Eden's Eyes (27 page)

In the dark she couldn't see him at all.

Then he hurdled into that first dim pocket of light, elbows pumping, not risking even the slightest backward glance. He passed through the light in a half-dozen strides, then vanished again.

The next dark path stretched even longer, and for a moment she thought he had slipped into some unseen bolthole—

And in her bed, a twitching half smile brightened Karen's face. . .
      

But then he burst into the next cone of light. He managed one more precarious stride, so that apart from his lagging left arm his entire body was visible.

Then, like a crazed dog that has run to the end of its leash, he jerked to a sudden stop, his legs sweeping out almost straight under the force of his momentum. He was drawn back into the dark for the space of an eyeblink. . . then catapulted into the light again, only his head and trunk still visible where he lay on his back in the dirt. His eyes had rolled back in a dead faint.

A fist came down like a thunderbolt, striking his scrawny chest, splitting the scar like a seam. It came down again—and again—snapping the old man's brittle ribs like breadsticks.

—Again—again and again—

Then a claw like a hoe blade gouged through pulped tissue and staved-in bone and found an edge, levered it back like a root-cellar door—and pulled, folding the dead man onto himself.

Then she was up and, running again, eyes full of blood, the ruin behind her still twitching.

She screamed—

And in the bed beside her Cass felt the hackles rise on her neck.

(KAREN!)

Slipping back through that first pocket of light, Karen thought she saw something at the edge of her vision, something clasped in her own pale hand.

Something quivering and red, meaty and alive—

(WAKE UP!)

Seconds later she did wake up.

In a shrieking frenzy.

Chapter 32

May 23

Jim Hall Had almost made it to sleep when the call came.

"Jim? It's Don."
      

"Hi, partner. What's up?"

"We've got another one, man. Another mutilation."

"Oh, Christ." Jim hooked up onto one elbow, squinting in a streamer of dawn light from the window. "Not another kid. . ."

"No, not a kid. A drunk, late sixties. In the alley out back of the Albion on York Street." There was a ragged sigh.

"It's bad, Jim. Real bad."

"The team there yet?"

"Just getting assembled. An old lady called it in. Bag lady, friend of the victim's. You coming down?"

"Give me twenty minutes."

Jim was glad he hadn't had time for breakfast.

It wasn't the carnage so much, although that was bad enough. The old guy'd been found accordioned on to his knees, bowed forward as if in prayer. In the harsh glare of the photographer's floods he looked like a B-movie actor, a worshiping Satanist in a circle of blood. When the forensic team moved him, Jim saw that the poor bastard's chest had been burst open, the cavity where his heart should have been yawning gore-streaked and empty.

No. . . it wasn't the carnage. He'd, seen worse. The kid had been worse. What made his eyes ache and his gut churn acidly was the inescapable imagining of how this savagery must have been done.

He turned to his partner, who stood propped against a lamp post wiping blood from his shoe. The same question hovered queasily in the younger man's eyes.

"What do you think?" Jim asked him, trying to shift onto professional. "Are they connected? This one and the girl?"

Don Mellan's eyes crept to their corners, drawn against his will to the sprawl on the hardpack. The morning was cool, unseasonably so, and steam laced up from the ragged wound-edges.

"I'm no doctor," Don said shakily, "but I can see the guy's heart is gone. Ripped right out. And look. . ." He moved closer to the corpse, on its back now, stretched, out beside a dark green body bag. "Look at this." He pointed to a freshly healed surgical scar, only its lower few inches still intact beneath the gape in the chest. "This guy's had surgery recently. That's the way my hernia scar looked for two months after."

Jim nodded, impressed at his partner's observation.

"Could an animal have done this, Jim? A big rabid dog or something?

"Yeah. It was an animal, all right," Jim agreed. "But the two-legged variety."

He studied the corpse, more able to do so dispassionately now than he'd been with the Bleeker child. It was always easier with adults—they'd had some time to live.

The victim had clearly been a drunk: his tattered attire and spidery complexion proved that well enough for Jim. Apart from a few dollars in panhandled change, and a Sucrets tin filled with cigarette butts, his pockets were empty; he carried no ID, nothing to distinguish him from the next shiftless derelict.

