The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “All people who had been up to the Holland mines,” Ben said.

  “Which means it all fits,” Emily said to Ben.

  “Fits what?” Henry asked.

  “The other hypothesis,” Ben said. “When we looked at the biblical allusions, we got to wondering if the dreams could be repressed memories of actual experiences.”

  “But then why would the dreams fade when I’m not in Sauls Run?”

  “Maybe it’s a matter of proximity,” Emily said. “You come too close to … whatever it is, the original experience … and you have dreams. And you continue to have them as long as you stay inside its sphere of influence.”

  “Inside the circle on Dad’s map,” Henry said.

  “Right.”

  “The point is,” Ben said, “what if all of you—everyone who’s been into the mines, Asa, Perry Holland, Ostrowski, whoever—what if you saw or felt or perceived somehow—who knows how?—something so transformative that you couldn’t handle it on a conscious level?”

  Henry sat back. “Gods and demons,” he said after a moment.

  Emily and Ben traded another look.

  “What do you mean?” Ben asked.

  “Raymond Ostrowski told me the mountain was holy to the Shawnee, that men who worked those tunnels in the early part of the century also complained of dreams.” He paused. “How did he say it? That they’d rubbed up against something, some god or demon, and they were working it through in their sleep. Something like that.”

  “So it goes back that long,” Ben said.

  “What does?” Henry said. “What are these connections you were talking about?”

  “Well,” Ben said. “Emily told me that you dreamed there was something down there. Something with …” Ben hesitated.

  “Wings,” Henry said.

  “Wings.” Ben lit a cigarette. The coughing, when it came, was vicious, a phlegmy rattle deep in his chest. When he put the cigarette into the ashtray, he was pale.

  “Maybe you ought to cut that out,” Emily said.

  Ben just smiled.

  “Wings,” Henry said. “So that’s important?”

  “You tell me.” Ben picked up the notes and dragged a nicotine-stained finger down the page. “The first column cites two passages about giants.” He flipped open a book. “Here we go. ‘There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them.’”

  Emily picked up another sheet of paper—this one covered with writing Henry recognized as her own. “The actual Hebrew word translated as giants is Nephelim. When you trace that word back to its root—napal, to fall—you realize that these giants—these ‘sons of God’—are the fallen ones.”

  Henry took a long breath. Overwhelmed by the smell of Ben’s cigarette, he stood. Halfway across the kitchen, the floor cut loose beneath his feet, swinging like a ship at anchor,

  “You okay?” Emily asked.

  Henry clutched the countertop for a moment, riding the swells. “Tired, I guess.” He paused. “The fallen ones. Well, that sounds a little ominous.”

  “In a Christian context,” Ben said, “it sounds like the host of angels who fell with Lucifer.” He lifted his hands. “Wings, right? But that’s not all. You said your father was interested in connections between pre-Christian belief and Christianity.”

  “Like the rest of the Old Testament, the text itself is pre-Christian,” Emily said. “Some Rabbinical commentators view the Nephelim not as angels but as … associates of God—servants, soldiers, whatever. God’s terminators, if you will.” She lifted her eyebrows. “They had a sort of semidivine status, but they weren’t necessarily evil, not in the way we think of the angels—the demons—who fell with Satan.”

  “In fact,” Ben added, “they probably had little interest at all in human affairs.”

  “It sounds like you believe in them.”

  Ben picked up his cigarette and put it down without taking a drag. He shrugged. “Hypothetically, then. The point is, there’s at least a hint of a connection to your dreams.”

  “What about the second column?”

  “That’s where it gets really interesting,” Ben said. “The second list cites passages using the Hebrew word Rephaim. In some contexts it means departed spirits, in others it, too, refers to giants. Until the 1920s, most scholars thought the two usages were distinct. That is, they saw the Rephaim as a race of giants, like the Nephelim. But they didn’t link that use of the word with the ghost meaning.”

  “So what happened in the 1920s?”

