The Nightmare People

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  It wasn’t that hard. All her life she had taken what came her way without undue protest, doing as she was told, even when she hated it. She had thought that was done with when Pat died and left her on her own, but now she saw it wasn’t.

  “No,” she said, “I’m not all right. I’m sorry. Officer, could you take me home, please? I’m afraid I’m not well.”

  Nilson glanced at Dodge, who nodded.

  “Come on, Mrs. McGowan,” Nilson said, “I’ll take you home. Miss McGowan, I’m sorry if we’ve disturbed you.” He escorted Annie to the door, holding one elbow with his left hand; she did not resist, made no attempt to pull away.

  Kate stood up, looking a trifle dazed. “It’s all right, officer,” she said. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some tea?”

  They were both nuts, Nilson decided.

  Dodge picked up Annie’s umbrella, then stepped out, closing the door of the apartment behind himself. Nilson raised a questioning eyebrow at him.

  “We’ll take you home now, Mrs. McGowan,” Dodge said. “If there’s anything you’d like to tell me, though, I’d be glad to listen. Did you say something about an imposter wearing your sister’s skin? Did you mean that literally?”

  Annie shook her head as she started down the steps. There was no point in telling these people the truth, because they would either treat her as a silly old woman and ignore her, or as a genuine lunatic, in which case they might take her away somewhere.

  All she wanted now was to go home.

  She had to give it one more try, though – just one, and if it didn’t work, then she would be meek and mild and they would let her go home.

  “I thought,” she began, “that maybe something had, well…”

  She let her voice trail off as she realized how utterly unbelievable anything she could say would sound. Frustrated, she tried again.

  “I don’t know what I thought,” she said, “but I really do think that there’s something very wrong with Kate, and I wish that you could get a doctor to check her. Dr. Dodge, couldn’t you examine her, somehow?”

  Surely, Annie thought, the creature wouldn’t be able to fool a doctor.

  Dr. Dodge shook his head. “You may be right,” he said, “But I’m afraid it’s not my line. I would suggest that both of you might want to talk to your own doctors – I’ll call your sister-in-law later and explain how worried you are, and suggest that, if I may. I can’t examine her myself, though, unless she asks me to. To be honest, Mrs. McGowan, I didn’t see anything strange about her, but then I don’t know her as you do. It may be that whatever’s changed her, if something really has, has you so upset that you’re not thinking clearly about it. I really think you should both see a physician – but I can’t make either of you do anything you don’t want to, I can only make the suggestion.”

  Annie nodded. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said, her voice lifeless.

  That was another dead end. That thing would never go near a doctor of its own free will.

  No help from the police. No help from doctors. That just left Mr. Smith and his vigilantes.

  She wondered how their expedition had gone the day before.

  4.

  Smith stared at the screen, trying to see why the routine didn’t work. He didn’t hear Einar come up behind him.

  “So, Ed,” Einar said suddenly.

  Smith started, and his hand hit the keyboard, transforming line 16186 into gibberish.

  “How’s it going?” Einar asked. “You over whatever you had last week?”

  Smith said, “Uh… oh. Yeah, I guess. Sure, I’m over it.”

  What had that line said, anyway? He had lost five characters that he had typed over, or possibly six, and the line had no notation attached that would tell him what it was. He’d always been sloppy about documenting his work.

  What was it he wanted this line to do? “How’s it coming?” Einar asked, distracting him again. “Still on schedule?”

  “I think so,” Smith said, trying to ignore Einar without being rude about it. He needed to concentrate on the program. Was that supposed to be the line that specified the data string for the page header subroutine? No, that was 16180.

  This wasn’t working; he couldn’t think clearly.

  “What happened there?” Einar asked, peering over his shoulder and pointing at line 16186.

  “Bumped the keyboard,” Smith said.

  “Oh,” Einar said. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to fix it, then.”

  “Right,” Smith said.

  He had the old line 16186 on disk somewhere, he realized, and he set out to retrieve it.

  He wished he weren’t so tired, but the lack of sleep and the unusual hours he had been keeping were catching up with him – not to mention the strain of trying to concentrate on his work when the nightmare people were always lurking in the back of his mind, worrying him, intruding on his every thought.

  He called up the file he wanted, and only after he had done it did he realize that he had forgotten to save the changes he had spent the last half-hour on.

  “Damn!” he said.

  Choong Fu, at the next terminal, straightened up from his own keyboard and glanced over at Smith. Smith waved at him half-heartedly, then went back to the screen and started over.

  5.

  Maggie had stayed in the house all morning, and she knew her mother had noticed that. That wasn’t her usual pattern. One day, though, wasn’t anything for anyone to get upset about, and she could blame it on the rain.

  Even so, when the postman came by not long after the rain stopped, Maggie decided it was time to get outside at least long enough to walk out to the curb and get the mail.

  She trotted across the porch, down the steps and along the walk, and was almost to the mailbox when she noticed someone waving from up the street, on the other side. She turned and looked.

  It was Elias.

  Elias, who she had seen butchered the day before, was standing there waving at her.

  She didn’t run.

  She didn’t run, but it took all the determination she could muster not to. She went on to the mailbox, collected the day’s delivery, and walked back to the house. She didn’t run.

