Steve Rasnic Tem

EXCAVATION

For Melanie, with special thanks to Dan Simmons and Ed Bryant

Chapter 1

Again the bear awakened with his muzzle sunk in huckleberries. He snorted once and inhaled them. Growled deep within his throat and raised up. Stiffened and scented the air. Nothing. But something bothered him, just on the edge of his awareness. He could not smell it, or hear it. He lumbered off toward the trees, leaving even this vague awareness behind.

He recognized the kind of tree where he could get the acorns. It was important to get them now, before they fell; otherwise the deer would gobble them all up. He sniffed the air, then let his ears do the searching for him. Nothing. Propelled by his hind legs, he shinnied up the tree, circling the rough bark in a spiral. Then he stopped. Smelled the air. Nothing.

But something was wrong. He stared at the acorns for a long time but did not eat them. He needed to be full; the cold would come, the snow, and he needed to be full. Acorns and pine seeds and roots and carpenter ants, grasshoppers… He needed filling. He was empty, had nothing but night hollow inside, cold hollow, and needed to be filled. But somehow he knew these usual things would not fill him this year.

Something was different. He could not be sure if it was the things outside or the things inside him, but something had changed. He did not stay in this part of the woods. It had been a long moving to get here, a moving he could not remember, and there were no others of his kind here.

He saw an old house inside him, and humans, when these things were not there. And he knew he used to live in that house and act like one of those humans.

It hurt to have these things inside. He was used to having many things inside: insects, roots, stems and berries, the woods, the air and the dark; he had had all these things, but he had never had these human things inside before. He descended the tree tail first, landed on his rump, rolled over, and ambled off.

Something was different. He should be filling himself, but he could not fill himself. He should be ready for the cold, but somehow he knew he might not get ready this year. He might stay here, going back and forth through the woods even when the cold came. Something new inside was making him do this. This thought frightened him.

He stopped, pulled his ears back. Staring. This thing… he had never seen, never heard or smelled this thing before. Sniffing the air then staring ahead, eyes not moving. This new thing not moving.

He slapped the ground with both front paws. He gave a loud huff, blowing air and dark and smell of what he’d eaten. This new thing not moving.

He gnashed his teeth. Not moving. He began snapping his jaws rapidly while popping his lips together. Not moving.

He charged. Wind and ground and woods rushing.

The new thing did not move, did not seem to know he was charging. Was he charging? He no longer knew. He roared in fear.

At the last minute the bear veered off and ran away, thinking of the old house inside him, the humans, knowing he must see this place.

Chapter 2

It was an early fall Saturday in Denver, a day that started out cool and windy and pleasant, but Reed knew it could easily flash back into midsummer in the afternoon, before giving them an icy taste of winter that evening. It made his cold worse; his nose had been running for weeks now, his thoughts congested. He had thought he was through with colds—hadn’t had them in years. But now it was worse than ever—felt as if his nose were being worn away. He hadn’t slept properly in days.

He had always thought of Colorado as a land of transformations, an open country of wide sky and empty plains and seemingly bare mountains, ready to be manipulated by the imagination that was large enough. What kind of imagination it was that would be so fickle with the weather he had no idea. Surely a powerful, youthful, arrogant one.

When he had first decided to be an archaeologist, he had an old, romantic professor. Dr. Simms had the uncanny ability of wearing suits that, although only a few years out of date, looked virtually Victorian on him. Most of his students wouldn’t have identified the look so specifically, merely thinking the professor “old-fashioned,” but Reed knew Dr. Simms looked very much the Victorian gentleman, recently stepped out of an old engraving in The Police Gazette. The Victorian gentleman of lower class, he guessed, since Reed liked to think of Dr. Simms as a crusty, eccentric old chief of detectives from that period. His suits were usually a coppery brown, with darker brown pinstripes. The pants seemed too wide at the hips, almost like riding breeches. He wore a vest of the same material, covering an almost nonexistent chest, and a belly that seemed swollen only because his chest was so narrow. He was balding, had a pencil-thin mustache, wore old shoes with the leather cracking but never so badly he had to replace them. But what most made him seem like an old-time detective, besides a permanent and unidentifiable scent of tobacco smoke and your conviction that his clothes were spotted with mysterious oil-like stains throughout (even though when you examined him carefully the stains weren’t there) was his attitude. He questioned everything. “Nothing, nothing, my friends, about a building or a locale or ruin, is as it seems!” He’d say that at least twice a week, gesturing nervously with his hands like a palsied symphony conductor. “Our first impressions are illusion! You must dig, dig deeply, to discover the hidden faces of a place…” Then, when it was late in the semester and he thought his students were ready for it, he’d add, “…or even the hidden faces of a human being. Remember that, young friends, and friendship and marriage will be kinder to you!”

Reed had snickered with all the others at the time, although perhaps not as convincingly as the rest. Even then he knew there were lessons to be learned from most of what the old professor said.

He’d thought a great deal about the professor of late, had imagined he could hear that mock-lecturing tone every morning as he took a walk around his neighborhood in old North Denver. Especially when the weather seemed in the process of changing like this. During his unusually romantic spells the professor used to talk about “the spirit of a place,” how it is so easy for us to anthropomorphize places because there did seem to be this animating persona that moved through and dwelled in all the realms of the earth. That was one reason why landscape painting has been popular at all times throughout history, he explained; the artists were compelled to capture some of that spirit in more tangible, permanent form.

The spirit of a place… the hidden faces of places and people. Reed had grown obsessed with that of late. He’d been thinking about how this place was so different from the place he’d grown up, Simpson Creeks, Kentucky. The spirit of this place was still very much a mystery to him—too wide and changing to really get a handle on—whereas Simpson Creeks, and the Big Andy Mountain brooding behind it, had a very definite sense of spirit, one that even now he found painful to think about.

What was going on with him? He was twenty-seven, but it sounded like a midlife crisis. So maybe he was having his midlife crisis early—that was all. His wife, Carol, was getting fed up with it, he knew. She didn’t think he was doing his fair share with the kids; he was too busy brooding all the time, daydreaming, not being truly there when she tried to talk to him. Michael, their adopted son, was almost a teenager now; he needed a father to get through all the crap that new teenagers have to go through. Their youngest, Alicia, at age four was still very dependent on him. He used to think it great that she thought of him as the most wonderful person in the world. That didn’t feel great anymore.

Hidden faces. Reed was just beginning to realize he had lots of those. His wife, Carol, was realizing it too. That meant that he had to have more time to deal with them, but it was hard getting enough time to himself. Having a family seemed the most “real,” the most normal thing he had ever done with his life. But it demanded a great deal of time. Grownups didn’t always have a lot of time. Reed was thinking that perhaps he needed to be a young boy again.

Early morning walks, before the rest of the family got up, seemed to help a little. And it calmed him, helped lower his blood pressure. That was another thing… his blood pressure. Abnormally high of late; it had him scared. He was too young to be thinking about dying. And although it wasn’t spoken, Carol was terrified over it too. She wasn’t up to raising a family by herself; in some ways she was as much a child as he was.

He took a long walk, up around Sloan’s Lake—virtually deserted every year once the temperature began to drop. He and Carol had spent a great deal of time there when they were first dating. It was beautiful at night, the dark water rippling with melting lights and metallic colors. This morning there was a slight mist drifting off the water, catching on the docks like wet, fraying cotton. Any kind of fog was unusual here, unlike Simpson Creeks, where the thickest fog became an expected part of your mornings. He’d left there when he was fifteen, but he could still remember looking out of his bedroom window and seeing it creep across their front yard, drawing back occasionally for a brief moment, as if the fog had suddenly realized Reed was watching it.

Every place possesses a hidden spirit…

He walked across Sheridan Boulevard and wandered for a while in the neighborhoods on the other side. This part of the metropolitan area was known as Edgewater, a small incorporated town with its own mayor and police force, right in the middle of the city. Reed and Carol used to go to a place there called the Edgewater Inn every St. Patrick’s Day to drink green beer served by a slightly seedy leprechaun.

On one of the side streets Reed sat down under a large elm tree. Even this far away he could smell Sloan’s Lake, the water vapor in the air, and that odd, slightly sour smell of wooden docks that have been sitting in the water for a long time.

The smell of the water, the overpowering sense of a large body of water nearby, seemed to pull at his own liquids, his blood and cell fluids, with a frightening kind of sympathy. He rested back against the tree, closed his eyes, and tried to track down his disturbing sensations, the sense that he had forgotten something it was very important to try to remember. He felt himself falling asleep trying to track down the memory. On his face the sense of there being water in the air was disappearing, as the morning sun rose higher in the sky to burn it away.

~ * ~

Carol was sitting in the green overstuffed chair by the front window when Reed walked in the door.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Morning,” she said quietly. He glanced immediately at his watch. Eleven A.M. He’d been gone four hours. She was furious with him—he could tell. Her eyes were downcast over the newspaper, but she didn’t have the intense look about her face she had when she was actually reading. She was faking it, waiting for him to say something, to explain himself. Her lips were pressed out thinly in her efforts to hold her tongue. She obviously knew he was watching her, and ran her hand down her long, shiny brown hair to hide more of her face from him.

He should say something—there was always pain in letting things hang with her. But he had come to avoid confrontations; they twisted his stomach, made him tighten up so that he felt he had no control over what he was saying. And he might say something he regretted. Besides, if he didn’t bring it up, he could always say later she should have confronted him at the time, and not waited until they’d both forgotten the exact details of what had happened. It was a damned dishonest tactic, but he thought it protected their relationship. And there was a great deal of truth in it—often by the time they got around to talking about a problem there were so many layers of ill feeling over it neither of them could even pretend to be objective.

He’d love to be able to strip away those layers and get at the true difficulties, work on solving them. But he didn’t feel capable. In that way, most of all, he felt he was still a child.

He walked out of the living room, through the kitchen, and up the short flight of steps to the office over the garage.

They’d built this office together, Carol and he, the first month they were married. It was meant to be a place they’d occasionally share, but whose main purpose was as a place of refuge, a sanctuary for either of them to use when they’d had too much togetherness. But as their family had grown—first having Alicia and then adopting Michael—Carol had found herself using the office less and less, spending her spare time with the children, whereas Reed discovered he needed it more and more. Reed had a desk made out of an old barn door sloppily lacquered. Carol’s desk was a small, antique, oak rolltop; he bought it for her their first Christmas. She’d always loved the feel of sitting at an old writing desk; she said she could feel the presence of the woman, or man, who had used it a hundred years ago. It made writing letters a little special.

Two stacks of year-old magazines filled the top of the writing desk. Reed pulled out the chair with the fading wine upholstery from his own desk and sat facing the west window. He could see the back of the house, the yard where his children played.

Reed liked having a family. When he first met Carol, things had worked out so well, he’d been almost numb with the overwhelming “normalcy” of their relationship. He’d grown up in an unhappy family, a constant atmosphere of resentment and revenge. Even at the time he knew the situation was not usual, and yet had never been able to picture himself in any other kind of family.

Then the two children had come along, and their addition had seemed to work very well, unusually well. The situation between Carol and himself had been rough of late, but not overwhelmingly so. There were always good, satisfying things about their relationship, nice times when they seemed to have an unspoken understanding and caring for each other.

That house, his family, was relatively solid. Perhaps the first solid thing he’d ever had in his constantly shifting life. But sometimes he couldn’t enjoy it.

Sometimes he just had to sit back here and watch it, enjoy it from afar. Sometimes he would watch his children playing from that west window—watching Alicia talking animatedly to her dolls and Michael working on the bicycle Reed had bought for him, shiny and red like the one Reed had as a kid—and he’d be filled with such love for them his facial muscles would contract, trying to hold back the tears. Those were his kids. His wife. His house.

But if he got up out of this chair and walked back to the house, if he left his sanctuary too soon, he’d find himself thrust into their arguments, their worries and concerns, and Carol’s almost electric expectations of what Reed should do about them. Sometimes he just couldn’t handle them. He wasn’t always adult enough. In so many ways he knew he hadn’t yet grown up. He wasn’t completely ready to be normal.

There were footsteps of a certain weight on the staircase. He knew she’d feel compelled to come back here to the office, try to say something to him. She always did. He could have gone somewhere else where she couldn’t follow, but he never did. This way, she always knew where to find him.

She paused at the top of the stairs and her fingers lingered on the dusty surfaces of the magazines covering her writing desk. She stared a moment at the wall. Without turning she said, “There’s really no point in my talking about it… but I really resent your leaving me here all morning to take care of the kids by myself.”

“If there’s no point… why are you talking to me?” He grimaced, wishing he could take that back, at least soften it.

“I tell you and tell you but you still do it. You still go away.” She was going to ignore what he had just said. He was relieved by that, and yet irritated.

He held his breath, knowing he needed to say something then, but not knowing what to say. “I need the time…”

“I need time, too! I’m stuck with the kids all day!”

“Well, I guess we need to work out some sort of schedule.” He looked away from her.

“You always say that, but it hasn’t changed, Reed.”

“We haven’t really addressed the question of scheduling our time with the kids.”

“Yes we have, Reed. We sure have.”

His throat tightened. He didn’t know where to go from there. “I don’t know what to say; I don’t know how to talk about this.” He unclenched his hands and stretched out his fingers. He was aware of her staring at his hands, seeing how helpless he was in the face of an ordinary argument, an argument like everyone had. “I don’t know either…” she said, turning, walking back down the stairs. “I’m going out for a while. I’ll take the kids with me.” He waited ten minutes before going back into the house, checking to see if they’d actually left. The house was indeed empty, toys lying on the living room rug where the kids had abandoned them, Carol’s half-eaten sandwich on the counter, a full pot of soup turning cold on the stove. Maybe she was taking them out to lunch; she did that sometimes.

Every time this happened Reed expected to get a phone call an hour later… her telling him that she and the kids would be spending the night at a friend’s house, that she couldn’t stand to be around him when he was like this. That would be hard to take. He’d always feared a phone call like that because he knew if she felt she had to do that, things would never be the same between them again. He didn’t know why that bothered him so much—maybe because it was what people who couldn’t talk anymore did to each other.

Or maybe there’d be a phone call from the police. There’d been this accident.

Stop it. Stop it…

Sometimes if you didn’t think you deserved someone, you dreamed they died. Reed found that to be one of the more unattractive tricks the human mind could play.

He sat out on the front porch for a while. Michael had been working out here; his tools were scattered everywhere. He appeared to be developing quite an interest in mechanical things. Bicycle parts, electric motors, old radios, parts of a phonograph, miscellaneous nuts, bolts, and unidentified apparatus filled one corner of the porch, made officially Michael’s corner to avoid arguing over it every day.

Michael was a private, mysterious sort of kid; he had been since they got him. He kept most things to himself, and usually the only way you could tell something was bothering him was by looking at his forehead and cheeks. They’d flush ever so slightly when he was upset. Otherwise you couldn’t have paid him to tell. His background was just as mysterious: he’d been found abandoned at age four in a railroad switching yard. He could talk, but even then he wouldn’t tell the social workers anything, He wouldn’t tell them he couldn’t remember, he just wouldn’t tell them anything at all. He’d gone through quite a few foster homes because of that quality; people said you couldn’t get close to him.

Maybe so, but Reed liked him. Always had. He recognized, and appreciated, the need for self-containment. It had been difficult for a long time—their mutual distancing had kept them away from each other. But in small ways—Michael volunteering to go with him to the store, inviting Reed to watch him tinker with some new piece of junk—there was a new closeness. There were still problems; that little progress, so significant to Reed, might go almost unnoticed by someone else. Carol still complained that Reed didn’t spend enough time with the boy.

She was right. Reed recognized that the same thing that made Michael appealing to him was also a barrier. The boy was just too much like him for him to be that comfortable. And with his black hair, generally pale features, and intense eyes, he even looked like him.

They were gone all day. Around seven o’clock Reed went upstairs to bed. After lying sleepless about an hour, he heard the front door open downstairs, Alicia laughing, Carol shushing her and telling her it was time for bed. Then, after a few minutes, the back door opening. He climbed out of bed and walked over to the window, waiting. The office light went on. He expected to find the magazines gone from her desktop the next morning.

After Reed climbed back into bed he heard footsteps on the stairs. Too light for Carol’s. He raised up onto his elbows and squinted into the dim light. For a moment he thought he saw himself standing at the top of the stairs. He reached up and turned on the reading lamp.

His son Michael stood there, not moving any closer. “Good night, Dad.”

Reed stared at him. “Anything wrong… Michael?”

“No. Just wanted to say good night.” Michael’s face was shadowed, his body still motionless.

“Good night, Michael.”

Michael’s body relaxed, turned, and seemed to drift back down the stairs, almost as if Reed’s words had released it from a spell. Reed turned out the light and lay on his back, staring up into the dark where the ceiling should be. Michael had never called him Dad before.

The light from the office window lay stark against his darkened sheets. He thought about getting up to close the curtains, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He kept thinking, Carol is in the office, outside the house, so I’m responsible here. I have to keep my kids safe. The thought was frightening him. It seemed particularly hard to be a responsible adult at night when he was half asleep.

What if someone called for Carol? He’d have to go get her. He wondered if he could. He kept thinking about Michael, calling him Dad as he used to call that great big shadow of a man back in Simpson Creeks, Kentucky, his own dead father. He kept thinking about that, and how much he didn’t want to answer the phone if it rang.

~ * ~

Something was trembling in the room.

Reed stretched a sleep-palsied hand to where his wife lay… should have lain. For a moment he thought she had died, her and the two kids. Stop it… stop it. He remembered; they’d had an argument. She must still be in the office. Her side of the bed was still tucked in, flat, cool to the touch. He curled up on his side of the bed.

If they all died, it would be as if they’d never existed, as if ten years had just been erased from his life and he was a young man again, who had just left home.

The worst dream was other people, people you loved. Because when they died on you, part of your world suddenly became unreal. Stop it… stop it.

Something was trembling in the room.

Reed thought about turning on the light, but the thought seemed a long time coming, and he didn’t know what to do with the thought when it finally came. He had been having trouble sleeping—the colds were back, yes… he remembered, his nose continually raw—it kept him on edge, and full of faraway sounds with no apparent source. When sleep finally came, he didn’t know it. And the dreams didn’t know they were dreams.

He was seeing his life with Carol. Her hands massaging his hairline, outlining his jaw. He wanted to turn on the light and clear her away, burn the image out of his closed eyelids. But he could not.

Even now he wasn’t used to the idea of being married, having his own, separate family. Their skin, trying to remember them here, in the dark, seemed paler somehow than normal skin; their hair had too many shadows, their moist eyes too many highlights. They never had the reality his mother and father and little sister had, but seemed more a dream never meant to be remembered.

His wife and kids were what he’d always hoped for, dreamed of, but could not believe would ever be his. So his senses always seemed to deny their presence in subtle and disturbing ways. He missed words out of their sentences; when he read or watched TV, they weren’t there. Sometimes when he went out late for a paper or coffee, he’d forget which house was his. Little things. They bothered Carol tremendously. His many distractions, his absent gaze, as if he were viewing another channel in his mind.

Something was trembling in the room.

My God, the house is coming down, he thought. I’ve got to get out…

But he could not move, and realized it was because he had been dreaming, and might still be dreaming. And with that he found himself standing again, in his father’s house in the Appalachians, his mother at work in the kitchen, singing to the gospel station on the radio.

He turned and looked around the living room—the staircase behind him with the brown banister, the old radio with so many knobs and half of them not working, his father’s bright blue overstuffed chair. His mother had made lace doilies for the arms a year ago last summer and had warned his father not to go ruining them. His father sat in that chair now, his newspaper propped up on his barrel of a chest and stomach, his meaty fingers rubbing the backs of the pages nervously as he read, so that he would always have that grayish powder on his palms and fingertips.

The room was dimly lit, as always. The shadows had dull, mud yellow halos around them. You never could see faces clearly enough to know what they were feeling.

Reed stared at the paper. It was trembling.

The newspaper was shaking just perceptibly from side to side, back and forth, just vaguely enough that Reed’s attention was drawn into the motion, and just noticeably enough that it made him nauseous to watch it.

Then there was a rumbling from behind the newspaper and Reed thought it was his father asleep, snoring in his usual basso way. Then he thought maybe his father wasn’t sleeping at all, but growling, his animal eyes alert for any false moves. Reed was unaccountably terrified that he couldn’t see his father’s eyes behind the paper.

There was a low vibration in the room.

Reed looked all around him for the source of the vibration, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere. He looked behind the radio and beneath, thinking there had been some sort of odd feedback effect. But as he got closer to the radio he could hear the faint sounds of the gospel music still playing, and when he looked into the kitchen his mother was still singing along, singing as if nothing were wrong, as if all she could hear was the song and there was nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about, Reed honey, nothing at all.

Even as the vibration grew louder, Reed’s mother continued to sing, smiling and gazing out the kitchen window, her sandy hair duller than he remembered it.

Reed looked at his father, who was still reading the paper, still rubbing his fingers delicately against the print, rubbing the ink into his fingers where it would remain for all time. For all time.

Water had started to pool on the floor.

Water was seeping out of every corner of the room, coming up through the floorboards, dripping out of the light fixtures. Water was oozing out of the old imitation-Persian rugs they said Reed’s grandfather had hauled over the ridge in a tiny wagon, dripping down the wallpaper with the pale green cupids holding pale blue flowers, sloshing around the red-slippered feet of his father. Who did not react. Who continued to read his paper.

Reed didn’t know what to do. He began to scream at his father, reaching after the paper to tear it away. But his father would move the paper, just ever so slightly, so Reed never could reach it. Reed tried again and again, but the paper was always just out of his reach.

“I’ll drown because of you!” he shouted. But there was no reaction from his father. “Tell me what to do!” His father read and rubbed the paper, water dripping on his forehead. Reed’s mother continued to sing. “Daddy!” Reed screamed.

Mud was creeping over the floor.

Dark, rich mud covered up the left edge of the Persian carpet, then the entire left side. It pooled around one of the legs of the triangular maple side table and began climbing it. It lapped at the blue overstuffed chair with a sound like a thick tongue in grease. It crept closer and closer to his father’s red-slippered feet. “Daddy!” Reed screamed again, but there was no response. The meaty fingers continued to rub at the print, eating first one word, then another.

Reed looked around him, and did not know what he could do. He thought this was somehow wrong. He was twenty-eight; he wasn’t a child anymore. But he had wet his pants. He was a child, really was a child, and he was scared… he didn’t know what to do.

His mother came singing into the living room, her bare feet splashing through the oozing mud and water. It looks like the gully under Johnson’s outhouse, Reed thought in wonder, and cringed away from her. Her eyes were wide open, but her face looked so relaxed it was as if she were asleep. Her mouth was wide open, too, singing the gospel tune as she stared at him. It was no song he could remember. He could not even understand the words—they seemed so thick, full of choked-off syllables, garbled—but the song terrified him. He looked down at her feet, and the rich brown mud covered them. He turned to run.

Reed’s mother screamed and began chasing him. “Don’t go! Don’t leave us!” she shouted, but Reed jumped onto the first-step of the stairwell and began bounding up to the second story, away from the water and mud, his mother’s outstretched arms clawing at him.

…when the wall of mud came thundering down the stairs to greet him.

~ * ~

Something was trembling in the room.

Reed couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes. Something about the vibration made him want to stay asleep. He remembered being awake before, and how there was a difference. The vibration seemed clearer, as if a layer of sleep, or dream, had been peeled away. But he still wasn’t quite able to understand it, to figure out what it could be. There was still a darkness in his head.

He was still in that hypnagogic state between sleep and awakening, and it had always struck him as bizarrely self-conscious to be aware that he was in that state, even at the time he was in it. Or when in a dream he became aware that he was dreaming. It changed the experience; it gave him a powerful sense of freedom and self-control.

The vibration again, much clearer now.

He felt like opening his eyes but did not. The dark was warm and comfortable. He imagined that outside it was cold, the darkness graying as sunrise approached. He really didn’t like that time of day, the way the light appeared to his eyes, everything slightly hazy and insubstantial. The dark seemed to have more substance. You could always fight substantial things; at least you had a chance.

The vibration seemed to have risen in pitch until it hurt his ears. It was the phone. Ringing. Carol wouldn’t answer it; she must still be in the office. He had to answer it. He had to stop the ringing.

And still he didn’t open his eyes, or make any move to pick up the receiver. He thought about it, thought about lifting the sheet from his face—he realized suddenly he had slept with his face covered over, like a shroud—but for some reason he could not move. He recognized that he was fully awake now. He thought about the phone, tried to concentrate on it, but he could not move.

Late night phone calls had always terrified him. He knew it was a common fear. His mother would not answer the phone after nine o’clock at night. It was either a wrong number, a crank call, or bad news. And she didn’t want to hear about any of them. As if the bad occurrence wouldn’t exist anymore if she didn’t hear about it. As if when everyone woke up in the morning things would be fine. It occurred to Reed that she never listened to bad news from any source, even from her own heart.

When his father used to go out drinking, a late-night phone call always informed Reed that his father was in jail. His mother wouldn’t answer; he was always the one. A late-night phone call from his Uncle Ben had let Reed know that his parents were dead. I’m sorry, Reed…

The phone was ringing on its stand across the room. Each electronic gargle cutting through Reed’s thoughts, draining his consciousness of dream. And resistance. He somehow knew it had stopped ringing for a time, while he’d been thinking, and only just commenced ringing again. Pulling his arm out of the covers was like pulling it out of multiple layers of water, soil, and mud.

His fingers touched hard plastic, then he jerked the receiver to his ear.

“Reed?” The voice sounded vaguely familiar.

“Yes.”

“When you comin’ home, boy?” Reed’s stomach went cold, and his head throbbed sickeningly. He sat upright in his bed. He’d always dreamed they’d finally call him, ask him to come back. Call him home even after the disaster.

“It’s time you were gettin’ home, boy. Long past time. We need you here. Your sister needs her big brother.” It was his father’s voice, but without the characteristic harshness. Although as a child he’d longed to hear it that way, he never had.

“I…” Reed didn’t know what to say. He could hear his mother, his mother whom he hadn’t heard in ten years, talking in the background.

“Tell him to come home soon.”

“Papa…” He began to cry. It surprised him, but he couldn’t help it.

And then in the background he heard the rising screams: himself at ten, his father beating him. If all went as usual, Reed knew he’d be battered almost into unconsciousness.

The screams drew out into a moan, then inarticulate garble sounding more animal than human. Then a sound like claws scratching the receiver.

Reed slammed down the phone, and was immediately sorry he had severed this one thin line running back to Simpson Creeks, Kentucky, into his past. That he had hung up on his dead mother and father. Who had been dead almost ten years now.

As a child, Reed had sometimes believed that magical things happened when he was around. His whole family seemed special that way. His Uncle Ben had magical knowledge about the woods. His mother could be magically sensual when she would, using her body to stop his father’s magical anger, magical rage.

It came from living on the Big Andy Mountain; it was as if the Big Andy had given them that.

But something was trembling in his room. Again and again. He tried to ignore the rings that would disturb his sleep for hours to come.

Chapter 3

Charlie Simpson woke early on Monday morning. For some reason he hadn’t been able to sleep very well of late. Seemed to be having lots of dreams that were waking him up in the middle of the night, yet he couldn’t remember any of them. Not even one little detail. It wasn’t like him; he usually remembered his dreams.

So there wasn’t much sense in knockin’ around the house all morning. In any case there was work he might do in the lot behind the store. Old Buck, his hound dog, loved it when he worked there. There wouldn’t be much reaction when he got the yard tools out of the shed—just a raised ear or an opened, slack mouth—but for Buck that was the equivalent of hysteria.

He had a special treat for Buck today—a box of those yellow marshmallow birds they called Peeps—left over from Easter. They were quite stale now, six months later, but Buck liked them best that way. He’d wedge each one between his two front paws until they were sort of standing up, then he’d stare at them a minute, bark softly as if they were supposed to answer him, then eat them, one at a time in the same way. He never seemed to get tired of the game. Every Easter Charlie always laid in a supply of the things about four times too large for his needs so that Buck could have a box each month of the year. It was Charlie’s only extravagance.

Funny how Buck was scared to death of real birds. One time Ben Taylor’s little daughter Lannie brought over a chick he’d given her, and Buck took one look at the little yellow ball of fuzz, cheeping and hopping, and dashed around behind the storage shed. Charlie’d never seen him move so fast. The chick had followed in its awkward way, and Buck kept retreating, until pretty soon the chick had him cornered under the lilac bush, just his nose and two enormous, shock-filled eyes showing. The chick was having a grand old time, cheeping away to its heart’s content.

Buck wasn’t the bravest of animals, not the most practical for a country storekeeper, Charlie knew, but he was all he had since Mattie died five years ago. It wasn’t like Charlie to be so unrealistic about an animal, to give it almost human characteristics—animals were animals, after all, and their thoughts a mystery. But the dog had filled a big hole in his life.

Charlie stood for a moment in his living room, finding it difficult to leave just yet. Normally he dusted here every morning before going to work; it was the best kept up room in the house. Not that it required much dusting and straightening up, because it was a room he never used. It really wasn’t a room for the living anymore. Mattie and he had spent most of their time here during their years of marriage—reading, playing cards, singing along with Mattie on the piano, and listening to the old Philco back when there were things on the radio worth listening to, dramas and such. Practically every morning he’d dust a little, move a knickknack or a book a fraction of an inch one way, look at it, then usually move it back to where it was. Then he’d stand for a long time on the braided green rug at the center of the room and look around, and remember. The whole process usually took an hour, yet almost every morning he managed to get up early enough to do it. It didn’t seem right to skip it this morning, but lately he’d been feeling it was time for a change. It was time to engage himself in something else—it was a feeling in the air.

Charlie’d slipped on his white shirt and overalls, his old hunting jacket, jumped into the old Chevy pickup, and headed down to his store in the Creeks. The road had been unusually foggy for the season, nothing but cloud about ten feet ahead of him. Breaking into torn fingers that separated occasionally just to show him a bit of limestone outcrop or fencepost. His usually brittle gray hair felt wet, clammy, and water seemed to line the many cracks in his weathered skin. With the fog he could hardly see the old walnut trees that grew along the roadside. He was thinking of stopping and picking up a few of the nuts when the shadow stepped out in front of him.

He slammed on his brakes and cried out. The dark shadow passed into the woods. Bigger than a man, he thought, swollen and dark. But walking upright like a man. He thought about a bear, but there hadn’t been bear in those woods in years. Not since before the flood.

He opened the pickup door and slid out. Later, he would wonder whatever possessed him.

The fog had begun to burn off in earnest, but it only made the countryside more unapproachable as far as Charlie was concerned. In spots, like fifty feet in front of the truck, it was clear as a new picture window. He could see the corner fence post of Jack Martin’s north pasture, one cow coming up to it even as he watched, and further down the road the big roadside hickory that marked the beginning of Bob Collins’s land.

But closer in, in the shadows of the trees, the fog was thick as lace hung up sopping wet, seeming to cling to every irregular surface. On the left bank it was especially thick in places, heaviest where the bank was piled high with old debris and driftwood from the flood, pushed there when the road crews bulldozed the road clear. You could tell the dirt was from the old dam: the color was darker than the rest of the bank, with coal trailings here and there. The variation of thickness in the fog made Charlie uneasy; it made the fog seem more substantial than it should be, as if it had something in it for thickening, like flour added to milk gravy.

He began to sweat profusely, a sure sign that he was nervous. Charlie could always tell by the way his hair began to feel like wet cotton stuck to his forehead, even before he was consciously aware of being scared. But he had been in these woods a thousand times; what was making him so nervous now?

He didn’t hear any noises in the brush. In fact, things seemed much quieter than usual. A bear would have telegraphed his passage a long way, breaking and smashing a trail.

He moved toward the woods—again, the action would puzzle him later—breaking apart the emaciated embrace of driftwood as he made his way up the embankment. He paused momentarily at the top, fiddling with something made out of cloth hung up in the branches. When he got it loose he examined it: old and grimy, but it was a child’s doll, cheeks and hair smeared with black, one button eye missing. He started to throw it away, then on second thought stuffed it into the pocket of his red-checked hunter’s jacket.

There were more signs of the flood further into the woods. When the Simpson Creeks left their banks and roared down the hollow that day, they hadn’t made the creek bend behind Jack Martin’s pasture. Instead, they’d slopped over that good bottom land and hit the left road embankment like a freight train, catapulting tools and pieces of houses and bodies and all manner of things into the trees beyond. Charlie had helped recover some of the bodies after the waters dropped. Chickens, pigs, and two little kids, were hung up in the upper branches. He knew immediately that the little boy belonged to the Willis family. The little girl’s face had been broken and washed clean of character, just like a blank-faced doll you’d buy in a store—not looking like any real person in particular, but resembling a number of them. Charlie would never forget that. Never.

Charlie tried to kick a rusted bucket out of the way, and it broke apart around his boot. He listened for the bear, or whatever, but there was nothing.

Patches of fog still hung here, but drifting a bit, so that areas, and objects, completely concealed only a moment before were revealed suddenly, as if to startle him. An ax handle. A lady’s handbag. Two broken mason jars. A torn picture of the Empire State Building. Part of an old radio. A high-heeled shoe. Pieces of clothing. Charlie was careful not to disturb them. What was scary about the fog was that he wasn’t sure what he would find when it separated.

Charlie Simpson felt guilty about the flood. Having his name on the creek that had killed so many people, left so many others homeless. His great grandfather had founded the community, then sold the mineral rights to a large portion of the land to the coal companies for a dollar and less an acre. Sold the rights “in perpetuity,’’ the birthright right out from under his great grandson’s feet.

The Nole Company had built the coal waste dam. Built it damn poorly, for all their money and technical expertise. And that same creek named after his great granddaddy had ripped the dam apart during a rainstorm one night—ripped it apart, Charlie liked to think, in righteous rage.

And brought down death and destruction to the innocent, people whose last name wasn’t Simpson, and who had nothing to do with that coal company.

Charlie grimaced as he pushed through the brush with his bare hands. The woods seemed much too quiet for this time of the morning. More and more fog was burning off as the sun penetrated through the top boughs, illuminating the small clearings, but no animals appeared to greet it. Several times he thought he saw the great shadow again, as the fog drifted away in pieces, the gray bulk appearing just behind the white curtain that had been torn away, but each time he was mistaken. Just a thick tree trunk, or a shadow between two overlapping sets of tree branches.

He’d gone a good distance into the trees before he realized it. He was ready to turn around and get back to his truck when something heavy seemed to shift its weight off to his left. He could hear it; the trees seemed to groan.

Charlie began to wonder what possessed him to be out in the woods like that. But he could not seem to leave. Even as everything was telling him to turn around and go back, he began stepping forward, slowly at first, then more rapidly, until it seemed he couldn’t wait to meet whatever it was out in those woods.

The woods seemed to be crashing around him, and so he ran, but forward, closer and closer to the loudest sound, trying not to look back at the source of the other sounds, the echoes, at what he imagined were great trees falling at his heels.

The woods seemed thicker here, the underbrush heavier, and driftwood and house debris were stacked among the trees. Brush and planks and pieces of sheet metal, and a soupy layer of mist over that, stretching out before him like strata. He felt suddenly trapped, and ran alongside the wall of debris and fog, seeking a way around it. He thought about the large shadowy thing finding him here, and he almost cried out. He turned around, intent on escaping back to the road and his truck, but a thick fence of hickories loomed before him, the brush so thick between them he knew he’d never be able to get through.

Charlie stumbled around a large tree, falling, sending his hands out to the wall of brush and debris. And found a little girl hung there between two layers of strata, a mummy excavated from the flood sediment, her arms like discolored dough pierced by the branches.

Charlie beat his knees with quivering fists. “I’m… I’m…” He coughed. “…sorry!” he gasped out, and began to sob.

He leaned back against the tree trunk and stared at her: a gob of wet rags and a piece of an old white plastic container. Impossible. For he had seen her eyes, fixed on him.

Charlie Simpson rose weakly and began to walk, numbed to the branches slapping his bare skin through the torn jacket. The fog was almost completely gone now, just a little mist in the air rising off the leaves. He had secretly wished the waste dam would break, had wished it with all his heart. The waste dam up at the top of the hollow had loomed there all his life, reminding him how much his family had given away. He hadn’t thought about so many people getting killed; he lived so high up on the ridge no flood could have gotten him. His imagination just hadn’t taken him that far. He couldn’t have imagined something like that little girl drowning. Could he?

The woods stopped just ahead of him. He was surprised. Apparently he’d circled around—that was the old Taylor place up ahead, or at least what was left of it, north of where he had parked the truck. The flood had hit here hardest, in part because of the cliff southeast of the property. The high waters had poured through the narrows north of the house, washed over the yard, hit the cliff, and come crashing back. The resulting turbulence had moved everything around so that the countryside here didn’t even resemble what it had been before. A good deal of the waste from the dam itself had been dropped here, leaving the fields under eight feet of mud, double that in some spots. In the distance Charlie could just see the top of the rusted tin roof of the Taylors’ two-story house. It had been knocked off its foundations, carried a little ways and dropped, and then filled with mud to its second story. The top of the ground now, and for several feet underneath it, was littered with everything the family had owned. Nobody had come after it, at least nobody he knew. He figured kids might have scavenged here, though—at least Ben Taylor, the uncle, thought that some of that had taken place. None of the neighbors had the heart, even as poor as most of them were, and all the Taylors had died: mother and father and little girl. Reed Taylor had been out west at the time—story was the old man, Alec Taylor, had thrown him out of the house. Charlie didn’t know for sure Reed even knew that all his family was dead. That would be a terrible, terrible thing, he thought, to have something that tragic go on in your family and not know a thing about it.

Charlie was gazing down the old path up on the left side of the hollow that wound its way to the bottom of the cliff and then up to the Taylor place, parts of the pathway remarkably intact despite the flood, when he saw the bear rise out of the brush and gallop up the path. Brown or black, he couldn’t tell from this distance. It looked kind of gray, and out of focus. Larger than the norm, a good eight hundred pounds, and well over four feet at the shoulder.

Then the bear appeared to rear on its hind legs, leaning forward as it ran. Charlie squinted but couldn’t see any better. He’d never seen a bear do that before. Running almost like a man.

It took Charlie a good hour to get back to his truck and on his way again. For a while all he could think of was how hungry Buck was going to be. He didn’t want to think about a bear around Simpson Creeks.

When Charlie Simpson was driving into town that morning, still shaken by his experience in the woods near the Taylor place, he saw Hector Pierce wandering across the field behind Inez Pierce’s rooming house. The old man was feebleminded certainly, ever since the big cave-in in ‘53. Four men had been buried alive in that, and Pierce the only one to survive—intact, except for a piece of brain missing, left somewhere back down in the mine. But even a man as feebleminded as that deserved a little freedom now and then, not being cooped up in that third-story room all the time like his sister Inez seemed to want. So seeing Hector Pierce out in that field, staggering around, hairless scalp and baby like skin shiny as metal in the morning light, arms out and touching everything he passed, seemed to Charlie something perfectly right and proper, a kind of righting of past wrongs. He found himself waving to Hector, smiling when Hector waved back, and driving on to the store feeling just a little better.

Chapter 4

Alicia and Michael were playing down by Sloan’s Lake with the family’s two dogs: Ben, an Irish setter, and Josef, an unusually small German shepherd. Reed watched them for a long time, taken with the progress the two children had made in getting along. When Michael first came, he wouldn’t have anything to do with Alicia—she was just a little kid who cried all the time, got in his way, and frequently got him into trouble. Both Reed and Carol knew that jealousy was operating at full force here. In Michael’s eyes Alicia was both the “real” child and the baby who got most of the attention. And since Michael obviously hadn’t gotten enough attention when he was a baby, that must have really hurt.

They’d worked with Michael for a long time on the jealousy, letting him be younger than he actually was if that was what he needed, trying to give him the attention he had missed as a baby, holding him as much as possible, reading him bedtime stories even when most of his friends thought they were too old for that. Reed had participated fully in all of that, and in fact enjoyed few things more than reading to Michael in the evenings. It was something Reed felt very proud of; he had made a real difference in his son’s life.

Michael was playing catch with Alicia now, being careful not to throw the bright red ball too hard, saying encouraging words when she did anything even vaguely accomplished. Reed smiled. Michael was growing up fast. He looked at his wife.

Carol leaned against a pine tree, her arms folded across her chest. She was smiling, too, until she glanced over at Reed and noticed that he was watching her. She turned to him with a worried look on her face and walked over to where he was sitting.

She sat down in front of him, blocking his view of the kids. “Enough being the proud daddy, admiring his kids…” She smiled. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I love you.”

She grinned and grabbed the back of his neck, pulling him to her lips. “I love you, too,” she mumbled into his neck. Then she pushed herself away, holding onto his shoulders so that he had to look at her directly. “But you’re avoiding me. Something’s bothering you, or there’s something you want to tell me. What is it?”

He grabbed her around the waist and twisted her around so that she was facing the children too, his chin resting on the back of her right shoulder. “Look at our children, wife,” he said with mock gruffness. “Look at Michael; see how he takes care of his little sister.” Michael was holding Alicia up so that she could see a sea gull on one of the trees more clearly. Both children wore red Windbreakers of the same shade. Alicia’s had a down-filled hood. “Aren’t you proud of him?”

“I sure am… I’m also proud of the proud daddy, Reed.” Then she twisted out of his arms and stared at him again, examining his face. “Tell me. It’s that phone call you got, isn’t it? I heard the phone ringing from the office, but I was too mad at you to answer it, even if it did wake you up. Was it the phone call? Is that what’s bothering you?”

“Yeah…”

“I should have answered it, Reed. I’m sorry…”

“The phone call was for me, Carol. Stop feeling bad about something that you had nothing to do with. You always..,” He stopped, looked at her, and grinned. “Sorry. But there’s nothing you could, or can, do. My problem.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

He found himself looking at his children again. His children. His wife. The core of normalcy, the one thing solid in his life. “It was a call from back home. There’s some trouble; I… I probably need to go back there for a week or so and take care of things.” He looked up at her. “Some problems with my father’s estate.”

She held his hand. “Who was it that called?”

He stared at her. “My… Uncle Ben.”

“Oh… you haven’t seen him in a long time. That’ll be good for you to see him. And it’ll be good for you to see where you grew up; it’s time.”

“Yeah… I think it is. Seeing Uncle Ben, Charlie Simpson… it’ll be nice.”

“Reed… can we go with you? I’d like to see where you grew up.”

“No.” He looked at her quickly. “Sorry… but I think I’d probably better do this by myself. I won’t be there long. A week at the most, I guess.”

“I understand. Of course.”

But Reed knew that of course she didn’t. He’d never told her about his past. About his father. About his family. She just knew they’d been killed in a flood while Reed was somewhere else. He hadn’t even told her he’d been running away from home at the time. He just couldn’t bring himself to tell her the story.

“You be careful, okay?”

Reed looked at her, at the tightness around her mouth, and wondered if she knew, if she sensed something. But that was impossible. “I will,” he said automatically, hoping she wouldn’t ask any more questions. “I promise.”

“Is there anything more you want to tell me, Reed?” Her eyes were bright, intense.

“I could be better… at having a family…” he began.

“You do fine.”

He raised his hand. “I know, I know. But I’m not always good at being an adult. I think maybe going back there, seeing where I grew up, trying to dig out why I am the way I am… I think I’ll be a better adult. Things’ll be better for all of us.” What he could not say was that he was afraid not to go back. That if he didn’t go back, his childishness might foul things up so badly between them there’d be no fixing it. If he didn’t go back, he might not have his solid family anymore. His security.

“You’ve never told me much about your childhood.” She leaned over into his arms and he held her tightly.

“I know. Maybe I can tell you a great deal more when I get back. Maybe I’ll tell you everything.”

Then suddenly the children were there, and there Josef was, yawning in Reed’s face. Alicia was laughing at the dog, but Reed was suddenly uneasy, staring into the dark open mouth, the pink lips, gums, and enormous tongue, the long, sharp teeth. He pulled away. Then he sneezed.

Carol laughed. “Your cold’s getting worse, Reed. I’ve never known you to be sick like this before.” Then she looked at him seriously again. “You’re still losing weight, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“How much so far?”

“I don’t know. Almost thirty pounds I think.”

“Reed!”

“I’m okay—I needed to lose the weight anyway.” He made a false smile, even though he knew she would recognize it. “I was getting fat.”

“You’re making yourself ill, Reed…” Then suddenly they were overwhelmed with thrashing legs and wet fur, barks and giggles.

Carol, Michael, and Alicia were laughing, all three wrestling with the dogs. Reed smiled as he watched them, determined to remember exactly how they looked at this moment, wanting to hold them, to join in.

But each time the German shepherd swung near, Reed pulled back, thinking of its teeth. He wanted to warn them of its teeth, to tell them it might not be safe, but he held himself back. It was a foolish fear. Josef was the gentlest of dogs. They would not understand.

Chapter 5

That morning the woman with the bright face and hair had come to Hector Pierce’s window, awakening him from his frequent nightmare of suffocation. He had been trying to claw his way up out of layer after layer of earth, each succeeding layer covering the one he had just broken through so that it seemed he’d never reach the top. But finally the sun had penetrated, and it had been her face shining at the window.

Hector had been thrilled; he had not seen a woman so close in years, none except his sister Inez, and particularly none who had looked at him so kindly. The woman’s hair glowed, as if her head were on fire.

He’d pulled himself out of bed and was again amazed at how difficult it had become, harder every morning. His body was slow to do what he wanted, stubborn and disobedient. He wanted to smack it sometimes like a bad child, whip it into shape.

Finally he was able to get himself dressed. Inez would be out shopping, he knew, and most of the boarders at work. There wouldn’t be anyone around to stop him. He stood in front of the ornate hallway mirror—it used to belong to their mother and it made him a little sad to think about that—touched his face with stiff fingers, and, deciding that it would more than do, felt like bounding down the stairs, dancing his way out onto the front porch in order to impress the woman. But the body was too tired, and he had to make do with ambling slowly, his right hand clutching the railing with a desperation that did not seem to belong to him.

When he stepped out on the porch, he could not see her anywhere. He turned around, struggling with his body, finally letting his head lead his body into the turnings, but she seemed to be nowhere near the porch. He walked down the steps cautiously, then turned around to look back at the boardinghouse.

It was then he remembered that his room was on the third floor. The bright-faced woman must have been standing on the roof of the porch to look in on him. He grinned broadly, then laughed aloud.

She wasn’t on the roof now, and Hector looked in vain for a ladder. Probably flew, he thought, then chuckled again. He started walking toward the field in the back of the house. He didn’t know why he was going there, but knew that was where he had to go.

He had to climb over the low fence one of Inez’s boarders put up some years ago. Or had that been his father? He couldn’t remember. Actually, he might have put it up himself. It was a difficult obstacle for him, and he almost fell on the other side. He was always terrified of falling, afraid he wouldn’t get up again.

The field had been a garden at one time, their mother’s garden; he did remember that. Inez hadn’t kept it up, said she was too busy tending the house. He might have planted the garden himself if he were able. It seemed a shame to have it go to waste.

Off in the distance, on the far edge of the field where the willows covered the creek bank, he could see something glowing. A face turning to smile at him. He began to walk faster.

He was surprised somebody hadn’t come after him already. They usually did by now. Inez didn’t trust him out by himself, said he’d kill himself outside. Hector didn’t understand how that could happen, even though Inez seemed to be right about a lot of things and he usually bowed to her judgment. But he really didn’t know what she was talking about—”his accidents,” she always said. And anyhow, Hector didn’t care this time. He had to find that woman.

He thought he saw her moving under the willows, but he couldn’t trust his eyes so much anymore. Not since he was buried. Didn’t seem right they’d dig him up like that. Once a body was buried it should stay buried. It seemed like his body had forgotten things from being buried like that. From being like it was dead. He knew people thought him feebleminded, but that didn’t bother him much.

From the distance she looked like his mother. But that couldn’t be; his mother was dead. She’d died… he wasn’t sure when. He thought maybe it had been when he was buried like that—the shock of it killed her. But maybe she had died before the mine swallowed him up, and all that dirt had just made him forget. He remembered dreaming about her while he was down there in the dark: her soft face rising up out of the strips of rock and dirt that covered him like he was an old root lying down there in the ground. Singing to him, trying to make him feel better like she had when his father had died. Only it was him dying this time, and there didn’t seem much comfort for that.

Since he’d been buried, since he’d spent all that time lying down in that wet darkness with the taste of earth in his mouth, it seemed that a lot of his dreams came to him in the daytime. There didn’t seem to be much difference between waking and sleeping anymore. He’d dream about his daddy and see him in his rocker the next day, just waiting for Hector to get up and help the old man downstairs for breakfast. He’d dream about Ellen, his girl in grade school, and the next afternoon she’d be throwing pebbles up to his window at the boardinghouse, wanting him to come out and play. He’d open the window and she’d be standing there underneath the maple in the southeast corner of the front yard—the one that used to have a tire swing. And the tire would still be swinging there, and Ellen holding on to the rope in her pale yellow dress with the wide pink ribbon for a belt, and all the way to his window he could smell the lilacs she was holding.

But this woman with the bright face wasn’t like that. As he got closer to the line of willows he could see her moving down to the branch of the Simpson that meandered its way through this part of their land, and it felt different from those other times. It scared him a little, but he had to follow her, have her look at him.

Maybe his mother had died in the flood? Had she drowned? He knew the flood had happened several years after he had been buried, but he couldn’t remember if he had seen his mother alive before that. There’d been a lot of excitement that night. The boardinghouse had just missed the flood—the water had risen to the first step on one side of the porch—but there were people running around, and he remembered they’d taken in a few families. It seemed like his mother had been taking care of everyone, but that might have been Inez. But it didn’t sound like Inez; he couldn’t imagine her acting just that way.

He stepped softly under the willows, hoping not to disturb the bright-haired woman. He wanted time to think about what he was going to say to her.

She turned and her face loomed large before him. This wasn’t his mother; it wasn’t his mother at all. Her hair was on fire.

