But, too soon, she was behind the wet, translucent curtain again. And what he saw of her mouth then convinced him only that she was wearing too much dull red lipstick.
She got to the barred door, pressed her nakedness into it, and clawed screechingly at the glass with her fingernails. George's fantasies gave him no choice but to press the button that opened the door and let her spill out over him, onto him, and push those awful canines into his thick grayish-pink neck while he grinned broadly, and loud nasal "uhnns" of pleasure came from him. Until he died.
~ * ~
Joan Mott Evans felt ill at ease. She thought her mother, rest her soul, would have said, "Someone's walking over your grave, Joanie," a phrase that much appealed to Joan because of its commingling of various apparent absurdities (time as a kind of Mobius band that's constantly folding back on itself; death as a state of continuous static wakefulness; resurrection as a small whispered promise). She thought it was likely that someone she didn't want to see was going to visit her that day. Similar ideas had proved correct in the past. Like the time her former sister-in-law, Judith, a woman who was obsessed with money-making plans for the housewife-Amway, Tupperware, envelope-stuffing, et cetera-had shown up with all her paraphernalia in hand, brought it into Joan's house, dumped it in the garbage, and announced, "I'm going to save you," because, she explained, she had given up making money in favor of, as she'd put it coyly, "making time with Jesus, instead." Joan had had an out that day. She was on her way to visit Lila Curtis, her new young friend who lived in Edgewater, just twenty miles south of Erie, where she had lived at the time. Lila had to take her driving test and Joan had offered her car to take it in; so Judith, smiling a promise that she would be back, left the house.
Minutes later, so did Joan. She drove to Edgewater, pulled up in front of Lila's house, honked the horn. She knew then that she should probably go inside and chat with Lila's parents. How did it look, after all, to have their sixteen-year-old daughter honked for by a twenty-three-year-old woman who claimed merely to be their daughter's friend? But she didn't like Lila's parents. They were cloying and possessive and judgmental. She could read it in them, in the aura they projected, more than in anything they said or did. She thought that Mr. Curtis, for instance, had ideas about his daughter that bordered on the unhealthy. And she thought that Mrs. Curtis knew this and blamed Lila for it. Caught in the middle, of course, was poor Lila-a good-natured, artistic, joke-telling girl who seemed to have struggled heroically out of her parents' bizarre attitudes toward her and developed a winning personality all her own.
But that day, the day of her driving test, Joan knew that something was wrong as soon as Lila got into the car. She could see trouble in her, in her eyes and in the set of her mouth. And every once in a while some-thing tight and cold and miserable leaped from Lila's brain into hers and made her shiver.
"What's wrong?" Joan asked.
And Lila, flashing a pale copy of her usual bright smile, answered, "Just nervous. About the test."
Joan nodded. "Sure. That's understandable, but you've been driving now for three or four months. Just pretend when the examiner sits down there"-she nodded at Lila's side of the seat-"that it's me."
Lila's smile flattened. "Thanks. That's a good idea. I'll do it."
Joan studied her for a few seconds. "What's wrong, Lila?"
Lila, looking straight ahead, answered, "I'm sick, Joan. Oh, God, I'm so sick!"
That had been the beginning of their walk together through hell.
~ * ~
Now, seven months later, after Joan's ill-at-ease feeling had dissipated, there was a soft knock at her front door. She got a twinge of apprehension, no more, then, convincing herself that it was only the paper boy collecting, she went and answered the knock.
Her face dropped when she saw Ryerson Biergarten, Creosote in his arms, standing on the porch. He smiled apologetically. "Am I disturbing you, Joan?"
"Of course you are," she answered, pretending weariness.
His smile faded. "We've got to talk, Joan," he said. "About Lila."
She sighed resignedly, because she'd heard a very firm resolve in his voice. She nodded. "Yes. We do," she said, and backed away from the door to let him into the house.
~ * ~
At the Buffalo Police Department's Records Division
Glen Coffman asked, "What'd you find out at the Evening News last night, Irene?"
She punched a few figures onto an equation she was jumbling, glanced at him. "Nothing. They wouldn't let me in."
Glen smiled, pleased. "Didn't you tell them who you were?"
"Of course I told them who I was. I told them I was a cop, and they-"
"Wait. Who's 'they'?"
"A janitor."
"Oh."
"A wise-ass janitor at that, too. He said if I wanted to get into the building's morgue at that hour, I had to have a warrant. Jesus, everyone's a damned civil libertarian." She sighed. "And I guess there's nothing wrong with that, really. It's just that I hate wasting my time."
"What about your boyfriend?"
"What about him? He wasn't there."
"Didn't the janitor know him?" Glen was smiling; he was clearly enjoying himself.
Irene looked askance at him. "Why don't you get out your Space Wars or your Star Wars or whatever juvenile game you play when you should be working?"
"Don't mind if I do." A pause. "You going back there today, Irene?"
"Yes," she answered.
Chapter Twelve
The woman was sated. And because she was sated, and Laurie's fantasy satisfied, and the incredible need gone, if just temporarily-like the feeling of release that comes after orgasm-Laurie herself should have by now made a reappearance.
But she hadn't.
She lay inside the woman, beaten and weary from battle with her, unable even to cry out again, "Mommy. Help me, Mommy!" She wanted only to fall into a long and dreamless sleep, where she did not have to be a part of this woman, where she did not have to watch the woman animate herself so sensuously and murderously; where she did not have to hear the awful sucking sounds and feel the warm blood coursing into her mouth, and into her throat, and into her belly.
The belly where Gail Newman's bullet had been.
The belly that was torn and bleeding now because of this woman. The belly that threatened to split open and end both their lives.
But there was this, too: The woman had begun to think, to reason. She had changed-because Laurie's fantasies about her had changed-from what had at first been merely an overripe eating machine, to vampire, and now into a sentient being, who, at any moment, could toss the bleeding, dying Laurie Drake inside her away, like some kind of tumor, and go off-a new and separate creature from her host-to do the things that her host's fantasies had told her she must do.
~ * ~
She was wearing clothes that she'd found in the Buffalo City Jail's locker room, a blessedly short distance from where she'd encountered George Orlando, and where his body now lay, a fearsome smile on his face. The clothes were a size smaller than her body required, but that was okay; tight was appealing. She was wearing a long-sleeved white blouse, no bra, a green cardigan sweater that barely took the chill off the early November day, a black, mid-calf-length formfitting skirt, and red high heels. She was a quarter mile east of the jail, on Lawrence Street, in a fashionable and self-important neighborhood of small elite restaurants, and specialty shops-a yuppie's paradise. Around her, men of various ages, and even a few women, turned their heads to stare appreciatively, and she gave some of the men and some of the women a flat, close-mouthed, come-hither smile.