by Brian Hodge
"I'm astonished …"
She stared down her hawk nose at him, refusing to be provoked.
Almost vindictively he switched gears. "Unreasonable seems too mild a word for some of your precautions. Are you having a problem with birds and oversize insects?"
"Come again?"
"The chicken wire on the windows."
She paled a shade. "I believe you told me on your first visit: your father tends to wander. I can’t afford guards."
"That's true about my father, but I don't think he could work his way out a window. And I didn't notice any double-cylinder dead bolts on your doors."
"—then there's Thomas."
"In his wheelchair on the third floor?"
"You don't know all the residents here, Mr. Bryce. Your father isn't the only one who gets confused."
"But you told me you didn't accept dementia patients."
"I accepted your father." Her cold calculation ebbed a bit, as if she were making a decision. The supercilious tilt of her gaze suddenly lowered, and her clear eyes met his straight on. "Mr. Bryce, we do some miraculous things here—miraculous. I told you there haven't been any serious illnesses in New Eden—nothing that wasn't addressed—and we've never had a death."
"You're a small population. Naturally I hope that continues as long as humanly possible, but—"
"Oh, it will. Even longer than humanly possible."
Denny smiled thinly. "It's the water, I suppose. Look, I'm not unhappy with anything. I wouldn't have fought to get my dad in here if I didn't think it was better than his other options. I just want a phone for him. If that's a big problem, okay. It's not a hill I'm going to die on."
"Wouldn't you like your father to become healthier … younger even?"
"That's not going to happen."
"Oh, I don't know. A lot of aging is a state of mind, and that's what I control here."
He didn't try to answer that. She was more than an odd bird, and now she was showing her flightiness. People had a statistical success with something and right away they thought it validated everything they ever did. Because her little island was healthy, Ariel thought she had all the answers, the magic beans. Wait till the first one fell facedown into the mushroom soup. It could set a trend. A couple cases of terminal flu in the same month and her salubrious outpost would be quarantined. Then see what a sage she was. But why burst her bubble?
"I couldn't help but notice that picture of your father when he was young," Ariel was saying. "A Navy photograph, isn't it? My father was in the service, but I never had his photo. How I wish I did. Such a handsome man—your father—and his character is written all over his face. You must love that picture, or you wouldn't have carted it out here and hung it on his wall."
"As a matter of fact, I do."
"Well, then, wouldn't you like him to look like that picture again?"
He wanted to say "Sure," but the conversation was getting a little more than just odd now. He didn't want to explore how unbalanced Ariel Leppa might be, didn't want to doubt her to the point where he had to rethink everything. She had made him promise that his father would stay here for life, if she let him in, and even though he had taken that with a large grain of salt, it was another hill he wasn't prepared to die on right now. So he didn't say, Sure, I'd like my father to look just like that photo. Dose him with your magic well water and we'll watch the years peel away. And while you're at it, you could use a little de-aging yourself, if you don't mind my saying. What he said was: "I just want him to stay the same."
"The same," she repeated, as though it were the saddest thing in the world. "'Same' makes death inevitable, doesn't it?"
"My father wants to die. I wish I could change that, but I can't. Even if you could make him younger, you couldn't bring back the context. Everything around him has died or changed. I just want him to be safe, comfortable and respected as a viable human being. He's not going to roll beach balls on the floor with a bunch of human artifacts sitting in a circle of chairs." The words were scarcely out of his mouth before he was waving a retraction. "I didn't mean it that way."
"Don’t apologize. You say it very well. The whole idea of New Eden is to get 'the context' back. Especially the context. We have no beach balls here, Mr. Bryce. You know that. We just … become as young as we like."
She seemed to be expecting him to say something more, but he thanked her for her time, adding, "Sorry for intruding up here in this part of the house."
"That's your problem, you know," she called after him. "Making your father's death inevitable. You should stay away from him, if you feel that way. Just let him go."
