Creepers

"Give it to me." Cora raised it to her nostrils, as if hoping it retained her dead husband's scent, but the disgusted shake of her head indicated that all she smelled was vinegar.

Amanda looked frozen.

"Here. Take my Windbreaker." Vi

She zipped it over her nightgown, looking grateful for the warmth. The Windbreaker was long enough to cover her hips.

"Ready?" Balenger asked.

"For what?" Tod said. "There's nothing we can do."

"We can take the high ground."

"High ground. What are you talking about?"

"The penthouse." Balenger picked up his hard hat where Tod had thrown it. Its light was out. He flicked the switch. Nothing happened. "You piece of shit, you broke the headlamp."

"Penthouse?" Tod said, appalled.

"I can't." Amanda shuddered. "That's where Ro

"There are other hidden staircases. I'm sure of it," Balenger said, bitterly examining the useless lamp on his hard hat. "They all lead to the penthouse. Ro

"Yeah, and we might pick one that leads us straight to him," Tod said.

"Your way, he knows where we are, and he comes for us."

"We've got a gun."

"With only twelve rounds left, thanks to you. And how do you know Ro

Tod looked sick.

"You should dump those coins." Balenger pointed at Tod's bulging pockets. "The weight will slow you down."

"No way am I tossing that much money."

"Vi

"Lost it."

"Fucking great. Which leaves this one that Mack or JD dropped so he could carry more coins." Vi

"Not much light. We'd better blow out these candles and take them with us," Balenger said. "And something else."

When he was taped to the chair with the pillowcase over him, waiting for Ro

He turned toward the professor's headless body on the sofa. Between Conklin's legs, the headlamp continued to glow up through the sheet. Seized by revulsion, Balenger lifted the edge of the blood-soaked sheet and felt under it. His trembling hands touched the professor's beard. With greater revulsion, he pried the chin strap free and tugged the hard hat away, feeling the professor's head tilt. He pulled the hat from under the sheet and almost wept at the blood on it.

"Sorry, Bob," he said. "I'm so sorry."

He put the lamp on his head and felt his muscles cramp. "Let's go."

45

After a cautious look down the stairwell, Balenger climbed toward the penthouse. He heard footsteps on metal below him, the others following. As he was about to press up on a hatch, Amanda said, "There's a switch to the side, behind the two-by-four on the wall to your right. Ro

Balenger felt behind the board, touched a switch, and flicked it. He pushed at the hatch. To his relief and then suspicion, it rose smoothly, with none of the creak of hinges he'd heard in the rest of the hotel. What he heard instead was the increased din of the storm. The skylight didn't extend this far. No rain poured through. But the rain did its best to penetrate, pounding relentlessly on the roof.

The light on Balenger's hard hat revealed a dark chamber. A chair. A bureau. A canopied bed. Wallpaper. All were in a lush, Victorian style. His nostrils picked up the smell of strong household cleaners.

Wary, he peered along the floor and noticed a lever that the rising trapdoor had flipped upward. The lever was linked to wires that led to a metal box. He imagined what would have happened if Amanda hadn't remembered to tell him about the switch. "Looks like explosives. I guess Ro

Continuing to scan his light around the room, Balenger climbed all the way up and aimed his pistol toward the shadows. Tod, Amanda, Cora, and Vi

"No dust, no cobwebs." Cora sounded puzzled.

Amanda's voice shook. "Ro

When Vi

Compared to the chill of Danata's suite, Balenger noticed, the penthouse was curiously warm. "Hurry. We need to find the other trapdoors and lock them before Ro

"No. That's the bathroom," Amanda said.

Balenger shifted toward a door on the left, and suddenly a blazing light filled the room. It was overhead, making him shield his eyes with his left hand while he crouched, ready with the pistol in his right. "How did…"

Amanda stood against a wall, her hand on a switch. "The penthouse has electricity."

The information was so surprising, Balenger took a moment to adjust to it. Now he understood why the penthouse felt warm-the heating system was on.

Tod's single word expressed his dismay but also functioned as an unintentional prayer. "Christ."

Balenger ran to the next room, groped for a switch, and flicked it. Another overhead light assaulted his eyes. Blinking, he saw an array of electronic equipment and monitors.

"Ro

"Turn everything on." Along the wall to his left, Balenger noticed that a metal shutter was smaller than those he'd seen elsewhere in the hotel. But what he concentrated on was a trapdoor in the floor below it. The door was bolted shut. It, too, had a lever with wires attached to a metal box.

The next room's door took him in a new direction. Balenger had a sudden mental image of the penthouse divided into four quadrants, two rooms per quadrant. The interior of each quadrant faced a wall that separated it from the hotel's center column, where the grand staircase had been.

When he flicked the light switch, he saw a library: floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves, countless leather-bound books, two Victorian reading chairs, another locked trapdoor, another lever with wires to a metal box. His unease intensified. A row of shelves along the inside wall had no books. In their place, the eyepieces of small telescopes projected from holes in the wall, another way Carlisle used to monitor what happened in the hotel, a primitive version of Ro

The next room transported Balenger from 1901 to more than a century later. It was a modern media room, with a flat-screen TV, a surround-sound system, a DVD player, a VHS player, racks of DVDs and videotapes, and a sofa on which to enjoy them. Again, wires led from a bolted hatch to a metal box.

The subsequent door led to another quadrant. Balenger faced a kitchen in a 1960s style, the refrigerator and stove the avocado-green color popular during that era. Sure, he thought. Ro

A hatch, the same as the others.

The schizoid pattern continued in the next room, for when Balenger flicked the light switch, he was again in 1901, looking at a Victorian dining room.