“I thought,” she began, “that maybe something had, well…”
She let her voice trail off as she realized how utterly unbelievable anything she could say would sound. Frustrated, she tried again.
“I don’t know what I thought,” she said, “but I really do think that there’s something very wrong with Kate, and I wish that you could get a doctor to check her. Dr. Dodge, couldn’t you examine her, somehow?”
Surely, Annie thought, the creature wouldn’t be able to fool a doctor.
Dr. Dodge shook his head. “You may be right,” he said, “But I’m afraid it’s not my line. I would suggest that both of you might want to talk to your own doctors – I’ll call your sister-in-law later and explain how worried you are, and suggest that, if I may. I can’t examine her myself, though, unless she asks me to. To be honest, Mrs. McGowan, I didn’t see anything strange about her, but then I don’t know her as you do. It may be that whatever’s changed her, if something really has, has you so upset that you’re not thinking clearly about it. I really think you should both see a physician – but I can’t make either of you do anything you don’t want to, I can only make the suggestion.”
Annie nodded. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said, her voice lifeless.
That was another dead end. That thing would never go near a doctor of its own free will.
No help from the police. No help from doctors. That just left Mr. Smith and his vigilantes.
She wondered how their expedition had gone the day before.
4.
Smith stared at the screen, trying to see why the routine didn’t work. He didn’t hear Einar come up behind him.
“So, Ed,” Einar said suddenly.
Smith started, and his hand hit the keyboard, transforming line 16186 into gibberish.
“How’s it going?” Einar asked. “You over whatever you had last week?”
Smith said, “Uh… oh. Yeah, I guess. Sure, I’m over it.”
What had that line said, anyway? He had lost five characters that he had typed over, or possibly six, and the line had no notation attached that would tell him what it was. He’d always been sloppy about documenting his work.
What was it he wanted this line to do? “How’s it coming?” Einar asked, distracting him again. “Still on schedule?”
“I think so,” Smith said, trying to ignore Einar without being rude about it. He needed to concentrate on the program. Was that supposed to be the line that specified the data string for the page header subroutine? No, that was 16180.
This wasn’t working; he couldn’t think clearly.
“What happened there?” Einar asked, peering over his shoulder and pointing at line 16186.
“Bumped the keyboard,” Smith said.
“Oh,” Einar said. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to fix it, then.”
“Right,” Smith said.
He had the old line 16186 on disk somewhere, he realized, and he set out to retrieve it.
He wished he weren’t so tired, but the lack of sleep and the unusual hours he had been keeping were catching up with him – not to mention the strain of trying to concentrate on his work when the nightmare people were always lurking in the back of his mind, worrying him, intruding on his every thought.
He called up the file he wanted, and only after he had done it did he realize that he had forgotten to save the changes he had spent the last half-hour on.
“Damn!” he said.
Choong Fu, at the next terminal, straightened up from his own keyboard and glanced over at Smith. Smith waved at him half-heartedly, then went back to the screen and started over.
5.
Maggie had stayed in the house all morning, and she knew her mother had noticed that. That wasn’t her usual pattern. One day, though, wasn’t anything for anyone to get upset about, and she could blame it on the rain.
Even so, when the postman came by not long after the rain stopped, Maggie decided it was time to get outside at least long enough to walk out to the curb and get the mail.
She trotted across the porch, down the steps and along the walk, and was almost to the mailbox when she noticed someone waving from up the street, on the other side. She turned and looked.
It was Elias.
Elias, who she had seen butchered the day before, was standing there waving at her.
She didn’t run.
She didn’t run, but it took all the determination she could muster not to. She went on to the mailbox, collected the day’s delivery, and walked back to the house. She didn’t run.
By the time she was inside with the handful of letters, magazines, and junk mail her jaw hurt from clenching her teeth tight to keep from screaming.
She threw the mail on the table and stared at the door, expecting the doorbell to ring, expecting the false Elias to be there on the porch, expecting it to smile at her with those gleaming silver teeth and then to kiss her and sink them into her flesh, into her jaw.
When the doorbell rang she wouldn’t answer it. She wouldn’t go back out there. She would never leave the house again.
She was scheduled to work a four-hour shift at the mall Tuesday evening, but she would call in sick, and she would just stay safely inside, and that thing would have to give up and go away eventually, and then she could go on as if none of it had ever happened.
She wouldn’t let it in. It couldn’t get in.
Could it?
She had seen Elias die. She had seen that thing start to crawl into his corpse’s mouth, eating as it went. She’d seen the blood bubbling up, heard Elias scream before he died. When the creature had started eating its way in it had been shaped like that woman, Mary somebody, the one Maggie had talked to all those times when she babysat Jimmy Billiard. Mary had been short and small, with breasts and a round ass that Maggie had secretly envied, and that thing had looked just like her.
Now one of the monsters was pretending to be Elias, and it was taller and thinner than Mary, flat-chested and narrow-hipped, and from the glimpse she had gotten it seemed to amble like Elias, in a way that no woman ever had.
That meant that either this was a different one that had somehow taken Elias’s place, or else the thing could change its shape.
And how could it be a different one? She had seen that thing crawling out of Mary’s skin and into Elias.
If it could change its shape, couldn’t it squeeze under the door, or around the window, or in through the gable vents or the chimney or through the same cracks in the basement floor that had let water seep in during all that heavy rain they’d had the last few months?
And if it was pretending to be Elias – was it staying in his house, sleeping in his bed?
What about his parents? Did they know that thing wasn’t really their son?
The doorbell still hadn’t rung, and she saw nothing oozing in anywhere; she crossed to the front window and looked out.
Elias was still up the street, just hanging around, just as if he were an ordinary teenager and this was an ordinary summer day.
Did his parents know?
They had to know. She had to call them, tell them.
She headed for the phone, then stopped in the kitchen doorway.
What would she say? “Mrs. Samaan, Elias got eaten by a monster yesterday, and that thing on the sidewalk isn’t him, it’s the monster dressed up in his skin.”
If she said anything like that, Mrs. Samaan would call the narcs and have Maggie put away. It did sound like something a strung-out druggie would come up with.
Maggie wished it was just a drug-induced hallucination, but she didn’t use, except for an occasional drink or a little weed at parties sometimes, just to be sociable, and she hadn’t even done any of that in months – not since school let out, anyway.
Maybe she could just hint that something was wrong with Elias, and not give any specifics. After all, Mrs. Samaan was a mother, right? Any clue that there was something wrong with her kid and she’d be watching him every minute, seeing stuff anyone else would miss, wouldn’t she?
Maggie’s own mother was certainly like that, and from what Maggie had seen of Mrs. Samaan, she was even more so.