Phantoms Part 55

Bryce. He got the lid off the first cannister. Tal heard it ring off a piece of concrete as Bryce tossed it aside. Tal was sure something was going to leap out of the hole, up from the caverns below, and seize Bryce in a deadly embrace.

Flyte. He had stopped screaming.

Bryce. He tipped the cannister and poured the bacterial solution into the subterranean warren under the floor of the pit.

Flyte was dead.

The only thing that remained of the hound was its large head. Although it was disembodied, although it was blistering and suppurating, it continued to snap at the dead archaeologist.

Below, Timothy Flyte lay in b.l.o.o.d.y ruins.

He had seemed like a nice old man.

Shuddering with revulsion, Lisa, who was alone on her side of the pit, backed away from the edge. She reached the gutter, sidled along it, finally stopped, stood there, shaking- -until she realized she was standing on a drain grate. She remembered the tentacles that had slithered out of the drain, snaring and killing Sara Yamaguchi. She quickly hopped up onto the sidewalk.

She glanced at the buildings behind her. She was near one of the covered serviceways between two stores. She stared at the closed gate with apprehension.

Was something lurking in this pa.s.sageway? Watching her?

Lisa started to step into the street again, saw the drain grate, and stayed on the sidewalk.

She took a tentative step to the left, hesitated, moved to the right, hesitated again. Doorways and serviceway gates lay in both directions. There was no sense in moving. No other place was any safer.

Just as he began to pour the Biosan-4 out of the blue cannister, into the hole in the floor of the pit, Bryce thought he saw movement in the gloom below. He expected a phantom to launch itself up and drag him down into its subterranean lair. But he emptied the entire contents of the cylinder into the hole, and nothing came after him.

Lugging the second cannister, pouring sweat, he made his way through the angled slabs and spires of concrete and broken pipe. He stepped gingerly around a torn and sputtering electric power line, leaped across a small puddle that had formed beside a leaking water main. He pa.s.sed Flyte's mangled body and the stinking remains of the decomposed phantom that had killed him.

When Bryce reached the next hole in the pit floor, he crouched, unscrewed the lid from the second cannister, and dumped the contents into the chamber below. Empty. He discarded it, turned away from the hole, and ran. He was anxious to get out of the pit before a phantom came after him the way one had gone after Flyte.

He was a third of the way up the sloped wall of the pit, finding the climb considerably more difficult than he had antic.i.p.ated, when he heard something terrible behind him.

Jenny was watching Bryce claw his way up toward the street. She held her breath, afraid that he wasn't going to make it.

Suddenly her eyes were drawn to the first hole into which he had dumped Biosan. The shape-changer surged up from underground, gushed out onto the floor of the pit. It looked like a tide of thick, congealed sewage; except for where it was stained by the bacterial solution, it was now darker than it had been before. It rippled, writhed, and churned more agitatedly than ever, which was perhaps a sign of degeneration. The milky stain of infection was spreading visibly through the creature: Blisters formed, swelled, popped; ugly sores broke open and wept a watery yellow fluid. Within only a few seconds, at least a ton of the amorphous flesh had spewed out of the hole. All of it was apparently afflicted with disease, and still it came, ever faster, a lavalike outpouring, a wild spouting of living, gelatinous tissue. Even more of the beast began to issue from another hole. The great oozing ma.s.s lapped across the rubble, formed pseudopods-shapeless, flailing arms-that rose into the air but quickly fell back in foaming, spasming seizures. And then, from still other holes, there came a ghastly sound: the voices of a thousand men, women, children, and animals, all crying out in pain, horror, and bleak despair. It was an agonized wail of such heartbreak that Jenny could not bear it-especially when a few voices sounded uncannily familiar, like old friends and good neighbors. She put her hands to her ears, but to no avail; the roar of the suffering mult.i.tude still penetrated. It was, of course, the death-cry of only one creature, the shape-changer, but since it had no voice of its own, it was forced to employ the voices of its victims, expressing its inhuman emotions and unhuman terror in intensely human terms.

It surged across the rubble. Toward Bryce.

Halfway up the slope, Bryce heard the noise behind him change from the wailing of a thousand lonely voices to a roar of rage.

