T. Wright - The Devouring

"Laurie?" she managed. "You need help; let me call someone." She was at her bedroom door now.

The woman advancing on her across the small living room said, sneering, "The only thing I need right now is you, Detective." And she opened her mouth to reveal the huge white canines within.

"God in heaven," Gail whispered, and launched herself into the bedroom toward the little nightstand. She hit the side of the bed with her stomach. A gust of air and a quick "Uhh!" of pain and surprise escaped her. She doubled over, fell backward to the floor, saw the woman standing victoriously above her, scrambled up, fumbled for the drawer pull, felt an incredibly strong hand on her neck, pulled the drawer open.

Some things happen purely by coincidence. A woman whose mortgage is two months past due and whose kid's shoes are too tight because she can't afford new ones wins the New York State Lottery purely by coincidence. And, purely by coincidence, a man decides not to board a plane and learns a couple of hours later that it crashed with no survivors. Another man leaves for work two minutes later than usual, for whatever reason, and is broadsided by a runaway bus that would have been two minutes behind him had he left for work at his usual time.

All by coincidence. Chance. Which, like gravity, is a force that no one understands completely.

And so it was purely by coincidence as well that Ryerson Biergarten was passing Delaware Avenue at 2:15 that morning, after leaving the home of Dr. Craig Gibson. And it was purely by coincidence, too-along with, perhaps, a sudden shift in the direction of the psychic breeze-that he looked to his left to see a young, brown-haired, shabbily dressed girl stumbling through the glow of a streetlight one hundred and fifty feet away.

He braked hard; the Woody pulled to the right; he swung a wide left onto Delaware Avenue and floored the accelerator. Beside him on the passenger's seat, Creosote whimpered in his sleep, as if in protest. Ryerson braked hard again so the Woody came to a halt beside the streetlamp. He jumped from the wagon, looked over its roof in the direction the girl had been moving, between two darkened houses, and called, "Hello. Are you there? Are you all right?"

He heard weeping at a distance, from that direction, and he strained to see past the glow of the streetlamp and into the area between the houses, but his eyesight was pitifully poor at night and he saw little more than the vague, hulking dark shapes of the houses, and a shaft of blacker darkness in between.

The weeping grew softer, as if the girl were moving away from him. "Hello?" he called again. "Are you all right? Answer me, please!" He hesitated going after her in the darkness. Six months earlier, near the end of his investigation of the murders in Rochester, New York, he'd gone after someone else in darkness and it had nearly cost him his life. He had, then, to rely on the sight of the creature he was chasing, to see through its eyes.

"Please!" he called now. "I want to help you."

The source of the weeping seemed to steady at a point midway between the houses. Ryerson saw a light go on in the second floor of the left-hand house; he heard a dog begin to bark somewhere far down the block. Then, screwing up courage against his night blindness, he walked out of the glow of the streetlamp and into the darkness.

A porch light went on at the same house, the front door opened, and a thin woman in her fifties, dressed in a green nightgown and a man's dark suit coat, appeared in the doorway. "What's going on here?" she whispered harshly, as if afraid her own voice would wake the neighbors.

Ryerson, crossing her lawn, said, "There's someone in trouble," and nodded at the area between the houses. "There!"

"Trouble?" the woman said.

"Someone's hurt, I think," Ryerson added.

"Someone's hurt?" the woman said. "Who?"

Ryerson was parallel with the front of the house now. He said, as he vanished into the darkness at the side of the house, "I don't know."

The woman said, "I'm calling the police," and slammed her door shut. A moment later Ryerson heard it being locked and bolted. Then he heard, in front of him, "I didn't mean it." It was the voice of a young girl.

He stopped. He could see nothing ahead of him in the area between the houses. He said, in his most soothing tones, "Please, come into the light."

"No," the girl said.

"Are you hurt?" Ryerson said.

"Yes," said the girl. "I'm hurt," and it was clear from her tone that she was telling the truth.

Ryerson took a couple of steps forward. "Please," the girl said frantically, "stay where you are!"

"Yes," Ryerson said, "I will. I'm sorry." Then, for an instant, he got a picture of himself backlit by the light of the streetlamp a hundred feet behind him. He was seeing through the eyes of this young girl, he realized. A stab of pain shot through his belly; he winced. The pain dissipated. He said, "Where are you hurt? Is it your stomach?"

After a moment the girl answered, as if surprised, "Yes. It's my stomach. God, it hurts!"

Ryerson got an image of himself once again, through her eyes, and the image stayed with him long enough that he was able to gauge from it how far away he was from the girl-too far, he knew, to lunge for her, which would probably be foolish, anyway. He asked, "Are you carrying a weapon?" He wasn't sure why he'd asked it; it seemed a ludicrous question at best.

The girl said, "No. No."

He didn't believe her. As she spoke, the image of a gun settled coldly and suddenly into his head. And just as suddenly, he did not want at all to be there, in the darkness, where his eyes were useless. He said, voice quaking noticeably, "I want to help you; believe me, I want to help you. If you have …" Again a hot pain seared through his belly; again he winced and the pain was gone. He went on, voice quaking once more, as much now from sudden exhaustion as from fear-as if a kind of psychic adrenaline had pushed through him, leaving him light-headed and weak. "If you have a gun pointed at me, I would really appreciate it if you'd point it at something else."

She began to weep again.

And Ryerson realized his mistake. She did not have a gun pointed at him. "My God," he breathed, "you've been shot, haven't you?"

Then, mercifully, from behind him, on the street, he heard the wail of police sirens winding down and the screech of brakes. He glanced around. "Over here!" he called.

~ * ~

Buffalo's Tenth Precinct captain looked very skeptical. He was a balding, cigar-smoking bear of a man named Jack Lucas who was, Ryerson thought, the living amalgamation of all the hard-boiled, hard-bitten, but deep-down-soft-as-butter police captains that TV cop shows had ever produced. Ryerson thought, too, that the man had indeed developed much of his own tough but lovable persona from those same cop-show police captains. Lucas said, letting cigar smoke sift from his mouth as he spoke, "And you say that you're a psychic , Mr. Biergarten?"

Ryerson, the sleeping Creosote in his lap, nodded. "Yes, sir. Actually, I'm a psychic investigator." He was surprised, even a little disappointed, though he'd never have admitted it, that the man hadn't heard of him. He added, "As a matter of fact, I've helped a few police departments from time to time-"

Lucas cut in, "Then they're assholes, Mr. Biergarten, because I don't believe in any of that crap. Everything's got a logical explanation, everything's explainable, everything's real; if you can't touch it or smell it or taste it or fuck it, then by God it doesn't exist!"

Ryerson shrugged, "Yes, I agree, but-"

"How well do you know this girl, this"-he leaned forward, checked the police report on his desk-"this Laurie Drake, Mr. Biergarten?"