The Changing (The Biergarten Series) (13 page)

But Bud, to whom
No
from a woman had always meant "Yes, harder!" (and to whom
Yes
meant "Yes, but make me say 'no' first") merely grinned and led her farther down the corridor that led, quickly enough, to the exact spot where Walt Morgan had been killed. "I
wanta
show you something, Sandi." What he wanted to show her were some remnants of Walt's blood that the cleanup crew—who'd come and gone from the area as fast as spinning tops—had left behind in the seams where the baseboard met the wall.

"Well I don't want to see it, whatever it is!" Sandi protested, but they were at the junction where the south corridor meets the west corridor—the corridor where Walt's murder had happened—and Bud's need to strut and sneer in the face of Death and so impress his lady was nearly overwhelming. "Don't be a wimp!" he said, glancing back at her. "Don't be a wimp!" he repeated.

She looked confusedly at him. "Huh?"

"Just c'mon," he snapped at her, and pulled her arm harder. She followed very reluctantly, as much afraid now of Bud himself as of the thing that moved about in these basement corridors.

~ * ~

But the thing wasn't moving about. It was still. It was numb, confused, frightened, hungry all at the same time, and it, like Bud, had an overwhelming need to fill; because when it was filled, the anguish, the hunger, the fear, and the numbness would end.

It had followed the lead of its twisted and tortured soul. Down. Into the lower levels. Into the earth, after a fashion. Because it realized, with the kind of horrible intuition that all such creatures shared, that the way to its satisfaction lay in the quiet and aloneness that existed in the lower levels.

It had sought out the room marked "AIR," because there was peace of a sort in it. And it was a place to lie in wait, as well, for the prey that inevitably appeared, as if fulfilling a role of its own.

~ * ~

"No, Bud!" Sandi said, planting her feet firmly on the cement floor. I'm not going to go a step farther. I'm going to turn around and I'm going to go back upstairs, because I think you're acting like a crazy man."

He whirled around and slapped her hard across the face; she staggered to the right and nearly fell. He pulled her closer, hissed at her, "Don't you
ever
call me crazy again!"

She said nothing. She stiffened up.

"Because if I
was
crazy, and you called me crazy—listen to me,
goddamnit
—if I was crazy, and you called me crazy, then I'd get upset." He stopped, listened to himself, mentally said
Huh?

And from the other end of the corridor, from the room marked "AIR," both of them heard a deep, low growling sound that came and went as quickly as a burp. Bud smiled. It was the werewolf, sure (it was The Great American Hero, it was
Mork
from Ork, it was
Kitt
the Wonder Car). He grabbed Sandi's arm, pulled her down the corridor.

"Damn you, damn you, damn you!" she screamed.

"It's okay," he assured her. "It'll be fun!"

"Let me go, you asshole, you jerk, you numbskull, you cretin!"

Bud glanced around at her; she'd never called him a cretin before, and he wasn't sure he liked it. "I'm not a cretin," he said, almost sullenly. "I just want us to have some fun. Everybody's gotta have fun, Sandi."

Sandi quieted, her gaze riveted on the door marked "AIR," which had just opened toward the two of them, so whatever had opened it was hidden by it.

Bud saw her wide-eyed gaze and for a moment did not want to turn and look; if he didn't look, of course, there wouldn't be anything there. But then he did look, smiling, at the door marked "AIR," and he saw what Sandi had seen, although now a huge, misshapen, reddish hand with wide, yellow, pointed nails appeared around the edge of the door frame, and Bud wondered
Why's it red?
and answered himself, looking more closely.
It's fur
, and he called, "Hey, Mr. Werewolf, fuck you, Mr. Werewolf, and the horse you may or may not have rode in on." He looked, smiling, at Sandi, who was still wide-eyed, still moving stiffly along behind him; and he said to her, "Funny, huh?" But she didn't answer. She'd fallen into a kind of paralyzed recognition of her fate and was hoping deep within herself, as Walt Morgan had hoped, that there wouldn't be much pain.

