by Brian Hodge
For the first time since carrying Marjorie down from the studio her mind felt clear. You were supposed to cross the river of forgetfulness when you died, but in reality it was the other way around. Birth was forgetfulness. Birth blotted out the origins of consciousness.
From somewhere above, the dull thud of Amber's music intruded on her peace, and she moved through the switch-backed passageway to the laundry room, where the lowered floor and doubled joists tamped all sound.
Out of habit she walked to the washer and thrummed her knuckles on the enameled corn-yellow surface. Hollow, empty. She lifted the lid with a click. S'alright. Dropped it. S'alright. Thank you, Señor Wences.
Then to the dryer.
Dust encrusted, belinted. A faded laundry tag from someone's shirt collar lay in the grime on the floor, along with a blue button and a piece of burnished straw that must have come in on her shoe. This time when she thrummed her knuckles on the appliance there was a dull sound. And that was funny, because she was sure she hadn't left any clothes inside. But a decade of lint was probably built up inside the shell around the outside of the drum. A thorough cleaning was in order before they wound up with a fire.
She popped the door, and it was the odor that hit her first. Because you couldn't see inside very well. She knew the gamey smell from her husband's duck-hunting days, though. And it must have been jammed chock-full, because one of them rolled to the lip of the door seal and lay there, staring up at her with its filmy blue eyes, its jet-black wings shrugged up a little and folded tightly to its stiffened body, as if to say "Don't ask." She jumped away, because how could the dryer be loaded up with dead crows? And that was when a pair of large hands closed around her hips.
Denny Bryce had come up behind her unannounced just as she jumped back, but the start of his apology was suspended by what he saw in the dryer. "What the hell is that?" he said.
She could do no more than glance at him before her attention went back to the abhorrent mass of sodden plumage. "This is sick," she murmured.
He sidled behind the machine and jiggled the corrugated metal venting. "Where does this exit the house?"
"In back on the barn side. But you can't be thinking they flew into the dryer?"
"If the louvers, or the screen, or whatever seals it is broken—maybe. I don't know. It would make more sense in winter."
"I suppose they could have been looking to build a nest." The impossible heap of avian cadavers belied that, and she added that possibly an animal was stashing them there.
"It must have been storing them for a long time," he said.
"This dryer was empty two days ago."
"Do you have a flashlight down here?"
"There are some candles and wooden matches back in the other room."
"Where do those tunnels lead?"
"I don't know. No one goes in there. They were built by gangsters or something during Prohibition or something. One of them may have collapsed. I hear water dripping in there when it rains."
"Then animals could get in."
"We would have seen them in the house, wouldn't we?"
"I'll go get those candles."
Like taproots, the crude tunnels had once nourished the farm with money and commerce from the external world, but now they could harbor almost anything, Dana was thinking as Denny glided back slowly in the cerise aura of two lit candles.
"Igor returns," he said.
"I’m not so sure this is a good idea."
"I've been sent to put a little excitement in your life, Mademoiselle, but if you want, wait here."
She regarded his little-boy smile and green eyes gleaming in the candle's throw. "Monsieur," she sighed. "Lead on."
She cupped the candle he had given her, and each time she came alongside him the twin nimbuses swept darkness away, revealing clutter all the way to the shelves that lined the passage. There were railroad lanterns, rusted tins, empty Mason jars faintly luminescent through a coating of dust, and smashed wooden cases littering the floor. Not far along they came upon a roughly made cellarette, minus a door.
"We have some genuine rotgut here," Denny said, withdrawing a green bottle from its cradle. "This could be very good swill. Here's to Al Capone." He started to work off the cork when she cautioned him.
"What's that?"
"What's what?"
She moved her candle laterally. "I heard rustling."
The flame fled back toward her, a snapping pennant changing from chrome to cerulean blue just before it went out. Darkness leapt in by half and smoke threaded up, but that too was lost as Denny's candle flame did its own swan dance and guttered out.
"Draft," he declared in the absolute blackness.
Of course it was a draft, Dana tried to tell herself. She knew that, knew that, knew that. But the tunnel was a dead end; it should have been dead air. Something was there. Bigger than a rat. Something just outside the light but close—very close— that had to have a barrel chest and cavernous lungs because it had huffed and puffed and blew their—
Scratch!
Denny had set down the bottle and struck a wooden match on the box he still carried, but his back was turned away from the draft and Dana didn't like that. The danger was in front of them. She took the box and tried to light her own candle. But she had to keep scratching away, because the old sulfurous lucifer matches were getting no help from Old Scratch—haha—until one of them finally popped and sizzled and flared. And she had a feeling that it was just in time. Because something that feared fire (or at least obeyed it) was shrinking back into the blackened crevices directly in front of them.
"Let's get out of here, Denny," she said.
Shadows were going up his face, making him look all wrong. He wanted to keep searching ahead. But at last he gestured toward the laundry room. She took the lead, shielding the flame with her body, gliding so as not to create a draft and all the while feeling as if whatever was behind them was weighing whether to rush onto their backs.
When the light of the single bulb surrounded them again, she saw that Denny had brought the green bottle with him.
