Coming of Age: Three Novellas (Dark Suspense, Gothic Thriller, Supernatural Horror)

by Douglas Clegg

  “I found it out on the blacktop,” he’d told the guidance counselor at his previous school. “I did not bring it to school. I didn’t threaten to kill anyone. And I didn’t stab him. I held it up and I wanted him to get away from me. He was a bully. He tried to push me. He got cut because he pushed me on the blacktop and then he was about to hit me and I put the knife up between us.”

  Dash told Mark that he was at the Gardner School for something fucked up, too.

  “I have an IQ of 180, so I’m apparently really smart only I’m bored with school already. Why don’t they get better teachers here? It costs a fortune to go here. You’d think they could hire a better group.”

  They’d bonded immediately.

  They both turned up in French class, sitting next to each other in eighth grade. Then, they found themselves with lockers side by side. Mark was an altar boy at St. Peter’s, and as he got his robe on one Sunday, there was Dash, inside one of the confessionals, his head craning out from behind the narrow doorway.

  “Wanna smoke?”

  “How’d you get out here?” Mark asked. Dash lived closer to school than to Mark’s neighborhood.

  “Bus.”

  “I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

  “I’m not,” Dash said. “I don’t believe in that stuff. I was just waiting for you to get off-duty. And have a smoke. I saw you smoke in the stalls at school. I like to hang out in graveyards, and there’s a nice one behind this god place. I was having a smoke, and I saw you troop in with all the other god people.” Dash had a funny rhythm to his speaking voice, even then. As if he were preparing lectures, an old professor in the body of an adolescent.

  “We’re too young to smoke,” Mark said. “And it’s bad for you.”

  “Like I said, I saw you smoke at school. Or at least, I thought it was you. Do you have vices? Self-destructive ones?”

  Mark only hesitated a moment. He had never smoked a cigarette before in his life. “They might catch us in there.”

  “Nope. Confessional’s all empty. Come on,” Dash said.

  He held up a pack of Marlboros. “This is the slowest way of killing yourself. One cigarette at a time, but if you start young enough, it’ll help.”

  “Not everyone dies from that,” Mark said.

  “Everyone dies from something. That’s the problem of life. You’re just going to die,” Dash said. “Me, I’ll get hooked on any number of things if I can. It’s always good to improve the odds if you want to succeed.”

  “That’s like suicide. That’s a sin.”

  “For you. You’re Catholic. You have that whole resurrection of the body thing and the life everlasting, choirboy,” Dash said. “Not that I don’t find that appealing. I’d love to die and then come back. Conquering death should be the alternate goal if dying is the common one. I’d love to be a messiah. It would suit me. Now, come on, let’s have a smoke.”

  In school, they went into the janitor’s closet -- a deep broom closet that had stacks of Playboys beneath a pile of cleaning supplies. The closet stank of Comet and bleach and oil.

  “Just shut off the lights.”

  “Why?”

  “Just shut ‘em off.”

  “Okay.”

  Off went the lights.

  “Listen,” Dash said.

  “To what?”

  “Just listen. Hear my breathing? Now?”

  Mark mumbled something about bad breath.

  “See? This is the Nowhere,” Dash said.

  “This definitely is nowhere.”

  “The Nowhere. It’s a different place than when the lights are on,” Dash said. “Different rules apply. Hell, there are no rules. With the light on, it’s all rules and regulations and laws and order. But with the dark, it’s a different world. When you’re dead, you’re in the dark.”

  “When I’m dead, I’ll be somewhere else.”

  “You think so?” Dash asked. “Now here’s the thing. I know these people who believe they talk to the dead.”

  “Psychics?” Mark said.

  “No, none of that crap. I mean people who actually believe they talk to the dead. They summon them from graves. They believe it. I don’t know if I believe it yet.”

  “Are they in school?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I met them in a graveyard. Manosset has more than just the rocky beach. There’s the Old Church. They were there. Doing a ceremony. They were sacrificing a turtle.”

  “Gross.”

  “It wasn’t as gross as you’d think,” Dash said. “They told me all about the Nowhere. How it changes the world. Darkness. Night. Absence of light. And in the dark, they think they talk to the dead. They have an old religion. Older than, well, yours. One of them told me that people still practice it, only no one ever talks about it. Bands of believers, basically. It’s not so much different than yours. Only, they believe in a messiah of darkness. A savior who comes by night.”

  “You making this up?”

  “I wish I were. I don’t really believe it. But they do. I find it a very attractive kind of belief system. It’s this interesting idea. And you know how I like interesting ideas. And you’ve got this absolute connection between death and life. Bringing back the dead,” Dash said this last part in full old professor mode. Then, he asked, “Do you believe in God?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, then you might as well believe in the Nowhere. I mean, virgins and miracles and raising from the dead. It’s not so far from what they believe.”

  “You mean your made-up people who sacrifice turtles?”

