by Brian Hodge
"I suppose they're all horrified about Danielle."
"A little."
"A little horrified? I don’t suppose it occurred to anyone that the only thing I really did was give her more life than God did?"
"No one blamed you, Ariel. They may be nervous—I'm not going to lie about that—but no one blamed you."
"I'm certainly glad you're not going to lie about that. So, who is the most nervous down in my parlor?"
"I don't know."
"Are you nervous?"
"A little."
"Good. Because now that I have the last word, I really do want to know who is saying things behind my back. Be very careful, Ruta. I'm not above testing you."
"It’s really not anything. They're just upset. No one is thinking clearly."
"Who?"
"No one—"
"Beverly?"
“No –“
"Helen?"
"Helen wouldn't—"
"Paavo, then."
"No, no, not Paavo. He told her … told everyone not to get upset."
"Told her?"
No one could say Ruta hadn't tried. No one could say she hadn't lied to Ariel's face trying to protect them. But when Ariel exclaimed "Marjorie!" with triumph and dismay, Ruta could no longer risk a denial.
"Please, Ariel, it was just words. Don't do anything to her."
"I'll do what I have to do. You don't want to lose what you have, do you, Ruta? I've always protected you and the others. Which is why I won't make you younger just yet, Ruta. Because then everyone would understand how I knew about Kraft and Danielle. You see how I care? When everything is safe—when everyone understands that we need to pull together to make this work—then I can reward you. I can paint, you as you really want to be."
She made the new painting first, and it was rending to Ariel. Marjorie—of all people to betray her. If anyone among them had lived by principle, it was Marjorie Korpela. That she had always underestimated Ariel didn't alter that. A bit old-fashioned, fueled by misconceptions, as hard-nosed as a man sometimes, Marjorie’s good opinion was still worth cultivating and that was why Ariel had brought her back to begin with.
More than anyone else, practical, level-headed Marjorie should have understood what a wonderful thing it was that Ariel was doing. In fact, in the beginning Ariel considered her for her closest helper instead of Molly. She had even seen a poetic balance in this, having been Marjorie's employee. But some ghost of their former relationship had held her back from painting the patrician woman younger and more able. And nothing in the past year had stirred her to change that. There were people who lived rigid lives according to the strictures around them and never reached beyond that. Marjorie seemed to be that way. She never talked about her husband or asked for anything but just accepted a quiet, dignified life as quite enough for the foreseeable eternity. And now to find this sensible woman speaking ill of her behind her back was like discovering embezzlement deep within her securest accounts.
So the new painting gave birth to Marjorie Kristen Korpela the living relic. Worse even than Danielle Kramer. Her temples were translucent with blue veins threading to the surface. Her limbs were draped in mottled flesh, and her head—slightly askew where it came to rest on her chest—was framed by the bony mantle of a bowed and fusing spine. All that remained of her eyebrows were tufts at the bridge of her nose, and this thrust the orbital ridge around her eye sockets into prominence. Ulcerations crusted the few remaining lashes on her eyelids. Where flesh had not puddled like sediment it was drawn taut, and the cartilage of her nose was receding from yawning nostrils that pulled her mouth into a raw wound fissured at the edges.
Ariel even pulled down a tome of painter Ivan Albright's "magic realism" and borrowed a morgue look from the galleries there. All was blue and gray. All was pits and erosion. Only the eyes carried the fading gleam of life, like flat pennies losing their luster. Gravity and entropy were winning. Energy had lost.
And yet it was Marjorie Korpela—no question about that. The genius of Ariel Leppa the uncelebrated painter was that it could have been no one but Marjorie Korpela. And she did it with the fast-drying alla prima technique—the mark of her mastery.
When the painting had dried and the ossifying thing actually lay bundled and wheezing against the wall, Ariel studied it. She felt neither compunction nor compassion, only a vague sense of satisfaction that she had created precisely what she had intended. This was not the living being downstairs asleep in a room of her house. That version of Marjorie awaited a separate act of extinction. This was a separate entity, something that would never have existed except by Ariel's will. Marjorie then. Marjorie now. Same person. But one was not an alteration of the other.
