Ben started the engine and stamped the gas pedal. His father flew apart into dozens of strands of sooty smoke as the truck hit him.
Ben kept going. The fog was creeping up this side of the mountain now.
For the past half hour or so Audra had been climbing the slope. Heavy mist still surrounded her, but she could feel the additional pressure on her ankles the way they were bending, so she could tell she was walking up an incline.
A gnashing behind her. A whispering.
It had been going on for so long, she couldn’t even be scared anymore. She just wanted it over. She would have stopped and faced it, waited for it, but her body wouldn’t let her. The cold, wet fog had somehow gotten between her mind and her legs.
A little boy was crying somewhere in the fog. Then a slightly older boy, moaning and sobbing. Then the sobbing became snarls, animal whines.
Dark streaks in the fog behind her. Dark movement. Giggling. Then the popping of animal lips.
“Stop it!” she screamed, and stumbled forward, bringing sharp pains into her ankles and feet. Her lower legs ached with sharp points of pain, as if an animal’s needle-sharp teeth were entering her skin again and again.
Giggling again. He was playing with her. There was nothing human in him, to play with her like that.
“Reed!”
More giggling. Then a sound like beast laughter, short and grunty puffs of sound.
A swift moving behind her. She screamed and tried to fly up the slope.
A tree caught her full in the face, a broken-off branch pierced her cheek, and with a shock she knew it had penetrated all the way to the mouth cavity. She jerked away and sobbed; bile came up to her teeth. Swiftness behind her. A whisper-movement through the dense fog. She began frantically climbing the tree. Branch after branch clutched or clawed with broken fingernails, bleeding hands, and soon she was hugging a section of bark above the branches, her cheek rubbing the sandpaper like bark as she screamed and shook, kicking down with her feet to break off the branches below her so that he couldn’t get up, no way could he get up here please GOD!
A thin shadow approached the tree out of white mist. Sniffling. She looked down…only a few feet below her, but could not see past the shadows shrouding his face, could just see the dull pink highlight of eye. Hair that was coal black, straight. Quarter moon reflection off a pasty-white cheek. He…it whimpered. And began scratching at the trunk with its fingernails, long fingernails glistening even through the dulling mist.
She sobbed.
Giggling. Giggling. It began to scratch more vigorously, furiously.
She looked down. The fog was rising, swirling around the tree. She could see no traces of her stalker anymore. The fog began working on the tree on contact, putting it through temperature changes—she could feel alternating waves of intense heat and intense cold. It caused a ticking noise in the tree, the ticking spreading out into the fog. Soon the whole area was ticking, slowly, and she couldn’t tell if her stalker was scratching anymore. She had no idea if he was still there.
Inez had calmed considerably since they’d left the mine, Charlie really had to admire her; he wondered why he hadn’t noticed this strength in her before. She was really some woman. There were things to do now, and she seemed pretty clear-headed about that.
“We’ve gotta get to the boarding house, Charlie…get those people out.” She was running at a good clip down the gravel road, plunging right through large, evil-feeling fog patches where neither one of them could see a thing, but she wasn’t even slowing down. Charlie was afraid he was going to have a heart attack before they’d made it half way.
When they reached the junction of a couple of dirt and gravel logging trails, he could see the town below them for the first time. He stopped short and grabbed her arm.
“Charlie!” She turned on him, enraged.
All the energy, and, curiously, the fear, had run out of him. He could see the worry passing over her face. He turned her to the town and pointed.
A dark lake, thick with assorted debris and strange, writhing shadows, covered what used to be the town of Simpson Creeks. Patches of green and blue and yellow darted back and forth beneath the surface like some sort of underwater moths or fireflies.
“We can’t see the house from here,” she said quietly.
“That’s even lower than the town, Inez.” He squeezed her shoulder. “It would have gone under before anything else.”
