Phantoms

Chapter 21 The Big Story

Santa Mira.

Monday-1:02 A.M.

“Hello?”

“Is this the Santa Mira Daily News?”

“Yeah.”

“The newspaper?”

“Lady, the paper's closed. It's after one in the morning.”

“Closed? I didn't know a newspaper ever closed.”

“This isn't the New York Times.”

“But aren't you printing tomorrow's edition now?”

“The printing's not done here. These are the business and editorial offices. Did you want the printer or what?”

“Well… I have a story.”

“If it's an obituary or a church bake sale or something, what you do is you call back in the morning, after nine o'clock, and you—”

“No, no. This is a big story.”

“Oh, a garage sale, huh?”

“What?”

“Never mind. You'll just have to call back in the morning.”

“Wait, listen, I work for the phone company.”

“That's not such a big story.”

“No, see, it's because I work for the phone company that I found out about this thing. Are you the editor?”

“No. I'm in charge of selling ad pace.”

“Well… maybe you can still help me.”

“Lady. I'm sitting here on a Sunday night — no, a Monday morning now — all alone in a dreary little office, trying to figure out how the devil to drum up enough business to keep this paper afloat. I am tired. I am irritable”

“How awful.”

“—and I am afraid you'll have to call back in the morning.”

“But something terrible has happened in Snowfield. I don't know exactly what, but I know people are dead. There might even be a lot of people dead or at least in danger of dying.”

“Christ, I must be tireder than I thought. I'm getting interested in spite of myself. Tell me.”

“We've rerouted Snowfield's phone service, pulled it off the automatic dialing system, and restricted all ingoing calls. You can only reach two numbers up there now, and both of them are being answered by the sheriff's men. The reason they've set it up that way is to seal the place off before the reporters find out something's up.”

“Lady, what've you been drinking?”

“I don't drink.”

“Then what've you been smoking?”

“Listen, I know a little bit more. They're getting calls from the Santa Mira sheriff's office all the time, and from the governor's office, and from some military base out in Utah, and they—”

San Francisco.

Monday-1:40 A.M.

“This is Sid Sandowicz. Can I help you?”

“I keep tellin' them I want to talk to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, man.”

“That's me.”

“Man, you guys have hung up on me three times! What the fuck's the matter with you guys?”

“Watch your language.”

“Shit.”

“Listen, do you have any idea how many kids like you call up newspapers, wasting our time with silly-ass gags and hot tip hoaxes?”

“Huh? How'd you even know I was a kid?”

“'Cause you sound twelve.”

“I'm fifteen!”

“Congratulations.”

“Shit!”

“Listen, son, I've got a boy your age, which is why I'm bothering to listen to you when the other guys wouldn't. So if you've really got something of interest, spill it.”

“Well, my old man's a professor at Stanford. He's a virologist and an epidemiologist. You know what that means, man?”

“He studies viruses, disease, something like that.”

“Yeah. And he's let himself be corrupted.”

“How's that?”

“He accepted a grant from the fuckin' military. Man, he's involved with some biological warfare outfit. It's supposed to be a peaceful application of his research, but you know that's a lot of horseshit. He sold his soul, and now they're finally claimin' it. The shit's hit the fan.”

“The fact that your father sold out — if he did sell out might be big news in your family, son, but I'm afraid it wouldn't be of much interest to our readers.”

“Hey, man, I didn't call up just to jerk you off. I've got a real story. Tonight they came for him. There's a crisis of some kind. I'm supposed to think he had to fly back East on business. I snuck upstairs and listened at their bedroom door while he was layin' it all out for the old lady. There's been some kind of contamination in Snowfield. A big emergency. Everyone's tryin' to keep it secret.”

“Snowfield, California?”

“Yeah, yeah. What I figure, man, is that they were secretly runnin' a test of some germ weapon on our own people and it got out of hand. Or maybe it was an accidental spill. Somethin' real heavy's going' down, for sure.”

“What's your name, son?”

“Ricky Bettenby. My old man's name is Wilson Bettenby.”

“Stanford, you said?”

“Yeah. You gonna follow up on this, man?”

“Maybe there's something to it. But before I start calling people at Stanford, I need to ask you a lot more questions.”

“Fire away. I'll tell you whatever I can. I want to blast this wide open, man. I want him to pay for sellin' out.”

Throughout the night, the leaks sprung one by one. At Dugway, Utah, an army officer, who should have known better, used a pay phone off the base to call New York and spill the story to a much-loved younger brother who was a cub reporter for the Times. In bed, after sex, an aide to the governor told his lover, a woman reporter. Those and other holes in the dam caused the flow of information to grow from a trickle to a flood.

By three o'clock in the morning, the switchboard at the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Office was overloaded. By dawn, the newspaper, television, and radio reporters were swarming into Santa Mira. Within a few hours of first light, the street in front of the sheriff's offices was crowded with press cars, camera vans bearing the logos of TV stations in Sacramento and San Francisco, reporters, and curiosity seekers of all ages.

The deputies gave up trying to keep people from congregating in the middle of the street, for there were too many of them to be herded onto the sidewalks. They sealed off the block with sawhorses and turned it into a big open-air press compound. A couple of enterprising kids from a nearby apartment building starting selling Tang, cookies, and — with the aid of the longest series of extension cords anyone could remember seeing — hot coffee. Their refreshment stand became the rumor center, where reporters gathered to share theories and hearsay while they waited for the latest official information handouts.

Other newsmen spread out through Santa Mira, seeking people who had friends or relatives living up in Snowfield, or who were in some way related to the deputies now stationed there. Out at the junction of the state route and Snowfield Road, still other reporters were camping at the police roadblock.

In spite of all this hurly-burly, fully half of the press had not yet arrived.

Many representatives of the Eastern media and the foreign press were still in transit. For the authorities who were trying hard to deal with the mess, the worst was yet to come. By Monday afternoon, it would be a circus.

Chapter 22 Morning in Snowfield

Not long after dawn, the shortwave radio and the two gasoline powered electric generators arrived at the roadblock that marked the perimeter of the quarantine zone. The two small vans which bore them were driven by California Highway Patrolmen. They were permitted to pass through the blockade, to a point midway along the four-mile Snowfield Road, where they were parked and abandoned.

When the CHiP officers returned to the roadblock, county deputies radioed a situation report to headquarters in Santa Mira. In turn, headquarters put through a go-ahead call to Bryce Hammond at the Hilltop Inn.

Tal Whitman, Frank Autry, and two other men took a squad car to the midpoint of the Snowfield Road and picked up the abandoned vans. Containment of any possible disease vectors was thus maintained.

The shortwave was set up in one corner of the Hilltop lobby. A message sent to headquarters in Santa Mira was received and answered. Now, if something happened to the telephones, they wouldn't be entirely isolated.

Within an hour, one of the generators had been wired into the circuitry of the streetlamps on the west side of the Skyline Road. The other was spliced into the hotel's electrical system. Tonight, if the main power supply was mysteriously cut off, the generators would kick in automatically. Darkness would last only one or two seconds.

Bryce was confident that not even their unknown enemy could snatch away a victim that fast.

Jenny Paige began the morning with an unsatisfactory sponge bath, followed by a completely satisfactory breakfast of eggs, sliced ham, toast, and coffee.

Then, accompanied by three heavily armed men, she went up the street to her house, where she got some fresh clothes for herself and for Lisa. She also stopped in her office, where she gathered up a stethoscope, a sphygmomanometer, tongue depressors, cotton pads, gauze, splints, bandages, tourniquets, antiseptics, disposable hypodermic syringes, painkillers, antibiotics, and other instruments and supplies that she would need in order to establish an emergency infirmary in one corner of the Hilltop Inn's lobby.

The house was quiet.

The deputies kept looking around nervously, entering each new room as if they suspected a guillotine was rigged above the door.

As Jenny was finishing packing up supplies in her office, the telephone rang. They all stared at it.

They knew only two phones in town were working, and both were at the Hilltop Inn.

The phone rang again.

Jenny lifted the receiver. She didn't say hello.

Silence.

She waited.

After a second, she heard the distant cries of sea gulls. The buzzing of bees. The mewling of a kitten. A weeping child. Another child: laughing. A panting dog. The chicka-chickachicka-chicka sound of a rattlesnake.

Bryce had heard similar things on the phone last night, in the substation, just before the moth had come tapping at the windows. He had said that the sounds had been perfectly ordinary, familiar animal noises. They had nonetheless, unsettled him. He hadn't been able to explain why.

Now Jenny knew exactly what he meant.

Birds singing.

Frogs croaking.

A cat purring.

The purr became a hiss. The hiss became a cat-shriek of anger. The shriek became a brief but terrible squeal of pain.

Then a voice: “I'm gonna shove my big prick into your succulent little sister.”

Jenny recognized the voice. Wargle. The dead man.

“You hear me, Doc?”

She said nothing.

“And I don't give a rat's ass which end of her I stick it in.” He giggled.

She slammed the phone down.

The deputies looked at her expectantly.

“Uh… no one on the line,” she said, deciding not to tell them what she had heard. They were already too jumpy.

From Jenny's office, they went to Tayton's Pharmacy on Vail Lane, where she stocked up on more drugs: additional painkillers, a wide spectrum of antibiotics, coagulant, anticoagulants, and anything else she might conceivably need.

As they were finishing in the pharmacy, the phone rang.

Jenny was closest to it. She didn't want to answer, but she couldn't resist.

And it was there again.

Jenny waited a moment, then said, “Hello?”

Wargle said, “I'm gonna use your little sister so hard she won't be able to walk for a week.”

Jenny hung up.

“Dead line,” she told the deputies.

She didn't think they believed her. They stared at her trembling hands.

Bryce sat at the central operations desk, talking by telephone to headquarters in Santa Mira.

The APB on Timothy Flyte had turned up nothing whatsoever. Flyte wasn't wanted by any police agency in the United States or Canada. The FBI had never heard of him. The name on the bathroom mirror at the Candle glow Inn was still a mystery.

The San Francisco police had been able to supply background on the missing Harold Ordnay and wife, in whose room Timothy Flyte's name had been found. The Ordnays owned two bookstores in San Francisco. One was an ordinary retail outlet. The other was an antiquarian and rare book dealership; apparently, it was by far the more profitable of the two. The Ordnays were well known and respected in collecting circles. According to their family, Harold and Blanche had gone to Snowfield for a four-day weekend to celebrate their thirty-first anniversary. The family had never heard of Timothy Flyte. When police were granted permission to look through the Ordnays' personal address book, they found no listing for anyone named Flyte.

The police had not yet been able to locate any of the bookstores' employees; however, they expected to do so as soon as both shops opened at ten o'clock this morning. It was hoped that Flyte was a business acquaintance of the Ordnays' and would be familiar to the employees.

“Keep me posted,” Bryce told the morning desk man in Santa Mira, “How're things there?”

“Pandemonium.”

“It'll get worse.”

As Bryce was putting down the receiver, Jenny Paige returned from her safari in search of drugs and medical equipment. “Where's Lisa?”

“With the kitchen detail,” Bryce said.

“She's all right?”

“Sure. There are three big, strong, well-armed men with her. Remember? Is something wrong?”

“Tell you later.”

Bryce assigned Jenny's three armed guards to new duties, then helped her establish an infirmary in one corner of the lobby.

“This is probably wasted effort,” she said.

“Why?”

“So far no one's been injured. Just killed.”

“Well, that could change.”

“I think it only strikes when it intends to kill. It doesn't take halfway measures.”

“Maybe. But with all these men toting guns, and with everyone so damned jumpy, I wouldn't be half surprised if someone accidentally winged someone else or even shot himself in the foot.”

Arranging bottles in a desk drawer, Jenny said, “The telephone rang at my place and again over at the pharmacy. It was Wargle.” She told him about both calls.

“You're sure it was really him?”

“I remember his voice clearly. An unpleasant voice.”

“But, Jenny, he was—”

“I know, I know. His face was eaten away, and his brain was gone, and all the blood was sucked out of him. I know. And it's driving me crazy trying to figure it out.”

“Someone doing an impersonation?”

“If it was, then there's someone out there who makes Rich Little look like an amateur.”

“Did he sound as if he—”

Bryce broke off in mid-sentence, and both he and Jenny turned as Lisa ran through the archway.

The girl motioned to them. “Come on! Quick! Something weird is happening in the kitchen.”

Before Bryce could stop her, she ran back the way she had come.

Several men started after her, drawing their guns as they went, and Bryce ordered them to halt. “Stay here. Stay on the job.”

Jenny had already sprinted after the girl.

Bryce hurried into the dining room, caught up with Jenny, moved ahead of her, drew his revolver, and followed Lisa through the swinging doors into the hotel kitchen.

The three men assigned to this shift of kitchen duty — Gordy Brogan, Henry Wong, and Max Dunbar — had put down their can openers and cooking utensils in favor of their service revolvers, but they didn't know what to aim at. They glanced up at Bryce, looking disconcerted and baffled.

“Here we go 'round the mulberry bush,

the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.”

The air was filled with a child's singing. A little boy. His voice was clear and fragile and sweet.

“Here we go 'round the mulberry bush,

so early in the moooorrrninnnggg!”

“The sink,” Lisa said, pointing.

Puzzled, Bryce went to the nearest of three double sinks. Jenny came close behind him.

The song had changed. The voice was the same:

“This old man, he plays one;

he plays nicknack on my drum,

With a nicknack, paddywack,

give a dog a bone—”

The child's voice was coming out of the drain in the sink, as if he were trapped far down in the pipes.

“—this old man goes rolling home.”

For metronomic seconds, Bryce listened with spellbound intensity. He was speechless.

He glanced at Jenny. She gave him the same astonished stare that he had seen on his men's faces when he had first pushed through the swinging doors.

“It just started all of a sudden,” Lisa said, raising her voice above the singing.

“When?” Bryce asked.

“A couple of minutes ago,” Gordy Brogan said.

“I was standing at the sink,” Max Dunbar said. He was a burly, hairy, rough-looking man with warm, shy brown eyes.

“When the singing started up… Jesus, I must've jumped two feet!”

The song changed again. The sweetness was replaced by a cloying, almost mocking piety:

“Jesus loves me, this I know,

for the Bible tells me so.”

“I don't like this,” Henry Wong said, “How can it be?”

“Little ones to Him are drawn.

They are weak, but He is strong.”

Nothing about the singing was overtly threatening; yet, like the noises Bryce and Jenny had heard on the telephone, the child's tender voice, issuing from such an unlikely source, was unnerving. Creepy.

“Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus—”

The singing abruptly ceased.

“Thank God!” Max Dunbar said with a shudder of relief, as if the child's melodic crooning had been unbearably harsh, grating, off-key. “That voice was drilling right through to the roots of my teeth!”

After several seconds had passed in silence, Bryce began to lean toward the drain, to peer into it—

— and Jenny said maybe he shouldn't—

— and something exploded out of that dark, round hole.

Everyone cried out, and Lisa screamed, and Bryce staggered back in fear and surprise, cursing himself for not being more careful, jerking his revolver up, bringing the muzzle to bear on the thing that came out of the drain.

But it was only water.

A long, high-pressure stream of exceptionally filthy, greasy water shot almost to the ceiling and rained down over everything. It was a short burst, only a second or two, spraying in every direction.

Some of the foul droplets struck Bryce's face. Dark blotches appeared on the front of his shirt. The stuff stank.

It was exactly what you would expect to gush out of a backed-up drain: dirty brown water, threads of gummy sludge, bits of this morning's breakfast scraps which had been run through the garbage disposal.

Gordy got a roll of paper towels, and they all scrubbed at their faces and blotted at the stains on their clothes.

They were still wiping at themselves, still waiting to see if the singing would begin again, when Tal Whitman pushed open one of the swinging doors. “Bryce, we just got a call. General Copperfield and his team reached the roadblock and were passed through a couple of minutes ago.”

Chapter 23 The crisis team

Snowfield looked freshly scrubbed and tranquil in the crystalline light of morning. A breeze stirred the trees. The sky was cloudless.

Coming out of the inn, with Bryce and Frank and Doc Paige and a few of the others behind him, Tal glanced up at the sun, the sight of which unlocked a memory of his childhood in Harlem. He used to buy penny candy at Boaz’s Newsstand, which was at the opposite end of the block from his Aunt Becky’s apartment. He favored the lemondrops. They were the prettiest shade of yellow he had ever seen. And now this morning, he saw that the sun was precisely that shade of yellow, hanging up there like an enormous lemondrop. It brought back the sight and sounds and smells of Boaz’s with surprising force.

Lisa moved up beside Tal, and they all stopped on the sidewalk, facing downhill, waiting for the arrival of the CBW Defence unit.

Nothing moved at the bottom of the hill. The mountainside was silent. Evidently, Copperfield’s team was some distance away.

Waiting in the lemon sunshine, Tal wondered if Boaz's Newsstand was still doing business at its old location. Most likely, it was now just another empty store, filthy and vandalized. Or maybe it was selling magazines, tobacco, and candy only as a front for pushing dope.

As he grew older, he became ever more acutely aware of a tendency toward degeneration in all things. Nice neighborhoods somehow became shabby neighborhoods; shabby neighborhoods became seedy neighborhoods; seedy neighborhoods became slums. Order giving way to chaos. You saw it everywhere these days. More homicides this year than last. Greater and greater abuse of drugs. Spiraling rates of assault, rape, burglary. What saved Tal from being a pessimist about mankind's future was his fervent conviction that good people — people like Bryce, Frank, and Doc Paige; people like his Aunt Becky — could stern the tide of devolution and maybe even turn it back now and then.

But his faith in the power of good people and responsible actions was facing a severe test here in Snowfield. This evil seemed unbeatable.

“Listen!” Gordy Brogan said, “I hear engines.”

Tal looked at Bryce. “I thought they weren't expected until around noon. They're three hours early.”

“Noon was the latest possible arrival time,” Bryce said. “Copperfield wanted to make it sooner if he could. Judging from the conversation I had with him, he's a tough taskmaster, the kind of guy who usually gets exactly what he wants out of his people.”

“Just like you, huh?” Tal asked.

Bryce regarded him from under sleepy, drooping eyelids. “Me? Tough? Why, I'm a pussycat.”

Tal grinned. “So's a panther.”

“Here they come!”

At the bottom of Skyline Road, a large vehicle drove into view, and the sound of its laboring engine grew louder.

There were three large vehicles in the CBW Civilian Defense Unit. Jenny watched them as they crawled slowly up the long, sloped street toward the Hilltop Inn.

Leading the procession was a gleaming, white motor home, a lumbering thirty-six foot behemoth that had been somewhat modified. It had no doors or windows along its flank. The only entrance evidently was at the back. The curved, wraparound windshield of the cab was tinted very dark, so you couldn't see inside, and it appeared to be made of much thicker glass than that used in ordinary motor homes. There was no identification on the vehicle, no project name, no indication that it was army property. The license plate was standard California issue. Anonymity during transport was clearly part of Copperfield's program.

Behind the first motor home came a second. Bringing up the rear was an unmarked truck pulling a thirty-foot, plain gray trailer. Even the truck's windows were tinted, armor-thick glass.

Not certain that the driver of the lead vehicle had seen their group standing in front of the Hilltop, Bryce stepped into the street and waved his arms over his head.

The payloads in the motor homes and in the truck were obviously quite heavy. Their engines strained hard, and they ground their way up the street, moving slower than ten miles an hour, then slower than five, inching, groaning, grinding. When at last they reached the Hilltop, they kept on going, made a right-hand turn at the corner, and swung into the cross street that flanked the inn.

Jenny, Bryce, and the others went around to the side of the inn as the motorcade pulled up to the curb and parked. All of the east-west streets in Snowfield ran across the broad face of the mountain, so that most of them were level. It was much easier to park and secure the three vehicles there than on the steeply sloped Skyline Road.

Jenny stood on the sidewalk, watching the rear door of the first motor home, waiting for someone to come out.

The three overheated engines were switched off, one after the other, and silence fell in with a weight of its own.

Jenny's spirits were higher than they had been since she'd driven into Snowfield last night. The specialists had arrived. Like most Americans, she had enormous faith in specialists, in technology, and in science. In fact, she probably had more faith than most, for she was a specialist herself, a woman of science. Soon, they would understand what had killed Hilda Beck and the Liebermanns and all the others. The specialists had arrived. The cavalry had ridden in at last.

The back door of the truck opened first, and men jumped down. They were dressed for operations in a biologically contaminated atmosphere. They were wearing the white, airtight vinyl suits of the type developed for NASA, with large helmets that had oversize, plexiglass faceplates. Each man carried his own air supply tank on his back, as well as a briefcase-size waste purification and reclamation system.

Curiously, Jenny did not, at first, think of the men as resembling astronauts. They seemed like followers of some strange religion, resplendent in their priestly raiments.

Half a dozen agile men had scrambled out of the truck. More were still coming when Jenny realized that they were heavily armed. They spread out around both sides of their caravan and took up positions between their transport and the people on the sidewalk, facing away from the vehicles. These men weren't scientists. They were support troops. Their names were stenciled on their helmets, just above their faceplates: SGT. HARKER, PW. PODOR, PVT. PASCAM, LT. UNDERHILL. They brought up their guns and aimed outward, securing a perimeter in a determined fashion that brooked no interference.

To her shock and confusion, Jenny found herself staring into the muzzle of a submachine gun.

Taking a step toward the troops, Bryce said, “What the hell is the meaning of this?”

Sergeant Harker, nearest to Bryce, swung his gun toward the sky and fired a short burst of warning shots.

Bryce stopped abruptly.

Tal and Frank reached automatically for their own sidearms.

“No!” Bryce shouted, “No shooting, for Christ's sake! We're on the same side.”

One of the soldiers spoke. Lieutenant Underhill. His voice issued tinnily from a small radio amplifier in a six-inch-square box on his chest. “Please stay back from the vehicles. Our first duty is to guard the integrity of the labs, and we will do so at all costs.”

“Damn it,” Bryce said, “we're not going to cause any trouble. I'm the one who called for you in the first place.”

“Stay back,” Underhill insisted.

The rear door of the first motor home finally opened. The four individuals who came out were also dressed in airtight suits, but they were not soldiers. They moved unhurriedly. They were unarmed. One of them was a woman; Jenny caught a glimpse of a strikingly lovely, female, oriental face. The names on their helmets weren't preceded by designation of rank: BETTENBY, VALDEZ, NIVEN, YAMAGUCHI. These were the civilian physicians and scientists who, in an extreme chemical biological warfare emergency, walked away from their private lives in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and other Western cities, putting themselves at Copperfield's disposal. According to Bryce, there was one such team in the West, one in the East, and one in the Southern-Gulf states.

Six men came out of the second motor home. GOLDSTEIN, ROBERTS, COPPERFIELD, HOUK. The last two were in unmarked suits, no names above their faceplates. They moved up the line, staying behind the armed soldiers, and joined up with Bettenby, Valdez, Niven, and Yamaguchi.

Those ten conducted a brief conversation among themselves, by way of intersuit radio. Jenny could see their lips moving behind their plexiglass visors, but the squawk boxes on their chests did not transmit a word, which meant they had the capability to conduct both public and strictly private discussions. For the time being, they were opting for privacy.

But why? Jenny wondered. They don't have anything to hide from us. Do they?

General Copperfield, the tallest of the twenty, turned away from the group at the rear of the first motor home, stepped onto the sidewalk, and approached Bryce.

Before Copperfield took the initiative, Bryce stepped up to him, “General, I demand to know why we're being held at gunpoint.”

“Sorry,” Copperfield said. He turned to the stone-faced troopers and said, “Okay, men. It's a no-sweat situation. Parade rest.”

Because of the air tanks they were carrying, the soldiers couldn't comfortably assume a classic parade rest position. But, moving with the fluid harmony of a precision drill team, they immediately slung their submachine guns from their shoulders, spread their feet precisely twelve inches apart, put their arms straight down at their sides, and stood motionless, facing forward.

Bryce had been correct when he'd told Tal that Copperfield sounded like a tough taskmaster. It was obvious to Jenny that there was no discipline problem in the general's unit.

Turning to Bryce again, smiling through his faceplate, Copperfield said, “That better?”

“Better,” Bryce said, “But I still want an explanation.”

“Just SOP,” Copperfield said, “Standard Operating Procedure. It's part of the normal drill. We don't have anything against you or your people, Sheriff. You are Sheriff Hammond, aren't you? I remember you from the conference in Chicago last year.”

“Yes, sir, I'm Hammond. But you still haven't given me a suitable explanation. SOP just isn't good enough.”

“No need to raise your voice, Sheriff.” With one gloved hand, Copperfield tapped the squawk box on his chest. “This thing's not just a speaker. It's also equipped with an extremely sensitive microphone. You see, going into a place where there might be serious biological or chemical contamination, we've got to consider the possibility that we might be overwhelmed by a lot of sick and dying people. Now, we simply aren't equipped to administer cures or even amelioratives. We're a research team. Strictly pathology, not treatment. It's our job to find out all we can about the nature of the contaminant, so that properly equipped medical teams can come in right behind us and deal with the survivors. But dying and desperate people might not understand that we can't treat them. They might attack the mobile labs out of anger and frustration.”

“And fear,” Tal Whitman said.

“Exactly,” the general said, missing the irony, “Our psychological stress simulations indicate that it's a very real possibility.”

“And if sick and dying people did try to disrupt your work,” Jenny said, “would you kill them?”

Copperfield turned to her. The sun flashed off his faceplate, transforming it into a mirror, and for a moment she could not see him. Then he shifted slightly, and his face emerged into view again, but not enough of it for her to see what he really looked like. It was a face out of context, framed in the transparent portion of his helmet.

He said, “Dr. Paige, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Doctor, if terrorists or agents of a foreign government committed an act of biological warfare against an American community, it would be up to me and my people to isolate the microbe, identify it, and suggest measures to contain it. That is a sobering responsibility. If we allowed anyone, even the suffering victims, to deter us, the danger of the plague spreading would increase dramatically.”

“So,” Jenny said, still pressing him, “if sick and dying people did try to disrupt your work, you'd kill them.”

“Yes,” he said flatly, “Even decent people must occasionally choose between the lesser of two evils.”

Jenny looked around at Snowfield, which was as much of a graveyard in the morning sun as it had been in the gloom of night. General Copperfield was right. Anything he might have to do to protect his team would only be a little evil. The big evil was what had been done — what was still being done — to this town.

She wasn't quite sure why she had been so testy with him.

Maybe it was because she had thought of him and his people as the cavalry, riding in to save the day. She had wanted all the problems to be solved, all the ambiguities cleared up instantly upon Copperfield's arrival. When she'd realized that it wasn't going to work out that way, when they had actually pulled guns on her, the dream had faded fast. Irrationally, she had blamed the general.

That wasn't like her. Her nerves must be more badly frayed than she had thought.

Bryce began to introduce his men to the general, but Copperfield interrupted. “I don't mean to be rude, Sheriff, but we don't have time for introductions. Later. Right now, I want to move. I want to see all those things you told me about on the phone last night, and then I want to get an autopsy started.”

He wants to skip introductions because it doesn't make sense to be chummy with people who may be doomed, Jenny thought. If we develop disease symptoms in the next few hours, if it turns out to be a brain disease, and if we go berserk and try to rush the mobile labs, it'll be easier for him to have us shot if he doesn't know us very well.

Stop it! she told herself angrily.

She looked at Lisa and thought: Good heavens, kid, if I'm this frazzled, what a state you must be in. Yet you've kept as stiff an upper lip as anyone. What a damned fine kid to have for a sister.

“Before we show you around,” Bryce told Copperfield, “you ought to know about the thing we saw last night and what happened to—”

“No, no,” Copperfield said impatiently, “I want to go through it step by step. Just the way you found things. There'll be plenty of time to tell me what happened last night. Let's get moving.”

“But, you see, it's beginning to look as if it can't possibly be a disease that's wiped out this town,” Bryce protested.

The general said, “My people have come here to investigate possible CBW connections. We'll do that first. Then we can consider other possibilities. SOP, Sheriff.”

Bryce sent most of his men back into the Hilltop Inn, keeping only Tal and Frank with him.

Jenny took Lisa's hand, and they, too, headed back to the inn.

Copperfield called out to her. “Doctor! Wait a moment. I want you with us. You were the first physician on the scene. If the condition of the corpses has changed, you're the one most likely to notice.”

Jenny looked at Lisa. “Want to come along?”

“Back to the bakery? No, thanks.” The girl shuddered.

Thinking of the eerily sweet, childlike voice that had come from the sink drain, Jenny said, “Don't go in the kitchen. And if you have to go to the bathroom, ask someone to go along with you.”

“Jenny, they're all guys!”

“I don't care. Ask Gordy. He can stand outside the stall with his back turned.”

“Jeez, that'd be embarrassing.”

“You want to go into that bathroom by yourself again?”

The color drained out of the girl's face, “No way.”

“Good. Keep close to the others. And I mean close. Not just in the same room. Stay in the same part of the room. Promise?”

“Promise.”

Jenny thought about the two telephone calls from Wargle this morning. She thought of the gross threats he'd made.

Although they had been the threats of a dead man and should have been meaningless, Jenny was frightened.

“You be careful, too,” Lisa said.

She kissed the girl on the cheek. “Now hurry and catch up with Gordy before he turns the corner.”

Lisa ran, calling ahead: “Gordy! Wait up!”

The tall young deputy stopped at the corner and looked back.

Watching Lisa sprint along the cobblestone sidewalk, Jenny felt her heart tightening.

She thought: What if, when I come back, she's gone? What if I never see her alive again?

Chapter 24 Cold Terror

Liebermann's Bakery.

Bryce, Tal, Frank, and Jenny entered the kitchen. General Copperfield and the nine scientists on his team followed closely, and four soldiers, toting submachine guns, brought up the rear.

The kitchen was crowded. Bryce felt uncomfortable. What if they were attacked while they were all jammed together?

What if they had to get out in a hurry?

The two heads were exactly where they had been last night: in the ovens, peering through the glass. On the worktable the severed hands still clutched the rolling pin.

Niven, one of the general's people, took several photographs of the kitchen from various angles, then about a dozen closeups of the heads and hands.

The others kept edging around the room to get out of Niven's way. The photographic record had to be completed before the forensic work could begin, which was not unlike the routine policemen followed at the scene of a crime.

As the spacesuited scientists moved, their rubberized clothing squeaked. Their heavy boots scraped noisily on the tile floor.

“You still think it looks like a simple incident of CBW?” Bryce asked Copperfield.

“Could be.”

“Really?”

Copperfield said, “Phil, you're the resident nerve gas specialist. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

The question was answered by the man whose helmet bore the name HOUK, “It's much too early to tell anything for certain, but it seems as if we could be dealing with a neuroleptic toxin. And there are some things about this — most notably, the extreme psychopathic violence — that lead me to wonder if we've got a case of T-139.”

“Definitely a possibility,” Copperfield said, “Just what I thought when we walked in.”

Niven continued to snap photographs, and Bryce said, “So what's this T-139?”

“One of the primary nerve gases in the Russian arsenal,” the general said. “The full moniker is Timoshenko-139. It's named after Ilya Timoshenko, the scientist who developed it.”

“What a lovely monument,” Tal said sarcastically.

“Most nerve gases cause death within thirty seconds to five minutes after skin contact,” Houk said, “But T-139 isn't that merciful.”

“Merciful!” Frank Autry said, appalled.

“T-139 isn't just a killer,” Houk said, “That would be merciful by comparison. T-139 is what military strategists call a demoralizer.”

Copperfield said, “It passes through the skin and enters the bloodstream in ten seconds or less, then migrates to the brain and almost instantly causes irreparable damage to cerebral tissues.”

Houk said, “For a period of about four to six hours, the victim retains full use of his limbs and a hundred percent of his normal strength. At first, it's only his mind that suffers.”

“Dementia paranoides,” Copperfield said, “Intellectual confusion, fear, rage, loss of emotional control, and a very strongly held feeling that everyone is plotting against him. This is combined with a fierce compulsion to commit violent acts. In essence, Sheriff, T-139 turns people into mindless killing machines for four to six hours. They prey on one another and on unaffected people outside the area of the gas attack. You can see what an extremely demoralizing effect it would have on an enemy.”

“Extremely,” Bryce said, “And Dr. Paige theorized just such a disease last night, a mutant rabies that would kill some people while turning others into demented murderers.”

“T-139 isn't a disease,” Houk said quickly, “It's a nerve gas. And if I had my choice, I'd rather this was a nerve gas attack. Once gas has dissipated, the threat is over. A biological threat is considerably harder to contain.”

“If it was gas,” Copperfield said, “it'll have dissipated long ago, but there'll be traces of it on almost everything. Condensative residue. We'll be able to identify it in no time at all.”

They backed against a wall to make way for Niven and his camera.

Jenny said, “Dr. Houk, in regards to this T-139, you mentioned that the ambulatory stage lasts four to six hours. Then what?”

“Well,” Houk said, “the second stage is the terminal stage, too. It lasts anywhere from six to twelve hours. It begins with the deterioration of the efferent nerves and escalates to paralysis of the cardiac, vasomotor, and respiratory reflex centers in the brain.”

“Good God,” Jenny said.

Frank said, “Once more for us laymen.”

Jenny said, “It means that during the second stage of the illness, over a period of six to twelve hours, T-139 gradually reduces the brain's ability to regulate the automatic functions of the body — such as breathing, heartbeat, blood vessel dilation, organ function… The victim starts experiencing an irregular heartbeat, extreme difficulty in breathing, and the gradual collapse of every gland and organ. Twelve hours might not seem gradual to you, but it would seem like an eternity to the victim. There would be vomiting, diarrhea, uncontrollable urination, continuous and violent muscle spasms… And if only the efferent nerves were damaged, if the rest of the nervous system remained intact, there would be excruciating, unrelenting pain.”

“Six to twelve hours of hell,” Copperfield confirmed.

“Until the heart stops,” Houk said, “or until the victim simply stops breathing and suffocates.”

For long seconds, as Niven clicked the last of his photographs, no one spoke.

Finally, Jenny said, “I still don't think a nerve gas could've played any part in this, not even something like T-139 that would explain these beheadings. For one thing, none of the victims we found showed any signs of vomiting or incontinence.”

“Well,” Copperfield said, “we could be dealing with a derivative of T-139 that doesn't produce those symptoms. Or some other gas.”

“No gas can explain the moth,” Tal Whitman said.

“Or what happened to Stu Wargle,” Frank said.

Copperfield said, “Moth?”

“You didn't want to hear about that until you'd seen these other things,” Bryce reminded Copperfield, “But now I think it's time you—”

Niven said, “Finished.”

“All right,” Copperfield said, “Sheriff, Dr. Paige, deputies, if you will please maintain silence until we've completed the rest of our tasks here, your cooperation will be much appreciated.”

The others immediately set to work. Yamaguchi and Bettenby transferred the severed heads into a pair of porcelainlined specimen buckets with locking, airtight lids. Valdez carefully pried the hands away from the rolling pin and put them in a third specimen bucket. Houk scraped some flour off the table and into a small plastic jar, evidently because dry flour would have absorbed — and would still contain — traces of the nerve gas — if, in fact, there had been any nerve gas. Houk also took a sample of the pie crust dough that lay under the rolling pin. Goldstein and Roberts inspected the two ovens from which the heads had been removed, and then Goldstein used a small, battery-powered vacuum cleaner to sweep out the first oven. When that was done, Roberts took the bag of sweepings, sealed it, and labeled it, while Goldstein used the vacuum to collect minute and even microscopic evidence from the second oven.

All of the scientists were busy except for the two men who were wearing the suits that had no names on the helmets. They stood to one side, merely watching.

Bryce watched the watchers, wondering who they were and what function they preformed.

As the others worked, they described what. they were doing and made comments about what they found, always speaking in a jargon that Bryce couldn't follow. No two of them spoke at once; that fact — when coupled with Copperfield's request for silence from those who were not team members — made it seem as if they were speaking for the record.

Among the items that hung from the utility belt around Copperfield's waist there was a tape recorder wired directly into the communications system of the general's suit. Bryce saw that the reels of tape were moving.

When the scientists had gotten everything they wanted from the bakery kitchen, Copperfield said, “All right, Sheriff. Where now?”

Bryce indicated the tape recorder. “Aren't you going to switch that off until we get there?”

“Nope. We started recording from the moment we were allowed past the roadblock, and we'll keep recording until we've found out what's happened to this town. That way, if something goes wrong, if we all die before we find the solution, the new team will know every step we took. They won't have to start from scratch, and they might even have a detailed record of the fatal mistake that got us killed.”

The second stop was the arts and crafts gallery into which Frank Autry had led the three other men last night. Again, he led the way through the showroom, into the rear office, and up the stairs to the second-floor apartment. It seemed to Frank that there was almost something comic about the scene: all these spacemen lumbering up the narrow stairs, their faces theatrically grim behind plexiglass faceplates, the sound of their breathing amplified by the closed spaces of their helmets and projected out of the speakers on their chests at an exaggerated volume, and ominous sound. It was like one of those 1950s science fiction movies—Attack of the Alien Astronauts or something equally corny — and Frank couldn't help smiling.

But his vague smile vanished when he entered the apartment kitchen and saw the dead man again. The corpse was where it had been last night, lying at the foot of the refrigerator, wearing only blue pajama bottoms. Still swollen, bruised, staring at nothing.

Frank moved out of the way of Copperfield's people and joined Bryce beside the counter where the toaster oven stood.

As Copperfield again requested silence from the uninitiated, the scientists stepped carefully around the sandwich fixings that were scattered across the floor. They crowded around the corpse.

In a few minutes they were finished with a preliminary examination of the body.

Copperfield turned to Bryce and said, “We're going to take this one for an autopsy.”

“You still think it looks as if we're dealing with just a simple incident of CBW?” Bryce asked, as he had asked before.

“It's entirely possible, yes,” the general said.

“But the bruising and swelling,” Tal said.

“Could be allergic reactions to a nerve gas,” Houk said.

“If you'll slide up the leg of the pajamas,” Jenny said, “I believe you'll find that the reaction extends even to unexposed skin.”

“Yes, it does,” Copperfield said, “We've already looked.”

“But how could the skin react even where no nerve gas came into contact with it?”

“Such gases usually have a high penetration factor,” Houk said, “They'll pass right through most clothes. In fact, about the only thing that'll stop many of them is vinyl or rubber garments.”

Just what you're wearing, Frank thought, and just what we're not. “There's another body here,” Bryce told the general, “Do you want to have a look at that one, too?”

“Absolutely.”

“It's this way, sir,” Frank said.

He led them out of the kitchen and down the hall, his gun drawn.

Frank dreaded entering the bedroom where the dead woman lay naked in the rumpled sheets. He remembered the crude things that Stu Wargle had said about her, and he had the terrible feeling that Stu was going to be there now, coupled with the blonde, their dead bodies locked in cold and timeless passion.

But only the woman was there. Sprawled on the bed. Legs still spread wide. Mouth open in an eternal scream.

When Copperfield and his people had finished a preliminary examination of the corpse and were ready to go, Frank made sure they had seen the.22 automatic which she had apparently emptied at her killer. “Do you think she would have shot at just a cloud of nerve gas, General?”

“Of course not,” Copperfield said, “But perhaps she was already affected by the gas, already brain damaged. She could have been shooting at hallucinations, at phantoms.”

“Phantoms,” Frank said, “Yes, sir, that's just about what they would've had to've been. Because, see, she fired all ten shots in the clip, yet we found only two expended slugs — one in that highboy over there, one in the wall where you see the hole. That means she mostly hit whatever she was shooting at.”

“I knew these people,” Doc Paige said, stepping forward. “Gary and Sandy Wechlas. She was something of a markswoman. Always target shooting. She won several competitions at the county fair last year.”

“So she had the skill to make eight hits out of ten,” Frank said, “And even eight hits didn't stop the thing she was trying to stop. Eight hits didn't even make it bleed. Of course, phantoms don't bleed. But, sir, would a phantom be able to walk out of here and take those eight slugs with it?”

Copperfield stared at him, frowning.

All the scientists were frowning, too.

The soldiers weren't only frowning, they were looking around uneasily.

Frank could see that the condition of the two bodies especially the woman's nightmarish expression — had had an effect on the general and his people. The fear in everyone's eyes was sharper now. Although they didn't want to admit it, they had encountered something beyond their experience. They were still clinging to explanations that made sense to them nerve gas, virus, poison — but they were beginning to have doubts.

Copperfield's people had brought a zippered plastic body bag with them. In the kitchen, they slipped the pajama-clad corpse into the bag, then carried it out of the building and left it on the sidewalk, intending to pick it up again on the way back to the mobile labs.

Bryce led them to Gil Martin's Market. Inside, back by the milk coolers where it had happened, he told them about Jake Johnson's disappearance, “No screams. No sound at all. Just a few seconds of darkness. A few seconds. But when the lights came on again, Jake was gone.”

Copperfield said, “You looked”

“Everywhere.”

“He could have run away,” Roberts said.

“Yes,” Dr. Yamaguchi said, “Maybe he deserted. Considering the things he'd seen…”

“My God,” Goldstein said, “what if he left Snowfield? He might be beyond the quarantine line, carrying the infection”

“No, no, no. Jake wouldn't desert,” Bryce said, “He wasn't exactly the most aggressive officer on the force, but he wouldn't run out on me. He wasn't irresponsible.”

“Definitely not,” Tal agreed, “Besides, Jake's old man was once county sheriff, so there's a lot of family pride involved.”

“And Jake was a cautious man,” Frank said, “He didn't do anything on impulse.”

Bryce nodded. “Anyway, even if he was spooked enough to run, he'd have taken a squad car. He sure wouldn't have walked out of town.”

“Look,” Copperfield said, “he'd have known they wouldn't let him past the roadblock, so he'd have avoided the highway altogether. He might have gone off through the woods.”

Jenny shook her head. “No, General. The land is wild out there. Deputy Johnson would've known he'd get lost and die.”

“And,” Bryce said, “would a frightened man plunge pellmell into a strange forest at night? I don't think so, General. But I do think it's time you heard about what happened to my other deputy.”

Leaning against a cooler full of cheese and lunchmeat, Bryce told them about the moth, about the attack on Wargle and the bloodcurdling condition of the corpse. He told them about Lisa's encounter with a resurrected Wargle and about the subsequent discovery that the body was missing.

Copperfield and his people expressed astonishment at first, then confusion, then fear. But during most of Bryce's tale, they stared at him in wary silence and glanced at one another knowingly.

He finished by telling them about the child's voice that had come from the kitchen drain just moments before their arrival. Then, for the third time, he said, “Well, General, do you still think it looks like a simple incident of CBW?”

Copperfield hesitated, looked around at the littered market, finally met Bryce's eyes, and said, “Sheriff, I want Dr. Roberts and Dr. Goldstein to give complete physical examinations to you and to everyone who saw this… uh… moth.”

