"What if you came here one day and I didn't recognize you?" she asked him, and of course he thought she meant what if she had Alzheimer's. "What if I seemed to be someone else?"
"Maybe I should take your fingerprints," he said and pressed five fingertips against hers until their flesh seemed welded together.
She could have met someone like this man, she realized, and the sweet sting of sex would not have been mixed with fear, as it had been when she had married and lived unhappily ever after. But that was another world, another lifetime.
"Bottle's empty," she noted with just a slight slur. "Must get back to the scullery."
"Alas."
She thought he might kiss her, but he merely said, “I’ve got your fingerprints now, and after a minute or so she heard him start his car and drive off. He had forgotten to take his comforter. She folded it and made her way through the rows of corn.
The rustling as she brushed against the stalks seemed to have an echo that reminded her of the rustling in the cellar, though of course that was because she was half in the bag, she thought. But a few rows from the edge she heard crows cawing accusatively, and that brought back the dryer and the cellar even more sharply.
She stopped.
How vehement they sounded. She had trouble picking them out, but they were there in the willows—were there, because when she saw them they stopped cawing and took flight.
Where had the day gone? It was late afternoon. Probably everyone would be sitting around drinking coffee or iced tea. She couldn't stumble in like this, carrying a comforter. Better to leave it in the barn and sober up for a while.
She went around to the front and tugged the rolling barn door open just enough to squeeze past. The wheels in the overhead track were all gummed up, and if someone didn't clean it soon it was going to take a fire axe to get inside. You could see daylight between the boards, and you didn't need a ladder to get into the loft because it had obligingly turned into a slide where the center posts had rotted and collapsed. But it was a nice place to go and get your head on straight—shady and aromatic with the sachet of harvests and seasons. So she dragged herself over to the lip of the loft where it dipped to the floor, and fell back on the brittle hay while the world spun round inside her head.
It was still spinning, but only at carousel speed, when she heard the door wobble slightly on its track. Shit, she thought, who would come out here now? Amber? Molly or Paavo? She hoped it wasn’t Amber. Maybe they wouldn't see her. It was gloomy and the garden tools were close by the door, so maybe they would just grab the hoe or whatever and saunter off to the garden. But the door rolled open at least six or seven feet, judging by the sound. So it must be Molly or Paavo—someone strong. Still, she didn't sit up. She didn't sit up until nothing happened for another minute, and the suspicion grew that someone was just standing there, someone who knew she was there, trying to find her in the haze of shadows and sun-shot stripes that fell on the floor.
So then she came up on her elbows and blinked at the bright rectangle of the doorway. The silhouette there refused to make sense, because the light from the opening conspired to limn it with red in an irregular way, as if it were jaunty and ragged. No one in the house looked like that. It responded to her movement too. She could see that much. How it straightened suddenly and stiffened and . . . rustled? It was the same rustle she had heard at least three times within the last several hours. In fact, it seemed now that she had heard it all afternoon, in the cellars, in the tunnels, in the field, unsure of what it wanted to do, or waiting for her to be alone again. Only now it must be sure, because it had come into the barn looking for her.
What came next was so peculiar that she almost thought it didn't happen. The figure moved, but it did so twisting and thrusting as if it didn't have enough joints and stopping every few steps like a blind animal trying to locate its prey. Sobriety began to kick in very fast.
The sun striping through the shrunken boards fell full on it when it was twenty feet away, and despite Dana’s instinct to freeze, mouse quiet at the very moment her heart leaped into her throat, she couldn't suppress a gasp. Because it was a scarecrow, a red scarecrow—pulsingly red—and she was transported instantly to the outré regions from which she had never fully returned.
It was Amber's creation, of course, Ruta's nightmare—"Red straw . . . red straw!"—except that no one had mentioned its rows of harrow teeth the foolish child had painted, or the nails tearing right through the gloves, stiletto length and crimson. And the reason it moved in sudden bursts was because it had no eyes—no eyes, but God knows what other senses—and so it had to pause and pick up . . . what? Sound, scent, heat? It must have known she was alone, must have kept close all afternoon, sensing her somehow. And now it had her in the barn.
