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

by Douglas Clegg

  “Knock knock,” a boy, a junior from the Gardner School, reaches the front door. He draws the door inward.

  A gust of steam. Humidity has risen.

  Two figures in the dark, on the front porch.

  “You’re late,” the boy says, sleepily, not quite recognizing them in the dark. “Party’s almost over.”

  For a split second, the boy who has opened the door has an instinct, but he ignores it. He thinks he should shut the door and lock it, but he doesn’t know why he’d think that.

  And then, it begins.

  * * *

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  Publication Information

  Published by Alkemara Press, in an arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.

  Copyright 2002, 2009 Douglas Clegg

  Cover image by ©iStockphoto.com/Ivan Bliznetsov, used here with permission.

  ISBN-10: 0-9796862-4-5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9796862-4-5

  The Words can also be found in the collection, The Machinery of Night.

  About the Author

  Douglas Clegg is the award-winning author of more than 25 books, including Afterlife, The Children’s Hour, The Hour Before Dark, The Harrow Series, The Criminally Insane Series, Purity and many others.

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  The Attraction

  A Novella By Douglas Clegg

  Copyright © 2004, 2006 Douglas Clegg

  Published by Alkemara Press

  Further publisher, copyright and other information can be found at the end of this ebook.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  Author's Note

  Dear Reader,

  I hope you enjoy this road trip horror drive-in of a novella. The Attraction was inspired by a trip to one or two roadside attractions on the desert highways of Arizona and New Mexico. There is nothing like driving across the desert in the southwestern U.S. and stopping in at the gas station emporiums to see what kinds of curiosities might be on display. Admittedly, you'd never want to run into what's in the back of the place called the Brakedown Palace Gas & Sundries...

  This is a horror story. Sometimes, there's no moral other than: the Horror, the Horror.

  With best wishes,

  Douglas Clegg

  The Attraction

  Watch the desert. It is out there. This abomination.

  Keep an eye along the ridge, over at that mesa, after sundown.

  You can hear it, sometimes,when it’s completely dark. So dark, even the stars have died out.

  In the Southwest. In Arizona.

  Not among the cities and towns. Out where the scrub brush and ocotillo cactus take over the landscape.

  In those places where the tumbleweed blows through like a whisper of the past. The coyotes at twilight on the ridge of a mesa, their ki-yis sing of something sinister, something unnatural.

  And something, at sunset, scuttles along the dark lip of a cave—a crack in the wall of a cliff—some creature.

  Strange things live on the desert.

  Strange people, too.

  I heard from an old man over in town that some dogs got torn up bad out on the mesa, right near where the new housing development’s going in.

  Maybe it was just coyotes, or maybe even a mountain lion from up in the hills, driven down from its home by hunger and thirst, but it didn’t sound like it.

  Someone said that they found a deep hole in the ground where someone started to dig up an area for a new house and a swimming pool.

  Fools. They break up the earth, tear into it, and change it.

  They don’t think there’s anything in that desert, do they?

  They’re idiots to expand this town out there, out where nobody in his or her right mind should live.

  I’ve seen a lot of strange things on the desert. I’ve seen a man who seemed to be turning into a dog. I’ve seen rains come out of nowhere, and from their pools, in the crater depressions of the mesa, strange fish generate from fossilized eggs. I’ve heard of a snake so large that it feeds on wild burros, and of a mountain lion who hunts only children.

  But the one thing that is undoubtedly the strangest in my existence was something that was called Scratch, and lay within a stone box in a glass case inside a gas station’s roadside attraction.

  It happened a long time ago.

  Let me tell you.

  1977. No cell phones. An old-fashioned, pre-tech world, if you will. An innocent world that seemed guilty. A year of death, pardon, disco, and, as the year wore on, gas lines. The death penalty was reinstated with the execution of Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed in the U.S. of A. since 1967. Gerald Ford, then-president, pardoned Tokyo Rose. Jimmy Carter arrived in the White House just about the time when the economy began taking a downturn. Soon enough, gas lines lengthened. It was a strange year of unrest and discontent, and nobody knew why. Maybe it was because disco had become the dominant force in pop music. Who knows? If you were in college at the time, and it was a little private middle of nowhere college in Virginia, in the mountains, you probably wanted to get the hell out of there except your folks were divorced, nobody really wanted you home for the Spring Break, half your friends were heading to Virginia Beach, half to Florida, but the girl you wanted badly was going to make a fast trip to California and get back to campus within two weeks.

  And you owned a car and wanted to drive her out there and back. Four days out, four days back, four days in L.A.

  Not bad.

  It was a crazy thing to do.

  But you were nineteen, hated your life, and crazy was something you needed.

  She was someone you needed.

  “Attraction can really fuck you up,” so said Josh.

  He stretched out on the lawn because he drank too much that night and felt too awful and wished he were somewhere else and could be someone other than Josh, youngest son of a farmer, first to go to college on a scholarship, no less, and further from his dreams than from the stars above him.

