She had had a dream, or something like a dream. She knew she was past ordinary dreaming. She had lived inside this dream, walking, talking, flying. It had been a revelation.
In this vision the slab had swollen to cliff size, striped with layer after layer of strata. The people of Simpson Creeks, those newly dead, those centuries dead, and those still living, trapped inside each layer of stone. The waves crashing against the cliff, wave after wave crashing and breaking the slab apart.
She sat on top of the cliff and sang. A siren song for sailors who might be lost on this enormous dark sea. This endless night. The wails of the dead so mixed with her song she could not tell which was which. And did not care.
For the people of Simpson Creeks—all those living and all those who had died—had one eventual destiny.
Charlie threw his tools into the store, locked it, and headed for his pickup. It was late; dark was falling fast. Repairing the slab had eventually made him feel acutely uncomfortable. But it was his responsibility. He knew he had a duty not only to all those who lived, but to all those who had died in the Creeks as well.
They were all in this together—living and dead. The crime of the flood had been against them all. It was a crime against their ancestry, their way of life, against everyone who had ever lived here, against the mountain and the valley itself. They all demanded payment.
He hunched his shoulders, the air suddenly gone chill. As he climbed into the pickup, he didn’t notice the soft red glow emanating from the cracks he had missed in the slab.
Chapter 25
The static seemed to float out of the telephone receiver, fluid, suffocating. Reed could barely hear the faint rings beneath it. Then the rings stopped. “Hello?”
“Carol.”
“Reed! How are you? Did you find out what you need? Are you coming home?” She said it rapidly, all the words pushed together.
“I’m not sure, Carol. I’m not…well. Something seems to be happening to me here I don’t understand.” He coughed then, and was amazed himself how bad he sounded.
“Reed, your cold…have you been to see a doctor?”
He paused. He shouldn’t have called her; what could she do to help him anyway? He just needed to hear her voice, tell her, even obliquely, what was bothering him. There was normalcy at home—he could hear it in every word she spoke. The difference between here, the Creeks, and home. He yearned for it. “Yes…I’m fine. He says I’m fine.”
“Well, you don’t sound fine. Reed, I want you home. I want to take care of you. We need you home.”
“I…” He stared at the receiver. His hands were sweating so much the phone was wet. Her voice sounded garbled, as if she were drowning. He stared as one, then two, drops of moisture fell to the floor by his feet. “I want to come home, Carol. But I can’t just yet. I’m finding…things.”
“You need to get out of there, Reed. You sound awful!”
“I know, love. I know.”
Static filled her voice for the rest of the conversation. He had no idea what she was saying, but it comforted him to know her presence was on the other end of this line. The static became worse and worse, until finally she broke the connection. Reed hung on to the phone, listening to the dial tone, for several minutes longer.
The bear ripped through the underbrush and caught the small deer on the run. He crushed its life quickly, not out of mercy but out of eagerness. He still burned, but the burning was steadier now, easier to live with because there weren’t all those peaks and valleys. It just burned and burned, ridding him temporarily of the inside thoughts that had irritated him so, letting him think of basic things. Hunger and food. Thirst. Rage.
He sank his muzzle into the steaming carcass and bit into the flesh. Warm blood flooded his throat. He groaned with satisfaction, drinking in the salt taste.
But then the harsh thoughts were back, the thing inside him, crowding his head and making him roar in pain and anger. He wanted to be biting into something else. Ripping it apart. Something human.
He staggered away from the carcass as if drunk, and charged into the growing darkness.
Chapter 26
Audra stepped softly from the cafe just as dark was falling—she was leaving a little later than usual tonight. Jake had stayed for a long time looking over the books, that gun he’d gotten from Charlie Simpson lying at his feet like some stretched-out snake. It scared her, and she started to tell him she didn’t think he should have a gun in a public restaurant, but the look that suddenly came over his face stopped her. She knew there was no use talking to him. He’d been drinking all day and yet had this intense, clear, and dark-eyed look. She’d never seen him like that before; it was as if he were burning up the liquor as fast as he could consume it, with whatever it was he was holding down inside.
Now and then he would glance up at her irritably, sometimes asking her a question or two. She couldn’t tell why he was asking the questions—Is that amount right? or I thought Bobby Waters ate lunches here on Wednesdays? or When did we raise the price on the sausages? Maybe he was just trying to make her feel uneasy. But she was fed up; it was making her angry instead.
No customers came in those last few hours. Audra had seen a few stop in front of the door, peer in at Jake with the papers spread everywhere and that big gun at his feet, and turn away. Finally, a few minutes ago, he had just shoved all the papers into a grocery sack, picked up the gun, and carried it all out to the car without even bothering to say good night.
Normally she wouldn’t be out on the street this time of night, not since the bear came. But she’d grown to enjoy her early evening strolls, and she wasn’t about to let her brother-in-law cheat her out of one of them. She pulled the front door closed and breathed in the cool night air. She started to walk, but held herself in front of the door a moment longer. Her secret admirer…in her hassle with Jake she’d almost forgotten him.
