A Cold Wind in July by Craig Shaw Gardner

Author:Craig Shaw Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, terror, ghost stories, horror stories
Publisher: Bob Booth

The bellman was gone. Sam had tipped him quickly and generously. Sam wanted to be alone with his wife.

Sally had already begun unpacking. He admired the quiet efficiency with which she worked. He liked to watch her slim fingers from behind, the way her hips moved beneath the thin fabric of her summer skirt. Sally had always been careful about staying trim.

Sam rubbed the spot on his arm where she had held him. That sudden contact had felt good, like old times. He wanted to feel that contact again.

It was their second honeymoon, after all. Just because things had changed didn’t mean they couldn’t change back. Sam walked up behind Sally and put his large hands on her delicate shoulders. His thumbs dug gently into the spaces beneath her shoulder blades, massaging her back the way he used to, when they had first been married.

“Sam?” she asked, surprise in her voice.

“Yes, honey?” he replied. “I thought this might help you relax.”

“Please, Sam!” She stepped forward, pulling free from his grip. “Not now.” She began to turn, as if to look him in the eye, but then thought better of it and returned to her unpacking.

“I’m not in the mood,” she murmured after a minute. “I guess I’m just tired from the trip. I need to think a little.”

“To think?” Sam replied, feeling the old anger rising up in him again. “That wasn’t why we came here.”

“Wasn’t it?” She turned around at last to look at him. “Oh, Sam! There’s too much wrong —” She cut herself off and looked away again. “No, that’s too easy. I just have to concentrate. Everything will be fine once I calm down.”

She reached in her purse and pulled out the crystal. Her goddamned crystal! Sam turned away this time, before he said something he’d regret. He wasn’t being realistic. You couldn’t change two years overnight. He had to give her a little time, that was all.

She had finished unpacking the suitcase, having hung up half the clothes in the closet on what was “her” side of the large double bed. She proceeded to put the remaining folded piles in various dresser drawers, working with deliberate speed, as if she had had this unpacking planned for months.

Sam decided he might as well make himself useful. He flipped the suitcase closed and hauled it from the bed. There was a door on his side as well. Maybe it was a second closet. In these big old hotels, anything was possible.

Sam tried the door, but it was locked. It probably led into the next room, to make this place into some kind of suite. Then again, it could lead nowhere at all. Looking at the walls and ceiling of this room, he could see signs of an ill-advised renovation, half-completed, then abandoned.

They probably tried to modernize this floor in the fifties. Sam smiled to himself, remembering what it had been like to be a teen-ager back then. They tried to modernize everything in the fifties, to bring it up to their current antiseptic standards.

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