Eden's Eyes

by Sean Costello

  Then her gaze fixed on the eyes.

  Her eyes.

  And it registered anew that the image she was seeing was not just an image but a true reflection of herself. A little blurry perhaps, its hollows deepened by the soft yellow light. . . but it was her.

  Karen Lockhart.

  She felt a fit of giggles welling up in her throat and thought: Not yet. There would be time enough later to vent the joy she was feeling, to leap and dance and shout at the moon. Now was the time for discovery. There were no guarantees that the darkness might not at any moment reassert itself, drawing her back perhaps eternally into its lightless womb.

  She had to see as much as she could right now, in this single enchanted moment.

  A hand came up and scrubbed away the tear. Karen combed her fingers through her hair and watched, fascinated, as her reflection did the same. She flared her nostrils and laughed. Now she leaned forward, the tip of her nose almost touching the mirror.

  "Hi there, Lockhart," she said. "Pleased to meet you."

  Rapt, Karen gazed into the crystal chambers of her eyes, forcing back with an iron fist any thought of where the gift had come from. That part of it was finished, behind her now.

  There was yet another reflection, she observed with a kind of awestruck glee, in the pool of each eye. Tiny duplicates of herself, grinning back at her from the cool, Aegean blue. She imagined them filing away inside of her, these miniature reflections, hundreds upon hundreds of them, an overload of images, glutting the cobwebbed chambers of her visual memory, assuring like some frenzied pack rat that if darkness fell again, there would be staple enough to last.

  She leaned back, ignoring the worsening pain in her temples, her eyes straying now to the smooth contours of her neck. They paused in the warm valley formed by the notch of her breastbone, then scanned left, to the taut skin of that shoulder, following its youthful slope till it vanished beneath the cotton margin of her nightdress.

  Karen fingered the loose material off her shoulder, revealing its shiny dome, and it occurred to her only now, in a kind of happy shock, that there was more to see than her face. . .

  Standing, she loosened the buttons one by one, her, breath catching as the peeling gown revealed first one naked breast, then the other.

  Her fingers strayed, her mind pleased by what she was seeing: the fleshy fullness, the rich color contrast, the symmetry. Now she turned and glanced over her shoulder, at the curving cliff face of her back, the corn-silk cascade of her thick blond hair. A breeze from the nearby screens found her skin, and she whirled to witness the tight engorgement of her nipples.

  She smiled.

  There was a pounding in her ears, and as the gown pooled at her feet she realized the pounding was her heart.

  There she is, she thought, the giggling fit threatening to seize her again. Karen K. Lockhart, newborn, in all her naked glory.

  Her eyes dropped and settled on the pale tuft of her center, and in a flash she remembered her lecherous pal Cass telling her that that was how her boyfriends would know she was a true blonde.

  Now she did giggle. And laugh. And cry.

  Boyfriends. . .

  Possibilities began to rain down like manna from heaven. Boyfriends, travel, learning to read and write real words and not just pimples of braille on paper as thick as cardboard. . .

  Karen stood the oval mirror, turning, twisting, charting her mortal topography in all of its most intimate detail. She lost track of time in the low light of her bedroom, stopping only after the images had smeared together indecipherably, and the pain had reached the intolerable.

  Then, swooning-weary, she dropped into bed and slept.

  She dreamt of darkness.

  But there was light out, there, just beyond the press of blackness, and she fought toward it, clawing and thrashing with a fierceness she had never known. The jealous dark sought to hold her back with its weight, intent on keeping her there until she rotted in its seamless shroud. She fought it desperately, dug and gouged as if through a wall of earth.

  And when she briefly awoke in the middle reaches of the night, the battle was won. There was light out there, just beyond the pink-lined veil of her eyelids.

  Smiling, Karen rolled onto her side and drifted off again, forgetting the dream as she did.

  The seed had long since dried on Danny's fingers, and still he squinted through the field glasses, desperate for another glimpse of her. The puppy, whose chocolate eye had opened only a few days before, had slipped from his lap and scurried away, leaving Danny to his fruitless yearnings.

  But tonight had been, wonderful! How she had touched herself! In all the ways he thirsted to touch her. If only he could have gone over there, become her hands. . .

