Phantoms (49 page)

The shape-changer bulged across the width of the room. It was now larger than an elephant.

As the thing engaged upon a continuous, relentless, mysterious pattern of apparently purposeless change, Jenny and the others edged back toward the windows.

Outside, in the street, the fog roiled in its own formless dance, as if it were a ghostly reflection of the shape-changer.

Flyte spoke with a sudden urgency, answering the questions that Sara Yamaguchi had posed, as if he felt he didn’t have much time left to explain. “About twenty years ago, it occurred to me that there might be a connection between mass disappearances and the unexplained extinction of certain species in pre-human geological eras. Like the dinosaurs, for instance.”

The shape-changer pulsed and throbbed, towering almost to the ceiling, filling the entire far end of the room.

Lisa clung to Jenny.

A vague but repellent odor laced the air. Slightly sulphurous. Like a draft from Hell.

“There are a host of theories purporting to explain the demise of the dinosaurs,” Flyte said. “But no single theory answers all the questions. So I wondered . . . what if the dinosaurs were exterminated by another creature, a natural enemy, that was a superior hunter and fighter? It would have to have been something large. And it would have been something with a very frail skeleton or perhaps with no skeleton whatsoever, for we’ve never found a fossil record of any species that would have given those great saurians a real battle.”

A shudder passed through the entire bulk of tenebrous, churning slime. Across the oozing mass, dozens of faces began to appear.

“And what if,” Flyte said, “several of those amoeboid creatures had survived through millions of years . . .”

Human and animal faces arose from the amorphous flesh, shimmered in it.

“... living in subterranean rivers or lakes . . .”

There were faces that had no eyes. Others had no mouths. But then the eyes appeared, blinked open. They were achingly real, penetrating eyes, filled with pain and fear and misery.

“... or in deep ocean trenches . . .”

And mouths cracked into existence on those previously seamless countenances.

“. . . thousands of feet below the surface of the sea . . .”

Lips formed around the gaping mouths.

“. . . preying on marine life . . .”

The phantom faces were screaming, yet they made no sounds.

“. . . infrequently rising to feed . . .”

Cat faces. Dog faces. Prehistoric reptile visages. Ballooning up from the slime.

“. . . and even less frequently feeding on human beings . . .”

To Jenny, the human faces looked as if they were peering out from the far side of a smoky mirror. None of them ever quite finished taking shape. They
had
to melt away, for there were countless new faces surging and coalescing beneath them. It was an endlessly flickering shadow show of the lost and the damned.

Then the faces stopped forming.

The huge mass was quiescent for a moment, slowly and almost imperceptibly pulsing, but otherwise still.

Sara Yamaguchi was groaning softly.

Jenny held Lisa close.

No one spoke. For several seconds, no one even dared breathe.

Then, in a new demonstration of its plasticity, the ancient enemy abruptly sprouted a score of tentacles. Some of them were thick, with the suction pads of a squid or an octopus. Others were thin and ropy; some of these were smooth, and some were segmented; they were even more obscene than the fat, moist-looking tentacles. Some of the appendages slid back and forth across the floor, knocking over chairs and pushing tables aside, while others wriggled in the air, like cobras swaying to the music of a snake charmer.

Then it struck. It moved fast, gushed forward.

Jenny stumbled back one step. She was at the end of the room.

The many tentacles snapped toward them, whiplike, cutting the air with a hiss.

Lisa could no longer keep from looking. She gasped at what she saw.

In just a fraction of a second, the tentacles grew dramatically.

A rope of cold, slick, utterly alien flesh fell across the back of Jenny’s hand. It curled around her wrist.

With a shudder of relief, she pulled loose. It hadn’t taken much effort to free herself. Evidently, the thing really wasn’t interested in her; not now; not yet.

She crouched as tentacles lashed the air above her head, and Lisa huddled with her.

In his haste to get out of the creature’s way, Flyte tripped and fell.

A tentacle moved toward him.

Flyte scooted backwards across the floor, came to the wall.

