The Devouring Read online

  So, the blue funk persisted.

  It wasn't the first time he'd been in jail. During his junior year at Duke University he'd gotten rip-roaring drunk with several other juniors and they had collectively mooned the sorority house where Coreen lived. They were caught, as the cop who arrested them said, "with their pants down," charged with "lewd and lascivious behavior" and put in the drunk tank for the night.

  It wasn't the last time Ryerson got drunk. For five years after that he consistently worked himself into a stupor, consistently made a fool of himself in public places, and consistently got arrested. At last, he realized that he was sliding into alcoholism, and that if he didn't quit drinking, he'd slowly kill himself. A year later, after several failed attempts at putting booze behind him, he was offered a drink and said no. On the night that he sat in a blue funk in the Buffalo holding cell, he hadn't had a drink in nearly fifteen years.

  ~ * ~

  In "The District"

  "Power!" the woman breathed. She had power. Power to be, to have, to control, power to change! It made up for the darkness, made up for the pain, made up for her time here in this damp and stinking place.

  Because another damp and stinking place was where she had sprung up and had begun to visit herself upon the earth.

  Power! Control! Change!

  And what had that last poor fool called her—werewolf? That was for others to imagine, only one of the evil fantasies her beautiful living children could indulge in and so, through it, take power for themselves.

  And so give power to her.

  Werewolf indeed! The fool. That was for that other creature. The creature she had sprung from. The creature whose flesh hung now like paper on its bones and whose eyes mingled with the liquid that its brain had become.

  ~ * ~

  Captain Lucas came to Ryerson's cell at 9:30 that morning. He had a sheet from a computer printout in his hand, and as the guard opened the cell door for him, he smiled gloatingly.

  He sat on the bed next to Ryerson and held up the sheet of paper as if holding up a picture of one of his kids; "You know what this is, Dr. Biergarten?"

  Ryerson glanced disinterestedly at him, and looked away. "I don't like to be called doctor."

  "Shit," Lucas cried, "I would if I were you. If I had a fucking doctorate in parapsychology, I'd sure as hell want to be called fucking doctor."

  Ryerson shrugged. "Call me what you wish to call me."

  Lucas guffawed. "Call you anything but sober, isn't that right?" He guffawed again, immensely pleased with his joke.

  Ryerson chose to ignore the remark; he nodded at the computer printout. "What you have there, Captain Lucas, is a litany of past mistakes. I paid for those mistakes, and I can't see that what happened a decade and a half ago has any bearing at all on what you're investigating now."

  It was Lucas's turn to shrug. "What we have here, Dr. Biergarten, is the record of a loser. Once an alky, always an alky, that's what I say."

  "You're a real phrasemaker, aren't you, Captain?"

  Lucas quickly grew angry. He waved the computer printout so it flapped in the air. "Whether this has anything to do with Laurie Drake and Detective Newman is something we have yet to determine—"

  Ryerson cut in, sighing. "You called Tom McCabe, didn't you?" Tom McCabe was Chief of Detectives in Rochester, New York, where Ryerson had worked on what had become known as "the park werewolf." He and McCabe had grown close during his investigation, and Ryerson assumed he'd be an excellent character reference.

  Lucas said, "Yeah. Sure. I called him. How'd you know?"

  Ryerson answered simply, "I know a lot of things, Captain." He paused. "I assume that Tom vouched for me?"

  "He said you worked with him and he said he was sorry to hear you were in trouble. That's about it."

  "You're lying."

  Captain Lucas grinned. "Whatever your friend said, Mr. Biergarten, doesn't make a bit of difference here. I don't care if you're the fucking queen of France, you're trying to play footsy with us and I don't like it one damn bit."

  Ryerson leveled a withering gaze at him; he wished mightily that his gifts included telekinesis as well, so he could mentally untie the man's shoelaces or make his cigar fall into his lap. Instead, he said, "Tell me, Captain Lucas—just how much do you value your credibility here at the Buffalo Police Department?"

  Lucas looked confused, a little apprehensive. "What are you talking about?"

