The Changing Page 9

  MONDAY, MAY 5: 1:00 P.M.

  The man from Quality Control said to the man from Research as they both stood looking up at the Ansel Adams mural–transparency—"Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico"—near the Ridge Road exit at Kodak Park, "Wasn't that supposed to have come down last month, Earl?"

  Earl nodded. "They were going to put something by Linda McCartney up there, I think, but it got spoiled in processing, so they've got to redo it. I guess it'll be another couple of weeks, anyway."

  "Too bad," said the man from Quality Control. "I mean, this is nice and everything, it's really nice, but you get sick of anything after a while, no matter how good it is."

  "Even sex," Earl said.

  "I wouldn't go that far," said the man from Quality Control, and, both of them chuckling manfully, they turned and left The Park by the Ridge Road exit—the same exit that Greta Lynch and George Dixon and Doug Miller (when he was tagging after Greta) and a thousand other people used—to have a liquid lunch at Jack Ryan's Grill, just five minutes away on foot.

  TUESDAY, MAY 6: 4:20 P.M.

  Okay, twenty-three-year-old Bud Wygant told himself, so this was where Walt Morgan bought the farm?! Big deal! People died every day; what did it matter if you died in your sleep or if you had your head ripped off like an overripe melon? You were still dead, still just a memory, you were still someone they'd called 'late,' whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. Bud took an almost perverse delight in treating the subject of death as if it were nothing but an adolescent joke. That may have been because death had never come close to touching him or anyone he knew. What he knew about it was only what several thousand hours of watching the tube had shown him—a version of death that was as sanitized and lily white as the people who sold detergent and toilet paper or as overblown and exploitive as a bout of professional wrestling.

  He said aloud, with feeling, "Hey, Mr. Werewolf, fuck you, and fuck the horse you may or may not have rode in on!" He chuckled. He was an apprentice copywriter in Advertising at Kodak's State Street office and was in The Park only because his girlfriend, Sandi Hackman, worked there, and he was on his way to see her to take her out when her shift came to an end at 4:30. He didn't need to go through Building Seven's basement corridor to get to her office, of course, but there was no way he was going to bypass it. It was, again, a way of sneering at Death. Like he did, he thought, when he drove with twelve beers in his gut, or went deer hunting in a camouflage suit—the other hunters wouldn't see him, of course, but then, neither would the deer. A way of sneering at Death. And a way of sneering at the horrific things, like this werewolf, that carried Death with them.

  Roger Crimm, Doug Miller's new boss in Emulsion Technology, said, "Have you been to see her, Doug?" It was the first time the two had spoken that day. Roger had been in another part of the plant for most of the day, and for the past hour and a half he'd been shut up in his office going over Walt Morgan's Employee Performance Charts. At last he'd tipped them all into the circular file with a sigh, a shake of his head, and a mental note that The Peter Principle—which said that people worked up to their level of incompetence—had really applied in Walt's case.

  "Who?" Doug said, looking up and smiling amiably from behind his desk.

  "Greta. From what you've told me, I thought you'd be camped out at her door."

  Miller shook his head once, quickly. "No, I'm sorry, I don't understand."

  "At the hospital. I thought you'd be camped out by her door at the hospital, Doug."

  "Greta's in the hospital?" Miller was stunned; it was the first he'd heard of it. The previous day, a Monday, had been his regular day off, and Sunday had been his golfing day with Jack Youngman. "I don't understand. I thought this was her day off." For the last two weeks, Tuesdays had been Greta's regular day off, a situation she'd arranged because it gave her three days in a row away from Doug Miller. "Why's she in the hospital?" He stood shakily. "What happened?"

  Roger Crimm went over to him, put a hand comfortingly on his shoulder. "Are you okay, Doug? Can I get you something?"

  "No!" Miller shook his head quickly, in agitation. "No!" He looked urgently, pleasingly at Crimm. "What hospital? Please. Which one?"

  "Strong Memorial. I thought you knew. I'm sorry—"

  And Doug sprinted around from behind his desk and headed for the Ridge Road exit. He got all the way to the street and stopped. What the hell was he doing? he asked himself. His car was in the north parking lot on the opposite side of the plant, where he always parked it. Greta, he told himself. Greta; it's you, isn't it?! Because there were those countless end-of-shifts when he'd walked her to her car out the Ridge Road exit, and now, with her so much on his mind . . .

  He turned around and went back through the doors he'd just come out, because it was easier to get to the north parking lot by going through the plant than going all the way around outside.

  He stopped.

  Above him he saw the magnificent Ansel Adams mural–transparency—"Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico."

  And he felt something strange inside him, as if there were insects loose in his belly, and in his groin.

  Sandi Hackman tugged on Bud Wygant's arm as he led her through Building Seven's basement corridor. "Bud," she said testily, "I mean it, I really do mean it. If you make me do this, we're done, through, kaput, over, finished!"

  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.

  Chapter Fourteen

  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 in
ches 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."