Phantoms Read online

  “Gross,” Lisa said, and shuddered.

  “It was that, all right,” Dr. Paige said, putting a comforting hand on her younger sister’s shoulder.

  Bryce was impressed with the doctor’s emotional strength and resiliency. She seemed to be taking every shock that Snowfield threw at her. Indeed, she seemed to be holding up better than his own men. Hers was the only gaze that didn’t slide away when he met it; she returned his stare forthrightly.

  This, he thought, is a special woman.

  “Impossible,” Frank Autry said. “That’s what it was. Just plain impossible.”

  “Hell, what’s the matter with you people?” Wargle asked. He screwed up his meaty face. “It was only a bird. That’s all it was out there. Just a goddamned bird.”

  “Like hell it was,” Frank said.

  “Just a lousy bird,” Wargle insisted. When the others disagreed, he said, “The bad light and all them shadows out there sort of give you a lse impression. You didn’t see what you all think you seen

  “And what do you think we saw?” Tal asked him.

  Wargle’s face became flushed.

  “Did we see the same thing you saw, the thing you don’t want to believe?” Tal pressed. “A moth? Did you see one goddamned big. ugly impossible moth?”

  Wargle looked down at his shoes. “I seen a bird. Just a bird.”

  Bryce realized that Wargle was so utterly lacking in imagination that the man couldn’t encompass the possibility of the impossible, not even when he had witnessed it with his own eyes.

  “Where did it come from?” Bryce asked.

  No one had any ideas.

  “What did it want?” he asked.

  “It wanted us,” Lisa said.

  Everyone seemed to agree with that assessment.

  “But the thing at the window wasn’t what got Jake,” Frank said. “It was weak, lightweight. It couldn’t carry off a grown man.”

  “Then what got Jake?” Gordy asked.

  “Something bigger,” Frank said. “Something a whole lot stronger and meaner.”

  Bryce decided that, after all, the time had come to tell them about the things he had heard—and sensed—on the telephone, between his calls to Governor Retlock and General Copperfield: the silent presence; the forlorn cries of sea gulls; the warning sound of a rattlesnake; worst of all, the agonizing and despairing screams of men, women, and children. He hadn’t intended to mention any of that until morning, until the arrival of daylight and reinforcements. But they might spot something important that he had missed, some scrap, some clue that would be of help. Besides, now that they had all seen the thing at the window, the phone incident was, by comparison, no longer very shocking.

  The others listened to Bryce, and this new information had a negative effect on their demeanor.

  “What kind of degenerate would tape-record the screams of his victims?” Gordy asked.

  Tal Whitman shook his head. “It could be something else. It could be that...”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, maybe none- of you wants to hear this right now.”

  “Since you’ve started it, finish it,” Bryce insisted.

  “Well,” Tal said, “what if it wasn’t a recording you heard? I mean, we know people have disappeared from Snowfield. In fact as far as we’ve seen, more have vanished than died. So ... what if the missing are being held somewhere? As hostages? Maybe the screams were coming from people who were still alive, who were being tortured and maybe killed right then, right then while you were on the phone, listening.”

  Remembering those terrible screams, Bryce felt his marrow slowly freezing.

  “Whether it was tape-recorded or not,” Frank Autry said, “it’s probably a mistake to think in terms of hostages.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Paige said. “If Mr. Autry means that we’ve got to be careful not to narrow our thinking to conventional situations, then I wholeheartedly agree. This just doesn’t feel like a hostage drama. Something damned peculiar is happening here, something that no one’s ever encountered before, so let’s not start backsliding just because we’d be more comfortable with cozy, familiar explanations. Besides, if we’re dealing with terrorists, how does that fit with the thing we saw at the window? It doesn’t.”

  Bryce nodded. “You’re right. But I don’t believe Tal meant that people were being held for conventional motives.”

  “No, no,” Tal said. “It doesn’t have to be terrorists or kidnappers. Even if people are being held hostage, that doesn’t necessarily mean other people are holding them. I’m even willing to consider that they’re being held by something that isn’t human. How’s that for remaining open-minded? Maybe it is holding them, the it that none of us can define. Maybe it’s holding them just to prolong the pleasure it takes from snuffing the life out of them. Maybe it’s holding them just to tease us with their screams, the way it teased Bryce on the phone. Hell, if we’re dealing with something truly extraordinary, truly unhuman, its reasons for holding hostages—if it is holding any—are bound to be incomprehensible.”

  “Christ, you’re talking like lunatics,” Wargle said.

