by Brian Hodge
The green smell was overpowering, and there was no sun or moon to dispel the darkness of the gaping hole. She could just see the weathered ladder ends like two paws clinging to the brink. Tucking the spade in her waistband, she buried her fingers in the spurge and dangled one foot in search of a rung.
She had a sudden premonition then that there was already something down there, maybe on the ladder, and that it was going to grab her by the ankle, but her toe found support and she let her weight sink after it. Down she went, one hand letting go of the spurge, then the other. Coolness came, then the pungency of the emerald fungus, and even the wisp of cinnamon sharpness she had smelled before. The ladder shivered less and less as she descended until her left foot encountered the solid floor and she stepped off.
The spade was cutting into her hip. She rotated it slightly. Then she felt around for the brick enclosure she had built around the precious jar, and to her relief, she found it smooth and whole to her touch. She sidled around so as to be able to pull out her treasure without knocking the glass on anything hard. But as she squatted, she sensed something whiz past her cheek, followed by scraping like a violin bow across flaccid strings. She looked up just as the geometry of the ladder was disappearing over the edge of the cistern. Against the dusk a small face peered over, green eyes lucid with remorse.
"You should've told me," echoed down. "I would've trusted you, if you'd told me."
Chapter 26
They had been watching her all along. Watching when she left the house, probably from the second floor. The long delay had been to make her run for the paint so that her twin could follow.
The little girl at the bottom of the cistern heard the voice and saw the face slide away and knew that her only possible escape was abandoning her to die by whatever fate found her.
"She lied!" she screamed at the empty rim.
Slowly the face came back.
But what could she say now? She couldn't really blame her twin for knuckling under to their mother's threats. What did Amber Two have to save herself with except cooperation?
A torrent of desperate persuasion poured out of the cistern: "She won't let you live for long … You won't be able to please her … She's crazy, and the first time you do something wrong, she'll repaint you … You can't live like that … Let me up and we'll do something … see, I've got the paint … We can stop her! … C'mon, Amber"—there, she used the name—"let me out. It's not too late. We can gang up on her, if you put the ladder back and let me out."
The answer that came down was much softer but almost as mournful. "She's got the paintings."
So now the prisoner switched to raw pleading. "Don't do this. Please don't. It's almost dark, and the spider will come if you leave me here. Please, please, please, don't do this!"
And then it was just a circle of graying light above her, the last daylight she would know before the night and the spider came. But still she yelled, foolishly yelled—"Amber! Amber!"—until the shaft in the earth rang with her voice and her head was exploding with the sound.
The pressure of the voice in her skull was red. Red needles jumped into line like a stockade fence and sank back into the green stench of the hole. And then it struck her that if the spider hadn't known she was here before, it would know now because of her shouts. Even if it was deaf, it would feel vibrations. She stopped yelling.
Think. Think! What was going to happen? Her twin would tell her mother where she was, and even if she hadn’t seen the paint, she must have heard the glass clinking, and so she would tell their mother that the paint was here. Then her mother would take out the portrait of her and paint it over. No. She would want to see that the paint was here first. She would come see for herself. Then she would paint her out. But what about the spider? Her mother knew about that, so she probably wouldn't come at night. So Amber had until morning. If she survived that long.
The spider knew where she was and it would come, and of course it could crawl down the wall. The specter of that huge hairy creature filling the circle above her and creeping down, demon eyes never blinking, until it had her with its legs and its fangs made her clammy and faint. It would eat her right here. Or maybe it would paralyze her and drag her back to its web to feed its young. And even if it couldn't crawl down one side, it was big enough to brace its legs across the circle and come down that way.
If only she could reach all the way across the cistern herself. But she couldn't. Not by a mile. And then it occurred to her to use the length of her body instead of just the spread of her arms. So she pressed her palms into the bricks on one side and lifted one foot against the opposite side, then the other. She had to spread her arms a little on the curve to shorten the distance, but she got everything up in the air.
Except the paint …
Forget the paint. The ladder must still be up there, and once she got out, she could lower it in and come back for the paint.
Her arms were already starting to get heavy from pushing so hard, and her spine was killing her, so she had to keep going while she still had the strength. She felt like an elephant trying to back out of a bucket—right foot, left foot, lifting butt first, but only a couple of inches at a time, because otherwise she couldn't reach all the way across, and—crap, she couldn't do this! Her arms felt like goalposts and her backbone was splintering. She let one leg drop and that pulled her down like a bobber on a short fishing line. With a whimper she collapsed to the bottom.
There were things she couldn't quite frame but that sat in the anteroom of her child's logic like numbered puzzle tiles waiting to be set in order, as in: Amber One, who was really Amber the Second if you counted a forty-four-year-old woman who lay moldering in her grave, could not coexist with Amber Two, who was really Amber the Third. And there were things she couldn't know or grasp for their horror. Such as the fact that her mother could birth her in legions! I am Amber. Numberless. No bond-engendering gestations, no womb-ripping travails—the industrious strokes of a brush laden with red dust from an ancient site on the other side of the world would create dispensable armies of Ambers marching off canvases. What she did grasp, lying there, was that she was no longer special.
