by Brian Hodge
Well, she was ready too. She took her cane (because there might be snakes or even spiders—and how she detested vermin!). Downstairs she went, first to the kitchen to get some twine for a leash, then to Amber's room where she still remembered how to use her knee to keep the frenzied toy collie from wriggling past before she got the tether on. He was hyper tonight, and that was good because he wouldn't need coaxing. By the time she moved out of his way, Get Amber was redundant.
She had forgotten a flashlight, she realized as they crossed the yard, and almost reined Aarfie in. But the twine might not withstand dragging him back, and anyway, Amber must be well into her business by now.
Never mind the flashlight. She would trust the silver complicity of the moon with Aarfie's noisy rush and the parry of her cane, hovering back and forth along the ground, to keep her safe from crawling things. And besides, she didn't expect they would have to go far.
She was depending on the dog not to bark too soon. He had enough hunter in his blood to go with the herder until the moment of confrontation. And then he would create a triumphant racket, having come to the end of his instincts. But that would mean they were in sight of Amber.
When they entered the fields Ariel began to have second thoughts about the flashlight. She had expected the hiding place to be close by in the old pump housing or the machine shed or perhaps the rubble of the barn. Her own childhood caches had all been near the house: an old rubber tire, an upturned crate, the abandoned 1926 Minerva Landaulet that had sat on its rear axle near the light pole and later was used for a chicken coop. But, of course, Amber the undaunted would not shrink from crossing all borders as her shrinking-violet mother had.
So Ariel found herself knifing between stalks and plunging through sinks. There were no obvious signs beyond Aarfie's surges that a human had come this way.
"Get Amber," she reminded him in case he had gotten sidetracked by the scent of a rabbit or a raccoon. And then, two fields removed from the house, the dog suddenly stiffened. "Bingo, Aarfie," she said. But his ears and tail went down and he began to slink forward, whining a little, nosing from side to side. Ahead of them was a thick swathe of trees.
She quickened a little at recognition of the tract. It was a parcel where she had picked wild blackberries as a child, a refuge for does with yearlings. And now it was her daughter's secret hideaway. But Aarfie's ears went up and he woofed truculently, then immediately whined a contradiction. Ariel could feel his tremor right through the twine. A few seconds later she heard faint crashing in the undergrowth. There were moving silhouettes, an insoluble mix. And finally a scream.
Amber's scream.
The caterpillar of abject fur Aarfie had become answered with sudden urgency. Ariel took a single step and that launched him. But if it was the right course for a canine, it was the wrong one for the tandem human. The disturbing tumult was coming toward them so rapidly that it was obviously not a timid nocturnal chase. Ariel stabbed her cane out front, trying desperately to slow down without letting go of the twine.
A silken something filled the air, distinct from the humidity that bathed her skin. The swaying trees and staccato thumpings planted an idea in her head of what it was. She had to tell herself, These are not filaments floating over me; it's only mist.
Aarfie's ears were on swivels: up for Amber's screams, down when they stopped. He must have smelled or heard or sensed the enormity of the horror even before Ariel discerned it in the shifting blackness. On the next piercing scream Ariel let go of the twine, knowing that – brave little shepherd that he was – Aarfie would keep going straight into the valley of the shadow of death.
Afterward she would pretend that the twine broke—this is what she would tell Amber. But the shrill accusations against her then would not be stilled. And she did let it go. She had to let it go, because it bought them a little time. Even though the mismatch between the dog and the emerging obscenity wasn't going to last long.
There were thick silhouettes that were too high in the trees to be growing there, too disjointed in their sudden swaying to be rooted, as if whole groups of trunks and limbs were suddenly transplanting themselves. And there were the fireflies, pinpoints of demon light flickering through shadowy lace. Something so huge that it couldn't squeeze between the branches darted there, searching for a way down. And unseen but heard, a little girl was struggling through the underbrush.
Despite the fact that its silk was extruded all over the tract of trees, the horror could not move freely. But Sir Aarfie could. He barked and worried the thing, forced it to recoil and dodged when it suddenly solved the intervening foliage with a rush of legs. But in the end, the toy collie's blood went spurting around the obscene fangs of a behemoth that had been created by the very child he was protecting.
They would think of that afterward, but no one was thinking of it while they fled: mother and daughter pounding across the field hand in hand. Ariel huffed dazedly as she tried to keep up, and for once in her life she was using her cane for its intended purpose.
When they were back in the house they lay in a cold embrace, too numb to cry for Aarfie or themselves.
"I painted it, Mommy," Amber confessed in a drained voice about the spider just before dawn.
"I know."
"I did it because you hate spiders."
"I know."
Later that day Amber had the temerity to go back and look. The spider was a nocturnal thing, her mother had said, and that meant it wouldn't bother anyone until nightfall. As if she knew. So Amber went looking for Aarfie, but mercifully never found the drained wad of fur in its silk coffin.
She found his paw prints mixed with her mother's shoe tracks, however, and that was when she understood. Her mother could not have heard the screams when she was in the house. She had been waiting for her to move the paint. That was why she had painted Aarfie back to life. So that he could betray her when she hid the paint. And he would have too, but what happened in the woods kept them from finding the cistern.
