Eden's Eyes

by Sean Costello

  By the curtained window a cluster of birthday balloons hung limply afloat. Heaps of stuffed toys crammed every corner. Posters covered most of the available wall space, and a forest of Get-Well-Soon cards obscured the dresser-top. Hastily cast-aside clothes draped the footrail of a single brass bed. . .

  Then she saw the motionless shape of a child, huddled beneath a thick mound of covers. . . and the curving shape of its head, stirring now, and in the lambent glow from the window a single pale arm, curiously ravaged, encircling a stuffed toy—

  A cherry-pink unicorn with a rainbow-colored horn.

  There was a blur then, a fan of motion which could only have been her own arm sweeping violently downward. A half-glimpsed fist buried itself in the blankets and flung them back. The child, a girl, fully awake now, shrank into the clown-papered corner at the head of her bed, drawing her knees to her chest and clutching her toy as her body darkened in shadow.

  And as that half-seen arm strobed downward again, the child raised her own arms in a hopelessly feeble block, her tiny face tearing itself open in a soundless scream.

  There was a fleeting glimpse of pale tissue parting, a sickly white hand gouging something loose—

  Then blood sheeted up, blackened by the nightlight, and in the maddening silence a faraway shriek of horror found Karen's ears.

  A shriek that became her own, shattering the peach-colored dawn with its shrillness.

  Karen leapt out of bed and lunged for the mirror, scrubbing cruelly at her eyes in an effort to wipe away the blood.

  But of course there was none.

  And she understood as she leaned over the vanity and gaped at her eyes—eyes which seemed curiously inept at reflecting her horror and fear—that she had just experienced a nightmare.

  A grisly, hideous, unspeakable nightmare, paling every terror that had come before it.

  Lungs pistoning, Karen dropped to the stool and buried her face in her hands. God, she had cried out, actually screamed! It had been so real! Murdering—no, mutilating—a sleeping child, like nothing she could ever imagine. . .

  But she had.

  Stitch by stitch, Karen felt her mind give along some crucial seam. Around her, the room seemed to undulate like a reflection on dark water. Her stomach rolled threateningly. . .

  Then Cass pounded into the room.

  "Jesus, Karen, what is it?" Through burning eyes Karen looked up into Cass's sleep-creased face. "Did you scream?"

  Karen blinked.

  And in that spasm of darkness blood sprayed and a small white face convulsed—

  On the verge of toppling over, she grabbed Cass's hand and squeezed it. Her eyes roved the room crazily before snapping back to Cass's. She seemed to calm a bit then.

  "A dream," she said hoarsely, informing herself as well as Cass. "Only a dream. . ."

  Gently, Cass pried herself free of Karen's grip. She stroked her friend's clammy brow, feeling hot and lightheaded herself—the scream which had wakened her had been a death-scream, a brittle, wavering ode to that final agony.

  "Do you want to tell me about it?"

  "No!" Karen cried, almost shouting the word.

  "Okay," Cass soothed. "Just let it go, then. Just let it go."

  They were drinking coffee when the newsbreak came on the TV.

  In the hour since they had left Karen's room, Cass had been chattering incessantly, trying in earnest to steer Karen away from the glassy, inward gaze of her own eyes. She had tried a couple of times to draw Karen out, but Karen only shook her head and went back to staring at her half-eaten breakfast. The television, which Cass had wheeled into the kitchen and snapped on, did little to distract either one of them. When the newsbreak came on Karen barely glanced at it, and Cass didn't look up at all.

  But when Karen saw the house behind the grim-faced reporter—the small white bungalow with the pale blue shutters and dark blue trim—the coffee cup slipped from her fingers and crashed to the tabletop, where it shattered and sprayed hot liquid.

  The reporter's words burred like drill bits into her brain.

  "This small suburban home in Ottawa' s West End was the scene last night of the most savage slaying in this city's history. A defenseless child of seven was brutally slaughtered in her sleep by an unknown assailant. This atrocity. . .

  As the reporter spoke on, the camera jerked abruptly to the bungalow's front door. Being hefted through it on a stretcher was a young, blank-faced woman Karen knew could only be the child's mother. A white gauze dressing, already soaked through with blood, encircled her head like a turban. On her chest between motionless hands lay a cuddly stuffed toy, which the camera zoomed in on with deliberate slowness.

