The Nightmare People

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Did it take pleasure in scaring him? Did it draw some sort of sustenance from terror?

  Could it feed on emotion, like the monsters in some of the stories he’d read, or seen on Star Trek? “Vampire,” Smith muttered. Maybe Elias was right with his theories about the vampire legends.

  “What did you say?” the voice on the phone asked eagerly.

  “Nothing,” Smith said, his voice catching in his throat.

  “Sounded like you said something,” the creature insisted. “Sounded like ‘vampire.’”

  Smith hesitated. Then he asked, “Are you?”

  “Am I what?” the creature said. “Am I a vampire? Hell, no; don’t be stupid. There aren’t any vampires.”

  Hearing a walking nightmare, a cannibal monster bent on replacing him, dismiss vampires so easily, as if the supernatural was the nonsense Smith had always considered it to be, was a very strange and confusing experience. “But you…” Smith began.

  “If there were still any vampires around, I wouldn’t be here,” the thing said, interrupting him. “The last vampire bought it in Los Angeles in 1939 – got a stake through the heart and her head cut off, the mouth stuffed with garlic and the whole thing burned. Messy, very messy.”

  Smith stared at the phone, as that horrible imitation of his own voice continued, casually conversational, “Of course, I don’t suppose I should criticize; as you saw in that basement, we aren’t very tidy ourselves, when we feed…”

  Smith hung up, slamming the phone abruptly into its cradle.

  6.

  He thought about calling back, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he sat, trying to order his disordered thoughts.

  The creature had been so calm and matter-of-fact about it all. It hadn’t tried to deny anything. It had admitted openly that it and its kind had eaten all his neighbors, and that it had intended to eat him.

  And what was that about vampires?

  Had there once really been vampires?

  He shook his head. The image of blood-sucking bats was too corny, too overworked, to take seriously. The creature must have been trying to sidetrack him somehow.

  Maybe it really was a vampire, and had been trying to mislead him. Maybe Elias was right after all.

  The phone rang, and he jumped. He stared at it, then reached out carefully and picked it up.

  After all, the thing couldn’t get at him through a telephone.

  It could seep through closed windows, though – why else would it have been outside that first night, instead of coming up the stairs? And it could heal bullet wounds in seconds – how did he know what it could do? Maybe it could travel through the phone lines!

  He almost hung up again, but then he decided to risk it. He lifted the receiver and said, “Hello?”

  “Mr. Smith?” a voice asked, a feminine and unfamiliar voice. Whoever it was, she sounded very young and very nervous.

  Was it one of the other nightmare people, trying to lull him, get him off-guard somehow? “Yes?” he said warily.

  “Mr. Smith, this is Maggie Devanoy,” the voice said. “I… look, I think I need to talk to you again. And some other people do, too. Could you maybe meet us somewhere, say, tomorrow afternoon? After church?”

  “I don’t go to church,” Smith said without thinking.

  “Well, I do,” Maggie replied, “And it doesn’t matter anyway. Could we see you tomorrow?”

  “Who’s ‘we’? Who are these people?” he asked.

  Had the nightmare people gotten at Maggie? Had they gone after her, because he had told her about them?

  Was it really Maggie at all, and not a nightmare imitating her voice? “Well, after you left,” Maggie explained, “I got thinking, and I made some phone calls to some people I know, and I found some other people who are worried about what’s been happening at that apartment building.”

  That did sound like a trap. “What people?” he asked warily.

  “Well,” Maggie said, “there’s Annie McGowan, her sister Kate lived at Bedford Mills, or maybe her sister-in-law, and there’s Alice and Maddie Newell, their father lived there, and there’s Khalil Saad, who had friends there and knew Bill, and Sandy Niklasen, who lived there himself except he had a fight with his girlfriend last week and moved out, and… and… I think that’s all, but maybe I forgot someone.”

  Smith stared at the flowered curtains that hid most of the window. “How’d you find them all?” he asked.

