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 a
t 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.
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