  Emily shuffled papers. “A Syrian farmer stumbled across some ancient tombs, leading to excavations at a place called Ras Shamra, where they uncovered the archives of an ancient kingdom named Ugarit. It was one of the most famous finds of the century—like the Dead Sea Scrolls—because the tablets there not only shed light on scripture, but on some disputed Hebrew words.”

  “Including the word Rephaim,” Ben said.

  “The Ugaritic tablets suggest that the two meanings—giant and ghost—may be related. Apparently, the—what? the Ugarites?—the Ugarites worshipped an elaborate pantheon in which the Rephaim, the departed spirits of their ancestors, held special powers.”

  Ben stubbed out his cigarette as another fit of coughing overwhelmed him. When it had passed, Emily said, “Which brings us to another connection. You ready for this?”

  “I don’t know what I’m ready for.”

  “Your dad’s notes steer us back to word origin,” she said. “This time the word in question is Rephaim. Its history is nowhere near as clear as that of Nephelim, but one etymology traces it back to the Hebrew word râphâ.”

  “And that means?”

  “It means to heal,” Emily said. She looked up and held his gaze. “It means they had the power to heal.”

  At twilight, Ben went back to the bedroom to nap—as much because he sensed they needed time alone, Henry thought, as because he needed the rest. Henry appreciated the gesture, but as shadows stole across the faded linoleum, he questioned its wisdom. He and Emily sat at the kitchen table in a silence teeming with chafed emotion. Uncertain how to break it, he found himself toying with a pencil instead.

  They spoke simultaneously—

  “I’m sorry—”

  “I guess I owe you an apology—

  —and dissolved a moment later into laughter. Subdued laughter, but the real thing.

  Emily said, “I wish the power would come back on.”

  “I wish the phones would.”

  The words dissipated their laughter, inviting it all back—the enveloping dread, the ghosts of Asa and Cindy and Quincy Sleep, as well. Henry thought of Crawford rising up behind his desk, clutching the stapler like a bludgeon, and he glanced at the gun lying on the table, taking comfort in its chill promise. He had reclaimed it when Ben retreated to the bedroom. Emily had watched silently while he loaded it, sliding the bullets into their chambers with unsteady fingers. She was silent now, too, her breath frosty in the chill apartment, her face half obscured in gloom.

  “How are you doing with everything?” Henry asked.

  “You mean my mother.”

  “Yeah.”

  Emily riffled a stack of notes. “I keep thinking that if I had believed you, maybe we could have—” She paused, biting at her lower lip.

  “What?”

  “Done something.” She looked up. “Figured this out some way. Maybe we could have saved her.”

  “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “But, Henry—”

  “Look, if I hadn’t spent nearly two decades running away from all this, maybe Dad would still be alive. We can sit here and second-guess our decisions all night, but that won’t change anything.”

  “I guess.”

  “Besides, how can you blame yourself?” He rapped the pencil dismissively against a book and laughed. “I mean, come on, what are we talking about here? Fallen angels?”

  “I
don’t know,” she said. “Something, though, I believe that.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. After Mom died, I went back to the house and opened a bottle of wine. I sat at the table for an hour or more, looking at that glass and thinking, Why not have a drink? What possible harm could it do now?”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I was tempted, but no.” She pushed aside a stack of books and laid a hand over his. “I’d been living for my mother so long that I wasn’t sure I could find a reason to go on. I think that’s what it was. And the whole time I sat there, our conversation was running through the back of my mind. Two other patients had died within hours of Mom, and I kept remembering what you said, that whatever’s going on here is getting worse.”

  He flashed upon Asa’s spectacles, twisted in the junk from the spilled drawer, somehow more terrible than all the blood in the world. “It is,” he said.

  “Well, I decided I wanted to help figure that out.”

  “What about finding a reason to go on?”

  Biting her lip, she twined her fingers through his. “I don’t know.”

  Henry stood, dragging his hand away. Still clutching the pencil, he strode to the window. “So why did you even come here, then?”

  “Look at me,” she said.

  He turned.

