by Brian Hodge
And that was it.
Except that the spider must have wedged itself into the bends in the toilet, because no sooner had the water begun to ebb back to its normal level than she saw red legs scrabbling frantically around the curve of the hole.
Trembling at the invincible will of the thing, she plunked down on the tank handle. Ridges of water spiraled around the sides, agitating the surface and carving a hole right through to where it clung. She could see the legs flex and grip, completely exposed now, except that the flow was sucking at its body. It wasn't going to be enough, she thought. The horrible creature was going to hang on. But just before the final swirl, it suddenly let loose and was gone.
She didn't wait to see if it came back this time. She didn't want to know. She just slammed the seat and the lid down. Then she drained the tub without taking her bath and grabbed her clothes and fled to her bedroom.
Let it be dead, let it be dead, she prayed.
For a long time afterward she listened. Because if it was still alive in the house plumbing, sooner or later someone was going to scream very, very loudly.
Chapter 9
Martin opened his eyes just before midnight and saw the green glow. It was the clock radio he had given his wife for an anniversary present thirteen years ago, but without his glasses on and with his eyes crusted with sleep, the 11 throbbed phosphorescently.
"Beth …" he said and closed his eyes again.
The green glow went with him as he fell and fell back to an outpost of memory where deeply etched events fired cerebral salvos like pom-pom guns on the beach of a Pacific hell. Distant flares on the deck of a flattop homed him in. When you were flying in at night like this, the first thing you saw was that glowing green number 11—two flares—throbbing phosphorescently. Split it, Marty…. Split the uprights! But he didn't split them. He ditched. And here the geography became muddled. Night was now day. The F4F Wildcat was scattered over a quarter mile of ocean. And he was being lifted—crawling, lifted, crawling—by waves over a sandbar. The murmur of surf blended with chatter in Japanese. Then he was being dragged, interrogated, beaten with a two-by-four, and when he was on his feet again, he was trudging through the dust from bullpen to bullpen, camp to camp—Capiz Tarlac, O'Donnell, Cabanatuan. The guns of Corregidor faded as he marched. Men died, hundreds a day from starvation, from beatings, from the "sun treatment," from beheadings. Get rid of your Japanese tokens…. Throw away your money. And then his eyes were open again, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed in New Eden, trying to decide what to do … what to do for the men.
"Beth!" he called ahead fifty-nine years.
But she didn't answer. All he heard were the insects out in the swamp and a dog barking on the camp perimeter. He was a little dizzy. Black motes swam in the black air. He had to pee, but he was afraid to. They had shoved a glass rod up the penis of one of the men and broken it, and whenever he peed, others had to hold him. There was a seam of light under the door. Martin stood in his shorts and his socks and shuffled toward it.
Out in the hall of New Eden he recognized the bathroom, but the screaming man with the broken glass up his penis would be in there. Martin turned toward the main part of the house. A chrome yellow moon staring through windows followed him from kitchen to dining room to parlor, past the painting of the Garden of Eden, and into another hallway. There were doors in the hallway, and he stopped before the first one. This was where Beth made him take baths, he thought. And when he pushed open the door, that was what he saw—the white bathtub in the middle of the room.
He grazed his hand up the wall but failed to find the light switch. It didn't matter. He could see a ghostly toilet next to a ghostly sink. Shuffling across the tile floor, he lifted the lid and the seat. He was going to go standing up, but the bowl presented a blurred target of concentric circles—rim, porcelain, water, drain—that seemed to agitate together and drift. Dropping the seat again and undoing his trousers, he sat down. It took a long time. His swollen prostate was like a drip-dry sponge. When he was done, he fumbled in the dark for the handle, and again the gradation of circles seemed to agitate together as if something moved there.
Back through the house he came, past the Garden of Eden, through the dining room and into the kitchen. He paused now, not certain where he was, where he was going. There were two doors and two arches, and when he had turned around once, he lost track of how he had come in. He tried one of the doors and found himself looking into a pantry. And then he tried the other, and it was a stairway leading down.