And yet she herself would never see the two of them alive at the same time, so how could she be sure?
She flipped through the dozen frames stacked next to the workbench to pull out the first painting of Marjorie and set it upon the easel. Downstairs was a viable personality she had reanimated from her past, something lucid and capable of creative thought, of love and loyalty and appreciation. Only, of her own free, Marjorie Korpela hadn't felt any of those things. As if she didn't owe them to Ariel but had dredged herself up from her grave and endowed herself with breath, spirit and consciousness all of her own accord.
Ariel glanced at the heap against the wall. It was watching her through its ruined eyes. What thoughts could it be thinking—born nearly dead?
I must see my other Marjorie, she decided on impulse. One last time. Must understand the distinction.
And so she left the dawn-streaked studio and made her way down the staircase to the new wing and entered Marjorie's room, which smelled of lilacs and liniment, and stood over the form on the bed. Wrapped in a cotton blanket like that, the sleeping woman could indeed be the swathed thing lying against the wall two floors above.
The light from the corridor streaming through the door got lost in the fold of the hood that peaked over Marjorie’s head, leaving a deep emptiness into which Ariel leaned closer and closer. Why wasn't she breathing? Not even a dainty snore. Petite Marjie, ever the guarded aristocrat. Or perhaps she was sleeping more deeply and further into that shroud hollow than Ariel could imagine. Beyond apnea. Beyond mortal dreams.
Abruptly there was a sharp inhalation. Ariel reared back just as an alabaster hand snaked out from the covers and threw off the hood.
"Ariel … ?" Marjorie squinted up from her bed against the light and came to one elbow, her pale blue nightgown falling from her corrugated throat. "What is it? What time is it?"
"It's your time, Marjie."
"What are you talking about?"
"I've been painting, and I've made another portrait. It's upstairs in the studio. I put it next to yours just to see the likenesses and the differences. Lots of differences. But you can tell who it is. You might say you're beside yourself, Marjie."
The woman on the bed shrank back as if trying to gain perspective. "You're losing it, Ariel."
"Wasn't I loyal enough when I worked for you?"
"I never demanded loyalty from you. I was just your supervisor, Ariel, not your god."
“Is that what you think, Marjie? That I want to be your God?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
"Oh, this is bad, very bad. I hope it's not too late to save the others by making an example of you."
"Yes, yes, love you or else. That's what all the worst religions do."
"That's a stretch and you know it."
"… God on a rampage."
"How would you have done it?"
A rag of hope, an invitation to reason, but Marjorie Korpela couldn't think of an answer. "I wouldn't manufacture more suffering," she said.
"If giving you life is suffering, then I'm guilty of that. But I’ll correct that as soon as I get back upstairs and paint you out of existence, my dear."
"There are two Danielles dead now, two Paavos, and now you want to include me. You can't possibly imagin
e what that means."
"Are you begging me not to include you?"
"I will if that's what you want. Don't do this, Ariel."
Ariel leaned back into the darkness. "I wish I hadn't come down, but I had to know for sure. Go back to sleep, Marjorie. It will be easier that way. For both of us. Let me remember you as someone whose opinion was worth cultivating."
The words evaporated, and suddenly Marjorie was kicking and thrusting against the entangling blankets. With her lame leg there was never any doubt who would reach the studio and the painting first, but Ariel retreated to the doorway in surprise at the raw physical desperation. Marjorie stumbled out of bed.
And so began a snails' race through the house—dueling sloths—absurd but for the stakes. Survival versus extinction. By the time Marjorie reached the staircase, Ariel was already on the first landing, her witch's fingers hissing along the wallpaper for guidance. In fear and dismay, Marjorie shouted after her. But try as she might, she could not frame a genuine, groveling, have-mercy plea. If she had, then she would already have ceased to be Marjorie Korpela.
