"You brought it up."
Beverly waved a hand at them. "Let's not lose track here. This is a crisis of survival."
"I've told you, survival isn't in question!" Ariel snapped. "You should all know that. You should be grateful—why aren't you grateful? Why don't you have faith in me?"
The silence crackled with nervous restraint and fear of imminent danger in Ariel Leppa's magic fiefdom.
"I think they're worried about something happening to you," Molly ventured delicately, as if she were not herself involved. "What if . . . what if that thing had attacked you last night? Who would paint you back?"
"Me? My, my. Someone is worried about me. Thank you. But nothing is going to happen to me."
"Something could, Ariel," Helen said. "You can't be foolish about that. None of us could paint you back, even if we knew where . . . where things were, or how to do it. If we tried, we'd end up with something like what attacked Paavo last night."
"Maybe I'll paint myself back when I'm on my deathbed. Maybe I'll leave you a number painting, and all you'll have to do is put the colors in." They were listening very hard, she noticed. "So you don't have to worry about me being around to keep you healthy."
"If you even want to keep us healthy," murmured Ruta.
"'If I want to.' You dare ask that? Even though I've given each of you the ultimate gift of life when you were dead? You still want more—a guarantee, a warranty on your bodies and your health. As if I owe you that. But I had nothing to do with your deaths, did I? You lived just fine without me in the only lives you thought you'd ever have. And now, instead of being sorry or grateful or trusting me, you want some kind of contract. Well, there isn't any. Just our feelings for each other. Our sincere feelings."
"You had something to do with my death." Amber, who had been sitting sullenly on the floor near the arch, looked surprised by her own outburst.
"You were paralyzed and living in misery. I made you better."
"You could make us all better," Ruta said.
"I could. I may. Or I may not. What would you do, Ruta, if you were a young woman again? Run off to the city like you did before? Whore it up for a few years? Oh, don’t look at me like that. You think I don’t know that I'm just a dried-up old crone who never got her chance for a little fun? Well, some of us aren't equipped to get that chance. It's a superficial world, and we can't all be Danielles or Rutas, can we? Anyway, here we are in the encore, and all that matters is what we are inside. Make you better, Ruta? What could be better than this?"
The look of helpless agony became unanimous.
Off to one side Beverly stared poutily out the window and rubbed the age spots on her hands. "What good is virtue untested?"
"No good at all," Ariel said and took a step forward with her cane that seemed to re-center the room. "But it does keep the status quo for the time being. I'm not saying we'll stay like this forever. Forever is a long time. It's amazing how much paint I can manufacture, but it won't last forever. So virtue will get its acid test sooner or later. For now we don't have a choice. We can't have our little situation here if we're exposed before the rest of the world. You all know that. As soon as past paths cross or attention is focused on us, it will just be a matter of time before we're exploited by thieves or desperate people looking for the fountain of youth. Don’t you think I’ve thought about this? We might even be quarantined by the government in the name of science or national welfare or some damn thing they invent. But . . . if we wait, maybe there will come a time when it can be different. When all the people who knew us have passed away. When we can move freely again. I haven't decided yet. It depends. But we've got all the time in the world."
"All the time in the world," Molly echoed vacantly. "Would you paint our children back, then?"
"I don't like this," Helen said. "Why are we talking about the future? We could all be dead in the next attack by those things out there."
"Stop scaring everyone," Ariel said sternly. "Everyone is alive and well. That's all that matters. This problem will get solved one way or another, and we'll still be alive and well."
"Problem? How is it going to get solved? You make it sound like all we have to do is call up Orkin. How can we be safe now? Is Amber going to undo what she did?"
Ariel turned to look at her daughter, but something in the light glazing across the painting of the Garden of Eden that still leaned against the wall caught her artist’s eye.
"I told you everything," Amber said, scowling.
"Amber says she doesn't know where her artwork went," Ariel informed the room, still distracted by the painting against the wall.