“Those people…our neighbors…”
Charlie saw headlights moving off above the town. “Somebody made it! Maybe a whole bunch!” He started dragging her down one of the log trails. “We can meet up with ‘em if we hurry!”
He didn’t have to say more; Inez had already raced ahead of him. Charlie could hear the pounding of his old heart. It filled his head. Likely as not just the sound of it was goin’ to kill him.
As the bear leaped through the window into Reed’s old room, the stalker in the woods started across the marshy, green-shadowed land at a slow plod.
Hector Pierce went rigid on his bed. One of the salesmen shouted, and Joe Manors began to beat on Hector’s chest.
His mother was bringing him cookies. Reed smiled gratefully. He could see her now, her red hair floating about her head as she stood in the kitchen doorway, the dim green light behind her.
He’d hoped he could finish the cookies and have a nice pleasant time with her before his father came down, but he could already hear the old man’s heavy tread on the stairs, his angry voice…
“The boy’s…got teeth, now…” Hector whispered faintly. But Joe Manors was the only one to hear. The face on the bed went slightly pale, the form trembled, then stopped.
“What he say?” the salesman asked when Joe straightened up from the now-still form.
“Oh, nothin’…nothin’. You know…he was just a crazy old man.”
But Joe could not help looking out the window and into the distance where the old Taylor place used to be.
Reed backed against the wall as his father came bellowing down the staircase, black and swollen, sending debris flying through the room. Part of the staircase collapsed on one side as the large man with the red eyes reached the bottom. His lips pulled back from his teeth.
Reed began to moan as Daddy Taylor stepped toward him, his great hands raised to bash Reed’s face.
But a scream sounded suddenly from across the room, and Reed’s mother was leaping on his father, her hair in flames, her pale hands ripping at his shadowed flesh with long, translucent fingernails. Reed gasped as the flames spread down her body and onto Daddy Taylor while the two did their strange, almost beautiful dance around the room.
Reed began to cry as the flames enveloped them. Then he stopped. And looked around him. The two figures were fading rapidly into the shadows of the room. Only a faint stench of smoke, the slight silvery highlights in a corner told Reed they’d ever been here at all.
He crawled over to where they had struggled and felt the carpet. There was nothing…but dirt, a little dampness, nothing else. Dirt and more dirt, all around him. His head seemed clearer now, and he wondered if he’d been hallucinating, dreaming, something…Reed stood up and walked toward the darkness where the staircase should have been.
The stalker looked out of the darkness into Reed’s pale, red-eyed, and sharp-edged face. Agitated gestures. He looked half-dead. The stalker grinned, self-consciously proud of the sharp teeth against his lower lip. Reed should never have left him behind.
He smiled. Reed might not survive that mistake.
Reed examined himself in the darkened mirror. He could not remember there being a full-length mirror in his old room before, but there it was.
He moved closer. His face was streaked with dirt, his matted black hair pushed back off his face so he could see his high forehead. Gleaming white teeth. Filling the mouth. He looked surprisingly healthy.
He was filled once again with a sense of loss, loss of his wife, his daughter, his son. There was a sens
e of relief. Something had broken inside.
“Carol?” he said to the mirror. “Carol…” He began to cry. “Something…died down there.” He could barely see his reflection through the tears. “I should have drowned…that night of the flood. Now…Carol, something in me died down there!” He cried more loudly, ashamed.
As the moon rose over the trees and fog outside, it illuminated more of the mirror. And then he realized his image was holding something in its hands. But he wasn’t holding anything in his hands. He was not looking at a mirror, he now knew, but at someone else.
The stalker held up his old teddy bear, the eyes ripped out of the stuffed skull.
“You’re the one,” Reed choked. “The part of me that stayed…”
Then the stalker’s long, thin fingers began pulling at the cloth, ripping it, tearing his old toy to pieces.
When Reed looked up, the stalker was beginning to smile.
