Dust of Eden

by Thomas Sullivan

  "Our father, who art in heaven, thy will be done, thy will be done."

  Kraft prayed not to God but as a protective mantra to drown out the croaking echo inside him, because otherwise he really would lose his sanity. Yes, yes, he remembered – oh, yes, he remembered everything of his particular hell! The green hellscape itself. The obscene carapaces of gangliate things that lashed across the void. The bloated, feral entities that smote the walls of limbo like rapacious predators waiting at a food gate in a cosmic zoo. Had he really been dead, or to put it another way, had he ever really lived? Mad thoughts floating in a mad universe, simply because all possibilities must exist . . . navigating the zero coordinates of Chaos and Night . . . seeking to connect, to adhere to something . . . two being infinitely better than one, because two is mutually corroborative . . . giving rise, therefore, to the demiurge of the universe so as to make more evidence of being, because otherwise YOU DID NOT EXIST!

  So he had heard the croaking voice that had followed him from the grave, a groaning ship's-timbers voice that for all its terribleness implied that there was a way, a light, a form of real existence. And the voice had told him what he must do, the gateway he must open and how to serve if he wanted to leave the darkness that otherwise awaited him. Only, for a year now he had been surrounded by vivid color and light, and he had let himself doubt that there ever had been a voice. Voices were sounds you heard through ears, and he had ears now and they no longer heard the deep, resonant croaking. Voices were articulated chains of thoughts and feelings. Voices were not groaning ship's timbers that erupted into consciousness, gone before they registered, heard almost as echoes. But the memory of soul terror is soul deep, and he listened to Ariel and dared not speak. As if he could fool not just her but the giver of mandates.

  ". . . But deliver us from evil, from evil, from—"

  His chin was down, covering his throat, and his eyes were fixed on his hands when he saw the smoke begin to curl out from under his fingernails. It was just a wisp at first, fed from bubbles moving up from the quicks. But suddenly it foamed into the air, thick and yellow, and the flesh of his fingers turned white-hot. He opened his mouth to scream and something thudded softly onto the carpet. He did not want to see it, because he could taste gouts of blood now, warm and salty, and his voice was a wheezy ululation, all vowels and no consonants. No, he refused to believe it was his tongue lying there on the carpet, torn out by the roots. His insides were not crawling with vermin, cankers were not eating through his lips, sucking things were not draining away his vis vitae. These were his nightmares—imagination turning in on itself. Tomorrow he would be whole again. And the tomorrow after that. Only, he was on borrowed time and the tomorrows could not go on forever, and when they stopped, as they inevitably must, it was right back where he had been, where he was doomed to be, forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever—UNLESS . . . he accepted the mandate.

  "Our father, who art in hell . . . thy will be done, thy will be done, thy will be done."

  Chapter 6

  Amber saw him. He was just sitting there outside her bedroom door when she decided to make her move. By that time she could hear her mother on the warpath, and everyone was circling around the house like leaves in the wind. He hardly ever talked and he couldn't remember things, so she thought he probably didn't know what was going on. And anyway, she had to move her stuff super quick, because sooner or later her mother would figure out who really had stolen her paint, and then she would come to her bedroom like Speedy Gonzalez.

  Amber didn't move everything to the cupola the first trip because she needed a practice run to make sure she could do it with one hand and wouldn't crumple the paper or drop the brush or spill the paint. But she should have moved the paint first. Leaving it behind was stupid. Because that was when someone else got into it. She still didn't think it could've been Mr. Olson, but you never knew with adults. Especially old ones like that. He could've got right up and gone into her room and taken some, and then she would never know, because he wasn't there when she came back for the second trip. The screw-cap jar from the kitchen was just like her mother's jars, and that kept the paint from sloshing out when she jumped for the pipe and then the chimney. It coated the whole side of the glass by the time she got to the cupola, but nothing leaked out. That was what was funny, though—and why she knew someone had been in her room. Because the glass above the paint line was already smeared when she had come back for it. So someone had poured some out.

