The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Henry took a deep breath.

  The breeze had turned a shade cooler. Thunder boomed through the skies.

  Henry turned his back on Perry and trudged off. A moment later, he heard the mesh sing as Perry started under the fence.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this. If my dad finds out—”

  “Your dad won’t find out. And what if he does? It’s not like you’re trespassing.” Henry spat into the mud. “How come they ever closed all this down anyway?”

  “Maybe there wasn’t any coal left. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know? You practically own the place.”

  Henry winged a flat chunk of slate off the tin roof of the machine shop. Hollow reverberations banged back to them, a kettle drum in an echo chamber, blending seamlessly into a distant rumor of thunder. The gray sky lowered over them.

  Ten minutes later, they found themselves following a railroad spur into a narrow hollow, the larger vista of the coalfields going, going, gone. The shadow of a tipple fell across them, metal creaking eerily in the breeze. When the thunder started up again—a low, continuous throb that seemed to last forever—Henry paused to look up. A mine loomed in the mountainside above him, a blasted tumble of debris crumbling to an apron of muddy shale and weeds. Tracks arced away into the moraine. Henry felt his heart quicken.

  “Check it out.”

  “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” Perry said at his shoulder.

  “Go home, then.”

  He kept walking. A pregnant drop of rain slapped his cheek. Another splashed in a weedy gap between the ties.

  “Henry.”

  “I’m not going back.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “You won’t melt,” Henry said. And then he winced: that was a thing his mother used to say.

  Glass, he thought. I am made of glass. He had an image of himself made all of glass—how everything would pass right through him.

  He clambered across a rusting, flat-topped railcar with a steering wheel at either end—a mantrip, the miners called it—and dropped to the ground on the far side. He glanced back at Perry, crouched atop the mantrip, backlit against a boiling sky. Wind whipped by, hurling spikes of electricity at the high ridges. A barrage of raindrops spattered at his feet.

  “We’re gonna get soaked.”

  “No, we’re not,” Henry said.

  He studied the wall of rubble. It looked impenetrable, a massive rockslide sloping down from the cliff face above. Here and there, disconsolate clumps of witch-grass poked from between the rocks. One or two tenacious saplings had sprung up in narrow crevices, leaves hissing in the wind.

  “Come on, Henry!”

  “Shut up, Perry. You can go crying home to your Dad if that’s the way you’re going to be.”

  Henry heard Perry scramble to the ground behind him as he hunkered down to examine an aperture between two massive chunks of rock—a narrow gap, three feet high and two wide. Big enough to skin through if you wanted to get out of the rain. Switching on the flashlight, he peered into the dark.

  “Henry. Are you crazy? It’s dangerous in there. There could be pits. The air might be bad.”

  Henry glanced at the sky as the first scattered blades of rain knifed down at him. Storm-pregnant clouds, swollen guts veined by twisting spokes of electric blue, hung so close he could almost touch them. Thunder blasted out of the sky in a deafening cannonade.

  “We’ll just crawl inside. Just to get out of the rain.”

  And then the heavens opened.

  Rain. Rain like nothing Henry had ever seen before—like Noah might have known on the first of his long forty days. Rain cascaded from the fretful sky. Rain carved runnels in the mud, undercutting the railroad tracks at his feet. Rain pounded the corroded surface of the mantrip. Lightning rent the dark curtain of sky. The scene danced around them, leaping close in bright, discordant flashes and drawing away in quick, ephemeral dark. Thunder shook the mountain in deafening peals.

  “Shit,” Perry said, his black hair greased against his skull. “Shit!”

  Henry started to duck inside the wormhole, but Perry’s hand closed on his shoulder, jarring the flashlight out of his hand. He spun, that mocking phrase—

  —what’s the matter, Perry, you scared—

  —jumping to his lips, and just then an enormous stroke of lightning carved the sky. Thunder boomed simultaneously, rattling pebbles through the moraine. His father had taught Henry to calculate the distance of lightning by the interval between the flash and the concussion. No interval meant no margin of safety. Especially when you stood in a graveyard of twisted metal. Even as this conclusion leaped unbidden into Henry’s mind, another bolt of lightning slammed from the forbidding sky. Its lambent zigzag ripped away the dark and smashed with a vast hollow bang into the tipple below. The entire superstructure blazed electric blue, and the stink of ozone sizzled in the air.

