Creepers

by David Morrell

  It bared its teeth, hissing.

  “Look how it stands its ground,” Vinnie said. “Not afraid of us. Feral. Furious that we’re intruding.”

  “Must weigh twenty pounds,” Rick said. “From that banquet of rats downstairs.”

  “When I was a kid, I spent summers on my grandmother’s farm,” Vinnie said. “There were a bunch of feral cats in an abandoned barn down the road. They ate every mouse, rabbit, and groundhog for miles. The birds got smart and stayed away. Finally the cats took to killing chickens. Then they graduated to goats and—”

  “Thanks, Vinnie,” Conklin said. “I believe we get the idea.”

  “What happened to the cats?” Balenger asked as the white animal hissed again.

  “A farmer left poisoned meat. Didn’t work. The cats were too smart to touch it. The guy said he counted at least fifty of them and was glad to jump back in his car and get out of there. A neighbor’s wife claimed they made a try for her infant daughter. So, finally, about ten farmers got permission from the game warden or the sheriff or whoever and went out there with guns. I remember the shots lasted all afternoon. My grandmother said she heard they killed over a hundred.”

  “Vinnie,” Cora warned.

  “Well, this is just one. Scram!” Rick shouted. He took out his water pistol and sprayed vinegar in the cat’s direction.

  The liquid didn’t come close. Even so, the cat gave a final hiss and disappeared around the corner.

  “See, it doesn’t like us any better then we like it.”

  Balenger noticed that during the commotion Cora put the bottle of urine into her knapsack. She shoved the Kleenex into a plastic bag, sealed it, and stuffed that into her knapsack, also.

  “Are you okay?” Rick asked.

  “Fine.” She sounded apologetic. “It surprised me is all.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go on.”

  “Hey, it wasn’t anything.” Embarrassment made her stand straighter. “We’ve all had jumpy moments in various buildings. Isn’t that some of the point? To get an adrenaline rush. Just because I yell on a roller coaster doesn’t mean I don’t want to take another ride.”

  But it seemed to Balenger that she wished they were leaving.

  “If that’s what you want,” Rick said.

  He sounded reluctant, also.

  “Let’s go,” Balenger said.

  Like the darkness that seemed to thicken, time felt even more compressed. Balenger noticed Vinnie limping slightly. Had he lied about not being injured? Then Balenger realized that Vinnie’s awkward motion came from the wet feel of his pants.

  They returned to the balcony.

  “I don’t have the need,” the professor said, “but perhaps this is the best time. I don’t want to delay us later.” He removed his plastic bottle from his knapsack. “We know the first three rooms we checked are safe. I’ll use one of those.”

  “Safe, if you don’t count a dead monkey in a suitcase,” Cora said.

  “The room I had in mind is the one with the Burberry coat.”

  “Professor,” Vinnie said, “one of us should go with you. Just to be extra cautious.”

  “Being cautious is good,” Conklin agreed.

  Balenger watched them open the door. They tested the floor, even though it had supported them earlier. Their lights went into the darkness.

  Balenger put a hand against the balcony’s wall. Satisfied that it was sturdy, he slid down, sitting with his back against it. Even if he wasn’t relaxed, the illusion of resting felt good.

  Rick and Cora slid down next to him. They looked as exhausted as he felt. Well, that’s what adrenaline does to you, he thought. Eventually, it wears you out.

  “Might as well use the time.” Balenger reached for the file folder he’d dropped when Cora shouted.

  POLICE REPORTS.

  “Want some reading material?” He gave pages to Rick and Cora, keeping the most recent one for himself.

  It was dated August 31, 1968. As the professor had explained, that was the year the hotel stopped receiving guests. Balenger expected that the file would be dominated by reports about thefts, the most common crime in a hotel, but what he read was far more serious.

  An inquiry about a missing person. In August, one week after a woman named Iris McKenzie stayed in the Paragon, a police detective arrived, asking questions about her. No one had seen or heard from her after she paid her bill and left the hotel. Someone who worked for the Paragon made detailed handwritten notes about the conversation with the detective.

