Читать книгу The Nightmare People - Lawrence Watt-Evans - Страница 4

Chapter One: Wednesday, August 2nd

1

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.

2.

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.

3.

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?”

4.

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 cliche 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.

5.

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.

7.

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.