"Give me a break, Greta."
She chuckled. "I'm only kidding." A short pause. "Harry himself thinks it was a werewolf that got him. Did you know that?"
"Greta, please-"
She held her hand up, shook her head briskly. "No, really. He says it was a werewolf. He says he heard this deep kind of growling sound down there where he works, and when he went to find out what the hell was going on-"
"Greta… "
"Don't interrupt me, Doug, I'm on a roll." She smiled again, playfully this time. "And anyway, he went to find out what the hell was going on and"-she growled suddenly, very deep in her chest, and grabbed Miller by the throat-"it got him." She let go of Miller.
"Christ, Greta!"
"Pretty good, huh?"
"You're going to scare me out of my damned shorts, Greta."
Miller thought she paused just long enough on that remark, and it pleased him. Then she said, "The part about hearing a growling noise down in Section Twelve is true, Doug." Miller realized that her tone had changed to one of deadly seriousness. "You're aware of that, aren't you?"
He nodded. "Yes. I am. But it could have been anything. It could have been one of the emulsifiers."
Greta shook her head. "No. The emulsifiers were off."
Miller shrugged. "Then it had to have been a werewolf, I guess."
"Or a were-chicken," Greta said.
"Or at the very least, a were-chihuahua," Miller said.
They both laughed at that, though not very hard or very long. And when they stopped laughing, Miller said, "Is Harry going to make it?"
Greta shook her head. "God knows, Doug."
~* ~
Kodak Park, the manufacturing arm of Eastman Kodak Company, was so large that it had its own fire department and its own police department. It also had an army of support people-cooks, sanitation workers, engineers, architects, glaziers, construction people, maintenance workers, air quality analyzers, electrical workers-who were employed so the other army, the army of people whose job was to produce the products of the Eastman Kodak company, could come and do their work. They made photographic film, primarily-print film, slide film, black-and-white film, color film, film for amateurs and film for professionals, film for doctors and dentists, nature lovers, brides and grooms, film for new parents and new grandparents, film for anyone who had pictures to take. It was likely, in fact, that one out of three people in the country had at one time or another used Kodak film.
And the ten thousand people employed at Kodak Park were fairly representative of the population mix of Rochester, New York, Kodak's home city. There were blacks and whites and Orientals, a few American Indians, some Pakistanis, some Vietnamese. There were Catholics and Protestants, Unitarians, a few Buddhists, some atheists, and a lot who never thought much about just what they were. There were fishermen and baseball players, hunters, bird-watchers and Amway representatives, musicians, writers, amateur historians, and budding young poets. And most of these people had one thing in common-the need for security, because a secure job with good pay and wonderful benefits went a long way toward insuring a secure life. Vacations, new cars, new homes, being able to indulge in the hundreds of nice little things that made life just that much sweeter, and at last a peaceful and happy retirement were what employment at Kodak had come to mean for most of its people.
Except one.
And for that one it had come to mean darkness, and agony, and a transient satisfaction in ripping away at the flesh of whoever might be close at hand.
Chapter Two
"He died, didn't he?" asked the man from Quality Control, Building Eight.
"Who?" the man from Research asked. "Who died? Harry Simons?"
The man from Quality Control nodded at the eight-by-ten-foot transparency just inside Kodak Park's Ridge Road entrance, in an archway above three green-carpeted stairs that led down to The Park's personnel offices (almost always crowded with hopeful applicants for employment). Corridors branching to the left and right at the bottom of the stairs also led into the interior of The Park, into Emulsion Coating, where Harry Simons had had such a bad time, into Research and Development, into Films Technology, into Long-Term Storage, and a host of other departments that filled a total of twelve one-acre buildings. "No," the man from Quality Control continued. "Him-the guy who took that picture."
The man from Research looked at the transparency with smiling appreciation for several seconds. Then he said, "Yeah. A couple of years ago, I guess."
"Alfred Eisenstadt, wasn't it?"
"No," answered the man from Research. "Ansel Adams."
"Oh, yeah. Ansel Adams." A short pause; then, "Great shot, isn't it?!"
"None better. I shoot in black and white quite a bit, myself. There's lots more room for creativity in black and white."
The man from Quality Control nodded sagely. "That's true. I mean, look at that, you can almost reach right out and touch it."
"Uh-huh. Though I think it's a shame that it's been so de-romanticized."
" `De-romanticized'?"
"Sure. By the astronauts."
"Oh. Yes. I see."
"I mean, it's like we've dumped on it or something."
The man from Quality Control wasn't convinced. "Maybe, maybe not. It's still got a kind of aura about it, it's still got some power."
The man from Research thought about that, then conceded, "Yes, it does. I think it's in the kind of light, I think it's in the wavelength-"
"No," the other man cut in, "I don't think it's that so much as the quality -I mean, I don't want to start sounding mystical or anything, but-"
"Oh heck, there's nothing mystical here."
"I was only going to point out what's already been proved, and that is that the quality of the light is the determining factor in the kind of influence it has."
The man from Research was up for a discussion. He nodded briskly. "Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but let me ask you this: Would that," and he pointed stiffly, "just as we see it, that, literally, have the same effect as the real thing?"
The man from Quality Control shook his head. "Not in a million years," he said. "Because it's not the real thing at all. It's chemicals and dyes and a remote light source. It's fake, it's an illusion."
The man from Research said, ending the discussion abruptly, "Sure it's fake, sure it's an illusion, but my God, it's such a true illusion," and they turned and walked out of the plant to Ridge Road, at the south side of The Park, and then to Jack Ryan's Grill nearby.
~* ~
Young, slim, vivacious Tammy Levine was on her way to see Smokey and the Bandit, Part Two. She'd seen it twice, but she'd decided that she could never tire of seeing it, because she could never tire of seeing Burt Reynolds. She'd seen Smokey and the Bandit (part one) twelve times, The Longest Yard ten times, and Smokey and the Bandit, Part Three four times. She kept such good track of the number of times she'd seen each movie because keeping track of things was her job, and she liked it. For the past five years she'd been keeping track of film in cold storage. She knew, at any given moment, just how much film-and its type (ASA, number of exposures, print or slide, black-and-white or color)-there was in each of the five cold-storage rooms in Building Nine. It was a job that, in most of the other buildings, took several people to do, but Tammy had always had an uncanny facility with numbers, facts, and lists. She considered it a kind of wild talent, and the Personnel Department considered her worth her weight in gold. Without her, two or three people would have to be hired (at a total of over $100,000 a year in wages and benefits) just to do her job.
The movie that Tammy Levine was going to see was being shown at one of The Park's five theaters. Getting to it from the building where she worked required a long and dreary walk through Building Nine's subbasement corridors. It was, Tammy had once told a friend, like walking through the inside of a weird kind of cereal box. The walls were close enough to touch with both hands at once, the ceiling so low that it sparked claustrophobia, and the lighting dismal at best. She'd made the walk at least a hundred times since coming to Kodak Park, and each time she'd told herself that yes, at last she was getting used to it. And each time she knew it was a lie. That she'd never get used to it.