Free The 5th Witch by Graham Masterton Page A

Gayle will be gone .
    He turned over and closed his eyes for two or three seconds, but he didn’t have the nerve to keep them closed any longer than that. Supposing she comes into the bedroom and I don’t see her? So he propped himself up on the pillow and sat facing the open door, keeping his .38 on top of the nightstand.
    Ten minutes went by, and he began to calm down. Maybe he had been hallucinating and Gayle wasn’t really there. After all, he had been through a strange andhighly stressful day, as well as drinking four bottles of Goose Island stout. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him.
    But what if he went out into the hallway to look and she was still there?
    She was dead; he had been to her funeral. She couldn’t be there. But what if she was?
    Okay—if she was there, maybe it was her spirit, looking for some kind of closure. Maybe she wanted to hear him say how sorry he was that he had killed her. Maybe she wanted to show him that he was forgiven.
    Or maybe this was another magical stunt by Michelange DuPriz to show him that she knew exactly what cross he was carrying and to warn him to keep his nose out of the Zombie’s personal business.
    He picked up his gun and went back to the bedroom door.
    “Gayle?” he called. He knew she couldn’t answer, but he wanted to reassure her that it was only him.
    He hesitated for a moment, then stepped out into the hallway. Gayle was still standing in front of the window. Now, however, her face was miraculously intact and she was unhurt.
    “Gayle? What are you doing here? You’re not alive anymore.”
    She was staring at him, but she didn’t appear to see him.
    “Gayle?” he said and took a step toward her, holding out his hand. God, he had forgotten how pretty she’d been.
    She still didn’t seem to be focusing on him. Her eyes were fixed in the distance, as if she were looking down a long road.
    Under her breath, she started to sing, “ When I was a child I had a fever…my hands felt just like two balloons…eee…eee…eee! ”

    “Gayle baby,” said Dan. His eyes filled with tears, and he had to wipe his nose with the back of his hand. “You have to know how sorry I am. I’ve never been able to forget you. I’ve never been able to forget what happened.”
    Softly, she carried on singing. But then suddenly she stopped and stared straight ahead of her, along the hallway.
    Dan said, “Gayle, listen to me—”
    As he took another step forward, however, there was a terrible clanging sound right behind him, like a badly tuned church bell. Instinctively, Dan took a step back, just as a twenty-foot scaffolding pole came hurtling along the hallway and struck Gayle directly in the face. He heard her nose break and her cheekbones smash.
    She flew backward into the window, and then she was gone, vanished, and the scaffolding pole vanished, too.
    Dan stood in the hallway for a long time, breathing deeply to steady himself. Hallucination, no question about it. But what had made him hallucinate? His own exhaustion, his own drunkenness? Or witchery?

Chapter Eight
    He stayed awake for the rest of the night, sitting on the couch with all the lights on and the television, too, but with the volume muted in case Gayle came back and he failed to hear her.
    Early the next day he drove out to visit his father at the Stage Performers’ Retirement Home in Pasadena. It was a hazy morning but very warm, and his father was sitting on his balcony, looking out over a steeply sloping orange grove. He had three decks of playing cards on the table in front of him, and he was obviously trying to perfect some trick. A bright yellow canary was sitting in a cage next to him, twittering and cheeping on its perch. Perversely, his father had named the canary Sylvester.
    His father was a small man with a round pugnacious face, a snub nose, and rimless spectacles. His hair was white now, but it still stuck up like one of the Katzenjammer Kids. He was wearing a yellow and red Hawaiian-style