She thought of the dryer full of dead crows, and she had no doubt whatsoever that this was the predator that had amassed them. It was a killing thing, after all, and it must be a very effective killing thing to have captured the wary crow in such numbers without benefit of sight. The way it twisted and leaned sharply forward made her think it was hypersensitive—as if it were exposing some sensory organ to minute vibrations. She tried to hold her breath and stay calm, but it knew. With that horrible rustling it was zigzagging toward her.
The alcohol still buzzed in her brain. But then she wasn't going to have to outthink it. She was going to have to outrun it, and she thought she could do that. Inching upward, she rose to a crouch, and when it fronted her with a terrifying burst to within six feet, she made her dash.
She sprang off the loft. But before she could take a second step it was in front of her again, and she had to sidestep back onto the hay just as its arm rived the air with a sweep of nails. Sliding, backpedaling she went, gaining maybe two seconds while it struck one of its odd tilting postures as if to determine the nature of the loft from sounds or smell or the way the air moved—or all three. By the time it had placed one red boot on the fallen fascia board, she was scrambling for the pitchfork that hung on the wall.
"Back off!" she quavered, brandishing tines.
A mistake, of course. As if she had issued an invitation to embrace her, it leaped, Ray Bolger-style, head askew, limbs bent, harrow teeth unmistakably grinning. But it landed stiffly, bristling with power, and so close. It had called her bluff. Here I am! Surrender, Dorothy! And she could do nothing more than thrust the pitchfork into its chest—through its chest—with the tempered steel finding no resistance at all in the red straw.
Worse, with the precision of a catch in a ballet, its right glove clamped instantly onto the haft and with a twist of its torso jerked the weapon from her. Then it yanked the tines out of itself and snapped the pitchfork in two. Then it tossed both, clattering and clanging, to the floor.
So she was going to have to outthink it after all.
It seemed momentarily confused by all the rustle and vibration as she rolled sideways and scrambled higher into the loft. But it was relentless, and it was sorting out her heat from the sound or whatever it was picking up.
Heat.
Faint flicker of hope, flicker of an idea, flicker of a match. She still had the wooden matches she had taken from Denny in the tunnel. If she could get one lit, if she could set the obscene thing on fire. . . .
She fumbled with the box, hands shaking, spilling matches in her lap. And then she had one, and without sliding the cover shut, she tried to scratch it on the friction strip on the side. But there wasn't enough support with just the cover, so she tried to slide the box back into it, only it was hanging right on the end and her trembling fingers jammed it a little sideways. It dropped out of the sleeve and fell in the hay. Take your time, girl! But when she reached for the box, it disappeared into the hay like a drowning hand slipping under a wave.
The red scarecrow twisted, harrow teeth working, nails fanning like hackles.
She still had the matchbox cover and one wooden match. Bracing two fingers of her left hand on the inside of the sleeve, she pressed
her right index finger against the head of the match and snicked it on the friction strip. This time it started to hiss. But her hands were sweating and the dampness of her forefinger must have soaked into the match head, because it fizzled and died in a copious puff of yellow smoke.
She knew without lifting her eyes when it found her. She was ground zero and the countdown was at one. But all the same she was groping through the hay for another match. And when she actually came up with one, the scarecrow still hadn't hurled itself on her. She thought fleetingly that the smell of sulfur had arrested it. It wasn't sure. It was hesitating. If she could just . . .
This time she pressed her index finger a half-inch higher up the match, and the grit of the friction paper resonated grain by grain into her sense of touch. She felt each nuance, each subatomic transfer, as if the reaction were aggrandized to a cosmic scale for the entertainment and edification of every consciousness in the universe. Dana Novicki has struck a match. Will the antimony sulphide and potassium chlorate melt and ignite the little stick? Will she combust the red straw of Amber Leppa's diabolical horror before it leaps in rage upon her?