Hector felt himself falling toward the woman with flaming hair, and suddenly he was under water, sputtering and flapping like a fish. Houses tumbled by along the bottom. A child’s doll made out of cloth, its one button eye staring. Chickens and pigs and dogs and cats all screaming watery screams in hideous slow motion. Then a dead girl child, her face seeming to melt in the distorting turbulence of the stream. The Taylor man who lived up the hollow: his face big and bloated, black and ugly like some huge beast.

And the woman with flaming hair, bending over to tuck him into bed, slip him down into a deep, blue sleep.

~ * ~

The bear stopped at the opening of the old house. Something… felt wrong. Something irritating in the back of his mind. He could not find the irritation, and he growled in anger. Something he knew about this place. He pawed at the broken boards and dug at the mound of silt outside the boards, uncovering more and more of the old house as he dug.

Then he stopped digging. No humans lived here. He knew. But something was here. He was here… and something like him was here.

He shook his head and growled. Something brown flashed in the woods to his left, and he broke away to stalk the animal. He was hungry, and for a time would be able to ignore the irritant at the back of his mind.

Chapter 6

Something that had to be done…

Reed had changed his mind twice about whether he should return to Simpson Creeks. He was tired and disgusted with his own indecisiveness. Carol was too. She’d taken the kids with her to her aunt and uncle’s farm out in eastern Colorado. He was to call her when he made his decision.

He was only six months away from his doctorate in archaeology with some of the highest grades in the graduate program. He grinned self-consciously at his success. But he wasn’t interested in that kind of excavating at the moment.

Concentrating on his Mesa Verde project had become next to impossible for Reed. Fist-sized balls of paper lay scattered like hail over his desk; he’d suddenly find himself pulling one apart, shredding it with stiff fingers. He’d been poring over site reports, feature and survey reports, data records, photographs of artifacts, correspondence with participants in the digs, his own notes from trips down to Cortez… and the sameness, the repetition of observation that was always so much a part of the paperwork relating to archaeological digs seemed especially irritating now.

~ * ~

Most archaeology is boring, hard work. But there are those moments, those sudden discoveries and realizations, that make it all worth it. Reed remembered the first time he ever visited Mesa Verde, on a special summer class with Dr. Simms. They’d camped out on the grounds for a month, visiting the sites during the day and attending additional lectures around a campfire at night. He and Carol had been married a year, and the students had been allowed to bring their spouses along. They’d both had a wonderful time for a while.

Reed found the landscape startling. The great escarpment that contains Mesa Verde dominates the Montezuma Valley region between Cortez and Mancos, Colorado, the result of a great uplift taking place during the Cenozoic era twenty-five million years ago. That, in combination with steady downcutting by the river, created deep, narrow canyons that peeled away at the original block of stone until a series of fingerlike projections were created. On the surface of these mesas and on the cliffsides of the intervening canyons, the ancient Anasazi made their homes.

Reaching the top of this escarpment around sunset, the canyons adrift with rich browns and reds, had been like stepping backward into the past. Dr. Simms’s talk about the “spirit of a place” suddenly came alive for Reed. This place was a living, powerful presence. Looking down from the top of the escarpment, past two thousand years of human history arranged in strata on the canyon wall, to a far more ancient, prehuman history lying secretively in the shadows below, Reed knew he would never be the same.

Carol had been quite taken with the place as well; she’d shown a great deal of interest in the peoples who had lived here, from the Basket Makers contemporaneous with Christ to the Pueblo builders hiding from as-yet-unknown invaders in their fortified cliff houses.

Reed really enjoyed her interest—few of his friends had ever shared his obsessions. “You know at one time early archaeologists thought there had been two types of people living here,” he explained to her. “The Basket Makers, and then a race with a slight deformity—unusually broad heads, flattened in the back. Then later archaeologists discovered it was merely because of the introduction of a new type of cradle during the eighth century. Originally the cradle was a basket with a pillow to protect the baby’s head. But then someone invented a wooden cradle board without a pillow whose repeated use caused the baby’s head to deform. Everyone started using them, and soon almost an entire generation grew up with heads of that shape.”

Her eyes were shiny from the campfire. Maybe that had made her seem more interested than she actually was. But no… she did find the surfaces of archaeology fascinating. It was just when they went deeper…

“You know, it’s amazing to think about,” she said. “I mean, how different styles of parenting can affect the future. Here these people chose one style of cradle over another, and it affected the actual physical appearance of the next generation of their people.”

“And think about how someone from our future might look at us,” he’d said. “This outsider will look at the distant past and conclude, ‘See here… these were humans, but there were always these alien elements in their culture… which finally took over.’“ He’d thought it thrilling to think about, but the look in Carol’s eyes as she thought about it, and looked at him, and obviously thought about what Reed had told her about his own upbringing—it showed that the conversation had obviously unsettled her. That night Reed had seen the beginnings of Carol’s discomfort with his chosen field.

Her unease had become obvious when Dr. Simms and the class began examination of Site 1453, the Badger House area. At one time there had been an enormous trash mound here, whose excavation had yielded a great number of interesting data about its people. One of Reed’s first great interests in archaeology had been the whole idea of ancient trash piles. Farming groups who had lived in one place for a long time—the spiritual forebears to his own ancestors in Simpson Creeks, he supposed—left wonderful garbage piles for the archaeologist. There was nothing more delightful to Reed than a big garbage dump. Each piece told part of a story.

The trash pile at Badger House had yielded corrugated pottery, pendant disks, scrapers and hammerstones, choppers, knives, projectile points, bone awls, the discarded bones of rock squirrels, badgers, porcupines, gray and red foxes, wolves, coyotes, dogs, bighorn sheep, mule deer, turkeys, and even an occasional horned owl. Rare finds included various unfired animal effigies and clay balls, fetishes, and a whetstone. And finally, after stripping away most of the mound, they’d found evidence of even earlier buildings, pit houses and the like. These people often built on top of the ruins of even earlier people, so that layer upon layer of houses, of lives lived out undramatically before ending in fire or drought or old age, were not uncommon.

“I can’t go near that thing,” Carol had said. “I won’t go in there, Reed. It’s just too much.” So she’d left the trash pile and returned to camp, and didn’t go to any of the sites after that, just stayed in their tent and read. That’s what finally got to Carol. The layers. Death upon death. To dig beneath someone’s house and find the skull of someone who had lived there before. To find the ghost of someone else’s last meal mixed in with your own garbage. To find the central artifacts of someone else’s dead life drifting up through the ground into your living room. She’d talked about those things at the time, and Reed had thought she shared his obsession with it. Later he realized she only shared his occasional fear of it.

Carol didn’t like looking down, or digging into the layers. And she didn’t like that part of Reed that found such excavating to be of central importance. It made her profoundly uncomfortable.

If Reed had known more, if he had dug a little deeper, he would be even more frightened than she. He had hints of it even back then.

The Anasazi abandoned the Mesa Verde area during the great drought of A.D. 1276 to 1299, never to return. But there had been droughts before, and they’d remained. There is evidence of various nomadic tribes raiding them; perhaps that’s why they moved off the top of the mesa into the cliffs in the first place. No one knows. Reed liked to think they were haunted by the history, the overwhelming sense of a past here. As he was, though he didn’t know it then. The “spirit of the place” had finally gotten to them. They left their homes to the spreading vegetation, and the drifting earth.

~ * ~

For a time he’d convinced himself that the phone call from his parents was a dream, part of his dream of the flood. But as he went over that night again and again, he knew it could not have been a dream. It was simply too vivid, and he could remember being awake—he knew he had been awake. Some sort of prank, then, although he knew no one who could have pulled it off so convincingly. He had to know, but he was afraid to know.

He broke off studies for a day and played several hours of racquetball with Terry, a slightly overweight, redheaded classmate whose physical presence never seemed to change no matter how much he exercised. Terry referred to Reed as his “fit friend,” but he was neither. They just played racquetball together, and occasionally drank afterward. Reed’s own body had always felt strange to him, as if he weren’t really at home there. He was generally thin, and extremely pale, a pasty white that made his black hair and pink lips and nostrils almost a shock. It made him look slightly ill most of the time, actually. That used to bother him, to think of other people seeing him that way, but it didn’t anymore. After all, he didn’t really feel ill. He just had to take special care on the digs, always wearing a wide-brimmed hat and thin, long-sleeved khaki shirts.

Although his shoulders and legs were strong, showing some muscle, his arms were long and thin, and never seemed to change no matter how many weights he lifted. He knew some people thought of him as hyperactive, and he did have this agitated, can’t-sit-down presence much of the time, but he felt calmer in his mind than he looked. It was the body that was agitated.

He put on a lot of weight after he was married, which seemed to round off some of those slightly sharp, agitated angles in his physique, though he was still aware of them underneath the roundness—he sometimes imagined he saw the shadows of them in his mirror. But marriage had made him healthier—more color in the cheeks, and the almost continual colds that had given the nostrils their pinkness were gone now. Only his eyes seemed the same—a slightly feverish, wet look that he knew others took for intensity.

He’d begun losing weight steadily the past few months, and his nose was feeling vaguely sore again. As the layers of fat were stripped away, the nervous angles came back; his hidden body took over completely, changing his gestures, stance, expressions, everything. Friends from his early married days no longer recognized him on the street.

The red ball came at him fast; he felt his shoulders creaking as he slammed it back at the wall. Terry maneuvered slowly to intercept its return—Reed moving restlessly, his face feeling uncomfortably warm, aware of his mouth extending slightly as his facial muscles tensed—and slammed it back at the wall. Reed returned it awkwardly, his legs crossed, his body hesitating, then overcompensating in response to his commands.

The physical activity—the slamming of the red or blue or green ball against a stark white wall—seemed to help him focus, made him feel a little more in touch. The last few years he’d found it necessary to focus self-consciously like that at least once each day. Sometimes it consisted merely of lying in the grass and observing what was there, how the grass felt, what the insects were doing, what it looked like up close.

Reed felt suddenly in a hurry after the games, but Terry wanted a drink. They dropped into a dim bar downtown with faded-looking moose heads, stuffed squirrels, and mounted birds decorating the walls and the shelves behind the bar.

“You’re looking tired, Reed. Working hard on that Mesa Verde thing?” Terry downed his drink quickly, coughed, almost choking.

Reed glanced away and spoke into his drink. “I think I’m going to quit for a while, Terry. I think I am.”

“No shit? What brought this on?” He drank again, jerking the glass up so quickly Reed found it distracting. “You having a hard time… troubles with your wife and kids?” He looked embarrassed. “Adoption… that’s a real hard thing. I don’t think I could handle that, and school both…” He shrugged helplessly.

Reed looked at him wearily. He decided to let the stupid remark on the nature of adoption pass. “I don’t know… I’m tired, I suppose.” Reed sipped slowly at the beer, wiping the foam from his lip awkwardly, with the back of his hand. “Do you have a hometown, Terry?”

“Sure… doesn’t everybody? Minneapolis.”

“Ever visit?”

“Oh, last time was a year and a half ago to see my folks. We had sort of a reunion with the rest of the family. Funny to see where you came from… all those old folks, I mean. They’d bring out their albums with the pictures of the houses and cars, and the clippings from the old country. Once in a while that’s kinda nice to see.”

“Well, I think I’m going to be going home for a while. I haven’t been home in ten years.”

“No shit! A reunion?”

“Yes… yes, I think so.”

~ * ~

The rest of the day he read, or rather tasted, books. It had become an obsessive activity with him; he’d read long into the night in a darkened house, the only illumination a floor lamp tilted over the worn green chair, pizza and a quart of beer sitting on the footstool pulled up between his legs.

He rarely finished a book. They were stacked two feet deep around the green chair, sometimes spread-eagled on the floor to mark a halt, but usually with one bookmark or several to note the places where he had stopped, unable to continue with the thing.

The reasons he could not continue with a book were usually the same: he would reach a particularly vivid image or a passage that threatened to pull him into another reality, and it frightened him, sometimes even into terror.

Something that had to be done…

He’d changed the light bulbs over much of the house tonight and redirected lamps so that the floors and wainscoting were almost entirely in darkness. He even went to the trouble of locking several rooms.

He had obscured the bottom layers of the house, the strata of the child. He couldn’t bear to think about them—Alicia and Michael. Unaccountably, he felt as if he would never see them again. A child leaves a strong presence in a place—he would have had to scrub the floors down to bare wood, replacing planks and borders showing the obvious scuffing of small shoes and roller skates and the impact of thrown toys, to cover the walls and replace furniture, and still there’d be the occasional piece of a toy he’d overlooked, the green soldier dropped down a radiator grating or the marble rolling suddenly out of a closet.

And still he walked carefully here, listening for the sudden fall of a ball, or a jack-in-the-box accidentally jarred to action because of a spring wound too tight when there were a child’s hands to wind it.

Chapter 7

The old dog stretched his body as far as he could alongside the hickory root, trying to get the kinks out, get his bones working, loosen skin that had tightened from hours baking under the afternoon sun. One eye opened slightly, then the other a bit wider, and he stared at the dark doorway leading into the back of the store. He saw the man opening the door, a wide grin on his face… his man… carrying the can of water for Buck.

But then he was gone. It was dark now, cooler; the man had left a long time ago. Buck snorted. More and more the old dog knew he saw things that weren’t there.

He hunched his shoulders and began pushing up his aged frame. Then stopped. Sniffed the air, knowing vaguely his nose didn’t work anymore. But he still sensed it… something… was wrong. He growled softly to himself, then rose to a standing position and looked around the yard.

No changes here.

The door to the shed began to creak. Buck turned swiftly and barked. The branches of the tree were swaying, the dark moving swiftly over the ground. Air moving around Buck’s stiff shoulders… moving the shed door back and forth. No problem here…

But something was wrong. The old dog fixed his eyes on the dark beyond the fence. Trying to see with the weak old eyes… see through the dark…

Something was out there.

~ * ~

The bear moved quietly through the brush. He knew this place. But he had never been here. More and more there were human beings inside him, and their dwelling places, and he was seeing some of these dwelling places outside him now, here, in this place. He did not understand and it made him angry. He growled low in his throat and would have roared, but somehow knew he dared not roar in this place.

He sniffed the air. Something… ahead of him. A picture came into his mind. He would have stopped, turned around and run away. But this time he was confused. A picture he saw inside him of a friend. And another picture of the same thing, but an enemy. He was confused and it made him very angry.

Forgetting the danger, he roared. Then he charged.

Buck swung around to face the fence, the dark and the roar coming across it. The hair rose up on the back of his neck and he suddenly found his own roar.

A few buildings away, Ben Taylor was having a nightmare, moaning in his sleep. In another house, Alice Parkey bolted upright in bed, listening to the night with widening eyes. She poked her husband vigorously with her fist, but he would not wake up.

And on the top floor of Inez Pierce’s boardinghouse, her brother Hector sat up in bed with two words on his lips. “Bloody teeth!”

Chapter 8

Something that had to be done… It took him only another day to decide.

Reed left the campus feeling rather foolish. Dr. Simms couldn’t understand why he was resigning; all Reed had told him was that he had to go home for a while. For an awkward moment in the old man’s office Reed had wanted to tell Simms the truth—he thought that maybe Simms would understand—but he was able to stop the urge. Dr. Simms liked him; Reed didn’t want him thinking him crazy.

He had no idea how long he would be away from Denver, knew he had to make some arrangements, make sure the kids were all settled, had everything they needed, something, but could not even begin to think about those things. Carol would have to manage. Things were moving fast, overlapping, transforming. A dam had broken inside, and the waters were creeping higher.

It had suddenly become so easy to make a decision. But he was still, for some reason, reluctant to leave this place. Leave his family. His family.

Most of the afternoon he sat in his car parked on the edge of Sloan’s Lake, just west of the city’s center. There were library books in the front seat with him; they were likely to go overdue while he was gone, and the branch was only a ten-minute drive away. But he was finding it strangely difficult to give them up. With their library stamp, their warning of prompt return or the levying of a fine… they tied him to this place.

The clouds were graying, the dark falling swiftly. He found himself peering into his rearview mirror repeatedly, anxious in case someone crept behind him. His black hair—”Dracula hair,” Carol had always called it—hung down into his face in long, stuck-together strands. He should get it cut—he was looking like a wild man lately. With his pale face and perpetually bloodshot eyes, he probably looked much the vampire.

There were a number of cars around; it was a favorite spot for necking. And cruising: on weekends Seventeenth Avenue was virtually a parking lot. The cops had started ticketing for tassels and flags hanging from rearview mirrors to discourage the cruising, and a riot here was threatened and worried over most every Sunday. He could see the tower of Lake Middle School on the far side, the St. Anthony’s Flight-for-Life helicopter landing atop the tall hospital building on his right. Pollution hung in the air beneath an inversion, the sunset suspended in the dark orange layer of cloud like an overdone egg, the entire mass congealing, seeming to drop lower with the weight.

The lake had come about when a farmer back before the Civil War was digging an irrigation well. He’d found water, all right. When it finally stopped running, the valley was full. They’d had boat rides and a big pavilion and circus animals here throughout much of the nineteenth century, all because of this mysterious gift of water. Reed had never heard where it all came from, if the farmer had hit an underground stream, or what. Maybe no one knew. It was odd to think about that. It made you want to watch your step—no telling where you might break through to. The Earth had its own, secret life, and it didn’t consult people.

Something he still had to do. He had something to take care of in Simpson Creeks. He seemed afraid to leave and afraid to stay.

Had it really been his father on the phone, his mother?

The urge to go and the urge to stay. It had begun to rain. Water rippling down his windshield, taking the light with it, melting his face and car and drawing it all into the lake.

He’d never liked driving in the rain. There was something less than real about it. As if you were driving through someone else’s dream—things weren’t quite as familiar as they should be. The sides of buildings melted into the dark street, and pedestrians seemed to flicker in and out of focus as they made their way in front of his wipers.

As he waited at a light the rain began to fall harder, then it seemed as if a gray wall had suddenly descended around the car. And in the roar he thought he could hear first his wife, then his two children, calling for help. He didn’t want to listen to them; he didn’t even want to think about it. He gripped the steering wheel, and the calls intensified into the car horns prodding him from behind.

~ * ~

He just began driving. They used to enjoy that, he and Carol and Alicia and Michael. They’d start by going up and down side streets they hadn’t explored before, vaguely seeking a house or a lot they might move to someday. As the Denver metropolis stretched its wings it left areas, pockets that were open and green, almost rural. If they could find an area like that, made private with large trees and bushes, and so situated that more urban kinds of development around it were unlikely, then they could have the best of the city and the country.

He’d always found living in an urban area vaguely unsettling. Back home in Simpson Creeks they’d had to drive a hundred miles or more to buy anything beyond the basic necessities. Towns with shopping centers and malls were places you visited. Living in the city was like always being on a shopping trip. With no way to get home, trapped in your car.

Something that still had to be done…

He drove down Sheridan Boulevard, slowing when he reached Lakeside Amusement Park. Something left to be done. The entrance was the original, with the old picture of “The Cyclone—Greatest Roller Coaster In North America” over the gate. He wondered how long ago that had ceased to be true, or even if it had ever been true.

“You mean you’ve never ridden a roller coaster?” Carol’s face had looked so shocked he had to laugh.

“Never. And I haven’t been to a Greek restaurant, or visited a synagogue, or gone to a street fair. All that stuff isn’t exactly popular where I come from.”

It was their second date. Carol had practically dragged him to her car and driven directly to Lakeside Amusement Park and the Cyclone. Later that evening they went to a Greek restaurant for dinner. The synagogue and the street fair came on succeeding weekends. That entire summer had been spent on “kids’ big city pleasures.” Catching up.

The Cyclone. Even now he could hear the roar, and feel his hands clutching hers, surprised that he needed to hold her so badly, surprised at the depth of it. It thrilled and terrified him. As the car plunged down the incline, he’d welcomed the excuse to open his mouth and scream.

Wind and rain rattling the metal. The dead roaring down the tracks and screaming into the black, damp air.

“I never expected you,” he’d said to her,

Carol looked at him with obvious admiration. “The good stuff comes when you don’t look for it.”

He couldn’t remember ever being admired before.

~ * ~

He drove across the Nineteenth Street Bridge after darkness had fallen completely, to eat dinner at My Brother’s Bar. They played only classical music, and there wasn’t any sign so you had to know where it was to find it. Steer-burgers and the best french fries in town. Watney’s on tap. Reed and Carol had spent a lot of time there, slipping over a bit guiltily after Michael had finally gotten off to sleep. It was a good place to talk. The Forney Transportation Museum loomed behind it, one of Michael’s favorite places—Florence Nightingale’s car. Special movie editions. Row after row of ancient automobiles covered with dust and dimly lit by the yellowed light filtering down from high, dirty windows. You didn’t see many people there; usually you’d be the only one. Reed used to wonder what the place would be like in a hundred years… neat rows of rusted mummies. He couldn’t imagine the lives of the people who had owned them.

The bar was crowded that night, which bothered him. Normally he could find an entire corner for himself. He made his way through the narrow space between two tables, the rounded backs of chairs squeezing his thighs like hard, oily hands. He sat under an old miner’s lamp. The bench was old and stained, like an ancient church bench. He thought about that every time he came here, and wondered what kind of people had sat on the bench through the years. Did they ever see ghosts? Find images in the fireplace? Hear voices over a dead phone?

After the waitress brought him a Watney’s, he spent a moment finding a safe spot for the top-heavy glass on the uneven tabletop. There were shallow depressions worn or, perhaps, intentionally pressed into the plastic coating the old, scarred wood. He’d always intended to ask but never got around to it. He sat staring at the people in the room. Something left he had to do… There always seemed to be the couples who acted so unnaturally out in public he had to wonder about them. But perhaps that was cynicism. He knew that most likely they were unnatural only because of social constraints, that alone with their spouse they behaved more genuinely.

But seeing people like that always made him anxious—what if they were the same at home? What if the world was full of people who were uncomfortable no matter where they were, who never really recognized themselves?

An older woman with light blonde hair fading into gray sat beneath a dim light set next to one of the framed menus. Staring off, listening to the music. She was smoking, the rising smoke mixing with her hair and making a nimbus around her head. As if her head were smoldering. She smiled at him and he was unaccountably chilled by her smile.

Older women had always fascinated him. For a time he wondered if there was something oedipal about it all. He’d never known his mother very well; she was quiet, reserved, though even in her mystery she was always kind to him, and loving within limits.

But still she would not interfere when his father raged against him. She would not keep him from being hurt.

At first he’d thought Carol was an “older woman.” When he met her she’d had her law practice for over two years. Perhaps that had made her seem older. He’d been having some trouble with a former landlord trying to get his damage deposit back. Furious, he’d gone to the first lawyer’s office he could find, a storefront a couple of blocks from his apartment building.

Carol had patiently explained to him that there was a tenants’ board he could go to with his complaint, and that hiring a lawyer would cost him far more than it was worth, despite his urge for vengeance. Reed had been impressed with her gentleness, her obvious knowledge of people. They were married nine months later.

But Carol had her child side, which slowly revealed itself the more she grew to trust him. Underneath the professional woman were all the anxieties and insecurities children are prey to. She was afraid she was ugly. She was afraid no one would ever really love her. She was afraid she would lose him. She was afraid of dying, of ends in general. He had been surprised at first, but then it had only made him love her more. She had allowed him to know her, and that felt good. But it was still hard to talk to her about himself.

“Sometimes I don’t think I know you at all,” she’d say at night, in the dark, when they were alone together. “You completely surprise me. Some layer comes off, and it’s as if there’s a stranger underneath.” He never knew what to say. And even more frightening, he wasn’t always sure he knew what she was talking about. Sometimes he was afraid she would find out things about him that would disgust her, that would drive her away from him. She seemed able to pry beneath the skin so easily. Sometimes that was terrifying, and he’d wish he’d never met her.

The older woman at the other table seemed to be inviting him with her eyes. The cloud of smoke around her hair was thicker, more luminous than before. Burning above her eyes. He tried to ignore her as he left the bar.

Muddy’s was only a couple of blocks up the street, across the bridge. He walked, a cold wind seeming to rise up off the interstate, tearing at his clothes. He paused near the center of the bridge and gazed down at the cars slipping through the gray darkness beneath like luminous insects. He shuddered, and hurried up the sidewalk.

Reed entered through the used book store, browsing nervously, noting that there didn’t seem to be any new additions to the stock since the former proprietor had died. He felt foolish; he had no idea why he’d come. Killing time. He stared at the woman behind the counter until she looked down in obvious discomfort, then turned to leave. It was time to go home. He had a phone call to make.

~ * ~

Reed parked in front of his house and sat there for a long time. The wind had picked up, much colder than normal for this time of year. Leaves and other debris seemed to rock the car. A shingle blew down from the roof and clattered against a hubcap and he wondered, briefly, how secure the rest were.

The house was of the type called a Victorian castle—bay windows like turrets, a curved, wraparound porch. It was in the Old North Denver section, one of the earliest, filled with quaint old houses and ancient brickwork. The neighborhood had been slightly run-down when they bought the house, but property values had soon skyrocketed with well-to-do young couples buying the properties as fix-ups.

They’d spent a great deal of time remodeling the place; replacing the kitchen tile, cleaning the fine old marble fireplace, rewiring several rooms. Reed had spent hours delineating the carved sunburst patterns at each corner of the house in bright yellow and orange. Over the past two years he had been stripping the six layers of paint from the ornate baseboards and door frames, and although the downstairs had been refinished and stained, the upstairs still had long strips of patchworked wood. Carol had reminded him every spring that it needed to be finished. He had never told her, but he had put the job off as long as possible because he felt uncomfortable while stripping the wood. Long, angular shadows would seem to appear suddenly in the wood, as if it were discolored, but then they’d vanish again, and he never did find any combination of lighting that could duplicate those shadows. And sometimes as he worked, there’d suddenly be some shape in the corner of his vision that would disappear as soon as he turned. The rooms seemed suddenly charged, as if by removing the old shielding of paint he were releasing energies centuries old.

He walked through the first floor in the dark, negotiating the furniture by memory. As in a dream, he could visualize each piece in silver gray, its exact size and placement, where he needed to step to get around it. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights; it was as if he couldn’t bear to turn on the lights.

He walked slowly up the staircase, the darkness so grainy, his arms outstretched as if he were pushing soft dirt aside in his ascent, turning now and then to a shad owed picture on the wall, pictures of Carol, Michael, Alicia, the four of them together. He knew them by heart, and could almost see them raised out of the ebony glass, coming to life.

He sat down on his bed, Carol’s bed—the one she’d picked out in the antique store in Georgetown—and stared out the bedroom window. The tree branches outside, illuminated by moonlight, the whiter light of the street lamp. Something he had to do.

He stroked the bedspread gently, and breathed in the house, the smell of bedroom, kitchen, the yard outside; imagined each room in detail, the look of it from the outside in summer, winter, fall, the weekend they painted the outside, the day she’d planted her first flower garden, the day Alicia had been big enough to try the tricycle Reed had saved for her since the day after her birth.

Reed opened the door of the bedside table and a pile of small packages tumbled off the bottom shelf. Each one marked “Things of Science.” He’d subscribed for the family, for Michael mostly, planning to study each experiment carefully before helping Michael through them. But there never seemed to be enough time to really look at the damn things, and they’d accumulated month by month until he had a full year’s worth and still hadn’t looked at the first one.

An old shoebox full of pictures sat on the top shelf. Reed pulled it out gingerly and laid it on the bed beside him, staring at it. At the top was a picture of Carol, weeding her flower garden with Josef resting beside her. She was looking over her left shoulder and frowning at the camera because she didn’t want him taking a picture of her rear end—she thought she was getting fat. Other color snaps clustered around her: Alicia walking for the first time, her fat little legs bowed; Michael working on his bike, his dinner plate balanced precariously on a bicycle tire; Alicia and Michael trying to give Ben a bath, Alicia with her face bearded in suds. He peeled the pictures away, one at a time, dropping them on the bedspread.

As he went further down into the pile, the pictures changed: smaller size, square instead of rectangular, wider borders around them, some of them with scalloped borders.

With trembling hands he pulled the small clump of yellowing, cracked photographs out of the bottom of the shoebox. A large man, overweight, his face almost completely whited out by the glare in the picture. All you could see was the thin, downturned line of a frown. Sitting in his favorite chair, his paper folded in his lap. The next picture was Reed’s mother. Reddish hair that looked a light brown in the black and white photograph. At one time she must have been beautiful; he could tell by her eyes, how large they seemed in her small face. Then his little sister, hiding behind Reed’s old teddy bear. Beautiful little thing. One small hand clamped over the bear’s mouth, as if she didn’t want Reed to hear what it was saying.

He had stopped to grab these pictures from his mother’s dresser the night he’d run away. The first time he’d ever stolen anything, though his father had accused him of thievery along with everything else. Remembering the scared, determined boy he’d been that night, Reed could scarcely believe he’d stopped to steal the pictures.

He stared at the three time-dimmed faces and put them back into the box. He’d find a lid for it, then find room in his suitcase for the entire lot. He’d call the airport tomorrow; he’d made his decision. The Badger House trash mound. Sifting through the layers of photographs had told him what he needed to do when he got to the Creeks. There should have been plenty of debris left even after the flood—the waters would have been boxed in by the cliff below the house. He could still excavate there.

The wind roared and pulled the shutter loose by the bedroom window, banging it on the side of the house. Suddenly excited, suddenly agitated, Reed jumped up and ran to the window.

The clothing hung up on the line in the yard below flapped wildly, twisting and turning on the line like emaciated children. One of Carol’s dresses, Michael’s pajamas, Alicia’s socks, underwear. They flapped and waved and twisted and wrung themselves ragged as the shutter beat and beat against the wall.

Carol’s dress tore loose from one clothespin, and Reed cried out. Then the other side spun loose, followed by Michael’s pajamas. They flew against the gray cedar fence, caught on the honeysuckle bush. A small sock flew up and over the yard, out into the street beyond.

Reed fell back into bed and began to cry. He felt ashamed. Because he felt relieved.

~ * ~

Carol was a long time coming to the phone. Reed could hear the kids in the background, her cousin’s and Alicia and Michael playing, but he couldn’t tell which was which. It made him uncomfortable, her taking so long. Several people were waiting to use the airport phones; one man was glancing down at his watch and then back to Reed irritably. Reed gazed out the wall-size window in front of him. That was his plane coming into the gate. For a moment the planes reminded him of giant, awkward sea gulls lifting out of the mist. Hundreds of them. Full of tiny insects and off to God knows where.

“Hello?”

Already she sounded distant. Suddenly he didn’t want to talk to her; he just wanted to get on that plane and go.

“Hello… Reed? Are you there?”

“Yeah. You’ll be glad to know I finally made up my mind.”

“You’re going back to Simpson Creeks, aren’t you?”

“Yes. How did you guess?”

“One, because you’ve been leaning in that direction the whole time. Two, because that’s what you need to do—with my blessing, I might add. And three, because I can hear the airport intercom in the background.”

He laughed. He suddenly felt much better. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too. Very much. Is the house a mess?”

“Nope. Cleaned it up this morning.”

“Good. We’re all getting antsy to get back home.”

“Me too, Carol. My home is here.”

There was a long pause. “Take care of yourself, Reed. I want you back safe with me and the kids as soon as you can.”

“I will.”

“And write.”

“That too.”

“I can’t manage long without you, you know. And that’s love, not dependence speaking.”

Reed gripped the phone more tightly. He couldn’t speak. He could tell she was aware of his discomfort, because suddenly the kids were on, both of them, giggling and asking him to bring back a souvenir for each of them and when was he going to be back because they missed him already.

“You’ll be back soon, I guess?” That was Michael, trying to act nonchalant. But Reed knew the boy still felt insecure; every time Reed or Carol went anywhere, Michael was sure they wouldn’t come back for him.

“You bet. I love you, Michael. Help your mother out now, okay?”

“Okay.” His son sounded much better now.

Reed talked to his children for a long time; he almost missed the plane back into his past.

Chapter 9

The town of Simpson Creeks did not awaken as most country hamlets do. It did not rise early, few residents had early morning chores, since farming had ceased to be a business and was more a pastime for retirees. Charlie Simpson was usually the first up, for the long ride into town to open up the store. The few remaining miners were next, but they didn’t have to report until eight. That left insects and small animals to greet the dawn, a few deer, and one bear.

Bear… yes, there’s bear out there… Charlie thought, and discovered that for the first time in his life he didn’t want to drive into work. In fact, he had the sudden impulse to crawl back into bed with a good bottle of whiskey and pull the covers up over his head. He couldn’t bear the thought of passing those woods—no telling what might walk… or swing or slither or fly out of there this morning. Just no telling.

But he’d been doing the same thing for years and he just couldn’t break the pattern today, not even for what had happened to him out in the woods. Whatever happened… he wondered if he would ever know for sure. He figured not; he didn’t even want to think about it.

Besides, his old hound Buck would be waiting for him, for food and water and companionship. Charlie figured there wasn’t a being alive who cared about Charlie more, or counted on him more, than Buck did. It made him grin just thinking about it. Now, wasn’t he getting to be the sentimental old fool? Mattie would rib him to death, if she were still alive. He pulled on his pants and shirt, fumbled with his shoelaces, and headed out to the pickup.

Happily, Charlie found the old truck fast starting that morning. He roared out of the driveway, hoping to get by those woods just as fast as he could.

Fog usually lay heavy in the valley until almost midmorning, when the sun finally reached over the top of the Big Andy Mountain and began to burn it out of the hollows in layers from the top down, revealing the landscape with no small amount of suspense, if you were driving those roads early in the morning, and if you were still sleepy.

The old timers said the fog was different since the mines came; the streams full of mine acid added an acrid steam to the mist. They didn’t like to be out in it; they swore it would scour your lungs, give you cancer. The land had changed drastically over the past fifty-odd years. Families who had moved away to Indiana or Illinois or Ohio found little they could recognize when they returned. The Big Andy had changed its profile; the bear’s head—a head-shaped outcropping on the north face—had disintegrated from the blasting when they blew out the last tunnels. The chimney formations on the east side were carved off during a stripping operation five years ago. If you looked at the base of the Big Andy you saw what your ancestors might have seen, but above eye level he was a butchered animal, his snout lolling into a landslide of tailings.

When the miners came out of their houses, they stepped carefully into the mist. It was as if Big Andy were dreaming, and they were stepping out into his dream. But something had turned bad in Big Andy’s dream, and the miners drove more slowly up to the main mine inside his severed neck. Something seemed slightly mad about the way Big Andy crouched beside the Simpson Creeks.

Between the mining and the flood there seemed to be little left of the forest that once blanketed the Big Andy and the slighter hills for miles around. Now it was more concentrated: the thicker, wilder areas had mostly been worked around as the mining operations spread. A lot of those areas were virtually impassable, and discomfiting in their liveliness. So much surrounding the town of Simpson Creeks was dead clay now; it accentuated your sense of being on a safe island in the wilderness. The woods were alive, almost obscene with life—crawling with greens and browns.

The forest floor could be alluring; more than one Simpson Creeks resident found himself wandering out where he had no business, just to feel what it was like, see what was there.

Charlie Simpson had spent a lot of time in those woods; as a boy they’d been his playground, his school, his library. And even in their changed, more threatening state, they held much meaning for him. Thoughts of those woods made a lush backdrop for more practical, day-to-day thinking.

But still, Charlie Simpson knew from his more youthful explorations here that the woods were teeming with life, rocks and rotted logs hiding unseen communities on their undersides, and miles of underground tunnels beneath that. A forest floor burning with thriving, agitated life.

There wasn’t much undergrowth in these woods; the odd mix of soil and decaying conifer needles made the land too acidic. Mostly herbs and wood ferns spread their leaves here over ground too cold for the more inviting plants found lower in the valley. Layer upon layer of rich humus—the partially rotted corpses of countless plants and animals—dissolving into the layers below, then the minerals, the weathered rock making more soil, then the bedrock, hard and unchanging, the stoic heart of Big Andy. Layer upon layer upon layer, and all of it unthinkably ancient strata.

From his pickup window Charlie could see the chipmunks scurrying on the embankments bordering the winding gravel road. The sight relaxed him some. Occasionally he would see one disappear and he would wonder if it had entered its underground home a yard beneath the surface. There would be a small central chamber with a bed of grass and leaves down there somewhere, with its own bathroom off a short passage leading even deeper. There might be countless tunnels radiating from the bed chamber like the legs on a fat spider. Thoughts of that busy underground life had made Charlie vaguely uneasy as a boy.

Small snakes were bursting out of their eggs hidden beneath rocks and logs out there, their untouched skin gleaming wet and bright. Infant mice were squirming in pockets within the loose soil. In decaying logs a madhouse reigned: millipedes and centipedes—their bites were toxic, he remembered painfully—wriggling through masses of pill bugs, oil beetles, abandoned snake skins, worms and salamanders, so thick you might think the log had ceased to be a home for them and become a thin armor their thick masses held together.

Charlie could remember as a boy jumping into the soil under those ancient trees as if he were playing on a featherbed. All that vegetable and mineral matter honeycombed with pockets of air, pushing back at him playfully, like one great teddy bear of a beast. At times the ground seemed strangely insubstantial, like the ground you walked on in dreams.

It had always seemed to Charlie that the links in the food chain were unusually close here, the dance of victim and predator so interwoven that one began to blur into the other. Roles were reversed or exchanged. One thing becoming another over and over again—all life was like that, Charlie guessed. It was kind of nice and kind of frightening at the same time. It made it easy to imagine everything becoming animate at one stage of existence—ancient trees shifting their roots in preparation for a stroll, or a patch of insects and moss flowing slowly over a rock like some undersea ray.

Fungi dotted the woods, mushrooms of all different kinds; from the road they looked like jewel encrustations, or shiny balloons, or colorful pillows sewn to the ground, trees, rocks, anything even remotely physical. They appeared from nowhere, and could cover a log virtually overnight, or vanish just as quickly. One time in high school Charlie tried to learn them all, but finally gave up. He could still remember a few—hen-of-the-woods like yellow coral, the milky ones, lots of them, and all kinds of the giant variety (boletuses they were called) with red and brown, pink and yellow caps, like sinister dwarves. Of course the pillowy things were only the fruit—the tiny network of tubes that ran under the ground from the fungi covered the forest floor like an eerie net, rotting everything it came into contact with.

Then there was destroying angel, pure white, one of the deadliest mushrooms in the area. His cousin Winnie ate some of those when she was five, and her parents and relatives had all prayed desperately the Lord would take her soon. Sometimes when Charlie was out in the woods her agonized screams would come back to him, echoing strangely through the conifer walls.

As a boy Charlie had seen a giant water bug stick its snout into a frog, paralyze it with some kind of secretion, then slowly proceed to suck its guts out. Later, when he’d had time to muse on the implications of that, he’d become terrified. The dark woods on the edge of the Creeks took on a new meaning for him. The woods weren’t always a safe, nice place. The lesson had taken a long time to learn. As a young man it didn’t matter so much; he’d brave most anything. But the fear just seemed to settle into him as he got older. He didn’t go into those woods much anymore.

As Charlie drove by Inez Pierce’s boarding house on his way into town, it looked as if no one there was awake. Mist off the Creeks still clung heavily to the large maples and oaks clustered around the house and the numbers of lilac bushes Inez loved so well. Above the line of trees the windows stared out at the road with steel gray panes. Charlie used to like the silence, the ever-present quiet in the town. But there seemed to have been a slight change in the character of the silence, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something trembling, ever so slightly, in the stillness. He didn’t like it. He gunned the Ford’s aging motor and spun toward the incline leading up to the town proper.

~ * ~

Inez Pierce stared up at the ceiling; she hadn’t been able to sleep all night. She heard the far-off sound of Charlie Simpson’s pickup and turned slightly to the window, but she didn’t really have the strength to look out. She was faintly surprised. She’d never felt so tired in her life. But she was getting old, she thought. She still had some of the young girl in her: the rounded cheeks and the dark shock of still-black hair in front of all her gray, and she still moved more like a young girl, fluidly—nothing like the way most of the old women she knew walked. But time still took its toll; that was pretty much a law, she suspected. When she looked at the clock, it was running past six. She groaned; another late morning start.

It was worry over her brother Hector keeping her up. Ever since they found him by the creek, half-drowned and mumbling nonsense out of his numbed face, he hadn’t been the same. The confusion was much, much worse. And he couldn’t seem to manage to climb out of bed at all. He had the physical ability; she’d cared for enough sick people in her time—father and grandfather and two uncles—to know when a body just couldn’t stand up. There was nothing physically wrong with Hector; it was something in Hector’s mind. He just couldn’t stand on his two feet. One morning she’d been so exasperated with him she’d tried to force the issue. She’d gotten Joe Manors, the miner who lived on the third floor, to help her pull him up out of bed and stand him up. She was sorry she’d done that, but he’d just made her so mad.

Hector had scared her bad. When they got him up on his feet he began to shake like he had the palsy—though far worse than any palsy she’d ever seen—moving his eyes around like he was spastic. “Get away! Bbbb… ear!” And it wasn’t anything physical; she was sure of it. He’d been almost hysterical with fear. Poor Joe hadn’t known quite what to do, and had almost dropped Hector on the floor.

She could hear her tenants stirring on both floors above her ground-floor bedroom. Wasn’t much you could hide in an old house; sound traveled too well through the loose and softening boards. She supposed she should get up and start fixing them all some breakfast, much as she hated the idea this morning. She just hadn’t been herself lately, and for the first time in her life since her father died, she found she didn’t enjoy taking care of people. Something funny about the weather, or maybe it was just changes in her because of age. Whatever, things seemed vaguely out of whack, unbalanced. It made her agitated and cranky.

Perhaps some handsome elderly man would come by one of these days and take her away to his big house in Knoxville. Could be. She chuckled aloud and climbed into her quilted slippers.

~ * ~

Reed’s cold was worse, much worse. He felt terrible: his nose aching, chest and throat inflamed. As the plane neared the Kentucky state line, he’d developed a bad cough, a cough that had two stewardesses immediately at his side with alarm in their faces, the elderly black man next to him pounding his back and making solicitous comments. It was embarrassing, but he’d appreciated the attention; he’d been scared, and didn’t want to be alone.

The cough had gone, but the skin across his chest was sore. Needle pricks raced up and down beneath his shirt. He’d had two stiff drinks, then a third.

It seemed strange how peaceful and safe the ground looked from up in the air. He’d always been a little scared of heights; he would have thought the ground would frighten him as the plane passed over at an angle. He would have thought he’d be thinking of the ground rushing up to meet the plane and tearing it apart. But looking at the ground from this distance, it was hard to imagine anything untoward occurring within those stretches of rolling green, those luxurious swatches of trees. Several times he thought he’d caught a glimpse of the Big Andy Mountain above Simpson Creeks, but he knew that wasn’t possible—he was much too far away. But there were ridges in the distance, crags and rough places, that seemed to hold latent within them the resting-animal shape of Big Andy. Some said a bear, others a muskrat or a beaver or a deer lying down. Uncle Ben used to say the mountain was named by an early settler who thought the mountain looked like his Uncle Andrew lying down, and Ben would kid Reed about when he was going to go out and find a mountain to name Big Ben.

It suddenly occurred to Reed that he might not have any place to stay once he got to the Creeks. He had no idea if his uncle still lived there, or if he lived at all, for that matter. Inez Pierce had had a boarding house and hotel, but that had been years ago, and it might not have survived the flood.

They hit an air pocket and Reed suddenly broke out into a heavy, chilling sweat. His chest seemed to collapse in on him; his eyes burned. He thought he was going to throw up. The place was drawing him on—he could feel it—something like an open, sucking wound. Who had called? Who had started all this? Someone who hated him, but as far as he knew he had no enemies anywhere.

The mountains darkened around him, the lights of the towns coming up, and off in the distance there was the lone light of a coke oven. He wondered if that was the Nole Company mine, he wondered if families were gathering for dinner on the hillsides beneath that light, he wondered if they knew, if they were waiting for him. But the light had begun to blur, and the pain in his chest had at last begun to subside.

The turbulent descent into Louisville jostled Reed out of his sleep, and from a dream he imagined must have turned bad as soon as he crossed the state line. His father was screaming at him—for one of the usual infractions, although he couldn’t visualize it specifically—his father’s face red in that way that had always frightened him, like a cherry red balloon so full of air it was finally going to explode, leaving pieces of skin and bone all over Reed’s face.

His father’s mouth opened so wide he could see the back of the mouth, the gold-filled molars, the pink and vibrant uvula like a fetus in spasm. And for a brief moment, fantastically, Reed knew that this was no human being’s mouth. His father was going to eat him alive.

Reed opened his eyes wide and stared out the window at the dark sky. The plane tilted sharply as it made its approach, until suddenly it seemed as if Reed were staring straight down into the lights of the city. Two red lights, almost beacons, near the city’s center transfixed him. Like eyes. The luminous twin spaghetti trails of traffic curved beneath his window like a feral grin. He traced the grin on the cool glass with his fingers and chilled. He would be catching the train in an hour, and even then he would be several hours away from Simpson Greeks, probably not arriving until well after dark. But the Creeks would be a familiar smile, he told himself, albeit a lazy one. Nothing ever changed in the Creeks; nothing ever happened there.

~ * ~

Charlie’s Ford almost stalled heading up the hill into town. He had no doubt he was going to make it—the old Ford came within a hair of stalling on that hill every morning—but it was embarrassing, and as he did every morning he checked over his shoulder and looked past the first bridge toward the boarding house to see if Joe Manors was out there on the road laughing at him. He wasn’t, but he’d be out there any minute. But when Charlie gunned the engine the truck shot up the hill, and his pride was secured for another morning.

The town proper had been moved up on this little ridge eighty years ago. It used to be down by the Creeks, only a little ways past the bridge that led to the Pierce place. But that site had proved to be too prone to minor flooding from the Creeks, and so some of the merchants had decided to move it a little higher. The old site was pastureland now, although a curious spirit could still find a lot of the area’s history just by digging into the soil around there. Charlie had done it himself once upon a time, finding old tools and brass buttons, even a cracked glass picture. But the picture was faded; water had near erased it.

Then a couple of kids had been scared real bad down there—Charlie had never been quite sure what it had all been about; from the way they’d described it, it had sounded like a patch of shifting earth, or a bog. “The ground came alive!” one of them had shouted, near to sobbing. There were small bogs here and there all through those mountains, he’d told them. But they’d been real scared—everybody could see that. Then something similar had happened with Ames Nickles’s elder brother. He’d died of a heart attack two hours after being scared there. And Inez herself had claimed seeing lights out there. So nobody went down to the old town site anymore, or excavated much anywhere around the ridge.

And Charlie didn’t either. He thought the fear a bit foolish, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to go down there just the same. “Everything finally comes to life in these hills,” his daddy used to say, and supposedly he’d heard that from his grandaddy. And Charlie Simpson did believe that, he surely did.

Before they moved the town, they built a big slab out of rocks and bricks and mortar—whatever they could find—on the upslope part of the townsite. Then they rebuilt the stores on top of that. The story was this was meant to provide a good foundation—the front part made a sidewalk almost a foot off the roadbed—and in case of heavy rains the muds wouldn’t push out the foundations or rot the wood.

The other, big reason, Charlie thought, was that way they wouldn’t have to dig into that ridge, or even level off any rough spots. Profoundly lazy folk, his forebears. Of course, maybe even then they had qualms about digging down under the Simpson Creeks dirt. You heard about strange things happening—people disappearing or going crazy or two-headed calves being born—all over these hills, as if they were a magnet for anything outside your everyday limits.

In any case the road had sunk some over the years, making the sidewalk pretty high to climb up onto comfortably, so they’d added steps here and there. And the slab itself had been so piecemeal it was getting bad cracks. Jake Parkey had the first house on the left as you went into town—butted up right against the end of that slab—and his wife Doris was always complaining that there were things living inside the slab. Half-crazy, she seemed most of the time. It was too bad; when Jake had married her twenty years ago she was thought to be the prettiest woman around. Women seemed to age quickly in the mountains; the hills took something from them, a little more each year. Doris’s beautiful blonde hair had turned the color of a mud creek stained yellow with mine acid.

She said she could hear them scratching around in there at night. Nobody else could hear them, although during the day you might see a mouse or a harmless black snake crawling into one of the cracks. Doris kept saying that the reason no one else heard them was because they only made noise at night and their house was closest to the slab and besides her Jake slept too soundly to hear anything short of the heavens busting open and the Angel Gabriel coming down into their bedroom. They had a roomer, Mr. Emmanuel, a mining inspector with the Nole Company Mines, but he was gone a great deal of the time.

The Nole Company was responsible not only for the flood of years back, but for the gray- and rust-colored backdrop to the town: row upon row of two- and three-room shacks stacked up the sides of the ridge all the way to the Nole’s hills of mine waste sitting above the town. These cabins had been for the miners when the Nole Company was booming; now all but a few were empty.

As Charlie Simpson drove into town he always took a long look at the Parkey place, seeing if that Mr. Emmanuel was around. He’d never trusted that Emmanuel fellow; he was an odd bird. Dressed like someone from the city, even when he was working. Dark skin and a too-neat mustache, tight corduroy pants, and always a tweed or a corduroy coat. He’d even seen the man wearing one of those two coats with his jeans. The other reason he looked at the Parkey place, of course, was to avoid looking at the two abandoned buildings across the street. First one was the old Simpson Hotel, pretty elegant for those parts, a Victorian structure run by his grandfather and now boarded up, the entire second and third stories a tangle of charcoal and the harder support beams that had escaped the ‘38 fire. The other was just an empty storefront, container for a variety of businesses over the years, from a furniture maker’s to an old lady’s confectionery. It made him sad to look at them; they hadn’t been occupied in years, making them sure signs that all growth in the Creeks had stopped and wasn’t likely to continue. He thought about them the same way he thought about headstones.

