by Brian Hodge
It was eerily silent on the first floor. One by one she flicked on lights, revealing overturned furniture and the milk glass bowl of the brass floor lamp, broken in large pieces. The shade had torn so cleanly that it was unfolded like a scroll, and the painting of the Garden of Eden lay face down on the parlor rug. With her cane she raised the frame to lean against the wall. She hesitated before Amber's closed door. Maybe it was good to leave her in there. It wasn't her daughter who had screamed, and a little prolonged anxiety over what was happening outside her door might make Amber more cooperative about returning the stolen paint. And then she heard faint weeping from behind the bathroom door across the hall.
"Dana?"
"Is it gone?"
Ariel tried the door handle. "Yes. Come out, Dana."
"I can't. Bring me some clothes—my bathrobe …"
But it was going to be a while before that detail was remembered, because when Ariel reached the residents' corridor, the blood trail began. There was a splash on the wall, a ghastly handprint on Beverly Swanson's door, and beyond that an unbroken chain of dribbles and smears on the floor tiles leading to the double windows at the end. Against the darkness she couldn't quite see that the glass was smashed, but the air flowing along the corridor was heavy with the smell of the fields and the woods. So the unholy thing had come in and probably gone out that way. Paavo's chicken wire, it seemed, had been a deadly joke. Ariel rapped softly on the doors as she moved closer and closer to the shattered glass: Come out, come out, little people, wherever you are…. It's all right … the Wicked Witch of the East is gone. And so they crept out, bent and trembling, to take a census and determine who it was they had not tried to save. Only Ruta and Martin remained in their rooms, she refusing to unlock her door, he sitting in his undershorts on the edge of his bed, holding his shoe like a blackjack.
"It sounded like Paavo," white-faced Helen said.
That prompted Ariel to knock forcefully on Ruta's door. From within, hysteria erupted. She had told Paavo not to leave the room, Ruta wailed. It was impossible that her lament could carry very far through the solid oak door—certainly not past the corridor—but suddenly from the heart of darkness beyond the broken window Paavo's thin moan quavered. It went on for an intolerable time, and when it finally subsided, the shocked silence was profound.
"It's playing with its food," Helen wheezed at last.
Ruta's door lock snapped open then and she rushed forth, straight at Ariel, where she dropped like a stone to her knees.
"That's him, that's him! Make it stop!"
"Ruta—"
"He's still alive. Make it stop, please!"
"Ruta, I can't. If it overpowered Paavo, then how can I—"
"No, no. Not it. Him!"
A consensus of pleading looks came to rest on Ariel. Stop Paavo, Ruta meant. Make his suffering stop. A petition fit for a deity.
For just a moment Ariel Leppa looked like the inadequate rag of a woman they had taken her for throughout their mortal lives. Her lips pulsed, her eyes dulled, her fingertips slid nervously in the folds of her robe. But there were no dismissive looks from the major players of her life now, no sly confirmations of her inferior status. This was the moment she had fantasized, the one they had robbed her of by dying.
Another scream from the darkness ended in a gurgle.
"It's eating him," Beverly whispered.
And then Martin Bryce appeared in his doorway, breathless and clutching his shoe. "They must have found Japanese money in his pockets," he said. And then he shuffled toward the broken windows.
Gripping her cane like a baton, Ariel hastened to her studio while the others shrank back into their rooms like mollusks into shells. Frantically she threw Paavo's portrait flat on the workbench. With one pop she had the lid off a can of ordinary white paint. Without stirring, she poured it directly onto the canvas. No need for extinction to dry. Underneath the ghostly gloss, the dust-impregnated vehicle for life was obliterated. Downstairs, Martin Bryce sidled gingerly among shards of broken glass, looking futilely for a way to climb out the broken window. Not many yards away in the darkness Paavo Seppanen's shrieks abruptly ceased.
