Phantoms Read online

  probably what would happen. Kale grinned at the comatose child, began to raise his revolver, and winced as a cramp twisted his guts.

  Then he saw movement in the shadows. Swung away from the bed. A man. Coming at him. Hammond. Kale opened fire, squeezing off six rounds, taking no chances. He was dizzy, and his vision was blurry, and his arm felt weak, and he could hardly keep a grip on the gun; even in those close quarters, he couldn’t trust his aim.

  Hammond went down hard and lay very still.

  Although the light was dim, and although Kale’s eyes wouldn’t focus properly, he could see spots of blood on the wall and floor.

  Laughing happily, wondering when the illness would leave him now that he’d completed one of the tasks Lucifer had given him, Kale weaved toward the body, intending to deliver the coup de grâce. Even if Hammond was stone-cold dead, Kale wanted to put a bullet in that snide, smug face, wanted to mess it up real good.

  Then he would deal with the boy.

  That was what Lucifer wanted. Five deaths. Hammond, the boy, Whitman, Dr. Paige, and the girl.

  He reached Hammond, started to bend down to him—

  —and the sheriff moved. His hand was lightning quick. He snatched a gun from an ankle holster, and before Kale could respond, there was a muzzle flash.

  Kale was hit. He stumbled, fell. His revolver flew out of his hand. He heard it clang against the leg of one of the beds.

  This can’t be happening, he told himself. I’m protected. No one can harm me.

  Lisa was alive. When she’d fallen behind the bed, she hadn’t been shot; she’d just been diving for cover. Jenny held her tightly.

  Tal was crouched over Gene Terr. The gang leader was dead, a gaping hole in his chest.

  A crowd had gathered: nurses, nurses’ aides, a couple of doctors, a patient or two in bathrobe and slippers.

  A red-haired orderly hurried up. He looked shell-shocked. “There’s been a shooting on the second floor, too!”

  “Bryce,” Jenny said, and a cold blade of fear pierced her.

  “What’s going on here?” Tal said.

  Jenny ran for the exit door at the end of the hall, slammed through it, went down the stairs two at a time. Tal caught up with her by the time she reached the bottom of the second flight. He pulled open the door, and they rushed out into the second-floor corridor.

  Another crowd had gathered outside Timmy’s room. Her heart beating twenty to the dozen, Jenny rammed through the onlookers.

  A body was on the floor. A nurse stooped beside it.

  Jenny thought it was Bryce. Then she saw him in a chair. Another nurse was cutting the shirt away from his shoulder. He was just wounded.

  Bryce forced a smile. “Better be careful, Doc. If you always arrive on the scene this soon, they’ll start calling you an ambulance chaser.”

  She wept. She couldn’t help it. She had never been so glad to hear anything as she was to hear his voice.

  “Just a scratch,” he said.

  “Now you sound like Tal,” she said, laughing through her tears. “Is Timmy okay?”

  “Kale was going to kill him. If I hadn’t been here...”

  “This is Kale?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jenny wiped her eyes with her sleeves and examined Bryce’s shoulder. The bullet had passed through, in the front and out the back. There was no reason to think it had fragmented, but she intended to order X-rays anyway. The wound was bleeding freely, although it wasn’t spurting, and she directed the nurse to stanch the flow with gauze pads soaked in boric acid.

  He was going to be all right.

  Sure of Bryce’s condition, Jenny turned to the man on the floor. He was in more serious condition. The nurse had torn open his jacket and shirt; he’d been shot in the chest. He coughed, and bright blood sputtered over his lips.

  Jenny sent the nurse for a stretcher and put in an emergency call for a surgeon. Then she noticed Kale was running a fever. His forehead was hot, face flushed. When she took his wrist to check his pulse, she saw it was covered with fiery red spots. She pushed up his sleeve and found the spots extended halfway up his arm. They were on his other wrist, too. None on his face or neck. She had noticed pale red marks on his chest but had mistaken them for blood. Looking again, more closely than before, she saw they were like the spots on his wrists.

  Measles? No. Something else. Something worse than measles.

  The nurse returned with two orderlies and a wheeled stretcher, and Jenny said, “We’ll have to quarantine this floor. And the one above. We’ve got some disease here, and I’m not entirely sure what it is.”

  After X-rays and after his wound had been dressed, Bryce was put in a room down the hall from Timmy. The ache in his shoulder got worse, not better, as the shocked nerves began to regain their function. He refused painkillers, intending to keep a clear head until he knew what had happened and why.

