8.

None of them had any experience in setting fires.

Most particularly, none of them had ever tried to set a fire where no one was supposed to get out. Starting the fire itself seemed simple enough, given the kerosene and lighter fluid and Sandy’s cigarette lighter, but figuring out how to keep the nightmare people inside until they burned was another matter entirely.

“In the movies,” Maggie pointed out, “when the bad guys are trying to burn somebody up, they always tie them to chairs.”

Smith began, “After what happened to Elias…”

Sandy cut him off. “I’m not trusting any goddamn movie,” he growled.

“If we just burn down the house, though, they’ll just get out, and we won’t get anywhere,” Maggie said. “We need to make sure they stay inside until they burn.”

“We do not really need to burn the house at all,” Khalil pointed out, from his straight-backed chair in the corner. “It is not the house we want destroyed, it is the things inside.”

Sandy stared silently at Khalil for a moment, then smiled tightly and nodded his understanding.

“Well, how are we going to burn them up, except by burning up the house?” Maggie demanded. “What are we going to do, walk up to them and hold a match to their toes?”

“Close,” Sandy said, “Very close. Maggie, how well did you know Elias’s folks? Well enough that they’d let you in the house?”

She shrugged. “Well, yeah, I guess so; I’ve been inside there a few times. What are… oh, wait a minute. I mean, this is like…” Her voice trailed off as she found all three men staring at her.

It was clear what Sandy had in mind, and Smith wondered whether Maggie was up to it. Sandy wanted her to play decoy, to get the door open so that they all could get inside – but once inside, it would be the three of them – four, counting Maggie – against three nightmare people.

Those were not favorable odds. Not against creatures that shrugged off bullets, that could pull themselves up off impaling stakes.

He wondered if he were up to it himself.

He wondered if any of them were up to it.

Chapter Eight:

Monday Night

1.

The grass sighed softly against the sides of Smith’s sneakers as he moved into hiding. The sound of his own breath was loud in his ears, and gurgling of the can of lighter fluid in one unsteady hand seemed like waves crashing in the cool August night. He knelt down behind a rhododendron and found himself in a patch of mud; the day had been overcast and unseasonably cool, and traces of the morning rain still lingered in the sheltered area between the bush and the wall of the house. It was damp, but it was out of sight; he stayed. He wiped a forearm across his face to remove the sudden moisture, then waved to Maggie with his crowbar, signalling that he was ready. She stood out on the sidealk, under a streetlight, looking very small and vulnerable and scared.

Sandy crouched nearby, between a scraggly evergreen and one end of the Samaans’ front porch. Smith could see only his back, but there was no sign that he was nervous at all.

Theoretically, Khalil was somewhere nearby, but Smith could neither see nor hear him.

Maggie took a deep breath and marched up the walk, up the steps and onto the porch. Smith crouched down low as she pressed the doorbell button.

He heard no bell, but Maggie presumably did. She looked quickly, nervously about, then faced the door again.

It opened, but Smith could see nothing of who or what had opened it.

“Hi, Mrs. Samaan,” Maggie said, and Smith was sure he heard a quaver in her voice. “Elias left some stuff at my place; can I come in and give it to him?”

“What stuff, dear?” a voice asked, a voice that seemed to Smith to have an oddly familiar sound to it.

“Well, just… just stuff… I mean…” Maggie’s voice trailed off. After a second or so of awkward silence, she asked plaintively, “Can I come in?”

“Well,” the voice said, “If it’s just something he left, I can give it to him, but if you want…”

“I need to talk to him, too, Mrs. Samaan.”

Smith saw that Sandy was up and moving, so suddenly and silently that it caught Smith completely off-guard. Sandy was jumping up onto the porch and charging toward Maggie and the open door.

Khalil, too, had emerged from somewhere – Smith hadn’t seen where – and was coming up the porch steps.

Smith realized belatedly that “I need to talk to him” had been the agreed-upon signal; he rose and pushed around the rhododendron and clambered awkwardly up onto the porch.

He still only had one foot up on the concrete when Khalil and Sandy burst in through the open door, out of Smith’s line of sight, carrying Maggie in with them. Smith heard the door slam back against a doorstop with a sharp bang.

Cursing his own ineptitude, he flung himself across the porch and into the house.

2.

Sandy was sitting astride the thing that wore the late Hanna Samaan’s skin; he held a hunting knife at its throat. Maggie was standing with her back pressed to the foyer wall, trying to stay out of the way of whatever might happen. Khalil, armed with an ordinary hammer, was halfway down the front hall, scouting for further opposition.

“Close the door!” Sandy ordered.

Smith stepped into the house, shoved aside one of the false Hanna’s slippered feet, and closed the door. After a moment’s hesitation, he threw the deadbolt.

The creature smiled up at Sandy, a cruel, tight-lipped smile that looked very much out of place on Hanna Samaan’s haggard and ordinary face. A faint hint of a baleful red glow showed through the brown of her eyes.

“You again,” it said, in a conversational tone.

“Us again,” Sandy agreed, grinning back. He pressed the knife-blade down, driving the point through the skin and deeply into the flesh beneath.

He had been unsure what to expect, so he was not surprised that except for the lack of blood it felt very much as he had always imagined it would feel to cut a person’s throat. The blade sank in fairly easily for perhaps an inch, and then met resistance.

He drew the blade across the thing’s neck, and the mottled, wrinkled skin of Elias’s aging and out-of-shape mother parted, peeling back slightly to either side, revealing no red blood or mortal flesh, but that hard, grey, ropy substance that the nightmare people seemed to be made of.

He had to saw at it to cut effectively, and he sawed grimly away.

“What’s going on here?” someone asked.

Sandy didn’t look up. He was busy; the other two weren’t his problem, they were for Smith and Khalil to deal with. Instead he went on sawing, putting all his strength into it.

He could feel sweat on his forehead.

The knife-blade was halfway through the thing’s neck, and the consistency of the flesh was changing. Strands of gray, gummy stuff were sticking to the knife, and a thick pale liquid seemed to be oozing everywhere. The wound seemed to be closing up over the top of the blade. “Damn,” Sandy muttered.

The creature just smiled up at him with its woman’s face, not bothered at all by the huge gouge in its neck.

Sandy had hoped that he would be able to cut the thing’s head off, to see whether it could survive decapitation, but it appeared his knife was not going to be enough to do the job.

That left the original plan, burning the things to death. He looked up.

Khalil and Smith were standing in the archway between the foyer and the living room, brandishing hammer and crowbar, and facing the mock Elias and someone who must be the false father, a big pot-bellied figure in a sweat-stained T-shirt who reminded Sandy of a black-haired Archie Bunker.