Dust of Eden (20 page)

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.

T
he 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.

It was eerily silent on the first floor. One by one she flicked on lights, revealing overturned furniture and the milk glass bowl of the brass floor lamp, broken in large pieces. The shade had torn so cleanly that it was unfolded like a scroll, and the painting of the Garden of Eden lay face down on the parlor rug. With her cane she raised the frame to lean against the wall. She hesitated before Amber's closed door. Maybe it was good to leave her in there. It wasn't her daughter who had screamed, and a little prolonged anxiety over what was happening outside her door might make Amber more cooperative about returning the stolen paint. And then she heard faint weeping from behind the bathroom door across the hall.

"Dana?"

"Is it gone?"

Ariel tried the door handle. "Yes. Come out, Dana."

"I can't. Bring me some clothes—my bathrobe . . ."

But it was going to be a while before that detail was remembered, because when Ariel reached the residents' corridor, the blood trail began. There was a splash on the wall, a ghastly handprint on Beverly Swanson's door, and beyond that an unbroken chain of dribbles and smears on the floor tiles leading to the double windows at the end. Against the darkness she couldn't quite see that the glass was smashed, but the air flowing along the corridor was heavy with the smell of the fields and the woods. So the unholy thing had come in and probably gone out that way.
Paavo's
chicken wire, it seemed, had been a deadly joke. Ariel rapped softly on the doors as she moved closer and closer to the shattered glass:
Come out, come out, little people, wherever you are. . . . It's all right . . . the Wicked Witch of the East is gone
. And so they crept out, bent and trembling, to take a census and determine who it was they had not tried to save. Only
Ruta
and Martin remained in their rooms, she refusing to unlock her door, he sitting in his undershorts on the edge of his bed, holding his shoe like a blackjack.

"It sounded like
Paavo
," white-faced Helen said.

That prompted Ariel to knock forcefully on
Ruta's
door. From within, hysteria erupted. She had told
Paavo
not to leave the room,
Ruta
wailed. It was impossible that her lament could carry very far through the solid oak door—certainly not past the corridor—but suddenly from the heart of darkness beyond the broken window
Paavo's
thin moan quavered. It went on for an intolerable time, and when it finally subsided, the shocked silence was profound.

"It's playing with its food," Helen wheezed at last.

Ruta's
door lock snapped open then and she rushed forth, straight at Ariel, where she dropped like a stone to her knees.

"That's him, that's him! Make it stop!"

"
Ruta
—"

"He's still alive. Make it stop,
please
!"

"
Ruta
, I can't. If it overpowered
Paavo
, then how can I—"

"No, no. Not it.
Him!
"

A consensus of pleading looks came to rest on Ariel.
Stop
Paavo
,
Ruta
meant.
Make his suffering stop
. A petition fit for a deity.

For just a moment Ariel
Leppa
looked like the inadequate rag of a woman they had taken her for throughout their mortal lives. Her lips pulsed, her eyes dulled, her fingertips slid nervously in the folds of her robe. But there were no dismissive looks from the major players of her life now, no sly confirmations of her inferior status. This was the moment she had fantasized, the one they had robbed her of by dying.

Another scream from the darkness ended in a gurgle.

"It's eating him," Beverly whispered.

And then Martin Bryce appeared in his doorway, breathless and clutching his shoe. "They must have found Japanese money in his pockets," he said. And then he shuffled toward the broken windows.

Gripping her cane like a baton, Ariel hastened to her studio while the others shrank back into their rooms like mollusks into shells. Frantically she threw
Paavo's
portrait flat on the workbench. With one pop she had the lid off a can of ordinary white paint. Without stirring, she poured it directly onto the canvas.
No need for extinction to dry
. Underneath the ghostly gloss, the dust-impregnated vehicle for life was obliterated. Downstairs, Martin Bryce sidled gingerly among shards of broken glass, looking futilely for a way to climb out the broken window. Not many yards away in the darkness
Paavo
Seppanen's
shrieks abruptly ceased.

A
t dawn, when nothing was sighted from the sewing room window save tattered clothing and dark stains in the dust of the yard, Molly and Dana went out with pitchforks. They went as far as the woods and probed along the brush and also the ditch by the road. And when they started back toward the house, they met something that churned the stark horror of the last ten hours all over again while resonating an uncertain joy. Miraculously it was
Paavo
himself. On his feet and walking toward them.

"
Paavo
?" Molly called, raising the pitchfork a little.

He was unhurt, unmarked even. No blood whatsoever.

"She's painted him again," Dana murmured.

And she had.

Ariel had fretted only a minute or two after painting out the canvas the night before. Then she had pulled out a fresh frame and gotten the photo of
Paavo
and taped it to the top of her easel. For all she knew, there would be two of them on the farm when she finished—one dead, one living. And what if the first one somehow survived? That would be novel.
Paavo
Seppanens
on either side of the dinner table. She would have to tell that fool of a son of Martin Bryce that
Paavo
had a twin.

