The Nightmare People Lawrence Watt Evans

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The Nightmare People

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Wildside - Horror

Other books by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Night of Madness

Dragon Weather

Touched by the Gods

Crosstime Traffic

The Rebirth of Wonder

Split Heirs (with Esther M. Friesner)

THE NIGHTMARE PEOPLE

The next step in the evolution of evil ...

Lawrence Watt-Evans

WILDSIDE PRESS

Berkeley Heights, New Jersey

Originally published by Onyx, an imprint of Penguin Books USA, July 1990.

The names of all the characters in this book other than the author and his immediate family are derived from historical sources. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The Nightmare People

A publication of

Wildside Press

www.wildsidepress.com

SECOND EDITION

Dedicated to

Richard Tucholka

because he’s partly responsible.

Chapter One:

Wednesday, August 2nd

The air was hot and thick, heavy with moisture, and he lay unwillingly awake beneath its weight, his bedsheet soaked in sweat. The ceiling was gray and blank above him when he opened his eyes. When he closed them and tried to sleep, or pretended to try, he saw only a darker gray.

He thought he could almost hear the air moving about him, a slow, sluggish, viscous movement, like the shifting of wet sand, and he wished that his clock-radio were an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock, so that at least he would have the ticking to mark off time for him. As it was he lay in an infinite timelessness, feeling the perspiration ooze from his back into the mattress.

He forced a sigh out into the air above him and turned his head. The glowing red digits on the clock read 3:09 a.m.

There was no point in pretending he could sleep, he decided. It was too hot, too humid, the air too still and the silence too deep.

He could sleep later, by daylight, after he had dragged someone from Maintenance up to fix the air conditioner. He was almost two weeks ahead at work, and half the department was off at the beach anyway. No one would care if he took Wednesday off and slept all day.

If his bedroom stayed this hot, however, he was not sure whether he would ever sleep again.

He wondered whether the outside air had cooled off enough to be better than the air in his apartment. He had carefully hoarded what little coolness remained since his air conditioner had failed, but now, he admitted reluctantly, it was gone. It was time to open the windows and gain whatever benefit the warm, foul outside air might hold.

Wearily, he swung his legs off the bed and leaned forward, his arms resting on his thighs. Breathing required a conscious effort.

After a moment’s rest he stood up and took the one step necessary to reach the window. He stretched out one hand, groping in the gray gloom, and found the drawcord of the drapes. He tugged, and the drapes slid away from the window, revealing the streetlighted world beyond.

Something was blocking his view.

With a shock, he saw that eyes were staring in at him, glowing red eyes beneath a blue-black slouch hat, eyes that were too large to be human, set in a dark, bony face, a face too long and narrow to be human.

He stared back, too surprised to react.

The misshapen red-eyed face parodied his surprise; the eyes widened like his own.

There were no whites, and the pupils were vertical black slits in scarlet that blazed like neon.

Between the eyes was a mere sketch of a nose, a narrow grey ridge down the center of the face, ending in two large, open, sharp-edged nostrils.

Below that, thin black lips rimmed a pursed little slit of a mouth.

Above that face the hat was like a patch of starless night sky, a heavy, old-fashioned hat that made no sense at all on a hot August night.

For a moment he tried to tell himself that it was his imagination, or a distortion of his own reflection, but then the apparition smiled at him, a humorless grin revealing long needle-sharp teeth, far too many teeth, gleaming pale gray in the darkness. That was not his reflection, distorted or not.

A misshapen, attenuated hand appeared, one black, clawlike fingernail touched the brim of the hat in sardonic salute, and abruptly the thing was gone, sliding suddenly away in a direction the man inside the bedroom could not identify.

Startled out of his paralysis by this disappearance, he snatched at the window latch and flung up the sash; he wanted to lean out the window and call after whoever — or whatever — had looked in.

The screen blocked him. He leaned up against it, knowing that by the time he could work the stiff, unoiled, spring-loaded catches the peeper would be long gone.

He stared out at shadowy treetops above the parking lot and saw no trace of anyone at the window, no sign of anyone at all, and through his surprise and muddled weariness he remembered abruptly that he was on the fourth floor, the top floor, and that the only balcony was outside the living room, a good twenty feet away.

The window was thirty feet up in a sheer brick wall. Nobody could possibly look in that window.

He sank slowly back onto the bed until he was sitting with his hands at his sides, suddenly unsure of the reality of what had just happened. Perhaps he had fallen asleep after all, he thought, enough to dream the apparition.

That had to be it, he told himself. After all, he could see nothing outside now but the motionless leafy branches, the dark mass of the building across the way, and the dim glow of distant streetlights.

He stood again and stepped toward the window. Thick, moist air brushed against his face, warm and muggy, but cooler than the air in his apartment. There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary.

He stepped back again, leaving the sash wide open.

He shuddered. He was out of practice facing nightmares. He did not remember having any since he was a kid.

He had had one now, though. That ghastly face could be nothing else. It had seemed completely real for an instant, but it couldn’t have been. It had to have been a nightmare.

It had to have been a nightmare.

Well, he told himself, if he was sleepy enough to dream, he was sleepy enough to sleep, whatever the weather. He lay down on the bed, shifted in a vain effort to get comfortable, then closed his eyes.

Sleep came slowly, and reluctantly, and in tiny increments, but at last it did come.

The world sounded wrong when he awoke.

Outside the window traffic growled and murmured and voices flickered in and out of audibility, just as they always did by day, but something was subtly different, and he knew from the sound that it was not his usual hour for waking — or if it was, then something was wrong somewhere nearby.

He rolled over, blinking in the bright wash of sunlight, and puzzled out the digits on the clock: 11:23 a.m.

That was later than he had really expected to sleep. He had half expected to awaken at 7:30, as he usually did, despite having stayed up until after 3:00.

The thought of 3:00 a.m., and the moist heat that still filled the room, reminded him of the apparition he had seen at the window, and again he shuddered slightly. What on Earth, he asked himself, had brought on anything like that? How had he come up with such a thing?

He remembered the long silver-grey teeth, pointed needle-sharp, gleaming dully — how truly hideous!

What had he done to dredge up such an image from his subconscious?

And that hat, that great dark slouch hat, the brim turned down on one side, how had he dreamt up something that was simultaneously as frightening and absurd as that hat?

He shook his head, clearing away the memory of the face, clearing his thoughts of the cobwebs spun there by the spiders of sleep, readying himself to face the day — or what was left of it, at any rate.

Coffee, he thought. He rose and let himself fall forward in the direction of the kitchen, catching himself with his feet and transforming the fall into a shambling walk.

The air seemed cooler; he wondered if the little heat wave that had made the last few days so unbearable was over. The summer, and the spring before it, had been cool and wet, so that when temperatures finally had reached the nineties the heat had seemed even worse by comparison.

He was halfway down the hall when someone knocked on the door of the apartment.

Cursing, he turned back to the bedroom, snatched his bathrobe from the back of the door, and shuffled toward the living room.

“Police!” someone called, “Is anyone in there?”

“Oh, shit,” he muttered. “I’m coming!” he called, pulling on his robe as he crossed the living room. The cotton clung to the sweat on his back.

He heard voices, but couldn’t make out the words; someone was talking in the hallway. He thought the tone was one of surprise, maybe fear — that puzzled him.

He stopped and peered through the lens in the door as he knotted the belt.

Two men in police uniforms stood there — and one had his gun out.

He froze, with his hand on the doorknob.

He could not think of anything he had done, anything he was involved with, anything anyone he knew might have done, that could logically account for the presence of a cop with a drawn gun outside his door.

He’d heard stories about drug sales in the area, but nothing like that had happened here on the fourth floor of C Building in the Bedford Mills Apartments, and he certainly hadn’t been involved in any illegal transactions, here or anywhere else in Diamond Park. Even back in college he’d never done anything stronger than pot, and he hadn’t even done that in several years.

“Let me see your badges!” he called through the closed door.

The two cops glanced at each other; then each, in turn, showed his badge to the lens.

He had no idea what to look for in determining whether the badges were authentic. They certainly looked real, as far as he could see in the distorted view through the peephole.

The door was equipped with a cheap little chain-lock. He knew that it wouldn’t stop a serious intruder for more than a few seconds, but he put it on anyway, and with a tightening in his stomach, he opened the door a crack.

One policeman, the larger one, was standing at the door. The other, the one with his gun drawn, had stepped back well out of reach, and had the gun raised — not pointed anywhere in particular, but up and ready, a black silhouette against the drab gray of the concrete block wall.

The big cop said, “Sorry to bother you, sir, but could we have a few minutes of your time? We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

The cop’s voice was calm, polite, unhurried — but beads of sweat gleamed on his forehead, and his partner was still there with the gun.

He was not stupid or ignorant; he had read of “good cop/bad cop” scenarios. This, however, was carrying the idea to a bizarre extreme.

“What about?” he asked, trying to sound normal.

He failed; his voice was still clogged with sleep, and the question came out as a hoarse whisper.

“Well, sir, that’s hard to explain. If you could come downstairs and talk to the lieutenant...”

“I’m not dressed,” he pointed out. His voice was better this time.

“There’s no hurry,” the cop said diffidently. “You can get dressed.” He was becoming annoyed, despite the presence of the gun in the background.

“What’s this about, officer?” he demanded.

The cop hesitated, and then said, “It’s a missing persons case, sir. We hope you’ll be able to help us.” He was still puzzled. Why the gun? Why should he come downstairs and talk to a lieutenant, instead of answering questions here?

“Who’s missing?” he asked.

The cop hesitated again, almost glanced at his partner, and then thought better of taking his eyes off the open door. “Your neighbors,” he said quietly.

“Which ones?”

That drew the longest hesitation yet.

Finally, the cop took a deep breath and answered, in a voice that almost shook.

“All of them,” he said.

His tie was crooked.

So was the lieutenant’s.

Neither of them gave a damn. Both men had put ties on out of habit, despite the heat, and from nothing more than habit. Both were concerned with matters other than their appearance just now.

He was still confused, and without his morning coffee he felt half asleep. He had stumbled and almost fallen on the stairs coming down; the police vehicles, the people milling about on various tasks, were all very distracting. Even so, he realized almost immediately that something very, very strange was going on, far stranger than a bunch of confused cops.

The parking lot was full.

At 11:30 on a Wednesday morning, the apartment complex lot was full.

He had never seen it full at midday before, not even on weekends. Ordinarily it emptied out almost completely during the morning rush hour, and then filled back up in the evening. People went to work, after all, and they drove their cars to get there.

Except that this time, they hadn’t. The police had parked their half-dozen cars and vans in fire lanes or on the apartment complex lawn, because there were no vacant spaces.

For the first time, it began to really sink in that the cop had said all his neighbors were missing.

One of the cops who had come to his door, the one with the gun, had gone on back down while he was dressing; the other was close at his side, but not touching him.

Half a dozen uniformed officers were trotting about, counting the one escorting him; as many others in plainclothes, but still obviously cops, were standing around talking quietly and seriously, or reading from clipboards.