"Know what I think?" he said. "I think our picnic is right here in this bottle. I think we've earned it. We should just slip into the cornfield and find out if aging really does make a difference."
Oh, aging makes a difference, she thought. If only you knew, Denny Bryce.
She looked at the dryer, its door still yawning open, vomiting out its virulent meal. Upstairs was more insanity, mirrored in the faces of her gray and tenuous companions. And here was this man who knew only oxygen and sky and firmness beneath his feet and laughing children and a world held together by cycles and seasons, like some great calendar clock with infallible gears, and he wanted her to taste some earthly pleasure on an afternoon in the summer of a year named 2001.
"Why not?" she said.
They made a furtive exit from the house, and he retrieved a fawn-colored comforter from his car and something called an MP3 player, which she had never heard of. He played a single song over and over on the device—something titled "Mambo No. 5"—that she could barely hear because the MP3 player had little earpieces that he just left lying on the spread comforter with the volume up fully. Which allowed them to talk
…
She told him a lot about herself, even that she had a husband somewhere in the Texas prison system, if he hadn't been executed. She told him that New Eden was wonderful and terrible, and that everyone here except his father had known Ariel a long time. Why didn't anyone ever leave, he asked her, why didn't she want to know whether her husband was dead or alive? She tried to make him understand without telling him anything that would let him understand. How could he accept the truth? And they killed the bottle and pretended it was better than it was.
"What if you came here one day and I didn't recognize you?" she asked him, and of course he thought she meant what if she had Alzheimer's. "What if I seemed to be someone else?"
"Maybe I should take your fingerprints," he said
and pressed five fingertips against hers until their flesh seemed welded together.
She could have met someone like this man, she realized, and the sweet sting of sex would not have been mixed with fear, as it had been when she had married and lived unhappily ever after. But that was another world, another lifetime.
"Bottle's empty," she noted with just a slight slur. "Must get back to the scullery."
"Alas."
She thought he might kiss her, but he merely said, “I’ve got your fingerprints now, and after a minute or so she heard him start his car and drive off. He had forgotten to take his comforter. She folded it and made her way through the rows of corn.
The rustling as she brushed against the stalks seemed to have an echo that reminded her of the rustling in the cellar, though of course that was because she was half in the bag, she thought. But a few rows from the edge she heard crows cawing accusatively, and that brought back the dryer and the cellar even more sharply.
She stopped.
How vehement they sounded. She had trouble picking them out, but they were there in the willows—were there, because when she saw them they stopped cawing and took flight.
Where had the day gone? It was late afternoon. Probably everyone would be sitting around drinking coffee or iced tea. She couldn't stumble in like this, carrying a comforter. Better to leave it in the barn and sober up for a while.
She went around to the front and tugged the rolling barn door open just enough to squeeze past. The wheels in the overhead track were all gummed up, and if someone didn't clean it soon it was going to take a fire axe to get inside. You could see daylight between the boards, and you didn't need a ladder to get into the loft because it had obligingly turned into a slide where the center posts had rotted and collapsed. But it was a nice place to go and get your head on straight—shady and aromatic with the sachet of harvests and seasons. So she dragged herself over to the lip of the loft where it dipped to the floor, and fell back on the brittle hay while the world spun round inside her head.
It was still spinning, but only at carousel speed, when she heard the door wobble slightly on its track. Shit, she thought, who would come out here now? Amber? Molly or Paavo? She hoped it wasn’t Amber. Maybe they wouldn't see her. It was gloomy and the garden tools were close by the door, so maybe they would just grab the hoe or whatever and saunter off to the garden. But the door rolled open at least six or seven feet, judging by the sound. So it must be Molly or Paavo—someone strong. Still, she didn't sit up. She didn't sit up until nothing happened for another minute, and the suspicion grew that someone was just standing there, someone who knew she was there, trying to find her in the haze of shadows and sun-shot stripes that fell on the floor.
So then she came up on her elbows and blinked at the bright rectangle of the doorway. The silhouette there refused to make sense, because the light from the opening conspired to limn it with red in an irregular way, as if it were jaunty and ragged. No one in the house looked like that. It responded to her movement too. She could see that much. How it straightened suddenly and stiffened and … rustled? It was the same rustle she had heard at least three times within the last several hours. In fact, it seemed now that she had heard it all afternoon, in the cellars, in the tunnels, in the field, unsure of what it wanted to do, or waiting for her to be alone again. Only now it must be sure, because it had come into the barn looking for her.
What came next was so peculiar that she almost thought it didn't happen. The figure moved, but it did so twisting and thrusting as if it didn't have enough joints and stopping every few steps like a blind animal trying to locate its prey. Sobriety began to kick in very fast.
The sun striping through the shrunken boards fell full on it when it was twenty feet away, and despite Dana’s instinct to freeze, mouse quiet at the very moment her heart leaped into her throat, she couldn't suppress a gasp. Because it was a scarecrow, a red scarecrow—pulsingly red—and she was transported instantly to the outré regions from which she had never fully returned.
