by Brian Hodge
Nice men like Denny Bryce didn't know how to look for a woman, she reflected. He had a certain awkwardness that made him read too much into contacts with the opposite sex. She didn't want to hurt him. He must be a very decent man to care for his father like he did. But she didn't dare feel anything for him.
Trying not to feel was how she had finally brought herself to take the photo Ariel was demanding. Probably nothing would happen to Denny Bryce, she told herself. Ariel would have the power to paint him from the photo, but she wasn't likely to use it. In any case, it wasn't her concern. How could she look out for a near stranger when her own preservation was at stake?
Let him hover. A decoy wasn't capable of responding like the real thing.
Later, she slipped past Martin Bryce's slightly open door with only a glance at Denny standing over the bed. She had to check on Kraft Olson and Danielle Kramer. Between she and Molly, they took care of Kraft and Danielle and Martin when he would let them, and sometimes, when Ariel permitted it, they even went upstairs and helped Thomas Leppa.
The classrooms-turned-bedrooms in this corridor were so regular and barren that they seemed like oversize cells of an abandoned hive, and the inhabitants were like ancient larva deposited there by their gray queen. But of all the rooms, Kraft's seemed the least lived in. He never put anything on top of the dresser or the table, and there was no whiff of aftershave or toiletries from the items Ariel had purchased and placed on his window ledge. The towels remained folded, and the dust was always layered fine and undisturbed. Day after day Dana rapped lightly and entered to find him sitting riveted to his chair by the window, wearing creaseless slacks and a seasonless plaid shirt. Except that today, instead of staring blankly, his eyes bore into her with a cognizance that was unmistakable.
Almost reflexively she pushed the door shut.
"What was it like for you, Dana?" he asked presently, and though it was a question, she heard the old certainty in his voice.
"Kraft?" She came forward, not knowing whether to embrace him or address the urgency of what he wanted to know. "You really are back."
"What was it like before she brought you back?"
Dana sank down on the edge of the bed, facing him. Never mind that he had been faking dementia, the commonality of having been dead was always front and center, and you didn't segue into it. It ran like a tape, reel to reel in the background of your consciousness, playing blackness and silence, and at any moment you could be summoned to return by its cabalistic lure. And then the images and the shrieks would glut your mind and you would wonder how you ever got away from it. That was reality. Mortal life, it turned out, was merely the background hiss of cosmic awareness.
"All motion and roar," she replied with a tremble in her voice. "Like a black carnival."
"Do you think we had the same experience?"
She closed her eyes and began to rock.
"Dana?"
Eyes up. "I don't know."
"I brought it back. I let it in. I painted it with my finger on the painting downstairs. The one of the Garden of Eden, with the snake—you know?"
"What are you talking about?"
Her failure to grasp his meaning transformed his expression, and she saw how fragile he was.
"It stopped," he offered up defenselessly. "The voice stopped after I painted it. What does that mean?"
“What voice?”
“The voice. The one that says all those terrible things over and over and tells us we’re going back soon.”
Suddenly she wanted to scream. Felt, in fact, as if she had screamed – had been screaming all along for the past year at the barely repressed dream of death that poisoned the experience of life. Candles out! Matter away! Cease. Desist. Dissolve. Lose your identity, join the howl. Become the zero wind blowing forever through empty space, nibbling at the mammoth columns, those pillars of the universe that tower above comprehension and disappear into the darkness beyond stars. A black wind that carries the crippled scrape of purgatory's obscene army marching, marching, marching. Soldiers of saturnalia, lunatic, gaping wounds for medals, babbling from crusted orifices. Limbs do not come off like melted cheese, striding bodies do not truncate at the waist, eyes do not catch fire and roll out of—
"I must be all right, if the voice stopped," Kraft said with final hope. "Don't you think?"
