Phantoms Read online

  36

  Face to Face

  At 3:12 A.M., Snowfield’s church bells began to clang.

  In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, Bryce got up from his chair. The others rose, too.

  The firehouse siren wailed.

  Jenny said, “Flyte must be here.”

  The six of them went outside.

  The streetlights were flashing off and on, casting leaping marionette shadows through the shifting banks of fog.

  At the foot of Skyline Road, a car turned the corner. Its headlights speared upward, imparting a silvery sheen to the mist.

  The streetlamps stopped blinking, and Bryce stepped into the soft cascade of yellow light beneath one of them, hoping that Flyte would be able to see him through the veils of fog.

  The bells continued to peal, and the siren shrieked, and the car crawled slowly up the long hill. It was a green and white sheriff’s department cruiser. It pulled to the curb and stopped ten feet from where Bryce stood; the driver extinguished the headlights.

  The driver’s door opened, and Flyte got out. He wasn’t what Bryce had expected. He was wearing thick glasses that made his eyes appear abnormally large. His fine, white, tangled hair bristled in a halo around his head. Someone at headquarters had lent him an insulated jacket with the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Department seal on the left breast.

  The bells stopped ringing.

  The siren groaned to a throaty finish.

  The subsequent silence was profound.

  Flyte gazed around the fog-shrouded street, listening and waiting.

  At last Bryce said, “Apparently, it’s not ready to show itself.”

  Flyte turned to him. “Sheriff Hammond?”

  “Yes. Let’s go inside and be comfortable while we wait.”

  The inn’s dining room. Hot coffee.

  Shaky hands clattered china mugs against the tabletop. Nervous hands curled and clamped around the warm mugs in order to make themselves be still.

  The six survivors leaned forward, hunched over the table, the better to listen to Timothy Flyte.

  Lisa was clearly enthralled by the British scientist, but at first Jenny had serious doubts. He seemed to be an outright caricature of the absent-minded professor. But when he began to speak about his theories, Jenny was forced to discard her initial, unfavorable opinion, and soon she was as fascinated as Lisa.

  He told them about vanishing armies in Spain and China, about abandoned Mayan cities, the Roanoke Island colony.

  And he told them of Joya Verde, a South American jungle settlement that had met a fate similar to Snowfield’s. Joya Verde, which means Green Jewel, was a trading post on the Amazon River, far from civilization. In 1923, six hundred and five people—every man, woman, and child who lived there—vanished from Joya Verde in a single afternoon, sometime between the morning and evening visits of regularly scheduled riverboats. At first it was thought that nearby Indians, who were normally peaceful, had become inexplicably hostile and had launched a surprise attack. However, there were no bodies found, no indications of fighting, and no evidence of looting. A message was discovered on the blackboard at the mission school: It has no shape, yet it has every shape. Many who investigated the Joya Verde mystery were quick to dismiss those nine chalk-scrawled words as having no connection with the disappearances. Flyte believed otherwise, and after listening to him, so did Jenny.

  “A message of sorts was also left in one of those ancient Mayan cities,” Flyte said. “Archaeologists have unearthed a portion of a prayer, written in hieroglyphics, dating from the time of the great disappearance.” He quoted from memory: “ ‘Evil gods live in the earth, their power asleep in rock. When they awake, they rise up as lava rises, but cold lava, flowing, and they assume many shapes. Then proud men know that we are only voices in the thunder, faces on the wind, to be dispersed as if we never lived.’ ” Flyte’s glasses had slid down his nose. He pushed them back into place. “Now, some say that particular part of the prayer refers to the power of earthquakes and volcanoes. I think it’s about the ancient enemy.”

  “We found a message here, too.” Bryce said. “Part of a word.”

  “We can’t make anything of it,” Sara Yamaguchi said.

  Jenny told Flyte about the two tetters—P and R—that Nick Papandrakis had painted on his bathroom wall, using a bottle of iodine. “There was a portion of a third letter, too. It might have been the beginning of a U or an O.”

  “Papandrakis,” Flyte said, nodding vigorously. “Greek. Yes, yes, yes—here’s confirmation of what I’m telling you. Was this fellow Papandrakis proud of his heritage?”

  “Yes,” Jenny said. “Extremely proud of it. Why?”

