by Brian Hodge
The house was big and old and the ducts were big and old, and it suddenly occurred to her that she could crawl through them—crawl and climb—if she could just get inside. And she could. Because one of them, right where the Lutheran school had installed square ducts to go to the new wing, had rusted through on the bottom, and her father had cut the rusty part out and laid another panel in its place inside the duct. She had watched him do it. "Guess that's not going anywhere," he had said, and she thought that was funny at the time—the idea that it could go somewhere. Only, now it did. Because she dragged boxes in place and climbed up and pushed the panel until it slid back enough for her to lift one of the candles and poke her head in.
It looked like oatmeal inside, a gray blanket of dust all wavy and pilled, but there were squiggly lines along the bottom too, like rivers that had dried up, so it must have leaked, and that was why her father had replaced the rusty part. She could see the bare metal in the riverbeds. And every few feet there was a rib where one section joined the next. A ways down she could see a dark opening where the oversize duct turned up. I can do it, she thought.
Daddy's little monkey …
She was barefoot and in a cotton nightshirt, but whatever was happening upstairs left her no choice except to try to defeat her mother before she herself was destroyed. So she wormed her way in and slowly crept forward, mindful of the hot wax dribbling onto her hand as she maneuvered a few inches at a time. Dust clung to all four inner surfaces and stirred into the stifling air as she planted her elbows commando style. The fine tickle in her throat thickened until it felt like she had swallowed a washcloth, and then she coughed and that made her bump her head, knocking wads of the stuff loose. Like cotton candy, it vaporized. She barely had time to realize it had caught on fire. Embers, smoke, ash—all in a burst.
So now she knew the gray lining could all go up at once, and her grip began to sweat, making the candles slippery. One touch to the blanket of dust and—poof!—cremated Amber. Old Mr. Bryce would think it was Tiffany burning up and blame himself again.
She would have turned back at that point, except that she was near a vertical shaft. Squiggling her bare toes forward in the soft blanket, trying not to create a tear that would bring down curtains of flammable dust, she twisted her neck and peered up the intersecting riser.
It wasn't as dusty up there, and she could stand. In fact, it wasn't a duct at all. Vaguely she remembered her father joking about how the furnace must have been built by the same people who had done the Tower of Babel, because it had round ducts and square commercial ducts and sometimes no ducts at all but something he just called chases. She must be standing in a chase, she thought, because most of it didn't have any metal. It was a wood-frame shaft with metal sections here and there that she thought maybe the church people had put in as part of the agreement for their school. The ribs every couple of feet would make it easy to brace her feet, she thought, and unlike the cistern, it was just narrow enough for her to use the sides. The problem was the candles. She didn't think she could climb and hang onto the candles. The only way to do it would be to push against the sides with just her elbows and wrists instead of her fingers.
There were voices now—shouts—coming from high up in the house, and that spurred her on. Pawing away the coating of dust on the horizontal shaft right below the chase, she dribbled a little wax on the bare metal and stuck both candles upright. Even if her body kept the light from shining past, at least she would be able to look down and see what progress she had made.
Cautiously she tried the first handhold, simultaneously feeling with her toes for the first ridge. It took a little adjustment of her balance, pushing just right against the sides as well as down, but it wasn't all that hard for Amber the Human Fly. Up she went, faster than she had been able to crawl in the horizontal duct. She kept looking down to make sure she wasn't dislodging dust onto the candles. And each time she looked up again, she had to give it a couple of seconds for her eyes to get used to the darkness. Enough light made it past her so that she could pick out the dark openings of passages that came horizontally into the chase. And when she reached the second of these and looked in, a fall of genuine light was tantalizing close.
It took only a few seconds to slide on her butt through the horizontal shaft and discover that she was looking up through the floor register of the downstairs bathroom by her bedroom. And that made her wonder if the red spider she had drowned that day had gotten into the bathroom through this very shaft and afterward gone down the tub drain. She pushed as hard as she could on the grid, hammered with her palm. Then got her feet against the lattice with her knees up against her chin. Nothing budged. She cried out in frustration, but the tinny echo just blended with the general tumult from upstairs.
