by Brian Hodge
Bruised and scraped, she positioned herself across the emptiness again and once more started to climb. But the surge of adrenaline abandoned her after a few feet, and another wave of nausea made her want to just let go. Maybe she would be unconscious before she was eaten. Maybe she would crush the snake. She thought she could hear her heart thudding. But then – no – it was pounding overhead. Her mother’s voice. Yelling something. Not a cry for help. Something drawn out and angry.
Too exhausted and sick with terror to figure it out, her fingers feeling less and less, she climbed leadenly, mechanically, until at last she came to the third-floor crossing and saw another pocket of light like the others. This would be it. Endgame.
The meager light threw a pattern across her face as she dragged herself a few feet into the shaft behind a wall register. Again she got her feet against it, her shoulders braced. But this grid wouldn't budge either. And then she saw the room beyond, and it was the studio, and there was her mother.
Chapter 32
The banging resumed with such fury that, despite the thickness of the door, it alarmed Ariel. She twisted to see before realizing that it wasn't coming from the door but from the inner wall near the baseboard. How the hell had her murderous rebellion gotten in there? She scuttled to the radiator grid on the wall and stooped far enough to make out a tear-stained face and battered fingers.
“Amber?” Impossible. “Amber.” Possible. More than possible. “What are you doing?”
"Let me out."
Let her out? That would be letting her in. Then what?
"Let me out!" Bare feet tattooed against the grid, sending flakes of loose paint from the plaster around the frame. "Let me out, let me out, let me out!"
"Stop it!"
But it didn't stop. Her brash young daughter had never been this frantic before. It half persuaded her that the others had done something to her. Maybe Amber wasn't on their side after all. And the child would have the grid broken out of the plaster in another minute.
"All right, all right, I'll get you out. But then you have to climb out the window and get something to fight them with. Get them away from the door. Do you understand?
"Yes, yes, anything – hurry!"
Ariel had a small metal spatula for working paint, and this she applied to the slotted screws one by one. But the fourth screw was still partially threaded into the plaster when Amber added a final kick to the effort and the grid shot off. The child tumbled out then.
Ariel was struck by the spectacle. Two small patches of her nightshirt were blood soaked, and her hair was matted and powdered like a nineteenth-century periwig. More crimson trickled through the caked dust between her bare toes, as if it flowed up from wounds on the soles of her feet, and dust obliterated the pattern of her nightshirt where it covered her knees. Her arms hung limp and her shoulders sagged as she stumbled toward the door.
"Not that way. Out the window I said."
“Why?”
“Can’t you hear them? They’re after me. They want to kill me!”
For the first time, Amber understood; but her eyes flicked to the open duct on the wall.
“If you stay here, you’ll die anyway,” she said.
“Not if you go out the window and get something to attack them with.”
"I can't."
"What do you mean, you can't? You've been up and down on that lightning rod, and you can reach it from this window as easily as from the sewing room."
Then, before Ariel could stop her, Amber pattered to the door and turned the key.
Had the seven who stood in the corridor known what to expect they might have forced their way past the child in the doorway, but the rattling in the lock was taken as a sign that Ariel was coming out. Whether in surrender or with a weapon, it would be Ariel, so they backed away. And when Amber stood there they were distracted just long enough for Ariel to push the child into them, slam the door and twist the key again.
Dismay turned to anger.
"Now look what you've done!" Ruta blistered.
"I didn't do anything. I opened the door for you."
"You're just like your mother…."
"No—"
"You painted those creatures," Molly said. "You made the thing that got Paavo the first time."
"You made the scarecrow," Dana added.
"Yes, but I didn't know they were going to hurt anyone."
They had her hemmed in, and Paavo took her by the arm. "How did you get out of the cellar?" he demanded.
"We're sorry, child," Helen said. "But we can't let you go. You've got the paint."
“I don't want it anymore,” Amber murmured with resignation. Her weary gaze swept the gray faces and stopped on Helen Hoverstein. “If you want it, I'll tell you where it is.”
And as if that offer devastated Ariel behind the locked door, the studio suddenly erupted in shrieks. Something overturned; something else clattered as if hurled; glass shattered.
Only Amber understood.
Her mother was throwing things, breaking the window to see if there was a way to escape. Not from the other members of the household, of course. She was trying to get away from her worst nightmare. Because it was coming through the open wall register now—it—and she really hated snakes….
When the key rattled in the lock this time, the ravaged insurgents of New Eden were ready. They took hold of Ariel Leppa the instant she stumbled out, and it seemed unreal that they actually had their hands on the cause of their damnation and that her power over them could be at an end. Paavo let go of Amber, who for the moment was forgotten. What did the offspring matter when you had the queen bee? Nothing, unless you believed in royal succession. And perhaps they should have. Because the daughter of the queen suddenly jumped back into the studio that held the dust of Eden, the paint that it had potentiated, and all their portraits, and locked the door behind her.
