Excavation

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.