Green Eyes Page 0,6
cards.
The grounds were gloomy and gently rolling. A flagstone path bordered with ferns and azalea meandered among enchanted-looking oaks, which fountained up at regular intervals. They overspread the lawn, casting a dark green shade upon the stone benches beneath them; thin beams of sun penetrated to the grass as a scatter of gold coins. And at the center of the gloom, glowing softly like the source of the enchantment, was a two-story house of rose-colored brick with white trim and fluted columns across the front. A faceted glass dome bulged from the midpoint of its gabled roof. Two orderlies hustled down the steps as Jocundra pulled up and helped Donnell into his wheelchair.
'If you'll take Mr Harrison to the suite,' she said, 'I'll see he gets checked in.' And paying no attention to Donnell's alarmed reaction, she walked out along the drive.
From the bench nearest the gate, the brightness of the brick and trim made the house appear to be rippling against the gloom, as if while she had been walking it had reverted to its true form - a black castle, a gingerbread house - and in turning back she had caught it unawares. It was an unlikely place for scientific work, though its gothic atmosphere bolstered the image Edman had fostered; he had suggested that Shadows would be an Experience, spoken about it in terms suited to the promotion of a human potential group rather than demystifying it as he usually did any hint of the occult. She had talked to other therapists who had been at Shadows, but most had seemed traumatized, unwilling to discuss it. Even the microbiologists had been hazy at her briefing, saying they knew little about the new strain of bacteria with which Donnell had been injected. 'He'll be longer lived,' Ezawa had said. 'Better motor control, sharper senses. Watch his visual development especially, and keep in mind he won't be easy to fool. He's no short-termer.'
No doubt about that, she thought, as she began strolling back to the house. Before lapsing into his depression, Donnell had displayed a subtle good humor, a joyful appreciation of life apparently grounded in a realistic assessment of its pleasures and pains, this far different from the short-termers: cloudy, grotesque creatures who clutched and stared until you feared you would burn up under the kindling glare of their eyes. They had many of the qualities of the zombies in her father's lurid bedtime stories: dazed, ragged men and women stumbling through plantation fields at midnight, penned in windowless cabins fifty or more to a room, stinking, shuffling, afraid to touch each other, sustained on water and unsalted bread. 'They ever get a taste of salt,' her father had said, 'they'll head straight for the buryin' ground and try to claw their way back into Hell.' Sometimes the straw boss would send them after runaway slaves, and the slave would scramble through the swamp, eyes rolling and heart near to bursting, hearing the splash of the zombie's tootsteps behind him or seeing its shadow rear up from the weird fogs wreathing the cypress, reaching for him with rotting fingers and arms rigid as gibbets. Let the slave escape, however, and the zombie would wander on, single-mind-edly searching until years later - because a zombie lives as long as the binding magic holds; even if its flesh disintegrates the particles still incorporate the spirit -maybe a hundred years later, the image of its quarry grown so amorphous that it would react to any vaguely human form, the zombie spots a lighted window in a house on the bayou and is drawn by the scent of blood... Her father had banged the bottom of the bed, jumped up in mock terror, and she had lain awake for hours, shivering, seeing the tortured faces of zombies in the grain of the ceiling boards.
But there was no such witchery involved with Donnell, she thought; or if there was, then it was witchery of an intensely human sort.
She had a moment of nervousness at the door; her stomach grew fluttery, as if crossing the threshold constituted a spiritual commitment, but she laughed at herself and pushed on in. No one was in sight. The foyer faced large cream-colored double doors and opened onto a hallway; the walls were painted pale peach, and the doorways ranging them were framed with intricate molding. Ferns splashed from squat brass urns set between them. Church quiet, with the pious, sedated air common to sickrooms and funeral homes.
'Jocundra!'