  Her face was strained and worn. “The worst thing about the night Mom died was that a part of me—a part I didn’t even want to acknowledge—was relieved. I’d given up my life—I’d given up myself—to keep her at Ridgeview. I don’t even remember my plans and dreams. If I’m going to be fair to you—if I’m going to be fair to us—I have to take some time and get to know me again. And then we’ll see. I care about you, I know that, but we’ll have to see.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “You can wait if you want to. I’d like you to. I don’t want you to run away again, Henry.”

  Henry swallowed, shamed—

  —I got used to you running away a long time ago—

  —into turning back to the window.

  The sky glowed with sunset, a palette of red and orange that shimmered over the ridges, reminding him of the optical illusion that had seized him that night in the scenic overlook—that bright conflagration leaping from tree to tree and finally to the Run itself, huddled in the narrow valley.

  Emily’s phrase had caught in his head—

  —whatever’s going on here is getting worse—

  —and in a brief, almost palpable flash, the kitchen seemed to shear apart, bright shards spinning away as he plunged into the labyrinth of dreams.

  His hand flexed unconsciously, snapping the pencil. He stared stupidly at the broken ends for a moment, and then he looked back to the table.

  He met Emily’s gaze.

  “I’m not running anymore,” he said.

  There was a banging in his dream.

  He woke suddenly, disoriented, the cumulative impact of the last few days—the deaths, the wreck, the fever—washing over him in a paralyzing wave.

  “What—”

  Emily’s hand closed over his mouth. Henry gaped at her, her face blanched and strange in the candlelight, and it all came back to him, huddling under a blanket on the sofa and whispering while Ben napped. Glancing at the luminous dial of his watch—

  —7:30—

  —he saw that they must have dozed.

  Then the banging.

  The door.

  Prying Emily’s hand away, he reached for the gun and scrambled to his feet. Ben joined him an instant later, breathing laboriously. Another moment passed with the two of them crowded in the foyer while Ben fumbled at the lock. At last, he drew back the bolt and threw open the door.

  An old woman stumbled in, her thin face shielded by the plastic rain bonnet tied beneath her chin. Dropping the gun atop a table, Henry stepped forward to meet her. She sagged against him, her chest heaving.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  The old woman thrust back the rain bonnet; a cloud of wispy gray hair escaped. Willa Holland looked up to meet Henry Sleep’s bewildered gaze. “You have to help me,” she said.

  For a moment, Henry’s mind ricocheted between memories of blinding snow, her hawklike face looming in the dark, and the twisting labyrinth of nightmare. He had been dreaming of it once again. Willa Holland clamped her hands over his shoulders, anchoring him in the moment. “There’s no time,” she said, and then Emily was shepherding her past him toward the sofa.

  As soon as the old woman was seated, the strength seemed to drain from her. When Ben said, “Please, ma’am, what is it that’s going on here?” she made no reply. She just hunched shivering under the blanket, her face ashen, her breath coming in long gasps. Emily rubbed her back for a moment, and then the old woman drew a long breath and squared her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was so cold. So cold.”

  “You walked here?” Emily said.

  “My car,” she said. “I got stuck on the other side of the Stone Bridge. I should have been here earlier.” She took another breath. “He came for Perry an hour ago, maybe an hour and a half. Harold Crawford. The doorbell woke me. I eavesdropped.” She laughed humorlessly. “Not for the first time, either. It’s not especially dignified, I suppose, but I’m far too old to fuss with dignity.”

  “They’re going to the mines,” Henry said.

  “That’s right.” Her hands knotted in her lap. “Perry and you … I know you had some trouble—but he’s my only child. He’s all I have left.” She leaned forward, taking Henry’s hand between her own. Her chill was catching. Suddenly he wanted to draw away, to run away, but she held him fast, her eyes burning with desperation.

  “Go to him,” she whispered. “Please.”

