such an ungodly night.
“Very good, sir,” the driver said. He shielded Stearns from the rain as they walked toward the front entrance of the building, then promptly turned back to the limousine when Stearns gestured him away.
There was a filth-encrusted buzzer on the side of the metal door, and Stearns tentatively raised a finger. Deciding that he wouldn’t be making contact with it long enough to catch something contagious, he quickly pressed the button.
How many of these kinds of visits have I made over the years? he pondered as he waited. He looked back to the car and saw that Aubrey still stood with the umbrella, observing his progress. His driver was one of a kind. He had actually passed away from pancreatic cancer a year ago, but Stearns wasn’t about to let death stand in the way of twenty-five years of excellent service. Good help was so hard to find; a simple spell of resurrection had saved Stearns the trouble.
A sharp click interrupted his musings as the door popped open about a half inch. Stearns gave his driver a nod as he pulled open the door and slipped inside the building.
It was dark in the entryway, lit by only a single bulb from an emergency light; its partner had burned out. There was a door below the emergency light, and Stearns moved toward it, careful to avoid the dust-covered pieces of office furniture that had been left in the hallway.
Is that where Daphene is waiting?
Stearns had been searching for his former lover for quite some time and had begun to believe that she had met an untimely end, when she had reached out to him. She had learned of the murders of Desplat and Montecello and feared the future for herself. They had arranged a meeting, and here he was.
Stearns stopped short just before the door, encountering one of the largest rats he had ever seen. He considered grabbing something from the floor to throw at it, but the way it looked at him-unwavering as it balanced on its thick, gray haunches-was almost as if it were studying him.
Verifying him.
Seemingly satisfied, the rat turned its large, hairy body toward the door that opened with an offending buzz.
Stearns stepped through the heavy door and began to follow the rat down a series of concrete steps. Wall- mounted emergency lights tinted the stairway an arterial red. They descended three levels, the already damp air growing more fetid with the nearly choking smell of urine.
As he reached the last step, the rodent darted quickly away into a patch of darkness. Stearns could not see what waited beyond it, but knew that was where he needed to go.
Cautiously, he entered the shadow. Something smelling of mildew brushed against his cheek, and he recoiled, then carefully reached out to touch what seemed to be velvet curtains. He pushed them roughly aside and entered another passageway. The rat was waiting for him and turned to scamper through an open doorway at the far end of the short corridor, where a flickering light in the room beyond beckoned.
A sudden spasm of pain nearly sent Stearns to his knees, reminding him of what he needed. He took a deep breath and managed to right himself, using the damp cinder-block wall to steady himself as he made his way toward the room at the end of the hall.
The air grew heavier with the stench of mold and piss, and there was also a sound. He could not place it at first, but when he was finally able to discern the squeaks and growls of multiple rats, an image started to form inside his head.
An image that became reality as he stepped into the large, underground storage room.
The floor was a sea of writhing, furry bodies. Everywhere he looked there were rats, thousands of them, crawling atop one another, some lashing out with snarls and hisses, some busily grooming themselves as if wanting to impress a suitor, some just attempting to scurry from one area of the floor to another, others simply waiting for who knew what.
Stearns was both disgusted and fascinated.
“Is that you, Algernon?” a woman’s voice asked from somewhere in the room.
“Daphene?” he called out, moving farther into the room, trying not to step on the living carpet at his feet.
“I’m so glad you were able to come,” the woman said.
And with those words, the rats seemed to part like the Red Sea before Moses, revealing a hunched figure sitting in a wheelchair at the far end of the space.
Stearns had expected to see the same vivacious woman with whom he’d shared numerous sexual liaisons over the many years they had been alive, perhaps a bit older, given the time that had passed since last they’d seen each other, but still with the same hungry vitality for life she had always possessed.
But the closer he got, the more disturbed he became.
For sitting in the wheelchair was a swollen wreck of a woman, her obscenely fat body straining against the material of the drab, short-sleeved dress she wore. Her arms were pale and flabby, like unbaked dough; her legs were a mess of blue veins crisscrossing beneath mottled, ulcerated skin. Her slippers were split at the sides, unable to contain the flesh of her puffy feet.
“Have I changed that much, my love?” she asked in a wheezy, congested voice.
And to think she once made her fortune in fashion design.
Stearns was repulsed by what he saw. He stared at her bloated face, looking for some trace of the woman he had once lusted after hiding beneath layers of pale, sickly flesh.
“It has been too long, darling,” he finally said, watching as the rats crawled upon her chair and her person. She stroked them lovingly as they came within reach, and then he saw the oddest thing. As Daphene laid her hands upon them, the rodents became suddenly still, falling limply onto their sides.
“Even though we’ve been given more life than the average person, time still marches on at an alarming clip,” Daphene answered, brushing still bodies of rats from her expansive lap.
“And what have you been doing with that additional life?” Stearns asked, fighting to hide his revulsion.
“What haven’t I done?” she exclaimed with a laugh, causing her ample flesh to undulate. “I made the world my lover… I had whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. It was good for a time,” she said, gazing off into the distance. “Quite good. But then it all went wrong when the dreams started.”
She turned her glassy-eyed stare to Stearns.
“Do you know what I’m talking about, Algernon?”
He knew exactly what she meant: the memories of all those killed in Hiroshima coming to him when his mind was at rest, desperate to be claimed as his own. “The dreams,” he said, reaching down to swat a rat beginning its ascent up his trouser leg. “They can be quite…overpowering at times.”
“Yes,” Daphene agreed. “They can be, but once I adjusted to them…the hunger came.”
Just the mention of the word made every muscle in Stearns’ body contract painfully. He hid his body’s response with a casual cough.
“At first I had no idea what was happening, but then I realized that Deacon’s experiment that night had changed me. I hungered for the energies of living things.”
She continued to stare at him, petting rats two at a time, draining their life forces before moving on to the next.
Insatiable.
He could have sworn she was growing larger before his eyes.
“Which explains your little friends,” Stearns said, still in awe of the multitude of vermin that surrounded them.
“They breed very quickly, and are quite nutritious as far as life energies go,” she explained. “They’re also very easily manipulated with magick.”
The rats were climbing up, then dropping off, her body in droves now, their conversation obviously making her anxious-and hungry.
“What about you, Algernon?”
Stearns stared at her, pretending he didn’t know what she was getting at.
“Were you changed, too?” she asked, a trace of desperation in her voice.
Stearns finally nodded. “Yes, Daphene. Deacon’s damnable contraption changed all of us.”
She picked up a squirming rat and squeezed the life from it like the juice from a lemon.
