She got taller, first, though her face remained that of a thirteen- or fourteen-year old. Rapidly, and fluidly, as if enacting a precise time lapse of the next decade of her life, she grew a good ten inches. And her body matured, too, her hips flared and her breasts blossomed, and the skeleton costume, which did not change, shredded down the sides and held precariously at the left shoulder.
A quivering, incredulous smile appeared on Vera's mouth. "Are you all right, honey?" she whispered raggedly, as if the girl had merely put her hand to her stomach, or had looked suddenly pale, or had asked for a glass of water. Because, very simply, how could she-Vera-actually be seeing what she thought she was seeing? Clearly something was wrong here, but just as clearly it was something wrong with her, with Vera, as much as with the pretty brown-haired girl. Clearly the sun did not rise in the west, and if, one morning, it appeared to, then someone was simply mistaken about directions.
The change hesitated there-the playfully grinning thirteen- or fourteen-year-old face on the electrifyingly sensuous body of a twenty-year-old woman.
That's when John appeared from the kitchen. He had a bottle of Coke in one hand, a cheese sandwich in the other, and when he saw what Vera was seeing, a huge and lustful grin played on his mouth momentarily. Until he realized that what he was looking at was not quite right somehow, that it was even a little obscene-like goats surgically altered to look like unicorns. That sweet and pretty little girl's face had no business there, on that incredible body.
"Vera?" he managed. "Who's that?'
Vera shook her head slowly. She said nothing.
The skeleton costume fell, revealing the nakedness beneath.
And the change resumed. The eyes lost their innocence, the playful grin became a sneer. And the mouth opened very, very wide, the way a snake's mouth opens to take in the body of a mouse.
John dropped his bottle of Coke. It thudded to the floor, bounced on the hard wood; the lip of the bottle hit his ankle and he glanced at it, muttered a small, confused Urp! of pain, looked back at the woman in the doorway.
Her head was buried in the left side of Vera's neck. Only her arms, the top of her head, something of her forehead, and the bridge of her nose were visible because Vera 's quivering body in the flower print housedress blocked the rest of her.
And for a moment John resented Vera for that. For blocking his view of the woman's incredible body. He smiled in anticipation. He said, "Vera?" and wanted to add, Get out of the way, but realized he couldn't say that to her, that she was still his wife; they'd shared twenty-seven .years and had produced six children and now that her life was coming to an end-it was obvious; the red stain on the back of her housedress was growing larger by the second-he had to say something comforting to her, something to sum up their lives together, something short and simple and sweet, something that would surely push through the shock and fear that had to be consuming her-just as that incredible body was consuming her-and into her heart.
"Vera," he said, "you really knew how to keep track of things."
Vera's body quivered violently, and she fell with a massive thump to the hardwood floor.
Then the woman standing over her turned her gaze on John. And he turned his gaze on her-on her nakedness, first. Then on her eyes as she swept toward him. And he was as pleased and as eager as an infant at its mother's breast to make himself her next victim.
~ * ~
In another part of Buffalo, where the rats outnumbered the humans a hundred to one, a woman pushed open the door of a seedy bar, moved fetchingly over to a table, and sat down. The night was unseasonably warm, and she was in a voluptuous, low-cut, tight green dress and high heels.
At the other end of the bar, one of two men sitting playing poker nudged his buddy-who had his back turned to the woman-and said loudly enough that he hoped the woman could hear him, "Looka that, Sam. I wouldn't mind givin' her a poke or two."
Sam glanced around and saw the woman; his face broke into a broad, sleazy grin. "What's she doin' in here, I wonder, Hap?"
Hap said, "Only one way to find out," and he stood and made his way over to the woman.
She didn't acknowledge him at once, so he said, "How you doin', honey?"
She glanced slowly up at him. A chill coursed through him. He'd never seen eyes like hers before-they were huge, and brown and beautiful and … distant. As if, as she looked at him, her eyes were on something else entirely. And her little flat grin, Hap thought, was like the one that Sam got when they watched porno flicks together.
He pressed on. "My name's Hap. What's yours?"
The bartender, a beefy guy in his early forties who'd spent several years as a professional wrestler, bellowed, "What'll it be, lady?"
Her gaze turned slowly from Hap to the bartender. "Sloe gin fizz," she said, and her gaze drifted back to Hap. Another chill went through him. He nodded. "Nice meetin' you, huh?" he said, and hurried back to his table.
"Not my type," he said sullenly to his friend Sam, and sat down.
Sam took a long, appreciative look at the woman. "Well, she's sure as hell mine," he said.
~ * ~
Six Months Earlier
In a little town twenty miles south of the Pennsylvania border, near Erie, a middle-aged man and woman laid a wreath on the grave of their teenage daughter, Lila, dead exactly two months. The man, whose name was Will Curtis, was wearing a heavy gray coat to protect himself from the mid-April chill and supported himself with a cane because of arthritis. He nodded sullenly at the grave and said to the woman, his voice slight and creaking, "All her life she was a good girl, Frances. She was a nice girl. She ran away, but she came back to us. She was a nice girl."
But Frances said nothing. Frances believed otherwise. She let her husband rattle on: "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, it surely was the truth.
Chapter Two
In Boston
"Yes, Coreen," sighed Ryerson Biergarten, "I realize that I look like a slob. And no, I don't like to look like a slob, and I really would do something about it if I-"
His first wife, who went these days by the name of Coreen Savage, sneered and cut in. "If you wanted to, Doctor." She called him "doctor" now as a kind of prod. When they were married, she called him doctor because he held a doctorate in parapsychology from Duke University, and although no one else called him doctor, because he didn't encourage it, for her, he knew, it had been a title filled with implied status and self-serving pride. Ryerson Biergarten knew many things, not only through the normal processes of education and living, but also because he was an astoundingly gifted psychic. His casual handsomeness and his unparalleled work as a psychic investigator had made him the darling of the popular press, and although he claimed to dislike the popular press, he'd admitted grudgingly that when People magazine had featured him on its cover ten months earlier, it had made him feel very good.