The Nightmare People

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  3.

  “Hey, George,” he said into the phone as he lay back on the motel bed.

  “That you, Ed?” George’s voice was calm and familiar.

  “Yeah,” Smith said. “How’s life treating you lately?”

  “Not bad, not bad. You gonna be at the poker game this month?”

  “That’s a week from Friday, right?”

  “Right, and it’ll be right here at my place.”

  “Yeah, I expect I’ll be there. In fact… well, listen, George, I have a favor to ask.”

  “Ask away; what’s up?”

  “Well, see, there’s a problem with my apartment. In fact, I’m calling from a motel; I had to move out. Is your living room couch still vacant?” He tried not to sound as if he were begging.

  George hesitated, and Smith’s heart sank.

  “Jeez, Ed,” he said at last, “I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s sleeping on the couch, but Bridget’s been…” He let his sentence trail off unfinished.

  “Oh,” Smith said. He paused for a moment, trying to decide how badly he needed somewhere else to stay, and then asked, “You think that would be a problem? I mean, it wouldn’t bother me.”

  “Well, yeah,” George said, slightly annoyed. “I think it might have something of an inhibiting effect, you know?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Smith acknowledged.

  For a moment both men were silent; then George said, “Look, if it’s an emergency, maybe for a day or two…”

  “No, that’s all right,” Smith said, a trifle reluctantly. “I can stay at the motel. At least for now.”

  “Okay. Hey, I’m sorry; if the situation changes, I’ll let you know. And if I come across any good apartments I’ll give you a call.”

  “Fine. Thanks, George. Really. I’m at the Red Roof Inn in Gaithersburg, room 203.”

  “Right.”

  “Right. Well, guess I’ll see you at the poker game.”

  “Yeah. See you.”

  He hung up.

  It would seem, Smith thought wryly, that he was not going to be staying with good old George down in Bethesda.

  Well, he could find an apartment easily enough. Right across Route 124 there were plenty of apartments, and there were bound to be vacancies – maybe not right now, but reasonably soon.

  Then he’d have to go and get all his stuff out of his old apartment – maybe it was just as well he’d never really finished unpacking everything. That meant spending at least a couple of hours at the Bedford Mills complex, with the monsters all around – if they were real. That was a daunting prospect.

  At least he’d be able to get George to help – he could play on the guilt about his refusing the couch.

  But right now, he didn’t have much to do. He couldn’t go apartment-hunting at this hour, or call the police, and while he’d have been able to work if he were already there, he couldn’t get into the building this late; they locked up at six, and he didn’t have a key yet.

  And all his books and records and tapes were back in his apartment, damn it.

  He sighed, turned on the TV, and sat on the bed.

  Midway through the Tonight Show, where Jay Leno was filling in for Johnny Carson, Smith came to a conclusion.

  When you aren’t tired or sleepy or doing anything else, when there are things you’d like to do but can’t, and when you’re all alone in a motel room, watching late-night television is really, really boring.

  Worst of all, the television didn’t distract him from worrying about when that nightmare face was going to peer in his window again. His earlier cheerful optimism had faded once night had settled in, the sky had darkened, and the traffic had started to thin.

  And not only is late-night TV boring, he decided, but motel rooms are depressing.

  Sitting in a motel room watching late-night TV was stupid. There had to be something better to do!

  Well, a mere twenty miles away was the heart of the nation’s capital, and after living in Diamond Park for three months he still hadn’t seen most of the monuments and attractions. Except for one weekend in May when he’d driven around the Mall unsuccessfully hunting a parking space, he hadn’t been into the District at all in that time.

  Midnight probably wasn’t the best time, but at least parking should be easier.

  He got up and shut off the TV, then checked through his pockets to make sure he had his license and keys. He glanced out the window.

  For an instant he thought he saw something moving, something dark and red-eyed, but when he stepped closer there was nothing there.

  Imagination, he told himself, just imagination. This whole thing had him horribly jumpy.

  He hoped it was just his imagination, but he had never imagined seeing things before.

  He stood at the window for a moment, staring out. He saw Denny’s and the Shell station and Route 124, and no sign of any monsters.

  He opened the door and left the room.

  4.

  Admiring monuments is all very well, Smith decided, but in the muggy August weather, even at night, he didn’t care to do much walking or climbing, and staying in his air-conditioned car put serious limitations on what he could see or do – not to mention that Washington was reportedly not a particularly safe place to walk at night. The national capital was the national murder capital as well, after all – there had been something like two hundred and fifty homicides in the District so far this year.

  Of course, nobody got shot by crack dealers on the Mall, whatever the hour, and he wasn’t about to go wandering through the streets of Anacostia. All the same, except for a quick jaunt past the Vietnam Memorial over to the Reflecting Pool and back, he had stayed in his car.

  Nobody had bothered him during his walk; he had glimpsed a few other people strolling the area, but they were just dark shapes in the distance.

  He drove around the Washington Monument once more, and then, at about 3:30, he headed back out of the city, taking 18th Street north to Connecticut Avenue and following that straight out to the Beltway.