  A cherry-pink unicorn with a rainbow-colored horn.

  Chapter 25

  May 22

  "'Jesus. . . What Kind of an animal would. . ."

  Detective-Sergeant Jim Hall did not respond to his partner's half-choked words. His eyes were on the torn, bloody shape in the bed his throat clamped shut with outrage and horror.

  What kind of animal indeed.

  Crimes like this one—random, mindless, unimaginably brutal—were the main reason Jim Hall had fled the NYPD six years ago. Something malignant had been swelling inside him during the two long decades he had served there—and early one snowy December morning it had finally burst. That morning, without any concrete plan, he had driven downtown, cleaned out his desk, and turned in his shield. A week later, with nearly all of his assets made liquid, he and his family had left the States for Canada.

  And now this. . . all of it coming back, like some rancid, unthinkable offspring.

  "We don't see that sort of crime up here,"' his old classmate Frank Prentice had assured him during Jim's courtship into the Ottawa force. Up to that point Jim had been contenting himself odd-jobbing for a trucking firm. "We just don't see it. . ."

  Well, he should have known better. There was just no escaping it.

  "Sergeant?"

  Jim Hall turned slowly, his eyes still throbbing with shock.

  Chuck Wiseman, the coroner, stood heavily behind him, his plump face milk white.

  "Yeah," Jim said hoarsely. He kept picturing Billy, his nine-year-old son, and thinking: There but for the grace of God. . .

  "Can we move the body now? There's quite a crowd gathering out there"—the coroner indicated the window with a jerk of his chin—"neighbors, reporters."

  "Yeah," Jim said again. "Get it out of here." He glanced up at the ceiling. There was blood up there.

  (christ of christ what a godawful mess)

  From what those assembled could gather, the child had been ripped apart using sheer brute force, the torn halves of her left lolling at impossible angles in her blood-sogged bed.

  Jim Hall looked away as the two attendants lowered the remains into an oversized body bag and began zipping it closed. His rookie partner, Don Mellan, spun on his heel and ran, gagging, for the toilet. Jim listened as Don spurted up his single black coffee, thinking how grotesquely apt it sounded, underpinning the ratcheting purr of the zipper.

  They lowered her onto a stretcher and carried her out.

  And suddenly Jim was alone in the dead child's room, more alone than he had ever imagined possible. Slowly and without his direction his eyes roved the sunny-bright room trying to erase the darkly clotting evidence and glimpse the budding life that had done its dreaming in here. Trying to find something real.

  For suddenly he sensed—perhaps even realized—that where he stood was at the center of a void, not on a boards-and-tile floor but on a dankly cold updraft which at any moment might falter and let him drop, as it had for the murdered child. Reality was a skin, a fragile overlay, and beyond it swirled blackness without boundary. He stood in artifice, in darkness brightly painted. And it was just a matter of time.

  "Sorry, man." It was Don, leaning in the doorway, dabbing nervously at a dime-size stain on the leg of his trousers.

  For a swooning instant as Jim crossed it the floor seem
ed to tilt and fade. . . but the illusion passed quickly. He clapped his partner on the shoulder. "You'll see worse," he told the trembling rookie, grateful for the man's intrusion on his thoughts. It had been exactly this kind of bleak rumination which had swept him to the brink once before.

  They left the room together.

  In the vestibule by the front door, which was partway open and somehow leering, Jim noticed his own reflection in a circular brass-framed mirror. He flinched involuntarily. It was like looking through a watery porthole into the past, at a tired, defeated, lonely man. A man whose fingers one late and stormy night had touched the butt of his service revolver as one might touch an old friend. . . a friend with all the right answers.

  He turned away, savagely battling his thoughts. Inclining his head, he followed his partner outside into sparkling late spring sunshine. He wound his way through a confusion of reporters, patrolmen and chattering oglers, and climbed into his car.

  In a moving ambulance not five blocks away, Mary Bleeker began shrieking her daughter's name, over and over, as if the child could hear her from wherever she had gone.

