Sean Costello Horror Box Set

By Sean Costello

Three full length horror novels for one great value: Eden's Eyes, Captain Quad, The Cartoonist

EDEN'S EYES

On a cool spring night in a quiet northern community, a life of violence comes to an end. In a drunken brawl, petty criminal Eden Crowell is beaten to death and his organs are harvested.

Blind writer Karen Lockhart becomes one of the recipients, gaining sight after a lifetime of darkness. But with sight comes a new breed of darkness. In a series of vivid dreams, Karen witnesses horrors that threaten her sanity.

Soon, Karen realizes that what she’s experiencing are much more than simple dreams. One by one the organ recipients die horrible, mutilating deaths…and Karen witnesses it all with her new eyes.

CAPTAIN QUAD

For Peter Gardner, a young man fresh out of high school with a literal bank of doorways standing open to him, they all slam shut at once. A terrible accident leaves him quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down, shattering his dreams of flying, tearing his family apart, and ending a cherished relationship with his girl. Now, he wishes only for death.

But ironically, it is a brush with death which opens a new door for Peter. And when he 'steps' through, it is not into sunlight and promise, but into the darkest reaches of fury, torment and revenge.

So ask yourself this: "Do I have the courage to step through with him?"

THE CARTOONIST

Imagine this: You and two of your best friends have just been accepted into medical school, a coveted payoff after years of hard work and self-sacrifice. So you go on a road trip together, have a few drinks, a final fling before the long academic haul ahead. 

But a series of small lapses ends in tragedy and now you're confronted with a terrible decision: Do you take responsibility for what you've done and risk losing everything? Or flee into the night unseen, with only God and conscience as your jury?

16 years ago, Scott Bowman faced this very decision . . .

Now a successful psychiatrist with a loving family, Scott encounters an ancient derelict appears in his practice, an apparently senile old man with a remarkable artistic talent. Otherwise disconnected from the world around him, this strange little man quickly demonstrates an ability to foretell events through his drawings.

But before long Scott has to wonder: is this eldritch prophet predicting events? Or shaping them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sean Costello
• Release date: Mar 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513042251

Sean Costello

Sean Costello is the author of eight novels and six screenplays, two of which are currently under option to film. Depending on the whims of his muse, Costello's novels alternate between two distinct genres: Horror and Thriller. His horror novels have drawn comparisons to the works of Stephen King, and his thrillers to those of Elmore Leonard. In the real world he's an anesthesiologist, but, if asked, he'd tell you he'd much rather be writing. Recently, all of his titles have been made available as ebooks, wherever ebooks are sold. Sean is currently hard at work on several new writing projects. Get a FREE COPY of one of Costello's paranormal thrillers by subscribing to his Newsletter, an occasional update that keeps you informed about upcoming projects and special deals on existing titles. Sign up here: http://eepurl.com/bc06Jv

Book preview

HORROR BOX SET

Eden's Eyes

Captain Quad

The Cartoonist

Red Tower Publications

Table of Contents

EDEN’S EYES

CAPTAIN QUAD

THE CARTOONIST

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Books by Sean Costello

Eden's Eyes

The Cartoonist

Captain Quad

Finders Keepers

Sandman

Here After

Squall

Last Call

Horror Box Set

Thriller Box Set

Coming Soon...

Visit the author's website

SEAN COSTELLO

Eden's Eyes

Red Tower Publications

Sudbury, Ontario

Author's Note

What follows is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental and unintended. Its content in no way implies the author's feelings regarding organ donation. Though the procedure itself can be disturbing, as a professional I have seen only good result from it.

Death comes inevitably to us all; better it should come bearing gifts.

As one great furnace flam'd, yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible

Serv'd only to discover sights of woe.

—Milton, Paradise Lost

PART ONE

EMBRACING THE LIGHT

1

April 4

WHEN THE TELEPHONE WOKE her, Karen was dreaming...the soothing balm of her mother's voice, the fresh-scrubbed scent of her skin, the safe, enfolding warmth of her hand around Karen's. Though startled, she let go of the dream begrudgingly, preferring the death-cheating feel of her mother, who'd passed away sixteen years prior, to the cumbersome dark of her bedroom, just a thought's breadth away.

The phone rang again.

And Karen sat up in darkness, aware of the dream taking a small, almost physical part of herself away with it—there was a palpable tug in her chest. But the tug became a tightness as she realized the hour. A ringing phone at three A.M. usually meant one of three things: a wrong number, a prank...or bad news.

Karen waited for it to ring again—and during that interminable pause, the worst catastrophes she could imagine marched through her mind. Was it her father? A wreck in that godforsaken pickup truck of his? But no...what would he be doing out at this hour? Besides, she'd said goodnight to him over the phone not five hours before. Maybe Uncle Ike had finally died, his heart—

The phone rang again, its intrusion somehow more insistent this time. Karen's hand fluttered out to answer it...then she thought of Cass, her best friend, who'd moved to Alberta a year ago. Was it Cass? The way she rodded around in that Camaro of hers...

Karen lifted the receiver in the middle of its fourth ring.

Hello?

A crisp male voice said: Is this Karen Lockhart?

Yes. She had no idea who it was.

This is Dr. Burkowitz calling, from the Civic Hospital in Ottawa.

Karen took a deep breath and held it.

We've got a donor for you, Karen. They're working on him now, up north in Sudbury. We expect to be ready at this end by about five o'clock...that's just over two hours from now. Can you make it?

Of course, Karen said, a dozen conflicting emotions snapping at her heart. I'll have my father drive me down. She swallowed dryly. Where do I go once I get there?

Go through admitting. Someone will meet you there.

Do I need to bring anything?

Just your hope, the voice said.

Who is it? Karen said, blurting the words. The donor, I mean. I have to know who he is. How he... What was the word for the state the donor was in right now? How he died.

We'll tell you all we can when you get here.

Thank you, Karen said. Thank you.

Goodbye, Karen, the voice said.

Then there was only the dial tone.

She tried to find that hope as she dialed her father's number. For years she'd dreamed of this moment, this incredible chance. But when at last he came on the line and Karen explained what had happened, the only feeling she could clearly define was fear.

