The Devouring

by T. M. Wright

  He did not go inside.

  He knew only too well what he would find there.

  ~ * ~

  In the Records Division

  "There's one thing you could try," Glen said. "I mean, if you really want a look in that locker."

  "Yes," Irene said, "I do."

  "Simple," he said, and smiled.

  "Yes, yes, go on. Do I link up this computer with the Greyhound computer, search out the hard disk subsystem? What?"

  "No, Irene. You get a set of master keys and you go and open the locker up."

  She was aghast. "I couldn't do that. What if someone caught me?"

  "Then you'd be in a lot of trouble. But it's probably the only way you're going to be able to get into that locker. And if you're right about Lucas, if he really does want to be caught, then he'd probably welcome it."

  Irene looked blankly at him a few moments, then she sputtered, "Wh-where do I get a set of master keys?"

  Glen opened the top drawer of his desk and made a show of peering in. "It just so happens ..." He looked up, grinned. "They're not free, Irene. I mean, I've got 'em just for the night, until Detective Triano comes in, so they're not free."

  She sighed. "Okay, okay, name your price."

  "Dinner and a movie. That's pretty cheap, I'd say."

  She nodded. "Sure. Okay."

  "Smart girl." He reached into the drawer, took out a set of perhaps 100 keys of various types—all on a huge key ring—and tossed them to her. "Friday evening," he said. "I know it'll be an evening to remember."

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson kneeled over what was left of Joan Mott Evans. Her body lay on its back on the bed, arms wide, legs together, as if she were on some invisible cross. And the green night-gown she wore was streaked everywhere with her blood.

  Behind him, in the bedroom doorway, the cop breathed, "Jee-sus H. Christ!"

  Ryerson, his gaze on Joan's open eyes, waved at him to go away. "Leave us alone," he pleaded.

  "I sure as hell will not ..."

  Ryerson reeled around, his face a mask of agony. "For the love of God, let me say good-bye to her."

  The cop hesitated.

  Ryerson hurried on. "I won't touch anything. Just, please, let me be alone with her."

  The cop said nothing for a few moments. Then, "Sure, pal. Just, like you said, don't touch nothin'. Not her, not nothin'! You understand what I'm saying to you?"

  "Yes," Ryerson nodded. "Thank you."

  The cop sighed, glanced around the room, then looked at Ryerson again. "Is the phone in the kitchen?"

  "No," Ryerson managed, voice trembling. "It's in the living room. It's on an end table."

  The cop nodded at Joan. "She your wife?"

  "No. A friend."

  "Sure," the cop said. "I understand." He gestured toward the living room. "I'll be phoning this in. You got five minutes." A short pause. "Oh, leave the door open, okay?" And he disappeared into the living room.

  Ryerson turned back to Joan. He shook his head briskly in disbelief. He whispered, "Why, Joan? My God, why?"

  She lay very still.

  His eyes scanned the wounds that traced her body like a hundred dark red tattoos; they crisscrossed here, paralleled there, formed a rough circle there, there a rough triangle, there what could have been the letter C, there what looked like the number two. Some of the wounds had let copious amounts of blood, but most were all but dry, and this told Ryerson that thankfully, she had died early in the attack.

  Grief was, strangely, a new experience for him. He'd never lost anyone terribly close, except his mother, who had died when he was not yet into his teens. What grief he'd felt since then had been the grief of others—a friend whose father died in an automobile accident, a business acquaintance whose wife died of leukemia. And although their grief bore into him, although there had been moments when he felt their grief almost as strongly as they did, for a quarter of a century he had never faced the prospect of living with grief interminably.

  That prospect hit him very hard now. It made him numb and speechless; it made him want to crawl into himself and hide from the obscenity that had happened here.

  And it was that need, that compulsion to run from his grief, that nearly made him deaf to her.

  Nearly made her words—which vaulted the ever-widening gap between death and life—inaudible.

  But even through his grief he heard her, and he said aloud, "Joan?"

