T. M. Wright

The Changing

Chapter One

Harry Simons called, "Okay, melon-head, come on outta there. This ain't a friggin' zoo! Some of us got work to accomplish." Harry was a large, strong man, his face shot through with the lines of age and work and living, but his voice had a small whisper of fear in it, as if his gut was telling him something that his head was denying. His head was telling him that Halloween was a long way off, but that some people would do anything for a laugh, and his gut was telling him that whoever was idiot enough to go running around dressed like that might also be idiot enough to carry the act a little further.

Harry Simons liked his job in Emulsion Coating at Kodak Park. He liked the constant, comforting hum of the big, shiny, beige-colored machines; he liked the machines themselves-they were, he'd once told his wife, "like, you know, symbols of industry," which he thought was a good and true and simple observation. And he didn't mind the hours of aloneness here-because the big beige coating machines very nearly ran themselves. It had taken a while to get used to, sure. Several years, in fact. But he had grown used to it. He'd grown to prize it. Just him-Harry Simons-and the low, constant hum of the big, beige-colored machines.

"I'm gonna call security you don't come outta there real quick, Bozo!" he shouted into the midst of the machines. He knew it was an empty threat; this was his section, and no way was he going to let those numb-heads from security down here. He'd take care of this clown himself.

"I mean it, Bozo! You don't show yourself, yer gonna get hauled outta here by yer butt!" Again he heard the whisper of fear in his voice, louder now. He supposed it was because the low, hard, growling noise this creep was making was so damned… real. "And you can cut that out, too," Harry called. "Whatta you think this is, a friggin'-" He stopped, thought that if he started repeating himself it would tell this clown he was scared… almost scared…getting scared.

Harry wished, suddenly, that the light were better. For years he'd enjoyed the dull-yellow light that the recessed lighting fixtures in the high ceilings provided; he liked the way it bounced off the rounded, polished corners of the machines, as if highlighting them, while everything else-the gray tile floor, the blue cement walls-seemed to soak it up.

"Stop that!" he shouted, because the growling noise had grown suddenly louder, harsher, closer, and Harry heard something in it that made his stomach turn over and his head spin: he heard need in it; he heard desperation in it; he heard murder in it.

So he turned; he didn't know if he was turning toward or away from the creature he'd seen only briefly, like some particle of dust darting across the surface of his eye. Too quick, he reasoned, too damned quick to really have seen what he thought he'd seen-the long, luxuriant, reddish fur, the wide black nose, the small, malicious brown eyes, the mouth that glittered with a hundred wonderfully pointed canines. Damn, it had looked so… so new, Harry thought.

He turned and started moving quickly toward his small steel desk at the south end of the huge room. He called matter-of-factly, as if deciding on the spur of the moment that this particular game had gone far enough, "Well, by Jesus, I'm gettin' my freakin' gun!" which also was a lie. He had no gun; guns were not allowed in Kodak Park without authorization. And poor Harry Simons had never been authorized.

He got halfway to his desk before much of his stomach was ripped away, and he fell in awe and pain and self-pity to the gray tile floor.

THREE DAYS LATER: APRIL 10

The chunky man with thinning black hair and tiny green eyes thought Douglas Miller was conning him, and he didn't like it. His jowls quivered in anger, his brow pulled itself into a dozen thick white folds, and his beefy hands clutched themselves hard until the knuckles were reddish-gray. Then his heart began to race, and with what looked to Doug Miller like a monumental effort, the man forced himself into a kind of stiff calm that usually scared the hell out of his other workers, though Miller had never let himself be much intimidated by it. The big man said, "Tell me that again, and remember-if I can't have you fired (and I think I can), I sure as hell can make life miserable for you."

Miller glanced quickly around the big man's office. His gaze lingered briefly on the nameplate at the front of the man's desk-"J. Youngman/Manager" -then on the backs of several small framed snapshots on the right side of the desk, then on the large square window that overlooked one of Kodak Park's many picnicking areas; several workers were there already, having an early lunch, enjoying the unexpected mid-spring warmth.

He took a breath. "Jack," he said, -there's a werewolf loose in The Park. The chances are good that it's just someone who thinks he's a werewolf, someone who likes to dress up like a werewolf, you know, someone who makes noises like a werewolf-"

Jack Youngman cut in, "You all think I'm pretty stupid, don't you? Admit it, you think I've got the brains of a doorknob."

Miller thought, No, you're smarter than a doorknob; I'll admit that! But he said, "Jack, I'm just telling you what I've seen, and what I've heard. I think precautions should be taken."

Youngman closed his eyes lightly in an effort, Miller realized, to keep himself calm. When he opened them, Miller knew that he'd at last gone too far. Youngman rose very slowly from his big green Naugahyde desk chair, came just as slowly, but with great deliberation, around the side of the desk, reached up-because Miller was nearly a foot taller than Youngman-took him by the collar, hard, stood on his tiptoes and hissed, "Get the hell out of here, dammit, and if you try to make me look like a fool again, I'll tear your throat out! I don't give a damn how big your fucking pec torals are"-Miller had been into body building for a few years and he looked awfully overdeveloped-" then I'll have you fired. And that's a promise."

Miller valued his job, his yearly bonus, his friends at the plant, the security, so he nodded once, said, "Sure, Jack. You can let me go now," which Jack did, though with a small, sharp shove for emphasis, and Miller turned at once and quickly left the office.

~* ~

"He didn't believe a word of it, Greta."

Greta Lynch, who was in her early thirties, short, brunette, her long hair done up attractively around a face that was appealing in a quiet, sensual, and therefore overwhelming way, sighed, grinned, and shrugged. "Maybe we should have said 'vampire,' Doug. Maybe he would have believed that. Vampires are easier to believe in."

Miller wasn't sure if she was kidding him. He was never sure how to react to her because she was smart, and liked a good joke, and sometimes, he thought, it seemed as if she were playing a joke on whoever was within earshot. He said, "Sure. I guess," and smiled in a flat, noncommittal way.

"I mean," she explained, "vampires are wispier, somehow." She fluttered her graceful hands in the air as if mimicking a bird. "They're more fantastic, so they're easier to be afraid of, and easier to believe in. And what's a werewolf? A werewolf's your basic supernatural grunt, he's a dogface, a slob. He's mundane, he's concrete, Doug, he's noisy and messy, and real. So naturally, if he existed, there'd be plenty of evidence. That's why I think we should have said ‘vampire.' Maybe Jack would have thought twice about whether or not there's a vampire loose in The Park."

"You think he really would have believed that a vampire got Harry Simons?"

"He believes in flying saucers, doesn't he?”

“Lots of people believe in flying saucers, Greta.”

“I don't."

"Well, I do. Kind of."

Greta smiled. Miller usually liked her smile, because he could always see more than the hint of sexuality in it; now he thought it was condescending. She said, "Which kind do you believe in, Doug, the cigar-shaped kind, or the tea cup kind-"

"Give me a break, Greta."

She chuckled. "I'm only kidding." A short pause. "Harry himself thinks it was a werewolf that got him. Did you know that?"

"Greta, please-"

She held her hand up, shook her head briskly. "No, really. He says it was a werewolf. He says he heard this deep kind of growling sound down there where he works, and when he went to find out what the hell was going on-"

"Greta… "

"Don't interrupt me, Doug, I'm on a roll." She smiled again, playfully this time. "And anyway, he went to find out what the hell was going on and"-she growled suddenly, very deep in her chest, and grabbed Miller by the throat-"it got him." She let go of Miller.

"Christ, Greta!"

"Pretty good, huh?"

"You're going to scare me out of my damned shorts, Greta."

Miller thought she paused just long enough on that remark, and it pleased him. Then she said, "The part about hearing a growling noise down in Section Twelve is true, Doug." Miller realized that her tone had changed to one of deadly seriousness. "You're aware of that, aren't you?"

He nodded. "Yes. I am. But it could have been anything. It could have been one of the emulsifiers."

Greta shook her head. "No. The emulsifiers were off."

Miller shrugged. "Then it had to have been a werewolf, I guess."

"Or a were-chicken," Greta said.

"Or at the very least, a were-chihuahua," Miller said.

They both laughed at that, though not very hard or very long. And when they stopped laughing, Miller said, "Is Harry going to make it?"

Greta shook her head. "God knows, Doug."

~* ~

Kodak Park, the manufacturing arm of Eastman Kodak Company, was so large that it had its own fire department and its own police department. It also had an army of support people-cooks, sanitation workers, engineers, architects, glaziers, construction people, maintenance workers, air quality analyzers, electrical workers-who were employed so the other army, the army of people whose job was to produce the products of the Eastman Kodak company, could come and do their work. They made photographic film, primarily-print film, slide film, black-and-white film, color film, film for amateurs and film for professionals, film for doctors and dentists, nature lovers, brides and grooms, film for new parents and new grandparents, film for anyone who had pictures to take. It was likely, in fact, that one out of three people in the country had at one time or another used Kodak film.

And the ten thousand people employed at Kodak Park were fairly representative of the population mix of Rochester, New York, Kodak's home city. There were blacks and whites and Orientals, a few American Indians, some Pakistanis, some Vietnamese. There were Catholics and Protestants, Unitarians, a few Buddhists, some atheists, and a lot who never thought much about just what they were. There were fishermen and baseball players, hunters, bird-watchers and Amway representatives, musicians, writers, amateur historians, and budding young poets. And most of these people had one thing in common-the need for security, because a secure job with good pay and wonderful benefits went a long way toward insuring a secure life. Vacations, new cars, new homes, being able to indulge in the hundreds of nice little things that made life just that much sweeter, and at last a peaceful and happy retirement were what employment at Kodak had come to mean for most of its people.

Except one.

And for that one it had come to mean darkness, and agony, and a transient satisfaction in ripping away at the flesh of whoever might be close at hand.

Chapter Two

"He died, didn't he?" asked the man from Quality Control, Building Eight.

"Who?" the man from Research asked. "Who died? Harry Simons?"

The man from Quality Control nodded at the eight-by-ten-foot transparency just inside Kodak Park's Ridge Road entrance, in an archway above three green-carpeted stairs that led down to The Park's personnel offices (almost always crowded with hopeful applicants for employment). Corridors branching to the left and right at the bottom of the stairs also led into the interior of The Park, into Emulsion Coating, where Harry Simons had had such a bad time, into Research and Development, into Films Technology, into Long-Term Storage, and a host of other departments that filled a total of twelve one-acre buildings. "No," the man from Quality Control continued. "Him-the guy who took that picture."

The man from Research looked at the transparency with smiling appreciation for several seconds. Then he said, "Yeah. A couple of years ago, I guess."

"Alfred Eisenstadt, wasn't it?"

"No," answered the man from Research. "Ansel Adams."

"Oh, yeah. Ansel Adams." A short pause; then, "Great shot, isn't it?!"

"None better. I shoot in black and white quite a bit, myself. There's lots more room for creativity in black and white."

The man from Quality Control nodded sagely. "That's true. I mean, look at that, you can almost reach right out and touch it."

"Uh-huh. Though I think it's a shame that it's been so de-romanticized."

" `De-romanticized'?"

"Sure. By the astronauts."

"Oh. Yes. I see."

"I mean, it's like we've dumped on it or something."

The man from Quality Control wasn't convinced. "Maybe, maybe not. It's still got a kind of aura about it, it's still got some power."

The man from Research thought about that, then conceded, "Yes, it does. I think it's in the kind of light, I think it's in the wavelength-"

"No," the other man cut in, "I don't think it's that so much as the quality -I mean, I don't want to start sounding mystical or anything, but-"

"Oh heck, there's nothing mystical here."

"I was only going to point out what's already been proved, and that is that the quality of the light is the determining factor in the kind of influence it has."

The man from Research was up for a discussion. He nodded briskly. "Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but let me ask you this: Would that," and he pointed stiffly, "just as we see it, that, literally, have the same effect as the real thing?"

The man from Quality Control shook his head. "Not in a million years," he said. "Because it's not the real thing at all. It's chemicals and dyes and a remote light source. It's fake, it's an illusion."

The man from Research said, ending the discussion abruptly, "Sure it's fake, sure it's an illusion, but my God, it's such a true illusion," and they turned and walked out of the plant to Ridge Road, at the south side of The Park, and then to Jack Ryan's Grill nearby.

~* ~

Young, slim, vivacious Tammy Levine was on her way to see Smokey and the Bandit, Part Two. She'd seen it twice, but she'd decided that she could never tire of seeing it, because she could never tire of seeing Burt Reynolds. She'd seen Smokey and the Bandit (part one) twelve times, The Longest Yard ten times, and Smokey and the Bandit, Part Three four times. She kept such good track of the number of times she'd seen each movie because keeping track of things was her job, and she liked it. For the past five years she'd been keeping track of film in cold storage. She knew, at any given moment, just how much film-and its type (ASA, number of exposures, print or slide, black-and-white or color)-there was in each of the five cold-storage rooms in Building Nine. It was a job that, in most of the other buildings, took several people to do, but Tammy had always had an uncanny facility with numbers, facts, and lists. She considered it a kind of wild talent, and the Personnel Department considered her worth her weight in gold. Without her, two or three people would have to be hired (at a total of over $100,000 a year in wages and benefits) just to do her job.

The movie that Tammy Levine was going to see was being shown at one of The Park's five theaters. Getting to it from the building where she worked required a long and dreary walk through Building Nine's subbasement corridors. It was, Tammy had once told a friend, like walking through the inside of a weird kind of cereal box. The walls were close enough to touch with both hands at once, the ceiling so low that it sparked claustrophobia, and the lighting dismal at best. She'd made the walk at least a hundred times since coming to Kodak Park, and each time she'd told herself that yes, at last she was getting used to it. And each time she knew it was a lie. That she'd never get used to it.

Which, thanks to the thing walking the corridor with her that afternoon, was tragically correct.

~* ~

She had long ago begun talking to herself on her walks through Building Nine's subbasement corridors. She had a high-pitched but pleasant voice, and today, with thoughts of Burt Reynolds in her head, she said to herself, "Burt, baby, what I wouldn't do to you if I got you alone." She was going to say more, because she usually did-she usually lost herself in a string of amazing sexual daydreams-but the thing that was walking the corridor with her, several yards behind, let forth with a small half growl, half grunt that echoed loudly on the smooth walls. Tammy Levine stopped walking. She said, at a whisper, "Get away from me, okay?!" She had no idea what she was talking to, or even if it understood what she was saying; she had a vague idea that one of The Park's nighttime patrol dogs had gotten loose, although that was unlikely. The dogs were used only in Building Twelve, a high-security area, and were allowed out only for emergency trips to a veterinarian, or when Death paid them a visit.

Death was paying Tammy Levine a visit that afternoon. She had a vague idea that it was true; something in the half grunt-half growl, something desperate and unreasoning, had told her it was true.

"Get away from me," she said again, "and I mean it!" She thought she sounded pretty pathetic. She didn't want to sound pathetic, she wanted to sound like she was in control, even in charge. But the thing behind her in the cereal-box corridor let go with another half growl and grunt, but louder, and longer. And Tammy ran.

She got ten feet before the thing caught up with her and tore most of her throat away. The last image that flashed across her consciousness was Burt Reynolds's face, which made her smile a little. She would keep that image forever.

And Building Nine's subbasement corridor walls would, even after an extensive cleanup, hold traces of her blood for a very long time.

Chapter Three

Ryerson H. Biergarten-his friends called him "Rye"-had the body of a long-distance runner, a face that was invariably described as "sexy," or "intriguing," or both, and he dressed in a way that the first of his two divorced wives called "poor man's preppy"-in faded, no-name jeans or corduroys, battered yellow or brown cardigan sweaters, argyle socks, penny loafers, and well-worn blue, cream-colored or green button-down shirts. ("It's clear, Rye," his first wife told him, "that you don't give a damn what you look like." He had readily agreed.) He had a full head of reddish-brown hair, usually in need of cutting or combing, and his gray-green eyes almost always had a spark of humor in them. He had also, in the past few weeks, taken to carting around a snorting Boston bull terrier pup he'd named Creosote. He called the dog Creosote because he'd found it in a smokehouse behind a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Vermont. Ryerson had been in the house looking for several of its previous tenants-a man in his nineties who did lots of cursing at odd hours and a young woman of twenty or twenty-one who had a fetching smile and wonderful green eyes; she liked to lounge on a huge, Victorian-style sofa in the parlor and say suggestive things to the house's male visitors. Both of these previous tenants were dead. The man in his nineties had died a hundred and ten years earlier, according to the county hall of records, and the woman had died, at her lover's hands, early in the twentieth century. Her name had been Gwendolyn, and the man's name had been Mr. Barclay.

Ryerson did not go to the house convinced of anything. He was, by nature, a skeptical person and was ready to find any of a number of answers, the most likely being, he guessed, that the owners of the house had cooked the whole thing up to draw visitors in. The owners, a group of five area businessmen, charged two dollars a head for people to walk through what they called "A living piece of America's heritage." Ryerson believed firmly in the supernatural, and he believed just as firmly in its various and usually unpredictable effects on the world of the living. He also believed, perhaps even more firmly, in the potential for greed and ignobility inherent in everyone (including himself-though, at the age of thirty-eight, he liked to think that he hadn't yet fallen to too much greed, or too much ignobility).

He talked to each of the five businessmen first. He asked them pointed questions about what they'd heard and seen, the same question several times, from different perspectives, trying to catch any of them in a lie. And when he was done, his own very well-developed sixth sense told him that there was a little bit of hoax, a little bit of truth, and a lot of colorful exaggeration involved in the whole thing. Whether there was anything actually supernatural happening at the house was a judgment he would put off until he'd been through it.

He went there on a Monday, the day the house was closed to visitors, and to his surprise-and without much effort-he found the two ghosts he'd been hired to find. It was late afternoon, the day was dismal and rainy, and the young woman, Gwendolyn, was in her usual place on the huge Victorian sofa in the parlor. She was, as Ryerson liked to say, "flickering"-her image waxing and waning like the light of a candle. Her suggestive words waxed and waned in the same way.

"Hi," she said when Ryerson walked into the room.

"Hi," he said.

"Would you"-her image waned; her words grew inaudible-"me?"

"I'm sorry," Ryerson said. He had stopped in the doorway. He didn't want to go any farther. The truth was that, although he'd investigated several hundred "events," as he called them, he had never been able to push back the loud whisper of fear. He'd tried smiling, coughing, whistling, he'd tried thinking about Yogi Berra, he had tried logic (My God, this poor creature is lost, and I'm here to help it!), but still the fear remained. No matter that Gwendolyn, when he could see her, was probably the most delightful and sensuous of all the ghosts he'd encountered; she was still a ghost, so she made his stomach flutter, and started a hard knot of panic in his throat.

"I want you to take your pants off," Gwendolyn said, then faded once more. When she reappeared-she was lounging with her legs up on the Victorian sofa and was dressed in an extremely low-cut red floor-length gown-Ryerson asked, "What good would that do?"

This confused her. Her brow furrowed, she glanced down at the floor briefly. When she looked up, she was smiling happily, as if she'd discovered something that had been missing for a long time. She said, "Well, we could diddle with…" the rest of the sentence was inaudible, but Ryerson thought he understood the gist of it.

"How?" he asked.

She faded, returned, faded. She swung her feet to the floor; Ryerson was a little troubled by the total silence that accompanied her bodily movements. He'd encountered the phenomenon a lot with "the others," as he called them, but it too was something he'd never grown used to.

"How what?" she asked at last.

"How could we ‘diddle' with each other?"

"You don't like me? You don't want to diddle with me?" This seemed to hurt her. "Aren't I attractive enough?"

"You're very attractive. You're wonderfully attractive," Ryerson told her. "But, I'm sorry, you're dead. Do you know that?"

"No," she said without hesitation, faded, returned, faded. She was gone for a full minute. When she returned, she was standing on the opposite side of the room near a tall, narrow window, her profile to Ryerson; the window's sheer white curtains had been drawn, and the dismal light of the afternoon was giving her an especially gray and chalky look that, Ryerson thought, she hadn't had when she'd been on the sofa. It was a look that was at once frightening and sad, and his heart went out to her when he saw it. She was, after all, another human being-her form was a bit altered, it was true, and she had long ago left life behind her, but she was another human being nonetheless (much, much more a human being, he thought, than the rotting shell that had once been her body, buried in a country cemetery ten miles south of the house).

"No," she said again, and added, "I don't know that." She said it slowly and at a whisper, eyes lowered, hands clasped in front of her. "I don't know that," she repeated. "I can't be dead. I feel. I hear. I want. The dead don't have any of that."

Ryerson said, "You are proof that they do."

And she faded, returned, faded, returned, faded. And was gone.

He found the ninety-year-old man in the cellar. The man had once had a workshop there, where he built clocks. His specialty had been cuckoo clocks fashioned from cherry wood indigenous to the area, but the problem was that he was a lousy clockmaker. He made one stupid mistake after another, so he was constantly cursing at himself, which is how Ryerson found him, from the cursing.

"Fucking fairy farts!" he heard, in a voice that was old and cracking.

"Hello!" Ryerson called down the cellar stairs.

"Donkey tits!" he heard.

"Who's there?" Ryerson called.

"Rancid rat cocks!" he heard.

"You're awfully creative!" Ryerson called.

"Shit, shit, shit!"

"Most of the time, anyway."

"Who's there?" called the aged voice.

"I'd like to help you," Ryerson called.

"Bite my bird!"

"Are you building clocks?" Ryerson was still at the top of the stairs; he had found, more than once, that it was easier to talk to a voice alone than a voice and the image of a body. Besides, there were no lights in the cellar, and Ryerson was all but blind in the dark. He added, "Are you building cuckoo clocks?"

"Lousy turd!"

"I want to help you; will you let me help you?”

“Shit, shit, shit!"

"My name is Ryerson. I'm one of the living." It was a standard line with Ryerson, one he'd developed, and he was proud of it. He had a doctorate in psychology from Duke University (though no one except his first wife called him "Doctor"), and he thought that it was often best to let "the others" come to their own conclusions about whether or not they were still among the living. The whole issue was incredibly complex. "The world of the supernatural," he had told his students at a short-lived night class in the paranormal at New York University, "is every bit as pluralistic and multifaceted as our own. Indeed, it is sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between the two. Each 'event' and each participant in an 'event' must be treated as individual phenomenon-"

"Eat my shorts!" called the voice in the cellar.

This surprised Ryerson; wasn't Eat my shorts! a fairly recent phrase? Maybe the old man was picking up on what visitors to the house had been saying or thinking.

"I'm one of the living," Ryerson called back, and thought that the whole thing was going badly.

"Eat my shorts anyway!" called the voice.

And so it went. Eventually Ryerson closed the cellar door and decided to try again on another day, which was his usual procedure, anyway. Rarely was he able to placate one of "the others" on the first try. The chances were good, at any rate, that the group of businessmen was just as content to have the hauntings continue.

It was when he was about ready to get into his 1948 Ford station wagon-a car that he'd spent a considerable amount of time and money getting into working condition because, he explained to anyone who asked, "I can feel the memories and good times in it; it feels like a comfortable old shoe"-that he got a quick mental image of four dark, cold walls and a sense of urgency, and hunger, and fear pushed into him. He looked about, saw the stone smokehouse a good hundred feet behind the farmhouse, and there found Creosote, who was terribly weak and thin. Ryerson called one of the businessmen, explained that he wanted to come back, that there was "additional work to do," and then mentioned Creosote, which at the time he referred to only as "a damned pathetic Boston bull terrier pup."

"Shit, keep it," said the businessman.

And he did.

Ryerson lived then on Market Street in Boston. Three years earlier he'd moved there from New York City, his boyhood home, and had begun work on a book about the paranormal- Conversations with Charlene, a reference to a particularly intriguing case of "erotic possession" he'd looked into-which sold well enough that he was able to sever his academic ties completely and make a living solely as a licensed psychic investigator.

It was barely a month after finding Creosote in the smokehouse that he got a call from Tom McCabe, Chief of Detectives in Rochester, New York. McCabe had read Conversations with Charlene and had struck up a running correspondence with Ryerson because, he explained, he had a "skeptical but consuming interest in that stuff."

"I think there's something weird going on at The Park, Rye," he said.

"The park? What park?"

"Kodak Park."

"Oh."

"We got a couple dead people," he said, because by then Harry Simons had died.

"That's murder, Tom. I'm not a cop."

"Someone thinks he's a werewolf, Rye."

"I don't think I believe in werewolves, Tom. Are you asking me to help as a psychic investigator, or as a psychologist?"

"I'm not sure, Rye. I guess I'd just like you to have a look around. Could you do that?"

"I could do that, sure. My usual fee applies.”

“Of course." A pause. "What is your usual fee, Rye?"

Ryerson told him. McCabe didn't say anything for several secondsThat's cheap enough, Ryerson read from him, and realized sinkingly that he could have asked for considerably more. Then McCabe said, "Okay, I think I can get that for you, Rye. It'll be tough, but I'll work it out."

"I'm sure you will, Tom. I'll be in Rochester tomorrow."

"Thanks, Rye. You'll stop and see me first, of course. This is a strictly informal invitation, I'm afraid-"

Ryerson cut in, "Yes, Tom. I hear what you're saying. I'll get the ground rules first before I start stepping on any toes." He heard McCabe sigh and added, "Is there a problem, Tom?" He knew there was a problem, and knew what the problem was, but he'd learned, over the years, that regardless of what he knew, it usually made people more than a little nervous to let them know that he knew.

"Yes, Rye. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're going to have to… pussyfoot around on this." Ryerson had attained something of a reputation in the popular press as someone who relished "stepping on toes.”“Whatever's necessary to get the job done," he would explain. McCabe continued, "Lots of people think that people like you-"

"People like me, Tom?"

"Oh, shit, Rye-you know what I'm talking about."

