Phantoms (28 page)

Not long after dawn, the shortwave radio and the two gasoline-powered electric generators arrived at the roadblock that marked the perimeter of the quarantine zone. The two small vans which bore them were driven by California Highway Patrolmen. They were permitted to pass through the blockade, to a point midway along the four-mile Snowfield Road, where they were parked and abandoned.

When the CHiP officers returned to the roadblock, county deputies radioed a situation report to headquarters in Santa Mira. In turn, headquarters put through a go-ahead call to Bryce Hammond at the Hilltop Inn.

Tal Whitman, Frank Autry, and two other men took a squad car to the midpoint of the Snowfield Road and picked up the abandoned vans. Containment of any possible disease vectors was thus maintained.

The shortwave was set up in one corner of the Hilltop lobby. A message sent to headquarters in Santa Mira was received and answered. Now, if something happened to the telephones, they wouldn’t be entirely isolated.

Within an hour, one of the generators had been wired into the circuitry of the streetlamps on the west side of the Skyline Road. The other was spliced into the hotel’s electrical system. Tonight, if the main power supply was mysteriously cut off, the generators would kick in automatically. Darkness would last only one or two seconds.

Bryce was confident that not even their unknown enemy could snatch away a victim
that
fast.

 

 

Jenny Paige began the morning with an unsatisfactory sponge bath, followed by a completely satisfactory breakfast of eggs, sliced ham, toast, and coffee.

Then, accompanied by three heavily armed men, she went up the street to her house, where she got some fresh clothes for herself and for Lisa. She also stopped in her office, where she gathered up a stethoscope, a sphygmomanometer, tongue depressors, cotton pads, gauze, splints, bandages, tourniquets, antiseptics, disposable hypodermic syringes, painkillers, antibiotics, and other instruments and supplies that she would need in order to establish an emergency infirmary in one corner of the Hilltop Inn’s lobby.

The house was quiet.

The deputies kept looking around nervously, entering each new room as if they suspected a guillotine was rigged above the door.

As Jenny was finishing packing up supplies in her office, the telephone rang. They all stared at it.

They knew only two phones in town were working, and both were at the Hilltop Inn.

The phone rang again.

Jenny lifted the receiver. She didn’t say hello.

Silence.

She waited.

After a second, she heard the distant cries of sea gulls. The buzzing of bees. The mewling of a kitten. A weeping child. Another child: laughing. A panting dog. The
chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka
sound of a rattlesnake.

Bryce had heard similar things on the phone last night, in the substation, just before the moth had come tapping at the windows. He had said that the sounds had been perfectly ordinary, familiar animal noises. They had nonetheless unsettled him. He hadn’t been able to explain why.

Now Jenny knew exactly what he meant.

Birds singing.

Frogs croaking.

A cat purring.

The purr became a hiss. The hiss became a cat-shriek of anger. The shriek became a brief but terrible squeal of pain.

Then a voice: “I’m gonna shove my big prick into your succulent little sister.”

Jenny recognized the voice. Wargle. The dead man.

“You hear me, Doc?”

She said nothing.

“And I don’t give a rat’s ass which end of her I stick it in.” He giggled.

She slammed the phone down.

The deputies looked at her expectantly.

“Uh . . . no one on the line,” she said, deciding not to tell them what she had heard. They were already too jumpy.

From Jenny’s office, they went to Tayton’s Pharmacy on Vail Lane, where she stocked up on more drugs: additional painkillers, a wide spectrum of antibiotics, coagulants, anticoagulants, and anything else she might conceivably need.

As they were finishing in the pharmacy, the phone rang.

Jenny was closest to it. She didn’t want to answer, but she couldn’t resist.

And it was there again.

Jenny waited a moment, then said, “Hello?”

Wargle said, “I’m gonna use your little sister so hard she won’t be able to walk for a week.”

Jenny hung up.

“Dead line,” she told the deputies.

She didn’t think they believed her. They stared at her trembling hands.

 

 

Bryce sat at the central operations desk, talking by telephone to headquarters in Santa Mira.

The APB on Timothy Flyte had turned up nothing whatsoever. Flyte wasn’t wanted by any police agency in the United States or Canada. The FBI had never heard of him. The name on the bathroom mirror at the Candleglow Inn was still a mystery.

The San Francisco police had been able to supply background on the missing Harold Ordnay and wife, in whose room Timothy Flyte’s name had been found. The Ordnays owned two bookstores in San Francisco. One was an ordinary retail outlet. The other was an antiquarian and rare book dealership; apparently, it was by far the more profitable of the two. The Ordnays were well known and respected in collecting circles. According to their family, Harold and Blanche had gone to Snowfield for a four-day weekend to celebrate their thirty-first anniversary. The family had never heard of Timothy Flyte. When police were granted permission to look through the Ordnays’ personal address book, they found no listing for anyone named Flyte.

The police had not yet been able to locate any of the bookstores’ employees; however, they expected to do so as soon as both shops opened at ten o’clock this morning. It was hoped that Flyte was a business acquaintance of the Ordnays’ and would be familiar to the employees.

“Keep me posted,” Bryce told the morning desk man in Santa Mira. “How’re things there?”

“Pandemonium.”

“It’ll get worse.”

As Bryce was putting down the receiver, Jenny Paige returned from her safari in search of drugs and medical equipment. “Where’s Lisa?”

“With the kitchen detail,” Bryce said.

“She’s all right?”

“Sure. There are three big, strong, well-armed men with her. Remember? Is something wrong?”

“Tell you later.”

Bryce assigned Jenny’s three armed guards to new duties, then helped her establish an infirmary in one corner of the lobby.

“This is probably wasted effort,” she said.

“Why?”

“So far no one’s been injured. Just killed.”

“Well, that could change.”

“I think
it
only strikes when it intends to kill. It doesn’t take halfway measures.”

“Maybe. But with all these men toting guns, and with everyone so damned jumpy, I wouldn’t be half surprised if someone accidentally winged someone else or even shot himself in the foot.”

Arranging bottles in a desk drawer, Jenny said, “The telephone rang at my place and again over at the pharmacy. It was Wargle.” She told him about both calls.

“You’re sure it was really him?”

“I remember his voice clearly. An unpleasant voice.”

“But, Jenny, he was—”

“I know, I know. His face was eaten away, and his brain was gone, and all the blood was sucked out of him. I know. And it’s driving me crazy trying to figure it out.”

“Someone doing an impersonation?”

“No way. This was the real article. Snake-mean as he was in life.”

“Did he sound as if he—”

Bryce broke off in midsentence, and both he and Jenny turned as Lisa ran through the archway.

The girl motioned to them. “Come on! Quick! Something weird is happening in the kitchen.”

Before Bryce could stop her, she ran back the way she had come.

Several men started after her, drawing their guns as they went, and Bryce ordered them to halt. “Stay here. Stay on the job.”

Jenny had already sprinted after the girl.

Bryce hurried into the dining room, caught up with Jenny, moved ahead of her, drew his revolver, and followed Lisa through the swinging doors into the hotel kitchen.

The three men assigned to this shift of kitchen duty—Gordy Brogan, Henry Wong, and Max Dunbar—had put down their can openers and cooking utensils in favor of their service revolvers, but they didn’t know what to aim at. They glanced up at Bryce, looking disconcerted and baffled.

The air was filled with a child’s singing. A little boy. His voice was clear and fragile and sweet.

“The sink,” Lisa said, pointing.

Puzzled, Bryce went to the nearest of three double sinks. Jenny came close behind him.

The song had changed. The voice was the same:

The child’s voice was coming out of the drain in the sink, as if he were trapped far down in the pipes.

For metronomic seconds, Bryce listened with spellbound intensity. He was speechless.