  Ryerson shrugged; he hated doing this, he thought a person's private life should indeed remain private, but for some reason this man bore him a lot of animosity, and if the man had his way, Ryerson would probably sit in the holding cell until Christmas. He said, "What I'm talking about, Captain, is what you do at night. At"—he paused, probed about in the psychic atmosphere—"at Ed's Place."

  Lucas grinned broadly. "Ain't no Ed's Place in Buffalo, my friend." He put his hands palm down on the bed, as if preparing to stand.

  Ryerson went on. "The name of the place doesn't matter much. Whatever it's called, it's what you do there that gives you such a kick, isn't it?"

  Lucas hissed, "You son of a bitch!"

  Ryerson shook his head. "No, Captain. I just want to get out of here, that's all. And if I have to blackmail you to do it, then I will."

  Lucas's cheeks puffed several times with anger and frustration. Finally, he pushed himself violently to his feet, went to the cell door, barked, "Guard! Guard!" glanced around at Ryerson, and said very succinctly—through lips tightly clenched with anger—"You'll be free as soon as I can clear the paperwork. Just don't leave the city."

  "I have no intention of leaving the city," Ryerson said. "I've got business to attend to here."

  Then the guard came and let the captain out.

  Ryerson sighed. He thought that the years he'd spent gambling—which seemed to have gone hand in hand with his drinking—had paid off; at least he'd learned how to bluff. Because what he'd read from Captain Lucas had merely been vague—only that Lucas went to a bar on certain nights and while he was there he did something that made him feel ashamed. Ryerson had read no more than that. He didn't think he'd have been able to, anyway, because whatever it was that Lucas did at the bar made him feel so very ashamed that he pushed it far back into his consciousness and let it lie hidden most of the time.

  At 11:00 that morning Ryerson was let out of the holding cell. He located the police matron—who was getting ready to go home—got Creosote back, was told by the desk sergeant that the Woody was at the Buffalo Impound Garage, five blocks away, and was reminded one more time by a growling Captain Lucas, "I don't care what you think you know about me, ace; if you try to go back to Boston or whatever damned hole you climbed out of, I'll haul your bare ass back here personally."

  It was 11:25 A.M. when Lucas gave Ryerson this warning.

  Not quite five minutes later Laurie Drake, in Room 12 of the hospital wing of the Buffalo City Jail, began to suffer the torments of the damned.

  ~ * ~

  The thing inside Laurie had no color, or shape, or smell, but it did have mass, though very little of it, and weight, about a quarter of a gram, and it traveled about in her veins like a blood clot. Most of the time in the past two months, ever since, on a dare, she'd gone at night into the area called "The District," she had had no idea she was playing host to it; she'd felt a vague discomfort now and again, or her belly ached, and she would think that she was at last beginning to have her period.

  And when the change started, pretty, laughing, "academically talented" Laurie Drake was all but squashed by the entity of her own creation. Laurie Drake—who secretly longed for the mama doll she'd carted through infancy and into preadolescence and had at last thrown away to prove she was indeed growing up—was squashed by the tall, buxom, incredibly sensual and murderous woman that lived deep inside her adolescent fantasies. The fantasy she had built up out of a character in a movie.

  The thing inside her fed on the darkness in that fantasy. It saw murder there, and bui
lt on it; it saw hunger there, and built on it. It changed Laurie Drake inexorably. It changed her into the fantasy that lived and moved at first only inside her head.

  And then it made that fantasy into something sensuously and murderously real.

  In Room 12 of the hospital wing of the Buffalo City Jail, Laurie Drake again began to change.

  But she didn't want to change.

  She wanted to stay what she was—the pretty, brown-haired, .twelve-year-old girl who secretly longed for her mama doll. She was tired of being squashed, buried, pushed back.

  And so she fought the change. And it fought her.

  And the pain therefore was incredible.

  Chapter Eleven

  The nurse on duty was drinking apple juice. It was lunchtime, and because she was a very health-conscious person, she'd brought a very healthful lunch—a quart of apple juice to keep her regular, sprout sandwiches made with nine-grain bread for iron and protein and B vitamins, and a crunchy granola bar for dessert.

