An old door floated by, a greenish blue mold trapped in the ornate carving. A rat scurried to the edge and chittered like an enraged sea captain.
A tumbling of plow blades and barbed-wire balls and shattered wagon wheels and slate-colored barn walls in the waves.
Ripped apart and smashed further into smaller and smaller pieces. The flood was a great grinder, gnawing every lost thing from the valley into images too tiny to remember.
He could just make out the vague outlines of human forms in the waters, but they appeared to be holding back, keeping hidden. Or waiting.
Occasionally Charlie would see wreckage he thought he recognized; something about the shape of a piece of wood or the color of some metal would remind him of objects, landmarks in his own past, artifacts long lost that he knew could not be here, in this place or in this time. But the shapes and colors still nagged at him, and he strained his eyes in the gloom to identify them. The yellow wagon he had as a boy. The old Ford his father owned, had to save years to get, and then wrecked after only a week on one of those narrow winding roads in the mountains above the Hinckey place, trying to make a delivery to somebody who probably couldn’t pay him anyway. Charlie’d recognize that radiator and those headlights anywhere.
It was as if Big Andy had been hiding that stuff all these years, deep inside him, and now was coughing it up like an old man with a diseased gut. You can’t get away from your past… his daddy had always said that. He should have listened to his daddy more. You might ignore your past for a long time, for years, but something would always happen to scrape the scab off, dig away at the ignorance you’d piled over it, and shove that mother lode of guilt and pain right up in your face.
Something light brown, twisted, patterned like a cobweb, was drifting Charlie’s way. Her mother had made that bridal veil for her… the whole family had been so proud…
“Mattie…” he choked, and turned. He wasn’t about to see what floated up after it.
Flames were dancing out of the trees, racing toward the edge of the flooded mine. Charlie stood still, entranced by their terrible beauty. Dancing. Dancing… as they grew closer, he knew it was a woman, her head on fire. Her feet weren’t even touching the ground, and she moved so swiftly she was soon only a few yards in front of him, increasing speed as she neared the dark floodwaters, and rising ever so slightly in the air.
At the last moment Charlie saw that Inez was right behind her, reaching, her face frozen into a white sheen as she began to enter the damp fog bordering the waters. He reached, and pulled her to him. They fell, tumbling to the edge of the flood.
A scream made them both look up. The woman with flaming hair twisted within her blazing tresses, suspended several feet over the flood, her bright face a maze of cracks. A naked form flashed out of the woods to their right and plunged over the embankment, her arms outstretched, face exploding into a scream.
“Doris…” Inez mumbled groggily.
Charlie shielded his eyes as Doris’s form struck the flaming woman. But the expected burst of fire didn’t come. The two ran together like a wet, dripping sheet, pulsing phosphorescent green and orange within the folds. They fell into the water, the mass turning over slowly, spreading out into what seemed to be a thin layer of pale, melted skin before the darkness swallowed any remains.
“It’s going to kill the whole town, Charlie,” Inez said quietly.
Charlie didn’t answer her. He was watching the fog. It was beginning to drift away from the mine, entering the trees a little bit at a time, moving toward the road into town.
And the dark flood was creeping up on the embankment, following.
Reed walked out into the living room of his childhood. Little had changed. There was the old radio in the corner, the one on which he’d listened to shows like “The Lone Ranger” and “Jack Benny.” His mother would come right through that shiny wood door beside it and bring him freshly baked cookies. That perfume of hers that smelled like a mix of several kinds of flowers, some of them not at all compatible. And beneath that: the aroma of freshly ironed and starched shirts hanging up in the kitchen. He could almost see her face, her hair a glowing nimbus from the kitchen bulb showing through it into the darkened living room.
She was always nicer to him with his father away. When his father was there, she was much too frightened. Fear was her magic, he realized, not the sex. Fear made her seem sensual to his father. He had always waited for the day when she would be fed up with Daddy Taylor’s treatment of her, and then maybe she’d slap him. Often Reed had even fantasized her kicking Daddy Taylor out of the house. It had been a silly fantasy; it could never happen.
Reed wished Carol and the kids could have seen this, so much as it had been when he was a child.
He felt half-asleep, groggy with the day’s work. Perhaps removing all that dirt had been more taxing than it seemed. Had he really done all that? He couldn’t remember. He slumped into his father’s favorite overstuffed chair. It was a bright blue, and the lace doilies his mother had made for the arms were as neat and white as ever.
He could not connect the moist smell, however, with anything he was now seeing. He wondered if it was the smell of his mother’s cookies baking.
He felt peaceful, at home. The radio played quietly. The dust lifted like a shroud into the ceiling, then was absorbed completely into the creamy white plaster.
The announcer’s voice on the radio suddenly grew garbled and indistinct. He decided to get up to adjust the radio’s knobs but found he could not. He called his mother to please come fix the radio. He could hear her at work in the kitchen, the pots banging, the oven door slamming…
He watched in fascination as a shadow crept into the room from under the shiny kitchen door. He sat quietly, pleasantly relaxed, as the shadow turned floor, walls, and ceiling a dim greenish color. His mouth began to fill with moisture.
The bear came roaring out of the fog-shrouded woods, his gut on fire, his throat filled with an agonizing rage that gnawed at his muzzle.
The old homeplace rose out of the mud before him, and he started forward, his wild eyes fixed on Reed’s window just above the new ground line. He was going to beat that son of his, beat him within an inch of his life. He looked down at his bear body, and gloried in its strength. His eyes burned.
But he seemed to have trouble getting traction. He looked down: the ground was turning to mire. Pools of water were slowly spreading across the floor of the hollow.
Ben readied himself to move to higher ground. It was a strange thing. There was now a good eight feet of water inside the fog covering Main Street. He could hear the buildings creaking, groaning: one wall of the old hotel had started buckling inward.
Yet there was no water where he stood. He could have walked right up to where the fog ended, rearing over him like a wall twenty feet high. He could have touched that wall, and found a flood contained behind it, waiting there, with a depth far over his head.
Yet there was no water where he stood.
Faces floated in and out of view there, staring at him, speaking to him even though he couldn’t hear any words.
Just a hum of mixed voices. Like drowning bees.
Things had fallen apart at Inez Pierce’s boarding house. Several of the tenants had seen the fog out near the town from their windows, and the dark water rising up inside it, and vague, shadowy things within those dark floodwaters no one wanted even to try to identify. They’d run down from their rooms on the third floor, but soon everybody was back up there, crowding the windows, watching the progress of fog and flood, speaking in whispers, wondering what it might all mean.