  By the time she was inside with the handful of letters, magazines, and junk mail her jaw hurt from clenching her teeth tight to keep from screaming.

  She threw the mail on the table and stared at the door, expecting the doorbell to ring, expecting the false Elias to be there on the porch, expecting it to smile at her with those gleaming silver teeth and then to kiss her and sink them into her flesh, into her jaw.

  When the doorbell rang she wouldn’t answer it. She wouldn’t go back out there. She would never leave the house again.

  She was scheduled to work a four-hour shift at the mall Tuesday evening, but she would call in sick, and she would just stay safely inside, and that thing would have to give up and go away eventually, and then she could go on as if none of it had ever happened.

  She wouldn’t let it in. It couldn’t get in.

  Could it?

  She had seen Elias die. She had seen that thing start to crawl into his corpse’s mouth, eating as it went. She’d seen the blood bubbling up, heard Elias scream before he died. When the creature had started eating its way in it had been shaped like that woman, Mary somebody, the one Maggie had talked to all those times when she babysat Jimmy Billiard. Mary had been short and small, with breasts and a round ass that Maggie had secretly envied, and that thing had looked just like her.

  Now one of the monsters was pretending to be Elias, and it was taller and thinner than Mary, flat-chested and narrow-hipped, and from the glimpse she had gotten it seemed to amble like Elias, in a way that no woman ever had.

  That meant that either this was a different one that had somehow taken Elias’s place, or else the thing could change its shape.

  And how could it be a different one? She had seen that thing crawling out of Mary’s skin and into Elias.

  If it could ch
ange its shape, couldn’t it squeeze under the door, or around the window, or in through the gable vents or the chimney or through the same cracks in the basement floor that had let water seep in during all that heavy rain they’d had the last few months?

  And if it was pretending to be Elias – was it staying in his house, sleeping in his bed?

  What about his parents? Did they know that thing wasn’t really their son?

  The doorbell still hadn’t rung, and she saw nothing oozing in anywhere; she crossed to the front window and looked out.

  Elias was still up the street, just hanging around, just as if he were an ordinary teenager and this was an ordinary summer day.

  Did his parents know?

  They had to know. She had to call them, tell them.

  She headed for the phone, then stopped in the kitchen doorway.

  What would she say? “Mrs. Samaan, Elias got eaten by a monster yesterday, and that thing on the sidewalk isn’t him, it’s the monster dressed up in his skin.”

  If she said anything like that, Mrs. Samaan would call the narcs and have Maggie put away. It did sound like something a strung-out druggie would come up with.

  Maggie wished it was just a drug-induced hallucination, but she didn’t use, except for an occasional drink or a little weed at parties sometimes, just to be sociable, and she hadn’t even done any of that in months – not since school let out, anyway.

  Maybe she could just hint that something was wrong with Elias, and not give any specifics. After all, Mrs. Samaan was a mother, right? Any clue that there was something wrong with her kid and she’d be watching him every minute, seeing stuff anyone else would miss, wouldn’t she?

  Maggie’s own mother was certainly like that, and from what Maggie had seen of Mrs. Samaan, she was even more so.

  But then, if Mrs. Samaan got suspicious, what if she said something wrong and gave herself away? What if she just thought that Elias needed someone to talk to? What if she talked to that thing about her suspicions?

  What if the monsters ate her?

  What if they had already eaten her?

  Maggie’s hand had found its way to the receiver, but now she let it drop again.

  What if they had already eaten her? And Elias’s father, too? Three of those things, not a mile away at Bedford Mills, but right there on the same block with her – she couldn’t stand that.

  She couldn’t stand not knowing, either. She picked up the phone and dialed.

  6.

  At 4:00 Smith finally gave up. He wasn’t accomplishing anything useful by sitting there and staring at the screen. His actual yield for the entire day’s work was one minor subroutine successfully debugged, after six attempts. He gave up fighting against it; he would need a few days of rest before he could get back to serious programming.

  Whether he could manage a few days of rest he didn’t know. The nightmare people might still be after him; the one night without a visit might be a decoy, to get him off-guard.

  Maybe, though, they’d seen how ineffectual he was, seen that he had been unable to harm them, and they’d decided to leave him alone. If there was some mystical reason they had needed to kill one hundred forty-four people, and couldn’t settle for one hundred forty-three, then now, with Elias, they might be satisfied. They’d gotten a hundred and forty-four.

  It was possible, wasn’t it, that they’d given up on him, because they had enough, or had run out of time, or he had been away from his apartment too long?

  Couldn’t that be possible?

  He wanted it to be true, but was it?

  He knew who could answer that. It probably wouldn’t want to, but it could answer. After he packed up his notes and shut off his terminal, he picked up the phone and dialed the number for his own apartment.

  He let it ring eleven times before he hung up.

  The thing wasn’t there, or at least wasn’t answering.

  Maybe it was gone. Maybe the creature was gone for good. Maybe the nightmare was all over.

  As he walked out to his car he told himself that it must all be over. The things had finished doing whatever they had come to do, and were gone.

  Or at least they were no longer after him.