Rye heard himself slip into his little speech and regretted it at once, though he couldn't stop it; "Listen, Tom, what people choose to believe or dis believe is really none of my concern. It's a very complex world out there, but as complex as it is, Tom, there are other worlds we never see, and they impinge on our own-"

McCabe interrupted, "Yes, Rye. I know. I've heard it before; I think I've got it memorized."

Ryerson sighed. "Uh-huh. Sorry." A quick, embarrassed pause, then he finished, "I'll see you tomorrow, then. Okay?"

"Yes. Thanks, Rye. I'll see you tomorrow."

He got there on Friday, April 14, at 12:30 P.M. At 1:45, a third Kodak Park employee was killed.

Chapter Four

No one liked Walt Morgan. In 1979, at the Building Seven Christmas party, an anonymous benefactor had given him a book titled The Compleat Asshole. He'd thought it was a joke, because he thought of himself as essentially a pretty nice guy. If on occasion he had to be a hard-nose, if he had to crack the proverbial whip now and again, it was because he was the boss, and that's what bosses were expected to do. Everyone knew it, and everyone respected it. And everyone, he was convinced, down deep in their heart of hearts, really liked him.

He was carrying a sheaf of Employee Performance Charts from Building Seven to Personnel through Building Eight's basement corridors when he became aware that something was following him. The basement corridors in Building Eight were not nearly as dismal as the subbasement corridors in Building Nine, where Tammy Levine had made such a mess. The walls of Building Eight's basement corridors were festooned with employees' photographs: some in black and white, some in color, some eight by ten inches, some five by seven, most of them distinctly amateurish, but all of them bearing the unmistakable stamp of someone who's tried hard. There were the sad faces of boys, the black-and-white geometry of skyscrapers, the antics of pups and kittens, the bucolic pleasantness of sagging barns and tumbledown farmhouses. Walt Morgan liked these photographs. He thought it was good and right that employees of the Eastman Kodak Company should be photographers. It was like patriotism, esprit de corps, it showed loyalty, and he noted mentally as many names as he could for inclusion on his monthly Employee Evaluation Charts. These were graphs, mostly-with a few short paragraphs of explanation-that showed the month-to-month variation of individual employees in five areas: "Work Performance,”“Tardiness,”“Fraternizing,”“Job Interest," and "Loyalty." Each area was rated on a scale from one to ten. If any employee's six-month average of all five areas fell below six, the employee was subject to a reprimand. Twelve months below six meant mandatory transferral to a lower job classification. The charts he was carrying today were all in that category. Seven of the one hundred workers assigned to him were being reassigned to lower-paying jobs. It was hard-nosed, sure, and maybe, as he'd been told more than once, his chart and graph system was just a tad subjective ("What the hell do you mean by 'Loyalty,' Walt, and 'Job Interest'? My God, as long as the job gets done…"), but that was okay, too, because he'd point out, he hadn't been made the boss for nothing. His opinion mattered.

In its human state, the thing following Walt professed to dislike him just as much as everyone else. But in its human state, it also saw Walt for what he was-a small-minded man who'd been assigned to a job that was too large for him. And in its human state, the thing secretly forgave Walt his shortcomings (though to have said it aloud would have been social suicide), because square pegs cannot fit into round holes, no matter how hard you push.

In its present state, it didn't give a shit. It had an awful, devouring passion and need, and Walt was close at hand. Walt had flesh-a lot of it-and blood-enough to paint a barn-and Walt had a life-force within him that the thing desperately needed to still.

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.

Chapter Five

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?"

Youngman gulped, and then obeyed.

Ryerson leaned over what was left of Walt Morgan. Detective Second Grade Bill Andrews of the Rochester Police Department, Homicide Division, put his hand on Ryerson's shoulder. "I know that Chief McCabe has given you authorization to be here, Mr. Biergarten, but if you're thinking of touching the victim's body-"

Ryerson glanced back. "I'm not about to touch him, Detective."

The detective, a tall, thin, nervous man in his late twenties, took his hand off Ryerson's shoulder. "Yes," he said, embarrassed, "of course you aren't."

Ryerson added, "Where's my dog?" Detective Andrews, protesting that Creosote might "corrupt the crime scene," had taken him from Ryerson.

"I gave him to one of the uniforms. He's okay." Ryerson could tell that the detective was having a pretty hard time of it; the smell in the corridor was awful, for starters-a mixture of bile, saliva, excrement, and blood; Ryerson imagined that it was probably like the smell of a slaughterhouse. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand, studied Walt Morgan's corpse for a few moments-long enough to realize that most of its internal organs were gone-then straightened. "I've seen enough," he said.

There were several other people in the corridor: one of The Park's security guards, who stood well back from the body, two uniformed cops, a man and a woman, both of whom looked as if they were fighting to keep their lunches down, and a police photographer who said to Ryerson and the detective, "You guys finished here?"

Andrews managed, feeling proud of himself for it, Ryerson knew, "What's your hurry? The guy's not going anywhere-"

And the photographer answered, "How the hell can you tell it's a guy, for Christ's sake?" which, Ryerson decided, was a good question, though it was easy enough to answer.

"The shirt," he said and nodded at it. It was light yellow, short-sleeved, badly torn, and bloodstained, lying open on the corpse.

The photographer smiled a long-suffering kind of smile. "What about the shirt?"

Ryerson shrugged. "It buttons on the right. It's a man's shirt. Men's shirts button on the right."

Tom McCabe said to Ryerson, "He's number three." They were having coffee in the Building Seven cafeteria while the people from the crime lab made what sense they could of what had been found in Building Nine's basement corridor.

Ryerson sipped his coffee, set the cup down delicately. "Were the other two also… mutilated, Tom?"

McCabe smiled thinly. "Don't you mean, 'Were they eaten,' Rye? Isn't that what you mean?"

"That's what you think happened to this man?" Creosote was on Ryerson's lap jockeying for the proper sleeping position; he snorted and gurgled occasionally, though not as loudly or for as long as usual. Ryerson wondered if he might be coming down with something. In between the snorting and gurgling, he chewed disconsolately on the rawhide bone attached to his collar.

McCabe held his hand up, fingers outstretched. "Number one, the guy's heart is missing." He pulled his index finger down. "Number two, his liver's missing." The middle finger went down. "Number three, his lungs." The ring finger. "And number four, his genitals." The pinkie. "So unless we find those items some where, we have to assume that they were eaten."

Creosote whimpered. Very briefly, Ryerson read the slow rise of fear in him, like watching ice crystallize on a pane of glass. He stroked the puppy idly, whispered, "What's the matter, guy?" and asked himself, as he'd asked himself a dozen times before, why trying to read what was going on in the head of an animal was such an unpredictable thing, like trying to read a book written in a foreign language; he might decipher some of the words and sentences, but the real substance of the book was ultimately hidden from him.

McCabe went on, "And, no, the other two were merely mutilated. The woman, Tammy Levine, was almost literally torn apart. And that first guy, Simons, had his stomach ripped open, as if a bear had done it." He paused, added, "I've done some hunting in Alaska. I know about bears."

Ryerson glanced quickly around the cafeteria, noticing the people nearby. At a table to his right, a red-haired woman, dressed in a black pleated skirt and white blouse, was eating a cheeseburger and fries. Across from her at another table, an older woman dressed in a tent-like lab smock was daintily eating a hot turkey sandwich, mashed potatoes, and a glass of chocolate milk. At the table nearest him he saw a muscular young blond man who was having a small green salad and a cup of tea. He's on a diet, Ryerson realized, and wondered idly what a man who looked so clearly in fighting trim needed with a diet. He turned back to McCabe. "Sorry, Tom-I was drifting. What did you say?"

"I said, I've been in Alaska, and I know about bears."

"I see. And do you know about wolves, too?" Ryerson asked.

McCabe smiled and shook his head. "The only thing I know about wolves, Rye, is that their scat, their shit, has… bugs in it, like earwigs, that burrow right into your brain. I saw that on Never Cry Wolf. "

Creosote whimpered again. "Uh-huh," Ryerson said. "Well I think what we've got here is someone who thinks he's a wolf, as you've suggested." Again Creosote whimpered, and again Ryerson read fear in him; but it was much stronger now. "Not a real wolf, but someone who thinks he's a wolf, someone who wants to be a wolf-which, to my way of thinking, is a hell of a lot worse than the real thing."

"You don't buy this 'werewolf garbage, then, right?"

"I don't know." He sipped his coffee again, put the cup down less delicately. "I'll buy anything if the price is right, and the sales pitch is convincing enough." He leaned over the table. "And just between you and me, Tom, this particular sales pitch is becoming harder and harder to resist." A pause. "There's one thing that doesn't fit, though."

Getting rid of all the blood had always been the hardest part. Most of it came off easily enough under the shower with a good, abrasive soap, although it hurt the skin and made it red, so excuses had to be made to fellow workers: "Oh, I spent too long under the sunlamp," or "Just a touch of the flu." But still, in the dry spots, under the nails, at the cuticles, in the hair, the blood was almost impossible to get rid of altogether; small traces of it remained to scream Here, here is the guilty one! Which, upon reflection, was a moot point, because the guilt was so plain, so clear anyway. No one can hide such guilt. So everyone knew-they were just biding their time, gathering up evidence, making sure the case wouldn't be thrown out by a lenient judge because of a "technical error." That was their scam. So the blood was part of their evidence and had to be gotten rid of entirely. In the dry spots, under the fingernails, at the cuticles, in the hair. No blood, no evidence. Just the evidence of the eyes that were filled to overflowing with guilt.

"My dog's sick," Ryerson told Tom McCabe. Creosote was curled up on Ryerson's lap, flat face buried in his paws.

"Oh?" McCabe stood slightly and leaned over the table to look at Creosote. "Sorry to hear that. What's he? Old?"

"No. He's just a pup. And he's sick. I'd better get him out of here." He pushed his chair back. The cafeteria had been at least half full during much of his discussion with McCabe. Now, it being close to 4:30, the mid-shift people were just about ready to go back to work after the afternoon break. News of the carnage in Building Nine's basement corridor had not yet broken out. A woman named Elvira Larson had found the body, and she was under sedation at The Park's hospital. The only other people who knew anything were the security people and the Rochester Police assigned to the case. There were rumors, of course, and they'd kept people talking. During his thirty minutes or so at the cafeteria, Ryerson had overheard bits and pieces of speculation as well as good advice: "Stay away from the lower levels," and "Carry a can of Mace," and "Stay in groups of twos and threes, that's what I say." And during his time there in the cafeteria, Ryerson had reminded himself that the chances were good that the murderer was there, too, at one of the tables, scarfing down a Twinkie, or playing cards, or reading the latest horror thriller.

The 4:30 chimes sounded, and the cafeteria began to empty. Creosote started feeling better, Ryerson noticed, because the dog's sniffling and wheezing and deep, benign growling renewed itself.

McCabe said, "Jesus, he sounds like he's going to die!"

Ryerson shook his head. "No. He always sounds like that. When he's feeling good, anyway." He paused to stroke Creosote and tell him he was glad he was feeling better, all of which made him realize that he was growing awfully fond of the beast. "I say ‘wolf,' " Ryerson continued, picking up on their topic of conversation from earlier, "not ‘werewolf,' because this man, or woman, doesn't seem to have his mythology quite right." McCabe looked confused. Ryerson explained, "He's done what-three killings in the last week or so? That's right, isn't it?"

McCabe nodded. "Yes. That's right."

"And when was the last full moon?" Ryerson asked, then answered himself, "It was two weeks ago, Tom. The moon's been in wane ever since. And today-even that's important, Tom; this was a day time killing; the moon's not really visible during the day, is it? I mean, you've got to look for it, you've got to look hard, and any… supernatural influence it might have would be nullified-" He paused a moment to get back on his original train of thought. "But there is no-" Creosote cut loose with a particularly loud series of groaning gurgles. "There is no full moon, now," Ryerson continued. "And that's the crux of werewolf mythology. A man, or woman, is made into a werewolf by the influence of the full moon."

McCabe sat back in his chair, shrugged. "Well, I know that, Rye. Every one knows that."

Ryerson nodded. "Yes. Everyone but our murderer."

A uniformed cop appeared at the table. "Pardon me, Chief McCabe?"

McCabe said, "Yes?"

The cop said, "They've identified the body, sir."

McCabe rolled his eyes. "Good Lord, boy, why don't you announce it over the P A system?! None of these people knows about this thing yet."

The cop looked embarrassed and confused. "I don't understand, sir; there's no one else here."

McCabe looked quickly about, saw that the cafeteria was empty, and apologized.

"His name was Walt Morgan," George Dixon, head of security at The Park, explained. Dixon was a middle-aged man who drank too much and relished being what even his closest friend called "an overweight, out-of-shape, cynical bastard." He'd been a cop once, in Buffalo, but his drinking and his sloppiness had put the promise of an interesting if not brilliant career far behind him. Dixon's office was small and cramped, but strangely neat. McCabe and Biergarten stood in front of Dixon's desk while Dixon sorted through Morgan's file. "He was a manager in Emulsion Technology, Building Nine. Married, four kids, a Methodist; and if you're wondering about suspects, you've got your choice of maybe fifty people who worked under him. He was an asshole from the word go."

Ryerson said, "Oh? How so?"

Dixon looked suspiciously at him. "How's anybody an asshole, Mr. Burngarden?"

"Biergarten," Ryerson corrected.

"Whatever," Dixon said. "Some people are just assholes, plain and simple. Some people are nerds, some people are assholes, some people are jerks, some people are good ole boys -it's self -explanatory, Mr. Biergarten."

Ryerson shifted the snorting Creosote from his right arm to his left and held his free hand out. "Could I see that file, please?"

Dixon looked at McCabe, who nodded, then gave Ryerson the file. McCabe and Dixon had worked together several years earlier, when a short-lived spate of vandalism had erupted at The Park; it was an encounter that Dixon felt had put them on a friendly, first-name basis, though McCabe did his best to discourage it. He said to McCabe now, as Ryerson leafed through the file, "Who'd you say this guy is, Tom?"

McCabe answered tersely. "He's a friend. He's a psychic investigator."

Dixon's quick, toothy smile was the soul of incredulity. "A psychic investigator?! Jesus, Tom, I'm fucking impressed-"

McCabe cut in, "Your reactions to Mr. Biergarten are none of my concern, Dixon-"

Dixon's smile vanished.

Ryerson said, "My dog has to relieve himself." He held up the employee file. "Can I borrow this overnight?"

Again Dixon looked at McCabe. McCabe said to Ryerson, "Rye, I'm not sure that would be… politic. We usually have to get a warrant, ourselves, to take these things out of The Park-"

Dixon interrupted, trying, Ryerson knew, to get a hand up on McCabe. "Can you get it back to me tomorrow, Mr. Biergarten?"

"Yes," Ryerson said.

Dixon shrugged. "Then knock yourself out."

"Thanks," Ryerson said. "Now if you could tell me where the nearest exit is, my dog has to…"

Dixon nodded toward the door. "Down the hallway, up the stairs, under the mural, out to Ridge Road."

"Thanks," Ryerson said again, and left the office quickly, followed the narrow corridor to the Ansel Adams mural-transparency, which was behind him as he left The Park, so he didn't see it, then out to Ridge Road, where he put Creosote down, and where Creosote did what Ryerson, being psychic, had known he had to do.

Chapter Six

Greta Lynch was just getting off her shift, then. She usually used the Ridge Road exit, the one Ryerson had used, because she kept her four-year-old VW Rabbit in the south parking lot. But the Rabbit was in the shop today, so she was walking home and used the Lake Avenue exit instead. Mostly to get Douglas Miller off her back. "No, Doug, really, I'm just going over to Films Technology for a moment.”

“Okay," he'd said, clearly unconvinced. "But why do I get the idea that you're trying to dodge me, Greta?" There had been a playful tone in his voice, but Greta knew that his feeling for her went beyond flirtation. Ever since the beginning of the month, when he'd been transferred to Emulsion Technology5-A from Emulsion Technology 5-C-where she'd had to deal with him only occasionally-he'd been walking her to her car in the south parking lot, even though it meant that he had to go back across Ridge Road, back past the personnel offices, and then through what seemed like miles of corridors to get to his own car in the north parking lot. Why he didn't merely park in the same lot as she, Greta wasn't sure; she supposed that his nightly "errand of mercy," as he'd once called it, "to protect you, Greta, from the muggers and thieves and rapists that prowl these streets after 4:30," was designed to illustrate the real depth of his affection for her.

But tonight, even though she didn't have Doug Miller tagging along after her, she found that she did have the annoyance of having to walk past a number of police cars lined up on the Lake Avenue side of The Park, past what she knew were a dozen leering cops, and that made her feel very ill at ease. Deep inside, something else made her feel ill at ease, too. Something she couldn't define. Something that slipped away when she tried to get hold of it.

She heard someone whistle, low. Why the hell did men have to whistle, for Christ's sake?! As if women were animals of some kind that were supposed to respond to a whistle, a nudge, a poke-a damned "errand of mercy." When she turned she saw a tall, heavily muscled cop in his middle thirties leaning against his car and nodding at her. She gave him the bird, quickly and efficiently. He smiled slyly. God, she said to herself, but I hate cops.

She came to the corner of Lake and Ridge and stopped, waiting for the light. She looked to her right, west down Ridge Road, and saw Ryerson Biergarten tending to Creosote. He was a nice-looking man, she thought. Lord knew why he carried that ugly, disgusting mutt around with him.

The light changed. She crossed the street, and fifteen minutes later was at her three-room apartment in a house on Fairview Heights off Lake Avenue.

Ryerson had seen Greta, too, as she'd crossed the street. And something in him had made him watch her until she passed to the side of an ugly brick building that housed a store called "Unclaimed Freight." He thought she looked nice, and he had always enjoyed watching a good-looking woman. But there was something else, too. Something slippery and undefinable about her, but something very powerful, as well.

McCabe had come up beside him as he watched her. "Do you know her?" Ryerson asked, nodding. Greta was a good hundred yards off then and nearing Unclaimed Freight.

"Who?" McCabe asked.

"Her," Ryerson said. Then the building hid her. "Never mind. She's gone."

McCabe nodded at what Creosote had left on the sidewalk. "I'm afraid we've got laws against that, Rye," he said.

Ryerson looked surprised. "What am I supposed to do-scoop it up?"

McCabe shrugged. "Just thought I'd mention it. We like to keep our city clean, you know."

For his stay in Rochester, Ryerson had taken a room at the Samuelson Guest House on Birr Street, near The Park and not far from Greta's apartment, though he was unaware of it. The room he rented was large, airy, and warm, which he appreciated, because he thought, for the middle of April, there was a decided nip in the air. He's promised the landlord to walk Creosote four times a day and feed him only dry food. "That canned stuff leaves such a smell," said Loren Samuelson, the very pale, very thin octogenarian widower, former pipe fitter and stevedore who'd been running the guest house for fifteen years. "I can't stand bad smells, Mr. Burgermeister." Ryerson didn't correct him. "I had to work with bad smells for forty years. Now I don't have to put up with 'em if I don't want to." This seemed to please the old man immensely. And then he'd added, "What'd you say you were in town for, Mr. Burgermeister?"

Ryerson answered, "I didn't."

"Oh." The old man thought a moment, grinned widely, secretively, and asked, "Well, do ya wanta tell me?"

"No," said Ryerson, "I'd rather not."

Samuelson nodded knowingly. "Okay, as long as it ain't illegal; and if it is, I don't want to know anyway, and you probably wouldn't tell me."

"It's nothing illegal, Mr. Samuelson," Ryerson said. The old man nodded again and then excused himself to go back to his own room. "My stories are coming on," he explained.

Ryerson's room was on the third floor of the guest house. Because the house had been built at the top of a slight incline, it offered, from the south-facing windows, a nice view of the Rochester skyline-Ryerson decided it was muted, but interesting-and from the north-facing windows, a view of Kodak Park itself. At night, its red brick walls lighted by a dozen stationary spotlamps, he thought it looked immense, monolithic, and dull, which had been his daytime impression of the place, too.

He sat at an old three-drawer pine desk between the two north-facing windows and took Walt Morgan's employee file from his briefcase. He really didn't expect to find anything. He'd already decided that the killer was someone who killed solely for the pleasure of it, so whether Walt Morgan had one enemy or a hundred probably made no difference.

He laid the file out on the desk, opened it, thumbed through it. All the while, Creosote grunted and snorted and wheezed up a storm as he hopped continuously on and off the twin bed at the opposite end of the room, a mangled soft plastic duck in his mouth. (This was another of Ryerson's attempts to keep the dog away from his socks but, like the rawhide bone attached to Creosote's collar, a failure. The dog had developed an uncanny ability to find the socks, wherever they might be-on the floor, on a chair, even in a closed suitcase, whose latches he'd taught himself to open, or in a dresser drawer, which he'd also learned to open-and, in Ryerson's absence, to happily chew them into oblivion. Ryerson wondered, watching the dog leap up on and down from the bed, if he had any whole socks left at all.)

Suddenly Creosote, on the bed now, fell silent. The soft-plastic duck dropped from his mouth.

"Something wrong?" Ryerson asked teasingly, and once again read a strong, numbing fear in the dog's brain. "Creosote? What's wrong, boy?" Ryerson got up, went over, sat on the bed beside the dog, stroked him, felt the dog shivering. "Good Lord, what's wrong, Creosote?" The dog urinated on the bed. "Oh, for Christ's sake!" The dog began to whimper loudly.

Ryerson got up, went to the window that faced The Park, and studied the street and sidewalks three stories below, lighted well by newly installed street-lamps. It was a little past nine; there were a half dozen couples on the sidewalks, a few loners-two men, a woman, someone pulling a two-wheeled grocery cart, someone else who could have been a man or a woman (it was hard to tell from the clothes or the walk) walking well behind the woman pulling the cart. Ryerson said, as much to himself as to Creosote, "Is it one of them, fella? Is that what you're telling me?" He glanced back. "Huh? Are you giving me a warning, Creosote?" Suddenly he felt foolish, and he went back to the desk and gave Walt Morgan's file a thorough going over.

At 9:30 he called Tom McCabe at his home.

"Tom, it's me, Ryerson. Tom, I need to see your homicide files for the last year."

"What for?"

"For a pattern, of course."

"Don't you think I've looked into that, Rye? Don't you think that occurred to me?"

Ryerson said nothing. He'd watched more than a few people fall to embarrassment that day; now it was his turn.

McCabe continued, "And there is no pattern. Not locally, at least. Maybe in Peoria, or Tucson, or Albuquerque there's a killer with the same M.O., but not in Rochester."

Ryerson sighed. "Yes. Of course. I'm sorry, Tom. I assume you're in contact with other cities on this, then-"

"You mean to find a killer with the same M.O.?

Yes, Rye, we're looking into it. But it's not an overnight kind of thing, even in this marvelous computer age of ours-"

Ryerson cut in, "How about the files on new employees, Tom? Have you checked those?”

“What for?"

"You mean you haven't checked them?"

"No. What's the sense?"

"Can you get hold of them quickly?"

"Sure. With a warrant."

"Get one, then. Okay?"

"I'll see what I can do, Rye, but I can't promise anything."

"Thanks, Tom." He hesitated a moment, then went on quizzically, "Tom, did I wake you?"

He heard McCabe sigh. "It's okay. I had to get up to answer the phone, anyway."

Ryerson smiled. "Sorry-" Another pause; he was reading something from McCabe, something strange and off key, something that he couldn't quite get a look at, as if he were trying to see movement in a darkened room. "Did I… disturb you, Tom?" he went on, hoping his tone and inflection said precisely what he wanted to say.

McCabe shot back, "Hell, no, Rye. Forget it. I'll get those files for you, okay?"

"Yeah. Thanks, Tom."

"No problem," and McCabe hung up.

At 7:30, two hours earlier, Greta Lynch had gone down to the first floor of the house at 8 Fairview Heights where she rented a three-room apartment. She saw Linda Bowerman, a single woman in her forties, the owner of the house, watching television in the big living room and stuck her head in. "I'm going out, Linda. Do you need anything?" Linda turned her head, smiled, said, "No, thanks. I shopped today."

"Okay," Greta said. "Just thought I'd check. Do you think the drugstore's open now?"

Linda checked her watch: "Sure. It closes at 9:00. What do you need? Some aspirin or something? I've got some aspirin. No sense going out if you don't have to; those streets ain't the safest place to be at night. Maybe where you come from they are, but not here."

Greta smiled, pleased by the woman's concern. "No. There are just some… other things I need. Thanks." She turned, stopped, looked back. "Oh, can I borrow your little grocery cart, Linda?"

"Sure," Linda said, waving the question away. "You don't even need to ask." She came forward, made a show of studying Greta's face. "You look a little flushed, Greta. If you have a fever, maybe you shouldn't-"

Greta shook her head briskly. "No. It's nothing. I have a… sunlamp and I'm afraid I spent too long under it."

"Dangerous things, sunlamps," Linda Bowerman said.

"Yes," Greta said, "I know. I'll have to be more careful." And she left the house.

Chapter Seven

APRIL 16: 9:04 P.M.

Just before he died, Leonard Pitcher was trying to think of phrases other than "security guard" to describe his job. But the phrases that came to him were no good: Rent-A-Cop, for instance, was awful. Company Peacekeeping Personnel, he thought, sounded pretty good in his head, but not so good when he said it aloud. Too wordy, he told himself. Too… pre ten tious, yeah.

Then he hit on it.

