Phantoms

he’d want is to be obscure.”
    The sheriff began sorting through the articles on the deep shelf that was above the sink, just under the mirror: a bottle of Mennen’s Skin Conditioner, lime-scented aftershave, a man’s electric razor, a pair of toothbrushes, toothpaste, combs, hairbrushes, a woman’s makeup kit. “From the looks of it, there were two people in this room. So maybe they both locked themselves in the bath—which means two of them vanished into thin air. But what did they write on the floor with?”
    “It looks as if it must’ve been an eyebrow pencil,” Lisa said.
    Jenny nodded. “I think so, too.”
    They searched the bathroom for a black eyebrow pencil. They couldn’t find it.
    “Terrific,” the sheriff said exasperatedly. “So the eyebrow pencil disappeared along with maybe two people who locked themselves in here. Two people kidnapped out of a locked room.”
    They went downstairs to the front desk. According to the guest register, the room in which the message had been found was occupied by a Mr. and Mrs. Harold Ordnay of San Francisco.
    “None of the other guests was named Timothy Flyte,” Sheriff Hammond said, closing the register.
    “Well,” Lieutenant Whitman said, “I guess that’s about all we can do here right now.”
    Jenny was relieved to hear him say that.
    “Okay,” Bryce Hammond said. “Let’s catch up with Frank and the others. Maybe they’ve found something we haven’t.”
    They started across the lobby. After only a couple of steps, Lisa stopped them with a scream.
    They all saw it a second after it caught the girl’s attention. It was on an end table, directly in the fall of light from a rose-shaded lamp, so prettily lit that it seemed almost like a piece of artwork on display. A man’s hand. A severed hand.
    Lisa turned away from the macabre sight.
    Jenny held her sister, looking over Lisa’s shoulder with ghastly fascination. The hand. The damned, mocking, impossible hand.
    It was holding an eyebrow pencil firmly between its thumb and first two fingers. The eyebrow pencil. The same one. It had to be.
    Jenny’s horror was as great as Lisa’s, but she bit her lip and suppressed a scream. It wasn’t merely the sight of the hand that repelled and terrified her. The thing that made the breath catch and burn in her chest was the fact that this hand hadn’t been on this end table a short while ago. Someone had placed it here while they were upstairs, knowing that they would find it; someone was mocking them, someone with an extremely twisted sense of humor.
    Bryce Hammond’s hooded eyes were open farther than Jenny had yet seen them. “Damn it, this thing wasn’t here before—was it?”
    “No,” Jenny said.
    The sheriff and deputy had been carrying their revolvers with the muzzles pointed at the floor. Now they raised their weapons as if they thought the severed hand might drop the eyebrow pencil, launch itself off the table toward someone’s face, and gouge out someone’s eyes.
    They were speechless.
    The spiral patterns in the oriental carpet seemed to have become refrigeration coils, casting off waves of icy air.
    Overhead, in a distant room, a floorboard or an unoiled door creaked, groaned, creaked.
    Bryce Hammond looked up at the ceiling of the lobby.
    Creeeeeaaak.
    It could have been only a natural settling noise. Or it could have been something else.
    “There’s no doubt now,” the sheriff said.
    “No doubt about what?” Lieutenant Whitman asked, looking not at the sheriff but at other areas to the lobby.
    The sheriff turned to Jenny. “When you heard the siren and the church bell just before we arrived, you said you realized that whatever had happened to Snowfield might still be happening.”
    “Yes.”
    “And now we know you’re right.”
     

Chapter 12
    Battleground
     
    Jake Johnson waited with Frank, Gordy, and Stu Wargle at the end of the block, on a brightly lighted stretch of sidewalk in front of Gilmartin’s Market, a grocery store.
    He watched Bryce Hammond coming out of the Candleglow Inn, and he wished to god the sheriff would move faster. He didn’t like standing here in all this light. Hell, it was like being on stage. Jake felt vulnerable.
    Of course, a few minutes ago, while conducting a search of some of the buildings along the street, they’d had to pass through dark areas where the shadows had seemed to pulse and move like living creatures, and Jake had looked with fierce longing toward this very same