Phantoms

Chapter 10

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

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

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

Then they went downhill again to the sheriff's substation.

A wooden bench was bolted to the cobblestones by the curb in front of the town jail, and they sat waiting for help from Santa Mira.

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

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

"It's not so long, honey.”

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

:"Yes?”

"Who was calling?”

"No one.”

::What did you hear?”

Nothing," Jenny lied.

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

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

:"Then you got a dial tone?”

"Yes.”

She probably doesn't believe me, Jenny thought. She thinks I'm trying to protect her from something. And, of course, I am. How can I explain the feeling that something evil was on that phone with me? I can't even begin to understand it myself.

Who or what was on that telephone? Why did he-or it finally let me have a dial tone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You got home as often as you could," Lisa said." I know it wasn't easy.

I must've read a couple of dozen books about what a person has to go through to become a doctor. I always knew there was a lot on your shoulders, a lot you had to worry about.”

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

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

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

That statement not only surprised Jenny: It rocked her.

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

Jenny blinked." Are you serious?”

"Of course, I'm serious.”

"But didn't Mom…”

"Didn't she what?" Lisa asked.

"Well… didn't she ever say anything about… about Dad?

He died twelve years ago.”

"Jeez, I know that. He died when I was two and a Lisa frowned." But what're you asking about?" "You mean you never heard Mom blame, me?”

"Blames you for what?”

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

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

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

Gordy was scared.

He knew his fear wasn't visible, and he was thankful for that. In fact, he looked as if he didn't know how to be afraid.

He was tall, large-boned, slab-muscled. His hands were strong and as large as the hands of a professional basketball player; he looked capable of slam-dunking anyone who gave him trouble. He knew that his face was handsome enough; women had told him so. But it was also a rather rough-looking face, dark.

His lips were thin, giving his mouth a cruel aspect. Jake Johnson had said it best: Gordy, when you frown, you look like a man who eats live chickens for breakfast.

But in spite of his fierce appearance, Gordy Brogan was scared. It wasn't the prospect of disease or poison that occasioned fear in Gordy.

The sheriff had said that there were indications that the people in Snowfield had been killed not by germs or by toxic substances but by other people. Gordy was afraid that he would have to use his gun for the first time since he had become a deputy, eighteen months ago; he was afraid he would be forced to shoot someone-either to save his own life, the life of another deputy, or that of a victim.

He didn't think he could do it.

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

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

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

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

But now something unimaginably violent had transpired up in Snowfield.

And Gordy knew all too well that violence frequently had to be met with violence.

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

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

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

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

Gordy Brogan was scared.

The streetlamps and all other lights went out, casting the town into darkness.

Jenny and Lisa bolted up from the wooden bench.

"What happened?”

"Ssshh!" Jenny said." Listen!”

But there was only continued silence.

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

Thank God for the moon, Jenny thought.

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

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

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

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

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

That primitive fear again.

That sense of evil.

That superstitious terror.

"Come on," she said to Lisa.

"Where?”

"In the street. Nothing can get us out there" 'without our seeing it coming," Lisa finished, understanding.

They went into the middle of the moonlit roadway.

"How long until the sheriff gets here?" Lisa asked.

"At least fifteen or twenty minutes yet.”

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

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

Her throat was fear-parched, her mouth dry.

A blast of sound-an ungodly wall-slammed through Snowfield.

Jenny and Lisa both cried out in shock and turned, bumping against each other, squinting at the moon-tinted darkness.

Then silence.

Then another shriek.

Silence.

"What?" Lisa asked.

"The firehouse!”

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

Bong!

Jenny jumped again, twisted around.

Bong! Bong!

"A church bell," Lisa said.

"The Catholic church, west on Vail.”

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

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

Jenny said nothing.

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

In the mountains, a mile from the turnoff to Snowfield, the night landscape was rendered solely in black and moon-silver.

The looming trees were not green at all; they were somber shapes, mostly shadows, with albescent fringes of vaguely defined needles and leaves.

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

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

Frank Autry was lean, sinewy, with neatly trimmed salt and-pepper hair.

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

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

" It isn't fucking fair," Stu Wargle said.

"Commanding officers don't always have to be fair-just right," Frank said.

" What commanding officer?" Wargle asked querulously.

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

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

"Well, that's what he is," Frank said.

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

Frank said nothing.

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

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

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

Wargle was a bore. He had absolutely no sense of humor.

He read nothing, knew nothing-yet he had strong opinions about every current social and political issue.

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

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

Frank didn't take the bait. He didn't ask who Wargle had a date with.

He just drove the car and kept his eyes on the road and hoped that Wargle wouldn't tell him who this "hot number" was.

"She's a waitress over at Spanky's Diner," Wargle said.

"Maybe you seen her. Blond broad. Name's Beatrice; they call her Bea.”

" I seldom stop at Spanky's," Frank said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

" About what?”

"Everything. He don't like the way I keep my uniform. He don't like the way I write up my reports. He told me I should try to improve my attitude. Christ, my attitude! He wants my ass, but he won't get it.

I'll hang in five more years, see, so I can get my thirty-year pension.

That bastard won't squeeze me out of my pension.”

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

They reached the Snowfield turnoff.

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

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

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

Three five-gallon bottles of water stood on the floor in the back of the car.

Frank said, "The water in Snowfield might be contaminated.”

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

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

"I don't believe they're all dead.”

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

"So what? Henderson's a jerk-off.”

"The doctor up there said Henderson's dead, along with-”

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

..What?”

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

"Wargle, you never cease to amaze me.”

"What's eating you?" Wargle asked.

"Nothing. Forget it.”

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

Another problem with Stu Wargle was that he didn't have any imagination.

"What a lot of crap. And me lined up with a hot number.”

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

Hunch? — that they were driving straight into Hell.

The firehouse siren screamed.

The church bell tolled faster, faster.

A deafening cacophony clattered through the town.

"Jenny!" Lisa shouted.

" Keep your eyes open! Look for movement!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The siren swelled into a teeth-jarring, bone-piercing screech.

It seemed a miracle that windows didn't shatter.

Lisa had her hands over her ears.

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

Then, as abruptly as the pandemonium had begun, it ceased.

The siren died. The church bell stopped. The lights stayed on.

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

But nothing happened.

Again, the town was as tranquil as a graveyard.

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

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

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

"Playing with us.”

"Like a cat with mice," Jenny said softly.

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

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

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

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

"My God," Lisa said.

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

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

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

A second man got out of the front seat of the same vehicle.

He had unruly, sandy hair. His eyelids were so heavy that he looked as if he were about to fall asleep. He was dressed in civilian clothing-gray slacks, a pale blue shirt, a dark blue nylon jacket-but there was a badge pinned to the jacket.

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

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