by Brian Hodge
But if she wasn't going to give it back, she was going to have to move it. Sooner or later her mother would figure a way to get it off the roof, so it had to be moved.
Night was the best time. Night was the only time, now that the third-story window was screwed shut. Amber went to bed at ten o'clock without being told, and at twelve thirty, while the house exhaled the heat trapped in its walls, she rose up again and pulled on her jeans, her Mudd T-shirt and Skechers, and stroked Sir Aarfie, whispering: "You stay here, Aarfie. And don't bark, okay? No bark."
He made a throaty "woof" that registered his indignation as soon as she closed the door on him, but she moved away quickly so that he wouldn’t think it was a game.
In the parlor, luminous with moonlight, she stopped and listened. She had a funny feeling, like everything around her—the wooden blue doll on the mantel, the pincushion porcupine on the corner shelf, the metronome that seemed to be clicking its tongue with disapproval, the oval picture frames gaping like open mouths hanging on the wall—was alive and warning her not to go. Her mother said she had fallen while climbing in her other life and that was how she had ended up paralyzed, and now she had to climb from the ground to the roof, so maybe that was why she felt anxious. But she had to do it. Because if she didn't, she wouldn't have that much of a life anyway.
The moonlight was so bright that she could see mosquitoes rising off the screen as she pushed onto the porch. The air was very still and muggy under the overhang, but as soon as she passed the corner by the willow she felt the uneven current, as if the wind were circling the house in waves. And by the time she got around to the back it was flooding against her like water flowing through an invisible moat. The old TV antenna wires slapped rhythmically against the clapboards, reminding her of Colonel Klink slapping his riding crop on his thigh in Hogan's Heroes (“… Don't even think about trying to climb that wall, Hogan”). But the thing that bothered her the most now that she stood behind the towering farmhouse was the light on the third floor. That was the studio.
And it meant her mother was painting.
She could be painting anything, of course, but the fear that she was altering her horrid little daughter right this instant grew to a conviction in Amber’s mind. The picture could already be done and just drying. And when it dried what would she be? Too old to climb up on a roof and get the magic antidote? Too old to climb down if the change came while she was up there?
Rebelling against her fear, Amber went straight to the lightning rod and clamped her hands as high as she could. Then she drew her hips up parallel with the ground by planting both feet against the side of the house. The rust on the rod gave her a grip, but it tore her skin too. Hand over hand, foot over foot she climbed, pulling with her arms and pushing at right angles with her legs. Every few feet she tried to rest her hip against the rod. And each time she did, she heard a wrenching sound from the brackets. There were three of them, so rusted that you couldn't see the screws. And there was no window on the second floor within reach of the pole.
The wind was tossing her hair against her mouth and her arms were burning and her legs felt like sand was draining out of them, so she had to stop now and simply hang with her arms extended and one leg still pushing against the side of the house. But she still thought she could do it. She thought she could do it right up until she got halfway when without any warning at all the rod began to pull away from the house.
Her feet slipped off the clapboards and her body swayed slightly past the vertical. She almost let go, but miraculously the pole stayed straight and her legs swung back against the house. And now as she twisted and scrabbled to get her feet back in place, she saw that it was the middle bracket. When she had come even with it, it had popped out of the rotting board. The lower and upper brackets were still holding, though. If she could keep her weight centered with the lightning rod over the ground, maybe it would support her.
Giddiness was sweeping over her, and she tried to focus on the thrumming through the metal as she went higher. The sewing room was just above her now. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, and when she opened them again she made three more determined steps against the siding and swung her knee onto the window ledge. Numbed and exhausted, she clung there for long moments.
One more hard pull and she would reach the galvanized gutter, she thought. Drawing close against the clapboards, she gathered her right foot under her and pushed … and pulled … and now she had her right elbow above the gutter. The thrumming stopped as she got past the upper bracket with a last thrust of her left hand. And there on the roof she lay, flat to the pitch, letting the blood flow back into her limbs and the pain subside where the skin at the base of her fingers had been pinched against the pole.
Below her the TV antenna wires still slapped the side of the house, and to either side loose shingles flapped with the gusts as if in derisive applause. Nevertheless, she felt safer now than she did in the house. The minor sense of triumph quickly restored her. This was her realm. This was where no one else could reach her. Even the wind seemed different now, soothing on her forehead instead of pushing at her back.
It wasn't until she made her zigzag to a higher point and then to the pipe and then to the chimney that the feeling of being out of reach from things that could hurt her underwent revision. Because now she could hear something inside the cupola. But she had already thrown herself up the pitch, and if she stopped, she would slide down. So she kept going until she got one hand over the saddle shingles at the ridge, even though she knew it wasn’t going to wait, that if it was going to attack, it would do so while she couldn’t defend herself. And before she could pull herself up, it came at her with a rush of wings and golden eyes.
She never saw the claws. They scraped her ear and cheek as she turned away, and then the thing was gone. By the time she got one leg over the ridge, all she saw was an edge-on silhouette gliding into a line of trees against the blue green glow to the west. An owl, probably. That's what happened when you burned down a barn. Owls went looking for new homes.
She touched her cheek. There was blood for sure—black and slippery. Her mother used to warn her about cuts and rusty nails and stuff, so she knew you could get lockjaw from that, and now she had gotten rust from her fingers in the scratches on her face. She'd better hurry up and get done so she could wash out the cuts, she thought. Straddling the ridge, she edged cautiously toward the cupola. The good thing about the owl was that there probably wasn’t anything else in there now. Half standing, she wormed her way through the broken slats.
It still smelled funny inside, like the mud that stayed icky in the canals along the road, but she thought she could smell the owl too. A kind of warm, gray odor, like a dog that had been out in the rain. Everyone in the house beneath her laughed when she said she could tell colors with her nose. Which she could. Gray. Definitely gray.
She waited for her eyes to adjust, but the stripes of moonlight stayed silvery blue and the black was just black. So she felt around very slowly where she had snugged the paint jar down next to the platform until her fingers touched the glass shoulders just below the screw cap. There wasn't any point in saving the paintbrush or the poster paper, so she just tucked the jar against her side with one hand and started back down the roof.
It was easier than going up, even with the paint. But then she came to the lightning rod. She was going to have to put the brakes on gravity, and for that she was going to need both arms. Encircling her Mudd T-shirt over the jar, she tucked the hem deep into her jeans. The glass was cool against her skin right where her heart thumped, and she could actually feel the red liquid sloshing around like it was blood or something. She kept her legs bent to stop the T-shirt from pulling up as she worked her way off the edge of the gutter onto the lightning rod. Then she began walking down the side of the house, controlling the descent with her arms and the pressure of her hip against the pole.
Her father had read some of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to her—the part where Tom an
d Huck climb up and down a lightning rod in order to help Jim—and Amber grew a little heady remembering that, thinking she could do the same even though she was younger and a girl. No one could climb like she could. But then her hands slipped just above the second floor, and she had to press her forearms against the rusty metal to stop a slide. Chastened and scraped, she came down the rest of the way fighting for breath.
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 dreaming 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.