The steepness would have discouraged him, except that the dank earthiness wafting to his nostrils triggered remote associations from his past. And the past was all that mattered. It was more than the thinning connections of a failing brain that made time slip. If he came awake in the middle of the night looking back over his shoulder, it was a last search and rescue for all the failed rescues of Martin B. Bryce.
So down the worn cellar steps he went, finding the light switch but almost losing his balance as he fumbled for a handrail that wasn't there. At the bottom he turned and moved steadily through the storage room. He took small, even steps as though he were advancing on rails.
He knew he had to keep going, that he was looking for something or someone—or something for someone. He did not specifically remember the starving men at Cabanatuan or his daughter Tiffany screaming for him from behind a wall of flesh-searing flame, but his heart was pounding with fear that he would fail again. The darkness in front of him was not a deterrent. The cellar could have been a lion's den and he would have pushed on. Sometimes there was nothing in the unknown that could be worse than what you knew.
But the darkness of the passageway beyond the storage room caused him to totter. He groped for the walls, pausing, pushing away. When the passage U-turned sharply, he bumped through the change and kept going. He kept feeling for a light switch, but there was only cold stone and silken spider trip lines. A few steps farther he reached out and the walls were gone.
Air was flowing against him from all sides now and it was very cool, so he must be outside. But where was the sky? Maybe he was in a cavern. His hearing wasn't particularly good, but there was a range in which he heard quite well. A shade going up, dead leaves underfoot, shingles flapping in the wind or the subtle spank of air above burning wood on a grate. He readily heard those things. And now it seemed that something was being dragged to his left in the darkness. It almost sounded like breathing—two-staged like that—except there was no pause. Bellows worked that way, or iron lungs for polio victims. And then the dragging changed directions, cutting in front of him, and he realized what it was.
Separate segments were slithering around him. Those nasty green snakes that waited by the wallows outside the camp. But it couldn't be avoided. You were glad to go to the dirty carabao wallows whenever they took you out on a work gang, because back inside the perimeter there was one spigot for twelve thousand men and the wait for a drink was twelve hours.
And then he heard the whirring wings, and they weren't trying to get out of his way; they were coming toward him. A dragonfly sound. A hunter sound. Straight at him, though for a few seconds he couldn't tell from which direction, just that the drone was getting louder. He raised his arms in the dark. Something brushed his scalp, and before it could come around again, there was another burst of wings, this one a flutter. It must have leaped from somewhere and intersected the whirring, because the dragonfly drone abruptly ceased.
Now the sounds were all of tearing and feasting. Martin Bryce had smelled the charnel horror before in the stench of a bullpen where diarrhetic men could not fall down to die, and again at the edge of a twilit grotto where other men hung, gutted and draining, upside-down over barbed wire. A universe without sanity was the most unsettling revelation possible. Once you had stared starkly over the edge of that immeasurable abyss, you could never forget it. Life thereafter had been hope but not trust in goodness or in order. And now, decades later, he was feeling it again: th
e rapacious and merciless appetite that drove the universe. One thing eating another until … what? What survived? What incarnation of life was the final cannibal?
He was listening to the blasphemies of creation sucking the marrow out of each other, and he didn't want to see them. But when the light burst around him, he did see. In the glare, one indelible glimpse at vespertine creatures on the floor of a tunnel. Two forms. Three, if you counted the bloody offal plucked up by the greedy thing that flopped quickly into the shadows. And the other one—that one was not involved in the grisly repast. That one was the slitherer. A red serpent. Bigger than the worm-size void in the Garden of Eden upstairs in the parlor from which it was growing, but not much bigger. About the size and length of a belt. Lashing its way out of sight and into the tunnel.
Amber thought she saw something beyond Mr. Bryce, though she couldn't be sure. He was across the laundry room and partially blocking her view of one of the tunnels. And the light was bright, even though she had only been in the dark for half a minute, feeling her way through the double-backed section to the wall switch. So she wasn't sure about the flash of red on the floor. It seemed longer than the spider, but then again, it was blurry.
