by Brian Hodge
"That's because you're always to blame," Ariel said. "Do you expect me to accuse Ruta Seppanen of riding a bike through the flower bed or Marjorie Korpela for thundering around on the roof?"
"That wasn't me!" A twitch of a smile broke her anxiety at the thought of Mrs. Korpela prancing around on the roof. Everyone could see she had a limp.
"Do you think this is funny?"
"Then what were you doing up there?"
"It wasn't me."
"My dear, you are the only one who could have made that much noise. It sounded like a herd of wild animals. All that flapping and scratching—oh. Dear God. It wasn't you. Amber, what did you paint?"
"I didn't."
Raspy and desperate now. "WHAT did you paint?" Hands encasing the child's shoulders, squeezing, strong as a butcher's. "What did you paint, I said! May God damn whatever it was—tell me! What did you paint?"
"I didn't, I didn't." Little girl's dissembling tears. It was transparent now, and either she would gut it out or cave in. But as soon as her mother had the paint she would punish Amber, and punishments weren't the same anymore. Amber didn't know what her mother might do. So keeping the paint was protection against something really bad happening to her.
"Amber," said Ariel with sudden pathological calm. "You're going to give it back."
Silence.
"… And you're going to tell me: what did you paint? Was it one thing?" Pause. "More than one?" Voice rising, eyes blazing. Then a gasp of revelation and dismay. "Where are they?"
"Where are what?"
"The paintings. Where are they?"
"I don't have any."
This was almost true. Most of them had blown out into the fields. She hadn't been able to find them—except for a couple, one of which was completely soaked because it had been lying in a furrow of the vegetable garden after the rain.
As soon as she had heard the screams and the clawing she had known what was happening. It was lightning and thundering outside, but inside the cupola her paintings were drying. Which meant that one by one they were coming alive. And some of them not one by one. Some of them were coming alive together: animals with fangs and tusks, and ten-legged spiders, and the scarecrow.
Mrs. Seppanen kept babbling and crying because she must have seen the scarecrow falling, and there were wings flapping and wood splintering.
The next day when Amber had gone up there, she had seen that they had shoved right through the side of the cupola. There were big white gashes on the basswood tree too, as if something had leaped from the roof to the trunk. She had thought there might be dead things left inside the cupola, but when she dared poke her head in, it was empty, except for splatters of blood with bits of fur stuck in them. The pictures, of course, were gone, and that was when she had searched for them in the fields and found only the two. She had also found the actual remains of one of the things that had left the cupola alive. It was more like a stain than an animal. All puddly and with the eyes floating around and one red claw. That one had come from the painting that was partly ruined in the rain, and so it was partly ruined too. And the other painting she found—that was the scarecrow. It was probably messed up now, or maybe even gone, because the colors had all run on the paper and it sort of made it glow. But it was just a scarecrow, and scarecrows didn't hurt people.
"What do you mean you don't have any?" Ariel demanded about the paintings. "I want them, Amber. I have to have them. You understand why, don't you? You know what you've unleashed? I need the paintings to undo what you've done."
Amber was shaken and uncertain because her mother looked so intent, with her short gray hair all choppy like that and dark circles around her eyes. "I don't have them, Momma," she delivered with shudders.
Stalemate.
Amber spent the rest of the day trying to look innocent and avoiding her usual haunts. She didn't dare climb to the cupola. Downstairs everyone seemed to know she had something to do with the noises on the roof and the thing Mrs. Seppanen had seen falling off the lightning rod. Mrs. Armitage was spying on her, and Mrs. Swanson was giving her hard looks, and even Miss Hoverstein—who had never been married and always treated her like she wished Amber were her daughter—was avoiding her. She didn't care about Mrs. Armitage. Mrs. Armitage was a big beluga butt her mother sent after her every time she did something wrong. But Miss Hoverstein was nice and read a lot of travel books and told her stories. Like the one about the Taron pygmies, who lived in a place called Myanmar that used to be called Burma, and how they were all going to let themselves die out. Amber liked stories about faraway places and people who were sad and struggling to survive. And Mrs. Swanson could be nice too. Like when she watched the soaps on TV and told Amber everything that was going to happen or did her torch singer imitation while Mr. Seppanen played the piano.
