Phantoms Read online

  “That’s me. ”

  “Man, you guys have hung up on me three times! What the fuck’s the matter with you guys?”

  “Watch your language.”

  “Shit.”

  “Listen, do you have any idea how many kids like you call up newspapers, wasting our time with silly-ass gags and hot tip hoaxes?”

  “Huh? How’d you even know I was a kid?”

  “’Cause you sound twelve.”

  “I’m fifteen!”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Shit!”

  “Listen, son, I’ve got a boy your age, which is why I’m bothering to listen to you when the other guys wouldn’t. So if you’ve really got something of interest, spill it.”

  “Well, my old man’s a professor at Stanford. He’s a virologist and an epidemiologist. You know what that means, man?”

  “He studies viruses, disease, something like that.”

  “Yeah. And he’s let himself be corrupted.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He accepted a grant from the fuckin’ military. Man, he’s involved with some biological warfare outfit. It’s supposed to be a peaceful application of his research, but you know that’s a lot of horseshit. He sold his soul, and now they’re finally claimin’ it. The shit’s hit the fan.”

  “The fact that your father sold out—if he did sell out—might be big news in your family, son, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be of much interest to our readers.”

  “Hey, man, I didn’t call up just to jerk you off. I’ve got a real story. Tonight they came for him. There’s a crisis of some kind. I’m supposed to think he had to fly back East on business. I snuck upstairs and listened at their bedroom door while he was layin’ it all out for the old lady. There’s been some kind of contamination in Snowfield. A big emergency. Everyone’s tryin’ to keep it secret.”

  “Snowfield, California?”

  “Yeah, yeah. What I figure, man, is that they were secretly runnin’ a test of some germ weapon on our own people and it got out of hand. Or maybe it was an accidental spill. Somethin’ real heavy’s goin’ down, for sure.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Ricky Bettenby. My old man’s name is Wilson Bettenby.”

  “Stanford, you said?”

  “Yeah. You gonna follow up on this, man?”

  “Maybe there’s something to it. But before I start calling people at Stanford, I need to ask you a lot more questions.”

  “Fire away. I’ll tell you whatever I can. I want to blast this wide open, man. I want him to pay for sellin’ out.”

  Throughout the night, the leaks sprung one by one. At Dugway, Utah, an army officer, who should have known better, used a pay phone off the base to call New York and spill the story to a much-loved younger brother who was a cub reporter for the Times. In bed, after sex, an aide to the governor told his lover, a woman reporter. Those and other holes in the dam caused the flow of information to grow from a trickle to a flood.

  By three o’clock in the morning, the switchboard at the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Office was overloaded. By dawn, the newspaper, television, and radio reporters were swarming into Santa Mira. Within a few hours of first light, the street in front of the sheriff’s offices was crowded with press cars, camera vans bearing the logos of TV stations in Sacramento and San Francisco, reporters, and curiosity seekers of all ages.

  The deputies gave up trying to keep people from congregating in the middle of the street, for there were too many of them to be herded onto the sidewalks. They sealed off the block with sawhorses and turned it into a big open-air press compound. A couple of enterprising kids from a nearby apartment building starting selling Coke, cookies, and—with the aid of the longest series of extension cords anyone could remember seeing—hot coffee. Their refreshment stand became the rumor center, where reporters gathered to share theories and hearsay while they waited for the latest official information handouts.

  Other journalists spread out through Santa Mira, seeking people who had friends or relatives living up in Snowfield, or who were in some way related to the deputies now stationed there. Out at the junction of the state route and Snowfield Road, still other reporters were camping at the police roadblock.

  In spite of all this hurly-burly, fully half of the press had not yet arrived. Many representatives of the Eastern media and the foreign press were still in transit. For the authorities who were trying hard to deal with the mess, the worst was yet to come. By Monday afternoon, it would be a circus.

  22

  Morning in Snowfield

  Not long after dawn, the shortwave radio and the two gasoline-powered electric generators arrived at the roadblock that marked the perimeter of the quarantine zone. The two small vans which bore them were driven by California Highway Patrolmen. They were permitted to pass through the blockade, to a point midway along the four-mile Snowfield Road, where they were parked and abandoned.

  When the CHiP officers returned to the roadblock, county deputies radioed a situation report to headquarters in Santa Mira. In turn, headquarters put through a go-ahead call to Bryce Hammond at the Hilltop Inn.

