The Nightmare People

1.

The tall, sixtyish woman in the flowered dress who had answered the door was undoubtedly Annie McGowan herself.

“Hi,” Smith said uncertainly, “I’m Ed Smith.”

“Come in, Mr. Smith,” she replied, “We’ve been expecting you. I’m Anne McGowan.” She held the door wide, and he stepped past her, through the foyer into a small, sunny living room.

Elias Samaan and Maggie Devanoy were already there, sitting at either end of a rose-patterned couch, not talking to each other. A dark young man with straight black hair sat silently on a nearby chair.

“I think you know Maggie, and Elias,” Annie said, as she followed Smith into the room. “This is Khalil Saad.”

Smith nodded, and Saad nodded back.

“Have a seat, Mr. Smith,” Annie said.

Smith took the remaining armchair and looked about.

A large window at the back gave a view of a small fenced yard ablaze with roses and gladioli; an archway on one side opened into a tidy little dining room where crystal glistened in the sun. Mirrors hung over the couch and the dining-room buffet, reflecting each other into infinity, a myriad of Maggies and Eliases in the lower corners of every second image.

“Mr. Smith,” Khalil Saad said suddenly.

“Yes?” Smith replied, startled.

“You have seen the things without their masks? Maggie said you had?”

The man had a slight accent, Smith noticed. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen them.”

“What is it they look like?”

Smith considered. “Well, the first time I saw one, I thought I was asleep and dreaming – having a nightmare. I think of them as nightmare people, because of that. They have grey skin, like old grey leather, and needle-sharp silvery teeth, and red eyes.”

“I have glimpsed the eyes and the teeth,” Saad agreed, nodding.

The doorbell rang, and Annie answered it, letting in two attractive young women – one eighteen or twenty, Smith judged, and the other in her mid-teens.

Annie showed them in and introduced them around – Alice and Maddie Newell. Alice was the elder of the two, her hair blonde and curled where her sister’s was light brown and straight.

Before the introductions were complete, the doorbell rang again, and Annie admitted a stocky, brown-haired man, probably in his late twenties, who introduced himself as Sander Niklasen.

Names were pronounced once more, and the newcomers found seats – the regular living room furniture was not sufficient, so more chairs were brought from the dining room.

When everyone had a place, Annie turned to Smith, but hesitated, unsure what to say.

Smith took his cue and rose.

“My name’s Ed Smith,” he announced, “And until a few days ago I lived in Apartment C41 at the Bedford Mills Apartments on Barrett Road.”

All eyes turned to him; his audience was attentive and ready.

Smith told his story, beginning to end – the face at the window, the mass disappearance, the continuing late-night apparitions, the bloody basement, the borrowed gun, all of it. As he spoke, he noticed that Elias and Maggie and Khalil Saad were listening closely; the Newells seemed distracted, and kept glancing about at the others. Annie McGowan listened, but with an expression of disapproval that grew steadily more intense.

And Sandy Niklasen sat back and stared at him, face calm and unreadable, the entire time.

When he had finished, Smith simply stopped. He had no rousing conclusion.

“I saw them again last night,” he said, “Outside my window at the motel – the one with my voice, and Bill Goodwin behind it. They saw I was awake, and ready for them, same as always, and they went away. And that’s all; that’s all I know about them.”

Alice Newell stood up suddenly, long hair flouncing prettily. “Is this a joke?” she demanded, frowning.

“No,” Smith said mildly. “I know it all sounds pretty stupid, but it’s not a joke.”

She looked around at them all, and saw no one smiling. “Look,” she said, turning back to Smith, “I came here because Maggie called me yesterday and asked me if my father had been acting funny. And I said yeah, he had, he wasn’t himself – but I didn’t mean he’s turned into some kind of movie monster or anything, I just meant he was… was distracted or something. I know Maggie said something about strange things happening at the apartments, and that the people there weren’t human any more, but I thought… I don’t know, I didn’t take her seriously. I was expecting some kind of group counseling here, or something, or maybe something about toxic wastes in the water there, I don’t know what I expected, but I know I wasn’t expecting a bunch of loonies out of a horror movie!”

Elias snorted.

Smith looked at Alice for a moment, and then said, “Ms. Newell, I know the whole thing sounds unbelievable, but it’s true. Everything I’ve told you is the truth. Maggie and Elias have seen for themselves that the creature pretending to be Bill Goodwin isn’t human; I had hoped that everybody here already knew that their friends and family are gone. If you don’t know that, don’t already believe it, I’m not going to try to convince you. You can leave, if you don’t believe, or if you don’t want to get involved, or you can stay, and maybe help avenge your father’s death – because he really is dead.”

Alice stared at him, then turned on her heel, without a word, and marched out the door.

Her sister looked after her, looked around the room at the others, then whispered, “I’m sorry,” and ran after Alice.

“Mr. Smith,” Annie McGowan said, “I don’t doubt you believe that you’ve been telling the truth. I know that thing pretending to be my sister-in-law Kate isn’t her – my Lord, the thing can’t even knit, and Kate’s been knitting since she was a girl! But are you really sure that… that these things have killed all those people?”

Smith considered carefully before replying, “No, Ms. McGowan, I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything any more. Maybe I’ve gone mad and imagined the whole thing. I know that those things appear to be wearing the skins of the people they replaced, and I know I saw blood and bone in that basement, so I made some assumptions – but I don’t know they’re all dead. Fair enough?”

Annie nodded. “Yes, Mr. Smith, that’s fair enough. But in that case, why haven’t you gone to the police?”

Elias snorted again, and Maggie leaned over and slapped him lightly across the ribs. He looked at her, startled.

