The Nightmare People

6.

At 4:00 Smith finally gave up. He wasn’t accomplishing anything useful by sitting there and staring at the screen. His actual yield for the entire day’s work was one minor subroutine successfully debugged, after six attempts. He gave up fighting against it; he would need a few days of rest before he could get back to serious programming.

Whether he could manage a few days of rest he didn’t know. The nightmare people might still be after him; the one night without a visit might be a decoy, to get him off-guard.

Maybe, though, they’d seen how ineffectual he was, seen that he had been unable to harm them, and they’d decided to leave him alone. If there was some mystical reason they had needed to kill one hundred forty-four people, and couldn’t settle for one hundred forty-three, then now, with Elias, they might be satisfied. They’d gotten a hundred and forty-four.

It was possible, wasn’t it, that they’d given up on him, because they had enough, or had run out of time, or he had been away from his apartment too long?

Couldn’t that be possible?

He wanted it to be true, but was it?

He knew who could answer that. It probably wouldn’t want to, but it could answer. After he packed up his notes and shut off his terminal, he picked up the phone and dialed the number for his own apartment.

He let it ring eleven times before he hung up.

The thing wasn’t there, or at least wasn’t answering.

Maybe it was gone. Maybe the creature was gone for good. Maybe the nightmare was all over.

As he walked out to his car he told himself that it must all be over. The things had finished doing whatever they had come to do, and were gone.

Or at least they were no longer after him.

All the way back to the motel he tried to convince himself that that was it, that they had had an arcane quota to fill, and their task was now done, and they wouldn’t be bothering him any more. He would be able to sleep all night in safety.

He kept telling himself that, but he didn’t really believe it.

At the motel, the first thing he saw in his room was the red light on the phone. He threw his briefcase on the bed, sat down beside it, and picked up the receiver.

When he’d reached the clerk and identified himself, he was told, “Oh, yeah, these two women kept calling. Maggie somebody, looks like Delaney, maybe, I can’t read the handwriting, and a Mrs. McGowan. They left their numbers; you want ’em?”

“Yes, please.” He found a pen and pad in the briefcase, and noted down the numbers.

When the clerk had hung up he stared at the numbers for a moment. Why was Maggie Devanoy calling? And why was Annie McGowan calling? Ms. McGowan had said she wanted nothing to do with him and his “vigilante” tactics, and he had thought that was the end of it. As for Maggie, she had looked sick after last night’s disaster, physically sick, which was understandable under the circumstances, and he had assumed that she had reached and passed her limit, that she wanted nothing more to do with any of the nightmare people, or with him, or anything else related to them, at least for awhile.

He hadn’t expected to hear from either Maggie or Annie any time soon.

He dialed the Devanoy number.

The phone at the other end rang twice, and then someone picked up.

“Hello?” a female voice answered.

“Is this Maggie?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “Who… oh, is that Mr. Smith?” Sudden suspicion crept into her voice. “Or is it the other one?” she asked.

“This is the real Ed Smith, Maggie,” he said. “You left a message to call you?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Smith, thanks for calling, really!” She sounded almost cheerful for a moment, but that vanished when she added, “It’s… it’s about Elias.”

He blinked, and felt a tightness in his chest. “Maggie,” he said, in a low, sympathetic voice, “What about Elias? I didn’t really know him, you know, but if you just need someone to talk to…”

“No, it’s not anything like that!” She made no attempt to hide her exasperation. “I mean he’s back, or the thing that ate him is, the way Bill Goodwin was, and he’s come back home, and I think those things got his parents, too, because Mrs. Samaan doesn’t sound right on the phone and Mr. Samaan didn’t go to work, and Mrs. Samaan says he’s not feeling well, but Mr. Samaan always went to work no matter how sick he was, and this one isn’t… well, it’s not him. They got them all.” Her voice rose toward the end.

Smith stared at the blank concrete wall, wondering how he could possibly have failed to anticipate this.

“You’re sure it’s both of them?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, I’m sure,” Maggie said. “At least, I think I am.”

Smith didn’t argue with the confusion implicit in that reply. He asked, “Were there any other kids in the family, or anybody else living there?”

“No, just the three of them,” Maggie said. “I think Elias had an older brother once, but he died or something; anyway, he’s never lived there.”

A wave of helplessness, stirred into overwhelming motion by this unexpected new catastrophe, threatened to drown Smith. Here he had been thinking that maybe the nightmare was over, just because he was no longer being directly bothered, when other innocents, who knew no more about what was happening than his dead neighbors had, were dying.

And there wasn’t anything he could think of that could help.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

Maggie said, “Well, I talked to Mrs. McGowan, Annie McGowan, and she says the cops weren’t any help at all, so we’re having another meeting at her house, this evening, as soon as everybody can get there. I was waiting for you to call back before I went over there, but I’ll head over right now, on my bike. I haven’t gotten hold of Sandy Niklasen or Khalil Saad yet, I guess they’re at work, but I’ll keep trying from over there. Um… do you think I should try the Newell girls again?”

“No,” Smith said, “Don’t bother. They probably still wouldn’t believe us. Listen, do you… do you know anything more about them? The monsters, I mean, not the Newells. Have you got any ideas on how we can kill those things?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. And that means I don’t know if this meeting is going to do any good…”

“Don’t say that!” Maggie shouted, interrupting him. “I mean, we’ve got to think of something, right, if all of us are there? I mean, there’s got to be… well, hey, I’ve got to talk to you guys, okay? Will you be there?”

Reluctantly, Smith said, “I’ll be there.”

He hung up.

He stared at the phone for a moment, then let out a sigh, but whether it was a sigh of dismay or relief he wasn’t sure.