And now there was another thing. Was it her imagination or was it growing hotter in the duct? She could no longer get a full breath. Still scrunched up, she began edging her way back to the vertical shaft. Too late she realized that she was dragging a carpet of dust with her. And as she shoved her feet over the edge into the chase, it went raining down on the candles below. She peered past her toes at the feathery clusters as they hit the flames and set them winking. For just a second she thought they would go out. And when the wavering stopped and the light steadied again, she almost wished they had. Because now she could see every detail of the crimson eyes in the crimson head and the crimson serpent's tongue flicking up at her.
Amber Leppa screamed and screamed.
Screamed until she was deafened and the metal that surrounded her hummed. But the vibrations only seemed to excite the thing below, and its split tongue flicked up at her like a fork probing after tender morsels.
For a few dizzying moments her arms and legs wouldn't move. If they did, she was going to pass out from sheer fright and fall down the chase, she thought. And then the snake was going to unhinge its jaw and work its mouth over her head. It was probably starving, probably able to swallow her bit by bit by unhinging its jaws the way she had once seen in science lab when she had been in school. And this snake looked terrifyingly real, not at all like the ones she had painted, but more like the one in the painting in the parlor, only much bigger. It was still writhing into view out of the horizontal shaft, and it was incredibly long. Anaconda long. And it was red. She understood what the wriggly lines in the dust at the bottom shaft were now. They were not leaks that had rusted out the panel. They were tracks where the thing had come and gone. It must have crawled in and grown and grown until it couldn't get out.
But suddenly her heart surged, flushing the cobwebs out of her mind and allowing her to reason that the snake wasn't all that fast, not going up anyway. So that's what she had to do. Go up.
She began to scramble for footing in the ductwork, but she must have dragged more dust out of the horizontal chase she had just left, because the light around her began to pulse like a strobe, and when she looked down the last thing she saw before first one and then the other of the candles winked out was the flattened viper head much, much closer.
Chapter 30
Ariel walked right into them on the stairs. She came out of the studio, intending to search the cellar for the other missing portrait of Amber, and there they were, a guilty little huddle of rebellion halfway to the second floor. She looked down with scorn but they glared back, and she saw that they didn't look guilty after all. Their haggard, burning eyes were anything but conflicted.
Then she saw that Paavo had a hammer and a chisel and Molly carried the jack handle from the car. The others—Dana, Helen, Beverly, Ruta—seemed to be holding things at their sides. But the really shocking sight was the seventh figure, the one bringing up the rear. Kraft Olson looked disturbingly sentient for a man clutching a serrated carving knife with homicidal intent.
And yet the vivid reality of what they were attempting seemed absurd to her. A more desperate act by so inadequate a group was hard to imagine. Her first reaction was to confront them head-on, and she actually took five or si
x steps down the staircase as if she were not afraid. But they kept on coming, a ridiculous slow-motion coup straight out of a B-horror film: arthritic knees lifting, flaccid arms pulling on the banister, fingers catching on steps. Ruta's obscenely small mouth strained for air, and runty Beverly struggled to get both feet on each step behind Helen the Hunchback.
Ariel balked. Farce or not, she did not like their intensity or the very fact that they were unafraid. Better to retreat to the studio. Put a heavy oak door between her and them. But as she turned, her eyes came up sharply to the wheelchair that sat poised at the top of the stairs. Massive and shaggy, her invalid husband leered down at her.
"Wait for me, dear!" Thomas Leppa rumbled, and yanking as hard as he could he launched the big silver wheels over the edge.
