Something had changed.
Something had altered here, ever so slightly. He spent a long time gazing fixedly at the land surrounding the site and at the old house, then scanned the border of trees slowly. He got up and walked toward the house, trying not to think about it. Something had changed, and he knew he would never know exactly what.
Reed walked up the gentle rise that now served as a ramp to the second-story window. The casement was cracked and splintery, but all the glass, even the smallest fragments, was gone. He took a careful look behind him at the area, strange and not as he remembered it…maybe because of the new angle. This window had once led into his bedroom.
Outside his window had been his mother’s flowerbed. White and yellow and purple pansies. They changed color every year, they had felt magical to him that way. And with their facelike shapes. She’d planted the flowers there just for him. Now they were at least eight feet below the surface…but the house had moved, hadn’t it? He would never be able to find the exact spot. The location of the flowerbed was lost forever.
Reed wondered how a woman who seemed able to do so many things could be so helpless. He used to be angry with his father for slapping her, belittling her, but as he got older she made him mad too. That made him a little ashamed, but she was so weak sometimes. Once when his father was chasing his mother—slapping at her, trying to grab her hair and jerk her back—she’d run behind Reed, expecting him to protect her. He’d been only ten years old, and when his father reached them…he’d looked so crazy…Reed had been terrified. He could never forgive her for that.
Reed stepped through the window into gray shadows and fallen plaster.
Scavengers had obviously already carried away anything of value; his room was almost bare. Except for a small dust-covered lump in one corner.
Reed could taste bile coming up in his throat, but he walked over to the object anyway, reached out his hand to touch it, even as he wanted to bolt and leap back through the broken window into daylight again.
He picked up the dry, soft, fur-covered form, and turned it over.
It was a teddy bear, his old teddy bear, and it could not be here. He was sure he had lost it years before the flood.
His father used to say he was too big for a toy like that. But Reed knew better. The teddy bear had always seemed like a smaller, passive version of his father, something Reed could beat against the floor but that would not hit back.
Something Reed could hold.
The teddy bear stared up at him, but with wide holes full of sour-smelling sawdust. The shining, dark glass eyes had been ripped out of the teddy bear’s face. But Reed had never touched those eyes; they’d been intact when he’d lost the toy. He was sure. Someone else had ripped them out.
Jake Parkey stopped, elbows tensely spread, the shotgun raised. Something had moved in the brush behind him.
He waited for another noise, his throat too tight to let breath escape. The gun metal felt wet under his finger. No sound. He hated being afraid; he hated admitting that he was afraid. Like when he was a kid—in bed he’d bite his lip almost in two rather than scream and let his daddy know he was afraid of the dark.
And he hated Reed Taylor for making him so afraid.
Jake didn’t know exactly why he’d figured it out this way…but it made some sort of sense. All these things happening…all the craziness hadn’t begun until Reed Taylor came back. Supposedly the boy had gotten off the train after the bear had got poor Amos, but Jake had heard Ben Taylor say he thought he’d seen Reed up on the Big Andy while the hunt was going on. And now he was spending all his time up the hollow digging and scratching around…grave robbing was what it looked like to Jake. A man shouldn’t dig where other folks had died…nobody ‘round the Creeks would ever think of doing such a thing.
Hell, something was going on, and since Reed Taylor got into town things had gone bad. There had to be a connection.
He’d left the town a long time ago…he had no right. He didn’t belong here anymore. He wasn’t part of the town. Jake checked the gun. Two shells, primed and ready. Reed was going to be real sorry he’d ever come back, real sorry he’d caused the town all this trouble.
There were branches breaking behind him, a noise kind of like whispering in the branches overhead. Wind…and trees shifting. Jake began chewing on his lip, biting until he could taste the blood.
Reed began with a sweep of all the rooms on the second floor of the house, removing dust and dirt to a level with the stairwell. Not very difficult; at most there was two inches of dirt. There was little to be found here, however: a comb that had belonged to his mother—she had been extremely proud of her long auburn hair and spent hours before the mirror grooming it—a few scattered coins, bobby pins and thimbles and empty thread spools. He did find an old decoder ring he remembered finding in a box of candy, and this small discovery thrilled him. On an impulse he wedged it over his little finger. Its plastic jewel seemed to glow in the dim yellow light. He suddenly felt a child again, playing at being archaeologist in an ancient Egyptian tomb, discovering the sacred ring of Aman-Tut. Complete with a curse.
Somewhere he thought he heard someone singing, and somewhere else, a crying, just beneath his voice as he spoke. He stopped to listen, but could hear nothing.
Carol liked to sing.
After living in this house with his family all those years he’d learned the advantages of separation and distance. Sometimes if you pretended you weren’t there, the old man would forget about you. It kept things safe.
As he walked through the gray and dust-laden rooms, he was able to remember how he got to be that way. A dust-laden table brought back an afternoon drunk of his father’s, when hiding under the table was the only way to keep him from stumbling over you. A scar in the wall was where a thrown fire log had almost taken off Reed’s head. He’d hidden in the woods all night. He’d been four years old at the time. There had been noises, and awful smells—of dead things and beasts’ breath, and it was the first time Reed had known that the forest wasn’t always your friend.
