The Nightmare People

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  The lieutenant took a breath, let it out, glanced around, then turned his gaze back to Smith.

  “Now, think carefully,” he said. “Are you really sure that you didn’t see or hear anything strange last night?”

  4.

  He told them about the nightmare, and the heat, and the broken air conditioner. He told them about his clock-radio that didn’t tick, and his neighbor in C42, Mrs. Malinoff, who creaked when she walked, and his neighbor across the hall in C44, whom he never saw but whose name was on his mailbox, Attalla Sleiman, who kept a cat that meowed occasionally. He told them about his mother back in Boston, and his sister in Ohio, and his father who’d been in Florida last they’d heard. He told them about answering an employment ad from DML Communications and getting hired to work in Rockville, and moving to Diamond Park because he couldn’t afford to live any closer in toward Washington. He told them about driving out here in April and finding an apartment, and about the Goodwin kids from downstairs who had helped him carry in all his stuff and had wanted to play games on his computers.

  He told them everything he could think of, over and over again, while the sun beat down on him and his sweat oozed from every pore. He drank lukewarm lemonade from a cop’s thermos, and then told them everything all over again.

  And somehow none of it made any sense at all.

  The lieutenant’s tape recorder ran out of tape; he put it back in his pocket, sighed deeply, looked around at the cars that jammed the parking lot, and said, “All right, Mr. Smith, thank you. If you want to go back to your apartment, you can, but I’d appreciate it if you let a couple of my men look it over first. You can wait out here; sit in my car, if you like.”

  “I’ll use the bench,” Smith said, pointing to the park bench that stood against the retaining wall, beside the steps between his building and the next – between C Building and D Building.

  The lieutenant nodded, and Smith walked nervously over.

  Nobody paid any attention to him. He brushed away imaginary dirt, and then settled down onto the wooden slats, slats that were faded and warm from the sun.

  The back of the bench pressed his sweat-soaked shirt into his back, and the dampness felt horribly cool and clammy. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and stared.

  He was facing the parking lot, facing two cars, an old blue Chevy and a silver-grey Toyota hatchback. He knew the Chevy belonged to Bill Goodwin, the oldest of those kids in C12; the Toyota could have been anybody’s. The sun glared blindingly off its bright finish, obscuring details.

  Beside the Toyota was a Honda Accord, beyond that an old Ford van; beside the Chevy stood another nondescript coupe that he couldn’t identify exactly from where he sat. They were all completely normal; a sweater was draped across a steering wheel, a parking decal from Johns Hopkins was stuck crookedly to one end of a bumper, a Redskins sunshade was propped up behind a windshield.

  And their owners were missing.

  He shivered, despite the sun, and stood up.

  Looking over the cars he could see a police van, sitting in the middle of the lot, the back doors open and a uniformed officer moving things around inside. Beyond it was the other row of parked cars, facing the other direction, and beyond that was the green divider lined with poplars, separating this parking lot from the next, his building and its neighbor from the two across the way.

  The other lot was just as full as his own, and police were hurrying in and out of both the buildings on that side, too. The entire complex was affected, all four buildings.

  He looked for his own car, a red 1986 Chevy Spectrum, and spotted it right where he had left it, between a white mini-van and an old VW Beetle. None of the three had moved since he had parked there the previous evening.

  His eye followed the line of cars out to the left, out to the street, where traffic was zipping by normally, ignoring the crowded lot. The world was going on about its business.

  He turned back the other way, to his right, to the little patch of trees that separated the apartment complex from the unfinished office building on the next street. Sunlight glinted from the new chain-link fence that had recently gone up around the office building, erected hurriedly by creditors when the original builder had gone bankrupt.

  Not that the fence would actually stop anyone; he had seen kids slipping under it easily, all along the back. He peered, trying to see if the new builder had started work yet.

  Something was moving in the shade of the trees.

  He blinked, and looked again. Someone was walking through the grove, straight toward the parking lot. He stared.

  It was a woman, a plump middle-aged woman wearing a flowered nightgown or housedress and carrying a small dog, looking very much like a clich? dowdy housewife, the sort that might turn up on any prime time sitcom, except for one bizarre incongruity.

  She was wearing a hat.

  On a hot, humid day in August, she was wearing a broad-brimmed man’s hat.

  She was wearing a dark slouch hat, blue-black, with one side of the brim turned down.

  5.

  Smith stared silently at her, completely incapable of deciding what to do.

  Then one of the policemen noticed the woman, and pointed her out to Lieutenant Buckley. Buckley spotted her, and called a few orders that Smith didn’t catch.

  Three cops trotted down the parking lot toward the woman; a fourth headed for a patrol car. The woman smiled and waved at them, her little dog tucked in the crook of one arm.

  Smith stared, as the realization slowly percolated into his dazed mind that he recognized the woman. He didn’t know her name, but he had seen her here and there about the complex, walking her dog or taking her trash to the dumpster. Even the flowered nightgown was familiar.

  But he had only seen the slouch hat in his nightmare.

