The Nightmare People

6.

They talked and schemed until 2:00 a.m. Maggie phoned her parents and told them she was staying over at the Ryersons’. Annie apologized and went to bed around midnight, and the others sat up, planning.

They discarded a dozen ideas, and finally settled on a clear and simple one. Maggie would phone the Samaan house and tell whoever answered that she wanted to meet him outside, alone, somewhere. The others would be watching the house, and when one came out, they would follow it, jump it, and try to eat it.

If two came out, they would break into the house and go after the one left behind.

If all three emerged, or none, they would abandon the scheme and try again another time.

There was some argument as to whether Sandy, with the fresh bite in his jaw and the older one on his hand, was fit for this, but he won out, and was included.

Smith was glad of that; Sandy was clearly the strongest and most aggressive of the lot of them, and two humans against one of the creatures would not be odds much to Smith’s liking.

At least, whatever the things were, they didn’t seem to have the legendary strength of ten that vampires had, nor the ability to turn to mist, or a bat, or a wolf.

Smith wondered if vampires had really been able to do all those things, or whether the legends had grown in the telling. He remembered what Elias had said about unicorns and rhinoceri.

That was not comforting, however, when he considered that he’d much rather face a unicorn of legend than a real rhinoceros. What if vampires had been worse than the legends? What if the nightmare people had hidden powers that Smith and his little group hadn’t yet learned about?

He said nothing about that, though, as they headed back to Amber Crescent.

They parked Sandy’s car two houses up, and crept quietly down the street, and into the bushes beside the Samaans’ front porch, just as they had before, and then they waited.

It seemed forever. The cool air was thick and humid, the silent street oppressive, and the heavy overcast reflected a diffuse and hostile blue-grey light down upon the unlit house. There was no sign of the moon; if it was up the clouds hid it, and Smith was fairly sure it had already set.

Then, faintly, Smith heard the ring of a phone. He smiled; Sandy glanced back at him, and he, too, smiled.

A light came on, and then another, somewhere inside, and golden light spilled across the lawn. Smith tensed.

It seemed like another eternity before the front door opened, turning the flow of light from within into a flood. The thing wearing Elias’s skin stepped out onto the porch and looked around cautiously.

Smith and Sandy ducked back down.

It pulled the door closed behind itself, and started down the steps. Sandy had his hunting knife in his hand; Smith raised his own weapon, a bread knife he had borrowed from Annie’s kitchen.

“Get it!” Sandy whispered, and he and Smith leapt forward.

Khalil appeared from somewhere beside them, and the three of them landed heavily on the back of the Elias thing, knocking it to the ground and falling with it, so that all four of them lay in a heap on the front walk.

Sandy got up on his knees and heaved at the thing’s shoulder; the others slid off, and he flipped it onto its back.

It was wearing a grubby T-shirt and a pair of jeans, colorless in the darkness. It looked up at him and smiled.

“Hello, Sandy,” it said, showing those needle-sharp teeth.

“Hold that pose,” Sandy said, and he plunged his knife into its chest.

Smith had its right shoulder and was pinning it down; Khalil had the left. It raised its head and looked at the knife piercing its flesh, and it smiled again.

Sandy dragged the knife down, trying to open a cut; the T-shirt ripped, and the skin beneath it parted, but the underlying grey flesh oozed thickly and closed up again, leaving only a thin line like an old scar. The thing watched with mild amusement.

“Give me a hand here,” he muttered.

Smith reached over.

“Hold it open,” Sandy said, and he pulled at the knife again.

Smith shoved his fingers into the wound before it could close.

It was like a thick pudding, like wet sand, like shoving his hand into lukewarm mud, and he could feel the stuff oozing between his fingers, and he thrust his other hand in as well, trying to hold back the flow, holding the thing’s shoulder with one knee.

“It won’t hold,” he muttered.

Khalil added his hands, and Sandy stabbed and ripped again, but the wound continued to close, and the thing just smiled at them.

“Having fun?” it asked.

Sandy spat in its face.