She packed in a kind of reckless frenzy, moving from closet to bureau and back again, stuffing into a suitcase items she would never really need. In her bedroom she knocked over the vanity stool with her knee, and when she hurried into her workroom to grab the manuscript she'd been working on, she elbowed one of her plants and it fell with a dusty thud.

By the time she reached the front door her heart was a creature of fury, battering the cage of her chest. She waited there for the sound of her father's truck.

* * *

A quarter mile away, while Karen spoke with the doctor over the phone, Danny Dolan crept down the stairs of his mother's farmhouse. The pattern of two long rings had awakened him, and now he lifted the receiver—carefully, so as not to be overheard by the speakers. He was good at that; years of listening in on Karen's calls over the party line had made him good.

When he heard a man's voice a coil of quick, jealous rage tightened like a clock spring in his chest. But then the guy identified himself as a doctor and gave his news, and Danny's rage withered into something dark and unmanning. Lightheaded, he stood hunched in the shadows at the base of the staircase and waited. When the line went dead, he replaced the handset in its cradle and felt his way to the front vestibule, where a pair of patched coveralls hung from a hook behind the door. He took them down, pulled them on and thumped out barefoot onto the porch, letting the screen clap briskly in its frame behind him. He peered owl-eyed through the night toward Karen's wood-frame, a quarter mile west, but saw only dark against dark.

In the house the phone rang again, another familiar pattern, and a start slammed into Danny like a hammer blow.

She was calling her father...

And that meant it was true. He hadn't dreamed it.

Several times the pattern of three short rings repeated, and for a crazy moment Danny prayed Albert Lockhart wouldn't hear it—he’d always been deaf as a post—and Karen would miss her chance.

But now the lights were on at Albert's farmhouse, a half-mile beyond Karen's, and the phone had stopped ringing.

Danny leaped off the porch and ran down the lane, cutting into the field at the gate. His stride through the stubby spring grass was long and he reached Karen's place in under a minute. From the willow at the edge of her property he had a clear, moon-sketched view of the house, which itself remained steeped in darkness.

He waited, his mind a whirlwind of dread.

Then Albert's pickup rattled into the yard and Karen appeared in the doorway, a suitcase clasped resolutely in one hand. She started down shakily, stumbled on the bottom step...then her father was there to help her.

They climbed into the truck and the truck sped away, its high beams knifing the night. Danny watched until the taillights faded to pinpricks, brightened briefly, and died. Then he turned and ran away.

The night swallowed him.

2

DR. SKEAD SAW THE donor for the first time in ICU at the University Hospital in Sudbury. Skead was the anesthesiologist on call. He'd had only four hours sleep in the past thirty-six and now he was cranky, feeling unfairly put-upon having to drag his ass in at two A.M. to anesthetize a dead man.

He waited until the big, hunched-over man at the bedside—the father, he assumed—had left, then he picked up the chart and got to work.

Skead didn't bother checking the donor's name. That was unimportant. What was important was the man's general state of health. That would determine how well he would tolerate the retrieval procedure. Once that was done, it wouldn't matter much anymore.

Standing at the foot of the bed, Skead scanned the medical history: white male; twenty-seven; single; unemployed; heavy boozer; heavy smoker; involved in a brawl out back of the Prospect Hotel on Elgin Street; acute subdural hematoma; admitted comatose, April 1, three days ago; hematoma drained, no improvement.

Sighing with fatigue, Skead glanced at the lean body on the bed.

Another loser.

Greasy black hair; blood-caked nose packed with gauze; lips swollen and raddled; endotracheal tube protruding from a gaping mouth, each breath fed in by a mechanical ventilator; bile-filled nasogastric tube; Foley catheter leaking bloody urine.

Not a pretty sight.

Skead noticed a tattoo on the man's left forearm, a cobra coiled around a slim dagger, and he leaned in closer to read the inscription.

Live fast. Party hard. Die young.

Credo turned prophecy, Skead thought.

Shall we get on with the nasty business at hand, Ed?

Starting a little, Skead turned to face Ken Tucker, the surgeon who'd be removing the kidneys.

Yeah, Skead said. No time like the present. He waved a nurse over to help transport the donor to the OR. Who's coming up for the heart?

The Ottawa team, Ken said, taking the chart and flipping it open. And there's a real major-leaguer coming for the eyes. They're flying him in separately, in a Lear jet. Ken glanced at his watch. Should be here any time now.

Ed regarded him curiously.

German by the name of Hanussen, Ken said. "You might have read about him in Time magazine about a month back. Ed shrugged. He's the guy who's done all the pioneer work in the field of whole-eye transplantation. Apparently he's had a string of successes over in Europe, decades ahead of anything we've got here. This'll be the first time the procedure's tried in North America. And I understand they've come up with a near-perfect tissue match. A twenty-eight-year-old woman, a writer."

A blind writer, Ed thought, bemused.

Ken returned his attention to the chart, leafing to the certificate of death, checking it for completeness. Thumbing next to the consent, he noted that it had been duly signed by the donor's father. Ken was a cautious man. In a case like this, there was no room for error.

Satisfied, he started away. See you in the OR, Ed.

Yeah, Ed said. Room five. Give me about ten minutes.

* * *

Bert Crowell had seen his son for the last time—lying whole and at least organically alive in his bed in ICU—and had felt nothing. That was the part which tortured him most: the not caring. He'd stood by the deathbed of his only child, searching his heart for even the faintest spasm of pain...but had found only relief. There was no sense trying to dress it up. His son had been a mean, self-thinking bastard whose life had come to a justly violent end. From the very outset the boy had lived at odds with everything his father held sacred and dear. Even in birth he'd shown his true colors, punishing his already frail mother through ten hours of labor only to suddenly pop out, minutes shy of the knife, robust and wailing. The boy's battle with the world had begun then, in the womb of a doting mother.

And it ended three nights ago, in a senseless, drunken brawl.

Sighing wearily, Bert Crowell climbed into his car. He drove out of the hospital parking lot and headed for home.

Dr. Tucker had called him earlier that evening to explain that technically Bert's son had died—that his brain was dead. He warned Bert that as long as the life-support systems functioned, his son's body would have the appearances of life, but that without it he wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes. After offering his condolences, he told Bert the hospital hoped to obtain consent for organ retrieval—the deceased hadn't filled out the release form on the back of his driver's license, so they needed a family member to sign.

