Phantoms

by Dean Koontz

  “It sounds like him,” Bryce admitted.

  “Well, there you are!” Copperfield said. “Nothing mysterious about it, after all. He’s been right here all this time.”

  Bryce glared at the general. “I told you we searched everywhere last night. Even in the goddamned meat locker. He wasn’t there.”

  “Well, he is now,” the general said.

  “Hey, out there! I’m c-cold. Can’t m-m-move this ... damned leg!”

  Jenny touched Bryce’s arm. “It’s wrong. It’s all wrong.”

  Copperfield said, “Sheriff, we can’t just stand here and allow an injured man to suffer.”

  “If Jake had really been in there all night,” Frank Autry said, “he would’ve frozen to death by now.”

  “Well, if it’s a meat locker,” Copperfield said, “then the air inside isn’t freezing. It’s just cold. If the man was warmly dressed he might easily have survived this long.”

  “But how’d he get in there in the first place?” Frank asked. “What the devil’s he been doing in there?”

  “And he wasn’t in there last night,” Tal said impatiently.

  Jake Johnson called for help again.

  “There’s danger here,” Bryce told Copperfield. “I sense it. My men sense it. Dr. Paige senses it.”

  “I don’t,” Copperfield said.

  “General, you just haven’t been in Snowfield long enough to understand that you’ve got to expect the utterly unexpected.”

  “Like moths the size of eagles?”

  Biting back his anger, Bryce said, “You haven’t been here long enough to understand that... well... nothing’s quite what it seems.”

  Copperfield studied him skeptically. “Don’t get mystical on me, Sheriff.”

  In the meat locker, Jake Johnson began to cry. His whimpering pleas were awful to hear. He sounded like a pain-racked, terrified old man. He didn’t sound the least bit dangerous.

  “We’ve got to help that man now,” Copperfield said.

  “I’m not risking my men,” Bryce said. “Not yet.”

  Copperfield again ordered Sergeant Harker and Private Pascalli to look in the meat locker. Although it was obvious from his demeanor that he didn’t think there was much danger for men armed with submachine guns, he told them to proceed with caution. The general still believed the enemy was something as small as a bacterium or a molecule of nerve gas.

  The two soldiers hurried along the rows of coolers toward the gate that led into the butcher’s work area.

  Frank said, “If Jake could open the door, why couldn’t he push it completely open and let us see him?”

  “He probably used up the last of his strength just getting the door unlatched,” Copperfield said. “You can hear it in his voice, for God’s sake. Utter exhaustion.”

  Harker and Pascalli went through the gate, behind the coolers.

  Bryce’s hand tightened on the butt of his holstered revolver.

  Tal Whitman said, “There’s too much wrong with this setup, damn it. If it’s really Jake, if he needs help, why did he wait until now to open the door?”

  “The only way we’ll find out is to ask him,” the general said.

  “No, I mean, there’s an outside entrance to that locker,” Tal said. “He could’ve opened the door earlier and shouted out into the alley. As quiet as this town is, we’d have heard him all the way over at the Hilltop.”

  “Maybe he’s been unconscious until now,” Copperfield said.

  Harker and Pascalli were moving past the worktables and the electric meat saw.

  Jake Johnson called out again: “Is someone ... coming? Is someone... coming now?”

  Jenny began to raise another objection, but Bryce said, “Save your breath.”

  “Doctor,” Copperfield said, “can you actually expect us to just ignore the man’s cries for help?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “But we ought to take time to think of a safe way of having a look in there.”

  Shaking his head, Copperfield interrupted her: “We’ve got to attend to him without delay. Listen to him, Doctor. He’s hurt bad.”

  Jake was moaning in pain again.

  Harker moved toward the meat locker door.

  Pascalli dropped back a couple of paces and over to one side, covering his sergeant as best he could.

  Bryce felt the muscles bunching with tension in his back, across his shoulders, and in his neck.

  Harker was at the door.

  “No,” Jenny said softly.

  The locker door was hinged to swing inward. Harker reached out with the barrel of his submarine gun and shoved the door all the way open. The cold hinges rasped and squealed.