  “Well, if he was proud of being Greek,” Flyte said, “he might well have known Greek mythology. You see, in ancient Greek myth, there was a god named Proteus. I suspect that was the word your Mr. Papandrakis was trying to write on the wall. Proteus. A god who lived in the earth, crawled through its bowels. A god who was without any shape of his own. A god who could take any form he wished—and who fed upon everything and everyone that he desired.”

  With frustration in his voice, Tal Whitman said, “What is all this supernatural stuff? When we communicated with it through the computer, it insisted on giving itself the names of demons.”

  Flyte said, “The amorphous demon, the shapeless and usually evil god that can assume any form it wishes—those are relatively common figures in most ancient myth systems and in most if not all of the world’s religions. Such a mythological creature appears under scores of names, in all of the world’s cultures. Consider the Old Testament of the Bible, for example. Satan first appears as a serpent, later as a goat, a ram, a stag, a beetle, a spider, a child, a beggar, and many other things. He is called, among other names: Master of Chaos and Formlessness, Master of Deceit, the Beast of Many Faces. The Bible tells us that Satan is ‘as changeable as shadows’ and ‘as clever as water, for as water can become steam or ice, so Satan can become that which he wishes to become.’”

  Lisa said, “Are you saying the shape-changer here in Snowfield is Satan?”

  “Well... in a way, yes.”

  Frank Autry shook his head. “No. I’m not a man who believes in spooks, Dr. Flyte.”

  “Nor am I,” Flyte assured him. “I’m not arguing that this thing is a supernatural being. It isn’t. It’s real, a creature of flesh—although not flesh like ours. It’s not a spirit or a devil. Yet... in a way... I believe it is Satan. Because, you see, I believe it was this creature—or another like it, another monstrous survivor from the Mesozoic Era—that inspired the myth of Satan. In prehistoric times, men must have encountered one of these things, and some of them must have lived to tell about it. They naturally described their experiences in the terminology of myth and superstition. I suspect most of the demonic figures in the world’s various religions are actually reports of these shape-changers, reports passed down through countless generations before they were at last committed to hieroglyphics, scrolls, and then print. They were reports of a very rare, very real, very dangerous beast ... but described in the language of religious myth.”

  Jenny found this part of Flyte’s thesis to be both crazy and brilliant, unlikely yet convincing. “The thing somehow absorbs the knowledge and memories of those on whom it feeds,” she said, “so it knows that many of its victims see it as the Devil, and it gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of playing that role.”

  Bryce said, “It seems to enjoy mocking us.”

  Sara Yamaguchi tucked her long hair behind her ears and said, “Dr. Flyte, how about explaining this in scientific terms. How can such a creature exist? How can it function biologically? What’s your scientific rationalization, your theory?”

  Before Flyte could answer her, it came.

  High on one wall, near the ceiling, a metal grille covering a heating duct suddenly popped from its screws. It flew into the room, crashed into an empty table, slid off the table, clattered-rattled-banged onto the flo
or.

  Jenny and the others leapt up from their chairs.

  Lisa screamed, pointed.

  The shape-changer bulged out of the duct. It hung there on the wall. Dark. Wet. Pulsing. Like a mass of glistening, bloody snot suspended from the edge of a nostril.

  Bryce and Tal reached for their revolvers, then hesitated. There was nothing whatsoever that they could do.

  The thing continued to surge out of the duct, swelling, rippling, growing into an obscene, gnarled, shifting lump the size of a man. Then, still flowing out of the wall, it began to slide down. It formed into a mound on the floor. Much bigger than a man now, still oozing out of the duct. Growing, growing.

  Jenny looked at Flyte.

  The professor’s face could not settle on a single expression. It tried wonder, then terror, then awe, then disgust, then awe and terror and wonder again.

  The viscous, ever-churning mass of dark protoplasm was now as large as three or four men, and still more of the vile stuff gushed from the heating duct in a revolting, vomitous flow.

  Lisa gagged and averted her face.

  But Jenny couldn’t take her eyes from the thing. There was a grotesque fascination that couldn’t be denied.

  In the already enormous agglomeration of shapeless tissue that had extruded itself into the room, limbs began to form, although none of them maintained its shape for more than a few seconds. Human arms, both male and female, reached out as if seeking help. The thin, flailing arms of children were formed from the jellied tissue, some of them with their small hands open in a silent, pathetic plea. It was difficult to keep in mind that these were not the arms of children trapped within the shape-changer; they were imitation, phantom arms, a part of it, not a part of any child. And claws. A startling, frightening variety of claws and animal limbs appeared out of the protoplasmic soup. There were insect parts, too, enormous, hugely exaggerated, terrifyingly frenetic and grasping. But all of these swiftly melted back into the formless protoplasm almost as soon as they took shape.