She didn't think. Couldn't think. How many hours had passed since she had lain huddled at the foot of a bathroom door, trying to restore gravity, while an inch away something with earthly claws and earthly fangs raged for her flesh? Could Ariel's magic last forever? And if it couldn't, if somewhere there was an amorphous maggot in the food chain that would suck her soul out of the frail shell and spit it out, did it all end up the same?
"I could go back there now if I wouldn't be alone," Kraft said. "If I wouldn't be alone I think I could endure it."
Go back to it? How could he say that, if it had left him so bereft? And then she began to truly understand. It wasn't shock from coming back. It was shock from something else. Something that had just happened. "How could you be alone?" she probed. "Everyone dies."
"I don't want to be with everyone. I want to be with her."
Her? There was only one "her" for Kraft Olson. Even if her outward form was a suppurating relic. "You are with her, Kraft. Danielle is right here in this house."
"No." Melancholy in his voice. “No. She’s gone now. No … no.” A lilt of things lost beyond reclaim.
Dana digested the implacable syllable and grasped for the first time what this whole Grand Guignol conducted unexpectedly in his room was all about. A wave of fresh horror tingled at her hairline. Kraft was staring blankly again as she moved to the door.
Despite the clammy heat the corridor was cold as she walked to Danielle Kramer's room. This time she didn't knock, because she didn't want to have hope or expectation. She simply turned the doorknob and pushed.
Empty cell.
No larva here. The gray queen had visited. Had killed the competing queen with a few strokes of a brush. Just the bedcovers mussed, as if Danielle had wasted away to nothing. And Kraft had known. Had she caught them together?
Damn you, Ariel Leppa.
Trembling, Dana took the Polaroid shot of Denny Bryce out of her pocket. The resolution was sharp. Plenty of detail for a skilled painter to capture a soul. How could she let that happen? Don't be stupid, Dana…. This will end up being about you instead of him. Maybe she was the duck and he was the decoy. But with agonizing slowness she tore the photograph in half, again and again, until it was just macerated paper made moist by her sweating fingers.
Chapter 15
Like old wolves the core group gathered, wanting the security of the pack but untrusting and staking out territories in the parlor. Helen, Paavo, Molly on the ottoman, Marjorie in the Morris chair, Beverly leaning against the screen door as if to draw in the smoky, fermented ethers of an alluring but distant civilization. Dana in the dark of the dining room just beyond the arch. And Ruta moving, pacing, wringing her hands, changing chairs each time she sat back down. It was uncharacteristic of her not to settle in the center of things where she could broadcast her daily tribulations. They took it as a sign of her fear. Fear and distress. There was no doubt about the distress.
"I didn't think Ariel would do that," she kept repeating in disbelief. "I didn't think she would actually get rid of one of us."
"Was Danielle ever one of us?" someone posed.
This was Danielle Kramer's wake, the postmortem, the inquiry. A headwind set the willow chattering across the yard, and a jay about to be dislodged from its crown hurled its single expletive. Storm coming. They sat listening for the first large drops to patter on the windowpane, waiting for Sturm und Drang nature to haul away a soul.
"She never could handle power." The words rattled up from Marjorie's private boil like steam from a covered pot.
"Who?"
"Who do you think?"
"Better watch what you say," Helen warned.
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"Why? We're all in the same boat."
Helen leaned forward slightly to glance at Molly. "But some of us have life jackets."
The big woman sat with her elbows folded across her stomach, knuckles of one hand to her lips, liquid brown eyes red rimmed. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Figure it out."
"Just because Ariel trusts me doesn't mean I can't be trusted by you."
"Doesn't it?"
"That's cruel, Helen."
"Oh, don't pretend, Molly. You've been snitching on us forever."
Paavo sat between them like a thin tenement wall hammered by fractious neighbors.
"And what did you do for Danielle, eh?” Molly bristled. “Did you toilet her? Did you wipe the drool off her chin? No. You did as little as you could, because you're old, and that makes you privileged."
"Want to trade places?"
