That's what her mother did. Because her mother couldn't trust anyone, couldn't share with them, and so she could only be below or above them. And she had been both. She had made everyone come back, but not equal with her. So that was kinda her own choice too, Amber thought. And she was like her mother, sure, but not just like her mother.
They were pleading with her when she went to the door, begging her to give them their portraits.
Chapter 33
Denny punched the speaker button on the ringing phone because he was putting on his sunscreen in order to go out and mow the lawn, and his hands were greasy.
"Hello?"
"You'd better get out here."
"Dad?" He grabbed the phone out of the cradle.
"You'd better get out here, son."
His father actually calling him on the phone, getting the number right to boot—the first call he'd received from him in, what, a dozen years? "What's the matter, Pop?"
"I dunno. I hear things."
"Like what?"
"Screams and guns."
"In the house?"
Hesitation. "Yes, in the house."
"Is anyone else right there? Dana, maybe. You know, the one you bipped on the beak, old man."
"Everyone's gone."
"Gone?"
"They're screaming."
"Okay. Okay." Screaming. Guns. His father still had nightmares now and then. The Bataan thing his mother had told him about had never healed—never would heal. "You're sure you hear screaming?"
"Yeah." Straining with impatience now. "And guns." A raspy remnant of a voice. "Turret guns."
This is what Denny had gotten the phone for. To reassure his father when he couldn't be there. Cauterize the hemorrhaging of events that flowed without sequence. Chase away the nightmares 24/7. Tell him where he was and what year it was. And he was about to do that, but all at once he heard the "guns" for himself. Right over the phone. Distant and tinny, like backstage thunder. It must have sounded like Tin Pan Alley if you were right there in the house. It could have been the metal wardrobe. It could have been someone banging on the furnace. But his father said turret guns. And screams.
"I'm coming, Dad. Stay right where you are, okay?"
He left the mower out in the drive, and he kept wiping his hands on his yellowed sweatshirt as he drove. How could he have been so stupid, so reckless with his father's well-being? Something was very wrong with that farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Unless there was a totally innocent explanation for all this, he would bring the old man home with him tonight.
On the seat beside him was the pack of cigarettes he had finally remembered to buy for Beverly the night before.
Chapter 34
Amber could hear them dragging her mother downstairs, but she knew that others were still lingering by the studio door in the hallway. They had quit begging for their paintings, but they were still there.
In point of fact, it was Paavo and Kraft and Molly who were taking their captive to the cellar while the rest passively stood by, riveted by Ariel's baleful warnings of what Amber would create as she was pulled down—kicking and screaming—into her own apocalypse. Behind the door Amber listened, and a whole range of adult feelings she could not put into words beset her. The leaden pall over her life was literally sinking down the staircase like a counterweight, lifting a curtain of anger, mistrust and doubt and revealing a thinner fabric of pity for her mother that must have always been there in her heart. It would always be there, visible but not impeding anything. And a lot of fear remained too. There was fear on both sides of the door. But when the others returned and her mother's dire sputterings were just a smothered murmur in the distant cellar, Amber decided to take a chance Ariel never would have taken.
Turning the key, she opened the door on seven startled faces.
"God bless you, dear," Miss Hoverstein said, reaching out a waxy hand that looked shrink-wrapped over blue veins.
They doddered into Ariel's inner sanctum like awestruck children then, and for a few moments the studio resembled a life-size music box whose figurines turn slowly while the last dirge-soft notes unwind. Here was the castle tower, empty of its lightning-hurling sorceress, and it was just as warped and faded as the rest of the house. How strange that the gateway between the two contrasting dimensions they had known should be so mundane. Dust crawled for the corners and plaster sagged along the exterior edge of the ceiling. But then they saw something that was anything but mundane. The miserable creature in the castle keep, it seemed, was not finished with them yet.
"Look," Dana warned, drawing their gazes as she glided toward the appalling portraits lined across the workbench. "She was already starting on Paavo."
They saw; they slumped. Eyes refused eyes. The air seemed to go out of the room.
"But it hasn't dried yet," Beverly noted.
Paavo came slowly toward the image of himself that showed his left arm torn out of its glistening socket, and he braced his hands on the edge of the workbench. His eye fell on the open jars of paint that Ariel had been using. "Doesn't matter," he said. He pushed himself erect and hefted a can of commercial alkyd from the shelf. "I don't have to be here when it's dry."
Molly raised her head as if in affirmation. "No, it really doesn't matter, does it? None of us have to be here anymore."
Amber sensed the drama of a decision flowing round the room with the ease of a cloud passing over the horizon.
Dana walked to the window. Ruta looked at each of them in turn, as if to borrow a resistance she wanted but could no longer feel and then wrapped her arms around herself. Kraft was stone solid. It got very still then, very posed. Even the dust stopped crawling for the corner.
"It's what we talked about before, child," Helen said to Amber, because she was the only person in the room who didn't understand.
But they hadn't talked about it. Not in specific terms. Just a few remarks posed by Marjorie Korpela when they were playing canasta. And now it was Helen's role to make it concrete.
