Phantoms Part 20

She gradually grew calmer. Not less disturbed. Not less afraid. Just calmer.

"Better?" Bryce asked.

"As my sister says-I guess I flaked out on you, huh?"

"Not at all. Are you kidding or what? I couldn't even take the flashlight from you and look in those eyes like you wanted me to. You're the one who had the nerve to examine him."

"Well, thanks for getting me back together. You sure know how to knit up raveled nerves."

"Me? I didn't do anything."

"You sure have a comforting way of doing nothing."

They sat in silence, thinking of things they didn't want to think about.

Then he said, "That moth..."

She waited.

He said, "Where'd it come from?"

"h.e.l.l?"

"Any other suggestions?"

Jenny shrugged. "The Mesozoic era?" she said half-jokingly.

"When was that?"

"The age of dinosaurs."

His blue eyes flickered with interest. "Did moths like that exist back then?"

"I don't know," she admitted.

"I can sort of picture it soaring through prehistoric swamps."

"Yeah. 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 d.a.m.ned 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 flas.h.i.+ng.

"They're here," Bryce told the others.

He had been thinking of the reinforcements as a rea.s.suringly 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.

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 gla.s.s, distorting the view from the dining room. Occasionally, brilliant flashes of lightning, pa.s.sing through the water-beaded windowpanes, briefly cast shadowy images of raindrops onto the clean white table-cloths.

Burt Sandier, in London on business from New York, sat at one of the window tables, wondering how in G.o.d'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 of your croissants."

"Yes, sir," the waiter said.

"Are they very flaky?"

"Yes, sir. Very."

"Oh, good. And eggs," Flyte said. "Two lovely eggs, of course, rather soft, with b.u.t.tered toast."

"Toast?" the waiter asked. "Is that in addition to the two croissants, sir?"

"Yes, yes," Flyte said, fingering the slightly frayed collar of his white s.h.i.+rt. "And a rasher of bacon with the eggs."

The waiter blinked. "Yes, sir."

At last Flyte looked up at Burt Sandler. "What's breakfast without bacon? Am I right?"

"I'm an eggs-and-bacon man myself," Burt Sandler agreed, forcing a smile.

"Wise of you," Flyte said sagely. His wire-rimmed spectacles had slipped down his nose and were now perched on the round, red tip of it. With a long, thin finger, he pushed them back into place.

Sandler noticed that the bridge of the eyegla.s.ses had been broken and soldered. The repair job was so distinctly amateurish that he suspected Flyte had soldered the frames himself, to save money.

"Do you have good pork sausages?" Flyte asked the waiter. "Be truthful with me. I'll send them back straightaway if they aren't of the highest quality."

"We've quite good sausages," the waiter a.s.sured him. "I'm partial to them myself."

"Sausages, then."

"Is that in place of the bacon, sir?"

"No, no, no. In addition," Flyte said, as if the waiter's question was not only curious but a sign of thick-headedness.

Flyte was fifty-eight but looked at least a decade older. His bristly white hair curled thinly across the top of his head and thrust out around his large ears as if crackling with static electricity. His neck was scrawny and wrinkled; his shoulders were slight; his body favored bone and cartilage over flesh. There was some legitimate doubt whether he could actually eat all that he had ordered.

"Potatoes," Flyte said.

"Very well, sir," the waiter said, scribbling it down on his order pad, on which he had very nearly run out of room to write.

"Do you have suitable pastries?" Flyte inquired.

The waiter, a model of deportment under the circ.u.mstances, having made not the slightest allusion to Flyte's amazing gluttony, looked at Burt Sandler as if to say: Is your grandfather hopelessly senile, sir, or is he, at his age, a marathon runner who needs the calories?

Sandler merely smiled.

To Flyte, the waiter said, "Yes, sir, we have several pastries. There's a delicious-"

"Bring an a.s.sortment," Flyte said. "At the end of the meal, of course."