“You don't believe me.”

“Oh, I believe that you genuinely, sincerely think you saw all of those things.”

“Damn,” Tal said.

Copperfield said, “Surely, you can understand that, to us, it sounds as if you've all been contaminated, as if you're suffering from hallucinations.”

Bryce was weary of their disbelief and frustrated by their intellectual rigidity. As scientists, they were supposed to be receptive to new ideas and unexpected possibilities. Instead, they appeared determined to force the evidence to conform to their preconceived notions of what they would find in Snowfield.

“You think we all could've had the same hallucination?” Bryce asked.

“Mass hallucinations aren't unknown,” Copperfield said.

“General,” Jenny said, “there was absolutely nothing hallucinatory about what we saw. It had the gritty texture of reality.”

“Doctor Paige, I would ordinarily accord considerable weight to any observation you cared to make. But as one of those who claim to have seen this moth, your medical judgment in the matter simply isn't objective.”

Scowling at Copperfield, Frank Autry said, “But, sir, if it was all just something we hallucinated — then where is Stu Wargle?”

“Maybe both he and this Jake Johnson ran out on you,” Roberts said, “And maybe you've merely incorporated their disappearances into your delusions.”

From long experience, Bryce knew that a debate was always lost the moment you became emotional. He forced himself to remain in a relaxed position, leaning against the cooler. Keeping his voice soft and slow, he said, “General, from the things you and your people have said, someone could get the idea that the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department is staffed exclusively by cowards, fools, and goldbrickers.”

Copperfield made placating gestures with his rubber-sheathed hands. “No, no, no. We're not saying anything of the kind. Please, Sheriff, try to understand. We're only being straight forward with you. We're telling you how the situation looks to us — how it would look to anyone with any specialized knowledge of chemical and biological warfare. Hallucination is one of the things we expect to find in survivors. It's one of the things we have to look for. Now, if you could offer us a logical explanation for the existence of this eagle-size moth… well, maybe then we could come to believe in it ourselves. But you can't. Which leaves our suggestion — that you merely hallucinated it — as the only explanation that makes sense.”

Bryce noticed the four soldiers staring at him in a much different way now that he was thought to be a victim of nerve gas. After all, a man suffering from bizarre hallucinations was obviously unstable, dangerous, perhaps even violent enough to cut off people's heads and pop them into bakery ovens. The soldiers raised their submachine guns an inch or two, although they didn't actually aim at Bryce. They regarded him — and Jenny and Tal and Frank — with a new and unmistakable air of suspicion.

Before Bryce could respond to Copperfield, he was startled by a loud noise at the back of the market, beyond the butcher'sblock tables. He stepped away from the cooler, turned toward the source of the commotion, and put his right hand on his holstered revolver.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two soldiers reacting to him rather than to the noise. When he had put his hand on his revolver, they had instantly raised their submachine guns.

It was a hammering sound that had drawn his attention. And a voice. Both were coming from within the walk-in meat locker, on the other side of the butcher's work area, no more than fifteen feet away, almost directly opposite the point at which Bryce and the others were gathered. The thick, insulated door of the locker muffled the blows that were being rained on it, but they were still loud. The voice was muffled, too, the words unclear, but Bryce thought he could hear someone shouting for help.

“Somebody's trapped in there,” Copperfield said.

“Can't be,” Bryce said.

Frank said, “Can't be locked in because the door opens from both sides.” The hammering and shouting ceased abruptly.

A clatter.

A rattle of metal on metal.

The handle on the large, burnished-steel door moved up, down, up, down, up…

The latch clicked. The door swung open. But only a couple of inches. Then it stopped.

The refrigerated air inside the locker rushed out, mixing with the warmer air in the market. Tendrils of frosty vapor rose along the length of the open door.

Although the light was on in the room beyond the door, Bryce couldn't see anything through the narrow gap. Nevertheless, he knew what the refrigerated meat locker looked like. During last night's search for Jake Johnson, Bryce had been in there, poking around. It was a frigid, windowless, claustrophobic place, about twelve by fifteen feet. There was one other door — equipped with two deadbolt locks — that opened onto the alley for the easy receival of meat deliveries. A painted concrete floor. Sealed concrete walls. Fluorescent lights. Vents in three of the walls circulated cold air around the sides of beef, veal, and slabs of pork that hung from the ceiling racks.

Bryce could hear nothing except the amplified breathing of the scientists and soldiers in the decontamination suits, and even that was subdued; some of them seemed to be holding their breath.

Then from within the locker came a groan of pain. A pitifully weak voice cried out for help. Rebounding from the cold concrete walls, carried on the spiraling thermals of air that escaped through the narrowly opened door, the voice was shaky, echodistorted, yet recognizable.

“Bryce… Tal…? Who's out there? Frank? Gordy? is somebody out there? Can… somebody… help me?”

It was Jake Johnson.

Bryce, Jenny, Tal, and Frank stood very still, listening.

Copperfield said, “Whoever it is, he needs help badly.”

“Bryce… please… somebody…”

“You know him?” Copperfield asked, “He's calling your name — isn't he, Sheriff?”

Without waiting for an answer, the general ordered two of his men — Sergeant Harker and Private Pascalli — to look in the meat locker.

“Wait!” Bryce said, “Nobody goes back there. We're keeping these coolers between us and that locker until we know more.”

“Sheriff, while I fully intend to cooperate with you as far as possible, you have no authority over my men or me.”

“Bryce… it's me… Jake… For God's sake, help me. I broke my damned leg.”

“Jake?” Copperfield asked, squinting curiously at Bryce.

“You mean that man in there is the same one you said was snatched away from here last night?”

“Somebody… help… Jesus, it's c-cold… so c-c-cold.”

“It sounds like him,” Bryce admitted.

“Well, there you are!” Copperfield said, “Nothing mysterious about it, after all. He's been right here all this time.”

Bryce glared at the general. “I told you we searched everywhere last night. Even in the goddamned meat locker. He wasn't there.”

“Well, he is now,” the general said.

“Hey, out there! I'm c-cold. Can't take more this… damned leg!”

Jenny touched Bryce's arm. “It's wrong. It's all wrong.”

Copperfield said, “Sheriff, we can't just stand here and allow an injured man to suffer.”

“If Jake had really been in there all night,” Frank Autry said, “he would've frozen to death by now.”

“Well, if it's a meat locker,” Copperfield said, “then the air inside isn't freezing. It's just cold. If the man was warmly dressed he might easily have survived this long.”

“But how'd he get in there in the first place?” Frank asked. “What the devil's he been doing in there?”

“And he wasn't in there last night,” Tal said impatiently.

Jake Johnson called for help again.

“There's danger here,” Bryce told Copperfield, “I sense it. My men sense it. Dr. Paige senses it.”

“I don't,” Copperfield said.

“General, you just haven't been in Snowfield long enough to understand that you've got to expect the utterly unexpected.”

“Like moths the size of eagles?”

Biting back his anger, Bryce said, “You haven't been here long enough to understand that… well… nothing's quite what it seems.”

Copperfield studied him skeptically. “Don't get mystical on me, Sheriff.” In the meat locker, Jake Johnson began to cry. His whim paring pleas were awful to hear. He sounded like a pain-racked, terrified old man. He didn't sound the least bit dangerous.

“We've got to help that man now,” Copperfield said.

“I'm not risking my men,” Bryce said, “Not yet.”

Copperfield again ordered Sergeant Harker and Private Pascalli to look in the meat locker. Although it was obvious from his demeanor that he didn't think there was much danger for men armed with submachine guns, he told them to proceed with caution. The general still believed the enemy was something as small as a bacterium or molecule of nerve gas.

The two soldiers hurried along the rows of coolers toward the gate that led into the butcher's work area.

Frank said, “If Jake could open the door, why couldn't he push it completely open and let us see him?”

“He probably used up the last of his strength just getting the door unlatched,” Copperfield said, “You can hear it in his voice, for God's sake. Utter exhaustion.”

Harker and Pascalli went through the gate, behind the coolers.

Bryce's hand tightened on the butt of his holstered revolver.

Tal Whitman said, “There's too much wrong with this setup, damn it. If it's really Jake, if he needs help, why did he wait until now to open the door?”

“The only way we'll find out is to ask him,” the general said.

“No, I mean, there's an outside entrance to that locker,” Tal said, “He could've opened the door earlier and shouted out into the alley. As quiet as this town is, we'd have heard him all the way over at the Hilltop.”

“Maybe he's been unconscious until now,” Copperfield said.

Harker and Pascalli were moving past the worktables and the electric meat saw.

Jake Johnson called out again: “Is someone… coming? Is someone… coming now?”

Jenny began to raise another objection, but Bryce said, “Save your breath.”

“Doctor,” Copperfield said, “can you actually expect us to just ignore the man's cries for help?”

“Of course not,” she said, “But we ought to take time to think of a safe way of having a look in there.”

Shaking his head, Copperfield interrupted her: “We've got to attend to him without delay. Listen to him, Doctor. He's hurt bad.”

Jake was moaning in pain again.

Harker moved toward the meat locker door.

Pascalli dropped back a couple of paces and over to one side, covering his sergeant as best he could.

Bryce felt the muscles bunching with tension in his back, across his shoulders, and in his neck.

Harker was at the door.

“No,” Jenny said softly.

The locker door was hinged to swing inward. Harker reached out with the barrel of his submachine gun and shoved the door all the way open. The cold hinges rasped and squealed.

That sound sent a shiver through Bryce.

Jake wasn't sprawled in the doorway. He wasn't anywhere in sight.

Past the sergeant, nothing could be seen except the hanging sides of beef: dark, fat-mottled, bloody.

Harker hesitated

(Don't do it! Bryce thought.)

— and then plunged through the doorway. He crossed the threshold in a crouch, looking left and swinging the gun that way, then almost instantly looking right and bringing the-muzzle around.

To his right, Harker saw something. He jerked upright in surprise and fear. Stumbling hastily backwards, he collided with a side of beef, “Holy shit!”

Harker punctuated his cry with a short burst of fire from his submachine gun.

Bryce winced. The boom-rattle of the weapon was thunderous.

Something pushed against the far side of the meat locker door and slammed it shut.

Harker was trapped in there with it. It.

“Christ!” Bryce said.

Not wasting the time it would have taken to run to the gate, Bryce clambered up onto the waist-high cooler in front of him, stepping on packets of Kraft Swiss cheese and wax-encased gouda. He scrambled across and dropped off the other side, into the butcher's area.

Another burst of gunfire. Longer this time. Maybe even long enough to empty the gun's magazine.

Pascalli was at the locker door, struggling frantically with the handle. Bryce rounded the worktables. “What's wrong?”

Private Pascalli looked too young to be in the army — and very scared.

“Let's get him the hell out of there!” Bryce said.

“Can't! This fucker won't open!”

Inside the meat locker, the gunfire stopped.

The screaming began.

Pascalli wrenched desperately at the unrelenting handle.

Although the thick, insulated door muffled Harker's screams, they were nevertheless loud, and they swiftly grew even louder. Coming through the walkie-talkie built into Pascalli's suit, the agonized wailing must have been deafening, for the private suddenly put a hand to his helmeted head as if trying to block out the sound.

Bryce pushed the soldier aside. He gripped the long, leveraction door handle with both hands. It wouldn't budge up or down.

In the locker, the piercing screams rose and fell and rose, getting louder and shriller and more horrifying.

What in the hell is it doing to Harker? Bryce wondered. Skinning the poor bastard alive?

He looked toward the coolers. Tal had scrambled over the display case and was coming on the double. The general and another soldier, Private Fodor, were rushing through the gate. Frank had jumped onto one of the coolers but was facing out toward the main part of the store, guarding against the possibility that the commotion at the meat locker was just a diversion. Everyone else was still standing in a group, in the aisle beyond the coolers.

Bryce shouted, “Jenny!”

“Yeah?”

“Does this store have a hardware section?”

“Odds and ends.”

“I need a screwdriver.”

“Can do.” She was already running.

Harker screamed.

Jesus, what a terrible cry it was. Out of a nightmare. Out of a lunatic asylum. Out of Hell.

Just listening to it caused Bryce to break out in a cold sweat.

Copperfield reached the locker. “Let me at that handle.”

“It's no use.”

“Let me at it!”

Bryce got out of the way.

The general was a big brawny man — the biggest man here, in fact. He looked strong enough to uproot century-old oaks. Straining, cursing, he moved the door handle no farther than Bryce had done.

“The goddamned latch must be broken or bent,” Copperfield said, panting.

Harker screamed and screamed.

Bryce thought of Liebermann's Bakery. The rolling pin on the table. The hands. The severed hands. This was the way a man might scream while he watched his hands being cut off at the wrists.

Copperfield pounded on the door in rage and frustration.

Bryce glanced at Tal. This was a first: Talbert Whitman visibly frightened.

Calling to Bryce, Jenny came through the gate. She had three screwdrivers, each of them sealed in a brightly colored cardboard and plastic package.

“Didn't know which size you needed,” she said.

“Okay,” Bryce said, reaching for the tools, “now get out of here fast. Go back with the others.”

Ignoring his command, she gave him two of the screwdrivers, but she held on to the third.

Harker's screams had become so shrill, so awful, that they no longer sounded human.

As Bryce ripped open one package, Jenny tore the third bright yellow container to shreds and extracted the screwdriver from it.

“I'm a doctor. I stay.”

“He's beyond any doctor's help,” Bryce said, frantically tearing open the second package.

“Maybe not. If you thought there wasn't a chance, you wouldn't be trying to get him out of there.”

“Damn it, Jenny!”

He was worried about her, but he knew he wouldn't be able to persuade her to leave if she had already made up her mind to stay.

He took the third screwdriver from her, shouldered past General Copperfield, and returned to the door.

He couldn't remove the door's hinge pins. It swung into the locker, so the hinges were on the inside.

But the lever-action handle fitted through a large cover plate behind which lay the lock mechanism. The plate was fastened to the face of the door by four screws. Bryce hunkered down in front of it, selected the most suitable screwdriver, and removed the first screw, letting it drop to the floor.

Harker's screaming stopped.

The ensuing silence was almost worse than the screams.

Bryce removed the second, third, and fourth screws.

There was still no sound from Sergeant Harker.

When the cover plate was loose, Bryce slid it along the handle, pulled it free, and discarded it. He squinted at the guts of the lock, probed at the mechanism with the screwdriver. In response, ragged bits of torn metal popped out of the lock; other pieces rattled down through a hollow space in the interior of the door. The lock had been thoroughly mangled from within the door. He found the manual release slot in the shaft of the latch bolt, slid the screwdriver through it, pulled to the right. The spring seemed to have been badly bent or sprung, for there was very little play left in it. Nevertheless, he drew the bolt back far enough to bring it out of the hole in the lamb, then pushed inward. Something clicked; the door started to swing open.

Everyone, including Bryce, backed out of the way.

The door's own weight contributed sufficiently to its momentum, so that it continued to swing slowly, slowly inward.

Private Pascalli was covering it with his submachine gun, and Bryce drew his own handgun, as did Copperfield, although Sergeant Harker had conclusively proved that such weapons were useless.

The door swung all the way open.

Bryce expected something to rush out at them. Nothing did.

Looking through the doorway and across the locker, he could see that the outer door was open, too, which it definitely hadn't been when Harker had gone inside a couple of minutes ago. Beyond it lay the sun-splashed alleyway.

Copperfield ordered Pascalli and Fodor to secure the locker. They went through the door fast, one turning to the left, the other to the right, out of sight.

In a few seconds, Pascalli returned. “It's all clear, sir.”

Copperfield went into the locker, and Bryce followed.

Harker's submachine gun was lying on the floor.

Sergeant Harker was hanging from the ceiling meat rack, next to a side of beef-hanging on an enormous, wickedly pointed, two-pronged meat hook that had been driven through his chest.

Bryce's stomach heaved. He started to turn away from the hanging man — and then realized it wasn't really Harker. It was only the sergeant's decontamination suit and helmet, hanging slack, empty. The tough vinyl fabric was slashed. The plexiglass faceplate was broken and torn half out of the rubber gasket into which it had been firmly set. Harker had been pulled from the suit before it had been impaled. But where was Harker?

Gone.

Another one. Just gone.

Pascalli and Fodor were out on the loading platform, looking up and down the alleyway.

“All that screaming,” Jenny said, stepping up beside Bryce, “yet there's no blood on the floor or on the suit.”

Tal Whitman scooped up several expended shell casings that had been spat out by the submachine gun; scores of them littered the floor. The brass casings gleamed in his open palm. “Lots of these, but I don't see many slugs. Looks like the sergeant hit what he was shooting at. Must've scored at least a hundred hits. Maybe two hundred. How many rounds are in one of those big magazines, General?”

Copperfield stared at the shiny casings but didn't answer.

Pascalli and Fodor came back in from the loading platform, and Pascalli said, “There's no sign of him out there, sir. You want us to search farther along the alley?”

Before Copperfield could respond, Bryce said, “General, you've got to write off Sergeant Harker, painful as that might be. He's dead. Don't hold out any hope for him. Death is what this is all about. Death. Not hostage-taking. Not terrorism. Not nerve gas. There's nothing halfway about this. We're playing for all the marbles. I don't know exactly what the hell's out there or where it came from, but I do know that it's Death personified. Death is out there in some form we can't even imagine yet, driven by some purpose we might never understand. The moth that killed Stu Wargle — that wasn't even the true appearance of this thing. I feel it. The moth was like the reincarnation of Wargle's body, when he went after Lisa in the restroom: It was a bit of misdirection… sleight-of-hand.”

“A phantom,” Tal said, using the word that Copperfield had introduced with somewhat different meaning.

“A phantom, yes,” Bryce said. “we haven't yet encountered the real enemy. It's something that just plain likes to kill. It can kill quickly and silently, the way it took Jake Johnson. But it killed Harker more slowly, hurting him real bad, making him scream. Because it wanted us to hear those screams. Harker's murder was sort of like what you said about T-139: It was a demoralizer. This thing didn't carry Sergeant Harker away, It got him, General. It got him. Don't risk the lives of more men searching for a corpse.”

Copperfield was silent for a moment. Then he said, “But the voice we heard. It was your man, Jake Johnson.”

“No,” Bryce said, “I don't think it really was Jake. It sounded like him, but now I'm beginning to suspect we're up against something that's a terrific mimic.”

“Mimic?” Copperfield said.

Jenny looked at Bryce. “Those animal sounds on the telephone.”

“Yeah. The cats, dogs, birds, rattlesnakes, the crying child… It was almost like a performance. As if it were bragging: “Hey, look what I can do; look how clever I am.” Jake Johnson's voice was just one more impersonation in its repertoire.”

“What are you proposing?” Copperfield asked, “Something supernatural?”

“No. This is real.”

“Then what? Put a name to it,” Copperfield demanded.

“I can't, damn it,” Bryce said, “Maybe it's a natural mutation or even something that came out of a genetic engineering lab somewhere. You know anything about that, General? Maybe the army's got an entire goddamned division of geneticists creating biological fighting machines, man-made monsters designed to slaughter and terrorize, creatures stitched together from the DNA of half a dozen animals. Take some of the genetic structure of the tarantula and combine it with some of the genetic structure of the crocodile, the cobra, the wasp, maybe even the grizzly bear, and then insert the genes for human intelligence just for the hell of it. Put it all in a test tube; incubate it; nurture it. What would you get? What would it look like? Do I sound like a raving lunatic for even proposing such a thing? Frankenstein with a modern twist? Have they actually gone that far with recombinant DNA research? Maybe I shouldn't even have ruled out the supernatural. What I'm trying to say, General, is that it could be anything. That's why I can't put a name to it. Let your imagination run wild, General. No matter what hideous thing you conjure up, we can't rule it out. We're dealing with the unknown, and the unknown encompasses all our nightmares.”

Copperfield stared at him, then looked up at Sergeant Harper's suit and helmet which hung from the meat hook. He turned to Pascalli and Fodor, “We won't search the alley. The sheriff is probably right. Sergeant Harker is lost, and — there's nothing we can do for him.”

For the fourth time since Copperfield had arrived in town, Bryce said, “Do you still think it looks as if we're dealing with just a simple incident of CBW?”

“Chemical or biological agents might be involved,” Copperfield said. “As you observed, we can't rule out anything. But it's not a simple case. You're right about that, Sheriff. I'm sorry for suggesting you were only hallucinating and—”

“Apology accepted,” Bryce said.

“Any theories?” Jenny asked.

“Well,” Copperfield said, “I want to start the first autopsy and pathology tests right away. Maybe we won't find a disease or a nerve gas, but we still might find something that'll give us a clue.”

“You'd better do that, sir,” Tal said, “Because I have a hunch that time is running out.”

Chapter 25 Questions

Corporal Billy Velazquez, one of General Copperfield's support troops, climbed down through the manhole, into the storm drain. Although he hadn't exerted himself, he was breathing hard. Because he was scared.

What had happened to Sergeant Harker?

The others had come back, looking stunned. Old man Copperfield said Harker was dead. He said they weren't quite sure what had killed Sarge, but they intended to find out. Man, that was bullshit. They must know what killed him. They just didn't want to say. That was typical of the brass, making secrets of everything.

The ladder descended through a short section of vertical pipe, then into the main horizontal drain. Billy reached the bottom. His booted feet made hard, flat sounds when they struck the concrete floor.

The tunnel wasn't high enough to allow him to stand erect. He crouched slightly and swept his flashlight around.

Gray concrete walls. Telephone and power company pipes. A little moisture. Some fungus here and there. Nothing else.

Billy stepped away from the ladder as Ron Peake, another member of the support squad, came down into the drain.

Why hadn't they at least brought Harker's body back with them when they'd returned from Gil Martin's Market?

Billy kept shining his flashlight around and glancing nervously behind him.

Why had old Iron Ass Copperfield kept stressing the need to be watchful and careful down here?

Sir, what're we supposed to be on the lookout for? Billy had asked.

Copperfield had said, Anything. Everything. I don't know if there's any danger or not. And even if there is, I don't know exactly what to tell you to look for. Just be damned cautious. And if anything moves down there, no matter how innocent it looks, even if it's just a mouse, get your asses out of there fast.

Now what the hell kind of answer was that?

Jesus.

It gave him the creeps.

Billy wished he'd had a chance to talk to Pascalli or Fodor. They weren't the damned brass. They would give him the whole story about Harker — if he ever got a chance to ask them about it.

Ron Peake reached the bottom of the ladder. He looked anxiously at Billy.

Velazquez directed the flashlight all the way around them in order to show the other man there was nothing to worry about.

Ron switched on his own flash and smiled self-consciously, embarrassed by his jumpiness.

The men above began to feed a power cable through the open manhole. It led back to the two mobile laboratories, which were parked a few yards from the entrance to the drain.

Ron took the end of the cable, and Billy, shuffling forward in a crouch, led the way Cast. On the street above, the other men paid out more cable into the drain.

This tunnel should intersect an equally large hole perhaps larger conduit under the main street, Skyline Road. At that point there ought to be a power company junction box where several strands of the town's electrical web were joined together. As Billy proceeded with all the caution that Copperfield had suggested, he played the beam of his flashlight over the walls of the tunnel, looking for the power company's insignia.

The junction box was on the left, five or six feet this side of the intersection of the two conduits. Billy walked past it, to the Skyline Road drain, leaned out into the passageway, and pointed his light to the right and to the left, making sure there was nothing lurking around. The Skyline Road pipe was the same size as the one in which he now stood, but it followed the slope of the street above it, plunging down the mountainside. There was nothing in sight.

Looking downhill, into the dwindling gray bore of the tunnel, Billy Velazquez was reminded of a story he'd read years ago in a horror comic. He'd forgotten the title of it. The tale was about a bank robber who killed two people during a holdup and then, fleeing police, slipped into the city's storm drain system. The villain had taken a downward-sloping tunnel, figuring it would lead to the river, but where it had led, instead, was to Hell. That was what the Skyline Road drain looked like as it fell down, down, down: a road to Hell.

Billy turned to peer uphill again, wondering if it would look like a road to Heaven. But it looked the same both ways. Up or down, it looked like a road to Hell.

What had happened to Sergeant Harker?

Would the same thing happen to everyone, sooner or later?

Even to William Luis Velazquez, who had always been so sure (until now) that he would live forever?

His mouth was suddenly dry.

He turned his head inside his helmet and put his parched lips on the nipple of the nutrient tube. He sucked on it, drawing a sweet, cool, carbohydrate-packed, vitamin-and-mineral-rich fluid into his mouth. What he wanted was a beer. But until he could get out of this suit, the nutrient solution was the only thing available. He carried a forty-eight-hour supply — if he didn't take more than two ounces an hour.

Turning away from the road to Hell, he went to the junction box. Ron Peake was at work already. Moving efficiently despite their bulky decon suits and the cramped quarters, they tapped into the power supply.

The unit had brought its own generator, but it would be used only if the more convenient municipal power were lost.

In a few minutes, Velazquez and Peake were finished. Billy used his suit-to-suit radio to call up to the surface. “General, we've made the tap. You should have power now, sir.”

The response came at once: “We do. Now get your asses out of there on the double!”

“Yes, sir,” Billy said.

Then he heard… something.

Rustling.

Panting.

And Ron Peake grabbed Billy's shoulder. Pointed. Past him. Back toward the Skyline drain.

Billy whirled around, crouched down even farther, and shone his flashlight out into the intersection, where Peake's flash was focused.

Animals were streaming down the Skyline Road tunnel. Dozens upon dozens. Dogs. White and gray and black and brown and rust-red and golden, dogs of all sizes and descriptions: mostly mutts but also beagles, toy poodles, full-size poodles, German shepherds, spaniels, two Great Danes, a couple of Airedales, a schnauzer, a pair of coal-black Dobermans with brown-trimmed muzzles. And there were cats, too. Big and small. Lean cats and fat cats. Black and calico and white and yellow and ring-tailed and brown and spotted and striped and gray cats. None of the dogs barked or-growled. None of the cats meowed or hissed. The only sounds were their panting and the soft padding and scraping of their paws on the concrete. The animals poured down through the drain with a curious intensity, all of them looking straight ahead, none of them even glancing into the intersecting drain, where Billy and Peake stood.

“What're they doing down here?” Billy wanted to know.

“How'd they get here?”

From the street above, Copperfield radioed down: “What's wrong, Velazquez?”

Billy was so amazed by the procession of animals that he didn't immediately respond.

Other animals began to appear, mixed in among the cats and dogs. Squirrels. Rabbits. A gray fox. Raccoons. More foxes and more squirrels. Skunks. All of them were staring straight ahead, oblivious of everything except the need to keep moving. Possums and badgers. Mice and chipmunks. Coyotes. All rushing down the road to Hell, swamng over and around and under one another, yet never once stumbling or hesitating or snapping at one another. This strange parade was as swift, continuous, and harmonious as flowing water.

“Velazquez! Peake! Report in!”

“Animals,” Billy told the general, “Dogs, cats, raccoons, all kinds of things. A river of 'em.”

“Sir, they're running down the Skyline tunnel, just beyond the mouth of the pipe,” Ron Peake said.

“Underground,” Billy said, baffled. “it's crazy.

Retreat, goddamnit!” Copperfield said urgently, “Get out of there now. Now!”

Billy remembered the general's warning, issued just before they had descended through the manhole: If anything moves down there… even if it's just a mouse, get your asses out of there fast.

Initially, the subterranean parade of animals had been startling but not particularly frightening. Now, the bizarre procession was suddenly eerie, even threatening.

And now there were snakes among the animals. Scores of them. Long blacksnakes, slithering fast, with their heads raised a foot or two above the floor of the storm drain. And there were rattlers, their flat and evil heads held lower than those of the longer blacksnakes, but moving just as fast and just as sinuously, swarming with mysterious purpose toward a dark and equally mysterious destination.

Although the snakes paid no more attention to Velazquez and Peake than the dogs and cats did, their slithering arrival was enough to snap Billy out of his trance. He hated snakes. He turned back the way he had come, prodded Peake. “Go. Go on. Get out of here. Run!”

Something shrieked-screamed-roared.

Billy's heart pounded with jackhammer ferocity.

The sound came from the Skyline drain, from back there on the road to Hell. Billy didn't dare look back.

It was neither a human scream nor like any animal sound, yet it was unquestionably the cry of a living thing. There was no mistaking the raw emotions of that alien, blood-freezing bleat. It wasn't a scream of fear or pain. It was a blast of rage, hatred, and feverish blood-hunger.

Fortunately, that malevolent roar didn't come from nearby, but from farther up the mountain, toward the uppermost end of the Skyline conduit. The beast — whatever in God's name it was — was at, least not already upon them. But it was coming fast.

Ron Peake hurried back toward the ladder, and Billy followed. Encumbered by the curved floor Although they hadn’t far to go, their progress was maddingly slow.

The thing in the tunnel cried out again.

Closer.

It was a whine and a snarl and a howl and a roar and a petulant squeal all tangled together, a barbed-wire sound that punctured Billy's ears and raked cold metal spikes across his heart.

Closer.

If Billy Velazquez had been a God-fearing Nazarene or a Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone, fundamentalist Christian, he would have known what beast might make such a cry. If he had been taught that the Dark One and His wicked minions stalked the earth in fleshy forms, seeking unwary souls to devour, he would have identified this beast at once. He would have said, “It's Satan.” The roar echoing through the concrete tunnels was truly that terrible.

And closer.

Getting closer.

Coming fast.

But Billy was a Catholic. Modern Catholicism tended to downplay the sulphurous-pits-of-Hell stories in favor of emphasizing God's great mercy and infinite compassion. Extremist Protestant fundamentalists saw the hand of the Devil in everything from television programming to the novels of Judy Blume to the invention of the push-up bra. But Catholicism struck a quieter, more light-hearted note than that. The Church of Rome now gave the world such things as singing nuns, Wednesday Night Bingo, and priests like Andrew Greeley. Therefore, Billy Velazquez, raised a Catholic, did not immediately associate supernatural Satanic forces with the chilling cry of this unknown beast — not even though he so vividly remembered that old road-to-Hell comic book story. Billy just knew that the bellowing creature approaching through the bowels of the earth was a bad thing. A very bad thing.

And it was getting closer. Much closer.

Ron Peake reached the ladder, started up, dropped his flashlight, didn't bother to return for it.

Peake was too slow, and Billy shouted at him: “Move your ass!”

The scream of the unknown beast had become an eerie ululation that filled the subterranean storm drains as completely as floodwater. Billy couldn't even hear himself shouting.

Peake was halfway up the ladder.

There was almost enough room for Billy to slip in under him and start up. He put one hand on the ladder.

Peake's foot slipped. He dropped down a rung.

Billy cursed and snatched his hand out of the way.

The banshee keening grew louder.

Closer, closer.

Peake's fallen flashlight was pointing off toward the Skyline drain, but Billy didn't look back that way. He stared only up toward the sunlight. If he glanced behind and saw something hideous, his strength would flee him, and he would be unable to move, and it would get him, by God, it would get him.

Peake scrambled upwards again. His feet stayed on the rungs this time.

The concrete drain was transmitting vibrations that Billy could feel through the soles of his boots. The vibrations were like heavy, lumbering, yet lightning-quick footsteps.

Don't look, don't look!

Billy grabbed the sides of the ladder and clawed his way up as rapidly as Peake's progress would allow. One rung. Two. Three.

Above, Peake passed through the manhole and into the street.

With Peake out of the way, a fall of autumn sunlight splashed down over Billy Velazquez, and there was something about it that was like light piercing a church window — maybe because it represented hope.

He was halfway up the ladder.

Going to make it, going to make it, definitely going to make it, he told himself breathlessly.

But the shrieking and howling, Jesus, like being in the center of a cyclone! Another rung.

And another one.

The decontamination suit felt heavier than it had ever felt before. A ton. A suit of armor. Weighing him down.

He was in the vertical pipe now, moving out of the horizontal drain that ran beneath the street. He looked up longingly at the light and the faces peering down at him, and he kept moving.

Going to make it.

His head rose through the manhole.

Someone reached out, offering a hand. It was Copperfield himself.

Behind Billy, the shrieking stopped.

He climbed another rung, let go of the ladder with one hand, and reached for the general—

— but something seized his legs from below before he could grasp Copperfield's hand.

“No!”

Something grabbed him, wrenched his feet off the ladder, and yanked him away. strangely, he heard himself screaming for his mother — Billy went down, cracking his helmet against the wall of the pipe and then against a rung of the ladder, scratching his elbows and knees, trying desperately to catch hold of a rung but failing, finally collapsing into the powerful embrace of an unspeakable something that began to drag him backwards toward the Skyline conduit.

He twisted, kicked, struck out with his fists, to no effect. He was held tightly and dragged deeper into the drains.

In the backsplash of light coming through the manhole, then in the rapidly dimming beam of Peake's discarded flashlight, Billy saw a bit of the thing had him in its grasp. Not much. Fragments looming out of the shadows, then vanishing into darkness again. He saw just enough to make his bowels and bladder loosen. It was lizardlike. But not a lizard. Insectlike. But not an insect. It whaled and mewled and snarled. It snapped and tore at his suit as it pulled him along. It had cavernous jaws and teeth. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph — the teeth! A double row of razor — edge spikes. It had claws, and it was huge, and its eyes were smoky red with elongated pupils as black as the bottom of a grave. He had scales of skin, and two horns, thrusting from its brow above its baleful eyes, curving out and up, as sharply pointed as daggers. A snout redder than a nose, a snout that oozed snot. A forked tongue that flickered in and out and in and out across all dim deadly fangs, and something that looked like the stinger on a wasp or maybe a pincer.

It dragged Billy Velazquez into the Skyline conduit. He clawed at the concrete, desperately seeking something to hold on to, but he only succeeded in abrading away the fingers and palms of his gloves. He felt the cool underground air on his hands, and he realized he might now be contaminated, but that wasn't the end of his worries.

It dragged him into the tunnel of darkness. Then stopped, and held him tightly. Then tore at his suit. It cracked his helmet. It pried at his plexiglass faceplate. It was after him as if he were a delicious morsel of nut meat in a hard shell.

His hold on sanity was tenuous at best, but he struggled to keep his wits about him, tried to understand. At first, it seemed to him that this was a prehistoric creature, something millions of years old that had somehow dropped through a time warp into the storm drains. But that was crazy. He felt a silvery, high-pitched, lunatic giggle coming over him, and he knew he would be lost if he gave voice to it. The beast tore away most of his decontamination suit. It was on him now, pressing hard, a cold and disgustingly slick thing that seemed to pulse and somehow to change when it touched him. Billy, gasping and weeping, suddenly remembered an illustration in an old catechism text. A drawing of a demon. That was what this was. Like the drawing. Yes, exactly like it. The horns. The dark, forked tongue. The red eyes. A demon risen from Hell. And then he thought: No, no; that's crazy, too! And all the while that those thoughts raced through his mind, the ravenous creature stripped him and pulled his helmet almost completely apart. In the unrelieved darkness, he sensed its snout pressing through the halves of the broken helmet, toward his face, sniffing. He felt its tongue fluttering against his mouth and nose. He smelled a vague but repellent-odor, like nothing he had ever smelled before. The beast gouged at his belly and thighs, and then he felt a strange and brutally painful fire eating into him; acid fire. He writhed, twisted, bucked, strained — all to no avail. Billy heard himself cry out in terror and pain and confusion: “It's the Devil, it's the Devil!” He realized he had been shouting and screaming things almost continuously, from the moment he had been dragged off the ladder. Now, unable to speak as the flameless fire burned his lungs to ash and churned into his throat, he prayed in a silent singsong chant, warding off fear and death and the terrible feeling of smallness and worthlessness that had come over him: Mary, Mother of God, Mary, hear my plea… hear my plea, Mary, pray for me… pray, pray for me, Mary, Mother of God, Mary, intercede for me and—

His question had been answered.

He knew what had happened to Sergeant Harker.

Galen Copperfield was an outdoorsman, and he knew a great deal about the wildlife of North America. One of the creatures he found most interesting was the trap-door spider. It was a clever engineer who created a deep, tubular nest in the ground with a hinged lid at the top. The lid blended so perfectly with the soil in which it was set that whatever wandered across it, unaware of the danger below, were instantly dropped into the opening, dragged down, and devoured. it was horrifying and fascinating. One instant, the prey was dying, and the next instant it was gone, as if it had never been.

Corporal Velazquez was gone as sudden as if he had stepped upon the lid of a spider's lair.

Gone.

Copperfield's men were already edgy about Harker's disappearance and were frightened by the howling that ceased just before Velazques was dragged down. When the corporal was taken, they all spread back across the street, afraid that something was about to launch itself out of the manhole.

Copperfield, in the act of grieving for Velazquez when he was snatched, jumped back. Then froze. That was not like him. He had never before been indecisive in a crisis.

Velazquez was screaming through the suit-to-suit radio.

Breaking the ice that locked his joints, Copperfield went to the manhole and looked down. Peake's flashlight lay on the floor of the drain. But there was nothing else. No sign of Velazquez.

Copperfield hesitated.

The Corporal continued to scream.

Send other men down after the poor bastard?

No. It would be a suicide mission. Remember Harker. Cut the losses here, now.

But, good God, the screaming was horrible. Not as awful as Harker's. Those had been screams born of excruciating pain. These were screams of torment. Not as bad, but bad enough. As bad as anything Copperfield had seen on the battlefield.

There were words among the screams, spat out in explosive gasps. The corporal was making a desperate, babbling attempt to explain to those above-gound — and maybe to himself — just what he was seeing.

“… lizard… “

“… bug… ”

“… dragon… ”

“… prehistoric… “

“… demon… ”

And finally, with both physical pain and anguish of the soul in his voice, the corporal cried out, “It's the Devil, it's the Devil!”

After that, the screams were every bit as bad as Harker's. At least he didn't last as long.

When there was only silence, Copperfield slid the manhole cover back into place. Because of the power cable, the metal plate didn't fit tightly and was tilted up at one end, but it covered most of the hole.

He stationed two men on the sidewalk, ten feet from the rim, and ordered them to shoot anything that came out.

Because a gun had been of no help to Harker, Copperfield and a few other men collected everything needed to manufacture Molotov cocktails. They got a couple of dozen bottles of wine from Brookhart's liquor store on Vail Lane, emptied them, put an inch of soap powder in the bottom of each, filled them with gasoline, and twisted rag fuses into the necks of them until they were snugly stoppered.

Would fire succeed where bullets had failed?

What had happened to Harker?

What had happened to Velazquez?

What will happen to me? Copperfield wondered.

The first of the two mobile field units cost more than twenty million dollars, and the Defense Department had gotten its money's worth.

The lab was a marvel of technological microminiaturization. For one. thing, its computer-based on a trio of intel 432 micromainfranes; 690,000 transistors squeezed onto only nine silicon chips — took up no more room than a couple of suitcases, yet it was a highly sophisticated system that was capable of complex medical analyses. In fact, it was a more system — with general logic and memory capacity than could be found in most major university hospitals' pathology labs.

There was a great deal of It stacked up into the motor home, all of it designed and positioned for maximum utility of the limited space. In addition to a pair of computer access terminals along one wall, there were a number of devices and machines: a centrifuge that would be used to separate the major components of blood, urine, and other fluid samples; a spectrophotometer; a spectrograph; an el microscope with an image interpretation-enhancement mad-out link to one of the computer screens; a compact appliance that would quick-freeze blood and tissue samples for storage and for use in tests in which element extractions were mom easily performed on frozen materials; and much, much more.

Toward the front of the vehicle, behind the drivers' compartment, was an autopsy table that collapsed into the wall when not in use. At the moment, the table was down, and the body of Gary Wechlas — thirty-seven, Caucasian — lay on the stainless-steel surface. The blue pajama bottoms had been scissored away from the corpse and set aside for later examination.

Dr. Seth Goldstein, one of the three leading forensic medicine specialists on the West Coast, would perform the autopsy. He stood at one side of the table with Dr. Daryl Roberts, and General Copperfield stood at the other side, facing them across the dead body.

Goldstein pressed a button on a control panel that was set in the wall to his right. A recording would be made of every word spoken during the autopsy; this was common procedure in even ordinary postmortems. A visual record was also being made: two ceiling-mounted videotape cameras were focused on the corpse; they, too, were activated when Dr. Goldstein pressed the button on the wall panel.

Goldstein began by closely examining and describing the corpse: the unusual facial expression, the universal bruising, the curious swelling. He was especially searching for punctures, abrasions, localized contusions, cuts, lesions, blisters, fractures, and other indications of specific points of injury. He could not find any.

With his gloved hand poised over the instrument tray, Goldstein hesitated, not quite sure where to start. Usually, at the beginning of an autopsy, he already had a pretty good idea of the cause of death, When the deceased had been wasted by a disease, Goldstein usually had seen the hospital report. If death had resulted from an accident, there were visible trauma. If it was death at the hand of another, there were signs of violence. But in this case, the conditions of the corpse raised more questions than it answered, strange questions unlike any he had ever faced before.

As if sensing Goldstein's thoughts, Copperfield said, “You've got to find some answers for us, Doctor. Our lives very probably depend on it.”

The second motor home had many of the same diagnostic machines and instruments that were in the lead vehicle — a test tube centrifuge, an electron microscope, and so forth — in addition to several pieces of equipment that were not duplicated in the other vehicle. It contained no autopsy table, however, and only one videotape system. There were three computer terminals instead of two.

Dr. Enrico Valdez was sitting at one of the programming boards, in a deep-seated chair designed to accommodate a man in a decontamination suit complete with air tank. He was working with Houk and Niven on chemical analysis of samples of various substances collected from several business places and dwellings along Skyline Road and Vail Lane — such as the flour and dough taken from the table in Liebermann's Bakery. They were seeking traces of nerve gas condensate or other chemical substances. Thus far, they had found nothing out of the ordinary.

Dr. Valdez didn't believe that nerve gas or disease would turn out to be the culprit.

He was beginning to wonder if this whole thing might actually be in Isley's and Arkham's territory. Isley and Arkham, the two men without names on their decontamination suits, were not even members of the Civilian Defense Unit. They were from a different project altogether. Just this morning, before dawn, when Dr. Valdez had been introduced to them at the team rendezvous point in Sacramento, when he had heard what kind of research they were doing, he had almost laughed.

He had thought their project was a waste of taxpayers' money. Now he wasn't so sure. Now he wondered…

He wondered… and he worried.

Dr. Sara Yamaguchi was also in the second motor home.

She was preparing bacteria cultures. Using a sample of blood taken from the body of Gary Wechlas, she was methodically contaminating a series of growth media, jellied compounds filled with nutrients on which bacteria generally thrived: horse blood agar, sheep blood agar, simplex, chocolate agar, and many others.

