Phantoms

by Dean Koontz

And it isn’t?” “They couldn’t find even one lonely, living C. welchii in the water droplet that had been contaminated with bowel material. And that is precisely the sample that ought to be swimming with it. It should be teeming with Proteus vulgaris, too, which is a saprophytic bacterium.” “Translation?” he asked patiently. “Sorry. Saprophytic means it flourishes in dead or decaying matter.” “And Wechlas is unquestionably dead.”

Unquestionably. Yet there’s no P. vulgaris. There should be other bacteria, too. Maybe Micrococcus albus and Bacillus mesentericus. Anyway, there aren’t any of the microorganisms that’re associated with decomposition, not any of the forms you’d expect to find. Even stranger, there’s no living Escherichia coli in the body. Now, damn it, that would’ve been there, thriving, even before Wechlas was killed. And it should be there now, still thriving. E. coli ...

a benign organism.” She paged through the report. “Now, here. Here, look at this. When they used general and differential stains to search for dead microorganisms, they found plenty of E. coli. But all the specimens were dead. There are no living bacteria in Wechlas’s body.” “What’s that supposed to tell us?” Bryce asked. “That the corpse isn’t decomposing as it should be?” “It isn’t decomposing at all. Not only that. Something a...

of a sterilizing and stabilizing agent. A preservative, Bryce. The corpse seems to have been injected with an ex...

Well,” she was saying, “I guess everyone’s seen enough of those old Walt Disney wildlife

documentaries to know that some spiders and mud wasps—and certain other insects—inject a preservative into their victims and put them aside for consumption later or to feed their unhatched young. The preservative distributed through Mr. Wechlas’s tissues is vaguely similar to those substances but far more potent and sophisticated.”

Are you saying it was an insect that killed these people?” Bryce asked Sara Yamaguchi. “Actually, the evidence doesn’t point that way. An insect would employ a stinger to kill and to inject the preservative. There would be a puncture wound, however minuscule. But Seth Goldstein went over the Wechlas

corpse with a magnifying glass. Literally. Over every square inch of skin. Twice. He even used a depilatory cream to remove all the body hair in order to examine the skin more closely. Yet he couldn’t find a puncture or any other break in the skin through which an injection might have been administered. We were afraid we had atypical or inaccurate data. So a second postmortem was performed.” “On Karen Oxley,” Jenny said. “Yes.” Sara Yamaguchi

However, everything tested out the same. No animate bacteria in the corpse. Decomposition unnaturally arrested. Tissues saturated with preservative. It was bizarre data again. But we were satisfied that it wasn’t atypical or inaccurate data.” Bryce said, “If the preservative wasn’t injected, how was it administered?” “Our best guess is that it’s highly absorbable and enters the body by skin contact, then circulates through the

tissues within seconds.” Jenny said, “Could it be a nerve gas, after all? Maybe the preservative aspect is only a side effect.” “No,” Sara Yamaguchi said. “There aren’t any traces on the victims’ clothes, as there would absolutely have to be if we’re dealing here with gas saturation. And although the substance has a toxic effect, chemical analysis shows it isn’t primarily a toxin, which a nerve gas would be; primarily, it’s a preservative.” “But was it the cause of death?” Bryce asked.

“It contributed. But we can’t pinpoint the cause. It was partly the toxicity of the preservative, but other factors lead us to believe death also resulted from oxygen deprivation. The victims suffered either a prolonged constriction or a complete blockage of the trachea.” Bryce leaned forward. “Strangulation? Suffocation?” “Yes. But we don’t know precisely which.” “But how can it be either one?” Lisa asked. “You’re ta...

Besides,” Jenny said, “as I remember the scene in the Oxleys’ den, there weren’t any signs of struggle. People being smothered to death will generally thrash like hell, knock things over—” “Yes,” the geneticist said, nodding. “It doesn’t make sense.” “Why are all the bodies swollen?” Bryce asked. “We think it’s a tox...

Skin and subcutaneous tissue from both corpses clearly indicate that the bruising was caused by compression from an external source; they were classic contusions. In other words, the bruising wasn’t due to the swelling, and it wasn’t a separate allergic reaction to the preservative. It seems as if something struck the victims. Hard. Repeatedly. Which is just crazy. Because to cause that much bruising,

there would have to be at least a fracture, one fracture, somewhere. Another crazy thing: The degree of bruising is the same all over the body. The tissues are damaged to precisely the same degree on the thighs, on the hands, on the chest, everywhere. Which is impossible.” “Why?” Bryce asked. Jenny answered him. “If you were to beat someone with a heavy weapon, some areas of the body would be more severely bruised than others. You wouldn’t be able to deliver every blow with precisely the same force and at

precisely the same angle as all the other blows, which is what you would’ve had to’ve done to create the kind of contusions on these bodies.” “Besides,” Sara Yamaguchi said, “they’re bruised even in places where a club wouldn’t land. In their armpits. Between the cheeks of the buttocks. And on the soles of their feet! Even though, in the case of Mrs. Oxley, she had her shoes on.” “Obviou...

blows to the body.” “Such as?” Bryce asked. “I’ve no idea.” “And they died fast,”...

If you put a certain kind of flatworm through a maze often enough, with food at one end, eventually it’ll learn to negotiate the maze more quickly than it did at first. Then, if you grind it up and feed it to another flatworm, the new worm will negotiate the maze quickly, too, even though it’s never been put through the test before. Somehow, it ate the knowledge and experience of its cousin when it ate the flesh.”

but when he began to speak at last, they were enthralled within a minute. He told them about the Roanoke Island colony,

about vanishing Mayan civilizations, about mysterious depletions of marine populations, about an army that disappeared in 1711. The crowd grew hushed. Corello relaxed. Flyte told them about the Eskimo village of Anjikuni, five hundred miles northwest of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police outpost at Churchill. On a snowy afternoon in November of 1930, a French-Canadian trapper and trader, Joe LaBelle, stopped at Anjikuni—only to discover that everyone who lived there had disappeared. All belongings,

including precious hunting rifles, had been left behind. Meals had been left half-eaten. The dogsleds (but no dogs) were still there, which meant there was no way the entire village could have moved overland to another location. The settlement was, as LaBelle put it later, “as eerie as a graveyard in the very dead of night.” LaBelle hastened to the Mounted Police Station at ...

As the reporters took notes and aimed tape recorder microphones at Flyte, he told them about his much-maligned theory: the ancient enemy. There were gasps of surprise, incredulous expressions, but ...

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 school: 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. “A message of sorts was also left in one of those ancient Mayan cities,” Flyte said. “Archaeologists have unearthed a portion of a prayer, written in hieroglyphics, dating from the time of the great disappearance.” He quoted from memory: “ ‘Evil gods live in the earth, their power asleep in rock. When they awake, they rise up as lava rises, but c...

on the wind, to be dispersed as if we never lived.’” Flyte’s glasses had slid down his nose. He pushed them back into place. “Now, some say that particular part of the prayer refers to the power of earthquak...