The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  —monster angel servant of my daddy’s God—

  —at his back. A standoff.

  So he had resolved to act. In action, Grubb found solace; in action, Grubb found strength—that had always been the case, and perhaps it would have been so this time. But then he heard the rattle of those congested lungs, the rustle of those mighty wings, the creature—

  —angel demon—

  —shifting on its bed of stone. Grubb stumbled back, dragging the girl with him as the creature rose before him. Its taloned feet splintered the floor. Its rib-staved breast heaved with exertion. The vast wings flexed and unfurled, wafting to him an unutterably ancient reek of iron and blood and tears.

  For the first time in his life, Del Grubb was afraid.

  Even as he lifted his gaze, climbing it rung by rung up the ladder of puckered scar tissue on the thing’s gaunt chest, Grubb felt his fingers open, the girl slip scrambling away. And then he was staring it full in the face, the features hooked and cruel, the mouth an implacable gash, and the eyes—

  —God God—

  —the eyes, deep sunk beneath the high-crowned dome of skull, the eyes, flat and affectless and cold, a cauterizing sheen of silver burning flame—

  Fire swept through him—

  Harold Crawford writhed in agony.

  —a scorching fire, a cleansing inferno that burned Delbert Grubb out of him, and—

  —too late too late—

  —made of Harold Crawford the man he had always longed to be.

  Crawford wrenched his head away.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’d take it back. If I could, I’d take it back—”

  Great hands closed about him, clawed fingers tearing at his clothes. Helpless, he found himself dangling before the thing.

  “I wanted to be a good man,” he cried. “It’s all I ever wanted.”

  Higher and still higher, the thing hoisted him. He found himself staring once again into those terrible eyes, unable to tear his gaze away, and the guilt came bubbling out of him, guilt and recrimination and hate.

  “I even prayed for it,” he said, “just like my daddy told me. I got down on my knees and prayed.”

  Why was he pleading? He’d done the best he could. He’d tried; God knows he’d tried. Where was this God, where was his daddy’s God? And that question too came gushing out of him, an anguished whisper—

  “Why did you abandon me?”

  —freighted with sorrow and guilt and all those years of bitter resentment. And even before he realized it, an avenging impulse had fired along his nerves and his arm was moving, plunging the blade deep, deep between the slatted ribs even as the thing lunged toward him, its flesh parting like paper, like seamed and ancient parchment, and through the rent it made came pouring out at him all the light in the world, tides of light, great combers of light, he had never known there was so much light in the world, and that face, those strange hooked features, what was it that he saw there, was it gratitude?

  Harold Crawford cried aloud as the great hands closed tighter still about him, a dying reflex, crushing, tearing him asunder. And in the moment he realized he was dead, he was already falling, falling and falling, down to a sunless sea.

  The light flared out at them all, bright as a star going nova, brighter. Just as it became blinding, Henry Sleep saw two things he thought he would remember the rest of his life.

  The first was a vision of Harold Crawford, his body bent at an angle no man could survive, his face enraptured as he gazed up at the thing that clutched him.

  The second was the expression in that alien physiognomy.

  Release. He thought it was release.

  Then the light went out, plunging them into darkness.

  Flashlight beams punched radiant alleys through the murk. Ben reeled back, his eyes burning with the afterimage of that awful vision. Overhead, rock shifted, releasing fresh torrents of dust. Not three feet away, a chunk of stone the size of his fist smashed into the floor. The mountain sounded as if it was tearing itself apart.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” he screamed.

  Ben glanced at Henry, standing in an awestruck huddle with Emily and Perry Holland, and saw him bend to retrieve his fallen flashlight. In the same moment, Holland wheeled to face him. Ben caught a flash of bloodstained face beneath the helmet, the smudged wound at his temple where Crawford must have struck him. They lunged toward him.

  “Go!” Holland shouted. “We’re right behind you!”

