Phantoms (15 page)

Sheriff Hammond turned toward the shattered front of the market and said what Jake was afraid he would say: “Let’s have a look.”

Jake didn’t want to be one of the first through the doors. Or one of the last either. He slipped into the middle of the procession.

The grocery store was a mess. Around the three cash registers, black metal display stands had been toppled. Chewing gum, candy, razor blades, paperback books, and other small items spilled over the floor.

They walked across the front of the store, looking into each aisle as they passed it. Goods had been pulled off the shelves and thrown to the floor. Boxes of cereal were smashed, torn open, the bright cardboard poking up through drifts of cornflakes and Cheerios. Smashed bottles of vinegar produced a pungent stench. Jars of jam, pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, and relish were tumbled in a jagged, glutinous heap.

At the head of the last aisle, Bryce Hammond turned to Dr. Paige. “Would the store have been open this evening?”

“No,” the doctor said, “but I think sometimes they stock the shelves on Sunday evenings. Not often, but sometimes.”

“Let’s have a look in the back,” the sheriff said. “Might find something interesting.”

That’s what I’m afraid of, Jake thought.

They followed Bryce Hammond down the last aisle, stepping over and around five-pound bags of sugar and flour, a few of which had split open.

Waist-high coolers for meat, cheese, eggs, and milk were lined up along the rear of the store. Beyond the coolers lay the sparkling-clean work area where the meat was cut, weighed, and wrapped for sale.

Jake’s eyes nervously flicked over the porcelain and butcher’s-block tables. He sighed with relief when he saw that nothing lay on any of them. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the store manager’s body neatly chopped into steaks, roasts, and cutlets.

Bryce Hammond said, “Let’s have a look in the storeroom.”

Let’s not, Jake thought.

Hammond said, “Maybe we—”

The lights went out.

The only windows were at the front of the store, but even up there it was dark; the streetlights had gone out, too. Here, the darkness was complete, blinding.

Several voices spoke at once:

“Flashlights!”

“Jenny!”

“Flashlights!”

Then a lot happened very fast.

Tal Whitman switched on a flashlight, and the bladelike beam stabbed down at the floor. In the same instant, something struck him from behind, something unseen that had approached with incredible speed and stealth under the cover of darkness. Whitman was flung forward. He crashed into Stu Wargle.

Autry was pulling the other long-handled flashlight from the utility loop on his gun belt. Before he could switch it on, however, both Wargle and Tal Whitman fell against him, and all three went down.

As Tal fell, the flashlight flew out of his hand.

Bryce Hammond, briefly illuminated by the airborne light, grabbed for it; missed.

The flashlight struck the floor and spun away, casting wild and leaping shadows with each revolution, illuminating nothing.

And something cold touched the back of Jake’s neck. Cold and slightly moist—yet something that was
alive.

He flinched at the touch, tried to pull away and turn.

Something encircled his throat with the suddenness of a whip.

Jake gasped for breath.

Even before he could raise his hands to grapple with his assailant, his arms were seized and pinned.

He was being lifted off his feet as if he were a child.

He tried to scream, but a frigid hand clamped over his mouth. At least he
thought
it was a hand. But it felt like the flesh of an eel, cold and damp.

It stank, too. Not much. It didn’t send out clouds of stink. But the odor was so different from anything Jake had ever smelled before, so bitter and sharp and unclassifiable that even in small whiffs it was nearly intolerable.

Waves of revulsion and terror broke and foamed within him, and he sensed he was in the presence of something unimaginably strange and unquestionably evil.

The flashlight was still spinning across the floor. Only a couple of seconds had passed since Tal had dropped it, although to Jake it seemed much longer than that. Now it spun one last time and clanged against the base of the milk cooler; the lens burst into countless pieces, and they were denied even that meager, erratic light. Although it had illuminated nothing, it had been better than total darkness. Without it, hope was extinguished, too.

Jake strained, twisted, flexed, jerked, and writhed in an epileptic dance of panic, a spasmodic fandango of escape. But he couldn’t free even one hand. His unseen adversary merely tightened its grip.

Jake heard the others calling to one another; they sounded far away.

Jake Johnson had disappeared.

