Smith stared at Elias in baffled anger. “What?”

“Do you know where the story of the unicorn first came from?” Elias insisted.

“No; do you?”

“Yeah, I do,” Elias replied. “It’s no big secret. If you work your way back through older and older descriptions of unicorns, you can see it; I read about it a couple of places. What happened was that travelers to Africa and India brought back descriptions of what they’d seen there, including an animal they called a unicorn, because it had just one horn. It’s Latin…”

“I know that,” Smith growled. “Unicorn, one horn. Go on.”

“Right. Well, they didn’t have any pictures, so all they could do was to describe what they’d seen in terms of what the people they were talking to already knew. So they said that a unicorn had a head and body shaped sort of like a huge warhorse, with a horn on its face, and with a tail like an ass, and with great flat feet like an elephant.”

“Wait a minute… feet like an elephant?”

“That was part of the early descriptions, yeah,” Elias said. “It sort of faded out of them over time.”

“Go on,” Smith said.

“Well, that was the description they gave,” Elias said, “And that was what the pictures were drawn from, by people who had never seen a unicorn. And the travelers said that nobody could get near a unicorn, and that became the whole thing about only virgins approaching them, somehow, even though what the travelers meant was that the things were big and stupid and dangerous and would charge at anyone who came near them. And the locals in India used the horn as an aphrodisiac, because it looked phallic, and that became all the stuff about the magical healing.”

“You’re telling me,” Smith said slowly, “that a unicorn is the same thing as a rhinoceros?”

Elias nodded. “Yeah. Not the same thing, though; it’s what was left of the rhinoceros after five hundred years of legends getting handed down by word of mouth.”

“A unicorn’s a rhinoceros?” Maggie asked, confused.

“Yeah,” Elias said. “And we’ve heard vampire stories the same way we’ve heard unicorn stories. Except these things here aren’t unicorns, they’re the real thing, the rhinoceros. They’re what the vampire stories started out from, before everything got twisted around.”

Smith released the brake, and the car rolled out into the street.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, but I don’t know. And even if you are, it doesn’t prove anything about what they’re like.”

“I know,” Elias admitted, “it doesn’t, not really – but that stuff about vampires being hard to kill must come from somewhere.”

“Like the stuff about virgins and unicorns, huh?” Smith said.

Elias had no answer for that one.

They drove on in silence for a moment, and then Maggie said, “Wait a minute.”

“What?” Smith asked, slowing slightly, but not stopping.

“If the gun won’t hurt them, why’d Elias want to get it? What are we going to do with it?”

Elias said sheepishly, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Maggie turned and glared at him. Of all the times for Elias Samaan, of all people, to turn macho and want to play with his father’s gun! “You mean we don’t need it for anything,” she accused.

Elias shrugged.

“I think we should try it,” Smith said suddenly.

“Try what?” Maggie asked.

“Shooting them. It might work.”

“Yeah, but if it doesn’t…” Elias began.

As Maggie looked back at the.45 and saw Elias’s hands tremble slightly holding it, the reality of the situation sank in.

That was a gun. A real gun, that fired real bullets. And they were talking about really shooting somebody with it.

“That’s murder!” she said.

“No, it isn’t,” Smith said, “It’s… they’re not human. They’re monsters.”

“That’s what the Nazis said about the Jews,” Maggie said.

“Hey!” Elias protested.

“The Jews didn’t eat anybody,” Smith retorted. “These things did. The Jews didn’t dress themselves in other people’s skins, they didn’t leave blood and bones scattered all over an empty basement, they didn’t peer in anybody’s window in the middle of the night with teeth like steel needles…”

“That’s what you say these things did,” Maggie yelled. “Nobody’s been peeking in my window, and I haven’t seen any blood or anything!”

Smith drove on without comment for a few seconds, as Elias tried to protest and Maggie shouted him down.

“Was that Bill Goodwin you talked to this morning?” Smith asked softly.

Maggie quieted, and they rode on.

“Take me home,” she said suddenly.

Smith glanced at her.

“Take me home,” she insisted. “Maybe you’re right, maybe they’re monsters, but I’m not ready for this. I can’t just go along and watch you shoot somebody – or some thing. What if we’re all wrong, somehow? Then it’s murder! Or what if Elias’s right, and shooting them doesn’t kill them? They’ll kill us. And even if it does kill them, and they are monsters, are we going to shoot all a hundred and whatever it is of them?”

“We’re going to start with one,” Smith said, tense, “And see what happens.”

“You guys go ahead,” Maggie said, “But take me home first.”

Smith glanced back at Elias, who shrugged helplessly.

“Okay,” Smith said, resignedly. “If you change your mind, let us know.”

He turned the car back toward Amber Crescent.

6.

She watched the red Chevy pull away, then turned from the window and looked for something to do, to distract herself from any thought of where Elias and Mr. Smith might be going, what they might be going to do.

She started to reach for the kitchen phone, to call Bill – that was what she always did when she was bored or lonely.

Then she stopped.

Bill wasn’t there. Something had taken his place.

Bill was dead.

Tears welled up suddenly.

Bill was dead.

She clenched her teeth to keep from screaming.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. She wasn’t some tragic soap-opera heroine. She was an ordinary suburban kid, about to start her junior year of high school. She was supposed to be worried about sex and clothes and whether her friends were on drugs, not about monsters eating her boyfriend, or Elias taking his father’s gun and going off to shoot people.

Bill was dead. That thing had eaten him.

And she had talked to it, touched it, tried to kiss it, for God’s sake!

She didn’t want to be with Elias, with that gun, or with Mr. Smith, who seemed a little bit crazy – he might be a nice enough guy ordinarily, but he was strung pretty tight just now, what with having gone four nights without sleeping while he worried about those creatures. She didn’t really know him, anyway, and until he calmed down she didn’t want to know him.

She didn’t want to be in that little Chevy, driving over to Bill’s apartment.

And she didn’t want to try and act normal right now, either. She didn’t want to talk to Emmy Ryerson about trying to sneak into the Ringo Starr concert at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, or to her mother about buying her school clothes for the fall, or to anybody about anything normal, because she knew that in the back of her head she’d keep remembering that Bill had been killed and eaten, and she’d want to scream.

She could just lock herself in her room and try to forget all about it, and she even took a step toward the stairs before she realized that wasn’t going to work.

You don’t forget something like that so easily.

She had to do something.

She looked at the kitchen phone.

Bill was dead, and so were all his neighbors, except for Mr. Smith. And his family – Harry and Sid and Jessie. They were dead, too.

Oh, God, even little Sid!

She had to talk to someone about it. Elias and Mr. Smith were too busy trying to do something about it; she just needed to talk, to try and understand it. She wasn’t ready to do anything yet.