One-Eyed Jack (41 page)

He forced a sigh out into the air
above him and turned his head. The glowing red digits on the clock
read 3:09 AM.

There was no point in pretending he
could sleep, he decided. It was too hot, too humid, the air too
still and the silence too deep.

He could sleep later, by daylight,
after he had dragged someone from Maintenance up to fix the air
conditioner. He was almost two weeks ahead at work, and half the
department was off at the beach anyway. No one would care if he
took Wednesday off and slept all day.

If his bedroom stayed this hot,
however, he was not sure whether he would ever sleep
again.

He wondered whether the outside air
had cooled off enough to be better than the air in his apartment.
He had carefully hoarded what little coolness remained since his
air conditioner had failed, but now, he admitted reluctantly, it
was gone. It was time to open the windows and gain whatever benefit
the warm, foul outside air might hold.

Wearily, he swung his legs off the bed
and leaned forward, his arms resting on his thighs. Breathing
required a conscious effort.

After a moment’s rest he stood up and
took the one step necessary to reach the window. He stretched out
one hand, groping in the gray gloom, and found the drawcord of the
drapes. He tugged, and the drapes slid away from the window,
revealing the streetlighted world beyond.

Something was blocking his
view.

With a shock, he saw that eyes were
staring in at him, glowing red eyes beneath a blue-black slouch
hat, eyes that were too large to be human, set in a dark, bony
face, a face too long and narrow to be human.

He stared back, too surprised to
react.

The misshapen red-eyed face parodied
his surprise; the eyes widened like his own.

There were no whites, and the pupils
were vertical black slits in scarlet that blazed like
neon.

Between the eyes was a mere sketch of
a nose, a narrow grey ridge down the center of the face, ending in
two large, open, sharp-edged nostrils.

Below that, thin black lips rimmed a
pursed little slit of a mouth.

Above that face the hat was like a
patch of starless night sky, a heavy, old-fashioned hat that made
no sense at all on a hot August night.

For a moment he tried to
tell himself that it was his imagination, or a distortion of his
own reflection, but then the apparition smiled at him, a humorless
grin revealing long needle-sharp teeth, far too
many
teeth, gleaming pale gray in
the darkness. That was not his reflection, distorted or
not.

A misshapen, attenuated hand appeared,
one black, clawlike fingernail touched the brim of the hat in
sardonic salute, and abruptly the thing was gone, sliding suddenly
away in a direction the man inside the bedroom could not
identify.

Startled out of his paralysis by this
disappearance, he snatched at the window latch and flung up the
sash; he wanted to lean out the window and call after whoever--or
whatever--had looked in.

The screen blocked him. He leaned up
against it, knowing that by the time he could work the stiff,
unoiled, spring-loaded catches the peeper would be long
gone.

He stared out at shadowy treetops
above the parking lot and saw no trace of anyone at the window, no
sign of anyone at all, and through his surprise and muddled
weariness he remembered abruptly that he was on the fourth floor,
the top floor, and that the only balcony was outside the living
room, a good twenty feet away.

The window was thirty feet up in a
sheer brick wall. Nobody could possibly look in that
window.

He sank slowly back onto the bed until
he was sitting with his hands at his sides, suddenly unsure of the
reality of what had just happened. Perhaps he had fallen asleep
after all, he thought, enough to dream the apparition.

That had to be it, he told himself.
After all, he could see nothing outside now but the motionless
leafy branches, the dark mass of the building across the way, and
the dim glow of distant streetlights.

He stood again and stepped toward the
window. Thick, moist air brushed against his face, warm and muggy,
but cooler than the air in his apartment. There was no sign of
anything out of the ordinary.

He stepped back again, leaving the
sash wide open.

He shuddered. He was out of practice
facing nightmares. He did not remember having any since he was a
kid.

He had had one now, though. That
ghastly face could be nothing else. It had seemed completely real
for an instant, but it couldn’t have been. It had to have been a
nightmare.

It
had
to have been a
nightmare.

Well, he told himself, if he was
sleepy enough to dream, he was sleepy enough to sleep, whatever the
weather. He lay down on the bed, shifted in a vain effort to get
comfortable, then closed his eyes.

Sleep came slowly, and reluctantly,
and in tiny increments, but at last it did come.

2.

The world sounded wrong when he
awoke.

Outside the window traffic growled and
murmured and voices flickered in and out of audibility, just as
they always did by day, but something was subtly different, and he
knew from the sound that it was not his usual hour for waking--or
if it was, then something was wrong somewhere nearby.

He rolled over, blinking in the bright
wash of sunlight, and puzzled out the digits on the clock: 11:23
AM. That was later than he had really expected to sleep. He had
half expected to awaken at 7:30, as he usually did, despite having
stayed up until after 3:00.

