In Buffalo, New York
Laurie Drake said to her best friend Jennifer Wright, "They do too eat people."
Jennifer rolled her eyes. "No, no, no, Laurie-werewolves eat people."
They were coming out of an advanced placement class in mythology at the Henrietta Heberling Memorial Junior-Senior High School and were on their way to lunch. They were best friends because most of the other kids in the school thought they were strange and unapproachable. The fact was that they were very bright, brighter in fact by half than their classmates, and so they had gravitated to each other. Jennifer, however, couldn't help but think that Laurie could be impossibly dense at times. She went on, her tone very instructional. "Vampires are subtle, Laurie. They feed, but they don't feed too much. They don't waste anything."
Laurie would hear none of it. "I know what I saw-"
Jennifer cut in, laughing, "My God, it was only a movie."
"Nothing is only anything, Jennifer," Laurie interrupted icily. "Don't you think that people research these things?! Of course they do. Besides, what we're talking about here is hunger! Have you ever been hungry, Jennifer?" She paused; they both knew the answer to that-Jennifer had never wanted for anything. Laurie nodded sagely. "Of course you haven't. I have. I've been hungry enough to eat an old shoe-and let me tell you something-"
Behind them a man's voice said, "Hurry along, girls." They turned their heads in unison to see the physical education teacher, Mr. Piper, behind them. He added, "Cheeseburgers today; you don't want to miss out on cheeseburgers, do you?" And he slid gracefully past them and into the cafeteria. "What a fox!" Jennifer whispered.
Laurie would normally have agreed very heartily, but her stomach-which had been aching on and off now for several days-suddenly began to ache very badly, so her only response was a whispered "Uh-huh."
~ * ~
In Boston
Hell, Ryerson thought, convinced that Coreen had returned for another whack at him.
"No!" he called, although he was on the second floor of the house and whoever was ringing the doorbell couldn't possibly hear him. With Creosote in his arms, he made his way down the open spiral staircase to the front door. He hesitated. The doorbell rang again. He looked down at Creosote, whose tongue was wagging at him. "It's a woman, isn't it, boy?" Creosote's tongue wagged harder. Ryerson went on. "And it's not Coreen, is it?" Creosote's tongue disappeared into his mouth; he cocked his head questioningly. "It's a stranger," Ryerson said. "Someone from out-of-state." Creosote's head cocked to the other direction; his tongue reappeared briefly.
Ryerson pulled the door open.
He had never seen Joan Mott Evans before. He had tracked her down to Buffalo, using various standard sources-the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Vital Statistics, the New York Motor Vehicle Department. At the beginning he had only her first name to go on, which was given to him by the parents of poor, damned Lila Curtis; "Our daughter had a friend," Mrs. Curtis had told him. "Someone she confided in, someone she looked up to, like a big sister. She said her name was Joan." He had a good description of her, too, also given to him by Lila's parents. And eventually, using those two pieces of information-Joan's first name and her description-it had been easy enough to track her down, although when he'd arrived at her house in Buffalo two months earlier, there had been no answer to his knock.
"Yes?" he said now.
"Hi," said Joan Mott Evans with a slight, unconvincing smile, as if sorry she were disturbing him. "We've never met, Mr. Biergarten." Her smile flattened. "Not formally, anyway."
"Yes?" he said again.
"I was in the city visiting a friend-her name's Nadine Homer; perhaps you know her."
Ryerson shook his head. "No, I'm afraid not." The description that Lila Curtis's parents had given him had been very accurate-short auburn hair, a round, appealing face, small straight nose, large, round, expressive gray eyes; "She's very nice to look at," Lila's father had said. "She's no beauty queen, but she is nice to look at."
Mrs. Curtis had merely shrugged and said, "Yes, I suppose so." She had a trim and athletic-looking body, too; Ryerson got a quick mental picture of her doing an hour's worth of aerobic exercises each morning-it was an image he liked, because he had always been a firm believer in a healthy body being necessary to the maintenance of a strong and healthy mind.
Joan rattled on, clearly nervous now, but trying hard not to show it. "I have a copy of your book…." She produced a copy of Conversations with Charlene from her purse and thrust it at him. "And I was wondering if you could autograph it for me."
