The Nightmare People

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 clich? 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.