Phantoms

Chapter 41

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-”

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, Jenny dodged a tentacle that took a swipe at her.

She sprayed Tal and all the snaky appendages-none 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 toTal 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 rhass that had poured out of the front of the Towne Bar and Grille. Now, that heaving monstrosity spasmed and flung off foaming, infected-gobbers 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 toTal" I think it's all over.”