"You ever figure you, might have to let go some of your vices?" Bella said, cackling again.
"Not a chance," Tommy declared once his hacking subsided. "If you can't smoke then you can't drink, and if you can't drink then you can't be a Kelly. And a Kelly's what I am, thank you kindly, Miss Bella LeGuin." He grinned and took another puff, his impish blue eyes darting to the doorway, alert for white-clad spies.
The banter finished, Bella leaned closer, and Tommy knew right off that she had something on her mind. . . something serious. In fact, he, thought, she looked a wee bit like someone about to admit to a new-found belief in ghosts.
"Tommy. . . I been wondering about this since I hear they brought you in here." She paused, fidgeting uneasily in her chair. "What's it like? I mean having another guy's heart knockin' away inside of you?"
Averting his eyes, Tommy took another deep drag on his cigarette. Unnoticed, a fat finger of ash fell onto the bib of his hospital johnny.
He had never counted himself superstitious. In fact, Tommy Kelly had never thought of himself as anything but a drunk, like his father before him, God rest his pickled soul. But Bella's question cut closer to the bone than he cared to admit. Lying here alone at night, deprived of the liquid staple of his sanity, Tommy had thought of almost nothing else. It was one of the reasons he'd been so desperate to get back on the bottle, so he could dull his mind to the fact that the heart beating inside him was not his own.
"Weird," he admitted after fetching out the Mickey and draining off another quarter. "Sometimes thinkin' about, it drives me near crazy."
He drank again, and in a flash decided to let it all come out.
"I lay awake nights, Bella, and I start to fancy I can hear it inside me, hammering out its business, only too loud and too fast. And that sets me to thinkin' about the poor dumb sonofabitch what owned it before me. I mean, it's not like I picked out a pair of his hand-me-down trousers at the Sally Ann. I got his heart now, Bella. His Jesus-Christ heart!" A shudder danced visibly through him. "So. . . what about his soul? Huh? Where's that, Bella? It gives me the fuckin' willies, if you don't mind my sayin'. With bells on."
Disturbed, and yet keen to hear all of this, Bella flapped a hand of dismissal. Her own mouth was fouler than a sewer pipe, and Tommy knew that. But whatever else he might be, Tommy Kelly was a gentleman, and Bella respected him for that.
"And there's other times Bella. . . other times when it don't feel like it's beating at all, but just sort of. . . writhin'."
An angry voice roared out—"What in blazes is going on in, here?"—and Tommy half spilled the dregs of his Mickey trying to stash it with the cap missing.
He looked up into the fat, tyrannical face of Helen "The Hun" Gibson, the broad-backed R.N. in charge of the postsurgical floor.
"Out!"' the gunboat that passed itself off as a nurse bleated at Bella. "Visiting hours don't start till four o'clock."
For a giddy moment Tommy feared Bella would go for the rusty shiv she kept tucked in her sock to scare off muggers.
But then Nurse Gibson swung the full heat of her attention on Tommy.
"And you!"' She snatched the bottle away just as his lips pursed for that last reviving guzzle. "You can do whatever you want once we spring you out of here. But I'll not stand by and watch you waste the taxpayers' money and ruin a perfectly good heart in this hospital. Understood?"
Head forlornly bowed, Tommy only grunted. Out of the corner of his eye he spied Bella in the doorway, junk-laden shopping bags cutting into gnarly fingers, bright eyes laughing like a child's.
"'Bye for now, Tommy Kelly," she said, uttering a cackle as the nurse snatched his tobacco.
"Bye, Bella," Tommy said, to her back.
Five minutes later he was alone again. Alone with the sound of his heartbeat.
At ten past eight, a small group of people shuffled unannounced into Karen's room. Karen recognized Burkowitz's asthmatic breathing, but she was unable to place any of the others. She estimated from all the shuffling that there were at least five of them. Students? Yes, they would likely be medical students. She recalled a nurse mentioning that a few of them might tag along.
There followed a moment of agonizing silence.
Then Dr. Smith, the psychiatrist, breezed into the room, the swish of her windbreaker and thud of her stride reminding Karen of the woman's vitality.