  Her body did not respond. Her eyes were fixed, her pupils dilated, her heart quiet, her blood was rapidly congealing in her veins. But still she spoke to him. And because she was beyond the limitations that life imposes, she told him many things at once. And he heard them all.

  She told him how much she loved him. How much she longed to be with him. How precious their brief time together had been, that she would carry that time with her through eternity. That she had real happiness now, and peace.

  And at last she told him that she knew her murderer. She told him, too, that although she knew better now—and he even heard a wry chuckle from her at that—in life she would have said that her murder was just.

  And then she was gone.

  Ryerson stepped away from the body on the bed. All at once he did not see it as Joan Mott Evans. He saw it as the home where her spirit had lived for a few years. And now her spirit had flown from it.

  His gaze lifted and passed slowly about the room. He saw that the debris that littered the lawn and pranced about droolingly in the other rooms and hung from the windows and hunkered around on greasy thighs was nowhere in evidence here.

  He said aloud, his voice still trembling, but as much now with hope as with grief, "Good-bye, Joan."

  ~ * ~

  He went into the living room. The cop was there, notepad in hand, one wide-mouthed, gauzy-eyed, translucent demon hanging around his neck; another, a dull burnt orange, was shimmying up his leg on incredibly long, thin arms. The cop nodded toward the bedroom. "You finished?"

  Ryerson nodded.

  "Are you up to answering a few questions then?"

  "Sure," Ryerson answered, and gestured to indicate a short hallway off the living room. "Bathroom first," he said.

  The cop shook his head. "I can't let you go in there. I'm sorry. If I let you corrupt the crime scene—" He stopped. "Whatcha gotta do? Take a leak?"

  Ryerson nodded.

  "Okay, then. But like I said before, don't touch nothin'."

  Ryerson started for the bathroom; the cop called after him. "Flush it with your elbow, okay, buddy?"

  "Yes, okay," Ryerson said.

  "And if you—" He stopped, apparently unsure of himself. He continued. "I'm sorry, but if you ... find anything—in the toilet, I mean—let me know before you use it."

  "You're very thorough," Ryerson said.

  "Sure," the cop said, as if aware he was being humored, and Ryerson went down the hallway to the bathroom.

  The cop knocked on the door half a minute later. "Hey, buddy," he called, "on second thought, why don't you go out back or something, okay?"

  There was no response. He knocked again. "You hear me, buddy?"

  Still nothing. He pushed the door open.

  The bathroom was empty.

  ~ * ~

  "Dammit!" Ryerson breathed as the Woody clattered to life. Beneath that clatter he could hear the wail of sirens to the east; he hoped the grisly trail he'd be following did not lead in their direction.

  He put the Woody in gear, glanced to his left at the front door of the house, saw the cop appear there and unholster his weapon. He put the accelerator pedal to the floor; the Woody ambled backward and hit the patrol car just behind it with a thud. He desperately put it in first, pulled forward, glanced to his left again. The cop had the gun leveled at him and had assumed a wide-legged, straight-armed stance. "I don't wanta shoot you!" he screeched. Ryerson caught and held the man's gaze. He realized that he was telling the truth—he did indeed not want to shoot, and the chances were only slight that he would. Ry
erson put the Woody in reverse, and backed around the patrol car while the cop, maintaining his military stance all the while, duck-walked in a half circle to keep Ryerson in his sights.

  Ryerson backed out of the driveway and swung the Woody around so it was facing east. He could see a soft, undulating red glow at the end of the street, beyond the glare of the high beams. But in the light of the high beams themselves, he saw only the street. And that meant that the evil thing that had visited Joan's house had gone in some other direction. He pulled quickly back into the driveway, noted that the cop was still keeping him in his sights. He yelled through the open window at the cop, "Call Captain Lucas. Tell him to meet Ryerson Biergarten at Frank's Place. He knows where it is."

  The cop yelled back, "Get out of the car!" and cocked the gun.

