The Nightmare People

6.

He stood panting for a moment, the car keys in his hand and the door of the car standing open, trying to think.

He had to do something. He had to call the police.

What would he tell them, though? That there were bloodstains and what looked like human bones all over the basement here?

That was too lurid, too much like something out of a horror movie. He would just report a dead body. And he’d do it anonymously, disguise his voice – he didn’t want to be connected with this.

He turned and looked back at the building. In the bright sunlight, with the solid normality of his car beneath his hands, the everyday reality of the dirt and the chain-link fence and the scrub grass that grew here and there, it was very hard to believe that he had seen monsters, or that he had found human bones – fresh human bones – just a few yards away in that basement.

Something moved.

He blinked, and tried to focus on it.

Someone was standing under the trees behind the construction site, the trees that separated it from the Bedford Mills apartments. It was a boy in his teens, wearing a pair of cut-off shorts and a wide-brimmed hat; Smith thought he looked familiar, despite the distance; he squinted, and finally placed him.

That was Bill Goodwin, one of the four kids that Charlie and Lillian Goodwin had crammed into Apartment C12. Smith had met the whole clan as soon as he had arrived at Bedford Mills – Bill’s kid brothers, Harry and Sid, had helped him carry boxes of books and dishware upstairs when he had first moved in. Later on he’d talked to Bill a few times, and let him try out a few things on his desktop computer. The Goodwin kids were probably the closest thing to real friends he had in the whole complex.

He started to raise a hand to wave, and then stopped.

Was it really Bill Goodwin?

Wasn’t it one of the monsters?

Whoever or whatever it was, the boy stared at him for a moment, then abruptly turned and hurried away.

Smith’s mind refused to work properly. He had just seen a basement strewn with human remains, evidence that some sort of horror was loose, but all he could see now was an ordinary summer day, and an ordinary teenager, and he couldn’t reconcile his theories of monsters disguised as their victims with that calm, everyday reality. Every impulse, every habit, made him want to wave and call a polite hello to the Goodwin boy, but at the same time the memory of the pile of bones had left a knot of panic just below the surface, a knot that was trying to choke him, to force him into his car, to make him drive to the nearest pay-phone and call the police, or to flee as quickly as he could, drive away and never come back.

Despite his panicky confusion, the prankster theory somehow pushed its way to the surface of his mind. Could the blood and bone be fake?

He doubted it – but he wasn’t sure. He was no expert. He couldn’t be certain the bones were human.

He hadn’t really taken that close a look, and it was dark down in there. He hadn’t touched them. The bones might even be some sort of plastic replicas.

It could be a prank. A horrible and elaborate prank, but a prank.

If it was a prank, was Bill Goodwin in on it?

And if the monsters were real, was Bill Goodwin one of them?

Was Bill going to call for help, get the pranksters or monsters or whatever they were to clean up the basement, hide the bones, do something to cover their tracks?

Almost certainly, Smith realized, that was exactly what would happen. Why else would the boy have behaved as he did?

Or was his imagination running away with him? Was he panicking, turning paranoid?

He suddenly wished he had thought to bring a camera. His own battered Pentax was still in his apartment, but he could have bought a cheap little Instamatic or something when he got his crowbar and flashlight.

Or he could run across to his apartment and get the Pentax right now.

His mouth twisted at the thought. He climbed into the car and slammed the door.

He wasn’t going back in his apartment just now, thank you very much.

He could go back down in the basement, though, and take some of those bones, for proof of his story.

But what would they really prove? And how could he prove where he got them?

That wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t try it.

Besides, if he went back down into that basement he might be cornered in there if the monsters came back. He wasn’t going back.

He would call the police, anonymously, and report a dead body.

That’s all he would do, for now.

He started the engine.

Chapter Three:

Friday, August 4th