Sandy crouched nearby, between a scraggly evergreen and one end of the Samaans’ front porch. Smith could see only his back, but there was no sign that he was nervous at all.
Theoretically, Khalil was somewhere nearby, but Smith could neither see nor hear him.
Maggie took a deep breath and marched up the walk, up the steps and onto the porch. Smith crouched down low as she pressed the doorbell button.
He heard no bell, but Maggie presumably did. She looked quickly, nervously about, then faced the door again.
It opened, but Smith could see nothing of who or what had opened it.
“Hi, Mrs. Samaan,” Maggie said, and Smith was sure he heard a quaver in her voice. “Elias left some stuff at my place; can I come in and give it to him?”
“What stuff, dear?” a voice asked, a voice that seemed to Smith to have an oddly familiar sound to it.
“Well, just… just stuff… I mean…” Maggie’s voice trailed off. After a second or so of awkward silence, she asked plaintively, “Can I come in?”
“Well,” the voice said, “If it’s just something he left, I can give it to him, but if you want…”
“I need to talk to him, too, Mrs. Samaan.”
Smith saw that Sandy was up and moving, so suddenly and silently that it caught Smith completely off-guard. Sandy was jumping up onto the porch and charging toward Maggie and the open door.
Khalil, too, had emerged from somewhere – Smith hadn’t seen where – and was coming up the porch steps.
Smith realized belatedly that “I need to talk to him” had been the agreed-upon signal; he rose and pushed around the rhododendron and clambered awkwardly up onto the porch.
He still only had one foot up on the concrete when Khalil and Sandy burst in through the open door, out of Smith’s line of sight, carrying Maggie in with them. Smith heard the door slam back against a doorstop with a sharp bang.
Cursing his own ineptitude, he flung himself across the porch and into the house.
2.
Sandy was sitting astride the thing that wore the late Hanna Samaan’s skin; he held a hunting knife at its throat. Maggie was standing with her back pressed to the foyer wall, trying to stay out of the way of whatever might happen. Khalil, armed with an ordinary hammer, was halfway down the front hall, scouting for further opposition.
“Close the door!” Sandy ordered.
Smith stepped into the house, shoved aside one of the false Hanna’s slippered feet, and closed the door. After a moment’s hesitation, he threw the deadbolt.
The creature smiled up at Sandy, a cruel, tight-lipped smile that looked very much out of place on Hanna Samaan’s haggard and ordinary face. A faint hint of a baleful red glow showed through the brown of her eyes.
“You again,” it said, in a conversational tone.
“Us again,” Sandy agreed, grinning back. He pressed the knife-blade down, driving the point through the skin and deeply into the flesh beneath.
He had been unsure what to expect, so he was not surprised that except for the lack of blood it felt very much as he had always imagined it would feel to cut a person’s throat. The blade sank in fairly easily for perhaps an inch, and then met resistance.
He drew the blade across the thing’s neck, and the mottled, wrinkled skin of Elias’s aging and out-of-shape mother parted, peeling back slightly to either side, revealing no red blood or mortal flesh, but that hard, grey, ropy substance that the nightmare people seemed to be made of.
He had to saw at it to cut effectively, and he sawed grimly away.
“What’s going on here?” someone asked.
Sandy didn’t look up. He was busy; the other two weren’t his problem, they were for Smith and Khalil to deal with. Instead he went on sawing, putting all his strength into it.
He could feel sweat on his forehead.
The knife-blade was halfway through the thing’s neck, and the consistency of the flesh was changing. Strands of gray, gummy stuff were sticking to the knife, and a thick pale liquid seemed to be oozing everywhere. The wound seemed to be closing up over the top of the blade. “Damn,” Sandy muttered.
The creature just smiled up at him with its woman’s face, not bothered at all by the huge gouge in its neck.
Sandy had hoped that he would be able to cut the thing’s head off, to see whether it could survive decapitation, but it appeared his knife was not going to be enough to do the job.
That left the original plan, burning the things to death. He looked up.
Khalil and Smith were standing in the archway between the foyer and the living room, brandishing hammer and crowbar, and facing the mock Elias and someone who must be the false father, a big pot-bellied figure in a sweat-stained T-shirt who reminded Sandy of a black-haired Archie Bunker.
The sweat stains were old, Sandy noticed, not fresh, despite the heat of the day.
“Give me the can,” he said.
Smith took a single step back, never taking his eyes from the two creatures he faced, and held out the can of lighter fluid.
Maggie took it from him, popped the plastic cap, and handed it to Sandy.
“What are you doing?” the thing beneath him rasped; his knife might not have killed it, but its voice was reduced to a harsh whisper.
Sandy’s answer was to spray lighter fluid in its face.
It didn’t even blink.
Moving slowly and carefully, Sandy crawled back down the thing’s body to its feet, spraying fluid as he went, soaking its face, its hair, its pale blue housedress. It stared up at him, not frightened, only puzzled.
The stench of lighter fluid arose.
“What’s that stuff you sprayin’ there?” the fat “man” called.
Nobody bothered to answer it.
Sandy got to his feet and stood, looking down at the creature he had just saturated. He sheathed his knife on his belt, then handed the can of lighter fluid to Maggie, who took it and backed away.
The Hanna thing blinked, finally, trying to clear its vision of the fluid that had pooled in its eyes. It sat up.
Sandy and the others moved away from it, away from the front door; the other two creatures stepped back, making room for them, watching.
Sandy took an old business card from one pocket, and his cigarette lighter from another, and flicked the wheel. The lighter flared up, and the flame caught the corner of the card.
When it was burning strongly, Sandy flipped it at the false Hanna, just as it was getting awkwardly to its feet, still trying to blink the lighter fluid out of its eyes.
The fluid caught immediately, and flames spread across the front of Hanna Samaan’s housedress, up into her hair, onto her stolen face.
Sandy had half-expected a great “whoosh,” like in the movies, but the only sound was a faint hissing, and a sudden crackle, like a far-distant string of firecrackers, as Hanna’s grey hair went up.
“Hey, you crazy?” the largest of the nightmare people demanded as a billow of orange fire flickered across the foyer ceiling, leaving a thin black film of smoke.
Sandy turned and squirted lighter fluid at the creature. It backed away.
The one in Elias’s skin hadn’t spoken yet, but now it did.
“Sandy,” it said, in Mary’s voice, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Sandy’s reply was to spray lighter fluid at that one, as well. “Bastard,” he growled.
Khalil and Smith had stepped to the side, along the living room wall; Maggie was on the stairs, but at a gesture from Sandy she ran across and joined the others.
“You don’t know what’s up there,” Sandy told her, “and if the fire spreads there might not be a way out.” He turned back to the burning thing in the foyer.
It was standing there, smiling at him through the writhing flames as flakes of burning skin peeled away, flakes that fluttered up like orange fireflies, then blackened and fell.