Phantoms Read online

  HQ in Santa Mira, rang through. He had news. Fletcher Kale had escaped while being taken to the county courthouse for arraignment on two charges of murder in the first degree.

  Bryce was furious.

  Charlie let him rage on for a while, and when Bryce quieted down, Charlie said, “There’s worse. He killed Joe Freemont.”

  “Aw, shit,” Bryce said. “Has Mary been told?”

  “Yeah. I Went over there myself.”

  “How’s she taking it?”

  “Bad. They were married twenty-six years.”

  More death.

  Death everywhere.

  Christ.

  “What about Kale?” Bryce asked Charlie.

  “We think he took a car from the apartment complex across the alley. One’s been stolen from that lot. So we put up the roadblocks as soon as we knew Kale slipped, but I figure he had almost an hour’s lead on us.”

  “Long gone.”

  “Probably. If we don’t nab the son of a bitch by seven o’clock, I want to call the blocks off. We’re so shorthanded—what with everything that’s going on—we can’t keep tying men up on roadblocks.”

  “Whatever you think’s best,” Bryce said wearily. “What about the San Francisco police? You know—about that message Harold Ordnay left on the mirror up here?”

  “That was the other thing I called about. They finally got back to us.”

  “Anything useful?”

  “Well, they talked to the employees at Ordnay’s bookstores. You remember, I told you one of the shops deals strictly in out-of-print and rare books. The assistant manager at that store, name of Celia Meddock, recognized the Timothy Flyte moniker.”

  “He’s a customer?” Bryce asked.

  “No. An author.”

  “Author? Of what?”

  “One book. Guess the title.”

  “How the devil could I ... Oh. Of course. The Ancient Enemy.”

  “You got it,” Charlie Mercer said.

  “What’s the book about?”

  “That’s the best part. Celia Meddock says she thinks it’s about mass disappearances throughout history.”

  For a moment, Bryce was speechless. Then: “Are you serious? You mean there’ve been a lot of others?”

  “I guess so. At least a bookful of ’em.”

  “Where? When? How come I’ve never heard about them?”

  “Meddock said something about the disappearance of ancient Mayan populations—”

  Something stirred in Bryce’s mind. An article he had read in an old science magazine. Mayan civilizations. Abandoned cities.

  “—and the Roanoke Colony, which was the first British settlement in North America,” Charlie finished.

  “That I’ve heard about. It’s in the schoolbooks.”

  “I guess maybe a lot of the other disappearances go back to ancient times,” Charlie said.

  “Christ!”

  “Yeah. Flyte apparently has some theory to account for such things,” Charlie said. “The book explains it.”

  “What’s the theory?”

  “The Meddock woman didn’t know. She hasn’t read the book.”

  “But Harold Ordnay must’ve read it. And what he saw happening here in Snowfield must’ve been exactly what Flyte wrote about. So Ordnay printed the title on the bathroom mirror.”

  “So it seems.”

  With a rush of excitement, Bryce said, “Did the San Francisco P.D. get a copy of the book?”

  “Nope. Meddock didn’t have one. The only reason she knew about it was because Ordnay recently sold a copy—two, three weeks ago.”

  “Can we get a copy?”

  “It’s out of print. In fact, it never was in print in this country. The copy they sold was British, which is evidently the only edition there ever was—and a small one. It’s a rare book.”

  “What about the person Ordnay sold it to? The collector. What’s his name and address?”

  “Meddock doesn’t remember. She says the guy’s not a heavy customer of theirs. She says Ordnay would probably know.”

  “Which doesn’t do us one damned bit of good. Listen, Charlie, I’ve got to get a copy of that book.”

  “I’m working on it,” Charlie said. “But maybe you won’t need it. You’ll be able to get the whole story from the horse’s mouth. Flyte’s on his way here from London right now.”

  Jenny was sitting on the edge of the central operations desk in the middle of the lobby, gaping at Bryce as he leaned back in his chair; she was amazed by what he had told her. “He’s on his way here from London? Now? Already? You mean he knew this was going to happen?”

  “Probably not,” Bryce said. “But I guess the minute he heard the news, he knew it was a case that fit his theory.”

  “Whatever it is.”

  “Whatever.”

  Tal was standing in front of the desk. “When’s he due in?”

  “He’ll be in San Francisco shortly after midnight. His U.S. publisher has arranged a news conference for him at the airport. Then he’ll come straight to Santa Mira.”

  “U.S. publisher?” Frank Autry said. “I thought you told us his book was never in print over here.”

  “It wasn’t,” Bryce said. “Evidently, he’s writing a new one.”

  “About Snowfield?” Jenny asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

  “He sure works fast,” Jenny said, frowning. “Less than a day after it happens, he’s got a contract to write a book about it.”

  “I wish he worked even faster. I wish to God he was here right now.”

  Tal said, “I think what Doc means is that this Flyte character might just be another sharp hustler out to make a fast buck.”

  “Exactly,” Jenny said.

  “Could be,” Bryce admitted. “But don’t forget Ordnay wrote Flyte’s name on that mirror. In a way, Ordnay’s the only witness we have. And from his message, we have to deduce that what happened was very much like the thing Timothy Flyte wrote about.”