  Chapter 23

  Everything was exactly as Henry remembered: the nine-foot chain-link fence surmounted by coils of razor wire, the decaying moonscape beyond. Only the sky had changed, a black, fathomless gulf looming up where he half expected the lowering storm clouds of that long-ago July. Winter clutched the mountains like a fist.

  The drive had taken nearly an hour, Ben steering his Jeep with a sure hand over cindered, snow-packed roads, the town dark under the night sky. There had been a bad moment before they got under way, Henry and Emily exhanging words while Ben hunted up some flashlights in the newspaper office downstairs.

  “What are you doing?” he had asked as she shrugged into her coat.

  “Going with you,” she had said, and he had bitten off his response before it escaped his lips. She had made her terms clear enough, and he supposed he could accept them. He owed her that.

  He reached into his jacket and touched Asa’s pistol, reassured by its cold weight as the Jeep slipped through the open gates. A single set of tire tracks disturbed the pristine snow cover, winding past the weathered brick facades of the machine shop and the bathhouse just beyond, the coke ovens and the slag heaps lifting bony spines above the snow. As they climbed into the ridges, Henry felt that lost summer rushing back to claim him, the boy he had been inhabiting the man he had become.

  Had he won anything at all from those seventeen years?

  A little wisdom, he supposed. Enough to know that invulnerability was a lie.

  Glass shattered, and its shards drew blood.

  The sound of the engine shutting off drew him back to the present. They had parked by a Blazer with county tags, in the shadow of the tipple. Reluctantly, Henry followed Emily from the Jeep. Wind swept across the shoulder of the mountain, nipping at his flesh. On the far side of the Jeep, Ben tilted his head and curled a long hand before his face to light a cigarette. Coughing another of those deep, moist death rattles, he straightened up. He shouldered a gym bag from the backseat and slammed the door.

  “Let’s get moving.”

  Henry and Emily fell in behind him, as he followed the footprints angling off toward the mine. The creak of the tipple overhead echoed across the derelict coalfields, a lonely and bereft moan tha
t touched something buried inside Henry. He felt time slipping once again, with only the manifest changes around him—the cluster of yellow earth-moving machinery, the open mouth of the mine itself, as flat and impenetrably black as the baptismal pool of his fever dream—to anchor him in the present.

  Emily spoke, her words echoing his own foreboding. “Are we really going in there?”

  Ben snapped his cigarette into the snow. He dug three heavy flashlights out of his gym bag and passed them around. “It’ll get us out of the wind, anyway,” he said, and his words sparked another memory—

  —just to get out of the rain—

  —this one rocking Henry on his heels.

  Get away, an inner voice beseeched him. Get as far away as you can.

  Henry shivered. Harold Crawford’s voice, he thought, and he saw the man himself looming up over the desk, gripping the stapler in one thick hand, murder in his eyes. His gaze had kept drifting past Henry, as though someone stood at his shoulder, and remembering that now, Henry knew that he was mad. He was mad, he had Perry Holland, and he was somewhere down there in all that dark.

  Get away.

  But he was done running.

  Switching on his flashlight, Henry stepped inside. A sense of the vast weight of the mountain overhead possessed him, and for a single—

  —vertiginous instant, paralyzing claustrophobia gripped him. He closed his eyes, but the air blazed blinding white even through his eyelids as another lightning bolt slammed to earth behind him. The assemblage of rock above him groaned, threatening collapse, and then he was moving, terror spurring him deeper into the wormhole. Perry must have fled before him, his fear of the blackness under the mountain eclipsed by the terrific storm without, for the glimmering white soles of his shoes were gone.

  The passage grew narrower, and with each concussion of the storm, dust sifted down from above. Henry hurried on, anxious to get free of the avalanche of debris overhead before something shook loose and the whole mass tumbled in, crushing him. Then his hands came down on emptiness. He teetered for a single moment, overbalanced, too terrified even to scream as he tumbled forward, clutching the flashlight in one hand and scrabbling desperately with the other at the stones beneath him. Ten seconds later, he jolted to a stop, his breath exploding in a moment of white-hot agony.