  Everyone ignored him.

  They had stepped through the looking glass. The impossible was possible. The enemy was the unknown.

  Lisa Paige cleared her throat. Her face was pasty. In a barely audible voice, she said, “Maybe it spun a web somewhere, down in a dark place, in a cellar or a cave, and maybe it tied all the missing people into its web, sealed them up incocoons, alive. Maybe it’s just saving them until it gets hungry again.”

  If absolutely nothing lay beyond the realm of possibility, if even the most outrageous theories could be true, then perhaps the girl was right, Bryce thought. Perhaps there was an enormous web vibrating softly in some dark place, hung with a hundred or two hundred or even more man- and woman- and child-size tidbits, wrapped in individual packages for freshness and convenience. Somewhere in Snowfield, were there living human beings who had been reduced to the awful equivalent of foil-wrapped Pop Tarts, waiting only to provide nourishment for some brutal, unimaginably evil, darkly intelligent, other-dimensional horror.

  No. Ridiculous.

  On the other hand: maybe.

  Jesus.

  Bryce crouched in front of the shortwave radio and squinted at its mangled guts. Circuit boards had been snapped. Several parts appeared to have been crushed in a vice or hammered flat.

  Frank said, “They had to take off the cover plate to get at all this stuff, just the way we did.”

  “So after they smashed the crap out of it,” Wargle said, “why’d they bother to put the plate back on?”

  “And why go to all that trouble to begin with?” Frank wondered. “They could’ve put the radio out of commission just by ripping the cord loose.”

  Lisa and Gordy appeared as Bryce was turning away from the radio. The girl said, “Food and coffee’s ready if anyone wants anything.”

  “I’m starved,” Wargle said, licking his lips.

  “We should all eat something, even if we don’t feel like it,” Bryce said.

  “Sheriff,” Gordy said, “Lisa and I have been wondering about the animals, the pets. What made us think about it was when you said you heard dog and cat sounds over the phone. Sir, what’s happened to all the pets?”

  “Nobody’s seen a dog or cat,” Lisa said. “Or heard barking.”

  Thinking of the silent streets, Bryce frowned and said, “You’re right. It’s strange.”

  “Jenny says there were some pretty big dogs in town. A few German shepherds. One Doberman that she knows of. Even a Great Dane. Wouldn’t you think they’d have fought back? Wouldn’t you think some of the dogs would’ve gotten away?” the girl asked.

  “Okay,” Gordy said quickly, anticipating Bryce’s response, “so maybe it was big enough to overwhelm an ordinary, angry dog. Okay, so we also know that bullets didn’t stop it, which says that maybe nothing can. It’s apparently big, and it’s strong. But, sir, big and strong don
’t necessarily count for much with a cat. Cats are greased lightning. It’d take something real damned sneaky to slip up on every cat in town.”

  “Real sneaky and real fast,” Lisa said.

  “Yeah,” Bryce said uneasily. “Real fast.”

  Jenny had just begun eating a sandwich when Sheriff Hammond sat down in a chair beside the desk, balancing his plate on his lap. “Mind some company?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Tal Whitman’s been telling me you’re the scourge of our local motorcycle gang.”

  She smiled. “Tal’s exaggerating.”

  “That man doesn’t know how to exaggerate,” the sheriff said. “Let me tell you something about him. Sixteen months ago, I was away for three days at a law enforcement conference in Chicago, and when I got back, Tal was the first person I saw. I asked him if anything special had happened while I’d been gone, and he said it was just the usual business with drunk drivers, bar fights, a couple of burglaries, various CITs—”

  “What’s a CIT?” Jenny asked.

  “Oh, it’s just a cat-in-tree report.”

  “Policemen don’t really rescue cats, do they?”

  “Do you think we’re heartless?” he asked, feigning shock.

  “CITs? Come on now.”

  He grinned. He had a marvelous grin. “Once every couple of months, we do have to get a cat out of a tree. But a CIT doesn’t mean just cats in trees. It’s our shorthand for any kind of nuisance call that takes us away from more important work.”

  “Ah.”

