Phantoms Part 19

Wargle wasn't the only one screaming. The others cried out and fell back in surprise. The moth was squealing, too, making a high-pitched, keening sound.

In the moon's silvery beams, the impossible insect's huge pale velvety wings flapped and folded and spread with horrible grace and beauty, buffeting Wargle's head and shoulders.

Wargle staggered away, veering downhill, moving blindly, clawing at the outrageous thing that clung to his face. His screams quickly grew m.u.f.fled; within a couple of seconds, they were silenced altogether.

Bryce, like the others, was paralyzed by disgust and disbelief.

Wargle began to run, but he only went a few yards before coming to an abrupt halt. His hands dropped away from the thing on his face. His knees were buckling.

Snapping out of his brief trance, Bryce dropped his useless shotgun and ran toward Stu.

Wargle didn't crumple to the ground, after all. Instead, his shaky knees locked, and he snapped erect. His shoulders jerked back. His body twitched and shuddered as if an electric current had flashed through him.

Bryce tried to grab the moth and tear it away from Wargle. But the deputy began to weave and thrash in a St. Vitus dance of pain and suffocation, and Bryce's hands closed on empty air. Wargle moved erratically across the street, jerked this way and that, heaved and writhed and spun, as if he were attached to strings that were being manipulated by a drunken puppeteer. His hands hung slackly at his sides, which made his frantic and spasmodic capering seem especially eerie. His hands flopped and fluttered weakly, but they did not rise to tear at his a.s.sailant. It was almost as if, now, he were in the grip of ecstasy rather than the clutch of pain. Bryce followed him, tried to move in on him, but couldn't get close.

Then Wargle collapsed.

In that same instant, the moth rose and turned, suspended in the air, hovering on rapidly beating wings, eyes night-black and hateful. It swooped at Bryce.

He stumbled backwards and threw his arms across his face. He fell.

The moth sailed over his head.

Bryce twisted around, looked up.

The kite-size insect glided soundlessly across the street, toward the buildings on the other side.

Tal Whitman raised his shotgun. The blast was like cannonfire in the silent town.

The moth pitched sideways in midair. It tumbled in a loop, dropped almost to the ground, then it swooped up again and flew on, disappearing over a rooftop.

Stu Wargle was sprawled on the pavement, flat on his back. Unmoving.

Bryce scrambled to his feet and went to Wargle. The deputy lay in the middle of the street, where there was just enough light to see that his face was gone. Jesus. Gone. As if it had been torn off. His hair and ragged ribbons of his scalp bristled over the white bone of his forehead. A skull peered up at Bryce.

17.

The Hour Before Midnight Tal, Gordy, Frank, and Lisa sat in red leatherette armchairs in a corner of the lobby of the Hilltop Inn. The inn had been closed since the end of the past skiing season, and they had removed the dusty white dropcloths from the chairs before collapsing into them, numb with shock. The oval coffee table was still covered by a dropcloth; they stared at that shrouded object, unable to look at one another.

At the far end of the room, Bryce and Jenny were standing over the body of Stu Wargle, which lay on a long, low sideboard against the wall. No one in the armchairs could bring himself to look over that way.

Staring at the covered coffee table, Tal said, "I shot the d.a.m.ned thing. I hit it. I know I did."

"We all saw it take the buckshot," Frank agreed.

"So why wasn't it blown apart?" Tal demanded. "Hit dead-on by a blast from a 20-gauge. It should've been torn to pieces, d.a.m.n it."

"Guns aren't going to save us," Lisa said.

In a distant, haunted voice, Gordy said, "It could've been any of us. That thing could've gotten me. I was right behind Stu. If he had ducked or jumped out of the way...

"No," Lisa said. "No. It wanted Officer Wargle. n.o.body else. Just Officer Wargle."

Tal stared at the girl. "What do you mean?"

Her flesh had taken paleness from her bones. "Officer Wargle refused to admit he'd seen it when it was battering against the window. He insisted it was just a bird."

"So?"

"So it wanted him. Him especially," she said. "To teach him a lesson. But mostly to teach us a lesson."

"It couldn't have heard what Stu said."

"It did. It heard."

"But it couldn't have understood."

"It did."

"I think you're crediting it with too much intelligence," Tal said. "It was big, yes, and like nothing any of us has ever seen before. But it was still only an insect. A moth. Right?"

The girl said nothing.

"It's not omniscient," Tal said, trying to convince himself more than anyone else. "It's not all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing."

The girl stared silently at the covered coffee table.