Sara Yamaguchi was a geneticist who had spent eleven years in recombinant DNA research. If it developed that Snowfield had been stricken by a man-made microorganism, Sara's work would become central to the investigation. She would direct the study of the microbe's morphology, and when that was completed, she would have a major role in attempting to determine the function of the bug.

Like Dr. Valdez, Sara Yamaguchi had begun to wonder if Isley and Arkham might become more essential to the investigation than she had thought. This morning, their area of expertise had seemed as exotic as voodoo. But now, in light of what had taken place since the team's arrival in Snowfield, she was forced to admit that Isley's and Arkham's specially seemed increasingly pertinent.

And like Dr. Valdez, she was worried.

Dr. Wilson Bettenby, chief of the civilian scientific arm of the CBW Civilian Defense Unit's West Coast team, sat at a computer terminal, two seats away from Dr. Valdez.

Bettenby was running an automated analysis program on several water samples. The samples were inserted into a processor that distilled the water, stored the distillate, and subjected the filtered-out substances to spectrographic analysis and other tests. Bettenby was not searching for microorganisms; that would require different procedures than these. This machine only identified and quantified all mineral and chemical elements present in the water; the data was displayed on the cathode ray tube.

All but one of the water samples had been taken from taps in the kitchens and bathrooms of houses and businesses along Vail Lane. They proved to be free of dangerous chemical impurities.

The other water sample was the one that Deputy Autry had collected from the kitchen floor of the apartment on Vail Lane, sometime last night. According to Sheriff Hammond, puddles of water and saturated carpets had been discovered in several buildings. By this morning, however, the water had pretty much evaporated, except for a couple of damp carpets from which Bettenby wouldn't have been able to obtain a clean sample. He put the deputy's sample into the processor.

In a few minutes, the computer flashed up the complete chemical-mineral analysis of the water and of the residue that remained after all of the liquid in the sample had been distilled:

The computer went on at considerably greater length, flashing up the findings for every substance that might ordinarily be detected. The results were the same. In its undistilled state, the water contained absolutely no traces of any elements other than its two components, hydrogen and oxygen. And complete distillation and filtration had left behind no residue whatsoever, not even any trace elements. Autry's sample couldn't have come from the town's water supply, for it was neither chlorinated nor fluoridated. It wasn't bottled water, either. Bottled water would have had a nominal mineral content. Perhaps there was a filtration system underneath the kitchen sink in that apartment — a Culligan unit — but even if there was, the water that passed through it would still possess more mineral content than this. What Autry had collected was the purest laboratory grade of distilled and multiply filtered water.

So… what was it doing all over that kitchen floor?

Bettenby stared at the computer screen, frowning.

Was the small lake at Brookhart's liquor store also composed of this ultrapure water?

Why would anyone go around town emptying out gallons and gallons of distilled water?

And where would they find it in such quantity to begin with?

Strange.

Jenny, Bryce, and Lisa were at a table in one corner of the dining room at the Hilltop Inn.

Major Isley and Captain Arkham, who wore the decontamination suits that had no names on the helmets, were sitting on two stools, across the table. They had brought the news about Corporal Velazquez. They had also brought a tape recorder, which was now in the center of the table.

“I still don't see why this can't wait,” Bryce said.

“We won't take long,” Major Isley said.

“I've got a search team ready to go,” Bryce said, “We've got to go through every building in this town, take a body count, find out how many are dead and how many are missing, and look for some clue as to what the hell killed all these people. There's several days of work ahead of us, especially since we can't continue with the search past sundown. I won't let my men go prowling around at night, when the power might go off at any second. Damned if I will.”

Jenny thought of Wargle's eaten face. The hollow eye sockets.

Major Isley said, “Just a few questions.”

Arkham switched on the tape recorder.

Lisa was staring hard at the major and at the captain.

Jenny wondered what was on the girl's mind.

“We'll start with you, Sheriff,” Major Isley said, “In the forty-eight hours prior to these events, did your office receive any reports of power failures or telephone service interruptions?”

“If there were problems of that nature,” Bryce said, “people would generally call the utility companies, not the sheriff.”

“Yes, but wouldn't the utilities notify you? Aren't power and telephone outages contributory to criminal activity?”

Bryce nodded, “Of course. And to the best of my knowledge, we didn't receive any such alerts.”

Captain Arkham leaned forward. “What about difficulties with television and radio reception in this area?”

“Not that I'm aware of,” Bryce said.

“Any reports of unexplainable explosions?”

“Explosions?”

“Yes,” Isley said, “Explosions or sonic booms or any unusually loud and untraceable noises.”

“No. Nothing like that.”

Jenny wondered what in the devil they were driving at.

Isley hesitated and said, “Any reports of unusual aircraft in the vicinity?”

“No.”

Lisa said, “You guys aren't part of General Copperfield's team, are you? That's why you don't have names on your helmets.”

Bryce said, “And your decontamination suits don't fit as well as everyone else's. Theirs are custom tailored. Yours are strictly off the rack.”

“Very observant,” Isley said.

“If you aren't with the CBW project,” Jenny said, “what are you doing here?”

“We didn't want to bring it up at the start,” Isley said, “We thought we might get straighter answers from you if you weren't immediately aware of what we were looking for.”

Arkham said, “We're not Army Medical Corps. We're Air Force.”

“Project Skywatch,” Isley said, “We're not exactly a secret organization, but… well… let's just say we discourage publicity.”

“Skywatch?” Lisa said, brightening, “Are you talking about UFOs? Is that it? Flying saucers?”

Jenny saw Isley wince at the words “flying saucers.”

Isley said, “We don't go around checking out every crackpot report of little green men from Mars. For one thing, we don't have the funds to do that. Our job is planning for the scientific, social, and military aspects of mankind's Just encounter with an alien intelligence. We're really more of a think tank than anything else.”

Bryce shook his head. “No one around here's been reporting flying saucers.”

“But that's just what Major Isley means,” Arkham said. “You see, our studies indicate the Just encounter might start out in such a bizarre way that we wouldn't even recognize it as a first encounter. The popular concept of spaceships descending from the sky… well, it might not be like that. If we find ourselves dealing with truly alien intelligences, their ships might be so different from our concept of a ship that we wouldn't even be aware they'd landed.”

“Which is why we check into strange phenomena that don't seem to be UFO related at first glance,” Arkham said. “Like last spring, up in Vermont, there was a house in which an extremely active poltergeist was at work. Furniture was levitated. Dishes flew across the kitchen and smashed against the wall. Streams of water burst from walls in which there were no water pipes. Balls of flame erupted out of empty air—”

“Isn't a poltergeist supposed to be a ghost?” Bryce asked. “What could ghosts have to do with your area of interest?”

“Nothing,” Isley said, “We don't believe in ghosts. But we wondered if perhaps poltergeist phenomena might result from an attempt at interspecies communication gone awry. If we were to encounter an alien race that communicated only by telepathy, and if we were unable to receive those telepathic thoughts, maybe the unreceived psychic energy would produce destructive phenomena of the sort sometimes attributed to malign spirits.”

“And what did you finally decide about the poltergeist up there in Vermont?” Jenny asked.

“Decide? Nothing,” Isley said.

“Just that it was… interesting,” Arkham said.

Jenny glanced at Lisa and saw that the girl's eyes were very wide. This was something Lisa could grasp, accept, and cling to. This was a fear she had been thoroughly prepared for, thanks to movies and books and television. Monsters from outer space. Invaders from other worlds. It didn't make the Snowfield killings any less gruesome. But it was a known threat, and that made it infinitely preferable to the unknown. Jenny strongly doubted this was mankind's Just encounter with creatures It-from the stars, but Lisa seemed eager to believe.

“And what about Snowfield?” the girl asked, “Is that what's going on? Has something landed from… out there?”

Arkham looked uneasily at Major Isley.

Isley cleared his throat: As translated by the squawk box on his chest, it was a racheting, machinelike sound. “It's much too soon to make any judgment about that. We do believe there's a small chance the first contact between man and alien might involve the danger of biological contamination. That's why we've got an information-sharing arrangement with Copperfield's project. An inexplicable outbreak of an unknown disease might indicate an unrecognized contact with an extraterrestrial presence.”

“But if it is an extraterrestrial creature we're dealing with,” Bryce said, obviously doubtful, “it seems damned savage for a being of 'superior' intelligence.”

“The same thought occurred to me,” Jenny said.

Isley raised his eyebrows, “There's no guarantee that a creature with greater intelligence would be pacifistic and benevolent.”

“Yeah,” Arkham said, “That's a common conceit: the notion that aliens would've learned how to live in complete harmony among themselves and with other species. As that old song says… it ain't necessarily so. After all, mankind is considerably further along the road of evolution than gorillas are, but as a species we're definitely more warlike than gorillas at their most aggressive.”

“Maybe one day we will encounter a benevolent alien race that'll teach us how to live in peace,” Isley said, “Maybe they'll give us the knowledge and technology to solve all our earthly problems and even to reach the stars. Maybe.”

“But we can't nile out the alternative,” Arkham said grimly.

Chapter 26 London, England

Eleven o'clock Monday morning in Snowfield was seven o'clock Monday evening in London.

A miserably wet day had flowed into a miserably wet night. Raindrops drummed on the window in the cubbyhole kitchen of Timothy Flyte's two-room, attic apartment.

The professor was standing in front of a cutting board, making a sandwich.

After partaking of that magnificent champagne breakfast at Burt Sandler's expense, Timothy hadn't felt up to lunch. He had fore one afternoon tea, as well.

He'd met with two students today. He was tutoring one of them in hieroglyphics analysis and the other in Latin. Surfeited with breakfast, he had nearly fallen asleep during both sessions. Embarrassing. But, as little as his pupils were paying him, they could hardly complain too strenuously if, just once, he dozed off in the middle of a lesson.

As he put a thin slice of boiled ham and a slice of Swiss cheese on mustard-slathered bread, he heard the telephone ringing down in the front hall of the rooming house. He didn't think it was for him. He received few calls.

But seconds later, there was a knock at the door. It was the young Indian fellow who rented a room on the first floor. In heavily accented English, he told Timothy the call was for him. And urgent.

“Urgent? Who is it?” Timothy asked as he followed the young man down the stairs. “Did he give his name?”

“Sand-leer,” the Indian said.

Sandier? Burt Sandier?

Over breakfast, they had agreed on terms for a new edition of The Ancient Enemy, one that was completely rewritten to appeal to the average reader. Following the original publication of the book, almost seventeen years ago, he had received several offers to popularize his theories about historical mass disappearances, but he had resisted the idea; he had felt that the issuance of a popularized version of The Ancient Enemy would be playing into the hands of all those who had so unfairly accused him of sensationalism, humbug, and money grubbing. Now, however, years of want had made him more amenable to the idea. Sandler's appearance on the scene and his offer of a contract had come at a time when Timothy's ever-worsening poverty had reached a critical stage; it was truly a miracle. This morning, they had settled on an advance (against royalties) of fifteen thousand dollars. At the current rate of exchange, that amounted to a little more than eight thousand pounds sterling. It wasn't a fortune, but it was more money than Timothy had seen in a long, long time, and at the moment it seemed like wealth beyond counting.

As he went down the narrow stairs, toward the front hall, where the telephone stood on a small table beneath a cheap print of a bad painting, Timothy wondered if Sandier was calling to back out of the agreement.

The professor's heart began to pound with almost painful force.

The young Indian gentleman said, “I hope is no trouble, sir.”

Then he returned to his own room and closed the door.

Flyte picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“My God, do you get an evening newspaper?” Sandler asked. His voice was shrill, almost hysterical.

Timothy wondered if Sandier was drunk. Was this what he considered urgent business?

Before Timothy could respond, Sandier said, “I think it's happened! By God, Dr. Flyte I think it's actually happened! It's in the newspaper tonight. And on the radio. Not many details yet. But it sure looks as if it's happened.”

The professor's worry about the book contract was now compounded by exasperation. “Could you please be more specific, Mr. Sandler?”

“The ancient enemy, Dr. Flyte. One of those creatures has struck again. Just yesterday. A town in California. Some are dead. Most are missing. Hundreds. An entire town. Gone.”

“God help them,” Flyte said.

“I've got a friend in the London office of the Associated Press, and he's read me the latest wire service reports,” Sandier said, “I know things that aren't in the papers yet. For one thing, the police out there in California have put out an all-points bulletin for you. Apparently, one of the victims had read your book. When the attack came, he locked himself in a bathroom. It got him anyway. But he gained enough time to scrawl your name and the title of your book on the mirror!”

Timothy was speechless. There was a chair beside the telephone. He suddenly needed it.

“The authorities in California don't understand what's happened. They don't even realize The Ancient Enemy is the title of a book, and they don't know what part you play in all this. They think it was a nerve gas attack or an act of biological warfare or even extraterrestrial contact. But the man who wrote your name on that mirror knew better. And so do we. I'll tell you more in the car.”

“Car?” Timothy said.

“My God, I hope you have a passport!”

“Uh… yes.”

“I'm coming by with a car to take you to the airport. I want you to go to California, Dr. Flyte.”

“But—”

“Tonight. There's an available seat on a flight from Heathrow. I've reserved it in your name.”

“But I can't afford—”

“Your publisher is paying all expenses. Don't worry. You must go to Snowfield. You won't be writing just a popularization of The Ancient Enemy. Not any more. Now, you're going to write a well-rounded human story about Snowfield, and all of your material on historical mass disappearances and your theories about the ancient enemy will be supportive of that narrative. Do you see? Won't it be great?”

“But would it be right for me to rush in there now?”

“What do you mean?” Sandler asked.

“Would it be proper?” Timothy asked worriedly, “Wouldn't it appear as if I were attempting to cash in on a terrible tragedy?”

“Listen, Dr. Flyte, there are going to be a hundred hustlers in Snowfield, all with book contracts in their back pockets. They'll rip off your material. If you don't write the book on the subject, one of them will write it at your expense.”

“But hundreds are dead,” Timothy said. He felt ill. “Hundreds. The pain, the tragedy…”

Sandier was clearly impatient with the professor's hesitancy. “Well… okay, okay. Maybe you're right. Maybe I haven't really stopped to think about the horror of it. But don't you see — that's why you must be the one to write the ultimate book on the subject. No one else can bring your erudition or compassion to the project.”

“Well…”

Seizing on Timothy’s hesitation, Sandler said, “Good. Pack a suitcase fast. I'll be there in half an hour.”

Sandler hung up, and Timothy sat for a moment, holding the receiver, listening to the dead line. Stunned.

In the taxi's headlights, the rain was silvery. It slanted on the wind, like thousands of thin streamers of glittering Christmas tinsel. On the pavement, it puddled in quicksilver pools.

The cabdriver was reckless. The car careened along the slick streets. With one hand, Timothy held tightly to the safety bar on the door. Evidently Burt Sandler had promised a very large tip as a reward for speed.

Sitting next to the professor, Sandier said, “There'll be a layover in New York, but not too long. One of our people will meet you and shepherd you through. We won't alert the media in New York. We'll save the press conference for San Francisco. So be prepared to face an army of eager reporters when you get off the plane there.”

“Couldn't I just go quietly to Santa Mira and present myself to the authorities there?” Timothy asked unhappily.

“No, no, no!” Sandier said, clearly horrified by the very thought, “We've got to have a press conference. You're the only one with the answer, Dr. Flyte. We've got to let everyone know that you're the one. We've got to start beating the drum for your next book before Norman Mailer puts aside his latest study of Marilyn Monroe and jumps into this thing with both feet!”

“I haven't even begun to write the book yet.”

“God, I know. And by the time we publish, the demand will be phenomenal!”

The cab turned a corner. Tires squealed. Timothy was thrown against the door.

“A publicist will meet you at the plane in San Francisco. He'll guide you through the press conference,” Sandler said. “One way or another he'll get you to Santa Mira. It's a fairly long drive, so maybe it can be done by helicopter.”

“Helicopter?” Timothy said, astonished.

The taxi sped through a deep puddle, casting up plumes of silvery water.

The airport was within sight.

Burt Sandler had been talking nonstop since Timothy had gotten into the cab. Now he said, “One more thing. At your press conference, tell them the stories you told me this morning. About the disappearing Mayans. And three thousand Chinese infantrymen who vanished. And be sum to make any references you possibly can to mass disappearances that took place in the U S. — even before there was a United States, even in previous geological eras. That'll appeal to the American press. Local ties. That always helps. Didn't the Just British colony in America vanish without a trace?”

“Yes. The Roanoke Island colony.”

“Be sure to mention it.”

“But I can't say conclusively that the disappearance of the Roanoke colony is connected with the ancient enemy.”

“Is there any chance whatsoever that it might've been?”

Fascinated, as always, by this subject, Timothy was able, for the first time, to wrench his mind away from the suicidal behavior of the cabdriver. “When a British expedition, funded by Sir Walter Raleigh, returned to the Roanoke colony in March of 1590, they found everyone gone. One hundred and twenty people had vanished without a trace. Countless theories have been advanced regarding their fate. For example, the most popular theory holds that the people at Roanoke Island fell victim to the Croatonn Indians, who lived nearby. The only message left by the colonists, slashed into the bark of a tree. But the Croatoans professed to know nothing about the disappearance. And they were peaceful Indians. Not the least bit warlike. Indeed, they had initially helped the colonists settle in. Further, there were no signs of violence at the settlement. No bodies were ever found. No bones. No graves. So you see, even the most widely accepted theory raises a greater number of questions than it answers.”

The taxi swept around another curve, braked abruptly to avoid colliding with a truck.

But now Timothy was only passingly aware of the driver's daredevil conduct. He continued:

“It occurred to me that the word the colonists had carved into that tree-Croatoan-might not have been intended to point an accusing finger. It might have meant that the Croatoans would know what had happened. I read the journals of several British explorers who later talked with the Croatoans about the colony's disappearance, and there's evidence the Indians did, indeed, have some idea of what had happened. Or thought they knew. But they were not taken seriously when they tried to explain to the white man. The Croatoans reported that, Simultaneously with the disappearance of the colonists, there was a great depletion of game in the forests and fields in which the tribe hunted. Virtually all species of wildlife had abruptly dwindled drastically in numbers. A couple of the more perceptive explorers noted in their journals that the Indians regarded the subject with superstitious dread. They seemed to have a religious explanation for the disappearance. But unfortunately, the white men who talked with them about the missing colonists were not interested in Indian superstitions and did not pursue that avenue of enquiry.”

“I gather you've researched Croatoan religious beliefs,” Burt Sandler said.

“Yes,” Timothy said, “Not an easy subject, for the tribe has been extinct itself for many, many years. What I've found is that the Croatoans were spiritualists. They believed that the spirit endured and walked the earth even after the death of the body, and they believed there were 'greater spirits' that manifested themselves in the elements — wind, earth, fire, water, and so forth. Most important of all — as far as we're concerned — they also believed in an evil spirit, a source of all evil, an equivalent to the Christians' Sam. I forget the exact Indian word for it, but it translates roughly as He Who Can Be Anything — Yet is Nothing.”

“My God,” Sandler said. “That's not a bad description of the ancient enemy.”

“Sometimes there are truths hidden in superstitions. The Croatoans believed that both the wildlife and the colonists had been taken away by He Who Can Be Anything Yet is Nothing. So… while I cannot say conclusively that the ancient enemy had something to do with the disappearance of the Roanoke Islanders, it seems to me sufficient reason to consider the possibility.”

“Fantastic!” Sandier said, “Tell them all of that at the press conference in San Francisco. Just the way you've told me.”

The taxi squealed to a stop in front of the terminal.

Burt Sandler shoved a few five-pound notes into the driver's hand. He glanced at his watch. “Dr. Flyte, let's get you on that plane.”

From his window seat, Timothy Flyte watched the city lights disappearing beneath the storm clouds. TV jet speared upward through the thin rain. Soon, they rose above the overcast; the storm was below them, clear sky overhead. The rays of the moon bounced off the churning tops of the clouds, and the night beyond the plane was filled with soft, eerie light.

The seatbelt sign winked off.

He unbuckled but couldn't relax. His mind was churning just as the storm clouds were.

The stewardess came around, offering drinks. He asked for Scotch.

He felt like a coiled spring. Overnight, his life had changed. There had been more excitement in this one day than in the entire past year.

The tension that gripped him was not unpleasant. He was more than happy to slough off his dreary existence; he was putting on a new and better life as quickly as he might have put on a new suit of clothes. He was risking ridicule and all the old familiar accusations by going public with his again. But there was also a chance that he would at last be able to prove himself.

The Scotch came, and he drank it. He ordered another. Slowly, he relaxed.

Beyond the plane, the night was vast.

Chapter 27 Escape

From the barred window of the temporary holding cell, Fletcher Kale had a good view of the street. All morning he watched the reporters congregating. Something really big had happened.

Some of the other inmates were sharing news cell to cell, but none of them would share anything with Kale.

They hated him. Frequently, they taunted him, called him a baby killer. Even in jail, there were social classes, and no one was farther down the ladder than child killers.

It was almost funny. Even car thieves, muggers; burglars, holdup men, and embezzlers needed to feel morally superior to someone. So they reviled and persecuted anyone who had harmed a child, and somehow that made them feel like priests and bishops by comparison.

Fools. Kale despised them.

He didn't ask anyone to share information with him. He wouldn't give them the satisfaction of freezing him out.

He stretched out on his bunk and daydreamed about his magnificent destiny: fame, power, wealth…

At eleven-thirty, he was still lying on his bunk when they came to take him to the courthouse for arraignment on two counts of murder. The cellblock guard unlocked the door. An other man a gray-haired, pot-bellied deputy — came in and put handcuffs on Kale.

“We're shorthanded today,” he told Kale, “I'm the only one detailed for this. But don't you get some damn-fool idea that you'd have a chance to make a break for it. You're cuffed, and I've got the gun, and nothing would please me as much as shooting your ass off.”

In both the guard's and the deputy's eyes, there was loathing.

At last, the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison became real to Kale. To his surprise, he began to cry as they led him out of the cell.

The other prisoners hooted and laughed and called him names.

The potbellied man prodded Kale in the ribs. “Get a move on.”

Kale stumbled along the corridor on weak legs, through a security gate that rolled open for them, out of the cellblock, into another hall. The guard remained behind, but the deputy prodded Kale toward the elevators, prodded him too often and too hard, even when it wasn't necessary. Kale felt his self-pity giving way to anger.

In the small, slowly descending elevator, he realized that the deputy no longer saw any threat in his prisoner. He was disgusted, impatient, embarrassed by Kale's emotional collapse.

By the time the doors opened, a change had occurred in Kale, as well. He was sill weeping quietly, but the tears were no longer genuine, and he was shaking with excitement rather than with despair.

They went through another checkpoint. The deputy presented a set of papers to another guard who called him Joe. The guard glared at Kale with undisguised disdain. Kale averted his face as if he were ashamed of himself. And continued to cry.

Then he and Joe were outside, crossing a large parking lot toward a row of green and white police cruisers that were lined up in front of a cyclone fence. The day was warm and sunny.

Kale continued to cry and to pretend that his legs were wobbly. He kept his shoulders hunched and his head low. He shuffled along listlessly, as if he were a broken, beaten man.

Except for him and the deputy, the parking lot was deserted. Just the two of them. Perfect.

All the way to the car, Kale looked for the right moment in which to make his move. For a while he thought it wouldn't come. Then Joe shoved him against a car and half-turned away to unlock the door — and Kale struck. He threw himself at the deputy as the man bent to insert a key into the lock. The deputy gasped and swung a fist at him. Too late. Kale ducked under the blow and came up fast and slammed him against the car, pinning him. Joe's face went white with pain as the door handle rammed hard against the base of his spine. The ring of keys flew out of his hand, and even as they were falling, he was using the same hand to grab for his holstered revolver.

Kale knew, with his hands cuffed, he couldn't wrestle the gun away. As soon as the revolver was drawn, the fight was finished.

So Kale went for the other man's throat. Went for it with his teeth. He bit deep, felt blood gushing, bit again, pushed his mouth into the wound, like an attack dog, and bit again, and the deputy screamed, but it was only a yelp-rattle-sigh that no one could have heard, and the gun fell out of the holster and out of the deputy's spasming hand, and both men went down hard, with Kale on top, and the deputy tried to scream again, so Kale rammed a knee into his crotch, and blood was pump-pump-pumping out of the man's throat.

“Bastard,” Kale said.

The deputy's eyes froze. The blood stopped spurting from the wound. It was over.

Kale had never felt so powerful, so alive.

He looked around the parking lot. Still no one in sight.

He scrambled to the ring of keys, tried them one by one until he unlocked his handcuffs. He threw the cuffs under the car.

He rolled the dead deputy under the cruiser, too, out of sight.

He wiped his face on his sleeve. His shirt was spotted and stained with blood. There was nothing he could do about that. Nor could he change the fact that he was wearing baggy, blue, woven institutional clothing and a pair of canvas and rubber slip-on shoes.

Feeling conspicuous, he hurried along the fence, through the open gate. He crossed the alley and went into another parking lot behind a large, two-story apartment complex. He glanced up at all the windows and hoped no one was looking.

There were perhaps twenty cars in the lot. A yellow Datsun had keys in the ignition. He got behind the wheel, closed the door, and sighed with relief. He was out of sight, and he had transportation.

A box of Kleenex stood on the console. Using paper tissues and spit, he cleaned his face. With the blood removed, he looked at himself in the rearview mirror — and grinned.

Chapter 28 Body Count

While General Copperfield's unit was conducting the autopsy and tests in the mobile field lab, Bryce Hammond formed two search teams and began a building-by-building inspection of the town. Frank Autry led the first group, and Major Isley went along as an observer for Project Skywatch. Likewise, Captain Arkham joined Bryce's group. Block by block and street by street, the two teams were never more than one building apart, remaining in close touch with walkie-talkies.

Jenny accompanied Bryce. More than anyone else, she was familiar with Snowfield's residents, and she was the one most likely to identify any bodies that were found. In most cases, she could also tell them who had lived in each house and how many people had been in each family — information they needed to compile a list of the missing.

She was troubled about exposing Lisa to more gruesome scenes, but she couldn't refuse to assist the search team. She couldn't leave her sister behind at the Hilltop Inn, either. Not after what had happened to Harker. And to Velazquez. But the girl coped well with the tension of the house-to-house search. She was still proving herself to Jenny, and Jenny was increasingly proud of her.

They didn't find any bodies for a while. The first businesses and houses they entered were deserted. In several houses, tables were set for Sunday dinner. In others, tubs were filled with bathwater that had grown cold. In a number of places, television sets were still playing, but there was no one to watch them.

In one kitchen they discovered Sunday dinner on the electric stove. The food in the three pots had cooked for so many hours that all of the water content had evaporated. The remains were dry, hard, burnt, blistered, and unidentifiable. The stainlesssteel pots were ruined; they had turned bluish-black both inside and out. The plastic handles of the pots had softened and partially melted. The entire house reeked with the most acrid, nauseating stench Jenny had ever encountered.

Bryce switched off the burners. “It's a miracle the whole place wasn't set on fire.”

“It probably would've been if that were a gas stove,” Jenny said.

Above the three pots, there was a stainless-steel range hood with an exhaust fan. When the food had burned, the hood had contained the short-lived flash of flames and had prevented the fire from spreading to the surrounding cabinetry.

Outside again, everyone (except Major Arkham in his decontamination suit) took deep breaths of the clean mountain air. They needed a couple of minutes to purge their lungs of the vile stuff they had breathed inside that house.

Then, next door, they found the first body of the day. It was John Farley, who owned the Mountain Tavern, which was open only during the ski season. He was in his forties. He had been a striking man, with salt-and pepper hair, a large nose, and a wide mouth that had frequently curved into an immensely engaging smile. Now he was bloated and bruised, his eyes bulging out of his skull, his clothes bursting at the seams as his body swelled.

Farley was sitting at the breakfast table, at one end of his big kitchen. On a plate before him was a meal of cheese-filled ravioli and meatballs. There was also a glass of red wine. On the table, beside the plate, there was an open magazine. Farley was sitting up straight in his chair. One hand lay palm-up in his lap. His other arm was on the table, and in that hand was clenched a crust of bread. Farley's mouth was partly open, and there was a bite of bread trapped between his teeth. He had perished in the act of chewing; his jaw muscles had never even relaxed.

“Good God,” Tal said, “he didn't have time to spit the stuff out or swallow it. Death must've been instantaneous.”

“And he didn't see it coming, either,” Bryce said, “Look at his face. There's no expression of honor or surprise or shock as there is with most of the others.”

Staring at the dead man's clenched jaws, Jenny said, “What I don't understand is why death doesn't bring any relaxation of the muscles whatsoever. It's weird.”

In Our Lady of the Mountains Church, sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows, which were composed predominantly of blues and greens. Hundreds of irregularly shaped patches of royal blue, sky blue, turquoise, aquamarine, emerald green, and many other shades dripped across the polished wooden pews, puddled in the aisles, and shimmered on the walls.

It's like being underwater, Gordy Brogan thought as he followed Frank Autry into the strangely and beautifully illuminated nave.

Just beyond the narthex, a stream of crimson light splashed across the white marble font that contained the holy water. It was the crimson of Christ's blood. The sun pierced a stained glass image of Christ's bleeding heart and sprayed sanguineness rays upon the water that glistened in the pale marble bowl.

Of the five men in the search team, only Gordy was a Catholic. He moistened two fingers in the holy water, crossed himself, and genuflected.

The church was solemn, silent, still.

The air was softened by a pleasant trace of incense.

In the pews, there were no worshipers. At first it appeared as if the church was deserted.

Then Gordy looked more closely at the altar and gasped.

Frank saw it, too. “Oh, my God.”

The chancel was cloaked in more shadows than was the rest of the church, which was why the men hadn't immediately noticed the hideous — and sacrilegious — thing above the altar. The altar candies had burned down all the way and had gone out.

However, as the men in the search team progressed hesitantly down the center aisle, they got a clearer and clearer view of the life-size crucifix that rose up from the center of the altar, along the rear wall of the chancel. It was a wooden cross, with an exquisitely detailed, hand-painted, glazed plaster figure of Christ fixed to it. At the moment, much of the godly image was obscured by another body that hung in front of it. A real body, not another plaster corpus. It was the priest in his robes; he was nailed to the cross.

Two altar boys knelt on the floor in front of the altar. They were dead, bruised, bloated.

The flesh of the priest had begun to darken and to show other signs of imminent decomposition. His body was not in the same bizarre condition as all the others that had been found thus far. In his case, the discoloration was what you would expect of a day-old corpse.

Frank Autry, Major Isley, and the other two deputies continued through the gate in the altar railing and stepped up into the chancel.

Gordy wasn't able to go with them. He was too badly shaken and had to sit in the front pew to keep from collapsing.

After inspecting the chancel and glancing through the sacristy door, Frank used his walkie-talkie to call Bryce Hammond in the building next door. “Sheriff, we've found three here in the church. We need Doc Paige for positive IDs. But it's especially grisly, so better leave Lisa in the vestibule with a couple of the guys.”

“We'll be there in two minutes,” the sheriff said.

Frank came down from the chancel, through the gate in the railing, and sat down beside Gordy. He was holding the walkie talkie in one hand and a gun in the other. “You're a Catholic.”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry you had to see this.”

“I'll be okay,” Gordy said, “It's no easier for you just because you're not a Catholic.”

“You know the priest?”

“I think his name's Father Callahan. I didn't go to this church, though. I attended St. Andrew's, down in Santa Mira.”

Frank put the walkie-talkie down and scratched his chin.

“From all the other indications we've had, it looked like the attack came yesterday evening, not long before Doc and Lisa came back to town. But now this… If these three died in the morning, during Mass”

“It was probably during Benediction,” Gordy said, “Not Mass.”

“Benediction?”

“The Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The Sunday evening service.”

“Ah. Then it fits right in with the timing of the others.” He looked around at the empty pews. “What happened to the parishioners? Why are only the altarboys and the priest here?”

“Well, not an awful lot of people come to Benediction,” Gordy said. “There were probably at least two or three others. But it took them.”

“Why didn't it just take everyone?”

Gordy didn't answer.

“Why did it have to do something like this?” Frank pressed.

“To ridicule us. To mock us. To steal our hope,” Gordy sighed miserably.

Frank stared at him.

Gordy said, “Maybe some of us have been counting on God to get us through this alive. Probably most of us have. I know I've sure been praying a lot since we've been here. Probably you have, too. It knew we would do that. It knew we would ask God for help. So this is its way of letting us know that God can't help us. Or at least that's what it would like us to believe. Because that's its way. To instill doubt about God. That's always been its way.”

Frank said, “You sound as if you know exactly what we're up against here.”

“Maybe,” Gordy said. He stared at the crucified priest, then turned to Frank again. “Don't you know? Don't you really, Frank?”

After they left the church and went around the corner onto the cross street, they found two wrecked cars.

A Cadillac Seville had run across the front lawn of the church rectory, mowing down the shrubbery in its path, and had collided with a porch post at one corner of the house. The post was nearly splintered in two. The porch roof was sagging.

Tal Whitman squinted through the side window of the Caddy. “There's a woman behind the wheel.”

“Dead?” Bryce asked.

“Yeah. But not from the accident.”

At the other side of the car, Jenny tried to open the driver's door. It was locked. All of the doors were locked, and all of the windows were rolled up tight.

Nevertheless, the woman behind the wheel — Edna Gower; jenny knew her — was like the other corpses. Darkly bruised. Swollen. A scream of terror frozen on her twisted face.

“How could it get in there and kill her?” Tal wondered aloud. “Remember the locked bathroom at the Candle glow Inn,” Bryce said.

“And the barricaded room at the Oxleys',” Jenny said.

Captain Arkham said, “It's almost an argument for the general's nerve gas theory.”

Then Arkham unclipped a miniaturized geiger counter from his utility belt and carefully examined the car. But it wasn't radiation that had killed the woman inside.

The second car, half a block away, was a pearl-white Lynx. On the pavement behind it were black skid marks. The Lynx was angled across the street, blocking it. The front end was punched into the side of a yellow Chevy van. There wasn't a lot of damage because the Lynx had almost braked to a stop before hitting the parked vehicle.

The driver was a middle-aged man with a bushy mustache. He was wearing cut-off jeans and a Dodgers T-shirt. Jenny knew him, too, Marty Sussman. He had been Snowfield's city manager for the past six years. Affable, earnest Marty Sussman. Dead. Again, the cause of death was clearly not related to the collision.

The doors of the Lynx were locked. The windows were rolled up tight, just as, they had been on the Cadillac.

“Looks like they both were trying to escape from something,” Jenny said.

“Maybe,” Tal said, “Or they might just have been out for a drive or going somewhere on an errand when the attack came. If they were trying to escape, something sure stopped them cold, forced them right off the street.”

“Sunday was a warm day. Warm but not too warm,” Bryce said, “Not hot enough to ride around with the windows closed and the air conditioner on. It was the kind of day when most people keep the windows down, taking advantage of the fresh air. So it looks to me as if, after they were forced to stop, they put up the windows and locked themselves in, trying to keep something out.”

“But it got them anyway,” Jenny said.

It.

Ned and Sue Marie Bischoff owned a lovely Tudor-style home set on a double lot, nestled among huge pine trees. They lived there with their two boys. Eight-year-old Lee Bischoff could already play the piano surprisingly well, in spite of the smallness of his hands, and once told Jenny he was going to be the next Stevie Wonder “only not blind.” Six-year-old Terry looked exactly like a black-skinned Dennis the Menace, but he had a sweet temper.

Ned was a successful artist. His oil paintings sold for as much as six and seven thousand dollars, and his limited edition prints went for four or five hundred dollars apiece.

He was a patient of Jenny's. Although he was only thirty-two and was already a success in life, she had treated him for an ulcer.

The ulcer wouldn't be bothering him any more. He was in his studio, lying on the floor in front of an easel, dead.

Sue Marie was in the kitchen. Like Hilda Beck, Jenny's housekeeper, and like many other people all over town, Sue Marie had died while preparing dinner. She had been a pretty woman. Not any more.

They found the two boys in one of the bedrooms.

It was a wonderful room for kids, large and airy, with bunk beds. There were built-in bookshelves full of children's books. On the walls were paintings that Ned had done just for his kids, whimsical fantasy scenes quite unlike the pieces for which he was well known: a pig in a tuxedo, dancing with a cow in an evening gown; the interior of a spaceship command chamber, where all the astronauts were toads; an eerie yet charming scene of a school playground at night, bathed in the light of a full moon, no kids around, but with a huge and monstrous-looking werewolf having a grand and giddy time on a set of swings.

The boys were in one corner, beyond an array of overturned Tonka Toys. The younger boy, Terry, was behind Lee, who seemed to have made a valiant effort to protect his smaller brother. The boys were staring out into the room, eyes bulging, their dead gazes still fixed upon whatever had descended upon them yesterday. Lee's muscles had locked, so that his thin arms were in the same position now as they had been in the last seconds of his life: raised in front of him, shielding him, palms spread, as if warding off blows.

Bryce knelt in front of the kids. He put one trembling hand against Lee's face, as if unwilling to believe that the child was actually dead.

Jenny knelt beside him.

“Those are the Bischoffs' two boys,” she said, unable to keep her voice from breaking. “So now the whole family's accounted for.”

Tears were streaming down Bryce's face.

Jenny tried to remember how old his own son was. Seven or eight? About the same age as Lee Bischoff. Little Timmy Hammond was lying in the hospital in Santa Mira this very minute, comatose, just as he had been for the past year. He was pretty much a vegetable. Yes, but even that was better than this. Anything was better than this.

Eventually, Bryce's tears dried up. There was rage in him now. “I'll get them for this,” he said, “Whoever did this… I'll make them pay.”

Jenny had never met a man quite like him. He had considerable masculine strength and purpose, but he was also capable of tenderness.

She wanted to hold him. And be held.

But, as always, she was far too guarded about expressing her own emotional state. If she had possessed his openness, she would never have become estranged from her mother. But she wasn't that way, not yet, although she wanted to be. So, in response to his vow to get the killers of the Bischoffs' children, she said, “But what if it isn't anything human that killed them? Not all evil is in men. There's evil in nature. The blind maliciousness of earthquakes. The uncaring evil of cancer. This thing here could be like that — remote and unaccountable. There'll be no taking it to court if it isn't even human. What then?”

“Whoever or whatever the hell it is, I'll get it. I'll stop it. I'll make it pay for what's been done here,” he said stubbornly.

Frank Autry's search team prowled through three deserted houses after leaving the Catholic church. The fourth house wasn't empty. They found Wendel! Hulbertson, a high school teacher who worked in Santa Mira but who chose to live here in the mountains, in a house that had once belonged to his mother. Gordy had been in Hulbertson's English class only five years ago. The teacher was not swollen or bruised like the other corpses; he had taken his own life. Backed into a corner of his bedroom, he had put the barrel of a.32 automatic in his mouth and had pulled the trigger. Evidently, death by his own hand had been preferable to whatever it had been about to do to him.

After leaving the Bischoff residence, Bryce led his group through a few houses without finding any bodies. Then, in the fifth house, they discovered an elderly husband and wife locked in a bathroom, where they had tried to hide from their killer. She was sprawled in the tub. He was in a heap on the floor.

“They were patients of mine,” Jenny said, “Nick and Melina Papandrakis.”

Tal wrote their names down on a list of the dead.

Like Harold Ordnay and his wife in the Candle glow Inn, Nick Papandrakis had attempted to leave a message that would point a finger at the killer. He had taken some iodine from the medicine cabinet and had used it to paint on the wall. He hadn't had a chance to finish even one word. There were only two letters and part of a third:

PR(

“Can anyone figure out what he intended to write?” Bryce asked.

They all took turns squeezing into the bathroom and stepped over Nick Papandrakis's corpse to have a look at the orange brown letters on the wall, but none of them had any flashes of inspiration.

Bullets.

In the house next to the Papandrakis’s, the kitchen floor was littered with expended bullets. Not entire cartridges. Just dozens of lead slugs, and their brass casings.

The fact that there were no ejected casings anywhere in the room indicated that no gunfire had taken place here. There was no odor of gunpowder. No bullet holes in the walls or cabinets.

There were just bullets all over the floor, as if they had rained magically out of thin air.

Frank Autry scooped up a handful of the gray lumps of metal. He wasn't a ballistics expert, but, oddly, none of the bullets was fragmented or badly deformed, and that enabled him to see that they had come from a variety of weapons. Most of them—scores of them — with caliber of ammunition that was spat out by the submachine guns with which General Copperfield's support units were armed.

Are these slugs from Sergeant Harker's gun? Frank wondered. Are these the rounds Harker fired at his killer in the meat locker at Gil Martin's Market?

He frowned, perplexed.

He dropped the bullets, and they clattered on the floor. He plucked several other slugs off the tiles. There were a.22 and a.32 and another.22 and a.38. There were even a lot of shotgun pellets.

He picked up a single .45-caliber bullet and examined it with special interest. It was exactly the ammunition that his own revolver handled.

Gordy Brogan hunkered down beside him.

Frank didn't look at Gordy. He continued to stare intently at the slug. He was wrestling with an eerie thought.

Gordy scooped a few bullets off the kitchen tiles. “—They aren't deformed at all.”

Frank nodded.

“They had to've hit something,” Gordy said, “So they should be deformed. Some of them should be, anyway, “He paused, then said.” Hey, you're a million miles away. What're — you thinking about?”

“Paul Henderson.” Frank held the .45 slug in front of Gordy's face, “Paul fired three like this last night, over at the substation.”

“At his killer.”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“So I have this crazy hunch that if we asked the lab to run ballistics tests on it, they'd find residue from Paul's revolver.”

Gordy blinked at him.

“And,” Frank said, “I also think that if we searched through all of the slugs on the floor here, we'd find exactly two more like this one. Not just one more, mind you. And not three more. Just two more with precisely the same markings as this one.”

“You mean… the same three Paul fired last night.”

“Yeah.”

“But how'd they get from there to here?”

Frank didn't answer. Instead, he stood and thumbed the send button on the walkie-talkie. “Sheriff?”

Bryce Hammond's voice issued crisply from the small speaker. “What is it, Frank?”

“We're still here at the Sheffield house. I think you'd better come over. There's something you ought to see.”

“More bodies?”

“No, sir. Uh… something sort of weird.”

“We'll be there,” the sheriff said.

Then, to Gordy, Frank said, “What I think is… sometime within the past couple of hours, sometime after Sergeant Harker was taken from Gil Martin's Market, it was here, right in this room. It got rid of all the bullets it'd taken last night and this morning.”

“The hits it took?”

“Yes.”

“Got rid of them? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Frank said.

“But how?”

“Looks like it just sort of… expelled them. Looks like it shed those bullets the way a dog shakes off loose hairs.”

