Steve Tem - Excavation

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.

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.

He felt his belly roil and he turned his head and threw up into the cold fog. Now the stuff coming into the mist looked thick and mudlike, pale green and blue.

Like vomit, maybe. Or poison.

He thought he could hear the men below him screaming, but the mist distorted sound. The men’s voices sounded like crows, maybe, or a machine tearing itself apart.

He watched as the thick liquid surrounded the trees in the mist, swept away mine buildings, tumbled heavy equipment onto its back.

There were houses in the flood, stone and wood debris, pieces of furniture, signs and dead livestock churning together. Charlie saw the twisted wreckage of a bicycle, a dented refrigerator with its insides dangling, a heavy overstuffed chair tumbling end over end.

Charlie knew then why the flood was so thick. It was thick with time.

The flood hadn’t yet spread to the men. But it was close. Charlie watched in horror as they slipped on the wet stones of the embankment, the dense flood of time and memory swirling just below their feet. He was frozen in place, watching. And then he was moving, scrambling down the slick debris toward them, one hand outstretched, the other shredding on the sharp stones as he dragged it behind him for some support. He had no idea what he’d do if one of them grabbed his hand. How could he possibly support them both?

He was close to the men; they were only a few yards below him. He could see now that there was only a handful, strangers, probably the geologists the Nole Company had sent down. The man in front was stretching his arm out, his fingers straining toward Charlie’s hand. Charlie willed his arm longer, and was amazed to see it get closer, closer, but not close enough. He looked into the man’s shadowed face, and as the face pulled out of the shadows, into the man’s desperate eyes. But he couldn’t get any closer. He couldn’t. Any closer and Charlie would have tumbled down the embankment. He couldn’t look the man in the face while thinking that, and gazed past him.

At the wall creeping up behind them with a slowed down roar. Like a wall of flood, debris hanging out of the front of it, houses and farm equipment and fence posts and ironwork and people’s bodies protruding at all angles from the surface of the wall of water. A slice of time.

Charlie stared into the wall. And faces stared back from just under the surface of water. Faces with mouths stretched back and teeth rotted away.

For a moment Charlie thought the faces were coming closer, that they would soon break the surface. And then he would see their eyes. And they, the long-ago dead of Simpson Creeks, would see him. He gasped and pulled back a few inches up the slope.