The Nightmare People

5.

He drove back to the motel alone. He had told Elias to call if he had any news, or any ideas about how the creatures could be fought – but right now, he had no idea what the two of them could do, so there was no point in driving about aimlessly together.

Elias had agreed, a bit reluctantly.

They had to know more about the things before they could fight them effectively, that was all there was to it.

Once he was back in his motel room, he first checked to make sure that the maid hadn’t disturbed any of his belongings.

She hadn’t, nor had anyone else.

Reassured, he sat down on the bed and reached for the phone. He took a deep breath, and then dialed his own number.

He held the receiver to his ear. He heard the buzz that meant the phone in his apartment was ringing, and then someone picked up.

“Hello?” said a voice, a voice that was oddly familiar. He thought for a moment, and realized that it sounded not like his own voice as he ordinarily heard it, but as he had heard it on recordings. When he had called his own phone at work to test the answering machine, his taped message had sounded exactly like this.

It must be how he sounded to other people. The thing had his voice.

“Hello,” Smith said, “Who is this?”

“You dialed this number,” that familiar voice said. “Don’t you know who I am?”

Smith could almost hear the creature smirking.

“Yeah,” he said, “I know who you are, I guess. Or at least who you’re pretending to be. I don’t know what you are, though.”

The thing on the other end of the line snickered.

It was a really hideous snicker. Smith wondered if he ever sounded like that when he laughed; he fervently hoped not. He hesitated, trying to think how he should phrase his questions, how he could get the nightmare to tell him what he wanted to know.

The snickering died away, and the silence grew awkward, but Smith couldn’t get his questions out.

“Did you want something?” the thing asked at last, “or did you just call to taunt me?”

Smith blinked. “Taunt you?” he asked.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” the creature said hastily.

“But you did say it,” Smith said. “What do you mean, taunt you?”

“With the fact that you’re still alive, of course. I should have gotten you on Lammas Night. Damn stupid air conditioner!”

Hearing his own voice say that sent a chill down Smith’s spine. “I…” he began, then froze.

A thought trickled into the back of his mind – who was taunting whom? The creature might well be very much aware of the effect its words created, the revulsion its seemingly casual manner evoked.

Did it take pleasure in scaring him? Did it draw some sort of sustenance from terror?

Could it feed on emotion, like the monsters in some of the stories he’d read, or seen on Star Trek? “Vampire,” Smith muttered. Maybe Elias was right with his theories about the vampire legends.

“What did you say?” the voice on the phone asked eagerly.

“Nothing,” Smith said, his voice catching in his throat.

“Sounded like you said something,” the creature insisted. “Sounded like ‘vampire.’”

Smith hesitated. Then he asked, “Are you?”

“Am I what?” the creature said. “Am I a vampire? Hell, no; don’t be stupid. There aren’t any vampires.”

Hearing a walking nightmare, a cannibal monster bent on replacing him, dismiss vampires so easily, as if the supernatural was the nonsense Smith had always considered it to be, was a very strange and confusing experience. “But you…” Smith began.

“If there were still any vampires around, I wouldn’t be here,” the thing said, interrupting him. “The last vampire bought it in Los Angeles in 1939 – got a stake through the heart and her head cut off, the mouth stuffed with garlic and the whole thing burned. Messy, very messy.”

Smith stared at the phone, as that horrible imitation of his own voice continued, casually conversational, “Of course, I don’t suppose I should criticize; as you saw in that basement, we aren’t very tidy ourselves, when we feed…”

Smith hung up, slamming the phone abruptly into its cradle.