A melted oblong of glass might have been the top of his mother’s flower vase—the big one that she kept in the window and that broke the light in such a way that you could stand by her stove and feel like you were trapped inside a prism. A fragment of dark-stained wood might have come from the small three-legged table that used to stand by the stairs. His mother always put the mail there, and if it wasn’t there when his dad got home he’d knock the table over in anger. There were several chips out along the edge of the tabletop.
He’d found miscellaneous pieces of old toys: a wheel, several doll’s arms, button eyes, windup keys, and a variety of plastic parts. He kept all these in a separate sack, determined to go through them someday, figuring out which toys they had come from, if they had been old toys of his, or his sister’s. He found himself thinking about the metal and plastic robot he’d had when he was nine, and now he looked for that robot in every piece he picked up.
As the sun rose higher in a sky spotted with torn swatches of cloud, Reed found that scene after scene arose and surrounded him as he picked his way through this, the richest vein so far in his mining. The days his mother hung out the Indian corn to dry over the porch railing, the setting sun catching each kernel and setting it afire. The time his sister fell on a rake, her yellow sundress turning crimson as she ran into their mother’s arms. The afternoon some of the boys from town had wandered out and they’d played stickball out front with him, and the whole family had watched.
Each scene arose and swelled oppressively around him, before breaking apart and falling into these pieces scattered through the dirt and underground. Red plastic and blue metal. Orange sun and white cheeks. Fragments of a young boy’s shoes and cooking spoons and pieces of eye, cheeks, smiles, and tears. The fragmented colors of grass and blood and dog and wrinkled hands and laughter and fear.
Reed found himself trying to visualize scenes in Denver, with his family, Carol, the children. Nothing. For a moment he thought he could see their fragments also lying in the dirt before his feet. His face stiffened, but he could not cry.
He raked through them all with his bare fingers held clawlike, the fragments wedging under his fingernails and tearing the skin. But Reed didn’t notice, intent on the digging.
The bear had spent some time resting in the green undergrowth. So much green, and cool to his hot muzzle and hot tongue and hot eyes. His thoughts and smells still burned him, but it was better now. The things inside him, the thing inside him, had quieted, maybe asleep for a time. That would give the bear time to sleep; he hadn’t been able to sleep for what seemed like a very long time.
The world was becoming a stranger place for the bear with each passing hour. So many sounds and thoughts and things he had never known about, and in his confusion these things had burned him. He had felt fire deep down in his throat as the thing inside him had tried to come out.
Now he sniffed the cool air, was puzzled, then irritated. What? He sniffed again. There was no real smell but… something. No real smell. Something.
The young human child stepped softly over the bear’s back. He stared. No smell. And this was a dead human child, a female, but still moving. Her feet did not touch the ground. He roared and snapped at her; she broke apart and drifted away in pieces. No smell. Was she attacking? No… more like play. She had been playing with him. The bear roared his displeasure. Then he realized he knew this child; the thing inside knew her. This thought made him roar again, and smash out at the cool green around him. Pieces of green filled the air. He breathed it in and snarled.
Bright flame filled the sky above the green; he looked up in puzzlement. The human woman smiled down at him. But no smell. He charged and she drifted apart, filled his throat and made it burn.
The human woman’s laughter filled the green. He roared. No… not human. Like human. No smell.
The laughter died away. The bear looked around him: no more green. In his rage he had destroyed it all, and not even known.
The cool was gone; his body began to burn hotter. He groaned deeply inside, shaking the thing inside him awake. But he didn’t care. He loped out of the edge of the wood, letting the thing inside guide him.
Chapter 23
It was the fourth day that Reed had been carefully, methodically excavating the land around his old home-place. Keeping a calm mind, holding back any premature conclusions, meticulously examining the evidence. So far he had stayed away from the house itself.
Being carefuclass="underline" that was what he was doing. Being scientific. But at the moment that didn’t seem much different from being afraid.
The cold was back, worse than ever. It was a fire inside his head, inside his chest. He thought he might have pneumonia. But he couldn’t stop; there seemed so little time. And he had to keep his Uncle Ben from stopping him, only meaning him well.
He had come out here every morning, intent on his work, eating breakfast at his uncle’s as quickly as possible so that he could get an early start. He met his uncle’s questions concerning the progress of the dig with bland, noncommittal statements, and twice he had had to discourage Ben from coming out here with him. When Reed got home at night, everyone else was in bed. Martha always had something waiting in the oven.
He didn’t have to get in that late; he had to quit digging around sunset anyway, when the dusk shadows started confusing him, showing him discolorations, evidence of features that weren’t really there. And every shift of the darkness in the woods seemed a large animal. He’d climb into the truck he borrowed from his uncle and sit there for hours, watching the shadows spread and the dark creep out from the trees, and try to recapture his lost feel for the place.
Hiding… he needed to think the word, for that was what he was really doing. For all his excuses about getting to know the site, educating himself on the lay of the land, he was hiding. He was beginning to sense a panic beneath the easy exteriors of the citizens of Simpson Creeks, even in his uncle. Things had been happening to the town since before he got here, but they seemed to have intensified after his arrival, as if he had carried some sort of disease into the valley with him.
Things were going subtly wrong in the Creeks. No one thing so obvious, but the accumulation of little events…
A couple of days ago Jake Parkey had found his wife wandering out in the woods with her clothes half torn off, babbling nonsense. Jake had beaten her badly before Charlie Simpson happened by and pulled him off. Then they discovered water seeping into parts of the Nole Company stripping operation and they had to shut down. Reed couldn’t care too much about that, but no one could explain how such a thing could happen. The water had stopped for a time, and Mr. Emmanuel had sent for geologists from the main office to study the matter. They’d be sending a staff of lawyers too, Reed knew. They’d want to cover themselves in case of possible damages.
His uncle said people were recalling the big flood, but they weren’t talking about evacuating. Of course, there’d never been flooding caused by a leaking sinkhole before, at least not that he’d heard of.
And so Reed had stayed by his excavations, reviewing his notes and studies, feeling too guilty to talk to anyone. Afraid to talk to anyone. He had been so sure that careful inquiry and analysis would protect him from the traumas of the past. But they were breaking through the dam he’d erected; they were clamping their jaws around the back of his neck.