Phantoms

by Dean Koontz

  “Timothy Flyte is a scientist, not a theologian,” Jenny said firmly. “If Flyte’s got an explanation for what’s happening here, it’s strictly scientific, not religious.”

  Gordy wasn’t listening to her. Tears were streaming down his face. His eyes looked glazed. When he tilted his head and stared up at the sky, he was not seeing the sunset; he was apparently seeing, instead, some grand celestial highway on which the archangels and hosts of Heaven would soon descend in their chariots of fire.

  He was in no condition to be entrusted with a loaded gun. Bryce slipped the revolver out of Gordy’s holster and took possession of it. The deputy didn’t even seem to notice.

  Bryce saw that Gordy’s bizarre soliloquy had had a serious effect on Lisa. She looked as if she had been hit very hard, stunned.

  “It’s all right,” Bryce told her. “It’s not really the end of the world. It’s not judgment day. Gordy’s just ... disturbed. We’re going to come through this just fine. Do you believe me, Lisa? Can you keep that pretty chin of yours lifted? Can you be brave for just a little while longer?”

  She didn’t immediately respond. Then she reached into herself and found yet another reserve of strength and nerve. She nodded. She even managed a weak, uncertain smile.

  “You’re a hell of a kid,” he said. “A lot like your big sister.”

  Lisa glanced at Jenny, then brought her eyes back to Bryce again. “You’re a hell of a sheriff,” she said.

  He wondered if his own smile was as shaky as hers.

  He was embarrassed by her trust, for he wasn’t worthy of it.

  I lied to you, girl, he thought. Death is still with us. It’ll strike again. Maybe not for an hour. Maybe not even for a whole day. But sooner or later, it will strike again.

  In fact, although he couldn’t possibly have known it, one of them would die in the next minute.

  32

  Destiny

  In Santa Mira, Fletcher Kale spent the greatest part of Monday afternoon tearing apart Jake Johnson’s house, room by room. He thoroughly enjoyed himself.

  In the walk-in pantry, off the kitchen, he at last located Johnson’s cache. It wasn’t on the shelves, which were crammed full of at least a year’s supply of canned and bottled food, or on the floor with stacks of other supplies. No, the real treasure was under the pantry floor: under the loose linoleum, under the subflooring, in a secret compartment.

  A small, carefully selected, formidable collection of guns was hidden there; each of the weapons was individually wrapped in watertight plastic. Feeling as if it were Christmas morning, Kale unwrapped all of them. There were a pair of Smith & Wesson Combat Magnums, perhaps the best and most powerful handgun in the world. Loaded with .357s, it was the deadliest piece a man could carry, with nearly enough punch to stop a grizzly bear; and with light-loaded .38s, it was an equally useful and extremely accurate gun for small game. One shotgun: a Remington 870 Brushmaster 12-gauge with adjustable rifle sights, a folding stock, a pistol grip, magazine extension, and sling. Two rifles. An M-1 semiautomatic. But far better than that, there was a Heckler & Koch HK91, a superb assault rifle, complete with eight thirty-round magazines, already loaded, and a couple of thousand rounds of additional ammunition.

  For almost an hour, Kale sat examining and playing with the rifles. Fondling them. If the cops happened to spot him on his way to the mountains, they would wish they had looked the other way.

  The hole beneath the pantry also contained money. A lot of it. The bills were in tightly rolled wads, encircled by rubber bands, and then stuffed into five large, well-sealed mason jars; there were anywhere from three to five rolls in each container.

  He took the jars out to the kitchen and stood them on the table. He looked in the refrigerator for a beer, had to settle for a can of Pepsi, sat down at the table, and began to count his treasure.

  $126,880.

  One of the most enduring modern legends of Santa Mira County was the one that concerned Big Ralph Johnson’s secret fortune, amassed (so it was rumored) through graft and bribe-taking. Obviously, this was what remained of Big Ralph’s ill-gotten stash. Just the kind of grubstake Kale needed to start on a new life.

  The ironic thing about finding the stash was that he wouldn’t have had to kill Joanna and Danny if only he’d had this money in his hands last week. This was more than he had needed to bail himself out of his difficulties with High Country Investments.