The heavy chair plunged straight at Ariel, thrusting her husband upright, his arms outflung to prevent any possibility of her escape. But the right footrest caught the second step, pivoting the wheelchair on its side and altering its trajectory. Ariel was already losing her balance when a flailing hand clutched the throat of her blouse. It was an irresistible force, and she spun after her attacker while the misdirected chair tumbled to the landing. She fell elbow first against the small of his back, and she actually heard the snapping of the vertebrae, though she couldn't tell whose. But the two of them rode only a couple of steps before he slid out from under, leaving her gently sprawled halfway down the flight.
She had hit her lip and now she tasted blood, tasted reality. The blur of open rebellion rising from the lower level was palpably real now. By the time Molly and Paavo were past the upended wheelchair and Thomas Leppa's grotesquely twisted body, Ariel had crawled ponderously to the top step on the third floor.
She threw one white-eyed glance over her shoulder as she gained her feet, then hobbled toward the studio. A chill went through her as she fumbled for the key in the pocket of her slacks. Where was it? Lying on the staircase? An ironic premonition of her death falling from the window of the studio as she had intended the night she first mixed the paint flashed through her mind. But then her fingers closed around the key, and that little triumph infected her with insane glee. She was actually giggling as she unlocked the door.
"Do you know what you've just thrown away?" she shouted to the climbers on the stairs. Then stepping into the studio, she slammed the door thunderously and set the lock.
But once inside she began to cry. Shudders racked her bony form and the warm salty tears that coursed down her withered cheeks felt like blood draining out of her. Faintness swept in. She staggered to her workbench and collapsed beside it with a final dry sob.
Why had everything gone so wrong for her? She had been at the bottom of the food chain and at the top, and each time she had been devoured by the ravenous pack. There was no reason for it except capriciousness. It was as simple as that. Children on a playground nearly three-quarters of a century removed had decided at a glance that she lacked the symmetry and grace of the rest of them. So they had practiced their own "natural selection" ever since. And nothing – absolutely nothing she could ever hope to do – was going to change that.
And suddenly, as if giving voice to the utter frustration of that, there was a scream. The fact that it was a distant scream from deep within the walls of the house failed to register. More screams followed – frantic and rising. She thought they were coming from the horrorstruck collection of damned souls at her locked door. Like a raft of doomed sinners they had arrived on Charon's ferry to the far shore of the river Styx, and now their screaming drove the self-pity out of her mind, because it was their turn to suffer the full consequences ….
"You've lost!" she shrieked, half rising, half scrabbling to the door. "Long, long lives and you threw them all away!"
She landed on the inner panel as if she had been hurled, and she spoke hoarsely into the wood, letting it resonate her condemnation and her laments to the faithless inhabitants of New Eden on the other side.
"I gave you a chance to redeem yourselves, and you were too selfish, too proud, too weak to take it. I cared … I cared enough to let you back, and all you could do was look down on me. Do you think I'm made of stone? Ariel the Leper? Ariel the Doormat?”
The first blow jarred her a step back. It was Paavo hitting the middle of the door with the hammer she had seen him carrying. But the wood was thick and Paavo was weak. He could pound until he dropped and the door would hold.
"Do you know what I'm going to do now?" she amplified more loudly still. "I'm going to make you so hideous that you'll wish for hell again. Did you hear me, Ruta? You think Marjorie is a festering ruin? Wait till you're too weak to brush the worms out of your sores. Wait until your bowels leak and your skin is so thin that it bursts when you move. You'll wish for hell to save you from me!"
More blows. From metal objects this time. And fists. But Ariel Leppa set about getting the portraits ready.
She would paint them as she had described: a rogue's gallery of living agony that would put the ugliness of their souls on their outward bodies. Fit company for Dorian Gray! And if, by some chance, they were able to beat down the door before the changes could dry, she would have open containers of paint ready to spill over their images, obliterating them forever.
But the hammering on the door suddenly stopped of its own accord, too suddenly to be exhaustion. Ariel heard movement as if they were stepping aside. But for who? Or what?
