The Changing (The Biergarten Series) (4 page)

The thing whimpered. It was a good thirty feet behind Walt, just around a turn in the corridor. It whimpered because the need within it had come close to making it numb, like the promise of an orgasm so intense that screams won't do it justice.

Walt turned his head slightly, kept walking, clutched his sheaf of Employee Evaluation Charts close to his side as if whoever had made the noise behind him was intent on stealing them.

The thing whimpered again, longer, and Walt glanced back. "Who goes there? Who goes there?" he said, chuckled falsely, and walked faster.

The thing growled. It was not unlike the growl of a large dog—deep and resonant, so Walt's body broke out in goose bumps and his eyes frantically searched the corridor for a doorway he might try. One, several feet ahead and to his left, was simply marked "19," and the other, several yards farther ahead, and also on the left, had the word "AIR" on it in black, Walt had no idea why. He stepped quickly over to the door marked "19," tried the knob, cursed because it was locked, and heard the thing behind him growl yet again. "Oh, fuck!" Walt whispered. He tried the knob again, frantically and in vain. And the thing thirty feet behind him began rapidly closing the distance. He heard the muffled scrape and shuffle of its feet on the bare cement floor; again he whispered, "Oh, fuck!" and added, almost instantly, "Please—" and glanced back. He saw the thing. It stood very still for a brief moment under one of the ceiling lights.

And Walt laughed at it. Because for just a moment—long enough that the adrenaline pumping through him subsided and he felt immense relief:
Shit, I'm not going to have to feel pain, after all!--
he was certain that he was being made the brunt of a joke. Because everyone knew that Harry Simons had proclaimed himself the victim of a werewolf. And poor Tammy Levine, whose insides had made such a
godawful
mess in Building Nine's subbasement corridors, had been made to
look
like the victim of a werewolf. But of course, since there were no werewolves—just as there were no trolls, no gnomes, nor fairies—this .. .
thing
standing before him under the blue-white glow of the ceiling light was only someone dressed up like a werewolf (and in a suit that was getting a little seamy, a little frayed at the edges, even a little smelly), someone whose sense of humor was tacky at best, someone who—once his or her identity had been discovered—would very quickly be transferred to a lower job classification. But Walt was not a hopelessly stupid man. Just limited. And he realized within the space of only a couple of heartbeats that the creature under the ceiling light was precisely what it appeared to be—a slavering, misshapen, murderous, and merciless thing that was going to make
him
its next victim.

He managed these words at a low, harsh whisper, his voice quaking: "Not too much pain. Please!"

And the thing beneath the ceiling light heard the words somewhere deep, deep below the awful force that was driving it. It understood them. And it cared. And it wanted to spare Walt whatever pain it could, because it didn't require pain. Only death. And dismemberment. Its soul had become the soul of anarchy and disorder; it was a rabid thing that no virus had ever touched. And so it whimpered something unintelligible and swept down on Walt Morgan as rapidly as sound. And in that moment it forgot its caring, it forgot the dregs of humanness quivering in some small, grimy room deep within its brain. And it ripped Walt's cheek away, so the cheekbone was bared and Walt felt an incredible, searing pain there, and he screamed, "No, please!" though it was almost instantly unintelligible because of the blood pouring into his throat. He clung hard to his sheaf of Employee Evaluation Charts. And through the agony of pain and terror drenching him, he saw that the creature ripping away at him had what looked like breasts beneath the short, matted, reddish fur covering its body. And if his mouth had not been hanging open anyway—because his jaw muscles were gone—it would have hung open in awe at this. But then his jaw was gone, too; he heard it being ripped away, which made a sound almost exactly like the sound of hard snow being crunched underfoot. Then he heard his jaw hit the wall farther down the corridor; and he heard himself scream, "No, please, no pain, please!" But of course, no one else heard it, not even the thing tearing away at him, because by then everything from the bottom of his nose to the top of his chest was gone. And he still clung hard to his Employee Evaluation Charts.