At least he’d overcome some of those fears, years later, in Denver. At least he had been healthy enough to recognize how good Carol would be for him, and let himself marry her.
Then Reed thought of something really frightening, far more terrifying than the childhood he had finally escaped. He wondered what would have happened if he’d never gotten any better, if he’d never improved. Never left this place.
What might he have become if he’d stayed behind with his family in Simpson Creeks?
He had to have been an angry child, he had to have had bubbling rage in him most of the time. Reed couldn’t remember ever being depressed, so there had to have been tremendous rage in him as a child. The thought chilled him.
For he could not remember ever being angry.
A section of the wall before him began to crack, the cracks spreading until they’d spiderwebbed the entire surface. Then the wall began to collapse, and filth-encrusted roaches slipped out as if from a lopsided, toothless, and aged mouth. All of them spreading out in a wave toward his feet.
He gasped and stepped back. But the roaches were gone, and the plaster wall as clean and unbroken as before.
He laughed softly; his voice had an odd, hollow quality within the room. Then he realized his mouth was closed; he hadn’t uttered a sound.
“The imagination’s a pretty powerful thing,” he said aloud to the house, as if to break the uneasy silence, as if to ward off the malice of the house and court its favor.
The bear heard the rustling once again. He cocked his ears. Rocked back and forth on his front paws, biting insects under his skin. This presence…frightened him. But something made him want to go closer to the man rather than run away.
And this other presence, off in the woods beside him, running along beside him…frightened him even more. He didn’t know what to do about that one. He had never seen such a thing before.
He found himself moving toward
the man. It didn’t surprise him. He just let his legs take him in that direction.
Ben Taylor stood in the empty lot behind his feed store, gazing up at the Big Andy, looking for the road cut leading to his brother’s old place, looking a long time until he realized new tree growth had obscured the narrow pass a long time ago from eyes peering up from the town.
Reed was up there, and he wished to hell he could get the boy back down to the house, make him forget about the digging, about the past in general. No good could come of it. The boy was sick; he looked worse every day. He shouldn’t think so much about what was past…dead and buried. It was just making him sicker and sicker. At that moment Ben began thinking it might even kill him.
Ben had never had much love for his brother; he had admitted that to himself a long time ago. But that didn’t mean he didn’t owe him something. He could have sued Nole Coal.
He could have gone up there the night of the flood. The way it had been raining…some people from up the hollows along the Simpson had already come into town, afraid of flooding. And he’d thought about driving up there in the pickup and asking them if they’d like to stay down at the store.
But he hadn’t. Alec’s company was always so unpleasant; they always ended their visits together with some sort of big argument. So he hadn’t gone.
But Janie and the little girl shouldn’t have had to suffer. They might be alive today if he’d just driven up there.
The slab…rocked…once, beneath him. He felt his stomach turn. Tiny cracks spread from one of the mortar joints a few inches from his feet.
The bear could see the other presence through the trees, keeping pace with him as he advanced steadily on the man. As fast as he was…as strong…but like nothing he’d ever seen. He felt his throat quaking, but dared not roar, even with all the anger he was feeling. This other thing was dangerous; he would keep out of its way.
Something…inside him…recognized this other presence, and was suddenly angry, suddenly afraid. The something inside him, that had been inside him all this time, taking him places, telling him things, putting things inside him, suddenly became very, very small.
The bear stopped and batted at a low-hanging branch. He now had no desire to go near the man, to…hurt the man.
He watched as the other presence continued the chase.
Jake turned slowly, unable to resist any longer the fear and the dark tugging at him, the sound of rustlings, snappings, in the woods behind him.
“Come out!” he cried, raising the gun, sweeping it along the mass of trees, searching, probing. “I know you’re there!”
Tears were leaking out of his eyes, and he had no idea how to stop them. No idea. He was desperate. He wanted to scream. Alone.
Reed raised his head from the cloth toy he was preserving with plastic compound.
There it was again. A shout. Or a scream. Just over his shoulder, behind him. He gazed across the clearing. Nothing. Nothing. He found himself hoping he could be finished before dark.
Ben looked down through the crack formed when the mortar fell through into the interior of the slab. Damn thing had to happen someday; now he was wondering if any of the buildings erected on the slab were safe. But maybe it was only a temporary settling; things might be okay for a while. He’d best talk the others into forcing cement into all the cracks and hollow places in the slab to strengthen it, otherwise they all might find their stores collapsing someday.
But hell…sometimes he wondered what was the sense, anyway. He looked across the street at the abandoned hotel, then gazed down toward the railway station. Not a soul on the street. Everybody was locked up in their houses, and nobody was talking. What the hell was happening to this place?
Maybe they should move the town again, off the slab. Hell, maybe they should abandon the town altogether.
Clouds were gathering over Big Andy. Looked like rain. He wished Reed would call it a day and get himself back into town.
A whispering under his feet. He looked down, seeing nothing at first, sure it was just the sound of the mortar falling deeper into the slab, the powdered brick and stone shifting within the interior. Then he saw an eye looking back up at him through the crack.