Then Bud looked back and saw a flat, wide, reddish face appear—like a cross between the face of an ape and the smashed, beaten face of a pig—and he whispered to himself, "Oh, awesome!" turned to Sandi again, "Hey,
looka
that, Sandi!" turned back to the thing that had been near the end of the corridor, behind the door marked "AIR," and saw that it was nearly on top of him now,
its
great shaggy arms outstretched, and Bud thought,
Time for a commercial
.

But there was no commercial. The show went on without a break for a full five minutes. And the special effects were terrific.

George Dixon, head of security at The Park, bellowed, "Goddammit it all to hell!
Goddamnit
!"

And Tom McCabe said to Ryerson, "I guess we should have posted some people down here; this isn't going to be easy to explain to the brass."

Ryerson, with Creosote in his arms, could only shake his head in disbelief and mutter a confused, "I don't understand this."

And Dixon, standing nearby, was also shaking his head but had his hands on his hips as if upset by some personal affront. "Jesus Christ," he growled, "isn't this the pits, isn't this the fucking pits?!"

Detective Bill Andrews came over from an examination of one of the bodies. "Girl's name is Sandi
Hackman
," he said, and Ryerson knew that he was trying very hard for a Dirty Harry persona. "She works here; at least she used to. She's twenty-two, unmarried." He gave them both a lopsided grin. "And she used to be pretty damned attractive, or so I've heard; not that you'd be able to tell from what's left of her now."

McCabe interrupted, "Don't overcompensate, Detective Andrews."

"Sorry?"

"Accept your feelings. See that"—and he nodded briskly at Sandi
Hackman's
body—"for what it is,
damnit
. It's a body that's been mutilated, and it's your job to find out who did it. Don't give me all this other horseshit, okay?!"

Detective Andrews looked crestfallen. "Sure, Chief, I was just trying to lighten things up, I guess—"

"The effort's not required, or appreciated. Thanks, anyway. Now go and find out who the other victim is, please."

"Sure," Andrews said, nodded humbly, and went over to the area where the major parts of Bud
Wygant's
body lay strewn about in the corridor.

Ryerson looked quizzically at McCabe. "That was quite a speech, Tom."

"Yeah, and I meant it—this isn't a sideshow, for Christ's sake! Some of us have to act as if we're civilized human beings." He was clearly upset. He inhaled deeply, lowered his head, closed his eyes, then sighed and looked half-pleadingly at Ryerson, "Do your job, too, okay, Rye?"

Ryerson said nothing.

McCabe finished, "Help me catch this lunatic. Reach into that brain of yours, that special brain of yours, and help me catch this lunatic."

"I've been doing what I can—"

"No," McCabe cut in, "you haven't. You've been holding back; I don't know why. But now's the time to do your job."

And it was true, Ryerson had to admit. He had been holding back, had been keeping his special talents reined in. And he knew why. It was that old standby, that first and most reliable line of self-defense: fear. He nodded. "Sure, Tom." He stroked Creosote affectionately. Creosote looked up at him and growled benignly. Ryerson concluded, "I'll do what I have to do."

~ * ~

In Edgewater, at the cemetery where poor Lila Curtis had been buried, dug up, reburied, dug up, and reburied yet again, the thing that had stayed near her because it had nowhere else to go, and no real
need
to go anywhere, hitched a ride on a passing raccoon. The raccoon was old and arthritic, but had a very wide mean streak, so the thing saw it as essentially friendly. The raccoon didn't notice the extra weight, because it amounted to half a gram or less (a weight that bore a kind of inverse relationship to its power), lumbered out of the cemetery and eventually onto Route Ninety-three, where a sixteen-year-old boy driving alone for the very first time hit it. The boy—Larry Wilde, from Edgewater—hadn't seen the raccoon, but he heard the awful thump of its body hitting the right front tire. He brought his 1977 Mustang II to a jarring halt, put it in reverse, and backed up frantically a good one hundred feet. He leaned over toward the passenger's window and peered out into the early evening darkness. He saw nothing on the gravel shoulder, so he dug a flashlight out of the glove compartment and shone it past the shoulder into tall weeds. He saw what he supposed was the hind end of a dog. "Oh, shit!" he whispered. "Crud, horseshit, crap!" His first night out—and on a junior license, he realized, he wasn't supposed to be out past dusk, which it now was—and he'd hit a damned dog.

