Dust of Eden

by Thomas Sullivan

  "My apologies," he said and stuck out his hand. "Denny. Denny Bryce."

  The fingers that had flown to her breast came forward in a limp grasp. "Dana Novicki."

  They had to raise their voices above the noise of the washer, but the exaggerated conversation seemed to give them time to size each other up. Her slate blue eyes did not look angry, he decided; the boyish set of his middle-aged face was not defensive about his father, she thought. They moved away from the washer, and he took note of her sandy blond hair, tiny ears and ample lips. Her cheeks had that ephemeral ruddiness of women who blush easily and always look a little surprised. She could have been either side of fifty, though age seemed irrelevant to her quick and graceful movements. But the inescapably damning thing about her face, he saw now, was the faint mouse developing above her right eye.

  "I can't believe my father did that,” he said. “What can I say, except I’m profoundly sorry?”

  She waggled slender fingers dismissively.

  "He's never mistreated a woman before," he added with earnest assurance.

  "He's probably never had a woman try to get him to take a shower before either."

  "That's no excuse."

  "Maybe it's a little bit of one when you're getting older and some strange woman tries to help you off with your shirt."

  “It’s very gracious of you to say so."

  "Not at all."

  They looked at each other helplessly, because they were still shouting and the relentless chug of the washer was going to defeat any delicate conversation.

  "Look," he said as he reached for his wallet, "I hope you take this the right way. I'm not trying to buy you off or anything, but I'd like to give you the price of a good dinner, if you'll permit me."

  She shook her head. "That's not necessary, really."

  "You have a thankless job. I don't know what they pay you, but it isn't enough for what my father put you through."

  "Oh"– the ample lips parted in a rosy smile – "I don't work here."

  "But . . ."

  "I live here."

  His pale lashes blinked. Ariel had said they all pitched in. So now he had just insulted this woman by offering her money. "Okay," he tried to say in a nuanced way above the racket while nonchalantly sliding his wallet back into his pocket, "let me make it up to you some other way. Let me . . . take you to lunch."

  "Really, I can't."

  Just then the washer kicked into a new cycle best described as lift-off at Cape Canaveral.

  He pointed upstairs. "We'll talk."

  She nodded and he A-framed his hands in a gesture of indebtedness before starting toward the wrong end of the room to make his exit. There were two tunnels in that direction, he saw after two steps.You could lose a minotaur down here. At least she was laughing at his wrong turn, he noted, though he could only hear the rockets of the spin cycle reach full burn.

  His father didn't remember the incident. Didn't know who Dana Novicki was. Sometimes he faked forgetting, but Denny didn't think he was faking this morning. "So, I hear you got your mug shot taken, old man," he said, and the vague way Martin Bryce went along with the statement made Denny sure he didn't remember that either. He stayed with him for an hour, then spent another ten or fifteen minutes trying to relocate Dana. No one had seen her. No one had any idea where she might be.

  He sat down on a chair in the parlor to wait a few more minutes, aware of the curious looks he was getting and pretending to study the painting of the Garden of Eden that hung on the opposite wall. Something odd caught his eye. He got to his feet for a closer examination. The serpent was missing. The artist had failed to paint it in. But then again there was a ridge of paint all along the outline that wound round the Tree of Knowledge, as if someone had scraped the coils right off. Strange. Sneaky snake gone missing.

  Suddenly something else that was undersized caught his attention. A flash of blonde, a glint of green, and a girl, no more than ten years of age, darted through the archway and up the staircase. Tiffany! his eyes said. Only, it had to be the child he had seen at the window. What a striking similarity to the memory of his sib. Obviously a grandchild, but whose among these aging women?

  Like a missing piece returned to a jigsaw puzzle, that faint restoration of credibility to his father's insistence that he had talked to Tiffany seemed to make his old man whole for a moment. Always take him seriously, he reminded himself. Nothing infuriated him more than to have people talk over his father's head as if the old man wasn’t there, wasn’t in command of his daily destiny.

