Although the disappearance of Edgar Woods from public life was met with some surprise, the shock faded quickly, giving way to occasional spells of unpleasant silence when somebody brought him up at a gathering. His house, the granite driveway of which once beckoned the liveliest of partygoers, was generally thought to be his hermitage of choice, though for all anybody knew he had gone to Australia. His lights were off; the blinds were drawn. A faint creaking could be heard from the inside by little boys who dared one another to go up by the wasted window trellis in the garden. The rotted vines had been eaten away by insects, and left to hang from their frames like corpses left for the crows.
But life went on without Edgar; another locus was found for his famous parties, and the partygoers migrated there. The smell of cheap cigarettes and expensive wine, of perfume worn thin by sweat and hor d’eurves ground underfoot moved elsewhere. If Edgar had been remembered, even by his closest friends, for something other than a geographical beacon to wine or women, then he would have been remembered at all in his exile. But he was not.
Day after day, his garden went to rot. A thin layer of grime settled on the hood of his sleek black car. Louisiana humidity generally dictates that a man dead is to be buried within a day, but whether he was dead or alive nobody knew. That famous humidity ate away at what was artificial, and infused power into what was natural. New vines, vines which he did not plant, began to creep back over his house. Surely, people began to say, he did go to Australia. No man, especially one who used to like such fine things, would be found in there. Not living, leastwise.
And so it was that people stopped watching his house, so that nobody saw the woman who stepped foot on his porch. It was the first Friday in September, and he had been gone for nearly a year.
The woman was tall, with pale skin and a Roman nose, and thin brown hair gathered at her neck. Her eyes were hard and blue, not cruel, but very direct. They stared with unflinching simplicity at the door of her brother. They knew that he was inside.
She knocked twice, her hard white knuckles rapping at the door with such force that the rotten wooden door seemed to buckle a little under them. The creaking of floorboards, so faint that even curious little neighborhood boys would have been hard-pressed to hear them, sounded in the parlor. Then there was silence, and Edgar’s sister knew that his eye was to the peephole.
All at once the door swung open, and the woman stepped forward, and the door was slammed violently back to closed, casting her back onto the porch with a bashed nose and bruised shoulder. But now she knew the door was unlocked. Fast as lightning, she laid her hand on the handle and threw the force of her body into the door, opening it again, wedging her foot in the crack and heaving with all her might to save her bones from being crushed. With one last shove the door swung open again, and the blackness behind swallowed her whole.
With a bony white hand she threw up the light switch, and when the electricity failed her, she yanked down the blinds beside the door. Dusty light streamed into the foyer. Edgar stood in front of her. He was cleanshaven and even dressed as normal, but heavier than she remembered, and his eyes were empty and beast-like when they met hers. Still, the family resemblance was strong. Both sets of eyes displayed a particular sort of piercing neutrality—something about their color, something about their placement in the face—which in ancient times would have been associated with prophecy, and in modern times with hereditary madness.
“Edgar,” she said. Her nose was freshly leaking blood, but she took no notice.
Her brother snorted like an animal.
“I’ll do you the dignity of not inquiring after your health,” she told him. He was silent a moment more, breathing heavily, before he spoke.
“I am going to gut you, Ella,” he said to her. “I am going to cut you up and eat you like the rats.”
“You think you can frighten me? I was raised in the same hole as you. I don’t get scared anymore, not by pathetic beasts who crawl into a hole to die. Not by you.”
He had nothing to say to that.
Ella Woods swept past her brother into the rest of the house, tearing down drapes and wrenching open shutters, twisting each set of blinds determinately off of their hinges so that they could not be closed again. What she had told her brother was as true as could be expected under the circumstances, and if there existed other entities, beast or man, capable of scaring her, she did not find them in that house. The light came in, exploring almost cautiously the house which had been kept dark so long. Insects fled from the light like shadows; shadows hid themselves like insects. A man or woman with nerves more sensitive than Ella’s might have been alarmed at what they saw. Edgar himself was such a man, and he flushed with rage and fear when he saw the ruin he had been hiding from: the bottles and plates and crawling insects, the cigarettes and smashed light bulbs and dead things which littered every surface. But she would not be stopped. Room after room, window after window, the house that had been made into a dungeon was dragged to the foot of the sun to be judged by it.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked of her, in a voice little more than a whimper. They had reached what had been the dining room.
She looked for a moment without compassion at the shutters in this last room before tearing them down and placing them squarely atop the other rubbish on the dining room table. “I am here to offer you a choice.”
“I made my choice.”
“Will you sit down?”
“I made my choice,” he repeated.
Ella brushed a spider off of the mahogany dining chair, seated herself at the head of the table, and said nothing to him. There was no response to her gesture, save the buzzing of those patient flies which had dutifully replaced his old circle of acquaintances.