Audra scanned the gray buildings. It was so dark she couldn’t see the corners very well, couldn’t know if someone was hiding, watching her. She didn’t like that. She didn’t like that at all.
She stared at each corner she could see of the old hotel. The shadows were dark there, but she thought she’d at least be able to detect any movement if she concentrated enough.
The straight lines of the building wavered as she gazed at it, the wind bending the trees and distorting the shadows, as if she were seeing the building through water. She felt a vague unease in the pit of her stomach and looked away. She studied the dark planes of Charlie Simpson’s store—now where was he? He was always open this time of day—and the empty sidewalk in front of Ben Taylor’s. Nothing. Not a soul around. She felt almost desperate to move, to find someone else tonight, and after a few more moments she was walking down the street and staring at shadows, before she’d even realized it.
Daddy brought me up to be a baby, she thought. Silly goose. Crazier than Doris.
The creaking made her stop the first time. The oddest sort of creaking: it didn’t sound like wood or metal or leather or anything else she could think of. She stared at the buildings across the way, up on the slab. Empty. The wind was picking up, but there were no loose signs to swing or unsecured doors. Maybe it was the buildings themselves creaking, maybe…
Gray light illuminated the slab. And she thought…but it couldn’t be. She slowed her walk but the illusion didn’t alter. The slab seemed to be shifting on its own, being moved, perhaps, by the wind. She stopped and stared at it. The illusion still remained. Creaking.
She began to walk faster. A door banged behind her and she was running.
And stopped just as suddenly. She wouldn’t be pushed around like this, she wouldn’t be…frightened. She turned and everything was still again. Silly goose…a trick of the light.
She decided to take the dirt path that ran behind the stores on the slab, and up around the shacks abandoned by the Nole Company, falling down and filling with dirt and fungus and rot. Lovely image…She shook herself. She’d alway
s been too afraid to take that path at night, and everybody was always warning their kids away from those old shacks.
But she wasn’t going to be scared like this. She was going to fight it.
She rounded the path between Ben Taylor’s store and his house, walking briskly, keeping her eyes steadily on the path ahead. The trees bent around her, and a breeze soft as cool breath moved past.
A large patch of darkness seemed to shift…somewhere…as she passed the back of Charlie Simpson’s store.
She stopped and looked around. Charlie’s fence was still down from the bear attack; apparently he didn’t have the heart to fix it. The place seemed abandoned with Buck not there. It made the whole hillside a bit ominous.
The shadow again. Her hair lifted in the gust and suddenly curtained her face. She cried out and tried to move forward, stumbling through a thistle patch. She thought she might cry.
A lower bough of one of the maples bordering the line of shacks bent low to the ground, then up again, making the shadow. She gasped in relief.
And then knew someone was there, standing in the darkened yard where Buck had been torn apart.
She waited with her arms slightly raised. It would move soon, she thought, and then she’d know whether it was a man, a boy, a woman, or just another shadow under the trees.
But even after five long minutes she did not know. Faint silver spots shone like eyes, and always in the same position, but disappeared again too quickly.
And each time the spots made her colder.
Pieces of paper blew past, plastering her legs and feet like oddly shaped phantoms. Someone’s dog had probably emptied the family garbage…or some other animal had been feeding there.
More and more garbage drifting around her feet, flowing slowly, like a tide. The wind seemed to be moving it in a straight line down the path. She moved her feet, trying to get away from it, but it stuck to her shoes and stockings. She was afraid, and shook her feet, but the garbage refused to let go.
She imagined the garbage rising higher, sweeping her along with it as it descended the valley. She tried to move out of the path, but the garbage seemed to block her.
She’d missed the flood, too. Just like Reed Taylor.
And just as suddenly the wind died, leaving a sediment of debris covering the length of the path. None of it spoiled the grass and weeds on both sides. She stared into the dark behind Charlie’s store, but there were no silver spots anymore. The wind rose up again, as if it were ascending from the ground. Tall grass bowed in waves, showing silver backs, then darker green fronts. She shuddered, and realized the uneasiness that had been building in her since she had left the cafe. She brushed the hair back from her face and gazed up into the gathering thunderheads, silver outlines flashing now and then with no sound. Perhaps it would rain and wash away her anger.
The vegetation appeared to be charged, the darkness full of anger and static. If her secret admirer revealed himself now, she knew she would have nothing to do with him.
She continued her walk hurriedly, crossing under the maples and ascending the short hill. Both sides of the path were lined with broken-down shacks. It was hard to think, now, of people living here. It must have been awful—always dust or mud.
The shacks leaned uncomfortably together. If one fell, it would take several others down with it. She could see where other shacks had fallen together in previous years, reduced to piles of rotting kindling. People lived here. Children played.
A faint voice…a cat crying behind the long drab faces of wood. Louder, and it sounded like no cat she had ever heard. Close to the sound a cat might make when in pain, but not quite.
There was a baby here, trapped in one of the shacks.
