Eden's Eyes

by Sean Costello

  But he had been here, right here in this room and about to kill her (or behind you, what about that?) and now it was over.

  It was over, it was over, it was over.

  Thinking back on it now, small wonder Cass had wanted her back in the hospital. Somehow she'd managed to convince herself, genuinely convince herself, that a reanimated corpse was traipsing around through the night, coming to get her, to squeeze the eyes from her head like seeds from an overripe cantaloupe.

  But it was Danny.

  Now that he was dead, she could almost pity him.

  Tired. . . so tired. . .

  And yet sleep wouldn't come. Or maybe she refused to allow it. Sleep meant dreams, and dreams meant—

  No. It's over.

  Feeling ancient and beaten, Karen rose from her coverless bed and crossed to the vanity. After a moment's rummaging, she found the bottle of sleeping pills in a top drawer, next to the dark glasses Burkowitz had given her an eternity before. Her fingers were still shaky, and she spilled a few tablets getting the cap off. The last time she had used the pills, she had not replaced the cotton batting in the bottle.

  She dry-swallowed a whole one and returned to bed.

  For a long while her thoughts continued to roam wild. Vivid replays of Danny's attacks churned through her mind. . . the child, the old man, the cop in the woods. . . Danny's leering face just inches above her oven, the sharp steel coming down. . .

  And despite the open window, she could still smell him in the room; Danny, and a faint hint of the gunshot which had so narrowly saved her skin.

  As she finally drifted down, Karen wondered if her life would ever be the same.

  Then, briefly, there was nothing.

  Chapter 49

  By increments, the rush of the kill was fading. It had been her first (though she had dreamed of it often, in purple shades of dread), and it was not sitting well. Sure, the guy was a psycho; killing him had not only been just, it had saved an innocent life. You could rationalize it all you wanted. But it left a taste in the mouth that nothing could sweeten, a sickness in the gut that refused to be budged. Implacable images of that spurting bullet hole, of the dumbly surprised look on the dying man's face, overmastered her fatigue, her desire to simply crash into bed and dream the whole thing away.

  But gradually, as morning lifted its drowsy old head, the foulness of it all was fading.

  And what a morning it was, Mel thought dazedly. You just didn't get them like this in the city. . . sweet yellow sunshine turning moisture to mist, songbirds flitting agilely from branch to rain-blackened branch, downy clouds scudding slowly away.

  Not a morning to be pondering death. . .

  Mel lay back on the porch boards, grateful for their solid warmth against the small of her back. She'd been sitting out here for an hour now, lost in thought, and her spine had begun to complain.

  But the sun felt good on her face. It seeped through her pores like a drug, reaching the storm in her mind, calming it. . .

  And soon, she began to drowse.

  In her mind, fuzzily, Met kept telling herself that if she didn't sit up she was going to fall asleep out here and the dull ache in her back was going to mature into a rioting agony and then was she going to be sorry, not to mention the sunburn she was going to get on her face. But soon, even this faint caution fell to a meaningless murmur at the back of her mind. She could still hear the birds, though their melody was hollow, as if perceived through a dark length of culvert. When the porch boards creaked to her left, she barely noticed. When they creaked again, closer this time, she flinched a little, and her eyes blinked open to slits. . . but a cool rim of shade had covered her face, and her back didn't feel all that bad, not bad enough to get up yet, anyway. And the sun was so warm, last night's violence so far away. . .

  Then the cool shade darkened and another board creaked, this one so close Mel felt it shift beneath, a stealthy, unwelcome weight.

  Something fleshy landed on her forehead. It twitched.

  Mel opened her eyes and looked up, the stench of death already burning in her nostrils.

  It was pleasant. Like the warm, narcotic reveries she had experienced in the hospital. Half dream, half hallucination. . .

  She was afloat, gently afloat, bathed in the light of a newly born day. There was a sense of calm like none she had ever known, of perfection, of completeness within easy grasp. . .

  (but oh the hideous silence)

  She drifted as if on a tide, a tide so warm and so gentle its substance could not be felt.

  She drifted. . .

