Dust of Eden (25 page)

"Know what I think?" he said. "I think our picnic is right here in this bottle. I think we've earned it. We should just slip into the cornfield and find out if aging really does make a difference."

Oh, aging makes a difference
, she thought.
If only you knew, Denny Bryce.

She looked at the dryer, its door still yawning open, vomiting out its virulent meal. Upstairs was more insanity, mirrored in the faces of her gray and tenuous companions. And here was this man who knew only oxygen and sky and firmness beneath his feet and laughing children and a world held together by cycles and seasons, like some great calendar clock with infallible gears, and he wanted her to taste some earthly pleasure on an afternoon in the summer of a year named 2001.

"Why not?" she said.

T
hey made a furtive exit from the house, and he retrieved a fawn-colored comforter from his car and something called an MP3 player, which she had never heard of. He played a single song over and over on the device—something titled "Mambo No. 5"—that she could barely hear because the MP3 player had little earpieces that he just left lying on the spread comforter with the volume up fully. Which allowed them to talk

. . .

She told him a lot about herself, even that she had a husband somewhere in the Texas prison system, if he hadn't been executed. She told him that New Eden was wonderful and terrible, and that everyone here except his father had known Ariel a long time. Why didn't anyone ever leave, he asked her, why didn't she want to know whether her husband was dead or alive? She tried to make him understand without telling him anything that would
let
him understand. How could he accept the truth? And they killed the bottle and pretended it was better than it was.

"What if you came here one day and I didn't recognize you?" she asked him, and of course he thought she meant what if she had Alzheimer's. "What if I seemed to be someone else?"

"Maybe I should take your fingerprints," he said and pressed five fingertips against hers until their flesh seemed welded together.

She could have met someone like this man, she realized, and the sweet sting of sex would not have been mixed with fear, as it had been when she had married and lived unhappily ever after. But that was another world, another lifetime.

"Bottle's empty," she noted with just a slight slur. "Must get back to the scullery."

"Alas."

She thought he might kiss her, but he merely said, “I've got your fingerprints now, and after a minute or so she heard him start his car and drive off. He had forgotten to take his comforter. She folded it and made her way through the rows of corn.

The rustling as she brushed against the stalks seemed to have an echo that reminded her of the rustling in the cellar, though of course that was because she was half in the bag, she thought. But a few rows from the edge she heard crows cawing accusatively, and that brought back the dryer and the cellar even more sharply.
 

She stopped.

How vehement they sounded. She had trouble picking them out, but they were there in the willows—were there, because when she saw them they stopped cawing and took flight.

Where had the day gone? It was late afternoon. Probably everyone would be sitting around drinking coffee or iced tea. She couldn't stumble in like this, carrying a comforter. Better to leave it in the barn and sober up for a while.

She went around to the front and tugged the rolling barn door open just enough to squeeze past. The wheels in the overhead track were all gummed up, and if someone didn't clean it soon it was going to take a fire axe to get inside. You could see daylight between the boards, and you didn't need a ladder to get into the loft because it had obligingly turned into a slide where the center posts had rotted and collapsed. But it was a nice place to go and get your head on straight—shady and aromatic with the sachet of harvests and seasons. So she dragged herself over to the lip of the loft where it dipped to the floor, and fell back on the brittle hay while the world spun round inside her head.

It was still spinning, but only at carousel speed, when she heard the door wobble slightly on its track.
Shit
, she thought,
who would come out here now?
Amber? Molly or
Paavo
? She hoped it wasn't Amber. Maybe they wouldn't see her. It was gloomy and the garden tools were close by the door, so maybe they would just grab the hoe or whatever and saunter off to the garden. But the door rolled open at least six or seven feet, judging by the sound. So it must be Molly or
Paavo
—someone strong. Still, she didn't sit up. She didn't sit up until nothing happened for another minute, and the suspicion grew that someone was just standing there, someone who knew she was there, trying to find her in the haze of shadows and sun-shot stripes that fell on the floor.

So then she came up on her elbows and blinked at the bright rectangle of the doorway. The silhouette there refused to make sense, because the light from the opening conspired to limn it with red in an irregular way, as if it were jaunty and ragged. No one in the house looked like that. It responded to her movement too. She could see that much. How it straightened suddenly and stiffened and . . . rustled? It was the same rustle she had heard at least three times within the last several hours. In fact, it seemed now that she had heard it all afternoon, in the cellars, in the tunnels, in the field, unsure of what it wanted to do, or waiting for her to be alone again. Only now it must be sure, because it had come into the barn looking for her.

What came next was so peculiar that she almost thought it didn't happen. The figure moved, but it did so twisting and thrusting as if it didn't have enough joints and stopping every few steps like a blind animal trying to locate its prey. Sobriety began to kick in very fast.

The sun striping through the shrunken boards fell full on it when it was twenty feet away, and despite Dana's instinct to freeze, mouse quiet at the very moment her heart leaped into her throat, she couldn't suppress a gasp. Because it was a scarecrow, a red scarecrow—
pulsingly
red—and she was transported instantly to the outré regions from which she had never fully returned.

It was Amber's creation, of course,
Ruta's
nightmare—"Red straw . . . red straw!"—except that no one had mentioned its rows of harrow teeth the foolish child had painted, or the nails tearing right through the gloves, stiletto length and crimson. And the reason it moved in sudden bursts was because it had no eyes—no eyes, but God knows what other senses—and so it had to pause and pick up . . . what? Sound, scent, heat? It must have known she was alone, must have kept close all afternoon, sensing her somehow. And now it had her in the barn.

