She opened one door, then another. Gaping holes in roof and floors, dust and rotted belongings. Rats scurrying in the far corners.
Something falling. She opened each door carefully, and still things fell, creaked, moaned. The cry again, and then again. She was in a panic now, and jerked the doors open, and more and more things fell to disrupt the layers and layers of dust, rot, mildew, grime. She bit her lip as rats and mice scurried out, as bats took wing, as tiny animals snarled in the dark corners.
A little child in one of these places, one of these awful places.
Then she opened one door to black silence. And a piece of the black stirred, and moved. Scrambled across the dark floor. And cried with a hollow sound.
She ran in and there were silver places where eyes might be, and teeth.
He rose up, her secret admirer, with hair only distinguishable because it was darker than the surrounding dark. Dark clothes and skin with no highlights. He turned to her in the shadows and she smelled an ancient, stagnant damp smell.
Teeth gleaming… the only light.
And his size… slight or medium build?… she thought of all the men in the area and found only one who might fit. She started to say his name when he reached for her.
Damp hands and fetid breath.
She pushed and ran, stumbling over beams and something soft and moist as she broke through the door, stepping over the warped gray boards of the shack that had collapsed next door. And still he whimpered behind her.
Why, he’s just a little boy, she thought, still running, her mind racing with fear and whatever reassurances it could assemble out of the shadows, a lost little boy.
Then she heard the hiss, and jumped when the lightning exploded over Big Andy. But an angry, hateful little boy, too, she thought, and felt the anesthetizing dampness even before it began to rain. An old, rich hate. The hard raindrops loosened the tight skin of her face and she began to cry, her lips distorting, hands clenched.
“I’ve done nothing to you!” she screamed, running as hard as she could for the cafe, thinking she might never escape this rain.
Chapter 27
The bear lumbered through the woods, angry, as if some irritant—insect bite or bee sting—were working its way along the underside of his skin. He smashed bushes and saplings as he progressed above the narrow gravel road snaking along the hillside. Dimly aware of a place he must go, a certain time of shadow and light, he followed his legs… they seemed to know. The lack of understanding was a constant bother now; he was enraged by it. He was vaguely aware of once having been something else. Rage grew in his belly like a storm. His human eyes burned. As he approached the place of the meeting, that rage grew and grew until it was almost uncontrollable. He roared into the dim forest light, letting loose his frustration as he swiped at low branches and vines…
Reed had spent much of the morning digging into the area in front of the house, at first not even bothering to look through the gaping window cavity into the darkness there. He stripped away a band of earth maybe five feet square and six inches deep, not carefully, not scientifically, just anxious to get it over and done with. His eyes were running, his nose clogged, which made the work miserable. Periodically he would find something, pocketing a few things but throwing almost everything away after a cursory examination. He’d lost patience. Now his project seemed a ridiculous waste of time. The possibility that a vicious crank had made the call that had brought him here now seemed more and more likely. He quit by noon and went to rest under the twin sycamores at one side of the clearing.
As a child he’d spent a lot of time under these trees, yet never had they seemed so large. He felt himself lulled by their swinging, their drifting branches, leaves swaying as if floating in water. Before he fell asleep he wondered briefly, how high the flood waters had risen up their trunks that long-ago rainy afternoon.
The bear recognized this place… the structure. A moan escaped him, and it was as if the moan didn’t belong to him. He drew back from the clearing, suddenly terrified. Eyes turning this direction, here, then there. Moaning. Drawing back again.
Then he saw the man lying under the tree. Still… as if dead. Something about him… he knew. The bear moaned. Then he saw the slight rising and falling of the chest and something felt different inside. He growled, suddenly angered, then the anger was gone.
Something inside him. Something seeing out through his eyes. Foglike. He stared for a long time at the man.
And could not move.
Reed awakened to dimmer light and at first thought he had slept through until nightfall, and that something had gone wrong. But when he sat up he realized it was only mid-afternoon; the sun had just moved some across Big Andy, and tall trees were blocking the light. He turned his head and stretched.
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.