“All right,” Deborah said expectantly. “What about ’em?”
“That’s the most important thing,” I said. “What he’s trying to say about her seeing. And, um, not seeing.”
Deborah snorted. “I didn’t know that?” she said. “I mean, he rips out her eye and shoots his wad into her eye socket, and I’m supposed to think that’s an accident? I know he blinded her, so he had a thing about the eyes. So what?”
“But that’s exactly it, Debs,” I said.
“What is?” Jackie demanded, sounding very much like Deborah.
“He didn’t blind her,” I said. “He left her one good eye. He wanted her to see what he was doing.”
“Jesus Christ,” Robert muttered.
“And I still don’t know why, or what it means,” Deborah snarled, her normal cranky self once more.
“The whole thing for him is centered around it,” I said, and I felt a soft rustle
of encouragement from the Passenger, almost as if it was whispering, Good, go on.… “Vision, watching, seeing … It’s all about that. It’s not just part of it; it’s the whole point.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Deborah snapped.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said, and Robert cleared his throat to show he wasn’t going to say what he was thinking.
“I don’t understand,” Jackie said. “I mean, okay, the thing with the eye socket. But how does that say anything except he’s a sick bastard?”
“You have to try to go inside his mind,” I said, and I took a deep breath. “Try to picture what he was thinking.”
“I’d rather not,” Jackie said softly, but I was already hearing the far-off whisper of wings and the slow rising of shadows and I closed my eyes and tried to see it, reaching down into the Dark Basement and stroking the thing that uncurled there, petting it until it purred, stretched, and sprang up into the black interior sky and showed me all the pictures of Eternal Nighttime pleasure.…
And I see her, see the way she thrashes, moans, twists wildly against the ropes, fighting to get a scream past the gag, seeing nothing but her approaching death and not even seeing the all-important Why of it, the reason it must be, the Me who is doing this to her because she has refused to notice—and even now her eyes are on the knife and not the hand holding it and I need to make her see ME, need to make her pay attention to ME, and I drop the knife and I move closer, more direct, more intimate, and I begin to use hands, feet, fingernails, teeth—and still she will not see ME and so I grab her by the hair, that perfect golden hair, and I haul her face around to look and she has to see ME at last.
And she does.
She sees me. For the first time, she looks at ME and she sees ME and she knows me for who I really am and at last at last I can show her how I can care for her like no one else ever could, show her that this was meant to be, this was how it was always supposed to be, and at last at last I can show her my Truth, my Self, my Reason for Being.
I can show her my love.
And so I will know that she will always see my love I take her eye and I will keep it with me forever so I will remember, too.
And so she will really and truly see how I love her I put my love there where her eye used to be.
And then I am done. And I feel the sadness again. Because nothing is forever. But love is supposed to be forever, and I want this love to last. And so she will know that, and so this love will be forever and can never change and never end, and so it can never be anything else, there is one more thing. Nothing else can ever happen that will tarnish this matchless love or make this perfect moment less than forever. It’s important.
And so I kill her.
Somebody cleared their throat; I opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was Jackie. She was looking at me with a very strange expression on her face, a mix of fascination and fright, almost as if she had heard the soft and leathery whispers that were still fluttering through my brain.
“What?” I said to her.
She shook her head. Her ponytail flopped to one side, then back. “Nothing,” she said. “I just …” She bit her lip and frowned. “Where did you go just now?”
“Oh,” I said, and I could feel a hot flush mounting into my cheeks. “I, uh, it’s hard to explain.”
Deborah snickered, which I thought was extremely unkind. “Try,” she said. “I want to hear it, too.”
“Well, uh,” I said, which was not up to my usual stellar standards of wit. “I, um … I try to imagine it, you know. What the killer was thinking, and feeling.”
Jackie was still staring, still frowning. She hadn’t even blinked. “Uh-huh,” she said.