BESTIAL
By Ray Garton

 

PROLOGUE

Big Rock, California—four months ago...

The unusually warm spring night was still except for a gentle breeze, and the sprawling house was mostly dark, with a glow in only one open upstairs window. From in­side, the piercing cry of a baby cut through the calm, stopped only to gasp for breath, and then continued to wail. Crickets sang all around, and the whispering breeze was accompanied by the ocean surf as it huffed and pounded against the rocks of the nearby shore. And something else—a hushed, sibilant sound rose and fell slightly in the night’s warm darkness. It was the secret sound of tense, anticipatory whispering in the dark all around the outside of the house. A black sky covered it all, clear and sparkling with stars, touched by the glowing, bluish white curl of a crescent moon. The baby’s cry, which had been sounding for some time, continued to come from inside the house, muffled but distinct.

The house had belonged to a man named Marvin Cooper, the owner of a chain of used- car dealerships that had begun there in town thirty- three years ago and had spread throughout California. Marvin had no use for the house now. A few months ago, what was left of his bloody and ravaged remains had been found in Hallwell Park near the big rock after which the town had been named. Marvin’s home had been taken over by others since his death.

In the upstairs bedroom beyond that single glowing open window, three people were gathered around a king-size platform bed beneath a bright overhead light. A fourth person lay on the bed, a young woman named Cynthia Newell.

A blanket covered Cynthia’s upper torso, rising up over the enormous bulge of her pregnant belly. White towels were spread out beneath the lower half of her body. Re­flections of light shimmered on the perspiring flesh of her face and neck and uncovered arms as she desperately inhaled, then exhaled explosively, puffing her cheeks as she blew again and again. Tendons stood out on her neck like taut wires. Ropes of sweat- matted hair clung to the sides of her face. Her bare, shiny legs were spread wide, knees up, feet on the bottom edge of the mattress. A short, plump woman sat on a stool at the foot of the bed and leaned forward between Cynthia’s legs. A taller, younger woman sat on the bed beside Cynthia, dabbing her pained face with a wet cloth, murmuring to her comfortingly, instructing her quietly. A tall, slender, bald man stood at a bottom corner of the bed, his hands joined behind his back, and watched silently.

The baby that had been screaming for awhile, at least a month old lay beside Cynthia, naked and uncovered, un­tended. Its tiny arms and legs jerked and kicked spasti­cally, its eyes nothing more than tightly clenched slits in its round, pink face, its mouth a gaping, wailing hole.

Through the open window, the crickets were a distant background chirping sound, and buried somewhere be­neath that at an almost subliminal level came the other, more secret sound of whispering.

Cynthia cried out in pain, her voice a ragged, choked shriek. Her sweaty arms, trembling with tension, reached out at each side, and her fists closed on the bedsheets.

At twenty-two, Cynthia was single, but already had a number of relationships behind her, all of them bad. Her taste in men had been about as reliable as her ability to hold a job. She had just begun a new waitressing job at the time of her rape, but that job, like her last boyfriend, had been only the most recent in a long line. The rape had occurred in the parking lot behind the twenty- four-hour restaurant where she worked the graveyard shift. She’d just arrived, had parked her car, and was making her way to the restaurant’s rear entrance when her attacker rushed out of the darkness and slammed into her, knocking her into a dizzy stupor. He’d dragged her behind two garbage Dumpsters, where she’d lost consciousness. She’d awakened there later, beaten and bleeding, with the rapist’s gamey smell clinging to her nostrils. Crying as she tried to get back on her feet, she’d been discovered by a startled young busboy.

The next few days remained a blur, but she’d done her best to pull herself together and go back to her life. She’d walked through the following week numb, stunned. She’d told no one of the rape, only that she’d been attacked and beaten, and she’d tried to keep even that information as quiet as possible. Until chilling suspicions began to sicken her only days after the rape. She’d begun feeling nause­ated in the morning, had vomited a couple of times. It seemed awfully soon for such signs, but there they were. A home pregnancy test had made real her biggest fear.

The rapid pregnancy had not been the only frightening development in her life. She’d felt a hunger she could not quite satisfy, and she’d had nightmares in which she’d fed that hunger with human flesh. She’d thought they were nightmares, anyway—at first. Until she’d awakened one morning to find blood on her sheets, blood that had not come from her body.