  The city streets were almost empty; he saw an occasional taxi here and there, but for the most part there was no traffic. The only delays on Connecticut were the traffic lights, but despite the hour he didn’t care to run them. He wasn’t in any hurry.

  There were other cars on the Beltway and I-270, of course. There were always cars on the Beltway and I-270, at any hour of day or night. Traffic wasn’t heavy enough to get in his way, though.

  At twenty past four he hit the ramp off I-270 at Exit 10 and followed the loop around onto 117. Right up until he passed Bureau Drive and the entrance to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he wasn’t sure where he was going.

  If he turned right onto 124, he’d be back at the motel in seconds.

  If he went straight through the light he’d be on his way back to Diamond Park, where he could take another look at that unfinished building, or drive past his old apartment, and see if anything had changed.

  There might be yellow-tape police lines around the office park. That would be worth seeing. It would mean that his call had done something.

  That decided him. He stayed on 117 until he reached Barrett, where he turned left.

  Then he cruised through the trees and across the dam, Lake Clopper pitch-black in the darkness, far darker than the sky overhead. He turned right on Willow and then left onto Orchard Heights Road.

  The abandoned office park was on the left, the fence gleaming faintly beneath the streetlights.

  There wasn’t any tape.

  He continued on down to Diamond Park Avenue, turned right and passed the dark shops of the town’s commercial district, turned right again onto Willow, and came back up to Orchard Heights for another pass.

  There was no tape. The unfinished building was just as he had left it.

  There were no vehicles anywhere.

  There were no visible tire-tracks.

  There was no sign that the police, or anyone else, had been anywhere n
ear the place.

  He drove on past at a crawl, then gradually let his car pick up to a more normal speed until he came again to the intersection with Diamond Park Avenue.

  This time he turned left, past the Safeway, and then left again on Barrett.

  That took him by the Bedford Mills Apartments, and he inched past with his foot lightly touching the brake, the speedometer needle resting against the peg at 5 MPH. (Why, he wondered when he noticed that, didn’t it go all the way down to zero?) He stared at the complex as he passed.

  The parking lot was full. Most of the windows were dark; yellow light showed in a scattered few, squares of rich color showing through the grey darkness of the walls. The blank outer faces of A and D buildings were featureless slabs of blackness.

  Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

  He noticed that most of the lights seemed to be in C building. There were lights in three apartments there.

  In fact, his own lights were on.

  He stopped the car, looked for traffic, and, seeing none, backed up a few yards and stopped again. He leaned close to the glass and looked again.

  The lights were on in the living room and bedroom of his apartment.

  He felt himself shiver slightly, and tried to tell himself that it was because he had the air conditioning turned up too high. He rolled down the window and leaned out.

  Warm, sticky air bathed his face as he looked up at the windows on the top floor of C building.

  Something moved in his apartment; he saw a dark figure outlined briefly against the glass in the living room, as if someone were taking a quick look out through the drapes, and then the drapes fell back in place and it was gone again.

  He hadn’t been able to make out any detail. It was just a tall, thin figure, black against the light, and it was there and then it wasn’t.

  He stared up at those closed drapes and the yellow light that poured through them for a long, long moment. Then he pulled his head back into the car, rolled the window up, and stepped on the gas.

  5.

  He was the only customer at Denny’s when he first got there, at about five, but by the time he’d finished his meal the place had acquired a dozen or so other patrons, and the sky was pale blue above the motel and the railroad tracks.

  His long night was beginning to wear on him; he was ready to go to bed, though he’d only been up for about ten hours. His body wanted rest, wanted to get back on something resembling a normal schedule, rather than the weird reversal of day and night he had just lived through.

  He’d been on a normal schedule until Tuesday night, when the air conditioner had been broken.

  He’d slept from 3:30 until 11:20 Wednesday morning, maybe napped briefly Wednesday night, and then slept from sometime Thursday morning – he really didn’t know just when – until about 7:00 p.m. on Thursday evening. That was, effectively, two nights’ sleep in three days. Here it was Friday morning, and that was catching up with him. He wasn’t a college kid any more, able to pull an all-nighter for a term paper or a poker game without suffering for it.

  The constant nervousness, the strain he was under, hadn’t helped a bit.

  If he went to bed, he guessed he would sleep for eight hours again, which would mean getting up around mid-afternoon.

  If he stayed up – and he wasn’t so worn that his ability to stay awake was seriously in doubt – he could probably hold out until early evening, go to bed, and get up for a somewhat early Saturday morning. If he could manage that, he’d probably be back to normal by Monday, ready to go to work.

  Of course, that would mean sleeping at night, in the dark, and something in the back of his mind didn’t like that idea at all. What if his earlier guess about the monsters had been right? What if they could only… could only do whatever it was they did at night, and only when the victim was sleeping?

  They knew where his motel room was, and he couldn’t retreat to George’s couch.