A snapping of boards. A roof shifting ever so slightly. The quick and shocking smell of decay suddenly released.
The outline of…something moved somewhere to her left. She turned slightly and an off-center gray door swung out like a broken jaw.
She stared for a while at the pile of mildewed furniture and discarded clothing inside, then continued up the hill, keeping maximum distance between herself and the lines of shacks on both sides.
A building settled, then a piece of tin fell, echoing. And then a cry, a young child’s whimper, lost and afraid…
Silly goose…
She stepped past a sighing building that suddenly moved out, toward her, reaching with its swinging door and gaping windows. She screamed and ran, and the building fell into the pathway behind her, as if it had been pushed. Shadows moved crazily in the darkness behind where the building had been, the dust swirled up in plumes and waves, but she could see no more. The wind was stronger now; it must have been the wind. She was unsafe among the abandoned shacks now because of the strong wind.
The crying again, lifted by the wind, traveling past her. No doubt, no doubt at all. She had to find the child.
She opened one door, then another. Gaping holes in roof and floors, dust and rotted belongings. Rats scurrying in the far corners.
Something falling. She opened each door carefully, and still things fell, creaked, moaned. The cry again, and then again. She was in a panic now, and jerked the doors open, and more and more things fell to disrupt the layers and layers of dust, rot, mildew, grime. She bit her lip as rats and mice scurried out, as bats took wing, as tiny animals snarled in the dark corners.
A little child in one of these places, one of these awful places.
Then she opened one door to black silence. And a piece of the black stirred, and moved. Scrambled across the dark floor. And cried with a hollow sound.
She ran in and there were silver places where eyes might be, and teeth.
He rose up, her secret admirer, with hair only distinguishable because it was darker than the surrounding dark. Dark clothes and skin with no highlights. He turned to her in the shadows and she smelled an ancient, stagnant damp smell.
Teeth gleaming…the only light.
And his size…slight or medium build?…she thought of all the men in the area and found only one who might fit. She started to say his name when he reached for her.
Damp hands and fetid breath.
She pushed and ran, stumbling over beams and something soft and moist as she broke through the door, stepping over the warped gray boards of the shack that had collapsed next door. And still he whimpered behind her.
Why, he’s just a little boy, she thought, still running, her mind racing with fear and whatever reassurances it could assemble out of the shadows, a lost little boy.
Then she heard the hiss, and jumped when the lightning exploded over Big Andy. But an angry, hateful little boy, too, she thought, and felt the anesthetizing dampness even before it began to rain. An old, rich hate. The hard raindrops loosened the tight skin of her face and she began to cry, her lips distorting, hands clenched.
“I’ve done nothing to you!” she screamed, running as hard as she could for the cafe, thinking she might never escape this rain.
Chapter 27
The bear lumbered through the woods, angry, as if some irritant—insect bite or bee sting—were working its way along the underside of his skin. He smashed bushes and saplings as he progressed above the narrow gravel road snaking along the hillside. Dimly aware of a place he must go, a certain time of shadow and light, he followed his legs…they seemed to know. The lack of understanding was a constant bother now; he was enraged by it. He was vaguely aware of once having been something else. Rage grew in his belly like a storm. His human eyes burned. As he approached the place of the meeting, that rage grew and grew until it was almost uncontrollable. He roared into the dim forest light, letting loose his frustration as he swiped at low branches and vines…
Reed had spent much of the morning digging into the area in front of the house, at first not even bothering to look through the gaping window cavity into the darkness there. He stripped away a band of earth maybe five feet square and six inches deep, not carefully, not scientifically, just anxious to get it over a
nd done with. His eyes were running, his nose clogged, which made the work miserable. Periodically he would find something, pocketing a few things but throwing almost everything away after a cursory examination. He’d lost patience. Now his project seemed a ridiculous waste of time. The possibility that a vicious crank had made the call that had brought him here now seemed more and more likely. He quit by noon and went to rest under the twin sycamores at one side of the clearing.
As a child he’d spent a lot of time under these trees, yet never had they seemed so large. He felt himself lulled by their swinging, their drifting branches, leaves swaying as if floating in water. Before he fell asleep he wondered briefly, how high the flood waters had risen up their trunks that long-ago rainy afternoon.
The bear recognized this place…the structure. A moan escaped him, and it was as if the moan didn’t belong to him. He drew back from the clearing, suddenly terrified. Eyes turning this direction, here, then there. Moaning. Drawing back again.
Then he saw the man lying under the tree. Still…as if dead. Something about him…he knew. The bear moaned. Then he saw the slight rising and falling of the chest and something felt different inside. He growled, suddenly angered, then the anger was gone.
Something inside him. Something seeing out through his eyes. Foglike. He stared for a long time at the man.
And could not move.
Reed awakened to dimmer light and at first thought he had slept through until nightfall, and that something had gone wrong. But when he sat up he realized it was only mid-afternoon; the sun had just moved some across Big Andy, and tall trees were blocking the light. He turned his head and stretched.
A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult Page 537