She turned slowly on the bottom step, breathing shallow breaths that sounded like katabatic booms across the Arctic, aware that her human essence was emanating like a feast to the other's numberless senses, and that it was homing in on every atom of her being in ways she could not prevent. But where was it exactly? Beyond the archway through the parlor, or lurking in the one leading to the old school wing? And what exactly was it like? Did it have leathery wings, stiletto claws?
"Amber . . ." she whispered involuntarily.
Because that must be how the vessel was created. The child painting things that didn't exist—had never existed—and therefore were just empty husks inhabitable by whatever desperate and raptorial anima broke in. A very deviant atman, this one. Something from the cosmic pit itself. A sediment, a residue of merciless passions that had swirled together like sewage, growing denser and more potent until the apprehension of its very vileness became toxic.
Dana Novicki edged off the step, feeling the late night air with raised hands as if it were palpable. To her right, she thought. And then again, maybe to her left. Could there be two? No. One powerful source. And it was on the left. Somewhere in the shadows that vaulted beyond the arch leading toward the added wing. It was feeling her mortal warmth, just as she was feeling its alien chill.
Ariel had shepherded spirits to life as carefully as had the unknown God of the universe. But Amber—how carefully had she put her creations together? The hints they had gotten the other night from the commotion on the roof and certain disturbing silhouettes in the fields had been all too familiar to the others, Dana was sure. Amalgams of the dead . . . composite corpses . . . banshee wails . . . nails scratching on glass—fragments of a latent nightmare, the things that had never been spoken of out of fear that they might actually exist. But everyone who had come back knew; everyone was only one illusion away from the suppressed horrors they held in common.
She was one step into the dining room when she saw it rise up. A baleful eye, crimson in the moonlight, and a scar for a mouth, glistening wet with appetite. Its feet moved—feet should not move like that. Half padding, half clattering. Stentorian breaths heaving in cavities terrestrial morphologies did not possess. A satyr. A manticore. One part child-driven. The rest self-defined by the intensity of its needs. Crashing into evolution. Gnashing and shredding its way into the food chain. And the smell. Worse than the suppurating rot that clung to Dana Novicki's indelible nightmare, because it also bore the pungency of its predator flesh. Rancid sweat, fetid breath, carnal traces of its nesting among recent kills.
And if it had eaten, it knew how to hunt.
A great bowel-wrenching wave of fear swept over Dana. The specter of returning to where she and this feral entity had come from struck her with such violence that she voided her bladder and began to regurgitate. Her legs shook and started to fold like twists of paper; chill sweat poured down her sides and sprang from her brow. For a moment she wished for the shore beyond extinction. She did not want to hold on to her identity in the face of such bone-pulverizing terror. Better to surrender. Better to be torn asunder. To live with integrity of form was to endure pain. To be cast upon the tsunami of undifferentiated atoms that swept across the universe was welcome.
But when the "it" uncoiled, raging from the darkness, she instantly melded into a single force. Her calves firmed, her ankles tensed as she launched herself into the parlor and scrambled over the ottoman. Around the Morris chair she went, feeling her options narrow by slices as the thing cut off one direction, then another. Finally she shrank back and tried to look away as it rose red in the moonlight coming through the window.
She did not want to see it reared up at the penultimate moment before it struck. But its triumphant howl was inescapable: a maniacal, unbridled chord from multiple structures in its throat, splitting the air like some saurian bleat in a Mesozoic bog. And that bodeful sound seemed to acquaint Dana with every detail of its anatomy, as if it were already feeding voraciously on her flesh and a part of her, still conscious, was sliding through its maw.
In the wake of the howl, which must have shaken the house to its foundation, Dana Novicki grasped her bearings. The nearest door with a lock was the bathroom behind her and across from Amber's bedroom. A brass floor lamp with a marble base stood on her left, too heavy to heft as a weapon but a potential obstacle to use. Inching toward it, she placed one outstretched hand on its column just as the measured crepitations in the throat of her besieger turned into a hiss. As if the brass had turned blistering hot, she flung it down in a shower of sparks and jumped for the narrow darkness of the corridor.