The thought of 3:00 AM, and the moist
heat that still filled the room, reminded him of the apparition he
had seen at the window, and again he shuddered slightly. What on
Earth, he asked himself, had brought on anything like that? How had
he come up with such a thing?

He remembered the long silver-grey
teeth, pointed needle-sharp, gleaming dully--how truly hideous!
What had he done to dredge up such an image from his
subconscious?

And that hat, that great dark slouch
hat, the brim turned down on one side, how had he dreamt up
something that was simultaneously as frightening and absurd as that
hat?

He shook his head, clearing away the
memory of the face, clearing his thoughts of the cobwebs spun there
by the spiders of sleep, readying himself to face the day--or what
was left of it, at any rate.

Coffee, he thought. He rose and let
himself fall forward in the direction of the kitchen, catching
himself with his feet and transforming the fall into a shambling
walk.

The air seemed cooler; he wondered if
the little heat wave that had made the last few days so unbearable
was over. The summer, and the spring before it, had been cool and
wet, so that when temperatures finally had reached the nineties the
heat had seemed even worse by comparison.

He was halfway down the hall when
someone knocked on the door of the apartment.

Cursing, he turned back to the
bedroom, snatched his bathrobe from the back of the door, and
shuffled toward the living room.

“
Police!” someone called,
“Is anyone in there?”

“
Oh, shit,” he muttered.
“I’m coming!” he called, pulling on his robe as he crossed the
living room. The cotton clung to the sweat on his back.

He heard voices, but couldn’t make out
the words; someone was talking in the hallway. He thought the tone
was one of surprise, maybe fear--that puzzled him.

He stopped and peered through the lens
in the door as he knotted the belt.

Two men in police uniforms stood
there-- and one had his gun out.

He froze, with his hand on the
doorknob.

He could not think of anything he had
done, anything he was involved with, anything anyone he knew might
have done, that could logically account for the presence of a cop
with a drawn gun outside his door.

He’d heard stories about drug sales in
the area, but nothing like that had happened here on the fourth
floor of C Building in the Bedford Mills Apartments, and he
certainly hadn’t been involved in any illegal transactions, here or
anywhere else in Diamond Park. Even back in college he’d never done
anything stronger than pot, and he hadn’t even done that in several
years.

“
Let me see your badges!”
he called through the closed door.

The two cops glanced at each other;
then each, in turn, showed his badge to the lens.

He had no idea what to look for in
determining whether the badges were authentic. They certainly
looked real, as far as he could see in the distorted view through
the peephole.

The door was equipped with a cheap
little chain-lock. He knew that it wouldn’t stop a serious intruder
for more than a few seconds, but he put it on anyway, and with a
tightening in his stomach, he opened the door a crack.

One policeman, the larger one, was
standing at the door. The other, the one with his gun drawn, had
stepped back well out of reach, and had the gun raised--not pointed
anywhere in particular, but up and ready, a black silhouette
against the drab gray of the concrete block wall.

The big cop said, “Sorry to bother
you, sir, but could we have a few minutes of your time? We’d like
to ask you a few questions.”

The cop’s voice was calm, polite,
unhurried--but beads of sweat gleamed on his forehead, and his
partner was still there with the gun.

He was not stupid or ignorant; he had
read of “good cop/bad cop” scenarios. This, however, was carrying
the idea to a bizarre extreme.

“
What about?” he asked,
trying to sound normal.

He failed; his voice was still clogged
with sleep, and the question came out as a hoarse
whisper.

“
Well, sir, that’s hard to
explain. If you could come downstairs and talk to the
lieutenant...”

“I’m not dressed,” he
pointed out. His voice was better this time.

“
There’s no hurry,” the
cop said diffidently. “You can get dressed.”

He was becoming annoyed, despite the
presence of the gun in the background.

“
What’s this about,
officer?” he demanded.

The cop hesitated, and then said,
“It’s a missing persons case, sir. We hope you’ll be able to help
us.”

He was still puzzled. Why the gun? Why
should he come downstairs and talk to a lieutenant, instead of
answering questions here?

“
Who’s missing?” he
asked.

The cop hesitated again, almost
glanced at his partner, and then thought better of taking his eyes
off the open door. “Your neighbors,” he said quietly.

“
Which ones?”

That drew the longest hesitation
yet.

Finally, the cop took a deep breath
and answered, in a voice that almost shook.

“
All of them,” he
said.

The Nightmare People
is available in both eBook and trade paperback
form from various outlets.

About the Author:

Lawrence Watt-Evans has been a
full-time writer for more than thirty years, with more than forty
novels and well over a hundred short stories to his credit. He
served two terms as president of the Horror Writers' Association,
and won the Silver Hammer award for service to HWA. His story “Why
I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers” won the 1988 Hugo for short
story, as well as the Asimov's Readers Award. He lives in Takoma
Park, Maryland, with his wife and an overweight cat.

His website is at
http://www.watt-evans.com.