  A year and a half ago, when he had become a partner in High Country, he couldn’t have foreseen that it would lead to disaster. Back then, it had seemed like the golden opportunity that he knew was destined to come his way sooner or later.

  Each of the partners in High Country Investments had put up one-seventh of the necessary funds to acquire, subdivide, and develop a thirty-acre parcel over at the eastern edge of Santa Mira, on top of Highline Ridge. To get in on the ground floor, Kale had been forced to commit every available dollar he could lay his hands on, but the potential return had seemed well worth the risk.

  However, the Highline Ridge project turned out to be a money-eating monster with a voracious appetite.

  The way the deal was set up, each partner was liable for additional assessments if the initial pool of capital proved inadequate to the task. If Kale (or any other partner) failed to meet an assessment, he was cut of High Country Investments, immediately, without any compensation for what he had already paid in, thank you very much and goodbye. Then the remaining partners became liable for equal portions of his assessment—and acquired equal fractions of his share of the project. It was the sort of arrangement that facilitated the financing of the project by enticing (usually) only those investors who had a lot of liquidity—but it also required an iron stomach and steel nerves.

  Kale hadn’t thought there would be any assessments. The original capital pool had looked more than adequate to him. But he was wrong.

  When the first of the special assessments was levied for thirty-five thousand dollars, he had been shocked but not defeated. He figured they could borrow ten thousand from Joanna’s parents, and there was sufficient equity in their house to arrange refinancing to free another twenty. The last five thousand could be pieced together.

  The only problem was Joanna.

  Right from the start, she hadn’t wanted him to become involved in High Country Investments. She had said the deal was too rich for him, that he should stop trying to play the big-shot wheeler-dealer.

  He had gone ahead anyway, and then the assessment had come, and she reveled in his desperation. Not openly, of course. She was too clever for that. She knew she could play the martyr more effectively than she could play the harpy. She never said I-told-you-so, not directly, but that smug accusation was in her eyes, humiliatingly evident in the way she treated him.

  Finally he talked her into refinancing the house and taking a loan from her parents. It had not been easy.

  He had smiled and nodded and taken all their smarmy advice and snide criticism, but he had promised himself he would eventually rub their faces in all the crap they’d thrown at him. When he hit it big with High Country, he’d make them crawl, Joanna most of all.

  Then, to his consternation, the second special assessment had been levied on the seven partners. It was forty thousand dollars.

  He could have met that obligation, too, if Joanna had sincerely wanted him to succeed. She could have tapped the trust fund for it. When Joanna’s grandmother had died, five months after Danny was born, the old hag had left almost half her estate—eighty thousand dollars—in trust for her only great-grandson. Joanna was appointed the chief administrator of the fund. So when the second assessment came from High Country, she could have taken forty thousand of the trust fund money and paid the bill. But Joanna had refused. She had said, “What if there’s another assessment? You lose everything, Fletch, everything, and Danny loses half of his trust fund, too.” He had tried to make her see that there wouldn’t be a third assessment. But, of course, she would not listen to him
because she didn’t really want him to succeed, because she wanted to see him lose everything and be humiliated, because she wanted to ruin him, break him.

  He’d had no choice but to kill her and Danny. The way the trust was set up, if Danny were to die before his twenty-first birthday, the fund would be dissolved. The money, after taxes, would become Joanna’s property. And if Joanna died, all of her estate went to her husband; that’s what her will said. So if he got rid of both of them, the proceeds of the trust fund—plus a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus in the form of Joanna’s life insurance policy—wound up in his hands.

  The bitch had left him no choice.

  It wasn’t his fault she was dead.

  She had done it to herself, really. She had arranged things so that there wasn’t any other way out for him.

  He smiled, remembering her expression when she had seen the boy’s body—and when she’d seen him point the gun at her.

  Now, sitting at Jake Johnson’s kitchen table, Kale looked at all the money, and his smile grew even broader.

  $126,880.

  A few hours ago, he had been in jail, virtually penniless, facing a trial that could result in a death penalty. Most men would have been immobilized by despair. But Fletcher Kale had not been beaten. He knew he was destined for great things. And here was proof. In an incredibly short time, he had gone from jail to freedom, from penury to $126,880. He now had money, guns, transportation, and a safe hideout in the nearby mountains.

  It had begun at last.