The thing ate him. Much of him, anyway. His intestines, his brain, his lungs, his heart, his liver, his genitals. This wasn't its usual routine. But, for various reasons, it was very hungry.

And when, in its human state, it woke up inside the little room marked "AIR," it looked down at its sticky, red, human nakedness. And it wept. Then it washed itself as well as it could in a washbasin there and climbed into a pair of overalls hanging from a hook near the washbasin.

And it forgot. It pushed the events of the past half hour far, far back into its consciousness where, in its human form, it would never find them.

It had grown very good at forgetting.

It needed to forget. Because, in its human state, forgetting had become survival.

Tom McCabe's glass-enclosed office at the Public Safety Building in Rochester was small and cluttered and smelled of stale coffee. When Ryerson
Biergarten
was shown in, McCabe stood behind his big green metal desk, which took up fully one third of the office, and shook his hand mightily. "It's good to meet you, at last, Rye," he said. Though Ryerson knew that McCabe's welcome was genuine, he also read, quickly,
Probably jogs. Jesus, why does anyone jog?!

"Thanks," Ryerson said. "It's good to be here, Tom."

McCabe let go of Ryerson's hand and grinned thinly. He was a tall, stocky man in his late forties, with close-cut, thinning brown hair and a round, essentially pleasant face, despite an excess of worry lines at his forehead.

He nodded to indicate an uncomfortable-looking metal chair in a corner of the room; there were files piled high on it, and a brown, half-eaten apple sat on top of the files. "Sit down, Rye."

Ryerson put the files on the- floor, the apple in an overflowing wastebasket, pulled the chair closer to the desk, and sat with his arms flat on the arms of the chair. "I don't believe in werewolves, Tom," he said.

McCabe grinned. "I don't either, Rye." He paused, went on, "You want some coffee?"

Ryerson shook his head. "No. Thanks. And by the way, I don't jog." It was his turn to grin.

McCabe shook his head. "Don't people tell you to stay out of their brains, Rye?"

"Only when they know I've been in them, Tom. And believe me, I try to stay out of them as much as I can. It's not always pleasant—"

McCabe cut in, "Okay, so this is what we've got; we've got this creep, this asshole, this loony, and he
thinks
he's a werewolf, Rye. His M.O. is straight out of. . . out of Orion Pictures."

"Orion Pictures?"

"Sure, you know, the company that makes all those horror movies."

"You mean Hammer Films, Tom?"

"Yeah, yeah." He waved the observation away. "Hammer Films; this guy thinks he's a fucking werewolf, Rye. I mean, what he did to this poor woman, this . . ." He checked a file on his desk, continued, ". . . this Tammy Levine was no damned picnic. It made me want to toss my cookies, for Christ's sake!"

"Do I have any authority on this, Tom?"

McCabe didn't answer at once; Ryerson saw procrastination in his eyes and heard a number of excuses—few of them intelligible—running about in his head. "
Authority
, Tom," he coaxed. "Do I have any authority on this case?"

McCabe shook his head, frowning. "No. I'm sorry, Rye. You don't. Not beyond what I can grant you from moment to moment. I'm sorry; I've got people to answer to, and these people ask tough questions, Rye."

"So give them the answers; tell them you've got a psychic investigator working with you—"

"They'd tell me to turn in my badge, Rye. I'm sorry."

"My God, Tom, psychic investigators have been helping police departments for years."

"Sure, sure, I know that, Rye. And if this were any other case, if this were just a kid who's wandered off, or a simple shoot-'em-stab-'em kind of murder, it wouldn't be a problem. But since our murderer wants us to believe he's some kind of… supernatural steamroller—" He stopped, sighed. "You can see what I'm driving at, can't you, Rye? How is it going to look if I tell the brass, 'Hey, our murderer believes he's a werewolf, so I thought I'd bring in a fortune-teller—"

Ryerson bristled. "You know how I feel about that term, Tom."

McCabe nodded. "Yeah, sure. Sorry." He meant it, Ryerson knew. "But listen, even if I can't give you any authority—what does it matter? If you need something, if you've got some hard evidence to share with me, or if you want to look at our files, whatever, you know you can get hold of me anytime, here or at my home.
Any
time. I mean that, Rye."

