The Nightmare People

6.

At 3:10 p.m. on Wednesday, August 2nd, the Montgomery County police, under the direction of Detective Lieutenant Daniel R. Buckley, acting in response to several reports of missing persons in the unincorporated town of Diamond Park, Maryland, found one hundred and forty-two people, ranging in age from three to sixty-eight, waiting in the basement of a partially-completed building in the temporarily-abandoned Orchard Heights office park. Accompanying them were fourteen assorted dogs, eleven cats, two hermit crabs carefully tucked in their owner’s coat pocket, a hamster, and a scarlet macaw. Two cats, a parakeet, and a white mouse had been lost, and were never recovered.

All of those found were residents of the Bedford Mills Apartments, a small residential complex on Barrett Road. All gave the same story, of being awakened by a polite young man who told them that the complex had received a bomb threat. When informed that the threat was apparently false, all came out of the basement promptly and under their own power, without further urging.

The police took no further action. They did not enter the unfinished office basement, nor continue searching the vacated apartments; they no longer had a probable cause, or anything to search for.

Lieutenant Buckley did, however, ask for signed statements from several of the people involved in the incident. Over the course of the next few days, most of those he had asked obliged him. The statements all tallied closely – very closely, indeed.

When he read through them on the afternoon of Monday, August 7th, Buckley noticed the unusual lack of discrepancies, but dismissed it as the result of those giving the statements having spent the morning together with nothing to do but discuss the situation.

The parties responsible for the prank were never identified or apprehended.

Neither the Washington Post nor the Times bothered to mention the incident, but the various weekly Gazette newspapers put it on page one. Both the daily edition and the weekly version of the Montgomery Journal also reported it on page one, below the fold. The Express weeklies, which had just changed their collective name from the Chronicle-Express the week before and were still experimenting with the front page, put it on page two.

The Gaithersburg Gazette gave it a follow-up mention the next week, as well, castigating the decline in parental discipline that led to such stunts. None of the other papers bothered.

Also on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 2nd, somewhat after 3:10, Edward J. Smith threw his summer clothes and a few toiletries in a suitcase and took a room at the Red Roof Inn on Route 124, three miles up the road in Gaithersburg.

This was not the result of careful planning, rational thought, or even any conscious decision at all.

He had re-entered Apartment C41 of the Bedford Mills Apartments with every intention of staying there. After all, the whole bizarre incident was just a prank. Most of the police were packing up and leaving, while others argued with each other about why no one had thought to check the empty office building when men had been sent to canvass the neighborhood. The other inhabitants of the complex were drifting back, two or three at a time; some were standing around on the lawn discussing the day’s events, while others were returning to their apartments. A few of the first arrivals were already dressed and trying to back their cars out into the stream of police vehicles, presumably to go belatedly to their jobs and other engagements.

Smith had turned to close the door, and had seen Mrs. Malinoff coming up the stairs behind him, on her way to C42. She had smiled at him, a tight-lipped little smile.

He had seen her, but he had not heard her. Her knees were completely silent, even on the stairs.

And in the three months or so he had lived there, Mrs. Malinoff had never smiled at him. He had never seen her smile at anything, and certainly not at him.

And her eyes had seemed to glow red for an instant, like eyes in a badly-angled flash picture.

Smith nodded politely to her, closed the door, and headed toward the bedroom.

The air in the apartment was still stifling hot. The bedroom window was still open, but the outside air, which was now noticeably cooler than the air inside, seemed reluctant to enter.

Mrs. Malinoff’s knees hadn’t creaked.

Maybe, Smith tried to tell himself as he crossed to his bedroom closet, the unusual exertions of the morning had loosened up her joints.

Her eyes had gleamed red.

Sometimes eyes gleamed red in flash photos when the bright light reflected directly off the retina, at the back of the eye. Maybe Mrs. Malinoff’s eyes had caught a stray bit of sunlight somehow to produce the same effect.

Except that it had happened in the windowless fourth-floor stairwell, under a skylight crusted over grime, and the only electric light had been behind her.

He pulled out his suitcase without thinking about it, and threw it open on the bed.

She had smiled at him.

She hadn’t shown her teeth, though, and with a glance at the window screen he had this sudden mental image of Mrs. Malinoff grinning broadly, showing dozens of silver-grey needle teeth like the thing in his nightmare, and then he was grabbing for his shirts and stuffing them into the suitcase, and he knew that he was not going to stay the night in that apartment again, no matter whether the air conditioner was fixed or not, not even if they gave him the place rent-free.

The Red Roof Inn was the closest motel, since there were none at all in Diamond Park itself, so that was where he went. There were at least half a dozen others in Gaithersburg, and more in Germantown, but the Red Roof Inn was the closest.

He threw his suitcase in the back seat of his Chevy and went, his hands tight on the steering wheel as he waited his turn to exit the parking lot, tight on the wheel as he drove up Barrett Road to Route 117, east on 117 to 124, left on 124, past the Shell station and then right into the parking lot of the motel.

In the motel office he stared closely at the clerk, studying his eyes to be sure they didn’t gleam red, trying to see his teeth to be sure they were white and blunt.

The clerk was perfectly ordinary, a bored young man with sandy brown hair, clearly uncomfortable, despite the air conditioning, in the bright red jacket with the motel chain’s logo on it. His teeth were white; his eyes were green, or maybe hazel. Smith took the key to Room 203 without comment.

Once safely in his room he threw his suitcase on the bed, hesitated, and then, feeling slightly foolish, checked the place over carefully, making sure the window was locked and the grilles securely bolted down on the heating/cooling vents.

Then he went back downstairs and crossed the parking lot to the Denny’s Restaurant next door, to finally get himself a cup of coffee, something he never had gotten that morning, and while he was at it he would get something to eat to quiet his empty stomach.