Phantoms (48 page)

“Will you come up here?” Hammond asked.

“I hadn’t intended to come any closer than I am now,” Timothy said. “But if it’s
intelligent . . .
and if it’s offering me safe passage . . .”

On the telephone, a child’s voice piped up, the sweet voice of a young boy, perhaps five or six years old: “Please, please, please come play with me, Dr. Flyte. Please. We’ll have lots of fun. Please?”

And then, before Timothy could respond, there came a woman’s soft and musical voice: “Yes, dear Dr. Flyte, by all means, do come pay us a visit. You’re more than welcome. No one will harm you.”

Finally, the voice of an old man came over the line, warm and tender: “You have so much to learn about me, Dr. Flyte. So much wisdom to acquire. Please come and begin your studies. The offer of safe passage is sincere.”

Silence.

Confused, Timothy said, “Hello? Hello? Who’s this?” “I’m still here,” Hammond answered.

The other voices did not return.

“Just me now,” Hammond said.

Timothy said, “But who were those people?”

“They’re not actually people. They’re just phantoms. Mimicry. Don’t you get it? In three different voices,
it
just offered you safe passage again. The ancient enemy, Doctor.”

Timothy looked at the other four men in the room. They were all staring intently at the black conference box from which Hammond’s voice—and the voices of the creature—had issued.

Clutching a wad of already sodden paper tissues in one hand, Timothy wiped his sweat-slick face again. “I’ll come.”

Now, everyone in the room looked at him.

On the telephone, Sheriff Hammond said, “Doctor, there’s no good reason to believe that it’ll keep its promise. Once you’re here, you may very well be a dead man, too.”

“But if it’s intelligent . . .”

“That doesn’t mean it plays fair,” Hammond said. “In fact, all of us up here are certain of one thing: This creature is the very essence of evil. Evil, Dr. Flyte. Would you trust in the Devil’s promise?”

The child’s voice came on the line again, still lilting and sweet: “If you come, Dr. Flyte, I’ll not only spare you, but these six people who’re trapped here. I’ll let them go if you come play with me. But if you don’t come, I’ll take these pigs. I’ll crush them. I’ll squeeze the blood and shit out of them, squeeze them into pulp, and use them up.”

Those words were spoken in light, innocent, childlike tones—which somehow made them far more frightening than if they had been shouted in a basso profundo rage.

Timothy’s heart was pounding.

“That settles it,” he said. “I’ll come. I have no choice.”

“Don’t come on our account,” Hammond said. “It might spare you because it calls you its Saint Matthew, its Mark, its Luke and John. But it sure as hell won’t spare us, no matter what it says.”

“I’ll come,” Timothy insisted.

Hammond hesitated. Then: “Very well. I’ll have one of my men drive you to the Snowfield roadblock. From there, you’ll have to come alone. I can’t risk another man. Do you drive?”

“Yes, sir,” Timothy said. “You provide the car, and I’ll get there by myself.”

The line went dead.

“Hello?” Timothy said. “Sheriff?”

No answer.

“Are you there? Sheriff Hammond?”

Nothing.

It
had cut them off.

Timothy looked up at Sal Corello, Charlie Mercer, and the two men whose names he didn’t know.

They were all staring at him as if he were already dead and lying in a casket.

But if I die in Snowfield, if the shape-changer takes me, he thought, there’ll be no casket. No grave. No everlasting peace.

“I’ll drive you as far as the roadblock,” Charlie Mercer said. “I’ll drive you myself.”

Timothy nodded.

It was time to go.

At 3:12 A.M., Snowfield’s church bells began to clang.

In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, Bryce got up from his chair. The others rose, too.

The firehouse siren wailed.

Jenny said, “Flyte must be here.”

The six of them went outside.

The streetlights were flashing off and on, casting leaping marionette shadows through the shifting banks of fog.

At the foot of Skyline Road, a car turned the corner. Its headlights speared upward, imparting a silvery sheen to the mist.

The streetlamps stopped blinking, and Bryce stepped into the soft cascade of yellow light beneath one of them, hoping that Flyte would be able to see him through the veils of fog.