His escort had led him to a nondescript man in a yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled up, whose clipboard lay besides a brown sportcoat atop the retaining wall between the lawn in front of D building and the parking lot. His brown tie was loose and uneven.

“Here he is, Lieutenant,” the uniformed cop said.

“Thanks,” the man in rolled sleeves answered, looking up. He nodded, but did not offer his hand. “I’m Lieutenant Buckley,” he said. He turned and fished something from a pocket of his jacket.

The civilian watched, puzzled, simultaneously trying to figure out what was going on and why he had bothered to put on a tie. He didn’t usually wear one, after all.

Somehow, though, going to talk to a police lieutenant had seemed like an occasion that called for a tie —

something like jury duty, perhaps. He had put one on, a blue print to go with his powder-blue shirt, but he had tied it badly, and it hung askew.

“Your name?” the lieutenant asked, holding up a pocket tape recorder. Under a thick layer of tinted plastic the tape-reels were turning.

“Smith,” he replied, “Edward J. Smith. And yes,” he added wearily, as he always did, “My name is really Smith, it’s not an alias; do you want to see I.D.?”

“If you have any handy, this man will check it,” the lieutenant replied, completely seriously, nodding to a small, balding man in plainclothes.

Smith fished his wallet out of his pants pocket, unclipped the set of plastic windows that held his driver’s license, insurance cards, and credit cards, and handed it over.

The lieutenant watched silently. When the other man had the cards securely in hand, he asked, “Mr.

Smith, did my men tell you anything about what’s going on here?”

“No,” Smith replied immediately. He started to say more, then thought better of it.

Buckley nodded. “Well, that’s probably because we don’t know what the hell is going on here,” he said.

“Not yet, anyway. We’re hoping you can tell us.”

“I’ll tell you anything I can,” Smith replied.

The lieutenant glanced at the clipboard, without moving it from where it sat atop the retaining wall, then asked, “What do you do, Mr. Smith?”

“I’m a programmer,” he answered.

“Computers, you mean?”

Smith nodded. He supposed that there could be other jobs where people called themselves programmers.

“I see,” the lieutenant said. “If you don’t mind, why are you home today? Were you sick?” He peered searchingly at Smith’s face, as if looking for some trace of illness.

“No,” Smith said, “I just needed a day off. I’m ahead on my work, and I didn’t sleep well last night because of the heat — the air conditioning unit in my apartment’s busted, and I couldn’t get maintenance people out here yesterday because it was after four-thirty when I got home, and I’m up on the top floor, which makes it worse, so I wanted to sleep while I could and I didn’t set the alarm.” The lieutenant nodded. “Yeah, it was a scorcher yesterday.” He looked down at Smith’s shoes for an instant, scratched an ear, and then looked up again.

“Did you see or hear anything strange last night, or this morning?” he asked. “Or smell anything, maybe?”

“No,” Smith said, automatically. The memory of the nightmare, that monstrous face at the window, came back to him suddenly, and he started to mention it, but then he stopped. That hadn’t been real.

It couldn’t have been real.

The lieutenant was watching his face. “You’re sure there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary?” He shrugged. “I had a nightmare, first one in years, but that’s all. I figure it was the heat.”

“Uh-huh.” The lieutenant nodded, glanced down again, then back at Smith’s face.

“Mr. Smith,” he said, “We’ve had more than a dozen calls this morning about people who live here, in this complex. A bus driver who was supposed to pick up here for day-camp was one of them; there wasn’t a single kid at the bus stop at the entrance this morning, where there were supposed to be eight or ten, and that was strange enough that he let us know about it. We’ve had people call who were worried about senior citizens who don’t answer the phone, and people who didn’t show up for work and didn’t call in sick — people like nurses and airline pilots who just don’t do that sort of thing. Nobody could reach the rental office, not even the company’s other offices. It was pretty obvious by nine o’clock that something was wrong here, and we came out to see what it was.” He paused, took a breath, and went on, “Mr. Smith, my men have checked through all sixty-four apartments here, with pass-keys we got from the management company’s home office down in Silver Spring, because there wasn’t anybody in the office here. And before you ask, yes, we have a warrant; a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty, whatever it is, that many people missing is pretty good probable cause for something. We don’t know what, but something. So we checked all sixty-four apartments, and sixty-three of them were empty, as if everybody had suddenly gone for a stroll last night and hadn’t come back. Nothing disturbed or broken, but nobody there. Not so much as a dog, or a cat, or even a canary. Hell, we haven’t even seen a stinking cockroach! You, Mr. Smith, are the only living thing we’ve found in this entire apartment complex. The only one. The only person living or dead. We estimate that at least a hundred, and maybe as many as two hundred people have vanished overnight, along with a few dozen cats, dogs, parakeets, and hamsters. You, and you alone, didn’t vanish.”

The lieutenant took a breath, let it out, glanced around, then turned his gaze back to Smith.

“Now, think carefully,” he said. “Are you really sure that you didn’t see or hear anything strange last night?”

He told them about the nightmare, and the heat, and the broken air conditioner. He told them about his clock-radio that didn’t tick, and his neighbor in C42, Mrs. Malinoff, who creaked when she walked, and his neighbor across the hall in C44, whom he never saw but whose name was on his mailbox, Attalla Sleiman, who kept a cat that meowed occasionally. He told them about his mother back in Boston, and his sister in Ohio, and his father who’d been in Florida last they’d heard. He told them about answering an employment ad from DML Communications and getting hired to work in Rockville, and moving to Diamond Park because he couldn’t afford to live any closer in toward Washington. He told them about driving out here in April and finding an apartment, and about the Goodwin kids from downstairs who had helped him carry in all his stuff and had wanted to play games on his computers.

He told them everything he could think of, over and over again, while the sun beat down on him and his sweat oozed from every pore. He drank lukewarm lemonade from a cop’s thermos, and then told them everything all over again.

And somehow none of it made any sense at all.

The lieutenant’s tape recorder ran out of tape; he put it back in his pocket, sighed deeply, looked around at the cars that jammed the parking lot, and said, “All right, Mr. Smith, thank you. If you want to go back to your apartment, you can, but I’d appreciate it if you let a couple of my men look it over first. You can wait out here; sit in my car, if you like.”

“I’ll use the bench,” Smith said, pointing to the park bench that stood against the retaining wall, beside the steps between his building and the next — between C Building and D Building.

The lieutenant nodded, and Smith walked nervously over.

Nobody paid any attention to him. He brushed away imaginary dirt, and then settled down onto the wooden slats, slats that were faded and warm from the sun.

The back of the bench pressed his sweat-soaked shirt into his back, and the dampness felt horribly cool and clammy. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and stared.

He was facing the parking lot, facing two cars, an old blue Chevy and a silver-grey Toyota hatchback.

He knew the Chevy belonged to Bill Goodwin, the oldest of those kids in C12; the Toyota could have been anybody’s. The sun glared blindingly off its bright finish, obscuring details.

Beside the Toyota was a Honda Accord, beyond that an old Ford van; beside the Chevy stood another nondescript coupe that he couldn’t identify exactly from where he sat. They were all completely normal; a sweater was draped across a steering wheel, a parking decal from Johns Hopkins was stuck crookedly to one end of a bumper, a Redskins sunshade was propped up behind a windshield.

And their owners were missing.

He shivered, despite the sun, and stood up.

Looking over the cars he could see a police van, sitting in the middle of the lot, the back doors open and a uniformed officer moving things around inside. Beyond it was the other row of parked cars, facing the other direction, and beyond that was the green divider lined with poplars, separating this parking lot from the next, his building and its neighbor from the two across the way.

The other lot was just as full as his own, and police were hurrying in and out of both the buildings on that side, too. The entire complex was affected, all four buildings.

He looked for his own car, a red 1986 Chevy Spectrum, and spotted it right where he had left it, between a white mini-van and an old VW Beetle. None of the three had moved since he had parked there the previous evening.

His eye followed the line of cars out to the left, out to the street, where traffic was zipping by normally, ignoring the crowded lot. The world was going on about its business.

He turned back the other way, to his right, to the little patch of trees that separated the apartment complex from the unfinished office building on the next street. Sunlight glinted from the new chain-link fence that had recently gone up around the office building, erected hurriedly by creditors when the original builder had gone bankrupt.

Not that the fence would actually stop anyone; he had seen kids slipping under it easily, all along the back. He peered, trying to see if the new builder had started work yet.

Something was moving in the shade of the trees.

He blinked, and looked again. Someone was walking through the grove, straight toward the parking lot.

He stared.

It was a woman, a plump middle-aged woman wearing a flowered nightgown or housedress and carrying a small dog, looking very much like a cliché dowdy housewife, the sort that might turn up on any prime time sitcom, except for one bizarre incongruity.

She was wearing a hat.

On a hot, humid day in August, she was wearing a broad-brimmed man’s hat.

She was wearing a dark slouch hat, blue-black, with one side of the brim turned down.

Smith stared silently at her, completely incapable of deciding what to do.

Then one of the policemen noticed the woman, and pointed her out to Lieutenant Buckley. Buckley spotted her, and called a few orders that Smith didn’t catch.

Three cops trotted down the parking lot toward the woman; a fourth headed for a patrol car. The woman smiled and waved at them, her little dog tucked in the crook of one arm.

Smith stared, as the realization slowly percolated into his dazed mind that he recognized the woman. He didn’t know her name, but he had seen her here and there about the complex, walking her dog or taking her trash to the dumpster. Even the flowered nightgown was familiar.

But he had only seen the slouch hat in his nightmare.

Had it been a nightmare? He had fought down any suspicion that it was more than that, but that hat — it was hard to be certain, given the distance, and the hot glare of the afternoon sun compared to the gloom of night, and the distortions of a sleep-clouded memory, but it certainly looked like the hat from his dream.

If he had really seen that hat, then it hadn’t been a nightmare after all, it had been real.

Either that, or he was still dreaming.

That was a comforting thought; it could make sense of the mass disappearance. He couldn’t accept it, though. The world around him was too real, too solid. He didn’t sweat like this in his dreams.

So he was awake, and the hat was real.

It could be a coincidence, he tried to tell himself as the first cop reached the approaching woman. Or maybe he had seen the hat somewhere and it had stuck in his subconscious.

Or maybe it hadn’t been a nightmare, but some elaborate practical joke, a false face on a pole held up to his window — but that didn’t make any sense. How could anyone have known he would look out the window just then, at 3:09 in the morning and no other time? How could the face have smiled at him?

No, a subconscious memory of the hat, that had to be it.

“Hello, officer,” the woman said. He heard her plainly, her voice bright and cheerful. “Was there really a bomb?”

“Lieutenant!” the cop called.

Lieutenant Buckley was already on his way; he brushed past Smith and continued down the sidewalk.

Smith followed, not entirely sure whether it was simple curiosity that drove him, or something more complex and dangerous.

The woman had stopped in the middle of the parking lot, the three policemen — no, Smith corrected himself, three officers, two men and a woman — standing in a semi-circle around her, carefully out of reach.

The lieutenant left the sidewalk and squeezed between two cars; Smith stopped there and leaned forward to listen, his hand on the peeling vinyl top of an old Lincoln.

