“This is the real Ed Smith, Maggie,” he said. “You left a message to call you?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Smith, thanks for calling, really!” She sounded almost cheerful for a moment, but that vanished when she added, “It’s… it’s about Elias.”
He blinked, and felt a tightness in his chest. “Maggie,” he said, in a low, sympathetic voice, “What about Elias? I didn’t really know him, you know, but if you just need someone to talk to…”
“No, it’s not anything like that!” She made no attempt to hide her exasperation. “I mean he’s back, or the thing that ate him is, the way Bill Goodwin was, and he’s come back home, and I think those things got his parents, too, because Mrs. Samaan doesn’t sound right on the phone and Mr. Samaan didn’t go to work, and Mrs. Samaan says he’s not feeling well, but Mr. Samaan always went to work no matter how sick he was, and this one isn’t… well, it’s not him. They got them all.” Her voice rose toward the end.
Smith stared at the blank concrete wall, wondering how he could possibly have failed to anticipate this.
“You’re sure it’s both of them?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, I’m sure,” Maggie said. “At least, I think I am.”
Smith didn’t argue with the confusion implicit in that reply. He asked, “Were there any other kids in the family, or anybody else living there?”
“No, just the three of them,” Maggie said. “I think Elias had an older brother once, but he died or something; anyway, he’s never lived there.”
A wave of helplessness, stirred into overwhelming motion by this unexpected new catastrophe, threatened to drown Smith. Here he had been thinking that maybe the nightmare was over, just because he was no longer being directly bothered, when other innocents, who knew no more about what was happening than his dead neighbors had, were dying.
And there wasn’t anything he could think of that could help.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
Maggie said, “Well, I talked to Mrs. McGowan, Annie McGowan, and she says the cops weren’t any help at all, so we’re having another meeting at her house, this evening, as soon as everybody can get there. I was waiting for you to call back before I went over there, but I’ll head over right now, on my bike. I haven’t gotten hold of Sandy Niklasen or Khalil Saad yet, I guess they’re at work, but I’ll keep trying from over there. Um… do you think I should try the Newell girls again?”
“No,” Smith said, “Don’t bother. They probably still wouldn’t believe us. Listen, do you… do you know anything more about them? The monsters, I mean, not the Newells. Have you got any ideas on how we can kill those things?”
“No. Do you?”
“No. And that means I don’t know if this meeting is going to do any good…”
“Don’t say that!” Maggie shouted, interrupting him. “I mean, we’ve got to think of something, right, if all of us are there? I mean, there’s got to be… well, hey, I’ve got to talk to you guys, okay? Will you be there?”
Reluctantly, Smith said, “I’ll be there.”
He hung up.
He stared at the phone for a moment, then let out a sigh, but whether it was a sigh of dismay or relief he wasn’t sure.
7.
Annie McGowan smiled at him as she held the door. “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Smith,” she said. “Mr. Niklasen and Mr. Saad should be here soon; they called, or at least Mr. Niklasen did. Maggie’s in the kitchen making sandwiches; you haven’t had dinner yet, have you?”
“No, I haven’t, Ms. McGowan. Thanks.” He followed her gesture and found himself in a small, tidy kitchen, where Maggie Devanoy was slathering mustard onto slices of bread.
He had just started to look at the selection of cold cuts spread on the counter when the doorbell rang. He stepped back to the doorway to look as Annie answered it.
Sandy Niklasen pushed his way in, clutching something that looked like a thick bundle of gauzy, soiled rags; Khalil Saad followed him somberly, a couple of paces back.
“Look at this!” Sandy said, and Smith saw that he was literally shaking with rage. “Look at it!”
“What is it?” Maggie asked over Smith’s shoulder.
Sandy turned, and his mouth opened, then snapped shut; he was too furious to speak. He thrust the bundle at Smith.
Smith accepted it reluctantly. The instant his fingers touched it he realized it wasn’t cloth, gauzy or otherwise. He stared down in horror at what he held.
Maggie, looking around his shoulder, went white.
“I don’t understand,” Annie said. “What it it?”
“It’s Mary,” Sandy said.
“We went to that place,” Khalil said, “In the woods. And we found this there. It is all that is left of her. We found this, and her clothes, and the wooden stake, and some blood, and pieces of bone, all lying in the dirt. Nothing else.”
With unsteady hands, Smith unfolded a little of the bundle, and a thick hank of blonde hair tumbled free.
“I don’t understand,” Annie repeated. “What is that you have there, Mr. Smith?”
“It’s skin,” Smith forced out.
“It’s Mary’s skin,” Sandy bellowed, “Mary’s skin that that thing was wearing like long underwear, and when it got Elias instead it just crawled out and left it lying there, where we found it!”
Smith had not been prepared for the shock of having the entirety of a woman’s mortal remains thrust into his hands without warning, so most of his mind was blank.
Somewhere, though, far in the back, a little trace of logical thought lurked.
This would be the evidence needed to convince even the most skeptical cop that something out of the ordinary was going on here. Even the most determined psychopath could not have removed a woman’s whole skin so neatly or completely.
Could he?
That little bit of him tried to push its way up through the layers of shock and fatigue, to tell the others, to let them know that this could save them all, but then Maggie burst out wailing and fled to the far corner of the kitchen, and he stepped aside to let a concerned Annie hurry past him on her way to comfort the terrified girl, and then Sandy was taking the skin back and saying, “We’re going to burn them. It was Khalil’s idea; aren’t evil spirits all afraid of fire? We’re going to burn all those bastards!”
Smith tried to think of something intelligent to say, but his thoughts refused to cohere. One fragment managed to surface for an instant.
“Elias,” he said.
“Yeah,” Sandy said, “It’s dressed up as Elias now, but it must be living in Mary’s apartment, right? I mean, it…”
Smith shook his head. “No,” he said, “Elias came home last night, Maggie said.”
Sandy stared at him. “What?”
“Elias came home. And Maggie thinks they got his parents, that the one in Elias’s skin let in a couple more.”
Sandy and Khalil looked at one another.
“If,” Smith managed, his thoughts moving again, sluggishly, “If we tried to burn down the apartments, we couldn’t get them all. It’s too big, too many of them. And those three aren’t there.”
“We wouldn’t get the one that got Mary,” Sandy agreed.
“And we don’t know,” Smith said, “that fire will stop them. Not really.” The image of a hundred nightmare creatures swarming out of the burning Bedford Mills complex, like wasps from a broken nest, came to him. “And the cops…” He lost the thread of what he wanted to say.
“All right,” Sandy said, “Then we burn the house first, a trial run – burn the three of them, or however many are in there. Get the one who got Mary and Elias.”
Khalil nodded.
Annie McGowan, with Maggie in an encircling arm, came up to the kitchen door just then.