Phantoms

Blisters formed, swelled, popped; ugly sores broke open and wept a watery yellow fluid. Within only a few seconds, at least a ton of the amorphous flesh had spewed out of the hole. All of it was apparently afflicted with disease, and still it came, ever faster, a lava-like outpouring, a wild spouting of living, gelatinous tissue. Even more of the beast began to issue from another hole. The great oozing mass lapped across the rubble, formed pseudopods—shapeless, flailing arms—that rose into the air but quickly fell back in foaming, spasming seizures. And then, from still other holes, there came a ghastly sound: the voices of a thousand men, women, children, and animals, all crying out in pain, horror, and bleak despair. It was an agonized wail of such heartbreak that Jenny could not bear it—especially when a few voices sounded uncannily familiar, like old friends and good neighbors. She put her hands to her ears, but to no avail; the roar of the suffering multitude still penetrated. It was, of course, the death-cry of only one creature, the shape-changer, but since it had no voice of its own, it was forced to employ the voices of its victims, expressing its inhuman emotions and unhuman terror in intensely human terms.
    It surged across the rubble. Toward Bryce.
     
    Halfway up the slope, Bryce heard the noise behind him change from the wailing of a thousand lonely voices to a roar of rage.
    He dared to look back. He saw that three or four tons of amorphous tissue had fountained into the pit, and more was still gushing forth, as if the bowels of the earth were emptying. The ancient enemy’s flesh was shuddering, leaping, bursting with leprous lesions. It tried to create winged phantoms, but it was too weak or unstable to competently mimic anything; the half-realized birds and enormous insects either decomposed into a sludge that resembled pus or collapsed back into the pool of tissue beneath them. The ancient enemy was coming toward Bryce nonetheless, coming in a quivering-churning frenzy; it had flowed almost to the base of the slope, and now it was sending degenerating yet still powerful tentacles toward his heels.
    He turned away from it and redoubled his efforts to reach the rim of the pit.
     
    The two big windows of the Towne Bar and Grille, in front of which Lisa was standing, exploded out onto the sidewalk. A shard nicked her forehead, but she was otherwise unhurt, for most of the fragments landed on the sidewalk between her and the building.
    An obscene, shadowy mass bulged through the broken windows.
    Lisa stumbled backwards and nearly fell off the curb.
    The foul, oozing flesh appeared to fill the entire building out of which it extruded itself.
    Something snaked around Lisa’s ankle.
    Tendrils of amorphous flesh had slithered out of the drain grate in the gutter behind her. They had taken hold of her.
    Screaming, she tried to pull free of them—and found that it was surprisingly easy to do so. The thin, wormlike tentacles fell away. Lesions broke out along the length of them; they split open, and in seconds they were reduced to inanimate slime.
    The disgusting mass that burgeoned out of the barroom was also succumbing to the bacteria. Gobs of foaming tissue fell away and splattered the sidewalk. Still, it continued to gush forth, turning tentacles, and the tentacles weaved through the air, seeking Lisa, but with the tentative groping of something sick and blind.
     
    Tal saw the Towne Bar and Grille’s windows explode on the other side of the street, but before he could take one step to help Lisa, windows shattered behind him, too, in the lobby and dining room of the Hilltop Inn, and he turned in surprise, and the front doors of the inn flew open, and from both the doors and the windows came tons of protoplasm that pulsated (Oh, Jesus, how big was the goddamned thing? As big as the whole town? As big as the mountain out of which it had come? Infinite?) and roiled, sprouting a score of lashing tentacles as it surged forth, marked by disease but noticeably more active than the extension of itself that it had sent after Bryce in the pit, and before Tal could raise the nozzle of his sprayer and depress the pressure-release lever, the cold tentacles found him, gripped him with dismaying strength, and then he was being dragged across the pavement, toward the inn, toward the oozing wall of slime that was still rupturing through the shattered windows, and the tentacles began to burn through his clothing,