  The mountain rolling above him, Ben ducked into the passage. He was around the ell and into the central shaft before the coughing took him. Cursing, he collapsed to his hands and knees as moist, wrenching eruptions tore through him. He spat blood into the dust between his splayed fingers. His vision narrowed, darkening—

  Not yet, he thought, I’m not ready yet—

  “Jesus, Ben—”

  Hands snatched at him. Ben caught a glimpse of Emily, Henry close behind her. Then they were moving, dragging him to his feet between them. He’d managed to hang on to his flashlight somehow. They stumbled on in the wake of the moted beams as the mountain heaved and fell still once again. In the silence, a beam cracked ominously, and razor-edged shards of rock pattered down around them.

  “Go,” he gasped. “I’m slowing you down—”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Henry said.

  “If we can reach the section where Perry bolted the top, we should be okay,” Emily gasped.

  The same realization struck them all at once.

  For Henry, the moment had the crystalline fragility of a dream. Touch it and it might shatter—the labyrinth of tunnels winding around them, the faint plume of his breath, the terror and guilt—

  —my fault, my fault—

  —rising up inside him once again, old friends. Oh yes, touch it, it might shatter. If you’re lucky you might wake up, snug and warm in your bed. If you’re lucky you might—

  But it was real.

  The cold sheen of perspiration on Emily’s face, the panic in her eyes—those were real things. The clinging chill, the rattle in Ben’s lungs. The clouds of iridescent dust, each breath gritty and particulate. Real. Real. All real.

  “Perry,” he said.

  They stood in a pocket of calm, the mountain quiet.

  Ben shrugged them away and tottered a few paces on his own. He slumped against the wall and lifted his face, gray and smudged in the backwash of his flashlight. The words came between inhalations as labored as gusts of storm. “When did you see him last?”

  “He was here—”

  “—he was right behind us—”

  “We were trying to get you up, and—”

  Emily held his gaze. “Something gave away. It sounded like a rockslide.”

  Henry turned away, his head filling with voices—

  —I should never have abandoned him—

  —he’s my only child, he’s all that I have left—

  Emily was staring at him. He could feel her gaze, a positive weight against his skin.

  Above them, the mountain rumbled threateningly.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “I have to,” he said. He looked at Ben. “I’m going back. It can’t be far now. Emily can help—”

  “Henry.”

  He turned to face her.

  “Please, Henry—”

  He took her by the shoulders and pulled her close, the length of her body warm against his own, her eyes frank and hard. “Can’t you see, I don’t have any choice.” His lips brushed hers, chapped and dry, for a fraction of an instant.

  “Go, then,” she said.

  He went.

  He descended into the detritus of geologic upheaval: rockslides and fallen stones, that glistening veil of dust. There were noises, too, a legion of whispers and murmurs, the trickle of stone and earth, the endless drip of water into faraway pools. It was all too much like the dreams, and at the thought, panic touched him, panic like a wild bird, a blur of wings and razor-edged b
eak.

  He fought it, choked it off, descended.

  The mine rumbled at closer intervals, building to some awful crescendo. Once he scampered into the sheltering arch of a tunnel as the ceiling came down in chunks. Later, he found his path blocked by fallen slate. He clambered over the rubble on hands and knees, his fingers bleeding. At last, after how long he could not say—hours, days, the timeless intervals of nightmare—he found the tunnel, blind now, empty of light.

  He went in, around the corner into the shorter end of the ell. There was light here, a dim electric illumination—

  Something rattled under foot, summoning echoes from the chasm beyond. He nearly tripped. Light cascaded by him, shadows capering along the walls. Blind terror seized him. The thing clanged against the tunnel mouth, spinning into stillness.

  A mining cap, its light still burning.

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  Hunkering down, Henry picked up the cap, dented and misshapen. A sick wave of dismay rolled through his guts.

  He stepped inside.

  Perry lay just beyond the archway, slumped on one side, his fingers pale and open, beckoning. A softball-sized chunk of stone lay nearby. Henry knelt, his heart pounding. When he touched the body, it rolled bonelessly to its back. Perry moaned. Blood seeped from the wound at his temple, but his serene face was otherwise unmarked.

