Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “Yep.”

  “Took a photo of you from across the street on Sunday and then someone began following you on Thursday.”

  “Yep.”

  “Could I see the photo, please?” asked Natalie. She studied it under the light for a minute and said, “Whoever took it was using a built-in light meter . . . you see it exposed more for the sunlight on the door here than on your face. Probably had a two-hundred-millimeter lens. That’s pretty big. The print was developed in a private darkroom rather than a commercial lab.”

  “How can you tell that?” asked Gentry. “See how the paper’s been cut? Not exact enough for a commercial job. I don’t think they cropped this at all . . . that’s why I think it was a long lens . . . but it was printed in a hurry. Private darkrooms that handle color are fairly common these days, but unless your Oberst or Miz Fuller are staying with someone who has a setup like that, they didn’t pro cess it out of the trunk of their cars. Have you seen anyone recently with an automatic SLR with a long lens, Sheriff?”

  Gentry grinned at her. “Dickie Haines had a rig like that,” he said. “Little tiny Konika with a big Bushnell lens.”

  Natalie handed the photograph back and frowned at Saul. “Is it possible that there are . . . others? More of these creatures?”

  Saul folded his arms and looked back toward the city. “I don’t know,” he said. “For years I thought the Oberst was the only one. A terrible freak . . . spawned by the Third Reich, if such a thing is possible. Then our research suggested that the ability to influence other people’s actions and reactions was not that uncommon. I read history and wonder if such figures as disparate as Hitler, Rasputin, and Gandhi had this power. Perhaps there is a continuum and the Oberst, the Fuller woman, Nina Drayton, and God knows how many more are at the far end of it . . .”

  “So there could be others?”

  “Yes,” said Saul. “And, for some reason, they’re interested in me,” said Bobby Joe Gentry.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, back to square one,” said the sheriff. “Not quite,” said Saul. “Tomorrow I will find out what I can in Washington. Perhaps, Sheriff, you can continue to look into the whereabouts of Mrs. Fuller and the current status of the investigation into the airline explosion.”

  “What about me?” asked Natalie.

  Saul hesitated. “It might be wise if you returned to St. Louis and . . .”

  “Not if I can be of help here,” insisted the young woman. “What can I do?”

  “I have some ideas,” said Gentry. “We can talk about ’em tomorrow when we take the professor to the airport.”

  “All right, then,” said Natalie. “I’ll stay here at least through the first of the year.”

  “I will give you both my home and office numbers in New York,” said Saul. “We should talk by telephone every other day at least. And, Sheriff, even if all of our inquiries turn up negative, there is a way in which we can search for them through the news media . . .”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “Miss Preston’s meta phor of them being vampires is not so far from the mark,” said Saul. “And like vampires, they are driven by their own dark needs. These needs do not go unnoticed when they are satisfied.”

  “You mean reports of more murders?” said Gentry. “Precisely.”

  “But this country has more murders per day than En gland has in a year,” said Gentry.

  “Yes, but the Oberst and the others have a penchant for . . . bizarreness,” Saul said softly. “I doubt if they can alter their habits so completely that some flavor of their particular sickness does not come through.”

  “All right,” said Gentry. “If worse comes to worst, we wait ’til these . . . these vampires begin killing again and track them down that way. We find them. Then what?”

  Saul removed a handkerchief from his pants pocket, took his glasses off, and squinted out at the harbor lights as he cleaned the lenses. The lights were unfocused prisms to him, the night diffused and encroaching. “We find them and we follow them and we catch them,” he said. “And then we do what should be done to all vampires.” He put his glasses back on and gave Natalie and the sheriff a thin, cold smile. “We drive a stake through their hearts,” he said. “Drive stakes through their hearts, cut off their heads, and stuff garlic in their mouths. And if that does not work . . .” Saul’s thin smile became something infinitely colder, “. . . we will think of something that will.”

