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

by Douglas Clegg

  Dash grinned. “No. Not witches. Not Satan. That’s all fairly new stuff. This is older than that. Long before. They’re wise people, though. They know things. They believe that they talk to the dead. They believe the dead tell them things. They know the name of twelve different gods. The real names. The names of power. I don’t know how they do. They knew things about me that even my mother wouldn’t know. Even you wouldn’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Dash said. “There are some things I wouldn’t want people to know. But they knew.”

  “Is it about why you had to leave the other school?”

  Dash ignored the question. “Want to know something funny?”

  Mark shrugged.

  “They told me about you. This was before we met. They told me about that thing you did. When you were eleven.”

  “What thing?”

  “You know,” Dash said. “With the knife. Don’t worry. It’s kind of cool.”

  Dash put his hand on Mark’s shoulder. Felt his breath against his ear.

  “I did something terrible when I was twelve,” Dash whispered. “Something you can’t ever tell anyone else in the whole world, or I will hunt you down and kill you and tear out your heart and cut the eyes out of your face. Understood? We’re fifteen, but when you’re a kid -- I mean a little kid -- you do things without really knowing why. You’re changing. Everything is changing. You have these impulses. You do things because something inside you tells you to do them. I once saw the most beautiful dead woman in the world, lying on the ground. She had killed herself, but it left no marks on her because she took pills. She was naked. I was caught doing something to her. But it wasn’t what you think. Nothing perverted. She was so beautiful I didn’t want to hurt her, even when she was dead and was beyond hurting. And they knew about what I did. They had spoken to her. The Nowhere people. After she died. They had gone to where she was buried, and they’d dug her up from the grave, and she told them about me, about what I did, and they think I’m some kind of messiah because of it, like it was a sign that I was the golden child or something.”

  On the phone, the next afternoon, a Saturday. “I made it all up. None of it’s true,” Dash said, and then hung up.

  Mark didn’t see Dash for awhile, but eventually, Mark saw Dash’s car idling on the street beneath his bedroom window.

  Mark was furious with his father for taking away his stereo because of a drop in grades, and he snuck out the back of the house and got in the car and told Dash, “It’s about time you showed your sorry face.”

  Once, they narrowly missed being hit by a car that was following Dash's car too closely. They followed the car for miles just to annoy the driver.

  They planned raids on some houses, too.

  When a family was out of town, Mark and Dash would go out in the dark, late as they could stand and still feel awake. They’d break in, out in some suburban enclave. They wouldn’t take anything from the home. They’d just get in through some window – it was easy to jimmy one of them open – and just see what the house was like on the inside. They wouldn’t disturb anything. They kept the lights out, and wandered the house.

  Dash said he wanted to see how the people in suburbia lived, what they owned, what they had. Mark once said it seemed psycho to do it, but Dash reassured him that they weren’t doing any harm.

  Sitting there, on someone else’s sofa, Dash would sometimes say some words that weren’t English, and they weren’t any kind of language that Mark had ever heard. He would say a few words, and if Mark asked about them, Dash would say that he hadn’t said anything at all.

  Sometimes, they’d move a book around on a bookshelf. Or they’d put a CD out of its case and put it on a windowsill. Just enough that it might seem curious to the family, returning from a weekend away.

  But this was the worst of what they did together, and it really wasn’t much. Some of the other guys at school regularly shoplifted. Others were smoking marijuana half the school day. Others were doing much worse. Mark assured himself that what he and Dash did was fairly innocent. It really hurt no one. He tried not to think about that needle that Dash had. He didn’t really see it, although sometimes he noticed the plastic toothbrush carrier inside Dash’s green army jacket.

  Although Mark and Dash loved girls and talked about them as much as any other guy in school, they really adored each other. They could’ve been brothers. Before they’d met – at thirteen – nobody would’ve thought they resembled each other. But by fifteen, they could’ve been twins.