"Damnit," he said aloud to the mirror in the all-but-empty locker room to a face that was long and thin, the cheeks hollow, the brownish hair heavily lacquered, the hazel eyes small and ignorant. "I'm a fuckin' cop! There ain't no two ways about it. I'm a fuckin' cop!" After all, what did it matter if he was an employee of the city or if he was an employee of the Eastman Kodak Company? The job was the same, wasn't it? And it was the job that was important, not the freakin' asshole who signed the freakin' paycheck. "I'm a cop!" he said again, and again, and again. Didn't the gun prove it? Cops wore guns. He wore a gun. He was a cop! And the uniform, too, which was cop-blue. And the badge, the cap, the nightstick. All of it. The whole… persona ("pretentious" and "persona" were his improve-yourvocabulary words for the week). He stood with his arms stiff, his hands on either side of the sink supporting him, his head tilted slightly upward, and an I'm-a-real-mean-son-of-a-bitch look about him. He said to himself, tightly, with feeling, "If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, then, shit!-it's gotta be a fuckin' duck!"

Then he sniffed the air conspicuously and asked himself, "What for crimey's sake is that smell?"

He heard a low and menacing growl behind him. And the top of his head and most of his brain were ripped away and thrown, with a clunking thud, to the other side of the room.

~* ~

McCabe said, "One thing's for sure, Rye." They were again in the cafeteria at Building Six; it was not quite 7:30 in the morning; Leonard Pitcher's body had been found nine hours earlier.

"Oh? What's that?" Ryerson chomped on a piece of whole-wheat toast, found it was stale and grimaced. Creosote looked pleadingly at it. "No," he said firmly. "No people food!" For man or beast, Ryerson maintained, a proper diet was paramount to the maintenance of good health.

"Our murderer," McCabe said, "is damned strong. I mean, he's just in cred ibly strong; so I think that would probably rule out the possibility that he's a female." Since McCabe had been awakened at his house at about 1:00 A.M., he was having a full breakfast-cheese omelet, sausage patties, home fries, orange juice, toast, a side order of pancakes. It made Ryerson a little queasy just to look at it.

"Our murderer," Ryerson said, "doesn't know what he is. When he's doing a murder, anyway." Ryerson sipped his grapefruit juice, took a small bite of the toast, and glanced down at Creosote, who was again looking pleadingly at him. "No!" he said, more firmly this time. Then to McCabe, "When he's doing a murder, Tom, he thinks he's an animal-a wolf, a bear; I don't know. If he thought he was an armadillo he'd probably act like one. My point is; it's all simply a matter of belief. If we believe deep in our heart of hearts, down where we live, that we're a wolf, or a bear, or a mountain lion, then we can probably gather up immense reserves of strength just to keep that belief alive. To fill the role. To be what we believe we are."

"Yes," McCabe said, spreading orange marmalade on his toast, "I can understand that. I don't think it applies here, because I don't think any woman has the strength that this guy has-even in reserve, even to pump up her insanity." He took one then quickly another big bite of the toast and smiled as he chewed it.

Ryerson said, "Well, for the record, Tom, I think you're wrong." A short pause. "Did you get that warrant I asked you about?"

McCabe swallowed and asked, "For the files on new employees?"

Ryerson nodded.

"Yes," McCabe said, swiping at his lips with a napkin. "I got it. The files are being sorted now. You should have them by tonight."

Douglas Miller said to Greta, "You look terrible, Greta."

She said, "Well, you look like death warmed over," and sat wearily at her desk in Emulsion Technology. She pushed some papers around and leaned back in her chair, sighing. She folded her hands on her stomach. "Jesus," she breathed.

"Hot date?" Miller asked and immediately regretted the question because he thought she'd see it as a come-on, which it was, though he didn't want her to know it just yet.

"Yeah," she whispered, eyes on the ceiling, "hot date."

"Anybody I know?"

She glanced at him and shook her head slightly. "Doug, just can it, okay?"

He'd been standing near her desk. He held his hands up, said "Okay," and went to his own desk, kitty-corner from hers in the small beige room. Greta thought he moved with a slight stiffness, as if he were aware of his muscles and didn't want them to show. That was her fault, she realized. When she'd known him only a week or so and had the idea that perhaps they could go out sometime, just for the hell of it, she'd let slip that he walked as if he were muscle-bound-which, of course, he was. He'd looked hurt, and she'd regretted saying anything, but ever since he had manifested a stiff, sexless walk that was unnerving.

After a few minutes he said, a little squeamishly, "I didn't mean to pry, Greta."

She shook her head. "And I didn't mean to snap your head off."

"You didn't snap my head off."

She managed a smile, though it was weak, and showed clearly that she was hurting under the skin. "Maybe you and I can… do something one of these days, Doug."

His smile was quick, strong, and disbelieving: "Sure," he said. "Sure," and found himself tongue-tied.

"Maybe," she suggested, "you can show me the nightlife in this city of yours."

He nodded vigorously-a little too vigorously, he realized-so he stopped nodding and shrugged, which he thought was stupid, too. "Sure," he said again. "Anytime. You name the time, Greta. There's a place called The Manhattan. I think you'd like it"

She cut in, "It sounds great, Doug. Really. I'll let you know." She stood, shakily. "For now, I think I'll go and throw up in the ladies' lounge." And that's precisely what she did.

In a little town twenty miles south of the Pennsylvania border, near Erie, a middle-aged man and woman laid a wreath on the grave of their teen-age daughter, dead exactly two months. The man, whose name was Will Curtis, was wearing a heavy gray coat to protect himself from the mid-April chill and supported himself with a cane because of arthritis. He nodded sullenly at the grave and said to the woman, his voice slight and creaking, "All her life she was a good girl, Frances. She was a nice girl. She ran away, but she came back to us. She was a nice girl."

But Frances said nothing. Frances believed otherwise, and Frances was the soul of honesty, even with herself. She let her husband rattle on:

"It's impossible… it's impossible to protect ourselves totally from the… evils…" He fought back a tear; it returned and slid down his weathered cheek. He finished, "… the evils of this world, Frances."

She nodded. "Yes," she said. She knew it was the truth.

He took her hand and said again, "The evils of this world." He thought a moment. "The evils of this fucking world!"

"Yes," Frances said.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?"

"For using the 'F' word here. In front of Lila."

She squeezed his hand. "It doesn't matter. She hears no words at all." And that, Frances thought, surely was the truth, thank God.

Ryerson had a list of names and places. It was a fairly long list, because The Park's new employees-transferees as well as people who'd joined the company within the past two years (a period of time he'd picked purely from intuition)-comprised a crowd that would fill a good-sized high-school gymnasium. He'd whittled that list down-again, almost purely by intuition-to sixty-three names. Greta Lynch was on that list. So was Jack Youngman, who'd been transferred from Detroit eighteen months earlier. And George Dixon.

Of those sixty-three names, twelve had cities or towns in common. George Dixon, for instance, came from Buffalo. So did a woman named Renee Jacqueline Borodin, who worked as a freelance model for the company. Greta Lynch came from Erie, Pennsylvania, and so did a man named Bill Clark, one member of Kodak's army of accountants. What Ryerson wanted McCabe to do was to check each of those cities or towns for murders or attempted murders that involved an M.O. similar to that of what was now being dubbed "The Park Werewolf." But when he tried to call McCabe-it was April 18th, two days after Leonard Pitcher's murder-he found that McCabe had been "called away from Rochester on an unexpected emergency."

Ryerson, thinking, What other kind of emergency is there? asked, "To where? What city? This is very important."

"I'm afraid I can't divulge that information," answered the lieutenant who had taken his call.

Ryerson sighed. Creosote, at the other end of the room on the bed, let out a huge and extended belch. "Sorry?" said the lieutenant, sounding offended.

"Nothing," Ryerson said, "that was my dog." A brief pause. "Could you tell me when he'll be back, please? This is in regard to The Park Werewolf."

"I don't know," said the lieutenant. "As I said, this was in the nature of an unex pec ted emergency, so his estimated time of return is information to which none of us is privy."

"Could I talk with Detective Bill Andrews then, please?"

"I'm sorry, but Detective Andrews is not available. Perhaps if you could tell me, sir, the nature of your business with Chief McCabe?"

"Yes," said Ryerson, thinking that surely McCabe had told most of the people involved in the investigation about him. "My name's Ryerson Biergarten; I'm a psychic investigator. I'm working with Tom, as you probably know, and I need access-"

"What sort of investigator did you say you were, Mr. Biergarten?"

"Psychic. I'm a psychic investigator."

"Oh?" A long pause; then, "And you say you're working with Chief McCabe on The Park Were wolf case?"

"Yes, that's right. He must have told you-" Creosote belched again, as loudly as before.

"Sir," said the lieutenant wearily, "are you trying to make werewolf noises?"

"No, no-I told you, that's my dog; he's a Boston bull terrier, that's the kind of noise that Boston bull terriers make."

"Yes, sir." Another long pause. "Sir, did you want to confess?"

"Confess?! Oh, for God's sake-"

"Because if you do, I'll have to put you on hold; we have a number of people confessing to this series of crimes, I'm afraid-it's a very popular series of crimes…"

Ryerson hung up.

Jack Youngman had the day off. On his days off he liked to golf, and even though the day was chilly and overcast, threatening rain, he got his clubs out and put on his golfing clothes. They fit very tightly, and he realized forlornly that he was in really lousy shape, that his belly hung nearly halfway down his thighs when he was sitting, and that he could probably make good use of a Jane Russell full-figure bra, for Christ's sake. He climbed into his Mercury Marquis and headed for the Happy Acres Golf Course.

Jack had been doing quite a bit of soul-searching lately. He'd been taking good long looks at himself and his life, especially at his career as a manager at Kodak. He wasn't sure there was much of a future in it, and he thought it might be time to switch careers, to strike out for new, more interesting territory-to change not only careers but cities, too, because this particular city was getting tiresome. Jack wasn't really certain where these thoughts came from. Sometimes he chalked them up to mid-life crisis, although he'd been going through that for ten years anyway and was unaware of it. And sometimes he chalked it up to honesty. Hell, he knew that people here-at Kodak and in his neighborhood in Rochester-didn't like him very much. And everyone likes to be liked. They didn't understand him, of course; that's why they didn't like him. They thought he was gruff and unapproachable, which was true enough, but not for the reasons they might think. No, he had long since decided, he was gruff and unapproachable for the same reason that people put up "No Salesmen" signs. Because they're made of mush; they can't say "no," their emotions are all right there on the surface. So if someone, anyone, were allowed to get close… The idea was too repulsive even to consider. Hell, he had an image to uphold, even in his own eyes. And if he played at being "gruff and unapproachable" long enough, wouldn't it eventually come true? Wouldn't he at last become what he was pretending to be?

He pulled his big Marquis into the Happy Acres parking lot, got out, looked around. He saw that the course was all but deserted, and it made him sad, because he thought of himself as a better-than-average golfer-at least he had a hell of a drive-and he enjoyed what he supposed were the envious stares of the other golfers.

He went around to the back of the car, opened the trunk, got his golf bag out, hefted it over his shoulder, and put his hand on the trunk lid to close it. He stopped. He looked confusedly at the long, red stain there, in the trunk. He bent over, fingered the stain, smelled his finger. "Jesus H.," he whispered. It was blood.

Chapter Eight

At night, in the little town near Erie, Pennsylvania where the Curtises had paid a brief visit to their daughter's grave, something stirred above it. Something that had lingered in the young girl, and even after her death still lingered near her, because it knew nothing of distance, or time. And it had no place to go, anyway. Before long it would hitch a ride on whatever creature happened along and seemed receptive to it. It was something very small, but something that could be incredibly powerful, too. When the time came. And the moment was right.

The thing there, at the grave, stopped stirring suddenly. And it rested. It was night. The cloud cover was thick, and the moon beyond it at waning gibbous. The thing rested because even those apparently all-powerful entities that dwell on the Other Side must rest. And the moon, even had it been full, would have had no effect on it. That depended on its host. Because the entity that lingered there, at the grave, was a kind of parasite. It was nurtured and it grew on whatever thick, black ooze it found in the human spirit.

When Ryerson Biergarten got in the mood, when he sat down, closed his eyes, and cleared his mind as completely as possible of the dregs of the day, he got a psychic, mental picture of The Park Werewolf. But as is true of most such mental pictures, when he tried to look at it, when he tried to study it as he would study a photograph or a painting in a gallery, the edges and details blurred, became indistinct, and he wasn't at all sure what he was seeing. So what he could see ultimately, in his mind's eye, was the horrific and nightmarish figure of a werewolf that looked as if it had wriggled into a huge nylon stocking.

When this happened, Ryerson, who usually kept his temper on a very short leash, cut loose with a string of obscenities, because seeing and not seeing at the same time can be very frustrating. "Donkey tits!" he hissed, borrowing, he knew, from the old spook in the cellar of the house in Vermont. "Fairy farts!" Then, "Shit, shit, shit!"

He heard a knock at the door of his room at the Samuelson Guest House. Creosote, who'd been happily and noisily chewing one of Ryerson's argyle socks on the bed, looked at the door and whimpered.

"Who's there?" Ryerson called.

"My name's Ashland," a man's voice called back.

Ryerson got out of his chair, went to the door, and looked through the little security peephole. The young, fresh-faced blond man on the other side of the door was trying very hard to smile amiably, as if he knew he was being watched. "Yes?" Ryerson said through the door. "What can I do for you?"

"I'd like to talk with you a moment, Mr. Biergarten."

"About what?"

"About The Park Werewolf."

Ryerson glanced around at Creosote, who was still whimpering. He said, under his breath, "What do you think, Creosote?" Creosote stopped whimpering and cocked his flat, stubby head to one side. Ryerson tried to read him, could read only something like the snow that comes between channels on TV sets. He shrugged, said "Okay," and opened the door.

The blond man who called himself Ashland extended his hand. Ryerson took it.

"I have some information for you," the man said, still trying very hard to smile amiably, though his palms were sweaty and his eyes darted quickly from one area of the room to another. He was clearly nervous.

"You do?" Ryerson said.

"About The Park Werewolf," the man said and nodded at the oak rocking chair that Ryerson had just gotten out of. "May I?"

"Sure."

The man went quickly to the chair and sat heavily, wearily in it. He let his head fall back and sighed. "My God!" he breathed.

"How'd you find me?" Ryerson asked. "How do you know who I am?"

The man let a quick smile-a smile of self-amusement, Ryerson thought-come and go on his lips. "I followed you here," he answered.

"Oh? Well, that answers my first question-”

“There's an article about you in The D and C."

" 'The D and C'? What's that?"

The man looked offended: " The Democrat and Chronicle -the paper. The Rochester newspaper."

"Oh," Ryerson said again. He was a little miffed. He didn't like publicity, especially in the middle of a case; too often it brought out the loonies, which, he supposed, included this man.

Once more a smile of what Ryerson thought was self-amusement flitted across the man's mouth. "Do you really think there's a werewolf loose in The Park, Mr. Biergarten?"

Ryerson went to the bed and sat next to Creosote. "Why don't you simply tell me, Mr. Ashland, what information you have-"

The man who called himself Ashland cut in, "I know who it is."

"Do you?"

"Yes. I know who it is." He looked quickly at Creosote, who had all but torn the argyle sock in half and was continuing to work happily at it, then looked back at Ryerson. "Do you believe me?"

"Should I?" Ryerson asked.

The man looked stunned by the question. He said nothing for a long moment, then yet another smile appeared; it stayed longer this time, and Ryerson guessed that the man was trying to be coy. "Everything I say… is a lie, Mr. Biergarten."

Ryerson inhaled deeply, let the air out slowly, and said, "Yes, I've heard that one, Mr. Ashland."

He looked offended. "It's a woman."

"The werewolf?"

Ashland nodded vigorously. "Yes. It's a woman." He pushed himself to his feet. "But I can't give you her name. I want to, I really want to. But I can't. I won't." He looked quickly, almost frantically, Ryerson thought, at the door, at Creosote, at Ryerson, back at the door, the window, at Ryerson. "I'm sorry; I've got to leave now. You don't mind, do you?"

Ryerson, still on the bed with Creosote beside him, shook his head and said "No," very matter-of-factly, "I don't mind."

The man who called himself Ashland protested, "I'm not crazy, Mr. Biergarten."

Ryerson said, "Neither am I," which clearly confused the visitor, who shuffled in place for a few moments, then went quickly to the door and left the room.

George Dixon, head of security at Kodak Park, pulled open the bottom right-hand drawer of his big gray metal desk and shrieked. There was a tongue-like a pale, dried red pepper-lying in the drawer on top of an old Playboy magazine.

Dixon slammed the drawer shut, found that his breathing was becoming labored from the quick onrush of adrenaline, and forced himself to breathe slowly, deeply. After a minute his breathing regulated itself, and he put his hand on the drawer handle.

"It's just a tongue," he whispered. "Jesus, everyone has one." He took a breath, pulled the drawer open, studied the tongue for a few moments, then closed the drawer slowly.

Would you know? he wondered. Would you really know? Or would you hide it? Even from yourself? Would you have to hide it, for Christ's sake, so you wouldn't go nutsaronee?! Sure you would.

Maybe you do it while you're asleep. Maybe you get up and you run around in some goddamned wolf suit – He shook his head. "Shit, no!" he breathed. How could he be The Park Werewolf? It was impossible. No way, Jose!

But still, he wrapped the raggedly severed tongue up in a napkin, put it in his black lunch pail, and took it home with him. And that evening he put it in a Baggie, put the Baggie in his lunch pail, took the lunch pail to a stretch of Genesee River that he knew no one ever frequented because it reeked of sewage, and threw the lunch pail in.

And again he whispered to himself, "So, it's a tongue. I don't need one. I got one of my own," grinned a wide, quaking grin, and went back to his apartment house.

Chapter Nine

APRIL 28

"It's unlikely," said Rochester's WROC-TV news anchorperson Mark Wolf, a handsome, square-faced man with sensitive eyes and a narrow, well-groomed mustache, "that too many more days will elapse before the murderer of four at Kodak Park is caught, according to Chief of Detectives Tom McCabe."

The picture cut to a shoulders-up shot of McCabe talking to an unidentified off-camera reporter.

"These are particularly heinous murders," McCabe said, "as all murders are, of course. But these murders are even more heinous than the… average murder because the murderer has chosen to mutilate his victims, much the way that the legendary werewolf does-"

"Are you suggesting," said the male voice of the anonymous off-camera reporter, "that there is something supernatural going on here, Chief?"

He shook his head vigorously. "No. Not at all. Quite the contrary. I'm suggesting that a sick individual, an individual who could appear to be quite normal, as a matter of fact, has… has run amok-"

"Is it true," the reporter cut in, "as the papers have said, that a psychic investigator has been called in to help in this case?"

Again McCabe shook his head. "Ryerson Biergarten is my friend. He's visiting Rochester, and I've asked him to look at some of the evidence-because he is a psychologist, after all-and to give us at the Rochester P.D. his… insights."

"Thank you, Chief."

Mark Wolf came back on the screen. "As expected, absenteeism at Kodak has risen quite dramatically since the murders began, from an average of two percent three weeks ago to more than forty percent today. Additionally, it has been reported that people are moving from place to place in groups of threes and fours, and that security guards-who are posted at all entrances and exits to The Park, anyway-have been told to let regular employees carry Mace, hatpins, and small knives for defense against a possible attack. According to Head of Security George Dixon, however, no unauthorized firearms of any kind have ever been allowed inside Kodak Park, nor will they be allowed now."

The shot cut to young, blond Sandi Hackman-whom Jack Youngman had ogled at the Kodak pool. She opened her purse to reveal a can of Mace inside and next to it what looked like a Swiss Army knife. She grinned threateningly; "If he wants me, he'll have to get past these! "

"And so," Mark Wolf continued, "the tension mounts. For nearly two weeks, The Park has been quiet, and there is some evidence that things are returning to normal. However, many people see each day that passes without a new atrocity as something of a blessing; these people are convinced that we haven't seen the last of The Park Werewolf.

"They ask, 'How will we slide into May?' Because tomorrow, April twenty-ninth, "-a pause for effect-"the moon will be full!"

Greta Lynch said to Doug Miller, "Do you miss him?"

"Miss who?" Miller asked from behind his desk.

"Walt." A pause. "I kind of miss him."

"Why the hell would you miss that crud?" Miller asked. "I mean, I'm sorry he's dead and everything-I'm sorry, especially, that he had to die like that-"

"You can be incredibly callous sometimes, Doug," Greta said. "He was another human being, after all."

Miller interrupted with a guffaw.

"And he had his good points," Greta said.

"Oh? Like what?"

She said nothing for a few moments, seemed to be in thought. Then, "Well, like-he never made a pass at me, for one."

This obviously astounded Miller. "Never?"

She shook her head. "Not once." A pause. "Not like him."

"Him?"

"Yes," Greta said. "Roger." Roger Crimm was the new manager at Emulsion Technology; he'd been called in from Syracuse to take Walt Morgan's place until someone permanent was found to fill the vacancy.

"He makes passes at you, Greta?" Miller's lips got suddenly moist.

"I'm sorry I mentioned it; this isn't some kind of soap opera, Doug."

He shrugged. "Sure it is." He grinned. "Life's a soap opera. Sometimes it's a pretty… grisly soap opera-"

"What in the hell are you talking about?"

His grin softened; he tilted his head quickly to one side in a clear effort to dismiss her question. "Nothing." He hesitated. "I made a reservation at The Manhattan. For Friday, eight o'clock."

She nodded slowly. "Good. I hope you enjoy yourself."

He shook his head. "No. We'll enjoy ourselves, Greta. You and me."

Again she shook her head. She stood, shook her head again. "No. I like to be asked, Doug.”

“So, I'm asking."

"The answer's still `no,' " she said, and left the office quickly.

Miller called after her, "I was going to say it's nice to have you back," because she'd been out ("sick," she'd claimed; "some kind of flu") since April 18, "but now," Miller concluded, "I'm not so sure?"

Ryerson said to Tom McCabe, "You hadn't encountered this case before, then?" They were at a restaurant called Foggy's Notion on Rochester's fashionable and self-important Park Avenue. McCabe loved the place; Ryerson thought, secretly, that it was starkly pretentious, that if the owners really had to mix decors, they could have mixed something other than Art Deco, late Victorian, and mid-twentieth-century junk. Behind them, the rear end of a 1960 black Cadillac jutted from the wall; the trunk lid was open and the trunk itself had been made into a small salad bar. The waiters and waitresses were nicely scrubbed young men and women in their early twenties; the men were dressed as members of a barbershop quartet, the women as flappers.

"Only," McCabe explained, "because it happened outside one of the target cities on that list you gave me. I got wind of it because the medical examiner in Erie was called in to do an autopsy, and he filed a report that got put on file there in Erie."

Ryerson had some papers relative to the case on the table in front of him. He checked them over briefly, looked up, and said, "Jesus. A sixteen-year-old girl."

McCabe nodded. "Lila Curtis. Poor kid."

"Yeah. Both of them," Ryerson said. Apparently Lila had killed her boyfriend, Tom Muggins, using an M.O. similar, but not identical to The Park Werewolf-then had turned a gun on herself. He pulled a single sheet of paper with the Eastman Kodak logo at the top from underneath the sheets dealing with the murder-suicide near Erie. "And who is it," he said, as much to himself as to McCabe, "that comes from Erie?"

From nearby they heard a loud screech of pain. They looked. A waiter had backed into one of the Cadillac's fins. "Happens all the time," McCabe said. "I'm not sure that car was such a good idea."

"Greta Lynch," Ryerson said.

"Sorry," McCabe said.

"Greta Lynch. She works in Emulsion Technology." He hesitated, thought a moment, went on, "Hey, wait a minute; wasn't that Walt Morgan's section?" He hurriedly got out some more papers with the Kodak logo at the top. He studied one, then another, and another. Finally he said, "Sure. Here it is." He turned the paper toward McCabe, who glanced at it, and said, "Yeah, and?"

"And there's a connection, Tom," Ryerson concluded. "Not only in the fact that this Greta Lynch used to live in Erie, but in the fact that she worked for the third victim, Walt Morgan, as well." He studied Greta's employment sheet for a good half minute, then said, "I'd like to talk with her, Tom. If I could talk with her, I'd-"

McCabe was shaking his head. "I'm sorry, Rye. I can't do that. If she is connected somehow to these murders, you might tip her off." He sipped a Coke. "Of course, I'd say the chances are awfully slim, Rye, that she's connected in any way-"

"Because she's a woman?"

"Yes."

"You're living in another century, my friend."

McCabe smiled knowingly. "And I'm better off for it, Rye." Once again, Ryerson got a fleeting glimpse of something slippery and secretive from McCabe. And though he had a chance to study it more closely this time-the image was stronger, less slippery than when he'd interrupted McCabe's sleep with a phone call-he backed off. McCabe was a friend, and was deserving of his privacy, after all.

Their lunch came. Ryerson had a tuna melt on whole wheat, a small salad, and a glass of milk. McCabe had his Coke, the soup of the day-cream of cauliflower-“Chicken Italian," and a medium-sized green salad. "What happened to your appetite, Tom?" Ryerson teased.

McCabe patted his all-too-obvious belly. "Doctor says if I don't lose weight I'll end up on a slab by the time I'm fifty. I don't want to end up on a slab by the time I'm fifty, so I'm trying to cut out a thousand calories or so a day."

"Uh-huh," Ryerson said. As far as he was concerned, people like McCabe were hooked on eating, and though their intentions might be noble, their stomachs still were masters of their spirits. "Why'd you leave me dangling, Tom?"

"Sorry?" He looked confused. Ryerson knew it was an act.

"Why'd you leave me dangling when you left Rochester? Why couldn't you have instructed your people to cooperate with me, for Christ's sake?!" He felt a fit of anger taking hold, fought it back. He didn't want to get on the subject of where McCabe had been for the last two weeks. He knew where he'd been, though McCabe hadn't told him. He'd been resting at his lakeside cottage in the Adirondacks. He had felt the hard, cold touch of reality on his head and had needed, simply and desperately, to run from it, to take a few days of "rejuvenation," to "sweep away the cobwebs"-phrases, Ryerson knew, McCabe would have used if the subject had been broached. But Ryerson wasn't about to broach it. He knew that McCabe had been walking a very thin line, knew that the man had needed the time off, regardless of what was happening in Rochester. And he also knew that the fact was a source of keen embarrassment for him.

