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.
George knew he was going to have nightmares about this one, bad nightmares.
“We need help,” Smith told him. “There are just two of us doing this, now. We’ve got some… I guess you’d call them support people, some other people backing us up who don’t actually go out after the monsters. We started out with four of us, but they got the other two before we learned enough to protect ourselves, and we need more. Khalil and I can’t do it all ourselves. There are more than a hundred of them still in there, in those apartments, and next week, when the moon’s full, they’ll be able to breed, and there could be more of them, more than we could ever get.”
George didn’t say anything; he was still too sick.
“George,” Smith said, “Will you help us?”
George raised his head unhappily. “Help you do what?” he asked.
“Kill these things,” Smith replied.
“Like that?” he said, pointing at the dripping mess on the back seat.
Smith nodded.
George shook his head.
“I can’t do it, Ed,” he said.
They argued for a few minutes, but eventually Smith yielded.
“If you won’t do it, you won’t,” he said. “I can’t make you. If you change your mind, let me know. Or if you can find someone who will help, let me know.”
He drove back to Topaz Court, where George’s car waited.
George drove away slowly, and Smith and Khalil silently watched him go.
They’d had trouble contacting Lieutenant Buckley, who was, after all, a busy man. Smith had finally got hold of him, however, and arranged to meet him later that evening.
They didn’t plan to try a graphic demonstration with him, as they had with George, for fear that as a trained man of action he would stop them and give the monster a chance to escape or retaliate. They didn’t lay it all out, the story of spontaneous generation of evil, the extinction of the vampires, any of that. They didn’t mention that they had killed any of the creatures. They merely told him, as they drove along, that the things in the Bedford Mills apartments weren’t human. They described some of what they knew about the nightmare people.
Smith watched his face carefully, judging how much the cop believed.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t much.
“It’s not my problem,” Buckley told them.
“It’s over a hundred murders,” Smith replied.
“I don’t see any evidence,” Buckley answered.
“What if we brought you one of the skins they wear?” Smith suggested. “That would prove someone had been killed, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Buckley admitted, “But not by a monster.”
“A complete human skin in one piece, except for, say, a hole in the chest, wouldn’t prove something supernatural was happening? I mean, the fingers and toes all there, not cut open?”
“I don’t know,” Buckley said, eyeing Smith uneasily.
“We didn’t do it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Smith said. “We didn’t skin anybody. We got it away from one of the creatures.”
“How?”
“I’d rather not answer that yet. You tell me, first, what the police would do if I could show them that skin.”
Buckley blinked, then sat for a moment, thinking it over.
“Officially?” he asked.
Smith nodded.
“Officially, nothing,” Buckley replied. “It doesn’t fit. This isn’t something we’re set up to handle. I mean, think about it. What are we going to do, arrest these creatures of yours? Then what? Put them on trial for murder? They aren’t human. If we leave the skins on, we have no evidence of a crime; if we take them off, the thing’s not human, and we don’t put animals on trial. And could we hold onto them, anyway? Didn’t you say they can ooze out through windows? And how are we going to report any of this to higher up? What’ll we put in the papers? Nobody’s going to believe something like that unless they see it.”
“All right, then,” Smith said, “What about unofficially?”
“Unofficially, I think you’re both nuts, but if it were true, I think I could look the other way at some vigilante efforts, and maybe some of my officers might help out when they’re off-duty. But I’d need to see that skin.”
Smith nodded.
“It’s in the trunk,” he said. “It came from a friend of ours named Sandy Niklasen; they got him a couple of days ago, but we killed the one that got him.”
Smith saw Buckley tense slightly, and realized that the cop didn’t believe him.
“I’ll show you in a minute,” Smith said. He turned at the corner.
Buckley sat silently until they turned into the parking lot.
“I thought you said that all the people here were really monsters,” he said, as Smith slowed the car.
“They are,” Smith said, “But you don’t believe us. So I’m going to show you.” He stopped the car.
In the back seat, Khalil checked to be certain his windows were closed tightly.
“Here?” Buckley protested. “You’re going to show me that skin?”
“Not exactly,” Smith replied as he got out of the car.
“Khalil,” he said, “You get in front. And keep the motor running.”
Khalil nodded, and clambered into the driver’s seat while Lieutenant Buckley stepped out.
“What are you doing, Smith?” he asked.
“A little demonstration, Lieutenant,” he said. “Take a look around.”
Buckley looked.
It was nine o’clock on a pleasantly cool summer evening, but nobody was visible on any of the balconies or basement patios. The windows were all dark. The parking lot was virtually full.
That, Buckley knew, was not normal.
“Hey!” Smith shouted suddenly, “Who’s in there?”
No one replied; no lights came on. For an instant, though, Buckley thought he saw something flicker red in a nearby window.