The first building up on the slab, right next to the Parkey place, was Ben Taylor’s Feed Store. He had a house about fifty feet behind it, on a plot his daddy’d dug out of the slope there. The Taylors always had a hard time of it; they had never been too well off, and during the flood Ben’s brother Alec and his family had all been drowned, most of the property washed away. All but Alec’s boy Reed, Charlie reminded himself. Reed had run away a few years before and hadn’t been heard from since. Charlie had heard Alec Taylor had been a big man with a whip, and most people seemed to think Reed had made the right decision. Ben Taylor was another case entirely—a large, strong man, but there wasn’t a gentler soul ever born. Charlie had always been impressed by the kind way Ben handled Doris Parkey’s goings on. Doris would be in Ben’s store most everyday asking him if he had heard things under the slab. Ben would always scratch his head with one of those great big hands of his, and you could see his face getting soft as dough as he’d say, “Well, now there might have been something a few days ago, Missus Parkey, but I’ve been so busy I didn’t really notice. But I suspect you’re much more knowledgeable about them things than I am.” Then he would always promise to try to notice better next time.

Charlie was wondering if Buck was getting hungry about now. First place he’d gotten a glimpse of the old hound had been on the walk in front of Taylor’s store. The dog had been limping up the slab, turning his head this way and that to sniff, and so slowly it seemed to take him five minutes to check each direction. Charlie had been standing in the doorway of his own store talking to Ben Taylor. Buck had ambled right past him, paying no attention whatsoever, as if he were blind. He crept slowly to the potbellied stove and collapsed there, sound asleep. Charlie had had him ever since, almost ten years. He was an incredibly old dog. And how Charlie loved that dog…

Across the street from Ben Taylor’s store there was a small cafe open three days a week, owned by somebody from out of town but run by Doris Parkey’s younger sister, Audra Larson. Some of the miners ate their breakfasts there, and Charlie tried to get in one day a week for some coffee just to be sociable.

At the end of town on that side of the street there was a small railway and freight station. The train came in every three days, just after dark. Charlie realized there was one due in that evening, and for some reason thinking about it made him nervous. Of course, that meant there’d be more goods to put on the shelves the next day, and he supposed that was what he was anticipating. Seemed like there were always several things wrong with his order, and he’d have items he’d never even heard of before and no idea what they were good for. It was too much trouble to send them back, and they’d usually end up in one of those boxes on the shelves in his storage room. He was too old for such aggravation.

Last store on the slab was his own, with the little building he used as the town post office hanging awkwardly on its left side like a black sheep on its mother’s teat. The post office certainly looked that part; although his store was finished in fine old red brick, the little post office was covered front, back, top, and sides with coal black tar paper. Charlie’s daddy had been Simpson Creeks’ first postmaster and had built the post office with what he had on hand. Charlie had always intended to improve it some, but he’d never had the funds. He had a deal with the postmaster up at the capital; they didn’t get rid of the Simpson Creeks office in favor of some larger office a hundred miles away, and he didn’t ask them for any money.

Charlie usually had the store swept out, the shelves and counters straightened, and the lids off the apple barrels in time to open at eight A.M. But the first thing he had to do before he unlocked the door was to feed Buck, who should have been sleeping out by the shed in back of the store as a kind of honorary watchdog. Some watchdog; Charlie grinned. Buck was so old and toothless… if he had arms and hands he’d carry an armload of Charlie’s merchandise down to any halfway friendly burglar’s automobile. Happily there’d never been a crime in the Creeks aside from husbands and wives—and once two brothers—killing each other.

Buck didn’t come to greet Charlie when he rattled the dog’s water can by the store’s back steps.

“Hey, lazy! Water, boy!” But there wasn’t the usual answering bark, the lumbering of crooked legs trying to maneuver faster than they could manage.

Charlie walked slowly out to the shed. The dog was old, he reminded himself. It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Then he saw where the fence had been torn down, and the streaks of blood here and there on the bright green grass. Buck had always perked up when Charlie had worked on the lawn here, fertilizing it, weeding it. Buck would sit under the big shade tree by the shed, with his head up, as if listening. Eyes gleaming. The most animated Charlie had ever seen the old dog.

He followed the trail of strewn blood, crushed grass, and broken boards around the side of the shed, and even in his apprehension he felt amazed. Incredibly, all evidence showed that the old dog had really put up a fight. Charlie never would have guessed.

The old dog’s thin flanks were pressed against the fence that ran behind the shed. Half-buried by the weeds. Charlie got down on his knees slowly. Another massive hole had been torn in the board fence here. He gazed through it, up the trail of smashed weeds and bushes that led up the slope to Nickles’ Lumberyard on top of the hill. It was the only other business in the community, just outside town; you followed the gravel road as it curled around the hill to its top, and the road ended there in Nickles’ yard. Charlie hadn’t seen old man Nickles in weeks; he kept pretty much to himself. Charlie gazed at the slope for a long time. He could not remember the last time he had cried.

After awhile he turned to his old pet. He wanted to carry him back to the shed, look into the old wrinkled face once more. But he searched for the dog’s head in vain.

Chapter 10

Joe Manors didn’t have to work that day—the Nole mine was on a three-day shift now for those without the seniority—and he was at a loss about what to do with himself. The mine’s troubles weren’t his fault, but he still felt so embarrassed about not working, so out of sorts about it, that he wouldn’t talk to anyone about his work schedule, and had stayed hidden up in his room on his days off. Christ… they all knew he didn’t have the seniority, so who was he trying to fool?

So today was his day to go up to the town, sit around Charlie Simpson’s store and talk, maybe check into some odd jobs. It was time he did something with those free days.

Besides, it had gotten bad around Miss Pierce’s place since old Hector went off his beam this last time. Inez was always snapping at you for dirtying her carpet with your boots or getting fingerprints on her towels or talking too loud or having bad table manners, most everything, and she’d never done that before. In fact, you couldn’t have asked to meet a more agreeable soul. But lately she was treating most everybody like the devil himself.

He’d always been a bit clumsy in nice houses. Too wide-shouldered, too narrow-hipped. It made him awkward when he walked. With his short black hair and red face he made a funny picture, he knew, not fitting in hardly anywhere. Except in the cab of a dozer—he felt right at home there.

He really couldn’t blame Inez for being so irritable; Hector had made a frightening sight this last time: what little hair he had all twisted around his head, his hands groping through the water and mud of the creek bank, his face muddy, his eyes wild, and garbling the worst gobbledygook Joe’d ever heard. Crazy as a half-drowned cat. Yelling about a woman with bright red hair. It had made Inez blush. Joe’d had to hide his face to keep her from seeing him laughing. He’d liked to died.

But then the old man had started talking about “bloody teeth” and things beginning to “rip apart in the night for that young boy” and it had scared Joe Manors, scared him bad. The wild look in the old man’s eyes as they carried him up to bed and the way he spit when he cried out all that garbage.

Joe Manors’ daddy used to say there was enough out in the woods and out in the animals that could terrify a man right out of his wits without the men themselves getting so scary. All that craziness comes from nature, his daddy used to say, and Joe Manors was beginning to agree. Things were busy out there in the dark; if you were real quiet yourself you could sense it. And when you did sense it, you could feel it clutching at your heart, your breath, all the juices that kept you alive and going.

When Joe Manors turned onto the street running through the Creeks he stopped, the hair bristling on his arms. Something had happened. Charlie Simpson was sitting out in front of his store with his head in his hands. Ben Taylor was crouched down beside him, talking low.

And that crazy Doris Parkey was standing out in the middle of the street just bawling, screaming at the sky that “the day’s finally come! Oh I knew it! Finally come! I ain’t stepping back onto that bedeviled slab no more, not for anything!”

Joe started to run.

~ * ~

Mr. Felix Emmanuel heard the Parkey woman screaming, but made no attempt to move from the big easy chair by the window. These mountain women were all the same—hysterical, worn out hags—hardly women in any sense. Superstitious lot, especially this Doris Parkey. She’d kept him up more than one night with her endless pacing and her whining attempts to get that drunken husband of hers awake and out to inspect that crumbling slab. Horrible, dirty town…

He pulled back the curtain a bit and stared at the old scarecrow—hardly old in years, be thought, probably no more than thirty, but just look at her!—as she wailed at the skies, her skeletal arms upraised, knobby fists clenched. Crazy, crazy lady.

He’d be out of here soon, however; the company had been punishing him for that cave-in in West Virginia, but his cousin Willie in Pittsburgh was taking care of things. He’d be out of this cesspool in no time.

The cave-in hadn’t been his fault, and it bothered Mr. Emmanuel the way some people still looked at him about that. As if he had caused all those deaths. It had been a tragedy, no doubt about that—Mr. Emmanuel hated to see all those lives lost. He himself had two brothers who worked a good fifteen years apiece in the coal mines, one with a gimp leg to show for it, so he knew what it was like. The mines were a lot better than they used to be; used to be some of the small, owner-operated mines were no better than deathtraps. Things were a lot better now with the larger operators, the corporations. He liked to think he had had a small part in making the mines safer.

But you could only do so much before it ceased to be a business, and Mr. Emmanuel knew that was where you had to draw the line. After all, people had to have jobs, they had to eat, and if you closed down every coal shaft that had a minor problem then no one would survive. The miners knew that, and they knew what risks they were taking. So most of them supported the company in what they were trying to do—make the mines safer but still profitable. That was the name of the game, wasn’t it? But there were always a few troublemakers, and Mr. Emmanuel had to admit he’d never cared too much for troublemakers.

The people around here still seemed to blame the coal company for that terrible flood of a few years back. It had been a terrible tragedy—a number of lives were lost, massive property damage—and the company had done all it could to help out afterwards. They considered themselves a part of the community—and dammit, Emmanuel knew most companies wouldn’t have done as much, they’d have said screw those folks—and had sent food supplies, surplus lumber, and two of the company physicians down from Pennsylvania. They’d had their workmen out with bulldozers clearing the debris. They’d done all they could.

Besides, the work on the waste dam had been farmed out to a smaller, locally owned company, one of their own people. If anyone was responsible for the disaster, they were, not the Nole Company.

But despite all Mr. Emmanuel’s careful, reasoned explanations, the people still distrusted him and blamed the company. They just wouldn’t listen. As stubborn as the hills, as their own saying went. It infuriated him.

He pulled on his undershirt and grimaced. Not even a decent laundry anywhere, and the Parkey woman had no aptitude for washing. He could do better himself in some stream steaming with mine acid. He grinned and drew on his pipe.

He could hear the Parkey man growling in his sleep again like an animal. Bright red hair like a great fox. Ugly man. Redneck—he fit the description in every way.

~ * ~

Inez paused outside Hector’s door, her hand clutching the doorknob. She balanced his breakfast tray on the other hand. But she couldn’t go in. He was babbling on again… bloody teeth… bloody teeth… and she couldn’t bear to go in the room while he was carrying on like that.

She glanced at the tray indecisively, removed her hand from the knob, and used it to help support the tray. Then she started back down the stairs; she would try him later.

~ * ~

Something bad had happened in the town; everyone had left the cafe and gathered on the street outside, but Audra Larson couldn’t bring herself to go out there. She stayed behind the counter, as if that counter were a castle wall a hundred feet tall, and polished—polished the fixtures and the counter and the glassware and even the glass on the Coca-Cola wall clock—and after that was done she took out the ammonia and began dabbing with a big yellow sponge at the wall tiles and the switchplates and the woodwork surrounding the doorway to the kitchen. Nothing ever seemed to stay clean around there, no matter how hard she tried. All her brother-in-law could see was that the place was never clean enough, no matter how hard she tried.

When Daddy had given her the cafe to run, she’d thought it was the nicest thing he’d ever done for her. The only nice thing, if truth be told. At one time she’d figured it was because Doris was married, and her father had little hope Audra would ever get married. Too plain. After years of believing that, she’d finally come to realize that her washed-out skin and long light brown hair were at least pleasant to look at, and she did have a nice smile. She wasn’t married, but she just hadn’t met the right man. She was different, always had been, and she had learned that sometimes made it harder.

She should’ve known there’d be strings attached; her daddy never did anything for anybody without strings. This time the string was Doris’s husband Jake as part-owner, since her father would never give ownership to Doris because he was convinced she didn’t have a brain in her head. At least Audra has been to college, as he was so fond of saying.

For all the good it had done her. Maybe her father had a point about majoring in history. Certainly no jobs there. But it was something she wanted, and she worked her way through so he had no right to complain. She shouldn’t have come home… that was the mistake. But she let herself go back, where things were easier. She’d needed the time to think, to “get herself together,” as they used to say in college.

Everybody was still out there; no one had come back into the cafe. She finally stopped cleaning and, puzzled, sat on a tall stool behind the counter. Nothing ever went wrong here, at least nothing new went wrong.

She wanted to go ask somebody what was going on, but she couldn’t bring herself to walk out in front of that counter.

~ * ~

By the time Inez Pierce had mustered enough nerve to enter her brother’s room it was almost noon. Reed Taylor was boarding a train in Louisville that would eventually take him to the Big Andy and the town of Simpson Creeks. And some of the men of the Creeks had gathered in Charlie Simpson’s store to discuss the death of Buck, Charlie’s old hound dog.

“…not like a bear to do such a thing,” Joe Manors said. “Bears are pretty cowardly; they won’t attack you unless they’re cornered. Can’t see how a bear could’a’ done such a thing.”

“Well, it was a bear… no doubt about that. You know it was a bear, Joe.” Jake Parkey leaned forward and belched, then chugged another beer.

“He’s right, Joe.” Ben Taylor stretched his long legs out before the stove, putting his hands in back of his sandy-colored hair as he studied his old worn shoes. With all the excitement, he’d forgotten to put on the ones he usually wore in the store. The other men looked at the shoes. Jake Parkey nodded at their significance. “Nothing else could maul an animal that way. But the way it happened don’t make much sense, I admit. Hasn’t been a bear in the area in over twenty years, and I never knew one to come into a town like this.”

“I’ve seen it before,” Charlie Simpson said quietly, as if to himself. “I’ve seen this bear.”

No one said anything for several minutes. Then Jake Parkey moved his chair around boldly, facing Charlie with his long, greasy red hair falling down in his eyes. He didn’t bother to push it back. “Where, Charlie, where? Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

“I’m not sure… guess I was still thinking on it…”

“Thinking on it? Charlie, this is important! This is the biggest…”

“Hold it, Jake.” Ben Taylor pulled his own chair around and placed it beside Charlie’s. Jake scooted back a little, so he wasn’t facing the two men so directly. Ben turned his head slightly to Charlie, his eyes still examining his old boots. He started to say something, then stopped himself. He pulled out a pocketknife and began cutting at a loose piece of leather hanging out from the heel of his shoe. “Where’d you see this bear, Charlie?”

“Out by your brother’s old place, Ben. And crossing the road, I think. At least it might have been the bear crossing the road in front of my truck. I know for sure it was a bear out near your brother’s land.”

Ben continued to stare at his feet, but there seemed to be an unusual movement to his eyes—looking sidelong at Charlie Simpson, then at other places on the creosoted floorboards. “Big one, Charlie?”

“Three hundred, I’d say.”

Jake Parkey whistled. “That’s a lot of meat!”

Ben looked up and stared at Jake. “This ain’t sport, Jake. Pretty serious business, I’d say.” Joe Manors nodded his head silently.

“Pretty serious business when a bear starts attacking dogs on its own accord,” Charlie said.

No one replied.

~ * ~

Inez was sweeping out the third-floor hallway when she heard the rocking noises coming from Hector’s room. She stepped quietly to the door and stood there awhile, listening. It was a soft sound, almost as if the breeze were moving the old antique rocker their father had brought up from Knoxville so many years ago. It had always been Hector’s favorite piece of furniture.

But she knew the window was shut. There could be no breeze.

She turned the knob, holding it stiffly to keep it from rattling in its collar, and pushed open the door. A shadow was moving slowly back and forth on the red and blue braided rug.

Hector’s thin gray hair floated over the back of the rocker like dandelion silk. His head seemed still and lifeless as a melon. At first she couldn’t tell how the rocker was moving; she could perceive no movement of hand, arm, or leg. Then she realized it was his muscles tensing, then releasing, that moved the old rocker back and forth.

She edged around the end of the bed and stood beside him. His eyes were closed. “Hector…” she whispered.

His left eye opened a crack. His slack mouth opened about a quarter inch. He hissed.

“Hector?”

A tear rolled down his left cheek and he began to speak, so softly she could not make out the words. She bent closer.

“Mama…” he said, “I’m so scared.”

She put her arms around him and cried quietly to herself. His hand raised weakly and touched her elbow.

~ * ~

Charlie Simpson was standing behind the counter adjusting the items on the shelves when Mr. Emmanuel came into the store. The Nole Company man looked around at the other men gathered about the old stove, nodded briefly to Joe Manors, then turned to speak to Charlie Simpson.

But the appearance of the storekeeper stopped him. The man was usually a virtual fountain of friendly energy. Today he looked as if half his family had just died. “Pipe tobacco, Mr. Simpson. And matches,” Mr. Emmanuel said, with some hesitation.

Charlie Simpson pulled the two items off the shelf and gave them to the man. “No charge for the matches,” he said. Mr. Emmanuel felt as if he should say something in reply to that, but was suddenly at a loss for words.

Joe Manors looked around at the men gathered there, nervously, looking at his feet now and then before meeting a face. Then he looked up at Willard Marx, an elderly man from the upper part of the valley who’d come in to do his monthly shopping. “That boy of yours still with you, Willard?”

Willard looked up quickly with surprised eyes, a white shock of hair flopping down over the bridge of his nose. He swept it back with a trembling hand, then smiled quickly, as if relieved at the sudden change in subject. “No. He’s in Indianapolis, doin’ fine though. We got a letter last week tellin’ about all the weldin’ he’s doing now and the good money he’s been makin’.”

“Not many younguns left in the valley,” Nigel Jacobs said. “Don’t have enough to go round anymore, I reckon. Shame.”

Victor Strunk waved his hands grotesquely in the air. The little man had some sort of muscular problem—he hadn’t told anybody yet what it was and nobody thought it’d be right to ask directly. “Ben Taylor’s got some fine younguns home still, and the Wilsons’ two little girls and Bobby Kramer’s teenage boy… Jimmy, ain’t it?”

Ben Taylor smiled broadly. “Kramer’s boy is Jerry… and fine one he is. I let him help out at the store when he needs some extra money, could use a lot more like him around, sure could. Reminds me a lot of…” Ben lapsed into an awkward silence.

“Reed’ll be back one of these days,” Charlie Simpson said from behind the counter. “He’s gonna want to see his uncle… you were a good man to him, Ben.”

Ben looked over his shoulder at Charlie and nodded. “Hope so, Charlie. Me and Martha both. And he’s never seen Lannie or Tim; they weren’t even born yet when he left.”

The screen door banged behind him and he turned his head slightly to see old Amos Nickles, the lumberman, entering the room in full hunter’s regalia: red-checkered CPO jacket and flop-eared cap, a shotgun under one arm. Amos Nickles was probably the richest man in the area, a good deal of that wealth obtained via timber deals with the mines and railroads. Mr. Emmanuel had long known that not all of that wood was prime material, to say the least. He figured at least one cave-in at a small local mine was in part due to Nickles’ timbers. And these people considered him their friend.

“Hear there’s a bear round here needs huntin’.”

Jake was up immediately. “Sure is, Mr. Nickles! Killed ole Buck, Charlie’s dog!”

Nickles spat. “Dog weren’t worth much, I guess.”

Ben Taylor looked up with a scowl. Everyone else was careful not to look at Charlie.

“Some of us… well, I was, I guess…” Jake was speaking with more animation than Mr. Emmanuel could remember ever seeing in the man before. He found himself listening in with a surprising degree of interest. “I was hoping you’d agree to bringing those fine blueticks and Walker hounds you got up your place and going out with us to hunt the damn thing.”

“Well, I was figuring I could help. Haven’t been bear huntin’ in some time.”

“Damn!” Jake slapped his leg. “I just remembered I lent my cousin my rifle two weeks ago.”

“Why, son, you don’t need a rifle to fight a bear with!” Amos turned slightly to Charlie Simpson and winked.

Jake laughed. “So what do I use instead?”

“Why, a bear attacked me once and I didn’t have nary a weapon!” Amos gazed around at the men with a solemn face. “Before I knew what was what this big black bear was right on me, mouth stretched wider than that old cave on Jim Turner’s land.”

“What did you do, Mr. Nickles?” Jake asked.

“Not much I could do, Jake. Just stuck my arm down the bear’s throat all the way to where his tail joined his body and grabbed a hold there. Then I yanked hard as I could and turned the damn thing inside out! White as a sheet, it was! Damn bear had to go north and be a polar bear!”

The men roared with laughter. Jake finally stopped tittering and said, “’Fraid I wouldn’t be as skillful with my hands in that situation as you were, Mr. Nickles.”

“I’ll lend you a gun, Jake,” Nickles said. “Providin’ you take care with it.”

“Oh, I sure will, Mr. Nickles! I dearly ’preciate it.”

Joe Manors sat up on the edge of his chair. “I’m not so sure that’s such a smart thing, fellas. That bear sounds like he’s gone crazy.”

“I’m afraid Jake and Mr. Nickles have the right idea this time, Joe,” Ben Taylor said. “If that animal has gone crazy, we’ve got to get rid of it quick.”

“I have to agree,” Charlie Simpson said quietly. And the decision was made.

~ * ~

By the time the sun set the men were on their way up the Big Andy. At about that same time Inez Pierce fell asleep on the floor beside her brother’s rocker.

Hector’s eyes were wide open. He was suddenly intensely aware of that fact, and that something seemed odd about the window. It was glowing.

He climbed effortlessly out of the rocker and approached the window. He touched the cool, glowing pane.

Then he opened it and climbed out.

Chapter 11

The train laid over in Four Corners for two and a half hours. It gave Reed more than ample time to walk around the town, have a bite to eat, and remember. Four Corners was the last “big” town—almost a thousand people—before the long trek up the ridges toward Simpson Creeks. It had two groceries, a drugstore, restaurants, hardware store, even two full-fledged department stores. When anyone in the Creeks or the surrounding area needed to buy something really major—usually once a year—they made the trip down to Four Corners. The round trip with shopping usually meant a full day’s excursion.

As he walked through the streets, it seemed the dust was getting to him rapidly—his eyes burning, throat parched, nose and nasal passages filled to discomfort. He was suffocating. And his body tense, like a caged tiger. He was burning to do something, anything. As he passed parked cars, he had the disturbing urge to smash windows.

Occasionally he would glance up at the surrounding hills, and they would look uncomfortably like the Big Andy Mountain. At any moment he expected to see people he hadn’t seen in ten years, crossing the street or turning a corner. Most of those people were dead.

Dead. It was hard to believe. As a child they’d all seemed immortal. His mother’s sensual magic, her power over his father. She didn’t always use it, didn’t always stop the rage, and that had made Reed resent her. Uncle Ben’s knowledge of the woods. His sister’s quiet magic—the magic of all young children, he supposed, with that imagined world they lived in. His father’s magic of rage that cast a spell on everything around him.

Reed had a hard time believing such rage could ever die.

His mother had bought him cowboy boots in the older of the two department stores in Four Corners when Reed had been ten. He was thrilled, and so nervous about scuffing them up he never wore them outside. He’d wear old shoes to school with the boots wrapped in paper under his arm, then change into them before class started, changing to the old shoes again when recess time came. That’s how he lost them; somebody stole the precious boots while he was outside playing.

Four Corners hadn’t changed much—the paint was clean and bright—and in that, Reed realized, it was very much unlike Simpson Creeks. In the Creeks people painted their houses and buildings but once every ten years or so. No one much cared. Amos Nickles usually had a well-painted house, but he was probably the only one.

Flowerbeds were well kept, and everyone appeared to have a garden. Every town family with a car. Very, very different from Simpson Creeks, he thought. In many ways Four Corners was the town the Creeks might have dreamed of being, if they’d cared that much.

Still, there were many similarities—the slow rhythm of the people’s speech, coupled with the long pauses between thoughts or between questions and replies that could drive an outsider half-crazy to listen to. The open friendliness with strangers who didn’t look too much out of the ordinary, which proved to be a thin veneer over a basic uneasiness with anyone from outside the community.

And the sense of there being a hard life out there, an existence barely won from nature, a momentary stay against danger.

At the Pork & Pie Restaurant the proprietor stared at him. Every time Reed looked back his way the man averted his eyes. Finally, he came over and smiled.

“Aren’t you the Taylor boy?”

“I guess… Reed Taylor is my name.”

The man beamed and grabbed his hand. “Your family had dinner here… oh maybe ten years ago. You ain’t changed much; just a little taller. And thinner… I’d say. Nice to see you again! Be in town long?”

Suddenly he was the Taylor boy again. He was the Taylor son. And once again, he was shy.

“No, I’ll be taking the train to the Creeks in about an hour.”

“Well, you say hello to your folks for me, will you? Tell ‘em we’d like to see ‘em again real soon!” The man smiled expectantly.

“Sure,” Reed said. “I’ll tell them… when I see them.”

The man looked at him oddly for a moment, then walked back to his kitchen, glancing at Reed’s table now and then, unsmiling.

Reed tried the soup and it seemed too cold; he tried a soft drink, with ice, and it burned going down. He started to choke, coughing into his napkin, and knew that the owner was trying not to notice. Reed caught the man spying on him once more—that look of complete suspicion—and he got up and left the restaurant.

So much for a homecoming…

Darkness fell swiftly in Four Corners; the mountains here were high on all sides, and cut off the sun’s rays early. It was already pretty dark an hour before Reed was supposed to get back on the train. He spent part of that time on a park bench near the courthouse watching two dogs struggle for a piece of scrap meat. They were small dogs, their fight a playful one, until one of them decided to go for the throat of the other. The black terrier’s neck suddenly spouted blood and Reed leaped to his feet.

The dog turned and snarled, would have had his right hand if Reed hadn’t jerked it out of the way. Reed shouted and kicked out at the dog, and it was gone around the corner of the courthouse.

He looked around. Several people watching him. Whispering. He tried to think it was because he was a stranger here, and of course people down here distrusted strangers.

They didn’t let anyone back on the train until fifteen minutes before departure. The conductor said they were cleaning, but Reed was unreasonably suspicious. Everything seemed suddenly awry, the town of Four Corners like his hometown of Simpson Creeks in one of his nightmares. Nearly dark and the minimal light distorted. As the sky grew darker and shadows blended, the edges of buildings began to waver and disappear. His fever grew worse; his head pounded. He walked to the train station and sat on a concrete loading platform in front of the train. He wanted to be as close as possible, the first one to leap aboard when the conductor granted permission. Two station hands eyed him from a freight doorway and he turned his head, told himself they weren’t looking. He coughed and his throat and mouth took fire in succession; he spat up a spot of darkness into the palm of his hand, and wiped it clean on his pants without checking to see what it was.

Finally the conductor stepped outside the train and waved. Relieved, he began to step up, then hesitated, suddenly afraid to go home.

~ * ~

Charlie could hear the hounds baying in the distance, their hollow voices distorted among the columns of trees and the rock abutments of this part of the Big Andy. It had been a long time since he’d been this high up on the mountain, not since he was a teenager in fact. The woods here were mostly conifers, more similar to woods up north than those lower down on Big Andy’s slopes. Remnants of that great forest that once covered the entire continent, Charlie knew. A dinosaur of a forest.

It had turned chilly; they were up about six thousand feet. Fog had shrunk their world to a rough oval about fifty feet across. Charlie stared past the campfire at the white cloud surrounding them, broken limbs protruding here and there out of the mist like arthritic fingers.

They’d all been surprised by the turn the hunt had taken, even Amos Nickles, who appeared to have encountered almost everything in the way of bear antics. They’d picked up on the trail almost immediately—so quickly it seemed as if the bear had been waiting for them to follow him—tracked it around the edge of the old Taylor property, and before they knew it the bear was leading them straight up the Big Andy, right to the top, where bears had never been before, according to Amos Nickles, even when he was a boy.

The dogs were near exhaustion; Amos said he’d never seen a bear run animals so hard. “Ain’t no natural bear.”

Charlie didn’t know if it was fear or cold, but he was shaking.

There were bits of the Ice Age left behind here, he thought. Thick tree trunks dark with damp. Shallow pools of still black water. On the climb up he noticed how the shortest trees were on the cold, windward side, and most of these trees bare of branches on this side. Ice had built up and broken the branches off during the winters, he supposed. Further up the slope many trees had been blown down, hanging in the upper branches of their neighbors like fallen soldiers. Other trees were leaning or twisted crazily.

Brittle gray lichen covered large areas of the trees and stone, like pale, luminous shadows in the dark. Charlie had heard that some of these growths might be over two thousand years old. Here and there you’d run into a muskeg, or “trembling earth” as the Indians called it. Bog. Most of them were small, a thick mat of vegetation you could stand on covering a shallow pool of water and sediments. You always wondered if there might be larger bogs out there; the Indians certainly did. There were a number of old tales about Indians being swallowed up by the trembling earth. There were also stories about missing white hunters.

Charlie, Joe, and Ben Taylor had remained by the fire. They were exhausted, and didn’t have the enthusiasm for the hunt shown by Amos Nickles and Jake Parkey. They’d rejoin the party later, but Charlie had some doubts the hunt would continue much longer. They were all tired, and after the bear had led them this far, he seemed to have just disappeared into the fog.

Charlie didn’t like it here. There were supposedly few animals at this altitude, but their presence seemed to be everywhere. Not just the bear, although his leading them to this remote spot seemed strange enough in itself, but all the other animals, now insubstantial as fog, that had once existed. On similar mountaintops in the area, the bones of the great ground sloth had been discovered, over seven feet high at the shoulder. Saber-toothed tiger, mastodon, mammoth, then later the musk ox, elk, and Eastern bison. All of them gone.

Amos had told them there had been timber wolves up on Big Andy when he was a boy, as well as cougars. But that had been a long time ago.

Charlie found it hard to put all that together. So many different forms of the beast in one place. As if you could just sprinkle some bog water on an ancient stone and some bizarre form of life might sprout there, uproot itself, and bound after a rabbit. Suddenly the luminous fog seemed alive with wet nostrils and eyes.

A bear was actually a throwback to all of that, but something more. A bear was more human than elk or mastodon. Like a human swollen with darkness. So empty of purpose it eats constantly trying to fill itself, that it might be ready for its six-month dreamsleep. A bear ate the kind of things people ate; human garbage was a treat. Then wild apples and horse plums, shadberries, and watercress for dessert. And its front and back paws were different because they’d been used differently. Just like a man’s. Manlike wails and grunts. “Wild-man-of-the-woods,” some of the Indians had called it, what you might imagine a neighbor might become, if left in the woods for generations, deprived of companionship and forced to live in the dark.

Charlie thought the most frightening thing about a bear was that face. Just like a mask with its hidden eyes and unmoving muzzle. You couldn’t tell what a bear was thinking by looking into that face, if he was planning to run or rip you apart. And that smell—there was nothing like it. A bear smells like everything he’s eaten, dying there in the bear mask mouth.

Joe Manors stirred the fire lazily and looked past Charlie into the fog. “Wet one, huh, Charlie?”

“That it is.”

“S’pose they’ll shoot the damn thing?”

Ben Taylor chuckled. “I expect those eager beavers are more likely to shoot each other.”

Joe squirmed closer to the fire. “Hey, Charlie? Why don’t you tell us one of those famous spook stories o’ yours?”

“Yeah, Charlie. Tell the one about the big toe!” Ben Taylor said, laughing.

“Yeah, Charlie; that’s a goodun.”

Charlie gazed into the fire, eyes fixed on the glowing embers near the bottom. He didn’t think they really wanted to hear the tale; they just wanted to kill some time. And he didn’t want to tell the story, having told that particular old folktale a hundred times. Everybody knew it. But strangely, he found himself beginning, as if the way the flames danced were forcing him to speak.

“An old, ragged-looking man was out walking in the woods,” he began.

Joe interrupted. “Hey, Charlie, weren’t that a little boy last time you told it?”

Ben Taylor waved his hand at Joe and looked at Charlie Simpson with a worried expression on his face. Charlie spoke dully, as if half-asleep or half-dead, his eyes rigid, only his mouth moving. Now and then the eyes gleamed before the firelight, as if on their own.

“The man had been out in those woods a long time, so long he couldn’t even remember when was the last time he’d seen another human being. His clothes were all ragged; he ate wild berries, roots, grubs, birds—just like an animal. He couldn’t remember the names for most things, and when he opened his mouth to speak, it was growls and snaps and yappings that came out of it.”

Joe and Ben drew closer together on the opposite side of the fire. Across the flames Ben could see Charlie Simpson’s narrow, almost meatless face, his eyes reflecting the campfire with red highlights. Ben wondered why Charlie was changing the story; it didn’t sound like one of Charlie’s at all.

“One day he found himself in the darkest part of the forest, a place he had never been before. So dark it was hard to see where one tree ended and another tree or the night between them took up. Great trees leaned crazily over him, curtains of moss bending the boughs almost to the ground. Exposed roots lay everywhere like amputated knees and elbows, and he had to walk carefully so as not to fall flat on his face.

“He was hungry now, hungrier than he could remember ever being before. That’s when he found the root. It looked so juicy and tender, but when he stooped down to examine it, he saw that it looked like somebody’s big toe.”

Joe Manors chuckled softly, but Ben Taylor detected a strain in the laugh. This was a part of the story Ben recognized, and it made him think about the fun of the rest of the tale. But everything else about the story was so strange and disturbing, he was having a hard time enjoying it. This wasn’t like one of Charlie’s stories. This wasn’t like Charlie at all.

“He hesitated picking up the root, or the toe—it was really hard to tell for sure which it was, it was caked with so much dirt. But he was so hungry. He popped the toe in his mouth and began to chew, thinking it mighty delicious.”

Ben smiled.

“He started to walk away then, and he heard this faint voice that he’d heard before whispering, ‘Where is my to-o-o-o-e?’

“He turned around quick when he heard that, but there was no one around to be seen. Then he looked down at the ground. The dirt was stirring around the hole where he’d pulled up that root, and suddenly this voice came, a groanin’ and a creakin’ up out of that hole, saying ‘Where is my to-o-o-o-e?’

“So he took off running.”

Joe Manors poked Ben in the ribs with his elbow.

“That old man ran as fast as he could, leaping over logs and dodging branches, trying his damnedest to get away from that voice, but he kept hearing it, ‘Where is my to-o-o-o-e?’ over and over again. Sometimes he’d look back over his shoulder and never see anything coming, but he’d always hear that voice, and sometimes the sound of crashing footsteps, and sometimes branches being snapped in two, and sometimes water splashing.”

Staring into Charlie’s burning eyes through the campfire, Ben was sure Charlie didn’t even know where he was. The hounds were wailing their excitement, getting closer now.

“Finally he stumbled into where he’d been staying that season, a cave hollowed out by hand in the riverbank, brush piled here and there to hide it from the other animals.”

“Other animals, Charlie?” Joe Manors said. Ben grabbed his arm and Joe shook it off. “But Ben… he said other animals. But it’s a man he’s talking about, ain’t it?” Ben gestured at the woods around them. The hounds were nearby, baying as if half-crazed.

Charlie’s voice was getting louder, even louder than the hounds. The two men stopped tussling and listened.

“But he kept hearing it. ‘Who’s got my to-o-o-o-e? Who’s got my to-o-o-o-e?’ getting closer and closer, the branches crashing all down the riverbank, the mud slapping and the grass groaning as the thing approached.

“Finally it was right outside. The old man shook and cried. The brush in front of the opening was swept away. He smelled stinking breath.

“He saw a face, wild, bleeding, full of sores, hair matted with mud. ‘YOU HAVE!’ the face shouted, and the breath was like a dozen corpses set out to rot a month in the summertime.

“Then the thing stepped in. There was a bloody stump where the big toe should’ve been. It was then the old man realized what he was looking at, what it was like looking at this horrible, stinking thing that had just come up out of the ground, come up like some crop grown from rocks and roots and garbage.”

Charlie looked across the campfire at the two men with dull, heat-seeking eyes. “It was like looking in the mirror.”

He stopped, looking up at the two men in surprise. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember just how he had told that story, but somehow he knew he had told it wrong. What was the matter with him? Was he getting old or what?

Two hounds burst into the center of the campsite; one of them, a black-and-tan, stumbled over the flames, yowling when its hair was singed. The rest of the pack exploded then out of the night and fog, mouths gaping, teeth gnashing, circling the fire as if panic-stricken, searching, searching…

“Where’s the damn bear!” Amos shouted, coming into the light. “We tracked him right here!”

“Ain’t no bear here, Mr. Nickles,” Joe said.

“Hell, them dogs know better!” Jake was suddenly behind them, shouting, tossing his gun around dangerously. “Bear’s gotta be here somewhere! They got his smell! Just look at ‘em!”

The dogs did seem to be hot on the trail, but a trail that ended right in the middle of their campfire. Ben and Joe looked around in confusion. Jake and Amos were angry, shouting, cursing the dogs and the fog. Charlie Simpson just sat there, still staring into the flames, all life gone from his face.

Then they heard it. A sound like a wild man howling from deep down inside his belly. Turning into a growl. Bear.

The hounds raced around the fire and off into the darkness, Amos and Jake running and shouting behind them. Ben Taylor found himself crazily trying to figure out where all the hounds had come from instead of looking for the bear—he’d never realized Amos Nickles had so many. Blueticks and Walkers were most prevalent, but there were black-and-tans, Plotts, and redbones, too. Just about every kind of dog you could work on a bear. The last few almost knocked poor Charlie into the fire, and Joe and Ben ran to help him to his feet.

Incredibly, the dogs had the bear treed halfway up an oak only thirty feet or so away from the campfire. As if he’d been spying on the hunting party.

“That’s it, Flap! That’s it, boy!” Amos was shouting at his lead pull dog, a handsome Walker almost mad with the chase. All the dogs looked mad, Ben thought, that glassy look, the scarred and flattened muzzle, grasshopper legs shaking like a spastic, thin tail whipping, nose snorting and popping like some machine run far past its limits. And no wonder—dogs like these were kept penned up all year waiting for such rare chances at action. They couldn’t even forage their own food when lost in the woods.

Amos ran to the tree and began thumping the trunk with a stick. The bear howled above him, trying not to look straight down. The hounds swirled around the tree flashing wet hide; the men circled with lanterns in hand.

Charlie walked tentatively to the outer edge of the maelstrom of men and hounds. He strained for a look at the bear.

He could smell it all the way from where he was standing. Suffocating. The bear’s head lifted, the muzzle bloody, drooling sputum, crawling with insects. Eating carrion, Charlie thought, and wondered briefly whose carrion it might be. A disgusting wall of smell. He’d never encountered anything like it.

Then, amazingly, the bear dropped to the ground, into the center of the maelstrom. The pull dogs screamed and leaped at the standing black form. “Pulling fur,” they called it. But it was something much uglier than that. The dogs wanted to rip this manlike creature’s heart out, render his flesh. Charlie thought, sickened, this bear was just a stand-in for man; it was a man these dogs were ripping apart, avenging themselves for having been chained so long.

The bear charged in jackhammer assaults. Yiiiiiiii as one dog was clipped. A scream as another was held and chewed. Another scream. Then another. Charlie couldn’t believe it. With that many dogs a bear would never focus on one individual’s damage. But this one, doing it again and again—he had to be crazy. Or vengeful. Something wrong here…

The bear turned once, just an instant, and stared Charlie down. Massive, sullen, and for that brief moment Charlie could swear he saw a humanness in the eyes, but the darkness expanded in them, so that the bear was concentrated human and concentrated bear at the same time. Shadow. An idiot, or a monk. A saint or devil. Bear. So much bear that it was, simply, no longer the bear, but bear forever and eternal.

A dark, composite animal was beginning to rear, growing out of the mad dance of men, hounds, and bear: a face of lantern eyes, bloody man-hands, and dark fur. A new creature just given its life. Change into change into change as the mass of forms blurred before Charlie’s tired eyes. Blood leaping from indistinguishable flesh, trying to escape into the night air.

Suddenly Amos was leaping. “Watch his mouth, dammit! His mouth!”

Bear rips Flap ear to tail.

Jake rising, shouldering the gun. Firing once, twice. Pitching over, crying, throwing up over his red-checkered vest.

Amos firing, sobbing over his dog. “Needs to be gutted, soon as he’s shot, boys!” he cries. Leaning over. Amos painting his cheeks, chin, with blood-coated fingers, staggering a dance while the dogs yawp.

Then explosion after explosion. Jake throwing up somewhere, crying.

~ * ~

Reed groaned in his sleep, cried out against the roar filling his head, then leaped up at the rocking train window. Small lights dotted the ridges ahead. The Creeks? He couldn’t be sure. He suddenly wished he hadn’t come. Something was waiting for him up there in the hills, something just now whetting its teeth. Hungry for him.

He thought he saw tiny lights moving near the top of the Big Andy, but suddenly the brooding peak was dark again. He couldn’t be sure.

He closed his eyes, seeking more sleep, but it was the rocking, and the roar, that consumed him.

~ * ~

Charlie thought he’d finally found the campfire. They seemed to have been separated during the fight, and a long time passed. He hadn’t seen the campfire since it happened. But now it was glowing just ahead, between the trees. It seemed as if he had been wandering forever. Everything ached. He could hear some of the dogs off crying in the woods, but he’d stumbled over the carcasses of several. The warm glow was comforting, and maybe one of the others would be there, waiting. They had to get off the Big Andy soon. Things had gone just crazy up here.

He stepped right up to the glow. But something was wrong. It seemed covered… by fog, or… something.

He stepped right up to the glow. Her flaming hair. She floated by him… a beautiful thing. She wanted him to kiss her, to… be a man to her.

But he was afraid. He began to cry.

~ * ~

The dog was still moving. Joe Manors reached over for it, thinking maybe he could carry it back to the campsite, where it just might survive. Where was everybody? He suddenly hated Amos Nickles for bringing the dog up here, making it do all the dirty work for him, suddenly hated himself and Jake and Ben Taylor and Charlie and even that old dog Buck for getting him into this mess.

He touched the heaving sides, crawled over to examine it. Then pulled back. For a second he thought it was the body of a little girl. Her lips blue. Dead.

But just for a second. Just for a second.

~ * ~

Ben would have recognized his brother’s boy anywhere. “Reed?”

The boy kept running. Ben knew he was getting farther and farther away from the others, but he just couldn’t leave the boy out here.

Why was the boy here? How could he be here?

“Reed?”

Ben ran for a long time, but the boy was always way ahead. Sprinting like a young animal.

And the same age as he’d been ten years ago. He hadn’t aged a bit. Ben would have to ask him about that.

~ * ~

“Mr. Nickles, that you? Amos?” Jake rose up on his knees, wiping the puke off his jacket, embarrassed, afraid the others would see him that way.

“Seen it happen to a hunter, hundred damn times,” a voice behind him said. Amos! Jake twisted around.

Hector Pierce stood against the tree, naked as the day he was born. Staring straight ahead, his body rigid, emaciated muscles standing out like an animal’s hackles. It was the tree the bear had climbed. There were hounds lying all around—some of them whimpering and mewling, most of them dead.

And a red hunting jacket. A pale, withered face. Amos Nickles with his steaming gray guts looped over Flap’s flayed torso.

It was starting to rain.

“’Bloody teeth…” Hector whispered.

Chapter 12

Reed stepped down from the train at nine-thirty in the evening. Shivering, his head cold having spread to numb the rest of his body. His legs and arms moved stiffly. Rain was splashing off the tin roofs of Simpson Creeks in thick, broad strokes. Just as he remembered it, the still picture he’d always carried in his mind of the town: shallow pools and tides of water backed up on the hard clay, deepening in ditch lines and small sink holes. Off in the distance, toward the Nole Company mines, he could make out the gob piles steaming under the hard rain, the giant hills of mine waste bleeding down into the creeks in ribbons of scarlet.

The buildings here appeared all the same color: slab shacks like wet gray limestone with rusted tin chimneys anchored to the cracked rock slab his forebears considered some kind of lifeboat. And behind these, more gray shacks leaned back in rows far up the ridge and around the bend of the tracks—most of them empty, unless the mines were doing better than the last time he had been here. Dark scratches and wet paperboard on the dead wood sides of foreground buildings indicated old signs, but Reed couldn’t read any of them.

The town really hadn’t changed much; fewer trees dotted several more tons of clay.

The station house looked less well used than it had when Reed lived here. At least then there was always some equipment being shipped in for the Nole mine, and there were always a few miners commuting from further down the mountain for the night shift. He doubted there was a night shift anymore; he was the only passenger. And he watched the freight man unload the only freight: some crates for Charlie Simpson’s store.

It really wasn’t so bad. He felt sicker than a dog, but he could see nothing frightening here.

“Charlie should have been here to help me unload,” the potbellied freight man said. “He’s usually real good about that. Can’t figure what must’ve happened to him.”

Most of the windows in the station house were boarded up. When Reed tried the door, he discovered it was locked.

“We don’t use the inside of the Creeks Station no more,” the freight man told him. “No reason to. Just use the loading platform, is all.” Reed opened his umbrella and started to step off the platform. “You live around here, boy?” the freight man drawled.

Reed turned and stared, finally saying, “I do believe I’ve lived here all my life.”

The freight man laughed and Reed wondered if he really knew what he was laughing about.

The building across the street from the boarded-up station house had a bare yellow lightbulb over the porch: Charlie Simpson’s General Store. There appeared to be lights on inside, silhouettes. Reed remembered that Charlie had usually kept the store open at nights, selling beer and providing a place for people to gather and talk. He slipped around in the mud in front of the slab, but finally managed to climb up onto the first wide step. He took a few deep, wet breaths. That seemed to bring his energy back with a rush; he suddenly wanted to get things done, get them over with. He gripped the doorknob tightly and pulled.

When he opened the rickety screen door, he was acutely aware that everyone had suddenly stopped talking.

A general store full of old men and younger old men, even at an hour when most country people had gone to bed. They stared, turning slowly at his entrance, not quite simultaneously but close enough that Reed felt suddenly a little wetter in his rain-drenched army surplus jacket.

Their eyes didn’t fit the rest of their faces. Strained and blanked-out, every pair of eyes in the room. Reed could see the bottom halves of the faces talking, making jokes, occasionally suffering a grim smile, but the eyes, and the lines around the eyes, remained frozen. Bleached-white eyeballs, with pupils so pale and small they seemed to have disappeared entirely. White holes in dark faces. Like the faces of soldiers in shock.

Reed was suddenly convinced that there was nothing behind those sockets but the white sky of some hidden countryside. The old surface of the eyeball had been peeled away to let this other landscape shine through. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be looking at one old man’s face, and another set of eyes would suddenly peep out of the sockets to get a better look at him. Reed expected the masks to fall away from the old men’s shoulders at any moment, revealing perhaps a bright landscape of exotic trees and colorful birds tended by a dwarf with a twisted back, or some experimental animal with too much and too little brain, all there in miniature, sitting atop their shoulders where the heads used to be. Like the glass paperweights you used to see with the miniature scenes inside and the snow that would fall when you shook them.

Craziness. The train of thought amused him. What would they think, these people he had grown up with, if they knew what was running through his mind? He shivered as the warmth of the potbellied stove struck him. He could feel damp running out of his skin. Sometimes his imagination took on a life of its own.

Then one of the men stood and staggered in front of him, examining him with a dazed expression. Reed saw the blood on his face and hands, the torn jacket, the dirt and leaves in his greasy black hair. As if the man had been wandering out in the woods a hundred years.

Reed’s fantasy suddenly changed as he looked around the room. He could see, so real it made him shudder, skeletal heads on the shoulders, faces dumb and twisted from a heritage of incest, blackened tongues and mouths twisted with pain.

~ * ~

“Boy!” The man gripped Reed’s arms tightly, his red-veined eyes fixed on Reed’s black hair. The man reached up a trembling hand and pulled at it. “What you been doing!”

Reed tried to struggle out of the wild man’s grip, but he was too strong. “Jake? You’re Jake Parkey, aren’t you? I used to know you!”

Then suddenly Charlie Simpson was there, pulling Jake away. “Leave the boy be, Jake. He wasn’t out there; you’re just all tired and confused right now!” Then Charlie turned back to Reed. Reed was shocked; the storekeeper looked so old. “Reed? That you, son?”

“Yessir, Mr. Simpson. I’ve… I guess I’ve come home.”

“Well… welcome home, son.” He scratched his head and looked around. “I apologize for Jake there. See… we had a hunt tonight; a man was killed. Everybody’s on edge… half-crazy some of them. Here now… come sit down with me and your uncle.”

As Charlie led him unsteadily across the room, Reed glanced down at Jake Parkey bent over a beer. The man stared up at him with sullen suspicion. Reed grew cold, acutely aware of the water running down the back of his neck.

Ben Taylor was on his feet beside the table. “Reed?”

“Yessir…”

The man reached out and pulled his nephew into his arms. “Good to see you, son,” he mumbled into Reed’s jacket. “Wait’ll Martha and the kids see you. Another Taylor back in town.” Ben stepped back and looked at him, then said, “You weren’t out on the mountain, up the top of Big Andy, earlier tonight, were you?”

Reed caught Charlie Simpson giving Ben a worried look.

“No, no, I just got in off the train.”

Ben looked at him with a puzzled expression. But then, too quickly, his uncle grinned broadly. “Course not! You can see how old I’m gettin’, Reed. Imaginin’ all sorts of things lately.”

Reed smiled. “I don’t think my Uncle Ben will ever get old. I remember a time when you helped… helped my dad at harvest time, doing twice the work of any young man there. And still had energy left over to take me on a hike through the woods.”

Ben laughed. “Now those were fine hikes, weren’t they? Think I learned as much about the land around here as you did on our hikes. I miss ‘em, Reed.”

“Then we’ll do them again, Uncle. I’ve several things to do here, so I think there’ll be time.”

Ben and Charlie glanced at each other as they all sat down. Something was up, and it was making Reed very nervous. He’d always thought nothing happened here; nothing changed. But obviously something had these men frightened. Men like these didn’t frighten easily. “You said someone was killed tonight?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid so.” Charlie looked at his hands. “You may remember him, Amos Nickles? Owned the lumberyard up near the Nole Mine?”

Reed nodded. He barely remembered the man, seemed like he stayed in his house or at the lumberyard all the time, except when he was bear hunting. “How did it happen?”

“Bear got’m,” his uncle said. “Got Charlie’s dog, too.”

