”
“We going to read them right here?” Dean asked. Reading wasn’t his favorite activity by any means, and he had found that people in the past often used way more words than they had to. And funny handwriting.
“If we try to transport them, we run the risk that they’ll fall apart,” Sam said. “Besides, given the urgency—”
“Then I guess we read them right here. Better get started.” Dean sat down in the muck, figuring it was already too late to salvage any of the clothes he was wearing. The books all looked alike from the outside, so he didn’t see how to choose where to begin.
It didn’t take long for him to decide that he’d started with the wrong book. He was immediately immersed in some old ranch hand’s account of a particularly dry summer, with grass dying, fires burning up what hadn’t died, and cattle starving. Unpleasant reading, but nothing that struck him as even remotely supernatural. And the old-fashioned handwriting, while precisely formed, was in ink that had purpled on the yellow paper, hard to read even with a flashlight clutched in his left hand.
He skimmed the pages, looking for any mention of a witch or any event that might have led to antagonism against the town. There were plenty of small slights—trips into town for supplies that ended in a fight, or someone feeling they’d been overcharged for merchandise, that kind of thing. Dean had learned not to underestimate how petty people could be, but he didn’t get the sense that anyone would have launched an ongoing murder cycle because of such minor disagreements.
He reached the end of that first book and picked up another. Sam was turning pages just as quickly as he had. Baird sat with a book open on his lap but his gaze wandering around the room, as if in his mind’s eye he was seeing all the children he had gone to school with in this little room. Dean wondered if the old guy understood the stakes here. Then again, he had armed himself and faced potential danger in order to help out the residents of a town to which he didn’t feel any genuine attachment anymore. In the long run, Dean guessed, no one had done more than Harmon Baird to try to stop the killings from happening again.
Still, he felt the minutes ticking by as if each one carved a notch in his arm.
When Dean was on his third book, he heard Sam issue a low whistle. “What?” Dean asked.
“I might have something here,” Sam said. “Hang on.” He read further, tracing his finger along underneath the lines in the book. Dean ignored his own book and watched his younger brother’s face cloud over as he read.
After another few minutes Sam stopped and looked up from the pages. “I think this is it. Harmon, do you remember ever hearing about a woman named Elizabeth Claire Marbrough?”
“The Marbrough family owned the ranch before the Murphys,” Baird said, snapping his fingers. “Couldn’t remember that name, for the life of me.”
“But what about the woman? Does that name ring a bell?”
“Not specifically,” Baird said. “Jens Marbrough, I think he was the first owner. My people, they worked for him for at least a generation before I was born, then my folks stayed on when he sold out to the Murphys.”
“Who is this Marbrough lady?” Dean asked, wanting Sam to get to the point.
“According to this account, given by one of the young women who worked as a maid and laundress on the ranch, Elizabeth Claire Marbrough was a witch,” Sam said. “She came here from back East someplace, and there were stories about her before she even got here. Once she was here, though, the stories got worse. This woman, Mary Beth Gibson, said she once saw Elizabeth turn a horse that had thrown her grandson into a lizard.”
“Sounds like the kind of scare stories they used to tell in Salem,” Dean said.
“But we know there was a certain amount of truth to some of those. Not that the practice of witchcraft is necessarily inherently evil, but some of the people drawn to it as a way to gain and exercise power are happy to misuse it.”
“Some witches are plain evil, though,” Dean added. “And whatever’s going on in Cedar Wells is the work of someone or something evil. You see anything in there about her cursing the town or anything?”
“So far, just this one reference.”
Dean turned his attention back to the book on his lap. “So we need to look for more stories about Elizabeth whatshername.”
“Elizabeth Claire Marbrough,” Sam said again. “And yeah, that seems like a good idea.”
Paging through more of the volumes—always with an appreciation for the time slipping by—they put together an idea of Elizabeth Claire Marbrough’s history, at least as described by the rotating cast of employees and family members interviewed over a twelve-year span by schoolteacher Neville Stein. These memories had been related years after the fact, in most cases by people who had not witnessed them firsthand but had been told about them. In the telling and retelling, stories had a tendency to grow, and Dean suspected these were no different.
