Phantoms Read online

  consistent with the mythology it had helped create. It was bitterly aware of the irony. It had been cast down. It had been damned. It would dwell in darkness and despair for the rest of its life—which could be measured in hours.

  At least it had left behind two apostles. Kale and Terr. They would do its work even after it had ceased to exist. They would spread terror and take revenge. They were perfectly suited to the job.

  Now, reduced to only a brain and minimal supporting tissue, the shape-changer cowered in a chthonian niche of densely packed rock and waited for the end. It spent its last minutes seething with hatred, raging at all mankind.

  Kale rolled up his trousers and looked at the calf of his right leg. In the lantern light, he saw two small red spots; they were swollen, itchy, and very tender.

  “Insect bites,” he said.

  Gene Terr looked. “Ticks. They burrow under the skin. The itchin’ won’t stop until you get ’em out. Burn ’em out with a cigarette.”

  “Got any?”

  Terr grinned. “Couple joints of grass. They’ll work just as well, man. And the ticks’ll die happy.”

  They smoked the joints, and Kale used the glowing tip of his to burn out the ticks. It didn’t hurt much.

  “In the woods,” Terr said, “keep your pants tucked in your boots.”

  “They were tucked into my boots.”

  “Yeah? Then how’d them ticks get underneath?”

  “I don’t know.”

  After they had smoked more grass, Kale frowned and said, “He promised us no one could hurt or stop us. He said we’d be under His protection.”

  “That’s right, man. Invincible.”

  “So how come I’ve got to put up with tick bites?” Kale asked.

  “Hey, man, it’s no big thing.”

  “But if we’re really protected—”

  “Listen, maybe the tick bites are sort of like His way of sealing the bargain you made with Him. With a little blood. Get it?”

  “Then why don’t you have tick bites?”

  Jeeter shrugged. “Ain’t important, man. Besides, the fuckin’ ticks bit you before you struck your bargain—didn’t they?”

  “Oh.” Kale nodded, fuzzy-headed from dope. “Yeah. That’s right.”

  They were silent for a while.

  Then Kale said, “When do you think we can leave here?”

  “They’re probably still lookin’ for you pretty hard.”

  “But if they can’t hurt me—”

  “No sense makin’ the job harder for ourselves,” Terr said.

  “I guess so.”

  “We’ll lay low for like a few days. Worst of the heat will be off by then.”

  “Then we do the five like he wants. And after that?”

  “Head on out, man. Move on. Make tracks.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere. He’ll show us the way.” Terr was silent for a while. Then he said, “Tell me about it. About killin’ your wife and kid.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everythin’ there is to know, man. Tell me what it felt like. What was it like to off your old lady. Mostly, tell me about the kid. What’d it feel like, wastin’ a kid? Huh? I never did one that young, man. You kill him fast or drag it out? Did it feel different than killin’ her? What exactly did you do to the kid?”

  “Only what I had to do. They were in my way.”

  “Draggin’ you down, huh?”

  “Both of them.”

  “Sure. I see how it was. But what did you do?”

  “Shot her.”

  “Shoot the kid, too?”

  “No. I chopped him. With a meat cleaver.”

  “No shit?”

  They smoked more joints, and the lantern hissed, and the whisper-chuckle of the underground river came up through the hole in the floor, and Kale talked about killing Joanna, Danny, and the county deputies.

  Every once in a while, punctuating his words with a little marijuana giggle, Jeeter said, “Hey, man, are we gonna have some fun? Are we gonna have some fun together, you and me? Tell me more. Tell me. Man, are we gonna have some fun?”

  44

  Victory?

  Bryce stood on the sidewalk, studying the town. Listening. Waiting. There was no sign of the shape-changer, but he was reluctant to believe it was dead. He was afraid it would spring at him the moment he relaxed his guard.

  Tal Whitman was stretched out on the pavement. Jenny and Lisa cleaned the acid burns, dusted them with antibiotic powder, and applied temporary bandages.

