The Nightmare People
Page 7
He glanced around carefully before shutting off the engine, but he saw no one. He picked up the crowbar and hefted it, then climbed out of the car.
He left the door unlocked, just in case he had to leave quickly, and stuffed the keys well down into his pocket, where they wouldn’t fall out accidentally.
Then, crowbar in hand, he entered the building.
The stairwell was empty and quiet, and seemed even more dusty than usual. He tried to move silently as he climbed the stairs, pausing on each landing to look ahead and make sure no one was waiting for him.
At the top he headed for the door to C41, and his hand fell to his keys from habit, but he stopped himself before he put the key in the lock. He leaned forward and peered into the peephole.
It didn’t work properly in this direction, and in any case could only show him a small part of the interior, but he stared through it anyway.
Nothing looked wrong. Nobody was there. Everything was as he had left it.
He unlocked the door, pocketed the key, and then shifted the crowbar to his right hand and adjusted his grip. He took a deep breath, and swung open the door.
He had half expected to find the place torn up, as burglars might have left it, but nothing had been disturbed. Everything was just as he had left it on Wednesday afternoon.
The air conditioning still hadn’t been fixed, and the apartment was like an oven, but it was otherwise undisturbed.
He had not expected to see the nightmare person in it, and he didn’t. The apartment was empty.
Somehow, he simply couldn’t imagine seeing that creature in full daylight, and the bright August sunlight was pouring in every window.
Of course, the creature had to be somewhere, and it had answered his phone in daylight – though that had been morning, when his side of the building was in shadow.
Still, he somehow hadn’t expected to find it here.
He moved cautiously through the place, checking the living room, the dining area, the tiny walk-through kitchen, then down the hall, a quick look in the bathroom, and into the front bedroom that he had used as his library-cum-office.
Nothing had been disturbed. The laptop computer was packed up and sitting beside the bookcase, and his main machine, a customized Compaq Deskpro 386, was on the desk.
The dustcover was off the monitor, and he tried to remember whether he had left it that way or not.
After a moment’s thought he decided he had. He usually did.
He went on to the bedroom, but nothing was out of place there, either.
There was no sign that the monster had ever dared to intrude here.
He wondered, for an instant, where it was just now, and then suppressed the thought. It wasn’t here, and that was enough.
He held onto the crowbar, though, as he began planning what to take with him.
The first thing to get was the laptop, he decided as he emerged into the hallway again, and second would be the Compaq. With those in his possession he would be much more in control of things, he thought. He’d also have something better to do than watch TV all night.
Someone knocked at the door.
He froze.
Another knock sounded.
“Who is it?” he called.
After all, he tried to tell himself, it didn’t have to be one of the monsters. It could be Lieutenant Buckley, or Einar come to check on his story, or any number of other people.
“Mr. Smith? It’s me, Bill Goodwin, from downstairs.”
He hesitated, unsure what to do.
The Goodwin boy was one of them, wasn’t he? He was the one who had alerted them all after spotting Smith coming out of the Orchard Heights basement, so that they could clear out the bones and paint over the blood in time.
But this might be a chance to learn more about what was really going on, if he could talk to one of them. And if it was just the one of them, in broad daylight – and Bill wasn’t that big, and he had his crowbar…
“Just a minute!” Smith called.
He crossed the living room and peered through the peephole.
It looked like Bill Goodwin, certainly, standing there in cut-off shorts and an old Metallica T-shirt. And he couldn’t see anybody else.
He hooked the chain-bolt, opened the door a crack, and looked out.
He still saw nobody else.
“All right, come in,” he said, opening the door wide.
“Hey, I didn’t mean…”
“Get in here!” Smith bellowed, startling them both.
“Okay, okay!” The boy ducked quickly inside, and Smith slammed and locked the door behind him.
Then he turned to face his guest, still holding his crowbar, and gestured toward the chairs over by the windows. “Have a seat,” he said.
He wanted the boy in the sunlight. He couldn’t have said why; it just seemed safer, somehow.
“Sure,” the lad said, dropping onto one of the chairs. “Hey, what’s with the wrecking bar?”
Smith settled slowly onto the other chair, never loosening his grip on the crowbar and never taking his eyes off his guest. “Just a precaution,” he said. “I think somebody broke in here while I was out.”
The other made a wordless noise of concern.
Whoever and whatever he was talking to, it looked like Bill Goodwin. It sounded exactly like him, even moved like him.
“How’re your folks?” Smith asked.
Goodwin, if it really was he, shrugged. “They’re fine.”
For a moment they both just sat, staring at each other.
“So what brings you up here?” Smith asked at last.
Goodwin shrugged again. “Oh, well, I saw your car in the lot, and you hadn’t been around the last couple of days, so I wondered if there was anything wrong, and if there was anything, y’know, that I could do to help out.”
Smith eyed him warily.
