novel.

The last time, he’d had his protagonist traveling across Ohio in a drunken haze. Now he would stop in a small Pennsylvania town, and meet a lonely woman who ran a rooming house. She would be in her early thirties, pale, divorced, and pretty. She would invite him to dinner one night. Outside the rain would be falling softly. Inside the candlelight danced across her face, softening its lines…

Taylor heard a sound.

His preconscious heard the sound and registered it before his conscious mind. His conscious mind didn’t want anything to do with it.

Distant, but not too distant, the sound of a woman crying in pain.

He scanned the lot. The moon rode high, the small floods illuminating the terminal building. The sound seemed to be coming from the far right rear of the perimeter, where a few trailers were parked.

This is weird, but it is not as weird as it seems.

Taylor climbed out of the car, taking shotgun and flashlight. He walked quickly across the lot, the sound of his boots crunching gravel loud in the night.

It came again, the cry, louder, a catch of horrible pain in the woman’s voice. Taylor began to run.

It was coming from directly behind the line of four trailers. Instead of running between them into the darkness, he slowed and went around them to the left.

The moonlight was bright. It seemed as if that icy white moon were chilling the air. There were narrow black shadows behind the trailers, but the cries hadn’t come from there. Taylor paused to catch his breath.

The cry came again, piercing, agonized. A young woman’s voice. It sounded as if she were dying, horribly.

Beyond the edge of the lot there was a stand of dry cattails, perhaps ten yards deep, indicating swampy ground. Taylor walked cautiously toward them. A scent hit his nose, not of the swamp: a faint, sweetish scent.

He almost did not go on, for it was the same scent that he’d smelled when he saw the man by his car.

But that was insane. The cry had subsided to a horrible gasping sob. Carefully placing his feet in the soggy ground, Taylor flipped on his flashlight and pressed through the cattails.

There was a small clearing in the center of the cattails. Here he saw a pool of water a few yards across, and lying half in the greenish pool was…

The corpse of a young woman. A pale, mottled, decayed thing whose long fair hair was entangled in the weeds, and whose hands still clutched something long and dull and metal that it had plunged into its chest.

Taylor shuddered, the light shaking in his hands, the odd, sweet smell very strong.

This thing could have made no sound.

Even as he watched, it slowly straightened, and the eyes rolled open and flashed moonlight into his.

Taylor heard his own scream. The shotgun roared in his hand, and he fell back, stumbled to his feet, crashed through the cattails back to the parking lot, wiping frantically at bits of moist… something… that the blast had scattered across his face and clothes.

He stood in the open, panting, looked back, terrified that the thing would follow. The smoke of the shotgun blast hung low over the little patch of cattails. There was no sound. He forced himself to turn and walk slowly back to the car.

The walkie-talkie was calling. Taylor answered, grateful for the human voice.

“See any more spooks, 2101?”

Silence.

“2101, copy?”

“No, Base, no more spooks. Everything 10-2.”

“You kinda sound like one, 2101. Base out.”

“10-4, 2101 out.”

Taylor turned his car so that he faced the terminal, and had the swamp to his left, the entrance to his right. His back was to the woods, but at the moment he was not worried about anything that might come out of the woods.

His hands were shaking. He poured himself half a cup of coffee and filled it with bourbon from the pint he kept under the seat. For emergencies. This was an emergency.

The bourbon felt good going down. Slowly he began to relax.

He tried to consider the… things… he’d seen in a calm, rational manner. There were really only three alternatives: the most likely was that someone was playing tricks on him. Elaborate tricks, to be sure, but it was possible.

The second possibility was that his own mind was playing tricks on him. But why now? Tonight? Why not at the LSD parties of the old days, when he’d sat cool, calm, and collected while everybody else was freaking their heads off? No, that was out. He was not an unstable person.

The third alternative was that there were spooks out there. No, and no, and no. Taylor was a romantic, but he did not believe in spooks in any way, shape, or form.

He raised the doctored coffee to his lips, savoring the old bourbon. Suddenly it came to him. It was so simple!

They’d had trouble keeping guards out here before. A few had told crazy stories, but management would have put that down to boozing on the job.

Someone was going to a lot of trouble to scare the guards off. He knew there were “hot loads”—booze or electronics—here occasionally. It was one thing to tackle an armed guard, but if you could just scare him off with some Dark Shadows routine, the rest would be a piece of cake!

Tricky. Well, he’d show them a trick or two! Taylor finished the coffee and decided to take another walk back to the perimeter.

Bright light filled the car. Someone was turning in off the river road.

The big Ford passed him, heading for the side door of the terminal. Taylor was halfway across the lot when a tall man in a suede jacket and western hat climbed out.

“Don’t shoot,” he said, “I gotta piss like a racehorse.”

“Sorry, this place is—”

“It’s okay. My name’s Stahl, day dispatch here. Yours is Taylor, right?”

He produced a ring of keys from his pocket and proceeded to open the door.

“Why don’t you come in for a minute? Just don’t drop that cannon. Browning auto, isn’t it? Good deer gun, close up.”

Taylor followed the big man into a narrow paneled room with a half-window like a doctor’s office, when truckers picked up their lading bills and logged in. Stahl took off his jacket and put a tin pot on an old two-burner hotplate for coffee, then plugged in the large electric heater by the desk.

Taylor sat close to the heater. It felt good. He hadn’t realized he was shivering.

Stahl disappeared behind a door marked Private and returned a few minutes later, zipping up his trousers. In the light of a couple of bare bulbs, he looked older. Taylor placed his age at about sixty, a healthy sixty.

“So you’re the new replacement guard,” said Stahl, half to himself.

“Nope, I’ve got a regular beat over across the river, pawnshops and trucking, but they needed someone for the holidays.”

Stahl shifted a pile of papers on his desk, spooned instant coffee into a couple of cups, poured the steaming water, and handed one to Taylor.

“Well, hope you enjoy yourself out here. They kind of have a hard time keeping guards here.”

Taylor had a brief suspicion that Stahl might know something about the “tricks” someone was playing. But looking into the brown, lined face, he thought not.

“Spooks, probably,” said Taylor. “This is kind of a weird spot, what with the old barracks and all. Wouldn’t be surprised if somebody might try a few tricks to scare a guard off.”

Stahl’s eyes narrowed, his nose twitching above his close-rimmed gray moustache, as if he might

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