Eden's Eyes (34 page)

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 ankle.

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!

Karen's fingers, the lacquered nails prominent, gouged at the skin of her eyelids. Blood trickled, then coursed down her cheeks. There was no pain, just hot knives sinking into rancid butter, seeking the source of the rot.

As the last plank clattered to the floor, her fingers dug brutally deeper. . .

And his shadow fell full across her.

A mechanical roar filled the world.

For an instant, in the heat of the barn, the criss-crossing pattern of light beams faltered, then vanished from the opposite wall, blacked out by the approach of a mammoth shadow. . .

The Massey Ferguson combine burst through the wall with a splintering crash, reducing the barn boards to kindling. Jagged splinters of wood flew in every direction. Dust and chaff filled the air. A blinding halogen light beam pinned everything before it in a lurid white glare.

Death swung around to face it.

Music?

Suddenly slack, Karen's fingers came away from her face—but she did not open her eyes. She could see it all on her eyelids.

"Why do birds si-ing so gay?"

"Cass?"

And there she was on the combine, barely visible above the blistering glare of the spotlight, blood trickling from the gash in her temple. She had her boom-box jammed between her knees, the volume cranked up to the top. Her whole body wobbled unsteadily, and her eyelids drooped to half mast.

But she was grinning.

"Why do they fall in lo-ove?"

Spewing diesel exhaust, the combine howled full throttle across the broad expanse of the barn, rapidly chewing up yards. One of its cone-shaped dividers, thrusting ahead of the machine like a giant spearhead, struck an upright barn beam and felled it like a rotten tree. Cass meant to spear him with the other one.

Only seconds had passed, but as the combine struck the rusted rotary hoe, canted, and nearly stalled, Karen felt eternity grind open before her.

Cass gunned the engine. It sputtered, then caught. Gears groaned miserably as she shifted from first to reverse and back again, trying to set the big machine to rocking, to free it from its snag on the hoe. And although the shark-toothed knife blade still chattered, and the rotating auger blade spun, the combine would move no further.

Death turned back to its quest. Printed on her eyelids, Karen saw her own cowering body.

"Karen!" Cass shrieked.

I can't look I can't look I can't—

"KAREN!"

Karen looked up.

Into the mummified face of Eden, head lolling, eye sockets plugged with gore-blackened cotton—

And as her eyes shifted downward, as if in deference to the dark majesty of death, she saw another face, this one wild and utterly alive.

"You," Karen rasped.

"Oh, yes, me," Eve Crowell said, hitching up a rawhide shoulder strap. "Me and my boy."

She carried him papoose-style, in the oversized baby carrier she'd been working on the morning of Bert's comeuppance. His dead legs, kept bent at the hips by the carrier, dangled limply at Eve's waist, and his arms enfolded her neck. She had dressed him up in a sailor suit, also of her own creation, the sleeves and pant legs of which were stained with seeped-in corruption.

Slowly, her back pressed to the coarse barn boards behind her, Karen rose to her feet. She blinked through bloody tears.

"We've come for what's ours," Eve said, a jagged butt of collarbone jutting from her shoulder.

Just a woman, a voice within Karen informed her. Just a crazy old hag, half-dead from that leap out the window.

Run!

Obeying that command, Karen sidestepped—

And Eve moved with her, springing like a sidewinder, keeping her quarry at bay. She leered at Karen like a two-headed demon.

"Don't even think of it," she said.

And Karen understood the scope of the danger she was facing.

"You bitch," Eve spat, her arms looped out to her sides, penning Karen in. "You thieving, murdering bitch."

Over his mother's hunched shoulder, Eden's lipless mouth seemed to broaden in a gleeful grin. Almost solemnly, Eve lifted a hand to his face. Like a bowman selecting an arrow, she plucked the rancid cotton from his eyes. First the left, then the right. She dropped the wads to the floorboards, where they landed with twin wet splats.

Now both of them grinned.

"Give them to me, cunt," Eve said, extending a crabbed hand. "Or I'll twist off your head and pluck them out for myself."

Behind them, high in her perch on the combine, Cass wobbled to her feet and flung the boom-box. Bits of metal and plastic flew wild as the heavy object struck and shattered on the floor next to Eve's splayed feet.

Eve didn't notice. "You decide," she said.

But her words were lost as the combine's engine whined higher, shaking the barn with its roar, scalding the air with its wind. The cutter bar rattled like sunbaked bones, the auger blade whirred, the pickup reel chattered like a huge flock of gulls. The mammoth machine seemed on the verge of exploding.

And above it all, shrieking, stood Cass.

"Do it!" she screamed, pointing at the front of the combine. "Shove the crazy bitch in!"

The combine roared with renewed fury, lurching ahead a few inches before faltering again. Caught off guard by this abrupt motion, Cass pitched forward onto the controls, jamming the throttle fully open. She did not get up again.

(Do it!)

But Karen's knees failed her and she sank like sand to the floorboards, her gaze fixed immovably on the waiting holes in that head.

Eve Crowell reached down for her son's eyes.