Phantoms

Chapter 1 The Town Jail

The scream was distant and brief. A woman's scream.

Deputy Paul Henderson looked up from his copy of Time. He cocked his head, listening.

Motes of dust drifted lazily in a bright shaft of sunlight that pierced one of the mullioned windows. The thin, red second hand of the wall clock swept soundlessly around the dial.

The only noise was the creak of Henderson's office chair as he shifted his weight in it.

Through the large front windows, he could see a portion of Snowfield's main street, Skyline Road, which was perfectly still and peaceful in the golden afternoon sunshine. Only the trees moved, leaves aflutter in a soft wind.

After listening intently for several seconds, Henderson was not sure he had actually heard anything.

Imagination, he told himself. Just wishful thinking.

He almost would have preferred that someone had screamed. He was restless.

During the off season, from April through September, he was the only full-time sheriff's deputy assigned to the Snowfield substation, and the duty was dull. In the winter, when the town was host to several thousand skiers, there were drunks to be dealt with, fistfights to be broken up, and room burglaries to be investigated at the inns, lodges, and motels where the skiers stayed. But now, in early September, only the Candle glow Inn, one lodge, and two small motels were open, and the natives were quiet, and Henderson — who was just twenty-four years old and concluding his first year as a deputy — was bored.

He sighed, looked down at the magazine that lay on his desk — and heard another scream. As before, it was distant and brief, but this time it sounded like a man's voice. It wasn't merely a shriek of excitement or even a cry of alarm; it was the sound of terror.

Frowning, Henderson got up and headed toward the door, adjusting the holstered revolver on his right hip. He stepped through the swinging gate in the railing that separated the public area from the bull pen, and he was halfway to the door when he heard movement in the office behind him.

That was impossible. He had been alone in the office all day, and there hadn't been any prisoners in the three holding cells since early last week. The rear door was locked, and that was the only other way into the jail.

When he turned, however, he discovered that he wasn't alone any more. And suddenly he wasn't the least bit bored.

Chapter 2 Coming Home

During the twilight hour of that Sunday in early September, the mountains were painted in only two colors: green and blue. The forests — pine, fir, spruce — looked as if they had been fashioned from the same felt covered billiard tables. Cool, blue shadows lay everywhere, growing larger and deeper and darker by the minute.

Behind the wheel of her Pontiac Trans Am, Jennifer Paige smiled, buoyed by the beauty of the mountains and by a sense of homecoming. This was where she belonged.

She turned the Trans Am off the double-lane state road, onto the county-maintained, two-lane blacktop that twisted and climbed four miles through the pass to Snowfield.

In the passenger seat, her fourteen-year-old sister, Lisa, said, “I love it up here.”

“So do I.”

“When will we get some snow?”

“Another month, maybe sooner.”

The trees crowded close to the roadway. The Trans Am moved into a long tunnel by overhanging boughs, and Jenny switched on the headlights.

“I've never seen snow, except in pictures,” Lisa said.

“By next spring, you'd be sick of it.”

“Never. Not me. I've always dreamed about living in snow country, like you.”

Jenny glanced at the girl. Even for sisters, they looked remarkably alike: the same green eyes, the same auburn hair, the same high cheekbones.

“Will you teach me to ski?” Lisa asked.

“Well, honey, once the skiers come to town, there'll be the usual broken bones, sprained ankles, wrenched backs, torn ligaments… I'll be pretty busy then.”

“Oh,” Lisa said, unable to conceal her disappointment.

“Besides, why learn from me when you can take lessons from a real pro?”

“A pro?” Lisa asked, brightening somewhat.

“Sure. Hank Sanderson will give you lessons if I ask him.”

“Who's he?”

“He owns Pine Knoll Lodge, and he gives skiing lessons, but only to a handful of favored students.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

Jenny smiled, remembering what it was like to be fourteen years old. At that age, most girls were obsessively concerned about boys, boys above all else. “No, Hank isn't my boyfriend. I've known him for two years, ever since I came to Snowfield, but we're just good friends.”

They passed a green sign with white lettering: SNOWFIELD 3 MILES.

“I'll bet there'll be lots of really neat guys my age.”

“Snowfield's not a very big town,” Jenny cautioned, “But I suppose you'll find a couple of guys who're neat enough.”

“Oh, but during the ski season, there'll be dozens!”

“Whoa, kid! You won't be dating out-of-towners — at least not for a few years.”

“Why won't I?”

“Because I said so.”

“But why not?”

“Before you date a boy, you should know where he comes from, what he's like, what his family is like.”

“Oh, I'm a terrific judge of character,” Lisa said. “My first impressions are completely reliable. You don't have to worry about me. I'm not going to hook up with an ax murderer or a mad rapist.”

“I'm sure you won't,” Jenny said, slowing the Trans Am as the road curved sharply, “because you're only going to date local boys.”

Lisa sighed and shook her head in a theatrical display of frustration. “In case you haven't noticed, Jenny, I passed through puberty while you've been gone.”

“Oh, that hasn't escaped my attention.”

They rounded the curve. Another straightaway lay ahead, and Jenny accelerated again.

Lisa said, “I've even got boobs now.”

“I've noticed that, too,” Jenny said, refusing to be rattled by the girl's blunt approach.

“I'm not a child any more.”

“But you're not an adult, either. You're an adolescent.”

“I'm a young woman.”

“Young? Yes. Woman? Not yet.”

“Jeez.”

“Listen, I'm your legal guardian. I'm responsible for you. Besides, I'm your sister, and I love you. I'm going to do what I think — what I know — is best for you.”

Lisa sighed noisily.

“Because I love you,” Jenny stressed.

Scowling, Lisa said, “You're going to be just as strict as Mom was.” Jenny nodded. “Maybe worse.”

“Jeez.”

Jenny glanced at Lisa. The girl was staring out the passenger-side window. Her face was only partly visible, but she didn't appear to be angry; she wasn't pouting. In fact, her lips seemed to be gently curved in a vague smile.

Whether they realize it or not, Jenny thought, all kids want to have rules put down for them. Discipline is an expression of concern and love. The trick is not to be too heavy-handed about it.

Looking at the road again, flexing her hands on the steering wheel, Jenny said, “I'll tell you what I will let you do.”

“What?”

“I'll let you tie your own shoes.”

Lisa blinked. “Huh?”

“And I'll let you go to the bathroom whenever you want.”

Unable to maintain a pose of injured dignity any longer, Lisa giggled, “Will you let me eat when I'm hungry?”

“Oh, absolutely.” Jenny grinned, “I'll even let you make your own bed every morning.”

“Positively permissive!” Lisa said.

At that moment the girl seemed even younger than she was.

In tennis shoes, jeans, and a Western-style blouse, unable to stifle her giggles, Lisa looked sweet, tender, and terribly vulnerable.

“Friends?” Jenny asked.

“Friends.”

Jenny was surprised and pleased by the ease with which she and Lisa had been relating to each other during the long drive north from Newport Beach. After all, in spite of their blood tie, they were virtually strangers. At thirty-one, Jenny was seventeen years older than Lisa. She had left home before Lisa's second birthday, six months before their father had died. Throughout her years in medical school and during her internship at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Jenny had been too over-worked and too far from home to see either her mother or Lisa with any regularity. Then, after completing her residency, she returned to California to open an office in Snowfield. For the past two years, she had worked extremely hard to establish a viable medical practice that served Snowfield and a few other small towns in the mountains. Recently, her mother had died, and only then had Jenny begun to miss not having had a closer relationship with Lisa. Perhaps they could begin to make up for all the lost years — now that there were only the two of them left.

The county lane rose steadily, and the twilight temporarily grew brighter as the Trans Am ascended out of the shadowed mountain valley.

“My ears feel like they're stuffed full of cotton,” Lisa said, yawning to equalize the pressure.

They rounded a sharp bend, and Jenny slowed the car. Ahead lay a long, up-sloping straightaway, and the county lane became Skyline Road, the main street of Snowfield.

Lisa peered intently through the streaked windshield, studying the town with obvious delight. “It's not at all what I thought it would be!”

“What did you expect?”

“Oh, you know, lots of ugly little motels with neon signs, too many gas stations, that sort of thing. But this place is really, really neat!”

“We have strict building codes,” Jenny said, “Neon isn't acceptable. Plastic signs aren't allowed. No garish colors, no coffee shops shaped like coffee pots.”

“It's super,” Lisa said, gawking as they drove slowly into town.

Exterior advertising was restricted to rustic wooden signs bearing each store's name and line of business. The architecture was somewhat eclectic — Norwegian, Swiss, Bavarian, Alpine French, Alpine — Italian — but every building was designed in one mountain-country style or another, making liberal use of stone, slate, bricks, wood, exposed beams and timbers, mullioned windows, stained and leaded glass. The private homes along the upper end of Skyline Road were also graced by flower-filled window boxes, balconies, and front porches with ornate railings.

“Really pretty,” Lisa said as they drove up the long hill toward the ski lifts at the high end of the town. “But is it always this quiet?”

“Oh, no,” Jenny said, “During the winter, the place really comes alive and…”

She left the sentence unfinished as she realized that the town was not merely quiet. It looked dead.

On any other mild Sunday afternoon in September, at least a few residents would have been strolling along the cobblestone sidewalks and sitting on the porches and balconies that overlooked Skyline Road.

Winter was coming, and these last days of good weather were to be treasured. But today, as afternoon faded into evening, the sidewalks, balconies, and porches were deserted. Even in those shops and houses where there were lights burning, there was no sign of life. Jenny's Trans Am was the only moving car on the long street.

She braked for a stop sign at the first intersection. St. Moritz Way crossed Skyline Road, extending three blocks east and four blocks west. She looked in both directions, but she could see no one.

The next block of Skyline Road was deserted, too. So was the block after that.

“Odd,” Jenny said.

“There must be a terrific show on TV,” Lisa said.

“I guess there must be.”

They passed the Mountainview Restaurant at the corner of Vail Lane and Skyline. The lights were on inside and most of the interior was visible through the big corner windows, but there was no one to be seen. Mountainview was a popular gathering place for locals both in the winter and during the off season, and it was unusual for the restaurant to be completely deserted at this time of day. There weren't even any waitresses in there.

Lisa already seemed to have lost interest in the uncanny stillness, even though she had noticed it first. She was again gawking at and delighting in the quaint architecture.

But Jenny couldn't believe that everyone was huddled in front of TV sets, as Lisa had suggested. Frowning, perplexed, she looked at every window as she drove farther up the hill. She didn't see a single indication of life.

Snowfield was six blocks long from top to bottom of its sloping main street, and Jenny's house was in the middle of the uppermost block, on the west side of the street, near the foot of the ski lifts. It was a two-story, stone and timber chalet with three dormer windows along the street side of the attic. The many-angled, slate roof was a mottled gray-blue-black. The house was set back twenty feet from the cobblestone sidewalk, behind a waist-high evergreen hedge. By one corner of the porch stood a sign that read JENNIFER PAIGE, M D., it also listed her office hours.

Jenny parked the Trans Am in the short driveway.

“What a nifty house!” Lisa said.

It was the first house Jenny had ever owned; she loved it and was proud of it. The mere sight of the house warmed and relaxed her, and for a moment she forgot about the strange quietude that blanketed Snowfield. “Well, it's somewhat small, especially since half of the downstairs is given over to my office and waiting room. And the bank owns more of it than I do. But it sure does have character, doesn't it?”

“Tons,” Lisa said.

They got out of the car, and Jenny discovered that the setting sun had given rise to a chilly wind. She was wearing a long-sleeved, green sweater with her jeans, but she shivered anyway. Autumn in the Sierras was a succession of splendid days and contrastingly crisp nights.

She stretched, uncramping muscles that had knotted up during the long drive, then pushed the door shut. The sound echoed off the mountain above and through the town below. It was the only sound in the twilight stillness.

At the rear of the Trans Am, she paused for a moment, staring down Skyline Road, into the center of Snowfield. Nothing moved.

“I could stay here forever,” Lisa declared, hugging herself as she happily surveyed the town below.

Jenny listened. The echo of the slammed car door faded away — and was replaced by no other sound except the soft soughing of the wind.

There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor, which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom. To Jenny, it seemed curiously as if there were cause for grieving in Snowfield's silence; however, she didn't know why she felt that way or even why such a peculiar thought had occurred to her in the first place. She thought of the silence of a gentle summer night, too, which isn't actually a silence at all, but a subtle chorus of moth wings tapping on windows, crickets moving in the grass, and porch swings ever-so-faintly sighing and creaking. Snowfield's soundless slumber was imbued with some of that quality, too, a hint of fevered activity voices, movement, struggle — just beyond the reach of the senses. But it was more than that. There is also the silence of a winter night, deep and cold and heartless, but containing an expectation of the bustling, growing noises of spring. This silence was filled with expectation, too, and it made Jenny nervous.

She wanted to call out, ask if anyone was here. But she didn't because her neighbors might come out, startled by her cry, all of them safe and sound and bewildered by her apprehension, and then she would look foolish. A doctor who behaved foolishly in public on Monday was a doctor without patients on Tuesday.

“… stay here forever and ever and ever,” Lisa was saying, still swooning over the beauty of the mountain village.

“It doesn't make you… uneasy?” Jenny asked.

“What?”

“The silence.”

“Oh, I love it. It's so peaceful.”

It was peaceful. There was no sign of trouble.

So why am I so damned jumpy? Jenny wondered.

She opened the trunk of the car and lifted out one of Lisa's suitcases, then another.

Lisa took the second suitcase and reached into the trunk for a book bag.

“Don't overload yourself,” Jenny said, “We've got to make a couple of more trips, anyway.”

They crossed the lawn to a stone walkway and followed that to the front porch, where, in response to the amber-purple sunset, shadows were rising and opening petals as if they were night-blooming flowers.

Jenny opened the front door, and stepped into the dark foyer. “Hilda, we're home!”

There was no answer.

The only light in the house was at the far end of the hall, beyond the open kitchen door.

Jenny put down the suitcase and switched on the hall light. “Hilda?”

“Who's Hilda?” Lisa asked, dropping her suitcase and the book bag.

“My housekeeper. She knew what time we expected to arrive. I thought she'd be starting dinner about now.”

“Wow, a housekeeper! You mean, a live-in?”

“She has the apartment above the garage,” Jenny said, putting her purse and car keys on the small foyer table that stood beneath a large, brass-framed mirror.

Lisa was impressed. “Hey, are you rich or something?”

Jenny laughed. “Hardly. I can't really afford Hilda — but I can't afford to be without her, either.”

Wondering why the kitchen light was on if Hilda wasn't here, Jenny headed down the hall, with Lisa following close behind.

“What with keeping regular office hours and making emergency house calls to three other towns in these mountains, I'd never eat more than cheese sandwiches and doughnuts if it wasn't for Hilda.”

“Is she a good cook?” Lisa asked.

“Marvelous. Too good when it comes to desserts.”

The kitchen was a large, high-ceilinged room. Pots, pans, ladles, and other utensils hung from a gleaming, stainless-steel utility rack above a central cooking island with four electric burners, a grill, and a work area. The countertops were ceramic tile, and the cabinets were dark oak. On the far side of the room were double sinks, double ovens, a microwave oven, and the refrigerator.

Jenny turned left as soon as she stepped through the door, and she went to the built-in secretary where Hilda planned menus and composed shopping lists. It was there she would have left a note. But there was no note, and Jenny was turning away from the small desk when she heard Lisa gasp.

The girl had walked around to the far side of the central cooking island. She was standing by the refrigerator, staring down at something on the floor in front of the sinks. Her face was flour-white, and she was trembling.

Filled with sudden dread, Jenny stepped quickly around the island.

Hilda Beck was lying on the floor, on her back, dead. She stared at the ceiling with sightless eyes, and her discolored tongue thrust stiffly between swollen lips.

Lisa looked up from the dead woman, stared at Jenny, tried to speak, could not make a sound.

Jenny took her sister by the arm and led her around the island to the other side of the kitchen, where she couldn't see the corpse. She hugged Lisa.

The girl hugged back. Tightly. Fiercely.

“Are you okay, honey?”

Lisa said nothing. She shook uncontrollably.

Just six weeks ago, coming home from an afternoon at the movies, Lisa had found her mother lying on the kitchen floor of the house in Newport Beach, dead of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The girl had been devastated. Never having known her father, who had died when she was only two years old, Lisa had been especially close to her mother. For a while, that loss had left her deeply shaken, bewildered, depressed. Gradually, she had accepted her mother's death, had discovered how to smile and laugh again. During the past few days, she had seemed like her old self. And now this.

Jenny took the girl to the secretary, urged her to sit down, then squatted in front of her. She pulled a tissue from the box of Kleenex on the desk and blotted Lisa's damp forehead. The girl's flesh was not only as pale as ice; it was ice-cold as well.

“What can I do for you, Sis?”

“I'll b-be okay,” Lisa said shakily.

They held hands. The girl's grip was almost painfully tight.

Eventually, she said, “I thought… When I first saw her there… on the floor like that… I thought… crazy, but I thought… that it was Mom.” Tears shimmered in her eyes, but she held them back, “I kn-know Mom's gone. And this woman here doesn't even look like her. But it was… a surprise… such a shock… and so confusing.”

They continued to hold hands, and slowly Lisa's grip relaxed.

After a while, Jenny said, “Feeling better?”

“Yeah. A little.”

“Want to lie down?”

“No.” She let go of Jenny's hand in order to pluck a tissue from the box of Kleenex. She wiped at her nose. She looked at the cooking island, beyond which lay the body. “Is it Hilda?”

“Yes,” Jenny said.

“I'm sorry.”

Jenny had liked Hilda Beck enormously. She felt sick at heart about the woman's death, but right now she was more concerned about Lisa about anything else. “Sis, I think it would be better if we got you out of here. How about waiting in my office while I take a closer look at the body. Then I've got to call the sheriff's office and the county coroner.”

“I'll wait here with you.”

“It would be better if”

“No!” Lisa said, suddenly breaking into shivers again, “I don't want to be alone.”

“All right,” Jenny said soothingly, “You can sit right here.”

“Oh, Jeez,” Lisa said miserably, “The way she looked… all swollen… all black and b-blue. And the expression on her face…” She wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand.

“Why's she all dark and puffed up like that?”

“Well, she's obviously been dead for a few days,” Jenny said, “But listen, you've got to try not to think about things like—”

“If she's been dead for a few days,” Lisa said quaveringly, “why doesn't it stink in here? Wouldn't it stink?”

Jenny frowned. Of course, it should stink in here if Hilda Beck had been dead long enough for her flesh to grow dark and for her body tissues to bloat as much as they had. It should stink. But it didn't.

“Jenny, what happened to her?”

“I don't know yet.”

“I'm scared.”

“Don't be scared. There's no reason to be scared.”

“That expression on her face,” Lisa said, “It's awful.”

“However she died, it must have been quick. She doesn't seem to have been sick or to have struggled. She couldn't have suffered much pain.”

“But… it looks like she died in the middle of a scream.”

Chapter 3 The Dead Woman

Jenny Paige had never seen a corpse like this one. Nothing in medical school or in her own practice of medicine had prepared her for the peculiar condition of the body. She crouched beside the corpse and examined it with sadness and distaste but also with considerable curiosity and with steadily increasing bewilderment.

The dead woman's face was swollen; it was now a round, smooth, and somewhat shiny caricature of the countenance she had worn in life. Her body was bloated, too, and in some places it strained against the seams of her gray and yellow housedress. Where flesh was visible — the neck, lower waist, hands, calves, ankles — it had a soft, overripe look. However, this did not appear to be the gaseous bloat that was the consequence of decomposition. For one thing, the stomach should have been grossly distended with gas, far more bloated than any other part of the body, but it was only moderately expanded. Besides, there was no odor of decay.

On close inspection, the dark, mottled skin did not appear to be the result of tissue deterioration. Jenny couldn't locate any certain, visible signs of ongoing decomposition: no lesions, no blistering, no weeping pustules. Because they were composed of comparatively soft tissue, a corpse's eyes usually bore evidence of physical degeneration before most other parts of the body. But Hilda Beck's eyes — wide open, staring — were perfect specimens. The whites of her eyes were clear, neither yellowish nor discolored by burst blood vessels. The irises were clear as well; there were not even milky, postmortem cataracts to obscure the warm, blue color.

In life, there had usually been merriment and kindness in Hilda's eyes. She had been sixty-two, a gray-haired woman with a sweet face and a grandmotherly way about herself. She spoke with a slight German accent and had a surprisingly lovely singing voice. She had often sung while cleaning house or cooking, and she had found joy in the most simple things.

Jenny was stricken by a sharp pang of grief as she realized how very much she would miss Hilda. She closed her eyes for a moment, unable to look at the corpse. She collected herself, suppressed her tears.

Finally, when she had reestablished her professional detachment, she opened her eyes and went on with the examination.

The longer she looked at the body, the more the skin seemed bruised. The coloration was indicative of severe bruising: black, blue, and a deep sour yellow, the colors blending in and out of one another. But this was unlike any contusion Jenny had ever seen. As far as she could tell, it was universal; not even one square inch of visible skin was free of it. She carefully took hold of one sleeve of the dead woman's housedress and pulled it up the swollen arm as far as it would easily slide. Under the sleeve, the skin was also dark, and Jenny suspected that the entire body was covered with an incredible series of contiguous bruises.

She looked again at Mrs. Beck's face. Every last centimeter of skin was contusive. Sometimes, a victim of a serious auto accident sustained injuries that left him with bruises over most of his face, but such a severe condition was always accompanied by worse trauma, such as a broken nose, split lips, a broken jaw… How could Mrs. Beck have acquired bruises as grotesque as these without also suffering other, more serious injuries?

“Jenny?” Lisa said, “Why're you taking so long?”

“I'll only be a minute. You stay there.”

So… perhaps the contusions that covered Mrs. Beck's body were not the result of externally administered blows. Was it possible that the discoloration of the skin was caused, instead, by internal pressure, by the swelling of subcutaneous tissue? That swelling was, after all, vividly present. But surely, in order to have caused such thorough bruising, the swelling would have had to have taken place suddenly, with incredible violence. Which didn't make sense, damn it. Living tissue couldn't swell that fast. Abrupt swelling was symptomatic of certain allergies, of course; one of the worst was severe allergic reaction to penicillin. But Jenny was not aware of anything that could cause critical swelling with such suddenness that hideously ugly, universal bruising resulted.

And even if the swelling wasn't simply classic postmortem bloat — which she was sure it wasn't — and even if it was the cause of the bruising, what in the name of God had caused the swelling in the first place? She had ruled out allergic reaction.

If a poison was responsible, it was an extremely exotic variety. But where would Hilda have come into contact with an exotic poison? She had no enemies. The very idea of murder was absurd. And whereas a child might be expected to put a strange substance into his mouth to see if it tasted good, Hilda wouldn't do anything so foolish. No, not poison.

Disease?

If it was disease, bacterial or viral, it was not like anything that Jenny had been taught to recognize. And what if it proved to be contagious?

“Jenny?” Lisa called.

Desease.

Relieved that she hadn't touched the body directly, wishing that she hadn't even touched the sleeve of the housedress, Jenny lurched to her feet, swayed, and stepped back from the corpse.

A chill rippled through her.

For the first time, she noticed what lay on the cutting board beside the sink. There were four large potatoes, a head of cabbage, a bag of carrots, a long knife, and a vegetable peeler. Hilda had been preparing a meal when she had dropped dead. Just like that. Bang. Apparently, she hadn't been ill, hadn't had any warning. Such a sudden death sure as hell wasn't indicative of disease.

What disease resulted in death without first progressing through ever more debilitating stages of illness, discomfort, and physical deterioration? None. None that was known to modern medicine.

“Jenny, can we get out of here?” Lisa asked.

“Ssssshhh! In a minute. Let me think,” Jenny said, leaning against the island, looking down at the dead woman.

In the back of her mind, a vague and frightening thought had been stirring: plague. The plague — bubonic and other forms — was not a stranger to parts of California and the Southwest. In recent years, a couple of dozen cases had been reported; however, it was rare that anyone died of the plague these days, for it could be cured by the administration of streptomycin, chloramphenicol, or any of the tetracyclines. Some strains of the plague were characterized by the appearance of petechiae; these were small, purplish, hemorrhagic spots on the skin. In extreme cases, the petechiae became almost black and spread until large areas of the body were afflicted by them; in the Middle Ages, it had been known, simply, as the Black Death. But could petechiae arise in such abundance that the victim's body would turn as completely dark as Hilda's?

Besides, Hilda had died suddenly, while cooking, without first suffering fever, incontinence — which ruled out the plague. And which, in fact, ruled out every other known infectious disease, too.

Yet there were no blatant signs of violence. No bleeding gunshot wounds. No stab wounds. No indications that the housekeeper had been beaten or strangled.

Jenny stepped around the body and went to the counter by the sink. She touched the head of cabbage and was startled to find that it was still chilled. It hadn't been here on the cutting board any longer than an hour or so.

She turned away from the counter and looked down at Hilda again, but with even greater dread than before.

The woman had died within the past hour. The body might even still be warm to the touch.

But what had killed her?

Jenny was no closer to an answer now than she had been before she'd examined the body. And although disease didn't seem to be the culprit here, she couldn't rule it out. The possibility of contagion, though remote, was frightening.

Hiding her concern from Lisa, Jenny said, “Come on, honey. I can use the phone in my office.”

“I'm feeling better now,” Lisa said, but she got up at once, obviously eager to go.

Jenny put an arm around the girl, and they left the kitchen.

An unearthly quiet filled the house. The silence was so deep that the whisper of their footsteps on the hall carpet was thunderous by contrast.

Despite overhead fluorescent lights, Jenny's office wasn't a stark, impersonal room like those that many physicians preferred these days. Instead, it was an old-fashioned, country doctor's office, rather like a Norman Rockwell painting in the Saturday Evening Post. Bookshelves were overflowing with books and medical journals. There were six antique wooden filing cabinets that Jenny had gotten for a good price at an auction. The walls were hung with diplomas, anatomy charts, and two large watercolor studies of Snowfield. Beside the locked drug cabinet, there was a scale, and beside the scale, on a small table, was a box of inexpensive toys — little plastic cars, tiny soldiers, miniature dolls — and packs of sugarless chewing gum that were dispensed as rewards — or bribes — to children who didn't cry during examinations.

A large, scarred, dark pine desk was the centerpiece of the room, and Jenny guided Lisa into the big leather chair behind it.

“I'm sorry,” the girl said.

“Sorry? — ” Jenny said, sitting on the edge of the desk and pulling the telephone toward her.

“I'm sorry I flaked out on you. When I saw… the body… I… well… I got hysterical.”

“You weren't hysterical at all. Just shocked and frightened, which is understandable.”

“But you weren't shocked or frightened.”

“Oh, yes,” Jenny said, “Not just shocked; stunned.”

“But you weren't scared, like I was.”

“I was scared, and I still am.” Jenny hesitated, then decided that, after all, she shouldn't hide the truth from the girl. She told her about the disturbing possibility of contagion. “I don't think it is a disease that we're dealing with here, but I could be wrong. And if I'm wrong…”

The girl stared at Jenny with wide-eyed amazement. “You were scared, like me, but you still spent all that time examining the body. Jeez, I couldn't do that. Not me. Not ever.”

“Well, honey, I'm a doctor. I'm trained for it.”

“Still…”

“You didn't flake out on me,” Jenny assured her.

Lisa nodded, apparently unconvinced.

Jenny lifted the telephone receiver, intending to call the sheriff's Snowfield substation before contacting the coroner over in Santa Mira, the county seat. There was no dial tone, just a soft hissing sound. She jiggled the disconnect buttons on the phones cradle, but the line remained dead.

There was something sinister about the phone being out of order when a dead woman lay in the kitchen. Mrs. Beck had been murdered. If someone cut the telephone line and crept into the house, and if he sneaked up on Hilda with care and cunning… well… he could have stabbed her in the back with a long-bladed knife that had sunk deep enough to pierce her heart, killing her instantly. In that case, the wound would have been where Jenny couldn't have seen it — unless she had rolled the corpse completely over, onto its stomach. That didn't explain why there wasn't any blood. And it didn't explain the universal bruising, the swelling. Nevertheless, the wound could be in the housekeeper's back, and since she had died within the past hour, it was also conceivable that the killer — if there was a killer — might still be here, in the house.

I'm letting my imagination run away with me, Jenny thought.

But she decided it would be wise for her and Lisa to get out of the house right away.

“We'll have to go next door and ask Vince or Angie Santini to make the calls for us,” Jenny said quietly, getting up from the edge of the desk. “Our phone is out of order.”

Lisa blinked. “Does that have anything to do with… what happened?”

“I don't know,” Jenny said.

Her heart was pounding as she crossed the office toward the half-closed door. She wondered if someone was waiting on the other side.

Following Jenny, Lisa said, “But the phone being out of order now… it's kind of strange, isn't it?”

“A little.”

Jenny half-expected to encounter a huge, grinning stranger with a knife. One of those sociopaths who seemed to be in such abundant supply these days. One of those Jack the Ripper imitators whose bloody handiwork kept the TV reporters supplied with grisly film for the six o'clock news.

She looked into the hall before venturing out there, prepared to jump back and slam the door if she saw anyone. It was deserted.

Glancing at Lisa, Jenny saw the girl had quickly grasped the situation.

They hurried along the hall toward the front of the house, and as they approached the stairs to the second floor, which lay just this side of the foyer, Jenny's nerves were wound tighter than ever. The killer — if there is a killer, she reminded herself exasperatedly — might be on the stairs, listening to them as they moved toward the front door. He might lunge down the steps as they passed him, a knife raised high in his hand…

But no one waited on the stairs.

Or in the foyer. Or on the front porch.

Outside, the twilight was fading rapidly into night. The remaining light was purplish, and shadows — a zombie army of them — were rising out of tens of thousands of places in which they had hidden from the sunlight. In ten minutes, it would be dark…

Chapter 4 The House Next Door

The Santinis' stone and redwood house was of more modern design than Jenny's place, all rounded corners and gentle angles. It thrust up from the stony soil, conforming to the contours of the slope, set against a backdrop of massive pines; it almost appeared to be a natural formation. Lights were on in a couple of the downstairs rooms.

The front door was ajar. Classical music was playing inside.

Jenny rang the bell and stepped back a few paces, where Lisa was waiting. She believed that the two of them ought to keep some distance between themselves and the Santinis; it was possible they had been contaminated merely by being in the kitchen with Mrs. Beck's corpse.

“Couldn't ask for better neighbors,” she told Lisa, wishing the hard, cold lump in her stomach would melt. “Nice people.”

No one responded to the doorbell.

Jenny stepped forward, pressed the button again, and returned to Lisa's side. “They own a ski shop and a gift store in town.”

The music swelled, faded, swelled. Beethoven.

“Maybe no one's home,” Lisa said.

“Must be someone here. The music, the lights…”

A sudden, sharp whirlwind churned under the porch roof, blades of air chopping up the strains of Beethoven, briefly transforming that sweet music into irritating, discordant sound.

Jenny pushed the door all the way open. A light was on in the study, to the left of the foyer. Milky luminescence spilled out of the open study doors, across the oak-floored foyer, to the brink of the dark living room.

“Angie? Vince?” Jenny called.

No answer.

Just Beethoven. The wind abated, and the torn music was knitted together again in the windless calm. The Third Symphony, Eroica.

“Hello? Anybody home?”

The symphony reached its stirring conclusion, and when the last note faded, no new music began. Apparently, the stereo had shut itself off. “Hello?”

Nothing. The night behind Jenny was silent, and the house before her was now silent, too.

“You aren't going in there?” Lisa asked anxiously.

Jenny glanced at the girl. “What's the matter?”

Lisa bit her lip. “Something's wrong. You feel it, too, don't you?”

Jenny hesitated. Reluctantly, she said, “Yes. I feel it, too.”

“It's as if… as if we're alone here… just you and me… and then again… not alone.”

Jenny did have the strangest feeling that they were being watched. She turned and studied the lawn and the shrubs, which had been almost completely swallowed by the darkness. She looked at each of the blank windows that faced onto the porch. There was light in the study, but the other windows were flat, black, and shiny. Someone could be standing just beyond any of those panes of glass, cloaked in shadow, seeing but unseen.

“Let's go, please,” Lisa said, “Let's get the police or somebody. Let's go now. Please.”

Jenny shook her head. “We're overwrought. Our imagination is getting the best of us. Anyway, I should take a look in there, just in case someone's hurt — Angie, Vince, maybe one of the kids…”

“Don't.” Lisa grabbed Jenny's arm, restraining her.

“I'm a doctor. I'm obligated to help.”

“But if you picked up a germ or something from Mrs. Beck, you might infect the Santinis. You said so yourself.”

“Yes, but maybe they're already dying of the same thing that killed Hilda. What then? They might need medical attention.”

“I don't think it's a disease,” Lisa said bleakly, echoing Jenny's own thoughts. “It's something worse.”

“What could be worse?”

“I don't know. But I… I feel it. Something worse.”

The wind rose up again and rustled the shrubs along the porch.

“Okay,” Jenny said, “You wait here while I go have a look.”

“No,” Lisa said quickly, “If you're going in there, so am I.”

“Honey, you wouldn't be flaking out on me if you—”

“I'm going,” the girl insisted, letting go of Jenny's arm. “Let's get it over with.”

They went into the house.

Standing in the foyer, Jenny looked through the open door on the left.

“Vince?”

Two lamps cast warm golden light into every corner of Vince Santini's study, but the room was deserted.

“Angie? Vince? Is anyone here?”