“Ma’am,” the lieutenant said while still walking, “What’s this about a bomb?”

“Well, was there a bomb or not?” the woman demanded. “That’s what that boy told us, who came and got us all out of bed this morning — he said some of those crazy Iranian terrorists had planted dynamite all around the place and were going to blow us up. Did they really?”

“Hold on, ma’am,” Buckley said, raising his hands in a calming gesture. “We don’t know anything about any terrorists. Can you tell me what happened?”

The woman stared at him. “Are you on the bomb squad?” she demanded.

“No, ma’am,” he replied, “I’m a detective, Lieutenant Daniel Buckley. And you are?” She considered, and apparently decided it was a fair question. “I’m Nora Hagarty,” she said. “I live in B22. This is Bozo.” She held up the dog, a small gray mongrel with a surly expression.

“Pleased to meet you,” Buckley said, with a faint nod. “Ms. Hagarty, you live in Apartment B22, here in the Bedford Mills complex?”

“That’s what I said, Officer,” she answered, her smile gone.

“Ms. Hagarty,” Buckley asked, “What happened this morning? If you don’t mind, why are you out here in the parking lot in a nightgown?”

“Well, that’s what I was saying, Officer!” She shifted Bozo to her other arm and explained, “Some boy came around this morning at about five o’clock and woke us all up, nicely, though, he was very polite and well-spoken, and he said that the management had sent him, that some terrorist group or other was going to blow the entire complex up with dynamite because one of the owners did something the Iranians didn’t like, had helped hide Salman Rushdie or something like that. So I got Bozo, and we hurried out here and we all went over to that building over there, and we hid in the basement.” She turned, and pointed with her free hand, indicating the unfinished office building.

Lieutenant Buckley nodded. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, that’s where we all are, but I got tired of waiting, so I came up to see what was going on, and I looked over here and saw all your cars and came over to ask if you’d found all the dynamite yet. Did you?”

“We haven’t found any dynamite, Ms. Hagarty,” Buckley told her. “I think it must have been a prank.

We’ll check, though.”

“A prank?” Her voice rose in outrage. “But we’re all over there in our pajamas, and we’ve missed work because we didn’t dare come back for our clothes! It’s almost been fun, in a scary sort of way, but I have better things to do! Whose idea of a prank is this, anyway?”

“I don’t know, Ms. Hagarty,” Buckley said. He turned to one of the officers and muttered something Smith couldn’t catch; the officer nodded, then turned and trotted back toward the main body of police.

Buckley gestured to the policewoman, and said, “Ms. Hagarty, if you’ll go to that van over there, this officer will take your statement, and then I think we can let you go back to your apartment, and you can get on with whatever you should be doing. Thank you for your cooperation.” Nora Hagarty started to say something, but just then Bozo made a bid for freedom, scrabbling and trying to leap down from her arms, and she had to struggle to haul him back up to her generous bosom, leaving dirty paw-prints on her nightgown.

“This way, Ms. Hagarty,” the policewoman said. With a hand on Ms. Hagarty’s elbow, she started across the parking lot. Buckley headed in the other direction, toward the office building.

Smith called out, “Ms. Hagarty!”

“Yes?” She stopped abruptly and turned to stare at him. The policewoman stopped as well.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Hagarty,” Smith said, “But where did you get that hat?” Startled, Hagarty reached up and removed the slouch hat, revealing a headful of curlers, and looked at it.

“This thing? Why, I’ve had it for years. I just threw it on on my way out the door, to keep the sun off, or in case we got more rain. I couldn’t find my umbrella and the boy said I shouldn’t take the time to look. I thought I might need it, though. I know the weather reports didn’t say anything about rain, but the way the weather’s been this year you never know; I’ve never seen so much rain as we’ve had this year!” She shrugged and plopped the hat back on her head.

“Have you worn it much recently?” Smith asked.

The policewoman was looking at him doubtfully. Buckley had stopped and turned back to listen.

“This old thing? In the summer? Of course not!” Hagarty made a wave of dismissal. “Don’t be silly! It hasn’t been out of my closet in months. In fact, I don’t think I’ve worn it since Easter.” She stared at him.

“Why?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

“Oh, nothing,” Smith lied, “It just looked like one I’d seen somewhere, and I was trying to remember where.”

“Well, I think I did wear it back in February, maybe,” Hagarty reluctantly allowed.

“I wasn’t here in February; I only moved in in April,” Smith told her.

“Well, then I can’t help you, young man!” She turned away and marched on across the lot, the policewoman at her side.

Buckley strolled back across the lot to where Smith stood, between the Lincoln and a brown Datsun.

“Mr. Smith,” he said, “What was that about?”

Smith shrugged. “That hat,” he said, “It’s just like the one I saw in my nightmare.” Buckley glanced after the hat, then back at Smith. “Really?” he said.

“I think so.”

Buckley shrugged. “Just a coincidence, maybe.”

“Yeah,” Smith agreed, doubtfully, staring after Nora Hagarty, “Just a coincidence.” 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.

That night he turned off David Letterman, turned out the light, and lay back on the bed, telling himself he should get some sleep.

Telling himself that did not make it so, however; he was still too nervous to sleep, particularly in a strange bed. After a few minutes of staring at the ceiling, on a sudden impulse he turned and looked toward the window.

His breath caught in his throat, and he felt himself choking, strangling, as his eyes widened so far that they stung.

That creature, that nightmare person, was peering in the window at him. The red eyes gleamed, and the silvery teeth sparkled a duller red in the glow from the motel sign.

And behind it he could see other faces, human faces, familiar faces.

Mrs. Malinoff. Nora Hagarty. Walt Harris, from C31, who complained whenever he played loud music.

Mrs. Malinoff was leaning over the nightmare thing’s shoulder, and as he watched, frozen, unable to breathe, she reached up with both hands and began peeling her upper lip back.

The skin of her face slid up, across her cheeks and over her nose, peeling back like a rubber mask and revealing greyish flesh and gleaming silver needle-teeth beneath, eyes a baleful red.

On the other side Nora Hagarty was tugging at her ears, as if to loosen them; then she, too, reached for her upper lip.

As Mrs. Malinoff’s face came away, revealing completely the horror beneath, his breath came free, his throat opened, and he began to scream.

He screamed wordlessly, raw sound pouring out.

The red eyes blinked in unison, both pairs of them; Nora Hagarty’s hands froze where they were, her lip peeled back ludicrously to the tip of her nose. Walt Harris ducked down out of sight, vanishing completely.

Slowly, reluctantly, Nora’s hands pulled the skin of her face back into place, and she, too, dropped out of sight.

The thing that had been Mrs. Malinoff tugged her skin back down over the sparse black hair of its head, back across forehead, eyes, and nose, resuming its human appearance, and then it, too, disappeared.

The last one, the undisguised nightmare face, frowned at him. There was something horribly familiar about the gesture. It raised a long-fingered hand in a parting salute, just as it had before, and then it was gone.

He stopped screaming and caught his breath, gasping, taking deep, ragged gulps of the room’s artificially cool air.

Someone pounded on the door. “Mr. Smith? Are you all right in there?”

“I’m fine,” he gasped, recognizing the motel clerk’s voice, “I’m fine. I just had a nightmare.” He gathered what little remained of his composure, and said, “I’m sorry if I disturbed anyone.” After a moment’s hesitation, the clerk asked, “Could you open the door, please, sir, and let me make sure you’re all right?”

Smith got to his feet and reached out, then paused.

Could it be a trick?

He leaned over and looked out the window.

Nobody was there.

He looked through the peephole.

Only the clerk was there.

He had never seen this clerk around the Bedford Mills complex, he was sure. And he had square white teeth and hazel eyes.

He turned the knob and opened the door.

Nothing leaped in at him. Nobody was there on the balcony but the clerk. Smith tried to smile at him.

“I’m fine, really,” he said.

The clerk peered suspiciously past him, then at his face. “If you’re sure you’re okay, Mr. Smith...”

“I’m sure,” Smith told him. “Really, I’m quite sure. It was just a nightmare — a very bad one, but just a nightmare. I’m really sorry if I disturbed anyone.”

“That’s okay, Mr. Smith,” the clerk told him, in one of those calming voices that can be so maddening.

“Listen, if there’s any problem, you call me, okay?”

“I will.” Smith managed a smile, then closed the door, repeating, “It was just a nightmare.” This time, however, he didn’t believe it.

Chapter Two:

Thursday, August 3rd

Smith was unsure whether or not he had slept, but when dawn crept up over I-270 and spilled down the railroad tracks behind the motel he decided to pretend he had, that he was fully rested. He got out of the chair where he had spent most of the night, stretched, and headed for the bathroom.

At first, he had only intended to rinse his face, but after he had flushed the toilet and washed his hands he reconsidered and took a long, hot shower.

When he stepped out and towelled himself off he still felt a bit woozy from lack of sleep, but the gummy taste in his mouth was gone, and his skin was fresh and clean. He felt as if he were just now waking up, as if the long night in the motel and the entire day before had been one long continuation of his initial nightmare.

He knew that it had not been a nightmare, that he had seen something strange and abnormal, but for the moment he was willing to not think about it, to worry instead about the demands of everyday life.

For example, he asked himself, did he plan to go to work today?

It was Thursday. He was still ahead of schedule, and had had so little sleep the past two nights that he was quite sure he would be unable to write any code the computers would accept. On the other hand, it would be a step toward getting back to normal.

And if he didn’t go to work, just what was he going to do all day?

One alternative would be to spend the day looking for somewhere new to live, as he had no intention of returning to the Bedford Mills complex.

In either case, he decided as he folded the towel, he would want to look fairly respectable. He picked out a yellow sport shirt and dark brown slacks that would serve that purpose, and dressed quickly.

And whatever he was going to do later, the first thing to do was to eat some breakfast. He’d only managed one meal the day before.

Checking his wallet and room key carefully, he took a last look around the room, stepped out on the motel balcony, and then closed the door behind him.

It was almost seven o’clock. I-270, behind him, was already buzzing with traffic. Denny’s, across the parking lot, was busy with the breakfast rush.

He noticed the sign that read “Always Open,” and snorted quietly, thinking he’d been foolish to stay in his room. He could have gone to the restaurant and gotten himself a snack at two or three in the morning, when the place would have been almost empty.

He’d missed his chance. He would have to settle for an ordinary breakfast. He headed down the stairs and across the lot.

The food at Denny’s was good, but the service could be slow, and was that time; he had plenty of time to consider his plans as he sat in a booth waiting for his fried eggs. He tried to break everything down logically, as if he were planning out a program.

First, what was the actual situation? Never mind what the customer says is happening — in this case, what he thought he’d seen — what was really happening?

Second, what needs to be done about the situation?

Third, how could he do it?

Well, to start with, he didn’t know the actual situation.

He thought he’d seen something at his top-floor window at three in the morning.

The following day, all the other people in the apartment complex vanished, and were found emerging from a basement several hours later with a story about a phony bomb scare.

Minor details, such as Nora Hagarty’s hat and Mrs. Malinoff’s knee, had seemed strange after everybody came back.

That night he’d again seen something bizarre at his window.

That was it, so far — four things out of the ordinary. Were they related?

