Bloodeye (10 page)

“Got to get him out,” said Keane to himself.

Teresa was silent, for a moment, until Keane opened the cupboard above the sink. His reflection was replaced with toothbrush and paste, aftershave, shaving foam, deodorant, and a razor.

Keane took the razor.

Keane…no. Don’t do this. It’s not you! Brother Shadow is not you…don’t…

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right.”

Just got to get him out. Get the fucker out.

Keane put the razor on the linoleum floor and stamped down on it, hard, with the heel of his shit-stained work boots.

The plastic shattered. He pulled one of the four blades from the mess on the floor and looked and the metal glinting in the light pouring through the small bathroom window’s frosted glass.

Baby, don’t.
Crying, now.

I’m not killing myself,
he told her.

“Just taking a look. One way or the other…”

Keane shrugged.

“He’s been hiding long enough.”

And he began to cut.

42

The first cut was ragged because he was frowning, because it hurt. It wasn’t quite ideal. Not like the Eye of Horus, but something far simpler and purer. A line above, the ragged first cut. He quit frowning and made the smoother cut below, ignoring the blood. Finally, the blood pouring freely, the harder cuts in the middle for the iris.

Finished, he dropped the blade into the red sink with his shaking hand. Blood ran down his nose in rivulets to splash into the sink.

And he looked into the mirror again. Stared hard and a crazed man stared back at him. But he couldn’t see into his soul. There was nothing there. Just a crazy man, spewing bright red blood on his own face, a lunatic who’d cut an eye on his own forehead with a razor, thinking he could see demons in his soul.

He closed his eyes against anger so deep it hurt.

“Oh,” he said, then, “Oh God…”

Because with his eyes closed, the blood eye opened and a world of shadows was his to see.

43

And, at last, he could see her again. Teresa. She stood at his shoulder, real as she’d been alive.

He turned away from the sight of her in the mirror. Mortal eyes closed and his blood eye open, he saw her as she couldn’t show herself in the darkness of the attic.

She bore the scars, still, she’d suffered in death, though she stood unaided. She was entirely naked.

Keane could barely look on her, though. It took all his will not to open his eyes and send her spirit away.

Teeth marks where chunks of her legs had been chewed on, deep gouges where Brother Shadow had gouged and torn at her…all while he’d been unconscious, while she’d slept.

He’d promised she wouldn’t feel a thing.

Teresa bore his scrutiny with patience.

“It was my fault.”

She nodded. Shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter now. I’m dead, Keane. I’m not coming back. Neither are you. You know that, right? You come to this side, there’s no going back. You’re in the underworld, baby.”

“Is that what this is? Is this what I see?”

She nodded again. “This is where death abides. In the shadows of the living.”

“Baby, I’m so sorry.”

“You didn’t do it, honey. You brought him. He’s in you, but he’s not you.”

“My shadow brother.”

“Brother Shadow.”

“He’s death.”

Teresa nodded one last time, kissed him on the cheek. He saw her shift to move in with his blood eye, and felt her cold, dead lips on his bristled, tanned jaw.

“He’s your death, Keane. Own it. You can’t win otherwise.”

“I can’t beat him. He’s made of shadow…I tried. Twice.” He didn’t ask if she remembered. It would have been rude, stupid, even. She remembered. Of course she did. She bore the scars still even in the underworld.

“Then do the best you can, honey. Force a draw.”

He opened his eyes and the bathroom was there, dim in the setting sun. Teresa was not.

Force a draw.

He wiped some of the blood from his eyes absently. Stared at himself in the mirror with his real eyes. Then he grinned, like he had that very morning.

A draw.

“Okay,” he said, and went into the bedroom to get changed from his work clothes.

44

Shorts, T-shirt, socks, sneakers. No watch. Never a watch.

Because it didn’t matter how long he was out for, or where he went. This time he didn’t put on Vaseline, either. It wasn’t going to matter if he bled from his groin or his nipples. He wasn’t going running again after this one.

VIII. Run

Runners run because they must. It is as much an obsession as collections of things, or music in all its forms, words, sex, dancing, food, cigarettes and alcohol.

You run to live.

Now you run to die while with your last breath you seek out the void, with your blood eye and your sneakers on your feet.

There is no one else who can set it right.

You’re a man. You’ll set it right. You’ll chase down the shadows, run them down, leave them nowhere within or without to hide away.

You’ll run, because you must. You’ll run, and it doesn’t matter how long, or how hard, or where you go, because this is it. This. So run.

Run.

45

The heat was hard, even though the night was late when Keane closed the front door to his flat. He didn’t lock it, or take a key. Didn’t need to. He wasn’t coming back.

