“Am I what?” the creature said. “Am I a vampire? Hell, no; don’t be stupid. There aren’t any vampires.”

Hearing a walking nightmare, a cannibal monster bent on replacing him, dismiss vampires so easily, as if the supernatural was the nonsense Smith had always considered it to be, was a very strange and confusing experience. “But you…” Smith began.

“If there were still any vampires around, I wouldn’t be here,” the thing said, interrupting him. “The last vampire bought it in Los Angeles in 1939 – got a stake through the heart and her head cut off, the mouth stuffed with garlic and the whole thing burned. Messy, very messy.”

Smith stared at the phone, as that horrible imitation of his own voice continued, casually conversational, “Of course, I don’t suppose I should criticize; as you saw in that basement, we aren’t very tidy ourselves, when we feed…”

Smith hung up, slamming the phone abruptly into its cradle.

6.

He thought about calling back, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he sat, trying to order his disordered thoughts.

The creature had been so calm and matter-of-fact about it all. It hadn’t tried to deny anything. It had admitted openly that it and its kind had eaten all his neighbors, and that it had intended to eat him.

And what was that about vampires?

Had there once really been vampires?

He shook his head. The image of blood-sucking bats was too corny, too overworked, to take seriously. The creature must have been trying to sidetrack him somehow.

Maybe it really was a vampire, and had been trying to mislead him. Maybe Elias was right after all.

The phone rang, and he jumped. He stared at it, then reached out carefully and picked it up.

After all, the thing couldn’t get at him through a telephone.

It could seep through closed windows, though – why else would it have been outside that first night, instead of coming up the stairs? And it could heal bullet wounds in seconds – how did he know what it could do? Maybe it could travel through the phone lines!

He almost hung up again, but then he decided to risk it. He lifted the receiver and said, “Hello?”

“Mr. Smith?” a voice asked, a feminine and unfamiliar voice. Whoever it was, she sounded very young and very nervous.

Was it one of the other nightmare people, trying to lull him, get him off-guard somehow? “Yes?” he said warily.

“Mr. Smith, this is Maggie Devanoy,” the voice said. “I… look, I think I need to talk to you again. And some other people do, too. Could you maybe meet us somewhere, say, tomorrow afternoon? After church?”

“I don’t go to church,” Smith said without thinking.

“Well, I do,” Maggie replied, “And it doesn’t matter anyway. Could we see you tomorrow?”

“Who’s ‘we’? Who are these people?” he asked.

Had the nightmare people gotten at Maggie? Had they gone after her, because he had told her about them?

Was it really Maggie at all, and not a nightmare imitating her voice? “Well, after you left,” Maggie explained, “I got thinking, and I made some phone calls to some people I know, and I found some other people who are worried about what’s been happening at that apartment building.”

That did sound like a trap. “What people?” he asked warily.

“Well,” Maggie said, “there’s Annie McGowan, her sister Kate lived at Bedford Mills, or maybe her sister-in-law, and there’s Alice and Maddie Newell, their father lived there, and there’s Khalil Saad, who had friends there and knew Bill, and Sandy Niklasen, who lived there himself except he had a fight with his girlfriend last week and moved out, and… and… I think that’s all, but maybe I forgot someone.”

Smith stared at the flowered curtains that hid most of the window. “How’d you find them all?” he asked.

“Well, I just kinda knew them, I guess,” Maggie answered. “I met Annie when I was waiting for Bill one day, she was sitting on the lawn with her sister Kate, that’s the one that… that they got, and she was crocheting something, and I got talking to her. And she’s listed in the phone book, so that’s how I found her. And the Newell girls are in my school, or at least Maddie is, and Alice was last year, before she graduated – they live with their mother, and when their folks got divorced a few years ago their father moved into the apartment over there. And Khalil used to talk to Bill about cars sometimes, he works in a garage – Khalil, I mean, not Bill; anyway, he talked to Bill sometimes when he was over there visiting his other friends there, so I knew him from that. And I met Mary, that was Sandy’s girlfriend, when I babysat for her neighbor across the hall a couple of times. She talked about Sandy a lot, but I never met him, but I knew his name, and she told me who he’d gone to stay with when he moved out, so I called him.”

It sounded plausible, certainly. It was exactly the sort of thing he had wanted to do himself, except that he hadn’t been able to think of anybody except Maggie herself.

It appeared he’d chosen well, though, when he contacted Maggie.

“So will you come, tomorrow?” Maggie asked.

“All right,” Smith said. “Where and when?”

“Well, I was figuring that the best place would be Annie McGowan’s house, on Topaz Court – number 706, Topaz Court – around two o’clock. Would that be okay with you?”

“That would be fine,” he said, scribbling down the address on the pad on the nightstand. “I’ll be there.”

“Oh, good! See you tomorrow, then!”

“See you tomorrow.”

She hung up.

He held the phone for a moment, then put it gently down.

He had his group now, assembled for him and ready to go. He was clearly going to be the team leader, since he was the one who had started this and who knew the most about those things, but these were people who would know what the nightmare people had done, people who had lost friends and family, had them eaten. They’d be angry and frightened, and would probably ready to do almost anything he asked of them.

But he remembered the bullet-holes, he remembered the slow grey fluid that had sealed them. These things that he and the rest were up against were not mortal flesh. Whatever the things were, they were truly supernatural.

Maggie’s recruits, he was sure, would do what he asked – but what could he ask?

7.

Maggie stared at the phone for a long moment.

She had called everyone she could think of – sweet old Annie, and that crazy Khalil, and that rotten Sandy Niklasen, and the Newells. She had called Elias Samaan, and talked to him for awhile. She had called Smith back.

And she still needed to talk. She was still scared, still confused, still twisted around.

But she’d called them all, everyone she could think of that she could find a number for and that wasn’t out of town on vacation or something. Elias, Khalil, Annie, Sandy, the Newells, Ed Smith – that was everybody. There was nobody else left that she could call about the monsters.

Nobody, that is, except the monsters themselves.

Without knowing why, she dialed the Goodwins’ number.

“Hello?”

Mrs. Goodwin’s voice. Even if it wasn’t really her, the voice was still the same. “Hi,” Maggie said. “Is Bill there?”

“Just a minute.”

A sudden panic swept over her. What was she going to say?

Would she pretend it was really Bill, her old familiar BIll, and talk to it as if nothing had happened? Would they talk about friends and movies and TV and sex, just like any ordinary couple?

Could that thing carry on a real conversation? That morning it hadn’t seemed to know what was going on. It hadn’t gotten her jokes. It hadn’t followed any of the gossip about their friends. It hadn’t watched any of the TV shows she talked about.