And yet his face. . . what was wrong with that face?

Then Jim got it. He'd seen maybe two hundred bodies in his time, and all of them—unless the victim's features had been damaged by whatever had killed him—had shared the same blank expression. Or, as Jim realized now, they had all shared the same lack of expression.

But this guy. . .

He leaned closer to the corpse, staying with a raised hand the attendants who were preparing to move it. The eyes were still open—that in itself was not unusual. But there was a look in them, Jim thought, an imprint. A reflection, maybe. . . of whatever had killed him?

No. It was terror, Jim realized. Terror frozen into his eyes.

"Any witnesses?" he said, turning back to. Don.

"None," his partner replied with a shrug. "The old lady who called it in, name of LeGuin, she talked with him a couple of hours before finding him. Claims he looked pretty bad, worse than she'd ever seen him. She didn't see anything, though. Just happened to cut through this way, taking a shortcut to God-knows-where. She's around front when you're ready to question her."

At Jim's nod the morgue attendants bagged the remains.

A missing kidney. A missing heart.
      

"Where's that old lady?"

Don pointed to the end of the alley opposite the one Jim had entered by, to the nose of a parked cruiser. "One of the boys is baby-sitting her."

Jim hurried out to the car and climbed in back. The woman beside him, automatically fussing with a scrap-stuffed shopping bag, reminded him of a caged animal.

"Mrs. LeGuin?"

“That'd be Miss, if you don't mind."

"I'm Sergeant Hall, Miss LeGuin, and right now I've got only one question for you. The man in the alley—"

"Tommy Kelly, God love him."

"He had an operation recently, Miss LeGuin. Do you know anything about it?"

Bella narrowed her eyes. "You may be sure that I do," she said. Tommy Kelly got a new heart, Sergeant. Just a couple of months back."

After thanking the old woman, Jim climbed out of the car and started back into the alley, mentally roughing out a plan of attack. He'd start at the hospital, get the details of the dead man's transplant surgery, perhaps even talk to the surgeon if he could find the man. This second killing let some of the air out of his earlier speculation, although it still could have been a jilted recipient-to-be.

What else? He'd have to talk to the bag lady again, find out who Tommy Kelly did his boozing with. Don could hold on to her till then—

Something caught Jim's eye—a woman standing by a parked Camaro at the street end of the alleyway. Young, a looker, but obviously in a state of barely controlled hysteria. A relative? Probably so.

He started toward the girl, preparing himself for a story he'd told too often before. As he got closer he was struck by the blueness of her eyes, and thought that he might have seen her someplace before.

But before he could reach her she climbed into the waiting car, and its driver wheeled them away.

Chapter 33

Cass swung the Camaro off York Street onto Laurier, her heart bucking hard inside of her. She had no idea what was happening; she knew only that she was deeply afraid. She had expected to find the alleyway deserted—it was the only thing she could reasonably expect.

And yet a murder had been committed there, just like Karen had said. Now, Cass felt like she was sitting next to an alien, someone she had never really known.

As they drove, Cass tried to coax Karen into going to the hospital, to sit with her psychiatrist and talk this all through. Karen only shook her head. Surpassing her terror at all that had happened was the overpowering fear of having the doctors find out; because if the doctors found out then they'd take back her eyes, she was sure of that now—and there was no way she was going to allow it. They'd have to drag her away biting and kicking. If it came right down to a choice between sanity and eyesight, she'd take her chances with madness. Enslaved as she was by the sweet wine of vision, madness seemed the least of the havoc a return to blindness might wreak.

Karen had awakened at just after five that morning, clawing at Cass's hair and screaming insanely. She'd kept it up until Cass had been forced to smack her to make her quit. Time, reassurance, and a stiff belt of brandy got her settled enough that she could talk.

"Another dream?" Cass had asked needlessly.

Karen nodded. "It was horrible!" she said between papery gasps. "So real. . . like I was there. . . like it was me."

"Was it the same? The same as the other night?"