“It was rainy and windy and I couldn't find anything,” Amber maintained.
"Pity," Beverly said dryly.
Amber scrambled to her feet. "I don't care if you all hate me. I don't care. I didn't mean for anything to happen, and you just need someone to blame, so go ahead. That's all you do anyway—sit around and blame people." And with that she stalked out of the room. Moments later her bedroom door slammed.
"Well, at least she didn't call us 'beluga butts' this time," Beverly said.
Ariel saw now what it was about the painting that bothered her. The paint had flecked off where the serpent was. How could that be? Either someone had scraped it off or the paint there had been different, drying and not bonding, or . . . or what? She wanted to drop down and scrutinize it, but she was talking about how everyone should just keep their cool here in New Eden, and so she couldn't let them see her agitation, couldn't let them know her unreasoned fear—because she hated snakes with a passion! Ariel Leppa had an absolutely irrational terror of things that crawled or slithered. That, as much as anything else, was why she carried a cane: to fend off loathsome vermin that scurried from a baseboard crevice or dripped from a web in the high-ceiling old farmhouse, coming to horripilating life on the back of her neck.
"Everyone is alive and well," she repeated for the third and final time, and when she had left for her lofty inner sanctum, Helen Hoverstein remained on the ottoman, murmuring, "But we aren't alive . . . not really . . . not when Ariel Leppa can rescind us any time she feels like it."
Chapter 14
"Say cheese."
If Denny Bryce could have reacted in time, he would have shielded his face from the Polaroid camera. But the flash went off simultaneously with Dana’s warning. Now he stood blinking across the parlor, having just entered from the white blaze of an August afternoon that rendered the flash anticlimactic.
"I wish you hadn't done that," he said.
"You said I should surprise you."
"Surprise me about picking a time for a picnic." He noted the flicker of wildness in her slate blue eyes. "Is my picture so important around here?"
"Ariel thinks so. Visual things are important to a painter."
"Are you telling me she wants to paint me?"
The slate blue grew steely.
"I'll pose with a rose between my teeth, if you want to cash in on the picnic," he added.
"Not a good idea."
"The posing or the picnic?"
"Maybe both."
"Bugs bad today? I don't see the chicken wire."
"Chickens took it back."
". . . And then they flew the coop. What are you doing living in a place like this, Dana Novicki? You're young enough to live out in the world."
He had followed her into the kitchen, where she began putting away dishes from the drain rack. "This is my world."
When she turned back from the cupboard, he moved in front of the drain rack. Color rose in her cheeks. Her expression held for a long moment as if to freeze him before he could make a mistake. They could have been focused on a high wire whip-sawing between tandem aerial performers struggling for balance, but then the impulse to take another step faded and the moment passed.
"Your father has some cuts on his feet," she said. "He stepped in some broken glass. I think we got all the slivers out."
And while Denny was digesting
that she made some further excuse and slipped out of the kitchen. He stood there, gazing at the heavily lacquered cabinets and white ceramic kitchen sink. Definitely colder, he thought. And he didn't know why, but he had the arrogance to think she was trying not to like him. Something had happened since his last visit. Was it the broken glass? His father had gotten broken glass in his feet how?
Molly was on her hands and knees scrubbing the tiles when he got to the residents' corridor, and she slackened her effort at sight of him, as if to belie that she was removing something. He saw too that the wall in one spot and one of the doors had been scrubbed vigorously.
"An accident, Molly?"
She sat back on her haunches, plump arms going limp. "Your father stepped in some glass. We got it all out of his feet, I think."
"How did he do that?"
She gestured toward the end of the corridor where a Himalayan profile of jagged glass sat in the lower window frame. Denny didn't ask how it had been broken, and she didn't say, but he wondered if he had underestimated Ariel's caution about his father trying to get out a window.
The old man was asleep when he entered the room. He sat down to wait.