  The stars were out in full force—thousands covered the night sky.

  Josh tried to identify the constellations—the Pleiades, Orion, Scorpio—but he nearly flunked astronomy. To him, they just looked like jumbly pinpricks in the fabric of the world. The darkness, with the holes in it that hint at another side, a bright paradise somewhere far away.

  He got drunk from the cheapest beer from a warm keg out back in the driveway, and he stumbled to the front lawn, where girls step over him on the way into the party.

  The party roared—its music and screams spreading out into the night, but he heard it like the ocean in a shell.

  “Attraction can really fuck you up,” he repeated to no one. “It can fuck you up good. You gotta choose the right person. If you don’t, and you choose the wrong one, or you let nature take over so you always pick the wrong ones, it sends you to hell. Hell in a hand-basket.”

  He thought of Bronwyn.

  Bronwyn Shapiro: brown hair, straight, long. Five foot three, wore black too much, smoked too much, no breasts to speak of, but somehow looked more skeletally advanced than other sophomores, wore glasses but looked intellectual instead of geeky, never put up with shit from the guys at the frat, wrote poetry that she considered puerile.

  Josh first saw her: freshman year, Expository and Creative Writing 101, Michael Framington—the short story writer—teaching.

  Bronwyn read a poem about setting fire to her roommate’s hair.
<
br />   Framington called it the worst case of overwrought emotional baggage with the sensibility of a disturbed eighteen-year-old that he’d heard in years.

  Josh wanted to hear that poem again. He remembered the line: "The kiln of her skull explodes; a hundred broken memories burn."

  After class, he dogged her steps, following her to a bench shaded by an oak tree and asked what she was reading. She glanced up at him and shut the book.

  “It’s called a book,” she said.

  “Now that’s a suitably bitchy thing to say,” he said.

  She took a drag on her cigarette, narrowing her eyes as she looked beyond him. “You know, when I’ve noticed you in class, I always thought you were a loser. Now you’ve just confirmed it for me,” she said. “Please leave.”

  And that was the moment he felt that he had to have this woman in his life no matter what.

  A year later, lying on the grass, looking up at the stars, Josh wished she were with him.

  Bronwyn sat on the stairs, nursing a beer, and wishing she were anywhere else but in a frat house the night after second semester finals.

  “See him?” she nudged her friend Alli. Her target was Mitchell Sloane, from Poughkeepsie, New York, wearing his cardigan and khakis, vodka gimlet in one hand, cigar in another. “He’s a classic closet case. His friends think he’s male bonding or something, but look at how he’s sizing up Joe Welsh. He wants to plant a big wet one on Joe’s puss.”

  “Half this frat are closet cases,” Alli said.

  “How’d you do on the accounting final?”

  “Okay, I think.”

  “I bit the dust,” Bronwyn said. “I thought that last question about debits and credits was a trick question. I wrote a note to Jones that he was trying to trick us on the final and that the answer was that it was impossible. I think I just flunked. Look at him.” She pointed with the bottle toward Dave Olshaker. “He’s pathetic. He’s looking for Tammy Detweiler.”

  “The hose queen,” Alli said.

  “Exactly. He thinks because he gets a boner when he looks at her that she must love him.”

  “Detweiler’s incapable of love.”

  “So’s Olshaker. Maybe they’re made for each other. Besides, Olshaker’s a psycho, and him,” Bronwyn’s bottle tipped over to a guy with filthy long hair and dirty jeans and a stained t-shirt.

  “He looks like a scrappy dog.”

  “Ziggy. He’s just looking for weed. He dropped acid seventeen times before he was eighteen. You can be declared legally insane for that. He’s legally insane too many times over. But hell, he’s got a light. I need a light.”

  “Where’s Griff?” Bronwyn asked, leaning over Kathy Emmons to light her cigarette from Ziggy’s magical torch.

  Ziggy gave a blank look. “No idea.”

  “God, this cigarette tastes like shit.” Bronwyn took another drag off the cigarette, and then stubbed it out against the wall of the frat house. “He’s with her, isn’t he?”

  Kathy nodded. “Of course.”

  “Damn it,” Bronwyn said, and then let out a vile string of profanity, but her curses couldn’t be heard above the thud of the music on the floor below. She lit another cigarette.

  “Let’s get high,” Ziggy said.

  “You’re already high." Bronwyn sucked at the cigarette. A cloud of smoke surrounded her face for just a moment. ". Give up the drugs, Ziggy. I’m telling you. You are going to mess your entire life up and maybe even your chromosomes so your future wife might have turtle babies someday. You’re going to end up in rehab anyway. Just stop now. ‘High’ is not the natural state for human beings. Low is. Get low. Low is good.”

  “I want to get high,” Ziggy said, as if he hadn’t heard a word. He glanced aroundt others, and then wandered off claiming that he’d left a bong somewhere in the kitchen.

  “Why are you obsessed with Griff?” Kathy asked. “He dumped you.”