"Mr. Bryce?"
He didn't turn, and she thought maybe he was embarrassed because he only had on underwear and socks. She went up and took him by the hand.
"This is the way out," she said.
He looked down, kind of breathless, and she knew by how hard he stared at her that he thought she was the other girl.
"What are you doing here?" he gruffed.
"I heard you use the bathroom outside my room, and then I heard you on the cellar stairs. Are you okay?"
"You should be inside."
"We are inside."
He looked around. "You shouldn't be here."
"Did you see something down here? Like maybe a spider?"
"It was a snake."
She hadn't painted a snake, but he got things mixed up sometimes. Telling her she should get rid of her Japanese money or her head would be cut off and everything. "It's not safe down here," she said. "Why don't you come upstairs?"
"I don't care if I die."
"I didn't mean you were going to die. C'mon, let's go upstairs."
"You go. I've got to …" He looked around again.
"Got to what?"
"I don't know."
"Are you hungry? You should come to meals. You never come to the table for your meals."
"I ate."
"What did you eat?"
"Insects."
She laughed curtly. "You must be starving. I'll get you some yogurt."
"I don't care if I starve. I'm tired of living like this."
"Like what?"
She pulled him gently by the hand and he followed her. She thought she understood him. Lonely. Different. He needed her, and she needed a friend. He kept asking where they were going, and she kept telling him his room. But she knew it wasn't his room. Nothing in this house was ever going to be familiar to him. He had lived too long in other places and with other people, and he didn't want to change them. So she was Tiffany. She liked that. Whoever Tiffany was, maybe she was better to be than Amber.
"You're a good girl …" he said when she had tucked him into his bed.
"No, I'm not. You don't know me."
He grunted, and she could tell, he was almost smiling. "Little Miss Contrary. You're a good girl."
Chapter 10
Rules of canasta in New Eden: bitch, subvert, manipulate.
The card playing went on at a snail's pace in little bursts of draws, discards and melds, while remarks and glances flowed within the matrix. Matronix. Four of them—Ruta Seppanen, Beverly Swanson, Marjorie Korpela, Helen Hoverstein—elbows on the card table, nose to nose to nose to nose, a canopy of gossip over the incidental game. Kraft Olson sat stone-faced in the Morris chair, and now and then the Spy, Molly Armitage, passed through on one pretext or another.
Ruta was complaining sarcastically about their isolation, indulged to a point by the others, because, to a point, she was speaking for all of them:
"… Yes, yes, thank you, Ariel, thank you for reconvening us in your little garden. Replanting us like cut flowers, rootless, to wither and die."
"Don't be melodramatic, Ruta. We aren't going to wither and die."
Three pair of eyebrows went up in response to Beverly.
"Well, Ruta makes us sound like those genocidal pygmies of Helen's. All we have to do is keep Ariel happy."
"Ariel is mad as a hatter—"
"Careful, Ruta."
"She is. Certifiable. It's wonderful that we're back, but for what? To be preserved in her little museum just the way she wants us? Unable to change a thing or pick up a phone or drive to Saint Paul?"
"Give yourself some peace," Helen. weighed in. "Why do you want to make the same mistakes you made before? Stop logging the infractions. Time stopped for all of us once. Be grateful it started again."
"Mistakes? What mistakes did I make with Ariel?"
Marjorie played an ace on her meld of three and discarded. "Not just your mistakes, Ruta. Ours. We ought to recognize that."
"Well, aren't you the good trooper? I think you've finally gotten to the miserable point of our being here. Ariel will paint a gold star in the middle of your forehead."
"It's not about satisfying Ariel."
"No?"
"It's about where we were when she brought us back." Their eyes came up and their postures changed. Composure was shattering like an icicle dropped from a roof. "We ought to think about it. Where we were, and is that the only alternative there is?"
