Phantom (Page 52)

"Oh, that does make a difference. Yes, I see. Thank you."

By the time she had finished and her eyes snapped back to focus on them, the others had also noticed her one-sided conversation and grown silent, watching her.

"Does your mother know what happened to Bonnie?"

Matt asked her eagerly. He had stayed in Fel ‘s Church fighting the kitsune with Mrs. Flowers when his friends had traveled to the Dark Dimension, and their time as comrades in arms had made him familiar with Mrs. Flowers’s casual exchanges with the spirit realm. If Mrs. Flowers’s mother had interrupted their conversation, she probably had something useful and important to say.

"Yes," said Mrs. Flowers, smiling at him. "Yes, indeed, Mama was very helpful." Her face grew serious as she glanced around. "Mama was able to sense the thing that took Bonnie’s spirit. Once it had entered the house, she could observe it, although she was powerless to fight it herself. She’s upset that she wasn’t able to save Bonnie. She’s quite fond of her."

"Is Bonnie going to be okay?" Matt asked, over the others’ questions of, "So what is it?" and "It’s a demon or something, then, not a curse?"

Mrs. Flowers looked at Matt first. "We may be able to save Bonnie. We wil certainly try. But we wil have to defeat the thing that took her. And the rest of you are stil very much in danger."

She looked around at them al . "It’s a phantom."

There was a little pause.

"What’s a phantom?" Elena asked. "Do you mean a ghost?"

"A phantom, of course," Stefan said quietly, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe the idea hadn’t occurred to him earlier. "There was a town I heard of once back in Italy many years ago, where they said a phantom stalked the streets of Umbria. It wasn’t a ghost, but a being created by strong emotions. The story was that a man became so enraged at his unfaithful lover that he kil ed her and her paramour, and then himself. And these actions released something, a being made out of their emotions. One by one people living nearby went mad. They did terrible things."

Stefan looked shaken to his core.

"Is that what we’re facing? Some kind of demon created out of anger that wil drive people mad?" Elena turned to Mrs. Flowers imploringly. "Because frankly I think this town has had enough of that."

"It can’t happen again," Matt said. He was also looking at Mrs. Flowers. She was the only one who had seen the neardestruction of Fel ‘s Church with him. The others had been there for the beginning, sure, but when things got real y awful, when they were at their worst, the girls and the vampires had been off in the Dark Dimension, fighting their own battles to fix it.

Mrs. Flowers met his eyes and nodded firmly, like she was making a pledge. "It won’t," she said. "Stefan, what you’re describing probably was a rage phantom, but it sounds like the popular explanation of what was going on wasn’t quite accurate. According to Mama, phantoms feed on emotions like vampires do on blood. The stronger an emotion is, the better fed and more active they are. They’re attracted to people or communities that already have these strong emotions, and they create almost a feedback loop, encouraging and nurturing thoughts that wil make the emotion stronger so that they can continue to feed. They’re quite psychical y powerful, but they can survive only as long as their victims keep feeding them."

Elena was listening careful y. "But what about Bonnie?"

She looked at Stefan. "In this town in Umbria, did people fal into comas because of the phantom?"

Stefan shook his head. "Not that I ever heard of," he said.

"Maybe that’s where Caleb comes in."

"I’l cal Celia," said Alaric. "This wil help focus her research. If anyone has any material at al on this, it’l be Dr. Beltram."

"Could your mother tel what kind of phantom it was?"

Stefan asked Mrs. Flowers. "If we know what emotion it feeds on, we could cut off its supply."

"She didn’t know," she said. "And she doesn’t know how to defeat a phantom either. And there’s one more thing we should take into consideration: Bonnie’s got a lot of innate psychic power of her own. If the phantom has taken her, it’s probably tapped into that."

Matt nodded, fol owing her train of thought. "And if that’s so," he finished grimly, "then this thing is only going to get stronger and more dangerous."

Chapter 26

The day passed with much research, but with very little in the way of results, which left Elena feeling increasingly concerned for her comatose friend. By the time night fel and Aunt Judith cal ed to wearily inquire whether Elena’s family would see her at al that day, they had sorted through the first bag of papers and Alaric had gone over a third or so of what seemed to be the notebook in which Caleb kept the record of his magical experiments, grumbling about Caleb’s terrible handwriting.

Elena frowned, flipping through another stack of papers. Looking through the pictures and clippings confirmed that Celia hadn’t been among Caleb’s planned victims. If the phantom had targeted her first, it must have been because she was rich in whatever emotion this phantom fed off.

"Snippiness," Meredith suggested, but she was careful to say it out of Alaric’s hearing.

The clippings and printouts also showed that Caleb was indeed obsessed with Tyler’s disappearance, and that he had evidence and memories of two different time lines for the same period – one where Fel ‘s Church had been fal ing apart and Elena Gilbert had been dead, and one where everything had been just fine, thanks in the smal Virginia town of Fel ‘s Church, including the continuing reign of the senior class’s golden girl, Elena. In addition to Caleb’s own double memories, which covered only the summer, Tyler had apparently talked to him over the phone the previous fal and winter about the mysterious events surrounding Mr. Tanner’s death and everything that fol owed. Although it didn’t sound from Caleb’s notes like Tyler had mentioned his own transformation to werewolf and conspiracy with Klaus, just his growing suspicions of Stefan.