At dawn, when nothing was sighted from the sewing room window save tattered clothing and dark stains in the dust of the yard, Molly and Dana went out with pitchforks. They went as far as the woods and probed along the brush and also the ditch by the road. And when they started back toward the house, they met something that churned the stark horror of the last ten hours all over again while resonating an uncertain joy. Miraculously it was Paavo himself. On his feet and walking toward them.
"Paavo?" Molly called, raising the pitchfork a little.
He was unhurt, unmarked even. No blood whatsoever.
"She's painted him again," Dana murmured.
And she had.
Ariel had fretted only a minute or two after painting out the canvas the night before. Then she had pulled out a fresh frame and gotten the photo of Paavo and taped it to the top of her easel. For all she knew, there would be two of them on the farm when she finished—one dead, one living. And what if the first one somehow survived? That would be novel. Paavo Seppanens on either side of the dinner table. She would have to tell that fool of a son of Martin Bryce that Paavo had a twin.
But, of course, the first one was beyond reanimation. Whatever was left of him had ceased to exist when she slashed white paint across his portrait. She was all but sure of this. It wasn't like natural-born Amber, who had died in her wheelchair when her nine-year-old self was brought back. The inhabitants of New Eden had all returned from the dead to begin with. Paavo was not a first edition. He was already an extension of what she had done with red dust and paint. All of them Adams and Eves, if the dust was indeed something from God—or whatever else that powder represented in the way of cosmic events and interventions. That it was her father's ashes, she had come to doubt. She had once read of extraterrestrials returning to Earth like caretakers to a garden they had planted. Perhaps the red dust was their seedbed …
So the third Paavo came upon the earth, and he knew nothing of the second, though he remembered the first one, his natural life, which had come to a natural end. The mechanics were such a muddle to Ariel. She didn't want to understand them. She just wanted to move on. And so she told Paavo the bare minimum again: that she had brought him back after his death from a heart attack at age seventy. She had brought him back younger, and he was to be "the man about the place." And then she sent him out to help the others look for his own remains. Let the others help him sort it out if a body turned up, she thought. It didn't.
Later in the day, when Dana and Molly and Paavo returned together and the tenantry of New Eden was gathered, nervous and stunned in the parlor, Ariel attempted to clear the air and instill calm.
"I know you're all upset, but you see everything is back to where it was. As long as I'm here, there's nothing we can't recover from."
"I don't like this … I don't like this," Helen persisted.
Ruta, quiet for once, had already discovered differences in this new Paavo and sat a little apart from him. Kraft Olson stared rigidly at the floor, and when he raised his head he kept Danielle Kramer as far behind his line of sight as possible.
"No one likes it," Ariel said, "but let's not overreact."
Beverly laughed sharply. "One of us was killed. How are we supposed to react?"
"He was not killed"—a nod at Paavo, who sat numb and disoriented from his return from the Stygian darkness—"he's right here just like he was yesterday, and the day before, and the way he'll be tomorrow."
"We don't want to die again," murmured Marjorie. "Even if you bring us right back, we don't want to die. You don't know what that's like, Ariel."
Ariel softened. "That's true," she conceded, "I don't know. And none of you will tell me."
"There's no way to tell you," said Dana, hollow-eyed and listless. "Death is everything wrong. It's—"
"Don't!" Marjorie said curtly.
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br /> "You brought it up."
Beverly waved a hand at them. "Let's not lose track here. This is a crisis of survival."
"I've told you, survival isn't in question!" Ariel snapped. "You should all know that. You should be grateful—why aren't you grateful? Why don't you have faith in me?"
The silence crackled with nervous restraint and fear of imminent danger in Ariel Leppa's magic fiefdom.
"I think they're worried about something happening to you," Molly ventured delicately, as if she were not herself involved. "What if … what if that thing had attacked you last night? Who would paint you back?"
"Me? My, my. Someone is worried about me. Thank you. But nothing is going to happen to me."
"Something could, Ariel," Helen said. "You can't be foolish about that. None of us could paint you back, even if we knew where … where things were, or how to do it. If we tried, we'd end up with something like what attacked Paavo last night."
