Amber looked down at her plate but couldn't blot out the halting progress to the arch and thereafter the lisp of an uneven gait retreating on hardwood floors. I'm not like my mother! she screamed inside. I hate Mrs. Korpela. I hate everyone. I hate Mrs. Armitage and Momma and . . . and—
But not Daddy.
It might have been because of the lameness that she thought of him just then. Mrs. Korpela limped and her father was in a wheelchair. Her father was even worse off than Mrs. Korpela, but he had never stopped talking to her or been cruel. Late in the day she went up to see him. She snuck up to the room her mother kept him in and knocked really softly and then opened the door, because you didn't expect him to answer. And then she walked around the room, touching things and stopping at the window until she was sure his eyes were following her.
You had to do that because it was hard to get his attention. She didn't think he saw too well, but except for her and Mrs. Novicki, no one ever tried to find his glasses for him. Other times, though, his eyes were all gluey and wide and she thought he was looking right through her. He was still big. Even in his wheelchair he was big, but he had lost his shape, sort of like a pyramid of corn sitting out in the rain that gets rounder and rounder by the day. His lips were all dry too. And when he whispered you could hear his tongue like it was sticking to the roof of his mouth. Sometimes he just nodded and grunted and only said hello and good-bye. But still he listened.
Except for today.
Today she didn't think he was listening at all, even though he looked right at her. She told him lots of stuff, all about the cupola and taking the paint and, finally, about the things she had painted. But he didn't seem to hear. Then she put her hand on the back of his chair and leaned against the wheel. "Tell me about the red corn," she said. "You know, about the gangsters in the tunnels and how their blood turns the corn red."
But he just stared through her, and she felt a little scared and maybe hurt, because she didn't have any friends and friends were the most important thing. That's why she had painted the animals. So she would have friends. She wanted Sir Aarfie back. But trying to paint him back had been a mistake—a horrible mistake. She could see that now. It had gotten out of hand, because she lost most of the paintings and now there was no way to undo them, like her mother said.
She left her father to his depression and moped around all evening, and when Molly told her that her mother wanted her to take a bath, she didn't protest. She went into the bathroom and took off her clothes. Then she climbed into the old tub and turned on the faucets, stamping a little in the splash until the temperature was just right. She looked in the soap caddy and behind her on the curved rail for the rubber plug, but it wasn't there. Sometimes it dropped onto the floor and rolled under the tub, so she got on her hands and knees in the cascading water and leaned out to see. It was there, all right. Behind one of the feet. She snatched it up and turned back to jam it into the drain, and that was when her heart took one gigantic beat and stopped.
Because she wasn't alone in the tub anymore.
It came out of the drain. Even though it looked too big to fit down there. Crimson, with huge eyes and dagger fangs and too many legs—more than eight, just like she had painted it. Her mother hated spiders and crawly things, so she had wanted them to have lots of legs. Only now this one was zigzagging around her like a bullet, trying to stay out of the water and looking at her and crouching to spring like she might be an island. She tried to scramble up, but as soon as she planted her foot the scuttling thing stopped and faced her, and by the way it raised its fangs and front legs she knew she had better not move again.
Because it could leap. She was sure of that. It looked like a hideous cartoon with its funny bent legs, but she bet it could jump up on her bare flesh and bury those oversize fangs in her throat or her heart or—and this frightened her more than the other possible landing sites—her eyes. She thought somehow that its great goggle eyes were focused on hers.
Maybe it had venom, and maybe it could shoot the venom and blind her. She had seen that in a documentary somewhere—a great fanged spider in India, or some place like that, that blinded its prey with a stream of poison. Just like that. This one was bigger than the spider in India. As big as her hand maybe. She drew back her face, and it seemed to rise up like it was tracking her.
The impulse to scream (were spiders deaf?) rose in her throat, but she fought it down. They must be able to pick up vibrations, because that was what they did with their webs, and she was in a tub that sounded almost like a bell when you hit it, so if she screamed the spider was going to know it, even if it was deaf, and it would probably strike just like they did when a web vibrated. She couldn't jump out, because she only had one foot under her and by the time she thumped around and got her other leg unbent it would be too late.