No sound disturbed the preternatural silence, although the darkness itself seemed somehow alert, watchful — as if it were a crouching animal.

To Jenny's right, the living room was draped with shadows as thick as densely woven black hunting. At the far end, a few splinters of light gleamed at the edges and at the bottom of a set of doors that closed off the dining room, but that meager glow did nothing to dispel the gloom on this side.

She found a wall switch that turned on a lamp, revealing the unoccupied living room.

“See,” Lisa said, “no one's home.”

“Let's have a look in the dining room.”

They crossed the living room, which was furnished with comfortable beige sofas and elegant, emerald-green Queen Anne wing chairs. The stereo phonograph and tape deck were nestled inconspicuously in a corner wall unit. That's where the music had been coming from; the Santinis had gone out and left it playing.

At the end of the room, Jenny opened the double doors, which squeaked slightly.

No one was in the dining room, either, but the chandelier shed light on a curious scene. The table was set for an early Sunday supper: four placemats; four clean dinner plates; four matching salad plates, three of them shiny-clean, the fourth holding a serving of salad; four sets of stainless-steel flatware; four glasses — two filled with milk, one with water, and one with an amber liquid that might be apple juice. Ice cubes, only partly melted, floated in both the juice and the water. In the center of the table were serving dishes: a bowl of salad, a platter of ham, a potato casserole, and a large dish of peas and carrots. Except for the salad, from which one serving had been taken, all of the food was untouched. The ham had grown cold. However, the cheesy crust on top of the potatoes was unbroken, and when Jenny put one hand against the casserole, she found that the dish was still quite warm. The food had been put on the table within the past hour, perhaps only thirty minutes ago.

“Looks like they had to go somewhere in an awful hurry,” Lisa said.

Frowning, Jenny said, “It almost looks as if they were taken away against their will.”

There were a few unsettling details. Like the overturned chair. It was lying on one side, a few feet from the table. The other chairs were upright, but on the floor beside one of them lay a serving spoon and a two-pronged meat fork. A balled-up napkin was on the floor, too, in a corner of the room, as if it had not merely been dropped but flung aside. On the table itself, a salt shaker was overturned.

Small things. Nothing dramatic. Nothing conclusive.

Nevertheless, Jenny worried.

“Taken away against their will?” Lisa asked, astonished.

“Maybe.” Jenny continued to speak softly, as did her sister. She still had the disquieting feeling that someone was lurking nearby, hiding, watching them — or at least listening.

Paranoia, she warned herself.

“I've never heard of anyone kidnapping an entire family,” Lisa said.

“Well… maybe I'm wrong. What probably happened was that one of the kids took ill suddenly, and they had to rush to the hospital over in Santa Mira. Something like that.”

Lisa surveyed the room again, cocked her head to listen to the tomblike silence in the house. “No. I don't think so.”

“Neither do I,” Jenny admitted.

Walking slowly around the table, studying it as if expecting to discover a secret message left behind by the Santinis, her fear giving way to curiosity, Lisa said, “It sort of reminds me of something I read about once in a book of strange facts. You know—The Bermuda Triangle or a book like that. There was this big sailing ship, the Mary Celesta… this is back in 1870 or around then… Anyway, the Mary Celesta was found adrift in the middle of the Atlantic, with the table set for dinner, but the entire crew was missing. The ship hadn't been damaged in a storm, and it wasn't leaking or anything like that. There wasn't any reason for the crew to abandon her. Besides, the lifeboats were all still there. The lamps were lit, and the sails were properly rigged, and the food was on the table like I said; everything was exactly as it should have been, except that every last man aboard had vanished. It's one of the great mysteries of the sea.”

“But I'm sure there's no great mystery about this,” Jenny said uneasily, “I'm sure the Santinis haven't vanished forever.”

Halfway around the table, Lisa stopped, raised her eyes, blinked at Jenny. “If they were taken against their will, does that have something to do with your housekeeper's death?”

“Maybe. We just don't know enough to say for sure.”

Speaking even more quietly than before, Lisa said, “Do you think we ought to have a gun or something?”

“No, no.” She looked at the untouched food congealing in the serving dishes. The spilled salt. The overturned chair. She turned away from the table. “Come on, honey.”

“Where now?”

“Let's see if the phone works.”

They went through the door that connected the dining room to the kitchen, and Jenny turned on the light.

The phone was on the wall by the sink. Jenny lifted the receiver, listened, tapped the disconnect buttons, but could get no dial tone.

This time, however, the line wasn't actually dead, as it had been at her own house. It was an open line, filled with the soft hiss of electronic static. The number of the fire department and the sheriff's substation were on a sticker on the base of the phone. In spite of having no dial tone, Jenny punched out the seven digits for the sheriff's office, but she couldn't make a connection.

Then, even as Jenny put her fingers on the disconnect buttons to jiggle them again, she began to suspect that someone was on the line, listening to her.

Into the receiver, she said, “Hello?”

Far-away hissing. Like eggs on a griddle.

“Hello?” she repeated.

Just distant static. What they called “white noise.”

She told herself there was nothing except the ordinary sounds of an open phone line. But what she thought she could hear was someone listening intently to her while she listened to him.

Nonsense.

A chill prickled the back of her neck, and, nonsense or not, she quickly put down the receiver.

“The sheriff's office can't be far in a town this small,” Lisa said.

“A couple of blocks.”

“Why don't we walk there?”

Jenny had intended to search the rest of the house, in case the Santinis were lying sick or injured somewhere. Now she wondered if someone had been on the telephone line with her, listening on an extension phone in another part of the house. That possibility changed everything. She didn't take her medical vows lightly; actually, she enjoyed the special responsibilities that came with her job, for she was the kind of person who needed to have her judgment, wits, and stamina put to the test on a regular basis; she thrived on challenge. But right now, her first responsibility was to Lisa and to herself. Perhaps the wisest thing to do was to get the deputy, Paul Henderson, return here with him, and then search the rest of the house.

Although she wanted to believe it was only her imagination, she still sensed inquisitive eyes; someone watching… waiting.

“Let's go,” she said to Lisa, “Come on.”

Clearly relieved, the girl hurried ahead, leading the way through the dining room and living room to the front door.

Outside, night had fallen. The air was cooler than it had been at dusk, and soon it would get downright cold — forty-five or forty degrees, maybe even a bit colder — a reminder that autumn's tenancy in the Sierras was always brief and that winter was eager to move in and take up residency.

Along Skyline Road, the streetlamps had come on automatically with the night's descent. In several store windows, after-hours lights also had come on, activated by light-sensing diodes that had responded to the darkening world outside.

On the sidewalk in front of the Santinis' house, Jenny and Lisa stopped, struck by the sight below them.

Shelving down the mountainside, its peaked and gabled roofs thrusting into the night sky, the town was even more beautiful now than it had been at twilight. A few chimneys issued ghostly plumes of wood smoke. Some windows glowed with light from within, but most, like dark mirrors, cast back the beams of the streetlanps. The mild wind made the trees sway gently, in a lullaby rhythm, and the resultant susurration was like the soft sighs and dreamy murmurs of a thousand peacefully slumbering children.

However, it wasn't just the beauty that was arresting. The perfect stillness, the silence — that was what made Jenny pause. On their arrival, she had found it strange. Now she found it ominous.

“The sheriff's substation is on the main street,” she told Lisa, “Just two and a half blocks from here.”

They hurried into the unbeating heart of town.

Chapter 5 Three Bullets

A single fluorescent lamp shone in the gloom of the town jail, but the flexible neck of it was bent sharply, focusing the light on the top of a desk, revealing little else of the big main room. An open magazine lay on the desk blotter, directly in the bar of hard, white light. Otherwise, the place was dark except for the pale luminescence that filtered through the mullioned windows from the streetlights.

Jenny opened the door and stepped inside, and Lisa followed close behind her.

“Hello? Paul? Are you here?”

She located a wall switch, snapped on the overhead lights and physically recoiled when she saw what was on the floor in front of her.

Paul Henderson. Dark, bruised flesh. Swollen. Dead.

“Oh, Jesus!” Lisa said, quickly turning away. She stumbled to the open door, leaned against the jamb, and sucked in great shuddering breaths of the cool night air.

With considerable effort, Jenny quelled the primal fear that began to rise within her, and she went to Lisa. Putting a hand on the girl's slender shoulder, she said, “Are you okay? Are you going to be sick?”

Lisa seemed to be trying hard not to gag. Finally she shook her head. “No. I w-won't be sick. I'll be all right. L-let's get out of here.”

“In a minute,” Jenny said, “First I want to take a look at the body.”

“You can't want to look at that.”

“You're right. I don't want to, but maybe I can get some idea what we're up against. You can wait here in the doorway.”

The girl sighed with resignation.

Jenny went to the corpse that was sprawled on the floor, knelt beside it.

Paul Henderson was in the same condition as Hilda Beck. Every visible inch of the deputy's flesh was bruised. The body was swollen: a puffy, distorted face; the neck almost as large as the head; fingers that resembled knotted links of sausage; a distended abdomen. Yet Jenny couldn't detect even the vaguest odor of decomposition.

Unseeing eyes bulged from the mottled, storm-colored face. Those eyes, together with the gaping and twisted mouth, conveyed an unmistakable emotion: fear. Like Hilda, Paul Henderson appeared to have died suddenly — and in the powerful, icy grip of terror.

Jenny hadn't been a close friend of the dead man's. She had known him, of course, because everyone knew everyone else in a town as small as Snowfield. He had seemed pleasant enough, a good law officer. She felt wretched about what had happened to him. As she stared at his contorted face, a rope of nausea tied itself into a knot of dull pain in her stomach, and she had to look away.

The deputy's sidearm wasn't in his holster. It was on the floor, near the body. A .45-caliber revolver.

She stared at the gun, considering the implications. Perhaps it had slipped out of the leather holster as the deputy had fallen to the floor. Perhaps. But she doubted it. The most obvious conclusion was that Henderson had drawn the revolver to defend himself against an attacker.

If that were the case, then he hadn't been felled by a poison or a disease. Jenny glanced behind her. Lisa was still standing at the open door, leaning against the jamb, staring out at Skyline Road.

Getting off her knees, turning away from the corpse, Jenny crouched over the revolver for long seconds, studying it, trying to decide whether or not to touch it. She was not as worried about contagion as she had been earlier after finding Mrs. Beck's body. This was looking less and less like a case of some bizarre plague. Besides, if an exotic plague was stalking in Snowfield, it was frightening virulent, and Jenny surely was contaminated by now. She had nothing to lose by picking up the revolver and studying it closely. What most concerned her was that she might obliterate incriminating fingerprints or other important evidence.

But even if Henderson had been murdered, it wasn't likely that his killer had used the victim's own gun, conveniently leaving fingerprints on it. Furthermore, Paul didn't appear to have been shot; if any shooting had been done, he was probably the one who had pulled the trigger.

She picked up the pistol and examined it. The cylinder had a six-round capacity, but three of the chambers were empty. The sharp odor of burnt gunpowder told her that the weapon had been fired sometime today; maybe even within the past hour.

Carrying the .45, scanning the blue tile floor, she rose and walked to one end of the reception area, then to the other end. Her eye caught a glint of brass, another, then another: three expended cartridges.

None of the shots had been fired downward, into the floor. The highly polished blue tiles were unmarred.

Jenny pushed through the swinging gate in the wooden railing, moving into the area that TV cops always called the “bull pen.” She walked down an aisle between facing pairs of desks, filing cabinets, and work tables. In the center of the room, she stopped and let her gaze travel slowly over the pale green walls and the white acoustic-tile ceiling, looking for bullet holes. She couldn't find any.

That surprised her. If the gun hadn't been discharged into the floor, and if it hadn't been aimed at the front windows which it hadn't; no broken glass — then it had to have been fired with the muzzle pointing into the room, waist-high or higher. So where had the slugs gone? She couldn't see any ruined furniture, no splintered wood or torn sheet-metal or shattered plastic, although she knew that a .45-caliber bullet would do considerable damage at the point of impact.

If the expended rounds weren't in this room, there was only one other place they could be: in the man or men at whom Paul Henderson had taken aim.

But if the deputy had wounded an assailant — or two or three assailants — with three shots from a .45 police revolver, three shots so squarely placed in the assailant's body trunk that the bullets had been stopped and had not passed through, then there would have been blood everywhere. But there wasn't a drop.

Baffled, she turned to the desk where the gooseneck fluorescent lamp cast light on an open issue of Time. A brass nameplate read SERGEANT PAUL J. HENDERSON. This was where he had been sitting, passing an apparently dull afternoon, when whatever happened had… happened.

Already sure of what she would hear, Jenny lifted the receiver from that stood on Henderson's desk. No dial tone. Just the electronic, insect-wing hiss of an open line.

As before, when she had attempted to use the telephone in the Santinis' kitchen, she had the feeling that she wasn't the only one on the line.

She put the receiver down — too abruptly, too hard.

Her hands were trembling.

Along the back wall of the room, there were two bulletin boards, a photocopier, a locked gun cabinet, a police radio (a home base set), and a teletype link. Jenny didn't know how to operate the teletype. Anyway, it was silent and appeared to be out of order. She couldn't make the radio come to life. Although the power switch was in the on-position, the indicator lamp didn't light. The microphone remained dead. Whoever had done in the deputy had also done in the teletype and the radio.

Heading back to the reception area at the front of the room, Jenny saw that Lisa was no longer standing in the doorway, and for an instant her heart froze. Then she saw the girl hunkered down beside Paul Henderson's body, peering intently at it.

Lisa looked up as Jenny came through the gate in the railing. Indicating the badly swollen corpse, the girl said, “I didn't realize skin could stretch as much as this without splitting.” Her pose — scientific inquisitiveness, detachment, studied indifference to the horror of the scene — was as transparent as a window. Her darting eyes betrayed her. Pretending she didn't find it stressful, Lisa looked away from the deputy and stood up.

“Honey, why didn't you stay by the doors?”

“I was disgusted with myself for being such a coward.”

“Listen, Sis, I told you”

“I mean, I'm afraid something's going to happen to us, something bad, right here in Snowfield, tonight, any minute maybe, something really awful. But I'm not ashamed of that fear because it's only common sense to be afraid after what we've seen. But I was even afraid of the deputy's body, and that was just plain childish.”

When Lisa paused, Jenny said nothing. The girl had more to say, and she needed to get it off her mind.

“He's dead. He can't hurt me. There's no reason to be so scared of him. It's wrong to give in to irrational fears. It's wrong and weak and stupid. A person should face up to fears like that,” Lisa insisted, “Facing up to them is the only way to get over them. Right? So I decided to face up to this.” With a tilt of her head, she indicated the dead man at her feet.

There's such anguish in her eyes, Jenny thought.

It wasn't merely the situation in Snowfield that was weighing heavily on the girl. It was the memory of finding her mother dead of a stroke on a hot, clear afternoon in July. Suddenly, because of all of this, all of that was coming back to her, coming back hard.

“I'm okay now,” Lisa said, “I'm still afraid of what might happen to us, but I'm not afraid of him.” She glanced down at the corpse to prove her point, then looked up and met Jenny's eyes. “See? You can count on me now. I won't flake out on you again.”

For the first time, Jenny realized that she was Lisa's role model. With her eyes and face and voice and hands, Lisa revealed, in countless subtle ways, a respect and an admiration for Jenny that was far greater than Jenny had imagined. Without resorting to words, the girl was saying something that deeply moved Jenny: I love you, but even more than that, I like you; I'm proud of you; I think you're terrific, and if you're patient with me, I'll make you proud and happy to have me for a kid sister.

The realization that she occupied such a lofty position in Lisa's personal pantheon was a surprise to Jenny. Because of the difference in their ages and because Jenny had been away from home almost constantly since Lisa was two, she had thought that she was virtually a stranger to the girl. She was both flattered and humbled by this new insight into their relationship.

“I know I can count on you,” she assured the girl, “I never thought I couldn't.”

Lisa smiled self-consciously.

Jenny hugged her.

For a moment, Lisa clung to her fiercely, and when they pulled apart, she said, “So… did you find any clue to what happened here?”

“Nothing that makes sense.”

“The phone doesn't work, huh?”

“No.”

“So they're out of order all over town.”

“Probably.”

They walked to the door and stepped outside, onto the cobblestone sidewalk.

Surveying the hushed street, Lisa said, “Everyone's dead.”

“We can't be sure.”

“Everyone,” the girl insisted softly, bleakly, “The whole town. All of them. You can feel it.”

“The Santinis were missing, not dead,” Jenny reminded her.

A three-quarter moon had risen above the mountains while she and Lisa had been in the sheriff's substation. In those nightclad places where the streetlamps and shop lights did not reach, the silvery light of the moon limned the edges of shadowed forms. But the moonglow revealed nothing. Instead, it fell like a veil, clinging to some objects more than to others, providing only vague hints of their shapes, and, like all veils, somehow managing to make all things beneath it more mysterious and obscure than they would have been in total darkness.

“A graveyard,” Lisa said. “The whole town's a graveyard. Can't we just get in the car and go for help?”

“You know we can't. If a disease has—”

“It's not disease.”

“We can't be absolutely sure.”

“I am. I'm sure. Anyway, you said you'd almost ruled it out, too.”

“But as long as there's the slightest chance, however remote, we've got to consider ourselves quarantined.”

Lisa seemed to notice the gun for the first time. “Did that belong to the deputy?”

“Yes.”

“Is it loaded?”

“He fired it three times, but that leaves three bullets in the cylinder.”

“Fired at what?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Are you keeping it?” Lisa asked, shivering.

Jenny stared at the revolver in her right hand and nodded. “I guess maybe I should.”

“Yeah. Then again… it didn't save him, did it?”

Chapter 6 Novelties and Notions

They proceeded along Skyline Road, moving alternately through shadows, yellowish sodium-glow from the streetlamps, darkness, and phosphoric moonlight. Regularly spaced trees grew from curbside planters on the left. On the right, they passed a gift shop, a small cafe, and the Santinis' ski shop. At each establishment, they paused to peer through the windows, searching for signs of life, finding none.

They also passed townhouses that faced directly onto the sidewalk. Jenny climbed the steps at each house and rang the bell. No one answered, not even at those houses where light shone beyond the windows. She considered trying a few doors and, if they were unlocked, going inside.

But she didn't do it because she suspected, just as Lisa did, that the occupants (if they could be found at all) would be in the same grotesque condition as Hilda Beck and Paul Henderson. She needed to locate living people, survivors, witnesses. She couldn't learn anything more from corpses.

“Is there a nuclear power plant around here?” Lisa asked.

“No. Why?”

“A big military base?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe… radiation.”

“Radiation doesn't kill this suddenly.”

“A really strong blast of radiation?”

“Wouldn't leave victims who look like these.”

“No?”

“There'd be burns, blisters, lesions.”

They came to the Lovely Lady Salon, where Jenny always had her hair cut. The shop was deserted, as it would have been on any ordinary Sunday. Jenny wondered what had happened to Madge and Dana, the beauticians who owned the place. She liked Madge and Dana. She hoped to God they'd been out of town all day, visiting their boyfriend over in Mount Larson.

“Poison?” Lisa asked as they turned away from the beauty shop.

“How could the entire town be poisoned simultaneously?”

“Bad food of some kind.”

“Oh, maybe if everyone had been at the town picnic, eating the same tainted potato salad or infected pork or something like that. But they weren't. There's only one town picnic, and that's on the Fourth of July.”

“Poisoned water supply?”

“Not unless everyone just happened to take a drink at precisely the same moment, so that no one had a chance to warn anyone else.”

“Which is just about impossible.”

“Besides, this doesn't look much like any kind of poison reaction I've ever heard about.”

Liebermann's Bakery. It was a clean, white building with a blue-and-white-striped awning. During the skiing season, tourists lined up halfway down the block, all day long, seven days a week, just to buy the big flaky cinnamon wheels, the sticky buns, chocolate-chip cookies, almond cupcakes with gooey mandarin-chocolate centers, and other goodies that Jakob and Aida Liebermann produced with tremendous pride and delicious artistry. The Liebermanns enjoyed their work so much that they even chose to live near it, in an apartment above the bakery (no light visible up there now), and although there wasn't nearly as much profit in the April-to-October trade as there was the rest of the year, they remained open Monday through Saturday in the off season. People drove over from all the outlying mountain towns — Mount Larson, Shady Roost, and Pineville — to purchase bags and boxes full of the Liebermanns' treats.

Jenny leaned close to the big window, and Lisa put her forehead against the glass. In the rear of the budding, back in the part where the ovens were, light poured brightly through an open door, splashing one end of the sales room and indirectly illuminating the rest of the place. Small cafe tables stood to the left, each with a pair of chairs. White enamel display cases with glass fronts were empty.

Jenny prayed that Jakob and Aida had escaped the fate that appeared to have befallen the rest of Snowfield. They were two of the gentlest, kindest people she had ever met. People like the Liebermanns made Snowfield a good place to live, a haven from the rude world where violence and unkindness were disconcertingly common.

Turning away from the bakery window, Lisa said, “How about toxic waste? A chemical spill. Something that would've sent up a cloud of deadly gas.”

“Not here,” Jenny said, “aren't any toxic waste dumps in these mountains. No factories. Nothing like that.”

“Sometimes it happens whenever a train derails and a tank car full of chemicals splits open.”

“Nearest railroad tracks are twenty miles away.”

Her brow creasing with thought, Lisa started walking away from the bakery.

“Wait. I want to take a look in here,” Jenny said, stepping to the front door of the shop.

“Why? No one's there.”

“We can't be sure.” She pushed the door but couldn't open it. “The lights are on in the back room, the kitchen. They could be back there, getting things ready for the morning's baking, unaware of what's happened in the rest of the town. This door's locked. Let's go around back.”

Behind a solid wood gate, a narrow covered serviceway led between Liebermann's Bakery and the Lovely Lady Salon. The gate was held shut by a single sliding bolt, which yielded to Jenny's fumbling fingers. It shuddered open with a squeal and a rasp of unoiled hinges. The tunnel between the buildings was forbiddingly dark; the only light lay at the far end, a dim gray patch in the shape of an arch, where the passageway ended at the alley.

“I don't like this,” Lisa said.

“It's okay, honey. Just follow me and stay close. If you get disoriented, trail your hand along the wall.”

Although Jenny didn't want to contribute to her sister's fear by revealing her own doubts, the unlighted walkway made her nervous, too. With each step, the passage seemed to grow narrower, crowding her.

A quarter of the way into the tunnel, she was stricken by the uncanny feeling that she and Lisa weren't alone. An instant later, she became aware of something moving in the darkest space, under the roof, eight or ten feet overhead. She couldn't say exactly how she became aware of it. She couldn't hear anything other than her own and Lisa's echoing footsteps; she couldn't see much of anything, either. She just suddenly sensed a hostile presence, and as she squinted ahead at the coal-black ceiling of the passageway, she was sure the darkness was… changing.

Shifting. Moving. Moving up there in the rafters.

She told herself she was imagining things, but by the time she was halfway along the tunnel, her animal instincts were screaming at her to get out, to run. Doctors weren't supposed to panic; equanimity was part of the training. She did pick up her pace a bit, but only a little, not much, not in panic; then after a few steps, she picked up the pace a bit more, and a bit more, until she was running in spite of herself.

She burst into the alley. It was gloomy there, too, but not as dark as the tunnel had been.

Lisa came out of the passageway in a stumbling run, slipped on a wet patch of blacktop, and nearly fell.

Jenny grabbed her and prevented her from going down.

They backed up, watching the exit from the lightless, covered passage. Jenny raised the revolver that she'd taken from the sheriff's substation.

“Did you feel it?” Lisa asked breathlessly.

“Something up under the roof. Probably just birds or maybe, at worst, several bats.”

Lisa shook her head. “No, no. N-not under the roof. It was c-crouched up against the w-wall.”

They kept watching the mouth of the tunnel.

“I saw something in the rafters,” Jenny said.

“No,” the girl insisted, shaking her head vigorously.

“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… I don't know exactly. I couldn't actually see it.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“No,” Lisa said, eyes riveted on the passageway.

“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… shifting…”

“That's like what I thought I saw — but up in the rafters.”

They waited. Nothing came out of the passageway.

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 succumbed to hysteria. She didn't like that explanation one damn 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,” she 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 Lieberman's Bakery, but they glanced repeatedly behind them, at the mouth of the covered passage.

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 waited 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 shiny 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.

“Nobody'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, God.

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 hell is going on? What the hell?”

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 glass 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 glass.

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 glass 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 somethin' 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 .45 revolver 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 sharply.

Lisa turned, blinking, confused.

“Not the alley,” Jenny said. “And not that dark passage again.”

“God, 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 passageway.

After a while the girl said, “Radiation, disease, poison, toxic gas — boy, we sure were on the wrong walk. 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, shivering.

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 mass 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 “hello?” 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-shingle-brick-gabled-balconied tombs, a graveyard fashioned in the image of a quaint alpine village.

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

Chapter 7 The County Sheriff

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 constitutional 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 found himself looking around in amazement and delight at the gentle, 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 nine, 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. Institutional-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.

“Listen, Sheriff,” Kale said, “can we just cut this crap? You don't have to read me my rights again, for Christ's sake. Haven't we been through this a dozen times in the past three days?”

Bob Robine, Kale's attorney, quickly patted his client's arm to make him be quiet. Robine was pudgy, round-faced, with a sweet smile but with the hard eyes of a casino pit boss.

“Fletch,” Robine said, “Sheriff Hammond knows he's held you on suspicion just about as long as the law allows, and he knows that I know it, too. So what he's going to do — he's going to settle this one way or the other within the next hour.”

Kale blinked, nodded, and changed his tactics. He slumped in his chair as if a great weight of grief lay on his shoulders. When he spoke, there was a — faint tremor in his voice. “I'm sorry if I sort of lost my head there for a minute, Sheriff. I shouldn't have snapped at you like that. But it's so hard… so very, very hard for me.” His face appeared to cave in, and the tremor in his voice became more pronounced. “I mean, for God's sake, I've lost my family. My wife… my son… both gone.”

Bryce Hammond said, “I'm sorry if you think I've treated you unfairly, Mr. Kale. I only try to do what I think is best. Sometimes, I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong this time.”

Apparently deciding that he wasn't in too much trouble after all, and that he could afford to be magnanimous now, Fletcher Kale dabbed at the tears on his face, sat up straighter in his chair, and said, “Yeah… well, uh… I guess I can see your position, Sheriff.”

Kale was underestimating Bryce Hammond.

Bob Robine knew the sheriff better than his client did. He frowned, glanced at Tal, then stared hard at Bryce.

In Tal Whitman's experience, most people who dealt with the sheriff underestimated him, just as Fletcher Kale had done. It was an easy thing to do. Bryce didn't look impressive. He was thirty-nine, but he seemed a lot younger than that. His thick sandy hair fell across his forehead, giving him a mussed, boyish appearance. He had a pug nose with a spatter of freckles across the bridge of it and across both cheeks. His blue eyes were clear and sharp, but they were hooded with heavy lids that made him seem bored, sleepy, maybe even a little bit dullwitted. His voice was misleading, too. It was soft, melodic, gentle. Furthermore, he spoke slowly at times, and always with measured deliberation, and some people took his careful speech to mean that he had difficulty forming his thoughts. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Bryce Hammond was acutely aware of how others perceived him, and when it was to his advantage, he reinforced their misconceptions with an ingratiating manner, with an almost witless smile, and with a further softening of speech that made him seem like the classic hayseed cop.

Only one thing kept Tal from fully enjoying this confrontation: He knew the Kale investigation had affected Bryce Hammond on a deep, personal level. Bryce was hurting, sick at heart about the pointless deaths of Joanna and Danny Kale, because in a curious way this case echoed events in his own life. Like Fletcher Kale, the sheriff had lost a wife and a son, although the circumstances of his loss were considerably different from Kale's.

A year ago, Ellen Hammond had died instantly in a car crash. Seven-year-old Timmy, sitting on the front seat beside his mother, had suffered serious head injuries and had been in a coma for the past twelve months. The doctors didn't give Timmy much chance of regaining consciousness.

Bryce had nearly been destroyed by the tragedy. Only recently had Tal Whitman begun to feel that his friend was moving away from the abyss of despair.

The Kale case had opened Bryce Hammond's wounds again, but he hadn't allowed grief to dull his senses; it hadn't caused him to overlook anything. Tal Whitman had known the precise moment, last Thursday evening, when Bryce had begun to suspect that Fletcher Kale was guilty of two premeditated murders, for suddenly something cold and implacable had come into Bryce's heavy-lidded eyes.

Now, doodling on a yellow note pad as if only half his mind was on the interrogation, the sheriff said, “Mr. Kale, rather than ask you a lot of questions that you've already answered a dozen times, why don't I summarize what you've told us? If my summary sounds pretty much right to you, then we can get on with these new items I'd like to ask you about.”

“Sure. Let's get it over with and get out of here,” Kale said.

“Okay then,” Bryce said, “Mr. Kale, according to your testimony, your wife, Joanna, felt she was trapped by marriage and motherhood, that she was too young to have so much responsibility. She felt she had made a terrible mistake and was going to have to pay for it for the rest of her life. She wanted some kicks, a way to escape, so she turned to dope. Would you say that's how you've described her state of mind?”

“Yes,” Kale said, “Exactly.”

“Good,” Bryce said, “So she started smoking pot. Before long, she was stoned almost continuously. For two and a half years, you lived with a pothead, all the while hoping you could change her. Then a week ago she went berserk, broke a lot of dishes and threw some food around the kitchen, and you had hell's own time calming her down. That was when you discovered she'd recently begun using PCP — what's sometimes called 'angel dust' on the street. You were shocked. You knew that some people became maniacally violent while under the influence of PCP, so you made her show you where she kept her stash, and you destroyed it. Then you told her that if she ever used drugs around little Danny again, you'd beat her within an inch of her life.”

Kale cleared his throat. “But she just laughed at me. She said I wasn't a woman-beater and I shouldn't pretend to be Mr. Macho. She said, 'Hell, Fletch, if I kicked you in the balls, you'd thank me for livening up your day.'”

“And that was when you broke down and cried?” Bryce asked.

Kale said, “I just… well, I realized I didn't have any influence with her.”

From his window seat, Tal Whitman watched Kale's face twist with grief — or with a reasonable facsimile. The bastard was good.

“And when she saw you cry,” Bryce said, “that sort of brought her to her senses.”

“Right,” Kale said, “I guess it… affected her… a big ox like me bawling like a baby. She cried, too, and she promised not to take any more PCP. We talked about the past, about what we had expected from marriage, said a lot of things maybe we should have said before, and we felt closer than we had in a couple of years. At least I felt closer. I thought she did, too. She swore she'd start cutting down on the pot.”

Still doodling, Bryce said, “Then last Thursday you came home early from work and found your little boy, Danny, dead in the master bedroom. You heard something behind you. It was Joanna, holding a meat cleaver, the one she'd used to kill Danny.”

“She was stoned,” Kale said, “PCP. I could see it right away. That wildness in her eyes, that animal look.”

“She screamed at you, a lot of irrational stuff about snakes that lived inside people's heads, about people being controlled by evil snakes. You circled away from her, and she followed. You didn't try to take the cleaver away from her?”

“I figured I'd be killed. I tried to talk her down.”

“So you kept circling until you reached the nightstand where you kept a.38 automatic.”

“I warned her to drop the cleaver. I warned her.”

“Instead, she rushed at you with the cleaver raised. So you shot her. Once. In the chest.”

Kale was leaning forward now, his face in his hands.

The sheriff put down his pen. He folded his hands on his stomach and laced his fingers. “Now, Mr. Kale, I hope you can bear with me a little bit longer. Just a few more questions, and then we can all get out of here and get on with our lives.”

Kale lowered his hands from his face. It was clear to Tal Whitman that Kale figured “getting on with our lives” meant he would be released at last. “I'm all right, Sheriff. Go ahead.”

Bob Robine didn't say a word.

Slouched in his chair, looking loose and boneless, Bryce Hammond said, “While we've been holding you on suspicion, Mr. Kale, we've come up with a few questions we need to have answered, so we can set our minds to rest about this whole terrible thing. Now, some of these things may seem awful trivial to you, hardly worth my time or yours. They are little things. I admit that. The reason I'm putting you through more trouble… well, it's because I want to get reelected next year, Mr. Kale. If my opponents catch me out on one technicality, on even one tiny little damned thing, they'll huff and puff and blow it into a scandal; they'll say I'm slipping or lazy or something.” Bryce grinned at Kale — actually grinned at him. Tal couldn't believe it.

“I understand, Sheriff,” Kale said.

On his window seat, Tal Whitman tensed and leaned forward.

And Bryce Hammond said, “First thing is — I was wondering why you shot your wife and then did a load of laundry before calling us to report what had happened.”

Chapter 8 Barricades

Severed hands. Severed heads.

Jenny couldn't get those gruesome images out of her mind as she hurried along the sidewalk with Lisa.

Two blocks east of Skyline Road, on Vail Lane, the night was as still and as quietly threatening as it was everywhere else in Snowfield. The trees here were bigger than those on the main street; they blocked out most of the moonlight. The streetlamps were more widely spaced, too, and the small pools of amber light were separated by ominous lakes of darkness.

Jenny stepped between two gateposts, onto a brick walk that led to a one-story English cottage set on a deep lot. Warm light radiated through leaded glass windows with diamond-shaped panes.

Tom and Karen Oxley lived in the deceptively small-looking cottage, which actually had seven rooms and two baths. Tom was the accountant for most of the lodges and motels in town. Karen ran a charming French cafe during the season. Both were amateur radio operators, and they owned a shortwave set, which was why Jenny had come here.