She cried soft, aching tears that made her throat hurt. It wasn't fair. She wanted to be nine again in 1965. She wanted to go to school and listen to the Beatles and see her poster of Twiggy in mod stockings and a miniskirt back on her wall and talk to her dad out in the yard while he tinkered with the old Ford Fairlane, and no one said "far out" anymore or wore mood rings. But she felt too gritty and thirsty to mount a good cry. Bone dry. Funny. Here she was at the bottom of a cistern and she was dying for a drink.
Dying.
And that was the lightning that set the dry tinder of rebellion inside her on fire again. Because now she was thinking of another way she might get out. The cistern was falling apart, and there were bricks all over the bottom. Ignoring the burning where she had scraped her palms and the bruises on her knees, she stood up.
This time she put the precious glass jar of paint in her shirt, and with the spade she had brought for the mud at the culvert, she began to dig at the loose bricks in front of her. To her intense relief the first one came out like a cookie on a spatula. And the next. She could almost build her own staircase out of bricks, she thought in a burst of jubilation. But she wouldn't have to try that.
Using the cavities that were already in the wall, digging out others, stabbing the spade into the crumbling joints, she began to climb. She had to lean close like a rock climber to keep from falling, but that was the kind of thing she did instinctively. Never mind that the natural-born Amber had become paralyzed in a rock-climbing accident at age thirty-three, this was her prototype, the nimble child who danced in the bonnets of trees and sprinted on fence rails. The Skechers slid into the open slots that her fingers abandoned as if they were stirrups, and in less than five minutes she was clawing at the fennel and the spurge at the top.
She kept to the field because it was already too late to
avoid the spider. If it was there, she would have to outrun it. Too late too for the culvert. Too late and too dark. She had a stitch in her side, and the paint sloshing against her chest like blood from her heart made her feel queasy. Hunger pains alternated with faintness. She wished she had eaten the gingersnaps Mrs. Novicki had put out for her. When she crossed the dead furrow, she slowed. And when she got to the field nearest the house, she began to walk.
In the charred debris where the barn had stood she dug into the ashes with the spade and buried the jar. She buried it deep enough where she didn't think it could be broken or accidentally uncovered. She would have to clean the ashes off the spade before she put it back, she thought dully. And she couldn't go inside the house until she figured out what to do. But she was too tired to think now. Or maybe it was just that, even after tonight, she didn't want to accept the truth: that she couldn't share her life with a twin after all. They were like the newborn queen bees her father liked to talk about. First one out of a cell must kill the others.
She slipped toward the machine shed where her mother parked the old Plymouth Fury that she still drove to the strip malls. She could sleep in the car for a while because no one would dare go look at the cistern until daylight. But the shadows and the smelt of things around her—violet smells, deep black violet—made her uneasy.
She didn't feel like she was really inside the shed when she passed under the sagging header and stood in the gloom. It was not like a room of the house where you could see everything and you knew what each object was. The oily smell and the uniform color hid things. Her child's mind grasped only that everything was blending together, that it was rotting or rusted or somehow changing into something that she would become too if she stayed long enough. She curled up and hugged herself on the car seat, and she thought that maybe blending in wasn't so bad after all, and that if she sat really, really still she could become part of the shed. Then she would be hidden too.
From the rearview mirror her white face ghosted back at her, whereas nothing else in the car was reflected. There could be things on the back seat watching her and she wouldn't know. Things in the shed too. Guarding her, she told herself. And that self-deception allowed her to close her eyes.
She didn't mean to fall asleep, but exhaustion and the hour of the night dictated otherwise, and it wasn't until she heard a series of short, even scrapes that she opened her eyes again. The nightmare stalkers in her imagination tried the sounds on for size—snakes that moved like inchworms and jackbooted centipedes and trudging spiders—but there was something helpless and lost about this sound that correctly informed her at last. Opening the car door, she scrambled to the entrance of the shed.
"Mr. Bryce," she called.
He paused his shuffling gait.
"Mr. Bryce … over here."
"Tiffany? You'd better come out of there."
"Why?"
He concentrated hard for a moment, but his thoughts, like his slippered steps, came in disconnected segments. "Do you want me to come in and get you?"
And that little paternalism was all it took to drive her crying into his embrace, her arms around his waist, her face buried in his concave chest. She blurted out her own disjointed segments then—all the way back to Aarfie and the scarecrow and the spiders, and he just kept patting her on the back of the head and crooning that it was okay now.
"… You're the only one I can trust, because you're the only one she hasn't painted," Amber/Tiffany babbled. "I don't wanta disappear like the others, and I'm scared. She makes people disappear who go against her, but I stole her paint, so now she won't do anything to me until she gets it back. But she's already made another person like me, and she's got a painting of me. That's the big thing. The painting. I've got the paint, but she's got my picture."
"It's okay … it's okay," he said.