"No. Different. A man this time. . . an old man in an alley." She got out of bed and began pacing the floor, wrapped in her own arms. "Oh, Cass. . . what am I going to do?"

"What can you do?" had been Cass's helpless reply. "Call your doctor is all I can think of. Tell her the dreams are still going on."

"No, I mean what am I going to do about the murder?"

Cass cleared her throat, dropping her gaze in sympathy.

"How can you be sure there even was one?"

Karen turned and gaped at her blankly. It hadn't occurred to her to doubt what she'd seen.

But now. . .

"Am I losing my mind, Cass? Is that what it is?"

"Look," Cass said firmly. "Get a grip on yourself. If there really was a murder it'll be on the news, right? So let's just sit tight until then. Turn on the TV and wait. Decide what to do after that."

But at that moment Karen had clapped a hand to her mouth and whirled around, as if the enormity of whatever she'd just recalled threatened to rupture her skull. When her eyes locked on Cass's, their light was maniacal.

"The Albion!" she shouted. "Do you know it?"

"Sure I know it. It's a hotel in Ottawa, a real dive. Why?"

"It was in the dream. . ." She closed her eyes and pictured it. "A name over a door, near where I. . . near where the man was killed." She began pulling on her clothes, almost falling as her legs got tangled in her jeans.

"Where are you going?" Cass had asked in surprise.

"Get dressed, Cass. . . quickly. We've got to go there, to that hotel."

Cass started to protest, then thought better of it, deciding instead to humor the girl. They'd take a drive in to Ottawa—it was only forty minutes away—zip down to the Market and scout the alley out back of the Albion Hotel. And when they found nothing, she'd take Karen straight to the hospital, make sure she got seen by somebody. God help her, maybe the poor kid really was losing her marbles.

But when they'd turned off Sussex onto York they'd seen the patrol cars, an easy dozen of them, choking the mouth of the alley. And two morgue attendants, exiting the back of an idling van, one wheeling a stretcher, the other hefting an unfolded body bag.

Karen bailed out before the car had stopped and elbowed her way through the oglers. Craning her neck, she caught a glimpse of the corpse beyond the cordoned-off entryway, folded onto its knees—then it was lost beyond the milling officials. She glimpsed it again as the photographer's floods popped on, saw the dark circle of blood. . .

The world took a violent spin.

"I've got to see him," she told a patrolman.
      

"Got to see who?"

Still lightheaded, she tried to peek over the cop's shoulder. He shifted, blocking her view.

"The dead man. . . I've got to see him."

"You a relative?"

"No, but I—"

"Then move it back, lady. You and the rest of these morbid creeps." He grabbed Karen's elbow and hustled her back to the barricade. Gesturing at Cass, who was just climbing out of the car, he added, "And get this wreck outta here. This isn't a side show, damn it, it's a police investigation."

Then she was back in the car and Cass was pulling away.

It was six a.m. and almost nothing was open, but after a brief search they found a twenty-four-hour joint on Bank Street near Waverly. They bought coffee, took it to a booth by the window, and let it go cold in the silence between them. They had tumbled together into the lap of the inexplicable, and there were no words.

Time crawled, reminding Cass of her waitressing days in the all-night diner on Highway 17, those wee hours between five-thirty and the breakfast rush, when sleep came on like death and the clockhands crept imperceptibly through the sludge.

Karen spent the time gazing out at the mostly deserted street, her eyes glazed and unseeing. She had never been so frightened, so unsure of her sanity. There had been times as a blind girl when she'd doubted her sanity, when her mind had erased the tangible reality her other senses told her was there. Panic had come during these moments, a honed-steel emotion with the purity of venom. But she had always survived, relying at first on her parents and later on herself. And with time she had learned to trust her existing senses, to negotiate her world through them.

But where was the sanity in this? To which of her senses could she turn now for assurance? What in God's earth was happening? Had her acquiring sight awakened some latent mental power, some whole new sense? Doubting psychic phenomena did not refute their existence. She had been an eyewitness to two brutal slayings, and in each case had been forty miles away from the scene, asleep in her own bed. If it wasn't. . . clairvoyance, then what in hell was it?