“If someone sabotaged the radio at the sheriff's office,” Lisa said, “what makes you think they didn't get this one, too?”

“Maybe they didn't know about it. It's worth taking a look.”

She rang the bell, and when them was no response, she tried the door. It was locked.

They went around to the rear of the property, where brandy-hued light flowed out through the windows. Jenny looked warily at the rear lawn, which was left moonless by the shadows. Their footsteps echoed hollowly on the wooden floor of the back porch. She tried the kitchen door and found it was locked, too.

At the nearest window, the curtains were drawn aside. Jenny looked in and saw only an ordinary kitchen: green counters, cream-colored walls, oak cabinets, gleaming appliances, no signs of violence.

Other casement windows faced onto the porch, and one of these, Jenny knew, was a den window. Lights were on, but the curtains were drawn. Jenny rapped on the glass, but no one responded. She tested the window, found that it was latched. Gripping the revolver by the barrel, she smashed a diamond-shaped pane adjacent to the center post. The sound of shattering glass was jarringly loud. Although this was an emergency, she felt like a thief. She reached through the broken pane, threw open the latch, pulled the halves of the window apart, and went over the sill, into the house. She fumbled through the drapes, then drew them aside, so that Lisa could enter more easily.

Two bodies were in the small den. Tom and Karen Oxley.

Karen was lying on the floor, on her side, legs drawn up toward her belly, shoulders curled forward, arms crossed over her breasts — a fetal position. She was bruised and swollen. Her bulging eyes stared in horror. Her mouth hung open, frozen forever in a scream.

“Their faces are the worst thing,” Lisa said.

“I can't understand why the facial muscles didn't relax upon death. I don't see how they can remain taut like that.”

“What did they see?” Lisa wondered.

Tom Oxley was sitting in front of the shortwave radio. He was slumped over the radio, his head turned to one side. He was sheathed in bruises and swollen hideously, just as Karen was. His right hand was clenched around a table-model microphone, as if he had perished while refusing to relinquish it. Evidently, however, he had not managed a call for help. If he had gotten a message out of Snowfield, the police would have arrived by now.

The radio was dead.

Jenny had figured as much as soon as she had seen the bodies.

However, neither the condition of the radio nor the condition of the corpses was as interesting as the barricade. The den door was closed and, presumably, locked. Karen and Tom had dragged a heavy cabinet in front of it. They had pushed a pair of easy chairs hard against the cabinet, then had wedged a television set against the chairs.

“They were determined to keep something from getting in here,” Lisa said.

“But it got in anyway.”

“How?”

They both looked at the window through which they'd come.

“It was locked from the inside,” Jenny said.

The room had only one other window.

They went to it and pulled back the drapes.

It was also latched securely on the inside.

Jenny stared out at the night, until she felt that something hidden in the darkness was staring back at her, getting a good look at her as she stood unprotected in the lighted window. She quickly closed the drapes.

“A locked room,” Lisa said.

Jenny turned slowly around and studied the den. There was a small outlet from a heating duct, covered with a metal vent plate full of narrow slots, and there was perhaps a half-inch of air space under the barricaded door. But there was no way anyone could have gained access to the room.

She said, “As far as I can see, only bacteria or toxic gas or some kind of radiation could've gotten in here to kill them.”

“But none of those things killed the Liebermanns.”

Jenny nodded. “Besides, you wouldn't build a barricade to keep out radiation, gas, or germs.”

How many of Snowfield's people had locked themselves in, thinking they had found defensible havens — only to die as suddenly and mysteriously as those who'd had no time to run? And what was it that could enter locked rooms without opening doors or windows? What had passed through this barricade without disturbing it?

The Oxleys' house was as silent as the surface of the moon.

Finally, Lisa said, “Now what?”

“I guess maybe we have to risk spreading a contagion. We'll drive out of town only as far as the nearest pay phone, call the sheriff in Santa Mira, tell him the situation, and let him decide how to handle it. Then we'll come back here to wait. We won't have any direct contact with anyone, and they can sterilize the telephone booth if they think that's necessary.”

“I hate the idea of coming back here once we've gotten out,” Lisa said anxiously.

“So do I. But we've got to act responsibly. Let's go,” Jenny said, turning toward the open window through which they had entered.

The phone rang.

Startled, Jenny turned toward the strident sound.

The phone was on the same table as the radio.

It rang again.

She snatched up the receiver. “Hello?”

The caller didn't respond.

“Hello?”

Icy silence.

Jenny's hand tightened on the receiver.

Someone was listening intently, remaining utterly silent, waiting for her to speak. She was determined not to give him that satisfaction. She just pressed the receiver to her ear and strained to hear something, anything, if even nothing more than the faint sealike ebb and flow of his breathing. He didn't make the slightest sound, but still she could feel, at the other end of the line, the presence that she had felt when she'd picked up the phone in the Santinis' house and in the sheriff's substation.

Standing in the barricaded room, in that silent house where Death had crept in with impossible stealth, Jenny Paige felt an odd transformation form her. She was well-educated, a woman of reason and logic, not even mildly superstitious. Thus far, she had attempted to solve the mystery of Snowfield by applying the tools of logic and reason. But for the first time in her life, they had utterly failed her. Now deep in her mind, something… shifted, as if an enormously heavy iron cover were being slid off a dark pit in her subconscious. In that pit, within ancient chambers of the mind, there lay a host of primitive sensations and perceptions, a superstitious awe that was new to her. Virtually on the level of racial memory stored in the genes, she sensed what was happening in Snowfield. The knowledge was within her; however, it was so alien, so fundamentally illogical, that she resisted it, fighting hard to suppress the superstitious terror that boiled up within her.

Clutching the telephone receiver, she listened to the silent presence on the line, and she argued with herself

— It isn't a man; it's a thing.

— Nonsense.

— It's not human, but it's aware.

— You're hysterical.

— Unspeakably malevolent; perfectly, purely evil.

— Stop it, stop it, stop it!

She wanted to slam down the phone. She couldn't do it. The thing on the other end of the line had her mesmerized.

Lisa stepped close. “What's wrong? What's happening?”

Shaking, drenched with sweat, feeling tainted merely by listening to the despicable presence, Jenny was about to tear the receiver away from her ear when she heard a hiss, a click and then a dial tone.

For a moment, stunned, she couldn't react.

Then, with a whimper, she jabbed at the 0 button on the phone.

There was a ringing — on the line. It was a wonderful, sweet, reassuring sound.

“Operator.”

“Operator, this is an emergency,” Jenny said, “I've got to reach the county sheriff's office in Santa Mira.”

Chapter 9 A Call for Help

“Laundry?” Kale asked, “What laundry?”

Bryce could see that Kale was jolted by the question and was only pretending not to understand.

“Sheriff, where is this supposed to lead'?” Bob Robine asked.

Bryce's hooded eyes remained hooded, and he kept his voice calm, slow. “Gee, Bob, I'm just trying to get to the bottom of things, so we can all get out of here. I swear, I don't like working on Sundays, and here this one is almost shot to hell already. I have these questions, and Mr. Kale doesn't have to answer a one of them, but I will ask, so that I can go home and put my feet up and have a beer.”

Robine sighed. He looked at Kale. “Don't answer unless I say it's okay.” Worried now, Kale nodded.

Frowning at Bryce, Robine said, “Go ahead.”

Bryce said, “When we arrived at Mr. Kale's house last Thursday, after he phoned in to report the deaths, I noticed that one cuff of his slacks and the thick bottom edge of his sweater both looked slightly damp, so as you'd hardly notice. I got the notion he'd laundered everything he was wearing and just hadn't left his clothes in the dryer quite long enough. So I had a look in the laundry room, and I found something in interesting. In the cupboard right there beside the washer, where Mrs. Kale kept all of her soaps and detergents and fabric softeners, there were two bloody fingerprints on the big box of Cheer. One was smeared, but the other was clear. The lab says it's Mr. Kale's print.”

“Whose blood was on the box?” Robine asked sharply.

“Both Mrs. Kale and Danny were type 0. So is Mr. Kale. That makes it a little more difficult for us to—”

“The blood on the box of detergent?” Robine interrupted.

“Type O.”

“Then it could have been my client's own blood! He could have gotten it on the box on a previous occasion, maybe after he cut himself gardening last week.”

Bryce shook his head. “As you know, Bob, this whole blood-typing business is getting highly sophisticated these days. Why, they can break down a sample into so many enzymes and protein signatures that a person's blood is almost as unique as his fingerprints. So they could tell us unequivocally that the blood on the box of Cheer — the blood on Mr. Kale's hand when he made those two prints — was little Danny Kale's blood.”

Fletcher Kale's gray eyes remained flat and unexpressive, but he turned quite pale. “I can explain,” he said.

“Hold it!” Robine said, “Explain it to me first — in private.” The attorney led his client to the farthest corner of the room.

Bryce slouched in his chair. He felt gray. Washed out. He'd been that way since Thursday, since seeing Danny Kale's pathetic, crumpled body.

He had expected to take considerable pleasure in watching Kale squirm. But there was no pleasure in it.

Robine and Kale returned. “Sheriff, I'm afraid my client did a stupid thing.”

Kale tried to look properly abashed.

“He did something that could be misinterpreted — just as you have misinterpreted it. Mr. Kale was frightened, confused, and grief-stricken. He wasn't thinking clearly. I'm sure any jury would sympathize with him., You see, when he found the body of his little boy he picked it up”

“He told us he never touched it.”

Kale met Bryce's gaze forthrightly and said, “When I first saw Danny lying on the floor… I couldn't really believe that he was… dead. I picked him up… thinking I should rush him to the hospital… Later, after I'd shot Joanna, I looked down and saw that I was covered with… with Danny's blood. I had shot my wife, but suddenly I realized it might look as if I'd killed my own son, too.”

“There was still the meat cleaver in your wife's hand,” Bryce said, “And Danny's blood was all over her, too. And you could've figured the coroner would find PCP in her bloodstream.”

“I realize that now,” Kale said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and wiping his eyes. “But at the time, I was afraid I'd be accused of something I'd never done.”

The word “psychopath” wasn't exactly right for Fletcher Kale, Bryce decided. He wasn't crazy. No r was he a sociopath, exactly. There wasn't a word that described him properly. However, a good cop would recognize the type and see the potential for criminal activity and, perhaps, the talent for violence, as well. There is a certain kind of man who has a lot of vitality and likes plenty of action, a man who has more than his share of shallow charm, whose clothes are more expensive than he can afford, who owns not a single book (as Kale did not), who seems to have no well-thought-out opinions about politics or art or economics or any issue of real substance, who is not religious except when misfortune befalls him or when he wishes to impress someone with his piety (as Kale, member of no church, now read the Bible in his cell for at least four hours every day), who has an athletic build but who seems to loathe any pursuit as healthy as physical exercise, who spends his leisure time in bars and cocktail lounges, who cheats on his wife as a matter of habit (as did Kale, by all reports), who is impulsive, who is unreliable and always late for appointments (as was Kale), whose goals are either vague or unrealistic ("Fletcher Kale? He's a dreamer."), who frequently overdraws his checking account and lies about money, who is quick to borrow and slow to pay back, who exaggerates, who knows he's going to be rich one day but who has no specific plan for acquiring that wealth, who never doubts or thinks about next year, who worries only about himself and only when it's too late. There was such a man, such a type, and Fletcher Kale was a prime example of the animal in question.

Bryce had seen others like him. Their eyes were always flat; you couldn't see into their eyes at all. Their faces expressed Whatever emotion seemed required, although every expression was a shade too right. When they expressed concern for anyone but themselves, you could detect a bell-clear ring of insincerity. They were not burdened by remorse, morality, love, or empathy. Often, they led lives of acceptable destruction, ruining and embittering those who loved them, shattering the lives of friends who believed them and relied on them, betraying trusts, but never quite crossing the line into outright criminal behavior. Now and then, however, such a man went too far. And because he was the type who never did things by halves, he always went much, much too far.

Danny Kale's small, torn, bloody body lying in a heap.

The grayness enveloping Bryce's mind grew thicker, until it seemed like a cold, oily smoke. To Kale, he said, “You've told us that your wife was a heavy marijuana smoker for two and a half years.”

“That's right.”

“At my direction, the coroner looked for a few things that wouldn't ordinarily have interested him. Like the condition of Joanna's lungs. She wasn't a smoker at all, let alone a pothead. Lungs were clean.”

“I said she smoked pot, not tobacco,” Kale said.

“Marijuana smoke and ordinary tobacco smoke both damage the lungs,” Bryce said. “In Joanna's case, there was no damage whatsoever.”

“But I—”

“Quiet,” Bob Robine advised his client. He pointed a long, slim finger at Bryce, waggled it, and said, “The important thing is — was there PCP in her blood or wasn't there?”

“There was,” Bryce said, “It was in her blood, but she didn't smoke it. Joanna took the PCP orally. There was still a lot of it in her stomach.”

Robine blinked in surprise but recovered quickly. “There you go,” he said. “She took it. Who cares how?”

“In fact,” Bryce said, “there was more of it in her stomach than in her bloodstream.”

Kale tried to look curious, concerned, and innocent — all at the same time; even his elastic features were strained by that expression.

Scowling, Bob Robine said, “So there was more in her stomach than in her bloodstream. So what?”

“Angel dust is highly absorbable. Taken orally, it doesn't remain in the stomach for very long. Now, while Joanna had swallowed enough dope to freak out, there hadn't been time for it to affect her. You see, she took the PCP with ice cream Which coated her stomach and retarded the absorption of the drug. During the autopsy, the coroner found partially digested chocolate fudge ice cream. So there hadn't been time for the PCP to cause hallucinations or to send her into a berserk rage.” Bryce paused, took a deep breath. “There was chocolate fudge ice cream in Danny's stomach, too, but no PCP. When Mr. Kale told us he came home from work early on Thursday, he didn't mention bringing an afternoon treat for the family. A half-gallon of chocolate fudge ice cream.”

Fletcher Kale's face had gone blank. At last, he seemed to have used up his collection of human expressions.

Bryce said, “We found a partly empty container of ice cream in Kale's freezer. Chocolate fudge. What I think happened, Mr. Kale, is that you dished out some ice cream for everyone. I think you secretly laced your wife's serving with PCP, so you could later claim she was in a drug-induced frenzy. You didn't figure the coroner would catch you out.”

“Wait just one goddamned minute!” Robine shouted.

“Then, while you washed your bloody clothes,” Bryce said to Kale, “you cleaned up the ice-cream-smeared dishes and put them away because your story was that you had come home from work to find little Danny already dead and his mother already freaked out on PCP.”

Robine said, “That's only supposition. Have you forgotten motive? Why in God's name would my client do such a hideous thing?”

Watching Kale's eyes, Bryce said, “High Country Investments.”

Kale's face remained impassive, but his eyes flickered.

“High Country Investments?” Robine asked, “What's that?”

Bryce stared at Kale. “Did you buy ice cream before you went home last Thursday?”

“No,” Kale said flatly.

“The manager of the 7-Eleven store over on Calder Street says you did.”

The muscles in Kale's jaws bulged as he clenched his teeth in anger.

“What about High Country Investments?” Robine asked.

Bryce fired another question at Kale. “Do you know a man named Gene Teer?”

Kale only stared.

“People sometimes just call him ‘Jeeter.'”

Robine said, “Who is he?”

“Leader of the Demon Chrome,” Bryce said, watching Kale.

“It's a motorcycle gang. Jeeter deals drugs. Actually, we've never been able to catch him at it himself, we've only been able to jail some of his people. We leaned on Jeeter about this, and he steered us to someone who admitted supplying Mr. Kale with grass on a random basis. Not Mrs. Kale. She never bought.”

“Who says?” Robine demanded, “This motorcycle creep? This social reject? This drug pusher? He's not a reliable witness!”

“According to our source, Mr. Kale didn't just buy grass last Tuesday. Mr. Kale bought angel dust, too. The man who sold the drugs will testify in return for immunity.”

With animal cunning and suddenness, Kale bolted up, seized the empty chair beside him, threw it across the table at Bryce Hammond, and ran for the door of the interrogation room.

By the time the chair had left Kale's hands and was in the air, Bryce was already up and moving, and it sailed harmlessly past his head. He was around the table when the chair crashed to the floor behind him.

Kale pulled open the door and plunged into the corridor.

Bryce was four steps behind him.

Tal Whitman had come off the window ledge as if he'd been blown off by an explosive charge, and he was one step behind Bryce, shouting.

Reaching the corridor, Bryce saw Fletcher Kale heading for a yellow exit door about twenty feet away. He went after the son of a bitch.

Kale hit the crashbar and flung the metal door open.

Bryce reached him a fraction of a second later, as Kale was setting foot onto the macadamed parking lot.

Sensing Bryce close behind him, Kale turned with catlike fluidity and swung one huge fist.

Bryce ducked the blow, threw a punch of his own, connecting with Kale's hard, flat belly. Then he swung again, hitting him in the neck.

Kale stumbled back, putting his hands to his throat, gagging and choking.

Bryce moved in.

But Kale wasn't as badly stunned as he pretended to be. He leaped forward as Bryce approached and grabbed him in a bear hug.

“Bastard,” Kale said, spraying spittle.

His gray eyes were wide. His lips were skinned back from his teeth in a fierce snarl. He looked lupine.

Bryce's arms were pinned, and although he was a strong man himself, he couldn't break Kale's iron hold on him. They staggered a few steps backwards, stumbled, and went down, with Kale on top. Bryce's head thumped hard against the pavement, and he thought he was going to black out.

Kale punched him once, ineffectively, then rolled off him and crawled away fast.

Warding off the darkness that rose behind his eyes, surprised that Kale had surrendered the advantage, Bryce pushed up onto his hands and knees. He shook his head — and then saw what the other man had gone after.

A revolver.

It lay on the macadam, a few yards away, gleaming darkly in the glow of the yellowish sodium-vapor lights.

Bryce felt his holster. Empty. The revolver on the ground was his own. Apparently, it had slipped out of his holster and had spun across the pavement when he'd fallen.

The killer's hand closed on the weapon.

Tal Whitman stepped in and swung a nightstick, striking Kale across the back of the neck. The big man collapsed on top of the gun, unconscious.

Crouching, Tal rolled Kale over and checked his pulse.

Holding the back of his own throbbing skull, Bryce hobbled over to them, “Is he all right, Tal?”

“Yeah. He'll be coming around in a few minutes.” He picked up Bryce's gun and got to his feet.

Accepting the revolver, Bryce said, “I owe you one.”

“Not at all. How's your head?”

“I should be so lucky to own an aspirin company.”

“I didn't expect him to run.”

“Neither did I,” Bryce said, “When things get worse and worse for a man like that, he usually just gets calmer, cooler, more careful.”

“Well, I guess this one saw the walls closing in.”

Bob Robine was standing in the open doorway, staring out at them, shaking his head in consternation.

A few minutes later, as Bryce Hammond sat at his desk, filling out the forms charging Fletcher Kale with two homicides, Bob Robine rapped on the open door.

Bryce looked up. “Well, counselor, how's your client?”

“He's okay. But he's not my client any more.”

“Oh? His decision or yours?”

“Mine. I can't handle a client who lies to me about everything. I don't like being made a fool of.”

“So does he want to call another-attorney tonight?”

“No. When he's arraigned, he's going to ask the judge for a public defender.”

“That'll be the Just thing in the morning.”

“Not wasting any time, huh?”

“Not with-this one,” Bryce said.

Robine nodded. “Good. He's a very bad apple, Bryce. You know, I've been a lapsed Catholic for fifteen years,” Robine said softly, “I made up my mind long ago that them weren't such things as angels, demons, miracles. I thought I was too well educated to believe that Evil — with a capital E — stalks the world on cloven hooves. But back there in the cell, Kale suddenly whirled on me and said, ‘They won't get me. They won't destroy me. Nobody can. I'll walk away from this,' When I warned him against excessive optimism, he said, ‘I'm not afraid of your kind. Besides, I didn't commit murder; I just disposed of some garbage that was stinking up my life.'”

“Jesus,” Bryce said.

They were both silent. Then Robine sighed. “What about High Country Investments? How's it provide a motive?”

Before Bryce could explain, Tal Whitman rushed in from the hall. “Bryce, could I have a word with you?” He glanced at Robine, “Uh, this better be in private.”

“Sure,” Robine said.

Tal closed the door behind the lawyer. “Bryce, do you know Dr. Jennifer Paige?”

“She set up practice in Snowfield sometime back.”

“Yeah. But what kind of person would you say she is?”

“I've never met her. I heard she's a fine doctor, though. And folks up in those little mountain towns are glad they don't have to drive all the way in to Santa Mira for a doctor any more.”

“I've never met her either. I was just wondering if maybe you'd heard anything about… about whether she drinks. I mean… booze.”

“No, I haven't heard any such thing. Why? What's going on?”

“She called a couple of minutes ago. She says there's been a disaster up in Snowfield.”

“Disaster? What's she mean?”

“Well, she says she doesn't know.”

Bryce blinked. “Did she sound hysterical?”

“Frightened, yeah. But not hysterical. She doesn't want to say much of anything to anyone but you. She's on line three right now.”

Bryce reached for the phone.

“One more thing,” Tal said, worry lines creasing his forehead.

Bryce paused, hand on the receiver.

Tal said, “She did tell me one thing, but it doesn't make sense. She said…”

“Yes?”

“She said that everyone's dead up there. Everyone in Snowfield. She said she and her sister are the only ones alive.”

Chapter 10 Sisters and Cops

Jenny and Lisa left the Oxley house the same way they had entered: through the window.

The night was growing colder. The wind had risen once more.

They walked back to Jenny's house at the top of Skyline Road and got jackets to ward off the chill.

Then they went downhill again to the sheriff's substation. A wooden bench was bolted to the cobblestones by the curb in front of the town jail, and they sat waiting for help from Santa Mira.

“How long will it take them to get here?” Lisa asked.

“Well, Santa Mira is more than thirty miles away, over some pretty twisty roads. And they've got to take some unusual precautions.” Jenny looked at her wristwatch. “I guess they'll be here in another forty-five minutes. An hour at most—”

“Jeez.”

“It's not so long, honey.”

The girl pulled up the collar of her fleece-lined, dinim jacket. “Jenny, when the phone rang at the Oxley place and you picked it up…”

“Yes?”

“Who was calling?”

“No one.”

“What did you hear?”

“Nothing,” Jenny lied.

“From the look on your face, I thought someone was threatening you or something.”

“Well, I was upset, of course. When it rang, I thought the phones were working again, but when I picked it up and it was only another dead line, I felt… finished. That was all.”

“Then you got a dial tone?”

“Yes.”

She probably doesn't believe me, Jenny thought. She thinks I'm trying to protect her from something. And, of course, I am. How can I explain the feeling that something evil was on that phone with me? I can't even begin to understand it myself. Who or what was on that telephone? Why did he — or it finally let me have a dial tone?

A scrap of paper blew along the street. Nothing else moved.

A thin rag of cloud passed over one corner of the moon.

After a while, Lisa said, “Jenny, in case something happens to me tonight”

“Nothing's going to happen to you, honey.”

“But in case something does happen to me tonight,” Lisa insisted, “I want you to know that I… well… I really am… proud of you.”

Jenny put an arm around her sister's shoulders, and they moved even closer together. “Sis, I'm sorry that we never had much time together over the years.”

“You got home as often as you could,” Lisa said, “I know it wasn't easy. I must've read a couple of dozen books about what a person has to go through to become a doctor. I always knew there was a lot on your shoulders, a lot you had to worry about.”

Surprised, Jenny said, “Well, I still could've gotten home more often.”

She had stayed away from home on some occasions because she had not been able to cope with the accusation in her mother's sad eyes, an accusation which was even more powerful and affecting because it was never bluntly put into words: You killed your father, Jenny; you broke his heart, and that killed him.

Lisa said, “And Mom was always so proud of you, too.”

That statement not only surprised Jenny: It rocked her.

“Mom was always telling people about her daughter the doctor.” Lisa smiled, remembering. “I think there were times her friends were ready to throw her out of her bridge club if she said just one more word about your scholarships or your good grades.”

Jenny blinked. “Are you serious?”

“Of course, I'm serious.”

“But didn't Mom…”

“Didn't she what?” Lisa asked.

“Well… didn't she ever say anything about… about Dad? He died twelve years ago.”

“Jeez, I know that. He died when I was two and a half” Lisa frowned. “But what're you asking about?”

“You mean you never heard Mom blame, me?”

“Blames you for what?”

Before Jenny could respond, Snowfield's graveyard tranquillity was snuffed out. All the lights went off.

Three patrol cars set out from Santa Mira, beaded into the night-enshrouded hills, toward the high, moon-bathed slopes of the Snowfield, their red emergency lights flashing.

Tal Whitman drove the car at the head of the speeding procession, and Sheriff Hammond sat beside him. Gordy Brogan was in the back seat with another deputy, Jake Johnson.

Gordy was scared.

He knew his fear wasn't visible, and he was thankful for that. In fact, he looked as if he didn't know how to be afraid. He was tall, large-boned, slab-muscled. His hands were strong and as large as the hands of a professional basketball player; he looked capable of slam-dunking anyone who gave him trouble. He knew that his face was handsome enough; women had told him so. But it was also a rather rough-looking face, dark. His lips were thin, giving his mouth a cruel aspect. Jake Johnson had said it best: Gordy, when you frown, you look like a man who eats live chickens for breakfast.

But in spite of his fierce appearance, Gordy Brogan was scared. It wasn't the prospect of disease or poison that occasioned fear in Gordy. The sheriff had said that there were indications that the people in Snowfield had been killed not by germs or by toxic substances but by other people. Gordy was afraid that he would have to use his gun for the first time since he had become a deputy, eighteen months ago; he was afraid he would be forced to shoot someone — either to save his own life, the life of another deputy, or that of a victim.

He didn't think he could do it.

Five months ago, he had discovered a dangerous weakness in himself when he had answered an emergency call from Donner's Sports Shop. A disgruntled former employee, a burly man named Leo Sipes, had returned to the store two weeks after being fired, had beaten up the manager, and had broken the arm of the clerk who had been hired to replace him. By the time Gordy arrived on the scene, Leo Sipes — big and dumb and drunk — was using a woodsman's hatchet to smash and splinter all of the merchandise. Gordy was unable to talk him into surrendering. When Sipes started after him, brandishing the hatchet, Gordy had pulled his revolver. And then found he couldn't use it. His trigger finger became as brinle and inflexible as ice. He'd had to put the gun away and risk a physical confrontation with Sipes. Somehow, he'd gotten the hatchet away from him.

Now, five months later, as he sat in the rear of the patrol car and listened to Jake Johnson talking to Sheriff Hammond, Gordy's stomach clenched and turned sour at the thought of what a .45-caliber hollow-nose bullet would do to a man. It would literally take off his head. It would smash a man's shoulder into rags of flesh and broken needles of bone. It would rip open a man's chest, shattering the heart and everything else in its path. It would blow off a leg if it struck a kneecap, would turn a face to bloody slush. And Gordy Brogan, God help him, was just not capable of doing such a thing to anyone.

That was his terrible weakness. He knew there were people who would say that his inability to shoot another being was not a weakness but a sign of moral superiority. However, he knew that was not always true. There were times when shooting was a moral act. An officer of the law was sworn to protect the public. For a cop, the inability to shoot (when shooting was clearly justified) was not only weakness but madness, perhaps even sinful.

During the past five months, following the unnerving episode at Donner's Sport Shop, Gordy had been lucky. He'd drawn only a few calls involving violent suspects. And fortunately, he had been able to bring his adversaries to heel by using his fists or his nightstick or threats — or by firing warning shots into the air. Once, when it had seemed that shooting someone was unavoidable, the other officer, Frank Autry, had fired first, winging the gunman, before Gordy had been confronted with the impossible task of pulling the trigger.

But now something unimaginably violent had transpired up in Snowfield. And Gordy knew all too well that violence frequently had to be met with violence.

The gun on his hip seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

He wondered if the time was approaching when his weakness would be revealed. He wondered if he would die tonightor if he would cause, by his weakness, the unnecessary death of another.

He ardently prayed that he could beat this thing. Surely, it was possible for a man to be peaceful by nature and still possess the nerve to save himself, his friends, his kind.

Red emergency beacons flashing on their roofs, the three white and green squad cars followed the winding highway into the night-cloaked mountains, up toward the peaks where the moonlight created the illusion that the first snow of the season had already fallen.

Gordy Brogan was scared.

The streetlamps and all other lights went out, casting the town into darkness. Jenny and Lisa bolted up from the wooden bench.

“What happened?”

“Ssshh!” Jenny said, “Listen!”

But there was only continued silence.

The wind had stopped blowing, as if startled by the town's abrupt blackout. The trees waited, boughs hanging as still as old clothes in a closet.

Thank God for the moon, Jenny thought.

Heart thudding, Jenny turned and studied the buildings behind them. The town jail. A small cafe. The shops. The townhouses.

All the doorways were so clotted with shadows that it was difficult to tell if the doors were open or closed — or if, just now, they were slowly, slowly coming open to release the hideous, swollen, demonically reanimated dead into the night streets.

Stop it! Jenny thought. The dead don't come back to life.

Her eyes came to rest on the gate in front of the covered serviceway between the sheriff's substation and the gift shop next door. It was exactly like the cramped, gloomy passageway beside Liebertnann's Bakery.

Was something hiding in this tunnel, too? And, with the lights out, was it creeping inexorably toward the far side of the gate, eager to come out onto the dark sidewalk?

That primitive fear again.

That sense of evil.

That superstitious terror.

“Come on,” she said to Lisa.

“Where?”

“In the street. Nothing can get us out there—”

“—without our seeing it coming,” Lisa finished, understanding.

They went into the middle of the moonlit roadway.

“How long until the sheriff gets here?” Lisa asked.

“At least fifteen or twenty minutes yet.”

The town's lights all came on at once. A brilliant shower of electric radiance stung their eyes with surprise — then darkness again.

Jenny raised the revolver, not knowing where to point it.

Her throat was fear-parched, her mouth dry.

A blast of sound — an ungodly wall — slammed through Snowfield. Jenny and Lisa both cried out in shock and turned, bumping against each other, squinting at the moon-tinted darkness.

Then silence.

Then another shriek. Silence.

“What?” Lisa asked.

“The firehouse!”

It came again: a short burst of the piercing siren from the east side of St. Moritz Way, from the Snowfield Volunteer Fire Company stationhouse.

Bong!

Jenny jumped again, twisted around.

Bong! Bong!

“A church bell,” Lisa said.

“The Catholic church, west on Vail.”

The bell tolled once more — a loud, deep, mournful sound that reverberated in the blank windows along the dark length of Skyline Road and in other, unseen windows throughout the dead town.

“Someone has to pull a rope to ring a bell,” Lisa said, “Or push a button to set off a siren. So there must be someone else here beside us.”

Jenny said nothing.

The siren sounded again, whooped and then died, whooped and died, and the church bell began to toll again, and the bell and the siren cried out at the same time, again and again, as if announcing the advent of someone of tremendous importance.

In the mountains, a mile from the turnoff to Snowfield, the night landscape was rendered solely in black and moon-silver. The looming trees were not green at all; they were somber shapes, mostly shadows, with albescent fringes of vaguely defined needles and leaves.

In contrast, the shoulders of the highway were blood-colored by the light that splashed from the revolving beacons atop the three Ford sedans which all bore the insignia of the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department on their front doors.

Deputy Frank Autry was driving the second car, and Deputy Stu Wargle was slouched down on the passenger's seat.

Frank Autry was lean, sinewy, with neatly trimmed salt and-pepper hair. His features were sharp and economical, as if God hadn't been in the mood to waste anything the day that He had edited Frank's genetic file: hazel eyes under a finely chiseled brow; a narrow, patrician nose; a mouth that was neither too parsimonious nor too generous; small, nearly lobeless ears tucked flat against the head. His mustache was most carefully groomed.

He wore his uniform precisely the way the service manual said he should: black boots polished to a mirrored shine, brown slacks with a knife-edge crease, leather belt and hoister kept bright and supple with lanolin, brown shirt crisp and fresh.

“It isn't fucking fair,” Stu Wargle said.

“Commanding officers don't always have to be fair — just right,” Frank said.

“What commanding officer?” Wargle asked querulously.

“Sheriff Hammond. Isn't that who you mean?”

“I don't think of him as no commanding officer.”

“Well, that's what he is,” Frank said.

“He'd like to break my ass,” Wargle said, “The bastard.”

Frank said nothing.

Before signing up with the county constabulary, Frank Autly had been a career military officer. He had retired from the United States Army at the age of forty-four, after twenty-five years of distinguished service, and had moved back to Santa Mira, the town in which he'd been born and raised. He had intended to open a small business of some kind in order to supplement his pension and to keep himself occupied, but he hadn't been able to find anything that looked interesting. Gradually, he had come to realize that, for him at least, a job without a uniform and without a chain of command and without an element of physical risk and without a sense of public service was just not a job worth having. Three years ago, at the age of forty-six, he had signed up with the sheriff's department, and in spite of the demotion from major, which was the rank he'd held in the service, he had been happy ever since.

That is, he had been happy except for those occasions, usually one week a month, when he'd been partnered with Stu Wargle. Wargle was insufferable. Frank tolerated the man only as a test of his own self-discipline.

Wargle was a slob. His hair often needed washing. He always missed a patch of bristles when he shaved. His uniform was wrinkled, and his boots were never shined. He was too big in the gut, too big in the hips, too big in the butt.

