The Nightmare People

4.

“You people think you’re so smart, with your science and your religion, you think you know all about space and time and what’s real and what isn’t,” the nightmare person said. “Well, you don’t. You don’t know shit. You worry about atoms and quarks and gods and devils, or about car payments and income tax and cocaine, and you don’t even know what death really is.”

“And I suppose you do?” Smith said.

“More than you,” it answered.

Smith didn’t reply.

A moment later, the thing went on, “There’s real evil in the world, you know. Real evil. Not just disease or accidents or bad luck, but evil, a force that wants you people to suffer and die and rot away, that wants to see you all destroyed, that wants to see everything you’ve done perverted and debased and ruined, and then blotted out – everything that any of you ever did, ever fought for or loved, wiped away. That’s what it wants – what we want. Some of you call the true evil the devil, but that’s wrong – your idea of the devil is so fucking wimpy and anthropocentric it doesn’t even begin to reflect the truth. You don’t have any words that do it justice. You don’t have any words that fit it at all, but the one – evil.

“There’s a real, tangible evil in the world, a supernatural force that’s basic to the universe, indestructible and omnipresent. It manifests itself wherever life exists, taking its form in part from whatever life it finds.

“It touches you sometimes, some of you more than others – or maybe you touch it, because you feed it, all of you, there’s evil in all of you, lurking down there in the darkness. It’s something that evolved in you, and in some of the other natural species on this planet – and on other planets, too, but the part of it here, the part I’m talking about, it can’t reach that far. It’s part of this world, part of your world. And it wants you. It wants you, and it’s going to get you, consume you.

“And it’s not satisfied with just touching you every so often, so that you destroy each other and yourselves. A few suicides, murders, wars, that’s not enough. It’s insatiable. It wants you all, it wants you to die horribly, it wants to devour you, absorb you, make you all part of itself.

“So when the touches aren’t enough, when it can’t find another Ted Bundy or Adolf Hitler, it makes tools for itself, living tools.

“I don’t want you to think, though, that it’s intelligent, that it thinks the way you people do, with your fragile little egos and half-assed schemes. It’s beyond that. It’s a force of nature – of a part of nature you people call supernatural. It’s not an entity, it’s nothing you have a word for, but it has this drive to hurt you, and every so often that manifests itself in a new way.

“It doesn’t design these things; they evolve, they just happen, from random chance guided by what survives, what works, in supernatural selection. The competition isn’t here, in your reality, it’s somewhere else, and only the survivors, only the fittest, ever break through and become real.

“You’ve always had them. On Earth, you’ve called them demons and monsters. It’s manifested itself as lamia, witches, demons, vampires, werewolves, all of them – but only one form at a time, in our own supernatural evolution. Each species appeared spontaneously, bred and flourished after its fashion, and was in time wiped out by humanity as its secrets were learned and the initial fear conquered. Each was appropriate to the time in which it appeared, and each one has eventually failed, it’s been destroyed, wiped out, and then, when time has passed, another has appeared, stronger and fitter, to fill that same niche in the ecology – to be the new predator that preys on humanity. The Romans destroyed the lamiae, and you thought they were just a myth. The Saxons wiped out the fay, the elven, and you turned them into a mere fairy tale.

“Each time, though, the evil came back in a new and more frightening form, one that was harder to destroy. In the Middle Ages there were witches, who could only die three ways – burning, drowning, or by snapping the neck. Then werewolves, that could be slain only by silver. And in 1639 the vampires came, and they had several strange weaknesses, but what they gave up in their susceptibility to sunlight and cross and holy water, their deathlike daytime trances, they thought they had gained back in their powers – mesmerism, and the transformations, and the vast physical strength, and the immunity to all normal weapons.

“At first the vampires, those night-stalkers, were terrifying and unstoppable, but in time people learned the defenses – the cross, garlic, running water, the stake, sunlight, all of them. The vampires took their nature from human beliefs – fear of the dark made them nocturnal, Christian superstition made them susceptible to the cross and holy water, and so forth.

“They were powerful, but they were vulnerable, and once the knowledge of how they could be destroyed became common knowledge they were doomed. It took three hundred years, but your people stamped them out. At the end, they were helpless and hunted, just a handful of survivors hiding in corners, and the last one took refuge in Hollywood fantasies, pretending to be an actress playing vamps and vampires – but it did her no good when she was found drinking the blood she needed from the husband of a jealous wife.

“So the last vampire was impaled and beheaded in California in 1939, and after a fifty-year hiatus the heart of evil has spewed forth its new spawn. In that fifty-year period, and the long period before it when vampires were rare, hunted creatures, you people forgot that such things had ever been real.

“But they were real, and they are real.

“For fifty years there was nothing, but the forces of evil were not silent, were not still; our evolution was at work.

“And here we are, twelve dozen of us to start, and we don’t have the vampire’s weaknesses. We don’t sleep by day; we don’t sleep at all. A stake through the heart won’t kill us. We don’t have the strength of ten, nor can we turn to bats or mist – but we have our strengths, our secrets.

“And you don’t know what they are.

“Nobody knows anything about us, about what you call nightmare people. Nobody believes in us, nobody knows what our equivalents of cross, wooden stake, and sunlight are.”