Dean Koontz - Phantoms

"It seemed bigger than a cat. It seemed a lot bigger than a cat," Lisa said nervously.

"Okay, so maybe it wasn't cats. Most likely, it wasn't anything at all.

We're keyed up. Our nerves are wound tight." She sighed." Let's go see if the rear door of the bakery is open.

That's what we came back here to check out-remember?”

They headed toward the rear of Lieberman's Bakery, but they glanced repeatedly behind them, at the mouth of the covered passage.

The service door at the bakery was unlocked, and there was light and warmth beyond it. Jenny and Lisa stepped into a long, narrow storage room.

The inner door led from the storage room to the huge kitchen, which smelled pleasantly of cinnamon, flour, black walnuts, and orange extract. Jenny inhaled deeply. The appetizing fragrances that waited through the kitchen were so homey, so natural, so pungently and soothingly reminiscent of normal times and normal places that she felt some of her tension fading.

The bakery was well-equipped with double sinks, a walk-in refrigerator, several ovens, several immense white enamel storage cabinets, a dough-kneading machine, and a large array of other appliances. The middle of the room was occupied by a long, wide counter, the primary work area; one end of it had a shiny stainless-steel top, and the other end had a butcher's block surface. The stainless-steel portion-which was nearest the store-room door, where Jenny and Lisa had entered-was stacked high with pots, cupcake and cookie trays, baking racks, bundt pans, regular cake pans, and pie tins, all clean and bright.

The entire kitchen gleamed.

"Nobody's here," Lisa said.

"Looks that way," Jenny said, her spirits rising as she walked farther into the room.

If the Santini family had escaped, and if Jakob and Aida had been spared, perhaps most of the town wasn't dead. Perhaps Oh, God.

On the other side of the piled cookware, in the middle of the butcher's-block counter, lay a large disk of pie dough. A wooden rolling pin rested on the dough. Two hands gripped the ends of the rolling pin. Two severed, human hands.

Lisa backed up against a metal cabinet with such force that the stuff inside rattled noisily." What the hell is going on?

What the hell?”

Drawn by morbid fascination and by an urgent need to understand what was happening here, Jenny moved closer to the counter and stared down at the disembodied hands, regarding them with equal measures of disgust and disbelief and with fear as sharp as razor blades. The hands were not bruised or swollen; they were pretty much flesh-colored, though gray-pale. Blood-the first blood she had seen so far-trailed wetly from the raggedly torn wrists and glistened in streaks and drops, midst a fine film of flour dust. The hands were strong; more precisely-they had once been strong. Blunt fingers. Large knuckles.

Unquestionably a man's hands, with white hair curled crisply on the backs of them. Jakob Liebermann's hands.

"Jenny!”

Jenny looked up, startled.

Lisa's arm was raised, extended; she was pointing across the kitchen.

Beyond the butcher's-block counter, set in the long wall on the far side of the room, were three ovens. One of them was huge, with a pair of solid, over-and-under, stainless-steel doors.

The other two ovens were smaller than the first, though still larger than the conventional models used in most homes; there was one door in each of these two, and each door had a glass portal in the center of it.

None of the ovens was turned on at the moment, which was fortunate, for if the smaller ones had been in operation, the kitchen would have been filled with a sickening stench.

Each one contained a severed head.

Jesus.

Ghastly, dead faces gazed out into the room, noses pressed to the inside of the oven glass.

Jakob Liebermann. White hair spattered with blood. One eye half shut, the other glaring. Lips pressed together in a grimace of pain.

Aida Liebermann. Both eyes open. Mouth gaping as if her jaws had come unhinged.

For a moment Jenny couldn't believe the heads were real.

Too much. Too shocking. She thought of expensive, lifelike Halloween masks peering out of the cellophane windows in costume boxes, and she thought of the grisly novelties sold in joke shops-those wax heads with nylon hair and glass eyes, those gruesome things that young boys sometimes found wildly amusing (and surely that's what these were-and, crazily, she thought of a line from a TV commercial for cake mixes. Nothin' says lovin' like somethin'from the oven!

Her heart thudded.

She was feverish, dizzy.

On the butcher's-block counter, the severed hands were still poised on the rolling pin. She half-expected them to skitter suddenly across the counter as if they were two crabs.

Where were the Liebermanns' decapitated bodies? Stuffed in the big oven, behind steel doors that had no windows? Lying stiff and frosted in the walk-in refrigerator?

Bitterness rose in her throat, but she choked it back.

The.45 revolver now seemed an ineffectual defense against this incredibly violent, unknown enemy.

Again, Jenny had the feeling of being watched, and the drumbeat of her heart was no longer snare but timpani.

She turned to Lisa." Let's get out of here.”

The girl headed for the storeroom door.

"Not that way!" Jenny said sharply.

Lisa turned, blinking, confused.

"Not the alley," Jenny said." And not that dark passage again.”

" God, no," Lisa agreed.

They hurried across the kitchen and through the other door, into the sales room. Past the empty pastry cases. Past the cafe tables and chairs.

Jenny had some trouble with the deadbolt lock on the front door. It was stiff. She thought they might have to leave by way of the alley, after all. Then she realized she was trying to turn the thumb-latch the wrong way. Twisted the proper direction, the bolt slipped back with a clack, and Jenny yanked the door open.

They rushed out into the cool, night air.

Lisa crossed the sidewalk to a tall pine tree. She seemed to need to lean against something.

Jenny joined her sister, glancing back apprehensively at the bakery. She wouldn't have been surprised to see two decapitated bodies shambling toward her with demonic intent. But nothing moved back there except the scalloped edge of the blue-and-white-striped awning, which undulated in the inconstant breeze.

The night remained silent.

The moon had risen somewhat higher in the sky since Jenny and Lisa had entered the covered passageway.

After a while the girl said, "Radiation, disease, poison, toxic gas-boy, we sure were on the wrong walk. Only other people, sick people, do that kind of weird stuff. Right? Some weird psycho did all of this.”

Jenny shook her head." One man can't have done it all. To overwhelm a town of nearly five hundred people, it would take an army of psychopathic killers.”

"Then that's what it was," Lisa said, shivering.

Jenny looked nervously up and down the deserted street. It seemed imprudent, even reckless, to be standing here, in plain sight, but she couldn't think of anywhere else that would be safer.

She said, "Psychopaths don't join clubs and plan mass murders as if they were Rotarians planning a charity dance. They almost always act alone.”

Flicking her eyes from shadow to shadow as if she expected one of them to have substance and malevolent intentions, Lisa said, "What about the Charles Manson commune, back in the sixties, those people who killed the movie star-what was her name?”

" Sharon Tate.”

"Yeah. Couldn't this be a group of nuts like that?”

"At most, there were half a dozen people in the core of the Manson family, and that was a very rare deviation from the lone-wolf pattern.

Anyway, half a dozen couldn't do this to Snowfield. It would take fifty, a hundred, maybe more. That many psychopaths just couldn't act together.”