In the examination room of her doctor’s office, she’d broken down and told him the whole story. She could not understand why these things were happening so fast. In only the second week after the rape, she’d begun to gain weight, and a slight swelling had begun in her abdomen. That had been made only worse by the ravenous hunger, the awful nightmares, and the blood in her bed. Dr. Mor­gan had listened quietly, and when she was done, he’d re­mained silent for some time, frowning thoughtfully. Then he’d smiled at her and reacted compassionately, saying he wanted to introduce her to some people he thought might be able to help her. She’d thought he was referring to counselors, perhaps some kind of support group. But no.

He had introduced her to the two women now in the room with  her—dark, matronly, middle- aged Carmen at the foot of the bed, and Beth, the beautiful, blonde woman in her late twenties who sat beside  her—and they had introduced her to Jeremiah, the tall, gaunt man who now stood watching her. Jeremiah had taken her then, away from her apartment and her friends and her life, and nothing had been the same since then—not even Cynthia. The pregnancy had progressed with frightening speed. The shocking changes that had occurred in her since the rape had been terrifying—the hunger and nightmares, at first, then the horrible and painful physical changes that had taken place one frightening night. And worst of all, that same night, the feeding through which Carmen and Beth had guided her, the first she’d been aware of, but not really the first at all. It had been a bum, some middle-aged man spending the night on the beach alone, trying to warm himself by a small fire. When he saw her, he’d tried to scream, but he’d been dead before he could make a sound.

At the same time, though, as nightmarish as those things had been, they also had been exhilarating. They had sick­ened her, and yet invigorated her. The pregnancy itself had seemed surreal. In the final week, Jeremiah had in­troduced her to the man who now waited downstairs, a man with an eye patch who had about him a certain . . . something. A strength, a presence, an invisible, compelling force. The sheriff. She had known almost instantly that he was in charge of everything, of all of them . . . of her.

“Push, Cynthia!” Carmen said.

The pain was inconceivable. It engulfed her. Along with it came the startling sensations with which she’d become fa­miliar in the last three  months—the feelings of movement inside her, of her bones snapping and repositioning, of her tissue tearing, growing, stretching.

The baby on the bed beside her continued to scream. Cynthia had asked earlier why it was there, whose baby it was, why it wasn’t being cared for and held and made to stop that god- awful screaming. They would not answer her and behaved as if the baby  weren’t there at all.

“Push, Cynthia, now!” Carmen said, her voice loud and stern.

Cynthia’s body bulged uncontrollably in places, made thick, wet, popping sounds as her face elongated and her teeth narrowed, lengthened, and sharpened. A moment later, she melted back to her original form, only to go through the change again, then change back.

As impossible as it seemed, the pain grew even worse, and Cynthia felt as if her insides were being violently pulled out of her. Everything—the light, the room, the world—blinked, and for a moment, Cynthia felt as if she did not exist.

Jeremiah stood at the corner of the bed and watched, back straight, shoulders even, hands behind him. The over­head light was reflected in a puddle of white on the smooth, bare scalp of his narrow, oval head. He wore a black, long-sleeved turtleneck shirt, gray slacks, shiny black shoes. He was unmoved by Cynthia’s screams, which thickened into a different sound, a throatier shriek that soon leveled back out into a human scream, until it changed again, back and forth. His dark eyes, looking bored and uninterested be­neath narrow, arched eyebrows, stayed on the spot between Cynthia’s legs where Carmen’s hands waited. He watched as the head appeared, as the baby finally came into the world in a rush of blood and fluids, as Cynthia’s screams al­tered again and again in her pain. His right eyebrow rose as Carmen took the newborn into her hands. It squirmed, glistening with viscous blood, still attached to its mother by a gnarled umbilical.

Beth hurried to Carmen’s side and produced a sharp knife. The cord was cut, and a moment later the thin, mewling cry of the infant mingled with the wailing sound of the other crying baby on the bed. Carmen placed the newborn on the white towel to the side of Cynthia’s spread legs.

“My baby!” Cynthia cried, her voice thick and trembling, words slurring together. “Whuh- where’s my b-baby?”

Cynthia was ignored.

Carmen stood and went to the older bawling, pink baby on the bed beside Cynthia, picked it up, and placed it near the glistening, wet newborn.

Jeremiah’s eyes narrowed slightly as he watched the bloody newborn. Nothing in his face revealed the antici­pation and suspense he felt inside his narrow chest as he waited.

The newborn’s cries grew louder, richer. Its tiny arms and legs twitched and kicked.

“My b-baby... Guh-give me my baby!” Cynthia said sluggishly.

Carmen and Beth stood together, looking at the new­born.

Jeremiah watched, waited.