Suppressing nausea, Jenny examined Wargle's hideous wound. The lobby lights were not quite bright enough, so she used a flashlight to inspect the edges of the injury and to peer into the skull. The center of the dead man's demolished face was eaten away clear to the bone; all the skin, flesh, and cartilage were gone. Even the bone itself appeared to be partially dissolved in places, pitted, as if it had been splashed with acid. The eyes were gone. There was, however, normal flesh on all sides of the wound; smooth untouched flesh lay along both sides of the face, from the outer points of the jawbones to the cheekbones, and there was unmarked skin from the midpoint of the chin on down, and from the midpoint of the forehead on up. It was as if some torture artist had designed a frame of healthy skin to set off the gruesome exhibition of bone on display in the center of the face.

Having seen enough, Jenny switched off the flashlight. Earlier, they had covered the body with a dropcloth from one of the chairs. Now Jenny drew the sheet over the dead man's face, relieved to be covering that skeletal grin.

"Well?" Bryce asked.

"No teeth marks," she said.

"Would a thing like that have teeth?"

"I know it had a mouth, a small chitinous beak. I saw its mandibles working when it bashed itself against the substation windows."

"Yeah. I saw them, too."

"A mouth like that would mark the flesh. There'd be slashes. Bite marks. Indications of chewing and tearing."

"But there were none?"

"No. The flesh doesn't look as if it was ripped off. It seems to've been... dissolved. Along the edges of the wound, the remaining flesh is even sort of cauterized, as if it has been seared by something."

"You think that... that insect... secreted an acid?"

She nodded.

"And dissolved Stu Wargle's face?"

"And sucked up the liquefied flesh," she said.

"Oh, Jesus."

"Yes."

Bryce was as pale as an untinted deathmask, and his freckles seemed, by contrast, to burn and shimmer on his face. "That explains how it could've done so much damage in only a few seconds."

Jenny tried not to think of the bony face peering out of the flesh-like a monstrous visage that had removed a mask of normality.

"I think the blood is gone," she said. "All of it."

"What?"

"Was the body lying in a pool of blood?"

"No."

"There's no blood on the uniform, either."

"I noticed that."

"There should be blood. He should've spouted like a fountain. The eye sockets should be pooled with it. But there's not a drop."

Bryce wiped one hand across his face. He wiped so hard, in fact, that some color rose in his cheeks.

"Take a look at his neck," she said. "The jugular."

He didn't move toward the corpse.

She said, "And look at the insides of his arms and the backs of his hands. There's no blueness of veins anywhere, no tracery."

"Collapsed blood vessels?"

"Yeah. I think all the blood is drained out of him."

Bryce took a deep breath. He said, "I killed him. I'm responsible. We should have waited for reinforcements before leaving the substation-just like you said."

"No, no. You were right. It was no safer there than in the street."

"But he died in the street."

"Reinforcements wouldn't have made a bit of difference. The way that d.a.m.ned thing dropped out of the sky... h.e.l.l, not even an army could've stopped it. Too quick. Too surprising."

Bleakness had taken up tenancy in his eyes. He felt his responsibility far too keenly. He was going to insist on blaming himself for his officer's death.

Reluctantly, she said, "There's worse."

"Couldn't be."

"His brain..."

Bryce waited. Then he said, "What? What about his brain?"

"Gone."

"Gone?"

"His cranium is empty. Utterly empty.

"How can you possibly know that without opening-"

She held out the flashlight, interrupting him: "Take this and shine it into the eye sockets."

He made no move to act upon her suggestion. His eyes were not hooded now. They were wide, startled.

She noticed that she couldn't hold the flashlight steady. Her hand was shaking violently.

He noticed, too. He took the flash away from her and put it down on the sideboard, next to the shrouded corpse. He took both of her hands and held them in his own large, leathery, cupped hands; he warmed them.

She said, "There's nothing beyond the eye sockets, nothing at all, nothing, nothing whatsoever, except the back of his skull."

Bryce rubbed her hands soothingly.

"Just a damp, reamed-out cavity," she said. As she spoke, her voice rose and cracked: "It ate through his face, right through his eyes, probably about as fast as he could blink, for G.o.d's sake, ate into his mouth and took his tongue out by the roots, stripped the gums away from his teeth, then ate up through the roof of his mouth, Jesus, just consumed his brain, consumed all of the blood in his body, too, probably just sucked it up and out of him and-"

"Easy, easy," Bryce said.

But the words rattle-clanked out of her as if they were links in a chain that bound her to an albatross: "-consumed all of that in no more than ten or twelve seconds, which is impossible, d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l, plain impossible! It devoured-do you understand?-devoured pounds and pounds and pounds of tissue-the brain alone weighs six or seven pounds-devoured all of that in ten or twelve seconds!"

She stood gasping, hands trapped in his.

He led her to a sofa that lay under a dusty white drape. They sat side by side.

Across the room, none of the others was looking this way.

Jenny was glad for that. She didn't want Lisa to see her in this condition.

Bryce put a hand on her shoulder. He spoke to her in a low, rea.s.suring voice.