Phantoms

now,” Hammond said.
    Timothy said, “But who were those people?”
    “They’re not actually people. They’re just phantoms. Mimicry. Don’t you get it? In three different voices, it just offered you safe passage again. The ancient enemy, Doctor.”
    Timothy looked at the other four men in the room. They were all staring intently at the black conference box from which Hammond’s voice—and the voices of the creature—had issued.
    Clutching a wad of already sodden paper tissues in one hand, Timothy wiped his sweat-slick face again. “I’ll come.”
    Now, everyone in the room looked at him.
    On the telephone, Sheriff Hammond said, “Doctor, there’s no good reason to believe that it’ll keep its promise. Once you’re here, you may very well be a dead man, too.”
    “But if it’s intelligent…”
    “That doesn’t mean it plays fair,” Hammond said. “In fact, all of us up here are certain of one thing: This creature is the very essence of evil. Evil, Dr. Flyte. Would you trust in the Devil’s promise?”
    The child’s voice came on the line again, still lilting and sweet: “If you come, Dr. Flyte, I’ll not only spare you, but these six people who’re trapped here. I’ll let them go if you come play with me. But if you don’t come, I’ll take these pigs. I’ll crush them. I’ll squeeze the blood and shit out of them, squeeze them into pulp, and use them up.”
    Those words were spoken in light, innocent, childlike tones—which somehow made them far more frightening than if they had been shouted in a basso profundo rage.
    Timothy’s heart was pounding.
    “That settles it,” he said. “I’ll come. I have no choice.”
    “Don’t come on our account,” Hammond said. “It might spare you because it calls you its Saint Matthew, its Mark, its Luke and John. But it sure as hell won’t spare us, no matter what it says.”
    “I’ll come,” Timothy insisted.
    Hammond hesitated. Then: “Very well. I’ll have one of my men drive you to the Snowfield roadblock. From there, you’ll have to come alone. I can’t risk another man. Do you drive?”
    “Yes, sir,” Timothy said. “You provide the car, and I’ll get there by myself.”
    The line went dead.
    “Hello?” Timothy said. “Sheriff?”
    No answer.
    “Are you there? Sheriff Hammond?”
    Nothing.
    It had cut them off.
    Timothy looked up at Sal Corello, Charlie Mercer, and the two men whose names he didn’t know.
    They were all staring at him as if he were already dead and lying in a casket.
    But if I die in Snowfield, if the shape-changer takes me, he thought, there’ll be no casket. No grave. No everlasting peace.
    “I’ll drive you as far as the roadblock,” Charlie Mercer said. “I’ll drive you myself.”
    Timothy nodded.
    It was time to go.
     

Chapter 36
    Face to Face
     
    At 3:12 A.M., Snowfield’s church bells began to clang.
    In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, Bryce got up from his chair. The others rose, too.
    The firehouse siren wailed.
    Jenny said, “Flyte must be here.”
    The six of them went outside.
    The streetlamps were flashing off and on, casting leaping marionette shadows through the shifting banks of fog.
    At the foot of Skyline Road, a car turned the corner. Its headlights speared upward, imparting a silvery sheen to the mist.
    The streetlamps stopped blinking, and Bryce stepped into the soft cascade of yellow light beneath one of them, hoping that Flyte would be able to see him through the veils of fog.
    The bells continued to peal, and the siren shrieked, and the car crawled slowly up the long hill. It was a green and white sheriff’s department cruiser. It pulled to the curb and stopped ten feet from where Bryce stood; the driver extinguished the headlights.
    The driver’s door opened, and Flyte got out. He wasn’t what Bryce had expected. He was wearing thick glasses that made his eyes appear abnormally large. His fine, white, tangled hair bristled in a halo around his head. Someone at headquarters had lent him an insulated jacket with the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Department seal on the left breast.
    The bells stopped ringing.
    The siren groaned to a throaty finish.
    The subsequent silence was profound.
    Flyte gazed around the fog-shrouded silence, listening and waiting.
    At last Bryce said, “Apparently, it’s not ready to show itself.”
    Flyte turned to him. “Sheriff Hammond?”
    “Yes. Let’s go inside and be comfortable while we wait.”
     
    The inn’s dining room. Hot