He dared to look back. He saw that three or four tons of amorphous tissue had fountained into the pit, and more was still gushing forth, as if the bowels of the earth were emptying. The ancient enemy's flesh was shuddering, leaping, bursting with leprous lesions. It tried to create winged phantoms, but it was too weak or unstable to competently mimic anything; the half-realized birds and enormous insects either decomposed into a sludge that resembled pus or collapsed back into the pool of tissue beneath them. The ancient enemy was coming toward Bryce nonetheless, coming in a quivering-churning frenzy; it had flowed almost to the base of the slope, and now it was sending degenerating yet still powerful tentacles toward his heels.

He turned away from it and redoubled his efforts to reach the rim of the pit.

The two big windows of the Towne Bar and Grille, in front of which Lisa was standing, exploded out onto the sidewalk. A shard nicked her forehead, but she was otherwise unhurt, for most of the fragments landed on the sidewalk between her and the building.

An obscene, shadowy ma.s.s bulged through the broken windows.

Lisa stumbled backwards and nearly fell off the curb.

The foul, oozing flesh appeared to fill the entire building out of which it extruded itself.

Something snaked around Lisa's ankle.

Tendrils of amorphous flesh had slithered out of the drain grate in the gutter behind her. They had taken hold of her.

Screaming, she tried to pull free of them-and found that it was surprisingly easy to do so. The thin, wormlike tentacles fell away. Lesions broke out along the length of them; they split open, and in seconds they were reduced to inanimate slime.

The disgusting ma.s.s that burgeoned out of the barroom was also succ.u.mbing to the bacteria. Gobs of foaming tissue fell away and splattered the sidewalk. Still, it continued to gush forth, forming tentacles, and the tentacles weaved through the air, seeking Lisa, but with the tentative groping of something sick and blind.

Tal saw the Towne Bar and Grille's windows explode on the other side of the street, but before he could take one step to help Lisa, windows shattered behind him, too, in the lobby and dining room of the Hilltop Inn, and he turned in surprise, and the front doors of the inn flew open, and from both the doors and the windows came tons of protoplasm that pulsated (Oh, Jesus, how big was the G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing? As big as the whole town? As big as the mountain out of which it had come? Infinite?) and roiled, sprouting a score of lashing tentacles as it surged forth, marked by disease but noticeably more active than the extension of itself that it had sent after Bryce in the pit, and before Tal could raise the nozzle of his sprayer and depress the pressure-release lever, the cold tentacles found him, gripped him with dismaying strength, and then he was being dragged across the pavement, toward the inn, toward the oozing wall of slime that was still rupturing through the shattered windows, and the tentacles began to burn through his clothing, he felt his skin burning, blistering, he howled, the digestive acids were eating into his flesh, he felt brands of fire across and arms, he felt one fiery line along his left thigh, he remembered how a tentacle had beheaded Frank Autry by eating swiftly through the man's neck, he thought of his Aunt Becky, he- Jenny dodged a tentacle that took a swipe at her.

She sprayed Tal and all the snaky appendages-three of them-that had hold of him.

Decomposing tissue sloughed off the tentacles, but they didn't degenerate entirely.

Even where she hadn't sprayed, the creature's flesh broke out in new sores. The entire beast was contaminated; it was being eaten up from within. It couldn't last much longer. Maybe just long enough to kill Tal Whitman.

He was screaming, thrashing.

Frantic, Jenny let go of the sprayer's hose and moved in closer to Tal. She grabbed one of the tentacles that gripped him, and she tried to pry it loose.

Another tentacle clutched at her.

She twisted out of its fumbling grip and realized that, if she could evade it so easily, it must be swiftly losing its battle with the bacteria.

In her hands, pieces of the tentacle came away, chunks of dead tissue that stank horribly.

Gagging, she clawed harder than ever, and the tentacle finally dropped away from Tal, and then so did the other two, and he collapsed in a heap on the pavement, gasping and bleeding.

The blind, groping tentacles never touched Lisa. They receded into the vomitous ma.s.s that had poured out of the front of the Towne Bar and Grille. Now, that heaving monstrosity spasmed and flung off foaming, infected gobbets of itself.

"It's dying," Lisa said aloud, although no one was close enough to hear her. "The Devil is dying."

Bryce crawled on his belly the last few-almost vertical-feet of the pit wall. He reached the rim at last and pulled himself out.