  “Well, I just kinda knew them, I guess,” Maggie answered. “I met Annie when I was waiting for Bill one day, she was sitting on the lawn with her sister Kate, that’s the one that… that they got, and she was crocheting something, and I got talking to her. And she’s listed in the phone book, so that’s how I found her. And the Newell girls are in my school, or at least Maddie is, and Alice was last year, before she graduated – they live with their mother, and when their folks got divorced a few years ago their father moved into the apartment over there. And Khalil used to talk to Bill about cars sometimes, he works in a garage – Khalil, I mean, not Bill; anyway, he talked to Bill sometimes when he was over there visiting his other friends there, so I knew him from that. And I met Mary, that was Sandy’s girlfriend, when I babysat for her neighbor across the hall a couple of times. She talked about Sandy a lot, but I never met him, but I knew his name, and she told me who he’d gone to stay with when he moved out, so I called him.”

  It sounded plausible, certainly. It was exactly the sort of thing he had wanted to do himself, except that he hadn’t been able to think of anybody except Maggie herself.

  It appeared he’d chosen well, though, when he contacted Maggie.

  “So will you come, tomorrow?” Maggie asked.

  “All right,” Smith said. “Where and when?”

  “Well, I was figuring that the best place would be Annie McGowan’s house, on Topaz Court – number 706, Topaz Court – around two o’clock. Would that be okay with you?”

  “That would be fine,” he said, scribbling down the address on the pad on the nightstand. “I’ll be there.”

  “Oh, good! See you tomorrow, then!”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  She hung up.

  He held the phone for a moment, then put it gently down.

  He had his group now, assembled for him and ready to go. He was clearly going to be the team leader, since he was the one who had started this and who knew the most about those things, but these were people who would know what the nightmare people had done, people who had lost friends and family, had them eaten. They’d be angry and frightened, and would probably ready to do almost anything he asked of them.

  But he remembered the bullet-holes, he remembered the slow grey fluid that had sealed them. These things that he and the rest were up against were not mortal flesh. Whatever the things were, they were truly supernatural.

  Maggie’s recruits, he was sure, would do what he asked – but what could he ask?

  7.

  Maggie stared at the phone for a long moment.

  She had called everyone she could think of – sweet old Annie, and that crazy Khalil, and that rotten Sandy Niklasen, and the Newells. She had called Elias Samaan, and talked to him for awhile. She had called Smith back.

  And she still needed to talk. She was still scared, still confused, still twisted around.

  But she’d called them all, everyone she could think of that she could find a number for and that wasn’t out of town on vacation or something. Elias, Khalil, Annie, Sandy, the Newells, Ed Smith – that was everybody. There was nobody else left that she could call about the monsters.

  Nobody, that is, except the monsters themselves.

  Without knowing why, she dialed the Goodwins’ number.

  “Hello?”

  Mrs. Goodwin’s voice. Even if it wasn’t really her, the voice was still the same. “Hi,” Maggie said. “Is Bill there?”

  “Just a minute.”

  A sudden panic swept over her. What was she going to
say?

  Would she pretend it was really Bill, her old familiar BIll, and talk to it as if nothing had happened? Would they talk about friends and movies and TV and sex, just like any ordinary couple?

  Could that thing carry on a real conversation? That morning it hadn’t seemed to know what was going on. It hadn’t gotten her jokes. It hadn’t followed any of the gossip about their friends. It hadn’t watched any of the TV shows she talked about.

  Did monsters watch TV?

  What would she say to it?

  If she didn’t pretend, if she treated it as the monster it was, what would she say to it?

  Was there anything she could tell it, anything she needed to ask?

  What did she really need to know? “Hello?” Bill’s voice said in her ear.

  Her voice burst from her. “Why?” she asked it, without thinking. “Why did you kill him?”

  For a moment there was only silence on the line.

  Then Bill’s voice asked calmly, “Have you ever wondered about the nature of evil?”

