The Nightmare People

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Maggie found the lever to slide her seat forward a little. “Is that better?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Smith ignored this exchange as he fastened his seat belt and got his key into the ignition. He started the engine, gave it a minute to warm up, then punched on the air conditioning.

  “Where to?” he asked. “Any suggestions?”

  “Why don’t we just drive around?” Maggie asked. “We can talk, and no one can overhear us.”

  “Not unless they’ve bugged the car,” Elias agreed.

  “Nobody’s bugged my car,” Smith said, annoyed at the suggestion – not because it was absurd, but because he was afraid that it wasn’t.

  He pulled away from the curb.

  After a moment’s silence, Maggie suddenly announced, “Okay, I’m convinced. It’s not Bill. He’s got a bandage on the back of his neck where you got that skin off, but he doesn’t… well, it isn’t Bill. He doesn’t feel right.”

  “He doesn’t smell right, either,” Elias said from the back.

  Maggie smiled back at him gratefully, then added, “And he’s forgotten things that Bill wouldn’t forget, and sometimes he doesn’t move right, and he wouldn’t… I mean…”

  Smith threw her a glance, and suggested, “He wouldn’t kiss you?”

  “Yeah,” Maggie admitted, relieved. “He didn’t seem to want to touch me at all, and that’s not like Bill.”

  Smith nodded. “I didn’t think he’d want to touch you,” he said. “Their disguises aren’t that good.”

  They rode on without speaking for a block or so, up Southfield Road to the corner of Barrett.

  “So what do we do?” Maggie asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Smith admitted. “I hadn’t really thought it through. I just knew that I needed help.”

  “Help with what?” Maggie demanded.

  “That’s obvious,” Elias replied scornfully. “Killing them.”

  5.

  Elias’s father was named Youssef Samaan, according to his birth certificate, but he called himself “Joe” to sound more American. He considered himself a good, solid American, and as such he didn’t like blacks, Hispanics, or smart-ass do-gooders. He didn’t trust the police, or the courts, or his neighbors.

  What he did trust was the.45 he kept in the drawer by his bed.

  Joe Samaan had started drinking on the way home from work the night before, and had gone on drinking until the bars closed. Then he had gone home and polished off the bottle of gin he kept in the linen closet for emergencies. He went on these binges every so often – and with increasing frequency of late. Never more than once a week, though. Never on weekdays. He knew better than to drink on the job, or risk missing work. He only drank on Friday nights, maybe on Saturdays, and not every week.

  Most weeks, maybe, but not every week.

  He had finally fallen onto the bed around four a.m., and had stayed there, not moving, ever since.

  He never even stirred as Elias removed the gun from its hiding place and slipped out of the house, out to the driveway, where Smith’s Chevy waited.

  Maggie stared at the weapon apprehensively as Elias climbed back into the car.

  “I was thinking,” Elias said, as he sat back with the gun in his lap, “This might not work. I mean, in all the stories, bullets won’t kill vampires.”

  “These aren’t vampires,” Smith said for what seemed like the hundredth time, as he started the engine.

  “Yeah, but they’re like vampires,” Elias insisted, “So maybe the gun can’t hurt them.”

  “What about silver bullets?” Maggie asked.

  “That’s werewolves,” Elias said in prompt dismissal.

  “Well,” Maggie began, “Maybe these things are like werewolves…”

  “Jesus!” Smith burst out, stamping suddenly on the brake and bringing the car to an abrupt halt, halfway out of the driveway into the street. “Listen to you two! Vampires! Werewolves! Jesus fuckin’ Christ, this is not some damn horror movie, this is real!”

  His outburst was followed by a moment of silence. Maggie pushed herself back against the door of the car, trying to make herself as small as possible.

  Elias was blinking, startled, but not abashed.

  “But, Mr. Smith,” he said, “What are they, then, if they aren’t vampires?”

  “I don’t know, damn it, but they aren’t vampires! There’s nobody in any black capes turning into bats and sucking blood! And werewolves…”

  “So they aren’t vampires,” Elias said, “or werewolves, but they are monsters, right?”

  “Yes!” Smith snapped.

  “But then… listen to me, please, before you yell again, Mr. Smith. Do you know where the unicorn legend comes from?”

  Smith stared at Elias in baffled anger. “What?”

  “Do you know where the story of the unicorn first came from?” Elias insisted.

  “No; do you?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Elias replied. “It’s no big secret. If you work your way back through older and older descriptions of unicorns, you can see it; I read about it a couple of places. What happened was that travelers to Africa and India brought back descriptions of what they’d seen there, including an animal they called a unicorn, because it had just one horn. It’s Latin…”

  “I know that,” Smith growled. “Unicorn, one horn. Go on.”

  “Right. Well, they didn’t have any pictures, so all they could do was to describe what they’d seen in terms of what the people they were talking to already knew. So they said that a unicorn had a head and body shaped sort of like a huge warhorse, with a horn on its face, and with a tail like an ass, and with great flat feet like an elephant.”

  “Wait a minute… feet like an elephant?”

  “That was part of the early descriptions, yeah,” Elias said. “It sort of faded out of them over time.”

