The Nightmare People

3.

Maggie turned to watch the thing burn, leaning around the corner of the arch and trusting Smith and Khalil to warn her if one of the others made a move toward her. She saw the dress fall away, saw the skin shrivel and darken, the hair drift away as ash, and she saw the thing smile.

She saw it smile, and saw it step forward toward Sandy, who stood there, frozen.

“That’s the second time you people have ruined a perfectly good skin for me,” it said in Bill Goodwin’s voice, and it reached out through dying flames toward Sandy. “I think I’ll just have to take yours.”

Sandy stepped back and drew his hunting knife, so quickly that Maggie didn’t see him move; just one moment he held a lighter in one hand and the other was empty, and the next moment the lighter was still there, and the other hand held a knife.

“Fuckin’ A you will,” Sandy told the thing. “I’ll see you in hell first!”

The thing just kept smiling, and it came forward, seeming to step out of the fire as the last fluid burned off, the last tatters of cloth and skin falling away. Sandy stepped back again, and the thing lunged for him.

It lunged, and it got him.

The pair fell past Maggie into the living room, the thing on top, Sandy underneath, and she could hear Sandy grunting as he hacked at the thing with his knife, but she couldn’t see any blood, couldn’t see anything but the smoldering grey flesh and a few charred black flakes of skin, and then it reached up with both hands and dug its thumbs into Sandy’s jaw, and its head dipped down to kiss him, the way the other one had kissed Elias, and Maggie found herself screaming.

“No!” she shrieked, “No, no! No!”

She dove on top of the thing, her hands curved like claws, like talons, but she’d cut her fingernails, because who needs long nails in the summer? She couldn’t claw the thing, but she grabbed its still-hot shoulders and tried to pull it away, and she heard Sandy shriek as it did something to him, and then his shriek was muffled, and she couldn’t stand it, she couldn’t.

She’d seen Elias die that way. She’d seen this thing, this same one by the voice, walking around as a parody of Bill Goodwin, who she thought she might even have been in love with. She was not going to let it get another of her friends!

She forced an arm around its neck in a chokehold that would have stopped anything human, ignoring the heat that singed the fine hairs on her forearm, but it didn’t even notice, and she flung herself forward again, desperate, and closed her teeth on the thing’s ash-streaked shoulder.

It let out an eerie wail, a sound like nothing Maggie had heard before, and erupted beneath her, flinging her off to the side and releasing Sandy.

Sandy seized his chance. He rolled aside, leaving a smear of blood on the carpeting, and staggered to his feet, running toward the sliding glass door that led out onto the deck, one hand on his mouth, blood oozing between his fingers.

Confused, unsure what was going on, Smith followed him.

Khalil leapt forward and picked Maggie up from where she had landed, threw a quick glance around at the three nightmare people, and then dragged her, too, toward the back door.

Maggie looked, trying to understand what had happened.

The burned nightmare creature was cowering in a corner, pawing ineffectually at one shoulder; the other two were standing over it, doing nothing.

And the important part was that none of them was paying any attention at all to the four humans.

Sandy had the door open, and the four of them spilled out onto the deck, then down the steps to the back yard, and then Maggie led them around to the street and away. She resisted the temptation to run home; her parents could not deal with this. Annie McGowan might.

She led the way to Sandy’s car.