  Dash made Mark promise to be his Best Man at his wedding, whenever it happened; Mark asked Dash to be the godfather of his first kid, whenever it came into the world.

  In the Nowhere, sometimes, Mark would say things to Dash that he never told anyone else. When Mark got dumped by Emmie, he told Dash first.

  When Dash decided he was going to kill himself rather than grow up, he only told Mark.

  “That’s right,” Dash said. “Why turn into some corporate robot and end up like our dads? I’d do it with a knife. I’ll become one with the Nowhere. You?”

  “Hanging. The front staircase.”

  “Do it at my folks’ place. In the foyer. From the chandelier,” Dash said. “In the dark.”

  They had a good laugh about it, and then shared a cigarette.

  “What about those people?”

  “What people?”

  “The ones,” Mark said, grabbing the cigarette from Dash’s mouth, “that were in the graveyard. The ones you told me about.”

  Dash flicked on the light. Regarded Mark with a nearly mistrustful look. His eyes were bloodshot. “Listen, they’re dangerous, sometimes. They showed me some things that were kind of nasty.”

  “Like what?”

  Dash shivered slightly. Mark couldn’t tell if he was just joking or not.

  “Just some really bad shit,” he said. “They have these ceremonies that you have to study. I’ve been studying them for a long time now, and I still don’t completely understand them.”

  “Why haven’t I met them?”

  “They decide who meets them and who doesn’t,” Dash said.

  “I thought you made them up,” Mark laughed again, puffing on the cigarette. “To scare me. You told me you made it all up. Remember?”

  “No,” Dash said. “I got a little scared. I was worried they might come after you. The priests of the Nowhere are real. They’re practically holy. They’re really good people, but they do some nasty shit. I’m sort of into what they do.”

  “Sort of philosophically,” Mark added.

  “Maybe,” Dash said. “Give me that cig back, or go buy a new pack.”

  Dash would end the night out in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, spinning the car in the mud, or gliding down an icy patch of road, the back-end of the car fish-tailing.

  All around them, the dark, as if they drove inside their own minds, and the world existed only for them.

  They could talk about their deepest thoughts, argue philosophy, their sense of the meaning of life and if there was one at all. They determined that there was no meaning to life, but to truly enjoy life, they each must act as if there were a meaning to it.

  Their understanding of girls became legendary, as they discussed sexual availability versus the sacred virgin as it applied to the girls they knew; misunderstanding of other boys in school, which manifested in an open contempt for jocks and their football parties; they shared their love for Herman Hesse’s novels and Joan Armatrading albums and this writer with the unusual name of Wacey Crossing who wrote When Nowhere Comes and other books in the 1800s.

  Dash owned three Wacey Crossing books, all short stories, and their bindings were leathery and cracked like old Bibles, and inside the books, people had written messy illegible notes all in the margins and drawn what looked like dirty pictures of naked women with huge breasts in the front and back pages.

  The Crossing stories were about a mystery cult that h
ad survived centuries of persecution, misshapen creatures that lived beneath graves, and ancient ones that prowled the darkness.

  Mark borrowed each of them, and read them thoroughly, enjoying the terribleness of the punishments meted out to those who treated the Nowhere people badly. There were six primary deities in the Crossing stories, all with nicknames: the Devourer, She Who Befouls The Night, Hallingorianang-the-Eater-of-Souls, Oliara-the-Sword-of-Fire, The Swarmgod of the Thousand Stings, The Pope of Pestilence, and Julaiiar the Conqueror.

  Mark began calling Dash the Devourer, and he in turn might call Mark Swarmgod.

  It definitely sealed their fates within weirdohood, and Mark was perfectly happy with that. They dreamed together, aloud, of what they’d do if they had the powers of Julaiiar the Conqueror who came in Shadow and cut the heads off friend and foe; or if She Who Befouls the Night decided to make it with Oliara-the-Sword-of-Fire, what kind of kid they’d produce.

  It all happened when the lights went out.

