Phantoms

“Well, not an awful lot of people come to Benediction,” Gordy said. “There were probably at least two or three others. But it took them.”

“Why didn't it just take everyone?”

Gordy didn't answer.

“Why did it have to do something like this?” Frank pressed.

“To ridicule us. To mock us. To steal our hope,” Gordy sighed miserably.

Frank stared at him.

Gordy said, “Maybe some of us have been counting on God to get us through this alive. Probably most of us have. I know I've sure been praying a lot since we've been here. Probably you have, too. It knew we would do that. It knew we would ask God for help. So this is its way of letting us know that God can't help us. Or at least that's what it would like us to believe. Because that's its way. To instill doubt about God. That's always been its way.”

Frank said, “You sound as if you know exactly what we're up against here.”

“Maybe,” Gordy said. He stared at the crucified priest, then turned to Frank again. “Don't you know? Don't you really, Frank?”

After they left the church and went around the corner onto the cross street, they found two wrecked cars.

A Cadillac Seville had run across the front lawn of the church rectory, mowing down the shrubbery in its path, and had collided with a porch post at one corner of the house. The post was nearly splintered in two. The porch roof was sagging.

Tal Whitman squinted through the side window of the Caddy. “There's a woman behind the wheel.”

“Dead?” Bryce asked.

“Yeah. But not from the accident.”

At the other side of the car, Jenny tried to open the driver's door. It was locked. All of the doors were locked, and all of the windows were rolled up tight.

Nevertheless, the woman behind the wheel — Edna Gower; jenny knew her — was like the other corpses. Darkly bruised. Swollen. A scream of terror frozen on her twisted face.

“How could it get in there and kill her?” Tal wondered aloud. “Remember the locked bathroom at the Candle glow Inn,” Bryce said.

“And the barricaded room at the Oxleys',” Jenny said.

Captain Arkham said, “It's almost an argument for the general's nerve gas theory.”

Then Arkham unclipped a miniaturized geiger counter from his utility belt and carefully examined the car. But it wasn't radiation that had killed the woman inside.

The second car, half a block away, was a pearl-white Lynx. On the pavement behind it were black skid marks. The Lynx was angled across the street, blocking it. The front end was punched into the side of a yellow Chevy van. There wasn't a lot of damage because the Lynx had almost braked to a stop before hitting the parked vehicle.

The driver was a middle-aged man with a bushy mustache. He was wearing cut-off jeans and a Dodgers T- shirt. Jenny knew him, too, Marty Sussman. He had been Snowfield's city manager for the past six years. Affable, earnest Marty Sussman. Dead. Again, the cause of death was clearly not related to the collision.

The doors of the Lynx were locked. The windows were rolled up tight, just as, they had been on the Cadillac.

“Looks like they both were trying to escape from something,” Jenny said.

“Maybe,” Tal said, “Or they might just have been out for a drive or going somewhere on an errand when the attack came. If they were trying to escape, something sure stopped them cold, forced them right off the street.”

“Sunday was a warm day. Warm but not too warm,” Bryce said, “Not hot enough to ride around with the windows closed and the air conditioner on. It was the kind of day when most people keep the windows down, taking advantage of the fresh air. So it looks to me as if, after they were forced to stop, they put up the windows and locked themselves in, trying to keep something out.”

“But it got them anyway,” Jenny said.

It.

Ned and Sue Marie Bischoff owned a lovely Tudor-style home set on a double lot, nestled among huge pine trees. They lived there with their two boys. Eight-year-old Lee Bischoff could already play the piano surprisingly well, in spite of the smallness of his hands, and once told Jenny he was going to be the next Stevie Wonder “only not blind.” Six-year-old Terry looked exactly like a black-skinned Dennis the Menace, but he had a sweet temper.

Ned was a successful artist. His oil paintings sold for as much as six and seven thousand dollars, and his limited edition prints went for four or five hundred dollars apiece.

He was a patient of Jenny's. Although he was only thirty-two and was already a success in life, she had treated him for an ulcer.

The ulcer wouldn't be bothering him any more. He was in his studio, lying on the floor in front of an easel, dead.

Sue Marie was in the kitchen. Like Hilda Beck, Jenny's housekeeper, and like many other people all over town, Sue Marie had died while preparing dinner. She had been a pretty woman. Not any more.

They found the two boys in one of the bedrooms.

It was a wonderful room for kids, large and airy, with bunk beds. There were built-in bookshelves full of children's books. On the walls were paintings that Ned had done just for his kids, whimsical fantasy scenes quite unlike the pieces for which he was well known: a pig in a tuxedo, dancing with a cow in an evening gown; the interior of a spaceship command chamber, where all the astronauts were toads; an eerie yet charming scene of a school playground at night, bathed in the light of a full moon, no kids around, but with a huge and monstrous- looking werewolf having a grand and giddy time on a set of swings.

The boys were in one corner, beyond an array of overturned Tonka Toys. The younger boy, Terry, was behind Lee, who seemed to have made a valiant effort to protect his smaller brother. The boys were staring out into the room, eyes bulging, their dead gazes still fixed upon whatever had descended upon them yesterday. Lee's muscles had locked, so that his thin arms were in the same position now as they had been in the last seconds of his life: raised in front of him, shielding him, palms spread, as if warding off blows.

Bryce knelt in front of the kids. He put one trembling hand against Lee's face, as if unwilling to believe that the child was actually dead.

Jenny knelt beside him.

“Those are the Bischoffs' two boys,” she said, unable to keep her voice from breaking. “So now the whole family's accounted for.”

Tears were streaming down Bryce's face.

Jenny tried to remember how old his own son was. Seven or eight? About the same age as Lee Bischoff. Little Timmy Hammond was lying in the hospital in Santa Mira this very minute, comatose, just as he had been for the past year. He was pretty much a vegetable. Yes, but even that was better than this. Anything was better than this.

Eventually, Bryce's tears dried up. There was rage in him now. “I'll get them for this,” he said, “Whoever did this… I'll make them pay.”

Jenny had never met a man quite like him. He had considerable masculine strength and purpose, but he was also capable of tenderness.

She wanted to hold him. And be held.

But, as always, she was far too guarded about expressing her own emotional state. If she had possessed his openness, she would never have become estranged from her mother. But she wasn't that way, not yet, although she wanted to be. So, in response to his vow to get the killers of the Bischoffs' children, she said, “But what if it isn't anything human that killed them? Not all evil is in men. There's evil in nature. The blind maliciousness of earthquakes. The uncaring evil of cancer. This thing here could be like that — remote and unaccountable. There'll be no taking it to court if it isn't even human. What then?”

“Whoever or whatever the hell it is, I'll get it. I'll stop it. I'll make it pay for what's been done here,” he said