Phantoms (12 page)

“It’s okay,” Lisa assured Jenny. “I don’t want to be left behind, anyway.”

She was a spunky kid. Both she and her older sister intrigued Bryce Hammond. They were pale, and their eyes were alive with dervish shadows of shock and horror—but they were coping a great deal better than most people would have in this bizarre, waking nightmare.

The Paiges led the entire group out of the substation and down the street to the bakery.

Bryce found it difficult to believe that Snowfield had been a normal, bustling village only a short while ago. The town felt as dry and burnt-out and dead as an ancient lost city in a far desert, off in a corner of the world where even the wind often forgot to go. The hush that cloaked the town seemed a silence of countless years, of decades, of centuries, a silence of unimaginably long epochs piled on epochs.

Shortly after arriving in Snowfield, Bryce had used an electric bullhorn to call for a response from the silent houses. Now it seemed foolish ever to have expected an answer.

They entered Liebermann’s Bakery through the front door and went into the kitchen at the rear of the building.

On the butcher’s-block table, two severed hands gripped the handles of a rolling pin.

Two severed heads peered through two oven doors.

“Oh, my God,” Tal said quietly.

Bryce shuddered.

Clearly in need of support, Jake Johnson leaned against a tall white cabinet.

Wargle said, “Christ, they were butchered like a couple of goddamned cows,” and then everyone was talking at once.

“—why the hell anyone would—”

“—sick, twisted—”

“—so where are the bodies?”

“Yes,” Bryce said, raising his voice to override the babble, “where are the
bodies?
Let’s find them.”

For a couple of seconds, no one moved, frozen by the thought of what they might find.

“Dr. Paige, Lisa—there’s no need for you to help us,” Bryce said. “Just stand aside.”

The doctor nodded. The girl smiled in gratitude.

With trepidation, they searched all the cupboards, opened all the drawers and doors. Gordy Brogan looked inside the big oven that wasn’t equipped with a porthole, and Frank Autry went into the walk-in refrigerator. Bryce inspected the small, spotless lavatory off one end of the kitchen. But they couldn’t find the bodies—or any other pieces of the bodies—of the two elderly people.

“Why would the killers cart away the bodies?” Frank asked.

“Maybe we’re dealing with some sort of cultists,” Jake Johnson said. “Maybe they wanted the bodies for some weird ritual.”

“If there was any ritual,” Frank said, “it looks to me like it was conducted right here.”

Gordy Brogan bolted for the lavatory, stumbling and weaving, a big gangling kid who seemed to be composed solely of long legs and long arms and elbows and knees. Retching sounds came through the door that he had slammed behind himself.

Stu Wargle laughed and said, “Jesus, what a ninny.”

Bryce turned on him and scowled. “What in God’s name do you find so funny, Wargle? People are dead here. Seems to me that Gordy’s reaction is a lot more natural than any of ours.”

Wargle’s pig-eyed, heavy-jowled face clouded with anger. He didn’t have the wit to be embarrassed.

God, I despise that man, Bryce thought.

When Gordy came back from the bathroom, he looked sheepish. “Sorry, Sheriff.”

“No reason to be, Gordy.”

They trooped through the kitchen, across the sales room, out onto the sidewalk.

Bryce went immediately to the wooden gate between the bakery and the shop next door. He stared over the top of the gate, into the lightless, covered passageway. Dr. Paige moved to his side, and he said, “Is this where you thought something was in the rafters?”

“Well, Lisa thought it was crouched along the wall.”

“But it was
this
serviceway?”

“Yes.”

The tunnel was utterly black.

He took Tal’s long-handled flashlight, opened the creaking gate, drew his revolver, and stepped into the passage. A vague, dank odor clung to the place. The squeal of the rusty gate hinges and then the sound of his own footsteps echoed down the tunnel ahead of him.

The beam of the flash was powerful; it carried over half the length of the passageway. However, he focused it close at hand, swept it back and forth over the immediate area, studying the concrete walls, then looking up at the ceiling, which was eight or ten feet overhead. In this part of the serviceway, at least, the rafters were deserted.

With each step, Bryce grew increasingly certain that drawing his revolver had been unnecessary—until he was almost halfway through the tunnel. Then he suddenly felt. . . something odd . . . a tingle, a cold augural quiver along the spine. He sensed that he wasn’t alone any longer.

He was a man who trusted his hunches, and he didn’t discount this one. He stopped advancing, brought the revolver up, listened more closely than before to the silence, moved the flashlight rapidly over the walls and ceiling, squinted with special care at the rafters, looked ahead into the gloom almost as far as the mouth of the alleyway, and even glanced back to see if something had crept magically around behind him. Nothing waited in the darkness. Yet he continued to feel that he was being watched by unfriendly eyes.

He started forward again, and his light caught something. Covered by a metal grille, a foot-square drain opening was set in the floor of the serviceway. Inside the drain, something indefinable glistened, reflecting the flashlight beam; it
moved
.

Cautiously, Bryce stepped closer and directed the light straight down into the drain. Whatever had glistened was gone now.

He squatted beside the drain and peered between the ribs of the grille. The light revealed only the walls of a pipe. It was a storm drain, about eighteen inches in diameter, and it was dry, which meant he had not merely seen water.

A rat? Snowfield was a resort that catered to a relatively affluent crowd; therefore, the town took unusually stringent measures to keep itself free of all manner of pests. Of course, in spite of Snowfield’s diligence in such matters, the existence of a rat or two certainly wasn’t impossible. It
could
have been a rat. But Bryce didn’t believe that it
had
been.

He walked all the way to the alley, then retraced his steps to the gate where Tal and the others waited.

“See anything?” Tal asked.

“Not much,” Bryce said, stepping onto the sidewalk and closing the gate behind him. He told them about his feeling of being watched and about the movement in the drain.