"Oh," she trumpeted. "You mustn't start without me!" She crossed to the bedside and pulled up a chair, announcing as if no one else were there: "I've just come back from the Gatineau Hills, Karen, and I saw the most exquisite Baltimore oriole! I shot nearly a full roll of film." She took Karen's hand and squeezed it. "Just wait until you see the prints."'
Karen managed a ghost of a smile.
"Well,"' Burkowitz said simply. "This is it."
Karen's heart began to pound. As. if in a dream, Hanussen's last words to her came echoing back: It will be painful at first, perhaps even agonizing. . .
"Lights," she heard Burkowitz say. And then the sound of a switch being thrown. Did that mean he'd turned them off? Or on?
Light, she thought wonderingly. What is it like?
The door hissed shut. Curtain's slid noisily along aluminum tracks. Excited voices dropped, melding into a low, anticipatory murmur.
Then Karen felt the doctor's hands at the back of her head, loosening the bandages.
She held her breath.
Unbidden, she recalled a story she had listened to on tape as a teenager: "The Day Of The Triffids". . . the protagonist removing his own bandages following an eye injury, uncertain of whether or not he would see finding out only later that everyone else had gone blind and that his bandages had saved him. . .
The first layer was off.
Karen's grip tightened around her father's hand on one side and Dr. Smith's on the other.
"Don't expect much at first," Burkowitz said softly. "The room is dark now, but there's still enough light that you'll notice a difference. . ."
If it's going to work at all, she finished his sentence for him. If it's going to work at all.
He was down to the eye pads now. . . she could feel them wanting to fall away, cool air reaching the stale skin underneath.
Karen scrunched her eyelids tight as the pads were removed.
"Okay, Karen. Very slowly now. . . open your eyes."
She tried to but couldn't, the muscles of her face bunching together in an involuntary spasm. She was terrified.
She breathed.
"Slowly. . . very slowly. . . let them open, Karen. Let them open."
"C'mon, baby," her father's voice urged, and she knew, from its quaver he was biting back tears. "Open 'em up. You'll see, I know you will."
Karen relaxed her face but did not open her eyes. Stringy gray phantoms capered against a blood-red background. . . although she had no idea it was the color red she was seeing—light through the screen of her eyelids. She knew only that it was no longer black. She smiled nervously.
"Open your eyes, Karen."
Karen's eyes, opened to slits, then snapped closed again. There had been something out there—dark, coalescing blobs—and it had frightened her.
She tried again.
"Oh, my," Karen said, her face contorting in a kind of hysterical spasm, "I can see. . . I can see something. . ."
She reached out clumsily and poked Burkowitz in the face. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
As if hoping somehow to see what Karen was seeing, one of the students stepped in closer, inadvertently catching the edge of the drawn curtains on his lab coat—
A javelin of brilliant spring sunlight cut through the gap and plunged into Karen's eyes. Shrieking in agony, she buried her face in her hands and flipped to one side in the bed, away from the window, writhing as, if caught in a seizure. Groaning in sorrow, the student repaired the gap and lapsed into a stream of apologies.
"Out!" Burkowitz commanded brutally, fearful that some irreparable damage had been done.
"N
o," Karen sobbed. "It's all right. . . it's all right."
She sat up. Burkowitz replaced the bandages.
"Was that light?" she asked when the doctor was done.
"Yes," her father's voice came out of the darkness. "That was light."
Karen smiled. "It was beautiful," she said. "Terribly beautiful."
She wept.
Chapter 7
Three weeks had passed since they'd buried their son, and Bert Crowell felt that finally his wife was recovering. She seemed to have taken an interest in life again—outside of the Bible and her daily pilgrimages to the Pentecostal church on Ash Street—and had resumed her years-old hobby of sewing. The arthritic deformity in her hands made the going slow, but she seemed to be getting along nicely despite that drawback. This morning, the radio was on as she worked at the table, the curtains were open, and rich golden sunlight flooded the kitchen.