  If Mr. Olson took it, he probably didn't know what he was doing. He probably thought it was ketchup or something. And now he was gone, and it occurred to her that maybe it was good that he had the paint, because if her mother found him with it, she would blame him and stop looking.

  So that was how Amber Leppa began to paint sitting high above her kingdom, and for the next quarter hour the evolution of life on Earth made startling quantum leaps. There were spiders with huge eyes and fangs and ten legs—call this new class decarachnids—created because her mother hated crawly things. Almost everything else had batlike wings, because it occurred to her that they couldn't get off the roof if they couldn't fly. But by then she had done the very first thing, and it didn't have wings. That was a scarecrow, and she hoped it could climb down the lightning rod. She had also discarded a few attempts at painting Aarfie the Wonder Dog, which, because they were painted from a specific memory, weren't shaping up just right. In fact, they were very wrong. Mutant beasties, no less. Natural selection was a crapshoot. And all of these things necessarily shared one link in their ascendancy from the disparate elements of the cosmos: they were bright, bright red.

  Sunshine blazed between the slats, dismembering the face of the child into composite strips of light and shadow. Radiant blonde hair . . . murky alabaster brow . . . scintillating emerald eyes . . . smoke-gray button nose . . . pink lips the hue of sugared rhubarb . . . chin sharp and dark. She gazed out in regal reflection at the world, trying to decide what else it needed in order to become exciting and fun. And all around her on the rotting platform, the papers she had painted were drying, starting to thicken . . . rustling to life.

  The first spiders she had painted were drying the fastest, because she had gotten them down to quick circles (for the bodies and the eyes) and daggers (for the fangs) and crooked lines (for the legs). But where had they gone? The breeze really zipped through when the branches of the basswood tree swayed, and her paintings were shifting around a little. So she knew without actually seeing that the spider pictures must have moved behind her. She twisted as far as she could but still couldn't tell, and if she moved her legs she would brush some of the others paintings, so she didn't turn around completely. Just enough to be pretty sure that the papers were still there. And she thought she caught the red too, only there was more of it than at first. Your eyes could do that, she had noticed, when you strained to see out the corners like that. You got all teary, and then whatever you were trying to see would blur into other shapes. But then she made a super effort to twist, and that made the extra red go away. She even thought she saw it disappearing into the dark, damp corners of the cupola where it joined with the rafters in the attic below.

  Enough, she decided about populating the world. She had better get back into the house so she could look innocent when her mother came looking for her. And she wondered if Mr. Olson had been caught with the paint he had taken yet. He couldn't have taken much, because there was still plenty left in the jar. Just that smear, like a finger had been dipped into it.

  Kraft Olson. Standing in the parlor in front of the painting of the Garden of Eden. Trembling. Especially his right index finger—TREMBLING. Because it looked like it had been severed. Crimson from knuckle to nail. And because it was stabbing out at the painting, slowly, slowly, trying to muster the dexterity to touch it right where it must.

  Ancient things—incredibly ancient things from where he had spent his death—had persuaded him. ("Our father, who art in hell . . . thy will be done,
thy will be done, thy will be done.") They had shown him the bedrock of the universe. Traveling down beams from the moon in hideous, giggling packs, erupting out of the stench of buried death, bubbling through swamps and sewers and fecal decay, they came at night. He had seen the horrors of the grave, been on the wrong side of the river, breathed the ethers of miasma and effluvium floating out from the black islands in the green mist, and if he wanted to escape the howling abyss, they offered the only way open to him. Because it was too late for him to follow the light.

  So he reached out to the painting of the Garden of Eden with his wet crimson finger and touched it just there, like God and Adam reaching across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Touched it and followed the helical coil of the thing, tracing wet paint over the form that wound around the Tree of Knowledge.

  Done!

  The slithering viper was unbound from its pit now. As good as if Ariel had eaten the apple. Because what was an Eden without a serpent?