When his wife, Eve, asked him who it was on the phone, Bert had lied. A problem at the smelter, he told her. He would have to go out.

They'd been forewarned of the gravity of their son's condition, that it was only a matter of time. But Eve had brushed it off, convinced her boy was just sleeping. The Lord's sleep, she had told him solemnly. And soon he will be re'wakened, cleansed and at peace in his soul.

Bert sighed again, his shoulders heaving under the weight of his anguish. He'd reached the traffic lights at Highway 69 South—the road out of town—and for a moment the urge to flee into the starless middle-night was almost overpowering. Then the light changed and he thought of Eve the way he'd known her, years ago, and the memory drew him homeward.

Donating the boy's organs was a chance, Bert had decided, to salvage something good from the wreckage. The doctors had told him to take his time, consider it carefully, go back home and discuss it with his wife. His son's body, they told him, could be kept viable almost indefinitely.

But Bert had signed the consent right away, without hesitation, excluding his wife from an important family decision for the first time in almost thirty-five years of marriage. His reason, although tragic, was simple enough. Eve had changed over the course of their lives together—changed for the worse. Her once moderate religious beliefs had taken on the sulphury flavor of fanaticism, and she'd drifted away from him, become someone he no longer knew or wholly understood. And Bert had known that, given her say, Eve would not have allowed the surgery. She'd have come up with some cryptic Biblical quote, paraphrased it in her own zealous, self-serving way, and damned the whole thing.

So he'd gone over her head...and now he had to tell her.

Bert swung into the driveway and paused, heavy behind the wheel of his aging Chrysler, remembering dreams that had turned to regrets. Then he went inside.

Eve was there, sitting stiffly erect in her wheelchair, the bandaged domes of her arthritic knees pressed firmly together, her worn, leather-bound Bible laid open in her lap.

You weren't at the smelter, she said. I called.

Bert looked down at his feet. I was at the hospital.

Is he all right? Eve said, her blue eyes suddenly bright with dread. Is my baby all right?

She was parked partway through the entrance to the living room, her grim face only half-lit in the darkened hallway. The light, yellow and flickering, came from the dozens of blessed candles she'd kept burning since the boy was injured. Behind her, Jimmy Swaggart crooned a scratchy, muted hymn on the stereo. It was almost four in the morning.

Bert paused in the vestibule, the urge to turn and walk away more compelling now than ever before. He'd thought of it often, how easy it would be to just cut and run, abandon his wife to her quotes and her tracts and her TV evangelists. But whenever he got close to actually doing it, the guilt would set in. He'd look at Eve and remember her as she had been—the wide, easy smile, that cute little notch in her turned-up nose, the round, inquisitive eyes cut from a clear summer sky—and he'd be powerless to do it. Something inside him kept hoping she'd go back to her old self, and someday soon they'd retire together, buy that mobile home, see a bit of the world before time finally planted them.

But in the haggard face that glowered at him now, Bert Crowell could see not even the faintest trace of the girl he'd once known.

Is he all right? Eve said again, Bert's silence catching at her mouth and twisting it.

Bert drifted toward her along the shadowy hallway, his shoes whispering over the worn runner. No, he said before the light found his eyes. He's not all right. He's gone.

No.

Yes, Eve, Bert said firmly. He's gone.

Eve's face wilted. She clutched her Bible to her chest and her mouth began working around meaningless syllables; Bert got an absurd image of his wife speaking in tongues. Sick with pity, he knelt before her and took her hand.

I have to see him, Bertrand, she said, sobbing miserably. He isn't dead, he can't be... She drew his face to her breast and Bert felt a warm surge of love for her. The Bible, smelling of dark leather, felt cool against his cheek. He's my baby and I have to see him...I have to see him now.

This was the moment. You can't see him now.

Bristling with fury, Eve took Bert by the ears like a recalcitrant child. "What do you mean I can't see him now? He's my boy and I have to see him. He's not dead, Bertrand...it's not possible."

Now, Bert thought. Tell her now.

But a part of him felt traitorous and ashamed, and the words lodged like gravel in his throat. In the ensuing silence, the grandfather clock at the end of the hallway bonged out the hour.

The doctors asked me to sign some forms— Bert began.

But before he could finish the clock struck four and Eve recoiled in her wheelchair, clutching her breast as if shot. Her head flew back and her face went gray, the cords in her neck bulging horribly. Bert, stunned by this display, was certain she was having a coronary.

Evie... ?

Oh, my God, she cried, her voice laced with pain. I can feel... Her body jerked once—

Then her eyes bore down on Bert like rifle barrels.

What did you do? she growled, each word tipped with poison. What-did-you-do?

They said there were people who needed his organs, Bert said, fear spilling over him like slag. So I—

In a lightning-quick thrust Eve's hands curled into Bert's hair, grabbing thick handfuls and twisting fiercely.

You did what? she shrieked like something prehistoric.

And with strength Bert had never imagined her possessing, Eve wrenched his head back until their eyes met. He tried to pull free but couldn't, his balance in that moment pitched precariously backward. His eyes watered as he looked up in fear and awe at his raving wife.

You did what? she screeched again, her ice blue eyes screwed down to baleful slits. "You did WHAT?"

Eve—

With lethal speed Eve dragged a claw across Bert's face, opening furrows that reddened and wept. Bert half rose, stumbled, then toppled back heavily against the doorjamb, giving his skull a dizzying crack. In the swimming extremity of his gaze, the big mantelpiece portrait of Jesus eyed him with quiet benevolence—all seeing eyes of celestial blue, heart naked and aflame in a bracelet of thorns.

Murderer, Eve raged. She jerked her wheelchair forward, digging a footplate into Bert's ribs, lashing out again. This time Bert deflected the blow with an upraised arm.

"You've got to stop them. Stop them now."

Bert shook his head, tears still blearing his eyes. It's too late.

"It is not too late."

Forsaking him, Eve wheeled sharply away, down the hall to the small back kitchen. Uttering prayers mixed with bitter condemnation, she picked up the phone and dialed in the flickering light of the range lamp.

Oh please God I beg You damn this killing heathen hasten him on his hell bound path wield your Holy armor deflect the fiery darts of the fallen angel save my boy Your servant blessed issue—

Then her whole demeanor changed. In a cadenced, controlled voice she said into the phone: Give me the ICU please.

