Eden's Eyes (33 page)

Dead men did not get up.

At six thirty-five, the first of the body bags was hoisted onto a stretcher. The ambulance was no longer idling.

Ten minutes following the departure of the clean-up team, Albert called to inform them that Danny had died. The bullet had torn a nick in his aorta, and he'd been beyond salvage by the time they'd discovered it. A half hour after that, Albert returned with Jim and Mel. All looked tired and worn. There were still a lot of unanswered questions, and although Jim had intended leaving it alone for a while, Karen seemed only too anxious to assist, perhaps hoping to finish it off in one fell swoop, then get on with her life.

They sat together on the porch while Cass showered and Mel and Albert fixed coffee. Karen talked and Jim listened. She described what she now saw plainly as Danny's unrequited love, a simple thing turned foul at a glance. She told him of the years Danny had been hanging around. . . and felt ashamed at her self-centered lack of awareness. In many ways she had used Danny Dolan, had perhaps even precipitated some part of this hideous disaster herself.

In the car on the road back to Ottawa, Jim tried again to construct a motive, one which might seem logical to the killer's mind. Mel had said Danny had been about to stab Karen's eyes, apparently intent on rendering her blind again. In his deranged mind, that would restore things to the way they had been, the way he wanted them to be once again. That much Jim could accept.

But killing the others? Ripping their organs out?

Then it occurred to him. What Danny was killing was not the child or the wino, but the organs themselves. His beef was with a dead man. . . or a mostly dead man. What Danny craved most was to hurt Eden, for what he had given to Karen, for the havoc that gift had created in his own lifelong fantasy. But how did you kill a dead man?

You didn't.

But if you could get your hands on chunks of him, living chunks. . . why, then you could hack and stomp and. . .

Jim turned on the car stereo. He turned it on loud.

To everyone's pleased surprise, Mel asked if she could hang around for a day or so. She had some down-time coming, and admitted that the prospect of spending it in her airless, apartment in Ottawa, particularly in light of recent events, was a gloomy one. Besides, arthritic or not, Eve Crowell was still unaccounted for and thus still potentially dangerous, a fact which Mel had discussed with Jim during the drive back from the hospital. It wouldn't hurt to have someone around until the woman was collared. Stated mildly, her taste in wallpaper was unsettling.

By eight a.m., everyone had agreed that sleep was foremost in order. Karen, who had by-this time beaten down the last stray thought of marauding dead men, believed that she actually might sleep for a week. Just lie there like a big old grizzly and snooze until the seasons changed. . . until this season of madness grew as tranquil as blindness had been.

This thought surprised her, shocked her even. She, had never imagined missing a single aspect of blindness, and prayed that one day she could savor that same tranquillity with sight.

After much fussing and kissing and hugging, Albert climbed into his truck and rattled his way home. Cass lay down on the couch and instantly passed out; she had drizzled down more brandy than Karen had thought compatible with life. Karen sat with Mel on the porch for a while, watching the day come up, then she, too made her way upstairs, leaving Mel alone with her thoughts.

Only now did she notice the stale odor of her room. The sweaty reek of her dreams, of her days-old fear. And of Danny. Beside her bed, she noticed the gash in the floor where his knife had lodged, and gooseflesh flared like a nettle rash. Thankfully, the police had picked the place clean, removing the knife and the tiny whetstone in its worn leather pouch that had slipped from Danny's pocket when he pitched in a heap across her legs.

Karen closed her bedroom door, then crossed to the window and heaved it up wide. After flooding her lungs with crisp morning air, she moved to the bed and stripped off the sheets. Too whipped to remake it, she lay on her back on the bare mattress and stared at the scrolled-tin ceiling.

Danny. . .

Doubt insinuated itself harshly.

Come on, you don't really believe—

"Damn right I do," Karen said aloud.

Why he'd killed the others, she didn't know. Why she had been linked with him so intimately was a similar mystery, one she would be unlikely ever to understand.

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. . .

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.