  Jigsaw. The painting had suggested that. A missing piece. And Dana Novicki was missing and he couldn't wait any longer, so he decided to check the cellars one last time before leaving.

  Down the worn narrow steps he went, through the storage room and into the passageway where the dim light behind him was squeezed to near nothingness. Ahead and still out of sight, the masticating washing machine was silent. He groped toward the peculiar U-turn that would go to the right and a few feet further on would make another U-turn to the left. Why did it do that? What could be in the earth that had to be negotiated around?

  He had been guided by light from the laundry on his first trip through, but now it was midnight in front of him. There was no point in going on.

  "Dana?" he called to make sure.

  How had she turned on the light in the laundry room? He ran his hand around the corner of the black rectangle at the first U-turn. The cold stone was damp, but not from sweating. It was saturated. The earth on the exterior side of the wall must be a quagmire. It made him wonder if the passageway led beyond the foundation of the house.

  No light switch. It must be in the laundry room.

  Well, hell, only a few feet and a couple of turns. Dana had done it. What if something had happened to her? She could be lying on the floor in there, though that would still leave the light burning, so maybe she had turned it off first.

  He groped ahead. One step, two—hands scraping for reference points, reaching for an end. Something like fur passed under his fingertips, only it was brittle and dissolved under his touch. The white crystalline mold, he thought with disgust. Enough spores down here to kill Mr. Clean. So now he imagined great puffballs and fruited fungi spewing around him. And could that be the faint phosphorescence of a fairy ring on the wall directly in front of him? Something was glowing. End of passage. He took the second U-turn, and a few steps later the clammy air of the laundry room expanded around him.

  "Dana?"

  He had the same feeling that had come to him out on the road after the thing with no mouth loped across. The sense that alien things were watching, smelling, feeling his heat. You couldn't have a place like this that was perpetually in the dark, in the damp, in the earth, and not expect dark-loving things to take up residence. Small, probably. Most of them. Very small. Bats, rats. Things like that. Even smaller. Noctivagant forms, feeling out territory, each contriving a means of sustenance. They lived pretty much off juices of things that were even smaller or the organic cells that dropped off laundry, but not human blood or big chunks out of your neck or something. So he, Denny Bryce, was the big kahuna down here.

  No sweat.

  At last he found the wall plate and threw the switch and the Cartesian world flooded back into being. Washer, dryer, three slate set tubs. No Dana Novicki lying there, sucked dry by vampire gnats who afterward turned off the light. But . . .

  What the hell was that?

  He could have sworn he saw something receding into one of the far passageways. It was small—or at least low to the ground—as it shrank from the light. He probably would not have even seen it, in fact, except that it was . . . red. Crimson, in fact.

  Red sweat sock escapes laundry room! Last seen limping into tunnel.

  Yeah, well, enough of this shit. She wasn't here. And he had done the brave thing, half out of curiosity, and now he wasn't curious anymore, and so he backtracked through the labyrinth and left the house and drove home, or at least to
the spot where that other red thing had crossed the road. There he pulled onto the shoulder and studied the panoply of green heart-shaped ivy. Because there was something there now, he could see. Definitely a gap in the ground cover. And it was bright sunshine everywhere, so he got out of the car and leaped the ditch and waded through the ankle-grabbing network of vines until the flies all lifted in a blue cloud.

  "My God . . ." he murmured.

  Whatever it was—whatever it had been—there was nothing left now that was recognizable. Just purplish masses of tissue wrapped in bloody sinews, gnawed bones that his imagination could not re-assemble, shreds of glistening gore, swatches of red fur that he knew weren't blood soaked and a savaged skull with a very pronounced anomaly. The skull had been licked clean by something that had worked rather diligently at getting the brain out through the eye sockets and spinal opening. And that must have been a task, because there was no other orifice. Which is what you would get if there were no teeth, no jaw, no mouth . . .