  And saw her own house, from the brush-tangled edge of the woodlot. Saw it clearly, silently. . .

  Then she was running, nearly flying, closing on the house like a missile.

  * * *

  By the big maple now, and still Karen could not free herself from the tight grip of sleep. . . and yet not sleep. Her shattered psyche refused to credit as real the images she now so vividly witnessed. It was a dream, nothing more, the inevitable expression of her deepest fears, a terrifying purging of baseless terrors. . .

  She reached the east side of the, house and slowed, easing into a catlike prowl along the sun-drenched wall, close enough to see the flecked white, paint on the wood. At the edge of the, porch she stopped—

  And saw Mel's body, splayed motionless on the floorboards. She stepped up furtively onto the long deck of the porch, gliding silently. . . until her bulky shadow crossed Mel's face, and a grave slug fell onto the policewoman's forehead.

  Mel's eyes flew open in terror.

  "No!"

  Karen sat ramrod straight in her bed. Eyed the sun-dappled walls of her bedroom.

  "Mel?"

  Silence.

  Itchy with sweat, she crawled out of bed and crept to the window. On tiptoes she peered down, straining to glimpse the porch steps past the sloping edge of the roof. . .

  Nothing there.

  She'd been dreaming.

  Reluctantly Karen lay down again, closed her eyes—

  And swung away from Mel's gutted carcass to face her own front door. A foot blurred out and the door flew silently inward (no, I can hear it) and now there was no doubt she could hear it, but not in her dream; no, she could hear it below her through the floorboards. . .

  Downstairs.

  Karen's eyes snapped open.

  "Dream," she whispered to God. "Let it be a dream. . ."

  Then Cass's scream tore the air and Karen slammed her eyes shut again—

  And saw Cass lurching up off the couch, the heavy brass table lamp they had bought at Eaton's held menacingly aloft.

  "Run!" she mouthed behind Karen's shut eyelids. "Run, Karen, run!" The image was soundless. . . but the words ripped up through the floorboards, shrill and unmistakable:

  "Oh, Jesus, run!"

  Then that killing blur swept across the screen of Karen's eyelids again. It caught Cass with a sharp backhand and sent her sailing onto the glass-topped coffee table. Her elbow hammered the glass, starring it, then her whole body flipped onto the floor, taking the ghetto blaster down with it. Cass slid, limbs flailing. . . until the jutting corner of the end table stopped the violent arc of her head. Blood spat from her temple as the heavy wood corner split her scalp.

  Her body abruptly went slack.

  And before Karen opened her eyes onto her own sun-bright bedroom again, she saw the terror leave Cass's face and a chalk-white mask take its place.

  Silence.

  "Cass?" An inaudible whisper.

  (dreamdreamdreamdreamdream. . . ) "Cass?"

  The dry wood creak of a footfall on the bottom step.

  "Cass?" Louder now terrified. "Answer me, Cass."

  She blinked—saw the staircase from below—opened her eyes again.

  "Cass!" A shout.

  Another footfall.

  And another.

  It's Cass coming to see why I screamed and she doesn't answer because I'm still asleep and she can't hear me calling. . .

&n
bsp; Karen listened. Eyes wide open and trained on the door, she listened with ears made super-sensitive by a lifetime of blindness.

  Something was wrong.

  There were fourteen steps out there, just beyond the flimsy wall of her bedroom. . .

  And by the time the eighth one had creaked, she had it.

  Whoever it was on the staircase, they were not breathing.

  This was no dream.

  It was him.

  Chapter 50

  Suddenly Karen was moving. She leaped to her feet and ran to the door and threw the tarnished-brass bolt. Then she got herself wedged between the dresser and the wall and heaved, sliding the huge oak antique in front of the door. With each blink of her eyes she glimpsed the steps. . .

  Then the phone was in her hand and she was dialing it, struggling for the tear-blurred numerals. A moment later, her father's phone started ringing.

  (tenth riser. . .)

  And ringing. . .

  (twelfth. . .)

  And ringing. . .

  Karen opened her eyes as the top landing appeared, and a clawlike hand clasped the doorknob.