  THIRTEEN

  Charleston

  Wednesday, Dec. 24, 1980

  It was the loneliest Christmas Eve Natalie Preston had ever experienced and she decided to do something about it. She took her purse and her Nikon with the 135mm portrait lens, left the house, and drove slowly into the Old Section of Charleston. It was not quite four P.M., but already the evening light was fading.

  As she drove past the old homes and posh shops, she listened to Christmas music on the radio and let her mind wander.

  She missed her father. Even though she had seen less and less of him the past few years, the thought of his not being there— not being somewhere— not thinking about her, not waiting for her— made her feel as if something were collapsing inside her, folding inward and pulling at the very fabric of her being. She wanted to cry.

  She had not cried when she had heard the news on the telephone. Had not cried when Fred drove her to the St. Louis airport— he insisting on accompanying her, she insisting he not, he allowing her to convince him. She had not cried at the funeral or during the hours and days of confusion with friends and relatives that followed. It was not until five days after her father’s murder, four days after her return to Charleston, that she had been hunting for a book one night when she was unable to sleep and— finding a new Dell paperback of Jean Shepherd’s humor— the book had fallen open and there, in the margins, in her father’s looping, generous handwriting—Share with Nat this Xmas. And she had read the page describing a boy’s hysterically funny and terrifying visit to a department store Santa— so reminiscent of when Natalie’s own parents brought her downtown when she was four and waited in line for an hour only to have their daughter flee in panic at the crucial moment— and when she was finished reading, Natalie had laughed until the laughter turned to tears and then the tears to sobs; she had cried much of that night, sleeping only an hour or so before dawn, but rising with the winter sunrise and feeling empty, drained, but better the way a nausea victim feels after the first spasm of being ill. The worst was behind her.

  Natalie turned left and drove past the stucco town houses of Rainbow Row, colorful facades muted now as the gas lamps were coming on, and she wondered.

  It had been a mistake to stay in Charleston. Mrs. Culver came over from next door almost hourly, but Natalie found the conversations with the older widow strained and painful. She began to suspect that Mrs. Culver had had hopes of being the second Mrs. Preston, and the thought made Natalie want to go in the bedroom and hide when she heard the familiar, timid knock at the door.

  Frederick called from St. Louis every evening, precisely at eight, and Natalie could imagine the stern expression on her friend and one-time lover’s dark face as he would be saying, “Babe, get back here. You’re not doing any good hanging around your father’s house. I miss you, babe. C’mon home to Frederick.” But home to her little apartment in University City no longer seemed like home to her . . . and Frederick’s cluttered room on Alamo Street was little more than a sleeping place for him between fourteen-hour stints at the computer center as he wrestled with the mathematics of the distribution of mass in galactic clusters. Frederick, the smart but poorly educated boy she had heard about from mutual friends who had come back from two tours in Vietnam with a murderous temper, a renewed ferocity in defense of dignity, and revolutionary spirit that had been channeled into becoming the extraordinary research mathematician whom Natalie knew and . . . at least for much of the previous year . . . had loved. Had thought she loved. “Come on home here, babe,” came the voice e
very evening and Natalie— lonely, aching from the bruises of loss still inside of her— would say, “A few more days, Frederick. A few more days.”

  A few more days for what? she thought. The big old houses along South Battery were bright with window lights illuminating tiers of porches, palmettos, cupolas, and balustrades. She had always loved this part of the city. She and her father had come up here to walk along the Battery when she was a girl. She had been twelve before she realized that no black people lived there— that all of the fine old homes and fine old shops held only whites. Years later she marveled that such a revelation could come so late to a black girl growing up in the South in the sixties. So many things came naturally, so many of the old ways had to be resisted daily, that she could not believe that she had never noticed that the avenues of her evening walks— the big old homes of her dreams as a child— were as off-limits to her and her kind as some of the swimming pools, movie theaters, and churches that she would have never considered entering. By the time Natalie was old enough to travel the streets of Charleston by herself, the blatant signs had been removed, the public fountains were truly public, but habit persisted, boundaries set by two centuries of tradition still remained, and Natalie found it incredible that she could still remember the day— a damp, chill November day in 1972— when she had stood in shock not far from this place on old South Battery and stared at the big homes and realized that no one in her family had ever lived there, would ever live there. But the second thought had been banished as quickly as it had appeared. Natalie had inherited her mother’s eyes and her father’s pride. Joseph Preston had been the first black businessman to own and run a shop in the prestigious bayfront area. She was Joseph Preston’s daughter.