The tentacle followed, hovered over him, as if it would smash him. Then it moved away. It wasn’t interested in Flyte, either.

Although the gesture was pointless, Bryce fired his revolver.

Tal shouted something Jenny couldn’t understand. He moved in front of her and Lisa, between them and the shape-changer.

After passing over Sara, the thing seized Frank Autry.
That
was who it wanted. Two thick tentacles snapped around Frank’s torso and dragged him away from the others.

Kicking, flailing with his fists, clawing at the thing that held him, Frank cried out wordlessly, face contorted with horror.

Everyone was screaming now—even Bryce, even Tal.

Bryce went after Frank. Clutched his right arm. Tried to pull him away from the beast, which was relentlessly reeling him in.

“Get it off me! Get it off me!” Frank shouted.

Bryce tried peeling one of the tentacles away from the deputy.

Another of the thick, slimy appendages swept up from the floor, whirled, whipped, struck Bryce with tremendous force, sent him sprawling.

Frank was lifted off the floor and held in midair. His eyes bulged as he looked down at the dark, oozing, changing bulk of the ancient enemy. He kicked and fought to no avail.

Yet another pseudopod erupted from the central mass of the shape-changer and rose into the air, trembling with savage eagerness. Along part of the tentacle’s repulsive length, the mottled gray-maroon-red-brown skin seemed to dissolve. Raw, weeping tissue appeared.

Lisa gagged.

It wasn’t just the sight of the suppurating flesh that was loathsome and sickening. The foul odor had gotten stronger, too.

A yellowish fluid began to drip from the open wound in the tentacle. Where the drops struck the floor, they sizzled and foamed and ate into the tile.

Jenny heard someone say, “Acid!”

Frank’s screaming became a desperate, piercing shriek of terror and despair.

The acid-dripping tentacle slipped sinuously around the deputy’s neck and drew as tight as a garrote.

“Oh, Jesus, no!”

“Don’t look,” Jenny told Lisa.

The shape-changer was showing them how it had beheaded Jakob and Aida Liebermann. Like a child showing off.

Frank Autry’s scream died in a bubbling, mucous-thick, blood-choked gurgle. The flesh-eating tentacle cut through his neck with startling quickness. Only a second or two after Frank was silenced, his head popped loose and fell to the floor, smashed into the tiles.

Jenny tasted bile in the back of her throat, choked it down. Sara Yamaguchi was sobbing.

The thing still held Frank’s headless body in midair. Now, in the mass of shapeless tissue from which the tentacles sprouted, a huge toothless maw opened hungrily. It was more than large enough to swallow a man whole. The tentacles drew the deputy’s decapitated corpse into the gaping, ragged mouth. The dark flesh oozed around the body. Then the mouth closed up tight and ceased to exist.

Frank Autry had ceased to exist, too.

 

 

Bryce stared in shock at Frank’s severed head. The sightless eyes gazed at him, through him.

Frank was gone. Frank, who had survived several wars, who had survived a life of dangerous work, had not survived this.

Bryce thought of Ruth Autry. His heart, already jackhammering, twisted with grief as he pictured Ruth alone. She and Frank had been exceptionally close. Breaking the news to her would be painful.

The tentacles shrank back into the pulsing glob of shapeless tissue; in a second or two, they were gone.

The formless, rippling hulk filled a third of the room.

Bryce could imagine it oozing swiftly through prehistoric swamps, blending with the muck, creeping up on its prey. Yes, it would have been more than a match for the dinosaurs.

Earlier, he had believed that the shape-changer had spared him and a few of the others so that they could entice Flyte to Snowfield. Now he realized this wasn’t the case. It could have consumed them and then imitated their voices on the telephone, and Flyte would have been coaxed to Snowfield just as easily. It had saved them for some other reason. Perhaps it had spared them only in order to kill them, one at a time, in front of Flyte, so that Flyte would be able to see precisely how it functioned.

Christ
.

The shape-changer towered over them, quivering gelatinously, its entire grotesque bulk pulsating as if with the unsynchronized beats of a dozen hearts.

