Phantoms Read online

  Corporal Billy Velazquez, one of General Copperfield’s support troops, climbed down through the manhole, into the storm drain. Although he hadn’t exerted himself, he was breathing hard. Because he was scared.

  What had happened to Sergeant Harker?

  The others had come back, looking stunned. Old man Copperfield said Harker was dead. He said they weren’t quite sure what had killed Sarge, but they intended to find out. Man, that was bullshit. They must know what killed him. They just didn’ t want to say. That was typical of the brass, making secrets of everything.

  The ladder descended through a short section of vertical pipe, then into the main horizontal drain. Billy reached the bottom. His booted feet made hard, flat sounds when they struck the concrete floor.

  The tunnel wasn’t high enough to allow him to stand erect. He crouched slightly and swept his flashlight around.

  Gray concrete walls. Telephone and power company pipes. A little moisture. Some fungus here and there. Nothing else.

  Billy stepped away from the ladder as Ron Peake, another member of the support squad, came down into the drain.

  Why hadn’t they at least brought Harker’s body back with them when they’d returned from Gilmartin’s Market?

  Billy kept shining his flashlight around and glancing nervously behind him.

  Why had old Iron Ass Copperfield kept stressing the need to be watchful and careful down here?

  Sir, what’re we supposed to be on the lookout for? Billy had asked.

  Copperfield had said, Anything. Everything. I don’t know if there’s any danger or not. And even if there is, I don’t know exactly what to tell you to look for. Just be damned cautious. And if anything moves down there, no matter how innocent it looks, even if it’s just a mouse, get your asses out of there fast.

  Now what the hell kind of answer was that?

  Jesus.

  It gave him the creeps.

  Billy wished he’d had a chance to talk to Pascalli or Fodor. They weren’t the damned brass. They would give him the whole story about Harker—if he ever got a chance to ask them about it.

  Ron Peake reached the bottom of the ladder. He looked anxiously at Billy.

  Velazquez directed the flashlight all the way around them in order to show the other man there was nothing to worry about.

  Ron switched on his own flash and smiled self-consciously, embarrassed by his jumpiness.

  The men above began to feed a power cable through the open manhole. It led back to the two mobile laboratories, which were parked a few yards from the entrance to the drain.

  Ron took the end of the cable, and Billy, shuffling forward in a crouch, led the way east. On the street above, the other men paid out more cable into the drain.

  This tunnel should intersect an equally large or perhaps larger conduit under the main street, Skyline Road. At that point there ought to be a power company junction box where several strands of the town’s electrical web were joined together. As Billy proceeded with all the caution that Copperfield had suggested, he played the beam of his flashlight over the walls of the tunnel, looking for the power company’s insignia.

  The junction box was on the left, five or six feet this side of the intersection of the two conduits. Billy walked past it, to the Skyline Road drain, leaned out into the passageway, and pointed his light to the right and to the left, making sure there was nothing lurking around. The Skyline Road pipe was the same size as the one in which he now stood, but it followed the slope of the street above it, plunging down the mountainside. There was nothing in sight.

  Looking downhill, into the dwindling gray bore of the tunnel, Billy Velazquez was reminded of a story he’d read years ago in a horror comic. He’d forgotten the title of it. The tale was about a bank robber who killed two people during a holdup and then, fleeing police, slipped into the city’s storm drain system. The villain had taken a downward-sloping tunnel, figuring it would lead to the river, but where it had led, instead, was to Hell. That was what the Skyline Road drain looked like as it fell down, down, down: a road to Hell.

  Billy turned to peer uphill again, wondering if it would look like a road to Heaven. But it looked the same both ways. Up or down, it looked like a road to Hell.

  What had happened to Sergeant Harker?

  Would the same thing happen to everyone, sooner or later?

  Even to William Luis Velazquez, who had always been so sure (until now) that he would live forever?

  His mouth was suddenly dry.

  He turned his head inside his helmet and put his parched lips on the nipple of the nutrient tube. He sucked on it, drawing a sweet, cool, carbohydrate-packed, vitamin-and-mineral-rich fluid into his mouth. What he wanted was a beer. But until he could get out of this suit, the nutrient solution was the only thing available. He carried a forty-eight-hour supply—if he didn’t take more than two ounces an hour.

  Turning away from the road to Hell, he went to the junction box. Ron Peake was at work already. Moving efficiently despite their bulky decon suits and the cramped quarters, they tapped into the power supply.

  The unit had brought its own generator, but it would be used only if the more convenient municipal power were lost.

