EXCAVATION
By Steve Rasnic Tem
Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2010 by Steve Rasnic Tem
Copy-edited by David Dodd
Originally published in paperback by Avon Books
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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.
ALSO BY STEVE TEM FROM CROSSROAD PRESS:
NOVELS:
Daughters (with Melanie Tem)
COLLECTIONS:
Tales From the Crossroad, Vol. 1
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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.”