The other naked  baby—clean and plump and  pink— rolled slightly back and forth as it continued to cry, gulp for air, and cry some more.

The newborn’s small, blood- streaked body and limbs bulged here and there—gently at first, then with greater force. The puckered little face shifted, then suddenly jut­ted forward away from the skull. The clenched eyes opened to reveal silver.

One corner of Jeremiah’s thin- lipped razor slice of a mouth twitched upward, but that was the only outer ex­pression of his inner excitement.

The newborn’s arms and legs lengthened a bit, the tiny hands and feet changed. It became quiet as the nostrils flared at the end of its snout. The silver eyes began to roll in the direction of the other infant. In a quick, unexpected motion, the newborn rolled onto its stomach.

Beth gasped and her right hand shot up to touch fin­gertips to her chin.

The silver eyes found the pink, bawling baby. The new­born silently pulled itself forward until it was at the cry­ing infant’s side. It sniffed the baby, curled its tongue out briefly, and touched the tip to the baby’s pink flesh.

The crying infant remained oblivious, eyes still shut, mouth still gaping.

The newborn held perfectly still for several seconds, then made a small, deep sound. It pounced in a blurry flash of fangs. Blood spurted.

A quiet gasp rose from the two women.

One half of Jeremiah’s mouth turned up.

The baby’s crying ended in an abrupt cough, and with a rush of wet, tearing sounds, the newborn began to eat.

Downstairs, the house was dark. The only light in the sunken living room came from the fireplace, where a healthy fire crackled and roared. The man with the eye patch sat leaning forward in a club chair directly before the fire, elbows on the armrests, head inclined as he stared into the flames. The fire’s orange light poured over his face like rain dribbling down a windowpane. The black patch covered his left eye, but his right, a clear blue, glimmered with the glow of the flames as it stared in­tensely. The man’s chin worked slowly, thoughtfully, back and forth. He wore a khaki sheriff’s uniform with a silver badge over the left breast pocket, a heavy leather belt around his waist that held, among other things, a hol­stered gun.

A sound of movement startled him and he turned sharply to look over his right shoulder.

“Jeremiah,” he said. He stood and faced the older, taller man, took in a deep breath, and released it in a long sigh. “Well?”

Jeremiah leaned forward and said something very qui­etly into his right ear.

The man smiled as Jeremiah pulled away. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, then the man turned and left Jeremiah behind as he hurried out of the room.

In the foyer, the man swept a flashlight off a small desk with his left hand and opened the front door with his right. As he pushed the security door open and stepped out onto the covered wooden porch, he thumbed the flashlight’s button and a beam of light stabbed the dark­ness. He crossed the porch and stood at the top of the steps a moment, peering into the darkness of the yard with his good eye.

In the background, the ocean breathed its nighttime breaths and the crickets chirruped.

The eager susurrations that had been ongoing in the darkness around the house abruptly fell silent.

The man moved down a step. The flashlight beam rose and passed back and forth over the yard. It oozed over the dark, shadowy figures gathered there. They stood close to­gether, covering the grass, spreading out to spill past the sprawling yard and over the driveway to the fence, and far­ther out to the narrow road that passed between the  house and the beach beyond. The light glowed eerily in the many pairs of reflective silver eyes that turned with anticipation to the man on the porch steps, waiting.

The moment hung heavily in the air like a thick, damp, tropical heat as the man’s single eye passed over the lake of eyes before him.

He tipped his head back slightly and shouted, “It’s a girl!”

The chirping of the crickets stopped. Even the sea seemed to pause.

The weighty heat of the moment remained in the si­lence that followed, until the man spoke again.

“And it’s thriving!”

In the near distance, another ocean wave rushed in against the beach.

A new sound rose from the dark, still crowd, but only for a  moment—a brief sound of inhalation, the drawing in of a single breath by many.

In the dark, the heads of the crowd bent backward, faces turned to the glittering night sky, and together they filled the night with a loud, reverberating sound.

A rich, triumphant, lupine howl.

Big Rock, California—Lemon Tree Mobile Home Park— three months ago...

Penny Anderson and Byron Clifton walked together down the road that ran through the center of the Lemon Tree Mobile Home Park. It was a cool night in early summer, with the sound of televisions playing throughout the trailer park. Penny’s dark blue flip- flops slapped against her heels with each step. She held a folded blanket tucked beneath her left arm. Byron was seventeen, a year older than Penny, but with his childlike mind, he giggled at nothing in partic­ular and sometimes walked circles around Penny as they moved through the faint glow from the windows of mobile homes on either side of them. His black skin made him dif­ficult to see in the night, while her thick, pale arms and moonlike, double- chinned face practically glowed. They were on their way to their secret hiding place, known only to them, in the patch of woods beyond the back edge of the trailer park.