Chapter 29 On the Run

Driving through Santa Mira in the stolen Datsun, Fletcher Kale heard about Snowfield on the radio.

Although it had captured the rest of the country's attention, Kale wasn't very interested. He was never particularly compassionate about other people's tragedies.

He reached out to switch off the radio, already weary of hearing about Snowfield when he had so many problems of his own — and then he caught a name that did mean something to him. Jake Johnson. Johnson was one of the deputies who had gone up to Snowfield last night. Now he was missing and might even be dead.

Jake Johnson…

A year ago, Kale had sold Johnson a solidly built log cabin on five acres in the mountains.

Johnson had professed to be an avid hunter and had pretended to want the cabin for that purpose. However, from a number of things the deputy let slip, Kate decided dud Johnson was actually a survivalist, one of those doomsayers who believed the would was rushing toward Armageddon and that society was going to collapse either because of runaway inflation or nuclear war or some other Kale became increasingly convinced that Johnson wanted the cabin for a hiding place that could be stocked with food and ammunition then easily defended in times of social upheaval.

The cabin was certainly remote enough for that purpose. it was on Snowtop Mountain, all the way around the other side from the town of Snowfield. To get to the place, you had to go up a county fire road, a narrow dirt track that was passable virtually only to a four-wheel vehicle, then switch to another, even tougher track. The final quarter-mile had to be covered on foot.

Two months after Johnson purchased the mountain property, Kale sneaked up there on a warm June morning when he knew the deputy was on duty in Santa Mira. He wanted to see if Johnson was turning the place into a wilderness fortress, as he suspected.

He found the cabin untouched, but he discovered that Johnson was doing extensive work in some of the limestone caves to which there was an entrance on his land. Outside the caves, there were sacks of cement and sand, a wheelbarrow, and a pile of stones.

Just inside the mouth of the first cave, there had been two Coleman gas lanterns standing on the stone floor, by the wall. Kale had picked up one of the lanterns and had gone deeper into the subterranean chambers.

The first cave was long and narrow, little more than a tunnel. At the end of it, he followed a series of doglegs, twisting through irregular limestone antechambers, before he came into the first roomlike cave.

Stacked against one wall were cases of five-pound, vacuum sealed cans of nitrogen-preserved milk powder, freeze-dried fruits and vegetables, freeze-dried soup, powdered eggs, cans of honey, drums of whole grain. An air mattress. And much more. Jake had been busy.

The first underground room led to another. In this one, there was a naturally formed hole in the floor, about ten inches in diameter, and odd noises were rising out of it. Whispering voices. Menacing laughter. Kale almost turned and ran, but then he realized that he was hearing nothing more sinister than the chuckling of running water. An underground stream. Jake Johnson had lowered one-inch rubber tubing into the natural well and had rigged a hand pump beside it.

All the comforts of home.

Kale decided that Johnson was not merely cautious. The man was obsessed.

On another day at the end of that same summer, late in August, Kale returned to the mountain property. To his surprise, the cave mouth — which was about four feet high and five feet wide — was no longer visible. Johnson had created an effective barrier of vegetation to conceal the entrance to his hideaway.

Kale pushed through the brush, careful not to harm it.

He had brought his own flashlight this time. He crawled through the mouth of the cave, stood up once he was inside, followed the tunnel down three doglegs — and suddenly came up against an unexpected dead end. He knew there should be one more short doglegged passageway and then the first of the large caves. Instead, there was only a wall of limestone, a flat face of it that sealed off the rest of the caverns.

For a moment Kale was at the barrier, confused. Then he examined it closely, and in a few minutes he found the hidden release. The rock was actually a thin facade that had been bonded with epoxy to a door that Johnson had cleverly mounted in the natural frame between the final dogleg and the first of the room-size caves.

That day in August, marveling over the hidden door, Kale decided that he would take the retreat for his own if the need ever arose. After all, maybe these survivalists were on to something. Maybe they were right. Maybe the fools out there would try to blow up the world some day. If so, Kale would get to this retreat first, and when Johnson came through his cleverly hidden door, Kale would simply blow him away.

That thought pleased him.

It made him feel shrewd. Superior.

Thirteen months later, he had, much to his surprise and horror, seen the end of the world coming. The end of his world. Locked up in the county jail, charged with murder, he knew where he could go if he could only manage to escape: into the mountains, to the caves. He could stay up there for several weeks, until the cops finally stopped looking for him in and around Santa Mira County.

Thank you, Jake Johnson.

Jake Johnson…

Now, in the stolen yellow Datsun, with the county jail only a few minutes behind him, Kale heard about Johnson on the radio. As he listened, he began to smile. Fate was on his side.

After escaping, his biggest problem was disposing of his jail clothes and getting properly outfitted for the mountains.

He hadn't been quite sure how he would do that.

As soon as he heard the radio reporter say that Jake Johnson was dead — or at least out of the way, up there in Snowfield Kale knew he would go straight to Johnson's house, here in Santa Mira. Johnson had no family. It was a safe, temporary hiding place. Johnson wasn't exactly Kale's size, but they were close enough so that Kale could swap his jail uniform for the most suitable items in the deputy's closet.

And guns. Jake Johnson, survivalist that he was, would surely have a gun collection somewhere in the house.

The deputy lived in the same one-story, three-bedroom house that he had inherited from his father, Big Ralph Johnson. It wasn't what you would call a showplace. Big Ralph hadn't spent his bribe and graft money with reckless abandon; he had known how to keep a low profile when it came to anything that might draw the attention of a passing IRS agent. Not that the Johnson place was a shack. It was in the center block of Pine Shadow Lane, a well-established neighborhood of mostly larger homes, oversized lots, and mature trees. The Johnson house, one of the smaller ones, had a large Jacuzzi sunk in the tile floor of its rear sun porch, an enormous game room with an antique pool table, and a number of other creature comforts not visible from outside.

Kale had been there twice during the course of selling Johnson the mountain property. He had no difficulty finding the house again.

He pulled the Datsun into the driveway, cut the engine, and got out. He hoped no neighbors were watching.

He went around toward the back of the house, broke a kitchen window, and clambered inside.

He went directly to the garage. It was big enough for two cars, but only a four-wheel-drive Jeep station wagon was there. He had known Johnson owned the Jeep, and he had hoped to find it here. He opened the garage door and drove the stolen Datsun inside. When the door was closed again and the Datsun could not be seen from the street, he felt safer.

In the master bedroom, he went through Johnson's closet and found a pair of sturdy hiking boots only half a size larger than he required. Johnson was a couple of inches shorter than Kale, so the pants weren't the right length, but tucked into the boots, they looked good enough. The waist was too large for Kale, but he cinched it in with a belt. He selected a sports shirt and tried it on. Good enough.

Once dressed, he studied himself in the full-length mirror.

“Looking good,” he told his reflection.

Then he went through the house, looking for guns. He couldn't find any.

All right, then they were hidden somewhere. He'd tear the joint to pieces to find them, if it came to that.

He started in the master bedroom. He emptied out the contents of the bureau and dresser drawers. No guns. He went through both nightstands. No guns. He took everything out of the walk-in closet: clothes, shoes, suitcases, boxes, a steamer trunk. No guns. He pulled up the edges of the carpet and searched under it for a hidden storage area. He found nothing.

Half an hour later, he was sweating but not tired. Indeed, he was exhilarated. He looked around at the destruction he had wrought, and he was strangely pleased. The room appeared to have been bombed.

He went into the next room — probing, ripping, overturning, and smashing everything in his path.

He wanted very much to find those guns.

But he was also having fun.

Chapter 30 Some Answers More Questions

The house was exceptionally neat and clean, but the color scheme and the unrelenting frilliness made Bryce Hammond nervous. Everything was either green or yellow. Everything. The carpets were green, and the walls were pale yellow. In the living room, the sofas were done in a yellow and green floral print that was bright enough to send you running for an ophthalmologist. The two armchairs were emerald green, and the two side chairs were canary yellow. The ceramic lamps were yellow with green swirls, and the shades were chartreuse with tassels. On the walls were two big prints — yellow daisies in a verdant field. The master bedroom was worse: floral wallpaper brighter than the fabric on the living room sofas, scaringly yellow drapes with a scalloped valance. A dozen accent pillows were scattered across the upper end of the bed; some of them were green with yellow lace trim, and some were yellow with green lace trim.

According to Jenny, the house was occupied by Ed and Theresa Lange, their three teenagers, and Theresa's seventy-year-old mother.

None of the occupants could be found. There were no bodies, and Bryce was thankful for that. Somehow, a bruised and swollen corpse would have looked especially terrible here, in the midst of this almost maniacally cheerful decor.

The kitchen was green and yellow, too.

At the sink, Tal Whitman said, “Here's something. Better have a look at this, Chief.”

Bryce, Jenny, and Captain Arkhain went to Tal but the other two deputies remained back by the doorway with Lisa between them. It was hard to tell what might turn up in a kitchen sink in this town, in the middle of this Love craft nightmare. Someone's head, maybe. Or another pair of severed hands. Or worse.

But it wasn't worse. It was merely odd.

“A regular jewelry store,” Tal said.

The double sink was filled with jewelry. Mostly rings and watches. There were both men's and women's watches: Timex, Seiko, Bulova, even a Rolex; some of them were attached to flexible bands; some with no bands at all; none of them was attached to a leather or plastic band. Bryce saw scores of wedding and engagement rings; the diamonds glittered brilliantly. Birthstone rings, too: garnet, amethyst, bloodstone, topaz, tourmaline; rings with ruby and emerald chips. High school and college rings. Junk jewelry was all mixed up with the high priced pieces. Bryce dug his hands into one of the piles of valuables the way a pirate, in the movies, always drenched his hands in the contents of a treasure chest. He stirred up the shining baubles and saw other kinds of jewelry: earrings, charm bracelets, loose pearls from a broken necklace or two, gold chains, a lovely cameo pendant…

“This stuff can't all belong to the Langes,” Tal said.

“Wait,” Jenny said. She snatched a watch from the pile and examined it closely. “Recognize that one?” Bryce asked.

“Yes. Earlier. A tank watch. Not the classic tank with Roman numerals. This has no numerals and a black face. Sylvia Kanarsky gave it to her husband, Dan, for their fifth wedding anniversary.”

Bryce frowned. “Where do I know that name from?”

“They own the Candle glow Inn,” Jenny said.

“Oh, yes. Your friends.”

“Among the missing,” Tal said.

“Dan loved this watch,” Jenny said, “When Sylvia bought it for him, it was a terrible extravagance. The inn was still on rather shaky financial footing, and the watch cost three hundred and fifty dollars. Now of course, it's worth considerably more. Dan used to joke that it was the best investment they'd ever made.”

She held the watch up, so Tal and Bryce could see the back. At the top of the gold case, above the Cartier logo, was engraved: TO MY DAN. At the bottom, under the serial number, was LOVE, SYL.

Bryce looked down at the sinkful of jewelry. “So the stuff probably belongs to people from all over Snowfield.”

“Well, I'd say it belongs to those whore missing, anyway,” Tal said, “The victims we've found so far were still wearing their jewelry.” Bryce nodded. “You're right. So those who’re missing were stripped of all their valuables before they were taken to… to… well, to wherever the hell they were taken.”

“Thieves wouldn't let the loot lie around like this,” Jenny said, “They wouldn't collect it and then just dump it in someone's kitchen sink. They'd pack it up and take it with them.”

“Then what's all this stuff doing here?” Bryce said.

“Beats me,” Jenny said.

Tal shrugged.

In the two sinks, the jewelry gleamed and flashed.

The cries of sea gulls.

Dogs barking.

Galen Copperfield looked up from the computer terminal, where he had been reading data. He was sweaty inside his decon suit, tired and achy. For a moment, he wasn't sure he was really hearing the birds and dogs.

Then a cat squealed.

A horse whinnied.

The general glanced around the mobile lab, frowning.

Rattlesnakes. A lot of them. The familiar, deadly sound: chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka.

Buzzing bees.

The others heard it, too. They looked at one another uneasily. Roberts said, “It's coming through the suit-to-suit radio.”

“Affirmative,” Dr. Bettenby said from over in the second motor home, “We hear it here, too.”

“Okay,” Copperfield said, “let's give it a chance to perform. If you want to speak to one another, use your external com systems.”

The bees stopped buzzing.

A child — the sex indeterminate; androgynous — began to sing very softly, far away:

The voice was sweet. Melodic.

Yet it was also blood-freezing.

Copperfield had never heard anything quite like it. Although it was a child's voice, tender and fragile, it nevertheless contained… something that shouldn't be in a child's voice. A profound lack of innocence. Knowledge, perhaps. Yes. Too much knowledge of too many terrible things. Menace. Hatred. Scorn. It wasn't audible on the surface of the lilting song, but it was there beneath the surface, pulsing and dark and immeasurably disturbing.

“They told us about this,” Goldstein said, “Dr. Paige and the sheriff. They heard it on the phone and coming out of the kitchen drains at the inn. We didn't believe them; it sounded so ridiculous.”

“Doesn't sound ridiculous now,” Roberts said.

“No,” Goldstein said. Even inside his bulky suit, his shivering was visible.

“It's broadcasting on the same wavelength as our suit radios,” Roberts said.

“But how?” Copperfield wondered.

“Velazquez,” Goldstein said suddenly.

“Of course,” Roberts said, “Velazquez's suit had a radio. It's broadcasting through Velazquez's radio.”

The child stopped singing. In a whispery voice, it said, “Better say your prayers. Everyone say your prayers. Don't forget to say your prayers.” Then it giggled.

They waited for something more.

There was only silence.

“I think it was threatening us,” Roberts said.

“Damn it, put a lid on that kind of talk right now,” Copperfield said, “Let's not panic ourselves.”

“Have you noticed we're saying it now?” Goldstein asked.

Copperfield and Roberts looked at him and then at each other, but they said nothing.

“We're saying it the same way that Dr. Paige and the sheriff and the deputies do. So… have we come completely around to their way of thinking?”

In his mind, Copperfield could still hear the child's haunting, human-yet-not-human voice.

It.

“Come on,” he said gruffly, “We've still got a lot of work to get done.”

He turned his attention back to the computer terminal, but he had difficulty concentrating.

It.

By 4:30 Monday afternoon, Bryce called off the house-to house search. A couple of hours of daylight remained, but everyone was bone weary. Weary from climbing up and down stairs. Weary of grotesque corpses. Weary of nasty surprises. Weary of the extent of the human tragedy, of horror that numbed the senses. Weary of the fear knotted in their chests. Constant tension was as tiring as heavy manual labor.

Besides, it had become apparent to Bryce that the job was simply too big for them. In five and a half hours, they had covered only a small portion of the town. At that rate, confined to a daylight schedule, and with their limited numbers, they would need at least two weeks to give Snowfield a thorough inspection. Furthermore, if the missing people didn't turn up by the time the last building was explored, and if a clue to their whereabouts could not be found, then an even more difficult search of the surrounding forest would have to be undertaken.

Last night, Bryce hadn't wanted the National Guard tramping through town. But now he and his people had had the town to themselves for the better part of a day, and Copperfield's specialists had collected their samples and had begun their work. As soon as Copperfield could certify that the town had not been stricken by a bacteriological agent, the Guard could be brought in to assist Bryce's own men.

Initially, knowing little about the situation here, he had been reluctant to relinquish any of his authority over a town in his jurisdiction. But now, although not willing to surrender authority, he was certainly willing to share it. He needed more men. Hour by hour, the responsibility was becoming a crushing weight, and he was ready to shift some of it to other shoulders.

Therefore, at 4:30 Monday afternoon, he took his two search teams back to the Hilltop Inn, placed a call to the governor's office, and spoke with Jack Retiock. It was agreed that the Guard would be placed on standby for a call-up, pending an all-clear signal from Copperfield.

He had no sooner hung up the phone than Charlie Mercer, the desk-sergeant at HQ in Santa Mira, rang through. He had news. Fletcher Kale had escaped while being taken to the county courthouse for arraignment on two charges of murder in the first degree.

Bryce was furious.

Charlie let him rage on for a while, and when Bryce quieted down, Charlie said, “There's worse. He killed Joe Freemont.”

“Aw, shit,” Bryce said, “Has Mary been told?”

“Yeah. I went over there myself.”

“How's she taking it?”

“Bad. They were married twenty-six years.”

More death.

Death everywhere.

Christ.

“What about Kale?” Bryce asked Charlie.

“We think he took a car from the apartment complex across the alley. One's been stolen from that lot. So we put up the roadblocks as soon as we knew Kale slipped, but I figure he had almost an hour's lead on us.”

“Long gone.”

“Probably. If we don't nab the son of a bitch by seven o'clock, I want to call the blocks off. We're so shorthanded what with everything that's going on — we can't keep tying men up on roadblocks.”

“Whatever you think's best,” Bryce said wearily, “What about the San Francisco police? You know — about that message Harold Ordnay left on the mirror up here?”

“That was the other thing I called about. They finally got back to us.”

“Anything useful?”

“Well, they talked to the employees at Ordnay's bookstores. You remember, I told you one of the shops deals strictly in out-of-print and rare books. The assistant manager at that store, name of Celia Meddock, recognized the Timothy Flyte moniker.”

“He's a customer?” Bryce asked.

“No. An author.”

“Author? Of what?”

“One book. Guess the title.”

“How the devil could I… Oh. Of course. The Ancient Enemy.”

“You got it,” Charlie Mercer said.

“What's the book about?”

“That's the best part. Celia Meddock says she thinks it's about mass disappearances throughout history.”

For a moment, Bryce was speechless. Then: “Are you serious? You mean there've been a lot of others?”

“I guess so. At least a bookful of 'em.”

“Where? When? How come I've never heard about them?”

“Meddock said something about the disappearance of ancient Mayan populations—”

(Something stirred in Bryce's mind. An article he had read in an old science magazine. Mayan civilizations. Abandoned cities.)

“—and the Roanoke Colony, which was the first British settlement in North America,” Charlie finished.

“That I've heard about. It's in the schoolbooks.”

“I guess maybe a lot of the other disappearances go back to ancient times,” Charlie said.

“Christ!”

“Yeah. Flyte apparently has some theory to account for such things,” Charlie said. “The book explains it.”

“What's the theory?”

“The Meddock woman didn't know. She hasn't read the book.”

“But Harold Ordnay must've read it. And what he saw happening here in Snowfield must've been exactly what Flyte wrote about. So Ordnay printed the title on the bathroom mirror.”

“So it seems.”

With a rush of excitement, Bryce said, “Did the San Francisco P D. get a copy of the book?”

“Nope. Meddock didn't have one. The only reason she knew about it was because Ordnay recently sold a copy — two, three weeks ago.”

“Can we get a copy?”

“It's out of print. In fact, it never was in print in this country. The copy they sold was British, which is evidently the only edition there ever was — and a small one. It's a rare book.”

“What about the person Ordnay sold it to? The collector. What's his name and address?”

“Meddock doesn't remember. She says the guy's not a heavy customer of theirs. She says Ordnay would probably know.”

“Which doesn't do us one damned bit of good. Listen, Charlie, I've got to get a copy of that book.”

“I'm working on it,” Charlie said, “But maybe you won't need it. You'll be able to get the whole story from the horse's mouth. Flyte's on his way here from London right now.”

Jenny was sitting on the edge of the central operations desk in the middle of the lobby, gaping at Bryce as he leaned back in his chair; she was amazed by what he had told her. “He's on his way here from London? Now? Already? You mean he knew this was going to happen?”

“Probably not,” Bryce said, “But I guess the minute he heard the news, he knew it was a case that fit his theory.”

“Whatever it is.”

“Whatever.”

Tal was standing in front of the desk. “When's he due in?”

“He'll be in San Francisco shortly after midnight. His U S. publisher has arranged a news conference for him at the airport. Then he'll come straight to Santa Mira.”

“U S. publisher?” Frank Autry said. “I thought you told us his book was never in print over here.”

“It wasn't,” Bryce said, “Evidently, he's writing a new one.”

“About Snowfield?” Jenny asked.

“I don't know. Maybe. Probably.”

“He sure works fast,” Jenny said, frowning, “Less than a day after it happens, he's got a contract to write a book about it.”

“I wish he worked even faster. I wish to God he was here right now.”

Tal said, “I think what Doc means is that this Flyte character might just be another sharp hustler out to make a fast buck.”

“Exactly,” Jenny said.

“Could be,” Bryce admitted, “But don't forget Ordnay wrote Flyte's name on that mirror. In a way, Ordnay's the only witness we have. And from his message, we have to deduce that what happened was very much like the thing Timothy Flyte wrote about.”

“Damn,” Frank said, “If Flyte's really got some information that could help us, he should've called. He shouldn't have made us wait.”

“Yeah,” Tal said, “We could all be dead by midnight. He should have called to tell us what we can do.”

“There's the rub,” Bryce said.

“What do you mean?” Jenny asked.

Bryce sighed. “Well, I have a hunch that Flyte would have called if he could've told us how to protect ourselves. Yeah, I think maybe he knows exactly what sort of creature or force we're dealing with, but I strongly suspect he doesn't have the faintest idea what to do about it. Regardless of how much he can tell us, I suspect he won't be able to tell us the one thing we need to know the most — how to save our asses.”

Jenny and Bryce were having coffee at the operations desk. They were talking about what they had discovered during today's search, trying to make sense of senseless things: the mocking crucifixion of the priest; the bullets all over the kitchen floor of the Sheffield house; the bodies in the locked cars…

Lisa was sitting nearby. She appeared to be totally involved in a crossword puzzle magazine, which she had picked up somewhere along the search route. Suddenly she looked up and said, “I know why the jewelry was piled in those two sinks.”

Jenny and Bryce looked at her expectantly.

“First,” the girl said, bending forward on her chair, “you've got to accept that all the people whore missing are really dead. And they are. Dead. No question about that.”

“But there is some question about that, honey,” he said.

“They're dead,” Lisa said softly, “I know it. So do you.” Her vivid green eyes were almost feverish. “It took them, and it ate them.”

Jenny recalled Lisa's response last night, at the substation, after Bryce had told them about hearing tortured screams on the phone, when it had been in control of the line. Lisa had 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.

Last night, everyone had stared at the girl, wanting to laugh, but realizing there could be a crazy sort of truth to what she said. Not necessarily a web or cocoons or a giant spider. But something. None of them had wanted to admit it, but the possibility was there. The unknown. The unknown thing. The unknown thing that ate people.

And now Lisa returned to the same theme. “It ate them.”

“But how does that explain the jewelry?” Bryce asked.

“Well,” Lisa said, “after it ate the people, maybe it… maybe it just spit out all that jewelry… the same way you would spit out cherry pits.”

Dr. Sara Yamaguchi walked into the Hilltop Inn, paused to answer a question from one of the guards at the front door, and came across the lobby toward Jenny and Bryce. She was still dressed in her decontamination suit, but she was no longer wearing the helmet, the tank of compressed air, or the waste recycling unit. She was carrying some folded clothes and a thick sheaf of pale green papers.

Jenny and Bryce rose to meet her, and Jenny said, “Doctor, has the quarantine been lifted already?”

“Already? Seems like I've been trapped inside this suit for years.” Dr. Yamaguchi's voice was different from what it had sounded like through the squawk box. It was fragile and sweet. Her voice was even more diminutive than she was. “It feels good to breathe air again.”

“You've run bacteria cultures, haven't you?” Jenny asked.

“Started-to.”

“Well, then… doesn't it take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to get results?”

“Yes. But we've decided it's pointless to wait for the cultures. We're not going to grow any bacteria on them — neither benign bacteria nor otherwise.”

Neither benign bacteria nor otherwise. That peculiar statement intrigued Jenny, but before she could ask about it, the geneticist said:

“Besides, Meddy told us it was safe.”

“Meddy?”

“That's shorthand for Medanacomp,” Dr. Yamaguchi said. “Which is itself short for Medical Analysis and Computation Systems. Our computer. After Meddy assimilated all the data from the autopsies and tests, she gave us a probability figure for biological causation. Meddy says there's a zero point zero chance that a biological agent is involved here.”

“And you trust a computer's analysis enough to breathe air,” Bryce said, clearly surprised.

“In over eight hundred trial runs, Meddy's never been wrong.”

“But this isn't just a trial run,” Jenny said.

“Yes. But after what we found in the autopsies and in all pathology tests…” The geneticist shrugged and handed the sheaf of green papers to Jenny. “Here. It's all in the consults. General Copperfield thought you'd like to see them. If you have any questions, I'll explain. Meanwhile, all the men are up at the field lab, changing out of their decon suits, and I'm itching to do the same. And I do mean itching.” She smiled and scratched her neck. Her gloved fingers left faint red marks on her porcelain-smooth skin. “Is there someway I could wash?”

Jenny said, “We've got soap, towels, and a washbasin set up in one corner of the kitchen. It doesn't offer much privacy, but we're willing to sacrifice a little privacy rather than be alone.”

Dr. Yamaguchi nodded. “Understandable. How do I get to this washbasin?”

Lisa jumped up from her chair, casting aside the crossword puzzle. “I'll show you. And I'll make sure the guys whore working in the kitchen keep their backs turned and their eyes to themselves.”

The pale green papers were computer print-outs that had been cut into eleven-inch pages, numbered, and clipped together along the left-hand margin with plastic pressure binding.

With Bryce looking over her shoulder, Jenny leafed through the first section of the report, which was a computer transcription of Seth Goldstein's autopsy notes. Goldstein noted indications of possible suffocation, as well as even more evident signs of severe allergic reaction to an unidentified substance, but he could not fix a cause of death.

Then her attention came to rest on one of the first pathology tests. It was a light microscopy examination of unstained bacteria in a long series of hanging-drop preparations that had been contaminated by tissue and fluid samples from Gary Wechlas's body; darkfield illumination had been used to identify even the smallest microorganisms. They had been searching for bacteria that were still thriving in the cadaver. What they found was startling.

The print-out continued to list bacteria for which the computer and Dr. Bettenby had searched, all with the same results.

Jenny remembered what Dr. Yamapchi had said, the statement that she had wondered about and about which she had wanted to inquire: neither benign bacteria nor otherwise. And here was the data, every bit as abnormal as the computer said it was.

“Strange,” Jenny said.

Bryce said, “It doesn't mean a thing to me. Translation?”

“Well, you see, a cadaver is an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria — at least for the short run. This many hours after death, Gary Wechlas's corpse ought to be teeming with Clostridium welchii, which is associated with gas gangrene.”

“And it isn't?”

“They couldn't find even one lonely, living C. welchii in the water droplet that had been contaminated with bowel material. And that is precisely the sample that ought to be swimming with it. It should be teeming with Proteus vulgaris, too, which is a saprophytic bacterium.”

“Translation?” he asked patiently.

“Sorry. Saprophytic means it flourishes in dead or decaying matter.”

“And Wechlas is unquestionably dead.”

“Unquestionably. Yet there's no P. vulgaris. There should be other bacteria, too. Maybe Micrococcus albus and Bacillus mesentericus. Anyway, there aren't any of the microorganisms that're associated with decomposition, not any of the forms you'd expect to find. Even stranger, there's no living Escherichia coli in the body. Now, damn it, that would've been there, thriving, even before Wechlas was killed. And it should be there now, still thriving. E. coli inhabits the colon. Yours, mine, Gary Wechlas's, everyone's. As long as it's contained within the bowel, it's generally a benign organism.” She paged through the report. “Now, here. Here, look at this. When they used general and differential stains to search for dead microorganisms, they found plenty of E. coli. But all the specimens were dead. There are no living bacteria in Wechlas's body.”

“What's that supposed to tell us?” Bryce asked, “That the corpse isn't decomposing as it should be?”

“It isn't decomposing at all. Not only that. Something a whole lot stranger. The reason it isn't decomposing is because it's apparently been injected with a massive dose of a sterilizing and stabilizing agent. A preservative, Bryce. The corpse seems to have been injected with an extremely effective preservative.”

Lisa brought a tray to the table. There were four mugs of coffee, spoons, napkins. The girl passed coffee to Dr. Yamaguchi, Jenny, and Bryce; she took the fourth mug for herself.

They were sitting in the dining room at the Hilltop, near the windows. Outside, the street was bathed in the orange-gold sunlight of late afternoon.

In an hour, Jenny thought, it'll be dark again. And then we'll have to wait through another long night.

She shivered. She sure needed the hot coffee.

Sara Yamaguchi was now wearing tan corduroy jeans and a yellow blouse. Her long, silky, black hair spilled over her shoulders. “Well,” she was saying, “I guess everyone's seen enough of those old Walt Disney wildlife documentaries to know that some spiders and mud wasps — and certain other insects — inject a preservative into their victims and put them aside for consumption later or to feed their unhatched young. The preservative distributed through Mr. Wechlas's tissues is vaguely similar to those substances but far more potent and sophisticated.”

Jenny thought of the impossibly large moth that had attacked and killed Stewart Wargle. But that wasn't the creature that had depopulated Snowfield. Definitely not. Even if there were hundreds of those things lurking somewhere in town, they couldn't have gotten at everyone. No moth that size could have found its way into locked cars, locked houses, and barricaded rooms. Something else was out there.

“Are you saying it was an insect that killed these people?” Bryce asked Sara Yamaguchi.

“Actually, the evidence doesn't point that way. An insect would employ a stinger to kill and to inject the preservative. There would be a puncture wound, however minuscule. But Seth Goldstein went over the Wechlas corpse with a magnifying glass. Literally. Over every square inch of skin. Twice. He even used a depilatory cream to remove all the body hair in order to examine the skin more closely. Yet he couldn't find a puncture or any other break in the skin through which an injection might have been administered. We were afraid we had atypical or inaccurate data. So a second postmortem was performed.”

“On Karen Oxley,” Jenny said.

“Yes.” Sara Yamaguchi leaned toward the windows and peered up the street, looking for General Copperfield and the others. When she turned back to the table, she said, “However, everything tested out the same. No animate bacteria in the corpse. Decomposition unnaturally arrested. Tissues saturated with preservative. It was bizarre data again. But we were satisfied that it wasn't atypical or inaccurate data.”

Bryce said, “If the preservative wasn't injected, how was it administered?”

“Our best guess is that it's highly absorbable and enters the body by skin contact, then circulates through the tissues within seconds.”

Jenny said, “Could it be a nerve gas, after all? Maybe the preservative aspect is only a side effect.”

“No,” Sara Yamaguchi said, “There aren't any traces on the victims' clothes, as there would absolutely have to be if we're dealing here with gas saturation. And although the substance has a toxic effect, chemical analysis shows it isn't primarily a toxin, which a nerve gas would be; primarily, it's a preservative.”

“But was it the cause of death?” Bryce asked.

“It contributed. But we can't pinpoint the cause. It was partly the toxicity of the preservative, but other factors lead us to believe death also resulted from oxygen deprivation. The victims suffered either a prolonged constriction or a complete blockage of the trachea.”

Bryce leaned forward. “Strangulation? Suffocation?”

“Yes. But we don't know precisely which.”

“But how can it be either one?” Lisa asked, “You're talking about things that took a minute or two to happen. But these people died fast. In just a second or two.”

“Besides,” Jenny said, “as I remember the scene in the Oxleys' den, there weren't any signs of struggle. People being smothered to death will generally thrash like hell, knock things over”

“Yes,” the geneticist said, nodding. “It doesn't make sense.”

“Why are all the bodies swollen?” Bryce asked.

“We think it's a toxic reaction to the preservative.”

“The bruising, too?”

“No. That's… different.”

“How?”

Sara didn't answer right away. Frowning, she stared down at the coffee in her mug. Finally: “Skin and subcutaneous tissue from both corpses clearly indicate that the bruising was caused by compression from an external source; they were classic contusions. In other words, the bruising wasn't due to the swelling, and it wasn't a separate allergic reaction to the preservative. It seems as if something struck the victims. Hard. Repeatedly. Which is just crazy. Because to cause that much bruising, there would have to be at least a fracture, one fracture, somewhere. Another crazy thing: The degree of bruising is the same all over the body. The tissues are damaged to precisely the same degree on the thighs, on the hands, on the chest, everywhere. Which is impossible.”

“Why?” Bryce asked.

Jenny answered him. “If you were to beat someone with a heavy weapon, some areas of the body would be more severely bruised than others. You wouldn't be able to deliver every blow with precisely the same force and at precisely the same angle as all the other blows, which is what you would've had to've done to create the kind of contusions on these bodies.”

“Besides"' Sara Yamaguchi said, “they're bruised even in places where a club wouldn't land. In their armpits. Between the cheeks of the buttocks. And on the soles of their feet! Even though, in the case of Mrs. Oxley, she had her shoes on.”

“Obviously,” Jenny said, “the tissue compression that resulted in bruising was caused by something other than blows to the body.”

“Such as?” Bryce asked.

“I've no idea.”

“And they died fast,” Lisa reminded everyone.

Sara leaned back in her chair, tilting it onto its rear legs, and looked out the window again. Up the hill. Toward the labs.

Bryce said, “Dr. Yamaguchi, what's your opinion? Not your professional opinion. Personally, informally, what do you think's going on here? Any theories?”

She turned to him, shook her head. Her black hair tossed, and the beams of the late-afternoon sunlight played upon it, sending brief ripples of red and green and blue through it the same way that light, shimmering on the black surface of oil, creates short-lived, wriggling rainbows. “No. No theories, I'm afraid. No coherent thought. Just that.”

“What?”

“Well… now I believe Isley and Arkham were wise to come along.”

Jenny was still skeptical about extraterrestrial connections, but Lisa continued to be intrigued. The girl said, “You really think it's from a different world?”

“There may be other possibilities,” Sara said, “but at the moment, it's difficult to see what they are.” She glanced at her wristwatch and scowled and fidgeted and said, “What's taking them so long?” She turned her attention to the window again.

Outside, the trees were motionless.

The awnings in front of the stores hung limp.

The town was dead-still.

“You said they were packing away the decon suits.”

Sara said, “Yes, but that just wouldn't take this long.”

“If there'd been any trouble, we'd have heard gunfire.”

“Or explosions,” Jenny said, “Those firebombs they made.”

“They should've been here at least five… maybe ten minutes ago,” the geneticist insisted. “And still no sign of them.”

Jenny remembered the incredible stealth with which it had taken Jake Johnson.

Bryce hesitated, then pushed his chair back. “I suppose it won't hurt if I take a few men to have a look.”

Sara Yamaguchi swung away from the window. The front legs of her chair came down hard against the floor, making a sharp, startling sound. She said, “Something's wrong.”

“No, no. Probably not,” Bryce said.

“You feel it, too,” Sara said, “I can tell you do. Jesus.”

“Don't worry,” Bryce said calmly.

However, his eyes were not as calm as his voice. During the past twenty-some hours, Jenny had learned to read those hooded eyes quite well. Now they were expressing tension and icy, needle-sharp dread.

“It's much too soon to be worried,” he said.

But they all knew.

They didn't want to believe it, but they knew.

The terror had begun again.

Bryce chose Tal, Frank, and Gordy to accompany him to the lab.

Jenny said, “I'm going, too.”

Bryce didn't want her to come. He was more afraid for her than he was for Lisa or for his own men or even for himself.

An unexpected and rare connection had taken place between them. He felt right with her, and he believed she felt the same.

He didn't want to lose her.

And so he said, “I'd rather you didn't go.”

“I'm a doctor,” Jenny said, as if that were not only a calling but an armor that would shield her from all harm.

“It's a regular fortress here,” he said, “It's safer here.”

“It's not safe anywhere.”

“I didn't say safe. I said safer.”

“They might need a doctor.”

“If they've been attacked, they're either dead or missing. We haven't found anyone just wounded, have we?”

“There's always a first time.” Jenny turned to Lisa and said, “Get my medical bag, honey.”

The girl ran toward the makeshift infirmary.

“She stays here for sure,” Bryce said.

“No,” Jenny said, “She stays with me.”

Exasperated, Bryce said, “Listen, Jenny, this is virtually a martial law situation. I can order you to stay here.”

“And enforce the order — how? At gunpoint?” she asked, but with no antagonism.

Lisa returned with the black leather bag.

Standing by the front doors of the inn, Sara Yamaguchi called to Bryce: “Hurry. Please hurry.”

If it had struck at the field lab, there was probably no use hurrying.

Looking at Jenny, Bryce thought: I can't protect you, Doc. Don't you see? Stay here where the windows are locked and the doors are guarded. Don't rely on me to protect you because, sure as hell, I'll fail. Like I failed Ellen… and Timmy.

“Let's go,” Jenny said.

Agonizingly aware of his limitations, Bryce led them out of the inn and up the street toward the corner — beyond which it might very well be waiting for them. Tal walked at the head of the procession, beside Bryce. Frank and Gordy brought up the rear. Lisa, Sara Yarnaguchi, and Jenny were in the middle.

The warm day was beginning to turn cool.

In the valley below Snowfield, a mist had begun to form.

Less than three-quarters of an hour remained before nightfall. The sun spilled a final flood of bloody light through the town. Shadows were extremely long, distorted. Windows blazed with reflected solar fire, reminding Bryce of eyeholes in Halloween jack-o'-lantems.

The street seemed even more ominously silent than it had been last night. Their footsteps echoed as if they were crossing the floor of a vast, abandoned cathedral.

They rounded the corner cautiously.

Three decontamination suits lay tangled and untenanted in the middle of the street. Another empty suit lay half in the gutter and half on the sidewalk. Two of the helmets were cracked.

Submachine guns were scattered around, and unused Molotov cocktails were lined up along the curb.

The back of the truck was open. More empty decontamination suits and submachine guns were piled in there. No people.

Bryce shouted: “General? General Copperfield?”

Graveyard silence.

Surface-of-the-moon silence.

“Seth!” Sara Yamaguchi cried, “Will? Will Bettenby? Galen? Somebody, please answer me.”

Nothing. No one.

Jenny said, “They didn't even manage to fire one shot.”

Tal said, “Or scream. The guards at the front door of the inn would've heard them even if they'd just screamed.”

Gordy said, “Oh, shit.”

The rear doors on both labs were ajar.

Bryce had the feeling that something was waiting for them inside.

He wanted to turn and walk away. Couldn't. He was the leader here. If he panicked, they would all panic. Panic was an invitation to death.

Sara started toward the rear of the first lab.

Bryce stopped her.

“They're my friends, damn it,” she said.

“I know. But let me look first,"-he said.

For a moment, however, he couldn't move.

He was immobilized by fear.

Couldn't move an inch.

But then at last, of course, he did.

Chapter 31 Computer Games

Bryce's service revolver was drawn and cocked. He seized the door with his other hand and threw it wide open. At the same time, he jumped back, pointing his gun into the lab.

It was deserted. Two rumpled decon suits lay on the floor, and another was draped over a swivel chair in front of a computer terminal.

He went to the rear of the second lab.

Tal said, “Let me do this one.”

Bryce shook his head. “You stay back there. Protect the women; they don't have guns. If anything comes out of here when I open the door, run like hell.”

Heart pounding, Bryce hesitated behind the second field lab. Put his hand on the door. Hesitated again. Then pulled it open even more carefully than he had opened the first.

It was deserted, too. Two decontamination suits. Nothing else.

As Bryce peered into the lab, all the ceiling lights winked out, and he jerked in surprise at the sudden darkness. In a second, however, light sprang up once more, although not from the ceiling bulbs; this was an unusual light, a green flash that startled him. Then he saw it was only the three video display terminals, which had all come on at once. Now they went off. And came on. Off, on, off, on, off… At first they flashed simultaneously, then in sequence, around and around. Finally they all came on and stayed on, filling the otherwise unlighted work area with an eerie glow.

“I'm going in,” Bryce said.

The others protested, but he was already up the step and through the door. He went to the first terminal screen, where six words burned in pale green letters across a dark green background.

JESUS LOVES ME — THIS I KNOW.

Bryce glanced at the other two screens. They bore the same words. Blink. Now there were new words:

FOR THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO.

Bryce frowned.

What sort of program was this? These were the words to one of the songs that had come out of the kitchen drain at the inn.

THE BIBLE IS FULL OF SHIT, the computer told him.

Blink.

JESUS FUCKS DOGS.

The latest three words remained on the screen for several seconds. It seemed to Bryce as if the green light from the display terminals was cold. As fireplace light carries a dry heat with it, so this radiance carried a chill that pierced him.

This was no ordinary program being run on these displays. This was nothing General Copperfield's people had put into the computer, no form of code, no exercise of logic, no systems test of any kind. Blink.

JESUS IS DEAD. GOD IS DEAD.

Blink.

I AM ALIVE.

Blink.

DO YOU WANT TO PLAY 20 QUESTIONS?

Gazing at the screen, Bryce felt a primitive, superstitious terror rising within him; terror and awe, twisting his gut and clutching his throat. But he didn't know why. On a deep, almost subconscious level, he sensed that he was in the presence of something evil, ancient, and… familiar. But how could it be familiar? He didn't even know what it was. And yet… And yet perhaps he did know. Deep down. Instinctively. If only he could dig inside himself, down past his civilized veneer which embodied so much skepticism, if he could reach into his racial memory, he might find the truth about the thing that had seized and slaughtered the people of Snowfield.

Blink.

SHERIFF HAMMOND?

Blink.

DO YOU WANT TO PLAY 20 QUESTIONS WITH ME?

The use of his name jolted him. And then a far bigger and more disturbing surprise followed.

ELLEN

The name burned on the screen, the name of his dead wife, and every muscle in his body grew tense, and he waited for something more to flash up, but for long seconds, there was only the precious name, and he could not take his eyes away from it, and then-

ELLEN ROTS.

He couldn't breathe.

How could it know about Ellen?

Blink.

ELLEN FEEDS THE WORMS.

What kind of shit was this? What was the point of this?

TIMMY WILL DIE.

The prophecy glowed, green on green.

He gasped. “No,” he said softly. For the past year, he had thought it would be better if Timmy succumbed. Better than a slow wasting away. Only yesterday, he would have said that his son's swift death would be a blessing. But not any longer. Snowfield had taught him that nothing was worse than death. In the arms of death, there was no hope. But as long as Timmy lived, there was a possibility of recovery. After all, the doctors said the boy hadn't suffered massive brain damage. Therefore, if Timmy ever woke from his unnatural sleep, he had a good chance of retaining his normal faculties and functions. Chance, promise, hope. So Bryce said, “No,” to the computer. “No.” Blink.

TIMMY WILL ROT. ELLEN ROTS. ELLEN ROTS IN HELL.

“Who are you?” Bryce demanded.

The moment he spoke, he felt foolish. He couldn't just talk to a computer as if it were another human being. If he wanted to ask a question, he would have to type it out.

SHALL WE HAVE A LITTLE CHAT?

Bryce turned away from the terminal. He went to the door and leaned outside.

The others looked relieved to see him.