Denny Bryce was acting like she was eligible, Dana Novicki thought with mixed feelings. She felt like a decoy around which a live duck was hovering. A decoy because she was drawing him to a woman who by natural age and state of mind could have been his mother, and again a decoy because the muzzle flash of the camera she had used to take his picture hid the hunter Ariel Leppa.
She could not even be sure that she wasn’t technically still married. The Dana Novicki who had died of a brain hemorrhage more than a decade ago would be seventy-four if she had lived. Her husband would also be seventy-four, if he was still alive. For all she knew the great state of Texas had executed him at "the Walls" for murdering his ex-employer in 1986. Probably they hadn't, though. Probably he was still in Ellis outside Huntsville, ostensibly undergoing treatment. As if he could be rehabilitated. The murder had not been premeditated—hothead that he was—so he had that going for him. She had often wished him dead in the past and felt guilty about it, and then she had wished him dead without feeling guilty about it. Now she didn't wish anyone dead. But she didn't consider herself married anymore. She had no desire whatsoever to go back to Detroit Lakes or to see the man who had turned her into a poster wife for abuse.
Nice men like Denny Bryce didn't know how to look for a woman, she reflected. He had a certain awkwardness that made him read too much into contacts with the opposite sex. She didn't want to hurt him. He must be a very decent man to care for his father like he did. But she didn't dare feel anything for him.
Trying not to feel was how she had finally brought herself to take the photo Ariel was demanding. Probably nothing would happen to Denny Bryce, she told herself. Ariel would have the power to paint him from the photo, but she wasn't likely to use it. In any case, it wasn't her concern. How could she look out for a near stranger when her own preservation was at stake?
Let him hover. A decoy wasn't capable of responding like the real thing.
Later, she slipped past Martin Bryce's slightly open door with only a glance at Denny standing over the bed. She had to check on Kraft Olson and Danielle Kramer. Between she and Molly, they took care of Kraft and Danielle and Martin when he would let them, and sometimes, when Ariel permitted it, they even went upstairs and helped Thomas Leppa.
The classrooms-turned-bedrooms in this corridor were so regular and barren that they seemed like oversize cells of an abandoned hive, and the inhabitants were like ancient larva deposited there by their gray queen. But of all the rooms, Kraft's seemed the least lived in. He never put anything on top of the dresser or the table, and there was no whiff of aftershave or toiletries from the items Ariel had purchased and placed on his window ledge. The towels remained folded, and the dust was always layered fine and undisturbed. Day after day Dana rapped lightly and entered to find him sitting riveted to his chair by the window, wearing creaseless slacks and a seasonless plaid shirt. Except that today, instead of staring blankly, his eyes bore into her with a cognizance that was unmistakable.
Almost reflexively she pushed the door shut.
"What was it like for you, Dana?" he asked presently, and though it was a question, she heard the old certainty in his voice.
"Kraft?" She came forward, not knowing whether to embrace him or address the urgency of what he wanted to know. "You really are back."
"What was it like before she brought you back?"
Dana sank down on the edge of the bed, facing him. Never mind that he had been faking dementia, the commonality of having been dead was always front and center, and you didn't segue into it. It ran like a tape, reel to reel in the background of your consciousness, playing blackness and silence, and at any moment you could be summoned to return by its cabalistic lure. And then the images and the shrieks would glut your mind and you would wonder how you ever got away from it. That was reality. Mortal life, it turned out, was merely the background hiss of cosmic awareness.
"All motion and roar," she replied with a tremble in her voice. "Like a black carnival."
"Do you think we had the same experience?"
She closed her eyes and began to rock.
"Dana?"
Eyes up. "I don't know."
"I brought it back. I let it in. I painted it with my finger on the painting downstairs. The one of the Garden of Eden, with the snake—you know?"
"What are you talking about?"
Her failure to grasp his meaning transformed his expression, and she saw how fragile he was.
"It stopped," he offered up defenselessly. "The voice stopped after I painted it. What does that mean?"
“What voice?”
“The voice. The one that says all those terrible things over and over and tells us we’re going back soon.”
