Phantoms (40 page)

Then a cat squealed.

A horse whinnied.

The general glanced around the mobile lab, frowning.

Rattlesnakes. A lot of them. The familiar, deadly sound:
chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka.

Buzzing bees.

The others heard it, too. They looked at one another uneasily.

Roberts said, “It’s coming through the suit-to-suit radio.”

“Affirmative,” Dr. Bettenby said from over in the second motor home. “We hear it here, too.”

“Okay,” Copperfield said, “let’s give it a chance to perform. If you want to speak to one another, use your external com systems.”

The bees stopped buzzing.

A child—the sex indeterminate; androgynous—began to sing very softly, far away:

The voice was sweet. Melodic.

Yet it was also blood-freezing.

Copperfield had never heard anything quite like it. Although it was a child’s voice, tender and fragile, it nevertheless contained . . . something that shouldn’t be in a child’s voice. A profound lack of innocence. Knowledge, perhaps. Yes. Too much knowledge of too many terrible things. Menace. Hatred. Scorn. It wasn’t audible on the surface of the lilting song, but it was there beneath the surface, pulsing and dark and immeasurably disturbing.

“They told us about this,” Goldstein said. “Dr. Paige and the sheriff. They heard it on the phone and coming out of the kitchen drains at the inn. We didn’t believe them; it sounded so ridiculous.”

“Doesn’t sound ridiculous now,” Roberts said.

“No,” Goldstein said. Even inside his bulky suit, his shivering was visible.

“It’s broadcasting on the same wavelength as our suit radios,” Roberts said.

“But how?” Copperfield wondered.

“Velazquez,” Goldstein said suddenly.

“Of course,” Roberts said. “Velazquez’s suit had a radio. It’s broadcasting through Velazquez’s radio.”

The child stopped singing. In a whispery voice, it said,
“Better say your prayers. Everyone say your prayers. Don’t forget to say your prayers.”
Then it giggled.

They waited for something more.

There was only silence.

“I think it was threatening us,” Roberts said.

“Damn it, put a lid on that kind of talk right now,” Copperfield said. “Let’s not panic ourselves.”

“Have you noticed we’re saying
it
now?” Goldstein asked.

Copperfield and Roberts looked at him and then at each other, but they said nothing.

“We’re saying
it
the same way that Dr. Paige and the sheriff and the deputies do. So . . . have we come completely around to their way of thinking?”

In his mind, Copperfield could still hear the child’s haunting, human-yet-not-human voice.

“Come on,” he said gruffly. “We’ve still got a lot of work to get done.”

He turned his attention back to the computer terminal, but he had difficulty concentrating.

 

 

By 4:30 Monday afternoon, Bryce called off the house-to-house search. A couple of hours of daylight remained, but everyone was bone weary. Weary from climbing up and down stairs. Weary of grotesque corpses. Weary of nasty surprises. Weary of the extent of the human tragedy, of horror that numbed the senses. Weary of the fear knotted in their chests. Constant tension was as tiring as heavy manual labor.

Besides, it had become apparent to Bryce that the job was simply too big for them. In five and a half hours, they had covered only a small portion of the town. At that rate, confined to a daylight schedule, and with their limited numbers, they would need at least two weeks to give Snowfield a thorough inspection. Furthermore, if the missing people didn’t turn up by the time the last building was explored, and if a clue to their whereabouts could not be found, then an even more difficult search of the surrounding forest would have to be undertaken.

Last night, Bryce hadn’t wanted the National Guard tramping through town. But now he and his people had had the town to themselves for the better part of a day, and Copperfield’s specialists had collected their samples and had begun their work. As soon as Copperfield could certify that the town had not been stricken by a bacteriological agent, the Guard could be brought in to assist Bryce’s own men.

Initially, knowing little about the situation here, he had been reluctant to surrender any of his authority over a town in his jurisdiction. But now, although not willing to surrender authority, he was certainly willing to share it. He needed more men. Hour by hour, the responsibility was becoming a crushing weight, and he was ready to shift some of it to other shoulders.