He gasped, stepped back a little, then forced himself to his knees. He leaned over and peered down through the crack. Damn, he thought. A little girl…a dead little girl…
But the stare was so fixed, the features so waxen, he finally decided it was a doll down there. A doll with pale sandy hair and a plain dress and bright blue eyes. A pretty doll like his own little girl had. He was sure of it.
But he had no idea how it could have gotten there.
Jake shouted, almost dropping the gun, as the wind suddenly picked up, blowing branches against his face and letting the shadows loose from the woods. He squinted his eyes, trying to distinguish shadow from tree and tree from the darkness in between trees. The sky had gone dark, and he no longer had any idea in which direction he would find the old Taylor place.
Then the shadow was at his back; he turned, and fired. A tree limb split, and crashed.
“Reed!” he screamed to the shadow, and found he could not think of firing again. It hadn’t done any good…no gun would, he thought. But he wasn’t thinking right; he wasn’t seeing right.
“Reed!” he said again to the shadow with the black, black hair. He couldn’t make out the face, or most of the form…crowded with shadows as it was, moving so swiftly, leaving soot, or burnt leaves, or black mud…something…on the forest floor as it reached toward him.
Then the grin, that gleaming grin with the one sharp tooth showing, the rest hidden almost seductively by the too-red lips.
“Bear…” The bear was going to get him! He started to turn…to run…when it spun him around with a vicious slap. And Jake saw bright, gleaming blood falling, leaving ever-growing beaded patterns on the black backdrop of hair. Bright drops of crimson. His blood. Flying up and spreading there. Jake’s own blood.
Bear the bear the bear bear bear…
But even then, he wasn’t sure. It was so dark, and the figure full of shadows, and every shadow had a tooth or a claw.
“Reed!” he cried, knowing it would be the last word he would say, and wondering why he would call on him for help, the man he might have killed. “Reed!”
Jake saw the gun flying away, painted in crimson. Jake saw the pieces of shredded cloth between the teeth. Pieces of bloodied skin and pale broken skin suddenly gone blue and silver under the dark and silver clouds dropping lower over him.
Jake on the ground. How long had he been there? Being savaged. Savaged. And as his mouth stretched wide and wider still, soundlessly, matching the impossible extension of jaws that hovered over him, he looked into the shadowy mask growing dimmer, but still bright with its paint: the stretched lines and dripping starbursts of his own blood.
Far back in the woods, away from the screams and fury of movement, the bear watched, trying to keep still despite the agitation inside, the desire to run. He watched as the man was savaged. And wondered.
And was sick with his own fear.
When Joe Manors came in from work that evening, he was sure he saw old Mr. Pierce out in the side yard talking to a woman with red hair. But when he hurried over, he couldn’t find anyone there. He took the back stairs two at a time and rushed past the rooms on the second floor shouting. “Old man Pierce is out! He’s out!” he cried, and all the doors opened with a few of the occupants joining him as he ran up the steps to the third floor.
But Hector Pierce was lying in bed, babbling as usual. “She told me…she told me what’s happening. That poor boy don’t know what he’s in for…part of him stayed behind.”
Joe looked at the other tenants sheepishly. “Don’t understand it. I swear I saw him clear as day. With some woman.” Several of the men laughed and winked.
“Fire and flood and that boy’s ravening teeth!” the old man shouted, and they all shook their heads, bemused.
Joe thought he
saw an orange glow at the window, but said nothing.
When everyone else had gone to bed, Joe stayed with the old man. Sitting in this old rocker by the bed, he listened to the delirium, making a point to remember later scattered phrases here and there from the monologue, as if he were listening to a preacher who talked too fast but had some sort of important message for him.
Several times he heard “little girl” and “the little girl.” That chilled him. It was as if Hector were trying to address Joe’s past mistakes directly, tell him where he’d gone wrong, let him know how he could make it up to his little daughter.
As the evening wore on, Joe started drinking and was completely drunk by the time the storm was in full force. He didn’t have to work tomorrow; the flooding of the sinkhole had taken care of that. He was wondering if he’d ever be going back to work the way things were going. He wasn’t even sure he would if he had the chance. Now he was afraid of stepping anywhere around the mine, afraid his foot would break through to some underground place or the rock would spring a leak right under his footstep. Lord, it was getting so he just hated the water, water of any kind.
He watched the lightning running itself to ground all over the head of the Big Andy, like flaming strands of hair.
Reed had waited much too long. Now the storm was in full force, and he had to dash through the dark woods to his uncle’s pickup, dodging fallen branches and hoping he wouldn’t be struck by lightning before he got there. He shouldn’t have stayed so long; he hadn’t found much of anything anyway.
He tripped on a half-buried log and sprawled into damp underbrush. The texture of the ground was repulsive here, and he raised his head quickly. Rain and mud spread down his face and he thought he would scream. He rubbed at his eyes frantically.
At first he thought he was looking into a clown’s mask…the bright red lips and large white spots painted on cheeks and forehead. But then he knew there was no paint here, and the white spots were from something eaten away rather than from something painted on.
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