The Nightmare People

5.

Maggie had stayed in the house all morning, and she knew her mother had noticed that. That wasn’t her usual pattern. One day, though, wasn’t anything for anyone to get upset about, and she could blame it on the rain.

Even so, when the postman came by not long after the rain stopped, Maggie decided it was time to get outside at least long enough to walk out to the curb and get the mail.

She trotted across the porch, down the steps and along the walk, and was almost to the mailbox when she noticed someone waving from up the street, on the other side. She turned and looked.

It was Elias.

Elias, who she had seen butchered the day before, was standing there waving at her.

She didn’t run.

She didn’t run, but it took all the determination she could muster not to. She went on to the mailbox, collected the day’s delivery, and walked back to the house. She didn’t run.

By the time she was inside with the handful of letters, magazines, and junk mail her jaw hurt from clenching her teeth tight to keep from screaming.

She threw the mail on the table and stared at the door, expecting the doorbell to ring, expecting the false Elias to be there on the porch, expecting it to smile at her with those gleaming silver teeth and then to kiss her and sink them into her flesh, into her jaw.

When the doorbell rang she wouldn’t answer it. She wouldn’t go back out there. She would never leave the house again.

She was scheduled to work a four-hour shift at the mall Tuesday evening, but she would call in sick, and she would just stay safely inside, and that thing would have to give up and go away eventually, and then she could go on as if none of it had ever happened.

She wouldn’t let it in. It couldn’t get in.

Could it?

She had seen Elias die. She had seen that thing start to crawl into his corpse’s mouth, eating as it went. She’d seen the blood bubbling up, heard Elias scream before he died. When the creature had started eating its way in it had been shaped like that woman, Mary somebody, the one Maggie had talked to all those times when she babysat Jimmy Billiard. Mary had been short and small, with breasts and a round ass that Maggie had secretly envied, and that thing had looked just like her.

Now one of the monsters was pretending to be Elias, and it was taller and thinner than Mary, flat-chested and narrow-hipped, and from the glimpse she had gotten it seemed to amble like Elias, in a way that no woman ever had.

That meant that either this was a different one that had somehow taken Elias’s place, or else the thing could change its shape.

And how could it be a different one? She had seen that thing crawling out of Mary’s skin and into Elias.

If it could change its shape, couldn’t it squeeze under the door, or around the window, or in through the gable vents or the chimney or through the same cracks in the basement floor that had let water seep in during all that heavy rain they’d had the last few months?

And if it was pretending to be Elias – was it staying in his house, sleeping in his bed?

What about his parents? Did they know that thing wasn’t really their son?

The doorbell still hadn’t rung, and she saw nothing oozing in anywhere; she crossed to the front window and looked out.

Elias was still up the street, just hanging around, just as if he were an ordinary teenager and this was an ordinary summer day.

Did his parents know?

They had to know. She had to call them, tell them.

She headed for the phone, then stopped in the kitchen doorway.

What would she say? “Mrs. Samaan, Elias got eaten by a monster yesterday, and that thing on the sidewalk isn’t him, it’s the monster dressed up in his skin.”

If she said anything like that, Mrs. Samaan would call the narcs and have Maggie put away. It did sound like something a strung-out druggie would come up with.

Maggie wished it was just a drug-induced hallucination, but she didn’t use, except for an occasional drink or a little weed at parties sometimes, just to be sociable, and she hadn’t even done any of that in months – not since school let out, anyway.

Maybe she could just hint that something was wrong with Elias, and not give any specifics. After all, Mrs. Samaan was a mother, right? Any clue that there was something wrong with her kid and she’d be watching him every minute, seeing stuff anyone else would miss, wouldn’t she?

Maggie’s own mother was certainly like that, and from what Maggie had seen of Mrs. Samaan, she was even more so.

But then, if Mrs. Samaan got suspicious, what if she said something wrong and gave herself away? What if she just thought that Elias needed someone to talk to? What if she talked to that thing about her suspicions?

What if the monsters ate her?

What if they had already eaten her?

Maggie’s hand had found its way to the receiver, but now she let it drop again.

What if they had already eaten her? And Elias’s father, too? Three of those things, not a mile away at Bedford Mills, but right there on the same block with her – she couldn’t stand that.

She couldn’t stand not knowing, either. She picked up the phone and dialed.