Bert rose to his feet, his face a stinging agony where Eve had clawed him. He moved to stop her, meaning to hang up the phone on her; then he thought better of it. Let them tell her. Perhaps the shock would settle her once and for all. He didn't regret what he'd done. The boy had been his, too. It was a good thing. Good from bad. Couldn't she see that?

He started into the stairwell, shutting out Eve's voice as she made her demands into the phone. At the top landing he paused and glanced into his son's bedroom, lit eerily now by the grinning Daffy Duck night-light Bert had bought for him twenty-five years ago.

It was a child's room still—stuffed toys with black-button eyes, stacks of dog-eared comic books, water-marked rocking-horse wallpaper, a football dimpled from lack of air...

Bert pulled the door shut, nauseated by the room's musty breath. He slouched down the hall to its far end, to his own room—Eve had shut him out of the master bedroom years ago—and lay down in the dark.

Far away, Eve's voice railed on.

After a while he got up and locked the door from the inside. For the first time in their long lives together, Bert Crowell was afraid of his wife.

* * *

Once the guy was on the ventilator again, and receiving enough anesthetic to relax his muscles and dampen any reflexes that might otherwise occur, there was little for Ed Skead to do. Ed had been in practice for nine years now, and during that time he'd been involved in procedures like this on perhaps a dozen occasions. But as he watched Dr. Hanussen preparing to remove the donor's eyes, he decided that even a hundred such cases would fail in making the process any more pleasant to witness.

In the fashion of all accomplished surgeons, Hanussen had arrived with an entourage, each member of which would later assist him in the laborious process of grafting the eyes into the recipient in Ottawa. Terse without being impolite, he'd swept quietly into the room, nodded his greetings without inviting conversation, and set about his business.

The first thing Ed noticed was the color of the donor's eyes, a most striking shade of blue. Like Paul Newman's eyes, he thought. So clear and so blue they were almost silver.

He watched with sickened fascination as the surgeon began the first extraction, slender gloved fingers moving with deftness and speed.

The lids of the left eye were propped open using a tiny metal retractor. Then the conjunctiva, the membrane encapsulating the eye, was split and stripped away, making Ed think of peeled grapes. Next, the tiny strap muscles responsible for the movement of the eye were transected and folded back. Finally, the major vessels and the trunk-like optic nerve were neatly severed.

The left eye, freed of its mortal tethers, was plopped into a fluid­ filled jar. The jar was tightly capped and lowered into a bowl-shaped thermos. The pirated socket, welling blood, was packed with cotton batting.

The cardiac monitor registered a jump in the donor's heart rate, from ninety to a hundred and twenty-three. Noting this, Ed adjusted the anesthetic up a notch.

On the opposite side of the surgical drape, a nurse prepped the donor's abdomen with a brownish iodine solution. At the sinks outside the door, Ken Tucker and his assistant scrubbed their hands.

Without ceremony, Hanussen started in on the opposite side, glancing up only once to note the time. With similar ease he dissected and freed the right eye. He said something in German and a second jar was opened. The eye went in with a plop.

Ed felt his stomach do a deliberate rollover.

Now Ken Tucker strode into the operating room, soapy water dripping from his elbows. A nurse helped him gown and glove. He nodded to Hanussen as the man skinned off his gloves and left the OR.

Just like that, Ed thought. Just like that.

He looked at the donor's unknowing face. A scarlet streamer of blood issued from the corner of the left eye-socket. Cotton batting protruded from the wet slits.

Ed looked away.

Live fast.

How's he doing? Ken said, accepting a scalpel from the scrub nurse.

Ed thought: Is he trying to be funny? But there was no trace of jest in the surgeon's eyes. He glanced at the monitors. The heart rate had settled back to eighty-eight.

Stable, Ed said.

Party hard.

Ed caught the scrub nurse averting her eyes as Ken's knife traced with brutal precision a line from breastbone to pubis. White at first, the line quickly flashed red. The incision was deepened using surgical cautery, a concentrated arc of electrical fire that spewed sterile white smoke smelling of cooked fat and incinerated muscle.

Die young.

Ken extended the incision laterally, creating the illusion that a giant letter I had been painted in red along the man's belly. Using metal clips, he turned back and anchored a full-thickness flap at each corner, causing the abdomen to gape like a hideous, viscera-filled mouth.

Again the nurse looked away.

Disturbed himself, Ed glanced uneasily around the brightly lit OR, his gaze pausing on the clock over the doorway.

Twenty to four...Jesus.

The room was too quiet, Ed realized as he settled into his chair and began his flow sheet. There was none of the late-hour banter they normally engaged in, none of the tasteless jokes or endless gossip they habitually exchanged in an effort to buoy morale in the face of chronic exhaustion. It was this damned case, Ed knew. This obscene, mutilating case. It was creepy, plain and simple, even for those inured to death, as health professionals inevitably became. All of Ed's carefully cultivated instincts were meaningless in this situation...because the patient was not intended to survive the intervention. It was for a worthy cause, true—but Ed disliked it just the same.

Against his will, Ed's gaze drifted back to the donor's face. The guy was sweating now, beads of the stuff blooming on his brow, his cheeks, under his nose. Ed's hand itched to crank up the anesthetic—in a normal situation sweating indicated a too-light level of anesthesia—but he reminded himself that it didn't matter and the itch went away.

The cotton batting in the eye sockets. That part bothered him—

Slowly, deliberately, the donor's head rolled ten degrees to the right.

Jesus, Ed said, springing to his feet, spilling the chart to the floor. "Jesus Christ." The hackles were up on his neck.

What is it? Tucker said, peering over the drapes.

His head just moved.

The circulating nurse appeared at Ed's side, eyes fixed expectantly on the donor's head.

You mean like this? Ken said, dark mirth narrowing his jade green eyes.

The donor's head moved again, and this time Ed saw Ken's fingers through the drapes, nudging the donor's chin.

You sick bastard, Ed said over Ken's paroxysm of laughter. You sick son of a bitch.

Ken's assistant, a taciturn G.P. by the name of David Wong, joined Ken's crowing, letting out a series of spastic, high-pitched chuckles. Nervously, the two nurses, and finally Ed himself, took up the chorus.

For a moment the tension slackened.

Then: The Ottawa team's here.