  Had it been a nightmare? He had fought down any suspicion that it was more than that, but that hat – it was hard to be certain, given the distance, and the hot glare of the afternoon sun compared to the gloom of night, and the distortions of a sleep-clouded memory, but it certainly looked like the hat from his dream.

  If he had really seen that hat, then it hadn’t been a nightmare after all, it had been real.

  Either that, or he was still dreaming.

  That was a comforting thought; it could make sense of the mass disappearance. He couldn’t accept it, though. The world around him was too real, too solid. He didn’t sweat like this in his dreams.

  So he was awake, and the hat was real.

  It could be a coincidence, he tried to tell himself as the first cop reached the approaching woman. Or maybe he had seen the hat somewhere and it had stuck in his subconscious.

  Or maybe it hadn’t been a nightmare, but some elaborate practical joke, a false face on a pole held up to his window – but that didn’t make any sense. How could anyone have known he would look out the window just then, at 3:09 in the morning and no other time? How could the face have smiled at him?

  No, a subconscious memory of the hat, that had to be it.

  “Hello, officer,” the woman said. He heard her plainly, her voice bright and cheerful. “Was there really a bomb?”

  “Lieutenant!” the cop called.

  Lieutenant Buckley was already on his way; he brushed past Smith and continued down the sidewalk.

  Smith followed, not entirely sure whether it was simple curiosity that drove him, or something more complex and dangerous.

  The woman had stopped in the middle of the parking lot, the three policemen – no, Smith corrected himself, three officers, two men and a woman – standing in a semi-circle around her, carefully out of reach.

  The lieutenant left the sidewalk and squeezed between two cars; Smith stopped there and leaned forward to listen, his hand on the peeling vinyl top of an old Lincoln.

  “Ma’am,” the lieutenant said while still walking, “What’s this about a bomb?”

  “Well, was there a bomb or not?” the woman demanded. “That’s what t
hat boy told us, who came and got us all out of bed this morning – he said some of those crazy Iranian terrorists had planted dynamite all around the place and were going to blow us up. Did they really?”

  “Hold on, ma’am,” Buckley said, raising his hands in a calming gesture. “We don’t know anything about any terrorists. Can you tell me what happened?”

  The woman stared at him. “Are you on the bomb squad?” she demanded.

  “No, ma’am,” he replied, “I’m a detective, Lieutenant Daniel Buckley. And you are?”

  She considered, and apparently decided it was a fair question. “I’m Nora Hagarty,” she said. “I live in B22. This is Bozo.” She held up the dog, a small gray mongrel with a surly expression.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Buckley said, with a faint nod. “Ms. Hagarty, you live in Apartment B22, here in the Bedford Mills complex?”

  “That’s what I said, Officer,” she answered, her smile gone.

  “Ms. Hagarty,” Buckley asked, “What happened this morning? If you don’t mind, why are you out here in the parking lot in a nightgown?”

  “Well, that’s what I was saying, Officer!” She shifted Bozo to her other arm and explained, “Some boy came around this morning at about five o’clock and woke us all up, nicely, though, he was very polite and well-spoken, and he said that the management had sent him, that some terrorist group or other was going to blow the entire complex up with dynamite because one of the owners did something the Iranians didn’t like, had helped hide Salman Rushdie or something like that. So I got Bozo, and we hurried out here and we all went over to that building over there, and we hid in the basement.” She turned, and pointed with her free hand, indicating the unfinished office building.

  Lieutenant Buckley nodded. “Go on,” he said.

  “Well, that’s where we all are, but I got tired of waiting, so I came up to see what was going on, and I looked over here and saw all your cars and came over to ask if you’d found all the dynamite yet. Did you?”

  “We haven’t found any dynamite, Ms. Hagarty,” Buckley told her. “I think it must have been a prank. We’ll check, though.”

  “A prank?” Her voice rose in outrage. “But we’re all over there in our pajamas, and we’ve missed work because we didn’t dare come back for our clothes! It’s almost been fun, in a scary sort of way, but I have better things to do! Whose idea of a prank is this, anyway?”

  “I don’t know, Ms. Hagarty,” Buckley said. He turned to one of the officers and muttered something Smith couldn’t catch; the officer nodded, then turned and trotted back toward the main body of police.

  Buckley gestured to the policewoman, and said, “Ms. Hagarty, if you’ll go to that van over there, this officer will take your statement, and then I think we can let you go back to your apartment, and you can get on with whatever you should be doing. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Nora Hagarty started to say something, but just then Bozo made a bid for freedom, scrabbling and trying to leap down from her arms, and she had to struggle to haul him back up to her generous bosom, leaving dirty paw-prints on her nightgown.

  “This way, Ms. Hagarty,” the policewoman said. With a hand on Ms. Hagarty’s elbow, she started across the parking lot. Buckley headed in the other direction, toward the office building.

  Smith called out, “Ms. Hagarty!”

  “Yes?” She stopped abruptly and turned to stare at him. The policewoman stopped as well.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Hagarty,” Smith said, “But where did you get that hat?”

