The Frighteners (21 page)

The reality of what was happening began to hit her. The man was dying, literally dying, in order to save her life. In what seemed to her the very short space of twenty minutes, his emanation would go off . . . and do what? Fight some creature called the Reaper that had already claimed forty lives? And if by some miracle Frank beat this beast, he would have to return to his body, which she would then have to revive. And where was this Reaper? What if he showed up now, before Frank had his out-of-body experience? The creature seemed able to go anywhere—inside walls, even into the floor of the jail. What if it were lurking in the medical center? What if it were in the walls of the cryolab itself?

Startled by that thought, Lucy looked over her shoulder and found herself staring into the cold, cruel eyes of Milton Dammers. She screamed.

“What are you doing here?”

He grinned at her, roughly shoving her to one side so he could get at the freezer window.

“This is my lab! Get out of it!”

“You’re in over your head, Doctor,” Dammers said.

“You have no right to be here! Get out!”

Dammers peered into the freezer at Bannister. A sneering smile crossed his lips.

“I didn’t know you had an interest in cyrogenics, Dr. Lynskey,” he said.

She glanced at the wall clock. It was exactly nine
P.M.

“I’ve got to revive him in twenty minutes,” she said.

“What on earth for?”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you,” she said. “You’re in my lab—let’s see your search warrant!”

“Here it is,” he said, pulling out an automatic and aiming it at her.

She glared at him. “You’re a maniac.”

“I’m doing what I have to do, Dr. Lynskey,” he said, locking the freezer door. “I’m ridding the world of a menace.”

Lucy was horrified. “You’ll kill him,” she said.

“No, Dr. Lynskey,” Dammers said. “It’s you who killed him. His body will be found in
your
freezer.”

Dammers stole another look inside the freezer. Bannister’s breath had slowed nearly to a stop. After a long moment he exhaled one final time, his breath hanging in the air. Then his chest stopped moving. He was dead.

“That’s it for Frank Bannister,” Dammers said. “Take a look.”

He kept the gun aimed at Lucy while she, too, looked in the freezer. After she saw Bannister’s frozen body lying there, she said, “If I don’t revive him it will be your fault.”

“I’ll learn to live with that.” Dammers motioned her toward the door.

Bannister’s body may have been frozen solid, but it trembled slightly as his emanation began to stir within it. First his fingers and arms moved slightly, then his feet and legs. A ripple ran through the muscles of his abdomen as the emanation came to life. It appeared first by his head, lifting up exactly the way a sleeping man lifts his head to look at the new day. Then the rest of the emanation lifted itself out of Bannister’s body. He was now an emanation, just like Stuart or Cyrus or the Judge.

The freezer was suddenly bathed in white light. The frozen crystals sparkled and the ice-cold test tubes glowed like gemstones in the ethereal light. The corridor that, at that moment, only he could see swept down from the heavens and through the roof and upper floors of the medical center and into the freezer. It picked out Frank the way a spotlight illuminates a star performer on a Broadway stage.

Frank stood and looked up into the corridor, awestruck. He felt its strong attraction, like a magnet for souls. But he forced himself to back away from it, thinking only of Lucy and how he could save her. He backed across the freezer and straight through the door.

“Wow,” he said, falling onto the lab floor.

He felt as light as a feather. He sprang to his feet and flew straight into the air. His head and shoulders went right through the ceiling, and for an instant he found himself looking around the inside of an examination room on the next floor. Then he slipped back down to the lab and landed on his feet.

“This is unreal,” he said, feeling his power.

As he slipped back down through the floor he had seen the bricks, the mortar, the pipes, and the electric wires as though viewing a cross section on a monitor. It was amazing, these abilities he suddenly had—the extra strength and speed, the ability to defy gravity, and the ability to go anywhere. If only he could share it with Lucy.

But where was she? “Lucy?” he asked, looking around.

Bannister found an empty lab and wondered where she might have gone. Her equipment was there, the syringes and the defibrillator, but there was no Lucy. He called her name again but got no response.

On an impulse, he left the lab and walked down the hall to the women’s room. He lingered outside the door.

“Lucy? Are you in there?”