  “Not just turtles,” Dash said. “Other stuff, too. Goats sometimes. Chickens. I’ll introduce you to them one night. Did you know that a man named Crossing actually wrote several stories about their group? More than a hundred years ago. He was one of them. People thought he was writing fiction, but apparently, none of it was made up. I’ll loan you one of his books sometime. He said that the darkness has a reality to it that lets illogic through. Isn’t that a cool way of saying it? The darkness lets illogic through. He called it The Veil.” He paused. Smoking. “It’s not so different than anything else. It’s almost logical. There aren’t any virgins in it. But there are some miracles. Take the streets: lights on. It’s normal. Boring. At night? Lights out. No light. No moonlight even, it’s a place where you make up the rules. You define the space. You create what’s there and what’s not,” Dash said, his breath all warm. “You create what’s there. And maybe it creates what’s there.”

  “It?”

  “The Nowhere. There’s something out there. In the dark. And if you’re in it long enough, it comes out. That’s why they had to do the sacrifices. They told me it stops worse things from happening. You know about eastern philosophy?”

  Mark did not.

  “Some of it is about how it’s all an illusion. Everything we think we see. It’s not what’s really there. And if that’s true, maybe what’s really there is something else. Only we don’t see it because we’re too busy perceiving the crap we expect to see. We’re taught from an early age to see things a certain way, and we name things so that they stay that way. But the darkness is fluid. It defies perception. You know how your eyeball works? How everything you see, you’re really seeing upside-down, only your eye somehow adjusts it back again?”

  Mark had never heard of this before. Sometimes, Dash’s ideas went right over his head; or else they hit him square in the face and gave him massive headaches.

  “Or a rose. They’re not really red. How it’s the absence of some pigment, and how all the other colors are there, and it somehow makes it red? But if you turn off the light, is the rose still red? Or is it no color? Is it even a rose? Does it become something else in the dark? And do you become something else in the dark?”

  “Cool,” Mark said. “But, I mean, I’m…me. I’m me even now. Even in the dark.”

  “Are you? Are you sure?”

  Mark laughed a little.

  “I’m not joking. Are you
the same you in the dark as you were when the light was on?” Dash asked. “Would you do the same things in the light of day that you’d do if no one could see you? Do you ever wonder why people have sex in the dark?”

  Mark didn’t answer.

  “Maybe it’s ‘because they can be something different in the dark. Or maybe they really are something different in the dark,” Dash said. “Maybe right now, you’re not even Mark. Maybe you’re something else. Do you believe in life after death?”

  “Well,” Mark fumbled with his thoughts. “I’m sort of Catholic.”

  “Sorta?”

  Mark shrugged. “I believe some things and not others.”

  “The only thing I believe about Christianity is the resurrection of the body. I mean, I think dead bodies still have somebody in them. Maybe we do them a disservice by burying them.”

  “What, you mean if you didn’t bury a body it would just be fine?”

  “Not saying that,” Dash said. “If you can’t think deeper than that, Marco, I don’t know about you. I just don’t know. I mean, what are those caskets for? They’re like little traps. What if we could all roll the stones away from our tombs after we die? Maybe there’d be more messiahs around. Who knows? Let me give you a rundown on deity. First, God’s name is not God. Second, in the Old Testament, they called him Yahweh or Jehovah. In Greek, Deus. The Greek name for the top dog god was Zeus. Pretty close to Deus, don’t you think? And Jehovah is pretty close to the Roman god, Jove, alias Jupiter. I won’t even go into what I learned about the goddess Ishtar and her relationship to your Queen of Heaven. You don’t want to know what the word Easter comes from, trust me. It would blow you out of that little church world you’re in. God, Yahweh, what have you. And none of these are the names of God, and even with God, there are other gods. That’s why you have this commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.’ It’s because there are other ones. And people can’t say their names because no one really knows how to say the names. They used to. That’s what priests in ancient times used to do. That was their power. They knew the real names of the gods. And naming them means bringing them. Invoking them. And that’s what these people in the Nowhere have. For centuries, they’ve kept alive the name of a particular god. Maybe it’s ‘the’ God. I don’t know. But the name of the god is the power. And the god of the Nowhere is all about death and resurrection and darkness.”

  Dash had been reading a lot. He claimed to have read the Bible three times till he knew it backward and forward, and a book called the Aegyptian Book of Darkness. He spoke of Kierkegaard and Kant and Buddha and Hesse and Yeats and Eliot and someone named Robert Graves and someone named Colin Wilson and about quantum something, and about transformations and chiaroscuro and shadows. He loaned books to Mark, and asked him questions about what was in them.

  Mark found it irresistible, although the books were tough to get through. Only the short stories by Wacey Crossing seemed to be any fun. In them, Crossing wrote about ancient practices that called up creatures of beauty and malevolence. He even mentioned Manosset Sound by name, as if these practices happened there in the 1800s. T.S. Eliot and Robert Graves were a little rougher going, although Mark loved a book called Demien by Herman Hesse.

  Dash told Mark that, in the dark, everywhere was Nowhere. And it was better to be in the Nowhere than in the Somewhere.

  Particularly if you were like one of them. A bit outcast.