  Iris McKenzie lived in Baltimore, Maryland, Balenger learned. She was thirty-three, single, a copywriter for an advertising firm that collaborated with big agencies in New York. After a summer business trip to Manhattan, she went to Asbury Park and spent a weekend in the Paragon. At least, the phone reservation she made indicated that she intended to stay for a weekend. Arriving Friday evening. Leaving Monday morning. Instead, she checked out on Saturday morning. Balenger had a suspicion that she realized how misinformed she was—that Asbury Park was no longer the place to go for a peaceful weekend getaway.

  The person who took notes about the detective’s inquiries (the handwriting seemed masculine) indicated that he showed the detective the reservation card and the receipt that Iris McKenzie had signed when she paid her bill and checked out early. The phone charges to her room showed a 9:37 A.M. long-distance call to a number the detective identified as belonging to Iris’s sister in Baltimore. The detective indicated that the sister’s seventeen-year-old son answered the phone and told Iris that his mother wouldn’t be home until dinnertime. Iris told the boy to tell his mother she’d be returning to Baltimore that night. Iris then took a cab to the train station and got a ticket for Baltimore, but she never arrived at her destination.

  Awfully talkative detective, Balenger thought. He volunteered way too much information. Ask questions. Don’t provide details. Let the person you’re talking to provide the details.

  The hotel had no idea what might have happened to Iris after she left, the document indicated. It then went on to note that a month later a private investigator arrived from Baltimore, asking the same questions. The hotel representative who summarized the inquiries gave the impression that he was keeping a record in order to make sure everyone understood the hotel wasn’t at fault.

  Balenger felt his pulse quicken with the sudden thought that perhaps Carlisle himself had written the document. As darkness hovered beyond the balustrade, he concentrated on faded ink that was almost purple. His flashlight’s beam went through the brittle yellow paper and cast a shadow of the handwriting onto Balenger’s hand. Was there a hint of age in the handwriting, an imprecise quality in the letters that might have been caused by the arthritic fingers of someone in his late eighties?

  Vinnie and the professor returned. As Conklin put the plastic bottle in his knapsack and zipped it shut, Balenger asked, “Was Carlisle’s diary handwritten?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “See if this looks familiar.” Balenger handed the report to him.

  The harsh lights made Conklin squint through his spectacles. The degree of his concentration was obvious. “Yes. That’s Carlisle’s handwriting.”

  “Let me have a look,” Vinnie said. He surveyed the handwriting as if it posed a riddle. Then he passed the document to Rick and Cora.

  “Makes me feel a little closer to him,” Rick said. “You told us Carlisle had a…How did you put it? An arresting physical presence because of the steroids and the exercise. But what was his face like? His manner? Was he attractive or homely? Charming or overbearing?”

  “In his prime, he was compared to a matinee idol. His eyes were the color of aquamarine. Sparkling. Charismatic. People felt hypnotized by him.”

  Rick gave the missing-person report back to Balenger and indicated a yellowed page from a newspaper. “I’ve got one of the murders. The thirteen-year-old boy who took a baseball bat to his father’s head while he was sleeping. Hit him twenty-two times, really ba
shed his brains in. Happened in 1960. The boy’s name was Ronald Whitaker. It turns out his mother was dead and his father sexually abused him for years. His teachers and the kids he went to school with described him as quiet and withdrawn. Moody.”

  “A common description of sex-abuse victims,” Balenger said. “They’re in shock. Ashamed. Afraid. They don’t know who to trust, so they don’t dare talk to anybody for fear they might blurt out what’s being done to them. The abuser usually threatens to do something awful—kill a pet, cut off a penis or a nipple—if the victim tells anybody what’s going on. At the same time, the abuser tries to make the victim believe that what’s happening is the most natural thing in the world. Eventually, some victims feel everybody’s an abuser in one way or another, that the world’s all about manipulating people and they can’t rely on anyone.”