  Chapter Six:

  Sunday, August 6th

  1.

  The tall, sixtyish woman in the flowered dress who had answered the door was undoubtedly Annie McGowan herself.

  “Hi,” Smith said uncertainly, “I’m Ed Smith.”

  “Come in, Mr. Smith,” she replied, “We’ve been expecting you. I’m Anne McGowan.” She held the door wide, and he stepped past her, through the foyer into a small, sunny living room.

  Elias Samaan and Maggie Devanoy were already there, sitting at either end of a rose-patterned couch, not talking to each other. A dark young man with straight black hair sat silently on a nearby chair.

  “I think you know Maggie, and Elias,” Annie said, as she followed Smith into the room. “This is Khalil Saad.”

  Smith nodded, and Saad nodded back.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Smith,” Annie said.

  Smith took the remaining armchair and looked about.

  A large window at the back gave a view of a small fenced yard ablaze with roses and gladioli; an archway on one side opened into a tidy little dining room where crystal glistened in the sun. Mirrors hung over the couch and the dining-room buffet, reflecting each other into infinity, a myriad of Maggies and Eliases in the lower corners of every second image.

  “Mr. Smith,” Khalil Saad said suddenly.

  “Yes?” Smith replied, startled.

  “You have seen the things without their masks? Maggie said you had?”

  The man had a slight accent, Smith noticed. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen them.”

  “What is it they look like?”

  Smith considered. “Well, the first time I saw one, I thought I was asleep and dreaming – having a nightmare. I think of them as nightmare people, because of that. They have grey skin, like old grey leather, and needle-sharp silvery teeth, and red eyes.”

  “I have glimpsed the eyes and the teeth,” Saad agreed, nodding.

  The doorbell rang, and Annie answered it, letting in two attractive young women – one eighteen or twenty, Smith judged, and the other in her mid-teens.

  Annie showed them in and introduced them around – Alice and Maddie Newell. Alice was the elder of the two, her hair blonde and curled where her sister’s was light brown and straight.

  Before the introductions were complete, the doorbell rang again, and Annie admitted a stocky, brown-haired man, probably in his late twenties, who introduced himself as Sander Niklasen.

  Names were pronounced once more, and the newcomers found seats – the regular living room furniture was not sufficient, so more chairs were brought from the dining room.

  When everyone had a place, Annie turned to Smith, but hesitated, unsure what to say.

  Smith took his cue and rose.

  “My name’s Ed Smith,” he announced, “And until a few days ago I lived in Apartment C41 at the Bedford Mills Apartments on Barrett Road.”

  All eyes turned to him; his audience was attentive and ready.

  Smith told his story, beginning to end – the face at the window, the mass disappearance, the continuing late-night apparitions, the bloody basement, the borrowed gun, all of it. As he spoke, he noticed that Elias and Maggie and Khalil Saad were listening closely; the Newells seemed distracted, and kept glancing about at the others. Annie McGowan listened, but with an expression of disapproval that grew steadily more intense.

  And Sandy Niklasen sat back and stared at him, face calm and unreadable, the entire time.

  When he had finished, Smith simply stopped. He had no rousing conclusion.

  “I saw them again last night,” he said, “Outside my window at the motel – the one with my voice, and Bill Goodwin behind it. They saw I was awake, and ready for them, same as always, and they went away. And that’s all; that’s all I know about them.”

  Alice Newell stood up suddenly, long hair flouncing prettily. “Is this a joke?” she demanded, frowning.

  “No,” Smith said mildly. “I know it all sounds pretty stupid, but it’s not a joke.”

  She looked around at them all, and saw no one smiling. “Look,” she said, turning back to Smith, “I came here because Maggie called me yesterday and asked me if my father had been acting funny. And I said yeah, he had, he wasn’t himself – but I didn’t mean he’s turned into some kind of movie monster or anything, I just meant he was… was distracted or something. I know Maggie said something about strange things happening at the apartments, and that the people there weren’t human any more, but I thought… I don’t know, I didn’t take her seriously. I was expecting some kind of group counseling here, or something, or maybe something about toxic wastes in the water there, I don’t know what I expected, but I know I wasn’t expecting a bunch of loonies out of a horror movie!”