  Jenny came to see him half an hour after he was put to bed. She looked exhausted, yet her weariness didn’t diminish her beauty. The sight of her was all the medicine he needed.

  “How’s Kale?” he asked.

  “The bullet didn’t damage his heart. It collapsed one lung, nicked an artery. Ordinarily, the prognosis would be fair. But he’s not only got surgery to recuperate from; he’s also got to deal with a case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.”

  Bryce blinked. “Spotted fever?”

  “There’re two cigarette burns on his right calf, or rather the scars of two burns, where he got rid of the ticks. Wood ticks transmit the disease. Judging from the look of the scars, I’d say he was bitten five or six days ago, which is just about the incubation period for spotted fever. The symptoms must’ve hit him within the past several hours. He must’ve been dizzy, chilled, weak in the joints...”

  “That’s why his aim was so bad!” Bryce said. “He fired three times at close range and only winged me once.”

  “You’d better thank God for sending that tick up his pants leg.”

  He thought about that and said, “It almost does seem like an act of God, doesn’t it? But what were he and Terr up to? Why’d they risk coming here with guns? I can understand Kale might want to kill me and even Timmy. But why Tal and you and Lisa?”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “Since last Tuesday morning, Kale’s been keeping a written record of what he calls ‘The Events After the Epiphany.’ It seems that Kale and Terr made a bargain with the Devil.”

  Four o’clock Monday morning, only six days after the epiphany of which Kale had written, he died in the county hospital. Before he passed out of this life, he opened his eyes, stared wildly at a nurse, then looked past her, saw something that terrified him, something the nurse couldn’t see. He somehow found the strength to raise his hands, as if trying to protect himself, and he cried out; it was a thin, death-rattle scream. When the nurse tried to calm him, he said, “But this isn’t my destiny.” And then he was gone.

  On October 31, more than six weeks after the events in Snowfield, Tal Whitman and Paula Thorne (the nurse he’d been dating) held a Halloween costume party at Tal’s house in Santa Mira. Bryce went as a cowboy. Jenny was a cowgirl. Lisa was dressed as a witch, with a tall pointed hat and lots of black mascara.

  Tal opened the door and said, “Cluck, cluck.” He was wearing a chicken suit.

  Jenny had never seen a more ridiculous costume. She laughed so hard that, for a while, she didn’t realize Lisa was laughing, too.

  It was the first laugh the girl had given voice to in the past six weeks. Previously, she’d managed only a smile. Now she laughed until tears ran down her face.

  “Well, hey, just a minute here,” Tal said, pretending to be offended. “You make a pretty silly-looking witch, too.”

  He winked at Jenny, and she knew he’d chosen the chicken suit for the effect it would have on Lisa.

  “For God’s sake,” Bryce said, “get out of the doorway and let us inside, Tal. If the public sees you in that getup, they’
ll lose what little respect they have left for the sheriff’s department.”

  That night, Lisa joined in the conversation and the games, and she laughed a great deal. It was a new beginning.

  In August of the following year, on the first day of their honeymoon, Jenny found Bryce on the balcony of their hotel room, overlooking Waikiki Beach. He was frowning.

  “You aren’t worried about being so far away from Timmy, are you?” she asked.

  “No. But it’s Timmy I’m thinking about. Lately... I’ve had this feeling everything’s going to be all right, after all. It’s strange. Like a premonition. I had a dream last night. Timmy woke up from his coma, said hello to me, and asked for a Big Mac. Only... it wash’t like any dream I’ve ever had before. It was so real.”

  “Well, you’ve never lost hope.”

  “Yes. For a while I lost it. But I’ve got it back again.”

  They stood in silence for a while, letting the warm sea wind wash over them, listening to the waves breaking on the beach.

  Then they made love again.

  That night they had dinner at a good Chinese restaurant in Honolulu. They drank champagne all evening, even though the waiter politely suggested they switch to tea with the meal, so their palates would not be “stained.”

  Over dessert, Bryce said, “There was something else Timmy said in that dream. When I was surprised he’d awakened from his coma, he said, ‘But, Daddy, if there’s a Devil, then there’s got to be a God, too. Didn’t you already figure that out when you met the Devil? God wouldn’t let me sleep my whole life away.’ ”

  Jenny stared at him uncertainly.