  Startled, Hagarty reached up and removed the slouch hat, revealing a headful of curlers, and looked at it. “This thing? Why, I’ve had it for years. I just threw it on on my way out the door, to keep the sun off, or in case we got more rain. I couldn’t find my umbrella and the boy said I shouldn’t take the time to look. I thought I might need it, though. I know the weather reports didn’t say anything about rain, but the way the weather’s been this year you never know; I’ve never seen so much rain as we’ve had this year!” She shrugged and plopped the hat back on her head.

  “Have you worn it much recently?” Smith asked.

  The policewoman was looking at him doubtfully. Buckley had stopped and turned back to listen.

  “This old thing? In the summer? Of course not!” Hagarty made a wave of dismissal. “Don’t be silly! It hasn’t been out of my closet in months. In fact, I don’t think I’ve worn it since Easter.” She stared at him. “Why?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “Oh, nothing,” Smith lied, “It just looked like one I’d seen somewhere, and I was trying to remember where.”

  “Well, I think I did wear it back in February, maybe,” Hagarty reluctantly allowed.

  “I wasn’t here in February; I only moved in in April,” Smith told her.

  “Well, then I can’t help you, young man!” She turned away and marched on across the lot, the policewoman at her side.

  Buckley strolled back across the lot to where Smith stood, between the Lincoln and a brown Datsun.

  “Mr. Smith,” he said, “What was that about?”

  Smith shrugged. “That hat,” he said, “It’s just like the one I saw in my nightmare.”

  Buckley glanced after the hat, then back at Smith. “Really?” he said.

  “I think so.”

  Buckley shrugged. “Just a coincidence, maybe.”

  “Yeah,” Smith agreed, doubtfully, staring after Nora Hagarty, “Just a coincidence.”

  6.

  At 3:10 p.m. on Wednesday, August 2nd, the Montgomery County police, under the direction of Detective Lieutenant Daniel R. Buckley, acting in response to several reports of missing persons in the unincorporated town of Diamond Park, Maryland, found one hundred and forty-two people, ranging in age from three to sixty-eight, waiting in the basement of a partially-completed building in the temporarily-abandoned Orchard Heights office park. Accompanying them were fourteen assorted dogs, eleven cats, two hermit crabs carefully tucked in their owner’s coat pocket, a hamster, and a scarlet macaw. Two cats, a parakeet, and a white mouse had been lost, and were never recovered.

  All of those found were residents of the Bedford Mills Apartments, a small residential complex on Barrett Road. All gave the same story, of being awakened by a polite young man who told them that the complex had received a bomb threat. When informed that the threat was apparently false, all came out of the basement promptly and under their own power, without further urging.

  The police took no further action. They did not enter the unfinished office basement, nor continue searching the vacated apartments; they no longer had a probable cause, or anything to search for.

  Lieutenant Buckley did, however, ask for signed statements from several of the people involved in the incident. Over the course of the next few days, most of those he had asked obliged him. The statements all tallied closely – very closely, indeed.

  When he read through them on the afternoon of Monday, August 7th, Buckley noticed the unusual lack of discrepancies, but dismissed it as the result of those giving the statements having spent the morning together with nothing to do but discuss the situation.

  The parties responsible for the prank were never identified or apprehended.

  Neither the Washington Post nor the Times bothered to mention the incident, but the various weekly Gazette newspapers put it on page one. Both the daily edition and the weekly version of the Montgomery Journal also reported it on page one, below the fold. The Express weeklies, which had just changed their collective name from the Chronicle-Express the week before and were still experimenting with the front page, put it on page two.

  The Gaithersburg Gazette gave it a follow-up mention the next week, as well, castigating the decline in parental discipline that led to such stunts. None of the other papers bothered.

  Also on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 2nd, somewhat after 3:10, Edward J. Smith threw his summer clothes and a few toiletries in a suitcase and took a room at t
he Red Roof Inn on Route 124, three miles up the road in Gaithersburg.

  This was not the result of careful planning, rational thought, or even any conscious decision at all.

  He had re-entered Apartment C41 of the Bedford Mills Apartments with every intention of staying there. After all, the whole bizarre incident was just a prank. Most of the police were packing up and leaving, while others argued with each other about why no one had thought to check the empty office building when men had been sent to canvass the neighborhood. The other inhabitants of the complex were drifting back, two or three at a time; some were standing around on the lawn discussing the day’s events, while others were returning to their apartments. A few of the first arrivals were already dressed and trying to back their cars out into the stream of police vehicles, presumably to go belatedly to their jobs and other engagements.

  Smith had turned to close the door, and had seen Mrs. Malinoff coming up the stairs behind him, on her way to C42. She had smiled at him, a tight-lipped little smile.

  He had seen her, but he had not heard her. Her knees were completely silent, even on the stairs.

  And in the three months or so he had lived there, Mrs. Malinoff had never smiled at him. He had never seen her smile at anything, and certainly not at him.