Dust of Eden (38 page)

Mrs.
Armitage
came in first and then Mrs.
Novicki
. The rest of them, Mr.
Seppanen
and his wife, Miss
Hoverstein
and Mrs. Swanson, stayed just outside the doorway. Her mother had made them older and they were slower now, but she didn't like the way they stood there holding their arms out a little like a game of Red Rover, where kids tried to block you from running past. She had felt bad for them—Mrs.
Seppanen
with her mouth shrunk up like that, and Miss
Hoverstein
all hunched over, and Mrs. Swanson so tiny that she could have been one of the twelve
Taron
pygmies waiting to die that Miss
Hoverstein
talked about—but now they looked threatening.

"We want you to come with us, Amber," Mrs.
Armitage
said, moving to one side of the bed. (
Red Rover Red Rover, let AMBER come over!
)

Mrs.
Novicki
moved to the other side, mumbling an apology, and Amber jumped off the foot of the mattress, almost into Mr.
Seppanen's
arms as he blocked the doorway. She dodged back, squealing with fear. Mrs.
Armitage's
plump fingers flexed, catching the sleeve of her nightshirt for a moment. The room was too small. She couldn't get away, so with both hands she grabbed one of the bedposts and squeezed until her fingers were white. But then as they closed in from three sides, she jumped back onto the mattress and jounced to the other end.

The window there was closed but not locked, and she took hold of the handles and yanked as hard as she could because it was always swollen shut this time of year. She only had a couple of seconds, and if she didn't get it up the first time, there wouldn't be a second. So she put everything into it, shrugging as she lifted and pushing with her legs, but her feet sank down into the mattress and the frame barely slid up on the gray metal tracks. Then dry fingers closed around her ankles and a heavy hand clamped over her shoulder.

"We're sorry, Amber"—Miss
Hoverstein's
swollen shoulder blades forced her head into her neck and made her voice strained—"but we've got to make sure you don't interfere."

"Interfere with what?" she whimpered.

"With what we've got to do. You know we can't go on like this."

Amber had no idea what they were talking about. "I promise I won't interfere! I'll just stay in my room."

"She's your mother. We can't take that chance, child."

"When we're done, we'll let you out of the cellar," Mrs.
Novicki
assured her.

They were all in the room now, and a half-dozen hands were pulling her off the bed. The air had that mad quality of a humming beehive. They were going to attack her mother, she realized. They were going to try and take over New Eden.

"She's got your pictures," Amber said between ragged breaths. "She'll kill you!"

The momentary hush told her this was very much on their minds, but it was only a second before Miss
Hoverstein
conceded with resignation, "That would be acceptable. It's living like this"—she waved her hand at the stooped and hoary company—"that we have to stop. Your mother can make us suffer anything any time she wants."

Amber's feet barely touched the floor as they lifted her toward the door.

"I won't interfere, honest, I won't!" she begged, but into the corridor went the eerily infirm cortege, bumbling along through the house to the top of the cellar stairs. "I could help. You need me. Mom's just gonna lock herself in her studio and do whatever she wants to your pictures!"

They were like some slow machine that couldn't stop running, a sump pump with a stuck switch gurgling dry air or a car dieseling on with a dead ignition. The reason they wouldn't listen to her wasn't just because she was a kid and they were old; Amber thought, it was because they were practically zombies while she had been alive when she was painted for the first time.

Someone threw the light switch and the vague glow from the storage room rose halfway up the stairs. Amber was edged onto the dark top step. Dry fingers slid off her arms like limp fronds a moment before the door firmly closed. She saw the ghostly white ceramic handle twist, heard the lock snap.

Tears burned hotly in her eyes as her captors shuffled away, but she fought them down. It wouldn't be so bad, she thought. Being locked down here while a battle raged wouldn't be so bad. Then – because she still didn't know that Ariel no longer had her painting – she thought what if her mother painted her out along with the rest of them? Her mother didn't know she was locked in the cellars. She might assume she was part of the rebellion. The others might be willing to die, but she wasn't! She had to get out of here, had to tell her mother she wasn't part of it. Or else she had to become part of it and make sure they won. Because if they didn't win, she would lose with them.

