The Nightmare People

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.

It didn’t feel like paint.

He shone the light into the gloom beyond the plywood, expecting to see more concrete and scrap.

The concrete and scrap were there, but everything was liberally splashed with that same reddish-brown, and there were white fragments heaped on the floor that did not look like any sort of building material.

He knew what the brown stuff was. He didn’t want to admit it, but he knew perfectly well what it was.

He walked around the stack of plywood, his hand trembling slightly so that the light danced across the floor in frantic whirls, and he looked at the stains that spread across the floor, across the walls, across the plywood and the scattered bits of lumber, and even, in spattered rows of uneven reddish dots, across the metal beams overhead.

Then he looked at the fragments on the floor, white where they weren’t stained.

He knew what those were, too. He stooped and shone his light directly on one of them.

It was bone, a curving chunk of bone broken off unevenly at one end. It was a piece of rib, like a bit of leftover from a barbecue, except that it wasn’t smoky from cooking; it was gleaming white.

He stared at it and saw marks on it, tiny scratches and indentations. They looked like toothmarks.

Knowing what he would see he swung the light onward, across scattered bits of bone, to a heap of bones piled in the corner, thrown together haphazardly.

All of them had those little marks.

He stood, and began backing out, away from the bones and the bloodstains, back around the stack of plywood, back to the stairs, where he turned and ran up them into the blinding summer sunlight, ran back out across the plywood flooring, back out of the skeletal building, skidding on the bare dirt, scrambling desperately back out under the fence to his car, where the mad struggle to find his car keys, to unlock and open the door, finally broke his unthinking panic.