Eden's Eyes by Sean Costello Read Free Book Online Page A

witness the sky and the earth and the fragrant blossom, then surely God had touched her.
    Three weeks. . .
    Karen drifted away on the sound of the doctor's voice, uncertain if the words she was hearing came from him or from the poetic muse of her own imagination.
    "It will be painful at first," he whispered through a tunnel. "Perhaps even agonizing. For a while, you will fear the light for its ability to scorch the chambers of your mind. But gradually, shapes will appear where before there was only darkness. . ."
    Darkness.
    She dreamed of darkness. But a darkness with substance, slithering life, immovable weight. In the dream she could feel it folding in around her, smell its seamless fiber, and fear grew within her like a blighted fetus. She felt buried, buried alive and when. . . and when she awoke she was screaming.
    Screaming and clawing and fighting to get out.
    Three hundred miles northwest, in the mining town of Sudbury, Eve Crowell sat in her wheelchair before her son's open grave and prayed. It was eight o'clock and full dark. The funeral service had ended ten hours earlier. Bert, who sat waiting in the front seat of his car a hundred yards away, had tried at least a dozen times to wheel her out of there; but each time Eve had hissed at him like a rabid bat, and Bert had backed away. The sexton had finally given up and gone home. He'd left his number with Bert, who was to call him on the chapel phone as soon as Eve was ready to leave. He still had to fill in the hole.
    Bert ground another cigarette into the gravel beneath the open car door. It had been his last from the pack he'd bought just this morning. Normally a pack lasted him a week. He glanced down at the litter of butts, eerily luminescent in the hardening moonlight, and thought of grave slugs feasting. As he watched them, they seemed to move.
    He, stood up, rubbing his eyes, wishing it was over. He wondered now if he shouldn't have just left things alone. The boy's body would have died on its own eventually anyway, the doctors had told him as much. Maybe that would have been better for Eve. Maybe that would have given her time to adjust.
    But now. . .
    Her ceaseless outpouring of words reached him as low, unintelligible mutters. He turned and in the moonlight saw her gesticulating madly, tugging at her hair, pounding her breast. Part of him wanted to go over there and slap her till she quit. . . but another part understood. Let her have her grief. If it had to be so. . . crazy, then so be it. Let her get it out.
    Bert sat down again. He wanted a cigarette, badly.
    He waited till midnight. By then, Eve had begun babbling about bringing the boy back, summoning his vengeful spirit. . . and suddenly Bert had had enough. He seized the handgrips on her wheelchair, rolled her over to the car, and piled her as gently as he was able into the back seat. In her rage she managed to gouge him again, this time across the back of one hand, but Bert barely noticed. Once she was in, he strode to the chapel to call up the sexton, then waited in the lot near the car, ignoring Eve as she cursed him through the rolled-down window. When the sexton arrived Bert apologized for the delay, then climbed back into the car.
    He turned in the seat and glared at his wife, his words weighted with a menacing tone Eve had never heard him use before tonight.
    "Now you listen to me, Eve Crowell. I know that you're hurting. I know that it's hard. But I'm going to start up this car and drive us home. . . and you're going to sit there and not make a sound, do you understand me?" Eve did not reply, only sat there, stunned, like a slapped child. "Because if you do, if you so much as squeak back there, I'll drive you straight to Algoma Psychiatric and have them lock you up in a padded cell. Do I make myself clear?"
    Clutching her Bible, Eve regarded her husband with wet, wounded eyes. And even as she nodded Bert felt the guilt slicing through him like a saw blade.
    No, he told himself as he cranked