A lightning bolt carving through the upper stories of the century-and-a-half-old farmhouse and striking Ariel Leppa dead—that was the only hope. In the name of God Almighty, strike this lesser god dead! Marjorie prayed. But you didn't petition the whirlwind to save a mote of merely human flesh. Marjorie Korpela was on her way out once more.
She tried to run. As soon as she realized she couldn’t beat Ariel on the staircase, she reversed course and tried to get out of the house. Blindly, instinctively, bare feet slapping the wooden floors and padding across throw rugs with the two-note beat of her infirmity, she blundered to the front door. There she had to grasp the dead bolt pommel with two fingers from either hand to stop shaking. Stiffening her arms and rolling her shoulders to control the violent trembling, she turned the old white enameled doorknob. Then, rushing the front steps, she pitched and sprawled along the path, her blue nightgown stretching and tearing. An explosion of sparks erupted through her sinuses when her nose struck the dirt. But up she came without pause, numb to anything except flight.
The sparks somehow remained in her mind. Incoming now from the nether regions she had known before. Tardy emissaries of creation, lost from black space, from frozen time, like fireflies lingering heavily in the damp dawn. Gray all around her. The barn a great, looming mausoleum of agrarian death on a farm that was fallow. And so she spun and tottered past it into the cold mud of the fields that sucked at her feet. Sucked like the cosmos sucked at her soul. Fifteen rows in she mired and twisted back and thought she saw a lighted window in the upper story of the house and a figure there—Ariel in her studio—contemplating the whirling dervish flight below.
With animal grunts, Marjorie lunged free of the ooze. A few furious steps and she found the dead furrow of the field, which was carpeted with wet leaves and debris. The simple pain in her body became reassuring. Bless the taste of blood seeping around her teeth from the fall off the steps, bless the cold stab of cavernous breaths, bless the downbeat sound of her good foot and the grace note of her trailing one. Bless the pain because it meant she was still of the Earth.
But now she began to notice the things in the trees. Great, arcing silhouettes were advancing through the branches parallel to her path. They were not precisely flying but bouncing and flapping along like ungainly lovers of carrion who only had to arrive after the killing was done by others. These were Amber’s creations, she knew. She wished she had her glasses.
Was it better to be rent apart than to be exiled whole and aware by Ariel into the abyss again?
She didn't need her glasses to see the bloated thing that might have been red but looked dusky in the dawn. It stood against the largest tree at the edge of the field, and its great saucer eye strained luminously as if to absorb movement or light. She wanted to cry out to it—Here I am, come feast on me!—but her throat was so parched that she only dredged up a dry gasp that ended in weeping.
It was too late. Ariel was painting already, layering creation over creation, evicting her atom by atom from this beautiful Garden of New Eden. And she knew that it was being done with deliberate and excruciating slowness, whether out of hate by a sadistically demented woman or out of reluctance because that same wretchedly lonely woman felt some loss of friendship after all. Either way, she was going to be spared nothing of the terrible roiling specter.
Mist began to boil out of the earth, the miasma and effluvium of everything that had ever died here: corn and shrews and crows and foxes and the people—settlers and gangsters – who had passed through the veil before her without having their humanity defrocked. But she knew that the pumping, fulgent haze held much more than that and was far more ancient. It came from before the last eon, before Indians or ice ages or reptilian denizens had slithered through time and slithered out again. Ephemeral billows disgorged herds and flocks of things that had no name or niche in evolution. Vapors fastened onto her like clammy tentacles, draining her, diluting her as surely as a whitewash over a portrait in Ariel Leppa's studio. Liquid ashes of her own flesh seemed to twinkle into it. She "saw" beyond and before the Earth to the seed itself of spinning nebulae and accreting elements. Spinning down into ever smaller universes of matter—clusters to galaxies to solar systems to sister stars to atoms and less. She must try to remember that she had once been an entity of light. Let not chaos extinguish that!
