Eden's Eyes

by Sean Costello

  But like it or not, mightn't the same thing be happening to Karen? The dreams were driving her batty—they'd drive anyone batty—and it had long since started to show on her. She was pale, whipped looking, skittish as a colt. . . and now this new bloody horror.

  Suddenly intent, Cass got up and strode to the phone in the kitchen. She picked up Karen's green-leather personal directory. . . and then paused, smiling fondly, remembering the night a week ago when Karen had excitedly converted all of the phone numbers on her braille list into digits, then carefully transferred them into this book. . .

  And at that point, such a loathsome, traitorous feeling overswept her that she almost dropped the book, putting it down again. Christ, what had she been thinking? She'd been an inch away from calling up that psychiatrist, Dr. Smith, and spilling the whole thing. She loved Karen, but this was not for Cass to decide—not yet at least. If it got much worse then she'd have to. For now, though, better to try and discuss it with Karen, tomorrow maybe, in the good light of a new day.

  The phone rang then, and Cass snatched it up quickly, before its harsh jangle could waken Karen. As she brought the receiver to her ear, she recalled Karen mentioning the double-click of someone listening in (she, for one, had no doubt who it was), but on this occasion heard nothing.

  "Hello?" Cass said quietly.

  "Is this Karen Lockhart?" a harsh female voice inquired.

  "N—" Cass started to say.

  "He walks, bitch," the voice rasped, and Cass inhaled as if stung. "He walks."

  "Who the Christ is this?" Cass bellowed. "Who—?"

  But the buzz of the dial tone silenced her.

  Chapter 27

  Detective-Sergeant Jim Hall got an unofficial autopsy report later that same morning. After completing his preliminary investigations at the scene and relegating certain tedious duties to his junior partner, he camped on the morgue's doorstep until the harried, chain-smoking pathologist confirmed what Jim had already suspected.

  "I don't like doing this sort of thing until all of the information is in," the pathologist complained as he unzipped the body bag. "I don't even have the child's medical records yet."

  Jim tried to speak without breathing too deeply; he hated morgues, the stink of death veiled in antiseptic.

  "Strictly off the record, Dr. Preston," he coaxed gently. "But before I talk to the parents I need some idea of what I'm dealing with here. Anything you can tell me at a glance? The weapon, for instance?"

  Begrudgingly, Preston snapped on a pair of mud-brown surgical gloves. He didn't want to do this—it defied strict protocol—but there was something in the quiet, squarely built detective's manner which precluded a negative response. He was grinning, but it was like being grinned at by a rattler.

  Reaching up, Preston flicked on a dish-shaped lamp, illuminating in harsh relief regions of human terrain that had never been meant to see light. His breath was a papery wheeze behind his mask as he probed the rent-open corpse.

  "No weapon that I can see evidence of," he said before a minute had passed. "At least not grossly. The ragged wound edges suggest tearing as opposed to cutting. And here, on either side of the wound. Finger bruises. Made by rather smallish hands, judging by the spans." He looked up at Jim, whose eyes deliberately skirted the stainless steel table. "Unless the microscopic investigation proves differently, and I don't believe that it will, it's a fair bet that your man did this by hand, Sergeant."

  And in that moment, unwillingly, Jim Hall tried to imagine the act, tearing a child in half with his own bare hands. Crawling inside the psychopath's head had always been distressingly easy for Jim. It was an ability—or curse—he'd employed on a number of occasions in New York City to net serial killers, the type who followed bizarre, ritualistic patterns not readily apparent even to the trained observer.

  But try as he might, even with his gaze fixed unwaveringly on the horrific result, he was incapable of picturing the act.

  He breathed a sigh of relief.

  "Anything else?"

  The pathologist took hold of the child's left arm, rotating it stiffly at the elbow to reveal the soft inner flesh, fish-belly white and wickedly scarred.