Before Tal could locate the unbroken flashlight, the one that Frank Autry had dropped, the market’s lights flickered and then came on bright and steady. The darkness had lasted no longer than fifteen or twenty seconds.

But Jake was gone.

They searched for him. He wasn’t in the aisles, the meat locker, the storeroom, the office, or the employees’ bathroom.

They left the market—only seven of them now—following Bryce, moving with extreme caution, hoping to find Jake outside, in the street. But he wasn’t there, either.

Snowfield’s silence was a mute, mocking shout of ridicule.

Tal Whitman thought the night seemed infinitely darker now than it had been a few minutes ago. It was an enormous maw into which they had stepped, unaware. This deep and watchful night was hungry.

“Where could he have gone?” Gordy asked, looking a little savage, as he always did when he frowned, even though, right now, he was actually just scared.

“He didn’t go anywhere,” Stu Wargle said. “He was
taken.”

“He didn’t call for help.”

“Never had a chance.”

“You think he’s alive . . . or dead?” the young Paige girl asked.

“Little doll,” Wargle said, rubbing the beard stubble on his chin, “I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I was you. I’ll bet my last buck we’ll find Jake somewheres, stiff as a board, all swelled up and purple like the rest of ’em.”

The girl winced and sidled closer to her sister.

Bryce Hammond said, “Hey, let’s not write Jake off that quickly.”

“I agree,” Tal said. “There
are
a lot of dead people in this town. But it seems to me that most of them
aren’t
dead. Just missing.”

“They’re all deader than napalmed babies. Isn’t that right, Frank?” Wargle said, never missing a chance to needle Autry about his long-ago service in Vietnam. “We just haven’t found ’em yet.”

Frank didn’t rise to the bait. He was too smart and too self-controlled for that. Instead, he said, “What I don’t understand is why it didn’t take all of us when it had the chance? Why did it just knock Tal down?”

“I was switching on the flashlight,” Tal said. “It didn’t want me to do that.”

“Yes,” Frank said, “but why was Jake the only one of us it grabbed, and why did it do a fast fade right after?”

“It’s teasing us,” Dr. Paige said. The streetlamp made her eyes flash with green fire. “It’s like I said about the church bell and the fire siren. It’s like a cat playing with mice.”

“But
why
?” Gordy asked exasperatedly. “What’s it get out of all this? What’s it want?”

“Hold on a minute,” Bryce said. “How come everyone’s all of a sudden saying ‘it’? Last time I took an informal survey, seems to me the general consensus was that only a pack of psychopathic killers could’ve done this. Maniacs.
People.”

They regarded one another with uneasiness. No one was eager to say what was on his mind. Unthinkable things were now thinkable. They were things that reasonable people could not easily put into words.

The wind gusted out of the darkness, and the obeisant trees bent reverently.

The streetlamps flickered.

Everyone jumped, startled by the lights’ inconstancy. Tal put his hand on the butt of his holstered revolver. But the lights did not go out.

They listened to the cemeterial town. The only sound was the whisper of the wind-stirred trees, which was like the last long exhalation of breath before the grave, an extended dying sigh.

Jake
is
dead, Tal thought. Wargle is right for once. Jake is dead and maybe the rest of us are, too, only we don’t know it yet.

To Frank Autry, Bryce said, “Frank, why’d you say ‘it’ instead of ‘they’ or something else?”

Frank glanced at Tal, seeking support, but Tal wasn’t sure why he, himself, had said “it.” Frank cleared his throat. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and looked at Bryce. He shrugged. “Well, sir, I guess maybe I said ‘it’ because . . . well . . . a soldier, a
human
adversary, would have blown us away right there in the market when he had the opportunity, all of us at once, in the darkness.”

“So you think—what?—that this adversary isn’t human?”

“Maybe it could be some kind of. . . animal.”

“Animal? Is that really what you think?”

Frank looked exceedingly uncomfortable. “No, sir.”

“What
do
you think?” Bryce asked.

