Phantom (30 page)

"Spare the bull and pass the brew."

"Hey!"

"What?"

"Let's make a night of it."

"I thought we was."

"Okay, good."

But as the night wore on they sank lower and
lower in their seats and the talk wound down. Finally, Peeler
stopped in the middle of a sentence, having lost his train of
thought. He closed his eyes to concentrate, but he didn't open them
again. A moment later, he was snoring. That didn't bother Cloudy,
who had stretched out on the junked car seat and fallen asleep
already.

At about the same time,
Linda Covington dozed off as well, a copy of
Glamour
open on her lap.

* * *

27. 4:47 A.M.

The magazine slid off Linda's knees and
landed on the throw rug at her feet. Her eyes opened briefly, then
fell shut again. A few seconds later, she sat bolt upright and
looked around anxiously. There was a painful crick in her neck and
a sudden hammering behind her forehead. She had been asleep for a
little over two hours.

Ned's face was covered with
a ghostly sheen of perspiration. It had formed a line of tiny beads
along his upper lip. His hair was smeared to his head and the
pillow case was dark with moisture. When Linda touched the boy's
arm it felt wet, but very hot. He's burning up, she thought. Her
hands trembled as she took his temperature; the plastic strip
registered one hundred and three degrees exactly. That's the limit,
no more please, she prayed. This has to be the fever's crisis
point. It has to break here, and soon. She felt guilty for having
slept, but grateful that she had not awakened any later. A line
from an old song flashed through her mind—
the darkest hour is just before dawn
.
This was the hour.

Linda hurried downstairs to get a fresh
glass of cold juice, but when she returned she couldn't get Ned to
drink. He moaned and whimpered in his troubled sleep as she tried
to raise his head. She forced the rim of the glass between his
lips, but he wouldn't swallow. Juice ran out of the sides and
trickled down his chin. She would try again in a few minutes.

There was something else
about this hour of the day. Something that was trying to worm its
way into Linda's conscious mind. A fact. An item of information.
No, forget it. But she couldn't push it away. It was a
space-filler, one of those morbid tidbits of useless knowledge that
newspapers put in to take care of a two-line gap in a
column.
Doctors report that most deaths
occur in the hour before dawn.

Linda had to do something to keep from
thinking. She went to the bathroom and let the faucet run until the
water was good and cold. She soaked a face cloth, wrung it out and
went back into the bedroom to wipe down Ned's face, neck and arms.
Even after she had done that, however, her son's skin still felt
very hot. The fever was raging in him. What else could she do for
him? She found a bottle of rubbing alcohol and applied it to his
arms and chest. Such frail little bones, she thought as her fingers
worked. He seemed to be all ribs, thin and pliable. A sparrow of a
child. She buttoned up his pajama top when she finished.

Something else. Linda remembered being told
once that a person's blood sugar level dropped to its
twenty-four-hour low at this time of the day. The human body was at
its weakest. The bottom of the pit of night. The deepest sleep,
from which some never came back. Blood sugar level—that had been a
contributing factor in the massive asthma attack she had suffered a
few years ago. Or so the doctors said, but what did they know?
After all those tests they had given her, not one of a half-dozen
specialists had been able to say what had caused such an unusual
attack. You believe in doctors, you had faith in them because you
had no choice—but sometimes it seemed that they were just guessing
too. Blood sugar ... Linda tried once more to get Ned to swallow
some juice. Maybe a little went down, but not much.

Perhaps Dr. Melker was wrong, for all his
good intentions and his air of confidence. Perhaps it wasn't a flu
or a viral infection. It could be something more serious, something
the doctor had failed to recognize. Would a small town doctor read
all the journals and keep himself up-to-date? No one had known
Legionnaire's Disease until all those people died a few years ago
....

Linda held Ned's hand and sat watching.
''I'm here, honey," she whispered softly. ''I'm right here with
you."