He looked human. His eyes were blue, not red. Smith thought he might have seen a slight silvery glint to his teeth when he spoke, but that might just have been fillings, and it was too quick to be certain of anything.
He looked right. He sounded right.
Still, something was slightly off. Smith puzzled over it for a moment, while Goodwin shifted nervously under his scrutiny.
“Hey,” Goodwin said at last, “If you’re okay, I guess I’ll go.”
“No, wait,” Smith said, raising a hand – his left, since the crowbar was still in his right. He thought the teeth might have glinted again, and he felt as if any moment he would sense what was wrong, why he didn’t believe he was really talking to the Bill Goodwin he knew.
“Fact is,” Smith said, “that I’m planning to move out of here. That… that whatever-it-was on Wednesday made me nervous, you know? And I could probably use a hand loading the car, when I get everything ready to go. Think you could help me out?”
“Sure,” Goodwin said, shrugging. “No sweat.”
That was it!
That was what was wrong, Smith realized. He couldn’t smell anything.
No sweat.
That is, he couldn’t smell anything but his own scent and his apartment’s normal dusty odor. Goodwin gave off no odor at all, so far as he could tell. No sweat, no deodorant, no aftershave, no hair oil, nothing. And there was no dampness to his T-shirt, no sheen of moisture on his forehead.
It was a hot day, outside and in, and Goodwin had just come up three flights of stairs and into a baking-hot apartment. He was a healthy young male, and not over-scrupulous about bathing. He ought to have an odor – nothing offensive, nothing anyone would ordinarily notice, but something.
And in that T-shirt, he ought to be visibly sweating. Smith knew that his own shirt was damp under the arms and across the back of his shoulders. He could feel a film of perspiration on his forehead, and imagined it would be visibly shiny.
Bill Goodwin’s shirt and forehead looked totally dry.
Before he could stop himself, Smith blurted, “What the hell are you, anyway?”
“What?” it said. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” Smith said quickly. On an impulse, he rose from his chair, transferred the crowbar to his left hand and stuck out his right, offering to shake. He wanted to know what the thing felt like, whether its skin was really as dry as it looked.
“I’ll be moving Wednesday, I think,” Smith said. “See you then?”
Startled, the creature stood and took his hand. “Sure,” it said, “Wednesday.”
The hand felt cool and dry and lifeless, more like a glove than like living flesh. “Thanks,” Smith said.
“No problem,” it answered. It hesitated, then started toward the door.
Smith came along behind it, the crowbar ready in one hand. Without warning, he threw the other arm around the Goodwin creature’s shoulders in a comradely gesture.
“I really appreciate this,” he said.
The T-shirt was completely dry. The skin at the back of the thing’s neck was as cold and dead as its palm, maybe more so.
As Smith pulled his hand away, as his fingers slid across the back of the thing’s neck, he hooked them into claws, nails scraping at the skin.
The Goodwin thing didn’t seem to notice.
Smith’s hand came away and he stuck it immediately in his pocket, and kept it there. He stepped back and let the creature open the door itself, rather than either putting down the crowbar or taking his other hand back out of the pocket again.
That step back gave him a clear view of where his fingernails had scraped.
“Well, see you Wednesday,” the thing said as it turned in the doorway.
“Right, thanks,” Smith said, trying very hard not to tremble.
The creature stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind it.
Smith pulled his hand from his pocket.
Where he had scratched the thing, something had come away. When he had looked at the back of its neck he had seen a hole, a hole where something damp and slick and grey had showed through the skin, something the color of wet modeling clay. There was no bleeding or oozing, just that greyness.
The piece that had come away was still in his fingers, and he held it up to the light. It was a sliver of translucent material, dry on one side and damp on the other, about two inches long and half an inch wide across the middle, no thicker than the fabric of a pair of jeans.
Even though he had never encountered such a thing in quite this form before, there was no doubt about what it was.
He was holding a piece of human skin.
Chapter Four:
Saturday, August 5th
1.
He sat in the car, the crowbar across his lap, the Kaypro on the seat beside him, the Compaq and his stereo in back.
There was no way any prankster could have set this up.
There really were monsters. They really had taken over the apartment complex, replacing the people who had lived there.
He looked around at the full parking lot, the lot that had been mostly full even during regular business hours, and he knew that at least some of the nightmare people were not bothering to carry out all the details of their charade of normal humanity – or were not able to. Some of them must have abandoned the jobs held by the people they had replaced – or perhaps they had been unable to do the work, and had been fired.
Or perhaps they didn’t even know what jobs they were supposed to have. After all, how much did they know about their victims?
He paused. Was he sure that his replaced neighbors were “victims?” What had really happened to them?
He remembered the blood splattered on the walls and floor of that unfinished basement, and the pile of fresh bones, and he clenched his jaw, fighting nausea. He knew what had happened to the victims.
If he could accept that the creatures were real, he could accept what he had seen; he didn’t need to try to gloss over anything.