  And Snowfield remained as silent as if it were at the bottom of the sea.

  Finished ministering to Tal, Jenny said, “We should get him to the hospital right away. The wounds aren’t deep, but there might be a delayed allergic reaction to one of the shape-changer’s toxins. He might suddenly start having respiratory difficulties or blood pressure problems. The hospital is equipped for the worst possibilities; I’m not.”

  Sweeping the length of the street with his gaze, Bryce said, “What if we get in the car, trap ourselves in a moving car, and then it comes back?”

  “We’ll take a couple of sprayers with us.”

  “There might not be time to use them. It could come up out of a manhole, overturn the car, and kill us that way, without ever touching us, without giving us a chance to use the sprayers.”

  They listened to the town. Nothing. Just the breeze.

  Lisa finally said, “It’s dead.”

  “We can’t be sure,” Bryce said.

  “Don’t you feel it?” Lisa insisted. “Feel the difference. It’s gone! It’s dead. You can feel the change in the air.”

  Bryce realized the girl was right. The shape-changer had not been merely a physical presence, but a spiritual one as well; he had been able to sense the evil of it, an almost tangible malevolence. Apparently, the ancient enemy had emitted subtle emanations—Vibrations? Psychic waves?—that couldn’t be seen or heard but which were registered on an instinctual level. They left a stain on the soul. And now those vibrations were gone. There was no menace in the air.

  Bryce took a deep breath. The air was clean, fresh, sweet.

  Tal said, “If you don’t want to get in a car just yet, don’t worry about it. We can wait awhile. I’m okay. I’ll be fine.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Bryce said. “We can go. Nothing’s going to stop us. Lisa’s right. It’s dead.”

  In the patrol car, as Bryce started the engine, Jenny said, “You remember what Flyte said about the creature’s intelligence? When he was speaking to it, through the computer, he told it that it had probably acquired its intelligence and self-awareness only after it had begun consuming intelligent creatures.”

  “I remember,” Tal said from the back seat, where he sat with Lisa. “It didn’t like hearing that.”

  “And so?” Bryce asked. “What’s your point, Doc?”

  “Well, if it acquired its intelligence by absorbing our knowledge and cognitive mechanisms ... then did it also acquire its cruelty and viciousness from us, from mankind?” She saw that the question made Bryce uneasy, but she plunged on. “When you come right down to it, maybe the only real devils are human beings; not all of us; not the species as a whole; just the ones who’re twisted, the ones who somehow never acquire empathy or compassion. If the shape-changer was the Satan of mythology, perhaps the evil in human beings isn’t a reflection of the Devil; perhaps the Devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our own kind. Maybe what we’ve done is ... create the Devil in our own image.”

  Bryce was silent. Then: “You may be right. I suspect you are. There’s no use wasting energy being afraid of devils, demons, and things that go bump in the night ... because, ultimately, we’ll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monsters among us. Hell is where we make it.”

  They drove down Skyline Road.

  Snowfield looked serene and beautiful.

  Nothing tried to stop them.

  45


  Good and Evil

  On Sunday evening, one week after Jenny and Lisa found Snowfield in its graveyard silence, five days after the death of the shape-changer, they were at the hospital in Santa Mira, visiting Tal Whitman. He had, after all, suffered a toxic reaction to some fluid secreted by the shape-changer and had also developed a mild infection, but he had never been in serious danger. Now he was almost as good as new—and eager to go home.

  When Lisa and Jenny stepped into Tal’s room, he was seated in a chair by the window, reading a magazine. He was dressed in his uniform. His gun and holster were lying on a small table beside the chair.

  Lisa hugged him before he could get up, and Tal hugged her back.

  “Lookin’ good,” she told him.

  “Lookin’ fine,” he told her.

  “Like a million bucks.”

  “Like two million.”

  “You’ll turn the ladies’ heads.”

  “And you’ll make the boys do back-flips.”

  It was a ritual they went through every day, a small ceremony of affection that always elicited a smile from Lisa. Jenny loved to see it; Lisa didn’t smile often these days. In the past week, she hadn’t laughed at all, not once.