She resumed as if she had not expected an answer at all. “Our mother is dead. You did not hear about it because you were locked away here and nobody cared enough to tell you. All the same, she was a pious and God-fearing woman, and she demanded on her death-bed that I deliver to you a message and offer you a choice.”
“I made my choice.”
Ella laughed. “You made your choice, did you? Do insects choose to bury themselves in the ground?”
“You stupid woman! Does a man not have the right to do what he pleases in his own house? I have always lived exactly as I want. You will not affect me with any story of our mother; she was a crank and a fool.”
“I won’t argue with you there. I wouldn’t personally have thought to knock at the door of a burrow and preach religion to a worm; but that is what she wanted, and I am here to enforce her wishes. I guess I have more sympathy for religious fools than evil ones.”
Edgar’s lips parted as if he were going to speak, but instead he slowly bared all of his teeth and laughed in a high, unnatural way. “She’s convinced you!” he shouted in mean delight, recovering a hint of that famous joviality which his friends had forgotten. “The old fool convinced you of her piety—piety which she didn’t even believe, in by the way—you know it was hypocrisy! Hypocrisy of dogs!—of rats!—and now you come here to feed it to me!” Still laughing, he settled into a chair opposite her. The two looked at one another for a long moment, and then Ella began to speak again.
“She wasn’t very complicated, our mother. She only knew one thing, and it didn’t save her from alcohol or opioids and it didn’t save her from death, but she read the entire bible and she learned one thing. She learned more than you or me, because she birthed us, but we forgot we were born. She knew the doctrine of creation. Do you scoff at it? I did too. No, please, don’t get up. If you get up I’ll kill you, and they won’t find your body in here until you’re too rotten to incriminate me. Only listen, and shut your mouth. Shut your mouth or I’ll kill you. I mean it. I had forgotten I was born because I didn’t remember it in the first place. I didn’t know, not with my guts anyway, that there was a time before, when the world went on before me. You knew that better than me, of course, with your college-course nihilism—we’re all familiar with your snide, your self-satisfied despair. But look, the doctrine of creation has got two parts, and they go like this: first, that one time there was a time when you were not, and second, that never ever, not in a thousand years, will that time come again. We are contingently, idiotically bounded by time, but only on one side. Do you understand what I’m saying? No? I’m sorry, you’re going to have to listen anyway. It’s like this. Some men think they have lived and will live forever, and other men think they are some kind of momentary aberration in the much more rational universe that has gone on and will go on without them. It’s up to the doctrine of creation to tell both sorts of men that they’re wrong. And it means something else as well, something very strange—strange because of men like you, in fact. We can do things for no reason, but we can’t be—can’t have been—created for no reason; we have got to be created because we are good. And you can’t un-create yourself, because you cannot take out what’s good in you. Isn’t that strange? Isn’t that a strange thing to think, with men like yourself abound? That always, there is good—”
“Ah!” Edgar shrieked with laughter and flung his upper body entirely onto the table, his long arms reaching near to the place where Ella sat. “You think there’s still good in me! You think that I have good deep down in my heart and I might change my mind! That’s what our mother told you!” And he laughed and laughed, baring his teeth again like a hyena, screaming with animal mirth.
Ella stood up in a flash and flung her seat out from behind her. It skittered and hit the wall behind her with a thud. “You have misunderstood me,” she said sternly, as his laughter subsided. “I do not think that at all. You have missed the point of the doctrine of creation.”
“But you said that—”
“No, no, you have to listen. Even dogs, even disgusting insects can listen. Listen carefully. This is what it means to be created. I’m telling you right now.” Now she began to speak with hurry, her voice trembling almost imperceptibly. Edgar smiled at the small sign of weakness. “That is the whole mistake that people make when they don’t know the doctrine of creation. They think that there’s got to be something good in them—”
“That’s what you—”
“No! Shut up! I’m trying to save your life—I think—or save you from hell, I don’t care which. That’s mom’s business. You have to listen. Everyone knows there’s something good in them. But because they don’t know what our mother knew, they think that it’s because of them, because of something they chose. And so they think that as long as they can see something good in themselves, that means they’re not too far gone. That little speck of goodness that hasn’t been extinguished yet means that fundamentally, deep down, they’re one of the good ones; that they’re still in control. They don’t know that it’s a mark that has nothing to do with them; it’s from their past, a past before you—they—even existed—”
“I’m not limited by the past,” said Edgar, his face falling naturally into long-practiced smugness. “I don’t think I have to be good.”