Some of the tales sounded like pure fantasy. Elizabeth zooming across the rangelands on a flaming broom. Elizabeth striking down Apache shaman Geronimo through a long-distance spell, although according to Sam, historians said he died of pneumonia at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and not—as this story claimed—from having his head explode suddenly at the dinner table. Elizabeth taking multiple werecats, in their human forms, as lovers. Okay, Dean allowed that this one could have some basis in truth—he had heard some pretty kinky stories involving witches.
But even setting those aside, a clearer picture emerged. Elizabeth was the mother of Jens Marbrough, the original owner of the ranch. She had lived somewhere in New York or New England until a scandal of some sort caused her to need to get away from that region. With some reluctance, Jens arranged for her to move to the ranch.
In those days, running a ranch in Arizona Territory sounded like a struggle. Indian raiders were a constant threat. There was little in the way of real law enforcement, so Jens had to take matters in his own hands when it came to theft, cattle rustling, and the like. Soldiers on the hunt for Indians could be as destructive as the Indians themselves, cutting fences and trampling fields.
The local population was small at the time, since the Grand Canyon had not yet become a national park, but Jens made efforts to be a good neighbor and a community leader. This became harder to do when his ill-tempered, spiteful, malicious mother moved in. Her occasional forays into town brought complaints and cost Jens friendships he had spent years cultivating. Finally—and on this story, multiple accounts agreed—she had caused the withering death of a Basque ranch hand named Bacigalupi because he had failed to bow sufficiently low when he ran into her between the house and the stable one morning. That day, he had been hale and hearty, but by the end of the week he looked as if a wasting disease had had its way with him for months. He died a week to the day after the original encounter.
For Jens, this was the last straw. He couldn’t get rid of his own mother, but he wanted her far away from him. Telling her that it was for her own privacy and peace of mind, he built her a cabin of her own, in an isolated canyon far from the main ranch headquarters.
She protested from the first day she learned of the plan, and her attitude—not to mention her relations with other local settlers—soured even more. After some additional run-ins, she was finally banned from the little community that would become Cedar Wells. Not long after that, the new cabin was finished and Jens hauled all her belongings there before going back for her.
A horrific argument followed. Apparently, Elizabeth was unwilling to use her witchy powers against members of her immediate family, but witnesses claimed that only that fact curtailed her response. One said he had never seen her so furious, and this was a woman to whom rage seemed a first response to any provocation. And there was no second response.
She agreed, Jens leaving her little choice, and moved to the little cabin. There, by all reports, she stewed and plotted her revenge, on the ranch and on the town that grew up nearby.
“I found this one account of what that revenge would be,” Sam said. He sat awkwardly on what had once been a student’s desk, although the years had made it resemble a vaguely desk-shaped mound of mud and sticks. “And it sounds familiar.”
“Spill it, Sam,” Dean said. “We’re burning daylight.”
“According to this, she had one confidante on the ranch, the wife of one of the hands, who took pity on her and visited her in the cabin when no one else would. This woman says that Elizabeth told her that she had cast a spell that would bring to life everyone who had ever died violently on the ranch’s property, human and animal alike.”
“That does sound familiar,” Dean said. “Does she say what this pissed-off bitch wanted the undead to do?”
“This is where it gets good,” Sam said. “Every forty years, they would attack the town, killing indiscriminately, in the ways that they had been killed. Some would come back in their own forms, but some would be skinwalkers, able to take animal forms at will.”
“The forty-year,” Baird said. Something like awe tinged his voice.
“The forty-year,” Sam agreed.
“I don’t suppose there’s a schedule in there,” Dean said. “When we can count on this thing to be over.”
Sam shook his head. “It says Elizabeth Claire Marbrough died in 1886. The cycle was supposed to begin after her death. So ’eighty-six, ’twenty-six, ’sixty-six, and ’oh-six. But if her confidante knew how long it was supposed to last, she didn’t say.”
“It’d sure be good to know,” Dean said. “Because if it’s not ending soon, we could be staring at a massacre at that mall opening.”