Creepers

by David Morrell

  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 Ronnie figured if the wrong person came up here, it was time to make sure the evidence was destroyed.”

  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 Vinnie followed. Their headlamps and Vinnie’s flashlight searched the room.

  “No dust, no cobwebs.” Cora sounded puzzled.

  Amanda’s voice shook. “Ronnie keeps it absolutely spotless.”

  When Vinnie shut the trapdoor, he discovered a bolt on it and rammed it into a metal slot anchored to the floor. “No way to free the bolt from underneath.”

  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 Ronnie gets to one of them.” He headed toward a door straight ahead.

  “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.

  “Ronnie’s surveillance system,” Amanda explained.

  “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 Ronnie’s surveillance system.

  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. Ronnie could carry video and audio equipment in here by himself and not be noticed, but getting a new fridge and stove in here, not to mention the equipment to remodel the kitchen, would have attracted a lot of attention. Even the sink was green. But a gourmet’s array of copper pots and pans hung from hooks in the ceiling.

  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.

  Another hatch, no different from the others. More eyepieces in the wall.

  Now a door to the right, another quadrant. An overhead light revealed primitive exercise equipment, an early version of a treadmill and a stationary bicycle. Balenger imagined Carlisle laboring on them, trying to build the muscle tone and stamina that, along with steroids and vitamin supplements, helped him combat his bleeding. But the heavy weights in the corner had to be Ronnie’s, not Carlisle’s. The strain of the weights on Carlisle’s body would have caused bleeding in his muscles rather than have helped prevent it.

  Where Balenger expected to find a bolted, wired hatch and a small metal shutter, he saw a compartment with a door. A button was next to the door. An elevator. Aiming, he opened the door, finding a brass gate and dark shaft.

  He closed the door and pushed several weights against it. Then he hurried to the final quadrant, where Vinnie stood, looking troubled, having come through a door in the bedroom and turned on the light. As Cora, Amanda, and Tod caught up to Balenger, he saw another bolted, wired hatch. But this time, what made him frown was a primitive medical clinic. A glass cabinet filled with medicines. Hypodermics. A doctor’s examining table. Stainless-steel poles with hooks from which bottles containing blood transfusions would have been linked to a needle in Carlisle’s bruised arm. The desperation was insane. How do you stop a hemophiliac from bleeding after you’ve stuck a needle in his arm to give him medication to try to prevent him from bleeding?

  “All the trapdoors are secured,” Balenger said.

  “We bought some time,” Vinnie said, “but we’d better find a way to disconnect those explosives in case Ronnie has a way of setting them off by remote control.”

  Everyone looked at Balenger for guidance.

  He felt helpless. “In the Rangers, explosives weren’t my specialty.”

  “But you must have had some training in them,” Amanda said.

  “Not enough.” Balenger crossed toward the metal box.

  Behind him, he heard Tod ask, “How come the shutters on the windows are so small?”

  “We told you Carlisle was agoraphobic,” Vinnie said. “Open spaces terrified him. He never left the hotel.”

  Except once, Balenger thought, remembering that the old man shot himself on the beach.

  “The only views he could have tolerated,” Cora said, “were through small windows.”

  “What a nutjob.” Tod shifted several vials, examining them. “Never heard of some of this stuff.”

  “They’re blood-clotting agents,” Vinnie said.

  “Not this one. It’s morphine. Did he like to shoot up?”

  “Carlisle needed it for the pain when blood seeped into his joints.”

  “Into his joints? Now I’ve heard everything. The label on the morphine’s from 1971.” Tod looked tempted to put it in his pocket, then thought better. “Stuff probably doesn’t work anymore. It’s probably poison by now.”

  Balenger unzipped his Windbreaker and shoved the pistol into his shoulder holster. Kneeling, he studied the wires connected to the lever hooked over the trapdoor. “You might want to be in another room while I do this.”

  They didn’t move.

  Except Tod. “Guess I’m the only one with the brains to take cover.” He went into the bedroom.

  “If that thing blows up, I have a feeling it won’t make a difference where we are,” Cora said.

  Vinnie knelt beside him. “Besides, how can we help if we don’t see what you’re d
oing?”

  Balenger gave them a look of respect, then held his breath and pulled the wires from plugs on the lever. He exhaled and gently lifted the box’s lid.

  They peered over his shoulder.

  “Plastic explosive.” Balenger managed to keep his voice calm. “The detonator’s pushed into a block of the stuff.”