  Perry Holland’s face went bloodless.

  Wordless communication flashed between the boys. Henry dove to the earth, scrabbling for the flashlight. His shoulder bounced against the rail, and a white-hot burst of pain fired along his nerves. Simultaneously, Perry lunged for the aperture between the rocks. As Henry came up with the flashlight, his shoulder throbbing, he saw the bottoms of the other boy’s sneakers disappearing into the dark. Henry scrambled after him as another galvanizing streak blasted the mantrip at his back. The world went flashbulb white around him, and every hair on his body stood simultaneously on end.

  In, deeper and deeper, he thrust himself, chasing the soles of Perry’s tennis shoes, half glimpsed in the watery radiance of the flashlight, and then—

  Then what?

  Nothing. Memory failed him.

  Seventeen years later, Henry had only a fragmentary recollection: dust motes spinning in the shaft of the flashlight beam, a sense of the wormhole opening out before him into a larger space, nothing else.

  A lacuna of darkness.

  Just the labyrinth. Just dreams.

  Then rain, more rain. He could remember that, that and the sky a bruised welter, fat-bellied clouds gravid with lightning, trees bending horizontal before a gale-force wind, the banshee shriek of the tipple as he fled.

  His clothes clung to him, his jeans, socks, underwear, everything soaked and leaden. Geysers of mud spewed out at his heels. He stumbled and fell, scrambling to his feet with coal grime and mud clinging to his clothes. He scraped filth from his face, unplugged his nostrils, bolted off again as exhaustion sent a bright stitch—

  —glass, I am glass—

  —through his left side.

  A rusty shard of chain link snagged his shirt as he wormed under the fence, and then he was through, prone in the wet grass, sobbing.

  A hand fell against his shoulder.

  He twisted, digging at the swampy earth, looked up into Perry Holland’s wild, affrighted face. “Son of a bitch,” Perry hissed. Perry’s fist blurred toward him, rocking him backward as he scrambled to his feet. Henry fell back into the muck, without resistance—

  —why—

  —actually welcoming the blows, as if the pain might burn something out of him, punish something that needed punishing. Perry was on top of him, pinning his arms down with bony knees. Perry hit him in the face. Again.

  “Don’t you ever,” Perry gasped. “Don’t you ever—”

  Hail started to pelt down, big chunks of glittery ice, bruising. In the flashing intervals between the thunder, Henry could hear them sing against the tin roof of the machine shop.

  “C’mon,” Perry said, hauling him to his feet.

  They went on together, through the woods and into the brush by the tracks, where they had stashed their bikes. Henry knew that something was over between them, a friendship he had struck up in kindergarten finished. But he didn’t care; he was glass.

  By the time they reached Crook’s Hollow, the old company houses rising ghostly out of the mist, the hail had tapered off
. But the rain kept coming, steady and intent, like it meant to stay awhile. It could not be much past five, but the sky had gone the color of twilight. Streetlights began to blink on. The ditches churned with foul, swift-moving water. Mill Creek, which paralleled the tracks from here to Cinder Bottom, lapped at its banks. Quick little rivulets began to pool in the broken streets.

  “Listen,” Henry said. “Perry …”

  But Perry lowered his head and pushed his bike along without a word.

  Lightning struck somewhere close by, a sharp sizzle of ozone and a crack as though the earth itself had split open. The streetlights flickered and went dark.

  Henry flung a leg over his bike and started to push off.

  Just then a sheriff’s car topped the knoll ahead, its panic lights turning the water-glossed streets to rivers of blood. Henry could not say why, but even before the car pulled diagonally across the street, blocking their way, a black seed of foreboding had lodged in his breast, like a fragment of ancient grain encased in a museum paperweight.