The worst time was dinner. There were mashed potatoes, but Amber just played with her food and put one elbow on the table because no one was talking to her. Ordinarily she liked old people. They gave you stuff, and even if they were hard of hearing, they listened or pretended to. But no one asked her what she had been doing or said she had "grown a foot since yesterday." She put both elbows on the table. Still they just munched away, everyone minding their own business and leaving one by one when they were done eating, like they had suddenly remembered something they had to do instead of sitting around talking about the olden days or what was happening on the news.
"I'm going to go to school this fall," Amber said when it was just Mr. Seppanen, Mrs. Swanson, Mrs. Korpela and Miss Hoverstein left.
That got their attention. They knew she couldn't go to school. And then Mr. Seppanen got up and stood there in his khakis with the high-water cuffs, holding on to the back of his chair, and said, "Maybe they'll put some sense into your head."
Pretending not to notice, Amber turned to Miss Hoverstein. "Tell me about the pygmies."
"I don't remember," Miss Hoverstein said.
"Yes, you do. You said they're all just one family that lives in the mountains and all their babies are misshapen or retards."
"I didn't say 'retards.'"
"Tell me, then."
"You've just said it."
"No, tell me the sad part. How they decided not to make babies anymore, because the world shouldn't have them."
The others were looking at Miss Hoverstein now, a funny glint of curiosity and something like fear in their eyes, or maybe it was worry. And Miss Hoverstein seemed almost to speak to them instead of to Amber. "The Taron pygmies of southeast Asia say that they don't belong in the world, so they've chosen to make themselves extinct. There are only twelve of them left."
"Cheery," Mrs. Swanson said then, pushing back from the table. "I think I'll go pretend to smoke a cigarette."
Wordlessly, Miss Hoverstein followed.
So then it was just the two of them, Amber and Mrs. Korpela, and that was how the game began. Because no one could make Amber get out of their sight. She would be in their face until they paid attention to her. She would be like poison. If they wouldn't talk while she was there, she would hang around until they left.
Mrs. Korpela had once been Amber's mother's boss at Kresge's or some place a long time ago, and Amber thought that was strange. She wore suits and dabbed her lips when she ate and never badmouthed anyone. Amber leaned on one elbow again and chewed mashed potatoes with her mouth open and twiddled the handle of her fork, but Mrs. Korpela paid no attention. Then Amber remembered. The limp. Mrs. Korpela was always sitting there when you showed up for dinner, and she would wait until everyone else left before she got up, because she didn't want anyone to notice her limp.
Well, she would just have to talk to Amber if she didn't want her to see. She would have to say something, like ask her why she wasn't eating, or why didn't she go outside and play while it was still light. It wasn't really being cruel, because Mrs. Korpela was being cruel by giving her the silent treatment.
And suddenly the straight-backed Marjorie Korpela, for whom qui
et, unobtrusive dignity had gotten everything she had in life, edged her seat back in a series of feeble thrusts, stood and sidled out from her prescribed position like a bowling pin rocking off its mark. For a moment she leaned there, looking straight ahead. Then she said in a very high-pitched voice, "You're just like your mother."
Amber looked down at her plate but couldn't blot out the halting progress to the arch and thereafter the lisp of an uneven gait retreating on hardwood floors. I'm not like my mother! she screamed inside. I hate Mrs. Korpela. I hate everyone. I hate Mrs. Armitage and Momma and … and—
But not Daddy.