Wargle was a bore. He had absolutely no sense of humor. He read nothing, knew nothing — yet he had strong opinions about every current social and political issue.

Wargle was a creep. He was forty-five years old, and he still picked His nose in public. He belched and farted with aplomb.

Still slumped against the passenger-side door, Wargle said, “I'm supposed to go off duty at ten o'clock. Ten goddamned o'clock! It's not fair for Hammond to pull me for this Snowfield crap. And me with a hot number all lined up.”

Frank didn't take the bait. He didn't ask who Wargle had a date with. He just drove the car and kept his eyes on the road and hoped that Wargle wouldn't tell him who this “hot number” was.

“She's a waitress over at Spanky's Diner,” Wargle said. “Maybe you seen her. Blond broad. Name's Beatrice; they call her Bea.”

“I seldom stop at Spanky's,” Frank said.

“Oh. Well, she don't have a half-bad face, see. One hell of a set of knockers. She's got a few extra pounds on her, not much, but she thinks she looks worse than she does. Insecurity, see? So if you play her right, if you kind of work on her doubts about herself, see, and then if you say you want her, anyway, in spite of the fact that she's let herself get a little pudgy why, hell, she'll do any damned thing you want. Anything.”

The slob laughed as if he had said something unbearably funny.

Frank wanted to punch him in the face. Didn't.

Wargle was a woman-hater. He spoke of women as if they were members of another, lesser species. The idea of a man happily sharing his life and innermost thoughts with a woman, the idea that a woman could be loved, cherished, admired, respected, valued for her wisdom and insight and humor — that was an utterly alien concept to Stu Wargle.

Frank Autry, on the other hand, had been married to his lovely Ruth for twenty-six years. He adored her. Although he knew it was a selfish thought, he sometimes prayed that he would be the first to die, so that he wouldn't have to handle life without Ruth.

“That fuckin' Hammond wants my ass nailed to a wall. He's always needling me.”

“About what?”

“Everything. He don't like the way I keep my uniform. He don't like the way I write up my reports. He told me I should try to improve my attitude. Christ, my attitude! He wants my ass, but he won't get it. I'll hang in five more years, see, so I can get my thirty-year pension. That bastard won't squeeze me out of my pension.”

Almost two years ago, voters in the city of Santa Mira approved a ballot initiative that dissolved the metropolitan police, putting law enforcement for the city into the hands of the county sheriff's department. It was a vote of confidence in Bryce Hammond, who had built the county department, but one provision of the initiative required that no city officers lose their jobs or pensions because of the transfer of power. Thus, Bryce Hammond was stuck with Stewart Wargle.

They reached the Snowfield turnoff.

Frank glanced in the mirror mirror and saw the third patrol car pull out of the three-car train. As planned, it swung across the entrance to Snowfield road, setting up a blockade.

Sheriff Hammond's car continued on toward Snowfield, and Frank followed it.

“Why the hell did we have to bring water?” Wargle asked.

Three five-gallon bottles of water stood on the floor in the back of the car. Frank said, “The water in Snowfield might be contaminated.”

“And all that food we loaded into the trunk?”

“We can't trust the food up there, either.”

“I don't believe they're all dead.”

“The sheriff couldn't raise Paul Henderson at the substation.”

“So what? Henderson's a jerk-off.”

“The doctor up there said Henderson's dead, along with—”

“Christ, the doctor's off her nut or drunk. Who the hell would go to a woman doctor, anyway? She probably screwed her way through medical school.”

“What?”

“No broad has what it takes to earn a degree like that!”

“Wargle, you never cease to amaze me.”

“What's eating you?” Wargle asked.

“Nothing. Forget it.”

Wargle belched. “Well, I don't believe they're all dead.”

Another problem with Stu Wargle was that he didn't have any imagination. “What a lot of crap. And me lined up with a hot number.”

Frank Autry, on the other hand, had a very good imagination. Perhaps too good. As he drove higher into the mountains, as he passed a sign that read SNO 3 MILES, his imagination was humming like a well-lubricated machine. He had the disturbing feeling — Premonition? Hunch? — that they were driving straight into Hell.

The firehouse siren screamed.

The church bell tolled faster, faster.

A deafening cacophony clattered through the town.

“Jenny!” Lisa shouted.

“Keep your eyes open! Look for movement!”

The street was a patchwork of ten thousand shadows; there were too many dark places to watch.

The siren wailed, and the bell rang, and now the lights began to flash again — hid,)use lights, shop lights, streetlights on and off, on and off so rapidly that they created a strobelike effect. Skyline Road flickered; the buildings seemed to jump toward the street, then fall back, then jump forward; the shadows danced jerkily.

Jenny turned in a complete circle, the revolver thrust out in front of her.

If something was approaching under cover of the stroboscopic light show, she couldn't see it.

She thought: What if, when the sheriff arrives, he finds two severed heads in the middle of the street? Mine and Lisa's.

The church bell was louder than ever, and it banged away continuously, madly.

The siren swelled into a teeth-jarring, bone-piercing screech. It seemed a miracle that windows didn't shatter.

Lisa had her hands over her ears.

Jenny's gun hand was shaking. She couldn't keep it steady.

Then, as abruptly as the pandemonium had begun, it ceased. The siren died. The church bell stopped. The lights stayed on.

Jenny scanned the street, waiting for something more to happen, something worse.

But nothing happened.

Again, the town was as tranquil as a graveyard.

A wind sprang out of nowhere and caused the trees to sway, as if responding to ethereal music beyond the range of human hearing.

Lisa shook herself out of a daze and said, “It was almost as if… as if they were trying to scare us… teasing us.”

“Teasing,” Jenny said, “Yes, that's exactly what it was like.”

“Playing with us.”

“Like a cat with mice,” Jenny said softly.

They stood in the middle of the silent street, afraid to go back to the bench in front of the town jail, lest their movement should start the siren and the bell again.

Suddenly, they heard a low grumbling. For an instant, Jenny's stomach tightened. She raised the gun once more, although she could see nothing at which to shoot. Then she recognized the sound: automobile engines laboring up the steep mountain road.

She turned and looked down the street. The gamble of engines grew louder. A car appeared around the curve, at the bottom of town.

Flashing red roof lights. A police car. Two police cars.

“My God,” Lisa said.

Jenny quickly led her sister to the cobblestone sidewalk in front of the substation.

The two white and green patrol cars came slowly up the deserted street and angled to the curb in front of the wooden bench. The two engines were cut off simultaneously. Snowfield's deathlike hush took possession of the night once more.

A rather handsome black man in a deputy's uniform got out of the first car, letting his door stand open. He looked at Jenny and Lisa but didn't immediately speak. His attention was captured by the preternaturally silent, unpeopled street.

A second man got out of the front seat of the same vehicle. He had unruly, sandy hair. His eyelids were so heavy that he looked as if he were about to fall asleep. He was dressed in civilian clothing — gray slacks, a pale blue shirt, a dark blue nylon jacket — but there was a badge pinned to the jacket.

Four other men got out of the cruisers. All six newcomers stood there for a long moment without speaking, eyes moving over the quiet stores and houses.

In that strange, suspended bubble of time, Jenny had an icy premonition that she didn't want to believe. She was certain she knew—that not all of them would leave this place alive.

Chapter 11 Exploring

Bryce knelt on one knee beside the body of Paul Henderson.

The other seven — his own men, Dr. Paige, and Lisa — crowded into the reception area, outside the wooden railing, in the Snowfield substation. They were quiet in the presence of Death.

Paul Henderson had been a good man with decent instincts. His death was a terrible waste. Bryce said, “Dr. Paige?”

She crouched down at the other side of the corpse. “Yes?”

“You didn't move the body?”

“I didn't even touch it, Sheriff.”

“There was no blood?”

“Just as you see it now. No blood.”

“The wound might be in his back,” Bryce said.

“Even if it was, there'd still be some blood on the floor.”

“Maybe.” He stared into her striking eyes-green flecked with gold. “Ordinarily, I wouldn't disturb a body until the coroner had seen it. But this is an extraordinary situation. I'll have to turn this man over.”

“I don't know if it's safe to touch him.”

“Someone has to do it,” Bryce said.

Dr. Paige stood up, and everyone moved back a couple of steps. Bryce put a hand to Henderson's purple-black, distorted face. “The skin is still slightly warm,” he said in surprise.

Dr. Paige said, “I don't think they've been dead very long.”

“But a body doesn't discolor and bloat in just a couple of hours,” Tal Whitman said.

“These bodies did,” the doctor said.

Bryce rolled the corpse over, exposing the back. No wound.

Hoping to find an unnatural depression in the skull, Bryce thrust his fingers into the dead man's thick hair, testing the bone. If the deputy had been struck hard on the back of the head… But that wasn't the case, either. The skull was intact.

Bryce got to his feet. “Doctor, these two decapitations you mentioned… I guess we'd better have a look at those.”

“Do you think one of your men could stay here with my sister?”

“I understand your feelings,” Bryce said, “But I don't really think it would be wise for me to split up my men. Maybe there isn't any safety in numbers; then on the other hand, maybe there is.”

“It's okay,” Lisa assured Jenny, “I don't want to be left behind, anyway.”

She was a spunky kid. Both she and her older sister intrigued Bryce Hammond. They were pale, and their eyes were alive with dervish shadows of shock and honor — but they were coping a great deal better than most people would have in this bizarre, waking nightmare.

The Paiges led the entire group out of the substation and down the street to the bakery.

Bryce found it difficult to believe that Snowfield had been a normal, bustling village only a short while ago. The town felt as dry and burnt-out and dead as an ancient lost city in a far desert, off in a corner of the world where even the wind often forgot to go. The hush that cloaked the town seemed a silence of countless years, of decades, of centuries, a silence of unimaginably long epochs piled on epochs.

Shortly after arriving in Snowfield, Bryce had used an electric bullhorn to call for a response from the silent houses. Now it seemed foolish ever to have expected an answer.

They entered Liebermann's Bakery through the front door and went into the kitchen at the rear of the building.

On the butcher's-block table, two severed hands gripped the handles of a rolling pin.

Two severed heads peered through two oven doors.

“Oh, my God,” Tal said quietly.

Bryce shuddered.

Clearly in need of support, Jake Johnson leaned against a tall white cabinet.

Wargle said, “Christ, they were butchered like a couple of goddamned cows,” and then everyone was talking at once.

“—why the hell anyone would—”

“— sick, twisted—”

“—so where are the bodies?”

“Yes,” Bryce said, raising his voice to override the babble, “where are the bodies? Let's find them.”

For a couple of seconds, no one moved, frozen by the thought of what they might find.

“Dr. Paige, Lisa — there's no need for you to help us,” Bryce said, “Just stand aside.”

The doctor nodded. The girl smiled in gratitude.

With trepidation, they searched all the cupboards, opened all the drawers and doors. Gordy Brogan looked inside the big oven that wasn't equipped with a porthole, and Frank Autry went into the walk-in refrigerator. Bryce inspected the small, spotless lavatory off one end of the kitchen. But they couldn't find the bodies — or any other pieces of the bodies — of the two elderly people.

“Why would the killers cart away the bodies?” Frank asked.

“Maybe we're dealing with some sort of cultists,” Jake Johnson said. “Maybe they wanted the bodies for some weird ritual.”

“If there was any ritual,” Frank said, “it looks to me like it was conducted right here.”

Gordy Brogan bolted for the lavatory, stumbling and weaving, a big gangling kid who seemed to be composed solely of long legs and long arms and elbows and knees. Retching sounds came through the door that he had slammed behind himself.

Stu Wargle laughed and said, “Jesus, what a ninny.”

Bryce turned on him and scowled. “What in God's name do you find so funny, Wargle? People are dead here. Seems to me that Gordy's reaction is a lot more natural than any of ours.”

Wargle's pig-eyed, heavy-jowled face clouded with anger. He didn't have the wit to be embarrassed.

God, I despise that man, Bryce thought.

When Gordy came back from the bathroom, he looked sheepish. “Sorry, Sheriff.”

“No reason to be, Gordy.”

They trooped through the kitchen, across the sales room, out onto the sidewalk.

Bryce went immediately to the wooden gate between the bakery and the shop next door. He stared over the top of the gate, into the lightless, covered passageway. Dr. Paige moved to his side, and he said, “Is this where you thought something was in the rafters?”

“Well, Lisa thought it was crouched along the wall.”

“But it was this serviceway?”

“Yes.”

The tunnel was utterly black.

He took Tal's long-handled flashlight, opened the creaking gate, drew his revolver, and stepped into the passage. A vague, dank odor clung to the place. The squeal of the rusty gate hinges and then the sound of his own footsteps echoed down the tunnel ahead of him.

The beam of the flash was powerful; it carried over half the length of the passageway. However, he focused it close at hand, swept it back and forth over the immediate area, studying the concrete walls, then looking up at the ceiling, which was eight or ten feet overhead. In this part of the serviceway, at least, the rafters were deserted.

With each step, Bryce grew increasingly certain that drawing his revolver had been unnecessary — until he was almost halfway through the tunnel. Then he suddenly felt… an odd… a tingle, a cold quiver along the spine. He sensed that he wasn't alone any longer.

He was a man who trusted his hunches, and he didn't discount this one. He stopped advancing, brought the revolver up, listened more closely than before to the silence, moved the flashlight rapidly over the walls and ceiling, squinted with special care at the rafters, looked ahead into the gloom almost as far as the mouth of the alleyway, and even glanced back to see if something had crept magically around behind him. Nothing waited in the darkness. Yet he continued to feel that he was being watched by unfriendly eyes.

He started forward again, and his light caught something. Covered by a metal grille, a foot-square drain opening was set in the floor of the serviceway. Inside the drain, something indefinable glistened, reflecting the flashlight beam; it moved.

Cautiously, Bryce stepped closer and directed the light straight down into the drain. Whatever had glistened was gone now.

He squatted beside the drain and peered between the ribs of the grille. The light revealed only the walls of a pipe. It was a storm drain, about eighteen inches in diameter, and it was dry, which meant he had not merely seen water.

A rat? Snowfield was a resort that catered to a relatively affluent crowd; therefore, the town took unusually stringent measures to keep itself free of all manner of pests. Of course, in spite of Snowfield's diligence in such matters, the existence of a rat or two certainly wasn't impossible. It could have been a rat. But Bryce didn't believe that it had been.

He walked all the way to the alley, then retraced his steps to the gate where Tal and the others waited.

“See anything?” Tal asked.

“Not much,” Bryce said, stepping onto the sidewalk and closing the gate behind him. He told them about his feeling of being watched and about the movement in the drain.

“The Liebermanns were killed by people,” Frank Autry said. “Not by something small enough to crawl through a drain.”

“That certainly would seem to be the case,” Bryce agreed.

“But you did feel it in there?” Lisa asked anxiously.

“I felt something,” Bryce told the girl. “It apparently didn't affect me as strongly as you said it did you. But it was definitely… strange.”

“Good,” Lisa said, “I'm glad you don't think we're just hysterical women.”

“Considering what you've been through, you two are about as unhysterical as you could get.”

“Well,” the girl said, “Jenny's a doctor, and I think maybe I'd like to be a doctor someday, and doctors simply can't afford to get hysterical.”

She was a cute kid — although Bryce couldn't help noticing that her older sister was even better looking. Both the girl and the doctor had the same lovely shade of auburn hair; it was the dark red-brown of well-polished cherry wood, thick and lustrous. Both of them had the same golden skin, too. But because Dr. Paige's features were more mature than Lisa's, they were also more interesting and appealing to Bryce. Her eyes were a shade greener than her sister's, too.

Bryce said, “Dr. Paige, I'd like to see that house where the bodies were barricaded in the den.”

“Yeah,” Tal said, “The locked room murders.”

“That's the Oxley place over on Vail.” She led them down the street toward the corner of Vail Lane and Skyline Road.

The dry shuffle of their footsteps was the only sound, and it made Bryce think of desert places again, of scarabs swarming busily across stacks of ancient, papyrus scrolls in desert tombs.

Rounding the corner onto Vail Lane, Dr. Paige halted and said, “Tom and Karen Oxley live… uh… lived two blocks farther along here.”

Bryce studied the street. He said, “Instead of walking straight to the Oxleys', let's have a look in all the houses and shops between here and there — at least on this side of the street. I think it's safe to split up into two squads, four to a group. We won't be going off entirely in different directions. We'll be close enough to help each other if there's trouble. Dr. Paige, Lisa — you stay with Tal and me. Frank, you're in charge of the second team.”

Frank nodded.

“The four of you stick together,” Bryce warned them, “And I mean together. Each of you remain within sight of the other three at all times. Understood?”

“Yes, Sheriff,” Frank Autry said.

“Okay, you four have a look in the first building past the restaurant here, and we'll take the place next door to that. We'll hopscotch our way along the street and compare notes at the end of the block. If you come across something really interesting, something more than just additional bodies, come get me. If you need help, fire two or three rounds. We'll hear the gunshots even if we're inside another building. And you listen for gunfire from us.”

“May I make a suggestion?” Dr. Paige asked.

“Sure,” Bryce said.

To Frank Autry, she said, “If you come across any bodies that show signs of hemorrhaging from the eyes, ears, nose, or mouth, let me know at once. Or any indications of vomiting or diarrhea.”

“Because those things might indicate disease?” Bryce asked.

“Yes,” she said, “Or poisoning.”

“But we've ruled that out, haven't we?” Gordy Brogan asked.

Jake Johnson, looking older than his fifty-seven years, said, “It wasn't a disease that cut off those people's heads.”

“I've been thinking about that,” Dr. Paige said, “What if this is a disease or a chemical toxin that we've never encountered before — a mutant strain of rabies, say — that kills some people but merely drives others stark raving mad? What if the mutilations were done by those who were driven into a savage madness?”

“Is such a thing likely?” Tal Whitman asked.

“No. But then again, maybe not impossible. Besides, who's to say what's likely or unlikely any more? Is it likely that this would have happened to Snowfield in the first place?”

Frank Autry tugged at his mustache and said, “But if there are packs of rabid maniacs roaming around out there… where are they?”

Everyone looked at the quiet street. At the deepest pools of shadow spilling over lawns and sidewalks and parked cars. At unlighted attic windows. At dark basement windows.

“Hiding,” Wargle said.

“Waiting,” Gordy Brogan said.

“No, that doesn't make sense,” Bryce said, “Rabid maniacs just wouldn't hide and wait and plan. They'd charge us.”

“Anyway,” Lisa said quietly, “it isn't rabid people. It's something a lot stranger.”

“She's probably right,” Dr. Paige said.

“Which somehow doesn't make me feel any better,” Tal said.

“Well, if we find any indications of vomiting, diarrhea, or hemorrhaging,” Bryce said, “then we'll know. And if we don't…”

“I'll have to come up with a new hypothesis,” Dr. Paige said.

They were silent, not eager to begin the search because they didn't know what they might find — or what might find them.

Time seemed to have stopped.

Dawn, Bryce Hammond thought, will never come unless we move.

“Let's go,” he said.

The first building was narrow and deep, with a combination art gallery and crafts shop on the first floor. Frank Autry broke a pane of glass in the front door, reached inside, and released the lock. He entered and switched on the lights.

Motioning the others to follow, he said, “Spread out. Don't stay too close together. We don't want to offer an easy target.”

As Frank spoke, he was reminded of the two tours of duty he served in Vietnam almost twenty years ago. This operation had the nerve-twisting quality of a search-and-destroy mission in guerrilla territory.

They prowled cautiously through the gallery's display but found no one. Likewise, there was no one in the small office at the rear of the showroom. However, a door in that office opened onto stairs that led to the second floor.

They took the stairs in military fashion. Frank climbed to the top alone, gun drawn, while the others waited. He located the light switch at the head of the stairs, snapped it on, and saw that he was in one corner of the living room of the gallery owner's apartment. When he was certain the room was deserted, he motioned for his men to come up. As the others climbed the stairs, Frank moved into the living room, staying close to the wall, watchful.

They searched the rest of the apartment, treating every doorway as a potential point of ambush. The den and dining room were both deserted. No one was hiding in the closets.

On the kitchen floor, however, they found a dead man. He was wearing only blue pajama bottoms, propping the refrigerator door open with his bruised and swollen body. There were no visible wounds. There was no look of horror on his face. Apparently, he had died too suddenly to have gotten a glimpse of his assailant — and without the slightest warning that death was near. The makings of a sandwich were scattered on the floor around him: a broken jar of mustard, a package of salami, a partially squashed tomato, a package of Swiss cheese.

“It sure wasn't no illness killed him,” Jake Johnson said emphatically, “How sick could he have been if he was gonna eat salami?”

“And it happened real fast,” Gordy said, “His hands were full of the stuff he got out of the refrigerator, and as he turned around… it just happened. Bang: just like that.”

In the bedroom they discovered another corpse. She was in bed, naked. She was no younger than about twenty, no older than forty; it was difficult to guess her age because of the universal bruising and swelling. Her face was contorted in terror, precisely as Paul Henderson's had been. She had died in the middle of a scream.

Jake Johnson took a pen from his shirt pocket and slipped it through the trigger of a.22 automatic that was lying on the rumpled sheets beside the body.

“I don't think we have to be careful with that,” Frank said. “She wasn't shot. There aren't any wounds; no blood. If anybody used the gun, it was her. Let me see it.”

He took the automatic from Jake and ejected the clip. It was empty. He worked the slide, pointed the muzzle at the bedside lamp, and squinted into the barrel; there was no bullet in the chamber. He put the muzzle to his nose, sniffed, smelled gunpowder.

“Fired recently?” Jake asked.

“Very recently. Assuming the clip was full when she used it, that means she fired off ten rounds.”

“Look here,” Wargle said.

Frank turned and saw Wargle pointing to a bullet hole in the wall opposite the foot of the bed. It was at about the seven foot level.

“And here,” Gordy Brogan said, drawing their attention to another bullet lodged in the splintered wood of the dark pine highboy.

They found all ten of the brass shell casings in or around the bed, but they couldn't find where the other eight bullets were lodged.

“You don't think she scored eight hits?” Gordy asked Frank.

“Christ, she can't have!” Wargle said, hitching his gun belt up on his fat hips. “If she'd hit somebody eight times, she wouldn't be the only damned corpse in the room.”

“Right,” Frank said, though he disliked having to agree with Stu Wargle about anything. “Besides, there's no blood. Eight hits would mean a lot of blood.”

Wargle went to the foot of the bed and stared at the dead woman. She was propped up by a couple of plump pillows, and her legs were spread in a grotesque parody of desire. “The guy in the kitchen must've been in here, screwing this broad,” Wargle said. “When he was finished with her, he went into the kitchen to get them somethin' to eat. While they was separated, someone came in and killed her.”

“They killed the man in the kitchen first,” Frank said, “He couldn't have been taken by surprise if he'd been attacked after she fired ten shots.”

Wargle said, “Man, I sure wish I'd spent all day in the sack with a broad like that.”

Frank gaped at him, “Wargle, you're disgusting. Are you even turned on by a bloated corpse — just because it's naked?”

Wargle's face reddened, and he looked away from the corpse. “What the hell's the matter with you, Frank? What d'ya think I am—some kind of pervert? Huh? Hell, no. I seen that picture over on the nightstand.” He pointed to a silver-framed photograph beside the lamp. “See, she's wearin' a bikini. You can see she was a hell of a nice-lookin' broad. Big jugs on her. Great legs, too. That's what turned me on, pal.”

Frank shook his head. “I'm just amazed that anything could turn you on in the midst of this, in the midst of so much death.”

Wargle thought it was a compliment. He winked.

If I get out of this business alive, Frank thought, I won't ever let Bryce Hammond partner me with Wargle. I'll quit first.

Gordy Brogan said, “How could she have made eight hits and not have stopped something? How come there's not one drop of blood?”

Jake Johnson pushed a hand through his white hair again. “I don't know, Gordy. But one thing I do know — I sure wish Bryce'd never picked me to come up here.”

Next to the art gallery, the sign on the front of the quaint, two-story building read:

BROOKHART’S

BEER WINE LIQUER TOBACCO

MAGAZINES NEWSPAPER BOOKS

The lights were on, and the door was unlocked. Brookhart's stayed open until nine even on Sunday evenings during the off season.

Bryce went in first, followed by Jennifer and Lisa Paige. Tal entered last. When choosing a man to protect his back in a dangerous situation, Bryce always preferred Tal Whitman. He trusted no one else as much as he trusted Tal, not even Frank Autry.

Brookhart's was a cluttered place, but curiously warm and pleasing. There were tall glass-doored coolers filled with cans and bottles of beer, shelves and racks and bins laden with bottles of wine and liquor, and other racks brimming with paperbacks, magazines, and newspapers. Cigars and cigarettes were stacked in boxes and cartons, and tins of pipe tobacco were displayed in haphazard mounds on several countertops. A variety of goodies were tucked in wherever there was space: candy bars, LifeSavers, chewing gum, peanuts, popcorn, pretzels, potato chips, corn twisties, tortilla chips.

Bryce led the way through the deserted store, looking for bodies in the aisles. But there were none.

There was, however, an enormous puddle of water, about an inch deep, that covered half the floor. They stepped gingerly around it.

“Where'd all this water come from?” Lisa wondered.

“Must be a leak in the condensation pan under one of the beer coolers,” Tal Whitman said.

They came around the end of a wine bin and got a good look at all of the coolers. There was no water anywhere near those softly humming appliances.

“Maybe there's a leak in the plumbing,” Jennifer Paige said.

They continued their exploration, descending into the cellar, which was used for the storage of wine and booze in cardboard cases, then going up to the top floor, above the store, where there was an office. They found nothing out of the ordinary.

In the store again, heading toward the front door, Bryce stopped and hunkered down for a closer look at the puddle on the floor. He moistened one fingertip in the stuff, it felt like water, and it was odorless.

“What's wrong?” Tal asked.

Standing again, Bryce said, “It's odd — all this water here.”

Tal said, “Most likely, it's what Dr. Paige said — only a leak in the plumbing.”

Bryce nodded. However, although he couldn't say why, the big puddle seemed significant to him.

Tayton's Pharmacy was a small place that served Snowfield and all of the outlying mountain towns. An apartment occupied two floors above the pharmacy; it was decorated in shades of cream and peach, with emerald-green accent pieces, and with a number of fine antiques.

Frank Autry led his men through the entire building, and they found nothing remarkable-except for the sodden carpet in the living room. It was literally soaking wet; it squished beneath their shoes.

The Candle glow Inn positively radiated charm and gentility: the deep caves and elaborately carved cornices, the mullioned windows flanked by carved white shutters. Two carriage lamps were fixed atop stone pilasters, bracketing the short stone walkway. Three small spotlights spread dramatic fans of light across the face of the inn.

Jenny, Lisa, the sheriff, and Lieutenant Whitman paused on the sidewalk in front of the Candle glow, and Hammond said, “Are they open this time of year?”

“Yes,” Jenny said, “They manage to stay about half full during the off season. But then they have a marvelous reputation with discriminating travelers — and they only have sixteen rooms.”

“Well… let's have a look.”

The front doors opened onto a small, comfortably appointed lobby: an oak floor, a dark oriental carpet, light beige sofas, a pair of Queen Anne chairs upholstered in a rose-colored fabric, cherry wood end tables, brass lamps.

The registration desk was off to the right. A bell rested on the wooden counter, and Jenny struck it several times, rapidly, expecting no response and getting none.

“Dan and Sylvia keep an apartment behind this office area,” she said, indicating the cramped business quarters beyond the counter.

“They own the place?” the sheriff asked.

“Yes. Dan and Sylvia Kanarsky.”

The sheriff stared at her for a moment. “Friends?”

“Yes. Close friends.”

“Then maybe we'd better not look in their apartment,” he said.

Warm sympathy and understanding shone in his heavy-lidded blue eyes. Jenny was surprised by a sudden awareness of the kindness and intelligence that informed his face. During the past hour, watching him operate, she had gradually realized that he was considerably more alert and efficient than he had at first appeared to be. Now, looking into his sensitive, compassionate eyes, she realized he was perceptive, interesting, formidable.

“We can't just walk away,” she said, “This place has to be searched sooner or later. The whole town has to be searched. We might as well get this part of it out of the way.”

She lifted a hinged section of the wooden countertop and started to push through a gate into the office space beyond.

“Please, Doctor,” the sheriff said, “always let me or Lieutenant Whitman go first.”

She backed out obediently, and he preceded her into Dan's and Sylvia's apartment, but they didn't find anyone. No dead bodies.

Thank God.

Back at the registration desk, Lieutenant Whitman paged through the guest log. “Only six rooms are being rented right now, and they're all on the second floor.”

The sheriff located a passkey on a pegboard beside the mailboxes. With almost monotonous caution, they went upstairs and searched the six rooms. In the first five, they found luggage and cameras and half-written postcards and other indications that there actually were guests at the inn, but they didn't find the guests themselves.

In the sixth room, when Lieutenant Whitman tried the door to the adjoining bath, he found it locked. He hammered on it and shouted, “Police! Is anyone there?”

No one answered.

Whitman looked at the doorknob, then at the sheriff. “No lock button on this side, so someone must be in there. Break it down?”

“Looks like a solid-core door,” Hammond said, “No use dislocating your shoulder. Shoot the lock.”

Jenny took Lisa's arm and drew the girl aside, out of the path of any debris that might blow back.

Lieutenant Whitman called a warning to anyone who might be in the bathroom, then fired one shot. He kicked the door open and went inside fast. “Nobody's here.”

“Maybe they climbed out a window,” the sheriff said.

“There aren't any windows in here,” Whitman said, frowning.

“You're sure the door was locked?”

“Positive. And it could only be done from the inside.”

“But how — if no one was in there?”

Whitman shrugged. “Besides that, there's something you ought to have a look at.”

They all had a look at it, in fact, for the bathroom was large enough to accommodate four people. On the mirror above the sink, a message had been hastily printed in bold, greasy, black letters:

Timothy Flyte.

The Ancient Enemy

In another apartment above another shop, Frank Autry and his men found another water-soaked carpet that squished under their feet. In the living room, dining room, and bedrooms, the carpet was dry, but in the hallway leading to the kitchen, it was saturated. And in the kitchen itself, three-quarters of the vinyl-tile floor was covered with water up to a depth of one inch in places.

Standing in the hallway, staring into the kitchen, Jake Johnson said, “Must be a plumbing leak.”

“That's what you said at the other place,” Frank reminded him, “Seems coincidental, don't you think?”

Gordy Brogan said, “It is just water. I don't see what it could have to do with… all the murders.”

“Shit,” Stu Wargle said, “we're wastin' time. There's nothin' here. Let's go.”

Ignoring them, Frank stepped into the kitchen, trading carefully through one end of the small lake, heading for a dry area by a row of cupboards. He opened several cupboard doors before he found a small plastic tub used for storing leftovers. It was clean and dry, and it had a snap-on lid that made an airtight seal. In a drawer he found a measuring spoon, and he used it to scoop water into the plastic container.

“What're you doing?” Jake asked from the doorway.

“Collecting a sample.”

“Sample? Why? It's only water.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, “but there's something funny about it.”

The bathroom. The mirror. The bold, greasy, black letters.

Jenny stared at the five printed words.

Lisa said, “Who's Timothy Flyte?”

“Could be the guy who wrote this,” Lieutenant Whitman said.

“Is the room rented to Flyte?” the sheriff asked.

“I'm sure I didn't see that name on the registry,” the lieutenant said, “We can check it out when we go downstairs, but I'm really sure.”

“Maybe Timothy Flyte is one of the killers,” Lisa said. “Maybe the guy renting this room recognized him and left this message.”

The sheriff shook his head. “No. If Flyte's got something to do with what's happened to this town, he wouldn't leave his name on the mirror like that. He would've wiped it off.”

“Unless he didn't know it was there,” Jenny said.

The lieutenant said, “Or maybe he knew it was there, but he's one of the rabid maniacs you talked about, so he doesn't care whether we catch him or not.”

Bryce Hammond looked at Jenny. “Anyone in town seen Flyte?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Do you know everyone in Snowfield?”

“Yeah.”

“All five hundred?”

“Nearly everyone,” she said.

“Nearly everyone, huh? Then there could be a Timothy Flyte here?”

“Even if I'd never met him, I'd still have heard someone mention him. It's a small town, Sheriff, at least during the off season.”

“Could be someone from over in Mount Larson, Shady Roost, or Pineville,” the lieutenant suggested.

She wished they could go somewhere else to discuss the message on the mirror. Outside. In the open. Where nothing could creep close to them without revealing itself. She had the uncanny, unsupported, but undeniable feeling that something — something damned strange — was moving about in another part of the inn right this minute, stealthily carrying out some dreadful task of which she and the sheriff and Lisa and the deputy were dangerously unaware.

“What about the second part of it?” Lisa asked, indicating THE ANCIENT ENEMY.

Jenny finally said, “Well, we're back to what Lisa first said. It looks as if the man who wrote this was telling us that Timothy Flyte was his enemy. Our enemy, too, I guess.”

“Maybe,” Bryce Hammond said dubiously, “But it seems like an unusual way to put it—'the ancient enemy.” Kind of awkward. Almost archaic. If he locked himself in the bathroom to escape Flyte and then wrote a hasty warning, why wouldn't he say, “Timothy Flyte, my old enemy,' or something straightforward?”

Lieutenant Whitman agreed. “In fact, if he wanted to leave a message accusing Flyte, he'd have written, 'Timothy Flyte did it,' or maybe 'Flyte killed them all.' The last thing he'd want is to be obscure.”