Penny’s mother Gretchen had gone out with one of her tricks—a new guy this time, bald and flabby, with a bushy mustache—giving Penny yet another summer night to kill by herself. She’d already gone through a package of Chips Ahoy! Chocolate-chip cookies and half of the upside- down pineapple cake Aunt Tess had brought them on Sunday, all while watching reruns of sitcoms on TV. She couldn’t eat that way while Gretchen was around, not without getting yelled at and sometimes slapped.

“How can you look at yourself in the mirror and keep eating like that?” Gretchen often shouted. “You’re way over two hundred pounds and you look like a fuckin’ whale! I don’t even like you being here when guys come over, because you disgust them and turn them off, and then they don’t wanna fuck!”

Sometimes she watched Gretchen with her tricks. Penny was always to call her by name, never “Mom,” because the word Mom wasn’t exactly a turn- on to her clientele. Gretchen made no effort to keep her business private and even had sex with her men on the living- room couch sometimes. Penny watched and masturbated. Sometimes she masturbated when there was nothing to watch. She thought of little besides food and sex, sex and food. The trailer smelled of sex all the time, and Gretchen always kept pornography around because some of her men liked to look at it. Penny often perused the magazines or watched the DVDs when Gretchen wasn’t around.

School was Penny’s idea of hell. She was tortured end­lessly by her classmates, and even the teachers sometimes chimed in with cruel remarks or derisive laughter. She lived for weekends, and especially for the summer break, which was about to start. Then, she didn’t have to be any­where or do anything. When she wasn’t eating or mastur­bating, she spent time with Byron, her only friend, who lived just a few trailers down with his parents. Byron’s parents were always screaming at each other, and some­times his dad beat up on his mom, so Byron always wel­comed a chance to get away from them with Penny.

Recently, Penny had started experimenting with By­ron. He was retarded, like a little boy, so it didn’t matter to him that she was so fat and had pimples all over her face. And yet, as childlike as he was, he was seventeen, after all, and as horny as she. He often sported an erec­tion, so he welcomed Penny’s advances. A couple of weeks ago, she’d taken him to their hiding place and they’d spent some time kissing. Byron had gotten so excited that he’d begun humping Penny’s leg as they kissed. When she stopped and refused to kiss any more, Byron had frantically opened his pants and jerked off, grinning and grunting the word good over and over. Penny had found it exciting to watch—he was hung better than most of Gretchen’s tricks, but then Gretchen always said black guys had bigger dicks than anybody else. The next time, Penny had jerked him off, and the time after that, she’d given oral sex a try on Byron while masturbating herself. Then she’d let him fondle her fleshy breasts, which were only slightly larger than the rolls of fat beneath them. She’d let him touch her later and had taught him to call the hairy mound between her massive thighs her “coochy,” which had made him laugh. This time, she had other plans.

They passed the last two trailers and moved into the wooded area behind the park.

“You gawn lemme play wit’ yer coochy?” Byron said with a guffaw as they passed through the wall of bushes and into the small clearing that was their hideout. It was surrounded by trees and bushes and a couple of large rocks.

“Something better than that this time, Byron,” Penny said with a smile. She spread out the blanket on the ground. As Byron sat down cross- legged on the blanket, Penny took off her black tank top and hiked up her purple skirt. She wore no underwear. “You wanna stick your wiener in my coochy, Byron?” she said.

Byron guffawed. “’Zit gawn feel good?”

“Oh, yeah. It’ll feel real good. For both of us.”

More laughing as he slapped his big hands against his thighs. “Yeah, sure, yeah.”

A faint breeze whispered through the tops of the trees around them, and they could still hear the faint sound of television sets playing in trailers in the park.

“Take your pants off,” Penny said. Byron stood and dropped his pants as she stretched out and spread her legs. “Now you lay down between my legs, Byron.”

“ ’Tween yer legs?” He thought about that a moment, giggled, then got down on top of her.

Penny reached over her fat middle and grabbed his cock, which was already erect—it seemed to be most of the time—and put it in her. An explosion of breath came from her lungs. She whispered, “Okay, Byron, in and out. In and out. Fuck me.”

“Fuck you?” He laughed. “Momma says that’s a dirty word an’ I shouldn’t never say—”

“Just do it.”