  Rick pointed at the document. “In this case, the father took Ronald to Asbury Park on the Fourth of July weekend. A so-called summer treat. A child psychiatrist tried for several weeks to get Ronald to talk about what happened next. Eventually, the words came out in a torrent, how Ronald’s father accepted money for another man to spend an hour alone with the boy. The stranger gave Ronald a ball, bat, and cheap baseball glove as a bribe. After the man left, the father came back to the room drunk and fell asleep. Ronald found a use for the baseball bat.”

  “Thirteen years old.” Cora was sickened. “What happens to someone like him?”

  “Because of his youth, he couldn’t have been tried in a regular court,” Balenger replied. “If he’d been of age, he’d have probably been found innocent by reason of temporary insanity. But in the case of a minor, a judge likely sent him to a juvenile facility where he received psychiatric counseling. He’d have been released when he was twenty-one. His court and psychiatric records would have been sealed so that no one could learn about his past and use it against him. Then it was up to him to try to move ahead with his life.”

  “But basically, that life was ruined,” Cora said.

  “There’s always hope, I guess,” Balenger said. “Always tomorrow.”

  “You sure know a lot about this.” Rick studied him.

  Is he questioning me again? Balenger wondered. “I was a reporter on a couple of cases like this.”

  “This hotel soaked up a lot of pain,” Vinnie said. “Look at this report.” The aged paper rustled in his hands. “The woman who owned the suitcase with the dead monkey in it. What was the name on the suitcase tag?”

  “Edna Bauman,” Cora said.

  “Yeah, it’s the same. Edna Bauman. She committed suicide here.”

  “What?”

  “August 27, 1966. She took a hot bath and slit her wrists.”

  “Cora, your instincts are finely tuned,” the professor said. “Remember you asked Rick to look in the bathtub? You were afraid something might be in there.”

  Cora shuddered. “Almost forty years earlier.”

  “August twenty-seventh,” Rick said. “When was the date of the obituary for her ex-husband?”

  “August twenty-second,” Balenger answered.

  “Five days. As soon as the funeral was over, she came back here to where she and her then-husband spent their last vacation the previous summer.” Vinnie thought a moment. “Maybe that summer was her last happy memory. That’s when the photograph of the two of them and the monkey was taken. One year later, her life was in ruins. Surrounded by better memories, she killed herself.”

  “Yes,” Cora said, “this hotel soaked up a lot of pain.”

  “But wouldn’t the police or somebody have removed the suitcase with the dead monkey in it?” Rick wondered. “Why did they leave it behind?”

  “Maybe they didn’t,” Balenger told him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe Carlisle took it before the police arrived. Later, he returned it.”

  The group became silent. Balenger thought he heard the wind outside, then realized that the sound came from an upper level.

  “The room that has the Burberry coat,” Conklin said. “When I was in there, Vinnie thought to search the pockets.”

  “I found this.” Vinnie handed a letter to Rick and Cora.

  Cora read the heading and the date. “The Mayo Clinic. February 14, 1967. ‘Dear Mr. Tobin: Your recent chest X rays indicate that the primary tumor has spread from the upper lobe of your right lung. A secondary tumor has appeared on your trachea. A new course of aggressive radiation needs to be scheduled at once.’”

  “Tobin.” Rick sorted through the pages Balenger had given him and found another yellowed newspaper clipping. “Edward Tobin. Philadelphia stockbroker. Age forty-two. Suicide. February 19, 1967.”

  “Right after he received that letter.”

  “February?” Vinnie asked. “Even if he was suicidal, winter’s an odd time to come to the Jersey shore.”

  “Not if he intended to walk into the ocean and freeze to death before he drowned.” Rick pointed toward the newspaper article. “The guy was wearing only a shirt and trousers when his body was found iced-over where the tide brought him in.”

  Again, Balenger was conscious of the shriek of wind above him. “Odd to have two rooms next to each other, both associated with a suicide.”

  “Not if you think about it,” Conklin said. “Thousands and thousands of guests stayed here over the Paragon’s many years. A changeover in each unit every few days. Decades and decades. Eventually, every single room would have been associated with a tragedy. Heart attacks, miscarriages, strokes. Fatal concussions from falls in bathtubs. Drug overdoses. Alcoholic rages. Beatings. Rape. Sexual abuse. Marital and business betrayals. Financial disasters. Suicides. Murders.”

