The Nightmare People

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Both its own flesh, and Mary’s skin, were spattered with a fine spray of his blood. A stray shaft of sunlight suddenly broke through the clouds and spilled through the trees to blaze golden from her hair, and Sandy could see gleaming red droplets in her hair, on the surrounding earth, on the moist undergrowth.

  All around, the crickets sang.

  His spittle caught it on its bare cheek; it didn’t react.

  It wasn’t struggling, he realized. It was lying there, grinning at them all, no longer screaming, just lying there.

  He felt a chill, and he flexed his neck. Why was it so calm? He suppressed a shiver.

  Why was he shivering? Shit, he’d been hurt worse than this, been through worse, without being scared.

  Blood loss, he thought, looking at the trickle that was dripping from his elbow. He was losing a lot of blood. Or maybe there was venom in the wounds.

  It wasn’t dangerous, though, not unless there was venom, and he didn’t have time to worry about it. They had to kill the thing.

  “Give me that,” he said, and he snatched the stake away from Smith, who was standing helplessly, like a fucking baby, Sandy thought, he started this and now he can’t go through with it.

  He placed the stake between the thing’s breasts, point down, ignoring the blood that dripped from his hand and ran down the rough oak.

  Before he was really ready, Khalil swung the hammer, and the wood ripped against his palms; the point drove down into the thing’s flesh, tearing through the flimsy halter it wore, and tearing through Mary’s stolen skin.

  He braced himself, squinting against the expected spurt of blood.

  Nothing came; the thing gasped softly, and lay still.

  It was still smiling.

  “Again,” Sandy said.

  Khalil swung again, and the stake drove down again, tearing at Sandy’s hands; he let go, and it stood upright, held by the creature’s flesh.

  Khalil swung a third time, and the stake drove in again, and this time Sandy saw the thing’s hands flop at the impact, saw the loose skin on its hideous face bounce up. Something came loose, and its other eye shone red, Mary’s blue gone forever.

  Sandy moved back and climbed unsteadily to his feet; once upright, he clutched at his wounded hand again.

  God, that hurt!

  He looked at the thing on the ground, and saw that only about eight or nine inches of the two-foot oaken stake still showed. It had obviously been driven clear through the creature, and well into the ground beneath.

  That was pretty good driving, he thought; Khalil was stronger than he looked.

  Maggie knelt by the thing’s side, and Sandy started to shout at her, to warn her away from it, because despite that shaft pinning it to the earth he was not entirely convinced it was dead.

  He was having trouble getting his breath, though.

  Then Maggie grabbed Mary’s halter top and tore a strip of the fabric away, exposing bare pink skin and a shrivelled nipple. The skin had torn where the stake went in, revealing the grey flesh beneath, and the slackening had let the nipple slide over to the outside of the lump on the creature’s chest, a lump that was not a breast, but only a rough imitation of one.

  Sandy gagged at the sight, remembering all too clearly when that nipple had stood atop a real woman’s breast.

  Then Maggie was there in front of him with the strip of cloth, wrapping it around his injured hand to stop the bleeding. He looked down, and realized that his hand and arm were completely covered with his own blood, that blood had run down his T-shirt, down his jeans and into his Nikes, that the thing that had pretended to be Mary was smeared and splattered with blood – and all of it was his.

  The daylight was dying, the sun was almost down and the clouds were closing in again.

  “Cut off its head,” Sandy tried to say, but his voice failed him. He tried again.

  “Cut off its fucking head!”

  That was better.

  Elias was standing there holding the axe, and not doing a damn thing with it. Khalil was holding the sledge, and looking ill. Smith wasn’t holding anything; he was just standing there, staring at the thing.

  “He’s right,” Smith said. “Elias, cut off its head.”

  Suddenly Elias looked sicker than Khalil did. “I can’t,” he said, “You do it!”

  Sandy started forward, intending to take the axe and do the job himself, but he brushed up against Maggie and stopped as pain laced through his hand again.

  He probably couldn’t even hold the damn axe, with his hands all torn up!