"I don't like to talk about this," Helen said.
"I'm just saying, we ought to think about it—"
"You think she's really God, don't you?" from Ruta.
"Of course not."
"You think giving Ariel what she wants will change where we go if we die again."
"Well, we've been giving her what she wants anyway, so that takes care of that," Helen sighed. "End of subject."
Ruta laughed harshly. "No, no, we can never give Ariel what she wants, because she's just going to want more and more. I don't know why no one else can see that."
Marjorie tapped a card. "You're still missing the point. Ariel has her own motives, but now that we're here this is about us, our … attitudes. She may be right about one thing: we've all got a second chance."
"I'm not happy; that's the point," Ruta said.
Helen, who especially didn't like an argument being passed around like a baton, seized her chance to snuff out the metaphysical flicker. "At least your husband is here."
"Pardon me … pardon me, but you never married, so I don't see that your situation is any worse than mine."
"I'm not the one complaining."
"—and Beverly's husband died in the Vietnam war, didn't he? A hero too. So she's got closure."
Beverly—Our Lady of Perpetual Sarcasm—responded as if poked. "Maybe we should play Old Maid."
"And we have children—Paavo and I—don't forget that," Ruta said.
Beverly rolled her eyes.
Marjorie did not miss her own husband particularly and found Helen's spinsterhood admirable. Out of a sense of duty she worried sometimes that she should find out if her husband was still alive; but then what would she do about it? "Molly has children," she pointed out, "and a grandchild, I believe. And Dana's husband may be alive."
"Dana's husband is a brute. Cinderella is thrilled to be out of her marriage, dead or alive." Cinderella. Ruta's exclusive term for the wholesome-looking and now much younger Dana Novicki.
And then it happened—just like that. The thing that hadn't happened for many months but which tethered them to their creator and kept them in fear and trembling. Helen, who was facing the staircase, saw it first: Ariel coming slowly down the staircase, no cane, one hand on the banister, the other looped through the arm of a companion. Ariel's face was incandescent, her brow nearly geis
ha white, her eyes like ice at sunrise. A mad artist's look, fresh from creation. But it was the companion who was the draw …
"Danielle …" Ruta whispered.
Marjorie and Beverly drew back with shock as they turned.
Because it was not the beautiful Danielle Kramer, inamorata of Kraft Olson, whose death in middle age had left them with the memory of a cowl of ebony hair, languid eyes, a serene mouth, a gypsy's flashing teeth and nails, taut skin as luminous as moist marble and a haughty confidence in all of the above. That was Danielle Kramer when she had died. But what was coming down the staircase was a coffin-sprung travesty of ragged flyaway hair the color of ashes, burning ferret eyes and a slack jaw, yellowed teeth and a crone's nails. The skin was stretched and sagging. Worst of all, in the expression of this pitiful remnant there was a contradictory mix of hideous joy and fear and shame at being alive on any terms.
It was this trembling gratitude that struck the room dumb. They could all be like this. The mocking husk of what they remembered as Danielle Kramer was the object lesson of a woman who could paint with the dust of creation. A few strokes of a brush here and there and another decade would reside in their flesh. The paint would dry and their bones would bend, their skin would loosen, their heads would bow. And whatever was commensurate with physical corruption would enfeeble their minds until they were like this ghastly drooling hag on the stairs.
So they froze around the card table, four vassals of their suzerain lady, unable to return Ariel Leppa's triumphant smile. And as the lone, last float of a grand mummers' parade that had started a year ago reached the bottom step and moved inexorably into line with where Kraft Olson sat, the women at the card table understood:
Ariel's revenge.
Ariel's test.
Ariel's vanity.
Here is your lover, Kraft. See how beautiful she is? Take her. Show me a sign that you haven't been deceiving me. Show me that you really have lost your memory….
Ariel Leppa stared intently into Kraft Olson's face, searching for the slightest twinge of recognition from the man who still scorned her.
