Phantoms Part 22

Jenny was reminded of Bryce Hammond's gentle, hooded eyes.

And of Jakob and Aida Liebermann's eyes, glaring out of their severed heads.

And Deputy Wargle's eyes. Gone. Those burnt-out, empty sockets in that hollow skull.

She tried to force her thoughts away from that gruesome-ness, from that too-well-remembered, grim reaper's gaze. But her mind kept circling back to that image of monstrous violence and death.

She wished there were someone to talk her to sleep as she was doing for Lisa. It was going to be a restless night.

In the utility room that adjoined the lobby and backed up against the elevator shaft, the light was off. There were no windows.

A faint odor of cleaning fluids clung to the place. Pinesol. Lysol. Furniture polish. Floor wax. Janitorial supplies were stored on shelves along one wall.

In the right-hand corner, farthest from the door, was a large metal sink. Water dripped from a leaky faucet-one drop every ten or twelve seconds. Each pellet of water struck the metal basin with a soft, hollow ping.

In the center of the room, as shrouded in utter blackness as was everything else, the faceless body of Stu Wargle lay on a table, covered by a dropcloth. All was still. Except for the monotonous ping of the dripping water.

A breathless antic.i.p.ation hung in the air.

Frank Autry huddled under the blanket, his eyes closed, and he thought about Ruth. Tall, willowy, sweet-faced Ruthie. Ruthie with the quiet yet crisp voice, Ruthie with the throaty laugh that most people found infectious, his wife of twenty-six years: She was the only woman he had ever loved; he still loved her.

He had spoken with her by telephone for a few minutes, just before turning in for the night. He had not been able to tell her much about what was happening-just that there was a siege situation underway in Snowfield, that it was being kept quiet as long as possible, and that by the look of it he wouldn't be home tonight. Ruthie hadn't pressed him for details. She had been a good army wife through all his years in the service. She still was.

Thinking of Ruth was his primary psychological defense mechanism. In times of stress, in times of fear and pain and depression, he simply thought of Ruth, concentrated solely on her, and the strife-filled world faded. For a man who had spent so much of his life engaged in dangerous work-for a man whose occupations had seldom allowed him to forget that death was an intimate part of life, a woman like Ruth was indispensable medicine, an inoculation against despair.

Gordy Brogan was afraid to close his eyes again. Each time that he had closed them, he had been plagued by b.l.o.o.d.y visions that had rolled up out of his own private darkness. Now he lay under his blanket, eyes open, staring at Frank Autry's back.

In his mind, he composed his letter of resignation to Bryce Hammond. He wouldn't be able to type and submit that letter until after this Snowfield business was settled. He didn't want to leave his buddies in the middle of a battle; that didn't seem right. He might actually be of some help to them, considering that it didn't appear as if he would be required to shoot at people. However, as soon as this thing was settled, as soon as they were back in Santa Mira, he would write the letter and hand-deliver it to the sheriff.

He had no doubt about it now: police work was not-and never had been-for him.

He was still a young man; there was time to change careers. He had become a cop partly as an act of rebellion against his parents, for it had been the last thing they had wanted. They'd noted his uncanny way with animals, his ability to win the trust and friends.h.i.+p of any creature on four legs within about half a minute flat, and they had hoped he would become a veterinarian. Gordy had always felt smothered by his mother's and father's unflagging affection, and when they had nudged him toward a career in veterinary medicine, he had rejected the possibility. Now he saw that they were right and that they only wanted what was best for him. Indeed, deep down, he had always known they were right. He was a healer, not a peacekeeper.

He had also been drawn to the uniform and the badge because being a cop had seemed a good way of proving his masculinity. In spite of his formidable size and muscles, in spite of his acute interest in women, he had always believed that others thought of him as androgynous. As a boy, he had never been interested in sports, which had obsessed all of his male contemporaries. And endless talk about hotrods had simply bored him. His interests lay elsewhere and, to some, seemed effete. Although his talent was only average, he enjoyed painting. He played the French horn. Nature fascinated him, and he was an avid bird-watcher. His abhorrence of violence had not been acquired as an adult; even as a child, he had avoided confrontations. His pacifism, when considered with his reticence in the company of girls, had made him appear, at least to himself, somewhat less than manly. But now, at long last, he saw that he did not need to prove anything.

He would go to school, become a vet. He would be content. His folks would be happy, too. His life would be on the right track again.

He closed his eyes, sighing, seeking sleep. But out of darkness came nightmarish images of the severed heads of cats and dogs, flesh-crawling images of dismembered and tortured animals.

He snapped his eyes open, gasping.

What had happened to all the pets in Snowfield?

The utility room, off the lobby.

Windowless, lightless.

The monotonous ping of water dropping into the metal sink had stopped.