As Byron moved, Penny struggled to reach down be­tween his belly and her rolls of fat to rub her clitoris. Byron moaned as Penny bit her lower lip and clenched her eyes shut, losing herself in the sensation of his thrusts. She lifted her big legs into the air, spread them as far as she could. By­ron began chanting, “Good . . . good,” with each thrust, but Penny barely heard him. She was lost in the new feelings she was experiencing. She climbed toward her orgasm, felt it build, ready to explode into a bright flash of inner white light.

Byron grunted, then cried out.

A moment later, Penny realized he’d pulled out and was no longer on top of her. She opened her eyes and saw nothing but darkness at first. Then there was movement above her, and weight pressed down on her again.  Byron— at least, she thought it was Byron at first—slid back into her, and she clenched her eyes shut again. But now he be­gan to pound her much harder. Hands roughly clutched the backs of her knees and pushed her legs back hard, so far that it made her hips hurt. A sharp, foul smell filled Penny’s nostrils as an unfamiliar voice growled above her. She opened her eyes again.

The face that hovered above her was not Byron’s. It was white and darkly bearded and the eyes—

A ragged gasp tore from Penny’s throat.

The eyes above her were a sparkling silver.

“Byron?” she croaked. “Byron?”

The man on top of her pounded harder. Spittle drib­bled from his open mouth as he growled again and again. His hands gripped the backs of her knees so hard that she thought he was going to break the skin.

The darkness was distorting the face of the man who was fucking her—that had to be it, she decided, because she could not be seeing what she thought she was seeing.

Closer, closer, she thought. Almost, so close . . .

His face was changing shape. Strange sounds came from him—popping and crunching—as his nose seemed to grow longer. The entire bottom half of his face jutted out from his skull in a sudden, trembling thrust, and he opened his mouth—now a snout—as his teeth became long and sharp.

No, no, this isn’t happening, but... closer, closer . . . oh God it’s a nightmare I’m having a nightmare . . . closer, closer . . .

As she came in a bright flash of pure white inside her head, the large, heavy figure on top of her slammed into her with increased force, swelled inside her, and released a sound that was a mixture of impassioned cry and roar­ing howl.

She gasped for breath, her fatty flesh quivering as she attempted to crawl backward on the blanket, away from the hulking man above her. He pulled away from her, got up on his knees, and pulled his right arm back. He swung his fist down hard and it connected with Penny’s left temple.

There was another bright flash of white, but this one was not at all orgasmic.

When she opened her eyes, the dark shape above her was gone and her ears rang with a deafening silence. Even the murmur of televisions playing in the trailer park had stopped. Moonlight shone through the tops of the trees above her and gave everything a faint bluish tinge.

“Byron?” she said, her throat dry, voice hoarse. She propped herself up on her elbows, then slowly climbed to her feet and straightened her bunched- up skirt. She found her tank top on the blanket and pulled it on, then looked around for Byron. She called his name again, but got no response. She quickly folded up the blanket and tucked it under her arm. “Byron, are you still here?”

She wondered who the man had been, the one who had replaced Byron between her legs. For the first time since it happened, she felt a wave of fear, of . . . creepiness. Some stranger, a man who was not her friend Byron, had fucked her. She’d always been queasy about her mother’s lifestyle—having sex with virtual strangers, trading sex for money and/or drugs, bringing them home and fucking them and sending them on their way without ever know­ing anything about them, even their real names. And now, she had done something like that—but it had not been by choice. Had it?

Have I been raped? Penny wondered.

She walked toward the edge of the little clearing that had become her and Byron’s secret place—

—and her foot caught on something, throwing her for­ward. The ground swung up and slammed into her with a thud, knocking an explosive grunt from her lungs. Penny clumsily and heavily climbed to her feet, picked up the blanket, and turned around. She looked down to find that she’d tripped over Byron’s legs, his pants down around his ankles. Her eyes followed his legs up to his bare ass, and then . . .

From the waist up, Byron disappeared in a black mass of glistening lumps and jagged bones.

Penny gasped. It wasn’t until then that she caught a whiff of the thick, coppery scent in the air. She stumbled backward away from the torn body, hugging the blanket to her chest. A storm of emotions raced through her—fear, sadness, guilt. She looked down at her feet in their flip-flops. Had she stepped in blood?

A possible scenario played out in her mind: she tracked blood back to the trailer; the cops followed her steps; and Gretchen found out about what she’d been doing with Byron, that she was guilty of luring Byron out to the hid­ing place to be killed by this stranger from nowhere. Penny could not let that happen. Moving numbly and without much thought, she took off her flip- flops and wrapped them in her blanket. She walked a good distance around Byron’s body, left the hiding place, and hurried back to the trailer.