Clearing his throat, trying to conceal the fact that he was badly shaken, he said, “Dr. Yamaguchi, I need your help here.”

Tal, Jenny, Lisa, and Sara Yamaguchi stepped into the field lab. Frank and Gordy remained outside, by the door, nervously surveying the street, where the daylight was fading fast.

Bryce showed Sara the computer screens.

SHALL WE HAVE A LITTLE CHAT?

He told them what had flashed onto the video displays, and before he was finished, Sara interrupted him to say, “But that's not possible. This computer has no program, no vocabulary that would enable it to—”

“Something has control of your computer,” he said.

Sara scowled. “Control? How?”

“I don't know.”

“Who?”

“Not who,” Jenny said, putting an arm around her sister. “More like what.”

“Yeah,” Tal said, “This thing, this killer, whatever the hell it is, it has control of your computer, Dr. Yamaguchi.”

Obviously doubtful, the geneticist sat down at one of the display terminals and threw a switch on an automatic typewriter. “Might as well have a print-out just in case we actually get something from this.” She hesitated with her delicate, almost childlike hands poised above the keyboard. Bryce watched over her shoulder. Tal, Jenny, and Lisa turned to the other two screens — just as all the displays went blank. Sara stared at the smooth field of green light in front of her, and then finally keyed in the access code and typed a question.

IS SOMEONE THERE?

The automatic typewriter chattered, beginning the print-out, and the answer came at once. YES.

WHO ARE YOU?

COUNTLESS.

“What's it mean?” Tal asked.

“I don't know,” the geneticist said.

Sara tapped out the question again and received the same obscure response: COUNTLESS.

“Ask it for a name,” Bryce said.

The words she composed appeared instantly on all three of the display screens: DO YOU HAVE A NAME?

YES.

WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

MANY.

YOU HAVE MANY NAMES?

YES.

WHAT IS ONE OF YOUR NAMES?

CHAOS.

WHAT OTHER NAMES DO YOU HAVE?

YOU ARE A BORING, STUPID CUNT. ASK ANOTHER QUESTION.

Visibly shocked, the geneticist glanced up at Bryce. “That is definitely not a word you're going to find in any computer language.”

Lisa said, “Don't ask it who it is. Ask it what it is.”

“Yeah,” Tal said, “See if it'll give you a physical description.”

“It'll think we're asking it to run diagnostic tests on itself,” Sara said. “It'll start flashing up circuitry diagrams.”

“No, it won't,” Bryce said, “Remember, it's not the computer you're having a dialogue with. It's something else. The computer is only the means of communication.”

“Oh. Of course,” Sara said, “In spite of the word it just used, I still want to think of it as good old Meddy.”

After a moment's thought, she typed: PROVIDE A PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF YOURSELF. I AM ALIVE.

BE MORE SPECIFIC, Sara directed.

I AM BY NATURE UNSPECIFIC.

ARE YOU HUMAN?

THAT IS A POSSIBILITY ALSO.

“It's just playing with us,” Jenny said, “Amusing itself.” Bryce wiped a hand over his face, “Ask it what happened to Copperfield.”

WHERE IS GALEN COPPERFIELD?

DEAD.

WHERE IS HIS BODY?

GONE.

WHERE HAS IT GONE?

BORING BITCH.

WHERE ARE THE OTHERS WHO WERE WITH GALEN COPPERFIELD?

DEAD.

DID YOU KILL THEM?

YES.

WHY DID YOU KILL THEM?

YOU

Sara tapped the keyboard: CLARIFY.

YOU ARE

CLARIFY.

YOU ARE ALL DEAD.

Bryce saw that the woman's hands were shaking. Yet they moved across the keys with skill and accuracy: WHY DO YOU WANT TO KILL US?

THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE FOR.

ARE YOU SAYING WE EXIST ONLY TO BE KILLED?

YES. YOU ARE CATTLE. YOU ARE PIGS. YOU ARE WORTHLESS.

WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

VOID.

CLARIFY.

NOTHINGNESS.

WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

LEGION.

CLARIFY.

CLARIFY MY COCK, YOU BORING BITCH.

Sara blushed and said, “This is madness.”

“You can almost feel it in here with us now,” Lisa said.

Jenny squeezed her sister's shoulder encouragingly and said, “Honey? What do you mean by that?”

The girl's voice was strained, tremulous. “You can almost feel its presence.” Her gaze roamed over the lab, “The air seems thicker' don't you think? And colder. It's as if something's going to… materialize right here in front of us.”

Bryce knew what she meant.

Tal caught Bryce's eye and nodded. He felt it, too.

However, Bryce was certain that what they felt was entirely a subjective sensation. Nothing was really going to materialize. The air wasn't actually thicker than it had been a minute ago; it just seemed thicker because they were all tense, and when you were rigid with tension, it was just naturally somewhat more difficult to draw your breath. And if the air was colder… well, that was only because the night was coming.

The computer screens went blank. Then: WHEN IS HE COMING?

Sara typed, CLARIFY.

WHEN IS THE EXORCIST COMING?

“Christ,” Tal said. “What is this?”

CLARIFY, Sara typed.

TIMOTHY FLYTE.

“I'll be damned,” Jenny said… “It knows this Flyte character,” Tal said, “But how? And is it after him — or what?”

ARE YOU AFRAID OF FLYTE?

STUPID BITCH.

ARE YOU AFRAID OF FLYTE? she persisted, undeterred.

I AM AFRAID OF NOTHING.

WHY ARE YOU INTERESTED IN FLYTE?

I HAVE DISCOVERED THAT HE KNOWS.

WHAT DOES HE KNOW?

ABOUT ME.

“Evidently,” Bryce said, “we can rule out the possibility that Flyte is just another hustler.”

Sara tapped the keys: DOES FLYTE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE?

YES. I WANT HIM HERE.

WHY DO YOU WANT HIM HERE?

HE IS MY MATTHEW.

CLARIFY.

HE IS MY MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE AND JOHN.

Frowning, Sara paused, glanced at Bryce. Then her fingers flew over the keys again: DO YOU MEAN THAT FLYTE IS YOUR APOSTLE?

NO. HE IS MY BIOGRAPHER. HE CHRONICLES MY WORK. I WANT HIM TO COME HERE.

DO YOU WANT TO KILL HIM TOO?

NO. I WILL GRANT HIM SAFE PASSAGE.

CLARIFY.

YOU WILL ALL DIE. BUT FLYTE WILL BE ALLOWED TO LIVE. YOU MUST TELL HIM. IF HE DOES NOT KNOW THAT HE HAS SAFE PASSAGE, HE WILL NOT COME.

Sara's hands were shaking worse than ever. She missed a key, hit a wrong letter, had to cancel out and start over again.

She asked: IF WE BRING FLYTE TO SNOWFIELD, WILL YOU LET US LIVE? YOU ARE MINE.

WILL YOU LET US LIVE?

NO.

Thus far, Lisa had been braver than her years. However, seeing her fate spelled out so bluntly on a computer display was too much for her. She began to cry softly.

Jenny comforted the girl as best she could.

“Whatever it is,” Tal said, “it sure is arrogant.”

“Well, we're not dead yet,” Bryce told them. “There's hope. There's always hope as long as we're still alive.”

Sara used the keyboard again—. WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

TIME IMMEMORIAL.

CLARIFY.

BORING BITCH.

ARE YOU EXTRATERRESTRIAL?

NO.

“So much for Isley and Arkhmn,” Bryce said, before realizing that Isley and Arkham were already dead and gone.

“Unless it's lying,” Jenny said.

Sara retyped a question she had posed earlier. WHAT ARE YOU? YOU BORE ME.

WHAT ARE YOU?

STUPID SLUT.

WHAT ARE YOU?

FUCK OFF.

WHAT ARE YOU? She typed again, pounding at the keys so hard that Bryce thought she might break them. Her anger appeared to have outgrown her fear.

I AM GLASYALABOLAS.

CLARIFY.

THAT IS MY NAME. I AM A WINGED MAN WITH THE TEETH OF A DOG. I FOAM AT THE MOUTH. I HAVE BEEN CONDEMNED TO FOAM AT THE MOUTH FOR ALL ETERNITY.

Bryce stared at the display, uncomprehending. Was it serious? A winged man with the teeth of a dog? Surely not. It must be playing with them, amusing itself again. But what was so amusing about this? The screen went blank.

A pause.

New words appeared, even though Sara had asked no question.

I AM HABORYM. I AM A MAN WITH THREE HEADS ONE HUMAN, ONE CAT, ONE SERPENT.

“What's this crap all about?” Tal asked, frustrated.

The air in the room was definitely colder.

Only the wind, Bryce told himself. The wind at the door, bringing the coolness of the oncoming night.

I AM RANTAN.

Blink.

I AM PALLANTRE.

Blink.

I AM AMLUTIAS, ALFINA, EPYN, FUARD, BELIAL, OMGORMA, NEBIROS, BAAL, ELIGOR, AND MANY OTHERS.

The strange names glowed on all three screens for a moment, then winked off.

I AM ALL AND NONE. I AM NOTHING. I AM EVERYTHING.

Blink.

The trio of video displays shone brightly, greenly, blankly for a second, two, three. Then went dark.

The overhead lights came on.

“End of interview,” Jenny said.

Belial. That was one of the names it had given itself.

Bryce was not an ardently religious man, but he was sufficiently well-read to know that Belial was either another name for Satan or the name of one of the other fallen angels. He wasn't sure which it was.

Gordy Brogan was the most religious one among them, a devout Roman Catholic. When Bryce came out of the field lab, the last to leave it, he asked Gordy to look at the names toward the end of the print-out.

They stood on the sidewalk by the lab, in the dwindling light of day, while Gordy read the pertinent lines. In twenty minutes, perhaps less, it would be dark.

“Here,” Gordy said, “This name. Baal.” He pointed to it on the accordion-folded length of computer paper. “I don't know exactly where I've seen it before. Not in church or catechism. Maybe I read it in a book somewhere.”

Bryce detected an odd tone and rhythm in Gordy's speech. It was more than just nervousness. He spoke too slowly for a few words, then much to fast, then slowly again, then almost frenetically.

“A book?” Bryce asked. “The Bible?”

“No, I don't think so. I'm not much of a Bible miller. Should be. Should read it regular. But where I saw this name was in an ordinary book. A novel. I can't quite remember.”

“So who is this Baal?” Bryce asked.

“I think he's supposed to be a very powerful demon,” Gordy said. And something was definitely wrong with his voice; with him.

“What about the other names?” Bryce asked.

“They don't mean anything to me.”

“I thought they might be the names of other demons.”

“Well, you know, the Catholic Church doesn't go in much for fire-and-brimstone preaching,” Gordy said, still speaking oddly, “Maybe it should. Yeah. Maybe it should. 'Cause I think you're right. I think those are the names of demons.”

Jenny sighed wearily. “So it was just playing another one of its games with us.”

Gordy shook his head vigorously. “No. Not a game. Not at all. It was telling the truth.”

Bryce frowned. “Gordy, you don't actually think it's a demon or Satan himself or anything like that — do you?”

“That's all nonsense,” Sara Yamaguchi said.

“Yes,” Jenny said. “The entire performance on the computer, this demonic image it wants to project — all of that's only more misdirection. It's never going to tell us the truth about itself because if we knew the truth, then we might be able to think of a way to beat it.”

“How do you explain the priest who was crucified above the altar at Our Lady of the Mountains?” Gordy asked.

“But that was just one more part of the charade,” Tal said.

Gordy's eyes were strange. It wasn't just fear. They were the eyes of a man who was in spiritual disom, even agony.

I should've noticed this coming sooner, Bryce berated himself.

Speaking softly but with spellbinding intensity, Gordy said, “I think maybe the time has come. The end. The fun of the ending. At last. Just like the Bible says. That was something I never believed. I believed in everything else the Church taught. But not that. Not judgment day. I just sort of thought everything would go on like this forever. But now it's here, isn't it? Yes. The judgment. Not just for the people who live in Snowfield. For all of us. The end. So I've been asking myself how I'll be judged. And I'm scared. I mean, I was given a gift, a very special gift, and I threw it away. I was given the gift of St. Francis. I've always had a way with animals. It's true. No dog ever barks at me. Did you know that? No cat has ever scratched me. Animals respond to me. They trust me. Maybe they even love me. Never met one that didn't. I've coaxed some wild squirrels to eat right out of my hand. It's a gift. So my folks wanted me to be a veterinarian. But I turned my back on them and on my gift. Became a cop instead. Picked up a gun. A gun. I wasn't meant to pick up a gun. Not me. Not ever. I did it partly 'cause I knew it would bother my folks. I was expressing my independence, see? But I forgot. I forgot about where it tells you in the Bible to honor thy father and thy mother. What I did instead was hurt them. And I turned my back on God's gift to me. More than that. Worse than that. What I did was to spit on the gift. Last night I made up my mind to quit the force, put away the gun, and become a vet. But I think I was too late. Judgment was already underway, and I didn't realize it. I've spit on the gift God gave me, and now… I'm afraid.”

Bryce didn't know what to say to Gordy. His imagined sins were so far removed from genuine evil that it was almost laughable. If there was anyone here who was destined for Heaven, it was Gordy. Not that Bryce believed the judgment day had come. He didn't. But he couldn't think of a thing to say to Gordy, for the big, rawboned kid was too far gone to be talked out of his delusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 32 Destiny

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

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

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

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

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

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

$63,440.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The only problem was Joanna.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bitch had left him no choice.

It wasn't his fault she was dead.

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

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

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

$63,440.

A few hours ago, he had been in jail, virtually penniless, facing a trial that could result in a death penalty. Most men would have been immobilized by despair. But Fletcher Kale had not been beaten. He knew he was destined for great things. And here was proof. In an incredibly short time, he had gone from jail to freedom, from penury to $63,440. He now had money, guns, transportation, and a safe hideout in the nearby mountains.

It had begun at last.

His special destiny had begun to unfold.

Chapter 33 Phantoms

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

Within the next quarter of an hour, night would take possession of the town. Shadows were growing with cancerous speed, oozing out of hiding places, where they had slept the day away. They spread toward one another, forming pools of darkness.

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

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

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

The whole group turned as one and looked back.

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

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

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

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

Gordy was the first to act.

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

At first, Jenny was dumbstruck by the dog. She gaped at it. And then a fierce joy began to swell within her. Life had somehow triumphed over death. It hadn't gotten every living thing in Snowfield, after all.

This dog (which sat down wearily when Gordy started toward it) had survived, which meant maybe they, themselves, would manage to leave this town alive—

— and then she thought of the moth.

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

And Stu Wargle's reanimated corpse.

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

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

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

“Gordy, no!” Lisa cried.

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

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

But Gordy didn't seem to hear them.

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

He put a hand out to the dog.

It nuzzled him but didn't lick.

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

“Poor baby,” Gordy said.

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

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

The pooch whined and shivered.

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

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

It licked his hand.

Its tongue was cold.

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

Then.

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

Christ.

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

Gordy stared in shock at the thing in his hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus, please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The girl was screaming.

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

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

Gordy's screams were unbearable.

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

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

“We can put him out of his misery.”

“Don't get too close to that damned thing!”

“We don't have to get too close to get a good shot.”

Gordy's eyes became more tortured by the second, and now he began to scream for Jesus's help, and he drummed his heels on the pavement, arched his back, vibrated with the strain, trying to push up from under the growing weight of the nightmarish assailant.

Bryce winced. “All right. Quickly.”

They both edged nearer to the thrashing, dying deputy and opened fire. Several shots struck him. His screaming stopped.

They quickly backed off.

They didn't try to kill the thing that was feeding on Gordy. They knew bullets had no effect on it, and they were beginning to understand why. Bullets killed by destroying vital organs and essential blood vessels. But from the look of it, this thing had no organs and no conventional circulatory system. No skeleton, either. It seemed to be a mass of undifferentiated highly sophisticated — protoplasm. A bullet would pierce it, but the amazingly malleable flesh would flow into the channel carved by the bullet, and the wound would heal in an instant.

The beast fed more frantically than before, in a silent frenzy, and in seconds there was no sign of Gordy at all. He had ceased to exist. There was only the shape-changer, grown larger, much bigger than the dog that it had been, even bigger than Gordy, whose substance it now incorporated.

Tal and Bryce rejoined the others, but they didn't run for the inn. As the twilight was slowly squeezed out of the sky in a vise of darkness, they watched the thing on the sidewalk.

It began to take a new shape. In only seconds, all of the free-form protoplasm had been molded into a huge, menacing timber wolf, and the creature threw its head back and howled at the sky.

Then its face rippled, and elements of its ferocious countenance shifted, and Tal could see human features trying to rise up through the image of a wolf Human eyes replaced the animal's eyes, and there was part of a human chin. Gordy's eyes? Gordy's chin? The lycanthropic metamorphosis lasted only seconds, and then the thing's features flowed back into the wolf form.

Werewolf, Tal thought.

But he knew it wasn't anything like that. It wasn't anything. The wolf identity, as real and frightening as it looked, was as false as all the other identities.

For a moment it stood there, confronting them, baring its enormous and wickedly sharp teeth, far greater in size than any wolf that had ever stalked the plains and forests of this world. Its eyes blazed with the muddy-bloody color of the sunset.

It's going to attack, Tal thought.

He fired at it. The bullets penetrated but left no visible wound, drew no blood, caused no apparent pain.

The wolf turned away from Tal, with a sort of cool indifference to the gunfire, and trotted toward the open manhole, into which the field lab's electric power cables disappeared.

Abruptly, something rose out of that hole, came from the storm drain below the street, rose and rose into the twilight, shuddering, smashing up into the air with tremendous power, a dark and pulsating mass, like a flood of sewage, except that it was not a fluid but a jellied substance that formed itself into a column almost as wide as the hole from which it continued to extrude itself in an obscene, rhythmic gush. It grew and grew: four feet high, six feet, eight…

Something struck Tal in the back. He jumped, tried to turn, and realized that he had only collided with the wall of the inn. He hadn't been aware he'd been backing away from the towering thing that had soared out of the manhole.

He saw now that the pulsing, rippling column was another body of freeform protoplasm like the animal that had become a timber wolf; however, this thing was considerably larger than the first creature. Immense. Tal wondered how much of it was still hidden below the street, and he had a hunch that the storm drain was filled with it, that what they were seeing here was only a small portion of the beast.

When it reached a height of ten feet, it stopped rising and began to change. The upper half of the column broadened into a hood, a mantle, so that the thing now resembled the head of a cobra. Then more of the amorphous flesh flowed out of the oozing, glistening, shifting column and poured into the hood, so that the hood rapidly grew wider, wider, until it was not a hood at all any more; now it was a pair of gigantic wings, dark ' and membranous, like a bat's wings, sprouting out of the central (and still shapeless) trunk. And then the body segment between the wings began to acquire a texture — coarse, overlapping scales — and small legs and clawed feet began to form. It was becoming a winged serpent.

The wings flapped.

The sound was like a whip cracking.

Tal pressed back against the wall.

The wings flapped.

Lisa's grip on Jenny tightened.

Jenny held the girl close, but her eyes, mind, and imagination were fixed upon the monstrous thing that had risen out of the storm drain. It flexed and throbbed and writhed in the twilight and seemed like nothing so much as a shadow that had come to life.

The wings flapped again.

Jenny felt a cold, wing-stirred breeze.

This new phantom looked as if it would detach itself from whatever additional protoplasm lay within the storm drain.

Jenny expected it to leap into the darkening air and soar away or come straight at them.

Her heart thumped; slammed.

She knew escape was impossible. Any movement she made would only draw unwanted attention from it. There was no point wasting energy in flight. There was nowhere to hide from a thing like this.

More streetlamps came on, and shadows slunk in with ghostly stealth.

Jenny watched in awe as a serpent's head took shape at the top of the ten-foot-high column of mottled tissue. A pair of hate-filled green eyes swelled out of the shapeless flesh; it was like viewing time-lapse photography of the growth of two malignant tumors. Cloudy eyes, obviously blind, milky green ovals; they quickly cleared, and the elongated black pupils became visible, and the eyes glared down at Jenny and the men with malevolent intent. A foot-wide, slitted mouth sprang open; a row of sharp white fangs grew from the black gums.

Jenny thought of the demonic names that had glowed on the video display terminals, the Hell-born names the thing had given itself. The mass of amorphous flesh, foaling itself into a winged serpent, was like a demon summoned from beyond.

The phantom wolf, which incorporated the substance of Gordy Brogan, approached the base of the towering serpent. It brushed against the column of pulsing flesh — and simply melted into it. In less than a blink of an eye, the two creatures became as one.

Evidently, the Just shape-changer wasn't a separate individual. It was now, and perhaps always had been, part of the gargantuan creature that moved within the storm drains, under the streets. Apparently, that massive mother-body could detach pieces of itself and dispatch them on tasks of their own — such as the attack on Gordy Brogan — and then recall them at will.

The wings flapped, and the whole town reverberated with the sound. Then they began to melt back into the central column, and the column grew thicker as it absorbed that tissue. The serpent's face dissolved, too. It had grown tired of this performance. The legs and three-toed feet and vicious talons withdrew into the column, until there was nothing left but a churning, oozing mass of darkly mottled tissue, as before. For several seconds, it posed in the gloomy dusk, a vision of evil, then began to shrink down into the drains under it, down through the manhole.

Soon it was gone.

Lisa had stopped screaming. She was gasping for air and crying.

Some of the others were nearly as shaken as the girl. They looked at one another, but none of them spoke.

Bryce looked as if he had been clubbed.

At last he said, “Come on. Let's get back to the inn before it gets any darker.”

There was no guard at the front entrance of the inn.

“Trouble,” Tal said.

Bryce nodded. He stepped through the double doors with caution and almost put his foot on a gun. It was lying on the floor.

The lobby was deserted.

“Damn,” Frank Autry said.

They searched the place, room by room. No one in the cafeteria. No one in the makeshift dormitory. The kitchen was deserted, too. Not a shot had been fired. No one had cried out.

No one had escaped, either.

Ten more deputies were gone.

Outside, night had fallen.

Chapter 34 Saying Goodbye

The six survivors — Bryce, Tal, Frank, Jenny, Lisa, and Sara stood at the windows in the lobby of the Hilltop Inn. Outside, Skyline Road was still and silent, rendered in stark patterns of night-shadow and streetlamp-glow. The night seemed to tick softly, like a bomb clock.

Jenny was remembering the covered passageway beside Liebermann's Bakery. Last night, she had thought something was in the rafters of the service tunnel, and Lisa had believed something was crouching along the wall; very likely they had both been right. The shape-changer — or at least a part of it — had been there, slithering soundlessly through the rafters and down the wall. Later, when Bryce had caught a glimpse of something in the drain inside that passage, he had surely seen a dark glob of protoplasm creeping through the pipe, either keeping tabs on them or engaged upon some alien and unfathomable task.

Thinking, also, of the Oxleys in their barricaded den, Jenny said, “The locked-room mysteries suddenly aren't very mysterious any more. That thing could ooze under the door or through a heating duct. The smallest hole or crack would be big enough. As for Harold Ordnay… after he locked himself in the bathroom at the Candle glow Inn, the thing probably got at him through the sink and bathtub drains.”

“The same for the locked cars with victims in them,” Frank said, “It could surround a car, envelope it, and squeeze in through the vents.”

“If it wanted to,” Tal said, “it could move real quietly. That's why so many people were caught by surprise. It was behind them, oozing under a door or out of a heating vent, getting bigger and bigger, but they didn't know it was there until it attacked.”

Outside, a thin fog was coming up the street, rising out of the valley below. Misty auras began to form around the streetlights.

“How big do you think it is?” Lisa asked.

No one responded for a moment. Then Bryce said, “Big.”

“Maybe the size of a house,” Frank said.

“Or as big as this entire inn,” Sara said.

“Or even bigger,” Tal said, “After all, it struck in every part of town, apparently simultaneously. It could be like… like an underground lake, a lake of living tissue, beneath most of Snowfield.”

“Like God,” Lisa said.

“Huh?”

“It's everywhere,” Lisa said, “It sees all and knows all. Just like God.”

“We've got five patrol cars,” Frank said, “If we split up, take all five cars, and drive out of here at exactly the same time”

“It would stop us,” Bryce said.

“Maybe it wouldn't be able to stop all of us. Maybe one car would get through.”

“It stopped a whole town.”

“Well… yeah,” Frank said reluctantly.

Jenny said, “Anyway, it's probably listening to us right this minute. It would stop us before we even reached the cars.”

They all looked at the heating ducts near the ceiling. There was nothing to be seen beyond the metal grilles. Nothing but darkness.

They gathered around a table in the dining room of the fortress that was no longer a fortress. They pretended to want coffee because, somehow, sharing coffee gave them a sense of community and normality.

Bryce didn't bother putting a guard on the front doors. Guards were useless. If it wanted them, it would surely get them.

Beyond the windows, the fog was getting thicker. It pressed against the glass.

They were compelled to talk about what they had seen. They were all aware that death was coming for them, and they needed to understand why and how they were meant to die. Death was terrifying, yes; however, senseless death was the worst of all.

Bryce knew about senseless death. A year ago, a runaway truck had taught him everything he needed to know about that subject.

“The moth,” Lisa said, “Was that like the Airedale, like the thing that… that got Gordy?”

“Yes,” Jenny said, “The moth was just a phantom, a small piece of the shape-changer.”

To Lisa, Tal said, “When Stu Wargle came after you last night, it wasn't actually him. The shape-changer probably absorbed Wargle's body after we left it in the utility room. Then, later, when it wanted to terrorize you, it assumed his appearance.”

“Apparently,” Bryce said, “the damned thing can impersonate anyone or any animal that it's previously fed upon.”

Lisa frowned. “But what about the moth? How could it have fed on anything like the moth? Nothing like that exists.”

“Well,” Bryce said, “maybe insects that size thrived a long time ago, tens of millions of years ago, back in the age of dinosaurs. Maybe that's when the shape-changer fed on them.”

Lisa's eyes widened. “You mean the thing that came out of the manhole might've been millions of years old?”

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

“No,” the geneticist said.

“So why shouldn't it also be immortal?”

Jenny looked dubious.

Bryce said, “You have an objection?”

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

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

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

“No,” Tal said, “It was straight out of voodoo.”

Bryce turned to Tal surprised. “Voodoo? What would you know about voodoo?”

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

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

Lisa said, “Is it really the Devil? A demon? Something from Hell?”

“No,” Jenny said, “That's just a… pose.”

“But then why does it take the shape of the Devil?” Lisa asked, “And why does it call itself the names of demons?”

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

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

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

“It sure looks that way,” Jenny said.

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

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

“But how in the name of God did Flyte know about it?” Tal asked.

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

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

“It's just toying with us.”

“Having fun. A sick kind of fun.”

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

“It wants us to pass along the offer of safe conduct to Flyte.”

“We're just bait.”

“Yes.”

“And when we've served our purpose.”

“Yes.”

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

Bryce stood so fast that he knocked over his chair.

Another crash. Harder, louder. Then a scraping noise.

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

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

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

“The shape-changer,” Lisa said.

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

They all stared at the ceiling, listening, waiting.

What phantom form has it assumed this time? Bryce wondered.

Scrape. Tick. Clatter.

The sound of death.

Bryce's hand was colder than the butt of his revolver.

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

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

“That's what's climbing the building,” Tal said, “Another damned crab thing like that one. Something straight out of an alky's DTs.”

They heard it reach the roof. Its chitinous limbs tapped and scraped across the slate shingles.

“What's it up to?” Lisa asked worriedly, “Why's it pretending to be what it isn't?”

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

The noises on the roof stopped.

The six waited.

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

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

Outside, only the fog moved.

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

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

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

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

She shuddered.

“The water,” Jenny said.

“What?” Bryce said.

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

“How do you figure?”

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

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

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

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

“Can the damned thing be killed?” Frank wondered.

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

“Fire?” Lisa said.

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

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

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

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

They were silent, considering.

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

“But then what can we do?”

“I don't know,” Bryce said, “I just don't know.”

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

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

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

Chapter 35 Pandemonium

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

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

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

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

Earlier in the day, on the telephone from London, Burt Sandler, the editor from Wintergreen and Wyle, had prepared Corello for the possibility that Flyte would make a negative impression on the newsmen, but Sandler needn't have worried. The newsmen grew restless as Flyte cleared his throat half a dozen times, loudly, into the microphone, but when he began to speak at last, they were ended within a minute. He told them about the Roanoke Island colony, about vanishing Mayan civilizations, about mysterious depletions of marine populations, about an army that disappeared in 171 I. The crowd grew hushed. Corello relaxed.

Flyte told them about the Eskimo village of Anjikuni, five hundred miles northwest of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police outpost at Churchill. On a snowy afternoon in November of 1930, a French-Canadiantrapper and trader, Joe LaBelle, stopped at Anjikuni — only to discover that everyone who lived there had disappeared. All belongings, including precious hunting rifles, had been left behind. Meals had been left half-eaten. The dogsleds (but no dogs) were still there, which meant there was no way the entire village could have moved overland to another location. The settlement was, as LaBelle put it later, as eerie as a graveyard in the very dead of night. LaBelle hastened to the Mounted Police Station at Churchill, and a major investigation was launched, but nothing was ever found of the Anjikunians.

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

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

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

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

“This way,” a security man said.

“The chopper's here,” another said.

They hurried along a maze of hallways, down a flight of concrete stairs, through a metal fire door, and outside, onto a windswept expanse of tarmac, where a sleek, blue helicopter waited. It was a plush, well-appointed, executive craft, a Bell JetRanger 11.

“It's the governor's chopper,” Corello told Flyte.

“The governor?” Flyte said. “He's here?”

“No. But he's put his helicopter at your disposal.”

As they climbed through the door, into the comfortable passengers' compartment, the rotors began to churn overhead.

Forehead pressed to the cool window, Timothy Flyte watched San Francisco fall away into the night.

He was excited. Before the plane had landed, he had felt dopey and bedraggled; not any more. He was alert and eager to learn more about what was happening in Snowfield.

The JetRanger had a high cruising speed for a helicopter, and the trip to Santa Mira took less than two hours. Corello a clever, fast-talking, amusing man — helped Timothy prepare another statement for the media people who were waiting for them. The journey passed quickly.

They touched down with a thump in the middle of the fenced parking lot behind the county sheriff's headquarters. Corello opened the door of the passengers' compartment even before the chopper's rotors had stopped whirling; he plunged out of the craft, turned to the door again, buffeted by the wind from the blades, and lent a hand to Timothy.

An aggressive contingent of newsmen — even more of them than in San Francisco — filled the alleyway. They were pressed against the chain-link fence, shouting questions, aiming microphones and cameras.

“We'll give them a statement later, at our convenience,” Corello told him, shouting in order to be heard above the din. “Right now, the police here are waiting to put you on the phone to the sheriff up in Snowfield.”

A couple of deputies hustled Timothy and Corello into the building, along the hallway, and into an office where another uniformed man was waiting for them. His name was Charlie Mercer. He was husky, with the bushiest eyebrows that Timothy had ever seen — and the briskly efficient manner of a first-rate executive secretary.

Timothy was escorted to the chair behind the desk.

Mercer dialed a number in Snowfield, making the connection with Sheriff Hammond. The call was put on a conference speaker, so that Timothy didn't have to hold a receiver, and so that everyone in the room could hear both sides of the conversation.

Hammond delivered the first shocker as soon as he and Timothy had exchanged greetings: “Dr. Flyte, we've seen the ancient enemy. Or at least I guess it's the thing you had in mind. A massive… Another thing. A shape-changer that can mimic anything.”

Timothy's hands were shaking; he gripped the arms of his chair. “My God.”

“Is that your ancient enemy?” Hammond asked.

“Yes. A survivor from another era. Millions of years old.”

“You can tell us more when you get here,” Hammond said. “If I can persuade you to come.”

Timothy only heard half of what the sheriff was saying. He was thinking of the ancient enemy. He had written about it; he had truly believed in it; yet, somehow, he had not been prepared to actually have his theory confirmed. It rocked him.

Hammond told him about the hideous death of a deputy named Gordy Brogan.

Besides Timothy himself, only Sal Corello looked stunned and horrified by Hammond's story. Mercer and the others had evidently heard all about it hours ago.

“You've seen it and lived?” Timothy said, amazed.

“It had to leave some of us alive,” Hammond said, “so that we'd try to convince you to come. It has guaranteed your safe conduct.”

Timothy chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip.

Hammond said, “Dr. Flyte? Are you still there?”

“What? Oh… yes. Yes, I'm still here. What do you mean by saying it guaranteed my safe passage?”

Hammond told him an astonishing story about communication with the ancient enemy by way of a computer.

As the sheriff talked, Timothy broke into a sweat. He saw a box of Kleenex on one corner of the desk in front of him; he grabbed a handful of tissues and mopped his face.

When the sheriff finished, the professor drew a deep breath and spoke in a strained voice, “I never anticipated… I mean… well, it never occurred to me that.”

“What's wrong?” Hammond asked.

Timothy cleared his throat. “It never occurred to me that the ancient enemy would possess human-level intelligence.”

“I suspect it may even be a superior intelligence,” Hammond said.

“But I always thought of it as just a dumb animal, of distinctly limited self-awareness.”

“It's not.”

“That makes it a lot more dangerous. My God. A lot more, dangerous.”

“Will you come up here?” Hammond asked.

“I hadn't intended to come any closer than I am now,” Timothy said, “But if it's intelligent… and if it's offering me safe passage…”

On the telephone, a child's voice piped up, the sweet voice of a young boy, perhaps five or six years old: “Please, please, please come play with me, Dr. Flyte. Please. We'll have lots of fun. Please?”

And then, before Timothy could respond, there came a woman's soft and musical voice: “Yes, dear Dr. Flyte, by all means, do come pay us a visit. You're more than welcome. No one will harm you.”

Finally, the voice of an old man called over the line, warm and tender “You have so much to learn about me, Dr. Flyte. So much wisdom to acquire. Please come and begin your studies. The offer of safe passage is sincere.”

Silence.

Confused, Timothy said, “Hello? Hello? Who's this?”

“I'm still here,” Hammond answered.

The other voices did not return.

“Just me now,” Hammond said.

Timothy said, “But who were those people?”

“They're not actually people. They're just phantoms. Mimicry. Don't you get it? In three different voices, it just offered you safe passage again. The ancient enemy, Doctor.”

Timothy looked at the other four men in the room. They were all staring intently at the black conference box from which Hammond's voice — and the voices of the creature — had issued.

Clutching a wad of already sodden paper tissues in one hand, Timothy wiped his sweat-slick face again. “I'll come.”

Now, everyone in the room looked at him.

On the telephone, Sheriff Hammond said, “Doctor, there's no good reason to believe that it'll keep its promise. Once you're here, you may very well be a dead man, too.”

“But if it's intelligent…”

“That doesn't mean it plays fair,” Hammond said, “In fact, all of us up here are certain of one thing: This creature is the very essence of evil. Evil, Dr, Flyte. Would you trust in the Devil's promise?”

The child's voice came on the line again, still lilting and sweet: “If you come, Dr. Flyte, I'll not only spare you, but these six people whore trapped here. I'll let them go if you come play with me. But if you don't come, I'll take these pigs. I'll crush them. I'll squeeze the blood and shit out of them, squeeze them into pulp, and use them up.”

Those words were spoken in light, innocent, childlike tones which somehow made them far more frightening than if they had been shouted in a basso profundo rage.

Timothy's heart was pounding.

“That settles it,” he said, “I'll come. I have no choice.”

“Don't come on our account,” Hammond said, “It might spare you because it calls you its Saint Matthew, its Mark, its Luke and John. But it sure as hell won't spare us, no matter what it says.”

“I'll come,” Timothy insisted.

Hammond hesitated. Then: “Very well. I'll have one of my men drive you to the Snowfield roadblock. From there, you'll have to come alone. I can't risk another man. Do you drive?”

“Yes, sir,” Timothy said, “You provide the car, and I'll get there by myself.”

The line went dead.

“Hello?” Timothy said, “Sheriff?”

No answer.

“Are you there? Sheriff Hammond?”

Nothing.

It had cut them off.

Timothy looked up at Sal Corello, Charlie Mercer, and the two men whose names he didn't know.

They were all staring at him as if he were already dead and lying in a casket.

But if I die in Snowfield, if the shape-changer takes me, he thought, there'll be no casket. No grave. No everlasting peace.

“I'll drive you as far as the roadblock,” Charlie Mercer said. “I'll drive you myself.”

Timothy nodded.

It was time to go.

Chapter 36 Face to Face

At 3:12 A.M., Snowfield's church bells began to clang.

In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, Bryce got up from his chair. The others rose, too.

The firehouse siren wailed.

Jenny said, “Flyte must be here.”

The six of them went outside.

The streetlights were flashing off and on, casting leaping marionette shadows through the shifting banks of fog.

At the foot of Skyline Road, a car turned the corner. Its headlights speared upward, imparting a silvery sheen to the mist.

The streetlamps stopped blinking, and Bryce stepped into the soft cascade of yellow light beneath one of them, hoping that Flyte would be able to see him through the veils of fog.

The bells continued to peal, and the siren shrieked, and the car crawled slowly up the long hill. It was a green and white sheriff's department cruiser. It pulled to the curb and stopped ten feet from where Bryce stood; the driver extinguished the headlights.

The driver's door opened, and Flyte got out. He wasn't what Bryce had expected. He was wearing thick glasses that made his eyes appear abnormally large. His fine, white, tangled hair bristled in a halo around his head. Someone at headquarters had lent him an insulated jacket with the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department seal on the left breast.

The bells stopped ringing.

The siren groaned to a throaty finish.

The subsequent silence was profound.

Flyte gazed around the fog-shrouded silence, listening and waiting.

At last Bryce said, “Apparently, it's not ready to show itself.”

Flyte turned to him. “Sheriff Hammond?”

“Yes. Let's go inside and be comfortable while we wait.”

The inn's dining room. Hot coffee.

Shaky hands clattered china mugs against the tabletop. Nervous hands curled and clamped around the warm mugs in order to make themselves be still.

The six survivors leaned forward, hunched over the table, the better to listen to Timothy Flyte.

Lisa was clearly enthralled by the British scientist, but at first Jenny had serious doubts. He seemed to be an outright caricature of the absent-minded professor. But when he began to speak about his theories, Jenny was forced to discard her initial, unfavorable opinion, and soon she was as fascinated as Lisa.

He told them about vanishing armies in Spain and China, about abandoned Mayan cities, the Roanoke Island colony.

And he told them of Joya Verde, a South American jungle settlement that had met a fate similar to Snowfield's. Joya Verde, which means Green Jewel, was a trading post on the Amazon River, far from civilization. In 1923, six hundred and five people — every man, woman, and child who lived there vanished from Joya Verde in a single afternoon, sometime between the morning and evening visits of regularly scheduled riverboats. At first it was thought that nearby Indians, who were normally peaceful, had become inexplicably hostile and had launched a surprise attack. However, there were no bodies found, no indications of fighting, and no evidence of looting. A message was discovered on the blackboard at the mission school: It has no shape, yet it has every shape. Many who investigated the Joya Verde mystery were quick to dismiss those nine chalk-scrawled words as having no connection with the disappearances. Flyte believed otherwise, and after listening to him, so did Jenny.

“A message of sorts was also left in one of those ancient Mayan cities,” Flyte said. “Archaeologists have unearthed a portion of a prayer, written in hieroglyphics, dating from the time of the great disappearance.” He quoted from memory: “'Evil gods live in the earth, their power asleep in rock. When they awake, they rise up as lava rises, but cold lava, flowing, and they assume many shapes. Then proud men know that we are only voices in the thunder, faces on the wind, to be dispersed as if we never lived.'” Flyte's glasses had slid down his nose. He pushed them back into place. “Now, some say that particular part of the prayer refers to the power of earthquakes and volcanoes. I think it's about the ancient enemy.”

“We found a message here, too,” Bryce said, “Part of a word.”

“We can't make anything of it,” Sara Yamaguchi said.

Jenny told Flyte about the two letters — P and R that Nick Papandrakis had painted on his bathroom wall, using a bottle of iodine. “There was a portion of a third letter, too. It might have been the beginning of a U or an O.”

“Papandrakis,” Flyte said, nodding vigorously, “Greek. Yes, yes, yes — here's confirmation of what I'm telling you. Was this fellow Papandrakis proud of his heritage?”

“Yes,” Jenny said, “Extremely proud of it. Why?”

“Well, if he was proud of being Greek,” Flyte said, “he might well have known Greek mythology. You see, in ancient Greek myth, there was a god named Proteus. I suspect that was the word your Mr. Papandrakis was trying to write on the wall. Proteus. A god who lived in the earth, crawled through its bowels. A god who was without any shape of his own. A god who could take any form he wished — and who fed upon everything and everyone that he desired.”

With frustration in his voice, Tal Whitman said, “What is all this supernatural stuff? When we communicated with it through the computer, it insisted on giving itself the names of demons.”

Flyte said, “The amorphous demon, the shapeless and usually evil god that can assume any form it wishes — those are relatively common figures in most ancient myth systems and in most if not all of the world's religions. Such a mythological creature appears under scores of names, in all of the world's cultures. Consider the Old Testament of the Bible, for example. Satan first appears as a serpent, later as a goat, a ram, a stag, a beetle, a spider, a child, a beggar, and many other things. He is called, among other names: Master of Chaos and Formlessness, Master of Deceit, the Beast of Many Faces. The Bible tells us that Satan is 'as changeable as shadows' and 'as clever as water, for as water can become steam or ice, so Satan can become that which he wishes to become.”

Lisa said, “Are you saying the shape-changer here in Snowfield is Satan?”

“Well… in a way, yes.”

Frank Autry shook his head. “No. I'm not a man who believes in spooks, Dr. Flyte.”

“Nor am I,” Flyte assured him, “I'm not arguing that this thing is a supernatural being. It isn't. It's real, a creature of flesh — although not flesh like ours. It's not a spirit or a devil. Yet… in a way… I believe it is Satan. Because, you see, I believe it was this creature — or another like it, another monstrous survivor from the Mesozoic Era — that inspired the myth of Satan. In prehistoric times, men must have encountered one of these things, and some of them must have lived to tell about it. They naturally described their experiences in the terminology of myth and superstition. I suspect most of the demonic figures in the world's various religions are actually reports of these shape-changers, reports passed down through countless generations before they were at last committed to hieroglyphics, scrolls, and then print. They were reports of a very rare, very real, very dangerous beast… but described in the language of religious myth.”

Jenny found this part of Flyte's thesis to be both crazy and brilliant, unlikely yet convincing. “The thing somehow absorbs the knowledge and memories of those on whom it feeds,” she said, “so it knows that many of its victims see it as the Devil, and it gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of playing that role.”

Bryce said, “It seems to enjoy mocking us.”

