“Fuckin’ A you will,” Sandy told the thing. “I’ll see you in hell first!”
The thing just kept smiling, and it came forward, seeming to step out of the fire as the last fluid burned off, the last tatters of cloth and skin falling away. Sandy stepped back again, and the thing lunged for him.
It lunged, and it got him.
The pair fell past Maggie into the living room, the thing on top, Sandy underneath, and she could hear Sandy grunting as he hacked at the thing with his knife, but she couldn’t see any blood, couldn’t see anything but the smoldering grey flesh and a few charred black flakes of skin, and then it reached up with both hands and dug its thumbs into Sandy’s jaw, and its head dipped down to kiss him, the way the other one had kissed Elias, and Maggie found herself screaming.
“No!” she shrieked, “No, no! No!”
She dove on top of the thing, her hands curved like claws, like talons, but she’d cut her fingernails, because who needs long nails in the summer? She couldn’t claw the thing, but she grabbed its still-hot shoulders and tried to pull it away, and she heard Sandy shriek as it did something to him, and then his shriek was muffled, and she couldn’t stand it, she couldn’t.
She’d seen Elias die that way. She’d seen this thing, this same one by the voice, walking around as a parody of Bill Goodwin, who she thought she might even have been in love with. She was not going to let it get another of her friends!
She forced an arm around its neck in a chokehold that would have stopped anything human, ignoring the heat that singed the fine hairs on her forearm, but it didn’t even notice, and she flung herself forward again, desperate, and closed her teeth on the thing’s ash-streaked shoulder.
It let out an eerie wail, a sound like nothing Maggie had heard before, and erupted beneath her, flinging her off to the side and releasing Sandy.
Sandy seized his chance. He rolled aside, leaving a smear of blood on the carpeting, and staggered to his feet, running toward the sliding glass door that led out onto the deck, one hand on his mouth, blood oozing between his fingers.
Confused, unsure what was going on, Smith followed him.
Khalil leapt forward and picked Maggie up from where she had landed, threw a quick glance around at the three nightmare people, and then dragged her, too, toward the back door.
Maggie looked, trying to understand what had happened.
The burned nightmare creature was cowering in a corner, pawing ineffectually at one shoulder; the other two were standing over it, doing nothing.
And the important part was that none of them was paying any attention at all to the four humans.
Sandy had the door open, and the four of them spilled out onto the deck, then down the steps to the back yard, and then Maggie led them around to the street and away. She resisted the temptation to run home; her parents could not deal with this. Annie McGowan might.
She led the way to Sandy’s car.
4.
Sandy couldn’t drive; he was bleeding from the mouth, and the hand that had been bitten the day before was bleeding again as well. His shirt was scorched and blackened, and he had minor burns on his arms and face.
Smith seemed dazed; Maggie was incoherent. Khalil took the wheel.
They only had three long blocks to cover to Annie McGowan’s house, but as a group they weren’t fit for walking or running.
Besides, the car would be harder to follow, should the nightmare people attempt pursuit.
Khalil pulled into the driveway at 706 Topaz Court, parked the car neatly on the apron, not blocking the garage, and then turned his attention to getting his passengers safely into the house.
The first step was to get the door open, so that no one would have to wait on the porch. He hurried up the steps and rang the doorbell while Smith helped the burned and bleeding Sandy out of the car and up the walk.
Maggie followed, slowly; now it was she who seemed dazed, while Smith was largely recovered.
Annie answered, and Khalil shushed her before she could exclaim over the sorry condition of the group. He then acted as doorman, herding the others inside before he entered himself.
He made certain the door was locked, and glanced around to reassure himself that there were no open windows before he followed the others into the living room.
Sandy was sitting in one of the armchairs, his head tilted back, while Annie held a cold towel to his lower jaw; the bleeding seemed to have stopped, finally. Maggie was huddled at one end of the couch, curled up in foetal position. Smith was standing by the window, looking out at Annie’s flower garden.
Annie looked up as Khalil entered. “What happened?” she asked.
Khalil shrugged.
“What did happen?” Smith asked. “Sandy, I thought it had you; why’d it let go? What did you do?”
Sandy tried to speak, and almost choked on a fresh flow of blood. He desisted, and managed a half-shrug. He pointed to the knife on his belt – he had managed to sheathe it somewhere along the way – but followed that with another shrug.
“You stabbed one of them?” Annie asked.
Sandy nodded.
“He stabbed it a dozen times, at least,” Smith said. “He cut its throat, tried to cut its head off, and it didn’t even care. And then when it was attacking him he stabbed it in the chest over and over again, and it didn’t seem to notice at first, but then all of a sudden it screamed and let go.”
Annie swallowed, looking at the sheathed knife. “I thought you were going to burn them?”
“We did,” Smith said. “Sandy set one on fire, and its clothes and skin burned off, but that didn’t seem to bother it any more than the knife did.”
Annie shuddered. Maggie curled herself more tightly.
“Maggie,” Khalil said.
Smith looked at her, then at Khalil. “You think it was something she did?” he asked.
Khalil nodded.