  “Go on,” Smith said.

  “Well, that was the description they gave,” Elias said, “And that was what the pictures were drawn from, by people who had never seen a unicorn. And the travelers said that nobody could get near a unicorn, and that became the whole thing about only virgins approaching them, somehow, even though what the travelers meant was that the things were big and stupid and dangerous and would charge at anyone who came near them. And the locals in India used the horn as an aphrodisiac, because it looked phallic, and that became all the stuff about the magical healing.”

  “You’re telling me,” Smith said slowly, “that a unicorn is the same thing as a rhinoceros?”

  Elias nodded. “Yeah. Not the same thing, though; it’s what was left of the rhinoceros after five hundred years of legends getting handed down by word of mouth.”

  “A unicorn’s a rhinoceros?” Maggie asked, confused.

  “Yeah,” Elias said. “And we’ve heard vampire stories the same way we’ve heard unicorn stories. Except these things here aren’t unicorns, they’re the real thing, the rhinoceros. They’re what the vampire stories started out from, before everything got twisted around.”

  Smith released the brake, and the car rolled out into the street.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, but I don’t know. And even if you are, it doesn’t prove anything about what they’re like.”

  “I know,” Elias admitted, “it doesn’t, not really – but that stuff about vampires being hard to kill must come from somewhere.”

  “Like the stuff about virgins and unicorns, huh?” Smith said.

  Elias had no answer for that one.

  They drove on in silence for a moment, and then Maggie said, “Wait a minute.”

  “What?” Smith asked, slowing slightly, but not stopping.

  “If the gun won’t hurt them, why’d Elias want to get it? What are we going to do with it?”

  Elias said sheepishly, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Maggie turned and glared at him. Of all the times for Elias Samaan, of all people, to turn macho and want to
play with his father’s gun! “You mean we don’t need it for anything,” she accused.

  Elias shrugged.

  “I think we should try it,” Smith said suddenly.

  “Try what?” Maggie asked.

  “Shooting them. It might work.”

  “Yeah, but if it doesn’t…” Elias began.

  As Maggie looked back at the.45 and saw Elias’s hands tremble slightly holding it, the reality of the situation sank in.

  That was a gun. A real gun, that fired real bullets. And they were talking about really shooting somebody with it.

  “That’s murder!” she said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Smith said, “It’s… they’re not human. They’re monsters.”

  “That’s what the Nazis said about the Jews,” Maggie said.

  “Hey!” Elias protested.

  “The Jews didn’t eat anybody,” Smith retorted. “These things did. The Jews didn’t dress themselves in other people’s skins, they didn’t leave blood and bones scattered all over an empty basement, they didn’t peer in anybody’s window in the middle of the night with teeth like steel needles…”

  “That’s what you say these things did,” Maggie yelled. “Nobody’s been peeking in my window, and I haven’t seen any blood or anything!”

  Smith drove on without comment for a few seconds, as Elias tried to protest and Maggie shouted him down.

  “Was that Bill Goodwin you talked to this morning?” Smith asked softly.

  Maggie quieted, and they rode on.

  “Take me home,” she said suddenly.

  Smith glanced at her.

  “Take me home,” she insisted. “Maybe you’re right, maybe they’re monsters, but I’m not ready for this. I can’t just go along and watch you shoot somebody – or some thing. What if we’re all wrong, somehow? Then it’s murder! Or what if Elias’s right, and shooting them doesn’t kill them? They’ll kill us. And even if it does kill them, and they are monsters, are we going to shoot all a hundred and whatever it is of them?”

  “We’re going to start with one,” Smith said, tense, “And see what happens.”

  “You guys go ahead,” Maggie said, “But take me home first.”

  Smith glanced back at Elias, who shrugged helplessly.

  “Okay,” Smith said, resignedly. “If you change your mind, let us know.”

  He turned the car back toward Amber Crescent.

  6.

  She watched the red Chevy pull away, then turned from the window and looked for something to do, to distract herself from any thought of where Elias and Mr. Smith might be going, what they might be going to do.

  She started to reach for the kitchen phone, to call Bill – that was what she always did when she was bored or lonely.

  Then she stopped.

  Bill wasn’t there. Something had taken his place.

  Bill was dead.

  Tears welled up suddenly.

  Bill was dead.

  She clenched her teeth to keep from screaming.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. She wasn’t some tragic soap-opera heroine. She was an ordinary suburban kid, about to start her junior year of high school. She was supposed to be worried about sex and clothes and whether her friends were on drugs, not about monsters eating her boyfriend, or Elias taking his father’s gun and going off to shoot people.

  Bill was dead. That thing had eaten him.

  And she had talked to it, touched it, tried to kiss it, for God’s sake!

  She didn’t want to be with Elias, with that gun, or with Mr. Smith, who seemed a little bit crazy – he might be a nice enough guy ordinarily, but he was strung pretty tight just now, what with having gone four nights without sleeping while he worried about those creatures. She didn’t really know him, anyway, and until he calmed down she didn’t want to know him.

  She didn’t want to be in that little Chevy, driving over to Bill’s apartment.