The two apparitions were obviously connected, since they involved the same monstrous face. And Nora Hagarty and Mrs. Malinoff and Walt Harris were tied in by the second apparition, as well.

The connection to the mass disappearance was less definite.

And what had really caused the disappearance?

If it had really been a prank, why hadn’t he been included?

He could make guesses, and he did.

He might have been skipped by a prankster because, exhausted from staying up so late, he had slept too heavily to be awakened by knocking at his door.

Nora Hagarty had said the boy came around at about five, when he would have been asleep for roughly an hour and a half. He would have been deeply asleep.

But why was everyone else so easily awakened? If they were taking it seriously enough to rouse everyone, how had he been skipped?

And how did it relate to the apparitions and the general strangeness?

Could somebody be playing an absurdly elaborate prank on him, and him alone?

What if the faces at the window had been faked, somehow? Special effects could do amazing things, he knew.

What other explanation could there be for a face hanging thirty feet in the air?

Suppose that Nora Hagarty and Mrs. Malinoff and Walt Harris had decided, for some perverse reason, to frighten him. Suppose they had somehow projected that inhuman face on the outside of his window, using some sort of movie or hologram.

That would account for how it could reach a fourth-floor window, and how it could vanish so mysteriously, without leaving a trace.

For the second apparition, they could have used a live actor in make-up, and the four of them could have just ducked away around the corner, or into the next room, when he started screaming, before the clerk could see anything strange about them.

The slouch hat and the strange smile would be easy little teases. The red gleam from Mrs. Malinoff’s eyes

— that could be colored contact lenses.

The knee that didn’t creak was harder to explain. Some sort of special treatment, perhaps?

He had no idea what caused creaking joints in the first place, so he couldn’t even guess at what would cure them.

What about the disappearance, though? How did that tie in?

It might be coincidence — or it might be that the pranksters, Hagarty and Malinoff and Harris, had done that, too, hiring some kid to go around and wake up everybody except that guy in Apartment C41, with the story about Iranian terrorists.

It could have happened that way. He told himself that. It could have.

And didn’t an elaborate practical joke make more sense than some sort of needle-toothed monster hiding behind Mrs. Malinoff’s face?

His hand shook slightly as he sipped his coffee.

If that was done with special effects, they were damn good, he thought. It had been totally convincing.

Although, he added mentally, he had been tired, it had been dark out on the balcony, he had been caught by surprise — maybe it hadn’t been that hard to fool him.

Why would anyone want to play such a trick on him, though? Why go to such incredible lengths?

He shook his head, and sipped coffee again. It didn’t make sense.

He knew that he had annoyed Walt Harris sometimes, by playing his stereo too loudly. He knew that Mrs. Malinoff distrusted him because he was relatively young and because he worked with computers, which she hated and feared. Why, though, would they go to such fantastic trouble?

And what had he ever done to Nora Hagarty?

He shrugged that question off easily enough; the other two could have brought her in for money, or the sake of a friendship, or just for fun.

Maybe the three of them — or four, if whoever had worn the grey make-up and fake teeth was one of them, and not a hired actor — were a little gang that did this for kicks.

Maybe they’d even done it before. Maybe, if he knew more about them, he would find out that they’d pulled any number of stunts on other people.

His eggs finally arrived, and he cut a piece with his fork as he considered that.

The whole thing could be the work of three or four middle-aged tricksters.

It could be. He reminded himself that he hadn’t proven anything with all his clever theorizing. It could be tricksters.

Or it could be that the monsters were real.

He didn’t like the idea of real monsters lurking outside his windows, but they had certainly looked real.

The true skeptic, he remembered reading somewhere, doesn’t take anything on faith, and that includes the non-existence of the supernatural, just as much as its existence.

Suppose, then, that the monsters he saw were real. How did that fit the facts?

He sopped up some runny yolk and lifted the fork to his mouth as he thought that over.

If the monsters were real, then they presumably had some unusual abilities, in order to appear outside a fourth-floor window and vanish so abruptly.

If the monsters were real, then Nora Hagarty and Mrs. Malinoff were monsters — he had seen that with his own eyes. That would explain the hat and the eyes.

The knee could be explained by assuming that Mrs. Malinoff — the real Mrs. Malinoff — had been a normal human being, and had been replaced by a monster in her shape.

Walt Harris could be a monster, or could be a human being working with the monsters. His face had never displayed any inhuman characteristics.

What about the disappearance?

He dabbed a bit of yolk off his chin as he considered that.

The monsters had been responsible, he supposed. The fact that everything at Bedford Mills had seemed perfectly normal on Tuesday, but on Wednesday everyone had vanished temporarily and when they came back at least two of them were no longer human, certainly seemed to imply...

He stopped at that point, his fork dangling from one hand, his napkin in the other.

What on Earth was he thinking? This was like something out of a horror movie. “...two of them were no longer human...?”

But he had seen the monsters. He had seen that hat, and Mrs. Malinoff’s smile. All his neighbors had vanished.

He clenched his jaw for a moment and told himself that he would think it through, no matter how ridiculous it sounded.

Suppose, then, that all his neighbors had been herded away by the monsters, and that when they came back some of them had become monsters.

Why had he been neglected? Because he slept too soundly?

Wasn’t anybody else in the entire complex a sound sleeper?

And why wouldn’t the monsters have found some way to awaken him, if that was what they wanted?

Another possibility occurred to him, and suddenly seemed to make far more sense.

What if the monsters had not come at five in the morning, but at three?

What if he had been skipped not because he was asleep, but because he was awake? Because he had seen the thing outside his window?

It was far more believable that only one out of a hundred and forty-four people would be awake at three in the morning, than that only one would sleep too soundly to be awakened at five.

That would do for a provisional explanation.

And at the motel, the four of them had fled when he started screaming. That seemed to fit. They preferred sleeping victims, or at least unresisting ones.

The four of them — four monsters?

Only four?

They had taken a hundred and forty-three people away, and at least two had come back as monsters.

One monster, the one who had appeared at his own window, apparently still had no human disguise.

What if all of them had come back as monsters?

What if the one he had seen outside his window had been meant to replace him?

What if it was still after him? What if it had come back for a second try and brought along friends to help, in case he resisted? What if that was why the four of them had all been at his window?

What would have happened if he hadn’t screamed?

He put down the fork and the napkin and stared at the eggs on his plate, and suddenly had no appetite for them. He picked up his cup and gulped coffee.

When he lowered the cup again he grimaced.

He had two explanations, so far — real supernatural monsters that only he had seen, or an incredibly complicated practical joke directed at him.

Neither one seemed very likely, and a third possibility occurred to him, one he didn’t like to think about, but one that certainly made as much sense as either of the others.

Maybe he had imagined the entire thing, from start to finish. Maybe none of it was real at all.

Maybe he’d gone mad.

He finished his coffee and sat staring at his half-eaten eggs.

He had three possible explanations, and he didn’t like any of them.

The next step was to figure out what had to be done.

If he was mad, then perhaps the best thing to do was to do nothing and hope he recovered. He’d read Operators and Things years ago, and he knew that insane people, even ones with horrible delusions, sometimes recovered spontaneously.

More often they didn’t. Perhaps he should see a psychiatrist.

But then, if he wasn’t mad, that would be a mistake. The psychiatrist would probably think he was hallucinating, and would feed him Thorazine or Stelazine or some other such drug and he’d be reduced to a zombie-like state. He’d heard that while Thorazine could return many schizophrenics to near-normal functioning, it could reduce non-schizophrenics to a near-vegetable condition.

He remembered the discussions in his college abnormal-psych class where this had come up. Someone had said that yeah, some doctors used Thorazine not just to treat schizophrenia, but to diagnose it, too. If they gave a patient Thorazine and he got better, then he was schizophrenic and treatment was working. If he sat around and did nothing but stare at the walls, then he hadn’t been schizophrenic after all, and they’d stop the drug.

If he went to a doctor and got dosed with Thorazine and the monsters were real, then he’d be easy prey until the doctors decided he wasn’t schizo after all.

That assumed that the monsters were not only real, but were pursuing him — but after the little scene on the motel balcony, that seemed a reasonable assumption. After all, he knew they existed, and besides, if his theory was right, then one of them had intended to replace him all along, and had been delayed — but not necessarily stopped.

Well, if the monsters were real, then, what should he do?

He could go to the authorities, to the police, and tell them.

And they’d think he was nuts and he’d be in a cell somewhere, dosed with Thorazine, the next time the nightmare people came looking for him.

That was one thing that he thought the horror movies probably had right, despite all their foolishness —

he couldn’t look for much help from the police or the government unless he had real, solid proof that there really were monsters around.

Even then, what could the police do?

What could anybody do?

What could he do?

He could run away, of course, but he had tried that last night. It hadn’t worked.

Maybe he hadn’t run far enough.

If he ran, though — if he went back home to Boston, or headed out to California the way he’d intended to before he got the offer from DML — he’d lose his job, and the friends he’d made in the area, and he’d have to start all over again, looking for work.

And he wouldn’t be able to explain why he left this job so suddenly. What could he say? If he said, “Oh, I didn’t like the area,” would anyone believe that?

Actually, they might; he could talk about the humid weather and the ridiculous cost of living. Not that Silicon Valley would be any cheaper.

But even if it worked, he didn’t want to find a new job.

And besides, the things might follow him, even to California. Why not? He had no way of knowing what they might do.

Was there some way to stop them?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know what they were, after all.

If the monsters were real, he had no idea what he should do. He just didn’t know enough.

Enough, hell, he didn’t know anything.

What, then, if it was all a prank?

He frowned. If it was a trick, how had they found him at the motel?

He shook his head and ignored that. Maybe someone had followed him, or recognized his car.

If it was a prank, was it done with? Would they leave him alone now?

Why had they done it? To drive him out of his apartment? If that was it, then why did they come after him at the motel?

He didn’t know.

Whatever was happening, he didn’t know enough. Whether it was a prank, or insanity, or genuine monsters, or something else he hadn’t thought of, he didn’t know enough.

He could just forget about it and try to go on with his life — but then, if he was insane, he might get worse, he might lose control completely.

The pranksters might continue to torment him.

Or the monsters might get him.

He had to do something.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to write anything that would run properly with this hanging over him; there was no point in trying to go to work. He could stay in the motel for another few nights if he had to, or maybe he could go stay with George down in Bethesda; finding an apartment could wait. He wouldn’t need a new apartment if he got himself killed or committed, or if he made up with the pranksters.

The first thing to do, then, was to learn more about whatever it was he was involved in.

In the horror movies, people got themselves killed by walking blithely and disbelievingly into the monster’s lair. While it was hard to think of life as being anything like a horror movie when he was sitting on an ordinary green-upholstered bench in a quiet booth in a sunny restaurant, drinking coffee and staring at plastic plants, he intended to be a bit more prepared, and more careful, than the people in the movies.

He picked up the check and headed for the register.

Simply walking into the Bedford Mills complex, he decided as he waited for a chance to make his left turn onto Route 124, would be too much like entering the locked room, the haunted house, the forbidden vault — if there were really monsters there, he’d be asking for it by doing anything so foolhardy.

