Phantoms

sidewalk?
    That primitive fear again.
    That sense of evil.
    That superstitious terror.
    “Come on,” she said to Lisa.
    “Where?”
    “In the street. Nothing can get us out there—”
    “—without our seeing it coming,” Lisa finished, understanding.
    They went into the middle of the moonlit roadway.
    “How long until the sheriff gets here?” Lisa asked.
    “At least fifteen or twenty minutes yet.”
    The town’s lights all came on at once. A brilliant shower of electric radiance stung their eyes with surprise—then darkness again.
    Jenny raised the revolver, not knowing where to point it.
    Her throat was fear-parched, her mouth dry.
    A blast of sound—an ungodly wail—slammed through Snowfield.
    Jenny and Lisa both cried out in shock and turned, bumping against each other, squinting at the moon-tinted darkness.
    Then silence.
    Then another shriek.
    Silence.
    “What?” Lisa asked.
    “The firehouse!”
    It came again: a short burst of the piercing siren from the east side of St. Moritz Way, from the Snowfield Volunteer Fire Company stationhouse.
    Bong!
    Jenny jumped again, twisted around.
    Bong! Bong!
    “A church bell,” Lisa said.
    “The Catholic church, west on Vail.”
    The bell tolled once more—a loud, deep, mournful sound that reverberated in the blank windows along the dark length of Skyline Road and in other, unseen windows throughout the dead town.
    “Someone has to pull a rope to ring a bell,” Lisa said. “Or push a button to set off a siren. So there must be someone else here beside us.”
    Jenny said nothing.
    The siren sounded again, whooped and then died, whooped and died, and the church bell began to toll again, and the bell and the siren cried out at the same time, again and again, as if announcing the advent of someone of tremendous importance.
     
    In the mountains, a mile from the turnoff to Snowfield, the night landscape was rendered solely in black and moon-silver. The looming trees were not green at all; they were somber shapes, mostly shadows, with albescent fringes of vaguely defined needles and leaves.
    In contrast, the shoulders of the highway were blood-colored by the light that splashed from the revolving beacons atop the three Ford sedans which all bore the insignia of the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Department on their front doors.
    Deputy Frank Autry was driving the second car, and Deputy Stu Wargle was slouched down on the passenger’s seat.
    Frank Autry was lean, sinewy, with neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper hair. His features were sharp and economical, as if God hadn’t been in the mood to waste anything the day that He had edited Frank’s genetic file: hazel eyes under a finely chiseled brow; a narrow, patrician nose; a mouth that was neither too parsimonious nor too generous; small, nearly lobeless ears tucked flat against the head. His mustache was most carefully groomed.
    He wore his uniform precisely the way the service manual said he should: black boots polished to a mirrored shine, brown slacks with a knife-edge crease, leather belt and hoister kept bright and supple with lanolin, brown shirt crisp and fresh.
    “It isn’t fucking fair,” Stu Wargle said.
    “Commanding officers don’t always have to be fair—just right,” Frank said.
    “What commanding officer?” Wargle asked querulously.
    “Sheriff Hammond. Isn’t that who you mean?”
    “I don’t think of him as no commanding officer.”
    “Well, that’s what he is,” Frank said.
    “He’d like to break my ass,” Wargle said. “The bastard.”
    Frank said nothing.
    Before signing up with the county constabulary, Frank Autry had been a career military officer. He had retired from the United States Army at the age of forty-four, after twenty-five years of distinguished service, and had moved back to Santa Mira, the town in which he’d been born and raised. He had intended to open a small business of some kind in order to supplement his pension and to keep himself occupied, but he hadn’t been able to find anything that looked interesting. Gradually, he had come to realize that, for him at least, a job without a uniform and without a chain of command and without an element of physical risk and without a sense of public service was just not a job worth having. Three years ago, at the age of forty-six, he had signed up with the sheriff’s department, and in spite of the demotion from major, which was the rank he’d held in the service, he had been happy ever since.
    That is, he had