Creepers

by David Morrell

  “How?” Balenger asked. “Old age? Heart failure?”

  “Actually, he committed suicide.”

  The group became still.

  “Suicide?” Balenger scribbled a note.

  “He used a shotgun to blow the top of his head off.”

  The group seemed to stop breathing.

  “Despair because of ill health?” Balenger asked.

  “The autopsy report was among the documents I examined,” Conklin said. “Thanks to the strict health regimen and exercise program with which he tried to offset his hemophilia, he was remarkably fit for a man of ninety-two. He didn’t leave a note. No one was able to explain why he killed himself.”

  “His mind must have been as sharp as his body,” Rick said. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to hide his intentions from his servants.”

  “In his last few years, Carlisle didn’t have any servants.”

  “What? He took care of himself in this huge place all alone?” Cora frowned. “Wandering the halls.”

  “But if he was alone…?” Vinnie sounded puzzled.

  “You mean, how was he found?” Conklin said. “For probably the first time in his life, he left the hotel in the middle of the night, went down to the beach, and shot himself there. Even then, Asbury Park was in such decline, it wasn’t until noon the next day that someone found him.”

  “A man with agoraphobia going down to the beach for the first time in his life so he can kill himself?” Balenger shook his head firmly. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “The police wondered if he’d been murdered,” the professor said. “But it had rained earlier in the night. The only footprints on the beach were Carlisle’s.”

  “Eerie,” Cora said.

  “After his suicide, the old man’s personal papers were deposited in the Carlisle family library, which is actually a storage area in the basement of the Manhattan building that used to be the family mansion. Carlisle’s trust occupied the building until its funds ran out.”

  “The papers include the diary?” Balenger asked.

  “Yes. When I chose the Paragon for this year’s expedition, I did my usual research and discovered the existence of the storage area. The man who oversees the trust allowed me to examine the materials. He was trying to get various universities to bid on them. Evidently, he thought I had my university’s authority to participate in the auction. I was given a day with the papers. That’s when I discovered the diary.”

  “You weren’t just repeating a rumor? There really is a vault in Danata’s suite?” Balenger asked.

  “All I can tell you is, there’s no record of its having been removed.”

  “Hell, this is going to be more interesting than usual.” Vinnie rubbed his hands together. “Of course, we still have to figure out which suite Danata had.”

  “Six-ten,” Conklin said. “According to the diary, it has the best view in the hotel.”

  “Not the penthouse?”

  “Because of Carlisle’s agoraphobia, he couldn’t bear large windows. A full view of the ocean would have terrified him. But he had other ways of looking. When I told you earlier that Aristotle Onassis wanted to buy the Paragon, I didn’t add that Carlisle couldn’t have sold it even if he’d been tempted. Without major reconstruction, almost tearing the hotel to the ground, Carlisle would have been publicly embarrassed and probably arrested.”

  “Arrested?” Rick asked in surprise.

  “Because of his curiosity. The building has hidden corridors that allowed him to watch his guests without their knowledge.”

  “Peepholes? Two-way mirrors?” Balenger wrote hurriedly.

  “Carlisle was diseased in more ways than his hemophilia. He allowed his diary to survive because he believed it served a social purpose. He thought of himself as a cross between a sociologist and a historian.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “No one,” the professor said. “Carlisle left no heirs. The man who administers the trust has remarkably little curiosity about his dead client. He’s a blank-faced, bureaucratic type. The sort that does nothing but think about retirement when he’s in his fifties. Does his work by rote. No expression in his eyes. Reminds me of my dean at Buffalo. I hid the diary at the bottom of Carlisle’s papers. He’ll never notice. But if a university buys those documents, eventually many people will learn what I just told you. Of course, it won’t make a difference. The hotel will be a vacant lot by then. That’s why this is the most important building we’ve ever infiltrated. The chance to verify and document the Paragon’s history has all kinds of cultural implications begging to be included in a book.”

  “One that you’ll write, I hope,” Vinnie said.

  “My final project.” The professor looked pleased.

  Cora glanced at her watch. “Then we’d better get going. The night’s flying by.”

  Balenger tilted his headlamp toward his watch, surprised to see that almost an hour had passed from when they’d left the motel. Like the air in the tunnels, time felt compressed.

  Cora glanced at the message slots and reached into one of the few that contained something. The paper was brittle. “Mmm, Mr. Ali Karim’s credit card doesn’t seem valid. The manager wishes to speak with him. Well, don’t be embarrassed, Mr. Karim. I’ve had that happen a few times myself.” Putting on her hard hat, she joined them in front of the counter.

  “Too bad the elevators don’t work,” Vinnie said. “We’ve got a lot of stairs to climb. Can you do it, Professor?”

  “Try to keep up with me.”

  Balenger warily studied dark corners as he and the others crossed the lobby.

  “There’s the ballroom.” Conklin’s headlamp indicated open doors to their right, an empty oak-floored space beyond.

  “Can I have this dance, Cora?” Rick asked.

  “Gosh, my dance card’s all filled. But the only thing that matters is who I go home with.”

  Rick glanced into the ballroom, smiled, and disappeared. A moment later, an out-of-tune piano began playing “Moon River.”