  It didn’t matter; Smith had taken the axe from Elias, and was lifting it up over his head. The sharp edge caught the last glimmer of direct light, as at that moment the sun finally vanished for good.

  Then the thing on the ground moved, it twisted its head to look up at the axe, and its arms came up.

  The axe came down, but a hand was there to meet it, meet it not at the blade, but the haft, just behind the head. The axe didn’t stop, not at first, but it slowed, and never reached the thing’s neck; it stopped an inch or two short, the creature holding it with both hands. It glared up at Smith with those baleful blood-red eyes, its needle-teeth gleaming.

  Elias stared, and then began groping at his shirt, pawing at it, desperately searching as the nightmare on the ground began a bizarre, grim tug of war with Ed Smith, each of the two trying to snatch the axe away from the other. Smith was standing, feet braced, while the woman was lying pinned to the earth, but he could not wrench it away.

  The woman-thing had the better grip, because of the axe-head, which kept her hands from slipping off the end, and because Smith’s hands were slick with sweat, while hers were dry – or almost dry. There was still a faint slick of Sandy’s blood on them.

  Elias pulled at the chain around his neck, and brought out his grandmother’s silver cross.

  Sandy took more direct action; injured hands or not, he had to do something. He stepped forward and kicked the axe out of the thing’s hands.

  Khalil stepped up and grabbed it, and he and Smith backed away with it to one side, beyond the thing’s right shoulder, while Maggie pulled Sandy back, past its feet. And Elias stood there, protected by his holy crucifix, to its left.

  The thing was still pinned and helpless, but now it was struggling, silently.

  Then it took the stake in both hands, but instead of trying to pull it up and out, it pushed down.

  “Jesus God,” Sandy said, watching. Maggie retched.

  The thing was pushing itself up off the stake.

  “Split it with the axe!” Sandy called. “Split the stake! Wedge something in it!”

  “Are you nuts?” Smith yelled back. “I’m not going near that thing! What if it got the axe away from us?”

  “Let’s get out of here!” Maggie shouted.

  Sandy watched as the thing pushed itself up, and saw that the grey flesh around the stake wasn’t just sliding, it was oozing, or rolling, along the rough oak. “Yeah,” he said, “Yeah, I think you’re right.” He started backing away.

  He wasn’t afraid of anything God had put on Earth, Sandy told himself, but this thing was none of God’s doing.

  “Sandy,” it called, in Mary’s voice, “What’s the rush?”

  He ignored that. “Smith,” he called, “Whatsyername, come on!”

  Smith nodded, and started circling around the thing, giving it a wide berth. The axe was still in his hand. Khalil, after an instant’s hesitation, came close behind him.

  Only an inch or two of stake still showed above its chest, and its entire body was off the ground. Its knees were bent, its sandalled feet planted on the earth; Mary’s golden hair, tangled and filthy with blood and dirt, hung from its head.

  “Elias,” Maggie called, “Come on!”

  Elias was holding out the crucifix. “I’m all right,” he called. “It can’t hurt me while I’ve got this; you guys go on, and I’ll bring up the rear.”

  “Elias,” Smith shouted, “It
’s not a goddamn vampire! Look at the stake, for Christ’s sake!”

  Elias threw Smith a glance in which Smith read dawning terror, and then turned to follow.

  The thing came off the stake and threw itself after him; a hand caught his ankle, and he went down.

  He rolled over and thrust the cross in its face as it fell on top of him. “Get away!” he shrieked, “Get it off me!”

  “Oh, Christ,” Sandy said, and he turned back.

  Smith and Khalil hesitated, then joined him.

  Elias was lying on his back, the Mary thing sprawled across him, and as the others started back toward it it took the crucifix from Elias’s hand, smiled at him, and then lifted the crucifix to its mouth and bit it in half.

  Even in the dimming light Sandy and Smith and Khalil could see the ragged hole in the thing’s back where the stake had gone through; Mary’s skin had been shredded, leaving an opening several inches across surrounded by ragged flaps of tissue.