  “The thing that looks like a short pencil, is that the detonator?” Cora asked.

  “Yes. There’s some kind of electronic device hooked to it. When the trapdoor rises, it flips the lever and brings these wires in contact with another pair of wires. That closes a battery-driven circuit and triggers the detonator.”

  “Can the electronic device be activated by remote control?” Vinnie asked.

  “Don’t know. It might also be programmed to blow up if anybody cuts the wires. The simplest tactic…” Balenger steadied himself. “…is to pull the detonator from the block of explosive.”

  “Maybe motion also sets it off,” Vinnie said.

  “Then we’re back to where we started, and we wait to see if Ronnie can trigger these bombs from a distance.”

  “Damned if we do, damned if we don’t,” Vinnie said.

  “We’re damned, all right,” Amanda said.

  Balenger wiped sweat from his brow. He reached into the metal box, then hesitated and took off his gloves. Again, he reached into the box. Thunder made him flinch. Working to control his trembling fingers, he gently pulled the detonator out. He lifted the block of explosive from the box—it felt like putty—and set it a distance away.

  Vinnie stepped back. “Isn’t that dangerous to move?”

  “You mean like nitroglycerin and the slightest jolt blows it up? No.” Balenger dried his palms on his jeans. “Plastic explosive’s stable. You can pound it with a hammer. You can throw it against a wall. You can hold a lit match against it. The stuff won’t go off unless there’s a preliminary explosion with enough heat to do the job.” He pointed toward the block he’d put aside. “Right now, that’s one of the least dangerous things in this hotel.”

  “I’m not encouraged,” Cora said.

  “Six to go,” Balenger said with the tone of someone rolling a boulder up a hill. “If Ronnie can trigger these things by remote control, once we remove the explosives, only the detonators will go off. But even they have a kick. Stay away from them.”

  Urgency accumulating in him, he headed toward the bedroom to disable the bomb in there. “There’s an elevator in the exercise room,” he said to Amanda. “Does it work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cora, you said you couldn’t find keys for some of the rooms.”

  “Yes. The penthouse, Danata’s suite, and a column of rooms from three twenty-eight all the way up to six twenty-eight.”

  “I think we know what’s behind the doors to those rooms. The shaft for Carlisle’s private elevator.”

  “All these lights,” Vinnie said. “Maybe they can be seen from outside. Maybe someone will come and help us.”

  “No,” Amanda said. “No one can see the lights. Ronnie bragged that the penthouse was completely blacked out.”

  Balenger cursed and hurried to the trapdoor in the bedroom.

  “I watched what you did,” Vinnie told him. “I’ll work on some of the other boxes.”

  “Slow and careful.”

  “Bet on it.”

  “Tod?” Balenger shouted.

  “I’m in the surveillance room watching the monitors!”

  Balenger went to the door on the opposite side of the bedroom and peered inside. An array of screens showed green-tinted night-vision images.

  Tod’s facial tattoos were rigid with concentration. “Maybe we’ll get a look at what this psycho’s doing.”

  The top row of monitors displayed various angles of the hotel’s exterior, but the rain was so dense that Balenger had difficulty seeing the outside walls and metal shutters. A lower row of screens revealed parts of the hotel’s dark interior: the lobby, the collapsed staircase, the fire stairs, and the utility room, where a hidden camera was aimed toward the door through which they’d entered from the tunnel. The door was open, confirming Balenger’s suspicion that Tod’s group had failed to shut it after following their quarry into the building.

  “So far all I saw were rats, a bird, and a freaky cat with three back legs,” Tod said.

  “The cat’s beginning to seem normal.” Balenger didn’t recognize one of the interior images: a deserted garage area, where the camera was aimed toward a metal door.

  “That must be where Ronnie comes into the hotel,” Balenger said. He hurried back to the bedroom, where he disconnected the wires from the trapdoor’s lever. He lifted the metal box’s lid and separated the detonator from the explosive. “Two down.”

  “Three,” he heard Vinnie say from another room.

  “Four,” Cora said from farther away.

  “This is him,” Amanda said.

  Balenger wasn’t sure what she meant. As rain pounded the roof, he looked up and saw her holding a framed photograph.

  “Ronnie,” she said, pointing at the photograph. “This is Ronnie.”