"We didn't want our portraits just so that we could stay alive, Amber. We wanted your mother to stop changing them."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that maybe your mother was right about what we were. You never knew us when we were younger. Maybe we needed a second chance to come to terms with that. But now we have seen it, and we're as ready as we'll ever be."
"Ready to what?"
"Ready to die."
"You're going to make yourself extinct like the pygmies."
"The Tarons . . . very apt. Yes, the Tarons. This is all wrong. The world shouldn't have us anymore."
The elder faces were concentrating on Helen now, thinking profoundly what they hadn't wanted to think since returning from the nonplace, the infinite paradox where existence meant you couldn't corroborate that you existed. Limbo, purgatory, hell, Sheol, Tophet, Gehenna, Hades, perdition, the abyss, the pit—it mattered not what infernal region it was. It was not paradise. Or even serene oblivion. And death was coming again, no matter what. If they lived another day, it subtracted a mere twenty-four hours from the final and eternal disposition. Forever minus twenty-four in their present condition. Twenty-four followed by twenty-four followed by . . .
". . . Better to go now," Helen was saying, "while we've got the perspective and the will. It's as close as we're going to come to a state of grace."
"State of grace?" Kraft Olson growled in a voice none of them had heard for years. "There's nothing graceful about life. I've never seen anything that makes me believe in a God of grace."
"God made Danielle," Dana said.
"Whatever made her let her die."
"Get over it, Kraft."
"I think I'll paint my portrait pink," Ruta mused, surveying the paints as if they were cosmetics. "If Ariel's got any pink."
Beverly caught the spirit of bravado. "Wish I had one last cigarette."
And Molly: "I still don't know if there's a heaven, but there has to be something better than wh
ere we were. Eventually. If there's a dark place, then there must be a light one. A white universe all crystal and warm. If I can't be me, then I want to dissolve in a white universe."
"So who's going first?" Ruta asked nervously. "I don't want to go first, but if we stall around any longer, I'm going to change my mind."
"What about Ariel?" Molly said. "We can't just leave her locked in the cellar."
"Leave that to me," Kraft said. "No one is going to be painting over my picture. I'll let Ariel out when you're gone."
Helen glanced at the shelves. "Her paints have to be destroyed." And looking pointedly at Amber, she added, "I hope there aren't any more around the house."
They all looked at Ariel's heir then, who like them was a painting come to life, but unlike them had never been dead.
Amber stared at a point more or less in the middle of the room. "I'm going to burn down the house like I burned down the barn," she recited with perfect composure.
Helen dropped down on the ratty Chesterfield. "Are you sure you can do that?"
"Yes. I can. If you want, I'll paint you all out. I did it to my twin, so I know how it works—it won't have to dry if it's not the magic paint. And then I'll paint fire all over the studio. I'm really good at painting fire. But Mr. Olson will have to help me get my father and Mrs. Korpela out of the house first. I can get Mr. Bryce out by myself later while he’s letting my mother out of the cellar."
Trembling, Helen reached out to the small hand. "Amber, your father is dead. His chair went down the staircase."
The all-seeing, lambent eyes of the shriveled figure on the sofa swallowed the child whole, while Amber's eyes welled and shimmered emerald but held fast. He had never really come back—her father – bound in that wheelchair. So he was no worse off than before. But what if he was where the rest of them had been? A dark place, Molly had said. She really didn't get it all, but she understood that they were going to go back because they thought they were ready now and because they were suffering. So it was probably all right for her dad, too.
But not her mother.
In a little while the house would be on fire, and she would be standing outside with her mother and Mr. Olson and Mr. Bryce and Mrs. Korpela. But she wasn't afraid of her mother anymore. Without the paint her mother would just be an old woman.
Amber tugged her hand free of Miss Hoverstein's frail fingers and went to the few canvases left against the wall. The one she wanted was in front: a picture of herself. She was surprised that up close it looked so different from the one she had destroyed in the cellar. It looked older, in fact. And even the paint looked different, thinner and flatter.
Beverly nodded. "You'll have to keep it with you. Guard it all the time."
"I know."
"Are you ready?"
Amber sat her portrait by the sofa and nodded. At the workbench Paavo had the lid off the can of paint, but Molly had another frame that she had found in the stack.
"Marjorie is suffering," she said. "If she could say so, she would want this. There’s no point in taking her outside. Start with her, Amber."
There was a certain poetic balance in the acts of annihilation by the daughter of the woman who had created them. If the line between deity and mortal had been crossed, it was made inviolate again by what went on over the next quarter hour.
Amber painted quickly with the largest brush she could find. She painted facing away from them, afraid to look, afraid to falter, afraid even to listen. The silence at her back was solemn and profound. The alkyd was white—alas, no pink for Ruta—and that was good too, Amber thought, because Mrs. Armitage had said that about finding a "white universe," a place of light instead of darkness. She did Mrs. Seppanen second and Miss Hoverstein last, thinking about the Taron pygmies of Myanmar and wondering if, in whatever was to follow, Miss Hoverstein would meet them.