"Sorry," McCabe said. "I should have told my people to cooperate with you, I know. It was… an oversight, and it won't happen again. That's a promise, Rye."

Ryerson sighed. "Yes. Thanks for that, anyway, Tom."

McCabe nodded; then, clearly anxious to change the subject, went on, "I've got a telephone-answering machine at home, you know."

"Yes, I know that, Tom. And?"

"And when I got back I found a couple of… messages on it."

"Oh? What kind of messages?"

McCabe shrugged. "The usual kind. People confessing in great, but unfortunately inaccurate, detail to the murders, people claiming to have information they'll release if the reward money's right. Those kinds of messages."

Ryerson cocked his head knowingly. "You're keeping something from me, aren't you, Tom?"

McCabe grinned. "How could I, even if I wanted to?" He paused. "Yes, I've gotten a couple of other messages, too. Messages from someone who won't identify himself, I'm afraid. Someone who knows things that only the murderer-or someone who happened by the murder scenes before anyone else-would know."

"What kinds of things, Tom?"

He shrugged. "Like the fact that one of the victims had her tongue ripped out. That was Tammy Levine, I think-it's hard to keep track of these things without a scorecard." He smiled grimly. "And this… person-I can't tell, Rye, if it's a man or a woman-says that I've got three good suspects, so why aren't they in jail?"

"Oh?" Ryerson said. "Does he name them?"

McCabe nodded. "Yes. Two of them, anyway. But I'm afraid I can't share those names with you, Rye. I've got them under observation, anyway-"

Ryerson cut in, "Two men and a woman? Am I right?"

McCabe shook his head incredulously. "Stay the hell out of my brain, Rye!" He meant it, Ryerson knew. "Yes. Two men and a woman. I don't have the woman's name. This… person who calls tells me to find out her name myself, that it's my job! The creep-telling me what my damned job is! And the most I can tell you, Rye-for all kinds of reasons-is that this person names two men. If you can pick my brain for their names, go ahead. But I wish you wouldn't."

Ryerson shrugged. "Sure, Tom. Anything for the sake of friendship."

And McCabe said, "Tell me why I don't believe you."

Ryerson answered, smiling, "Because you're a professional skeptic, Tom." His smile altered; he went on, his tone dripping with sincerity, "If you want me to stay out of your brain, Tom, then I will." And he meant it, although, much to his chagrin, when he had tried moments earlier to peer into McCabe's brain for the names he knew were probably swimming around in it, he had seen little more than what he sometimes saw in Creosote's brain-snow, interference, a haze-and it made the psychologist in him wonder and worry that Rochester's chief of detectives was losing his grip.

The letter Greta Lynch got that night was written in bold block print, and it was unsigned. My Dear Greta, Love's a strange thing, isn't it? I used to believe that it was the ultimate driving force in a person's life, that we will do anything to get it, or keep it. And I was right. Because I know about you, Greta, my love. I know about you, I know what your compulsions are, I know what you've done, and what you have to do. And I'm not going to tell a soul. It'll be our little secret. Then, one day, when you have shaken this "need," we can be together. That is my hope.

She stared blankly at the note for quite a long time, until Linda Bowerman came into the hallway.

"Hello, Greta." Linda got no reply and added, "Something wrong? Bad news from home?"

Greta answered, her voice weak, "No. Just a prank. Someone's idea of a joke," and she went upstairs quickly, with agitation, into her apartment.

It was the blood, of course. He'd seen the blood. She hadn't gotten it all off. Some of it had clung around her fingernails, maybe, or in the lines on her palm, or in her shoes-God knew where!

And that meant, simply, that she'd have to scrub harder, much harder. And then she'd have to look very, very closely, with a magnifying glass, into each pore, into each cell if she could.

Damn him! Goddamn him!

She turned the shower on. Hot. And got in.

Chapter Ten

Eugene Conkey figured the chances were about the same that The Park Werewolf would get him as they were that he'd win The New York State Lottery (into which he had faithfully, and in vain, plugged fifty dollars a month for the past six years). Number one, it was called "The Park Werewolf" because its territory was Kodak Park, not here, five miles away on Bayview Drive. Number two, even if it strayed out of The Park for some reason, Christ, it had a couple of hundred square miles to mess around in; the chances that it would somehow find him were about the same as the chances that a meteorite would plummet from the sky and take his ear off. And number three, he was prepared. If any creep who thought he was a werewolf interrupted his nightly jogging routine, then he'd find his guts somewhere far behind him in the weeds. Sure the forty-five was illegal, sure it was hard to run with it tucked into his jogging pants, sure he'd never used one before. But those were small considerations indeed in the face of his own self-defense.

Eugene heard a car round the bend a hundred yards behind him. He glanced back into the car's headlights, saw they were on high beam. "Fuck you!" he breathed. The headlights dimmed. He looked back at the road in front of him-poorly lighted because here, in Irondequoit, one of Rochester's more fashionable neighborhoods, streetlamps were looked upon as a little gauche; no one walked anywhere anymore-and angled to his right, onto the shoulder, just in case the car's driver didn't see him. He was thankful there was a full moon tonight; it lit the gravel shoulder well enough that he could see the occasional pothole or rock.

He idly watched the car as it passed him. He saw that it was dark gray in color (though that was hard to tell in the dark, he realized) and that it had a whip antenna on the back-an unmarked police car, he decided, and felt grateful that it was prowling the neighborhood. He watched it round the corner onto Briarcliffe, which ran into Bayview, then he angled back onto the road.

The neighborhood was awfully quiet. He'd noticed that as soon as he'd left his house, because at this hour-it was 9:30-there was usually still a good amount of traffic-people coming and going to the big twenty-four-hour grocery, Wegman's, at the Culver Ridge Shopping Plaza or heading to one of the half dozen bars that dotted the area or to one of the five theaters at Eastway Plaza just a couple miles north. He liked the quiet, especially for jogging, because he jogged not only, he claimed, "for the health of it," but also, "for the peace of it," and the roads had rarely been as peaceful as they were to-night, with most people shut up in their houses away from the threat of the full moon. He thought, wryly, that there was some good to be found in any situation.

His breathing as he jogged was heavy, especially toward the end of his routine, and the sound of it often covered up small sounds around him.

So he didn't hear the low, ragged growling from the weeds just to his right. Or the weeds themselves being squashed underfoot. Or the gravel at the shoulder of the road crunching under an awful weight. And by then he was past the thing that was making all this noise, so he didn't see it, either, as it fell in behind him and kept pace with him just a couple of arm's lengths away.

And when the thing was nearly upon him his nose twitched, because the smell wafting over him reminded him of the open sewers in Williamson, New York where he'd grown up. Then he felt only the whisper of a touch-like the touch of a butterfly-at the side of his throat. Then the top of his spinal column was ripped away, and he tumbled head over heels and lay with his arms and legs wide, his head at an impossible angle, and these words spilling incoherently from his lips: "The peace of it, the peace of it, the peace of it…"

Jack Youngman stared for a long time into the trunk of his Marquis and at last convinced himself that there was no blood left in it. He'd cleaned it very thoroughly two weeks before, when he'd first found the blood. And then again when it had come back a week later. And now today, the day after Eugene Conkey's murder, which had been discovered several hours earlier and so had been part of the morning TV and radio newscasts but hadn't yet hit the newspapers. He closed the trunk quietly, though he was in his garage and the door was shut. You never knew about neighbors; one day they could be as warm as toast, and the next day they could turn you in for cheating on your income taxes. Or one of them might phone the cops anonymously and say, "Hey, I got this neighbor and he's been acting real peculiar; he cleans the trunk of his car all the time, you know."

Because maybe, just maybe, Jack had decided, he was The Park Werewolf. He was big enough, after all. And strong enough. And what did it matter if he couldn't remember killing anyone? If he was nuts, if he went around taking people's heads off, then the chances were pretty damned good that he wouldn't remember it. Shit, why would he want to? Or maybe he had two or three personalities. Maybe during the day he was Big Jack Youngman, gruff and unapproachable-Big Jack Youngman, who was really made of mush on the inside and didn't want people to get too close to him because all that mush would come out. And then at night, during the full moon, he changed. He became a rock-hard, drooling killer.

But when he thought about it, he didn't believe a word of it. Actually, he realized, he didn't want to believe a word of it. But there was the evidence of the blood, after all.

THAT EVENING: 7:30

"Poor slob," Tom McCabe said to Ryerson. They were standing several feet from an autopsy table at the Monroe County Medical Examiner's office. Dr. Peter B. Taub, a balding, thin, no-nonsense man in his early fifties, was performing the autopsy on Eugene Conkey. Detective Bill Andrews, who'd been brought in to help on The Park Werewolf case after Walt Morgan's murder, stood just behind Ryerson and McCabe, his eyes averted.

Creosote had been left in what Ryerson hoped were the capable hands of Loren Samuelson, the owner of the guest house where he was staying.

Creosote had apparently not been feeling well lately, and Ryerson wanted to keep him out of the chill, moist Rochester air. He looked at McCabe: "Thanks for getting me in here, Tom."

"No problem," McCabe said. Then, to Dr. Taub,

"Can you give me a cause of death, Pete?"

"Take your pick," Taub said dryly. "Broken neck, severed spinal column, lacerated trachea-"

Detective Andrews, who had been trying to ignore what was happening and so hadn't realized the doctor was talking, cut in. "He won the lottery, you know.”

“Sorry?" McCabe said.

"Mr. Conkey won the New York State Lottery. I heard it on the radio on the way in this evening."

Taub harrumphed; "I guess this was supposed to be his day."

"It kind of was," Ryerson said.

"Poor slob," McCabe said again.

And Detective Andrews said, "Mind if I leave?" and before getting an answer, turned and quickly left the room.

"Greta, Greta, my love," Doug Miller breathed-once, then again and again, deeply and with an almost overpowering sense of urgency. Then his orgasm was done and he stood from his bed, wadded up the soiled toilet paper in his hand, and tossed it idly into the wastebasket nearby. He pulled his pants up, zippered and buttoned them, and sat again, exhausted.

He put his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and took several long, deep breaths. "Greta, Greta, Greta," he whispered into his hands. He sighed.

For God's sake, she would love him someday! He would make her love him! What else did he have to do to show her that he loved her? He followed her around like a damned puppy dog, didn't he? He walked her to her car every night, even though-and she knew this-his own car, a dark blue Plymouth Fury, was in the other parking lot. Hell, hadn't he even moved from his big house in Pittsford (which had been left to him upon his mother's death three years earlier) to this crummy apartment just a block away from her?

And there was the best evidence of all-the evidence that he couldn't yet share with her, but that he would share in time-the evidence of his faithfulness. The evidence of his fidelity to her, even though she wasn't yet his. His fidelity not only in the fact that he'd kept himself clean for her, but also that he was keeping her secret. Her awful, nightmarish secret.

He stood and went to the window that looked out on Fairview Heights. He could see Greta's house from that window. He could see that the lights in her third-floor apartment were on, and he wondered if she were there in the apartment, thinking about him.

"Greta, my love," he whispered, "I'll always keep your secret."

Chapter Eleven

Ryerson felt awful about having Creosote here, making his abominable noises in the midst of this poor couple's grief. He apologized often, but he also felt relieved that getting the dog away from Rochester had, in a manner of speaking, brought him back to life.

"She ran away?" Ryerson asked Will Curtis, who was seated across from him at the aluminum and glass dining table. The man's wife, Frances, sat with Ryerson and her husband. Each of them had a cup of cocoa to drink and a plate of D'Oro Cookies to pick at, but though the Curtises had told Ryerson "Eat, please eat!" several times, they had all let their cocoa get cold and hadn't touched the plate of cookies.

"Yes," said the man, his voice weary with several kinds of pain, "as many children do today, Lila ran away." He paused and smiled, though it was a smile as weak and pain-ridden as his voice. "But she came back, Mr. Biergarten. Lila came back."

"And she was…" Ryerson paused; he could sense the anguish in the small, memorabilia-cluttered dining room; it was an anguish, he knew, that had grown not only from loss but from confusion and, as well, from a strange, lingering fear. "She acted… oddly when she came back?"

The woman, Frances, nodded slowly. She had her small, pale hands clasped on the tabletop in front of her cup of cocoa, and her gaze was lowered, as if she were looking somewhere between her hands and the cup. She said, "Lila was sixteen, and I know that sixteen-year-old girls are full of the devil-" She stopped and appeared unable to go on. A tear slid down her cheek; she swiped at it, continued, "I was when I was sixteen. But Lila-" She stopped again.

Her husband took over for her. "Lila was a very confused girl, Mr. Biergarten. Maybe it was because we were… older when we became parents. Frances was well into her thirties, you see-"

Frances cut in, a little sharply, "Our age has nothing to do with it, Will. Lila was confused for her own reasons; we were good parents, damnit, we were the very best parents we could be."

Creosote cut loose with a lengthy bout of snorting, belching, and benign growling. "I'm sorry, forgive me," Ryerson pleaded. He got Creosote's soft plastic duck from the pocket of his cream-colored bulky-knit sweater and stuck it in the dog's mouth. Creosote began working at it happily.

Will Curtis waved Ryerson's words awry. "Nothing to forgive; I had four Boston bull terriers when I was growing up, Mr. Biergarten. Fine animals. Noisy, sure, but still fine animals. Smart as a whip, and loyal as your shadow-"

"Lila was cursed," Frances cut in.

Ryerson studied the woman's eyes for several seconds; he saw the same anguish in them that filled the room, but he saw resolve, too, and an almost painful sort of honesty. He said, "How was she cursed?"

Frances nodded again, slowly, as if it were a nervous habit. Her gaze lowered. "I've read about what's happening up north. In Rochester."

"Yes?" Ryerson coaxed.

"And if I didn't know that Lila was lying in her grave-"

"Shut up," her husband cut in sharply. "You shut your mouth, woman-"

"Don't you speak to me in that tone, Will Curtis-”

“I'll speak to you in whatever tone I please; you can't talk about my Lila that way-"

" Your Lila?! Your Lila?! Good Lord, she was our daughter, she was our mistake-"

"Goddamnit, she was a beautiful, beautiful child who ran away and got… corrupted -"

Ryerson felt embarrassment flooding into him like hot soup. He stood, tucked Creosote firmly under his arm, said "Excuse me, please, I'll be in here," and nodded toward the living room. Then he went and sat on a big overstuffed blue couch and waited for the argument to subside.

" Corrupted? " Frances screeched. "Our daughter was corrupted by your cloying, smothering, overprotective-"

"Not that again. My God, woman-"

"Stop calling me 'woman'! My name is Frances, or did you forget? Did you want to call me 'Lila'?"

And so it went.

After ten minutes Ryerson got the idea that this sort of thing went on quite a lot, that it was a way the couple had of putting their grief and confusion and fear aside, if just temporarily, if only until both of them became exhausted and, in all probability, Ryerson thought, fell sobbing into each other's arms.

After fifteen minutes he got up from the couch and went outside, onto the wraparound, screen-enclosed porch. He closed the door firmly behind him, which shut him off well enough from the sound of the argument inside. He inhaled deeply of the fresh, clean country air, found a white rattan rocking chair halfway down the porch toward the east end of the house, and sat in it with Creosote on his lap. He scratched idly at the dog's ears, rocked, picked out the Big Dipper above the northern horizon, the constellation of Orion to the east.

"Creosote," he said, "this is a world of pain and confusion, I'm afraid." And Creosote belched, snorted, belched, and snorted again, all as if to say, Yes, but I'm feeling good, thank you!

And then, for half an instant, as he scratched idly at his dog's ears, Ryerson saw The Park Werewolf in his mind's eye as clearly as he could see the Big Dipper above the northern horizon, and feelings rushed into him, feelings of need and compulsion and hunger, feelings so vile and intense that they made his stomach turn over and pushed bile high into his throat. Then the image and the feelings dissipated and he felt breathless, exhausted, and vaguely panic-stricken, as if he had just nearly been run over by a truck.

Creosote fell silent.

"Jesus!" Ryerson whispered. "He's… he's…" But he could think of no words that exactly fit the awful creature his mind's eye had just shown him.

~* ~

The argument between Frances and Will Curtis ended half an hour after it began, and they both came out to the porch, where Ryerson was sitting, and looked rather sheepishly down at him.

Frances said, "We are very sorry, Mr. Biergarten," and she smiled a quick, broad smile. "How is your little dog?"

"He's fine," Ryerson said.

"We've both been quite tense," Will Curtis offered. "Ever since Lila's… passing, we've both been irritable, and tense, and I'm afraid we…"-he searched for the right word,-"sub mit to it on occasion."

"Yes," Ryerson said, "I understand that. Please don't feel that you need to apologize."

And Frances suggested, "Why don't we go to the grave now."

"Sorry?" Ryerson said, confused. "It's-" He checked his watch, which was difficult to do on the darkened porch.

Will Curtis cut in, "Eight forty-five. Not too late, Mr. Biergarten, not too late."

"Not too late at all," Frances said. Ryerson thought they sounded almost enthusiastic, as if it were a bright midsummer's day and someone had suggested they go on a picnic. Frances hurried on, "She likes us to visit her at night, under a full moon." Her voice rose in pitch, and apparently in expectation, as she added, "She talks to us then."

Will Curtis nodded meaningfully. "Yes, Mr. Biergarten. She does talk to us."

Ryerson was still confused, and uneasy, too, but he said, "Yes, of course; whenever you're ready."

Will Curtis shrugged. "We're ready now. We're always ready."

The cemetery where Lila was buried was a short drive from the Curtis home, half a mile down a narrow, unpaved road that had an old two-wire fence running on both sides down its entire length. The wire was just visible in the moonlight, like a long, meandering, thick strand of silk, because the evening dew was on it.

"Electric fence," Will Curtis offered. "Least it used to be, when they had horses in there." He nodded at the field of chickweed and clover creamy in the moonlight, beyond the fence.

Frances, who was driving the couple's vintage Chevrolet, said, "Nothing in there now. No horses, anyway." Then she slowed the car and brought it to a stop. "Here it is," she said. "Will, you can get the gate this time."

Will said, "Sure," opened his door, got out slowly because of his arthritis, and opened the wrought-iron gates to Edgewater Cemetery, its name wrought in Gothic lettering above the gates. "We're in Edgewater," Frances said. "This is Edgewater."

"Yes," Ryerson said.

Frances drove through while her husband held the gate open.

It had been only two months since Lila's burial and the ground had yet to settle, so there was still no stone to mark her grave, just a wreath at its head and a small pot of freshly watered chrysanthemums below it. "Got a nice stone picked out," Will said. They'd been standing at the graveside for ten minutes or more, Ryerson thought. The Curtises had their hands clasped in front of them and their heads lowered.

"It'll be a while," Frances said.

"Yes," Ryerson began, and Frances interrupted, "Until she starts to talk to us, I mean."

"Oh," Ryerson said, still confused and still uneasy around this grieving middle-aged couple who were probably taking him on an eerie stroll through their most profound fantasy. Creosote was deathly still in his arms, the soft plastic duck sticking out of one corner of its mouth. Several times Ryerson had actually felt the dog's chest to be sure it was breathing.

"Sometimes it's a half hour or more," Will said.

"And sometimes it's an hour," Frances said.

"Sometimes you can understand her," Will said.

"And sometimes you can't," Frances said.

"Sometimes it's gibberish. It sounds like…" Will faltered.

Frances suggested, "Birds. It sounds like birds sometimes."

Will nodded. "Bluejays," he said. "It's raucous. Like bluejays are."

"Yes, of course," Ryerson said, distractedly. He was thankful for the full moon. He could see well enough by its light, but if a cloud covered it, he'd be all but blind here, he realized.

Lila's grave was at the extreme northeast perimeter of the small cemetery. Just a couple of yards beyond it, the six-foot-high wrought-iron fence stood straight and dark, its pitted and rusted surfaces reflecting the moonlight dully. Beyond the fence, the same fields of chickweed and clover stretched to a horizon that, at the northeast, was a light bluish-green; Erie, Ryerson supposed, sketching a quick map of the area in his mind. Where Greta Lynch came from, he reminded himself. He said, to either of the Curtises who might answer him, "Could you tell me something about your daughter's friends?"

"Boyfriends, you mean?" Will asked, a small tremor of suspicion in his voice.

Frances offered sharply, "She had lots of boyfriends, Mr. Biergarten."

"None that mattered," Will maintained steadfastly.

"Not boyfriends, particularly," Ryerson said. "I'm talking more about… friends -girlfriends, teachers." He paused only briefly, went on, "Did she have any women friends?"

"Sorry," Frances said, "I don't understand that," and her tone announced clearly that she hoped he wasn't asking what she thought he was asking.

Ryerson shook his head urgently. "No, not that kind of woman friend. I'm sorry. I mean, an older woman friend. A woman in her twenties, for instance. Someone she… talked to; like a big sister." His uneasiness doubled.

Will and Frances fell silent for several moments. Then Will said, "Yes," and Frances said, almost at the same time, "She had a friend named Joan. Near Erie."

"Joan?" Ryerson asked. "Do you remember her last name?"

And there was movement in the dirt over the grave. "Good Lord," Ryerson breathed.

Will nodded urgently. "She's gonna talk to us, Mr. Biergarten. Lila's gonna talk to us." He looked at his wife. "Frances, our Lila's gonna talk to us."

"Yes," Frances said matter-of-factly. "I can hear her humming."

"She hums first, Mr. Biergarten," Will said.

"Like a singer warming up her pipes," Frances said, smiling slightly, as if pleased with the image.

The ground quieted. Ryerson heard, from within the grave, what sounded for all the world like someone humming. But it was strained and tight, like air being let out of a balloon.

The humming stopped.

And Ryerson saw, for the first time, that the ground over the grave was quite a bit more disturbed than it should have been. He asked, "How long ago did you say it was that your daughter was buried?"

"Two months," Will answered.

While Creosote whimpered raggedly in his arms-because the dog wouldn't let go of his treasured soft plastic duck-Ryerson knelt over the grave and touched the earth. It was moist, as if it had been freshly turned. He looked up at Frances and Will Curtis, who were looking quizzically down at him. "I…" he began, and wasn't sure what to say next. He looked quickly, anxiously back at the grave.

Will Curtis said, his voice tentative and unsure, "That ground's not settled yet, Mr. Biergarten."

The humming started again, lower in pitch, as if the balloon were running out of air.

"There," Frances said, "Lila's talking to us."

Ryerson glanced at her, shook his head. "No," he whispered. "No, I'm sorry, no," and he looked yet again at the grave and cocked his head to one side to get a better fix on the source of the humming noise. He looked again at Frances and Will Curtis. "I assume that Lila was embalmed."

Frances shook her head. "No, she wasn't. Joan said not to, and the medical examiner in Erie said that was okay if her coffin was closed, which it was-"

"My God," Ryerson breathed; he held Creosote in his left hand and stuck his right hand six or seven inches into the sort earth. He touched something. It felt like the skin that forms on Jell-O that's allowed to harden uncovered. He recoiled, reached into the earth again, let his fingers linger on the thing he was touching there. He kneaded it experimentally and heard the same high, humming sound he'd heard moments earlier, like air escaping from a balloon.

"She's talking to us," Will Curtis cried happily.

"No, I'm sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Curtis, I'm sorry-”

“She's talking to us, our Lila is talking to us!"

Chapter Twelve

"She'd been dug up," Ryerson said, "and then reburied, though not quite deep enough, I'm afraid." Tom McCabe shook his head in disbelief.

"And I'm awfully damned sure this friend of Lila's, the woman Frances referred to as ‘Joan,' did it, though I couldn't get much out of Frances or her husband-they were both in a state of shock. He had to be sedated, and she simply refused to talk."

"In time," McCabe suggested.

"We can live in hope, Tom. I'll go back down there in a few days, unless you have some objections."

"No, I don't. I'd like to go with you, though, to sort of keep the whole thing as… official as we can."

"Sure."

"How's the pooch, Rye?"

"I don't know. It was as if he went into shock, too. The vet says he'll be all right, which-"

McCabe, who clearly had asked about Creosote purely from courtesy, broke in. "So you think this `Joan' woman is Greta Lynch?"

Ryerson exhaled slowly, a kind of extended sigh. "I don't know," he said. They were at Foggy's Notion; Ryerson had ordered a scotch and soda, though it wasn't yet noon, and he rarely drank at all, let alone before noon. He'd downed half the drink and could already feel it working on him. "I think there's a good chance that `Joan' and Greta Lynch are the same person. Maybe I want to believe it, because it would start bringing things together for me."

"Oh?" McCabe was intrigued. "How?"

Ryerson took a sip of the drink, set the glass down. "Okay, we know that Greta worked in Erie, right?"

"Right."

"And we know that poor Lila Curtis killed her boyfriend using an M.O. similar to that of The Park Werewolf."

"Uh-huh. Right."

"Okay, now Lila Curtis lived in Edgewater, which is only twenty miles from Erie, and Lila Curtis also had a friend named Joan who may or may not have come from Erie."

"Sure, Rye. But it's damned tenuous. You know that, don't you?"

Ryerson nodded. "If you're saying we can't get a conviction on it, I'm aware of that. We're also not going to get a conviction if we go to a judge and say, 'Judge, a werewolf did these murders.'

McCabe grinned. "So, you've settled on that, huh? That it's a werewolf?"

Ryerson grimaced. "Don't make it sound so melodramatic, Tom. I told you once that I'm not sure I believe in werewolves, and that still goes. I'm not sure what we're dealing with here. First I say that he's got his mythology all wrong, that he's doing his killing not only at times when there's no full moon, but during the day as well, and then this poor bastard-Conkey-gets it under a full moon. I don't know, Tom. I really do not know. And it's frustrating the hell out of me."