Chapter 32
Audra…
She peered into the white clouds billowing up around her. The strange, shadowy flood had risen to just below her feet now. She’d climbed as high as she could up the tree; she knew that the branches above her would be too thin to support her weight.
Audra…
She wasn’t sure whether it was a real voice or words she was imagining spinning around inside her head. The water and wet fog distorted sound; her ears felt as if she were on a mountain high above sea level, the pressure building and pushing toward her inner ear.
Audra…
The voice was familiar, particularly when it whispered like that, so softly—soft like a snake slipping through mud. She strained her eyes, looking out at the fog, turning her head to see as much as she could, but still gripping the top branches firmly…mustn’t let go of the branches…they were all that kept her from the secret horrors below.
Audra…
The landscape up here was strange, like the landscape outside a plane window when it was flying above the clouds. Here and there the tops of trees jutted like church spires out of the discolored cloud. She could see the rest of the Big Andy off in the distance, but this horizon looked much different from the one she was used to. It could have been a completely different mountain she was looking at…the wrong mountain. She shook her head. To her north—at least she thought that direction was north, toward the old Taylor place, where Reed was, had been—the flood quickened; there seemed to be a lot of activity over there. And an incredible roaring.
Pieces of wood, light metal, leaves, and all manner of garbage. Some pieces like signs and old furniture touched something now and then in her memory, but she was too frightened to dwell on them much. Because they were drifting past her in the slate-colored water and white cloud, quickening at a certain point, then disappearing over the edge, at that place north of her.
Where the roar was.
Audra…
The whisper was coming clearer to her…his voice, but that could not be. Something touched her foot. She hadn’t even bothered to look down. She lowered her eyes.
Her father’s gnarled fingers were creeping spiderlike up her lower leg.
Audra…
She screamed and kicked. She caught one finger against the rough bark with her shoe and heard it snap like a dead branch. The others spasmed and curled and uncurled nervously like the legs of a wounded insect. She started laughing, then, recognizing the hint of hysteria in her voice, she bit her lip, hard, to make herself stop.
Audra… Softer now.
She’d have recognized the hands anywhere.
Touching her hair, clasping her arm—too hard—when he wanted to make a point, when he wanted her to give in to him. Submit. Her father’s hands. The rest of his body so weak-looking, sickly. His face so pale. Only his eyes and his hands ever showed color. The hands were ruddy, with large, gnarled ridges of skin over the knuckles, and a tracery of great blue veins down the back so that they looked like dead leaves or roots left too long in a damp place.
Touching her, running fingers up her leg. Audra…
He had given her the cafe to keep her near him, to keep her from going away with other men.
To keep her in his hands.
It made so much sense…Doris hadn’t been his favorite after all…it had been her. Audra.
She screamed and kicked and stamped and flailed at the hands. They shook, and the blood pooled in the palms, briefly, before washing over the knobby wrists and descending the emaciated lower arm. But still they persisted, bloodying the bottom cuff of her slacks as they pulled their way up her leg.
She kicked a final time before leaping from the tree reaching as far as she could for the next one, a slightly taller tree, larger branches, only a few feet away. She screamed as she fell.
The scream stopped, abruptly muffled as she dropped into the churning fog.
At the moment Audra was leaping from the tree, Joe Manors had just gotten the last occupant of Inez Pierce’s boarding house onto the roof of that old building. Including the sheet-wrapped corpse of Hector Pierce—Joe just couldn’t bring himself to leave Hector behind. Later, if there was to be a later, they might never have found the body.
There were eight of them left, all huddled near the middle of the roof, and all wide-eyed except Joe, who was much too tired for his fear to show. He wondered, with only feigned interest, if Old Man Pierce had built a strong roof. Certainly, it was going to be tested.
The dark waters rose rapidly, full of dark forms, hands reaching, faces straining with joy or agony, he couldn’t tell. And although earlier he had been able to make out individual identities among those inside the flood—not believing his own eyes even then, for some of the people he thought these were had been dead thirty years and more—he could recognize no one now, although he could see their faces quite clearly. They had lost their hair; their faces had been rubbed nearly blank. Death had made them all the same.