In fact, walking in anywhere with nothing but the clothes on his back would be stupid. He abruptly changed his mind and turned right, instead of left, when a break in traffic finally appeared.

A quick switch to the left lane as he went under I-270, and he turned left at the light, onto Route 355

northbound.

Most of the traffic was southbound this time of day, in toward Washington, so he was able to get up a little speed. Then a kid in a battered green pickup cut him off, and he leaned on the horn for a moment, almost missing the entrance to the new Hechinger’s. His rear wheels slewed a bit on the gravel at the corner as he took the turn too fast, but then he was safely into the mostly-empty parking lot.

It was mostly empty for a good reason, he realized when he looked at the dark facade — the place wasn’t open yet.

He looked at his watch and saw 8:17; he sighed, unbuckled his harness, and got out of the car.

He stood for a moment looking at the store, then closed and locked the car and crossed to the concrete apron.

A small sign on the door gave the hours, starting at 8:30. He looked at his watch again — 8:18.

He tried to think of someplace that would already be open, and decided that 84 Lumber on Bureau Drive might be, or Barron’s down by the Cuddy Bridge, but by the time he could fight his way through the traffic to either one it would be 8:30.

He waited.

At 8:28 a black-haired kid in a red Hechinger’s vest unlocked the door.

Smith had had time to consider what he wanted, and wasted no time in finding it.

His first selection was a small heavy-duty crowbar, eighteen inches of blue-painted steel. He passed up the axe-handles as being too obviously intended as weapons. Carrying a crowbar around an apartment complex or construction site, unusual though it might be, seemed reasonable enough; carrying an axe handle did not.

The larger crowbars he looked over carefully, but in the end he decided they would be too large and conspicuous, and he limited himself to the little one.

Besides, it was cheaper.

He followed that up with a sturdy rechargeable flashlight, after hesitating briefly over a pump-charged version.

The hand-pump light couldn’t give out on him, but the rechargeable was brighter and easier to hold.

While waiting at the door he’d thought about guns, and decided against buying one. He wasn’t sure whether Hechinger’s even carried them, anyway. He’d never owned one, hadn’t fired one since high school back in Massachusetts, and had no idea what the local laws were about permits, concealed weapons, discharging firearms, whatever.

Besides, guns were too dangerous. He might shoot too soon or too late, he might miss what he aimed at, he might get himself killed or arrested. The crowbar was better.

All the same, he added a good-quality four-inch-blade jackknife to his collection, as back-up for the crowbar.

He tried to think what else he might need, but his brain didn’t want to work. As he hefted the crowbar his knees seemed to weaken, and his shins trembled slightly. The solid reality of the wrecking tool in his hand seemed to bring home, more than all his plans or the weird late-night visitations, that he was involved in something real, something serious, something dangerous.

He forced a deep breath down, held it for a second, and then marched up to the check-out with his supplies.

The yawning clerk barely glanced at him as she rang up the bar, light, and knife. He handed her his MasterCard, and she gave the slip of plastic more attention than she had its owner.

“You want a bag for that?” she asked, handing back the card.

“Don’t bother,” he said, slipping the jackknife into one hip pocket, his wallet into the other. He took the receipt from her, stuffed it in his shirt pocket, then picked up the bar and light and left.

Back in the car he dropped the crowbar and flashlight on the passenger seat and started the engine.

Was there anything else he needed?

A sudden revulsion at further delay made him thrust that thought aside. He needed to get at it; he needed to find out what was going on. He released the brake and rolled.

Getting from the parking lot back out onto 355, and into the rush-hour traffic, took a few minutes; then he crept along past the IBM plant, surrounded by commuters, until he reached the turn for 124.

Traffic was lighter there, and thinned out even more once he was past the entrance ramps for I-270.

When he turned onto Clopper Road he was going against the traffic. He sailed past the turn for the MVA, past the townhouses and the new construction, to the left turn onto Barrett.

The morning sun slanted down through the trees, flickering across his windshield, as he drove through the state park; it poured down steadily over the lake as he crossed the dam back into Diamond Park.

He almost missed the turn he wanted. His apartment, the whole Bedford Mills complex, was on Barrett, so his habits were all set for that, but that wasn’t where he was going this time. Instead he took the right fork onto Willow Street.

Willow Street was empty, and the emptiness was suddenly oppressive; he turned on the radio and got Harris In The Morning on WCXR, introducing another forty-five minute block of non-stop classic rock.

He turned left onto Orchard Heights Road to the sound of Pat Benatar.

The trees vanished on the right, replaced by bare dirt and weathered two-by-fours behind chain-link fence. He pulled over, slowing gradually to a stop, in front of the unfinished centerpiece building of the Orchard Heights Office Park.

He set the brake and turned off the engine, and the sound of the radio died away abruptly, leaving him in near-silence. The hum of distant traffic was barely audible, and a bird was singing somewhere.

He sat for a moment, listening, and looking over the site.

The builder had gotten the steel frame up, and the floors, and had had the brick facade about half-done when the money ran out. The south wall rose up above the three-storey frame in an unsupported brick gable, a pink brick triangle stabbing at the sky; the west wall, facing him, was three stories high at the south end, only one at the north, the steel frame behind it thrusting up on the left like the bare flesh revealed by an off-the-shoulder gown.

The east wall, the far side, was invisible. The north end wasn’t there at all.

The whole thing looked crooked, and he wondered why the builder had done it that way, instead of building the walls up evenly on all four sides.

Then he shrugged; it didn’t matter. He got out of the car, the crowbar in hand.

The fence was no problem. It wasn’t a permanent structure, with poles set into the ground, but just a temporary affair strung hurriedly around the property to discourage vandals, the uprights set in old wheel-rims filled with concrete. At one point it passed over a large pile of dirt left by the bulldozers, with a single post set atop the hump, leaving openings on either side where the ground fell away more steeply than the fencing.

Squeezing through one of these spaces got powdery dirt on the legs of his good brown pants, but presented no real obstacle, any more than the No Trespassing signs did.

Once inside he stood up again, bar in his right hand and flashlight in his left, and looked the ground over.

There were footsteps in the dirt at the north end of the unfinished building, hundreds of footsteps, a broad track left when the inhabitants of the Bedford Mills Apartments had marched up into the light and headed back through the little patch of woods that separated the two complexes.

He followed the trail around, and saw where a section of the fence had been torn down and trampled on.

He could have kept his pants clean if he had bothered to go around.

He looked through the trees at the apartment parking lot. He had never seen it from this angle, but it was still thoroughly familiar. Through the leaves he could see the windows of his own apartment, gleaming in the morning light.

The lot looked rather full for this time of the morning, he thought, and he tightened his grip on the light.

A momentary urge to just walk on through the trees and go home came to him, but he fought it down. He had other things he wanted to do before he dared go home.

He forced himself to turn away and to look into the open north end of the unfinished building.

The eastern wall was mostly open, and bright sunlight poured warmly in across a sand-strewn expanse of bare plywood flooring. A dark opening gaped in the center, a hundred feet away, with a crude railing of knocked-together two-by-fours leading down into it. Above it, a matching opening in the ceiling let in more light, but no stairway or railing led to the upper levels.

That hole in the floor was the basement, of course. That was what he had come to look at.

After all, why had all those people gone down there and hidden, instead of just going to other buildings, or sheltering behind the fragmentary brick walls?

A car buzzed by without stopping, out on Orchard Heights Road.

He stepped in onto the plywood, his feet thumping heavily.

The stairs leading down into the basement were in place, heavy red-painted metal with black non-skid treads. The rough railing went only as far as the landing.

He turned on his flashlight and shone it down into the opening, revealing loose dirt, concrete floor, and scraps of lumber.

Cautiously, he descended, one step at a time, shining the light around as he went.

Bare concrete, a small pile of broken bricks, scattered chunks of two-by-four, sand and dirt, a tangle of wire. An area of concrete wall was striped by steel studding. Twenty feet off to one side panels of plywood were stacked up five feet high, the lower part of the pile still bound into two tight bundles by metal shipping bands.

He reached bottom and stepped off onto concrete.

Nothing looked out of place or at all unusual except for the disturbance of the dirt where dozens of people had come marching out of the south end of the basement, out past the plywood and up the stairs.

He shone the light around, and realized that there were no tracks anywhere else; to the north, east, and west of the stairs the dust and dirt were undisturbed.

That made the whole thing seem stranger than ever. The practical joke theory seemed to have just developed a problem. How could the pranksters have kept the entire group crammed into one end of the basement all morning? Hadn’t the kids gone running around, playing with the scraps? Hadn’t anybody gone exploring to see if there might be a better corner to take cover in?

Nervous, he shone the light at the plywood.

It was ordinary plywood, the manufacturer’s code symbols stamped on the side of each bundle. A spanch of reddish-brown paint was smeared across the top sheet.

He blinked and stepped out of the light of the stairwell, looking more closely, shining his light directly on that top sheet.

Was that paint?

He couldn’t be sure.

He swallowed, walked up to the pile of plywood, and dabbed at the smear with a finger.

Whatever the stuff was, it was dry and powdery, and some of it came up when he rubbed at it, but it left a dark reddish stain.

It didn’t feel like paint.

He shone the light into the gloom beyond the plywood, expecting to see more concrete and scrap.

The concrete and scrap were there, but everything was liberally splashed with that same reddish-brown, and there were white fragments heaped on the floor that did not look like any sort of building material.

He knew what the brown stuff was. He didn’t want to admit it, but he knew perfectly well what it was.

He walked around the stack of plywood, his hand trembling slightly so that the light danced across the floor in frantic whirls, and he looked at the stains that spread across the floor, across the walls, across the plywood and the scattered bits of lumber, and even, in spattered rows of uneven reddish dots, across the metal beams overhead.

Then he looked at the fragments on the floor, white where they weren’t stained.

He knew what those were, too. He stooped and shone his light directly on one of them.

It was bone, a curving chunk of bone broken off unevenly at one end. It was a piece of rib, like a bit of leftover from a barbecue, except that it wasn’t smoky from cooking; it was gleaming white.

He stared at it and saw marks on it, tiny scratches and indentations. They looked like toothmarks.

Knowing what he would see he swung the light onward, across scattered bits of bone, to a heap of bones piled in the corner, thrown together haphazardly.

All of them had those little marks.

He stood, and began backing out, away from the bones and the bloodstains, back around the stack of plywood, back to the stairs, where he turned and ran up them into the blinding summer sunlight, ran back out across the plywood flooring, back out of the skeletal building, skidding on the bare dirt, scrambling desperately back out under the fence to his car, where the mad struggle to find his car keys, to unlock and open the door, finally broke his unthinking panic.

He stood panting for a moment, the car keys in his hand and the door of the car standing open, trying to think.

He had to do something. He had to call the police.

What would he tell them, though? That there were bloodstains and what looked like human bones all over the basement here?

That was too lurid, too much like something out of a horror movie. He would just report a dead body.

And he’d do it anonymously, disguise his voice — he didn’t want to be connected with this.

