by Brian Hodge
Something wide-winged and jagged, like an animated kite, glided to the top of the basswood, but he didn't see it, didn't feel it when it swooped down from behind and passed within six feet of him. He was too absorbed with the charred remains of the barn, and he just kept padding through the soft perimeter of ashes, searching for a way in. The smell of smoke was damp and acrid; there must be flames in there. And he didn't know, but maybe this was where Tiffany's screams came from at night. Lifting the extinguisher and aiming it at the debris, he tried to squeeze the handles together, but nothing happened.
The kite-like silhouette lifted off the roof of the machine shed for a second ponderous attack, beating its ragged asymmetry, lifting its talons, arrowing straight for the upright human being.
Martin fumbled with the extinguisher mechanism, twisting, pushing and finally catching his finger in a plastic loop. He pulled out the pin and squeezed the handles again. This time the extinguisher gushed foam, and the prolonged hiss drove the swooping silhouette away. When the extinguisher sputtered its last, Martin dropped it and listened hard for a cry.
"Tiffany?" he called.
Then he shuffled back to the house, head down—a line of steps, a pause, a quarter or a half turn to reorient himself. Inside he passed through the parlor, but the inky darkness threw off his balance and he grasped a wooden post that suddenly appeared on his left. For a few seconds his chest lifted effortfully. Why couldn't he find Tiffany? He glanced to the side, saw that he was leaning on a newel, looked up a staircase that led to darkness.
He didn't remember the staircase, didn't think he had ever climbed it. That must be where she was. Where the fire was. He hoped he wouldn't be too late this time. She would be horribly scarred if he was late. He started up, pushing on one knee, sliding his elbow along the banister and winching himself to each successive step. But he made only a few before he had to sit down. There were days (or nights) when he could climb this staircase, but this night wasn't one of them. He felt lousy. And he couldn't remember why he had started up now. He was tired, and he knew he had a bed here somewhere. Downstairs. Wearily, he stood.
"You there," came a whisper.
He looked to where the whisper had come from; saw nothing.
"Mr. Bryce? Come up here."
Martin peered wide-eyed in the gloom. "Who are you?"
"I can't come down. I'm in a wheelchair. I've got something for you."
"What is it?"
"Something that belongs to … Tiffany."
And that galvanized him a little. His focus came back, and he climbed one slow step at a time, hesitating to strain up at the darkness until he could see the face peering through the balusters on the landing. He reached the second floor, and there was the man, a shaggy man with a huge head. But he wasn't in a wheelchair. He was sitting on the carpet.
"I've been waiting for you, Mr. Bryce. My daughter told me you walk around at night, so I knew if I could just get to the landing, sooner or later I'd catch you."
"Where's Tiffany?"
"She hasn't been up in a while. I think her mother is keeping her away. But I've got something for her. It's a secret, and there isn't anyone else in this house I trust. Can I trust you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Come and I'll show you." He began to drag himself up the next flight. "Come on, Mr. Bryce."
They weren't that different when it came to climbing stairs—octogenarian Martin Bryce, legless Thomas Leppa, sighing like steam locomotive pistons working in tandem up a steep grade. At the very top the wheelchair was outlined in dim light cast from an open doorway. With his farmer's biceps and a little dexterity not unlike a gymnast's on a pommel horse, Thomas Leppa stiff-armed himself onto the foot stops and hauled himself onto the seat. Releasing the brakes on the wheels, he spun silently through the open door.
"Under the cedar chest," he said when Martin caught up.
Maneuvering slowly, he brought the chair alongside a brass-bound chest and adjusted the green shade of the lamp that sat on its lid. With the light spilling squarely on the floor, he reached down again and slid out two objects.
"You see?" he said. And Martin Bryce saw. "I want you to take them to Amber—to Tiffany. Hide them until you get a chance to show her in private. Will you do that?"
Chapter 25
So now Amber knew. It was in her mother's icy eyes, wide and staring like a cat's. She had even sounded like a cat, purring when she offered a test to see which of her daughters would survive.
And that was why Amber had to get the paint out of the cistern now, no matter what the risk from the thing that lived in the woods. She had to move it far, far away this time, so that her mother wouldn't follow her. The creek that wound through the property and came out at Crookshank Road had a culvert there with cattails and mud on either side, and that's where she thought she would go. Aarfie had gotten into that mud once, and it had taken them a couple of hours to reach him. Her father used to joke that he was going to leave the family jewels there, because no one would touch them in all that muck. So she would take a spade with her and dig a hole near the culvert and bury the paint jar there.
But it had to be now. Only, she was afraid to go at night because of the spider. And anyway, the other Amber would know because they slept together in the big bed.
The other Amber. She didn't know what else to call her. That was the one big awkwardness between them.
