Phantoms

saying the shape-changer here in Snowfield is Satan?”
    “Well… in a way, yes.”
    Frank Autry shook his head. “No. I’m not a man who believes in spooks, Dr. Flyte.”
    “Nor am I,” Flyte assured him. “I’m not arguing that this thing is a supernatural being. It isn’t. It’s real, a creature of flesh—although not flesh like ours. It’s not a spirit or a devil. Yet… in a way… I believe it is Satan. Because, you see, I believe it was this creature—or another like it, another monstrous survivor from the Mesozoic Era—that inspired the myth of Satan. In prehistoric times, men must have encountered one of these things, and some of them must have lived to tell about it. They naturally described their experiences in the terminology of myth and superstition. I suspect most of the demonic figures in the world’s various religions are actually reports of these shape-changers, reports passed down through countless generations before they were at last committed to hieroglyphics, scrolls, and then print. They were reports of a very rare, very real, very dangerous beast… but described in the language of religious myth.”
    Jenny found this part of Flyte’s thesis to be both crazy and brilliant, unlikely yet convincing. “The thing somehow absorbs the knowledge and memories of those on whom it feeds,” she said, “so it knows that many of its victims see it as the Devil, and it gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of playing that role.”
    Bryce said, “It seems to enjoy mocking us.”
    Sara Yamaguchi tucked her long hair behind her ears and said, “Dr. Flyte, how about explaining this in scientific terms. How can such a creature exist? How can it function biologically? What’s your scientific rationalization, your theory?”
    Before Flyte could answer her, it came.
    High on one wall, near the ceiling, a metal grille covering a heating duct suddenly popped from its screws. It flew into the room, crashed into an empty table, slid off the table, clattered-rattled-banged onto the floor.
    Jenny and the others leapt up from their chairs.
    Lisa screamed, pointed.
    The shape-changer bulged out of the duct. It hung there on the wall. Dark. Wet. Pulsing. Like a mass of glistening, bloody snot suspended from the edge of a nostril.
    Bryce and Tal reached for their revolvers, then hesitated. There was nothing whatsoever that they could do.
    The thing continued to surge out of the duct, swelling, rippling, growing into an obscene, gnarled, shifting lump the size of a man. Then, still flowing out of the wall, it began to slide down. It formed into a mound on the floor. Much bigger than a man now, still oozing out of the duct. Growing, growing.
    Jenny looked at Flyte.
    The professor’s face could not settle on a single expression. It tried wonder, then terror, then awe, then disgust, then awe and terror and wonder again.
    The viscous, ever-churning mass of dark protoplasm was now as large as three or four men, and still more of the vile stuff gushed from the heating duct in a revolting, vomitous flow.
    Lisa gagged and averted her face.
    But Jenny couldn’t take her eyes from the thing. There was a grotesque fascination that couldn’t be denied.
    In the already enormous agglomeration of shapeless tissue that had extruded itself into the room, limbs began to form, although none of them maintained its shape for more than a few seconds. Human arms, both male and female, reached out as if seeking help. The thin, flailing arms of children were formed from the jellied tissue, some of them with their small hands open in a silent, pathetic plea. It was difficult to keep in mind that these were not the arms of children trapped within the shape-changer; they were imitation, phantom arms, a part of it , not a part of any child. And claws. A startling, frightening variety of claws and animal limbs appeared out of the protoplasmic soup. There were insect parts, too, enormous, hugely exaggerated, terrifyingly frenetic and grasping. But all of these swiftly melted back into the formless protoplasm almost as soon as they took shape.
    The shape-changer bulged across the width of the room. It was now larger than an elephant.
    As the thing engaged upon a continuous, relentless, mysterious pattern of apparently purposeless change, Jenny and the others edged back toward the windows.
    Outside, in the street, the fog roiled in its own formless dance, as if it were a ghostly reflection of the shape-changer.
    Flyte spoke with a