Dust of Eden (41 page)

"Ready to what?"

"Ready to die."

"You're going to make yourself extinct like the pygmies."

"The
Tarons
. . . very apt. Yes, the
Tarons
. This is all wrong. The world shouldn't have us anymore."

The elder faces were concentrating on Helen now, thinking profoundly what they hadn't wanted to think since returning from the
nonplace
, the infinite paradox where existence meant you couldn't corroborate that you existed. Limbo, purgatory, hell,
Sheol
,
Tophet
,
Gehenna
, Hades, perdition, the abyss, the pit—it mattered not what infernal region it was. It was not paradise. Or even serene oblivion. And death was coming again, no matter what. If they lived another day, it subtracted a mere twenty-four hours from the final and eternal disposition. Forever minus twenty-four in their present condition. Twenty-four followed by twenty-four followed by . . .

". . . Better to go now," Helen was saying, "while we've got the perspective and the will. It's as close as we're going to come to a state of grace."

"State of grace?" Kraft Olson growled in a voice none of them had heard for years. "There's nothing graceful about life. I've never seen anything that makes me believe in a God of grace."

"God made Danielle," Dana said.

"Whatever made her let her die."

"Get over it, Kraft."

"I think I'll paint my portrait pink,"
Ruta
mused, surveying the paints as if they were cosmetics. "If Ariel's got any pink."

Beverly caught the spirit of bravado. "Wish I had one last cigarette."

And Molly: "I still don't know if there's a heaven, but there has to be something better than where we were. Eventually. If there's a dark place, then there must be a light one. A white universe all crystal and warm. If I can't be me, then I want to dissolve in a white universe."

"So who's going first?"
Ruta
asked nervously. "I don't want to go first, but if we stall around any longer, I'm going to change my mind."

"What about Ariel?" Molly said. "We can't just leave her locked in the cellar."

"Leave that to me," Kraft said. "No one is going to be painting over my picture. I'll let Ariel out when you're gone."

Helen glanced at the shelves. "Her paints have to be destroyed." And looking pointedly at Amber, she added, "I hope there aren't any more around the house."

They all looked at Ariel's heir then, who like them was a painting come to life, but unlike them had never been dead.

Amber stared at a point more or less in the middle of the room. "I'm going to burn down the house like I burned down the barn," she recited with perfect composure.

Helen dropped down on the ratty Chesterfield. "Are you sure you can do that?"

"Yes. I can. If you want, I'll paint you all out. I did it to my twin, so I know how it works—it won't have to dry if it's not the magic paint. And then I'll paint fire all over the studio. I'm really good at painting fire. But Mr. Olson will have to help me get my father and Mrs.
Korpela
out of the house first. I can get Mr. Bryce out by myself later while he's letting my mother out of the cellar."

Trembling, Helen reached out to the small hand. "Amber, your father is dead. His chair went down the staircase."

The all-seeing, lambent eyes of the shriveled figure on the sofa swallowed the child whole, while Amber's eyes welled and shimmered emerald but held fast. He had never really come back—her father – bound in that wheelchair. So he was no worse off than before. But what if he was where the rest of them had been? A dark place, Molly had said. She really didn't get it all, but she understood that they were going to go back because they thought they were ready now and because they were suffering. So it was probably all right for her dad, too.

But not her mother.

In a little while the house would be on fire, and she would be standing outside with her mother and Mr. Olson and Mr. Bryce and Mrs.
Korpela
. But she wasn't afraid of her mother anymore. Without the paint her mother would just be an old woman.

Amber tugged her hand free of Miss
Hoverstein's
frail fingers and went to the few canvases left against the wall. The one she wanted was in front: a picture of herself. She was surprised that up close it looked so different from the one she had destroyed in the cellar. It looked older, in fact. And even the paint looked different, thinner and flatter.

Beverly nodded. "You'll have to keep it with you. Guard it all the time."

"I know."

"Are you ready?"

Amber sat her portrait by the sofa and nodded. At the workbench
Paavo
had the lid off the can of paint, but Molly had another frame that she had found in the stack.

"Marjorie is suffering," she said. "If she could say so, she would want this. There's no point in taking her outside. Start with her, Amber."

T
here was a certain poetic balance in the acts of annihilation by the daughter of the woman who had created them. If the line between deity and mortal had been crossed, it was made inviolate again by what went on over the next quarter hour.

Amber painted quickly with the largest brush she could find. She painted facing away from them, afraid to look, afraid to falter, afraid even to listen. The silence at her back was solemn and profound. The alkyd was white—alas, no pink for
Ruta
—and that was good too, Amber thought, because Mrs.
Armitage
had said that about finding a "white universe," a place of light instead of darkness. She did Mrs.
Seppanen
second and Miss
Hoverstein
last, thinking about the
Taron
pygmies of Myanmar and wondering if, in whatever was to follow, Miss
Hoverstein
would meet them.

It must have been terrifying behind her. No matter what they hoped or how much they were suffering in their present conditions, it had to be terrifying. She wondered if they were watching each other, or if they closed their eyes. She wondered if it was even working, because there were no gasps or whimpers or clues. And when she was done and she turned around, it was just Mr. Olson staring at her with dull, flat eyes.

"Are you going to start the fire?" he asked in a voice that rattled like an old car engine shaken by winter.

"Yes," she answered.

"Good. Fire is cleansing. I'll go tend to your mother now."