He slid carefully over the console between the bucket seats and opened the passenger door. He shone the flashlight around the area of what he supposed was the dog's hind end and, still whispering curses at himself, got out of the Mustang. He left the passenger door open; the light from within the car was comforting.

He took a couple of steps onto the shoulder toward the tall weeds. "
Jees
, I'm sorry, mutt!" he said.

If he'd been a full-fledged country boy, Larry would have known at once that the thing in the weeds was a raccoon and he'd merely have kicked it farther into the weeds, checked for any damage to the Mustang—a now-you've-got-your-license gift from his father—and driven off. But he was a transplanted city boy from Pittsburgh, and he knew practically nothing about raccoons, only that they had "masks," that they liked to raid garbage cans, and that they washed their paws in streams. So when he bent over and touched this particular raccoon, it was simple human concern that was pushing through him. He'd hit a dog,
damnit
! He'd hit someone's
pet
! And that caring, that good feeling would have served him well had the thing that hitched a ride on the raccoon wanted only to hitch a ride on him. Because the thing was repulsed by good feelings; good feelings were like a Star Wars force field against it. The only way it could penetrate them was through the blood.

Through the skin and into the blood.

If, for instance, the raccoon had just enough strength left in it to turn and bite the hand that wanted to help it.

The raccoon had that strength.

And it was fully ten minutes later, when Larry Wilde pulled frantically into his driveway in Edgewater, that he had recovered enough from the shock of being bitten to realize that he'd probably have to have rabies inoculations.

But the raccoon didn't have rabies, of course. It had something far deadlier.

~ * ~

Ryerson had the Erie medical examiner's two autopsy reports on Lila Curtis opened on the desk in front of him—one of them dated February 12, when she'd killed herself, and the other April 17, when Ryerson had discovered her body just inches below ground level at the Edgewater Cemetery. He muttered, "A silver bullet! My God, a silver bullet. The Lone Ranger strikes again." She'd been shot twice, the reports showed. Once on February 12, with a thirty-eight that she'd turned on herself, and then some time later, after she'd been buried, someone had shot her again. This time with a silver bullet.

"Joan," Ryerson whispered, "it was you, wasn't it? You did this." He wondered if he'd ever find out who `Joan' was. He was certain, now, that Greta Lynch was only a very troubled woman who happened to have lived in Erie and had no connection at all with Lila Curtis.

"Why, Joan?" Ryerson went on. It was a method he used occasionally, a kind of conversational self-hypnosis. "Was Lila a threat?" He hesitated, absently stroked Creosote, asleep on his lap. He droned on, "What kind of threat, Joan? And how did you know?" He stopped again, realized—without knowing how he realized it that he was on the wrong track. "What sort of friend were you, Joan? Tell me. And what sort of friend was Lila to you? Did you end her suffering for her? Was that it?" And again he realized he was on the wrong track; he continued absently stroking Creosote. Then, suddenly, he sat bolt upright in the chair, his mouth wide as if in a scream. But he was silent, stiff, for a full minute. "Christ!" he yelled. "Christ, Lila, no!" And his head slumped forward over Creosote.

He heard Loren Samuelson pounding on the door, heard him yelling, "Mr.
Biergarten
, what's wrong, what are you doing in there?" But it was some time before he was able to call, "I'm okay. It's okay, Mr. Samuelson. It's nothing." He managed to go to the door, and open it.

Samuelson said, "Good heavens, I thought someone was being murdered up here, Mr.
Biergarten
."

A weary smile creased Ryerson's lips. "No," he assured the old man. "No one's being murdered."

"It was only a figure of speech, Mr.
Biergarten
. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't allow—"

Ryerson pushed past him into the hallway, Creosote squirming like a piece of living baggage under his arm, the soft plastic duck in his teeth. "I'm sorry," Mr. Samuelson," Ryerson called as he started downstairs, "It won't happen again, I promise."