"Uh-huh," Ryerson said, unconvinced. He stood. "Where is this place?"

"Kodak Park?"

Ryerson nodded. "Yes, Tom. Kodak Park." McCabe gave him directions, shook his hand again.

"I really am sorry, Rye. If I could change it—”

“I appreciate that, Tom."

McCabe said, "You're to meet with someone named ‘Youngman.' He'll be waiting for you at the Personnel Department."

Ryerson nodded and left.

~ * ~

AT KODAK PARK: 2:00 P.M.

"This is the swimming pool," Jack Youngman said to Ryerson
Biergarten
.

"I thought there was a swimming pool on the eighth floor," Ryerson said. They were in Building Six—Recreation. Around them, several dozen men and women were enjoying the big Olympic-style pool, making the most of their hour-a-day free time at The Park.

"Yes," said Jack Youngman, whose eye wandered quite often from Ryerson and his Boston bull terrier pup, Creosote, to a tall, willowy blond woman named Sandi
Hackman
, who,
Youngmen
knew, spent most of her company free time at the pool. "Yes," he repeated, "there is a pool on eight, but it's not in use. The architect forgot to figure in the weight of the water when he designed it."

"Oh," Ryerson said simply. A number of incredibly obscene images—with Sandi
Hackman
as their focus—had vaulted from Youngman's mind to his, and he was a little embarrassed.

Youngman grinned. "Stupid, huh? These college-educated dimwits shouldn't be let out—" He stopped in midsentence, eyes wide, his grin suddenly a leer: Sandi
Hackman
, her back to him, was adjusting the rear end of her clingy red one-piece suit to let her cheeks have what Youngman called "more breathing room."

Ryerson looked too, and grinned as well, though more at Youngman than at Sandi
Hackman
. "You were saying," he coaxed.

Youngman savored the moment without answering. Then Sandi
Hackman
dove into the pool; he sighed and turned his attention back to Ryerson. "I was saying that there
is
a pool on eight, but no one uses it"

"You already told me that," Ryerson said and paused while Creosote cut loose with a longer-than-usual session of grunting and gurgling and wheezing.

Youngman looked offended: "What's he—sick?"

Ryerson shook his head; Creosote quieted. "All Boston bull terriers do that. It's asthma." He thought a moment. "So I suppose he is sick, yes. I'm sorry." Creosote started chewing on a small rawhide bone that Ryerson had fastened to his collar, using six inches of heavy twine, to satisfy the dog's puppy urge to chew. Ryerson also hoped that it might cure Creosote of mangling his socks, which Ryerson, not being the very neatest of men, usually let lie around his bedroom until washday.

Youngman whispered, "Yeah. No problem," though he still looked offended, which pleased Ryerson because he'd taken an instant dislike to the man. Youngman nodded to indicate a big flabby man wearing tight black swimming trunks that were all but hidden beneath the huge white mound of the man's belly. "
Looka
that," Youngman breathed in disgust. "Jesus. Guy's got tits just like a woman."

"Uh-huh," Ryerson said, and thought,
You're a real specimen, yourself
. "Could you show me the cafeteria, please?" he continued. And that's when the shrill blare of a siren shot through the room. Once. And again. Then, over the intercom:

"Will Mr. Ryerson ..." A pause; then, lower, "What's this guy's name?" Another pause; then, "Oh." And yet another pause. "Will Mr. Ryerson
Burn
-garden please report to Building Nine Security at once." The message was repeated, and everyone around the pool froze, as if knowing its importance.

"Take me there," Ryerson told Youngman.

Youngman said, "Are you
really
psychic?"

It was a question Ryerson got asked a lot, and no one ever believed him, whether he said "Yes" or whether he said "No." He answered impatiently, "Mr. Youngman, some of the sexual positions you want to put the young lady in"—he nodded at Sandi
Hackman
—“are anatomically impossible. Now would you please take me to Building Nine Security?"