Phantoms

want her with us, and what we want instead is to have fun with her. Or maybe we see a kid who’s run away from home, you know, sweet sixteen, some hitchhiker, and we pick her up, no matter whether she wants to come along or not. We give her some nose candy or hash, get her feelin’ good, then we bring her up here where it’s real remote, and what we do is we fuck her brains out for a couple days, turn her inside out, and then when none of us can get it up any more, we waste her in really interestin’ ways.”
    The demonic presence in the center of the room changed yet again. The multitude of hands melted away. A score of mouths opened along the dark length of it, every one filled with razor-edged fangs.
    Gene Terr glanced at this latest manifestation but didn’t seem frightened. In fact, Jeeter smiled at it.
    “Waste them?” Kale said. “You kill them?”
    “Yeah,” Jeeter said. “In interestin’ ways. We bury ‘em around here, too. Who’s ever gonna find the bodies in the middle of nowhere like this? It’s always a kick. Thrills. Until Sunday. Sunday afternoon late, we was out there in the grass by the cabin, drinkin’ and gangin’ a chick, and all of a sudden Jake Johnson comes out of the woods, bare-assed, like he figured on fuckin’ the bitch, too. At first I thought we’d have some fun with him. I figured, well, we’ll waste him when we waste the girl, get rid of the witness, you know, but before we can grab him, another Jake comes out of the woods, then a third—”
    “Just like what happened to me,” Kale said.
    “—and another one and another. We shot ‘em, hit ‘em square in the chest, in the face, but they didn’t go down, didn’t even pause, just kept comin’. So Little Willie, one of my main men, rushes the nearest one and uses a knife, but it doesn’t do no good. Instead, that Johnson grabs Willie, and he can’t break loose, and then all of a sudden like… well… Johnson isn’t Johnson any more. He’s just this thing , this bloody-lookin’ thing without no shape at all. The thing eats Willie… eats into him like… well, hell, it just sort of dissolves Willie, man. And the thing gets bigger, and then it turns into the craziest damn big wolf—”
    “Jesus,” Kale said.
    “—biggest wolf you ever saw, and then the other Jakes turn into other things, like big lizards with the nastiest jaws, but one of them wasn’t a lizard or a wolf but somethin’ I just can’t describe, and they all come after us. We can’t get to our bikes, man, ‘cause these things are between us and them, and so they kill a couple more of my guys, and then they start to herd us up the hill.”
    “Toward the caves,” Kale said. “That’s what they did to me.”
    “We never even knew about these caves,” Terr said. “So we get in here, way in here in the dark, and the things start killin’ more of us, man, killin’ us in the dark—”
    The fang-filled mouths vanished.
    “—and there’s all this screamin’, you know, and I couldn’t see where I was, so I crawled into a corner to hide, hoped they wouldn’t smell me out, though I figured for sure they would.”
    The blood-streaked tissue pulsed, rippled.
    “—and after a while the screamin’ stops. Everyone’s dead. It’s real quiet… and then I hear somethin’ movin’ around.”
    Kale was listening to Terr but staring at the column of slime. A different kind of mouth appeared, a sucker, like you might see on an exotic fish. It sucked greedily at the air, as if seeking flesh.
    Kale shuddered. Terr smiled.
    Other sucker-mouths began to form all over the creature.
    Still smiling, Jeeter said, “So I’m there in the dark, and I hear movement, but nothin’ comes at me. Instead, a light comes on. Faint at first, then brighter. It’s one of the Jakes, lightin’ a Coleman. He tells me to come with him. I don’t want to go. He grabs my arm, and his hand’s cold, man. Strong . He won’t let go, makes me come here, where that thing’s pushing up out of the floor, and I never seen anythin’ like that before; never, nowhere. I almost shit. He makes me sit down, sets the lantern with me, then just walks into the oozin’ crud over there, melts into it, and I’m left alone with the thing, which starts right away goin’ through all kinds of changes.”
    It was still going through changes, Kale saw. The suckerlike mouths vanished. Viciously pointed horns formed along the churning flanks of the creature; dozens of horns,