  Tal stood up, and Jenny hugged him, too. She said, “Bryce is with Timmy. He’ll be up in a little while.”

  “You know,” Tal said, “he seems to be handling that situation a whole lot better. All this past year, you could see how Timmy’s condition was killing him. Now he seems able to cope with it.”

  Jenny nodded. “He’d gotten it in his head that Timmy would be better off dead. But up in Snowfield, he had a change of heart. I think he decided that, after all, there wasn’t a fate worse than death. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “In another year, if Timmy’s still in a coma, Bryce might change his mind again. But for the moment, he seems grateful just to be able to sit down there for a while each day, holding his little boy’s warm hand.” She looked Tal over and demanded: “What’s with the street clothes?”

  “I’m being discharged.”

  “Fantastic!” Lisa said.

  Timmy’s roommate these days was an eighty-two-year-old man who was hooked up to an IV, a beeping cardiac monitor, and a wheezing respirator.

  Although Timmy was attached only to an IV, he was in the embrace of an oblivion as complete as the octogenarian’s coma. Once or twice an hour, never more often, never for longer than a minute at a time, the boy’s eyelids fluttered or his lips twitched or a muscle ticked in his cheek. That was all.

  Bryce sat beside the bed, his hand through the railing, gently gripping his son’s hand. Since Snowfield, just this meager contact was enough to satisfy him. Each day he left the room feeling better.

  There wasn’t much light now that evening had come. On the wall at the head of the bed, there was a dim lamp that cast a soft glow only as far as Timmy’s shoulders, leaving his sheet-covered body in shadow. In that wan illumination, Bryce could see how his boy had withered, losing weight in spite of the IV solution. The cheekbones were too prominent. There were dark circles around his eyes. The chin and jawline looked pathetically fragile. His son had always been small for his age. But now the hand Bryce held seemed to belong to a much younger child than Timmy; it seemed like the hand of an infant.

  But it was warm. It was warm.

  After a while, Bryce reluctantly let go. He smoothed the boy’s hair, straightened the sheet, fluffed the pillow.

  It was time to leave, but he couldn’t go; not yet. He was crying. He didn’t want to step into the hall with tears on his face.

  He pulled a few Kleenex from the box on the nightstand, got up, went to the window, and looked out at Santa Mira.

  Although he wept every day when he came here, these were different tears from those he had cried before. These scalded, washed away the misery, and healed. Bit by bit, slowly, they healed him.

  “Discharged?” Jenny said, scowling. “Says who?”

  Tal grinned. “Says me.”

  “Since when have you become your own doctor?”

  “I just thought a second opinion seemed called for, so I asked myself in for consultation, and I recommended to me that I go home.”

  “Tal—”

  “Really, Doc, I feel great. The swelling’s gone. Haven’t run a temperature in two days. I’m a prime candidate for release. If you try to make me stay here any longer, my death will be on your hands.”

  “Death?”

  “The hospital food is sure to kill me.”

  “He looks ready to go dancing,” Lisa said.

  “And when’d you get your medical degree?” Jenny asked. To Tal she said, “Well ... let me have a look. Take off your shirt.”

  He slipped out of it quickly and easily, not nearly as stiff as he’d been yesterday. Jenny carefully untaped the bandages and found that he was right: no swelling, no breaks in the scabs.

  “We’ve beaten it,” he assured her.

  “Usually, we don’t discharge a patient in the evening. Orders are written in the morning; release comes between ten o’clock and noon.”

  “Rules are made to be broken.”

  “What an awful thing for a policeman to say,” she teased. “Look, Tal, I’d prefer you stayed here one more night, just in case—”

  “And I’d prefer I didn’t, just in case I go stir crazy.”

  “You’re really determined?”

  “He’s really determined,” Lisa said.

