Steve Tem - Excavation

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.

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.

Her father’s gnarled fingers were creeping spiderlike up her lower leg.

Audra…

She screamed and kicked. She caught one finger against the rough bark with her shoe and heard it snap like a dead branch. The others spasmed and curled and uncurled nervously like the legs of a wounded insect. She started laughing, then, recognizing the hint of hysteria in her voice, she bit her lip, hard, to make herself stop.

Audra… Softer now.

She’d have recognized the hands anywhere.

Touching her hair, clasping her arm—too hard—when he wanted to make a point, when he wanted her to give in to him. Submit. Her father’s hands. The rest of his body so weak-looking, sickly. His face so pale. Only his eyes and his hands ever showed color. The hands were ruddy, with large, gnarled ridges of skin over the knuckles, and a tracery of great blue veins down the back so that they looked like dead leaves or roots left too long in a damp place.

Touching her, running fingers up her leg. Audra…

He had given her the cafe to keep her near him, to keep her from going away with other men.

To keep her in his hands.

It made so much sense… Doris hadn’t been his favorite after all… it had been her. Audra.

She screamed and kicked and stamped and flailed at the hands. They shook, and the blood pooled in the palms, briefly, before washing over the knobby wrists and descending the emaciated lower arm. But still they persisted, bloodying the bottom cuff of her slacks as they pulled their way up her leg.

She kicked a final time before leaping from the tree reaching as far as she could for the next one, a slightly taller tree, larger branches, only a few feet away. She screamed as she fell.

The scream stopped, abruptly muffled as she dropped into the churning fog.

At the moment Audra was leaping from the tree, Joe Manors had just gotten the last occupant of Inez Pierce’s boarding house onto the roof of that old building. Including the sheet-wrapped corpse of Hector Pierce—Joe just couldn’t bring himself to leave Hector behind. Later, if there was to be a later, they might never have found the body.

There were eight of them left, all huddled near the middle of the roof, and all wide-eyed except Joe, who was much too tired for his fear to show. He wondered, with only feigned interest, if Old Man Pierce had built a strong roof. Certainly, it was going to be tested.