"It's not okay." She pushed herself away. "She's got pictures in her studio, and she's got mine. I've tried to get in, but the door is always locked. So nobody can get their picture."
He looked at her, thinking hard. "I'll get it," he said and turned toward the house.
"Where are you going?"
"Inside."
"I'm not safe in there."
He looked around, looked at the house. "You'll be safe in my room."
She couldn't stay outside forever, and if she ran away her mother might paint her out anyway, she thought. Even though the jar of stolen paint would not be accounted for, her mother might take that chance. She had thought a lot about running away, but it always came down to the fact that her mother would paint her, or maybe everyone, out, if attention were drawn to the farmhouse. The stolen paint might not even matter anymore if the risk to her mother got big enough. So she couldn't leave. Maybe she could hide in Mr. Bryce's room for a few hours until she figured things out. It had windows she could escape through, if she had to, and her mother and her twin wouldn't know she was gone until they went back to the cistern in daylight.
So she took Mr. Bryce's hand and they went to his room. One long segment of shuffling to the porch, then another segment from the top of the steps to the new corridor where the seam of light from under his door made her hesitate. But he had left the lamp on himself, she realized. When the door was closed behind them, he went directly to the brown wardrobe that stood next to the windows. The flimsy metal tinned as he rummaged behind his clothes, and then he had the edge of something that had a white corner on it, and as he hauled it out she froze in disbelief.
It was her portrait.
For just an instant she had the ridiculous impression that it was something he had done, but of course it was her mother's work. No question about that. Her. Amber Leppa. Exactly the portrait she had seen more than a year ago. No question at all, as exultation rose in her breast. This was it! Somehow. She couldn't believe it. Old Mr. Bryce had walked out of her mother's studio with the painting that kept her a prisoner!
"Take it," he said as offhandedly, as if he were offering her a peppermint.
"But how did you get it?"
"A man gave it to me."
She studied his face, but there was no way to tell the truth. He made up things when he couldn't remember. What man could he be talking about? Paavo? Her father? The thought was like lightning in her blood.
"You can have it," he repeated.
It didn't matter how it had come to him. She had it. She had it. She had it. She took the frame, then leaned it on the bed and hugged him. She hugged him twice.
The problem was going to be where to hide something that big, she decided about the painting. She could take the canvas off the frame like she had seen her mother do, and … and suddenly her world came crashing down. Because it had taken her a minute but now it occurred to her that this might not be her picture. It could be her twin. Squatting down on her haunches, she breathed painfully as she scrutinized the image. It looked the same as she remembered, but her mother had probably made the second one from the first. She hugged her knees and rocked and thought. And then she knew what she had to do.
"Thank you," she said, mouse quiet. "You don't know what you've done." And giving him another hug, and carting the frame along, she hurried from the room.
Martin Bryce stood staring after her for a moment, wondering if there was something wrong. Then he turned stiffly to regard the wardrobe. Shuffling to its open doors, he pulled back the clothes and made his slight genuflexion. It was still there. The second of the two paintings the man in the wheelchair had given him at the top of the stairs. One for Tiffany, one for him.
There were half a dozen bottles of liquid shoe polish down in the cellars. All but two—one black, one white—were dried out. There was more of the white, but Amber chose the black. Black felt right.
You could get along with just three fingers and a thumb on one of your hands, she thought. The Simpsons had only three fingers and a thumb on each of their hands. So she would probably never miss her little finger if she guessed wrong. She chose the left hand, even though i
t would be harder to separate the little finger from the finger next to it in the painting. The shoe polish applicator was just a blob of fuzz too thick to use for a brush. She tried a pipe stem cleaner from a yellow sleeve on the shelves but that was still too thick, and then she tried a broomcorn stem from the whisk hanging from the end of a shelf but that was too unsteady, so she ended up using a small finishing nail. She wiped the nail as clean as she could—and she remembered then to wipe the ashes off the spade, which she still had in her waistband—and then she dipped the nail in the black polish and practiced making a straight line on the side of the shoe box that held the shoe polish bottles.
Upstairs her twin was probably asleep in their bedroom. She wondered if it would cause pain to lose a finger this way—if, in fact, her twin would wake up screaming. If it did, she would paint out her head next, because that would end the pain.
And what if it was her own finger that went away? She didn't dare scream, because if everyone woke up, she would have to leave the house in the middle of the night carrying the painting, and what if the pain was so horrible that she couldn't run?
Don't think, don't think …
She tried to catch just the tip of the finger first, but there was barely any paint on the point of the finishing nail at all. Not even a drop. And her hand was trembling. So she dipped the nail deeper in the shoe polish this time and came back to the canvas, kind of resting the side of her right hand against her left. But her left little finger was right there, practically over the one in the painting, and that made her want to wince when the drop of shoe polish squiggled on.
… Do it!
And it was more than she wanted to get on the painting, so it kind of smeared around, and then her left hand began to tingle and then burn. At least she thought it did, but after she jerked it away and held it up in front of her face, already whimpering and gasping against the tightness in her throat, it was still there. Chewed fingernails and all.