The red serpent was gone. In the turmoil, Amber had stolen a look in the studio to see how imminent the threat was and caught a last glimpse of it rippling back into the duct. For a moment she was uncertain. Why hadn't it attacked everyone? Then again, it lived in the cellar; it could have attacked before and didn't. It was almost like it had been after her mother alone and now her mother was caught. So Amber took her chance—hadn't Ruta said she was just like her mother—darting back into the studio and locking the door.
Once before she had been in the studio alone with the paints. She had thought then that if she could get good enough like her mother, she would paint her father healthy again and then he would be able to get out of his wheelchair. But she hadn't gotten good enough. Instead she had unleashed a bunch of hideous things that didn't fit in, things that had no way to survive without killing. They were like Miss Hoverstein's pygmies who married each other and whose babies were all deformed or had sick brains, and so the world shouldn't have them anymore. Only, her monsters weren't going to let themselves die out voluntarily. They had to be killed.
But now that she was actually in the studio again, she realized the choices more clearly. You're just like your mother. Yes. In some ways. She had the artistic ability that ran in the family. And she could learn the rest. And she had all of the paints now. She could do it. Here were the pictures. She could paint them all out. Then she would practice, practice, practice with just regular paint—all day long, if she wanted—until she got good enough to use the magic paints. She would start again with a different world. She would paint Aarfie back, and her dad, and any friends she wanted. Maybe even a sister. That's what she would do. Could do.
That's what her mother did. Because her mother couldn't trust anyone, couldn't share with them, and so she could only be below or above them. And she had been both. She had made everyone come back, but not equal with her. So that was kinda her own choice too, Amber thought. And she was like her mother, sure, but not just like her mother.
They were pleading with her when she went to the door, begging her to give them their portraits.
Chapte
r 33
Denny punched the speaker button on the ringing phone because he was putting on his sunscreen in order to go out and mow the lawn, and his hands were greasy.
"Hello?"
"You'd better get out here."
"Dad?" He grabbed the phone out of the cradle.
"You'd better get out here, son."
His father actually calling him on the phone, getting the number right to boot—the first call he'd received from him in, what, a dozen years? "What's the matter, Pop?"
"I dunno. I hear things."
"Like what?"
"Screams and guns."
"In the house?"
Hesitation. "Yes, in the house."
"Is anyone else right there? Dana, maybe. You know, the one you bipped on the beak, old man."
"Everyone's gone."
"Gone?"
"They're screaming."
"Okay. Okay." Screaming. Guns. His father still had nightmares now and then. The Bataan thing his mother had told him about had never healed—never would heal. "You're sure you hear screaming?"
"Yeah." Straining with impatience now. "And guns." A raspy remnant of a voice. "Turret guns."
This is what Denny had gotten the phone for. To reassure his father when he couldn't be there. Cauterize the hemorrhaging of events that flowed without sequence. Chase away the nightmares 24/7. Tell him where he was and what year it was. And he was about to do that, but all at once he heard the "guns" for himself. Right over the phone. Distant and tinny, like backstage thunder. It must have sounded like Tin Pan Alley if you were right there in the house. It could have been the metal wardrobe. It could have been someone banging on the furnace. But his father said turret guns. And screams.
"I'm coming, Dad. Stay right where you are, okay?"
He left the mower out in the drive, and he kept wiping his hands on his yellowed sweatshirt as he drove. How could he have been so stupid, so reckless with his father's well-being? Something was very wrong with that farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Unless there was a totally innocent explanation for all this, he would bring the old man home with him tonight.
On the seat beside him was the pack of cigarettes he had finally remembered to buy for Beverly the night before.
Chapter 34
Amber could hear them dragging her mother downstairs, but she knew that others were still lingering by the studio door in the hallway. They had quit begging for their paintings, but they were still there.
In point of fact, it was Paavo and Kraft and Molly who were taking their captive to the cellar while the rest passively stood by, riveted by Ariel's baleful warnings of what Amber would create as she was pulled down—kicking and screaming—into her own apocalypse. Behind the door Amber listened, and a whole range of adult feelings she could not put into words beset her. The leaden pall over her life was literally sinking down the staircase like a counterweight, lifting a curtain of anger, mistrust and doubt and revealing a thinner fabric of pity for her mother that must have always been there in her heart. It would always be there, visible but not impeding anything. And a lot of fear remained too. There was fear on both sides of the door. But when the others returned and her mother's dire sputterings were just a smothered murmur in the distant cellar, Amber decided to take a chance Ariel never would have taken.
Turning the key, she opened the door on seven startled faces.
"God bless you, dear," Miss Hoverstein said, reaching out a waxy hand that looked shrink-wrapped over blue veins.
They doddered into Ariel's inner sanctum like awestruck children then, and for a few moments the studio resembled a life-size music box whose figurines turn slowly while the last dirge-soft notes unwind. Here was the castle tower, empty of its lightning-hurling sorceress, and it was just as warped and faded as the rest of the house. How strange that the gateway between the two contrasting dimensions they had known should be so mundane. Dust crawled for the corners and plaster sagged along the exterior edge of the ceiling. But then they saw something that was anything but mundane. The miserable creature in the castle keep, it seemed, was not finished with them yet.