"Leave it to me, sir."

"Good. Very good. Excellent!" Flyte said, beaming. Finally, with a trace of reluctance, he relinquished his menu.

Sandler almost sighed with relief. He asked for orange juice, eggs, bacon, and toast, while Professor Flyte adjusted the day-old carnation pinned to the lapel of his somewhat s.h.i.+ny blue suit.

As Sandler finished ordering, Flyte leaned toward him conspiratorially. "Will you be having some of the champagne, Mr. Sandler?"

"I believe I might have a gla.s.s or two," Sandler said, hoping the bubbly would liberate his mind and help him formulate a believable explanation for this extravagance, a likely tale that would convince even the parsimonious clerks in accounting who would be poring over this bill with an electron microscope.

Flyte looked at the waiter. "Then perhaps you'd better bring two bottles."

Sandler, who was sipping ice-water, nearly choked.

The waiter left, and Flyte looked out through the rain-streaked window beside their table. "Nasty weather. Is it like this in New York in autumn?"

"We have our share of rainy days. But autumn can be beautiful in New York."

"Here, too," Flyte said. "Though I rather imagine we have more days like this than you. London's reputation for soggy weather isn't entirely undeserved."

The professor insisted on small talk until the champagne and caviar were served, as if he feared that, once business had been discussed, Sandler would quickly cancel the rest of the breakfast order.

He's a character out of d.i.c.kens, Sandler thought.

As soon as they had proposed a toast, wis.h.i.+ng each other good fortune, and had sipped the Mumm's, Flyte said, "So you've come all the way from New York to see me, have you?" His eyes were merry.

"To see a number of writers, actually," Sandler said. "I make the trip once a year. I scout out books in progress. British authors are popular in the States, especially thriller writers."

"MacLean, Follett, Forsythe, Bagley, that crowd?"

"Yes, very popular, some of them.

The caviar was superb. At the professor's urging, Sandler tried some of it with chopped onions. Flyte piled gobs on small wedges of dry toast and ate it without benefit of condiments.

"But I'm not only scouting for thrillers," Sandler said. "I'm after a variety of books. Unknown authors, too. And I suggest projects on occasion, when I have a subject for a particular author."

"Apparently, you have something in mind for me."

"First, let me say I read The Ancient Enemy when it was first published, and I found it fascinating."

"A number of people found it fascinating," Flyte said. "But most found it infuriating."

"I hear the book created problems for you."

"Virtually nothing but problems."

"Such as?"

"I lost my university position fifteen years ago, at the age of forty-three, when most academics are achieving job security."

"You lost your position because of The Ancient Enemy?"

"They didn't put it quite that bluntly," Flyte said, popping a morsel of caviar into his mouth. "That would have made them seem too closeminded. The administrators of my college, the head of my department, and most of my distinguished colleagues chose to attack indirectly. My dear Mr. Sandler, the compet.i.ton among power-mad politicians and the Machiavellian backstabbing of junior executives in a major corporation are as nothing, in terms of ruthlessness and spitefulness, when compared to the behavior of academic types who suddenly see an opportunity to climb the university ladder at the expense of one of their own. They spread rumors without foundation, scandalous tripe about my s.e.xual preferences, suggestions of intimate fraternization with my female students. And with my male students, for that matter. None of those slanders was openly discussed in a forum where I could refute them. Just rumors. Whispered behind the back. Poisonous. More openly, they made polite suggestions of incompetence, overwork, mental fatigue. I was eased out, you see; that's how they thought of it, though there was nothing easy about it from my point of view. Eighteen months after the publication of The Ancient Enemy, I was gone. And no other university would have me, ostensibly because of my unsavory reputation. The true reason, of course, was that my theories were too bizarre for academic tastes. I stood accused of attempting to make a fortune by pandering to the common man's taste for pseudoscience and sensationalism, of selling my credibility."

Flyte paused to take some champagne, savoring it.