“And it’s not satisfied with just touching you every so often, so that you destroy each other and yourselves. A few suicides, murders, wars, that’s not enough. It’s insatiable. It wants you all, it wants you to die horribly, it wants to devour you, absorb you, make you all part of itself.

“So when the touches aren’t enough, when it can’t find another Ted Bundy or Adolf Hitler, it makes tools for itself, living tools.

“I don’t want you to think, though, that it’s intelligent, that it thinks the way you people do, with your fragile little egos and half-assed schemes. It’s beyond that. It’s a force of nature – of a part of nature you people call supernatural. It’s not an entity, it’s nothing you have a word for, but it has this drive to hurt you, and every so often that manifests itself in a new way.

“It doesn’t design these things; they evolve, they just happen, from random chance guided by what survives, what works, in supernatural selection. The competition isn’t here, in your reality, it’s somewhere else, and only the survivors, only the fittest, ever break through and become real.

“You’ve always had them. On Earth, you’ve called them demons and monsters. It’s manifested itself as lamia, witches, demons, vampires, werewolves, all of them – but only one form at a time, in our own supernatural evolution. Each species appeared spontaneously, bred and flourished after its fashion, and was in time wiped out by humanity as its secrets were learned and the initial fear conquered. Each was appropriate to the time in which it appeared, and each one has eventually failed, it’s been destroyed, wiped out, and then, when time has passed, another has appeared, stronger and fitter, to fill that same niche in the ecology – to be the new predator that preys on humanity. The Romans destroyed the lamiae, and you thought they were just a myth. The Saxons wiped out the fay, the elven, and you turned them into a mere fairy tale.

“Each time, though, the evil came back in a new and more frightening form, one that was harder to destroy. In the Middle Ages there were witches, who could only die three ways – burning, drowning, or by snapping the neck. Then werewolves, that could be slain only by silver. And in 1639 the vampires came, and they had several strange weaknesses, but what they gave up in their susceptibility to sunlight and cross and holy water, their deathlike daytime trances, they thought they had gained back in their powers – mesmerism, and the transformations, and the vast physical strength, and the immunity to all normal weapons.

“At first the vampires, those night-stalkers, were terrifying and unstoppable, but in time people learned the defenses – the cross, garlic, running water, the stake, sunlight, all of them. The vampires took their nature from human beliefs – fear of the dark made them nocturnal, Christian superstition made them susceptible to the cross and holy water, and so forth.

“They were powerful, but they were vulnerable, and once the knowledge of how they could be destroyed became common knowledge they were doomed. It took three hundred years, but your people stamped them out. At the end, they were helpless and hunted, just a handful of survivors hiding in corners, and the last one took refuge in Hollywood fantasies, pretending to be an actress playing vamps and vampires – but it did her no good when she was found drinking the blood she needed from the husband of a jealous wife.

“So the last vampire was impaled and beheaded in California in 1939, and after a fifty-year hiatus the heart of evil has spewed forth its new spawn. In that fifty-year period, and the long period before it when vampires were rare, hunted creatures, you people forgot that such things had ever been real.

“But they were real, and they are real.

“For fifty years there was nothing, but the forces of evil were not silent, were not still; our evolution was at work.

“And here we are, twelve dozen of us to start, and we don’t have the vampire’s weaknesses. We don’t sleep by day; we don’t sleep at all. A stake through the heart won’t kill us. We don’t have the strength of ten, nor can we turn to bats or mist – but we have our strengths, our secrets.

“And you don’t know what they are.

“Nobody knows anything about us, about what you call nightmare people. Nobody believes in us, nobody knows what our equivalents of cross, wooden stake, and sunlight are.”

5.

Smith blinked.

“But you’re wrong,” he said. “We know how to kill you.”

“Only the four of you,” the creature said. “And there’s plenty you don’t know.”

“We’ll learn,” Smith said grimly.

“You can try,” the thing said, “but I doubt you’ll live that long.”

“Is that a threat?”

The thing just grinned at him.

Smith pushed the knife a little deeper, and the grin vanished.

“So when we let you go,” he asked, “What are you going to do?”

The creature shrugged.

“Are you going to go on pretending to be Sandy Niklasen? Living a mockery of his life, the way those things over at Bedford Mills are going through the motions, pretending to be the people they ate?”

“Probably not,” it said. “You’ve torn up this skin some, after all. It’s not going to heal up.”

Khalil’s grip on the thing tightened suddenly. Smith’s eyes narrowed.

“You mean you’ll kill somebody else, and wear his skin? Or hers?”

“Hey!” it said, and suddenly the voice wasn’t Sandy’s at all any more, it was Bill Goodwin’s. “Lighten up!”

“Is that what you meant?” Smith demanded through clenched teeth, and the knife cut down more deeply, pulling down through the grey flesh, opening a slit in the shirt and the skin beneath. Behind him, Annie gasped.

“Yes, it’s what I meant!” the creature snarled, still in Goodwin’s voice. “Of course it’s what I meant! I can’t go out in the sun without a human skin to protect me – it burns, it’s like needles, like acid. And I can’t even go out at night unless I hide every time a human happens along – you know what I really look like! Bad enough that this skin doesn’t fit, it binds and itches, but it’s better than nothing, and now you’ve gone and cut it open, so of course I’ll get another. Idiot!”

“You mean if we let you go, you’ll murder some other innocent person, just so you won’t have to worry about sunburn.”

“If? We had a deal, Smith!”

“Fuck our deal, monster!” Smith replied. “I’m not going to let you go out and kill someone for his skin!” The knife drove in clear to the hilt, and everyone in the room heard upholstery tear as the blade came out the nightmare thing’s back and cut into the cushions beneath.

The thing surged upward, pulling Khalil forward, and its arms swung forward around Smith’s neck. Gleaming black fingernails, inches long, thrust out through the tips of the fingers, shredding Sandy’s skin and digging into Smith’s back as Smith dove down into the thing’s chest.

Smith worked the knife with both hands, ignoring the pain in his back, ignoring the stink that rose up around him, ignoring the squirming, sawing it through the stubborn gray flesh until he found what he was looking for, the black slug-shaped heart.

He cut around it and pulled it free, and the thing gasped.

He put it to his mouth and set his teeth on it.

The thing let out a low, keening wail. Its claws stopped digging into him.

“Wait, Smith,” it said, “Wait, please, I’ll do anything.”

Smith looked at its face.

Smith looked at Sandy’s stolen face.

It still looked exactly like Sandy, and its features were twisted in an expression of abject terror – an expression that Smith was sure the real Sandy never wore in his life. Its eyes, still falsely brown, were pleading.

The heart he held was pulsing faintly, and a thin, clear slime was oozing from it, making it slippery and hard to hold. He set his teeth in more firmly.