  A bit funky. A bit eccentric. A bit different.

  “Nowhere guys,” Dash said. Their favorite song became “Nowhere Man.” They loved to say to their parents, when asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere. Honest. Just Nowhere.”

  And the Nowhere was always dark, and always somewhere else.

  But Mark didn’t ever get to meet these “people of the Nowhere,” as he began thinking of them.

  Dash mentioned them now and again; he acted as if he were getting close to them in some way that wasn’t expressed. He became secretive about some of the goings-on when Mark wasn’t with him.

  “There’s a ceremony they have called the Tempting. Each of them cuts his left arm open and spills it over a newly dug grave. They say some ancient words, and begin chanting something I still can’t make out. They have these stones and they put the words on them, and dip them in this syrupy mixture, and then put the stones under their tongues, and the words are always inside them after that. Their bodies memorize them or something. They don’t even use their minds. It’s weird. And then, one of them becomes possessed by the dead person.”

  Mark assumed it was made-up, stolen from Wacey Crossing’s stories, and as a year or so passed, he grew to appreciate Dash’s offbeat and dark sense of humor.

  Once, together again in some dark place, hanging out, Dash asked, “Do you love me?”

  “Excuse you?”

  “I don’t mean that,” Dash said. “I mean, do you love me. Like a brother. Like we have a bond?”

  Mark thought a minute, feeling uncomfortable with the question. “Sure. Like a brother.”

  “We’ve got to have that bond to make any of it worthwhile. I mean, we’ll get married to some babes someday and do all kinds of stuff, but if we love each other like that – like brothers – than we can move mountains.”

  “Sure,” Mark said, but decided to turn the light on the back porch at his parent’s house.

  He was surprised by what he saw.

  Dash sat next to him, but he had a hypodermic needle in his arm, just withdrawing it.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Dash held the needle up. “It’s not for you. Don’t worry.”

  “You a junkie? Dash? What the hell is that?”

  “It’s not heroin. Jesus, it’s The Veil,” but Dash would not explain further. He took the needle, covered it, and pressed it into a plastic case that looked more suitable to a toothbrush. “See? I’m not tripping out or anything. Don’t freak.”

  Dash reached up to shut the light off.

  Dark again.

  Mark sat there wondering if he shouldn’t end the friendship or talk to someone at school about what seemed to be Dash’s latest self-destructive habit.

  But he didn’t.

  He did what others probably did when their best friends were on drugs – he somehow just put it out of his mind, because Dash never seemed high or wired.

  And Mark didn’t see much evidence of the hypodermic needle again. Nor did he look for it.

  After a few months or so, Mark blocked that moment from his mind. Everything seemed normal, in its own messed up way.

  Dash was his only real friend at school, anyway.

  On a night-smitten country road, Dash would flick the headlights off.

  Suddenly, it was as if the world vanished. They were in a car with the world gone.

  With just a sense of “road.” A sense of “nowhere.”

  Dash started doing the headlight trick before he even had his license. This was back when he had managed to steal his brother’s car and sneak out in the night.

  He’d pick Mark up down the hill from where he lived. Always after midnight.

  Mark would be out there waiting for him, waiting for the adventure.

  “I been here forever,” he’d say.

  “Forever must last about fifteen minutes,” Dash said, giving him a gentle punch to the shoulder.

  They’d go to parties, or sneak off and grab a burger, or find out where some of the other guys were hanging out, smoking, drinking. Sometimes, they just watched people make out in their cars.

  Neither one of them did much wild stuff. Mark even wrote down what he called the Nowhere Manifesto, but he tore it up one afternoon, worried that his mother might find it.

  At the end of most evenings, they just called it a night and Dash dropped Mark off at his house.

  But, on some nights, Dash took Mark to the graveyard behind the old church.

  Mark never saw him draw the needle out again, but he knew that when Dash asked him
to wait in the car a second, he might be going into the darkness to shoot up with whatever he used. The Veil.

  Mark could ignore it. It didn’t matter. They were friends.

  Mark got out of the car, and Dash, up near the church, whistled to him to come on up the path to the graves.

  It was not Mark’s church, nor was it Dash’s. It was older and more of a historic landmark than a functioning church. All Mark knew about it was that the founding fathers of the area had built it, or built the original building that no longer existed. The graves behind it had those names like Goody Something and Sir Walter John Something, but most of the gravestones were rubbed smooth and coated with a slimy ooze of moss and yellow-green muck. A bog, just the other side of a thin line of trees, had flooded the area, so they walked in mud and damp weeds.

  “This is where I saw them,” Dash said. “This is where they spoke to me. They showed me The Veil for the first time. Here.”

  Mark glanced around, but they were alone together.

  “They asked me to tell them my heart’s desire,” Dash said. He went over and sat on a long flat stone. He patted the area beside him. Mark went over and joined him. “They told me that the Nowhere needed guys like me. Maybe like you, too.”

  “Are they some kind of witch cult?” Mark asked, chin in his hand. He stared across the expanse of field and wood beyond the old church. “Do they worship Satan?”