There were little girls, lots of little girls, and women, too, in the flood. But he couldn’t recognize any of them. If he ever survived this…he was going back to Cincinnati. Maybe he could still find them, be a father to his little girl again.
But there didn’t seem much chance of that. The boarding house was completely flooded; he heard the things crashing inside, felt the walls crumbling far below his feet. The roof rocked violently, making his stomach heave. Most of the men around him were crying. He’d have been crying too if he’d had a better grip on himself.
The roof buckled; several pieces floated away. A dark wave pushed itself over one side of the roof, like a solid thing, taking three of the men with it. Joe sprawled on the roof and made a grab for one of the salesmen. The man held on a moment, and he, too, had an expression somewhere between grin and grimace. It confused Joe; he wanted to scream at the guy. But then the salesman was gone, jerked out of Joe’s grip and washed over the side.
Then the roof was loose, completely detached from the Pierce boarding house, spinning away in the dark. Joe saw the last wall crumble behind them as the swift current suddenly shot them forward, away from Simpson Creeks. Debris was everywhere, flying in the wind and thrown by the waves. The men were screaming so loudly Joe thought his ears were going to bleed. He stared straight into a pitch-black wave that held the face of Amos Nickles, then Amos Nickles grew long shark teeth and rushed at him.
There was a crash as the dark wave descended.
A few minutes before the roof of Inez Pierce’s boarding house separated from the structure that had been the Pierce family home for almost a hundred years, and just as Audra’s last scream pierced the roar of the flood, Ben Taylor pulled up on the High Mountain Road across the hollow from his late brother’s home. Charlie and Inez were squeezed into the cab with him.
All three heard Audra scream. All three saw her fall into the fog and water. But at the moment none was moved to action. They were too entranced by the nightmare landscape before them. A landscape no one but a fool or a crazy person would have any eagerness to enter.
“Th
at’s…impossible,” Charlie said. No one answered him. The impossibility was self-evident, but they had all seen the impossible become commonplace this evening.
The remains of the old Taylor place still stood as Ben remembered them, nestled in the middle of what had been a quiet valley. Behind that house, however, was the flood, rising up to the very top of the trees, but contained as if behind an invisible wall. It wasn’t a complete, break less wall, he could see; water leaked out of several spots and was snaking toward the house. And in other places, halfway up the border of trees, fingers and thumbs of water pushed their way out now and then, as if seeking escape. The area reminded Ben of an arena, like the Romans had, although whatever was holding the arena together, holding the water back, seemed to be weakening. He wondered how much time he had to get Reed out of that house.
He ignored the most amazing thing about this landscape, however, until he could ignore it no longer. Just south of the Taylor place was the cliff, almost completely shrouded by the fog; the tall trees bordering it—where he had last seen Audra—were almost completely submerged in the flood. But then, for a width of about a hundred yards, there was the largest waterfall he had ever seen in his life, dropping to the valley floor. Where the water just disappeared. It roared, however, roared like nothing he had ever heard, the sound increasing in volume and depth even as he watched.
He couldn’t make any sense of this at all. His first impulse was to turn the truck around and get as far away from this valley as he possibly could, ignoring all the objections he knew both Inez and Charlie would have. But this was impossible. This was unreal; there was no way to fight something like this. But more than that, there was something even scarier about this place, this waterfall, than anything else Ben Taylor had seen that night.
Somehow Ben knew, looking at the water leaking out of the forest behind the old house, watching the waterfall roar over the lip of forest and ghost-flood, disappearing when it touched the bottom, that this was a flaw, a break in the magic. Big Andy was waiting for something in that house to conclude. Then the water dropping down the fall would stop disappearing; the trees would let the wall of water escape. The flood would have full reign here, and his brother’s house would vanish beneath the waves.
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