In her tiny, cramped bedroom, she opened the blanket and looked at her flip- flops. The bottoms were dark with blood. She wrapped them in the blanket again, stuffed the blanket into a plastic trash bag, and looked at the clock on the DVD player. It was just past eleven. Gretchen proba­bly wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours. Penny left the trailer, walked toward the front of the park, and took a sharp turn to the right between two trailers. She took a shortcut—a narrow path through the woods that led to a nearby 7- Eleven. There was a large Dumpster behind the convenience store. Penny opened the Dump­ster and stuffed her bag deep into the garbage. Her fore­arm was sticky and smelly when she pulled it out.

She went back to the trailer, took a long, hot shower, then put on a T-shirt and sweatpants. She sat in front of the TV with a bag of Lay’s Wavy chips and a jar of ranch- style dip. She watched TV and ate and tried to push everything that had happened that night far from her mind—including the image of Byron’s ripped and mangled body spread over the ground in their secret hiding place.

* * *

CHAPTER ONE

Driving Back to the Seventies

The silver Mercedes coupé put Carmel behind it on California’s Highway 1 and sped south. To the right, the meringue breakers of the gray- blue Pacific repeatedly surged against the rocky cliffs and flat expanses of wet, shiny sand, stirring a thin, silvery mist. It was a bright, sparklingly clear Friday in July, and the morning neared its end.

In the passenger seat, Karen Moffett smoked a Win­ston and occasionally flicked ashes out of the three- inch opening in the window. She had been annoyed with car manufacturers ever since they’d stopped installing ash­trays in cars. She took a drag and exhaled smoke as she waited for the driver to respond to the explanation she’d just given.

“So let me get this straight,” Gavin Keoph said as he drove. “Essentially, we’re, uh . . . traveling back in time to the seventies. Is that it?”

“I haven’t been to this place myself, but yeah, that’s pretty much the case.”

Gavin eyed the cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand.

“From what I’ve learned,” she went on, “the Esalen Institute has perfectly preserved the philosophies and pop psychology of the seventies in a hermetically sealed environment. Sort of like stepping back in time to Marin County, circa 1973.”

Karen noticed that his eyes glanced at the road but spent most of their time on her cigarette.

“Can I have a drag off that?” he said.

“Didn’t you bring your own?”

“I’m trying to quit.”

She laughed as she handed him the half- smoked ciga­rette. Gavin pulled on the cigarette, and his eyes closed briefly with plea sure as he inhaled while Karen watched. As he exhaled the smoke slowly with a sigh, his eyes opened only halfway to watch the road, and his body slumped in the seat, suddenly relaxed, soothed.

“Careful,” Karen said. “You enjoy that anymore and you’re going to need a cigarette afterwards, if you know what I mean.”

Gavin chuckled as he handed the cigarette back to her.

“How long has it been since your last smoke?” she said.

“Oh . . .” He looked at his watch. “About nine hours.”

“They have pills for that now, you know.”

“I don’t believe in pills.”

“You may not believe in them, Keoph, but they do ex­ist.” At Karen’s feet was an Aquafina bottle with some dead cigarette butts floating in a few inches of water. She took another drag, then picked up the bottle, removed the cap, and dropped the remainder of the cigarette into it. She replaced the cap and put the bottle back down by her feet.

“We’ve known each other for a couple years now, and you’re still calling me Keoph,” he said, smiling. “I hate that.”

“You do? Why haven’t you ever said so?”

“I have. At least twice.”

“You have? Oh. Well, what do I call you?”

“How about my first name? Gavin.”

“All right, Gavin it is. Sometimes I get distracted and don’t hear things. Sorry I didn’t hear you.”

“So, what is Martin Burgess doing at the Esalen Insti­tute?”

Karen laughed. “You’ve known him awhile now, and you have to ask?”

“You know him better than I do. You’ve spent more time with him because he’s got a house down in Los Angeles. Which is why I suppose he always calls you with as­signments, and never me.”

“Yes, but you know his . . . leanings, so to speak. Esalen is right up his alley. He’s attending a weeklong seminar on remote viewing.”

“Remote viewing?”

“It’s a form of ESP. Allegedly, those with an aptitude for it can develop it with time and practice, hone it. Like . . . I don’t know . . . crocheting, or playing the accordion. It’s the ability to gather information about a person or place or event that’s outside the physical perception of the viewer. For example, using remote viewing, you might track the movements of a person who’s on the other side of the country.”

