Chapter Ten

The trick that Joan Mott Evans used to rouse herself from sleep when the dream began was a simple one. When she saw that she was approaching the spot where Lila was buried—and she always approached it from the east, through a field of horsetail and clover, at night, under a full moon—she bit her lip very hard, hard enough, in fact, that when she awoke, she found that she was bleeding. But that was okay—the blood was okay. Because the dream was hell.

It's what she did the night that Ryerson Biergarten was doing his clumsy dance for Captain Jack Lucas. She came up over the rise in the field of horsetail and clover—it had the creamy sheen of a full moon on it. She saw the wire fence to her left, used to keep the horses that once roamed these fields from wandering into the roadway. She saw, at the bottom of the slope, the place where Lila Curtis was buried. And she knew that the nightmare was about to begin again.

So she bit her lip. And started the blood. And awoke screaming, "Lila, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!" Then, because it was a scene that had been repeated countless times in the past four months, the panic, the fear, and the enormous sense of pleading and apology wore away almost at once, and she was left to get out of bed and take a long, hot shower to wash the sweat off.

~ * ~

The first words Gail Newman said when her eyes fluttered open and she saw Guy Mallory's face above her were, "How is she? How's Laurie?"

Mallory, who wanted very much to be tough about it, who wanted to growl at her, "She's locked up, thank ^-God," saw that Gail was genuinely concerned, so he answered simply, "She's going to be okay. They got the bullet out and she's going to be okay."

Gail's eyes closed. "Thank God," she whispered. She could feel the starched sheets beneath her, could smell the faint sting of antiseptic, could hear someone being paged once, then again, over the hospital intercom. She whispered, "I had to do it, Guy. I had no choice. She came after me." She opened her eyes again. "I really had to do it!" she insisted, her voice high and hard and tense because she'd mistaken the look of concern on Guy's face for one of skepticism.

He nodded once. "Yes, I know."

Gail became aware of the bandage around her neck, and of the IV letting blood into her arm. She asked confusedly, "What'd she do to me, Guy?"

Guy answered, a small nervous smile flitting across his mouth, "She bit you. As close as we can tell, she bit you, Gail." He hesitated, as if uncertain how to continue.

"And?" Gail coaxed.

He shrugged. "I don't know, sweet cheeks. They tell me you lost a lot of blood." He inhaled deeply, was clearly finding it hard to continue.

Gail coaxed again, "C'mon, Guy, be straight with me, okay?"

She saw another nervous smile appear on his mouth, saw him glance around. "Oh, hi," he said.

Another male face appeared next to his—the face of a man in his sturdy sixties who had a full head of bright white hair, piercing hazel eyes, and an air of quiet but intense authority about him. "Hello, Miss Newman," he said. "I'm Dr. Chandler; I'd like to ask you a question or two if you feel up to it."

"What the hell is going on here?!" Gail said aloud, and felt a sudden wave of nausea and dizziness wash over her.

Guy began, "She bit you, Gail, like I said—"

And Dr. Chandler broke in. "Sergeant Mallory, if you could please leave me alone with Miss Newman for a few minutes."

Guy shrugged, said, "Sure okay, I'll be right out here," and left the room.

Chandler began, summoning up a kind of stiff and uneasy bedside manner, "So tell me how you're feeling, Miss Newman; you gave us all a bit of a scare."

Gail said, "What did she do to me, Doctor?"

Dr. Chandler appeared to be considering her question for a moment. Then he nodded. "As the sergeant said, Miss Newman, you were bitten—"

"For Christ's sake, how many times do I have to be told that?" She stopped, again felt nauseous, closed her eyes against it.

"Dizzy?" Chandler asked.

She nodded.

"You lost a good bit of blood, I'm afraid," he added.

Gail whispered tightly, "She bit me, I know that, Doctor. But for God's sake, what else did she do?"

"Yes," he said, clearly to gain time. After a moment he went on. "Actually, we think she ... withdrew some of your blood—"

"Oh my God!"

"A small amount—"

"She sucked my blood?!" Gail cut in. "My God, what does she think she is, some kind of vampire?" Again, dizziness pushed through her. She closed her eyes.

And Chandler said, "Yes. I'm afraid that's precisely what she thinks."

~ * ~

"Wait a minute," Irene in the Records Division said to her coworker, Glen Coffman, "I remember someone named Curtis."

Glen growled at her, his fingers poised over his keyboard, gaze fixed on his computer monitor. "In a moment, Irene; I've got Darth Vader cornered here!"

She looked at him, astonished. "Glen, this is not a video arcade!"

"We all need a diversion, Irene." He punched three keys in rapid succession, then threw himself back angrily in his gray metal secretarial chair. "Dammit, goddammit!" he hissed. "I almost had him!"

"Can you forget about Darth Vader for a moment, Glen? I'm trying to talk to you about this file I've been trying to open for the last five days."

He sighed, got up, went over, studied her screen. It read, as before:

FILE DIRECTORY

CURTIS L.BAK

JME.BAK

HAWKINS.LET

LET.BAK

FORMAT.CMD

STAT.CMD

OPER.CMD

JME.OPE

USER NUMBER?