Ed turned to the sound of the voice and saw the nursing supervisor standing in the doorway, a hand cupped over her mouth in lieu of a mask.

They're in the change room now.

Ken nodded and the laughter subsided. Let's get moving, he said to his assistant. Get the perfusionist in here.

Yes, Doctor, the circulating nurse said, and hurried out of the room to find him.

Ed, Ken said. Is this guy relaxed?

Still red-faced, Ed touched the donor's temple with the leads of a battery-powered nerve stimulator, a device designed to test the depth of surgical paralysis. At the start of the case Ed had injected a huge dose of muscle relaxant and expected no muscle twitch now.

There was none.

As relaxed as I can make him, Ed said.

Ken grunted and returned to his dissection, freeing up the kidneys for eventual removal.

The first of the Ottawa team entered the room, a husky resident in tight-fitting greens. He greeted the Sudbury team warmly, and Ed guessed from his bright-eyed enthusiasm that his boss would be allowing him to remove the heart tonight. For a moment Ed recalled his own grueling residency without fondness. His gut still felt queasy from Ken's sick little prank.

Now four other members of the Ottawa team entered en masse, setting about their preordained tasks with practiced efficiency, and Ed felt a glow of admiration. These guys flew all over the nation, gentlemen farmers, late-night harvesters of man's most precious crop.

Maybe it was the fatigue, but Ed found himself recalling a Monty Python film he'd see a few years back, a gruesome little flick entitled The Meaning of Life...

Two guys in dirty white lab coats appear at this rummy's front door and one of them says, We've come for your liver.

And the rummy says, But I'm not done with it yet...

Doctor, could you give the patient a gram of Solu?

Ed whirled as if slapped. Sure, he said to the tall, imperious looking fellow who'd just entered the room. The head honcho, Ed guessed from the man's demeanor.

Evening, Ken, the man said, peering over the drapes into the surgical field.

Ozzie, Ken said. I didn't expect to see you up here.

Oh, I like to make the trip every now and again.

I'll be out of your way in a minute, Ken said. The right kidney's shot—big subcapsular hematoma—but the left one looks fine. He chuckled. Ozzie, have you met Dr. Skead?

Turning toward Ed, the heart surgeon shook his head.

Oswald Harrington, Ken said. Meet Ed Skead, our weary gas man.

Ed shook the man's hand. And all at once things sped up to triple time, diverting Ed's attention from the dead man on the table and his own enveloping fatigue.

Ken stepped back from the table, dipping his bloody gloves into a water-filled basin but keeping them sterile. Once the heart was ready he'd have to finish his job, extracting the one viable kidney as quickly as possible.

Now, under Harrington's supervision, the resident took over, extending Ken's incision up to just below the chin. Years removed from cardiac surgery, Ed peeked over the drapes, his sleepy psyche easily entranced by the busy hands in front of him.

In a single slick stroke the incision was taken down to the sternum. Next, a pressure-powered jigsaw rasped through the bone with liquid ease. Again the odor of cooked tissue wafted up on gray-white smoke.

Noting an abrupt increase in the donor's heart rate, Ed glanced again at the monitor. He's feeling that, he thought, even though he realized it was merely a brainstem reflex and not a conscious awareness. It spooked him all the same.

Now the pericardium, the lubricated bag in which the heart tapped out its living beat, was incised and reflected away.

Bared to the world, the donor's heart thumped in earnest, rolling slightly to one side with each separate systole. Draped in a kind of apron of fat, it made a rather unimpressive sight in the white-hot glare of the overhead spots. No romantic associations here, Ed thought. Just a thick, muscular pump, jetting blood through myriad conduits in a frantic, suddenly pointless rhythm.

You can take over now, Ken, Harrington said, stepping away from the table. We're all set here.

While Tucker cut the kidney's final linkups, another Ottawan prepared a cold, potassium-rich solution which would later bathe the heart, paralyzing it in mid beat and facilitating its removal.

Jesus, Ed, Ken said with annoyance. Are you positive this guy's relaxed?

Ed tested him again. He's flat out, Ken. Really.

Well then maybe he just doesn't want to part with this thing. I'm having a hell of a time here.

Tiring of Ken's complaints, Ed fired in another dose of relaxant. He failed to see, considering the size of the hole in the donor's belly, how Ken could be having any trouble, but he'd learned years ago that it was better to coddle than to clash, particularly with surgeons.

Shit, Ken said, he's hemorrhaging. An instrument clattered to the floor. Clamp, he said to the nurse.

Curious, the Ottawa surgeons stepped in for a closer look.

Ken's hands moved with swift precision, delving into the wound and probing blindly. There was a sustained moment of tense silence, then a sound like a foot pulling free of a thick bed of mud.

There, Ken said with obvious relief. Got it.

He lifted out the small, purplish organ and carried it like a dripping newborn to the perfusionist, whose job it was to bathe the kidney in a preserving solution until the time of transplant. By now the recipient would be on the table in Ottawa, where this organ, along with the heart and eyes, would be going by helicopter very shortly.

Meanwhile, Harrington and his resident had already begun the final process. The removal of the heart.

At the head of the table Ed felt his own heartbeat quicken. This was it. Once the major vessels were cross-clamped, the guy was a goner.

It surprised Ed, the tension he was feeling. He supposed it was the presence of that old dark cousin, Mortality, which was doing it to him. That and his bone-deep fatigue. But this was a unique glimpse of death, he realized, glancing again at the donor's face.

A favorite expression of his father's, who before his death had been a Presbyterian minister, flitted unbidden through Ed's mind: Death hath ten thousand doors for men to take their exits.

Ten thousand and one, Ed thought. We just cooked up a new one.

The guy was brain-dead, Ed knew, and therefore legally dead—but what about the rest? Who could say with any real certainty, save God Himself, what was going on inside him at this exact moment?

Ed found himself stirring up questions he hadn't touched on since med school...simply because they defied answering.

Was the guy really dead? Had his spirit, if such a mythic intangible existed, already fled his ruined body? Or was it trapped in there somewhere, in some dark, untraceable cavern, festering into a gob of unsalvageable slime, unfit for eternity or reincarnation or whatever transcendence lay ahead? For Ed believed fervently in God, and therefore in some form of, if not life, then continuance after death. And all of that made this particular situation, this artificially suspended evolution from life to death, seem highly unique indeed.

