~ * ~
Stephen Brownleigh looked away from the viewing window in the basement of the Buffalo County Medical Examiner's Office and nodded grimly. "Yes," he said to the detective standing with him, "that's my mother. That's Vera Brownleigh."
Sergeant Guy Mallory, recently promoted, neat, pleasant-looking, put his hand comfortingly on Stephen Brownleigh's arm. "I'm very sorry," he said.
"Yes," Stephen sighed, "thank you-"
"But I must ask you to identify the other body," Sergeant Mallory interrupted.
Stephen sighed yet again, nodded, and turned back to the viewing window. On the other side of the window, a grim-faced, white-coated female lab technician lifted the sheet from the face of the second corpse. Stephen gasped and turned quickly away. There was a row of black plastic chairs nearby; he sat in one, put his face in his hands. Sergeant Mallory again laid his hand comfortingly on Stephen's arm. "Mr. Brownleigh, are you all right?"
Stephen said nothing.
The sergeant coaxed gently, "Mr. Brownleigh, are you all right? Can I get you something?"
Stephen's head, face still buried in his hands, nodded a trifle.
Mallory asked, "Is that your father, sir?" Stephen answered into his hands, "I think so."
Mallory sat down beside him. "You think so?" His voice still was gentle. "Could it be someone else, sir?"
Stephen looked quickly at him, in astonishment. "Good Lord, Sergeant, it could be anyone, couldn't it? It could be . . . it could be anyone! How am I supposed to identify him? How can I identify what looks like a slab of meat, for Christ's sake!"
"Sir, it's actually just a formality-"
"A formality? My father is just a formality? What the hell are you-" He stopped, took a deep breath, turned his head again, planted his elbows on his thighs, clasped his hands in front of his knees. "Yes, then," he whispered, voice quaking. "Yes! It's my father-that thing in there is my father!"
"Thank you, sir." Mallory patted Stephen's arm. "Thank you. And you have our very sincere condolences."
~ * ~
"Dear Ann Landers," wrote Margaret Drake, "this is the first time I've written to you, although I've been reading your column"-She stopped, crossed out the word "column," and wrote instead "wonderful column for years." She thought a moment, the pen point stuck into her mouth, her tongue working idly at it. She went on. "But I have a problem that only a person of your credentials can help me with." She stopped, thought again, rewrote the sentence as, "But I have a problem with which only a person of your marvelous credentials can help." She liked that. She smiled, continued writing. "The problem is my daughter, whom we shall call Loretta, whom is eight"-she crossed out "eight," wrote "ten" instead-"and who is using very bad language and is also resorting to physical types of acts." She reread the letter and decided that it was going well. She wrote on. "I think you will agree with me, Ann, if I may be so bold as to call you Ann, that twelve-year-old girls"- She stopped, hurriedly crossed out the phrase "twelve-year-old girls," wrote "ten-year-old girls," and continued, "have no right whatsoever to use foul language with their mothers or to resort to physical acts against them. It is not as if they are boys, which is bad enough …" She reread the letter and decided that it sounded pretty good so far. Maybe it could stand some polishing here and there, some tightening, but it was going nicely.
She was in her bedroom, at her pink vanity table. Laurie's bedroom was right next to hers, and since the walls of the late-60s-style ranch house-in the late-60s-style subdevelopment near Orchard Park, five miles west of Buffalo-were wafer-thin, she could easily hear through them. She could hear now a string of vicious obscenities from Laurie's bedroom. She paid little attention to it; Laurie had been cursing all morning. She thought only that some of the words she was hearing had to be foreign words because she'd never heard them before.
She continued writing. "The tried and true method of stopping girls from using obscenities is to wash their little mouths out with soap, and this I have done to Laurie." She hurriedly crossed out "Laurie," wrote "Loreen," thought a moment, crossed that out, wrote "Loretta," and continued writing: "But she is still swearing 'like a trooper' as the saying goes. And there is another thing too which I think is the start of it all, and that is that she has gotten an interest in things that are supernatural, in vampires especially. I don't know why. With all this horror stuff in the movies and on TV, etcetera, I suppose it was bound to happen. My own theory, however, is that it has something to do with her father who is dead and whom she misses. She is so taken with this vampire thing that I said to her No, you may not wear a vampire costume out trick or treating this year (her last time out, of course, since she is going to be thirteen next year). I told her I thought vampires were unhealthy. So she wore a skeleton costume instead and of course when she came back to the house it was in shreds, and I had made it myself too." She stopped writing. The tone of the obscenities ushering through the wall from Laurie's room had changed. It was no longer the high whine of a twelve-year-old girl; it was a velvet drizzle tinged with hate. And by itself it was a million times more communicative than what she had been hearing before. It was communicative of murder.
She dropped her pen; it rolled to the edge of the desk and then to the pale blue shag carpet. She raised her head in nervous little fits and starts, so she was looking in the vanity's oval mirror. She saw that the bedroom door was closed, but as she watched, it opened very slowly, so slowly, in fact, that it was a good quarter minute before the naked woman who had pushed it open was revealed in the doorway.
Margaret Drake's mouth fell open. At the Level of a high breathless whisper, these words escaped her: "I don't have any money."
And the naked woman said in that voice which was at once murderous and velvet and drizzly, like a razor-edge sword slicing through a melon, "You idiot, I don't want any money!" Then her mouth opened very wide-revealing the deadly, gleaming canines within-so she could consume as much of Margaret Drake as possible in the first bite.
But then her mouth closed partway, as if she had suddenly lost her appetite. And the electrifying aura of murder that hung about her lost some of its intensity, as if the blush of passion were leaving her, and these words, in the high pleading voice of a twelve-year-old girl vaulted across the room: "Mommy? Help me, Mommy!"
Margaret Drake's thoughts turned very briefly-more briefly than the instant necessary to blow out a candle-back to the time when her husband was alive and Laurie was a cute and bouncy toddler. Margaret remembered hearing those same words then, when the Laurie she loved most was still with her: "Mommy?" she had said in her halting, lispy toddler's voice, her little hands holding the two ends of her shoelaces, "Help me, Mommy!"
Then the instant was over and the naked woman flew across the bedroom. And because the twelve-year-old that dwelt within her had her own ideas about vampires, ideas which said that there was nothing subtle or slow or strangely loving in what they did, her wide-open mouth latched savagely onto Margaret Drake's throat and she tore a huge and quivering chunk of flesh from it.
~ * ~
"Whatchoo smilin' at like that for?" Hap asked the woman. "Why you smilin' like that?" He couldn't see her face well, he could see only that she was smiling, and that her eyes seemed to be on something far beyond his small stinking room.
She was naked beneath him on the lumpy mattress, and the only light in the place was from a streetlamp on the edge of what was known as "The District," an area which, forty-five years earlier, had been alive with industrial activity, manufacturing thousands of tons of war materiel, from shoes to rotor blades to toothbrushes. But when the war ended, the hub of industrial activity became merely redundant-the shoes and rotor blades and toothbrushes manufactured here, in these dozens of big square cement block buildings, were no longer needed, or were manufactured more cheaply elsewhere. So, within a couple of years, the area fell into disuse. Eventually, some of the buildings were bought by entrepreneurs, who saw them as perfect places for indoor malls, or-with major renovation-for low-cost housing. But these efforts were doomed to failure for one very good reason; the air was bad. On Buffalo's southwest side, a little more than two miles away, a hundred acres worth of smelters were kept going night and day, and since the prevailing winds were to the northeast, "The District" got the brunt of the foul air.