He turned and looked back at the building. In the bright sunlight, with the solid normality of his car beneath his hands, the everyday reality of the dirt and the chain-link fence and the scrub grass that grew here and there, it was very hard to believe that he had seen monsters, or that he had found human bones

— fresh human bones — just a few yards away in that basement.

Something moved.

He blinked, and tried to focus on it.

Someone was standing under the trees behind the construction site, the trees that separated it from the Bedford Mills apartments. It was a boy in his teens, wearing a pair of cut-off shorts and a wide-brimmed hat; Smith thought he looked familiar, despite the distance; he squinted, and finally placed him.

That was Bill Goodwin, one of the four kids that Charlie and Lillian Goodwin had crammed into Apartment C12. Smith had met the whole clan as soon as he had arrived at Bedford Mills — Bill’s kid brothers, Harry and Sid, had helped him carry boxes of books and dishware upstairs when he had first moved in. Later on he’d talked to Bill a few times, and let him try out a few things on his desktop computer. The Goodwin kids were probably the closest thing to real friends he had in the whole complex.

He started to raise a hand to wave, and then stopped.

Was it really Bill Goodwin?

Wasn’t it one of the monsters?

Whoever or whatever it was, the boy stared at him for a moment, then abruptly turned and hurried away.

Smith’s mind refused to work properly. He had just seen a basement strewn with human remains, evidence that some sort of horror was loose, but all he could see now was an ordinary summer day, and an ordinary teenager, and he couldn’t reconcile his theories of monsters disguised as their victims with that calm, everyday reality. Every impulse, every habit, made him want to wave and call a polite hello to the Goodwin boy, but at the same time the memory of the pile of bones had left a knot of panic just below the surface, a knot that was trying to choke him, to force him into his car, to make him drive to the nearest pay-phone and call the police, or to flee as quickly as he could, drive away and never come back.

Despite his panicky confusion, the prankster theory somehow pushed its way to the surface of his mind.

Could the blood and bone be fake?

He doubted it — but he wasn’t sure. He was no expert. He couldn’t be certain the bones were human.

He hadn’t really taken that close a look, and it was dark down in there. He hadn’t touched them. The bones might even be some sort of plastic replicas.

It could be a prank. A horrible and elaborate prank, but a prank.

If it was a prank, was Bill Goodwin in on it?

And if the monsters were real, was Bill Goodwin one of them?

Was Bill going to call for help, get the pranksters or monsters or whatever they were to clean up the basement, hide the bones, do something to cover their tracks?

Almost certainly, Smith realized, that was exactly what would happen. Why else would the boy have behaved as he did?

Or was his imagination running away with him? Was he panicking, turning paranoid?

He suddenly wished he had thought to bring a camera. His own battered Pentax was still in his apartment, but he could have bought a cheap little Instamatic or something when he got his crowbar and flashlight.

Or he could run across to his apartment and get the Pentax right now.

His mouth twisted at the thought. He climbed into the car and slammed the door.

He wasn’t going back in his apartment just now, thank you very much.

He could go back down in the basement, though, and take some of those bones, for proof of his story.

But what would they really prove? And how could he prove where he got them?

That wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t try it.

Besides, if he went back down into that basement he might be cornered in there if the monsters came back. He wasn’t going back.

He would call the police, anonymously, and report a dead body.

That’s all he would do, for now.

He started the engine.

Chapter Three:

Friday, August 4th

He sat on the bed in his cramped room at the motel, wondering if the police had found anything. Various horrible scenarios drifted through his mind.

What if two cops went down those steps to find a hundred of those nightmare people waiting for them, silver teeth gleaming in anticipatory grins?

What if his voice on the phone had been recorded and analyzed, his identity somehow discovered, his refuge tracked down, and the cops were about to come knocking on his door, demanding to know why he was wasting their time, warning him of the penalties for giving false information?

(What were the penalties for giving false information, anyway? He had no idea.) What if the police had found the bones and realized that the current inhabitants of Bedford Mills were all cannibalistic monsters, and were trying to stamp them out — but couldn’t? What if the monsters came after him, seeking vengeance for this inconvenience he had caused them?

The whole thing was so incredible that he had no idea what to do, or what to expect. He had fallen out of the normal and predictable world into ... into what? Madness? Hell?

Into exhaustion, for one thing. He needed sleep.

He looked at the phone and considered calling the police again, but giving his name this time and asking Lieutenant Buckley what had happened, if anything, in the investigation of yesterday’s mass disappearance. Surely, if anything had been found in that basement, Buckley would know and would mention it.

But whoever it was who had answered when he called from the pay-phone at the Quince Orchard shopping center would probably still be on duty, and might recognize his voice. He didn’t want that.

Besides, the cops who went to investigate might not have had time to report back yet.

He would wait and call later.

He glanced at his watch, still thinking about phones, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t yet called in to work to explain his absence. Einar would be annoyed. Einar didn’t mind an occasional missed day, but he liked to know what was going on.

Smith reached for the phone and dialed.

It rang twice. Smith heard the click as someone picked up, and then a familiar voice said, “Hello, DML

Communications, software division, Einar Lindqvist speaking.”

“Hi, Einar,” he said. “It’s Ed Smith.”

“Hey, Ed,” Einer replied, “What’s up now? Change your mind about coming in today?”

“No,” Smith said, a bit puzzled by Einar’s jovial tone. “I was just calling to let you know that I’ll be out for the rest of the week, but I should be back Monday.”

“So why’d you call?” Now Einar sounded appropriately annoyed. “I mean, that’s what you told me an hour ago.”

Smith blinked, staring at the painted concrete wall, and tried to convince himself that he had heard wrong.

He felt very unsteady, and for a moment he thought he might faint, just fall over on the bed, or the floor, and let consciousness go away for a little while. He needed sleep, he needed sleep very badly.

“What?” he said.

“I said, that’s what you told me an hour ago.” Now Einar sounded worried. “Are you all right, Ed? I mean, I know you’re sick, but ... well, you’re sick, I shouldn’t nag.”

“You talked to me an hour ago?” Smith asked.

There was a pause, and Smith could picture Einar leaning back to get a good look at the wall clock.

“About that,” he said. “Maybe only forty-five minutes.”

Smith swallowed and improvised. “Look, Einar, maybe it’s the medication — my doctor gave me some stuff that makes me really fuzzy — but I don’t remember talking to you since Tuesday. Did you call me or did I call you?”

“I called you,” Einar said. “Hey, Ed, how serious is this bug you’ve got? I thought it was just a summer cold or something, but if you’re on this medication...”

“Oh, it’s okay, I think, really, it’s okay,” Smith said hurriedly. “It’s some sort of, you know, three-day wonder.” He hesitated, then asked, “Einar, where did you call me?”

“At your apartment, of course,” Einar said. “Where else?”

Smith felt himself tense up at that. His throat was dry, and he had to swallow again before he could speak.

“Einar,” he said, and then hesitated, unsure what to say.

The phone hummed quietly in his ear.

“Einar,” he continued at last, “That wasn’t me. There was some trouble at my apartment building yesterday, and I’m staying in a motel in Gaithersburg. That’s where I am now.” For a long moment he heard only silence.

“Ed,” Einar finally said, “What are you talking about? It sure sounded like you, and who the hell else could it have been, in your apartment?”

It took Smith a moment to figure out how to answer that. He really did not want to try to convince anyone over the phone, least of all the mind-bogglingly unimaginative Einar, that his apartment complex had been taken over by monsters.

“I don’t know,” he said, after an uncomfortable pause, “Some prankster, most likely. The trouble yesterday was a practical joke that got out of hand — you can call the police if you want the details, I don’t really know what happened. Ask for Lieutenant Daniel Buckley. Maybe one of the pranksters got into my apartment and thought it would be funny to answer my phone when it rang, I don’t know. Maybe it was a smart-ass burglar, or a cop leading you on and hoping you’d spill something. I don’t know, Einar. I do know that I’m sitting here in Room 203 at the Red Roof Inn on Route 124, and that I haven’t been in my apartment since yesterday afternoon.”

The silence that followed was perhaps the longest yet.

“I don’t know, Ed,” Einar said at last. “It sounds pretty unlikely. Sounds completely screwy, in fact. I mean, whoever it was sure sounded like you, and he seemed to know who I was, and everything.”

“Did you give your name before he used it?” Smith asked.

He dreaded a possible affirmative answer. If the one who answered the phone was that thing, that nightmare person, and if they really took over the lives of the people they replaced, they must have some way of knowing little details of people’s lives.

“I don’t remember,” Einar admitted after a moment’s thought. “I guess not; I guess he said hello, and I said hi, it’s Einar, and then I asked if you — if he’d be coming into work this afternoon ... oh, shit, Ed, I don’t know. It’s weird. The voice was exactly the same — are you sure it wasn’t you?”

“I’m sure,” Smith told him. “And the voice — well, you expected it to be me, so you heard what you expected, right? It’s not like my voice is unusual or anything.”

“Well, yeah, but ... Jeez, I’m not sure whether you’re telling the truth now, or if maybe you’re the one pulling a practical joke.”

“I’m not, Einar, I swear it. Look, I’ll be in Monday, and you can see me face to face, and maybe by then the police will have it all straightened out. And if you’ve just got to talk to me, call me here. The Red Roof Inn in Gaithersburg.”

“Red Roof Inn. Right. Room 203, you said.”

“That’s right,” Smith agreed.

“Got it,” Einar said. “See you Monday, then.”

“Right. See you.”

Smith set the receiver gently down on the cradle, then fell back on the bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to think.

His thoughts were a mass of fragmentary and horrific images that he tried desperately and unsuccessfully to force into order. That thing was in his apartment, answering his phone — and what else was it doing there? What did a walking nightmare do in its free time?

What about all his things — his clothes, his books, his computers? Was that thing wearing his clothes, reading his books, using his computers?

There were so many questions and mysteries!

What had happened in that basement? What had the nightmare people done there? What had they done to his neighbors? What had the police found there?

Where had the monsters come from in the first place? Where could they have come from? Outer space?

Hell? Genetic experiments?

None of those made any sense. How could monsters from outer space disguise themselves as human?

Why would they want to? Why attack an apartment complex?

And nobody was doing genetic experiments like that, not even the CIA, he was sure.

And he didn’t believe in hell, not really, not as a source of devils and monsters.

So where had they come from?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine any sane explanation, and as he tried, his exhaustion got the better of him; he fell asleep.

He was awakened by the growling of his stomach. Sitting up stiffly, he looked out the window to see the sun low in the west, behind the Orchard Pond apartments.

He looked at his watch and saw that he had slept away the entire afternoon; it was only a minute or two before 7:00 p.m.

He felt better, calmer and more rested, than he had since fleeing his apartment the day before. Sleep had been what he needed, no doubt about it.

He took a moment to use the bathroom, comb his hair, and change his wrinkled and sweat-stained shirt, then headed for Denny’s for dinner. It was obviously too late to call Lieutenant Buckley now; he would call in the morning.

And when he did call, besides asking what progress had been made in the investigation, it occurred to him that it might be a good idea to let Buckley know where he was staying.

He found a table, read the menu, and told the waitress what he wanted. After he had ordered, he sat back and considered.