Gavin frowned. “With my mind?”

She nodded. “The CIA has done all kinds of research into it in the past, and for all we know, they may have used it. They still may be using it.”

“What’s Burgess want with it?”

“He writes horror novels. It’s grist for his mill.”

“So, he’s at Esalen for the whole weekend?”

“At least. It’s a resort- style conference center where people gather to meditate, discuss alternative science, the soul, philosophy and odd religious stuff, nutrition, what ever.”

He grunted. “Sounds like a circle jerk for people with too much money and time on their hands.”

“We think alike, Mr. Keoph. At least it’ll be pretty. Big Sur is gorgeous.”

Gavin turned his head to the right and looked out at the richly colored coast. “Everything is gorgeous around here. If Burgess is busy with this weird seminar, what does he want with us?”

“The usual. He has something for us to do. You know him. It couldn’t wait.”

“What’s with the ring size?”

Burgess had asked for their ring sizes. Left hand, wed­ding finger.

“I don’t know,” Karen said. “All I know is that he has someone there he wants us to meet, and then he’s going to give us another assignment.”

They were silent for awhile as Gavin drove. Finally, he frowned and turned to Karen. “They discuss ‘alternative science’? What is alternative science, anyway? I mean, there’s . . . empiricism, right? What other kind of science— I mean, real science—is there?”

Karen shrugged. “I’m okay, you’re okay? If it feels good, do it? That sort of thing.”

Gavin’s eyebrows rose and he nodded. “Ah, okay. Get in touch with your inner child. Make love, not war.”

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

“Sit on it, Potsie.”

Karen laughed.

Gavin shook his head slowly and said, “We are working for a loon.”

“Ah, yes, but he’s a loon who pays very well.”

Martin Burgess, the loon to whom they referred, was a writer of gruesome horror novels that routinely made the bestseller lists and were typically made into bad movies that yielded bigger box office receipts than they deserved. His work, combined with his quirky, witty personality, made him a frequent guest on talk shows.

“Did you see him on Letterman last week?” Gavin asked.

“Burgess? Sure. He and Letterman are good together.”

Gavin chuckled. “Letterman always acts like he’s a lit­tle afraid of him. It’s funny.”

“Anyone who’s read his books has got to be a little nervous about him at first. I mean, he writes some pretty... well, strange stuff. That last book, the one about the alien women with fanged vaginas—What kind of person thinks that stuff up?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Any man who’s dated for any length of time?”

“Chauvinist pig.”

“Ah, more seventies jargon.”

She laughed. “Burgess is harmless. He’s just got a wild imagination.”

“Oh, yeah, he’s a nice guy. I actually like him. He’s just . . . I don’t know.”

“A loon.”

“Yeah.”

The two of them had met two years earlier when Mar­tin Burgess, whom they’d heard of but hadn’t known at the time, summoned them to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Karen was co- owner of Moffett and Brand Private Inves­tigators in Los Angeles, and Gavin owned Burning Lizard Security and Investigations in San Francisco. Burgess had conducted a lengthy search for private investigators who he felt  were well- suited to his needs, and they  were the best he’d found. He’d made them an offer. They were to farm out their current clients to other investigators in their employ and place their firms temporarily in the care of others while they devoted their full time to an investi­gation for Burgess, for which he would pay them hand­somely. Very handsomely. Once they’d learned the details of the investigation, though, they saw the large paycheck in a different light. The  whole thing—the investigation, the money—had struck them both, at first, as the whim of a rich, happy lunatic.

In the course of that investigation, a number of people had been killed—some for the second time—and Karen and Gavin had come close to joining them. Karen’s fate had been especially dark, and it had taken her awhile to get past it. She’d put up a good front at first, but inside, a part of her had died. She had been kidnapped, tortured, beaten, and brutally raped. Mrs. Dupassie, a petite old chocolate- colored woman who swore like a sailor, had helped them in their investigation, and she’d given Karen a lot of support afterward. Mrs. Dupassie had put her in touch with a psychiatrist, whom she still  saw—Dr. Roder­ick Kincaid. These days, she saw him once or twice a month, but at first, she’d been in his home office four or five times a week. He had been very understanding, far more understanding than any typical psychiatrist would have been. He was not typical at all . . . just as Mrs. Du­passie was not typical....

