The Changing (The Biergarten Series) (15 page)

Ryerson catapulted forward in the chair, face shaking with enthusiasm. "And yet . . . and yet, Tom. . . you can say that, and yet, you still believe in those . . .
demons
of yours—"

"I didn't say I
believed
in them, Rye."

"You did." Ryerson felt himself growing suddenly petulant. "You did!" he repeated, with emphasis.

McCabe let a self-accusing grin play on his lips, then fade. "Yes, I do believe in them. Of course I believe in them. I believe in my dreams, too. My dreams are real; my
thoughts
are real. But all by themselves they're not going to get up and go out and have a root beer. They're real, Rye—these little naked men are real, sure. In
my world
they're real. But not anywhere else."

Now Ryerson grinned. "Are you sure, Tom?"

And that's when Creosote latched onto the argyle sock Ryerson was wearing, taking him by surprise, which caused him to kick out and knock over the
saucerful
of water. Ryerson cursed, McCabe hooted. And Creosote trotted triumphantly off toward the kitchen with a piece of Ryerson's sock dangling from his mouth.

~ * ~

The round-headed boy shoved the knitting needle in very hard; it slid against a rib, then sank with a
phump
into the heart.

Joanna Wilde wanted to die then. But she didn't. It was shock, mostly, that was keeping her alive, lowering her blood pressure, bringing her oxygen requirements down. She stared stiffly into the sunken oval dark eyes of the thing on the landing. She cooed, "
Oooh
,
nooo
!" and watched expectantly, hopefully—knowing that blessed death was very near now—as the other knitting needle plummeted into her.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Miller," said the admitting nurse at Strong Memorial Hospital, "but Ms. Lynch has slipped into a coma, her listed condition has been returned to critical, and I'm afraid under those circumstances, no visitors are allowed." She saw the hurt in Miller's eyes. "I really am sorry, Mr. Miller."

"Yes," Miller said, "of course you are," then turned to go, head lowered.

"Mr. Ashland?" he heard.

He looked up. "Sorry?" he said, because the face before him didn't register immediately.

"How are you, Mr. Ashland?" Ryerson
Biergarten
said.

Miller shook his head confusedly; something about this man was familiar, if only he could place him. "Forgive me, I believe you have the wrong—"

Ryerson,
sans
Creosote, who had been left in the reluctant hands of Loren Samuelson, cut in, seeing that Miller really was confused. "My name's
Biergarten
. You came to see me a couple of weeks ago."

Miller looked momentarily stunned. He whispered something that sounded for all the world like "Ida is a member!" and then ran for the automatic exit doors. Ryerson turned, saw a beefy security guard step in front of Miller and stop him with both hands at Miller's chest. "No running, please; this is a hospital, not a gymnasium."

"Get
out
of my way!" Miller screeched, and pushed the security guard aside. The guard's hand went to his gun.

"Don't be a fool!" Ryerson screamed. The security guard turned toward him. Ryerson ran for the exit door; as he passed the security guard he hissed, with ill-disguised contempt, "What the hell were you going to do? Shoot him?"

The security guard looked confused. He took his hand off his gun and fell in behind Ryerson in pursuit of Douglas Miller. "What are you running for?" Ryerson called to Miller. "Don't run, there's no need to run!"

He watched Miller clamber over the hood of a car that had screeched to a halt to avoid him, watched him move—with incredible swiftness, Ryerson thought, for a man so clearly muscle-bound—into the main hospital parking lot where still another car had to screech to a halt to avoid him, and another and another, until at last one rolled slowly into him and sent him spinning into a parked Chevy van. For several seconds he staggered around as if drunk. Then he collapsed.

