When they reached the junction of a couple of dirt and gravel logging trails, he could see the town below them for the first time. He stopped short and grabbed her arm.
“Charlie!” She turned on him, enraged.
All the energy, and, curiously, the fear, had run out of him. He could see the worry passing over her face. He turned her to the town and pointed.
A dark lake, thick with assorted debris and strange, writhing shadows, covered what used to be the town of Simpson Creeks. Patches of green and blue and yellow darted back and forth beneath the surface like some sort of underwater moths or fireflies.
“We can’t see the house from here,” she said quietly.
“That’s even lower than the town, Inez.” He squeezed her shoulder. “It would have gone under before anything else.”
“Those people… our neighbors…”
Charlie saw headlights moving off above the town. “Somebody made it! Maybe a whole bunch!” He started dragging her down one of the log trails. “We can meet up with ‘em if we hurry!”
He didn’t have to say more; Inez had already raced ahead of him. Charlie could hear the pounding of his old heart. It filled his head. Likely as not just the sound of it was goin’ to kill him.
As the bear leaped through the window into Reed’s old room, the stalker in the woods started across the marshy, green-shadowed land at a slow plod.
Hector Pierce went rigid on his bed. One of the salesmen shouted, and Joe Manors began to beat on Hector’s chest.
His mother was bringing him cookies. Reed smiled gratefully. He could see her now, her red hair floating about her head as she stood in the kitchen doorway, the dim green light behind her.
He’d hoped he could finish the cookies and have a nice pleasant time with her before his father came down, but he could already hear the old man’s heavy tread on the stairs, his angry voice…
“The boy’s… got teeth, now…” Hector whispered faintly. But Joe Manors was the only one to hear. The face on the bed went slightly pale, the form trembled, then stopped.
“What he say?” the salesman asked when Joe straightened up from the now-still form.
“Oh, nothin’… nothin’. You know… he was just a crazy old man.”
But Joe could not help looking out the window and into the distance where the old Taylor place used to be.
Reed backed against the wall as his father came bellowing down the staircase, black and swollen, sending debris flying through the room. Part of the staircase collapsed on one side as the large man with the red eyes reached the bottom. His lips pulled back from his teeth.
Reed began to moan as Daddy Taylor stepped toward him, his great hands raised to bash Reed’s face.
But a scream sounded suddenly from across the room, and Reed’s mother was leaping on his father, her hair in flames, her pale hands ripping at his shadowed flesh with long, translucent fingernails. Reed gasped as the flames spread down her body and onto Daddy Taylor while the two did their strange, almost beautiful dance around the room.
Reed began to cry as the flames enveloped them. Then he stopped. And looked around him. The two figures were fading rapidly into the shadows of the room. Only a faint stench of smoke, the slight silvery highlights in a corner told Reed they’d ever been here at all.
He crawled over to where they had struggled and felt the carpet. There was nothing… but dirt, a little dampness, nothing else. Dirt and more dirt, all around him. His head seemed clearer now, and he wondered if he’d been hallucinating, dreaming, something… Reed stood up and walked toward the darkness where the staircase should have been.
The stalker looked out of the darkness into Reed’s pale, red-eyed, and sharp-edged face. Agitated gestures. He looked half-dead. The stalker grinned, self-consciously proud of the sharp teeth against his lower lip. Reed should never have left him behind.
He smiled. Reed might not survive that mistake.
Reed examined himself in the darkened mirror. He could not remember there being a full-length mirror in his old room before, but there it was.
He moved closer. His face was streaked with dirt, his matted black hair pushed back off his face so he could see his high forehead. Gleaming white teeth. Filling the mouth. He looked surprisingly healthy.
He was filled once again with a sense of loss, loss of his wife, his daughter, his son. There was a sense of relief. Something had broken inside.
“Carol?” he said to the mirror. “Carol…” He began to cry. “Something… died down there.” He could barely see his reflection through the tears. “I should have drowned… that night of the flood. Now… Carol, something in me died down there!” He cried more loudly, ashamed.
As the moon rose over the trees and fog outside, it illuminated more of the mirror. And then he realized his image was holding something in its hands. But he wasn’t holding anything in his hands. He was not looking at a mirror, he now knew, but at someone else.
The stalker held up his old teddy bear, the eyes ripped out of the stuffed skull.
“You’re the one,” Reed choked. “The part of me that stayed…”
Then the stalker’s long, thin fingers began pulling at the cloth, ripping it, tearing his old toy to pieces.
When Reed looked up, the stalker was beginning to smile.
Chapter 32
Audra…
She peered into the white clouds billowing up around her. The strange, shadowy flood had risen to just below her feet now. She’d climbed as high as she could up the tree; she knew that the branches above her would be too thin to support her weight.
Audra…
She wasn’t sure whether it was a real voice or words she was imagining spinning around inside her head. The water and wet fog distorted sound; her ears felt as if she were on a mountain high above sea level, the pressure building and pushing toward her inner ear.
Audra…
The voice was familiar, particularly when it whispered like that, so softly—soft like a snake slipping through mud. She strained her eyes, looking out at the fog, turning her head to see as much as she could, but still gripping the top branches firmly… mustn’t let go of the branches… they were all that kept her from the secret horrors below.
Audra…
The landscape up here was strange, like the landscape outside a plane window when it was flying above the clouds. Here and there the tops of trees jutted like church spires out of the discolored cloud. She could see the rest of the Big Andy off in the distance, but this horizon looked much different from the one she was used to. It could have been a completely different mountain she was looking at… the wrong mountain. She shook her head. To her north—at least she thought that direction was north, toward the old Taylor place, where Reed was, had been—the flood quickened; there seemed to be a lot of activity over there. And an incredible roaring.
Pieces of wood, light metal, leaves, and all manner of garbage. Some pieces like signs and old furniture touched something now and then in her memory, but she was too frightened to dwell on them much. Because they were drifting past her in the slate-colored water and white cloud, quickening at a certain point, then disappearing over the edge, at that place north of her.
Where the roar was.
Audra…
The whisper was coming clearer to her… his voice, but that could not be. Something touched her foot. She hadn’t even bothered to look down. She lowered her eyes.