He was killing time, waiting for inspiration, waiting for things to settle inside. Waiting for courage.
He was scared.
At times since he had arrived in the Creeks he thought he had come close to knowing what he was dealing with. A bear. A mad woman. Someone’s drunken, guilt-ridden hallucination of a floating girl. But the familiarity they all had…it was getting hard to deny it, however improbable. His father. His mother. His sister.
Craziness. But he knew.
What had called him back here?
Two things he would always remember from his trips with Uncle Ben: Once they had visited a burnt-out patch of forest. A white carpet of ash over everything, trees reduced to skeletal armatures, green sucked up into the polarity of blazing white and charcoal. He’d been peering at the wreckage of a log when suddenly a swarm of emerald-backed insects poured from the blackened heart of it. As if Big Andy were shouting its defiance with this one little gesture. It would always return, its life would be perpetually recreated. It was stronger than anyone could imagine.
And again, the day Ben broke his leg. He had been walking along a ledge of loose limestone and fallen about ten feet. Reed could hear the sickening snap yards away. When he’d scrambled down to his uncle, he’d seen the white bone poking through the skin. And it had occurred to him that bone was what was real, and uniform. Dogs had similar bones, as did cattle, as did fox and beaver and bear. What cloaked the bone was changeable, variable, and illusion.
Reed remembered. His mother touching his father’s cheek, the rage magically subsiding. His little sister singing a magic song until he could almost see a playmate materialize. Reed remembered, and felt something like magic pacing inside him too.
Reed finally turned the pickup onto the narrow road that eventually led to the opposite homesite. He didn’t see the old white Studebaker that had been parked on the bend behind him, and which now pulled slowly out into the road.
By the time Charlie Simpson got to the Nole Company mine he knew something was wrong. The sky was much darker than it should have been this time of day, the shadows thicker, and there was a heavy, greenish, corrupt-looking fog settling into the woods on either side of the road, and creeping into the road with long, sick-looking fingers.
The fog seemed to be spilling over the top of the cut, like steam from a bowl of soup. The fog seemed to originate from the mine itself.
It took Charlie an hour of stumbling and clawing his way up the incline to reach the top of the cut, just above the entrance to the strip mine. He knew the road would have taken twice as long.
He took a long look down into the mine.
He couldn’t see a thing. The entire valley here seemed flooded with the roiling waves of corrupt mist. Occasionally shapes would bob up and down, but he couldn’t make out what they were. They had no more definition than clouds. He had been an avid cloud watcher as a boy, and it seemed as if his imagination were giving them shape: upraised hands, frantic arms, heads pushing up out of violent waters with open, screaming mouths.
Inez ran down the slope to the ridge, faster, faster than she could ever remember running before. Dodging trees effortlessly, their playful outstretched leaves and branches slapping her body, greeting her. She opened her mouth and began to sing…a tuneless tune. She thought that soon she would be flying. The Nole mine gaped a few miles ahead, and she knew that if she just kept running like this she’d sail right on over it, right on over the Big Andy itself, over Four Corners, over her old beau Adam, all the way out to China if she wanted.
Her old friend Janie would make it all possible.
Janie was just ahead of her now, her long, bright red hair flowing back over her, behind her like a young girl’s bridal veil. Janie was the fastest thing Inez had ever seen, just like a young girl again, her pale feet simply gliding over the ground as if they weren’t touching down ever at all. Descending the misty, darkening hillside like a bright white bird with scarlet wings.
Inez tried her best to keep up with her, pushing herself hard and hardly aware of the aches in her side, her legs. It was a miracle! She almost caught up a few times, but each time Janie soared ahead, her hair suddenly catching the twilight and blazing brighter than before.
Inez was almost alongside her; she reached out to touch Janie’s flowing gown. Janie turned her face slightly. It was an ancient face, the oldest face Inez had ever seen.
But just as quickly she blazed again, the lines vanished from the face, the scalp burst into flame, and Inez’s discomfort faded. She’d follow Janie anywhere; she’d be young like Janie again. She soared. She glided. Inez imagined she could feel her own feet leave the ground. The mouth of the Nole mine lay ahead, singing to her. Filled with bright, beautiful, moon-reflecting cloud.
“What is it…what you say?” Joe Manors leaned over Hector anxiously. The old man was having a terrible time breathing. His chest convulsed. He spit up and drooled onto the bedclothes.
“Teeth!” he shouted, and grinned.
Joe pulled away. The old man had bitten the inside of his mouth. Bright red blood gleamed on the tips of his teeth; tiny shreds of skin glistened in the cracks.
It was a half hour after sunset when Reed began to work on the stairwell. The whole staircase seemed to be packed with dirt, as if a giant child had filled the well by hand. Packing it level with the floor of the second story. Reed had thought merely to get a start on the project that evening, but soon found himself lost in his work, the darkness in the house growing until he had to light a lantern to see by.
The work went more quickly than it should have. He was occasionally cognizant of the strange texture of the soil. The particles seemed too far apart somehow; there was too much air space in the mix. In minutes, he suddenly realized, he had moved several feet down the stairs.
The oval portraits on the walls of the stairwell were of his aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. Several generations of his family, their faces seemingly as vivid as when the photographs were first taken.
“You come from a long line, boy…a great line!” his father said into his ear.
Reed whirled on the dirt-covered staircase and stared at the still earthen wall on his left. Two shiny points of light gleamed at head level. He thought he was seeing his father’s eyes.
Panic-stricken, Reed attacked the points with his spade. The entire wall of dirt collapsed at his feet.
The shiny points were two projections of a brass lamp that had hung, he now remembered, between the staircase and the living room. Apparently he had broken through into a cave within the mass of mud that had filled the ground floor of the house. The room smelled wet. Silken cobwebs along the walls glistened within the dim lantern light. Something—insects, maybe—moved within the darkness.
Reed’s stomach ached. He was afraid. Desperately trying to control the fear, he forced himself to visualize what it was that terrified him so. Faces, he realized. He was afraid of faces. With that knowledge came a hulking, toothed horror.
Ben Taylor stood on his front porch with shotgun in hand. The sky looked bad: black and moving too fast. He’d never seen a sky quite like that before.
It looked like a storm, he figured, but he had no idea what sort of storm clouds like that might preface.
And now fog was rolling up to the edges of town. They’d never had fog this close to town before, this far away from the creeks. He couldn’t even see the road leading down to the Pierce place. It was smothered in soiled cotton.
He’d give Reed an hour. Then he was going after him.
Audra knew she shouldn’t have moved away from the Studebaker. She’d wanted to get a better look at the house; Reed was in there now. But then the fog had come in, quick as an eye blink; she hadn’t even noticed it before it had her surrounded.
The Studebaker was behind her somewhere in the fog.
And something else had entered the container the fog had made here between the trees. It was in the fog…with her. She couldn’t hear it moving…there was just this o
dd shifting in the white plumes off to her right. This slight darkness moving in the clouds. This charge in the damp mist. But she knew it was here, only a few feet away. Once the fog broke ahead of her, she knew she would start to run.
And maybe—she wasn’t sure yet—she would scream.
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 b
eing, 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.
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