  Chapter 8

  "Ammmber?"

  She said it in that slow, measured way adults have of leading you out of a lie, hinting at their power over you. And Amber was afraid of her mother's power. But she was still going to lie to her face about stealing the paint. Because if she gave up what she had—or what her mother thought she had—then she would be helpless again. "You always blame me!" she shrilled.

  "That's because you're always to blame," Ariel said. "Do you expect me to accuse Ruta Seppanen of riding a bike through the flower bed or Marjorie Korpela for thundering around on the roof?"

  "That wasn't me!" A twitch of a smile broke her anxiety at the thought of Mrs. Korpela prancing around on the roof. Everyone could see she had a limp.

  "Do you think this is funny?"

  "Then what were you doing up there?"

  "It wasn't me."

  "My dear, you are the only one who could have made that much noise. It sounded like a herd of wild animals. All that flapping and scratching—oh. Dear God. It wasn't you. Amber, what did you paint?"

  "I didn't."

  Raspy and desperate now. "WHAT did you paint?" Hands encasing the child's shoulders, squeezing, strong as a butcher's. "What did you paint, I said! May God damn whatever it was—tell me! What did you paint?"

  "I didn't, I didn't." Little girl's dissembling tears. It was transparent now, and either she would gut it out or cave in. But as soon as her mother had the paint she would punish Amber, and punishments weren't the same anymore. Amber didn't know what her mother might do. So keeping the paint was protection against something really bad happening to her.

  "Amber," said Ariel with sudden pathological calm. "You're going to give it back."

  Silence.

  ". . . And you're going to tell me: what did you paint? Was it one thing?" Pause. "More than one?" Voice rising, eyes blazing. Then a gasp of revelation and dismay. "Where are they?"

  "Where are what?"

  "The paintings. Where are they?"

  "I don't have any."

  This was almost true. Most of them had blown out into the fields. She hadn't been able to find them—except for a couple, one of which was completely soaked because it had been lying in a furrow of the vegetable garden after the rain.

  As soon as she had heard the screams and the clawing she had known what was happening. It was lightning and thundering outside, but inside the cupola her paintings were drying. Which meant that one by one they were coming alive. And some of them not one by one. Some of them were coming alive together: animals with fangs and tusks, and ten-legged spiders, and the scarecrow.

  Mrs. Seppanen kept babbling and crying because she must have seen the scarecrow falling, and there were wings flapping and wood splintering.

  The next day when Amber had gone up there, she had seen that they had shoved right through the side of the cupola. There were big white gashes on the basswood tree too, as if something had leaped from the roof to the trunk. She had thought there might be dead things left inside the cupola, but when she dared poke her head in, it was empty, except for splatters of blood with bits of fur stuck in them. The pictures, of course, were gone, and that was when she had searched for them in the fields and found only the two. She had also found the actual remains of one of the things that had left the cupola alive. It was more like a stain than an animal. All puddly and with the eyes floating around and one red claw. That one had come from the painting that was partly ruined in the rain, and so it was partly ruined too. And the other painting she found—that was the scarecrow. It was probably messed up now, or maybe even gone, because the colors had all run on the paper and it sort of made it glow. But it was just a scarecrow, and scarecrows didn't hurt people.

  "What do you mean you don't have any?" Ariel demanded about the paintings. "I want them, Amber. I have to have them. You understand why, don't you? You know what you've unleashed? I need the paintings to undo what you've done."

  Amber was shaken and uncertain because her mother looked so intent, with her short gray hair all choppy like that and dark circles around her eyes. "I don't have them, Momma," she delivered with shudders.

  Stalemate.