He turned around and saw, really saw, the world. For the first time, a world that no one else, maybe ever, had seen.

Perhaps those dead people, with the third eye, had died without seeing it, too. Of course they had. The eye had been carved after death. They hadn’t seen a thing of the really real world.

The underworld, laid atop this overworld he knew so well. The underworld, guarded by that big black dog. But he was here to beat the dog, to escape the well, to smash down the walls of the abyss.

Cerberus. Was that the black dog’s name?

Did it matter? Could be Rex or Rover, and no, Keane figured—it didn’t matter at all.

The shadows juddered in places, flowed smooth and slow in others, but all independently of their makers, their overworld counterparts. His own?

It wasn’t there. Brother Shadow wasn’t with him.

He cast no shadow.

Because Brother Shadow was there, waiting, wasn’t he?

There. In the void. Waiting for Keane and the end.

“Coming, Brother. I’m coming,” he said and couldn’t stop himself from grinning. A shadow-less man with a blood eye in his forehead, grinning at a world full of shadows.

46

That fuck-you grin, maybe a fuck-me grin, on his face, Keane headed for…nowhere.

He set out for nowhere on the same path as he always did. The one that you tread by putting one foot in front of the other.

IX. The Void

There is no end. You know this. The underworld and the overworld exist here, now, and evermore. Shadows and shades of memories lost, the living, the inanimate, it is all in the present. You know this because you see it.

Eyes open, it is just an ordinary world. But through your blood eye? The eye of your soul?

Everything is
everything
.

Blink and it’s gone. Got to keep that eye open, you think. Your real eye. The one you’ve been looking for all along. Because that eye…that’s the only way to see into the void. To find a way in. You close your eyes…and see.

47

Darkness was everywhere. With his eyes open, it was a simple kind of darkness through which he ran. Streetlights and a minimum of starlight. A thin strip of the moon.

With his eyes closed, then…God…then…

Shadows dancing, swirling like smoke. Shuddering like a climax. Sliding, devouring, smiling with no faces, lumbering great beastly shadows of trucks and big vans or dainty and delicate shadows silently yip-yapping around dogs and cats and the small animals of the night. Shadows drunk on shadow-fumes and the sickness of the world that spewed into the still, solid night air.

Keane ran through the shade and it parted for him. It knew him.

Brother Shadow.

He
was Brother Shadow.

I am him,
he thought.
And he’s waiting for me.

He ran to meet him, where he knew he waited. In the void, with a cold and crisp mug that would taste just like oblivion for the winner of this fucked-up race he ran alone.

Feet pounding pavement and road, making little noise. Breath coming in steady, unhurried puffs.

A spring in his step, like his body knew this was it.

This was the race he’d been training for. Time, distance, pace…didn’t matter. All that mattered was when…when he’d reach the wall of this gigantic black abyss through which he ran.

When he hit that wall and broke the fucker down.

He ran, eyes closed, watching the shadowland at play and rest in the dim night lights. Ran, not thinking or blank but untiring, unhurried.

Ran until he found it. The wall before the void.

And it was high. Endlessly high. Thick and black, dripping moist rock like the wall of a cave.

He slowed, for a second…just a second. Then that fuck-you/fuck-me grin was back on his face and he ran with his second wind right at the wall, pushing his face forward like he was trying to break the tape, but really, he thought if it didn’t break, didn’t let him pass, he’d just as happily die with his face crushed.

But God, he wanted to see the void. He wanted to run there with Brother Shadow and race that dark bastard right to the heart of everywhere.

So he ran, his knees high his sweat pouring his lungs burning.

48

And hit the wall so hard he broke his left hand, his cheekbone, and fractured his right knee.

At the impact he opened his eyes and saw he’d hit a real wall.

“Fuck,” he said, agony splintering his thoughts.

But agony can be an obsession, too.

Can lead to oblivion, if you let it.

Keane pushed himself up from the floor, groaning in pain more from his broken knee than his other injuries.

With his own eyes, he looked at his hands. Was he strong enough?

He nodded.

He cast no shadow to nod back at him, but he was strong enough. He needed no encouragement. He was strong enough to break through.

49

Everything hurt…but not enough.

No distractions, baby
, but not Teresa’s voice…just his own.

With clawed fingers and uncut nails, Keane pushed against his eyes. Hard enough to push them out and then, with a terrible scream, rip them free.

This time, pain mounted on pain, he didn’t stop.

Keane ran, fearless. And found, staggering through, that there was no wall after all.

The abyss melted into absolutely nothing, and beyond?

Grin turned to smile. He didn’t slow. But he was through. Through.

50

Run, you. Run.
Run.

He ran and laughed, following Brother Shadow into nothingness.