It was as if the words had triggered
something. Ned's face tightened into a grimace and his hand turned
sharply this way and that on the pillow. It looked as if he was
trying to avoid something in his sleep. Perhaps he was running or
looking away, in a bad dream. Linda leaned over, close to his
ear.

"It's all right, Ned," she told him. "It's
all right, I'm here. Mommy's here with you."

Ned mewed pitifully, like a frightened
kitten, and his face was bathed in sweat again. Linda checked his
temperature. It was creeping toward one hundred and four. She began
to feel panicky. Should she call the doctor now, or wait a few
minutes and take one more reading? Melker had said to phone if the
temperature went over that point. Nervous, struggling to impose
calm on herself, Linda decided to hold on just a little longer. She
wondered if she should wake Michael before doing anything else. No,
not unless it became necessary to rush Ned to the hospital.
Otherwise, this was in her hands. Besides, what was happening to
the temperature now might be the last outburst before the fever
simmered down. If only she could believe that.

The house was so still at this early (or
late) hour. To Linda the silence, freighted with expectancy, was
disturbing, almost threatening. The only sound raised against it
was the slight whistle of Ned's shallow breathing. Linda busied
herself by wiping away the boy's sweat and giving him another
rubdown with alcohol. Useless gestures perhaps, she thought, but
better than doing nothing. She tried to convince herself that the
most important thing was simply to be there, touching Ned, holding
his hand, always in contact, whispering to him, so he would know,
if only on a subconscious level, that he was not alone.

Ned was anything but alone.

Out of the tumultuous black storm in his
mind, a figure was taking shape. The suggestion of a woman's body,
a woman's face, darkly shrouded in a swirl of darker clouds. A pale
apparition glimpsed in a confusing play of shadows. She was
distant, elusive, but unmistakably there. Ned was adrift on a sea
and the night was a hurricane of chaos all around him. The only
fixed point was that woman, drawing closer. He had no control, but
part of his mind knew what was happening. The games were over now.
The cross was no help; it was nothing more than a wish, an idea of
a defense when there really was no defense. Vampires and werewolves
were unreal, myths people had created to give form and limits to
what they feared most. Which was this woman, bearing down on him.
She was real. A phantom, a lost soul, trapped between one world and
another. All those years she had been unable to find peace .... But
now she would, by taking Ned with her. This time, he knew, she
would not be denied.

Linda stared at her son. Feelings of fear,
anger and helplessness warred within her, and yet she concentrated
on keeping Ned at the center of her mental focus. If sheer force of
will were sufficient, she would have extinguished his fever in an
instant. But all her psychic energy was funneling away, apparently
into nothingness. Her instinct was to fight, but the lack of a
target completely undermined her.

Ned's breathing became more labored. Linda
took his temperature. How many minutes had elapsed? It didn't
matter. The fever was on the verge of one hundred and four. Break,
break, break, she prayed. Or even advance a little—that would at
least set her on a definite course of action. But for the
temperature to stay lodged at that terrible point-that was the
worst thing.

Ned began to wheeze, his throat muscles
contracting visibly, his breath coming in pronounced but seemingly
airless spasms. At the same moment, Linda noticed the reaction in
herself. It was as if her own lungs were being winched taut. The
pressure of a very heavy weight was building up on her chest.

"No, not now," she said aloud, fumbling for
the right inhaler. Becotide wouldn't do now, she needed the
Alupent, which was a bronchial dilator and which might hold off an
attack. She found it, clicked the device firmly and sucked in the
mist as deeply as she could.

"Mommy ... "

Ned's eyes were screwed shut, and his face
was contorted with fear and pain. His lips were turning
purple-blue, set off against the rest of his face, which was
incredibly white. Linda jumped to the closet and pulled out the
small metal oxygen bottle.

"Don't—let—her—take—me," Ned pleaded
haltingly.

