Dust of Eden (23 page)

Ruta
slumped. "I never knew you felt this way."

"What an act you put on. There was a time when I could have scratched your eyes out. But, you know, it got better, even though the inner circle never changed. All those years—you age and the past just gets silly. I ran out of revenge fantasies a long time ago."

The moment sizzled like a hot coal, and the shadow of the spinning wheel seemed to fly on the wall, and
Ruta
sat with her long neck oddly inclined, like an aging swan attempting graceful deference. For a long while neither of them could speak. Rain pattered, diluting and cooling, until just the red shade on the banker's lamp seemed to have any heat left. Then, in a granite hard voice, Ariel changed the subject:

"I suppose they're all horrified about Danielle."

"A little."

"A little horrified? I don't suppose it occurred to anyone that the only thing I really did was give her more life than God did?"

"No one blamed you, Ariel. They may be nervous—I'm not going to lie about that—but no one blamed you."

"I'm certainly glad you're not going to lie about that. So, who is the most nervous down in my parlor?"

"I don't know."

"Are you nervous?"

"A little."

"Good. Because now that I have the last word, I really do want to know who is saying things behind my back. Be very careful,
Ruta
. I'm not above testing you."

"It's really not anything. They're just upset. No one is thinking clearly."

"Who?"

"No one—"

"Beverly?"

“No –“

"Helen?"

"Helen wouldn't—"

"
Paavo
, then."

"No, no, not
Paavo
. He told her . . . told everyone not to get upset."

"Told
her?
"

No one could say
Ruta
hadn't tried. No one could say she hadn't lied to Ariel's face trying to protect them. But when Ariel exclaimed "Marjorie!" with triumph and dismay,
Ruta
could no longer risk a denial.

"Please, Ariel, it was just words. Don't do anything to her."

"I'll do what I have to do. You don't want to lose what you have, do you,
Ruta
? I've always protected you and the others. Which is why I won't make you younger just yet,
Ruta
. Because then everyone would understand how I knew about Kraft and Danielle. You see how I care? When everything is safe—when everyone understands that we need to pull together to make this work—then I can reward you. I can paint, you as you really want to be."

S
he made the new painting first, and it was rending to Ariel. Marjorie—of all people to betray her. If anyone among them had lived by principle, it was Marjorie
Korpela
. That she had always underestimated Ariel didn't alter that. A bit old-fashioned, fueled by misconceptions, as hard-nosed as a man sometimes, Marjorie's good opinion was still worth cultivating and that was why Ariel had brought her back to begin with.

More than anyone else, practical, level-headed Marjorie should have understood what a wonderful thing it was that Ariel was doing. In fact, in the beginning Ariel considered her for her closest helper instead of Molly. She had even seen a poetic balance in this, having been Marjorie's employee. But some ghost of their former relationship had held her back from painting the patrician woman younger and more able. And nothing in the past year had stirred her to change that. There were people who lived rigid lives according to the strictures around them and never reached beyond that. Marjorie seemed to be that way. She never talked about her husband or asked for anything but just accepted a quiet, dignified life as quite enough for the foreseeable eternity. And now to find this sensible woman speaking ill of her behind her back was like discovering embezzlement deep within her securest accounts.

So the new painting gave birth to Marjorie Kristen
Korpela
the living relic. Worse even than Danielle Kramer. Her temples were translucent with blue veins threading to the surface. Her limbs were draped in mottled flesh, and her head—slightly askew where it came to rest on her chest—was framed by the bony mantle of a bowed and fusing spine. All that remained of her eyebrows were tufts at the bridge of her nose, and this thrust the orbital ridge around her eye sockets into prominence. Ulcerations crusted the few remaining lashes on her eyelids. Where flesh had not puddled like sediment it was drawn taut, and the cartilage of her nose was receding from yawning nostrils that pulled her mouth into a raw wound fissured at the edges.

Ariel even pulled down a tome of painter Ivan Albright's "magic realism" and borrowed a morgue look from the galleries there. All was blue and gray. All was pits and erosion. Only the eyes carried the fading gleam of life, like flat pennies losing their luster. Gravity and entropy were winning. Energy had lost.

And yet it was Marjorie
Korpela
—no question about that. The genius of Ariel
Leppa
the uncelebrated painter was that it could have been no one but Marjorie
Korpela
. And she did it with the fast-drying
alla
prima
technique—the mark of her mastery.

When the painting had dried and the ossifying thing actually lay bundled and wheezing against the wall, Ariel studied it. She felt neither compunction nor compassion, only a vague sense of satisfaction that she had created precisely what she had intended. This was not the living being downstairs asleep in a room of her house. That version of Marjorie awaited a separate act of extinction. This was a separate entity, something that would never have existed except by Ariel's will. Marjorie then. Marjorie now. Same person. But one was not an alteration of the other.

And yet she herself would never see the two of them alive at the same time, so how could she be sure?

She flipped through the dozen frames stacked next to the workbench to pull out the first painting of Marjorie and set it upon the easel. Downstairs was a viable personality she had reanimated from her past, something lucid and capable of creative thought, of love and loyalty and appreciation. Only, of her own free, Marjorie
Korpela
hadn't felt any of those things. As if she didn't owe them to Ariel but had dredged herself up from her grave and endowed herself with breath, spirit and consciousness all of her own accord.

Ariel glanced at the heap against the wall.
It
was watching her through its ruined eyes. What thoughts could it be thinking—born nearly dead?

I must see my other Marjorie
, she decided on impulse.
One last time. Must understand the distinction
.

