"Careful!" he shouted, more anger in his tone than he'd intended. He glanced down the dark, sloping staircase—it seemed to vanish into nothing down there—and shuddered.
"Sorry," Eve said in her smallest voice. But that weird, plastic smile still clung to her face. She trained the light on the faulty fixture.
Breathing heavily, Bert loosened the first screw, scrunching his eyes shut against a shower of dust. When he reached for the opposite screw, the one closest to the stairwell, he saw that it was a Phillips type. He fished around in his tool-apron, but found only a regular flat-head. The open toolbox was on the floor next to Eve's left wheel.
"Could you reach down and get that screwdriver?" he said. "The one with the blue rubber handle?"
The flashbeam shifted, crossed Bert's eyes in a blinding sweep, then extinguished. When his eyes adjusted, he saw Eve brandishing the tool like a weapon.
"Is this the one?" she asked sweetly.
Bert nodded, leaned forward to take it—
And with the same deadly swiftness she had shown on that night three weeks ago, Eve thrust the point of the screwdriver an inch into the meat of Bert's calf. Crying out, Bert reeled dangerously backward, his suddenly canted weight lifting the ladder's near legs right up off the floor. . . but at the last possible instant he shifted back, defying the will of gravity in a combination of thrusting hips and pinwheeling arms.
"Jesus Christ!" he bellowed, suddenly furious. He took a step down the ladder. "What. . . ?"
Eve rammed the footplate into the ladder-base again, really rammed it, and Bert froze in mid-motion. With a quick backward glance he saw that the leading shoe of the ladder hung halfway over the rim of the top step.
"Don't you move from there, blasphemer! Murderer! Don't you move a muscle!" She nudged the ladder again, and it swayed vertiginously. "You so much as breathe and you're going over the edge. Do you understand me, Bert Crowell?"
Bert looked down at a complete and deadly stranger. He nodded, dismissing any thought of jumping on top of her when the ladder shifted again. In that first violent flurry the spreader had flexed its elbow, rendering the ladder even more unstable. Now it seemed to wobble with each breath Bert took.
Still buried in his leg, the screwdriver throbbed with each quickening heartbeat.
Eve was grinning now. With her squinty eyes and her tent-peg chin jutting wickedly, she looked like a crazed, medieval witch.
"You thought I'd forgotten, didn't you. You thought I'd forgiven you your black killing sin!" She spat, bumping the ladder again with the force of the gesture. "Well, I didn't forget. You murdered our boy just the same as if you took down a gun and shot him—"
"But he was already dead—"
"Shut your mouth!" She flicked on the flashlight and aimed it into Bert's eyes, making him squint in the dusty dark. "You killed him and then you let them carve him up. My son, my boy!
"But he's come to me, Bertrand. We're together now. I can. . . feel him." Her eyes sparkled. "And he's calling for expiation."
Bert realized in that single horrible second that he was in mortal danger. Eve's mind had snapped like a green stick, and if he didn't get off this ladder right now he was a dead man.
"He guides my hand now, shows me the face of the future. . ."
His feet were badly placed for the leverage he would need to clear the ladder. The top landing sloped away from the door on a ten-degree incline, and right now it was a he could do just to keep from toppling over backward.
Hoping Eve wouldn't notice, Bert shifted one of his feet.
Eve's eyes flickered but she kept on talking. The flashlight was still trained on his face.
"He's inside me now, Bertrand. And he's shown me the way. The way to make things right again. Vengeance shall be—"
Now!
In a sudden desperate lunge, Bert thrust his weight forward, dislodging the screwdriver from his calf and tilting the ladder sharply. The flashbeam fell from his face, and for a breathless instant he thought he had made it. He was falling but falling forward, toward his wife and her grinning-witch face.
Then there was a sound like a snarl and the footplate struck the ladder base again. Bert swung back, and in that weightless limbo between standing and falling groped futilely for the cracked-plaster walls. He made a soft, surprised noise in his throat: uhmn! Then he was gone, into the void behind him. For what seemed like forever he hung there, a wingless bird on the musty air. Tools and nails flew from his apron and clattered down the steps ahead of him. He had time to think about what part of him would hit first. . .