  He left the rest of his coffee untouched, and substituted another glass of orange juice. When that was gone, he went back to his room, where he dropped into bed, still clothed, and fell quickly asleep.

  6.

  When he looked at his watch upon awakening he was startled to see that he had only slept for a couple of hours. Apparently he had only been ready for a nap – his metabolism wasn’t quite ready to switch over to a nightwatchman’s hours.

  Well, he could accept that. That meant he had that much more of the day to try and get something done.

  He certainly had plenty to do; he wanted to call the police and find out what had happened at Orchard Heights, and he wanted to find himself a new apartment. And he intended to go back to Bedford Mills, by daylight, and start moving his belongings out of his old apartment.

  He got up, showered, dressed, and got ready to face the day.

  When he felt sufficiently alert, he reached for the phone – then paused, and reached for the phone book. He didn’t know the non-emergency number for the county police.

  Finding it, he dialed, and when a polite voice answered he asked for Lieutenant Buckley.

  A moment later, a vaguely-familiar voice said, “Daniel Buckley.”

  “Lieutenant? This is Ed Smith. From the Bedford Mills Apartments.”

  “Yes, I remember you, Mr. Smith. What can I do for you?”

  “I was wondering whether there’s been any progress in explaining what happened on Wednesday.”

  “Not really, Mr. Smith.”

  Smith hesitated, then said, “Someone told me that there were officers looking at that unfinished office building yesterday; did they find anything?”

  Buckley hesitated, and then said, “Well, it isn’t really any of your business, but I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you. We got a call about that place, and when two of our men investigated they wound up walking through puddles of fresh paint. We think it might have been the same pranksters who got your neighbors over there on Wednesday, but we don’t really know.”

  “Fresh paint?” Smith was honestly puzzled by that.

  “Buckets of it,” Buckley told him, “White latex house paint was splashed all over the place, half an inch deep some places, and it couldn’t have been poured more than twenty minutes before – you know how fast latex paint dries.”

  “But where… I mean…” Smith tried to formulate a single question that would take in all his confusion.

  “Why’d they do it, do you mean?” Buckley suggested. “I’d say that pretty obviously, somebody thought it would be funny to get paint all over some uniforms.”

  “Oh,” Smith said.

  Another “prank,” that’s all it was, then.

  At least, that was all the police saw.

  No wonder there had been no police line. The nightmare people, or pranksters, or whatever they were, had successfully covered their tracks.

  That had been ingenious, he had to admit. The creatures clearly weren’t stupid. Paint would hide the blood pretty effectively, and they must have carried the bones away and hidden them.

  “Abandoned buildings like that always attract vandals, Mr. Smith,” Buckley said.

  Smith made a wordless noise of agreement into the phone, and then added, “By the way, there’s something I should tell you, if you’re still investigating all this. I’ve moved out of my apartment there; after what happened, it made me nervous staying there.”

  “I think that’s understandable, Mr. Smith, but if you’ll forgive me, don’t you feel that you’re giving in to the people responsible? They’ll probably think it’s all very funny that they forced you out of your home…”

  “Lieutenant,” Smith interrupted, “That’s not my home. I only lived there a few months, and I was never all that comfortable there. I just wanted to let you know where you can reach me.”

  “All right, then.”

  “For now, I’m staying at the Red Roof Inn in Gaithersburg, Room 203. I’ll be looking for a new apartment this afternoon. If I forget to tell you where I am, you can either ask
my boss, Einar Lindqvist, or a friend of mine, George Brayton.” He gave George’s address and phone number.

  There was silence for a moment, and Smith assumed Buckley was noting down the information.

  “All right, Mr. Smith, thank you. Was there anything else?”

  Smith hesitated, trying to think if there was anything he could say that would force Buckley to push his investigation a little harder, anything that might help him discover the monsters.

  “No, that’s all,” he said at last. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Smith.”

  He hung up.

  7.

  As he passed the Willow Street fork he began to slow down.

  By the time he reached the entrance to the Bedford Mills complex he was creeping along at little more than walking speed, and on the small bump that marked the division between street and lot he let the car come to a full stop.

  It was mid-afternoon, and sweltering hot. He had eaten lunch, found himself a new apartment over in Gaithersburg that would be available Wednesday and only cost about twice what it should, and it was time to come and look over his old place, pack up a few useful things and load them in the car. He was tired of living out of a hastily-packed suitcase.

  But this place was full of monsters.

  One of them was apparently living in his own apartment.

  What would he do if he walked in the door and came face to face with that thing?

  He hadn’t entirely worked that out, but his new folding knife was in his hip pocket, and the crowbar was on the seat beside him, waiting for him.

  Sooner or later, he would have to face this. He was not going to abandon all his belongings. His books, his stereo, his Kaypro 2000 laptop – he was not going to just leave them.

  He stepped on the gas, and the Chevy rolled forward into the lot.

  The lot was fuller than usual for this time of the afternoon on a weekday, even a Friday; he glanced at his watch, and saw that it wasn’t even 4:30 yet. Mildly puzzled, he found a space in front of C building and pulled in.