Khalil came and stood over her. “Maggie,” he said, “We must know what you did.”
“Don’ wanna talk about it,” she said, and Smith realized that she was sucking her thumb. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder.
She twitched away. “Go ’way!” she snapped.
“The hell I will!” Smith snapped back. “Listen, Maggie, I know you don’t want to talk about it or think about it, but you have to! Those things are still out there, and they’re probably determined to kill us all, and they’ve already killed Elias and his parents and Bill Goodwin and his whole family and all those other people. We’ve shot them and stabbed them and burned them and driven a fucking stake through one’s heart, and they just smiled at us like we were nothing, and now you did something that hurt one of them, and we have got to know what it was!”
Maggie curled up more tightly than ever.
Enraged, Smith leaned over and yanked her thumb out of her mouth.
She spun around and slapped him across the face, hard.
Smith grabbed one hand, and Khalil grabbed the other, and they held her there, facing Smith.
“What did you do?” Smith demanded.
“I bit it!” Maggie shouted. “That’s all! I bit it, I was so scared and mad I couldn’t help it.”
For a moment, no one spoke, and the room was silent. With a distant hum, the central air conditioning came on.
“You bit it?” Smith asked at last. Maggie nodded.
“What did it taste like?”
“Like shit,” Maggie said, “And there were ashes and bits of skin and it smelled of lighter fluid, and I think I’m going to be sick, let me up.”
Smith and Khalil released her, and she staggered to the bathroom. The others all sat, silently staring at one another, pretending they couldn’t hear her retching.
“Has she been poisoned, do you think?” Khalil asked.
Smith shook his head. “She’s just upset.”
“If they don’t mind knives and bullets,” Annie asked, “Why would a bite bother them?”
Smith shrugged. “Why does a cross bother a vampire?”
“’S no reason,” Sandy said.
“The cross is the sign of God,” Annie said, “and vampires are supposed to be the spawn of hell, so naturally they’d fear it.”
Smith shrugged. “But that’s if you accept the whole Christian worldview. If you don’t know that, it seems pretty arbitrary. Never mind the cross, then; why does it take a stake through the heart to kill a vampire?”
Nobody had an answer to that.
“You mean,” Annie asked, “that it’s all just random? That there’s no sense to it?”
Smith shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “As you said, with vampires, there’s the whole Christian mythology thing, where they fear the cross and holy water, and sunlight, which comes from God, and maybe there’s some sort of symbolism to the stake through the heart, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a pattern with the nightmare people, too, a pattern we can figure out.”
“Not Christian,” Khalil said. “The cross did nothing.”
“They’re Jewish?” Sandy suggested sarcastically. The bleeding had stopped again, and he had swabbed away most of the blood.
Smith shook his head. His brain seemed oddly clear for the moment. “No, it’s not that. Look, when there were vampires, people took Christianity and its symbols pretty seriously.”
“They still do!” Annie protested. Smith held up a hand.
Maggie emerged from the bathroom, but stood silently listening.
“No, most people don’t, not really,” Smith said. “A hundred years ago nobody was putting ‘Is God Dead?’ on the covers of magazines. Some people take it seriously, but even for them, the trappings don’t have the same meaning they once did.”
“Whash your point?” Sandy asked. His speech was still a bit mushy, but better, and improving rapidly.
“My point is that vampires were creatures of their time,” Smith replied. “And these things are probably creatures of our time. They’re new, just invented, or evolved, or whatever. They’re meant for now, for the 1990s.”
“So they aren’t Chris… Christians?” Sandy said, working his jaw carefully. “Fine, but what the hell are they, and what’s it got to do with biting? I don’t see biting as the next big fashion trend around here.”
“No,” Smith said, “but nowadays nobody has any grand scheme of good and evil. There’s no moral order to our universe, not when kids are killing each other over crack, and people on Wall Street are getting rich without ever doing anything but playing with other people’s money. We don’t have any God any more, or any real devil, we just have the law of the jungle.”
He realized that Sandy and Annie and Maggie and Khalil were all staring at him, and he hesitated.
“Look,” he said, “It makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s using their own weapon against them, after all. They try to eat us, don’t they? And to kill a vampire, which sucks blood, you stop the blood from flowing with a stake through the heart. It’s the law of the jungle, as I said.”
Smith paused, looking at them all.
“Kill or be killed,” he said. “Eat or be eaten.”
5.
“How do you mean that?” Sandy asked.
Maggie moaned, and took a step back toward the bathroom.
“Mr. Smith,” Annie said, “You don’t mean we have to eat those things?”
Smith nodded. “I think we do,” he said. “I think that’s why Maggie’s bite hurt it. I think that’s the only way to kill them.”
An uncomfortable silence followed Smith’s pronouncement.
“Mr. Smith,” Annie asked at last, “How do you propose to test this theory?”
Smith shrugged. “I don’t know that I do propose to test it. I was just presenting it as I saw it.”
“Of course we’re going to test it!” Sandy said. “We’ve gotta kill those damned things!”
“But eat them…” Annie said, aghast.
Maggie moaned again.
“Maybe we wouldn’t need to eat all of one to kill it,” Smith said. “Maybe just the heart, same as a stake through the heart kills a vampire.”
“Mr. Smith,” Annie said, “I asked you before, and I’m asking again – how do you propose to find out?”
“Well, Ms. McGowan, I guess we’d have to try to eat one.”
Maggie ran for the bathroom again.
“We’ll need to get one of them alone,” Sandy said. “They don’t seem too eager to work together – I mean, the other two never attacked us when we set that one on fire – but we couldn’t expect them to just stand by. We couldn’t count on it.”
Smith nodded. “Maybe we could lure one here, somehow. We lured that one out to the woods, after all.”
“Not here!” Annie protested.
“Maybe at that house,” Khalil said, “Maybe we lure two of them away?”
Smith and Sandy looked at one another. Sandy nodded. “Yeah, we could try that,” he said. “Maggie must know someone else who knew Elias, someone who could lure him away.”
“Do we know which nightmare people they are?” Smith asked. “The one that got Elias was the one that used to be Mary, but what about the others?”
“Who cares?” Sandy asked.
“Maybe they do,” Smith said. “That one that was after me – it tried every night for five nights, and as far as I know it didn’t go after anyone else.”
Sandy shook his head. “Then why did that thing give up Mary’s skin to get Elias?”
Smith shrugged. “I don’t know. It did, though. And that other one, the one we burned, that used to be the Goodwin kid, judging by its voice. I guess they get tired and move on to the next victim, or something. But do they maybe still… I mean, if I tried to get Bill Goodwin for something, would that thing come, even though it’s not Goodwin any more?”
“Nah,” Sandy said. “Why should it?”
Smith had no answer to that.
6.
They talked and schemed until 2:00 a.m. Maggie phoned her parents and told them she was staying over at the Ryersons’. Annie apologized and went to bed around midnight, and the others sat up, planning.
They discarded a dozen ideas, and finally settled on a clear and simple one. Maggie would phone the Samaan house and tell whoever answered that she wanted to meet him outside, alone, somewhere. The others would be watching the house, and when one came out, they would follow it, jump it, and try to eat it.