"You and me, both, Rye. But off the record-and this goes nowhere but into my head for now-you're saying that what we've got is a genuine, Hammer-films-variety, snarling, gut-eating werewolf. Is that right?"

"That's right," Ryerson answered simply. He stood. "But I wouldn't bet my ass on it, Tom. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to see a man about a dog."

Greta held the sealed envelope in her hand for a full minute before she opened it. It had only her name on it, no stamp, no return address, so whoever had written it had put it in her mailbox himself-and that made her feel more apprehensive than if the mailman had brought it.

When she did open it, she saw the same dark block lettering that had been used in the first letter: My Dearest Greta, Our little secrets are what make us human. Animals have no secrets from each other, beyond where they've hidden their stash of food, and under what logs their dens lie. So, if we are animal, and human, at the same time, then the things that the animal inside us has to do, to survive, become the human's awful secrets. Because the animal knows no shame. It knows only its needs, and how to satisfy them. But secrets like that, Greta, can make us sick and depressed. They can eat away at us and make our human world a place of horror. Share your secrets, Greta. Bring them out, into the light, for me. Then, together, we can make them right and good.

Greta crumpled the letter in her fist and cursed savagely beneath her breath, just as Linda Bowerman appeared from inside the house, her little two-wheel grocery cart in hand.

"Come to the store with me, Greta?" she asked. Greta shook her head, eyes closed.

"Can I get you anything, then? It's no problem."

Again Greta shook her head; she opened her eyes, looked at Linda. "No, thank you. I don't need anything."

Linda shrugged. "Okay, suit yourself." She descended the porch steps, looked back, waved, and said, "See you later."

"Sure," Greta called back, and went sullenly up to her apartment.

It was simply furnished, because she was a woman of simple tastes. In her move from Erie, Pennsylvania, she'd either discarded or given to the Salvation Army a number of things that she and her estranged husband had shared and that he had-with unusual magnanimity, she thought at the time-let her keep. Things like a portable stereo, a ten-year-old color TV, two cherry end tables, a super-8-min movie camera and projector, which they'd used quite a lot during the first year of their marriage, and several boxes of essentially useless odds and ends.

She'd had to acquire a number of things when she'd moved to Rochester and settled into her apartment on Fairview Heights: furniture, cooking utensils, a bed. She bought them all in one day, using her savings to buy only the best, if not the best-looking, stuff she could find. Form, she believed, followed function; if something looked nice but didn't work, what good was it?

She also read quite a lot, and had built quite an impressive library. Her tastes were eclectic; the only sort of books she didn't read were modern romances. She read historicals, westerns and spy thrillers, horror, poetry, mainstream fiction, psychological fiction, self-help, and current events. She had all of the Arthur Conan Doyle books, all of Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, John Updike, T. M. Wright, Shirley Jackson, Richard Brautigan, Paula Fox, and Peter S. Beagle, to name a few of her favorite authors. And she read every night.

Tonight she would not read. Tonight she would spend her evening hours agonizing, in vain, over the "goddamned, cowardly bastard"-as she thought of him-who was writing her these anonymous, sophomorically philosophical, and weirdly accusative letters. Why, if he knew her awful secret, didn't he simply share it with her personally? That would be better. That would be better for both of them. Her anxiety followed her to bed and then into sleep.

The following morning, Saturday, May 3, was warm, dry, and cloudless, and Ryerson Biergarten thought there were places he'd rather be than trying to pump a possible murder suspect; the psychic effort always left him weary.

With Creosote tucked snorting under his arm, he knocked firmly on the massive oak door-there was a window in the middle of it covered by a sheer curtain-at 8 Fairview Heights, saw a doorbell, used it. Seconds later he watched as a short, square-faced, dark-haired woman in a long green terrycloth robe appeared from an inner room, moved to the front door, parted the sheer curtains, and peered out.

"Yes?" said the woman.

"I'd like to speak to Greta Lynch," Ryerson called through the closed door.

"Greta's asleep. Could you come back later, please?"

Ryerson checked his watch. "You're sure she's asleep? It is 10:30, you know."

"Yes. I know what time it is."

"Could I leave her my card, then?"

The woman looked confused. "Your what?”

“My card. Could I leave it with you to give to her?"

The woman hesitated, opened the door slightly, stuck her face into the opening. "Yes, you can leave your card. Are you a salesman?"

"No."

"Then what are you?"

"I'm an investigator." Creosote cut loose; the woman gave him a look that was half confusion, half disgust.

"What's wrong with him?" she asked.

"Nothing," Ryerson answered. "He always does that."

"Oh." Her face vanished from the opening briefly. Ryerson read a momentary anxiety; her face reappeared. "Greta's not up. It's Saturday; I guess it's her day off."

"You're her-" Ryerson hesitated expectantly.

"I'm her landlady, Linda Bowerman. And her friend." That last, Ryerson knew, was a veiled warning; I'm her protector, too, it said. "What is it you're investigating?"

"I'm investigating the murders at The Park."

Linda Bowerman nodded her acceptance of that. "And how do you think Greta's connected with them?"

"I'm not saying I do. She does work at The Park, however, so there are some-"

"And so do ten thousand other people, Mr.-”

“Biergarten."

"Uh-huh." Again her face disappeared from the opening. Again Ryerson read anxiety from her. Her face reappeared. She suggested tentatively, "I guess she had a hard night, Mr. Biergarten."

And then he read something else, something from within the house, from above, from Greta's apartment. Something like fear. Or paralysis. Something that wanted to scream but couldn't, as if the vocal cords were numb, useless.

He said urgently, "Please, I think I should come in. Let me come in," and he took a step closer to the door.

Linda Bowerman closed the door until half an inch or less separated it from the frame and hissed, "Go away, this is private property!"

"You don't understand," Ryerson pleaded, "and I don't have time to explain, but I know that something's wrong in there. Something's wrong in your house."

"There's nothing wrong in my house. Nothing at all. Now go away, just go away!"

And Ryerson told himself, If she meant it, she'd close the door. "I'm coming in," he announced, "please step aside," and he straight-armed the door. Linda Bowerman backed out of the way, started for her living room, said, over her shoulder, "I'm calling the police." Ryerson said, "Good," because it was, he knew, the very best thing she could do at that moment.

"Motrin," the resident on call in the Emergency Ward at Strong Memorial Hospital explained to Ryerson. Ryerson had been waiting a good two hours for a report. "She took maybe thirty of them. Thirty of the big ones-six hundred milligrams each. We nearly lost her." The resident was a black woman not quite thirty with long straight hair and a distinctly businesslike air about her.

Ryerson breathed a little sigh of relief.

"You're her husband?" the resident asked.

"No, just a friend." He glanced in the direction of the Emergency Ward down a long narrow hallway to his right. "Can I talk to her?"

The resident answered, "In a day or two, yes." She paused, nodded at Creosote, who was snorting and belching, though more quietly than usual. "And without the dog, please."

"Of course," Ryerson answered, embarrassed. "Without the dog."

George Dixon glanced quickly around his office-though there was no one else in it-and opened the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk all the way.

"Goddamnit!" he whispered. "Goddamnit all the fucking hell!" What in God's name was his damned lunch pail doing here? He'd thrown the damned thing into the Genesee River. He studied the pail for a full minute. Then, tremblingly, he reached into the drawer, grabbed the handle, and lifted the pail out. His brow furrowed; this wasn't his lunch pail. His had had a long scratch down the front. This pail was brand new; Jesus, it still had a price tag on it.

He opened the pail quickly. It was empty except for a note written on a piece of yellow, lined paper.

The note said simply, "Who are you trying to kid, George? The world? Or yourself?"

And he thought desperately, What the hell does someone know about me that I don't?!

Chapter Thirteen

HAPPY ACRES GOLF CLUB: SUNDAY, MAY 4

"Lost it in the sun, damnit!" Jack Youngman whispered.

"Good drive, anyway, Jack," Doug Miller said and teed up for his own shot. "I saw where it landed." They were at the ninth hole, a 413-yard, par-five dogleg to the left that Doug Miller always parred, but which Jack Youngman had parred only once.

Youngman growled back, "Just because I let you play through with me once or twice doesn't mean you can call me anything but 'Mr. Youngman,' you got that?"

Doug Miller grinned, shrugged, and took his shot. The solid thwack of the club head against the ball told him almost at once that it was going to be a long, straight drive, longer, perhaps, than Youngman's, who usually drove well but ended up taking two or three extra shots on the green.

Youngman watched the ball arch high, but not too high, then hit the fairway a good 260 yards straight ahead. He grimaced. "Where are those other assholes, anyway?" he said. "I'll be damned if I have to walk another nine holes with just you for company, Miller." He didn't add that the reason he'd let Miller golf with him these last six weeks or so was that Miller was just about the best partner a guy could ask for. He was a good golfer, for one-almost as good, Youngman thought, as he was-and number two, he was just asshole enough that he got the members of the other team mad and flustered enough that they screwed up a lot.

"They said they'd meet us here, right?" Miller asked. "At the ninth hole?"

"That's what they said," Youngman answered, a noticeable strain in his voice because he hated to wait for anyone. He glanced at his watch. It said 12:15. "We'll give 'em another ten minutes." He looked suspiciously at the wooden driver that Miller had just used. "What is that, Miller? Is that new?" He thought it was possible that the reason Miller's drives were so good was that he was using an illegal club, one with a head that was heavier than normal.

Miller handed him the club. "Nice, huh? English; custom made. You wanta try it? Go ahead."

Youngman shook his head as he studied the club. "I don't need no special club-"

Miller guffawed. "It isn't special, Jack." Youngman gave him a quick, critical glance. "It's a standard club."

"Uh-huh," Youngman said, unconvinced. "And what's this?" He pointed at three letters cut into the top of the club head: "DAM."

"My initials," Miller answered. "Douglas A. Miller."

"Uh-huh. What's the 'A' for-'Asshole'?" He grinned, pleased with his joke.

"No." Miller grinned too, as if sharing the joke. " 'Ashland.'”

"Who the hell gave you a name like that?" He handed the club back, but Miller said nothing; the answer to the question was obvious, and the other players had appeared.

~* ~

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 any thing 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 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."

McCabe held a chicken leg up in front of his face. "Hi," he said to Ryerson at his front door, "you want some? My own recipe."

"We've got to talk; can we talk?" Ryerson asked urgently.

McCabe shrugged. "Sure. Let's go into the den." Again he held up the chicken leg, which had a huge chunk missing from it. "Have some, Rye. It's my own version of Chicken French-"

Ryerson pushed past him into the house. "Where's the den, Tom?"

McCabe motioned to the left, down a short hall-way. "Over here." They started toward it. McCabe said, behind Ryerson, "How about what's-his-name, your mutt?"

"He's fine," Ryerson said over his shoulder.

"I mean, would he like some of my Chicken French?"

"No, Tom. He doesn't eat people food."

"Oh, good." A pause. "To the right, Rye, it's the door at the end of the hallway."

Ryerson looked back. "Why do you live alone in a house this big, Tom?"

McCabe chomped on the chicken leg and answered as he chewed, "Gives me room to breathe, Rye."

Then Ryerson opened the door to the den, and they went in and sat facing each other in two big cream-colored wing chairs. McCabe set his chicken leg down in a floor-standing ashtray near his chair, hunkered forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands elapsed. "Okay, Rye. What's the scoop?"

Ryerson nodded at Creosote. "Do you mind if I put him down, Tom?"

"Does he pee?"

"Outside, yes."

"As long as he doesn't pee on anything, Rye. I have a housekeeper who'd throw a fit if he peed on anything."

Ryerson put Creosote on the floor; the dog looked around for a moment, sniffed at one of the Argyle socks Ryerson was wearing as if it were an old friend, then settled down for a snooze under the chair his master was sitting in. Ryerson sat back, arms flat on the arms of the chair. He said, "I still don't believe in werewolves, Tom."

"That's good to know, Rye." McCabe sat back, too, as if on cue from Ryerson.

Ryerson went on, "But I believe that there are plenty of people out there who do. And I believe that faith can move mountains."

McCabe smiled uneasily. "You've got religion, right, Rye?"

Ryerson shook his head. "No; no more than usual, anyway." He sat forward suddenly, assumed the same position that McCabe had-elbows on his knees, hands clasped. "What I've got is a new way of looking at our murderer. What I've got, Tom, is a new twist to the old werewolf legend."

Chapter Fifteen

Sixteen-year-old Larry Wilde had two hobbies. One was coin-collecting; he was currently into completing his collection of early twentieth-century Lincoln-head pennies. And the other was Great Movie Slashers of the Past. That was, in fact, the title of a book he'd been putting together. Of course, when you're sixteen, "the past" doesn't mean what it means to a thirty-year-old (and when you're thirty, it doesn't mean what it means to a sixty-year-old, either). So, his book began with the faceless drowned adolescent from the original Friday the Thirteenth, proceeded to the equally faceless slasher from the original Halloween (which, he maintained, was worlds better than the losers that followed), and involved itself further with Terror Train and The Fog and The Creeping Dead and a half dozen others. He'd gotten 120 single-spaced typewritten pages done on the book and was beginning to check the current Writer's Market for possible agents and publishers.

Today, a Wednesday, the same day that Ryerson Biergarten was sitting down with Tom McCabe, Larry was feeling deathly ill, as if, he told his mother, "Little bugs had got inside me and were scratching away at my insides, Mom."

It sounded to Mrs. Wilde like food poisoning. The day before, they'd gone to a picnic sponsored by the company where Mr. Wilde worked, and there were complaints all around that the macaroni salad was "slimy,”“greasy,”“sour tasting," and "alcoholic." And indeed a few of the people who ate it got nauseous several hours later.

"How much of that salad did you have yesterday, Larry?" Mrs. Wilde asked.

"None of it," he answered. "It tasted like shit."

She thought of telling him that "shit" was not a proper word for a sixteen-year-old to use, decided that maybe it was-considering the times-and told him to go up to bed. Maybe, she decided, when he got to feeling really sick he'd tell her the truth about why his hand was bandaged up, too-"Slammed it in the car door, Mom," just seemed too much like a lie, for some reason.

"Let me ask you something," Ryerson said to Tom McCabe.

"Shoot," McCabe said.

And Ryerson said, "What did you believe in as a kid, Tom?"

"Sorry?"

"It's not a trick question. I just want you to tell me what you believed in when you were a kid. You know-did you believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, gnomes under the bed?"

McCabe nodded. "Yes," he said.

"You believed in all those things?"

"Uh-huh. Especially the gnomes under the bed, except they weren't gnomes, they were little wrinkled, naked men who pulled at your skin all night-" He stopped and looked embarrassed. Ryerson read, momentarily, something very strange in him, something cockeyed and off key; it was, he knew, the same sort of strange, cockeyed, off-key thing that most people harbored deep within themselves. The only difference with McCabe was that it was closer to the surface. "You mean," Ryerson coaxed, "if you let something dangle over the bed, these little men-"

McCabe held his hand up, cut in, "No. You didn't have to let anything dangle over the bed. These little men just came out at night and sat on you and pulled at your skin."

Ryerson, needing some time to think about this, leaned over in the chair and picked up Creosote, who'd been sleeping contentedly for a quarter of an hour. The dog awoke with a start and immediately began grunting. Ryerson stroked the dog for a few moments, gaze lowered because he didn't want to look at McCabe. Then he said, looking at him at last, "And do you still believe in these little naked men, Tom?"

McCabe chuckled shortly. "That's a hell of a question to ask a chief of detectives, Rye."

"You're being evasive."

"You should be a detective."

"I am a detective. Sort of."

"Yes. I still believe in them."

"Thanks for your honesty."

"Around you, Rye, I'd be foolish to lie, isn't that right?"

Ryerson shrugged humbly. "I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes."

"And do you think I'm… childish, Rye, for believing in these little naked men?"

"Only if you let that belief interfere with your sleep, Tom."

He shook his head. "I don't. I've grown used to them. They're even a kind of comfort; I've slept alone for a long time, Rye." He grinned sadly. "If you follow me."

In Edgewater, Larry Wilde wanted desperately to puke but realized, in agony, that he wasn't going to. He got up, went to the top of the stairs, yelled down to his mother, "Mom? Mom? We got any of that-" He stopped to let a particularly dizzying wave of nausea pass over him, then continued, "Any of that stuff. That I-pak-ik."

She appeared at the bottom of the stairs, knitting in hand. "Ipecac, you mean, Larry?"

"Yeah." He put his hand on his stomach. "Yeah. That stuff. The stuff that makes you throw up. I need it bad, Mom."

"I'm sorry, son, but we used the last of it the day after New Year's."

"Shit!" Larry said, and went back to his room.

"But you don't believe in werewolves, do you?" Ryerson asked McCabe. "Or in vampires, or zombies, or demons-"

"I kind of believe in demons, Rye."

"Do you?"

"Well, yes. These little wrinkled, naked men are demons; I'd say they're demons-I guess they're the damned closest things to demons I've come in contact with."

"But you don't believe in zombies, vampires, or werewolves-the big three of the world of the supernatural; as far as you're concerned they're Saturday-matinee stuff, right?"

McCabe nodded. "Right."

"Your fascination is with little wrinkled naked men?"

"Well, I don't know if 'fascination' is the right word-"

"Your nighttime preoccupation, then."

"Yes. I guess so." He paused only a moment. "What about ghosts, Rye?"

"What about them?"

"You said vampires, werewolves, and zombies were the big three of the world of the supernatural. What about ghosts?"

Ryerson shook his head; he was aware that he was slowly assuming an air of superiority, and he didn't like it. "They're benign. They're not physical enough."

"For what?"

Ryerson scratched behind Creosote's ears, which caused the dog to make a noise that was disconcertingly close to a ragged purr because, as usual, he had his treasured soft plastic duck in his mouth. "For murder. In our hearts, I think most of us are murderers. I think we're very, very taken with the idea of death. And with power."

McCabe eyed him suspiciously; "You think my little wrinkled naked men have something to do with death?"

Ryerson grinned knowingly. "Maybe, Tom." He heard the clearly superior tone in his voice. He shook his head. "No, I'm sorry; yes, Tom. I think they do. I think they have to do with sex, and with death, and, damnit, this theory I'm trying to develop here for you is so damned slippery, every time I try to get hold of it, it slithers away." He had been leaning forward; now he leaned back, sighed, his eyes on the ceiling, hand draped over the top of Creosote's head, which he knew the dog enjoyed. "I saw her; I saw Lila-"

"Good Lord, you mean today-"

"Yes." He touched the side of his head. "Here. I saw her, and I felt such agony around her, as if she were being eaten alive from within-" He stopped, shook his head. "I don't know, Tom. I don't know." He was suddenly very weary. "Maybe it doesn't have to be vampires, or werewolves, or zombies at all. Maybe it can be anything. Maybe it can be tigers. Or hyenas. Maybe it can be Jack The Ripper, or Gengis Khan, or Charles Manson. I don't know. I'm sorry, Tom, but I'm stumped."

McCabe stood. "Drink?" he asked.

Ryerson said, "Tomato juice, okay?" He nodded at Creosote. And some water for him, if possible.”

“Sure."

Larry Wilde vomited at last. Not that it did him any good. The nausea returned seconds later with a vengeance, and, panic-stricken, he ran again to the top of the stairs; "Mom!" he yelled down. "Mom!" And he collapsed in a heap, his head dangling over the top stair.

Mrs. Wilde, her knitting still in hand, appeared at the bottom of the stairs moments later, saw her son, and ran up to him. She bent over and lifted his head.

"Larry?" she asked, confused, because what she saw there on her son's face wasn't Larry at all; it was something else, something hateful and murderous, something that was the very soul and spirit of evil. "Larry?" she said again, her voice trembling.

And it was Larry who answered, "Yes, mother?" But it was a Larry who had been in hiding for sixteen years; a Larry she had never known.

And then he began to change. The nose first, then the eyes, the cheeks, the forehead…

"Larry?" his mother whispered, not certain at all that she was seeing correctly-believing, in fact, that she wasn't, that she was seeing only her son in the throes of his illness, her son about to puke again. So she smiled tremblingly and said, "Can I get you something, Larry? Can I get you a bucket?"

"No," he answered, his voice lower, sharper, with a weird kind of warbling intensity to it. "I don't need a bucket, Mom."

And she watched as a boy she had never known, a strange, round-headed boy who looked for all the world as if he'd just been pulled dead from a river pushed himself to a standing position over her on the stairway, watched as a huge, empty smile full of a hollow, desperate, and murderous expectation spread over a face she'd seen only on movie posters.

She shook her head slowly, in terror. She whispered, "No. Please."

And the boy above her held his water-smoothed hand out. "Give me those." He nodded at the knitting needles she clutched in her hand. "Give me those, now."

And obediently, as if under hypnosis, she gave him the knitting needles.

"Or Bonnie and Clyde, or The Phantom of the Opera," Ryerson rattled on, trying hard to reach into his own subconscious and find out just what in the hell he was talking about. Creosote was on the floor lapping contentedly at a saucer full of water that McCabe had gotten for him. Ryerson glanced down at the dog, continued, "Or a Boston bull terrier, Tom."

McCabe was shaking his head in confusion and disagreement. "No, Rye. No. We can't just change, I mean there really is no such thing as 'shape shifting'; it's all just a bunch of… fun-"

Ryerson catapulted forward in the chair, face shaking with enthusiasm. "And yet… and yet, Tom… you can say that, and yet, you still believe in those… demons of yours-"

"I didn't say I believed in them, Rye."

"You did." Ryerson felt himself growing suddenly petulant. "You did!" he repeated, with emphasis.

McCabe let a self-accusing grin play on his lips, then fade. "Yes, I do believe in them. Of course I believe in them. I believe in my dreams, too. My dreams are real; my thoughts are real. But all by themselves they're not going to get up and go out and have a root beer. They're real, Rye-these little naked men are real, sure. In my world they're real. But not anywhere else."

Now Ryerson grinned. "Are you sure, Tom?"

And that's when Creosote latched onto the argyle sock Ryerson was wearing, taking him by surprise, which caused him to kick out and knock over the saucerful of water. Ryerson cursed, McCabe hooted. And Creosote trotted triumphantly off toward the kitchen with a piece of Ryerson's sock dangling from his mouth.

The round-headed boy shoved the knitting needle in very hard; it slid against a rib, then sank with a phump into the heart.

Joanna Wilde wanted to die then. But she didn't. It was shock, mostly, that was keeping her alive, lowering her blood pressure, bringing her oxygen requirements down. She stared stiffly into the sunken oval dark eyes of the thing on the landing. She cooed, "Oooh, nooo!" and watched expectantly, hopefully-knowing that blessed death was very near now-as the other knitting needle plummeted into her.

Chapter Sixteen

"I'm sorry, Mr. Miller," said the admitting nurse at Strong Memorial Hospital, "but Ms. Lynch has slipped into a coma, her listed condition has been returned to critical, and I'm afraid under those circumstances, no visitors are allowed." She saw the hurt in Miller's eyes. "I really am sorry, Mr. Miller."

"Yes," Miller said, "of course you are," then turned to go, head lowered.

"Mr. Ashland?" he heard.

He looked up. "Sorry?" he said, because the face before him didn't register immediately.

"How are you, Mr. Ashland?" Ryerson Biergarten said.

Miller shook his head confusedly; something about this man was familiar, if only he could place him. "Forgive me, I believe you have the wrong-"

Ryerson, sans Creosote, who had been left in the reluctant hands of Loren Samuelson, cut in, seeing that Miller really was confused. "My name's Biergarten. You came to see me a couple of weeks ago."

Miller looked momentarily stunned. He whispered something that sounded for all the world like "Ida is a member!" and then ran for the automatic exit doors. Ryerson turned, saw a beefy security guard step in front of Miller and stop him with both hands at Miller's chest. "No running, please; this is a hospital, not a gymnasium."

"Get out of my way!" Miller screeched, and pushed the security guard aside. The guard's hand went to his gun.

"Don't be a fool!" Ryerson screamed. The security guard turned toward him. Ryerson ran for the exit door; as he passed the security guard he hissed, with ill-disguised contempt, "What the hell were you going to do? Shoot him?"

The security guard looked confused. He took his hand off his gun and fell in behind Ryerson in pursuit of Douglas Miller. "What are you running for?" Ryerson called to Miller. "Don't run, there's no need to run!"

He watched Miller clamber over the hood of a car that had screeched to a halt to avoid him, watched him move-with incredible swiftness, Ryerson thought, for a man so clearly muscle-bound-into the main hospital parking lot where still another car had to screech to a halt to avoid him, and another and another, until at last one rolled slowly into him and sent him spinning into a parked Chevy van. For several seconds he staggered around as if drunk. Then he collapsed.

When Ryerson got to him, Miller was muttering Greta's name with a deep and almost embarrassing affection. Not too long after that there were several doctors standing around him, barking orders to the crowd that had gathered; the doctors were followed by nurses from admitting and emergency, one with a clipboard in hand and an admittance form to fill out; she was told by one of the other nurses that "it can probably wait, Emma," so she turned around and went back inside. Not too long after that, Miller was carried on a stretcher back into the hospital through the same doors he'd run out of minutes earlier and was taken up to radiology for X-rays. Ryerson Biergarten-who'd been asking repeatedly when he could talk to Miller, whom he knew only as "Mr. Ashland"-was told, "It doesn't look serious, but let us do our jobs first, please."

While all this was happening, Greta Lynch, lying in a coma in Room 1077, was reliving over and over again the blood guilt from her childhood-the guilt that had followed her into adulthood and sat on her shoulders night and day and babbled at her that she really was no good after all. How could anyone who was good have done something like that?