They talked so intimately and shared everything else, but they couldn't decide about the name. Did that mean they were competing? She had been thinking about it and she was going to suggest that they both pick different names. She would be Christina, or maybe Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The other subject that they had never talked about in the week before her mother made her threat in the studio was the stolen paint. She hadn't been able to bring that up either. A couple of times she had been on the verge of telling her twin, and something had interrupted—
Alicia Keys singing "Fallin’" on the radio, and another time Ruta glaring cow-eyed at them from the porch. But now that her mother had threatened to make it a test between them, how lucky was that? She would have revealed the hiding place today or tomorrow. Lucky but sad. Because when her mother told her twin what the deal for survival was, it was going to change everything.
When she came back from the studio that night and got into bed, she started to cry.
"What is it?" came at her shoulder. "Was she mean?"
"Sort of."
"What did she say?"
"She wants to split us up."
"How can she?"
Hesitation. "She can't."
But she could. She would. One way or another. Amber wasn't crying because her mother didn't love her. She was crying because yet another dream of having a companion had been shot through the heart.
Which may have had something to do with why she procrastinated going for the paint the next day. It was like admitting that she couldn't trust her only friend, ending their friendship, in fact. So she didn't move the stolen paint right away. After all, as long as they were together, she would know if their mother called her twin aside to tell her about the stolen paint and the test.
There were other excuses to delay her trip back to the cistern. Everyone in the house was watching them out of the corners of their eyes, as if something was going to happen, so it would be hard to slip away. And late in the afternoon they got into some boxes in the cellar filled with stuff from their childhood, and that was really strange—
"Oh, remember this?" (Of course she remembered the coloring book. They couldn't contradict each other's memories because they were exactly the same.) "Look at the green hair."
"I know."
"I was heavy into green then."
"I know."
"This was my best one—Cinderella at the ball." And then with sudden social deference—"What was your favorite?"
"Duh?"
"Oh. Yeah, it would be the same. What does 'duh' mean?"
They found the witch costume from Halloween and the azure love beads and the first five Nancy Drews. An Argus 75 camera that had been old even in the '60s was still in its brown case, and there were the contraband lapel buttons (GIVE A DAMN, GOD IS DEAD, BAN THE BRA, STONED) hidden from their parents, which apparently their mother had known about all along and preserved. And Snoopy, chewed and hugged to piebald alopecia, unexplainably wrapped in a Jimi Hendrix psychedelic poster.
They sensed the anticlimax of these discoveries, but didn't understand where the drain was coming from; felt the echo, but couldn't identify it; saw their common source, yet lost the thread of sameness in the fact of being two people on either side of an old trunk. The only difference was mathematical and inscrutable: three-and-a-half intervening decades had shrunk to one year for Amber One, one week for Amber Two.
And by the time they climbed the stairs from the cellar dinner was ready, and then it was getting dark again, so there was no trip to the cistern that day.
Amber the stealer of paint understood that her mother was giving her time. It was the simplest solution. Scare her, then reward her when she gave up the paint. But Amber couldn't trust in that. Even if she gave up the paint, she wouldn't be able to trust it. Safer for both she and her twin if she called her mother's bluff by just holding out. And she wanted to tell her companion that. Wanted desperately to share everything and make a pact never to give their mother what she wanted. But, of course, if they both knew where the stolen paint was hidden, then their mother could paint out either one of them. And Amber wasn't ready to sacrifice her only chance for survival. Her mother was giving her time to figure all this out, because once her twin knew what the stakes were and how expendable she was, it was going to get very, very bad.
And then the next day, at exactly five o'clock, Molly came in and said that the newest resident of New Eden was wanted upstairs. Molly looked soberly at Amber Two, but clearly she wasn't sure which of them was which.
"Let me go," Amber the thief whispered to her twin when Molly was out of earshot.
“Why?”
"Because I know her better than you, and she wants to split us up. Please …"
"It won't work. You're more tanned than me, and you've still got that mark on your cheek. She'll know if we switch. Don't worry. I can handle her."
Amber wasn't worried – worried didn’t cover it. She was panicked! Watching her twin go off, she realized it was over. The clock that had been running had stopped. Or was this another scare? Her mother might not really be telling her twin that only one of them was going to survive. Because what if Amber Two freaked out? What if they got in a fight and Amber Two killed her while trying to force her to reveal where the paint was hidden? Then her mother wouldn't get the paint back at all and wouldn't know if it was someplace where someone else might find it.
So Amber waited downstairs, drifting back and forth between the porch and her room and the parlor. She wanted to be ready to dive out the window of her room but at the same time keep in range of the staircase, so she could see her companion the second she appeared. She would read her face, her eyes, and she would know. Either there would be the connection they had made or there would be something else, like her mother's cat stare. That’s the look she would see if Amber Two was rehearsed to face her after what she learned from their mother. But what would be her twin's look if she was suddenly surprised by Amber looking steadily up at her? She would turn her eyes away, that's what she would do. So Amber had to be right there to look up when her twin wasn't expecting it. When you looked down a staircase it was hard to pretend you didn't see what was at the bottom.
