Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Not long after, some college girls who claimed they were on a scavenger hunt lifted him out of the grave and untied him, giggling over him and brushing their fingers in his hair like he was a baby; as far as Tad was concerned they were angels.

  He brushed as much mud off of himself as he could, and then went directly back to his father's house.

  But he didn't tell anyone what he'd heard there, lying in that grave. The voices beneath the ground.

  Children's voices, as if they were calling to him to come join them.

  He recognized one of the voices, a kid named Billy Hoskins—

  It can't be. It was just my imagination. I know it. It was just me being scared and scaring myself.

  Billy Hoskins, beneath the grave, had said, "Tad, hey, Tad, hey, Tad, we're coming to get you. All of us. Coming to get you."

  CHAPTER SIX

  A BRIEF INTERLUDE:

  JOE AND MELISSA AND HOPFROG AND PATTY GLASS ARE KIDS —AND THE FEELY BARN IS DARK

  1

  In those days, more than twenty years before the disappearance of Billy Hoskins, the rain tasted clean and good. (Joe stuck his tongue out to catch a few drops. He closed his eyes.)

  "Come on." Hopfrog's crackly voice was insistent.

  Joe opened his eyes. He was standing beside Melissa Welles, whose light brown hair was plastered to the sides and top of her scalp from the downpour. She looked frightened, so he took her hand in his.

  "It's Patty," Hopfrog said, and pointed towards Old Man Feely's barn.

  Melissa squeezed Joe's hand. "Joey," she whispered, and he could barely hear her, so he leaned into her, close to her face. "Joey, I'm scared. What if she got caught? What if he's gonna do something bad to her."

  Joe grinned, shaking his head. "Aw, nothing bad's gonna happen. It can't. We're just lads."

  "He had a gun," Melissa said. "Even if he's not supposed to use it. Maybe he shot her."

  "Old Man Feely, he went inside," Joe reassured her.

  Hopfrog waited at the edge of the gray barn. Three cracked and broken boards created a small opening into the barn. Hopfrog slid another board to the side, and glanced within.

  Joe was shivering. He told himself it was the cold. But it wasn't the cold, and it wasn't just because Patty Glass had cried out.

  It was because he was getting a feeling like he had maybe once before in his life (when a strange man looked at him funny at the Esso gas station when he was about six years old). It was a feeling that someone was talking to him, only he didn't quite know who it was or where the voice was coming from. He didn't like to think about this voice too much because he was afraid it meant he was nuts; and the voice had only spoken once before. Worse, the voice didn't seem to say anything that Joe could understand. It just whispered.

  Suddenly Joe shouted, "Hopfrog, don't go in there!"

  Hopfrog looked at him funny, and then went between the space in the old boards, into the barn.

  "Melissa," Joe said, "something bad's in there. Something we're not supposed to play with."

  "Give me a break," she said, and let go of his hand, following Hopfrog's lead. "I'm not five. Patty may be hurt."

  As Melissa Welles ducked beneath the rotting wood, she said, "I wish you weren't so chicken sometimes, Joey."

  That was it. Weird feeling or not, Joe ducked in and around the boards. When he stepped inside the barn the first thing he did was gasp. The second thing he did was wet his pants, but they were already soaked from the rain, so nobody was going to notice.

  2

  "Holy," Joe was about to say, "shit," but it was a forbidden word, and even though he heard it enough from other kids, he wasn't the kind to say it; but he could think it.

  The barn was dark, except for a ring of light which came from its center.

  Hopfrog was standing in the shadows, outside the light.

  Melissa hung back, waiting for Joe. She said, "What is it?"

  "It's a well," Hopfrog said. He picked up the cross that straddled the rim of the cylindrical opening. He looked at the cross as if he'd never seen one before, and then set it back down in its place.

  "That's not a well," Joe took a few steps forward. When he reached Melissa he was shivering so badly he didn't want to touch her, lest he convey his fear (and he very quickly needed to prove to her that he was no chicken).

  Hopfrog stepped into the ring of light. The emanation from it seemed to turn Hopfrog's rain-shiny skin to gold. Hopfrog held his hands in front of him. They shone. "Maybe its radiation," he said.

  "You're being nuked!" Joe shouted. His voice echoed in the barn.

  Melissa shushed him. She whispered, "Look." She pointed up to the rafters.

  Joe looked up and saw crucifixes and Egyptian symbols drawn in some kind of fluorescent chalk all over the barn.

  "It says something." Hopfrog knelt down and put his fingers on the side of the gold cylinder. "I can't read it, but it says something."

  "Maybe we shouldn't touch it," Joe said. He was getting that feeling again, and not just from fear; he felt a weight in the barn, a presence.

  "I wish you were a little more like Hopfrog," Melissa said, and went towards the golden light. Joe, striking out in the bravery department, hurried over to them.

  He looked down the cylinder; it was dark inside.

  "It's some kind of a well," he said. "Listen."

  The sound of gently splashing water, as if an eel were moving through its waters.

  Joe called out, "Patty!"

  With his shout, the ground beneath his feet seemed to rumble, but it was only his voice echoing down the well.

  And then, Patty Glass, from somewhere down there, said something. Joe couldn't tell what she'd said, but it was as if she'd heard him and tried to say something back, only she was too far away.