  Natalie drove down Dock Street, past the renovated Dock Street Theatre with its wrought-iron tracery clinging to the second-floor balcony like a riot of metal ivy.

  Ten days she had been home and everything that had come before seemed like a different life. Gentry should be off duty by now, bidding good evening and Merry Christmas to his deputies and secretaries and the other whites that inhabited the old hulk of the City-County Building. He would be calling her about now.

  She parked the car near St. Michael’s Episcopal Church and thought about Gentry. About Robert Joseph Gentry.

  After seeing Saul Laski off at the airport the previous Friday, they had spent most of that day together. And the next. Much of the first day’s discussion had been about Laski’s story— about the entire idea of people who could mentally use others. “If the Professor is crazy, it probably isn’t going to hurt anybody,” Gentry had said. “If he’s not crazy, it explains why a lot of people got hurt.”

  Natalie had told the sheriff about peeking out from her room when the exhausted New York psychiatrist had been returning from the bathroom to the hide-a-bed in her living room. He had been barefoot, wearing only trousers and what she thought of as “an old man’s undershirt.” She had looked at his right foot. The little toe was missing, old scar tissue visible like white veins on pale skin.

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Gentry had reminded her.

  Sunday they had talked of other things. Gentry made dinner for the two of them at his home. Natalie had loved his house— an aging Victorian structure about ten minutes from the Old Section. The neighborhood was in transition; some homes fading into disrepair, others being renovated to full beauty. Gentry’s block was populated with young couples— black and white— with tricycles on front walks, jump ropes lying on the small front lawns, and the sounds of laughter from backyards.

  Three rooms on the first floor had been filled with books: lovely builtin bookshelves in the library/study off the entrance hall, handmade wooden shelves on either side of the bay windows in the dining room, and inexpensive metal shelves along a blank, brick wall of the kitchen. While Gentry had been preparing the salad, Natalie had, with the sheriff’s blessing, wandered from room to room, admiring the aged, leather-bound volumes, noticing the shelves of hardback books dealing with history, sociology, psychology, and a dozen other topics, and smiling at the row upon row of espionage, mystery, and suspense paperbacks. Gentry’s study made her want to curl up with a book immediately. She compared the huge roll-top desk littered with papers and documents, the overstuffed leather club chair and couch, and the walls with built-in and overflowing bookshelves to her spartan workroom back in St. Louis. Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry’s study had the lived-in, center-of-everything feel to it that her father’s darkroom had always imparted to her.

  The salad tossed, the lasagna cooking, she and Gentry had sat in the study, enjoyed a premium unblended Scotch whiskey, and talked again— their conversation circling back to Saul Laski’s reliability and their own reaction to his story.

  “The whole thing has the classic feel of paranoia to it,” Gentry had said, “but, then, if a European Jew had predicted the details of the Holocaust a decade before it was set in motion, any good psychiatrist— even a Jewish one— would have diagnosed him as a probable paranoid schizophrenic.”

  They had watched the last light fade out the bay windows as they ate a leisurely dinner. Gentry had rummaged around in a basement well stocked with wine bottles and had almost blushed with embarrassment at her suggestion that he owned a wine cellar before coming up with two bottles of excellent BV Cabernet Sauvignon to go with dinner. She had thought the dinner excellent, had complimented him on being a gourmet chef. He had riposted with the comment that women who could cook were known as good cooks, old bachelors who could get by in the kitchen had to be gourmet cooks. She had laughed and promised to cross that particular ste reo-type off her list.

  Ste reo types. Alone on Christmas Eve, sitting in a rapidly chilling car near St. Michael’s Episcopal, Natalie thought about ste reo types.