But, of course, the first one was beyond reanimation. Whatever was left of him had ceased to exist when she slashed white paint across his portrait. She was all but sure of this. It wasn't like natural-born Amber, who had died in her wheelchair when her nine-year-old self was brought back. The inhabitants of New Eden had all returned from the dead to begin with.
Paavo
was not a first edition. He was already an extension of what she had done with red dust and paint. All of them Adams and Eves, if the dust was indeed something from God—or whatever else that powder represented in the way of cosmic events and interventions. That it was her father's ashes, she had come to doubt. She had once read of extraterrestrials returning to Earth like caretakers to a garden they had planted. Perhaps the red dust was their seedbed . . .

So the third
Paavo
came upon the earth, and he knew nothing of the second, though he remembered the first one, his natural life, which had come to a natural end. The mechanics were such a muddle to Ariel. She didn't want to understand them. She just wanted to move on. And so she told
Paavo
the bare minimum again: that she had brought him back after his death from a heart attack at age seventy. She had brought him back younger, and he was to be "the man about the place." And then she sent him out to help the others look for his own remains. Let the others help him sort it out if a body turned up, she thought. It didn't.

Later in the day, when Dana and Molly and
Paavo
returned together and the
tenantry
of New Eden was gathered, nervous and stunned in the parlor, Ariel attempted to clear the air and instill calm.

"I know you're all upset, but you see everything is back to where it was. As long as I'm here, there's nothing we can't recover from."

"I don't like this . . . I don't like this," Helen persisted.

Ruta
, quiet for once, had already discovered differences in this new
Paavo
and sat a little apart from him. Kraft Olson stared rigidly at the floor, and when he raised his head he kept Danielle Kramer as far behind his line of sight as possible.

"No one likes it," Ariel said, "but let's not overreact."

Beverly laughed sharply. "One of us was killed. How are we supposed to react?"

"He was not killed"—a nod at
Paavo
, who sat numb and disoriented from his return from the Stygian darkness—"he's right here just like he was yesterday, and the day before, and the way he'll be tomorrow."

"We don't want to die again," murmured Marjorie. "Even if you bring us right back, we don't want to die. You don't know what that's like, Ariel."

Ariel softened. "That's true," she conceded, "I don't know. And none of you will tell me."

"There's no way to tell you," said Dana, hollow-eyed and listless. "Death is everything wrong. It's—"

"Don't!" Marjorie said curtly.

"You brought it up."

Beverly waved a hand at them. "Let's not lose track here. This is a crisis of survival."

"I've told you, survival isn't in question!" Ariel snapped. "You should all know that. You should be grateful—why aren't you grateful? Why don't you have faith in me?"

The silence crackled with nervous restraint and fear of imminent danger in Ariel
Leppa's
magic fiefdom.

"I think they're worried about something happening to you," Molly ventured delicately, as if she were not herself involved. "What if . . . what if that thing had attacked you last night? Who would paint you back?"

"Me? My, my. Someone is worried about me. Thank you. But nothing is going to happen to me."

"Something could, Ariel," Helen said. "You can't be foolish about that. None of us could paint you back, even if we knew where . . . where things were, or how to do it. If we tried, we'd end up with something like what attacked
Paavo
last night."

"Maybe I'll paint myself back when I'm on my deathbed. Maybe I'll leave you a number painting, and all you'll have to do is put the colors in." They were listening very hard, she noticed. "So you don't have to worry about me being around to keep you healthy."

"If you even
want
to keep us healthy," murmured
Ruta
.

"'If I want to.' You dare ask that? Even though I've given each of you the ultimate gift of life when you were dead? You still want more—a guarantee, a warranty on your bodies and your health. As if I owe you that. But I had nothing to do with your deaths, did I? You lived just fine without me in the only lives you thought you'd ever have. And now, instead of being sorry or grateful or trusting me, you want some kind of contract. Well, there isn't any. Just our feelings for each other. Our
sincere
feelings."

"You had something to do with my death." Amber, who had been sitting sullenly on the floor near the arch, looked surprised by her own outburst.

"You were paralyzed and living in misery. I made you better."

"You could make us all better,"
Ruta
said.

"I could. I may. Or I may not. What would you do,
Ruta
, if you were a young woman again? Run off to the city like you did before? Whore it up for a few years? Oh, don't look at me like that. You think I don't know that I'm just a dried-up old crone who never got her chance for a little fun? Well, some of us aren't equipped to get that chance. It's a superficial world, and we can't all be
Danielles
or
Rutas
, can we? Anyway, here we are in the encore, and all that matters is what we are inside. Make you
better
,
Ruta
? What could be better than this?"