The Devouring Read online

  "Sure, Irene. Sure," Glen said. "But caught at what?"

  She looked blankly at him. "Gee," she said, "I don't know."

  ~ * ~

  Officer Leonard McGuire glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror. He could see his right eye, his eyebrow, part of his forehead. He said aloud, "Who am I looking at? Who are you?" The reflection stared back impassively.

  He also wanted to know where he was going. Where, in reality, he was being drawn, and who or what was drawing him there.

  He recognized the area he was in: "The District," where, several days earlier—and it seemed like centuries now—he and Mathilde and Spurling had found the body of a wino.

  A call came over McGuire's radio: "All cars in the area of Bailey Avenue and Schyler respond to two one two"—hit and run—"white female. Suspect vehicle last seen heading north. Suspect vehicle is described as closely resembling a black and white unit."

  McGuire grabbed his mike, hit the talk button, said, "Unit Fourteen respond—" And put the mike down.

  The radio squawked back, "Unit Fourteen? Come in, Unit Fourteen."

  He pulled the squad car over to the curb, stopped, pushed his door open, got out, turned stiffly, and faced the huge cement-block building to his right. Vaguely he was aware of the acrid stench of the smelters two miles away. Just as vaguely he was aware of a low humming noise from within the big cement building, as if there were people inside it. And very, very powerfully, he realized that he was being manipulated; that whatever had drawn him here would draw him into that building and then would do with him what it pleased.

  But as powerfully as he realized this, he realized just as powerfully, just as hellishly, that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson watched Joan leave Frank's Place. She'd told him to take all the time he needed but that she'd wait in the car. "I shouldn't have come here in the first place, Rye," she'd said. "I'm scared. That woman scares the hell out of me."

  He turned to the woman; she was smiling at him, a coy smile that whispered of victory. He said to her, "How do you know Jack Lucas?"

  "We're friends," she answered quickly and smoothly, as if she'd anticipated the question. "We go back—" Her smile broadened. "A long time."

  "How long?"

  She sipped her whiskey, reached into her bodice, withdrew a soiled hanky from it, and wiped the lipstick from her glass. "Months," she said.

  "Months?" Ryerson said.

  "Oh, yes," she said, "a long time."

  "And how long have you known Miss Evans?"

  She missed a step. A small half-step, but Ryerson noticed it. And when she missed it, the fog and static that he'd been reading from her lifted very briefly and he was able to peer past it.

  He saw little.

  Only an evening sky littered with stars. And, underlying it, the suggestion of a wire fence. And beyond the fence, a field of chickweed and clover.

  He knew that he'd been there. He'd seen it from a slightly different angle, perhaps, and not very well, because his night vision was all but nonexistent. But he had been there.

  If only he could remember when.

  Then the fog settled and Doreen was back in step. "Miss Evans is imagining things, my man." Another sip of the whiskey, another swipe at the lipstick on the glass. "I don't like kids. Maybe Miss Evans does"—another coy smile appeared—" 'cuz some of us ain't too discriminatin'. But me, I like my meat well done." She gave Ryerson a long, critical once-over. "Yes, sir, very well done."

  Her once-over made Ryerson very uncomfortable. He glanced nervously about at the two men at the opposite end of the bar, then at the bartender, who was clearly trying to look like he didn't give a damn what Ryerson did, then back at Doreen, who began to chuckle.

  And as she chuckled, the fog and static he'd been reading from her lifted once again. Again he saw a sky crowded with stars, the hint of a wire fence, a field of chickweed and clover.

  And he saw something else, too. Something that brought a gasp from him and made him step involuntarily away from her, as if from something obscene.

  He saw the damp reddish-brown earth all around her as if it were some kind of bizarre halo.

  And as he backed away from her, her chuckling quickened. "You got problems, Mr. Biergarten? You don't like Doreen?"

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Joan had been asleep for only a few hours when the dream started, the same dream that had driven her screaming into wakefulness a dozen times before. She saw the field of chickweed and clover, the wire fence gleaming dully in the moonlight, and she knew that if she came up over the rise, she would see the spot where Lila had been buried, and the nightmare would have her in its grasp at last.