  Under that, though, the grey flesh had already healed over; only a slight indentation remained where a two-inch shaft of oak had gone through the creature’s body.

  It spat out one piece of the crucifix, and flung the other aside. One hand reached up and pulled Mary’s skin up and off its face, flopping it back like a hood. Blonde hair trailed back in a mass of blood, dirt, and tangles, and its own true face was revealed – staring red eyes in round, black-rimmed sockets, grey muscles like clay smeared on a skull, a few strands of grayish-white hair on an almost-bald scalp the color of mud. It smiled down at the trapped boy, revealing what seemed like hundreds of gleaming silver teeth.

  Then it leaned its head forward and kissed Elias on the mouth.

  He shrank away in terror. The thing’s black lips were hard and cold; its red eyes filled his field of vision. There was no warmth or softness to this, such as he imagined there would be in kissing a woman, no warm breath – no breath at all that he could sense.

  Nonetheless, it was undeniably a kiss, and somewhere under his terror he wondered why, why was this thing kissing him? How should he respond?

  Then its hands reached up to his face and stroked gently along either side of his lower jaw. He felt a thin, pointed tongue pressing against his lips.

  Then the thumbs dug into his cheeks just behind his molars, painfully forcing his mouth open. The tongue slipped into his mouth, and ran slickly along his teeth.

  He could taste something foul, something compounded of mildew and decay, as if that tongue probing his jaw were rotted and moldy.

  He pulled his own tongue back until he almost gagged on it, and struggled to pull his head away, forcing himself back against the hard ground. He was dimly aware that Sandy and Smith had reached him, that they were tugging at the creature’s shoulders, trying to get it off him, but with no effect.

  The thing shifted, its lips sliding down, so that instead of meeting his own mouth squarely it was nuzzling his lower lip, its own lower lip on his chin, its upper lip in his mouth. He tried to bite, but those unyielding fingers at the hinge of his jaw wouldn’t let him.

  And then he felt the fangs extending from its upper jaw – not just a pair of them, like a vampire, but an entire rank of them, six or eight, at least, like steel needles, forcing themselves down behind his teeth and into the flesh below his gums, and then the pain hit and he screamed and screamed and screamed until the blood filled his mouth and he couldn’t scream any more.

  It seemed like an eternity.

  It was just over four seconds before he passed out.

  5.

  When the screaming began, Sandy and Smith struggled harder, hauling at the thing’s shoulders with all their strength, but they couldn’t move it. Sandy’s hands were bleeding again, which made it hard to grip, but he tried not to think about it.

  Khalil wasn’t helping them, and Sandy started to shout a demand to him, but then he saw him running up with the axe, and he was swinging it at the nightmare creature’s back.

  The screaming had been muffled to begin with, and within seconds it stopped. Sandy saw that Elias’s eyes had rolled back in their sockets until only the whites showed.

  The axe struck the creature, and bit into it, but the thing didn’t seem to even notice, and Sandy realized that the flesh of its shoulders seemed to be softening.

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  His hands pulled free suddenly, ripping away pieces of Mary’s skin; the thing’s shoulder had become too soft to grip properly. He started to reach down again, then stopped as Smith’s hands, too, came away with nothing but skin in them.

  He looked at its lower back, where Khalil had hit it with the axe, and the thing seemed almost insubstantial. Mary’s shorts were no longer filled out in a mockery of human sexuality; they were flattening even as he watched.

  What’s more, the thing seemed to be crawling forward, as if somehow, despite its size, it was crawling into Elias’s mouth. Blood bubbled up around its jaws, spilling out of Elias’s mouth and running thickly down his cheeks.

  Khalil hadn’t noticed what was happening; he was raising the axe again.

  “Don’t,” Sandy said, “Look!”

  Khalil, startled, looked.

  “If you hit again, you might go right through her and hit Elias,” Sandy said. Smith nodded agreement.

  “What’s happening?” Maggie called from the roadside.