How long was he going to stay at the motel, anyway? And where was he going to go?

Sleeping on George’s couch down in Bethesda would be cheaper — not that he was especially short of funds or anything — and would get him farther away from Diamond Park. He would be heading against the worst of the rush-hour traffic on his way to his job in Rockville, instead of being in the middle of it, and that would be nice.

And what was he going to do about his apartment?

He would give it up, clear it out, and forget about the monsters, that’s what he would do. He had done his part in calling the police. Dealing with monsters wasn’t his responsibility.

If there really were any monsters.

And if there weren’t, well, living with vicious practical jokers wasn’t his idea of a good time, either.

A few hours’ sleep made it all seem so much simpler. It wasn’t his business. He might make a few more anonymous calls, but he wasn’t going to ruin his life. The monsters, if they were really monsters, had come and taken over that one apartment complex, and he had been lucky enough to get out alive, and as far as he knew that was the end of it.

That they had turned up at the motel later on didn’t matter. After all, they’d had plenty of opportunity while he was asleep just now, or when he was poking around the unfinished office building; if they were going to attack him, they could have done so then.

Of course, he thought, looking out the window at the orange-streaked western sky, that had all been in broad daylight, and the two occasions when he had seen nightmare people undisguised had been in the middle of the night.

Clearing out his apartment had better wait until morning, he decided. And in fact, he might see about staying up all night again, just until he could get settled in at George’s place and start looking for a new apartment.

He was watching the glorious summer sunset and trying very hard not to think any more about any of it when his steak and shrimp platter arrived.

“Hey, George,” he said into the phone as he lay back on the motel bed.

“That you, Ed?” George’s voice was calm and familiar.

“Yeah,” Smith said. “How’s life treating you lately?”

“Not bad, not bad. You gonna be at the poker game this month?”

“That’s a week from Friday, right?”

“Right, and it’ll be right here at my place.”

“Yeah, I expect I’ll be there. In fact ... well, listen, George, I have a favor to ask.”

“Ask away; what’s up?”

“Well, see, there’s a problem with my apartment. In fact, I’m calling from a motel; I had to move out. Is your living room couch still vacant?” He tried not to sound as if he were begging.

George hesitated, and Smith’s heart sank.

“Jeez, Ed,” he said at last, “I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s sleeping on the couch, but Bridget’s been...” He let his sentence trail off unfinished.

“Oh,” Smith said. He paused for a moment, trying to decide how badly he needed somewhere else to stay, and then asked, “You think that would be a problem? I mean, it wouldn’t bother me.”

“Well, yeah,” George said, slightly annoyed. “I think it might have something of an inhibiting effect, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Smith acknowledged.

For a moment both men were silent; then George said, “Look, if it’s an emergency, maybe for a day or two...”

“No, that’s all right,” Smith said, a trifle reluctantly. “I can stay at the motel. At least for now.”

“Okay. Hey, I’m sorry; if the situation changes, I’ll let you know. And if I come across any good apartments I’ll give you a call.”

“Fine. Thanks, George. Really. I’m at the Red Roof Inn in Gaithersburg, room 203.”

“Right.”

“Right. Well, guess I’ll see you at the poker game.”

“Yeah. See you.”

He hung up.

It would seem, Smith thought wryly, that he was not going to be staying with good old George down in Bethesda.

Well, he could find an apartment easily enough. Right across Route 124 there were plenty of apartments, and there were bound to be vacancies — maybe not right now, but reasonably soon.

Then he’d have to go and get all his stuff out of his old apartment — maybe it was just as well he’d never really finished unpacking everything. That meant spending at least a couple of hours at the Bedford Mills complex, with the monsters all around — if they were real. That was a daunting prospect.

At least he’d be able to get George to help — he could play on the guilt about his refusing the couch.

But right now, he didn’t have much to do. He couldn’t go apartment-hunting at this hour, or call the police, and while he’d have been able to work if he were already there, he couldn’t get into the building this late; they locked up at six, and he didn’t have a key yet.

And all his books and records and tapes were back in his apartment, damn it.

He sighed, turned on the TV, and sat on the bed.

Midway through the Tonight Show, where Jay Leno was filling in for Johnny Carson, Smith came to a conclusion.

When you aren’t tired or sleepy or doing anything else, when there are things you’d like to do but can’t, and when you’re all alone in a motel room, watching late-night television is really, really boring.

Worst of all, the television didn’t distract him from worrying about when that nightmare face was going to peer in his window again. His earlier cheerful optimism had faded once night had settled in, the sky had darkened, and the traffic had started to thin.

And not only is late-night TV boring, he decided, but motel rooms are depressing.

Sitting in a motel room watching late-night TV was stupid. There had to be something better to do!

Well, a mere twenty miles away was the heart of the nation’s capital, and after living in Diamond Park for three months he still hadn’t seen most of the monuments and attractions. Except for one weekend in May when he’d driven around the Mall unsuccessfully hunting a parking space, he hadn’t been into the District at all in that time.

Midnight probably wasn’t the best time, but at least parking should be easier.

He got up and shut off the TV, then checked through his pockets to make sure he had his license and keys. He glanced out the window.

For an instant he thought he saw something moving, something dark and red-eyed, but when he stepped closer there was nothing there.

Imagination, he told himself, just imagination. This whole thing had him horribly jumpy.

He hoped it was just his imagination, but he had never imagined seeing things before.

He stood at the window for a moment, staring out. He saw Denny’s and the Shell station and Route 124, and no sign of any monsters.

He opened the door and left the room.

Admiring monuments is all very well, Smith decided, but in the muggy August weather, even at night, he didn’t care to do much walking or climbing, and staying in his air-conditioned car put serious limitations on what he could see or do — not to mention that Washington was reportedly not a particularly safe place to walk at night. The national capital was the national murder capital as well, after all — there had been something like two hundred and fifty homicides in the District so far this year.

Of course, nobody got shot by crack dealers on the Mall, whatever the hour, and he wasn’t about to go wandering through the streets of Anacostia. All the same, except for a quick jaunt past the Vietnam Memorial over to the Reflecting Pool and back, he had stayed in his car.

Nobody had bothered him during his walk; he had glimpsed a few other people strolling the area, but they were just dark shapes in the distance.

He drove around the Washington Monument once more, and then, at about 3:30, he headed back out of the city, taking 18th Street north to Connecticut Avenue and following that straight out to the Beltway.

The city streets were almost empty; he saw an occasional taxi here and there, but for the most part there was no traffic. The only delays on Connecticut were the traffic lights, but despite the hour he didn’t care to run them. He wasn’t in any hurry.

There were other cars on the Beltway and I-270, of course. There were always cars on the Beltway and I-270, at any hour of day or night. Traffic wasn’t heavy enough to get in his way, though.

At twenty past four he hit the ramp off I-270 at Exit 10 and followed the loop around onto 117. Right up until he passed Bureau Drive and the entrance to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he wasn’t sure where he was going.

If he turned right onto 124, he’d be back at the motel in seconds.

If he went straight through the light he’d be on his way back to Diamond Park, where he could take another look at that unfinished building, or drive past his old apartment, and see if anything had changed.

There might be yellow-tape police lines around the office park. That would be worth seeing. It would mean that his call had done something.

That decided him. He stayed on 117 until he reached Barrett, where he turned left.

Then he cruised through the trees and across the dam, Lake Clopper pitch-black in the darkness, far darker than the sky overhead. He turned right on Willow and then left onto Orchard Heights Road.

The abandoned office park was on the left, the fence gleaming faintly beneath the streetlights.

There wasn’t any tape.

He continued on down to Diamond Park Avenue, turned right and passed the dark shops of the town’s commercial district, turned right again onto Willow, and came back up to Orchard Heights for another pass.

There was no tape. The unfinished building was just as he had left it.

There were no vehicles anywhere.

There were no visible tire-tracks.

There was no sign that the police, or anyone else, had been anywhere near the place.

He drove on past at a crawl, then gradually let his car pick up to a more normal speed until he came again to the intersection with Diamond Park Avenue.

This time he turned left, past the Safeway, and then left again on Barrett.

That took him by the Bedford Mills Apartments, and he inched past with his foot lightly touching the brake, the speedometer needle resting against the peg at 5 MPH.

(Why, he wondered when he noticed that, didn’t it go all the way down to zero?) He stared at the complex as he passed.

The parking lot was full. Most of the windows were dark; yellow light showed in a scattered few, squares of rich color showing through the grey darkness of the walls. The blank outer faces of A and D

buildings were featureless slabs of blackness.

Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

He noticed that most of the lights seemed to be in C building. There were lights in three apartments there.

In fact, his own lights were on.

He stopped the car, looked for traffic, and, seeing none, backed up a few yards and stopped again. He leaned close to the glass and looked again.

The lights were on in the living room and bedroom of his apartment.

He felt himself shiver slightly, and tried to tell himself that it was because he had the air conditioning turned up too high. He rolled down the window and leaned out.

Warm, sticky air bathed his face as he looked up at the windows on the top floor of C building.

Something moved in his apartment; he saw a dark figure outlined briefly against the glass in the living room, as if someone were taking a quick look out through the drapes, and then the drapes fell back in place and it was gone again.

He hadn’t been able to make out any detail. It was just a tall, thin figure, black against the light, and it was there and then it wasn’t.

He stared up at those closed drapes and the yellow light that poured through them for a long, long moment. Then he pulled his head back into the car, rolled the window up, and stepped on the gas.

He was the only customer at Denny’s when he first got there, at about five, but by the time he’d finished his meal the place had acquired a dozen or so other patrons, and the sky was pale blue above the motel and the railroad tracks.

His long night was beginning to wear on him; he was ready to go to bed, though he’d only been up for about ten hours. His body wanted rest, wanted to get back on something resembling a normal schedule, rather than the weird reversal of day and night he had just lived through.

He’d been on a normal schedule until Tuesday night, when the air conditioner had been broken.

He’d slept from 3:30 until 11:20 Wednesday morning, maybe napped briefly Wednesday night, and then slept from sometime Thursday morning — he really didn’t know just when — until about 7:00 p.m. on Thursday evening. That was, effectively, two nights’ sleep in three days. Here it was Friday morning, and that was catching up with him. He wasn’t a college kid any more, able to pull an all-nighter for a term paper or a poker game without suffering for it.

The constant nervousness, the strain he was under, hadn’t helped a bit.

If he went to bed, he guessed he would sleep for eight hours again, which would mean getting up around mid-afternoon.

If he stayed up — and he wasn’t so worn that his ability to stay awake was seriously in doubt — he could probably hold out until early evening, go to bed, and get up for a somewhat early Saturday morning. If he could manage that, he’d probably be back to normal by Monday, ready to go to work.

Of course, that would mean sleeping at night, in the dark, and something in the back of his mind didn’t like that idea at all. What if his earlier guess about the monsters had been right? What if they could only ...

could only do whatever it was they did at night, and only when the victim was sleeping?

They knew where his motel room was, and he couldn’t retreat to George’s couch.

He left the rest of his coffee untouched, and substituted another glass of orange juice. When that was gone, he went back to his room, where he dropped into bed, still clothed, and fell quickly asleep.

