That step back gave him a clear view of where his fingernails had scraped.

“Well, see you Wednesday,” the thing said as it turned in the doorway.

“Right, thanks,” Smith said, trying very hard not to tremble.

The creature stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind it.

Smith pulled his hand from his pocket.

Where he had scratched the thing, something had come away. When he had looked at the back of its neck he had seen a hole, a hole where something damp and slick and grey had showed through the skin, something the color of wet modeling clay. There was no bleeding or oozing, just that greyness.

The piece that had come away was still in his fingers, and he held it up to the light. It was a sliver of translucent material, dry on one side and damp on the other, about two inches long and half an inch wide across the middle, no thicker than the fabric of a pair of jeans.

Even though he had never encountered such a thing in quite this form before, there was no doubt about what it was.

He was holding a piece of human skin.

Chapter Four:

Saturday, August 5th

1.

He sat in the car, the crowbar across his lap, the Kaypro on the seat beside him, the Compaq and his stereo in back.

There was no way any prankster could have set this up.

There really were monsters. They really had taken over the apartment complex, replacing the people who had lived there.

He looked around at the full parking lot, the lot that had been mostly full even during regular business hours, and he knew that at least some of the nightmare people were not bothering to carry out all the details of their charade of normal humanity – or were not able to. Some of them must have abandoned the jobs held by the people they had replaced – or perhaps they had been unable to do the work, and had been fired.

Or perhaps they didn’t even know what jobs they were supposed to have. After all, how much did they know about their victims?

He paused. Was he sure that his replaced neighbors were “victims?” What had really happened to them?

He remembered the blood splattered on the walls and floor of that unfinished basement, and the pile of fresh bones, and he clenched his jaw, fighting nausea. He knew what had happened to the victims.

If he could accept that the creatures were real, he could accept what he had seen; he didn’t need to try to gloss over anything.

He looked at the piece of skin he still held, and he knew that it had come from the real Bill Goodwin, and that a thing was now wearing the boy’s skin, pretending to be him.

A hundred and forty-three people had been murdered by those creatures, and no one knew it but him.

That sounded like paranoid raving, but when he looked at the strip of skin he had all the proof he needed that it was real, that he was not insane.

Unfortunately, proving it to anybody else wouldn’t be that easy. If he took it to the police, they could analyze it, prove it was human skin – but they wouldn’t believe him when he told them where he got it. It was convincing proof of something, certainly, but he knew he could never convince them that it came from some murderous creature out of his nightmares. It was far more likely that they would decide that he had found a corpse somewhere, or even murdered someone, and was hallucinating rather than admit it to himself.

He would probably find himself in St. Elizabeth’s, or wherever Montgomery County sent possibly-dangerous lunatics these days.

And even if somebody did give him the benefit of the doubt – which was staggeringly unlikely – then what? The police had rules and regulations to follow. They would need warrants and evidence and probable cause before they could attempt anything like what he had just done, peeling a piece of skin off a monster to prove that it wasn’t human.

And what would they do with the monsters if they ever did acknowledge that they really existed? Again, they’d be bound by rules and forms and procedures. They’d need proof that the nightmare people had killed their victims. They’d need a legal determination as to whether the creatures were human or animal. The whole thing would inevitably get into the news, and there would be crazies of every sort popping up – people who would claim that the nightmare people were innocent victims, or UFO aliens, or a punishment sent by God.

And who knew what would happen then? What would the nightmare people do, if the police started investigating them? What would they do to reporters and gawkers and loonies?

Smith knew he couldn’t fight the things alone, but he couldn’t go to the police, either.

He asked himself whether he really needed to fight them at all. Couldn’t he just flee?

He shook his head. No, he couldn’t do that. They had killed his neighbors – killed them, and from the fact that there were only bones and no flesh, maybe eaten them. He couldn’t just leave the creatures there. Even if he got away, surely, they would eventually kill other innocent people, kill them and eat them.

He shuddered.

Where had the things come from?

Had there always been monsters like this, lurking in quiet corners of the world?

He didn’t know, of course. He had no way of knowing.

He did know that he had to fight them, somehow, and destroy them – kill them all.

But wouldn’t that be murder?

No, they weren’t human, he reminded himself. They might be intelligent and humanoid, but they weren’t human, and they were all murderers and presumably cannibals – well, man-eaters, anyway. “Cannibal” wasn’t the right term if they weren’t human.

And “murder” wasn’t the right term if they weren’t human. Killing them wouldn’t be murder.

The police might have another opinion, though. So might the nightmare people themselves. He couldn’t just walk in with an assault rifle and start gunning them down and expect to get out alive, or to stay out of jail if he did survive.

He needed to know more about them, and he needed help.

He looked around at the parking lot again, at all the cars there, the cars that had been sitting there all afternoon, instead of carrying their owners to and from ordinary nine-to-five jobs.

The things weren’t human. They had disguised themselves as human, but the disguises weren’t perfect. Their victims had had friends, relatives, co-workers – the neighbors were all gone, but the families and friends were still out there.

If he could find those friends, and could convince them of what had happened, he would have allies.

He wished he knew more about his neighbors. Did Mrs. Malinoff have any family, or Nora Hagarty, or Walt Harris? None of them had ever told him. He had hardly spoken to most of his neighbors; he had been too busy settling in at work, arranging his apartment, making contacts in the area. The only ones he’d ever spoken to, other than a few minutes here and there in the stairwell or on the lawn, were the Goodwins. He knew a little about them – not much, but a little.

Well, he decided, at least that was a place to start.