It was getting dark; he’d better hurry. He didn’t like staying in town anymore after dark.
Again she awakened inside the slab. Her thoughts hot, drifting away from her skull, floating and licking at the dark stones. Her thoughts on fire. Her head of flames.
She’d left the Pierce woman only a short time ago to return to this retreat. The Pierce woman had stirred uncomfortable things in her, and she’d needed this darkness, this rest.
She remembered more things. Knew more about how it had been to be human. The ache and frustration. The desire to be what she could not be. Fire licking at her throat, her thighs. But now she was something else, and these old desires belonged to her but yet did not belong to her. She had been something else, then. She had changed.
There were soft sounds outside the slab. Human hands working. Her hand floated out and she picked up a fragment of mirror, holding it lightly in front of her face. Alabaster skin, thin arched brows, crimson hair. Beautiful. She was beautiful. What any man would want.
She turned and floated a few inches off the black, moist earth. Insects scurried away from beneath her. Bugs and dull white worms. She let her eyes rest on the scattered bones near one end of the cavity. Fox, cat, dog. Scattered among the pieces of jewelry, the coins, the bits of glass and wood and paper, the things lost or left behind over the years this slab had been here.
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.