  Elias snorted.

  Smith looked at Alice for a moment, and then said, “Ms. Newell, I know the whole thing sounds unbelievable, but it’s true. Everything I’ve told you is the truth. Maggie and Elias have seen for themselves that the creature pretending to be Bill Goodwin isn’t human; I had hoped that everybody here already knew that their friends and family are gone. If you don’t know that, don’t already believe it, I’m not going to try to convince you. You can leave, if you don’t believe, or if you don’t want to get involved, or you can stay, and maybe help avenge your father’s death – because he really is dead.”

  Alice stared at him, then turned on her heel, without a word, and marched out the door.

  Her sister looked after her, looked around the room at the others, then whispered, “I’m sorry,” and ran after Alice.

  “Mr. Smith,” Annie McGowan said, “I don’t doubt you believe that you’ve been telling the truth. I know that thing pretending to be my sister-in-law Kate isn’t her – my Lord, the thing can’t even knit, and Kate’s been knitting since she was a girl! But are you really sure that… that these things have killed all those people?”

  Smith considered carefully before replying, “No, Ms. McGowan, I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything any more. Maybe I’ve gone mad and imagined the whole thing. I know that those things appear to be wearing the skins of the people they replaced, and I know I saw blood and bone in that basement, so I made some assumptions – but I don’t know they’re all dead. Fair enough?”

  Annie nodded. “Yes, Mr. Smith, that’s fair enough. But in that case, why haven’t you gone to the police?”

  Elias snorted again, and Maggie leaned over and slapped him lightly across the ribs. He looked at her, startled.

  “Ms. McGowan, the police aren’t interested,” Smith explained. “They know all about the disappearance, but they’ve written it off as a prank – and what hard evidence could we show them? You know that thing isn’t your sister-in-law, but how could you prove that to the police? They aren’t equipped to handle this – at least, not unless we can come up with something clear and definite enough that they’ll accept it as proof that a crime has been committed.”

  “You c
ould show them what’s under the skin of one of these creatures,” Elias suggested.

  “I could?” Smith asked. “How?”

  “It seems simple enough,” Annie said. “Get an officer out there on some pretext, and then just grab the creature’s arm and pull up a piece of skin.”

  “But what’s the thing going to do while you’re doing this?” Smith asked. “And what’s the officer going to do? After all, at first glance, it’ll look like you’re attacking an innocent person. Would a police officer just stand there and let you pull skin off an innocent person? Besides, there are more than a hundred of the things out there, and they probably don’t want us proving anything to the police.”

  Annie frowned. “Mr. Smith, this is a nation of laws,” she said. “We should at least try to work with the police before we take the law into our own hands, as you seem to be proposing! As you already did, when you took a shot at that boy!”

  “Ms. McGowan – I just can’t see how it can work. And it wasn’t a ‘boy.’”

  “Ms. McGowan,” Maggie said, startling everyone, “I talked to one of those things last night, on the phone. They aren’t scared of the police. They aren’t scared of anything. The one I talked to said that they were evil incarnate.”

  Smith blinked at her. “What?” he asked. This was the first he had heard of this.

  “That’s what it said,” Maggie explained. “It said that evil is a real thing, a real force, a… a power in the world, a power that can take on solid form, and live with us without us even knowing it. And it’s done that, throughout history – it’s taken one form after another. Each time, it’s been found out, and its creatures have been hunted down and destroyed, but each time it’s come back again, more powerful than before, in a new form. And it’s been gone, but it’s back, now, and these creatures are its new form.”

  His own conversation with the thing in his apartment came back to him. “Vampires,” he said.

  Everyone turned to look at him.