Phantoms Part 45

"Well," Bryce said, "it certainly doesn't conform to the rules of biology as we know them-does it, Dr. Yamaguchi?"

"No," the geneticist said.

"So why shouldn't it also be immortal?"

Jenny looked dubious.

Bryce said, "You have an objection?"

"To the possibility that it's immortal? Or the next thing to immortal? No. I'll accept that. It might be something out of the Mesozoic, all right, something so self-renewing that it's virtually immortal. But how does the winged serpent fit? I find it d.a.m.ned hard to believe that anything like that has ever existed. If the shape-changer becomes only those things it has previously ingested, then how could it become something like the winged serpent?"

"There've been animals like that," Frank said. "Pterodactyls were winged reptiles."

"Reptiles, yes," Jenny said. "But not serpents. Pterodactyls were the ancestors of birds. But that thing was clearly a serpent, which is very different. It looked like something out of a fairy tale."

"No," Tal said. "It was straight out of voodoo."

Bryce turned to Tal, surprised. "Voodoo? What would you know about voodoo?"

Tal didn't seem to be able to look at Bryce, and he spoke with evident reluctance. "In Harlem, when I was a kid, there was this enormous fat lady, Agatha Peabody, in our apartment building, and she was a boko. That's a sort of witch who uses voodoo for immoral or evil purposes. She sold charms and spells, helped people strike back at their enemies, that sort of thing. All nonsense. But to a kid, it seemed exciting and spooky. Mrs. Peabody ran an open apartment, with clients and hangers-on going in and out all day and night. For a few months I spent a lot of time there, listening and watching. And there were quite a few books on the black arts. In a couple of them, I saw drawings of Haitian and African versions of Satan, voodoo and juju devils. One of them was a giant, winged serpent. Black, with bat wings. And terrible green eyes. It was exactly like the thing we saw tonight."

In the street, beyond the windows, the fog was very thick now. It churned sluggishly through the diffused glow of the streetlamps.

Lisa said, "Is it really the Devil? A demon? Something from h.e.l.l?"

"No," Jenny said. "That's just a ... pose."

"But then why does it take the shape of the Devil?" Lisa asked. "And why does it call itself the names of demons?"

"I figure the Satanic mumbo-jumbo is just something that amuses it," Frank said. "One more way to tease us and demoralize us."

Jenny nodded. "I suspect it isn't limited to the forms of its victims. It can a.s.sume the shape of anything it has absorbed and anything it can imagine. So if one of the victims was somebody familiar with voodoo, then that's where it got the idea of becoming a winged serpent."

That thought startled Bryce. "Do you mean it not only absorbs and incorporates the flesh of its victims but their knowledge and memories as well?"

"It sure looks that way," Jenny said.

"Biologically, that's not unheard of," Sara Yamaguchi said, combing her long black hair with both hands and nervously tucking it behind her delicate ears. "For instance ... If you put a certain kind of flatworm through a maze often enough, with food at one end, eventually it'll learn to negotiate the maze more quickly than it did at first. Then, if you grind it up and feed it to another flatworm, the new worm will negotiate the maze quickly, too, even though it's never been put through the test before. Somehow, it ate the knowledge and experience of its cousin when it ate the flesh."

"Which is how the shape-changer knows about Timothy Flyte," Jenny said. "Harold Ordnay knew about Flyte, so now it knows about him, too."

"But how in the name of G.o.d did Flyte know about it?" Tal asked.

Bryce shrugged. "That's a question only Flyte can answer."

"Why didn't it take Lisa last night in the restroom? For that matter, why hasn't it taken all of us?"

"It's just toying with us."

"Having fun. A sick kind of fun."

"There's that. But I think it's also kept us alive so we could tell Flyte what we've seen and lure him here."

"It wants us to pa.s.s along the offer of safe conduct to Flyte."

"We're just bait."

"Yes."

"And when we've served our purpose ..."

"Yes."

Something thumped solidly against the outside of the inn. The windows rattled, and the building seemed to shake.

Bryce stood so fast that he knocked over his chair.

Another crash. Harder, louder. Then a sc.r.a.ping noise.

Bryce listened intently, trying to get a fix on the sound. It seemed to be coming from the north wall of the building. It started at ground level but swiftly began to move up, away from them.

A clattering-rattling sound. A bony sound. Like the skeletons of long-dead men clawing their way out of a sepulcher.

"Something big," Frank said. "Pulling itself up the side of the inn."