His sister, still standing, began to sway slightly like a tree. “But you do,” she told him. “Deep down—I don’t mean psychologically, I don’t mean that it could ever come out to the surface exactly—but deep down, down in the Truth of it, you think that you’re perfectly fine. Our mother always told us that we were such good children, you know, even when it wasn’t true at all. And I think that all this time, you’ve believed that. And I know you have, because I saw it—I saw that that’s exactly how it has to be. It’s just true. We all act for some good, you know…”
“Not me.”
“It’s not like that,” she responded, looking past him rather than at him. “I’m sure for you it feels just like that. But you’re missing something; you’re missing that you took that optimism that you detested from our mother, and you made it part of yourself, and now you pat yourself on the head and tell yourself you’re a good boy, just like she did. Only deep down, so deep that you don’t remember and you don’t care; but that’s all the priests mean when they say that pride is the root of all sins. They don’t mean that it looks that way, even for Satan, even for you. They mean it just is. It has to be. No, you don’t understand, and you never will—unless you choose to understand, I guess. That’s the choice. I think I can see you won’t make it; you will never make that choice, because it’s a different kind of choice than insects choosing to bury themselves in the dirt, it’s a kind of choice you have never made before, a sort that you don’t know and don’t like. But I’m offering it to you anyway. That’s mom’s business.
Look at me—listen to me, or I’ll kill you myself. This is the doctrine of creation. It is a terrible doctrine. It means that the world, that you, and I, the world and the spiders and the bottles and the dust—it’s all good. Fundamentally, with the ink we’re written in, we’re good. And that means that isn’t any limit to our evil. If we weren’t created than we would stop existing once we got wretched enough; we would hit a wall, we couldn’t go about like this, thinking we understand ourselves. But we are created, so the good is intact; no matter what we do, that goodness is the same, you know, the one that makes us understand ourselves and feel that we’re not too far gone, that even someone like you isn’t too far gone. But our mother know the truth and so do I; I know that you—that all of us—we are made from Dust and Good; that is our origin. The good is guaranteed, it is secure on that end, and that means that you can go as far, as deep into the dust as you like, until there is no getting out, and you will live forever in the mire; you will go on forever and ever without end, yes, unto ages of ages, because of that other ingredient, because of the good. It is not the dust but the goodness which will damn us…”
She trailed off. Edgar had grown pale as she spoke, and had crept backwards from the table. He had returned to an upright sitting position, with his head twisted slightly to one side as if he were trying to retreat from an unpleasant smell.
“You’re the same as me!” he told her, and began to laugh again, harder and harder, but without humor, his neck still twisted unnaturally. He began to heave as if he were about to throw up, but did not stop laughing. For the first time Ella began to be affected by the putrid smell that swelled through the whole house. Its epicenter was the kitchen, which was nearby. Still, she maintained eye contact with her brother. As a word seems less and less like a word the more it is spoken, Edgar seemed less like a man the longer he sat in a chair like one.
“We’re both created,” she agreed. “That’s what I’m saying. It’s the same—the same ingredients, always. But you—” her eyes darted to the ruined house around them. “I saw something, Ed. I saw the thing that could save us.”
He met her eyes again in a flash. “Do you think you can—what? Save me? I lived the high life, the best life. I lived until there was nothing left! I ate it! I ate an entire life, I ate the food and the liquor and I ate up the girls and the money and now I will eat the rats. I am happy. I am happier than you can ever be, than our mother ever was. It’s not myfault that you’re afraid of the dark.”
“I told you, I’m not afraid of anything. That’s the point. That’s the point of the doctrine of creation, is that there’s only one thing that is worth fearing, and that’s what’s true. But what’s true asks for a different kind of fear. It’s the kind of fear that worms can’t feel, just like this is the kind of choice worms can’t make. It’s the beginning of wisdom.”
Edgar suddenly heaved again, and spittle flew across the table. He produced a low groan, and said nothing besides.
His sister leaned forward, just slightly, and put her hands on the table in front of her. Something stern and bulletproof dropped from her face. She asked, once—it was something like pleading—“Will you leave here? Will you start again?”
The opportunity to finally deny his sister what she wanted—what their mother had wanted—brought a familiar comfort and helped Edgar recover from the unpleasant feeling she had introduced to him a moment ago. He straightened out his neck, met her eyes, and smiled. “I told you already,” he said to her. “I made my choice.” No, he decided, he was not afraid of her. There was fear in the room, that was all, and he had gotten mixed up and thought that it was his own.
Ella left without saying another word, exiting the house by the same path she had come in. When he was certain she had gone, Edgar set to work returning his home to darkness—except that he did not repair the dining room blinds, but left them where they were, atop the great table like the fatted calf at a banquet.
Esther Berry graduated from Thomas Aquinas College and now lives in Ohio with her husband. She has enjoyed writing fiction since she was a child, and is currently pursuing graduate work in philosophy. Her favorite authors include Charles Williams, Leo Tolstoy, and George MacDonald.