Phantoms Read online

  “Yeah,” Frank said, “but there’s something funny about it.”

  The bathroom. The mirror. The bold, greasy, black letters.

  Jenny stared at the five printed words.

  Lisa said, “Who’s Timothy Flyte?”

  “Could be the guy who wrote this,” Lieutenant Whitman said.

  “Is the room rented to Flyte?” the sheriff asked.

  “I’m sure I didn’t see that name on the registry,” the lieutenant said. “We can check it out when we go downstairs, but I’m really sure.”

  “Maybe Timothy Flyte is one of the killers,” Lisa said. “Maybe the guy renting this room recognized him and left this message.”

  The sheriff shook his head. “No. If Flyte’s got something to do with what’s happened to this town, he wouldn’t leave his name on the mirror like that. He would’ve wiped it off.”

  “Unless he didn’t know it was there,” Jenny said.

  The lieutenant said, “Or maybe he knew it was there, but he’s one of the rabid maniacs you talked about, so he doesn’t care whether we catch him or not.”

  Bryce Hammond looked at Jenny. “Anyone in town named Flyte?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Do you know everyone in Snowfield?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All five hundred?”

  “Nearly everyone,” she said.

  “Nearly everyone, huh? Then there could be a Timothy Flyte here?”

  “Even if I’d never met him, I’d still have heard someone mention him. It’s a small town, Sheriff, at least during the off season.”

  “Could be someone from over in Mount Larson, Shady Roost, or Pineville,” the lieutenant suggested.

  She wished they could go somewhere else to discuss the message on the mirror. Outside. In the open. Where nothing could creep close to them without revealing itself. She had the uncanny, unsupported, but undeniable feeling that something—something damned strange—was moving about in another part of the inn right this minute, stealthily carrying out some dreadful task of which she and the sheriff and Lisa and the deputy were dangerously unaware.

  “What about the second part of it?” Lisa asked, indicating THE ANCIENT ENEMY.

  Jenny finally said, “Well, we’re back to what Lisa first said. It looks as if the man who wrote this was telling us that Timothy Flyte was his enemy. Our enemy, too, I guess.”

  “Maybe,” Bryce Hammond said dubiously. “But it seems like an unusual way to put it—’the ancient enemy.’ Kind of awkward. Almost archaic. If he locked himself in the bathroom to escape Flyte and then wrote a hasty warning, why wouldn’t he say, ‘Timothy Flyte, my old enemy,’ or something straightforward?”

  Lieutenant Whitman agreed. “In fact, if he wanted to leave a message accusing Flyte, he’d have written, ‘Timothy Flyte did it,’ or maybe ‘Flyte killed them all.’ The last thing he’d want is to be obscure.”

  The sheriff began sorting through the articles on the deep shelf that was above the sink, just under the mirror: a bottle of Mennen’s Skin Conditioner, lime-scented aftershave, a man’s electric razor, a pair of toothbrushes, toothpaste, combs, hair-brushes, a woman’s makeup kit. “From the looks of it, there were two people in this room. So maybe they both locked themselves in the bath—which means two of them vanished into thin air. But what did they write on the mirror with?”

  “It looks as if it must’ve been an eyebrow pencil,” Lisa said.

  Jenny nodded. “I think so, too.”

  They searched the bathroom for a black eyebrow pencil. They couldn’t find it.

  “Terrific,” the sheriff said exasperatedly. “So the eyebrow pencil disappeared along with maybe two people who locked themselves in here. Two people kidnapped out of a locked room.”

  They went downstairs to the front desk. According to the guest register, the room in which the message had been found was occupied by a Mr. and Mrs. Harold Ordnay of San Francisco.

  “None of the other guests was named Timothy Flyte,” Sheriff Hammond said, closing the register.

  “Well,” Lieutenant Whitman said, “I guess that’s about all we can do here right now.”

  Jenny was relieved to hear him say that.

  “Okay,” Bryce Hammond said. “Let’s catch up with Frank and the others. Maybe they’ve found something we haven’t.’

  They started across the lobby. After only a couple of steps, Lisa stopped them with a scream.

  They all saw it a second after it caught the girl’s attention. It was on an end table, directly in the fall of light from a rose-shaded lamp, so prettily lit that it seemed almost like a piece of artwork on display. A man’s hand. A severed hand.