  Behind her, the inner knob twisted. . .

  Then the steady pressure of an inching bulldozer was applied to the outside of the door. Karen blinked—and saw its wood-grain pattern up close. The door moaned with the strain. . . then the bolt gave with a dry crack of wood. Four brass screws popped free and fell in unison to the polished surface of the dresser.

  The dresser started to move.

  Karen heard a sound then, a wavering, horrified utterance. . . and realized that it was coming from herself.

  The phone was still ringing when it dropped from her hand and clattered to the hardwood floor.

  She blinked (wood grain) then scanned the room.

  The window!

  It was already open, and it was all she could do to keep from hurling herself out through it. As she angled her right leg into the gap, she imagined her eyelids held open with surgical clamps, so she wouldn't be able to close them.

  But she blinked—

  And saw her own left leg, vanishing out through the window.

  Death was up in her room, and she daren't lay eyes upon it.

  Scaling down the ivy trellis, that one thought kept recurring in Karen's mind.

  I can't look I can't look I can't. . .

  A third of the way down, her left foot snapped through a crosspiece. At the same instant, the one in her left hand let go too—then she was dangling like a flag in a faltering breeze, her full weight borne by one hand. Too late, she remembered Mel asking for a hacksaw, and describing her clever plan. As she struggled to swing herself back, that crosspiece split and then she was scrabbling down the trellis, grasping at fingerholds, slowing a fraction before plummeting full speed again.

  She hit the hardpack at the base of the house with the flats of both feet. A pain like a knife blade jabbed her right hip. She dropped to her rump, teeth clacking painfully, and squeezed her eyes shut. . .

  Sheer curtains swirled in her face.

  That got her going. She climbed to her feet and started to run—but her hip gave out and she pitched to the ground in a sprawl. Eating dirt, she tried again, lurching off in a drunken hobble. Out of the corner of her eye as she cut past the porch she spotted Mel's legs, jutting out over the steps, the scuffed toes of her cowboy boots pointing at the sky.

  Dead.

  Without the slightest idea where to hide, Karen ran.

  But the terror produced a sort of clarity, a singularity of purpose, which, despite the urge to just sit down and gibber, focused the lower parts of her mind intensely, allowing them free rein. To survive was the only objective, to put as much distance between herself and death as she could. While the front of her mind went busily about rattling itself to pieces, the back bits gunned her legs even faster. Soon the pain meant nothing, and the strides she took threatened to strip tendon from bone.

  The nearest outbuilding, the old cow barn, was still maybe a hundred yards away.

  She veered automatically toward it.

  When the inevitable moment came and she blinked her eyes, Karen saw the ground flying up at her face. She opened them again, heard the thud of a body striking the ground behind her (Christ in heaven, he jumped!), then pumped her legs harder still.

  The wind in her face caused her eyes to water, making it impossible to keep them open for long. The first time she blinked she saw herself from behind, the size of a cartoon character, fleeing the big bad bear. The next time she blinked she had doubled in size, while before her the barn seemed no closer.

  She poured on more speed, her mind a mass of white noise.

  And when her eyes closed again, perhaps twenty feet shy of the barn, all she could see was herself, nightgown belling, loose hair flying, pale arms pumping like pistons.

  In a millisecond flash, her mind replayed a scene from a segment of Wild Kingdom she had watched, spellbound, on TV. In it a lion had been chasing an antelope, and was about to lunge for the kill. She'd been glued to the edge of her seat, not breathing, certain the poor creature's life was finished—then the antelope cut agilely to one side. The lion skidded off broadside, raising a thin cloud of dust. . . and the antelope bounded away.

  Ten feet from the barn Karen blinked, her eyes—and that hooked claw, its, hideous fingertips bloodstained, reached out and snapped at her shoulder, which now almost filled her vision.

  Three feet from the barn, Karen cut deftly to her right.

  And behind her, barn boards rattled as death missed the turn and tumbled headlong into the wall.

  She slipped through the open barn door, jerked it shut, and brought the lockbar down with a slap.

