Phantoms

somehow never acquire empathy or compassion. If the shape-changer was the Satan of mythology, perhaps the evil in human beings isn’t a reflection of the Devil; perhaps the Devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our own kind. Maybe what we’ve done is… create the Devil in our own image.”
    Bryce was silent. Then: “You may be right. I suspect you are. There’s no use wasting energy being afraid of devils, demons, and things that go bump in the night… because, ultimately, we’ll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monsters among us. Hell is where we make it.”
    They drove down Skyline Road.
    Snowfield looked serene and beautiful.
    Nothing tried to stop them.
     

Chapter 45
    Good and Evil
     
    On Sunday evening, one week after Jenny and Lisa found Snowfield in its graveyard silence, five days after the death of the shape-changer, they were at the hospital in Santa Mira, visiting Tal Whitman. He had, after all, suffered a toxin reaction to some fluid secreted by the shape-changer and had also developed a mild infection, but he had never been in serious danger. Now he was almost as good as new—and eager to go home.
    When Lisa and Jenny stepped into Tal’s room, he was seated in a chair by the window, reading a magazine. He was dressed in his uniform. His gun and holster were lying on a small table beside the chair.
    Lisa hugged him before he could get up, and Tal hugged her back.
    “Lookin’ good,” she told him.
    “Lookin’ fine,” he told her.
    “Like a million bucks.”
    “Like two million.”
    “You’ll turn the ladies’ heads.”
    “And you’ll make the boys do back-flips.”
    It was a ritual they went through every day, a small ceremony of affection that always elicited a smile from Lisa. Jenny loved to see it; Lisa didn’t smile often these days. In the past week, she hadn’t laughed at all, not once.
    Tal stood up, and Jenny hugged him, too. She said, “Bryce is with Timmy. He’ll be up in a little while.”
    “You know,” Tal said, “he seems to be handling that situation a whole lot better. All this past year, you could see how Timmy’s condition was killing him. Now he seems able to cope with it.”
    Jenny nodded. “He’d gotten it in his head that Timmy would be better off dead. But up in Snowfield, he had a change of heart. I think he decided that, after all, there wasn’t a fate worse than death. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
    “That’s what they say.”
    “In another year, if Timmy’s still in a coma, Bryce might change his mind again. But for the moment, he seems grateful just to be able to sit down there for a while each day, holding his little boy’s warm hand.” She looked Tal over and demanded: “What’s with the street clothes?”
    “I’m being discharged.”
    “Fantastic!” Lisa said.
     
    Timmy’s roommate these days was an eighty-two-year-old man who was hooked up to an IV, a beeping cardiac monitor, and a wheezing respirator.
    Although Timmy was attached only to an IV, he was in the embrace of an oblivion as complete as the octogenarian’s coma. Once or twice an hour, never more often, never for longer than a minute at a time, the boy’s eyelids fluttered or his lips twitched or a muscle ticked in his cheek. That was all.
    Bryce sat beside the bed, his hand through the railing, gently gripping his son’s hand. Since Snowfield, just this meager contact was enough to satisfy him. Each day he left the room feeling better.
    There wasn’t much fight now that evening had come. On the wall at the head of the bed, there was a dim lamp that cast a soft glow only as far as Timmy’s shoulders, leaving his sheet-covered body in shadow. In that wan illumination, Bryce could see how his boy had withered, losing weight in spite of the IV solution. The cheekbones were too prominent. There were dark circles around his eyes. The chin and jawline looked pathetically fragile. His son had always been small for his age. But now the hand Bryce held seemed to belong to a much younger child than Timmy; it seemed like the hand of an infant.
    But it was warm. It was warm.
    After a while, Bryce reluctantly let go. He smoothed the boy’s hair, straightened the sheet, fluffed the pillow.
    It was time to leave, but he couldn’t go; not yet. He was crying. He didn’t want to step into the hall with tears on his face.
    He pulled a few Kleenex from the box on the nightstand, got up, went to the window, and looked out at Santa