And so she left the dawn-streaked studio and made her way down the staircase to the new wing and entered Marjorie's room, which smelled of lilacs and liniment, and stood over the form on the bed. Wrapped in a cotton blanket like that, the sleeping woman could indeed be the swathed thing lying against the wall two floors above.

The light from the corridor streaming through the door got lost in the fold of the hood that peaked over Marjorie's head, leaving a deep emptiness into which Ariel leaned closer and closer. Why wasn't she breathing? Not even a dainty snore. Petite
Marjie
, ever the guarded aristocrat. Or perhaps she was sleeping more deeply and further into that shroud hollow than Ariel could imagine. Beyond apnea. Beyond mortal dreams.

Abruptly there was a sharp inhalation. Ariel reared back just as an alabaster hand snaked out from the covers and threw off the hood.

"Ariel . . . ?" Marjorie squinted up from her bed against the light and came to one elbow, her pale blue nightgown falling from her corrugated throat. "What is it? What time is it?"

"It's
your
time,
Marjie
."

"What are you talking about?"

"I've been painting, and I've made another portrait. It's upstairs in the studio. I put it next to yours just to see the likenesses and the differences. Lots of differences. But you can tell who it is. You might say you're beside yourself,
Marjie
."

The woman on the bed shrank back as if trying to gain perspective. "You're losing it, Ariel."

"Wasn't I loyal enough when I worked for you?"

"I never
demanded
loyalty from you. I was just your supervisor, Ariel, not your god."

“Is that what you think,
Marjie
? That I want to be your God?”

“That's exactly what I think.”

"Oh, this is bad, very bad. I hope it's not too late to save the others by making an example of you."

"Yes, yes, love you or else. That's what all the worst religions do."

"That's a stretch and you know it."

". . . God on a rampage."

"How would you have done it?"

A rag of hope, an invitation to reason, but Marjorie
Korpela
couldn't think of an answer. "I wouldn't manufacture more suffering," she said.

"If giving you life is suffering, then I'm guilty of that. But I'll correct that as soon as I get back upstairs and paint you out of existence, my dear."

"There are two
Danielles
dead now, two
Paavos
, and now you want to include me. You can't possibly imagine what that means."

"Are you begging me not to include you?"

"I will if that's what you want. Don't do this, Ariel."

Ariel leaned back into the darkness. "I wish I hadn't come down, but I had to know for sure. Go back to sleep, Marjorie. It will be easier that way. For both of us. Let me remember you as someone whose opinion was worth cultivating."

The words evaporated, and suddenly Marjorie was kicking and thrusting against the entangling blankets. With her lame leg there was never any doubt who would reach the studio and the painting first, but Ariel retreated to the doorway in surprise at the raw physical desperation. Marjorie stumbled out of bed.

And so began a snails' race through the house—dueling sloths—absurd but for the stakes. Survival versus extinction. By the time Marjorie reached the staircase, Ariel was already on the first landing, her witch's fingers hissing along the wallpaper for guidance. In fear and dismay, Marjorie shouted after her. But try as she might, she could not frame a genuine, groveling, have-mercy plea. If she had, then she would already have ceased to be Marjorie
Korpela
.

A lightning bolt carving through the upper stories of the century-and-a-half-old farmhouse and striking Ariel
Leppa
dead—that was the only hope.
In the name of God Almighty, strike this lesser god dead!
Marjorie prayed. But you didn't petition the whirlwind to save a mote of merely human flesh. Marjorie
Korpela
was on her way out once more.

S
he tried to run. As soon as she realized she couldn't beat Ariel on the staircase, she reversed course and tried to get out of the house. Blindly, instinctively, bare feet slapping the wooden floors and padding across throw rugs with the two-note beat of her infirmity, she blundered to the front door. There she had to grasp the dead bolt pommel with two fingers from either hand to stop shaking. Stiffening her arms and rolling her shoulders to control the violent trembling, she turned the old white enameled doorknob. Then, rushing the front steps, she pitched and sprawled along the path, her blue nightgown stretching and tearing. An explosion of sparks erupted through her sinuses when her nose struck the dirt. But up she came without pause, numb to anything except flight.

The sparks somehow remained in her mind. Incoming now from the nether regions she had known before. Tardy emissaries of creation, lost from black space, from frozen time, like fireflies lingering heavily in the damp dawn. Gray all around her. The barn a great, looming mausoleum of agrarian death on a farm that was fallow. And so she spun and tottered past it into the cold mud of the fields that sucked at her feet.
 
Sucked like the cosmos sucked at her soul. Fifteen rows in she mired and twisted back and thought she saw a lighted window in the upper story of the house and a figure there—Ariel in her studio—contemplating the whirling dervish flight below.

With animal grunts, Marjorie lunged free of the ooze. A few furious steps and she found the dead furrow of the field, which was carpeted with wet leaves and debris. The simple pain in her body became reassuring. Bless the taste of blood seeping around her teeth from the fall off the steps, bless the cold stab of cavernous breaths, bless the downbeat sound of her good foot and the grace note of her trailing one. Bless the pain because it meant she was still of the Earth.

But now she began to notice the things in the trees. Great, arcing silhouettes were advancing through the branches parallel to her path. They were not precisely flying but bouncing and flapping along like ungainly lovers of carrion who only had to arrive after the killing was done by others. These were Amber's creations, she knew. She wished she had her glasses.

Was it better to be rent apart than to be exiled whole and aware by Ariel into the abyss again?