  Chapter 26

  The reporter's lips were still moving, but the words were lost in the tidal roar of Karen's thoughts. At the sight of the stuffed unicorn she sprang to her feet and reeled back from the table, dragging the tablecloth and breakfast dishes crashing to the floor in front of her. She continued that backward flail until her backside rammed against a counter-edge, and the back of her head struck an open cupboard door.

  And through that entire reflex reaction burned the lunatic certainty that she had killed a child. Somehow she had run all that way, broken into that house. . . and torn a child apart with her own bare hands.

  "Karen!"

  A shape swam into focus before her.

  "'Cass?" The word was a sob.

  "It's me, kid. What the hell happened?" For a mind-shattering moment as Karen lurched back from the table Cass feared she had suffered the same lightning-stroke fate as her mother had sixteen years prior, a blood vessel bursting within the vault of her skull.

  "I. . ."

  A rational voice spoke up in Karen's mind then, cutting short what would have proved little more than a garbled response to Cass's question. Forty miles, it told her. It happened forty miles away. That's an eighty-mile round trip. No way you could have done it. You were asleep in your own bed. You only dreamed it. . .

  And what did that mean?

  "What is it?" Cass was still pleading. "What happened? Should I call a doctor?—"

  But Karen couldn't hear beyond the din in her head. Over Cass's shoulder she glimpsed the TV. . . a Playtex commercial. In a sane world, could news of such an atrocity actually be followed by a tampon commercial?

  A fit of laughter, not sane, built toward critical mass in her chest.

  "Are you in pain? Talk to me, Karen—"

  A grimace twitched across Karen's pale features. "I didn't kill her," she whispered weakly. "I didn't—"

  "Kill who?" Cass blurted, confused. "What in hell are you talking about?"

  Karen's body was shaking now, shaking violently, and something dug hurtfully into the flesh of her arms. The mad laughter drew back a little, cracking under the force of this new assault. She focused briefly on Cass. . . and realized Cass was shaking her, showing teeth in a frightened snarl.

  "Karen, goddamn it, speak to me!"

  By degrees, the roar in her head subsided. She became aware of an annoyingly repetitive jungle on the television. Somewhere outside a crow cawed plaintively.

  "Cass, I'm sorry, I. . ."

  She allowed herself to be led to the living-room couch, where she slouched in a boneless heap. Coffee and half-eaten eggs splotched the front of her nightdress.

  Cass knelt in front of her. "Talk to me," she urged. "C'mon, kid, tell me what's wrong."

  Karen's gaze drifted back to the TV. There was a beer commercial on now. . . beautiful suntanned bodies.

  "That child," she said in a dry whisper. "I dreamed its murder.”

  Cass's words were the only thing real.

  "I'll tell you what I think," she said once Karen had described her dream and frantically explained its connection with the newscast. "I think you had a nightmare—a real fucking doozy. You dreamt that you killed a child. What that means I don't know. I imagine your psychiatrist could tell you—"

  "No!" Karen barked, startling Cass. "No psychiatrist."

  "Okay," Cass soothed. "Okay. One of those books on dreams might say what it means. Anyway, that part doesn't matter. I dreamt once that I slit my sister June's throat, but that don't mean I'd ever do such a thing. The point is, it scared the crap out of you, right?"

  Karen nodded numbly, wanting nothing more than to have this whole thing neatly explained away.

  "Okay. So a couple of hours go by—and believe me, that's plenty long enough for your mind to play tricks on you, especially where dreams are concerned. Cripes, sometimes I forget em in the time it takes me to open my eyes, and only a second before they were as plain as the nose on your face. So a couple of hours go by and the details start to blur." She raised an open hand, staying Karen's unvoiced objections. "You may not think they do—you may think you've still got it all down pat in your head—but they do, Karen, dreams blur."

  Cass lit a cigarette, the pause deliberate.

  "Then this newsbreak comes on and you see a house that looks like the one in your dream—"

  "It was the same house," Karen protested, in spite of her desire for a sane explanation. "Exactly."

  "See what I mean?" Cass poked the side of her head with a rigid finger. "Tricks! Do you know how many little white bungalows there are in a city the size of Ottawa? Thousands, probably. You and I drove past I don't know how many of them in the past two weeks. Little wonder you dreamed about one of 'em.

