Phantoms

poked through the slime that had sheathed it. But it wasn’t a hand any more. God, no. It was only bones. Skeletal fingers, stiff and white, picked clean. The flesh had been eaten away.
    She gagged, stumbled backwards, turned to the gutter, vomited.
     
    Jenny pulled Lisa two steps back, farther away from the thing with which Gordy was grappling.
    The girl was screaming.
    The slime oozed around the bony hand, reclaimed those denuded fingers, enfolded them, sheathed them in a glove of pulsing tissue. In a couple of seconds, the bones were gone as well, dissolved, and the glove folded up into a ball and melted back into the main body of the organism. The thing writhed obscenely, churned within itself, swelled, bulged here, formed a concavity there, now a concavity where the bulge had been, now a swelling nodule where the concavity had been, feverishly changing, as if even a moment’s stillness meant death. It pulled itself up Gordy’s arms, and he struggled desperately to rid himself of it, and as it progressed toward his shoulders, it left nothing behind it, nothing, no stumps, no bones; it devoured everything. It began to spread across his chest, too, and wherever it went, Gordy simply disappeared into it and did not come out, as if he were sinking into a vat of fiercely corrosive acid.
    Lisa looked away from the dying man and clung to Jenny, sobbing.
     
    Gordy’s screams were unbearable.
    Tal’s revolver was already in his hand. He hurried toward Gordy.
    Bryce stopped him. “Are you crazy? Tal, damn it, there’s nothing we can do.”
    “We can put him out of his misery.”
    “Don’t get too close to that damned thing!”
    “We don’t have to get too close to get a good shot.”
    Gordy’s eyes became more tortured by the second, and now he began to scream for Jesus’s help, and he drummed his heels on the pavement, arched his back, vibrated with the strain, trying to push up from under the growing weight of the nightmarish assailant.
    Bryce winced. “All right. Quickly.”
    They both edged nearer to the thrashing, dying deputy and opened fire. Several shots struck him. His screaming stopped.
    They quickly backed off.
    They didn’t try to kill the thing that was feeding on Gordy. They knew bullets had no effect on it, and they were beginning to understand why. Bullets killed by destroying vital organs and essential blood vessels. But from the look of it, this thing had no organs and no conventional circulatory system. No skeleton, either. It seemed to be a mass of undifferentiated—yet highly sophisticated—protoplasm. A bullet would pierce it, but the amazingly malleable flesh would flow into the channel carved by the bullet, and the wound would heal in an instant.
    The beast fed more frantically than before, in a silent frenzy, and in seconds there was no sign of Gordy at all. He had ceased to exist. There was only the shape-changer, grown larger, much bigger than the dog that it had been, even bigger than Gordy, whose substance it now incorporated.
    Tal and Bryce rejoined the others, but they didn’t run for the inn. As the twilight was slowly squeezed out of the sky in a vise of darkness, they watched the thing on the sidewalk.
    It began to take a new shape. In only seconds, all of the free-form protoplasm had been molded into a huge, menacing timber wolf, and the creature threw its head back and howled at the sky.
    Then its face rippled, and elements of its ferocious countenance shifted, and Tal could see human features trying to rise up through the image of a wolf. Human eyes replaced the animal’s eyes, and there was part of a human chin. Gordy’s eyes? Gordy’s chin? The lycanthropic metamorphosis lasted only seconds, and then the thing’s features flowed back into the wolf form.
    Werewolf, Tal thought.
    But he knew it wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t anything . The wolf identity, as real and frightening as it looked, was as false as all the other identities.
    For a moment it stood there, confronting them, baring its enormous and wickedly sharp teeth, far greater in size than any wolf that had ever stalked the plains and forests of this world. Its eyes blazed with the muddy-bloody color of the sunset.
    It’s going to attack, Tal thought.
    He fired at it. The bullets penetrated but left no visible wound, drew no blood, caused no apparent pain.
    The wolf turned away from Tal, with a sort of cool indifference to the gunfire, and trotted toward the open manhole, into which the