She was right, he thought when he was back on the solitary road, passing the long undulating waves of heart-shaped ivy. He was making his father's death inevitable because he was losing the battle to give him the will to live. It might have been different if they could have kept their lives together in the gingerbread cottage in Little Canada. If Denny could have continued like that. His mother had kept the old man going for years. The Freudian totality: mother-mistress. A lifetime of being the maternal consolation for the murder of his father's mother. And his father in turn had "kept her"—with apologies to Mary Chapin Carpenter. He had kept her the way she had wanted to be kept. If she had wanted it otherwise, he would not have opposed that. But however much they may have had to work at it, in the end they had just the right temperament for each other. He secured her. She created brightness just by being there. I loved her because her idea of romance was giving, not getting. How could you not keep living for that? And if she hadn't been killed in the car accident …
Well, we all die, thought Denny Bryce wearily. The gray regina of New Eden couldn't make death avoidable, despite what she believed. She could not be the sovereign of their souls, no matter how much she wished to be. And surely there were inner deaths that occurred while outward bodies yet survived.
Chapter 12
"Haven't I made you the youngest?"
"Yes, but—"
"Why do you think I did that?"
"Because … because I was never cruel to you."
"And … ?"
"I don't know."
"And because I trust you, Dana. I can trust you, can't I?"
"Yes. Of course."
"Look at me, then. That's better. I know you've been talking to him. He has a certain boyish charm. I'm not asking you not to be friends with him. I'm just asking you to take his picture. Simple. Click … flash. That's all. It doesn't mean you're betraying his friendship. On the contrary, you're keeping faith with me."
"But … what will I tell him?"
"Tell him? Tell him I asked you to. Tell him you're my official photographer. That's true, isn't it? I want pictures of everything. He comes here every day. Surprise him."
Surprise me.
That's what Denny Bryce had said to her about picking a time for their picnic. But Dana Novicki felt hollow and cold when she took the camera from Ariel and started downstairs in the early hours of the night. Because she knew what Ariel used photos for. Knew any photo she took would end up with the others. A surrogate death row of images, waiting on appeal. Thumbs up; thumbs down. Denny Bryce would be under that thumb, then, like all the rest of them. No longer a threat to the mistress of New Eden, but threatened by her.
But by the time Dana Claire Novicki reached the foot of the long staircase it all became a moot point. Because now she sensed something that eroded the thin plane of existence she had returned to. Something that immediately froze her blood, suspended her rhythms, cleaved emotions from her mind, flatlining all the gentilities and subordinate dramas of relationships on earth. The core being within her contracted like a membrane—knotting into a root essence as dense as a neutron star, excluding light, shutting out any purpose but survival. It was as though she had suddenly been returned to an obscene flight of rodents, clawing over one another in the deepest midnight rush up the walls of a flooding cellar to avoid extinction. And she was one of them. Fiery eyed,
shrieking. How could she have forgotten that? Only a year removed from the grave, and she had smothered the memory.
But now the gulf was opening around her again, exhaling the dreaded stench of compounding decay while receding into the horizonless vastness from which she had been summoned by Ariel Leppa. She knew why it was there. What it meant at this moment. It had opened, like an overgrown gateway that is always present but never quite discerned, to let something in. Something new—or rather very ancient—had arrived from outer realms. A corrupted thing. A wild malevolence escaped from limbo. Here now. Physically here in this house, this night.
She turned slowly on the bottom step, breathing shallow breaths that sounded like katabatic booms across the Arctic, aware that her human essence was emanating like a feast to the other's numberless senses, and that it was homing in on every atom of her being in ways she could not prevent. But where was it exactly? Beyond the archway through the parlor, or lurking in the one leading to the old school wing? And what exactly was it like? Did it have leathery wings, stiletto claws?
"Amber …" she whispered involuntarily.