It might have been because of the lameness that she thought of him just then. Mrs. Korpela limped and her father was in a wheelchair. Her father was even worse off than Mrs. Korpela, but he had never stopped talking to her or been cruel. Late in the day she went up to see him. She snuck up to the room her mother kept him in and knocked really softly and then opened the door, because you didn't expect him to answer. And then she walked around the room, touching things and stopping at the window until she was sure his eyes were following her.
You had to do that because it was hard to get his attention. She didn't think he saw too well, but except for her and Mrs. Novicki, no one ever tried to find his glasses for him. Other times, though, his eyes were all gluey and wide and she thought he was looking right through her. He was still big. Even in his wheelchair he was big, but he had lost his shape, sort of like a pyramid of corn sitting out in the rain that gets rounder and rounder by the day. His lips were all dry too. And when he whispered you could hear his tongue like it was sticking to the roof of his mouth. Sometimes he just nodded and grunted and only said hello and good-bye. But still he listened.
Except for today.
Today she didn't think he was listening at all, even though he looked right at her. She told him lots of stuff, all about the cupola and taking the paint and, finally, about the things she had painted. But he didn't seem to hear. Then she put her hand on the back of his chair and leaned against the wheel. "Tell me about the red corn," she said. "You know, about the gangsters in the tunnels and how their blood turns the corn red."
But he just stared through her, and she felt a little scared and maybe hurt, because she didn't have any friends and friends were the most important thing. That's why she had painted the animals. So she would have friends. She wanted Sir Aarfie back. But trying to paint him back had been a mistake—a horrible mistake. She could see that now. It had gotten out of hand, because she lost most of the paintings and now there was no way to undo them, like her mother said.
She left her father to his depression and moped around all evening, and when Molly told her that her mother wanted her to take a bath, she didn't protest. She went into the bathroom and took off her clothes. Then she climbed into the old tub and turned on the faucets, stamping a little in the splash until the temperature was just right. She looked in the soap caddy and behind her on the curved rail for the rubber plug, but it wasn't there. Sometimes it dropped onto the floor and rolled under the tub, so she got on her hands and knees in the cascading water and leaned out to see. It was there, all right. Behind one of the feet. She snatched it up and turned back to jam it into the drain, and that was when her heart took one gigantic beat and stopped.
Because she wasn't alone in the tub anymore.
It came out of the drain. Even though it looked too big to fit down there. Crimson, with huge eyes and dagger fangs and too many legs—more than eight, just like she had painted it. Her mother hated spiders and crawly things, so she had wanted them to have lots of legs. Only now this one was zigzagging around her like a bullet, trying to stay out of the water and looking at her and crouching to spring like she might be an island. She tried to scramble up, but as soon as she planted her foot the scuttling thing stopped and faced her, and by the way it raised its fangs and front legs she knew she had better not move again.
Because it could leap. She was sure of that. It looked like a hideous cartoon with its funny bent legs, but she bet it could jump up on her bare flesh and bury those oversize fangs in her throat or her heart or—and this frightened her more than the other possible landing sites—her eyes. She thought somehow that its great goggle eyes were focused on hers.
Maybe it had venom, and maybe it could shoot the venom and blind her. She had seen that in a documentary somewhere—a great fanged spider in India, or some place like that, that blinded its prey with a stream of poison. Just like that. This one was bigger than the spider in India. As big as her hand maybe. She drew back her face, and it seemed to rise up like it was tracking her.
The impulse to scream (were spiders deaf?) rose in her throat, but she fought it down. They must be able to pick up vibrations, because that was what they did with their webs, and she was in a tub that sounded almost like a bell when you hit it, so if she screamed the spider was going to know it, even if it was deaf, and it would probably strike just like they did when a web vibrated. She couldn't jump out, because she only had one foot under her and by the time she thumped around and got her other leg unbent it would be too late.
The red spider was sitting right where the tub sloped up at the back. It was crouched to spring because the water was coming in faster than it could drain out. And it was coming in hotter and hotter. In a few seconds they were both going to be scalded. So it came down to who was going to move first. The spider wasn't wet yet, but Amber's toes and ankles were starting to sting.