She looked into the scarecrow's blind face and serrated maw and jerked the match forward. Touched the red straw, in fact. But the match was already falling from her violently shaking hand as she reached out. And the flame that had burst so promisingly a moment ago vanished in another gush of smoke. She could smell the cloyingly sweet red straw. She could hear it rustling. The sibilant sounds took her back so close to where she had lain after death that all the old nightmares of a year ago came rushing over the rim.
Once again she stood before ramparts and ageless pylons rooted in space. Pitted faces loomed near, shunned things sucked her breath, fused entities warred for her soul, and from all sides susurrant legions rustled and giggled, devoid of pity, incapable of empathy or unity or anything but the solitary and savage predation of the disconnected. But from three feet away, the empty vessel of red straw seemed suddenly unable to sense her presence. It contorted into a hyperextended Saint Andrew's cross, impossibly tall, a bristling thing of receptors, now seething, smoking, and suddenly bursting into flames—purely red flames—that singed her face as she shrank away.
She crabbed backward into the loft—a loft filled with flammable hay—rejoicing that she had lit her attacker on fire after all, because even though she knew that she had absolutely not done it, she told herself that there must have been an ember or a spark that had taken a few seconds to catch hold. So now the combustion had her in its thrall. Even after the thing was thoroughly immolated and tongues of flame were gesturing like melodramatic arms in a silent film, she kept sliding sideways, back and forth, as bereft as a spider in a bottle. The fascination was utterly irresistible because she could see that the malign creature was starting to break up into discrete particles. And that was a glimpse over the wall that all who live must take. This was not just another earthly death, or even the hastened transformation of matter to energy. It was annihilation—the reverse of creation. How could she have caused such a thing? In the midst of her calamity, she wanted to understand that.
Now the red scarecrow was fire within fire, as if each wisp was being torn loose to be seared into oblivion as it rose toward the rafters. Up went the embers, a diaspora of red straw, everywhere and nowhere. Red straw, red straw . . . Absurd and innocent, but now a cry of tramontane exile, a catch phrase of warning, given reinforcement by the others of the household as the barn went up and they came first to the windows of the house and then to the porch and the basswood. Red straw . . . red straw. The ululation of an exanimate population, wailing with horror as they rose like bits of straw into galactic winds that blasted them back to the far side of infinity.
Dana didn't remember letting herself slide off the gradient loft, or passing slowly through the firestorm of cinders raining down from the roof, or coming out into the sunlight from that orange hell and seeing her companions. She said nothing, remembered nothing. No one called the fire department. Ariel watched stonily from not more than thirty feet away, leaning on her cane, ashes pelting her like condemning angels.
When the pillar of fire had undulated to the ground and a huge pyre of shingles and beams flickered and smoked, Molly put her arm around Dana, grounding her from across the universe, reeling her in, restoring a human circuit that instantly lit up with what seemed an impossible denial.
"I didn't do it. . . . I didn't do it," Dana said, birthing the words like a half-drowned person glutted with water. "I tried to do it, but the match was already out. I didn't do it."
Chapter 17
It was pretty amazing how you couldn't really feel the heat from the burning barn inside the cupola. You could smell the smoke some, but even that didn't seem to stop the sauerkraut smell that had been coming up through the house since early afternoon. Molly always made sauerkraut when she was sad or mad, and Amber thought she was both today. Even before the fire she had been sad or mad about Mrs. Korpela. Everyone was. Except her mother.
And that made Amber sad and mad, because there wasn't anyone else to talk to. No stories of the Taron pygmies who were dying off one by one in far-away Myanmar because the world shouldn't have them anymore. No Sir Aarfie; No friends her own age. Just herself to talk to and whatever friends she made up. She still had the red paint, though, and she was going to get good enough so she could paint friends and pets and stuff, the way her mother did, and then she would never be lonely again.
That was why she had come up here on the roof to the cupola early this morning. And why she had taken the almost washed-out picture of her scarecrow and touched it up a little. She didn't think that would hurt, and it was good practice. But when she had come back this afternoon, she saw Mrs. Novicki and Mr. Bryce in the cornfield, and she had watched, hoping they would do kissing and stuff, but they never did, and when he finally left, she saw Mrs. Novicki go into the barn. And then she saw the scarecrow—her really, honest-to-God red scarecrow, just like she had painted him—go into the barn, and she knew she had made a mistake. She shouldn't have touched up the painting of it at all.