  That sound sent a shiver through Bryce.

  Jake wasn’t sprawled in the doorway. He wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  Past the sergeant, nothing could be seen except the hanging sides of beef: dark, fat-mottled, bloody.

  Harker hesitated—

  (Don’t do it! Bryce thought.)

  —and then plunged through the doorway. He crossed the threshold in a crouch, looking left and swinging the gun that way, then almost instantly looking right and bringing the muzzle around.

  To his right, Harker saw something. He jerked upright in surprise and fear. Stumbling hastily backwards, he collided with a side of beef. “Holy shit!”

  Harker punctuated his cry with a short burst of fire from his submachine gun.

  Bryce winced. The boom-rattle of the weapon was thunderous.

  Something pushed against the far side of the meat locker door and slammed it shut.

  Harker was trapped in there with it. It.

  “Christ!” Bryce said.

  Not wasting the time it would have taken to run to the gate, Bryce clambered up onto the waist-high cooler in front of him, stepping on packets of Kraft Swiss cheese and wax-encased gouda. He scrambled across and dropped off the other side, into the butcher’s area.

  Another burst of gunfire. Longer this time. Maybe even long enough to empty the gun’s magazine.

  Pascalli was at the locker door, struggling frantically with the handle.

  Bryce rounded the worktables. “What’s wrong?”

  Private Pascalli looked too young to be in the army—and very scared.

  “Let’s get him the hell out of there!” Bryce said.

  “Can’t! This fucker won’t open!”

  Inside the meat locker, the gunfire stopped.

  The screaming began.

  Pascalli wrenched desperately at the unrelenting handle.

  Although the thick, insulated door muffled Harker’s screams, they were nevertheless loud, and they swiftly grew even louder. Coming through the walkie-talkie built into Pascalli’s suit, the agonized wailing must have been deafening, for the private suddenly put a hand to his helmeted head as if trying to block out the sound.

  Bryce pushed the soldier aside. He gripped the long, lever-action door handle with both hands. It wouldn’t budge up or down.

  In the locker, the piercing screams rose and fell and rose, getting louder and shriller and more horrifying.

  What in the hell is it doing to Harker? Bryce wondered. Skinning the poor bastard alive?

  He looked toward the coolers. Tal had scrambled over the display case and was coming on the double. The general and another soldier, Private Fodor, were rushing through the gate. Frank had jumped onto one of the coolers but was facing out toward the main part of the store, guarding against the possibility that the commotion at the meat locker was just a diversion. Everyone else was still standing in a group, in the aisle beyond the coolers.

  Bryce shouted, “Jenny!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Does this store have a hardware section?”

  “Odds and ends.”

  “I need a screwdriver.”

  “Can do.” She was already running.

  Harker screamed.

  Jesus, what a terrible cry it was. Out of a nightmare. Out of a lunatic asylum. Out of Hell.


  Just listening to it caused Bryce to break out in a cold sweat.

  Copperfield reached the locker. “Let me at that handle.”

  “It’s no use.”

  “Let me at it!”

  Bryce got out of the way.

  The general was a big brawny man—the biggest man here, in fact. He looked strong enough to uproot century-old oaks. Straining, cursing, he moved the door handle no farther than Bryce had done.

  “The goddamned latch must be broken or bent,” Copperfield said, panting.

  Harker screamed and screamed.

  Bryce thought of Liebermann’s Bakery. The rolling pin on the table. The hands. The severed hands. This was the way a man might scream while he watched his hands being cut off at the wrists.

  Copperfield pounded on the door in rage and frustration.

  Bryce glanced at Tal. This was a first: Talbert Whitman visibly frightened.

  Calling to Bryce, Jenny came through the gate. She had three screwdrivers, each of them sealed in a brightly colored cardboard and plastic package.

  “Didn’t know which size you needed,” she said.

  “Okay,” Bryce said, reaching for the tools, “now get out of here fast. Go back with the others.”

  Ignoring his command, she gave him two of the screwdrivers, but she held on to the third.