The aorta's clamped, Harrington said. Begin the infusion.

Ed looked away from the donor's face, trying to switch his thoughts to another tack. He hoped he could catch a few hours sleep after this, because now his eyes were playing tricks on him. He thought he'd just seen the void, nerveless expression on the donor's face change subtly. Tighten somehow, as if...grimacing.

No way.

There was an empty stool in the far corner and Ed found himself imagining the Reaper seated there. Not the hooded skeleton of lore, but a grinning goblin with a cobra's green eyes and a hint of impatience in the set of its curving jaw. The Reaper waited right in this room, Ed fancied, annoyed but resigned...because tonight, Oswald Harrington would determine the instant of death, not the creature with the scythe.

Ed looked up at the monitor, at the electrical pattern of life gone awry. The blood pressure had dropped from one-ten over seventy to forty over nothing.

Any moment now, Ed thought, glancing compulsively at the donor's face. Sweat still oozed from the man's skin, which had already adopted the dusky hue of death.

Cutting the aorta now.

Quite unexpectedly, there followed a huge spike in the donor's blood pressure, way up over two hundred when by rights it should have dropped to zero. Ed looked on in awe as blood spurted up in a great red fountain-spray, spattering both surgeons, drenching their gowns and speckling their stupefied faces. Some of the stuff even found its way over the drapes, spotting Ed's shoes in dime-size gouts.

What the hell? Harrington said.

Freaky, Ed said. Fucking freaky.

Now, as it should be, the pressure was zero. Blood welled passively into the yawning chest cavity.

Suction, Harrington said.

Ed thought of vampires as the length of clear-plastic tubing flashed red and the room filled with a low rude sucking sound.

The scrub nurse turned pale above her mask.

Ed switched the ventilator off, feeling like the impish demon that trips up from the Gulf at night to steal the breath from sleeping children.

Scissors snipped, clamps clicked. Instruments changed hands, first gleaming silver, then streaked with blood.

Systematically, the donor's heart was taken.

Ed's gaze drifted helplessly downward, bleak curiosity compelling him to study the man's face for hints of his passing.

But there were none, save for the physical.

The skin hue deepened from bluish pink to pinkish blue to the dusky shade of a new bruise. The lips grew pale, almost ivory. The cheeks sank. The sweating stopped. The runner of blood at the corner of the left eye-socket had already begun to dry into a flaky red brush stroke.

Okay, Harrington said. Got it. Mark the time.

Four A.M., Ed said. Exactly. He marked it on his chart as the official time of termination. Then he looked back into the operative field.

The heart was out, lying on the donor's sheet-draped chest, now little more than a deflated balloon full of carefully cut holes. The surgeon inspected it a moment then handed it over to a technician, who packed it in a bed of ice.

Three minutes later the Ottawa team was gone.

Let's close 'er up, Tucker said. He looked at Ed. You should scram, man. You look like hell.

Ed nodded. Reflexes again, he thought, finding it difficult to leave ahead of the surgeon. Hesitating, he glanced around him. There was a single flat line on the monitor; he reached up and switched it off. Then, bidding his colleagues good night, he left the OR.

When he got to the change room Ed found it abandoned, the only evidence of the Ottawa team's presence a litter of bloodstained greens on the floor.

Fast, he said aloud, a hint of admiration in his voice.

He went to the coffee machine and poured himself a brimming cupful. It would keep him up, he knew, but somehow he'd lost his taste for sleep. Something about crossing into that void, itself so much like death, struck him as...unappealing just now.

He sat and sipped and felt like a superstitious idiot. But it sure felt good to be out of there. And he didn't care if he ever got involved in this kind of thing again. Who needed it? Christ, he'd had himself half convinced the guy was aware, feeling the whole thing. It was a crock, of course. He'd examined the poor sot himself preoperatively. Not that he'd needed to. One glance into the dead pools of those eyes had been enough.

But...

But nothing.

He grabbed a magazine and flipped noisily through it.

Ten minutes later Ken Tucker and his assistant filed into the change room. The assistant changed quickly and left. Ken poured himself a coffee and joined Ed on the threadbare couch.

That was quick, Ed said.

Aesthetics aren't a major concern in a case like this.

Ed nodded bleakly. Then something occurred to him. Oh, shit. I left my beeper in there. He remembered taking it out of his pocket at the start of the case and setting it on the heart monitor. He stood. The nurses still in there?

I think they broke for coffee, Ken said. I don't envy them having to clean up that mess. He gulped his coffee and stood. Let's hope that's it for tonight, eh, Ed?

Yeah, Ed said, watching Ken leave. You bet. He looked at his blood-spattered shoes. Then he went back to the OR.

The nurses were indeed at coffee; Ed could hear their nervous chatter from where he stood in the central corridor. Reluctantly, he trudged back to Room 5, pausing outside the open doors.

Jesus, what a scene, he thought with disgust. It looked like a slaughterhouse in there, an abattoir for the nearly dead: stained instruments scattered everywhere; a gallon suction bottle brimming with clotted crimson; blood tracked all over the floor in bootie-shaped foot prints.

Ed avoided looking at the still-draped corpse as he crossed the room to the anesthetic machine. He grabbed the pager, pocketed it, and started away.

Then he heard a sound, so slight he might have imagined it.

But Ed's ears were trained to pick up even the most inconsequential whisper in this environment. He knew he hadn't imagined it. It had been soft, a sort of...whicker.

Not wanting to, he looked at the corpse's face.

That new-bruise cast was gone now, replaced by a waxy, almost yellow paleness, like very old cheese. The features, which only hours before had been robust and strong, seemed ancient and unimaginably weary.

There was a reason for this dramatic color change, Ed knew, more from watching TV than from anything he'd learned in medical school. The patient's blood (corpse, he corrected himself, the corpse's blood), whatever small amount of it was left, would already be settling out under the influence of gravity, down into the dependent parts, the buttocks, back and neck...

What is that noise?

Ed's gaze shifted to the breathing circuit, still connected to the tube in the donor's throat. Automatically, he found himself performing a stepwise safety check, one he followed when suspicious of a leaky hookup or a spontaneous 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.

With a mortified shriek Ed grabbed the circuit and yanked it from its attachments, stilling the shifting bellows.