He looked down the way he had come. The shape-changer hadn't gotten close to him. An incredibly large, gelatinous lake of amorphous tissue lay at the bottom of the pit, pooling over and around the debris, but it was virtually inactive. A few human and animal forms still tried to rise, but the ancient enemy was losing its talent for mimicry. The phantoms were imperfect and sluggish. The shape-changer was slowly disappearing under a layer of its own dead and decomposing tissue.

Jenny knelt beside Tal.

His arms and chest were marked by livid wounds. A raw, weeping wound extended the length of his left thigh, as well.

"Pain?" she asked.

"When it had me, yeah, a lot. Not so much now," he said, although his expression left no doubt that he was still suffering.

The enormous bulk of slime that had erupted from the Hilltop Inn now began to withdraw, retreating into the plumbing from which it had risen, leaving behind the steaming residue of its decomposing flesh.

A Mephistophelian retreat. Back to the netherworld. Back to the other side of h.e.l.l.

Satisfied that they weren't in any immediate danger, Jenny looked more closely at Tal's wounds.

"Bad?" he asked.

"Not as bad as I would've thought." She forced him to lie back. "The skin's eaten away in places. And some of the fatty tissue underneath."

"Veins? Arteries?"

"No. It was weak when it took hold of you, too weak to burn that deep. A lot of ruined capillaries in the surface tissue. That's the cause of the bleeding. But there's not even as much blood as you'd expect. I'll get my bag as soon as it seems safe to go inside, and I'll treat you for infection. I think maybe you ought to be in the hospital for a couple of days, for observation, just to be sure there's no delayed allergic reaction to the acid or any toxins. But I really think you'll be just fine."

"You know what?" he said.

"What?"

"You're talking like it's all over."

Jenny blinked.

She looked up at the inn. She could see through the smashed windows, into the dining room. There was no sign of the ancient enemy.

She turned and looked across the street. Lisa and Bryce were making their way around to this side of the pit.

"I think it is," she said to Tal. "I think it's all over."

43.

Apostles Fletcher Kale was no longer afraid. He sat beside Jeeter and watched the Satanic flesh metamorphose into ever more bizarre forms.

Gradually, he became aware that the calf of his right leg itched. He scratched continuously, absentmindedly, while he watched the truly miraculous transformation of the demonic visitor.

Restricted to the caves since Sunday, Jeeter knew nothing about what had happened in Snowfield. Kale recounted what little he knew, and Jeeter was thrilled. "You know, what it is, it's a sign. What He did in Snowfield is like a sign tellin' the world His time is comin'. His reign is gonna begin soon. He'll rule the earth for a thousand years. That's what the Bible itself says, man-a thousand years of h.e.l.l on earth. Everyone'll suffer-except you and me and others like us. 'Cause we're the chosen ones, man. We're His apostles. We'll rule the world with Lucifer, and it'll belong to us, and we'll be able to do any f.u.c.kin' outrageous thing to anybody we happen to want to do it to. Anybody. And no one'll touch us, no one, ever. You understand?" Terr demanded, gripping Kale's arm, voice rising with excitement, trembling with evangelical pa.s.sion, a pa.s.sion that was easily communicated to Kale and stirred in him a dizzying, unholy rapture.

With Jeeter's hand on his arm, Kale imagined he could feel the hot gaze of the red and yellow eye tattoo. It was a magical eye that peered into his soul and recognized a certain dark kinship.

Kale cleared his throat, scratched his ankle, scratched his calf. He said, "Yeah. Yeah, I understand. I really do."

The column of slime in the center of the room began to form a whiplike tail. Wings emerged, spread, flapped once. Arms grew, large and sinewy. The hands were enormous, with powerful fingers that tapered into talons. At the top of the column, a face took shape in the oozing ma.s.s: chin and jaws like chiseled granite; a gash of a mouth with thin lips, crooked yellow teeth, viperous fangs; a nose like the snout of a pig; mad, crimson eyes, not remotely human, like the prismed eyes of a fly. Horns sprouted on the forehead, a concession to Christian myth-conceptions. The hair appeared to be worms; they glistened, fat and green-black, writhing continuously in tangled knots.

The cruel mouth opened. The Devil said, "Do you believe?"

"Yes," Terr said in adoration. "You are my lord."

"Yes," Kale said shakily. "I believe." He scratched at his right calf. "I do believe."

"Are you mine?" the apparition asked.

