Phantoms

up once or twice a month merely for the pleasure of slapping his woman senseless and terrorizing his children. Of course, Mama had been no better than the old man. She drank too much wine, tooted too much dope, and was nearly as ruthless with her children as their father was.
    When Tal was nine, on one of the rare nights when his father was home, a fire swept the tenement house. Tal was his family’s sole survivor. Mama and the old man had died in bed, overcome by smoke in their sleep. Tal’s brother, Oliver, and his sisters—Heddy, Louisa, and baby Francesca—were lost, and now all these years later it was sometimes difficult to believe that they had ever really existed.
    After the fire, he was taken in by his mother’s sister, Aunt Rebecca. She lived in Harlem, too. Becky didn’t drink. She didn’t use dope. She had no children of her own, but she did have a job, and she went to night school, and she believed in self-sufficiency, and she had high hopes. She often told Tal that there was nothing to fear but Fear Itself and that Fear Itself was like the boogeyman, just a shadow, not worth fearing at all. “God made you healthy, Talbert, and he gave you a good brain. Now if you mess up, it’s nobody’s fault but your own.” With Aunty Becky’s love, discipline, and guidance, young Talbert had eventually come to think of himself as virtually invincible. He was not scared of anything in life; he was not scared of dying, either.
    That was why, years later, after surviving the shoot-out in the 7-Eleven store over in Santa Mira, he was able to tell Bryce Hammond that it had been a mere cakewalk.
    Now, for the first time in a long, long string of years, he had come across a knot of fear.
    Tal thought of Stu Wargle, and the knot of fear pulled tighter, squeezing his guts.
    The eyes were eaten right out of his skull.
    Fear Itself.
    But this boogeyman was real.
    Half a year from his thirty-first birthday, Tal Whitman was discovering that he could still be afraid, regardless of how strenuously he denied it. His fearlessness had brought him a long way in life. But, in opposition to all that he had believed before, he realized that there were also times when being afraid was merely being smart.
     
    Shortly before dawn, Lisa woke from a nightmare she couldn’t recall.
    She looked at Jenny and the others who were sleeping, then turned toward the windows. Outside, Skyline Road was deceptively peaceful as the end of night drew near.
    Lisa had to pee. She got up and walked quietly between two rows of mattresses. At the archway, she smiled at the guard, and he winked.
    One man was in the dining room. He was paging through a magazine.
    In the lobby, two guards were stationed by the elevator doors. The two polished oak front doors of the inn, each with an oval of beveled glass in the center of it, were locked, but a third guard was positioned by that entrance. He was holding a shotgun and staring out through one of the ovals, watching the main approach to the building.
    A fourth man was in the lobby. Lisa had met him earlier—bald, florid-faced deputy named Fred Turpner. He was sitting at the largest desk, monitoring the telephone. It must have rung frequently during the night, for a couple of legal-size sheets of paper were filled with messages. As Lisa passed by, the phone rang again. Fred raised one hand in greeting, then snatched up the receiver.
    Lisa went directly to the restrooms, which were tucked into one corner of the lobby:
     
    SNOW BUNNIES                                                SNOW BUCKS
     
    That cuteness was out of sync with the rest of the Hilltop Inn.
    She pushed through the door marked SNOW BUNNIES. The restrooms had been judged safe territory because they had no windows and could be entered only through the lobby, where there were always guards. The women’s room was large and clean, with four stalls and sinks. The floor and walls were covered with white ceramic tile bordered by dark blue tile around the edge of the floor and around the top of the walls.
    Lisa used the first stall and then the nearest sink. As she finished washing her hands and looked up at the mirror above the sink, she saw him. Him . The dead deputy. Wargle.
    He was standing behind her, eight or ten feet away, in the middle of the room. Grinning.
    She swung around, sure that somehow it was a flaw in the minor, a trick of the looking glass. Surely he wasn’t really there.
    But he