That night he dreamed about his wife, locked inside a car with their two kids. They were both screaming, beating at the windows for escape. Carol’s hair was on fire.
Then the car became an enormous black bear, gnawing at their remains.
The bear moved quietly through the forest, standing up on its hind legs occasionally and peering through the low-hanging branches. It sniffed the air, and growled deeply.
The bear had an unusual way of carrying its head: high, like a man’s. It sniffed the air again and rocked its head from side to side, as if it were worried, or frightened. It turned and looked behind it, almost as if it thought it were being watched by something else, some other animal, or man. A thing that was man and not man.
It roared. It squinted, as if it too were watching someone. Someone it could not really see, except inside itself.
The eyes it could not see were like a man’s.
“You can’t just leave me alone, Jake!” Doris Parkey clutched at her husband’s patched jacket, careful to avoid his hands and avoid his stinking breath.
“Get away, woman! I got things to do!” Jake lunged toward the door, but Doris had him in a clawlike grip and he could stagger only a few steps. His wife had always seemed to have the strength of ten men when she was really scared. It frightened Jake; it seemed unnatural. The woman had the body of a scarecrow; she had no business frightening him like that. “Leggo me, goddammit!” Then he slapped her.
She let go instantly, rubbing at her face as if to wipe the red away. “There’s things out there, Jake. Bad things! Don’t let me be by myself tonight! You owe it to me. I’m your wife, ain’t I?”
She infuriated him. She sounded like a damned little kid. He made a motion as if to slap her again, but she scrambled out of his way, standing in the corner of the living room trembling, her eyes blurred beneath the tears.
“Damn…” he muttered, then jerked open the door and stalked out.
“I hope you die, Jake Parkey,” she said quietly, tearfully, then raising her voice to scream at the door, “I hope you die!”
Doris pressed herself against the wall trying to stop the trembling. But she didn’t think it was going to help.
For there was scratching on the other side of the wall. Something moving. Where the slab butted up against her house.
Her hair was burning.
She awakened in the hollow cavity under the slab, with the damp and the rats and the bugs and the snakes, and she was frightened until she remembered what had happened to her, what she had become. Her hair was burning.
She could not remember what her name had been, and that bothered her.
She sifted through the debris inside the slab, the things that had fallen down the cracks and holes over the years, and picked up the dusty things. Pretty things. Bottles and silver spoons and bits of lace and carvings and other things with prettiness under the grime, with brightness under the dust. She remembered that such things had been important to her at one time…when she had been something else.
She heard voices near her, and moved closer to them. One was female, as she had been. She felt something odd inside herself.
A piece of shiny stuff was propped up in the corner. She looked into it. Her hair was beautiful. It glowed.
The little girl had always liked bright things, shiny things. Things to play with. So she found herself floating toward the bright lights, moving through the dark the same way she vaguely remembered moving through the water: her mouth open, her limbs bobbing up and down, her pale dress and pale flesh melting into the dark liquid…
She remembered being in and near this place many times, a long time ago. Before the waters came.
Where was her mommy? She wanted her, she thought…the want was somewhere deep inside herself. Not quite hers. She saw the mother inside herself…the mother’s beautiful red hair. Daddy had always liked that red hair. He’d say it was the only reason he’d married mommy and then he’d laugh. She’d never liked that joke about mommy; she didn’t think it was very funny.
She let herself float over the brush, her feet dangling, but not touching the ground. The darkness moved over her like a coat, but she wasn’t afraid. She hadn’t been afraid of the dark since the Creeks jumped over their house. The dark made her all warm inside.
Her hair was burning.
She slipped out of the slab and let her beautiful, glowing hair lead her down the street. Her hair had become like a living thing, the most alive thing on her body, so she let it tell her what to do. It was more woman than she had ever been.
She floated up to the window and let her burning hair fill the glass. She let the woman see her. She smiled, even when the woman began screaming.
Then she let the beautiful hair lead her inside.
He watched the man and the younger man go inside the house. He felt rage, rage burning up from his feet to his head. He was angry at these two, especially the younger one. He wanted to come to them, lay his teeth on their pale throats, and taste copper. He wanted to do that to all the males of the town, the ugly, evil males. He wanted to rage and tear, gnash their dead bodies to bloody threads.
He was glad the bear and the burning woman, the dead little floating girl were not around just then. They, too, angered him. He didn’t want them around. They made him afraid. He would have to do something about them…soon.
They had Hector Pierce back in his bed in Inez’s rooming house once again. Inez had dismissed them all, angry with them for having seen a member of her family like this, and even angrier with herself for feeling that way. She had grown ashamed of her brother. Sometimes, she discovered, she hated him.
Now he was motioning her closer, his eyes rolling, lips smacking like some animal. He obviously wanted to tell her something, but she didn’t want to be near him.
He smacked his lips and rolled his eyes…popped his mouth and blinked and blinked…beckoning her with a spastic hand, a hand flapping like a beached fish…
Get it over with, she thought, get it over with…and bent over him, her left ear over his popping, smacking mouth.
“Part of him…stayed behind,” Hector whispered hoarsely. Inez drew back. She had no idea what he was talking about, but it frightened her.
