Phantoms

Those words were spoken in light, innocent, childlike tones which somehow made them far more frightening than if they had been shouted in a basso profundo rage.

Timothy's heart was pounding.

“That settles it,” he said, “I'll come. I have no choice.”

“Don't come on our account,” Hammond said, “It might spare you because it calls you its Saint Matthew, its Mark, its Luke and John. But it sure as hell won't spare us, no matter what it says.”

“I'll come,” Timothy insisted.

Hammond hesitated. Then: “Very well. I'll have one of my men drive you to the Snowfield roadblock. From there, you'll have to come alone. I can't risk another man. Do you drive?”

“Yes, sir,” Timothy said, “You provide the car, and I'll get there by myself.”

The line went dead.

“Hello?” Timothy said, “Sheriff?”

No answer.

“Are you there? Sheriff Hammond?”

Nothing.

It had cut them off.

Timothy looked up at Sal Corello, Charlie Mercer, and the two men whose names he didn't know.

They were all staring at him as if he were already dead and lying in a casket.

But if I die in Snowfield, if the shape-changer takes me, he thought, there'll be no casket. No grave. No everlasting peace.

“I'll drive you as far as the roadblock,” Charlie Mercer said. “I'll drive you myself.”

Timothy nodded.

It was time to go.

Chapter 36 Face to Face

At 3:12 A.M., Snowfield's church bells began to clang.

In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, Bryce got up from his chair. The others rose, too.

The firehouse siren wailed.

Jenny said, “Flyte must be here.”

The six of them went outside.

The streetlights were flashing off and on, casting leaping marionette shadows through the shifting banks of fog.

At the foot of Skyline Road, a car turned the corner. Its headlights speared upward, imparting a silvery sheen to the mist.

The streetlamps stopped blinking, and Bryce stepped into the soft cascade of yellow light beneath one of them, hoping that Flyte would be able to see him through the veils of fog.

The bells continued to peal, and the siren shrieked, and the car crawled slowly up the long hill. It was a green and white sheriff's department cruiser. It pulled to the curb and stopped ten feet from where Bryce stood; the driver extinguished the headlights.

The driver's door opened, and Flyte got out. He wasn't what Bryce had expected. He was wearing thick glasses that made his eyes appear abnormally large. His fine, white, tangled hair bristled in a halo around his head. Someone at headquarters had lent him an insulated jacket with the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department seal on the left breast.

The bells stopped ringing.

The siren groaned to a throaty finish.

The subsequent silence was profound.

Flyte gazed around the fog-shrouded silence, listening and waiting.

At last Bryce said, “Apparently, it's not ready to show itself.”

Flyte turned to him. “Sheriff Hammond?”

“Yes. Let's go inside and be comfortable while we wait.”

The inn's dining room. Hot coffee.

Shaky hands clattered china mugs against the tabletop. Nervous hands curled and clamped around the warm mugs in order to make themselves be still.

The six survivors leaned forward, hunched over the table, the better to listen to Timothy Flyte.

Lisa was clearly enthralled by the British scientist, but at first Jenny had serious doubts. He seemed to be an outright caricature of the absent-minded professor. But when he began to speak about his theories, Jenny was forced to discard her initial, unfavorable opinion, and soon she was as fascinated as Lisa.

He told them about vanishing armies in Spain and China, about abandoned Mayan cities, the Roanoke Island colony.

And he told them of Joya Verde, a South American jungle settlement that had met a fate similar to Snowfield's. Joya Verde, which means Green Jewel, was a trading post on the Amazon River, far from civilization. In 1923, six hundred and five people — every man, woman, and child who lived there vanished from Joya Verde in a single afternoon, sometime between the morning and evening visits of regularly scheduled riverboats. At first it was thought that nearby Indians, who were normally peaceful, had become inexplicably hostile and had launched a surprise attack. However, there were no bodies found, no indications of fighting, and no evidence of looting. A message was discovered on the blackboard at the mission school: It has no shape, yet it has every shape. Many who investigated the Joya Verde mystery were quick to dismiss those nine chalk- scrawled words as having no connection with the disappearances. Flyte believed otherwise, and after listening to him, so did Jenny.

“A message of sorts was also left in one of those ancient Mayan cities,” Flyte said. “Archaeologists have unearthed a portion of a prayer, written in hieroglyphics, dating from the time of the great disappearance.” He quoted from memory: “'Evil gods live in the earth, their power asleep in rock. When they awake, they rise up as lava rises, but cold lava, flowing, and they assume many shapes. Then proud men know that we are only voices in the thunder, faces on the wind, to be dispersed as if we never lived.'” Flyte's glasses had slid down his nose. He pushed them back into place. “Now, some say that particular part of the prayer refers to the power of earthquakes and volcanoes. I think it's about the ancient enemy.”

“We found a message here, too,” Bryce said, “Part of a word.”

“We can't make anything of it,” Sara Yamaguchi said.

Jenny told Flyte about the two letters — P and R that Nick Papandrakis had painted on his bathroom wall, using a bottle of iodine. “There was a portion of a third letter, too. It might have been the beginning of a U or an O.”

“Papandrakis,” Flyte said, nodding vigorously, “Greek. Yes, yes, yes — here's confirmation of what I'm telling you. Was this fellow Papandrakis proud of his heritage?”

“Yes,” Jenny said, “Extremely proud of it. Why?”

“Well, if he was proud of being Greek,” Flyte said, “he might well have known Greek mythology. You see, in ancient Greek myth, there was a god named Proteus. I suspect that was the word your Mr. Papandrakis was trying to write on the wall. Proteus. A god who lived in the earth, crawled through its bowels. A god who was without any shape of his own. A god who could take any form he wished — and who fed upon everything and everyone that he desired.”

With frustration in his voice, Tal Whitman said, “What is all this supernatural stuff? When we communicated with it through the computer, it insisted on giving itself the names of demons.”

Flyte said, “The amorphous demon, the shapeless and usually evil god that can assume any form it wishes — those are relatively common figures in most ancient myth systems and in most if not all of the world's religions. Such a mythological creature appears under scores of names, in all of the world's cultures. Consider the Old Testament of the Bible, for example. Satan first appears as a serpent, later as a goat, a ram, a stag, a beetle, a