Phantoms

Preying on small animals, bothering a Tyrannosaurus rex about the same way our own tiny summer moths bother us.”
    “But if it’s from the Mesozoic, where’s it been hiding for the last hundred million years?” he asked.
    More seconds, ticking.
    “Could it be… something from a genetic engineering lab?” she wondered. “An experiment in recombinant DNA?”
    “Have they gone that far? Can they produce whole new species? I only know what I read in the papers, but I thought they were years away from that sort of thing. They’re still working with bacteria.”
    “You’re probably right,” she said. “But still…”
    “Yeah. Nothing’s impossible because the moth is here .”
    After another silence, she said, “And what else is crawling or flying around out there?”
    “You’re thinking about what happened to Jake Johnson?”
    “Yeah. What took him? Not the moth. Even as deadly as it is, it couldn’t kill him silently, and it couldn’t carry him away.” She sighed, “You know, at first I wouldn’t try to leave town because I was afraid we’d spread an epidemic. Now I wouldn’t try to leave because I know we wouldn’t make it out alive. We’d be stopped.”
    “No, no. I’m sure we could get you out,” Bryce said. “If we can prove there’s no disease-related aspect to this, if General Copperfield’s people can rule that out, then, of course, you and Lisa will be taken to safety right away.”
    She shook her head. “No. There’s something out there, Bryce, something more cunning and a whole lot more formidable than the moth, and it doesn’t want us to leave. It wants to play with us before it kills us. It won’t let any of us go, so we’d damned well better find it and figure out how to deal with it before it gets tired of the game.”
     
    In both rooms of the Hilltop Inn’s large restaurant, chairs were stacked upside-down atop the tables, all covered with green plastic dropcloths. In the first room, Bryce and the others removed the plastic sheeting, took the chairs off the tables, and began to prepare the place to serve as a cafeteria.
    In the second room, the furniture had to be moved out to make way for the mattresses that would later be brought down from upstairs. They had only just begun emptying that part of the restaurant when they heard the faint but unmistakable sound of automobile engines.
    Bryce went to the French windows. He looked left, down the hill, toward the foot of Skyline Road. Three county squad cars were coming up the street, red beacons flashing.
    “They’re here,” Bryce told the others.
    He had been thinking of the reinforcements as a reassuringly formidable replenishment of their own decimated contingent. Now he realized that ten more men were hardly better than one more.
    Jenny Paige had been right when she’d said that Stu Wargle’s life probably wouldn’t have been saved by waiting for reinforcements before leaving the substation.
    All the lights in the Hilltop Inn and all the lights along the main street flickered. Dimmed. Went out. But they came back on after only a second of darkness.
    It was 11:15, Sunday night, counting down toward the witching hour.
     

Chapter 18
    London, England
     
    When midnight came to California, it was eight o’clock Monday morning in London.
    The day was dreary. Gray clouds melted across the city. A steady, dismal drizzle had been falling since before dawn. The drowned trees hung limply, and the streets glistened darkly, and everyone on the sidewalks seemed to have black umbrellas.
    At the Churchill Hotel in Portman Square, rain beat against the windows and streamed down the glass, distorting the view from the dining room. Occasionally, brilliant flashes of lightning, passing through the water-beaded windowpanes, briefly cast shadowy images of raindrops onto the clean white tablecloths.
    Burt Sandler, in London on business from New York, sat at one of the window tables, wondering how in God’s name he was going to justify the size of this breakfast bill on his expense account. His guest had begun by ordering a bottle of good champagne: Mumm’s Extra Dry, which didn’t come cheap. With the champagne, his guest wanted caviar—champagne and caviar for breakfast!—and two kinds of fresh fruit. And the old fellow clearly was not finished ordering.
    Across the table, Dr. Timothy Flyte, the object of Sandler’s amazement, studied the menu with childlike delight. To the waiter, he said, “And I should like an order