The red spider was sitting right where the tub sloped up at the back. It was crouched to spring because the water was coming in faster than it could drain out. And it was coming in hotter and hotter. In a few seconds they were both going to be scalded. So it came down to who was going to move first. The spider wasn't wet yet, but Amber's toes and ankles were starting to sting.
And then the spider nudged up the slope a little. Tried to nudge up the slope. Because it immediately slid back some, and then its fangs came down and it rotated like the faucet handle and began to drum its legs. There was no way it could get out. Maybe if it had leaped before the level got too high, but it slid all the way down now, half in the water, and that was her chance. She cleared the tub with barely a ripple.
The spider's legs were turning over like a combine harvester and going nowhere, but as the water rose, it rose too. She was going to have to kill it, she knew. Kill it and not tell anyone. They would all blame her for whatever didn't die outside the house—and inside now too, she guessed. She had a chance to take one off the list. Probably some of the creatures she had created would kill each other, she thought. But then again, maybe they would mate. No, they were too different, weren't they? They couldn't get together and make babies.
But they might.
And spiders had lots of babies. Thousands and thousands, some of them. So now she groped down into the tub and found the rubber drain plug and jammed it home. But then she thought What if the water got so close to the rim that the red spider could make it out? So she spun the faucets shut, and now the thing began bobbing around the edge, its front legs still going in a furious blur, and its awful eyes bulging out so that no matter where she stood, it seemed to be looking at her.
Standing there naked, she felt like it could touch her too easily, so she wrapped a towel around herself. Then from the other side of the tub, she began splashing water at it. But each time she drove it under, air bubbles seemed to protect it. Again and again it swirled to the surface. So of course she made bigger and bigger waves. Which was a mistake. Because the third one actually lifted it out of the water onto the slope just inches from the rim of the tub. And if she thought the legs were going fast before, now they were like egg beaters. She jabbed at it, gauging whether she could knock it back. But the eyes seemed to spark with something she didn't like. So then she blew on it. Blew and blew and blew, trying not to lean too close. And whether that made any difference or not, the red spider suddenly lost momentum and slid back into the water.
She wondered if it was getting scalded. It hated the water for sure, but it didn't seem affected by it. How could she kill it? She thought about throwing her shoe or hitting it with the toilet plunger, but she would have to drain the water to do that, and if it got onto the flat of the tub again, it might try to leap.
The toilet plunger, though—what if she got the rubber cup around it? Then she could push down and squash it. It wouldn't know about toilet plungers, so it would probably want to crawl into the cup on the end.
She dashed to the sink where the green wooden handle with the black rubber cup sat underneath. Returning to the tub, she took dead aim. But right away it knew. She could tell b
y its eyes. She had made it intelligent by painting those eyes, she thought, and now she would just have to stab it. One quick stab and she would have it pinned to the side of the tub.
Bracing her feet and taking the green handle in both hands, she thrust. But quicker than she could follow, the thing was over the black rubber rim and flying up the wooden shaft. She had just enough time to fling the plunger away as she uttered a short cry.
It fell into the water and the spider more or less clung to it, a rolling island of wood. But Amber didn't like the possibilities. The plunger would soon touch the side of the tub or drift near the overflow drain near the rim, and that would turn it into a bridge.
She had another idea. There was a gray plastic pail under the sink, and if she could somehow scoop the spider into the toilet, she could flush it away. It had fit through the tub drain, so it would go down the toilet. She didn't know where toilets led, but it had to be away from the house. So she raised the seat and grabbed the pail and tried to act like she wasn't going to do what she was going to do, because the spider seemed to know everything.
Her heart was beating wildly when she confronted it.
