Phantoms

whom it wanted. Two thick tentacles snapped around Frank’s torso and dragged him away from the others.
    Kicking, flailing with his fists, clawing at the thing that held him, Frank cried out wordlessly, face contorted with horror.
    Everyone was screaming now—even Bryce, even Tal.
    Bryce went after Frank. Clutched his right arm. Tried to pull him away from the beast, which was relentlessly reeling him in.
    “Get it off me! Get it off me!” Frank shouted.
    Bryce tried peeling one of the tentacles away from the deputy.
    Another of the thick, slimy appendages swept up from the floor, whirled, whipped, struck Bryce with tremendous force, sent him sprawling.
    Frank was lifted off the floor and held in midair. His eyes bulged as he looked down at the dark, oozing, changing bulk of the ancient enemy. He kicked and fought to no avail.
    Yet another pseudopod erupted from the central mass of the shape-changer and rose into the air, trembling with savage eagerness. Along part of the tentacle’s repulsive length, the mottled gray-maroon-red-brown skin seemed to dissolve. Raw, weeping tissue appeared.
    Lisa gagged.
    It wasn’t just the sight of the suppurating flesh that was loathsome and sickening. The foul odor had gotten stronger, too.
    A yellowish fluid began to drip from the open wound in the tentacle. Where the drops struck the floor, they sizzled and foamed and ate into the tile.
    Jenny heard someone say, “Acid!”
    Frank’s screaming became a desperate, piercing shriek of terror and despair.
    The acid-dripping tentacle slipped sinuously around the deputy’s neck and drew as tight as a garrote.
    “Oh, Jesus, no!”
    “Don’t look,” Jenny told Lisa.
    The shape-changer was showing them how it had beheaded Jakob and Aida Liebermann. Like a child showing off.
    Frank Autry’s scream died in a bubbling, mucous-thick, blood-choked gurgle. The flesh-eating tentacle cut through his neck with startling quickness. Only a second or two after Frank was silenced, his head popped loose and fell to the floor, smashed into the tiles.
    Jenny tasted bile in the back of her throat, choked it down.
    Sara Yamaguchi was sobbing.
    The thing still held Frank’s headless body in midair. Now, in the mass of shapeless tissue from which the tentacles sprouted, a huge toothless mouth opened hungrily. It was more than large enough to swallow a man whole. The tentacles drew the deputy’s decapitated corpse into the gaping, ragged mouth. The dark flesh oozed around the body. Then the mouth closed up tight and ceased to exist.
    Frank Autry had ceased to exist, too.
     
    Bryce stared in shock at Frank’s severed head. The sightless eyes gazed at him, through him.
    Frank was gone. Frank, who had survived several wars, who had survived a life of dangerous work, had not survived this.
    Bryce thought of Ruth Autry. His heart, already jackhammering, twisted with grief as he pictured Ruth alone. She and Frank had been exceptionally close. Breaking the news to her would be painful.
    The tentacles shrank back into the pulsing glob of shapeless tissue; in a second or two, they were gone.
    The formless, rippling hulk filled a third of the room.
    Bryce could imagine it oozing swiftly through prehistoric swamps, blending with the muck, creeping up on its prey. Yes, it would have been more than a match for the dinosaurs.
    Earlier, he had believed that the shape-changer had spared him and a few of the others so that they could entice Flyte to Snowfield. Now he realized that wasn’t the case. It could have consumed them and then imitated their voices on the telephone, and Flyte would have been coaxed to Snowfield just as easily. It had saved them for some other reason. Perhaps it had spared them only in order to kill them, one at a time, in front of Flyte, so that Flyte would be able to see precisely how it functioned.
    Christ.
    The shape-changer towered over them, quivering gelatinously, its entire grotesque bulk pulsating as if with the unsynchronized beats of a dozen hearts.
    In a voice even shakier than Bryce felt, Sara Yamaguchi said, “I wish there was some way we could get a tissue sample. I’d give anything to be able to study it under a microscope… get some idea of the cell structure. Maybe we could find a weakness… a way to deal with it, maybe even a way to defeat it.”
    Flyte said, “I’d like to study it… just to be able to understand… just to know .”
    An extrusion of tissue oozed out from the center of the shapeless mass. It