He cleared the first ten steps without touching them. His elbows raked the eleventh and twelfth, and his neck broke on the shelf of the thirteenth.
Faint and flickering, the flashbeam played like pale starlight over Bert Crowell's motionless body. It found his face and lingered there.
Eve was parked at the top of the stairs, the grin still plastered to her face. Squinting down through the dust motes, she could see that he was dead—in life, the human head never took such a twisted angle to the body—but she needed to be sure.
She waited, watching his bloodied face, his airless chest. When she was satisfied, she backed out of the narrow entryway, swung the chair around to face the kitchen—and stood up.
She crossed in steady strides to the phone and picked up the receiver, one gnarled finger searching for ambulance on the list of numbers tacked to the message-board mounted the phone. She dialed the number with easy precision.
While it rang she glanced at the empty wheelchair. She had never really needed it—her knees were bad, true, and her left hip flared up something wicked in the damp weather. But a cane would have served her just as well, even on the really bad days.
She grinned. Bert had been such a stupid, guilt-ridden sap. Oh, she had known his mind, had sensed his thoughts of leaving her. But the wheelchair had fixed all of that.
Such a low, murdering sap. . .
An officious female voice said: "Ambulance dispatch."
Eve cranked up her own voice to a frenzied high. "Oh, my God, please send someone quickly! My husband fell. . . oh, Jesus. . . oh, Bert. . ."
"Please try and be calm, ma'am. I’ll need your address."
"Four-forty-four Copper Street," Eve said clearly. "It's a dead end. We're the last house on the left. . . please hurry!"
"Give us five minutes," the dispatcher said confidently. "Have someone meet the attendants at the door."
Eve thanked the woman and hung up. Then she got back into her wheelchair, rolled down the sunlit hallway, and unlocked the front door.
Chapter 8
The week following the removal of the bandages, though flawed by defeats, was a time of discovery for Karen Lockhart. Darkness, profound and familiar, followed the incident with the student and lingered interminably, bleeding both her father and Burkowitz of the hope they had nurtured. It was only Karen, her tenacity during this period humbling, who refused to despair. It was a stooped and shabby cliche, but she really had seen the light. And the prospect, however remote, that she might witness it again, that dimension and color might join texture and smell, and the world at long last materialize, teamed with an iron will to fuel her optimism.
She would see. The man with God's touch had promised it.
Dr. Smith visited daily during this period, sometimes two and three times a day, depending on her assessment of Karen's state of mind at the time. Of the dozens of physicians, interns, and residents Karen had met and been prodded by, Heather Smith was easily her favorite. Not only did she make Karen feel as if she were the doctor's only patient—which of course she was not—but she shared Karen's optimism, too. "Things happen if you believe in them," Heather said one morning, and this both pleased and surprised Karen. Surprised her because it seemed a rather whimsical thing for a doctor to say. And pleased her because it was a lot like something, her mother might have said had she still been alive.
"Probably just a minor setback," Burkowitz told her the
second time the pads were removed, two days following the incident with the student. He had taken her to an examining room and shone increasingly harsher light beams in her eyes, none of which breached the darkness. "We'll try again tomorrow."
Denied sight from birth, Karen had learned by other means to pan the dust of truth from the gravel of deception. . . and she'd known immediately that Burkowitz was lying.
She didn't blame him. He was only trying to let her down easily, by tolerable degrees.
But she never gave up.
And on Monday, the first day of May, her faith was rewarded.
"I see no reason to keep the pads on any longer," Burkowitz said as he removed them. He had abandoned all attempts to disguise the defeat in his voice.
As with previous unveilings, Karen’s heartbeat quickened.
"We'll be keeping your room semidark for the time being, but you should have the nurse replace the pads if you decide to go out into more brightly lit areas, the halls or—"
"You've given up, haven't you?" Karen said, her pulse rapping painfully at the backs of her eyes.