  He scooted off his waterlogged seat and waited there, the bike leaning between his legs, his knuckles curled white about the rubber handgrips.

  Rain slammed out of the sky. Rain bounced and hissed against the pavement. Rain enclosed him like a curtain of crystal beads. That dark seed of premonition quickened in Henry’s heart.

  I am made of glass, he told himself. Glass.

  And he squeezed his eyes closed and tried to picture it to himself: a black prism of a boy, the light of the revolving flashers whirling in his depths, glancing back in bloody reflections or passing through him, but never, never touching him.

  He heard the heavy door swing open, heard the radio inside buzzing with chatter, smelled the steaming, tropical interior of the car push out at him through the downpour.

  He opened his eyes.

  A deputy got out of the car, a broad-shouldered, solid-looking man of perhaps twenty-five, with light blue eyes. Light and rain polished his rustling slicker. Water poured off the brim of his hat.

  Henry felt that seed of terrible knowing tremble in his chest. It pulsed outward, straining to be born, spinning tenuous roots through his breast, hairline fractures skating through his glassy heart.

  I’m sorry, God, he thought in desperation.

  I’m sorry, he prayed. I’ll be better. I’ll be good. Just don’t, don’t—

  “Is that Henry Sleep?” the deputy asked.

  A terrible keening sound was in the air. Henry wanted to lift his hands to hold it in, but he could not imagine what it might be, or why he thought it was coming out of him. And then that dark knowing—that seed of premonition—blossomed within him like a black, black rose. Sharp slivers of pain exploded through him, but he had to puzzle over the terrible sound a moment longer before he recognized it at last as the clatter of all the glass in the world—all of it, shattering at once.

  Henry remembered.

  He remembered the deputy’s broad face as he said, “You need to come with me now, son,” not even seeming to notice the streaks of coal dust and mud ground into Henry’s clothes. He remembered drawing close to the man, as if mere proximity to another living being—to an adult and his dimly apprehended power in the world—might shield him from the knowledge that every line of the deputy’s body confirmed: his shoulders bowed with news, and his wide eyes, and his blunt fingers curling with anxiety. He even remembered the deputy’s name, Harold Crawford. Oh yes.

  “Is that you, Perry Holland?” Crawford said.

  Perry nodded, silent on his bike.

  “You go straight home, Perry. I don’t have time to deal with you. Get home, before you drown.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Perry,” Henry said.

  The other boy paused.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Perry didn’t speak. They stared at each other for a moment, and then Crawford flapped his hands.

  “Get going now,” he said, and straightaway Perry was gone. Henry watched his figure dwindle in the rain, and then he looked up at Harold Crawford, those big hands clenching and unclenching at his thighs.

  The rain pummeled them. It poured off Crawford’s hat and drenched his slicker and still he stood there, a faraway stare in his eyes.

  “Where you been, son? Your dad’s been worried sick.”

  But the way he said it, you could tell he didn’t expect a reply. Henry just waited. He would have given all the wealth in the world to wait like that forever, the rain ticking off the pavement around them, the black knowing inside him unconfirmed.

  “Come on, son,” Crawford said. He lifted the bike into the trunk, and Henry would remember this as well: the black maw of the trunk, its light glimmering against the metal box of a first-aid kit, the burnished snout of a shotgun.

  He remembered the ride home: the ribbons of steam curling from the rain-spattered hood, the dank odor of wet clothing, even the sour stink of perspiration that Crawford gave off. When he lifted one hand to scrape away the fog that grimed his window, all he could see was rain—rain slamming against the pavement in sheets, rain choking the gutters and streaming away to pool in fields and front yards.

  Why doesn’t he tell me? Henry thought. Why doesn’t he say something?

  But Crawford said nothing, even when he turned off the courthouse square onto Christian’s Fork, climbing toward Widow’s Ridge.

  Never would Henry forget his dread as the car surged doggedly up the rain-washed road. Never would he forget his first vision of the house, every light ablaze as they rounded the curve. At last he could hold it back no longer; he had to give it voice. “It’s my mom, isn’t it?”