The red stalker hurdled the lamp with ease but balked as she yanked the picture frame from the wall for a shield. The creature had the wariness of something that knew terrors greater than itself, and Dana took heart. Turning the painting of the Garden of Eden like a cigarette girl's tray in front of her, she fended it off as it dogged her step by step—a macabre samba of retreat and advance. Giving ground a foot at a time, she fell back into the corridor and abreast of the bathroom. If only the door were open!
But it wasn't.
It was closed, and God help anyone locked inside. She wanted to call out, but anything that broke the fragile equilibrium that was holding off the final lunge was going to be her last maneuver. So she swung the painting end to end like a great clumsy scythe and sprang for the door. The knob turned in her hand and then she was inside, slamming it shut, fumbling for the lock.
The red thing hit the panels with a roar of outrage, and the frame reverberated with a disquieting crack. Dana found the metal crescent that stuck out from the lock plate and twisted it against some impediment, praying that the bolt was still lined up with the recess. And then she sank to the floor, surrendering in utter despair to whatever came next . . .
Chapter 13
It was Paavo who incurred the wrath of the helldog. Paavo Seppanen, who had his own festering cesspit of obscene and blasphemous horrors. And it was he who inadvertently saved Dana Novicki, because he heard the bloodcurdling howl that resonated the very wallpaper of the room he shared with his wife, Ruta, and the Corybantic frenzy of flailing nails and thuds as the chase ensued, and almost against his will he swung his feet from the bed to the floor.
"Don't go out there!" Ruta warned him.
She sat ramrod straight in bed, her hands pressed into the mattress, wearing a hairnet and looking oddly masculine without her makeup.
But of course Paavo did.
There was no other male in the house capable of playing that role, and while his act might be a mere intrepid gesture, peeking around the doorsill and then around the corner at the end of the hall, and from there to the dining room arch, and from there . . . well, by that time it was too late to outrun the thing. Never mind that his wife had leapt from their bed like a flea and locked the bedroom door behind him.
There was no going back.
It smelled him before it turned. And Paavo knew, as Dana had, that this was a creature without a species, a demiurge that had seized an empty form created in a Cartesian world. It had allegiances to neither laws nor evolution, and it would kill him.
He wished he had not seen its eye. A flat disk with a misshapen red orb—red, like everything else about it. But he did see it, and he couldn't tear himself away from its cartoonlike simplicity. Its snout made vermicular contractions, pivoting like a perforated thumb in his direction, and after that something dropped open that must have been its jaws—slavering tissued things, badly formed and serrated. Even from that distance Paavo caught the rankness of half-digested prey in its gullet.
Its foreclaws, which were caught in the upper panel of the bathroom door, released then, and it dropped quietly into shadow. That is when Paavo banged backward into the arch while turning to flee. By the time he stumbled into the resident corridor he was babbling, because the entire fugue of death from which he had been reprieved was back, and he knew he was once again untethered, knew that like this chimera breathing down h
is neck he would seize any crag in the storm of life. That much he remembered on the border of chaos and disorder.
He banged on the door of his bedroom, but the only response was Ruta's sobbing. And he couldn't articulate the obvious, that she must open the door to save him. Instead he went to the next door and the next. And the brute just played the same game it had played with Dana, advancing when he retreated, as if enjoying the bloodlust of anticipation. When Paavo reached the last door and his last bit of futile mewling, he turned to face it square on.
So it came at him, throat-straight, hitting him with gaping jaws and closing over him like a red canopy.
The screams etched every nerve from cellar to roof. Ariel heard them. Amber heard them. Molly and Dana and Helen and Marjorie and Martin and Beverly and Thomas and Kraft and Danielle and Ruta heard them. And except for Dana, who huddled on the bathroom floor, they remained on their beds as they had their cradles and their catafalques, mousy-eyed, understanding that one of them was going down.
