The Changing (The Biergarten Series) Read Free Page B

hesitation, faded, returned, faded. She was gone for a full minute. When she returned, she was standing on the opposite side of the room near a tall, narrow window, her profile to Ryerson; the window's sheer white curtains had been drawn, and the dismal light of the afternoon was giving her an especially gray and chalky look that, Ryerson thought, she hadn't had when she'd been on the sofa. It was a look that was at once frightening and sad, and his heart went out to her when he saw it. She was, after all, another human being—her form was a bit altered, it was true, and she had long ago left life behind her, but she was another human being nonetheless (much, much more a human being, he thought, than the rotting shell that had once been her body, buried in a country cemetery ten miles south of the house).
    "No," she said again, and added, "I don't know that." She said it slowly and at a whisper, eyes lowered, hands clasped in front of her. "I don't know that," she repeated. "I can't be dead. I feel. I hear. I want. The dead don't have any of that."
    Ryerson said, "You are proof that they do."
    And she faded, returned, faded, returned, faded. And was gone.
    ~ * ~
    He found the ninety-year-old man in the cellar. The man had once had a workshop there, where he built clocks. His specialty had been cuckoo clocks fashioned from cherry wood indigenous to the area, but the problem was that he was a lousy clockmaker. He made one stupid mistake after another, so he was constantly cursing at himself, which is how Ryerson found him, from the cursing.
    "Fucking fairy farts!" he heard, in a voice that was old and cracking.
    "Hello!" Ryerson called down the cellar stairs.
    "Donkey tits!" he heard.
    "Who's there?" Ryerson called.
    "Rancid rat cocks!" he heard.
    "You're awfully creative!" Ryerson called.
    "Shit, shit, shit!"
    "Most of the time, anyway."
    "Who's there?" called the aged voice.
    "I'd like to help you," Ryerson called.
    "Bite my bird!"
    "Are you building clocks?" Ryerson was still at the top of the stairs; he had found, more than once, that it was easier to talk to a voice alone than a voice and the image of a body. Besides, there were no lights in the cellar, and Ryerson was all but blind in the dark. He added, "Are you building cuckoo clocks?"
    "Lousy turd !"
    "I want to help you; will you let me help you?”
    “Shit, shit, shit!"
    "My name is Ryerson. I'm one of the living." It was a standard line with Ryerson, one he'd developed, and he was proud of it. He had a doctorate in psychology from Duke University (though no one except his first wife called him "Doctor"), and he thought that it was often best to let "the others" come to their own conclusions about whether or not they were still among the living. The whole issue was incredibly complex. "The world of the supernatural," he had told his students at a short-lived night class in the paranormal at New York University, "is every bit as pluralistic and multifaceted as our own. Indeed, it is sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between the two. Each 'event' and each participant in an 'event' must be treated as individual phenomenon—"
    "Eat my shorts!" called the voice in the cellar.
    This surprised Ryerson; wasn't Eat my shorts! a fairly recent phrase? Maybe the old man was picking up on what visitors to the house had been saying or thinking.
    "I'm one of the living," Ryerson called back, and thought that the whole thing was going badly.
    "Eat my shorts anyway!" called the voice.
    And so it went. Eventually Ryerson closed the cellar door and decided to try again on another day, which was his usual procedure, anyway. Rarely was he able to placate one of "the others" on the first try. The chances were good, at any rate, that the group of businessmen was just as content to have the hauntings continue.
    It was when he was about ready to get into his 1948 Ford station wagon—a car that he'd spent a considerable amount of time and money getting into working condition