The Changing

by T. M. Wright

  "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 . . . pretentious, 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 incredibly 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—a
gain, 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 unexpected 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 Werewolf 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—"