"Stop it," Dana said from the gloom of the arch. "Molly did more for Danielle than the rest of us put together."
"So now we hear from the other alter ego. Beautiful Dana. Just the right age. I'm not so sure about you either, my dear."
"… Never could handle power," Marjorie repeated from the Morris chair, deaf to the squabbling. "Once I made her shift manager for two weeks, and when I got back from a training seminar in Chicago, two of the cashiers had quit and another had filed a grievance with personnel. We need to do something."
It was raining now, but nobody had heard it begin. The trees were hissing and the windows drummed, and they listened like balcony figures in a cavernous theater cut off from main-floor applause rising to the mezzanine.
"Like what?" Beverly said, suddenly attentive at the screen door.
"It's clear enough."
"Not for me. Explain it, please. What do you mean, 'we need to do something'?"
Everyone looked to Marjorie except Ruta, who had migrated to one edge of the worn brick hearth and sat rigidly staring at a gilt mirror on the opposite wall.
"Ariel won't hesitate," Marjorie said. "Any time we don't make the grade, it's brush-brush—'off with their heads!' We used to call that murder."
"But she can bring us back indefinitely," Molly said. "She can keep us healthy."
"If you think living like this is healthy. Personally, I don't think it's going to get better. I think it's going to get worse."
"But at least we're alive!"
"Are we? I'm a copy of something that might still be out there in the darkness. Paavo is really the only one who has come back twice, and he hasn't said where he went the second time."
The subject of this speculation shrugged. "I don't remember. I don't remember being in this house before," he said.
"That's what I mean. You aren't a copy of a copy. You're a second copy of the original. So maybe if we die again nothing will happen to us that isn't already happening anyway. We haven't escaped anything. The people we once were lived and died and are still wherever the dead go. The people we think we are now go nowhere."
"All I know is I'm here now, and I want to stay," Molly declared.
"What are you driving at, Marjorie?" Helen demanded. "What choice do we have?"
"We could stop her if we wanted. We could stop Ariel."
"But then …"
"Then we'd live out our lives and die. Again."
"Are you out of your mind?" Ruta laughed forcibly. "You're the one who said we should change our attitudes toward her, and now you want to eliminate her and let us all die, like … like those stupid pygmies Helen told Amber about. That’s crazy. Tell her she's crazy, Paavo."
Paavo shifted his bony haunches uncomfortably on the ottoman. "She don't mean it, Ruta. Tell her, Marj. No reason to get everyone upset."
But no one looked upset.
"We'd have the paint," Beverly said, refusing to give up hope of life everlasting. "We'd just need a painter."
And that seemed to provide a middle ground for action, whatever anyone believed.
Except for Ruta.
Ruta felt life coursing in her veins. Saw her image in the smoky glass flecked with gold. Still saw the once-and-forever woman she had decided she would become when she was in her twenties. Her eyes were not the bloodshot, filmy pools that gazed tragically at morning misrepresentations in the mirror. Her hair was not a thin, brittle remnant of what she had brushed a hundred strokes a night since her progressive if not impious mother had taken her to Loews Paradise Theatre in New York to be awestruck by Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil in the year 1927. All the decades of diets and supplements and exercise did not add up to this bony, long-neck hag rendered in mockery by Ariel Leppa.
They all thought she was so vain, but no one had laughed when she was named Miss Thief River Falls at Harvest Fest, or when she swam the Black Duck Lake freshwater swim in fifty-eight-degree water at the age of twenty-two and only thirteen others, including eleven men, finished the race. When had she ever promised to age gracefully? Let others surrender to the ravages of time; they had less to lose. The tucks and peels were her own damn business. Paavo had never complained. And none of them had the discipline to endure what she had endured. They thought she was weak, but she was a survivor—physically, emotionally. They could keep their little intellectual games. What was wrong with taking personal pride, of wanting to live?