Sandy turned his head long enough to glance at Maggie, and then he nodded, as well. “Knife didden’ do nuffin’,” he said, trying not to move his lower jaw as he spoke.
Smith crossed to the couch and sat down. “Maggie?” he said. “What did you do to it?”
“Go ’way,” she said, not moving.
Smith blinked, and wished he’d had more sleep.
“Maggie?” he said again.
“Go ’way,” she repeated, with more emphasis.
Khalil came and stood over her. “Maggie,” he said, “We must know what you did.”
“Don’ wanna talk about it,” she said, and Smith realized that she was sucking her thumb. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder.
She twitched away. “Go ’way!” she snapped.
“The hell I will!” Smith snapped back. “Listen, Maggie, I know you don’t want to talk about it or think about it, but you have to! Those things are still out there, and they’re probably determined to kill us all, and they’ve already killed Elias and his parents and Bill Goodwin and his whole family and all those other people. We’ve shot them and stabbed them and burned them and driven a fucking stake through one’s heart, and they just smiled at us like we were nothing, and now you did something that hurt one of them, and we have got to know what it was!”
Maggie curled up more tightly than ever.
Enraged, Smith leaned over and yanked her thumb out of her mouth.
She spun around and slapped him across the face, hard.
Smith grabbed one hand, and Khalil grabbed the other, and they held her there, facing Smith.
“What did you do?” Smith demanded.
“I bit it!” Maggie shouted. “That’s all! I bit it, I was so scared and mad I couldn’t help it.”
For a moment, no one spoke, and the room was silent. With a distant hum, the central air conditioning came on.
“You bit it?” Smith asked at last. Maggie nodded.
“What did it taste like?”
“Like shit,” Maggie said, “And there were ashes and bits of skin and it smelled of
lighter fluid, and I think I’m going to be sick, let me up.”
Smith and Khalil released her, and she staggered to the bathroom. The others all sat, silently staring at one another, pretending they couldn’t hear her retching.
“Has she been poisoned, do you think?” Khalil asked.
Smith shook his head. “She’s just upset.”
“If they don’t mind knives and bullets,” Annie asked, “Why would a bite bother them?”
Smith shrugged. “Why does a cross bother a vampire?”
“’S no reason,” Sandy said.
“The cross is the sign of God,” Annie said, “and vampires are supposed to be the spawn of hell, so naturally they’d fear it.”
Smith shrugged. “But that’s if you accept the whole Christian worldview. If you don’t know that, it seems pretty arbitrary. Never mind the cross, then; why does it take a stake through the heart to kill a vampire?”
Nobody had an answer to that.
“You mean,” Annie asked, “that it’s all just random? That there’s no sense to it?”
Smith shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “As you said, with vampires, there’s the whole Christian mythology thing, where they fear the cross and holy water, and sunlight, which comes from God, and maybe there’s some sort of symbolism to the stake through the heart, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a pattern with the nightmare people, too, a pattern we can figure out.”
“Not Christian,” Khalil said. “The cross did nothing.”
“They’re Jewish?” Sandy suggested sarcastically. The bleeding had stopped again, and he had swabbed away most of the blood.
Smith shook his head. His brain seemed oddly clear for the moment. “No, it’s not that. Look, when there were vampires, people took Christianity and its symbols pretty seriously.”
“They still do!” Annie protested. Smith held up a hand.
Maggie emerged from the bathroom, but stood silently listening.
“No, most people don’t, not really,” Smith said. “A hundred years ago nobody was putting ‘Is God Dead?’ on the covers of magazines. Some people take it seriously, but even for them, the trappings don’t have the same meaning they once did.”
“Whash your point?” Sandy asked. His speech was still a bit mushy, but better, and improving rapidly.
“My point is that vampires were creatures of their time,” Smith replied. “And these things are probably creatures of our time. They’re new, just invented, or evolved, or whatever. They’re meant for now, for the 1990s.”
“So they aren’t Chris… Christians?” Sandy said, working his jaw carefully. “Fine, but what the hell are they, and what’s it got to do with biting? I don’t see biting as the next big fashion trend around here.”
“No,” Smith said, “but nowadays nobody has any grand scheme of good and evil. There’s no moral order to our universe, not when kids are killing each other over crack, and people on Wall Street are getting rich without ever doing anything but playing with other people’s money. We don’t have any God any more, or any real devil, we just have the law of the jungle.”
He realized that Sandy and Annie and Maggie and Khalil were all staring at him, and he hesitated.
“Look,” he said, “It makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s using their own weapon against them, after all. They try to eat us, don’t they? And to kill a vampire, which sucks blood, you stop the blood from flowing with a stake through the heart. It’s the law of the jungle, as I said.”
Smith paused, looking at them all.
“Kill or be killed,” he said. “Eat or be eaten.”
5.
“How do you mean that?” Sandy asked.
Maggie moaned, and took a step back toward the bathroom.
“Mr. Smith,” Annie said, “You don’t mean we have to eat those things?”
Smith nodded. “I think we do,” he said. “I think that’s why Maggie’s bite hurt it. I think that’s the only way to kill them.”
An uncomfortable silence followed Smith’s pronouncement.
“Mr. Smith,” Annie asked at last, “How do you propose to test this theory?”
