Steve Tem - Excavation

Reed had spent much of the morning digging into the area in front of the house, at first not even bothering to look through the gaping window cavity into the darkness there. He stripped away a band of earth maybe five feet square and six inches deep, not carefully, not scientifically, just anxious to get it over and done with. His eyes were running, his nose clogged, which made the work miserable. Periodically he would find something, pocketing a few things but throwing almost everything away after a cursory examination. He’d lost patience. Now his project seemed a ridiculous waste of time. The possibility that a vicious crank had made the call that had brought him here now seemed more and more likely. He quit by noon and went to rest under the twin sycamores at one side of the clearing.

As a child he’d spent a lot of time under these trees, yet never had they seemed so large. He felt himself lulled by their swinging, their drifting branches, leaves swaying as if floating in water. Before he fell asleep he wondered briefly, how high the flood waters had risen up their trunks that long-ago rainy afternoon.

The bear recognized this place… the structure. A moan escaped him, and it was as if the moan didn’t belong to him. He drew back from the clearing, suddenly terrified. Eyes turning this direction, here, then there. Moaning. Drawing back again.

Then he saw the man lying under the tree. Still… as if dead. Something about him… he knew. The bear moaned. Then he saw the slight rising and falling of the chest and something felt different inside. He growled, suddenly angered, then the anger was gone.

Something inside him. Something seeing out through his eyes. Foglike. He stared for a long time at the man.

And could not move.

Reed awakened to dimmer light and at first thought he had slept through until nightfall, and that something had gone wrong. But when he sat up he realized it was only mid-afternoon; the sun had just moved some across Big Andy, and tall trees were blocking the light. He turned his head and stretched.

Something had changed.

Something had altered here, ever so slightly. He spent a long time gazing fixedly at the land surrounding the site and at the old house, then scanned the border of trees slowly. He got up and walked toward the house, trying not to think about it. Something had changed, and he knew he would never know exactly what.

Reed walked up the gentle rise that now served as a ramp to the second-story window. The casement was cracked and splintery, but all the glass, even the smallest fragments, was gone. He took a careful look behind him at the area, strange and not as he remembered it… maybe because of the new angle. This window had once led into his bedroom.

Outside his window had been his mother’s flowerbed. White and yellow and purple pansies. They changed color every year, they had felt magical to him that way. And with their facelike shapes. She’d planted the flowers there just for him. Now they were at least eight feet below the surface… but the house had moved, hadn’t it? He would never be able to find the exact spot. The location of the flowerbed was lost forever.

Reed wondered how a woman who seemed able to do so many things could be so helpless. He used to be angry with his father for slapping her, belittling her, but as he got older she made him mad too. That made him a little ashamed, but she was so weak sometimes. Once when his father was chasing his mother—slapping at her, trying to grab her hair and jerk her back—she’d run behind Reed, expecting him to protect her. He’d been only ten years old, and when his father reached them… he’d looked so crazy… Reed had been terrified. He could never forgive her for that.

Reed stepped through the window into gray shadows and fallen plaster.

Scavengers had obviously already carried away anything of value; his room was almost bare. Except for a small dust-covered lump in one corner.

Reed could taste bile coming up in his throat, but he walked over to the object anyway, reached out his hand to touch it, even as he wanted to bolt and leap back through the broken window into daylight again.

He picked up the dry, soft, fur-covered form, and turned it over.

It was a teddy bear, his old teddy bear, and it could not be here. He was sure he had lost it years before the flood.

His father used to say he was too big for a toy like that. But Reed knew better. The teddy bear had always seemed like a smaller, passive version of his father, something Reed could beat against the floor but that would not hit back.

Something Reed could hold.

The teddy bear stared up at him, but with wide holes full of sour-smelling sawdust. The shining, dark glass eyes had been ripped out of the teddy bear’s face. But Reed had never touched those eyes; they’d been intact when he’d lost the toy. He was sure. Someone else had ripped them out.

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.