Near the end, she felt the mighty tsunami of space rushing in with a great shriek, unimaginably vast and distant but closing like a fist around her. And in its trough were hideous things, titan shapes flopping and flailing for a clawhold on daggered rocks. These were the aggregate. The unsuccessful bits of aspiring matter tossed up on the hiss and flume of channeled waves from some murky domdaniel beneath the sea to which she was returning. And from the ramparts she heard her name called with urgency and saw a tiny figure—Ariel—crying with remorse and pity (but not forgiveness), and she knew then that she had already passed beyond the palpable world, that these were the stored furnishings of her nightmares. From life. From deaths she had known before.
So she stopped in the field and took root in the primordial ooze and cried out one last time—thought she cried out—still grasping at the tether, trying to hang on to the silver cord, as her pulse faded, faded … and was gone.
Chapter 16
It was loathsome when they brought the new old Marjorie Korpela downstairs. The flesh slid like gelatin around the bones, and the skeleton was vividly palpable in Dana's hands as she and Molly lifted it. They had diapered her, but the odors went beyond bodily wastes, exuding in every breath and from every orifice. A metal tang hung above Marjorie's wispy hair and something like the pungency of rotting oranges wafted through her skin as though her bruised core had turned to mush. For the first time Dana felt repulsed by a member of the house.
Everyone else was fixated in horror on the relic being borne down the wide staircase. But as soon as the bumbling cortege thumped through the archway, they spread away from each other as if the shock of recognition had turned them into something immiscible. Beverly went to the porch, Paavo stood in the yard, the others disappeared into their rooms or went from one window to the next. Stalwart Molly kept at the necessary task of settling Marjorie in while Dana escaped the room, a thin sheen of moisture on her brow and above her lip.
Dana didn't want to look at anyone else either, didn't want to see what they were becoming. Her thoughts were in full flight, her senses overloaded. Most of all she was stunned by what must have been Ariel’s state of mind in order to commit such a blasphemy on Marjorie. Blasphemy. There was no other word for it.
Later, returning to the empty parlor, details leapt out at her like circumstantial evidence: the fireplace sealed with a rusted metal curtain that might once have been an awning; a blue wooden doll on the mantel with yellowed tatting for a dress; a metronome on a table, its pointer frozen out of plumb; and an empty oval among the family portraits clustered on
that same table. From a rafter in one corner hung a Japanese gong, which she now realized was a propane cylinder cut in half and painted umber. How had this miscellany accumulated? Withered violets tied with brown twine, crossed swords, glass and wood barometers by the plethora, a pile of Collier's magazines, a tattered pincushion shaped like a porcupine with sailcloth needles impaling it, someone's leather driving gloves, and a cone of rusted iron oxide around something no longer definable on the hearth—the room was acrawl with truncated things and dislocations. Was it just the consensus of many lives over time, or the single derangement of a single addled mind?
And then her eye came to the large painting—the Garden of Eden—and she leaned toward it with sudden focus. A little helix of missing paint was torqued around the Tree of Knowledge. This is what Kraft had been talking about. I painted it with my finger…. The snake. He had painted the snake. And now the damn thing was gone, as if it had slithered right off the tree and out of the frame.
It sickened her to see that. Because even though she could construct rational explanations for it based on Kraft's irrational behavior, she feared it was exactly what he had said: I brought it back. I let it in. You had to have experienced death in order to connect the dots of insane things like that. You couldn't make quantum leaps unless you had visited a quantum universe. And she had.
She wished Denny Bryce were here. Naïve, earthbound Denny Bryce would be a relief just now. She went to the kitchen where Molly was leaning against the cast iron sink, staring out the window. The cellar door was right there, and it was so stultifyingly humid after the rain that she grasped the white knob and went down.
Beverly said you couldn't coax her to the cellars with Tom Cruise in a thong, but Dana rather liked them. They were cool and quiet, and you had the sense that space ended when you stood within the earth-backed walls. The change in the sound of her steps going down was comforting too, an increasingly solid sound from the dry top stair to the damp-rot lowest one. She thought this might reflect a brief insensibility she had felt at death before being hurled into the phantasmal void. Terra firma. Subterranean closure. The sanctuary of a tomb was at least a place and not the emptiness of infinite darkness. So. The cellars. She liked to feel underground.