Excavation

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.