Crouskey was afraid there might be big trouble here. The water had turned a slightly greenish color; the mist around it seemed to have thickened and was spreading, drifting out almost like the gas dry ice gives off, so that you couldn’t always tell how far up it had risen in the sinkhole.
But unless Crouskey was very mistaken, it was rising by the minute.
Felix Emmanuel was lost. He should never have wandered off the path, but he was afraid one of the company geologists would see him before he was well-hidden in the brush overlooking the mine.
He knew somehow that the sinkhole was going to be very important… he might even get his job back because of it. Before he left the mine, the water down in the sinkhole had changed, just perceptibly, and had continued to change by the second. Became greener, cloudier, and filled with shadows, things in there he couldn’t possibly recognize because the water was so thick now, and dark. But things were moving in there, he was sure of it. Something very nasty was beginning to happen—that wasn’t ordinary water.
And Mr. Emmanuel couldn’t say that he was very sorry about it. Not sorry at all.
There was something… he wasn’t sure… but it seemed to be something trying to be quiet in the woods. Trying so hard you noticed it. A shadow. A cold form. Maybe it was a wind moving in from the north. Or a gathering storm.
These were spooky woods. Felix Emmanuel would just as soon see them all cut down and the brush bulldozed under. He’d always wondered how people could stand to live around woods like these.
He picked up his pace a little, although it was hard. He didn’t think he’d ever been this out of breath.
And strangely, he felt he was running short on time. Whatever he was going to do he was going to have to do soon.
Something… shifted… back off to his right. He turned in that direction and stared for a while, not moving. Nothing. Nothing but the birds leaving the trees slowly, one by one. And that slight, very cold wind.
His right knee was aching; he’d probably pulled it when he climbed over the rock outcropping about a half-mile back. He began to slow down, and felt compelled to hold the knee with his right hand. The underbrush was slightly damp, the leaves and vines brushing his pants legs with broad, wet strokes. He could feel the water precipitating on his lower leg, collecting inside his shoe, drowning his socks.
Something shifting in wet vegetation, rotting timbers being slogged aside behind him. He stumbled and righted himself quickly, but not before a small animal cry escaped him. A soaked frond slapped him across the cheek. He grabbed at it but his fingers slipped off the slick green surface. Now the mist was rising around his shoes; he looked down and it appeared as if his feet had been amputated, his ankles ending in a wet, green-tinted fog.
Again he tried to increase his speed, but it was becoming more and more difficult. His legs seemed to slip into a mud of black humus, wet green vegetation, and the sickening pale green of low-lying fog. He grabbed at the tree trunks for traction, but their hides were too wet, too slick, like gnarled tentacles.
A heaviness in the air. A heaviness moving to his left, then crossing over behind him. He turned quickly, but not quickly enough. The heaviness had moved off behind him. He stumbled as he tried to turn again, and cried out when his grimy fingers grasped a mushy root beneath the fog. It had grown hot in the woods, a tropical heat pressing down on him, threatening to crush his chest and pop his eyes.
The mist rose in columns and curtains around him, green- and blue-tinted, turning to water when it touched leaves and trunks, his skin and clothes. Water ran down his face in sheets, soaked into his clothes, then hung in the folds. A heaviness turning, taking warm air into its mouth, then letting even warmer air out into the woods. The heat trapped its roar, but Mr. Emmanuel could feel the trapped sound shaking the trees.
Faces floated up in the mist, green and blue faces with brown vine for hair.
Mr. Emmanuel’s movements slowed, until he was swimming standing up, his arms and hands and legs floating through the air in graceful slow motion.
Heavy hulk shadowed the trees ahead; Mr. Emmanuel turned to get away. Long fingers attached to loose hands drifted across his face, and Mr. Emmanuel began to cry. But the mist enveloped his tears, drying them instantly, and Mr. Emmanuel found himself weeping a desperate white heat. Mouths with broken teeth opened at his approach. Broken arms dangled as they reached for his help.
A little girl with pale blond weed-hair floated by.
A crowd of voices pushed by on a wave. A tumbling of heads bounded by, trapped in the undertow. Mr. Emmanuel pushed by, his arms and fingers bleeding, cut somehow. On the fog? On the voices floating by?
Mr. Emmanuel looked up. House after house drifted overhead, dismembered by the flood waters and disintegrating rapidly as they descended the valley. Window and door frames separated, disgorging bodies into the gray and green tide.
He knew, then, he could have done something.
He opened his mouth, but only flood sounds escaped.
Fingers at his arms at his legs at his groin at his eyes his eyes.
The last shadow seemed to float over him, black and big as the largest drowning house. He turned to look up, and it knocked him to the ground.
Mr. Emmanuel screamed, the edge of the log breaking his back. His eyes flew open as if on springs. He noted, quickly, that the fog was gone, before the bear pounded his front paws into him again, tearing open a flap of skin, letting the wetness inside Mr. Emmanuel drop out into his lap.
When the bear’s mouth dropped over him, Mr. Emmanuel was convinced it wasn’t a mouth at all, but a storm, a tornado. With jagged glass caught in the fury of its swirling sides.
Reed drove for several hours up one winding back road and down another, up narrow hollows no one but the immediate kin of those who lived there ever visited. Drab women and sun-baked men stared after the truck; they made him nervous, but no one approached the road, no one made any sudden moves for a firearm or a bottle or stone.
He was killing time, waiting for inspiration, waiting for things to settle inside. Waiting for courage.
He was scared.
At times since he had arrived in the Creeks he thought he had come close to knowing what he was dealing with. A bear. A mad woman. Someone’s drunken, guilt-ridden hallucination of a floating girl. But the familiarity they all had… it was getting hard to deny it, however improbable. His father. His mother. His sister.
Craziness. But he knew.
What had called him back here?
Two things he would always remember from his trips with Uncle Ben: Once they had visited a burnt-out patch of forest. A white carpet of ash over everything, trees reduced to skeletal armatures, green sucked up into the polarity of blazing white and charcoal. He’d been peering at the wreckage of a log when suddenly a swarm of emerald-backed insects poured from the blackened heart of it. As if Big Andy were shouting its defiance with this one little gesture. It would always return, its life would be perpetually recreated. It was stronger than anyone could imagine.
And again, the day Ben broke his leg. He had been walking along a ledge of loose limestone and fallen about ten feet. Reed could hear the sickening snap yards away. When he’d scrambled down to his uncle, he’d seen the white bone poking through the skin. And it had occurred to him that bone was what was real, and uniform. Dogs had similar bones, as did cattle, as did fox and beaver and bear. What cloaked the bone was changeable, variable, and illusion.
Reed remembered. His mother touching his father’s cheek, the rage magically subsiding. His little sister singing a magic song until he could almost see a playmate materialize. Reed remembered, and felt something like magic pacing inside him too.