His head twisted and turned, as if trying to
bury itself in the pillow. It had taken considerable effort to
force the words out, and even then they were as weak as bubbles,
gone as soon as they surfaced.

Linda gave herself the first short blast of
oxygen. It helped, and the equipment worked. She tried to hold the
mask to Ned's face, but that only made him struggle more. He shook
and rocked his head furiously, and then his hands flew up, swinging
wildly, trying to fend the thing off.

"Ned, please, this will help you."

The boy rose up from the pillow, almost into
a sitting position. His eyes opened and fixed on Linda. In the
split second when their eyes met, she thought she saw pain, wonder,
love and terror. The look pierced her soul. Then there was nothing
to see but terror and hysteria. But before Linda could react,
everything vanished from Ned's eyes. It seemed as if an invisible
cord attached to his body had been violently yanked out. Ned
collapsed like an unstrung marionette.

Was he breathing? Was this what it had been
like the night of her big attack? Was she witnessing it from the
outside now?

Linda clamped the oxygen mask over Ned's
nose and mouth. She could hear the familiar, low hiss, but the
boy's body wasn't moving at all. Frantic, Linda pulled the mask
away and pressed her ear to his lips. Nothing.

"Michael," she called. Just one word, but
her voice had gone all over the place, like a seismograph charting
an earthquake.

She put the mask back over Ned's face, and
with her other hand she ripped open his pajama top. She put her ear
on his chest and was shocked at how cold and clammy his skin felt.
She listened for something, anything, in what seemed an eternity of
silence.

It was 4:47 A.M.

Ned's heart had stopped beating.

* * *

28. The Dance of
Death

—
Child.

Ned thought his insides had been vacuumed
out of him. His body was somehow unfamiliar, and it felt as light
as balsa wood. But there was neither pain nor fear.

—
Child.

He was lying on the ground, which was hard,
like rock, but covered with a thin layer of very fine black sand.
The light, which came from no visible source, was dull red and
diffuse.

Where am I?

—
With me now.

She was standing over him. Ned got up and
faced her. He wasn't afraid, only curious. He saw her clearly for
the first time. She was truly beautiful, her features remarkably
like those of his mother, but with subtle differences. She might
have been his mother years before, when she had been younger and
not yet married.

Who are you?

She smiled. That was all, but it was
enough.

What is this place?

—
The end of time.

Am 1 alive or dead?

—
Alive with me
forever.

I'm dead.

She smiled again.

No! 1 want to go back, let me go!

The impulse was brief and hollow. An echo
from a dead past. As soon as the thought formed, Ned knew it was
useless. Somewhere, in another world or another universe, his other
body was lifeless on his parents' bed. And they—but as soon as
sorrow approached, the woman erased it.

—
Child.

She had only to communicate that single
thought-word to restore Ned to a kind of airy, neutral state of
being. He looked closely at her again, and her eyes held him. There
was peace in them, a peace he had never known before, and now that
he had experienced it he didn't want to lose it. But the woman
turned and moved away.

—
Come.

Ned found himself going along with her, like
an object in the tow of a magnetic field. He was keeping up with
her, but he could no longer see her eyes.

Where are we going?

—
To the top of the
mountain.

Ned looked around. They appeared to be out
in the middle of a vast rocky plain. There wasn't a mountain to be
seen. The entire panorama was alien, like the scorched sun-side of
Mercury.

Where is the mountain?

—
Come.

What will we do when we get there?

—
Stay.

Are you
—but he didn't get a chance to finish the thought.

—
Child.

The view was deceptive, perhaps because of
the strange light. Gradually, they were descending. Their path took
them through a long, shallow gully and brought them to a bizarre
sight. They had reached what Ned could only think of as a forest.
But the trees were nothing more than bare, black trunks, ten or
twelve feet tall and about a foot in diameter. The top of each tree
was a fused, glassy knob, shiny, but otherwise as black as the
trunks and the sand. No trees had more than two branches, and they
had the same stunted, or amputated look.