  “So anyway, when I came back from Chicago that time, Tal told me it’d been a pretty ordinary three days. And then, almost as an afterthought, he said there’d been an attempted robbery at a 7-Eleven. Tal had been a customer, out of uniform, when it went down. But even off duty, a cop’s required to carry his gun, and Tal had a revolver in an ankle holster. He told me one of the punks had been armed; he said he’d been forced to kill him, and he said I wasn’t to worry about whether it was a justified shooting or not. He said it was as justified as they come. When I got concerned about him, he said, ‘Bryce. It was really just a cakewaik.’ Later, I found out the two punks had intended to shoot everyone. Instead. Tal shot the gunman—although not before he was shot himself. The punk put a bullet through Tal’s left arm, and just about a split second after that, Tal killed him. Tal’s wound wasn’t serious, but it bled like hell, and it must’ve hurt something awful. Of course, I hadn’t seen the bandage because it was under the shirt sleeve, and Tal hadn’t bothered to mention it. So anyway, there’s Tal in the 7-Eleven, bleeding all over the place, and he discovers he’s out of ammo. The second punk, who grabbed the gun the first one dropped, is also out of ammo, and he decides to run. Tal goes after him, and they have themselves a knock-down-drag-out fight from one end of that little grocery store to the other. The guy was two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than Tal, and he wasn’t wounded. But you know what the backup officer told me they found when they arrived? They said Tal was sitting up on the counter by the cash register, his shirt off, sipping a complimentary cup of coffee, while the clerk tried to stanch the flow of blood. One suspect was dead. The other one was unconscious, sprawled in a sticky mess of Hostess Twinkies and Fudge Fantasies and coconut cupcakes. Seems they’d knocked over a rack of lunchbox cakes right in the middle of the fight. About a hundred packages of snack stuff spilled onto the floor, and Tal and this other guy stepped all over them while they were grappling. Most of the packages broke open. There was icing and crumbled cookies and smashed Twinkies all over one aisle. Staggered footprints were pressed right into the garbage, so that you could follow the progress of the battle just by looking at the sticky trail.”

  The sheriff finished his story and looked at Jenny expectantly.

  “Oh! Yes, he told you it’d been an easy arrest—just a cakewalk.”

  “Yeah. A cakewalk.” The sheriff laughed.

  Jenny glanced at Tal Whitman, who was across the room, eating a sandwich, talking to Officer Brogan and to Lisa.

  “So you see,” the sheriff said, “when Tal tells me you’re the scourge of the Demon Chrome, I know he’s not exaggerating. Exaggeration just isn’t his style.”

  Jenny shook her head, impressed. “When I told Tal about my little encounter with this man he calls Gene Terr, he acted as if he thought it was one of the bravest things anyone had ever done. Compared to that ‘cakewalk’ of his, my story must’ve seemed like a dispute on a kindergarten playground.”

  “No, no,” Hammond said. “Tal wasn’t just humoring you. He really does think you did a damned brave thing. So do I. Jeeter’s a snake, Dr. Paige. Poisonous variety.”

  “You can call me Jenny if you like.”

  “Well, Jenny-if-you-like, you can call me Bryce.”

  He had the bluest eyes she had ever seen. His smile was defined as much by those luminous eyes as it was by the curve of his mouth.

  As they ate, they talked about inconsequential things, as if this were an ordinary evening. He possessed an impressive ability to put people at ease regardless of the circumstances. He brought with him an aura of tranquillity. She was grateful for the calm interlude.

  When they finished eating, however, he guided the conversation back to the crisis at hand. “You know Snowfield better than I do. We’ve got to find a suitable headquarters for this operation. This place is too small. Soon, I’ll have ten more men here. And Copperfield’s team in the morning.”

  “How many is he bringing?”

  “At least a dozen people. Maybe as many as twenty. I need an HQ from which every aspect of the operation can be coordinated. We might be here for days, so there’ll have to be a room where off-duty people can sleep, and we’ll need a cafeteria arrangement to feed everyone.”

  “One of the inns might be just the place,” Jenny said.

  “Maybe. But I don’t want people sleeping two by two in a lot of different rooms. They’d be too vulnerable. We’ve got to set up a single dormitory.”

  “Then the Hilltop Inn is your best bet. It’s about a block from here, on the other side of the street.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. Biggest hotel in town, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. The Hilltop has a large lobby because it doubles as the hotel bar.”

  “I’ve had a drink there once or twice. If we change the lobby furniture, it could be set up as a work area to accommodate everyone.”

  “There’s also a large restaurant divided into two rooms. One part could be a cafeteria, and we could carry mattresses down from the rooms and use the other half of the restaurant as a dorm.”

  Bryce said, “Let’s have a look at it.”

  He put his empty paper plate on the desk and got to his feet.

  Jenny glanced at the front windows. She thought of the strange creature that had flown into the glass, and in her mind she heard the soft yet frenzied thumpthumpthumpthump.

