T. M. Wright
The Devouring
Part One
Item from the Buffalo Evening News
October 15
TRANSIENT FOUND DEAD
The body of Wilson Goode, 56, no known address, was found by sanitation workers in a dumpster on Lawrence Street, at the heart of what is commonly known as "The District," Friday morning. According to Buffalo's 10th Precinct Captain, Jack Lucas, Goode had apparently been dead for several days. Chief Lucas could not disclose the cause of death, saying only, "It is under investigation. We do not at this point suspect foul play."
Goode's last known address, according to people in the area, was the Peacock Hotel, on Gadow Street. There are no known survivors.
Chapter One
In Buffalo, New York
"How many is that, Vera?" John asked from his La-Z-Boy.
"Twenty-two," Vera answered. Vera-a chunky forty-five-kept track of trick-ortreaters. The previous Halloween there had been forty-seven of them, five more than the year before, but three less than the year before that. "Eight Frankensteins, two ghosts," she went on; she also kept track of costumes-keeping track of things was an obsession with her. She kept track of birthday cards, sunny days, gray squirrels (there were thirty-one of them, she insisted, in the twin maple trees in front of the house), salesmen, robins; anything that could repeat itself and therefore could be kept track of, she kept track of with a vengeance. She continued her litany of trick-or-treaters: "Three skeletons, one gremlin-"
"A Gremlin?" her husband John cut in. "Someone came dressed as a car?"
"A car?"
"Sure." He was making a small joke. He knew well enough what Gremlins were; he'd taken their five-year-old granddaughter, Amy, to see the movie. "A Gremlin; AMC makes them."
"AMC?" Vera asked, confused.
John sighed; Another gem down the toilet, he thought. "Forget it," he said.
She went on. "And six witches, one werewolf, two vampires-" She stopped; someone had knocked at the door. "And there's another one," she said. She went to the door, put her hand on the knob, glanced critically at the two large wooden bowls-one stocked with small packets of M amp;Ms, the other with candied apples-on a table to the right of the doorway. She'd, have to restock soon, she thought. She opened the door.
"Trick or treat!" the five kids standing on the porch screamed in unison. Vera quickly surveyed their costumes-two witches (witches were popular this year), something that looked like a dog, a Ronald Reagan-a costume she disapproved of because it showed flagrant disrespect-and another skeleton, though the little girl wearing that costume had taken the skeleton hood off, probably to give herself some breathing room this warm Halloween night.
"You're all very scary!" Vera shivered, and as she shivered her body vibrated beneath her flower print housedress.
"Trick or treat!" the kids screamed again, except for the pretty brown-haired, green-eyed girl in the skeleton costume, who looked vaguely pouty and put out, as if Vera were wasting her time.
Vera said to her, concerned, "Are you having a good time, honey?"
The girl nodded once glumly.
From inside the Ronald Reagan costume the voice of a small boy chirped, "Trick or treat!" as if to hurry things along.
"Just a moment," Vera said firmly but gently, and looked around at the two bowls on the table behind the door. She looked back at the trick-or-treaters. "Let me see," she began. "How many-" She stopped. The pretty girl in the skeleton costume was gone. Vera stepped forward and leaned with her hands on the door frame. She looked left down the row of well-lit lawns and then right, down a row of equally well-lit lawns; a number of other trick-or-treaters were going to and coming from the neat two-story houses that made up Hydrangea Avenue. In the roadway some cars were stopped and some were moving very slowly, all of them, Vera supposed, driven by the parents of trick-or-treaters. But she saw no pretty brown-haired girl in a skeleton costume, so she shrugged and got down to the business of handing out candied apples and M amp;Ms to the kids who remained.
~ * ~
An hour later John got wearily up from his La-Z-Boy and trundled into the kitchen for a snack. His habit was always to snack before retiring anyway; usually something heavy, something loaded with salt and laced with cholesterol-a ham sandwich with mayonnaise, mustard, and Colby cheese on deli rye, for instance, with a big glass of ice cold milk on the side. That's what he thought he'd like tonight.
He opened the refrigerator door and peered in glumly. "Vera?" he called. Vera was in the living room, in her own chair, a three-quarter-size pale violet upholstered version of John's dark green leatherette La-Z-Boy. She was knitting a bulky red sweater, probably, she thought, for John. She'd decide for certain when it was almost finished. If it was too small, it would go to her nephew, Floyd. If it was too large-which seemed unlikely-she'd put it in the Salvation Army bin.
"Yes, John?" she called back.
"I thought we had ham, Vera. Where's the ham?"
Before Vera could answer, there was a soft knock at the door. She got up, sighing. On her way to answer the knock, she stuck her head into the kitchen doorway. "I used it in the soup this afternoon," she said.
"Soup?" John said. "I didn't see any soup."
"I froze it," Vera explained.
Another soft knock. John glanced in the direction of the front door. "What's that? Some more trick-or-treaters? God almighty, it's"-he checked the teapot-shaped kitchen clock over the sink-"it's almost ten o'clock."
"Last year," Vera said, rummaging about in her memory, "they kept coming until eleven-fifteen."
John shook his head. There was another soft knock at the front door-no more urgent, no louder, and so, in its repetitive way, very insistent. "What kind of parent would let their kid trick-or-treat till ten o'clock at night, Vera?"
She said, "I don't know, John," and went to answer the door while John poked gloomily about in the refrigerator.
Before Vera put her hand on the doorknob, there was another knock; it was the same as the first three-a soft triple knock, the knock of a child, she thought. But she hesitated. She hesitated because she sensed danger. Vera had a sixth sense about such things. She had stopped counting the number of times, for instance, that she'd hesitated over a chicken leg or a forkful of fish because she was certain that an errant bone waited to strangle the life out of her, and, upon investigation, usually found that she was right.
"Yes?" she called now through the front door.
Her only answer was yet another soft triple knock.
John called from the kitchen, "Hey, this mayonnaise is rancid, for chrissake!"
"That's yogurt," she called back. "Florence made it." Florence was Vera's best friend.
"Yogurt?!" John called, as if the word itself smelled bad.
Another soft triple knock sounded from the front door.
Vera sighed quickly, with agitation. She wished she were tall enough to peer through the two small rectangular windows in the top of the door. She stared fixedly at the door itself, as if conjuring up the ability to see through it. "Damn!" she breathed; she'd have to ask John to look into installing one of those security peepholes in the center of the door.
John called, "Well, I'm not going to eat it!"
And Vera, sighing, pulled the front door open.
The pretty brown-haired girl in the skeleton costume, sans hood, smiled appealingly up at her. "Hello, Mrs. Brownleigh," she said.
Vera's smile, which had appeared automatically, vanished. "How do you know our name?" she asked, although the literal answer was obvious; The Brownleighs was emblazoned in stylized black letters just to the right of the front door. What she had meant to ask, but hadn't had the time to figure out how to phrase, was, Why do you greet me as if you've known me all your life? She was, in fact, starting to construct just such a sentence when the pretty brown-haired girl on her doorstep began to change.