A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  “You really are a clever one,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting there to be anybody inside.”

  How differently this could have gone had she not been outside talking to the neighbor when he sneaked inside, or if she hadn’t sent the only other officer away to drive Levi to see the sketch artist.

  “When I saw you, that’s when it happened.”

  “When what happened?” she asks.

  “When this new life presented itself. In the smallest of moments, I saw how desire could become reality. Don’t you see? Most of us don’t reach for the stars. Most of us settle for lesser lives because we don’t think we can achieve the unachievable. I didn’t go there to find you, but once I saw you I knew I had to have you. The old me would have snuck back out of the house and regretted it with every passing day. In fact, the old me would never have broken in in the first place. The new me is one who acts. Who makes something out of nothing. A do-it-yourself kind of guy.”

  “Don’t you see? That’s not the new you, that’s the old Simon Bower.”

  He shakes his head. “I know it’s difficult for you to understand, but I’m doing what I want. Being who I want. If what you’re saying is true about cellular memory, then I owe Simon Bower my thanks. He saw what he wanted and took it.”

  “It got him killed.”

  “Being foolish is what got him killed.”

  “Which is what you’re doing. You didn’t plan this. You knew the cabin was here, but didn’t know for sure who owned it. You went to Vincent’s house to remove any evidence he owned a cabin, not knowing if he was the one who even owned it, or if anybody else used it. You thought there’d be a girl tied up here, but there isn’t. You had to buy a dog leash on the way because you didn’t have one. You saw the metal shoes and thought they were a great idea, but they weren’t your idea. You’re making decisions on the fly, and trust me when I tell you, that always works out badly. You’re going to make a mistake and probably already have. Where does your wife think you are right now? How are you going to explain your trips away from home to come out here? What if somebody else shows up?”

  “Is there?” he asks.

  “Is there what?”

  “Evidence of the cabin at Vincent Archer’s house?”

  “Plenty of it,” she says, which isn’t true. She had no idea this place existed. “Anyone could come here at any point. Bringing me out here was a really bad idea.”

  He says nothing.

  “You have a wife, you have children, you have a productive role in society. You’re not a monster, and these desires aren’t yours. The old you hasn’t gone, it just needs to wise up and know this isn’t the way you’re supposed to be. I can help you,” she says. “The doctors can help you.”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “I said no. The desires might have come from Simon Bower, but they’re mine now. Would you tell a starving man he couldn’t eat from the plate full of food you sat in front of him?”

  “No, but I wouldn’t give heroin to a heroin addict going through withdrawal.”

  “Nothing you say changes the fact his desires have become my desires. I like the way they make me feel. I like the things they’re making me do.”

  “Will you let me go when you’re done with whatever it is you’re doing?”

  He smiles at her, the kind of smile that makes her skin crawl. “I’m sorry to be so blunt, but eventually killing you is also part of the desire.”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Joshua rolls out from his hiding space under the bed. Earlier, when he saw Vega pulled out of the car on a leash, hiding was the only thing he knew how to do. He looks around the room now for a weapon, but what is there? There’s an alarm clock, some coat hangers, some sheets, a chair. When they were in the utility room, he could hear them. This is the man who dreamed about Ruby and knocked on the wall by the kennel. It stands to reason that it must also be the man who got the other set of eyes. The same man who saved him yesterday? He doesn’t know. Now that they’re out in the lounge, they’re out of earshot.

  Olillia will be at the hospital in half an hour. She’ll explain what has happened, and the police will get involved. At least now he knows why they weren’t able to get hold of Detective Vega. Hopefully Olillia will have given up trying, and will call the police. Hopefully she’s called them already, and they’re on their way out here to save the day. If so, they won’t be in a hurry. They won’t be speeding through traffic with their lights flashing. If she’s called them, then they’re forty-five minutes away at the earliest.

  Or perhaps this maniac arrived while Olillia and Ruby were still on the road between the cabin and the motorway. Perhaps he waved them down. Maybe he stabbed them, or beat them, or tied them up before they could call anybody.

  The thought of something having happened to Olillia makes his blood run cold. It makes his body shake. His stomach rolls and there’s a weird taste in the back of his throat and for a few moments it’s like it was when he first tried to walk after the bandages were taken off and he couldn’t find his balance. He sucks in a few deep breaths. He closes his eyes, and he pictures Olillia being okay, and Ruby being okay too, and if he’s to believe anything different, he won’t be able to do what has to be done. He can’t wait for help to arrive, because he doesn’t know if it will.

  He sneaks into the hallway. The wind is pushing at the cabin, trying to pick it up and carry it away. He gets closer to the lounge. He can hear them talking again. He crouches down by the door but doesn’t look around. If he’s seen, it could go badly for both him and Detective Vega.

  “I know you saved Joshua Logan,” Vega says.

  The man doesn’t answer her.