  Tal said, “Doc, they had my gun in a safe, along with their drug supply. I had to wheedle, beg, plead, and tease a sweet nurse named Paula, so she’d get it for me this afternoon. I told her you’d let me out tonight for sure. Now, see, Paula’s a soul sister, a very attractive lady, single, eligible, delicious—”

  “Don’t get too steamy,” Lisa said. “There’s a minor present.”

  “I’d like to have a date with Paula,” Tal said. “I’d like to spend eternity with Paula. But now, Doc, if you say I can’t go home, then I’ll have to put my revolver back in the safe, and maybe Paula’s supervisor’ll find out she let me have it before my discharge was final, and then Paula might lose her job, and if she loses it because of me, I’ll never get a date with her. If I don’t get a date with her, I’m not going to be able to marry her, and if I don’t marry her, there won’t be any little Tal Whitmans running around, not ever, because I’ll go away to a monastery and become celibate, seeing as how I’ve made up my mind that Paula’s the only woman for me. So if you won’t discharge me, then you’ll not only be ruining my life but depriving the world of a little black Einstein or maybe a little black Beethoven.”

  Jenny laughed and shook her head. “Okay, okay. I’ll write a discharge order, and you can leave tonight.”

  He hugged her and quickly began putting on his shirt.

  “Paula better watch out,” Lisa said. “You’re too smooth to be let loose among women without a bell around your neck.”

  “Me? Smooth?” He buckled his holster around his waist. “I’m just good old Tal Whitman, sort bf bashful. Been shy all my life.”

  “Oh, sure,” Lisa said.

  Jenny said, “If you—”

  And suddenly Tal went berserk. He shoved Jenny aside, knocked her down. She struck the footboard of the bed with her shoulder and hit the floor hard. She heard gunfire and saw Lisa falling and didn’t know if the girl had been hit or was just diving for cover; and for an instant she thought Tal was shooting at them. Then she saw he was still pulling his revolver out of his holster.

  Even as the sound of the shot slammed through the room, glass shattered. It was the window behind Tal.

  “Drop it!” Tal shouted.

  Jenny turned her head, saw Gene Terr standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the brighter light in the hospital corridor behind him.

  Standing in the deep shadows by the window, Bryce finished drying his tears and wadded up the damp Kleenex. He heard a soft
noise in the room behind him, thought it was a nurse, turned—and saw Fletcher Kale. For a moment Bryce was frozen by disbelief.

  Kale was standing at the foot of Timmy’s bed, barely identifiable in the weak light. He hadn’t seen Bryce. He was watching the boy—and grinning. Madness knotted his face. He was holding a gun.

  Bryce stepped away from the window, reaching for his own revolver. Too late, he realized he wasn’t in uniform, wasn’t wearing a sidearm. He had an off-duty snubnose .38 in an ankle holster; he stooped to get it.

  But Kale had seen him. The gun in Kale’s hand snapped up, barked once, twice, three times in rapid succession.

  Bryce felt a sledgehammer hit him high and on the left side, and pain flashed across his entire chest. As he crumpled to the floor, he heard the killer’s gun roar three more times.

  “Drop it!” Tal shouted, and Jenny saw Jeeter, and another shot ricocheted off the bed rail and must have gone through the ceiling because a couple of squares of acoustic tile fell to the floor.

  Crouching, Tal fired two rounds. The first shot took Jeeter in the left thigh. The second struck him in the gut, lifted him, and staggered him backwards, into the comer, where he landed in a spray of blood. He didn’t move.

  Tal said, “What the hell?”

  Jenny cried for Lisa and scrambled on all fours around the bed, wondering if her sister was alive.

  Kale had been sick for a couple of hours. He was running a fever. His eyes burned and felt grainy. It had come on him suddenly. He had a headache, too, and standing there at the foot of the boy’s bed, he began to feel nauseated. His legs became weak. He didn’t understand; he was supposed to be protected, invincible. Of course, maybe Lucifer was impatient with him for waiting five days before leaving the caves. Maybe this illness was a warning to get on with His work. The symptoms would probably vanish the moment the boy was dead. Yeah. That was