Breathing?

He looked over the drapes at the rudely sutured chest...unmoving, still as August pond water. He breathed.

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 unsettling feeling that 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 got there shortly after sunrise. By then they'd 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 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.

My condolences, Mrs. Crowell, the attendant said as he drew open the stainless steel drawer. It's...a very hard time.

Leave us alone, Eve said, avoiding the man's lying eyes.

Nodding, the attendant undraped the corpse, starting a little when he saw the wads of cotton where there should have been eyes. 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 woman 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'd 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'd made of her son. For an instant her clear eyes darkened to the hue of blue steel and the fury sprang up again....

Then tears bleared her vision and she sobbed like a heartbroken child. 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 made her 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 hadn't been a bad boy, only confused by a father who'd 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 Bert's fault, he'd pushed the boy 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 forgive her husband his imagined transgressions....

Had one groping hand not in that same instant found the Bible, hefting its weight like a verdict. She pressed the Book to her breast, barely 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 shall come forth whole, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life... Eve closed her eyes and paused, the power of the Word coursing through her like life's-blood. In her mind she pictured all the murdering heathens, then quoted the rest from memory. And they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.

Feeling fortified, Eve let the Bible fall closed. She leaned forward and placed a lingering kiss on her son's forehead, no longer perturbed by its frigid pallor.

Let me see thy vengeance upon them, she whispered into one dead ear.

And ran the drawer closed on its runners.

She turned, wheeled her way back to the door and knocked.

The attendant rolled her out to the lobby.

3

FOR A WHILE KAREN believed she'd been forgotten.

They'd given her an injection when she arrived, something to relax her, the nurse said. But it hadn't relaxed her; on the contrary. Now her mouth was dry, her insides felt crampy and her head had begun to pound with the beat of her heart. She felt as she imagined a condemned prisoner must feel as the rope snugs slowly around his neck.

Everything had happened so fast—the telephone call, the tense drive down here from the country, the admission formalities, the half-stoned stretcher ride through the cold and foreign funhouse of hospital corridors, the last minute queries of faceless nurses...

And then nothing.

Now she was parked somewhere in the operating area, lying flat on her back on a too-hard stretcher, nothing around her but noise. On hold. We're waiting for Dr. Hanussen, was the last thing anyone had told her.

Wouldn't that be great, she thought now. Everyone assembled, some poor man's eyes floating in a jar...and the doctor doesn't show.

She wished her father could have come up here with her. Being alone, feeling so disoriented, that was the worst. It made her think of the anxiety attacks she'd suffered as a child growing up blind. The hideous moments of dislocation when she would lose her way and there was nothing around her but darkness, when a single step in any direction might topple her off a crumbling phalanx into the yawning abyss of hell. During these moments she would stand rigid with fear and shriek her father's name, scream and scream until he came running out of the ink to hold her.

She wanted to scream for him now. She wanted to be that little girl again and cry his name through the air vents, hear his familiar footfalls rounding a corner, coming to her. She wanted him to hold her and rock her and make the darkness seem more bearable, if only for a minute.

But she couldn't do that.

God, the noise. The constant clattering din....

Getting ready, she thought, feeling the drug more deeply now, worming its way through the knots of tension, slackening them. Getting ready for me.

* * *

She'd actually begun to drowse when someone spoke her name.

Karen?

It's him.

She knew it immediately; his accent was unmistakable.

Yes, she said. Dr. Hanussen.

She thought she could hear him smiling.

The accent? he said.

Karen nodded.

How do you feel?

His voice sounded good, strong, capable.

Afraid.

It is good to be afraid, he said, his frank words surprising her. It is nature's way of protecting us. But we will face this fear together, Karen. You and I.

She felt a cool, smooth hand on her feverish forehead.

Then the stretcher was moving again.

* * *

Too fast. Everything happening too fast.

You'll feel a needle in your hand.

Fire exploding in her skin.

Take a deep breath now, Karen.

Oblivion creeping up her arm, its maw widening to consume her.

You'll taste...

(garlic)

Then a new breed of darkness, absolute, without texture or dimension.

She remained there for a long time.

* * *

In a separate unit in the same hospital, swift preparations were being made for the transplantation of the donor's heart. The recipient was a sixty-two-year-old skid row alcoholic named Tommy Kelly, whose own heart had been transformed over the years into a flabby, booze-soaked sack. Though afraid, Tommy felt lucky as he lay waiting in the outer corridor. In the recent past a small but vocal social consciousness group had focused its collective eye on the system of recipient determination. Their findings, though erroneous, received full media coverage, suggesting that members of a certain social stratum (namely the underprivileged) were being systematically overlooked when it came to recipient selection. Unwilling to engage in what he knew would prove a ludicrous argument, the program director decided to go ahead with the surgery on Tommy Kelly. He fully expected to see the man back again inside of a year, with a quarter million in taxpayers' dollars pickling in his chest—but his hands were tied. The organ was available, but a more appropriate recipient was not. The woman he'd hoped to graft this heart into had expired only a half hour before.

To Tommy, that meddling group was a Godsend. He didn't want to die...and he knew that without this transplant, he almost certainly would.

Presently, when a gowned-and-masked nurse swept down on him with all the compassion of an alien anthropologist, Tommy Kelly blessed himself.

And secretly looked forward to his next drink.

* * *

At the Children's Hospital across the city, a helicopter settled smoothly on the rooftop heliport. A door slid open and the perfusionist stepped out, the cooler containing the donor kidney clasped in one hand. He strode quickly across the tarmac, head bowed beneath the sweep of the blades, shielding his eyes against the dust-devils the rotors threw up. Once clear, he paused for the space of an eyeblink to glance eastward, where a thin wedge of crimson thickened in forecast of the coming dawn.

Then he hurried inside.

In a waiting room papered with tumbling clowns, Bob and Mary Bleeker sat in orange vinyl chairs and waited. A half hour earlier they stood watching as the gurney bearing their seven-year-old daughter sped along a white-tiled corridor and vanished around a corner.

Mary Bleeker's eyes were puffy with tears. Bob Bleeker's chest hitched with failing efforts to avert tears of his own. They did not speak, though their thoughts were the same. To have their child free at last of the dialysis machine would be a miracle, a gift from a merciful God.

