Phantoms

in front of the altar. They were dead, bruised, bloated.
    The flesh of the priest had begun to darken and to show other signs of imminent decomposition: His body was not in the same bizarre condition as all the others that had been found thus far. In his case, the discoloration was what you would expect of a day-old corpse.
    Frank Autry, Major Isley, and the other two deputies continued through the gate in the altar railing and stepped up into the chancel.
    Gordy wasn’t able to go with them. He was too badly shaken and had to sit in the front pew to keep from collapsing.
    After inspecting the chancel and glancing through the sacristy door, Frank used his walkie-talkie to call Bryce Hammond in the building next door. “Sheriff, we’ve found three here in the church. We need Doc Paige for positive IDs. But it’s especially grisly, so better leave Lisa in the vestibule with a couple of the guys.”
    “We’ll be there in two minutes,” the sheriff said.
    Frank came down from the chancel, through the gate in the railing, and sat down beside Gordy. He was holding the walkie-talkie in one hand and a gun in the other. “You’re a Catholic.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Sorry you had to see this.”
    “I’ll be okay,” Gordy said. “It’s no easier for you just because you’re not a Catholic.”
    “You know the priest?”
    “I think his name’s Father Callahan. I didn’t go to this church, though. I attended St. Andrew’s, down in Santa Mira.”
    Frank put the walkie-talkie down and scratched his chin. “From all the other indications we’ve had, it looked like the attack came yesterday evening, not long before Doc and Lisa came back to town. But now this… If these three died in the morning, during Mass—”
    “It was probably during Benediction,” Gordy said. “Not Mass.”
    “Benediction?”
    “The Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The Sunday evening service.”
    “Ah. Then it fits right in with the timing of the others.” He looked around at the empty pews. “What happened to the parishioners? Why are only the altarboys and the priest here?”
    “Well, not an awful lot of people come to Benediction,” Gordy said. “There were probably at least two or three others. But it took them.”
    “Why didn’t it just take everyone?”
    Gordy didn’t answer.
    “Why did it have to do something like this? ” Frank pressed.
    “To ridicule us. To mock us. To steal our hope,” Gordy sighed miserably.
    Frank stared at him.
    Gordy said, “Maybe some of us have been counting on God to get us through this alive. Probably most of us have. I know I’ve sure been praying a lot since we’ve been here. Probably you have, too. It knew we would do that. It knew we would ask God for help. So this is its way of letting us know that God can’t help us. Or at least that’s what it would like us to believe. Because that’s its way. To instill doubt about God. That’s always been its way.”
    Frank said, “You sound as if you know exactly what we’re up against here.”
    “Maybe,” Gordy said. He stared at the crucified priest, then turned to Frank again. “Don’t you know? Don’t you really, Frank?”
     
    After they left the church and went around the corner onto the cross street, they found two wrecked cars.
    A Cadillac Seville had run across the front lawn of the church rectory, mowing down the shrubbery in its path, and had collided with a porch post at one corner of the house. The post was nearly splintered in two. The porch roof was sagging.
    Tal Whitman squinted through the side window of the Caddy. “There’s a woman behind the wheel.”
    “Dead?” Bryce asked.
    “Yeah. But not from the accident.”
    At the other side of the car, Jenny tried to open the driver’s door. It was locked. All of the doors were locked, and all of the windows were rolled up tight.
    Nevertheless, the woman behind the wheel—Edna Gower; Jenny knew her—was like the other corpses. Darkly bruised. Swollen. A scream of terror frozen on her twisted face.
    “How could it get in there and kill her?” Tal wondered aloud.
    “Remember the locked bathroom at the Candleglow Inn,” Bryce said.
    “And the barricaded room at the Oxleys’,” Jenny said.
    Captain Arkham said, “It’s almost an argument for the general’s nerve gas theory.”
    Then Arkham unclipped a miniaturized geiger counter from his utility belt and carefully examined the car. But it wasn’t radiation that had killed the woman inside.
    The second