The Nightmare People

6.

“I feel sick,” Smith said. The Chevy hummed quietly down Barrett Road, its headlights painting a swath of color through the black and grey gloom ahead.

Maggie just nodded. It went without saying that she, too, felt ill, and she hadn’t even been close enough to see just what the thing had actually done.

The Chevy’s empty back seat seemed to silently reproach her and Smith both.

“What do we do now?” Smith asked.

“I don’t know,” Maggie said quietly.

That wasn’t exactly the truth, she admitted to herself. She didn’t know what Smith would do, but she’d decided what she was going to do.

She was going to pretend the whole thing had never happened. She never knew any Bill Goodwin or Elias Samaan. She never talked on the phone late into the night with something that had claimed to be the newborn spawn of supernatural evil. She never saw a blood-spattered thing wearing a woman’s skin pull itself up off a wooden stake, somewhere in the woods between Diamond Park and Germantown.

It hadn’t happened.

In a month, she’d be back in school, and everything would be back to normal, and then the year after next she would go away to college – and she wouldn’t come back. Ever.

She wasn’t going to tell Mr. Smith, though. He was a part of it; he hadn’t happened, either. She had never met him. If she told him, he’d try to talk her out of it, try to make it all real again, and she couldn’t stand that.

It couldn’t be real. She wouldn’t let it be real.

She was going to go home, and stay there, and if Smith ever called her again she was going to hang up on him, and if Sandy Niklasen called, or that Khalil, she would hang up on them, and most of all, if Bill Goodwin ever called she would hang up, or maybe unplug the phone from the wall, because she couldn’t possibly let that thing ever talk to her again.

She couldn’t.

“I need to get home,” she said, “Take me home, please. Or just drop me off somewhere and I’ll walk.”

“I’ll drive you,” Smith said. “It’s no trouble.”

She didn’t argue, but she would almost have preferred walking. Smith was a part of it, and she wanted to get away from him.

On the other hand, those things were out there somewhere, and if she went walking around alone, with the sun down, one of them might find her.

They didn’t really exist, but one of them might find her.

It occurred to her that she might never dare go out at night again, but she didn’t much care. She had never been a night person. And right now, she wanted nothing but to be safely indoors somewhere, shut away from this horrible outside world where she could imagine things like nightmare people.

She sat silent the rest of the way home.