But there wasn't silence now. Something moved in the darkness. It made a soft, wet, stealthy sound as it crept around the pitch-black room.

Not yet ready to sleep, Jenny went into the cafeteria, poured a cup of coffee, and joined the sheriff at a corner table.

"Lisa sleeping?" he asked.

"Like a rock."

"How're you holding up? This must be hard on you. All your neighbors, friends..."

"It's hard to grieve properly," she said. "I'm just sort of numb. If I let myself react to every death that's had an effect on me, I'd be a blubbering mess. So I've just let my emotions go numb."

"It's a normal, healthy response. That's how we're all dealing with it."

They drank some coffee, chatted a bit. Then: "Married?" he asked.

"No. You?"

"I was."

"Divorced?"

"She died."

"Oh, Christ, of course. I read about it. I'm sorry. A year ago, wasn't it? A traffic accident?"

"A runaway truck."

She was looking into his eyes, and she thought they clouded and became less blue than they had been. "How's youi son doing?"

"He's still in a coma. I don't think he'll ever come out of it."

"I'm sorry, Bryce. I really am."

He folded his hands around his mug and stared down at the coffee. "With Timmy like he is, it'll be a blessing, really, when he just finally lets go. I was numb about it for a while. I couldn't feel anything, not just emotionally but physically, as well. At one point I cut my finger while I was slicing an orange, and I bled all over the d.a.m.ned kitchen and even ate a few b.l.o.o.d.y sections of the orange before I noticed that something was wrong. Even then I never felt any pain. Lately, I've been coming around to an understanding, to an acceptance." He looked up and met Jenny's eyes. "Strangely enough, since I've been here in Snowfield, the grayness has gone away."

"Grayness?"

"For a long time, the color has been leeched out of everything. It's all been gray. But tonight-just the opposite. Tonight, there's been so much excitement, so much tension, so much fear, that everything has seemed extraordinarily vivid."

Then Jenny spoke of her mother's death, of the surprisingly powerful effect it had had on her, despite the twelve years of partial estrangement that should have softened the blow.

Again, Jenny was impressed by Bryce Hammond's ability to make her feel at ease. They seemed to have known each other for years.

She even found herself telling him about the mistakes she had made in her eighteenth and nineteenth years, about her naive and stubbornly wrongheaded behavior that had grievously hurt her parents. Toward the end of her first year in college, she had met a man who had captivated her. He was a graduate student-Campbell Hudson; she called him Cam-five years her senior. His attentiveness, charm, and pa.s.sionate pursuit of her had swept her away. Until then, she had led a sheltered life; she had never tied herself down to one steady boyfriend, had never really dated heavily at all. She was an easy target. Having fallen for Cam Hudson, she then became not only his lover but his rapt student and disciple and, very nearly, his devoted slave.

"I can't see you subjugating yourself to anyone," Bryce said.

"I was young."

"Always an acceptable excuse."

She had moved in with Cam, taking insufficient measures to conceal her sinning from her mother and father; and sinning was how they saw it. Later, she decided-rather, she allowed Cam to decide for her-that she would drop out of college and work as a waitress, helping pay his bills until he was finished with his master's and doctoral work.

Once trapped in Cam Hudson's self-serving scenario, she gradually found him less attentive and less charming than he had once been. She learned he had a violent temper. Then her father died while she was still with Cam, and at the funeral she sensed that her mother blamed her for his untimely pa.s.sing. Within a month of the day that her father was consigned to the grave, she learned she was pregnant. She had been pregnant when he'd died. Cam was furious and insisted on a quick abortion. She asked for a day to consider, but he became enraged at even a twenty-four-hour delay. He beat her so severely that she had a miscarriage. It was over then. The foolishness was over. She grew up suddenly-although her abrupt coming of age was too late to please her father.

"Since then," she told Bryce, "I've spent my life working hard-maybe too hard-to prove to my mother that I was sorry and that I was, after all, worthy of her love. I've worked weekends, turned down countless party invitations, skipped most vacations for the past twelve years, all in the name of bettering myself. I didn't go home as often as I should have done. I couldn't face my mother. I could see the accusation in her eyes. And then tonight, from Lisa, I learned the most amazing thing."

"Your mother never blamed you," Bryce said, displaying that uncanny sensitivity and perception that she had seen in him before.

"Yes!" Jenny said. "She never held anything against me."

"She was probably even proud of you."

"Yes, again! She never blamed me for Dad's death. It was me doing all the blaming. The accusation I thought I saw in her eyes was only a reflection of my own guilty feelings." Jenny laughed softly and sourly, shaking her head. "It'd be funny if it wasn't so d.a.m.ned sad."

In Bryce Hammond's eyes, she saw the sympathy and understanding for which she had been searching ever since her father's funeral.

