Phantoms Part 5

"What did you see then?"

"It was against the wall. On the left. About halfway through the tunnel. I almost stumbled into it."

"What was it?"

"I ...1 don't know exactly. I couldn't actually see it."

"Did you hear anything?"

"No," Lisa said, eyes riveted on the pa.s.sageway.

"Smell something?"

"No. But ... the darkness was ... Well, at one place there, the darkness was ... different. I could sense something moving ... or sort of moving ... s.h.i.+fting ...

"That's like what I thought I saw-but up in the rafters."

They waited. Nothing came out of the pa.s.sageway.

Gradually, Jenny's heartbeat slowed from a wild gallop to a fast trot. She lowered the gun.

Their breathing grew quiet. The night silence poured back in like heavy oil.

Doubts surfaced. Jenny began to suspect that she and Lisa simply had succ.u.mbed to hysteria. She didn't like that explanation one d.a.m.n bit, for it didn't fit the image she had of herself. But she was sufficiently honest with herself to face the unpleasant fact that, just this one time, she might have panicked.

"We're just jumpy," she told Lisa. "If there were anything or anyone dangerous in there, they'd have come out after us by now-don't you think?"

"Maybe."

"Hey, you know what it might have been?"

"What?" Lisa asked.

The cold wind stirred up again and soughed softly through the alleyway.

"It could have been cats," Jenny said. "A few cats. They like to hang out in those covered walkways."

"I don't think it was cats."

"Could be. A couple of cats up there in the rafters. And one or two down on the floor, along the wall, where you saw something."

"It seemed bigger than a cat. It seemed a lot bigger than a cat," Lisa said nervously.

"Okay, so maybe it wasn't cats. Most likely, it wasn't anything at all. We're keyed up. Our nerves are wound tight." She sighed. "Let's go see if the rear door of the bakery is open. That's what we came back here to check out-remember?"

They headed toward the rear of Liebermann's Bakery, but they glanced repeatedly behind them, at the mouth of the covered pa.s.sage.

The service door at the bakery was unlocked, and there was light and warmth beyond it. Jenny and Lisa stepped into a long, narrow storage room.

The inner door led from the storage room to the huge kitchen, which smelled pleasantly of cinnamon, flour, black walnuts, and orange extract. Jenny inhaled deeply. The appetizing fragrances that wafted through the kitchen were so homey, so natural, so pungently and soothingly reminiscent of normal times and normal places that she felt some of her tension fading.

The bakery was well-equipped with double sinks, a walk-in refrigerator, several ovens, several immense white enamel storage cabinets, a dough-kneading machine, and a large array of other appliances. The middle of the room was occupied by a long, wide counter, the primary work area; one end of it had a s.h.i.+ny stainless-steel top, and the other end had a butcher's-block surface. The stainless-steel portion-which was nearest the store-room door, where Jenny and Lisa had entered-was stacked high with pots, cupcake and cookie trays, baking racks, bundt pans, regular cake pans, and pie tins, all clean and bright. The entire kitchen gleamed.

"n.o.body's here," Lisa said.

"Looks that way," Jenny said, her spirits rising as she walked farther into the room.

If the Santini family had escaped, and if Jakob and Aida had been spared, perhaps most of the town wasn't dead. Perhaps- Oh, G.o.d.

On the other side of the piled cookware, in the middle of the butcher's-block counter, lay a large disk of pie dough. A wooden rolling pin rested on the dough. Two hands gripped the ends of the rolling pin. Two severed, human hands.

Lisa backed up against a metal cabinet with such force that the stuff inside rattled noisily. "What the h.e.l.l is going on? What the h.e.l.l?"

Drawn by morbid fascination and by an urgent need to understand what was happening here, Jenny moved closer to the counter and stared down at the disembodied hands, regarding them with equal measures of disgust and disbelief-and with fear as sharp as razor blades. The hands were not bruised or swollen; they were pretty much flesh-colored, though gray-pale. Blood-the first blood she had seen so far-trailed wetly from the raggedly torn wrists and glistened in streaks and drops, midst a fine film of flour dust. The hands were strong; more precisely-they had once been strong. Blunt fingers. Large knuckles. Unquestionably a man's hands, with white hair curled crisply on the backs of them. Jakob Liebermann's hands.

