The Changing (The Biergarten Series)

by Wright, T. M. ; Armstrong, F. W.

  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 th
at."

  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 seconds—That'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 disbelieve 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 fiv
e 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.