"It's impossible… it's impossible to protect ourselves totally from the… evils…" He fought back a tear; it returned and slid down his weathered cheek. He finished, "… the evils of this world, Frances."
She nodded. "Yes," she said. She knew it was the truth.
He took her hand and said again, "The evils of this world." He thought a moment. "The evils of this fucking world!"
"Yes," Frances said.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"For what?"
"For using the 'F' word here. In front of Lila."
She squeezed his hand. "It doesn't matter. She hears no words at all." And that, Frances thought, surely was the truth, thank God.
Ryerson had a list of names and places. It was a fairly long list, because The Park's new employees-transferees as well as people who'd joined the company within the past two years (a period of time he'd picked purely from intuition)-comprised a crowd that would fill a good-sized high-school gymnasium. He'd whittled that list down-again, almost purely by intuition-to sixty-three names. Greta Lynch was on that list. So was Jack Youngman, who'd been transferred from Detroit eighteen months earlier. And George Dixon.
Of those sixty-three names, twelve had cities or towns in common. George Dixon, for instance, came from Buffalo. So did a woman named Renee Jacqueline Borodin, who worked as a freelance model for the company. Greta Lynch came from Erie, Pennsylvania, and so did a man named Bill Clark, one member of Kodak's army of accountants. What Ryerson wanted McCabe to do was to check each of those cities or towns for murders or attempted murders that involved an M.O. similar to that of what was now being dubbed "The Park Werewolf." But when he tried to call McCabe-it was April 18th, two days after Leonard Pitcher's murder-he found that McCabe had been "called away from Rochester on an unexpected emergency."
Ryerson, thinking, What other kind of emergency is there? asked, "To where? What city? This is very important."
"I'm afraid I can't divulge that information," answered the lieutenant who had taken his call.
Ryerson sighed. Creosote, at the other end of the room on the bed, let out a huge and extended belch. "Sorry?" said the lieutenant, sounding offended.
"Nothing," Ryerson said, "that was my dog." A brief pause. "Could you tell me when he'll be back, please? This is in regard to The Park Werewolf."
"I don't know," said the lieutenant. "As I said, this was in the nature of an unex pec ted emergency, so his estimated time of return is information to which none of us is privy."
"Could I talk with Detective Bill Andrews then, please?"
"I'm sorry, but Detective Andrews is not available. Perhaps if you could tell me, sir, the nature of your business with Chief McCabe?"
"Yes," said Ryerson, thinking that surely McCabe had told most of the people involved in the investigation about him. "My name's Ryerson Biergarten; I'm a psychic investigator. I'm working with Tom, as you probably know, and I need access-"
"What sort of investigator did you say you were, Mr. Biergarten?"
"Psychic. I'm a psychic investigator."
"Oh?" A long pause; then, "And you say you're working with Chief McCabe on The Park Were wolf case?"
"Yes, that's right. He must have told you-" Creosote belched again, as loudly as before.
"Sir," said the lieutenant wearily, "are you trying to make werewolf noises?"
"No, no-I told you, that's my dog; he's a Boston bull terrier, that's the kind of noise that Boston bull terriers make."
"Yes, sir." Another long pause. "Sir, did you want to confess?"
"Confess?! Oh, for God's sake-"
"Because if you do, I'll have to put you on hold; we have a number of people confessing to this series of crimes, I'm afraid-it's a very popular series of crimes…"
Ryerson hung up.
Jack Youngman had the day off. On his days off he liked to golf, and even though the day was chilly and overcast, threatening rain, he got his clubs out and put on his golfing clothes. They fit very tightly, and he realized forlornly that he was in really lousy shape, that his belly hung nearly halfway down his thighs when he was sitting, and that he could probably make good use of a Jane Russell full-figure bra, for Christ's sake. He climbed into his Mercury Marquis and headed for the Happy Acres Golf Course.
Jack had been doing quite a bit of soul-searching lately. He'd been taking good long looks at himself and his life, especially at his career as a manager at Kodak. He wasn't sure there was much of a future in it, and he thought it might be time to switch careers, to strike out for new, more interesting territory-to change not only careers but cities, too, because this particular city was getting tiresome. Jack wasn't really certain where these thoughts came from. Sometimes he chalked them up to mid-life crisis, although he'd been going through that for ten years anyway and was unaware of it. And sometimes he chalked it up to honesty. Hell, he knew that people here-at Kodak and in his neighborhood in Rochester-didn't like him very much. And everyone likes to be liked. They didn't understand him, of course; that's why they didn't like him. They thought he was gruff and unapproachable, which was true enough, but not for the reasons they might think. No, he had long since decided, he was gruff and unapproachable for the same reason that people put up "No Salesmen" signs. Because they're made of mush; they can't say "no," their emotions are all right there on the surface. So if someone, anyone, were allowed to get close… The idea was too repulsive even to consider. Hell, he had an image to uphold, even in his own eyes. And if he played at being "gruff and unapproachable" long enough, wouldn't it eventually come true? Wouldn't he at last become what he was pretending to be?
He pulled his big Marquis into the Happy Acres parking lot, got out, looked around. He saw that the course was all but deserted, and it made him sad, because he thought of himself as a better-than-average golfer-at least he had a hell of a drive-and he enjoyed what he supposed were the envious stares of the other golfers.
He went around to the back of the car, opened the trunk, got his golf bag out, hefted it over his shoulder, and put his hand on the trunk lid to close it. He stopped. He looked confusedly at the long, red stain there, in the trunk. He bent over, fingered the stain, smelled his finger. "Jesus H.," he whispered. It was blood.
Chapter Eight
At night, in the little town near Erie, Pennsylvania where the Curtises had paid a brief visit to their daughter's grave, something stirred above it. Something that had lingered in the young girl, and even after her death still lingered near her, because it knew nothing of distance, or time. And it had no place to go, anyway. Before long it would hitch a ride on whatever creature happened along and seemed receptive to it. It was something very small, but something that could be incredibly powerful, too. When the time came. And the moment was right.
The thing there, at the grave, stopped stirring suddenly. And it rested. It was night. The cloud cover was thick, and the moon beyond it at waning gibbous. The thing rested because even those apparently all-powerful entities that dwell on the Other Side must rest. And the moon, even had it been full, would have had no effect on it. That depended on its host. Because the entity that lingered there, at the grave, was a kind of parasite. It was nurtured and it grew on whatever thick, black ooze it found in the human spirit.
When Ryerson Biergarten got in the mood, when he sat down, closed his eyes, and cleared his mind as completely as possible of the dregs of the day, he got a psychic, mental picture of The Park Werewolf. But as is true of most such mental pictures, when he tried to look at it, when he tried to study it as he would study a photograph or a painting in a gallery, the edges and details blurred, became indistinct, and he wasn't at all sure what he was seeing. So what he could see ultimately, in his mind's eye, was the horrific and nightmarish figure of a werewolf that looked as if it had wriggled into a huge nylon stocking.