The Nightmare People

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Only four?

  They had taken a hundred and forty-three people away, and at least two had come back as monsters. One monster, the one who had appeared at his own window, apparently still had no human disguise.

  What if all of them had come back as monsters?

  What if the one he had seen outside his window had been meant to replace him?

  What if it was still after him? What if it had come back for a second try and brought along friends to help, in case he resisted? What if that was why the four of them had all been at his window?

  What would have happened if he hadn’t screamed?

  He put down the fork and the napkin and stared at the eggs on his plate, and suddenly had no appetite for them. He picked up his cup and gulped coffee.

  When he lowered the cup again he grimaced.

  He had two explanations, so far – real supernatural monsters that only he had seen, or an incredibly complicated practical joke directed at him.

  Neither one seemed very likely, and a third possibility occurred to him, one he didn’t like to think about, but one that certainly made as much sense as either of the others.

  Maybe he had imagined the entire thing, from start to finish. Maybe none of it was real at all.

  Maybe he’d gone mad.

  3.

  He finished his coffee and sat staring at his half-eaten eggs.

  He had three possible explanations, and he didn’t like any of them.

  The next step was to figure out what had to be done.

  If he was mad, then perhaps the best thing to do was to do nothing and hope he recovered. He’d read Operators and Things years ago, and he knew that insane people, even ones with horrible delusions, sometimes recovered spontaneously.

  More often they didn’t. Perhaps he should see a psychiatrist.

  But then, if he wasn’t mad, that would be a mistake. The psychiatrist would probably think he was hallucinating, and would feed him Thorazine or Stelazine or some other such drug and he’d be reduced to a zombie-like state. He’d heard that while Thorazine could return many schizophrenics to near-normal functioning, it could reduce non-schizophrenics to a near-vegetable condition.

  He remembered the discussions in his college abnormal-psych class where this had come up. Someone had said that yeah, some doctors used Thorazine not just to treat schizophrenia, but to diagnose it, too. If they gave a patient Thorazine and he got better, then he was schizophrenic and treatment was working. If he sat around and did nothing but stare at the walls, then he hadn’t been schizophrenic after all, and they’d stop the drug.

  If he went to a doctor and got dosed with Thorazine and the monsters were real, then he’d be easy prey until the doctors decided he wasn’t schizo after all.

  That assumed that the monsters were not only real, but were pursuing him – but after the little scene on the motel balcony, that seemed a reasonable assumption. After all, he knew they existed, and besides, if his theory was right, then one of them had intended to replace him all along, and had been delayed – but not necessarily stopped.

  Well, if the monsters were real, then, what should he do?

  He could go to the authorities, to the police, and tell them.

  And they’d think he was nuts and he’d be in a cell somewhere, dosed with Thorazine, the next time the nightmare people came looking for him.

  That was one thing that he thought the horror movies probably had right, despite all their foolishness – he couldn’t look for much help from the police or the government unless he had real, solid proof that there really were monsters around.

  Even then, what could the police do?

  What could anybody do?

  What could he do?

  He could run away, of course, but he had tried that last night. It hadn’t worked.

  Maybe he hadn’t run far enough.

  If he ran, though – if he went back home to Boston, or headed out to California the way he’d intended to before he got the offer from DML – he’d lose his job, and the friends he’d made in the area, and he’d have to start all over again, looking for work.

  And he wouldn’t be able to explain why he left this job so suddenly. What could he say? If he said, “Oh, I didn’t like the area,” would anyone believe that?

  Actually, they might; he could talk about the humid weather and the ridiculous cost of living. Not that Silicon Valley would be any cheaper.

  But even if it worked, he didn’t want to find a new job.

  And besides, the things might follow him, even to California. Why not? He had no way of knowing what they might do.

  Was there some way to stop them?

  He didn’t know. He didn’t know what they were, after all.

  If the monsters were real, he had no idea what he should do. He just didn’t know enough.

  Enough, hell, he didn’t know anything.

  What, then, if it was all a prank?

  He frowned. If it was a trick, how had they found him at the motel?

  He shook his head and ignored that. Maybe someone had followed him, or recognized his car.

  If it was a prank, was it done with? Would they leave him alone now?

  Why had they done it? To drive him out of his apartment? If that was it, then why did they come after him at the motel?

  He didn’t know.

  Whatever was happening, he didn’t know enough. Whether it was a prank, or insanity, or genuine monsters, or something else he hadn’t thought of, he didn’t know enough.

  He could just forget about it and try to go on with his life – but then, if he was insane, he might get worse, he might lose control completely.

  The pranksters might continue to torment him.

  Or the monsters might get him.

  He had to do something.

  He knew he wouldn’t be able to write anything that would run properly with this hanging over him; there was no point in trying to go to work. He could stay in the motel for another few nights if he had to, or maybe he could go stay with George down in Bethesda; finding an apartment could wait. He wouldn’t need a new apartment if he got himself killed or committed, or if he made up with the pranksters.

  The first thing to do, then, was to learn more about whatever it was he was involved in.

