The Nightmare People. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ cool and clammy. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and stared.

      He was facing the parking lot, facing two cars, an old blue Chevy and a silver-grey Toyota hatchback. He knew the Chevy belonged to Bill Goodwin, the oldest of those kids in C12; the Toyota could have been anybody’s. The sun glared blindingly off its bright finish, obscuring details.

      Beside the Toyota was a Honda Accord, beyond that an old Ford van; beside the Chevy stood another nondescript coupe that he couldn’t identify exactly from where he sat. They were all completely normal; a sweater was draped across a steering wheel, a parking decal from Johns Hopkins was stuck crookedly to one end of a bumper, a Redskins sunshade was propped up behind a windshield.

      And their owners were missing.

      He shivered, despite the sun, and stood up.

      Looking over the cars he could see a police van, sitting in the middle of the lot, the back doors open and a uniformed officer moving things around inside. Beyond it was the other row of parked cars, facing the other direction, and beyond that was the green divider lined with poplars, separating this parking lot from the next, his building and its neighbor from the two across the way.

      The other lot was just as full as his own, and police were hurrying in and out of both the buildings on that side, too. The entire complex was affected, all four buildings.

      He looked for his own car, a red 1986 Chevy Spectrum, and spotted it right where he had left it, between a white mini-van and an old VW Beetle. None of the three had moved since he had parked there the previous evening.

      His eye followed the line of cars out to the left, out to the street, where traffic was zipping by normally, ignoring the crowded lot. The world was going on about its business.

      He turned back the other way, to his right, to the little patch of trees that separated the apartment complex from the unfinished office building on the next street. Sunlight glinted from the new chain-link fence that had recently gone up around the office building, erected hurriedly by creditors when the original builder had gone bankrupt.

      Not that the fence would actually stop anyone; he had seen kids slipping under it easily, all along the back. He peered, trying to see if the new builder had started work yet.

      Something was moving in the shade of the trees.

      He blinked, and looked again. Someone was walking through the grove, straight toward the parking lot. He stared.

      It was a woman, a plump middle-aged woman wearing a flowered nightgown or housedress and carrying a small dog, looking very much like a cliche dowdy housewife, the sort that might turn up on any prime time sitcom, except for one bizarre incongruity.

      She was wearing a hat.

      On a hot, humid day in August, she was wearing a broad-brimmed man’s hat.

      She was wearing a dark slouch hat, blue-black, with one side of the brim turned down.

      5.

      Smith stared silently at her, completely incapable of deciding what to do.

      Then one of the policemen noticed the woman, and pointed her out to Lieutenant Buckley. Buckley spotted her, and called a few orders that Smith didn’t catch.

      Three cops trotted down the parking lot toward the woman; a fourth headed for a patrol car. The woman smiled and waved at them, her little dog tucked in the crook of one arm.

      Smith stared, as the realization slowly percolated into his dazed mind that he recognized the woman. He didn’t know her name, but he had seen her here and there about the complex, walking her dog or taking her trash to the dumpster. Even the flowered nightgown was familiar.

      But he had only seen the slouch hat in his nightmare.

      Had it been a nightmare? He had fought down any suspicion that it was more than that, but that hat— it was hard to be certain, given the distance, and the hot glare of the afternoon sun compared to the gloom of night, and the distortions of a sleep-clouded memory, but it certainly looked like the hat from his dream.

      If he had really seen that hat, then it hadn’t been a nightmare after all, it had been real.

      Either that, or he was still dreaming.

      That was a comforting thought; it could make sense of the mass disappearance. He couldn’t accept it, though. The world around him was too real, too solid. He didn’t sweat like this in his dreams.

      So he was awake, and the hat was real.

      It could be a coincidence, he tried to tell himself as the first cop reached the approaching woman. Or maybe he had seen the hat somewhere and it had stuck in his subconscious.

      Or maybe it hadn’t been a nightmare, but some elaborate practical joke, a false face on a pole held up to his window— but that didn’t make any sense. How could anyone have known he would look out the window just then, at 3:09 in the morning and no other time? How could the face have smiled at him?

      No, a subconscious memory of the hat, that had to be it.

      “Hello, officer,” the woman said. He heard her plainly, her voice bright and cheerful. “Was there really a bomb?”

      “Lieutenant!” the cop called.

      Lieutenant Buckley was already on his way; he brushed past Smith and continued down the sidewalk.

      Smith followed, not entirely sure whether it was simple curiosity that drove him, or something more complex and dangerous.

      The woman had stopped in the middle of the parking lot, the three policemen— no, Smith corrected himself, three officers, two men and a woman— standing in a semi-circle around her, carefully out of reach.

      The lieutenant left the sidewalk and squeezed between two cars; Smith stopped there and leaned forward to listen, his hand on the peeling vinyl top of an old Lincoln.

      “Ma’am,” the lieutenant said while still walking, “What’s this about a bomb?”

      “Well, was there a bomb or not?” the woman demanded. “That’s what that boy told us, who came and got us all out of bed this morning— he said some of those crazy Iranian terrorists had planted dynamite all around the place and were going to blow us up. Did they really?”

      “Hold on, ma’am,” Buckley said, raising his hands in a calming gesture. “We don’t know anything about any terrorists. Can you tell me what happened?”

      The woman stared at him. “Are you on the bomb squad?” she demanded.

      “No, ma’am,” he replied, “I’m a detective, Lieutenant Daniel Buckley. And you are?”

      She considered, and apparently decided it was a fair question. “I’m Nora Hagarty,” she said. “I live in B22. This is Bozo.” She held up the dog, a small gray mongrel with a surly expression.

      “Pleased to meet you,” Buckley said, with a faint nod. “Ms. Hagarty, you live in Apartment B22, here in the Bedford Mills complex?”

      “That’s what I said, Officer,” she answered, her smile gone.

      “Ms. СКАЧАТЬ