If her mother had accidentally saved her from the spider, the spider had accidentally saved her from her mother.
Chapter 22
Denny was thinking of the dead crows in the clothes dryer as he drove up. Dana hadn't mentioned them again, and he hadn't thought to ask. All that business at the table with having his picture taken, and then the photo dropping in the soup and then the camera getting smashed—what was that all about? A token event of some deeper schism going on? Beverly Swanson had warned him that letting his picture be taken was a bad idea, but Dana had already taken one the day after his father stepped barefoot in the broken glass, so what was the big deal? Maybe they were just upset about the barn burning down. Lightning strike, Molly had told him. But it didn't look like there had been a storm.
Shit, he had forgotten Beverly's cigarettes again.
At age fifty-one Denny Bryce knew this much about himself: that he had become a high school counselor because he didn't like being on the defensive, and almost everything in life made him feel defensive. He wished he could blame it on childhood deprivations or abuse, but it was simply his nature. His mother's nature before him. Yes, his father could have been more demonstrative—hugged him, given his unqualified thumbs-up without holding back the last carrot of motivation, witnessed his few triumphs on ball fields and in concerts—but Denny would have been full of self-doubt and yearning anyway. Maybe that was why he was still here every day, seeking his father's approval, seeking his own approval of who he was, who he should be. Being a school counselor put him behind the bench in the courtroom of human jurisprudence, when all he really wanted was just not to be in the dock. Nevertheless, he was a profoundly sympathetic judge. Everyone who stood before him left acquitted, absolved, exonerated. But New Eden was not one of the safe houses of his life. Coming here put him on the defensive in the extreme.
He had expected a comfort zone to eventually set in as he became familiar with the place, but when he pulled open the screen door and stepped across the th
reshold, he still felt the formality of borrowed space. There were protocols of age and perspective here he could never meet. The dusty bric-a-brac and worn fabrics were helplessly mute with history, the high ceilings swam with ghostly echoes, and the totem objects enshrined in cabinets or frames remained arcane mysteries to him. Worst of all, the eyes of the elders who lived here grew more distant instead of closer with each visit he paid. They were not sympathetic judges. They were an increasingly disinterested panel of jurors consigning him vote by vote to the irrelevant world of external things.
Except for today.
Today the gazes bore into him like bloodied iron pikes, stabbing again and again but failing to hold. Red-rimmed eyes, great gluey eyes, muzzy orbs wide with fear or desperation—not just on one person but on all of them. So he understood that whatever had agitated the table at yesterday's meal had progressed to this. Or deteriorated. And in part, because of the eyes, he glimpsed the vague travesties of Ariel's Passover without really seeing them, recognizing that something had changed but blind to the details. He saw that everyone looked older, more defeated by life than he had seen them before, but that was just a thing you noticed suddenly. And they kept moving, like so many ravaged salmon dying in the shallows of their final migration; this too confused the impression.
It was almost comical, their restless stirring in slow motion from room to room. He lingered longer than he normally would have in order to observe it, trying to start a conversation but getting only barely civil responses. How odd. It aroused all those counseling instincts that made him comfortable with distraught students sitting across a desk from him. Only, no one wanted to sit near him now. From parlor to dining room to kitchen they turned aside, slowly dying salmon casting raw-eyed pleas before wriggling away.
"What's going on?" he plied Dana when she came up from the cellars with a clothes basket only half full.
"Laundry," she said.
She looked haggard and pained, he thought. He followed her outside where she had strung a plastic clothesline from the stanchion at one end of the porch to a sugar maple thirty feet away.
"That's going to sag," he said about the clothesline.
"I couldn't fling the rope up through the first branch."
"Sounds like a job for Paavo."
She made a neutral sound, rubbed her fingers. He was startled by the knobbiness of her knuckles. This wasn't temporary swelling; it was the chronic deformity of arthritic hands. How had he not noticed before? That business with pressing his fingertips to hers the other day in the field—her hands had been smooth then. But, of course, he must be mistaken about that.
"Want me to clean out the dryer?" he said.
She looked at him with a glint of gratitude. "I couldn't ask you to do that."
"You aren't asking. I'm offering. Dana … what's going on?"
"You can't see?"
"See? Why don't you just say it? Then I'll know if it's what I see."
Her slate blue eyes were already receding, like the others. Doomed people looked that way. People on an ice floe drifting away from the mainland looked that way.
"There's nothing you can do for us," she said. "And your father … will be all right, I think."
"You think?"
She shook her head. "He'll be all right. I shouldn't have said it that way. I meant that you shouldn't interfere. There isn't any problem for you if you don't interfere."
"Listen, if I thought there was any danger to my father here, I'd be on it like—you'll pardon the expression—a fly on horseshit. So what exactly are you talking about? Why is everyone dragging around like mourners? Did someone die in that barn fire and Ariel is trying to hide it?"
But she wouldn't confirm, wouldn't deny. He played Twenty Questions. Got no satisfaction. It wasn't about the two of them or the photo or the camera, she maintained.
"You did drop that picture in the soup though?" he pressed her. "I mean, that wasn't an accident?"
