The Changing

by T. M. Wright

  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 police, never want no trouble with the police."

  "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, "Shutup, 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 s
ome 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!"