The steel blade cut into Sandy’s shirt a little. The individual threads seemed to slide up the blade one by one, stretching until they parted.

The thing stared up at Smith for a moment, then it flashed a quick, silvery grin.

“All right,” he said, “You’ve got me. I want to live, same as anybody; I’ll deal. What do I have to do?”

Smith looked up at Khalil, who looked back. Both of them could hear Annie McGowan’s voice in the kitchen, too low to make out the words, as she spoke to Maggie on the phone.

“What are you?” Smith asked.

The thing blinked, and its eyes flashed red for an instant before Sandy’s familiar brown returned. It shrugged. “You called us nightmare people,” it said. “That’s as good a name as any.”

“You don’t have a name for yourselves?” Smith asked.

“Nope,” the thing said. “Why should we? We knew that sooner or later, your kind would give us one.”

Smith hesitated, and then demanded, “Where did you come from?”

“Nowhere. Or everywhere. We didn’t come from anywhere so much as we just happened.” The voice was still Sandy’s, but something had crept into it, a coldness that hadn’t been there before.

“What are you talking about?” Smith asked, uneasily. The knife sank a little deeper, indenting Sandy’s stolen skin.

“We happened,” the creature insisted. “We didn’t come from anywhere. When Lammas Night came with the new moon, at 3:00 a.m., we were just there, at the Bedford Mills apartments.”

“What is Lammas Night?” Khalil asked, before Smith had phrased his next question.

“The night of August first,” the thing said. “And the early morning of August second. It’s one of the four nights of the year when the old, dark powers are strongest, the powers that you people say you don’t believe in any more – the powers you hid from as children, the ones that put monsters in your closets, the powers you deny now even when they put those same monsters in your streets and parks, with knives and guns instead of claws and teeth.” It shifted, and smiled again, showing silver teeth. “You all know Hallowe’en, and some of you remember Walpurgisnacht, or Beltane, and your very awareness of them weakens them. But that left us Candlemas and Lammas – and here we are.”

“Why 3:00 a.m.?” Smith asked, trying to inject a little sarcasm. “Isn’t midnight traditional?”

The creature shook its head. “Not any more. Before the electric light, midnight was the darkest hour, when sanity was weakest and evil could walk free, but nowadays you people are scarcely in bed then, what with the eleven o’clock news. No, it’s 3:00 a.m. when the spirit fails, when the darkness is deepest and hope furthest away. That’s the hour for suicides, the time of despair, when the day past is gone and the sunrise still impossibly far ahead.”

“You sound like you’re enjoying this,” Smith muttered, annoyed.

“Oh, I am!” the thing said, smiling. “Don’t you see? Isn’t it obvious? You people, you humans, you’re my natural prey, my targets, my enemies; my kind is destined to destroy yours, to devour you – but in secret. Always in secret. And where’s the fun in that? Hey, I like to gloat as much as you do; I want to brag. I want to let you poor creatures know something of what you’re up against, so you’ll see how hopeless it is. I want to see you scared. I want to see you suffer, see you worry. I enjoy seeing you frightened.” It paused, grinning.

“Ordinarily, I couldn’t tell anyone,” it said. “That would be too dangerous. But you’ve forced me to speak; my sibs can’t hold it against me, even if you let me live. And of course, you’re already marked anyway. You won’t live to tell anyone.”

“You sound like a bad movie villain, gloating over his captives and giving the hero time to arrive,” Smith said.

The thing’s grin widened. “Ah, but isn’t there some truth in that clich? gloating, however foolish it might seem to take the risk? And what if, instead, I’m distracting you while my own reinforcements arrive?”

Khalil glanced around at the windows and the front door, then back at the thing on the couch.

“If that’s the case,” Smith said, “then you’re a fool to tell us.”

“Only if you believe me,” it said, “But you don’t, do you? You don’t think I’d be that foolish – or that clever.”

Smith stared at it, baffled.

“Maybe we should just kill you after all,” he said. “Just in case.” The knife sank a little deeper, and Sandy’s skin gave, allowing it passage into the hard grey flesh beneath. Smith licked his lips and swallowed.

The grin vanished.

“No,” it said. “Don’t do that. I’ll tell you what you want to know. There’s no one else coming yet; they don’t know you saw through my disguise. I’m supposed to get you to separate, after dark, so we can get you one by one.”

The pressure on the knife lessened.

“Talk,” Smith said. “Don’t wait for questions, and don’t try and scare us with any stories about boogey-men in the closet. Just tell us what the hell is going on.”

“But you already know most of it,” the thing said.

“Tell us anyway,” Smith demanded.

Annie was standing in the doorway. “What are you doing?” she asked.

Smith didn’t take his eyes off the thing. “We’re questioning it,” he said.

“It looks like you’re torturing it,” she said.

Smith just shrugged.

“What about Maggie?” he asked.

“She says she’s all right, but she’s scared,” Annie reported. “She’s going to work in a few minutes – I caught her just as she was leaving, she’s already late – so she’ll be out in public for the rest of the evening, and she’s asking her father to come and pick her up after she gets off for the night.”

Smith looked up at Khalil, who looked back.

“Well,” Smith said, “I hope she’s okay. I don’t know what we can do about it.”

Khalil shrugged.

Smith glanced at Annie, who was still standing there, looking disapproving.

“Ms. McGowan,” he said, “have a seat. I’m afraid this will take awhile; we’ll have to hold off on eating dinner for now.”

She frowned, and said, “I’ll wait in the kitchen, if you don’t mind.”

“That’s fine,” Smith said. “Go ahead and eat if you like, you don’t need to wait for us. Besides,” he said, as he turned his attention back to the Sandy thing, “I may be eating in here.”

The thing sneered.

Smith smiled back. “All right,” he said. “Talk.”

It talked.

4.

“You people think you’re so smart, with your science and your religion, you think you know all about space and time and what’s real and what isn’t,” the nightmare person said. “Well, you don’t. You don’t know shit. You worry about atoms and quarks and gods and devils, or about car payments and income tax and cocaine, and you don’t even know what death really is.”

“And I suppose you do?” Smith said.

“More than you,” it answered.

Smith didn’t reply.

A moment later, the thing went on, “There’s real evil in the world, you know. Real evil. Not just disease or accidents or bad luck, but evil, a force that wants you people to suffer and die and rot away, that wants to see you all destroyed, that wants to see everything you’ve done perverted and debased and ruined, and then blotted out – everything that any of you ever did, ever fought for or loved, wiped away. That’s what it wants – what we want. Some of you call the true evil the devil, but that’s wrong – your idea of the devil is so fucking wimpy and anthropocentric it doesn’t even begin to reflect the truth. You don’t have any words that do it justice. You don’t have any words that fit it at all, but the one – evil.

“There’s a real, tangible evil in the world, a supernatural force that’s basic to the universe, indestructible and omnipresent. It manifests itself wherever life exists, taking its form in part from whatever life it finds.

“It touches you sometimes, some of you more than others – or maybe you touch it, because you feed it, all of you, there’s evil in all of you, lurking down there in the darkness. It’s something that evolved in you, and in some of the other natural species on this planet – and on other planets, too, but the part of it here, the part I’m talking about, it can’t reach that far. It’s part of this world, part of your world. And it wants you. It wants you, and it’s going to get you, consume you.