And now there came a thin, gritty thud in the center of the panel so impotent that she almost laughed. Only why were the others letting this weak assault take over? And then she remembered something else that one of them had been carrying, and she knew …
Kraft Olson was casting his hand in her assassination. The knife he carried came out of the door and went in again and again. Plunging, plunging. He didn't need to get any closer than that to wound Ariel Leppa to the heart. The very futility of it spoke of his passion. So vindictive.
The pain that instantly bubbled up inside her was blind. It hurt as it had hurt her entire life, and she reacted with equally blind rage, wanting to lash out as she was still learning to do. She wanted to tell Kraft how Danielle had suffered, how ugly his chosen one had become before her final annihilation. But she couldn't. Because she felt uglier than any of those travesties she had perpetrated on Danielle. Ugly and hated.
A tremendous agony filled her mind and body now, so paramount that she feared she could not exist another instant if she examined it. Everyone and everything had betrayed her. Even the agony threatened to betray her by yielding reasons she didn't want to hear. So she let the outrage that lay at the bottom of her heart scream it down—that ravenous outrage that had cowered mute all her life while it bloated itself with accumulated hurts. Such a scream it had pent up. Filling her mind so completely that it deafened and blinded her. And she was glad because she could no longer hear the knife in the door. And she was glad she couldn't see Kraft's face. And more important than even that, she was glad he couldn't see hers.
Chapter 31
The soles of Amber's bare feet tingled, and the cotton nightshirt that ended at her calves felt like a wind tunnel exposing her to every breath of heat rising in the duct. That she could actually feel heat from the nightmarish reptile behind her, that its scorching breath would touch her naked heels first when it caught her, seemed rational. A red serpent, a flickering flame for a tongue—its whole aspect was heat. Burning fangs would close around the tendon at the back of her foot, and she would be dragged down, already feverish from the poison that would paralyze her as the giant snake began to swallow and digest her in the hot acids of its stomach.
She caught the vanilla smell of the gutted candles then, and it was funny, but that sane association with unbaked cherry pies and cookie dough rekindled her with a hope as strong as fear. She began to climb furiously in the dark: hand following hand, foot following foot, grasping, pressing, clinging to successive ridges where sections of the old chases and newer ductwork met. She thrummed her
way upward, listening beneath the reverberations for pursuit. And the unfairness of the fact that the snake didn't make any sound at all made her want to cry.
Her response to the next hint of light in a connecting shaft was just as desperate. She scrambled onto the horizontal and banged her way to the grillwork. There would be no time to go back on this one. The red serpent would be on her at the juncture of the ducts. And then she saw that it was a second-floor bedroom that was used to store books and boxes. One of the boxes sat on half the floor grid, and from the way it bulged, she knew it was heavy. She got her feet up on the lattice and braced her shoulders. But one futile push was all it took to know she would never move it.
So now the panic hit her like ice dripping from the top of her spine to the pit of her stomach. Which way to go? The red snake might be up to the connecting shaft by now. She tried to remember where the registers were in the second-floor rooms, tried to figure where the duct might go. It would be a dead end, she thought, and before she could reason that any direction was going to be a dead end, she had started back to the vertical chase. But moving toward darkness was disorienting, and in her haste she miscalculated. Reaching out, she brought her right hand down into nothingness. Like a slow surface dive into a black lake, she pitched headlong into the shaft.
The fact that she stiffened her legs, which were still in the horizontal duct, was what saved her. She was rigid when her shoulder jarred against the opposite side. Pain radiated from her waist to her neck as her right hand clawed for a seam and her left grasped the horizontal lip of the crossing. She pushed, wriggling backward one awkward inch at a time until her hips were supported and she could rest both elbows on the opposite edge.
But now her body was bridging the intersection with her stomach bowed downward as if to invite the scaly red creature below to strike. She thought about all the high places she had climbed, roofs and trees and a lightning rod, and here she was inside a simple long box that had edges like a ladder on all four sides. All she had to do was get her feet under her. Her arms felt like rags and her spine like straw as with one last trembling effort she pushed herself upright.