  Heading down some lonesome road, the headlights off. They’d light their cigarettes, and the world would change from its unsubtle self to some kind of dark wonderland.

  Even though Mark might be in the backseat with a current girlfriend making out and doing everything two teens can do with each other while still keeping most of their clothes on, it was Dash who made him feel as if it were just their world: in the car, on a dark road, with nothing but the unexpected wonders of night around.

  And one night, Rachel Cowan had a big party out at the country place her folks had, a few weeks after graduation, and everybody they knew was going.

  Michelle and Danny needed a lift, and even though Dash and Rachel went out once on a date and now didn’t get along very well, Mark convinced him to go.

  “This is a perfect night for this,” Dash said.

  “Yeah?” Mark asked, grabbing a cooler of beer. Checked his watch: 10:15. “I figure the party’ll be hoppin’ by eleven.”

  “It’s a sacred night to the Nowhere. It’s a night they call Lifting the Veil.”

  “Oh,” Mark said, used to Dash’s tales of the Nowhere and its priests.

  Dash whispered to him, as Mark slid into the front seat next to him, “Let’s have some fun with them. Okay?”

  Mark couldn’t reply, because Danny had already gotten in the back of the car, and Michelle rapped at Mark’s window for him to unlock her door. In her arms, a plastic and wire cage.

  She brought a stupid puppy from her sister’s kennels as a surprise birthday gift for Rachel, who had just turned nineteen, and whose dog had recently passed away.

  “Just a little fun,” Dash said. “For a sacred night.”

  Then, he reached around to unlock the door for Michelle.

  Three: The Night Begins

  Dash flicked the headlights off.

  The night came up like veils of shadow against shadow – purple darkness, black darkness, and the curious ambient light of the earth itself – particles of illumination from unknown sources.

  Reflections of slivered moonlight off distant ponds. It was beautiful, Mark thought.

  The narrow, winding road was ripe with pot-holes and wounds, and the June-fat trees hung low over it – it was a beautiful world as far as Mark was concerned, and he felt comfortable there with Dash in the front seat, their world, their Nowhere surrounded them.

  Mark glanced over at Dash, beside him. Dash in his green army jacket, with holes through out it. Beneath, he wore a black t-shirt. Even in the summer he wore the jacket, his emblem of weirdohood, of not abandoning his outcast nature.

  Smoke from his mouth. The red glow of the cigarette lit Dash’s features. His hair had gone from brown to dark blue with fiery tinges where it flopped around his eyes. His eyes seemed to have a light of their own.

  Dash smiled, showing all his teeth.

  It was not pitch black quite yet, for the moon half-lit the world. Its light, diffuse behind scalloped clouds, hinted the outline of a dilapidated farmhouse with its property cut in a ragged square from the encroaching forest, and a balding fringe of dead trees at the edge of the road before the property. A single light glowed in the house, and it somehow made Mark think about loneliness, despite being there with his friends.

  He wondered what he would do – now that college loomed, and he and Dash would probably grow out of their friendship, as all friends seemed to after high school. He didn’t want it to happen, but there was an inevitability to it – they would move on and stay friends, but lose that closeness, that brotherhood they felt. The farmhouse became a blur as Dash recklessly swung the steering wheel to negotiate a curve in the road.

  Then, the woods appeared again, thick and dark, and another turn, another break in the woods cut by a stream and ditch to the left.

  They passed what seemed at first an empty, desolate field, and there came the moon across it, a white sickle of moon. It was not empty, but was some kind of cemetery – Mark didn’t recognize it at first, but then knew he had been there before – of course, he thought, it was here, the Old Church is here. Saint Something.

  They had been mostly silent in the car – me and Dash in front, our world, our night world.

  Mark grabbed another beer from the back, and nearly stuck his hand down Michelle’s shirt – she was sure I was making a grab for her, but Danny already had his hand halfway down her shirt, and suddenly something stank like a dead animal in the car, and I knew it was the puppy, in his crate. It was whimpering.