He looked at the piece of skin he still held, and he knew that it had come from the real Bill Goodwin, and that a thing was now wearing the boy’s skin, pretending to be him.
A hundred and forty-three people had been murdered by those creatures, and no one knew it but him.
That sounded like paranoid raving, but when he looked at the strip of skin he had all the proof he needed that it was real, that he was not insane.
Unfortunately, proving it to anybody else wouldn’t be that easy. If he took it to the police, they could analyze it, prove it was human skin – but they wouldn’t believe him when he told them where he got it. It was convincing proof of something, certainly, but he knew he could never convince them that it came from some murderous creature out of his nightmares. It was far more likely that they would decide that he had found a corpse somewhere, or even murdered someone, and was hallucinating rather than admit it to himself.
He would probably find himself in St. Elizabeth’s, or wherever Montgomery County sent possibly-dangerous lunatics these days.
And even if somebody did give him the benefit of the doubt – which was staggeringly unlikely – then what? The police had rules and regulations to follow. They would need warrants and evidence and probable cause before they could attempt anything like what he had just done, peeling a piece of skin off a monster to prove that it wasn’t human.
And what would they do with the monsters if they ever did acknowledge that they really existed? Again, they’d be bound by rules and forms and procedures. They’d need proof that the nightmare people had killed their victims. They’d need a legal determination as to whether the creatures were human or animal. The whole thing would inevitably get into the news, and there would be crazies of every sort popping up – people who would claim that the nightmare people were innocent victims, or UFO aliens, or a punishment sent by God.
And who knew what would happen then? What would the nightmare people do, if the police started investigating them? What would they do to reporters and gawkers and loonies?
Smith knew he couldn’t fight the things alone, but he couldn’t go to the police, either.
He asked himself whether he really needed to fight them at all. Couldn’t he just flee?
He shook his head. No, he couldn’t do that. They had killed his neighbors – killed them, and from the fact that there were only bones and no flesh, maybe eaten them. He couldn’t just leave the creatures there. Even if he got away, surely, they would eventually kill other innocent people, kill them and eat them.
He shuddered.
Where had the things come from?
Had there always been monsters like this, lurking in quiet corners of the world?
He didn’t know, of course. He had no way of knowing.
He did know that he had to fight them, somehow, and destroy them – kill them all.
But wouldn’t that be murder?
No, they weren’t human, he reminded himself. They might be intelligent and humanoid, but they weren’t human, and they were all murderers and presumably cannibals – well, man-eaters, anyway. “Cannibal” wasn’t the right term if they weren’t human.
And “murder” wasn’t the right term if they weren’t human. Killing them wouldn’t be murder.
The police might have another opinion, though. So might the nightmare people themselves. He couldn’t just walk in with an assault rifle and start gunning them down and expect to get out alive, or to stay out of jail if he did survive.
He needed to know more about them, and he needed help.
He looked around at the parking lot again, at all the cars there, the cars that had been sitting there all afternoon, instead of carrying their owners to and from ordinary nine-to-five jobs.
The things weren’t human. They had disguised themselves as human, but the disguises weren’t perfect. Their victims had had friends, relatives, co-workers – the neighbors were all gone, but the families and friends were still out there.
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If he could find those friends, and could convince them of what had happened, he would have allies.
He wished he knew more about his neighbors. Did Mrs. Malinoff have any family, or Nora Hagarty, or Walt Harris? None of them had ever told him. He had hardly spoken to most of his neighbors; he had been too busy settling in at work, arranging his apartment, making contacts in the area. The only ones he’d ever spoken to, other than a few minutes here and there in the stairwell or on the lawn, were the Goodwins. He knew a little about them – not much, but a little.
Well, he decided, at least that was a place to start.
2.
Maggie Devanoy was irked.
She was aggravated.
“Irked” was her father’s word, and “aggravated” was her mother’s; in her own words, she was royally pissed off.
She had had to ride the bus most of the way home from her summer job at the mall, and walk home from the bus stop, in ninety-zillion degree heat, and after waiting tables for six hours she did not need to do any more walking, and all because that asshole Bill Goodwin hadn’t shown up the way he had promised he would.
Now it was well after seven, and the sun was setting, and she’d missed dinner, and if she admitted that she hadn’t eaten her parents were going to give her another stupid lecture and ask why she hadn’t called them for a ride – and if she had called, of course, she’d have gotten a lecture on being independent and old enough to take care of herself and how inconvenient it was for them to make a special trip.
In an attempt at fairness, she admitted that Bill might have an excuse. Maybe he was sick, or that old clunker of his had broken down again, or something – but then why hadn’t he called?
He hadn’t called her since Monday, in fact.
Maybe this was his not-particularly-clever way of hinting that he was losing interest in their relationship, and if that was it, then she was going to be even more irked, because it was a really shitty way to break it off, and didn’t he know that?
He could have just told her – preferably in the car or over dinner, after he’d picked her up the way he had promised.