  His breath, calmer now, frosted the window glass.

  He watched. And waited. And later, when the sun splashed orange in the east, Danny replaced the binoculars in their hidy-hole and got dressed, pulling on the same grimy overalls he'd been wearing all week. He had to hike over to the Teevenses farm this morning and butcher a hog.

  A cool spring of excitement welled in his belly as he unsheathed his pigsticker and examined its curving blade. There was power in slaughter, the smug feeling of a finger on destiny's wheel. . .

  Before leaving his room, Danny glanced at himself in the beveled mirror, missing how much like a tragic clown he looked with the angry red eye circles the binoculars had left behind.

  Chapter 11

  Keeping to the shadows, Eve Crowell caned her way out to the carport and climbed into Bert's old Chrysler. She slipped her seatbelt on, adjusted the mirror, and keyed the ignition. The engine turned over with a shuddering cough, its innards damp from the drizzly weather. Eve hadn't driven in ten year's, and her license had long since expired. But as she backed out of the lane and steered her way through the sleeping streets, she found herself well in control.

  "Like riding a bike," she said aloud, completing the thought in her head: You never forget.

  No, you never forgot. Eve refused to forget. Bert had learned that the hard way, the way the Lord had intended.

  And everyone was so upset. Poor Bert. The phone was still ringing off the wall, call after call from the sentimental fools he had worked with at the mine in Falconbridge. And his funeral five days ago had been lousy with them. Where had they been for her boy's funeral? Where had the sons of bitches been then?

  "You poor dear," they bawled at her. "A double tragedy. First your boy and now your husband, and all in the space of a month. How can you keep your faith?"

  What they didn't realize was that Bert had killed his own son, signed the warrant in his own hand. And if that wasn't enough, he'd let them carve the boy open and dole out his living parts, too. It was hideous, Satan's answer to the Sermon on the Mount.

  Eve swung right onto Paris Street, slowing when the cop parked out front of the Mr. Grocer eyed her suspiciously. After gaining some distance, she glanced edgily into her side-view mirror. . . but the guy hadn't budged an inch.

  No need to be jumpy, she coached herself, accelerating a little. It was God's work she was doing, and no one had better interfere. Besides, she had as much right as anybody to be out in her car at three in the morning.

  She adjusted the kitchen knife she had tucked inside of her heavy tweed coat; its tip had been poking her thigh.

  No one had questioned her when she demanded that Bert be buried in a different part of the cemetery, away from the family plot. Oh, a few eyes had widened, a few monkeys had muttered, but not one of them had had the courage to say a word out loud. The whole parish thought her crazy, she knew, a psalm-singing zealot who'd lost all sight of the decorum of worship. And as much as they imagined she hadn't, Eve had noticed their silly smirks during mass, when her own voice rang out glorious and high above all of the rest. And she was well able to imagine the garbage that spilled from their mouths later on, on the steps in front of the church.

  But none of that mattered now. It never really had. Bert was
cold in the ground, and no one suspected a thing. The gavel was in motion, and it was coming down hard.

  The light was red at Cedar Street, a half block up from the hospital, but by craning her neck Eve was able to see the roof of the light blue Mercedes parked in the doctor's lot, which was sunk about eight feet below street level.

  The son of a bitch was there, just as Fay Worthington had said he would be. Eve swung into the visitor's lot, slowing for a white-painted speed bump. She parked near the entrance, slipping behind one of those big metal refuse containers so the car couldn't be seen from the street. Not that it mattered. She had met only one other vehicle since leaving home, a Lockerby taxi with no fare. The city was fast asleep.

  Fay was perhaps the only friend Ever had left. Six years younger and a member of the same parish, Fay was a widow. Her husband Wally, who had been a beer-guzzling boor not worth the box they buried him in, had got himself killed in a mining accident back in '75. Fay could have gotten along quite comfortably on the proceeds of the life-insurance policy she'd been wise enough to insist that Wally buy, but she had opted instead to continue working. Fay was a part time OR nurse at the University Hospital.