  Lisa turned away from the macabre sight.

  Jenny held her sister, looking over Lisa’s shoulder with ghastly fascination. The hand. The damned, mocking, impossible hand.

  It was holding an eyebrow pencil firmly between its thumb and first two fingers. The eyebrow pencil. The same one. It had to be.

  Jenny’s horror was as great as Lisa’s, but she bit her lip and suppressed a scream. It wasn’t merely the sight of the hand that repelled and terrified her. The thing that made the breath catch and burn in her chest was the fact that this hand hadn’t been on this end table a short while ago. Someone had placed it here while they were upstairs, knowing that they would find it; someone was mocking them, someone with an extremely twisted sense of humor.

  Bryce Hammond’s hooded eyes were open farther than Jenny had yet seen them. “Damn it, this thing wasn’t here before—was it?”

  “No,” Jenny said.

  The sheriff and deputy had been carrying their revolvers with the muzzles pointed at the floor. Now they raised their weapons as if they thought the severed hand might drop the eyebrow pencil, launch itself off the table toward someone’s face, and gouge out his eyes.

  They were speechless.

  The spiral patterns in the oriental carpet seemed to have become refrigeration coils, casting off waves of icy air.

  Overhead, in a distant room, a floorboard or an unoiled door creaked, groaned, creaked.

  Bryce Hammond looked up at the ceiling of the lobby.

  Creeeeeaaak.

  It could have been only a natural settling noise. Or it could have been something else.

  “There’s no doubt now,” the sheriff said.

  “No doubt about what?” Lieutenant Whitman asked, looking not at the sheriff but at other entrances to the lobby.

  The sheriff turned to Jenny. “When you heard the siren and the church bell just before we arrived, you said you realized that whatever had happened to Snowfield might still be happening.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now we know you’re right.”

  12

  Battleground

  Jake Johnson waited with Frank, Gordy, and Stu Wargle at the end of the block, on a brightly lighted stretch of sidewalk in front of Gilmartin’s Market, a grocery store.

  He watched Bryce Hammond coming out of the Candleglow Inn, and he wished to god the sheriff would move faster. He didn’t like standing here in all this light. Hell, it was like being on stage. Jake felt vulnerable.

  Of course, a few minutes ago, while conducting a search of some of the buildings along the street, they’d had to pass through dark areas where the shadows had seemed to pulse and move like living creatures, and Jake had looked with fierce longing toward this very same stretch of brightly lighted pavement. He had feared the darkness as much as he now feared the light.

  He nervously combed one hand through his thick white hair. He kept his other hand on the butt of his holstered revolver.

  Jake Johnson not only believed in caution: He worshiped it; caution was his god. Better safe than sorry; a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; fools rush in where angels fear to tread ... He had a million maxims. They were, to him, lightposts marking the one safe route, and beyond those lights lay only a cold void of risk, chance, and chaos.

  Jake had never marri
ed. Marriage meant taking on a lot of new responsibilities. It meant risking your emotions and your money and your entire future.

  Where finances were concerned, he had also lived a cautious, frugal existence. He had put away a rather substantial nest egg, spreading his funds over a wide variety of investments.

  Jake, now fifty-eight, had worked for the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Department for over thirty-seven years. He could have retired and claimed a pension a long time ago. But he had worried about inflation, so he had stayed on, building his pension, putting away more and more money.

  Becoming an officer of the law was perhaps the only incautious thing that Jake Johnson had ever done. He hadn’t wanted to be a cop. God, no! But his father, Big Ralph Johnson, had been county sheriff in the 1960s and ‘70s, and he had expected his son to follow in his footsteps. Big Ralph never took no for an answer. Jake had been pretty sure that Big Ralph would disinherit him if he didn’t go into police work. Not ,that there was a vast fortune in the family; there wasn’t. But there had been a nice house and respectable bank accounts. And behind the family garage, buried three feet below the lawn, there had been several big mason jars filled with tightly rolled wads of twenty- and fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, money that Big Ralph had taken in bribes and had set aside against bad times. So Jake had become a cop like his daddy, who had finally died at the age of eighty-two, when Jake was fifty-one. By then Jake was stuck with being a cop for the rest of his working life because it was the only thing he knew.