"The shape-changer," Lisa said.

"But not in its jellied form," Sara said. "In its natural state, it would just flow up the wall silently."

They all stared at the ceiling, listening, waiting.

What phantom form has it a.s.sumed this time? Bryce wondered.

Sc.r.a.pe. Tick. Clatter.

The sounds of death.

Bryce's hand was colder than the b.u.t.t of his revolver.

The six of them went to the window and looked out. The fog swirled everywhere.

Then, down the street, almost a block away, at the penumbra of a sodium-vapor lamp, something moved. Half-seen. A menacing shadow, distorted by the fog. Bryce got an impression of a crab as large as a car. He glimpsed arachnoid legs. A monstrous claw with saw-toothed edges flashed into the light, immediately into darkness again. And there: the febrile, quivering, seeking length of antennae. Then the thing scuttled off into the night again.

"That's what's climbing the building," Tal said. "Another d.a.m.ned crab thing like that one. Something straight out of an alky's DTs:"

They heard it reach the roof. Its chitinous limbs tapped and sc.r.a.ped across the slate s.h.i.+ngles.

"What's it up to?" Lisa asked worriedly. "Why's it pretending to be what it isn't?"

"Maybe it just enjoys mimicry," Bryce said. "You know ... the same way some tropical birds like to imitate sounds just for the pleasure of it, just to hear themselves."

The noises on the roof stopped.

The six waited.

The night seemed to be crouched like a wild thing, studying its prey, timing its attack.

They were too restless to sit down. They continued to stand by the windows.

Outside, only the fog moved.

Sara Yamaguchi said, "The universal bruising is understandable now. The shape-changer enfolded its victims, squeezed them. So the bruising came from a brutal, sustained, universally applied pressure. That's how they suffocated, too-wrapped up inside the shape-changer, totally encapsulated in it."

"I wonder," Jenny said, "if maybe it produces its preservative while squeezing its victims."

"Yes, probably," Sara said. "That's why there's no visible point of injection in either body we studied. The preservative is most likely applied to every square inch of the body, squeezed into every pore. Sort of an osmotic application."

Jenny thought of Hilda Beck, her housekeeper, the first victim she and Lisa had found.

She shuddered.

"The water," Jenny said.

"What?" Bryce said.

"Those pools of distilled water we found. The shape-changer expelled that water."

"How do you figure?"

"The human body is mostly water. So after the thing absorbed its victims, after it used every milligram of mineral content, every vitamin, every usable calorie, it expelled what it didn't need: excess amounts of absolutely pure water. Those pools and puddles we found were all the remains we'll ever have of the hundreds who're missing. No bodies. No bones. Just water... which has already evaporated."

The noises on the roof did not resume; silence reigned. The phantom crab was gone.

In the dark, in the fog, in the sodium-yellow light of the streetlamps, nothing moved.

They turned away from the windows at last and went back to the table.

"Can the d.a.m.ned thing be killed?" Frank wondered.

"We know for sure that bullets won't do the job," Tal said.

"Fire?" Lisa said.

"The soldiers had firebombs they'd made," Sara reminded them. "But the shape-changer evidently struck so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that no one had time to grab the bottles and light the fuses."

"Besides," Bryce said, "fire most likely won't do the trick. If the shape-changer caught fire, it could just... well ... detach itself from the part of it that was aflame and move the bulk of itself to a safe place."

"Explosives are probably useless, too," Jenny said. "I have a hunch that, if you blew the thing into a thousand pieces, you'd wind up with a thousand smaller shape-changers, and they'd all flow together again, unharmed."

"So can the thing be killed or not?" Frank asked again.

They were silent, considering.

Then Bryce said, "No. Not so far as I can see."

"But then what can we do?"

"I don't know," Bryce said. "I just don't know."

Frank Autry phoned his wife, Ruth, and spoke with her for nearly half an hour. Tal called a few friends on the other telephone. Later, Sara Yamaguchi tied up one of the lines for almost an hour. Jenny called several people, including her aunt in Newport Beach, to whom Lisa talked, as well. Bryce spoke with several men at headquarters in Santa Mira, deputies with whom he had worked for years and with whom he shared a bond of brotherhood; he spoke with his parents in Glendale and with Ellen's father in Spokane.

All six survivors were upbeat in their conversations. They talked about whipping this thing, about leaving Snowfield soon.

However, Bryce knew that they were all just putting the best possible face on a bad situation. He knew these weren't ordinary phone calls; in spite of their optimistic tone, these calls had only one grim purpose; the six survivors were saying goodbye.