She thought of the dryer full of dead crows, and she had no doubt whatsoever that this was the predator that had amassed them. It was a killing thing, after all, and it must be a very effective killing thing to have captured the wary crow in such numbers without benefit of sight. The way it twisted and leaned sharply forward made her think it was hypersensitive—as if it were exposing some sensory organ to minute vibrations. She tried to hold her breath and stay calm, but it knew. With that horrible rustling it was zigzagging toward her.

The alcohol still buzzed in her brain. But then she wasn't going to have to outthink it. She was going to have to outrun it, and she thought she could do that. Inching upward, she rose to a crouch, and when it fronted her with a terrifying burst to within six feet, she made her dash.

She sprang off the loft. But before she could take a second step it was in front of her again, and she had to sidestep back onto the hay just as its arm rived the air with a sweep of nails. Sliding, backpedaling she went, gaining maybe two seconds while it struck one of its odd tilting postures as if to determine the nature of the loft from sounds or smell or the way the air moved—or all three. By the time it had placed one red boot on the fallen fascia board, she was scrambling for the pitchfork that hung on the wall.

"Back off!" she quavered, brandishing tines.

A mistake, of course. As if she had issued an invitation to embrace her, it leaped, Ray Bolger-style, head askew, limbs bent, harrow teeth unmistakably grinning. But it landed stiffly, bristling with power, and so close. It had called her bluff.
Here I am! Surrender, Dorothy!
And she could do nothing more than thrust the pitchfork into its chest—through its chest—with the tempered steel finding no resistance at all in the red straw.

Worse, with the precision of a catch in a ballet, its right glove clamped instantly onto the haft and with a twist of its torso jerked the weapon from her. Then it yanked the tines out of itself and snapped the pitchfork in two. Then it tossed both, clattering and clanging, to the floor.

So she was going to have to outthink it after all.

It seemed momentarily confused by all the rustle and vibration as she rolled sideways and scrambled higher into the loft. But it was relentless, and it was sorting out her heat from the sound or whatever it was picking up.

Heat.

Faint flicker of hope, flicker of an idea, flicker of a match. She still had the wooden matches she had taken from Denny in the tunnel. If she could get one lit, if she could set the obscene thing on fire. . . .

She fumbled with the box, hands shaking, spilling matches in her lap. And then she had one, and without sliding the cover shut, she tried to scratch it on the friction strip on the side. But there wasn't enough support with just the cover, so she tried to slide the box back into it, only it was hanging right on the end and her trembling fingers jammed it a little sideways. It dropped out of the sleeve and fell in the hay.
Take your time, girl!
But when she reached for the box, it disappeared into the hay like a drowning hand slipping under a wave.

The red scarecrow twisted, harrow teeth working, nails fanning like hackles.

She still had the matchbox cover and one wooden match. Bracing two fingers of her left hand on the inside of the sleeve, she pressed her right index finger against the head of the match and
snicked
it on the friction strip. This time it started to hiss. But her hands were sweating and the dampness of her forefinger must have soaked into the match head, because it fizzled and died in a copious puff of yellow smoke.

She knew without lifting her eyes when it found her. She was ground zero and the countdown was at one. But all the same she was groping through the hay for another match. And when she actually came up with one, the scarecrow still hadn't hurled itself on her. She thought fleetingly that the smell of sulfur had arrested it. It wasn't sure. It was hesitating. If she could just . . .

This time she pressed her index finger a half-inch higher up the match, and the grit of the friction paper resonated grain by grain into her sense of touch. She felt each nuance, each subatomic transfer, as if the reaction were aggrandized to a cosmic scale for the entertainment and edification of every consciousness in the universe.
Dana
Novicki
has struck a match. Will the antimony
sulphide
and potassium chlorate melt and ignite the little stick? Will she combust the red straw of Amber
Leppa's
diabolical horror before it leaps in rage upon her?

She looked into the scarecrow's blind face and serrated maw and jerked the match forward. Touched the red straw, in fact. But the match was already falling from her violently shaking hand as she reached out. And the flame that had burst so promisingly a moment ago vanished in another gush of smoke. She could smell the cloyingly sweet red straw. She could hear it rustling. The sibilant sounds took her back so close to where she had lain after death that all the old nightmares of a year ago came rushing over the rim.

Once again she stood before ramparts and ageless pylons rooted in space. Pitted faces loomed near, shunned things sucked her breath, fused entities warred for her soul, and from all sides
susurrant
legions rustled and giggled, devoid of pity, incapable of empathy or unity or anything but the solitary and savage predation of the disconnected. But from three feet away, the empty vessel of red straw seemed suddenly unable to sense her presence. It contorted into a hyperextended Saint Andrew's cross, impossibly tall, a bristling thing of receptors, now seething, smoking, and suddenly bursting into flames—purely red flames—that singed her face as she shrank away.

She crabbed backward into the loft—a loft filled with flammable hay—rejoicing that she had lit her attacker on fire after all, because even though she knew that she had absolutely not done it, she told herself that there must have been an ember or a spark that had taken a few seconds to catch hold. So now the combustion had her in its thrall. Even after the thing was thoroughly immolated and tongues of flame were gesturing like melodramatic arms in a silent film, she kept sliding sideways, back and forth, as bereft as a spider in a bottle. The fascination was utterly irresistible because she could see that the malign creature was starting to break up into discrete particles. And that was a glimpse over the wall that all who live must take. This was not just another earthly death, or even the hastened transformation of matter to energy. It was annihilation—the reverse of creation. How could she have caused such a thing? In the midst of her calamity, she wanted to understand that.