  “Damn,” Frank said. “If Flyte’s really got some information that could help us, he should’ve called. He shouldn’t have made us wait.”

  “Yeah,” Tal said. “We could all be dead by midnight. He should have called to tell us what we can do.”

  “There’s the rub,” Bryce said.

  “What do you mean?” Jenny asked.

  Bryce sighed. “Well, I have a hunch that Flyte would have called if he could’ve told us how to protect ourselves. Yeah, I think maybe he knows exactly what sort of creature or force we’re dealing with, but I strongly suspect he doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do about it. Regardless of how much he can tell us, I suspect he won’t be able to tell us the one thing we need to know the most—how to save our asses.”

  Jenny and Bryce were having coffee at the operations desk. They were talking about what they had discovered during today’s search, trying to make sense of senseless things: the mocking crucifixion of the priest; the bullets all over the kitchen floor of the Sheffield house; the bodies in the locked cars...

  Lisa was sitting nearby. She appeared to be totally involved in a crossword puzzle magazine, which she had picked up somewhere along the search route. Suddenly she looked up and said, “I know why the jewelry was piled in those two sinks.”

  Jenny and Bryce looked at her expectantly.

  “First,” the girl said, leaning forward on her chair, “you’ve got to accept that all the people who’re missing are really dead. And they are. Dead. No question about that.”

  “But there is some question about that, honey,” Jenny said.

  “They’re dead,” Lisa said softly. “I know it. So do you.” Her vivid green eyes were almost feverish. “It took them, and it ate them.”

  Jenny recalled Lisa’s response last night, at the substation, after Bryce had told them about hearing tortured screams on the phone, when it had been in control of the line. Lisa had said, Maybe it spun a web somewhere, down in a dark place, in a cellar o
r a cave, and maybe it tied all the missing people into its web, sealed them up in cocoons, alive. Maybe it’s just saving them until it gets hungry again.

  Last night, everyone had stared at the girl, wanting to laugh, but realizing there could be a crazy sort of truth to what she said. Not necessarily a web or cocoons or a giant spider. But something. None of them had wanted to admit it, but the possibility was there. The unknown. The unknown thing. The unknown thing that ate people.

  And now Lisa returned to the same theme. “It ate them.” “But how does that explain the jewelry?” Bryce asked.

  “Well,” Lisa said, “after it ate the people, maybe it... maybe it just spit out all that jewelry... the same way you would spit out cherry pits.”

  Dr. Sara Yamaguchi walked into the Hilltop Inn, paused to answer a question from one of the guards at the front door, and came across the lobby toward Jenny and Bryce. She was still dressed in her decontamination suit, but she was no longer wearing the helmet, the tank of compressed air, or the waste recycling unit. She was carrying some folded clothes and a thick sheaf of pale green papers.

  Jenny and Bryce rose to meet her, and Jenny said, “Doctor, has the quarantine been lifted already?”

  “Already? Seems like I’ve been trapped inside this suit for years.” Dr. Yamaguchi’s voice was different from what it had sounded like through the squawk box. It was fragile and sweet. Her voice was even more diminutive than she was. “It feels good to breathe air again.”

  “You’ve run bacteria cultures, haven’t you?” Jenny asked.

  “Started to.”

  “Well, then... doesn’t it take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to get results?”

  “.Yes. But we’ve decided it’s pointless to wait for the cultures. We’re not going to grow any bacteria on them—neither benign bacteria nor otherwise.”

  Neither benign bacteria nor otherwise. That peculiar statement intrigued Jenny, but before she could ask about it, the geneticist said:

  “Besides, Meddy told us it was safe.”

  “Meddy?”

  “That’s shorthand for Medanacomp,” Dr. Yamaguchi said. “Which is itself short for Medical Analysis and Computation Systems. Our computer. After Meddy assimilated all the data from the autopsies and tests, she gave us a probability figure for biological causation. Meddy says there’s a zero point zero chance that a biological agent is involved here.”

  “And you trust a computer’s analysis enough to breathe real air,” Bryce said, clearly surprised.

  “In over eight hundred trial runs, Meddy’s never been wrong.”

  “But this isn’t just a trial run,” Jenny said.

  “Yes. But after what we found in the autopsies and in all pathology tests...” The geneticist shrugged and handed the sheaf of green papers to Jenny. “Here. It’s all in the results. General Copperfield thought you’d like to see them. If you have any questions, I’ll explain. Meanwhile, all the men are up at the field lab, changing out of their decon suits, and I’m itching to do the same. And I do mean itching.” She smiled and scratched her neck. Her gloved fingers left faint red marks on her porcelain-smooth skin. “Is there some way I could wash?”

  Jenny said, “We’re got soap, towels, and a washbasin set up in one corner of the kitchen. It doesn’t offer much privacy, but we’re willing to sacrifice a little privacy rather than be alone.”

  Dr. Yamaguchi nodded. “Understandable. How do I get to this washbasin?”