In a voice even shakier than Bryce felt, Sara Yamaguchi said, “I wish there was some way we could get a tissue sample. I’d give anything to be able to study it under a microscope . . . get some idea of the cell structure. Maybe we could find a weakness . . . a way to deal with it, maybe even a way to defeat it.”

Flyte said, “I’d like to study it . . . just to be able to understand . . . just to
know.”

An extrusion of tissue oozed out from the center of the shapeless mass. It began to acquire a human form. Bryce was shocked to see Gordy Brogan coalescing in front of him. Before the phantom was entirely realized, while the body was still lumpy and half detailed, and although the face wasn’t finished, the mouth nevertheless opened and the replica of Gordy spoke, though not with Gordy’s voice. It was Stu Wargle’s voice, instead, a supremely disconcerting touch.

“Go to the lab,” it said, its mouth only half formed, yet speaking with perfect clarity. “I will show you everything you want to see, Dr. Flyte. You are my Matthew. My Luke. Go to the lab. Go to the lab.”

The unfinished image of Gordy Brogan dissolved almost as if it had been composed of smoke.

The extruded man-size lump of gnarled tissue flowed back into the larger bulk behind it.

The entire pulsating, heaving mass began to surge back through the umbilical that led up the wall and into the heating duct.

How much more of it lies there within the walls of the inn? Bryce wondered uneasily. How much more of it waits down in the storm drains? How large
is
the god Proteus?

As the thing oozed away from them, oddly shaped orifices opened all over it, none bigger than a human mouth, a dozen of them, two dozen, and noises issued forth: the chirruping of birds, the cries of sea gulls, the buzzing of bees, snarling, hissing, child-sweet laughter, distant singing, the hooting of an owl, the maracalike warning of a rattlesnake. Those noises, all ringing out simultaneously, blended into an unpleasant, irritating, decidedly ominous chorus.

Then the shape-changer was gone back through the wall vent. Only Frank’s severed head and the bent grille from the heating duct remained as proof that something Hell-born had been here.

According to the electric wall clock, the time was 3:44.

The night was nearly gone.

How long until dawn? Bryce wondered. An hour and a half? An hour and forty minutes or more?

He supposed it didn’t matter.

He didn’t expect to live to see the sunrise, anyway.

The door of the second lab stood wide open. The lights were on. The computer screens glowed. Everything was ready for them.

Jenny had been trying to hold to the belief that they could still somehow resist, that they still had a chance, however small, of influencing the course of events. Now that fragile, cherished belief was blown away. They were powerless. They would do only what it wanted, go only where
it
allowed.

The six of them crowded inside the lab.

“Now what?” Lisa asked.

“We wait,” Jenny said.

Flyte, Sara, and Lisa sat down at the three bright video display terminals. Jenny and Bryce leaned against a counter, and Tal stood by the open door, looking out.

Fog foamed past the door.

We wait,
Jenny had told Lisa. But waiting wasn’t easy. Each second was an ordeal of tense and morbid expectations.

Where would death come from next?

And in what fantastic form?

And to whom would it come this time?

At last Bryce said, “Dr. Flyte, if these prehistoric creatures have survived for millions of years in underground lakes and rivers, in the deepest sea trenches . . . or wherever. . . and if they surface to feed . . . then why aren’t mass disappearances more common?”

Flyte pulled at his chin with one thin, long-fingered hand and said, “Because it seldom encounters human beings.”

“But why seldom?”

“I doubt that more than a handful of these beasts have survived. There may have been a climatic change that killed off most and drove the few remaining into a subterranean and suboceanic existence.”

“Nevertheless, even a few of them—”

“A rare few,” Flyte stressed, “scattered over the earth. And perhaps they feed only infrequently. Consider the boa constrictor, for example. That snake takes nourishment only once every few weeks. So perhaps this thing feeds irregularly, as seldom as once every several months or even once every couple of years. Its metabolism is so utterly different from ours that almost anything may be possible.”

“Could its life cycle include periods of hibernation,” Sara asked, “lasting not just a season or two, but years at a time?”