And then the spider nudged up the slope a little. Tried to nudge up the slope. Because it immediately slid back some, and then its fangs came down and it rotated like the faucet handle and began to drum its legs. There was no way it could get out. Maybe if it had leaped before the level got too high, but it slid all the way down now, half in the water, and that was her chance. She cleared the tub with barely a ripple.
The spider's legs were turning over like a combine harvester and going nowhere, but as the water rose, it rose too. She was going to have to kill it, she knew. Kill it and not tell anyone. They would all blame her for whatever didn't die outside the house—and inside now too, she guessed. She had a chance to take one off the list. Probably some of the creatures she had created would kill each other, she thought. But then again, maybe they would mate. No, they were too different, weren't they? They couldn't get together and make babies.
But they might.
And spiders had lots of babies. Thousands and thousands, some of them. So now she groped down into the tub and found the rubber drain plug and jammed it home. But then she thought What if the water got so close to the rim that the red spider could make it out? So she spun the faucets shut, and now the thing began bobbing around the edge, its front legs still going in a furious blur, and its awful eyes bulging out so that no matter where she stood, it seemed to be looking at her.
Standing there naked, she felt like it could touch her too easily, so she wrapped a towel around herself. Then from the other side of the tub, she began splashing water at it. But each time she drove it under, air bubbles seemed to protect it. Again and again it swirled to the surface. So of course she made bigger and bigger waves. Which was a mistake. Because the third one actually lifted it out of the water onto the slope just inches from the rim of the tub. And if she thought the legs were going fast before, now they were like egg beaters. She jabbed at it, gauging whether she could knock it back. But the eyes seemed to spark with something she didn't like. So then she blew on it. Blew and blew and blew, trying not to lean too close. And whether that made any difference or not, the red spider suddenly lost momentum and slid back into the water.
She wondered if it was getting scalded. It hated the water for sure, but it didn't seem affected by it. How could she kill it? She thought about throwing her shoe or hitting it with the toilet plunger, but she would have to drain the water to do that, and if it got onto the flat of the tub again, it might try to leap.
The toilet plunger, though—what if she got the rubber cup around it? Th
en she could push down and squash it. It wouldn't know about toilet plungers, so it would probably want to crawl into the cup on the end.
She dashed to the sink where the green wooden handle with the black rubber cup sat underneath. Returning to the tub, she took dead aim. But right away it knew. She could tell by its eyes. She had made it intelligent by painting those eyes, she thought, and now she would just have to stab it. One quick stab and she would have it pinned to the side of the tub.
Bracing her feet and taking the green handle in both hands, she thrust. But quicker than she could follow, the thing was over the black rubber rim and flying up the wooden shaft. She had just enough time to fling the plunger away as she uttered a short cry.
It fell into the water and the spider more or less clung to it, a rolling island of wood. But Amber didn't like the possibilities. The plunger would soon touch the side of the tub or drift near the overflow drain near the rim, and that would turn it into a bridge.
She had another idea. There was a gray plastic pail under the sink, and if she could somehow scoop the spider into the toilet, she could flush it away. It had fit through the tub drain, so it would go down the toilet. She didn't know where toilets led, but it had to be away from the house. So she raised the seat and grabbed the pail and tried to act like she wasn't going to do what she was going to do, because the spider seemed to know everything.
Her heart was beating wildly when she confronted it.
It knew, but what could it do? She scooped the pail over the surface. There was no way it could not be caught in her trap this time. She never gave it a chance to get its bearings. Without even straightening the bucket, she let the momentum carry the red spider and the water out of the tub and into the toilet. One big wave with a flash of crimson, almost like a goldfish, going down into that little hole. And the water was enough to make the toilet flush, which it did. A frothy swirl and a single gulp that took the level down to the bottom of the bowl.