Phantoms (25 page)

There was a rustle of cloth in the lightless room. The shroud over Wargle’s corpse. The shroud had slipped off the dead man and had fallen to the floor.

Slithering again.

And a dry-wood splintering sound. A brittle, muffled but violent sound. A hard, sharp bonecrack.

Silence again.

Silence.

 

 

While Tal Whitman waited for sleep, he thought about fear. That was the key word; it was the foundry emotion that had forged him. Fear. His life was one long vigorous denial of fear, a refutation of its very existence. He refused to be affected by—humbled by, driven by—fear. He would not admit that anything could scare him. Early in his life, hard experience had taught him that even acknowledgment of fear could expose him to its voracious appetite.

He had been born and raised in Harlem, where fear was everywhere: fear of street gangs, fear of junkies, fear of random violence, fear of economic privation, fear of being excluded from the mainstream of life. In those tenements, along those gray streets, fear waited to gobble you up the instant you gave it the slightest nod of recognition.

In childhood, he had not been safe even in the apartment that he had shared with his mother, one brother, and three sisters. Tal’s father had been a sociopath, a wife-beater, who had shown up once or twice a month merely for the pleasure of slapping his woman senseless and terrorizing his children. Of course, Mama had been no better than the old man. She drank too much wine, tooted too much dope, and was nearly as ruthless with her children as their father was.

When Tal was nine, on one of the rare nights when his father was home, a fire swept the tenement house. Tal was his family’s sole survivor. Mama and the old man had died in bed, overcome by smoke in their sleep. Tal’s brother, Oliver, and his sisters—Heddy, Louisa, and baby Francesca—were lost, and now all these years later it was sometimes difficult to believe that they had ever really existed.

After the fire, he was taken in by his mother’s sister, Aunt Rebecca. She lived in Harlem, too. Becky didn’t drink. She didn’t use dope. She had no children of her own, but she did have a job, and she went to night school, and she believed in self-sufficiency, and she had high hopes. She often told Tal that there was nothing to fear but Fear Itself and that Fear Itself was like the boogeyman, just a shadow, not worth fearing at all. “God made you healthy, Talbert, and he gave you a good brain. Now if you mess up, it’s nobody’s fault but your own.” With Aunty Becky’s love, discipline, and guidance, young Talbert had eventually come to think of himself as virtually invincible. He was not scared of anything in life; he was not scared of dying, either.

That was why, years later, after surviving the shoot-out in the 7-Eleven store over in Santa Mira, he was able to tell Bryce Hammond that it had been a mere cakewalk.

Now, for the first time in a long, long string of years, he had come across a knot of fear.

Tal thought of Stu Wargle, and the knot of fear pulled tighter, squeezing his guts.

Fear Itself.

But this boogeyman was real.

Half a year from his thirty-first birthday, Tal Whitman was discovering that he could still be afraid, regardless of how strenuously he denied it. His fearlessness had brought him a long way in life. But, in opposition to all that he had believed before, he realized that there were also times when being afraid was merely being smart.

 

 

Shortly before dawn, Lisa woke from a nightmare she couldn’t recall.

She looked at Jenny and the others who were sleeping, then turned toward the windows. Outside, Skyline Road was deceptively peaceful as the end of the night drew near.

Lisa had to pee. She got up and walked quietly between two rows of mattresses. At the archway, she smiled at the guard, and he winked.

One man was in the dining room. He was paging through a magazine.

In the lobby, two guards were stationed by the elevator doors. The two polished oak front doors of the inn, each with an oval of beveled glass in the center of it, were locked, but a third guard was positioned by that entrance. He was holding a shotgun and staring out through one of the ovals, watching the main approach to the building.

A fourth man was in the lobby. Lisa had met him earlier—a bald, florid-faced deputy named Fred Turpner. He was sitting at the largest desk, monitoring the telephone. It must have rung frequently during the night, for a couple of legal-size sheets of paper were filled with messages. As Lisa passed by, the phone rang again. Fred raised one hand in greeting, then snatched up the receiver.

Lisa went directly to the restrooms, which were tucked into one corner of the lobby:

That cuteness was out of sync with the rest of the Hilltop Inn.

She pushed through the door marked SNOW BUNNIES. The restrooms had been judged safe territory because they had no windows and could be entered only through the lobby, where there were always guards. The women’s room was large and clean, with four stalls and sinks. The floor and walls were covered with white ceramic tile bordered by dark blue tile around the edge of the floor and around the top of the walls.

Lisa used the first stall and then the nearest sink. As she finished washing her hands and looked up at the mirror above the sink, she saw him.
Him.
The dead deputy. Wargle.

He was standing behind her, eight or ten feet away, in the middle of the room. Grinning.

She swung around, sure that somehow it was a flaw in the mirror, a trick of the looking glass. Surely he wasn’t really there.

But he
was
there. Naked. Grinning obscenely.

His face had been restored: the heavy jowls, the thick-lipped and greasy-looking mouth, the piggish nose, the little quick eyes. The flesh was magically whole again.

Impossible.

Before Lisa could react, Wargle stepped between her and the door. His bare feet made a flat, slapping sound against the tile floor.

Someone was pounding on the door.

Wargle seemed not to hear it.

Pounding and pounding and pounding. . .

Why didn’t they just open the door and come in?

Wargle extended his arms and made come-to-me motions with his hands. Grinning.

From the moment Lisa had met him, she hadn’t liked Wargle. She had caught him looking at her when he thought her attention was elsewhere, and the expression in his eyes had been unsettling.

“Come here, sweet stuff,” he said.

She looked at the door and realized no one was pounding on it. She was only hearing the frantic thump of her own heart.