Then he realized she couldn’t hear him anyway, so why shout? He slipped through the door and peeked discreetly inside the bathroom. There was no Lucy. It was then that Frank remembered having seen a lock on the freezer door. Why lock it, he wondered, if she was the only one there and, dead and frozen, his corpse wasn’t going anywhere? Only someone else would have done it. He started toward the exit.

In a hurry for the first time, Frank realized how unaccustomed he was to his “body’s” new form. It felt light and rubbery. If he put his foot down too hard, he was propelled off the ground. If he reached for a door knob, his hand went right through it and he felt like an idiot. If he put his hand on a wall to brace himself, his hand went through it and he was likely to follow. He found he could lean on a real object, so long as he didn’t push hard against it. He knew he could go up through a ceiling, or sideways through a wall, but what if he wanted to go down, through a floor? How was he supposed to do
that?

He ran through the back door but misjudged it. Because it was thicker than the rest, Frank thought it would be harder to get through. But he went through the final door the way a knife cuts hot butter and, off balance, tumbled onto the pavement of the parking lot.

Across the lot, Dammers locked a handcuff onto a roll bar in the backseat of a squad car he had commandeered. The other end of the cuffs was fast around Lucy’s wrist. She struggled against it, screaming, “You bastard!”

Dammers slammed the back door on her and let himself in the driver’s door. Then he started the engine and turned up the stereo to drown out her cries.

“Let me go!” she yelled. “Murderer!”

Frank heard her voice.

“Lucy!” he cried out, then realized yet again she couldn’t hear him.

Bannister began running toward the car, but his feet went straight through the asphalt and he fell down again. He struggled to his feet, yelling, “Let her go, Dammers,” then thought, So what if they can’t hear me!

Frank tried as hard as he could to control his rubbery body. This must be what Ray felt like when I shoved him through the car door, he thought.

Dammers put the car in gear and stepped on the gas pedal. He steered the vehicle out of the parking lot and into the street. As he did so the Reaper rose out of the sidewalk behind it. The creature looked around, and for an instant its eyes met Frank’s. It hissed, then turned away and began running, with damnable grace, after Dammers’s car as it entered a stream of traffic.

Frank began running after both of them. He flew through the air, controlling his feet this time, stepping neither too hard nor too lightly. He was much faster than he had ever been in his life, even as a high-school sprinter. Once he got the hang of it, Frank zipped down the road, the particles that formed his emanation body ebbing and flowing behind him, creating the effect of a silvery slipstream.

The squad car turned onto an on-ramp leading to the coastal highway. The Reaper, moving much faster than Dammers’s commandeered squad car, was closing in on it. Of course, neither Dammers nor his captive could see the creature.

But Frank could see it all too well. He ran as fast as he could, and thought he was doing a pretty good job of controlling his new emanation body, but still he fell behind. He stopped at the entrance to the on-ramp with the car and its pursuer hopelessly ahead of him.

Then he spotted the highway overpass under which the squad car would have to drive within a matter of seconds. Bannister ran up to the top of it, passing over a grassy area and straight through a stand of maples and, in so doing, sending a few hundred blackbirds flying, squawking, into the night.

Frank ran through a chain-link fence, turned right, and dashed up to the crest of the overpass. He stood at the side of the overpass and looked down as Dammers’s car approached, gaining speed.

Lucy was struggling in the back of the car as the stereo blasted. “This is the end of your career, you bastard!” she screamed. “Add kidnapping to the murder charge I’ll bring against you if Frank dies.”

“Bannister is already dead and nicely on ice,” Dammers shot back.

“You won’t get away with this, Dammers.”

“We’ll see who gets away with what,” Dammers replied, speeding up and pulling into the center lane.

The Reaper was visible through the rearview mirror of the car as it gradually caught up with the vehicle. It leaped onto the trunk and moved swiftly from there to the roof, where it clung on like a gigantic spider, hands and feet looking like claws to the edges of the roof, cloak whipping around in the wind caused by the moving car.

The Reaper plunged its hand down through the roof of the car, reaching for Lucy’s heart. But she had thrown herself to the left side of the car, the side on which there was the most traffic, and was beating against the window and screaming, trying to attract the attention of other drivers.