Reed looked at him in surprise. He felt suddenly, unaccountably anxious. He thought of the eyes from a recurring dream: dark, bestial. “There… haven’t been bears in this part of the country twenty years or more,” he said to his uncle, but suddenly could not look at him.

“Seem to be now,” Charlie said. Reed was thinking how Charlie Simpson very much resembled some kind of bean pole in an apron, pushing salt grains across the tabletop with a long, brown finger. He made a circuit of them, his finger tracing loops, spirals, and figure eights. “So… what brings you back, Reed?”

The old storekeeper said it as if Reed had only been gone a few hours, instead of ten years. Nobody ever leaves these hills, he had heard his uncle say one time, and people tended to treat you that way, as if you’d never left. Reed glanced around the room; the old men around a nearby stove seemed to be paying no attention, their shoes bunched on the rusted metal like baking potatoes. But he caught Jake Parkey’s eye; the man had been staring at him. Reed wondered why all the obvious resentment. Actually, he hardly knew Jake Parkey; the Parkeys had moved into the town only eight months or so before Reed left.

“I want to dig up around Dad’s old place… see if I can find anything left there.”

His uncle smiled and touched Reed’s hand across the table. “That’s your right, son. I always wondered why you never sold that piece of land after it was passed down to you.”

Reed thought his uncle was fishing for some kind of answer, but he didn’t feel ready to talk about it.

Charlie flattened the salt out with his palm. “Lot of mud up that holler.” Then, after an uncomfortably long pause, “But you probably take after your uncle and granddad.” He smiled at Ben. “You Taylors’ve always been big about digging, haven’t ya? Arrieheads… ain’t it? That sort of thing. Things off dead folk…”

“Yeah… that was it.”

Ben laughed. “Why, Charlie! You sound just like a sour old disapprovin’ schoolteacher!”

“No, I know you boys do the right things by it,” Charlie said. “I guess it would just make me uncomfortable.” Then he looked up at Reed. “I’d watch myself up around there, Reed. I’ve seen that bear up around your dad’s old place and he’s mean, I swear. That bear’s a crazy one.”

“You be staying at our place, won’t you, Reed?” Ben looked up anxiously.

“I wasn’t sure where I’d be staying. I wasn’t sure if I’d be welcome after all this time.”

Ben looked embarrassed. “Oh now, Reed…”

“I know, Ben. I should never have doubted your hospitality. And I plan to take you up on that. But I would like to spend the first couple of nights at Inez Pierce’s, that is, if she’s still got her boardinghouse.”

“She does… wouldn’t be surprised if she lasted longer than the town.” Charlie chuckled.

“Good… I’d like to stay there just the first two nights. I need time to myself for just a bit… to get used to being back.”

“Well… I can understand that,” Ben said, “but do let me take your bags down, get the arrangements made with Inez. At least that much.”

“Sure.” Reed grinned. “I’d appreciate that.”

Ben stood and eased past Charlie’s chair. “I’ll pick you up in ‘bout a half hour, son.” He squeezed Reed’s shoulder with a chop-sized hand. He held it a little too long and Reed looked up. “You’re lookin’ a little poorly, nephew,” Ben said softly. “Get yourself some rest. Martha’d kill me if anything happened to you now.” Reed nodded and Ben walked away.

“That man loves you, Reed,” Charlie said after Ben Taylor had left. “He never has stopped talking about you. Like you were his son and not his brother’s. Not many men in these parts can love as well. That Ben Taylor is a fine man.”

“He is.” Reed stared after his uncle, feeling a bit guilty. He’d never even written the man in all these years. Somehow, he hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, how much his uncle cared. “I’m pretty lucky, I guess.”

“I’d say.” Charlie finished his beer. “You know, it feels kind of odd seeing you back here like this. Not many of the young ones come back anymore.”

“I don’t suppose they do, Mr. Simpson.”

Reed thought back to the day he left, his father screaming and cursing him, looking swollen like a great beast in his rage, throwing rocks, bottles, anything he could get his hands on, even Indian relics from his collection—his most prized possession, maybe the only thing he prized in his entire life.

Reed remembered thinking his father had finally snapped, finally gone over, and that any second he’d be going into the house and getting his gun and killing his own son then and there.

Reed had never come back that night; he was on the train to Four Corners within hours.

Two months later the coal waste dam up above the valley had given way, sending tons of the gunk down the Simpson Creeks, and wiping out half his neighbors and all traces of his family.

~ * ~

The Pierce place was pretty much as he’d remembered it, although a bit worse for wear. Ben explained in the truck on the way over that hard times had finally come to the Pierce children. The insurance hadn’t covered Hector’s hospital bills, and as the fortunes of the Nole mine went down, so did Inez’s boarding house. Now there were only a handful of miners staying at her place, and she just didn’t have the money to do her annual spring repairs. The old house badly needed new paint, and work on the plumbing, the gutters, the roof, the electrical system, the foundation stones, most everything. Both Ben and Charlie had offered their free labor and some materials, but Inez had been too proud, assuring them that everything was “just fine at the Pierces’.”

It was the only house with gables and a full wraparound porch in the town, and Reed still loved the looks of it. Daddy Pierce had built it after the Civil War, putting in twelve bedrooms since all the Pierce relations were living together at the time. Reed had seen pictures of old man Pierce—a tall, ugly gentleman with the largest wart he had ever seen planted on one side of the distinguished, hawk-bill nose. At one time every room but one was occupied by a miner or someone who worked for the Nole Company, with one bedroom kept pretty much free for salesmen and other transients. Inez had had to live in a converted pantry at times, the place was so full. She would serve three meals a day for everyone, doing everything by herself, included in the price of the room. It had been said that she was the finest cook for counties around and that some local men used to rent the transient room for a night or two just to escape their wives and get a taste of Inez’s home cooking. This actually clouded her reputation for a time—some of these wives started talking about how “improper” such arrangements were. Until Inez visited each woman individually and put them straight.

Now there was just old lady Inez, a few coal miners—including Joe Manors—who were more or less permanent residents, and the old transient’s room still available for the occasional stranger. Strangers like myself, Reed thought.

One other person lived in the house, on the top floor, Reed discovered. Inez Pierce’s brother—Hector. Inez had been overly solicitous when Ben brought Reed in, wanting to make sure everything was just right with his room, wanting to know his favorite foods so that she might work them into the menu. She showed him the transient room with great pride, and brought up clean linen and towels right away. Like he was an important guest. A stranger.

That night, on the way back from his bath, Reed passed a half-open door, and smelled lilac scent over something stale. Peering around the door frame, he could see the old man tossing in bed, his splotched arm out of the covers, pulling on the sheet, then stroking the smooth walnut headboard, pulling the sheet, then making a wrinkled fist over one eye.

A hoarse voice out of the sheets, “The cab here yet? You take that box of cookies… I’ll take the others. You’re that Mullins boy, aren’t you? The one rode away in the Packard. My credit’s good… my son will pay you soon’s you get me to his place in that yellow cab. You got any cookies?”

“No, I…”

“You got any cookies for the little crippled kids? They sure do like ‘em! I got some for them. I know. I can tell by your voice you’re that Mullins boy. The one with the Packard. I don’t see the cookie box. Mommy downstairs? Ya… ya. Daddy in the mine this mornin’… Lord, he a good man. You… like ta sell that Packard maybe?”

The old man turned over to face the door, and the sheets and quilt cascaded off the side of his bed. He wore bright pink pajamas with white socks like bags over his feet, rolled around the ankles. Reed realized with a shock that both ankles were tied to the bed frame with heavy rope.

Hector Pierce stretched one arm toward Reed, stiff, bent fingers wavering, forearm shaking his sleeve like a banner. Reed walked over and lifted the covers back onto the bed. He looked into the old man’s eyes; he appeared blind, maybe half-conscious as well. His head was thrown back against the pillow, three ridges of skin stretched tightly from chin to collarbone. With his slash mouth, uncontrolled tongue leaving spittle at the corners, dry, flaked skin, he looked like a lizard suddenly discovered under a sun-warmed rock.

Although slightly squeamish about it, Reed found himself tucking the old man into bed, straightening the covers. “Bear! Terrible eyes!” the old man suddenly cried out, then “Her hair’s on fire!” He clutched the sleeve of Reed’s shirt tightly, twisting it with the arthritic fingers until Reed thought it was going to tear, and this filled Reed with a strange panic. “You…” the old man whispered hoarsely, the fear drawing dark lines down his face. “Part of you stayed behind… with teeth!”

Reed pulled himself away and backed out of the room, away from the old man’s trembling, pointing finger.

A short man clutching a bottle stood out in the hall. Reed figured him to be Joe Manors, the miner Inez said had the room next to his. The man’s breath made Reed pull back; he’d had a sizable amount to drink. Flipping his hand at the old man’s room, he muttered, “Ask you if the cab was here? Inez’s older brother… been crazy ever since he got caught in a cave-in up at the mine. Now tonight he was up on Big Andy stark naked. Crazy old man! Been waitin’ for a cab hours now. Hell, ain’t no taxi cabs in Simpson Creeks nohow.”

Chapter 13

Reed sat out on Inez Pierce’s porch long after everyone else was in bed. Whether he was afraid of dreaming his first night home, or if he was just so anxious to start out for the old homesite in the morning, he didn’t know, but he couldn’t sleep. Big Andy Mountain stretched out just beyond the house, a pitch-black body with a shallow fringe of pine illuminated by the moon on one bare slope. There were darker bands of pine farther up, then they thinned out again approaching Big Andy’s near-bald pate.

Much of the mountain must have been stripped away; he remembered there being more. When? He couldn’t remember when, sometime when he was a child, and the mountain in those days had looked like a giant wooly worm.

Two small suns lit up clearings on opposite sides of the range. The coke ovens at Dante and Trashtown: he’d grown up with their twin glows. One could be seen from his room’s window, the other from momma’s kitchen window. But which was which on this night, over a decade later? He couldn’t tell; the steady progression of the stripping and the flood had changed the mountain completely, until it was hardly Big Andy anymore.

Like his Uncle Ben had said in the truck tonight, “Mountain like that can’t have a name no more.”

A dark shadow approached the porch from the side yard. Lumbering. Brushing against one of Inez’s immense lilac bushes. Reed started from his chair, ready to cry out or run. Would the bear have come this close to town? Jake Parkey staggered into the light cast from the porch lamp.

The drunken man weaved about on his feet, then climbed the porch steps rapidly, sliding into the chair next to Reed’s. He held out his bottle. “Drink?”

“No… thanks.”

“Suit y’self…” Jake took a long pull from the bottle, then threw it over the porch railing into one of the lilac bushes. Then he turned on Reed, swiftly and off-balance, almost toppling from his chair. “Why you back here!” He gestured in a sweeping motion with one finger.

“I was born here.” Reed leaned back into his chair.

Jake looked at him with a puzzled expression, then frowned. “Friend o’ mine died ‘night. Mister Amos Nickles. Real good friend o’ mine.”

“I know. I was really sorry to hear.”

“Got et by a bear, crazy bear.”

Reed watched him carefully, wanting to leave, to go to bed.

“I knowed about your family!” Jake said suddenly.

“Yes?”

“The way they drowned up that holler…” Then he fell silent.

Reed thought about digging into the family land the next day and felt a little foolish. Who knew how much red clay had baked over the ruins in ten hot summers, how many feet he’d have to remove to get to any of his family’s things, or how far downslope the water might have spread the debris? What had Uncle Ben told him about the flood waters down that section of the hollow? He couldn’t remember if it had been better or worse there than in the rest of the valley.

Then Jake began his story, in that breathless, whiskey-sour voice of his. Reed tried not to listen, tried to leave, tried to shut the drunk up, but nothing would stop this last torrent of old family news.

“Swear boy, water twenty feet high… took out four bridges up above Carter, ‘fore it even got started, hell, cows and trees, four-foot rocks, houses—rollin’ over each other. People too… men, women… couldn’t tell no difference even with their clothes… ripped off… they was so tore up, worn out like creek stones… horses with their guts hanging, stuck on broken trees. Clothes. Swoll up dogs. Saw three houses, explode against that… state bridge ‘fore ya get to Two Forks. That coal waste dam, what it was. The company just kept dumpin’, an’ dumpin’ there. Couldn’t hold, after a rain. Hundred people, boy. Kilt and mangled. Company man say, it were an act of God. Didn’t see God… behind the wheel… them coal company dozers. Boy, ya hearin’ me? Saw yore daddy’s hand, yer momma’s dress, miles down, from home. Never did find… yer baby sister. Boy? Just to get a little strip of coal… hear that?”

Of course, he didn’t believe the bizarre detail concerning his father’s hand, which made some of the other details of Jake’s story suspect as well, but the audacity of the lie was almost exciting. He’d heard that Jake didn’t have much sense, and he supposed this proved it. But lots of people around the Big Andy had always seemed to possess this heightened sense of the grotesque, including the members of his own family.

Once his father had described to him in detail how a friend of his had died with rabies when his father was just a boy. And there were stories his grandfather used to like to help the old doctor with some of his operations, would even make rounds with him.

Jake fell asleep in the chair. Reed didn’t disturb him, just watched the mountain. Finally Jake woke up and stared at Reed several minutes before rising and stumbling off the porch.

Reed found himself reconsidering the job he had set up for himself for the next day. Chances were he wouldn’t find anything; the flood would have scattered his family’s possessions far and wide. Or what he did find… he might just as well not know about.

It seemed slightly ironic that while his father had prepared him for very little in life, had given him almost nothing, he had at least prepared him well for the task of excavating the old homesite. When his father had reached his sixties and the company forced him to retire from the mines, he started collecting odd rocks and Civil War and Indian relics. As he read more books on the subject, he started taking long trips down to the universities in Louisville and Knoxville, carting boxloads of his findings to various professors, learning more, collecting, and then reading more. He’d always been a large, pale man, and stoop-shouldered from a lifetime down in the mines. But the older Daddy Taylor was straight-backed and sunburnt. And the fierce, coal black eyes had taken on a thoughtful aspect. It was difficult sometimes connecting the two: the thoughtful amateur archaeologist with the hard-drinking, swearing, brutish bear of a man Reed had grown up with.

Reed had always tried to believe that he and his father had nothing in common. But over the years various traits—little habits, the way Reed told a story, or talked “around” awkward subjects, or prowled his room with nervous energy, too nervous, almost, to let his feet fall—had made it all too clear that just wasn’t true. In many ways he was very much his father’s son. So it was no surprise, really, when he took up archaeology in college. Dr. Simms and his father, they’d both helped foster that obsession in him.

All that death and destruction just to get a little strip of coal. Seems his father had said that once; now Jake Parkey was echoing him. Reed shared, he suddenly realized, his father’s interest in bitterness as well.

Funny how his cold seemed so much better now. Maybe he was already getting used to being home.

Before Reed went to bed he walked out into the front yard to get a better look at the stars. A shadow crossed his. He turned. Miss Pierce’s brother was standing up in the window, looking down at him, mouthing words silently against the glass like some pale fish in an aquarium.

But Hector Pierce was tied to his bed. Reed strained his eyes. The figure seemed shorter than Hector Pierce. Dark hair. Slight build.

He couldn’t make out the face. He couldn’t tell who it was.

Chapter 14

The bear stopped at the edge of the woods, gazing down at the town below, the place where it had killed the dog only a few yards away. There were lights there, and human beings, and although it had a strange need to go into this lighted place, to be with these human beings, it did not. It would not go near.

It could not understand or relate to anything in its bear experience what had happened with the men and dogs that night. It had recognized those human beings, although it had never been to this place before. It had recognized them, seen them inside itself, and this had enraged it.

But it would not have eaten and torn so, except that there was something else inside it that was also angered… something that did not belong inside it but was inside it and was angered. Had hated.

So the bear had torn and killed in its angers and irritations. It could not even remember everything it did that night.

It was very frightened.

It somehow knew that these things happening inside it were not over. This thing inside it was very angry. This made the bear agitated, and angry too.

The lights had gone out; the human beings were leaving. A man it had seen inside itself before was the last to leave.

The thing that did not belong inside it was angered as the man left. It wanted the bear to leap, to rip, to kill. But the bear snarled the thing inside away. It kept the thing from making it charge. The bear knew it would not be able to stop this thing very often, but now this thing inside it was very tired.

The bear was tired too.

The bear turned slowly and lumbered back into the dark wood.

~ * ~

Charlie Simpson installed a dead bolt lock on the store’s front door that evening after everyone had left, the strongest one he carried. He felt a little foolish about it; no one had ever broken into the store and it didn’t seem likely that anyone ever would. But strange things were happening, and it just made him feel a little more secure to have the extra lock on. He wondered foolishly if the lock might discourage a bear that size.

He was pretty drunk when he started the job, so it took a while to make the lock secure. When he opened the door to leave, he hesitated before the darkness, then went back to pick up the loaded shotgun he kept under his counter. Again, it seemed a silly thing to be doing, but he had an idea his usual habits had been changed permanently and irrevocably. He’d had to help carry Amos Nickles’s body into the abandoned depot—he hoped the coroner got there before too late tomorrow afternoon—and the feel of the man’s body, emptied of half its capacity of viscera and blood, would stay with him for a long time. No one should die like that.

He sat awhile after climbing into his truck. The woods seemed closer tonight, the sky a little lower. He gazed at the mountain. Incredibly, someone’s campfire seemed to be burning there. But no… he could see the light was moving down the mountain. Someone carrying a lantern. But it was moving so swiftly, as if someone were running down the mountain.

Damn. He must have been half-crazy with exhaustion up there, scared out of his wits, seeing what he did. All that burning hair. Hector Pierce’s story must have been on his mind. But he’d never hallucinated before. Damn strange thing.

He wished Buck were here. Lord, how he wished it. He’d take him home with him, keep him in the house so nothing could get at him. And Charlie wouldn’t have to be alone tonight. Oh, why didn’t he take better care? Lord, Lord, Lord…

He stopped himself. Shivering. Then he started the engine.

~ * ~

Doris Parkey sat in her living room by the window, gazing out at the darkened street. Headlights came up suddenly, then Charlie Simpson’s truck came roaring past the window, spitting gravel everywhere, then it was gone and the street was pitch-black again. They should get streetlights, they really should. The merchants should pay for them; they would be benefiting from them. A body wasn’t safe out in those dark streets, what with everything that had been happening.

Amos Nickles dead. She had seen the body when they brought it back and it like to drove her crazy… she’d never seen the like. Things were turning dark in Simpson Creeks; she wondered sometimes if maybe the apocalypse was coming, the final times, when the dead would be walking the earth.

The dead walking the earth… yeah… that’s what it felt like. That bear like some monster… weren’t no ordinary beast. Jake himself could see that. Told her all about how it had looked, almost a man’s eyes, the vengeful way it attacked them…

They ought to go drive a stake through Amos Nickles’s heart, that’s what they ought to do. No telling when he might get up and start walking.

Doris squinted, peering out into the darkened street. Somebody standing out there. She leaned toward the window. Dark hair and bright eyes. Flashing teeth.

There was a beating on the door. Doris put a hand over her mouth. Gonna scream. Gonna scream I swear to God! She looked around; maybe she could get Mr. Emmanuel up. Maybe he’d protect her.

More beating. “Goddammit, Doris! Let me in!”

She ran to the door. “Jake? That you?”

“Who else would it be this time o’ the goddam night? Let me in!”

Doris unbolted the door, opened it, and Jake Parkey stumbled into the living room. “Body could catch newmonia!” He coughed.

“You’ve been drinking…”

“Off my back, woman!”

“Don’t you talk that way to me, Jake Parkey! Leavin’ me here all to myself, and that Taylor boy just come back… must be something wrong with him!”

Jake turned his head to her with a puzzled look. “Huh? What you mean?”

“Why, he was just here! Standin’ in the street… lookin’ in on me!”

“Oh, you’re crazy, woman! I just left that boy!”

“I tell you it was him, Jake! I know what he looks like!”

Jake went to the window and looked out. “Well… whatever it was… gone now…” He stopped, listened. “What’s that?”

Doris looked at the wall adjoining the slab. She could hear it too. A scratching and a thumping. A movement. But louder than she’d ever heard before, as if something much larger were moving inside the slab. She turned to Jake and laughed. “Why, I don’t hear nothin’, Jake. Must be rats, don’t you suppose?”

~ * ~

Audra Larson finally completed rearranging the furniture, pushing the dresser up in front of her bedroom door so it couldn’t be pushed open. But maybe a bear could do that; she had no idea. At least the window was too small and too high to let in anything larger than a bird. For once she was happy about that.

She looked at the dresser critically, then moved her heavy rocker against it. She had seen Amos Nickles’s body; they’d taken it into the front of the cafe and stretched it out on one of the tables. She started to protest when Jake just shoved her out of the way like a madman. That was when she’d gone back into her quarters in the back of the cafe, and stayed there. Locked herself in.

It was terrible, living in a flimsy place like this, the walls only a couple of inches thick. She didn’t feel safe; a bear could rip his way right through.

She went to the bed and huddled there. She’d heard them when they finally came to get the body. She had no idea where they took it; she hadn’t gone out.

She was unlikely to go out after dark ever, until they killed that bear.

Daddy said she’d never get married. And despite herself, despite her strong wish to be independent, and strong, she was beginning to think that was quite a sentence that had been laid on her.

She hated Daddy for it.

~ * ~

“Ben? Coming to bed?”

Ben heard her, but found it difficult to speak.

“Ben…” Martha Taylor appeared in the doorway. “You need your rest.”

Ben looked up at her and smiled. “You sure look pretty tonight…”

Martha blushed, then sat on the chair beside him, tousling his gray hair as if he were a naughty boy. Her hair was almost exactly the same shade of gray; she liked that. “Old fool,” she said, and laughed.

“Martha…” He was silent then, for what seemed a very long time. Martha had long been used to her husband’s ruminations and knew he couldn’t be rushed. He would get to the point in his own good time. “I could have sworn I saw Reed up on that mountain tonight.”

“But that couldn’t have been. You said yourself his train hadn’t even gotten in yet when all that happened. He would have been halfway between here and Four Corners.”

“I know… I know. Guess it was somebody else, but that worries me… who?” Then, after another long pause, “My brother was a hateful man, Martha.”

“Shouldn’t talk ill of the dead, Ben.”

“Can’t help it… it’s true. Man like that would hold a grudge past all reasoning. I knew times when he was still thinking up vengeance for things twenty years gone.”

“But why worry about that now, Ben? Why upset yourself so?”

“I don’t know… but I just can’t seem to help thinking ‘bout him right now.” He suddenly sounded exhausted, and Martha helped him up from his chair, guiding him toward the bedroom, past the kids’ room, their snores so loud it made them both smile a little. “I don’t know… we need to take care of Reed, Martha. Make it up to him.”

“We’ll do our best,” she said, looking up into his eyes, suddenly frightened. “I’m sure we both will.”

~ * ~

Once again Mr. Emmanuel wakened from the dream drenched in sweat. He’d been drowning. The room had filled with water, he’d opened the window to climb out when small hands had grabbed his ankles, pulling him down. He twisted and turned, struggling, and in fighting off the grip dragging him under had turned around to see his attacker: a dead little girl with jelly eyes, her hands clenching his flesh like two sets of long white teeth.

He’d screamed and she’d opened her mouth as if to join him in the scream, but no sound came out of her mouth. Just mud. Rivulets of yellow, mine-acid mud.

He stared around the dimly lit bedroom, his heart pounding like a jackhammer against his ribs. He could hear Mrs. Parkey’s rats in the slab next door, scrabbling at the wall as if hungry for his meat.

Damn the woman anyway. He knew he could never have heard them if she hadn’t ranted so much about their nightly visits.

~ * ~

Inez Pierce checked in on her brother Hector one final time before going downstairs to bed. She was furious. He could have been killed. Naked as a jaybird. It was so bad this time she’d gone past embarrassment. There seemed no point to being embarrassed; everybody knew, no one was going to be surprised. But it still bothered her. She thanked God their parents weren’t still alive.

When she passed the window at the second-floor landing, she thought she saw something out in the yard. A woman in white, wrapped in fog, out walking on the lawn. Redheaded. Beautiful. Inez gaped, the sweat popping out on her forehead. Her bowels suddenly loosened, and she was afraid she was going to mess all over herself right there on the stairs. At her age.

“She hates us… she hates us all…” Inez whispered.

Now why had she said that? There was no sense in it. But somehow she knew. Then the image was gone, and it quickly became evident to Inez that the whole thing had been a trick of the light.

Brother Hector wasn’t the only squirrel-head in the family. Maybe it was catching.

~ * ~

Joe Manors sat huddled up on the pillows at the head of his bed, three empty liquor bottles on the nightstand. Inez wouldn’t be too happy if she knew about those; he’d have to get rid of them before she cleaned in the morning.

He couldn’t sleep; there’d be hell to pay in the morning at work. Tomorrow was Thursday though; maybe he could catch up on sleep during the weekend.

He just couldn’t get his mind off the little girl he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—up on the Big Andy. A little girl just like his baby sister. She’d died of the chicken pox a good thirty years ago. Only his sister had had black hair, black as the highest-grade coal. This one had been blonde. Freckled.

But of course he’d just thought he’d seen her. It had just been the dog, and the way the light and shadows had played across its heaving sides.

There seemed to be some sort of light outside his window, but somehow he knew he shouldn’t look out. He turned his face toward the wall and closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t even see its reflection.

~ * ~

In his dream Reed lay buried at the bottom of layer upon layer of earth. His body covered with filth and cobwebs. His body mummified. The earth around him alive, crawling with life, life thick to the point of revulsion.

Above him he could feel the giant excavator on Big Andy Mountain, its steel maw a dozen feet across, its power consumption far greater than that of the entire Simpson Creeks area. It began gnawing at the dirt, devouring tons of it at a time. First the covering vegetation, then layer after layer of subsoil and rock strata, overburden, looking for the sea of pure coal, looking for Reed’s body so it could strip it down too, layer after layer.

Reed could feel the excavator chewing at his head, gnawing away his hair, stripping off his scalp, cutting through the bone of his skull, seeking the soft, gray layers of brain, hungry for the thoughts sleeping there, peeling them, stripping them away until the skull was emptied like an oyster.

He awoke in a sweat, and at first he thought he had left his light on, the bare bulb over his bed blinding him with its halo.

But then the glow became a face, a woman’s face, her hair in flames. Reed screamed and leaped from the bed, but she still seemed to be there, following him, and even though he would not look around to check, he was sure she was reaching for him, trying to embrace him with her pale, cool arms, the flames licking at her face, at the ceiling, and reaching out for him as he ran for the corner.

Then the first light of morning broke through the window, and the apparition dissolved slowly into the illuminated dust motes floating before his window.

Chapter 15

Joe Manors climbed aboard the Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer using leg and arm muscles that seemed to creak with every movement. Not a moment too soon: the day foreman was staring down at him from his yellow pickup on the edge of the embankment. Fool was going to slide over the lip someday; here he was ridin’ everybody’s ass about safety all the time and the man himself was a walking accident. Wouldn’t break Joe’s heart none if the truck took a high dive.

He’d barely made it; he was pretty sure the foreman would use just about any excuse to get rid of him. The foreman didn’t like hiring the local men for his crew—that was well known—but it was hard getting people to work this far back in the woods. Joe felt satisfied that he’d be hard to replace.

Foreman was talking to Mr. Emmanuel now. Then the two were laughing, looking like idiots when you couldn’t hear the sound of the laugh. Joe set his jaw and warmed up the engine a few minutes, then started up the cut.

Joe had seen pictures the Nole Company PR people had taken of the Big Andy for some of their slick company magazines and advertisements. To show how well they were taking care of the land they were stripping, to show that it didn’t look as awful as everybody said.

The problem was the pictures were of the south side of Big Andy, with Simpson Creeks just out of view, hidden by one of the smaller ridges. They hadn’t stripped there at all, yet. All the stripping had taken place on the north side, eating into the base and side of the mountain like a bad case of tooth decay. Sometimes Joe got nervous when the big augers started working sideways into one of the exposed coal seams; he imagined them boring right into the backyard of Charlie Simpson’s store. Big Andy was becoming a shell pretty fast, like one of those fake western towns in the movies, with no back to them.

It was a shocking change… coming into work in the morning. You’d be walking up the mountain, under the trees, the earth so alive with small animals and growing things you couldn’t help but feel a little better about things. Then you’d cross that all-too-visible line near the top of the ridge… and suddenly you’re on the moon, and you could swear there hadn’t been life here in a million years.

Ninety-foot cliff walls and piles of gray rubble and great scars in the earth. Joe had never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world. While in the service he’d seen burnt and bombed-out areas in Vietnam that had shaken him badly, just to look at, but even those places had more life than the strip mine. Spoil banks hundreds of feet high, drifting like old vomit down to Big Andy’s base. Snapped-off trees and boulders as big as cars—some of the blasting had sent boulders like that dangerously close to farmhouses further downslope. Pools of acid water when it rained. Erosion so bad it was like the ground just melted under the mildest rain. Baked deserts and frothy white sulfuric streams containing no life whatsoever, not even the hardiest. Avalanches thundering across land that had been farmed a hundred years and more.

Joe was all a part of that—he had to admit it—but a man had to eat, and these days if he was going to live in the Creeks, he’d have to work in the mine. There was just no other way.

Joe’d spent some time in Cincinnati as a welder, making good money, but he hadn’t lasted a year in the city. He still had a wife and daughter up there somewhere, who wouldn’t leave. But he didn’t fit in; few of the people from Appalachia in the big cities did, and they ended up in their own “hillbilly ghettos.” At least in the Creeks he knew everyone, knew everything that was going on. That gave him a feeling of some control. In the city a man didn’t control anything. And he didn’t even understand his next door neighbor.

Once they knew you were a newcomer in the city, they seemed to think you were out to breathe their air. And the only way to see more than a hundred feet ahead of you was to look straight up. You didn’t get a chance to build anything in the city, to make anything. And everything there already had a name. You could walk miles around the Big Andy and not find anything with a name.

Couldn’t keep pigs or a cow in the city; most times you couldn’t even have a cat. You got buried under cement.

So you came home to these hills that your great grandfathers sold right from under you for fifty cents an acre, to the mine owners’ lawyers with their fancy contracts and their “long deeds,” and then you went and sold yourself to the children of those mine owners. You got black lung and hoar cough, but at least you died where your daddy died.

It made Joe angry. It made most of the people Joe had ever known angry as spit, but it was the kind of angry you learned not to do anything about. You buried it when you buried that rich topsoil under tons of rock with the dozer blade. And it made you just a little crazy. Made you look as old and scarred as the land itself.

Stripping was a simple process, really. It was possible for a very few men with the right equipment—and without all the hazards usually accompanying tunnel mining—to reduce prime forest and farm land to bare rock in a relatively short time. The speed of it was scary sometimes: you wouldn’t have thought all that destruction could happen that easily.

Some PR person for one of the coal companies had come up with a pretty clever plan for explaining away the ugliness of it sometime back in the seventies. He thought the devastated areas would be of interest to tourists one day; the coal companies could provide guided tours. It had been a big joke among the locals as to whose devastated area was worth most as a tourist attraction.

~ * ~

Mr. Emmanuel had to admit that Joe was a pretty good worker. Watching him down there on the dozer, it looked as if the man were actually attacking the ground in frustration and rage. Whoever said mountain people were natural conservationists didn’t know what he was talking about.

He still had that feeling of being watched. And once… a shadow… like a bear? He wasn’t sure. Could have been a man. He was just getting paranoid, like everybody else.

He wondered about what the Parkeys had said about that Reed Taylor fellow. A man like that—his entire family wiped out by the flood—might hold a grudge against Nole coal. He was young, rash… he might have revenge in mind.

Mr. Emmanuel tried to remember exactly what Reed Taylor looked like. Dark black hair… it was all he could remember. Why couldn’t he remember any more?

He looked around at the workers on the embankment, down in the cut, on the other slopes. They all wore hard hats. He couldn’t tell their hair color.

~ * ~

As Joe drove up the cut, he noted how much the area was beginning to resemble some giant washboard, each cut backed by a small ridge of waste material.

At the crest of the cut, just like the cut a highway made in the side of a mountain, there was a ridge with a few trees on it, and a razorback of exposed rock. Joe knew that that grassy area around the trees was thriving with all kinds of life; he was terribly aware of that every day he began work, and his first task every morning on the job was to put those kinds of thoughts out of his mind.

He dropped the blade into the edge of the soil, moving forward and skinning the topsoil off the layer of clay beneath. The bloom came up almost immediately—small pieces of carbon flaked off the coal vein far beneath. It was a rich area.

As the blade cut deeper, the topsoil peeled off in waves, like giant plow furrows, but Joe wasn’t planting this morning. As he approached one of the old trees, he could see the branches trembling, then the tight net of roots began pulling from the ground, then the whole tree began to topple, branches breaking, roots groaning against the strain.

Every so often he would push the mass of debris and uprooted trees over the side of the mountain, where it joined a steadily growing pile of refuse below.

The dozer blade was like a knife, cutting through everything. Small animals cascaded off both sides of the blade track; grapevines and ferns and all manner of vegetation were torn out of the ground and crushed.

~ * ~

A couple of days ago Doris Parkey had made suggestive remarks to Mr. Emmanuel. At least he thought they were suggestive. The woman might be so ignorant and crazy she didn’t really know what she was saying.

He wondered if he could make love to such a woman. Anything was possible, he supposed. But she had a large, strong husband. A beast of a man… hardly human, really. And Mr. Emmanuel didn’t want to risk a physical confrontation.

But what was he thinking of? He didn’t want the Parkey woman… he couldn’t.

Something moved in the brush and loose gravel behind him. But when he turned… he could see nothing.

~ * ~

Scraping away and scraping away at all that awful aliveness in the Big Andy. That wrinkled maze of ridges. Like skinning some creature alive. Sometimes Joe had this nightmare that after scraping away at Big Andy’s massive body for years they’d finally reach his insides… reach something. He didn’t think he wanted to be there when it happened. There were lots of places on the Big Andy he’d never been, woods so thick and entangled they were almost impassable. It agitated him just to think about running a dozer into those areas… no telling what might get turned up.

A squirrel dropped from a moving wave of earth and was pulled under the dozer. Joe gritted his teeth and plowed on.

Toadstools, moss, dandelions, rusted farm tools, somebody’s spectacles, a fox skeleton, churned under by the giant blade. Joe gritted his teeth and plowed on.

Once he was finished with the bench there’d be a “high-wall” of some sixty feet straight up. They’d have to detonate to get it down to size. Occasionally there’d be one tree left, a patch of grass. Most of the time that seemed worse than not having anything left at all. Joe tried to be extra clean about it, and not leave anything.

~ * ~

Someone was definitely here who did not belong. Mr. Emmanuel scanned the ravaged hillsides nervously. A moment before he’d caught a glimpse of a shadow at the edge of the woods where Joe Manors was stripping. But he hadn’t quite been able to make it out. Dark hair? Or bigger than a man… an animal? He couldn’t be sure, he just couldn’t be sure.

~ * ~

Joe watched, mesmerized, as the dozer blade cut through a nest of field mice, a few rotted logs, rich humus containing a variety of small creatures. The earth groaned and the machine seemed to be groaning back.

Joe felt the blade snag on something, gave the dozer more power, and was satisfied despite himself to see the mound of earth, rock, and vegetation he was attacking break into three pieces. Brush began tumbling off the ledge above him. He looked up to see the large brown head with dark eyes resting on top a moving ridge of earth, moving toward him…

The bear… he cried out and tried to pull the dozer loose of the mound. But the machine’s movements only caused further decay of the embankment—the head was coming closer, looming. And suddenly it fell through the open cab and was in the dozer with him.

Joe looked down cautiously. It was Buck’s head—Charlie’s old dog—the flies at it thick and heavy.

Chapter 16

The house was several miles up the hollow, about as far as you could go without climbing, and actually only a short distance from the ruins of the old waste dam. It had been the first lot hit by the wall of water and mud, and so had actually suffered less damage than some of those homes downstream where the flood had had time to build up speed and broaden out into a wide front.

The road was no longer where Reed remembered it; the rampaging waters had washed most of it out, and the new road had been cut higher up the hillside, completely bypassing the old place. Reed had to park his uncle’s ancient pickup back on a bend in the new road and clamber down the loose embankment.

He stumbled over an old cast-iron newel post with a date—1902. He supposed that was from the Little Simpson Bridge, washed out at the high-water mark. There were more sections of the bridge farther down the embankment, buried almost completely. He could see where the pins connected up the beams, the bridge having been erected back before they had rivets, when they used square nuts instead of hexagonal.

An old wheel Reed recognized from the cable-run oil-pumping operation back near where the old dam used to be was lying on its side, with weeds growing out of the empty hub. The rotting boards must have come from the powerhouse in the rear.

The woods had gone wild, uncut and untraveled, and it was about a half hour before he began finding sections of the old gravel roadbed, another half hour before he’d cut through enough brush to get his first look at what had been their front yard.

He really hadn’t expected to feel anything, but with all that growth, and the way the lines of the hollow had changed, it was like looking at ruins a hundred years old.

As a boy he’d often had the fantasy that his parents weren’t his real parents, that actually he was self-created, born whole out of nothing. How could he possibly have come from this? Pioneers might have lived here, Indians, prehistoric natives. But never any family of his.

He felt a little too hot, and pulled his wide-brimmed hat down over his eyes. He seemed more sensitive to the sun than ever before. He fiddled with the brim nervously.

He was almost into the old clearing itself before he finally saw the house. It had been swept to the side by the flood, knocked off its foundations, and it leaned into the hillside like a damp and empty box, its first floor filled with earth almost to the line of the second story. Otherwise it seemed to be basically intact, which added to Reed’s sense of the impossible.

“Us Taylors are good builders, son, build ‘em to last…”

In the early morning light the hollow south of the old Taylor homeplace seemed like moonscape, the vegetation almost ending where the old creek bed had been, and much of the small valley bottom covered with miscellaneous debris. There’d been so much mine waste in the water the night of the flood—settling down to fill the channel after the waters had receded—that the stream bed had pretty much been ruined for any form of life. Reed could tell where the old springhouse had stood from a fragment of limestone wall. Otherwise he’d never have guessed; the ground slope there had changed drastically with the several additional tons of mud, stone, and silt. Small saplings had begun to grow back where large trees had washed away. It was the same as it had always been: the great forest coming back by means of its extensive restorative powers, although it was beginning to look as if these restorative powers had their limits—the world was no longer such a hospitable place for trees.

It was angry-looking country. He’d read that rage remained forever in a place that had once nurtured it. “The spirit of the place.” With the twisted trees, the broken rock, the demolished structures, Reed could see how someone could believe such a theory. This was a raging place.

When he thought of this homeland of his, he thought of trees, a greater variety here than anywhere else in the country. Some straight, some twisted grotesquely by inhuman force. Remnants of the great forest.

Unlike the Indians, who gathered branches for firewood, the first white settlers girdled the trees to clear the land. And the great forest began to dwindle. As they would everywhere they went, the settlers used up the land to the point where they couldn’t grow enough food. The great forest began creeping back, making fast headway into its old environment, filling the clearings and fallow fields, before stripping began.

That was the turning point, Reed supposed. The great forest had finally faced something it could not overcome.

A few hundred yards down from the old springhouse foundations, diagonally across the valley where the old stream had turned, was a high, limestone cliff wall. He could make out faint lines across its surface where the onrushing water had struck, scraped trees and other debris brushlike down its length, then lingered before finally receding through narrow underground tunnels into another branch of the creeks. Reed had known about the tunnels for years; you could see the edge of them sometimes when the creek level was low. His mother had warned him against swimming into them, and he’d always obeyed. Not because he was naturally obedient, but because the tunnels scared him. They appeared so black beneath the brilliant surface he sometimes imagined that they were just painted on, and he always wondered what terrible creatures might live there.

Anything washed out of his old home might be scattered between the house, the springhouse wall, and the cliff.

Reed thought at first there was a man crawling up around the top of the cliff. But the figure was too big, too dark to be a man. He squinted: the figure was going back into the trees at the top. He couldn’t quite make it out, but he knew it was some kind of large animal, perhaps a moose. Or a bear. It was cold down in the hollow, he suddenly realized; fall was coming on. He should have brought a warmer jacket.

He was much calmer than he’d expected to be about returning to this place of his childhood. This bad place, like the bad places he’d read about in books: haunted castles, cursed sections of land, bewitched streams. He knew that good things had happened here, too; there had been happy times, but it was hard to remember them specifically. It was the beatings, the rages, that he remembered.

Stop it. Stop it. His parents had died here. His sister. His chest seemed filled with water pushing on his ribs.

Much of the land here was unrecognizable; the flood had completely changed the contours of the valley floor. And the house was so weathered that it looked like a different house. The old homesite appeared disturbingly like a landscape transformed by a bad dream—vaguely similar to its model, and yet frighteningly different at the same time. It was as if the flood were a bad dream—and now he was seeing the results of its transformations.

“Things change, boy!” His father had shouted that more than once, angry at Reed when he was sad because an animal had died, or when he had been disappointed. His father said it after breaking a promise. He said it when times were hard. His father put more passion into that one short sentence than Reed had heard him put into anything. As if the phrase summed up all of his father’s philosophy about things.

He once saw his father, drunk, fighting someone up in the woods behind their house. Calling the man “daddy,” but Reed hadn’t been able to see who it was. And at that point Reed’s grandfather had been dead five years.

Reed often wondered what his father had been like as a child, if he had changed drastically over the years, or if the man’s habits and disposition merely set with age. Sometimes, when he spoke—however briefly—about his own parents, he did so with such a wistful note in his voice it had caught Reed’s full attention. He often wondered about his grandparents, but his father never said anything very specific about them.

His grandfather had died when Reed was just a boy. A stony-faced man, who never talked. Story was he’d been married at least three times. The story also said that he might have murdered his first two wives. It had been hard for Reed to picture that small, wrinkled old man as a murderer. Especially a young one. It was hard to picture him caring that much.

What was his father afraid of? What made him so angry? Reed knew then he was going to have to have a long talk with his Uncle Ben.

~ * ~

He had decided back in Denver to handle the excavation of his old homeplace just as he would any other archaeological dig—marking off a grid of squares and taking precise measurements, making careful notes as to the exact position of every relic he found. That always enabled him to create some sort of visualization of the original state of the site, let him know something about the way the people lived. In this case, it might let him know what his family had been doing the night they all died.

He would recreate the flood.

~ * ~

Audra was serving coffee to Charlie Simpson and Bill Kramer when Jake burst in, slamming the door back against the wall so hard she could hear the hinges creak and the wood split.

“Dammit, Charlie! We gotta do something about this Reed Taylor!”

“Now, why is that?” Charlie looked over his coffee cup at her brother-in-law, as calm as she’d ever seen him.

“He was starin’ in at my wife last night, and now he’s up that hollow messin’ round his daddy’s place.”

“Well, Jake, I find it real hard to believe he’d be lookin’ in on Doris…” Audra blushed, almost grinning at the offhand way Charlie said it. “…and he does have a right to go up to that farm, and any of the land around it. It’s his now, you know.”

“Why’s all this stuff happenin’ just as he decides to come back to the Creeks? Tell me that?”

“Why’s that bear down here where there ain’t been bears in ages? I don’t know, Jake. Now just let me finish my coffee in peace.”

Jake spat on the floor. Audra opened her mouth to protest when he opened up the cash drawer, pulled out some bills, and started to leave. At the last minute he turned around.

“I’m auditing you tomorrow night, Audra. Make sure it’s all in order for me.”

Audra nodded, thinking maybe she should get to know Reed Taylor. Anybody Jake took such a dislike to couldn’t be half-bad.

~ * ~

Out of his pack Reed pulled compass and level, twenty-six two-foot stakes, tape measure, camera, short-handled hoe, Celluloid-acetone solution, a pointed shovel he’d bought at Charlie Simpson’s store, small brushes and picks, and several sizes of trowels. He spent a couple of hours staking out a baseline aligned north/south that ran from the springhouse foundations to the corner of the hollow where the house had been pushed by the flood waters, the line passing through the old location of the house. Working from the baseline east and west, he created perfect six-foot squares using the rest of his stakes.

Then he began a trench along the baseline, hoping that would give him some indication as to the depth of mud and debris covering the original ground horizon here. Happily, the soil was still loose, the digging relatively easy.

Reed knew he’d never been particularly concerned about the plight of the Appalachians when he’d left home. He’d been young at the time, and anxious to make a new life for himself. He didn’t even want to think about these hills. He had spent so much energy divorcing himself from this area of the country and its ways that it was difficult to change directions. And he was beginning to feel guilty about that.

What the mining companies were doing was wrong. The long deeds that took all the mineral rights beneath a piece of property for mere pennies—there was no justifying them. Then the companies could completely undermine the property, let the house and farmlands slide down the hill, and there was nothing the landowner could do. The birthrights for generations had been sold right from under the Appalachians’ feet.

And lives. The lives of entire families.

Reed suddenly felt cold. He was compelled to look around him. The shadows seemed suddenly darker somehow, and the black area beneath one large tree appeared to shift slightly to the right. To the left. A breathing there, as if the darkness had suddenly exhaled.

Two eyes opened in the blackness. He imagined he could smell dead meat in the animal’s mouth. He had never felt so self-conscious, so watched.

Reed suddenly knew the animal would not leave him alone, and knew a despair he had not known since childhood.

~ * ~

Shadows were growing long. Reed stared at the point where he had thought the bear to be. But nothing was there. Perhaps he had imagined it… most likely he had imagined it.

With the ground divided into squares, all that was left here was to make a surface sweep through the area, picking up and cataloging material that was easily retrieved. Much of it wouldn’t have belonged to his family anyway—it had been swept down from farther up the valley. He wanted to get it all out of the way so he could begin the real work in the morning.

Half-submerged, water-marked debris littered the surface of hard red clay around the old streambed. Reed went from piece to piece, prodding the objects with a stick, pushing them out of the dirt, turning them over. He made a list of everything he found, then stacked the objects into piles for sorting. A rusted can. Gray board. White fence. Nondescript cloth. A boy’s shoe—he couldn’t tell if it had been his or not. A coat hanger. Part of his momma’s white china teakettle, the spout and one side gone. A twisted bucket. Rifle barrel. His grandfather’s mantel clock, the wood rotted away, the workings bent as if a fist had entered. Two Civil War coins. Six arrowheads. A musket ball. Part of an Indian pipe. The frames of his father’s glasses.

Starting at the south wall of the house, he began systematically sweeping the surface of each square, listing objects, descriptions, locations, and jotting down any associations that seemed pertinent.

An old mason jar, a dried-out green substance filling the bottom. When his mother canned she had always worn that yellow smock Grandma had given her. One year she had been burned down one side of her neck; she wore high collars after that. His father couldn’t tell her he was sorry it happened, so he had made fun of her stupidity instead.

Decaying horse harness near the springhouse wall. Rusted hedge shears under two old boards. Pieces of a chicken’s skeleton. Two ladder rungs. The oven door with a large dent in the center, found under part of a roof beam. His father had gotten drunk on Reed’s fourteenth birthday, and when he thought Reed was talking back (Reed hadn’t said a word to his father all night), he jumped Reed, straddling him on the kitchen floor, and beat his head against Momma’s oven. Headless hobbyhorse, a gash in one side. His baby sister played with it for hours on the back porch.

A lizard worked its way out from between stones, its crest such a vivid red Reed wondered if he were hallucinating.

Assorted beads and brass fittings. Doorknob. Odd electrical wiring. Drawer handle. Three-inch piece of picture frame. Shapeless steel. Bag full of plaster dust. A baby’s… no, a calf’s broken skull. His hands trembled as he brushed it off.

He felt strangely uncomfortable when he had to dig a little in the dirt to get a piece completely out. The wind rose, and it was as if that wind were also rising inside himself. Something was in the woods, but he knew he had no chance of discovering it.

He continued with his work. Eyes beginning to water, cold coming back. He was a mess. He was feeling guilty now, as if he were grave robbing.

Chapter 17

Reed moved out of Inez’s boarding house and into his uncle’s home that first day of the excavations. He was hesitant at first, thinking that might be much too soon. He wasn’t sure he was ready to be deluged by family and the accompanying memories so quickly, especially when he was digging into those same memories at the old homesite. But Ben Taylor was a hard man to turn down. And besides, Reed found his uncle’s eagerness to accept him back into the bosom of family and neighbors very appealing.

“Now we don’t want you lifting a finger, Reed. This is your time to relax.” His Aunt Martha busied herself with cooking as she talked to him, moving plates and pans with such skill it seemed like a circus act. Her gray hair was neatly kept, except for one long strand that kept coming loose, hanging down between her eyes. She would periodically scratch at the irritant by raising her eyebrows, then brush it away with the back of her hand. Suddenly she pulled open a drawer, brought out a pair of scissors, and snipped the offending hair. Without missing a beat she had the scissors back in the drawer and continued with her work. “We want you to feel at home here. This here’s where you belong.”

Reed didn’t know why, but her statement made him profoundly uncomfortable.

The kids ran in and out of the room, sometimes dragging playmates in with them—the Wilsons, the Norrises, Martha trying to hush them. It gave Reed a warm, bittersweet feeling.

“Ben says he’s going to take you down to the new house later.”

“Yes, he is.”

She looked at him briefly and smiled. “He doesn’t show that place to just anybody. You know, that man really loves you, Reed.”

“I know…” and it made him nervous to think about it.

Tom Schmidt arrived just before dinner. Mr. Schmidt had done odd jobs for Reed’s father and uncle a decade or so before the flood, before he’d saved enough money to get a small place of his own. Reed’s uncle invited the man to stay, and he ended up sitting next to Reed during the meal. He seemed perpetually dirty—oil and coal stains on his britches and his white hair yellowed with dirt and grease. And he smelled—not unpleasantly, but strongly enough that it was distracting. He remembered Reed only by name.

“You were Alec Taylor’s second son; I remember, the first boy got killed in that green pickup.”

“No, I was the only son.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember. And you ran the mill in Barclay, gave me good rates cause I’d worked for yer daddy.”

“No, I went away to school, never had a regular job around here.”

“That’s right! That’s right!”

