Eden's Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

disconnect.
    Back along three feet of corrugated tubing, through a mixing chamber, up along a separate length of tubing to the ventilator bellows. . .
    The bellows was moving, up and down, ever so slightly.
    Uttering a small, mortified shriek, Ed Skead snatched the circuit and ripped it from its link with the corpse, stilling the shifting bellows.
    Breathing?
    He gaped over the drapes at the rudely sutured chest. . . unmoving, still as August pond water. He sighed.
    Couldn't be, he thought giddily. This, guy's cooked. Just a fluky flow pattern in the gas line. Yeah. Some sort of rhythmic stutter in the flow. He'd seen it before, with, nothing hooked to the circuit at all.
    Ed left the room without looking back. He didn't want to see that slack yellow face again, not ever.
    But the whole way out to the change-room, he got the uncanny feeling someone was walking behind him. Too close behind him.
    Unable to console herself at home, Eve Crowell took a cab to the University Hospital. She arrived there shortly after sunrise. By then, then had already transferred her son's remains to the morgue. She managed to bottle her fury—although as the morgue attendant approached her, the urge to claw at his face was a compelling one. But this close to her son, the fury seemed unimportant. She could deal with that later. Oh, yes, there would be hell to pay later—plenty of it. Right now, though, she needed her peace of mind.
    She needed to pray.
    "I'm sorry, Mrs. Crowell," the attendant said as he drew open the stainless steel drawer. "It's. . . a very hard time."
    "Leave us alone," Eve said tonelessly, avoiding the man's lying eyes.
    Nodding, the attendant undraped the corpse, starting a little when he noticed the wads of cotton where the eyes should have been. He'd seen this sort of thing before, but it never failed to rattle him. He backed away, as, repulsed by this peculiar, flint-eyed lady as he was by the corpse. Her bent, overweight body seemed coiled in that wheelchair. . . like a snake's.
    "Just knock when you're done," he told her, indicating the door they had entered by. He waited a moment for a response, then moved quietly away when none was forthcoming. The door snicked shut behind him.
    Trembling with disbelief, Eve gazed into the coffin-length drawer, at the ruin they had made of her son. For an instant, her clear eyes darkened to the hue of blue steel, and the fury sprang up once again. . . then tears bleared her vision, and she sobbed like a frightened child.
    "Oh, my poor, precious baby," she moaned. "How could they do this to you? You were sleeping. . . They took you in your sleep. . ."
    A hand flitted up from Eve's lap like a startled bird, hesitated, then caressed her son's lifeless cheek. Its coldness caused her to shudder.
    And for the first time in a life of unwavering faith, Eve Crowell felt lost. Lost and utterly helpless. In that moment she saw that her son was dead, understood that his life was over and that she and Bert must go on. In that moment she looked back on his life as one must, with love and cleansing forgiveness. He had not been a bad boy, only confused by a father who had expected too much. He was a gentle soul really, a lonely child who'd been drawn into sin much as Eve had herself, by the raptures of the flesh, the sweet euphoria of alcohol. It was Bertrand's fault, he had pushed too hard, kept back his love, blamed his son for his own failure as a father.
    But in that moment Eve might have been able to go on, perhaps even forgiven her husband his imagined transgressions. . .
    Had one groping hand not in that same moment found the Bible, and hefted its weight like a verdict. She pressed the Book to her breast, scarcely able to breathe as its leather-bound wrath pulsed through her.
    She flipped it open at random. And read.
    "And though worms destroy this body, yet in his flesh shall he see God. Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and