"Look," Dana warned, drawing their gazes as she glided toward the appalling portraits lined across the workbench. "She was already starting on Paavo."
They saw; they slumped. Eyes refused eyes. The air seemed to go out of the room.
"But it hasn't dried yet," Beverly noted.
Paavo came slowly toward the image of himself that showed his left arm torn out of its glistening socket, and he braced his hands on the edge of the workbench. His eye fell on the open jars of paint that Ariel had been using. "Doesn't matter," he said. He pushed himself erect and hefted a can of commercial alkyd from the shelf. "I don't have to be here when it's dry."
Molly raised her head as if in affirmation. "No, it really doesn't matter, does it? None of us have to be here anymore."
Amber sensed the drama of a decision flowing round the room with the ease of a cloud passing over the horizon.
Dana walked to the window. Ruta looked at each of them in turn, as if to borrow a resistance she wanted but could no longer feel and then wrapped her arms around herself. Kraft was stone solid. It got very still then, very posed. Even the dust stopped crawling for the corner.
"It's what we talked about before, child," Helen said to Amber, because she was the only person in the room who didn't understand.
But they hadn't talked about it. Not in specific terms. Just a few remarks posed by Marjorie Korpela when they were playing canasta. And now it was Helen's role to make it concrete.
"We didn't want our portraits just so that we could stay alive, Amber. We wanted your mother to stop changing them."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that maybe your mother was right about what we were. You never knew us when we were younger. Maybe we needed a second chance to come to terms with that. But now we have seen it, and we're as ready as we'll ever be."
"Ready to what?"
"Ready to die."
"You're going to make yourself extinct like the pygmies."
"The Tarons … very apt. Yes, the Tarons. This is all wrong. The world shouldn't have us anymore."
The elder faces were concentrating on Helen now, thinking profoundly what they hadn't wanted to think since returning from the nonplace, the infinite paradox where existence meant you couldn't corroborate that you existed. Limbo, purgatory, hell, Sheol, Tophet, Gehenna, Hades, perdition, the abyss, the pit—it mattered not what infernal region it was. It was not paradise. Or even serene oblivion. And death was coming again, no matter what. If they lived another day, it subtracted a mere twenty-four hours from the final and eternal disposition. Forever minus twenty-four in their present condition. Twenty-four followed by twenty-four followed by …
"… Better to go now," Helen was saying, "while we've got the perspective and the will. It's as close as we're going to come to a state of grace."
"State of grace?" Kraft Olson growled in a voice none of them had heard for years. "There's nothing graceful about life. I've never seen anything that makes me believe in a God of grace."
"God made Danielle," Dana said.
"Whatever made her let her die."
"Get over it, Kraft."
"I think I'll paint my portrait pink," Ruta mused, surveying the paints as if they were cosmetics. "If Ariel's got any pink."
Beverly caught the spirit of bravado. "Wish I had one last cigarette."
And Molly: "I still don't know if there's a heaven, but there has to be something better than where we were. Eventually. If there's a dark place, then there must be a light one. A white universe all crystal and warm. If I can't be me, then I want to dissolve in a white universe."
"So who's going first?" Ruta asked nervously. "I don't want to go first, but if we stall around any longer, I'm going to change my mind."
"What about Ariel?" Molly said. "We can't just leave her locked in the cellar."
"Leave that to me," Kraft said. "No one is goin
g to be painting over my picture. I'll let Ariel out when you're gone."
Helen glanced at the shelves. "Her paints have to be destroyed." And looking pointedly at Amber, she added, "I hope there aren't any more around the house."
They all looked at Ariel's heir then, who like them was a painting come to life, but unlike them had never been dead.
Amber stared at a point more or less in the middle of the room. "I'm going to burn down the house like I burned down the barn," she recited with perfect composure.
Helen dropped down on the ratty Chesterfield. "Are you sure you can do that?"
"Yes. I can. If you want, I'll paint you all out. I did it to my twin, so I know how it works—it won't have to dry if it's not the magic paint. And then I'll paint fire all over the studio. I'm really good at painting fire. But Mr. Olson will have to help me get my father and Mrs. Korpela out of the house first. I can get Mr. Bryce out by myself later while he’s letting my mother out of the cellar."
Trembling, Helen reached out to the small hand. "Amber, your father is dead. His chair went down the staircase."
The all-seeing, lambent eyes of the shriveled figure on the sofa swallowed the child whole, while Amber's eyes welled and shimmered emerald but held fast. He had never really come back—her father – bound in that wheelchair. So he was no worse off than before. But what if he was where the rest of them had been? A dark place, Molly had said. She really didn't get it all, but she understood that they were going to go back because they thought they were ready now and because they were suffering. So it was probably all right for her dad, too.
But not her mother.