Suddenly she wanted to scream. Felt, in fact, as if she had screamed – had been screaming all along for the past year at the barely repressed dream of death that poisoned the experience of life. Candles out! Matter away! Cease. Desist. Dissolve. Lose your identity, join the howl. Become the zero wind blowing forever through empty space, nibbling at the mammoth columns, those pillars of the universe that tower above comprehension and disappear into the darkness beyond stars. A black wind that carries the crippled scrape of purgatory's obscene army marching, marching, marching. Soldiers of saturnalia, lunatic, gaping wounds for medals, babbling from crusted orifices. Limbs do not come off like melted cheese, striding bodies do not truncate at the waist, eyes do not catch fire and roll out of—
"I must be all right, if the voice stopped," Kraft said with final hope. "Don't you think?"
She didn't think. Couldn't think. How many hours had passed since she had lain huddled at the foot of a bathroom door, trying to restore gravity, while an inch away something with earthly claws and earthly fangs raged for her flesh? Could Ariel's magic last forever? And if it couldn't, if somewhere there was an amorphous maggot in the food chain that would suck her soul out of the frail shell and spit it out, did it all end up the same?
"I could go back there now if I wouldn't be alone," Kraft said. "If I wouldn't be alone I think I could endure it."
Go back to it? How could he say that, if it had left him so bereft? And then she began to truly understand. It wasn't shock from coming back. It was shock from something else. Something that had just happened. "How could you be alone?" she probed. "Everyone dies."
"I don't want to be with everyone. I want to be with her."
Her? There was only one "her" for Kraft Olson. Even if her outward form was a suppurating relic. "You are with her, Kraft. Danielle is right here in this house."
"No." Melancholy in his voice. “No. She’s gone now. No . . . no.” A lilt of things lost beyond reclaim.
Dana digested the implacable syllable and grasped for the first time what this whole Grand Guignol conducted unexpectedly in his room was all about. A wave of fresh horror
tingled at her hairline. Kraft was staring blankly again as she moved to the door.
Despite the clammy heat the corridor was cold as she walked to Danielle Kramer's room. This time she didn't knock, because she didn't want to have hope or expectation. She simply turned the doorknob and pushed.
Empty cell.
No larva here. The gray queen had visited. Had killed the competing queen with a few strokes of a brush. Just the bedcovers mussed, as if Danielle had wasted away to nothing. And Kraft had known. Had she caught them together?
Damn you, Ariel Leppa.
Trembling, Dana took the Polaroid shot of Denny Bryce out of her pocket. The resolution was sharp. Plenty of detail for a skilled painter to capture a soul. How could she let that happen? Don't be stupid, Dana. . . . This will end up being about you instead of him. Maybe she was the duck and he was the decoy. But with agonizing slowness she tore the photograph in half, again and again, until it was just macerated paper made moist by her sweating fingers.
Chapter 15
Like old wolves the core group gathered, wanting the security of the pack but untrusting and staking out territories in the parlor. Helen, Paavo, Molly on the ottoman, Marjorie in the Morris chair, Beverly leaning against the screen door as if to draw in the smoky, fermented ethers of an alluring but distant civilization. Dana in the dark of the dining room just beyond the arch. And Ruta moving, pacing, wringing her hands, changing chairs each time she sat back down. It was uncharacteristic of her not to settle in the center of things where she could broadcast her daily tribulations. They took it as a sign of her fear. Fear and distress. There was no doubt about the distress.
"I didn't think Ariel would do that," she kept repeating in disbelief. "I didn't think she would actually get rid of one of us."
"Was Danielle ever one of us?" someone posed.
This was Danielle Kramer's wake, the postmortem, the inquiry. A headwind set the willow chattering across the yard, and a jay about to be dislodged from its crown hurled its single expletive. Storm coming. They sat listening for the first large drops to patter on the windowpane, waiting for Sturm und Drang nature to haul away a soul.
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