  In a few minutes, Velazquez and Peake were finished. Billy used his suit-to-suit radio to call up to the surface. “General, we’ve made the tap. You should have power now, sir.”

  The response came at once: “We do. Now get your asses out of there on the double!”

  “Yes, sir,” Billy said.

  Then he heard ... something.

  Rustling.

  Panting.

  And Ron Peake grabbed Billy’s shoulder. Pointed. Past him. Back toward the Skyline drain.

  Billy whirled around, crouched down even farther, and shone his flashlight out into the intersection, where Peake’s flash was focused.

  Animals were streaming down the Skyline Road tunnel. Dozens upon dozens. Dogs. White and gray and black and brown and rust-red and golden, dogs of all sizes and descriptions: mostly mutts but also beagles, toy poodles, full-size poodles, German shepherds, spaniels, two Great Danes, a couple of Airedales, a schnauzer, a pair of coal-black Dobermans with brown-trimmed muzzles. And there were cats, too. Big and small. Lean cats and fat cats. Black and calico and white and yellow and ring-tailed and brown and spotted and striped and gray cats. None of the dogs barked or growled. None of the cats meowed or hissed. The only sounds were their panting and the soft padding and scraping of their paws on the concrete. The animals poured down through the drain with a curious intensity, all of them looking straight ahead, none of them even glancing into the intersecting drain, where Billy and Peake stood.

  “What’re they doing down here?” Billy wanted to know. “How’d they get here?”

  From the street above, Copperfield radioed down: “What’s wrong, Velazquez?”

  Billy was so amazed by the procession of animals that he didn’t immediately respond.

  Other animals began to appear, mixed in among the cats and dogs. Squirrels. Rabbits. A gray fox. Raccoons. More foxes and more squirrels. Skunks. All of them were staring straight ahead, oblivious of everything except the need to keep moving. Possums and badgers. Mice and chipmunks. Coyotes. All rushing down the road to Hell, swarming over and around and under one another, yet never once stumbling or hesitating or snapping at one another. This strange parade was as swift, continuous, and harmonious as flowing water.

  “Velazquez! Peake! Report in!”

  “Animals,” Billy told the general. “Dogs, cats, raccoons, all kinds of things. A river of ’em.”

  “Sir, they’re running down the Skyline tunnel, just beyond the mouth of the pipe,” Ron Peake said.

  “Underground,” Billy said, baffled. “It’s crazy.”

  “Retreat, goddamnit!” Copperfield said urgently. “Get out of there now. Now!”

  Billy remembered the general’s warning, issued just before they had descended through the manole: If anything moves down there
... even if it’s just a mouse, get your asses out of there fast.

  Initially, the subterranean parade of animals had been startling but not particularly frightening. Now, the bizarre procession was suddenly eerie, even threatening.

  And now there were snakes among the animals. Scores of them. Long blacksnakes, slithering fast, with their heads raised a foot or two above the floor of the storm drain. And there were rattlers, their flat and evil heads held lower than those of the longer blacksnakes, but moving just as fast and just as sinuously, swarming with mysterious purpose toward a dark and equally mysterious destination.

  Although the snakes paid no more attention to Velazquez and Peake than the dogs and cats did, their slithering arrival was enough to snap Billy out of his trance. He hated snakes. He turned back the way he had come, prodded Peake. “Go. Go on. Get out of here. Run!”

  Something shrieked-screamed-roared.

  Billy’s heart pounded with jackhammer ferocity.

  The sound came from the Skyline drain, from back there on the road to Hell. Billy didn’t dare look back.

  It was neither a human scream nor like any animal sound, yet it was unquestionably the cry of a living thing. There was no mistaking the raw emotions of that alien, blood-freezing bleat. It wasn’t a scream of fear or pain. It was a blast of rage, hatred, and feverish blood-hunger.

  Fortunately, that malevolent roar didn’t come from nearby, but from farther up the mountain, toward the uppermost end of the Skyline conduit. The beast—whatever in God’s name it was—was at least not already upon them. But it was coming fast.

  Ron Peake hurried back toward the ladder, and Billy followed. Encumbered by their bulky decontamination suits, slowed by the curved floor of the pipe, they ran in a lurching shuffle. Although they hadn’t far to go, their progress was maddeningly slow.

  The thing in the tunnel cried out again.

  Closer.

  It was a whine and a snarl and a howl and a roar and a petulant squeal all tangled together, a barbed-wire sound that punctured Billy’s ears and raked cold metal spikes across his heart.

  Closer.