  The nurse's name was Tabby (short for Tabitha) Makepeace. She was thirty-one years old, firm of body and mind, and at the moment that she heard the scream from Room 12, she was smiling pleasantly and thinking that her dog really should be getting more bone meal.

  She was also in the middle of a long tug on the quart container of apple juice when she heard the scream from Room 12, and the muscle spasm that racked her body made her throat close up, so what was at the top half of her throat got spit out, and what was at the bottom half went down the wrong pipe.

  Fully half a minute later, when her gagging and gasping for air had subsided to occasional coughs, she heard another scream, just as loud, and just as pain-ridden as the first. She whispered, "Oh Jesus Lord God in Heaven," jumped to her feet, and moved as fast as her very healthy legs could carry her to Room 12.

  And wanted, as soon as she threw the door open and saw what was in the room, to stop and run screaming in the other direction. But because her emotional and physical momentum were simply too great, she half-stumbled, half-ran partway into the room and was there pulled firmly, lovingly, hungrily into the arms of a tall, buxom, and incredibly sensuous woman. And the life was sucked noisily out of her within minutes.

  ~ * ~

  Access to the hospital wing of the Buffalo City Jail was gained through a set of sliding barred doors about thirty feet east of Tabby's station. Sitting near these barred doors was an aging, disease-ridden cop named George Orlando who was, at the time of Tabby's murder, absorbed in the latest issue of the survivalist magazine Exotic Weaponry: smack dab in the middle of the cover there was an ad for the magazine's newest bumper sticker; the bumper sticker read, KILL A COMMIE FOR MOMMY. That tickled George because he'd done a lot of commie killing during the Korean War, and they had been the best years of his life.

  Covering the barred doors that let people in and out of the hospital wing, there was a layer of thick, unbreakable glass. This was why George hadn't heard the first screams from Room 12, or the abrupt scream from Tabby Makepeace when the life was sucked from her.

  So George, absorbed in his copy of Exotic Weaponry, heard absolutely nothing. Had he been twenty years younger, and his hearing more acute, he would have heard a set of small, shrill, hollow noises that might have gotten his momentary attention.

  Besides being racked by various diseases—one was a lingering low-grade hepatitis, still another was psoriasis—George was incredibly nearsighted. Recently, the powers that be had discussed asking him to resign voluntarily because he was in such lousy shape, but it was decided that for the two years remaining until his twenty-five-year retirement, sitting guard at the hospital wing probably wouldn't get him into too much trouble.

  So, because he was nearsighted, what he saw when he looked up after sensing movement down the corridor, beyond the glassed and barred doors, was a vague but very suggestive form moving toward him, as if he were looking at a naked woman through a wet, translucent shower curtain.

  He stood from his metal stool, a lascivious grin played on his mouth, and he rubbed his eyes hard as if that would help him to see better. And, as a matter of fact, it did, if just briefly, just long enough for him to see that what was moving toward him down the corridor was indeed a naked woman. And had he, for that brief moment, focused on the woman's face instead of on her incredible body, he would have seen that blood ringed her mouth, a mouth that was open wide to reveal the inch-long canines gleaming dully within.

  But, too soon, she was behind the wet, translucent curtain again. And what he saw of her mouth then convinced him only that she was wearing too much dull red lipstick.

  She got to the barred door, pressed her nakedness into it, and clawed screechingly at the glass with her fingernails. George's fantasies gave him no choice but to press the button that opened the door and let her spill out over him, onto him, and push those awful canines into his thick grayish-pink neck while he grinned broadly, and loud nasal "uhnns" of pleasure came from him. Until he died.