“Hell, I don’t
know
what to think,” Frank said in frustration. “I’m military-trained, as you know. A military man doesn’t like to plunge blindly into any situation. He likes to plan his strategy carefully. But good, sound strategic planning depends on a reliable body of experience. What happened in comparable battles in other wars? What have other men done in similar circumstances? Did they succeed or fail? But this time there just
aren’t
any comparable battles; there’s no experience to draw upon. This is so strange, I’m going to go right on thinking of the enemy as a faceless, neutral ‘it.’”

Turning to Dr. Paige, Bryce said, “What about you? Why did you use the word ‘it’?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe because Officer Autry used it.”

“But you were the one who advanced the theory about a mutant strain of rabies that could create a pack of homicidal maniacs. Are you ruling that out now?”

She frowned. “No. We can’t rule out anything at this point. But, Sheriff, I never meant that that was the only possible theory.”

“Do you have any others?”

“No.”

Bryce looked at Tal. “What about you?”

Tal felt every bit as uncomfortable as Frank had looked. “Well, I guess I used ‘it’ because I can’t accept the homicidalmaniac theory any more.”

Bryce’s heavy eyelids lifted higher than usual. “Oh? Why not?”

“Because of what happened at the Candleglow Inn,” Tal said. “When we came downstairs and found that hand on the table in the lobby, holding the eyebrow pencil we’d been looking for . . . well . . . that just didn’t seem like something a homicidal nut case would
do
. We’ve all been cops long enough to’ve dealt with our share of unbalanced people. Have any of you ever encountered one of those types who had a sense of humor? Even an ugly, twisted sense of humor? They’re humorless people. They’ve lost the ability to laugh at
anything,
which is probably part of the reason they’re crazy. So when I saw that hand on the lobby table it just didn’t seem to fit. I agree with Frank; for now I’m going to think of our enemy as a faceless ‘it.’”

“Why won’t any of you admit what you’re feeling?” Lisa Paige said softly. She was fourteen, an adolescent, on her way to being a lovely young lady, but she gazed at each of them with the unselfconscious directness of a child. “Somehow, deep down inside where it really counts, we all
know
it wasn’t people who did these things. It’s something really awful—Jeez, just
feel
it out there—something strange and disgusting. Whatever it is, we all
feel
it. We’re all scared of it. So we’re all trying hard not to admit it’s there.”

Only Bryce returned the girl’s stare; he studied her thoughtfully. The others looked away from Lisa. They didn’t want to meet one another’s eyes, either.

We don’t want to look inside ourselves, Tal thought, and that’s exactly what the girl’s telling us to do. We don’t want to look inward and find primitive superstition. We’re all civilized, reasonably well-educated
adults,
and adults aren’t supposed to believe in the boogeyman.

“Lisa’s right,” Bryce said. “The only way we’re going to solve this one—maybe the only way we’re going to avoid becoming victims ourselves—is to keep our minds open and let our imaginations have free rein.”

“I agree,” Dr. Paige said.

Gordy Brogan shook his head. “But what are we supposed to think, then?
Anything
? I mean, aren’t there any limits? Are we supposed to start worrying about ghosts and ghouls and werewolves and . . . and vampires? There’s got to be
some
things we can rule out.”

“Of course,” Bryce said patiently. “Gordy, no one’s saying we’re dealing with ghosts and werewolves. But we’ve got to realize that we’re dealing with the unknown. That’s all.
The unknown.”

“I don’t buy it,” Stu Wargle said sullenly. “The unknown, my ass. When it’s all said and done, what we’ll find is that it’s the work of some pervert, some stinkin’ scumbag pretty much like all the stinkin’ scumbags we’ve dealt with before.”

Frank said, “Wargle, your kind of thinking is exactly what’ll cause us to overlook important evidence. And it’s also the kind of thinking that’ll get us killed.”

“You just wait,” Wargle told them. “You’ll find out I’m right.” He spat on the sidewalk, hooked his thumbs in his gun belt, and tried to give the impression that he was the only levelheaded man in the group.

Tal Whitman saw through the macho posturing; he saw terror in Wargle, too. Though he was one of the most insensitive men Tal had ever known, Stu was not unaware of the primitive response of which Lisa Paige had spoken. Whether he admitted it or not, he clearly felt the same bone-deep chill that shivered through all of them.