Following the boy's burial, Eve had sunk into a black and remorse-filled depression. She kept the holy candles burning for a long while afterward, so many that from outside it looked as if the house was on fire, and spent countless hours on swollen knees before the big, hand-carved crucifix in the den. At first her withdrawal had concerned Bert deeply, making him fearful that she had finally slipped all the way over the edge. This fear was bolstered when, one morning after Eve thought he was gone, Bert had peeked in through the skeleton-keyhole of the locked den door, alarmed by the strange noises he'd heard coming from inside. To his astonishment, he glimpsed his wife sitting naked in her wheelchair, uttering what sounded like incantations before the crucifix, which she had somehow managed to turn upside down. Straining to listen through the heavy oak door, Bert had caught only snatches. . . bizarre stuff about revenge, resurrection, "Let his undead spirit rise"—and with these words she had pawed herself obscenely—"let them face him, in horror. . . vengeance. . . whole again. . ." Then her voice had faded to whispers.
Bert went to work and said not a word—but he came within an ace that morning of having her committed.
Eve had always turned a blind eye on her son's abuses, even when they were leveled at her, which had been more and more often as the years went by. Bert knew the reason for this well enough, and although he considered it fanatical, he still found himself feeling guilty over it. He had realized Eve was deeply religious when he met her, but they had been teenagers then, and Eve had been so beautiful, so. . . desirable. They loved one another, there had never been any question about that. But Eve had wanted to wait until they were married before yielding to the carnal imperative that whipped them both into a lusting frenzy each time, Bert kissed her lips or fondled her breasts, concessions Eve had allowed only at the expense of hours of penance afterward.
So one night Bert had gotten her drunk, lacing her Coke with vodka. . . and he had taken advantage. It wasn't as if he'd intended running out on her afterward, far from it. And oh, what a night it had been! But that one impassioned mistake had nearly ruined them. For weeks afterward Eve had refused to speak to him. She ignored his calls and, snubbed him in the street. . . until one day in angry exasperation Bert confronted her as she came out of church. In a heated exchange just out of earshot of Eve's
parents, also devout worshipers, Bert reminded, her that, she had enjoyed it, too, had even begged him to continue when at the last possible moment he had quickly pulled out. She had cuffed him hard for that—and with Eve's solid, big-boned frame behind it the blow had rocked his head back painfully—and then kissed him, right there in front of her parents and the disgorging house of God. They were married a month later, a full two years ahead of their original plan.
The real trouble began a year after that, when they decided to start a family. Try as they might, nothing happened. . . and with the brimstone inevitability of her upbringing, Eve blamed it on sin. She was a fornicatress a Godless strumpet, and now she was being punished for it. The Lord had singled her out, transformed her womb into a cracked and peeling wasteland. She had bent to the sin of lust, and now she was barren. This belief led to others—"God and Satan are One," she would rail at him in outbursts as sudden and unexpected as meteor strikes. "Satan is God; God when he's angry. Without the Dark Prince, without evil, there can be no good."
Soon, books began appearing in the mail, manuals of the arcane—magic, witchcraft, Satanism—and before long Eve had begun quoting from them, defending her actions with claims that God Himself had prompted her studies. "I must understand His dark side," she told Bert, "before I can receive forgiveness." She poured over these lurid texts for hours, concentrating mostly on fertility chants and spells against her enemies, whose numbers seemed to swell with each passing day.
That had been the first turning point, the first real rift in Eve's grasp of reality. The second came five years later, with her unexpected pregnancy. . . and it peaked when the child was born. From that moment on Bert was shut out, of Eve's life, of Eve's heart. He spent his days at work and his nights in bitter exile, in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall. The only good thing to come of it all was the sudden dissolution of Eve's interest in the occult.
