Karen's fingers, the lacquered nails prominent, gouged at the skin of her eyelids. Blood trickled, then coursed down her cheeks. There was no pain, just hot knives sinking into rancid butter, seeking the source of the rot.
As the last plank clattered to the floor, her fingers dug brutally deeper. . .
And his shadow fell full across her.
A mechanical roar filled the world.
For an instant, in the heat of the barn, the criss-crossing pattern of light beams faltered, then vanished from the opposite wall, blacked out by the approach of a mammoth shadow. . .
The Massey Ferguson combine burst through the wall with a splintering crash, reducing the barn boards to kindling. Jagged splinters of wood flew in every direction. Dust and chaff filled the air. A blinding halogen light beam pinned everything before it in a lurid white glare.
Death swung around to face it.
Music?
Suddenly slack, Karen's fingers came away from her face—but she did not open her eyes. She could see it all on her eyelids.
"Why do birds si-ing so gay?"
"Cass?"
And there she was on the combine, barely visible above the blistering glare of the spotlight, blood trickling from the gash in her temple. She had her boom-box jammed between her knees, the volume cranked up to the top. Her whole body wobbled unsteadily, and her eyelids drooped to half mast.
But she was grinning.
"Why do they fall in lo-ove?"
Spewing diesel exhaust, the combine howled full throttle across the broad expanse of the barn, rapidly chewing up yards. One of its cone-shaped dividers, thrusting ahead of the machine like a giant spearhead, struck an upright barn beam and felled it like a rotten tree. Cass meant to spear him with the other one.
Only seconds had passed, but as the combine struck the rusted rotary hoe, canted, and nearly stalled, Karen felt eternity grind open before her.
Cass gunned the engine. It sputtered, then caught. Gears groaned miserably as she shifted from first to reverse and back again, trying to set the big machine to rocking, to free it from its snag on the hoe. And although the shark-toothed knife blade still chattered, and the rotating auger blade spun, the combine would move no further.
Death turned back to its quest. Printed on her eyelids, Karen saw her own cowering body.
"Karen!" Cass shrieked.
I can't look I can't look I can't—
"KAREN!"
Karen looked up.
Into the mummified face of Eden, head lolling, eye sockets plugged with gore-blackened cotton—
And as her eyes shifted downward, as if in deference to the dark majesty of death, she saw another face, this one wild and utterly alive.
"You," Karen rasped.
"Oh, yes, me," Eve Crowell said, hitching up a rawhide shoulder strap. "Me and my boy."
She carried him papoose-style, in the oversized baby carrier she'd been working on the morning of Bert's comeuppance. His dead legs, kept bent at the hips by the carrier, dangled limply at Eve's waist, and his arms enfolded her neck. She had dressed him up in a sailor suit, also of her own creation, the sleeves and pant legs of which were stained with seeped-in corruption.
Slowly, her back pressed to the coarse barn boards behind her, Karen rose to her feet. She blinked through bloody tears.
"We've come for what's ours," Eve said, a jagged butt of collarbone jutting from her shoulder.
Just a woman, a voice within Karen informed her. Just a crazy old hag, half-dead from that leap out the window.
Run!
Obeying that command, Karen sidestepped—
And Eve moved with her, springing like a sidewinder, keeping her quarry at bay. She leered at Karen like a two-headed demon.
"Don't even think of it," she said.
And Karen understood the scope of the danger she was facing.
"You bitch," Eve spat, her arms looped out to her sides, penning Karen in. "You thieving, murdering bitch."
Over his mother's hunched shoulder, Eden's lipless mouth seemed to broaden in a gleeful grin. Almost solemnly, Eve lifted a hand to his face. Like a bowman selecting an arrow, she plucked the rancid cotton from his eyes. First the left, then the right. She dropped the wads to the floorboards, where they landed with twin wet splats.
Now both of them grinned.
"Give them to me, cunt," Eve said, extending a crabbed hand. "Or I'll twist off your head and pluck them out for myself."
Behind them, high in her perch on the combine, Cass wobbled to her feet and flung the boom-box. Bits of metal and plastic flew wild as the heavy object struck and shattered on the floor next to Eve's splayed feet.