  Michelle, after nearly slapping him, reached back and thrust a finger through the small Kari-Kennel opening and murmured, “That’s okay, baby, that’s okay,” then, she reached up and flicked on the car’s interior light. “Some light in here would be nice. What’s this thing with darkness?”

  “Darkness is cool,” Mark said.

  “Friggin’ Goth,” Michelle said; Mark was not a Goth. He was just a guy who felt better in the dark. With friends. In the car. It was his comfort zone.

  “Are you sure Rachel wants a new dog?” Dash asked. “She can’t exactly take it to college with her.”

  “I already talked to her mom about it. Her mom’s going to keep it while Rachel’s at Smith.”

  “She got into Smith?” Mark asked.

  “Last minute,” Michelle said.

  “Where are you two going?” Danny asked, fairly innocently. With the question, came the unspoken: they were a couple to some extent. Mark and Dash were paired in the minds of their classmates.

  “How could you not guess?” Michelle huffed. “They’ve practically been talking about it since sophomore year.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Danny said. “I thought maybe Mark might go to Georgetown.”

  “I didn’t want to go to Georgetown,” Mark said. Then, he added, “Really. I didn’t.”

  “U-Mass for us,” Dash said.

  Mark sniffed at the air. “Who farted?”

  “That dog crapped,” Dash said. “He needs to go outside. Not in the car.”

  Mark laughed, popped open the beer, and reached for the radio buttons. Dash rolled down a window, and the humidity poured in – a gentle steam. He switched the air conditioning up to a higher level.

  Michelle began lecturing Dash on why the puppy was in the car in the first place, and how Rachel had wanted the puppy ever since her last dog was hit by a car out on the highway; and how, even though we were headed for “what no doubt is going to be some kind of brawl,” the puppy would be fine, and when they got to Rachel’s house, she’d let it out to do its business in the wild.

  “Whoa!” Dash cried out, “that was close!” Another pair of headlights, in the opposite lane from them, fast approaching and crossing the invisible line in the road. Dash swung the car to the right a little too hard, and they all felt the car leaning into the ditch on that side.

  Then, back to normal, driving in the dark.

  “Do you really want to hurt me?” Mark began singing along with the radio, which he’d very wisely turned up slightly to drown ou
t Michelle’s whine. “Jesus, nothing but oldies.”

  He punched the radio buttons, but the best he could find was a heavy metal.

  Briefly, he turned the sound up high; Dash reached over and switched the radio off. Then, he switched it back on, and a voice came up that was nearly monotone, “And the angel carried a crown and a burning sword, and sayeth unto…”

  “‘Jesus radio. I love it. Selling God on the airwaves without really knowing all about God,” Dash said, switching to a soft rock station. “I like oldies better.”

  “Look,” Danny said, rising from the back seat. “I think that’s Carbo’s truck over there. Hell, did Rachel even invite the dropouts?”

  “That redneck,” Michelle whispered, as if no one would hear her. “Carbo is such a hillbilly. I’m surprised he ever even got into Gardner.” She drew the little yellow puppy from the crate into her arms. She let it lick her all over her face. Her shirt was still unbuttoned, and she wore no bra. Mark could make out the roundish mounds of her breasts, glancing back at her for a second too long. He found them unappealing. They weren’t as big as they looked when covered up.

  Perhaps it was because it was Michelle, whom Mark found generally unappealing.

  She had a well-bred look, as if her parents had never been in love, but had know that between their checkbooks, their inheritances, and their basic health, they should mate and produce offspring with equally good checkbooks, inheritances, and health. Like some alien life form that must have progeny in order to conquer the earth. Michelle was the natural product of this loveless but purposeful union. He had seen her type throughout high school – she was not a prototype the way Dash was, or even Rachel, who was a true original. She was just one of the herd. Dash had a thing for her, but he said that his interest didn’t go much past the flesh. “She’s a copy of a copy of a copy. But with an especially nice rack,” he’d said at some point.