  Harker’s screams had become so shrill, so awful, that they no longer sounded human.

  As Bryce ripped open one package, Jenny tore the third bright yellow container to shreds and extracted the screwdriver from it.

  “I’m a doctor. I stay.”

  “He’s beyond any doctor’s help,” Bryce said, frantically tearing open the second package.

  “Maybe not. If you thought there wasn’t a chance, you wouldn’t be trying to get him out of there.”

  “Damn it, Jenny!”

  He was worried about her, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to persuade her to leave if she had already made up her mind to stay.

  He took the third screwdriver from her, shouldered past General Copperfield, and returned to the door.

  He couldn’t remove the door’s hinge pins. It swung into the locker, so the hinges were on the inside.

  But the lever-action handle fitted through a large cover plate behind which lay the lock mechanism. The plate was fastened to the face of the door by four screws. Bryce hunkered down in front of it, selected the most suitable screwdriver, and removed the first screw, letting it drop to the floor.

  Harker’s screaming stopped.

  The ensuing silence was almost worse than the screams.

  Bryce removed the second, third, and fourth screws.

  There was still no sound from Sergeant Harker.

  When the cover plate was loose, Bryce slid it along the handle, pulled it free, and discarded it. He squinted at the guts of the lock, probed at the mechanism with the screwdriver. In response, ragged bits of torn metal popped out of the lock; other pieces rattled down through a hollow space in the interior of the door. The lock had been thoroughly mangled from within the door. He found the manual release slot in the shaft of the latch bolt, slid the screwdriver through it, pulled to the right. The spring seemed to have been badly bent or sprung, for there was very little play left in it. Nevertheless, he drew the bolt back far enough to bring it out of the hole in the jamb, then pushed inward. Something clicked; the door started to swing open.

  Everyone, including Bryce, backed out of the way.

  The door’s own weight contributed sufficiently to its momentum, so that it continued to swing slowly, slowly inward.

  Private Pascalli was covering it with his submachine gun, and Bryce drew his own handgun, as did Copperfield, although Sergeant Harker had conclusively proved that such weapons were useless.

  The door swung all the way open.

  Bryce expected something to rush out at them. Nothing did.

  Looking through the doorway and across the locker, he could see that the outer door was open, too, which it definitely hadn’t been when Harker had gone inside a couple of minutes ago. Beyond it lay the sun-splashed alleyway.

  Copperfield ordered Pascalli and Fodor to secure the locker. They went through the door fast, one turning to the left, the other to the right, out of sight.

  In a few seconds, Pascalli returned. “It’s all clear, sir.”

  Copperfield went into the locker, and Bryce followed.

  Harker’s submachine gun was on the floor.

  Sergeant Harker was hanging from the ceiling meat rack, next to a side of beef—hanging on an enormous, wickedly pointed, two-pronged meat hook that had been driven through his chest.

  Bryce’s stomach heaved. He started to turn away from the hanging man—and then realized it wasn’t really Harker. It was only the sergeant’s decontamination suit and helmet, hanging slack, empty. The tough vinyl fabric was slashed. The Plexiglas faceplate was broken and torn half out of the rubber gasket into which it had been firmly set. Harker had been pulled from the suit before it had been impaled.

  But where was Harker?

  Gone.

  Another one. Just gone.

  Pascalli and Fodor were out on the loading platform, looking up and down the alleyway.

  “All that screaming,” Jenny said, stepping up beside Bryce, “yet there’s no blood on the floor or on the suit.”

  Tal Whitman scooped up several expended shell casings that had been spat out by the submachine gun; scores of them littered the floor. The brass casings gleamed in his open palm. “Lots of these, but I don’t see many slugs. Looks like the sergeant hit what he was shooting at. Must’ve scored at least a hundred hits. Maybe two hundred. How many rounds are in one of those big magazines, General?”

  Copperfield stared at the shiny casings but didn’t answer.

  Pascalli and Fodor came back in from the loading platform, and Pascalli said, “There’s no sign of him out there, sir. You want us to search farther along the alley?”