  The mountain rumbled overhead.

  Henry slapped Perry’s cheek lightly, urgently. “Wake up,” he said.

  But Perry only lay there.

  For Emily, the moments following Henry’s departure were frenzied, nightmarish. Each seismic shock brought down a hail of dust and rock, making it hard to breathe or see, to climb at all, much less support Ben, who hobbled along beside her with his arm draped heavily across her shoulders.

  “You okay?” he grunted between breaths.

  “Fine,” she said, and she was except—

  Except she kept thinking about Henry, alone down there in all that dark. Except she kept replaying their talk back at Ben’s apartment—

  —I care about you, but we’ll have to see—

  —and the look on Henry’s face as he heard the words. Except—and maybe this was the worst thing of all—she couldn’t help thinking that if she had only believed him, they could have done something sooner, they could have saved that … that thing down there. They could have saved her mother—

  Stop it. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  But she could think of little else as they climbed, the passage gradually growing wider around them. Lifting her light to the ceiling, she could see the roof bolts start up, set at six-foot intervals.

  She breathed a sigh of relief.

  The mountain pitched beneath her. Something snapped with a crack. Turning, Ben’s arm slipping from her shoulder, she saw a great boulder, almost perfectly round, cut loose from the top and crash to the floor, shattering. Choking horror rose inside her. She knew what it was—the fossilized bole of an ancient tree—and she knew something else as well, the words miners used for such things, kettle bottoms—

  —widow makers—

  —because one of them had made a widow of her own mother. Emily had been nine then, and her memories of Boone Wood were scant indeed, a handful of washed-out photos, a few scattered recollections: his callused hands against her face, his stubble-roughened kisses. An abrasive tenderness. It was all she had of him.

  “Wait—” Ben said, his hand closing about her shoulder.

  But his grasp was weak, sick. She twisted free of him, running, calling Henry’s name. Chunks of rock hammered down around the kettle bottom, blocking the way. She sank to her knees and started digging at the obstruction. Dust clogged her throat. Her fingers ached and bled.

  “Emily.”

  She stared hopelessly at the collapsed roof. She had made no progress at all; there was nothing she could do.

  “Help me,” she whispered. “He’ll die.”

  “We have to get out of here.” Ben spoke slowly, the way you speak to a frightened child. “We have to get help.”

  An image of the abandoned coalfields possessed her, the endless vistas of snow, the darkened town below. And no hope to be had, no help as far as she could see.

  “How, how—”

  He seized her shoulders. The panic died away a little.

  “The sheriff’s Blazer. There’ll be a radio.”

  An absurd gratitude filled her. Some part of it must have shone through as she looked up into his bony face, for he did something unexpected. He leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead. This is what a father does, she thought. This wisdom in a crisis, this momentary comfort.

  But she didn’t have a father.

  She didn’t have anyone at all.

  Henry wedged the dented hard hat onto Perry’s head and levered him to a sitting position.

  “Okay,” Henry said to himself. “Up we go.”

  He took a deep breath and lurched to his feet. Perry fell against him, dead weight, like a drunken man. Henry staggered. As they swung around, Perry’s headlamp flashing, Henry caught a glimpse of the—

  —giant, angel—

  —the thing. The thing. Whatever it was. A flash of bedraggled wing and translucent flesh, a glittering pool of blood, black in the light. He sat down hard, Perry’s weight crashing down on top of him.

  He kept hearing voices in his head, disjointed snatches of conversation. The fallen ones, the healing ones. The Rephaim. He was twelve years old again, safe with his father in the rolling comfort of a funeral home limo. God can go to hell for all I care.

  What did he believe?

  “Fuck,” he said. “Not now.”

  Clutching the flashlight with one hand, he pushed himself to his feet. Once again, Perry’s full weight collapsed upon him, but this time, prepared, Henry managed to stay upright. He caught another glimpse of the bodies, Harold Crawford—

  —Grubb, he said his name was Grubb—

  —crushed and still beneath the thing’s outstretched arm. He ignored them.

