As the sheriff talked, Timothy broke into a sweat. He saw a box of Kleenex on one corner of the desk in front of him; he grabbed a handful of tissues and mopped his face.
When the sheriff finished, the professor drew a deep breath and spoke in a strained voice, “I never anticipated… I mean… well, it never occurred to me that.”
“What's wrong?” Hammond asked.
Timothy cleared his throat. “It never occurred to me that the ancient enemy would possess human-level intelligence.”
“I suspect it may even be a superior intelligence,” Hammond said.
“But I always thought of it as just a dumb animal, of distinctly limited self-awareness.”
“It's not.”
“That makes it a lot more dangerous. My God. A lot more, dangerous.”
“Will you come up here?” Hammond asked.
“I hadn't intended to come any closer than I am now,” Timothy said, “But if it's intelligent… and if it's offering me safe passage…”
On the telephone, a child's voice piped up, the sweet voice of a young boy, perhaps five or six years old: “Please, please, please come play with me, Dr. Flyte. Please. We'll have lots of fun. Please?”
And then, before Timothy could respond, there came a woman's soft and musical voice: “Yes, dear Dr. Flyte, by all means, do come pay us a visit. You're more than welcome. No one will harm you.”
Finally, the voice of an old man called over the line, warm and tender “You have so much to learn about me, Dr. Flyte. So much wisdom to acquire. Please come and begin your studies. The offer of safe passage is sincere.”
Silence.
Confused, Timothy said, “Hello? Hello? Who's this?”
“I'm still here,” Hammond answered.
The other voices did not return.
“Just me now,” Hammond said.
Timothy said, “But who were those people?”
“They're not actually people. They're just phantoms. Mimicry. Don't you get it? In three different voices, it just offered you safe passage again. The ancient enemy, Doctor.”
Timothy looked at the other four men in the room. They were all staring intently at the black conference box from which Hammond's voice — and the voices of the creature — had issued.
Clutching a wad of already sodden paper tissues in one hand, Timothy wiped his sweat-slick face again. “I'll come.”
Now, everyone in the room looked at him.
On the telephone, Sheriff Hammond said, “Doctor, there's no good reason to believe that it'll keep its promise. Once you're here, you may very well be a dead man, too.”
“But if it's intelligent…”
“That doesn't mean it plays fair,” Hammond said, “In fact, all of us up here are certain of one thing: This creature is the very essence of evil. Evil, Dr, Flyte. Would you trust in the Devil's promise?”
The child's voice came on the line again, still lilting and sweet: “If you come, Dr. Flyte, I'll not only spare you, but these six people whore trapped here. I'll let them go if you come play with me. But if you don't come, I'll take these pigs. I'll crush them. I'll squeeze the blood and shit out of them, squeeze them into pulp, and use them up.”
Those words were spoken in light, innocent, childlike tones which somehow made them far more frightening than if they had been shouted in a basso profundo rage.
Timothy's heart was pounding.
“That settles it,” he said, “I'll come. I have no choice.”
“Don't come on our account,” Hammond said, “It might spare you because it calls you its Saint Matthew, its Mark, its Luke and John. But it sure as hell won't spare us, no matter what it says.”
“I'll come,” Timothy insisted.
Hammond hesitated. Then: “Very well. I'll have one of my men drive you to the Snowfield roadblock. From there, you'll have to come alone. I can't risk another man. Do you drive?”
“Yes, sir,” Timothy said, “You provide the car, and I'll get there by myself.”
The line went dead.
“Hello?” Timothy said, “Sheriff?”
No answer.
“Are you there? Sheriff Hammond?”
Nothing.
It had cut them off.
Timothy looked up at Sal Corello, Charlie Mercer, and the two men whose names he didn't know.
They were all staring at him as if he were already dead and lying in a casket.
But if I die in Snowfield, if the shape-changer takes me, he thought, there'll be no casket. No grave. No everlasting peace.
“I'll drive you as far as the roadblock,” Charlie Mercer said. “I'll drive you myself.”
Timothy nodded.
It was time to go.
Chapter 36
Face to Face
At 3:12 A.M., Snowfield's church bells began to clang.
In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, Bryce got up from his chair. The others rose, too.
The firehouse siren wailed.
Jenny said, “Flyte must be here.”
The six of them went outside.
The streetlights were flashing off and on, casting leaping marionette shadows through the shifting banks of fog.
At the foot of Skyline Road, a car turned the corner. Its headlights speared upward, imparting a silvery sheen to the mist.
The streetlamps stopped blinking, and Bryce stepped into the soft cascade of yellow light beneath one of them, hoping that Flyte would be able to see him through the veils of fog.
The bells continued to peal, and the siren shrieked, and the car crawled slowly up the long hill. It was a green and white sheriff's department cruiser. It pulled to the curb and stopped ten feet from where Bryce stood; the driver extinguished the headlights.
The driver's door opened, and Flyte got out. He wasn't what Bryce had expected. He was wearing thick glasses that made his eyes appear abnormally large. His fine, white, tangled hair bristled in a halo around his head. Someone at headquarters had lent him an insulated jacket with the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department seal on the left breast.
The bells stopped ringing.
The siren groaned to a throaty finish.
The subsequent silence was profound.
Flyte gazed around the fog-shrouded silence, listening and waiting.
At last Bryce said, “Apparently, it's not ready to show itself.”
Flyte turned to him. “Sheriff Hammond?”
“Yes. Let's go inside and be comfortable while we wait.”
The inn's dining room. Hot coffee.
Shaky hands clattered china mugs against the tabletop. Nervous hands curled and clamped around the warm mugs in order to make themselves be still.
The six survivors leaned forward, hunched over the table, the better to listen to Timothy Flyte.
Lisa was clearly enthralled by the British scientist, but at first Jenny had serious doubts. He seemed to be an outright caricature of the absent-minded professor. But when he began to speak about his theories, Jenny was forced to discard her initial, unfavorable opinion, and soon she was as fascinated as Lisa.
He told them about vanishing armies in Spain and China, about abandoned Mayan cities, the Roanoke Island colony.
And he told them of Joya Verde, a South American jungle settlement that had met a fate similar to Snowfield's. Joya Verde, which means Green Jewel, was a trading post on the Amazon River, far from civilization. In 1923, six hundred and five people — every man, woman, and child who lived there vanished from Joya Verde in a single afternoon, sometime between the morning and evening visits of regularly scheduled riverboats. At first it was thought that nearby Indians, who were normally peaceful, had become inexplicably hostile and had launched a surprise attack. However, there were no bodies found, no indications of fighting, and no evidence of looting. A message was discovered on the blackboard at the mission schooclass="underline" It has no shape, yet it has every shape. Many who investigated the Joya Verde mystery were quick to dismiss those nine chalk-scrawled words as having no connection with the disappearances. Flyte believed otherwise, and after listening to him, so did Jenny.