Khalil, inspired, spat in the wound.

The healing slowed visibly. The mocking smile vanished. The thing looked almost worried.

“Who goes first?” Smith asked, uneasily.

Khalil shook his head. Sandy started to say something, but then the thing brought a knee up from behind, and he was too busy fighting this sudden attack to waste his breath on words.

Holding his own breath, Smith thrust his head down, between his hands, mouth open, and bit. A chunk of the thing’s flesh tore free in his mouth, a chunk that felt like hard rubber in his mouth.

And Maggie had been right; it tasted like shit.

Only worse.

The thing screamed, and Smith bit again, and chewed, trying hard to ignore the taste, which was the taste of foulness and corruption, like the stink of rotting meat, oily and vile. He ignored the screaming, though it hurt his ears, and he ignored the lights coming on in neighboring houses, and he ignored the churning in his belly, and he sank his teeth into that stinking grey flesh again, and hit something harder, something like clay, something that gleamed black and wet, and he bit into that, too, his teeth scraping through it.

The thing let out the loudest shriek yet, a howl like nothing Smith had ever imagined, like a damned soul in torment, and he almost gagged just from the sound of it.

Then he took another bite, and the scream trailed away into a breathy hissing.

Smith gnawed, and chewed, and forced himself to swallow, and didn’t worry about the clawed fingers scraping his side, or Sandy’s struggles to hold the thing’s legs, or Khalil leaning forward to push the thing’s head back down so it couldn’t bite. The taste and the stench seemed to get worse and worse, and he could only force himself to go on by refusing to think about anything except working his jaws, about biting and chewing and swallowing.

And then he finished the black stuff, and the struggling stopped, and the thing’s hands and head fell back, and Smith dared to rise up for a faceful of fresh air. He opened his eyes – he didn’t remember closing them, but they were tightly shut – and looked down.

The thing was utterly lifeless, a gaping hole in its chest, a hole through thick gray flesh, a hole smeared with viscous, milky fluid, a hole that was no longer trying to heal itself.

It still wore Elias’s skin on its face, but the boy’s features were twisted into a feral, inhuman expression of hatred and terror, the skin pulled back from around the mouth, revealing thin black lips and shining metallic teeth.

Its curled hands still wore Elias’s skin, but long black claws had thrust out from the fingertips. The left, that Khalil had held, was unmarked beyond that; the right, which had raked Smith’s side, was smeared with blood, the skin scraped back from two of the fingertips.

But the creature was dead.

In fact, the creature was rotting away.

That hole that his teeth and the knives had made in its boneless chest was blackening at the edges and growing; reeking black liquid was oozing from the decaying flesh, spilling across the gray gunk, flowing down and filling the bottom of the cavity.

Smith turned away and vomited on the grass, choking up the thing’s substance as best he could, spitting it all out on the lawn.

Khalil rose and stepped away, watching. Sandy fell back off the thing, onto the grass.

When Smith turned back the creature was visibly falling in upon itself; its head was flattening out like a deflating ball, oily black liquid dripping from the nose and mouth and seeping out around the eyes. The limbs had gone limp, and as Smith watched one shoe fell off. The foot that had worn it had withered away to nothing.

The stench of death and decay was overpowering, and Smith’s nausea returned. He gagged, then retched, but had nothing left to bring up.

Sandy got to his feet, staring down at the thing. He spat onto the rotting corpse, spat a gobbet of sputum mixed with blood.

“That’s for Mary, you son of a bitch,” he said, as he wiped his mouth.

Khalil hissed and pointed, and Smith and Sandy looked up to see the beam of a flashlight shining across the bushes in front of the house across the street.

A siren sounded in the distance.

“We better get out of here,” Smith said.

Sandy nodded, and the three of them ran for the car. Sandy limped slightly; Smith ran bent over, trying to minimize the pain from the gashes in his side.

Behind them the shapeless mass and stinking black puddle that had been the nightmare person, the false Elias, were beginning to steam.

Chapter Nine:

Tuesday, August 8th