Reed finally turned the pickup onto the narrow road that eventually led to the opposite homesite. He didn’t see the old white Studebaker that had been parked on the bend behind him, and which now pulled slowly out into the road.
By the time Charlie Simpson got to the Nole Company mine he knew something was wrong. The sky was much darker than it should have been this time of day, the shadows thicker, and there was a heavy, greenish, corrupt-looking fog settling into the woods on either side of the road, and creeping into the road with long, sick-looking fingers.
The fog seemed to be spilling over the top of the cut, like steam from a bowl of soup. The fog seemed to originate from the mine itself.
It took Charlie an hour of stumbling and clawing his way up the incline to reach the top of the cut, just above the entrance to the strip mine. He knew the road would have taken twice as long.
He took a long look down into the mine.
He couldn’t see a thing. The entire valley here seemed flooded with the roiling waves of corrupt mist. Occasionally shapes would bob up and down, but he couldn’t make out what they were. They had no more definition than clouds. He had been an avid cloud watcher as a boy, and it seemed as if his imagination were giving them shape: upraised hands, frantic arms, heads pushing up out of violent waters with open, screaming mouths.
Inez ran down the slope to the ridge, faster, faster than she could ever remember running before. Dodging trees effortlessly, their playful outstretched leaves and branches slapping her body, greeting her. She opened her mouth and began to sing… a tuneless tune. She thought that soon she would be flying. The Nole mine gaped a few miles ahead, and she knew that if she just kept running like this she’d sail right on over it, right on over the Big Andy itself, over Four Corners, over her old beau Adam, all the way out to China if she wanted.
Her old friend Janie would make it all possible.
Janie was just ahead of her now, her long, bright red hair flowing back over her, behind her like a young girl’s bridal veil. Janie was the fastest thing Inez had ever seen, just like a young girl again, her pale feet simply gliding over the ground as if they weren’t touching down ever at all. Descending the misty, darkening hillside like a bright white bird with scarlet wings.
Inez tried her best to keep up with her, pushing herself hard and hardly aware of the aches in her side, her legs. It was a miracle! She almost caught up a few times, but each time Janie soared ahead, her hair suddenly catching the twilight and blazing brighter than before.
Inez was almost alongside her; she reached out to touch Janie’s flowing gown. Janie turned her face slightly. It was an ancient face, the oldest face Inez had ever seen.
But just as quickly she blazed again, the lines vanished from the face, the scalp burst into flame, and Inez’s discomfort faded. She’d follow Janie anywhere; she’d be young like Janie again. She soared. She glided. Inez imagined she could feel her own feet leave the ground. The mouth of the Nole mine lay ahead, singing to her. Filled with bright, beautiful, moon-reflecting cloud.
“What is it… what you say?” Joe Manors leaned over Hector anxiously. The old man was having a terrible time breathing. His chest convulsed. He spit up and drooled onto the bedclothes.
“Teeth!” he shouted, and grinned.
Joe pulled away. The old man had bitten the inside of his mouth. Bright red blood gleamed on the tips of his teeth; tiny shreds of skin glistened in the cracks.
It was a half hour after sunset when Reed began to work on the stairwell. The whole staircase seemed to be packed with dirt, as if a giant child had filled the well by hand. Packing it level with the floor of the second story. Reed had thought merely to get a start on the project that evening, but soon found himself lost in his work, the darkness in the house growing until he had to light a lantern to see by.
The work went more quickly than it should have. He was occasionally cognizant of the strange texture of the soil. The particles seemed too far apart somehow; there was too much air space in the mix. In minutes, he suddenly realized, he had moved several feet down the stairs.
The oval portraits on the walls of the stairwell were of his aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. Several generations of his family, their faces seemingly as vivid as when the photographs were first taken.
“You come from a long line, boy… a great line!” his father said into his ear.
Reed whirled on the dirt-covered staircase and stared at the still earthen wall on his left. Two shiny points of light gleamed at head level. He thought he was seeing his father’s eyes.
Panic-stricken, Reed attacked the points with his spade. The entire wall of dirt collapsed at his feet.
The shiny points were two projections of a brass lamp that had hung, he now remembered, between the staircase and the living room. Apparently he had broken through into a cave within the mass of mud that had filled the ground floor of the house. The room smelled wet. Silken cobwebs along the walls glistened within the dim lantern light. Something—insects, maybe—moved within the darkness.
Reed’s stomach ached. He was afraid. Desperately trying to control the fear, he forced himself to visualize what it was that terrified him so. Faces, he realized. He was afraid of faces. With that knowledge came a hulking, toothed horror.
Ben Taylor stood on his front porch with shotgun in hand. The sky looked bad: black and moving too fast. He’d never seen a sky quite like that before.
It looked like a storm, he figured, but he had no idea what sort of storm clouds like that might preface.
And now fog was rolling up to the edges of town. They’d never had fog this close to town before, this far away from the creeks. He couldn’t even see the road leading down to the Pierce place. It was smothered in soiled cotton.
He’d give Reed an hour. Then he was going after him.
Audra knew she shouldn’t have moved away from the Studebaker. She’d wanted to get a better look at the house; Reed was in there now. But then the fog had come in, quick as an eye blink; she hadn’t even noticed it before it had her surrounded.
The Studebaker was behind her somewhere in the fog.
And something else had entered the container the fog had made here between the trees. It was in the fog… with her. She couldn’t hear it moving… there was just this odd shifting in the white plumes off to her right. This slight darkness moving in the clouds. This charge in the damp mist. But she knew it was here, only a few feet away. Once the fog broke ahead of her, she knew she would start to run.
And maybe—she wasn’t sure yet—she would scream.
Chapter 30
Once Charlie’s eyes had become accustomed to the dull mist below him, he discovered he could make out some of the landscape trapped inside—trees and a little scrub vegetation, jagged cuts through topsoil and solid rock, the mine’s utility buildings, earth-moving equipment—and the figures of several men struggling to climb the embankment.
He figured they were the men sent down from the Nole Company to check up on Willy’s sinkhole. Plus maybe Mr. Emmanuel, and a few workers like Joe Manors. At first Charlie thought they’d be up on top of the ridge with him in no time—but then the mist started changing, or something came inside the mist, joining it.
A pale and ghostly flood rose slowly within the mist, like well-aged white wine in a dark and dusty bottle.