Ben Taylor had rebuilt their home after the flood had leveled the old one. A freak situation, that: although the flood waters had never reached the town itself, the mud embankments were loosened by the heavy rains. One had collapsed above the house and virtually flattened it. In rebuilding the place, he had added three rooms. Reed’s uncle had always taken pride in his skills as a carpenter. Mr. Schmidt had been impressed by that.

“Did it all by himself, boy. I watched him. Took six months, workin’ daybreak till two hours after dark.”

“Now, Tom,” Ben Taylor said, smiling proudly.

“Well, hell; you worked hard, Ben. I tell you, Reed. He leveled the ground, redug the root cellar, straightened out the old nails cause he didn’t have much money… did it all. Lots of us watched.”

The house was interestingly, if not aesthetically, put together. Ben had had no money for new lumber—and Amos Nickles wasn’t extending credit then—so he had made do with what scrap was lying around after the flood. Not a right angle in the place, maybe only a dozen full-length boards, the rest being patched-together half and quarter pieces.

Mr. Schmidt leaned over toward Reed, who pulled away from the onslaught of the man’s unusual breath. “I felt real sorry about your family, son… real tragedy for the entire community.” Schmidt took another bite out of his chicken leg. “Hear you’re diggin’ up around the old place?”

“Yes. I’d… like to see what’s left.”

“Well, sure is your right, sure is. Know you won’t get nothing out of that coal company, nosir. They got the power round here for sure. First they leave the Simpson Creeks all yellow and red with that mine acid, then them gob piles that gonna burn and smoke ‘till Gabriel blows his horn, then they kill off all the old men with their black lung, then top it all off by killin’ half the valley with that damn flood.” He paused and looked at Martha Taylor sitting shyly at one end of the table. “Damn dam,” he said, and chuckled. She smiled and looked down at her hands. “You sure have had your share of the troubles,” he continued. “Haven’t you, son?” He turned and looked at Reed straight in the eyes. “Wouldn’t want to see nothing else happen to you, son, nosir. Now you watch out for that bear.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Now, I’ve seen that young brother o’ yours hangin’ round those woods… you tell him it ain’t safe, y’hear?”

“But I’ve no…”

“Boy looks something like you. Maybe somebody else’s boy… don’t know. Never saw him before. Seen him a hunderd times up that woody holler.”

~ * ~

After dinner that night Reed and his uncle went for a walk in the woods. Reed hadn’t walked that much in the city. The moon was full, giving a silvery pallor to the trees and polishing the limestone outcroppings and shallow pools to a mirrorlike finish. Ben had said he was going to show him the new house—”new” even though his uncle said he hadn’t done any work on it in about six years.

“Our dream house, mine and Martha’s.”

Ben had worked on the house in the little hollow behind his property a long time—almost ten years. It was to be their own special place, his and Martha’s, a place where they could live in the summers and after they retired. They’d both worked on it every chance they got, adding rooms, laying down tile, building bookshelves and furniture. And there was a little creek, a small branch of the Simpson, running right through the front yard.

They had loved it; it had been one of the reasons they decided to build where they did. But it had turned into their downfall. Reed stared at the house in disbelief.

“The Nole Company began stripping the mountain above here when Martha and I were almost finished with the building. I did everything I knew to try to stop them. But they wouldn’t even compromise. When I told them what stripping would do to the property, they just laughed.

“Well, at first it looked like it wasn’t going to affect us much—it was too far away. But then those Nole workers started doing what they always do in stripping operations—they bulldozed the excess soil, the overburden, over the side of the mountain, where it drifted down into the little creek here.”

Reed looked. The creek was just a trickle of water now; silt had filled in most of it.

“The creek couldn’t carry that much silt and it overflowed its banks. Again and again and again. I begged them, then I threatened them. Nothing worked.

“Our dream house sat in the damp year-round.”

Ben took Reed inside. Walls and floors and posts and old furniture were mildewed. “The mildew just crept right across these planks like a disease.” Like a plague, Reed thought. “Expensive planks, too. I hand chose ‘em. The linoleum buckled, tiles popped loose, doors and windows swole up ‘till they couldn’t be opened. New carpet rotted right on the floor.”

As his uncle described these effects, Reed confirmed them with his own observations. Twisted tile and warped wood. Doorways seemed vaguely askew when he walked through them. The floors slightly drunken. The smell of decay. The dampness seemed to have brought out all the corruption latent in the building materials. All the surfaces were dull, the shadows in the rooms like stains and somehow… soiled.

The new house sat there and, even as they watched it, creaked as moisture worked its way through the wood, the structure falling apart a little more each year. Each day, each moment, Reed thought, as he imagined he could see the walls falling around him.

This house, he imagined, must have had a much different feel to it than the house he had grown up in, the house his stern grandfather had built and his father had added on to. He could see that even beneath the distorting effects of the dampness. The living room was an open, living place. There was a swing for two on the porch. The kitchen had lots of room for storage and a table for eating right next to the cook. There were nice guest rooms. The bedroom had lots of shelves for books and for displaying memories. And the bed there was for two people who wanted to be close during their dreaming.

And suddenly, staring at warped floors and buckled woodwork, Reed saw a house full of water, human figures floating in it like rotting driftwood.

“You should have done something, Uncle. You should have sued,” Reed said quietly.

“There was no point, son. They’ve got the power. The courts say that’s their right.”

“But still… weren’t you angry?”

“Of course I was angry. Damn angry. But I was powerless… and that made me sadder than it made me angry, I guess. I was always like your father a little in that respect, Reed. It was hard to show my anger. Now your dad could rage sometimes, really go crazy. But only sometimes; there was a lot more rage where that came from. And he could never get it all out.” Ben looked off into the woods with a puzzled expression, as if distracted by something there. “Guess that must seem a funny way to look at it, from your viewpoint. Guess it must have seemed he was angry all the time.”

“Yes… it sure did.” Reed looked out toward the woods in the same direction his uncle had been looking, although he didn’t know what he should be looking for. “What was my father like… as a boy?”

“Unhappy,” his uncle said, then paused for a long time. “Your granddad was a hard man sometimes, especially where brother Alec was concerned.”

“He doesn’t look like a very warm person in his pictures.”

Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Only passion I ever saw him show was when he was angry. And you never could tell what was going to make him angry; he was a changeable man.”

Reed saw that his uncle was staring off into the woods again.

“One time your dad broke a jar of pickles; he was in a hurry climbing out of the root cellar with it.” He frowned, hesitated. “Daddy locked him in that root cellar a good twenty-four hours. Alec screamed that the rats were coming after him, that there were dark things down there that were going to get him, but our daddy paid no mind, and slapped Momma when she tried to sneak out and let Alec go.”

The wind was swaying the trees at the edge of the wood. The water-logged house creaked loudly in the cold breeze. Reed looked away from his uncle.

“Your daddy never acted much like a child again after that,” Ben said. “He hated our father then, simple as that. Then years later, after your granddad died…” He stopped, and they both listened to the wind inside Ben’s dream house, trapped in there and making sounds like a small, desperate animal. “If you remember, your dad didn’t go to the funeral. What you didn’t know… well, we all hushed it up pretty well I guess.” He sighed, “…the preacher caught Alec out in the graveyard. He’d shattered the stone into a hundred pieces with a hammer… and was digging into the grave… snapping and yowling like some animal…”

Something fell inside the dreamhouse. Dream of drowning house, Reed thought. The screen door swung open and clattered against the porch wall.

“…I tell you, Reed. Sometimes I wake up at night hearing your dad… snarling and yapping like that… like some dog that’s been abandoned out in the woods a few years.

“What if they hadn’t stopped him in time?”

Then Reed heard the low growl beneath the wind… the popping lips. He turned around as if under water. His uncle was turning in slow motion, returning to the darker shadows beyond. Turning. As if he too were drowning, dancing a death dance beneath the flood.

Chapter 18

He had to go through the operator in Four Corners to make the long distance call to Denver. He’d waited a long time to call; he probably should have called Carol the first night he was in, let her know he had arrived safely. That’s what he would have done a few years ago, and she would have expected it. The first few years they were married they both had had an almost desperate need to touch base after they’d been separated a number of hours, in order to head off fantasies of accidents and murder.

But the last few years they’d gone completely the other way—sometimes they didn’t call each other even when they knew the average person would. It was one way in which they both asserted a new independence, albeit an immature one. Reed had been the worse offender—he’d badly scared Carol a couple of times, and she had been too stubborn, too independent to show it.

Reed waited anxiously as the woman in Four Corners tried to make the connection; the static on the line was so bad tonight he could hardly hear her. He was self-consciously aware of Uncle Ben in the other room, keeping his kids quiet and acting as if this were the most important telephone call that had ever been made, surpassing even that of Bell’s first phone conversation.

“Be just a minute, Reed.” The static popped and crackled under her voice, and she was so incredibly old, so hoarse anyway, Reed thought her undistorted voice must not be much different. Eloise… could that be Eloise? It seemed impossible, but the voice and the manner seemed the same… asking for your first name, then calling you by it, even chatting with you before the other party came on the line. He supposed a lot of rural telephone operators were the same way, but that voice…

“Reed… Reed…” Static filled his name.

“Carol?”

“Just be a minute now, Reed. Say hello to your Uncle Ben for me…”

Eloise had been old when he was a boy. She must be seventy-five, eighty now. There was a loud popping in the receiver and Reed pulled his head away in pain. He wouldn’t be calling Carol very often; the phone system in the county was still impossible.

But that was an excuse. He didn’t want to call Carol. He was afraid if he talked to Carol too often he wouldn’t be able to stick to his decision to stay in the Creeks until he’d solved this thing. Talking to Uncle Ben tonight, seeing the dream house, had started a crack in that resolve. It had made him think of his own house, his particular neighborhood in Denver, where the streets were shaded, all the buildings old, and the people who lived there basically friendly.

Uncle Ben’s dream house… what a travesty. The boards virtually oozed moisture. Death and decay came out of the very ground here—there was just no escaping it. By comparison home life in Denver seemed so normal, so satisfying.

“Reed… Reed…” Eloise? Carol? “Reed, this is Carol. How are you?”

There were tears in his eyes; he couldn’t answer.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah… sure, I’m fine. How are you?”

Static obliterated her answer.

“Carol? Carol, please… I can’t hear you.” He tried to keep the desperation out of his voice; he knew he wasn’t succeeding.

“I’m here, Reed. I miss you.”

He could barely hear her. “I miss you, too.”

“How’s Michael? Alicia?” The static was getting worse.

“Fine… here…”

“What? Carol… the static…” Damn it, Eloise!

“Have you found out anything?” The static suddenly disappeared. Reed listened intently to her voice. “Will you be out there much longer? I need you home, Reed.”

“I…” Static exploded in his ears. He cried out in pain, dropping the phone. It bounced off the wall; he could hear Carol’s faraway, static-filled voice. He grabbed at the receiver, pulled it quickly to his ear.

Dead air on the other end. Then suddenly, so briefly it might have been an illusion, some distortion of the static… a low crying sound, almost a mewling, such as an animal might make. But Reed felt sure it was a child. Then nothing.

~ * ~

The bear had suddenly gone angry, gone mad… it had happened so quickly he didn’t even have time to puzzle over it. Like when he had been clawing at the old log, and the bees had come, stinging his nose and setting fire to his ears and the softer parts around his eyes. That was the worst time the bear could remember.

But this was worse, far worse. Because the stinging and the fire were inside his head, inside his nose, inside his great tongue and teeth, where he’d never get to them. He clawed at the ground, then at his muzzle, ripping it but not caring, getting some relief from this new outside pain that was easier to manage than his inside pain.

He stopped a moment, suddenly calm despite the raging fire inside, and saw on the edge of his vision the white figure floating into the branches. He turned and charged.

And broke into the brush pile, wood flying everywhere, sharp edges poking him, but they were so far below his awful inside pain he couldn’t think about them. A piece of human cloth hung from a branch. He sniffed at it. Nothing. The human being had not been with it for a very long time.

Something stirred inside him. He did not know why he had attacked the cloth, but there were many things he did now he could not begin to understand. Something stirred inside him. He had thought the cloth a little human being. And one time when he was angry, he had attacked little human beings. Human young. He had this picture inside him. They had made him angry. He had bared his teeth then. He had howled.

As he was baring his teeth now. As he was howling. The pain inside consuming him.

Chapter 19

That night Reed rode into town with his Uncle Ben, going to Charlie Simpson’s store for some beer and conversation. Reed had never pictured himself doing such a thing in his old hometown, but he found himself generally looking forward to it.

As the old truck neared the store, they could see people gathered all around the front, sitting on the edge of the slab or milling in the street. Several men were climbing the side of the building with flashlights, and once the truck was alongside the store, Ben and Reed could see the cause of all the commotion: they were trying to retrieve Hector Pierce from around the chimney.

Jake Parkey saw them from the doorway and yelled drunkenly, “We didn’t even know the old fool could still walk! Said there was a woman with burnin’ hair out there! Can you beat that? Swear old lady Inez’s gonna have to have the old fool locked away!”

Reed and Ben, once determining there was nothing they could do, turned around sadly and drove back to the house. Neither said a word during the trip. Reed couldn’t understand why the news about Hector Pierce had bothered him so much.

He had a terrible feeling he might soon find out.

That night he dreamed about his wife, locked inside a car with their two kids. They were both screaming, beating at the windows for escape. Carol’s hair was on fire.

Then the car became an enormous black bear, gnawing at their remains.

~ * ~

The bear moved quietly through the forest, standing up on its hind legs occasionally and peering through the low-hanging branches. It sniffed the air, and growled deeply.

The bear had an unusual way of carrying its head: high, like a man’s. It sniffed the air again and rocked its head from side to side, as if it were worried, or frightened. It turned and looked behind it, almost as if it thought it were being watched by something else, some other animal, or man. A thing that was man and not man.

It roared. It squinted, as if it too were watching someone. Someone it could not really see, except inside itself.

The eyes it could not see were like a man’s.

~ * ~

“You can’t just leave me alone, Jake!” Doris Parkey clutched at her husband’s patched jacket, careful to avoid his hands and avoid his stinking breath.

“Get away, woman! I got things to do!” Jake lunged toward the door, but Doris had him in a clawlike grip and he could stagger only a few steps. His wife had always seemed to have the strength of ten men when she was really scared. It frightened Jake; it seemed unnatural. The woman had the body of a scarecrow; she had no business frightening him like that. “Leggo me, goddammit!” Then he slapped her.

She let go instantly, rubbing at her face as if to wipe the red away. “There’s things out there, Jake. Bad things! Don’t let me be by myself tonight! You owe it to me. I’m your wife, ain’t I?”

She infuriated him. She sounded like a damned little kid. He made a motion as if to slap her again, but she scrambled out of his way, standing in the corner of the living room trembling, her eyes blurred beneath the tears.

“Damn…” he muttered, then jerked open the door and stalked out.

“I hope you die, Jake Parkey,” she said quietly, tearfully, then raising her voice to scream at the door, “I hope you die!”

Doris pressed herself against the wall trying to stop the trembling. But she didn’t think it was going to help.

For there was scratching on the other side of the wall. Something moving. Where the slab butted up against her house.

~ * ~

Her hair was burning.

She awakened in the hollow cavity under the slab, with the damp and the rats and the bugs and the snakes, and she was frightened until she remembered what had happened to her, what she had become. Her hair was burning.

She could not remember what her name had been, and that bothered her.

She sifted through the debris inside the slab, the things that had fallen down the cracks and holes over the years, and picked up the dusty things. Pretty things. Bottles and silver spoons and bits of lace and carvings and other things with prettiness under the grime, with brightness under the dust. She remembered that such things had been important to her at one time… when she had been something else.

She heard voices near her, and moved closer to them. One was female, as she had been. She felt something odd inside herself.

A piece of shiny stuff was propped up in the corner. She looked into it. Her hair was beautiful. It glowed.

~ * ~

The little girl had always liked bright things, shiny things. Things to play with. So she found herself floating toward the bright lights, moving through the dark the same way she vaguely remembered moving through the water: her mouth open, her limbs bobbing up and down, her pale dress and pale flesh melting into the dark liquid…

She remembered being in and near this place many times, a long time ago. Before the waters came.

Where was her mommy? She wanted her, she thought… the want was somewhere deep inside herself. Not quite hers. She saw the mother inside herself… the mother’s beautiful red hair. Daddy had always liked that red hair. He’d say it was the only reason he’d married mommy and then he’d laugh. She’d never liked that joke about mommy; she didn’t think it was very funny.

She let herself float over the brush, her feet dangling, but not touching the ground. The darkness moved over her like a coat, but she wasn’t afraid. She hadn’t been afraid of the dark since the Creeks jumped over their house. The dark made her all warm inside.

~ * ~

Her hair was burning.

She slipped out of the slab and let her beautiful, glowing hair lead her down the street. Her hair had become like a living thing, the most alive thing on her body, so she let it tell her what to do. It was more woman than she had ever been.

She floated up to the window and let her burning hair fill the glass. She let the woman see her. She smiled, even when the woman began screaming.

Then she let the beautiful hair lead her inside.

~ * ~

He watched the man and the younger man go inside the house. He felt rage, rage burning up from his feet to his head. He was angry at these two, especially the younger one. He wanted to come to them, lay his teeth on their pale throats, and taste copper. He wanted to do that to all the males of the town, the ugly, evil males. He wanted to rage and tear, gnash their dead bodies to bloody threads.

He was glad the bear and the burning woman, the dead little floating girl were not around just then. They, too, angered him. He didn’t want them around. They made him afraid. He would have to do something about them… soon.

~ * ~

They had Hector Pierce back in his bed in Inez’s rooming house once again. Inez had dismissed them all, angry with them for having seen a member of her family like this, and even angrier with herself for feeling that way. She had grown ashamed of her brother. Sometimes, she discovered, she hated him.

Now he was motioning her closer, his eyes rolling, lips smacking like some animal. He obviously wanted to tell her something, but she didn’t want to be near him.

He smacked his lips and rolled his eyes… popped his mouth and blinked and blinked… beckoning her with a spastic hand, a hand flapping like a beached fish…

Get it over with, she thought, get it over with… and bent over him, her left ear over his popping, smacking mouth.

“Part of him… stayed behind,” Hector whispered hoarsely. Inez drew back. She had no idea what he was talking about, but it frightened her.

“Part of him… he’s been here… all these years…” Hector said, grinning spastically, insanely. “Boy shoulda… stayed and… drowned!”

Chapter 20

Doris pushed herself back into the corner, pushed back and back until she could feel both walls coming together in her skin, the corner becoming part of her spine, hurting, hurting, but at least she didn’t have to know what she was seeing here, passing through her window, floating through her window like it wasn’t even there, all blazing like a fire ball… but it was a woman, wasn’t it? The most beautiful woman Doris Parkey had ever seen. She even wanted to touch her, she was so beautiful, although she was terrified, have that beauty against her skin, but that was wrong… but oh, so beautiful it hurt your eyes!

Doris knew this woman, she was sure! Something about the face… she had known this woman at one time, had seen her shopping… years ago… had talked to her, but the woman was long gone now, long gone. Moved away…

…or dead.

She wasn’t sure, she wasn’t sure… oh, how could she be sure?

The woman came closer, slipping across the carpet and not even bothering it none… and Doris wanted to stay and talk, she really did. She wanted to be sociable and show this pretty lady just how sociable she could be even living in such a hick town, but Doris was afraid of fire… see… and this woman’s hair was all in flames.

Doris opened her mouth wide, somewhere between a laugh and a scream, and felt her body take her through the doorway and out into the night.

She must have turned out in the street, reversed herself and run back past the house, past the Taylors and up the hill, heading off the left side of the embankment there, because before she knew it she was in the woods. And there was no one there, not even any sounds. And the glow was bobbing in and out of the darkened trees behind her, like a child skipping and dancing with ajar full of fireflies in the dark. Just like Doris had done herself when she was a child. Just like Doris had done a long time ago.

This woman wanted something from Doris… what did she want?

Doris started to run, but didn’t want to take her eyes off the glow, no telling what might happen to her if she took her eyes off the glow, so she kept turning her head, turning her head. And she fell on her back. Legs spread. Dazed.

And looked up at the woman with her head on fire. Beautiful. Staring down at her.

Doris felt the vague itchiness, the anxiety running down the inside of her legs. And thought of Mr. Emmanuel, strange little dapper man, whom she had thought and thought about since he had first come to live in her house. After years living with that rough, smelly man who drank all the time and didn’t care what bothered her, didn’t care about what she needed. Doris hadn’t felt much like a woman in years…

She felt the tension in her legs, and lower belly, and thought of him. And saw the woman with burning hair watching her, rubbing her own pale legs.

It was then Doris knew what the flaming lady wanted from her. They were very much alike, the two of them.

Doris began to feel the fire in her lower legs.

~ * ~

When Reed arrived at the old homeplace the next morning, he discovered he felt a bit easier about what he was trying to do. The clearing looked like the site of any typical archaeological dig now, similar to any number he had been on over the years. The grid of stakes, the clean-swept dirt, naked of weeds, the layered excavations. He could almost forget that he had once lived here, that his parents and little sister were living here when they died.

He tried to tell himself it was a job, a scientific project. Nothing more. He felt better, physically better, just thinking that way.

He had decided on a vertical-face excavation method for the site, since the various features were probably pretty well jumbled together. If he discovered anything of interest, he would stop and concentrate on exposing that single feature.

In the first square he had to use a pick to break the soil next to the trench he had dug. Apparently some dissolved mortar and cement had accumulated here in a pool several inches deep. It was hard going, and he had to proceed carefully, using the pick in short, careful strokes, since he couldn’t know what was immediately beneath this layer. For the most part, he knew, he would be using the short-handled hoe and a trowel.

He climbed down into the trench and began scraping away the layers of earth, proceeding horizontally across the first square until he had dug a shelf about six inches below the surface and another six inches wide. He stopped several inches from the stakes marking two corners of the grid, so that the stakes could remain standing as reference points. Eventually all the stakes would be left atop high mounds of earth as the excavation proceeded around them, like solitary wooden sentinels or grave markers.

He proceeded carefully in widening his shelf, occasionally finding small objects that he examined and placed in a bag attached to his waist, making a note on his log, or letting the object fall with the dirt into the trench. Pieces of his own past, or someone else’s. Most of the objects held no meaning for him: buttons, pieces of metal, other pieces off something much larger whose character he couldn’t determine from the one piece. One of the things that had always fascinated him about archaeology was the way in which such small pieces were virtually unrecognizable when separated from the whole. It was like trying to identify a person by just the nose or the eyes. Finding the other pieces to the pattern required hard, meticulous work, as well as imagination.

When his arms would no longer reach far enough across the shelf, he climbed out and stood on the shelf he had made. He began to widen it in the direction of the other two stakes marking off this first square. He found several marbles—cat’s eyes, a steelie—and wondered if they had once been his, or some other little kid’s. They went into his sack. Then an old yo-yo with an obscured painted face on the side. He’d once had one with Mickey Mouse on it, but he couldn’t remember the color. Maybe this was it.

The soil profile revealed by the trench and the initial digging was quite unusual—certainly he had never worked in land so dramatically traumatized—but consistent for all that. The top layer seemed to be a mixture of fine sands and silts and dissolved concrete, which made the surface alternately hard and soft the length of the valley. This material ran up to six inches deep in places; most of his first layer consisted of it. Below that were the slightly larger pebbles and stones the flood waters had dropped before the silt, along with the lightest objects—driftwood, small pieces of furniture, and the like—most of it half-rotted away.

Some of the amorphous lumps of wood reminded him of things—blocks, an old push toy, a cart wheel—but he really couldn’t be sure. Many of them were almost cloud-like in their shapelessness—and it was easy to find himself staring at them, trying to read them like a Rorschach of thunderheads. Animals, there, and people in distress…

Below that were the larger pieces of debris from the waste dam: pieces of coal and limestone, sandstone. The extent of the damage could be told from these stones: a layer a foot thick, they had moved down the creek like rocketing blades, shredding bridges, houses, trees, animals and people. Here and there in this layer Reed could see the tiny fragments of wood and cloth and leather carried down with their passage.

There seemed to be little flood debris in the strata below this, but it was scattered throughout these top layers. Below the layer of sharp rock fragments was the first layer of true soil, a light-colored humus, the farmland his father and grandfather before him had owned and worked. Also in this layer was a thin strip of light-colored silt, a remnant of a time when the creek overflowed its banks during a driving rainstorm when Reed had been only seven or eight years old.

And below that the dark, rich soils of his ancestors, and of the animals who had lived here before his ancestors. Dark topsoil blending into a rusty red layer of concentrated mineral compounds. Hardpan, they called it. Terribly ancient stuff. Compared to the lighter grays and sandy colors above, it appeared almost unbearably garish and alive. Reed could see only a bit of the top of it—most of it was now more than four feet below the surface—and for that he was glad for now.

He continued to strip away the first level, using his short-handled hoe to remove a quarter- to half-inch of soil at a time, occasionally scooping up a shovelful of the loose dirt and dumping it through a wood-framed screen he had built to make sure that no small artifacts or fragments were missed. Most of the objects he continued to cast aside: glass fragments, bent nails, and the like. But now and then something demanded his complete attention.

He first saw it as a faint outline in the dirt—a shadow of a small human figure, like a dream miniature or representation. But as he carefully brushed the loose dirt away, he recognized the toy figure he’d had as a child. It was an angular, hard-clay doll, though at one time, he believed, it had been a bit softer. Vaguely humanoid with its large eyes, nose, and mouth, but it had a square head.

He treated it like any other ancient clay artifact, and was unembarrassed. He cleaned it carefully with the brush, blowing off loose dirt as he went. He checked for the presence of salt, since salt in the clay would make it brittle, soaking it in a bowl of fresh water, then removing it. Then he added two drops of silver nitrate to the water. Since the water didn’t cloud, he knew no salt was present.

Then he brushed on a Celluloid-acetone solution to preserve this piece of his past. “Gee.” He’d called it that, he now remembered, “Gee,” he said.

Reed propped the small figure up on the shelf of earth and stared at it, as he remembered doing a number of times when it was on his bookshelf in the old house. The simplicity of the figure had always triggered his most elaborate fantasies: of how Gee was a younger brother Reed was sworn to protect, particularly during their lengthy explorations of the vast underground tunnels that crisscrossed Big Andy Mountain. Of how Gee was an alien from another planet, and Reed was the first person he had decided to contact; this alien had recognized the secret powers within Reed. Of how Gee was actually Reed’s secret self, shrunken and distorted, and whatever happened to Gee, happened to Reed. Gee, of course, had been buried ten years.

~ * ~

Joe Manors was “doing reclamation” that day, which in this case meant merely backfilling some of the areas that had been mined out with waste dirt, filling up the auger holes so that instead of a jagged mountain of useless waste you had a relatively smooth mountain of useless waste.

From his high seat on the dozer Joe could see Louie DeLong working on another ridge. Louie was sitting on top of a tanker truck, spraying a liquid containing grass seed up on one of the old waste slopes. So patches of spindly grass would take root, maybe some stunted pines. But the earth wasn’t compacted, so the banks were still unstable and the plants had a poor place to root. And with the layers turned topsy-turvy, the soil was so acidic plants would have a difficult time of it in any case.

Reclamation almost never included cleaning up the landslides or moving the boulders or refilling the bench cuts. And hardwood forests were almost irreplaceable.

Joe looked behind him, at the way the cut had widened as it was stripped. Benches they called them, like places where a giant might sit.

Nothing much was ever going to grow here again; the topsoil was now buried a good thirty feet or more. The top layer was all rocks and boulders, bits of slate, pyrites, coal. Loose and sliding material. That coal and pyrite, now unprotected by surface rock, exposed to the air for the first time in millions of years, would begin to oxidize and combine with rainwater to make an acid runoff.

Joe had seen concrete foundations dissolve in contact with that runoff.

He knew people, his uncle included, who’d lost homes and good farmland to a coal waste landslide. Churches buried under forty feet of dirt. Boulders dropping through the roofs of homes. Plaster cracking from the blasting. The people still had their land, the lawyers claimed… all the companies wanted was the minerals. Of course, it still might get a tad difficult for the people living around the mines. The noise and dust and all.

“Polly-ticks and money,” the three words Joe’s father had always used to explain the reasons behind almost any situation. He’d say it about a dozen times a day, no matter what the subject matter. Joe figured now the old man had probably been right. Local communities and merchants depended on the mines for their living, and when the companies told them that new regulations would surely knock the mines out of business, it scared them; they put pressure on the politicians. And both the politicians and the judges depended on the companies as well. Joe guessed it just came down to a choice of evils: devastation of the land or abject poverty. Problem was, he didn’t see that many local people awfully wealthy from it

He had to laugh at himself. My, but wasn’t he feeling bitter today! He was going to have to stop this drinking every night, this staying up to all hours brooding, brooding…

But how was he going to stop… with all that had been going on… He couldn’t remember ever being so scared, not since he was real little, so terrified of noises whose source he couldn’t see, of the darkness, of the cold wrapped around the Big Andy just before morning, of the fog the cold brought with it like an ill-developed twin.

It wasn’t doing him any good ignoring her, so he finally let the image of the little drowned girl expand to fill his attention. That was the problem right there. She wasn’t his little girl, left back in Cincinnati, but she could have been. About the same age, build. And here she was floating around where she shouldn’t be, out of her grave…

As much as he thought about it, he still didn’t think he could have made any other decision. He would still have had to leave that city, come back home. He’d never really loved the girl’s mother; he was pretty sure she hadn’t loved him either. But then, as far as he knew, she’d never bothered to get a divorce, and that made him feel funny.

They’d both been lonely and afraid. She’d grown up in a county only eighty miles away, one of his own kind, and she’d been just as homesick as he, at first. They met right after he arrived in Cincinnati; she’d already been there four months. Married a month later. Then he left right after the baby was born—Annie, after his great grandmother.

But she wouldn’t go back; she’d started to like the city and there was no life for them back in the hills, she said. He didn’t want to leave the child, but a child belongs with its mother.

Seemed like he had made nothing but bad decisions in his adult life. Leaving a younger sister at home all by herself the night of the big Simpson Creeks flood while he went hunting—his parents out of town—coming back to find nothing left. Then leaving for Cincinnati because he heard there were jobs there, and his daddy dying because none of the young ones were around anymore, his mother following him six months after.

Then abandoning that little girl of his to come back to… seemed like nothing so far but headaches from too much drinking and having to suck up to the Nole Company bosses.

And this other, drowned little girl. Looked like he had come back to her. Pale eyes and skin so damp gray… so that if he were to touch her, the water would just ooze out of her.

He finished with the first stretch of backfill and pointed the dozer down the long incline that led into “Willy’s sinkhole.” The sinkhole was the final remnant of the first stripping operation begun here fifteen years ago. It got its name when the backhoe Willy Daniels had been driving suddenly disappeared from view while returning from the equipment yard, much to everybody’s consternation. One moment he was sitting up on that big orange grasshopper of a machine, grinning and swearing as he fought the gears, and the next he was gone in a cloud of white limestone dust. “We all figured the devil’d just got tired of waiting for him to come voluntarylike, you know?” Joe’s daddy used to say.

Then they’d heard Willy calling for help, and swearing worse than ever. When they ran to the site they found him, still on top of his machine, at the bottom of a limestone sinkhole; he’d fallen through the thin shell covering it. They’d pulled him out and he quit that very day.

So they’d worked around Willy’s sinkhole for years, backfilling the cuts around it. Now the company geologist said it was nice and solid under there, and they could fill in the sinkhole with no danger and forget about it.

Joe’d been elected. But he wasn’t taking any chances, despite what the geologist said. He was going to ease in slow. He’d heard reassuring words from geologists and safety inspectors before. Believing them too much was a good way to get yourself killed.

He took a load of waste dirt off a pile north of the sinkhole and crept forward as slowly as possible, listening as well as he could through the engine’s roar for any creakings or shiftings in the ground, staring at the ground so intensely he couldn’t blink, inspecting it for cracks.

As he reached the lip, he knew there was somebody down there.

A dark, small form, all stretched out… stringy hair. He killed the engine and jumped off the machine, running up to the lip without thinking.

But it was just a dark log, patterned with gray lichen, floating. Floating.

He stared down into the sinkhole. Water was bubbling up out of the ground all around the log. Cloudy, mineral or waste-laden water, bringing its own brand of fog up with it. Like the fog you might see capping the sinkhole early in the morning, before the sun could scour it out. Or like the fog covering the soup an old woman might cook up… for someone like Hansel and Gretel. He’d loved that story as a child. It had been damned important to him… couldn’t hear it told enough times. It had scared him near to death… but he’d loved it.

~ * ~

Audra thought she might have a secret admirer. It seemed silly thinking in those terms; after all, she was twenty-five years old. It was hard to believe. It was the first indication of any romantic interest since she’d moved back to the Creeks five years ago.

Sometimes she’d leave the cafe at five to take her walk before going back to her room, and there’d be someone standing over by the boarded-up hotel, standing in the shadows so she never could tell who it was, although she thought he was a young man, a little shorter than normal.

It was silly, but some nights she stayed up late, unable to sleep, trying to figure out just who it might be. Maybe it was someone she had known all her life, or maybe even it was Reed Taylor, come back to the town after a long absence just the way she had. Maybe they had a lot in common. Already he was making her feel like a high school girl again, and some of the tension that had built up over the past few days was leaving.

She knew he had a wife, but she also knew he wouldn’t be here if things were going right at home.

Tonight when she left the cafe she looked for him, and at first thought he wasn’t there. She looked hard into the shadows by the old hotel, and finally, as if the very darkness were solidifying there, she saw him step out slightly into the street. His hair dark and clothes dark. His face… dark. It was as if he had carried the shadows out with him. She blinked her eyes and looked, and looked, but could find no faint glimmer of light in his perfect darkness.

She could have cried. For now she was afraid of him.

Chapter 21

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon at Uncle Ben’s house. A veritable feast of a dinner at three, followed by a walk to burn off some of that delicious country-style food, and then lounging around on the old wooden lawn furniture Ben had set up under the oak. Lannie and Tim, Ben’s kids, circled the chairs like enormous flies, one of them occasionally plopping down into Reed’s lap with a giggle.

He hadn’t had a Sunday like this in years; he and Carol and the kids had gotten into the bad habit of watching TV on Sundays, and Alicia usually couldn’t make it until a mid-afternoon meal, so they had lunch at noon and dinner at six. It didn’t seem right. One meal on Sunday, a big meal like this one—that was the way to do it. Reed was so contented he didn’t bother to stifle the belch he felt climbing his belly. Lannie and Tim giggled insanely, Ben began to laugh, and suddenly Reed found himself joining them, so enthusiastically he didn’t think he could stop. It felt good; he couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed like that.

He looked over at Ben, who was gazing at him with a wide smile, his eyes twinkling.

“So whose canary did you eat, Uncle Ben?”

Ben chuckled. “It’s just good to see you laughing, Reed. I was afraid you’d lost the knack.” He sat up in the lounger. “And it’s good to have you spend a nice, normal day in the Creeks. You haven’t had one since you’ve been here. You know, we don’t spend all our time gettin’ eat by bears and chasing Hector Pierce in his birthday suit all over creation.”

Reed laughed. “I should hope not. I was beginning to wonder if things had changed that drastically over the years. There’s been a lot of excitement around here lately, more than I could have found back in Denver.”

Ben stretched his legs and sighed. “Yep. Sure has… since just before you got back.” There was an awkward pause. Reed looked past Ben at the garden, all harvested out. Lannie and Tim were playing among the brown and gray cornstalks. Lannie was going to be a beautiful woman: she had fine delicate features, high cheekbones, and long, lustrous brown hair. A bit on the thin side, but she held herself well. Besides, she was only nine years old. But damn if she wasn’t going to be a heartbreaker when she grew up. It made Reed wonder what he might expect to see in Alicia in a few years. Alicia had some of the same characteristics, although she was a bit chunkier. Baby fat. He actually didn’t look forward to her losing it—now he could cover her belly with one hand and it made a soft, rounded bulge like a ball. He loved that. And they had this game where if he pushed on it she would puff up her cheeks, hold it, then blow all the air out in an explosion of bubbly laughter.

For a moment he wondered if he’d be around to see her lose that baby fat. Stop it. Stop it.

Tim was quiet, dark, a lot like Michael, and, Reed suddenly realized, a lot like almost all the Taylor men at that age. He’d seen pictures of his father and grandfather when they were boys—pale faces below broad swatches of raven black hair, their dark eyes seeming to pierce the camera lens. An intense look about them, so that it made you wonder if they knew far beyond what they should know. Reed had that same look in his early photographs. Of course, a lot of young boys with those kinds of features gave him that impression, Reed reminded himself.

Ben was different; he hadn’t fit the Taylor mold in a lot of ways. He’d always been sandy-haired, jovial, open and friendly to almost everybody. Reed could remember when he was young wanting to look more like his Uncle Ben. He hadn’t consciously realized the drastic difference in character between his Uncle Ben and the other Taylor men until years later, when it made him uncomfortable that he resembled his father and grandfather so much.

“You there, Reed?”

Reed jerked in his chair. He could hear Ben chuckling a few feet away.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Just daydreaming.”

“I know what you mean. Sunday’s a good day for it, all right. Fact, any day is, if you ask me. Folks round here work so hard sometimes they start takin’ themselves just too serious. And that ain’t good for you. Gotta put aside some time for daydreaming. Fact is, sometimes daydreaming is one of the most important things a body can do, if you ask me.”

Reed looked at his uncle. He’d forgotten how well put-together the man was, how wise for this place and time. He’d met few men in his life he admired so much—odd that he was just now beginning to realize that.

Simpson Creeks was a normal place. His Uncle Ben was supremely normal, and healthy and generous. Reed had almost forgotten that over the last few days. Strange things were happening, but they were essentially isolated incidents. This was an essentially ordinary place. Just like home. Home in Denver.

On their honeymoon he and Carol had gone back to her hometown. Reed had loved the feeling of the small town, the friendliness of people and architecture, the quiet, restful atmosphere. That’s the way small towns should feel—he didn’t get enough of those qualities in Denver. Now Simpson Creeks had that small-town feel for the first time since he’d been back—here, in his uncle’s backyard.

Martha brought out cookies and tea. The family sat around, and indeed Reed was feeling like part of this family, eating and drinking, listening to the crickets starting up late in the afternoon, feeling the cool breeze slipping under the trees, smiling at each other.

“Why, Reed, you’ve grown up into a handsome young man!” Martha squinted over her tea glass. She needed glasses, but had always thought they made her look ugly so she didn’t wear them in front of other people, just in bed to read, Ben had told him. She wouldn’t even let the kids see her wearing them. This uncharacteristic touch of vanity in his aunt amused and touched Reed. “Not that I ever had any doubts, mind you!”

“Why, thank you, Aunt Martha.”

“No… you’re better lookin’ than any of the other Taylor men by far.” She winked. “‘Ceptin’ Ben here, of course.”

Ben laughed. “You’ll turn my head talking like that, Martha. I’m liable to sweep you off your feet and take you up to that waterbed I’ve been hidin’ in the attic as a Christmas surprise!”

“A waterbed! Ben Taylor, if you’ve gone wasted our money for some oversized balloon, I’m gonna…” She stopped, looked puzzled a minute, then smiled almost imperceptibly. “Old fool.”

~ * ~

Ben and Reed went for another walk after the cookies had digested, and Reed would wonder for a long time after that just why they did. Uncle Ben took him farther up the Big Andy this time, up two connecting hollows and halfway up a ridge. It took them an hour just to go one way. Reed was out of breath by the time they reached a resting place on the ridge, and dizzy from the thin air.

Actually Ben had been maintaining a steady monologue the whole time; Reed had caught a line here and there, but mostly his mind wandered during the exertion.

Ben had been talking about Reed’s father, and what it had been like growing up together in these woods.

“A man can get lost pretty quick out here, so, as you might imagine, an inexperienced boy can get lost a lot quicker. Your granddaddy used to let the two of us boys loose in these woods just to see who’d get back. I’d be stubborn, wouldn’t play along, and as a result I wouldn’t wander too far afield. Now your daddy, he took all that real serious, saw that as a test his daddy was givin’ him that he needed to pass, and so he’d break into a run trying to be the first one back, and most times he just got lost worst than ever.”

Off to their left was an overgrown area full of bright pink rhododendrons, the clumps spreading all over the edge of the woods, obscuring fully the first half of the shadowed trunks. A number of ridges fell back from the one they were on, like great green ocean swells. The boughs and leaves were so tightly packed here that Reed couldn’t see a spot of ground. He knew the undergrowth must be just as thick and impenetrable.

Stands of forest looking much as they did when the first pioneers came into this valley—it never ceased to amaze him.

The view here made Reed remember one of the few good times he ever had with his father and grandfather. It was shortly before his grandfather died. There were four of them: grandfather, Reed’s father, Uncle Ben, and Reed. They’d gone up on some old forgotten patch of land his grandfather owned on the Big Andy. It might be this very one, in fact. After all these years it was difficult to tell.

Reed had been suspicious of going; he didn’t trust his father and grandfather. But things had really worked out okay.

They’d been planting red cedar on a bare slope next to some older trees. They had worked since sunup, which had been too much for Reed, but his grandfather—who was always in charge of any such group activities—had allowed him to rest on some limestone outcroppings. Later he’d pointed out to Reed the nearby black locust and cedar, giant trees over fifty feet high. “Trees won’t ever be that tall again,” his grandfather had said, and Reed could still remember the bleak feeling that had left him with. Even back then you could see the devastating effects of stripping four ridges away—the mountain there was bald. Now that particular ridge didn’t even exist anymore.

In most parts of the woods here tulip poplar and red oak had driven out the cedar. Cedar requires a lot of sun, and once the poplars come, needing lots of shade, they soon take over. After a time the poplars themselves grow so large they darken and crowd out their own seedlings, leaving room for the beech and hemlock that eventually take over the forest.

His father and grandfather between them had taught Reed all those things on that one outing. He’d remember them a lifetime. How an old forest invites new plants and animals. How the waxwings destroyed good fence post wood. How woodpeckers nested in knotholes softened by fungus. How a catbird can eat its weight in bugs each day.

For dinner that night the four shared a rabbit Uncle Ben had caught, and slept underneath the oldest cedar in the forest, maybe the oldest in the state, grandfather had said. It had been a good day.

Reed and Uncle Ben started back down the ridge around sunset. A few times Ben stumbled, and with a pang Reed realized his uncle—who had always seemed impossibly youthful—was getting old. After a time Reed put an arm around his uncle’s waist to help him.

Ben smiled and patted his nephew’s hand, and didn’t take it away.

Chapter 22

Reed rested in the shade of an earth wall running midway between the cliff and his old homeplace. He’d been working since sunup, and it had been good work; he’d found far more artifacts over the past five hours than in all the time before.

Funny how he was able to maintain a professional attitude through it all. Without a professional attitude, you missed things, or jumped to false conclusions. He couldn’t afford that on this particular dig. So he kept all the proper paperwork, spending a couple of hours each day on it. Archaeological site and survey records: owner’s name and address, physical description of the site, location of the nearest water, area of the site, physical condition of the site, artifacts discovered, sketch map. Daily field records, feature records, archaeological stratigraphy record, archaeological field catalog, archaeological photo record. Directions for reaching the site, vegetation, depth of deposit, surrounding and site soil, possibility of additional destruction. Site is partially damaged or inaccessible through: a) buildings on site, b) roads on site, c) cultivation, d) wind erosion, e) water erosion, f) vandalism.

Reed thumbed through the reports. Meaningless, finally. How had it happened here? How had his family died? How did they feel? Was there much pain?

Stop it… stop it. Getting emotionally involved was a trap. Dr. Simms had said that too. The “spirit of the place.” Make yourself open to it.

The spirit of this place had been a harsh one, no question about that. But there really wasn’t much in what he had found to indicate as much.

Slope west to east with a gentle fall of 4.3 feet in 100 feet… baseline X staked out along the crest of the long axis from the south edge of the front door… lines crossing the base at right angles lettered A through H, starting at the wood’s edge… square designated right or left as one faced the house… fill to the left and right of X removed by blocks and the profile of the exposed face of the transverse line was drawn…

Reed woke up from his earthy dream, the back of his skull cool where it had rested against the dirt wall. He shook his head and small clay particles drifted over his shoulders. Dig and dig and dig, and what was he finding?

Miscellaneous pieces from a set of blue china, along with several silver forks and a spoon. They hadn’t had such things that he could remember. Maybe they belonged to some other washed-away dwelling. Or maybe they came from his mother’s, maybe even his father’s side of the family, tucked away in storage for a special occasion that never came. Brushing away some of the dirt, he could clearly see the blue cupids that danced around the border. Hideously ugly stuff.

Decaying copies of Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost. No doubt they had belonged to his grandfather, who had been far more intelligent than he pretended to be. Miscellaneous pieces of decaying cloth and a shattered trunk lid. His mother had kept her finer things in there.

A few rusted iron skillets, an iron pot, cast-iron trivet. His mother had gotten those from her mother. Empty bottles of medicine for his mother’s aches and pains and general “women’s complaints.” She got them from an old peddler who came by once a year, in June. Reed doubted that they had any real value as medicine, but he was sure their alcoholic content had made his mother feel better. She’d never take a legitimate drink of liquor.

A few yards of rotted ribbon, some empty spools from her sewing box, the glass handle of the sewing box itself, a few odd needles he caught in the sieve, a glass doorknob, some rusted coat hangers, some foreign coins a relative had brought back from the war, coils from the refrigerator.

He found other parts to the Philco later—it must have hit some rocks, or logs, as it had been virtually ripped apart by the force of the waters. For the first time he realized how savage those flood waters must have been. Nothing but this debris.

Reed found himself thinking about the trash mound at Badger House in Mesa Verde. A way of life reduced to just so much garbage.

But there was a certain kind of peaceful satisfaction in this work. Counting artifacts, sorting them, fitting all the different pieces together. A gigantic jigsaw puzzle. There were items that had become so distorted through age and trauma they weren’t recognizable at first glance. He’d spend a great deal of time examining them, playing the game of fantasizing what their original form might have been.

A melted oblong of glass might have been the top of his mother’s flower vase—the big one that she kept in the window and that broke the light in such a way that you could stand by her stove and feel like you were trapped inside a prism. A fragment of dark-stained wood might have come from the small three-legged table that used to stand by the stairs. His mother always put the mail there, and if it wasn’t there when his dad got home he’d knock the table over in anger. There were several chips out along the edge of the tabletop.

He’d found miscellaneous pieces of old toys: a wheel, several doll’s arms, button eyes, windup keys, and a variety of plastic parts. He kept all these in a separate sack, determined to go through them someday, figuring out which toys they had come from, if they had been old toys of his, or his sister’s. He found himself thinking about the metal and plastic robot he’d had when he was nine, and now he looked for that robot in every piece he picked up.

As the sun rose higher in a sky spotted with torn swatches of cloud, Reed found that scene after scene arose and surrounded him as he picked his way through this, the richest vein so far in his mining. The days his mother hung out the Indian corn to dry over the porch railing, the setting sun catching each kernel and setting it afire. The time his sister fell on a rake, her yellow sundress turning crimson as she ran into their mother’s arms. The afternoon some of the boys from town had wandered out and they’d played stickball out front with him, and the whole family had watched.

Each scene arose and swelled oppressively around him, before breaking apart and falling into these pieces scattered through the dirt and underground. Red plastic and blue metal. Orange sun and white cheeks. Fragments of a young boy’s shoes and cooking spoons and pieces of eye, cheeks, smiles, and tears. The fragmented colors of grass and blood and dog and wrinkled hands and laughter and fear.

Reed found himself trying to visualize scenes in Denver, with his family, Carol, the children. Nothing. For a moment he thought he could see their fragments also lying in the dirt before his feet. His face stiffened, but he could not cry.

He raked through them all with his bare fingers held clawlike, the fragments wedging under his fingernails and tearing the skin. But Reed didn’t notice, intent on the digging.

~ * ~

The bear had spent some time resting in the green undergrowth. So much green, and cool to his hot muzzle and hot tongue and hot eyes. His thoughts and smells still burned him, but it was better now. The things inside him, the thing inside him, had quieted, maybe asleep for a time. That would give the bear time to sleep; he hadn’t been able to sleep for what seemed like a very long time.

The world was becoming a stranger place for the bear with each passing hour. So many sounds and thoughts and things he had never known about, and in his confusion these things had burned him. He had felt fire deep down in his throat as the thing inside him had tried to come out.

Now he sniffed the cool air, was puzzled, then irritated. What? He sniffed again. There was no real smell but… something. No real smell. Something.

The young human child stepped softly over the bear’s back. He stared. No smell. And this was a dead human child, a female, but still moving. Her feet did not touch the ground. He roared and snapped at her; she broke apart and drifted away in pieces. No smell. Was she attacking? No… more like play. She had been playing with him. The bear roared his displeasure. Then he realized he knew this child; the thing inside knew her. This thought made him roar again, and smash out at the cool green around him. Pieces of green filled the air. He breathed it in and snarled.

Bright flame filled the sky above the green; he looked up in puzzlement. The human woman smiled down at him. But no smell. He charged and she drifted apart, filled his throat and made it burn.

The human woman’s laughter filled the green. He roared. No… not human. Like human. No smell.

The laughter died away. The bear looked around him: no more green. In his rage he had destroyed it all, and not even known.

The cool was gone; his body began to burn hotter. He groaned deeply inside, shaking the thing inside him awake. But he didn’t care. He loped out of the edge of the wood, letting the thing inside guide him.

Chapter 23

It was the fourth day that Reed had been carefully, methodically excavating the land around his old home-place. Keeping a calm mind, holding back any premature conclusions, meticulously examining the evidence. So far he had stayed away from the house itself.

Being careful: that was what he was doing. Being scientific. But at the moment that didn’t seem much different from being afraid.

The cold was back, worse than ever. It was a fire inside his head, inside his chest. He thought he might have pneumonia. But he couldn’t stop; there seemed so little time. And he had to keep his Uncle Ben from stopping him, only meaning him well.