  He smiled. “Don’t worry. I’m not flaking out on you. I’m not going to start sending money to those charlatan preachers on TV, asking them to pray for Timmy. Hell, I’m not even going to start attending church. Sunday’s the only day I can sleep in! What I’m talking about isn’t your standard, garden variety religion...”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t really the Devil,” she said.

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “It was a prehistoric creature that—”

  “Couldn’t it be both?”

  “What’re we getting into here?”

  “A philosophical discussion.”

  “On our honeymoon?”

  “I married you partly for your mind.”

  Later, in bed, just before sleep took them, he said, “Well, all I know is that the shape-changer made me realize there’s a lot more mystery in this world than I once thought. I just won’t rule anything out. And looking back on it, considering what we survived in Snowfield, considering how Tal had just strapped on his gun when Jeeter walked in, considering how the spotted fever screwed up Kale’s aim... well, it seems to me like we were meant to survive.”

  They slept, woke toward dawn, made love, slept again.

  In the morning, she said, “I know one thing for sure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We were meant to be married.”

  “Definitely.”

  “No matter what, fate would’ve run us headlong into each other sooner or later.”

  That afternoon, as they strolled along the beach, Jenny thought the waves sounded like huge, rumbling wheels. The sound called to mind an old saying about the mill wheels of Heaven grinding slowly. The rumble of the waves enforced that image, and in her mind she could see immense stone mill wheels turning against each other.

  She said, “You think it has a meaning, then? A purpose?”

  He didn’t have to ask what she meant. “Yes. Everything, every twist and turn of life. A meaning, a purpose.”

  The sea foamed on the sand.

  Jenny listened to the mill wheels and wondered what mysteries and miracles, what horrors and joys were being ground out at this very moment, to be served up in times to come.

  A Note to the Reader

  Like all the characters in this novel, Timothy Flyte is a fictional person, but many of the mass disappearances to which he refers are not merely figments of the author’s imagination. They really happened. The disappearance of the Roanoke Island colony, the mysteriously deserted Eskimo village of Anjikuni, the vanished Mayan populations, the unexplained loss of thousands of Spanish soldiers in 1711, the equally mystifying loss of the Chinese battalions in 1939, and certain other cases mentioned in Phantoms are actually well-documented, historical events.

  Likewise, there is a real Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty. In Phantoms, the details of his development of the first patented microorganism are drawn from public record. Dr. Chakrabarty’s bacterium was, as stated in the book, too fragile to survive outside of the laboratory. Biosan-4. the trade name of a supposedly hardier strain of Chakrabarty’s bug, is a fictional device.

  And of course the ancient enemy is a product of the author’s imagination. But what if ...

  NEW AFTERWORD

  BY

  DEAN KOONTZ

  AFTERWORD

  We all make mistakes. Maybe you’ve been at a tony dinner party, where you’ve eaten your entire salad before realizing you’ve used the wrong fork. Faux pas. Maybe you’ve been a worker in a nuclear power plant, where you’ve pushed the wrong button, contaminating dozens of fellow workers with plutonium. Oops. In a drunken haze, high on cheap red wine spiked with Listerine, perhaps you have mistaken the neighbor’s golden retriever for an attractive blonde and eloped with it to a wedding chapel in Vegas, only to be told by the minister—who is dressed in a sequined jumpsuit and pomaded like Elvis—that the state of Nevada will not permit you to marry a canine without the written consent of its trainer plus a six-figure line of credit in a major casino. Woof. Perhaps you have tried to kill a spider with a nail gun, only to spike your foot to the floor. Ouch. It is possible, I suppose, that on a cold, rainy day in Manhattan, you have stepped out of an open window on the thirty-sixth floor of a high-rise, thinking you were passing through a door into a stairwell, that you plummeted like a wingless ox toward the street below, that you were spared death only because you fell onto a fruit vendor’s cart of mush melons, that you then stepped out of the cart into the path of a bus, were knocked aside like a mere rag doll, rolled in a tangle of broken limbs into an open manhole, fell into a storm drain, were swept by surging torrents from one end of the city to the other, and were flushed into the sea, where in your desperation you mistook a shark for a marker buoy, resulting in the loss of two pinkie fingers, an ear, and half a kneecap. Get insurance. Maybe, in an argument with a Hell’s Angel, you’ve used the words “kissy-lipped girly man.” Maybe you’ve eaten live fire ants. Maybe you’ve left a waffle iron plugged in, on the floor beside your bed, and then awakened in the middle of the night and mistook it for a slipper. Maybe, in spite of the printed warning, you tore the manufacturer’s tag off a sofa cushion; and now you are serving twenty years in a federal prison, making crocheted license-plate cozies for three cents an hour. Maybe one of you reading this has made all these mistakes, in which case you are not merely exhibiting the fundamental human tendency to err: You are as dumb as a sump pump.