“The Liebermanns were killed by people,” Frank Autry said. “Not by something small enough to crawl through a drain.”

“That certainly would seem to be the case,” Bryce agreed.

“But you did
feel
it in there?” Lisa asked anxiously.

“I felt something,” Bryce told the girl. “It apparently didn’t affect me as strongly as you said it did you. But it was definitely . . . strange.”

“Good,” Lisa said. “I’m glad you don’t think we’re just hysterical women.”

“Considering what you’ve been through, you two are about as
un
hysterical as you could get.”

“Well,” the girl said, “Jenny’s a doctor, and I think maybe I’d like to be a doctor someday, and doctors simply can’t afford to get hysterical.”

She was a cute kid—although Bryce couldn’t help noticing that her older sister was even better looking. Both the girl and the doctor had the same lovely shade of auburn hair; it was the dark red-brown of well-polished cherry wood, thick and lustrous. Both of them had the same golden skin, too. But because Dr. Paige’s features were more mature than Lisa’s, they were also more interesting and appealing to Bryce. Her eyes were a shade greener than her sister’s, too.

Bryce said, “Dr. Paige, I’d like to see that house where the bodies were barricaded in the den.”

“Yeah,” Tal said. “The locked room murders.”

“That’s the Oxley place over on Vail.” She led them down the street toward the corner of Vail Lane and Skyline Road.

The dry shuffle of their footsteps was the only sound, and it made Bryce think of desert places again, of scarabs swarming busily across stacks of ancient, brittle papyrus scrolls in desert tombs.

Rounding the corner onto Vail Lane, Dr. Paige halted and said, “Tom and Karen Oxley live . . . uh . . .
lived
two blocks farther along here.”

Bryce studied the street. He said, “Instead of walking straight to the Oxleys’, let’s have a look in all the houses and shops between here and there—at least on this side of the street. I think it’s safe to split up into two squads, four to a group. We won’t be going off entirely in different directions. We’ll be close enough to help each other if there’s trouble. Dr. Paige, Lisa—you stay with Tal and me. Frank, you’re in charge of the second team.”

Frank nodded.

“The four of you stick together,” Bryce warned them. “And I mean
together.
Each of you remain within sight of the other three at all times. Understood?”

“Yes, Sheriff,” Frank Autry said.

“Okay, you four have a look in the first building past the restaurant here, and we’ll take the place next door to that. We’ll hopscotch our way along the street and compare notes at the end of the block. If you come across something really interesting, something more than just additional bodies, come get me. If you need help, fire two or three rounds. We’ll hear the gunshots even if we’re inside another building. And you listen for gunfire from us.”

“May I make a suggestion?” Dr. Paige asked.

“Sure,” Bryce said.

To Frank Autry, she said, “If you come across any bodies that show signs of hemorrhaging from the eyes, ears, nose, or mouth, let me know at once. Or any indications of vomiting or diarrhea.”

“Because those things might indicate disease?” Bryce asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Or poisoning.”

“But we’ve ruled that out, haven’t we?” Gordy Brogan asked.

Jake Johnson, looking older than his fifty-seven years, said, “It wasn’t a disease that cut off those people’s heads.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Dr. Paige said. “What if this is a disease or a chemical toxin that we’ve never encountered before—a mutant strain of rabies, say—that kills some people but merely drives others stark raving mad? What if the mutilations were done by those who were driven into a savage madness?”

“Is such a thing likely?” Tal Whitman asked.

“No. But then again, maybe not impossible. Besides, who’s to say what’s likely or unlikely any more? Is it
likely
that this would have happened to Snowfield in the first place?”

Frank Autry tugged at his mustache and said, “But if there are packs of rabid maniacs roaming around out there . . . where
are
they?”

Everyone looked at the quiet street. At the deepest pools of shadow spilling over lawns and sidewalks and parked cars. At unlighted attic windows. At dark basement windows.

“Hiding,” Wargle said.

“Waiting,” Gordy Brogan said.

“No, that doesn’t make sense,” Bryce said. “Rabid maniacs just wouldn’t hide and wait and
plan
. They’d charge us.”

“Anyway,” Lisa said quietly, “it isn’t rabid people. It’s something a lot stranger.”

“She’s probably right,” Dr. Paige said.

“Which somehow doesn’t make me feel any better,” Tal said.

“Well, if we find any indications of vomiting, diarrhea, or hemorrhaging,” Bryce said, “then we’ll know. And if we don’t . . .”

“I’ll have to come up with a new hypothesis,” Dr. Paige said.

They were silent, not eager to begin the search because they didn’t know what they might find—or what might find them.

Time seemed to have stopped.

Dawn, Bryce Hammond thought, will never come unless we move.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The first building was narrow and deep, with a combination art gallery and crafts shop on the first floor. Frank Autry broke a pane of glass in the front door, reached inside, and released the lock. He entered and switched on the lights.

Motioning the others to follow, he said, “Spread out. Don’t stay too close together. We don’t want to offer an easy target.”

As Frank spoke, he was reminded of the two tours of duty he served in Vietnam almost thirty years ago. This operations had the nerve-twisting quality of a search-and-destroy mission in guerrilla territory.

They prowled cautiously through the gallery’s displays but found no one. Likewise, there was no one in the small office at the rear of the showroom. However, a door in that office opened onto stairs that led to the second floor.

They took the stairs in military fashion. Frank climbed to the top alone, gun drawn, while the others waited. He located the light switch at the head of the stairs, snapped it on, and saw that he was in one corner of the living room of the gallery owner’s apartment. When he was certain the room was deserted, he motioned for his men to come up. As the others climbed the stairs, Frank moved into the living room, staying close to the wall, watchful.