Sara Yamaguchi tucked her long hair behind her ears and said, “Dr. Flyte, how about explaining this in scientific terms. How can such a creature exist? How can it function biologically? What's your scientific rationalization, your theory?”

Before Flyte could answer her, it came.

High on one wall, near the ceiling, a metal grille covering a heating duct suddenly popped from its screws. It flew into the room, crashed into an empty table, slid off the table, clattered-rattled-banged onto the floor.

Jenny and the others leapt up from their chairs.

Lisa screamed, pointed.

The shape-changer bulged out of the duct. It hung there on the wall. Dark. Wet. Pulsing. Like a mass of glistening, bloody snot suspended from the edge of a nostril.

Bryce and Tal reached for their revolvers, then hesitated. There was nothing whatsoever that they could do.

The thing continued to surge out of the duct, swelling, rippling, growing into an obscene, gnarled, shifting-lump the size of a man. Then, still flowing out of the wall, it began to slide down. It formed into a mound on the floor. Much bigger than a man now, still oozing out of the duct. Growing, growing.

Jenny looked at Flyte.

The professor's face could not settle on a single expression. It tried wonder, then terror, then awe, then disgust, then awe and terror and wonder again.

The viscous, ever-churning mass of dark protoplasm was now as large as three or four men, and still more of the vile stuff gushed from the heating duct in a revolting, vomitous flow.

Lisa gagged and averted her face.

But Jenny couldn't take her eyes from the thing. There was a grotesque fascination that couldn't be denied.

In the already enormous agglomeration of shapeless tissue that had extruded itself into the room, limbs began to form, although none of them maintained its shape for more than a few seconds. Human arms, both male and female, reached out as if seeking help. The thin, flailing arms of children were formed from the jellied tissue, some of them with their small hands open in a silent, pathetic plea. It was difficult to keep in mind that these were not the arms of children trapped within the shape-changer; they were imitation, phantom arms, a part of it, not a part of any child. And claws. A startling, frightening variety of claws and animal limbs appeared out of the protoplasmic soup. There were insect parts, too, enormous, hugely exaggerated, terrifyingly frenetic and grasping. But all of these swiftly melted back into the formless protoplasm almost as soon as they took shape.

The shape-changer bulged across the width of the room. It was now larger than an elephant.

As the thing engaged upon a continuous, relentless, mysterious pattern of apparently purposeless change, Jenny and the others edged back toward the windows.

Outside, in the street, the fog roiled in its own formless dance, as if it were a ghostly reflection of the shape-changer.

Flyte spoke with a sudden urgency, answering the questions that Sara Yamaguchi had posed, as if he felt he didn't have much time left to explain. “About twenty years ago, it occurred to me that there might be a connection between mass disappearances and the unexplained extinction of certain species in pre-human geological eras. Like the dinosaurs, for instance.”

The shape-changer pulsed and throbbed, towering almost to the ceiling, filling the entire far end of the room.

Lisa clung to Jenny.

A vague but repellent odor laced the air. Slightly sulphurous. Like a draft from Hell.

“There are a host of theories purporting to explain the demise of the dinosaurs,” Flyte said, “But no single theory answers all the questions. So I wondered… what if the dinosaurs were exterminated by another creature, a natural enemy, that was a superior hunter and fighter? It would have to have been something large. And it would have been something with a very frail skeleton or perhaps with no skeleton whatsoever, for we've never found a fossil record of any species that would have given those great saurians a real battle.”

A shudder passed through the entire bulk of tenebrous, churning slime. Across the oozing mass, dozens of faces began to appear.

“And what if,” Flyte said, “several of those amoeboid creatures had survived through millions of years…”

Human and animal faces arose from the amorphous flesh, shimmered in it.

“… living in subterranean rivers or lakes…”

There were faces that had no eyes. Others had no mouths. But then the eyes appeared, blinked open. They were achingly real, penetrating eyes, filled with pain and fear and misery.

“… or in deep ocean trenches…”

And mouths cracked into existence on those previously seamless countenances.

“… thousands of feet below the surface of the sea…”

Lips formed around the gaping mouths.

“… preying on marine life…”

The phantom faces were screaming, yet they made no sounds.

“… infrequently rising to feed…”

Cat faces. Dog faces. Prehistoric reptile visages. Ballooning up from the slime.

“… and even less frequently feeding on human beings…”

To Jenny, the human faces looked as if they were peering out from the far side of a smoky mirror. None of them ever quite finished taking shape. They had to melt away, for there were countless new faces surging and coalescing beneath them. It was an endlessly flickering shadow show of the lost and the damned.

Then the faces stopped forming.

The huge mass was quiescent for a moment, slowly and almost imperceptibly pulsing, but otherwise still.

Sara Yamaguchi was groaning softly.

Jenny held Lisa close.

No one spoke. For several seconds, no one even dared breathe.

Then, in a new demonstration of its plasticity, the ancient enemy abruptly sprouted a score of tentacles. Some of them were thick, with the suction pads of a squid or an octopus. Others were thin and ropey; some of these were smooth, and some were segmented; they were even more obscene than the fat, moist-looking tentacles. Some of the appendages slid back and forth across the floor, knocking over chairs and pushing tables aside, while others wriggled in the air, like cobras swaying to the music of a snake charmer.

Then it struck. It moved fast, gushed forward.

Jenny stumbled back one step. She was at the end of the room.

The many tentacles snapped toward them, whiplike, cutting the air with a hiss.

Lisa could no longer keep from looking. She gasped at what she saw.

In just a fraction of a second, the tentacles grew dramatically.

A rope of cold, slick, utterly alien flesh fell across the back of Jenny's hand. It curled around her wrist.

No!

With a shudder of relief, she pulled loose. It hadn't taken much effort to free herself. Evidently, the thing wasn't interested in her; not now; not yet.

She crouched as tentacles lashed the air above her head, and Lisa huddled with her.

In his haste to get out of the creature's way, Flyte tripped and fell.

A tentacle moved toward him.

Flyte scooted backwards across the floor, came to the wall.

The tentacle followed, hovered over him, as if it would smash him. Then it moved away. It wasn't interested in Flyte, either.

Although the gesture was pointless, Bryce fired his revolver.

Tal shouted something Jenny couldn't understand. He moved in front of her and Lisa, between them and the shape-changer.

After passing over Sara, the thing seized Frank Autry. That was whom it wanted. Two thick tentacles snapped around Frank's torso and dragged him away from the others.

Kicking, flailing with his fists, clawing at the thing that held him, Frank cried out wordlessly, face contorted with horror.

Everyone was screaming now — even Bryce, even Tal.

Bryce went after Frank. Clutched his right arm. Tried to pull him away from the beast, which was relentlessly reeling him in.

“Get it off me! Get it off me!” Frank shouted.

Bryce tried peeling one of the tentacles away from the deputy.

Another of the thick, slimy appendages swept up from the floor, whirled, whipped, struck Bryce with tremendous force, sent him sprawling.

Frank was lifted off the floor and held in midair. His eyes bulged as he looked down at the dark, oozing, changing bulk of the ancient enemy. He kicked and fought to no avail.

Yet another pseudopod erupted from the central mass of the shape-changer and rose into the air, trembling with savage eagerness. Along part of the tentacle's repulsive length, the mottled gray-maroon-red-brown skin seemed to dissolve. Raw, weeping tissue appeared.

Lisa gagged.

It wasn't just the sight of the suppurating flesh that was loathsome and sickening. The foul odor had gotten stronger, too.

A yellowish fluid began to drip from the open wound in the tentacle. Where the drops struck the floor, they sizzled and foamed and ate into the tile. Jenny heard someone say, “Acid!”

Frank's screaming became a desperate, piercing shriek of terror and despair. The acid-dripping tentacle slipped sinuously around the deputy's neck and drew as tight as a garrote.

“Oh, Jesus, no!”

“Don't look,” Jenny told Lisa.

The shape-changer was showing them how it had beheaded Jakob and Aida Liebermann. Like a child showing off.

Frank Autry's scream died in a bubbling, mucous-thick, blood-choked gurgle. The flesh-eating tentacle cut through his neck with startling quickness. Only a second or two after Frank was silenced, his head popped loose and fell to the floor, smashed into the tiles.

Jenny tasted bile in the back of her throat, choked it down. Sara Yamaguchi was sobbing.

The thing still held Frank's headless body in midair. Now, in the mass of shapeless tissue from which the tentacles sprouted, a huge toothless mouth opened hungrily. It was more than large enough to swallow a man whole. The tentacles drew the deputy's decapitated corpse into the gaping, ragged mouth. The dark flesh oozed around the body. Then the mouth closed up tight and ceased to exist.

Frank Autry had ceased to exist, too.

Bryce stared in shock at Frank's severed head. The sightless eyes gazed at him, through him.

Frank was gone. Frank, who had survived several wars, who had survived a life of dangerous work, had not survived this.

Bryce thought of Ruth Autry. His heart, already jackhammering, twisted with grief as he pictured Ruth alone. She and Frank had been exceptionally close. Breaking the news to her would be painful.

The tentacles shrank back into the pulsing glob of shapeless tissue; in a second or two, they were gone.

The formless, rippling hulk filled a third of the room.

Bryce could imagine it oozing swiftly through prehistoric swamps, blending with the muck, creeping up on its prey. Yes, it would have been more than a match for the dinosaurs.

Earlier, he had believed that the shape-changer had spared him and a few of the others so that they could entice Flyte to Snowfield. Now he realized that wasn't the case. It could have consumed them and then imitated their voices on the telephone, and Flyte would have been coaxed to Snowfield just as easily. It had saved them for some other reason. Perhaps it had spared them only in order to kill them, one at a time, in front of Flyte, so that Flyte would be able to see precisely how it functioned.

Christ.

The shape-changer towered over them, quivering gelatinously, its entire grotesque bulk pulsating as if with the unsynchronized beats of a dozen hearts.

In a voice even shakier than Bryce felt, Sara Yamaguchi said, “I wish there was some way we could get a tissue sample. I'd give anything to be able to study it under a microscope… get some idea of the cell structure. Maybe we could find a weakness… a way to deal with it, maybe even a way to defeat it.”

Flyte said, “I'd like to study it… just to be able to understand… just to know.”

An extrusion of tissue oozed out from the center of the shapeless mass. It began to acquire a human form. Bryce was shocked to see Gordy Brogan coalescing in front of him. Before the phantom was entirely realized, while the body was still lumpy and half detailed, and although the face wasn't finished, the mouth nevertheless opened and the replica of Gordy spoke, though not with Gordy's voice. It was Stu Wargle's voice, instead, a supremely disconcerting touch.

“Go to the lab,” it said, its mouth only half formed, yet speaking with perfect clarity. “I will show you everything you want to see, Dr. Flyte. You are my Matthew. My Luke. Go to the lab. Go to the lab.”

The unfinished image of Gordy Brogan dissolved almost as if it had been composed of smoke,

The extruded man-size lump of gnarled tissue flowed back into the larger bulk behind it.

The entire pulsating, heaving mass began to surge back through the umbilical that led up the wall and into the heating duct.

How much more of it lies there within the walls of the inn? Bryce wondered uneasily. How much more of it waits down in the storm drains? How large is the god Proteus?

As the thing oozed away from them, oddly shaped orifices opened all over it, none bigger than a human mouth, a dozen of them, two dozen, and noises issued forth: the chirruping of birds, the cries of sea gulls, the buzzing of bees, snarling, hissing, child-sweet laughter, distant singing, the hooting of an owl, the maracalike warning of a rattlesnake. Those noises, all ringing out simultaneously, blended into an unpleasant, irritating, decidedly ominous chorus.

Then the shape-changer was gone back through the wall vent. Only Frank's severed head and the bent grille from the heating duct remained as proof that something Hell-born had been here.

According to the electric wall clock, the time was 3:44.

The night was nearly gone.

How long until dawn? Bryce wondered. An hour and a half? An hour and forty minutes or more?

He supposed it didn't matter.

He didn't expect to live to see the sunrise, anyway.

Chapter 37 Ego

The door of the second lab stood wide open. The lights were on. The computer screens glowed. Everything was ready for them.

Jenny had been trying to hold to the belief that they could still somehow resist, that they still had a chance, however small, of influencing the course of events. Now that fragile, cherished belief was blown away. They were powerless. They would do only what it wanted, go only where it allowed.

The six of them crowded inside the lab.

“Now what?” Lisa asked.

“We wait,” Jenny said.

Flyte, Sara, and Lisa sat down at the three bright video display terminals. Jenny and Bryce leaned against a counter, and Tal stood by the open door, looking out.

Fog foamed past the door.

We wait, Jenny had told Lisa. But waiting wasn't easy. Each second was an ordeal of tense and morbid expectations.

Where would death come from next?

And in what fantastic form?

And to whom would it come this time?

At last Bryce said, “Dr. Flyte, if these prehistoric creatures have survived for millions of years in underground lakes and fivers, irk the deepest sea trenches… or wherever… and if they surface to feed… then why aren't mass disappearances more common?”

Flyte pulled at his chin with one thin, long-fingered hand and said, “Because it seldom encounters human beings.”

“But why seldom?”

“I doubt that more than a handful of these beasts have survived. There may have been a climatic change that killed off most and-drove the few remaining into a subterranean and suboceanic existence.”

“Nevertheless, even a few of them”

“A rare few,” Flyte stressed, “scattered over the earth. And perhaps they feed only infrequently. Consider the boa constrictor, for example. That snake takes nourishment only once every few weeks. So perhaps this thing feeds irregularly, as seldom as once every several months or even once every couple of years. Its metabolism is so utterly different from ours that almost anything may be possible.”

“Could its life cycle include periods of hibernation,” Sara asked, “lasting not just a season or two, but years at a time?”

“Yes, yes,” Flyte said, nodding, “Very good. Very good, indeed. That would also help explain why the thing only infrequently encounters men. And let me remind you that mankind inhabits less than one percent of the planet's surface. Even if the ancient enemy did feed with some frequency, it would hardly ever run up against us.”

“And when it did,” Bryce said, “it would very likely encounter us at sea because the largest part of the earth is covered with water.”

“Exactly,” Flyte said, “And if it seized everyone aboard a ship, there wouldn't be witnesses, we'd never know about those contacts. The history of the sea is replete with stories of vanished ships and ghost ships from which the crews disappeared.”

“The Mary Celeste.” Lisa said, glancing at Jenny.

Jenny remembered when her sister had first mentioned the Mary Celeste. It had been early Sunday evening, when they had gone next door to the Santinis' house and had found the table set for dinner.

“The Mary Celeste is a famous case,” Flyte agreed, “But it's not unique. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of ships have vanished under mysterious circumstances ever since reliable nautical records have been kept. In good weather, in peacetime, with no 'logical' explanation. In aggregate, the missing crews must surely number in the tens of thousands.”

From his post by the open door of the lab, Tal said, “That area of the Caribbean where so many ships have disappeared…”

“The Bermuda Triangle,” Lisa said quickly.

“Yeah,” Tal said, “Could that be…?”

“The work of a shape-changer?” Flyte said, “Yes. Possibly. Over the years, there have been a few mysterious depletions of fish populations in that area, too, so the ancient enemy theory is applicable.”

Data flashed up on the video displays: I SEND YOU A SPIDER.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Flyte asked.

Sara tapped the keys: CLARIFY.

The same message repeated: I SEND YOU A SPIDER.

CLARIFY.

LOOK AROUND YOU.

Jenny saw it first. It was poised on the work surface to the left of the VDT that Sara was using. A black spider. Not as big as a tarantula, but much bigger than an ordinary spider.

It curled into a lump, retracting its long legs. It changed. First, it shimmered dully. The black coloration was replaced by the familiar gray-maroon-red of the shape-changer. The spider form melted away. The lump of amorphous flesh assumed another, longer shape: It became a cockroach, a hideously ugly, unrealistically large cockroach. And then a small mouse, with twitching whiskers.

New words appeared on the video displays.

HERE IS THE TISSUE SAMPLE THAT YOU REQUESTED, DR. FLYTE.

“It's so damned cooperative all of a sudden,” Tal said.

“Because it knows that nothing we find out about it will help us destroy it,” Bryce said morosely.

“There must be a way,” Lisa insisted, “We can't lose hope. We just can't.” Jenny stared in wonder as the mouse dissolved into a wad of shapeless tissue.

THIS IS MY SACRED BODY, WHICH I GIVE UNTO THEE, it told them, continuing to mock them with religious references.

The lump rippled and churned within itself, formed minute concavities and convexities, nodules and holes. It was unable to remain entirely still, just as the larger mass, which had killed Frank Autry, had seemed unable or unwilling to remain motionless for even a second.

BEHOLD THE LIRACLE OF MY FLESH, FOR IT IS ONLY IN ME THAT THOU CANST ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY. NOT IN GOD. NOT IN CHRIST. ONLY IN ME.

“I see what you mean about it taking pleasure in mockery and ridicule,” Flyte said.

The screen blinked. A new message flashed up:

YOU MAY TOUCH IT.

Blink.

YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED IF YOU TOUCH IT.

No one moved toward the quivering wad of singe flesh.

TAKE SAMPLES FOR YOUR TESTS. DO WITH IT WHAT YOU WISH.

Blink.

I WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND ME.

Blink.

I WANT YOU TO KNOW THE WONDERS OF ME.

“It isn't only self-aware; it appears to possess a well-developed ego, too,” Flyte said.

Finally, hesitantly, Sara Yamaguchi reached out, put the tip of one finger against the small glob of protoplasm.

“It's not warm like our flesh. Cool. Cool and a little… greasy.”

The small piece of the shape-changer quivered agitatedly.

Sara quickly pulled her hand away. “I'll need to section it.”

“Yeah,” Jenny said, “We'll need one or two thin cross-sections for light microscopy.”

“And another one for the electron microscope,” Sara said. “And a larger piece for analysis of the chemical and mineral composition.”

Through the computer, the ancient enemy encouraged them.

PROCEED, PROCEED, PROCEED, PROCEED PROCEED PROCEED PROCEED

Chapter 38 A Fighting Chance

Tendrils of fog slipped through the open door, into the lab.

Sara was seated at a work counter, hunched over a microscope, “Incredible,” she said softly.

Jenny was seated at another microscope, beside Sara, examining another slide of the shape-changer's tissue. “I've never seen cellular structure like this.”

“It's impossible… yet here it is,” Sara said.

Bryce, stood behind Jenny. He was eager for her to let him have a look at the slide. It wouldn't mean much to him, of course. He wouldn't know the difference between normal and abnormal cellular structure.

Nevertheless, he had to have a look at it.

Although Dr. Flyte was a scientist, he wasn't a biologist; cell structure would mean little more to him than it would to Bryce. Yet he, too, was eager to take a peek. He hung over Sara's shoulder, waiting. Tal and Lisa remained nearby, equally anxious to get a look at the Devil on a glass slide.

Still peering intently into the microscope, Sara said, “Most of the tissue is without cell structure.”

“The same with this sample,” Jenny said.

“But all organic matter must have cell structure,” Sara said. “Cell structure is virtually a definition of organic matter, a requisite of all living tissue, plant or animal.”

“Most of this stuff looks inorganic to me,” Jenny said, “but of course it can't be.”

Bryce said, “Yeah. We know all too well how alive it is.”

“I do see cells here and there,” Jenny said, “Not many; a few.”

“A few in this sample, too,” Sara said, “But each cell appears to exist independently of the others.”

“They're widely separated, all right,” Jenny said, “They're just sort of swimming in a sea of undifferentiated matter.”

“Very flexible cell walls,” Sara said, “A trifurcated nucleus. That's odd. And it occupies about half the interior cell space.”

“What's that mean?” Bryce asked, “Is it important?”

“I don't know if it's important or not,” Sara said, leaning away from the microscope and scowling. “I just don't know what to make of it.”

On all three computer screens, a question flashed up: DID YOU NOT EXPECT THE FLESH OF SATAN TO BE MYSTERIOUS?

The shape-changer had sent them a mouse-size sample of its flesh, but thus far not all of it had been needed for the various tests. Half remained in a petri dish on the counter.

It quivered gelatinously. It became a spider again and circled the dish restlessly.

It became a cockroach and darted back and forth for a while.

It became a slug.

A cricket.

A green beetle with a lacy red pattern on its shell.

Bryce and Dr. Flyte were seated in front of the microscopes now, while Lisa and Tal waited their turn.

Jenny and Sara stood in front of a VDT, where a computer-enhanced representation of an electron microscope autoscan was underway. Sara had directed the system to zero in and fix upon the nucleus in one of the shape-changer's widely scattered cells.

“Any ideas?” Jenny asked.

Sara nodded but didn't look away from the screen. “At this point, I can only make an educated guess. But I'd say the undifferentiated matter, which is clearly the bulk of the creature, is the stuff that can imprint any cell structure it wants; it's the tissue that mimics. It can form itself into dog cells, rabbit cells, human cells… But when the creature is at rest, that tissue has no cellular structure of its own. As for the few scattered cells we see… well, they must somehow control the amorphous tissue. The cells give the orders; they produce enzymes or chemical signals which tell the unstructured tissue what it should become.”

“So those scattered cells would remain unchanged at all times, regardless of what form the creature took.”

“Yes. So it would seem. If the shape-changer became a dog, for instance, and if we took a sample of the dog's tissue, we'd see dog cells. But here and there, spread throughout the sample, we'd come across these flexible cells with their trifurcated nuclei, and we'd have proof that it wasn't really a dog at all.”

“So does this tell us anything that'll help us save ourselves?” Jenny asked.

“Not that I can see.”

In the petri dish, the scrap of amorphous flesh had assumed the identity of a spider once again. Then the spider dissolved, and there were dozens of tiny ants, swarming across the floor of the dish and across one another. The ants rejoined to form a single creature — a worm. The worm wriggled for a moment and became a very large sow bug. The sow bug became a beetle. The pace of the changes seemed to be speeding up.

“What about a brain?” Jenny wondered aloud.

Sara said, “What do you mean?”

“The thing must have a center of intellect. Surely, its memory, knowledge, duplicating abilities aren't stored in those same altered cells.”

“You're probably right,” Sara said, “Somewhere in the creature, there's most likely an organ that's analogous to the human brain. Not the same as our brain, of course. Very, very different. But with similar functions. It probably controls the cells we've seen, and they in turn control the formless protoplasm.”

With growing excitement, Jenny said, “The brain cells would have at least one important thing in common with the scattered cells in the amorphous tissue: They would never change form themselves.”

“That's most likely true. It's hard to imagine how memory, logical function, and intelligence could be stored in any tissue that didn't have a relatively rigid, permanent cell structure.”

“So the brain would be vulnerable,” Jenny said.

Hope crept into Sara's eyes.

Jenny said, “If the brain's not amorphous tissue, then it can't repair itself when it's damaged. Punch a hole in it, and the hole will stay there. The brain will be permanently damaged. If it's damaged extensively enough, it won't be able to control the amorphous tissue that forms its body, and the body will die, too.”

Sara stared at her. “Jenny, I think maybe you've got something.”

Bryce said, “If we could locate the brain and fire a few shots into it, we'd stop the thing. But how do we locate it? Something tells me the shape-changer keeps its brain well protected, hidden far away from us, underground.” Jenny's excitement faded. Bryce was right. The brain might be its weak spot, but they'd have no opportunity to test that theory.

Sara pored over the results of the mineral and chemical analyses of the tissue sample.

“An extremely varied list of hydrocarbons,” she said, “And some of them are more than trace elements. A very high hydrocarbon content.”

“Carbons are a basic element of all living tissue,” Jenny said, “What's different about this?”

“Degree,” Sara said, “There's such an abundance of carbon in such various forms…”

“Does that help us somehow?”

“I don't know,” Sara said thoughtfully. She riffled through the print-out, looking at the rest of the data.

Sow bug.

Grasshopper.

Caterpillar.

Beetle. Ants. Caterpillar. Sow bug.

Spider, earwig, cockroach, centipede, spider.

Beetle-worm-spider-sna-earwig.

Lisa stared at the lump of tissue in the petri dish. It was going through a rapid series of changes, much faster than before, faster and faster by the minute.

Something was wrong.

“Petrolatum,” Sara said.

Bryce said, “What's that?”

“Petroleum jelly,” Jenny said.

Tal said, “You mean… like Vaseline?”

And Flyte said to Sara, “But surely you're not saying the amorphous tissue is anything as simple as petrolatum.”

“No, no, no,” Sara said quickly, “Of course not. This is living tissue. But there are similarities in the ratio of hydrocarbons. The composition of the tissue is far more complex than the composition of petrolatum, of course. An even longer list of minerals and chemicals than you'd find in the human body. An array of acids and alkalines… I can't begin to figure out how it makes use of nourishment, how it respires, how it functions without a circulatory system, without any apparent nervous system, or how it builds new tissue without using a cellular format. But these extremely high hydrocarbon values…”

Her voice trailed away. Her eyes appeared to swim out of focus, so that she was no longer actually looking at the test results.

Watching the geneticist, Tal had the feeling that she was suddenly excited about something. It didn't show in her face or in any aspect of her body or posture. Nevertheless, there was definitely a new air about her that told him she was onto something important.

Tal glanced at Bryce. Their eyes met. He saw that Bryce, too, was aware of the change in Sara.

Almost unconsciously, Tal crossed his fingers.

“Better come look at this,” Lisa said urgently.

She was standing by the petri dish that contained the portion of the tissue sample they hadn't yet used.

“Hurry, come here!” Lisa said when they didn't immediately respond.

Jenny and the others gathered around and stared at the thing in the petri dish.

Grasshopper-worm-centipede-snail-earwig.

“It just goes faster and faster and faster,” Lisa said.

Spider-worm-centipede-spider-snail-spider-worm-spiderworm…

And then even faster.

…spiderwonnspiderwormspiderwormspider…

“It's only half-changed into a worm before it starts changing back into a spider again,” Lisa said, “Frantic like. See? Something's happening to it.”

“Looks as if it's lost control, gone crazy,” Tal said.

“Having some sort of breakdown,” Flyte said.

Abruptly, the composition of the small wad of amorphous tissue changed. A milky fluid seeped from it; the wad collapsed into a runny pile of lifeless mush.

It didn't move.

It didn't take on another form.

Jenny wanted to touch it; didn't dare.

Sara picked up a small lab spoon, poked at the stuff in the dish. It still didn't move.

She stirred it.

The tissue liquefied even further, but otherwise did not respond.

“It's dead,” Flyte said softly.

Bryce seemed electrified by this development. He turned to Sara. “What was in the petri dish before you put the tissue sample there?”

“Nothing.”

“There must've been a residue.”

“No.”

“Think, damn it. Our lives depend on this.”

“There was nothing in the dish. I took it from the sterilizer.”

“A trace of some chemical.”

“It was perfectly clean.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Something in the dish must've reacted with the shape-changer's tissue,” Bryce said, “Right? Isn't that clear?”

“And whatever was in the dish,” Tal said, “that's our weapon.”

“It's the stuff that'll kill the shape-changer,” Lisa said.

“Not necessarily,” Jenny said, hating to shatter the girl's hopes.

“Sounds too easy,” Flyte agreed, combing his wild white hair with a trembling hand. “Let's not leap to conclusions.”

“Especially when there're other possibilities,” Jenny said.

“Such as?” Bryce asked.

“Well… we know that the main mass of the creature can shed pieces of itself in about any form it chooses, can direct the activities of those detached parts, and can summon them back the way it summoned the part of itself that it sent to kill Gordy. But now suppose that a detached portion of the shape changer can only survive for a relatively short period of time on its own, away from the mother-body. Suppose the amorphous tissue needs a steady supply of a particular enzyme in order to maintain its cohesiveness, an enzyme that isn't manufactured in those independently situated control cells that're scattered throughout the tissue—”

“—an enzyme that's produced only by the shape-changer's brain,” Sara said, picking up on Jenny's train of thought.

“Exactly,” Jenny said, “So… any detached portion would have to reintegrate itself with the main mass in order to replenish its supply of that vital enzyme, or whatever the substance may be.”

“That's not unlikely,” Sara said, “After all, the human brain produces enzymes and hormones without which our own bodies wouldn't be able to survive. Why shouldn't the shape-changer's brain fulfill a similar function?”

“All right,” Bryce said, “What does this discovery mean to us?”

“If it is a discovery and not just a wrongheaded guess,” Jenny said, “then it means we could definitely destroy the entire shape-changer if we could destroy the brain. The creature wouldn't be able to separate into several parts and crawl away and go on living in other incarnations. Without the essential brain-manufactured enzymes — or hormones or whatever — the separate parts would all eventually dissolve into lifeless mush, the way the thing in the petree dish has done.”

Bryce sagged with disappointment. “We're back at square one. We have to locate its brain before we have any chance of striking a death blow, but the thing's never going to let us do that.”

“We're not back to square one,” Sara said. Pointing to the lifeless slime in the petri dish: “This tells us something else that's important.”

“What?” Bryce asked, his voice heavy with frustration, “Is it something useful, something that could save us — or is it just another item of bizarre information?” Sara said, “We now know the amorphous tissue exists in a delicate chemical balance that can be disrupted.”

She let that sink in.

The deep worry lines in Bryce's face softened a bit.

Sara said, “The flesh of the shape-changer can be damaged. It can be killed. Here's proof in the petri dish.”

“How do we use that knowledge?” Tal asked, “How do we disrupt the chemical balance?”

“That's what we've got to find out,” Sara said.

“Do you have any ideas?” Lisa asked the geneticist.

“No,” Sara said, “None.”

But Jenny suddenly had the feeling that Sara Yamaguchi was lying.

Sara wanted to tell them about the plan that had occurred to her, but she couldn't say a word. For one thing, her strategy offered only a fragile thread of hope. She didn't want to raise their hopes unrealistically and then see them dashed again. More importantly, if she told them what was on her mind, and if by some miracle she actually had found a way to destroy the shape-changer, it would hear what she said, and it would know her plans, and it would stop her. There was no place where she could safely discuss her thoughts with Jenny and Bryce and the others. Their best hope was to keep the ancient enemy smug and complacent.

But she had time, buy some time, several hours, in which to set her plan in motion. The shape-changer was millions and millions of years old, virtually immortal. What were a few hours to this creature? Surely, it would comply with her request. Surely.

She sat down at one of the computer terminals, her eyes burning with weariness. She needed sleep. They all needed sleep. The night was nearly gone. She wiped one hand across her face, as if she could slough off her weariness. Then she typed: ARE YOU THERE?

YES.

WE HAVE COMPLETED A NUMBER OF TESTS, she typed as the others crowded around her.

I KNOW, it replied.

WE ARE FASCINATED. THERE IS MORE WE WISH TO KNOW.

OF COURSE.

THERE ARE OTHER TESTS WE WANT TO CONDUCT.

WHY?

IN ORDER THAT WE CAN KNOW MORE ABOUT YOU.

CLARIFY, it answered teasingly.

Sara thought for a moment, then typed: DR. FLYTE NEEDS ADDITIONAL DATA IF HE IS TO WRITE ABOUT YOU WITH AUTHORITY.

HE IS MY MATTHEW.

HE NEEDS MORE DATA TO TELL YOUR STORY AS IT SHOULD BE TOLD.

It flashed back a three-line response in the center of the video display:

— A FLOURISH OF TRUMPETS—

THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD

— A FLOURISH OF TRUMPETS—

Sara couldn't be sure if it was merely mocking them or whether its ego was actually so large that it could seriously equate its own story with the story of Christ.

The screen blinked. New words appeared: PROCEED WITH YOUR TESTS.

WE WILL NEED TO SEND FOR MORE LAB EQUIPMENT.

WHY? YOU HAVE A FULLY EQUIPPED LAB.

Sara's hands were moist. She blotted them on her jeans before tapping out her answer.

THIS LAB IS FULLY EQUIPPED ONLY FOR A NARROW AREA OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY: THE ANALYSIS OF CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGENTS. WE DID NOT ANTICIPATE ENCOUNTERING A BEING OF YOUR NATURE. WE MUST HAVE OTHER LAB EQUIPMENT IN ORDER TO DO A PROPER JOB.

PROCEED.

IT WILL TAKE SEVERAL HOURS TO HAVE THE EQUIPMENT SENT HERE, she told it. PROCEED.

She stared at the word, green on green, hardly daring to believe that gaining more time would be this easy.

She tapped the keys: WE WILL NEED TO RETURN TO THE INN AND USE THE TELEPHONE THERE.

PROCEED, YOU BORING BITCH. PROCEED, PROCEED PROCEED PROCEED.

Her hands were damp again. She wiped them on her jeans and stood up.

From the way the others were looking at her, she realized that they knew she was hiding something, and they understood why she was remaining silent about it.

But how did they know? Was she that obvious? And if they knew, did it know, too?

She cleared her throat. “Let's go,” she said shakily.

“Let's go,” Sara Yamaguchi said shakily, but Timothy said, “Wait. Just a minute or two, please. There's something I've got to try.”

He sat down at a computer terminal. Although he had gotten some sleep on the airliners, his mind was not as sharp as it ought to be. He shook his head and took several deep breaths, then typed: THIS IS TIMOTHY FLYTE.

I KNOW.

WE MUST HAVE A DIALOGUE.

PROCEED.

MUST WE DO IT THROUGH THE COMPUTER?

IT IS BETTER THAN A BURNING BUSH.

For a second or two, Timothy didn't understand what it meant. When he got the joke, he almost laughed aloud. The damned thing had its own perverse sense of humor. He typed: YOUR SPECIES AND MINE SHOULD LIVE IN PEACE.

WHY?

BECAUSE WE SHARE THE EARTH.

AS THE FARMER SHARES THE FARM WITH HIS CATTLE. YOU ARE MY CATTLE.

WE ARE THE ONLY TWO INTELLIGENT SPECIES ON EARTH.

YOU THINK YOU KNOW SO MUCH. IN FACT YOU KNOW SO LITTLE.

WE SHOULD COOPERATE, Flyte persisted doggedly.

YOU ARE INFERIOR TO ME.

WE HAVE MUCH TO LEARN FROM EACH OTHER.

I HAVE NOTHING TO LEARN FROM YOUR KIND.

WE MAY BE MORE CLEVER THAN YOU BELIEVE.

YOU ARE MORTAL. IS THAT NOT TRUE?

YES.

TO ME, YOUR LIVES ARE AS BRIEF AND UNIMPORTANT AS THE LIVES OF MAYFLIES SEEM TO YOU.

IF THAT IS THE WAY YOU FEEL, WHY DO YOU CARE WHETHER OR NOT I WRITE ABOUT YOU?

IT AMUSES ME THAT ONE OF YOUR SPECIES HAS THEORIZED MY EXISTENCE. IT IS LIKE A PET MONKEY LEARNING A DIFFICULT TRICK.

I DO NOT BELIEVE WE ARE YOUR INFERIORS, Flyte typed gamely.

CATTLE.

I BELIEVE YOU WANT TO BE WRITTEN ABOUT BECAUSE YOU HAVE ACQUIRED A VERY HUMAN EGO.

YOU ARE WRONG.

I BELIEVE THAT YOU WERE NOT AN INTELLIGENT CREATURE UNTIL YOU BEGAN FEEDING UPON INTELLIGENT CREATURES, UPON MEN.

YOUR IGNORANCE DISAPPOINTS ME.

Timothy continued to challenge it. I BELIEVE THAT ALONG WITH KNOWLEDGE AND MEMORY THAT WAS ABSORBED FROM YOUR HUMAN VICTIMS, YOU ALSO ACQUIRED INTELLIGENCE. YOU OWE US FOR YOUR OWN EVOLUTION.

It did not reply.

Timothy cleared the screen and typed more: YOUR MIND SEEMS TO HAVE A VERY HUMAN STRUCTURE — EGO, SUPEREGO, AND SO FORTH.

CATTLE, it replied.

Blink.

PIGS, it said.

Blink.

GROVELING ANIMALS, it said.

Blink.

YOU BORE ME, it said.

And then all the screens went dark.

Timothy leaned back in his chair and sighed.

Sheriff Hammond said, “Nice try, Dr. Flyte.”

“Such arrogance,” Timothy said.

“Befitting a god,” Dr. Paige said, “And that's more or less how it thinks of itself.”

“In a way,” Lisa Paige said, “that's what it really is.”

“Yeah,” Tal Whitman said, “for all intents and purposes, it might as well be a god. It has all the powers of a god, doesn't it?”

“Or a devil,” Lisa said.

Beyond the streetlamps and above the fog, the night was gray now. The first vague glow of dawn had sparked the far end of the sky.

Sara wished Dr. Flyte hadn't challenged the shape-changer so boldly. She was worried that he had antagonized it, and that now it would renege on its promise to give them more time.

During the short walk from the field lab to the Hilltop Inn, she kept expecting a grotesque phantom to lope or scuttle at them from out of the fog. It must not take them now. Not now. Not when there was, at long last, a glare of hope.

Elsewhere in town, off in the fog and shadows, there were strange animal sounds, eerie alienating cries like nothing that Sara had ever heard before. It was still engaged upon its ceaseless mimicry. A hellish shriek, uncomfortably close at hand, caused the survivors to bunch together.

But they were not attacked.

The streets, although not silent, were still. was not even a breeze; the mist hung motionless in the air.

Nothing waited for them inside the inn, either.

At the central operations desk, Sara sat down and dialed the number of the CBW Civilian Defense Unit's home base in Dugway, Utah.

Jenny, Bryce, and the others gathered around to listen.

Because of the ongoing crisis in Snowfield, there was not just the usual night-duty sergeant at the Dugway headquarters. Captain Daniel Tersch, a physician in the Army Medical Corps, a specialist in containing contagious disease, third in charge of the unit, was standing by to direct any support operations that might become necessary.

Sara told him about their latest discoveries — the microscopic examinations of the shape-changer's tissue, the results of the various mineral and chemical analyses — and Tersch was fascinated, though this was well beyond his field of expertise.

“Petrolatum?” he asked at one point, surprised by what she had told him.

“The amorphous tissue resembles petrolatum only in that it has a somewhat similar mix of hydrocarbons that register very high values. But of course it's much more complex, much more sophisticated.”

She stressed this particular discovery, for she wanted to be certain that Tersch passed it along to other scientists on the CBW team at Dugway. If another geneticist or a biochemist were to consider this data and then look at the list of materials she was going to ask for, he would almost certainly know what her plan was. If someone in the CBW unit did get her message, he would assemble the weapon for her before it was sent into Snowfield, sparing her the time-consuming and dangerous job of assembling it with the shape-changer looking over her shoulder.

She couldn't just tell Tersch what she had in mind, for she was certain the ancient enemy was listening in. There was an odd, faint hissing on the line…

Finally she spoke of her need for additional laboratory equipment. “Most of this stuff can be borrowed from university and industry labs right here in Northern California,” she told Tersch. “I just need you to use the army's manpower, transportation, and authority to put together the package and get it to me as quickly as possible.”

“What do you need?” Tersch asked, “Just tell me, and you'll have it in five or six hours.”

She recited a list of equipment in which she actually had no real interest, and then she finished by saying, “I will also need as much of the fourth generation of Dr. Chakrabarty's little miracle as it's feasible to send. And I'll need two or three compressed-air dispersal units, too.”

“Who's Chakrabarty?” Tersch asked, puzzled.

“You wouldn't know him.”

“What's his little miracle? What do you mean

“Just write down Chakrabarty, fourth generation.” She spelled the name for him.

“I haven't the vaguest idea what this is,” he said.

Good, Sam thought with considerable relief. Perfect.

If Tersch had known what Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty's little miracle was, he might have blurted something before she could stop him. And the ancient enemy would have been forewarned.

“It's outside your area of specialization,” she said, “There's no reason you should recognize the name or know the device.” She spoke hurriedly now, trying to move away from the subject as smoothly and as rapidly as possible."don't have time to explain it, Dr. Tersch. Other people in the CBW program will definitely know what it is I need. Let's get moving on this. Dr. Flyte very much wants to continue his studies of the cream, and he needs all the items on my list just as soon as he can get them. Five or six hours, you said?”

“That should do it,” Tersch said, “How should we deliver?”

Sara glanced at Bryce. He wouldn't want to risk yet another of his men in order to have the cargo driven into town. To Captain Tersch, she said, “Can it be brought in by army helicopter?”

“Will do.”

“Better tell the pilot not to try landing. The shape-changer might think we were attempting to escape. It would almost certainly attack the crew and kill all of us the moment the chopper touched down. Just have them hover and lower the package on a cable.”

“This could be quite a large bundle,” Tersch said.

“I'm sure they can lower it,” she said.

“Well… all right. I'll get on it right away. And good luck to you.”

“Thanks,” Sara said, “We'll need it.”

She hung up.

“All of a sudden, five or six hours seems like a long time,” Jenny said.

“An eternity,” Sara said.

They were all clearly eager to hear about her scheme but knew it couldn't be discussed. However, even in their silence, Sara detected a new note of optimism.

Don't get your hopes too high, she thought anxiously.

There was a chance that her plan had no merit. In fact, the odds were stacked against them. And if the plan failed, the shape-changer would know what they had intended to do, and it would wipe them out in some especially malicious fashion.

Outside, dawn had come.

The fog had lost its pale glow. Now the mist was dazzling, white-white, shining with refractions of the morning sunlight.

Chapter 39 The Apparition

Fletcher Kale woke in time to see the first light of dawn.

The forest was still mostly dark. Milky daylight speared down in shafts, through scattered holes in the green canopy that was formed by the densely interlaced branches of the mammoth trees. The sunshine was diffused by the fog, muted, revealing little.

He had passed the night in the Jeep station wagon that belonged to Jake Johnson. Now he got out and stood beside the Jeep, listening to the woods, alert for the sounds of pursuit.

Last night, a few minutes after eleven o'clock, headed for Jake Johnson's secret retreat, Kale had driven up the Mount Larson Road, had swung the Jeep onto the unpaved fire lane that led up the wild north slopes of Snowtop — and had run smack into trouble. Within twenty feet, his headlights picked up signs posted on both sides of the roadway; large red letters on a white background read QUARANTINE. Going too fast, he swung around a bend, and directly ahead of him was a police blockade, one county cruiser angled across the road. Two deputies started getting out of the car.

He remembered hearing about a quarantine zone encircling Snowfield, but he'd thought it was in effect only on the other side of the mountain. He hit the brakes, wishing that, for once, he'd paid more attention to the news.

There was an APB circulating with his photograph. These men would recognize him, and within an hour he'd be back in jail.

Surprise was his only hope. They wouldn't be expecting trouble. Maintaining a quarantine checkpoint would be easy, lulling duty.

The HK91 assault rifle was on the seat beside Kale, covered with a blanket. He grabbed the gun, got out of the Jeep, and opened fire on the cops. The semiautomatic weapon and the deputies did a dance of death, spectral figures in the fog.

