You In?

Kealan Patrick Burke

Smashwords Edition

Previously published as a chapbook by Bad Moon Books

No unauthorized reproduction permitted

* * *

Almost midnight.

To the man standing in the snow, shoulders hunched against the cold, it seemed ironic that Abigail Point Securicorp, a company dedicated to the prevention of theft, should choose to leave the keys to the inn outside their office doors rather than in a lockbox somewhere. They really hadn't even made much of an effort to hide them. Anyone passing might notice the large white padded envelope bearing the name PETER HASKINS propped up against the glass to the right of the office door, and he hardly thought the small layer of snow on the window ledge provided adequate camouflage. Still, as he shuddered away the attention of an icy gust that ran cold fingers up his spine and scalp, he supposed if they hadn't worried about it, then he shouldn't either. Besides, no matter how questionable their methods, or untrustworthy some of the nocturnal wanderers in Abigail Point might be, the keys were here. No one had seen fit to snatch them, and for that Peter was eternally grateful. The way his luck was going, he had fully expected to arrive at the office to find the keys gone, only a small rectangular pocket in the snow a sign that they'd ever been there. Of course, had that been the case, he could have called his new boss, or taken it upon himself to hurry to the Wickerwood Inn to confront the thief, but for a guy with Peter's reputation, the former course of action would undoubtedly lead his employer to suspect he'd taken the keys himself, perhaps to use at a later date to break into the hotel, while the latter represented more risk than he was willing to deal with on his own.

He shook his head. It didn't matter. Securicorp had given him the job, and the keys were where they'd left them. It was a good sign, an indication perhaps that almost eight months of dismal luck were finally coming to an end.

His reflection in the glass made a thin, pale-faced specter of him as he reached for the envelope. Snow left wet kisses on his wrist, the misty clouds of his breath billowing around him as he transferred the keys, still inside the envelope, into his pocket, following them with a cold hand to ensure they didn't somehow escape him on the short walk to the Wickerwood.

* * *

In daylight the Victorian and Italianate houses along Stanton Street stared proudly out over Abigail Point Harbor with spines straight as a Civil War General's, their windows gleaming like battle-hardened eyes on the verge of weeping at the sight of home. Tonight, however, as Peter bowed his head against the frigid wind, the moonless night had robbed those painted ladies of their luster, making them notable only by the weight of their timeless silhouettes and the faintest sparkle on their ice-limned balustrades.

The street was quiet, the cars parked on both sides silent beneath skins of frost. The faintest hush could be heard from the sea, punctuated here and there by the abrasive cry of a gull and the echo of Peter's footfalls. Lonesome sounds, that made him feel like the only man in town not invited to a party.

He huffed breath into the lapels of his coat and pressed the warmth to his face as he thought of the newspaper ad that had led him here. Night Security Wanted for the Wickerwood Inn, November 20th - 27th. 12. a.m. - 6. a.m. $400 p.w.

Four-hundred bucks for a week of watching over machinery and tools. He could hardly believe it, no more than he could believe someone had bought the Wickerwood Inn again. He would have thought, after all the unpleasant things rumored to have gone on there, that people would have learned to let it be. Not that he really gave much credence to that kind of nonsense, though he found it a lot easier to scoff at from the comfort of his sunlit living room than he did making his merry way in the freezing cold to spend the night in it. But even if it had been scientifically proven to him that the incidents at the inn had been caused by something other than poor luck, the money would have kept him moving briskly toward it. There was the cold, for one, and he'd been told there was a construction heater awaiting him in the lobby. For another, there were the debts, haunting him with a tenacity that would put any ghost to shame. And above all other considerations, there was Claire.

He closed his eyes, briefly, and there she was, as if the ice crystals had projected her likeness onto his retinas. Claire. The one person, perhaps the last person who still had faith in him, still believed he could make something of himself. If not for her, he'd still be operating under the delusion that gambling was a form of employment, the casino his workplace, every paycheck dependant on the capricious Fates. She'd saved him from that, took him in, loved him, and asked only that he try.

Try to find a good job, a real job.

Try to stop being a creature whose probable future was a direct result of his being unable to let go of an unsavory past, a man who based every decision on the allure of certain numbers and the quality of the light on any given Friday in Atlantic City.

