Jake Parkey stopped, elbows tensely spread, the shotgun raised. Something had moved in the brush behind him.
He waited for another noise, his throat too tight to let breath escape. The gun metal felt wet under his finger. No sound. He hated being afraid; he hated admitting that he was afraid. Like when he was a kid—in bed he’d bite his lip almost in two rather than scream and let his daddy know he was afraid of the dark.
And he hated Reed Taylor for making him so afraid.
Jake didn’t know exactly why he’d figured it out this way… but it made some sort of sense. All these things happening… all the craziness hadn’t begun until Reed Taylor came back. Supposedly the boy had gotten off the train after the bear had got poor Amos, but Jake had heard Ben Taylor say he thought he’d seen Reed up on the Big Andy while the hunt was going on. And now he was spending all his time up the hollow digging and scratching around… grave robbing was what it looked like to Jake. A man shouldn’t dig where other folks had died… nobody ‘round the Creeks would ever think of doing such a thing.
Hell, something was going on, and since Reed Taylor got into town things had gone bad. There had to be a connection.
He’d left the town a long time ago… he had no right. He didn’t belong here anymore. He wasn’t part of the town. Jake checked the gun. Two shells, primed and ready. Reed was going to be real sorry he’d ever come back, real sorry he’d caused the town all this trouble.
There were branches breaking behind him, a noise kind of like whispering in the branches overhead. Wind… and trees shifting. Jake began chewing on his lip, biting until he could taste the blood.
Reed began with a sweep of all the rooms on the second floor of the house, removing dust and dirt to a level with the stairwell. Not very difficult; at most there was two inches of dirt. There was little to be found here, however: a comb that had belonged to his mother—she had been extremely proud of her long auburn hair and spent hours before the mirror grooming it—a few scattered coins, bobby pins and thimbles and empty thread spools. He did find an old decoder ring he remembered finding in a box of candy, and this small discovery thrilled him. On an impulse he wedged it over his little finger. Its plastic jewel seemed to glow in the dim yellow light. He suddenly felt a child again, playing at being archaeologist in an ancient Egyptian tomb, discovering the sacred ring of Aman-Tut. Complete with a curse.
Somewhere he thought he heard someone singing, and somewhere else, a crying, just beneath his voice as he spoke. He stopped to listen, but could hear nothing.
Carol liked to sing.
After living in this house with his family all those years he’d learned the advantages of separation and distance. Sometimes if you pretended you weren’t there, the old man would forget about you. It kept things safe.
As he walked through the gray and dust-laden rooms, he was able to remember how he got to be that way. A dust-laden table brought back an afternoon drunk of his father’s, when hiding under the table was the only way to keep him from stumbling over you. A scar in the wall was where a thrown fire log had almost taken off Reed’s head. He’d hidden in the woods all night. He’d been four years old at the time. There had been noises, and awful smells—of dead things and beasts’ breath, and it was the first time Reed had known that the forest wasn’t always your friend.
At least he’d overcome some of those fears, years later, in Denver. At least he had been healthy enough to recognize how good Carol would be for him, and let himself marry her.
Then Reed thought of something really frightening, far more terrifying than the childhood he had finally escaped. He wondered what would have happened if he’d never gotten any better, if he’d never improved. Never left this place.
What might he have become if he’d stayed behind with his family in Simpson Creeks?
He had to have been an angry child, he had to have had bubbling rage in him most of the time. Reed couldn’t remember ever being depressed, so there had to have been tremendous rage in him as a child. The thought chilled him.
For he could not remember ever being angry.
A section of the wall before him began to crack, the cracks spreading until they’d spiderwebbed the entire surface. Then the wall began to collapse, and filth-encrusted roaches slipped out as if from a lopsided, toothless, and aged mouth. All of them spreading out in a wave toward his feet.
He gasped and stepped back. But the roaches were gone, and the plaster wall as clean and unbroken as before.
He laughed softly; his voice had an odd, hollow quality within the room. Then he realized his mouth was closed; he hadn’t uttered a sound.
“The imagination’s a pretty powerful thing,” he said aloud to the house, as if to break the uneasy silence, as if to ward off the malice of the house and court its favor.
The bear heard the rustling once again. He cocked his ears. Rocked back and forth on his front paws, biting insects under his skin. This presence… frightened him. But something made him want to go closer to the man rather than run away.
And this other presence, off in the woods beside him, running along beside him… frightened him even more. He didn’t know what to do about that one. He had never seen such a thing before.
He found himself moving toward the man. It didn’t surprise him. He just let his legs take him in that direction.
Ben Taylor stood in the empty lot behind his feed store, gazing up at the Big Andy, looking for the road cut leading to his brother’s old place, looking a long time until he realized new tree growth had obscured the narrow pass a long time ago from eyes peering up from the town.
Reed was up there, and he wished to hell he could get the boy back down to the house, make him forget about the digging, about the past in general. No good could come of it. The boy was sick; he looked worse every day. He shouldn’t think so much about what was past… dead and buried. It was just making him sicker and sicker. At that moment Ben began thinking it might even kill him.
Ben had never had much love for his brother; he had admitted that to himself a long time ago. But that didn’t mean he didn’t owe him something. He could have sued Nole Coal.
He could have gone up there the night of the flood. The way it had been raining… some people from up the hollows along the Simpson had already come into town, afraid of flooding. And he’d thought about driving up there in the pickup and asking them if they’d like to stay down at the store.
But he hadn’t. Alec’s company was always so unpleasant; they always ended their visits together with some sort of big argument. So he hadn’t gone.
But Janie and the little girl shouldn’t have had to suffer. They might be alive today if he’d just driven up there.
The slab… rocked… once, beneath him. He felt his stomach turn. Tiny cracks spread from one of the mortar joints a few inches from his feet.
The bear could see the other presence through the trees, keeping pace with him as he advanced steadily on the man. As fast as he was… as strong… but like nothing he’d ever seen. He felt his throat quaking, but dared not roar, even with all the anger he was feeling. This other thing was dangerous; he would keep out of its way.
Something… inside him… recognized this other presence, and was suddenly angry, suddenly afraid. The something inside him, that had been inside him all this time, taking him places, telling him things, putting things inside him, suddenly became very, very small.