Whoever and whatever he was talking to, it looked like Bill Goodwin. It sounded exactly like him, even moved like him.
“How’re your folks?” Smith asked.
Goodwin, if it really was he, shrugged. “They’re fine.”
For a moment they both just sat, staring at each other.
“So what brings you up here?” Smith asked at last.
Goodwin shrugged again. “Oh, well, I saw your car in the lot, and you hadn’t been around the last couple of days, so I wondered if there was anything wrong, and if there was anything, y’know, that I could do to help out.”
Smith eyed him warily.
He looked human. His eyes were blue, not red. Smith thought he might have seen a slight silvery glint to his teeth when he spoke, but that might just have been fillings, and it was too quick to be certain of anything.
He looked right. He sounded right.
Still, something was slightly off. Smith puzzled over it for a moment, while Goodwin shifted nervously under his scrutiny.
“Hey,” Goodwin said at last, “If you’re okay, I guess I’ll go.”
“No, wait,” Smith said, raising a hand – his left, since the crowbar was still in his right. He thought the teeth might have glinted again, and he felt as if any moment he would sense what was wrong, why he didn’t believe he was really talking to the Bill Goodwin he knew.
“Fact is,” Smith said, “that I’m planning to move out of here. That… that whatever-it-was on Wednesday made me nervous, you know? And I could probably use a hand loading the car, when I get everything ready to go. Think you could help me out?”
“Sure,” Goodwin said, shrugging. “No sweat.”
That was it!
That was what was wrong, Smith realized. He couldn’t smell anything.
No sweat.
That is, he couldn’t smell anything but his own scent and his apartment’s normal dusty odor. Goodwin gave off no odor at all, so far as he could tell. No sweat, no deodorant, no aftershave, no hair oil, nothing. And there was no dampness to his T-shirt, no sheen of moisture on his forehead.
It was a hot day, outside and in, and Goodwin had just come up three flights of stairs and into a baking-hot apartment. He was a healthy young male, and not over-scrupulous about bathing. He ought to have an odor – nothing offensive, nothing anyone would ordinarily notice, but something.
And in that T-shirt, he ought to be visibly sweating. Smith knew that his own shirt was damp under the arms and across the back of his shoulders. He could feel a film of perspiration on his forehead, and imagined it would be visibly shiny.
Bill Goodwin’s shirt and forehead looked totally dry.
Before he could stop himself, Smith blurted, “What the hell are you, anyway?”
The Goodwin thing blinked at him. It started to grin, and its teeth gleamed silver, but then it stopped, pulled its lips back together.
“What?” it said. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” Smith said quickly. On an impulse, he rose from his chair, transferred the crowbar to his left hand and stuck out his right, offering to shake. He wanted to know what the thing felt like, whether its skin was really as dry as it looked.
“I’ll be moving Wednesday, I think,” Smith said. “See you then?”
Startled, the creature stood and took his hand. “Sure,” it said, “Wednesday.”
The hand felt cool and dry and lifeless, more like a glove than like living flesh. “Thanks,” Smith said.
“No problem,” it answered. It hesitated, then started toward the door.
Smith came along behind it, the crowbar ready in one hand. Without warning, he threw the other arm around the Goodwin creature’s shoulders in a comradely gesture.
“I really appreciate this,” he said.
The T-shirt was completely dry. The skin at the back of the thing’s neck was as cold and dead as its palm, maybe more so.
As Smith pulled his hand away, as his fingers slid across the back of the thing’s neck, he hooked them into claws, nails scraping at the skin.
The Goodwin thing didn’t seem to notice.
Smith’s hand came away and he stuck it immediately in his pocket, and kept it there. He stepped back and let the creature open the door itself, rather than either putting down the crowbar or taking his other hand back out of the pocket again.
That step back gave him a clear view of where his fingernails had scraped.
“Well, see you Wednesday,” the thing said as it turned in the doorway.
“Right, thanks,” Smith said, trying very hard not to tremble.
The creature stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind it.
Smith pulled his hand from his pocket.
Where he had scratched the thing, something had come away. When he had looked at the back of its neck he had seen a hole, a hole where something damp and slick and grey had showed through the skin, something the color of wet modeling clay. There was no bleeding or oozing, just that greyness.
The piece that had come away was still in his fingers, and he held it up to the light. It was a sliver of translucent material, dry on one side and damp on the other, about two inches long and half an inch wide across the middle, no thicker than the fabric of a pair of jeans.
Even though he had never encountered such a thing in quite this form before, there was no doubt about what it was.
He was holding a piece of human skin.
Chapter Four:
Saturday, August 5th
1.
He sat in the car, the crowbar across his lap, the Kaypro on the seat beside him, the Compaq and his stereo in back.
There was no way any prankster could have set this up.
There really were monsters. They really had taken over the apartment complex, replacing the people who had lived there.
He looked around at the full parking lot, the lot that had been mostly full even during regular business hours, and he knew that at least some of the nightmare people were not bothering to carry out all the details of their charade of normal humanity – or were not able to. Some of them must have abandoned the jobs held by the people they had replaced – or perhaps they had been unable to do the work, and had been fired.
Or perhaps they didn’t even know what jobs they were supposed to have. After all, how much did they know about their victims?
He paused. Was he sure that his replaced neighbors were “victims?” What had really happened to them?
He remembered the blood splattered on the walls and floor of that unfinished basement, and the pile of fresh bones, and he clenched his jaw, fighting nausea. He knew what had happened to the victims.
If he could accept that the creatures were real, he could accept what he had seen; he didn’t need to try to gloss over anything.
He looked at the piece of skin he still held, and he knew that it had come from the real Bill Goodwin, and that a thing was now wearing the boy’s skin, pretending to be him.
A hundred and forty-three people had been murdered by those creatures, and no one knew it but him.
That sounded like paranoid raving, but when he looked at the strip of skin he had all the proof he needed that it was real, that he was not insane.
Unfortunately, proving it to anybody else wouldn’t be that easy. If he took it to the police, they could analyze it, prove it was human skin – but they wouldn’t believe him when he told them where he got it. It was convincing proof of something, certainly, but he knew he could never convince them that it came from some murderous creature out of his nightmares. It was far more likely that they would decide that he had found a corpse somewhere, or even murdered someone, and was hallucinating rather than admit it to himself.
He would probably find himself in St. Elizabeth’s, or wherever Montgomery County sent possibly-dangerous lunatics these days.
And even if somebody did give him the benefit of the doubt – which was staggeringly unlikely – then what? The police had rules and regulations to follow. They would need warrants and evidence and probable cause before they could attempt anything like what he had just done, peeling a piece of skin off a monster to prove that it wasn’t human.