When he looked at his watch upon awakening he was startled to see that he had only slept for a couple of hours. Apparently he had only been ready for a nap — his metabolism wasn’t quite ready to switch over to a nightwatchman’s hours.

Well, he could accept that. That meant he had that much more of the day to try and get something done.

He certainly had plenty to do; he wanted to call the police and find out what had happened at Orchard Heights, and he wanted to find himself a new apartment. And he intended to go back to Bedford Mills, by daylight, and start moving his belongings out of his old apartment.

He got up, showered, dressed, and got ready to face the day.

When he felt sufficiently alert, he reached for the phone — then paused, and reached for the phone book. He didn’t know the non-emergency number for the county police.

Finding it, he dialed, and when a polite voice answered he asked for Lieutenant Buckley.

A moment later, a vaguely-familiar voice said, “Daniel Buckley.”

“Lieutenant? This is Ed Smith. From the Bedford Mills Apartments.”

“Yes, I remember you, Mr. Smith. What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering whether there’s been any progress in explaining what happened on Wednesday.”

“Not really, Mr. Smith.”

Smith hesitated, then said, “Someone told me that there were officers looking at that unfinished office building yesterday; did they find anything?”

Buckley hesitated, and then said, “Well, it isn’t really any of your business, but I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you. We got a call about that place, and when two of our men investigated they wound up walking through puddles of fresh paint. We think it might have been the same pranksters who got your neighbors over there on Wednesday, but we don’t really know.”

“Fresh paint?” Smith was honestly puzzled by that.

“Buckets of it,” Buckley told him, “White latex house paint was splashed all over the place, half an inch deep some places, and it couldn’t have been poured more than twenty minutes before — you know how fast latex paint dries.”

“But where ... I mean...” Smith tried to formulate a single question that would take in all his confusion.

“Why’d they do it, do you mean?” Buckley suggested. “I’d say that pretty obviously, somebody thought it would be funny to get paint all over some uniforms.”

“Oh,” Smith said.

Another “prank,” that’s all it was, then.

At least, that was all the police saw.

No wonder there had been no police line. The nightmare people, or pranksters, or whatever they were, had successfully covered their tracks.

That had been ingenious, he had to admit. The creatures clearly weren’t stupid. Paint would hide the blood pretty effectively, and they must have carried the bones away and hidden them.

“Abandoned buildings like that always attract vandals, Mr. Smith,” Buckley said.

Smith made a wordless noise of agreement into the phone, and then added, “By the way, there’s something I should tell you, if you’re still investigating all this. I’ve moved out of my apartment there; after what happened, it made me nervous staying there.”

“I think that’s understandable, Mr. Smith, but if you’ll forgive me, don’t you feel that you’re giving in to the people responsible? They’ll probably think it’s all very funny that they forced you out of your home...”

“Lieutenant,” Smith interrupted, “That’s not my home. I only lived there a few months, and I was never all that comfortable there. I just wanted to let you know where you can reach me.”

“All right, then.”

“For now, I’m staying at the Red Roof Inn in Gaithersburg, Room 203. I’ll be looking for a new apartment this afternoon. If I forget to tell you where I am, you can either ask my boss, Einar Lindqvist, or a friend of mine, George Brayton.” He gave George’s address and phone number.

There was silence for a moment, and Smith assumed Buckley was noting down the information.

“All right, Mr. Smith, thank you. Was there anything else?” Smith hesitated, trying to think if there was anything he could say that would force Buckley to push his investigation a little harder, anything that might help him discover the monsters.

“No, that’s all,” he said at last. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Smith.”

He hung up.

As he passed the Willow Street fork he began to slow down.

By the time he reached the entrance to the Bedford Mills complex he was creeping along at little more than walking speed, and on the small bump that marked the division between street and lot he let the car come to a full stop.

It was mid-afternoon, and sweltering hot. He had eaten lunch, found himself a new apartment over in Gaithersburg that would be available Wednesday and only cost about twice what it should, and it was time to come and look over his old place, pack up a few useful things and load them in the car. He was tired of living out of a hastily-packed suitcase.

But this place was full of monsters.

One of them was apparently living in his own apartment.

What would he do if he walked in the door and came face to face with that thing?

He hadn’t entirely worked that out, but his new folding knife was in his hip pocket, and the crowbar was on the seat beside him, waiting for him.

Sooner or later, he would have to face this. He was not going to abandon all his belongings. His books, his stereo, his Kaypro 2000 laptop — he was not going to just leave them.

He stepped on the gas, and the Chevy rolled forward into the lot.

The lot was fuller than usual for this time of the afternoon on a weekday, even a Friday; he glanced at his watch, and saw that it wasn’t even 4:30 yet. Mildly puzzled, he found a space in front of C building and pulled in.

He glanced around carefully before shutting off the engine, but he saw no one. He picked up the crowbar and hefted it, then climbed out of the car.

He left the door unlocked, just in case he had to leave quickly, and stuffed the keys well down into his pocket, where they wouldn’t fall out accidentally.

Then, crowbar in hand, he entered the building.

The stairwell was empty and quiet, and seemed even more dusty than usual. He tried to move silently as he climbed the stairs, pausing on each landing to look ahead and make sure no one was waiting for him.

At the top he headed for the door to C41, and his hand fell to his keys from habit, but he stopped himself before he put the key in the lock. He leaned forward and peered into the peephole.

It didn’t work properly in this direction, and in any case could only show him a small part of the interior, but he stared through it anyway.

Nothing looked wrong. Nobody was there. Everything was as he had left it.

He unlocked the door, pocketed the key, and then shifted the crowbar to his right hand and adjusted his grip. He took a deep breath, and swung open the door.

He had half expected to find the place torn up, as burglars might have left it, but nothing had been disturbed. Everything was just as he had left it on Wednesday afternoon.

The air conditioning still hadn’t been fixed, and the apartment was like an oven, but it was otherwise undisturbed.

He had not expected to see the nightmare person in it, and he didn’t. The apartment was empty.

Somehow, he simply couldn’t imagine seeing that creature in full daylight, and the bright August sunlight was pouring in every window.

Of course, the creature had to be somewhere, and it had answered his phone in daylight — though that had been morning, when his side of the building was in shadow.

Still, he somehow hadn’t expected to find it here.

He moved cautiously through the place, checking the living room, the dining area, the tiny walk-through kitchen, then down the hall, a quick look in the bathroom, and into the front bedroom that he had used as his library-cum-office.

Nothing had been disturbed. The laptop computer was packed up and sitting beside the bookcase, and his main machine, a customized Compaq Deskpro 386, was on the desk.

The dustcover was off the monitor, and he tried to remember whether he had left it that way or not.

After a moment’s thought he decided he had. He usually did.

He went on to the bedroom, but nothing was out of place there, either.

There was no sign that the monster had ever dared to intrude here.

He wondered, for an instant, where it was just now, and then suppressed the thought. It wasn’t here, and that was enough.

He held onto the crowbar, though, as he began planning what to take with him.

The first thing to get was the laptop, he decided as he emerged into the hallway again, and second would be the Compaq. With those in his possession he would be much more in control of things, he thought.

He’d also have something better to do than watch TV all night.

Someone knocked at the door.

He froze.

Another knock sounded.

“Who is it?” he called.

After all, he tried to tell himself, it didn’t have to be one of the monsters. It could be Lieutenant Buckley, or Einar come to check on his story, or any number of other people.

“Mr. Smith? It’s me, Bill Goodwin, from downstairs.”

He hesitated, unsure what to do.

The Goodwin boy was one of them, wasn’t he? He was the one who had alerted them all after spotting Smith coming out of the Orchard Heights basement, so that they could clear out the bones and paint over the blood in time.

But this might be a chance to learn more about what was really going on, if he could talk to one of them.

And if it was just the one of them, in broad daylight — and Bill wasn’t that big, and he had his crowbar...

“Just a minute!” Smith called.

He crossed the living room and peered through the peephole.

It looked like Bill Goodwin, certainly, standing there in cut-off shorts and an old Metallica T-shirt. And he couldn’t see anybody else.

He hooked the chain-bolt, opened the door a crack, and looked out.

He still saw nobody else.

“All right, come in,” he said, opening the door wide.

“Hey, I didn’t mean...”

“Get in here!” Smith bellowed, startling them both.

“Okay, okay!” The boy ducked quickly inside, and Smith slammed and locked the door behind him.

Then he turned to face his guest, still holding his crowbar, and gestured toward the chairs over by the windows. “Have a seat,” he said.

He wanted the boy in the sunlight. He couldn’t have said why; it just seemed safer, somehow.

“Sure,” the lad said, dropping onto one of the chairs. “Hey, what’s with the wrecking bar?” Smith settled slowly onto the other chair, never loosening his grip on the crowbar and never taking his eyes off his guest. “Just a precaution,” he said. “I think somebody broke in here while I was out.” The other made a wordless noise of concern.

Whoever and whatever he was talking to, it looked like Bill Goodwin. It sounded exactly like him, even moved like him.

“How’re your folks?” Smith asked.

Goodwin, if it really was he, shrugged. “They’re fine.”

For a moment they both just sat, staring at each other.

“So what brings you up here?” Smith asked at last.

Goodwin shrugged again. “Oh, well, I saw your car in the lot, and you hadn’t been around the last couple of days, so I wondered if there was anything wrong, and if there was anything, y’know, that I could do to help out.”

Smith eyed him warily.

He looked human. His eyes were blue, not red. Smith thought he might have seen a slight silvery glint to his teeth when he spoke, but that might just have been fillings, and it was too quick to be certain of anything.

He looked right. He sounded right.

Still, something was slightly off. Smith puzzled over it for a moment, while Goodwin shifted nervously under his scrutiny.

“Hey,” Goodwin said at last, “If you’re okay, I guess I’ll go.”

“No, wait,” Smith said, raising a hand — his left, since the crowbar was still in his right. He thought the teeth might have glinted again, and he felt as if any moment he would sense what was wrong, why he didn’t believe he was really talking to the Bill Goodwin he knew.

“Fact is,” Smith said, “that I’m planning to move out of here. That ... that whatever-it-was on Wednesday made me nervous, you know? And I could probably use a hand loading the car, when I get everything ready to go. Think you could help me out?”

“Sure,” Goodwin said, shrugging. “No sweat.”

That was it!

That was what was wrong, Smith realized. He couldn’t smell anything.

No sweat.

That is, he couldn’t smell anything but his own scent and his apartment’s normal dusty odor. Goodwin gave off no odor at all, so far as he could tell. No sweat, no deodorant, no aftershave, no hair oil, nothing. And there was no dampness to his T-shirt, no sheen of moisture on his forehead.

It was a hot day, outside and in, and Goodwin had just come up three flights of stairs and into a baking-hot apartment. He was a healthy young male, and not over-scrupulous about bathing. He ought to have an odor — nothing offensive, nothing anyone would ordinarily notice, but something.

And in that T-shirt, he ought to be visibly sweating. Smith knew that his own shirt was damp under the arms and across the back of his shoulders. He could feel a film of perspiration on his forehead, and imagined it would be visibly shiny.

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