  Ryerson kept his eyes on him. He realized that the chances were now about fifty-fifty that the cop would fire. "And if you can't get hold of Captain Lucas," he yelled, aware that the wail of sirens was very close now, that he had perhaps thirty seconds before the other cars arrived, "call Guy Mallory and tell him the same thing." And he put the Woody in reverse, backed out of the driveway again, and swung around so he was facing west.

  His high beams showed him what he had expected to see—the obscene debris left in the wake of the thing that had visited here lay at random on the street in a kind of zigzagging trail. He floored the accelerator. With aching slowness the Woody clattered off to the west, but not before a bullet tore through the passenger window, then through the windshield, which exploded in a shower of shattered glass. Ryerson felt a dozen or more wounds open on his face and arms.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  What did duty mean? Jack Lucas wanted to know. And how had he so easily and quickly given it up? Was he really, as Doreen had called him, "just 240 pounds of groin and cowardice"? Yes, he was. She'd proven it.

  Because, for God's sake, what had she done except give herself to him and then threaten to take it all away? Other women had done the same thing. His first wife had. His girlfriend Monica had, and they'd fought it out and then had continued seeing each other, although with the understanding that he would call the shots, not her, that he would say when and how and where—and that's as it was intended to be, right? Sure, the relationship had ended in time. But everything ends. Even the bad things end. You win a few, you lose a few.

  And hadn't he thought that he'd won very, very big with Doreen? Hadn't the ecstasy he'd known with her been beyond anything he might have imagined? And hadn't she proved that he was indeed "just 240 pounds of groin and cowardice"? Here it is, Bozo; taste it, touch it, play with it. That's a good boy. Now, if you stop being a good boy, I'm going to take all these wonderful toys away from you.

  He wasn't forty-five years old. He was fourteen and he had his hand on a bare tit for the first time and his cock was rising and his heart was pumping hard and fast and his mouth was watering because he'd discovered what life was really all about.

  But Doreen had nothing to do with life. He'd known that almost from the beginning. She had nothing at all to do with life.

  He did. And that was the key, he realized at last, to the power she had over him.

  The key to the power she had over every-one in that place.

  Finally he understood what she had meant when she'd told him, "I am the link between death and life, between the living and the dead. I can show you what lies inside you—your power, your immortality."

  He swung the big Mercury Grand Marquis tight around the corner onto Peacock Street.

  ~ * ~

  Irene caught the eye of the burly Greyhound Package Express attendant, smiled, and decided to take a chance. He was halfway across the big, dark room, behind a waist-high counter. She pulled her shield from a vest pocket, flashed it at him, said loudly, "Police business," and nodded toward the bank of lockers in front of her.

  He looked at her a moment, then at the lockers, then shrugged and disappeared into the baggage area.

  Irene hurried over to the lockers. She found locker number 843—the second of the three numbers that had appeared on her monitor—and began to insert keys in the lock.

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson was not quite a mile from Joan's house, on a long, straight stretch of road bordered on both sides by several hundred flat and empty acres (soon to be the home of an industrial park—a kind of halfway zone between the city and the suburbs), when a pulsating red light appeared far behind him.

  In the glare of his own lights he could see that the grisly trail he was following was growing thinner—there an owl-eyed, bloated thing writhing at the side of the road, a hundred feet beyond it, something long and thin and sickeningly translucent smashed flat against the pavement, and a good distance beyond that, something bright pink, big-knuckled and fanged, hopped about on huge; flat human feet.

  And when he looked in the rearview mirror, he saw that the car was advancing very quickly on him, that he had maybe another twenty or thirty seconds until it pulled alongside and he'd have no choice but to stop.

  He sighed. It had been a desperate idea anyway—the idea that what was left in the wake of the evil thing that had murdered Joan would lead him to it, and so to his confrontation with it.

  He longed for that confrontation.

  If only for his own peace of mind.

  Now, he thought, that confrontation was going to be postponed.

  He sighed again; he felt his eyes water, felt a cold flower of grief and loneliness and fear blossom in his stomach.

