Steve Tem - Excavation

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.

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.