  Saul Laski had seemed a wonderful example of a ste reo type to Natalie: a New York Polish Jew complete with a beard, sad, Semitic eyes that seemed to stare out at her from some European darkness that Natalie could not even conceive of, much less understand. A professor . . . a psychiatrist . . . with a soft, foreign accent that might as well be Freud’s Viennese dialect for all Natalie’s untrained ear could detect. The man wore glasses held together by adhesive tape, for heaven’s sake, like Natalie’s Aunt Ellen who had suffered from senility— Alzheimer’s they called it now— for eleven years, most of Natalie’s life at the time, until she finally died.

  Saul Laski looked different, sounded different, acted different, was different from most of the people— black or white— whom Natalie had ever known. Even though Natalie’s ste reo type of Jews was sketchy— dark clothes, strange customs, an ethnic look, a closeness to money and power at the expense of her own people’s proximity to money and power— there should be no problem letting Saul Laski’s basic strangeness fall into those ste reo-types.

  But it did not. Natalie did not delude herself into thinking that she was too intelligent to reduce people to ste reo types; she was only twenty-one years old, but she had seen intelligent people such as her father and Frederick— intelligent people— simply shift the ste reo types they chose to apply to people. Her father— as sensitive and generous as he had been, as ferociously proud of race and heritage as he was— had seen the rise of the so-called New South as a dangerous experiment, a manipulation by radicals of both colors to change a system that had finally changed enough in its own framework to allow some success and dignity for hardworking men of color such as himself.

  Frederick saw people as dupes of the system, managers of the system, or victims of the system. The system was very clear to Frederick; it was the po liti cal structure that had made the Vietnam war inevitable, the power structure that had maintained it, and the social structure that had fed him into that waiting maw. Frederick’s response had been twofold: to step outside of the system into something as irrelevant and invisible as research mathematics, and to make himself so good at it that he would have the power to stay there and elude the system for the rest of his life. In t
he meantime, Frederick lived for the hours he spent interfaced with his computers, avoided human complications, made love to Natalie as fiercely and competently as he fought anyone who gave the appearance of offense, and taught Natalie how to fire the .38 revolver he kept in his cluttered apartment.

  Natalie shivered and turned on the engine so the heater would work. She drove past St. Michael’s, noticed the people arriving for some sort of early Christmas Eve ser vice, and turned toward Broad Street. She thought of the Christmas morning church ser vices she had attended with her father for so many years at the Baptist church three blocks from home. She had resolved not to accompany him this Christmas, not to be hypocritical about it all. She had know that her refusal would hurt him, anger him, but she had been prepared to insist on her point of view. Natalie felt the emptiness in her seem to grow in a lurch of sorrow that was physically painful. She would give anything at this moment to lose the argument and attend church tomorrow morning with her father.

  Her mother had died in an accident during the summer when Natalie was nine years old. It was a freak accident, her father told her that evening, kneeling next to the couch, holding Natalie’s hands in both of his; her mother had been walking home from work, crossing through a small park, a hundred feet from the street, when a convertible filled with five white college boys, all drunk, had cut across the lawn on a lark. They swerved around a fountain, lost traction in the loose sod of the park lawn, and struck the thirty-two-year-old woman walking home to join husband and daughter for a Friday afternoon picnic, not seeing the vehicle until the last second according to witnesses, looking up at the onrushing car with an expression that one bystander described as containing only surprise, no shock or horror.

  On the first day of fourth grade, Natalie’s teacher had had them write an essay on what had happened during their summer vacation. Natalie had looked at the blue-lined paper for ten minutes and then written, very carefully, using her best handwriting and her new fountain pen purchased the day before at Keener’s Drugs: This summer I went to my mother’s funeral. My mother was very sweet and kind. She loved me very much. She was too young to die this summer. Some people who should not have been driving a car ran over her and killed her. They did not go to jail or anything. After my mother’s funeral, my father and I went to see my Aunt Leah for three days. But then we came back. I miss my mother very much.