  “Cheery,” Rick said.

  “A small version of the world,” Balenger said. “That’s why Carlisle was fascinated with his guests.”

  “A Calvinist God watching the damned, capable of intervening but choosing not to.” Cora rubbed her arms in distress.

  “If we’re going to finish this tonight, we’d better keep moving.” Rick gathered the pages they’d been reading. He put everything inside the file and zipped it into a slot on the back of his knapsack.

  “We’ll need to remember to return it to the file cabinet when we leave,” the professor said.

  “I don’t know what the point would be,” Vinnie said. “This hotel will soon be a pile of rubble.”

  “But that’s a rule,” Rick told him. “If we break it even once, eventually we’ll break others. Then we’ll merely be vandals.”

  “Right.” Vinnie’s tone became flat. “When we leave, we’ll put the file back.”

  Flashing their lights around them, they left the balcony and headed up the stairs.

  “Feels solid,” Cora said. “But after what happened to Vinnie, to be safe maybe we should go up in single file. That way, there’s less pressure on the stairs.”

  “Excellent idea.” The professor was always ready with praise for Cora, Balenger noted. “Keeping a slight distance between each of us would be useful, too.”

  Forming a line, they climbed higher through the shadows. On occasion, the stairs creaked, making Balenger tense, but the wood remained steady, and he decided the sound wasn’t any different from the normal sounds that old stairs made when someone climbed them.

  The professor gasped as a bird on an upper banister panicked, bursting into the air, desperate to escape their intrusion. It slammed into a wall and swung away in greater panic. Blinded, it circled their lights, its wings thrashing. At once, it veered down the stairs, disappearing into the darkness.

  “Well, that certainly got the old heart racing,” Conklin said.

  Balenger turned toward him. “Are you sure you’re okay, Professor?”

  “Couldn’t be better.” The stocky man was out of breath again.

  “Only two more levels to go.”

  “Terrific.”

  Footsteps echoing, they reached level five.

  “Uh!” Rick jumped away.
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  “What’s wrong?” Cora shouted.

  “This.” Rick pointed. “Something brushed the top of my hat.”

  They aimed their lights above Rick’s head.

  “For God’s sake, that looks like—”

  “Roots,” Vinnie said.

  What resembled ropes and strings dangled from the floor of the balcony above them. Threads seemed attached to them: smaller roots.

  “I’ve never seen anything like…What’s growing up there?”

  They reached the continuation of the stairs. Rick took the lead, then Cora, Vinnie, Balenger, and finally the professor, whose slow pace made it natural for him to be the last.

  Balenger now had a chance to study the skylight. It was spacious, perhaps forty feet square, shaped like the tip of a pyramid. Large segments of glass were held in place by crisscrossing copper supports, their metal green with age.

  But many segments were missing or broken. After so many years, heavy accumulations of ice and snow had weakened the supports. Balenger remembered the shattered glass at the bottom of the stairwell. Yes, this is how the birds get in, he thought. He saw a half moon disappearing behind clouds. The wind whistled past the gaps in the skylight, the source of one of the sounds he’d earlier heard. The air got colder.

  Something’s wrong, he realized. “The stairs don’t go higher. We’re coming to the sixth level. There should be another set of stairs leading up to Carlisle’s penthouse on the seventh. But there aren’t any. How do we get up to it?”

  “Take a look at that.” Rick aimed his flashlight at the balcony he climbed toward.

  As one, the group imitated him, their lights revealing the area from which the roots dangled.

  “Some kind of…” Cora paused in astonishment. “For the love of…Is that a tree?”

  Five feet tall, leafless and listing, its scraggly trunk and branches cast shadows from their lights.

  “But how the hell…”

  “A bird brought a seed in,” Cora said. “Or the wind did it.”

  “Yes, but how did it manage to grow?”

  Balenger’s flashlight revealed a shattered urn. Dirt lay in a pile among the broken pieces. The tree grew out of the dirt. “There’s your explanation. Add a little rain from the broken skylight, and it manages to stay alive.”