  Already, she could feel that a clammy sweat had started, that a cold knot of panic had formed in her stomach.

  So, as she had a dozen times before, she bit her lip hard to wake herself. And saw the field of chickweed and clover undulate, as if it were a reflection on a pond. Then the wire fence, gleaming in the moonlight, lost itself in infinity. And she knew that the awful grip of the dream was starting to fade.

  She knew also that she had succeeded only in chasing it off yet again. That it would return until, as Ryerson had told her, "it has played itself out." And even as she woke she knew that her wisest course of action would be to let the dream do just that—play itself out. Complete the circle. "I do it with songs that get stuck in my head," Ryerson had also told her. "I force the song to complete itself, to come to an end. And when it does complete itself, I'm usually free of it."

  "Usually?" she'd said.

  "Nothing's perfect," he'd said.

  But now, in darkness, with the tail end of the dream still in sight, she had no stomach for anything except to turn on the light, sit up in the bed, and get her mind on something else. If she woke Ryerson, too, that was okay.

  She opened her eyes. "Rye?" she whispered tentatively, voice quivering. "Wake up, Rye." She reached for him. "Rye?" She turned her head, strained to see in the darkness. "Damn!" she said aloud. The other side of the bed was empty.

  She swung her feet to the floor. "Damn!" she said again. She looked about the room, saw only the hulking, dark gray suggestion of the wing chair against the north wall, the chest of drawers near it, the bookcase against the opposite wall.

  She saw also that the door to the living room stood open.

  "Rye," she called, "are you out there?" and knew almost at once that he wasn't, that his all-but-nonexistent night vision did not allow him to walk around in darkness. And from what she could see through the doorway, the house was dark.

  She turned on the bedside lamp. Its low-wattage bulb illuminated a small area around her and turned the rest of the room a dull yellow.

  "Rye, are you—" she began, and stopped. Something had moved away from the open door.

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson parked the Woody several blocks from Frank's Place, got out, closed the door softly, and began walking down the center of the narrow street. He sensed little life in the big cement-block buildings around him. Now and then, desperate pieces of drug-induced dreams slapped at him. Now and then, he felt eyes on him and he knew that they were not human eyes.

  It was a little past 3:00, that time of the morning when the world is at its darkest; especially here, where the streetlamps had long since burned out, and a low mantle of clouds lay sullen and still overhead.

  He walked in the center of the narrow street. He could see very little in darkness such as this, only the dark gray and shimmering geometry of the buildings flat against the black sky and the black pavement. He guessed that there were no hazards in the roadway. On the sidewalk there could be open doors, trash, perhaps even someone sleeping off a hangover, and if he saw any of these things at all, it would be when he was half a heartbeat away from falling over them. So he stuck to the middle of the street, where he could roughly gauge its edges.

  He was going to Frank's Place to find Jack Lucas.

/>   ~ * ~

  "Is that you, Rye?" Joan called, knowing that he probably wouldn't be sulking about in the darkened house. Still, the possibility—remote as it was—was something to cling to: "Don't play games with me, Rye," she called. "I need you." She smiled quickly. "I do need you, Rye. Come in here and hold me."

  And a voice answered from the other room, "You'd like that, wouldn't you, Joan?"

  ~ * ~

  Five miles away, on a darkened street, in the desolate and all-but-abandoned area of the city known as "The District," Ryerson Biergarten gasped, doubled over in pain, .rumpled to his knees, got down on all fours. `No," he moaned, "for the love of God, no!" Then, despite the pain, he reared up on his knees, held his arms wide, clenched his fists. “Damn you!" he screamed. "Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!" Because he had realized at last where he had seen the field of chickweed and clover revealed to him when the woman who called herself Doreen had chuckled and her mind had opened up to him very briefly.

  He had seen it six months earlier.

  He had seen it in Edgewater. At the cemetery where Lila Curtis was buried.

  He screamed again, "No! Oh my God, no!"