  At Bert's funeral Eve had taken Fay aside and explained her fictitious predicament. It had been raining that day, as it was now, and they had both been holding umbrellas.

  "I made a fool of myself," Eve confessed, her head fittingly bowed. "It was just that I couldn't believe my boy was dead."

  Fay had clasped Eve's hand. "You mustn't bother your head about that, dear. I understand. It was a hard time for you, the hardest."

  Fay hadn't been working that night, but she had heard the talk. Always the talk. "Did you hear about the crazy-woman who called in here the other night? Her dead son was in the OR having his organs harvested, and she was raving over the phone about us all being murderers. She wanted the surgeons to stop—they were already halfway done when she called—she wanted them to stop and put the guy back together again. Like Humpty Dumpty.”

  "They're cruel and malicious," Fay hissed righteously. "They just can't fathom a mother's grief."

  "But I still feel ashamed," Eve confided. "I'd like a chance to apologize to the doctors concerned. Is there any way I can find out who they were?"

  Fay smiled pityingly. "I can tell you right now. It's always the same one who does these. . . cases. Dr. Tucker. He. . . takes the kidneys. The rest of them fly in from Ottawa, or sometimes Toronto or Kingston. In your son's case, I'm fairly certain it was the Ottawa group, under Dr. Harrington." Fay missed a beat, her discomfort reaching its height. "And they had an eye specialist in from Germany. A Dr. Hanussen. He. . ."

  Fay let her voice trail off, but Eve didn't notice. Her mind was whirring like a turbine. She knew Tucker. He'd removed her gallbladder four years ago. And attaching faces to the other names Fay had mentioned would be easy enough. She had time. Scads of it. A trip to. Europe for a chat with that Nazi eye surgeon might even be fun. She had to swallow an evil cackle at the thought.

  "The best day to catch Dr. Tucker is on Wednesday," Fay expanded, relieved to be done with specifics. "He generally takes call that day, and he does a huge list in the OR. I've never seen him leave the hospital before two a.m. on a Wednesday. He goes home, catches a few winks, then he's back in his office by nine." She smiled admiringly. "He's quite a guy."

  Yes, Eve thought now, the drizzle blurring her vision. Quite a guy.

  Using her cane, she followed the shadows into the narrow front lot, where the Mercedes was parked. She'd seen him parading around in that thing dozens of times, silver hair waving in the wind, pig eyes hidden behind a pair of those ridiculous mirrored sunglasses.

  Eve added the sins of Vanity and Exhibitionism to her list.

  Less than ten feet from the parked Mercedes stood a tall brick smokestack, its effluent drawn from the ground-level power plant. Eve squinted up through the worsening rain to its summit, where thin white smoke looped lazily out.

  Mouth grimly set, she slipped in behind the huge stack. Back here the night was pitch, and the rain couldn't reach her as easily.

  As it turned out, she didn't have long to wait.

  Ken Tucker paused in the lobby and gazed out listlessly at the rain. The pavement was puddled and slick, and a tattered curtain of rainwater cascaded from the edges of the flat-roofed portico, daring him to step through it.

  Screw that, Tucker thought, and set down his briefcase to pull on his raincoat.

  The weather matched the night he'd had—though it hadn't started out all that badly. By ten o'clock, miraculously, most of his work had been done. By eleven, he'd actually begun to believe that he'd be out of there before midnight.

  But then that Shawana girl had gone sour on him, and he'd had to reopen her.

  Ken picked up his briefcase. Inclining his head against the wind, he stepped out into the downpour.

  Christ, and he'd ended up losing her. She'd come in earlier that day with a ruptured spleen sustained in an auto accident, and he'd barely saved her then. When he'd gone back in tonight, he'd found that one of his stitches had slipped on the arterial stump. He blamed this lapse in technique—because that was what it was, no sense denying it—on the constant overwork. It couldn't go on. He couldn't go on.

  He'd lost an eighteen-year-old girl through an oversight, and he wasn't sure he could forgive himself. And judging by the way the kid's older brother had been glowering at him as he explained what had happened, it seemed evident that the family was loathe to forgive him as well.

  Ken got to the car before realizing that he hadn't pulled out his keys.

