He wasn't forty-five years old. He was fourteen and he had his hand on a bare tit for the first time and his cock was rising and his heart was pumping hard and fast and his mouth was watering because he'd discovered what life was really all about.
But Doreen had nothing to do with life. He'd known that almost from the beginning. She had nothing at all to do with life.
He did. And that was the key, he realized at last, to the power she had over him.
The key to the power she had over every-one in that place.
Finally he understood what she had meant when she'd told him, "I am the link between death and life, between the living and the dead. I can show you what lies inside you-your power, your immortality."
He swung the big Mercury Grand Marquis tight around the corner onto Peacock Street.
Irene caught the eye of the burly Greyhound Package Express attendant, smiled, and decided to take a chance. He was halfway across the big, dark room, behind a waist-high counter. She pulled her shield from a vest pocket, flashed it at him, said loudly, "Police business," and nodded toward the bank of lockers in front of her.
He looked at her a moment, then at the lockers, then shrugged and disappeared into the baggage area.
Irene hurried over to the lockers. She found locker number 843-the second of the three numbers that had appeared on her monitor-and began to insert keys in the lock.
Ryerson was not quite a mile from Joan's house, on a long, straight stretch of road bordered on both sides by several hundred flat and empty acres (soon to be the home of an industrial park-a kind of halfway zone between the city and the suburbs), when a pulsating red light appeared far behind him.
In the glare of his own lights he could see that the grisly trail he was following was growing thinner-there an owl-eyed, bloated thing writhing at the side of the road, a hundred feet beyond it, something long and thin and sickeningly translucent smashed flat against the pavement, and a good distance beyond that, something bright pink, big-knuckled and fanged, hopped about on huge; flat human feet.
And when he looked in the rearview mirror, he saw that the car was advancing very quickly on him, that he had maybe another twenty or thirty seconds until it pulled alongside and he'd have no choice but to stop.
He sighed. It had been a desperate idea anyway-the idea that what was left in the wake of the evil thing that had murdered Joan would lead him to it, and so to his confrontation with it.
He longed for that confrontation.
If only for his own peace of mind.
Now, he thought, that confrontation was going to be postponed.
He sighed again; he felt his eyes water, felt a cold flower of grief and loneliness and fear blossom in his stomach.
And he pulled the Woody over to the curb and waited for what he supposed was a patrol car to catch up with him.
Benny Bloom felt the change starting. It always started the same way. His insides felt as if they were solidifying, as if someone else were trying to shoulder in to the space he inhabited. And then-like Laurie Drake, Lilian Janus, Andrew Spurling, and a half-dozen others-he had watched himself do things that were murderous and obscene, things that made him cringe and chuckle and weep and laugh all at the same time.
Because it was all Benny Bloom.
And the form-changed or not-didn't matter a bit.
It was all Benny Bloom. Just as it had all been Lilian Janus, Andrew Spurling, Laurie Drake, Leonard McGuire.
"I am the link between death and life," she had told him. "Between the living and the dead. I can show you what lives inside you and makes you immortal, the children you produce within yourself-the children of your desires and your needs and fantasies."
He had believed her. They all had.
That's why they were dying here. In this big, damp room.
Because this was her feeding station.
This was where she took their power from them and absorbed it and left them to languish and die.
Benny fought the change as it began. He clung to the idea he had of himself, of the Benny who was a wimp and a nerd, the Benny whose only friends were other wimps and nerds, the Benny who hurt no one but himself.
And because he fought the change-just as Laurie Drake and Leonard McGuire, and Andrew Spurling had-it fought him, and it brought him incredible pain, because the entity struggling within him, the child of his desires and fantasies, was creating itself.
Irene Sabitch whispered, "It never happens this way. The last key is always the one that works." She'd inserted only a dozen or so keys into the lock, and the locker had opened.
A manila envelope lay anticlimactically within. She had expected much more. She wasn't sure how much more-files, computer disks, wads of money perhaps. But much more than this lone manila envelope.
She hesitated, glanced nervously around. The Package Express attendant was again behind the counter, attention on a magazine. She looked back at the manila envelope, inhaled, as if to give herself strength, and picked it up. She didn't open it at once. She tried to gauge its contents by touch first, and as she did, her brow furrowed in confusion. She spread the mouth of the envelope, looked in. "My God," she whispered, "cocktail napkins!"
Ryerson did not turn off the Woody's engine or headlights. The lights were necessary to him; he did not want to become blind here, did not want his only link to the world around him to be the pulsating red light in the rearview mirror as it grew closer, and brighter, and more urgent.
Resignedly, he began to study the pattern of wounds on his hands, where small fragments of the windshield had sliced into him. He thought how very much like some of Joan's wounds they were, and as that thought came to him, another cold flower of grief and loneliness blossomed inside him and he began to weep-not for Joan, but for himself.
He lowered his head as he wept. When he raised it, because the wail of the siren behind him had stopped, he saw Doreen grinning at him through the space where the windshield had been.
He screamed. It was a hard and deafening roar-a scream of sudden fear.
Doreen's grin became a leer. She said to him, "Your lady friend ain't gonna do you no favors anymore. You got Doreen for that now!"
He couldn't help it. Grief and anger moved him. With a speed born of desperation, he grabbed Doreen by the throat and squeezed very hard, so the wounds on the backs of his hands spurted blood.
Doreen continued to grin. "Whatchoo doin', Mr. Biergarten?" she said, her words soft and amused. "You can't kill me. I'm gonna show you what livin's all about."
He pushed at her-his intention was to send her reeling backward. But it was like pushing at a tree. His own body went back hard into the seat. And still grinning, voluptuous, deadly, she stayed precisely where she was-leaning into the space where the windshield had been.
She said, "You're a joke, my man. You think you got power?"
His mouth moved a little, but nothing coherent came from it. Doreen's face was awash now in the glare of the headlights of the approaching car. Her grin altered. "And sure you got power, you just don't know what kinda power you got. I been on the other side, man. I got death in here." Her hands went to her breasts, cupped them. "So I know what power is."
Ryerson became aware that the car behind him was coming to a halt.
Doreen cooed on. "I got death all around me, Mr. Biergarten. I got death for insides. Where other people got a heart and lungs and stomach, I got death. She gave that to me. Joan gave that to me."