“Ms. McGowan, the police aren’t interested,” Smith explained. “They know all about the disappearance, but they’ve written it off as a prank – and what hard evidence could we show them? You know that thing isn’t your sister-in-law, but how could you prove that to the police? They aren’t equipped to handle this – at least, not unless we can come up with something clear and definite enough that they’ll accept it as proof that a crime has been committed.”

“You could show them what’s under the skin of one of these creatures,” Elias suggested.

“I could?” Smith asked. “How?”

“It seems simple enough,” Annie said. “Get an officer out there on some pretext, and then just grab the creature’s arm and pull up a piece of skin.”

“But what’s the thing going to do while you’re doing this?” Smith asked. “And what’s the officer going to do? After all, at first glance, it’ll look like you’re attacking an innocent person. Would a police officer just stand there and let you pull skin off an innocent person? Besides, there are more than a hundred of the things out there, and they probably don’t want us proving anything to the police.”

Annie frowned. “Mr. Smith, this is a nation of laws,” she said. “We should at least try to work with the police before we take the law into our own hands, as you seem to be proposing! As you already did, when you took a shot at that boy!”

“Ms. McGowan – I just can’t see how it can work. And it wasn’t a ‘boy.’”

“Ms. McGowan,” Maggie said, startling everyone, “I talked to one of those things last night, on the phone. They aren’t scared of the police. They aren’t scared of anything. The one I talked to said that they were evil incarnate.”

Smith blinked at her. “What?” he asked. This was the first he had heard of this.

“That’s what it said,” Maggie explained. “It said that evil is a real thing, a real force, a… a power in the world, a power that can take on solid form, and live with us without us even knowing it. And it’s done that, throughout history – it’s taken one form after another. Each time, it’s been found out, and its creatures have been hunted down and destroyed, but each time it’s come back again, more powerful than before, in a new form. And it’s been gone, but it’s back, now, and these creatures are its new form.”

His own conversation with the thing in his apartment came back to him. “Vampires,” he said.

Everyone turned to look at him.

“Vampires,” he repeated. “The one I talked to said that the last vampire was killed in 1939, in Los Angeles. Fifty years ago. That must have been… well, if they’re a new form for this force, then vampires must have been the last one, the old form.”

“But vampires were never real!” Sandy Niklasen said.

“How do we know?” Elias asked. “How do we know that? If they’ve been extinct for fifty years, and they must have been rare for years before that, of course no one believes in them now. People thought that dodos were a hoax for years, after they were extinct. Vampires were real, but we finally killed them off – and now we have these new vampires!”

“Except they’re different,” Smith pointed out. “They aren’t vampires. They come out in daylight, or at least they can sometimes. They don’t sleep in coffins – as far as I can tell, they don’t sleep at all.”

“But they’re like vampires,” Elias insisted. “They’re heirs to the vampires – their descendants, more or less.”

“Sort of the next step in supernatural evolution,” Smith suggested.

Elias nodded enthusiastically, and rose to his feet. “They are,” he said, “That’s it exactly! They’re the next step in evolution! The vampires got wiped out, unfit to survive, so something else has come along to fit the ecological niche they left vacant!”

“So if we kill them all,” Maggie said, “Something else will come along and take their place?”

Elias nodded. “Yeah, of course!” he said.

“But not right away,” Smith pointed out. “It took fifty years for these things to appear. If we wipe them out, we might be safe for another fifty years…”

“Safe,” Khalil said. “Safe, like this past fifty years? World war, nuclear bombs, safe?”

“Yeah, safe,” Sandy said. “Which would you rather live with, monsters that’ll eat you in your sleep, or the same stuff we’ve always lived with?”

“I wonder,” Maggie said, “I wonder if there’s a connection? I mean, if these things are made out of evil, doesn’t that evil have to come from somewhere? Won’t it be… I mean, is it the same evil that’s been around loose in the world since 1939?”

“Evil was loose in the world long before 1939,” Annie pointed out.

“But some times have been worse than others,” Maggie said, “And maybe the better times were when all the evil was being used by creatures – so when there were vampires, there wouldn’t be world wars, maybe?”

“Hitler came to power in 1933, honey,” Annie said. “And he was a monster all along. World War II didn’t happen all at once.”

“But how many vampires were left, by then?” Maggie persisted. “Maybe when there were a lot of vampires, we got peace, like… like…” She stopped, puzzled.

“We’ve never had peace,” Smith said. “There have always been wars and atrocities. I don’t think there’s any law of conservation of evil.”

Sandy shifted in his chair. “Look, I don’t care about all this theory,” he said. “I just want to deal with the thing that you say is pretending to be my old lady. You claim that these nightmare people killed her and ate her?”

Smith nodded. “I think so,” he said.

“Then I’m gonna kill the sons of bitches. Now, how do we do that?”

Smith looked at Maggie, who shrugged; he turned toward Elias, but Annie interrupted.

“You all can hold it right there,” she said. “Those things may be monsters, but I don’t want any part of some vigilante attack on them. I won’t stop you, but I don’t want any part of it, and I won’t have you planning it here in my house. I still say it’s a job for the police, and tomorrow morning I intend to call ’em. I’d advise the rest of you to just wait and see whether they can handle this, before you go and do anything foolish!”

Sandy stood up. “Lady, the cops ain’t gonna do a fuckin’ thing.” He marched toward the door.

“Sandy, wait!” Smith called. He turned to Annie. “Ms. McGowan, thanks for your hospitality, but I’ve got to be going now. Is anyone else coming?”

Elias jumped up.

Smith nodded. “Wait for us, Sandy,” he said.

Together, the three men left the house.