And then he felt the fangs extending from its upper jaw – not just a pair of them, like a vampire, but an entire rank of them, six or eight, at least, like steel needles, forcing themselves down behind his teeth and into the flesh below his gums, and then the pain hit and he screamed and screamed and screamed until the blood filled his mouth and he couldn’t scream any more.
It seemed like an eternity.
It was just over four seconds before he passed out.
5.
When the screaming began, Sandy and Smith struggled harder, hauling at the thing’s shoulders with all their strength, but they couldn’t move it. Sandy’s hands were bleeding again, which made it hard to grip, but he tried not to think about it.
Khalil wasn’t helping them, and Sandy started to shout a demand to him, but then he saw him running up with the axe, and he was swinging it at the nightmare creature’s back.
The screaming had been muffled to begin with, and within seconds it stopped. Sandy saw that Elias’s eyes had rolled back in their sockets until only the whites showed.
The axe struck the creature, and bit into it, but the thing didn’t seem to even notice, and Sandy realized that the flesh of its shoulders seemed to be softening.
“What the fuck?” he said.
His hands pulled free suddenly, ripping away pieces of Mary’s skin; the thing’s shoulder had become too soft to grip properly. He started to reach down again, then stopped as Smith’s hands, too, came away with nothing but skin in them.
He looked at its lower back, where Khalil had hit it with the axe, and the thing seemed almost insubstantial. Mary’s shorts were no longer filled out in a mockery of human sexuality; they were flattening even as he watched.
What’s more, the thing seemed to be crawling forward, as if somehow, despite its size, it was crawling into Elias’s mouth. Blood bubbled up around its jaws, spilling out of Elias’s mouth and running thickly down his cheeks.
Khalil hadn’t noticed what was happening; he was raising the axe again.
“Don’t,” Sandy said, “Look!”
Khalil, startled, looked.
“If you hit again, you might go right through her and hit Elias,” Sandy said. Smith nodded agreement.
“What’s happening?” Maggie called from the roadside.
Elias had stopped screaming and struggling. He had stopped several seconds ago, Sandy realized. He reached down for the boy’s wrist, his hand passing within inches of the nightmare creature. It ignored him.
He could find no pulse.
“He’s dead,” Sandy announced.
Smith shot him a glance. “You’re sure?”
Sandy nodded.
“What’s it doing?” Smith asked.
“How the fuck should I know?” Sandy demanded.
“Sorry,” Smith said, turning to look at the thing, still wrapped around Elias’s corpse, its head now definitely being squeezed into the dead boy’s mouth. Blood was running steadily down the corpse’s cheek. As he watched, something white was forced up and out, and tumbled down the stream of blood to the ground – a tooth, or perhaps a piece of bone. Smith could hear a chewing noise now, like metal scraping on bone. He swallowed bile.
“What should we do?” he asked.
“I think we should go,” Khalil said.
“He’s right,” Sandy said, stepping back. “There’s nothing we can do for Elias now, or for Mary, and I think we’ve just made it pretty goddamn clear that we don’t know how the hell to kill these things, so I think we’d better just get the fuck out of here while it’s still doing whatever it’s doing. I don’t want to be next on its hit parade.”
Smith nodded. The three men slowly backed away from the creature and its prize; they gathered up the axe and the sledge and departed, leaving the stake still embedded in the earth, the fragments of the broken crucifix where the thing had flung them, the spattered blood undisturbed in the growing darkness.
Blood was beginning to pool under the two figures, locked in their fatal embrace; more teeth and bits of bone were coming up now, and the nightmare thing had its entire head forced into its victim’s mouth.
“I’m sorry, Elias,” Smith called. He turned away.
By the time they reached the road, they were all running.
6.
“I feel sick,” Smith said. The Chevy hummed quietly down Barrett Road, its headlights painting a swath of color through the black and grey gloom ahead.
Maggie just nodded. It went without saying that she, too, felt ill, and she hadn’t even been close enough to see just what the thing had actually done.
The Chevy’s empty back seat seemed to silently reproach her and Smith both.
“What do we do now?” Smith asked.
“I don’t know,” Maggie said quietly.
That wasn’t exactly the truth, she admitted to herself. She didn’t know what Smith would do, but she’d decided what she was going to do.
She was going to pretend the whole thing had never happened. She never knew any Bill Goodwin or Elias Samaan. She never talked on the phone late into the night with something that had claimed to be the newborn spawn of supernatural evil. She never saw a blood-spattered thing wearing a woman’s skin pull itself up off a wooden stake, somewhere in the woods between Diamond Park and Germantown.
It hadn’t happened.
In a month, she’d be back in school, and everything would be back to normal, and then the year after next she would go away to college – and she wouldn’t come back. Ever.
She wasn’t going to tell Mr. Smith, though. He was a part of it; he hadn’t happened, either. She had never met him. If she told him, he’d try to talk her out of it, try to make it all real again, and she couldn’t stand that.
It couldn’t be real. She wouldn’t let it be real.
She was going to go home, and stay there, and if Smith ever called her again she was going to hang up on him, and if Sandy Niklasen called, or that Khalil, she would hang up on them, and most of all, if Bill Goodwin ever called she would hang up, or maybe unplug the phone from the wall, because she couldn’t possibly let that thing ever talk to her again.
She couldn’t.
“I need to get home,” she said, “Take me home, please. Or just drop me off somewhere and I’ll walk.”
“I’ll drive you,” Smith said. “It’s no trouble.”
She didn’t argue, but she would almost have preferred walking. Smith was a part of it, and she wanted to get away from him.
On the other hand, those things were out there somewhere, and if she went walking around alone, with the sun down, one of them might find her.
They didn’t really exist, but one of them might find her.
It occurred to her that she might never dare go out at night again, but she didn’t much care. She had never been a night person. And right now, she wanted nothing but to be safely indoors somewhere, shut away from this horrible outside world where she could imagine things like nightmare people.
She sat silent the rest of the way home.
7.
“You want me to drop you at McGowan’s place?” Sandy asked.
“Yes, please,” Khalil said, nodding slightly.
“You got a car there?”
“Yes.”
Sandy glanced at his passenger, then returned his attention to the road. “Not real talkative, are you?”
Khalil didn’t answer that.
“Thanks for helping,” Sandy said. “It didn’t do any good, but you did real well. Thanks.”
For a moment Khalil didn’t reply. Then he asked, “How is your hand?”
Sandy glanced at him, startled. “It’s okay, I think.” He took it off the wheel and flexed it. “It still hurts, but I don’t think it’s bleeding any more, and it’s not stiffening up too much.” He didn’t mention that both his palms stung from the loss of skin he had suffered when Khalil had hammered down the stake while he was holding it.