Read Online Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons - Free Book Online Page A

of troublesome emotion or thought. Willi’s eyes were the cold of a blustery North Sea winter and were often clouded with shifting curtains of the emotions that controlled him— pride, hatred, love of pain, the pleasures of destruction. Willi never referred to his use of the Ability as Feedings— I was evidently the only one who thought in those terms— but Willi sometimes talked of the Hunt. Perhaps it was the dark forests of his homeland that he thought of as he stalked his human quarry through the sterile streets of Los Angeles. Did Willi dream of the forest? I wondered. Did he look back to green wool hunting jackets, the applause of retainers, the gouts of blood from the dying boar? Or did Willi remember the slam of jackboots on cobblestones and the pounding of his lieutenants’ fists on doors? Perhaps Willi still associated his Hunt with the dark European night of the oven which he had helped to oversee.
    I called it Feeding. Willi called it the Hunt. I had never heard Nina call it anything.
    “Where is your VCR?” asked Willi. “I have put them all on tape.”
    “Oh, Willi,” said Nina in an exasperated tone. “You know Melanie. She’s
so
old-fashioned. She wouldn’t have a video player.”
    “I don’t even have a television,” I said. Nina laughed. “Goddamn it,” muttered Willi. “It doesn’t matter. I have other records here.” He snapped rubber bands from around the small, black notebooks. “It just would have been better on tape. The Los Angeles stations gave much coverage to the Hollywood Strangler and I edited in the . . . Ach! Never mind.” He tossed the videocassettes into his briefcase and slammed the lid shut.
    “Twenty-three,” he said. “Twenty-three since we met twelve months ago. It doesn’t seem that long, does it?”
    “Show us,” said Nina. She was leaning forward and her blue eyes seemed very bright. “I’ve been curious since I saw the Strangler interviewed on
Sixty Minutes
. He was yours, Willi? He seemed so . . .”
    “
Ja, ja
, he was mine. A nobody. A timid little man. He was the gardener of a neighbor of mine. I left him alive so the police could question him, erase any doubts. He will hang himself in his cell next month after the press loses interest. But this is more interesting. Look at this.” Willi slid across several glossy black and white photographs. The NBC executive had murdered the five members of his family and drowned a visiting soap opera actress in his pool. He had then stabbed himself repeatedly and written 50 SHARE in blood on the wall of the bath house. “Reliving old glories, Willi?” asked Nina. “ ‘Death to the Pigs’ and all that?”
    “No, goddamn it. I think it should receive points for irony. The girl had been scheduled to drown on the program. It was already in the script outline.”
    “Was he hard to Use?” It was my question. I was curious despite myself.
    Willi lifted one eyebrow. “Not really. He was an alcoholic and heavily into cocaine. There was not much left. And he hated his family. Most people do.”
    “Most people in California, perhaps,” said Nina primly. It was an odd comment from Nina. Her father had committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a trolley car.
    I asked, “Where did you make contact?”
    “A party. The usual place. He bought the coke from a director who had ruined one of my . . .”
    “Did you have to repeat the contact?”
    Willi frowned at me. He kept his anger under control, but his face grew redder. “
Ja, ja
. I saw him twice more. Once I just watched from my car as he played tennis.”
    “Points for irony,” said Nina. “But you lose points for repeated contact. If he was as empty as you say, you should have been able to Use him after only one touch. What else do you have?”
    He had his usual assortment. Pathetic skid row murders. Two domestic slayings. A highway collision which turned into a fatal shooting. “I was in the crowd,” said Willi. “I made contact. He had a gun