  "Smart," he mumbled under the hiss of the rain. "Real smart. "He set his briefcase down in a puddle and dug in his pockets.

  "Dr. Tucker?"

  Startled, Ken spun on his heel. He hadn't heard anyone approaching. In his right-hand pocket, his fingers closed over his keys.

  It was a woman—mid-fifties, Ken estimated—stout and slow-moving, her heavy tweed coat droopy with moisture. She was hatless, and in the spectral glow of the streetlamps her head gleamed like pewter. She was carrying a cane.

  "Yes?" Ken said, thinking now that she looked familiar. Those incredibly blue eyes. . .

  "My name is Eve Crowell." She leaned her cane against the next car over. With an arthritic hand, she raked a wet clump of hair from her face. "You took out my gallbladder a few years back."

  He nodded. Was that it? Was that why she seemed so familiar?

  No.

  Crowell, Crowell. . .

  "What can I do for you?"

  The woman said nothing, only glared at him with those hard, glacial eyes.

  Ken bent to retrieve his briefcase. Suddenly, he wanted out of there. He didn't know what this dame wanted and he didn't care. In was clear the broad was a loony, standing out in the rain in the middle of the night. What was she doing here anyway? Maybe she'd slipped out of the lock-up ward downstairs. . .

  As he straightened, Ken noticed a glint of silver, swooping up from the tweed depths of the woman's coat like a ravening shark.

  A knife! he realized too late.

  A knife in his belly. . .

  Sweat filmed him, but it didn't really hurt. Not like he'd imagined. It felt like a well-placed punch. Maybe if she stopped now he'd be okay. . .

  The thought spiraled away.

  "You killed my son," Eve said, the fury in her eyes blazing above the madwoman's grin on her face.

  She rotated the broad steel blade.

  And as his vision blackened and his briefcase clattered to the pavement, the doctor remembered where he'd seen those blue eyes before.

  Eve lifted, hard on the knife, raising Ken Tucker's twitching toes an inch off the pavement. "I just wanted you to know that."

  Tucker looked down at his spilling guts in total disbelief. He was dead before he slid off the knife.

  After a sweeping glance to satisfy herself that she hadn't been seen, Eve leaned forward to inspect her work. Her pulse hadn’t budg
ed a beat, and her breath was as calm as a sleeper's.

  The dead man lay crumpled against the side of the Mercedes, his rolled-back eyes still quivering in his purpling face. Steam wisped up from the foot-long belly wound, the lips of which had parted to reveal a terrible tongue. Blood oozed freely from its edges, thinning in the pattering rain.

  "Enjoy Hell," Eve said in the rasp of a demon.

  Above her, out of sight, a bus droned wetly past.

  She knelt on the pavement to finish her task. With a grunt she tugged the man's arms out from under him, rolling him onto his face. Then she bared both of his wrists.

  There was still so much work to do.

  The stone was cold. Mottled granite, flesh-colored in the moonlight, which was miserly and pale. A monument to murder, to the worst kind of thievery—but also to vengeance, and the resurrection of life.

  Eve had designed it that way.

  Beneath her boy's name the stone read:

  Here lieth a beloved son, His life cruelly taken. Rue all ye who stole from him, The day he doth re'waken.

  Seated on her haunches at the foot of the grave, Eve Crowell smiled. She had composed the inscription herself, and in her mind she repeated it over and over, relishing the sound of it, the bloody promise of it. Her eyes, in this dim light the lustrous silver of a Siberian Husky's, traced each stone-cut letter.

  In her lap lay a Bible. A dark Bible.

  Eve flipped it open and read.

  "And the eagle spake and cried aloud: Come away from the house of death! You are the deathless one who rides the whirlwinds! Come away! For I have prepared a place for you. Move therefore, and show yourself!" She turned her eyes heavenward. The downpour had tapered to a mist, but her hair still clung wetly to her skull. "Be friendly unto me, for I am your God, the true worshiper of the flesh that liveth forevermore.

  Leaning forward, Eve pressed an ear to the damp sod and

  listened. Around her, wind chattered through budding branches, and a whippoorwill sang its lonesome song. There was no other sound, save her own anxious breathing.