Eve didn't notice. "You decide," she said.
But her words were lost as the combine's engine whined higher, shaking the barn with its roar, scalding the air with its wind. The cutter bar rattled like sunbaked bones, the auger blade whirred, the pickup reel chattered like a huge flock of gulls. The mammoth machine seemed on the verge of exploding.
And above it all, shrieking, stood Cass.
"Do it!" she screamed, pointing at the front of the combine. "Shove the crazy bitch in!"
The combine roared with renewed fury, lurching ahead a few inches before faltering again. Caught off guard by this abrupt motion, Cass pitched forward onto the controls, jamming the throttle fully open. She did not get up again.
(Do it!)
But Karen's knees failed her and she sank like sand to the floorboards, her gaze fixed immovably on the waiting holes in that head.
Eve Crowell reached down for her son's eyes.
Hunkered low against the barn wall, Karen's body grew leaden with numb resignation. Time became soft, seemed to sag like toffee. The madwoman's hands were coming down but with an infinite, almost elegant slowness. She was watching her own death unfolding as she might a dark opera, and she was utterly helpless to prevent it.
She kept her eyes open as long as she could, staring now into Eve's lunatic eyes. She waited until those hoary fingers were almost touching her. . . then reflex made her slam her eyes shut—
And she saw herself for the last time, unable to flinch away, forced to witness her own grotesque mutilation.
Hooked fingers touched her eyelids. . . but gently, lovingly, stroking the delicate flesh.
"Look at me," Eve said in a voice that was oddly comforting, a voice suddenly filled with compassion. "Open your eyes and look at me."
Karen did.
And Eve struck her a savage backhand, raising weals on the flesh of her cheek.
"THEY ARE NOT YOUR EYES!" she thundered, burying her fingers into Karen's shoulders, her eyes all madness again.
"They're my son's. . . "
She was smiling now, her eyes fixed dotingly on Karen's—but her grip never slackened.
"Everyone always said he had his mother's eyes."
Somewhere deep inside of Karen, a tiny ember of fury sparked into life.
"I wanted you first," Eve said, her face so close to Karen's she could feel the wind of each word. "Do you know how angry that made me feel? Seeing your grinning yap every tine I turned on the TV or opened a magazine? With my son's eyes in your face?" She grunted. "But my baby said no. He said, let the bitch see. Let her see what's in store."
Eve wrapped her hands around Karen's skull, pressing splayed thumbs into the soft flesh at the corners of her eyes. Karen let out a cry, but the leadenness damped even that.
"The eyes of the Lord are in every place," Eve bellowed over the shriek of the combine. "Neither shall mine eyes spare, nor shall I have pity." She was raving now, slavering, her rake-tine thumbs pressing deeper. "The Philistines took him and put out his eyes. If thy right eye offend thee pluck—"
Then a third head appeared atop that two-headed hell-hag, snarling and bleeding; it was Cass, Cass had leaped aboard this terrible folie à deux. There was a dry crack of bone as the impact drove the cadaver's head forward and a gout of black goo from its mouth.
"Noooo!" Eve roared,
commencing a wild dervish spin. "Stop it! You'll hurt him."
She spun and she spun, each stamp of her feet raising mushrooms of dust from the floorboards. She spun and she spun, and Cass hung on—while behind them, canted at a crazy angle, the combine harvester screamed. Sparks flew from the auger blade where it ground against the rusty frame hoe. Some of the sparks caught in the dry hay, sending up small licks of flame. Smoke curled into the air.
"Noooo!" Eve bellowed again, taking one last mighty spin.
And Cass went sailing. She landed at Karen's feet, her head striking the floor with a dull, meaty thud. She moaned, tried to sit up, then slumped backward again.
Eve bent over Cass's unconscious body, clawed hands reaching for her throat.
And Karen lunged. Howling like a banshee, she sprang up and between Eve's outstretched arms, her own arms rigid as battering rams. The flats of her palms struck the bulk of Eve's breast and skidded—then she was face to face with the remains of the man who had so begrudgingly given her sight, hugging him by the neck, the three of them sailing backward in a stamping, pinwheeling dance of lost balance. His greasy cheek touched hers, his sloughing arms enfolded her. . .