Because that must be how the vessel was created. The child painting things that didn't exist—had never existed—and therefore were just empty husks inhabitable by whatever desperate and raptorial anima broke in. A very deviant atman, this one. Something from the cosmic pit itself. A sediment, a residue of merciless passions that had swirled together like sewage, growing denser and more potent until the apprehension of its very vileness became toxic.
Dana Novicki edged off the step, feeling the late night air with raised hands as if it were palpable. To her right, she thought. And then again, maybe to her left. Could there be two? No. One powerful source. And it was on the left. Somewhere in the shadows that vaulted beyond the arch leading toward the added wing. It was feeling her mortal warmth, just as she was feeling its alien chill.
Ariel had shepherded spirits to life as carefully as had the unknown God of the universe. But Amber—how carefully had she put her creations together? The hints they had gotten the other night from the commotion on the roof and certain disturbing silhouettes in the fields had been all too familiar to the others, Dana was sure. Amalgams of the dead … composite corpses … banshee wails … nails scratching on glass—fragments of a latent nightmare, the things that had never been spoken of out of fear that they might actually exist. But everyone who had come back knew; everyone was only one illusion away from the suppressed horrors they held in common.
She was one step into the dining room when she saw it rise up. A baleful eye, crimson in the moonlight, and a scar for a mouth, glistening wet with appetite. Its feet moved—feet should not move like that. Half padding, half clattering. Stentorian breaths heaving in cavities terrestrial morphologies did not possess. A satyr. A manticore. One part child-driven. The rest self-defined by the intensity of its needs. Crashing into evolution. Gnashing and shredding its way into the food chain. And the smell. Worse than the suppurating rot that clung to Dana Novicki's indelible nightmare, because it also bore the pungency of its predator flesh. Rancid sweat, fetid breath, carnal traces of its nesting among recent kills.
And if it had eaten, it knew how to hunt.
A great bowel-wrenching wave of fear swept over Dana. The specter of returning to where she and this feral entity had come from struck her with such violence that she voided her bladder and began to regurgitate. Her legs shook and started to fold like twists of paper; chill sweat poured down her sides and sprang from her brow. For a moment she wished for the shore beyond extinction. She did not want to hold on to her identity in the face of such bone-pulverizing terror. Better to surrender. Better to be torn asunder. To live with integrity of form was to endure pain. To be cast upon the tsunami of undifferentiated atoms that swept across the universe was welcome.
But when the "it" uncoiled, raging from the darkness, she instantly melded into a single force. Her calves firmed, her ankles tensed as she launched herself into the parlor and scrambled over the ottoman. Around the Morris chair she went, feeling her options narrow by slices as the thing cut off one direction, then another. Finally she shrank back and tried to look away as it rose red in the moonlight coming through the window.
She did not want to see it reared up at the penultimate moment before it struck. But its triumphant howl was inescapable: a maniacal, unbridled chord from multiple structures in its throat, splitting the air like some saurian bleat in a Mesozoic bog. And that bodeful sound seemed to acquaint Dana with every detail of its anatomy, as if it were already feeding voraciously on her flesh and a part of her, still conscious, was sliding through its maw.
In the wake of the howl, which must have shaken the house to its foundation, Dana Novicki grasped her bearings. The nearest door with a lock was the bathroom behind her and across from Amber's bedroom. A brass floor lamp with a marble base stood on her left, too heavy to heft as a weapon but a potential obstacle to use. Inching toward it, she placed one outstretched hand on its column just as the measured crepitations in the throat of her besieger turned into a hiss. As if the brass had turned blistering hot, she flung it down in a shower of sparks and jumped for the narrow darkness of the corridor.
The red stalker hurdled the lamp with ease but balked as she yanked the picture frame from the wall for a shield. The creature had the wariness of something that knew terrors greater than itself, and Dana took heart. Turning the painting of the Garden of Eden like a cigarette girl's tray in front of her, she fended it off as it dogged her step by step—a macabre samba of retreat and advance. Giving ground a foot at a time, she fell back into the corridor and abreast of the bathroom. If only the door were open!