“Part of him…he’s been here…all these years…” Hector said, grinning spastically, insanely. “Boy shoulda…stayed and…drowned!”
Chapter 20
Doris pushed herself back into the corner, pushed back and back until she could feel both walls coming together in her skin, the corner becoming part of her spine, hurting, hurting, but at least she didn’t have to know what she was seeing here, passing through her window, floating through her window like it wasn’t even there, all blazing like a fire ball…but it was a woman, wasn’t it? The most beautiful woman Doris Parkey had ever seen. She even wanted to touch her, she was so beautiful, although she was terrified, have that beauty against her skin, but that was wrong…but oh, so beautiful it hurt your eyes!
Doris knew this woman, she was sure! Something about the face…she had known this woman at one time, had seen her shopping…years ago…had talked to her, but the woman was long gone now, long gone. Moved away…
…or dead.
She wasn’t sure, she wasn’t sure…oh, how could she be sure?
The woman came closer, slipping across the carpet and not even bothering it none…and Doris wanted to stay and talk, she really did. She wanted to be sociable and show this pretty lady just how sociable she could be even living in such a hick town, but Doris was afraid of fire…see…and this woman’s hair was all in flames.
Doris opened her mouth wide, somewhere between a laugh and a scream, and felt her body take her through the doorway and out into the night.
She must have turned out in the street, reversed herself and run back past the house, past the Taylors and up the hill, heading off the left side of the embankment there, because before she knew it she was in the woods. And there was no one there, not even any sounds. And the glow was b
obbing in and out of the darkened trees behind her, like a child skipping and dancing with ajar full of fireflies in the dark. Just like Doris had done herself when she was a child. Just like Doris had done a long time ago.
This woman wanted something from Doris…what did she want?
Doris started to run, but didn’t want to take her eyes off the glow, no telling what might happen to her if she took her eyes off the glow, so she kept turning her head, turning her head. And she fell on her back. Legs spread. Dazed.
And looked up at the woman with her head on fire. Beautiful. Staring down at her.
Doris felt the vague itchiness, the anxiety running down the inside of her legs. And thought of Mr. Emmanuel, strange little dapper man, whom she had thought and thought about since he had first come to live in her house. After years living with that rough, smelly man who drank all the time and didn’t care what bothered her, didn’t care about what she needed. Doris hadn’t felt much like a woman in years…
She felt the tension in her legs, and lower belly, and thought of him. And saw the woman with burning hair watching her, rubbing her own pale legs.
It was then Doris knew what the flaming lady wanted from her. They were very much alike, the two of them.
Doris began to feel the fire in her lower legs.
When Reed arrived at the old homeplace the next morning, he discovered he felt a bit easier about what he was trying to do. The clearing looked like the site of any typical archaeological dig now, similar to any number he had been on over the years. The grid of stakes, the clean-swept dirt, naked of weeds, the layered excavations. He could almost forget that he had once lived here, that his parents and little sister were living here when they died.
He tried to tell himself it was a job, a scientific project. Nothing more. He felt better, physically better, just thinking that way.
He had decided on a vertical-face excavation method for the site, since the various features were probably pretty well jumbled together. If he discovered anything of interest, he would stop and concentrate on exposing that single feature.
In the first square he had to use a pick to break the soil next to the trench he had dug. Apparently some dissolved mortar and cement had accumulated here in a pool several inches deep. It was hard going, and he had to proceed carefully, using the pick in short, careful strokes, since he couldn’t know what was immediately beneath this layer. For the most part, he knew, he would be using the short-handled hoe and a trowel.
He climbed down into the trench and began scraping away the layers of earth, proceeding horizontally across the first square until he had dug a shelf about six inches below the surface and another six inches wide. He stopped several inches from the stakes marking two corners of the grid, so that the stakes could remain standing as reference points. Eventually all the stakes would be left atop high mounds of earth as the excavation proceeded around them, like solitary wooden sentinels or grave markers.
He proceeded carefully in widening his shelf, occasionally finding small objects that he examined and placed in a bag attached to his waist, making a note on his log, or letting the object fall with the dirt into the trench. Pieces of his own past, or someone else’s. Most of the objects held no meaning for him: buttons, pieces of metal, other pieces off something much larger whose character he couldn’t determine from the one piece. One of the things that had always fascinated him about archaeology was the way in which such small pieces were virtually unrecognizable when separated from the whole. It was like trying to identify a person by just the nose or the eyes. Finding the other pieces to the pattern required hard, meticulous work, as well as imagination.
When his arms would no longer reach far enough across the shelf, he climbed out and stood on the shelf he had made. He began to widen it in the direction of the other two stakes marking off this first square. He found several marbles—cat’s eyes, a steelie—and wondered if they had once been his, or some other little kid’s. They went into his sack. Then an old yo-yo with an obscured painted face on the side. He’d once had one with Mickey Mouse on it, but he couldn’t remember the color. Maybe this was it.