  Writing Phantoms was one of the ten biggest mistakes of my life, ranking directly above that incident with the angry porcupine and the clown, about which I intend to say nothing more. Phantoms has been published in thirty-one languages and has been in print continuously for fifteen years, as I write this. Worldwide, it has sold almost six million copies in all editions. It has been well reviewed, and more than a few critics have called it a modern classic of its genre. Readers write to me by the hundreds every year, even this long after first publication, to tell me how much they like Phantoms. I enjoyed writing the book, and when I had to reread it to create a screenplay for the film version, I found it to be just the thrill ride that I had originally hoped to produce. Yet it is this novel, more than any other that earned for me the label of “horror writer,” which I never wanted, never embraced, and have ever since sought to shed.

  As I have written in another of these afterwords, I enjoy reading horror novels, have considerab
le respect for the form, and admire the finest writers who have worked in the genre. I believe, however, that 95 percent of my work is anything but horror. I am a suspense writer. I am a novelist. I write love stories now and then, sometimes humorous fiction, sometimes tales of adventure, sometimes all those things between the covers of a single volume. But Phantoms fixed me with a spooky-guy label as surely as if it had been stitched to my forehead by a highly skilled and diligent member of the United Garment Workers Union—making a far better wage than that poor bastard crocheting license-plate cozies.

  So why did I write it?

  In 1981, after Whispers had become a bestseller in paperback, I wanted to follow it with an equally strange novel of psychological suspense, an edgy and chilling tale in which the only monsters were the human kind. My publisher believed the other book had succeeded because readers had thought—solely because of packaging—that Whispers was a horror novel. Horror was then a hot genre. Prior to Whispers, I had never earned a great deal of money from a book, and the Whispers royalties then due were slowly, slowly, slowly moving through a long pipeline. Meanwhile, I needed to pay the bills, and my agent and publisher made it clear that I could not get a substantial advance for another book like Whispers, only for a horror novel. I was also told that a horror novel would be backed with major advertising, but that a mere suspense novel would not get much support. If I wanted to build upon the success of Whispers, I had no choice but to write a highly promotable horror novel. Against my better judgment, I wrote Phantoms.

  I thought I would cleverly evade their horror-or-starve ultimatum by making Phantoms something of a tour de force, rolling virtually all the monsters of the genre into one beast, and also by providing a credible, scientific explanation for the creature’s existence. Instead of fearless vampire hunters armed with wooden stakes, instead of werewolf trackers packing revolvers loaded with silver bullets, my protagonists would save themselves by using logic and reason to determine the nature of their mysterious enemy and to find a way to defeat it. Phantoms would be a horror story, yes, but it would also be science fiction, an adventure tale, a wild mystery story, and an exploration of the nature and source of myth.

  When I delivered the book, there was little enthusiasm for it. Only five thousand hardcovers were printed and, prior to publication, I was told by most people in my professional life that this was too much of a horror story and, therefore, could be of no interest to the broader audience that had made Whispers a paperback bestseller. I was flummoxed. I felt I had delivered precisely what had been asked of me, only to be crushed like that Hell’s Angel crushed the guy who called him a “kissy-lipped girly man.” The reviews began to come in, and they were largely excellent, although this praise did not result in a bigger first printing or any promotion, which led to festivals of self-pity and wild storms of depression in the Koontz household. Fortunately, enthusiasm for my work remained strong at the paperback house, and one year after the hardcover bombed, Phantoms followed Whispers onto the paperback bestseller list, ensuring that my career would not lose momentum. Thereafter, it sold and sold and sold; and as I write this, it is nearing its sixtieth printing in paperback in the United States.

  Do I like Phantoms? Yes. Do I wish I’d never written it? Yes. Am I happy to have written it? Yes. Am I a little schizo on this issue? Yes. Although as a matter of career planning, Phantoms was a major strategic blunder, the writing of it brought me considerable pleasure, and readers’ outspoken delight in the book has provided a gratification that has sustained me through some bad days.

  The lesson, I suppose, is that beneficial developments can flow even from a mistake. If you work in a nuclear power plant, however, triple check yourself before you push that button.