Phantoms

Chapter 32

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 lycandiropic 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.