Free Eden's Eyes by Sean Costello Page A

reality. The second came five years later, with her unexpected pregnancy. . . and it peaked when the child was born. From that moment on Bert was shut out, of Eve's life, of Eve's heart. He spent his days at work and his nights in bitter exile, in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall. The only good thing to come of it all was the sudden dissolution of Eve's interest in the occult.
    She kept the child with her always, sat by his crib while he napped, hefted him along wherever she went, papoose-style, in a canvas baby carrier she had fashioned herself, even took him to bed with her at night. She was convinced the boy was a saint, living proof of the Lord's Holy forgiveness. When he reached school age, Eve became at times so fretful without him that she would scurry up to the school, invent some urgent excuse why her son must leave, then spirit him away for the rest of the day. His delinquency seemed to Bert an inevitable outcome of this coddling, of this belief, constantly nourished in the boy, that he was better than the best of his peers, incapable of error or sin. Bert did his best to intervene, to instill in the boy some sense of perspective, to employ discipline when a situation called for it—but in these instances Eve made his life so unbearable, Bert finally, regretfully, withdrew from them both. Why he'd stayed on at all was an ongoing mystery to Bert. Perhaps it was a by-product of his own Christian upbringing, the ingrained, inarguable belief that once you had taken the vows, come hell or high water, you were in it for life. That and the lovelorn hope that somehow, someday, things might revert back to normal.
    By the time the boy reached his teens, he already had a police record. A neighbor's dog had bitten him, taunted into it Bert had no doubt, the bite itself little more than a scratch. Later that night, the animal was tossed through the neighbor's front window, skinned alive. Another neighbor had seen the boy running away, a bloodstained knife in his hand. This first act of brutal violence had led to others, the consequences of which Eve had somehow always managed to insulate him from.
    And there had been other things, darker than the sadistic cruelties, the petty thefts and the fist-happy bullying lout, some things Bert had come to suspect but had never quite allowed his eyes to see. But he had heard the boy—man, really—padding into his mother's room in the deep reaches of the night, heard the excited giggles, and later, the moans. . .
    "My son the saint," Eve had been fond of saying, her lips smiling with playful jest but her eyes full of deadly conviction.
    With the passage of time, only Bert had seen different.
    And until just recently, it seemed the boy's death had served only to sanctify him further in Eve's tottering mind.
    But one morning in mid-April, about two weeks following the funeral, Bert had come downstairs to find the candles gone, the crucifix shrouded, and a goodly number of the various plaster statues, brass icons, and holy pictures which had previously cluttered the house missing. And just yesterday, Eve had asked him how much that mobile home he had always talked about getting would cost them.
    Now Bert was standing in the dark, pantrylike entryway to the basement stairwell, arranging the stepladder beneath a burned-out light fixture. The damn thing was a fire hazard, always had been, and this morning Eve had finally coaxed him into fixing it. He had already been downstairs and thrown the main switch, stripping the house of power, and it struck him now how eerily quiet the place was, minus the hums and grumblings of electrical appliances. Behind him, her blue eyes magnified behind thick bifocals, Eve studiously surveyed a sewing pattern she had spread out on the table in front of her. Though glad to see her busy, Bert had no idea what she was working on. The big, odd-shaped sheets of material she had cut out looked to him like rawhide, or very coarse suede.
    Bert mounted the ladder