He had come out here every morning, intent on his work, eating breakfast at his uncle’s as quickly as possible so that he could get an early start. He met his uncle’s questions concerning the progress of the dig with bland, noncommittal statements, and twice he had had to discourage Ben from coming out here with him. When Reed got home at night, everyone else was in bed. Martha always had something waiting in the oven.

He didn’t have to get in that late; he had to quit digging around sunset anyway, when the dusk shadows started confusing him, showing him discolorations, evidence of features that weren’t really there. And every shift of the darkness in the woods seemed a large animal. He’d climb into the truck he borrowed from his uncle and sit there for hours, watching the shadows spread and the dark creep out from the trees, and try to recapture his lost feel for the place.

Hiding… he needed to think the word, for that was what he was really doing. For all his excuses about getting to know the site, educating himself on the lay of the land, he was hiding. He was beginning to sense a panic beneath the easy exteriors of the citizens of Simpson Creeks, even in his uncle. Things had been happening to the town since before he got here, but they seemed to have intensified after his arrival, as if he had carried some sort of disease into the valley with him.

Things were going subtly wrong in the Creeks. No one thing so obvious, but the accumulation of little events…

A couple of days ago Jake Parkey had found his wife wandering out in the woods with her clothes half torn off, babbling nonsense. Jake had beaten her badly before Charlie Simpson happened by and pulled him off. Then they discovered water seeping into parts of the Nole Company stripping operation and they had to shut down. Reed couldn’t care too much about that, but no one could explain how such a thing could happen. The water had stopped for a time, and Mr. Emmanuel had sent for geologists from the main office to study the matter. They’d be sending a staff of lawyers too, Reed knew. They’d want to cover themselves in case of possible damages.

His uncle said people were recalling the big flood, but they weren’t talking about evacuating. Of course, there’d never been flooding caused by a leaking sinkhole before, at least not that he’d heard of.

And so Reed had stayed by his excavations, reviewing his notes and studies, feeling too guilty to talk to anyone. Afraid to talk to anyone. He had been so sure that careful inquiry and analysis would protect him from the traumas of the past. But they were breaking through the dam he’d erected; they were clamping their jaws around the back of his neck.

Suddenly he wanted to forget about all his careful methodology, hire a bulldozer or backhoe, and strip it out as if he were mining here. Rake at it with bleeding fingers if need be. Mine his past, dump the debris out of him.

He had gotten down to topsoil in several of the squares, topsoil that made a rising curve on the soil profile. The small mound that used to be east of the house. Now he found himself going deeper, digging out the rich, dark earth.

As he went deeper, Reed discovered that the soil layering was mixed, perhaps indicating an artificial structure, the soil brought in baskets from a barrow pit. Then traces of charcoal, sharp stones in the top layers. Traces of red paint, here and there, and then Reed could tell the disturbance was oval in shape. A black layer of soil and then, as expected, the first traces of bone.

Clavicle, sternum, thorax, bits of rib. Then the skull nearby, with a partial closing of the cranial sutures. Some wearing down of the teeth. Obviously a young adult, anywhere from twenty to forty years old. But not from the flood. He’d dug into an ancient Indian burial mound.

They had lived by the mound all those years; he wondered if his father had known. No doubt he had. His father had been fascinated by burials, had always wondered what it would be like to dig into one one day, but had also been nervous about it. Grave robbing was the word for it, and Reed’s father wouldn’t have any part of that—more, Reed suspected, out of superstitious dread than any sort of reverence, although maybe there wasn’t much difference.

Strange how layers of earth and bones and memories were all mixed together here, all commingled in the earth, which did not differentiate. One becoming another, endlessly throughout time. Grave robbing. Thinking that, Reed felt the strange excitement that had led him to archaeology in the first place, and was surprised and a little alarmed that he could be feeling it here.

He looked at the falling-down matchbox of a house he’d grown up in, the barely visible second story now leaning crazily toward the woods as if pulled there. A plant drawn to the light. There was one square measured off directly in front of a second-floor window, the window of his old bedroom. He would be excavating that square, he knew, when the sun rose in the morning.

~ * ~

Charlie Simpson closed up early that afternoon; the men had exhausted all that could be said of recent events—Doris Parkey’s new craziness and the flooding of Willy’s sinkhole—and no one had been in to buy all day. He might have missed them during the morning; like all the others he’d gone up to examine the sinkhole, to search for clues to the water’s source, to speculate about what might happen.

“Groundwater seeping into the limestone,” one old man had said. “Go away when the heat rises.” They’d all nodded sagely, and it had sounded good at the time, but Charlie had no idea in hell what it was supposed to mean.

They’d all hiked around the slopes looking for weak spots, looking for damp areas, listening for bubbling, all acting as if they really knew what they were doing, Charlie included. Then they’d walked back to the store and sat around exchanging theories.

“Same thing made that water made Doris Parkey crazy,” Tim Colmano had said, and they’d all just looked at him. Charlie had wondered if they all felt as uncomfortable as he did when Tim said that.

Charlie had pretty much isolated himself the past few days. Suddenly there was an agitation in town, for the first time he could remember since the year following the big flood. Of course, there had always been a slight tension after the flood to mar the natural peacefulness—because of what people had done or hadn’t done at the time—but nothing like this. They were used to controlling things here; you could always send a troublemaker away until he cooled off, or the preacher could set straight a domestic quarrel.

But you couldn’t affect this kind of tension; everybody was feeling it.

He had always been an outgoing man, but he couldn’t pretend right now. All his easy talk and comfortable manner had been stripped away from him. He was all sinew and bone and blood vessels now. And fear.

A shadow appeared at the yellow-shaded front display window. Large and bulky, walking unsteadily on its hind feet. Charlie reached under the counter for his gun.

Then he saw red plaid flannel through a crack in the shade and halted his reach. There was a sudden pain in his arm that made him wince. But he kept the groan to himself. He leaned back and gritted his teeth. There was a knock at the door but he didn’t answer.

The store was dark, but a comfortable dark. He’d spent a large part of his life in this one room; some of the displays were arranged virtually as they were when his father had run the business. Old tonics and oils no one except an occasional old-timer bought anymore, but he kept them on the shelves just the same. A large scale for weighing grains, the same one his father had had, an old-fashioned coffee grinder, counters stacked high with every size of blue jeans imaginable, racks of cotton dresses, hardware of every description, a rotating, glass-fronted case full of thread spools a tourist had offered him eight hundred dollars for one time (“Then where would I show off what thread I got?” Charlie’d asked), all manner of canned goods, fresh meat in the freezer he bought regular from Tim Colmano, and all kinds of stuff on the back and top shelves he never would sell, like the silk and lace baby coffin left over from the flu epidemic of 1917.

He’d hate to lose any of it. But he might just lose it all, oh Lord… he knew he might if things took the wrong turn. Like back during the flood, after the Creeks jumped bank—only a few degrees of turn this way and that along the course of the racing waters had spelled the difference between narrow escape and death and destruction.

And some of us maybe didn’t deserve to be saved.

He’d tried twice in the past two days to talk to Reed Taylor out at his uncle’s, but apparently Reed had been spending almost all his time out at his father’s place. “Digging the past up and filling himself with the memories” was the rather poetic way Ben had described it. Charlie had broached the idea of maybe going up to see Reed there, but Ben had emphasized that the boy had wanted to be alone. Probably thinking of all we didn’t do for his family, Charlie thought.

He was working himself into some kind of mood, he realized. But he couldn’t seem to help it. Before, he’d always had Buck to cheer him up when he got down about something, just being with the old dog, seeing somebody with a bigger hound-dog look than he could ever manage.

He wasn’t sure what he would say to Reed if he talked to him anyway. Probably nothing.

Oh, he’d rehearsed it enough times… hundreds of times over the past ten years. A speech for the friends and relatives of the dead. Not to obtain their forgiveness, but at least so maybe they could understand a little about why the town had done so little before, and after, the flood. When there were wrongs to be set straight, dead to repay. Why the Creeks had never changed.

He’d always been afraid somebody like Reed Taylor would ask him that question point-blank someday: “Why didn’t you people change? Why didn’t you get off your asses and get Nole coal?” He wanted to be able to come up with something more than “We were afraid,” but that seemed increasingly unlikely. They’d been scared to death of losing everything, all of them.

The town had been an accomplice to what the mine had done in the first place: survivors, victims, Charlie and Ben and Amos Nickles and Inez, Reed’s parents, all of them. They’d known for years that the waste dam was unsafe, but had stopped at the mildest sort of complaints. Because the Nole Company had their jobs, and kept the town alive with its money. People figured if the Nole Company pulled out there wouldn’t be any Simpson Creeks anymore. The lies had been simple ones: lawyers had ignored small aspects of the cases and neglected to do adequate research, merchants had rationalized the shoddy materials they sold, laborers had told themselves that the company bosses knew best, husbands had reassured wives that at least there was still food on the table, politicians made deals “for the good of the community,” local regulators figured the statutes discriminated against an important source of local income—but the accumulation had meant one enormous, dangerous falsehood.

The company had said the dam was safe… perfectly safe. The Nole people had been very reassuring.

And after the flood, after all the lives lost and all the property damaged, they still did nothing. Just talked and grumbled.

Charlie supposed that could have been excused for a time—people had lost friends, neighbors, relatives—but as the months rolled by and the Nole Company sent down their team of lawyers, offering them this and that, offering them the moon, the grumbling quietly ceased. People still felt used, cheated, but the dissatisfaction went underground. And the town of Simpson Creeks still had its sugar daddy.

No lawsuits were filed. No one was asked to investigate. The townsfolk continued to accept the jobs the company offered. And when the company finally did shut down most of its operation above the Creeks—the profits just weren’t enough anymore—people moved away, and most of those remaining just plain forgot.

A shadow at the shaded window again, hulking. Beating on the door.

It was Big Andy’s revenge on them all, Charlie was thinking as the glass burst inward. The dead, now part of Big Andy, would be repaid in full.

~ * ~

Mr. Emmanuel had been thinking over the problem of the sinkhole all day, examining it, worrying over production time lost because of it, and he was fed up. The Simpson Creeks operation was now only a minor cog in the Nole Company operations, and not worth the trouble. He didn’t know if the geologists would be coming down or not; the supervisor certainly sounded reluctant over the phone. But there might be legal problems with this one… and there was Simpson Creeks’ past history to consider. He didn’t think they’d want to take any chances. They’d send somebody, if only one lawyer.

He’d left work early to take a long walk outside town; the weather was nice, there’d be almost no one around this time of day, and besides he needed the exercise. He had never been one for athletics, but sitting all day in that hot aluminum mine office didn’t help his mood any.

He was walking across what Jake Parkey said was the old site of the town. Emmanuel supposed that could have been; the area seemed flat enough, and occasionally he’d stumble over a brick or two. It was much nicer down here, with the trees all around—a damn sight better than that hideous-looking slab. But these people seemed to be obsessed with their fears of flooding.

The trees made a curved green and brown curtain bordering the level expanse of grass. He imagined the area would make a good football or baseball field, if only enough young people stayed to make a team. The grass was wonderful here—he hadn’t seen anything like it since Pennsylvania. Deep blue green like a sea.

There was something at the edge of the wood.

He squinted his eyes, but the form was still blurry. Hard even to guess what it was. He needed to get his eyes checked if he ever got back to civilization. Or maybe he was just getting old. The thought chilled him slightly. He began walking, fixing his eyes on the object, trying to guess what it might be. For one thing, it seemed to be moving. Not very much, but slowly, gracefully. Perhaps it was a small sapling bending in the wind. But there was no wind.

Pale, pale skin… the head and hair looking bright, bright. On fire! No… no, just pale skin and unusually bright, glowing hair. Giggling. Swift movement behind a tree.

Slowly, anxious and excited at the same time, he approached the edge of the woods, the place where the figure had disappeared. Another giggle. Soft laugh. He pulled back the first branch and saw pale pink skin.

Doris Parkey was standing in the tall ferns by a willow tree. Smiling. Stark naked. She held out her arms to Mr. Emmanuel.

He stepped closer, hesitated. He squinted, even more skeptical of his vision. But it was truly she… Doris Parkey. And naked she had more softness, more curves than he had imagined from her drab, straight-seamed cotton dresses.

She was stepping closer, her lips parted. He felt himself pulling back…

And suddenly she was pulling at him, moaning, tugging his shirttail loose and undoing his pants. Tugging them down. She was raking at his groin with her long fingers, pulling at his pubic hair as he felt himself dropping to his knees, losing himself among the trees, in her mouth, down in the wet grass and dampened earth…

~ * ~

Inez had seen somebody enter the woods past the old town site, just across the way. Now… why would anybody be messing around over there? Most people were scared of the place… she guessed she was, too. But then she didn’t see the movement anymore, and thought perhaps she was just seeing things. She was tired… much too tired. Her brother Hector was driving her crazy. The town and all the goings-on there were driving her crazy.

She’d been in Hector’s room just now; her forearms still ached from the way he’d grabbed her, clutching like some kind of starving, desperate bird or something. Some old bird. Seeing things again. His eyes ready to pop right out of his skull. “Woman with her head on fire!” he’d screamed. That again. It was getting worse. She was going to have to commit him finally. It made her feel real bad, but he had no right! She was just going to have to commit him, be rid of him, and get on with her own life… get herself a husband and maybe even move away, maybe even leave the hills entirely, live on the beach or on a snowbank… anything be better…

There was a glow out by the creek.

Inez stared at it for some time before even questioning what it was she was looking at. Nothing like she’d ever seen. Maybe one of those balls of fog she was always reading about in newspaper fillers. But the way it moved… something odd about that…

Then she realized the glow was moving around the spot where Hector had almost drowned. She went downstairs and out the front door.

The glow seemed to brighten as she neared the creek, bobbing here and there, hiding itself behind a bough or trunk momentarily, and then reappearing. Then Inez was standing by the creek. And there was another woman standing on the other side.

“Why, Janie Taylor!” It just slipped out, automatically. She wasn’t that close to see who it really was. And Janie Taylor, one of her best friends in this world, Ben Taylor’s sister-in-law and Reed Taylor’s mother, had been dead, drowned, a good ten years now.

The way the woman’s complexion… shone. It was almost unnatural. Dark eyes, reflecting… what? The sun was almost down. But those eyes were virtually flashing out at Inez like a beacon. Delicate pink mouth and sandy-colored hair. But the hair was also… brighter than it should be. What was going on here? Who was this?

“This is… my property,” Inez said haltingly, her hands making trembling fists behind her dress. “I’ll have to ask you… your name… please.” She tried to smile at the woman, but couldn’t.

The woman said nothing. Inez stepped closer to the edge of the bank, careful not to step too far. The current seemed swifter than normal, and it made her nervous.

Janie… the woman looked so much like her. And my… didn’t they have fun in their teens! Riding down to the high school in Four Corners on the bus together, sleeping over, always falling for the same dark-haired boys… she might have been Mrs. Inez Taylor, in fact, if Poppa hadn’t got so sick after graduation, and she’d had to stay with him all the time. And by the time Poppa died it had been Mrs. Janie Taylor a good four years, and Reed was almost three years old. Of course, the way Alec turned out, she’d been lucky.

They’d been best friends, but she hadn’t done a thing for Janie after the flood. Hadn’t tried to contact Reed and hadn’t made trouble for the Nole Company. Just like all the others. A coward. Hadn’t done a thing to make them pay for the murder of her best friend.

And Lord, Janie’s little girl… would’ve grown up to look just like Janie had when they’d gone to school together. Inez began to cry.

And felt… whispers… across her cheek. She looked up and the woman was smiling, her hair glowing.

“Janie…” Inez whispered. Inez felt an aching in her legs, an aching in her belly… from lack of child, lack of husband… suddenly she was thinking of things she hadn’t imagined in years: naked men, sweaty buttocks, and that secret thing they had… that she’d never understood, even taking care of her father in his deathbed, doing everything for him. She wondered if she’d even understand after she were married.

Inez was sweating profusely, stomach feeling queasy. She looked up, and the woman was right there, burning, burning…

Inez looked away, down into the cool, dark, now swift-running stream. And saw herself and her best friend Janie, the way it should have been, floating there with their eyes wide open, lips blue, hair trailing out and catching the debris like seaweed.

~ * ~

Charlie Simpson raised his gun at the great shadow stumbling its way toward him through the darkened store, shadow-arms sweeping items off counters, breaking bottles, the shadowy figure weeping. He began to squeeze the trigger.

“Dammit, Charlie! Don’t shoot!”

Charlie relaxed, and a very drunk Jake Parkey stumbled into view.

“What the hell you breakin’ in here for, Jake? I’m closed!” Charlie didn’t think he’d ever been so angry before.

Jake looked down shyly. “Need a gun, Charlie… need some protection.” Then he looked up, his eyes wide like an excitable little boy’s. “There’s a beast out there, Charlie; ain’t no bear! No bear was ever like that! Why, I can hear it out there at night, a-stalkin’ and waitin’ for me… for us! It’s waitin’, Charlie! I gotta get a gun ready for it. We all do!”

Charlie shook his head slowly. “Don’t know if I can sell you one, Jake… not the way you’ve been with Doris lately.”

Jake grinned crazily. “No harm… no harm, Charlie. Won’t happen again! Don’t care no more… she’s crazy, that Doris! Don’t even want her around! Drive me crazy if I keep livin’ with her. She’s out somewhere now… I don’t care if she never come back. No problem, Charlie, no problem. I’m through with that woman.”

Charlie stood silently, considering. Selling a man like that a gun… all hell to pay. Everything had just gone crazy; he wondered if he could see it to its end. Maybe they could just get all the craziness out of their systems… maybe the Big Andy would blow up like some volcano… get all that pent-up hate and long delayed revenge out of its system, and it would calm down some too.

He pulled the key ring out of his pocket and moved to the locked cabinet where he kept the guns and ammunition.

~ * ~

Mr. Emmanuel pulled away from the Parkey woman, rising up in a crouch over her sweaty, mud-slimed hips. Her eyes were closed, and she was still moaning, whimpering softly to herself. Like some animal. He was repulsed. By her and by himself.

His clothes were dirty. He’d throw them away. Burn them. He stood and pulled his pants up, zipped them and turned to walk… run back up to the town. What had come over him? Never… she looked and sounded like a pig. Moaning… moaning…

He raised his eyes and looked out over the grassy expanse of the old townsite. Deep blue green. Water green. Here and there mist rose from the shadows in the grass.

And brought the water with it. Climbing and climbing until he knew it would soon engulf him. People were screaming out there, whimpering. Dead animals drifted by, stench in their wake. People were drowning. Through the mist he could see the outstretched arms, the thrashing legs, the pale faces etched with desperation.

He squinted; he moved closer. But it was mist again: white, swirling mist. Fog filling in the shallow depressions of the earth, once sliding mud, that now covered the old townsite. A fine, impossibly wet, fog.

Chapter 24

For some reason Charlie decided to do a little repair work on the slab before going home for the evening. He didn’t know why—he worked a bit patching and strengthening the slab about once every five years, certainly no more frequently than that. It had to be done occasionally; the slab was quite old and a poor foundation for all the buildings on it even in the best of condition. Once enough bricks and stones started deteriorating, it was a downright hazard. Charlie’s family had had a lot to do with this slab being here, so he felt a special responsibility for it. Ben Taylor usually offered to lend a hand, but Charlie had always refused. Tonight he would have liked the company, but he figured he’d been afraid enough the past week. It was time to muster a little backbone and see to this job himself.

He brought out the cement and plaster and two different sized trowels from the storage shed in back. There were a couple of large brushes inside the store itself, and the embankment by his store, at the end of the slab, had about all the replacement stones and bricks he might need. He’d seen a few holes here and there down around the base of the slab. There were always stones missing—he never could understand that. He could understand wear and tear, the stones eroding away. But entire stones? What happened to them?

Charlie started with the cracks radiating out from the front door of his store, a firm believer in the idea that he should be taking care of his own eyesores first. He laid down a thick layer of cement here, knowing that in a few months’ time the slab would settle some more, the crack would widen, and the portion of the slab facing his store would look the same as before. But at least for those few months it would look mended. That was something.

He stood away from the slab and examined it critically. There was a series of hairline fractures running along the bottom, near the roadbed. For some reason they worried him, perhaps because there were so many of them. Cracks always formed in that area, but never before had there been so many, it seemed. He poked at one of them with the edge of the long trowel, and a layer of plaster fell away, revealing the decaying brick beneath.

Charlie remembered then that this brickwork was a relatively recent patch in the slab, one of the last his father himself had done before his death. And yet it looked older than those sections underlaid with field stones. The brick was cheap material, porous, and falling apart with the moisture. Charlie hadn’t realized that so much dampness could be trapped in there; seeing it, he was surprised the whole slab hadn’t crumbled by now.

He applied the cement thickly here, carrying bits of granite gravel from the embankment to use as a strengthener, and made a new, stronger top layer. After smoothing it out, he examined it for imperfections. It was a good job… couldn’t have been better. Now if only that crumbling brick underneath held together.

He patched some holes in front of Ben Taylor’s store, using roughly square stones from the embankment, using a hammer and chisel to knock off an occasional rough edge to make a better fit. Strange how only one stone would be missing here and there, as if someone had made windows in the slab. It looked as if the stones had been pushed out, or had fallen out, but he was never able to find even the broken pieces of the fallen stone on the outside. Maybe kids had picked them up and played with them. Or maybe some adult in the town made a habit of moving them without telling anyone, playing the mischief-maker. It was a mystery, kind of like losing socks in a washer—they just seemed to dissolve into the atmosphere. He chuckled as he thought about it, lifting one of the heavy replacement stones to slide it into place. For a moment he looked into the darkness of the hole, and discovered he couldn’t see past a couple of inches. But it was hollow back there in this section; he could feel an ice-cold draft seeping up from between the rocks. When the stone slipped in there was a thud and an echo, and Charlie thought he could hear a scurrying of tiny feet inside, like rats in a barrel.

It was getting dark; he’d better hurry. He didn’t like staying in town anymore after dark.

~ * ~

Again she awakened inside the slab. Her thoughts hot, drifting away from her skull, floating and licking at the dark stones. Her thoughts on fire. Her head of flames.

She’d left the Pierce woman only a short time ago to return to this retreat. The Pierce woman had stirred uncomfortable things in her, and she’d needed this darkness, this rest.

She remembered more things. Knew more about how it had been to be human. The ache and frustration. The desire to be what she could not be. Fire licking at her throat, her thighs. But now she was something else, and these old desires belonged to her but yet did not belong to her. She had been something else, then. She had changed.

There were soft sounds outside the slab. Human hands working. Her hand floated out and she picked up a fragment of mirror, holding it lightly in front of her face. Alabaster skin, thin arched brows, crimson hair. Beautiful. She was beautiful. What any man would want.

She turned and floated a few inches off the black, moist earth. Insects scurried away from beneath her. Bugs and dull white worms. She let her eyes rest on the scattered bones near one end of the cavity. Fox, cat, dog. Scattered among the pieces of jewelry, the coins, the bits of glass and wood and paper, the things lost or left behind over the years this slab had been here.

She had had a dream, or something like a dream. She knew she was past ordinary dreaming. She had lived inside this dream, walking, talking, flying. It had been a revelation.

In this vision the slab had swollen to cliff size, striped with layer after layer of strata. The people of Simpson Creeks, those newly dead, those centuries dead, and those still living, trapped inside each layer of stone. The waves crashing against the cliff, wave after wave crashing and breaking the slab apart.

She sat on top of the cliff and sang. A siren song for sailors who might be lost on this enormous dark sea. This endless night. The wails of the dead so mixed with her song she could not tell which was which. And did not care.

For the people of Simpson Creeks—all those living and all those who had died—had one eventual destiny.

~ * ~

Charlie threw his tools into the store, locked it, and headed for his pickup. It was late; dark was falling fast. Repairing the slab had eventually made him feel acutely uncomfortable. But it was his responsibility. He knew he had a duty not only to all those who lived, but to all those who had died in the Creeks as well.

They were all in this together—living and dead. The crime of the flood had been against them all. It was a crime against their ancestry, their way of life, against everyone who had ever lived here, against the mountain and the valley itself. They all demanded payment.

He hunched his shoulders, the air suddenly gone chill. As he climbed into the pickup, he didn’t notice the soft red glow emanating from the cracks he had missed in the slab.

Chapter 25

The static seemed to float out of the telephone receiver, fluid, suffocating. Reed could barely hear the faint rings beneath it. Then the rings stopped. “Hello?”

“Carol.”

“Reed! How are you? Did you find out what you need? Are you coming home?” She said it rapidly, all the words pushed together.

“I’m not sure, Carol. I’m not… well. Something seems to be happening to me here I don’t understand.” He coughed then, and was amazed himself how bad he sounded.

“Reed, your cold… have you been to see a doctor?”

He paused. He shouldn’t have called her; what could she do to help him anyway? He just needed to hear her voice, tell her, even obliquely, what was bothering him. There was normalcy at home—he could hear it in every word she spoke. The difference between here, the Creeks, and home. He yearned for it. “Yes… I’m fine. He says I’m fine.”

“Well, you don’t sound fine. Reed, I want you home. I want to take care of you. We need you home.”

“I…” He stared at the receiver. His hands were sweating so much the phone was wet. Her voice sounded garbled, as if she were drowning. He stared as one, then two, drops of moisture fell to the floor by his feet. “I want to come home, Carol. But I can’t just yet. I’m finding… things.”

“You need to get out of there, Reed. You sound awful!”

“I know, love. I know.”

Static filled her voice for the rest of the conversation. He had no idea what she was saying, but it comforted him to know her presence was on the other end of this line. The static became worse and worse, until finally she broke the connection. Reed hung on to the phone, listening to the dial tone, for several minutes longer.

~ * ~

The bear ripped through the underbrush and caught the small deer on the run. He crushed its life quickly, not out of mercy but out of eagerness. He still burned, but the burning was steadier now, easier to live with because there weren’t all those peaks and valleys. It just burned and burned, ridding him temporarily of the inside thoughts that had irritated him so, letting him think of basic things. Hunger and food. Thirst. Rage.

He sank his muzzle into the steaming carcass and bit into the flesh. Warm blood flooded his throat. He groaned with satisfaction, drinking in the salt taste.

But then the harsh thoughts were back, the thing inside him, crowding his head and making him roar in pain and anger. He wanted to be biting into something else. Ripping it apart. Something human.

He staggered away from the carcass as if drunk, and charged into the growing darkness.

Chapter 26

Audra stepped softly from the cafe just as dark was falling—she was leaving a little later than usual tonight. Jake had stayed for a long time looking over the books, that gun he’d gotten from Charlie Simpson lying at his feet like some stretched-out snake. It scared her, and she started to tell him she didn’t think he should have a gun in a public restaurant, but the look that suddenly came over his face stopped her. She knew there was no use talking to him. He’d been drinking all day and yet had this intense, clear, and dark-eyed look. She’d never seen him like that before; it was as if he were burning up the liquor as fast as he could consume it, with whatever it was he was holding down inside.

Now and then he would glance up at her irritably, sometimes asking her a question or two. She couldn’t tell why he was asking the questions—Is that amount right? or I thought Bobby Waters ate lunches here on Wednesdays? or When did we raise the price on the sausages? Maybe he was just trying to make her feel uneasy. But she was fed up; it was making her angry instead.

No customers came in those last few hours. Audra had seen a few stop in front of the door, peer in at Jake with the papers spread everywhere and that big gun at his feet, and turn away. Finally, a few minutes ago, he had just shoved all the papers into a grocery sack, picked up the gun, and carried it all out to the car without even bothering to say good night.

Normally she wouldn’t be out on the street this time of night, not since the bear came. But she’d grown to enjoy her early evening strolls, and she wasn’t about to let her brother-in-law cheat her out of one of them. She pulled the front door closed and breathed in the cool night air. She started to walk, but held herself in front of the door a moment longer. Her secret admirer… in her hassle with Jake she’d almost forgotten him.

Audra scanned the gray buildings. It was so dark she couldn’t see the corners very well, couldn’t know if someone was hiding, watching her. She didn’t like that. She didn’t like that at all.

She stared at each corner she could see of the old hotel. The shadows were dark there, but she thought she’d at least be able to detect any movement if she concentrated enough.

The straight lines of the building wavered as she gazed at it, the wind bending the trees and distorting the shadows, as if she were seeing the building through water. She felt a vague unease in the pit of her stomach and looked away. She studied the dark planes of Charlie Simpson’s store—now where was he? He was always open this time of day—and the empty sidewalk in front of Ben Taylor’s. Nothing. Not a soul around. She felt almost desperate to move, to find someone else tonight, and after a few more moments she was walking down the street and staring at shadows, before she’d even realized it.

Daddy brought me up to be a baby, she thought. Silly goose. Crazier than Doris.

The creaking made her stop the first time. The oddest sort of creaking: it didn’t sound like wood or metal or leather or anything else she could think of. She stared at the buildings across the way, up on the slab. Empty. The wind was picking up, but there were no loose signs to swing or unsecured doors. Maybe it was the buildings themselves creaking, maybe…

Gray light illuminated the slab. And she thought… but it couldn’t be. She slowed her walk but the illusion didn’t alter. The slab seemed to be shifting on its own, being moved, perhaps, by the wind. She stopped and stared at it. The illusion still remained. Creaking.

She began to walk faster. A door banged behind her and she was running.

And stopped just as suddenly. She wouldn’t be pushed around like this, she wouldn’t be… frightened. She turned and everything was still again. Silly goose… a trick of the light.

She decided to take the dirt path that ran behind the stores on the slab, and up around the shacks abandoned by the Nole Company, falling down and filling with dirt and fungus and rot. Lovely image… She shook herself. She’d always been too afraid to take that path at night, and everybody was always warning their kids away from those old shacks.

But she wasn’t going to be scared like this. She was going to fight it.

She rounded the path between Ben Taylor’s store and his house, walking briskly, keeping her eyes steadily on the path ahead. The trees bent around her, and a breeze soft as cool breath moved past.

A large patch of darkness seemed to shift… somewhere… as she passed the back of Charlie Simpson’s store.

She stopped and looked around. Charlie’s fence was still down from the bear attack; apparently he didn’t have the heart to fix it. The place seemed abandoned with Buck not there. It made the whole hillside a bit ominous.

The shadow again. Her hair lifted in the gust and suddenly curtained her face. She cried out and tried to move forward, stumbling through a thistle patch. She thought she might cry.

A lower bough of one of the maples bordering the line of shacks bent low to the ground, then up again, making the shadow. She gasped in relief.

And then knew someone was there, standing in the darkened yard where Buck had been torn apart.

She waited with her arms slightly raised. It would move soon, she thought, and then she’d know whether it was a man, a boy, a woman, or just another shadow under the trees.

But even after five long minutes she did not know. Faint silver spots shone like eyes, and always in the same position, but disappeared again too quickly.

And each time the spots made her colder.

Pieces of paper blew past, plastering her legs and feet like oddly shaped phantoms. Someone’s dog had probably emptied the family garbage… or some other animal had been feeding there.

More and more garbage drifting around her feet, flowing slowly, like a tide. The wind seemed to be moving it in a straight line down the path. She moved her feet, trying to get away from it, but it stuck to her shoes and stockings. She was afraid, and shook her feet, but the garbage refused to let go.

She imagined the garbage rising higher, sweeping her along with it as it descended the valley. She tried to move out of the path, but the garbage seemed to block her.

She’d missed the flood, too. Just like Reed Taylor.

And just as suddenly the wind died, leaving a sediment of debris covering the length of the path. None of it spoiled the grass and weeds on both sides. She stared into the dark behind Charlie’s store, but there were no silver spots anymore. The wind rose up again, as if it were ascending from the ground. Tall grass bowed in waves, showing silver backs, then darker green fronts. She shuddered, and realized the uneasiness that had been building in her since she had left the cafe. She brushed the hair back from her face and gazed up into the gathering thunderheads, silver outlines flashing now and then with no sound. Perhaps it would rain and wash away her anger.

The vegetation appeared to be charged, the darkness full of anger and static. If her secret admirer revealed himself now, she knew she would have nothing to do with him.

She continued her walk hurriedly, crossing under the maples and ascending the short hill. Both sides of the path were lined with broken-down shacks. It was hard to think, now, of people living here. It must have been awful—always dust or mud.

The shacks leaned uncomfortably together. If one fell, it would take several others down with it. She could see where other shacks had fallen together in previous years, reduced to piles of rotting kindling. People lived here. Children played.

A faint voice… a cat crying behind the long drab faces of wood. Louder, and it sounded like no cat she had ever heard. Close to the sound a cat might make when in pain, but not quite.

There was a baby here, trapped in one of the shacks.

A snapping of boards. A roof shifting ever so slightly. The quick and shocking smell of decay suddenly released.

The outline of… something moved somewhere to her left. She turned slightly and an off-center gray door swung out like a broken jaw.

She stared for a while at the pile of mildewed furniture and discarded clothing inside, then continued up the hill, keeping maximum distance between herself and the lines of shacks on both sides.

A building settled, then a piece of tin fell, echoing. And then a cry, a young child’s whimper, lost and afraid…

Silly goose…

She stepped past a sighing building that suddenly moved out, toward her, reaching with its swinging door and gaping windows. She screamed and ran, and the building fell into the pathway behind her, as if it had been pushed. Shadows moved crazily in the darkness behind where the building had been, the dust swirled up in plumes and waves, but she could see no more. The wind was stronger now; it must have been the wind. She was unsafe among the abandoned shacks now because of the strong wind.

The crying again, lifted by the wind, traveling past her. No doubt, no doubt at all. She had to find the child.

She opened one door, then another. Gaping holes in roof and floors, dust and rotted belongings. Rats scurrying in the far corners.

Something falling. She opened each door carefully, and still things fell, creaked, moaned. The cry again, and then again. She was in a panic now, and jerked the doors open, and more and more things fell to disrupt the layers and layers of dust, rot, mildew, grime. She bit her lip as rats and mice scurried out, as bats took wing, as tiny animals snarled in the dark corners.

A little child in one of these places, one of these awful places.

Then she opened one door to black silence. And a piece of the black stirred, and moved. Scrambled across the dark floor. And cried with a hollow sound.

She ran in and there were silver places where eyes might be, and teeth.

He rose up, her secret admirer, with hair only distinguishable because it was darker than the surrounding dark. Dark clothes and skin with no highlights. He turned to her in the shadows and she smelled an ancient, stagnant damp smell.

Teeth gleaming… the only light.

And his size… slight or medium build?… she thought of all the men in the area and found only one who might fit. She started to say his name when he reached for her.

Damp hands and fetid breath.

She pushed and ran, stumbling over beams and something soft and moist as she broke through the door, stepping over the warped gray boards of the shack that had collapsed next door. And still he whimpered behind her.

Why, he’s just a little boy, she thought, still running, her mind racing with fear and whatever reassurances it could assemble out of the shadows, a lost little boy.

Then she heard the hiss, and jumped when the lightning exploded over Big Andy. But an angry, hateful little boy, too, she thought, and felt the anesthetizing dampness even before it began to rain. An old, rich hate. The hard raindrops loosened the tight skin of her face and she began to cry, her lips distorting, hands clenched.

“I’ve done nothing to you!” she screamed, running as hard as she could for the cafe, thinking she might never escape this rain.

Chapter 27

The bear lumbered through the woods, angry, as if some irritant—insect bite or bee sting—were working its way along the underside of his skin. He smashed bushes and saplings as he progressed above the narrow gravel road snaking along the hillside. Dimly aware of a place he must go, a certain time of shadow and light, he followed his legs… they seemed to know. The lack of understanding was a constant bother now; he was enraged by it. He was vaguely aware of once having been something else. Rage grew in his belly like a storm. His human eyes burned. As he approached the place of the meeting, that rage grew and grew until it was almost uncontrollable. He roared into the dim forest light, letting loose his frustration as he swiped at low branches and vines…

~ * ~

Reed had spent much of the morning digging into the area in front of the house, at first not even bothering to look through the gaping window cavity into the darkness there. He stripped away a band of earth maybe five feet square and six inches deep, not carefully, not scientifically, just anxious to get it over and done with. His eyes were running, his nose clogged, which made the work miserable. Periodically he would find something, pocketing a few things but throwing almost everything away after a cursory examination. He’d lost patience. Now his project seemed a ridiculous waste of time. The possibility that a vicious crank had made the call that had brought him here now seemed more and more likely. He quit by noon and went to rest under the twin sycamores at one side of the clearing.

As a child he’d spent a lot of time under these trees, yet never had they seemed so large. He felt himself lulled by their swinging, their drifting branches, leaves swaying as if floating in water. Before he fell asleep he wondered briefly, how high the flood waters had risen up their trunks that long-ago rainy afternoon.

~ * ~

The bear recognized this place… the structure. A moan escaped him, and it was as if the moan didn’t belong to him. He drew back from the clearing, suddenly terrified. Eyes turning this direction, here, then there. Moaning. Drawing back again.

Then he saw the man lying under the tree. Still… as if dead. Something about him… he knew. The bear moaned. Then he saw the slight rising and falling of the chest and something felt different inside. He growled, suddenly angered, then the anger was gone.

Something inside him. Something seeing out through his eyes. Foglike. He stared for a long time at the man.

And could not move.

~ * ~

Reed awakened to dimmer light and at first thought he had slept through until nightfall, and that something had gone wrong. But when he sat up he realized it was only mid-afternoon; the sun had just moved some across Big Andy, and tall trees were blocking the light. He turned his head and stretched.

Something had changed.

Something had altered here, ever so slightly. He spent a long time gazing fixedly at the land surrounding the site and at the old house, then scanned the border of trees slowly. He got up and walked toward the house, trying not to think about it. Something had changed, and he knew he would never know exactly what.

Reed walked up the gentle rise that now served as a ramp to the second-story window. The casement was cracked and splintery, but all the glass, even the smallest fragments, was gone. He took a careful look behind him at the area, strange and not as he remembered it… maybe because of the new angle. This window had once led into his bedroom.

Outside his window had been his mother’s flowerbed. White and yellow and purple pansies. They changed color every year, they had felt magical to him that way. And with their facelike shapes. She’d planted the flowers there just for him. Now they were at least eight feet below the surface… but the house had moved, hadn’t it? He would never be able to find the exact spot. The location of the flowerbed was lost forever.

Reed wondered how a woman who seemed able to do so many things could be so helpless. He used to be angry with his father for slapping her, belittling her, but as he got older she made him mad too. That made him a little ashamed, but she was so weak sometimes. Once when his father was chasing his mother—slapping at her, trying to grab her hair and jerk her back—she’d run behind Reed, expecting him to protect her. He’d been only ten years old, and when his father reached them… he’d looked so crazy… Reed had been terrified. He could never forgive her for that.

Reed stepped through the window into gray shadows and fallen plaster.

Scavengers had obviously already carried away anything of value; his room was almost bare. Except for a small dust-covered lump in one corner.

Reed could taste bile coming up in his throat, but he walked over to the object anyway, reached out his hand to touch it, even as he wanted to bolt and leap back through the broken window into daylight again.

He picked up the dry, soft, fur-covered form, and turned it over.

It was a teddy bear, his old teddy bear, and it could not be here. He was sure he had lost it years before the flood.

His father used to say he was too big for a toy like that. But Reed knew better. The teddy bear had always seemed like a smaller, passive version of his father, something Reed could beat against the floor but that would not hit back.

Something Reed could hold.

The teddy bear stared up at him, but with wide holes full of sour-smelling sawdust. The shining, dark glass eyes had been ripped out of the teddy bear’s face. But Reed had never touched those eyes; they’d been intact when he’d lost the toy. He was sure. Someone else had ripped them out.

~ * ~

Jake Parkey stopped, elbows tensely spread, the shotgun raised. Something had moved in the brush behind him.

He waited for another noise, his throat too tight to let breath escape. The gun metal felt wet under his finger. No sound. He hated being afraid; he hated admitting that he was afraid. Like when he was a kid—in bed he’d bite his lip almost in two rather than scream and let his daddy know he was afraid of the dark.

And he hated Reed Taylor for making him so afraid.

Jake didn’t know exactly why he’d figured it out this way… but it made some sort of sense. All these things happening… all the craziness hadn’t begun until Reed Taylor came back. Supposedly the boy had gotten off the train after the bear had got poor Amos, but Jake had heard Ben Taylor say he thought he’d seen Reed up on the Big Andy while the hunt was going on. And now he was spending all his time up the hollow digging and scratching around… grave robbing was what it looked like to Jake. A man shouldn’t dig where other folks had died… nobody ‘round the Creeks would ever think of doing such a thing.

Hell, something was going on, and since Reed Taylor got into town things had gone bad. There had to be a connection.

He’d left the town a long time ago… he had no right. He didn’t belong here anymore. He wasn’t part of the town. Jake checked the gun. Two shells, primed and ready. Reed was going to be real sorry he’d ever come back, real sorry he’d caused the town all this trouble.

There were branches breaking behind him, a noise kind of like whispering in the branches overhead. Wind… and trees shifting. Jake began chewing on his lip, biting until he could taste the blood.

~ * ~

Reed began with a sweep of all the rooms on the second floor of the house, removing dust and dirt to a level with the stairwell. Not very difficult; at most there was two inches of dirt. There was little to be found here, however: a comb that had belonged to his mother—she had been extremely proud of her long auburn hair and spent hours before the mirror grooming it—a few scattered coins, bobby pins and thimbles and empty thread spools. He did find an old decoder ring he remembered finding in a box of candy, and this small discovery thrilled him. On an impulse he wedged it over his little finger. Its plastic jewel seemed to glow in the dim yellow light. He suddenly felt a child again, playing at being archaeologist in an ancient Egyptian tomb, discovering the sacred ring of Aman-Tut. Complete with a curse.

Somewhere he thought he heard someone singing, and somewhere else, a crying, just beneath his voice as he spoke. He stopped to listen, but could hear nothing.

Carol liked to sing.

After living in this house with his family all those years he’d learned the advantages of separation and distance. Sometimes if you pretended you weren’t there, the old man would forget about you. It kept things safe.

As he walked through the gray and dust-laden rooms, he was able to remember how he got to be that way. A dust-laden table brought back an afternoon drunk of his father’s, when hiding under the table was the only way to keep him from stumbling over you. A scar in the wall was where a thrown fire log had almost taken off Reed’s head. He’d hidden in the woods all night. He’d been four years old at the time. There had been noises, and awful smells—of dead things and beasts’ breath, and it was the first time Reed had known that the forest wasn’t always your friend.

At least he’d overcome some of those fears, years later, in Denver. At least he had been healthy enough to recognize how good Carol would be for him, and let himself marry her.

Then Reed thought of something really frightening, far more terrifying than the childhood he had finally escaped. He wondered what would have happened if he’d never gotten any better, if he’d never improved. Never left this place.

What might he have become if he’d stayed behind with his family in Simpson Creeks?

He had to have been an angry child, he had to have had bubbling rage in him most of the time. Reed couldn’t remember ever being depressed, so there had to have been tremendous rage in him as a child. The thought chilled him.

For he could not remember ever being angry.

A section of the wall before him began to crack, the cracks spreading until they’d spiderwebbed the entire surface. Then the wall began to collapse, and filth-encrusted roaches slipped out as if from a lopsided, toothless, and aged mouth. All of them spreading out in a wave toward his feet.

He gasped and stepped back. But the roaches were gone, and the plaster wall as clean and unbroken as before.

He laughed softly; his voice had an odd, hollow quality within the room. Then he realized his mouth was closed; he hadn’t uttered a sound.

“The imagination’s a pretty powerful thing,” he said aloud to the house, as if to break the uneasy silence, as if to ward off the malice of the house and court its favor.

~ * ~

The bear heard the rustling once again. He cocked his ears. Rocked back and forth on his front paws, biting insects under his skin. This presence… frightened him. But something made him want to go closer to the man rather than run away.

And this other presence, off in the woods beside him, running along beside him… frightened him even more. He didn’t know what to do about that one. He had never seen such a thing before.

He found himself moving toward the man. It didn’t surprise him. He just let his legs take him in that direction.

~ * ~

Ben Taylor stood in the empty lot behind his feed store, gazing up at the Big Andy, looking for the road cut leading to his brother’s old place, looking a long time until he realized new tree growth had obscured the narrow pass a long time ago from eyes peering up from the town.

Reed was up there, and he wished to hell he could get the boy back down to the house, make him forget about the digging, about the past in general. No good could come of it. The boy was sick; he looked worse every day. He shouldn’t think so much about what was past… dead and buried. It was just making him sicker and sicker. At that moment Ben began thinking it might even kill him.

Ben had never had much love for his brother; he had admitted that to himself a long time ago. But that didn’t mean he didn’t owe him something. He could have sued Nole Coal.

He could have gone up there the night of the flood. The way it had been raining… some people from up the hollows along the Simpson had already come into town, afraid of flooding. And he’d thought about driving up there in the pickup and asking them if they’d like to stay down at the store.

But he hadn’t. Alec’s company was always so unpleasant; they always ended their visits together with some sort of big argument. So he hadn’t gone.

But Janie and the little girl shouldn’t have had to suffer. They might be alive today if he’d just driven up there.

The slab… rocked… once, beneath him. He felt his stomach turn. Tiny cracks spread from one of the mortar joints a few inches from his feet.

~ * ~

The bear could see the other presence through the trees, keeping pace with him as he advanced steadily on the man. As fast as he was… as strong… but like nothing he’d ever seen. He felt his throat quaking, but dared not roar, even with all the anger he was feeling. This other thing was dangerous; he would keep out of its way.

Something… inside him… recognized this other presence, and was suddenly angry, suddenly afraid. The something inside him, that had been inside him all this time, taking him places, telling him things, putting things inside him, suddenly became very, very small.

The bear stopped and batted at a low-hanging branch. He now had no desire to go near the man, to… hurt the man.

He watched as the other presence continued the chase.

~ * ~

Jake turned slowly, unable to resist any longer the fear and the dark tugging at him, the sound of rustlings, snappings, in the woods behind him.

“Come out!” he cried, raising the gun, sweeping it along the mass of trees, searching, probing. “I know you’re there!”

Tears were leaking out of his eyes, and he had no idea how to stop them. No idea. He was desperate. He wanted to scream. Alone.

~ * ~

Reed raised his head from the cloth toy he was preserving with plastic compound.

There it was again. A shout. Or a scream. Just over his shoulder, behind him. He gazed across the clearing. Nothing. Nothing. He found himself hoping he could be finished before dark.

~ * ~

Ben looked down through the crack formed when the mortar fell through into the interior of the slab. Damn thing had to happen someday; now he was wondering if any of the buildings erected on the slab were safe. But maybe it was only a temporary settling; things might be okay for a while. He’d best talk the others into forcing cement into all the cracks and hollow places in the slab to strengthen it, otherwise they all might find their stores collapsing someday.

But hell… sometimes he wondered what was the sense, anyway. He looked across the street at the abandoned hotel, then gazed down toward the railway station. Not a soul on the street. Everybody was locked up in their houses, and nobody was talking. What the hell was happening to this place?

Maybe they should move the town again, off the slab. Hell, maybe they should abandon the town altogether.

Clouds were gathering over Big Andy. Looked like rain. He wished Reed would call it a day and get himself back into town.

A whispering under his feet. He looked down, seeing nothing at first, sure it was just the sound of the mortar falling deeper into the slab, the powdered brick and stone shifting within the interior. Then he saw an eye looking back up at him through the crack.

He gasped, stepped back a little, then forced himself to his knees. He leaned over and peered down through the crack. Damn, he thought. A little girl… a dead little girl…

But the stare was so fixed, the features so waxen, he finally decided it was a doll down there. A doll with pale sandy hair and a plain dress and bright blue eyes. A pretty doll like his own little girl had. He was sure of it.

But he had no idea how it could have gotten there.

~ * ~

Jake shouted, almost dropping the gun, as the wind suddenly picked up, blowing branches against his face and letting the shadows loose from the woods. He squinted his eyes, trying to distinguish shadow from tree and tree from the darkness in between trees. The sky had gone dark, and he no longer had any idea in which direction he would find the old Taylor place.

Then the shadow was at his back; he turned, and fired. A tree limb split, and crashed.

“Reed!” he screamed to the shadow, and found he could not think of firing again. It hadn’t done any good… no gun would, he thought. But he wasn’t thinking right; he wasn’t seeing right.

“Reed!” he said again to the shadow with the black, black hair. He couldn’t make out the face, or most of the form… crowded with shadows as it was, moving so swiftly, leaving soot, or burnt leaves, or black mud… something… on the forest floor as it reached toward him.

Then the grin, that gleaming grin with the one sharp tooth showing, the rest hidden almost seductively by the too-red lips.

“Bear…” The bear was going to get him! He started to turn… to run… when it spun him around with a vicious slap. And Jake saw bright, gleaming blood falling, leaving ever-growing beaded patterns on the black backdrop of hair. Bright drops of crimson. His blood. Flying up and spreading there. Jake’s own blood.

Bear the bear the bear bear bear…

But even then, he wasn’t sure. It was so dark, and the figure full of shadows, and every shadow had a tooth or a claw.

“Reed!” he cried, knowing it would be the last word he would say, and wondering why he would call on him for help, the man he might have killed. “Reed!”

Jake saw the gun flying away, painted in crimson. Jake saw the pieces of shredded cloth between the teeth. Pieces of bloodied skin and pale broken skin suddenly gone blue and silver under the dark and silver clouds dropping lower over him.

Jake on the ground. How long had he been there? Being savaged. Savaged. And as his mouth stretched wide and wider still, soundlessly, matching the impossible extension of jaws that hovered over him, he looked into the shadowy mask growing dimmer, but still bright with its paint: the stretched lines and dripping starbursts of his own blood.

~ * ~

Far back in the woods, away from the screams and fury of movement, the bear watched, trying to keep still despite the agitation inside, the desire to run. He watched as the man was savaged. And wondered.

And was sick with his own fear.

~ * ~

When Joe Manors came in from work that evening, he was sure he saw old Mr. Pierce out in the side yard talking to a woman with red hair. But when he hurried over, he couldn’t find anyone there. He took the back stairs two at a time and rushed past the rooms on the second floor shouting. “Old man Pierce is out! He’s out!” he cried, and all the doors opened with a few of the occupants joining him as he ran up the steps to the third floor.