It must have been terrifying behind her. No matter what they hoped or how much they were suffering in their present conditions, it had to be terrifying. She wondered if they were watching each other, or if they closed their eyes. She wondered if it was even working, because there were no gasps or whimpers or clues. And when she was done and she turned around, it was just Mr. Olson staring at her with dull, flat eyes.
"Are you going to start the fire?" he asked in a voice that rattled like an old car engine shaken by winter.
"Yes," she answered.
"Good. Fire is cleansing. I'll go tend to your mother now."
"Don't you want your picture?"
She took his portrait off the workbench and brought it to him, and he rolled himself up off the Chesterfield almost jauntily, an elbow leading from his side, and steps that were almost nimble. Amber was surprised at his energy. For the first time she could imagine what she had heard whispered in the parlor, that this man had been the object of her mother's desire before she married.
As soon as he was gone she turned her attention to finding a smaller brush that would fit through the mouth of the open glass jar of red paint on the workbench. It was important not to think too much about what she had just done to all the old people or that her father was dead or about the horrors in the house, but she couldn't suppress a little rush of power that came with standing in her mother's studio with all her magic paints. It was scary and exciting. And it almost seemed like her painting was made better by the power too, because she had never done fire so well. Getting the curves just right with yellow mixed in, and the flames at different heights all around the walls. The way the fire might spread or the house might collapse were not things she considered. There were chemicals that would explode in the studio, she knew, like the thinner, like the stuff that was used to seal finished paintings, but by then she would be outside with Mr. Bryce.
When she got to the workbench, she hesitated. Her mother's magic paints were right there in the glass jars.
There were a dozen of them, all different colors, but the three largest jars must be the ones she mixed the others from, Amber knew. She knew this because they were red, blue and yellow, and back when she was alive the first time, she had seen her mother use primary colors many times to mix regular paint. So there they were. Red, blue, yellow. The source for everything that had come alive in the house.
(Did she dare . . .?)
She had, promised to burn down the house, and she would. But she already had more than half a jar of the red paint buried out by the ashes of the barn, and what if her mother was sorry—truly sorry—for what she had done? What if—not now, of course, but someday—she wanted to bring everyone back and let them be free and healthy again? It could be done if—
Red, blue, yellow . . .
There wouldn't be any danger if she herself kept the paints under control, Amber thought. She had kept the red hidden, hadn't she? And she wouldn't be stupid about it. She wouldn't even tell her mother about them unless things really, really changed in the future.
There was a large portfolio bag her mother used to haul things when she painted out-of-doors, and impulsively Amber snatched it up. She would use it to protect her portrait, she told herself. And she did. She stuffed the frame into the widest pocket. But there were other pockets. Each padded to protect the contents. She had carried this bag for her mother decades ago.
(Red, blue, yellow . . . and she already had lots of red.)
It couldn't hurt to keep her choices open until she saw how things went. She would have to destroy the red anyway if things didn't change. What was the difference if she had three bottles to get rid of?
The pockets were too small, as it turned out. But she placed one jar on either side of the portrait frame. Blue and yellow. There was plenty of room.
She finished her task of painting the fire by the door, and by that time the flames she had painted first were almost dry. She could feel the heat as a sketch her mother had hung of a sunset began to smolder and turn brown. Lifting the canvas portfolio bag by its shoulder strap, she left the studio for the last time.
Chapter 35
&
nbsp; His soul was ruined already, so what did it matter? He could never be sorry, never forgive. Danielle's roots ran deep inside him, synergistically intertwined with his own, and so to kill one was to kill the other.
He was dead, you see. Still dead. Ever dead. His feet on the stairs echoed the dead steps of dead legions. He had heard them in the cosmos, scrabbling talons and mammoth four-toed pads, scraping up red dust and hurling it across collapsing galaxies. Energy sucked dry. Replaced by sheer will. The animus of nether regions croaking to him as Ariel drew him out of his grave: March . . . march . . . march with us. Open the gate. And he had. And he would again. Because it was all in the cellar now. The charnel cellar filled with the echoes of old violence and new blasphemies. Silhouettes slipping through, gathering there like desiccated cadavers awaiting the drench of blood to reconstitute them to grayness for their horrific hour. His kind of phantoms now.
Such a dark act of love he was going to perform.
He listened at the cellar door to make sure Ariel wasn't on the top step. But no, he could hear her sobbing somewhere down below. Foolish Ariel, still thrashing in self-pity. If she could stop, she might hear the ululant sighs coming from the damp walls or the slither and rasp of papery things unfolding like yellowed parchment. He turned the key, paused to listen again, jerked the door open.
She was sitting sideways on the bottom step in the dim illumination of the storage room's single bulb, and her great gluey eyes followed him as he clumped down one slow step at a time.
"You spoiled it," she said when he stood next to her. "You spoiled what could have been paradise, Kraft."
He put his hand on her gray head as she cried, and it was only a shudder or two before she blinked uncertainly at him. And then he said: "I'm sorry, Ariel."
She blanched, sat straighter. "You are?"
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