It had always seemed to Charlie that the links in the food chain were unusually close here, the dance of victim and predator so interwoven that one began to blur into the other. Roles were reversed or exchanged. One thing becoming another over and over again—all life was like that, Charlie guessed. It was kind of nice and kind of frightening at the same time. It made it easy to imagine everything becoming animate at one stage of existence—ancient trees shifting their roots in preparation for a stroll, or a patch of insects and moss flowing slowly over a rock like some undersea ray.
Fungi dotted the woods, mushrooms of all different kinds; from the road they looked like jewel encrustations, or shiny balloons, or colorful pillows sewn to the ground, trees, rocks, anything even remotely physical. They appeared from nowhere, and could cover a log virtually overnight, or vanish just as quickly. One time in high school Charlie tried to learn them all, but finally gave up. He could still remember a few—hen-of-the-woods like yellow coral, the milky ones, lots of them, and all kinds of the giant variety (boletuses they were called) with red and brown, pink and yellow caps, like sinister dwarves. Of course the pillowy things were only the fruit—the tiny network of tubes that ran under the ground from the fungi covered the forest floor like an eerie net, rotting everything it came into contact with.
Then there was destroying angel, pure white, one of the deadliest mushrooms in the area. His cousin Winnie ate some of those when she was five, and her parents and relatives had all prayed desperately the Lord would take her soon. Sometimes when Charlie was out in the woods her agonized screams would come back to him, echoing strangely through the conifer walls.
As a boy Charlie had seen a giant water bug stick its snout into a frog, paralyze it with some kind of secretion, then slowly proceed to suck its guts out. Later, when he’d had time to muse on the implications of that, he’d become terrified. The dark woods on the edge of the Creeks took on a new meaning for him. The woods weren’t always a safe, nice place. The lesson had taken a long time to learn. As a young man it didn’t matter so much; he’d brave most anything. But the fear just seemed to settle into him as he got older. He didn’t go into those woods much anymore.
As Charlie drove by Inez Pierce’s boarding house on his way into town, it looked as if no one there was awake. Mist off the Creeks still clung heavily to the large maples and oaks clustered around the house and the numbers of lilac bushes Inez loved so well. Above the line of trees the windows stared out at the road with steel gray panes. Charlie used to like the silence, the ever-present quiet in the town. But there seemed to have been a slight change in the character of the silence, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something trembling, ever so slightly, in the stillness. He didn’t like it. He gunned the Ford’s aging motor and spun toward the incline leading up to the town proper.
Inez Pierce stared up at the ceiling; she hadn’t been able to sleep all night. She heard the far-off sound of Charlie Simpson’s pickup and turned slightly to the window, but she didn’t really have the strength to look out. She was faintly surprised. She’d never felt so tired in her life. But she was getting old, she thought. She still had some of the young girl in her: the rounded cheeks and the dark shock of still-black hair in front of all her gray, and she still moved more like a young girl, fluidly—nothing like the way most of the old women she knew walked. But time still took its toll; that was pretty much a law, she suspected. When she looked at the clock, it was running past six. She groaned; another late morning start.
It was worry over her brother Hector keeping her up. Ever since they found him by the creek, half-drowned and mumbling nonsense out of his numbed face, he hadn’t been the same. The confusion was much, much worse. And he couldn’t seem to manage to climb out of bed at all. He had the physical ability; she’d cared for enough sick people in her time—father and grandfather and two uncles—to know when a body just couldn’t stand up. There was nothing physically wrong with Hector; it was something in Hector’s mind. He just couldn’t stand on his two feet. One morning she’d been so exasperated with him she’d tried to force the issue. She’d gotten Joe Manors, the miner who lived on the third floor, to help her pull him up out of bed and stand him up. She was sorry she’d done that, but he’d just made her so mad.
Hector had scared her bad. When they got him up on his feet he began to shake like he had the palsy—though far worse than any palsy she’d ever seen—moving his eyes around like he was spastic. “Get away! Bbbb… ear!” And it wasn’t anything physical; she was sure of it. He’d been almost hysterical with fear. Poor Joe hadn’t known quite what to do, and had almost dropped Hector on the floor.
She could hear her tenants stirring on both floors above her ground-floor bedroom. Wasn’t much you could hide in an old house; sound traveled too well through the loose and softening boards. She supposed she should get up and start fixing them all some breakfast, much as she hated the idea this morning. She just hadn’t been herself lately, and for the first time in her life since her father died, she found she didn’t enjoy taking care of people. Something funny about the weather, or maybe it was just changes in her because of age. Whatever, things seemed vaguely out of whack, unbalanced. It made her agitated and cranky.
Perhaps some handsome elderly man would come by one of these days and take her away to his big house in Knoxville. Could be. She chuckled aloud and climbed into her quilted slippers.
Reed’s cold was worse, much worse. He felt terrible: his nose aching, chest and throat inflamed. As the plane neared the Kentucky state line, he’d developed a bad cough, a cough that had two stewardesses immediately at his side with alarm in their faces, the elderly black man next to him pounding his back and making solicitous comments. It was embarrassing, but he’d appreciated the attention; he’d been scared, and didn’t want to be alone.
The cough had gone, but the skin across his chest was sore. Needle pricks raced up and down beneath his shirt. He’d had two stiff drinks, then a third.
It seemed strange how peaceful and safe the ground looked from up in the air. He’d always been a little scared of heights; he would have thought the ground would frighten him as the plane passed over at an angle. He would have thought he’d be thinking of the ground rushing up to meet the plane and tearing it apart. But looking at the ground from this distance, it was hard to imagine anything untoward occurring within those stretches of rolling green, those luxurious swatches of trees. Several times he thought he’d caught a glimpse of the Big Andy Mountain above Simpson Creeks, but he knew that wasn’t possible—he was much too far away. But there were ridges in the distance, crags and rough places, that seemed to hold latent within them the resting-animal shape of Big Andy. Some said a bear, others a muskrat or a beaver or a deer lying down. Uncle Ben used to say the mountain was named by an early settler who thought the mountain looked like his Uncle Andrew lying down, and Ben would kid Reed about when he was going to go out and find a mountain to name Big Ben.
It suddenly occurred to Reed that he might not have any place to stay once he got to the Creeks. He had no idea if his uncle still lived there, or if he lived at all, for that matter. Inez Pierce had had a boarding house and hotel, but that had been years ago, and it might not have survived the flood.
They hit an air pocket and Reed suddenly broke out into a heavy, chilling sweat. His chest seemed to collapse in on him; his eyes burned. He thought he was going to throw up. The place was drawing him on—he could feel it—something like an open, sucking wound. Who had called? Who had started all this? Someone who hated him, but as far as he knew he had no enemies anywhere.