  Tal Whitman, Frank Autry, and two other men took a squad car to the midpoint of the Snowfield Road and picked up the abandoned vans. Containment of any possible disease vectors was thus maintained.

  The shortwave was set up in one comer of the Hilltop lobby. A message sent to headquarters in Santa Mira was received and answered. Now, if something happened to the telephones, they wouldn’t be entirely isolated.

  Within an hour, one of the generators had been wired into the circuitry of the streetlamps on the west side of the Skyline Road. The other was spliced into the hotel’s electrical system. Tonight, if the main power supply was mysteriously cut off, the generators would kick in automatically. Darkness would last only one or two seconds.

  Bryce was confident that not even their unknown enemy could snatch away a victim that fast.

  Jenny Paige began the morning with an unsatisfactory sponge bath, followed by a completely satisfactory breakfast of eggs, sliced ham, toast, and coffee.

  Then, accompanied by three heavily armed men, she went up the street to her house, where she got some fresh clothes for herself and for Lisa. She also stopped in her office, where she gathered up a stethoscope, a sphygmomanometer, tongue depressors, cotton pads, gauze, splints, bandages, tourniquets, antiseptics, disposable hypodermic syringes, painkillers, antibiotics, and other instruments and supplies that she would need in order to establish an emergency infirmary in one corner of the Hilltop Inn’s lobby.

  The house was quiet.

  The deputies kept looking around nervously, entering each new room as if they suspected a guillotine was rigged above the door.

  As Jenny was finishing packing up supplies in her office, the telephone rang. They all stared at it.

  They knew only two phones in town were working, and both were at the Hilltop Inn.

  The phone rang again.

  Jenny lifted the receiver. She didn’t say hello.

  Silence.

  She waited.

  After a second, she heard the distant cries of sea gulls. The buzzing of bees. The mewling of a kitten. A weeping child. Another child: laughing. A panting dog. The chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka sound of a rattlesnake.

  Bryce had heard similar things on the phone last night, in the substation, just before the moth had come tapping at the windows. He had said that the sounds had been perfectly ordinary, familiar animal noises. They had nonetheless unsettled him. He hadn’t been able to explain why.

  Now Jenny knew exactly what he meant.

  Birds singing.

  Frogs croaking.

  A cat purring.

  The purr became a hiss. The hiss became a cat-shriek of anger. The shriek became a brief but terrible squeal of pain.

  Then a voice: “I’m gonna shove my big prick into your succulent little sister.”

  Jenny recognized the voice. Wargle. The d
ead man.

  “You hear me, Doc?”

  She said nothing.

  “And I don’t give a rat’s ass which end of her I stick it in.” He giggled.

  She slammed the phone down.

  The deputies looked at her expectantly.

  “Uh... no one on the line,” she said, deciding not to tell them what she had heard. They were already too jumpy.

  From Jenny’s office, they went to Tayton’s Pharmacy on Vail Lane, where she stocked up on more drugs: additional painkillers, a wide spectrum of antibiotics, coagulants, anticoagulants, and anything else she might conceivably need.

  As they were finishing in the pharmacy, the phone rang. Jenny was closest to it. She didn’t want to answer, but she couldn’t resist.

  And it was there again.

  Jenny waited a moment, then said, “Hello?”

  Wargle said, “I’m gonna use your little sister so hard she won’t be able to walk for a week.”

  Jenny hung up.

  “Dead line,” she told the deputies.

  She didn’t think they believed her. They stared at her trembling hands.

  Bryce sat at the central operations desk, talking by telephone to headquarters in Santa Mira.

  The APB on Timothy Flyte had turned up nothing whatsoever. Flyte wasn’t wanted by any police agency in the United States or Canada. The FBI had never heard of him. The name on the bathroom mirror at the Candleglow Inn was still a mystery .

  The San Francisco police had been able to. supply background on the missing Harold Ordnay and wife, in whose room Timothy Flyte’s name had been found. The Ordnays owned two bookstores in San Francisco. One was an ordinary retail outlet. The other was an antiquarian and rare book dealership; apparently, it was by far the more profitable of the two. The Ordnays were well known and respected in collecting circles. According to their family, Harold and Blanche had gone to Snowfield for a four-day weekend to celebrate their thirty-first anniversary. The family had never heard of Timothy Flyte. When police were granted permission to look through the Ordnays’ personal address book, they found no listing for anyone named Flyte.

