The Nightmare People

Khalil shifted. “I am leaving, too,” he said. “This area is not good for me any more.”

George Brayton, seated on the far side of the room, nodded in agreement. Smith had called him that morning and asked him to come over and join the party. With Buckley and the Newells coming, it had seemed like a good idea to get as many of the people who knew about the monsters as possible.

“But there are still some of those things out there!” Alice Newell shouted.

Smith shrugged. “Not my problem,” he said. “Look around, will you?” He waved an arm to take in everyone in the crowded room. The Newell girls and Maggie Devanoy sat on the couch; Khalil and Lieutenant Buckley stood in either side of the archway to the dining room. Dr. Frauenthal leaned against one arm of the chair George sat in. A

“Mr. Smith,” Dr. Frauenthal said, “After what I’ve heard, and having patched you back together the night before last, I can’t deny you’ve done your part, but how are we supposed to find them all and kill them? They could be anywhere by now. And we can’t tell anybody – they won’t believe us.”

“Show ’em the one in your bottle,” Smith suggested.

“I can’t,” Frauenthal said. “It died, once the moon was past full and it had no host, and it rotted away to nothing, same as the adults do. I tried to analyze the remains, but it’s just a mix of normal organic waste.”

“Can’t we tell the newspapers?” Maddie asked. “Couldn’t we go on TV, warn everybody about them? If people everywhere knew what they were and how to kill them, they wouldn’t last long.”

Buckley shook his head. “I thought of that a week ago,” he said. “I’ve talked to reporters, even staged a demonstration for one. Even if they believe me, they can’t get it into print or on the air. I’d need to convince not just the reporter, but his editor, and his editor, and even then, if they did publish it, nobody would believe it. And even if we found one somewhere – and right now we don’t know where any of them are, remember – even if we killed one live on TV, they’d all just call it a hoax. This is something people don’t believe just from hearing about it or reading it or seeing it on TV. You’ve got to see one of those things in person, get a look at them under their disguises, to believe it.”

That speech was greeted with several nods acknowledging its truth.

“All the papers refused?” Dr. Frauenthal asked. “You don’t think any of them would go for it?”

Buckley shrugged. “Maybe I could sell it to the tabloids, but nobody believes them anyway. It’d just be another ‘Space Aliens Stole My Lunch’ story. Something like this, it’s just not acceptable. People won’t believe it.”

“Nobody believed in vampires in 1939,” Maggie pointed out, “but somebody killed the last one anyway.”

“Sure,” George said, “Everybody knew how to kill them from all the stories. I mean, once you come up against a vampire, and you can’t disbelieve any more, it’s easy enough. You find its coffin and drive a stake through its heart; everyone knows that.”

“But nobody except us knows how to kill nightmare people,” Smith said, “and I don’t know what we can do about it, if we can’t get it all in the newspapers.”

“I never learned about vampires from the newspapers,” Maddie said. “What if you wrote stories about them, the way people wrote stories about vampires? Not news stories; books. Horror stories. What if you pretended it was all just fiction?”

“Yeah,” Alice said. “It wouldn’t matter if people believed it, as long as they knew what to do when they met one.”

“That might work, you know?” Buckley said, considering.

“But who’s going to write these stories?” A

No one had a good answer to that at first. After a moment’s silence, Smith said, “I’m no writer. I’m a computer programmer. I don’t even write tech manuals.”

George said, hesitantly, “I used to play poker with a writer, a guy named Lawrence Watt-Evans. He lives over in Gaithersburg.”

“What kind of a writer?” Buckley asked. “I mean, is this a guy who writes articles for Popular Mechanics? That’s not what we’re looking for, if he is.”

“No,” George said, “He writes novels. Science fiction, mostly. Makes his living at it.”

Smith shrugged. “Hey, if he agrees, we’ll tell him everything that’s happened, and maybe he can write it all up as a novel.”

George nodded. “I’ll give him a call,” he said, “And see if he agrees.”

4.

Obviously, I agreed.

I don’t usually do stuff like this. People have tried to get me to write up their story ideas for them before, and generally I’m just not interested. I have plenty of ideas of my own, and usually the people who try this have a really peculiar idea of what the story is worth and how the money should be divided. Ideas are cheap; it’s turning them into stories and getting them down on paper that’s the hard work.

This wasn’t the usual situation, though. I don’t usually have some guy I played poker with a couple of times turning up on my doorstep at ten p.m. one night with his friend who has “something important” to tell me, where the friend is on crutches and has more bandage than bare skin showing.

I wasn’t busy, and the kids were in bed, and I liked George when I played cards with him, so I agreed to listen.

It wasn’t the usual situation. The people who want me to write their stories for them don’t usually say the money doesn’t matter, I can keep it all, so long as the story gets published.

And nobody ever suggested a story to me that was anything like this one before.

Of course, the story isn’t like anything I’ve ever written before, either; as George said, I’m a science fiction writer, and I’ve never written anything set here and now, in contemporary Maryland, before. My wife Julie said she didn’t think I should do it. She pointed out that I was under contract for other stuff, which was certainly true.

I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a try, though, so long as I got something in writing that these people weren’t going to sue me for stealing their story. I didn’t make any promises that it would be published, or how it would be published if it ever was.

I didn’t really believe it, of course. Neither did Julie. We didn’t know how this guy had gotten all chewed up and burnt, but we didn’t think it was done by monsters.

But it was a good story.

So I agreed, and I wrote it all out just the way Ed Smith told it to me. It took a couple of nights to get all of it straight; the second night they brought Khalil along, just to prove he existed. Nice guy. Very quiet.

I still didn’t really believe it, and I still don’t, but I took what they told me and wrote it up as the novel you’ve just read. I changed a couple of the names, just in case; you won’t find a real Lieutenant Daniel Buckley on the Montgomery County police force, or a real Dr. Frauenthal practicing around here. Wherever I needed a new name I picked one from a list of the survivors of the Titanic – it seemed appropriate – but most names I didn’t change.

The apartment complex that burned down last August wasn’t really called Bedford Mills, either. That was the only other change I made.

I didn’t alter any of the events; as Smith said, you never know what little detail might turn out to be important to someone. I tried to tell them well, but just as they happened, nothing added or removed.

It took awhile to write the whole thing out, but I did it, and now I’ve found a publisher for it, who’ll buy it as a horror novel, and I’m starting to feel a little guilty. After all, all I did was write down what they told me.