Dean Koontz - Phantoms

"But it got them anyway," Jenny said.

it.

Ned and Sue Marie Bischoff owned a lovely Tudor-style home set on a double lot, nestled among huge pine trees. They lived there with their two boys. Eight-year-old Lee Bischoff could already play the piano surprisingly well, in spite of the smallness of his hands, and once told Jenny he was going to be the next Stevie Wonder "only not blind.”

Six-year-old Terry looked exactly like a black-skinned Dennis the Menace, but he had a sweet temper.

Ned was a successful artist. His oil paintings sold for as much as six and seven thousand dollars, and his limited edition prints went for four or five hundred dollars apiece.

He was a patient of Jenny's. Although he was only thirty-two and was already a success in life, she had treated him for an ulcer.

The ulcer wouldn't be bothering him any more. He was in his studio, lying on the floor in front of an easel, dead.

Sue Marie was in the kitchen. Like Hilda Beck, Jenny's housekeeper, and like many other people all over town, Sue Marie had died while preparing dinner. She had been a pretty woman. Not any more.

They found the two boys in one of the bedrooms.

It was a wonderful room for kids, large and airy, with bunk beds. There were built-in bookshelves full of children's books.

On the walls were paintings that Ned had done just for his kids, whimsical fantasy scenes quite unlike the pieces for which he was well known: a pig in a tuxedo, dancing with a cow in an evening gown; the interior of a spaceship command chamber, where all the astronauts were toads; an eerie yet charming scene of a school playground at night, bathed in the light of a full moon, no kids around, but with a huge and monstrouslooking werewolf having a grand and giddy time on a set of swings.

The boys were in one corner, beyond an array of overturned Tonka Toys.

The younger boy, Terry, was behind Lee, who seemed to have made a valiant effort to protect his smaller brother. The boys were staring out into the room, eyes bulging, their dead gazes still fixed upon whatever had descended upon them yesterday. Lee's muscles had locked, so that his thin arms were in the same position now as they had been in the last seconds of his life: raised in front of him, shielding him, palms spread, as if warding off blows.

Bryce knelt in front of the kids. He put one trembling hand against Lee's face, as if unwilling to believe that the child was actually dead.

Jenny knelt beside him.

"Those are the Bischoffs' two boys," she said, unable to keep her voice from breaking." So now the whole family's accounted for.”

Tears were streaming down Bryce's face.

Jenny tried to remember how old his own son was. Seven or eight? About the same age as Lee Bischoff. Little Timmy Hammond was lying in the hospital in Santa Mira this very minute, comatose, just as he had been for the past year. He was pretty much a vegetable. Yes, but even that was better than this. Anything was better than this.

Eventually, Bryce's tears dried up. There was rage in him now." I'll get them for this," he said." Whoever did this… I'll make them pay.”

Jenny had never met a man quite like him. He had considerable masculine strength and purpose, but he was also capable of tenderness.

She wanted to hold him. And be held.

But, as always, she was far too guarded about expressing her own emotional state. If she had possessed his openness, she would never have become estranged from her mother. But she wasn't that way, not yet, although she wanted to be. So, in response to his vow to get the killers of the Bischoffs' children, she said, "But what if it isn't anything human that killed them? Not all evil is in men. There's evil in nature. The blind maliciousness of earthquakes. The uncaring evil of cancer. This thing here could be like that-remote and unaccountable.

There'll be no taking it to court if it isn't even human. What then?”

"Whoever or whatever the hell it is, I'll get it. I'll stop it.

I'll make it pay for what's been done here," he said stubbornly.

Frank Autry's search team prowled through three deserted houses after leaving the Catholic church. The fourth house wasn't empty. They found Wendel! Hulbertson, a high school teacher who worked in Santa Mira but who chose to live here in the mountains, in a house that had once belonged to his mother. Gordy had been in Hulbertson's English class only five years ago. The teacher was not swollen or bruised like the other corpses; he had taken his own life. Backed into a corner of his bedroom, he had put the barrel of a.32 automatic in his mouth and had pulled the trigger. Evidently, death by his own hand had been preferable to whatever it had been about to do to him.

After leaving the Bischoff residence, Bryce led his group through a few houses without finding any bodies. Then, in the fifth house, they discovered an elderly husband and wife locked in a bathroom, where they had tried to hide from their killer.

She was sprawled in the tub. He was in a heap on the floor.

"They were patients of mine," Jenny said." Nick and Melina Papandrakis.”

Tal wrote their names down on a list of the dead.

Like Harold Ordnay and his wife in the Candle glow Inn, Nick Papandrakis had attempted to leave a message that would point a finger at the killer. He had taken some iodine from the medicine cabinet and had used it to paint on the wall. He hadn't had a chance to finish even one word. There were only two letters and part of a third: "Can anyone figure out what he intended to write?" Bryce asked.

They all took turns squeezing into the bathroom and stepped over Nick Papandrakis's corpse to have a look at the orange brown letters on the wall, but none of them had any flashes of inspiration.

Bullets.

In the house next to the P s s, the kitchen floor was littered with expended bullets. Not entire cartridges. Just dozens of lead slugs, and their brass casings.

The fact that there were no ejected casings anywhere in the room indicated that no gunfire had taken place here. There was no odor of gunpowder. No bullet holes in the walls or cabinets.

There were just bullets all over the floor, as if they had rained magically out of thin air.

Frank Autry scooped up a handful of the gray lumps of metal. He wasn't a ballistics expert, but, oddly, none of the bullets was fragmented or badly deformed, and that enabled him to see that they had come from a variety of weapons. Most of them-scores of them-with caliber of ammunition that was spat out by the submachine guns with which General Copperfield's support units were armed.

Are these slugs from Sergeant Harker's gun? Frank wondered. Are these the rounds Harker fired at his killer in the meat locker at Gil Martin's Market?

He frowned, perplexed.

He dropped the bullets, and they clattered on the floor. He plucked several other slugs off the tiles. There were a.22 and a.32 and another.22 and a.38. There were even a lot of shotgun pellets.

He picked up a single.45-caliber bullet and examined it with special interest. It was exactly the ammunition that his own revolver handled.

Gordy Brogan hunkered down beside him.

Frank didn't look at Gordy. He continued to stare intently at the slug.

He was wrestling with an eerie thought.

Gordy scooped a few bullets off the kitchen tiles. '-They aren't deformed at all.”

Frank nodded.

"They had to've hit something," Gordy said." So they should be deformed.

Some of them should be, anyway." He paused, then said." Hey, you're a million miles away. What're-you thinking about?”

"Paul Henderson." Frank held the.45 slug in front of Gordy's face." Paul fired three like this last night, over at the substation.

"At his killer.”

"Yeah.”

"So?”

"So I have this crazy hunch that if we asked the lab to run ballistics tests on it, they'd find residue from Paul's revolver.”