The bells continued to peal, and the siren shrieked, and the car crawled slowly up the long hill. It was a green and white sheriff’s department cruiser. It pulled to the curb and stopped ten feet from where Bryce stood; the driver extinguished the headlights.

The driver’s door opened, and Flyte got out. He wasn’t what Bryce had expected. He was wearing thick glasses that made his eyes appear abnormally large. His fine, white, tangled hair bristled in a halo around his head. Someone at headquarters had lent him an insulated jacket with the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Department seal on the left breast.

The bells stopped ringing.

The siren groaned to a throaty finish.

The subsequent silence was profound.

Flyte gazed around the fog-shrouded street, listening and waiting.

At last Bryce said, “Apparently, it’s not ready to show itself.”

Flyte turned to him. “Sheriff Hammond?”

“Yes. Let’s go inside and be comfortable while we wait.”

 

 

The inn’s dining room. Hot coffee.

Shaky hands clattered china mugs against the tabletop. Nervous hands curled and clamped around the warm mugs in order to make themselves be still.

The six survivors leaned forward, hunched over the table, the better to listen to Timothy Flyte.

Lisa was clearly enthralled by the British scientist, but at first Jenny had serious doubts. He seemed to be an outright caricature of the absent-minded professor. But when he began to speak about his theories, Jenny was forced to discard her initial, unfavorable opinion, and soon she was as fascinated as Lisa.

He told them about vanishing armies in Spain and China, about abandoned Mayan cities, the Roanoke Island colony.

And he told them of Joya Verde, a South American jungle settlement that had met a fate similar to Snowfield’s. Joya Verde, which means Green Jewel, was a trading post on the Amazon River, far from civilization. In 1923, six hundred and five people—every man, woman, and child who lived there—vanished from Joya Verde in a single afternoon, sometime between the morning and evening visits of regularly scheduled riverboats. At first it was thought that nearby Indians, who were normally peaceful, had become inexplicably hostile and had launched a surprise attack. However, there were no bodies found, no indications of fighting, and no evidence of looting. A message was discovered on the blackboard at the mission school:
It has no shape, yet it has every shape
. Many who investigated the Joya Verde mystery were quick to dismiss those nine chalk-scrawled words as having no connection with the disappearances. Flyte believed otherwise, and after listening to him, so did Jenny.

“A message of sorts was also left in one of those ancient Mayan cities,” Flyte said. “Archaeologists have unearthed a portion of a prayer, written in hieroglyphics, dating from the time of the great disappearance.” He quoted from memory: “ ‘Evil gods live in the earth, their power asleep in rock. When they awake, they rise up as lava rises, but cold lava, flowing, and they assume many shapes. Then proud men know that we are only voices in the thunder, faces on the wind, to be dispersed as if we never lived.’” Flyte’s glasses had slid down his nose. He pushed them back into place. “Now, some say that particular part of the prayer refers to the power of earthquakes and volcanoes. I think it’s about the ancient enemy.”

“We found a message here, too,” Bryce said. “Part of a word.”

“We can’t make anything of it,” Sara Yamaguchi said.

Jenny told Flyte about the two letters—P and R—that Nick Papandrakis had painted on his bathroom wall, using a bottle of iodine. “There was a portion of a third letter, too. It might have been the beginning of a U or an O.”

“Papandrakis,” Flyte said, nodding vigorously. “Greek. Yes, yes, yes—here’s confirmation of what I’m telling you. Was this fellow Papandrakis proud of his heritage?”

“Yes,” Jenny said. “Extremely proud of it. Why?”

“Well, if he was proud of being Greek,” Flyte said, “he might well have known Greek mythology. You see, in ancient Greek myth, there was a god named Proteus. I suspect that was the word your Mr. Papandrakis was trying to write on the wall. Proteus. A god who lived in the earth, crawled through its bowels. A god who was without any shape of his own. A god who could take any form he wished—and who fed upon everything and everyone that he desired.”

With frustration in his voice, Tal Whitman said, “What is all this supernatural stuff? When we communicated with it through the computer, it insisted on giving itself the names of demons.”