The sheriff began sorting through the articles on the deep shelf that was above the sink, just under the mirror: a bottle of Mennen's Skin Conditioner, lime-scented aftershave, a man's electric razor, a pair of toothbrushes, toothpaste, combs, hairbrushes, a woman's makeup kit. “From the looks of it, there were two people in this room. So maybe they both locked themselves in the bath — which means two of them vanished into thin air. But what did they write on the floor with?”

“It looks as if it must've been an eyebrow pencil,” Lisa said. Jenny nodded. “I think so, too.”

They searched the bathroom for a black eyebrow pencil.

They couldn't find it.

“Terrific,” the sheriff said exasperatedly, “So the eyebrow pencil disappeared along with maybe two people who locked themselves in here. Two people kidnapped out of a locked room.”

They went downstairs to the front desk. According to the guest register, the room in which the message had been found was occupied by a Mr. and Mrs. Harold Ordnay of San Francisco.

“None of the other guests was named Timothy Flyte,” Sheriff Hammond said, closing the register.

“Well,” Lieutenant Whitman said, “I guess that's about all we can do here right now.”

Jenny was relieved to hear him say that.

“Okay,” Bryce Hammond said, “Let's catch up with Frank and the others. Maybe they've found something we haven't.”

They started across the lobby. After only a couple of steps, Lisa stopped them with a scream.

They all saw it a second after it caught the girl's attention. It was on an end table, directly in the fall of light from a rose shaded lamp, so prettily lit that it seemed almost like a piece of artwork on display. A man's hand. A severed hand.

Lisa turned away from the macabre sight.

Jenny held her sister, looking over Lisa's shoulder with ghastly fascination. The hand. The damned, mocking, impossible hand.

It was holding an eyebrow pencil firmly between its thumb and first two fingers. The eyebrow pencil. The same one. It had to be.

Jenny's horror was as great as Lisa's, but she bit her lip and suppressed a scream. It wasn't merely the sight of the hand that repelled and terrified her. The thing that made the breath catch and burn in her chest was the fact that this hand hadn't been on this end table a short while ago. Someone had placed it here while they were upstairs, knowing that they would find it; someone was mocking them, someone with an extremely twisted sense of humor.

Bryce Hammond's hooded eyes were open farther than Jenny had yet seen them. “Damn it, this thing wasn't here before was it?”

“No,” Jenny said.

The sheriff and deputy had been carrying their revolvers with the muzzles pointed at the floor. Now they raised their weapons as if they thought the severed hand might drop the eyebrow pencil, launch itself off the table toward someone's face, and gouge out someone's eyes.

They were speechless.

The spiral patterns in the oriental carpet seemed to have become refrigeration coils, casting off waves of icy air.

Overhead, in a distant room, a floorboard or an unoiled door creaked, groaned, creaked.

Bryce Hammond looked up at the ceiling of the lobby.

Creeeeeaaak.

It could have been only a natural settling noise. Or it could have been something else.

“There's no doubt now,” the sheriff said.

“No doubt about what?” Lieutenant Whitman asked, looking not at the sheriff but at other areas to the lobby.

The sheriff turned to Jenny. “When you heard the siren and the church bell just before we arrived, you said you realized that whatever had happened to Snowfield might still be happening.”

“Yes.”

“And now we know you're right.”

Chapter 12 Battleground

Jake Johnson waited with Frank, Gordy, and Stu Wargle at the end of the block, on a brightly lighted stretch of sidewalk in front of Gil Martin's Market, a grocery store.

He watched Bryce Hammond coming out of the Candle glow Inn, and he wished to god the sheriff would move faster. He didn't like standing here in all this light. Hell, it was like being on stage. Jake felt vulnerable.

Of course, a few minutes ago, while conducting a search of some of the buildings along the street, they'd had to pass through dark areas where the shadows had seemed to pulse and move like living creatures, and Jake had looked with fierce longing toward this very same stretch of brightly lighted pavement. He had feared the darkness as much as he now feared the light.

He nervously combed one hand through his thick white hair. He kept his other hand on the butt of his holstered revolver.

Jake Johnson not only believed in caution: He worshiped it; caution was his god. Better safe than sorry; a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; fools rush in where angels fear to tread… He had a million maxims. They were, to him, lightposts marking the one safe route, and beyond those lights lay only a cold void of risk, chance, and chaos.

Jake had never married. Marriage meant taking on a lot of new responsibilities. It wasn't worth risking your emotions and your money and your entire future.

Where finances were concerned, he had also lived a cautious, frugal existence. He had put away a rather substantial nest egg, spreading his funds over a wide variety of investments.

Jake, now fifty-eight, had worked for the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Departmnt for over thirty-seven years. He could have retired and claimed a pension a long time ago. But he had worried about inflation, so he had stayed on, building his pension, putting away more and more money.

Becoming an officer of the law was perhaps the only incautious thing that Jake Johnson had ever done. He hadn't wanted to be a cop. God, no! But his father, Big Ralph Johnson, had been county sheriff in the 1940S and 50s, and he had expected his son to follow in his footsteps. Big Ralph never took no for an answer. Jake had been pretty sure that Big Ralph would disinherit him if he didn't go into police work. Not that there was a vast fortune in the family; there wasn't. But there had been a nice house and respectable bank accounts. And behind the family garage, buried three feet below the lawn, there had been several big mason jars filled with tightly rolled wads of twenty- and fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, money that Big Ralph had taken in bribes and had set aside against bad times. So Jake had become a cop like his daddy, who had finally died at the age of eighty-two, when Jake was fifty-one. By then Jake was stuck with being a cop for the rest of his working life because it was the only thing he knew.

He was a cautious cop. For instance, he avoided taking domestic disturbance calls because policemen sometimes got killed by stepping between hot-tempered husbands and wives; passions ran too high in confrontations of that sort. Just look at this real estate agent, Fletcher Kale. A year ago, Jake had bought a piece of mountain property through Kale, and the man had seemed as normal as anyone. Now he had killed his wife and son. If a cop had stepped into that scene, Kale would have killed him, too. And when a dispatcher alerted Jake to a robbery-in-progress, he usually lied about his location, putting himself so far from the scene of the crime that other officers would be closer to it; then he showed up later, when the action was over.

He wasn't a coward. There had been times when he'd found himself in the line of fire, and on those occasions he'd been a tiger, a lion, a raging bear. He was just cautious.

There was some police work he actually enjoyed. The traffic detail was okay. And he positively delighted in paperwork.

The only pleasure he took in making an arrest was the subsequent filling out of numerous forms that kept him safely, tied up at headquarters for a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, this time, the trick of dawdling over paperwork had backfired on him. He'd been at the office, filling out forms, when Dr. Paige's call had come in. If he'd been out on the street, driving patrol, he could have avoided the assignment.

But now here he was. Standing in bright light making a perfect target of himself. Damn.

To make matters worse, it was obvious that something extremely violent had transpired inside Gil Martin's Market. Two of the five large panes of glass along the front of the market had been broken from inside; glass lay all over the sidewalk. Cases of canned dog food and six-packs of Dr Pepper had crashed through the windows and now lay scattered across the pavement. Jake was afraid the sheriff was going to make them go into the market to see what had happened, and he was afraid that someone dangerous was still in there, waiting.

The sheriff, Tal Whitman, and the two women finally reached the market, and Frank Autry showed them the plastic container that held the sample of water. The sheriff said he'd found another enormous puddle back at Brookhart's, and they agreed it might mean something. Tal Whitman told them about the message on the mirror — and about the severed hand; sweet Jesus! — at the Candle glow Inn, and no one knew what to make of that, either.

Sheriff Hammond turned toward the shattered front of the market and said what Jake was afraid he would say: “Let's have a look.”

Jake didn't want to be one of the first through the doors. Or one of the last either. He slipped into the middle of the procession.

The grocery store was a mess. Around the three cash registers, black metal display stands had been toppled, Chewing gum, candy, razor blades, paperback books, and other small items spilled over the floor.

They walked across the front of the store, looking into each aisle as they passed it. Goods had been pulled off the shelves and thrown to the floor. Boxes of cereal were smashed, torn open, the bright cardboard poking up through drifts of cornflakes and Cheerios. Smashed bottles of vinegar produced a pungent stench. Jars of jam, pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, and relish were tumbled in a jagged, glutinous heap.

At the head of the last aisle, Bryce Hammond turned to Dr. Paige. “Would the store have been open this evening?”

“No,” the doctor said, “but I think sometimes they stock the shelves on Sunday evenings. Not often, but sometimes.”

“Let's have a look in the back,” the sheriff said, “Might find something interesting.”

That's what I'm afraid of, Jake thought.

They followed Bryce Hammond down the last aisle, stepping over and around five-pound bags of sugar and flour, a few of which had split open.

Waist-high coolers for meat, cheese, eggs, and milk were lined up along the rear of the store. Beyond the coolers lay the sparkling-clean work area where the meat was cut, weighed, and wrapped for sale.

Jake's eyes nervously flicked over the porcelain and butcher's-block tables. He sighed with relief when he saw that nothing lay on any of them. He wouldn't have been surprised to see the store manager's body neatly chopped into steaks, roasts, and cutlets.

Bryce Hammond said, “Let's have a look in the storeroom.”

Let's not, Jake thought.

Hammond said, “Maybe we—” The lights went out.

The only windows were at the front of the store, but even up there it was dark; the streetlights had gone out, too. Here, the darkness was complete, blinding.

Several voices spoke at once: “Flashlights!”

“Jenny!”

“Flashlights!”

Then a lot happened very fast.

Tal Whitman switched on a flashlight, and the blade-like beam stabbed down at the floor. In the same instant, something struck him from behind, something unseen that had approached with incredible speed and stealth under the cover of darkness. Whitman was flung forward. He crashed into Stu Wargle.

Autry was pulling the other long-handled flashlight from the utility loop on his gun belt. Before he could switch it on, however, both Wargle and Tal Whitman fell against him, and all three went down.

As Tal fell, the flashlight flew out of his hand.

Bryce Hammond, briefly illuminated by the airborne light, grabbed for it; missed.

The flashlight struck the floor and spun away, casting wild and leaping shadows with each revolution, illuminating nothing.

And something cold touched the back of Jake's neck. Cold and slightly moist — yet something that was alive.

He flinched at the touch, tried to pull away and turn.

Something encircled his throat with the suddenness of a whip.

Jake gasped for breath.

Even before he could raise his hands to grapple with his assailant, his arms were seized and pinned.

He was being lifted off his feet as if he were a child.

He tried to scream, but a frigid hand clamped over his mouth. At least he thought it was a hand. But it felt like the flesh of an eel, cold and damp.

It stank, too. Not much. It didn't send out clouds of stink. But the odor was so different from anything Jake had ever smelled before, so bitter and sharp and unclassifiable that even in small whiffs it was nearly intolerable.

Waves of revulsion and terror broke and foamed within him, and he sensed he was in the presence of something unimaginably strange and unquestionably evil.

The flashlight was still spinning across the floor. Only a couple of seconds had passed since Tal had dropped it, although to Jake it seemed much longer than that. Now it spun one last time and clanged against the base of the milk cooler; the lens burst into countless pieces, and they were denied even that meager, erratic light. Although it had illuminated nothing, it had been better than total darkness. Without it, hope was extinguished, too.

Jake strained, twisted, flexed, jerked, and writhed in an epileptic dance of panic, a spasmodic fandango of escape. But he couldn't free even one hand. His unseen adversary merely tightened its grip.

Jake heard the others calling to one another; they sounded far away.

Chapter 13 Suddenly

Jake Johnson had disappeared.

Before Tal could locate the unbroken flashlight, the one that, Frank Autry had dropped, the market's lights flickered and then came on bright and steady. The darkness had lasted no longer than fifteen or twenty seconds.

But Jake was gone.

They searched for him. He wasn't in the aisles, the meat locker, the storeroom, the office, or the employees' bathroom.

They left the market — only seven of them now — following Bryce, moving with extreme caution, hoping to find Jake outside, in the street. But he wasn't there, either.

Snowfield's silence was a mute, mocking shout of ridicule.

Tal Whitman thought the night seemed infinitely darker now than it had been a few minutes ago. It was an enormous maw into which they had stepped, unaware. This deep and watchful night was hungry.

“Where could he have gone?” Gordy asked, looking a little savage, as he always did when he frowned, even though, right now, he was actually just scared.

“He didn't go anywhere,” Stu Wargle said, “He was taken.”

“He didn't call for help.”

“Never had a chance.”

“You think he's alive… or dead?” the young Paige girl asked.

“Little doll,” Wargle said, rubbing the beard stubble on his chin, “I wouldn't get my hopes up if I was you. I'll bet my last buck we'll find Jake somewheres, stiff as a board, all swelled up and purple like the rest of 'em.”

The girl winced and sidled closer to her sister.

Bryce Hammond said, “Hey, let's not write Jake off that quickly.”

“I agree,” Tal said, “There are a lot of dead people in this town. But it seems to me that most of them aren't dead. Just missing.”

“They're all deader than napalmed babies. Isn't that right, Frank?” Wargle said, never missing a chance to needle Autry about his service in Vietnam. “We just haven't found 'em yet.”

Frank didn't rise to the bait. He was too smart and too self-controlled for that. Instead, he said, “What I don't understand is why it didn't take all of us when it had the chance? Why did it just knock Tal down?”

“I was switching on the flashlight,” Tal said, “It didn't want me to do that.”

“Yes,” Frank said, “but why was Jake the only one of us it grabbed, and why did it do a fast fade right after?”

“Its teasing us,” Dr. Paige said. The streetlamp made her eyes flash with green fire. “It's like I said about the church bell and the fire siren. It's like a cat playing with mice.”

“But why?” Gordy asked exasperatedly, “What's it get out of all this? What's it want?”

“Hold on a minute,” Bryce said, “How come everyone's all of a sudden saying 'it'? Last time I took an informal survey, seems to me the general consensus was that only a pack of psychopathic killers could've done this. Maniacs. People.”

They regarded one another with uneasiness. No one was eager to say what was on his mind. Unthinkable things were now thinkable. They were things that reasonable people could not easily put into words.

The wind gusted out of the darkness, and the obeisant trees bent reverently.

The streetlamps flickered.

Everyone jumped, startled by the lights' inconstancy. Tal put his hand on the butt of his holstered revolver. But the lights did not go out.

They listened to the cemeterial town. The only sound was the whisper of the wind-stirred trees, which was like the last long exhalation of breath before the grave, an extended dying sigh.

Jake is dead, Tal thought. Wargle is right for once. Jake is dead and maybe the rest of us are, too, only we don't know it yet.

To Frank Autry, Bryce said, “Frank, why'd you say 'it' instead of 'they' or something else?”

Frank glanced at Tal, seeking support, but Tal wasn't sure why he, himself, had said “it.” Frank cleared his throat. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and looked at Bryce. He shrugged. “Well, sir, I guess maybe I said 'it' because… well… a soldier, a human adversary, would have blown us away right there in the market when he had the opportunity, all of us at once, in the darkness.”

“So you think — what? — that this adversary isn't human?”

“Maybe it could be some kind of… animal.”

“Animal? Is that really what you think?”

Frank looked exceedingly uncomfortable. “No, sir.”

“What do you think?” Bryce asked.

“Hell, I don't know what to think,” Frank said in frustration. “I'm military-trained, as you know. A military man doesn't like to plunge blindly into any situation. He likes to plan his strategy carefully. But good, sound strategic planning depends on a reliable body of experience. What happened in comparable battles in other wars? What have other men done in similar circumstances? Did they succeed or fail? But this time there just aren't any comparable battles; there's no experience to draw upon. This is so strange, I'm going to go right on thinking of the enemy as a faceless, neutral 'it.”

Turning to Dr. Paige, Bryce said, “What about you? Why did you use the word 'it'?”

“I'm not sure. Maybe because Officer Autry used it.”

“But you were the one who advanced the theory about a mutant strain of rabies that could create a pack of homicidal maniacs. Are you ruling that out now?”

She frowned. “No. We can't rule out anything at this point. But, Sheriff, I never meant that that was the only possible theory.”

“Do you have any others?”

“No.”

Bryce looked at Tal, “What about you?”

Tal felt every bit as uncomfortable as Frank had looked.

“Well, I guess I used 'it' because I can't accept the homicidal maniac theory any more.”

Bryce's heavy eyelids lifted higher than usual. “Oh? Why not?”

“Because of what happened at the Candle glow Inn,” Tal said, “When we came downstairs and found that hand on the table in the lobby, holding the eyebrow pencil we'd been looking for… well… that just didn't seem like something a homicidal nut case would do. We've all been cops long enough to've dealt with our share of unbalanced people. Have any of you ever encountered one of those types who had a sense of humor? Even an ugly, twisted sense of humor? They're humorless people. They've lost the ability to laugh at anything, which is probably part of the reason they're crazy. So when I saw that hand on the lobby table it just didn't seem to fit. I agree with Frank; for now I'm going to think of our enemy as a faceless 'it.”

“Why won't any of you admit what you're feeling?” Lisa Paige said softly. She was fourteen, an adolescent, on her way to being a lovely young lady, but she gazed at each of them with the unselfconscious directness of a child. “Somehow, deep down inside where it really counts, we all know it wasn't people who did these things. It's something really awful — Jeez, just feel it out there — something strange and disgusting. Whatever it is, we all feel it. We're all scared of it. So we're all trying hard not to admit it's there.”

Only Bryce returned the girl's stare; he studied her thoughtfully. The others looked away from Lisa. They didn't want to meet one another's eyes, either.

We don't want to look inside ourselves, Tal thought, and that's exactly what the girl's telling us to do. We don't want to look inward and find primitive superstition. We're all civilized, reasonably well-educated adults, and adults aren't supposed to believe in the boogeyman.

“Lisa's right,” Bryce said, “The only way we're going to solve this one — maybe the only way we're going to avoid becoming victims ourselves — is to keep our minds open and let our imaginations have free rein.”

“I agree,” Dr. Paige said.

Gordy Brogan shook his head. “But what are we supposed to think, then? Anything? I mean, aren't there any limits? Are we supposed to start worrying about ghosts and ghouls and werewolves and… and vampires? There's got to be some things we can rule out.”

“Of course,” Bryce said patiently, “Gordy, no one's saying we're dealing with ghosts and werewolves. But we've got to realize that we're dealing with the unknown. That's all. The unknown.”

“I don't buy it,” Stu Wargle said sullenly, “The unknown, my ass. When it's all said and done, what we'll find is that it's the work of some pervert, some stinkin' scumbag pretty much like all the stinkin' scumbags we've dealt with before.”

Frank said, “Wargle, your kind of thinking is exactly what'll cause us to overlook important evidence. And it's also the kind of thinking that'll get us killed.”

“You just wait,” Wargle told them, “You'll find out I'm right.” He spat on the sidewalk, hooked his thumbs in his gun belt, and tried to give the impression that he was the only levelheaded man in the group.

Tal Whitman saw through the macho posturing; he saw terror in Wargle, too. Though he was one of the most insensitive men Tal had ever known, Stu was not unaware of the primitive response of which Lisa Paige had spoken. Whether he admitted it or not, he clearly felt the same bone-deep chill that shivered through all of them.

Frank Autry also saw that Wargle's imperturbability was a pose. In, a tone of exaggerated, insincere admiration, Frank said, “Stu, by your fine example, you fortify us. You inspire us. What would we do without you?”

“Without me,” Wargle said sourly, “you'd go right down the old toilet, Frank.”

With mock dismay, Frank looked around at Tal, Gordy, and Bryce. “Does that sound like a swelled head?”

“Sure does. But don't blame Stu. In his case,” Tal said, “a swelled head is just a result of Nature's frenzied efforts to fill a vacuum.”

It was a small joke, but the laugh it elicited was large. Although Stu enjoyed wielding the needle, he despised being on the pricking end of it; yet even he managed to dredge up a smile.

Tal knew they were not laughing at the joke as much as they were laughing at Death, laughing in its skeletal face.

But when the laughter faded, the night was still dark.

The town was still unnaturally silent.

Jake Johnson was still missing.

And it was still out there.

Dr. Paige turned to Bryce Hammond and said, “Are you ready to take a look at the Oxley house?”

Bryce shook his head. “Not right now. I don't think it's wise for us to do any more exploring until we get some reinforcements. I'm not going to lose another man. Not if I can help it.”

Tal saw anguish pass through Bryce's eyes at the mention of Jake.

He thought: Bryce, my friend, you always take too much of the responsibility when something goes wrong, just like you're always too quick to share the credit for successes that have been entirely yours.

“Let's go back to the substation,” Bryce said, “We've got to plan our moves carefully, and I've got calls to make.”

They returned along the route by which they had come. Stu Wargle, still determined to prove his fearlessness, insisted on being the rear guard this time, and he swaggered along behind them.

As they reached Skyline Road, a church bell tolled, startling them. It tolled again, slowly, again, slowly, again…

Tal felt the metallic sound reverberating in his teeth.

They all stopped at the corner, listening to the bell and staring west, toward the other end of Vail Lane. Only a little more than one block away, a brick church tower rose above the other buildings; there was one small light at each corner of the peaked, slate belfry roof.

“The Catholic church,” Dr. Paige informed them, raising her voice to compete with the bell. “It serves all the towns around here. Our Lady of the Mountains.”

The pealing of a church bell could be a joyous music. But there was nothing joyous about this one, Tal decided.

“Who's ringing it?” Gordy wondered aloud.

“Maybe nobody's ringing it,” Frank said, “Maybe it's hooked up to a mechanical device of some kind; maybe it's on a timer.”

In the lighted belfry, the bell swung, casting off a glint of brass along with its one clear note.

“Does it usually ring this time on a Sunday night?” Bryce asked Dr. Paige.

“No.”

“Then it's not on a timer.”

A block away, high above the ground, the bell wink-flashed and rang again. “So who's pulling the rope?” Gordy Brogan asked.

A macabre image crept into Tal Whitman's mind: Jake Johnson, bruised and bloated and stone-cold dead, standing in the bell-ringer's chamber at the bottom of the church tower, the rope gripped in his bloodless hands, dead but demonically animated, dead but nevertheless pulling on the rope, pulling and pulling, dead face turned up, grinning the wide mirthless grin of a corpse, protuberant eyes staring at the bell that swung and clanged under the peaked roof.

Tal shuddered.

“Maybe we should go over to the church and see who's there,” Frank said.

“No,” Bryce said instantly, “That's what it wants us to do. It wants us to come have a look. It wants us to go inside the church, and then it'll turn out the lights again…”

Tal noticed that Bryce, too, was now using the pronoun “it.”

“Yeah,” Lisa Paige said, “It's over there right this minute, waiting for us.” Even Stu Wargle wasn't prepared to encourage them to visit the church tonight.

In the open belfry, the visible bell swung, splintering off another shard of brassy light, swung, gleamed, swung, winked, as if it were flashing out a semaphoric message of hypnotic power at the same time that it issued its monotonous clang: You are growing drowsy, even drowsier, sleepy, sleepy… you are deep asleep, in a trance… you are under my power… you will come to the church… you will come now, come, come, come to the church and see the wonder that awaits you here… come… come…

Bryce shook himself as if casting off a dream. He said, “If it wants us to come to the church, that's a good reason not to go. No more exploring until daylight.”

They all turned away from Vail Lane and went north on Skyline Road, past the Mountainview Restaurant, toward the substation.

They had gone perhaps twenty feet when the church bell stopped tolling.

Once more, the uncanny silence poured like viscous fluid through the town, coating everything.

When they reached the substation, they discovered that Paul Henderson's corpse was gone. It seemed as if the dead deputy had simply gotten up and walked away. Like Lazarus.

Chapter 14 Containment

Bryce was sitting at the desk that had belonged to Paul Henderson. He had pushed aside the open issue of Time that Paul apparently had been reading when Snowfield had been wiped out. A yellow sheet of note paper lay on the blotter, filled with Bryce's economical handwriting.

Around him, the six others were busily carrying out tasks that he had assigned to them. A wartime atmosphere prevailed in the stationhouse. Their grim determination to survive had caused a fragile but steadily strengthening camaraderie to spring up among them. There was even guarded optimism, perhaps based on the observation that they were still alive while so many others were dead.

Bryce quickly scanned the list he had made, trying to determine if he had overlooked anything. Finally, he pulled the telephone to him. He got a dial tone immediately, and he was grateful for it, considering Jennifer Paige's difficulties in that regard.

He hesitated before placing the first call. A sense of the immense importance of the moment weighed heavily on him. The savage obliteration of Snowfield's entire population was like nothing that had ever happened before. Within hours, journalists would be coming to Santa Mira County by the scores, by the hundreds, from all over the world. By morning, the Snowfield story would have pushed all other news off the front pages. CBS, ABC, and NBC would all be interrupting regularly scheduled broadcasts for updates and bulletins throughout the duration of the crisis. The media coverage would be intense. Until the world knew whether or not some mutated germ had a role in the events here, hundreds of millions of people would wait breathlessly, wondering if their own death notices had been issued in Snowfield. Even if disease were ruled out, the world's attention wouldn't be diverted from Snowfield until the mystery had been explained. The pressure to find a solution was going to be unbearable.

On a personal level, Bryce's own life would be forever changed. He was in charge of the police contingent; therefore, he would be featured in all the news stories. That prospect appalled him. He wasn't the kind of sheriff who liked to grandstand. He preferred to keep a low profile.

But he couldn't just walk away from Snowfield now.

He dialed the emergency number at his own offices in Santa Mira, by-passing the switchboard operator. The desk sergeant on duty was Charlie Mercer, a good man who could be counted on to do precisely what he was told to do.

Charlie answered the phone halfway through the second ring. “Sheriff's Department.” He had a flat, nasal voice.

“Charlie, this is Bryce Hanuriond.”

“Yes, sir. We've been wondering what's happening up there.”

Bryce succinctly outlined the situation in Snowfield.

“Good God!” Charlie said, “Jake's dead, too?”

“We don't know for sure that he's dead. We can hope not. Now listen, Charlie, there are a lot of things we've got to do in the next couple of hours, and it would be easier for all of us if we could maintain secrecy until we've established our base here and secured the perimeters. Containment, Charlie. That's the key word. Snowfield has to be sealed off tight, and that'll be a lot easier to accomplish if we can do it before the newsmen start tramping through the mountains. I know I can count on you to keep your mouth shut, but there are a few of the men…”

“Don't worry,” Charlie said, “We can hold it close to the vest for a couple of hours.”

“All right. First thing I want is twelve more men. Two more on the roadblock at the Snowfield turnoff. Ten here with me. Wherever you can, select single men without families.”

“It really looks that bad?”

“It really does. And better select men who don't have relatives in Snowfield. Another thing: They'll have to bring, a couple of days' worth of drinking water and food. I don't want them consuming anything in Snowfield until we know for sure that the stuff is safe here.”

“Right.”

“Every man should bring his sidearm, a riot gun, and tear gas.”

“Got it.”

“This'll leave you short handed, and it'll get worse when the media people start pouring in. You'll have to call in some of the auxiliary deputies for directing traffic and crowd control. Now, Charlie, you know this part of the county pretty well don't you?”

“I was born and raised in Pineville.”

“That's what I thought. I've been looking at the county map, and so far as I can see, there are only two passable routes into Snowfield. First, there's the highway, which we've already blockaded.” He swiveled on his chair and stared at the huge, framed map on the wall.

“Then there's an old fire trail that leads about two-thirds of the way up the other side of the mountain. Where the fire trail leaves off, an established wilderness trail seems to pick up. It's just a footpath from that point, but from the way it looks on the map, it comes out smack-dab at the top of the longest ski-run on this side of the mountain, up here above Snowfield.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “I've backpacked through that neck of the woods. It's officially the Old Mount Greentree Wilderness Trail. Or as we locals used to call it — the Muscle Liniment Highway.”

“We'll have to station a couple of men at the bottom of the fire trail and turn back anyone who tries to come in that way.”

“It would take one hell of a determined reporter to try it.”

“We can't take chances. Are you aware of any other route that isn't on the map?”

“Nope,” Charlie said, “Otherwise, you'd have to come into Snowfield straight overland, making your own trail every dammed step of the way. That is wilderness out there; it's not just a playground for weekend campers, by God. No experienced backpacker would try to come overland. That'd be plain stupid.”

“All right. Something else I need is a phone number from the files. Remember that law enforcement seminar I went to in Chicago… oh… about sixteen months ago. One of the speakers was an army man. Copperfield, I think. General Copperfield.”

“Sure,” Charlie said, “The Army Medical Corps' CBW Division.”

“That's it.”

“I think they call Copperfield's office the Civilian Defense Unit. Hold on.” Charlie was off the line less than a minute.

He came back with the number, read it to Bryce. “That's out in Dugway, Utah. Jesus, do you think this could be something that'd bring those boys running? that's scary.”

“Real scary,” Bryce agreed, “A couple of other things. I want you to put a name on the teletype. Timothy Flyte.” Bryce spelled it, “No description. No known address. Find out if he's wanted anywhere. Check with the FBI, too. Then find out all you can about a Mr. and Mrs. Harold Ordnay of San Francisco.” He gave Charlie the address that had been in the Candle glow Inn's guest register. “One more thing. When those new men come up here, have them bring some plastic body bags from the county morgue.”

“How many?”

“To start with… two hundred.”

“Uh… two… hundred?”

“We might need a great many more than that before we're through. We might have to borrow from other counties. Better check into that. A lot of people seem just to've disappeared, but their bodies may still turn up. There were about five hundred people living here. We could possibly need that many body bags.”

And maybe even more than five hundred, Bryce thought. Because we might need a few bags for ourselves, too.

Although Charlie had listened attentively when Bryce told him that the entire town had been wiped out, and although there was no doubt that he believed Bryce, he obviously hadn't frilly, emotionally comprehended the awful dimensions of the disaster until he'd heard the request for two hundred body bags. An image of all those corpses, sealed in opaque plastic, stacked atop one another in Snowfield's streets — that was what had finally pierced him.

“Holy Mother of God,” Charlie Mercer said.

While Bryce Hammond was on the telephone with Charlie Mercer, Frank and Stu started to dismantle the hulking, police-band radio that stood against the back wall of the room. Bryce had told them to find out what was wrong with the set, for there weren't any visible signs of damage.

The front plate was fastened down by ten tightened screws. Frank worked them loose one at a time.

As usual, Stu wasn't much help. He kept glancing around at Dr. Paige, who was at the other end of the room, working with Tal Whitman on another project.

“She's sure a sweet piece of meat,” Stu said, casing a covetous look at the doctor and picking his nose at the same time.

Frank said nothing.

Stu looked at what he'd pried out of his nose, inspecting it as if it were a pearl found in an oyster. He glanced back at the doctor again. “Look at the way she fills out them jeans. Christ, I'd love to dip my wick in that.”

Frank stared at the three screws he'd removed from the radio and counted to ten, resisting the urge to drive one of the screws straight into Stu's thick skull. “You aren't stupid enough to make a pass at her, I hope.”

“Why not? That's a hot number if ever I did see one.”

“You try it, and the sheriff'll kick your ass.”

“He don’t’t spook me.”

“You amaze me, Stu. How can you be thinking about sex right now? Hasn't it occurred to you that we all might die here, tonight, maybe even in the next minute or two?”

“All the more reason to make a play for her if I get a chance,” Wargle said. “I mean, shit, if we're livin' on borrowed time, who cares? Who wants to die limp? Right? Even the other one's nice.”

“The other what?”

“The girl. The kid.” Stu said.

“She's only fourteen.”

“Sweet stuff.”

“She's a child, Wargle.”

“She's plenty old enough.”

“That's sick.”

“Wouldn't you like to have her firm little legs wrapped around you, Frank?” The screwdriver slipped out of the notch on the head of the screw and skidded across the metal cover plate with a stuttering screech.

In a voice which was nearly inaudible but which nevertheless froze Wargle's grin, Frank said, “If I ever hear of you laying one filthy finger on that girl or on any other young girl, anywhere, any time, I won't just help press charges against you; I'll come after you. I know how to go after a man, Wargle. I wasn't just a desk jockey in Nam. I was in the field. And I still know how to handle myself. I know how to handle you. You hear me? You believe me?”

For a moment Wargle was unable to speak. He just stared into Frank's eyes.

Conversations drifted over from other parts of the big room, but none of the words were clear. Still, it was obvious that no one realized what was happening at the radio.

Wargle finally blinked and licked his lips and looked down at his shoes and then looked up and put on an aw-shucks grin. “Hey, gee, Frank, don't get sore. Don't get so riled up. I didn't mean it.”

“You believe me?” Frank insisted.

“Sure, sure. But I tell you I didn't mean nothin'. I was just shootin' off at the mouth. Locker room talk. You know how it is. You know I didn't mean it. Am I some kind of pervert, for God's sake? Hey, come on, Frank, lighten up. Okay?”

Frank stared at him a moment longer, then said, “Let's get this radio dismantled.”

Tal Whitman opened the tall metal gun locker.

Jenny Paige said, “Good heavens, it's a regular arsenal.”

He passed the weapons to her, and she lined them up on a nearby work table.

The locker seemed to contain an excessive amount of firepower for a town like Snowfield. Two high-powered rifles with sniper scopes. Two semiautomatic shotguns. Two nonlethal riot guns, which were specially modified shotguns that fired only soft plastic pellets. Two flare guns. Two rifles that fired tear gas grenades. Three handguns: a pair of.38s and a big Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum.

As the lieutenant piled boxes of ammunition on the table, Jenny gave the Magnum a close inspection. “This is a real monster, isn't it?”

“Yeah. You could stop a Brahman bull with that one.”

“Looks as if Paul kept everything in first-rate condition.”

“You handle guns like you know all about them,” the lieutenant said, putting more ammunition on the table.