The soil profile revealed by the trench and the initial digging was quite unusual—certainly he had never worked in land so dramatically traumatized—but consistent for all that. The top layer seemed to be a mixture of fine sands and silts and dissolved concrete, which made the surface alternately hard and soft the length of the valley. This material ran up to six inches deep in places; most of his first layer consisted of it. Below that were the slightly larger pebbles and stones the flood waters had dropped before the silt, along with the lightest objects—driftwood, small pieces of furniture, and the like—most of it half-rotted away.
Some of the amorphous lumps of wood reminded him of things—blocks, an old push toy, a cart wheel—but he really couldn’t be sure. Many of them were almost cloud-like in their shapelessness—and it was easy to find himself staring at them, trying to read them like a Rorschach of thunderheads. Animals, there, and people in distress…
Below that were the larger pieces of debris from the waste dam: pieces of coal and limestone, sandstone. The extent of the damage could be told from these stones: a layer a foot thick, they had moved down the creek like rocketing blades, shredding bridges, houses, trees, animals and people. Here and there in this layer Reed could see the tiny fragments of wood and cloth and leather carried down with their passage.
There seemed to be little flood debris in the strata below this, but it was scattered throughout these top layers. Below the layer of sharp rock fragments was the first layer of true soil, a light-colored humus, the farmland his father and grandfather before him had owned and worked. Also in this layer was a thin strip of light-colored silt, a remnant of a time when the creek overflowed its banks during a driving rainstorm when Reed had been only seven or eight years old.
And below that the dark, rich soils of his ancestors, and of the animals who had lived here before his ancestors. Dark topsoil blending into a rusty red layer of concentrated mineral compounds. Hardpan, they called it. Terribly ancient stuff. Compared to the lighter grays and sandy colors above, it appeared almost unbearably garish and alive. Reed could see only a bit of the top of it—most of it was now more than four feet below the surface—and for that he was glad for now.
He continued to strip away the first level, using his short-handled hoe to remove a quarter- to half-inch of soil at a time, occasionally scooping up a shovelful of the loose dirt and dumping it through a wood-framed screen he had built to make sure that no small artifacts or fragments were missed. Most of the objects he continued to cast aside: glass fragments, bent nails, and the like. But now and then something demanded his complete attention.
He first saw it as a faint outline in the dirt—a shadow of a small human figure, like a dream miniature or representation. But as he carefully brushed the loose dirt away, he recognized the toy figure he’d had as a child. It was an angular, hard-clay doll, though at one time, he believed, it had been a bit softer. Vaguely humanoid with its large eyes, nose, and mouth, but it had a square head.
He treated it like any other ancient clay artifact, and was unembarrassed. He cleaned it carefully with the brush, blowing off loose dirt as he went. He checked for the presence of salt, since salt in the clay would make it brittle, soaking it in a bowl of fresh water, then removing it. Then he added two drops of silver nitrate to the water. Since the water didn’t cloud, he knew no salt was present.
Then he brushed on a Celluloid-acetone solution to preserve this piece of his past. “Gee.” He’d called it that, he now remembered, “Gee,” he said.
Reed propped the small figure up on the shelf of earth and stared at it, as he remembered doing a number of times when it was on his bookshelf in the old house. The simplicity of the figure had always triggered his most elaborate fantasies: of how Gee was a younger brother Reed was sworn to protect, particularly during their lengthy explorations of the vast underground tunnels that cr
isscrossed Big Andy Mountain. Of how Gee was an alien from another planet, and Reed was the first person he had decided to contact; this alien had recognized the secret powers within Reed. Of how Gee was actually Reed’s secret self, shrunken and distorted, and whatever happened to Gee, happened to Reed. Gee, of course, had been buried ten years.
Joe Manors was “doing reclamation” that day, which in this case meant merely backfilling some of the areas that had been mined out with waste dirt, filling up the auger holes so that instead of a jagged mountain of useless waste you had a relatively smooth mountain of useless waste.
From his high seat on the dozer Joe could see Louie DeLong working on another ridge. Louie was sitting on top of a tanker truck, spraying a liquid containing grass seed up on one of the old waste slopes. So patches of spindly grass would take root, maybe some stunted pines. But the earth wasn’t compacted, so the banks were still unstable and the plants had a poor place to root. And with the layers turned topsy-turvy, the soil was so acidic plants would have a difficult time of it in any case.
Reclamation almost never included cleaning up the landslides or moving the boulders or refilling the bench cuts. And hardwood forests were almost irreplaceable.
Joe looked behind him, at the way the cut had widened as it was stripped. Benches they called them, like places where a giant might sit.
Nothing much was ever going to grow here again; the topsoil was now buried a good thirty feet or more. The top layer was all rocks and boulders, bits of slate, pyrites, coal. Loose and sliding material. That coal and pyrite, now unprotected by surface rock, exposed to the air for the first time in millions of years, would begin to oxidize and combine with rainwater to make an acid runoff.
Joe had seen concrete foundations dissolve in contact with that runoff.
He knew people, his uncle included, who’d lost homes and good farmland to a coal waste landslide. Churches buried under forty feet of dirt. Boulders dropping through the roofs of homes. Plaster cracking from the blasting. The people still had their land, the lawyers claimed…all the companies wanted was the minerals. Of course, it still might get a tad difficult for the people living around the mines. The noise and dust and all.
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