Phantoms

arrival of daylight and reinforcements. But they might spot something important that he had missed, some scrap, some clue that would be of help. Besides, now that they had all seen the thing at the window, the phone incident was, by comparison, no longer very shocking.
    The others listened to Bryce, and this new information had a negative effect on their demeanor.
    “What kind of degenerate would tape-record the screams of his victims?” Gordy asked.
    Tal Whitman shook his head. “It could be something else. It could be that…”
    “Yes?”
    “Well, maybe none of you wants to hear this right now.”
    “Since you’ve started it, finish it,” Bryce insisted.
    “Well,” Tal said, “what if it wasn’t a recording you heard? I mean, we know people have disappeared from Snowfield. In fact as far as we’ve seen, more have vanished than died. So… what if the missing are being held somewhere? As hostages? Maybe the screams were coming from people who were still alive, who were being tortured and maybe killed right then , right then while you were on the phone, listening.”
    Remembering those terrible screams, Bryce felt his marrow slowly freezing.
    “Whether it was tape-recorded or not,” Frank Autry said, “it’s probably a mistake to think in terms of hostages.”
    “Yes,” Dr. Paige said. “If Mr. Autry means that we’ve got to be careful not to narrow our thinking to conventional situations, then I wholeheartedly agree. This just doesn’t feel like a hostage drama. Something damned peculiar is happening here, something that no one’s ever encountered before, so let’s not start backsliding just because we’d be more comfortable with cozy, familiar explanations. Besides, if we’re dealing with terrorists, how does that fit with the thing we saw at the window? It doesn’t.”
    Bryce nodded. “You’re right. But I don’t believe Tal meant that people were being held for conventional motives.”
    “No, no,” Tal said. “It doesn’t have to be terrorists or kidnappers. Even if people are being held hostage, that doesn’t necessarily mean other people are holding them. I’m even willing to consider that they’re being held by something that isn’t human. How’s that for remaining open-minded? Maybe it is holding them, the it that none of us can define. Maybe it’s holding them just to prolong the pleasure it takes from snuffing the life out of them. Maybe it’s holding them just to tease us with their screams, the way it teased Bryce on the phone. Hell, if we’re dealing with something truly extraordinary, truly unhuman, its reasons for holding hostages—if it is holding any—are bound to be incomprehensible.”
    “Christ, you’re talking like lunatics,” Wargle said.
    Everyone ignored him.
    They had stepped through the looking glass. The impossible was possible. The enemy was the unknown.
    Lisa Paige cleared her throat. Her face was pasty. In a barely audible voice, she said, “Maybe it spun a web somewhere, down in a dark place, in a cellar or a cave, and maybe it tied all the missing people into its web, sealed them up in cocoons, alive. Maybe it’s just saving them until it gets hungry again.”
    If absolutely nothing lay beyond the realm of possibility, if even the most outrageous theories could be true, then perhaps the girl was right, Bryce thought. Perhaps there was an enormous web vibrating softly in some dark place, hung with a hundred or two hundred or even more man- and woman- and child-size tidbits, wrapped in individual packages for freshness and convenience. Somewhere in Snowfield, were there living human beings who had been reduced to the awful equivalent of foil-wrapped Pop Tarts, waiting only to provide nourishment for some brutal, unimaginably evil, darkly intelligent, other-dimensional horror.
    No. Ridiculous.
    On the other hand: maybe.
    Jesus.
     
    Bryce crouched in front of the shortwave radio and squinted at its mangled guts. Circuit boards had been snapped. Several parts appeared to have been crushed in a vice or hammered flat.
    Frank said, “They had to take off the cover plate to get at all this stuff, just the way we did.”
    “So after they smashed the crap out of it,” Wargle said, “why’d they bother to put the plate back on?”
    “And why go to all that trouble to begin with?” Frank wondered. “They could’ve put the radio out of commission just by ripping the cord loose.”
    Lisa and Gordy appeared as Bryce was turning away from the