And because he loved her, and because he couldn't remember ever being as happy as she made him, he did try, and the effort he made was so uncharacteristically ardent, so substantial and heartfelt, it made his eventual failure all the more devastating for them both. She hadn't kicked him out, even after almost six months of false starts: jobs he took only to lose or get fired from; get-rich quick schemes that nosedived and made him more enemies than friends; half-baked strategies that were smothered at birth. No, she hadn't kicked him out, because of her unshakeable belief that it would work out in the end. And it wasn't until she said those words --it'll work out in the end, Pete--while sweeping up the glass that lay scattered around a rock someone--undoubtedly one of the many bookies he had been desperately avoiding--had hurled through their living room window, that he saw the end coming. Because it wasn't the first rock someone had thrown through his window. The last one, some years before, had had his surname (minus the final 's') written on it in black marker, which he didn't see until the policeman held it up in front of his face, Pete's eight-month-old son's blood still dripping from it, and the child's mother, Alison, screaming hysterically and clawing to get at him from somewhere amid the chaos of lights and noise.

As he turned onto Jericho Street, leaving Stanton behind him, he thought of the envelope in his pocket, his name scrawled across it in black ink. If it had been stolen, the thief would have been taking more than just a bunch of keys. They'd have robbed him of his chance to finally start making things right, to prove himself to Claire.

And now that someone else had finally decided to take a chance on him, namely the sour-faced manager of Abigail Point Securicorp, he intended to make good on it, to repay Claire for her faith, and her love.

Tonight, in the abandoned shell of the Wickerwood Inn, he would begin renovations of his own.

* * *

The aesthetic contradiction of a white picket fence around a Southern Gothic manor, built in the style of a paddlewheel riverboat, hadn't been lost on the youths of Abigail Point, who had, at some point in the year and a half the inn had been closed, kicked away the posts and slats until it looked like the broken grin of a beaten drunk. The construction crew, or perhaps more discerning vandals, had made off with the flat marbled stones which in their prime had led from the small gate up a short incline to the main door, leaving behind an unimaginative hopscotch game as the only viable path through an explosion of undergrowth. Unlike the painted ladies on Stanton Street, Wickerwood Inn, standing tall and silent above the verdant frenzy, did not stare out to sea or glare at the statue of the Civil War general in the park across the street, but the darkness lent it by the plywood boards shoved rudely into its glassless frames. Opaque sheets of plastic snapped and fluttered in the wind from windows on the second and third floors; the cupola seemed to totter from its place on the fourth. Verandas framed every floor and appeared spacious now that the rocking chairs--favored by the guests no matter what the weather--were gone. As Peter stood there, drawing out the keys, he thought the faint sigh of the tide could just as easily have been Wickerwood's labored breathing; it certainly looked like a sickly old man in a new suit, sagging inside but presenting the best face it could to anyone watching, which only made its appearance all the more pitiful.

The jingle of the keys hitting his palm was a reassuringly normal sound as Peter slipped them from the envelope. He had never been this close to the inn before, and never this late, when the ordinary ambience of a bustling seaside town wasn't there to drown out the creaks and groans and shudders of a building slouching beneath the weight of abandonment; when the sunlight wasn't there to burn away shadows that seemed to sprout and grow the longer he looked upon the monolithic aspect of the house; when the wind entered the cracks and fissures in the building and emerged as voices. He understood better then, as he lingered on the threshold of the property, the ease with which the house had gained its dark reputation. Whether justified or not, it certainly looked the part.

A quick check of his watch told him he'd been dawdling at the gate for almost eight minutes, and while he would have been surprised (and more than a little startled) to find someone from Securicorp waiting inside the house to chide him for his tardiness, it made no sense to stay out in the bitter cold any longer. With one final look over his shoulder at the quiet, empty street, he sighed and stepped onto the path.

* * *

After a further five minutes spent wrestling with the heavy, slightly rusted padlock that hung like a medallion from the chains looped through and around the front door's thick brass handles, there was a dull but satisfying click and Peter watched as the chains spilled to the floor, the rattling of the steel links through the handles more noise than he had encountered all night. He winced, realizing that though the Wickerwood's neighbors were a fair distance away, at this time of night the clamor he had just made had nothing to compete with and so would carry unfiltered to their ears. They might assume he was breaking in, and call the cops, who would know Peter only as a troublemaker they'd had dealings with in the past. The fact that beneath his overcoat he was wearing the dark blue Securicorp uniform, complete with clip-on tie and the company's gold insignia emblazoned on the breast would mean nothing. They'd assume he stole that too. He'd be tossed in jail until they confirmed that his claims were true. And that would be enough to make his boss think hiring him had been a mistake. Once again his past would intrude on the present, ruining his chance to make good.

