Phantoms

“No, no. You were right. It was no safer there than in the street.”

“But he died in the sum.”

“Reinforcements wouldn't have made a bit of difference. The way that damned thing dropped out of the sky… hell, not even an army could've stopped it. Too quick. Too surprising.”

Bleakness had taken up tenancy in his eyes. He felt his responsibility far too keenly. He was going to insist on blaming himself for his officer's death. Reluctantly, she said, “There's worse.”

“Couldn’t be”

“His brain…”

Bryce waited. Then he said, “What? What about his brain?”

“Gone.”

“Gone?”

“His cranium is empty. Utterly empty.”

“How can you possibly know that without opening-”

She held out the flashlight, interrupting him: “Take this and shine it into the eye sockets.”

He made no move to act upon her suggestion. His eyes were not hooded now. They were wide, startled.

She noticed that she couldn't hold the flashlight steady. Her hand was shaking violently.

He noticed, too. He took the flash away from her and put it down on the sideboard, next to the shrouded corpse. He took both of her hands and held them in his own large, leathery, cupped hands; he warmed them.

She said, “There's nothing beyond the eye sockets, nothing at all, nothing, nothing whatsoever, except the back of his skull.”

Bryce rubbed her hands soothingly.

“Just a damp, reamed-out cavity,” she said. As she spoke, her voice rose and cracked: “It ate through his face, right through his eyes, probably about as fast as he could blink, for God's sake, ate into his mouth and took his tongue out by the roots, stripped the gums away from his teeth, then ate up through the roof of his mouth, Jesus, just consumed his brain, consumed all of the blood in his body, too, probably just sucked it up and out of him and”

“Easy, easy,” Bryce said.

But the words rattle-clanked out of her as if they were links in a chain that bound her to an albatross: “— consumed all of that in no more than ten or twelve seconds, which is impossible, damn it to hell, plain impossible! It devoured — do you understand? — devoured pounds and pounds and pounds of tissue — the brain alone weighs six or seven pounds — devoured all of that in ten or twelve seconds!”

She stood gasping, hands trapped in his.

He led her to a sofa that lay under a dusty white drape. They sat side by side.

Across the room, none of the others was looking this way.

Jenny was glad for that. She didn't want Lisa to see her in this condition.

Bryce put a hand on her shoulder. He spoke to her in a low, reassuring voice.

She gradually grew calmer. Not less disturbed. Not less afraid. Just calmer.

“Better?” Bryce asked.

“As my sister says — I guess I flaked out on you, huh?”

“Not at all. Are you kidding or what? I couldn't even take the flashlight from you and look in those eyes like you wanted me to. You're the one who had the nerve to examine him.”

“Well, thanks for getting me back together. You sure know how to knit up raveled nerves.”

“Me? I didn't do anything.”

“You sure have a comforting way of doing nothing.”

They sat in silence, thinking of things they didn't want to think about.

Then he said, “That moth…”

She waited.

He said, “Where'd it come from?”

“Hell?”

“Any other suggestions?”

Jenny shrugged. “Mesozoic era?” she said half-jokingly.

“When was that?”

“The age of dinosaurs.”

His blue eyes flickered with interest. “Did moths like that exist back then?”

“I don't know,” she admitted.

“I can sort of picture it soaring around prehistoric swamps.”

“Yeah. Preying on small animals, bothering a Tyrannosaurus rex about the same way our own tiny summer moths bother us.”

“But if it's from the Mesozoic, where's it been hiding for the last hundred million years?” he asked.

More seconds, ticking.

“Could it be… something from a genetic engineering lab?” she wondered. “An experiment in recombinant DNA?”

“Have they gone that far? Can they produce whole new species? I only know what I read in the papers, but I thought they were years away from that sort of thing. They're still working with bacteria.”

“You're probably right,” she said, “But still…”

“Yeah. Nothing's impossible because the moth is here.”

After another silence, she said, “And what else is crawling or flying around out there?”

“You're thinking about what happened to Jake Johnson?”

“Yeah. What took him? Not the moth. Even as deadly as it is, it couldn't kill him silently, and it couldn't carry him away.” She sighed, “You know, at first I wouldn't try to leave town because I was afraid we'd spread an epidemic. Now I wouldn't try to leave because I know we wouldn't make it out alive. We'd be stopped.”

“No, no. I'm sure we could get you out,” Bryce said, “If we can prove there's no disease-related aspect to this, if General Copperfield's people can rule that out, then, of course, you and Lisa will be taken to safety right away.”

She shook her head. “No. There's something out there, Bryce, something more cunning and a whole lot more formidable than the moth, and it doesn't want us to leave. It wants to play with us before it kills us. It won't let any of us go, so we'd damned well better find it and figure out how to deal with it before it gets tired of the game.”

In both rooms of the Hilltop Inn's large restaurant, chairs were stacked upside-down atop the tables, all covered with green plastic dropcloths. In the first room, Bryce and the others removed the plastic sheeting, took the chairs off the tables, and began to prepare the place to serve as a cafeteria.

In the second room, the furniture had to be moved out to make way for the mattresses that would later be brought down from upstairs. They had only just begun emptying that part of the restaurant when they heard the faint but unmistakable sound of automobile engines.

Bryce went to the French windows. He looked left, down the hill, toward the foot of Skyline Road. Three county squad cars were coming up the street, red beacons flashing.

“They're here,” Bryce told the others.

He had been thinking of the reinforcements as a reassuringly formidable replenishment of their own decimated contingent. Now he realized that ten more men were hardly better than one more.

Jenny Paige had been right when she'd said that Stu Wargle's life probably wouldn't have been saved by waiting for reinforcements before leaving the substation.

All the lights in the Hilltop Inn and all the lights along the main street flickered. Dimmed. Went out. But they came back on after only a second of darkness.

It was 11:15, Sunday night, counting down toward the witching hour.