“Always hated guns. Never thought I'd own one,” she said. “But after I'd been living up here three months, we started having trouble with a motorcycle gang that decided to set up a sort of summer retreat on some land out along the Mount n Road.”

“The deamon Chrome.”

“That's them,” Jenny said, “Rough-looking crowd.”

“That's putting it kindly.”

“A couple of times, when I was making a house call at night, over to Mount Lamn or Pineville, I got an unwanted motorcycle escort. They rode on each side of the car, too close for safety, grinning in the side windows at me, shouting at me, waving, being foolish. They didn't actually try anything, but it sure was…”

“Threatening.”

“You said it. So I bought a gun, learned how to shoot it, and got a permit to carry.”

The lieutenant began to open the boxes of ammunition. “Ever have occasion to use it?”

“Well,” she said, “I never had to shoot anyone, thank God. But I did have to show it once. It was just after dark. I was on my way to Mount Larson, and the Demons gave me another escort, but this time it was different. Four of them boxed me in, and they all started slowing down, forcing me to slow down, too. Finally, they brought me to a complete stop in the middle of the road.”

“That must've given your heart a good workout.”

“Did it ever! One of the Demons got off his bike. He was big, maybe six feet three or four, with long curly hair and a beard. He wore a bandanna around his head. And one gold earring. He looked like a pirate.”

“Did he have a red and yellow eye tattooed on the palm of each hand?”

“Yes! Well, at least on the palm he put against the car window when he was looking in at me.”

The lieutenant leaned against the table on which they had placed the guns. “His name's Gene Teer. He's the leader of the Demon Chrome. They don't come much meaner. He's been in the slammer two or three times but never for anything serious and never for long. Whenever it looks as if Jester's going to have to do hard time, one of his people takes the blame for all the charges. He has an incredible hold on his followers. They'll do anything he wants; it's almost as if they worship him. Even after they're in jail, Jeeter takes care of them, smuggling money and drugs in to them, and they stay faithful to him. He knows we can't touch him, so he's always infuriatingly polite and helpful to us, pretending to be an upstanding citizen; it's a big joke to him. Anyway, Jeeter came over to your car and looked in at you?”

“Yes. He wanted me to get out, and I wouldn't. He said I should at least roll down the window, so we wouldn't have to shout to hear each other. I said I didn't mind shouting a little. He threatened to smash the window if I didn't roll it down. I knew if I did, he'd reach right inside and unlock the door, so I figured it was better to get out of the car willingly. I told him I'd come out if he'd back off a little. He stepped away from the door, and I snatched the gun from under the seat. As soon as I opened the door and got out, he tried to move in on me. I jammed the muzzle into his belly. The hammer was pulled back, fully cocked; he saw that right away.”

“God, I wish I'd seen the look on his face!” Lieutenant Whitman said, grinning.

“I was scared to death,” Jenny said, remembering, “I mean, I was scared of him, of course, but, I was also scared I might have to pull the trigger. I wasn't even sure I could pull the trigger. But I knew I couldn't let Jeeter see I had any doubts.”

“If he'd seen, he'd have eaten you alive.”

“That's what I thought. So I was very cold, very firm. I told him that I was a doctor, that I was on my way to see a very sick patient, and that I didn't intend to be detained. I kept my voice low. The other three men were still on their bikes, and from where they were, they couldn't see the gun or hear exactly what I was saying. This Jeeter looked like the type who'd rather die than let anyone see him take any orders from a woman, so I didn't want to embarrass him and maybe make him do something foolish.”

The lieutenant shook his head. “You sure had him pegged right.”

“I also reminded him that he might need a doctor some day. What if he took a spill off that bike of his and was lying on the road, critically injured, and I was the doctor who showed up — after he'd hurt me and given me good reason to hurt him in return? I told him there are things a doctor can do to complicate injuries, to make sure the patient has a long and painful recovery. I asked him to think about that.”

Whitman gaped at her.

She said, “I don't know if that unsettled him or whether it was simply the gun, but he hesitated, then made a big scene for the benefit of his three buddies. He told them I was a friend of a friend. He said he'd met me once, years ago, but hadn't recognized me at first. I was to be given every courtesy the Demon Chrome could extend. No one would ever bother me, he said. Then he climbed back on his Harley and rode away, and the other three followed him.”

“And you just went on to Mount Larson?”

“What else? I still had a patient to see.”

“Incredible.”

“I will admit, though, I had the sweats and the shakes all the way to Mount Larson.”

“And no biker has ever bothered you since?”

“In fact, when they pass me on the roads around here, they all smile and wave.”

Whitman laughed.

Jenny said, “So there's the answer to your question: Yes, I know how to use a gun, but I hope I never have to shoot anyone.”

She looked at the.357 Magnum in her hand, scowled, opened a box of ammunition, and began to load the revolver.

The lieutenant took a couple of shells from another carton and loaded a shotgun.

They were silent for a moment, and then he said, “Would you have done what you told Gene Teer?”

“What? Shoot him?”

“No. I mean, if he'd hurt you, maybe raped you, and then if you'd later had a chance to treat him as a patient… would you have…?”

Jenny finished loading the Magnum, clicked the cylinder into place, and put the gun down. “Well, I'd be tempted. But on the other hand, I have enormous respect for the Hippocratic Oath. So… well… I suppose this means I'm just a wimp at heart — but I'd give Jeeter the best medical care I could.”

“I knew you'd say that.”

“I talk tough, but I'm just a marshmallow inside.”

“Like hell,” he said, “Me way you stood up to him took about as much toughness as anybody has. But if he'd hurt you, and if you'd later abused your trust as a doctor just to get even with him… well, that would be different.”

Jenny looked up from the.38 that she'd just taken from the array of weapons on the table, and she met the black man's eyes. They were clear, probing eyes.

“Dr. Paige, you have what we call 'the right stuff.’ If you want, you can call me Tal Most people do. It's short for Talbert.”

“All right, Tal. And you can call me Jenny.”

“Well, I don't know about that.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“You're a doctor and all. My Aunt Becky — she's the one who raised me — always had great respect for doctors. It just seems funny to be calling a doctor by his… by her first name.”

“Doctors are people too, you know. And considering that we're all in sort of a pressure cooker here—”

“Just the same,” he said, shaking his head.

“If it bothers you, then call me what most of my patients call me.”

“What's that?”

“Just plain Doc.”

“Doc?” He thought about it, and a slow smile spread over his face. “Doc. It makes you think of one of those grizzled, cantankerous old coots that Barry Fitzgerald used to play in the movies, way back in the thirties and forties.”

“Sorry I'm not grizzled.”

“That's okay. You're not an old coot, either.”

She laughed softly.

“I like the irony of it,” Whitman said, “Doc. Yeah, and when I think of you jamming that revolver in Gene Teer's belly, it fits.”

They loaded two more guns.

“Tal, why all these weapons for a little substation in a town like Snowfield?”

“If you want to get state and federal matching funds for the county law enforcement budget, you've got to meet their requirements for all sorts of ridiculous things. One of the specifications is for minimal arsenals in substations like this. Now… well… maybe we should be glad we've got all this hardware.”

“Except so far we haven't seen anything to shoot at.”

“I suspect we will,” Tal said, “And I'll tell you something.”

“What's that?”

His broad, dark, handsome face could look unsettlingly. “I don't think you'll have to worry about having to shoot other people. Somehow, I don't believe it's people we have to worry about.”

Bryce dialed the private, unlisted number at the governor's residence in Sacramento. He talked to a maid who insisted the governor couldn't come to the phone, not even to take a life and-death call from an old friend. She wanted Bryce to leave a message. Then he talked to the chief of the household staff, who also wanted him to leave a message. Then, after being put on hold, he talked to Gary Poe, Governor Jack Retlock's chief political aide and advisor.

“Bryce,” Gary said, “Jack just can't come to the phone right now. There's an important dinner underway here. The Japanese trade minister and the consul general from San Francisco.”

“Gary—”

“We're trying damned hard to get that new Japanese-American electronics plant for California, and we're afraid it's going to go to Texas or Arizona or maybe even New York. Jesus, New York!”

“Gary”

“Why would they even consider New York, with all the labor problems and the tax rates what they are back there? Sometimes I think”

“Gary, shut up.”

“Huh?”

Bryce never snapped at anyone. Even Gary Poe — who could talk faster and louder than a carnival barker — was shocked into silence.

“Gary, this is an emergency. Get Jack for me.”

Sounding hurt, Poe said, “Bryce, I'm authorized to”

“I've got a hell of a lot to do in the next hour or two, Gary. If I live long enough to do it, that is. I can't spend fifteen minutes laying this whole thing out for you and then another fifteen laying it out again for Jack. Listen, I'm in Snowfield. It appears as if everyone who lived here is dead, Gary.”

“What?”

“Five hundred people.”

“Bryce, if this is some sort of joke or”

“Five hundred dead. And that's the least of it. Now will you for Christ's sake get Jack?”

“But Bryce, five hundred”

“Get Jack, damn it!”

Poe hesitated, then said, “Old buddy, this better be the straight shit.” He dropped the phone and went for the governor.

Bryce had known Jack Retlock for seventeen years. When he joined the Los Angeles police, he had been assigned to lack for his rookie year. At that time, Jack was a seven-year veteran of the force, a seasoned hand.

Indeed, Jack had seemed so streetwise that Bryce had despaired of ever being even half as good at the job. In a year, however, he was better. They voted to stay together, partners. But eighteen months later, fed up with a legal system that regularly turned loose the punks he worked so hard to imprison, Jack quit police work and went into politics. As a cop, he'd collected a fistful of citations for bravery. He parlayed his hero image into a seat on the L A. city council, then ran for mayor, winning in a landslide. From there, he'd jumped into the governor's chair. It was a far more impressive career than Bryce's own halting progress to the sheriff's post in Santa Mira, but Jack always was the more aggressive of the two.

“Doody? Is that you?” Jack asked, picking up the phone in Sacramento. Doody was his nickname for Bryce. He'd always said that Bryce's sandy hair, freckles, wholesome face, and marionette eyes made him look like Howdy Doody.

“It's me, Jack.”

“Gary's raving some lunatic nonsense”

“It's true,” Bryce said.

He told Jack all about Snowfield.

After listening to the entire story, Jack took a deep breath and said, “I wish you were a drinking man, Doody.”

“This isn't booze talking, Jack. Listen, the first thing I want is-”

“National Guard?”

“No!” Bryce said, “That's exactly what I want to avoid as long as we have any choice.”

“If I don't use the Guard and every agency at my disposal, and then if it later turns out I should've sent them in first thing, my ass will be grass, and there'll be a herd of hungry cows all around me.”

“Jack, I'm counting on you to make the right decisions, not just the right political decisions. Until we know more about the situation, we don't want hordes of Guardsmen tramping around up here. They're great for helping out in a flood, a postal strike, that sort of thing. But they're not full-time military men. They're salesmen and attorneys and carpenters and schoolteachers. This calls for a tightly controlled, efficient little police action, and that sort of thing can be conducted only by real cops, full-time cops.”

“And if your men can't handle it?”

“Then I'll be the first to yell for the Guard.”

Finally Retlock said, “Okay. No Guardsmen. For now.”

Bryce sighed. “And I want to keep the State Health Department out of here, too.”

“Doody, be reasonable. How can I do that? If there's any chance that a contagious disease has wiped out Snowfieldor some kind of environmental poisoning—”

“Listen, Jack, Health does a fine job when it comes to tracking down and controlling vectors for outbreaks of plague or mass food poisoning or water contamination. But essentially, they're bureaucrats; they move slowly. We can't afford to move slowly on this. I have the gut feeling that we're living strictly on borrowed time. All hell could break loose at any time; in fact, I'll be surprised if it doesn't. Besides, the Health Department doesn't have the equipment to handle it, and they don't have a contingency plan to cover the death of an entire town. But there's someone who does, Jack. The Army Medical Corps' CBW Division has a relatively new program they call the Civilian Defense Unit.”

“CBW Division?” Retlock asked. There was a new tension in his voice, “You don't mean the chemical and biological warfare boys?”

“Yes.”

“Christ, you don't think it has anything to do with nerve gas or germ war”

“Probably not,” Bryce said, thinking of the Liebermanns' severed heads, of the creepy feeling that had overcome him inside the covered passageway, of the incredible suddenness with which Jake Johnson had vanished. “But I don't know enough about it to rule out CBW or anything else.”

A hard edge of anger had crystallized in the governor's voice. “If the damned army has been careless with one of its fucking doomsday viruses, I'm going to have their heads!”

“Easy, Jack. Maybe it's not an accident. Maybe it's the work of terrorists who got their hands on a supply of some CBW agent. Or maybe it's the Russians running a little test of our CBW analysis and defense system. It was to handle those kinds of situations that the Army Medical Corps instructed its CBW Division to create General Copperfield's office.”

“Who's Copperfield?”

“General Galen Copperfield. He's the Commanding officer of the Civilian Defense Unit of the CBW Division. This is precisely the kind of situation they want to be notified about. Within hours, Copperfield can put a team of well-known scientists into Snowfield. First-rate biologists, virologists, bacteriologists, pathologists with training in the very latest forensic medicine, at least one immunologist and biochemist, a neurologist — and even a neuropsychologist. Copperfield's department has designed elaborate mobile field laboratories. They've got them garaged at depots all over the country, so there must be one relatively close to us. Hold off the State Health gang, Jack. They don't have people of the caliber that Copperfield can provide, and they don't have state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment as mobile as Copperfield's. I want to call the general; I am going to call him, in fact, but I'd prefer to have your agreement and your guarantee that state bureaucrats won't be tramping around here, interfering.”

After a brief hesitation, Jack Redock said, “Doody, what kind of world have we let it become when things like Copperfield's department are even necessary?”

“You'll hold off Health?”

“Yes. What else do you need?”

Bryce glanced down at the list in front of him. “You could approach the telephone company about pulling the Snowfield circuits off automatic switching. When the world finds out what's happened up here, every phone in town will be ringing off the hook, and we won't be able to maintain essential communications. If they could route all calls to and from Snowfield through a few special operators and weed out the crank stuff and”

“I'll handle it,” Jack said.

“Of course, we could lose the phones at any time. Dr. Paige had trouble getting a call out when she first tried, so I'll need a shortwave set. The one here at the substation seems to've been sabotaged.”

“I can get you a mobile shortwave unit, a van that has its own gasoline generator. The Office of Earthquake Preparedness has a couple. Anything else?”

“Speaking of generators, it'd be nice if we didn't have to depend on the public power supply. Evidently, our enemy here can tamper with it at will. Could you get two big generators for us?”

“Can do. Anything else?”

“If I think of anything, I won't hesitate to ask.”

“Let me tell you, Bryce, as a friend, I hate like hell to see you in the middle of this one. But as a governor, I'm damned glad it fell in your jurisdiction, whatever the hell it is. There are some prize assholes out there who'd already have screwed it up if it'd fallen in their laps. By now, if it was a disease, they'd have spread it to half the state. We sure can use you up there.”

“Thanks, Jack.”

They were both silent for a moment. Then Retlock said, “Doody?”

“Yeah, Jack?”

“Watch out for yourself.”

“I will, Jack,” Bryce said, “Well, I've got to get on to Copperfield. I'll call you later.”

The governor said, “Please do that, Bryce. Call me later. Don't you vanish, old buddy.”

Bryce put down the phone and looked around the substation. Stu Wargle and Frank were removing the front access plate from the radio. Tal and Dr. Paige were loading guns. Gordy Brogan and young Lisa Paige, the biggest and the smallest of the group, were making coffee and putting food on one of the worktables.

Even in the midst of disaster, Bryce thought, even here in the Twilight Zone, we have to have our coffee and supper. Life goes on.

He picked up the receiver to call Copperfield's number out at Dugway, Utah.

There was no dial tone. He jiggled the disconnect button.

“Hello,” he said.

Nothing.

Bryce sensed someone or something listening. He could feel the presence, just as Dr. Paige had described it.

“Who is this?” he asked.

He didn't really expect an answer, but he got one. It wasn't a voice. It was a peculiar yet familiar sound: the cry of birds, perhaps gulls; yes, sea gulls shrieking high above a windswept shoreline.

It changed. It became a clattering sound. A rattle. Like beans in a hollow gourd. The wanting sound of a rattlesnake. Yes, no doubt about it. The very distinct sound of a rattlesnake.

And then it changed again. Electronic buzzing. No, not electronic. Bees. Bees buzzing, swarm.

And now the cry of gulls once more.

And the call of another bird, a trilling musical voice.

And panting. Like a tired dog.

And snarling. Not a dog. Something larger.

And the hissing and spitting of fighting cats.

Although there was nothing especially menacing about the sounds themselves — except, perhaps, for the rattlesnake and the snarling — Bryce was chilled by them.

The animal noises ceased.

Bryce waited, listened, said, “Who is this?”

No answer.

“What do you want?”

Another sound came over the wire, and it pierced Bryce as if it were a dagger of ice. Screams. Men and women and children. More than a few of them. Dozens, scores. Not stage screams; not make-believe terror. They were the stark, shocking cries of the damned: of agony, fear and soul-scaring despair.

Bryce felt sick.

His heart raced.

It seemed to him that he had an open line to the bowels of Hell. Were these the cries of Snowfield's dead, captured on a recording tape? By whom? Why? Is it live or is it Memorex?

One final scream. A child. A little girl. She cried out in terror, then in pain, then in unimaginable suffering, as if she were being torn apart. Her voice rose, spiraled up and up.

Silence.

The silence was even worse than the screaming because the unnameable presence was still on the line, and Bryce could feel it more strongly now. He was stricken by an awareness of pure, unrelenting evil.

It was there.

He quickly put down the phone.

He was shaking. He had not been in any danger — yet he was shaking.

He looked around the bull pen. The others were still busy with the tasks he had assigned to them. Apparently, no one had noticed that his most recent session on the phone had been far different from those that had gone before it.

Sweat trickled down the back of his neck.

Eventually, he would have to tell the others what had happened. But not right now. Because right now he couldn't trust his voice. They would surely hear the nervous flutter, and they would know that this strange experience had badly shaken him.

Until reinforcements arrived, until their foothold in Snowfield was more firmly established, until they all felt less afraid, it wasn't wise to let the others see him shaking with dread. They looked to him for leadership, after all; he didn't intend to disappoint them.

He took a deep, cleansing breath.

He picked up the receiver and immediately got a dial tone.

Immensely relieved, he called the CBW Civilian Defense Unit in Dugway, Utah.

Lisa liked Gordy Brogan.

At first he had seemed menacing and sullen. He was such a big man, and his hands were so enormous they made you think of the Frankenstein monster. His face was rather handsome, actually, but when he frowned, even if he wasn't angry, even if he was just worrying about something or thinking especially hard, his brows knitted together in a fierce way, and his black-black eyes grew even blacker than usual, and he looked like doom itself.

A smile transformed him. It was the most astonishing thing. When Gordy smiled, you knew right away that you were seeing the real Gordy Brogan. You knew that the other Gordy — the one you thought you saw when he frowned or when his face was in repose — was purely a figment of your imagination. His warm, wide smile drew your attention to the kindness shining in his eyes, the gentleness in his broad brow.

When you got to know him, he was like a big puppy, eager to be liked. He was one of those rare adults who could talk to a kid without being self-conscious or condescending or patronizing. He was even better in that regard than Jenny. And even under the current circumstances, he could laugh.

As they put the food on the table — lunch meat, bread, cheese, fresh fruit, doughnuts — and brewed coffee, Lisa said, “You just don't seem like a cop to me.”

“Oh?” Gordy said, “What's a cop supposed to seem like?”

“Whoops. Did I say the wrong thing? Is 'cop' an offensive word?”

“In some quarters, it is. Like in prisons, for instance.”

She was amazed that she still could laugh after everything that had happened this evening. She said, “Seriously. What do officers of the law prefer to be called? Policemen?”

“It doesn't matter. I'm a deputy, policeman, cop — whatever you like. Except you think I don't really look the part.”

“Oh, you look the part all right,” Lisa said, “Especially when you scowl. But you don't seem like a cop.”

“What do I seem like to you?”

“Let me think.” She took an immediate interest in this game, for it diverted her mind from the nightmare around her. “Maybe you seem like… a young minister.”

“Me?”

“Well, in the pulpit, you'd be just fantastic delivering a fire and-brimstone sermon. And I can see you sitting in a parsonage, an encouraging smile on your face, listening to people's problems.”

“Me, a minister,” he said, clearly astonished, “With that imagination of yours, you should be a writer when you grow up.”

“I think I should be a doctor like Jenny. A doctor can do so much good.” She paused, “You know why you don't seem like a cop? It's because I can't picture you using that.” She pointed at his revolver, “I can't picture you shooting someone. Not even if he deserved it.”

She was startled by the expression that came over Gordy Brogan's face. He was visibly shocked.

Before she could ask what was wrong, the lights flickered. She looked up.

The lights flickered again. And again.

She glanced at the front windows. Outside, the streetlights were blinking, too.

No, she thought. No, please, God, not again. Don't throw us into darkness again; please, please!

The lights went out.

Chapter 15 The Thing at the Window

Bryce Hammond had spoken to the night-duty officer manning the emergency line at the CBW Civilian Defense Unit at Dugway, Utah. He hadn't needed to say much before he'd been patched through to General Galen Copperfield's home number. Copperfield had listened, but he hadn't said much. Bryce wanted to know whether it seemed at all likely that a chemical or biological agent had caused Snowfield's agony and obliteration. Copperfield said, “Yes.” But that was all he would say. He warned Bryce that they were speaking on an unsecured telephone line, and he made vague but stern references to classified information and security clearances. When he'd heard all of the essentials but only a few details, he cut Bryce off rather curtly and suggested they discuss the rest of it when they met face to face, “I've heard enough to be convinced that my organization should be involved.” He promised to send a field lab and a team of investigators into Snowfield by dawn or shortly thereafter.

Bryce was putting down the receiver when the lights flickered, dimmed, flickered, wavered — and went out.

He fumbled for the flashlight on the desk in front of him, found it, and switched it on.

Upon returning to the substation a while ago, they had located two additional, long-handled police flashlights. Gordy had taken one; Dr.

Paige had taken the other. Now, both of those lights flicked on simultaneously, carving long bright wounds in the darkness.

They had discussed a plan of action, a routine to follow if the lights went off again. Now, as planned, everyone moved to the center of the room, away from the doors and windows, and clustered together in a circle, facing outward, their backs turned to one another, reducing their vulnerability.

No one said much of anything. They were all listening intently.

Lisa Paige stood to the left of Bryce, her slender shoulders hunched, her head tucked down.

Tal Whitman stood at Bryce's right. His teeth were bared in a silent snarl as he studied the darkness beyond the sweeping scythe of the flashlight beam.

Tal and Bryce were holding revolvers.

The three of them faced the rear half of the room, while the other four — Dr. Paige, Gordy, Frank, and Stu — faced the front.

Bryce played the beam of his flashlight over everything, for even the shadowy outlines of the most mundane objects suddenly seemed threatening. But nothing hid or moved among the familiar pieces of furniture and equipment.

Silence.

Set in the back wall, toward the right-hand corner of the room, were two doors. One led to the corridor that served the three holding cells. They had searched that part of the building earlier; the cells, the interrogation room, and the two bathrooms that occupied that half of the ground floor were all deserted. The other door led to stairs that went up to the deputy's apartment; those rooms, too, were unoccupied. Nevertheless, Bryce repeatedly brought the beam of light back to the half-open doors; he was uneasy about them.

In the darkness, something thumped softly.

“What was that?” Wargle asked.

“It came from over this way,” Gordy said.

“No, from over this way,” Lisa Paige said.

“Quiet!” Bryce said sharply.

Thump… thump-thump.

It was the sound of a padded blow. Like a dropped pillow striking the floor.

Bryce swept his light rapidly back and forth.

Tal tracked the beam with his revolver.

Bryce thought: What do we do if the lights are out for the rest of the night? What do we do when the flashlight batteries finally go dead? What happens then?

He had not been afraid of darkness since he'd been a small child. Now he remembered what it was like.

Thump-thump… thuntp… thump-thump.

Louder. But not closer.

Thump!

“The windows!” Frank said.

Bryce swung around, probing with his flashlight.

Three bright beams found the front windows at the same time, transforming the mullioned squares of glass into mirrors that hid whatever lay beyond them.

“Turn your lights toward the floor or ceiling,” Bryce said.

One beam swung up, two down.

The backsplash of light revealed the windows, but it didn't turn them into reflective silver surfaces.

Thump!

Something struck a window, rattled a loose pane, and rebounded into the night. Bryce had an impression of wings.

“What was it?”

“—bird—”

“—not a bird of any kind I ever—”

“—something—”

“—awful—”

It returned, battering itself against the glass with greater determination than before: Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump!

Lisa screamed.

Frank Autry gasped, and Stu Wargle said, “Holy shit!”

Gordy made a strangled, wordless sound.

Staring at the window, Bryce felt as if he had lurched through the curtain of reality, into a place of nightmare and illusion.

With the streetlamps extinguished, Skyline Road was dark except for the luminous moonfall; however, the thing at the window was vaguely illuminated.

Even vague illumination of that fluttering monstrosity was too much. What Bryce saw on the other side of the glass what he thought he saw in the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of light, shadow, and shimmering moonlight — was something out of a fever dream. It had a three- or four-foot wingspan. An insectoid head. Short, quivering antennae. Small, pointed, and ceaselessly working mandibles. A segmented body. The body was suspended between the pale gray wings and was approximately the size and shape of two footballs placed end to end; it, too, was gray, the same shade as the wings — a moldy, sickly gray — and fuzzy and moist-looking. Bryce glimpsed eyes, as well: huge, ink-black, multifaceted, protuberant lenses that caught the light, refracting and reflecting it, gleaming darkly and hungrily.

If he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, the thing at the window was about as large as an eagle. Which was madness.

It bashed itself against the windows with new fury, in a frenzy now, its pale wings beating so fast that it became a blur. It moved along the dark panes, repeatedly rebounding into the night, then returning, trying feverishly to crash through the window. Thumpthunipthumpthump. But it didn't have the strength to smash its way inside. Furthermore, it didn't have a carapace; its body was entirely soft, and in spite of its incredible size and formidable appearance, it was incapable of cracking the glass.

Thumpthumpthump.

Then it was gone.

The lights came on.

It's like a damned stage play, Bryce thought.

When they realized that the thing at the window wasn't going to return, they all moved, by unspoken consent, to the front of the room. They went through the gate in the railing, into the public area, to the windows, gazing out in stunned silence.

Skyline Road was unchanged.

The night was empty.

Nothing moved.

Bryce sat down in the caging chair at Paul Henderson's desk. The others gathered around.

“So,” Bryce said.

“So,” Tal said.

They looked at one another. They fidgeted.

“Any ideas?” Bryce asked.

No one said anything.

“Any theories about what it might have been?”

“Gross,” Lisa said, and shuddered.

“It was that, all right,” Dr. Paige said, putting a comforting hand on her younger sister's shoulder.

Bryce was impressed with the doctor's emotional strength and resiliency. She seemed to be taking every shock that Snowfield threw at her. Indeed, she seemed to be holding up better than his own men. Hers were the only eyes that didn't slide away when he met them; she returned his stare forthrightly.

This, he thought, is a special woman.

“Impossible,” Frank Autry said, “That's what it was. Just plain impossible.”

“Hell, what's the matter with you people?” Wargle asked. He screwed up his meaty face. “It was only a bird. That's all it was out there. Just a goddamned bird.”

“Like hell it was,” Frank said.

“Just a lousy bird,” Wargle insisted. When the others disagreed, he said, “The bad light and all them shadows out there sort of give you a false impression. You didn't see what you all think you seen.”

“And what do you think we saw?” Tal asked him.

Wargle's face became flushed.

“Did we see the same thing you saw, the thing you don't want to believe?” Tal pressed, “A moth? Did you see one goddamned big, ugly impossible moth?”

Wargle looked down at his shoes, “I seen a bird. Just a bird.”

Bryce realized that Wargle was so utterly lacking in imagination that the man couldn't encompass the possibility of the impossible, not even when he had witnessed it with his own eyes.

“Where did it come from?” Bryce asked.

No one had any ideas.

“What did it want?” he asked.

“It wanted us,” Lisa said.

Everyone seemed to agree with that assessment.

“But the thing at the window wasn't what got Jake,” Frank said, “It was weak, lightweight. It couldn't carry off a grown man.”

“Then what got Jake?” Gordy asked

“Something bigger,” Frank said, “Something a whole lot stronger and meaner.”

Bryce decided that, after all, the time had come to tell them about the things he had heard — and sensed — on the telephone, between his calls to Governor Retlock and General Copperfield: the silent presence; the forlorn cries of sea gulls; the warning sound of a rattlesnake; worst of all, the agonizing and despairing screams of men, women, and children. He hadn't intended to mention any of that until morning, until the arrival of daylight and reinforcements. But they might spot something important that he had missed, some scrap, some clue that would be of help. Besides, now that they had all seen the thing at the window, the phone incident was, by comparison, no longer very shocking.

The others listened to Bryce, and this new information had a negative effect on their demeanor.

“What kind of degenerate would tape-record the screams of his victims?” Gordy asked.

Tal Whitman shook his head. “It could be something else. It could be that… “

“Yes?”

“Well, maybe none of you wants to hear this right now.”

“Since you've started it, finish it,” Bryce insisted.

“Well,” Tal said, “what if it wasn't a recording you heard? I mean, we know people have disappeared from Snowfield. In fact as far as we've seen, more have vanished than died. So… what if the missing are being held somewhere? As hostages? Maybe the screams were coming from people who were still alive, who were being tortured and maybe killed right then, right then while you were on the phone, listening.”

Remembering those terrible screams, Bryce felt his marrow slowly freezing.

“Whether it was tape-recorded or not,” Frank Autry said, “it's probably a mistake to think in terms of hostages.”

“Yes,” Dr. Paige said, “If Mr. Autry means that we've got to be careful not to narrow our thinking to conventional situations, then I wholeheartedly agree. This just doesn't feel like a hostage drama. Something damned peculiar is happening here, something that no one's ever encountered before, so let's not start backsliding just because we'd be more comfortable with cozy, familiar explanations. Besides, if we're dealing with terrorists, how does that fit with the thing we saw at the window? It doesn't.”

Bryce nodded. “You're right. But I don't believe Tal meant that people were being held for conventional motives.”

“No, no,” Tal said, “It doesn't have to be terrorists or kidnappers. Even if people are being held hostage, that doesn't necessarily mean other people are holding them. I'm even willing to consider that they're being held by something that isn't human. How's that for remaining open-minded? Maybe it is holding them, the it that none of us can define. Maybe it's holding them just to prolong the pleasure it takes from snuffing the life out of them. Maybe it's holding them just to tease us with their screams, the way it teased Bryce on the phone. Hell, if we're dealing with something truly extraordinary, truly unhuman, its reasons for holding hostages — if it is holding any — are bound to be incomprehensible.”

“Christ, you're talking like lunatics,” Wargle said.

Everyone ignored him.

They had stepped through the looking glass. The impossible was possible. The enemy was the unknown.

Lisa Paige cleared her throat. Her face was pasty. In a barely audible voice, she said, “Maybe it spun a web somewhere, down in a dark place, in a cellar or a cave, and maybe it tied all the missing people into its web, sealed them up in cocoons, alive. Maybe it's just saving them until it gets hungry again.”

If absolutely nothing lay beyond the realm of possibility, if even the most outrageous theories could be true, then perhaps the girl was right, Bryce thought. Perhaps there was an enormous web vibrating softly in some dark place, hung with a hundred or two hundred or even more man- and woman- and child-size tidbits, wrapped in individual packages for freshness and convenience. Somewhere in Snowfield, were there living human beings who had been reduced to the awful equivalent of foil-wrapped Pop Tarts, waiting only to provide nourishment for some brutal, unimaginably evil, darkly intelligent, other dimensional horror.

No. Ridiculous.

On the other hand: maybe.

Jesus.

Bryce crouched in front of the shortwave radio and squinted at its mangled guts. Circuit boards had been snapped. Several parts appeared to have been crushed in a vice or hammered flat.

Frank said, “They had to take off the cover plate to get at all this stuff, just the way we did.”

“So after they smashed the crap out of it,” Wargle said, “why'd they bother to put the plate back on?”

“And why go to all that trouble to begin with?” Frank wondered, “They could've put the radio out of commission just by ripping the cord loose.”

Lisa and Gordy appeared as Bryce was turning away from the radio. The girl said, “Food and coffee's ready if anyone wants anything.”

“I'm starved,” Wargle said, licking his lips.

“We should all eat something, even if we don't feel like it,” Bryce said.

“Sheriff,” Gordy said, “Lisa and I have been wondering about the animals, the pets. What made us think about it was when you said you heard dog and cat sounds over the phone. Sir, what's happened to all the pets?”

“Nobody's seen a dog or cat,” Lisa said, “Or heard barking.”

Thinking of the silent streets, Bryce frowned and said, “You're right. It's strange.”

“Jenny says there were some pretty big dogs in town. A few German shepherds. One Doberman that she knows of. Even a Great Dane. Wouldn't you think they'd have fought back? Wouldn't you think some of the dogs would've gotten away?” the girl asked.

“Okay,” Gordy said quickly, anticipating Bryce's response, “so maybe it was big enough to overwhelm an ordinary, angry dog. Okay, so we also know that bullets didn't stop it, which says that maybe — nothing can. It's apparently big, and it's strong. But, sir, big and strong don't necessarily count for much with a cat. Cats are greased lightning. It'd take something real damned sneaky to slip up on every cat in town.”