  Chapter 7

  Denny Bryce's thoughts were drifting with the ball scores, and the whole thing happened so fast that he could have been mistaken. One minute he was tooling serenely along the empty road in his Tercel, and the next his heart was flopping around his chest as he fought for control of the wheel. The car fishtailed just before he hit the creature, just before he thought he hit the creature, and so he wasn't sure whether the jarring was an actual collision or maybe—sweet Jesus, let it have gotten away, whatever it was—the suspension system tying up in some way.

  He slid onto the shoulder with the wheels locked and made a washboard stop just shy of the ditch. A glance in the mirror showed empty road behind him. Out of the car, around to the front, onto his knees he went, inspecting for damage. The left side of the bumper was smeared with viscera and a swatch of fur—red fur. Very red. What the hell was it? He peered back up the road. It was smoothly capped. He hadn't seen an animal flying off to the side after the collision, so it still must have been moving on its own. But, Lord Almighty, it appeared to be already injured before it ran across the road: bloodied and misshapen and . . . and—he thought, and this was really crazy—it had only three legs.

  Long, skinny stick legs.

  But then how could you tell much about something that was running? It had to have been wounded before it loped out into the road like that, though. Maybe it had been in a fight with another animal. Only, it was big enough where you wouldn't think it would fare so badly. Unless the fight was with another dog. That was it. Chewed up by another dog. Or hit by a truck. And the red fur, that was just blood.

  He pulled the few hairs off the bumper and saw that they were dry and smooth. Not bloodstained, just red. Redder than a red fox. Of course, you couldn't be sure with such a small sample. But that was one horribly mutilated pooch. And yet "mutilation" wasn't the right word either. Because it was smooth, almost featureless. Denny had seen the eye, the sharply pointed ears, and one more thing he was obviously mistaken about.

  He could have sworn it didn't have a mouth.

  There in the sunshine of a pastoral midday, Denny Bryce sensed an unseen actor just offstage and twisted around suddenly. He scrutinized the underbrush beside the shoulder of the road. Then the trees. No squirrels, no tattletale jays, no grasshoppers or butterflies. In fact it was very still. He wanted to go back and look for whatever it was he had hit, but something was warning him: Get back in the car!

  No way for a rationalist to act, he told himself.

  He stared hard at the embankment, but the feeling persisted that the stillness meant just the opposite—an invisible turmoil. It was like one of those puzzle pictures where you searched for hidden animals. Was he picking up bits of some nearly discernible form in the underbrush, hearing a faint patter? Nyet. Nein. Nonsense. Turning in a complete circle, he crossed the road and stood on the edge of the ditch.

  Some kind of gossamer-like vine was entwined through the embankment, he could see now. Up close he could detect that its green, heart-shaped leaves were faintly trembling like the skeins of a vast spider web. He looked toward the spot where the creature had crossed in front of his car. Dead still. The leaves stretched like ivy, unbroken as far as he could see. And then he saw a ridge appear in the glossy green bank and begin to ripple toward him. Exactly like an ocean swell it came, lifting and accelerating with a rush. It was the acceleration that finally got to him. He jumped, turned and skipped to the car.

  When he dove into the front seat, he slammed and locked the door. Then he felt silly. The wave or the shadow, whatever it was, did not pass him. He craned around to look and saw the same even green ground cover as before. A breeze, that was all. He had let himself be mocked by a breeze.

  It was only another half mile to KNEAL, and when he arrived he was surprised that the stagnancy he had sensed on the road seemed to reach this far. He got out of the car and stood beneath the willow, rubbernecking the branches of all the trees he could see and the roof of the farmhouse and the window where yesterday he thought he had seen the face like his dead sister's before the fire had scarred Tiffany for life. It felt like aftermath. Whatever had happened up the road seemed to have happened here as well. It was like hunting season where the first shot recoils through the woods and everything freezes and you know that the next shot will bring pandemonium.

  "So, did you bring my cigarettes?"

  He looked up just as the screen door banged the jamb. It was the brightly dressed erg of a woman who had warned him not to have his picture taken—Beverly Swanson, her name was. She smiled effortfully and for once neither of her eyeteeth was smudged with lipstick.

  "Sorry," he said, reaching into his shirt pocked as he strolled to the porch. "But I think I've got your glasses."