Dispirited at the bleak reminder of just how easy his best intentions could be derailed, he carefully picked up the chains and set them aside so they were not blocking the door. Pocketing the padlock, he picked through the keys until he found a slim silver one, the initials WW ornately suspended within the oval bow, and slid it into the lock. To his surprise, it turned with a fluidity that suggested recent oiling, and the door caught only once before swinging open.

* * *

He'd forgotten to bring the flashlight.

Inside the building, with little illumination from the open doorway at his back, and a mass of jagged shadows scattered before him, he cursed his forgetfulness. He was told there would be heat and light, and he believed there would be, but to get to appliances that would bestow these luxuries upon him, he would have to stumble around in the dark, and God only knew what might be scattered about on the floor between here and there.

"Nice job Pete." This self-admonition sounded very small, very alone, and completely devoid of conviction. It compelled him to get moving.

With his hands held out before him like antennae, he felt his way through the dark, the smell of dust and mold making his nose tickle. Shuffling, he stumbled when his shoes rammed against obstructions too heavy to yield before his passage or tangled in treacherous snares of plastic sheeting, and had to restrain a howl of pain when he banged his knee against something hard and cold. Glassy pain spread over the offended joint. Steadying himself, and with sparks dancing across his field of vision, he muttered a curse to Lady Luck and all her departure from his life had cost him.

Nah, he told himself a few moments later, as the pain dulled to a warm throb in his kneecap, forgetting the damn flashlight was all you, buddy. Eventually, by using hands and feet to probe the surfaces ahead of him, like a man walking on unsteady ice, he found one of the lamps, and quickly felt for the button that would chase away the increasingly treacherous dark.

A click, and the room flooded with light, blinding him. He stumbled back a step, blinking furiously until his back met resistance, which he then used to maintain his balance in the seemingly crowded room.

Turning his head away from the light, he waited for his vision to clear. When at last it did, what he saw made him forget about the other lamps, and the heater. Instead it made him think of Claire.

She had been working as a waitress in the Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City when they'd first met. It was there she'd defied all his expectations and inflamed his belief in Lady Luck by approaching him before he'd even worked up the nerve to look her way a second time. The first night they shared a bed, she'd told him about her plans to move to Abigail Point, to "leave behind the sleaze for a place where the air doesn't stink of desperation and dirty money" was how she'd put it. She'd shown him a brochure, designed by the Abigail Point Tourism Office to seduce outsiders into its folds. Among the pretty pictures of Victorian manors, glistening beaches and lofty lighthouses, there'd been interior shots of the Wickerwood Inn in all its opulent glory--a vibrant, proud place, from the gleaming crystal of the expensive chandeliers in the Rosewind restaurant, to the crisp and simple elegance of its rooms.

But the building in which Peter now stood was not elegant. It was a wreck. The lobby floor was covered in debris: splintered wood, cracked stone blocks, ruined furniture, broken glass and garbage, all of which merely served as a carpet to help obscure the badly damaged parquet underneath. Here was an old oak door, laid catty-corner on its side, three of the four stained-glass insets shattered, leaving emerald and crimson-colored teeth poking from the frames. Here, a stack of screens, badly ripped; here, a cart loaded with linens that had once been white but were now so dusty they'd turned gray; there a mountain of cardboard boxes growing in a corner and held together by large scabrous patches of mold.

At the head of the room, directly opposite the front door, was a surprisingly undamaged and new-looking registration desk. Upon it sat a cordless drill, a spool of extension cord, a crumpled pack of Pall Malls and a dusty bell.

Peter sidestepped the crusty maw of a cement mixer, which his new found sense of direction told him had been the object he'd collided with earlier. A few feet away stood another halogen lamp, its thick glass face turned toward the ropy mess of wires that hung from the ceiling where once there had been a light. To the right of it, looking like the turbine of a small jet engine set atop a cannon mount, was the construction heater.

He slid the keys back into his pocket, where their weight crumpled the now empty envelope. As he edged his way toward the heater via a crooked aisle of toolboxes, concrete blocks and what appeared to be a twine-bound bundle of yellowed newspaper, the tips of his fingers tingling at the thought of warmth, someone laughed.