  The shape-changer bulged across the width of the room. It was now larger than an elephant.

  As the thing engaged upon a continuous, relentless, mysterious pattern of apparently purposeless change, Jenny and the others edged back toward the windows.

  Outside, in the street, the fog roiled in its own formless dance, as if it were a ghostly reflection of the shape-changer.

  Flyte spoke with a sudden urgency, answering the questions that Sara Yamaguchi had posed, as if he felt he didn’t have much time left to explain. “About twenty years ago, it occurred to me that there might be a connection between mass disappearances and the unexplained extinction of certain species in pre-human geological eras. Like the dinosaurs, for instance.”

  The shape-changer pulsed and throbbed, towering almost to the ceiling, filling the entire far end of the room.

  Lisa clung to Jenny.

  A vague but repellent odor laced the air. Slightly sulphurous. Like a draft from Hell.

  “There are a host of theories purporting to explain the demise of the dinosaurs,” Flyte said. “But no single theory answers all the questions. So I wondered ... what if the dinosaurs were exterminated by another creature, a natural enemy, that was a superior hunter and fighter? It would have to have been something large. And it would have been something with a very frail skeleton or perhaps with no skeleton whatsoever, for we’ve never found a fossil record of any species that would have given those great saurians a real battle.”

  A shudder passed through the entire bulk of tenebrous, churning slime. Across the oozing mass, dozens of faces began to appear.

  “And what if,” Flyte said, “several of those amoeboid creatures had survived through millions of years...”

  Human and animal faces arose from the amorphous flesh, shimmered in it.

  “... living in subterranean rivers or lakes...”

  There were faces that had no eyes. Others had no mouths. But then the eyes appeared, blinked open. They were achingly real, penetrating eyes, filled with pain and fear and misery.

  “... or in deep ocean trenches...”

  And mouths cracked into existence on those previously seamless countenances.

  “... thousands of feet below the surface of the sea...”

  Lips formed around the gaping mouths.

  “... preying on marine life...”

  The phantom faces were screaming, yet they made no sounds.

  “... infrequently rising to feed...”

  Cat faces. Dog faces. Prehistoric reptile visages. Ballooning up from the slime.

  “... and even less frequently feeding on human beings...”

  To Jenny, the human faces looked as if they were peering out from the far side of a smoky mirror. None of them ever quite finished taking shape. They had to melt away, for there were countless new faces surging and coalescing beneath them. It was an endlessly flickering shadow show of the lost and the damned.

  Then the faces stopped forming.

  The huge mass was quiescent for a moment, slowly and almost imperceptibly pulsing, but otherwise still.

  Sara Yamaguchi was groaning softly.

  Jenny held Lisa close.

  No one spoke. For several seconds, no one even dared breathe.

  Then, in a new demonstration of its plasticity, the ancient enemy abruptly sprouted a score of tentacles. Some of them were thick, with the suction pads of a squid or an octopus. Others were thin and ropy; some of these were smooth, and some were segmented; they were even more obscene than the fat, moist-looking tentacles. Some of the appendages slid back and forth across the floor, knocking over chairs and pushing tables aside, while others wriggled in the air, like cobras swaying to the music of a snake charmer.

  Then it struck. It moved fast, gushed forward.

  Jenny stumbled back one step. She was at the end of the room.

  The many tentacles snapped toward them, whiplike, cutting the air with a hiss.

  Lisa could no longer keep from looking. She gasped at what she saw.

  In just a fraction of a second, the tentacles grew dramatically.

  A rope of cold, slick, utterly alien flesh fell across the back of Jenny’s hand. It curled around her wrist.

  No!

  With a shudder of relief, she pulled loose. It hadn’t taken much effort to free herself. Evidently, the thing really wasn’t interested in her; not now; not yet.

  She crouched as tentacles lashed the air above her head, and Lisa huddled with her.

  In his haste to get out of the creature’s way, Flyte tripped and fell.

  A tentacle moved toward him.

  Flyte scooted backwards across the floor, came to the wall.

  The tentacle followed, hovered over him, as if it would smash him. Then it moved away. It wasn’t interested in Flyte, either.

  Although the gesture was pointless, Bryce fired his revolver.