  And he pulled the Woody over to the curb and waited for what he supposed was a patrol car to catch up with him.

  ~ * ~

  Benny Bloom felt the change starting. It always started the same way. His insides felt as if they were solidifying, as if someone else were trying to shoulder in to the space he inhabited. And then—like Laurie Drake, Lilian Janus, Andrew Spurling, and a half-dozen others—he had watched himself do things that were murderous and obscene, things that made him cringe and chuckle and weep and laugh all at the same time.

  Because it was all Benny Bloom.

  And the form—changed or not—didn't matter a bit.

  It was all Benny Bloom. Just as it had all been Lilian Janus, Andrew Spurling, Laurie Drake, Leonard McGuire.

  "I am the link between death and life," she had told him. "Between the living and the dead. I can show you what lives inside you and makes you immortal, the children you produce within yourself—the children of your desires and your needs and fantasies."

  He had believed her. They all had.

  That's why they were dying here. In this big, damp room.

  Because this was her feeding station.

  This was where she took their power from them and absorbed it and left them to languish and die.

  Benny fought the change as it began. He clung to the idea he had of himself, of the Benny who was a wimp and a nerd, the Benny whose only friends were other wimps and nerds, the Benny who hurt no one but himself.

  And because he fought the change—just as Laurie Drake and Leonard McGuire, and Andrew Spurling had—it fought him, and it brought him incredible pain, because the entity struggling within him, the child of his desires and fantasies, was creating itself.

  ~ * ~

  Irene Sabitch whispered, "It never happens this way. The last key is always the one that works." She'd inserted only a dozen or so keys into the lock, and the locker had opened.

  A manila envelope lay anticlimactically within. She had expected much more. She wasn't sure how much more—files, computer disks, wads of money perhaps. But much more than this lone manila envelope.

  She hesitated, glanced nervously around. The Package Express attendant was again behind the counter, attention on a magazine. She looked back at the manila envelope, inhaled, as if to give herself strength, and picked it up. She didn't open it at once. She tried to gauge its contents by touch first, and as she did, her brow furrowed in confusion. She spread the mouth of the envelope, looked in. "My G
od," she whispered, "cocktail napkins!"

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson did not turn off the Woody's engine or headlights. The lights were necessary to him; he did not want to become blind here, did not want his only link to the world around him to be the pulsating red light in the rearview mirror as it grew closer, and brighter, and more urgent.

  Resignedly, he began to study the pattern of wounds on his hands, where small fragments of the windshield had sliced into him. He thought how very much like some of Joan's wounds they were, and as that thought came to him, another cold flower of grief and loneliness blossomed inside him and he began to weep—not for Joan, but for himself.

  He lowered his head as he wept. When he raised it, because the wail of the siren behind him had stopped, he saw Doreen grinning at him through the space where the windshield had been.

  He screamed. It was a hard and deafening roar—a scream of sudden fear.

  Doreen's grin became a leer. She said to him, "Your lady friend ain't gonna do you no favors anymore. You got Doreen for that now!"

  He couldn't help it. Grief and anger moved him. With a speed born of desperation, he grabbed Doreen by the throat and squeezed very hard, so the wounds on the backs of his hands spurted blood.

  Doreen continued to grin. "Whatchoo doin', Mr. Biergarten?" she said, her words soft and amused. "You can't kill me. I'm gonna show you what livin's all about."

  He pushed at her—his intention was to send her reeling backward. But it was like pushing at a tree. His own body went back hard into the seat. And still grinning, voluptuous, deadly, she stayed precisely where she was—leaning into the space where the windshield had been.

  She said, "You're a joke, my man. You think you got power?"

  His mouth moved a little, but nothing coherent came from it. Doreen's face was awash now in the glare of the headlights of the approaching car. Her grin altered. "And sure you got power, you just don't know what kinda power you got. I been on the other side, man. I got death in here." Her hands went to her breasts, cupped them. "So I know what power is."