It knew, but what could it do? She scooped the pail over the surface. There was no way it could not be caught in her trap this time. She never gave it a chance to get its bearings. Without even straightening the bucket, she let the momentum carry the red spider and the water out of the tub and into the toilet. One big wave with a flash of crimson, almost like a goldfish, going down into that little hole. And the water was enough to make the toilet flush, which it did. A frothy swirl and a single gulp that took the level down to the bottom of the bowl.
And that was it.
Except that the spider must have wedged itself into the bends in the toilet, because no sooner had the water begun to ebb back to its normal level than she saw red legs scrabbling frantically around the curve of the hole.
Trembling at the invincible will of the thing, she plunked down on the tank handle. Ridges of water spiraled around the sides, agitating the surface and carving a hole right through to where it clung. She could see the legs flex and grip, completely exposed now, except that the flow was sucking at its body. It wasn't going to be enough, she thought. The horrible creature was going to hang on. But just before the final swirl, it suddenly let loose and was gone.
She didn't wait to see if it came back this time. She didn't want to know. She just slammed the seat and the lid down. Then she drained the tub without taking her bath and grabbed her clothes and fled to her bedroom.
Let it be dead, let it be dead, she prayed.
For a long time afterward she listened. Because if it was still alive in the house plumbing, sooner or later someone was going to scream very, very loudly.
Chapter 9
Martin opened his eyes just before midnight and saw the green glow. It was the clock radio he had given his wife for an anniversary present thirteen years ago, but without his glasses on and with his eyes crusted with sleep, the 11 throbbed phosphorescently.
"Beth . . ." he said and closed his eyes again.
The green glow went with him as he fell and fell back to an outpost of memory where deeply etched events fired cerebral salvos like pom-pom guns on the beach of a Pacific hell. Distant flares on the deck of a flattop homed him in. When you were flying in at night like this, the first thing you saw was that glowing green number 11—two flares—throbbing phosphorescently. Split it, Marty. . . . Split the uprights! But he didn't split them. He ditched. And here the geography became muddled. Night was now day. The F4F Wildcat was scattered over a quarter mile of ocean. And he was being lifted—crawling, lifted, crawling—by waves over a sandbar. The murmur of surf blended with chatter in Japanese. Then he was being dragged, interrogated, beaten with a two-by-four, and when he was on his feet again, he was trudging through the dust from bullpen to bullpen, camp to camp—Capiz Tarlac, O'Donnell, Cabanatuan. The guns of Corregidor faded as he marched. Men died, hundreds a day from starvation, from beatings, from the "sun treatment," from beheadings. Get rid of your Japanese tokens. . . . Throw away your money. And then his eyes were open again, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed in New Eden, trying to decide what to do . . . what to do for the men.
"Beth!" he called ahead fifty-nine years.
But she didn't answer. All he heard were the insects out in the swamp and a dog barking on the camp perimeter. He was a little dizzy. Black motes swam in the black air. He had to pee, but he was afraid to. They had shoved a glass rod up the penis of one of the men and broken it, and whenever he peed, others had to hold him. There was a seam of light under the door. Martin stood in his shorts and his socks and shuffled toward it.
Out in the hall of New Eden he recognized the bathroom, but the screaming man with the broken glass up his penis would be in there. Martin turned toward the main part of the house. A chrome yellow moon staring through windows followed him from kitchen to dining room to parlor, past the painting of the Garden of Eden, and into another hallway. There were doors in the hallway, and he stopped before the first one. This was where Beth made him take baths, he thought. And when he pushed open the door, that was what he saw—the white bathtub in the middle of the room.
He grazed his hand up the wall but failed to find the light switch. It didn't matter. He could see a ghostly toilet next to a ghostly sink. Shuffling across the tile floor, he lifted the lid and the seat. He was going to go standing up, but the bowl presented a blurred target of concentric circles—rim, porcelain, water, drain—that seemed to agitate together and drift. Dropping the seat again and undoing his trousers, he sat down. It took a long time. His swollen prostate was like a drip-dry sponge. When he was done, he fumbled in the dark for the handle, and again the gradation of circles seemed to agitate together as if something moved there.