Without knowing it, she slipped away from the Reaper’s deadly fingers.

From above, Frank saw the Reaper clinging to the roof of the squad car. He leaped onto the railing, carefully judging the moment to spring, as the squad car raced along in increasingly thick traffic. He jumped, but his body didn’t exactly drop. Instead, it gently floated down, wafting on the air currents soaring around as a steady stream of traffic went under the overpass.

Floating along like an autumn leaf, Frank watched helplessly as the squad car passed beneath him and sped away. “Goddammit,” he yelled, and kicked at the air.

“Dammers, you bastard,” he swore, shaking a ghostly fist. As he watched the car recede into the distance, he suddenly floated through the roof of a speeding bus.

He landed on the floor, in the aisle, amid a bus full of gamblers on their way to Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut. These were solid Maine citizens, mostly middle-aged or older, dressed in their Sunday best and on the way for a two-day junket to lose their money in the gambling empire an Indian tribe had built in the Connecticut woods. Half of them were poring over color brochures showing the wonders of the casino. Frank scrambled to his feet and dashed toward the front of the bus, sending the brochures flying into the air.

A few people screamed. The bus driver got on the PA system and said, “Don’t worry, folks, it’s just a draft from that jammed AC vent. I’ll have it fixed before you’re ready for the trip home. Just settle down and enjoy the ride.”

That was the moment that Frank jammed his foot down on the accelerator. As the driver gasped and fought for control and the passengers ducked behind their seats, the huge, brightly painted charter bus rocketed forward—doing fifty, fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five, then seventy miles per hour.

Frank relinquished control to the driver and leaped out the front of the bus. He hit the ground running at seventy mph and soon was doing seventy-five and then eighty. He quickly began to gain ground on the squad car.

Sixteen

A
t eighty-five mph, Frank’s emanation became an almost amorphous fluid, his body discombobulating in the slipstream. He reached the back bumper of the squad car, close enough to see the Reaper atop it and Lucy struggling within.

“Lucy!” he yelled.

She couldn’t hear, but the Reaper looked around and hissed, its yellow eyes glaring at the sight of its persistent enemy. With a mighty leap, Frank hurled himself forward onto the car and grabbed the creature by the ankles. Hissing and growling, the Reaper was pulled off the roof of the squad car. Frank and the creature tumbled onto the road at high speed, rolling over and over in a tangle as Dammers drove off into the darkness. Cars sped through Frank and the Reaper as they grappled.

Frank had the creature by the throat. It frantically snapped and hissed, more like a wild animal than anything human. As they rolled to a halt Frank freed one hand and punched the Reaper again and again. He could see the thing more clearly now; its features changed with each blow. The horrible, skeletal eye sockets became more and more human with each punch.

Frank paused. Although distorted and still grotesque, the face was becoming to look . . . well, familiar.

“Who are you?” Frank groaned between clenched teeth.

For an answer, the Reaper roared and threw Frank off. He rolled away into the stream of traffic and was buffeted around by the speeding cars and trucks.

The Reaper sprang to its feet, producing the wooden staff from beneath the cloak. With a loud click, the steel blade locked into place.

Frank backed away as the Reaper approached, scythe raised. The creature charged then, swinging the awful weapon at Frank, narrowly missing him.

As a convoy of trucks sped by, their slipstreams caused both Frank and the Reaper to spin and float. Both were off their feet and wafting in midair, like feathers sucked down a country road behind a pickup truck. At one point the Reaper swung his scythe again at Frank. This time, to get away Frank had to dive to the ground—where he was immediately flattened by the wheels of a huge truck.

He re-formed his shape and turned to run—straight into the path of oncoming traffic. The Reaper was hot on his heels, scythe at the ready. Another bus was coming. They ran straight through it, their heads and shoulders visible above the floor of the speeding bus—this one carrying a group of mystery writers on their way to the annual Stephen King Convention in Bangor. In a flash they were out the back of the bus. Bannister was running as fast as he could, but the Reaper was gaining on him. More cars, trucks, and buses passed through them in quick succession.