  Amber spent the rest of the day trying to look innocent and avoiding her usual haunts. She didn't dare climb to the cupola. Downstairs everyone seemed to know she had something to do with the noises on the roof and the thing Mrs. Seppanen had seen falling off the lightning rod. Mrs. Armitage was spying on her, and Mrs. Swanson was giving her hard looks, and even Miss Hoverstein—who had never been married and always treated her like she wished Amber were her daughter—was avoiding her. She didn't care about Mrs. Armitage. Mrs. Armitage was a big beluga butt her mother sent after her every time she did something wrong. But Miss Hoverstein was nice and read a lot of travel books and told her stories. Like the one about the Taron pygmies, who lived in a place called Myanmar that used to be called Burma, and how they were all going to let themselves die out. Amber liked stories about faraway places and people who were sad and struggling to survive. And Mrs. Swanson could be nice too. Like when she watched the soaps on TV and told Amber everything that was going to happen or did her torch singer imitation while Mr. Seppanen played the piano.

  The worst time was dinner. There were mashed potatoes, but Amber just played with her food and put one elbow on the table because no one was talking to her. Ordinarily she liked old people. They gave you stuff, and even if they were hard of hearing, they listened or pretended to. But no one asked her what she had been doing or said she had "grown a foot since yesterday." She put both elbows on the table. Still they just munched away, everyone minding their own business and leaving one by one when they were done eating, like they had suddenly remembered something they had to do instead of sitting around talking about the olden days or what was happening on the news.

  "I'm going to go to school this fall," Amber said when it was just Mr. Seppanen, Mrs. Swanson, Mrs. Korpela and Miss Hoverstein left.

  That got their attention. They knew she couldn't go to school. And then Mr. Seppanen got up and stood there in his khakis with the high-water cuffs, holding on to the back of his chair, and said, "Maybe they'll put some sense into your head."

  Pretending not to notice, Amber turned to Miss Hoverstein. "Tell me about the pygmies."

  "I don't remember," Miss Hoverstein said.

  "Yes, you do. You said they're all just one family that lives in the mountains and all their babies are misshapen or retards."

  "I didn't say 'retards.'"

  "Tell me, then."

  "You've just said it."

  "No, tell me the sad part. How they decided not to make babies anymore, because the world shouldn't have them."

  The others were looking at Miss Hoverstein now, a funny glint of curiosity and something like fear in their eyes, or maybe it was worry. And Miss Hoverstein seemed almost to speak to them instead of to Amber. "The Taron pygmies of southeast Asia say that they don't belong in the world, so they've chosen to make themselves extinct. Th
ere are only twelve of them left."

  "Cheery," Mrs. Swanson said then, pushing back from the table. "I think I'll go pretend to smoke a cigarette."

  Wordlessly, Miss Hoverstein followed.

  So then it was just the two of them, Amber and Mrs. Korpela, and that was how the game began. Because no one could make Amber get out of their sight. She would be in their face until they paid attention to her. She would be like poison. If they wouldn't talk while she was there, she would hang around until they left.

  Mrs. Korpela had once been Amber's mother's boss at Kresge's or some place a long time ago, and Amber thought that was strange. She wore suits and dabbed her lips when she ate and never badmouthed anyone. Amber leaned on one elbow again and chewed mashed potatoes with her mouth open and twiddled the handle of her fork, but Mrs. Korpela paid no attention. Then Amber remembered. The limp. Mrs. Korpela was always sitting there when you showed up for dinner, and she would wait until everyone else left before she got up, because she didn't want anyone to notice her limp.

  Well, she would just have to talk to Amber if she didn't want her to see. She would have to say something, like ask her why she wasn't eating, or why didn't she go outside and play while it was still light. It wasn't really being cruel, because Mrs. Korpela was being cruel by giving her the silent treatment.

  And suddenly the straight-backed Marjorie Korpela, for whom quiet, unobtrusive dignity had gotten everything she had in life, edged her seat back in a series of feeble thrusts, stood and sidled out from her prescribed position like a bowling pin rocking off its mark. For a moment she leaned there, looking straight ahead. Then she said in a very high-pitched voice, "You're just like your mother."