  “Okay, Perry. You ready to roll?”

  Perry said nothing.

  A vast convulsion shook the mountain. Cracks zagged across the stone. Rock and dust pelted from the chill blackness overhead. It took him a frenzied few moments to negotiate the passage to the central heading. Perry’s feet caught a lip of rock. Stones the size of driveway gravel pelted from the jagged crack overhead.

  The mountain continued to shake. Something above him tore loose with a shriek. “Shit,” Henry cried. He lunged forward, his muscles screaming, and then they were out. The corridor collapsed at their heels, clamping down in a cloud of dust like a slammed gate. He turned, suddenly lost. The way out was gone, sealed behind an avalanche of fallen slate.

  A vein pulsed at his temple. “Wake up,” he whispered, but Perry only moaned, his eyelids fluttering.

  Lurching under his weight, Henry turned. Twenty feet below, the corridor branched. Maybe he could skirt the obstruction and circle back to the main shaft. It was worth a shot anyway. He dragged in breath as the mountain settled.

  “This isn’t going to work, pal,” he said. “I’m going to have to drag you, okay?”

  He lowered Perry gently to the floor, hunkered down, and hooked his forearms through Perry’s armpits. Still clutching the flashlight, he started inching down the corridor toward the junction of tunnels.

  The mountain rumbled threateningly, fell still.

  Don’t think about it, he told himself. Keep moving.

  A black certainty was growing in him: He wouldn’t get out of here alive.

  And again: Don’t think about it.

  But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t put it out of his mind.

  He paused for breath at the junction. The main shaft continued its descent. Narrow branches opened to either side. He studied them for a moment, trying to determine if either of them angled perceptibly toward the surface. The mountain uttered yet another of those premonitory rumbles, releasing
another cloud of dust. He coughed, choking, into the stillness that followed. Maybe the worst of it was over.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  Kneeling, he levered Perry up once more. Perry’s head flopped back, his upturned face sallow, the color of a comic book zombie. His helmet clattered to the floor. Henry jammed it back on, fumbling to extinguish the headlamp, suddenly worried about batteries. Another phrase came swimming up out of the past—

  —I was afraid of the dark when I was a kid, did you know that—

  —and he thought abruptly about being lost down here in all this endless black. How long before you died of thirst? How long before the air went bad? Maybe it was bad already. What was the old expression? Canary in the coal mine. When the canary dies, you know it’s time to head for the surface. He took a cautious breath, anxious to see if it was tainted with anything but dust. It tasted okay to him. But the gas—was it methane?—had no odor, no taste; thus the canary. They didn’t use canaries anymore, of course. He supposed they must have some kind of meter, now, a gadget of some—

  A wave of panic crested within him.

  He dammed it away, took a breath.

  Okay. He was okay. He just had to keep moving, he had to get moving.

  He chose the tunnel branching off to the right. It arced away before him, curving almost imperceptibly. He tried to picture the mine in his head, to retrace the route they had taken down, to calculate the angles and turns that might bring him back to that central shaft.

  Everything blurred together—his throbbing back, the sweat trickling into his eyes, the faint trails Perry’s feet dug in the dust—a chaotic welter charged with glaring moments of clarity when the mountain shook beneath him and adrenaline jolted through his system. During the worst of the shocks, something unseen whizzed by his face, drawing a bright line of pain down his cheek. After that, the mountain grew still, an eerie calm broken only by occasional shiftings of sand, the faraway plink of water droplets into still, dark pools.

  So he wouldn’t die of thirst, after all.

  Exhaustion maybe.

  Occasionally, he turned into branching passages, always angling toward the surface. Two, three, four times he paused for rest, his back and shoulders screaming, only to stumble erect once again and hobble on. During the last such stop, he thought Perry had stopped breathing, thought he had been dragging a corpse. Mocking, ironic laughter welled through him. He cupped a hand before Perry’s face. It was there, the faint whisper of respiration, like silk against his skin. He hooked his arms under Perry’s shoulders and plodded on.