“Real sneaky and real fast,” Lisa said.

“Yeah,” Bryce said uneasily, “Real fast.”

Jenny had just begun eating a sandwich when Sheriff Hammond sat down in a chair beside the desk, balancing his plate on his lap. “Mind some company?”

“Not at all.”

“Tal Whitman's been telling me you're the scourge of our local motorcycle gang.”

She smiled. “Tal's exaggerating.”

“That man doesn't know how to exaggerate,” the sheriff said, “Let me tell you something about him. Sixteen months ago, I was away for three days at a law enforcement conference in Chicago, and when I got back, Tal was the first person I saw. I asked him if anything special had happened while I'd been gone, and he said it was just the usual business with drunk drivers, bar fights, a couple of burglaries, various CITs”

“What's a CIT?” Jenny asked.

“Oh, it's just a cat-in-tree report.”

“Policemen don't really rescue cats, do they?”

“Do you think we're heartless?” he asked, feigning shock.

“CITs? Come on now.”

He grinned. He had a marvelous grin. “Once every couple of months, we do have to get a cat out of a tree. But a CIT doesn't mean just cats in trees. It's our shorthand for any kind of nuisance call that takes us away from more important work.”

“Ah.”

“So anyway, when I came back from Chicago that time, Tal told me it'd been a pretty ordinary three days. And then, almost as an afterthought, he said there'd been an attempted robbery at a 7-Eleven. Tal had been a customer, out of uniform, when it went down. But even off duty, a cop's required to carry his gun, and Tal had a revolver in an ankle holster. He told me one of the punks had been armed; he said he'd been forced to kill him, and he said I wasn't to worry about whether it was a justified shooting or not. He said it was as justified as they come. When I got concerned about him, he said, “Bryce. It was really just a cakewalk.” Later, I found out the two punks had intended to shoot everyone. Instead, Tal shot the gunman although not before he was shot himself. The punk put a bullet through Tal's left arm, and just about a split second after that, Tal killed him. Tal's wound wasn't serious, but it bled like hell, and it must've hurt something awful. Of course, I hadn't seen the bandage because it was under the shirt-sleeve, and Tal hadn't bothered to mention it. So anyway, there's Tal in the 7-Eleven, bleeding all over the place, and he discovers he's out of ammo. The second punk, who grabbed the gun the first one dropped, is also out of ammo, and he decides to run. Tal goes after him, and they have themselves a knock-down-drag out fight from one end of that little grocery store to the other. The guy was two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than Tal, and he wasn't wounded. But you know what the backup officer told me they found when they arrived? They said Tal was sitting up on the counter by the cash register, his shirt off, sipping a complimentary cup of coffee, while the clerk tried to stanch the flow of blood. One suspect was dead. The other one was unconscious, sprawled in a sticky mess of Hostess Twinkles and Fudge Fantasies and coconut cupcakes. Seems they'd knocked over a rack of lunchbox cakes right in the middle of the fight. About a hundred packages of snack stuff spilled onto the floor, and Tal and this other guy stepped all over them while they were grappling. Most of the packages broke open. There was icing and crumbled cookies and smashed Twinkles all over one aisle. Staggered footprints were pressed right into the garbage, so that you could follow the progress of the battle just by looking at the sticky trail.”

The sheriff finished his story and looked at Jenny expectantly.

“Oh! Yes, he told you it'd been an easy arrest — just a cakewalk.”

“Yeah. A cakewalk.” The sheriff laughed.

Jenny glanced at Tal Whitman, who was across the room, eating a sandwich, talking to Officer Brogan and to Lisa.

“So you see,” the sheriff said, “when Tal tells me you're the scourge of the Demon Chrome, I know he's not exaggerating. Exaggeration just isn't his style.”

Jenny shook her head, impressed. “When I told Tal about my little encounter with this man he calls Gene Teer, he acted as if he thought it was one of the bravest things anyone had ever done. Compared to that 'cakewalk' of his, my story must've seemed like a dispute on a kindergarten playground.”

“No, no,” Hammond said, “Tal wasn't just humoring you. He really does think you did a damned brave thing. So do I. Jeeter's a snake, Dr. Paige. Poisonous variety.”

“You can call me Jenny if you like.”

“Well, Jenny-if-you-like, you can call me Bryce.”

He had the bluest eyes she had ever seen. His smile was defined as much by those luminous eyes as it was by the curve of his mouth.

As they ate, they talked about inconsequential things, as if this were an ordinary evening. He possessed an impressive ability to put people at ease regardless of the circumstances. He brought with him an aura of tranquillity. She was grateful for the calm interlude.

When they finished eating, however, he guided the conversation back to the crisis at hand. “You know Snowfield better than I do. We've got to find a suitable headquarters for this operation. This place is too small. Soon, I'll have ten more men here. And Copperfield's team in the morning.”

“How many is he bringing?”

“At least a dozen people. Maybe as many as twenty. I need an HQ from which every aspect of the operation can be coordinated. We might be here for days, so there'll have to be a room where off-duty people can sleep, and we'll need a cafeteria arrangement to feed everyone.”

“One of the inns might be just the place,” Jenny said.

“Maybe. But I don't want people sleeping two by two in a lot of different rooms. They'd be too vulnerable. We've got to set up a single dormitory.”

“Then the Hilltop Inn is your best bet. It's about a block from here, on the other side of the street.”

“Oh, yeah, of course. Biggest hotel in town, isn't it?”

“Yeah. The Hilltop has a large lobby because it doubles as the hotel bar.”

“I've had a drink there once or twice. If we change the lobby furniture, it could be set up as a work area to accommodate everyone.”

“There's also a large restaurant divided into two rooms. One part could be a cafeteria, and we could carry mattresses down from the rooms and use the other half of the restaurant as a dorm.”

Bryce said, “Let's have a look at it.”

He put his empty paper plate on the desk and got to his feet.

Jenny glanced at the front windows. She thought of the strange creature that had flown into the glass, and in her mind she heard the soft yet frenzied thunipthumpthumpthunip.

She said, “You mean… have a look at it now?”

“Why not?”

“Wouldn't it be wise to wait for the reinforcements?” she asked.

“They probably won't arrive for a while yet. There's no point in just sitting around, twiddling our thumbs. We'll all feel better if we're doing something constructive; it'll take our minds off… the worst things we've seen.”

Jenny couldn't free herself from the memory of those black insect eyes, so malevolent, so hungry. She stared at the windows, at the night beyond. The town no longer seemed familiar. It was utterly alien now, a hostile place in which she was an unwelcome stranger.

“We're not one bit safer in here than we would be out there,” Bryce said gently. Jenny nodded, remembering the Oxleys in their barricaded room. As she got up from the desk, she said, “There's no safety anywhere.”

Chapter 16 Out of the Dark

Bryce Hammond led the way out of the stationhouse. They crossed the moonlight-mottled cobblestones, stepped through a fall of amber light from a streetlamp, and headed into Skyline Road. Bryce carried a shotgun as did Tal Whitman.

The town was breathless. The trees stood unrespiring, and the buildings were like vapor-thin mirages hanging on walls of air.

Bryce moved out of the light, walked on moon-dappled pavement, crossing the street, finding shadows scattered in the middle of it. Always shadows.

The others came silently behind him.

Something crunched under Bryce's foot, startling him. It was a withered leaf.

He could see the Hilltop Inn farther up Skyline Road. It was a four-story, gray stone building almost a block away, and it was very dark. A few of the fourth-floor windows reflected the nearly full moon, but within the hotel not a single light burned.

They had all reached or passed the middle of the street when something came out of the dark. Bryce was aware, first, of a moon shadow that fluttered across the pavement, like a ripple passing through a pool of water. Instinctively, he ducked. He heard wings. He felt something brush lightly over his head.

Stu Wargle screamed.

Bryce shot up from his crouch and whirled around.

The moth.

It was fixed firmly to Wargle's face, holding on by some means not visible to Bryce. Wargle's entire head was hidden by the thing.

Wargle wasn't the only one screaming. The others cried out and fell back in surprise. The moth was squealing, too, making a high-pitched, keening sound.

In the moon's silvery beams, the impossible insect's huge pale velvety wings flapped and folded and spread with horrible grace and beauty, buffeting Wargle's head and shoulders.

Wargle staggered away, veering downhill, moving blindly, clawing at the outrageous thing that clung to his face. His screams quickly grew muffled; within a couple of seconds, they were silenced altogether.

Bryce, like the others, was paralyzed by disgust and disbelief.

Wargle began to run, but he only went a few yards before coming to an abrupt halt. His hands dropped away from the thing on his face. His knees were buckling.

Snapping out of his brief trance, Bryce dropped his useless shotgun and ran toward Stu.

Wargle didn't crumple to the ground, after all. Instead, his shaky knees locked, and he snapped erect. His shoulders jerked back. His body twitched and shuddered as if an electric current had flashed through him.

Bryce tried to grab the moth and tear it away from Wargle. But the deputy began to weave and thrash in a St. Virus dance of pain and suffocation, and Bryce's hands closed on empty air. Wargle moved erratically across the cement, jerked this way and that, heaved and writhed and spun, as if he were attached to strings that were being manipulated by a drunken puppeteer. His hands hung slackly at his sides, which made his frantic and spasmodic capering seem especially eerie. His hands flopped and floundered weakly, but they did not rise to tear at his assailant. It was almost as if, now, he were in the grip of ecstasy rather than the clutch of pain. Bryce followed him, tried to move in on him, but couldn't get close.

Then Wargle collapsed.

In that same instant, the moth rose and turned, suspended in the air, hovering on rapidly beating wings, night-black and hateful. It swooped at Bryce.

He stumbled backwards and threw his arms across his face. He fell.

The moth sailed over his head.

Bryce twisted around, looked up.

The kite-size insect glided soundlessly across the street, toward the buildings on the other side.

Tal Whitman raised his shotgun. The blast was like cannon fire in the silent town.

The moth pitched sideways in midair. It tumbled in a loop, dropped almost to the ground, then it swooped up again and flew on, disappearing over a rooftop.

Stu Wargle was sprawled on the pavement, flat on his back. Unmoving.

Bryce scrambled to his feet and went to Wargle. The deputy lay in the middle of the street, where there was just enough light to see that his face was gone. Jesus. Gone. As if it had been torn off. His hair and ragged ribbons of his scalp bristled over the white bone of his forehead. A skull peered up at Bryce.

Chapter 17 The Hour Before Midnight

Tal, Gordy, Frank, and Lisa sat in red leatherette armchairs in a corner of the lobby of the Hilltop Inn. The inn had been closed since the end of the past skiing season, and they had removed the dusty white drop cloths from the chairs before collapsing into them, numb with shock. The oval coffee table was still covered by a dropcloth; they stared at that shrouded object, unable to look at one another.

At the far end of the room, Bryce and Jenny were standing over the body of Stu Wargle, which lay on a long, low sideboard against the wall. No one in the armchairs could bring himself to look over that way.

Staring at the covered coffee table, Tal said, “I shot the damned thing. I hit it. I know I did.”

“We all saw it take the buckshot,” Frank agreed.

“So why wasn't it blown apart?” Tal demanded, “Hit dead on by a blast from a 20-gauge. It should've been torn to pieces, damn it.”

“Guns aren't going to save us,” Lisa said.

In a distant, haunted voice, Gordy said, “It could've been any of us. That thing could've gotten me. I was right behind Stu. If he had ducked or jumped out of the way…”

“No,” Lisa said, “No. It wanted Officer Wargle. Nobody else. Just Officer Wargle.”

Tal stared at the girl. “What do you mean?”

Her flesh had taken paleness from her bones. “Officer Wargle refused to admit he'd seen it when it was battering against the window. He insisted it was just a bird.”

“So?”

“So it wanted him. Him especially,” she said, “To teach him a lesson. But mostly to teach us a lesson.”

“It couldn't have heard what Stu said.”

“It did. It heard.”

“But it couldn't have understood.”

“It did.”

“I think you're crediting it with too much intelligence,” Tal said, “It was big, yes, and like nothing any of us has ever seen before. But it was still only an insect. A moth. Right?”

The girl said nothing.

“It's not omniscient,” Tal said, trying to convince himself more than anyone else. “It's not all-seeing, all-hearing, all knowing.”

The girl stared silently at the covered coffee table.

Suppressing nausea, Jenny examined Wargle's hideous wound. The lobby lights were not quite bright enough, so she used a flashlight to inspect the edges of the injury and to peer into the skull. The center of the dead man's demolished face was eaten away clear to the bone; all the skin, flesh, and cartilage were gone. Even the bone itself appeared to be partially dissolved in places, pitted, as if it had been splashed with acid. The eyes were gone. There was, however, normal flesh on all sides of the wound; smooth untouched flesh lay along both sides of the face, from the outer points of the jawbones to the cheekbones, and there was unmarked skin from the midpoint of the chin on down, and from the midpoint of the forehead on up. It was as if some torture artist had designed a frame of healthy skin to set off the gruesome exhibition of bone on display in the center of the face.

Having seen enough, Jenny switched off the flashlight. Earlier, they had covered the body with a dropcloth from one of the chairs. Now Jenny drew the sheet over the dead man's face, relieved to be covering that skeletal grin.

“Well?” Bryce asked.

“No teeth marks,” she said.

“Would a thing like that have teeth?”

“I know it had a mouth, a small chitinous beak. I saw its mandibles working when it bashed itself against the substation windows.”

“Yeah. I saw them, too.”

“A mouth like that would mark the flesh. There'd be slashes. Bite marks. Indications of chewing and tearing.”

“But there were none?”

“No. The flesh doesn't look as if it was ripped off. It seems to've been… dissolved. Along the edges of the wound, the remaining flesh is even sort of cauterized, as if it has been scared by something.”

“You think that… that insect… secreted an acid?”

She nodded.

“And dissolved Stu Wargle's face?”

“And sucked up the liquefied flesh,” she said.

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Yes.”

Bryce was as pale as an untinted deathmask, and his freckles seemed, by contrast, to burn and shimmer on his face. “That explains how it could've done so much damage in only a few seconds.”

Jenny tried not to think of the bony face peering out of the flesh — like a monstrous visage that had removed a mask of normality.

“I think the blood is gone,” she said, “All of it.”

“What?”

“Was the body lying in a pool of blood?”

“No.”

“There's no blood on the uniform, either.”

“I noticed that.”

“There should be blood. He should've spouted like a fountain. The eye sockets should be pooled with it. But there's not a drop.”

Bryce wiped one hand across his face. He wiped so hard, in fact, that some color rose in his cheeks.

“Take a look at his neck,” she said. “The jugular.”

He didn't move toward the corpse.

She said, “And look at the insides of his arms and the backs of his hands. There's no blueness of veins anywhere, no tracery.”

“Collapsed blood vessels?”

“Yeah. I think all the blood is drained out of him.”

Bryce took a deep breath. He said, “I killed him. I'm responsible. We should have waited for reinforcements before leaving the substation — just like you said.”

“No, no. You were right. It was no safer there than in the street.”

“But he died in the sum.”

“Reinforcements wouldn't have made a bit of difference. The way that damned thing dropped out of the sky… hell, not even an army could've stopped it. Too quick. Too surprising.”

Bleakness had taken up tenancy in his eyes. He felt his responsibility far too keenly. He was going to insist on blaming himself for his officer's death. Reluctantly, she said, “There's worse.”

“Couldn’t be”

“His brain…”

Bryce waited. Then he said, “What? What about his brain?”

“Gone.”

“Gone?”

“His cranium is empty. Utterly empty.”

“How can you possibly know that without opening-”

She held out the flashlight, interrupting him: “Take this and shine it into the eye sockets.”

He made no move to act upon her suggestion. His eyes were not hooded now. They were wide, startled.

She noticed that she couldn't hold the flashlight steady. Her hand was shaking violently.

He noticed, too. He took the flash away from her and put it down on the sideboard, next to the shrouded corpse. He took both of her hands and held them in his own large, leathery, cupped hands; he warmed them.

She said, “There's nothing beyond the eye sockets, nothing at all, nothing, nothing whatsoever, except the back of his skull.”

Bryce rubbed her hands soothingly.

“Just a damp, reamed-out cavity,” she said. As she spoke, her voice rose and cracked: “It ate through his face, right through his eyes, probably about as fast as he could blink, for God's sake, ate into his mouth and took his tongue out by the roots, stripped the gums away from his teeth, then ate up through the roof of his mouth, Jesus, just consumed his brain, consumed all of the blood in his body, too, probably just sucked it up and out of him and”

“Easy, easy,” Bryce said.

But the words rattle-clanked out of her as if they were links in a chain that bound her to an albatross: “—consumed all of that in no more than ten or twelve seconds, which is impossible, damn it to hell, plain impossible! It devoured — do you understand? — devoured pounds and pounds and pounds of tissue — the brain alone weighs six or seven pounds — devoured all of that in ten or twelve seconds!”

She stood gasping, hands trapped in his.

He led her to a sofa that lay under a dusty white drape. They sat side by side.

Across the room, none of the others was looking this way.

Jenny was glad for that. She didn't want Lisa to see her in this condition.

Bryce put a hand on her shoulder. He spoke to her in a low, reassuring voice.

She gradually grew calmer. Not less disturbed. Not less afraid. Just calmer.

“Better?” Bryce asked.

“As my sister says — I guess I flaked out on you, huh?”

“Not at all. Are you kidding or what? I couldn't even take the flashlight from you and look in those eyes like you wanted me to. You're the one who had the nerve to examine him.”

“Well, thanks for getting me back together. You sure know how to knit up raveled nerves.”

“Me? I didn't do anything.”

“You sure have a comforting way of doing nothing.”

They sat in silence, thinking of things they didn't want to think about.

Then he said, “That moth…”

She waited.

He said, “Where'd it come from?”

“Hell?”

“Any other suggestions?”

Jenny shrugged. “Mesozoic era?” she said half-jokingly.

“When was that?”

“The age of dinosaurs.”

His blue eyes flickered with interest. “Did moths like that exist back then?”

“I don't know,” she admitted.

“I can sort of picture it soaring around prehistoric swamps.”

“Yeah. Preying on small animals, bothering a Tyrannosaurus rex about the same way our own tiny summer moths bother us.”

“But if it's from the Mesozoic, where's it been hiding for the last hundred million years?” he asked.

More seconds, ticking.

“Could it be… something from a genetic engineering lab?” she wondered. “An experiment in recombinant DNA?”

“Have they gone that far? Can they produce whole new species? I only know what I read in the papers, but I thought they were years away from that sort of thing. They're still working with bacteria.”

“You're probably right,” she said, “But still…”

“Yeah. Nothing's impossible because the moth is here.”

After another silence, she said, “And what else is crawling or flying around out there?”

“You're thinking about what happened to Jake Johnson?”

“Yeah. What took him? Not the moth. Even as deadly as it is, it couldn't kill him silently, and it couldn't carry him away.” She sighed, “You know, at first I wouldn't try to leave town because I was afraid we'd spread an epidemic. Now I wouldn't try to leave because I know we wouldn't make it out alive. We'd be stopped.”

“No, no. I'm sure we could get you out,” Bryce said, “If we can prove there's no disease-related aspect to this, if General Copperfield's people can rule that out, then, of course, you and Lisa will be taken to safety right away.”

She shook her head. “No. There's something out there, Bryce, something more cunning and a whole lot more formidable than the moth, and it doesn't want us to leave. It wants to play with us before it kills us. It won't let any of us go, so we'd damned well better find it and figure out how to deal with it before it gets tired of the game.”

In both rooms of the Hilltop Inn's large restaurant, chairs were stacked upside-down atop the tables, all covered with green plastic dropcloths. In the first room, Bryce and the others removed the plastic sheeting, took the chairs off the tables, and began to prepare the place to serve as a cafeteria.

In the second room, the furniture had to be moved out to make way for the mattresses that would later be brought down from upstairs. They had only just begun emptying that part of the restaurant when they heard the faint but unmistakable sound of automobile engines.

Bryce went to the French windows. He looked left, down the hill, toward the foot of Skyline Road. Three county squad cars were coming up the street, red beacons flashing.

“They're here,” Bryce told the others.

He had been thinking of the reinforcements as a reassuringly formidable replenishment of their own decimated contingent. Now he realized that ten more men were hardly better than one more.

Jenny Paige had been right when she'd said that Stu Wargle's life probably wouldn't have been saved by waiting for reinforcements before leaving the substation.

All the lights in the Hilltop Inn and all the lights along the main street flickered. Dimmed. Went out. But they came back on after only a second of darkness.

It was 11:15, Sunday night, counting down toward the witching hour.

Chapter 18 London, England

When midnight came to California, it was eight o'clock Monday morning in London.

The day was dreary. Gray clouds melted across the city. A steady, dismal drizzle had been falling since before dawn. The drowned trees hung limply, and the streets glistened darkly, and everyone on the sidewalks seemed to have black umbrellas.

At the Churchill Hotel in Portman Square, rain beat against the windows and streamed down the glass, distorting the view from the dining room. Occasionally, brilliant flashes of lightning, passing through the water-beaded windowpanes, briefly cast shadowy images of raindrops onto the clean white tablecloths.

Burt Sandier, in London on business from New York, sat at one of the window tables, wondering how in God's name he was going to justify the size of this breakfast bill on his expense account. His guest had begun by ordering a bottle of good champagne: Mumm's Extra Dry, which didn't come cheap. With the champagne, his guest wanted caviar — champagne and caviar for breakfast! — and two kinds of fresh fruit. And the old fellow clearly was not finished ordering.

Across the table, Dr. Timothy Flyte, the object of Sandler's amazement, studied the menu with childlike delight. To the waiter, he said, “And I should like an order of your croissants.”

“Yes, sir,” the waiter said.

“Are they very flaky?”

“Yes, sir. Very.”

“Oh, good. And eggs,” Flyte said, “Two lovely eggs, of course, rather soft, with buttered toast.”

“Toast?” the waiter asked, “Is that in addition to the two croissants, sir?”

“Yes, yes,” Flyte said, fingering the slightly frayed collar of his white shirt. “And a rasher of bacon with the eggs.”

The waiter blinked. “Yes, sir.”

At last Flyte looked up at Burt Sandler. “What's breakfast without bacon? Am I right?”

“I'm an eggs-and-bacon man myself,” Burt Sandler agreed, forcing a smile.

“Wise of you,” Flyte said sagely. His wire-rimmed spectacles had slipped down his nose and were now perched on the round, red tip of it. With a long, thin finger, he pushed them back into place.

Sandler noticed that the bridge of the eyeglasses had been broken and soldered. The repair job was so distinctly amateurish that he suspected Flyte had soldered the frames himself, to save money.

“Do you have good pork sausages?” Flyte asked the waiter. “Be truthful with me. I'll send them back straightaway if they aren't of the highest quality.”

“We've quite good sausages,” the waiter assured him, “I'm partial to them myself.”

“Sausages, then.”

“Is that in place of the bacon, sir?”

“No, no, no. In addition,” Flyte said, as if the waiter's question was not only curious but a sign of thick-headedness.

Flyte was fifty-eight but looked at least a decade older. His bristly white hair curled thinly across the top of his head and thrust out around his large ears as if crackling with static electricity. His neck was scrawny and wrinkled; his shoulders were slight; his body favored bone and cartilage over flesh. There was some legitimate doubt whether he could actually eat all that he had ordered.

“Potatoes,” Flyte said.

“Very well, sir,” the waiter said, scribbling it down on his order pad, on which he had very nearly run out of room to write.

“Do you have suitable pastries?” Flyte inquired.

The waiter, a model of deportment under the circumstances, having made not the slightest allusion to Flyte's amazing gluttony, looked at Burt Sandier as if to say: Is your grandfather hopelessly senile, sir, or is he, at his age, a marathon runner who needs the calories?

Sandier merely smiled.

To Flyte, the waiter said, “Yes, sir, we have several pastries. There's a delicious”

“Bring an assortment,” Flyte said, “At the end of the meal, Of course.”

“Leave it to me, sir.”

“Good. Very good. Excellent!” Flyte said, beaming. Finally, with a trace of reluctance, he relinquished his menu.

Sandier almost sighed with relief. He asked for orange juice, eggs, bacon, and toast, while Professor Flyte adjusted the day old carnation pinned to the lapel of his somewhat shiny blue suit.

As Sandler finished ordering, Flyte leaned toward him conspiratorially, “Will you be having some of the champagne, Mr. Sandler?”

“I believe I might have a glass or two,” Sandler said, hoping the bubbly would liberate his mind and help him formulate a believable explanation for this extravagance, a likely tale that would convince even the parsimonious clerks in accounting who would be poring over this bill with an electron microscope.

Flyte looked at the waiter. “Then perhaps you'd better bring two bottles.”

Sandler, who was sipping ice-water, nearly choked.

The waiter left, and Flyte looked out from the rain-streaked window beside their table. “Nasty weather. Is it like this in New York in autumn?”

“We have our share of rainy days. But autumn can be beautiful in New York.”

“Here, too,” Flyte said, “Though I rather imagine we have more days like this than you. London's reputation for soggy weather isn't entirely undeserved.”

The professor insisted on small talk until the champagne and caviar were served, as if he feared that, once business had been discussed, Sandier would quickly cancel the rest of the breakfast order.

He's a character out of Dickens, Sandier thought.

As soon as they had proposed a toast, wishing each other good fortune, and had sipped the Mumm's, Flyte said, “So you've come all the way from New York to see me, have you?” His eyes were merry.

“To see a number of writers, actually,” Sandler said, “I make the trip once a year. I scout out books in progress. British authors are popular in the States, especially thriller writers.”

“MacLean, Follett, Forsythe, Bagley, that crowd?”

“Yes, very popular, some of them.”

The caviar was superb. At the professor's urging, Sandier tried some of it with chopped onions. Flyte piled gobs on small wedges of dry toast and ate it without benefit of condiments.

“But I'm not only scouting for thrillers,” Sandier said, “I'm after a variety of books. Unknown authors, too. And I suggest projects on occasion, when I have a subject for a particular author.”

“Apparently, you have something in mind for me.”

“First, let me say I read The Ancient Enemy when it was first published, and I found it fascinating.”

“A number of people found it fascinating,” Flyte said, “But most found it infuriating.”

“I hear the book created problems for you.”

“Virtually nothing but problems.”

“Such as?”

“I lost my university position fifteen years ago, at the age of forty-three, when most academics are achieving job security.”

“You lost your position because of The Ancient Enemy?”

“They didn't put it quite that bluntly,” Flyte said, popping a morsel of caviar into his mouth. “That would have made them seem too close minded. The administrators of my college, the head of my department, and most of my distinguished colleagues chose to attack indirectly. My dear Mr. Sandler, the competition among power-mad politicians and the Machiavellian backstabbing of junior executives in a major corporation are as nothing, in terms of ruthlessness and spitefulness, when compared to the behavior of academic types who suddenly see an opportunity to climb the university ladder at the expense of one of their own. They spread rumors without foundation, scandalous tripe about my sexual preferences, suggestions of intimate fraternization with my female students. And with my male students, for that matter. None of those slanders was openly discussed in a forum where I could refute them. Just rumors. Whispered behind the back. Poisonous. More openly, they made polite suggestions of incompetence, overwork, mental fatigue. I was eased out, you see; that's how they thought of it, though there was nothing easy about it from my point of view. Eighteen months after the publication of The Ancient Enemy, I was gone. And no other university would have me, ostensibly because of my unsavory reputation. The true reason, of course, was that my theories were too bizarre for academic tastes. I stood accused of attempting to make a fortune by pandering to the common man's taste for pseudoscience and sensationalism, of selling my credibility.”

Flyte paused to take some champagne, savoring it.

Sandier was genuinely appalled by what Flyte had told him. “But that's outrageous! Your book was a scholarly treatise. It was never aimed at the best-seller lists. The common man would've had enormous difficulty wading through The Ancient Enemy. Making a fortune from that kind of work is virtually impossible.”

“A fact to which my royalty statements can attest,” Flyte said. He finished the last of the caviar.

“You were a respected archaeologist,” Sandler said.

“Oh, well, never really all that respected,” Flyte said self-deprecatingly. “Though I was certainly never an embarrassment to my profession, as was so often suggested later on. If my colleagues' conduct seems incredible to you, Mr. Sandler, that's because you don't understand the nature of the animal. I mean, the scientist animal. Scientists are educated to believe that all new knowledge comes in tiny increments, grains of sand piled one on another. Indeed, that is how most knowledge is gained. Therefore, they are never prepared for those visionaries who arrive at new insights which, overnight, utterly transform an entire field of inquiry. Copernicus was ridiculed by his contemporaries for believing that the planets revolved around the sun. Of course, Copernicus was proved right. There are countless examples in the history of science.” Flyte blushed and drank some more champagne. “Not that I compare myself to Copernicus or any of those other great men. I'm simply trying to explain why my colleagues were conditioned to turn against me. I should have seen it coming.”

The waiter came to take away the caviar dish. He also served Sandler's orange juice and Flyte's fresh fruit.

When he was alone with Flyte again, Sandler said, “Do you still believe your theory had validity?”

“Absolutely!” Flyte said, “I am right; or at least there's an awfully good chance I am. History is filled with mysterious mass disappearances for which historians and archaeologists can provide no viable explanation.”

The professor's dreaming eyes became sharp and probing beneath his bushy white eyebrows. He leaned over the table, fixing Burt Sandier with a hypnotic stare.

“On December 10, 1939,” Flyte said, “outside the hills of Nanking, an army of three thousand Chinese soldiers, on its way to the front lines to fight the Japanese, simply vanished without a trace before it got anywhere near the battle. Not a single body was ever found. Not one grave. Not one witness. The Japanese military historians have never found any record of having dealt with that particular Chinese force. In the countryside through which the missing soldiers passed, no peasants heard gunfire or other indications of conflict. An army evaporated into thin air. And in 1711, during the Spanish War of Succession, four thousand troops set out on an expedition into the Pyreness. Every last man disappeared on familiar and friendly ground, before the first night's camp was established!”

Flyte was still as gripped by his subject as he had been when he had written the book, seventeen years ago. His fruit and champagne were forgotten. He stared at Sandler as if daring him to challenge the infamous Flyte theories.

“On a grander scale,” the professor continued, “consider the great Mayan cities of Copin, Piedras Negras, Palenque, Mencht, Seibal, and several others which were abandoned overnight. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Mayans left their homes, approximately in A D. 610, perhaps within a single week, even within one day. Some appear to have fled northward, to establish new cities, but there is evidence that countless thousands just disappeared. All within a shockingly brief span of time. They didn't bother to take many of their pots, tools, cooking utensils… My learned colleagues say the land around those Mayan cities became infertile, thus making it essential that the people move north, where the land would be more productive. But if this great exodus was planned, why were belongings left behind? Why was precious seed corn left behind? Why didn't a single survivor ever return to loot those cities of their abandoned treasures?” Flyte softly struck the table with one fist. “It's irrational! Emigrants don't set out on long, arduous journeys without preparation, without taking every tool that might assist them. Besides, in some of the homes in Piedras Negras and Seibal, there is evidence that families departed after preparing elaborate dinners—but before eating them. This would surely seem to indicate that their leaving was sudden. No current theories adequately answer these questions — except mine, bizarre as it is, odd as it is, impossible as it is.”

“Frightening as it is,” Sandler added.

“Exactly,” Flyte said.

The professor sank back in his chair, breathless. He noticed his champagne glass, seized it, emptied it, and licked his lips.

The waiter appeared and refilled their glasses.

Flyte quickly consumed his fruit, as if afraid the waiter might spirit it away while the hothouse strawberries remained untouched.

Sandler felt sorry for the old bird. Evidently, it had been quite some time since the professor had been treated to an expensive meal served in an elegant atmosphere.

“I was accused of trying to explain every mysterious disappearance from the Mayans to Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart, all with a single theory. That was most unfair. I never mentioned the judge or the luckless aviatrix. I am interested only in unexplained mass disappearances of both humankind and animals, of which there have been literally hundreds throughout history.”

The waiter brought croissants.

Outside, lightning stepped quickly down the somber sky and put its spiked foot to the earth in another part of the city; its blazing descent was accompanied by a terrible crash and roar that echoed across the entire firmament.

Sandier said, “If subsequent to the publication of your book, there had been a new, startling mass disappearance, it would have lent considerable credibility-”

“Ah,” Flyte interrupted, tapping the table emphatically with one stiff finger, “but there have been such disappearances!”

“But surely they would have been splashed all over the front page—”

“I am aware of two instances. There may be others,” Flyte insisted, “One of them involved the disappearance of masses of lower lifeforms — specifically, fish. It was remarked on in the press, but not with any great interest. Politics, murder, sex, and two-headed goats are the only things newspapers care to report about. You have to read scientific journals to know what's really happening. That's how I know that, eight years ago, marine biologists noted a dramatic decrease in fish population in one region of the Pacific. Indeed, the numbers of some species had been cut in half. Within certain scientific circles, there was panic at first, some fear that ocean temperatures might be undergoing a sudden change that would depopulate the seas of all but the hardiest species. But that proved not to be the case. Gradually, sea life in that area — which covered hundreds of square miles — replenished itself. In the end no one could explain what had happened to the millions upon millions of creatures that had vanished.”

“Pollution,” Sandler suggested, between alternating sips of orange juice and champagne.

Dabbing marmalade on a piece of croissant, Flyte said, “No, no, no. No, sir. It would have required the most massive case of water pollution in history to cause such a devastating depopulation over that wide an area. An accident on that scale could not go unnoticed. But there were no accidents, no oil spills — nothing. Indeed, a mere oil spill could not have accounted for it; the affected region and the volume of water was too vast for that. And dead fish did not wash up on the beaches. They merely vanished without a trace.”