He shrugged. "I see you still haven't opened it." A pause. "You want my advice, Irene? Give it up. If there are no hard copies available anywhere, it's clearly something of no interest to the Buffalo Police Department."

She sighed. "We won't know that until we get a look at it, will we, Glen?"

Another shrug. "Okay, so don't take my advice."

"Gladly. I only wanted you to know that I think I remember someone named Curtis."

"So do I," Glen offered. "She was my kindergarten teacher. Miss Curtis. Great big fat woman; she had a mustache and smelled like sour cream."

Irene sighed again. "Can you be serious for just half a minute, Glen?"

"Sure." He checked his watch. "Starting now."

“Thanks."

"So?" he coaxed.

"So, I was only saying that I remember someone named Curtis. I remember it was a case from outside Buffalo, outside New York, in fact, if I'm not mistaken." She paused.

"And?"

"And that's about it. It was a murder case, I think. A murder/suicide—"

Glen was nodding.

"Why are you nodding?" Irene asked.

"I remember it, too. Her name was Lilian or Lily—something. But her last name was Curtis, and you're right, it was a murder/ suicide; I remember reading about it in the Evening News, maybe four, five months ago. It was a story out of Pennsylvania, I think."

Irene stood. "I'll be back in a while."

"Where you going?"

"To the Evening News. I'm going to check their morgue."

Glen looked at his watch again. "Irene, it's ten-thirty; their morgue's not open now."

She started for the door. "It is for people whose boyfriends are city editors."

"Oh," he nodded. "Yes, I see."

~ * ~

Detective Spurling and Captain Lucas booked Ryerson as a material witness in a case of attempted murder. It landed him in the Buffalo jail for the night, sans Creosote, who was given over to a police matron. "I hate these snotty little dogs," she explained, but agreed to keep him until morning when, Ryerson presumed, he'd be able to post bail.

He was in something of a blue funk, because while he hated jails, as everyone did, added to the usual reasons (they were places where people were locked up; they smelled bad; the people in them were almost universally unpleasant) was the fact that the psychic input here was not only dizzying and overwhelming, as it was in shopping malls and post offices, it was depressing as hell, too. It was sepia-toned, dead-ended, and desperate in a futile and resigned way. In his head it looked the way it smelled—of urine, sweat, and stale cigarette smoke.

So, the blue funk persisted.

It wasn't the first time he'd been in jail. During his junior year at Duke University he'd gotten rip-roaring drunk with several other juniors and they had collectively mooned the sorority house where Coreen lived. They were caught, as the cop who arrested them said, "with their pants down," charged with "lewd and lascivious behavior" and put in the drunk tank for the night.

It wasn't the last time Ryerson got drunk. For five years after that he consistently worked himself into a stupor, consistently made a fool of himself in public places, and consistently got arrested. At last, he realized that he was sliding into alcoholism, and that if he didn't quit drinking, he'd slowly kill himself. A year later, after several failed attempts at putting booze behind him, he was offered a drink and said no. On the night that he sat in a blue funk in the Buffalo holding cell, he hadn't had a drink in nearly fifteen years.

~ * ~

In "The District"

"Power!" the woman breathed. She had power. Power to be, to have, to control, power to change! It made up for the darkness, made up for the pain, made up for her time here in this damp and stinking place.

Because another damp and stinking place was where she had sprung up and had begun to visit herself upon the earth.

Power! Control! Change!

And what had that last poor fool called her—werewolf? That was for others to imagine, only one of the evil fantasies her beautiful living children could indulge in and so, through it, take power for themselves.

And so give power to her.

Werewolf indeed! The fool. That was for that other creature. The creature she had sprung from. The creature whose flesh hung now like paper on its bones and whose eyes mingled with the liquid that its brain had become.

~ * ~

Captain Lucas came to Ryerson's cell at 9:30 that morning. He had a sheet from a computer printout in his hand, and as the guard opened the cell door for him, he smiled gloatingly.

He sat on the bed next to Ryerson and held up the sheet of paper as if holding up a picture of one of his kids; "You know what this is, Dr. Biergarten?"

Ryerson glanced disinterestedly at him, and looked away. "I don't like to be called doctor."

"Shit," Lucas cried, "I would if I were you. If I had a fucking doctorate in parapsychology, I'd sure as hell want to be called fucking doctor."

Ryerson shrugged. "Call me what you wish to call me."

Lucas guffawed. "Call you anything but sober, isn't that right?" He guffawed again, immensely pleased with his joke.

Ryerson chose to ignore the remark; he nodded at the computer printout. "What you have there, Captain Lucas, is a litany of past mistakes. I paid for those mistakes, and I can't see that what happened a decade and a half ago has any bearing at all on what you're investigating now."

It was Lucas's turn to shrug. "What we have here, Dr. Biergarten, is the record of a loser. Once an alky, always an alky, that's what I say."

"You're a real phrasemaker, aren't you, Captain?"

