Steve Tem - Excavation

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.

“It’s the final times come down upon us,” someone said. No one answered him.

Somebody, an old-timer, mentioned the flood of ten years ago. Several of the men left in an old wagon, others on foot, on their way down to Four Corners or seeking higher ground. No one knew where Inez might be.

Joe Manors and two salesmen staying there overnight had their hands full with Hector Pierce; it looked like he’d finally gone off the deep end. Joe could tell this time was different; it scared him… the way Hector’s eyes looked, the colorless quality to his skin, the way his mouth moved, Hector wouldn’t be coming back to them out of this one. He was going to stay in that place, wherever it was.

“I tell ya he’ll drown! Can’t count on his momma and daddy to save him, no sir! They’s gone crazy since they died! That other boy’s been watchin’!”

‘’You gotta stop him! He’s gone crazy!” one of the men shouted at Joe.

Joe looked down at the old man bucking and snarling on the bed like a wild animal. The sight both saddened and disgusted him. He found himself wondering, vaguely, if he still had bullets for that gun of his.

Somewhere the phone was ringing. Reed sat up suddenly, reaching for Carol, and closed his hand on the neck of his old teddy bear, its eyes torn out. The teddy bear that shouldn’t have been there at all. He howled savagely and threw the stuffed toy across the living room. It bounced off the now-silent radio.

The phone still rang, ringing a line into his head, wedging a slowly growing headache there.

He stood up to answer the phone. Dark, noxious green filled his eyes, his mouth, his lungs. He could hardly move because of the green holding down his legs. By a strong exertion of will he lifted one foot, then another. He turned slowly, drifting his arms up and out as he made his way toward the phone by the staircase.

It was like moving through gel, swimming. It was like running in a dream.

The bear moved swiftly across the damp ground, splashing through the spreading marsh, bellowing in rage and excitement as it approached the familiar window, and the being within tried to forget in his dim and crude way that something else was back with the girl in the trees and fog, now and then watching from the forest’s edge…