  And from the edges of the buildings around him, a hundred pairs of eyes turned from the psychic storm brewing in the air around him.

  ~ * ~

  Joan wanted to speak but couldn't. Her breathing was shallow and fast and the lack of oxygen was making her dizzy.

  "Remember me, Joan?" teased the voice from the other room.

  Joan found her voice briefly. "Go away," she pleaded.

  "But Joan, I thought we were pals. Aren't we pals?"

  "Go away," she whispered.

  "No, no, no, Joan. I'm here to stay."

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson hadn't gone far from the Woody, only a hundred feet or so, and, normally, finding his way back to it would have been easy. But not in darkness such as this. Not when his eyes were all but useless. In his panic and desperation, he'd gone right instead of making a 180-degree turn. And though he saw the vague, dirty cream-colored suggestion of the curb, he saw it too late, stumbled over it, and his forward momentum sent him headlong toward the wall only a few feet away. He thrust his hands out to cushion the impact. His arms buckled; he instinctively tucked his head. And hit the wall hard. First with his shoulder, then, spinning around from the momentum, with his back, and got the wind knocked out of him. He fell gasping to one knee, grabbed his shoulder. After what seemed like a very long time, his breathing normalized, he moaned one of his rare curses, and pushed himself to his feet. He stood quietly for a moment, trying to gauge his location. Around him the buildings, the street, and the sky blended into an undulating milky-gray sameness.

  Then he sensed that there were eyes on him again. The same eyes that had been watching him since he'd gotten out of the Woody and started walking. The eyes of nocturnal predators and scavengers. Eyes hat were easily a hundred times more sensitive than any man's. Eyes that he could use f only he could make the tiny brains behind them open up and communicate with him.

  ~ * ~

  "Who are you?" Joan pleaded. "Please, who are you?"

  "Oh, come on, Joan," said the voice in the other room. "You know me." Then, at the edges of the dull yellow light cast by her bedside lamp, she could see that something vas moving with graceful and deliberate lowness toward her through the living room, and she screamed, "Who are you, goddammit, who are you?!"

  She heard a chuckle, low and menacing, then another, and another and another, until they blended into a kind of loud rushing noise, like dirt falling on metal.

  It ended abruptly.

  Doreen appeared in her bedroom doorway. And smiled a huge seductive smile. And said, her voice dripping with apology, "I gotta hurt you, Joan. I gotta hurt you!"

  Joan screamed, "I don't know you!"

  "Course you don't. But I know you." She stuck two fingers into her ample cleavage.

  "What ... are you doing?" Joan stammered.

  Doreen withdrew a small silver folding knife, held it up in front of her eyes, and snapped it open with a flick of the wrist. The blade was short, almost harmless-looking. Doreen whispered hoarsely, as if emotion were pinching her voice, "Don't look like much, does it, Joan? Hell, it ain't much, really. But let me ask you something; you ever seen what a cat can do with its tiny little claws? I'll tell you, Joan, a cat can do lots of damage. It can blind a dog, for sure. Kill it, maybe, if it catches it right." She cocked her head. "So why don't you just think of me as a cat." She cocked her head the other way and nodded at the knife she still held in front of her eyes. "And this," she said, “is my claw."

  ~ * ~

  The world Ryerson was seeing was a world no human eyes had ever seen before. It was a black and white world whose focus shifted from moment to moment as the creature viewing it gauged where a threat lay and where food could be had. At the moment those were the creature's primary concerns. It was also trying to take the measure of the man who had invaded its territory, trying to determine if the man was going to close in on its nest, or if the man was going to fall over—as some of them did—and so make a kind of offering of himself.

  And because the creature's concerns included the man, the world Ryerson was seeing included—from random moment to random moment—himself. His tweed sport coat, his corduroy slacks, his Wallabees. And his fear. The rigid set of his jaw, the stiffness of his limbs. Fear that he would not make it back to the car in time. Fear that he would again become blind because the creature whose eyes he was using would run off in search of something more interesting.