  The police had not yet been able to locate any of the bookstores’ employees; however, they expected to do so as soon as both shops opened at ten o’clock this morning. It was hoped that Flyte was a business acquaintance of the Ordnays’ and would be familiar to the employees.

  “Keep me posted,” Bryce told the morning desk man in Santa Mira. “How’re things there?”

  “Pandemonium.”

  “It’ll get worse.”

  As Bryce was putting down the receiver, Jenny Paige returned from her safari in search of drugs and medical equipment. “Where’s Lisa?”

  “With the kitchen detail,” Bryce said.

  “She’s all right?”

  “Sure. There are three big, strong, well-armed men with her. Remember? Is something wrong?”

  “Tell you later.”

  Bryce assigned Jenny’s three armed guards to new duties, then helped her establish an infirmary in one corner of the lobby.

  “This is probably wasted effort,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “So far no one’s been injured. Just killed.”

  “Well, that could change.”

  “I think it only strikes when it intends to kill. It doesn’t take halfway measures.”

  “Maybe. But with all these men toting guns, and with everyone so damned jumpy, I wouldn’t be half surprised if someone accidentally winged someone else or even shot himself in the foot.”

  Arranging bottles in a desk drawer, Jenny said, “The telephone rang at my place and again over at the pharmacy. It was Wargle.” She told him about both calls.

  “You’re sure it was really him?”

  “I remember his voice clearly. An unpleasant voice.”

  “But, Jenny, he was—”

  “I know, I know. His face was eaten away, and his brain was gone, and all the blood was sucked out of him. I know. And it’s driving me crazy trying to figure it out.”

  “Someone doing an impersonation?”

  “No way. This was the real article. Snake-mean as he was in life.”

  “Did he sound as if he—”

  Bryce broke off in midsentence, and both he and Jenny turned as Lisa ran through the archway.

  The girl motioned to them. “Come on! Quick! Something weird is happening in the kitchen.”

  Before Bryce could stop her, she ran back the way she had come.

  Several men started after her, drawing their guns as they went, and Bryce ordered them to halt. “Stay here. Stay on the job.”

  Jenny had already sprinted after the girl.

  Bryce hurried into the dining room, caught up with Jenny, moved ahead of her, drew his revolver, and followed Lisa through the swinging doors into the hotel kitchen.

  The three men assigned to this shift of kitchen duty—Gordy Brogan, Henry Wong, and Max Dunbar—had put down their can openers and cooking utensils in favor of their service revolvers, but they didn’t know what to aim at. They glanced up at Bryce, looking disconcerted and baffled.

  “Here we go ‘round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.”

  The air was filled with a child’s singing. A little boy. His voice was clear and fragile and sweet.

  “Here we go ‘round the mulberry bush, so early in the moooorrrrninnnggg!”

  “The sink,” Lisa said, pointing.

  Puzzled, Bryce went to the nearest of three double sinks. Jenny came close behind him.

  The song had changed. The voice was the same:

  “This old man, he plays one; he plays nick-nack on my drum. With a nick-nack, paddywack, give a dog a bone—”

  The child’s voice was coming out of the drain in the sink, as if he were trapped far down in the pipes.

  “—this old man goes rolling home.”

  For metronomic seconds, Bryce listened with spellbound intensity. He was speechless.

  He glanced at Jenny. She gave him the same astonished stare that the had seen on his men’s faces when he had first pushed through the swinging doors.

  “It just started all of a sudden,” Lisa said, raising her voice above the singing.

  “When?” Bryce asked.

  “A couple of minutes ago,” Gordy Brogan said.

  “I was standing at the sink,” Max Dunbar said. He was a burly, hairy, rough-looking man with warm, shy brown eyes. “When the singing started up... Jesus, I must’ve jumped two feet!”

  The song changed again. The sweetness was replaced by a cloying, almost mocking piety:

  “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

  “I don’t like this,” Henry Wong said. “How can it be?”

  “Little ones to Him are drawn. They are weak, but He is strong.”

  Nothing about the singing was overtly threatening; yet, like the noises Bryce and Jenny had heard on the telephone, the child’s tender voice, issuing from such an unlikely source, was unnerving. Creepy.

  “Yes, Jesus loves me.

  Yes, Jesus loves me.

  Yes, Jesus—”

  The singing abruptly ceased.

  “Thank God!” Max Dunbar said with a shudder of relief, as if the child’s melodic crooning had been unbearably harsh, grating, off-key. “That voice was drilling right through to the roots of my teeth!”