  For a breathless instant she was alone in the aromatic cool of the barn, long enough for the front of her mind to grasp once again at a thread.

  (you're dreaming goddamnit you're dreaming)

  Then a blow shook the wall and a rusty milk pail, clunked to the floor in a shower of chaff dust and splinters. A second blow, resonant as thunder, cracked the lockbar in half like a twig.

  Head down, Karen fled along a dark, wood-floored alleyway. The alley ended in a door. The door gave onto a haybarn.

  And Karen recalled something from her girlhood.

  She leaped the high step down to the hay-covered floor and scanned the darkened enclosure. Swallows dipped and complained in the dusty light beams that criss-crossed randomly through the cracks in the walls. An ancient rotary hoe, low and arthritic with rust, stood forgotten in the center of the floor. In the deeper shadows, another piece of outdated equipment hulked like the skeleton of something extinct.

  She spotted what she was looking for by the back wall, partially obscured by a moldy, knocked-over stack of hay bales.

  Back down the alley, the barn door exploded. Karen's eyes blinked. . . and she saw the tipped-over milk pail on the floor.

  Footfalls pounded in the alleyway.

  She sped to the rabbit run her uncle Ambrose had kept more than twenty years ago. Ambrose had been a carpenter as well as a farmer, and he had built the thing out of solid maple. Karen had loved the rabbits and had enjoyed crawling around in there with them. One day Ambrose had guided her to the entrance, a sliding door just big enough for a kid to crawl through, and had shown her how to open it.

  She found that door now and wanted to scream. There was no way she could fit—

  Death dropped to the floor behind her.

  Closing her eyes, helpless to stop it, Karen saw herself, bent over that tiny rabbit-run doorway.

  She flopped to her belly and started to crab her way through. It was tight, but the fear seemed to soften her bones. There was another door, this one leading out through the back wall of the barn; years ago, it had lead to an outdoor wire enclosure.

  Struggling her hips through, Karen shut her eyes—

  And saw the white of her bare, kicking legs. . . and that hand reaching down to grab one.

  It caught her by the ankl
e.

  And in its dead grasp, in the breathless stench of its rot, all hope of waking from this nightmare abandoned her.

  The hand yanked hard, Karen screamed—

  Then suddenly she was full of fight, slipping to one side, thrashing her legs, wedging her hips in the doorway. She was sweat-slicked now, hard as an eel to hold. . .

  And with one lucky twist she was free.

  Karen drew her legs inside and slammed the door shut with a crack. She crawled on hands and knees to the end of the coffin-sized run, and began yanking at the two-by-two exit. . .

  But it had been nailed firmly shut years ago.

  The thing started pounding on the roof of the enclosure, inches above Karen's head. Boards, weakened by dry rot and age, began to splinter. Jagged beams of barn light found their way in.

  Karen backed herself into a corner, a scream boiling up in her throat, an explosion of terror sparked by a mind jerked free of its circuits. It surged volcanically upward. . . then died in a madwoman's whimper.

  Karen blinked, this time in utter disbelief.

  The floor of the run had vanished, the vast canyon that now yawned open beneath her seething with the purple flames of damnation. Wails of agony curled up from its depths, canceling the hammering blows above her. There were faces down there, beckoning faces. . . outreaching hands. . . and bodies. . . white gutted bodies with entrails dangling like skirts.

  And one of those faces was her mother's.

  No.

  A fist burst through the side wall not six inches from Karen's face. She curled herself into a ball, the way Shirley Bleeker had done, and clamped her eyes shut—

  And suddenly her eyes came alive in their sockets. They spun and wriggled, pulsed and writhed. They scorched like coals, stung like ice, ballooned like overfilled tires.

  Above her, rusty nails shrieked as boards were ripped free and savagely flung aside.

  But that part of the madness was receding, eclipsed now by the frenzied life in her sockets. Her fingers jittered up to her face, bent and rigid as steel, and her head flailed madly to and fro. It was as though her eyeballs were crawling with leeches, slimy, blood-sucking leeches, boring hungrily inward, slithering their way back to her brain, and she had to get then out get them out get them out!