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.
5.
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.
6.
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.