When Ryerson got to him, Miller was muttering Greta's name with a deep and almost embarrassing affection. Not too long after that there were several doctors standing around him, barking orders to the crowd that had gathered; the doctors were followed by nurses from admitting and emergency, one with a clipboard in hand and an admittance form to fill out; she was told by one of the other nurses that "it can probably wait, Emma," so she turned around and went back inside. Not too long after that, Miller was carried on a stretcher back into the hospital through the same doors he'd run out of minutes earlier and was taken up to radiology for X-rays. Ryerson
Biergarten
—who'd been asking repeatedly when he could talk to Miller, whom he knew only as "Mr. Ashland"—was told, "It doesn't look serious, but let us do our jobs first, please."

~ * ~

While all this was happening, Greta Lynch, lying in a coma in Room 1077, was reliving over and over again the blood guilt from her childhood—the guilt that had followed her into adulthood and sat on her shoulders night and day and babbled at her that she really was no good after all. How could anyone who was
good
have done something like
that
?

That was crushing her seven-week-old kitten, Leopard, underfoot in the middle of the night, in the dark, on her way back from pestering her parents for another glass of water (the fifth glass of water that evening). She'd tried to hide the fact of the kitten's death, of course, because she felt sure she'd murdered it in a fit of temper after her father had yelled "Go back to bed, for Christ's sake!" So, trying hard to keep her whimpering at whisper level, she had taken the kitten's limp body down to the garage, found a small cardboard box, put the kitten in it, taken the box to the side of the garage, where the ground was soft from rain splattering over the
gutterless
edge of the roof, and had buried it, using her hands as a shovel.

With the passage of time, the kitten's death had indeed, in her mind, become a murder.

The dirt that had caked her hands and fingernails had become the kitten's blood.

Its burial—which was discovered several years later, by a later owner of the house—became her "awful secret." And if someone had asked her—Greta Lynch, twenty-six-years-old, vivacious, intelligent—what that awful secret really was, she would have been stumped for the details. She would only have mumbled the catchwords of her guilt:
murder, blood, deception
.

~ * ~

Ryerson
Biergarten
was getting angry. He didn't like it when he got angry, both for the usual reasons that people dislike their own anger—because they often say and do things that make them look like fools, and because anger is a very wearying emotion—and also because when
he
got angry, his mind opened up wide and hungrily, and a flood of psychic garbage rushed in from whomever happened to be near him.

That's what was happening to him now, as he tried—so far in vain—to get the admitting nurse to tell him who the man he knew only as "Mr. Ashland" really was.

"Listen, Miss"—he checked her nametag again—"
Belgetti
, the man may be a suspect in the Kodak Park murders—"

"Sir, I've told you a half dozen times that whether or not he is a suspect in anything is not at issue here. Unless you can show me some authority—" And as Ryerson listened to her he heard, as a kind of whispered, psychic backdrop from the small crowd that had gathered:
Well, who the hell does he think he is?
and
What's that dog smell?
and
Nurse has got big tits; huh, huh!
and
Hospitals, hate 'em, hospitals!
and
Like a virgin, virgin, virgin
. . . And that mass of input—some of it coherent, some of it not, but all of it as distracting as a bad traffic accident—made it almost impossible, Ryerson knew, for him to appear as anything other than a lunatic bystander.

"Have you found out his name yet, Miss
Belgetti
? Please—can you tell me that, at least?"

Wouldn't mind
pushin
' on those honkers, yeah, huh, huh! . . . Doctors earn too much, anyway .. . What the hell is that smell of dog?

"Sir, I'm afraid there are other people waiting to be taken care of, so if you don't mind—"

Yeah, I'll knock your freakin' block off, fella!

Ryerson turned his head quickly, saw a tall, muscular, middle-aged man wearing a
shit
-eating grin.
Yeah, you!
He turned back to Nurse
Belgetti
. "Just his name. Please. Can you tell me his name?" His voice was quivering with anger now. "All I want is his name, Nurse
Belgetti
. Do you think you can handle that?" And he felt a hand on his shoulder.
Don't give me no . . . Don't give me any trouble .. . I don't want no . . . any trouble!
He heard, "Don't give me no trouble here. We don't want any trouble, Mister." He turned, saw the same security guard that had run after "Mr. Ashland." The security guard reiterated, "We don't want no more trouble, sir. This is a hospital, not a gymnasium."

