Phantoms

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.”