Back through the house he came, past the Garden of Eden, through the dining room and into the kitchen. He paused now, not certain where he was, where he was going. There were two doors and two arches, and when he had turned around once, he lost track of how he had come in. He tried one of the doors and found himself looking into a pantry. And then he tried the other, and it was a stairway leading down.
The steepness would have discouraged him, except that the dank earthiness wafting to his nostrils triggered remote associations from his past. And the past was all that mattered. It was more than the thinning connections of a failing brain that made time slip. If he came awake in the middle of the night looking back over his shoulder, it was a last search and rescue for all the failed rescues of Martin B. Bryce.
So down the worn cellar steps he went, finding the light switch but almost losing his balance as he fumbled for a handrail that wasn't there. At the bottom he turned and moved steadily through the storage room. He took small, even steps as though he were advancing on rails.
He knew he had to keep going, that he was looking for something or someone—or something for someone. He did not specifically remember the starving men at Cabanatuan or his daughter Tiffany screaming for him from behind a wall of flesh-searing flame, but his heart was pounding with fear that he would fail again. The darkness in front of him was not a deterrent. The cellar could have been a lion's den and he would have pushed on. Sometimes there was nothing in the unknown that could be worse than what you knew.
But the darkness of the passageway beyond the storage room caused him to totter. He groped for the walls, pausing, pushing away. When the passage U-turned sharply, he bumped through the change and kept going. He kept feeling for a light switch, but there was only cold stone and silken spider trip lines. A few steps farther he reached out and the walls were gone.
Air was flowing against him from all sides now and it was very cool, so he must be outside. But where was the sky? Maybe he was in a cavern. His hearing wasn't particularly good, but there was a range in which he heard quite well. A shade going up, dead leaves underfoot, shingles flapping in the wind or the subtle spank of air above burning wood on a grate. He
readily heard those things. And now it seemed that something was being dragged to his left in the darkness. It almost sounded like breathing—two-staged like that—except there was no pause. Bellows worked that way, or iron lungs for polio victims. And then the dragging changed directions, cutting in front of him, and he realized what it was.
Separate segments were slithering around him. Those nasty green snakes that waited by the wallows outside the camp. But it couldn't be avoided. You were glad to go to the dirty carabao wallows whenever they took you out on a work gang, because back inside the perimeter there was one spigot for twelve thousand men and the wait for a drink was twelve hours.
And then he heard the whirring wings, and they weren't trying to get out of his way; they were coming toward him. A dragonfly sound. A hunter sound. Straight at him, though for a few seconds he couldn't tell from which direction, just that the drone was getting louder. He raised his arms in the dark. Something brushed his scalp, and before it could come around again, there was another burst of wings, this one a flutter. It must have leaped from somewhere and intersected the whirring, because the dragonfly drone abruptly ceased.
Now the sounds were all of tearing and feasting. Martin Bryce had smelled the charnel horror before in the stench of a bullpen where diarrhetic men could not fall down to die, and again at the edge of a twilit grotto where other men hung, gutted and draining, upside-down over barbed wire. A universe without sanity was the most unsettling revelation possible. Once you had stared starkly over the edge of that immeasurable abyss, you could never forget it. Life thereafter had been hope but not trust in goodness or in order. And now, decades later, he was feeling it again: the rapacious and merciless appetite that drove the universe. One thing eating another until . . . what? What survived? What incarnation of life was the final cannibal?
He was listening to the blasphemies of creation sucking the marrow out of each other, and he didn't want to see them. But when the light burst around him, he did see. In the glare, one indelible glimpse at vespertine creatures on the floor of a tunnel. Two forms. Three, if you counted the bloody offal plucked up by the greedy thing that flopped quickly into the shadows. And the other one—that one was not involved in the grisly repast. That one was the slitherer. A red serpent. Bigger than the worm-size void in the Garden of Eden upstairs in the parlor from which it was growing, but not much bigger. About the size and length of a belt. Lashing its way out of sight and into the tunnel.
Dust of Eden Page 11