That was crushing her seven-week-old kitten, Leopard, underfoot in the middle of the night, in the dark, on her way back from pestering her parents for another glass of water (the fifth glass of water that evening). She'd tried to hide the fact of the kitten's death, of course, because she felt sure she'd murdered it in a fit of temper after her father had yelled "Go back to bed, for Christ's sake!" So, trying hard to keep her whimpering at whisper level, she had taken the kitten's limp body down to the garage, found a small cardboard box, put the kitten in it, taken the box to the side of the garage, where the ground was soft from rain splattering over the gutterless edge of the roof, and had buried it, using her hands as a shovel.

With the passage of time, the kitten's death had indeed, in her mind, become a murder.

The dirt that had caked her hands and fingernails had become the kitten's blood.

Its burial-which was discovered several years later, by a later owner of the house-became her "awful secret." And if someone had asked her-Greta Lynch, twenty-six-years-old, vivacious, intelligent-what that awful secret really was, she would have been stumped for the details. She would only have mumbled the catchwords of her guilt: murder, blood, deception.

Ryerson Biergarten was getting angry. He didn't like it when he got angry, both for the usual reasons that people dislike their own anger-because they often say and do things that make them look like fools, and because anger is a very wearying emotion-and also because when he got angry, his mind opened up wide and hungrily, and a flood of psychic garbage rushed in from whomever happened to be near him.

That's what was happening to him now, as he tried-so far in vain-to get the admitting nurse to tell him who the man he knew only as "Mr. Ashland" really was.

"Listen, Miss"-he checked her nametag again-"Belgetti, the man may be a suspect in the Kodak Park murders-"

"Sir, I've told you a half dozen times that whether or not he is a suspect in anything is not at issue here. Unless you can show me some authority-" And as Ryerson listened to her he heard, as a kind of whispered, psychic backdrop from the small crowd that had gathered: Well, who the hell does he think he is? and What's that dog smell? and Nurse has got big tits; huh, huh! and Hospitals, hate 'em, hospitals! and Like a virgin, virgin, virgin… And that mass of input-some of it coherent, some of it not, but all of it as distracting as a bad traffic accident-made it almost impossible, Ryerson knew, for him to appear as anything other than a lunatic bystander.

"Have you found out his name yet, Miss Belgetti? Please-can you tell me that, at least?"

Wouldn't mind pushin' on those honkers, yeah, huh, huh!… Doctors earn too much, anyway… What the hell is that smell of dog?

"Sir, I'm afraid there are other people waiting to be taken care of, so if you don't mind-"

Yeah, I'll knock your freakin' block off, fella!

Ryerson turned his head quickly, saw a tall, muscular, middle-aged man wearing a shit-eating grin. Yeah, you! He turned back to Nurse Belgetti. "Just his name. Please. Can you tell me his name?" His voice was quivering with anger now. "All I want is his name, Nurse Belgetti. Do you think you can handle that?" And he felt a hand on his shoulder. Don't give me no… Don't give me any trouble… I don't want no

… any trouble! He heard, "Don't give me no trouble here. We don't want any trouble, Mister." He turned, saw the same security guard that had run after "Mr. Ashland." The security guard reiterated, "We don't want no more trouble, sir. This is a hospital, not a gymnasium."

Ryerson shook off the man's, grip. "Oh for God's sake, I know it's not a gymnasium!" He turned back to the nurse, sensed the security guard's hand going to his gun.

God, he's gonna shoot 'em!

I'll honk those honkers for ya, baby, yeah, I will!

Ryerson turned quickly, urgently back to the security guard. "Don't do it!" he hissed. The security guard backed up a step, as if in fear. Ryerson turned once more to Nurse Belgetti. He took a breath and nodded toward the big beige couches that cluttered the lobby. "I'll be over there, Nurse Belgetti. I want you to call the head of admitting. I want to talk to him. Or her." And he turned sharply and went to one of the couches.

As he sat and waited, he wondered two things: First, he wondered why his "gift," as so many people called it, was not more in his control, why it seemed so random and unfocusable-even under self-hypnosis, when the images were clearer, granted, but still needed a lot of interpretation. Why, for instance, in his anger just minutes ago did he get random thoughts from the crowd around him, but nothing at all from Nurse Belgetti? It was a phenomenon he'd encountered before, and the only conclusion he'd come to was that emotion blocked emotion (and take your pick of emotions-anger, sadness, love, hate), though he wasn't at all sure why.

Secondly, he realized that the man who called himself "Ashland" had presented a psychic picture that was essentially opaque, as if he-Ryerson-had been trying to look into a river that was choked with pollution, and anything floating even inches below the surface was rendered invisible. It was, he realized, the same sort of barrier he often encountered when he tried to read animals. Cats especially.

"Mr. Biergarten, is it?"

He climbed out of his reverie, glanced up at an officious-looking middle-aged woman wearing a gray business suit. "I'm one of your fans, Mr. Biergarten. I read Conversations with Charlene." She extended her hand; Ryerson stood, shook it, and smiled amiably. The woman added, "And I'm really very sorry for the trouble here."

"I'm helping in the investigation of The Park Werewolf-" Ryerson began.

She cut in, "Yes, I know. Any luck so far?"

He shook his head. "No, Miss, Mrs.-" She had no name tag; the name "Denise' swam into his consciousness.

"Mrs. McCurdy," she said.

"Is your first name Denise?"

She shook her head, smiled; "No. Nice try, though. My husband's name is Dennis." A quick pause. "You want the name of the man you were chasing, is that right?"

"Yes. I know him only as Mr. Ashland."

"And what makes you think that's not his real name?"

He smiled. "A hunch."

She nodded. "His name is Douglas Miller. Middle initial `A' for `Ashland.' You can go and see him now; he's in Emergency Room Five." She nodded to indicate a corridor to her right. "Down there, Mr. Biergarten."

In Edgewater, the round-headed adolescent with the small oval eyes that looked as if they never blinked stood over the body of Joanna Wilde. She lay on her back, legs pointing upward, arms spread wide, at the bottom of the stairway. She had two knitting needles sticking out of her chest; one on the right, one on the left, both stuck way in so only an inch or so was visible beyond the blood-soaked yellow housedress.

"Mom?" said the round-headed adolescent, half urgently, as if he were a passenger in a car she was driving and he was warning her about an upcoming icy patch of road. "Mom?" he said again. And then he began to change; his chin wrenched back into the shape-with a little cleft in it that was peculiar to Larry Wilde and no one else; the mouth wormed back into the mouth that was only Larry Wilde's. No pain attended this transformation. It was quick and smooth, like water sloshing about. Then the eyes changed, the forehead, the hair, the cheekbones. Four inches were added: one at the ankle bones, three at various places on the spine. And finally, Larry Wilde reappeared. And Larry Wilde screamed, "My God! My God! Help us, help us, help us!" as he vaulted down the stairs past his mother's body and out into the late-afternoon gloom of a coming storm.

Sure, George Dixon was thinking. Sure, I'm The Park Werewolf. The cops wouldn't be tailing him otherwise (and having once been a cop himself, he could easily spot a tail). Where there's smoke there's…

And so what if he didn't remember anything?! Who'd want to remember something like that?! Slam, barn, thank you, ma'am! Rip the head off, tear out the tongue, have your fun. Then forget it.

Sure. Like when he'd been in 'Nam. Plenty of stuff he did there he'd just as soon forget. And nearly had forgotten now-so many years later. Sure. You forget. You try to forget. You push the shit back where it doesn't smell so bad and where it's not so noticeable. Sure.

He was The Park Werewolf.

He was the lunatic who went around tearing people up.

He put their tongues in his lunch pail, for Christ's sake.

He was The Park Werewolf! So what was he going to do about it? Turn himself in? Tear up a few more people, and then turn himself in?

Maybe, he decided, maybe for now he'd have some lunch and think about it.

Chapter Seventeen

AT STRONG MEMORIAL HOSPITAL: EMERGENCY ROOM 4

And there, thought Douglas Miller, was the best evidence of all-the evidence that he couldn't yet share with her, but that he would share in time-the evidence of his faithfulness. The evidence of his fidelity to her, even though she wasn't yet his.

His fidelity not only in the fact that he'd kept himself clean for her (even when he'd had that little runaway in the car two months earlier, and they were going at it so hot and heavy-damned little bitch bit him, he remembered-and he'd actually stopped, had actually pulled out of her), but also that he was keeping her secret. Her awful, nightmarish secret.

"Mr. Miller?"

And that was the real proof of his love, wasn't it? That he'd keep her secret forever! No matter what they might do to him, he'd keep her secret. Let her go on killing; what did it matter? Everyone died sooner or later.

"Mr. Miller? I'd like to talk with you."

Death was just and fair; death was democratic. Death was peace. And it came to everyone; better that it came through her, from that marvelous body, through those moist lips, than through accident or disease.

"What's wrong with him, doctor?"

"I don't know, Mr. Biergarten. He was fine a few moments ago, before you came in."

"Please talk to me, Mr. Miller."

"Greta?" Miller said.

"No. Ryerson Biergarten. I'd like to talk with you, Mr. Miller."

"Greta."

Like dark water, Ryerson thought. His mind's like dark water-it's opaque, impenetrable. "Was it Greta you were telling me about two weeks ago?"

Miller said nothing.

"Talk to me, please!"

Still, Miller said nothing. He was on his back and was wearing a white hospital gown. His eyes were on the ceiling, his gaze steady, unblinking.

"Tell me about Greta," Ryerson coaxed. And for the barest fraction of a moment, the dark water cleared and Ryerson saw… His brow furrowed. He wasn't sure what he saw, had seen, because then it was gone. A woman's face, he guessed, but it was Picassoesque, a mass of bright colors and harsh angles-eyes wide, nostrils flaring, she looked for all the world like a strange, angular horse. Ryerson thought that that was a very odd way for a man to see a woman, even in his imagination. He repeated, "Tell me about Greta, Mr. Miller."

"I love Greta," Miller whispered.

"Yes. Good. Why do you love her?"

"And I will"-Miller started getting an erection; the gown in the area of his groin began to lift, like some hibernating animal waking slowly under a blanket of snow-"I will keep her secret. I love her."

The doctor said to a nurse standing by, "Throw something on that, would you?" meaning a blanket or a sheet, because, Ryerson knew, the doctor, for one reason or another, did not want that distraction.

"Throw something on what, Doctor?" the nurse asked.

The doctor's eyes rolled. He nodded at the abundant evidence of Miller's now-complete erection. "That!" he said.

The nurse looked. "What did you want me to throw on it, Doctor?" She paused very briefly. Ryerson read embarrassment and confusion in her, but also a hint of titillation and amusement. "Cold water or something?"

Ryerson said, smiling despite himself, "No. I think he means a sheet, nurse."

And the nurse said, still as if confused, "Well, sure, but it'll still be there, won't it? I mean, we'll still see it."

The doctor said, "Oh come now, nurse-"

And Ryerson thought, That's a setup if I ever heard one!

But it was Miller who came. Hard and long. So hard and long, in fact, that Ryerson, who knew something about physiological reactions to orgasm, began to worry about Miller's heart. And his throat, too. Because Miller was making a hell of a lot of noise. The same sort of noise, in fact, that Creosote made most of the time-a deep growling, hacking sound, but much louder, deeper and more self-involved than Creosote could ever hope for.

Ryerson glanced at the doctor, who was clearly trying very hard to retain the facade, at least, of professional self-control.

The nurse, at the other side of the bed, was grimacing, as if at some distasteful joke.

And Miller, after what seemed like several minutes-though Ryerson knew this was impossible; even one minute's worth of orgasm would probably kill most men-was at last quieting. And when he was quiet, when he'd fallen into a quick sleep, although his breathing remained labored for some time, the doctor glanced quizzically at Ryerson and said, "That was amazing. That was just simply amazing. I don't believe I've ever encountered anything-in my research," he added hastily, "quite like it." He looked at the nurse. "Nurse, did you keep track of the time that Mr. Miller was experiencing that orgasm?"

The nurse looked flustered and put-upon. She shook her head; "No, I'm sorry, Doctor-I didn't think-"

The doctor turned quickly to Ryerson. "How about you, Mr. Biergarten?"

Ryerson shook his head. "No, but I'd guess it was less than a minute. These things don't-"

The doctor cut in, "It was longer than a minute. It was two minutes, anyway. Maybe three. Good Lord, that's simply impossible." He looked at Miller, still asleep, breathing heavily. He leaned over, put a stethoscope to Miller's chest, listened for a few seconds, straightened. "His heartbeat's slightly erratic; nothing to worry about. But my God, the man should have no heartbeat at all after that-"

The nurse gasped. Ryerson looked at her, then looked at the spot she was pointing at so stiffly-the area below Miller's waist, where the gown was just now becoming stained with a milky-reddish excretion that was spreading quickly, moving outward from Miller's pubic area like a tide, and promising to stain most of the lower half of the gown before it was done.

The doctor wasted no time. He ordered Ryerson out of the room, then as Ryerson was leaving, barked at the nurse, "Did you get his blood type?"

"Of course," she answered. "It's A negative. We've got some on hand-"

"Good," the doctor said, "He's going to need it-" Which was the last that Ryerson heard before he left the room.

Miller was released three hours later, which surprised the hell out of Ryerson, who'd been waiting in the hospital lobby for word about Miller's condition.

"What do you mean he's been released?" he said to the admitting nurse-the same Nurse Belgetti who'd refused to give him Miller's real name several hours earlier. "The man's…" The phrase A basket case came to him, but he found it distasteful, so he said, "The man's in no condition-"

"Mr. Biergarten," Nurse Belgetti interrupted, "are we going to have another go-around here? I am telling you what I've been told by people who have no need or desire to lie to me, and that is that Mr. Miller was released twenty-five minutes ago. He was ambulatory; he was in control of his faculties; he could make decisions for himself. Under those conditions, we have no right to keep any patient against his will."

Ryerson looked at her for several moments. He wanted to say, Hey, I like you. I really do! Thought there were probably better times and better conditions under which to get acquainted with Nurse Belgetti, and said merely, "Thanks. You wouldn't know where he went, would you?"

She pursed her lips and shook her head slowly, impatiently. "Now why," she said, "would I have that information?"

He tried to call McCabe at his office but was told by the same lieutenant who'd given a hard time weeks earlier that McCabe had taken the day off. "Touch of the flu, I believe, Mr. Biergarten."

"Then he's at home?"

"Yes."

"Thanks."

"Uh-Mr. Biergarten?-I'm sorry, about that last time I talked to you. Tell me, are you really psychic?"

"No," Ryerson answered wearily. "I get hunches. Everyone gets hunches. Thank you, lieutenant." He started to hang up, heard the lieutenant hurrying on about "a horse at Aqueduct," then said, interrupting, "I'm sorry, I don't play the horses; I only play the tuba," which made him grin, and hung up. Have to remember that one, he told himself.

McCabe looked like hell. His color was a light grayish-pink, his eyes looked like half-squashed cherries, and his breath smelled like a mixture of cold medicine and old straw. He was dressed in a huge red-and-black checkered robe, and when he answered his door in response to Ryerson's knock, he had a glass of what looked to Ryerson like weak tea in hand.

"Jesus," Ryerson said, "you really are sick, aren't you?"

"God, yes," McCabe groaned. He motioned for Ryerson to come in. "I feel like I look, Rye."

Ryerson quipped, "I hope not, Tom," and followed him into the den; they sat in the same big wing chairs they'd used before.

"Got this from my nephew," McCabe explained. "Little twerp sneezed right in my damned face a couple days ago. Had 'the croup,' they said, said I'd probably be all right. I think I'll sue." He paused. "Where's your little dog, what's-his-name?"

"Creosote. He's with the owner of the place where I'm staying." Ryerson paused. "Tom, I went to see Greta Lynch today at Strong Memorial."

McCabe took a long, slow breath, let it out slowly, shook his head. "Rye, you're going to get into trouble pulling that crap. I admit she was damned lucky"-he paused, hacked a little, drank some of his weak tea, went on-"damned lucky you went to her place, and damned lucky you got that… feeling, or whatever you call it-"

Ryerson waved away what McCabe was saying. "Tom, I don't suspect Greta Lynch. Whatever her problems are, they have nothing to do with our werewolf. I'm sure of that."

McCabe eyed him suspiciously. "Oh?" he said. "That's a first."

"What's a first?"

"That you'll say you're sure of something. You're always so damned equivocal-"

"This is a complex world we live in, Tom-"

"Yeah, yeah; I know-I've heard it before." He coughed, drank some more of his weak tea, and continued, "So if you don't think it's Greta, who do you think it is, Rye?"

Ryerson shook his head. "It could be anybody, Tom. I haven't a clue." He grinned. "It isn't me, I know that. And I don't think it's you, though I wouldn't stake my life on it."

"Come off it, Rye." McCabe was clearly upset.

"I'm only telling you the truth, Tom. As I see it."

"And that's the point, my friend. Because you"-he coughed, swiped at his nose with a Kleenex he got from the pocket of his robe-"you see a shitload more than the rest of us, and if I was this nutcase who's running around carving people up-"

"He's not 'carving' anyone up, Tom. You know that. He's tearing them up."

"So let's get into an argument about semantics now. I'm really in the mood to argue with you about words -"

Ryerson stood. "Sorry, Tom. We can pick this up some other time. .."

McCabe stood, body shaking with anger. "Is it because of what I told you, Rye? About the god-damned little naked men? Christ, I knew I should have kept that to myself, I knew the goddamned psychologist in you would have a fucking field day with that-"

"No, Tom. No!" Ryerson heard a tightness in his own voice that was close to anger, too. He tried to soften it. "What you told me has nothing to do with anything. I do not suspect you. I suspect no one. I believe in possibilities, and probabilities. And I believe that whoever this 'nutcase' is, as you so eloquently put it, he or she probably believes himself to be as innocent as the next guy; he probably looks over his shoulder, too. He probably even has a mental list of people he suspects-" He stopped suddenly. "My God," he breathed.

McCabe hacked.

"My God," Ryerson breathed again.

McCabe said, "You're being cryptic, Rye. Don't be cryptic-you're always so fucking cryptic!"

But Ryerson wasn't listening to him. Ryerson was listening to a voice from within himself, a voice he couldn't resist.

Chapter Eighteen

Doug Miller was not a welcome sight on Jack Youngman's doorstep. Youngman thought he was noble enough to put up with Miller on Sundays, at the golf course-which, after all, was in a good cause: winning-and also during working hours. But not while he was between shifts. And not while he was trying to catch some time alone with the woman from next door, who'd only recently agreed to come into his house without her teen-age daughter or twenty-five-year-old son in tow as a freaking chaperone.

He growled at Miller, "What the hell you doin' here? Christ-" He stopped, noticed that Miller looked a bit on edge, a little nervous, that he was avoiding Youngman's gaze. "What's your problem, Miller? Jees-you got ants in your pants, or what?”

“Can I come in, Jack?"

"Come in?! Shit, no, I got a woman in here-"

"Jack, it's important. I know…" He hesitated. A sly grin spread over his mouth. He finished, "I know what you've been doing, Jack."

The fucking blood in the trunk! Youngman thought. He said, "You don't know shit, Miller," but he could hear that his voice was wavering and uncertain, and he knew that Miller could hear it, too. He took a breath. "Listen, Miller, let me get rid of the woman, okay? She doesn't need to know anything-"

"Whatever," Miller said. He suddenly seemed more at ease, less nervous; he met Youngman's gaze. "You do what you have to do, Jack. Then we'll talk."

"Yeah," said Youngman. "Wait right here." And he closed the door. A minute later he opened it again, just wide enough for Miller to squeeze through. "Okay, come in." Miller went in, was led into the small but scrupulously neat kitchen, and was told to sit down. He did.

"I'd like some coffee, Jack," he said matter-of-factly.

Youngman looked momentarily stunned; then, yet again, these wordsThe fucking blood in the trunk- swam before him, and he said, "Yeah," trying to sound gruff but missing it by several degrees. "So would I." He busied himself with instant coffee preparations.

Miller said, as Youngman poured water into a shiny aluminum teapot, "Confession's good for the soul, Jack."

Youngman glanced at him from the sink, a look of suspicion, fear, and distrust mingling on his face, making the skin over his cheekbones slither and his mouth open and close repeatedly. He looked back at what he was doing, said, as the water poured, "Yeah, sure it is, Miller; I know it is."

"Confession can make things right, Jack. It can give us peace."

Youngman turned the water off, set the pot on the stove, turned the stove on. "State your business, Miller," he said, this time hitting the gruff tone he was shooting for. "I haven't got all day." He crossed his arms, stood with the small of his back against the top of the stove, aware that in this position his gut hung out quite dramatically. He sucked it in as far as it would go until he could almost see the tips of his shoes.

Miller said, his words slow and measured, "Some of us are… tortured, Jack. Some of us are at war with ourselves; we have no… no inner peace because there are… two entities dwelling within us." He paused for effect. "The animal, and the man."

"Cut the bullshit, Miller!"

Miller went on, clearly ignoring him. "And the animal and the man that are at war within us cannot communicate, because, after all, animals and men communicate on only the most elemental levels. The cat wants food, it meows. But it meows for other reasons, too. It meows when it wants sex, or when it wants to go out. But if the animal dwelling within us is a wild animal, if it's beyond all communication, no matter at what level, even with itself-"

"This is a bore, Miller!"

"-Then the two entities, the animal and the man, are kept eternally separate and will never communicate, and so will probably never know anything about each other. Except by the fact of what the animal does. Except by the fact that the man knows he has some horrible secret eating away at him, gnawing at his guts, but he has no idea what that secret is, so his life is made into a kind of living hell-"

The teapot started whistling. Youngman didn't hear it for several seconds, his mind turning over and over what Miller had just said. Then Miller nodded at the teapot, "Jack; it's whistling," and Youngman turned automatically, as if in a daze, toward it.

Miller asked, as Youngman got two mugs from the cupboard, "You know what I'm saying, don't you, Jack?"

Youngman didn't answer.

Miller insisted, "Jack, you know what the fuck I'm saying; tell me you know what the fuck I'm saying, Jack."

Still Jack said nothing. He very methodically put a teaspoon of Brim Decaffeinated in each of the two big brown mugs he'd gotten down from the cupboard.

"I'm talking to you, Jack. Talk to me, goddamnit! Unless you want the cops to know what you found in your friggin' trunk, Jack!"

Then this went through Youngman's mind: "You want to play golf with me, Miller, you're going to have to be my little caddy. Is that all right?" "Sure, Jack-" "That's `Mr. Youngman,' damnit!" "Uh-huh. Whatever you say." "Here are my keys. Tote my clubs over to my car and put them in the trunk. Carefully, okay?! If I find one scratch on those clubs-"

Youngman turned to Miller. "You take milk in your coffee?"

"You're not talking to me, Jack. Talk to me. You've gotta talk to me, Jack. You don't talk to me, the cops are gonna be asking you lots of questions, lots of very embarrassing questions."

"I take milk in my coffee. Most people ask, `Do you take cream?' But who the hell puts cream in their coffee anymore?" He poured the hot water into the mugs, turned toward the refrigerator, hesitated, looked back at the mugs and the steam rising lazily from them.

Miller rattled on, "Confession's good for the soul, Jack. Confession can bring us peace, it can fix our tortured inner selves, it can kill the thing that gnaws away at our insides-"

Youngman moved very quickly. He lunged for the mug nearest him, got it, grabbed it, turned. But too late. The mug full of steaming water was easily pushed out of his hand by the inhumanly powerful thing standing with him in his kitchen. He heard the mug clatter to the blue linoleum, heard it shatter dully against the door to the garage. Then he heard the bones surrounding, his larynx being crushed, a sound not unlike ice cracking in a glass. It was the last sound he ever heard.

The man in the Kodak Park Personnel Department recognized Ryerson Biergarten from the article that had appeared in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle several weeks earlier. This didn't, however, mean much to him, because the man distrusted "these fortune tellers" and was enjoying the fact that he could give this particular "fortune teller" a hard time.

"Yes, I know who you are," he said.

And Ryerson said, his voice beginning to tighten with anger, "Then you know that I'm working with Rochester Chief of Detectives Tom McCabe-"

"Yes, I know you're working with Chief McCabe on an informal basis. And I'm afraid that that gives you absolutely no power to come in here and demand-"

"I'm not demanding a thing. All I'm asking is whether you have an employee named Douglas Miller. All I want is a yes or a no. Surely you're capable of that!"

The man, whose name was Mr. Kellogg, smiled thinly. "I'm capable of far more than you might believe, Mr. Biergarten. I'm capable, for instance, of calling security-"

"Good," Ryerson broke in. "Please, call security. Call George Dixon. Get him down here; he knows who I am, for God's sake-"

"Mr. Dixon is on a leave of absence."

"Oh." That wasn't good, Ryerson thought. "Oh," he repeated, momentarily at sea.

"Now if you had a warrant, if you had some legal authority-"

Ryerson nodded toward a corridor that led to the interior of The Park. "Is Emulsion Technology down there?" He was acting on a hunch.

Kellogg, speaking too quickly, answered, "Yes, but I'm afraid-"

And Ryerson began loping down that corridor, hoping for signs to show him the way to Emulsion Technology. Where Greta Lynch worked. And where Douglas Miller probably worked as well; all he needed was confirmation of it. A nameplate on a desk, a nod of the head from the manager there.

Ryerson heard Kellogg yell from behind him, "That's a restricted area. Please, come back; I'll have to call security on this-"

George Dixon was writing a letter to his teen-age daughter, Althea, who lived with her mother, Dixon's estranged wife, Martha, in Boxworth, California. The letter was in the nature of a confession, although Dixon was having a hell of a time with it. Words had never come easily to him, and these words especially did not flow from the pen onto the paper; instead he had to all but etch them there.