  "She was on dialysis. That lumpy mass under the skin is a Dacron shunt. The scarring is the result of repeated operations to replace or de-clot it." He released the arm, and with his fingers widened the margins of the nearly circumferential abdominal wound. "Both of her kidneys have been surgically removed, the right one recently, judging by the freshness of the scar."

  Preston skinned off his gloves and lit a smoke, an unfiltered Players. It trembled between his lips.

  "Can we get out of here?" Jim said in a whisper. "I need some air."

  "Yeah," Preston replied. "Me, too."

  He covered the corpse with a transparent draw sheet and snapped off the overhead light. Jim followed him to a book- and file-cluttered office across the hall, where the doctor poured out coffee for them both. Jim enfolded his cup with bloodless fingers.

  "I've seen victims of vicious slayings before," he began tentatively. "But. . . I find it hard to imagine the strength it would take to rip a human body in two, even a child's."

  "I know what you mean," Preston said, settling uneasily into his seat behind the desk. "Man's very nature dictates a certain belief in personal invulnerability, even in the face of death." He took out a fresh cigarette but didn't light it, aiming it instead at Jim. "A simple for instance—when you accidentally cut your finger, isn't part of your reaction a face-slap kind of surprise? How can I be opened up? This is not possible. The internal me cannot be violated."

  Jim reflected on this a moment, then nodded his assent.

  "Well, the truth of it is, we're damned easy to open. We both know it, we've both seen it. We just don't want to believe it. A strong man, properly hyped, could easily produce what we just witnessed in there. Using these." He held up his own small hands, still mottled with talcum from the gloves.

  Jim finished his coffee in silence, then stood to leave.

  "When can I expect a complete report?"

  "Call me around four," Preston said. "If there's more to tell you, I'll have it by then."

  Following a thorough going-over by the on-call neurologist, Mary Bleeker was admitted to the psych ward at the Ottawa General Hospital. Jim spoke first with the attending psychiatrist, an earnest, chestnut-skinned East Indian with a thick accent, who filled him in on the woman's condition.

  "She is suffering a mild concussion from the blow she was receiving in the forehead, but this is not elucidating her present state of stupor."

  He went on to explain in that same lilting verse that Mary Bleeker was catatonic, her mind temporarily—or quite possibly permanently—jammed into neutral. The condition was psychological, but in the acute phase it rendered the psyche as impenetrable as a Brink's van. It was as if all the major circuit boards of a complex computer had been suddenly and critically dislodged, leaving only that single green eye staring blankly out. Jim had seen it before and knew how pointless questioning her would be.

  Still, he had to try.

  He found her propped against a mound of pillows in an ill-lit private room, breathing raspily, her gray eyes afloat in their sockets. She blinked only infrequently, and each time she did a spasm shattered her otherwise vapid face. In the corner by the curtained window, overlit by a pale reading lamp, the child's father sat limply, looking almost a battleworn as his estranged wife. He gazed with lidded eyes at Mary, seeming not to notice Jim as the detective stepped into the room. He started violently when Jim cleared his throat.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Bleeker," Jim said somberly. He introduced himself and sat in the chair opposite. "I know this is a very bad time, but there are questions I need to ask you. Whoever did this to your daughter is still out there."

  Bob Bleeker's eyes reddened, but he nodded grimly. Straightening, he stole one last glance at Mary before shifting his attention to Jim. Pale and prematurely balding, he had the nimble fingers
and neatly coiffed look of a beautician. Out of habit, Jim guessed his occupation: a barber.

  "What can I tell you?" Bleeker asked shakily.

  "Let's start at the beginning," Jim said sympathetically. "Tell me what happened from the moment you arrived at the house."

  A half hour later Jim Hall was hurrying out of the room to find a telephone, his guts curling into new knots of horror. At virtually the same instant he had finished his interrogation of the father, Mary Bleeker had shot bolt upright in bed and begun screeching her daughter's name at the top of her lungs. Within seconds the room was transformed into a sinking island of chaos, nurses and orderlies struggling to subdue the grief-maddened woman, while a weeping and guilt-stricken Bob Bleeker did his best to defend her. She was screaming still.