He rolled the bodies into a ditch, pulled the patrol car out of the way, and drove the Jeep past the checkpoint. Then he went back and repositioned the car, so that it would appear that the deputies' killer hadn't continued up the mountain.

He drove three miles up the rugged fire lane, until he came to an even more rugged, overgrown trail. A mile later, at the end of that trail, he parked the Jeep in a tunnel of brush and climbed out.

In addition to the HK91, he had a sackful of other guns from Johnson's closet, plus the $63,440, which was distributed through the seven zippered pockets m the hunting jacket he wore. The only other thing he carried was a flashlight, and that was really all he needed because the limestone caves would be well stocked with other supplies.

The last quarter of a mile had to be covered on foot, and he had intended to finish the journey right away, but he had quickly found that even with the flashlight the forest was confusing at night, in the fog. Getting lost was almost a certainty. Once lost in this wilderness, you could wander in circles, within yards of your destination, never discovering how close you were to salvation. After only a few paces, Kale had m back to the Jeep to wait for daylight.

Even if the two dead deputies at the blockade were discovered before morning, and even if the cops figured the killer had come onto the mountain, they wouldn't launch a manhunt until first light. By the time the police reached here tomorrow, Kale would be snug in the caves.

He had slept on the front seat of the Jeep. It wasn't the Plaza Hotel, but it was more comfortable than jail.

Now, standing beside the Jeep in the wan tight of early morning, he listened for the sounds of a search party. He heard nothing. He hadn't really expected to hear anything. It wasn't his destiny to rot in prison. His future was golden. He was sure of that.

He yawned, stretched, then pissed against the trunk of a big pine.

Thirty minutes later, when there was more light, he followed the foot-path he hadn't been able to find last night. And he saw something that hadn't been obvious in the dark: The brush was extensively trampled. People had been through here recently.

He proceeded with caution, cradling the HK91 in his right arm, ready to blow away anyone who might try to ambush him.

In less than half an hour, he came out of the trees, into the clearing around the log cabin — and saw why the footpath had been trampled. Eight motorcycles were lined up alongside the cabin, big Harleys, all emblazoned with the name DEMON CHROME.

Gene Teer's bunch of misfits. Not all of them. About half the gang, by the looks of it.

Kale crouched against an outcropping of limestone and studied the mist-wrapped cabin. No one was in sight. He quietly fished in the laundry bag, located a fresh magazine for the HK91, rammed it in place.

How had Teer and his vicious playmates gotten here? A two-wheel trip up the mountain would have been difficult, wildly dangerous, a nerve-twisting bit of motocross. Of course, those crazy bastards thrived on danger.

But what the devil were the doing here? How had they found the cabin, and why had they come?

As he listened for a voice, for some indication of where the cyclists were and what they were up to, Kale realized there weren't even any animal or insect sounds. No birds. Absolutely nothing. Spooky.

Then, behind him, a rustle in the brush. A soft sound. In the pretematural silence, it might as well have been a cannon shot.

Kale had been kneeling on the ground. With catlike quickness, he fell on his side, rolled onto his back, brought up the HK91.

He was prepared to kill, but he wasn't prepared for what he saw. It was Jake Johnson, about twenty-five feet away, coming out of the trees and fog, grinning. Naked. Utterly bareassed.

Other movement. To the left of Johnson. Farther along the treeline.

Kale caught it from the corner of his eye and whipped his head around, swung the rifle in that direction.

Another man came out of the woods, through the mist, with the tall grass fluttering around his bare legs. He was also naked. And grinning broadly.

But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst part was that the second man was also Jake Johnson.

Kale looked from one to the other, startled and baffled. They were as perfectly alike as a set of identical twins.

But Jake was an only child — wasn't he? Kale had never heard anything about a twin.

A third figure advanced from the shadows beneath the spreading boughs of a huge spruce. This one, too, was Jake Johnson.

Kale couldn't breathe.

Maybe there was an outside chance that Johnson had a twin, but he damned well wasn't one of triplets.

Something was horribly wrong. Suddenly, it wasn't just the impossible triplets that frightened Kale. Suddenly, everything seemed menacing: the forest, the mist, the stony contours of the mountainside…

The three look-alikes walked slowly up the slope on which Kale was sprawled, closing in from different angles. Their eyes were strange, and their mouths were cruel.

Kale scrambled to his feet, heart lurching. “Stop right there!”

But they didn't stop, even though he brandished the assault rifle.

“Who are you? What are you? What is this?” Kale demanded.

They didn't answer. Kept coming. Like zombies.

He grabbed the bag that was filled with guns, and he backed rapidly and clumsily away from the nightmarish show.

No. Not a trio any more. A quartet. Downslope, a fourth Jake Johnson came out of the trees, stark naked like the rest.

Kale's fear trembled on the edge of panic.

The four moved toward Kale with hardly a sound; dried leaves underfoot; nothing else. They made no complaint about the stones and sharp weeds and prickly burrs that must have hurt their feet. One of them began to lick his lips hungrily. The others immediately began to lick their lips, too.

A quiver of icy dread went through Kale's bowels, and he wondered if he had lost his mind. But that thought was short-lived. Unfamiliar with self-doubt, he didn't know how to entertain it for long.

He dropped the laundry bag, clutched the HK91 in both hands, and opened fire, describing an are with the spurting muzzle of the gun. The bullets hit. He saw them tear into the four men, saw the wounds burst open. But there was no blood. And as soon as the wounds blossomed, they withered; they healed, vanished within seconds.

The men kept coming.

No. Not men. Something else.

Hallucinations? Years ago, in high school, Kale had dropped a lot of acid. Now he remembered that flashbacks could plague you months — even years — after you stopped using LSD. He'd never had acid flashbacks before, but he'd heard about them. Was that what was happening here? Hallucinations?

Perhaps.

On the other hand… all four of the men were glistening, as if the morning mists were condensing on their bare skin, and that wasn't the sort of detail you usually noticed in a hallucination. And this entire situation was very different from any drug experience he'd ever known.

Still grinning, the nearest Doppelganger raised one arm, pointed at Kale. Incredibly, the flesh of that hand split and peeled away from the fingers, from the palm. The flesh actually appeared to ooze bloodlessly back into the arm, as if it were wax melting and running from a flame; the wrist became thicker with this tissue, and then the hand was nothing but bones, white bones. One skeletal finger pointed at Kale.

Pointed with anger, scorn, and accusation.

Kale's mind reeled.

The other three look-alikes had undergone even more macabre changes. One had lost the flesh from part of his face: A cheekbone shone through, a row of teeth; the right eye, deprived of a lid and of all surrounding tissue, gleamed wetly in the calcimined socket. The third man was missing a chunk of flesh from his torso; you could see his sharp ribs and slick wet organs pulsing darkly inside. The fourth walked on one normal leg and one leg that was only bones and tendons.

As they closed on Kale, one of them spoke: “Baby killer.”

Kale screamed, dropped the HK91, and ran. Stopped short when he saw two more Johnson lookalikes approaching from behind, from the cabin. Nowhere to run. Except up toward the high limestone outcroppings above the cabin. He bolted that way, gasping and wheezing, reached the door, whimpering, waded through it to the mouth of the cave, glanced behind, saw that the six were still coming after him, and he plunged into the cave, into darkness, wishing he'd held onto his flashlight, and he put one hand against the wall, shuffled along, feeling his way, trying to recall the layout, remembering it was more or less a long tunnel ending in a series of doglegs — and suddenly he realized this might not be a safe place; it might be a trap, instead; yes, he was sure of it; they wanted him to come here — and he looked back, saw two decomposing men at the entrance, heard himself wall, and hurried faster, faster, into the deep blackness because there, was nowhere else to go, even if it was a trap, and he scraped his hand on a sharp projection of rock, stumbled, flailed, charged on, reached the doglegs, one after the other, and then the door, and he went through, slammed it behind him, but he knew it wouldn't keep them out, and then he was aware of light, in the next chamber, toward which he now began to move in a dreamlike haze of terror, passing stacks of supplies and equipment.

The light came from a Coleman lantern.

Kale stepped into the third chamber.

In the frost-pale glow, he saw something that made him freeze. It had risen from the subterranean river, up through the cave floor, out of the hole in which Jake Johnson had rigged a water pump. It writhed. It churned, pulsated, rippled. Dark, blood-mottled flesh. Shapeless.

Wings began to form. Then melted away.

A sulphurous odor, not strong yet nauseating.

Eyes opened all over the seven-foot column of slime. They focused on Kale.

He shrank from them, backed into a wall, held on to the stone as if it were reality, a last place to grip on the precipice of madness.

Some of the eyes were human. Some were not. They fixed on him — then closed and disappeared.

Mouths opened where no mouths had b-been. Teeth. Fangs. Forked tongues lolled over black lips. From other mouths, wormlike tentacles erupted, wriggled in the air, withdrew. Like the wings and eyes, the mouths eventually vanished into the formless flesh.

A man sat on the floor. He was a few feet from the pulsing thing that had come up from beneath the cave, and he was seated in the penumbra of the lantern's glow, his face in shadow.

Aware that Kale had noticed him, the man leaned forward slightly, putting his face in the light. He was six feet four or taller, with long curly hair and a beard. He wore a rolled bandanna around his head. One gold earring dangled. He smiled the most peculiar smile Kale had ever seen, and he raised one hand in greeting, and on the palm of the hand was a red and yellow tattoo of an eyeball.

It was Gene Tell.

Chapter 40 Biological Warfare

The army helicopter arrived three and a half hours after Sara spoke to Daniel Tersch in Dugway, two hours earlier than promised. Evidently, it had been dispatched from a base in California, and evidently her colleagues in the CBW program had figured out her war plan. They had realized she didn't actually need most of the equipment she had asked for, and they had collected only what she required for the attack on the shape-changer. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been so quick.

Please, God, let it be true, Sara thought. They must have brought the right stuff. They must have.

It was a large, camouflage-painted chopper with two full sets of whirling blades. Hovering sixty to seventy feet above Skyline Road, it stiffed the morning air, created a turbulent downdraft, and sliced up what little mist remained. It sent waves of hard sound crashing through the town.

A door slid open on the side of the helicopter, and a man leaned out of the cargo hold, looked down. He made no attempt to call to them, for the chattering rotors and roaring engines would have scattered his words. Instead, he used a series of incomprehensible hand signals.

Finally Sara realized that the crew was waiting for some indication that this was the drop spot. With hand signals of her own, she urged everyone to form a circle with her, in the middle of the street. They didn't join hands, but stood with a couple of yards between each of them. The circle had a diameter of twelve to fifteen feet.

A canvas-wrapped bundle, somewhat larger than a man, was pushed out of the chopper. It was attached to a cable, which was reeled out by an electric winch. Initially, the bundle descended slowly, then slower still, at last settling to the pavement in the center of the circle, so gently that it seemed the chopper crewmen thought they were delivering raw eggs.

Bryce broke out of the formation before the package touched down and was the first to reach it. He located the snaplink and released the cable by the time Sara and the others joined him.

As the chopper reeled in the line, it swung toward the valley below, moved off, out of the danger zone, gaining altitude as it went.

Sara crouched beside the bundle and started loosening the nylon rope that was threaded through the eyelets in the canvas. She worked feverishly and, in a few seconds, unpacked the contents.

There were two blue cannisters bearing white stenciled words and numbers. She sighed with relief when she saw them. Her message had been properly interpreted. There were also three aerosol tank sprayers similar in size and appearance to those used to spread weed killer and insecticide on a lawn, except that these were not powered by a hand pump but by cylinders of compressed air. Each tank was equipped with a harness that made it easy to carry on the back. A flexible rubber hose, ending in a four-foot metal extension with a high-pressure nozzle, made it possible to stand twelve to fourteen feet from the target that you wished to spray.

Sara lifted one of the pressurized tanks. It was heavy, already filled with the same fluid that was in the two spare, blue cannisters.

The helicopter dwindled into the Western sky, and Lisa said, “Sara, this isn't everything you asked for — is it?”

“This is everything we need,” Sara said evasively.

She looked around nervously, expecting to see the shape changer rushing toward them. But there was no sign of it.

She said, “Bryce, Tal, if you'd take two of these tanks…”

The sheriff and his deputy grabbed two of the units, slipped their arms through the harness loops, buckled the chest straps, shrugged their shoulders to settle the tanks as comfortably as possible.

Without having been told, both men clearly realized the tanks contained a weapon that might destroy the shape-changer. Sara knew they must be eaten by curiosity, and she was impressed that they asked no questions.

She had intended to handle the third sprayer herself, but it was considerably heavier than she'd expected. Straining, she would be able to carry it, but she wouldn't be able to maneuver quickly. And during the next hour or so, survival would depend on speed and agility.

Someone else would have to use the third unit. Not Lisa; she was no bigger than Sara. Not Flyte; he had some arthritis in his hand, of which he'd complained last night, and he seemed frail. That left Jenny. She was only three or four inches taller than Sara, only fifteen or twenty pounds heavier, but she appeared to be in excellent physical condition. She almost certainly would be able to handle the sprayer.

Flyte protested but then relented after trying to heft the tank. “I must be older than I think,” he said wearily.

Jenny agreed that she was the one best suited, and Sara helped her get into the harness, and they were ready for the battle.

Still no sign of the shape-changer.

Sara wiped sweat from her brow. “All right. The instant it shows itself, spray it. Don't waste a second. Spray it, saturate it, keep backing away if possible, try to draw more of it out of hiding, and spray, spray, spray.”

“Is this some sort of acid — or what?” Bryce asked.

“Not acid,” Sara said, “Although the effect will be something very like acid — if it works at all.”

“So if it's not an acid,” Tal said, “what is it?”

“A unique, highly specialized microorganism,” Sara said.

“Germs?” Jenny asked, eyes widening in surprise.

“Yes. They're suspended in a liquid growth culture.”

“We're gonna make the shape-changer sick?” Lisa asked, frowning.

“I sure to God hope so,” Sara said.

Nothing moved. Nothing. But something was out there, and it was probably listening. With the ears of the cat. With the ears of the fox. With highly sensitive ears of its own special design.

“Very, very sick, if we're lucky,” Sara said, “Because disease would seem to be the only way to kill it.”

Now their lives were at risk because it knew they had tricked it.

Flyte shook his head. “But the ancient enemy's so utterly alien, so different from man and animals… diseases dangerous to other species would have no effect whatsoever on it.”

“Right,” Sara said, “But this microbe isn't an ordinary disease. In fact, it isn't a disease-causing organism at all.”

Snowfield shelved down the mountain, still as a postcard painting.

Looking around uneasily, alert for movement in and around the buildings, Sara told them about Ananda Chakrabarty and his discovery.

In 1972, on behalf of Dr. Chakrabarty, his employer — the General Electric Corporation — applied for the first-ever patent on a man-made bacterium. Using sophisticated cell fusion techniques, Chakrabarty had created a microorganism that could feed upon, digest, and thereby transform the hydrocarbon compounds of crude oil.

Chakrabarty's bug had at least one obvious commercial application: It could be used to clean up oil spills at sea. The bacteria literally ate an oil slick, rendering it harmless to the environment.

After a series of vigorous legal challenges from many sources, General Electric won the right to patent Chakrabarty's discovery. In June, 1980, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision, ruling that Chakrabarty's discovery was “not nature's handiwork, but his own; accordingly, it's patentable subject matter.”

“Of course,” Jenny said, “I read about the case. It was a big story that June — man competing with God and all that.”

Sara said, “Originally, GE didn't intend to market the bug. It was a fragile organism that couldn't survive outside of strictly controlled lab conditions. They applied for a patent to test the legal question, to settle the matter before other experiments in genetic engineering produced more usable and more valuable discoveries. But after the court's decision, other scientists spent a few years working with the organism, and now they have a hardier strain that'll stand up outside the lab for twelve to eighteen hours. In fact it's been on the market under the trade name Biosan-4, and it's been used successfully to clean up oil slicks all over the world.”

“And that's what's in these tanks?” Bryce asked.

“Yes. Biosan-4. In a sprayable solution.”

The town was funereal. The sun beat down from an azure sky, but the air remained chilly. In spite of the uncanny silence, Sara had the unshakable feeling that it was coming, that it had heard and was coming and was very, very near, indeed.

The others felt it, too. They looked around uneasily.

Sara said, “Do you remember what we discovered when we studied the shape-changer's tissue?”

“You mean the high hydrocarbon values,” Jenny said.

“Yes. But not just hydrocarbons. All forms of carbon. Very high values all across the board.”

Tal said, “You told us something about it being like petrolatum.”

“Not the same. But reminiscent of petrolatum in some respects,” Sara said. “What we have here is living tissue, very alien but complex and alive. And with such extraordinarily high carbon content… Well, what I mean is, this thing's tissue seems like an organic, metabolically active cousin of petrolatum. So I'm hoping Chakrabarty's bug will…”

Something is coming.

Jenny said, “You're hoping it'll eat into the shape-changer the same way it would eat into an oil slick.”

Something… something…

“Yes,” Sara said nervously, “I'm hoping it'll attack the carbon and break down the tissue. Or at least interfere with the delicate chemical balance enough to-”

Coming, coming…

“… uh, enough to destabilize the entire organism,” Sara finished, weighed down by a sense of impending doom.

Flyte said, “Is that the best chance we have? Is it really?”

“I think it is.”

Where is it? Where's it coming from? Sara wondered, looking at the deserted buildings, the empty street, the motionless this.

“Sounds awfully thin to me,” Flyte said doubtfully.

“It is awfully thin,” Sara said, “It's not much of a chance, but it's the only one we've got.”

A noise. A chittering, hissing, hair-raising sound.

They froze. Waited.

But, again, the town pulled a cloak of silence around itself.

The morning sun cast its fiery reflection in some windows and glinted off the curved glass of the streetlamps. The black slate roofs looked as if they had been polished during the night; the last of the mist had condensed on those smooth surfaces, leaving a moist sheen.

Nothing moved. Nothing happened. The noise did not resume.

Bryce Hammond's face clouded with worry. “This Biosan… I gather it isn't harmful to us.”

“Utterly harmless,” Sara assured him.

The noise again. A short burst. Then silence.

“Something's coming,” Lisa said softly.

God help us, Sara thought.

“Something's coming,” Lisa said softly, and Bryce felt it, too. A sense of on rushing horror. A thickening and cooling of the air. A new predatory quality to the stillness. Reality? Imagination? He could not be certain. He only knew that he felt it.

The noise burst forth again, a sustained squeal, not just a short blast. Bryce winced. It was piercingly shrill. Buzzing. Whining. Like a power drill. But he knew it wasn't anything as harmless and ordinary as that.

Insects. The coldness of the sound, the metallic quality made him think of insects. Bees. Yes. It was the greatly amplified buzzing-screeching of hornets.

He said, “The three of you who aren't armed with spray guns, get in the middle here.”

“Yeah,” Tal said, “We'll circle around, give you a little protection.”

Very damned little if this Biosan doesn't work, Bryce thought.

The strange noise grew louder.

Sara, Lisa, and Dr. Flyte stood together, while Bryce and Jenny and Tal ringed them, facing outward.

Then, down the street, near the bakery, something monstrous appeared in the sky, skimming over the tops of the buildings, hovering for a few seconds above Skyline Road. A wasp. A phantom the size of a German shepherd. Nothing remotely like this insect had ever existed during the tens of millions of years that the shape-changer had been alive. This was surely something that had sprung. from its vicious imagination, a horrible invention. Six-foot, opalescent wings beat furiously upon the air, glimmered with rainbow color. The multifaceted black eyes were slant-set in the narrow, pointed, wicked head. There were four twitching legs with pincered feet. The curled, segmented, mold-white body terminated in a foot-long stinger with a needle-sharp point.

Bryce felt as if his intestines were turning to ice water.

The wasp stopped hovering. It struck.

Jenny screamed as the wasp streaked toward them, but she didn't run. She aimed the nozzle of the sprayer and squeezed the pressure-release lever. A cone-shaped, milky mist erupted for a distance of about six feet.

The wasp was twenty feet away and closing fast.

Jenny squeezed the lever all the way down. The mist became a stream, arcing fifteen or sixteen feet out from the nozzle.

Bryce loosed a stream from his sprayer. The two trails of Biosan played against each other, steadied, took the same aim, flowed together in midair.

The wasp came within range. The high-pressure streams sprayed, dulled the rainbow color of the wings, soaked the segmented body.

The insect stopped abruptly, hesitated, dipped lower, as if unable to maintain altitude. Hovered. Its attack had been arrested, although it still regarded them with hate-filled eyes.

Jenny felt a surge of relief and hope.

“It works!” Lisa cried.

Then the wasp came at them again.

Just when Tal thought they were safe, the wasp came at them again, through the mist of Biosan-4, flying slow but still flying.

“Down!” Bryce shouted.

They crouched, and the wasp swept over them, dripping milky fluid from its grotesque legs and from the tip of its stinger.

Tal stood again, so that he could give the thing a long squirt now that it was within range.

It swung toward him, but before he could give it a shot, the wasp faltered, fluttered wildly, then plummeted to the pavement. It flopped and buzzed angrily. It tried to rise up. Couldn't.

Then it changed.

It changed.

With the others, Timothy Flyte edged closer to the wasp and watched as it melted into a shapeless mass of protoplasm. The hind legs of a dog began to form. And the snout. It was going to be a Doberman, judging by that snout. One eye began to open. But the shape-changer couldn't complete the transformation; the dog's features vanished. The amorphous tissue shuddered and pulsed in a manner unlike anything that Timothy had seen it do before.

“It's dying,” Lisa said.

Timothy stared in awe as the strange flesh convulsed. This heretofore immortal being now knew the meaning and the fear of death.

The unformed mass broke out in pustulelike sores, leaking a thin yellow fluid. The thing spasmed violently. Additional sores opened in hideous profusion, lesions of all shapes and sizes that split and cracked and popped across the pulsating surface. Then, just as the tiny wad of tissue in the petri dish had done, this phantom degenerated into a lifeless pool of stinking, watery mush.

“By God, you've done it!” Timothy said, turning toward Sara.

Tentacles. Three of them. Behind her.

They rose out of a drain grating in the gutter, fifteen feet away. Each was as big around as Timothy's wrist. Already, the questing tips of them had slithered across the pavement, within a yard of Sara.

Timothy shouted a warning, but he was too late.

Flyte shouted, and Jenny whirled. It was among them.

Three tentacles whipped up from the pavement with shocking speed, surged forward with sinuous malevolence, and dropped onto Sara. In an instant, one lashed around the geneticist's legs, one around her waist, and the third around her slender neck.

Christ, it's too fast, too fast for us! Jenny thought.

She pointed the nozzle of her sprayer even as she turned, cursing, squeezing the lever, spewing Biosan-4 over Sara and the tentacles.

Bryce and Tal stepped in, using their sprayers, but they were all too slow, too late.

Sara's eyes widened; her mouth opened in a silent scream. She was lifted into the air and—

No! Jenny prayed

— flung back and forth as if she were a doll

No!

— and then her head fell from her shoulders and struck the street with a hard, sickening crack.

Gagging, Jenny stumbled back.

The tentacles rose twelve feet into the air. They writhed and twisted and foamed, broke open in sores as the bacteria destroyed the binding structure of the amorphous tissue. As Sara had hoped, Biosan affected the shape-changer almost the way sulphuric acid affected human tissue.

Tal darted past Jenny, heading straight toward the three tentacles, and she screamed at him to stop.

What in God's name was he doing?

Tal ran through the weaving shadows cast by the moving tentacles and prayed that none of them would fall on him.

When he reached the drain from which the things were extruded, he could see that the three appendages were separating from the main body of dark, throbbing protoplasm in the drainpipe below. The shape-changer was shedding the infected tissue before the bacteria could reach into the main body mass. Tal poked the nozzle of the sprayer through the grate and released Biosan-4 into the drain below.

The tentacles tore loose from the rest of the creature. They flopped and wriggled in the street. Down in the drain, oozing slime retreated from the spray, shedding another piece of itself, which began to foam and spasm and die.

Even the Devil could be wounded. Even Satan was vulnerable.

Exhilarated, Tal shot more of the fluid into the drain.

The amorphous tissue withdrew, out of sight, creeping deeper into the subterranean passageways, no doubt shedding more pieces of itself.

Tal turned away from the drain and saw the severed tentacles had lost their definition; they were now just long, tangled ropes of suppurating tissue. They lashed themselves and one another in apparent agony and rapidly degenerated into stinking, lifeless slop.

He looked at another drain, at the silent buildings, at the sky, wondering from where the next attack would come.

Suddenly the pavement rumbled and heaved under his feet. In front of him, Flyte was thrown to the ground; his glasses shattered. Tal staggered sideways, nearly trampling Flyte.

The street leaped and shuddered again, harder than before, as if earthquake shockwaves had passed beneath it. But this was not a quake. It was coming — not just a fragment, not just another phantom, but the largest part of it, perhaps the entire great bulk, surging toward the surface with unimaginable destructive power, rising like a god betrayed, bringing its unholy wrath and vengeance to the men and women who had dared to strike at it, turning itself into an enormous mass of muscle fiber and pushing, pushing, until the macadam bulged and cracked.

Tal was thrown to the ground. His chin snapped hard against the street; he was dazed. He tried to get up, so that he could use the sprayer when the creature appeared. He got as far as his hands and knees. The street was still rocking too much. He lay down again to wait it out.

We're going to die, he thought.

Bryce was flat on his face, hugging the pavement.

Lisa was beside him. She might have been crying or screaming. He couldn't hear her; there was too much noise.

Along this entire block of Skyline Road, an atonal symphony of destruction reached an ear-shattering crescendo: squealing, grinding, cracking, splitting sounds; the world itself coming asunder. The air was filled with dust that spurted up from widening fissures in the pavement.

The roadbed tilted with tremendous force. Chunks of it spewed into the air. Most were the size of gravel, but some were as large as a fist. A few were even larger than that, fifty and hundred- and two-hundred-pound blocks of concrete, leaping five or ten feet into the air as the protean creature below formed relentlessly toward the surface.

Bryce pulled Lisa against him and tried to shield her. He could feel the violent tremors passing through her.

The earth under them lifted. Fell with a crash. Lifted and fell again. Gravel-size debris rained down, clanked off the tank sprayer strapped to Bryce's back, thumped off his legs, snapped against his head, making him wince.

Where was Jenny?

He looked around m sudden desperation.

The street had hoved up; a ridge had formed down the middle of Skyline. Apparently, Jenny was on the other side of the hump, clinging to the street over there.

She's alive, he thought. She's alive. Dam it, she has to be!

A huge slab of concrete erupted from the to left and was flung eight or ten feet into the air. He was sure it was going to crash down on them, and he hugged Lisa as tight as he could, although nothing he could do would save them if the slab struck. But it hit Timothy Flyte instead. It slammed across the scientist's legs, breaking them, pinning Flyte, who howled in pain, howled so loudly that Bryce could hear him above the roar of the disintegrating pavement.

Still, the shaking continued. The street heaved up tardier. Ragged teeth of macadam concrete bit at the morning air.

In seconds, it would break through and be upon them before they had a chance to stand and fight back.

A baseball-size missile of concrete, spat into the air by the shape-changer's volcanic smell from the storm drain, now slammed back to the pavement, impacting two or three inches from Jenny's head. A splinter of concrete pierced her cheek, drew a trickle of blood.

The the ridge-forming pressure from below was suddenly widened. The street ceased shaking. Ceased rising.

The sounds of destruction faded. Jenny could hear her own raspy, harried breathing.

A few feet away, Tal Whitman started getting to his feet.

On the far side of the hoved-up pavement, someone wailed in agony. Jenny couldn't see who it was.

She tried to stand, but the street shuddered once more, and she was pitched flat on her face again.

Tal went down again, too, cursing loudly.

Abruptly, the street began caving in. It made a tortured sound, and pieces broke loose along the fracture lines. Slabs tumbled into the emptiness below. Too much emptiness: it sounded as if things were falling into a chasm, not just a drain. Then the entire hoved-up section collapsed with a thunderous roar, and Jenny found herself at the brink.

She lay belly-down, head lifted, waiting for something to rise up from the depths, dreading to see what form the shape changer would assume this time.

But it didn't come. Nothing rose out of the hole.

The pit was ten feet across, at least fifty feet long. On the far side, Bryce and Lisa were trying to get to their feet. Jenny almost cried out in happiness at the sight of them. They were alive!

Then she saw Timothy. His legs were pinned under a massive hunk of concrete. Worse than that — he was trapped on a precarious piece of roadbed that thrust over the rim of the hole, with no support beneath it. At any moment, it might crack loose and fall into the pit, taking him with it.

Jenny edged forward a few inches and stared into the hole. It was at least thirty feet deep, probably a lot deeper in places; she couldn't gauge it accurately because there were many shadows along its fifty-foot length. Apparently, the ancient enemy hadn't merely surged up from the storm drains; it had risen from some previously stable, limestone caves far below the solid ground on which the street was built.

But what degree of phenomenal strength, what unthinkably huge size must it possess in order to shift not only the street but the natural rock formations below? And where had it gone?

The pit appeared untenanted, but Jenny knew it must be down there somewhere, in the deeper regions, in the subterranean warrens, hiding from the Biosan spray, waiting, listening.

She looked up and saw Bryce making his way toward Flyte.

A crisp, cracking noise split the air. Flyte's concrete perch shifted. It was going to break loose and tumble into the chasm.

Bryce saw the danger. He clambered over a tilted slab of pavement, trying to reach Flyte in time.

Jenny didn't think he'd make it.

Then the pavement under her groaned, trembled, and she realized that she, too, was on treacherous territory. She started to get up. Beneath her, the concrete snapped with a bomb blast of sound.

Chapter 41 Lucifer

The shadows on the cave walls were ever-changing; so was the shadow-maker. In the moon-strange glow of the gas lantern, the creature was like a column of dense smoke, writhing, formless, blood-dark.

Although Kale wanted to believe it was only smoke, he knew better. Ectoplasm. That's what it must be. The otherworldly stuff of which demons, ghosts, and spirits were said to be composed.

Kale had never believed in ghosts. The concept of life after death was a crutch for weaker men, not for Fletcher Kale. But now…

Gene Tell sat on the floor, staring at the apparition. His one gold earring glittered.

Kale stood with his back pressed to a cool limestone wall. He felt as if he were fused to the rock.

The repellent, sulphurous odor still hung on the dank air.

To Kale's left, a man came through the opening from the first room of the underground retreat. No; not a man. It was one of the Jake Johnson look-alikes. The one that had called him a baby killer.

Kale made a small, desperate sound.

This was the demonic version of Johnson whose skull was half-stripped of flesh. One wet, lidless eye peered out of a bony socket, glaring malevolently at Kale. Then the demon turned toward the oozing monstrosity in the center of the chamber. It walked to the column of roiling slime, spread its anus, embraced the gelatinous flesh — and simply melted into it.

Kale stared uncomprehendingly.

Another Jake Johnson entered. The one that lacked flesh along his flank. Beyond the exposed rib cage, the bloody heart throbbed; the lungs expanded; yet, somehow, the organs didn't spill through the gaps between the fibs. Such a thing was impossible. Except that this was an apparition, a Hell-born presence that had swarmed up from the Pit — just smell the sulphur, the scent of Satan! — and therefore anything was possible.

Kale believed now.

The only alternative to belief was madness.

One by one, the remaining four Johnson lookalikes entered, glanced at Kale, then were absorbed by the oozing, rippling slime.

The Coleman lantern made a: oft, continuous hissing.

The jellied flesh of the netherworld visitor began to sprout black, terrible wings.

The hissing of the lantern echoed sibilantly off the stone walls. The half-formed wings degenerated into the column of slime from which they had sprung. Insecticide limbs started to take shape.

Finally, Gene Teer spoke. He might have been in a trance except that there was a lively sparkle in his eyes. “We come up here, me and some of my guys, two or maybe three times a year. You know? What it is… this here's a perfect place for a fuck an' waste party. Nobody to hear nothin'. Nobody to see. You know?”

At last Jeeter looked away from the creature and met Kale's eyes. Kale said, “What the hell's a… a fuck and waste party?”

“Oh, every couple months, sometimes more often, a chick shows up and wants to join the Chrome, wants to be somebody's old lady, you know, doesn't care whose, or maybe she'll settle for bein' an all-purpose bitch that all the guys can hack at when they want a little variety in their pussy. You know?” Jeeter sat with his legs crossed in a yoga position. His hands lay unmoving in his lap. He looked like an evil Buddha. “Sometimes, one of us happens to be lookin' for a new main squeeze, or maybe the chick is really foxy, so we make room for her. But it don't happen like that very often. Most of the time we tell them to beat it.”

In the center of the cave, the insecticide legs melted back into the oozing column of muck. Dozens of hands began to form, the fingers opening like petals of strange blossoms.

Jeeter said, “But then once in a while, a chick shows up, and she's damned good-lookin', but we don't happen to need or want her with us, and what we want instead is to have fun with her. Or maybe we see a kid who's run away from home, you know, sweet sixteen, some hitchhiker, and we pick her up, no matter whether she wants to come along or not. We give her some nose candy or hash, get her feelin' good, then we bring her up here where it's real remote, and what we do is we fuck her brains out for a couple days, turn her inside out, and then when none of us can get it up any more, we waste her in really interestin' ways.”

The demonic presence in the center of the room changed yet again. The multitude of hands melted away. A score of mouths opened along the dark length of it, every one filled with razor-edged fangs.

Gene Teer glanced at this latest manifestation but didn't seem frightened. In fact, Jeeter smiled at it.

“Waste them?” Kale said, “You kill them?”

“Yeah,” Jeeter said, “In interestin' ways. We bury 'em around here, too. Who's ever gonna find the bodies in the middle of nowhere like this? It's always a kick. Thrills. Until Sunday. Sunday afternoon late, we was out there in the grass by the cabin, drinkin' and gangin' a chick, and all of a sudden Jake Johnson comes out of the woods, bare-assed, like he figured on fuckin' the bitch, too. At first I thought we'd have some fun with him. I figured, well, we'll waste him when we waste the girl, get rid of the witness, you know, but before we can grab him, another Jake comes out of the woods, then a third”

“Just like what happened to me,” Kale said.

“—and another one and another. We shot 'em, hit 'em square in the chest, in the face, but they didn't go down, didn't even pause, just kept comin'. So Little Willie, one of my main men, rushes the nearest one and uses a knife, but it doesn't do no good. Instead, that Johnson grabs Willie, and he can't break loose, and then all of a sudden like… well… Johnson isn't Johnson any more. He's just this thing, this bloody-thing thing without no shape at all. The thing eats Willie… eats into him like… well, hell, it just sort of dissolves Willie, man. And the thing gets bigger, and then it turns into the craziest damn big wolf”

“Jesus,” Kale said.

“—biggest wolf you ever saw, and then the other Jakes turn into other things, like big lizards with the nastiest jaws, but one of them wasn't a lizard or a wolf but somethin' I just can't describe, and they all come after us. We can't get to our bikes, man, 'cause these things are between us and them, and so they kill a couple more of my guys, and then they start to herd us up the hill.”

“Toward the caves,” Kale said. “That's what they did to me.”

“We never even knew about these caves,” Teer said, “So we get in here, way in here in the dark, and the things start killin' more of us, man, killin' us in the dark'

The fang-filled mouths vanished.

'—and there's all this screamin', you know, and I couldn't see where I was, so I crawled into a corner to hide, hoped they wouldn't smell me out, though I figured for sure they would.”

The blood-streaked tissue pulsed, rippled.

“—and after a while the screamin' stops. Everyone's dead. It's real quiet… and then I hear somethin' movin' around.”

Kale was listening to Teer but staring at the column of slime. A different kind of mouth appeared, a sucker, like you might see on an exotic fish. It sucked greedily at the air, as if seeking flesh.

Kale shuddered. Teer smiled.

Other sucker-mouths began to form all over the creature.

Still smiling, Jeeter said, “So I'm there in the dark, and I hear movement, but nothin comes at me. Instead, a light comes on. Faint at first, then brighter. It's one of the Jakes, lighten' a Coleman. He tells me to come with him. I don't want to go. He grabs my arm, and his hand's cold, man. Strong. He won't let go, makes me come here, where that thing's pushing up out of the floor, and I never seen anythin' like that before; never, nowhere. I almost shit. He makes me sit down, lets the lantern with me, then just walks into the oozin' crud over there, melts into it, and I'm left alone with the thing, which starts right away going' through all kinds of changes.”

It was still going through changes, Kale saw. The suckerlike mouths vanished. Viciously pointed horns formed along the churning flanks of the creature; dozens of horns, barbed and unbarbed, in a variety of textures and colors, rising from the gelatinous mass.

“So for about a day and a half now,” Teer said, “I've been sittin' here, watchin' it, except when I doze off or go into the other room for somethin' to eat. Now and then it talks to me, you know. It seems to know almost everythin' there is to know about me, things that only my closest brother bikers ever knew. It knows all about the bodies buried up here, and it knows about the Mex bastards we wasted when we took the drug business away from them, and it knows about the cop we chopped to pieces two years ago, and like, see, not even the other cops suspect we had anythin' to do with that one. This thing here, this beautiful strange thing, it knows all my little secrets, man. And what it doesn't know about, it asks to hear, and it listens real good. It approves of me, man. I never thought I'd really meet up with it. I always hoped, but I never thought I would. I, been worshipin' it for years, man, and the whole gang used to hold these black masses once a week, but I never thought it would ever really appear to me. We've given it sacrifices, even human sacrifices, and chanted all the right chants, but we never were able to conjure up anythin'. So this here's a miracle.” Jeeter laughed. “I been doin' its work all my life, man. Prayin' to it all my life, preyin' to the Beast. Now here it is. It's a fuckin' miracle.”

Kale didn't want to understand. “You've lost me.”

Teer stared at him. “No, I haven't. You know what I'm talkin' about, man. You know.”

Kale said nothing.

“You've been thinkin' this must be a demon, somethin' It — from Hell. And it is from Hell, man. But it's no demon. It's Him. Him. Lucifer.”

Among the dozens of sharply pointed horns, small red eyes opened in the tenebrous flesh. A multitude of piercing little eyes glowed crimson with hatred and evil knowledge.

Tell motioned for Kale to come closer. “He's allowin' me to go on livin' because He knows I'm His true disciple.”

Kale didn't move. His heart boomed. It wasn't fear that loosed the adrenalin in him. Not fear alone. There was another emotion that shook him, overwhelmed him, an emotion he couldn't quite identify…

“He let me live,” Jeeter repeated, “because He knows I always do His work. Some of the others… maybe they weren't as purely devoted to His work as I am, so He destroyed them. But me… I'm different. He's lettin' me live to do His work. Maybe He'll let me live forever, man.”

Kale blinked.

“And he's lettin' you live for the same reason, you know,” Jeeter said, “Sure. Must be. Sure. Because you do His work.”

Kale shook his head. “I've never been a… a Devil worshiper. I never believed.”

“Don't matter. You still do His work, and you enjoy it.”

The red eyes watched Kale.

“You killed your wife,” Jeeter said.

Kale nodded dumbly.

“Man, you even killed your own little baby boy. If that isn't His work, then what is?”

None of the shining eyes blinked, and Kale began to identify the emotion surging within him. Elation, awe… religious rapture.

“Who knows what else you've done over the years,” Jeeter said, “Must've done lots of stuff that was His work. Maybe almost everthin' you ever done was His work. You're like me, man. You were born to follow Lucifer. You and me… it's in our genes. In our genes, man.”

At last Kale moved away from the wall.

“That's it,” Jeeter said, “Come here. Come close to Him.”

Kale was overwhelmed with emotion. He had always known he was different from other men. Better. Special. He had always known, but he had never expected this. Yet here it was, undeniable proof that he was chosen. A fierce, heart-swelling joy suffused him.

He knelt beside Jeeter, near the miraculous presence.

He had arrived at last.

His moment had come.

Here, Kale thought, is my destiny.

Chapter 42 The Other Side of Hell

Beneath Jenny, the concrete roadbed snapped with a sound like a cannon shot.

Wham!

She scrambled back but wasn't fast enough. The pavement shifted and began to drop out from under her.

She was going into the pit, Christ, no, if she wasn't killed by the fall then it would come out of hiding and get her, drag her down, out of sight; it would devour her before anyone could attempt to save her—

Tal Whitman grabbed her ankles and held on. She was dangling in the pit, head down. The concrete tumbled into the hole and landed with a crash. The pavement under Tal's feet shook, started to give way, and he almost lost his grip on Jenny. Then he moved back, hauling her with him, away from the crumbling brink. When she was on solid ground once more, he helped her stand.

Even though she knew it wasn't biologically possible for her heart to rise into her throat, she swallowed it anyway.

“My God,” she said breathlessly, “thank you! Tal, if you hadn't”

“All in a day's work,” he said, although he had nearly followed her into the spider's trap.

Just a cakewalk, Jenny thought, remembering the story about Tal that she had heard from Bryce.

She saw that Timothy Flyte, on the far side of the pit, wasn't going to be as fortunate as she had been. Bryce wasn't going to reach him in time.

The pavement beneath Flyte gave way. An eight-foot-long, four-foot-wide slab descended into the pit, carrying the archaeologist with it. It didn't crash to the bottom as the concrete had done on Jenny's side. Over there, the pit had a sloped wall, and the slab scooted down, slid thirty feet to the base, and came to rest against other rubble.

Flyte was still alive. He was screaming in pain.

“We've got to get him out of there fast,” Jenny said.

“No use even trying,” Tal said.

“But—”

“Look!”

It came for Flyte. It exploded out of one of the tunnels that pecked the floor of the pit and apparently led down into deep caverns. A massive pseudopod of amorphous protoplasm rose ten feet into the air, quivered, dropped to the ground, broke ire of the mother-body hiding below, and formed itself into an obscenely fat black spider the size of a pony. It was only ten or twelve feet from Timothy Flyte, and it clambered through the shattered blocks of pavement, heading toward him with murderous intent.

Sprawled helplessly on the concrete sled that had brought him into the pit, Timothy saw the spider coming. His pain was washed away by a wave of terror.

The black spindly legs found easy purchase in the angled ruins, and the thing progressed far more swiftly than a man would have done. There were thousands of bristling, wire like black hairs on those brittle legs. The bulbous belly was smooth, glossy, pale.

Ten feet away. Eight feet.

It was making a blood-freezing sound, half-squeal, half hiss.

Six feet. Four.

It stood in front of Timothy. He found himself looking up into a pair of huge mandibles, sharp-edged chitinous jaws.

The door between madness and sanity began to open in his mind.

Suddenly, a milky rain fell across Timothy. For an instant he thought the spider was squirting venom at him. Then he realized it was Biosan-4. They were standing above, on the rim of the pit, pointing their sprayers down.