Peter jumped, but did not stop moving. He was too cold for that. But he slowed his pace, his spine rigid, the hair on the back of his neck rising until the sensation was almost painful. Without turning to face the direction in which the laugh had come, he dropped his gaze to one of the toolboxes at his feet. Plenty of weapons there, he thought, and tried to swallow the knot of fear that had abruptly sucked the moisture from his mouth. Should have known. Nothing's easy.

He reached the heater and moved around it, so that the front door was behind him, the small entryway to the hall directly ahead, and waited for the sound to come again. Finger poised on the switch that would flood the room with much-needed heat, he stared through the clouds of his breath at the oblong of darkness to the right of the registration desk, the portal from which the sound of mirth had rolled like dust from an old closet.

A light came on.

He flinched so hard his finger jabbed the switch and the heater rumbled into life, startling him even more. Reminded of his boss's caveat, Stand too close to that thing and you'll be well done within a half-minute, he quickly backed away toward the front door and out of the range of the heater's mouth. "Damn it." He ran a hand through his coarse hair, and weighed his options. It's just kids, probably, he thought, but didn't believe it. The laugh had had a wheezing quality to it, better suited to an old man with emphysema than some punk kid. But for Chrissakes, there isn't supposed to be anyone here, so what difference does it make who--

His thoughts were interrupted by movement in the hall. Someone had passed in front of the light source in there, sending a lithe shadow sprawling toward the lobby where Peter stood paralyzed by indecision. "Hey," he yelled, fear shoving the word out of him before he knew it was coming. Quickly, he dropped to his haunches and grabbed a well-used hammer from atop one of the toolboxes. The heft of it in his palm made him feel a little better. The thought of what he might be forced to do with it, didn't. He rose on unsteady legs.

And: "Hey ya'self," a voice answered.

* * *

Fear gave way to confusion. He was supposed to be alone. They had told him he would be. Ergo, whoever was calling and casting shadows from somewhere down the hall was an intruder. Simple as that.

Only it wasn't.

Peter had taken the job, despite being briefed on the possible risks. He'd nodded in all the right places, kept his jaw set and his back straight to compliment the verbal assurances to his employer that he was the man for the job, no matter what. But in his mind he'd been grinning. Wickerwood was a battered old ruin, held up not by joists and walls but by reputation and respect, boarded up and locked to keep its secrets within and those who sought to know them without. He'd expected to sit on the stairs in the heat, reading the battered old Ed McBain paperback he'd crammed into his inside pocket while he tuned out the old protests of an ancient building. He'd expected to sleep most of the way toward some easy money. What he hadn't expected was to find himself frozen in the lobby, desperately trying to remember what his boss had told him to do in the "unlikely" event that he discovered he wasn't alone.

Whatever that advice, that training, had been, was now proving just as elusive as the source of the disembodied voice. He hadn't listened, hadn't cared. He'd been thinking of the money.

His grip tightened on the hammer.

Leave, said a mental voice he wasn't entirely sure had been offered by his own brain. It had almost seemed to come from over his shoulder, and the flesh on his back tightened. He thought of turning to look-- Just my luck to stumble into a friggin' ambush--but more laughter stopped him, jarring him worse than before because this time it was not just one voice, but many. To Peter, it was the once familiar sound of a bunch of friends sharing a laugh over a private joke.

Private joke. Private party.

An overwhelming sense of alienation washed over him. In there, somewhere, lounging in the shadows of the hall, were people, a bunch of guys by the sound of it, and their very presence made him feel as useless as he had always suspected he was. He'd tried to make something of himself, was still trying, but as per goddamn usual, every opportunity came with a built-in peanut gallery. Anger coursed through him. The rubber on the handle of the hammer squeaked beneath his tightening grip. His knuckles turned white. He was so tired of this. So tired of the odds always being stacked against him, tired of being the guy left to skulk out the door on a wave of someone else's laughter...of being the guy in the lobby listening to the mirth from the lounge. Well to hell with it; he wasn't leaving. Though the decision made unease thrum through him, knowing it was final imbued him with confidence, however frail. He squared his shoulders, ignored the imagined whisper--"mistake"--that drifted over his shoulder and called out, "This is security. Who's back there? There's no one supposed to be in here," in as authoritative a tone as he could muster.

The silence that came back to him was thick and endless, and it allowed the single most crucial bit of truth to settle in Peter's mind: There are more of them than you, before he broke it himself. "Hey, you hear me? You got five m--"

"Quit yer damn screamin'," a voice interrupted, sounding no closer than it had before. "Louie's still hungover."