  In the horror movies, people got themselves killed by walking blithely and disbelievingly into the monster’s lair. While it was hard to think of life as being anything like a horror movie when he was sitting on an ordinary green-upholstered bench in a quiet booth in a sunny restaurant, drinking coffee and staring at plastic plants, he intended to be a bit more prepared, and more careful, than the people in the movies.

  He picked up the check and headed for the register.

  4.

  Simply walking into the Bedford Mills complex, he decided as he waited for a chance to make his left turn onto Route 124, would be too much like entering the locked room, the haunted house, the forbidden vault – if there were really monsters there, he’d be asking for it by doing anything so foolhardy.

  In fact, walking in anywhere with nothing but the clothes on his back would be stupid. He abruptly changed his mind and turned right, instead of left, when a break in traffic finally appeared.

  A quick switch to the left lane as he went under I-270, and he turned left at the light, onto Route 355 northbound.

  Most of the traffic was southbound this time of day, in toward Washington, so he was able to get up a little speed. Then a kid in a battered green pickup cut him off, and he leaned on the horn for a moment, almost missing the entrance to the new Hechinger’s. His rear wheels slewed a bit on the gravel at the corner as he took the turn too fast, but then he was safely into the mostly-empty parking lot.

  It was mostly empty for a good reason, he realized when he looked at the dark facade – the place wasn’t open yet.

  He looked at his watch and saw 8:17; he sighed, unbuckled his harness, and got out of the car.

  He stood for a moment looking at the store, the
n closed and locked the car and crossed to the concrete apron.

  A small sign on the door gave the hours, starting at 8:30. He looked at his watch again – 8:18.

  He tried to think of someplace that would already be open, and decided that 84 Lumber on Bureau Drive might be, or Barron’s down by the Cuddy Bridge, but by the time he could fight his way through the traffic to either one it would be 8:30.

  He waited.

  At 8:28 a black-haired kid in a red Hechinger’s vest unlocked the door.

  Smith had had time to consider what he wanted, and wasted no time in finding it.

  His first selection was a small heavy-duty crowbar, eighteen inches of blue-painted steel. He passed up the axe-handles as being too obviously intended as weapons. Carrying a crowbar around an apartment complex or construction site, unusual though it might be, seemed reasonable enough; carrying an axe handle did not.

  The larger crowbars he looked over carefully, but in the end he decided they would be too large and conspicuous, and he limited himself to the little one.

  Besides, it was cheaper.

  He followed that up with a sturdy rechargeable flashlight, after hesitating briefly over a pump-charged version.

  The hand-pump light couldn’t give out on him, but the rechargeable was brighter and easier to hold.

  While waiting at the door he’d thought about guns, and decided against buying one. He wasn’t sure whether Hechinger’s even carried them, anyway. He’d never owned one, hadn’t fired one since high school back in Massachusetts, and had no idea what the local laws were about permits, concealed weapons, discharging firearms, whatever.

  Besides, guns were too dangerous. He might shoot too soon or too late, he might miss what he aimed at, he might get himself killed or arrested. The crowbar was better.

  All the same, he added a good-quality four-inch-blade jackknife to his collection, as back-up for the crowbar.

  He tried to think what else he might need, but his brain didn’t want to work. As he hefted the crowbar his knees seemed to weaken, and his shins trembled slightly. The solid reality of the wrecking tool in his hand seemed to bring home, more than all his plans or the weird late-night visitations, that he was involved in something real, something serious, something dangerous.

  He forced a deep breath down, held it for a second, and then marched up to the check-out with his supplies.

  The yawning clerk barely glanced at him as she rang up the bar, light, and knife. He handed her his MasterCard, and she gave the slip of plastic more attention than she had its owner.

  “You want a bag for that?” she asked, handing back the card.

  “Don’t bother,” he said, slipping the jackknife into one hip pocket, his wallet into the other. He took the receipt from her, stuffed it in his shirt pocket, then picked up the bar and light and left.

  Back in the car he dropped the crowbar and flashlight on the passenger seat and started the engine.

  Was there anything else he needed?

  A sudden revulsion at further delay made him thrust that thought aside. He needed to get at it; he needed to find out what was going on. He released the brake and rolled.

  Getting from the parking lot back out onto 355, and into the rush-hour traffic, took a few minutes; then he crept along past the IBM plant, surrounded by commuters, until he reached the turn for 124.

  Traffic was lighter there, and thinned out even more once he was past the entrance ramps for I-270.

  When he turned onto Clopper Road he was going against the traffic. He sailed past the turn for the MVA, past the townhouses and the new construction, to the left turn onto Barrett.

  The morning sun slanted down through the trees, flickering across his windshield, as he drove through the state park; it poured down steadily over the lake as he crossed the dam back into Diamond Park.

  He almost missed the turn he wanted. His apartment, the whole Bedford Mills complex, was on Barrett, so his habits were all set for that, but that wasn’t where he was going this time. Instead he took the right fork onto Willow Street.