The Bleekers had divorced four years ago, amicably enough, but even then the sole thing binding them after five mostly bad years of marriage had been Shirley, their only child. Born with a rare and progressive kidney disease, Shirley's love and courage knitted the three of them into an eternal weave.

When Bob's tears finally came, Mary took his hand and held it.

And the wait wore on.

4

AS HE WORKED, THE surgeon's recurring regret was that he would not be there when Karen first beheld herself in a mirror. He would be returning to Germany long before that wondrous occasion and, in a vaguely paternal sort of way, that disappointed him. He'd been present with all the others, back home, and the rewards had been incalculable. But there would be others still, many with stories more tragic than Karen's.

As a newborn, Karen Lockhart had been the victim of an acquired condition with a name as cumbersome as the disease was tragic: retrolental fibroplasia. Born nine weeks prematurely, Karen had developed a respiratory complication known as RDS, predictable in the premature, yet potentially devastating. By rights, she should have been transferred to a major pediatric center, Toronto or Ottawa, where the treatment of such problems was commonplace. But, through either negligence or inexperience, the rural doctor responsible for the infant's care had insisted on treating her himself. Hanussen knew the type. Young and headstrong, full of good intentions, they inevitably got their egos mixed up with sound clinical judgment. Karen's respiratory condition was adequately dealt with—there was no lasting damage to her lungs. But the high oxygen tensions used in the treatment led to insidious changes in her retinas, which inevitably resulted in scarring. Nine times out of ten this was a wholly preventable condition...if you were aware of its existence.

That was the tragedy.

Hanussen had a nurse wipe his brow. The work was delicate, so delicate. But it was going well, perhaps the best yet. His time on the first graft had been nine hours, a full hour under his previous best. And his hopes for this girl were high. She would see. For the first time in her lightless life she would see. He felt certain of it.

He worked tirelessly, already partway through his second shift of nurses, joining nerve-bundle to nerve-bundle with sutures so fine that without the microscope, they were practically invisible.

Seven hours later, it was done.

Weary but satisfied, Hanussen retired to the lounge, where he helped himself to a cup of hot coffee and put up his feet. Later he showered, slipped into a neatly pressed suit and made his way to the hospital's main auditorium. A press conference was scheduled there, and he was its primary focus.

* * *

It was pure chance that Danny Dolan caught the press conference on TV. He'd been about to go out rodding in his rust-pocked Charger when his mother hollered, Danny, come look at this, then dashed to the phone to alert the countryside.

The doctor doing most of the talking was not the one who'd called Karen earlier that morning. This guy had an accent, like the Krauts in the war movies. Half of what he was saying made little sense to Danny, but the gist of it came through toward the end of the clip, when the surgeon summed up.

The procedure went well, he said into a cluster of microphones, which to Danny looked like penises. Based on my experience in Europe, I have every reason to believe this girl will see. It will be a joyous experience for her, I am certain."

Danny saw Karen's father sitting next to the surgeon, all weepy eyed and grinning, and felt an odd thrill when the old man got up to the podium to babble his thanks.

Then it was over.

A cold feeling swept through Danny as the anchorman switched topics. He couldn't imagine a worse situation.

If Karen got her sight...

He pushed to his feet, trying to shirk the thought. The operation wouldn't work. It was never meant to work.

Yet more than anything, he feared that it would.

He went outside to the porch, where he sat like a man with a sick bowel. His eyes, hot bearings in their sockets, were closed, viewing a screen with Karen at its midpoint, approaching him slowly across an autumn meadow...but brown-eyed, and walking blind.

He watched until tears rained out her image, and the nausea creeping through him forced him to lift his head, open his eyes and breathe.

Then he dropped his head again, and saw her...

But now she was running away.

5

April 6

DARKNESS.

And Karen's first sinking thought was that the surgery had failed.

Then her hands came up to her face and she felt the snug-fitting eye pads that were taped there.

The bandages...of course. They had told her it would be at least three weeks before the bandages came off. She lay still a moment longer, listening to the droning clockwork of the hospital around her.

Then, Dad?

No answer.

Hello? Anybody there?

Nothing.

Moving slowly, testing her limits, Karen groped the edges of the bed in search of the call button. She found only bed rails. She cleared her throat, meaning to call out more loudly this time...but when she did, pain seared like heat-whitened pokers through her eyes.

His eyes.

The thought sliced through the pain and made it unimportant.

Not yours.

It was true. She was lying in a bed in a big city hospital and she had someone else's eyes in her sockets.

Knowing she shouldn't, Karen moved them beneath their dressings, ever so slightly, biting her lip against the pain the act caused her.

His eyes.

Had she really considered this before? Sifted it through the grid of her own moral makeup?

No, she realized with a sobering jolt. She hadn't. The prospect of seeing after a lifetime of darkness had eclipsed this fundamental truth. Even in her pre-op discussions with the doctors the donor's eyes had always been referred to as grafts.

But they weren't grafts. They were a dead man's eyes.

She decided not to think about it. Sure it felt strange, having parts of another human being inside you...like some twisted form of intimacy. But it was a wonderful gift, too, and she tried to focus on that. Were this sort of thing not possible, then death would endure as the pointless end to life it had always been. Death would, as always, be the hands-down winner.

But her mind kept drifting back to the man whose eyes she now bore, and, God willing, whose sight she would soon enjoy. Who had he been? She’d asked Dr. Burkowitz prior to the surgery, but his answer had served only to fuel her curiosity. The parents wish to remain anonymous, he told her. And there was nothing she could do about that. Still, the question burned. Who was he? What had he seen through these eyes, his private peepholes onto the world. What sort of man—

Karen?

Gingerly, Karen turned her head to the sound.

Dad?

Oh, honey, thank God, you're awake.

His rough, farmer's hand touched her face.

Yeah, she said, taking his hand in her own. Still groggy, though. Is Uncle Ike with you?

Nope. He wanted to come, but I made him stay home. Albert was rooming with his brother Ike while Karen was in the hospital. He'd left a hired hand to take care of the farm. He's still a bit weak after his heart attack. And can you believe it? He's still smokin' them damned coffin nails.

No one ever got a Lockhart to change, Karen said wryly. You know that, Dad.

I guess I do, pumpkin. I guess I do. He kissed her on the forehead. He smelled of dill and, more faintly, of the farm. "How're you