Phantoms

Paul Henderson.
    The other seven—his own men, Dr. Paige, and Lisa—crowded into the reception area, outside the wooden railing, in the Snowfield substation. They were quiet in the presence of Death.
    Paul Henderson had been a good man with decent instincts. His death was a terrible waste.
    Bryce said, “Dr. Paige?”
    She crouched down at the other side of the corpse. “Yes?”
    “You didn’t move the body?”
    “I didn’t even touch it, Sheriff.”
    “There was no blood?”
    “Just as you see it now. No blood.”
    “The wound might be in his back,” Bryce said.
    “Even if it was, there’d still be some blood on the floor.”
    “Maybe.” He stared into her striking eyes—green flecked with gold. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t disturb a body until the coroner had seen it. But this is an extraordinary situation. I’ll have to turn this man over.”
    “I don’t know if it’s safe to touch him.”
    “Someone has to do it,” Bryce said.
    Dr. Paige stood up, and everyone moved back a couple of steps.
    Bryce put a hand to Henderson’s purple-black, distorted face. “The skin is still slightly warm,” he said in surprise.
    Dr. Paige said, “I don’t think they’ve been dead very long.”
    “But a body doesn’t discolor and bloat in just a couple of hours,” Tal Whitman said.
    “ These bodies did,” the doctor said.
    Bryce rolled the corpse over, exposing the back. No wound.
    Hoping to find an unnatural depression in the skull, Bryce thrust his fingers into the dead man’s thick hair, testing the bone. If the deputy had been struck hard on the back of the head… But that wasn’t the case, either. The skull was intact.
    Bryce got to his feet. “Doctor, these two decapitations you mentioned… I guess we’d better have a look at those.”
    “Do you think one of your men could stay here with my sister?”
    “I understand your feelings,” Bryce said. “But I don’t really think it would be wise for me to split up my men. Maybe there isn’t any safety in numbers; then on the other hand, maybe there is .”
    “It’s okay,” Lisa assured Jenny. “I don’t want to be left behind, anyway.”
    She was a spunky kid. Both she and her older sister intrigued Bryce Hammond. They were pale, and their eyes were alive with dervish shadows of shock and horror—but they were coping a great deal better than most people would have in this bizarre, waking nightmare.
    The Paiges led the entire group out of the substation and down the street to the bakery.
    Bryce found it difficult to believe that Snowfield had been a normal, bustling village only a short while ago. The town felt as dry and burnt-out and dead as an ancient lost city in a far desert, off in a corner of the world where even the wind often forgot to go. The hush that cloaked the town seemed a silence of countless years, of decades, of centuries, a silence of unimaginably long epochs piled on epochs.
    Shortly after arriving in Snowfield, Bryce had used an electric bullhorn to call for a response from the silent houses. Now it seemed foolish ever to have expected an answer.
    They entered Liebermann’s Bakery through the front door and went into the kitchen at the rear of the building.
    On the butcher’s-block table, two severed hands gripped the handles of a rolling pin.
    Two severed heads peered through two oven doors.
    “Oh, my God,” Tal said quietly.
    Bryce shuddered.
    Clearly in need of support, Jake Johnson leaned against a tall white cabinet.
    Wargle said, “Christ, they were butchered like a couple of goddamned cows,” and then everyone was talking at once.
    “—why the hell anyone would—”
    “—sick, twisted—”
    “—so where are the bodies?”
    “Yes,” Bryce said, raising his voice to override the babble, “where are the bodies? Let’s find them.”
    For a couple of seconds, no one moved, frozen by the thought of what they might find.
    “Dr. Paige, Lisa—there’s no need for you to help us,” Bryce said. “Just stand aside.”
    The doctor nodded. The girl smiled in gratitude.
    With trepidation, they searched all the cupboards, opened all the drawers and doors. Gordy Brogan looked inside the big oven that wasn’t equipped with a porthole, and Frank Autry went into the walk-in refrigerator. Bryce inspected the small, spotless lavatory off one end of the kitchen. But they couldn’t find the bodies—or any other pieces of the bodies—of the two elderly people.
    “Why would the killers cart away the