  She said, “You mean ... have a look at it now?”

  “Why not?”

  “Wouldn’t it be wise to wait for the reinforcements?” she asked.

  “They probably won’t arrive for a while yet. There’s no point in just sitting around, twiddling our thumbs. We’ll all feel better if we’re doing something constructive; it’ll take our minds off...the worst things we’ve seen.”

  Jenny couldn’t free herself from the memory of those black insect eyes, so malevolent, so hungry. She stared at the windows, at the night beyond. The town no longer seemed familiar. It was utterly alien now, a hostile place in which she was an unwelcome stranger.

  “We’re not one bit safer in here than we would be out there,” Bryce said gently.

  Jenny nodded, remembering the Oxleys in their barricaded room. As she got up from the desk, she said, “There’s no safely anywhere.”

  16

  Out of the Dark

  Bryce Hammond led the way out of the stationhouse. They crossed the moonlight-mottled cobblestones, stepped through a fall of amber light from a streetlam
p, and headed into Skyline Road. Bryce carried a shotgun as did Tal Whitman.

  The town was breathless. The trees stood unrespiring, and the buildings were like vapor-thin mirages hanging on walls of air.

  Bryce moved out of the light, walked on moon-dappled pavement, crossing the street, finding shadows scattered in the middle of it. Always shadows.

  The others came silently behind him.

  Something crunched under Bryce’s foot, startling him. It was a withered leaf.

  He could see the Hilltop Inn farther up Skyline Road. It was a four-story, gray stone building almost a block away, and it was very dark. A few of the fourth-floor windows reflected the nearly full moon, but within the hotel not a single light burned.

  They had all reached or passed the middle of the street when something came out of the dark. Bryce was aware, first, of a moon shadow that fluttered across the pavement, like a ripple passing through a pool of water. Instinctively, he ducked. He heard wings. He felt something brush lightly over his head.

  Stu Wargle screamed.

  Bryce shot up from his crouch and whirled around.

  The moth.

  It was fixed firmly to Wargle’s face, holding on by some means not visible to Bryce. Wargle’s entire head was hidden by the thing.

  Wargle wasn’t the only one screaming. The others cried out and fell back in surprise. The moth was squealing, too, making a high-pitched, keening sound.

  In the moon’s silvery beams, the impossible insect’s huge pale velvety wings flapped and folded and spread with horrible grace and beauty, buffeting Wargle’s head and shoulders.

  Wargle staggered away, veering downhill, moving blindly, clawing at the outrageous thing that clung to his face. His screams quickly grew muffled; within a couple of seconds, they were silenced altogether.

  Bryce, like the others, was paralyzed by disgust and disbelief.

  Wargle began to run, but he only went a few yards before coming to an abrupt halt. His hands dropped away from the thing on his face. His knees were buckling.

  Snapping out of his brief trance, Bryce dropped his useless shotgun and ran toward Stu.

  Wargle didn’t crumple to the ground, after all. Instead, his shaky knees locked, and he snapped erect. His shoulders jerked back. His body twitched and shuddered as if an electric current had flashed through him.

  Bryce tried to grab the moth and tear it away from Wargle. But the deputy began to weave and thrash in a St. Vitus dance of pain and suffocation, and Bryce’s hands closed on empty air. Wargle moved erratically across the street, jerked this way and that, heaved and writhed and spun, as if he were attached to strings that were being manipulated by a drunken puppeteer. His hands hung slackly at his sides, which made his frantic and spasmodic capering seem especially eerie. His hands flopped and fluttered weakly, but they did not rise to tear at his assailant. It was almost as if, now, he were in the grip of ecstasy rather than the clutch of pain. Bryce followed him, tried to move in on him, but couldn’t get close.

  Then Wargle collapsed.

  In that same instant, the moth rose and turned, suspended in the air, hovering on rapidly beating wings, eyes night-black and hateful. It swooped at Bryce.

  He stumbled backwards and threw his arms across his face. He fell.

  The moth sailed over his head.

  Bryce twisted around, looked up.

  The kite-size insect glided soundlessly across the street, toward the buildings on the other side.

  Tal Whitman raised his shotgun. The blast was like cannonfire in the silent town.

  The moth pitched sideways in midair. It tumbled in a loop, dropped almost to the ground, then it swooped up again and flew on, disappearing over a rooftop.

  Stu Wargle was sprawled on the pavement, flat on his back. Unmoving.

  Bryce scrambled to his feet and went to Wargle. The deputy lay in the middle