Therefore, at 4:30 Monday afternoon, he took his two search teams back to the Hilltop Inn, placed a call to the governor’s office, and spoke with Jack Retlock. It was agreed that the Guard would be placed on standby for a call-up, pending an all-clear signal from Copperfield.

He had no sooner hung up the phone than Charlie Mercer, the desk-sergeant at HQ in Santa Mira, rang through. He had news. Fletcher Kale had escaped while being taken to the county courthouse for arraignment on two charges of murder in the first degree.

Bryce was furious.

Charlie let him rage on for a while, and when Bryce quieted down, Charlie said, “There’s worse. He killed Joe Freemont.”

“Aw, shit,” Bryce said. “Has Mary been told?”

“Yeah. I Went over there myself.”

“How’s she taking it?”

“Bad. They were married twenty-six years.”

More death.

Death everywhere.

“What about Kale?” Bryce asked Charlie.

“We think he took a car from the apartment complex across the alley. One’s been stolen from that lot. So we put up the roadblocks as soon as we knew Kale slipped, but I figure he had almost an hour’s lead on us.”

“Long gone.”

“Probably. If we don’t nab the son of a bitch by seven o’clock, I want to call the blocks off. We’re so shorthanded—what with everything that’s going on—we can’t keep tying men up on roadblocks.”

“Whatever you think’s best,” Bryce said wearily. “What about the San Francisco police? You know—about that message Harold Ordnay left on the mirror up here?”

“That was the other thing I called about. They finally got back to us.”

“Anything useful?”

“Well, they talked to the employees at Ordnay’s bookstores. You remember, I told you one of the shops deals strictly in out-of-print and rare books. The assistant manager at that store, name of Celia Meddock, recognized the Timothy Flyte moniker.”

“He’s a customer?” Bryce asked.

“No. An author.”

“Author? Of what?”

“One book. Guess the title.”

“How the devil could I . . . Oh. Of course.
The Ancient Enemy.”

“You got it,” Charlie Mercer said.

“What’s the book about?”

“That’s the best part. Celia Meddock says she thinks it’s about mass disappearances throughout history.”

For a moment, Bryce was speechless. Then: “Are you serious? You mean there’ve been a lot of others?”

“I guess so. At least a bookful of ’em.”

“Where? When? How come I’ve never heard about them?”

“Meddock said something about the disappearance of ancient Mayan populations—”

Something stirred in Bryce’s mind. An article he had read in an old science magazine. Mayan civilizations. Abandoned cities.

—and the Roanoke Colony, which was the first British settlement in North America,” Charlie finished.

“That
I’ve heard about. It’s in the schoolbooks.”

“I guess maybe a lot of the other disappearances go back to ancient times,” Charlie said.

“Christ!”

“Yeah. Flyte apparently has some theory to account for such things,” Charlie said. “The book explains it.”

“What’s the theory?”

“The Meddock woman didn’t know. She hasn’t read the book.”

“But Harold Ordnay must’ve read it. And what he saw happening here in Snowfield must’ve been exactly what Flyte wrote about. So Ordnay printed the title on the bathroom mirror.”

“So it seems.”

With a rush of excitement, Bryce said, “Did the San Francisco P.D. get a copy of the book?”

“Nope. Meddock didn’t have one. The only reason she knew about it was because Ordnay recently sold a copy—two, three weeks ago.”

“Can
we
get a copy?”

“It’s out of print. In fact, it never was in print in this country. The copy they sold was British, which is evidently the only edition there ever was—and a small one. It’s a
rare
book.”

“What about the person Ordnay sold it to? The collector. What’s his name and address?”

“Meddock doesn’t remember. She says the guy’s not a heavy customer of theirs. She says Ordnay would probably know.”

“Which doesn’t do us one damned bit of good. Listen, Charlie, I’ve
got
to get a copy of that book.”

