Bring Out Your Dead

            Jane sat back and rubbed her eyes.  She needed sleep.  The caffeine had stopped working several hours ago.  What had Yllom said?  The boy’s mother had green eyes.  Unnaturally green eyes. 

She looked over the search results again.  The second most recent event had occurred in 1952 in Bucyrus, Ohio, only about one hundred and fifty miles from Ann Arbor.  A baby had been born with all the mutant characteristics.  It had died a week later.  Cause of death: prematurity.

Alma Buehler had been brusque on the phone.  “No, I don’t want to talk about my baby.”  “That was too long ago.”  “No, I don’t want you to come, there’s nothing to say.” 

            Jane was not put off.  It was a four-hour drive through flat farmland from Ann Arbor to Bucyrus, Ohio.   Soybeans competed with corn for acreage on what, a century before, had been the Great Black Swamp, an impenetrable wilderness covering hundreds of square miles.  In what was the largest engineering project ever attempted, the Swamp was drained and became fertile farms as America pushed west.  Evangelical Christians preached damnation on half the stations she could find on her car radio.  The billboards sold pesticides.  It was conservative, steady, constant Middle America.

            She drove past the house three times before she summoned the nerve to walk up the short flagstone path to the porch.  This is legitimate scientific inquiry, she tried to tell herself, don’t be melodramatic.  Jane rang the doorbell and the door opened.  Warm air rolled out of the foot-wide opening of the door and it carried the heavy scent of incense, or maybe air freshener.  Inside was a dark, moldering place and, at first, Jane couldn’t see who had opened the door.  Then a dark shape appeared around the edge of the door.  It was a woman who looked out but, in the darkness, Jane could barely see her features.  What Jane could see, see as clearly as two beacons, were her eyes.  They were green and had that peculiar quality of the eyes of a cat or dog that captures ambient light and reflects it so as to appear internally luminous.  The woman’s eyes were lit with daylight sifting in through the opening until they seemed to float in the air framed only by her face, made darker in contrast.  Jane had expected the woman would possess the green eyes characteristic of the anomaly but not this.  The sight left her speechless.

            The woman, the eyes really, stared at Jane for a long moment and then she started to close the door. 

            “Wait.  I’m Jane Becker.  I called you.”  The door paused and the eyes considered Jane again.