  ~ * ~

  Joan Mott Evans felt ill at ease. She thought her mother, rest her soul, would have said, "Someone's walking over your grave, Joanie," a phrase that much appealed to Joan because of its commingling of various apparent absurdities (time as a kind of Mobius band that's constantly folding back on itself; death as a state of continuous static wakefulness; resurrection as a small whispered promise). She thought it was likely that someone she didn't want to see was going to visit her that day. Similar ideas had proved correct in the past. Like the time her former sister-in-law, Judith, a woman who was obsessed with money-making plans for the housewife—Amway, Tupperware, envelope-stuffing, et cetera—had shown up with all her paraphernalia in hand, brought it into Joan's house, dumped it in the garbage, and announced, "I'm going to save you," because, she explained, she had given up making money in favor of, as she'd put it coyly, "making time with Jesus, instead." Joan had had an out that day. She was on her way to visit Lila Curtis, her new young friend who lived in Edgewater, just twenty miles south of Erie, where she had lived at the time. Lila had to take her driving test and Joan had offered her car to take it in; so Judith, smiling a promise that she would be back, left the house.

  Minutes later, so did Joan. She drove to Edgewater, pulled up in front of Lila's house, honked the horn. She knew then that she should probably go inside and chat with Lila's parents. How did it look, after all, to have their sixteen-year-old daughter honked for by a twenty-three-year-old woman who claimed merely to be their daughter's friend? But she didn't like Lila's parents. They were cloying and possessive and judgmental. She could read it in them, in the aura they projected, more than in anything they said or did. She thought that Mr. Curtis, for instance, had ideas about his daughter that bordered on the unhealthy. And she thought that Mrs. Curtis knew this and blamed Lila for it. Caught in the middle, of course, was poor Lila—a good-natured, artistic, joke-telling girl who seemed to have struggled heroically out of her parents' bizarre attitudes toward her and developed a winning personality all her own.

  But that day, the day of her driving test, Joan knew that something was wrong as soon as Lila got into the car. She could see trouble in her, in her eyes and in the set of her mouth. And every once in a while some-thing tight and cold and miserable leaped from Lila's brain into hers and made her shiver.

  "What's wrong?" Joan asked.

  And Lila, flashing a pale copy of her usual bright smile, answered, "Just nervous. About the test."

  Joan nodded. "Sure. That's understandable, but you've been driving now for three or four months. Just pretend when the examiner sits down there"—she nodded at Lila's side of the seat—"that it's me."

  Lila's smile flattened. "Thanks. That's a good idea. I'll do it."

  Joan studied her for a few seconds. "What's wrong, Lila?"

  Lila, looking straight ahead, answered, "I'm sick, Joan. Oh, God, I'm so sick!"

  That had been the beginning of their walk together through hell.

  ~ * ~

 
Now, seven months later, after Joan's ill-at-ease feeling had dissipated, there was a soft knock at her front door. She got a twinge of apprehension, no more, then, convincing herself that it was only the paper boy collecting, she went and answered the knock.

  Her face dropped when she saw Ryerson Biergarten, Creosote in his arms, standing on the porch. He smiled apologetically. "Am I disturbing you, Joan?"

  "Of course you are," she answered, pretending weariness.

  His smile faded. "We've got to talk, Joan," he said. "About Lila."

  She sighed resignedly, because she'd heard a very firm resolve in his voice. She nodded. "Yes. We do," she said, and backed away from the door to let him into the house.

  ~ * ~

  At the Buffalo Police Department's Records Division

  Glen Coffman asked, "What'd you find out at the Evening News last night, Irene?"

  She punched a few figures onto an equation she was jumbling, glanced at him. "Nothing. They wouldn't let me in."

  Glen smiled, pleased. "Didn't you tell them who you were?"

  "Of course I told them who I was. I told them I was a cop, and they—"

  "Wait. Who's 'they'?"

  "A janitor."

  "Oh."

  "A wise-ass janitor at that, too. He said if I wanted to get into the building's morgue at that hour, I had to have a warrant. Jesus, everyone's a damned civil libertarian." She sighed. "And I guess there's nothing wrong with that, really. It's just that I hate wasting my time."

  "What about your boyfriend?"

  "What about him? He wasn't there."

  "Didn't the janitor know him?" Glen was smiling; he was clearly enjoying himself.

  Irene looked askance at him. "Why don't you get out your Space Wars or your Star Wars or whatever juvenile game you play when you should be working?"

  "Don't mind if I do." A pause. "You going back there today, Irene?"