"Yes, always," Terr said, and Kale agreed.

"Will you ever forsake me?" it asked.

"No."

"Never."

"Do you wish to please me?"

"Yes," Terr said, and Kale said, "Whatever you want."

"I will be leaving soon," the manifestation said. "It is not yet my time to rule. That day is coming. Soon. But there are conditions that must be met, prophesies to be fulfilled. Then I will come again, not merely to deliver a sign to all mankind, but to stay for a thousand years. Until then, I will leave you with the protection of my power, which is vast; no one will be able to harm or thwart you. I grant you life everlasting. I promise that, for you, h.e.l.l will be a place of great pleasure and immense rewards. In return, you must complete five tasks."

He told them what He would have them do to prove themselves and please Him. As He spoke, He broke out in pustules, hives, and lesions that wept a thin yellow fluid.

Kale wondered what significance these sores might have, then realized Lucifer was the father of all disease. Perhaps this was a not-so-subtle reminder of the terrible plagues He could visit upon them if they were unwilling to undertake the five tasks.

The flesh foamed, dissolved. Gobs of it dropped to the floor; a few were flung against the walls as the figure heaved and writhed. The Devil's tail dropped from the main body and wriggled on the floor; in seconds, it was reduced to inanimate muck that stank of death.

When he finished telling them what He wanted of them, He said, "Do we have a bargain?"

"Yes," Terr said, and Kale said, "Yes, a bargain."

The face of Lucifer, covered with running sores, melted away. The horns and wings melted, too. Churning, seeping a puslike paste, the thing sank down into the floor, disappeared into the river below.

Strangely, the odorous dead tissue did not vanish. Ectoplasm was supposed to disappear when the supernatural presence had departed, but this stuff remained: foul, nauseating, glistening in the gaslight.

Gradually, Kale's rapture faded. He began to feel the cold radiating from the limestone, through the seat of his pants.

Gene Terr coughed. "Well... well now ... wasn't that somethin'?"

Kale scratched his itchy calf. Beneath the itchiness, there was now a dull little spot of pain, throbbing.

It had reached the end of its feeding period. In fact, it had overfed. It had intended to move toward the sea later today, through a series of caverns, subterranean channels, and underground watercourses. It had wanted to travel out beyond the edge of the continent, into the ocean trenches. Countless times before, it had pa.s.sed its lethargic periods-sometimes lasting many years-in the cool, dark depths of the sea. Down where the pressure was so enormous that few forms of life could survive, down where absolute lightlessness and silence provided little stimulation, the ancient enemy was able to slow its metabolic processes; down there, it could enter a much-desired dreamlike state, in which it could ruminate in perfect solitude.

But it would never reach the sea. Never again. It was dying.

The concept of its own death was so new that it had not yet adjusted to the grim reality. In the geological substructure of Snowtop Mountain, the shape-changer continued to slough off diseased portions of itself. It crept deeper, deeper, across the underworld river that flowed in Stygian darkness, deeper still, farther down into the infernal regions of the earth, into the chambers of Orcus, Hades, Osiris, Erebus, Minos, Loki, Satan. Each time that it believed itself free of the devouring microorganism, a peculiar tingling sensation arose at some point in the amorphous tissue, a wrongness, and then there came a pain quite unlike human pain, and it was forced to rid itself of even more infected flesh. It went deeper, down into jahanna, into Gehenna, into Sheol, Abbadon, into the Pit. Over the centuries it had eagerly a.s.sumed the role of Satan and other evil figures, which men had attributed to it, had amused itself by catering to their superst.i.tions. Now, it was condemned to a fate consistent with the mythology it had helped create. It was bitterly aware of the irony. It had been cast down. It had been d.a.m.ned. It would dwell in darkness and despair for the rest of its life-which could be measured in hours.

At least it had left behind two apostles. Kale and Terr. They would do its work even after it had ceased to exist. They would spread terror and take revenge. They were perfectly suited to the job.

Now, reduced to only a brain and minimal supporting tissue, the shape-changer cowered in a chthonian niche of densely packed rock and waited for the end. It spent its last minutes seething with hatred, raging at all mankind.

Kale rolled up his trousers and looked at the calf of his right leg. In the lantern light, he saw two small red spots; they were swollen, itchy, and very tender.

"Insect bites," he said.