Phantoms

tortured and maybe killed right then, right then while you were on the phone, listening.”

Remembering those terrible screams, Bryce felt his marrow slowly freezing.

“Whether it was tape-recorded or not,” Frank Autry said, “it's probably a mistake to think in terms of hostages.”

“Yes,” Dr. Paige said, “If Mr. Autry means that we've got to be careful not to narrow our thinking to conventional situations, then I wholeheartedly agree. This just doesn't feel like a hostage drama. Something damned peculiar is happening here, something that no one's ever encountered before, so let's not start backsliding just because we'd be more comfortable with cozy, familiar explanations. Besides, if we're dealing with terrorists, how does that fit with the thing we saw at the window? It doesn't.”

Bryce nodded. “You're right. But I don't believe Tal meant that people were being held for conventional motives.”

“No, no,” Tal said, “It doesn't have to be terrorists or kidnappers. Even if people are being held hostage, that doesn't necessarily mean other people are holding them. I'm even willing to consider that they're being held by something that isn't human. How's that for remaining open-minded? Maybe it is holding them, the it that none of us can define. Maybe it's holding them just to prolong the pleasure it takes from snuffing the life out of them. Maybe it's holding them just to tease us with their screams, the way it teased Bryce on the phone. Hell, if we're dealing with something truly extraordinary, truly unhuman, its reasons for holding hostages — if it is holding any — are bound to be incomprehensible.”

“Christ, you're talking like lunatics,” Wargle said.

Everyone ignored him.

They had stepped through the looking glass. The impossible was possible. The enemy was the unknown.

Lisa Paige cleared her throat. Her face was pasty. In a barely audible voice, she said, “Maybe it spun a web somewhere, down in a dark place, in a cellar or a cave, and maybe it tied all the missing people into its web, sealed them up in cocoons, alive. Maybe it's just saving them until it gets hungry again.”

If absolutely nothing lay beyond the realm of possibility, if even the most outrageous theories could be true, then perhaps the girl was right, Bryce thought. Perhaps there was an enormous web vibrating softly in some dark place, hung with a hundred or two hundred or even more man- and woman- and child-size tidbits, wrapped in individual packages for freshness and convenience. Somewhere in Snowfield, were there living human beings who had been reduced to the awful equivalent of foil-wrapped Pop Tarts, waiting only to provide nourishment for some brutal, unimaginably evil, darkly intelligent, other dimensional horror.

No. Ridiculous.

On the other hand: maybe.

Jesus.

Bryce crouched in front of the shortwave radio and squinted at its mangled guts. Circuit boards had been snapped. Several parts appeared to have been crushed in a vice or hammered flat.

Frank said, “They had to take off the cover plate to get at all this stuff, just the way we did.”

“So after they smashed the crap out of it,” Wargle said, “why'd they bother to put the plate back on?”

“And why go to all that trouble to begin with?” Frank wondered, “They could've put the radio out of commission just by ripping the cord loose.”

Lisa and Gordy appeared as Bryce was turning away from the radio. The girl said, “Food and coffee's ready if anyone wants anything.”

“I'm starved,” Wargle said, licking his lips.

“We should all eat something, even if we don't feel like it,” Bryce said.

“Sheriff,” Gordy said, “Lisa and I have been wondering about the animals, the pets. What made us think about it was when you said you heard dog and cat sounds over the phone. Sir, what's happened to all the pets?”

“Nobody's seen a dog or cat,” Lisa said, “Or heard barking.”

Thinking of the silent streets, Bryce frowned and said, “You're right. It's strange.”

“Jenny says there were some pretty big dogs in town. A few German shepherds. One Doberman that she knows of. Even a Great Dane. Wouldn't you think they'd have fought back? Wouldn't you think some of the dogs would've gotten away?” the girl asked.

“Okay,” Gordy said quickly, anticipating Bryce's response, “so maybe it was big enough to overwhelm an ordinary, angry dog. Okay, so we also know that bullets didn't stop it, which says that maybe — nothing can. It's apparently big, and it's strong. But, sir, big and strong don't necessarily count for much with a cat. Cats are greased lightning. It'd take something real damned sneaky to slip up on every cat in town.”

“Real sneaky and real fast,” Lisa said.

“Yeah,” Bryce said uneasily, “Real fast.”

Jenny had just begun eating a sandwich when Sheriff Hammond sat down in a chair beside the desk, balancing his plate on his lap. “Mind some company?”

“Not at all.”

“Tal Whitman's been telling me you're the scourge of our local motorcycle gang.”

She smiled. “Tal's exaggerating.”

“That man doesn't know how to exaggerate,” the sheriff said, “Let me tell you something about him. Sixteen months ago, I was away for three days at a law enforcement conference in Chicago, and when I got back, Tal was the first person I saw. I asked him if anything special had happened while I'd been gone, and he said it was just the usual business with drunk drivers, bar fights, a couple of burglaries, various CITs”

“What's a CIT?” Jenny asked.

“Oh, it's just a cat-in-tree report.”

“Policemen don't really rescue cats, do they?”

“Do you think we're heartless?” he asked, feigning shock.

“CITs? Come on now.”

He grinned. He had a marvelous grin. “Once every couple of months, we do have to get a cat out of a tree. But a CIT doesn't mean just cats in trees. It's our shorthand for any kind of nuisance call that takes us away from more important work.”

“Ah.”

“So anyway, when I came back from Chicago that time, Tal told me it'd been a pretty ordinary three days. And then, almost as an afterthought, he said there'd been an attempted robbery at a 7-Eleven. Tal had been a customer, out of uniform, when it went down. But even off duty, a cop's required to carry his gun, and Tal had a revolver in an ankle holster. He told me one of the punks had been armed; he said he'd been forced to kill him, and he said I wasn't to worry about whether it was a justified shooting or not. He said it was as justified as they come. When I got concerned about him, he said, “Bryce. It was really just a cakewalk.” Later, I found out the two punks had intended to shoot everyone. Instead, Tal shot the gunman although not before he was shot himself. The punk put a bullet through Tal's left arm, and just about a split second after that, Tal killed him. Tal's wound wasn't serious, but it bled like hell, and it must've hurt something awful. Of course, I hadn't seen the bandage because it was under the shirt-sleeve, and Tal hadn't bothered to mention it. So anyway, there's Tal in the 7-Eleven, bleeding all over the place, and he discovers he's out of ammo. The second punk, who grabbed the gun the first one dropped, is also out of ammo, and he decides to run. Tal goes after him, and they have themselves a knock-down-drag out fight from one end of that little grocery store to the other. The guy was two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than Tal, and he wasn't wounded. But you know what the backup officer told me they found when they arrived? They said Tal was sitting up on the counter by the cash register, his shirt off, sipping a complimentary cup of coffee, while the clerk tried to stanch the flow of blood. One suspect was dead. The other one was unconscious, sprawled in a sticky mess of Hostess Twinkles and Fudge Fantasies and coconut cupcakes. Seems they'd knocked over a rack of lunchbox cakes right in the middle of the fight. About a hundred packages of snack stuff spilled onto the floor, and Tal and this other guy stepped all over them while they were grappling. Most of the packages broke open. There was icing and crumbled cookies and smashed Twinkles all