Ryerson shook off the man's, grip. "Oh for God's sake, I
know
it's not a gymnasium!" He turned back to the nurse, sensed the security guard's hand going to his gun.

God, he's gonna shoot 'em!

I'll honk those honkers for ya, baby, yeah, I will!

Ryerson turned quickly, urgently back to the security guard. "Don't do it!" he hissed. The security guard backed up a step, as if in fear. Ryerson turned once more to Nurse
Belgetti
. He took a breath and nodded toward the big beige couches that cluttered the lobby. "I'll be over there, Nurse
Belgetti
. I want you to call the head of admitting. I want to talk to him. Or her." And he turned sharply and went to one of the couches.

As he sat and waited, he wondered two things: First, he wondered why his "gift," as so many people called it, was not more in his control, why it seemed so random and
unfocusable
—even under self-hypnosis, when the images were clearer, granted, but still needed a lot of interpretation. Why, for instance, in his anger just minutes ago did he get random thoughts from the crowd around him, but nothing at all from Nurse
Belgetti
? It was a phenomenon he'd encountered before, and the only conclusion he'd come to was that emotion blocked emotion (and take your pick of emotions—anger, sadness, love, hate), though he wasn't at all sure why.

Secondly, he realized that the man who called himself "Ashland" had presented a psychic picture that was essentially opaque, as if he—Ryerson—had been trying to look into a river that was choked with pollution, and anything floating even inches below the surface was rendered invisible. It was, he realized, the same sort of barrier he often encountered when he tried to read animals. Cats especially.

"Mr.
Biergarten
, is it?"

He climbed out of his reverie, glanced up at an officious-looking middle-aged woman wearing a gray business suit. "I'm one of your fans, Mr.
Biergarten
. I read
Conversations with Charlene
." She extended her hand; Ryerson stood, shook it, and smiled amiably. The woman added, "And I'm really very sorry for the trouble here."

"I'm helping in the investigation of The Park Werewolf—" Ryerson began.

She cut in, "Yes, I know. Any luck so far?"

He shook his head. "No, Miss, Mrs.—" She had no name tag; the name "Denise' swam into his consciousness.

"Mrs. McCurdy," she said.

"Is your first name Denise?"

She shook her head, smiled; "No. Nice try, though. My husband's name is Dennis." A quick pause. "You want the name of the man you were chasing, is that right?"

"Yes. I know him only as Mr. Ashland."

"And what makes you think that's not his real name?"

He smiled. "A hunch."

She nodded. "His name is Douglas Miller. Middle initial `A' for `Ashland.' You can go and see him now; he's in Emergency Room Five." She nodded to indicate a corridor to her right. "Down there, Mr.
Biergarten
."

~ * ~

In Edgewater, the round-headed adolescent with the small oval eyes that looked as if they never blinked stood over the body of Joanna Wilde. She lay on her back, legs pointing upward, arms spread wide, at the bottom of the stairway. She had two knitting needles sticking out of her chest; one on the right, one on the left, both stuck way in so only an inch or so was visible beyond the blood-soaked yellow housedress.

"Mom?" said the round-headed adolescent, half urgently, as if he were a passenger in a car she was driving and he was warning her about an upcoming icy patch of road. "Mom?" he said again. And then he began to change; his chin wrenched back into the shape—with a little cleft in it that was peculiar to Larry Wilde and no one else; the mouth wormed back into the mouth that was only Larry Wilde's. No pain attended this transformation. It was quick and smooth, like water sloshing about. Then the eyes changed, the forehead, the hair, the cheekbones. Four inches were added: one at the ankle bones, three at various places on the spine. And finally, Larry Wilde reappeared. And Larry Wilde screamed, "My God! My God! Help us, help us, help us!" as he vaulted down the stairs past his mother's body and out into the late-afternoon gloom of a coming storm.