It was Amber's creation, of course, Ruta's nightmare—"Red straw … red straw!"—except that no one had mentioned its rows of harrow teeth the foolish child had painted, or the nails tearing right through the gloves, stiletto length and crimson. And the reason it moved in sudden bursts was because it had no eyes—no eyes, but God knows what other senses—and so it had to pause and pick up … what? Sound, scent, heat? It must have known she was alone, must have kept close all afternoon, sensing her somehow. And now it had her in the barn.
She thought of the dryer full of dead crows, and she had no doubt whatsoever that this was the predator that had amassed them. It was a killing thing, after all, and it must be a very effective killing thing to have captured the wary crow in such numbers without benefit of sight. The way it twisted and leaned sharply forward made her think it was hypersensitive—as if it were exposing some sensory organ to minute vibrations. She tried to hold her breath and stay calm, but it knew. With that horrible rustling it was zigzagging toward her.
The alcohol still buzzed in her brain. But then she wasn't going to have to outthink it. She was going to have to outrun it, and she thought she could do that. Inching upward, she rose to a crouch, and when it fronted her with a terrifying burst to within six feet, she made her dash.
She sprang off the loft. But before she could take a second step it was in front of her again, and she had to sidestep back onto the hay just as its arm rived the air with a sweep of nails. Sliding, backpedaling she went, gaining maybe two seconds while it struck one of its odd tilting postures as if to determine the nature of the loft from sounds or smell or the way the air moved—or all three. By the time it had placed one red boot on the fallen fascia board, she was scrambling for the pitchfork that hung on the wall.
"Back off!" she quavered, brandishing tines.
A mistake, of course. As if she had issued an invitation to embrace her, it leaped, Ray Bolger-style, head askew, limbs bent, harrow teeth unmistakably grinning. But it landed stiffly, bristling with power, and so close. It had called her bluff. Here I am! Surrender, Dorothy! And she could do nothing more than thrust the pitchfork into its chest—through its chest—with the tempered steel finding no resistance at all in the red straw.
Worse, with the precision of a catch in a ballet, its right glove clamped instantly onto the haft and with a twist of its torso jerked the weapon from her. Then it yanked the tines out of itself and snapped the pitchfork in two. Then it tossed both, clattering and clanging, to the floor.
So she was going to have to outthink it after all.
It seemed momentarily confused by all the rustle and vibration as she rolled sideways and scrambled higher into the loft. But it was relentless, and it was sorting out her heat from the sound or whatever it was picking up.
Heat.
Faint flicker of hope, flicker of an idea, flicker of a match. She still had the wooden matches she had taken from Denny in the tunnel. If she could get one lit, if she could set the obscene thing on fire….
She fumbled with the box, hands shaking, spilling matches in her lap. And then she had one, and without sliding the cover shut, she tried to scratch it on the friction strip on the side. But there wasn't enough support with just the cover, so she tried to slide the box back into it, only it was hanging right on the end and her trembling fingers jammed it a little sideways. It dropped out of the sleeve and fell in the hay. Take your time, girl! But when she reached for the box, it disappeared into the hay like a drowning hand slipping under a wave.
The red scarecrow twisted, harrow teeth working, nails fanning like hackles.
She still had the matchbox cover and one wooden match. Bracing two fingers of her left hand on the inside of the sleeve, she pressed her right index finger against the head of the match and snicked it on the friction strip. This time it started to hiss. But her hands were sweating and the dampness of her forefinger must have soaked into the match head, because it fizzled and died in a copious puff of ye
llow smoke.
She knew without lifting her eyes when it found her. She was ground zero and the countdown was at one. But all the same she was groping through the hay for another match. And when she actually came up with one, the scarecrow still hadn't hurled itself on her. She thought fleetingly that the smell of sulfur had arrested it. It wasn't sure. It was hesitating. If she could just …
This time she pressed her index finger a half-inch higher up the match, and the grit of the friction paper resonated grain by grain into her sense of touch. She felt each nuance, each subatomic transfer, as if the reaction were aggrandized to a cosmic scale for the entertainment and edification of every consciousness in the universe. Dana Novicki has struck a match. Will the antimony sulphide and potassium chlorate melt and ignite the little stick? Will she combust the red straw of Amber Leppa's diabolical horror before it leaps in rage upon her?
She looked into the scarecrow's blind face and serrated maw and jerked the match forward. Touched the red straw, in fact. But the match was already falling from her violently shaking hand as she reached out. And the flame that had burst so promisingly a moment ago vanished in another gush of smoke. She could smell the cloyingly sweet red straw. She could hear it rustling. The sibilant sounds took her back so close to where she had lain after death that all the old nightmares of a year ago came rushing over the rim.
Once again she stood before ramparts and ageless pylons rooted in space. Pitted faces loomed near, shunned things sucked her breath, fused entities warred for her soul, and from all sides susurrant legions rustled and giggled, devoid of pity, incapable of empathy or unity or anything but the solitary and savage predation of the disconnected. But from three feet away, the empty vessel of red straw seemed suddenly unable to sense her presence. It contorted into a hyperextended Saint Andrew's cross, impossibly tall, a bristling thing of receptors, now seething, smoking, and suddenly bursting into flames—purely red flames—that singed her face as she shrank away.