Creepers

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

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

"Vi

In shock, Vi

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 Vi

"Cora." Vi

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 Vi

"Why not?" Vi

35

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 sca

"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." Vi

"What is it?"

"A radio."

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

"Bakelite," Vi

"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 Vi

"It's a style of architecture and furniture from the 1920s and 1930s," Vi

"Speak English."

Vi

"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."

"Not normally attractive," Vi

No, Balenger thought, quit talking that way. Don't reinforce Mack's obsession with sex.

"Or that lamp"-Vi

The candles and flashlights showed furniture that worshiped geometry made seductive: circles, ovals, squares, triangles, pentagons.

"Sometimes, the furniture doesn't look sensuous, even though it is," Vi

"Carmine Danata could have happily napped here."

"But you're not going to," JD said. "I looked in all the rooms. Where's the vault?"

Conklin's mouth opened and closed.

"He lost a lot of blood," Balenger said. "He's dehydrated."

JD took a bottle of water from his knapsack and tossed it to Balenger. "Lubricate him."

Mack snickered.

Balenger twisted off the cap and offered it to the professor, but Conklin didn't seem to notice it, so Balenger raised the bottle to the injured man's lips and helped him drink. If Conklin didn't get to an emergency room in the next couple of hours, gangrene would set in, he knew. Water trickled from the professor's mouth and into his beard.