  The car plowed relentlessly on.

  Harold Crawford bit his lip. “I’m sorry, son,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Sauls Run 1978

  Chapter 5

  Sunk fathoms-deep in sleep, the thing curled close in its high mountain fastness.

  Four thousand million years and longer, it languished in the planet’s rocky mantle, imprisoned in a gulag of solitude. Earth’s surface raged, rent by volcanism. Vast plumes of ammonia, nitrogen, and methane glowed against the abyss of space. Tectonic plates clashed, thrusting mountains into the first faint wisps of atmosphere. Water condensed from the steaming air and gathered slowly into streams, rivers, seas.

  When the first progenitor of humanity slithered from ocean’s womb, the thing did not stir. When pterodactyls spread leathery wings to the Mesozoic sun, it lay unknowing in its oubliette. By the time the last Neanderthal died, what power had been left to it—not much, as it measured power—had already begun to wane.

  Even it grew old.

  In the end, even it felt pain.

  For a single instant—weeks as men count time—its power flickered.

  Those were hard weeks in the Run.

  It was about that time that Emily Wood, ten years old, first heard death rattling around inside her mother’s lungs. Her father—Boone—had passed six months back, crushed by a kettle bottom in a Copperhead mine. Ever since, Emily had lain awake nights, wondering why she couldn’t bring his face to mind. Days, she hung close about her mother’s skirts—too close, her mother chided her—determined not to let the world steal her away as well.

  So she was right there when it happened—right there on the cellar steps, watching her mother wrestle a basket of damp Holland laundry to the line. One minute, her mother was running on about old Mrs. Holland wanting more bleach in her whites. The next, she lurched into Emily like a High Street drunk on a three-day binge. Emily stumbled on the splintered risers as two loads of freshly laundered sheets—ten dollars of work—went tumbling over the rail to the damp concrete below. Mama, she started to say, but the sounds her mother was making—rending airless gasps, like a woman drowning—froze her voice inside her throat. Deep in her bones, at an almost cellular level, Emily knew that sound, knew it the way you know the voice of an old friend on the telephone in the dead of night.

  Death.

 
Just calling ahead to say he’d be along. Sooner or later, he’d be along.

  A long terrible moment later, Emily got her words thawed out. “Mama?” she said. “Mama? You all right?”

  “I’m fine, honey,” her mother whispered. “I’m just fine.”

  But in her heart, Emily knew it was a lie.

  It was the start of something. She knew it somehow, she did not know how.

  Earl Kimball had a demon inside him. His mother had told him that when he was seven years old, and in thirty-five years he had never forgotten it. He had never entirely believed it either.

  He believed it now.

  He stared blankly at the television—The Price Is Right, daytime television at its best—and wrestled the demon inside him. He could feel the demon winning. When he finished his beer, it was the demon that made him call out, “Hey, Bobbi Jean. C’mere a minute, will ya?”

  She banged around at the other end of the trailer for a minute before she came into the living room. She slouched lean and coltish in the door, looking five years older than twelve, and brushed dark hair from her fine-boned, resentful face. Earl felt the demon stir inside him.

  “What do you want, Earl?”

  “Fetch me a beer, will you?”

  “Something wrong with your legs?”

  “Hell, I’m tired, girl. Now don’t just stand there.”

  “You’re not my daddy,” she said. “Get your own beer.”

  She stared at him long enough to let him know what she really thought, and then she turned away. The demon watched her flounce down the hall, her shorts tight across the seat. How about a little respect, Earl? it whispered.

  Cursing, Earl got his own beer. Standing at the sink, he finished it in one swallow and popped the tab on another.

  Just then music erupted down the hall, drowning out the television. Disco. Earl hated that shit.

  “Hey, turn that down,” he hollered.

  The bass line throbbed in his bones. Earl closed his eyes and watched Bobbi Jean prance down the hall, her ass flexing inside her shorts. What was it she had said? You’re not my daddy.