But Hector Pierce was lying in bed, babbling as usual. “She told me… she told me what’s happening. That poor boy don’t know what he’s in for… part of him stayed behind.”

Joe looked at the other tenants sheepishly. “Don’t understand it. I swear I saw him clear as day. With some woman.” Several of the men laughed and winked.

“Fire and flood and that boy’s ravening teeth!” the old man shouted, and they all shook their heads, bemused.

Joe thought he saw an orange glow at the window, but said nothing.

When everyone else had gone to bed, Joe stayed with the old man. Sitting in this old rocker by the bed, he listened to the delirium, making a point to remember later scattered phrases here and there from the monologue, as if he were listening to a preacher who talked too fast but had some sort of important message for him.

Several times he heard “little girl” and “the little girl.” That chilled him. It was as if Hector were trying to address Joe’s past mistakes directly, tell him where he’d gone wrong, let him know how he could make it up to his little daughter.

As the evening wore on, Joe started drinking and was completely drunk by the time the storm was in full force. He didn’t have to work tomorrow; the flooding of the sinkhole had taken care of that. He was wondering if he’d ever be going back to work the way things were going. He wasn’t even sure he would if he had the chance. Now he was afraid of stepping anywhere around the mine, afraid his foot would break through to some underground place or the rock would spring a leak right under his footstep. Lord, it was getting so he just hated the water, water of any kind.

He watched the lightning running itself to ground all over the head of the Big Andy, like flaming strands of hair.

~ * ~

Reed had waited much too long. Now the storm was in full force, and he had to dash through the dark woods to his uncle’s pickup, dodging fallen branches and hoping he wouldn’t be struck by lightning before he got there. He shouldn’t have stayed so long; he hadn’t found much of anything anyway.

He tripped on a half-buried log and sprawled into damp underbrush. The texture of the ground was repulsive here, and he raised his head quickly. Rain and mud spread down his face and he thought he would scream. He rubbed at his eyes frantically.

At first he thought he was looking into a clown’s mask… the bright red lips and large white spots painted on cheeks and forehead. But then he knew there was no paint here, and the white spots were from something eaten away rather than from something painted on.

Chapter 28

Felix Emmanuel didn’t hear the shiny gray-steel van pull into the lot outside the mine office that morning; he’d spent the entire evening there, sleeping little because of the storm. But he did hear the van doors slam, and the men talking.

He peered over the bottom sill of the front window, just enough to see the Nole Company insignia on the van door and the block lettering below it: GEOLOGY. Suddenly Doris Parkey moaned under him.

He crouched and grabbed the woman by the neck. “Hush! You want me fired?”

Doris giggled and pulled his hand down over her belly. “Dammit, woman!” Mr. Emmanuel slapped her hard, clamping his hand over her mouth as she whimpered. “I’ve had it! Another word and I’ll…” He was at a loss. What would he do?

Then he realized she was looking at him in a very strange way. Her eyes wide, almost pop-eyed. Her lips trembling, losing spittle into his hand.

And then she was struggling, clawing to get away from him. Her filthy thighs and feet squirmed around him, he was punched in the face, and suddenly she was free, breaking through the back door of the office and climbing the embankment into the trees. Naked, her flabby buttocks quivering grotesquely.

To Mr. Emmanuel’s dismay, he found himself aroused. He gritted his teeth and began jerking his clothes on. He could hear the men walking toward the front door.

~ * ~

Ben Taylor held out the coffee cup with both hands; his fingers were still trembling. “Here, Reed. Best drink up.”

Reed received the cup into waiting palms. He avoided looking at Ben, staring past the edge of the cup as he raised it carefully to his lips and drank. He sniffed, then gasped a mouthful of air. He could hardly breathe.

“Yeah,” Ben mumbled. “Hell of a thing.”

Reed had driven back to his uncle’s place in the middle of the night with the pieces of Jake Parkey’s body. He didn’t even know if he’d gotten it all. It had been dark and he’d had to feel around the area, picking up dead wood and mud clumps and anything else that seemed to feel right to the touch, his stomach wrenching anytime he felt something that seemed particularly soft or moist. He’d paused now and then to catch his breath; try to calm himself down. It took him hours. Like some bizarre fraternity rite, bananas and syrup.

The ground had been torn apart for yards around. It must have been quite a struggle.

Now Jake was out on the back porch in two garbage bags. They were waiting for the sheriff and the coroner from Four Corners.

“I don’t want you going up there no more.” Reed looked up, and realized Ben’s hand was on his shoulder, one finger touching Reed’s neck, as if giving him direction. “It ain’t safe up there, son.”

Reed just stared at him. His eyes were burning. His uncle’s face went slightly out of focus every few seconds. “I don’t want to show disrespect, but I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said. “Dammit, Reed! Just look at yourself! Sneezin’ an’ wheezin’. Eyes so wet and hot lookin’. You look worse than any sick hound dog I ever had! You’re killin’ yourself with this; that ole house’ll wait ‘til stuff dies down around here.”

“No,” Reed said slowly, with no feeling.

“You look damned feverish, son, like your eyes were burning your skin. It scares me.”

“I don’t think it’s going to wait. It isn’t going to wait for anything, Ben. It wants me there and I think I’d better do what it wants. What you can’t face… it controls you.”

“It? You don’t mean that bear?”

“Maybe.” He looked up at his uncle earnestly, and his uncle sighed. Reed had never seen the man look so sad.

“You know, you look just like you did when you were a boy and were confused about something, thought you’d done something wrong, and trying so hard to make things right.”

“I don’t really know what it is.”

Ben stared at him awhile, as if musing, then, “Your daddy ain’t up there, Reed.”

Reed looked up in surprise; a chuckle almost escaped. “Why, Ben. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Don’t you now?” He looked out the front window. “Wonder what’s keeping the sheriff so long… you been acting like you do, if I read your face right.

“Matter of fact, I’m beginning to think I believe in ‘em, too.”

There was a knock at the door and the sheriff pushed his way in, an old man who must be the coroner tagging along behind. The sour feeling in Reed’s stomach was fading, but he wished he could talk to Ben and find out what he knew.

~ * ~

The geologists from the main office crowded around the sinkhole, charts in hand. Mr. Emmanuel tried to talk to them about the cave-in, but they were ignoring him, in fact wouldn’t even let him near Willy’s sinkhole.

“Damn… this is impossible.” Crouskey, the head geologist, sighed and scratched at the chart with the edge of his pencil.

A younger man strode up to the group. “I can’t find any possible source for that water, unless there’s an old storage tank buried somewhere here that they’ve ruptured.”

“I see no traces of metal here, Walt, just a clean break into the rock, as if we had an underground spring, despite what the charts say. That’s no buried tank.”

The men stared at the water in silence.

“Mr. Crouskey, I was thinking maybe some of my men could dig around the hole,” Felix Emmanuel babbled eagerly. “Maybe we could cut into the channel that’s bringing the water, expose it a little.”

Crouskey didn’t bother facing Emmanuel to reply. “You won’t be helping us at all on this one, Emmanuel. Or any other, once the main office gets my report. Just look at yourself. You hardly make a good local representative for this company.”

Mr. Emmanuel touched his face. He was sweating… sweating like a pig. And he was dirty, unkempt… filthy. He stared into the sinkhole. The water was moving, ever so slightly, barely visible. And unusually milky around the edges, like cloud, or… what was it?… fleece. He thought to call their attention to it, but did not.

~ * ~

Charlie went into the store early, but left the “Closed” sign out. At noon the sign was still out. By two that afternoon it was still out, and Charlie had drunk almost a quart of whiskey.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten drunk. Forty-two, forty-three… something like that. A prize horse had died… William Tell was his name, and you couldn’t find a finer thoroughbred a hundred miles from the Creeks. Mattie didn’t speak to him for a week—she never could abide a drunk. He supposed that Puritan streak in her was actually one of the reasons he’d married her—he figured she’d keep him out of most kinds of trouble. And she had.

But he’d never been in so much trouble as now, and the only bit of Mattie he had left was a few pictures, the lace doilies on all the furniture at home, and that blend of sweet gum and lilac smells that never seemed to leave the house, though it had no reason to be there. He really had no reason to believe anything out of the ordinary was happening in the Creeks; he’d been spooked that day in the woods, and later when they were hunting the bear, but he’d never seen anything that couldn’t be explained eventually.

Charlie burped and the amber liquid burned his throat. Damn, if he didn’t have the most cool-headed, practical sensibility! Here everybody was seeing things, unexplainable things… but not him. Doris Parkey and Hector Pierce had both seen a woman with flaming hair. Now they were both crazy, God knows, but it was kind of odd that two people would be sharin’ the same kind of craziness. And Joe Manors, about as sensible a man as he’d ever met, had seen a dead girl floating a good three feet and more off the ground. And here Ben Taylor, his best friend in this world, had sworn he’d seen Reed up on the Big Andy a good four hours before Reed could’ve gotten in on the train. And now Ben was acting so skittish about things, jumpin’ at shadows, lookin’ over his shoulder. And the way Inez had been looking the past few days, that quick, nervous movement in her gaze… everybody was changing.

Except good old level-headed Charlie.

He looked down at the bottle, then around at the darkened store where… he was hiding. He was scared to death.

He owed those people something… his daddy, his granddaddy, they all did… for what happened. He looked again at the bottle.

A face there. Reflected in the glass. Looking over his shoulder.

Pale cheeks and ragged hair and blue lips and dark shadows moving under the skin and white white teeth oh God God…

He jumped up and sprawled over the chair trying to get around to the other side of the counter. Knocking displays everywhere, breaking up displays that had been the same way, nary a bottle sold, since his daddy’s time. Dust and glass and his own spittle flying. He would have screamed, but the drink in him kept the screams traveling around inside, not sure which way was out.

He hit the far wall of the store and jerked around, his shoulder blades rubbing the old Doctor Scholl’s poster behind him. He blinked the tears away, trying to get a good look at the shadow floating across the room toward him.

Nothing. He saw nothing. He choked on a sob.

And that was when Charlie Simpson decided to start doing something about whatever was happening to his town. He watched as the rest of the whiskey joined the spilled tonics and elixirs pooling in front of the counter, the dark and amber liquids widening into a miniature flood.

He would start with the sinkhole at the Nole Company mine.

~ * ~

Joe Manors stood at his window in bright green underwear, holding the whiskey bottle nonchalantly on his cocked hip. He thought about what might happen if Inez were to pass by his window at the moment and glance up. Wouldn’t that be something? She’d toss him out on his ear… or maybe she’d comment on his pretty legs. He did have pretty legs.

He watched the line of woods bordering the old townsite. Most of the fog was gone, but mist still clung to trees here and there. He felt cold, but he was too drunk to put his pants back on.

He’d seen the little girl three or four times the past couple of days. Once out in the field behind the boarding house, staring at him and grinning with those teeth that had a hint of green in them, even at that distance. And floating at least three feet off the ground, her damp hair drifting out from her head. He’d seen her again out by the willows bordering the creek, staring at him out of the boughs of one of the larger trees. And again standing on the roof, her feet not quite touching the shingles.

And once in his bathwater, and twice in the water in his sink—just the head, floating with bloated cheeks and the long brown hair wrapped around the neck. Now he couldn’t take a bath, or wash; he couldn’t even stand the thought of drinking water, imagining bits and pieces of her drifting out of the tap.

So he had to drink whiskey, lots of it, if he was going to stay alive. Maybe he’d have to start taking baths in it, too, and washing his clothes in it. Everybody would. He didn’t know if they could afford that much whiskey, or if Charlie Simpson had that much in stock, even if he’d sell them that much. Or maybe he’d just give some to everybody in town as a kind of public service. He grinned drunkenly; the idea seemed to make some sense.

Somehow, he knew it was that kid he’d left back in Cincinnati. He never should have done it. He’d really loved that child. And she was never going to let him go.

He put the bottle on the windowsill and, not bothering to dress, started down to Hector Pierce’s room. He’d sit up with him, listening as careful as he could. The old man was babbling all the time, and something important was being said. That old man was more scared than any of them… he must know what was really going on in Simpson Creeks.

~ * ~

Hector had been dreaming. It had been a nice dream. About his mother, or some other woman. Not enough softness in his life, in the Creeks, or anywhere else for that matter. Not enough softness at all. But the woman had been whispering to him, making him her baby, her boy-child, and that had been quite all right.

He’d gone into the mines at seventeen. Twice he’d almost married, but both times some other man took her.

Not enough softness. Not enough joy. Pretty soon it looked like all his chances were past.

Until now.

He groaned and reached up. But she was just out of his reach. It hurt him… hurt him bad. There shouldn’t be so much pain in the world. Shouldn’t be that way. She knew about pain. And vengeance, too.

Pretty soon everything’d be all right, and everybody’d be all together, in the same place.

Hector’s face felt drenched, and for a moment he thought the time had already come.

~ * ~

“The sheriff was pretty mad when he left.” Ben stroked his empty cup and stared at the back of his store fifty yards in front of the house. There might be a few customers waiting, but he wouldn’t be opening today; he might not be opening for some time. “See, he’s never had no trouble like this, Reed. Oh, occasionally some youngsters’ll get rowdy, or some man’ll start shootin’ at his wife, but nothing like what happened to Jake. These people are his responsibility, and he don’t like awful things happening to ‘em that he can’t explain to people.” Ben looked at Reed, who mirrored his pose on the front porch. “I told Martha and the kids to stay a few extra days at her sister’s in Four Corners. I don’t want ‘em here.” Reed looked at him and nodded. His eyes seemed swollen, his lips cracked. Ben thought of ordering Reed to the doctor’s, even dragging him if he had to, but suddenly thought maybe he was going to need Reed with him, to handle whatever it was they were going to have to handle over the next day or so.

“No sense not talking about it, is there, son?” Ben gazed at his nephew, trying to read his reaction. “We both know something awful’s going on here. Audra Larson was scared half to death the other night, and she told me she could swear it was you.”

“It wasn’t.”

Ben grinned weakly. “I believe you, but damn, what is it? Something bad’s out there. That bear… and we’re both thinking it ain’t just no ordinary bear… but even more than that. I do believe I’m considering witches and goblins, Reed… I do believe so.”

Reed just stared at him for a while. Ben watched his face. He was waiting for his nephew to cry any minute. The way the lines formed around the young man’s eyes and mouth… good God, Ben thought, maybe he’s going crazy!

“It’s an angry thing out there,” Reed said softly, but it made Ben feel better, just to hear the clarity in his nephew’s voice and choice of words.

“Now that it is.”

“They say anger stays behind in a place; I’ve read that.”

“I’ve read that, too.” Ben looked at him anxiously, lips parted to interrupt his nephew if the boy started to say too much, if he went too far.

“How angry could my father be, Ben? You knew him as well as…”

“Reed.”

“How angry?”

Ben wet his lips and looked back at his store, and in one sweeping gaze took in the rest of the town. “I shoulda done something… shoulda made those Nole bigwigs pay… something,”

“There’s a lot more I didn’t do, either. A lot more.”

“I don’t want you back there, Reed! Now listen to me… you and I, we can go join Martha and the kids, wait just a little while, and then I’ll go back up there with you.”

“There were a lot of things that didn’t get done. And those things aren’t going to wait.”

Ben looked at the boy, suddenly overwhelmed with love. And pride. And fear. He might lose him; after all this time… he might lose him again. He turned his head, looking up at Big Andy so Reed couldn’t see his tears. He was dizzy for a moment; it looked as if the mountain were leaning forward.

But it was just the shadows spreading out from the trees, the sun dropping unusually fast today, it seemed.

“It’s getting dark, son.”

~ * ~

Hector Pierce gasped once on his bed, shuddering like a beached fish on the pale, shiny sheets. Joe Manors listened from a chair at the foot of the bed. For hours he had been waiting rather self-righteously for some explanation from the old man, and he had received none.

Hector coughed and sat bolt upright in bed, his eyes bulging, his head turned slightly toward the window as if he was listening for something in the distance.

“You’re not going nowhere,” Joe said, walking over to the side of the bed and tucking in the sheets.

The old man looked at him then, clutching the front of the miner’s shirt, still smudged with coal, pulling Joe down to ear level. The pressure on his collar began to choke Joe. In a panic he struggled with the old man’s clenched hands, but for some reason he was unable to break the hold.

“That boy… he might drown… maybe get eat by them terrible, terrible… teeth…” the old man gasped into his ear.

Joe broke the grip and backed away sputtering.

“What boy, you old fool? Ain’t no boy ‘round here!”

“Why that… Reed boy… the one what stayed in the woods…”

“Old fool…” Joe sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for his bottle.

Chapter 29

“We all owe the dead something, Reed. Not just you.”

“The fact is,” Reed said quietly, “I’m not sure I owe them much of anything. I have things to find out for myself, that’s all.”

“Is it worth your life?”

Reed looked at him in surprise. “Life? I’m taking a rifle, uncle. I’ll watch out for the bear.”

“Look in the mirror.”

Reed laughed it off, but when he went up to his room to collect his gear, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the washbasin. At first he thought something had gone wrong with the mirror, something staining the glass.

Shadowy hollows under the eyes, as if his skin were retaining sleep there. He hadn’t gotten enough sleep, just when he needed it most. Dark veins in the whites of his eyes and a coppery cast to the pupils. A tight look to his lips, nostrils thinned out and protruding more than he thought they had before. Membranes beet red inside; he’d become so used to the difficulties in breathing he had stopped noticing them. A general pallor to the skin.

He looked very, very ill. It frightened him to look.

So he decided not to look anymore.

The phone was ringing downstairs. Once… three times… then it stopped.

Reed could hear his uncle moving to the foot of the stairs. “Reed… it’s your wife on the phone.”

Reed looked at himself in the mirror. He was so pale, he hardly recognized himself. His throat convulsed, and he was afraid he’d throw up then and there, and not be able to stop. “Tell her I’m not here right now.”

“But, Reed…”

“I’m not here, Ben!” Then Ben went away. Reed listened hard, and he could just barely hear the phone being returned to its cradle. A click. He closed his eyes, his body suddenly weaving.

Reed spent several hours driving around before heading out to the homesite to begin excavating the stairwell. He just couldn’t face it yet; maybe Ben was getting to him. Maybe he didn’t really know what he was getting into.

He wondered what Carol and the kids were doing right now. He wondered what she was telling Alicia. She might lie to Michael, but somehow Reed knew that Michael would see through the lie. He thought of his son: pale white skin and dark black hair. Piercing, burning eyes. So much like Reed. He always looked slightly feverish. Too intense for comfort.

He had badly wanted to talk to her. But he knew he couldn’t. Not now, maybe not ever. The sense of loss sneaked up on him, and threatened to overwhelm him. He hadn’t realized it before, but that sense of loss had been waiting for him ever since he arrived in Simpson Creeks.

He passed Charlie on the road, walking in the direction of the Nole mine. Reed honked and waved, but Charlie gave no sign that he’d even heard him. Later Reed saw Mr. Emmanuel climbing the hillside behind the mine and wondered why the man wasn’t at work.

He didn’t see Inez Pierce, who was already a good mile into the thickest section of the forest covering the Big Andy Mountain.

~ * ~

When Inez awoke that morning the sun wasn’t up yet, but it cast a silver glow on the trees outside from its hiding place beneath the horizon. She lay in bed for some time, staring at the trees, watching the ghostly illumination come into them, annoyed that she was awake and that daylight hadn’t yet come. The dim glow in the trees made the darkness in their boughs seem somehow more terrible, and she saw faces there: teeth and eyes, a knob on a branch becoming a dark nose damp with perspiration. She pulled herself out of bed, dressed, and climbed up to the attic. She had planned to clean it today anyway… might as well get an early start.

The bulb produced a yellow light that filled much of the room, so that the scene looked very much like a brittle, sepia-tinted photograph. At any moment she expected the walls to crumble, the trunks and discarded furniture and boxes of memorabilia to curl into fragile two-dimensionality. Cobwebs hung like decaying swatches of hair from exposed beams and broken roof sheathing. There was an oppressive mustiness in the air, and she wondered if maybe the roof had been leaking every rainy season, if the things stored in the attic had been soaked and then dried so thoroughly they began to break apart, only to be thoroughly wet again the next rainy spell. It was a terrible smell… as if the flood waters had indeed reached her house that day, leaving something damp and dead here when they finally receded.

She had no idea what had possessed her to clean the attic today, of all times, with everything going on around town, people dying and marriages like the Parkeys’ falling apart, and Doris still gallivanting around. Inez wasn’t even sure if Doris knew about her husband’s death—now there was a pleasant thought.

It was a long time since she’d been up here, maybe five years. Longer than that. The last time she had put something away here… why, it had been the day she put away all of Adam’s old letters to her. Adam had been one of her father’s hired hands—they’d dated, and she even thought she loved him. But he was from Four Corners and he eventually went back, and from there to the Navy. The letters stopped after a while. He’d always promised he’d come back someday and court her, see what might happen between them, but he never had. That had been… why, it couldn’t be… almost twenty years. She hadn’t been courted since then, except by her father’s illness, then by her brother’s craziness. They had taken all her time, all her memories.

She looked around at the dusty wooden cave crowded with objects. She hadn’t even had the relics of a life of her own to add to these… in twenty years. Not since Adam. It seemed impossible. It seemed that burglars had broken into her home and taken everything.

She sank slowly onto a three-legged stool and stared at the leather-bound trunk near the middle of the room. She could vaguely remember lifting the lid that day, dumping his letters helter-skelter, dropping the lid and returning to her room. Then sleeping for almost three days.

She stood and leaned over the trunk. With the corner of her apron she wiped the thick dust from the lid and stared at the initials W.P. It had been her father’s trunk, passed down to her. She slid her fingertips beneath the lip and lifted.

White and yellow wings fluttered out, raising the dust. She reached out to pluck one from the air, and it fell apart in her fingertips. She cried out and tried desperately to gather them all to her before they crumbled, but her efforts only damaged them further.

Letters from Adam like white ash over her apron, like scrapings from a crematorium. She could see the large brown watermark on the underside of the trunk lid, and the narrow tendrils of stain where the water had crept farther, seeking his letters, corrupting them, destroying her memory of him. Had he brown hair, black? She couldn’t even remember his face.

But there were more things under the broken letters, a past the water hadn’t yet reached.

She lifted the items gingerly, one at a time, placing each in its appropriate pile around her knees as she sorted them. A pocket prayer from her grandmother. A book of love poems from her father—who had given the chest to her, joking at the time that it was to be her “hopeless chest.” Once he got sick, and watched her grow old caring for him, he never made that little joke again.

Drama programs from school, pressed flowers, a silly rhyme a little boy wrote her in grade school. A medical textbook. It was an old one her uncle had and she’d begged him for it because she wanted to be a doctor someday. She’d been twelve at the time. She’d completely forgotten she’d ever wanted to be something like that. More than everybody’s nursemaid. More than what she’d finally become. She was suddenly angry, and went through the trunk more rapidly, no longer bothering to arrange the items in her careful piles. Wooden-faced doll. Marbles. The first bottle of perfume she’d ever owned—most of it still there because she’d been so conservative with it, afraid it would run out too soon. Old copies of Argosy and Life magazine. A ticket to the theater in Four Corners, her first—something called Freaks, about all these terribly deformed people. She could hardly stand to watch, and they’d pulled the picture after two days. But she’d never forget that movie.

She was young then, a daydreamer, and afterwards she’d find herself staring at her shadow now and then; seeing the way it distorted at times, wondering whether that’s what she really was if she could only see herself clearly enough.

Her shadow in this attic was distorted too, she realized—she hardly had a distinct shadow at all. It blended in with the other ancient objects. And was eaten by the darkness.

Her album was on the bottom. She lifted it out carefully and rested it on her lap. Pictures of Father, Hector when he was little, an old picture of her in a short dress with boats on it. Pictures of Janie and her together—Janie always the cheerful-looking one, with so many plans for herself. Always so mean when she didn’t get her way.

Inez realized she no longer thought of Janie as dead. It was a strange thing, but Inez knew she believed she could just go out in the woods and talk to her old friend.

At least Janie had become something; that was more than Inez herself could say. She chuckled. She was thinking like a crazy woman!

The morning sun was filling the small circular attic window, the mist outside breaking the light into long strands. It does look like burning hair, Inez thought.

If she hurried she could be halfway up Big Andy by midday, just above where the mist would have burned away, leaving clear sky as far as the eye could see. She’d be able to see most anything from up there: a woman with bright red hair, or even a bear.

~ * ~

Doris had slowed down to a trudge. She wasn’t sure where she was at the moment—somewhere behind the mining operation. No telling how far—she might have been wandering in circles. Her naked flesh was scratched and torn, and she seemed to have more bruises than she could ever remember having at one time, even after Jake beat her, but none of that really seemed to bother her. Or the cold; it could have been summer as far as she could tell. She felt hot, almost feverish.

Maybe Felix had struck her; she couldn’t remember. She shuddered suddenly, feeling all the cold delivered in the one memory. His face, last time she’d seen him: blue lips and pupils vanished into the white of his eyes. Blood lining the ravaged cavities of his head like rainbow-tinted shadows. The face of a dead man.

Rocks and sharp branches jabbed at her tender feet. She grimaced, but continued to walk. The burning woman had given her drive; her hips still ached with it, her breath still ragged and hungry. But Doris was beginning to hate the woman for it. She couldn’t stop the needs that were racking her, and they seemed to be emptying her out.

She couldn’t eat; she couldn’t sit down because of all her recently exposed need. Maybe she could go to the burning woman, get her to let her go.

Beg her. Or force her. This couldn’t go on much longer.

~ * ~

Audra had seen Reed drive by in his uncle’s pickup that morning. She had just awakened, was stretching before the small window near her bed, when he sped past, crouched over the steering wheel as if angry or drunk. She leaned her face into the window and was able to catch a glimpse of the truck as Reed left the town, rear wheels biting into gravel and spitting up dust as he negotiated the bend that led to the Pierce place.

She gritted her teeth. She could hate him, she surely could, if she just knew a little more.

But she didn’t know any more, and it wasn’t likely she ever would staying around the cafe while Reed was up at his daddy’s old place. And until she knew any more, she just had to love him, or pretend she did. For he was the only man who had ever paid any attention to her. He was all she had.

If she could only figure out what he was up to, why he was playing with her like this. He’d terrified her, made her afraid to walk the streets of her own hometown. She wasn’t likely to forgive him for that soon.

She should ignore him, forget all about him. Avoid him. But she couldn’t.

Audra didn’t dress in her uniform that day. She put on slacks and a sweater, and on second thought took her father’s old camping lantern out of the closet. She went out the front door, and, not surprisingly, no one was waiting for her to open. The street was deserted. She left the “Closed” sign out.

Her father’s discolored white Studebaker was parked in the alley at the side of the building. Jake had been tinkering with it so she knew it was running, though pretty roughly. If she pushed it hard, maybe Reed couldn’t keep too far ahead of her. She knew the roads better than he did.

~ * ~

Mr. Crouskey frowned. They’d ordered Emmanuel to come back, and bring some of the workers with him, so where was he? The man wouldn’t get another chance, not if he could help it.

They were no closer to finding the source of the mysterious flooding. They’d at last, after considerable digging, been able to rule out an underground spring or other natural source. But there weren’t any signs of a man-made device, either. It just didn’t make sense. The main office would never let him forget this one if he fouled up, but he didn’t know much more he could do.

Crouskey was afraid there might be big trouble here. The water had turned a slightly greenish color; the mist around it seemed to have thickened and was spreading, drifting out almost like the gas dry ice gives off, so that you couldn’t always tell how far up it had risen in the sinkhole.

But unless Crouskey was very mistaken, it was rising by the minute.

~ * ~

Felix Emmanuel was lost. He should never have wandered off the path, but he was afraid one of the company geologists would see him before he was well-hidden in the brush overlooking the mine.

He knew somehow that the sinkhole was going to be very important… he might even get his job back because of it. Before he left the mine, the water down in the sinkhole had changed, just perceptibly, and had continued to change by the second. Became greener, cloudier, and filled with shadows, things in there he couldn’t possibly recognize because the water was so thick now, and dark. But things were moving in there, he was sure of it. Something very nasty was beginning to happen—that wasn’t ordinary water.

And Mr. Emmanuel couldn’t say that he was very sorry about it. Not sorry at all.

There was something… he wasn’t sure… but it seemed to be something trying to be quiet in the woods. Trying so hard you noticed it. A shadow. A cold form. Maybe it was a wind moving in from the north. Or a gathering storm.

These were spooky woods. Felix Emmanuel would just as soon see them all cut down and the brush bulldozed under. He’d always wondered how people could stand to live around woods like these.

He picked up his pace a little, although it was hard. He didn’t think he’d ever been this out of breath.

And strangely, he felt he was running short on time. Whatever he was going to do he was going to have to do soon.

Something… shifted… back off to his right. He turned in that direction and stared for a while, not moving. Nothing. Nothing but the birds leaving the trees slowly, one by one. And that slight, very cold wind.

His right knee was aching; he’d probably pulled it when he climbed over the rock outcropping about a half-mile back. He began to slow down, and felt compelled to hold the knee with his right hand. The underbrush was slightly damp, the leaves and vines brushing his pants legs with broad, wet strokes. He could feel the water precipitating on his lower leg, collecting inside his shoe, drowning his socks.

Something shifting in wet vegetation, rotting timbers being slogged aside behind him. He stumbled and righted himself quickly, but not before a small animal cry escaped him. A soaked frond slapped him across the cheek. He grabbed at it but his fingers slipped off the slick green surface. Now the mist was rising around his shoes; he looked down and it appeared as if his feet had been amputated, his ankles ending in a wet, green-tinted fog.

Again he tried to increase his speed, but it was becoming more and more difficult. His legs seemed to slip into a mud of black humus, wet green vegetation, and the sickening pale green of low-lying fog. He grabbed at the tree trunks for traction, but their hides were too wet, too slick, like gnarled tentacles.

A heaviness in the air. A heaviness moving to his left, then crossing over behind him. He turned quickly, but not quickly enough. The heaviness had moved off behind him. He stumbled as he tried to turn again, and cried out when his grimy fingers grasped a mushy root beneath the fog. It had grown hot in the woods, a tropical heat pressing down on him, threatening to crush his chest and pop his eyes.

The mist rose in columns and curtains around him, green- and blue-tinted, turning to water when it touched leaves and trunks, his skin and clothes. Water ran down his face in sheets, soaked into his clothes, then hung in the folds. A heaviness turning, taking warm air into its mouth, then letting even warmer air out into the woods. The heat trapped its roar, but Mr. Emmanuel could feel the trapped sound shaking the trees.

Faces floated up in the mist, green and blue faces with brown vine for hair.

Mr. Emmanuel’s movements slowed, until he was swimming standing up, his arms and hands and legs floating through the air in graceful slow motion.

Heavy hulk shadowed the trees ahead; Mr. Emmanuel turned to get away. Long fingers attached to loose hands drifted across his face, and Mr. Emmanuel began to cry. But the mist enveloped his tears, drying them instantly, and Mr. Emmanuel found himself weeping a desperate white heat. Mouths with broken teeth opened at his approach. Broken arms dangled as they reached for his help.

A little girl with pale blond weed-hair floated by.

A crowd of voices pushed by on a wave. A tumbling of heads bounded by, trapped in the undertow. Mr. Emmanuel pushed by, his arms and fingers bleeding, cut somehow. On the fog? On the voices floating by?

Mr. Emmanuel looked up. House after house drifted overhead, dismembered by the flood waters and disintegrating rapidly as they descended the valley. Window and door frames separated, disgorging bodies into the gray and green tide.

He knew, then, he could have done something.

He opened his mouth, but only flood sounds escaped.

Fingers at his arms at his legs at his groin at his eyes his eyes.

The last shadow seemed to float over him, black and big as the largest drowning house. He turned to look up, and it knocked him to the ground.

Mr. Emmanuel screamed, the edge of the log breaking his back. His eyes flew open as if on springs. He noted, quickly, that the fog was gone, before the bear pounded his front paws into him again, tearing open a flap of skin, letting the wetness inside Mr. Emmanuel drop out into his lap.

When the bear’s mouth dropped over him, Mr. Emmanuel was convinced it wasn’t a mouth at all, but a storm, a tornado. With jagged glass caught in the fury of its swirling sides.

~ * ~

Reed drove for several hours up one winding back road and down another, up narrow hollows no one but the immediate kin of those who lived there ever visited. Drab women and sun-baked men stared after the truck; they made him nervous, but no one approached the road, no one made any sudden moves for a firearm or a bottle or stone.

He was killing time, waiting for inspiration, waiting for things to settle inside. Waiting for courage.

He was scared.

At times since he had arrived in the Creeks he thought he had come close to knowing what he was dealing with. A bear. A mad woman. Someone’s drunken, guilt-ridden hallucination of a floating girl. But the familiarity they all had… it was getting hard to deny it, however improbable. His father. His mother. His sister.

Craziness. But he knew.

What had called him back here?

Two things he would always remember from his trips with Uncle Ben: Once they had visited a burnt-out patch of forest. A white carpet of ash over everything, trees reduced to skeletal armatures, green sucked up into the polarity of blazing white and charcoal. He’d been peering at the wreckage of a log when suddenly a swarm of emerald-backed insects poured from the blackened heart of it. As if Big Andy were shouting its defiance with this one little gesture. It would always return, its life would be perpetually recreated. It was stronger than anyone could imagine.

And again, the day Ben broke his leg. He had been walking along a ledge of loose limestone and fallen about ten feet. Reed could hear the sickening snap yards away. When he’d scrambled down to his uncle, he’d seen the white bone poking through the skin. And it had occurred to him that bone was what was real, and uniform. Dogs had similar bones, as did cattle, as did fox and beaver and bear. What cloaked the bone was changeable, variable, and illusion.

Reed remembered. His mother touching his father’s cheek, the rage magically subsiding. His little sister singing a magic song until he could almost see a playmate materialize. Reed remembered, and felt something like magic pacing inside him too.

Reed finally turned the pickup onto the narrow road that eventually led to the opposite homesite. He didn’t see the old white Studebaker that had been parked on the bend behind him, and which now pulled slowly out into the road.

~ * ~

By the time Charlie Simpson got to the Nole Company mine he knew something was wrong. The sky was much darker than it should have been this time of day, the shadows thicker, and there was a heavy, greenish, corrupt-looking fog settling into the woods on either side of the road, and creeping into the road with long, sick-looking fingers.

The fog seemed to be spilling over the top of the cut, like steam from a bowl of soup. The fog seemed to originate from the mine itself.

It took Charlie an hour of stumbling and clawing his way up the incline to reach the top of the cut, just above the entrance to the strip mine. He knew the road would have taken twice as long.

He took a long look down into the mine.

He couldn’t see a thing. The entire valley here seemed flooded with the roiling waves of corrupt mist. Occasionally shapes would bob up and down, but he couldn’t make out what they were. They had no more definition than clouds. He had been an avid cloud watcher as a boy, and it seemed as if his imagination were giving them shape: upraised hands, frantic arms, heads pushing up out of violent waters with open, screaming mouths.

~ * ~

Inez ran down the slope to the ridge, faster, faster than she could ever remember running before. Dodging trees effortlessly, their playful outstretched leaves and branches slapping her body, greeting her. She opened her mouth and began to sing… a tuneless tune. She thought that soon she would be flying. The Nole mine gaped a few miles ahead, and she knew that if she just kept running like this she’d sail right on over it, right on over the Big Andy itself, over Four Corners, over her old beau Adam, all the way out to China if she wanted.

Her old friend Janie would make it all possible.

Janie was just ahead of her now, her long, bright red hair flowing back over her, behind her like a young girl’s bridal veil. Janie was the fastest thing Inez had ever seen, just like a young girl again, her pale feet simply gliding over the ground as if they weren’t touching down ever at all. Descending the misty, darkening hillside like a bright white bird with scarlet wings.

Inez tried her best to keep up with her, pushing herself hard and hardly aware of the aches in her side, her legs. It was a miracle! She almost caught up a few times, but each time Janie soared ahead, her hair suddenly catching the twilight and blazing brighter than before.

Inez was almost alongside her; she reached out to touch Janie’s flowing gown. Janie turned her face slightly. It was an ancient face, the oldest face Inez had ever seen.

But just as quickly she blazed again, the lines vanished from the face, the scalp burst into flame, and Inez’s discomfort faded. She’d follow Janie anywhere; she’d be young like Janie again. She soared. She glided. Inez imagined she could feel her own feet leave the ground. The mouth of the Nole mine lay ahead, singing to her. Filled with bright, beautiful, moon-reflecting cloud.

~ * ~

“What is it… what you say?” Joe Manors leaned over Hector anxiously. The old man was having a terrible time breathing. His chest convulsed. He spit up and drooled onto the bedclothes.

“Teeth!” he shouted, and grinned.

Joe pulled away. The old man had bitten the inside of his mouth. Bright red blood gleamed on the tips of his teeth; tiny shreds of skin glistened in the cracks.

~ * ~

It was a half hour after sunset when Reed began to work on the stairwell. The whole staircase seemed to be packed with dirt, as if a giant child had filled the well by hand. Packing it level with the floor of the second story. Reed had thought merely to get a start on the project that evening, but soon found himself lost in his work, the darkness in the house growing until he had to light a lantern to see by.

The work went more quickly than it should have. He was occasionally cognizant of the strange texture of the soil. The particles seemed too far apart somehow; there was too much air space in the mix. In minutes, he suddenly realized, he had moved several feet down the stairs.

The oval portraits on the walls of the stairwell were of his aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. Several generations of his family, their faces seemingly as vivid as when the photographs were first taken.

“You come from a long line, boy… a great line!” his father said into his ear.

Reed whirled on the dirt-covered staircase and stared at the still earthen wall on his left. Two shiny points of light gleamed at head level. He thought he was seeing his father’s eyes.

Panic-stricken, Reed attacked the points with his spade. The entire wall of dirt collapsed at his feet.

The shiny points were two projections of a brass lamp that had hung, he now remembered, between the staircase and the living room. Apparently he had broken through into a cave within the mass of mud that had filled the ground floor of the house. The room smelled wet. Silken cobwebs along the walls glistened within the dim lantern light. Something—insects, maybe—moved within the darkness.

Reed’s stomach ached. He was afraid. Desperately trying to control the fear, he forced himself to visualize what it was that terrified him so. Faces, he realized. He was afraid of faces. With that knowledge came a hulking, toothed horror.

~ * ~

Ben Taylor stood on his front porch with shotgun in hand. The sky looked bad: black and moving too fast. He’d never seen a sky quite like that before.

It looked like a storm, he figured, but he had no idea what sort of storm clouds like that might preface.

And now fog was rolling up to the edges of town. They’d never had fog this close to town before, this far away from the creeks. He couldn’t even see the road leading down to the Pierce place. It was smothered in soiled cotton.

He’d give Reed an hour. Then he was going after him.

~ * ~

Audra knew she shouldn’t have moved away from the Studebaker. She’d wanted to get a better look at the house; Reed was in there now. But then the fog had come in, quick as an eye blink; she hadn’t even noticed it before it had her surrounded.

The Studebaker was behind her somewhere in the fog.

And something else had entered the container the fog had made here between the trees. It was in the fog… with her. She couldn’t hear it moving… there was just this odd shifting in the white plumes off to her right. This slight darkness moving in the clouds. This charge in the damp mist. But she knew it was here, only a few feet away. Once the fog broke ahead of her, she knew she would start to run.

And maybe—she wasn’t sure yet—she would scream.

Chapter 30

Once Charlie’s eyes had become accustomed to the dull mist below him, he discovered he could make out some of the landscape trapped inside—trees and a little scrub vegetation, jagged cuts through topsoil and solid rock, the mine’s utility buildings, earth-moving equipment—and the figures of several men struggling to climb the embankment.

He figured they were the men sent down from the Nole Company to check up on Willy’s sinkhole. Plus maybe Mr. Emmanuel, and a few workers like Joe Manors. At first Charlie thought they’d be up on top of the ridge with him in no time—but then the mist started changing, or something came inside the mist, joining it.

A pale and ghostly flood rose slowly within the mist, like well-aged white wine in a dark and dusty bottle.

He felt his belly roil and he turned his head and threw up into the cold fog. Now the stuff coming into the mist looked thick and mudlike, pale green and blue.

Like vomit, maybe. Or poison.

He thought he could hear the men below him screaming, but the mist distorted sound. The men’s voices sounded like crows, maybe, or a machine tearing itself apart.

He watched as the thick liquid surrounded the trees in the mist, swept away mine buildings, tumbled heavy equipment onto its back.

There were houses in the flood, stone and wood debris, pieces of furniture, signs and dead livestock churning together. Charlie saw the twisted wreckage of a bicycle, a dented refrigerator with its insides dangling, a heavy overstuffed chair tumbling end over end.

Charlie knew then why the flood was so thick. It was thick with time.

The flood hadn’t yet spread to the men. But it was close. Charlie watched in horror as they slipped on the wet stones of the embankment, the dense flood of time and memory swirling just below their feet. He was frozen in place, watching. And then he was moving, scrambling down the slick debris toward them, one hand outstretched, the other shredding on the sharp stones as he dragged it behind him for some support. He had no idea what he’d do if one of them grabbed his hand. How could he possibly support them both?

He was close to the men; they were only a few yards below him. He could see now that there was only a handful, strangers, probably the geologists the Nole Company had sent down. The man in front was stretching his arm out, his fingers straining toward Charlie’s hand. Charlie willed his arm longer, and was amazed to see it get closer, closer, but not close enough. He looked into the man’s shadowed face, and as the face pulled out of the shadows, into the man’s desperate eyes. But he couldn’t get any closer. He couldn’t. Any closer and Charlie would have tumbled down the embankment. He couldn’t look the man in the face while thinking that, and gazed past him.

At the wall creeping up behind them with a slowed down roar. Like a wall of flood, debris hanging out of the front of it, houses and farm equipment and fence posts and ironwork and people’s bodies protruding at all angles from the surface of the wall of water. A slice of time.

Charlie stared into the wall. And faces stared back from just under the surface of water. Faces with mouths stretched back and teeth rotted away.

For a moment Charlie thought the faces were coming closer, that they would soon break the surface. And then he would see their eyes. And they, the long-ago dead of Simpson Creeks, would see him. He gasped and pulled back a few inches up the slope.

The man in front of him, arm outstretched and face straining, eyes popping, screamed. The wall of flood touched the last man in the struggling group, then another, another, sucking them in one at a time. Then it was as if the man in front of Charlie leaped backward, so quickly all Charlie could register was the frantic, kicking legs being pulled back into the churning liquid surface.

Another staring face joined the others inside the moving wall.

Charlie scrambled back up the loose gravel slope, weeping, digging his hands into the sharp stones and trying to focus on the pain.

~ * ~

Ben stalked the loose boards of his front porch nervously, looking up at the clouds every few minutes, then at the tall waves of fog that had actually entered the town. And which looked so similar to the clouds—dark and angry—unlike any fog he could remember.

Shadows moved inside the fog, and at first Ben thought it was some of his neighbors, or people who had come down from the hollows for supplies, but the town had been virtually abandoned all day. He could make out the silhouettes of heads and arms, legs, but the faces were obscured. They moved in slow motion, with what seemed impossible grace, as if they were swimming. Or drowning. Their bodies filling with water…

“Who is it?” he shouted, and found himself shouldering his rifle, aiming it into the fog.

He had one of the dark shapes in his sights, but he couldn’t pull the trigger. After all, it could be anyone. He had to stay calm, get a grip on himself.

Someone was crying out in the fog.

A strangely faint, echoing cry, like that of a very small child locked up in a room. A boiling wave of mist passed in front of the house, about twenty-yards away, obscuring the lot behind his store.

He could hear the child’s cry, trapped inside it. The voice raised briefly as the traveling mist neared him, then faded away as it swirled past.

But it left shadows behind, an almost tangible, tasteable darkness in the air, and suddenly Ben could see much less of the town than before.

~ * ~

The fog wasn’t going to break. For several minutes Audra had been unable to see any of the old Taylor house at all. The fog had grown thicker, massing together, filling up all the spaces, taking up all the air. She could hardly breathe. She had to force herself to suck in mouthfuls of the thick soup, trusting her body to filter out any available air.

She was crying. She thought maybe she had been crying for some time.

Audra sensed a still spot in the whiteness behind her, a place where all noise had been held, denied escape. There was a will behind it, an anger. She could feel the charge of it in the particles of fog. The blonde hairs on her arms stood rigid. Her skin ached. She had never felt so cold.

She began to move in the direction in which she thought the Taylor place must be, but soon realized she had completely lost her bearings. It could be anywhere. It didn’t matter. She knew where she had to go. Away from the presence waiting behind her.

Waiting for her.

She couldn’t run, but she found she could ignore the tears and scratches the sharp-edged forest made as she pushed her way through it. Barbs reached out of the mist to snag her. Sharp branches stabbed at her; leaves and fronds slashed.

She sprawled over a downed tree so packed over with layers of the strange fog it had been impossible to see. Her slacks tore and she felt the sudden shock of blood exposed to frigid air.

This brought a sudden thrill of terror to her arms and legs and she found herself running, banging herself badly against tree trunks and large hidden outcroppings of rock. She couldn’t see, and suddenly she wasn’t sure where the intruder was.

She might be running straight into his arms. Reed’s arms.

A soft, animal hiss in the air. She ran faster, rammed her shoulder into a hidden tree, and exploded off it, screaming.

But the presence seemed so powerful, not like the pale, sickly looking Reed Taylor at all.

There was strength in the still air. An enormous charge contained within that hidden shadow. She could feel it.

She could sense the jagged, stone-hard teeth poised… somewhere, somewhere in the fog surrounding her. The jaws working hungrily as he watched her.

~ * ~

The flood had filled the site of the Nole strip mine rim to rim. Charlie sat on the ledge only a few feet above the surface of the heaving darkness, watching the waves, cataloging the debris, unable to move. For the time being, he thought, the flood waters seemed satisfied with the ground they’d gained.

After all, they’d taken the mine away from the Nole Company. In a way, Big Andy had gotten his land back.

Once, years ago—Charlie figured he had been about twenty years old at the time; he had done his tour in the Navy and was halfheartedly trying to decide if he should live away from Kentucky or let the Big Andy draw him back with its hard-to-ignore pull—he’d visited Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. He’d enjoyed it, he’d loved those northern woods, but the landscape there had made him uneasy as well. With its volcanic pools and restless geysers and periodic tremors, Charlie’d worried that the land might explode right under his feet. They had a thing up there called the mud volcano—jet black mud boiling up and burping furiously into the sky with a nasty-sulfur smell. It had looked just like these waters did now. Like they’d stolen the night and had it trapped in their waves and surf.

An old door floated by, a greenish blue mold trapped in the ornate carving. A rat scurried to the edge and chittered like an enraged sea captain.

A tumbling of plow blades and barbed-wire balls and shattered wagon wheels and slate-colored barn walls in the waves.

Ripped apart and smashed further into smaller and smaller pieces. The flood was a great grinder, gnawing every lost thing from the valley into images too tiny to remember.

He could just make out the vague outlines of human forms in the waters, but they appeared to be holding back, keeping hidden. Or waiting.

Occasionally Charlie would see wreckage he thought he recognized; something about the shape of a piece of wood or the color of some metal would remind him of objects, landmarks in his own past, artifacts long lost that he knew could not be here, in this place or in this time. But the shapes and colors still nagged at him, and he strained his eyes in the gloom to identify them. The yellow wagon he had as a boy. The old Ford his father owned, had to save years to get, and then wrecked after only a week on one of those narrow winding roads in the mountains above the Hinckey place, trying to make a delivery to somebody who probably couldn’t pay him anyway. Charlie’d recognize that radiator and those headlights anywhere.

It was as if Big Andy had been hiding that stuff all these years, deep inside him, and now was coughing it up like an old man with a diseased gut. You can’t get away from your past… his daddy had always said that. He should have listened to his daddy more. You might ignore your past for a long time, for years, but something would always happen to scrape the scab off, dig away at the ignorance you’d piled over it, and shove that mother lode of guilt and pain right up in your face.

Something light brown, twisted, patterned like a cobweb, was drifting Charlie’s way. Her mother had made that bridal veil for her… the whole family had been so proud…

“Mattie…” he choked, and turned. He wasn’t about to see what floated up after it.

Flames were dancing out of the trees, racing toward the edge of the flooded mine. Charlie stood still, entranced by their terrible beauty. Dancing. Dancing… as they grew closer, he knew it was a woman, her head on fire. Her feet weren’t even touching the ground, and she moved so swiftly she was soon only a few yards in front of him, increasing speed as she neared the dark floodwaters, and rising ever so slightly in the air.

At the last moment Charlie saw that Inez was right behind her, reaching, her face frozen into a white sheen as she began to enter the damp fog bordering the waters. He reached, and pulled her to him. They fell, tumbling to the edge of the flood.

A scream made them both look up. The woman with flaming hair twisted within her blazing tresses, suspended several feet over the flood, her bright face a maze of cracks. A naked form flashed out of the woods to their right and plunged over the embankment, her arms outstretched, face exploding into a scream.

“Doris…” Inez mumbled groggily.

Charlie shielded his eyes as Doris’s form struck the flaming woman. But the expected burst of fire didn’t come. The two ran together like a wet, dripping sheet, pulsing phosphorescent green and orange within the folds. They fell into the water, the mass turning over slowly, spreading out into what seemed to be a thin layer of pale, melted skin before the darkness swallowed any remains.

“It’s going to kill the whole town, Charlie,” Inez said quietly.

Charlie didn’t answer her. He was watching the fog. It was beginning to drift away from the mine, entering the trees a little bit at a time, moving toward the road into town.

And the dark flood was creeping up on the embankment, following.

~ * ~

Reed walked out into the living room of his childhood. Little had changed. There was the old radio in the corner, the one on which he’d listened to shows like “The Lone Ranger” and “Jack Benny.” His mother would come right through that shiny wood door beside it and bring him freshly baked cookies. That perfume of hers that smelled like a mix of several kinds of flowers, some of them not at all compatible. And beneath that: the aroma of freshly ironed and starched shirts hanging up in the kitchen. He could almost see her face, her hair a glowing nimbus from the kitchen bulb showing through it into the darkened living room.