"Maybe I'll paint myself back when I'm on my deathbed. Maybe I'll leave you a number painting, and all you'll have to do is put the colors in." They were listening very hard, she noticed. "So you don't have to worry about me being around to keep you healthy."
"If you even want to keep us healthy," murmured Ruta.
"'If I want to.' You dare ask that? Even though I've given each of you the ultimate gift of life when you were dead? You still want more—a guarantee, a warranty on your bodies and your health. As if I owe you that. But I had nothing to do with your deaths, did I? You lived just fine without me in the only lives you thought you'd ever have. And now, instead of being sorry or grateful or trusting me, you want some kind of contract. Well, there isn't any. Just our feelings for each other. Our sincere feelings."
"You had something to do with my death." Amber, who had been sitting sullenly on the floor near the arch, looked surprised by her own outburst.
"You were paralyzed and living in misery. I made you better."
"You could make us all better," Ruta said.
"I could. I may. Or I may not. What would you do, Ruta, if you were a young woman again? Run off to the city like you did before? Whore it up for a few years? Oh, don’t look at me like that. You think I don’t know that I'm just a dried-up old crone who never got her chance for a little fun? Well, some of us aren't equipped to get that chance. It's a superficial world, and we can't all be Danielles or Rutas, can we? Anyway, here we are in the encore, and all that matters is what we are inside. Make you better, Ruta? What could be better than this?"
The look of helpless agony became unanimous.
Off to one side Beverly stared poutily out the window and rubbed the age spots on her hands. "What good is virtue untested?"
"No good at all," Ariel said and took a step forward with her cane that seemed to re-center the room. "But it does keep the status quo for the time being. I'm not saying we'll stay like this forever. Forever is a long time. It's amazing how much paint I can manufacture, but it won't last forever. So virtue will get its acid test sooner or later. For now we don't have a choice. We can't have our little situation here if we're exposed before the rest of the world. You all know that. As soon as past paths cross or attention is focused on us, it will just be a matter of time before we're exploited by thieves or desperate people looking for the fountain of youth. Don’t you think I’ve thought about this? We might even be quarantined by the government in the name of science or national welfare or some damn thing they invent. But … if we wait, maybe there will come a time when it can be different. When all the people who knew us have passed away. When we can move freely again. I haven't decided yet. It depends. But we've got all the time in the world."
"All the time in the world," Molly echoed vacantly. "Would you paint our children back, then?"
"I don't like this," Helen said. "Why are we talking about the future? We could all be dead in the next attack by those things out there."
"Stop scaring everyone," Ariel said sternly. "Everyone is alive and well. That's all that matters. This problem will get solved one way or another, and we'll still be alive and well."
"Problem? How is it going to get solved? You make it sound like all we have to do is call up Orkin. How can we be safe now? Is Amber going to undo what she did?"
Ariel turned to look at her daughter, but something in the light glazing across the painting of the Garden of Eden that still leaned against the wall caught her artist’s eye.
"I told you everything," Amber said, scowling.
"Amber says she doesn't know where her artwork went," Ariel informed the room, still distracted by the painting against the wall.
“It was rainy and windy and I couldn't find anything,” Amber maintained.
"Pity," Beverly said dryly.
Amber scrambled to her feet. "I don't care if you all hate me. I don't care. I didn't mean for anything to happen, and you just need someone to blame, so go ahead. That's all you do anyway—sit around and blame people." And with that she stalked out of the room. Moments later her bedroom door slammed.
"Well, at least she didn't call us 'beluga butts' this time," Beverly said.
Ariel saw now what it was about the painting that bothered her. The paint had flecked off where the serpent was. How could that be? Either someone had scraped it off or the paint there had been different, drying and not bonding, or … or what? She wanted to drop down and scrutinize it, but she was talking about how everyone should just keep their cool here in New Eden, and so she couldn't let them see her agitation, couldn't let them know her unreasoned fear—because she hated snakes with a passion! Ariel Leppa had an absolutely irrational terror of things that crawled or slithered. That, as much as anything else, was why she carried a cane: to fend off loathsome vermin that scurried from a baseboard crevice or dripped from a web in the high-ceiling old farmhouse, coming to horripilating life on the back of her neck.
