The Changing (The Biergarten Series) (2 page)

"Christ, Greta!"

"Pretty good, huh?"

"You're going to scare me out of my damned shorts, Greta."

Miller thought she paused just long enough on that remark, and it pleased him. Then she said, "The part about hearing a growling noise down in Section Twelve is true, Doug." Miller realized that her tone had changed to one of deadly seriousness. "You're aware of that, aren't you?"

He nodded. "Yes. I am. But it could have been anything. It could have been one of the emulsifiers."

Greta shook her head. "No. The emulsifiers were off."

Miller shrugged. "Then it had to have been a werewolf, I guess."

"Or a
were
-chicken," Greta said.

"Or at the very least, a
were
-
chihuahua
," Miller said.

They both laughed at that, though not very hard or very long. And when they stopped laughing, Miller said, "Is Harry going to make it?"

Greta shook her head. "God knows, Doug."

~ * ~

Kodak Park, the manufacturing arm of Eastman Kodak Company, was so large that it had its own fire department and its own police department. It also had an army of support people—cooks, sanitation workers, engineers, architects, glaziers, construction people, maintenance workers, air quality analyzers, electrical workers—who were employed so the other army, the army of people whose job was to produce the products of the Eastman Kodak company, could come and do their work. They made photographic film, primarily—print film, slide film, black-and-white film, color film, film for amateurs and film for professionals, film for doctors and dentists, nature lovers, brides and grooms, film for new parents and new grandparents, film for anyone who had pictures to take. It was likely, in fact, that one out of three people in the country had at one time or another used Kodak film.

And the ten thousand people employed at Kodak Park were fairly representative of the population mix of Rochester, New York, Kodak's home city. There were blacks and whites and Orientals, a few American Indians, some Pakistanis, some Vietnamese. There were Catholics and Protestants, Unitarians, a few Buddhists, some atheists, and a lot who never thought much about just what they were. There were fishermen and baseball players, hunters, bird-watchers and Amway representatives, musicians, writers, amateur historians, and budding young poets. And most of these people had one thing in common—the need for security, because a secure job with good pay and wonderful benefits went a long way toward insuring a secure life. Vacations, new cars, new homes, being able to indulge in the hundreds of nice little things that made life just that much sweeter, and at last a peaceful and happy retirement were what employment at Kodak had come to mean for most of its people.

Except one.

And for that one it had come to mean darkness, and agony, and a transient satisfaction in ripping away at the flesh of whoever might be close at hand.

"He died, didn't he?" asked the man from Quality Control, Building Eight.

"Who?" the man from Research asked. "Who died? Harry Simons?"

The man from Quality Control nodded at the eight-by-ten-foot transparency just inside Kodak Park's Ridge Road entrance, in an archway above three green-carpeted stairs that led down to The Park's personnel offices (almost always crowded with hopeful applicants for employment). Corridors branching to the left and right at the bottom of the stairs also led into the interior of The Park, into Emulsion Coating, where Harry Simons had had such a bad time, into Research and Development, into Films Technology, into Long-Term Storage, and a host of other departments that filled a total of twelve one-acre buildings. "No," the man from Quality Control continued. "Him—the guy who took that picture."

The man from Research looked at the transparency with smiling appreciation for several seconds. Then he said, "Yeah. A couple of years ago, I guess."

"Alfred
Eisenstadt
, wasn't it?"

"No," answered the man from Research. "
Ansel
Adams."

"Oh, yeah.
Ansel
Adams." A short pause; then, "Great shot, isn't it?!"

"None better. I shoot in black and white quite a bit, myself. There's lots more room for creativity in black and white."

The man from Quality Control nodded sagely. "That's true. I mean, look at that, you can almost reach right out and touch it."

"Uh-huh. Though I think it's a shame that it's been so de-romanticized."

" `De-romanticized'?"

"Sure. By the astronauts."

"Oh. Yes. I see."

"I mean, it's like we've dumped on it or something."

The man from Quality Control wasn't convinced. "Maybe, maybe not. It's still got a kind of aura about it, it's still got some power."

The man from Research thought about that, then conceded, "Yes, it does. I think it's in the
kind
of light, I think it's in the wavelength—"

"No," the other man cut in, "I don't think it's that so much as the
quality
—I mean, I don't want to start sounding mystical or anything, but—"

"Oh heck, there's nothing
mystical
here."

"I was only going to point out what's already been proved, and that is that the
quality
of the light is the determining factor in the
kind
of influence it has."

The man from Research was up for a discussion. He nodded briskly. "Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but let me ask you this: Would that," and he pointed stiffly, "just as we see it, that, literally, have the same effect as the real thing?"

The man from Quality Control shook his head. "Not in a million years," he said. "Because it's
not
the real thing at all. It's chemicals and dyes and a remote light source. It's fake, it's an illusion."

The man from Research said, ending the discussion abruptly, "Sure it's fake, sure it's an illusion, but my God, it's such a
true
illusion," and they turned and walked out of the plant to Ridge Road, at the south side of The Park, and then to Jack Ryan's Grill nearby.

~ * ~

Young, slim, vivacious Tammy Levine was on her way to see
Smokey and the Bandit, Part Two
. She'd seen it twice, but she'd decided that she could never tire of seeing it, because she could never tire of seeing Burt Reynolds. She'd seen
Smokey and the Bandit
(part one) twelve times,
The Longest Yard
ten times, and
Smokey and the Bandit
,
Part Three
four times. She kept such good track of the number of times she'd seen each movie because keeping track of things was her job, and she liked it. For the past five years she'd been keeping track of film in cold storage. She knew, at any given moment, just how much film—and its type (ASA, number of exposures, print or slide, black-and-white or color)—there was in each of the five cold-storage rooms in Building Nine. It was a job that, in most of the other buildings, took several people to do, but Tammy had always had an uncanny facility with numbers, facts, and lists. She considered it a kind of wild talent, and the Personnel Department considered her worth her weight in gold. Without her, two or three people would have to be hired (at a total of over $100,000 a year in wages and benefits) just to do her job.