My Dear Althea, he wrote, thought briefly that he was being a little too sloppily sentimental with that "My Dear" stuff, and continued, Your Dad isn't a bad man, your Dad is sick, he's a sick man . He reread the sentence, thought it sounded fine, that it was a good start, and continued writing.

Your Dad -He stopped, wondered if "Your" should be "You're," because, after all, he didn't want Althea thinking he was too damned ignorant. He said "Your" to himself a couple of times, decided that the first way was correct, continued writing; is someone who got the short end of the stick not that he could help it or had any say either way, this way or that – The doorbell to his apartment rang; he snapped his head toward the door and called, voice quaking slightly because he'd been taken by surprise, "Who is it?"

"Douglas Miller," he heard through the closed door.

"I don't know any 'Douglas Miller,' "Dixon called back.

"I work in Emulsion Technology, Mr. Dixon, and I have some information about The Park Werewolf. I know about your desk drawer; I know what was in your desk drawer, Mr. Dixon."

Dixon breathed, "Oh, Jesus!" He shouted back, "Wait there!" He got up and moved quickly to the door, head spinning. "Wait there, please, I'm coming," he called urgently. Then he got to the door, pulled it open, began, "How the hell-" and stopped. His mouth dropped open.

The only other time Dixon had seen a man so blood-soaked was when he'd been working in construction, just before joining the Buffalo Police Department, and a young trainee had fallen twelve stories off a new high-rise head first onto concrete.

"Confession's good for the soul," Doug Miller began.

"Who are you?" Ryerson Biergarten pleaded of Roger Crimm, whom he found going through a file of papers in Emulsion Technology.

"Who am I?" Crimm shot back. "Who the hell are you?!"

"My name's Biergarten. I'm working with Tom McCabe-please, do you work here? Does a man named Miller work here?" Biergarten felt a strong hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. "Just a ‘yes' or a 'no,' please."

Crimm nodded, was about to say "Yes."

Behind Ryerson a security guard barked, "Come with me, sir."

Ryerson asked, "Where does he live? Does he live in the city?"

"Sir!" said the security guard, and again put his hand on Ryerson's shoulder. "You are not allowed here, sir, without a pass-"

"Yes," said Crimm.

"Thanks," said Ryerson, and allowed the security guard to take him back to the Personnel Department and Mr. Kellogg, who, wearing a big gloating grin, said, "We all must live by rules, sir. No matter who we are," which is when Ryerson at last saw the Ansel Adams mural-transparency over the archway leading into the plant.

Kellogg was behind a waist-high counter. There were several pens, fastened to it by long, thin chains, a large glass ashtray, which Kellogg was using, and a clipboard with a blank employment application clipped to it.

Ryerson grabbed the ashtray, hesitated, glanced at Kellogg, who seemed to realize what Ryerson was going to do and also that there was no way to stop him, so his only response was an incredulous shake of the head as Ryerson threw the ashtray forcefully through the mural-transparency, leaving behind a three-foot-long, but very neat, tear in the film. It wasn't enough, Ryerson knew. The picture was still whole. He grabbed the clipboard; Kellogg grabbed his hand; he wrenched free of Kellogg's not-terribly-strong grip and threw the clipboard into the mural-transparency. Another rip appeared, more ragged, at a right angle to the first. It would have to be enough, Ryerson thought.

Kellogg looked open-mouthed, first at the transparency, then at Ryerson, then back at the transparency. At last he said, "What did you do that for?"

Ryerson grinned. "No more Park Werewolf," he said and, at a fast run, exited the plant in search of a phone booth.

Douglas Miller's brain, the brain that used to sort things out quite well for him, where his ABC's were filed away, where he had kept "Miss Fox" his kindergarten teacher separate from "Miss Fox" his mother's friend who had told him, when he was barely into puberty, that he had "bedroom eyes"; the brain that enjoyed high school chemistry and hated high school English, the brain that had tried more than once to hide the truth from him-about his father, who was basically worthless; about his first love, who didn't love him back; about his future, which he had admitted only within the past year probably wouldn't be as grand as he'd hoped; and now about the incredible and vicious entity that dwelt within him-that brain was now a mass of frayed synapses and collapsed cell walls and midbrain, left brain, right brain all trying to keep themselves separate and at the same time to integrate, to come together, to make sense out of the mush that the whole had become.

And there was, for the first time, an exquisite pain attached to that degeneration. A pain unlike any other that Douglas Miller had ever known. A pain that was at once the pain of birth and the pain of death. A pain that wrapped him up and tugged his flesh hard across the bones and tissue, as if trying to free something that dwelt deep within the marrow.

It was a pain that shot out from within each of his cells as they were transformed, stretched, coaxed back from shapes that Mother Nature never intended.

He did scream, but it didn't sound much like a scream. It sounded more like a loud, extended burp that didn't fit at all with the creature it had come out of, the huge, hideous thing that stood crazily triumphant over George Dixon's shattered body.

Then, within moments, the creature that recognized itself as Douglas Miller reappeared, and Douglas Miller whispered to what was left of George Dixon, "See, confession is good for the soul, George. It releases it."

He took a long shower in Dixon's cramped bathroom until he at last felt clean again. Then he put on a pair of Dixon's pants and one of Dixon's Eastman Kodak Security shirts, which fit him poorly-too small at the chest (which were so overdeveloped that Miller's second victim had even seen, in his agony, the breasts of a woman there), and too large at the stomach.

And he went to tell Tom McCabe that his two chief suspects in The Park Werewolf murders were dead.

Under "D. Miller" in the Rochester Telephone Directory, Ryerson Biergarten found eight listings, including a "D. A. Miller." Under "Douglas Miller" he found six listings, three with middle initials other than "A" and one listed as "Douglas and Mary Ellen Miller," which he dismissed immediately. He called all the others, got no answer from two of the "D. Millers"- the "D. A. Miller" turned out to be a woman-and no answer from "Douglas Miller" on Electric Avenue, a street name that seemed strangely familiar to him. He called the operator, asked how he could find out where Electric Avenue was, and was told to call the Rochester Public Library. He called the library and got a Mrs. Bodega, who told him, "According to my Rochester Street Directory, Electric Avenue runs parallel, sir, with Seneca Parkway on the south and Landsdowne Lane on the North. Fairview Heights, Ellicot Street, and Stecko Avenue run into it from the south, and-" That was all Ryerson needed to hear.

Greta Lynch's apartment was on Fairview Heights.

Chapter Nineteen

Tom McCabe didn't trust the smiling, muscle-bound, poorly dressed young man at his door. He wasn't sure why, because the man appeared harmless enough, like an aging Boy Scout who was rapidly getting hooked on religion and had stopped caring what he looked like.

"Yes?" McCabe said, voice warbling because he was still sick to his stomach; within the past hour a genuine hummer of a headache had started as well.

"You don't know me, Mr. McCabe," said the man at the door. "But I know you, and I'd like it very much if we could talk."

McCabe shook his head wearily. "Listen, I'm sick, I don't have time to hear a sales pitch, so if you don't mind-" He began to close the door. The young man's hand shot out and stopped it.

"It's about The Park Werewolf, Mr. McCabe."

McCabe gave the young man's hand a quick, condemning glance. Then he looked him hard in the eye: "I told you, I'm sick, I don't feel like talking." Another nut case! "If you have a confession to make, or a finger to point, please do it at the Public Safety Building, Room two twenty-three. That's why it's there." Again he glanced at the young man's arm. "Now take that away or I'll chop it off."

"My name's Miller," the young man said.

"And I'm the Queen of France," McCabe said and pushed hard enough and quickly enough on the door that Miller's arm buckled and the door slammed shut.

It was dusk and the sky was threatening rain when Ryerson found Miller's apartment house on Electric Avenue. It was typical, except for its color, of houses in the area-a late Victorian, three-story, wood-frame house, but this one was painted a bright yellow, and it had just a touch of gingerbread near the roofline.

"Help you there?" called a man in a rocking chair on the house's front porch. Ryerson guessed that the man was in his eighties, at least.

"Yes, my name's Biergarten, I'm working with the Rochester Police Department-"

The man cut in, "Never had no trouble with the po lice, never want no trouble with the po lice."

"No," Ryerson said, climbing the steps, "you don't understand. I'm looking for a man named Miller. He lives here."

The old man, who was now within arm's reach of Ryerson, nodded slowly. "That's right. Douglas. I call him Douglas. He likes to be called Douglas. Says 'Doug' is for a kid and 'Mr. Miller' ain't right'specially from someone my age to someone his age-so I call him Douglas. He in trouble?"

"No," Ryerson answered, and regretted telling the man he was with the police. It probably would have been smarter, he thought, to have said he was related to Miller and wanted to surprise him. "I only want to talk to him. I'd like to see his room, if I may." Maybe, just maybe, he thought, the quick, direct, and casual approach might work.

"Not unless you got a warrant," the old man said.

And Ryerson began, "I can-"

The old man interrupted, "I'll let you see it, sure. But there ain't no way in hell you're gonna search it or nothin' unless you got a warrant."

Ryerson smiled companionably. "That's all I want to do, sir. I just want to look. I'm glad you know the law; I wish more people did."

"Country's built on laws," the old man said as he rose slowly from his rocking chair. "Got to have laws if you got people enough to obey 'em and people enough to break 'em. Otherwise you got"-he opened the front door of the house; held it for Ryerson-"you got," he repeated, "ant-arky, and when you got ant-arky you got yourself some heap of trouble."

"Yes, sir; I agree," Ryerson said and followed the man up to Miller's apartment on the second floor.

McCabe wanted only to sleep, wanted to drift away from the nausea and headache and overall sick-as-a-dog feeling that had come over him today. But sleep was eluding him. He'd begin to drift, feel his eyes closing, the bedroom wafting away, and then-Wham!-he was awake again.

He knew why sleep was eluding him. It was because deep down he thought he was malingering-playing at being sick, even fooling himself, just to get out of the responsibilities of his job.

And there was the young man who'd come to the door fifteen minutes earlier, too. What a spooky son of a bitch he'd been! Even if he knew nothing at all about The Park Werewolf he was just spooky enough, just off-key enough that maybe he-McCabe-should have taken him in hand. Driven him downtown. Had a good long talk with him to find out just exactly what his real problem was. Hell, he'd done it before, more than once. The poor slobs usually ended up at the State Hospital on Crittenden Boulevard. But at least they were off the streets.

It was raining on Rochester's West Side, where McCabe lived. In a few minutes the rain would reach Electric Avenue, where Ryerson Biergarten was about to enter Douglas Miller's room. But here in McCabe's house, McCabe could hear the rain as a hard, undulating, rushing sound, because a brisk wind came up and died every few seconds. It successfully hid the noises of the thing that had gotten into the house through the cellar-the thing that was just then moving in painful fits and starts toward the stairs that would lead it to the second floor.

McCabe whispered to himself: "Rye thinks I'm an idiot for believing in you guys." He was saying this to the small wrinkled naked men who camped out on his chest when he slept-or tried to-and pulled at his skin. "And maybe I am." He'd asked himself a number of times if he should talk to somebody, somebody other than Rye, about these little men. But hell, they had never hurt him; they'd never even seemed much interested in him, in Tom McCabe, as much as they were in pulling at his skin all night (he assumed they did it all night long, because they were there when he drifted off and there, if just briefly, when he awoke). And they'd never gotten in the way of his sleep, except for the first few weeks after they'd made their appearance, a long, long time ago-so long ago, in fact, that he couldn't remember how old he'd been. Ten, maybe. Eleven, tops.

They evaporated. They did that, as if on command, when something startled him or when he got a telephone call in bed. And on the very rare occasions when he had a woman in bed with him, they made no appearance at all, which he appreciated.

He sat bolt upright in the bed. He hadn't heard movement elsewhere in the house so much as he'd felt it, as if something were being dragged up the stairs. "Who is it?" he called, and reached instinctively for the thirty-eight Smith and Wesson he kept in the nightstand near his bed. There was no reply. He whispered, "Damn it!" and wished the rain would stop so he could hear better. He tossed the blanket off and swung his feet to the floor. He was dressed in pajama bottoms but no top; a shiver went through him because the room had gotten chilly from the cold front that had brought the rain. He moved with much more grace and speed than a man his size, feeling the way he did, would be expected to move, to the bedroom door, stood to the right of it, and listened. Yes, he could hear it now. A slow, methodical dragging sound, as if someone with a bad leg were moving toward the bedroom down the hall.

Junkie, he thought, though that, he knew, would be a first for this neighborhood. But hell, there was a first time for everything, wasn't there?

"Where's the light switch?" Ryerson Biergarten asked, fumbling to the left inside the door to Douglas Miller's apartment. The old man-on the way up the stairs he had introduced himself as Ira Cole, the house's owner-said, from behind Ryerson, "Ain't got no overhead light. You got to use the one on the desk."

The large room was very dark. Ryerson could make out only vague, amorphic shapes in it a table, he guessed, a small couch, a chair, and to the left against the west wall, what looked like a desk. He went to it, groped some more; his hand hit a metal lampshade hard; he cursed at the sudden pain in his knuckles.

Ira Cole called, "You think you're gonna be long, mister? Like I said, remember, you can look but I can't letcha do more than that without a warrant, not without Douglas's permission, you know-"

After what seemed like an eternity, Ryerson found the switch on the desk lamp. He turned it on. Behind him, Ira Cole droned, "Got to respect a person's privacy, you know. Got to give a person the benefit of the doubt-"

"Your phone!" Ryerson snapped.

"My phone?" Ira Cole said, surprised.

"Yes! Where is your phone?!"

"It's… down… downstairs," the old man stammered. "It's down in my… apartment. You wanta use it? You can… you can use it-"

But by then, Ryerson was pushing past him and was heading for the stairs.

McCabe realized that his nausea and headache were going away. He knew why. It was because he had stopped malingering and was doing his job again. He was catching the bad guys. He was laying in wait for the bad guys. He was a being a cop, and it felt good. Christ, it had been a long time, a long, long time since he'd felt so good, so alive, so necessary…

There was a phone on the nightstand next to the bed. It rang. McCabe snapped his gaze toward it. For Christ's sake, what a hell of a time for the phone to ring; how the fuck was he going to hear anything?!

And in the semi-darkness, as the rain pelted the windows, he didn't see the hint of a shadow on the hallway wall opposite the bedroom door. Didn't see it because he wasn't looking at it. He was looking disbelievingly, angrily at the phone.

It continued to ring. McCabe mouthed at it, "Shut up, Goddamnit!"

And realized in that instant that he was allowing himself to become distracted, that he had stopped paying attention to the problem at hand, that here and now he had to work with what little he had-the failing light, the continuous rushing noise of the rain, the heavy dragging sound of the thing in the hallway

The phone stopped ringing.

He caught his breath. He whispered a tight, vicious curse, one that had fear in it. Because he couldn't hear that dragging sound anymore. He could hear only the rain and the quick, thumping sound of his pulse in his ears, which was itself too loud, he thought frantically, too fucking loud…

And he could hear something else. Something breathing in a slow and labored way. Something that had as much pain, he knew, as he had fear. He could hear that pain; it was so clear in the ragged, labored breathing. Then, abruptly, it stopped, too.

And he could see what he supposed was the shadow of a tall chest of drawers he kept in the hallway with various odds and ends on it-shaving stuff, a broken lamp, a photograph in an eight-by-ten frame …

The phone started to ring again.

And McCabe imagined someone at the other end of the line repeating again and again, Answer it, answer it, answer it – And with the quickness of light, moved by its own incredible pain and its soul-tearing need, the thing that had invaded McCabe's home reached around the doorway and grabbed McCabe's protruding belly and ripped desperately at it.

Chapter Twenty

When Ryerson Biergarten got to Tom McCabe's house, he saw what he had expected to see; the line of police cars, the ambulance, the drone of people responding to an emergency with practiced and skillful efficiency. Because when he had listened to McCabe's phone ring over and over again, he had felt the low rumble of panic starting, the eruption of pain, the frenzy, the frenzy… And even ten miles away he had felt McCabe's pain, McCabe's agonized scream had erupted from his throat-and then he had pushed a startled Ira Cole to the top of the stairway and almost down it, though he'd caught himself in time; "Reese's Pieces!" Cole had muttered, which was his own way of cursing. So Ryerson wasted no time being startled by what he saw at McCabe's house. Instead he moved immediately toward the ambulance, which was just then receiving the stretcher with McCabe on it. A cop stopped him. "That's far enough," the cop said.

Ryerson decided not to argue with him. He asked, "Just tell me this; is he dead or is he alive?”

“Who are you?"

Ryerson felt his temper flaring, fought it back. "I'm a friend. And that's all I want to know; is he dead or is he-"

"He's alive. Barely."

The ambulance pulled away, siren blaring.

"Thank God," Ryerson breathed. And he over-heard from nearby a woman who was apparently one of McCabe's neighbors talking to a detective. "He just came running out of that house with this, this.. . thing chasing after him, and he fell down, right there"-she pointed at a spot on the lawn midway from the house to the street-"and he just

… twitched."

"What hospital?" Ryerson asked the cop. "Highland," said the cop. "Who'd you say you were again?"

"A friend," Ryerson answered, hoping it was enough. "A good friend." And he went back to his old Ford, hesitated briefly, trying to decide what exactly he wanted to do, and drove back to the Samuelson Guest House.

It was not confusion that made Douglas Miller sit so stiffly, as if paralyzed, hands gripping the arms of the hard plastic seat at the Trailways Bus Station half a mile north of downtown Rochester. It was not confusion. It was stark and terrifying knowledge. Self-knowledge. Awareness: God in heaven-this is what I am! I'm not human at all! This is what I am!

He was fighting that knowledge, of course. He'd fought it for two months now, as the thing inside him-the thing that poor, damned Lila Curtis had unwittingly shared with him, the thing that had weight and substance-as that thing had grown inside him, had gained strength inside him until now he, Douglas Miller, didn't need the rationale, the mythical excuse, of the image of the full moon to let it loose. To give it the control it wanted. To give it himself, when it wanted.

And there was another realization hitting him. Another bit of awful knowledge to push back.

He was dying.

His young life would soon come to a close, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

So after not too many minutes sitting in the Trailways terminal, hands clutching the arms of the hard plastic seat, he handled this knowledge-the knowledge of the thing inside him; the knowledge of his death-in the only way possible. He denied it. He cocked his head confusedly and he whispered to himself-surprising a Chicano woman sitting beside him, who had been planning to move to another seat anyway because Miller's smell was something less than pleasant-' What in the hell am I doing here?" And he got up and walked quickly out of the terminal and into the night.

The rain had stopped.

He walked in the city's neon darkness with one horrible bit of knowledge pushing him: That he possessed a secret so awesome and so terrible that he could share it with no one at all. Not even himself.

"Peed on my rug, Mr. Biergarten," Loren Samuelson said tightly. "And if I know one thing about dog pee it's that it sticks in a rug forever."

"I'll pay for cleaning it; thanks for watching him," Ryerson said, taking Creosote and scratching him idly around the ears, which, because he had his treasured soft plastic duck in his mouth, caused his weird, ragged purring sound to start.

"It's an Oriental rug, Mr. Biergarten," Samuelson said peevishly. "And it costs good money to clean an Oriental rug. Got it from Sears twenty-five years ago. `Kismet Classic,' they called it. Seventy-nine dollars and ninety-five cents, plus two percent salestax. 'Course it's appreciated some since then, like all Orientals do-"

"I'll pay for it," Ryerson said wearily. "Whatever it costs to clean it, I'll pay for it. If you have to buy a new rug, I'll pay for it."

"No need to get all tied up in knots, Mr. Biergarten."

"I'm sorry. I've had a rough day." He stepped backward out of Samuelson's apartment, glanced toward the stairs that led up to his own apartment, looked back at Samuelson. "The police might call," he said. "I left them your number. If I don't answer your knock, it's probably because I'll be asleep, but please keep knocking-"

Samuelson eyed him suspiciously. "You in some kinda trouble, Mr. Biergarten?"

Ryerson thought, He doesn't read the newspapers; he has no idea who I am. He said, "No. I've got a message… a very urgent message into a Detective Bill Andrews. If he calls, please wake me." And he turned and went quickly to his room.

Damn you, McCabe! he thought. Damn you! Why couldn't you have given me some authority, for Christ's sake?! I do your legwork and your brain work, and I've got to pussyfoot around when I come up with something.

But what, he wondered, what really had he come up with at Miller's apartment? That Douglas Miller was a neat freak? That he kept his studio apartment scrupulously clean, which to most people would have seemed merely odd, but to Ryerson had been like a scream in the dark: A human being lives here! it protested. A human being lives here!

What kind of evidence was that?

Sure, the areas around the wall plates, where fingerprints usually collected, had been scrubbed down to the plaster. Sure, the bathtub had been cleaned so furiously that much of the enamel was missing. Sure, even the lightbulbs had been dusted, and the hard-wood floors stripped of their sheen in spots, and the windows cleaned so thoroughly that even the frames, where grit usually collected for years, were spotless.

And sure the man's effects had been arranged with precise, geometrical, almost military precision; the snapshots just so; the papers on the desk arranged so no edges below the top sheet showed, all the shirts in the closet hung a precise two fingers apart.

So what? Ryerson thought. So he was a neat freak. Lots of people are neat freaks. That doesn't mean they're killers; just odd. "The world's full of odd people, Ryerson," he told himself. "Heck, you're as odd as they come!"

And thank God for that, his thoughts continued. Because that's what had told him what Douglas Miller was trying to tell him-what Douglas Miller had been trying to tell anyone who happened to come into his scrupulously clean, obsessively clean apartment: A human being lives here. Not a monster! A human being!

Ryerson heard a knock at his door; then, "Mr. Biergarten? You awake? Mr. Biergarten?"

"Yes," he called back, and went to the door, opened it.

Samuelson tried to look over Ryerson's shoulder into the apartment.

"Yes?" Ryerson coaxed.

Samuelson seemed to realize what he was doing and appeared embarrassed by it. He grinned an apology. "Call for you. It's that detective."

Detective Andrews, Ryerson thought, was once again into his Dirty Harry act. "Make it quick, Biergarten," he said brusquely. "I got lots of work to do tonight; this fuckin' paperwork-"

"You've heard about Chief McCabe?" Ryerson asked.

"Sure I have."

"And?"

"And…" He paused, continued, "And I'm sorry, I guess-what do you want from me-"

"Good Lord, I want you to give me a report on him, if you can. How's he doing? What's his condition?"

Another pause. "Oh. Yeah. I guess he's okay; I guess he lost lots of blood, but-"

"His condition, Detective. What is his condition?”

“You mean officially? What does the hospital say?"

"That's right, Detective. I assumed you'd be keeping track of that."

"Oh. Sure. I guess his condition is good. I don't know. I guess it's good-"

Ryerson interrupted; "What do you need to get an arrest warrant, Detective?"

"Sorry?" It was clear to Ryerson that the change of conversational direction had confused Detective Andrews. "Arrest warrant for who?"

"Douglas Miller. He's a Kodak employee.”

“Why do you want him arrested?"

Ryerson sighed. This was going to be very difficult, he realized. "I want him arrested because I suspect him in the case I'm investigating with Tom McCabe," he said, trying to put all the facts together in one sentence for the detective.

"Does Chief McCabe know this?" Andrews asked.

"No. Not yet. I was trying to call him when-"

"And what sort of evidence do you have, Mr. Biergarten? We need evidence before we can get an arrest warrant."

This is it, Ryerson thought.

"Mr. Biergarten?" Andrews coaxed. "You there?"

"Yes. I'm here." He paused again, again thought, This is it, and continued, "I'm sorry. I have no evidence." And he hung up.

Douglas Miller was furious. "You let someone in here, into my apartment?! You fool, you idiot, you goddamned, lame-brained-" He stopped. He could see the hurt in Ira Cole's eyes. He inhaled deeply. "Who?" he asked.

Ira Cole stammered, "I… I don't remember.”

“Who was it?"

"I'm… sorry, Douglas. He said he was with the police."

Miller froze.

Ira Cole said again, "I'm sorry, Douglas."

Miller said, "Did you watch him? Did he touch anything? Did he put his fingers on anything?"

"No, Douglas. I don't think so." Ira Cole was loosening up because Miller's anger seemed to be abating. "You keep a very neat apartment, Douglas. I've never seen anyone keep such a neat apartment-I wish all of my tenants kept such neat apartments-"

"I'm not an animal," Miller said, his voice a ragged, hoarse whisper that surprised Ira Cole. "So I won't live like one. I'm clean." He said this almost reverently. "I'm human, and I'm clean!"

Ira Cole said, "I'm glad," and meant it. He smiled quickly; "I remember his name now, Douglas. His name was Mr. Biergarten. He was a foreigner, I think. He didn't talk like a foreigner-"

But Douglas Miller had turned then and gone into his apartment, leaving behind the only thing that Ira Cole had lately found hard to take about him: his smell.

"Do you have any answers for me, Creosote?" Ryerson said. The dog was sitting on the bed beside him, duck between his paws. "What do you think? Do we get hold of some silver bullets, like Joan did?" He grinned uncomfortably, because he knew-his "special brain" told him-that "Joan," whoever she was (and maybe someday he'd find out), had done what… damnit, what popular mythology told her she should do? Kill the beast with a silver bullet, kill the beast with fire, kill the beast with holy water, kill the beast with flowing water, kill the beast with a stake through its heart, kill the beast in any of a number of prescribed ways. Depending on what the beast was, of course, and how it manifested itself.

But there was something else at work here. In Rochester.

Something that mythology had never reckoned on.

Something that had gotten loose from… somewhere (God knew where), something that played a kind of game of cat and mouse with a person's soul, something that rooted out the evil, the black ooze it found there, and built on it, and when it was tired of the game, gobbled it up.