Lucas quickly grew angry. He waved the computer printout so it flapped in the air. "Whether this has anything to do with Laurie Drake and Detective Newman is something we have yet to determine—"

Ryerson cut in, sighing. "You called Tom McCabe, didn't you?" Tom McCabe was Chief of Detectives in Rochester, New York, where Ryerson had worked on what had become known as "the park werewolf." He and McCabe had grown close during his investigation, and Ryerson assumed he'd be an excellent character reference.

Lucas said, "Yeah. Sure. I called him. How'd you know?"

Ryerson answered simply, "I know a lot of things, Captain." He paused. "I assume that Tom vouched for me?"

"He said you worked with him and he said he was sorry to hear you were in trouble. That's about it."

"You're lying."

Captain Lucas grinned. "Whatever your friend said, Mr. Biergarten, doesn't make a bit of difference here. I don't care if you're the fucking queen of France, you're trying to play footsy with us and I don't like it one damn bit."

Ryerson leveled a withering gaze at him; he wished mightily that his gifts included telekinesis as well, so he could mentally untie the man's shoelaces or make his cigar fall into his lap. Instead, he said, "Tell me, Captain Lucas—just how much do you value your credibility here at the Buffalo Police Department?"

Lucas looked confused, a little apprehensive. "What are you talking about?"

Ryerson shrugged; he hated doing this, he thought a person's private life should indeed remain private, but for some reason this man bore him a lot of animosity, and if the man had his way, Ryerson would probably sit in the holding cell until Christmas. He said, "What I'm talking about, Captain, is what you do at night. At"—he paused, probed about in the psychic atmosphere—"at Ed's Place."

Lucas grinned broadly. "Ain't no Ed's Place in Buffalo, my friend." He put his hands palm down on the bed, as if preparing to stand.

Ryerson went on. "The name of the place doesn't matter much. Whatever it's called, it's what you do there that gives you such a kick, isn't it?"

Lucas hissed, "You son of a bitch!"

Ryerson shook his head. "No, Captain. I just want to get out of here, that's all. And if I have to blackmail you to do it, then I will."

Lucas's cheeks puffed several times with anger and frustration. Finally, he pushed himself violently to his feet, went to the cell door, barked, "Guard! Guard!" glanced around at Ryerson, and said very succinctly—through lips tightly clenched with anger—"You'll be free as soon as I can clear the paperwork. Just don't leave the city."

"I have no intention of leaving the city," Ryerson said. "I've got business to attend to here."

Then the guard came and let the captain out.

Ryerson sighed. He thought that the years he'd spent gambling—which seemed to have gone hand in hand with his drinking—had paid off; at least he'd learned how to bluff. Because what he'd read from Captain Lucas had merely been vague—only that Lucas went to a bar on certain nights and while he was there he did something that made him feel ashamed. Ryerson had read no more than that. He didn't think he'd have been able to, anyway, because whatever it was that Lucas did at the bar made him feel so very ashamed that he pushed it far back into his consciousness and let it lie hidden most of the time.

At 11:00 that morning Ryerson was let out of the holding cell. He located the police matron—who was getting ready to go home—got Creosote back, was told by the desk sergeant that the Woody was at the Buffalo Impound Garage, five blocks away, and was reminded one more time by a growling Captain Lucas, "I don't care what you think you know about me, ace; if you try to go back to Boston or whatever damned hole you climbed out of, I'll haul your bare ass back here personally."

It was 11:25 A.M. when Lucas gave Ryerson this warning.

Not quite five minutes later Laurie Drake, in Room 12 of the hospital wing of the Buffalo City Jail, began to suffer the torments of the damned.

~ * ~

The thing inside Laurie had no color, or shape, or smell, but it did have mass, though very little of it, and weight, about a quarter of a gram, and it traveled about in her veins like a blood clot. Most of the time in the past two months, ever since, on a dare, she'd gone at night into the area called "The District," she had had no idea she was playing host to it; she'd felt a vague discomfort now and again, or her belly ached, and she would think that she was at last beginning to have her period.

And when the change started, pretty, laughing, "academically talented" Laurie Drake was all but squashed by the entity of her own creation. Laurie Drake—who secretly longed for the mama doll she'd carted through infancy and into preadolescence and had at last thrown away to prove she was indeed growing up—was squashed by the tall, buxom, incredibly sensual and murderous woman that lived deep inside her adolescent fantasies. The fantasy she had built up out of a character in a movie.

The thing inside her fed on the darkness in that fantasy. It saw murder there,  and built on it; it saw hunger there, and built on it. It changed Laurie Drake inexorably. It changed her into the fantasy that lived and moved at first only inside her head.

And then it made that fantasy into something sensuously and murderously real.

In Room 12 of the hospital wing of the Buffalo City Jail, Laurie Drake again began to change.

But she didn't want to change.

She wanted to stay what she was—the pretty, brown-haired, .twelve-year-old girl who secretly longed for her mama doll. She was tired of being squashed, buried, pushed back.

And so she fought the change. And it fought her.

And the pain therefore was incredible.