"Jenny!"

Jenny looked up, startled.

Lisa's arm was raised, extended; she was pointing across the kitchen.

Beyond the butcher's-block counter, set in the long wall on the far side of the room, were three ovens. One of them was huge, with a pair of solid, over-and-under, stainless-steel doors. The other two ovens were smaller than the first, though still larger than the conventional models used in most homes; there was one door in each of these two, and each door had a gla.s.s portal in the center of it. None of the ovens was turned on at the moment, which was fortunate, for if the smaller ones had been in operation, the kitchen would have been filled with a sickening stench.

Each one contained a severed head.

Jesus.

Ghastly, dead faces gazed out into the room, noses pressed to the inside of the oven gla.s.s.

Jakob Liebermann. White hair spattered with blood. One eye half shut, the other glaring. Lips pressed together in a grimace of pain.

Aida Liebermann. Both eyes open. Mouth gaping as if her jaws had come unhinged.

For a moment Jenny couldn't believe the heads were real. Too much. Too shocking. She thought of expensive, lifelike Halloween masks peering out of the cellophane windows in costume boxes, and she thought of the grisly novelties sold in joke shops-those wax heads with nylon hair and gla.s.s eyes, those gruesome things that young boys sometimes found wildly amusing (and surely that's what these were)-and, crazily, she thought of a line from a TV commercial for cake mixes-Nothin' says lovin' like some thin' from the oven!

Her heart thudded.

She was feverish, dizzy.

On the butcher's-block counter, the severed hands were still poised on the rolling pin. She half-expected them to skitter suddenly across the counter as if they were two crabs.

Where were the Liebermanns' decapitated bodies? Stuffed in the big oven, behind steel doors that had no windows? Lying stiff and frosted in the walk-in refrigerator?

Bitterness rose in her throat, but she choked it back.

The pistol now seemed an ineffectual defense against this incredibly violent, unknown enemy.

Again, Jenny had the feeling of being watched, and the drumbeat of her heart was no longer snare but timpani.

She turned to Lisa. "Let's get out of here."

The girl headed for the storeroom door.

"Not that way!" Jenny said sharply.

Lisa turned, blinking, confused.

"Not the alley," Jenny said. "And not that dark pa.s.sage again."

"G.o.d, no," Lisa agreed.

They hurried across the kitchen and through the other door, into the sales room. Past the empty pastry cases. Past the cafe tables and chairs.

Jenny had some trouble with the deadbolt lock on the front door. It was stiff. She thought they might have to leave by way of the alley, after all. Then she realized she was trying to turn the thumb-latch the wrong way. Twisted the proper direction, the bolt slipped back with a clack, and Jenny yanked the door open.

They rushed out into the cool, night air.

Lisa crossed the sidewalk to a tall pine tree. She seemed to need to lean against something.

Jenny joined her sister, glancing back apprehensively at the bakery. She wouldn't have been surprised to see two decapitated bodies shambling toward her with demonic intent. But nothing moved back there except the scalloped edge of the blue-and-white-striped awning, which undulated in the inconstant breeze.

The night remained silent.

The moon had risen somewhat higher in the sky since Jenny and Lisa had entered the covered pa.s.sageway.

After a while the girl said, "Radiation, disease, poison, toxic gas-boy, we sure were on the wrong track. Only other people, sick people, do that kind of weird stuff. Right? Some weird psycho did all of this."

Jenny shook her head. "One man can't have done it all. To overwhelm a town of nearly five hundred people, it would take an army of psychopathic killers."

"Then that's what it was," Lisa said, s.h.i.+vering.

Jenny looked nervously up and down the deserted street. It seemed imprudent, even reckless, to be standing here, in plain sight, but she couldn't think of anywhere else that would be safer.

She said, "Psychopaths don't join clubs and plan ma.s.s murders as if they were Rotarians planning a charity dance. They almost always act alone."

Flicking her eyes from shadow to shadow as if she expected one of them to have substance and malevolent intentions, Lisa said, "What about the Charles Manson commune, back in the sixties, those people who killed the movie star-what was her name?"

"Sharon Tate."

"Yeah. Couldn't this be a group of nuts like that?"