  He was a cautious cop. For instance, he avoided taking domestic disturbance calls because policemen sometimes got killed by stepping between hot-tempered husbands and wives; passions ran too high in confrontations of that sort. Just look at this real estate agent, Fletcher Kale. A year ago, Jake had bought a piece of mountain property through Kale, and the man had seemed as normal as anyone. Now he had killed his wife and son. If a cop had stepped into that scene, Kale would have killed him, too. And when a dispatcher alerted Jake to a robbery-in-progress, he usually lied about his location, putting himself so far from the scene of the crime that other officers would be closer to it; then he showed up later, when the action was over.

  He wasn’t a coward. There had been times when he’d found himself in the line of fire, and on those occasions he’d been a tiger, a lion, a raging bear. He was just cautious.

  There was some police work he actually enjoyed. The traffic detail was okay. And he positively delighted in paperwork. The only pleasure he took in making an arrest was the subsequent filling out of numerous forms that kept him safely tied up at headquarters for a couple of hours.

  Unfortunately, this time, the trick of dawdling over paperwork had backfired on him. He’d been at the office, filling out forms, when Dr. Paige’s call had come in. If he’d been out on the street, driving patrol, he could have avoided the assignment.

  But now here he was. Standing in bright light making a perfect target of himself. Damn.

  To make matters worse, it was obvious that something extremely violent had transpired inside Gilmartin’s Market. Two of the five large panes of glass along the front of the market had been broken from inside; glass lay all over the sidewalk. Cases of canned dog food and six-packs of Dr Pepper had crashed through the windows and now lay scattered across the pavement. Jake was afraid the sheriff was going to make them go into the market to see what had happened, and he was afraid that someone dangerous was still in there, waiting.

  The sheriff, Tal Whitman, and the two women finally reached the market, and Frank Autry showed them the plastic container that held the sample of water. The sheriff said he’d found another enormous puddle back at Brookhart’s, and they agreed it might mean something. Tal Whitman told them about the message on the mirror—and about the severed hand; sweet Jesus!—at the Candleglow Inn, and no one knew what to make of that, either.

  Sheriff Hammond turned toward the shattered front of the market and said what Jake was afraid he would say: “Let’s have a look.”

  Jake didn’t want to be one of the first through the doors. Or one of the last either. He slipped into the middle of the procession.

  The grocery store was a mess. Around the three cash registers, black metal display stands had been toppled. Chewing gum, candy, razor blades, paperback books, and other small items spilled over the floor.

  They walked across the front of the store, looking into each aisle as they passed it. Goods had been pulled off the shelves and thrown to the floor. Boxes of cereal were smashed, torn open, the bright cardboard poking up through drifts of cornflakes and Cheerios. Smashed bottles of vinegar produced a pungent stench. Jars of jam, pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, and relish were tumbled in a jagged, glutinous heap.

  At the head of the last aisle, Bryce Hammond turned to Dr. Paige. “Would the store have been open this evening?”

  “No,” the doctor said, “but I think sometimes they stock the shelves on Sunday evenings. Not often, but sometimes.”

  “Let’s have a look in the back,” the sheriff said. “Might find something interesting.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of, Jake thought.

  They followed Bryce Hammond down the last aisle, stepping over and around five-pound bags of sugar and flour, a few of which had split open.

  Waist-high coolers for meat, cheese, eggs, and milk were lined up along the rear of the store. Beyond the coolers lay the sparkling-clean work area where the meat was cut, weighed, and wrapped for sale.

  Jake’s eyes nervously flicked over the porcelain and butcher’s -block tables. He sighed with relief when he saw that nothing lay on any of them. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the store manager’s body neatly chopped into steaks, roasts, and cutlets.

  Bryce Hammond said, “Let’s have a look in the storeroom.”

  Let’s not, Jake thought.

  Hammond said, “Maybe we—”

  The lights went out.

  The only windows were at the front of the store, but even up there it was dark; the streetlights had gone out, too. Here, the darkness was complete, blinding.

  Several voices spoke at once:

  “Flashlights!”

  “Jenny!”

  “Flashlights!”

  Then a lot happened very fast.

  Tal Whitman switched on a flashlight, and the bladelike beam stabbed down at the floor. In the same instant, something struck him from behind, something unseen that had approached with incredible speed and stealth under the cover of darkness. Whitman was flung forward. He crashed into Stu Wargle.