Winos.

Peter closed his eyes and let some of the tension drain from his shoulders, though his grip on the hammer did not loosen. Drunks he could handle, even if they reacted somewhat belligerently to his attempts to roust them. And hell, maybe he'd even leave them alone; let them sleep in the house. What did he care? During what felt like an eternal spell of rotten luck, Peter had more than once found himself with an old coat as a bed sheet, a park bench as a bed, and while he was loathe to compare himself in any way to a bunch of tramps, he nonetheless felt sympathy for them. It was going to be a long night. As long as he shunted them out before dawn and relief came, nobody would be any the wiser.

He allowed himself a wan smile and made his way toward the hall. "You guys aren't supposed to be roosting in here," he said, but with less authority than before. "This building could come down around your ears. That, or the cops."

"Eh, we own those fucks," a voice replied, and Peter's smile vanished as he reached the doorway. Beyond it, the air was considerably colder. That doesn't sound like a wino, he thought. Far too sober. Far too cocky. His eyes settled on the dim yellow orb of light at the far end of the hall. An old hurricane lamp had been lit and set on the floor between the last door on the left side of the hall, and the one on the right. Further illumination came from the latter. Faintly glowing smoke breathed out into the musty air.

They would have lit a fire to keep them warm, he told himself, but immediately countered the thought with: Why, when they had the use of the heaters?

More laughter, then someone cursed and the laughter doubled. It was followed by a horribly familiar sound, a sound that had featured as much in Peter's dreams as it had in his most feverish nightmares. A sound that might as well have been the turning of a key to the forbidden area of Peter's mind, to a door behind which ghosts and demons clawed for release. Gooseflesh rippled his skin, every hair feeling like needles stabbed into his arm. The haze in the hall began to smell like cigar smoke. Panic returned and despite the chill, perspiration broke out all over his body.

No.

"Think he'll wanna?" someone asked.

"Damn right he will," someone else replied.

"Who's there?" Peter asked, but did not receive an answer.

He sagged against the doorframe.

Leave now.

But he couldn't, despite every particle of his being trying its damndest to propel him out of there.

He swallowed, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to picture Claire but her face was condensation on glass, running and melting in his memory.

"Shit." He rubbed the palm of his free hand over his face and it came away wet. Okay, man, keep it together. You're getting way too bent out of shape over this. Something to prove, right? So prove something.

"Hey Security. You in or out?"

The sound came again--snick!--and it was a leash that tugged at Peter, trying to jerk him into the hall, over the threshold of fear and toward the light. The hammer slipped from his sweaty grip and thumped to the floor. He bent down to retrieve it and a sudden horrid stench rose from the knotted red fibers of the carpet, as if he'd dunked his head in a cold river of sewage. It stuffed his nose, reached down his throat with foul fingers and he gagged, tried to rise, but the hall jerked away from him, the hurricane lamp a long fat splash of color that streaked across his vision.

Abruptly, there were people in the hall with him.

He could see them in his peripheral vision, staring at him. The laughing men, maybe? He squinted, trying to focus. No, it wasn't. Men, women and children, and not a single one of them looked capable of laughter. Some of them brushed long-fingered hands over old fashioned dresses, others held hats clutched to their chests in a gesture of respect that did not match the malice on their faces. He thought one might have been holding a limbless doll; another a straw hat with dark splotches on the brim. Still another held a whip, hanging limp like a dead snake. A silent crowd, all waiting for something. They could have been portraits, such was the motionless intensity of their presence, and he had no doubt they wished him harm. He put a hand to his temple and tried to massage sanity back into the scene, and when next he looked upon it, the people were gone.

Dizzy, disorientated, unsure from which direction he had come, he put a hand against the leprous yellow wallpaper and it moved beneath his hand. He jerked away and studied the spot where his hand had been. The impossibly sized cockroach or spider his imagination had told him had been there wasn't. There was nothing but mildewed wall.

"Hey? You still out there, Mac?"

"Fuck this," Pete muttered. He was going to get the hell out of Dodge while he still had his health. He'd go home, get some sleep, and tomorrow he could look for another job, something that didn't involve weird old inns, toxic fumes and cackling winos.

You're high from whatever shit they sprayed on that carpet, that's all. He agreed. Maybe the men in the room were high too, and that's why they were laughing so much.

