Excavation

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.