Phantoms

seconds.
    Bryce was confident that not even their unknown enemy could snatch away a victim that fast.
     
    Jenny Paige began the morning with an unsatisfactory sponge bath, followed by a completely satisfactory breakfast of eggs, sliced ham, toast, and coffee.
    Then, accompanied by three heavily armed men, she went up the street to her house, where she got some fresh clothes for herself and for Lisa. She also stopped in her office, where she gathered up a stethoscope, a sphygmomanometer, tongue depressors, cotton pads, gauze, splints, bandages, tourniquets, antiseptics, disposable hypodermic syringes, painkillers, antibiotics, and other instruments and supplies that she would need in order to establish an emergency infirmary in one corner of the Hilltop Inn’s lobby.
    The house was quiet.
    The deputies kept looking around nervously, entering each new room as if they suspected a guillotine was rigged above the door.
    As Jenny was finishing packing up supplies in her office, the telephone rang. They all stared at it.
    They knew only two phones in town were working, and both were at the Hilltop Inn.
    The phone rang again.
    Jenny lifted the receiver. She didn’t say hello.
    Silence.
    She waited.
    After a second, she heard the distant cries of sea gulls. The buzzing of bees. The mewling of a kitten. A weeping child. Another child: laughing. A panting dog. The chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka sound of a rattlesnake.
    Bryce had heard similar things on the phone last night, in the substation, just before the moth had come tapping at the windows. He had said that the sounds had been perfectly ordinary, familiar animal noises. They had nonetheless, unsettled him. He hadn’t been able to explain why.
    Now Jenny knew exactly what he meant.
    Birds singing.
    Frogs croaking.
    A cat purring.
    The puff became a hiss. The hiss became a cat-shriek of anger. The shriek became a brief but terrible squeal of pain.
    Then a voice: “I’m gonna shove my big prick into your succulent little sister.”
    Jenny recognized the voice. Wargle. The dead man.
    “You hear me, Doc?”
    She said nothing.
    “And I don’t give a rat’s ass which end of her I stick it in.” He giggled.
    She slammed the phone down.
    The deputies looked at her expectantly.
    “Uh… no one on the line,” she said, deciding not to tell them what she had heard. They were already too jumpy.
    From Jenny’s office, they went to Tayton’s Pharmacy on Vail Lane, where she stocked up on more drugs: additional painkillers, a wide spectrum of antibiotics, coagulant, anticoagulants, and anything else she might conceivably need.
    As they were finishing in the pharmacy, the phone rang.
    Jenny was closest to it. She didn’t want to answer, but she couldn’t resist.
    And it was there again.
    Jenny waited a moment, then said, “Hello?”
    Wargle said, “I’m gonna use your little sister so hard she won’t be able to walk for a week.”
    Jenny hung up.
    “Dead line,” she told the deputies.
    She didn’t think they believed her. They stared at her trembling hands.
     
    Bryce sat at the central operations desk, talking by telephone to headquarters in Santa Mira.
    The APB on Timothy Flyte had turned up nothing whatsoever. Flyte wasn’t wanted by any police agency in the United States or Canada. The FBI had never heard of him. The name on the bathroom mirror at the Candleglow Inn was still a mystery.
    The San Francisco police had been able to supply background on the missing Harold Ordnay and wife, in whose room Timothy Flyte’s name had been found. The Ordnays owned two bookstores in San Francisco. One was an ordinary retail outlet. The other was an antiquarian and rare book dealership; apparently, it was by far the more profitable of the two. The Ordnays were well known and respected in collecting circles. According to their family, Harold and Blanche had gone to Snowfield for a four-day weekend to celebrate their thirty-first anniversary. The family had never heard of Timothy Flyte. When police were granted permission to look through the Ordnays’ personal address book, they found no listing for anyone named Flyte.
    The police had not yet been able to locate any of the bookstores’ employees; however, they expected to do so as soon as both shops opened at ten o’clock this morning. It was hoped that Flyte was a business acquaintance of the Ordnays’ and would be familiar to the employees.
    “Keep me posted,” Bryce told the morning desk man in Santa Mira. “How’re