They're laughing because they're having a good time.

He turned, nausea whirling through him, threatening to send him back to the carpet where he would most certainly die from inhaling whatever chemicals had saturated it.

"Pussying out?"

Slowly, Pete looked back toward the light and the room, and there was a man standing there, a figure utterly unlike the people he thought he'd seen a few moments ago. For one, he was smiling. For another, he did not vanish when Pete looked straight at him.

Exhausted, dispirited, and unnerved, Pete ignored the insult. "Who the hell are you?"

The stranger took a long puff from his Cuban cigar and tilted his head back to aim a jet of smoke at the ceiling. When he was done admiring the fog he'd created, he shrugged and licked his thin lips. "A friend," he said. "And we're one man short. You in?"

"What are you doing here? No one's supposed to be here."

The man was dressed in an expensive gray suit, complimented by a dark red tie and charcoal-colored hat. The lamplight gleamed on the polished surface of his shoes, and the gold ring on the index finger curled around his cigar. "Hey, so what, right? So no one's supposed to be here. But we are, and figure if we gotta be here then we may as well pass the time somehow, right?"

"I have to go," Peter said, sick at the feeble sound of his own voice, and started to turn.

"I know you," the man said.

"What?" Peter did not look over his shoulder.

"I know you."

"How?"

"Well..." The man chuckled. "Not you personally, at least, not yet I don't. What I mean is...ah shit, I ain't so good at expressin' it, y'know? Not like Frankie is. He's our college boy." He sighed heavily.

Peter waited.

At length the man made a satisfied grunt. "I know your type. That's it."

Don't rise to the bait, Peter told himself, just keep moving. If he aims to stop you, he's too far away to catch you before you make the door. The words came to him sluggishly through a mist of pain and confusion that robbed them of their immediacy. "And what's my 'type'?" he asked, turning back to face the man.

The man's wide grin made him look predatory, shark-like. "A loser."

Peter straightened his posture and tried to make himself look as imposing as possible, a task made harder by the dizziness and the feeling as if he'd already taken a beating. What the hell was on that carpet? But any worries he might have had about the effect of toxins on his health were set aside in favor of defending what little honor he had left. "What did you call me?"

The man gestured with his cigar, scribbling smoke in the air before him. "No offense, Mac. I don't mean it as an insult."

"Then explain it."

"Aw c'mon. Don't go gettin' riled up now. We're just talkin' here, right?"

Peter didn't answer. He glared.

"What I meant was that you seem to be a guy who's spent most of his life trying to turn his luck around but somehow always ends up on his ass. Not that it's your fault. Hell," he chuckled, "I've been there. Most of my boys been there at some stage. Happens to the best of us. You put all your faith in somethin' and it turns rotten. What can you do, right? S'all I was saying."

"Huh." Peter shook his head. "You don't know the first thing about me."

"Sure I do." The man's eyes sparkled. He took a puff on his cigar, and let the smoke drift from his mouth without a breath to propel it. "You're a security guard watchin' over a deserted shithole inn in the dark of night. You're hardly livin' high on the hog." He raised his hands palm out. "Just sayin'."

"Hey Danny, what gives? He leavin' or stayin'?" someone called, and the man, Danny, looked at Pete expectantly.

Something to prove, Pete thought. I'm always walking away. My son died and I walked away. They came to Claire's house and broke her window, almost broke us, and I walked away, and now, just when things were starting to look up, I'm getting ready to walk away again. It never stops.

"Danny, what the fuck?"

"Shuddup a sec, willya? Guy's thinkin'."

Don't. A plea from the fractured, diluted image of Claire. It'll work out in the end, Pete.

But it never did. It never worked out, not the way he wanted it to, and now here was this stranger, a man in a suit that a hundred nights of watching over dead hotels would never pay for, offering him a chance to revisit the days when he'd known what magic was, when Lady Luck had been more than an interested glance from a beautiful woman. When he'd been a winner.

Slowly, he raised his head, unaware he'd been staring at the hammer, unsure why it suddenly seemed as if the sensible thing to do would be to bend down and retrieve it, and felt one last tug from behind him, urging him toward the front door and the cold night beyond. Where suddenly, without question, he knew nothing awaited him.

Danny's grin grew even wider. "You in?"

"Yeah, I'm in," Peter croaked, and inside the room where the laughing men were lounging and smoking cigars, another poker chip hit the pile. Snick!