Burkowitz paused, his wheezy breath suspended. "No," he told her honestly, "not completely. This is all new stuff to me, Karen. And apart from what Dr. Hanussen has told me, I really don't know what to expect. There have been only twelve other recipients ahead of you, and only half of those have fully succeeded." He sighed. Karen could tell he was relieved to be getting this off his chest. "Let's just say. I'm not as optimistic as I was. I hate to admit it, but there's a good chance the grafts have failed. . ."
"Thank you," Karen said.
"For what?"
"For your honesty." She smiled sunnily, and for a moment Burkowitz feared the disappointment had damaged her mind. "But you're wrong."
"What?"
She nodded. "I can see you.”
Karen blinked.
And before her eyes, myriad black dots bubbled effervescently in the gray, numerous of them gathering in the space Jim Burkowitz occupied, forming a trunk, a head, blunted black limbs.
"Are you moving?" Karen asked him, her smile so disarming Burkowitz found himself wanting to touch her.
He moved his body three broad steps to the right, watching for Karen's eyes to follow. "Yes," he said. "Did you see it?"
She nodded. "Do it again."
This time he shifted all the way across the room, doubling back on a different tack. Karen's gaze followed him.
She laughed.
"What's it like?" Burkowitz asked, his voice like a child's waiting a turn at a telescope.
Karen stared at him thoughtfully, her gaze not quite focused. "It's hard to describe. . . I only know the one color. But I can see shapes, crude shapes. And when you moved I could tell."
She knew from a lifetime of purely tactile observation that the finer details were missing. The doctor's face was merely a fuzzy black oval, one-dimensional, without feature.
But she was seeing! Finally, miraculously, she was seeing!
She thrust back the blankets and hopped out of bed, her eyes consuming her fuzzy surroundings.
"The bed." She reached out and touched its unmade edge. "That's the bed." A bulky flat plain, gray against gray. "And the night table." A shadowy stump in a morning mist. "And you. . .”
Treading in cautious short shuffles, as if this vestige of vision had somehow rendered her lame, Karen approached Burkowitz and stopped in front of him, one step short of collision. He made no move to stop her as she reached up and placed a hand on his chest.
"You're right here."
Karen's face seemed to writhe in a confusion of emotions, elation and disbelief warring with hysteria and fear.
"Oh, God, there's my hand," she said wonderingly, blinking at the misshapen hook she saw in front of her. My own. . . hand. . ."
New eyes rolling back in their sockets, Karen collapsed against the doctor's chest, her last conscious perception the musky odor of his cologne.
Musk.
And earth. . . hay. Farm smells.
"Dad?" She was back in her bed.
"I'm here, pet. I'm here."
His hand on hers.
"You blacked out, Karen," said Burkowitz.
Karen opened her eyes, uttering a moan of dismay when all she could see was blackness. Then she felt the eye pads, back in place. She sighed.
"I thought it best to replace them, Karen." The gloom had cleared from Burkowitz's voice. "We've made some real progress today, and I'm afraid to overdo it. We'll remove them again tomorrow."
Karen frowned. She wanted to tip off the pads and see her father, even if he was little more than a bubbly gray ghost.
She wanted to see Burkowitz and the nurses and the horrified student who had first shown her light. She wanted to see everything, glut herself with the shifting gray cutouts her eyes had snipped from the darkness only minutes before.
(his eyes)
No! My eyes, damn it!
She forced the thought away, unwilling to start on it again. Not now. Not ever. She had tormented herself as much as she planned to over that part of it. The guy was dead. They were her eyes now. He had given them to her. They we're her eyes and she was about to embark on a whole new life through them. And even if she never saw more than she had today, if the world remained a fuzzy montage of shifting gray, phantoms, didn't that beat nothing by a long shot?
No contest.
But she knew in her heart there was more, much more ahead.
She fingered the lower edges of the eye pads. "Couldn't I steal just one more little peek?"
"Patience," Burkowitz said unshakably. "More tomorrow. For now, rest."