She jiggled the white handle. Banged on the door. It would take an axe to get through the oak. She had once seen her father tear down a shed with a wrecking bar and a sledgehammer, but if those tools existed anymore they were probably in the machine shed. Skating her hand along the wall, she descended through the storage room looking for anything she could use to beat down the door.

When she snapped on the light in the laundry, the two tunnels at the far end seemed to leap toward her. The old stories of passageways and collapsed sections were vague in her memory. Somewhere within that clutter the secrets lay buried. Maybe she could find a path this time, she thought. But she wouldn't go in without a light. If a spider could come up through the plumbing into the bathtub, then there could be lots of them down here, so she wouldn't go feeling in the dark.

Back for the candles and matches in the cupboards she went. She tried not to look at the dried black shoe polish all over the floor as she lit a pair of sputtering wicks.

Returning through the double-back passageway, she went straight to the tunnel on the right. But she got only as far as the furnace when she saw all the debris: shelves and crates and barrel staves and broken, gluey, green glass mixed with a slope of dirt and stones and . . . red straw.

It could have just looked red because of the light, she thought.

Holding both candles in her left hand, she picked up a wisp of straw and held it close to the flames. The vividness of the color brought back the vividness of the scarecrow lurching into the barn that day and the fire that she had made happen. The red straw could have been here since before the fire in the barn, of course, but she had an eerie feeling that something was watching from just beyond the collapse. There could be undamaged tunnels on the other side of the debris. No telling how big they were or what might be in there.

She started to back away, moving the wicks side to side, trying to keep them from making blind spots in her field of vision, but a couple of steps brought her up hard against the furnace. She raised the candles to reassure herself that she had caused the metallic thrum.
 
And as she did so, the light revealed the old ductwork that wound round itself like ghostly robotic limbs, heading off to every room in the house. She and her friends—back when she had friends—had hollered through them sometimes.
 
Room to room they went, pretending the ducts were telephones or microphones or that they themselves were gods making booming pronouncements from on high.

The house was big and old and the ducts were big and old, and it suddenly occurred to her that she could crawl through them—crawl and climb—if she could just get inside. And she could. Because one of them, right where the Lutheran school had installed square ducts to go to the new wing, had rusted through on the bottom, and her father had cut the rusty part out and laid another panel in its place inside the duct. She had watched him do it. "Guess that's not going anywhere," he had said, and she thought that was funny at the time—the idea that it could go somewhere. Only, now it did. Because she dragged boxes in place and climbed up and pushed the panel until it slid back enough for her to lift one of the candles and poke her head in.

It looked like oatmeal inside, a gray blanket of dust all wavy and pilled, but there were squiggly lines along the bottom too, like rivers that had dried up, so it must have leaked, and that was why her father had replaced the rusty part. She could see the bare metal in the riverbeds. And every few feet there was a rib where one section joined the next. A ways down she could see a dark opening where the oversize duct turned up.
I can do it
, she thought.

Daddy's little monkey . . .

She was barefoot and in a cotton nightshirt, but whatever was happening upstairs left her no choice except to try to defeat her mother before she herself was destroyed. So she wormed her way in and slowly crept forward, mindful of the hot wax dribbling onto her hand as she maneuvered a few inches at a time. Dust clung to all four inner surfaces and stirred into the stifling air as she planted her elbows commando style. The fine tickle in her throat thickened until it felt like she had swallowed a washcloth, and then she coughed and that made her bump her head, knocking wads of the stuff loose. Like cotton candy, it vaporized. She barely had time to realize it had caught on fire. Embers, smoke, ash—all in a burst.

