Phantoms Read online

  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.

  He isn’t real. He’s an illusion.

  Another step.

  He isn’t real, he’s an illusion.

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

  He isn’t real he’s an illusion he isn’t real he’s—

  “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.

  He isn’t real. He’s an illusion.

  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.

  What’s he doing?

  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.

  His eyes.

  His empty eyes.

  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.”

  No!

  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-uh-uhhhhhhh” —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 peep-holes 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.

  20

  Bodysnatchers

  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?”

  “Is it still there?” the girl asked. “Maybe you’d better look.”

  Bryce met Jenny’s eyes. She nodded. Remembering that anything was possible tonight, Bryce got to his feet, letting go of the girl’s hand. He turned toward the utility room.

  “Tal?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Come with me.”

  Tal drew his revolver.

  Pulling his own sidearm from his holster, Bryce said, “The rest of you stay back.”

  With Tal at his side, Bryce crossed the lobby to the utility room door and paused in front of it.

  “I don’t think she’s the kind of kid who makes up wild stories,” Tal said.

  “I know she’s not.”

  Bryce thought about how Paul Henderson’s corpse had vanished from the substation. Damn it, though, that had been very different from this. Paul’s body had been accessible, unguarded. But no one could have gotten to Wargle’s corpse—and it couldn’t have gotten up and walked away of its own accord—without being seen by one of the three deputies posted in the lobby. Yet no one and nothing had been seen.

  Bryce moved to the left of the door and motioned Tal over to the right of it.

  They listened for several seconds. The inn was silent. There was no sound from within the utility room.

  Keeping his body out of the doorway, Bryce leaned forward and reached across the door, took hold of the knob, turned it slowly and silently until it had gone as far as it would go. He hesitated. He glanced over at Tal, who indicated his own readiness. Bryce took a deep breath, threw the door inward, and jumped back, out of the way.

  Nothing rushed from the unlighted room.

  Tal inched to the edge of the jamb, reached around with one arm, fumbled for the light switch, and found it.

  Bryce was crouched down, waiting. The instant the light came on, he launched himself through the doorway, his revolver poked out in front of him.

  Stark fluorescent light spilled down from the twin ceiling panels and glinted off the edges of the metal sink and off the bottles and cans of cleaning materials.

  The shroud, in which they had wrapped the body, lay in a pile on the floor, beside the table.

  Wargle’s corpse was missing.

  Deke Coover had been the guard stationed at the front doors of the inn. He wasn’t much help to Bryce. He had spent a lot of time looking out at Skyline Road, with his back to the lobby. Someone could have carted Wargle’s body away without Coover being the wiser.

  “You told me to watch the front approach, Sheriff,” Deke said. “As long as he didn’t accompany himself with a song, Wargle could’ve come out of there all by his lonesome, doing an old soft-shoe routine and waving a flag in each hand, and he mightn’t have attracted my notice.”

  The two men stationed by the elevators, near the utility room, were Kelly MacHeath and Donny Jessup. They were two of Bryce’s younger men, in their mid-twenties, but they were both able, trustworthy, and reasonably experienced.

  MacHeath, a blond and beefy fellow with a bull’s neck and heavy shoulders, shook his head and said, “Nobody went in or out of the utility room all night.”

  “Nobody,” Jessup agreed. He was a wiry, curly-haired man with eyes the color of tea. “We would’ve seen them.”

  “The door’s right there,” MacHeath observed.

  “And we were here all night.”

  “You know us, Sheriff,” MacHeath said.

  “You know we aren’t slackers,” Jessup said.

  “When we’re supposed to be on duty—”

  “—we are on duty,” Jessup finished.

  “Damn it,” Bryce said. “Wargle’s body is gone. It didn’t just climb off that table and walk through a wall!”

  “It didn’t just climb off that table and walk through that door, either,” MacHeath insisted.

  “Sir,” Jessup said, “Wargle was dead. I didn’t see the body myself, but from what I hear, he was very dead. Dead men stay where you put them.”

  “Not necessarily,” Bryce said. “Not in this town. Not tonight.”

  In the utility room with Tal, Bryce said, “There’s just not another way out of here but the door.”

  They walked slowly around the room, studying it.

  The leaky faucet drooled out a drop of water that struck the pan of the metal sink with a soft ping.

  “The heating vent,” Tal said, pointing to a grille in one wall, directly under the ceiling. “What about that?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Better have a look.”

  “It’s not big enough for a man to pass through.”

  “Remember the burglary at Krybinsky’s Jewelry Store?”

  “How could I forget? It’s still unsolved, as Alex Krybinsky so pointedly reminds me every time we meet.”

  “That guy entered Krybinsky’s basement through an unlocked window almost as small as that grille.”

  Bryce knew, as did any cop who handled burglaries, that a man of ordinary build required a surprisingly small opening to gain entrance to a building. Any hole large enough to accept a man’s head was also large enough to provide an entrance for his entire body. The shoulders were wider than the head, of course, but they could be collapsed forward or otherwise contorted enough to be squeezed through; likewise, the breadth of the hips was nearly always sufficiently alterable to follow where the shoulders had gone. But Stu Wargle hadn’t been a man of ordinary build.

  “Stu’s belly would’ve stuck in there like a cork in a bottle,” Bryce said.

  Nevertheless, he pulled up a stepstool that had been standing in one corner, climbed onto it, and took a closer look at the vent.

  “The grille’s not held in place by screws,” he told Tal. “It’s a spring-clip model, so it could conceivably have been snapped into place from inside the duct, once Wargle went through, so long as he wriggled in feet-first.”

  He pulled the grille off the wall.

  Tal handed him a flashlight.

  Bryce directed the beam into the dark heating duct and frowned. The narrow, metal passageway ran only a short distance before taking a ninety-degree upward turn.

  Switching off the flashlight and passing it down to Tal, Bryce said, “Impossible. To get through there, Wargle would have to’ve been no bigger than a child and as flexible as the rubber man in a carnival sideshow.”

  Frank Autry approached Bryce Hammond at the central operations desk in the middle of the lobby, where the sheriff was seated, reading over the messages that had come in during the night.

  “Sir, there’s something you ought to know about Wargle.”

  Bryce looked up. “What’s that?”

  “Well... I don’t like to have to speak ill of the dead...”