  But it wasn't the woman's violent reanimation which had so deeply appalled the detective. It had been something the father had said.

  He told Jim about going to the house at seven-thirty that morning to pick up his daughter. At the custody hearings, he explained disjointedly, it had been mutually decided that Sunday would be the best day for Bob to take Shirley out. It was his regular day off from his barbering job, and Shirley didn't need dialysis again until the following day. He had driven over with his latest girlfriend, Sara, who had waited in the car. When there was no answer at the front, he had gone around back to find the door kicked open.

  "Mary was. . . just sitting there against the doorjamb, half in and half out of Shirley's room. There was blood on her forehead, and a big goose egg. I could see she was breathing okay, but when I called her name she didn't ever budge. At first I thought the house had been robbed, you know, and whoever it was had popped her one. But then I went into the bedroom. . ."

  Jim had nursed him gently through the rest of it, switching as quickly as feasible to topics less painful: the details of the separation and divorce, both of which had been accomplished peaceably and with minimal resentment; what, if anything, he knew of his ex-wife's current social life; what her relationship with the daughter had been; his own thoughts on who might have murdered the child, although predictably this yielded nothing.

  As a matter of routine, Jim would have to verify Bleeker's story. The man's alibi seemed iron-clad—he had been away from his girlfriend less than five minutes, and besides the coroner's estimate placed the time of death a full four hours prior to Bleeker's urgent call. But even without the alibi Jim was confident of the man's innocence. If there was any single emotion he could read without fault it was the shocky, stunned, desperate agony of sudden loss. There was just no faking it. Even the psychos, with all their ranting and raving, could not get it right. It was in the eyes. . . and this man's eyes had been swelling with it.

  Jim had been about to leave the Bleekers to their separate miseries when something the pathologist had said popped into his mind.

  "Your daughter was on dialysis?"

  Bleeker glanced again at his wife, the pain mooring more deeply inside of him. "Yes. Has been since she was three. Poor kid. . . God, she had courage. Did you see her arm? That poor little arm with the shunt underneath?"

  Jim nodded, the memory of it making him shiver.

  "The shunt bothered her most, more than all the hours tied to that machine. More even than the dietary restrictions she lived with day in and day out." Bleeker's face pinched grotesquely, as if in reaction to a bad smell. "You could feel her pulse in the skin over that shunt—only it wasn't a pulse; it was more of a. . . buzz. Touching it was like getting a small electrical shock. Mary kept telling me how anxious Shirley was to get the damned thing out after the transplant—"

  "Transplant?" Jim had cut in with unintentional rudeness. "What transplant?"

  Bleeker looked surprised, as if he'd expected the police to have this information already. "Shirley had a donor kidney implanted two months ago. . . and she was doing so well, too." He sobbed miserably, then began to weep into his hands. "Dear Jesus, who could have done such a thing?"

  That had been when Mary Bleeker found her voice.

  Now, at the desk down the hall, Jim grabbed the telephone receiver from a nurse's hand. "Sorry," he, said, already dialing.

  It rang twice.

  A female voice said: "Ottawa Civic Hospital."

  "Give one Dr. Preston," Jim demanded brusquely. "Tell him it's urgent."

  A moment later the pathologist came on the line. "Who is this?"

  "Jim Hall. Listen—"

  "I know," Preston interrupted. "I just got her files." "Where's that kidney, Doctor?" "I don't know," Preston said hoarsely. "But it's not in her body."

  Chapter 28

  Karen opened her eyes.

  She was in bed. Her head ached miserably; when she tried to lift it up off the pillow, pain lanced through it like a spear tip. But she had slept, and there had been no dreams.

  It took her a foggy moment to realize that Cass was there with her, seated on the edge of the bed. A dinner tray rested on the shelf of her knees: soup and a grilled-cheese sandwich. The sight of food made Karen's tummy rumble.

  "Hi, sleepy-head," Cass said cheerily. "Want some grub?"