He smiled graciously, took the book from her, patted the pocket of his shirt-beneath his ragged white pullover sweater-and said, "I'm sorry, I don't have a pen."
She smiled back, searched a few moments in her purse, came up with a gold Cross pen, and handed it to him. She said, as he wrote on the title page of the book, "Actually, we have met, in a way. You came to my house a month ago."
He handed her the book. "Thanks," she said, and began to stuff it into her purse.
"No," he said, "please. Read the inscription."
She smiled nervously at him. "The inscription?"
"Yes. Please read it."
She took the book from her purse, opened to the copyright page, then to the title page. She read:
To Joan Mott Evans,
Let's talk.
Rye.
She kept her head down for a good half minute, as if reading the short inscription all that time. Then, sighing, she looked up at him. "I'm sorry," she said.
Ryerson, seeing her embarrassment, extended his arm welcomingly. "No," he said, "I'm sorry. That was unfair. Please, come inside. I'm sure there's a lot we have to say to each other."
~ * ~
In Buffalo
Irene Sabitch scowled at her computer monitor in the Buffalo Police Department Records Division. Her coworker, Glen Coffman, sitting behind his own computer monitor a few feet away, said, "You look like you just chomped down on a clove of garlic, Irene. What's the problem?"
She glanced at him, still scowling, then looked back at her monitor. She said tightly, "The problem is this new system." She guffawed. "Foolproof, my ass!"
Glen got up, went over, stood behind her, and scanned her monitor. "Just punch in the user number, Irene. It's 001.BPD," and he started for his seat.
"I tried that," she said.
He stopped, looked back, shrugged. "Try it again."
"I tried it six times, Glen."
He went back and put his hand on her shoulder to coax her from her chair. "Let me give it a try, okay?"
She stayed put. "For God's sake, Glen, I can punch in user numbers just as well as you can.
He hesitated, looked at the screen again. He was reading the computer's "file directory."
It showed him a list of files on that particular computer disk which were available for inspection by the computer operator. It read:
FILE DIRECTORY
CURTIS L.BAK
JME.BAK
HAWKINS.LET
LET.BAK
FORMAT.CMD
STAT.CMD
OPER.CMD
JME.OPE
USER NUMBER?
He reached over Irene's shoulder and punched in "001 .BPD." The screen cleared. A moment later these words appeared on it:
INVALID USER NUMBER.
RETURNING TO FILE DIRECTORY
He scowled. The file directory and its maddening "user number?" request came back on the screen. He said, "Well, someone's screwed up royally here. That user number is locked into the system-"
"I know that, Glen," Irene said, and glanced around at him. "You don't have to shout."
He looked back at her. "Was I shouting? I'm sorry." He studied the screen. "Where'd you get this disk?"
"From the hard disk subsystem. I was updating files, this appeared, and I made a copy of it."
"Uh-huh. That explains it then. Those files"-he nodded at the screen-"were in the system before it was restructured. So it's got a personal user number on it."
"Oh, yeah?" Irene teased. "Whose?"
"Whose?'' Glen said. "I don't know. We should have a list of personal user numbers around here somewhere. Find it and input every one till this damned file opens up."
She rolled her eyes. "Glen, do you know how many user numbers that could be?"
"Not many. A few thousand. But, hell, you type pretty fast." He chuckled, went back to his own monitor, sat down, looked back. "Hey, have you seen my games disk? I was halfway through Space Wars yesterday."
~ * ~
Lilian Janus
At thirty-three, Lilian Janus had what she considered a more or less perfect life. Her home was comfortable, she kept it neat; her children were nicely behaved and did well in school; her husband, Frank, was handsome and a good provider.
She had a part-time job as a cosmetics salesperson at Sibley's Department Store, in Buffalo. She liked the job because it enabled her to meet women she felt were much like herself, women whose only real concerns in life had to do with the inexorable approach of middle age, and, she assumed, the bothersome and sometimes unreasonable sexual overtures of their husbands. Because (everyone knew it) sex, or the promise of it, was merely something "that enables a woman to catch a husband and keeps a husband at home." Her mother, rest her sainted soul, had drilled it into her since she was twelve years old.