Phantoms

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.

A Note to the Reader

Like all the characters in this novel, Timothy Flyte is a fictional person, but many of the mass disappearances to which he refers are not merely figments of the author's imagination. They really happened. The disappearance of the Roanoke Island colony, the mysteriously deserted Eskimo village of Anjikuni, the vanished Mayan populations, the unexplained loss of thousands of Spanish soldiers in 1711, the equally mystifying loss of the Chinese battalions in 1939, and certain other cases mentioned in Phantoms are actually well-documented, historical events.

Likewise, there is a real Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty. In Phantoms, the details of his development of the first patented microorganism are drawn from public record. Dr. Chakrabarty's bacterium was, as stated in the book, too fragile to survive outside of the laboratory. Biosan-4, the trade name of a supposedly hardier strain of Chakrabarty's bug, is a fictional device; to the best of my knowledge, no effort has been made to refine and improve Dr. Chakrabarty's discovery, and it remains a laboratory oddity of note, primarily, because of its role in the precedent-setting Supreme Court decision.

And of course the ancient enemy is a product of the author's imagination. But what if…