  Karen wiggled up against the headboard. What time is it?" The west-facing window was dusky with twilight.

  "Half-past seven. You've been down nearly twelve hours."

  Karen yawned hugely. "Only feels like a few minutes."

  She accepted the tray and balanced it on her lap. The soup smelled good.

  "Any dreams?"

  Karen, shook her head, then spooned up some of the soup. In these first foggy moments of wakefulness, the whole thing seemed oddly separate, as if in sleep her mind had performed surgery on itself, excising the dream and the damning newscast like a segment of gangrenous bowel. It was still there, the memory of it, but capped and jarred in a kind of mental formalin, to be picked up later and dispassionately observed, a withering specimen of madness. In its place Cass's sensible words had been grafted, much as Karen's new eyes had been sewn into her sockets. It was behind her now, remote, as if the intervening hours had been weeks, or even months.

  But the fear remained, raw and faceless, and it drenched Karen now like a dash of cold water. The safety of her home, her own bedroom, seemed suddenly false, and she could feel her stomach clamping uncomfortably around her first nibbles of food. She reached out and touched Cass's hand. The dark was coming down fast now.

  "I know it sounds silly," Karen said shyly. "But would you mind. . . staying with me tonight? Sleeping with me?

  Cass clucked like a mother hen. "Do you hog the covers?"

  Karen grinned back. "I don't think so."

  "Then you're on. "

  In some sly, unbalancing way, fantasy and reality had merged. Sight itself obscured the demarcations. To those born blind, vision was the ultimate dream, as unfathomable and elusive as the face of God. Her dreams seemed real, as if sleep had become not a nightly rejuvenation but a portal onto a new realm of being, one as solid and tangible as the chair which now supported her. And yet, as she dialed her dad's number and the line commenced its repetitive burring, the room around her seemed suddenly unreal, its edges gone murky, its substance as fickle as woodsmoke. The accustomed references of her world had muddied. She felt like a soldier in a hostile jungle, where a step in any direction might be her last.

  Karen tightened her grip on the handset and closed her eyes. Through the floor beneath her she could hear Cass in the shower. Music reached her ears in muted fragments—Skeeter Davis, "I Can't Stay Mad at You." She had been alone in her room only a matter of minutes, but it had been long enough to rouse up the fear again. A moment earlier she had glanced at her bed and seen the moonlit face of that child. . .

  Come on, Dad. Pick up the phone.

  And just when it seemed she must flee her room, her father's gentle voice said “H'lo?"

  "Hi, Dad," Karen answered, her trepidation drawing back a little. His voice was an immediate comfort. "Cass told me you stopped by today."

  "Sure did. Ha
dn't seen you in a bit, and I guess I was startin' to miss you."

  There was a pause, and in its dark waters Karen's mind cried out to him. Daddy, please help me. I'm deeply afraid. There are ghosts and they're angry and I feel them closing in. They inhabit my dreams and I'm losing my bearings—

  But she said, "I miss you, too."

  And she knew in that breath that she couldn't involve him, for all that her heart implored her to. He was her father, a simple man whose love would make him betray her. He would listen to her fears with grim attentiveness and stroke her stormy brow—and the instant he was away from her he would be on the phone to the doctors. He would see it as his duty. And ascendant above all other terrors, immune to the illuminations of logic and more paralyzing than the most ghastly image her psyche could conjure, was her abject dread of returning to blindness. Now, in the chancy light of deepening nightfall, the reassurances that Cass and Heather Smith had so confidently delivered seemed much less real than the savagery of last night's dream.

  "Cass said you were pooped. Is everything okay?"

  "Fine," Karen told him, the lie tasting like oil in her mouth. "I've been running on all eight cylinders for so long that I guess I finally ran out of juice. Poor Cass. I must be driving her crazy."

  Another pause. In its grasp, Karen felt the same emotional nakedness she had experienced in Dr. Smith's office. Please, Dad. Let it go. Don't make me lie anymore.