Thunder rolled outside, making her jump. She didn't like storms. And going upstairs to see Ariel was like going out into a storm. But she had to do it. Even though she was appalled at the way things were turning out. How could she have known that telling Ariel what she had seen would seal Danielle's fate? Kraft had gone into her room—that's all she had said to Ariel. Not that they had deliberately met. Kraft could have been wandering. But Ariel must have caught them together. Ruta felt terrible about that. If she could undo it, she would. But she couldn't be held accountable for what Ariel did. And now she had to climb the stairs on this stormy night and address the source of all thunder and lightning herself, because the Creator of New Eden had as good as made a promise to her …
"I'll have to repaint you, you know," Ariel said when they had ghosted to chairs in the dimly lit sewing room.
"Yes, yes, of course." Ruta's voice crackled like the track of a 78-rpm record.
A small banker's lamp sat on a walnut ambo in one corner, its red glass cowl tilted toward the wall, leaving the chamber in gloom and grotesquely shadowed by the rebound of light. The spinning wheel's shadow in particular soared up the opposite wall, like some diabolical engine of medieval torture. Outside lightning flickered, dogged by a rumble that seemed to climb through the foundation to rattle the windows.
"Will I have to … ?"
"No, you won't die. I won't be making a new painting, just touching up the old."
Out of the corner of her eye, Ruta imagined the spinning wheel slowly turning. "Then I won't disappear like …"
"Danielle?"
"Paavo. I was thinking of Paavo."
"No, you won't disappear like Paavo."
"Will I just suddenly change?"
"Yes." Ariel, in a condescending fantasy voice. Magician to child. "I've done it before. Little things. In the middle of the night. No one seems to notice. But when did anyone ever notice anything I did?"
An invitation to suck up and Ruta seized it. "Oh, Ariel, nothing could be further from the truth. How can you say that?"
Ariel's artless laugh crushed the disavowal flat. "You were always such a liar, Ruta."
"Ariel! I mean now. No one ignores you now. We all treated you badly in the old days."
"And you worst of all."
"But I wasn't your enemy."
"No. Enemies don't have the power to hurt that deep. For that you need friends." Crocodile smile—thin lipped and crooked. "Tell me, Ruta, who came up with the name Ariel the Leper? Was it you?"
"I never heard anyone call you that, Ariel. Maybe when you were in grade school, but I wasn't there then."
"No, you showed up for the morals-and-manners phase of our lives. You navigated u
s through an adolescence of winners and losers. You set the pecking order, and you promoted and demoted us more often than the schools. As long as I was around everybody else was at least one rung off the ground. If you missed a social cue you could always point to me, because I missed all of them. I was your comic relief. I boosted everyone's self-esteem just by being there to catch the crumbs and feel the claws."
"Ariel, I'm shocked." She was shocked. "We had good times. You were always included—"
"Always there, never included."
"You went to the same parties and shows. You went to the rinks and beaches and … and you never liked to dance."
"Do you know that for a fact?"
"Well … did you? I don't remember you ever dancing."
Ariel threw her head back as if communing with the storm above the house, and when she spoke again her eyes misted. "How did you keep up with everything new, Ruta? Did anyone ever show me the latest dance or tell me what everyone was going to wear the next day? You were the oldest; you had the last word. If there wasn't room in the car or enough boys at the drive-in or theater tickets to go around … well, Ariel the Leper. Did you think I didn't hurt?"
Ruta slumped. "I never knew you felt this way."
"What an act you put on. There was a time when I could have scratched your eyes out. But, you know, it got better, even though the inner circle never changed. All those years—you age and the past just gets silly. I ran out of revenge fantasies a long time ago."
The moment sizzled like a hot coal, and the shadow of the spinning wheel seemed to fly on the wall, and Ruta sat with her long neck oddly inclined, like an aging swan attempting graceful deference. For a long while neither of them could speak. Rain pattered, diluting and cooling, until just the red shade on the banker's lamp seemed to have any heat left. Then, in a granite hard voice, Ariel changed the subject: