Phantoms

Page 36

Kale had been there twice during the course of selling Johnson the mountain property. He had no difficulty finding the house again.
He pulled the Datsun into the driveway, cut the engine, and got out. He hoped no neighbors were watching.
He went around toward the back of the house, broke a kitchen window, and clambered inside.
He went directly to the garage. It was big enough for two cars, but only a four-wheel-drive Jeep station wagon was there. He had known Johnson owned the Jeep, and he had hoped to find it here. He opened the garage door and drove the stolen Datsun inside. When the door was closed again and the Datsun could not be seen from the street, he felt safer.
In the master bedroom, he went through Johnson's closet and found a pair of sturdy hiking boots only half a size larger than he required. Johnson was a couple of inches shorter than Kale, so the pants weren't the right length, but tucked into the boots, they looked good enough. The waist was too large for Kale, but he cinched it in with a belt. He selected a sports shirt and tried it on. Good enough.
Once dressed, he studied himself in the full-length mirror.
“Looking good,” he told his reflection.
Then he went through the house, looking for guns. He couldn't find any.
All right, then they were hidden somewhere. He'd tear the joint to pieces to find them, if it came to that.
He started in the master bedroom. He emptied out the contents of the bureau and dresser drawers. No guns. He went through both nightstands. No guns. He took everything out of the walk-in closet: clothes, shoes, suitcases, boxes, a steamer trunk. No guns. He pulled up the edges of the carpet and searched under it for a hidden storage area. He found nothing.
Half an hour later, he was sweating but not tired. Indeed, he was exhilarated. He looked around at the destruction he had wrought, and he was strangely pleased. The room appeared to have been bombed.
He went into the next room-probing, ripping, overturning, and smashing everything in his path.
He wanted very much to find those guns.
But he was also having fun.
Chapter 30 – Some Answers, More
Questions
The house was exceptionally neat and clean, but the color scheme and the unrelenting frilliness made Bryce Hammond nervous. Everything was either green or yellow. Everything.
The carpets were green, and the walls were pale yellow. In the living room, the sofas were done in a yellow and green floral print that was bright enough to send you running for an ophthalmologist. The two armchairs were emerald green, and the two side chairs were canary yellow. The ceramic lamps were yellow with green swirls, and the shades were chartreuse with tassels. On the walls were two big prints-yellow daisies in a verdant field. The master bedroom was worse: floral wallpaper brighter than the fabric on the living room sofas, scaringly yellow drapes with a scalloped valance. A dozen accent pillows were scattered across the upper end of the bed; some of them were green with yellow lace trim, and some were yellow with green lace trim.
According to Jenny, the house was occupied by Ed and Theresa Lange, their three teenagers, and Theresa's seventy-year-old mother.
None of the occupants could be found. There were no bodies, and Bryce was thankful for that. Somehow, a bruised and swollen corpse would have looked especially terrible here, in the midst of this almost maniacally cheerful decor.
The kitchen was green and yellow, too.
At the sink, Tal Whitman said, “Here's something. Better have a look at this, Chief.”
Bryce, Jenny, and Captain Arkhain went to Tal but the other two deputies remained back by the doorway with Lisa between them. It was hard to tell what might turn up in a kitchen sink in this town, in the middle of this Love craft nightmare. Someone's head, maybe. Or another pair of severed hands. Or worse.
But it wasn't worse. It was merely odd.
“A regular jewelry store,” Tal said.
The double sink was filled with jewelry. Mostly rings and watches. There were both men's and women's watches: Timex, Seiko, Bulova, even a Rolex; some of them were attached to flexible bands; some with no bands at all; none of them was attached to a leather or plastic band. Bryce saw scores of wedding and engagement rings; the diamonds glittered brilliantly. Birthstone rings, too: garnet, amethyst, bloodstone, topaz, tourmaline; rings with ruby and emerald chips. High school and college rings. Junk jewelry was all mixed up with the high priced pieces. Bryce dug his hands into one of the piles of valuables the way a pirate, in the movies, always drenched his hands in the contents of a treasure chest. He stirred up the shining baubles and saw other kinds of jewelry: earrings, charm bracelets, loose pearls from a broken necklace or two, gold chains, a lovely cameo pendant…
“This stuff can't all belong to the Langes,” Tal said.
“Wait,” Jenny said. She snatched a watch from the pile and examined it closely. “Recognize that one?” Bryce asked.
“Yes. Earlier. A tank watch. Not the classic tank with Roman numerals. This has no numerals and a black face. Sylvia Kanarsky gave it to her husband, Dan, for their fifth wedding anniversary.”
Bryce frowned. “Where do I know that name from?”
“They own the Candle glow Inn,” Jenny said.
“Oh, yes. Your friends.”
“Among the missing,” Tal said.
“Dan loved this watch,” Jenny said, “When Sylvia bought it for him, it was a terrible extravagance. The inn was still on rather shaky financial footing, and the watch cost three hundred and fifty dollars. Now of course, it's worth considerably more. Dan used to joke that it was the best investment they'd ever made.”
She held the watch up, so Tal and Bryce could see the back. At the top of the gold case, above the Cartier logo, was engraved: TO MY DAN. At the bottom, under the serial number, was LOVE, SYL.
Bryce looked down at the sinkful of jewelry. “So the stuff probably belongs to people from all over Snowfield.”
“Well, I'd say it belongs to those whore missing, anyway,” Tal said, “The victims we've found so far were still wearing their jewelry.” Bryce nodded. “You're right. So those who’re missing were stripped of all their valuables before they were taken to… to… well, to wherever the hell they were taken.”
“Thieves wouldn't let the loot lie around like this,” Jenny said, “They wouldn't collect it and then just dump it in someone's kitchen sink. They'd pack it up and take it with them.”
“Then what's all this stuff doing here?” Bryce said.
“Beats me,” Jenny said.
Tal shrugged.
In the two sinks, the jewelry gleamed and flashed.
The cries of sea gulls.
Dogs barking.
Galen Copperfield looked up from the computer terminal, where he had been reading data. He was sweaty inside his decon suit, tired and achy. For a moment, he wasn't sure he was really hearing the birds and dogs.
Then a cat squealed.
A horse whinnied.
The general glanced around the mobile lab, frowning.
Rattlesnakes. A lot of them. The familiar, deadly sound: chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka.
Buzzing bees.
The others heard it, too. They looked at one another uneasily. Roberts said, “It's coming through the suit-to-suit radio.”
“Affirmative,” Dr. Bettenby said from over in the second motor home, “We hear it here, too.”
“Okay,” Copperfield said, “let's give it a chance to perform. If you want to speak to one another, use your external com systems.”
The bees stopped buzzing.
A child-the sex indeterminate; androgynous-began to sing very softly, far away:
“Jesus loves me, this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him are drawn.
They are weak, but He is strong.”
The voice was sweet. Melodic.
Yet it was also blood-freezing.
Copperfield had never heard anything quite like it. Although it was a child's voice, tender and fragile, it nevertheless contained… something that shouldn't be in a child's voice. A profound lack of innocence. Knowledge, perhaps. Yes. Too much knowledge of too many terrible things. Menace. Hatred. Scorn. It wasn't audible on the surface of the lilting song, but it was there beneath the surface, pulsing and dark and immeasurably disturbing. “Yes, Jesus loves me.”
“Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
the Bible tells me so.”
“They told us about this,” Goldstein said, “Dr. Paige and the sheriff. They heard it on the phone and coming out of the kitchen drains at the inn. We didn't believe them; it sounded so ridiculous.”
“Doesn't sound ridiculous now,” Roberts said.
“No,” Goldstein said. Even inside his bulky suit, his shivering was visible.
“It's broadcasting on the same wavelength as our suit radios,” Roberts said.
“But how?” Copperfield wondered.
“Velazquez,” Goldstein said suddenly.
“Of course,” Roberts said, “Velazquez's suit had a radio. It's broadcasting through Velazquez's radio.”
The child stopped singing. In a whispery voice, it said, “Better say your prayers. Everyone say your prayers. Don't forget to say your prayers.” Then it giggled.
They waited for something more.
There was only silence.
“I think it was threatening us,” Roberts said.
“Damn it, put a lid on that kind of talk right now,” Copperfield said, “Let's not panic ourselves.”
“Have you noticed we're saying it now?” Goldstein asked.
Copperfield and Roberts looked at him and then at each other, but they said nothing.
“We're saying it the same way that Dr. Paige and the sheriff and the deputies do. So… have we come completely around to their way of thinking?”
In his mind, Copperfield could still hear the child's haunting, human-yet-not-human voice.
It.
“Come on,” he said gruffly, “We've still got a lot of work to get done.”
He turned his attention back to the computer terminal, but he had difficulty concentrating.
It.
By 4:30 Monday afternoon, Bryce called off the house-to house search. A couple of hours of daylight remained, but everyone was bone weary. Weary from climbing up and down stairs. Weary of grotesque corpses. Weary of nasty surprises. Weary of the extent of the human tragedy, of horror that numbed the senses. Weary of the fear knotted in their chests. Constant tension was as tiring as heavy manual labor.
Besides, it had become apparent to Bryce that the job was simply too big for them. In five and a half hours, they had covered only a small portion of the town. At that rate, confined to a daylight schedule, and with their limited numbers, they would need at least two weeks to give Snowfield a thorough inspection. Furthermore, if the missing people didn't turn up by the time the last building was explored, and if a clue to their whereabouts could not be found, then an even more difficult search of the surrounding forest would have to be undertaken.
Last night, Bryce hadn't wanted the National Guard tramping through town. But now he and his people had had the town to themselves for the better part of a day, and Copperfield's specialists had collected their samples and had begun their work. As soon as Copperfield could certify that the town had not been stricken by a bacteriological agent, the Guard could be brought in to assist Bryce's own men.
Initially, knowing little about the situation here, he had been reluctant to relinquish any of his authority over a town in his jurisdiction. But now, although not willing to surrender authority, he was certainly willing to share it. He needed more men. Hour by hour, the responsibility was becoming a crushing weight, and he was ready to shift some of it to other shoulders.
Therefore, at 4:30 Monday afternoon, he took his two search teams back to the Hilltop Inn, placed a call to the governor's office, and spoke with Jack Retiock. It was agreed that the Guard would be placed on standby for a call-up, pending an all-clear signal from Copperfield.
He had no sooner hung up the phone than Charlie Mercer, the desk-sergeant at HQ in Santa Mira, rang through. He had news. Fletcher Kale had escaped while being taken to the county courthouse for arraignment on two charges of murder in the first degree.
Bryce was furious.
Charlie let him rage on for a while, and when Bryce quieted down, Charlie said, “There's worse. He killed Joe Freemont.”
“Aw, shit,” Bryce said, “Has Mary been told?”
“Yeah. I went over there myself.”
“How's she taking it?”
“Bad. They were married twenty-six years.”
More death.
Death everywhere.
Christ.
“What about Kale?” Bryce asked Charlie.
“We think he took a car from the apartment complex across the alley. One's been stolen from that lot. So we put up the roadblocks as soon as we knew Kale slipped, but I figure he had almost an hour's lead on us.”
“Long gone.”
“Probably. If we don't nab the son of a bitch by seven o'clock, I want to call the blocks off. We're so shorthanded what with everything that's going on-we can't keep tying men up on roadblocks.”
“Whatever you think's best,” Bryce said wearily, “What about the San Francisco police? You know-about that message Harold Ordnay left on the mirror up here?”
“That was the other thing I called about. They finally got back to us.”
“Anything useful?”
“Well, they talked to the employees at Ordnay's bookstores. You remember, I told you one of the shops deals strictly in out-of-print and rare books. The assistant manager at that store, name of Celia Meddock, recognized the Timothy Flyte moniker.”
“He's a customer?” Bryce asked.
“No. An author.”
“Author? Of what?”
“One book. Guess the title.”
“How the devil could I… Oh. Of course. The Ancient Enemy.”
“You got it,” Charlie Mercer said.
“What's the book about?”
“That's the best part. Celia Meddock says she thinks it's about mass disappearances throughout history.”
For a moment, Bryce was speechless. Then: “Are you serious? You mean there've been a lot of others?”
“I guess so. At least a bookful of 'em.”
“Where? When? How come I've never heard about them?”
“Meddock said something about the disappearance of ancient Mayan populations-”
(Something stirred in Bryce's mind. An article he had read in an old science magazine. Mayan civilizations. Abandoned cities.)