  “Not true,” Bronwyn said. “I dumped him.”

  “Okay. Either way, a dumping was had by all. Many moons ago.”

  “I don’t give a damn about him,” Bronwyn said. “I just don’t get what he sees in Tammy. Jesus, she has him, and Olshaker wants her back. What is it about her? She’s the poster girl for the living dead. Is it just boobies? Is that all boys are about? Boobies?”

  Kathy cocked her head to the side. “I think so.”

  “Yeah, sadly, sometimes I think so, too,” Bronwyn said, her cigarette nearly gone to ash. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t give a damnYou know, I am just about done with giving a damn.”

  SHE SNUBBED IT OUT ON THE WALL BUT NOW IT IS NEARLY ASH

  A room upstairs in the frat house. Smell of beer and sex in the room. Tammy Winthrop on top of Griff Montgomery. His pants around his ankles, which dangle over the edge of the slender bed. His starched white button-down shirt open at the chest.

  Tammy’s jeans on the floor, her tank-top half-pulled up around her neck, the small gold cross that hung from her neck bouncing up and down as Tammy’s thighs wrapped around, obscure and engulf Griff’s dong in the kind of banging that led college boys to believe that sex would always be like this—wild and free and stinking of marijuana and tequilas and ripe breasts like plums, no, like great melons bobbling, and pleasure that was urgent and wonderful and eternal and kind of skanky. He loved the stink of sex in his bed after they did it. He loved the way she looked when he was inside her.

  “God, do you feel my dong?” he asked, too loud.

  “Uh?”

  “My wang. My big boy. Do you feel it? I feel like…like I’m God or something. It feels so big.”

  “Uh,” Tammy muttered, “uh sure.”

  “Don’t you like it? Tell me how much you like it.”

  “Oh yeah, I like it. I love it.”

  “Say it.”

  “No. You know I don’t want to.”

  “Aw, please. Baby. It does so much for me.”

  “Okay. Okay. Your dick. Your cock. Your…wang. Your wang is so good.” She began giggling a little, but he didn’t notice.

  “Oh yeah. Oh yeah!” he groaned against her ear as she leaned into him.

  “It’s the biggest one I ever had. It’s the biggest. I don’t know if I can take it all. Oh,” she whispered. “Oh.”

  In her head, Tammy was thinking about how she worked too hard and how he needed to move around some more.

  In his head, Griff was thinking about two other girls at school, and pretending that it was both of them, kissing him, taking him into themselves, flicking their tongues all over him, and whispering obscenities like they were good luck charms.

  Outside of both their heads, they thrashed, and finally, they fell over on the floor, a heap in the heap of dirty laundry that Griff left there.

  She didn’t kiss him afterward, but got up, pulled on her panties, and looked in the long mirror on the door to his room and said, “I think I’m getting fat.”

  Griff, lying on the dirty clothes, some of which bunched up uncomfortably under his lower back, considered whether or not he should shower.

  Without saying another word, he bounded out of bed, grabbing a towel from the heap of dirty clothes in the corner by the dresser. Then, picked up his shirt, jeans, and briefs. Gave her a wink, and a too-brief hug, and went out into the hall.

  In the shower, one floor down from his room, Griff took the Ivory Soap and scrubbed away because there’s this smell that Tammy had that he couldn’t stand and when it got on him, it reminded him too much of his mother’s closet where he used to hide, and he hated that smell.

  Then, he thought of someone else, someone other than Tammy, and he got hard again.

  “You whore,” Dave Olshaker said. He stood in the doorway of Griff’s room. He’d been waiting on the stairs, and when he saw Griff run out to the showers, he knew he had his chance. Slammed the door shut behind him. Reached back, and twisted the bolt.

  He was a big guy, maybe 240, six five, like L’il Abner in overalls and a white t-shirt, a townie wh
o had a scholarship to Jackson College, and he looked, to Tammy Detweiler, as pissed as anyone could be. He turned his back to her for a second, fiddling with the lock on the door.

  “Dave? What the hell are you doing in here?”

  “You slept with that asshole,” Olshaker said, turning around to face her. “You told me you loved me.”

  “That was last year. Dave? Get the hell out of here. I’ll scream.”

  “You won’t. You can’t do this to me. You whore. You know I gave you my heart. And now you’re just stomping all over it. Look, look, I forgive you. Okay? I forgive you for your transgression, baby. I do. I love you that much.”

  “You aren’t gonna forgive me for anything. Now get the hell out of here, right now.”

  Tammy leapt out of bed. S, forgetting that she was bare-ass naked, but she felt like trying to find the gun that Griff kept. She was pretty sure he kept it in the top drawer of his dresser. He wasn’t supposed to have it, but then, in college, you weren’t supposed to have a lot of things you ended up having.

  SHE PULLED HER PANTIES ON EARLIER BUT NOW IS NAKED

  Olshaker rushed her, grabbing her by the wrists. “Just come back to me. Just tell me.”