Dust of Eden

by Thomas Sullivan

  For a few seconds after she stood at the bottom her legs seemed to be sinking into the ground. She squatted down, curled her body around the cool glass in her shirt and rested her head against her arms. She felt nauseous and her gashed cheek was starting to sting. The wind washed over her, carrying the smell of damp ashes from the charred heap that had been the barn. If it wasn't so messy and so close to the house, she could hide the jar there, she thought. But then again, it could still be hot underneath the ashes, and maybe the paint would dry up or the jar might crack. No, she would stick to her plan. She had a hiding place she had discovered a long time ago. It wasn't high up like she wanted, but it was all overgrown, and it had a wooden cover.

  Rising shakily to her feet, she started off for the fields.

  Her father had told her about the cistern—how the gangsters used it to dump bodies—but when she had actually stumbled on it one day, she was surprised and maybe a little disappointed that there were no skeletons at the bottom. She knew this because she had climbed down the rickety ladder that stood inside. On a bright day with the cover off, you could see all the way down. And when you stood on the bottom you could look up against the light and see pretty much everything about the cistern. It was lined with old, crumbling bricks with roots sticking through in a couple of spots, and some of the bricks were lying in the dirt. She thought the ladder was probably there because someone had used it to move the skeletons.

  So now it was going to be her new hiding place. Her studio. She would keep the magic paint there, and she would get another brush and poster paper and regular paint so she could practice. The field on whose edge the cistern lay was shielded from the house by a long strip of trees. She wouldn't be seen if she circled around and came up that side. It took a while to get there, but that was good, because no one else would go walking this far.

  She had to kick around some to find the cistern now, because even though she knew exactly where it was, all the weeds and briers looked the same in the moonlight. But then she stepped on the wooden cover and it made a clunking sound on the rim. She bent and clawed aside some dog fennel and spurge, exposing the weathered edge. With her legs braced, she got her fingers under the seam and slid aside the heavy cover.

  What Amber Leppa smelled evanescing up from that storied hole in the field evoked the color green in her portfolio of visual scents. The green didn't go with its history, she thought, though it could have been the green of snakes or frogs of the kind that showed up with spring rains. It was not the green of anything that survived in sunlight. Once, she had turned over a piece of slate in a ditch and been surprised by a ripple of emerald as vivid as sequins from the City of Oz. But the exposed glitter had faded to a dull brown residue so quickly that she doubted what she had seen. That was what she thought of when she smelled the hole, as if the sunless emerald fungus, or whatever she had unearthed beneath the slate, grew there between the bricks. She descended the rickety ladder and the green smell sharpened like a whiff of cinnamon when you got it up your nose.

  An irrepressible voyeur moon followed her, peeping straight down into the bore of the cistern. By its light she could see many more broken bricks than there had been on her last visit. It occurred to her that another brick might fall out of the walls and break her bottle of paint, so she set up a small enclosure of bricks behind the base of the ladder and placed her precious jar within that. She was just finishing when a moment of darkness swept past, as if the light above her had blinked. Her gaze shot upward, but the moon stared down innocently.

  Brushing her cheek, she stood and climbed the shaky ladder. Funny how she felt safer climbing a tree than a ladder. Ladders always bothered her. And just as she reached the top it happened again. A flicker of shadow. Only this time she saw a silhouette rocket across the field, something massive wheeling behind the tops of the trees.

  A jumble of branches filtered it there, but she had the impression that the arcing thing continued to move, gliding like the owl she had flushed from the cupola. Only this could not have been the owl. It had to be ten times bigger than that. In fact . . . maybe the owl had hidden itself in the cupola to get away from it. Maybe it had come at her because it was terrified.

  So now she squinted, trying to make sense of the moonlight coming through the branches. Only, it didn't really make sense. Like looking at one of those color blindness tests where everything blurs together if you can't pick out the color that makes the numbers. Down lower, where the shadows filled in, she could see a bunch of fireflies. But now she was starting to see the numbers, too—the pattern that was way too big for the treetops—and it couldn't be what it looked like.

  It just couldn't be a spiderweb.

  One big spiderweb, its threads raying out like floating stairways all leading away from a center. And when the breeze lifted it, just the silhouettes that made up a web moved, and that was why she saw it—thought she saw it—in the first place. But if it was that, then where was the spider that should have been waiting in the middle?

  Silly.

  A spider couldn't get that big. What would it eat?

  And then she thought about the red spider in the bathtub, and what if that was just a baby of the ones she had created? Maybe it had crawled through the drain because it was so small, and this was where it had come from. She had painted lots of spiders, and they had all been big compared to the other things she had painted. As big as the picture she had made of Aarfie. As big as the scarecrow.

  And that was when her stomach dropped out and she felt hollow and cold. Because what she had thought were fireflies arranged against the blackness at the base of the trees were still clustered the same way—like pairs of red headlights, some big, some small—and they weren't blinking.

  Chapter 21

  Passover.