  Willow Street was empty, and the emptiness was suddenly oppressive; he turned on the radio and got Harris In The Morning on WCXR, introducing another forty-five minute block of non-stop classic rock. He turned left onto Orchard Heights Road to the sound of Pat Benatar.

  The trees vanished on the right, replaced by bare dirt and weathered two-by-fours behind chain-link fence. He pulled over, slowing gradually to a stop, in front of the unfinished centerpiece building of the Orchard Heights Office Park.

  He set the brake and turned off the engine, and the sound of the radio died away abruptly, leaving him in near-silence. The hum of distant traffic was barely audible, and a bird was singing somewhere.

  He sat for a moment, listening, and looking over the site.

  The builder had gotten the steel frame up, and the floors, and had had the brick facade about half-done when the money ran out. The south wall rose up above the three-storey frame in an unsupported brick gable, a pink brick triangle stabbing at the sky; the west wall, facing him, was three stories high at the south end, only one at the north, the steel frame behind it thrusting up on the left like the bare flesh revealed by an off-the-shoulder gown.

  The east wall, the far side, was invisible. The north end wasn’t there at all.

  The whole thing looked crooked, and he wondered why the builder had done it that way, instead of building the walls up evenly on all four sides.

  Then he shrugged; it didn’t matter. He got out of the car, the crowbar in hand.

  5.

  The fence was no problem. It wasn’t a permanent structure, with poles set into the ground, but just a temporary affair strung hurriedly around the property to discourage vandals, the uprights set in old wheel-rims filled with concrete. At one point it passed over a large pile of dirt left by the bulldozers, with a single post set atop the hump, leaving openings on either side where the ground fell away more steeply than the fencing.

  Squeezing through one of these spaces got powdery dirt on the legs of his good brown pants, but presented no real obstacle, any more than the No Trespassing signs did.

  Once inside he stood up again, bar in his right hand and flashlight in his left, and looked the ground over.

  There were footsteps in the dirt at the north end of the unfinished building, hundreds of footsteps, a broad track left when the inhabitants of the Bedford Mills Apartments had marched up into the light and headed back through the little patch of woods that separated the two complexes.

  He followed the trail around, and saw where a section of the fence had been torn down and trampled on. He could have kept his pants clean if he had bothered to go around.

  He looked through the trees at the apartment parking lot. He had never seen it from this angle, but it was still thoroughly familiar. Through the leaves he could see the windows of his own apartment, gleaming in the morning light.

  The lot looked rather full for this time of the morning, he thought, and he tightened his grip on the light.

  A momentary urge to just walk on through the trees and go home came to him, but he fought it down. He had other things he wanted to do before he dared go home.

  He forced himself to turn away and to look into the open north end of the unfinished building.

  The eastern wall was mostly open, and bright sunlight poured warmly in across a sand-strewn expanse of bare plywood flooring. A dark opening gaped in the center, a hundred feet away, with a crude railing of knocked-together two-by-fours leading down into it. Above it, a matching opening in the ceiling let in more light, but no stairway or railing led to the upper levels.

  That hole in the floor was the basement, of course. That was what he had come to look at.

  After all, why had all those people gone down there and hidden, instead of just going to other buildings, or sheltering behind the fragmentary brick walls?

  A car buzzed by without stopping, out on Orchard Heights Road.

  He stepped
in onto the plywood, his feet thumping heavily.

  The stairs leading down into the basement were in place, heavy red-painted metal with black non-skid treads. The rough railing went only as far as the landing.

  He turned on his flashlight and shone it down into the opening, revealing loose dirt, concrete floor, and scraps of lumber.

  Cautiously, he descended, one step at a time, shining the light around as he went.

  Bare concrete, a small pile of broken bricks, scattered chunks of two-by-four, sand and dirt, a tangle of wire. An area of concrete wall was striped by steel studding. Twenty feet off to one side panels of plywood were stacked up five feet high, the lower part of the pile still bound into two tight bundles by metal shipping bands.

  He reached bottom and stepped off onto concrete.

  Nothing looked out of place or at all unusual except for the disturbance of the dirt where dozens of people had come marching out of the south end of the basement, out past the plywood and up the stairs.

  He shone the light around, and realized that there were no tracks anywhere else; to the north, east, and west of the stairs the dust and dirt were undisturbed.

  That made the whole thing seem stranger than ever. The practical joke theory seemed to have just developed a problem. How could the pranksters have kept the entire group crammed into one end of the basement all morning? Hadn’t the kids gone running around, playing with the scraps? Hadn’t anybody gone exploring to see if there might be a better corner to take cover in?

  Nervous, he shone the light at the plywood.

  It was ordinary plywood, the manufacturer’s code symbols stamped on the side of each bundle. A spanch of reddish-brown paint was smeared across the top sheet.

  He blinked and stepped out of the light of the stairwell, looking more closely, shining his light directly on that top sheet.

  Was that paint?

  He couldn’t be sure.

  He swallowed, walked up to the pile of plywood, and dabbed at the smear with a finger.

  Whatever the stuff was, it was dry and powdery, and some of it came up when he rubbed at it, but it left a dark reddish stain.