Then a hoe blade snagged Eve's ankle and toppled her over, backward. Karen fell with her, landing on her chest in an obscene parody of lovers frolicking in the hay. Karen's head bobbed just inches below the combine's jutting knife blades.
Above them the motor bellowed, revving so high the air reeked of boiled oil and seizing metal. Cass had wedged the throttle open wide, and now the harvester raged with a blind and fugitive life. The wheels on the left spun futilely in the air, while those on the right dug for purchase against the greasy floorboards, grabbing briefly and then skidding, bucking the machine forward in short, one-legged jerks.
Karen looked down at Eve's writhing face, at the terrible, confident grin that split it. . . then tried to slither free of her grip, jerking her head back and away from Eve's. Across her back Eve's arms tightened brutally, but Karen arched it as much as she could, managing to get her hands planted firmly against Eve's shoulders with her arms almost fully extended. The blistering heat of the combine baked Karen's face, the wind from it stealing her breath.
With a scream of agonized metal, the machine bucked forward a foot. The divider on the left wedged itself more deeply into the rotary hoe, shifting it sideways—then the combine kicked forward again. It was over Eden's head now, oiled silver teeth in a man-eating jaw. Bits of straw rained down on that moldering face, some of it falling into the gaping craters of its eye sockets. . .
Eve started to laugh.
And suddenly that ember of fury within Karen burst into black flames of rage. This horrible witch had broken her mind, haunted her dreams and fouled the daylight, and there was no fucking way she was getting Karen's eyes.
"Mine," a dead voice seemed to say through the hole in Eden's face, a voice like a chain dragged through dirt.
And somehow that single utterance was more horrible than all of the rest. With all of her might Karen rolled back and away.
Never slackening her grip, Eve followed her up. . .
And the combine harvester grabbed Eden.
It took his hair first, the greasy thatch that was left, scalping him clean as a shiny new golf ball. Then it caught the necrotic flesh of his neck, drawing it up over his face like a foreskin. When it got to his shoulders, folding him onto Eve as it went, first Eve's left arm and then her right jerked away, releasing Karen before flying out to the sides in a mock crucifixion.
Karen scrabbled to her feet and backed away.
The strained motor faltered, wheezed asthmatically and nearly stalled. Then it was howling again, jerking Eden Crowell into the combine's metal gullet. Lashed firmly to the corpse by the rawhide carrier, Eve was slowly drawn upward herself.
Karen stood wide-eyed and watched.
Eve's mouth gaped open as an impossible utterance escaped her. Deep-throated and horrid, it curled out of her throat like the thrashing tail of a boa, sliding to a low, gravelly register before pealing higher and higher, until it whined in the ears like a siren. A twitching convulsion seized her body, causing her legs to dance like a mad marionette's and her arms to flail out in front of her. A grimace of such heartfelt agony ravaged her face, Karen felt certain she would simply explode.
"NO!" Eve howled as her shrieks tapered off. She was trying to angle herself around to look at her son. Her eyes were rolling with madness. "You mustn't harm him. He's my boy, my saint, he must live—"
Eden's head and left shoulder had already been taken by the combine, and now it sucked at the top of Eve's head. The hair on her crown stood smartly at attention, as if crackling with a static charge.
In the iron guts of the combine, the dead man's skull cracked like a walnut. His back, angled over the cutter bar, bent past the breaking point and vertebrae started to snap. The heavy silk sutures in his chest, which Eve had neatly replaced, began to pop free, twanging like overtuned banjo strings. The wound gaped open as something black and meaty was slowly extruded.
Eden's heart plopped into his mother's lap. Limp with putrefaction, it lay there like a wet sock.
A startling change overcame Eve Crowell then. The demon luster dulled in her eyes; the hale blush of fury fled her face. She looked to Karen like a woman waking from a nightmare, only to find that the nightmare is real. Terror bloomed in her eyes as a knife blade poked a hole through her cheek.
Suddenly frantic, she batted the dead heart away and slithered down in the harness, earning herself a few precious inches from the cutter bar. With fumbling fingers, she grappled with the stout brass buckles. . .