  “Yesterday, on the train tracks,” Vega says. “It proves you’re a good person. It proves you can still be the man you used to be.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong,” Vega says. “You need help.”

  “No, I mean you’re wrong about . . . what did you say his name was? Logan?”

  “Joshua Logan,” she says.

  “I don’t know any Joshua Logan,” the man says, “and I don’t know anything about any train tracks.”

  Joshua can no longer resist looking. Staying low, he peeks around the corner. The man is standing by the window with his back to the door, half turned towards the view and half towards Vega, who is sitting on the floor near the couch facing Joshua’s direction. He can see raindrops hitting the windows. He can see trees bending in the wind. The sky is getting dark.

  “You saved his life,” she says. “You were following Vincent Archer, and you stopped him from killing Joshua.”

  “Detective, honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about, and this is quickly becoming very unamusing.”

  Detective Vega has eyes only for her abductor, but then she looks Joshua’s way. They make eye contact for only a fraction of a second before she looks back at her captor. Her expression doesn’t change. Joshua holds his breath and holds his ground.

  “You really don’t know what I’m talking about,” she says.

  “I really don’t.”

  “Joshua is the kind of boy who should never try anything by himself and should always find a way to call the police.”

  “Now you’re making even less sense.”

  “The police would have helped him. He had to find a way to call them, but given he didn’t have his cell phone, he could have flagged down a car on the motorway, and of course he would have warned them that the man had a gun.”

  “Are you mad?” he asks. “Nothing you say makes any sense.”

  “Your eyes came from the man that killed Joshua’s father.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your eyes,” she says. “They were donated. They—”

  “I do apologize, but I’m going to have to stop you there,” he says, holding up his hand. “I’m afraid we’re on completely different pages. I wasn’t given any eyes. I don’t know who Joshua Logan i
s.”

  “I thought . . . didn’t you have an operation? You said as much.”

  “Yes, I did say as much,” he says.

  “I don’t understand,” she says.

  “There was never anything wrong with my eyes,” he says. “It was my heart. The doctors, they gave me a new heart.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  Plastic ties keep Dr. Toni’s wrists tethered to the passenger door in a way that keeps her hunched forward slightly, and to the side. She has no movement. All she can do is sit in the passenger seat with her arm crossed over her body and stare out the window as they make conversation. Trying to look at Dustin strains her neck, and she wants to look at him. She wants to try to see what she’s obviously missed since that first time he came in with his mom and dad to see her. They are driving west, having now gone past the edge of the city and into the land of the farmer. Even if she could unlock and open the door, she’d only end up being dragged along the road.

  “At first, the nightmares kept me awake,” Dustin says, and she tries to see him as the shy thirteen-year-old boy who once drew a portrait of her from memory. He told her back then he wanted to be an artist, and there was no denying he was good at it, just as there was also no denying those talents would be taken away once his sight disappeared. She tries to see him as the boy whose school uniform looked too big for him, and whose hair was always a mess. “That week in the hospital after the surgery was difficult. My eyes kept itching, and the only relief from the itch was when I slept, but when I slept there were the dreams. People I didn’t know dying in the most horrible ways. It wasn’t until I was at home a week later that I was able to figure it out—they weren’t dreams, but symptoms. People call it cellular memory. Do you know of it?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Yeah? What was I going to say? Excuse me, Dr. Toni, but I’ve been having some bad dreams.”

  “That’s exactly what you should have said.”

  “And what would you have done?”

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  “You should have warned me, doctor.”

  “What?”

  “You should have warned me what was going to happen.”

  “I didn’t know back then.”

  “But you know now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because your other patients have the same dreams.”

  She doesn’t answer him.

  He reaches over and strokes her hair and she flinches away.

  “Some say the whole idea of cellular memory is a crock,” he says. “Others support it, but there was nothing describing what I was experiencing. The stuff I was reading about was subtle, it was people who hated bananas suddenly liking bananas. But nothing about dreams, or knowing faces and locations, and I think it’s because it was the eyes, right? They are a window to the soul, they are a lens that views the world. It makes sense that if any organ is going to experience cellular memory, it would be the eyes. I had to know—where did my new eyes come from? I asked you, you remember that?”

  She remembers. He asked her before the surgery.

  “You wouldn’t say anything.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Because all that information is confidential,” he says.

  “Exactly.”

  “Or is it because those eyes came from a killer?”

  She doesn’t answer him.

  “They came from Simon Bower,” he says. “He died the same day I got the eyes. The dreams . . . without them, I’d never have made the connection. I’d probably have thought they’d come from a car accident victim. Since getting them, Doctor, all I’ve seen is the blood and the pain of his life. There is a girl he tied up and kept as a dog. Can you believe that? What kind of person comes up with that? Then there’s a woman he cut into pieces with a power saw, and there’s a girl, much younger, and I think it was a long time ago that he tied her up, but he didn’t kill her. She escaped. There are limits to what I can remember, but I have a theory as to why. Do you want me to tell you?”