The movie that Tammy Levine was going to see was being shown at one of The Park's five theaters. Getting to it from the building where she worked required a long and dreary walk through Building Nine's subbasement corridors. It was, Tammy had once told a friend, like walking through the inside of a weird kind of cereal box. The walls were close enough to touch with both hands at once, the ceiling so low that it sparked claustrophobia, and the lighting dismal at best. She'd made the walk at least a hundred times since coming to Kodak Park, and each time she'd told herself that yes, at last she was getting used to it. And each time she knew it was a lie. That she'd never get used to it.

Which, thanks to the thing walking the corridor with her that afternoon, was tragically correct.

~ * ~

She had long ago begun talking to herself on her walks through Building Nine's subbasement corridors. She had a high-pitched but pleasant voice, and today, with thoughts of Burt Reynolds in her head, she said to herself, "Burt, baby, what I wouldn't do to you if I got you alone." She was going to say more, because she usually did—she usually lost herself in a string of amazing sexual daydreams—but the thing that was walking the corridor with her, several yards behind, let forth with a small half growl, half grunt that echoed loudly on the smooth walls. Tammy Levine stopped walking. She said, at a whisper, "Get away from me, okay?!" She had no idea what she was talking to, or even if it understood what she was saying; she had a vague idea that one of The Park's nighttime patrol dogs had gotten loose, although that was unlikely. The dogs were used only in Building Twelve, a high-security area, and were allowed out only for emergency trips to a veterinarian, or when Death paid them a visit.

Death was paying Tammy Levine a visit that afternoon. She had a vague idea that it was true; something in the half grunt-half growl, something desperate and unreasoning, had told her it was true.

"Get away from me," she said again, "and I mean it!" She thought she sounded pretty pathetic. She didn't want to sound pathetic, she wanted to sound like she was in control, even in charge. But the thing behind her in the cereal-box corridor let go with another half growl and grunt, but louder, and longer. And Tammy ran.

She got ten feet before the thing caught up with her and tore most of her throat away. The last image that flashed across her consciousness was Burt Reynolds's face, which made her smile a little. She would keep that image forever.

And Building Nine's subbasement corridor walls would, even after an extensive cleanup, hold traces of her blood for a very long time.

Ryerson H.
Biergarten
—his friends called him "Rye"—had the body of a long-distance runner, a face that was invariably described as "sexy," or "intriguing," or both, and he dressed in a way that the first of his two divorced wives called "poor man's preppy"—in faded, no-name jeans or corduroys, battered yellow or brown cardigan sweaters, argyle socks, penny loafers, and well-worn blue, cream-colored or green button-down shirts. ("It's clear, Rye," his first wife told him, "that you don't give a damn
what
you look like." He had readily agreed.) He had a full head of reddish-brown hair, usually in need of cutting or combing, and his gray-green eyes almost always had a spark of humor in them. He had also, in the past few weeks, taken to carting around a snorting Boston bull terrier pup he'd named Creosote. He called the dog Creosote because he'd found it in a smokehouse behind a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Vermont. Ryerson had been in the house looking for several of its previous tenants—a man in his nineties who did lots of cursing at odd hours and a young woman of twenty or twenty-one who had a fetching smile and wonderful green eyes; she liked to lounge on a huge, Victorian-style sofa in the parlor and say suggestive things to the house's male visitors. Both of these previous tenants were dead. The man in his nineties had died a hundred and ten years earlier, according to the county hall of records, and the woman had died, at her lover's hands, early in the twentieth century. Her name had been Gwendolyn, and the man's name had been Mr. Barclay.

Ryerson did not go to the house convinced of anything. He was, by nature, a skeptical person and was ready to find any of a number of answers, the most likely being, he guessed, that the owners of the house had cooked the whole thing up to draw visitors in. The owners, a group of five area businessmen, charged two dollars a head for people to walk through what they called "A living piece of America's heritage." Ryerson believed firmly in the supernatural, and he believed just as firmly in its various and usually unpredictable effects on the world of the living. He also believed, perhaps even more firmly, in the potential for greed and ignobility inherent in everyone (including himself—though, at the age of thirty-eight, he liked to think that he hadn't yet fallen to too much greed, or too much ignobility).

He talked to each of the five businessmen first. He asked them pointed questions about what they'd heard and seen, the same question several times, from different perspectives, trying to catch any of them in a lie. And when he was done, his own very well-developed sixth sense told him that there was a little bit of hoax, a little bit of truth, and a lot of colorful exaggeration involved in the whole thing. Whether there was anything actually supernatural happening at the house was a judgment he would put off until he'd been through it.

He went there on a Monday, the day the house was closed to visitors, and to his surprise—and without much effort—he found the two ghosts he'd been hired to find. It was late afternoon, the day was dismal and rainy, and the young woman, Gwendolyn, was in her usual place on the huge Victorian sofa in the parlor. She was, as Ryerson liked to say, "flickering"—her image waxing and waning like the light of a candle. Her suggestive words waxed and waned in the same way.

"Hi," she said when Ryerson walked into the room.

"Hi," he said.

"Would you"—her image waned; her words grew inaudible—"me?"