So now her heart started doing flip-flops because you could tell by the way the scarecrow was following Mrs. Novicki that it didn't want to be seen, but then when it went into the barn, it must have known it would be seen. So that was bad. And when Mrs. Novicki didn't come out afterward, Amber felt sick. She had seen the blood in the hallway the night of the break-in, and heard Mr. Seppanen screaming, and now she was going to hear Mrs. Novicki screaming. She should have painted the scarecrow out with white as soon as she had found the rain-streaked picture that day. But she hadn't had any white then, and she didn't have any white now. She only had the magic paint in the cupola. So she did the next best thing. She painted him out with red. Red fire. Fire was easy. She had always been good with fire. And she prayed.
Dear God, make my fire real.
She thought there must be a God, because who had painted things before her mother came along? So then she saw the smoke, and then the roof started to glow and the shingles began to curl, and she knew it had worked. But Mrs. Novicki still wasn't coming out. Amber shouted to her, and then the people in the house started to come outside and she didn't want them to see where her hiding place was up on the roof, so she didn't shout again. But no one looked inside the barn. They could see it was on fire, but they just stood there. So Amber was going to have to yell again and tell them that Mrs. Novicki would burn up if they didn't go inside and get her. But then she thought, her prayer had worked once, so she tried it again—Dear God, make Mrs. Novicki come out okay—and sure enough, out she came.
So everything was okay now. Except that Amber couldn't come down until everyone left. She had to stay up there and smell the smoke and the sauerkraut and watch through the slits in the louvers. Her mother was standing right there too, and if she found out that Amber had caused the barn to burn down, there was no telling what she would do. Kill her, probably. Take away TV and make her live in her
room on sauerkraut and water. Amber wished her dad was better, and that he'd tell her mother to "lighten up," like he used to.
And then she saw Mr. Bryce—not the young one who had almost been kissing Mrs. Novicki in the cornfield, but old Mr. Bryce. He came out all upset and shuffling as fast as he could. And when he got to where the others were standing, he went right on by. He was trying to run, but he couldn't lift his feet that good, so he just shuffled straight toward the fire. Then Mr. Seppanen and the others grabbed him and wouldn't let go. He tried to slug Mr. Seppanen the way he had slugged Mrs. Novicki when she had tried to get him to take a shower. That was funny, when you thought about it: old Mr. Bryce slugging her, and young Mr. Bryce taking her to the cornfield to fool around. But it wasn't funny the way old Mr. Bryce was yanking and pushing right now, trying to get free so he could run into the barn. And then Amber heard him shout.
"Tiffany!"
And that just made her feel sick again, because of course he was trying to save her.
"Tiffany!" he bellowed.
And when the barn finally collapsed, old Mr. Bryce collapsed too. Sitting down there in the dirt like he was a little kid or something. Everyone moved away from him in a circle and just let him get it out of his system.
A couple of times Amber almost shouted down to him, because that's all it would've taken to make him see that she was okay. But she didn't. Even though she felt ashamed, she couldn't give herself away. Finally old Mr. Bryce just sprawled out in the dust and looked exhausted. Some of the others helped him into the house then, and pretty soon everyone was gone. Miss Hoverstein was the last to go in.
So it was over. And Amber was tired and had to pee, and she didn't know what she was going to eat if all they had was sauerkraut and sausage. It was going to be one of those sit-there-until-you-eat-it-young-lady meals that would end when she gave up dessert or went to bed early. But all in all, she was relieved. Things had started out really bad, and now they were okay, if you didn't count the barn or how badly old Mr. Bryce felt. Amber would take whatever medicine went with the meal and just say another little prayer tonight, she thought, thanking God that her mother wasn't any the wiser about things, and if she didn't see Mr. Bryce before everyone went to bed, she would go to his room tonight.
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