Wargle licked his lips.

Lisa suddenly gasped, surprising herself. She had been so totally paralyzed by the man’s return from the dead that she had forgotten to breathe.

“Come here, you little bitch.”

She tried to scream. Couldn’t.

Wargle touched himself obscenely.

“Bet you’d like a taste of this, huh?” he said, grinning, his lips moist from his hungrily licking tongue.

Again, she tried to scream. Again, she couldn’t. She could barely wrench each badly needed breath into her burning lungs.

He’s not real, she told herself.

If she closed her eyes for a few seconds, squeezed them tightly shut and counted to ten, he wouldn’t be there when she looked again.

“Little bitch.”

He was an illusion. Maybe even part of a dream. Maybe her coming to the bathroom was really just another part of her nightmare.

But she didn’t test her theory. She didn’t close her eyes and count to ten. She didn’t
dare
.

Wargle took a step toward her, still fondling himself.

Another step.

“Come on, sweet stuff, let me nibble on them titties of yours.”

“You’re gonna love it, sweet stuff.”

She backed away from him.

“Cute little body you got, sweet stuff. Real cute.”

He continued to advance.

The light was behind him now. His shadow fell on her.

Ghosts didn’t throw shadows.

In spite of his laugh and in spite of his fixed grin, his voice became steadily harsher, nastier. “You stupid little slut. I’m gonna use you real good. Real damned good. Better than any of them high school boys ever used you. You ain’t gonna be able to walk right for a week when I’m through with you, sweet stuff.”

His shadow had completely engulfed her.

Her heart slamming so hard that it seemed about to tear loose, Lisa backed up farther, farther—but soon collided with the wall. She was in a corner.

She looked around for a weapon, something she could at least throw at him. There was nothing.

Each breath was harder to draw than the one before it. She was dizzy and weak.

But she couldn’t delude herself any longer; she couldn’t believe in the dream any more.

Wargle stopped just an arm’s length from her. He glared at her. He swayed from side to side, and he rocked back and forth on the balls of his bare feet, as if some mad-dark-private music swelled and ebbed and swelled within him.

He closed his hateful eyes, swaying dreamily.

A second passed.

Two seconds, three, six, ten.

Still, his eyes remained closed.

She felt herself carried away in a whirlpool of hysteria.

Could she slip past him? While his eyes were closed? Jesus. No. He was too close. To get away, she would have to brush against him. Jesus. Brush against him? No. God, that would snap him out of his trance or whatever this was, and he would seize her, and his hands would be cold, dead-cold. She could not bring herself to touch him. No.

Then she noticed something odd happening behind his eyes. Wriggling movement. The lids themselves no longer conformed to the curvature of his eyeballs.

He opened his eyes.

They were gone.

Beneath the lids lay only empty black sockets.

She finally screamed, but the cry she brought forth was beyond human hearing. Breath passed out of her in an express-train rush, and she felt her throat working convulsively, but there was absolutely no sound that would bring help.

She was certain that those hollow sockets could still see her. They sucked at her with their emptiness.

His grin had not faded.

“Little pussy,” he said.

She screamed her silent scream.

“Little pussy. Kiss me, little pussy.”

Somehow, dark as midnight, those bone-rimmed sockets still held a glimmer of malevolent awareness.

“Kiss me.”

Let me die, she prayed. God, please let me die first.

“I want to suck on your juicy tongue,” Wargle said urgently, bursting into a giggle.

He reached for her.

She pressed hard against the unyielding wall.

Wargle touched her cheek.

She flinched and tried to pull away.

His fingertips trailed lightly down her cheek.

His hand was icy and slick.

She heard a thin, dry, eerie groan—
“Uh-uh-uh-uhuhhhhhhh”
—and realized that she was listening to herself.

She smelled something strange, acrid. His breath? The stale breath of a dead man, expelled from rotting lungs? Did the walking dead breathe? The stench was faint but unbearable. She gagged.

He lowered his face toward hers.

She stared into his eaten-away eyes, into the swarming blackness beyond, and it was like peering through two peepholes into the deepest chambers of Hell.

His hand tightened on her throat.

He said, “Give us—”

She heaved in a hot breath.

“—a little kiss.”

She heaved out another scream.

This time the scream wasn’t silent. This time she pealed forth a sound that seemed loud enough to shatter the restroom mirrors and to crack the ceramic tile.

As Wargle’s dead, eyeless face slowly, slowly descended toward her, as she heard her scream echoing off the walls, the whirlpool of hysteria in which she’d been spinning became, now, a whirlpool of darkness, and she was drawn down into oblivion.

In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, on a rust-colored sofa, against that wall which was farthest from the restrooms, Jennifer Paige sat beside her sister, holding the girl.

Bryce squatted in front of the sofa, holding Lisa’s hand, which he couldn’t seem to make warm again no matter how firmly he pressed and rubbed it.

Except for the guards on duty, everyone had gathered behind Bryce, in a semicircle around the front of the sofa.

Lisa looked terrible. Her eyes were sunken, guarded, haunted. Her face was as white as the tile floor in the ladies’ room, where they had found her unconscious.

“Stu Wargle is dead,” Bryce assured her yet again.

“He wanted me t-t-to . . . kiss him,” the girl repeated, clinging resolutely to her bizarre story.

“There was no one in the restroom but you,” Bryce said. “Just you, Lisa.”

“He was
there,”
the girl insisted.

“We came running as soon as you screamed. We found you alone—”

“He was there.”

“—on the floor, in the corner, out cold.”

“He was there.”

“His body is in the utility room,” Bryce said, gently squeezing her hand. “We put it there earlier. You remember, don’t you?”