“I’m working on it,” Charlie said. “But maybe you won’t need it. You’ll be able to get the whole story from the horse’s mouth. Flyte’s on his way here from London right now.”

 

 

Jenny was sitting on the edge of the central operations desk in the middle of the lobby, gaping at Bryce as he leaned back in his chair; she was amazed by what he had told her. “He’s on his way here from London? Now? Already? You mean he
knew
this was going to happen?”

“Probably not,” Bryce said. “But I guess the minute he heard the news, he knew it was a case that fit his theory.”

“Whatever it is.”

“Whatever.”

Tal was standing in front of the desk. “When’s he due in?”

“He’ll be in San Francisco shortly after midnight. His U.S. publisher has arranged a news conference for him at the airport. Then he’ll come straight to Santa Mira.”

“U.S. publisher?” Frank Autry said. “I thought you told us his book was never in print over here.”

“It wasn’t,” Bryce said. “Evidently, he’s writing a new one.”

“About Snowfield?” Jenny asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

“He sure works fast,” Jenny said, frowning. “Less than a day after it happens, he’s got a contract to write a book about it.”

“I wish he worked even faster. I wish to God he was here right now.”

Tal said, “I think what Doc means is that this Flyte character might just be another sharp hustler out to make a fast buck.”

“Exactly,” Jenny said.

“Could be,” Bryce admitted. “But don’t forget Ordnay wrote Flyte’s name on that mirror. In a way, Ordnay’s the only witness we have. And from his message, we have to deduce that what happened was very much like the thing Timothy Flyte wrote about.”

“Damn,” Frank said. “If Flyte’s really got some information that could help us, he should’ve called. He shouldn’t have made us wait.”

“Yeah,” Tal said. “We could all be dead by midnight. He should have called to tell us what we can do.”

“There’s the rub,” Bryce said.

“What do you mean?” Jenny asked.

Bryce sighed. “Well, I have a hunch that Flyte
would
have called if he could’ve told us how to protect ourselves. Yeah, I think maybe he knows exactly what sort of creature or force we’re dealing with, but I strongly suspect he doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do about it. Regardless of how much he can tell us, I suspect he won’t be able to tell us the one thing we need to know the most
—how to save our asses.”

 

 

Jenny and Bryce were having coffee at the operations desk. They were talking about what they had discovered during today’s search, trying to make sense of senseless things: the mocking crucifixion of the priest; the bullets all over the kitchen floor of the Sheffield house; the bodies in the locked cars . . .

Lisa was sitting nearby. She appeared to be totally involved in a crossword puzzle magazine, which she had picked up somewhere along the search route. Suddenly she looked up and said, “I know why the jewelry was piled in those two sinks.”

Jenny and Bryce looked at her expectantly.

“First,” the girl said, leaning forward on her chair, “you’ve got to accept that all the people who’re missing are really dead. And they are. Dead. No question about that.”

“But there is some question about that, honey,” Jenny said.

“They’re dead,” Lisa said softly. “I know it. So do you.” Her vivid green eyes were almost feverish. “It took them, and it
ate
them.”

Jenny recalled Lisa’s response last night, at the substation, after Bryce had told them about hearing tortured screams on the phone, when
it
had been in control of the line. Lisa had said,
Maybe it spun a web somewhere, down in a dark place, in a cellar or a cave, and maybe it tied all the missing people into its web, sealed them up in cocoons, alive. Maybe it’s just saving them until it gets hungry again.

Last night, everyone had stared at the girl, wanting to laugh, but realizing there could be a crazy sort of truth to what she said. Not necessarily a web or cocoons or a giant spider. But something. None of them had wanted to admit it, but the possibility was there. The unknown. The unknown
thing
. The unknown thing that ate people.

And now Lisa returned to the same theme. “It
ate
them.”

“But how does that explain the jewelry?” Bryce asked.

“Well,” Lisa said, “after it ate the people, maybe it . . . maybe it just spit out all that jewelry . . . the same way you would spit out cherry pits.”