"Don't you want your picture?"

She took his portrait off the workbench and brought it to him, and he rolled himself up off the Chesterfield almost jauntily, an elbow leading from his side, and steps that were almost nimble. Amber was surprised at his energy. For the first time she could imagine what she had heard whispered in the parlor, that this man had been the object of her mother's desire before she married.

As soon as he was gone she turned her attention to finding a smaller brush that would fit through the mouth of the open glass jar of red paint on the workbench. It was important not to think too much about what she had just done to all the old people or that her father was dead or about the horrors in the house, but she couldn't suppress a little rush of power that came with standing in her mother's studio with all her magic paints. It was scary and exciting. And it almost seemed like her painting was made better by the power too, because she had never done fire so well. Getting the curves just right with yellow mixed in, and the flames at different heights all around the walls. The way the fire might spread or the house might collapse were not things she considered. There were chemicals that would explode in the studio, she knew, like the thinner, like the stuff that was used to seal finished paintings, but by then she would be outside with Mr. Bryce.

When she got to the workbench, she hesitated. Her mother's magic paints were right there in the glass jars.

There were a dozen of them, all different colors, but the three largest jars must be the ones she mixed the others from, Amber knew. She knew this because they were red, blue and yellow, and back when she was alive the first time, she had seen her mother use primary colors many times to mix regular paint. So there they were. Red, blue, yellow. The source for everything that had come alive in the house.

(
Did she dare . . .?
)

She had, promised to burn down the house, and she would. But she already had more than half a jar of the red paint buried out by the ashes of the barn, and what if her mother was sorry—truly sorry—for what she had done? What if—not now, of course, but someday—she wanted to bring everyone back and let them be free and healthy again? It could be done if—

Red, blue, yellow
. . .

There wouldn't be any danger if she herself kept the paints under control, Amber thought. She had kept the red hidden, hadn't she? And she wouldn't be stupid about it. She wouldn't even tell her mother about them unless things really, really changed in the future.

There was a large portfolio bag her mother used to haul things when she painted out-of-doors, and impulsively Amber snatched it up. She would use it to protect her portrait, she told herself. And she did. She stuffed the frame into the widest pocket. But there were other pockets. Each padded to protect the contents. She had carried this bag for her mother decades ago.

(
Red, blue, yellow . . . and she already had lots of red
.)

It couldn't hurt to keep her choices open until she saw how things went. She would have to destroy the red anyway if things didn't change. What was the difference if she had three bottles to get rid of?

The pockets were too small, as it turned out. But she placed one jar on either side of the portrait frame. Blue and yellow. There was plenty of room.

She finished her task of painting the fire by the door, and by that time the flames she had painted first were almost dry. She could feel the heat as a sketch her mother had hung of a sunset began to smolder and turn brown. Lifting the canvas portfolio bag by its shoulder strap, she left the studio for the last time.

H
is soul was ruined already, so what did it matter? He could never be sorry, never forgive. Danielle's roots
ran
deep inside him, synergistically intertwined with his own, and so to kill one was to kill the other.

He was dead, you see. Still dead. Ever dead. His feet on the stairs echoed the dead steps of dead legions. He had heard them in the cosmos, scrabbling talons and mammoth four-toed pads, scraping up red dust and hurling it across collapsing galaxies. Energy sucked dry. Replaced by sheer will. The animus of nether regions croaking to him as Ariel drew him out of his grave:
March . . . march . . . march with us. Open the gate
. And he had. And he would again. Because it was all in the cellar now. The charnel cellar filled with the echoes of old violence and new blasphemies. Silhouettes slipping through, gathering there like desiccated cadavers awaiting the drench of blood to reconstitute them to grayness for their horrific hour. His kind of phantoms now.

Such a dark act of love he was going to perform.

He listened at the cellar door to make sure Ariel wasn't on the top step. But no, he could hear her sobbing somewhere down below. Foolish Ariel, still thrashing in self-pity. If she could stop, she might hear the
ululant
sighs coming from the damp walls or the slither and rasp of papery things unfolding like yellowed parchment. He turned the key, paused to listen again, jerked the door open.

She was sitting sideways on the bottom step in the dim illumination of the storage room's single bulb, and her great gluey eyes followed him as he clumped down one slow step at a time.

"You spoiled it," she said when he stood next to her. "You spoiled what could have been paradise, Kraft."

He put his hand on her gray head as she cried, and it was only a shudder or two before she blinked uncertainly at him. And then he said: "I'm sorry, Ariel."

She blanched, sat straighter. "You are?"

"Very sorry."

"You mean . . . because I'm down here?"

He let his hand slide off her hair. "Are you all right?" She inclined her head with just a twitch of disbelief. He moved beneath the light with his back to her, anticipating that she would follow.

"Kraft?" She rose with new animation and came up behind him. "What did you mean? You're sorry for what?"

When he turned they were as close as they had ever been face-to-face, and he tried to keep his eyes trained on hers while he reached up to the
searingly
hot bulb with his left thumb and forefinger.

"No, not just because you're down here," he said. With a twist they were in darkness. "I'm sorry for
everything
."

Her faint exhalation of joy was blasphemous to him. The staircase in the upper reaches of the house gave off its tattoo beneath Amber's descending feet. The fire was started. It was irreversible now.

Ariel said: "What are they doing up there?"

"Dying."

"Dying?"

"Amber has painted over their pictures."