She fussed wearily with the wet clothes going over the plastic clothesline, as if he had made a statement. Maybe it had been an accident, he thought, staring at her deformed hands. She could be embarrassed about her arthritis.
He went straight to his father's room then and recited the litany of contact, looking for clues to the subtext of his old man's life: "How are you, guy?" "Lonely." "That's because you sit in here all day." "Says you." "Well, don't you?" "I don't remember." Sometimes it was, "I don't care." But Martin Bryce never spoke of events or the people around him. When he was stimulated enough, he would launch his own mantra:
"What is this place?"
"What time is it?"
"Beth is dead, isn't she?"
When she was alive, his father had always referred to her as "your mother." But increasingly now, as if it hurt to remove her even that far, it was just "Beth."
"You need a shave, old man," Denny said.
"No."
"I promise I won't cut you this time." His father remembered that. Good sign.
"Use the electric shaver."
"Can't get any whiskers that way. You're a lumpy old man. Getting rid of your whiskers is like trying to shave parsley off mashed potatoes."
"Says you."
Did it matter if he shaved? Did it matter if he wore a cheap flannel shirt buttoned to the neck on a muggy day? He wasn't breaking a sweat. Denny's mother had sent away for that shirt—some catalogue filled with deception and offering hope to a woman still vital but without the energy to argue her husband into going shopping.
Denny asked half a dozen questions, knowing his father would tolerate no more than that. He tried to sculpt them so that they could not be responded to with clichés, hoping that something of the undercurrent in New Eden would emerge from the answers. His father would begin inventing things if the demand on his memory grew too great. He would simply snip out years of intervening reality to find some parallel that pleased him, something that fit comfortably with the continuum of the life he had known when his wife was alive. Thus the food was fine at New Eden for Martin, though he could do with another helping of Beth's apple brown Betty; and the people were fine, though he wished they wouldn't honk their car horns at all hours of the night; and he was getting along with everyone just fine—no arguments—except that he wanted to be left alone. Alone. He had complained about being alone when Denny had entered. Meaning that no matter who else was around, without Denny he would always be alone. His boy, the only living being who was still admitted to the estates of shared time and memory. When had his father ever trusted anyone this much? It hurt Denny to the core to be trusted like that. He wasn't worthy of it.
And that was funny, because he had spent most of his life trying to secure just that demonstration of paternal love and endorsement. And now it was his by default, by derangement. No, not derangement. His father would simply die if Denny let him. He was alive because Denny demanded it. Because Denny couldn't let him go. Didn't want to ever, ever, ever have to look back and know that he had just let him go.
So why wasn't he doing something about all this weird stuff going on here? He should at least be looking for the right questions, if not the answers. Dana Novicki's reticence was proof positive that there was something going on. Could he trust her when she said his father would be all right if he didn't interfere?
"I'm not trying to interfere," he said, face-to-face with Ariel later on. He had asked for a few minutes with her through Molly (pallid, flabby Molly who seemed to have succumbed to gravity overnight) and was struck at how composed Ariel was and how nervous Molly became before she left them alone in the sewing room. "Believe me, the last thing I want to do is to interfere with something that attracted me in the first place because … because it seemed to be working." He lost track of where he was going. He was a lousy performer, and he should not have rehearsed that little preamble about not interfering.
"And now it isn't?" Ariel helped him crisply.
"Isn't … ?"
"Working."
"I don't know i
f it is. I mean, if I said that, I meant I'm just a little worried about my father."
"Then it's your father who isn't working?"
"No. No, I don't mean my old man. Something is going on here, and I don't know what it is. I think it's personal between you and … and your circle, so I really don't want to know. But if it's threatening to my father—and frankly, if everyone is at each other's throats, then it's bound to affect him sooner or later—then I'm worried. You can understand that."
"How is it threatening to your father, Mr. Bryce?"
"Well, for one thing, I can't get hold of him, and he can't get hold of me."
"Ah, the phone. What else?"
"I don't know what else. It's just the atmosphere. My first impression of this place was that it was so informal that I thought it was just what my father needed. A real home—natural. I guess this is the downside of that. But there are limits—" She looked at him so steadily that he forbore raising the possibility of taking his father out of New Eden.
"I'll remind you of all my reservations, Mr. Bryce. You wouldn't listen. Even after I made it clear to you how unorthodox we were, you wanted your father to come here. You implied that if I didn't let you in, you might raise questions with the authorities. Specifically, I believe you mentioned taxes and state subsidies and certification. I compromised rather than deal with that, because no one wants to do back flips for nearsighted inspectors. As you say, we're informal here—"
"I pay you more than the going rate."
"Yes, you do. Your choice again. All your choices. And when I told you I wouldn't accept anyone who didn't agree to stay here for life, you accepted that too."
There it was. So, what if he took his father out? The two of them would be right back where they had started. No place to go that wasn't a warehouse for the dying, and maybe a waiting list besides. The papers were full of horror stories of neglect, abuse and incompetence at one facility after another. At least his father wasn't getting worse here. In fact, what had he personally suffered? "I'm not trying to interfere …" Denny murmured, lifting his eyes above her, absorbing the countdown of her stare.