  Elias had stopped screaming and struggling. He had stopped several seconds ago, Sandy realized. He reached down for the boy’s wrist, his hand passing within inches of the nightmare creature. It ignored him.

  He could find no pulse.

  “He’s dead,” Sandy announced.

  Smith shot him a glance. “You’re sure?”

  Sandy nodded.

  “What’s it doing?” Smith asked.

  “How the fuck should I know?” Sandy demanded.

  “Sorry,” Smith said, turning to look at the thing, still wrapped around Elias’s corpse, its head now definitely being squeezed into the dead boy’s mouth. Blood was running steadily down the corpse’s cheek. As he watched, something white was forced up and out, and tumbled down the stream of blood to the ground – a tooth, or perhaps a piece of bone. Smith could hear a chewing noise now, like metal scraping on bone. He swallowed bile.

  “What should we do?” he asked.

  “I think we should go,” Khalil said.

  “He’s right,” Sandy said, stepping back. “There’s nothing we can do for Elias now, or for Mary, and I think we’ve just made it pretty goddamn clear that we don’t know how the hell to kill these things, so I think we’d better just get the fuck out of here while it’s still doing whatever it’s doing. I don’t want to be next on its hit parade.”

  Smith nodded. The three men slowly backed away from the creature and its prize; they gathered up the axe and the sledge and departed, leaving the stake still embedded in the earth, the fragments of the broken crucifix where the thing had flung them, the spattered blood undisturbed in the growing darkness.

  Blood was beginning to pool under the two figures, locked in their fatal embrace; more teeth and bits of bone were coming up now, and the nightmare thing had its entire head forced into its victim’s mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Elias,” Smith called. He turned away.

  By the time they reached the road, they were all running.

  6.

  “I feel sick,” Smith said. The Chevy hummed quietly down Barrett Road, its headlights painting a swath of color through the black and grey gloom ahead.

  Maggie just nodded. It went without saying that she, too, felt ill, and she hadn’t even been close enough to see just what the thing had actually done.

  The Chevy’s empty back seat seemed to silently reproach her and Smith both.

  “What do we do now?” Smith asked.

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said quietly.

  That wasn’t exactly the truth, she admitted to herself. She didn’t know what Smith would do, but she’d decided what she was goi
ng to do.

  She was going to pretend the whole thing had never happened. She never knew any Bill Goodwin or Elias Samaan. She never talked on the phone late into the night with something that had claimed to be the newborn spawn of supernatural evil. She never saw a blood-spattered thing wearing a woman’s skin pull itself up off a wooden stake, somewhere in the woods between Diamond Park and Germantown.

  It hadn’t happened.

  In a month, she’d be back in school, and everything would be back to normal, and then the year after next she would go away to college – and she wouldn’t come back. Ever.

  She wasn’t going to tell Mr. Smith, though. He was a part of it; he hadn’t happened, either. She had never met him. If she told him, he’d try to talk her out of it, try to make it all real again, and she couldn’t stand that.

  It couldn’t be real. She wouldn’t let it be real.

  She was going to go home, and stay there, and if Smith ever called her again she was going to hang up on him, and if Sandy Niklasen called, or that Khalil, she would hang up on them, and most of all, if Bill Goodwin ever called she would hang up, or maybe unplug the phone from the wall, because she couldn’t possibly let that thing ever talk to her again.

  She couldn’t.

  “I need to get home,” she said, “Take me home, please. Or just drop me off somewhere and I’ll walk.”

  “I’ll drive you,” Smith said. “It’s no trouble.”

  She didn’t argue, but she would almost have preferred walking. Smith was a part of it, and she wanted to get away from him.

  On the other hand, those things were out there somewhere, and if she went walking around alone, with the sun down, one of them might find her.

  They didn’t really exist, but one of them might find her.

  It occurred to her that she might never dare go out at night again, but she didn’t much care. She had never been a night person. And right now, she wanted nothing but to be safely indoors somewhere, shut away from this horrible outside world where she could imagine things like nightmare people.