Phantoms

he felt his skin burning, blistering, he howled, the digestive acids were eating into his flesh, he felt brands of fire across and arms, he felt one fiery line along his left thigh, he remembered how a tentacle had beheaded Frank Autry by eating swiftly through the man’s neck, he thought of his Aunt Becky, he—
     
    Jenny dodged a tentacle that took a swipe at her.
    She sprayed Tal and all the snaky appendages—three of them—that had hold of him.
    Decomposing tissue sloughed off the tentacles, but they didn’t degenerate entirely.
    Even where she hadn’t sprayed, the creature’s flesh broke out in new sores. The entire beast was contaminated; it was being eaten up from within. It couldn’t last much longer. Maybe just long enough to kill Tal Whitman.
    He was screaming, thrashing.
    Frantic, Jenny let go of the sprayer’s hose and moved in closer to Tal. She grabbed one of the tentacles that gripped him, and she tried to pry it loose.
    Another tentacle clutched at her.
    She twisted out of its fumbling grip and realized that, if she could evade it so easily, it must be swiftly losing its battle with the bacteria.
    In her hands, pieces of the tentacle came away, chunks of dead tissue that stank horribly.
    Gagging, she clawed harder than ever, and the tentacle finally dropped away from Tal, and then so did the other two, and he collapsed in a heap on the pavement, gasping and bleeding.
     
    The blind, groping tentacles never touched Lisa. They receded into the vomitous mass that had poured out of the front of the Towne Bar and Grille. Now, that heaving monstrosity spasmed and flung off foaming, infected gobbets of itself.
    “It’s dying,” Lisa said aloud, although no one was close enough to hear her. “The Devil is dying.”
     
    Bryce crawled on his belly for the last few, almost vertical feet of the pit wall. He reached the rim at last and pulled himself out.
    He looked down the way he had come. The shape-changer hadn’t gotten close to him. An incredibly large, gelatinous lake of amorphous tissue lay at the bottom of the pit, pooling over and around the debris, but it was virtually inactive. A few human and animal forms still tried to rise up, but the ancient enemy was losing its talent for mimicry. The phantoms were imperfect and sluggish. The shape-changer was slowly disappearing under a layer of its own dead and decomposing tissue.
     
    Jenny knelt beside Tal.
    His arms and chest were marked by livid wounds. A raw, weeping wound extended the length of his left thigh, as well.
    “Pain?” she asked.
    “When it had me, yeah, a lot. Not so much now,” he said, although his expression left no doubt that he was still suffering.
    The enormous bulk of slime that had erupted from the Hilltop Inn now began to withdraw, retreating into the plumbing from which it had risen, leaving behind the steaming residue of its decomposing flesh.
    A Mephistophelian retreat. Back to the netherworld. Back to the other side of Hell.
    Satisfied that they weren’t in any immediate danger, Jenny looked more closely at Tal’s wounds.
    “Bad?” he asked.
    “Not as bad as I would’ve thought.” She forced him to lie back. “The skin’s eaten away, in places. And some of the fatty tissue underneath.”
    “Veins? Arteries?”
    “No. It was weak when it took hold of you, too weak to burn that deep. A lot of ruined capillaries in the surface tissue. That’s the cause of the bleeding. But there’s not even as much blood as you’d expect. I’ll get my bag as soon as it seems safe to go inside, and I’ll treat you for infection. I think maybe you ought to be in the hospital for a couple of days, for observation, just to be sure there’s no delayed allergic reaction to the acid or any toxins. But I really think you’ll be just fine.”
    “You know what?” he said.
    “What?”
    “You’re talking like it’s all over.”
    Jenny blinked.
    She looked up at the inn. She could see through the smashed windows, into the dining room. There was no sign of the ancient enemy.
    She turned and looked across the street. Lisa and Bryce were making their way around to this side of the pit.
    “I think it is,” she said to Tal. “I think it’s all over.”
     

Chapter 43
    Apostles
     
    Fletcher Kale was no longer afraid. He sat beside Jeeter and watched the Satanic flesh metamorphose into ever more bizarre forms.
    Gradually, he became aware that the calf of his right leg itched. He scratched continuously, absentmindedly, while