  “My favorite song,” Cora said to the group.

  “A little old-fashioned for someone your age, isn’t it?” the professor teased.

  “Rick and I love watching those old movies Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer wrote songs for. The romantic ones. Dear Heart. Charade. ‘Moon River’ in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

  Balenger imagined how Vinnie felt about that.

  Blank spaces interrupted the notes, some of the keys not working. The tinny music reverberated in the huge space. It put Balenger on edge. Not that Rick was pounding away. The off-key melody wasn’t much louder than their voices. Someone outside wouldn’t be able to hear it. All the same, it felt like a violation.

  The piano stopped. Rick showed his sheepish face around the corner. “Couldn’t resist. Sorry.”

  “I’m sure if there were any more rats around here, you got rid of them,” Vinnie said.

  Rick laughed and rejoined the group.

  They reached the grand staircase. Between magnificent banisters the marble steps rose, then divided, curving higher toward shadows on the right and left. But that wasn’t where the group focused its lights. Instead, they stared at swaths of discoloration on the stairs.

  “Dried water. Probably from holes in the roof.” Vinnie’s shoes crunched on shattered glass so covered with grime that the shards didn’t glint from the reflection of his headlamp. “The water flowed all the way down to here. Look at all the dirt it brought along.”

  “As we go higher, watch your footing,” the professor warned Balenger. “There’ll be rotted wood.”

  They reached the division in the staircase. Other swaths of discoloration filled the right and left continuations of the steps.

  “A lot of water,” Rick said. “Years of it. When there’s a strong storm, it must really pour down.”

  “Be careful,” the professor said. “It could still be slippery.”

  They ascended the left curve of
the stairs, probing shadows. At the top, they found a row of elegant doors with tarnished brass numbers on them. Murky wood-paneled walls were covered with dust. At intervals, corridors disappeared into darkness. The smell of mold and age was powerful. Balenger peered down at rotted Persian carpeting, its intricate pattern faded and flecked with mildew.

  They turned left and followed a balcony. Every dozen paces, a narrow table was positioned against the wall. Some had vases with desiccated flowers, their petals looking as if the slightest touch would make them crumble. Then the group angled left again and came to more stairs. These were made of finely crafted wood, but Balenger couldn’t be sure what kind because of the water damage they’d sustained. He peered up.

  Vinnie did the same. “My God. The stairs keep following a central open column all the way to the top of the building. Hard to know for sure, but I think I see a glass roof. Moonlight. Clouds moving.”

  “A huge skylight occupies the top of the roof’s pyramid,” Conklin said. “The column rises through the middle of what used to be Carlisle’s living quarters. He could walk from room to room and look down at the guests on the stairs and those in the part of the lobby that was visible to him.”

  “Wouldn’t the guests have thought his behavior a little weird?” Cora asked.

  “The walls of his rooms blocked him. People couldn’t see him looking down. He used peepholes.”

  “The skylight must be broken. That’s where the water’s coming from. That’s how the birds got in,” Balenger said.

  Abruptly, wood creaked under him. His heart lurched. He grabbed the banister.

  Everyone paused.

  “I don’t feel the stairs moving,” Rick tried to assure him. “It’s just normal settling.”

  “Sure.” Balenger wasn’t convinced. He tested the next step.

  “I need more light.” Cora pulled her flashlight from her belt.

  The others drew theirs, also. The shifting rays gave the shadows vitality, making it seem as if guests had just entered their rooms and were closing the doors.

  The water stains became more pronounced as Balenger eased higher.

  “What’s that line William Shatner says at the beginning of every Star Trek episode? ‘Space—the final frontier’?” Vinnie asked. “Good old Captain Kirk. But as far as I’m concerned, this is the final frontier. Sometimes, when I explore like this, I feel like I’m on Mars or someplace, discovering things I never thought I’d see.”

  “Like this?” Cora aimed her flashlight toward the steps above. “What is it? More mold?”

  Green tendrils projected from debris on the stairs.

  “No way. It’s some kind of weed,” Rick said. “Can you imagine? During the day, there must be just enough sun coming through the skylight to allow it to grow. The damned things take root anywhere.” He looked at Balenger. “We once found dandelions growing from an old carpet near a broken window in a hospital scheduled to be torn down.”

  The wood creaked again.

  Balenger kept his grip on the banister.

  “I still don’t feel anything shifting,” Rick said. “We’re fine.”

  “Sure. Right.”

  The group reached the fourth level and kept going.

  But the professor hesitated. A dark corridor stretched ahead of him. He pressed his hand against a wall, then leaned against it, catching his breath.

  “Always test a wall before putting weight against it,” Cora warned Balenger. “On one of our expeditions in Buffalo, Rick leaned against one. He went right through. Then part of the ceiling collapsed. If he hadn’t been wearing a hard hat—”

  “Professor?” Vinnie frowned. “Are you okay?”

  The overweight man breathed hard. Through glasses fogged with exertion, he waved away their concerns. “All these flights of stairs. I can tell some of you feel it, too.”

  Balenger raised a hand. “Guilty.”