The fluid spattered over the spider, too. White spots began to speckle its black body.

Bryce's sprayer had been damaged by a chunk of debris. He couldn't get a drop of fluid from it.

Cursing, he unbuckled the harness and shrugged out of it, dropping the tank on the street. While Tal and Jenny shot Biosan down from the other side of the pit, Bryce hurried to the gutter and collected the two spare cannisters of bacteria rich solution. They had rolled across the pavement, away from the erupting concrete, and had come to rest against the curb. Each cannister had a handle, and Bryce clutched both of them. They were heavy. He rushed back to the brink of the pit, hesitated, then plunged over the side, down the slope, all the way to the bottom. Somehow, he managed to stay on his feet, and he kept a firm grip on both cannisters.

He didn't go to Flyte. Jenny and Tal were doing all that could be done to destroy the spider. Instead, Bryce wound through and clambered over the rubble, heading toward the hole out of which the shape-changer had dispatched this latest phantom.

Timothy Flyte watched in horror as the spider, looming over him, metamorphosed into an enormous hound. It wasn't merely a dog; it was a Hellhound with a face that was partly canine and partly human. Its coat (where it wasn't spattered with Biosan) was far blacker than the spider, and its big paws had barbed claws, and its teeth were as large as Timothy's fingers. Its breath stank of sulphur and of something worse.

Lesions began to appear on the hound as the bacteria ate into the amorphous flesh, and hope sparked in Timothy.

Looking down at him, the hound spoke in a voice like gravel rolling on a tin chute: “I thought you were my Matthew, but you were my Judas.”

The mammoth jaws opened.

Timothy screamed.

Even as the thing succumbed to the degenerative effects of the bacteria, it snapped its teeth together and savagely bit his face.

As he stood at the edge of the pit, looking down, Tal Whitman's attention was torn between the gruesome spectacle of Flyte's murder and Bryce's suicidal mission with the cannisters.

Flyte. Although the phantom dog was dissolving as the bacteria had its acidlike effect, it was not dying fast enough. It bit Flyte in the face, then in the neck.

Bryce. Twenty feet from the Hellhound, Bryce had reached the hole out of which the protoplasm had enapted a couple of minutes ago. He started unscrewing the lid of one of the cannisters.

Flyte. The hound tore viciously at Flyte's head. The hindquarters of the beast had lost their shape and were turning as they decomposed, but the phantom struggled hard to retain its shape, so that it could slash and chew at Flyte as long as possible.

Bryce. He got the lid off the first cannister. Tal heard it ring off a piece of concrete as Bryce tossed it aside. Tal was sure something was going to leap out of the hole, up from the caverns below, and seize Bryce in a deadly embrace.

Flyte. He had stopped screaming.

Bryce. He tipped the canister and poured the bacterial solution into the subterranean warren under the floor of the pit.

Flyte was dead.

The only thing that remained of the hound was its large head. Although it was disembodied, although it was blistering and suppurating, it continued to snap at the dead archaeologist.

Below, Timothy Flyte lay in bloody ruins.

He had seemed like a nice old man.

Shuddering with revulsion, Lisa, who was alone on her side of the pit, backed away from the edge. She reached the gutter, sidled along it, finally stopped, stood there, shaking—

— until she realized she was standing on a drain grate. She remembered the tentacles that had slithered out of the drain, snaring and killing Sara Yamaguchi. She quickly hopped up onto the sidewalk.

She glanced at the buildings behind her. She was near one of the covered serviceways between two stores. She stared at the closed gate with apprehension.

Was something lurking in this passageway? Watching her?

Lisa started to step into the street again, saw the drain grate, and stayed on the sidewalk.

She took a tentative step to the left, hesitated, moved to the right, hesitated again. Doorways and serviceway gates lay in both directions. There was no sense in moving. No other place was any safer.

Just as he began to pour the Biosan-4 out of the blue canister, into the hole in the floor of the pit, Bryce thought he saw movement in the gloom below. He expected a phantom to launch itself up and drag him down into its subterranean lair. But he emptied the entire contents of the cylinder into the hole, and nothing came after him.

Lugging the second canister, pouring sweat, he made his way through the angled slabs and spires of concrete and broken pipe. He stepped gingerly around a torn and sputtering electric power line, leaped across a small puddle that had tunnel beside a leaking water main. He passed Flyte's mangled body and the stinking remains of the decomposed phantom that had killed him.

When Bryce reached the next hole in the pit floor, he crouched, unscrewed the lid from the second canister, and dumped the contents into the chamber below. Empty. He discarded it, turned away from the hole, and ran. He was anxious to get out of the pit before a phantom came after him the way one had gone after Flyte.

He was a third of the way up the sloped wall of the pit, finding the climb considerably more difficult than he had anticipated, when he heard something terrible behind him.

Jenny was watching Bryce claw his way up toward the street. She held her breath, afraid that he wasn't going to make it.

Suddenly her eyes were drawn to the first hole into which he had dumped Biosan. The shape-changer surged up from underground, gushed out onto the floor of the pit. It looked like a tide of thick, congealed sewage; except for where it was stained by the bacterial solution, it was now darker than it had been before. It rippled, writhed, and churned more agitatedly than ever, which was perhaps a sign of degeneration. The milky stain of infection was spreading visibly through the creature: Blisters formed, swelled, popped; ugly sores broke open and wept a watery yellow fluid. Within only a few seconds, at least a ton of the amorphous flesh had spewed out of the hole. All of it was apparently afflicted with disease, and still it came, ever faster, a lava-like outpouring, a wild spouting of living, gelatinous tissue. Even more of the beast began to issue from another hole. The great oozing mass lapped across the rubble, formed pseudopods — shapeless, flailing arms — that rose into the air but quickly fell back in foaming, spasming seizures. And then, from still other holes, there came a ghastly sound: the voices of a thousand men, women, children, and animals, all crying out in pain, horror, and bleak despair. It was an agonized wall of such heartbreak that Jenny could not bear it especially when a few voices sounded uncannily familiar, like old friends and good neighbors. She put her hands to her ears, but to no avail; the roar of the suffering multitude still penetrated. It was, of course, the death-cry of only one creature, the shape-changer, but since it had no voice of its own, it was forced to employ the voices of its victims, expressing its inhuman emotions and unhuman terror in intensely human terms.

It surged across the rubble. Toward Bryce.

Halfway up the slope, Bryce heard the noise behind him change from the wailing of a thousand lonely voices to a roar of rage.

He dared to look back. He saw that three or four tons of amorphous tissue had fountained into the pit, and more was still gushing forth, as if the bowels of the earth were emptying.

The ancient enemy's flesh was shuddering, leaping, bursting with leprous lesions. It tried to create winged phantoms, but it was too weak or unstable to competently mimic anything; the half-realized birds and enormous insects either decomposed into a sludge that resembled pus or collapsed back into the pool of tissue beneath them. The ancient enemy was coming toward Bryce nonetheless, coming in a quivering-churning frenzy; it had flowed almost to the base of the slope, and now it was sending degenerating yet still powerful tentacles toward his heels.

He turned away from it and redoubled his efforts to reach the rim of the pit.

The two big windows of the Towne Bar and Grille, in front of which Lisa was standing, exploded out onto the sidewalk. A shard nicked her forehead, but she was otherwise unhurt, for most of the fragments landed on the sidewalk between her and the building.

An obscene, shadowy mass bulged through the broken windows.

Lisa stumbled backwards and nearly fell off the curb.

The foul, oozing flesh appeared to fill the entire building out of which it extruded itself.

Something snaked around Lisa's ankle.

Tendrils of amorphous flesh had slithered out of the drain grate in the gutter behind her. They had taken hold of her.

Screaming, she tried to pull free of them — and found that it was surprisingly easy to do so. The thin, wormlike tentacles fell away. Lesions broke out along the length of them; they split open, and in seconds they were reduced to inanimate slime.

The disgusting mass that burgeoned out of the barroom was also succumbing to the bacteria. Gobs of foaming tissue fell away and splattered the sidewalk. Still, it continued to gush forth, turning tentacles, and the tentacles weaved through the air, seeking Lisa, but with the tentative groping of something sick and blind.

Tal saw the Towne Bar and Grille's windows explode on the other side of the street, but before he could take one step to help Lisa, windows shattered behind him, too, in the lobby and dining room of the Hilltop Inn, and he turned in surprise, and the front doors of the inn flew open, and from both the doors and the windows came tons of protoplasm that pulsated (Oh, Jesus, how big was the goddamned thing? As big as the whole town? As big as the mountain out of which it had come? Infinite?) and roiled, sprouting a score of lashing tentacles as it surged forth, marked by disease but noticeably more active than the extension of itself that it had sent after Bryce in the pit, and before Tal could raise the nozzle of his sprayer and depress the pressure-release lever, the cold tentacles found him, gripped him with dismaying strength, and then he was being dragged across the pavement, toward the inn, toward the oozing wall of slime that was still rapturing through the shattered windows, and the tentacles began to burn through his clothing, he felt his skin burning, blistering, he howled, the digestive acids were eating into his flesh, he felt brands of fire across and arms, he felt one fiery line along his left thigh, he remembered how a tentacle had beheaded Frank Autry by eating swiftly through the man's neck, he thought of his Aunt Becky, he—

Jenny dodged a tentacle that took a swipe at her.

She sprayed Tal and all the snaky appendages — three of them — that had hold of him.

Decomposing tissue sloughed off the tentacles, but they didn't degenerate entirely.

Even where she hadn't sprayed, the creature's flesh broke out in new sores. The entire beast was contaminated; it was being eaten up from within. It couldn't last much longer. Maybe just long enough to kill Tal Whitman.

He was screaming, thrashing.

Frantic, Jenny let go of the sprayer's hose and moved in closer to Tal. She grabbed one of the tentacles that gripped him, and she tried to pry it loose.

Another tentacle clutched at her.

She twisted out of its fumbling grip and realized that, if she could evade it so easily, it must be swiftly losing its battle with the bacteria.

In her hands, pieces of the tentacle came away, chunks of dead tissue that stank horribly.

Gagging, she clawed harder than ever, and the tentacle finally dropped away from Tal, and then so did the other two, and he collapsed in a heap on the pavement, gasping and bleeding.

The blind, groping tentacles never touched Lisa. They receded into the vomitous mass that had poured out of the front of the Towne Bar and Grille. Now, that heaving monstrosity spasmed and flung off foaming, infected-gobbets of itself. “It's dying,” Lisa said aloud, although no one was close enough to hear her. “The Devil is dying.”

Bryce crawled on his belly for the last few, almost vertical feet of the pit wall. He reached the rim at last and pulled himself out.

He looked down the way he had come. The shape-changer hadn't gotten close to him. An incredibly large, gelatinous lake of amorphous tissue lay at the bottom of the pit, pooling over and around the debris, but it was virtually inactive. A few human and animal forms still tried to rise up, but the ancient enemy was losing its talent for mimericry. The phantoms were imperfect and sluggish. The shape-changer was slowly disappearing under a layer of its own dead and decomposing tissue.

Jenny knelt beside Tal.

His arms and chest were marked by livid wounds. A raw, weeping wound extended the length of his left thigh, as well.

“Pain?” she asked.

“When it had me, yeah, a lot. Not so much now,” he said, although his expression left no doubt that he was still suffering.

The enormous bulk of slime that had erupted from the Hilltop Inn now began to withdraw, retreating into the plumbing from which it had risen, leaving behind the steaming residue of its decomposing flesh.

A Mephistophelian retreat. Back to the netherworld. Back to the other side of Hell.

Satisfied that they weren't in any immediate danger, Jenny looked more closely at Tal's wounds.

“Bad?” he asked.

“Not as bad as I would've thought.” She forced him to lie back, “The skin's eaten away, in places. And some of the fatty tissue underneath.”

“Veins? Arteries?”

“No. It was weak when it took hold of you, too weak to burn that deep. A lot of ruined capillaries in the surface tissue. That's the cause of the bleeding. But there's not even as much blood as you'd expect. I'll get my bag as soon as it seems safe to go inside, and I'll treat you for infection. I think maybe you ought to be in the hospital for a couple of days, for observation, just to be sure there's no delayed allergic reaction to the acid or any toxins. But I really think you'll be just fine.”

“You know what?” he said.

“that?”

“You're talking like it's all over.”

Jenny blinked.

She looked up at the inn. She could see through the smashed windows, into the dining room. There was no sign of the ancient enemy.

She turned and looked across the street. Lisa and Bryce were making their way around to this side of the pit.

“I think it is,” she said to Tal, “I think it's all over.”

Chapter 43 Apostles

Fletcher Kale was no longer afraid. He sat beside Jeeter and watched the Satanic flesh metamorphose into ever more bizarre forms.

Gradually, he became aware that the calf of his right leg itched. He scratched continuously, absentmindedly, while he watched the truly miraculous transformation of the demonic visitor.

Restricted to the caves since Sunday, Jeeter knew nothing about what had happened in Snowfield. Kale recounted what little he knew, and Jeeter was thrilled. “You know, what it is, it's a sign. What He did in Snowfield is like a sign tellin' the world His time is comin'. His reign is gonna begin soon. He'll rule the earth for a thousand years. That's what the Bible itself says, man a thousand years of Hell on earth. Everyone'll suffer — except you and me and others like us. 'Cause we're the chosen ones, man. We're His apostles. We'll rule the world with Lucifer, and it'll belong to us, and we'll be able to do any fuckin' outrageous thing to anybody we happen to want to do it to. Anybody. And no one'll touch us, no one, ever. You understand?” Teer demanded, gripping Kale's arm, voice rising with excitement, trembling with evangelical passion, a passion that was easily communicated to Kale and stiffed in him a dizzying, unholy rapture.

With Jeeter's hand on his arm, Kale imagined he could feel the hot gaze of the red and yellow eye tattoo. It was a magical eye that peered into his soul and recognized a certain dark kinship.

Kale cleared his throat, scratched his ankle, scratched his calf. He said, “Yeah. Yeah, I understand. I really do.”

The column of slime in the center of the room began to form a whiplike tail. Wings emerged, spread, flapped once. Arms grew, large and sinewy. The hands were enormous, with powerful fingers that tapered into talons. At the top of the column, a face took shape in the oozing mass: chin and jaws like chiseled granite; a gash of a mouth with thin lips, crooked yellow teeth, viperous fangs; a nose like the snout of a pig; mad, crimson eyes, not remotely human, like the presumed eyes of a fly. Horns sprouted on the forehead, a concession to Christian myth-conceptions. The hair appeared to be worms; they glistened, fat and green-black, wreathing continuously in tangled knots.

The cruel mouth opened. The Devil said, “Do you believe?”

“Yes,” Tell said in adoration, “You are my lord.”

“Yes,” Kale said shakily, “I believe.” He scratched at his right calf, “I do believe.”

“Are you mine?” the apparition asked.

“Yes, always,” Teer said, and Kale agreed.

“Will you ever forsake me?” it asked.

“No.”

“Never.”

“Do you wish to please me?”

“Yes” Tell said, and Kale said, “Whatever you want.”

“I will be leaving soon,” the manifestation said, “It is not yet my time to rule. That day is coming. Soon. But there are conditions that must be met, prophesies to be fulfilled. Then I will come again, not merely to deliver a sign to all mankind, but to stay for a thousand years. Until then, I will leave you with the protection of my power, which is vast; no one will be able to harm or thwart you. I grant you life everlasting. I promise that, for you, Hell will be a place of great pleasure and immense rewards. In return, you must complete five tasks.”

He told them what He would have them do to prove themselves and please Him. As He spoke, He broke out in pustules, hives, and lesions that wept a thin yellow fluid.

Kale wondered what significance these sores might have, then realized Lucifer was the father of all disease. Perhaps this was a not-so-subtle reminder of the terrible plagues He could visit upon them if they were unwilling to undertake the five tasks.

The flesh foamed, dissolved. Gobs of it dropped to the floor; a few were flung against the walls as the figure heaved and writhed. The Devil's tail dropped from the main body and wriggled on the floor; in seconds, it was reduced to inanimate muck that stank of death.

When he finished telling them what He wanted of them, He said, “Do we have a bargain?”

“Yes,” Tell said, and Kale said, “Yes, a bargain.”

The face of Lucifer, covered with running sores, melted away. The horns and wings melted, too. Churning, seeping a puslike paste, the thing sank down into the floor, disappeared into the river below.

Strangely, the odorous dead tissue did not vanish. Ectoplasm was supposed to disappear when the supernatural presence had departed, but this stuff remained: foul, nauseating, glistening in the gaslight.

Gradually, Kale's rapture faded. He began to feel the cold radiating from the limestone, through the seat of his pants.

Gene Teer coughed. “Well… well now… wasn't that somethin'?” Kale scratched his itchy calf. Beneath the itchiness, there was now a dull little spot of pain, throbbing.

It had reached the end of its feeding period. In fact, it had overfed. It had intended to move toward The sea later today, through a series of caverns, subterranean channels, and underground watercourses. It had wanted to travel out beyond the edge of the continent, into the ocean trenches. Countless times before, it had passed its lethargic periods — sometimes lasting many years — in the cool, dark depths of the sea. Down there where the pressure was so enormous that few forms of life could survive, down there where absolute lightlessness and silence provided little stimulation, the ancient enemy was able to slow down its metabolic processes; down there, it could enter a much-desired dreamlike state, in which it could ruminate in perfect solitude.

But it would never reach the sea. Never again. It was dying.

The concept of its own death was so new that it had not yet adjusted to the grim reality. In the geological substructure of Snowtop Mountain, the shape-changer continued to slough off diseased portions of itself. It crept deeper, deeper, across the underworld river that flowed in Stygian darkness, deeper still, farther down into the infernal regions of the earth, into the chambers of Orcus, Hades, Osiris, Erebus, Minos, Loki, Satan. Each time that it believed itself free of the devouring microorganism, a peculiar tingling sensation arose at some point in the amorphous tissue, a wrongness, and then there came a pain quite unlike human pain, and it was forced to rid itself of even more infected flesh. It went deeper, down into jahanna, into Gehenna, into Sheol, Abbadon, into the Pit. Over the centuries it had eagerly assumed the role of satan and other evil figures, which men had attributed to it, had amused itself by catering to their superstitions. Now, it was condemned to a fate consistent with the mythology it had helped create. it was bitterly aware of the irony. It had been cast down. It had been damned. It would dwell in darkness and despair for the rest of its life — which could be measured in hours.

At least it had left behind two apostles. Kale and Tell. They would do its work even after it had ceased to exist. They would spread terror and take revenge. They were perfectly suited to the job.

Now, reduced to only a brain and minimal supporting tissue, the shape-changer cowered in a chthonian niche of densely packed rock and waited for the end. It spent its last minutes seething with hatred, raging at all mankind.

Kale rolled up his trousers and looked at the calf of his right leg. In the lantern light, he saw two small red spots; they were swollen, itchy, and very tender.

“Insect bites,” he said.

Gene Teer looked. “Ticks. They burrow under the skin. The itchin' won't stop until you get 'em out. Burn 'em out with a cigarette.”

“Got any?”

Teer grinned. “Couple joints of grass. They'll work just as well, man. And the ticks'll die happy.”

They smoked the joints, and Kale used the glowing tip of his to burn out the ticks. It didn't hurt much.

“In the woods,” Teer said, “keep your pants tucked in your boots.”

“They were tucked into my boots.”

“Yeah? Then how'd them ticks get underneath?”

“I don't know.”

After they had smoked more grass, Kale frowned and said, “He promised us no one could hurt or stop us. He said we'd be under His protection.”

“That's right, man. Invincible.”

“So how come I've got to put up with tick bites?” Kale asked.

“Hey, man, it's no big thing.”

“But if we're really protected—”

“Listen, maybe the tick bites are sort of like His way of sealing the bargain you made with Him. With a little blood. Get it?”

“Then why don't you have tick bites?”

Jeeter shrugged. “Ain't important, man. Besides, the fuckin' ticks bit you before you struck your bargain — didn't they?”

“Oh.” Kale nodded, fuzzy-headed from dope. “Yeah. That's right.”

They were silent for a while.

Then Kale said, “When do you think we can leave here?”

“They're probably still lookin' for you pretty hard.”

“But if they can't hurt me”

“No sense makin' the job harder for ourselves,” Teer said.

“I guess so.”

“We'll lay low for like a few days. Worst of the heat will be off by then.”

“Then we do the five like he wants. And after that?”

“Head on out, man. Move on. Make tracks.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere. He'll show us the way.” Teer was silent for a while. Then he said, “Tell me about it. About killin' your wife and kid.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everythin' there is to know, man. Tell me what it felt like. What was it like to off your old lady. Mostly, tell me about the kid. What'd it feel like, wastin' a kid? Huh? I never did one that young, man. You kill him fast or drag it out? Did it feel different than killin' her? What exactly did you do to the kid?”

“Only what I had to do. They were in my way.”

“Draggin' you down, huh?”

“Both of them.”

“Sure. I see how it was. But what did you do?”

“Shot her.”

“Shoot the kid, too?”

“No. I chopped him. With a meat cleaver.”

“No shit?”

They smoked more joints, and the lantern hissed, and the whisper-chuckle of the underground river came up through the hole in the floor, and Kale talked about killing Joanna, Danny, and the county deputies.

Every once in a while, punctuating his words with a little marijuana giggle, Jeeter said, “Hey, man, are we gonna have some fun? Are we gonna have some fun together, you and me? Tell me more. Tell me. Man, are we gonna have some fun?”

Chapter 44 Victory?

Bryce stood on the sidewalk, studying the town. Listening. Waiting. There was no sign of the shape-changer, but he was reluctant to believe it was dead. He was afraid it would spring at him the moment he relaxed his guard.

Tal Whitman was stretched out on the pavement. Jenny and Lisa cleaned the acid burns, dusted them with antibiotic powder, and applied temporary bandages.

And Snowfield remained as silent as if it were at the bottom of the sea.

Finished ministering to Tal Jenny said, “We should get him to the hospital right away. The wounds aren't deep, but there might be a delayed allergic reaction to one of the shape changer's toxins. He might suddenly start having respiratory difficulties or blood pressure problems. The hospital is equipped for the worst possibilities; I'm not.”

Sweeping the length of the street with his eyes, Bryce said, “What if we get in the car, trap ourselves in a moving car, and then it comes back?”

“We'll take a couple of sprayers with us.”

“There might not be time to use them. It could come up out of a manhole, overturn the car, and kill us that way, without ever touching us, without giving us a chance to use the sprayers.”

They listened to the town. Nothing. Just the breeze.

Lisa finally said, “It's dead.”

“We can't be sure,” Bryce said.

“Don't you feel it?” Lisa insisted, “Feel the difference. It's gone! It's dead. You can feel the change in the air.”

Bryce realized the girl was right. The shape-changer had not been merely a physical presence, but a spiritual one as well; he had been able to sense the evil of it, an almost tangible malevolence. Apparently, the ancient enemy had emitted subtle emanations — Vibrations? Psychic waves? — that couldn't be seen or heard but which were registered on an instinctual level. They left a stain on the soul. And now those vibrations were gone. There was no menace in the air.

Bryce took a deep breath. The air was clean, fresh, sweet.

Tal said, “If you don't want to get in a car just yet, don't worry about it. We can wait awhile. I'm okay. I'll be fine.”

“I've changed my mind,” Bryce said, “We can go. Nothing's going to stop us. Lisa's right. It's dead.”

In the patrol car, as Bryce started the engine, Jenny said, “You remember what Flyte said about the creature's intelligence? When he was speaking to it, through the computer, he told it that it had probably acquired its intelligence and selfawareness only after it had begun consuming intelligent creatures.”

“I remember,” Tal said from the back seat, where, he sat with Lisa, “It didn't like hearing that.”

“And so?” Bryce asked, “What's your point, Doc?”

“Well, if it acquired its intelligence by absorbing our knowledge and cognitive mechanisms… then did it also acquire its cruelty and viciousness from us, from mankind?” She saw that the question made Bryce uneasy, but she plunged on. “When you come right down to it, maybe the only real devils are human beings; not all of us; not the species as a whole; just the ones whore twisted, the ones who somehow never acquire empathy or compassion. If the shape-changer was the Satan of mythology, perhaps the evil in human beings isn't a reflection of the Devil; perhaps the Devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our own kind. Maybe what we've done is… create the Devil in our own image.”

Bryce was silent. Then: “You may be right. I suspect you are. There's no use wasting energy being afraid — of devils, demons, and things that go bump in the night… because, ultimately, we'll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monsters among us. Hell is where we make it.”

They drove down Skyline Road.

Snowfield looked serene and beautiful.

Nothing tried to stop them.

Chapter 45 Good and Evil

On Sunday evening, one week after Jenny and Lisa found Snowfield in its graveyard silence, five days after the death of the shape-changer, they were at the hospital in Santa Mira, visiting Tal Whitman. He had, after all, suffered a toxin reaction to some fluid secreted by the shape-changer and had also developed a mild infection, but he had never been in serious danger. Now he was almost as good as new — and eager to go home.

When Lisa and Jenny stepped into Tal's room, he was seated in a chair by the window, reading a magazine. He was dressed in his uniform. His gun and holster were lying on a small table beside the chair.

Lisa hugged him before he could get up, and Tal hugged her back.

“Looking' good,” she told him.

“Looking' fine,” he told her.

“Like a million bucks.”

“Like two million.”

“You'll turn the ladies' heads.”

“And you'll make the boys do back-flips.”

It was a ritual they went through every day, a small ceremony of affection that always elicited a smile from Lisa. Jenny loved to see it; Lisa didn't smile often these days. In the past week, she hadn't laughed not once.

Tal stood up, and Jenny hugged him, too. She said, “Bryce is with Timmy. He'll be up in a little while.”

“You know,” Tal said “he seems to be handling that situation a whole lot better. All this past year, you could see how Timmy's condition was killing him. Now he seems able to cope with it.”

Jenny nodded. “He'd gotten it in his head that Timmy would be better off dead. But up in Snowfield, he had a change of heart. I think he decided that, after all, there wasn't a fate worse than death. Where there life, there's hope.”

“That's what they say.”

“In another year, if Timmy's still in a coma, Bryce might change his mind again. But for the moment, he seems grateful just to be able to sit down there for a while each day, holding his little boy's warm hand.” She looked Tal over and demanded: “What's with the street clothes?”

“I'm being discharged.”

“Fantastic!” Lisa said.

Timmy's roommate these days was an eighty-two-year-old inn who was hooked up to an IV, a beeping cardiac monitor, and a wheezing respirator.

Although Timmy was attached only to an IV, he was in the embrace of an oblivion as complete as the octogenarian's coma.

Once or twice an hour, never more often, never for longer than a minute at a tim, the boy's eyelids fluttered or his lips twitched or a muscle ticked in his cheek. That was all.

Bryce sat beside the bed, his hand through the railing, gently gripping his son's hand. Since Snowfield, just this meager contact was enough to satisfy him. Each day he left the room feeling better.

There wasn't much fight now that evening had come. On the wall at the head of the bed, there was a dim lamp that cast a soft glow only as far as Timmy's shoulders, leaving his sheet-covered body in shadow. In that wan illumination, Bryce could see how his boy had withered, losing weight in spite of the IV solution. The cheekbones were too prominent. There were dark circles around his eyes. His chin and jawline looked pathetically fragile. His son had always been small for his age. But now the hand Bryce held seemed to belong to a much younger child than Timmy; it seemed like the hand of an infant.

But it was warm. It was warm.

After a while, Bryce reluctantly let go. He smoothed the boy's hair, straightened the sheet, fluffed the pillow.

It was time to leave, but he couldn't go; not yet. He was crying. He didn't want to step into the hall with tears on his face.

He pulled a few Kleenex from the box on the nightstand, got up, went to the window, and looked out at Santa Mira.

Although he wept every day when he came here, these were different tears from those he had cried before. These scalded, washed away the misery, and healed. Bit by bit, slowly, they healed him.

“Discharged?” Jenny said, scowling, “Says who?”

Tal grinned. “Says me.”

“Since when have you become your own doctor?”

“I just thought a second opinion seemed called for, so I asked myself in for consultation, and I recommended to me that I go home.”

“Tal—”

“Really, Doc, I feel great. The swelling's gone. Haven't run a temperature in two days. I'm a prime candidate for release. If you try to make me stay here any longer, my death will be on your hands.”

“Death?”

“The hospital food is sure to kill me.”

“He looks ready to go dancing,” Lisa said.

“And when'd you get your medical degree?” Jenny asked. To Tal she said, “Well… let me have a look. Take off your shirt.”

He slipped out of it quickly and easily, not nearly as stiff as he'd been yesterday. Jenny carefully untaped the bandages and found that he was right: no swelling, no breaks in the scabs.

“We've beaten it,” he assured her.

“Usually, we don't discharge a patient in the evening. Orders are written in the morning; release comes between ten o'clock and noon.”

“Rules are made to be broken.”

“What an awful thing for a policeman to say,” she teased. “Look, Tal. I'd prefer you stayed here one more night, just in case. —”

“And I'd prefer I didn't, just in case I go stir crazy.”

“You're really determined?”

“He's really determined,” Lisa said.

Tal said, “Doc, they had my gun in a safe, along with their drug supply. I had to wheedle, beg, plead, and tease a sweet nurse named Paula, so she'd get it for me this afternoon. I told her you'd let me out tonight for sure. Now, see, Paula's a soul sister, a very attractive lady, single, eligible, delicious—”

“Don't get too steamy,” Lisa said, “There's a minor present.”

“I'd like to have a date with Paula,” Tal said, “I'd like to spend eternity with Paula. But now, Doc, if you say I can't go home, then I'll have to put my revolver back in the safe, and maybe Paula's supervisor'll find out she let me have it before my discharge was final, and then Paula might lose her job, and if she loses it because of me, I'll never get a date with her. If I don't get a date with her, I'm not going to be able to marry her, and if I don't marry her, there won't be any little Tal Whitmans running around, not ever, because I'll go away to a monastery and become celibate, seeing as how I've made up my mind that Paula's the only woman for me. So if you won't discharge me, then you'll not only be ruining my life but depriving the world of a little black Einstein or maybe a little black Beethoven.”

Jenny laughed and shook her head. “Okay, okay. I'll write a discharge order, and you can leave tonight.”

He hugged her and quickly began putting on his shirt.

“Paula better watch out,” Lisa said, “You're too smooth to be left loose among women without a bell around your neck.”

“Me? Smooth?” He buckled his holster around his waist. “I'm just good old Tal Whitman, sort of bashful. Been shy all my life.”

“Oh, sure,” Lisa said.

Jenny said, “If you—”

And suddenly Tal went berserk. He shoved Jenny aside, knocked her down. She struck the footboard of the bed with her shoulder and hit the floor hard. She heard gunfire and saw Lisa falling and didn't know if the girl had been hit or was just diving for cover; and for an instant she thought Tal was shooting at them. Then she saw he was still pulling his revolver out of his holster.

Even as the sound of the shot slammed through the room, glass shattered. It was the window behind Tal.

“Drop it!” Tal shouted.

Jenny turned her head, saw Gene Teer standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the brighter light in the hospital corridor behind him.

Standing in the deep shadows by the window, Bryce finished drying his tears and wadded up the damp Kleenex. He heard a soft noise in the room behind him, thought it was a nurse, turned — and saw Fletcher Kale. For a moment Bryce was frozen by disbelief.

Kale was standing at the foot of Timmy's bed, barely identifiable in the weak light. He hadn't seen Bryce. He was watching the boy — and grinning. Madness knotted his face. He was holding a gun.

Bryce stepped away from the window, reaching for his own revolver. Too late, he realized he wasn't in uniform, wasn't wearing a sidearm. He had an off-duty snubnose.38 in an ankle holster; he stooped to get it.

But Kale had seen him. The gun in Kale's hand snapped up, barked once, twice, three times in rapid succession.

Bryce felt a sledgehammer hit him high and on the left side, and pain flashed across his entire chest. As he crumpled to the floor, he heard the killer's gun roar three more times.

“Drop it!” Tal shouted, and Jenny saw Jeeter, and another shot ricocheted off the bed rail and must have gone through the ceiling because a couple of squares of acoustic tile fell down.

Crouching, Tal fired two rounds. The first shot took Jeeter in the left thigh. The second struck him in the gut, lifted him, and threw him backwards, into the corner, where he landed in a spray of blood. He didn't move.

Tal said, “What the hell?”

Jenny cried for Lisa and scrambled on all fours around the bed, wondering if her sister was alive.

Kale had been sick for a couple of hours. He was running a fever. His eyes burned and felt grainy. It had come on him suddenly. He had a headache, too, and standing there at the foot of the boy's bed, he began to feel nauseated. His legs became weak. He didn't understand; he was supposed to be protected, invincible. Of course, maybe Lucifer was impatient with him for waiting five days before leaving the caves. Maybe this illness was a warning to get on with His work. The symptoms would probably vanish the moment the boy was dead. Yeah. That was probably what would happen. Kale grinned at the comatose child, began to raise his revolver, and winced as a cramp twisted his guts.

Then he saw movement in the shadows. Swung away from the bed. A man. Coming at him. Hammond. Kale opened fire, squeezing off six rounds, taking no chances. He was dizzy, and his vision was blurry, and his arm felt weak, and he could hardly keep a grip on the gun; even in those close quarters, he couldn't trust his aim.

Hammond went down hard. and lay very still.

Although the light was dim, and although Kale's eyes wouldn't focus properly, he could see spots of blood on the wall and floor.

Laughing happily, wondering when the illness would leave him now that he'd completed one of the tasks Lucifer had given him, Kale weaved toward the body, intending to deliver the coup de grâce. Even if Hammond was stone-cold dead, Kale wanted to put a bullet in that snide, smug face, wanted to mess it up real good.

Then he would deal with the boy.

That was what Lucifer wanted. Five deaths. Hammond, the boy, Whitman, Dr. Paige, and the girl.

He reached Hammond, started to bend down to him—

— and the sheriff moved. His hand was lightning quick. He snatched a gun from an ankle holster, and before Kale could respond, there was a muzzle flash.

Kale was hit. He stumbled, fell. His revolver flew out of his hand. He heard it clang against the leg of one of the beds.

This can't be happening, he told himself. I'm protected. No one can harm me.

Lisa was alive. When she'd fallen behind the bed, she hadn't been shot; she'd just been diving for cover. Jenny held her tightly.

Tal was crouched over Gene Teer. The gang leader was dead, a gaping hole in his chest.

A crowd had gathered: nurses, nurses' aides, a couple of doctors, a patient or two in bathrobe and slippers.

A red-haired orderly hurried up. He looked shell-shocked.

“There's been a shooting on the second floor, too!”

“Bryce,” Jenny said, and a cold blade of fear pierced her.

“What's going on here?” Tal said.

Jenny ran for the exit door at the end of the hall, slammed through it, went down the stairs two at a time. Tal caught up with her by the time she reached the bottom of the second flight. He pulled open the door, and they rushed out into the second-floor corridor.

Another crowd had gathered outside Timmy's room. Her heart beating twenty to the dozen, Jenny rammed through the onlookers.

A body was on the floor. A nurse stooped beside it.

Jenny thought it was Bryce. Then she saw him in a chair. Another nurse was cutting the shirt away from his shoulder. He was just wounded.

Bryce forced a smile. “Better be careful, Doc. If you always arrive on the scene this soon, they'll start calling you an ambulance chaser.”

She wept. She couldn't help it. She had never been so glad to hear anything as she was to hear his voice.

“Just a scratch,” he said.

“Now you sound like Tal,” she said, laughing through her tears, “Is Timmy okay?”

“Kale was going to kill him. If I hadn't been here…”

“This is Kale?”

“Yeah.”

Jenny wiped her eyes with her sleeves and examined Bryce's shoulder. The bullet had passed through, in the front and out the back. There was no reason to think it had fragmented, but she intended to order X-rays anyway. The wound was bleeding freely, although it wasn't spurting, and she directed the nurse to stanch the flow with gauze pads soaked in boric acid.

He was going to be all right.

Sure of Bryce's condition, Jenny turned to the man on the floor. He was in more serious condition. The nurse had torn open his jacket and shirt; he'd been shot in the chest. He coughed, and bright blood sputtered over his lips.

Jenny sent the nurse for a stretcher and put in an emergency call for a surgeon. Then she noticed Kale was running a fever. His forehead was hot, face flushed. When she took his wrist to check his pulse, she saw it was covered with firy red spots. She pushed up his sleeve and found the spots extended halfway up his arm. They were on his other wrist, too. None on his face or neck. She had noticed pale red marks on his chest but had mistaken them for blood. Looking again, more closely than before, she saw they were like the spots on his wrists.

Measles? No. Something else. Something worse than measles.

The nurse returned with two orderlies and a wheeled stretcher, and Jenny said, “We'll have to quarantine this floor. And the one above. We've got some disease here, and I'm not entirely sure what it is.”

After X-rays and after his wound had been dressed, Bryce was put in a room down the hall from Timmy. The ache in his shoulder got worse, not better, as the shocked nerves began to regain their function. He refused painkillers, intending to keep a clear head until he knew what had happened and why.

Jenny came to see him half an hour after he was put to bed. She looked exhausted, yet her weariness didn't diminish her beauty. The sight of her was all the medicine he needed.

“How's Kale?” he asked.

“The bullet didn't damage his heart. It collapsed one lung, nicked an artery. Ordinarily, the prognosis would be fair. But he's not only got surgery to recuperate from; he's also got to deal with a case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.”

Bryce blinked. “Spotted fever?”

“There're two cigarette burns on his right calf, or rather the scars of two burns, where he got rid of the ticks. Wood ticks transmit the disease. Judging from the look of the scars, I'd say he was bitten five or six days ago, which is just about the incubation period for spotted fever. The symptoms must've hit him within the past several hours. He must've been dizzy, chilled, weak in the joints…”

“That's why his aim was so bad!” Bryce said, “He fired five times at close range and only winged me once.”

“You'd better thank God for sending that tick up his pants leg.”

He thought about that and said, “It almost does seem like an act of God, doesn't it? But what were he and Teer up to? Why'd they risk coming here with guns? I can understand Kale might want to kill me and even Timmy. But why Tal and you and Lisa?”

“You're not going to believe this,” she said, “Since last Tuesday morning, Kale's been keeping a written record of what he calls ‘The Events After the Epiphany.' It seems that Kale and Teer made a bargain with the Devil.”

Four o'clock Monday morning, only six days after the epiphany of which Kale had written, he died in the county hospital.

Before he passed out of this life, he opened his eyes, stared wildly at a nurse, then looked past her, saw something that terrified him, something the nurse couldn't see. He somehow found the strength to raise his hands, as if trying to protect himself, and he cried out; it was a thin, death-rattle scream. When the nurse tried to calm him, he said, “But this isn't my destiny.” And then he was gone.

On October 31, more than six weeks after the events in Snowfield, Tal Whitman and Paula Thome (the nurse he'd been dating) held a Halloween costume party at Tal's house in Santa Mira. Bryce went as a cowboy.

Jenny was a cowgirl. Lisa was dressed as a witch, with a tall pointed hat and lots of black mascara.

Tal opened the door and said, “Cluck, cluck.” He was wearing a chicken suit.

Jenny had never seen a more ridiculous costume. She laughed so hard that, for a while, she didn't realize Lisa was laughing, too.

It was the first laugh the girl had given voice to in the past six weeks. Previously, she'd managed only a smile. Now she laughed until tears ran down her face.

“Well, hey, just a minute here,” Tal said, pretending to be offended, “You make a pretty silly-looking witch, too.”

He winked at Jenny, and she knew he'd chosen the chicken suit for the effect it would have on Lisa.

“For God's sake,” Bryce said, “get out of the doorway and let us inside, Tal. If the public sees you in that getup, they'll lose what little respect they have left for the sheriff's department.”

That night, Lisa joined in the conversation and the games, and she laughed a great deal. It was a new beginning.

In August of the following year, on the first day of their honeymoon, Jenny found Bryce on the balcony of their hotel room, overlooking Waikiki Beach. He was frowning.

“You aren't worried about being so far away from Timmy, are you?” she asked.

“No. But it's Timmy I'm thinking about, Lately… I've had this feeling everything's going to be all right, after all. It's strange. Like a premonition. I had a dream last night. Timmy woke up from his coma, said hello to me, and asked for a Big Mac. Only… it wasn't like any dream I've ever had before. It was so real.”

“Well, you've never lost hope.”

“Yes. For a while I lost it. But I've got it back again.”

They stood in silence for a while, letting the warm sea wind wash over them, listening to the waves breaking on the beach.

Then they made love again.

That night they had dinner at a good Chinese restaurant in Honolulu. They drank champagne all evening, even though the waiter politely suggested they switch to tea with the meal, so their palates would not be “stained.”

Over dessert, Bryce said, “There was something else Timmy said in that dream. When I was surprised he'd awakened from his coma, he said, ‘But, Daddy, if there's a Devil, then there's got to be a God, too. Didn't you already figure that out when you met the Devil? God wouldn't let me sleep my whole life away.'”

Jenny stared at him uncertainly.

He smiled. “Don't worry. I'm not flaking out on you. I'm not going to start sending money to those charlatan preachers on TV, asking them to pray for Timmy. Hell, I'm not even going to start attending church. Sunday's the only day I can sleep in! What I'm talking about isn't your standard, garden variety religion…”

“Yes, but it wasn't really the Devil,” she said.

“Wasn't it?”

“It was a prehistoric creature that—”

“Couldn't it be both?”

“What're we getting into here?”

“A philosophical discussion.”

“On our honeymoon?”

“I married you partly for your mind.”

Later, in bed, just before sleep took them, he said, “Well, all I know is that the shape-changer made me realize there's a lot more mystery in this world than I once thought. I just won't rule anything out. And looking back on it, considering what we survived in Snowfield, considering how Tal had just strapped on his gun when Jeeter walked in, considering how the spotted fever screwed up Kale's aim… well, it seems to me like we were meant to survive.”

They slept, woke toward dawn, made love, slept again.

In the morning, she said, “I know one thing for sure.”

“What's that?”

“We were meant to be married.”

“Definitely.”

“No matter what, fate would've run us headlong into each other sooner or later.”

That afternoon, as they strolled along the beach, Jenny thought the waves sounded like huge, rumbling wheels. The sound called to mind an old saying about the mill wheels of Heaven grinding slowly. The rumble of the waves enforced that image, and in her mind she could see immense stone mill wheels turning against each other.

She said, “You think it has a meaning, then? A purpose?”

He didn't have to ask what she meant. “Yes. Everything, every twist and turn of life. A meaning, a purpose.”

The sea foamed on the sand.

Jenny listened to the mill wheels and wondered what mysteries and miracles, what horrors and joys were being ground out at this very moment, to be served up in times to come.