  Chilled, Balenger came slowly to his feet, fixated on what Amanda showed him. In the black-and-white photograph, an elderly man wearing a suit stood next to a young man wearing a sweater. The old man’s broad shoulders would once have looked strong. His large chest would once have been solid. Despite deep wrinkles, his square-jawed face retained a suggestion of his youthful handsomeness. His full head of white hair reminded Balenger of Billy Graham in his later years. Indeed, everything about the old man, especially his piercing eyes, reminded Balenger of an evangelist.

  “Morgan Carlisle,” he whispered. “This is how Bob described him. Those hypnotic eyes.”

  In the photograph, Carlisle smiled, as did the young man next to him, who seemed barely out of his teens. A thin face, a thin body. Even his hair, which was trimmed closely at the sides and was thick on top, emphasized his thinness. Unlike Carlisle’s eyes, the young man’s were not expressive. Nor was his smile, which seemed entirely on the surface.

  “Ronnie,” Amanda said in disgust.

  Balenger studied the photograph more intensely. A dark, wood-paneled wall in the background matched walls in the hotel. Despite the pleasure in Carlisle’s smile, the elderly man kept a slight distance from the young man, his arms at his sides. The young man’s sweater was a crew neck, a shirt collar tucked under it in a style Balenger remembered seeing in movies from the sixties. He had a plain face, soft at the cheekbones and the chin.

  Amanda pointed. “This other man was Ronnie’s father.”

  “Carlisle? No. He couldn’t have been.”

  “Ronnie insisted that this man was his father.”

  “There’s no record that Carlisle married.”

  “Which means nothing,” Vinnie said from the doorway to the surveillance room. He and Cora had finished disarming the explosives. “The child could have been the result of an affair.”

  “But Carlisle was a watcher. A romantic fling doesn’t seem in his nature.”

  “Unless one of the women he spied on gave him inspiration.” Cora came into the room and looked at the photo. “Carlisle. So finally we get to see him. The monster responsible for the Paragon Hotel. How can anybody so twisted look so attractive? I bet this S.O.B. was irresistible in his prime. Those eyes. Finding a willing partner wouldn’t have been difficult.”

  “Or maybe the partner wasn’t willing,” Vinnie said.

  Balenger shook his head from side to side. “Rape doesn’t match his profile. Even drugged, the victim might have fought back. Carlisle would have been terrified of cuts and scratches and not being able to stop his bleeding.”

  “But if Carlisle had a son, he’d have mentioned it in his diary,” Cora insisted.

  “Not if the boy was illegitimate,” Vinnie said. “He might have wanted to keep the child a secret.”

  Balenger sounded doubtful. “It still doesn’t fit h
is profile. From what I’ve read about hemophiliacs, I gather many choose not to have children for fear of passing the disease on.”

  Amanda pointed emphatically at the photograph. “Ronnie told me this was his father.”

  “How old is the photograph?” Cora asked.

  Balenger freed catches at the back of the frame, pulled off the back, and studied the rear of the photograph. “There’s a developer’s date: July 31, 1968.”

  “Carlisle would have been eighty-eight.”

  Balenger heard the crack of nearby lightning. “Amanda, you said Ronnie’s in his fifties. That means…”

  Vinnie did the math faster. “Thirty-seven years ago. I’m guessing he’s in his late teens or early twenties in this picture. Let’s say twenty. So that makes him around fifty-seven. Surely to God, five of us can take him.”

  “He’s strong,” Amanda said flatly.

  “Tod, anything on the surveillance monitors?”

  “Just more rats.”

  “I’m watching the elevator.” Vinnie peered through the medical room toward the exercise room.

  “Amanda, what else did Ronnie tell you?” Balenger asked.

  “He bragged he never had any trouble getting girlfriends. He often recited their names.”

  “Names?” Balenger’s hands felt cold.

  “Iris, Alice, Vivian, Joan, Rebecca, Michelle. A lot more. Always in the same order. The list never varied. He repeated it enough for me to remember the names.”

  Balenger felt pressure building inside him. He worked to control his emotions, his rapid breathing and heartbeat almost overwhelming him. “I want you to think carefully. When he went through the names, did he ever mention someone called Diane?”

  “Diane?” Vinnie frowned. “Who is—”

  “Did he, Amanda?” Balenger put a hand on her shoulder. “Did he ever mention a woman called Diane?”

  Amanda didn’t answer for a moment. “Near the end of the list.”

  “Who’s Diane?” Cora asked, mystified.