Minor details, such as Nora Hagarty’s hat and Mrs. Malinoff’s knee, had seemed strange after everybody came back.
That night he’d again seen something bizarre at his window.
That was it, so far— four things out of the ordinary. Were they related?
The two apparitions were obviously connected, since they involved the same monstrous face. And Nora Hagarty and Mrs. Malinoff and Walt Harris were tied in by the second apparition, as well.
The connection to the mass disappearance was less definite.
And what had really caused the disappearance?
If it had really been a prank, why hadn’t he been included?
He could make guesses, and he did.
He might have been skipped by a prankster because, exhausted from staying up so late, he had slept too heavily to be awakened by knocking at his door.
Nora Hagarty had said the boy came around at about five, when he would have been asleep for roughly an hour and a half. He would have been deeply asleep.
But why was everyone else so easily awakened? If they were taking it seriously enough to rouse everyone, how had he been skipped?
And how did it relate to the apparitions and the general strangeness?
Could somebody be playing an absurdly elaborate prank on him, and him alone?
What if the faces at the window had been faked, somehow? Special effects could do amazing things, he knew.
What other explanation could there be for a face hanging thirty feet in the air?
Suppose that Nora Hagarty and Mrs. Malinoff and Walt Harris had decided, for some perverse reason, to frighten him. Suppose they had somehow projected that inhuman face on the outside of his window, using some sort of movie or hologram.
That would account for how it could reach a fourth-floor window, and how it could vanish so mysteriously, without leaving a trace.
For the second apparition, they could have used a live actor in make-up, and the four of them could have just ducked away around the corner, or into the next room, when he started screaming, before the clerk could see anything strange about them.
The slouch hat and the strange smile would be easy little teases. The red gleam from Mrs. Malinoff’s eyes— that could be colored contact lenses.
The knee that didn’t creak was harder to explain. Some sort of special treatment, perhaps?
He had no idea what caused creaking joints in the first place, so he couldn’t even guess at what would cure them.
What about the disappearance, though? How did that tie in?
It might be coincidence— or it might be that the pranksters, Hagarty and Malinoff and Harris, had done that, too, hiring some kid to go around and wake up everybody except that guy in Apartment C41, with the story about Iranian terrorists.
It could have happened that way. He told himself that. It could have.
And didn’t an elaborate practical joke make more sense than some sort of needle-toothed monster hiding behind Mrs. Malinoff’s face?
His hand shook slightly as he sipped his coffee.
If that was done with special effects, they were damn good, he thought. It had been totally convincing.
Although, he added mentally, he had been tired, it had been dark out on the balcony, he had been caught by surprise— maybe it hadn’t been that hard to fool him.
Why would anyone want to play such a trick on him, though? Why go to such incredible lengths?
He shook his head, and sipped coffee again. It didn’t make sense.
He knew that he had annoyed Walt Harris sometimes, by playing his stereo too loudly. He knew that Mrs. Malinoff distrusted him because he was relatively young and because he worked with computers, which she hated and feared. Why, though, would they go to such fantastic trouble?
And what had he ever done to Nora Hagarty?
He shrugged that question off easily enough; the other two could have brought her in for money, or the sake of a friendship, or just for fun.
Maybe the three of them— or four, if whoever had worn the grey make-up and fake teeth was one of them, and not a hired actor— were a little gang that did this for kicks.
Maybe they’d even done it before. Maybe, if he knew more about them, he would find out that they’d pulled any number of stunts on other people.
His eggs finally arrived, and he cut a piece with his fork as he considered that.
The whole thing could be the work of three or four middle-aged tricksters.
It could be. He reminded himself that he hadn’t proven anything with all his clever theorizing. It could be tricksters.
Or it could be that the monsters were real.
2.
He didn’t like the idea of real monsters lurking outside his windows, but they had certainly looked real. The true skeptic, he remembered reading somewhere, doesn’t take anything on faith, and that includes the non-existence of the supernatural, just as much as its existence.
Suppose, then, that the monsters he saw were real. How did that fit the facts?
He sopped up some runny yolk and lifted the fork to his mouth as he thought that over.
If the monsters were real, then they presumably had some unusual abilities, in order to appear outside a fourth-floor window and vanish so abruptly.
If the monsters were real, then Nora Hagarty and Mrs. Malinoff were monsters— he had seen that with his own eyes. That would explain the hat and the eyes.
The knee could be explained by assuming that Mrs. Malinoff— the real Mrs. Malinoff— had been a normal human being, and had been replaced by a monster in her shape.
Walt Harris could be a monster, or could be a human being working with the monsters. His face had never displayed any inhuman characteristics.
What about the disappearance?
He dabbed a bit of yolk off his chin as he considered that.
The monsters had been responsible, he supposed. The fact that everything at Bedford Mills had seemed perfectly normal on Tuesday, but on Wednesday everyone had vanished temporarily and when they came back at least two of them were no longer human, certainly seemed to imply…
He stopped at that point, his fork dangling from one hand, his napkin in the other.
What on Earth was he thinking? This was like something out of a horror movie. “…two of them were no longer human…?”
But he had seen the monsters. He had seen that hat, and Mrs. Malinoff’s smile. All his neighbors had vanished.
He clenched his jaw for a moment and told himself that he would think it through, no matter how ridiculous it sounded.
Suppose, then, that all his neighbors had been herded away by the monsters, and that when they came back some of them had become monsters.
Why had he been neglected? Because he slept too soundly?
Wasn’t anybody else in the entire complex a sound sleeper?
And why wouldn’t the monsters have found some way to awaken him, if that was what they wanted?
Another possibility occurred to him, and suddenly seemed to make far more sense.
What if the monsters had not come at five in the morning, but at three?
What if he had been skipped not because he was asleep, but because he was awake? Because he had seen the thing outside his