"Everyone is alive and well," she repeated for the third and final time, and when she had left for her lofty inner sanctum, Helen Hoverstein remained on the ottoman, murmuring, "But we aren't alive … not really … not when Ariel Leppa can rescind us any time she feels like it."
Chapter 14
"Say cheese."
If Denny Bryce could have reacted in time, he would have shielded his face from the Polaroid camera. But the flash went off simultaneously with Dana’s warning. Now he stood blinking across the parlor, having just entered from the white blaze of an August afternoon that rendered the flash anticlimactic.
"I wish you hadn't done that," he said.
"You said I should surprise you."
"Surprise me about picking a time for a picnic." He noted the flicker of wildness in her slate blue eyes. "Is my picture so important around here?"
"Ariel thinks so. Visual things are important to a painter."
"Are you telling me she wants to paint me?"
The slate blue grew steely.
"I'll pose with a rose between my teeth, if you want to cash in on the picnic," he added.
"Not a good idea."
"The posing or the picnic?"
"Maybe both."
"Bugs bad today? I don't see the chicken wire."
"Chickens took it back."
"… And then they flew the coop. What are you doing living in a place like this, Dana Novicki? You're young enough to live out in the world."
He had followed her into the kitchen, where she began putting away dishes from the drain rack. "This is my world."
When she turned back from the cupboard, he moved in front of the drain rack. Color rose in her cheeks. Her expression held for a long moment as if to freeze him before he could make a mistake. They could have been focused on a high wire whip-sawing between tandem aerial performers struggling for balance, but then the impulse to take another step faded and the moment passed.
"Your father has some cuts on his feet," she said. "He stepped in some broken glass. I think we got all the slivers out."
And while Denny was digesting that she made some f
urther excuse and slipped out of the kitchen. He stood there, gazing at the heavily lacquered cabinets and white ceramic kitchen sink. Definitely colder, he thought. And he didn't know why, but he had the arrogance to think she was trying not to like him. Something had happened since his last visit. Was it the broken glass? His father had gotten broken glass in his feet how?
Molly was on her hands and knees scrubbing the tiles when he got to the residents' corridor, and she slackened her effort at sight of him, as if to belie that she was removing something. He saw too that the wall in one spot and one of the doors had been scrubbed vigorously.
"An accident, Molly?"
She sat back on her haunches, plump arms going limp. "Your father stepped in some glass. We got it all out of his feet, I think."
"How did he do that?"
She gestured toward the end of the corridor where a Himalayan profile of jagged glass sat in the lower window frame. Denny didn't ask how it had been broken, and she didn't say, but he wondered if he had underestimated Ariel's caution about his father trying to get out a window.
The old man was asleep when he entered the room. He sat down to wait.
Denny Bryce was acting like she was eligible, Dana Novicki thought with mixed feelings. She felt like a decoy around which a live duck was hovering. A decoy because she was drawing him to a woman who by natural age and state of mind could have been his mother, and again a decoy because the muzzle flash of the camera she had used to take his picture hid the hunter Ariel Leppa.
She could not even be sure that she wasn’t technically still married. The Dana Novicki who had died of a brain hemorrhage more than a decade ago would be seventy-four if she had lived. Her husband would also be seventy-four, if he was still alive. For all she knew the great state of Texas had executed him at "the Walls" for murdering his ex-employer in 1986. Probably they hadn't, though. Probably he was still in Ellis outside Huntsville, ostensibly undergoing treatment. As if he could be rehabilitated. The murder had not been premeditated—hothead that he was—so he had that going for him. She had often wished him dead in the past and felt guilty about it, and then she had wished him dead without feeling guilty about it. Now she didn't wish anyone dead. But she didn't consider herself married anymore. She had no desire whatsoever to go back to Detroit Lakes or to see the man who had turned her into a poster wife for abuse.