  And she didn’t want to try and act normal right now, either. She didn’t want to talk to Emmy Ryerson about trying to sneak into the Ringo Starr concert at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, or to her mother about buying her school clothes for the fall, or to anybody about anything normal, because she knew that in the back of her head she’d keep remembering that Bill had been killed and eaten, and she’d want to scream.

  She could just lock herself in her room and try to forget all about it, and she even took a step toward the stairs before she realized that wasn’t going to work.

  You don’t forget something like that so easily.

  She had to do something.

  She looked at the kitchen phone.

  Bill was dead, and so were all his neighbors, except for Mr. Smith. And his family – Harry and Sid and Jessie. They were dead, too.

  Oh, God, even little Sid!

  She had to talk to someone about it. Elias and Mr. Smith were too busy trying to do something about it; she just needed to talk, to try and understand it. She wasn’t ready to do anything yet.

  She knew some of Bill’s neighbors. She’d babysat for some of them. She’d talked to them.

  She knew some of their friends and relatives, too.

  She reached for the phone and dialed.

  Chapter Five:

  Later Saturday

  1.

  “So what do we do, do we just walk in and shoot somebody?” Elias asked.

  Smith shook his head. “Give me the gun,” he said, holding out a hand.

  Elias hesitated, still holding the automatic. “Wait a minute,” he said. “First tell me what you’re going to do. This is my dad’s gun, after all.”

  Smith sighed. “I’m going to go into the building, and go up to my apartment, and then I’m going to call up the Goodwins on the phone and ask if someone can come up and help me move stuff, and when someone comes I’m going to shoot him, and if anyone finds out and asks what happened I’ll claim that I mistook him for a burglar.”

  Elias considered this, and couldn’t see anything really wrong with it, in theory.

  One detail still bothered him, though. “It’s my dad’s gun,” he pointed out. “If the police get it they’ll trace it. How’re you going to explain that?”

  Smith shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Maybe I stole it. I don’t think I’ll have to explain it. You think these things are going to call the police?”

  “But what about the neighbors…” Elias began, and then stopped. He had forgotten.

  There were no neighbors. Just the creatures that he privately thought of as proto-vampires.

  “So what do I do?” he asked.

  “You wait here,” Smith told him. “And if anything goes wrong, you get out of here, and you and Maggie can try your luck.”

  That sounded for all the world like a speech from a bad movie, Smith realized, the sort the hero gives before he plunges into some ridiculously dangerous situation, and as soon as Smith had finished saying it he wished he hadn’t.

  For one thing, it brought home all too vividly the possibility that he might be about to get himself killed, just like the heroic leader in all too many old war and adventure movies.

  And horror movies, of course.

  He knew if he stayed and talked any longer he would lose his nerve. “Give me the gun,” he said.

  Elias handed him the gun, butt first.

  Smith took it awkwardly; it was heavier than he had expected.

  Elias saw Smith’s uncertainty. “You know how to shoot, don’t you?” he asked, worried.

  “No,” Smith admitted. “I know you point and pull the trigger.” He lifted the gun.

  “It’s loaded, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Here,” Elias said, holding out his hand. “Give it back.”

  Smith handed it back.

  Elias expertly released the clip, checked it, slid it back in place, then worked the slide to chamber a round.

  He handed it back to Smith with the safety off, ready to fire.

  “Be careful with it,” he said. “It goes off p
retty easy. Just squeeze the trigger gently.”

  Smith nodded. He started to stick the gun in his pocket, then looked at the tension on Elias’s face and stopped.

  “I can’t walk in there with a gun in my hand,” he said.

  “Yeah, but you don’t want to stick it in your pocket, either – the trigger could snag on your belt or something.” Elias groped around behind the driver’s seat for a moment, then came up with an oily rag. “Cover it with this,” he suggested.

  Smith draped the rag across the gun and his hand. “That looks stupid,” he said, studying the result.

  “Hold it with your other hand, like a bandage,” Elias suggested.

  Smith looked at him suspiciously. “This is the rag I use when I check the oil. It’s filthy. It doesn’t look anything like a bandage.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  Smith shrugged and tried it, holding the rag around his right wrist with his left hand as if staunching a bad cut.

  “All right,” he admitted, “It’s better than nothing.” He opened the car door.

  “Watch where you point it,” Elias called, as Smith climbed out.

  2.

  Nobody had paid any attention to him as he had made his way from the car to his apartment; in fact, he had seen no sign of life anywhere in the complex. No children played in the grassy area between the two sections of parking lot; no housewives were sunning themselves on the balconies.

  He had to put the pistol down on the floor to unlock the apartment door. As the door swung inward, the thought suddenly struck him that his own particular monster might be lurking inside, ready to pounce, and he quickly knelt and grabbed the gun.

  The air conditioning was still out, and hot air poured out over him as he stood up.

  Remembering at the last moment what Elias had said, he stopped his finger from touching the trigger.

  Nothing jumped out at him.

  Gun in hand, no longer concealed, he stepped into his own living room, ignoring the heat.

  “Anyone home?” he called.

  A car horn suddenly sounded from outside, an almost nasal beep, repeated four times in quick succession.