  So Ryerson began to commit to memory all that he was seeing through the eyes of the creature watching him—the doorway a few feet to his right (it had the word "DELIVERY" over it), the wall behind him, the broad expanse of the curb in front of him. Then the creature's gaze shifted and he saw the street like a mouth yawning wide, and the great gray walls of the buildings.

  The creature's gaze shifted quickly about. Ryerson saw windows high on the wall above him; to the east, the heavily chromed front end of the Woody, parked a hundred feet away; beyond it, the suggestion of movement, as of someone moving on the street. Then he saw himself; he saw his fear again. And he felt, as well, the sudden and overwhelming onslaught of a much more primal kind of fear from the creature whose eyes he was using.

  And a flash of matted fur fell into that creature's line of vision; a great gaping mouth and huge almond-shaped eyes appeared, and the creature's gaze steadied for just an instant on that mouth and those eyes. Then it bolted. But too late. The black and white geometry of its world faded and was gone.

  And Ryerson, having committed to memory exactly what he had seen through that poor damned creature's eyes, set off blindly toward the Woody.

  ~ * ~

  Doreen moved in her graceful and deliberate way into Joan's bedroom, brandishing the small silver knife ahead of her.

  Joan sat very still on the bed. She whispered, "I don't know you, I don't know you!"

  And Doreen said again, "Of course you don't. But I know you."

  Joan shook her head. "Please don't hurt me."

  Doreen continued advancing very slowly and deliberately on her. "Hurtin's what I was made to do, honey. It's what we were all made to do. It's what we have to do, or we don't do nothin' no more," she said, and took an amazingly quick swing with the knife and opened a long thin wound across the top of Joan's chest, just above her blue nightgown. The wound seeped blood at once. Joan gasped, put her hand to the wound, looked at her fingers, saw the blood there, and looked in awe at Doreen. "But I don't know you, I don't know you," she pleaded, her voice a breathy, incredulous whisper.

  And Doreen said, "You don't really believe that anymore, do ya, honey? I think you know who I am. I think you want me to cut you up." She grinned a wide grin of amusement and expectation. "And you know what? That's exactly what I'm gonna do." She took another swing. Joan tried to back away from it, but too late. The knife sank an inch into her chest just below
the first wound. Joan reeled backward, across the bed, hand clutching the new wound. "No," she screeched, "please, no!"

  Doreen cooed, "I got to, Joan. I really got to." And she lunged.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Near the Buffalo city limits, as Ryerson pushed the Woody to its top speed of fifty, a patrol car pulled out of a side street, paced him a few moments, flashed its lights at him, then gave him a blast on its siren. Ryerson kept going. He was less than two minutes away from Joan's house; if necessary, he thought he could keep the cop behind him until then.

  The patrol car's roof lights came on, followed by another shrill blast of the siren, then the car swerved hard into the left-hand lane and Ryerson heard faintly, beneath the clatter of the Woody's engine, "Pull over immediately!"

  Ryerson switched on his interior lights and turned his head toward the patrol car. "Emergency!" he mouthed at it.

  "Pull over immediately!" he heard again.

  He pointed urgently ahead. "Emergency!" he mouthed once more. "E-mer-gen-cy!"

  And he heard at once, "I'll follow you!"

  ~ * ~

  They pulled into the driveway. Ryerson jumped from the Woody and ran across the lawn toward the house, the cop close behind him, their way illuminated by the spotlight over the garage. And as Ryerson ran, he wept. As he pushed himself through the litter of evil around him, as he swept his arms wide in a futile effort to sweep away the demons that crowded the lawn like weeds and wrapped themselves around his legs and leaped ineffectually upon his back and hunkered about on scrawny thighs and laughed and giggled and moaned, he wept.

  These were creatures which—like the slime left behind by snails—had been left in the wake of the evil thing that had visited this house.

  "Wait there, please!" the cop behind Ryerson called.

  Ryerson waved violently in the air.

  "Wait there!" the cop repeated.

  "No," Ryerson screamed. "Dammit, no!" And he ran through the debris of evil, arms swinging, feet kicking out occasionally, and futilely, to the porch. He threw the door open.