  If Billy Velazquez had been a God-fearing Nazarene or a Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone, fundamentalist Christian, he would have known what beast might make such a cry. If he had been taught that the Dark One and his wicked minions stalked the earth in fleshy forms, seeking unwary souls to devour, he would have identified this beast at once. He would have said, “It’s Satan.” The roar echoing through the concrete tunnels was truly that terrible.

  And closer.

  Getting closer.

  Coming fast.

  But Billy was a Catholic. Modem Catholicism tended to downplay the sulphurous-pits-of-Hell stories in favor of emphasizing God’s great mercy and infinite compassion. Extremist Protestant fundamentalists saw the hand of the Devil in everything from television programming to the novels of R. L. Stine to the invention of the push-up bra. But Catholicism struck a quieter, more light-hearted note than that. The Church of Rome now gave the world such things as singing nuns, Wednesday Night Bingo, and priests with degrees in psychology. Therefore, Billy Velazquez, raised a Catholic, did not immediately associate supernatural Satanic forces with the chilling cry of this unknown beast—not even though he so vividly remembered that old road-to-Hell comic book story. Billy just knew that the bellowing creature approaching through the bowels of the earth was a bad thing. A very bad thing.

  And it was getting closer. Much closer.

  Ron Peake reached the ladder, started up, dropped his flashlight, didn’t bother to return for it.

  Peake was too slow, and Billy shouted at him: “Move your ass!”

  The scream of the unknown beast had become an eerie ululation that filled the subterranean warren of storm drains as completely as floodwater. Billy couldn’t even hear himself shouting.

  Peake was halfway up the ladder.

  There was almost enough room for Billy to slip in under him and start up. He put one hand on the ladder.

  Peake’s foot slipped. He dropped down a rung.

  Billy cursed and snatched his hand out of the way.

  The banshee keening grew louder.

  Closer, closer.

  Peake’s fallen flashlight was pointing off toward the Skyline drain, but Billy didn’t look back that way. He stared only up toward the sunlight. If he glanced behind and saw something hideous, his strength would flee him, and he would be unable to move, and it would get him, by God, it would get him.

  Peake scrambled upwards again. His feet stayed on the rungs this time.

  The concrete drain was transmitting vibrations that Billy could feel through the soles of his boots. The vibrations were like heavy, lumbering, yet lightning-quick footsteps.

  Don’t look, don’t look!

  Billy grabbed the sides of the ladder and clawed his way up as rapidly as Peake’s progress would allow. One rung. Two. Three.

  Above, Peake passed through the manhole and into the street.

  With Peake out of the way, a fall of autumn sunlight splashed down over Billy Velazquez, and there was something about it that was like light piercing a church window—maybe because it represented hope.

  He was halfway up the ladder.

  Going to make it, going to make it, definitely going to make it, he told himself breathlessly.

  But the shrieking and howling, Jesus, like being in the center of a cyclone!

  Another rung.

  And another one.

  The decontamination suit felt heavier than it had ever felt before. A ton. A suit of armor. Weighing him down.

  He was in the vertical pipe now, moving out of the horizontal drain that ran beneath the street. He looked up longingly at the light and the faces peering down at him, and he kept moving.

  Going to make it.

  His head rose through the manhole.

  Someone reached out, offering a hand. It was Copperfield himself.

  Behind Billy, the shrieking stopped.

  He climbed another rung, let go of the ladder with one hand, and reached for the general—

  —but something seized his legs from below before he could grasp Copperfield’s hand.

  “No!”

  Something grabbed him, wrenched his feet off the ladder, and yanked him away. Screaming—strangely, he heard himself screaming for his mother—Billy went down, cracking his helmet against the wall of the pipe and then against a rung of the ladder, stunning himself, smashing his elbows and knees, trying desperately to catch hold of a rung but failing, finally collapsing into the powerful embrace of an unspeakable something that began to drag him backwards toward the Skyline conduit.

  He twisted, kicked, struck out with his fists, to no effect. He was held tightly and dragged deeper into the drains.

  In the backsplash of light coming through the manhole, then in the rapidly dimming beam of Peake’s discarded flashlight, Billy saw a bit of the thing that had him in its grasp. Not much. Fragments looming out of the shadows, then vanishing into darkness again. He saw just enough to make his bowels and bladder loosen. It was lizardlike. But not a lizard. Insectlike. But not an insect. It hissed and mewled and snarled. It snapped and tore at his suit as it pulled him along. It had cavernous jaws and teeth. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—the teeth! A double row of razor-edge spikes. It had claws, and it was huge, and its eyes were smoky red with elongated pupils as black as the bottom of a grave. It had scales instead of skin, and two horns, thrusting from its brow above its baleful eyes, curving out and up, as sharply pointed as daggers. A snout rather than a nose, a snout that oozed snot. A forked tongue that flickered in and out and in and out across all those deadly fangs, and something that looked like the stinger on a wasp or maybe a pincer.