  Tal shouted something Jenny couldn’t understand. He moved in front of her and Lisa, between them and the shape-changer.

  After passing over Sara, the thing seized Frank Autry. That was who it wanted. Two thick tentacles snapped around Frank’s torso and dragged him away from the others.

  Kicking, flailing with his fists, clawing at the thing that held him, Frank cried out wordlessly, face contorted with horror.

  Everyone was screaming now—even Bryce, even Tal.

  Bryce went after Frank. Clutched his right arm. Tried to pull him away from the beast, which was relentlessly reeling him in.

  “Get it off me! Get it off me!” Frank shouted.

  Bryce tried peeling one of the tentacles away from the deputy.

  Another of the thick, slimy appendages swept up from the floor, whirled, whipped, struck Bryce with tremendous force, sent him sprawling.

  Frank was lifted off the floor and held in midair. His eyes bulged as he looked down at the dark, oozing, changing bulk of the ancient enemy. He kicked and fought to no avail.

  Yet another pseudopod erupted from the
central mass of the shape-changer and rose into the air, trembling with savage eagerness. Along part of the tentacle’s repulsive length, the mottled gray-maroon-red-brown skin seemed to dissolve. Raw, weeping tissue appeared.

  Lisa gagged.

  It wasn’t just the sight of the suppurating flesh that was loathsome and sickening. The foul odor had gotten stronger, too.

  A yellowish fluid began to drip from the open wound in the tentacle. Where the drops struck the floor, they sizzled and foamed and ate into the tile.

  Jenny heard someone say, “Acid!”

  Frank’s screaming became a desperate, piercing shriek of terror and despair.

  The acid-dripping tentacle slipped sinuously around the deputy’s neck and drew as tight as a garrote.

  “Oh, Jesus, no!”

  “Don’t look,” Jenny told Lisa.

  The shape-changer was showing them how it had beheaded Jakob and Aida Liebermann. Like a child showing off.

  Frank Autry’s scream died in a bubbling, mucous-thick, blood-choked gurgle. The flesh-eating tentacle cut through his neck with startling quickness. Only a second or two after Frank was silenced, his head popped loose and fell to the floor, smashed into the tiles.

  Jenny tasted bile in the back of her throat, choked it down.

  Sara Yamaguchi was sobbing.

  The thing still held Frank’s headless body in midair. Now, in the mass of shapeless tissue from which the tentacles sprouted, a huge toothless maw opened hungrily. It was more than large enough to swallow a man whole. The tentacles drew the deputy’s decapitated corpse into the gaping, ragged mouth. The dark flesh oozed around the body. Then the mouth closed up tight and ceased to exist.

  Frank Autry had ceased to exist, too.

  Bryce stared in shock at Frank’s severed head. The sightless eyes gazed at him, through him.

  Frank was gone. Frank, who had survived several wars, who had survived a life of dangerous work, had not survived this.

  Bryce thought of Ruth Autry. His heart, already jack-hammering, twisted with grief as he pictured Ruth alone. She and Frank had been exceptionally close. Breaking the news to her would be painful.

  The tentacles shrank back into the pulsing glob of shapeless tissue; in a second or two, they were gone.

  The formless, rippling hulk filled a third of the room.

  Bryce could imagine it oozing swiftly through prehistoric swamps, blending with the muck, creeping up on its prey. Yes, it would have been more than a match for the dinosaurs.

  Earlier, he had believed that the shape-changer had spared him and a few of the others so that they could entice Flyte to Snowfield. Now he realized this wasn’t the case. It could have consumed them and then imitated their voices on the telephone, and Flyte would have been coaxed to Snowfield just as easily. It had saved them for some other reason. Perhaps it had spared them only in order to kill them, one at a time, in front of Flyte, so that Flyte would be able to see precisely how it functioned.

  Christ.

  The shape-changer towered over them, quivering gelatinously, its entire grotesque bulk pulsating as if with the unsynchronized beats of a dozen hearts.

  In a voice even shakier than Bryce felt, Sara Yamaguchi said, “I wish there was some way we could get a tissue sample. I’d give anything to be able to study it under a microscope ... get some idea of the cell structure. Maybe we could find a weakness .. a way to deal with it, maybe even a way to defeat it.”

  Flyte said, “I’d like to study it... just to be able to understand ... just to know.”

  An extrusion of tissue oozed out from the center of the shapeless mass. It began to acquire a human form. Bryce was shocked to see Gordy Brogan coalescing