Annie sipped tea again. “What if they didn’t have disguises, then? Or if nobody was asleep?”
“Sure, what if, but…” Smith’s voice trailed off, and his expression turned thoughtful.
“You know,” he said a moment later, “You might have something there.”
“Oh?”
“I think so, yes.” Smith was smiling thoughtfully.
“Would you care to explain that?” Annie asked sharply.
“Actually, Annie, no, I’d rather not,” Smith replied. “I need to think about it some more.”
She stared at him for a minute, then shrugged. “Have it your own way, Mr. Smith,” she said. She picked up the newspaper again.
“It’ll be easier if there aren’t as many of them by then, of course,” he said.
“Of course,” Annie said, without looking up. She drank down the rest of her tea.
“I’m not about to walk back into the apartment, though, where I’d be outnumbered a hundred to one.”
“Of course not.”
“I’ll need to get them alone, one by one.”
Khalil, still looking sleepy, entered at that point. He exchanged greetings with them both.
“Annie,” Smith asked, “May I use the phone?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Khalil, can you be ready to leave in ten minutes?” Smith asked. “I want to use what’s left of the daylight.”
Khalil nodded.
“Thanks,” Smith said. “Where’s the phone book?”
6.
“Hi, Walt? This is Jim. You remember, from work. Look, I’m having some trouble, and I need to talk to somebody. Could you meet me at that little bar on Townsend Road in about, oh, twenty minutes?”
The voice on the phone was puzzled. “I don’t know, uh, Jim; what’s up?”
“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone, Walt. Could you please come? I’ll be at the bar.”
“Oh, what the hell, sure, I guess. Twenty minutes? The bar on Townsend Road?”
“Yeah, you know the one, Carlie’s Nightside I think it’s called.”
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
Smith hung up and smiled at Annie and Khalil.
The thing pretending to be Walt Harris arrived right on time, but Smith and Khalil were not waiting at the bar. They were waiting in the parking lot behind the bar, which Smith had chosen because the lot backed up to a grove of trees and was not visible from the street or any neighboring buildings.
The only problem was muffling the screams; they used Khalil’s shirt for that, and Smith got a finger jabbed by one of the needle-sharp teeth while stuffing it in.
Khalil gagged repeatedly on the foul black lump, but gamely choked it all down. It didn’t stay down, of course, but once the thing had stopped moving and started to dissolve, they didn’t much care. Smith stood guard while Khalil heaved it all back up onto the grass beside the parking lot.
When he was done he looked at Smith. “You ate two of those?” he said.
Smith nodded. “And I’m going to eat another, just as soon as we can catch one. Then it’ll be your turn again.” He grimaced. “Who knows, maybe we’ll get used to it.”
They both thought of retrieving the skin, but looking at the stinking mess that lay beneath the trees, neither one could bring himself to touch it. Nor could they afford to wait around for the remains to finish dissolving. Someone, either human or nightmare person, might happen along at any time.
“We’ll get one another time,” Smith said, leading the way to his car.
“Who is Jim, that he thought he was meeting?” Khalil asked, as they headed back toward Topaz Court.
“Nobody,” Smith said, his eyes on the road. “I made him up.”
Startled, Khalil asked, “But how…”
“Their memories aren’t complete,” Smith explained. “It didn’t know whether the real Walt Harris knew someone named Jim who would want to meet him like that.”
“Ah,” Khalil said, nodding.
A moment later he added, “But that will not work with all of them, surely.”
“Surely,” Smith agreed, “But it’s a start.”
Khalil nodded again.
7.
The next ruse was a call from a veterinarian, to come and pick up a cat’s medicine. The false Attalla Sleiman knew that it had a cat in its care, and could not be sure that it was healthy; Smith’s mother had been through a bout of F.U.S. with her cat, years before, so Smith was able to fake the call quite convincingly, and to plead with the creature to come and get the diuretics and antibiotics quickly, because the cat would die without them. Wednesday, he said, was the only day they had evening hours at the clinic.
Sleiman’s replacement believed it; he came to the animal hospital on Longdraft Road, over in Gaithersburg, and Smith and Khalil dragged him behind the unused shed out back.
This time Smith had a Nerf ball for a gag, and used a stick to wedge it in.
It was full dark by then, and the nightmare people were stronger in the dark, so the struggle lasted for some time, but in the end numbers and the initial surprise were enough.
After that, the two of them were too battered and worn to tackle any more. They returned to Annie’s house, where they washed and rested.
They stood guard that night, while Annie slept; they made plans over the kitchen table, listing every resident of the Bedford Mills Apartments that Smith knew by name, writing down every deception they could think of that might draw nightmare people out alone.
“If they start travelling in pairs, we’re in trouble,” Smith remarked.
Khalil just nodded.
“Unless we recruit some more help, anyway,” Smith added a moment later.
Khalil looked up.
“When we started,” Khalil said, “There were four of us, even without Annie and Maggie. Now we are two.”
Smith nodded. “I know,” he said, “And I feel guilty about Elias and Sandy, too. All the same, we can’t do it all ourselves, not when there are a hundred and forty of them left, and they probably all know who we are.”
Reluctantly, Khalil nodded.
8.
Einar Lindqvist fired Smith on Thursday afternoon, but Smith didn’t worry about it. His job didn’t seem particularly important just now.
He had other concerns.
“George,” Smith said into the receiver, “I can’t explain it on the phone, but it’s really important. You’ve got to come out here this afternoon, right after work. I’ll give you the address…”
George came.
The first odd thing George encountered was that the old lady who answered the door wouldn’t let him in until he’d pricked his finger with a needle she gave him, and let her see the drop of blood that oozed out.
Then he was bundled into a car with Smith and another man, and driven over to the apartment house where Smith had lived, where they picked up a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, saying they’d drive her to Patsy’s house. The girl seemed to know and trust Smith.
Picking her up that way seemed strange, and made George nervous, but it was not particularly terrible.
What came next was terrible. George watched in horror as his friend Ed Smith, who was now obviously insane, stuck a steak knife into the girl’s belly, while the stranger Ed called “Khalil” held her down.
His horror grew when he saw that she didn’t bleed. She didn’t scream, either, but smiled, showing silvery teeth that George tried to convince himself were just peculiar braces.
She started screaming a moment later, though, when Smith pulled a slimy black lump out of her chest and started to eat it, not merely raw but still living, still pulsing faintly and secreting something thin and clear and oily.
George fainted.
He came to in time to see the girl’s corpse dissolve slowly into putrid, oozing slime. The stench was unbelievable.
“The real Jessie Goodwin’s been dead for a week,” Smith told him. “This thing ate her, and crawled inside her skin and wore it like a disguise.”
The combination of the description and the smell was too much; George leaned out the car door and lost his lunch. As he wiped his mouth and looked at the ground he noticed that Smith hadn’t been able to keep the black thing down.