  It’s too much to take on board. Girls being kept as dogs? People being cut into pieces? “Yes, Dustin, of course. I want to be able to help you.”

  He laughs. “I’m sure you do,” he says. “All the memories have one thing in common. Violence and domination. I think the emotion of those memories is what causes them to stick. See, people think memories are stored in the brain, and they’re right, but memories of such dark significance, they’re the ones that are stored in the cells. What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve put some real thought into it,” she says, but what she really thinks is that his theory doesn’t cover why normal people take on the normal hobbies of those their organs came from. Still, it explains why Joshua remembers his dad dying and was able to recognize Ben and Simon Bower.

  “Imagine, if you will, Doctor, having those memories as if they were your own. Who killed that woman? Simon Bower killed her, but it feels like I did. Can you imagine what that’s like?”

  “No,” she says, “but what you’re doing now, this isn’t Simon Bower, this is you.”

  “Simon—he wanted a different dog. He was tiring of the first one. He was going to kill her and replace her, only it didn’t go to plan. The replacement fought back. When I close my eyes I can see it all. I see it the way you picture things when you read a book. She fought too hard, and he killed her. I don’t just see what he saw, Doctor, but I see his intentions too. Do you know what else I saw?”

  Before she can answer, he carries on.

  “I saw the policeman kill him in an act of revenge. And that thing about intent . . . I know the two detectives planned on killing the person responsible for cutting that new dog into pieces. How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many others are there with these same dreams? How many organs got transplanted from Simon Bower?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, but she does know.

  “For me to have the memories of two different people . . . Well . . . tell me, Doctor, when did you figure out the mistake?”

  She doesn’t answer him. The mistake is something she’s recently begun to suspect.

  “Are you going to deny my eyes came from two different people?”

  “It’s called heterochromia,” she says. “At least, that’s what I put it down to. Or wanted to.”

  She tells him she noticed it during an exam last week. It was so fractional she almost missed it. The fact is, people can have different-colored eyes—heterochromia. People can have one green, one brown, they can have slightly different shades. She assumed the difference in shade was a condition Simon Bower had. Then she saw the same thing with Joshua. She suspected it, she just didn’t see how it was possible. Mistakes like that don’t happen.

  Only, mistakes happen all the time.

  “And you did nothing,” Dustin says, “because you knew it would open up a lawsuit if you did. You knew people would look into where the eyes came from, and it might lead to you being found out.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “So rather than be a good doctor, you decided to cover it up.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “I bumped into Joshua outside the hospital. It was the day my bandages came off. He was with his mom. I was walking with a cane because my balance was off after getting my sight back, and he knocked me over in his wheelchair. When I got up, I saw this was the kid from my dreams. I didn’t know right away that’s who he was, but I knew I’d seen him, I just couldn’t figure out from where. That came later. He wasn’t in the dreams with the blood, though. He was in the background, not really doing anything, like I was looking at a portrait of him. Then I kept seeing his face all over the place—in magazines, on the Internet. How?” he asks. “How did this happen?”

  “There was a mix-up.”

  “Of course there was a mix-up,” he says. “But I want you to tell me how there was one.”

  “I don’t know,” she says.


  “That’s not a great answer,” he says.

  “Somewhere between them being removed from the bodies and delivered to the operating rooms they were switched up somehow.”

  “That’s a marginally better answer,” he says, “but still not a great one.”

  “I don’t know, not for sure.” She changes subjects. “You saved Joshua yesterday.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the dreams, Doctor. Because of the way they make me feel.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He keeps staring ahead as he talks. The rain is getting heavier, and he has to speed up the wipers. “I couldn’t let him die out there. He’d have stayed at the crime scene for hours, his body decomposing while you all tried to figure out what happened, and that would be no good to me.”

  “No good to you?”

  “You’ve got another surgery to perform, Doctor. I want that boy’s eyes, and you’re going to get them for me.”

  “Wait . . . what?”

  “You heard me, Doctor.”

  “You want me to operate on you?”

  “I want that other eye, Doctor.”

  “Impossible,” she says.

  “Nothing is impossible if you have the right motivation. You do what I ask, and you get to live.”

  “It’s not possible.”

  “It is possible. You refuse, and I kill you and everybody you love.”

  “There is nobody I love,” she says, and it’s true. She never got over Ben leaving her. She never got over Jesse dying. She doesn’t have any family left.

  “Then I’ll choose an innocent bystander, perhaps one of your former patients.”

  “I’m not going to help you,” she says. “If you’re going to kill me, you may as well get it over with.”

  “Okay,” he says, and the speed at which he answers surprises her.

  He continues to drive. They say nothing for a minute.

  “You don’t really have to kill me,” she says, breaking the silence. “You could let me go.”

  “I have no reason to let you go,” he says. “If you’re not going to perform the surgery, then I have no reason to let you live. No reason to let Joshua live either.”