Ryerson scratched Creosote behind the ears. "What am I talking about, fella? Tell me what I'm talking about. Tell me what it is I'm thinking." Because Ryerson could not really verbalize what he was thinking-getting hold of the substance of it was like watching a dim star; you looked slightly to the left or to the right; you looked slightly away from it, because if you tried to see it straight on, it merged with the overwhelming darkness and was gone.

Creosote quieted suddenly.

"What's the matter, fella?" Ryerson coaxed. Creosote began to whimper.

"Creosote, what's the-"

Ryerson heard a knock at the door; he snapped his gaze toward it. "Mr. Samuelson?" he said.

There was no answer.

He called louder, "Mr. Samuelson? Is that you?”

“No," he heard. "It's me. It's Mr. Ashland."

You live, thought Loren Samuelson with a strange kind of poetic grace, you love, you die! Simple. Life is simple. You get it, you lose it. Simple.

Hello, hello, Marie Anne! and a small, weak smile spread over his mouth as he watched his wife, dead fifteen years, float appealingly in the air above him, watched her reach longingly for him.

Come home, Loren, she whispered, Come home, Loren, come home, Loren.

"Yes," he whispered through the blood filling his mouth.

You are done with this body, Loren. A new life waits for you; we will have a life together. Forever. Come home, come home.

"Yes," he managed gurglingly. "Yes."

I love you, Loren. Come home. Come home.

He nodded. "Yes," he said again, though it was inaudible now, even to himself. And with a small, grateful smile on his lips, he mouthed the word "Home," and he died.

Chapter Twenty-one

In Edgewater, Pennsylvania, sixteen-year-old Larry Wilde's Great Aunt Katherine was trying hard to comfort him in his grief; she wasn't having much luck. Larry's tears wouldn't stop, and they'd been coming now for nearly two hours.

"There, there," Great Aunt Katherine soothed, holding the boy's head to her old but very ample bosom.

"I loved her, Aunt Katherine. I loved my mother!"

"There, there," she repeated, wished that she could think of something else to say, and decided that the repetition itself was probably comforting. "They'll catch him. They'll catch the bastard."

Larry stopped weeping for a second or two; he'd never heard his staid Aunt Katherine use a word like that, and he wasn't sure what to think of it. He said, "You think so? Do you really think so?"

"Of course," she said.

"They'd better!" Larry said, hate and venom welling up with his tears.

"They will," Great Aunt Katherine assured him. "If there's a God in heaven, they will!"

Fear gripped Ryerson Biergarten's chest like a snake, making his breathing ragged and his head spin. He called, "What do you want, Mr. Ashland?"

"I want to talk. I have some information for you."

Ryerson said nothing; he glanced at Creosote, who'd stopped whimpering and was now as stiff as a lead pipe; Ryerson would have had to look closely to be sure the dog was alive.

"Mr. Biergarten? Are you there?"

Ryerson called back, his voice choked with apprehension, "How did you get in? Did Mr. Samuelson let you in?" It was a delaying tactic; it gave Ryerson time to gather his wits about him.

"Yes, of course, Mr. Biergarten. Please let me in. I have some very important information for you."

Ryerson's hand went to Creosote's ears and scratched them nervously; Ryerson let out a trembling sigh. He wanted desperately to yell, "Perhaps some other time, Mr. Ashland," but again the words This is it! came to him, as they had when he'd been talking to Detective Andrews. Only now they meant so much more. Now he had to listen to them. Now he had to do his damned job!

He put his arm around Creosote, stood with him, went to the door, and hesitated: "Are you alone, Mr. Ashland?" he called. He wasn't sure why he'd asked it; he'd gotten a quick, unclear image of two people beyond the door. Two entities, at least.

"Yes, I'm alone."

Ryerson turned the knob, opened the door.

It was the smell that hit him first; a smell that was a nerve-jarring combination of blood, ammonia, and bile. It swept over him from the hallway like a shroud, and made him even dizzier than his apprehension had. He put his free hand out and steadied himself on the door frame.

"Are you okay, Mr. Biergarten?"

Ryerson answered, straightening, and shaking his head to clear it, "Yes, thank you." He looked the man squarely in the eye. He said, "Please don't call yourself 'Mr. Ashland.' I know who you are. I was at the hospital-"

Miller grinned; it was designed to be coy, Ryerson thought. It wasn't; it was malicious. "Were you?" he said. "And were you also at my apartment?"

Delay! Ryerson told himself. "You said you had some information-" he began, and stopped abruptly. An image had flashed into his head: the image of two people lying naked together. It came and went as quickly as a glance. He repeated, "You said you had some information for me."

Miller nodded.

Ryerson wondered, Is it the light? Because the lights in the corridors of the Samuelson Guest House had always been dim; "Saves electric," Loren Samuelson had explained. Or is this man actually gray? Ryerson's thoughts continued.

Miller said, nodding toward Ryerson's room, "May I come in?"

Ryerson backed mechanically away from the door. "Yes. Of course."

Miller moved forward, his gait stiff and awkward, as if his knees were locked.

Ryerson nodded at the room's only chair besides his desk chair-an oak rocker. "Sit down, Mr. Miller."

Miller nodded and sat slowly-painfully, Ryerson thought-in the chair, let his head go back as if in contemplation, and whispered hoarsely, "I know who your murderer is, Mr. Biergarten."

Ryerson sat in his desk chair at the opposite end of the small room. It wasn't far enough; the smell that wafted from Miller still washed over him in long, rolling, suffocating waves. He took a quick, shallow breath, then another, realized that if he kept it up he'd hyperventilate, and breathed normally, though it was an effort. "Do you?" he said to Miller.

Miller nodded in a barely perceptible way, head still back, gaze on the ceiling. "It's George Dixon." He paused. "It's Jack Youngman." Another pause. He went on, in the same ragged, hoarse whisper, "I thought it was Greta, my Greta-"

Again an image of two people lying naked shot through Ryerson's head. But he saw the man more closely this time. It was Miller. And he saw the woman, too, and knew it wasn't Greta Lynch, but someone else. Someone… younger. Someone the age of Lila Curtis.

"Yes," Ryerson managed, "I know it wasn't Greta." He tried to alter his breathing again, unsuccessfully. In his arms, Creosote still was as stiff as a lead pipe, and Ryerson was beginning to worry about him. "What… makes you think it was George Dixon?"

"I talked to him," Miller answered.

"When?" Ryerson asked.

"Before he died."

Ryerson said nothing. Another image had pushed into his head, painfully this time. Not the pleasant image of two attractive people lying naked together, but the image of a man lying broken and squashed, like the close-up of a Junebug that has gotten under someone's heel. It made his stomach wrench. He fought for composure, got it, though just barely, and asked, "When did he die, Mr. Miller?"

"Today," Miller answered simply.

"How?"

Miller grinned. "He turned inside out, I think.”

“Good Lord," Ryerson breathed.

"Just like Jack Youngman did."

And the same image blasted into Ryerson's head: a man lying twisted, broken, squashed.

Miller said, still grinning, "Jack Youngman turned inside out. It was fatal." He chuckled deep in his chest, like a bulldog might, if it could chuckle.

"That was today, too?" Ryerson asked.

"Yes," Miller answered. He'd stopped grinning; he was speaking simply, dispassionately. "That was today. Dixon was today. Youngman was today, too. So was McCabe." His grin returned; it was lopsided and threatening. "And so is Biergarten."

Ryerson caught his breath. Another image was pushing into his head, an image he wanted desperately to stop, but couldn't-an image of something amorphous, something the color of dirty cream, something that moved like a tidal wave inside this creature who called himself Douglas Miller, something that filled his insides and gobbled him up and moved him about as if he were some grotesque marionette. And all the while the man, Douglas Miller, the Kodak Park employee, Greta Lynch's would-be lover, former high school athlete, was himself squashed, beaten, murdered.

My God, Ryerson thought, the man is dying!

"And today," the man said, "is Biergarten."

"Like hell it-" Ryerson began, intent upon lung-ing from the room and out into the night.

But Douglas Miller beat him to it. Douglas Miller screamed-in much the way that he'd screamed at the hospital, when the orgasm had wracked him-and threw himself from the chair and out of the room.

Creosote began to whimper.

Ryerson sat open-mouthed for several seconds. Then he called, surprising himself, "Wait! No! Miller! Wait!" And with Creosote whimpering under his arm, he vaulted from the room in crazy pursuit.

Chapter Twenty-two

When he got down to Birr Street, Ryerson saw Miller lurching toward Lake Avenue. He was a good one hundred feet off, but the street was well-lighted by new streetlamps, and Ryerson could see, as Miller passed under first one, then another, then another streetlamp, that the man was changing-growing taller, wider, his gait becoming less awkward, more graceful-more profoundly and impossibly graceful.

"Miller!" Ryerson called.

And then the change began to reverse itself. The profound gracefulness became, by degrees-as Miller was illuminated beneath first one then another of the streetlamps-an awful, stiff lurching movement; then the man lost his height, lost his bulk, became clearly something stick-like rattling around inside his clothes.

That's when he turned the corner onto Lake Avenue and Ryerson lost sight of him.

It was early evening, and there were people on the street. Walking toward him, a middle-aged woman in a huge gray cloth coat-though the temperature was in the sixties-caught his gaze stiffly, held it for a few seconds, looked away, and passed by. On the opposite side of the street a couple in their twenties walked hand in hand, and Ryerson got a quick feeling of peace and harmony from them. And at the end of the street, a boy was coming his way on a bicycle. Ryerson waited for him, forced a smile, and held a hand out to stop the boy when he was twenty yards off. The boy stopped; Ryerson saw that he had a basket with several newspapers in it The Rochester Times Union, the city's evening paper. The boy said with a friendly smile, "Want a paper, mister? I got a couple left."

Ryerson shook his head. Creosote, who had come back to life, grunted and gurgled. "No," Ryerson said. The boy looked disappointed. "Okay," Ryerson amended and dug some change from his pocket.

"You okay?" the boy asked.

"Yeah, sure," Ryerson answered, aware that he was trembling. "Here." He gave the boy a quarter, took a newspaper from him, rolled it up, shoved it into his back pocket.

"Thanks," the boy said and began to pedal away.

"Wait," Ryerson said, put a hand out and grabbed the handlebar.

The boy looked suddenly frightened. "I only got a couple a dollars, mister. You want it, you can have it-"

"No, please," Ryerson said. "I don't want to rob you. There was a man-" he nodded toward Lake Avenue-"down there. A tall man-"

"Yeah," said the boy. "I saw him. He looked like a scarecrow."

"Yes," Ryerson said; he wished to God that he could stop trembling. "Yes," he repeated. "Did you see where he went?"

"Uh-huh," said the boy, and didn't elaborate.

"Where?" Ryerson asked, a little too sharply, he realized, because the boy winced. "I'm sorry. Please. Where did the man go?"

"Into the church," the boy answered.

"What church?"

"At the corner. The church that burned. He went in there."

Before the night of August 16, 1975, the Church of St. Januarius at the corner of Birr Street and Lake Avenue had been one of Rochester's oldest, most venerable, and certainly one of its largest churches. Its massive gray stonework had been the pride of the neighborhood, and in its heyday the church had served a congregation that numbered nearly 3,000 people. On any given Sunday, it could have seated most of them.

But on that Saturday evening, August 16, 1975, a fire began in the basement of the church and spread quickly upward through the oak floors, the cherry pews, the walnut altar. The huge stained-glass windows melted from the incredible heat. The iron confessionals were reduced to great, black amorphous globs. And by morning, August 17, 1975, all that remained of the once-magnificent structure were its massive stone walls, its stone foundation, two dozen stone passageways that snaked maze-like through the cellar, and incredibly, the huge oak front doors. For years there was talk of rebuilding the church. Various money-raising schemes were hatched and plans drawn up, but these schemes and plans never reached fruition. And when Ryerson Biergarten got there, in pursuit of Douglas Miller, the remains of the Church of St. Januarius were less than a month away from demolition.

Ryerson approached the church from the street side, up the twenty wide stone steps to the great oak doors-the only wood in the building that had survived nearly unscathed the awful kiss of the flames-stopped there, and whispered to himself, "I'm a fool!" He meant it. Because he knew that if he were not a fool he'd have called Detective Andrews, or he'd have flagged down a passing patrol car-and indeed, one had passed on its way to Edgemont Street, which paralleled Lake Avenue, as he'd made his way to the church from the Samuelson Guest House-or, at the most, he'd have hidden somewhere near the church, waited for poor Douglas Miller to reappear, and then would have decided what to do next. But he knew what he was going to do. He was going to seek Douglas Miller out in that maze of stone passageways. He was going to follow the monster underground.

He knew the passageways were there because, for whole seconds at a time, he could see them through what served as Douglas Miller's eyes: he saw two vague, gray planes that were cut by the dark horizontals and verticals of doorways that had once led into rooms where church school was held, and benefit suppers eaten, and Bingo played. And Ryerson could hear, too, the slight, muted echoes of past events-the Bingo games, the suppers, the church school-which lingered for decades in places like this.

"Miller!" he called through the half-open front doors of the church. Beyond them a wide section of charred oak floor remained. Several yards to the right of the doors, a stone stairway led into the snakelike maze of passageways beneath. Again Ryerson called, "Miller!" but heard nothing. He sensed someone watching him from the street and turned his head. A short, thin, dark-haired man wearing horn-rimmed glasses was watching him with passing interest. The man called, "You'd best not go in there. It's dangerous. Damned kids!" Which was a reference to the fact that although the authorities regularly boarded up the doors, children in the area had consistently broken in.

"Yes," Ryerson agreed. Then he pushed on the doors, and with Creosote snorting in his arms, went into the ruined interior of the church. B-three. That's B-three… I-nineteen And bless this man and this woman… And make His face to shine upon thee

"Miller!" Ryerson called. He expected no answer. He expected that Miller-the creature which had once been Miller-might look up at him from the maze of passageways beneath, and that at the moment the creature looked up, he would see what it saw, and so would know in what part of the maze it was hiding. What God hath joined together let no man put asunder…

The muted echoes of past events came and went from Ryerson's mind like swiftly flying night birds. Welcome to St. Januarius, Welcome to St. Januarius And if that were to happen, if he saw himself through this creature's eyes and knew then where it was hiding… The lousy bum ate my chiffon pie but totally ignored the beans… then he would have to decide what to do next. N-twenty-three; N-twenty-three!

"Miller!"

And it happened.

He saw himself at the lip of that narrow, charred section of oak floor; he saw Creosote. He saw a pale blanket of clouds above.

And he knew where the creature was in that maze. And he knew this, too: he knew that the creature wasn't hiding.

It was waiting. B-eight, 0-forty-five, G-thirty-three: Bingo! Bingo!

"Shut up!" Ryerson screamed.

And from beneath, in the maze, he heard, "Greta!" in a voice that was torn, and piercing, and tremulous, like a tree splitting. "Greta, Greta, Greta," again and again, until it was little more than a dense screeching noise, a noise of fatal resignation: This is done; this is done! And at last nothing.

Ryerson saw the steps that led into the maze, and he took them quietly, Creosote silent in his arms. He heard behind him a heightened noise of traffic on Lake Avenue as people started their evenings at theaters and restaurants and shopping malls.

And when he reached the bottom of those stairs, he realized that he'd forgotten to take one awful fact into account: at night, in darkness that was several shades down from semi-darkness, as this place was, he was as blind as a bottom-dwelling fish. Sure, now and again glimpses of this place pushed fleetingly into his brain from the eyes of the creature he was pursuing. But his own eyes were all but useless here.

And what, he asked himself, am I going to do when I find him? If I find him? And he answered almost at once, I'm going to be his supper! which made him grin tremblingly.

He called, "Mr. Miller, I can help you. I want to help you." It wasn't a lie. It was simply an embellishment, he supposed. He did want to help him; he simply wasn't sure how he was going to help him-that was a bridge he'd cross when he came to it. But wasn't this poor creature pretty much the same as the darkly laughable spook in the Vermont cellar who spent his existence shouting creative obscenities at whoever might be listening? And wasn't this creature essentially the same as

No, Ryerson answered himself. This creature was different. This creature had an overwhelming need, a consuming lust for Death gobbling it up.

And that's when Ryerson started backing away, toward the stone stairway he'd just come down. Because he'd realized, at last, that however noble his intentions might be, he was powerless to help the creature that called itself Douglas Miller. He might as well, he realized, have hoped to reason with a disease.

Then he saw himself briefly through that creature's eyes; he saw the tall, athletic body, the square, intriguing face, the quiet baggage that was Creosote under his arm; and he saw the trembling, the fear. And he saw it all with a harsh, black-and-white reality that was as jarring as a slap in the face.

Then it was gone. And the smell of the creature whose eyes he had used replaced it.

And he thought, No pain! Please, no pain!

Creosote whimpered, snorted, growled deep in his throat. And the smell of the thing that had been Douglas Miller fell over him like black water. No pain, please, no pain! B-six, 0-sixty, I-sixteen No pain, please Turn, now, in your Catechism to the story of Lazarus "Mr. Miller, I can help you, I want to help you-" The bum ate my chiffon pie but never touched the beans

Cresote belched, snorted, growled.

Then fell silent.

Because the smell had dissipated. The creature that had called itself Douglas Miller had retreated. Into the maze. And Ryerson thought that if Creosote could have talked, he would have used one phrase to describe the reason for his momentary revival-"That disgusting smell!" he would have said.

"Mr. Miller!" Ryerson called. "I can help you, I want to help you," and he stopped backing away from the stone stairs that led up out of the maze and into the city.

This is it! he thought. This is it! It's time to do my job! It's time to help this creature! And he moved blindly forward into the maze. And walked face first into a wall. He stepped back, instinctively turned slightly to the right, moved forward again, slowly, feet barely lifting from the stone floor. He had a pair of eyes to use, after all. He had the creature's eyes to use.

"Mr. Miller, let me help you. I'm here to help you!"

And in his mind's eye he saw Douglas Miller and Lila Curtis lying naked together. And he saw a strange dull glow come into Lila's eyes, as if something smoldered deep within her. He saw her head move quickly forward into Douglas Miller's shoulder, saw her head come back, saw blood there at her mouth, heard Douglas Miller say, "Jees, what'd you do that for?"

Again he walked face first into a wall; he felt a gash open on his cheek. He winced, let a small grown of pain out, and supposed, distractedly, that that would probably be the very smallest pain he'd experience that evening.

Then, like an old coat being thrown over him, the suffocating smell of the creature in the maze with him was around him again, and again Creosote snorted in disgust.

But then fell silent. And still.

And in his mind's eye, Ryerson saw himself standing blind, as if naked, as if offering himself. And he saw, too, the corridors stretching to his left and right, corridors he could not have seen with his own eyes.

And with a speed borne of panic and desperation, he turned to his right and ran hard.

And through the eyes that watched him, he saw himself running, saw the wall coming fast, saw the corridor branch yet again to the right and left, turned left, saw himself falling closer to the creature in hungry pursuit, heard himself whispering raggedly, already out of breath, "Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus!"; heard around him the louder echoes of the past pushing at him, saw the soles of his shoes rising high from the stone floor as he ran, saw the back end of Creosote, his own elbows pumping, his shirt collar, the back of his neck- He smelled the sickening, suffocating odor of the creature, heard its own thudding footfalls Chapter Twenty-three

AT HIGHLAND HOSPITAL

Tom McCabe said, "He was our murderer, I know that." He nodded at the room's one window. "Close the curtains, would you? It's too damned bright. "

Ryerson Biergarten went over to the window, closed the curtains. He sat down in a pale green vinyl armchair that he'd placed near the bed, bent forward, lowered his head, shook it, sighed, and looked up at Tom McCabe, who was regarding him quizzically.

McCabe said, "What's on your mind, Rye?"

Ryerson smiled ruefully. "Him. Our murderer. Douglas Miller. He's on my mind, Tom." He paused, sat back, let his hands dangle over the front of the arms of the chair. "Werewolf," he whispered, and sighed again.

"Werewolf, my ass!" McCabe said.

"Yes," Ryerson agreed.

"I wish to God I hadn't seen anything, Rye-it'll stick with me the rest of my life. I think I can look forward to four decades worth of bad dreams."

Ryerson nodded. "It took the form that was convenient, Tom. It poked around inside Doug Miller and it found that… idea, that myth, that fear. And it fed on it, and moved with it, while it grew. And I guess-" He stopped, faltered, searched for the right words, went on: "I guess this is like… running in the dark, Tom"-he smiled-"and maybe I'm way out in left field, but I'd say that Miller fought it, for a while. I'd say he knew there was something very wrong, and he tried hard to hold on to what humanity was left in him. But hell, it was probably like trying to fight an orgasm. After a while, you have to give in to it. So for a month, two months, he gave in to this thing whenever the opportunity presented itself. 'Full Moon' equals 'Werewolf,' so whenever he saw that mural at The Park, it was an excuse to let the thing inside him take over."

McCabe shook his head incredulously. "That's a damned wild theory, Rye."

Ryerson shrugged. "It's the only theory I've got, Tom." He paused to change subjects, went on, "When are they going to let you out of here?"

"A week, ten days," McCabe answered wearily. "I was lucky, Rye. I guess that thing was… on its last legs when it got around to me."

Ryerson nodded. "George Dixon and Jack Youngman weren't quite so lucky." A pause. "And I'd say that poor Doug Miller was on his last legs, sure. I'd say he'd just about had it when he got to me." And Ryerson, like McCabe, wished fervently then that he could forget what he'd seen in the Church of St. Januarius. When he had stopped and looked back after hearing that awful, liquid-sounding Phump! behind him-just seconds, he knew, before he and Creosote were due to become one with the carrier pigeon and the dodo bird. That terrible, liquid-sounding Phump!, like a plastic bag full of wet laundry falling to the pavement. That pitiful Phump! of a once-strong-and-athletic body that's been all but turned inside out, gobbled up, and discarded-vomited, really-by an entity that, in Ryerson's "special brain," had revealed itself only as an amorphous, dirty-cream-colored tide. He finished, "So I'd say, Tom, that we've seen the last of Douglas Miller, anyway."

"Meaning?"

"Whatever you want it to mean." He nodded at McCabe's arm. "Does that bite still hurt?"

McCabe rubbed it; it was heavily bandaged. "No. It never did, really; the thing didn't have any teeth to speak of." He shuddered, remembering the face of his attacker- Like an orange that's sat around too long and some little kid has painted eyes on it, and a nose, and a mouth; but none of it fits, he'd told Ryerson. Like some fuzzy, ten-day-old, dried-up jack-o'-lantern, for Christ's sake!

"And how about the stomach?" Ryerson went on.

McCabe glanced at it; Ryerson thought he smiled a little, pleased, perhaps, that his previously round belly had deflated a bit during his hospital stay. "Ah, it gives me some pain now and again, Rye. Nothing I can't handle. If I'm lucky, it'll mean I can stay out of work for a while."

"Uh-huh," Ryerson said, "that'll be the day." He stood, took a breath. "They're keeping what's left of Miller's body on ice for you, Tom. I guess they're hoping you can identify him as the man who attacked you."

McCabe grimaced. "Jesus, I don't want to look at him-"

"We've all got jobs to do, Tom," Ryerson said, smiling. He started for the door, stopped. "I'll be back up this way in a week or two. I'll drop in."

"I'll probably be right here, Rye," McCabe said, again wearily. "Where are you going? Vacation?"

"Don't I wish. No. Creosote and I are going back to Edgewater. I've got to find this woman named 'Joan,' Tom." He paused, continued, "And if I can't, well, maybe I'll find something else."

"Rye," McCabe quipped, "I hope that whatever you find, it feels good."

Ryerson smiled, nodded, went to the door, opened it, stepped out. He stopped, looked back in, "Uh, Tom?"

McCabe had already started to nod off. He snapped awake, blinked a few times, as if to get his bearings, and said, "Yes? Something wrong, Rye?"

Ryerson nodded. "I didn't get paid, Tom. They won't pay me."

"What do you mean, they won't pay you? Just tell them that I said to pay you-"

"Yes, I told them that. They want to hear from you personally. Heck, Tom,"-Ryerson smiled feebly, "I wouldn't even mention it, but I really do like to keep these things on the up and up. Besides, I'm afraid the Ford's having some transmission work done, and the garage doesn't take cards-"

McCabe cut in, waving away Ryerson's concern, "I'll call them, now, Rye. No problem." He grabbed the phone on a nightstand near his bed, began to dial, hesitated; "You sure that bucket of bolts will take you to Pennsylvania, Rye?"

Ryerson nodded, "It has once; it will again."

"I hope so, Rye. Hate to see you get stuck down there." And he finished dialing.

In Erie, Joan Mott-Evans, twenty-three, single, attractive in a willowy, sixties-flower-child way, was feeling good for the first time in months, ever since her friend, Lila Curtis, had killed herself. Joan knew that she wouldn't feel good for long, that a lot of it, anyway, was due to the Valium she'd started taking on the advice of her doctor after Lila's suicide. But at least for now, for the next several hours, she could enjoy herself. Maybe she'd do some shopping. Buy a sweater. A hat. A record album. Buying things had always helped keep her spirits up.

Poor Lila, she thought. Poor, poor Lila. At least she was at rest now. At peace. At least the frenzy, the need, the thing inside her was gone-Joan had seen to that-and her soul could fly.

The eyes, Joan maintained, are the mirror of the soul. Lila had proved that. Because, Joan remembered, looking into Lila's eyes had been like looking into a pit filled with oil. It was a pair of eyes she thanked God she would never see again.

But she was wrong about that. Because when she bought her twice-weekly copy of The Midnight Examiner, and she saw the eyes of Larry Wilde staring back at her-under the bold black headline, "BOY SAYS `JASON' KILLED HIS MOM"-her mouth dropped open, she sputtered a string of incoherent curses, threw the paper down, and ran in terror and disbelief the full mile and a half to her home.

Content

T. M. Wright
The Changing

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

AT HIGHLAND HOSPITAL