  Lisa jumped up from her chair, casting aside the crossword puzzle. “I’ll show you. And I’ll make sure the guys who’re working in the kitchen keep their backs turned and their eyes to themselves.”

  The pale green papers were computer print -outs that had been cut into eleven-inch pages, numbered, and clipped together along the left-hand margin with plastic pressure binding.

  With Bryce looking over her shoulder, Jenny leafed through the first section of the report, which was a transcription of Seth Goldstein’s autopsy notes. Goldstein noted indications of possible suffocation, as well as even more evident signs of severe allergic reaction to an unidentified substance, but he could not fix a cause of death.

  Then her attention came to rest on one of the first pathology tests. It was a light microscopy examination of unstained bacteria in a long series of hanging-drop preparations that had been contaminated by tissue and fluid samples from Gary Wechlas’s body; darkfield illumination had been used to identify even the smallest microorganisms. They had been searching for bacteria that were still thriving in the cadaver. What they found was startling.

  HANGING-DROP PREPARATIONS

  AUTO SCAN - MEDANACOMP

  EYE VERIFICATION - BETTENBY

  FREQUENCY OF EYE VERIFICATION - 20% OF

  SAMPLES

  PRINT

  SAMPLE 1

  ESCHERICHIA GENUS

  FORMS PRESENT:

  NO FORMS PRESENT

  NOTE: ABNORMAL DATA.

  NOTE: IMPOSSIBLE VARIANT - NO ANIMATE E.

  COLI IN BOWEL - CONTAMINATE SAMPLE.

  ↓

  CLOSTRIDIUM GENUS

  FORMS PRESENT:

  NO FORMS PRESENT

  NOTE: ABNORMAL DATA.

  NOTE: IMPROBABLE VARIANT- NO ANIMATE C.

  WELCHII IN BOWEL - CONTAMINATE SAMPLE.

  ↓

  PROTEUS GENUS

  FORMS PRESENT:

  NO FORMS PRESENT

  NOTE: ABNORMAL DATA.

  NOTE: IMPROBABLE VARIANT - NO ANIMATE P.

  VULGARIS IN BOWEL - CONTAMINATE SAMPLE.

  The print-out continued to list bacteria for which the computer and Dr. Bettenby had searched, all with the same results.

  Jenny remembered what Dr. Yamaguchi had said, the statement that she had wondered about and about which she had wanted to inquire: neither benign bacteria nor otherwise. And here was the data, every bit as abnormal as the computer said it was.

  “Strange,” Jenny said.

  Bryce said, “It doesn’t mean a thing to me. Translation?”

  “Well, you see, a cadaver is an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria—at least for the short run. This many hours after death, Gary Wechlas’s corpse ought to be teeming with Clostridium welchii, which is associated with gas gangrene.”

  “And it isn’t?”

  “They couldn’t find even one lonely, living C. welchii in the water droplet that had been contaminated with bowel material. And that is precisely the sample that ought to be swimming with it. It should be teeming with Proteus vulgaris, too, which is a saprophytic bacterium.”

  “Translation?” he asked patiently.

  “Sorry. Saprophytic means it flourishes in dead or decaying matter.”

  “And Wechlas is unquestionably dead.”

  “Unquestionably. Yet there’s no P. vulgaris. There should be other bacteria, too. Maybe Micrococcus albus and Bacillus mesentericus. Anyway, there aren’t any of the microorganisms that’re associated with decomposition, not any of the forms you’d expect to find. Even stranger, there’s no living Escherichia coli in the body. Now, damn it, that would’ve been there, thriving, even before Wechlas was killed. And it should be there now, still thriving. E. coli inhabits the colon. Yours, mine, Gary Wechlas’s, everyone’s. As long as it’s contained within the bowel, it’s generally a benign organism.” She paged through the report. “Now, here. Here, look at this. When they used general and differential stains to search for dead microorganisms, they found plenty of E. coli. But all the specimens were dead. There are no living bacteria in Wechlas’s body.”

  “What’s that supposed to tell us?” Bryce asked. “That the corpse isn’t decomposing as it should be?”

  “It isn’t decomposing at all. Not only that. Something a whole lot stranger. The reason it isn’t decomposing is because it’s apparently been injected with a massive dose of a sterilizing and stabilizing agent. A preservative, Bryce. The corpse seems to have been injected with an extremely effective preservative.”

&n
bsp; Lisa brought a tray to the table. There were four mugs of coffee, spoons, napkins. The girl passed coffee to Dr. Yamaguchi, Jenny, and Bryce; she took the fourth mug for herself.

  They were sitting in the dining room at the Hilltop, near the windows. Outside, the street was bathed in the orange-gold sunlight of late afternoon.

  In an hour, Jenny thought, it’ll be dark again. And then we’ll have to wait through another long night.

  She shivered. She sure needed the hot coffee.

  Sara Yamaguchi was now wearing tan corduroy jeans and a yellow blouse. Her long, silky, black hair spilled over her shoulders. “Well,” she was saying, “I guess everyone’s seen enough of those old Walt Disney wildlife documentaries to know that some spiders and mud wasps—and certain other insects—inject a