And if she did look away, Amber would know it was going to be a fight for survival between them, and she would just turn and run. She knew the fields, the woods, the places you could hide and where to jump to avoid the mud, so probably her twin wouldn't be able to catch her, even though they were physically the same. And if she did catch her, what then? Probably nothing, unless her twin went totally ballistic. They would argue. Her twin would try to persuade her, or maybe trick her with a lie to find out where the paint was. Their mother would give her time to do that. It could turn into a long game. So she probably wouldn't go ballistic until their mother ran out of patience.
It was a sketchy strategy half-formed in a little girl’s mind, full of uncertainties; and Amber changed it a half dozen times. She went to her room and put on her Skechers; she got the spade she thought she would need to dig a hole at the culvert and set it by the porch; she even opened the window in the bedroom in case a real fight started and she had to get away. But she kept listening for the closing of a door upstairs. And she always came back to the same hope that it wasn't over, that the friend she had so desperately wished for in this everlasting childhood was still her friend and not her enemy.
Dinner was a minor production. Molly and Dana exaggerating the motions. Plates set down on the table with slow deliberation. The kitchen faucet on and off at low force, as if they knew there was trouble. No one asked Amber to sit down. When it was over and people straggled out, Mrs. Novicki put a plate of gingersnaps on the table and gave her a glance. But Amber couldn't eat.
What was taking so long upstairs?
It would be dark soon. In her mind she saw her mother glaring steadily at her twin, her voice like a melody but the words chilling: I suppose I'll have to paint one of you out, if it gets too confusing … Whichever one of you brings back my paint, that's the one who stays. Only, it must be a lot more than that. Explanations, plans, plots. Maybe tears and doubts. But it was taking a long time. And finally, with dusk falling, she had had enough.
Retreating to her room, she closed the door and wedged a slipper under the seam. Hopefully Amber Two or anyone else would think she was in there pouting and leave her alone at least for a while. Maybe, if she was lucky, she could even do what she had to do and get back here before anyone was the wiser. She pulled the shade so no one could see in the room. Then she wiggled behind it and climbed out the window, drawing the sash down from outside.
Stooping below the parlor window, she retrieved the spade she had left by the porch and scooted to the basswood side of the house. From there she followed the line of trees along the drive, circled back behind the charred remnants of the barn, and dashed out into the fields.
There was a mahogany cribbage board on the credenza in the dining room. The pegs had long since been replaced by small finishing nails, but she liked to push and pull them in and out in sequence, dreaming that each hole was another step in an exotic journey. The journey led to a treasure, and sometimes she had to dodge other pegs, or cross rows to escape imaginary pursuit. And that was what she felt like now, crossing the furrowed fields and darting among the broken stalks. Each step followed a row until she crossed to the next.
She thought of the spider and the other things she had painted: red eyes in red bodies with red fangs and red claws. The sun was half under the horizon, so her creations would be coming to life soon—nocturnal, like her mother said. But she had been out at night before since then and nothing had happened, so, so far so good. Of course, she hadn’t gone where she had to go now on any of those nights. If she could just get in and out of the cistern before the spider started to hunt ….
The closer she got to that hole in the earth, the harder she ran, her heart flip-flopping like a fish on a dock, perspiration on her brow (That kid never sweats, her father used to say, and she had tried not to then, wiping her lip or her brow before she came into the parlor on hot days). When she saw the stand of trees the warmth in her chest went out like a snuffed candle. Ice churned in her belly. She had to pee. How could she have thought she could do this?
The dreaded spider was probably watching her with all its pairs of firefly eyes, as unblinking as her mother. She had hoped the light would be bright enough in the tops of the trees so that she could see if it was up there. But maybe it was sitting on the ground in its hole or something—there were spiders that did that.
/> She would go around the woods as far as she could, she decided. She would try to come up on the cistern from the other side.
And then she stumbled, and it made her remember another thing her father had told her. That some spiders used trip lines. They ran them along walls or out on the ground, and when passing prey touched them the spider knew. It felt the vibration and it could tell everything, like how big you were. And then it came, and if you were what it wanted, it attacked and bit you and wrapped you up with silk as strong as steel cables, and it would stick something in you like a needle full of poison. Then you were paralyzed. Sometimes the poison dissolved your guts. Sometimes the spider just laid eggs in you and the eggs hatched and ate you while you were still alive, and—
She caught her balance again, but instead of slowing, she ran harder, faster. Going for the far side of the field. Fighting off the shucks in her face and staggering. Dodging nimbly, like a peg on a cribbage board.
When she got to the edge of the field she calmed a little. The sun fire on the horizon was just cold orange now. Nothing much lit the earth. She stared intently along the rows, trying to detect any motion, but it was very still. Unnaturally still. It was the moment right at sunset before the hunters came out. Which was why she had to hurry. No time for caution. As soon as it was totally dark, she was doomed.
Moving up the edge of the field to the end, she went straight to the cistern. She had pushed the dog fennel and spurge back in place the last time, but now she could see one of her footprints in the mud right by the rim. Reaching down she found the edge of the wooden cover and dragged it off.