by Brian Hodge
There was so much more to learn, and she had barely begun to experiment. The subjects wore the clothes she painted on them and came to life in the settings she chose. She always re-created them in the studio—that was the birthing chamber—but she could have recreated them anywhere, she thought. She had been extremely careful to let it happen just the way it had the first time when Amber's voice woke her up. In fact, she never watched. She left the studio and listened for the sudden steps or the tremulous cry, and then she presented herself, and the person knew instantly who it was that had brought them back. Ariel saw it in their eyes—a complex look she was still deciphering because of the glints of cunning and fear and pleading. She had brought them back from the grave, and they knew already that she had the power of life and death over them.
It was the clothes that made her understand she could paint inorganic things into existence as well as organic – that the power in the paint was creation per se. So she had made things happen in the fields and repaired the barn too. Should she paint chickens and cows and sell them, she wondered with a flicker of amusement. Should she paint vegetable gardens already grown and flowers in bloom?
But for some reason the thought of painting nonhuman subjects spooked her, and so now, except for rudimentary needs, supplies and repairs, she was very cautious about creating mere lifeless things. As if this might be tampering with unknown consequences — deus ex machina. So she still drove to the local strip mall once a week.
People were the substance of her life, not things. She knew people. This was her sphere of injustice to set right. A very small sphere. She wouldn't, for instance, paint back JFK. But she could, if she wanted, she thought. She could change history; she could solve a lot of problems or, perhaps, create unforeseen cataclysms. But …
Why don't I paint myself younger?
That night she went so far as to make a charcoal sketch on canvas of how she might look. Melting the flesh that sagged at her throat, tightening the corners of her eyes, softening the discolorations where her skull was starting to thrust through her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. She had a foolish urge to carry the sketch downstairs and stick it under a certain someone's nose—
"Is this better, Kraft? Do I make it to the top of your list if I look like this?"
But she had to recognize that the inertness of his feelings for her had been conditioned over a lifetime. Still, he was a docile old man now, confused and lost. He would never be more susceptible than he was now. She should talk to him plainly, try to reprogram him, and if his mind could be purged of all the old reflexes and negative associations, then maybe she would see about painting them both younger.
Leaning the sketch of herself against the studio wall, like a number painting waiting to be filled in, and resisting the impulse to check her appearance in the mirror, she negotiated the house to the room of the man she still loved.
The suave Kraft Olson of yesteryear might have risen smiling when she entered, but this one lowered his chin slightly, like a cornered animal protecting its throat. She wondered if he would have made that protective little nod if Danielle Kramer had come in.
"Hello, Kraft," she said very softly.
"Hello."
"Do you remember my name?"
"No."
"Molly says you remember lots of things." He was sitting in the chair, and it annoyed her to see his wonderful eyes go dull and flat in the lamp light. "If you really don't remember anything, then I suppose it won't matter what I say now, because you won't remember that either."
She dragged a bentwood chair slowly across the linoleum and sat knee-to-knee with him, and when she had his slightly askance gaze locked in, she took a long shaky breath.
"We've known each other for over half a century, Kraft, and I've felt the same about you the whole time. There is no one else in your whole life who can say that."
He could have been watching paint dry, for all the effect her confession had.
"You know, I've still got the Valentine card Mrs. Dulmeir made you give me in fifth grade," she said. "Do you remember that? Everyone had to give everyone else one of those little heart-shaped Valentines she brought in, and you tore mine up in front of the boys after school. You were very good at throwing cold water on me, Kraft. You tore my heart up, but I kept yours…."
She smiled a melancholy smile, while he maintained the barely tolerant look of a dog sitting in a tub of water.
"… So you see where we are, my dear Kraft. Of all your Valentines, I'm the sole survivor. In fact, you owe your very existence to me. I think maybe you know that. I think you remember just like the others that you were once dead. And if you don't, then I'm telling you: I brought you back. Not that I had any illusions."
She had to assume he understood her and recognized the truth about their miraculous existence. Yes, he must have, because otherwise he would think her completely insane for saying what she was saying, and surely she would be able to detect that in his eyes.
"You could decide to love me, Kraft. You could work at it. I brought you back. I can make us both younger. Was I so bad before? I was devoted to you. I gave you my loyalty. Give me yours. Well? Talk to me. How am I doing?"
Horribly.
She had emasculated him, then demanded that he want her. The stone lioness of ultimate justice crouched inside her on the verge of making a thinly veiled ultimatum. But at last she took a deep breath and said, "Think about it, Kraft."
Well, that took care of that, she thought, making her way slowly upstairs with frequent pauses to slide her hand up the banister. So what now? A complete personal makeover with miracle paint? It was too late for humility, but it was absurd to go through with the portrait. The others in the house would laugh behind her back. Ariel Leppa's desperate attempt to turn herself into a slightly overripe centerfold. What was her purpose anyway—to change the returnees to her life or to be changed by them?
And then she switched on the studio light, and it looked almost the same.
Almost.
But the paintings stacked one behind another were not lined up precisely as before, and the sketch she had just done of herself leaned at a different angle against the wall. She hadn't locked the door because she had thought everyone was asleep. Clearly someone had been waiting their chance.
Slowly she circled the studio. The dampness that had sprung to her eyes as she left Kraft's room glazed to ice as it came to rest on the glass jars. Something she saw there made her insides begin to shear off. She would never have left them staggered like that. The containers that held her paints had been disturbed.
A thin cuticle of red rose to the lip of one glass jar as if some of it had been poured out. Slowly she unscrewed the cap and peered inside. It was almost empty. Just the coated sides gave the illusion of a full jar. Not seeing red began to make her see red.
Who?
The red itself was a clue. Like makeup. Like the blush of youth. Ruta, she thought.
She stooped over the stacked paintings, flipping them like file folders until her long fingers found Ruta's portrait and yanked it out. Back to the bench she took it, scrutinizing every brush stroke, tilting the canvas to let light expose any fresh paint. But there were no touch-ups.
Who, then? Molly? For the child with cystic fibrosis?
Molly had no artistic ability whatsoever. But maybe the game was to steal a little at a time – one color – hoping it wouldn't be missed, and then when a full palette was possessed, the thief would take it to another artist.
Something flared hotly inside Ariel, something she hadn't known was smoldering there. (Thou shalt have no other artists before me!) So now she would have to make a change. Root it out, Ruta out. Or Molly, if it was she. Sad to have to make a display of punishment and fear, but someone was challenging her, defying her! The first sin had been committed in New Eden, the first blasphemy.
"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 dea
th, 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.