  Conklin drew a water bottle from a slot on the side of his knapsack, untwisted the cap, and drank.

  “I’ll join you,” Balenger said, taking a bottle from his knapsack. “To tell the truth, I wish I had some scotch in this.”

  “By popular demand, I don’t touch the stuff anymore,” Conklin said.

  Cora offered a bag of granola. “Anybody want an hors d’oeuvre?”

  Silhouetted by darkness, Rick and Vinnie each took a handful. Balenger heard the crunch of it in their mouths.

  The professor swallowed more water, waited, and finally put away his bottle. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Take a little more time,” Vinnie said. “I wonder what the rooms look like.” He tested a door, pleased when it opened. As his lights pierced the gloom, he nodded. “This room’s got a metal shutter, too.”

  Balenger walked cautiously over. Stale air drifted past him, carrying a bitter undercurrent. Their scanning lights revealed that the room had a standard layout: a closet on the right, a bathroom on the left, and a bedroom area beyond a short corridor.

  Cora glanced into the bathroom. “A marble countertop. The dust makes it difficult to tell, but those fixtures look as if they’re—”

  “Gold-plated,” Conklin said.

  “Wow.”

  There were two small beds, each with four posts and a dusty, floral-patterned bedspread. A Victorian sofa, table, and bureau contrasted with a television set. Apart from cobwebs, grime, and peeling wallpaper, the room presumably remained as it had looked in 1971 or earlier.

  Vinnie walked toward the television. “No color-adjustment knobs. It’s an old black-and-white. The screen has rounded corners. And look at this phone. The old-fashioned rotary kind. I’ve seen them in movies, but despite all the buildings we’ve explored, I’ve never come across a dial phone until now. Imagine the eternity it took to make a call.”

  “That metal shutter.” Rick pointed. “What’s it covering? We’re in the core of the building. There must be several rooms between here and the outside. There’s no point in having a window. There’s nothing to see.”

  “Actually,” the professor said, “Carlisle put a window in every room. Each quadrant of the hotel has an air shaft. At one time, there were flower gardens, shrubs, and trees for guests to look down at. Some rooms next to the shafts even have doors leading onto balconies. The shafts end at the fifth level. The sixth level and the penthouse don’t need them because, at the top of the pyramid, they have direct views of the outside.”

  “Until Carlisle installed the metal shutters,” Cora said. “Was the old man so paranoid that he thought rioters would scale the air shafts?”

  “The rampage. The fires. The gutted buildings. For him, it must have seemed like the end of the world.” Vinnie looked at the professor. “Did he say anything about it in his diary?”

  “No. The diary ends in 1968, the year he closed the hotel to guests.”

  “Three years before he died.” Balenger looked around. “No explanation why he stopped writing it or why he closed the hotel?”

  “None.”

  “Maybe life stopped being interesting,” Cora said.

  “Or maybe it was too interesting,” Conklin said. “From the first World War to the Cuban missile crisis, from the Depression to the threat of nuclear annihilation, he’d seen the twentieth century get worse and worse.”

  “1968. What happened that year?” Balenger asked.

  “The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy two months apart.”

  The group became silent.

  “What’s on the bed?” Balenger pointed.

  “Where? I don’t see anything.”

  “There.”

  Balenger’s lights centered on the first bed and a flat object on the pillows.

  A suitcase.

  “Why would anybody leave a hotel and not take a suitcase?” Cora wondered.

  “Maybe somebody couldn’t pay the bill and snuck out. Let’s see what’s in it.” Vinnie set down his flashlight a
nd pressed two levers, one on each side of the suitcase’s handle. “Locked.”

  Balenger unclipped his knife from his pocket. He opened it and pried at one of the locks.

  “No,” Rick insisted. “We look but don’t touch.”

  “But we’ve been touching a lot of things.”

  “‘Don’t touch’ means ‘don’t damage, don’t disturb, don’t alter.’ This is the equivalent of an archaeological site. We don’t change the past.”

  “But then you’ll never know what’s in the suitcase,” Balenger said.

  “I suppose there are worse things I won’t ever be able to do.”

  “If I can open it without breaking it, do you have a problem?”

  “Not at all. But I don’t see how you can manage it.”

  Balenger pulled out his ballpoint pen. He unscrewed the top and removed the ink cartridge, along with the spring that controlled the tip’s in-and-out movement. Humming to disguise his tension, he put the end of the spring into a keyhole in the suitcase. He pressed, twisted, and heard the latch pop free. He did the same to the other lock, although it took him a little longer.

  “Handy skill,” Rick said.

  “Well, I once did a story about a master locksmith, a guy the police send for when they really need to open something and nobody else can do it. He showed me a few easy tricks.”

  “The next time I lock myself out of my car, I’ll give you a call,” Vinnie said.

  “So who wants to do the honors?” Balenger asked. “Cora?”

  She rubbed her arms. “I’ll pass.”

  “Vinnie? How about you? You’re the first one who tried to open it.”

  “Thanks,” Vinnie said uneasily, “but since you got it open, you should do it.”

  “Okay, but remember, if this is a monumental discovery, it gets named after me.” Balenger lifted the suitcase’s lid.