Along with endangering their lives, it had changed the way they looked at the world. It had changed them. Both were well educated, and before that investigation, they had been in solid mental health. As Karen sometimes put it, “I drop something now and then, but I have most of my shit together.” But after that first investigation for Burgess, their beliefs, their outlooks, and their sanity had been shaken. Especially Karen’s. Afterward, she had not slept as well. She still didn’t. Gavin had been surprised to discover that he had a new fear of the dark. After con­quering their initial fears of encountering anything as deadly or horrific as the things they’d faced in that first job, they’d worked on two more cases for Burgess. Nei­ther investigation had turned out to be much of anything, which had been a tremendous relief to both Karen and Gavin.

It had been a difficult decision to go back to work for Burgess. Karen could not get the memories of her tor­ture and rape at the hands of those . . . creatures ... out of her mind, and she knew she never would. The risk of going through something like that again seemed great at first. But she began to realize that the chances of that were small. On top of that, Burgess had sweetened the pot with a bigger fee, and she’d been unable to turn it down. “It was a fluke,” Gavin had told her, and she knew he was probably right.

But they still didn’t talk about that first case. They’d tried a couple of times, but she had been unable to discuss it without stammering, without trembling and being unable to meet Gavin’s eyes. The experience had had a great im­pact on them both, but it had scarred Karen. Daylight wasn’t so bad. But the nights were still tough at times, even after the passage of time. She’d come from a stoic family of people who kept their emotions locked up tight, so she sel­dom showed to anyone the damage that had been done. But it was there.

More than anything, the things they had discovered and faced during that investigation for Burgess had damaged the firm hold they each had on reality. After looking into the predatory eyes of creatures that were not supposed to exist, Karen and Gavin had come to wonder what else might be out there in the world . . . what other boogeymen they’d previously dismissed as fantasy  were lurking in the shadows of hard, cold reality.

“That first time Burgess called,” Gavin said, “I was genuinely baffled. He wouldn’t tell me anything on the phone, wouldn’t say why he specifically wanted to see me. I offered to send someone from my firm, but he refused.”

“Yeah, same here. After he called, I dug up all the in­formation I could find on him just out of curiosity.”

Gavin chuckled. “So did I.”

“That first time we met in the hotel, I figured it had something to do with his wife, Denise. With her being so much younger, I figured he didn’t trust her. I thought maybe he wanted us to follow her around, see if she was cheating, or something.” After a pause, Karen said, “She finally left him, you know.”

“Well, I’m not surprised, after—”

The air between them became thick. They both stared straight ahead at the road, silent, a little stiff.

Before they’d met him, Burgess had left Sheila, his wife of nearly twenty years, to marry Denise Sykes, one of his twenty- something writing students. During their initial in­vestigation for Burgess, Denise, like Karen, had been raped and badly beaten due to her husband’s bungling. Also like Karen, she hadn’t been the same after that. But Denise had been much less able to handle the experience and had spent a little time in a mental hospital in Connecticut that spe­cialized in the discreet treatment of celebrities.

Karen clenched her teeth as she stared out at the high­way. A single word rose up in her mind.

Vampires.

They had been monsters. Not all of them—some fought their nature and refused to prey on people for the blood they needed. Mrs. Dupassie was such a vampire, as were a few of the others they’d worked with on the investiga­tion. Such was the case with Dr. Kincaid. The fact that he was one of them had allowed Karen to be totally honest with him about her experience and feelings. How would she have told a normal psychiatrist that she had been beaten and raped by vampires who had bitten her and sucked her blood?

Gooseflesh crawled across her shoulders and down her back, and she gave a small start.

Gavin caught the movement in the corner of his eye and turned to her. “You okay?” he asked.

She lit another cigarette and nodded.

After a moment, Gavin said, “It’s a little after noon and I’m getting hungry. Didn’t eat much breakfast. You want to stop somewhere and get some lunch?”

Keeping her eyes front, Karen said, “Yeah, okay.” She puffed on the cigarette. “Does the radio work in this crate? How about some music?”

“Sure.” He reached down and turned on the radio. “That button is the tuner. Have a party.” As Karen reached down to find a radio station, Gavin noticed the tremble in her hand. He didn’t have to ask why. He knew.

Three songs played on the radio before Karen finally spoke again. “If this is . . . Um, I mean, if Burgess wants us to do something that’s, uh . . . well, dangerous ... I’m just wondering—”

“Don’t worry, Karen,” Gavin said quietly. “It won’t hap­pen again. I told you once before—it was a fluke. That’s all. Just a fluke.”

They said little for the rest of the drive.