"At most, there were half a dozen people in the core of the Manson family, and that was a very rare deviation from the lone-wolf pattern. Anyway, half a dozen couldn't do this to Snowfield. It would take fifty, a hundred, maybe more. That many psychopaths just couldn't act together."

They were both silent for a while. Then Jenny said, "There's another thing that doesn't figure. Why wasn't there more blood in the kitchen?"

"There was some."

"Hardly any. Just a few smears on the counter. There should've been blood all over the place."

Lisa rubbed her hands briskly up and down her arms, trying to generate some heat. Her face was waxen in the yellowish glow of the nearest streetlamp. She seemed years older than fourteen. Terror had matured her.

The girl said, "No signs of a struggle, either."

Jenny frowned. "That's right; there weren't."

"I noticed it right away," Lisa said. "It seemed so odd. They don't seem to've fought back. Nothing thrown. Nothing broken. The rolling pin would've made a pretty good weapon, wouldn't it? But he didn't use it. Nothing was knocked over, either."

"It's as if they didn't resist at all. As if they... willingly put their heads on the chopping block."

"But why would they do that?"

Why would they do that?

Jenny stared up Skyline Road toward her house, which was less than three blocks away, then looked down toward Ye Olde Towne Tavern, Big Nickle Variety Shop, Patterson's Ice Cream Parlor, and Mario's Pizza.

There are silences and silences. No one of them is quite like another. There is the silence of death, found in tombs and deserted graveyards and in the cold-storage room in a city morgue and in hospital rooms on occasion; it is a flawless silence, not merely a hush but a void. As a physician who had treated her share of terminally ill patients, Jenny was familiar with that special, grim silence.

This was it. This was the silence of death.

She hadn't wanted to admit it. That was why she had not yet shouted "h.e.l.lo" into the funereal streets. She had been afraid no one would answer.

Now she didn't shout because she was afraid someone would answer. Someone or something. Someone or something dangerous.

At last she had no choice but to accept the facts. Snowfield was indisputably dead. It wasn't really a town any more; it was a cemetery, an elaborate collection of stone-timber-s.h.i.+ngle-brick-gabled-balconied tombs, a graveyard fas.h.i.+oned in the image of a quaint alpine village.

The wind picked up again, whistling under the eaves of the buildings. It sounded like eternity.

7.

The County Sheriff The county authorities, headquartered in Santa Mira, were not yet aware of the Snowfield crisis. They had their own problems.

Lieutenant Talbert Whitman entered the interrogation room just as Sheriff Bryce Hammond switched on the tape recorder and started informing the suspect of his const.i.tutional rights Tal closed the door without making a sound. Not wanting to interrupt just as the questioning was about to get underway, he didn't take a chair at the big table, where the other three men were seated. Instead, he went to the big window, the only window, in the oblong room.

The Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department occupied a Spanish-style structure that had been erected in the late 1930s. The doors were all solid and solid-sounding when you closed them, and the walls were thick enough to provide eighteen-inch-deep windowsills like the one on which Tal Whitman settled himself.

Beyond the window lay Santa Mira, the county seat, with a population of eighteen thousand. In the mornings, when the sun at last topped the Sierras and burned away the mountain shadows, Tal sometimes found himself looking around in amazement and delight at the gentle, forested foothills on which Santa Mira rose, for it was an exceptionally neat, clean city that had put down its concrete and iron roots with some respect for the natural beauty in which it had grown. Now night was settled in. Thousands of lights sparkled on the rolling hills below the mountains, and it looked as if the stars had fallen here.

For a child of Harlem, black as a sharp-edged winter shadow, born in poverty and ignorance, Tal Whitman had wound up, at the age of thirty, in a most unexpected place. Unexpected but wonderful.

On this side of the window, however, the scene was not so special. The interrogation room resembled countless others in police precinct houses and sheriffs' stations all over the country. A cheap linoleum-tile floor. Battered filing cabinets. A round conference table and five chairs. Inst.i.tutional-green walls. Bare fluorescent bulbs.

At the conference table in the center of the room, the current occupant of the suspect's chair was a tall, good-looking, twenty-six-year-old real estate agent named Fletcher Kale. He was working himself into an impressive state of righteous indignation.