David Morrell - Creepers

"NO."

"All right, all right, okay, we get the idea!" Tod aimed his flashlight straight into her eyes. "You miss him! Get used to it and shut up, or you'll go over the railing next!"

"Not until I'm done with her," Mack said.

"NO!"

"Somebody shut her up," Tod warned. "I'm not kidding. If she doesn't stop-"

Balenger went over to where she slumped on the floor. "Cora."

She kept screaming.

"Cora." He put his taped hands on her left shoulder. "Stop."

"NO!"

"Cora." Balenger nudged her. "Stop right now."

Tears streamed down her face. As she wailed, snot dripped from her nose. Saliva leaked from her open mouth.

"Cora." Balenger managed to grasp her arm. He shook her, shook harder. Her body was like a rag doll's. Her head flopped forward and back. He slapped her, and abruptly, she became silent.

Her cheek was red. She looked stunned. Her eyes remained wide, but she hardly blinked, just sank back against a wall and whimpered.

"You didn't need to hit her so hard," Vinnie said bitterly.

"It shut her up, didn't it?" Tod said. "I swear, she was going over the railing."

The professor lay on the floor, horrified.

Mack tapped the crowbar across one of his hands. "So now you know what'll happen if you try to use this against us. Get that door open."

He set the crowbar on the floor and backed away.

Balenger tried to control his emotions. His hands trembled when he picked up the crowbar and wedged it into the doorframe. He braced himself and tugged. Wood splintered.

"No," the professor moaned. "We don't destroy the past."

"Just steal from it. Right, Pops?" JD asked.

"Vinnie, give me some help," Balenger said.

In shock, Vinnie joined him. He put his hands next to Balenger's, who felt them tremble just as his did. The two of them yanked. Crack. Splinter.

Crack. The wood broke almost as loudly as a gunshot. Balenger's ears rang as the door flew open. Darkness beckoned.

"Put down the crowbar and step away from it," Tod warned.

Balenger did what he was told. He watched Mack retrieve the crowbar and return it to his knapsack.

"Now let's find the vault," Tod said.

Balenger and Vinnie lifted the professor to his good leg.

"Cora." Vinnie's voice was unsteady. "We need to go."

But Cora didn't move. She just remained slumped against the wall. Her head was down. The beam from her lamp illuminated her knees. It bobbed as her chest and shoulders heaved with quiet sobs.

"I'll get her inside," Mack said. He pulled her up. With an arm around her waist, close to a breast, he walked toward the open door.

"Don't touch me." She struggled.

As Mack forced her into the darkness, Balenger shouted, "The floor!"

"What?"

"You need to test the floor first! Some of the rooms have rotten wood! That's what happened to the staircase!"

Mack lurched back.

"The three of you go first," JD said.

"Yeah, if it's rotten, the fat old guy'll drop through," Tod said.

They shuffled over. Weighed down by the professor, Balenger put a shoe across the threshold and pressed down. The wood felt secure. He applied more weight and still detected no weakness.

"Ready?" he asked Vinnie.

"Why not?" Vinnie's voice quavered. "The way this is going, if we don't get killed one way, it'll soon happen another."

The beams of their headlamps pierced the darkness, showing Balenger that the room was larger than those they'd already explored. Numbed by Rick's death and the near certainty of his own, he turned his hard hat to the right and left, seeing vague shapes of furniture. They were in the living room of a suite.

Mack brought in Cora. JD and Tod followed. Their flashlights and the four remaining headlamps were the only illumination, revealing chairs, couches, and tables, an odd array of black, red, and gray.

"They're going to need more light to find the vault," Tod said. "Candles. Somebody mentioned finding candles."

"I did." Mack let go of Cora, who remained in place, leaning one way and then another, almost catatonic from grief.

He took off his knapsack and brought out a plastic bag of candles with a waterproof container of matches inside. He lit a candle and put it in a chrome tubular holder on a table against a wall. The flame wavered, then grew steady. He went about the room, lighting more candles, finding other holders or else dripping wax on the tables and sticking the base of the candles into it. The flames made Balenger feel he was in a desecrated church.

The room had the modest depth of the other rooms Balenger had seen, but it was three times as wide. An expansive shutter, a door, and another shutter-all dusty metal-occupied the wall across from him. He imagined Danata gazing past the wide windows toward the boardwalk, the beach, and the ocean. Carlisle stood in this room after Danata's death, he realized, enjoying Danata's view, filling Danata's space. But only at night. A full view during daylight would have terrified him.

Footsteps made Balenger turn to where JD came back from checking behind two doors on the left. "Closet and bedroom," JD said. "Bathroom's through the bedroom. Nothing to worry us."

They scanned their lights around the room, filling the shadows between candles.

"No TV in the old days," Mack said. "What did he do with the time? He must've been bored to death."

"That." Balenger pointed toward a felt-topped card table that occupied a corner. Keep the damned conversation going, he reminded himself.

"And that." Vinnie worked to follow Balenger's example, indicating an odd-looking object: a flat rectangle with a semicircle rising from it. Its surface was black with red trim.

"What is it?"

"A radio."

"They sure disguised it. What's that shiny stuff it's made of?"

"Bakelite," Vinnie said. "An early form of plastic."

"Check these magazines lying open, as if Danata just went to take a leak," JD said. "Esquire. The Saturday Evening Post. Never heard of it."

Mack went over to a bookcase that had ascending levels in the shape of a skyscraper. Again, the colors were black with red trim. "Gone with the Wind. How to Win Friends & Influence People. Yeah, Danata influenced people, all right. With a gun to their head."

Balenger kept staring at the candlelit room. He couldn't get over what he saw. Another time capsule, he thought. The terror of Rick's falling scream reverberated in his memory.

"Somebody tell me what kind of furniture this is," Tod said.

"Art deco," the professor murmured. Tired of waiting for permission, Balenger and Vinnie eased him onto a sofa that had black vinyl cushions, black lacquered wooden arms, and a five-inch strip of chrome along the bottom. The dusty chrome was the gray Balenger had first glimpsed. The cushions had red piping.

"It's a style of architecture and furniture from the 1920s and 1930s," Vinnie resignedly explained. His voice had little energy. Nonetheless, he forced himself to continue, seeming to realize that as long as he was useful, his captors would allow him to remain alive. "The name comes from an art exposition in Paris in 1925. The Exposition International des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes."

"Speak English."

Vinnie breathed with difficulty. "It means the International Exposition of Industrial and Modern Art Decorations. Art Decorations was shortened to art deco. Industry and art. Put simply, it tried to make a living room look like a cross between a factory and an art gallery."

"The materials are industrial." The professor leaned wearily back on the sofa. He too seemed to realize that if he didn't make himself useful, he'd be dead soon. "Glass, steel, chrome, nickel, vinyl, lacquer, hard rubber."