So now she knew the gray lining could all go up at once, and her grip began to sweat, making the candles slippery. One touch to the blanket of dust and—
poof!
—cremated Amber. Old Mr. Bryce would think it was Tiffany burning up and blame himself again.

She would have turned back at that point, except that she was near a vertical shaft. Squiggling her bare toes forward in the soft blanket, trying not to create a tear that would bring down curtains of flammable dust, she twisted her neck and peered up the intersecting riser.

It wasn't as dusty up there, and she could stand. In fact, it wasn't a duct at all. Vaguely she remembered her father joking about how the furnace must have been built by the same people who had done the Tower of Babel, because it had round ducts and square commercial ducts and sometimes no ducts at all but something he just called chases. She must be standing in a chase, she thought, because most of it didn't have any metal. It was a wood-frame shaft with metal sections here and there that she thought maybe the church people had put in as part of the agreement for their school. The ribs every couple of feet would make it easy to brace her feet, she thought, and unlike the cistern, it was just narrow enough for her to use the sides. The problem was the candles. She didn't think she could climb and hang onto the candles. The only way to do it would be to push against the sides with just her elbows and wrists instead of her fingers.

There were voices now—shouts—coming from high up in the house, and that spurred her on. Pawing away the coating of dust on the horizontal shaft right below the chase, she dribbled a little wax on the bare metal and stuck both candles upright. Even if her body kept the light from shining past, at least she would be able to look down and see what progress she had made.

Cautiously she tried the first handhold, simultaneously feeling with her toes for the first ridge. It took a little adjustment of her balance, pushing just right against the sides as well as down, but it wasn't all that hard for Amber the Human Fly. Up she went, faster than she had been able to crawl in the horizontal duct. She kept looking down to make sure she wasn't dislodging dust onto the candles. And each time she looked up again, she had to give it a couple of seconds for her eyes to get used to the darkness. Enough light made it past her so that she could pick out the dark openings of passages that came horizontally into the chase. And when she reached the second of these and looked in, a fall of genuine light was tantalizing close.

It took only a few seconds to slide on her butt through the horizontal shaft and discover that she was looking up through the floor register of the downstairs bathroom by her bedroom. And that made her wonder if the red spider she had drowned that day had gotten into the bathroom through this very shaft and afterward gone down the tub drain. She pushed as hard as she could on the grid, hammered with her palm. Then got her feet against the lattice with her knees up against her chin. Nothing budged. She cried out in frustration, but the tinny echo just blended with the general tumult from upstairs.

And now there was another thing. Was it her imagination or was it growing hotter in the duct? She could no longer get a full breath. Still scrunched up, she began edging her way back to the vertical shaft. Too late she realized that she was dragging a carpet of dust with her. And as she shoved her feet over the edge into the chase, it went raining down on the candles below. She peered past her toes at the feathery clusters as they hit the flames and set them winking. For just a second she thought they would go out. And when the wavering stopped and the light steadied again, she almost wished they had. Because now she could see every detail of the crimson eyes in the crimson head and the crimson serpent's tongue flicking up at her.

Amber
Leppa
screamed and screamed.

Screamed until she was deafened and the metal that surrounded her hummed. But the vibrations only seemed to excite the thing below, and its split tongue flicked up at her like a fork probing after tender morsels.

For a few dizzying moments her arms and legs wouldn't move. If they did, she was going to pass out from sheer fright and fall down the chase, she thought. And then the snake was going to unhinge its jaw and work its mouth over her head. It was probably starving, probably able to swallow her bit by bit by unhinging its jaws the way she had once seen in science lab when she had been in school. And this snake looked terrifyingly real, not at all like the ones she had painted, but more like the one in the painting in the parlor, only much bigger. It was still writhing into view out of the horizontal shaft, and it was incredibly long. Anaconda long. And it was red. She understood what the wriggly lines in the dust at the bottom shaft were now. They were not leaks that had rusted out the panel. They were tracks where the thing had come and gone. It must have crawled in and grown and grown until it couldn't get out.