And still he walked carefully here, listening for the sudden fall of a ball, or a jack-in-the-box accidentally jarred to action because of a spring wound too tight when there were a child’s hands to wind it.
Chapter 7
The old dog stretched his body as far as he could alongside the hickory root, trying to get the kinks out, get his bones working, loosen skin that had tightened from hours baking under the afternoon sun. One eye opened slightly, then the other a bit wider, and he stared at the dark doorway leading into the back of the store. He saw the man opening the door, a wide grin on his face… his man… carrying the can of water for Buck.
But then he was gone. It was dark now, cooler; the man had left a long time ago. Buck snorted. More and more the old dog knew he saw things that weren’t there.
He hunched his shoulders and began pushing up his aged frame. Then stopped. Sniffed the air, knowing vaguely his nose didn’t work anymore. But he still sensed it… something… was wrong. He growled softly to himself, then rose to a standing position and looked around the yard.
No changes here.
The door to the shed began to creak. Buck turned swiftly and barked. The branches of the tree were swaying, the dark moving swiftly over the ground. Air moving around Buck’s stiff shoulders… moving the shed door back and forth. No problem here…
But something was wrong. The old dog fixed his eyes on the dark beyond the fence. Trying to see with the weak old eyes… see through the dark…
Something was out there.
The bear moved quietly through the brush. He knew this place. But he had never been here. More and more there were human beings inside him, and their dwelling places, and he was seeing some of these dwelling places outside him now, here, in this place. He did not understand and it made him angry. He growled low in his throat and would have roared, but somehow knew he dared not roar in this place.
He sniffed the air. Something… ahead of him. A picture came into his mind. He would have stopped, turned around and run away. But this time he was confused. A picture he saw inside him of a friend. And another picture of the same thing, but an enemy. He was confused and it made him very angry.
Forgetting the danger, he roared. Then he charged.
Buck swung around to face the fence, the dark and the roar coming across it. The hair rose up on the back of his neck and he suddenly found his own roar.
A few buildings away, Ben Taylor was having a nightmare, moaning in his sleep. In another house, Alice Parkey bolted upright in bed, listening to the night with widening eyes. She poked her husband vigorously with her fist, but he would not wake up.
And on the top floor of Inez Pierce’s boardinghouse, her brother Hector sat up in bed with two words on his lips. “Bloody teeth!”
Chapter 8
Something that had to be done… It took him only another day to decide.
Reed left the campus feeling rather foolish. Dr. Simms couldn’t understand why he was resigning; all Reed had told him was that he had to go home for a while. For an awkward moment in the old man’s office Reed had wanted to tell Simms the truth—he thought that maybe Simms would understand—but he was able to stop the urge. Dr. Simms liked him; Reed didn’t want him thinking him crazy.
He had no idea how long he would be away from Denver, knew he had to make some arrangements, make sure the kids were all settled, had everything they needed, something, but could not even begin to think about those things. Carol would have to manage. Things were moving fast, overlapping, transforming. A dam had broken inside, and the waters were creeping higher.
It had suddenly become so easy to make a decision. But he was still, for some reason, reluctant to leave this place. Leave his family. His family.
Most of the afternoon he sat in his car parked on the edge of Sloan’s Lake, just west of the city’s center. There were library books in the front seat with him; they were likely to go overdue while he was gone, and the branch was only a ten-minute drive away. But he was finding it strangely difficult to give them up. With their library stamp, their warning of prompt return or the levying of a fine… they tied him to this place.
The clouds were graying, the dark falling swiftly. He found himself peering into his rearview mirror repeatedly, anxious in case someone crept behind him. His black hair—”Dracula hair,” Carol had always called it—hung down into his face in long, stuck-together strands. He should get it cut—he was looking like a wild man lately. With his pale face and perpetually bloodshot eyes, he probably looked much the vampire.
There were a number of cars around; it was a favorite spot for necking. And cruising: on weekends Seventeenth Avenue was virtually a parking lot. The cops had started ticketing for tassels and flags hanging from rearview mirrors to discourage the cruising, and a riot here was threatened and worried over most every Sunday. He could see the tower of Lake Middle School on the far side, the St. Anthony’s Flight-for-Life helicopter landing atop the tall hospital building on his right. Pollution hung in the air beneath an inversion, the sunset suspended in the dark orange layer of cloud like an overdone egg, the entire mass congealing, seeming to drop lower with the weight.
The lake had come about when a farmer back before the Civil War was digging an irrigation well. He’d found water, all right. When it finally stopped running, the valley was full. They’d had boat rides and a big pavilion and circus animals here throughout much of the nineteenth century, all because of this mysterious gift of water. Reed had never heard where it all came from, if the farmer had hit an underground stream, or what. Maybe no one knew. It was odd to think about that. It made you want to watch your step—no telling where you might break through to. The Earth had its own, secret life, and it didn’t consult people.
Something he still had to do. He had something to take care of in Simpson Creeks. He seemed afraid to leave and afraid to stay.
Had it really been his father on the phone, his mother?
The urge to go and the urge to stay. It had begun to rain. Water rippling down his windshield, taking the light with it, melting his face and car and drawing it all into the lake.
He’d never liked driving in the rain. There was something less than real about it. As if you were driving through someone else’s dream—things weren’t quite as familiar as they should be. The sides of buildings melted into the dark street, and pedestrians seemed to flicker in and out of focus as they made their way in front of his wipers.
As he waited at a light the rain began to fall harder, then it seemed as if a gray wall had suddenly descended around the car. And in the roar he thought he could hear first his wife, then his two children, calling for help. He didn’t want to listen to them; he didn’t even want to think about it. He gripped the steering wheel, and the calls intensified into the car horns prodding him from behind.
He just began driving. They used to enjoy that, he and Carol and Alicia and Michael. They’d start by going up and down side streets they hadn’t explored before, vaguely seeking a house or a lot they might move to someday. As the Denver metropolis stretched its wings it left areas, pockets that were open and green, almost rural. If they could find an area like that, made private with large trees and bushes, and so situated that more urban kinds of development around it were unlikely, then they could have the best of the city and the country.