* * *

Dawn. A pallid sun peered through a veil of cold rain as Gary Harrison turned his truck off Route 109 onto Stanton Street. He yawned and fingered the sleep from the corners of his eyes. Abigail Point was dead at this hour. Hell, during the off season it was dead at any hour, and the emptiness of it now, combined with the miserable weather, depressed him. It didn't help that he'd slept fitfully, most of the night spent wondering if hiring a one-time inveterate gambler had been a mistake that would end up costing him dearly. Sure the guy had claimed all of that was in the past, but during Gary's tenure as a cop, he'd spent enough time around chronic gamblers to know that the past was closer for them than it was for most people. But he'd also learned to read faces, and the desperation he'd seen in Haskins' eyes had seemed more like a genuine plea, a sincere need to find a way back into normal life, rather than mere jonesing for cash to blow on the tables. So, against his better judgment, and because he knew it was far from being in high demand, he'd given Haskins the Wickerwood job. But despite the confidence with which he'd sent the man on his way, the decision haunted him as soon as he laid his head down on the pillow at home. That Mike had made the miraculous and extremely rare decision to throw caution to the wind and spend the night with him, hadn't helped as much as he'd hoped. Their intimacy had been merely a distraction. Later, he'd envisioned all the possible repercussions that could result from hiring a man with Haskins' past. Over an early breakfast, he'd mentioned it to Mike, who of course was more preoccupied with the possible ramifications of his staying the night away from home, reminding him, for the umpteenth time, what would become of the town's squeaky clean image if the press got wind of their 'meetings'. All of which was preposterous, of course, and Gary told him so, adding that Abigail Point hadn't been 'squeaky clean' since the first settlers drove the Tuckahoe Indians off their land to build the damn thing. As usual, that drew little more than a roll of the eyes and an exaggerated sigh from Mike, and there the discussion ended.

Communication, Gary feared, together with Mike's overblown perception of how important his job made him, was the straw that was eventually going to snap their camel's spine.

A faint rumble of thunder echoed in the distance as Gary aimed the truck down Jericho Street.

The inn, despite the beauty for which it had once been known, looked ugly in the feeble light of dawn, its dark facade like an ancient expression of scorn, reluctant to let go of the night and the cover darkness had provided it. Gary guided the truck to the curb, killed the engine, and stepped out into the street.

He looked at the inn. The inn looked back.

The thought that he'd made a big mistake, coupled with yet another morning greeted by Mike's stubborn refusal to accept the reality that no one in Abigail Point would give a rat's ass about his sexual preferences brought a sour feeling to Gary's gut.

Not to mention the inn, and whatever might await him inside.

It was going to be a bad day.

* * *

The heat was stifling. With a curse, Gary quickly crossed the lobby and switched off the construction heater. "I said in intervals, goddammit." His mood even darker than it had been before, he carefully negotiated a path around the toolboxes and machinery and stopped in the center of the room. "Hey Haskins," he called out. "You here?"

It was a silly question. The chains by the unlocked front door, the heat and the lights all told him that Haskins was here, unless the guy got spooked and left early, in which case the next order of business for Gary would be a good reaming of his former employee, if he had the restraint to leave it at that. Today was not the day to test his patience. "Hey," he roared. "Where you sleeping? C'mon, wakey, wakey!" His own voice rolled back to him in soft echoes. "Jesus." The majority of the stuff SecuriCorp had been hired to look after was in the lobby, so naturally that was where the man assigned to watch over them should be. But he wasn't, and that didn't bode well.

On the verge of letting out another cry, this one laden with all sorts of creative invectives, Gary spotted something gleaming dully on the carpet in the hall, a few feet past the door. Cry forgotten, he sighed and made his way over.

It was a hammer, he saw, and when he picked it up--for use as a weapon, just in case he had seriously underestimated Haskins' reasons for not responding--the handle was icy cold. He shivered, and shoved the tool, handle first, into his jeans pocket, so the head was still protruding and would be easy to grab if he needed it in a hurry. At six-foot one and two-hundred-and-forty pounds, he considered himself a match for any man in a fistfight, but was not naive enough to believe he could punch his way around a bullet.

"Haskins?"

Wood creaked somewhere above his head and he looked in that direction, as if he might be able to glean from the sounds some idea who had made them. "Hey, you there?"