  His special destiny had begun to unfold.

  33

  Phantoms

  Bryce said, “We’d better get back to the inn.”

  Within the next quarter of an hour, night would take possession of the town.

  Shadows were growing with cancerous speed, oozing out of hiding places, where they had slept the day away. They spread toward one another, forming pools of darkness.

  The sky was painted in carnival colors—orange, red, yellow, purple—but it cast only meager light upon Snowfield.

  They turned away from the field lab, where they’d recently had a conversation with it, by way of computer, and they headed toward the corner as the streetlamps came on.

  At the same moment, Bryce heard something. A whimper. A mewling. And then a bark.

  The whole group turned as one and looked back.

  Behind them, a dog was limping along the sidewalk, past the field lab, trying hard to catch up with them. It was an Airedale. Its left foreleg appeared to be broken. Its tongue was lolling. Its hair was lank and knotted; it looked disheveled, whipped. It took another lurching step, paused to lick its wounded leg, and whined pitifully.

  Bryce was riveted by the sudden appearance of the dog. This was the first survivor they had found, not in very good shape, but alive.

  But why was it alive? What was different about him that had saved him when everything else had perished?

  If they could discover the answer, it might help them save themselves.

  Gordy was the first to act.

  The sight of the injured Airedale affected him more strongly than it affected any of the others. He couldn’t bear to see an animal in pain. He would rather suffer himself. His heart started beating faster. This time, the reaction was even stronger than usual, for he knew that this was no ordinary dog needing help and comfort. This Airedale was a sign from God. Yes. A sign that God was giving Gordon Brogan one more chance to accept His gift. He had the same way with animals that St. Francis of Assisi had, and he must not spurn it or take it lightly. If he turned his back on God’s gift, as he had done before, he would be damned for sure this time. But if he chose to help this dog... Tears burned in the corners of Gordy’s eyes; they trickled down his cheeks. Tears of relief and happiness. He was overwhelmed by the mercy of God. There was no doubt what he must do. He hurried toward the Airedale, which was about twenty feet away.

  At first, Jenny was dumbstruck by the dog. She gaped at it. And then a fierce joy began to swell within her. Life had somehow triumphed over death. It hadn’t gotten every living thing in Snowfield, after all. This dog (which sat down wearily when Gordy started toward it) had survived, which meant maybe they, themselves, would manage to leave this town alive—

  —and then she thought of the moth.

  The moth had been a living thing. But it hadn’t been friendly.

  And Stu Wargle’s reanimated corpse.

  Back there on the sidewalk, at the edge of shadows, the dog put its head down on the pavement and whimpered, begging to be comforted.

  Gordy approached it, crouching, speaking in encouraging, loving tones: “Don’t be afraid, boy. Easy, boy. Easy now. What a nice dog you are. Everything’ll be okay. Everything’ll be all right, boy. Easy...”

  Horror rose in Jenny. She opened her mouth to scream, but others beat her to it.

  “Gordy, no!” Lisa cried.

  “Get back!” Bryce shouted, as did Frank Autry.

  Tal shouted: “Get away from it, Gordy!”

  But Gordy didn’t seem to hear them.

  As Gordy drew near the Airedale, it lifted its chin off the sidewalk, raised its square head, and made soft, ingratiating noises. It was a fine specimen. With its leg mended, with its coat washed and brushed and shining, it would be beautiful.

  He put a hand out to the dog.

  It nuzzled him but didn’t lick.

  He stroked it. The poor thing was cold, incredibly cold, and slightly damp.

  “Poor baby,” Gordy said.

  The dog had an odd smell, too. Acrid. Nauseating, really. Gordy had never smelled anything quite like it.

  “Where on earth have you been?” he asked the dog. “What kind of muck have you been rolling around in?”

  The pooch whined and shivered.

  Behind him, Gordy heard the others shouting, but he was much too involved with the Airedale to listen. He got both hands around the dog, lifted it off the pavement, stood up, and held it close to his chest, with its injured leg dangling.

  He had never felt an animal this frigid. It wasn’t just that its coat was wet, and therefore, cold; there didn’t seem to be any heat rising from beneath the coat, either.

  It licked his hand.

  Its tongue was cold.