Burt Sandler was excited. He could smell money. He had hunches about some books, and none of his hunches had ever been wrong. (Well, except for that diet book by the movie star who, a week before publication day, died of malnutrition after subsisting for six months on little more than grapefruit, papaya, raisin toast, and carrots.) There was a surefire best-seller in this: two or three hundred thousand copies in hardcover, perhaps even more; two million in paperback. If he could persuade Flyte to popularize and update the dry academic material in The Ancient Enemy, the professor would be able to afford his own champagne for many years to come.

“You said you were aware of two mass disappearances since the publication of your book,” Sandier said, encouraging him to continue.

“The other was in Africa in 1980. Between three and four thousand primitive tribes — men, women, and children — vanished from a relatively remote area of central Africa. Their villages were found empty; they had abandoned all their possessions, including large stores of food. They seemed to have just run off into the bush. The only signs of violence were a few broken pieces of pottery. Of course, mass disappearances in that part of the world are dismayingly more frequent than they once were, primarily due to political violence. Cuban mercenaries, operating with Soviet weaponry, have been assisting in the liquidation of whole tribes that are unwilling to put their ethnic identities second to the revolutionary purpose. But when entire villages are slaughtered for political purposes, they are always looted, then burned, and the bodies are always interred in mass graves. There was no looting in this instance, no burning, no bodies to be found. So ten weeks later, game wardens in that district reported an inexplicable decrease in the wildlife population. No one connected it to the missing villagers; it was reported as a separate phenomenon.”

“But you know differently.”

“Well, I suspect differently,” Flyte said, putting strawberry jam on a last bit of croissant.

“Most of these disappearances seem to occur in remote areas,” Sandler said. “Which makes verification difficult.”

“Yes. That was thrown in my face as well. Actually, most incidents probably occur at sea, for the sea covers the largest part of the earth. The sea can be as remote as the moon, and much of what takes place beneath the waves is beyond our notice. Yet don't forget the two stories I mentioned — the Chinese and Spanish. Those disappearances took place within the context of modern civilization. And if tens of thousands of Mayans fell victim to the ancient enemy whose existence I've theorized, then that was a case in which entire cities, hearts of civilization, were attacked with frightening boldness.”

“You think it could happen now, today”

“No question about it!”

“—in a place like New York or even here in London?”

“Certainly! It could happen virtually anywhere that has the geological underpinnings I outlined in my book.”

They both sipped champagne, thinking.

The rain hammered on the windows with greater fury than before.

Sandier was not certain he believed in the theories Flyte had propounded in The Ancient Enemy. He knew they could form the basis for a wildly successful book written in a popular vein, but that didn't mean he had to believe in them. He didn't really want to believe. Believing was like opening the door to Hell.

He looked at Flyte, who was straightening his wilted carnation again, and he said, “It gives me the chills.”

“It should,” Flyte said, nodding, “It should.”

The waiter came with the eggs, bacon, sausages, and toast.

Chapter 19 The Dead of Night

The inn was a fortress. Bryce was satisfied with the preparations that had been made.

At last, after two hours of arduous labor, he sat down at a table in the cafeteria, sipping decaffeinated coffee from a white ceramic mug on which was enblazoned the blue crest of the hotel.

By one-thirty in the morning, with the help of the ten deputies who had arrived from Santa Mira, much had been accomplished. One of the, two rooms had been converted into a dormitory; twenty mattresses were lined up on the floor, enough to accommodate any single shift of the investigative team, even after General Copperfield's people arrived. In the other half of the restaurant, a couple of buffet tables had been set up at one end, where a cafeteria line could be formed at mealtimes. The kitchen had been cleaned and put in order. The large lobby had been converted into an enormous operations center, with desks, makeshift desks, typewriters, filing cabinets, bulletin boards, and a big map of Snowfield.

Furthermore, the inn had been given a thorough security inspection, and steps had been taken to prevent a break-in by the enemy. The two rear entrances — one through the kitchen, one through the lobby — were locked, and additionally secured with slanted two-by-fours, which were wedged under the crashbars and nailed to the frames; Bryce had ordered that extra precaution to avoid wasting guards at those entrances. The door to the emergency stairs was similarly sealed off—, nothing could enter the higher floors of the hotel and come down upon them by surprise. Now, only a pair of small elevators connected the lobby level to the three upper floors, and two guards were stationed there. Another guard stood at the front entrance. A detail of four men had ascertained that all upstairs rooms were empty. Another detail had determined that all of the ground floor windows were locked; most of them were painted shut, as well. Nevertheless, the windows were points of weakness in their fortifications.

At least, Bryce thought, if anything tries to get inside the window, we'll have the sound of breaking glass to warn us.

A host of other details had been attended to. Stu Wargle's mutilated corpse had been temporarily stored in a utility room that adjoined the lobby. Bryce had drawn up a duty roster, and had structured twelve-hour work shifts for the next three days, should the crisis last that long. Finally, he couldn't think of anything more that could be done until first light.

Now he sat alone at one of the round tables in the dining room, sipping Sanka, trying to make sense of the night's events. His mind kept circling back to one unwanted thought:

His brain was gone. His blood was sucked out of him every damned drop.

He shook off the sickening image of Wargle's mined face, got up, went for more coffee, then returned to the table.

The inn was very quiet.

At another table, three of the night shift men — Miguel Hernandez, Sam Potter, and Henry Wong — were playing cards, but they weren't talking much. When they did speak, it was almost in whispers.

The inn was very quiet.

The inn was a fortress.

The inn was a fortress, damn it.

But was it safe?

Lisa chose a mattress in a corner of the dormitory, where her back would be up against a blank wall.

Jenny unfolded one of the two blankets stacked at the foot of the mattress, and draped it over the girl.

“Want the other one?”

“No,” Lisa said, “This'll be enough. It feels funny, though, going to bed with all my clothes on.”

“Things'll get back to normal pretty soon,” she said, but even as she spoke she realized how stupid that statement was.

“Are you going to sleep now?”

“Not quite yet.”

“I wish you would,” Lisa said, “I wish you'd lay down right there on the next mattress.”

“You're not alone, honey.” Jenny smoothed the girl's hair.

A few deputies — including Tal Whitman, Gordy Brogan, and Frank Autrey — had bedded down on other mattresses. There were also three heavily armed guards who would watch over everyone throughout the night.

“Will they turn the lights down any farther?” Lisa asked.

“No. We can't risk darkness.”

“Good. They're dim enough. Will you stay with me until I fall asleep?” Lisa asked, seeming much younger than fourteen.

“Sure.”

“And talk to me.”

“Sure. But we'll talk softly, so we don't disturb anyone.”

Jenny lay down beside her sister, her head propped up on one hand. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I don't care. Anything. Anything except… tonight.”

“Well, there is something I want to ask you,” Jenny said.

“It's not about tonight, but it's about something you said tonight. Remember when we were sitting on the bench in front of the jail, waiting for the sheriff? Remember how we were talking about Mom, and you said Mom used to… used to brag about me?”

Lisa smiled. “Her daughter, the doctor. Oh, she was so proud of you, Jenny.”

As it had done before, that statement unsettled Jenny.

“And Mom never blamed me for Dad's stroke?” she asked.

Lisa frowned. “Why would she blame you?”

“Well… because I guess I caused him some heartache there for a while. Heartache and a lot of worry.”

“You?” Lisa asked, astonished.

“And when Dad's doctor couldn't control his high blood pressure and then he had a stroke-”

“According to Mom, the only thing you ever did bad in your entire life was when you decided to give the calico cat a black dye job for Halloween and you got Clairol all over the sun porch furniture.”

Jenny laughed with surprise. “I'd forgotten that. I was only eight years old.”

They smiled at each other, and in that moment they felt more than ever like sisters.

Then Lisa said, “Why'd you think Mom blamed you for Daddy's dying? It was natural causes, wasn't it? A stroke. How could it possibly have been your fault?”

Jenny hesitated, thinking back thirteen years to the start of it. That her mother had never blamed her for her father's death was a profoundly liberating realization. She felt free for the first time since she'd been nineteen.

“Jenny?”

“Mmmm?”

“Are you crying?”

“No, I'm okay,” she said, fighting back tears, “If Mom didn't hold it against me, I guess I've been wrong to hold it against myself I'm just happy, honey. Happy about what you've told me.”

“But what was it you thought you did? If we're going to be good sisters, we shouldn't keep secrets. Tell me, Jenny.”

“It's a long story, Sis. I'll tell you about it eventually, but not now. Now I want to hear all about you.”

They talked about trivialities for a few minutes, and Lisa's eyes grew steadily heavier.

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. when that gruesomeness, 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 anticipation 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 bloody 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 friendship 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?”

“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 your 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 damned kitchen and even ate a few bloody 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 passionate 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 passing. 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 damned 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 Restaurant in Santa Mira. Minestrone. Scampi in garlic butter. Some good veal or maybe a steak. A side dish of pasta. They make a wonderful vermicelli all 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 bumblebees. 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 spaced notes of the failing 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, muffled but violent sound. A hard, sharp bone crack.

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 appetite.

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. “God made you healthy, Talbert, and he gave you a good brain. Now if you mess up, it's nobody'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.

But this boogeyman was real.

Half a year from his thirty-first birthday, Tal Whitman was discovering that he could still be afraid, regardless of how strenuously he denied it. His fearlessness had brought him a long way in life. But, in opposition to all that he had believed before, he realized that there were also times when being afraid was merely being smart.

Shortly before dawn, Lisa woke from a nightmare she couldn't recall.

She looked at Jenny and the others who were sleeping, then turned toward the windows. Outside, Skyline Road was deceptively peaceful as the end of night drew near.

Lisa had to pee, She got up and walked quietly between two rows of mattresses. At the archway, she smiled at the guard, and he winked.

One man was in the dining room. He was paging through a magazine.

In the lobby, two guards were stationed by the elevator doors. The two polished oak front doors of the inn, each with an oval of beveled glass in the center of it, were locked, but a third guard was positioned by that entrance. He was holding a shotgun and staring out through one of the ovals, watching the main approach to the building.

A fourth man was in the lobby. Lisa had met him earlier bald, florid-faced deputy named Fred Turner. He was sitting at the largest desk, monitoring the telephone. It must have rung frequently during the night, for a couple of legal-size sheets of paper were filled with messages. As Lisa passed by, the phone rang again. Fred raised one hand in greeting, then snatched up the receiver.

Lisa went directly to the restrooms, which were tucked into one corner of the lobby:

SNOW BUNNIES SNOW BUCKS

That cuteness was out of sync with the rest of the Hilltop Inn.

She pushed through the door marked SNOW BUNNIES. The restrooms had been judged safe territory because they had no windows and could be entered only through the lobby, where there were always guards. The women's room was large and clean, with four stalls and sinks. The floor and walls were covered with white ceramic tile bordered by dark blue tile around the edge of the floor and around the top of the walls.

Lisa used the first stall and then the nearest sink. As she finished washing her hands and looked up at the mirror above the sink, she saw him. Him. The dead deputy. Wargle.

He was standing behind her, eight or ten feet away, in the middle of the room. Grinning.

She swung around, sure that somehow it was a flaw in the minor, a trick of the looking glass. Surely he wasn't really there.

But he was there. Naked. Grinning obscenely.

His face had been restored: the heavy jowls, the thick-lipped and greasy-looking mouth, the piggish nose, the little quick eyes. The flesh was magically whole again.

Impossible.

Before Lisa could react, Wargle stepped between her and the door. His bare feet made a flat, slapping sound against the tile floor.

Someone was pounding on the door.

Wargle seemed not to hear it.

Pounding and pounding and pounding…

Why didn't they just open the door and come in?

Wargle extended his arms and made come-to-me motions with his hands. Grinning.

From the moment Lisa had met him, she hadn't liked Wargle. She had caught him looking at her when he thought her attention was elsewhere, and the expression in his eyes had been unsettling.

“Come here, sweet stuff,” he said.

She looked at the door and realized no one was pounding on it. She was only hearing the frantic thump of her own heart.

Wargle licked his lips.

Lisa suddenly gasped, surprising herself. She had been so totally paralyzed by the man's return from the dead that she had forgotten to breathe.

“Come here, you little bitch.”

She tried to scream. Couldn't.

Wargle touched himself obscenely.

“Bet you'd like a taste of this, huh?” he said, grinning, his lips moist from his hungrily licking tongue.

Again, she tried to scream. Again, she couldn't. She could barely wrench each badly needed breath into her burning lungs.

He's not real, she told herself.

If she closed her eyes for a few seconds, squeezed them tightly shut and counted to ten, he wouldn't be there when she looked again.

“Little bitch.”

He was an illusion. Maybe even part of a dream. Maybe her coming to the bathroom was really just another part of her nightmare.

But she didn't test her theory. She didn't close her eyes and count to ten. She didn't dare.

Wargle took a step toward her, still fondling himself.

He isn't real. He's an illusion.

Another step.

He isn't real, he's an illusion.

“Come on, sweet stuff, let me nibble on them titties of yours.”

He isn't real he's an illusion he isn't real he's

“You're gonna love it, sweet stuff.”

She backed away from him.

“Cute little body you got, sweet stuff. Real cute.”

He continued to advance.

The light was behind him now. His shadow fell on her.

Ghosts didn't throw shadows.

In spite of his laugh and in spite of his fixed grin, his voice became steadily harsher, nastier. “You stupid little slut. I'm gonna use you real good. Real damned good. Better than any of them high school boys ever used you. You aren't gonna be able to walk right for a week when I'm through with you, sweet stuff.”

His shadow had completely engulfed her.

Her heart slammed so hard that it seemed about to tear loose, Lisa backed up farther, farther — but soon collided with the wall. She was in a corner.

She looked around for a weapon, something she could at least throw at him. There was nothing.

Each breath was harder to draw than the one before it. She was dizzy and weak.

He isn't real. He's an illusion.

But she couldn't delude herself any longer, she couldn't believe in the dream any more.

Wargle stopped just an arm's length from her. He glared at her. He swayed from side to side, and he rocked back and forth on the balls of his bare feet, as if some mad-dark-private music swelled and ebbed and swelled within him.

He closed his hateful eyes, swaying dreamily.

A second passed.

What's he doing?

Two seconds, four, six, ten.

Still, his eyes remained closed.

She felt herself carried away in a whirlpool of hysteria.

Could she slip past him? While his eyes were closed? Jesus. No. He was too close. To get away, she would have to brush against him. Jesus. Brush against him? No. God, that would snap him out of his trance or whatever this was, and he would seize her, and his hands would be cold, dead-cold. She could not bring herself to touch him. No.

Then she noticed something odd happening behind his eyes. Wriggling movement. The lids themselves no longer conformed to the curvature of his eyeballs.

He opened his eyes.

They were gone.

Beneath the lids lay only empty black sockets.

She finally screamed, but the cry she brought forth was beyond human hearing. Breath passed out of her in an express train rush, and she felt her throat working convulsively, but there was absolutely no sound that would bring help.

His eyes.

His empty eyes.

She was certain that those hollow sockets could still see her. They sucked at her with their emptiness.

His grin had not faded.

“Little pussy,” he said.

She screamed her silent scream.

“Little pussy. Kiss me, little pussy.”

Somehow, dark as midnight, those bone-rimmed sockets still held a glimmer of malevolent awareness.

“Kiss me.”

No!

Let me die, she prayed. God, please let me die first.

“I want to suck on your juicy tongue,” Wargle said urgently, bursting into a giggle.

He reached for her.

She pressed hard against the unyielding wall.

Wargle touched her cheek.

She flinched and tried to pull away.

His fingertips trailed lightly down her cheek.

His hand was icy and slick.

She heard a thin, dry, eerie groan—"Uh-uh-uh-uhuhhhhhhh" — and realized that she was listening to herself.

She smelled something strange, acrid. His breath? The stale breath of a dead man, expelled from rotting lungs? Did the walking dead breathe? The stench was faint but unbearable. She gagged.

He lowered his face toward hers.

She stared into his eaten-away eyes, into the swarming blackness beyond, and It was like peering through two peepholes into the deepest chambers of Hell.

His hand tightened on her throat.

He said, “Give us-”

She heaved in a hot breath.

“- a little kiss.”

She heaved out another scream.

This time the scream wasn't silent. This time she pealed forth a sound that seemed loud enough to shatter the mirrors and to crack the ceramic tile.

As Wargle's dead, eyeless face slowly, slowly descended toward her, as she heard her echoing off the walls, the whirlpool of hysteria in which she'd been spinning became, now, a whirlpool of darkness, and she was drawn down into oblivion.

Chapter 20 Body snatchers

In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, on a rust-colored sofa, against that wall which was farthest from the restrooms, Jennifer Paige sat beside her sister, holding the girl.

Bryce squatted in front of the sofa, holding Lisa's hand, which he couldn't seem to make warm again no matter how firmly he pressed and held it.

Except for the guards on duty, everyone had gathered behind Bryce, in a semicircle around the front of the sofa.

Lisa looked terrible. Her eyes were guarded, haunted.

Her face was as white as the tile floor in the ladies' room, where they had found her unconscious.

“Stu Wargle is dead,” Bryce assured her yet again.

“He wanted me t-t-to… kiss him,” the girl repeated, clinging resolutely to her bizarre story.

“There was no one in the room but you,” Bryce said. “Just you, Lisa.”

“He was there,” the girl insisted.

“We came running as soon as you screamed. We found you alone”

“He was there.”

“- on the floor, in the corner, out cold.”

“He was there.”

“His body is in the utility room,” Bryce said, gently squeezing her hand, “We put it there earlier. You remember. don't you?”

“Is it still there?” the girl asked, “Maybe you'd better look.”

Bryce met Jenny's eyes. She nodded. Remembering that anything was possible tonight, Bryce got to his feet, letting go of the girl's hand. He turned toward the utility room.

“Tal?”

“Yeah?”

“Come with me.”

Tal drew his revolver.

Pulling his own sidearm from his holster, Bryce said, “The rest of you stay back.”

With Tal at his side, Bryce crossed the lobby to the utility room door and paused in front of it.

“I don't think she's the kind of kid who makes up wild stories,” Tal said.

“I know she's not.”

Bryce thought about how Paul Henderson's corpse had vanished from the substation. Damn it, though, that had been very different from this. Paul's body had been accessible, unguarded. But no one could have gotten to Wargle's corpse and it couldn't have gotten up and walked away of its own accord — without being seen by one of the three deputies posted in the lobby. Yet no one and nothing had been seen.

Bryce moved to the left of the door and motioned Tal over to the right of it.

They listened for several seconds. The inn was silent. There was no sound from within the utility room.

Keeping his body out of the doorway, Bryce leaned forward and reached across the door, took hold of the knob, turned it slowly and silently until it had gone as far as it would go. He hesitated. He glanced over at Tal, who indicated his own readiness. Bryce took a deep breath, threw the door inward, and jumped back, out of the way.

Nothing rushed from the unlighted room.

Tal inched to the edge of the jamb, reached around with one arm, fumbled for the light switch, and found it.

Bryce was crouched down, waiting. The instant the light came on, he launched himself through the doorway, his revolver poked out in front of him.

Stark fluorescent light spilled down from the twin ceiling panels and glinted off the edges of the metal sink and off the bottles and cans of cleaning materials.

The shroud, in which they had wrapped the body, lay in a pile on the floor, beside the table.

Wargle's corpse was missing.

Deke Coover had been the guard stationed at the front doors of the inn. He wasn't much help to Bryce. He had spent a lot of time looking out at Skyline Road, with his back to the lobby. Someone could have carted Wargle's body away without Coover being the wiser.

“You told me to watch the front approach, Sheriff,” Deke Said, “As long as he didn't accompany himself with a song, Wargle could've come out of there all by his lonesome, doing an old soft-shoe routine and waving a flag in each hand, and he mightn't have attracted my notice.”

The two men stationed by the elevators, near the utility room, were Kelly MacHeath and Donny Jessup. They were two of Bryce's younger men, in their mid-twenties, but they were both able, trustworthy, and reasonably experienced.

MacHeath, a blond and beefy fellow with a bull's neck and heavy shoulders, shook his head and said, “Nobody went in or out of the utility room all night.”

“Nobody,” Jessup agreed. He was a wiry, curly-haired man with eyes the color of tea. “We would've seen them.”

“The door's right there.” MacHeath observed.

“And we were here all night.”

“You know us, Sheriff,” MacHeath said.

“You know we aren't slackers,” Jessup said.

“When we're supposed to be on duty—”

“—we are on duty,” Jessup finished.

“Damn it” Bryce said, “Wargle's body is gone. It didn't just climb off that table and walk through a wall!”

“It didn't just climb off that table and walk through that door, either,” MacHeath insisted.

“Sir", Jessup said, “Wargle was dead. I didn't see the body myself, but from what I bear, he was very dead. Dead men stay where you put them.”

“Not necessarily,” Bryce said, “Not in this town. Not tonight.”

In the utility room with Tal, Bryce said, “There's just not another way out of here but the door.”

They walked slowly around the room, studying it.

The leaky faucet drooled out a drop of water that struck the pan of the metal sink with a soft ping.

“The heating vent,” Tal said, pointing to a grille in one wall, directly under the ceiling. “What about that?”

“Are you serious?”

“Better have a look.”

“It's not big enough for a man to pass through.”

“Remember the burglary at Krybinsky's Jewelry Store?”

“How could I forget? It's still unsolved, as Alex Krybinsky so pointedly reminds me every time we meet.”

“That guy entered Krybinsky's basement through an unlocked window almost as small as that grille.”

Bryce knew, as did any cop who handled burglaries, that a man of ordinary build required a surprisingly small opening to gain entrance to a building. Any hole large enough to accept a man's head was also large enough to provide an entrance for his entire body. The shoulders were wider than the head, of course, but they could be collapsed forward or otherwise contorted enough to be squeezed through; likewise, the breadth of the hips was nearly always sufficiently alterable to follow where the shoulders had gone. But Stu Wargle hadn't been a man of ordinary build.

“Stu's belly would've stuck in there like a cork in a bottle,” Bryce said.

Nevertheless, he pulled up a stepstool that had been standing in one corner, climbed onto it, and took a closer look at the vent.

“The grille's not held in place by screws,” he told Tal, “It's a spring-clip model, so it could conceivably have been snapped into place from inside the duct, once Wargle went through, so long as he wriggled in feet-first.”

He pulled the grille off the wall.

Tal handed him a flashlight.

Bryce directed the hewn into the dark heating duct and frowned. The narrow, metal passageway ran only a short distance before taking a ninety-degree upward turn.

Switching off the flashlight and passing it down to Tal Bryce said, “Impossible. To get through there, Wargle would have to've been no bigger than Sammy Davis, Jr., and as flexible as the rubber man in a carnival sideshow.”

Frank Autry approached Bryce Hammond at the operations desk in the middle of the lobby, where the sheriff was seated, reading over the messages that had come in during the night.

“Sir, there's something you ought to know about Wargle.”

Bryce looked up. “What's that?”

“Well… I don't like to have to speak ill of the dead.”

“None of us cared much for him,” Bryce said flatly, “Any attempt to honor his memory would be hypocritical. So if you know something that'll help me, spill it, Frank.”

Frank smiled. “You'd have done real well for yourself in the army.” He sat on the edge of the desk. “Last night, when Wargle and I were dismantling the radio over at the substation, he made several disgusting remarks about Dr. Paige and Lisa.”

“Sex stuff?”

“Yeah.”

Frank recounted the conversation that he'd had with Wargle.

“Christ,” Bryce said, shaking his head.

Frank said, “The thing about the girl was what bothered me most. Wargle was half serious when he talked about maybe making a move on her if the opportunity arose. I don't think he'd have gone as far as rape, but he was capable of making a very heavy pass and using his authority, his badge, to coerce her. I don't think that kid could be coerced; she's too spunky. But I think Wargle might've tried it.”

The sheriff tapped a pencil on the desk, staring thoughtfully into the air.

“But Lisa couldn't have known,” Frank said.

“She couldn't have overheard any of your conversation?”

“Not a word.”

“She might have suspected what kind of man Wargle was from the way he looked at her.”

“But she couldn't have known,” Frank said, “Do you see what I'm driving at?”

“Yes.”

“Most kids,” Frank said, “if they were going to make up a tall tale, they would be satisfied just to say they'd been chased by a dead man. They wouldn't ordinarily embellish it by saying the dead man wanted to molest them.”

Bryce tended to agree. “Kids' minds aren't that baroque. Their lies are usually simple, not elaborate.”

“Exactly,” Frank said, “The fact that she said Wargle was naked and wanted to molest her… well… to me, that seems to add credibility to her story. Now, we'd all like to believe that someone sneaked into the utility room and stole Wargle's body. And we'd like to believe they put the body in the ladies' room, that Lisa saw it, that she panicked, and that she imagined all the rest. And we'd like to believe that after she fainted, someone got the corpse out of there by some incredibly clever means. But that explanation is full of holes. What happened was a lot stranger than that.”

Bryce dropped his pencil and leaned back in his chair. “Shit. You believe in ghosts, Frank? The living dead?”

“No. There's a real explanation for this,” Frank said, “Not a bunch of superstitious mumbo-jumbo. A real explanation.”

“I agree,” Bryce said, “But Wargle's face was…”

“I know. I saw it.”

“How could his face have been put back together?”

“I don't know.”

“And Lisa said his eyes.”

“Yeah. I heard what she said.”

Bryce sighed. “You ever worked Rubik's Cube?”

Frank blinked. “No. I never did.”

“Well, I did,” the sheriff said, “The damned thing almost drove me crazy, but I stuck with it, and eventually I solved it. Everybody thinks that's a hard puzzle, but compared to this case, Rubik's Cube is a kindergarten game.”

“There's another difference,” Frank said.

“What's that?”

“If you fail to solve Rubik's Cube, the punishment isn't death.”

In Santa Mira, in his cell in the county jail, Fletcher Kale, slayer of wife and son, woke before dawn. He lay motionless on the thin foam mattress and stared at the window, which presented a rectangular slab of the predawn sky for his inspection.

He would not spend his life in prison. Would not.

He had a magnificent destiny. That was the thing no one understood. They saw the Fletcher Kale who existed now, without being able to see what he would become. He was destined to have it all: money beyond counting, power beyond imagining, fame, respect.

Kale knew he was different from the rest of mankind, and it was this knowledge that kept him going in the face of all adversity. The seeds of greatness within him were already sprouting. In time, he would make them all see how wrong they had been about him.

Perception, he thought as he stared up at the barred window, perception is my greatest gift. I'm extraordinarily perceptive.

He saw that, without exception, human beings were driven by self-interest. Nothing wrong with that. It was the nature of the species. That was how humankind was meant to be. But most people could not bear to face the truth. The up so-called inspiring concepts like love, friendship, honor, truthfulness, faith, trust, and individual dignity. They claimed to believe in all those things and more; however, at heart, they knew it was all bullshit. They just couldn't admit it. And so, they stupidly hobbled themselves with a smarmy, self-congratulatory code of conduct, with noble but hollow sentiments, thus frustrating their true desires, dooming themselves to failure and unhappiness.

Fools. God, he despised them.

From his unique perspective, Kale saw that mankind was, in reality, the most ruthless, dangerous, unforgiving species on earth. And he reveled in that knowledge. He was proud to be a member of such a race.

I'm ahead of my own time, Kale thought as he sat up on the edge of his bunk and put his bare feet on the cold floor of his cell. I am the next step of evolution. I've evolved beyond the need to believe in morality. That's why they look at me with such loathing. Not because I killed Joanna and Danny. They hate me because I'm better than they are, more completely in touch with my true human nature.

He'd had no choice but to kill Joanna. She had refused to give him the money, after all. She had been prepared to humiliate him professionally, ruin him financially, and wreck his entire future.

He'd had to kill her. She was in his way.

It was too bad about Danny. Kale sort of regretted that part. Not always. Just now and then. Too bad. Necessary, but too bad.

Anyway, Danny had always been a regular mama's boy. In fact, he was actually downright distant toward his father. That was Joanna's handiwork. She had probably been brainwashing the kid, turning him against his old man. In the end, Danny really hadn't been Kale's son at all. He'd become a stranger.

Kale got down on the floor of, his cell and began to do pushups.

One-two, one-two, one-two.

He intended to keep himself in shape for that moment when an opportunity for escape presented itself. He knew exactly where he would go when he escaped. Not west, not out of the country, not over toward Sacramento. That's what they would expect him to do.

One-two, one-two.

He knew of a perfect hideout. It was right here in the county. They wouldn't be looking for him under their noses. When they couldn't find him in a day or so, they'd decide he had already split, and they'd stop actively looking in this neighborhood. When several more weeks passed, when they weren't thinking about him any longer, then he would leave the hideout, double back through town, and head west.

One-two.

But first, he would go up into the mountains. That's where the hideout was. The mountains offered him the best chance of eluding the cops once he'd escaped. He had a hunch about it. The mountains. Yeah. He felt drawn to the mountains.

Dawn came to the mountains, spreading like a bright stain across the sky, soaking into the darkness and discoloring it.

The forest above Snowfield was quiet. Very quiet.

In the underbrush, the leaves were beaded with morning dew. The pleasant odor of rich humus rose up from the spongy forest floor.

The air was chilly, as if the last exhalation of the night still lay upon the land.

The fox stood motionless on a limestone formation that thrust up from an open slope, just below the treeline. The wind gently ruffled his gray fur.

His breath made a small phosphoric plume in the crisp air.

The fox was not a night hunter, yet he had been on the prowl since an hour before dawn. He had not eaten in almost two days.

He had been unable to find game. The woods had been unnaturally silent and devoid of the scent of prey.

In all his seasons as a hunter, the fox had never encountered such barren quietude as this. The most bitter days of midwinter were filled with more promise than this. Even in the wind-whipped snows of January, there was always the blood scent, the game scent.

Not now.

Now there was nothing.

Death seemed to have claimed all the creatures in this part of the forest — except for one small, hungry fox. Yet there was not even the scent of death, not even the ripe stench of a carcass moldering in the underbrush.

But at last, as he had scampered across the low limestone formation, being careful not to set foot in one of the crevices or flute holes that dropped down into the caves beneath, the fox had seen something move on the slope ahead of him, something that had not merely been stirred by the wind. He had frozen on the low rocks, staring uphill at the shadowy perimeter of this new arm of the forest.

A squirrel. Two squirrels. No, there were even more of them than that — five, ten, twenty. They were lined up side by side in the dimness along the treeline.

At first there had been no game whatsoever. Now there was an equally strange abundance of it.

The fox sniffed.

Although the squirrels were only five or six yards away, he could not get their scent.

The squirrels were looking directly at him, but they didn't seem frightened.

The fox cocked his head, suspicion tempering his hunger.

The squirrels moved to their left, all at once, in a tight little group, and then came out of the shadows of the trees, away from the protection of the forest, onto open ground, straight toward the fox. They roiled over and under and around one another, a frantic confusion of brown pelts, a blur of motion in the brown grass. When they came to an abrupt halt, all at the same instant, they were only three or four yards from the fox. And they were no longer squirrels.

The fox twitched and made a hissing sound.

The twenty small squirrels were now four large raccoons.

The fox growled softly.

Ignoring him, one of the raccoons stood on its hind feet and began washing its paws.

The fur along the fox's back bristled.

He sniffed the air.

No scent.

He put his head low and watched the raccoons closely. His sleek muscles grew even more tense than they had been, not because he intended to spring, but because he intended to flee.

Something was very wrong.

All four raccoons were sitting up now, forepaws tucked against their chests, tender bellies exposed.

They were watching the fox.

The raccoon was not usually prey for the fox. It was too aggressive, too sharp of tooth, too quick with its claws. But though it was safe from foxes, the raccoon never enjoyed confrontation; it never flaunted itself as these four were doing.

The fox licked the cold air with his tongue.

He sniffed again and finally did pick up a scent.

His ears snapped back flat against his skull, and he snarled.

It wasn't the scent of raccoons. It wasn't the scent of any denizen of the forest that he had ever encountered before. It was an unfamiliar, sharp, unpleasant odor. Faint. But repellent.

This vile odor wasn't coming from any of the four raccoons that posed in front of the fox. He wasn't quite able to make out where it was coming from.

Sensing grave danger, the fox whipped around on the limestone, turning away from the raccoons, although he was reluctant to put his back to them.

His paws scraped and his claws clicked on the hard surface as he launched himself down the slope, across the flat weatherworn rock, his tail streaming out behind him. He leaped over a foot-wide crevice in the stone—

— and in midleap he was snatched from the air by something dark and cold and pulsing.

The thing burst up out of the crevice with brutal, shocking force and speed.

The agonized squeal of the fox was sharp and brief.

As quickly as the fox was seized, it was drawn down into the crevice. Five feet below, at the bottom of the miniature chasm, there was a small hole that led into the caves beneath the limestone outcropping. The hole was too small to admit the fox, but the struggling creature was dragged through anyway, its bones snapping as it went.

Gone.

All in the blink of an eye. Half a blink.

Indeed, the fox had been sucked into the earth before the echo of its dying cry had even pealed back from a distant hillside.

The raccoons were gone.

Now, a flood of field mice poured onto the smooth slabs of limestone. Scores of them. At least a hundred.

They went to the edge of the crevice. They stared down into it.

One by one, the mice slipped over the edge, dropped to the bottom, and then went through the small natural opening into the cavern below.

Soon, all the mice were gone, too.

Once again, the forest above Snowfield was quiet.