But it was futile. The combine's drag on her son's dead body had cinched the buckles too tight.
She was caught.
She looked up imploringly at Karen. "Please," she begged, her voice barely audible now. "Please. . . help me."
The combine reclaimed the few inches Eve had won and lifted her up off the floor. A chattering knife blade lacerated her scalp, sending streamlets of blood down her neck.
"Please. . ." she beckoned, reaching out a beggar's hand. "I'm so. . . sorry. . ."
Sick with pity, Karen fell to her knees and began working feverishly at the buckles. She loosened the first of them as Eve's right hand swept around behind her own back. She was just starting in on the second when Eve grasped the haft of the butcher knife where it lay snugged between her back and the carrier.
She brought the weapon around with a grunt, burying the blade four inches into the meat of Karen's left thigh. Her free hand clawed for purchase in Karen's hair as she jerked the knife free and drew it back for a second stab—
With a tremendous roar of effort, Karen rolled back and away. Crouched in a squat, bleeding and barely aware of it, she watched Eve's face change again.
She was grinning now, the mad gleam back in her eyes.
With four neat tugs of the knife Eve sliced through the straps of the carrier. Behind her, her son's black legs vanished into the maw of the combine. Crouching low, beneath the teeth of the harvester, Eve started climbing to her feet.
"Oh, no, you don't!" Karen hollered.
Springing forward, she drop-kicked Eve in the chest. The wild woman tumbled back. . .
And the combine harvester had her.
Up the grain auger and out through the chute, the first bits of gore spat free. From the flat, vibrating grain sieve below, runnels of blood oozed freely to the barn-board floor. Steak-sized hunks of flesh hit the walls like bloody rags, the sound of it indescribable. Karen watched at first dispassionately, the hot fuel of blood-battle still roaring through her veins, then sadly, then with repulsion, until finally she could watch no more.
The cutter blades chewed Eve through.
Something stirred in the hay behind her. Karen whirled. . . and there was Cass, wobbling unsteadily toward her.
"Oh, Jesus, Cass, I thought you were. . . I. . ."
"I know," Cass murmured. "I thought so
, too."
"How did you. . ."
"I saw you through the window," Cass said, her eyes tearing in the gathering smoke. Some of the flames had coalesced, and now several small fires were burning. "After she hit me."
Bloody-faced both, they joined in a fierce embrace. . . while behind them, the combine continued its wild work.
After a long moment, Cass pushed back a bit to inspect Karen's face. Her own face, where it wasn't covered in blood, had the vapid, stunned look of the concussed. She stroked blood and chaff from Karen's brow, then examined her eyes. Half-moon-shaped cuts ringed both sockets where her own fingernails had dug in.
"Christ, babe, did that fucking. . . whore do this to you?"
Karen shook her head. "I did."
"Oh, my God," Cass whispered as the last bit of color drained from her face. "Oh, my God."
"And look at you," Karen said, "We've got to get you to a doctor.
Cass managed a tiny pained smile. "Not to worry," she said. "It was only my headbone. It takes more tha—"
A sharp grating sound rose front the machine as what appeared to be an arm and a pelvis crunched simultaneously into the combine. On the opposite side, something rolled off the grain pan and thunked to the floor.
Then there was another sound, a flat, fleshy tattoo coming from the feeder end of the combine. Pulling away from Cass, Karen looked. . .
Snared by the rake blades, Eve's ghastly white legs kicked reflexively up and down, one then the next, as if running.
Callused, bleeding heels smacked wetly against the floorboards.
Then they were still.
The big machine groaned, shuddered. . . and quit.
Its stuttering roar had masked the sound of a rapidly approaching vehicle. It pulled up to the barn by the smashed-open door, shut down, and someone jumped out. . .
Then there were footfalls in the alleyway again, moving fast.
Dressed in cotton pajamas and half-laced boots, Albert appeared in the doorway, shotgun cocked at the ready. The only sounds now were the tick of the overheated engine, the drip of gore to the floorboards, and the crackle of spreading flames. The heat in the barn was explosive; Albert's body was immediately lathered in sweat.
Eden's Eyes Page 27
