The Sleepwalkers by J. Gabriel Gates Page A

is what it’ll be like on doomsday, he thinks, but he doesn’t know where the thought came from. Certainly it isn’t his. He isn’t a morbid guy. He’s a guy who believes in . . . what? He doesn’t know how to finish the thought and doesn’t have to, because around the corner of the rundown trailer, on the other side of the clearing, underneath the wide-reaching arms of an ancient live oak, a bonfire burns. Caleb hurries toward it.
    “Hey, man—I don’t think we should . . . ” Bean begins, “I don’t know if we . . . ”
    But Caleb is already striding with determination, so fast Bean can hardly keep up. He senses his friend lagging behind, but something, some impulse deeper than will, stronger than desire, pushes him onward. The singing is everything now, as bone-chilling as the roar of a siren but gilded with words of a tongue he doesn’t understand, and doesn’t want to.
    Caleb is getting close now, almost into the ring of firelight, and he can see clearly that all the ear-splitting sounds come from the lips of one woman. She kneels, shirtless, her dark, gray-streaked hair spilling over her face and down to her bare chest, which looks as ashen as the skin of a corpse in the moonlight. She wears a dark skirt, which seems to seep from her waist into the grass around her like liquid. Caleb follows her downturned gaze to a small book, sitting open at her knees. Next to her left hand is what looks like a cowbell, but there’s no mistaking what lies next to her right hand, half-obscured in the grass. It’s a big, serrated knife.
    The woman’s song deteriorates into another bout of guttural clicks and snapped, unintelligible phrases, and that’s when Caleb does it:
    “Ma’am?” he says.
    The woman’s eyes snap up from the book and her song pinches into a scream—whether it’s anger at being interrupted, fright at their sudden appearance, or simply another phrase in the song, he can’t tell.
    Instantly, the woman snaps her mouth shut. With one groping hand she seizes the cowbell, and with the other hand she scoops something out of the grass. She leaps directly over the probably three-foot-tall bonfire, and stands before the guys, brandishing what now looks to be a bowie-style survival knife in one hand, and ringing the bell violently with the other.
    “It’s okay,” says Caleb to Bean, trying to sound as calm as possible.
    He takes a step forward.
    “Don’t break the circle,” the woman says fiercely.
    Caleb stops and puts his hands up. He glances at his feet and sees there is indeed a circle made of some kind of white powder that stretches around the bonfire.
    “There are spirits here that will drag you into the netherworld, where no eyes see and no lips speak,” the woman yells with wild wolf ’s eyes.
    “Say your names,” she commands. The clangor of the cowbell is maddening.
    “Benjamin Michael Friedman,” says Bean.
    “Billy Mason,” says Caleb.
    The witch freezes, her bell clanging its last clang. She squints at Caleb, leaning forward as if trying to read some distant word.
    “Billy? You’re the little boy that was friend to my Annie?”
    “Yes,” he says, relieved. “You remember me.”
    “Don’t move.” She jabs her knife in the air. “My Annie was only a little girl, and you’re halfway a man. Yer a liar.”
    She drops the bell. It lands in the grass with a metallic clank.
    “I’m not lying. It’s me, Billy. I visited Christine at the Dream Center. I wanted to come and talk to you. This is my friend. I swear to God it’s me. I remember you used to make the cookies with the M&M’s because Christine used to sneak me some. It’s me, Billy.”
    The witch says nothing. She slowly turns the knife in her hand, as if twisting the blade in the heart of some unseen beast. She stares at Caleb.
    “Where’s my Annie?” she demands finally.
    “I don’t know, Mrs. Zikry,” says Caleb. “I wish I did.”
    In the moment that ensues, a strange thing happens. The woman’s