But it wasn't.
It was closed, and God help anyone locked inside. She wanted to call out, but anything that broke the fragile equilibrium that was holding off the final lunge was going to be her last maneuver. So she swung the painting end to end like a great clumsy scythe and sprang for the door. The knob turned in her hand and then she was inside, slamming it shut, fumbling for the lock.
The red thing hit the panels with a roar of outrage, and the frame reverberated with a disquieting crack. Dana found the metal crescent that stuck out from the lock plate and twisted it against some impediment, praying that the bolt was still lined up with the recess. And then she sank to the floor, surrendering in utter despair to whatever came next …
Chapter 13
It was Paavo who incurred the wrath of the helldog. Paavo Seppanen, who had his own festering cesspit of obscene and blasphemous horrors. And it was he who inadvertently saved Dana Novicki, because he heard the bloodcurdling howl that resonated the very wallpaper of the room he shared with his wife, Ruta, and the Corybantic frenzy of flailing nails and thuds as the chase ensued, and almost against his will he swung his feet from the bed to the floor.
"Don't go out there!" Ruta warned him.
She sat ramrod straight in bed, her hands pressed into the mattress, wearing a hairnet and looking oddly masculine without her makeup.
But of course Paavo did.
There was no other male in the house capable of playing that role, and while his act might be a mere intrepid gesture, peeking around the doorsill and then around the corner at the end of the hall, and from there to the dining room arch, and from there … well, by that time it was too late to outrun the thing. Never mind that his wife had leapt from their bed like a flea and locked the bedroom door behind him.
There was no going back.
It smelled him before it turned. And Paavo knew, as Dana had, that this was a creature without a species, a demiurge that had seized an empty form created in a Cartesian world. It had allegiances to neither laws nor evolution, and it would kill him.
He wished he had not seen its eye. A flat disk with a misshapen red orb—red, like everything else about it. But he did see it, and he couldn't tear himself away from its cartoonlike simplicity. Its snout made vermicular contractions, pivoting like a perforated thumb in his di
rection, and after that something dropped open that must have been its jaws—slavering tissued things, badly formed and serrated. Even from that distance Paavo caught the rankness of half-digested prey in its gullet.
Its foreclaws, which were caught in the upper panel of the bathroom door, released then, and it dropped quietly into shadow. That is when Paavo banged backward into the arch while turning to flee. By the time he stumbled into the resident corridor he was babbling, because the entire fugue of death from which he had been reprieved was back, and he knew he was once again untethered, knew that like this chimera breathing down his neck he would seize any crag in the storm of life. That much he remembered on the border of chaos and disorder.
He banged on the door of his bedroom, but the only response was Ruta's sobbing. And he couldn't articulate the obvious, that she must open the door to save him. Instead he went to the next door and the next. And the brute just played the same game it had played with Dana, advancing when he retreated, as if enjoying the bloodlust of anticipation. When Paavo reached the last door and his last bit of futile mewling, he turned to face it square on.
So it came at him, throat-straight, hitting him with gaping jaws and closing over him like a red canopy.
The screams etched every nerve from cellar to roof. Ariel heard them. Amber heard them. Molly and Dana and Helen and Marjorie and Martin and Beverly and Thomas and Kraft and Danielle and Ruta heard them. And except for Dana, who huddled on the bathroom floor, they remained on their beds as they had their cradles and their catafalques, mousy-eyed, understanding that one of them was going down.
Only Ariel had the courage to rise up after a minute or so and go to her door and open it. She knew the carnage was related to whatever Amber had unleashed. And it couldn't be ignored if they were to survive. So down she came, cautiously but imperiously too, because she really was the creator of New Eden. A year ago the farm had lain fallow, and now everything living owed its vitality to her. What breath there was under its roof she had quickened. The thing that had caused the screams was a blasphemy against her creation, a transgression against her will.
