Phantoms

sorry and that I was, after all, worthy of her love. I’ve worked weekends, turned down countless party invitations, skipped most vacations for the past twelve years, all in the name of bettering myself. I didn’t go home as often as I should have done. I couldn’t face my mother. I could see the accusation in her eyes. And then tonight, from Lisa, I learned the most amazing thing.”
    “Your mother never blamed you,” Bryce said, displaying that uncanny sensitivity and perception that she had seen in him before.
    “Yes!” Jenny said. “She never held anything against me.”
    “She was probably even proud of you.”
    “Yes, again! She never blamed me for Dad’s death. It was me doing all the blaming. The accusation I thought I saw in her eyes was only a reflection of my own guilty feelings.” Jenny laughed softly and sourly, shaking her head. “It’d be funny if it wasn’t so damned sad.”
    In Bryce Hammond’s eyes, she saw the sympathy and understanding for which she had been searching ever since her father’s funeral.
    He said, “We’re a lot alike in some ways, you and I. I think we both have martyr complexes.”
    “No more,” she said. “Life’s too short. That’s something that’s been brought home to me tonight. From now on I’m going to live, really live—if Snowfield will let me.”
    “We’ll get through this,” he said.
    “I wish I could feel sure of that.”
    Bryce said, “You know, having something to look forward to will help us make it. So how about giving me something to look forward to?”
    “Huh?”
    “A date.” He leaned forward. His thick, sandy hair fell into his eyes. “Gervasio’s Ristorante in Santa Mira. Minestrone. Scampi in garlic butter. Some good veal or maybe a steak. A side dish of pasta. They make a wonderful vermicelli al pesto. Good wine.”
    She grinned. “I’d love it.”
    “I forgot to mention the garlic bread.”
    “Oh, I love garlic bread.”
    “Zabaglione for dessert.”
    “They’ll have to carry us out,” she said.
    “We’ll arrange for wheelbarrows.”
    They chatted for a couple of minutes, relieving tension, and then both of them were finally ready to sleep.
     
    Ping.
    In the dark utility room where Stu Wargle’s body lay on a table, water had begun to drop into the metal sink again.
    Ping.
    Something continued to move stealthily in the darkness, around and around the table. It made a slick, wet, slithering through-the-mud noise.
    That wasn’t the only sound in the room; there were many other noises, all soft and low. The panting of a weary dog. The hiss of an angry cat. Quiet, silvery, haunting laughter; the laughter of a small child. Then a woman’s pained whimpering. A moan. A sigh. The chirruping of a swallow, rendered clearly but softly, so as not to draw the attention of any of the guards posted out in the lobby. The warning of a rattlesnake. The humming of bumblebees. The higher-pitched, sinister buzzing of wasps. A dog growling.
    The noises ceased as abruptly as they had begun.
    Silence returned.
    Ping.
    The quiet lasted, unbroken except for the regularly spaced notes of the failing water, for perhaps a minute.
    Ping.
    There was a rustle of cloth in the lightless room. The shroud over Wargle’s corpse. The shroud had slipped off the dead man and had fallen to the floor.
    Slithering again.
    And a dry-wood splintering sound. A brittle, muffled but violent sound. A hard, sharp bone crack.
    Silence again.
    Ping.
    Silence.
    Ping. Ping. Ping.
     
    While Tal Whitman waited for sleep, he thought about fear. That was the key word; it was the foundry emotion that had forged him. Fear. His life was one long vigorous denial of fear, a refutation of its very existence. He refused to be affected by—humbled by, driven by—fear. He would not admit that anything could scare him. Early in his life, hard experience had taught him that even acknowledgment of fear could expose him to its voracious appetite.
    He had been born and raised in Harlem, where fear was everywhere: fear of street gangs, fear of junkies, fear of random violence, fear of economic privation, fear of being excluded from the mainstream of life. In those tenements, along those gray streets, fear waited to gobble you up the instant you gave it the slightest nod of recognition.
    In childhood, he had not been safe even in the apartment that he had shared with his mother, one brother, and three sisters. Tal’s father had been a sociopath, a wife-beater, who had shown