35.

Pandemonium Sal Corello, the publicity agent who had been hired to meet Timothy Flyte at San Francisco International Airport, was a small yet hard-muscled man with corn-yellow hair and purple-blue eyes. He looked like a leading man. If he had been six feet two instead of just five feet one, his face might have been as famous as Robert Redford's. However, his intelligence, wit, and aggressive charm compensated for his lack of height. He knew how to get what he wanted for himself and for his clients.

Usually, Corello could even make reporters behave so well that you might mistake them for civilized people; but not tonight. This story was too big and much too hot. Corello had never seen anything like it: Hundreds of reporters and curious civilians rushed at Flyte the instant they saw him, pulling and tugging at the professor, shoving microphones in his face, blinding him with batteries of camera lights, and frantically shouting questions. "Dr. Flyte..." "Professor Flyte ..." "... Flyte!" Flyte, Flyte, Flyte-Flyte-Flyte, FlyteFlyteFlyte-Flyte ... The questions were reduced to meaningless gabble by the roar of competing voices. Sal Corello's ears hurt. The professor looked bewildered, then scared. Corello took the old man's arm and held it tightly and led him through the surging flock, turning himself into a small but highly effective battering ram. By the time they reached the small platform that Corello and airport security officers had set up at one end of the pa.s.sengers' lounge, Professor Flyte looked as if he might expire of fright.

Corello took the microphone and quickly silenced the throng. He urged them to let Flyte deliver a brief statement, promised that a few questions would be permitted later, introduced the speaker, and stepped out of the way.

When everyone got a good, clear look at Timothy Flyte, they couldn't conceal a sudden attack of skepticism. It swept the crowd; Corello saw it in their faces: a very visible apprehension that Flyte was hoaxing them. Indeed, Flyte appeared to be a tad maniacal. His white hair was frizzed out from his head, as if he had just stuck a finger in an electric socket. His eyes were wide, both with fear and with an effort to stave off fatigue, and his face had the dissipated look of a wino's grizzled visage. He needed a shave. His clothes were rumpled, wrinkled; they hung like shapeless bags. He reminded Corello of one of those street corner fanatics declaring the imminence of Armageddon.

Earlier in the day, on the telephone from London, Burt Sandler, the editor from Wintergreen and Wyle, had prepared Corello for the possibility that Flyte would make a negative impression on the press, but Sandler needn't have worried. The journalists grew restless as Flyte cleared his throat half a dozen times, loudly, into the microphone, but when he began to speak at last, they were enthralled within a minute. He told them about the Roanoke Island colony, about vanis.h.i.+ng Mayan civilizations, about mysterious depletions of marine populations, about an army that disappeared in 1711. The crowd grew hushed. Corello relaxed.

Flyte told them about the Eskimo village of Anjikuni, five hundred miles northwest of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police outpost at Churchill. On a snowy afternoon in November of 1930, a French-Canadian trapper and trader, Joe LaBelle, stopped at Anjikuni-only to discover that everyone who lived there had disappeared. All belongings, including precious hunting rifles, had been left behind. Meals had been left half-eaten. The dogsleds (but no dogs) were still there, which meant there was no way the entire village could have moved overland to another location. The settlement was, as LaBelle put it later, "as eerie as a graveyard in the very dead of night." LaBelle hastened to the Mounted Police Station at Churchill, and a major investigation was launched, but no trace was ever found of the Anjikunians.

As the reporters took notes and aimed tape recorder microphones at Flyte, he told them about his much-maligned theory: the ancient enemy. There were gasps of surprise, incredulous expressions, but no noisy questioning or blatantly expressed disbelief.

The instant Flyte finished reading his prepared statement, Sal Corello reneged on his promise of a question-and-answer session. He took Flyte by the arm and hustled him through a door behind the makes.h.i.+ft platform on which the microphones stood.

The reporters howled with indignation at this betrayal. They rushed the platform, trying to follow Flyte.

Corello and the professor entered a service corridor where several airport security men were waiting. One of the guards slammed and locked the door behind them, cutting off the reporters, who howled even louder than before.

"This way," a security man said.

"The chopper's here," another said.

They hurried along a maze of hallways, down a flight of concrete stairs, through a metal fire door, and outside, onto a windswept expanse of tarmac, where a sleek, blue helicopter waited. It was a plush, well-appointed, executive craft, a Bell JetRanger.