Eden's Eyes (36 page)

Albert moved the girls back from the billowing heat of the fire. When they were clear, he removed his pajama top and began tearing it into strips. Karen watched dazedly, feeling a faint and absurd embarrassment at the sight of her father's bare chest. Kneeling before her, he wrapped Karen's thigh in a makeshift bandage, stemming the flow of blood. Karen looked down at the stab wound with a kind of numb disembodiment. She felt nothing. Albert next turned his attention to Cass, swathing her head in a snug; pajama-print turban.

Beyond them the blaze swirled rapidly higher. Its voice, like hell's own choir, seemed to fill the countryside with a tormented dirge. The trio stood watching in stricken silence, Cass leaning heavily on Karen as consciousness drifted in and out. In her mind, Karen kept seeing the madwoman crunching into the combine, hearing, her screams choked off—

She made herself stop.

But the hypnotic eye of the inferno brought it all spiraling back again. Now she saw the eyeless corpse in her dreams, and understood that it was Eve who had been straddling its lap. She saw the child in its final agony, and that enfeebled old man in the alley. What horrors that woman had unleashed. . .

The barn burned.

Deep in its bones, the structure began to give way. Beams creaked, then moaned, then screamed in splintering agony. In two or three places the shingled roof burst open and huge gouts of flame leapt out. In the barn's hot belly, flames crackled and spat like pistol shots. The heat became fast unbearable.

The wail of the fire-wind diminished. It was replaced by a nearly subaural bass rumble, a sound so deep it was felt more than heard, in the bones, like the low-pitched hum of a tuning fork. Albert realized what it was as a new sound was superimposed, this one rolling like thunder.

"Oh, Jesus, she's gonna blow!"

A strong farmer's arm slung about each woman's waist, Albert drew them briskly away. In his urgent grip, Karen hopped lamely.

The fuel in the combine's ninety-gallon tank had reached a critical temperature.

It blew.

A roiling orange mushroom of flame kicked the remains of the barn apart, sending chunks of metal and fragments of wood a hundred feet up in the air.

From a safe distance, the stupefied threesome looked on.

"Mel. . . ?" Karen said later, looking up at her father, knowing what his answer would be but hoping against, hope. . .

"I'm sorry, honey," the old farmer said. "She's dead. I found her back there on the porch. . ."

Like the cavalry, the fire department arrived.

Karen told them to let it burn. It was beyond saving anyway. The nearest building was the equipment shed, where Cass had found the combine, and that was three hundred yards away. No danger there, the fire chief agreed. As a precaution, he had his men hose down the area surrounding the barn.

But Karen refused to let them douse the fire itself.

Let it burn.

Someone had the good sense to call for an ambulance. It rolled in about five minutes after the fire trucks, dome light flashing. A reluctant patient, Cass finally allowed them to load her in and whisk her away. She was having real difficulty staying awake, and Karen was afraid she might have fractured her skull. An attendant redressed Karen's stab wound, after first examining it for significant hemorrhage, and suggested she have it stitched. He urged her to climb in with Cass, get the wound properly tended to in town, but the bleeding had stopped, and Karen wasn't ready to leave just yet.

When the ambulance was gone, she returned with her father to the fire, leaning heavily on his shoulder for support.

Neighbors arrived in a kind of slow procession, their eyes flitting in uneasy darts from the fire to the unmoving hump on the porch. One of the ambulance driver's had covered Mel's body with a red-flannel blanket, but her boots still protruded from one end. Before long a second ambulance arrived, minus the flashing dome light this time, and the attendants loaded Mel in.

Over the course of the next few hours, people began filing away. Unmindful, Karen and her father stood arm in arm and watched the barn crisp to embers.

Sometime later, Albert said, "What happened here?"

Karen tried, but couldn't come up with an answer.

The explosion had collapsed the heavy beams of the barn's superstructure; now, like the charred ribs of some mythical dragon, they jutted into the air. Only scattered small fires remained, scorching whatever was left. The bones of the combine could barely be seen, nothing but jags of paint-blistered metal and one huge, half-melted tire.

The day was a summery perfection, the sky an unblemished blue. Birds chattered playfully in the high maples, and in the distance, a freight train tooted a warning.

After a while, Albert walked slowly back to the house.

Karen stood watching until the barn was a smoking ruin, nothing but ash, charcoal, and grease.

Then she stood there some more.

Just to be certain.