He glanced at Jenny. She gave him the same astonished stare that the had seen on his men’s faces when he had first pushed through the swinging doors.

“It just started all of a sudden,” Lisa said, raising her voice above the singing.

“When?” Bryce asked.

“A couple of minutes ago,” Gordy Brogan said.

“I was standing at the sink,” Max Dunbar said. He was a burly, hairy, rough-looking man with warm, shy brown eyes. “When the singing started up. . . Jesus, I must’ve jumped two feet!”

The song changed again. The sweetness was replaced by a cloying, almost mocking piety:

“I don’t like this,” Henry Wong said. “How can it be?”

Nothing about the singing was overtly threatening; yet, like the noises Bryce and Jenny had heard on the telephone, the child’s tender voice, issuing from such an unlikely source, was unnerving. Creepy.

The singing abruptly ceased.

“Thank God!” Max Dunbar said with a shudder of relief, as if the child’s melodic crooning had been unbearably harsh, grating, off-key. “That voice was drilling right through to the roots of my teeth!”

After several seconds had passed in silence, Bryce began to lean toward the drain, to peer into it—

—and Jenny said maybe he shouldn’t—

—and something exploded out of that dark, round hole.

Everyone cried out, and Lisa screamed, and Bryce staggered back in fear and surprise, cursing himself for not being more careful, jerking his revolver up, bringing the muzzle to bear on the thing that came out of the drain.

But it was only water.

A long, high-pressure stream of exceptionally filthy, greasy water shot almost to the ceiling and rained down over everything. It was a short burst, only a second or two, spraying in every direction.

Some of the foul droplets struck Bryce’s face. Dark blotches appeared on the front of his shirt. The stuff stank.

It was exactly what you would expect to gush out of a backed-up drain: dirty brown water, threads of gummy sludge, bits of this morning’s breakfast scraps which had been run through the garbage disposal.

Gordy got a roll of paper towels, and they all scrubbed at their faces and blotted at the stains on their clothes.

They were still wiping at themselves, still waiting to see if the singing would begin again, when Tal Whitman pushed open one of the swinging doors. “Bryce, we just got a call. General Copperfield and his team reached the roadblock and were passed through a couple of minutes ago.”

Snowfield looked freshly scrubbed and tranquil in the crystalline light of morning. A breeze stirred the trees. The sky was cloudless.

Coming out of the inn, with Bryce and Frank and Doc Paige and a few of the others behind him, Tal glanced up at the sun, the sight of which unlocked a memory of his childhood in Harlem. He used to buy penny candy at Boaz’s Newsstand, which was at the opposite end of the block from his Aunt Becky’s apartment. He favored the lemondrops. They were the prettiest shade of yellow he had ever seen. And now this morning, he saw that the sun was precisely
that
shade of yellow, hanging up there like an enormous lemondrop. It brought back the sights and sounds and smells of Boaz’s with surprising force.

Lisa moved up beside Tal, and they all stopped on the sidewalk, facing downhill, waiting for the arrival of the CBW Defense Unit.

Nothing moved at the bottom of the hill. The mountainside was silent. Evidently, Copperfield’s team was some distance away.

Waiting in the lemon sunshine, Tal wondered if Boaz’s Newsstand was still doing business at its old location. Most likely, it was now just another empty store, filthy and vandalized. Or maybe it was selling magazines, tobacco, and candy only as a front for pushing dope.

As he grew older, he became ever more acutely aware of a tendency toward degeneration in all things. Nice neighborhoods somehow became shabby neighborhoods; shabby neighborhoods became seedy neighborhoods; seedy neighborhoods became slums. Order giving way to chaos. You saw it everywhere these days. More homicides this year than last. Greater and greater abuse of drugs. Spiraling rates of assault, rape, burglary. What saved Tal from being a pessimist about mankind’s future was his fervent conviction that good people—people like Bryce, Frank, and Doc Paige; people like his Aunt Becky—could stem the tide of devolution and maybe even turn it back now and then.