She kept the child with her always, sat by his crib while he napped, hefted him along wherever she went, papoose-style, in a canvas baby carrier she had fashioned herself, even took him to bed with her at night. She was convinced the boy was a saint, living proof of the Lord's Holy forgiveness. When he reached school age, Eve became at times so fretful without him that she would scurry up to the school, invent some urgent excuse why her son must leave, then spirit him away for the rest of the day. His delinquency seemed to Bert an inevitable outcome of this coddling, of this belief, constantly nourished in the boy, that he was better than the best of his peers, incapable of error or sin. Bert did his best to intervene, to instill in the boy some sense of perspective, to employ discipline when a situation called for it—but in these instances Eve made his life so unbearable, Bert finally, regretfully, withdrew from them both. Why he'd stayed on at all was an ongoing mystery to Bert. Perhaps it was a by-product of his own Christian upbringing, the ingrained, inarguable belief that once you had taken the vows, come hell or high water, you were in it for life. That and the lovelorn hope that somehow, someday, things might revert back to normal.
By the time the boy reached his teens, he already had a police record. A neighbor's dog had bitten him, taunted into it Bert had no doubt, the bite itself little more than a scratch. Later that night, the animal was tossed through the neighbor's front window, skinned alive. Another neighbor had seen the boy running away, a bloodstained knife in his hand. This first act of brutal violence had led to others, the consequences of which Eve had somehow always managed to insulate him from.
And there had been other things, darker than the sadistic cruelties, the petty thefts and the fist-happy bullying lout, some things Bert had come to suspect but had never quite allowed his eyes to see. But he had heard the boy—man, really—padding into his mother's room in the deep reaches of the night, heard the excited giggles, and later, the moans. . .
"My son the saint," Eve had been fond of saying, her lips smiling with playful jest but her eyes full of deadly conviction.
With the passage of time, only Bert had seen different.
And until just recently, it seemed the boy's death had served only to sanctify him further in Eve's tottering mind.
But one morning in mid-April, about two weeks following the funeral, Bert had come downstairs to find the candles gone, the crucifix shrouded, and a goodly number of the various plaster statues, brass icons, and holy pictures which had previously cluttered the house missing. And just yesterday, Eve had asked him how much that mobile home he had always talked about getting would cost them.
Now Bert was standing in the dark, pantrylike entryway to the basement stairwell, arranging the stepladder beneath a burned-out light fixture. The damn thing was a fire hazard, always had been, and this morning Eve had finally coaxed him into fixing it. He had already been downstairs and thrown the main swi
tch, stripping the house of power, and it struck him now how eerily quiet the place was, minus the hums and grumblings of electrical appliances. Behind him, her blue eyes magnified behind thick bifocals, Eve studiously surveyed a sewing pattern she had spread out on the table in front of her. Though glad to see her busy, Bert had no idea what she was working on. The big, odd-shaped sheets of material she had cut out looked to him like rawhide, or very coarse suede.
Bert mounted the ladder to its summit, shone the flashlight into the high, cobwebby recess above him, and cursed. It was going to be one of those tough, hands-over-your-head, pain-in-the-ass chores, and for a moment he considered just saying to hell with it. But Eve had complained time and again that she had trouble seeing when she went in there for her bottled preserves, which occupied a triple row of dusty pinewood shelves at the top of the staircase. She was afraid she'd roll too far forward sometime when she was at home alone and topple down the steep series of steps to the moldering cement floor below. The house was old, the stairs rickety, and Bert knew she was right. It would be a bad way to go.
It became quickly evident—after holding the flashlight in one hand, a Robertson screwdriver in the other, and balancing his knees against a ladder rung—that he was going to need some help.
"Eve?" he said mildly. "Would you come over here and hold the flashlight a minute, please?"
There was the crinkly sound of her hands leaving the sewing pattern, the dry squeak of the wheelchair crossing the linoleum, then she was there in the doorway, looking up at him with a strange, tight smile which to Bert seemed false. . . sculpted somehow, like the smile on the plaster Virgin in the hallway.
Eve swung the chair into the doorway, leaned forward, and reached out a knobby hand.
Bert handed her the light. "Just shine it up here, will you?"
Eve rolled forward a bit. As she did, one of the wheelchair's footplates struck the base of the ladder, jarring it slightly. Bert's body jerked in surprise, and the ladder took a skidding step closer to the brink. In a sickening flash he remembered that same footplate digging into his ribs the night he had told her about their son.
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