No reply. The smell of dry rot and damp was near suffocating the further Gary moved down the hall, and he felt a pang of guilt that he hadn't equipped Haskins with a mask. For all he knew the guy was passed out somewhere with a lung full of spores.

Near the end of the hall, where single doors faced each other, the air grew denser still and Gary put a hand over his mouth. Another creak, louder than before, sounded from the room to his right, and he paused for a moment without being entirely sure why. He was reminded of a question he'd put to Haskins during the interview. While the other man stood before him dressed in a suit at least two sizes two big, Gary had sat forward in his comfortable leather office chair, a cup of coffee clamped between his large meaty hands, and asked, "Are you superstitious? Knock on wood and all that tripe? You believe in ghosts?" Haskins had said "no" and though Gary had simply nodded satisfactorily, he could have replied, "Good, glad to hear it. There's no way in hell I'd spend the night alone in that house," because he was superstitious, and he did believe in ghosts. As a kid, even when the inn had been alive and well and flourishing, it had made his flesh creep. He had heard some of the stories that didn't make the papers, had listened intently to the tales told by men his parents claimed were drunks and lunatics, and he hung on their every word, because his mind was wide open and willing to be populated with ghosts. He had believed with a fervor maturity didn't lessen and now, standing with a cold hammer stuck in his belt loop, in the damp moldy hallway of the very building that had given him nightmares and been the obvious focus of many a childish dare thirty years before, he was forced to recall that belief, because abruptly it seemed as if the building had grown heavy with expectancy, the silence strained and artificial, as it might if it was his birthday and all the guests were hiding, waiting to jump out and yell "Surprise!"

"Haskins?" He resolved that that would be his last time hailing the man. If Haskins wasn't here, then perhaps his absence represented a wise decision on his part, because Gary was starting to realize that thirty years of experience hadn't lessened the unpleasantness of the shadows inside the Wickerwood, the feeling of a thousand eyes studying you, the dusty, poisonous air that hung in every room like the memory of an argument.

He had to leave.

Before he did, guilt made him at least poke his head into the room to his right, and survey the area that had once been the lounge, frequented by rich drunks and richer gamblers. The bar and all the furniture had long since been removed, of course, which made it all the more unusual that an old green-felt poker table had been left sitting in the center of the room. It was surrounded by drop-cloths, plastic sheeting and the hunched, lopsided silhouettes of old beer crates, all of which were backlit by a halogen lamp positioned in the far corner, making them look like ghosts that had fallen asleep watching the gamblers. These specters of Gary's imagining were the only occupants in the room, and he turned, relieved---

BANG.

He froze, a startled cry lodged in his throat.

Then it happened again and he flinched, hard.

No subtle sounds were these; no vague structural protestation from a long abandoned house. This was a startlingly loud series of thumps against the floor, like a man with bowling balls for shoes hurrying to cross the room.

BANG.

An involuntary gasp escaped Gary and he swiveled round, one hand dropping to the hammer, his mind already plotting the fastest route back to his truck, and when he saw there was still no one there, no hideous, rotten, undead thing hurrying to snatch him into its ethereal arms, no swiftly moving revenant clattering its chains against the floor, he felt no better.

BANG

Slowly but steadily making its way toward him from somewhere in the darkness beyond the poker table, bouncing with all the ease of a basketball in capable hands, was a bloodstained rock, hammering against the floor as if thrown in anger, then miraculously rising again into some unseen hand.

Faster and faster it rose and fell, each impact hard enough to leave craters in the wood.

BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG.

Closer and closer it came, but only when it was almost at the door where he stood paralyzed with terror, only when it was close enough for him to see the misspelled name of his former employee written in black marker across the bloody still-wet surface of that rock, and only when the slumbering plastic sheeting in the lounge suddenly wrenched itself upward with a deafening snap, did Gary run screaming from the inn.

# # #

AUTHOR'S NOTE

If you enjoyed this e-book, please consider posting a review on Smashwords!

And as a thank you for taking the time to read "You In?", please accept this coupon code for $2.00 off my new title DEAD OF WINTER: UZ44W

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kealan Patrick Burke is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Turtle Boy, The Hides, Vessels, Kin, Midlisters, Master of the Moors, Ravenous Ghosts, The Number 121 to Pennsylvania & Others, Currency of Souls, Seldom Seen in August, and Jack & Jill.

Visit him on the web at: http://www.kealanpatrickburke.com or http://kealanpatrick.wordpress.com/ and check out more titles at Smashwords.

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You In?