Flyte said, “The amorphous demon, the shapeless and usually evil god that can assume any form it wishes—those are relatively common figures in most ancient myth systems and in most if not all of the world’s religions. Such a mythological creature appears under scores of names, in all of the world’s cultures. Consider the Old Testament of the Bible, for example. Satan first appears as a serpent, later as a goat, a ram, a stag, a beetle, a spider, a child, a beggar, and many other things. He is called, among other names: Master of Chaos and Formlessness, Master of Deceit, the Beast of Many Faces. The Bible tells us that Satan is ‘as changeable as shadows’ and ‘as clever as water, for as water can become steam or ice, so Satan can become that which he wishes to become.’”

Lisa said, “Are you saying the shape-changer here in Snowfield is Satan?”

“Well . . . in a way, yes.”

Frank Autry shook his head. “No. I’m not a man who believes in spooks, Dr. Flyte.”

“Nor am I,” Flyte assured him. “I’m not arguing that this thing is a supernatural being. It isn’t. It’s real, a creature of flesh—although not flesh like ours. It’s not a spirit or a devil. Yet . . . in a way . . . I believe it
is
Satan. Because, you see, I believe it was this creature—or another like it, another monstrous survivor from the Mesozoic Era—that inspired the myth of Satan. In prehistoric times, men must have encountered one of these things, and some of them must have lived to tell about it. They naturally described their experiences in the terminology of myth and superstition. I suspect most of the demonic figures in the world’s various religions are actually reports of these shape-changers, reports passed down through countless generations before they were at last committed to hieroglyphics, scrolls, and then print. They were reports of a very rare, very real, very dangerous beast . . . but described in the language of religious myth.”

Jenny found this part of Flyte’s thesis to be both crazy and brilliant, unlikely yet convincing. “The thing somehow absorbs the knowledge and memories of those on whom it feeds,” she said, “so it knows that many of its victims see it as the Devil, and it gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of playing that role.”

Bryce said, “It seems to enjoy mocking us.”

Sara Yamaguchi tucked her long hair behind her ears and said, “Dr. Flyte, how about explaining this in scientific terms. How can such a creature exist? How can it function biologically? What’s your scientific rationalization, your theory?”

Before Flyte could answer her,
it
came.

High on one wall, near the ceiling, a metal grille covering a heating duct suddenly popped from its screws. It flew into the room, crashed into an empty table, slid off the table, clattered-rattled-banged onto the floor.

Jenny and the others leapt up from their chairs.

Lisa screamed, pointed.

The shape-changer bulged out of the duct. It hung there on the wall. Dark. Wet. Pulsing. Like a mass of glistening, bloody snot suspended from the edge of a nostril.

Bryce and Tal reached for their revolvers, then hesitated. There was nothing whatsoever that they could do.

The thing continued to surge out of the duct, swelling, rippling, growing into an obscene, gnarled, shifting lump the size of a man. Then, still flowing out of the wall, it began to slide down. It formed into a mound on the floor. Much bigger than a man now, still oozing out of the duct. Growing, growing.

Jenny looked at Flyte.

The professor’s face could not settle on a single expression. It tried wonder, then terror, then awe, then disgust, then awe and terror and wonder again.

The viscous, ever-churning mass of dark protoplasm was now as large as three or four men, and still more of the vile stuff gushed from the heating duct in a revolting, vomitous flow.

Lisa gagged and averted her face.

But Jenny couldn’t take her eyes from the thing. There was a grotesque fascination that couldn’t be denied.

In the already enormous agglomeration of shapeless tissue that had extruded itself into the room, limbs began to form, although none of them maintained its shape for more than a few seconds. Human arms, both male and female, reached out as if seeking help. The thin, flailing arms of children were formed from the jellied tissue, some of them with their small hands open in a silent, pathetic plea. It was difficult to keep in mind that these were not the arms of children trapped within the shape-changer; they were imitation, phantom arms, a part of
it
, not a part of any child. And claws. A startling, frightening variety of claws and animal limbs appeared out of the protoplasmic soup. There were insect parts, too, enormous, hugely exaggerated, terrifyingly frenetic and grasping. But all of these swiftly melted back into the formless protoplasm almost as soon as they took shape.