Only Ariel had the courage to rise up after a minute or so and go to her door and open it. She knew the carnage was related to whatever Amber had unleashed. And it couldn't be ignored if they were to survive. So down she came, cautiously but imperiously too, because she really was the creator of New Eden. A year ago the farm had lain fallow, and now everything living owed its vitality to her. What breath there was under its roof she had quickened. The thing that had caused the screams was a blasphemy against her creation, a transgression against her will.
It was eerily silent on the first floor. One by one she flicked on lights, revealing overturned furniture and the milk glass bowl of the brass floor lamp, broken in large pieces. The shade had torn so cleanly that it was unfolded like a scroll, and the painting of the Garden of Eden lay face down on the parlor rug. With her cane she raised the frame to lean against the wall. She hesitated before Amber's closed door. Maybe it was good to leave her in there. It wasn't her daughter who had screamed, and a little prolonged anxiety over what was happening outside her door might make Amber more cooperative about returning the stolen paint. And then she heard faint weeping from behind the bathroom door across the hall.
"Dana?"
"Is it gone?"
Ariel tried the door handle. "Yes. Come out, Dana."
"I can't. Bring me some clothes—my bathrobe . . ."
But it was going to be a while before that detail was remembered, because when Ariel reached the residents' corridor, the blood trail began. There was a splash on the wall, a ghastly handprint on Beverly Swanson's door, and beyond that an unbroken chain of dribbles and smears on the floor tiles leading to the double windows at the end. Against the darkness she couldn't quite see that the glass was smashed, but the air flowing along the corridor was heavy with the smell of the fields and the woods. So the unholy thing had come in and probably gone out that way. Paavo's chicken wire, it seemed, had been a deadly joke. Ariel rapped softly on the doors as she moved closer and closer to the shattered glass: Come out, come out, little people, wherever you are. . . . It's all right . . . the Wicked Witch of the East is gone. And so they crept out, bent and trembling, to take a census and determine who it was they had not tried to save. Only Ruta and Martin remained in their rooms, she refusing to unlock her door, he sitting in his undershorts on the edge of his bed, holding his shoe like a blackjack.
"It sounded like Paavo," white-faced Helen said.
That prompted Ariel to knock forcefully on Ruta's door. From within, hysteria erupted. She had told Paavo not to leave the room, Ruta wailed. It was impossible that her lament could carry very far through the solid oak door—certainly not past the corridor—but suddenly from the heart of darkness beyond the broken window Paavo's thin moan quavered. It went on for an intolerable time, and when it finally subsided, the shocked silence was profound.
"It's playing with its food," Helen wheezed at last.
Ruta's door lock snapped open then and she rushed forth, straight at Ariel, where she dropped like a stone to her knees.
"That's him, that's him! Make it stop!"
"Ruta—"
"He's still alive. Make it stop, please!"
"Ruta, I can't. If it overpowered Paavo, then how can I—"
"No, no. Not it. Him!"
A consensus of pleading looks came to rest on Ariel. Stop Paavo, Ruta meant. Make his suffering stop. A petition fit for a deity.
For just a moment Ariel Leppa looked like the inadequate rag of a woman they had taken her for throughout their mortal lives. Her lips pulsed, her eyes dulled, her fingertips slid nervously in the folds of her robe. But there were no dismissive looks from the major players of her life now, no sly confirmations of her inferior status. This was the moment she had fantasized, the one they had robbed her of by dying.
Another scream from the darkness ended in a gurgle.
"It's eating him," Beverly whispered.
And then Martin Bryce appeared in his doorway, breathless and clutching his shoe. "They must have found Japanese money in his pockets," he said. And then he shuffled toward the broken windows.