  Frank stopped shouting. He just stared. Gordy had picked up the mutt, had begun cuddling it and fussing over it, and nothing terrible had happened. So maybe it was just a dog, after all. Maybe it—

  Then.

  The dog licked Gordy’s hand, and a strange expression crossed Gordy’s face, and the dog began to... change.

  Christ.

  It was like a lump of putty being reshaped under an invisible sculptor’s swiftly working hands. The matted hair appeared to melt and change color, then the texture changed, too, until it looked more like scales than anything else, greenish scales, and the head began to sink back into the body, which wasn’t really a body any more, just a shapeless thing, a lump of writhing tissue, and the legs shortened and grew thicker, and all this happened in just five or six seconds, and then—

  Gordy stared in shock at the thing in his hands.

  A lizard head with wicked yellow eyes began to take form in the amorphous mass into which the dog had degenerated. The lizard’s mouth appeared in the puddinglike tissue, and a forked tongue flickered, and there were lots of pointy little teeth.

  Gordy tried to throw the thing down, but it clung to him, Jesus, clung tight to him, as if it had reshaped itself around his hands and arms, as if his hands were actually inside of it now.

  Then it ceased to be cold. Suddenly it was warm. And then hot. Painfully hot.

  Before the lizard had completely risen out of the throbbing mass of tissue, it began to dissolve, and a new animal started to take shape, a fox, but the fox quickly degenerated before it was entirely formed, and it became squirrels, a pair of them, their bodies joined like Siamese twins but swiftly separating, and—

  Gordy began to scream. He shook his arms up and down, trying
to throw the thing off.

  The heat was like a fire now. The pain was unbearable.

  Jesus, please.

  Pain ate its way up his arms, across his shoulders.

  He screamed and sobbed and staggered forward one step, shook his arms again, tried to pull his hands apart, but the thing clung to him.

  The half-formed squirrels melted away, and a cat began to appear in the amorphous tissue that he held and that held him, and then the cat swiftly faded, and something else arose—Jesus, no, no, Jesus, no—something insectile, big as an Airedale but with six or eight eyes across the top of its hateful head and a lot of spiky legs and—

  Pain roared through him. He stumbled sideways, fell to his knees, then onto his side. He kicked and thrashed in agony, writhed and heaved on the sidewalk.

  Sara Yamaguchi stared in disbelief. The beast attacking Gordy seemed to have total control of its DNA. It could change its shape at will and with astonishing speed.

  No such creature could exist. She should know; she was a biologist, a geneticist. Impossible. Yet here it was.

  The spider form degenerated, and no new phantom shape took its place. In a natural state, the creature seemed to be simply a mass of jellied tissue, mottled gray-maroon-red, a cross between an enlarged amoeba and some disgusting fungus. It oozed up over Gordy’s arms—

  —and suddenly, one of Gordy’s hands poked through the slime that had sheathed it. But it wasn’t a hand any more. God, no. It was only bones. Skeletal fingers, stiff and white, picked clean. The flesh had been eaten away.

  She gagged, stumbled backwards, turned to the gutter, vomited.

  Jenny pulled Lisa two steps back, farther away from the thing with which Gordy was grappling.

  The girl was screaming.

  The slime oozed around the bony hand, reclaimed those denuded fingers, enfolded them, sheathed them in a glove of pulsing tissue. In a couple of seconds, the bones were gone as well, dissolved, and the glove folded up into a ball and melted back into the main body of the organism. The thing writhed obscenely, churned within itself, swelled, bulged here, formed a concavity there, now a concavity where the bulge had been, now a swelling nodule where the concavity had been, feverishly changing, as if even a moment’s stillness meant death. It pulled itself up Gordy’s arms, and he struggled desperately to rid himself of it, and as it progressed toward his shoulders, it left nothing behind it, nothing, no stumps, no bones; it devoured everything. It began to spread across his chest, too, and wherever it went, Gordy simply disappeared into it and did not come out, as if he were sinking into a vat of fiercely corrosive acid.

  Lisa looked away from the dying man and clung to Jenny, sobbing.

  Gordy’s screams were unbearable.

  Tal’s revolver was already in his hand. He hurried toward Gordy.

  Bryce stopped him. “Are you crazy? Tal, damn it, there’s nothing we can do.”