Smith shrugged. “I don’t know that I do propose to test it. I was just presenting it as I saw it.”
“Of course we’re going to test it!” Sandy said. “We’ve gotta kill those damned things!”
“But eat them…” Annie said, aghast.
Maggie moaned again.
“Maybe we wouldn’t need to eat all of one to kill it,” Smith said. “Maybe just the heart, same as a stake through the heart kills a vampire.”
“Mr. Smith,” Annie said, “I asked you before, and I’m asking again – how do you propose to find out?”
“Well, Ms. McGowan, I guess we’d have to try to eat one.”
Maggie ran for the bathroom again.
“We’ll need to get one of them alone,” Sandy said. “They don’t seem too eager to work together – I mean, the other two never attacked us when we set that one on fire – but we couldn’t expect them to just stand by. We couldn’t count on it.”
Smith nodded. “Maybe we could lure one here, somehow. We lured that one out to the woods, after all.”
“Not here!” Annie protested.
“Maybe at that house,” Khalil said, “Maybe we lure two of them away?”
Smith and Sandy looked at one another. Sandy nodded. “Yeah, we could try that,” he said. “Maggie must know someone else who knew Elias, someone who could lure him away.”
“Do we know which nightmare people they are?” Smith asked. “The one that got Elias was the one that used to be Mary, but what about the others?”
“Who cares?” Sandy asked.
“Maybe they do,” Smith said. “That one that was after me – it tried every night for five nights, and as far as I know it didn’t go after anyone else.”
Sandy shook his head. “Then why did that thing give up Mary’s skin to get Elias?”
Smith shrugged. “I don’t know. It did, though. And that other one, the one we burned, that used to be the Goodwin kid, judging by its voice. I guess they get tired and move on to the next victim, or something. But do they maybe still… I mean, if I tried to get Bill Goodwin for something, would that thing come, even though it’s not Goodwin any more?”
“Nah,” Sandy said. “Why should it?”
Smith had no answer to that.
6.
They talked and schemed until 2:00 a.m. Maggie phoned her parents and told them she was staying over at the Ryersons’. Annie apologized and went to bed around midnight, and the others sat up, planning.
They discarded a dozen ideas, and finally settled on a clear and simple one. Maggie would phone the Samaan house and tell whoever answered that she wanted to meet him outside, alone, somewhere. The others would be watching the house, and when one came out, they would follow it, jump it, and try to eat it.
If two came out, they would break into the house and go after the one left behind.
If all three emerged, or none, they would abandon the scheme and try again another time.
There was some argument as to whether Sandy, with the fresh bite in his jaw and the older one on his hand, was fit for this, but he won out, and was included.
Smith was glad of that; Sandy was clearly the strongest and most aggressive of the lot of them, and two humans against one of the creatures would not be odds much to Smith’s liking.
At least, whatever the things were, they didn’t seem to have the legendary strength of ten that vampires had, nor the ability to turn to mist, or a bat, or a wolf.
Smith wondered if vampires had really been able to do all those things, or whether the legends had grown in the telling. He remembered what Elias had said about unicorns and rhinoceri.
That was not comforting, however, when he considered that he’d much rather face a unicorn of legend than a real rhinoceros. What if vampires had been worse than the legends? What if the nightmare people had hidden powers that Smith and his littl
e group hadn’t yet learned about?
He said nothing about that, though, as they headed back to Amber Crescent.
They parked Sandy’s car two houses up, and crept quietly down the street, and into the bushes beside the Samaans’ front porch, just as they had before, and then they waited.
It seemed forever. The cool air was thick and humid, the silent street oppressive, and the heavy overcast reflected a diffuse and hostile blue-grey light down upon the unlit house. There was no sign of the moon; if it was up the clouds hid it, and Smith was fairly sure it had already set.
Then, faintly, Smith heard the ring of a phone. He smiled; Sandy glanced back at him, and he, too, smiled.
A light came on, and then another, somewhere inside, and golden light spilled across the lawn. Smith tensed.
It seemed like another eternity before the front door opened, turning the flow of light from within into a flood. The thing wearing Elias’s skin stepped out onto the porch and looked around cautiously.
Smith and Sandy ducked back down.
It pulled the door closed behind itself, and started down the steps. Sandy had his hunting knife in his hand; Smith raised his own weapon, a bread knife he had borrowed from Annie’s kitchen.
“Get it!” Sandy whispered, and he and Smith leapt forward.
Khalil appeared from somewhere beside them, and the three of them landed heavily on the back of the Elias thing, knocking it to the ground and falling with it, so that all four of them lay in a heap on the front walk.
Sandy got up on his knees and heaved at the thing’s shoulder; the others slid off, and he flipped it onto its back.
It was wearing a grubby T-shirt and a pair of jeans, colorless in the darkness. It looked up at him and smiled.
“Hello, Sandy,” it said, showing those needle-sharp teeth.
“Hold that pose,” Sandy said, and he plunged his knife into its chest.
Smith had its right shoulder and was pinning it down; Khalil had the left. It raised its head and looked at the knife piercing its flesh, and it smiled again.
The Nightmare People Page 17