  "Anyway, the point I'm getting at is this: Your dream was horrible, it got to you so deeply that when the reporter came on the TV and started talking about a similar situation—and that's all it could be, babe, just a similar situation—your tired, frightened mind said 'Holyjesusfuck that's the same house! It's the same house and it's the same kid!'" She shrugged, smiling sympathetically. "But how could it be?"

  "Yes. How could it be?

  Karen's conviction began to dissolve in the solvent of Cass's common-sense argument. Her mind, opting for the sake of its own integrity to ignore its perceptions, clung to Cass's words like gospel.

  Then she remembered something, an unmistakable detail, and that crazed certainty came galloping back again. Fear ran rampant once more.

  "What about the toy? That unicorn? I saw it, I know I did."

  Patiently, Cass restructured her point. "It's the same type of thing, kiddo. Mind-tricks. Look, you said it was dark in the room in your dream, right? Karen nodded. "Well what if the kid in your dream was holding a stuffed pink horsey?

  Or a bunny, for that matter. And in the dark, who can be sure of color? That's the thing about dreams, see. . ." She dug in her head for an analogy, remembering that for Karen dreams with images were a whole new ball game. "It's like good story. The story-teller supplies hints, suggestions, just enough to set your mind to working. Then your imagination takes over and fills in the rest. That's the subconscious, babe, something few of us have much control over.

  "So in your dream the kid held a toy. When you saw the one on TV your imagination just joined the two with an 'equals' sign. That simple."

  No! No way! I saw it!

  But Karen crushed that voice like a cockroach.

  "How did you get so smart?" she said, a hint of a smile quivering on her lips. She had never felt so utterly used-up.

  "Corn-fed, kid," Cass said. She slapped Karen's knee and rose to her feet. "Just like you. And after about twenty more hours' sleep, you're gonna see that I'm right."

  Sleep.

  "I don't want to sleep," Karen objected as Cass drew her up to her feet. "I. . . don't want to dream."

  "Think
nice thoughts,'' Cass said, leading her upstairs again. "That's the ticket."

  But Karen's thoughts were not nice. Not nice at all. Cass spent the next several hours creeping around like a church mouse, doing her best not to waken Karen. After cleaning up the mess in the kitchen, she installed herself on the living-room couch, where she plugged in her headphones and tried to let Elvis croon her worries away.

  But she could feel the TV beckoning with its single gray eye, and finally she got up and turned it on. Keeping the volume low, she scanned past the soaps and the game shows until she found the news brief again. It was more detailed this time, providing not only the victim's name but a panoramic view of the rear of the house, and the door through which the killer had entered.

  Cass shuddered as she watched, recalling the minute detail with which Karen had described her dream. When the camera pulled back from the kicked-in door to the reporter again, who stood now at the edge of the yard, Cass noticed a kid's swing, and a trike on its side. . .

  Hadn't Karen mentioned those things?

  And wasn't that kid's name familiar somehow?

  Whoa! Cass cautioned herself, getting up to snap off the TV. Whose imagination is running wild now?

  But the victim's name stayed with her, and she spent a long while that day caught up in an annoying mind-game of trying to recall where she had heard it before.

  Albert dropped by early that afternoon, on his way to a barn sale near. Arnprior. He hadn't seen Karen in days, and Cass guessed that maybe he was feeling a little left out. She explained that Karen had finally O.D.'d on the excitement and was upstairs asleep, recharging her batteries. Albert said he understood, and left a message for Karen to call him if she felt up to it later that evening.

  Toward dusk, Cass's concern for her friend, which had been escalating insidiously all day, threatened to spin out of control. Cass didn't have much education—she'd barely squeaked past the ninth grade—but she had a sense for things, a kind of country-folk logic that, by the uninitiated, was often misconstrued as plain pigheadedness. But it was a way of looking at things, of achieving a peaceful coexistence with the world. It was often narrow, certainly unscientific, and generally closed to argument—but it was one which had served numerous generations with backgrounds similar to hers. And right now that sense was bristling with alarm. She'd been so caught up in Karen's joy in the newfound faculty of sight that she'd failed to see what a fine line the girl was now walking. Karen had told her about the guy in Europe who'd lost first his mind and then his new eyes, and understood her apprehensions.