Gripping her cane like a baton, Ariel hastened to her studio while the others shrank back into their rooms like mollusks into shells. Frantically she threw Paavo's portrait flat on the workbench. With one pop she had the lid off a can of ordinary white paint. Without stirring, she poured it directly onto the canvas. No need for extinction to dry. Underneath the ghostly gloss, the dust-impregnated vehicle for life was obliterated. Downstairs, Martin Bryce sidled gingerly among shards of broken glass, looking futilely for a way to climb out the broken window. Not many yards away in the darkness Paavo Seppanen's shrieks abruptly ceased.
At dawn, when nothing was sighted from the sewing room window save tattered clothing and dark stains in the dust of the yard, Molly and Dana went out with pitchforks. They went as far as the woods and probed along the brush and also the ditch by the road. And when they started back toward the house, they met something that churned the stark horror of the last ten hours all over again while resonating an uncertain joy. Miraculously it was Paavo himself. On his feet and walking toward them.
"Paavo?" Molly called, raising the pitchfork a little.
He was unhurt, unmarked even. No blood whatsoever.
"She's painted him again," Dana murmured.
And she had.
Ariel had fretted only a minute or two after painting out the canvas the night before. Then she had pulled out a fresh frame and gotten the photo of Paavo and taped it to the top of her easel. For all she knew, there would be two of them on the farm when she finished—one dead, one living. And what if the first one somehow survived? That would be novel. Paavo Seppanens on either side of the dinner table. She would have to tell that fool of a son of Martin Bryce that Paavo had a twin.
But, of course, the first one was beyond reanimation. Whatever was left of him had ceased to exist when she slashed white paint across his portrait. She was all but sure of this. It wasn't like natural-born Amber, who had died in her wheelchair when her nine-year-old self was brought back. The inhabitants of New Eden had all returned from the dead to begin with. Paavo was not a first edition. He was already an extension of what she had done with red dust and paint. All of them Adams and Eves, if the dust was indeed something from God—or whatever else that powder represented in the way of cosmic events and interventions. That it was her father's ashes, she had come to doubt. She had once read of extraterrestrials returning to Earth like caretakers to a garden they had planted. Perhaps the red dust was their seedbed . . .
So the third Paavo came upon the earth, and he knew nothing of the second, though he remembered the first one, his natural life, which had come to a natural end. The mechanics were such a muddle to Ariel. She didn't want to understand them. She just wanted to move on. And so she told Paavo the bare minimum again: that she had brought him back after his death from a heart attack at age seventy. She had brought him back younger, and he was to be "the man about the place." And then
she sent him out to help the others look for his own remains. Let the others help him sort it out if a body turned up, she thought. It didn't.
Later in the day, when Dana and Molly and Paavo returned together and the tenantry of New Eden was gathered, nervous and stunned in the parlor, Ariel attempted to clear the air and instill calm.
"I know you're all upset, but you see everything is back to where it was. As long as I'm here, there's nothing we can't recover from."
"I don't like this . . . I don't like this," Helen persisted.
Ruta, quiet for once, had already discovered differences in this new Paavo and sat a little apart from him. Kraft Olson stared rigidly at the floor, and when he raised his head he kept Danielle Kramer as far behind his line of sight as possible.
"No one likes it," Ariel said, "but let's not overreact."
Beverly laughed sharply. "One of us was killed. How are we supposed to react?"
"He was not killed"—a nod at Paavo, who sat numb and disoriented from his return from the Stygian darkness—"he's right here just like he was yesterday, and the day before, and the way he'll be tomorrow."
"We don't want to die again," murmured Marjorie. "Even if you bring us right back, we don't want to die. You don't know what that's like, Ariel."
Ariel softened. "That's true," she conceded, "I don't know. And none of you will tell me."
"There's no way to tell you," said Dana, hollow-eyed and listless. "Death is everything wrong. It's—"
"Don't!" Marjorie said curtly.
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