She wanted to press him but knew he was right. Even now pain spawned steadily in the globes of her eyes, stretching them like overinflated balloons.
"Does this mean I'll be getting out of here soon?"
Burkowitz smiled, tipping a wink at Karen's father. "How does the day after tomorrow strike you?"
"Fabulous!" Karen said brightly. She sat up, then lay back again. Her head still wanted to spin.
"But you'll have to go easy," Burkowitz warned her. "I'd be fixing you up with a pair of super-dark glasses, and a schedule to go with them. Overdoing it at this point could be dangerous, not only to your eyes but to your mind as well"
Karen recalled once again Heather Smith's mention of the recipient in Europe, the one who had suffered a psychotic breakdown which led eventually to the removal of his grafts.
God, how awful. . .
"I'll want to see you weekly for the first little while. Dr. Smith, too. She asked me to let you know." He chuckled.
"She's gone off bird-watching again. Your first appointment will be on the tenth."
Karen nodded. Suddenly, she felt irresistibly drowsy. She closed her eyes behind the loose-fitting dressings and listened as her father and the doctor stepped quietly out of the room.
Later, as she drifted into a dreamless slumber, her thoughts turned back to the donor, and the people he'd left behind.
She wondered how they were dealing with the loss.
Chapter 9
May 3
Blood.
That's what it looked like to Danny Dolan. From where he was sitting on the porch of his mother's farmhouse, the sun—westering now, perhaps a quarter hour from slipping out of sight behind Karen's wood-frame—seemed to be bleeding, leaking crimson into the distant blue hills.
He swatted a sluggish housefly and sighed. Behind him, through the screen, he could hear his mother yammering over the telephone, her favorite game show competing tinnily in the background. It seemed the woman lived on the phone, gossip her only occupation. . . save riding herd on Danny.
Blood.
He tilted back in his chair, propped a shit-caked boot on the porch railing. . . and remembered his father. Remembered how the bastard had throttled him one drunken night with a length of bicycle chain, splitting the back of his hand to the bone; remembered how he'd pawed at Danny's three sisters; remembered the n
ight the fucker had run off, leaving his family for dead.
That had been fourteen years ago, but Danny's hatred hadn't diminished, not by a hair's-breadth. If anything it had intensified. He'd been only fifteen then, big for his age, but still not big enough to deal out the shit-kicking the old man had so dearly deserved.
The girls had been smart: they'd run off young, gotten married, disappeared. Even now Danny rarely saw them, every two or three years maybe, around Christmas time.
He often fantasized about meeting his father now. He'd sit here on the porch—right where his daddy used to sit—and in his mind's eye he'd see the stooped-over sonofabitch walking in from the Line, all hang-dog sorry and wanting to come home. His face was as clear in Danny's mind as if he'd seen him just yesterday, although there wasn't a single picture of him left since the fire. That dark, furious face, with its arc-lamp eyebrows and ugly-hard mouth, was one image time had been powerless to erase. He'd sit here on the porch and he'd see his father scuffing in up the lane, dressed in the greasy auto mechanic's coveralls he always wore. And in his mind Danny would rise from his chair and walk out to meet him, arms outspread in warmth and forgiveness.
And when the cocksucker got close enough, Danny would ram his pigsticker straight through that fat fucking forehead.
And then twist. . .
The old man had been drunk the night of the fire. Danny had heard him through the furnace grates, bellowing at his wife to get him another beer. But there had been no more beer and the bastard had smacked her. Seething with impotent fury, Danny had bitten his lip hard enough to make it bleed. The battle had raged on for a while, as it always did, and before long Danny's mother had trudged up to bed and locked herself in. Unable to sleep, Danny had smelled smoke at almost the same instant he'd heard the old man's flat-bed truck creeping out of the yard. Within minutes the old wood-frame had been transformed into a blistering inferno. Danny had scorched the left side of his neck, shoulder, and both of his hands saving his kid sister Maggy. The insurance people had been unable to prove arson but Danny had known better. Filled with a crazy jumble of hatred and love, he had watched every night for his father's return. But the prick had never come back.
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