She was always nicer to him with his father away. When his father was there, she was much too frightened. Fear was her magic, he realized, not the sex. Fear made her seem sensual to his father. He had always waited for the day when she would be fed up with Daddy Taylor’s treatment of her, and then maybe she’d slap him. Often Reed had even fantasized her kicking Daddy Taylor out of the house. It had been a silly fantasy; it could never happen.

Reed wished Carol and the kids could have seen this, so much as it had been when he was a child.

He felt half-asleep, groggy with the day’s work. Perhaps removing all that dirt had been more taxing than it seemed. Had he really done all that? He couldn’t remember. He slumped into his father’s favorite overstuffed chair. It was a bright blue, and the lace doilies his mother had made for the arms were as neat and white as ever.

He could not connect the moist smell, however, with anything he was now seeing. He wondered if it was the smell of his mother’s cookies baking.

He felt peaceful, at home. The radio played quietly. The dust lifted like a shroud into the ceiling, then was absorbed completely into the creamy white plaster.

The announcer’s voice on the radio suddenly grew garbled and indistinct. He decided to get up to adjust the radio’s knobs but found he could not. He called his mother to please come fix the radio. He could hear her at work in the kitchen, the pots banging, the oven door slamming…

He watched in fascination as a shadow crept into the room from under the shiny kitchen door. He sat quietly, pleasantly relaxed, as the shadow turned floor, walls, and ceiling a dim greenish color. His mouth began to fill with moisture.

~ * ~

The bear came roaring out of the fog-shrouded woods, his gut on fire, his throat filled with an agonizing rage that gnawed at his muzzle.

The old homeplace rose out of the mud before him, and he started forward, his wild eyes fixed on Reed’s window just above the new ground line. He was going to beat that son of his, beat him within an inch of his life. He looked down at his bear body, and gloried in its strength. His eyes burned.

But he seemed to have trouble getting traction. He looked down: the ground was turning to mire. Pools of water were slowly spreading across the floor of the hollow.

~ * ~

Ben readied himself to move to higher ground. It was a strange thing. There was now a good eight feet of water inside the fog covering Main Street. He could hear the buildings creaking, groaning: one wall of the old hotel had started buckling inward.

Yet there was no water where he stood. He could have walked right up to where the fog ended, rearing over him like a wall twenty feet high. He could have touched that wall, and found a flood contained behind it, waiting there, with a depth far over his head.

Yet there was no water where he stood.

Faces floated in and out of view there, staring at him, speaking to him even though he couldn’t hear any words.

Just a hum of mixed voices. Like drowning bees.

~ * ~

Things had fallen apart at Inez Pierce’s boarding house. Several of the tenants had seen the fog out near the town from their windows, and the dark water rising up inside it, and vague, shadowy things within those dark floodwaters no one wanted even to try to identify. They’d run down from their rooms on the third floor, but soon everybody was back up there, crowding the windows, watching the progress of fog and flood, speaking in whispers, wondering what it might all mean.

“It’s the final times come down upon us,” someone said. No one answered him.

Somebody, an old-timer, mentioned the flood of ten years ago. Several of the men left in an old wagon, others on foot, on their way down to Four Corners or seeking higher ground. No one knew where Inez might be.

Joe Manors and two salesmen staying there overnight had their hands full with Hector Pierce; it looked like he’d finally gone off the deep end. Joe could tell this time was different; it scared him… the way Hector’s eyes looked, the colorless quality to his skin, the way his mouth moved, Hector wouldn’t be coming back to them out of this one. He was going to stay in that place, wherever it was.

“I tell ya he’ll drown! Can’t count on his momma and daddy to save him, no sir! They’s gone crazy since they died! That other boy’s been watchin’!”

‘’You gotta stop him! He’s gone crazy!” one of the men shouted at Joe.

Joe looked down at the old man bucking and snarling on the bed like a wild animal. The sight both saddened and disgusted him. He found himself wondering, vaguely, if he still had bullets for that gun of his.

~ * ~

Somewhere the phone was ringing. Reed sat up suddenly, reaching for Carol, and closed his hand on the neck of his old teddy bear, its eyes torn out. The teddy bear that shouldn’t have been there at all. He howled savagely and threw the stuffed toy across the living room. It bounced off the now-silent radio.

The phone still rang, ringing a line into his head, wedging a slowly growing headache there.

He stood up to answer the phone. Dark, noxious green filled his eyes, his mouth, his lungs. He could hardly move because of the green holding down his legs. By a strong exertion of will he lifted one foot, then another. He turned slowly, drifting his arms up and out as he made his way toward the phone by the staircase.

It was like moving through gel, swimming. It was like running in a dream.

~ * ~

The bear moved swiftly across the damp ground, splashing through the spreading marsh, bellowing in rage and excitement as it approached the familiar window, and the being within tried to forget in his dim and crude way that something else was back with the girl in the trees and fog, now and then watching from the forest’s edge…

~ * ~

“Reed!” Hector Pierce shouted, in a voice not quite his own. Joe Manors’s skin crawled at the strangeness of it. “When you comin’ home, boy?” The old man laughed harshly. Then a moaning and a crying came from within his chest. Joe started. Hector’s mouth had locked shut, but Joe could still hear it distinctly: a child’s cries, a trapped child’s desperate pleas.

~ * ~

The phone floated up into Reed’s hand. He held it up to his ear in slow motion.

“It’s time you were gettin’ home, boy,” his father was saying, his loud voice garbled as if under water. “Long past time. We need you here.”

Then the moans began, interspersed with the slaps of hard leather against skin, the moans drawing out, dying…

Reed’s little sister floated past him, her eyes white and cloudy, her small dress torn and streaked with some dark substance, her nose and ears and lips disintegrating into clumps and ribbons of soft flesh that drifted about her head.

Reed opened his mouth wide, hoping for the greenness to fill him, but it would not.

Chapter 31

Ben had been on his way out of town. The spare pickup, the old Chevy, had been hard to start, so hard that at first he thought he’d be stuck here, to face the flood. Maybe that was proper; he’d missed the first one. But finally the engine had fired, and though the truck did sound like a cross between an old washing machine and a vacuum cleaner, it still ran. The old logging road that passed behind his house was barely negotiable, but the main road had been filled by that eerie fog. The logging road ran a little ways up the slope behind the town, then parallel to it for a while before cutting up a narrow hollow past the old Maynard place. From there Ben could take a couple of dirt roads that eventually came out above the Taylor homeplace.

Maybe he could get Reed out of there before the flood moved up the hollow.

But Ben stopped in his escape when he heard the gray boards flying apart behind him. He pulled the truck onto a wide place overlooking the town, got out, and leaned against the hood. He should be going, time was short, but it was important that he see the last moments of Simpson Creeks, the town he’d lived in all of his life.

He watched in fascination as the concrete slab suddenly seemed flexible, buckling all up and down its length like a series of piano keys being played. Great cracks broke the slab into dozens of large pieces, it settled into a rough sort of levelness, then buckled once again, more explosively this time, sending sprays of gravel and plumes of dust high into the air, followed by smaller eruptions of cans, bottles, bits of wood, that had been hiding under the stone.

Then the shadows slipped out of the cracks, long and narrow with a strange delicacy to their movements. They didn’t linger for Ben to identify any of them, but blended quickly into the lines of the waves, adding a further darkness to the water.

The surf foamed suddenly whiter over the slab, and then the slab sank beneath the waves, trailing a mass of air bubbles.

The hotel was the first building to come down, as he would have expected. The north wall buckled in completely and the flood, discovering the breach, pushed in with all its force, expanding the wound and bringing down most of the second story. The other walls wavered, seeming to expand and contract, then the front facade collapsed in all directions with an explosion of bricks. The roof hung on a little longer, bobbing up and down like one of those statues with the bounding, spring-necked head. Then it too fell, bringing down all the uprights with it. The roof spun around loose in the water, then the flood took it down the road and out of town, toward Inez Pierce’s.

The flooded street was full of shadowy debris at this point, gathering around the main buildings and clustering in pockets here and there. The debris seemed somehow softer in the increasing darkness, with more curves than before.

Like heads, backs, shoulders, arms, hands.

He could see them now, the hands grasping at the sides of the cafe, the railroad station, the Parkey house. Shoulders pushing against Simpson’s General Store, his own Feed Store. Bodies massing against every wall. Dark fingers tore at the tar paper covering the Simpson Creeks Post Office, pulling at its small support beams, rending it from the side of the General Store.

The dark flood rushed in through the door of his Feed Store, carrying a mass of the black shapes with it, and the walls suddenly pushed outward, the building collapsing like a house of cards.

Dozens of the dark shapes clumped together like black mushrooms on the side of Charlie’s store. There was a brief pause, then the entire building went over on its side. Some of the shapes drifted away on the flood, others slipped inside the fallen structure with the water. Hundreds of cans, bottles, packages, barrels, masses of paper and cardboard, tools, household goods, spread fan-like into the swift-running water.

Then everything fell silent. Maybe it was all over. But Ben felt compelled to lean forward off the hood, holding his breath, waiting.

Reflections suddenly broke the darkness of the water. Highlights. Dim lights under the surface. Here and there, a growing clarity of movement.

When they were first married, Ben and Martha went on a honeymoon trip through Pennsylvania and some of the New England states. One afternoon they had stopped at a shop outside Philadelphia, where an old watchmaker had a model village displayed in his window. Periodically small figures came out of the buildings of that village to perform—clockwork automatons. Fine Swiss movements, the old man had said.

That model village had looked exactly like Simpson Creeks did at the moment. Bustling with people going about their daily activities.

Several old-timers walked around the remains of Charlie Simpson’s store, chatting animatedly, gesturing, occasionally picking up cans and bottles out of the water and examining them. Ben recognized “Moldy” Clarke and Jessie Flanders, who’d both been killed in the first flood, but their bodies never found. He could also see—if he could believe his eyes—Bobbie Gibson, who’d died of a heart attack when Ben had been a teenager. Vivid, brighter than life. He could see the bright pinkness of their faces, the dazzling white of their hair. They were much more real than the landscape around them.

Lizzy Gibson, Bobbie’s ancient mother, was walking down the street using her cane, a paper sack under her arm. Her feet and cane tip touched the surface of the flood and sank no further. Ben couldn’t remember if she’d survived Bobbie or not.

Johnny Shedako, the Japanese man who’d been many things throughout Ben’s childhood—junk dealer, insurance salesman, farm equipment mechanic—was helping Garter Jones with his corn husker at the site of Ben’s wrecked store. The corn husker was a twisted wreck, rusted throughout, pieces missing, and, unless Ben was mistaken, upside down there in the water.

Jimmy Decker, Wilson Fenton, and Jackie DeLanny were racing each other down the street, their feet making no noise as they struck the water. They’d all lived in houses in a row along the banks of the main channel of the Simpson Creeks, and had perished when those houses were reduced to kindling by the flood.

Gillian Marsh was flirting with Harold Specktor near what used to be the cafe. Emil Johannsen was chasing his dog Crawdad up the street. The oil-colored hound had a tail like a snake. When Ben had been six or seven, Mr. Johannsen had spent several hours each week showing off the tricks his dog could do with that tail.

Ben heard the tinny sound of the bicycle bell and was suddenly a boy again, ten years old and running terrified down the gravel road past their house. He jerked the truck door open and leaped into the cab.

Alan Marley passed the pickup slowly on the ancient bicycle, the shiny hell-wheels spinning, spinning in the air a good three feet above the roof of the truck.

Ben shuddered and tried to pull his eyes away. Marley doffed his hat and cracked his mouth, filling it with shark’s teeth. A great purple birthmark clotted the entire right side of his face; it seemed to move like a separate, living parasite when Marley turned his head.

Alan Marley had delivered mail for Charlie Simpson’s dad when Mr. Simpson was postmaster. Marley had been the terror of Ben’s childhood, of all the children of that long-ago time. If he caught you out on the road alone, he’d chase you with that bicycle, trying to break a foot or a leg if he could. Cindy Gasson became a cripple because of him. And the worst thing was, none of the adults would believe them; they thought the children had made it up because of Marley’s unfortunate birthmark.

Then Marley finally killed somebody, little Timmy Peters; Timmy’s brother saw the whole thing and said Marley had ridden back and forth over the three-year-old dozens of times. Later Ben heard the little boy’s neck and back were broken, the ribs crushed into the lungs. Dan Peters caught up with Marley the next day—he’d been riding his bike down to Four Corners trying to get away—and shot him twelve times, reloading as he went. There never was a trial.

Marley grinned and rang the bell again and again. Ben thought he was going to cry. Then Marley was gone, and there was a tall man in black, preacher-looking clothes striding toward the pickup out of the darkness and the fog ahead. As he neared, Ben could see it was his father, with the same grim face.

Ben started the engine and stamped the gas pedal. His father flew apart into dozens of strands of sooty smoke as the truck hit him.

Ben kept going. The fog was creeping up this side of the mountain now.

~ * ~

For the past half hour or so Audra had been climbing the slope. Heavy mist still surrounded her, but she could feel the additional pressure on her ankles the way they were bending, so she could tell she was walking up an incline.

A gnashing behind her. A whispering.

It had been going on for so long, she couldn’t even be scared anymore. She just wanted it over. She would have stopped and faced it, waited for it, but her body wouldn’t let her. The cold, wet fog had somehow gotten between her mind and her legs.

A little boy was crying somewhere in the fog. Then a slightly older boy, moaning and sobbing. Then the sobbing became snarls, animal whines.

Dark streaks in the fog behind her. Dark movement. Giggling. Then the popping of animal lips.

“Stop it!” she screamed, and stumbled forward, bringing sharp pains into her ankles and feet. Her lower legs ached with sharp points of pain, as if an animal’s needle-sharp teeth were entering her skin again and again.

Giggling again. He was playing with her. There was nothing human in him, to play with her like that.

“Reed!”

More giggling. Then a sound like beast laughter, short and grunty puffs of sound.

A swift moving behind her. She screamed and tried to fly up the slope.

A tree caught her full in the face, a broken-off branch pierced her cheek, and with a shock she knew it had penetrated all the way to the mouth cavity. She jerked away and sobbed; bile came up to her teeth. Swiftness behind her. A whisper-movement through the dense fog. She began frantically climbing the tree. Branch after branch clutched or clawed with broken fingernails, bleeding hands, and soon she was hugging a section of bark above the branches, her cheek rubbing the sandpaper like bark as she screamed and shook, kicking down with her feet to break off the branches below her so that he couldn’t get up, no way could he get up here please GOD!

A thin shadow approached the tree out of white mist. Sniffling. She looked down… only a few feet below her, but could not see past the shadows shrouding his face, could just see the dull pink highlight of eye. Hair that was coal black, straight. Quarter moon reflection off a pasty-white cheek. He… it whimpered. And began scratching at the trunk with its fingernails, long fingernails glistening even through the dulling mist.

She sobbed.

Giggling. Giggling. It began to scratch more vigorously, furiously.

She looked down. The fog was rising, swirling around the tree. She could see no traces of her stalker anymore. The fog began working on the tree on contact, putting it through temperature changes—she could feel alternating waves of intense heat and intense cold. It caused a ticking noise in the tree, the ticking spreading out into the fog. Soon the whole area was ticking, slowly, and she couldn’t tell if her stalker was scratching anymore. She had no idea if he was still there.

~ * ~

Inez had calmed considerably since they’d left the mine, Charlie really had to admire her; he wondered why he hadn’t noticed this strength in her before. She was really some woman. There were things to do now, and she seemed pretty clear-headed about that.

“We’ve gotta get to the boarding house, Charlie… get those people out.” She was running at a good clip down the gravel road, plunging right through large, evil-feeling fog patches where neither one of them could see a thing, but she wasn’t even slowing down. Charlie was afraid he was going to have a heart attack before they’d made it half way.

When they reached the junction of a couple of dirt and gravel logging trails, he could see the town below them for the first time. He stopped short and grabbed her arm.

“Charlie!” She turned on him, enraged.

All the energy, and, curiously, the fear, had run out of him. He could see the worry passing over her face. He turned her to the town and pointed.

A dark lake, thick with assorted debris and strange, writhing shadows, covered what used to be the town of Simpson Creeks. Patches of green and blue and yellow darted back and forth beneath the surface like some sort of underwater moths or fireflies.

“We can’t see the house from here,” she said quietly.

“That’s even lower than the town, Inez.” He squeezed her shoulder. “It would have gone under before anything else.”

“Those people… our neighbors…”

Charlie saw headlights moving off above the town. “Somebody made it! Maybe a whole bunch!” He started dragging her down one of the log trails. “We can meet up with ‘em if we hurry!”

He didn’t have to say more; Inez had already raced ahead of him. Charlie could hear the pounding of his old heart. It filled his head. Likely as not just the sound of it was goin’ to kill him.

~ * ~

As the bear leaped through the window into Reed’s old room, the stalker in the woods started across the marshy, green-shadowed land at a slow plod.

~ * ~

Hector Pierce went rigid on his bed. One of the salesmen shouted, and Joe Manors began to beat on Hector’s chest.

~ * ~

His mother was bringing him cookies. Reed smiled gratefully. He could see her now, her red hair floating about her head as she stood in the kitchen doorway, the dim green light behind her.

He’d hoped he could finish the cookies and have a nice pleasant time with her before his father came down, but he could already hear the old man’s heavy tread on the stairs, his angry voice…

~ * ~

“The boy’s… got teeth, now…” Hector whispered faintly. But Joe Manors was the only one to hear. The face on the bed went slightly pale, the form trembled, then stopped.

“What he say?” the salesman asked when Joe straightened up from the now-still form.

“Oh, nothin’… nothin’. You know… he was just a crazy old man.”

But Joe could not help looking out the window and into the distance where the old Taylor place used to be.

~ * ~

Reed backed against the wall as his father came bellowing down the staircase, black and swollen, sending debris flying through the room. Part of the staircase collapsed on one side as the large man with the red eyes reached the bottom. His lips pulled back from his teeth.

Reed began to moan as Daddy Taylor stepped toward him, his great hands raised to bash Reed’s face.

But a scream sounded suddenly from across the room, and Reed’s mother was leaping on his father, her hair in flames, her pale hands ripping at his shadowed flesh with long, translucent fingernails. Reed gasped as the flames spread down her body and onto Daddy Taylor while the two did their strange, almost beautiful dance around the room.

Reed began to cry as the flames enveloped them. Then he stopped. And looked around him. The two figures were fading rapidly into the shadows of the room. Only a faint stench of smoke, the slight silvery highlights in a corner told Reed they’d ever been here at all.

He crawled over to where they had struggled and felt the carpet. There was nothing… but dirt, a little dampness, nothing else. Dirt and more dirt, all around him. His head seemed clearer now, and he wondered if he’d been hallucinating, dreaming, something… Reed stood up and walked toward the darkness where the staircase should have been.

~ * ~

The stalker looked out of the darkness into Reed’s pale, red-eyed, and sharp-edged face. Agitated gestures. He looked half-dead. The stalker grinned, self-consciously proud of the sharp teeth against his lower lip. Reed should never have left him behind.

He smiled. Reed might not survive that mistake.

~ * ~

Reed examined himself in the darkened mirror. He could not remember there being a full-length mirror in his old room before, but there it was.

He moved closer. His face was streaked with dirt, his matted black hair pushed back off his face so he could see his high forehead. Gleaming white teeth. Filling the mouth. He looked surprisingly healthy.

He was filled once again with a sense of loss, loss of his wife, his daughter, his son. There was a sense of relief. Something had broken inside.

“Carol?” he said to the mirror. “Carol…” He began to cry. “Something… died down there.” He could barely see his reflection through the tears. “I should have drowned… that night of the flood. Now… Carol, something in me died down there!” He cried more loudly, ashamed.

As the moon rose over the trees and fog outside, it illuminated more of the mirror. And then he realized his image was holding something in its hands. But he wasn’t holding anything in his hands. He was not looking at a mirror, he now knew, but at someone else.

The stalker held up his old teddy bear, the eyes ripped out of the stuffed skull.

“You’re the one,” Reed choked. “The part of me that stayed…”

Then the stalker’s long, thin fingers began pulling at the cloth, ripping it, tearing his old toy to pieces.

When Reed looked up, the stalker was beginning to smile.

Chapter 32

Audra…

She peered into the white clouds billowing up around her. The strange, shadowy flood had risen to just below her feet now. She’d climbed as high as she could up the tree; she knew that the branches above her would be too thin to support her weight.

Audra…

She wasn’t sure whether it was a real voice or words she was imagining spinning around inside her head. The water and wet fog distorted sound; her ears felt as if she were on a mountain high above sea level, the pressure building and pushing toward her inner ear.

Audra…

The voice was familiar, particularly when it whispered like that, so softly—soft like a snake slipping through mud. She strained her eyes, looking out at the fog, turning her head to see as much as she could, but still gripping the top branches firmly… mustn’t let go of the branches… they were all that kept her from the secret horrors below.

Audra…

The landscape up here was strange, like the landscape outside a plane window when it was flying above the clouds. Here and there the tops of trees jutted like church spires out of the discolored cloud. She could see the rest of the Big Andy off in the distance, but this horizon looked much different from the one she was used to. It could have been a completely different mountain she was looking at… the wrong mountain. She shook her head. To her north—at least she thought that direction was north, toward the old Taylor place, where Reed was, had been—the flood quickened; there seemed to be a lot of activity over there. And an incredible roaring.

Pieces of wood, light metal, leaves, and all manner of garbage. Some pieces like signs and old furniture touched something now and then in her memory, but she was too frightened to dwell on them much. Because they were drifting past her in the slate-colored water and white cloud, quickening at a certain point, then disappearing over the edge, at that place north of her.

Where the roar was.

Audra…

The whisper was coming clearer to her… his voice, but that could not be. Something touched her foot. She hadn’t even bothered to look down. She lowered her eyes.

Her father’s gnarled fingers were creeping spiderlike up her lower leg.

Audra…

She screamed and kicked. She caught one finger against the rough bark with her shoe and heard it snap like a dead branch. The others spasmed and curled and uncurled nervously like the legs of a wounded insect. She started laughing, then, recognizing the hint of hysteria in her voice, she bit her lip, hard, to make herself stop.

Audra… Softer now.

She’d have recognized the hands anywhere.

Touching her hair, clasping her arm—too hard—when he wanted to make a point, when he wanted her to give in to him. Submit. Her father’s hands. The rest of his body so weak-looking, sickly. His face so pale. Only his eyes and his hands ever showed color. The hands were ruddy, with large, gnarled ridges of skin over the knuckles, and a tracery of great blue veins down the back so that they looked like dead leaves or roots left too long in a damp place.

Touching her, running fingers up her leg. Audra…

He had given her the cafe to keep her near him, to keep her from going away with other men.

To keep her in his hands.

It made so much sense… Doris hadn’t been his favorite after all… it had been her. Audra.

She screamed and kicked and stamped and flailed at the hands. They shook, and the blood pooled in the palms, briefly, before washing over the knobby wrists and descending the emaciated lower arm. But still they persisted, bloodying the bottom cuff of her slacks as they pulled their way up her leg.

She kicked a final time before leaping from the tree reaching as far as she could for the next one, a slightly taller tree, larger branches, only a few feet away. She screamed as she fell.

The scream stopped, abruptly muffled as she dropped into the churning fog.

~ * ~

At the moment Audra was leaping from the tree, Joe Manors had just gotten the last occupant of Inez Pierce’s boarding house onto the roof of that old building. Including the sheet-wrapped corpse of Hector Pierce—Joe just couldn’t bring himself to leave Hector behind. Later, if there was to be a later, they might never have found the body.

There were eight of them left, all huddled near the middle of the roof, and all wide-eyed except Joe, who was much too tired for his fear to show. He wondered, with only feigned interest, if Old Man Pierce had built a strong roof. Certainly, it was going to be tested.

The dark waters rose rapidly, full of dark forms, hands reaching, faces straining with joy or agony, he couldn’t tell. And although earlier he had been able to make out individual identities among those inside the flood—not believing his own eyes even then, for some of the people he thought these were had been dead thirty years and more—he could recognize no one now, although he could see their faces quite clearly. They had lost their hair; their faces had been rubbed nearly blank. Death had made them all the same.

There were little girls, lots of little girls, and women, too, in the flood. But he couldn’t recognize any of them. If he ever survived this… he was going back to Cincinnati. Maybe he could still find them, be a father to his little girl again.

But there didn’t seem much chance of that. The boarding house was completely flooded; he heard the things crashing inside, felt the walls crumbling far below his feet. The roof rocked violently, making his stomach heave. Most of the men around him were crying. He’d have been crying too if he’d had a better grip on himself.

The roof buckled; several pieces floated away. A dark wave pushed itself over one side of the roof, like a solid thing, taking three of the men with it. Joe sprawled on the roof and made a grab for one of the salesmen. The man held on a moment, and he, too, had an expression somewhere between grin and grimace. It confused Joe; he wanted to scream at the guy. But then the salesman was gone, jerked out of Joe’s grip and washed over the side.

Then the roof was loose, completely detached from the Pierce boarding house, spinning away in the dark. Joe saw the last wall crumble behind them as the swift current suddenly shot them forward, away from Simpson Creeks. Debris was everywhere, flying in the wind and thrown by the waves. The men were screaming so loudly Joe thought his ears were going to bleed. He stared straight into a pitch-black wave that held the face of Amos Nickles, then Amos Nickles grew long shark teeth and rushed at him.

There was a crash as the dark wave descended.

~ * ~

A few minutes before the roof of Inez Pierce’s boarding house separated from the structure that had been the Pierce family home for almost a hundred years, and just as Audra’s last scream pierced the roar of the flood, Ben Taylor pulled up on the High Mountain Road across the hollow from his late brother’s home. Charlie and Inez were squeezed into the cab with him.

All three heard Audra scream. All three saw her fall into the fog and water. But at the moment none was moved to action. They were too entranced by the nightmare landscape before them. A landscape no one but a fool or a crazy person would have any eagerness to enter.

“That’s… impossible,” Charlie said. No one answered him. The impossibility was self-evident, but they had all seen the impossible become commonplace this evening.

The remains of the old Taylor place still stood as Ben remembered them, nestled in the middle of what had been a quiet valley. Behind that house, however, was the flood, rising up to the very top of the trees, but contained as if behind an invisible wall. It wasn’t a complete, break less wall, he could see; water leaked out of several spots and was snaking toward the house. And in other places, halfway up the border of trees, fingers and thumbs of water pushed their way out now and then, as if seeking escape. The area reminded Ben of an arena, like the Romans had, although whatever was holding the arena together, holding the water back, seemed to be weakening. He wondered how much time he had to get Reed out of that house.

He ignored the most amazing thing about this landscape, however, until he could ignore it no longer. Just south of the Taylor place was the cliff, almost completely shrouded by the fog; the tall trees bordering it—where he had last seen Audra—were almost completely submerged in the flood. But then, for a width of about a hundred yards, there was the largest waterfall he had ever seen in his life, dropping to the valley floor. Where the water just disappeared. It roared, however, roared like nothing he had ever heard, the sound increasing in volume and depth even as he watched.

He couldn’t make any sense of this at all. His first impulse was to turn the truck around and get as far away from this valley as he possibly could, ignoring all the objections he knew both Inez and Charlie would have. But this was impossible. This was unreal; there was no way to fight something like this. But more than that, there was something even scarier about this place, this waterfall, than anything else Ben Taylor had seen that night.

Somehow Ben knew, looking at the water leaking out of the forest behind the old house, watching the waterfall roar over the lip of forest and ghost-flood, disappearing when it touched the bottom, that this was a flaw, a break in the magic. Big Andy was waiting for something in that house to conclude. Then the water dropping down the fall would stop disappearing; the trees would let the wall of water escape. The flood would have full reign here, and his brother’s house would vanish beneath the waves.

“Look up there!” Inez shouted, and pointed.

A figure was struggling to the top of a tree near the cliff. Ben put the pickup in gear and sped down the road. If the Cliff Trail was still passable, they might just be able to get close enough…

~ * ~

Audra struggled to the top of the tree and clung there. Her clothes were ripped in long lines down her body. Her skin might be ripped, too; she couldn’t tell. She was so cold. Her eyes burned; she couldn’t see very well. She could be bleeding to death and not know. So she clung to the tree, whispering, praying, crying… all the same.

Her father almost got her… he almost had. But she’d gotten away; she’d been too smart for him. She giggled. He just didn’t know who he was dealing with. Never had. She’d felt his hands grabbing at her, pulling, trying to find something to hold onto, but she’d always slipped away. She was too smart for him.

But his nails had gotten to her. His fingernails. And those had cut her, wounded her bad.

From this tree she could see the waterfall. It was beautiful. The water just fell through the clouds, dropping to the ground far below. She wondered if there were lots of rainbows there. She wondered.

Over the lip of the waterfall she could see the Taylor place. She really needed to talk to Reed. It all looked very beautiful from up here. It almost made her want to let go, to let the water take her, to drift down to the valley below. To talk to Reed.

Maybe he really loved her after all.

~ * ~

Reed had been running through the house, trying to get away from the image of himself that stepped out of the darkened mirror. A false image. A lie. He didn’t think the house could be that big; it seemed as if he had been running forever. It had seemed that big to him when he was a child, of course; it had seemed enormous. When his father chased him he had run and run and had never been able to get to the right door. The house had been huge, and the doors impossibly far apart.

The dark, tattered image of himself, like an unfocused photograph, a self-portrait gone sour, didn’t run, but walked behind him, and yet had no trouble keeping up. Every time he looked back over his shoulder he was there, just a few steps behind.

Looking just like him… but darker, hungrier, with sharper teeth.

Here, Reed… here, boy. It seemed the entire house was whispering to him. I’m the one you came for… I’m the one you needed to talk to. Why don’t you stop and play?

Reed whimpered. The words struck a chord. He’d come back to face these things, he’d come back to face his family. But this. This he could not face.

You got to look at me, Reed. Look at what I… you’ve become…

“No!”

Reed! It wasn’t a whispering this time, but a thunderstorm inside the cramped rooms and hallways. Reed had never heard such anger, not even in his father’s voice. Reed! The wall to his left suddenly exploded. Roaches poured out and did a mad dance around his feet. Reed! The lamp in front of him rose into the air rapidly, smashing into the ceiling. Reed! A long spider-webbing of cracks appeared in the floorboards under his feet. He could hear the teeth grinding behind him. He could feel the hate like an intense heat, an electrical storm in the making.

~ * ~

When Joe Manors woke up, he thought at first he was back in bed at Inez’s, and this had all been a dream. There was sunlight here, and he heard birds singing. He struggled to his feet and looked up: the sky was clear overhead. He looked around him.

He was standing on the detached boarding house roof. He was alone; the rest must have been swept away. Except for a white-sheeted form tied securely to two lightning rods: Hector Pierce’s body.

The roof had run aground. And all around him… a calm lake, like one he might have liked going fishing on some time. There was no sign of Simpson Creeks, and none of the landmarks seemed at all familiar. He had no idea where he might be.

But there… a few miles away… he thought he recognized part of Big Andy’s flank. It was dark there, darker than any sky had a right to be. Thunder in the clouds. Bright lightning flashes.

Like the mountain was tearing itself apart in rage.

~ * ~

Reed! The floor buckled in front of him, throwing him headfirst into the wall. At the last moment he turned his shoulder and drove into the soft, moldy plaster. He looked behind him. Dark hands were gripping the door frame. Glistening, knifelike nails. Then they were splintering it.

~ * ~

Ben pulled the truck right up to the edge of the water, fishtailing slightly on the wet rock that capped the cliff there. He jumped out and stared across the expanse of water separating them from Audra. A good twenty-five yards. There was no way they could get to her.

He looked at Charlie. Charlie suddenly scowled. “We got to do something for her!” he shouted over the roar of the waterfall.

“Charlie…” Inez gripped his arm tightly, using his shoulder to shield her face from the spray. “There’s nothing we can do!”

Ben’s face grew hot with shame. Even now he was thinking of leaving the young woman, driving down there and getting his nephew out of that house before the flood let loose. But who could blame him? There was nothing, nothing they could do.

Audra screamed. They looked out through the flying mist. The tree was bending toward the water. One of her legs was already covered over.

“Dammit all to hell!” Charlie shouted, and jumped. Inez screamed. Ben started to jump in after his friend, but just stared, dumbfounded, as Charlie stood up on the water and began walking toward Audra… small, unsteady steps in that high wind, but progress just the same.

Then he saw what Charlie was standing on. Large sections of a house were floating just under the surface of the flood. Matt O’Riley’s house, if Ben wasn’t mistaken, swept away in that flood ten years ago. None of the O’Rileys had made it out alive.

The pieces were rocking; at any moment Ben knew Charlie’d be stepping on a rotten piece, or the whole thing would flip over on him.

But he’d made it almost to the tree. Audra was reaching out to him.

~ * ~

Reed bounded up the stairs to the attic, his shadow self chewing up the steps a few seconds behind him. Reed, you must talk to me… The anger and rage had gone out of the voice. There was just this coldness now, as if the whispered words might freeze his skin.

~ * ~

Charlie grabbed Audra and pushed her onto the floating slab of house. There seemed to be shapes in the water here, too… interested in her or him, he didn’t know. He pulled her to him—barely conscious, she seemed to weigh a ton—and they stumbled across the slippery surface of the boards.

Ben had backed his truck up so that the rear bumper faced the falls. He grabbed the bumper and stepped out into the edge of the flood, holding out his hand, coaxing Charlie closer. His friend looked dazed, ready to pass out. Ben slipped as the force of the flood pulling out to the falls increased slightly. Inez grabbed him for additional support.

Charlie and Audra were only a few yards away.

But Ben could see that the pieces of the O’Riley house were beginning to separate, leaving wide areas of dark water between them. Some of the sections were breaking apart and sinking.

~ * ~

It was dark in the attic, and Reed felt like a little boy again.

The sounds had been going on for a long time: scratchings, chitterings, creakings, that were so soft you wouldn’t know they were there unless you listened real hard. He hated it here. He was sick with terror.

Maybe it was a rat, a bat; or maybe a snake, or maybe one of those furry things Jim Leeman told him about that had the poisonous bite but usually chewed your head off before you could die of the poison—Reed had had nightmares for a week after Jim had told him about that one. Jim said they were all over this hollow, those furry things.

But he had to stay. It was the best hiding place he knew. And if Daddy caught him today…

Reed thought he could hear him bellowing down below, but no, no… that was just the blood beating in his own ears. He was so scared this time; he couldn’t remember ever being this scared.

The scratching continued… softly, softly. Then the whimpering started.

Reed listened closely, holding his breath. There was another kid up here with him. Crying.

The whimpering grew louder. Maybe his daddy had beaten this little kid too.

Louder. Louder. A sound like an animal… a calf, mewling. They’d had one hit by a truck one time and it had sounded just like this before Uncle Ben had took out his gun and shot the poor thing to put it out of its misery.

Suddenly Reed wished he had a gun right then. He’d help it; he’d put the poor thing out of its misery.

Then there was a change. The mewling became a growling. And Reed got real scared.

~ * ~

The house sections were separating, and Charlie could see it now, and that desperate look in Ben’s and Inez’s faces over there on the bank.

“Jump!” he shouted in Audra’s ear. She looked up at him uncomprehendingly. “Jump, girl, if you want to live!”

She jumped, and he gave her an extra push with all his might to help her on her way. He was satisfied that she had landed on some floating wood right in front of Ben’s outstretched hand when the momentum of his push carried him backwards and into the water.

He grabbed the tree Audra had been clinging to as he drifted past. That stopped him for a moment, but then the top of the tree broke off completely and he was suddenly rushing for the falls.

He still held on to the tree top. He wasn’t sure why.

~ * ~

The teeth were right in front of Reed, virtually glowing in the dark. The dark silhouette started breaking up the attic, throwing things around, sinking his teeth into things, chewing them apart, savaging them as Reed watched in fascination and horror.

Reed had never seen anyone so angry before, even angrier than his father. It both scared and thrilled him. Daddy shouldn’t have hit the little boy so hard. See what happened?

But the dark eyes, the bright teeth, were looking at Reed now. Reed jumped up and fumbled with the door that led to the roof. The dark little boy with the big teeth was almost on him when he got it open.

Reed climbed as fast as he could. The little boy roared behind him.

~ * ~

Ben held Audra and Inez to him. He was crying. He stared after Charlie, but Charlie wasn’t even looking at him anymore. He was staring at the edge of the falls, now only a few feet away.

~ * ~

Charlie watched as the two figures climbed up on the roof of the Taylor house. Two almost identical figures. But it was hard to tell from this distance. He figured that one of them must be Reed, but who was the other one? Could Joe Manors have come out here trying to save the boy, too? Charlie had always liked Joe Manors; he hoped he made it out okay.

There were more immediate concerns at hand, however. He was smelling lilacs. Not just any lilacs, mind you, but Mattie’s lilacs. He knew.

Charlie looked down over the approaching edge of the falls. It looked like you could see forever, forever down, that is. Charlie chuckled to himself. But he was still smelling lilacs. The foaming water was like thousands and thousands of yards of lace. Doilies. Embroidery. His Mattie had had a hand in all of this, yes indeedy. He would recognize her handiwork anywhere.

And as he looked over the edge, right straight down, he could see her face, shining up at him out of the water. Like she was taking a bath, her face well scrubbed and glowing so pretty. Smiling at him. And smelling so strongly of lilacs.

The worst thing about people dying on you was sometimes it seemed that they hadn’t even existed, and that they’d taken part of your own past with them when they died. Practically stolen it from you, Sometimes you had to spend the entire rest of your life trying to get those pieces back. Having to face those old ghosts again and again till you got things settled between you.

Charlie hoped his death wasn’t going to give anybody that kind of trouble. He sincerely did. He wished them all well.

Chapter 33

Those last minutes on the roof. The water was so loud, filled the air so completely, everything seemed strangely nullified, silenced, and Reed felt as if he were huddled in the quiet heart of the world.

But there was still this roaring inside his ears; the giant waterfall had slipped into his head and was raging there. He had to get Carol and the children away from this angry, insane waterfall, but where could he put them? He jerked the soggy handkerchief out of his pocket and thought about wrapping them up in that. He’d wrap them up safe and they’d be there in his pocket, warming his damp cold body, for all time. He couldn’t bear to think of them drowned, or kept from him forever.

Once as a boy he’d gotten lost in a heavy rainstorm, only a mile or maybe less from home. He’d become hysterical, convinced he was forever lost in the fury of the storm, and alarmed that he could not feel his own tears in the angry rain. His parents could not hear him above the angry rain. And the angry rain blinded him so he could not find his way.

He’d spent almost a lifetime in that rainstorm; he was in the center of that raging storm even now. All the people who had died here, all the people who had been betrayed. They wouldn’t rest. He knew; he had betrayed himself.

Reed saw his shadow in the rain, straddling the rooftop and mocking him. He thought he should jump, let himself drown, but he could not. As long as he lived there was a chance he might see Alicia and Michael and Carol again. Alicia with all the questions, Michael with the dark hair and burning gaze so like his own, Carol with the arms to hold him and make him feel part of the human race.

Animal fear escaped him as the shadow approached. He wet his pants, and felt absurdly grateful that later no one would be able to detect a urine stain on his corpse, so wet and soggy he would be. Like cotton. Like morning fog. Like a drowned rag doll.

The shadow came closer. He tensed and crouched. Reed wasn’t going to make things easy for it.

Reed leaped, and saw the toothy grin in the pale face filling the storm. Lightning flashed, and he could feel his own face lose definition…

~ * ~

As Charlie went over the falls, it was as if the whole world went down with him in an earthshaking explosion of water. The flood escaped from behind the trees and rapidly surrounded the old Taylor house, pulling it apart in seconds with a thousand invisible claws. The water level dropped immediately with a roaring all around Ben, Inez, and Audra, who ran as far away from the edge of the cliff as they could. Then the hollow filled up again, great waves splashing over the edge of the cliff, almost swallowing Ben’s pickup. It rocked near the edge, but stayed.

After a few more minutes the storm subsided, and the new lake grew calm. The three half-drowned former citizens of what had been Simpson Creeks looked out on a long valley filled with miles of water.

Big Andy’s become a serpent, Ben thought, and began to shake all over. Inez was tugging at him.

Floating out in the distance was a large piece of wall. And his nephew Reed was on it.

Chapter 34

He kept thinking of it as Simpson Creeks after the flood, but that was foolish. There was no Simpson Creeks anymore. It had been absorbed, erased, drowned. A new lake nestled here, thirty miles long and almost as wide as the original river valley, winding its way tortuously through the southeast Kentucky hills, always doubling back on itself, always presenting a surprising twist, a brand new turn to the eye. It seemed strange that it was still accessible by road—the old dirt logging system. The flood had leveled off a few yards below its hard-packed, though sometimes overgrown, surface. It was as if Big Andy wanted all to see his new face.

There were bits of the old stream system here and there, reduced to tributaries feeding the enormous lake. In several places waterfalls had formed where the ground had sunk. In one spot a small waterfall emptied out directly onto the road, and the occupants of the old pickup had to grip the seats to keep from screaming when they passed under the thundering waters. He wanted to say something to soothe them, but could not.

There was surprisingly little recognizable debris around the lake—mostly bits of bark, branches, leaves, moss, floating in large masses in the water. As if even the last dregs of memory had been wiped away. Here and there the thick trunks of fallen trees. As they passed it, a large oak standing at drunken attention on the bank suddenly shuddered up its entire height, as if with delayed terror, leaned crazily over, then fell with a series of moans and creaks into the lake. Squirrels and small birds exploded from its branches and rushed for other shelter just before its ragged roots let go completely and it turned over, corpselike in the water. He watched it turn in a slow, graceful circle before drifting away from shore.

Tiny jewels of water glittered over everything: stone and leaf and even the top branches of trees. With this morning’s sunrise, for the first time he could remember, there was no fog in the valley. No fog around Big Andy at all for the sun to burn off in layers. The mountain had been already stripped naked, with nothing left to conceal.

Most of the animals stayed hidden, probably as shocked by this strange land as were the occupants of the pickup. It was as if they had been picked up and transported a thousand miles or so. Nothing looked familiar. The animals, too, must have found it difficult to adjust to the morning’s unaccustomed brilliance. The sun’s heat must seem several hours early this morning. As after many disasters, natural enemies, still in shock, seemed to have made a truce. He saw a wildcat on the bank right beside a small deer.

Periodic winds stirred the water this morning, as if the previous night’s storm were threatening to begin again. But each died fitfully, as if they were Big Andy’s stray thought, his shadowy morning dreams, after a long night awake.

Occasionally he saw snakes lying in the shelter of the trees, snakes lying in the road: copperheads, coral snakes, king snakes, lying right beside the occasional spotted or red-cheeked salamander. Like worms escaping the ground after a heavy rain. He almost went off the road trying to avoid them, not because he was afraid, but because he thought they deserved to live.

At one point, he had to swerve sharply to avoid a Nole Company truck left upside down in the middle of the road. Another time he stopped and pointed out a shady area by the lake to his passengers. There, on the edge of the deep blue water, was the old wood-burning stove from Charlie Simpson’s store, sitting perfectly upright in a cleared area as if it were right where it belonged. He could see shadows under the trees there, and imagined, briefly, the shadows bunching their feet around the fire guard, passing on news and swapping stories, retelling the legend of the last great Simpson Creeks flood, and the giant lake that appeared overnight, again and again. It had been several minutes before he’d been able to pull out again and leave that antique stove behind.

As they traveled farther south toward Four Corners, they saw more and more pieces of water-sculpted, almost shapeless debris. Debris you could read like clouds, imagining anything you wanted. He kept staring at the pieces, wondering what they might be, daring them to move.

The insects, once so prevalent, had been silenced. Here and there, a whisper of circular ripples broke the surface, but he saw nothing that might have caused them. Whatever it might be remained beneath the surface.

They were still uneasy around the water. He wouldn’t drive too closely—he stayed on the far side of the road away from the lake wherever possible—and crossing bridges was a real terror to him. He did it quickly, and would not look into the water below him.

Many animals would have survived, although the toll in deer and rabbit—vulnerable animals—would be high. The trees’ seed crops—berries and nuts and the like—would have been stripped in such a storm. It suddenly occurred to him that a bear wouldn’t find the Big Andy too hospitable a place to its kind at the present time.

But so much still survived here. Hillsides blooming with purple rhododendron. The lake bank was painted with golden ragwort and Indian paintbrush, fairy wand and trumpet honeysuckle, and delicate pink lady’s slipper. Tufts of panic grass clutching sheer rock faces he’d have thought too unfriendly for any kind of life. Big Andy was one persistent devil.

Most of all, it looked to be virgin land here. As if this country had never been mined at all.

Not sure even these thoughts were his own, Ben Taylor drove the old pickup out from under Big Andy’s shadow toward Four Corners. Toward his wife Martha and the kids. He had to resist the urge to speed, to maneuver around these roads too rapidly, dangerously. He’d thought he’d never see them again. Terrible thing… the way people seemed to take family for granted. Big Andy had left the remaining Taylors intact; they’d been lucky. So many had lost everything, including their lives.

His passengers were still shell-shocked; impossibility upon impossibility, the great number of bizarre appearances and deaths had overloaded their brains. No wonder; he’d be surprised if any of them got a good night’s sleep for months to come. Ben could say that they’d actually been through hell and back.

Inez and Joe were in the front seat of the old truck with him. He’d been worried about Inez—she’d been deathly quiet for most of the trip. That thought made him feel like a foolish old man. After all, what did he expect? She’d lost everything. But the last few miles she’d been talking about the flowers they’d passed, and how unusual it was to have flowers like that around here this late in the year. Inez was going to be okay.

They’d picked Joe up on the way, walking down the road by himself. Ben and Joe’d talked excitedly for the space of several minutes… how neither had expected to see the other one ever again, how they both figured they were the only survivors. Then they’d caught the gloom in everyone else’s faces and it made them remember, made them think about where they were. They got back into the truck and headed down the road. Survivors. Now that was a word. Ben started to think about Charlie… that image of him gazing off into the distance before going over the waterfall. Ben would never forget that.

But he had to get a grip on himself; these people depended on him. He was probably the only one in good enough shape to drive; he couldn’t afford to break down now. None of them could.

Survivor. He hoped so. He dearly hoped they were survivors.

Joe was still talking pretty actively, more words than Ben could ever remember hearing out of the man. Gesturing with a queer sort of nervous energy. “Going back to Cincinnati, that I am, Ben,” he said. “Going to find my wife and that pretty little daughter of mine when I get there, yessir. Make a good life for us all. Make a family. Been hanging around down here too long, not being responsible. That’s gonna stop, I can promise you that!” Something had happened to Joe Manors. Ben believed him.

Audra huddled in the bed of the truck, leaned up against the back of the cab behind Ben. She’d been the quietest of the bunch; she hadn’t said a word since they found her, just whimpering occasionally, looking up at you out of those dark-circled, blood red eyes. You couldn’t bear to look into those eyes for very long. Ben was afraid she might never be the same; there was damage in that girl, he could see it.

And she wouldn’t go anywhere near Reed.

Reed sat upright in the truck bed behind Joe Manors. By looking into the rearview mirror Ben could look directly into his nephew’s face. Now the boy was sitting comfortably, staring ahead of him, hands folded neatly in his lap.

Ben had to admit Reed looked better than expected. In fact, he looked healthier, if anything, than the evening he got off the train. His pale complexion was almost ruddy now, as if he’d spent years outdoors. His movements seemed confident, agile. And he seemed to have completely gotten rid of that damn cold.

Reed’s eyes were dark and shadowed, actually pretty handsome, Ben thought. His hair had gotten a little wild, seemed a little longer than Ben remembered it. As if he hadn’t had it cut in years. There was something dark… mud or scum… smeared and dried into his hair, something from the flood, putting reddish highlights into the pitch-black hair.

Reed turned and looked Ben directly in the eye. His nephew’s eyes had odd, sickle-shaped highlights in the upper halves of the pupils.

What you can’t face… it controls you. They’d had the conversation a day ago. It seemed like years.

Reed was smiling. A gleaming tooth on one side of his mouth caught the lower lip and pulled it away from the mouth. He unfolded his hands. The knuckles were worn, the skin stained, dirty. The nails were like digging tools—or, Ben suddenly thought, like claws: long, curved, thick with the years.

For just a moment, Ben closed his eyes.

Thank You For Reading!

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ALSO BY STEVE TEM FROM CROSSROAD PRESS:

DAUGHTERS

By Steve & Melanie Tem

Four diverse characters collide in an ancient world of darkness and magic: the Amazon Gwynn, the princess Evonna, the wizard Alden, and the beast Thet. Out of that collision comes an unforgettable novel of endings and reconciliations, the death of magic and the birth of technology, and the eternal struggle between darkness and light.

Highborn Evonna is unhappy with her constricted choices and troubled by her brother Alden’s dabblings in wizardry. In the great city that is her home, where nothing unplanned ever happens, something has gone terribly wrong. Everywhere are signs of chaos and creeping madness, rumors of plague, and intimations of worse to come. But what can Evonna or Alden do? The answer comes unexpectedly, with the terrifying visit of the subhuman Thet and the sudden appearance of the amazon Gwynn, who harbors a shocking secret. Together, the four unlikely companions bring unimagined change to the city… and are themselves changed in unimaginable ways.

Yet the chaos continues to spread. Desperate, our heroes leave their dying home and embark on a hellish journey to the far mountains. There they will come face-to-face with a malignant darkness determined to forever unbalance the world… a darkness as insane as it is evil.

LICENSE NOTES:

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your vendor of choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

Copyright

Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital Edition

Copyright 2010 by Steve Rasnic Tem & Macabre Ink Digital Publications

Copy-edited by David Dodd

Originally published in paperback by Avon Books

Content

Steve Rasnic Tem
EXCAVATION

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Thank You For Reading!

ALSO BY STEVE TEM FROM CROSSROAD PRESS:

LICENSE NOTES:

Copyright