The Nightmare People

4.

“So did it work?” Elias asked.

Smith shook his head. “No,” he said. “You might as well go home and put the gun away.”

Elias shook his head. “Not right away; I’ll have to clean it, first. And you’ll want to wash your hands with a real strong soap, Lava or something like that – to get the powder grains out. I should’ve told you to wear gloves.”

Smith looked at his hands; they were a trifle unsteady, but he didn’t see anything else abnormal at first.

Then he looked more closely. Were there faint black smudges?

He rubbed, but they didn’t come out.

“Do you think maybe silver bullets would help?” Elias asked, clumsily negotiating the corner of Townsend Road.

Before Smith could answer, a horn honked, and Elias jumped slightly. He started to pull over.

“I think you better drive,” he said. “I don’t have my license yet.”

Smith stared at him.

“Hey, I’ve got a learner’s permit,” Elias said, defensively. “It’s legal, as long as you’re in the car with me. I’m just not used to this car. It doesn’t handle like my dad’s Ford.”

“Stop there, then,” Smith said, pointing to the parking lot of a 7-Eleven.

He wasn’t in the best of shape to drive, either, but if anybody was going to wreck his car, he preferred to do it himself.

Elias obeyed, and climbed out. Smith slid over, while Elias went around the front of the car.

When they were both belted in, Smith headed the Chevy out of the lot.

As he waited for a break in traffic, Elias asked again, “What about silver bullets?”

Smith was trying hard not to think about nightmare people, trying hard to concentrate on his driving. He didn’t want to think about whether silver bullets would work.

“Where would we get the silver?” he asked. “How would we make the bullets?”

Elias pondered this for a moment. They had gotten out of the parking lot and were turning right onto Willow Street when he said, “Well, in the movies, they just melt down jewelry, and make the bullets in a mold…”

Smith threw him a glance. “You got any silver jewelry? Real silver, not plate?”

“Ah… no, but there’s a jeweler at Lakeforest Mall…”

“There are jewelers all over; all right, so we could buy silver chains or something. But how would we make the bullets?”

“Well, you melt down the silver…”

“In what? You have an electric crucible somewhere? I don’t. I haven’t seen one since I toured the engineering lab back in college.”

Elias thought, and suggested, “What about an oven? I mean, how hot… no, I guess not, huh?”

“Ever left silverware in the oven?”

“No, and besides, ours isn’t silver, it’s stainless steel, but I get your point. But we could get…”

“And what about a mold?” Smith said, interrupting.

“Well, I don’t have one, but aren’t there hobbyists who make their own bullets?”

“Sure, there are – but I’m not one of them, and neither are you, and I don’t know where to find them, and doesn’t it seem to you that this is all going to one hell of a lot of trouble and expense for something neither of us really believes will work?”

Elias opened his mouth, then closed it again. Smith turned onto Diamond Park Avenue.

“You don’t think it’ll work?” Elias asked at last.

Smith shook his head. “I don’t know. I saw those wounds close up, and I don’t see why it would make any difference if the bullets had been silver instead of lead. I mean, they went right through.”

Elias didn’t answer, and after a moment Smith looked over to see what his passenger was doing.

Elias was staring at him, that was what he was doing.

“What’s your problem?” Smith snapped.

“They went right through?” Elias asked. “What… I mean, what happened? You didn’t say, and I’d sort of thought that the bullets just, you know, vanished, like in the movies or something…”

Smith snorted. His terror was completely gone now, worn away by the reassuring normality of driving. “I keep telling you, this isn’t some damn horror movie!” he said.

He drove on for a moment, then continued, “I shot it twice. The first time the bullet went through its chest, not right in the center, but up toward the right shoulder, and it came out the back and ricocheted around the stairwell. It left a hole in the shirt and… and the skin, and this grey slimy stuff filled up the hole and sealed it, like… like caulk or something. Then I thought it was going to kill me, so I fired again, and got it in the throat, and that one… well, I aimed high, or it got deflected or something, and went out through the skylight.”

“And that one closed up the same way?”

Smith nodded. “Exactly the same. Except I think maybe its voice sounded a little different afterward. And then I ran for it, and there was another one on the stairs but I got past it okay.”

“God,” Elias said, “you must’ve been scared shitless. How did… what did it do when you shot it?”

Smith shuddered at the memory. “It smiled at me, with those teeth.”

“God,” Elias repeated.

“Yeah,” Smith agreed. “Let’s take the gun back where we got it, all right?”

“All right,” Elias agreed. He glanced down regretfully at the pistol, lying on the floor of the car.

Smith reviewed the afternoon’s events, trying to recall if there was anything else he should tell Elias. Something occurred to him, not to tell, but to ask. “Hey,” he said, “Why’d you beep the horn?”

“Oh,” Elias said, “Well, that was because I thought I saw something climbing out of your bedroom window.”

“What?”

“Yeah, something climbed out. It didn’t look human, exactly, sort of like a big spider. It climbed down and then it went into one of the windows the next floor down. I didn’t really get a good look at it, and it was gone by the time you came to the window, so I figured it was too late to do anything about it.”

Smith blinked, and puzzled over that, trying to make it make sense.

The idea that came to mind at once was that the thing that had been in his apartment when Einar called actually had been there today, and had somehow slipped out the window and gotten away, so as not to confront him.

But why didn’t it want to confront him?

And Elias said it had looked like a spider, not like a person, when it crawled down the side of the building.

Could the things change shape?

Like vampires?

And what could kill them, if bullets couldn’t? Holy water? A stake through the heart? Sunlight couldn’t, obviously, although they didn’t really seem to like it much.

Had that thing he met on the stairs been his own familiar haunt, coming back up the steps by more normal means to investigate the gunshots?

He had so many questions, and so few answers, and no way to learn more.

Or was there really no way?

He was considering this as he pulled up in front of the Samaan house on Amber Crescent.

There might be one way to find out more about the things.

He could ask them.