He said, "We're a lot alike in some ways, you and I. I think we both have martyr complexes."

"No more," she said. "Life's too short. That's something that's been brought home to me tonight. From now on I'm going to live, really live-if Snowfield will let me."

"We'll get through this," he said.

"I wish I could feel sure of that."

Bryce said, "You know, having something to look forward to will help us make it. So how about giving me something to look forward to?"

"Huh?"

"A date." He leaned forward. His thick, sandy hair fell into his eyes. "Gervasio's Ristorante in Santa Mira. Minestrone. Scampi in garlic b.u.t.ter. Some good veal or maybe a steak. A side dish of pasta. They make a wonderful vermicelli al pesto. Good wine."

She grinned. "I'd love it."

"I forgot to mention the garlic bread."

"Oh, I love garlic bread."

"Zabaglione for dessert."

"They'll have to carry us out," she said.

"We'll arrange for wheelbarrows."

They chatted for a couple of minutes, relieving tension, and then both of them were finally ready to sleep.

Ping.

In the dark utility room where Stu Wargle's body lay on a table, water had begun to drop into the metal sink again.

Ping.

Something continued to move stealthily in the darkness, around and around the table. It made a slick, wet, slithering-through-the-mud noise.

That wasn't the only sound in the room; there were many other noises, all soft and low. The panting of a weary dog. The hiss of an angry cat. Quiet, silvery, haunting laughter; the laughter of a small child. Then a woman's pained whimpering. A moan. A sigh. The chirruping of a swallow, rendered clearly but softly, so as not to draw the attention of any of the guards posted out in the lobby. The warning of a rattlesnake. The humming of b.u.mblebees. The higher-pitched, sinister buzzing of wasps. A dog growling.

The noises ceased as abruptly as they had begun.

Silence returned.

Ping.

The quiet lasted, unbroken except for the regularly s.p.a.ced notes of the falling water, for perhaps a minute.

Ping.

There was a rustle of cloth in the lightless room. The shroud over Wargle's corpse. The shroud had slipped off the dead man and had fallen to the floor.

Slithering again.

And a dry-wood splintering sound. A brittle, m.u.f.fled but violent sound. A hard, sharp bonecrack.

Silence again.

Ping.

Silence.

Ping. Ping. Ping.

While Tal Whitman waited for sleep, he thought about fear. That was the key word; it was the foundry emotion that had forged him. Fear. His life was one long vigorous denial of fear, a refutation of its very existence. He refused to be affected by-humbled by, driven by-fear. He would not admit that anything could scare him. Early in his life, hard experience had taught him that even acknowledgment of fear could expose him to its voracious appet.i.te.

He had been born and raised in Harlem, where fear was everywhere: fear of street gangs, fear of junkies, fear of random violence, fear of economic privation, fear of being excluded from the mainstream of life. In those tenements, along those gray streets, fear waited to gobble you up the instant you gave it the slightest nod of recognition.

In childhood, he had not been safe even in the apartment that he had shared with his mother, one brother, and three sisters. Tal's father had been a sociopath, a wife-beater, who had shown up once or twice a month merely for the pleasure of slapping his woman senseless and terrorizing his children. Of course, Mama had been no better than the old man. She drank too much wine, tooted too much dope, and was nearly as ruthless with her children as their father was.

When Tal was nine, on one of the rare nights when his father was home, a fire swept the tenement house. Tal was his family's sole survivor. Mama and the old man had died in bed, overcome by smoke in their sleep. Tal's brother, Oliver, and his sisters-Heddy, Louisa, and baby Francesca-were lost, and now all these years later it was sometimes difficult to believe that they had ever really existed.

After the fire, he was taken in by his mother's sister, Aunt Rebecca. She lived in Harlem, too. Becky didn't drink. She didn't use dope. She had no children of her own, but she did have a job, and she went to night school, and she believed in self-sufficiency, and she had high hopes. She often told Tal that there was nothing to fear but Fear Itself and that Fear Itself was like the boogeyman, just a shadow, not worth fearing at all. "G.o.d made you healthy, Talbert, and he gave you a good brain. Now if you mess up, it's n.o.body's fault but your own." With Aunty Becky's love, discipline, and guidance, young Talbert had eventually come to think of himself as virtually invincible. He was not scared of anything in life; he was not scared of dying, either.

That was why, years later, after surviving the shoot-out in the 7-Eleven store over in Santa Mira, he was able to tell Bryce Hammond that it had been a mere cakewalk.

Now, for the first time in a long, long string of years, he had come across a knot of fear.

Tal thought of Stu Wargle, and the knot of fear pulled tighter; squeezing his guts.

The eyes were eaten right out of his skull.

Fear Itself.