  Autry was pulling the other long-handled flashlight from the utility loop on his gun belt. Before he could switch it on, however, both Wargle and Tal Whitman fell against him, and all three went down.

  As Tal fell, the flashlight flew out of his hand.

  Bryce Hammond, briefly illuminated by the airborne light, grabbeo for it; missed.

  The flashlight struck the floor and spun away, casting wild and leaping shadows with each revolution, illuminating nothing.

  And something cold touched the back of Jake’s neck. Cold and slightly moist—yet something that was alive.

  He flinched at the touch, tried to pull away and turn.

  Something encircled his throat with the suddenness of a whip.

  Jake gasped for breath.

  Even before he could raise his hands to grapple with his assailant, his arms were seized and pinned.

  He was being lifted off his feet as if he were a child.

  He tried to scream, but a frigid hand clamped over his mouth. At least he thought it was a hand. But it felt like the flesh of an eel, cold and damp.

  It stank, too. Not much. It didn’t send out clouds of stink. But the odor was so different from anything Jake had ever smelled before, so bitter and sharp and unclassifiable that even in small whiffs it was nearly intolerable.

  Waves of revulsion and terror broke and foamed within him, and he sensed he was in the presence of something unimaginably strange and unquestionably e
vil.

  The flashlight was still spinning across the floor. Only a couple of seconds had passed since Tal had dropped it, although to Jake it seemed much longer than that. Now it spun one last time and clanged against the base of the milk cooler; the lens burst into countless pieces, and they were denied even that meager, erratic light. Although it had illuminated nothing, it had been better than total darkness. Without it, hope was extinguished, too.

  Jake strained, twisted, flexed, jerked, and writhed in an epileptic dance of panic, a spasmodic fandango of escape. But he couldn’t free even one hand. His unseen adversary merely tightened its grip.

  Jake heard the others calling to one another; they sounded far away.

  13

  Suddenly

  Jake Johnson had disappeared.

  Before Tal could locate the unbroken flashlight, the one that Frank Autry had dropped, the market’s lights flickered and then came on bright and steady. The darkness had lasted no longer than fifteen or twenty seconds.

  But Jake was gone.

  They searched for him. He wasn’t in the aisles, the meat locker, the storeroom, the office, or the employees’ bathroom.

  They left the market—only seven of them now—following Bryce, moving with extreme caution, hoping to find Jake outside, in the street. But he wasn’t there, either.

  Snowfield’s silence was a mute, mocking shout of ridicule.

  Tal Whitman thought the night seemed infinitely darker now than it had been a few minutes ago. It was an enormous maw into which they had stepped, unaware. This deep and watchful night was hungry.

  “Where could he have gone?” Gordy asked, looking a little savage, as he always did when he frowned, even though, right now, he was actually just scared.

  “He didn’t go anywhere,” Stu Wargle said. “He was taken.”

  “He didn’t call for help.”

  “Never had a chance.”

  “You think he’s alive... or dead?” the young Paige girl asked.

  “Little doll,” Wargle said, rubbing the beard stubble on his chin, “I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I was you. I’ll bet my last buck we’ll find Jake somewheres, stiff as a board, all swelled up and purple like the rest of ’em.”

  The girl winced and sidled closer to her sister.

  Bryce Hammond said, “Hey, let’s not write Jake off that quickly.”

  “I agree,” Tal said. “There are a lot of dead people in this town. But it seems to me that most of them aren’t dead. Just missing.”

  “They’re all deader than napalmed babies. Isn’t that right, Frank?” Wargle said, never missing a chance to needle Autry about his long-ago service in Vietnam. “We just haven’t found ’em yet.”

  Frank didn’t rise to the bait. He was too smart and too self-controlled for that. Instead, he said, “What I don’t understand is why it didn’t take all of us when it had the chance? Why did it just knock Tal down?”

  “I was switching on the flashlight,” Tal said. “It didn’t want me to do that.”

  “Yes,” Frank said, “but why was Jake the only one of us it grabbed, and why did it do a fast fade right after?”

  “It’s teasing us,” Dr. Paige said. The streetlamp made her eyes flash with green fire. “It’s like I said about the church bell and the fire siren. It’s like a cat playing with mice.”