  She slid off the blue pearled pair of spectacles she wore and, with a jeweled finger, pressed the bridge of the glitter frames he handed her to seat the stems over her ears. "So it was you. I'd pegged your old man."

  "I found them lying around."

  "You don't look like a kleptomaniac."

  "What does a kleptomaniac look like?"

  "Like your old man. Martin collects things as if civilization is on the verge of collapse."

  This time Denny didn't deny it.

  "Quite a ladies man," she added.

  "Dad, a ladies man?"

  "Lets you know how he feels, that's for sure."

  "Uh-oh. What's he done now?"

  "Nothing James Cagney wouldn't have done."

  "I don't get you."

  "Well, they'll tell you inside, if it's worth telling. I'm not a gossip. I came out here for cigarettes, and you don't have any."

  She was a gossip, but she had learned how to control the flow of information to disguise that fact. "What kind do you smoke?" he asked about the cigarettes.

  "Anything but chocolate or peppermint. Do I look fussy?"

  "You look elegant. Like you might use a cigarette holder."

  "Aren't you the sweetheart, telling a wart of a woman things like that. I’m not surprised, seeing as how you’re the son of a ladies man. If you want to humor me, get something without filters and enough nicotine so that I don't bust an artery sucking the damn things."

  "I'll do that."

  "And don't worry about your old man. Everyone's upset about last night, and I guess your dad sensed that. It made him edgy. He's lost, poor guy."

  "What are you talking about? Upset about what?"

  "Cat burglars. Or maybe just cats. Last night something yowled on the roof and fell off. Ruta swears it was a red scarecrow trying to climb down the lightning rod. But that woman thinks she's gang-raped once a week by horny aliens, so who knows what she saw."

  Denny exhaled a laugh. You had to like this woman.

  "Mr. Bryce?" Someone calling from the shadow of the screen door.

  "I won't forget the cigarettes," he said and passed into the house.

  Molly faced him with the assurance of an accuser.

  "Did Beverly tell you?"

  "Tell me what?"


  "Your father hit one of the women."

  "What?"

  "With his fist."

  "You mean an actual punch?" She looked at him condescendingly, and he added, "I mean was he pushing or swinging?"

  "It wasn't ambiguous; he looked like a boxer. Your father doesn't like to sit for photographs, does he?"

  "No, but—"

  "The photograph was when he started to get testy. Then when Dana tried to get him to take a shower, he hit her."

  "Is she all right?"

  "He left a mark."

  The big woman looked at him with her cartoon-perfect button nose and large brown eyes, and Denny got the mandate. "All right," he said. "I understand. What was the woman's name—Dana? Let me apologize to her, and then I'll go talk to my dad."

  "She's doing laundry in the cellars. Second door past the kitchen. Watch the steps."

  Cellars? With a plural? He shouldn't be surprised, he thought – a farmhouse as old as this.

  The narrow steps were cupped and worn to velvet, and the side walls leading down were damp stone mottled with runes of mildew and mold. No handrail. Hauling baskets of laundry up and down would be a feat for a British charwoman, and Denny pictured a stalwart female with a yellow brick for a face and a right cross that could have dislocated his father's jaw. The light in the cellars banked from the left at the bottom, and he found himself on the hard dirt floor of a storage room lit by the splintered glare from a single naked bulb. It was dusty and oily and dank, and the temperature was at least twenty degrees cooler than that of the level above. The opposite end of the storage room funneled into darkness that emitted a steady churning. This must be the washer, of course, though in the context of the bowels of the house it sounded gastric and digestive.

  A half dozen steps across the dirt floor and he was groping through the vague illumination of the passageway. Curiously, it had a kink – right, right, left, left – around some hidden substructure in the house before it guided him into the moist chamber that held the washing machine and three slate set tubs. The ogress of ablutions had her back to him as she worked in the middle tub with a stick, but she had ankles and calves more like a Swedish Cinderella than the Brit charwoman of his expectations. And the way she jumped when he spoke suggested a certain frailty of nerves.