Phantoms

spider, a child, a beggar, and many other things. He is called, among other names: Master of Chaos and Formlessness, Master of Deceit, the Beast of Many Faces. The Bible tells us that Satan is 'as changeable as shadows' and 'as clever as water, for as water can become steam or ice, so Satan can become that which he wishes to become.”

Lisa said, “Are you saying the shape-changer here in Snowfield is Satan?”

“Well… in a way, yes.”

Frank Autry shook his head. “No. I'm not a man who believes in spooks, Dr. Flyte.”

“Nor am I,” Flyte assured him, “I'm not arguing that this thing is a supernatural being. It isn't. It's real, a creature of flesh — although not flesh like ours. It's not a spirit or a devil. Yet… in a way… I believe it is Satan. Because, you see, I believe it was this creature — or another like it, another monstrous survivor from the Mesozoic Era — that inspired the myth of Satan. In prehistoric times, men must have encountered one of these things, and some of them must have lived to tell about it. They naturally described their experiences in the terminology of myth and superstition. I suspect most of the demonic figures in the world's various religions are actually reports of these shape-changers, reports passed down through countless generations before they were at last committed to hieroglyphics, scrolls, and then print. They were reports of a very rare, very real, very dangerous beast… but described in the language of religious myth.”

Jenny found this part of Flyte's thesis to be both crazy and brilliant, unlikely yet convincing. “The thing somehow absorbs the knowledge and memories of those on whom it feeds,” she said, “so it knows that many of its victims see it as the Devil, and it gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of playing that role.”

Bryce said, “It seems to enjoy mocking us.”

Sara Yamaguchi tucked her long hair behind her ears and said, “Dr. Flyte, how about explaining this in scientific terms. How can such a creature exist? How can it function biologically? What's your scientific rationalization, your theory?”

Before Flyte could answer her, it came.

High on one wall, near the ceiling, a metal grille covering a heating duct suddenly popped from its screws. It flew into the room, crashed into an empty table, slid off the table, clattered-rattled-banged onto the floor.

Jenny and the others leapt up from their chairs.

Lisa screamed, pointed.

The shape-changer bulged out of the duct. It hung there on the wall. Dark. Wet. Pulsing. Like a mass of glistening, bloody snot suspended from the edge of a nostril.

Bryce and Tal reached for their revolvers, then hesitated. There was nothing whatsoever that they could do.

The thing continued to surge out of the duct, swelling, rippling, growing into an obscene, gnarled, shifting- lump the size of a man. Then, still flowing out of the wall, it began to slide down. It formed into a mound on the floor. Much bigger than a man now, still oozing out of the duct. Growing, growing.

Jenny looked at Flyte.

The professor's face could not settle on a single expression. It tried wonder, then terror, then awe, then disgust, then awe and terror and wonder again.

The viscous, ever-churning mass of dark protoplasm was now as large as three or four men, and still more of the vile stuff gushed from the heating duct in a revolting, vomitous flow.

Lisa gagged and averted her face.

But Jenny couldn't take her eyes from the thing. There was a grotesque fascination that couldn't be denied.

In the already enormous agglomeration of shapeless tissue that had extruded itself into the room, limbs began to form, although none of them maintained its shape for more than a few seconds. Human arms, both male and female, reached out as if seeking help. The thin, flailing arms of children were formed from the jellied tissue, some of them with their small hands open in a silent, pathetic plea. It was difficult to keep in mind that these were not the arms of children trapped within the shape-changer; they were imitation, phantom arms, a part of it, not a part of any child. And claws. A startling, frightening variety of claws and animal limbs appeared out of the protoplasmic soup. There were insect parts, too, enormous, hugely exaggerated, terrifyingly frenetic and grasping. But all of these swiftly melted back into the formless protoplasm almost as soon as they took shape.

The shape-changer bulged across the width of the room. It was now larger than an elephant.

As the thing engaged upon a continuous, relentless, mysterious pattern of apparently purposeless change, Jenny and the others edged back toward the windows.

Outside, in the street, the fog roiled in its own formless dance, as if it were a ghostly reflection of the shape-changer.

Flyte spoke with a sudden urgency, answering the questions that Sara Yamaguchi had posed, as if he felt he didn't have much time left to explain. “About twenty years ago, it occurred to me that there might be a connection between mass disappearances and the unexplained extinction of certain species in pre-human geological eras. Like the dinosaurs, for instance.”

The shape-changer pulsed and throbbed, towering almost to the ceiling, filling the entire far end of the room.

Lisa clung to Jenny.

A vague but repellent odor laced the air. Slightly sulphurous. Like a draft from Hell.

“There are a host of theories purporting to explain the demise of the dinosaurs,” Flyte said, “But no single theory answers all the questions. So I wondered… what if the dinosaurs were exterminated by another creature, a natural enemy, that was a superior hunter and fighter? It would have to have been something large. And it would have been something with a very frail skeleton or perhaps with no skeleton whatsoever, for we've never found a fossil record of any species that would have given those great saurians a real battle.”

A shudder passed through the entire bulk of tenebrous, churning slime. Across the oozing mass, dozens of faces began to appear.

“And what if,” Flyte said, “several of those amoeboid creatures had survived through millions of years…”

Human and animal faces arose from the amorphous flesh, shimmered in it.

“… living in subterranean rivers or lakes…”

There were faces that had no eyes. Others had no mouths. But then the eyes appeared, blinked open. They were achingly real, penetrating eyes, filled with pain and fear and misery.

“… or in deep ocean trenches…”

And mouths cracked into existence on those previously seamless countenances.

“… thousands of feet below the surface of the sea…”

Lips formed around the gaping mouths.

“… preying on marine life…”

The phantom faces were screaming, yet they made no sounds.

“… infrequently rising to feed…”

Cat faces. Dog faces. Prehistoric reptile visages. Ballooning up from the slime.

“… and even less frequently feeding on human beings…”

To Jenny, the human faces looked as if they were peering out from the far side of a smoky mirror. None of them ever quite finished taking shape. They had to melt away, for there were countless new faces surging and coalescing beneath them. It was an endlessly flickering shadow show of the lost and the damned.

Then the faces stopped forming.

The huge mass was quiescent for a moment, slowly and almost imperceptibly pulsing, but otherwise still.

Sara Yamaguchi was groaning softly.

Jenny held Lisa close.

No one spoke. For several seconds, no one even dared breathe.

Then, in a new demonstration of its plasticity, the ancient enemy abruptly sprouted a score of tentacles. Some of them were thick, with the suction pads of a squid or an octopus. Others were thin and ropey; some of