  It dragged Billy Velazquez into the Skyline conduit. He clawed at the concrete, desperately seeking something to hold on to, but he only succeeded in abrading away the fingers and palms of his gloves. He felt the cool underground air on his hands, and he realized he might no
w be contaminated, but that was the least of his worries.

  It dragged him into the hammering heart of darkness. It stopped, held him tightly. It tore at his suit. It cracked his helmet. It pried at his plexiglass faceplate. It was after him as if he were a delicious morsel of nut meat in a hard shell.

  His hold on sanity was tenuous at best, but he struggled to keep his wits about him, tried to understand. At first, it seemed to him that this was a prehistoric creature, something millions of years old that had somehow dropped through a time warp into the storm drains. But that was crazy. He felt a silvery, high-pitched, lunatic giggle coming over him, and he knew he would be lost if he gave voice to it. The beast tore away most of his decontamination suit. It was on him now, pressing hard, a cold and disgustingly slick thing that seemed to pulse and somehow to change when it touched him. Billy, gasping and weeping, suddenly remembered an illustration in an old catechism text. A drawing of a demon. That was what this was. Like the drawing. Yes, exactly like it. The horns. The dark, forked tongue. The red eyes. A demon risen from Hell. And then he thought: No, no; that’s crazy, too! And all the while that those thoughts raced through his mind, the ravenous creature stripped him and pulled his helmet almost completely apart. In the unrelieved darkness, he sensed its snout pressing through the halves of the broken helmet, toward his face, sniffing. He felt its tongue fluttering against his mouth and nose. He smelled a vague but repellent odor, like nothing he had ever smelled before. The beast gouged at his belly and thighs, and then he felt a strange and brutally painful fire eating into him; acid fire. He writhed, twisted, bucked, strained—all to no avail. Billy heard himself cry out in terror and pain and confusion: “It’s the Devil, it’s the Devil!” He realized he had been shouting and screaming things almost continuously, from the moment he had been dragged off the ladder. Now, unable to speak as the flameless fire burned his lungs to ash and churned into his throat, he prayed in a silent singsong chant, warding off fear and death and the terrible feeling of smallness and worthlessness that had come over him: Mary, Mother of God, Mary, hear my plea ... hear my plea, Mary, pray for me ... pray, pray for me, Mary, Mother of God, Mary, intercede for me and—

  His question had been answered.

  He knew what had happened to Sergeant Harker.

  Galen Copperfield was an outdoorsman, and he knew a great deal about the wildlife of North America. One of the creatures he found most interesting was the trap-door spider. It was a clever engineer, constructing a deep, tubular nest in the ground with a hinged lid at the top. The lid blended so perfectly with the soil in which it was set that other insects wandered across it, unaware of the danger below, and were instantly snatched into the nest, dragged down, and devoured. The suddenness of it was horrifying and fascinating. One instant, the prey was there, standing atop the trap-door, and the next instant it was gone, as if it had never been.

  Corporal Velazquez’s disappearance was as sudden as if he had stepped upon the lid of a trap-door spider’s lair.

  Gone.

  Copperfield’s men were already edgy about Harker’s disappearance and were frightened by the nightmarish howling that ceased just before Velazquez was dragged down. When the corporal was taken, they all stumbled back across the street, afraid that something was about to launch itself out of the manhole.

  Copperfield, in the act of reaching for Velazquez when he was snatched, jumped back. Then froze. Indecisive. That was not like him. He had never before been indecisive in a crisis.

  Velazquez was screaming through the suit-to-suit radio.

  Breaking the ice that locked his joints, Copperfield went to the manhole and looked down. Peake’s flashlight lay on the floor of the drain. But there was nothing else. No sign of Velazquez.

  Copperfield hesitated.

  The corporal continued to scream.

  Send other men down after the poor bastard?

  No. It would be a suicide mission. Remember Harker. Cut the losses here, now.

  But, good God, the screaming was terrible. Not as awful as Harker’s. Those had been screams born of excruciating pain. These were screams of mortal terror. Not as bad, perhaps, but bad enough. As bad as anything Copperfield had heard on the battlefield.

  There were words among the screams, spat out in explosive gasps. The corporal