  All the way back to the motel he tried to convince himself that that was it, that they had had an arcane quota to fill, and their task was now done, and they wouldn’t be bothering him any more. He would be able to sleep all night in safety.

  He kept telling himself that, but he didn’t really believe it.

  At the motel, the first thing he saw in his room was the red light on the phone. He threw his briefcase on the bed, sat down beside it, and picked up the receiver.

  When he’d reached the clerk and identified himself, he was told, “Oh, yeah, these two women kept calling. Maggie somebody, looks like Delaney, maybe, I can’t read the handwriting, and a Mrs. McGowan. They left their numbers; you want ’em?”

  “Yes, please.” He found a pen and pad in the briefcase, and noted down the numbers.

  When the clerk had hung up he stared at the numbers for a moment. Why was Maggie Devanoy calling? And why was Annie McGowan calling? Ms. McGowan had said she wanted nothing to do with him and his “vigilante” tactics, and he had thought that was the end of it. As for Maggie, she had looked sick after last night’s disaster, physically sick, which was understandable under the circumstances, and he had assumed that she had reached and passed her limit, that she wanted nothing more to do with any of the nightmare people, or with him, or anything else related to them, at least for awhile.

  He hadn’t expected to hear from either Maggie or Annie any time soon.

  He dialed the Devanoy number.

  The phone at the other end rang twice, and then someone picked up.

  “Hello?” a female voice answered.

  “Is this Maggie?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “Who… oh, is that Mr. Smith?” Sudden suspicion crept into her voice. “Or is it the other one?” she asked.

  “This is the real Ed Smith, Maggie,” he said. “You left a message to call you?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Smith, thanks for calling, really!” She sounded almost cheerful for a moment, but that vanished when she added, “It’s… it’s about Elias.”

  He blinked, and felt a tightness in his chest. “Maggie,” he said, in a low, sympathetic voice, “What about Elias? I didn’t really know him, you know, but if you just need someone to talk to…”

  “No, it’s not anything like that!” She made no attempt to hide her exasperation. “I mean he’s back, or the thing that ate him is, the way Bill Goodwin was, and he’s come back home, and I think those things got his parents, too, because Mrs. Samaan doesn’t sound right on the phone and Mr. Samaan didn’t go to work, and Mrs. Samaan says he’s not feeling well, but Mr. Samaan always went to work no matter how sick he was, and this one isn’t… well, it’s not him. They got them all.” Her voice rose toward the end.

  Smith stared at the blank concrete wall, wondering how he could possibly have failed to anticipate this.

  “You’re sure it’s both of them?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure,” Maggie said. “At least, I think I am.”

  Smith didn’t argue with the confusion implicit in that reply. He asked, “Were there any other kids in the family, or anybody else living there?”

  “No, just the three of them,” Maggie said. “I think Elias had an older brother once, but he died or something; anyway, he’s never lived there.”

  A wave of helplessness, stirred into overwhelming motion by this unexpected new catastrophe, threatened to drown Smith. Here he had been thinking that maybe the nightmare was over, just because he was no longer being directly bothered, when other innocents, who knew no more about what was happening than his dead neighbors had, were dying.

  And there wasn’t anything he could think of that could help.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  Maggie said, “Well, I talked to Mrs. McGowa
n, Annie McGowan, and she says the cops weren’t any help at all, so we’re having another meeting at her house, this evening, as soon as everybody can get there. I was waiting for you to call back before I went over there, but I’ll head over right now, on my bike. I haven’t gotten hold of Sandy Niklasen or Khalil Saad yet, I guess they’re at work, but I’ll keep trying from over there. Um… do you think I should try the Newell girls again?”

  “No,” Smith said, “Don’t bother. They probably still wouldn’t believe us. Listen, do you… do you know anything more about them? The monsters, I mean, not the Newells. Have you got any ideas on how we can kill those things?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “No. And that means I don’t know if this meeting is going to do any good…”

  “Don’t say that!” Maggie shouted, interrupting him. “I mean, we’ve got to think of something, right, if all of us are there? I mean, there’s got to be… well, hey, I’ve got to talk to you guys, okay? Will you be there?”

  Reluctantly, Smith said, “I’ll be there.”

  He hung up.

  He stared at the phone for a moment, then let out a sigh, but whether it was a sigh of dismay or relief he wasn’t sure.

  7.

  Annie McGowan smiled at him as she held the door. “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Smith,” she said. “Mr. Niklasen and Mr. Saad should be here soon; they called, or at least Mr. Niklasen did. Maggie’s in the kitchen making sandwiches; you haven’t had dinner yet, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t, Ms. McGowan. Thanks.” He followed her gesture and found himself in a small, tidy kitchen, where Maggie Devanoy was slathering mustard onto slices of bread.

  He had just started to look at the selection of cold cuts spread on the counter when the doorbell rang. He stepped back to the doorway to look as Annie answered it.

  Sandy Niklasen pushed his way in, clutching something that looked like a thick bundle of gauzy, soiled rags; Khalil Saad followed him somberly, a couple of paces back.

  “Look at this!” Sandy said, and Smith saw that he was literally shaking with rage. “Look at it!”