  Before Copperfield could respond, Bryce said, “General, you’ve got to write off Sergeant Harker, painful as that might be. He’s dead. Don’t hold out any hope for him. Death is what this is all about. Death. Not hostage-taking. Not terrorism. Not nerve gas. There’s nothing halfway about this. We’re playing for all the marbles. I don’t know exactly what the hell’s out there or where it came from, but I do know that it’s Death personified. Death is out there in some form we can’t even imagine yet, driven by some purpose we might never understand. The moth that killed Stu Wargle—that wasn’t even the true appearance of this thing. I feel it. The moth was like the reanimation of Wargle’s body, when he went after Lisa in the restroom: It was a bit of misdirection ... sleight-of-hand.”

  “A phantom,” Tal said, using the word that Copperfield had introduced with somewhat different meaning.

  “A phantom, yes,” Bryce said. “We haven’t yet encountered the real enemy. It’s something that just plain likes to kill. It can kill quickly and silently, the way it took Jake Johnson. But it killed Harker more slowly, hurting him real bad, making him scream. Because it wanted us to hear those screams. Harker’s murder was sort of like what you said about T-139: It was a demoralizer. This thing didn’t carry Sergeant Harker away. It got him, General. It got him. Don’t risk the lives of more men searching for a corpse.”

  Copperfield was silent for a moment. Then he said, “But the voice we heard. It was your man, Jake Johnson.”

  “No,” Bryce said. “I don’t think it really was Jake. It sounded like him, but now I’m beginning to suspect we’re up against something that’s a terrific mimic.”

  “Mimic?” Copperfield said.

  Jenny looked at Bryce. “Those animal sounds on the telephone.”

  “Yeah. The cats, dogs, birds, rattlesnakes, the crying child ... It was almost like a performance. As if it were bragging: ‘Hey, look what I can do; look how clever I am.’ Jake Johnson’s voice was just one more impersonation in its repertoire.”

  “What are you
proposing?” Copperfield asked. “Something supernatural?”

  “No. This is real.”

  “Then what? Put a name to it,” Copperfield demanded.

  “I can’t, damn it,” Bryce said. “Maybe it’s a natural mutation or even something that came out of a genetic engineering lab somewhere. You know anything about that, General? Maybe the army’s got an entire goddamned division of geneticists creating biological fighting machines, man-made monsters designed to slaughter and terrorize, creatures stitched together from the DNA of half a dozen animals. Take some of the genetic structure of the tarantula and combine it with some of the genetic structure of the crocodile, the cobra, the wasp, maybe even the grizzly bear, and then insert the genes for human intelligence just for the hell of it. Put it all in a test tube; incubate it; nurture it. What would you get? What would it look like? Do I sound like a raving lunatic for even proposing such a thing? Frankenstein with a modern twist? Have they actually gone that far with recombinant DNA research? Maybe I shouldn’t even have ruled out the supernatural. What I’m trying to say, General, is that it could be anything. That’s why I can’t put a name to it. Let your imagination run wild, General. No matter what hideous thing you conjure up, we can’t rule it out. We’re dealing with the unknown, and the unknown encompasses all our nightmares.”

  Copperfield stared at him, then looked up at Sergeant Harker’s suit and helmet which hung from the meat hook. He turned to Pascalli and Fodor. “We won’t search the alley. The sheriff is probably right. Sergeant Harker is lost, and there’s nothing we can do for him.”

  For the fourth time since Copperfield had arrived in town, Bryce said, “Do you still think it looks as if we’re dealing with just a simple incident of CBW?”

  “Chemical or biological agents might be involved,” Copperfield said. “As you observed, we can’t rule out anything. But it’s not a simple case. You’re right about that, Sheriff. I’m sorry for suggesting you were only hallucinating and—”

  “Apology accepted,” Bryce said.

  “Any theories?” Jenny asked.

  “Well,” Copperfield said, “I want to start the first autopsy and pathology tests right away. Maybe we won’t find a disease or a nerve gas, but we still might find something that’ll give us a clue.”

  “You’d better do that, sir,” Tal said. “Because I have a hunch that time is running out.”

  25

  Questions