  While the six slept, Ariel set their portraits in a row on the workbench: Helen, Beverly, Paavo, Ruta, Molly, Dana. She couldn't suppress a small spark of self-righteousness about their fate as she mixed her colors. She had begun New Eden without a scintilla of revenge in her heart, but they had forced her to this. Not her doing but theirs. And she was sick to death of their willfulness.

  She couldn't just throw them away and start over, because they would be the same aloof, unappreciative, backstabbing, disloyal covey who had determined the course of her life for all those years. They had to change from within. Recognize the error of their ways and how badly they had underestimated her abilities and her worth. And the only way she could hasten that was to discipline them, force them to rethink who they were and the consequences of their choices.

  The pointel's worth of red ashes she transferred to each jar as she mixed her paints was negligible compared to what remained in the flask. She could not conceive of ever running out. And yet she would. In time. Finite ashes; infinite time. What would happen when the last reanimation from the last drop of the last mix was lived and they all inevitably died? What kind of reckoning would the final death provide?

  Such a wind outside! The gusts slapped the antennae wires against the side of the house—and what was that? She put down her brush, went to the window. She flicked the latch and tried to raise the sash, but it was swollen shut and she managed only an inch or two. The humidity touched her fingers like webs and she pushed the window shut again and drew the shade. Another thrum came through the walls as she returned to her brush. Oh, bother, the damned house had stood for a century and a half, it would stand another night. So she tried to ignore the elements outside, though twice there were distinct thuds above the ceiling that made her lift her eyebrows. Something in the rafters? Not the first time, particularly with a storm in the neighborhood.

  And then she became wholly absorbed in the metaphysical oneness of creating. Even without miracle paint she knew the ecstasy of invention. Before she began encroaching on God's seminal act with the red dust, creating on canvas had been as close as she could get to worship. Legends of what if, histories of what was, myths of what wasn't. Art: worshipping the ideal and d
reaming aloud.

  She worked rapidly, and as always the intensity of concentration sustained her. Like a medium channeling energy, she took on the identities she was trying to create. She even felt a kind of self-pity, if not compassion, as if the frailties and deformities she was painting were actually hers. And she awoke to the moment of completion feeling that the universe had gathered at her shoulder, that she could throw the shade up and close by the window there would be stars, benign furnaces sighing with approbation. But even after she cast off this disorientation, a feeling persisted that she had assembled a whole new order. She gazed critically at the afflictions of her Passover and thought, These are not the people who held power over me. She saw the stiffness and infantilization, the humpback and the shrunken mouth, the atrophy and kraurosis, and they inspired an odd maternalism in her. She was pondering this mystery when she became aware of distant barking. It was something she hadn't heard for more than thirty years. Aarfie, of course. In exactly the same volume and muffled timbre she had heard hundreds of times, acting like coordinates that placed him in Amber's room.

  How late was it?

  Question: Why was Aarfie locked in there, and why wasn't Amber quieting him?

  Answer: Because Amber wasn't there, of course.

  And then it all fell into place like shuffled playing cards. The thrum of the lightning rod . . . the flutter of something against the clapboards . . . the thumps on the roof . . . Aarfie barking. Amber was relocating the stolen paint. Ariel hadn't expected it to happen so quickly, and certainly not in the middle of the night, but there it was, not a moment wasted. Like mother, like daughter.

  Well, she was ready too. She took her cane (because there might be snakes or even spiders—and how she detested vermin!). Downstairs she went, first to the kitchen to get some twine for a leash, then to Amber's room where she still remembered how to use her knee to keep the frenzied toy collie from wriggling past before she got the tether on. He was hyper tonight, and that was good because he wouldn't need coaxing. By the time she moved out of his way, Get Amber was redundant.

  She had forgotten a flashlight, she realized as they crossed the yard, and almost reined Aarfie in. But the twine might not withstand dragging him back, and anyway, Amber must be well into her business by now.

  Never mind the flashlight. She would trust the silver complicity of the moon with Aarfie's noisy rush and the parry of her cane, hovering back and forth along the ground, to keep her safe from crawling things. And besides, she didn't expect they would have to go far.

  She was depending on the dog not to bark too soon. He had enough hunter in his blood to go with the herder until the moment of confrontation. And then he would create a triumphant racket, having come to the end of his instincts. But that would mean they were in sight of Amber.

  When they entered the fields Ariel began to have second thoughts about the flashlight. She had expected the hiding place to be close by in the old pump housing or the machine shed or perhaps the rubble of the barn. Her own childhood caches had all been near the house: an old rubber tire, an upturned crate, the abandoned 1926 Minerva Landaulet that had sat on its rear axle near the light pole and later was used for a chicken coop. But, of course, Amber the undaunted would not shrink from crossing all borders as her shrinking-violet mother had.

  So Ariel found herself knifing between stalks and plunging through sinks. There were no obvious signs beyond Aarfie's surges that a human had come this way.

  "Get Amber," she reminded him in case he had gotten sidetracked by the scent of a rabbit or a raccoon. And then, two fields removed from the house, the dog suddenly stiffened. "Bingo, Aarfie," she said. But his ears and tail went down and he began to slink forward, whining a little, nosing from side to side. Ahead of them was a thick swathe of trees.

