might be going crazy.'
'What... ?' Janet stammered. 'How did you know?'
'My gram pa down there.'
'My father's on the way,' Miles said. 'We passed him on the road in.' group of them have arrived since I got here this morning. I sat in my Jeep and watched them.'
'What did they do?'
Garden shrugged. 'They walked into the water.'
'That's where your grandpa is?'
'Yep. He's down there walking.' The young man looked at Janet. 'What about you? Are you just here with him, or... ?' He left the sentence unfinished.
'It's my uncle,' she said. 'He died and kept walking.'
'Is he here?'
'We don't know,' Miles answered for her. 'We didn't see him on the way, and he was supposedly cremated, but...'
He shrugged. 'We don't know.'
'I see.'
An awkward pause followed.
Garden looked down at his scuba gear, looked up at them. 'Do, uh, you guys have a plan?'
Mile shook his head slowly. 'You?' he asked, though he already knew the answer.
'No. I was just going to play it by ear.'
It was Janet who asked the question they were all wondering: Does any of us actually know What's going on?' There another awkward silence
'Well, let's start with what we do know,' Miles said. He glanced at Janet, then turned toward Garden. He told his story. Afterward, Janet told hers.
When they were finished, Garden nodded. He looked down at his scuba gear, out at the lake, then took a deep breath. 'My gram pa went down twenty years ago. It was pretty much like your situations. He got sick from fever, started walking, died, then went into the water. We lived nearby here, in a side canyon, and he kept walking around and around the house--for weeks, wind, sun, rain, didn't matter. There was only me, my daddy and my uncle, and we didn't know what to do. My uncle and my daddy, I think, took turns watching him, but this went on for weeks. He
wasn't dead yet, but then he did die, sometime while he was walking, and I remember being so afraid of him. I didn't think he was going to kill me or anything, I was just... scared. Can't really say why.
Anyway, I went to bed, and I beard my daddy and my uncle talking aboutmjust like you said--a box of my gram pa magic powders and potions and stuff. I never saw it, though.
'When I woke up in the morning, he was gone. We followed his trail to the lake and got here just in time to see him walk into the water. My daddy yelled at him, but he couldn't hear, and he just kept walking into the water until he was gone.
'We never came back to the lake, pretended like it didn't even exist, but I never forgot about it, and when I grew up and went to college, I took a diving class. I think you can guess why. I came back on my break, told my daddy what I wanted to do, but both he and my uncle were against it.
'I went diving down there anyway.' Garden licked his lips, obviously unsettled by the memory even all these years later. The water was dirty, muddy, but I saw him. My gram pa was walking. And he wasn't alone. There were several people walking. Through that ghost town down there at the bottom.' He shivered. 'I guess they lived there.'
Miles shook his head, impressed with the boy's bravery. 'You've never been back since?'
'Nope.' Garden looked down at his diving gear. 'Not yet.'
'Where're your dad and uncle now?' Janet asked.
'My uncle died a few years back. My daddy lives over in Apache Junction, but I didn't want him to know I was coming here, so I didn't tell him anything. I lied and said I was going hunting over at San Carlos for the weekend.'
'All these years you never told anyone? None of you?'
Garden shook his head. 'Who would we tell? What would we tell them?
There was an old witch woman who lived here back then. Mother Lizabeth we called her. We were going to tell her originally, but for some reason we never did. I tried to look her up when I first got here this morning, but her shack's gone and I didn't see any sign of her.' He scanned the surrounding land. 'Everyone seems to be gone.' Who else?
'No one in particular. Here used to be little pockets of people living around here in the canyons, on the hills. Maybe this is a recreation area or something now and they kicked them all out, but it just seems strange, like the place is abandoned.'
'Like it's cursed,' Janet whispered.
Again the wry smile. 'I didn't want to be the first to say it, but, yeah, like that.'
'What made you come back now?' Miles wondered. 'Today? The same time as us?'
Garden shook his head. 'I don't know,' he admitted. 'l'here wasn't anything calling to me, if that's what you're asking. I didn't see any omens or anything. I guess, well, I guess it's because this is the twentieth anniversary of my gram pa of his going down there. Not to the day maybe, but almost.' He looked out at the lake. 'I've also been dreaming about this place lately, about the water, and probably that had something to do with it, too.'
Miles thought about his father's dream. In the nightmare, his dad had been rooted to the floor of the kitchen while a tidal wave crashed over the house. Was that what it had been like for the last residents of Wolf Canyon? Had they stood there, frozen in place, as a wall of water released from the upper dam bore down upon them?
Miles looked around. Where was the upper dam? To the left of their cove, a river snaked away from the lake, up into the hills, and he supposed that the other dam and its attendant lake where somewhere in there.
'We've had dreams, too,' Janet said. z95
Miles nodded.
'About water and drowning.'
Garden's voice was quiet. 'I drowned in my dream.' 'What does that mean?' Janet asked. 'Are these premonitions? Does that mean we're going to drown here?' She looked fearfully toward the water. 'I don't think so,' Miles said. 'But you don't know.'
'Not for sure. But that's not what this feels like to me. My father's dream was almost like a recollection of the past, like the flooding of Wolf Canyon as seen through the eyes of someone that was there---even though it took place in our house. But my dreams are different.
They're not that literal, not that realistic, and I don't think they have anything to do with a specific event. It's more like a coded message, like something I'm supposed to interpret, only I don't know how.'
Janet nodded, apparently understanding, though his meaning was far from clear even to himself. She faced Garden. 'Do you really think your grandpa's still down there? You don't think he's rotted by now?'
Garden met her eyes. 'No,' he said. 'He's there. And I'd put money on that.'
Miles had no doubt that he' was right, but the idea frightened him. He looked over the water. He did not like the lake. Even now, even on a warm weekend, it was deserted. Unlike Powell, Roosevelt, and the other lakes they'd passed, Wolf Canyon boasted no sunbathers, no swimmers, no skiers, no boaters, no jet skiers. Water in the desert usually attracted people, but Wolf Canyon seemed to repel them. The bank opposite, instead of featuring cottonwood and jojoba and the usual desert fauna, was barren, sporting only occasional clumps of dead orangish- brown weeds.
Apparently, the only other creatures at the lake were the
'Walkers,' as Garden called them, the witches who had returned to the underwater town.
Like And hisSeVeralfather miles behind them, the new Walkers. How close was Bob? Miles wondered. He excused himself and quickly dashed up to the parking lot. There was no sign of his dad, but two of the other Walkers had arrived. He could see them striding purposefully through the low brush. One, a woman, bumped into a saguaro but did not seem to notice the cactus' spines and continued walking, though at a slightly different angle,