  She quickened a little at recognition of the tract. It was a parcel where she had picked wild blackberries as a child, a refuge for does with yearlings. And now it was her daughter's secret hideaway. But Aarfie's ears went up and he woofed truculently, then immediately whined a contradiction. Ariel could feel his tremor right through the twine. A few seconds later she heard faint crashing in the undergrowth. There were moving silhouettes, an insoluble mix. And finally a scream.

  Amber's scream.

  The caterpillar of abject fur Aarfie had become answered with sudden urgency. Ariel took a single step and that launched him. But if it was the right course for a canine, it was the wrong one for the tandem human. The disturbing tumult was coming toward them so rapidly that it was obviously not a timid nocturnal chase. Ariel stabbed her cane out front, trying desperately to slow down without letting go of the twine.

  A silken something filled the air, distinct from the humidity that bathed her skin. The swaying trees and staccato thumpings planted an idea in her head of what it was. She had to tell herself, These are not filaments floating over me; it's only mist.

  Aarfie's ears were on swivels: up for Amber's screams, down when they stopped. He must have smelled or heard or sensed the enormity of the horror even before Ariel discerned it in the shifting blackness. On the next piercing scream Ariel let go of the twine, knowing that – brave little shepherd that he was – Aarfie would keep going straight into the valley of the shadow of death.

  Afterward she would pretend that the twine broke—this is what she would tell Amber. But the shrill accusations against her then would not be stilled. And she did let it go. She had to let it go, because it bought them a little time. Even though the mismatch between the dog and the emerging obscenity wasn't going to last long.

  There were thick silhouettes that were too high in the trees to be growing there, too disjointed in their sudden swaying to be rooted, as if whole groups of trunks and limbs were suddenly transplanting themselves. And there were the fireflies, pinpoints of demon light flickering through shadowy lace. Something so huge that it couldn't squeeze between the branches darted there, searching for a way down. And unseen but heard, a little girl was struggling through the underbrush.

  Despite the fact that its silk was extruded all over the tract of trees, the horror could not move freely. But Sir Aarfie could. He barked and worried the thing, forced it to recoil and dodged when it suddenly solved the intervening foliage with a rush of legs. But in the end, the toy collie's blood went spurting around the obscene fangs of a behemoth that had been created by the very child he was protecting.

  They would think of that afterward, but no one was thinking of it while they fled: mother and daughter pounding across the field hand in hand. Ariel huffed dazedly as she tried to keep up, and for once in her life she was using her cane for its intended purpose.

  When they were back in the house they lay in a cold embrace, too numb to cry for Aarfie or themselves.

  "I painted it, Mommy," Amber confessed in a drained voice about the spider just before dawn.

  "I know."

  "I did it because you hate spiders."

  "I know."

  Later that day Amber had the temerity to go back and look. The spider was a nocturnal thing, her mother had said, and that meant it wouldn't bother anyone until nightfall. As if she knew. So Amber went looking for Aarfie, but mercifully never found the drained wad of fur in its silk coffin.

  She found his paw prints mixed with her mother's shoe tracks, however, and that was when she understood. Her mother could not have heard the screams when she was in the house. She had been waiting for her to move the paint. That was why she had painted Aarfie back to life. So that he could betray her when she hid the paint. And he would have too, but what happened in the woods kept them from finding the cistern.

  If her mother had accidentally saved her from the spider, the spider had accidentally saved her from her mother.

  Chapter 22

  Denny was thinking of the dead crows in the clothes dryer as he drove up. Dana hadn't mentioned them again, and he hadn't thought to ask. All that business at the table with having his picture taken, and then the photo dropping in the soup and the
n the camera getting smashed—what was that all about? A token event of some deeper schism going on? Beverly Swanson had warned him that letting his picture be taken was a bad idea, but Dana had already taken one the day after his father stepped barefoot in the broken glass, so what was the big deal? Maybe they were just upset about the barn burning down. Lightning strike, Molly had told him. But it didn't look like there had been a storm.

  Shit, he had forgotten Beverly's cigarettes again.

  At age fifty-one Denny Bryce knew this much about himself: that he had become a high school counselor because he didn't like being on the defensive, and almost everything in life made him feel defensive. He wished he could blame it on childhood deprivations or abuse, but it was simply his nature. His mother's nature before him. Yes, his father could have been more demonstrative—hugged him, given his unqualified thumbs-up without holding back the last carrot of motivation, witnessed his few triumphs on ball fields and in concerts—but Denny would have been full of self-doubt and yearning anyway. Maybe that was why he was still here every day, seeking his father's approval, seeking his own approval of who he was, who he should be. Being a school counselor put him behind the bench in the courtroom of human jurisprudence, when all he really wanted was just not to be in the dock. Nevertheless, he was a profoundly sympathetic judge. Everyone who stood before him left acquitted, absolved, exonerated. But New Eden was not one of the safe houses of his life. Coming here put him on the defensive in the extreme.