  Melissa and Hopfrog were staring strangely at Joe.

  "She fell down there," Joe said.

  Melissa put her hand up to her mouth; Hopfrog's mouth opened, but he said nothing.

  "It's Patty," Joe said.

  And then he knew that there was something behind him, something just outside the golden circle of light, something ...

  He turned and saw what appeared to be a boy taller than he was, made up entirely of blood.

  The blood boy reached out and wiped its hand across Joe's face.

  3

  But this happened so long ago that sometimes Joe felt he had dreamed it, or had not seen it right, whenever he remembered it. He had only a vague remembrance, anyway, of seeing something strange and frightening when he'd been a boy, something that made him not like Colony at all.

  Joe and Melissa and Hopfrog made a pact after that, a pact that they would never tell anyone what they had seen in the barn, because if they did, they knew it would open something up that should stay in the barn until the end of time.

  They kept their vow of silence, but every now and then through the years, at thirteen, and then fifteen, and finally at eighteen, they looked at each other and briefly remembered. But then packed the memory back into the murky area of the brain where all of childhood might be lost.

  By the time Joe Gardner returned to Colony, in his thirties, the memory was a bad dream that was confused with a hundred or more other nightmares about his hometown.

  4

  From the journals of Joe Gardner / when he was twelve:

  This is a story about a boy who is a hero.

  He went into a barn and saw a big well. He was going to save a damsel in distress.

  When the blood dragon attacked him, he took out his sword of fire and drew a line across the grass. "You cannot pass this line," the boy said, "or you will blow up."

  The blood dragon wiped its dark claw across the boy's face and in a voice of lava said, "One day, boy, I will come and get you, but not today. Today you are strong. But one day, when I am stronger, and you have forgotten, I will skin you alive and drink your blood from a golden cup."

  The boy laughed at the dragon. He married the damsel a
nd when the dragon returned, the boy cut the dragon with his sword of fire and the dragon blew up real good. The damsel, now called Princess Melissa, told the boy that he was the bravest in the kingdom. He was known as King Joe Dragonheart and he and the princess lived happily ever after. The end.

  5

  From the journals of Joe Gardner / when he was eighteen:

  This is not the end of it, but I have to leave. I have to get the hell out of this place before I go crazy.

  I have to stop the voices in my head.

  From the journals of Joe Gardner / before dinner, his first night back in his hometown:

  I'm back.

  Shit.

  PART TWO

  COLONY

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TAD

  1

  Tad Petersen was always being shuttled between his mother's and father's. As his mother would've said, "divorce is a bitch," even though he knew that he wasn't allowed to use the kind of language he heard fly between his folks whenever they ran into each other. It was always, "you do this," or "you never do that," between them, so whenever he could, Tad ducked and covered and tried to be invisible. His mother lived three streets away from his father, and still Tad had to stay three nights with his mother, three with his father, and every other Sunday with one or the other. It was enough to drive him nuts, and being eleven was driving him nuts all by itself.

  So whenever he could (or maybe, just maybe it was whenever he dared), he'd hang out in his dad's woodshed, put behind what he'd come to think of as his second home, mainly to stay away from his parents when his mom had just dropped him off and needed to chide his dad about child support or about something from the past that had only just occurred to her; or like now when his dad was ragging on his mom for being an hour late with Tad, or because he had noticed that Tad's grades had slipped a little and whose fault was that?

  Tad was sure that if you put his folks in a locked room with a jar of peanut butter, they'd figure out a way to argue about it.

  His father's woodshed was really just a converted garage, separate from the house. Tad wasn't really supposed to go into it by himself, because his dad always told him that the machines were dangerous. But Tad was approaching an age in which he felt he was smart enough not to turn on the wrong thing. He knew enough not to fiddle with the jigsaw or lathe. Sometimes, however, he went and got a hammer and some nails and just started pounding them into a scrap of wood to make a design.

  He went searching for the jars of nails; there were tons to choose from, but he liked the larger kind. Hammering seemed to eat up a lot of his frustration, and being a particularly frustrated kid, he wanted to do a lot of it.

  He got a small jar with several fat, spiky nails, and grabbed a triangular piece of wood from the scrap pile next to the jigsaw.

  And then, he thought he heard something.

  The light in the woodshed was dim, and outside, the trees of the backyard obscured what little light of day remained.

  It was as if someone had coughed and then disappeared.

  Remembering what he'd imagined at the cemetery, Tad pulled his windbreaker closer around his collar.

  "Dad? Mom?" he asked.

  Then, he thought he saw a shape just beyond the woodshed door.

  He shivered.

  He was sure that someone or something was waiting there, just outside the woodshed.

  He dropped the piece of wood he'd just picked up.

  He could practically hear his own heartbeat.

  "Who's there?" he asked.

  He walked close to the shelves, away from the door. He opened the jar of nails and drew one out. He held it up in his fist, point turned towards the door.

  "Who's there?" he asked again.

  His dad came through the doorway. "Tad? I thought you weren't coming in here again without permission."

  Tad caught his breath, and lowered the spike. "Dad, you scared the bejesus outta me. Is Mom still around?"

  His father shook his head. "She left half an hour ago. I was wondering where you ran off to. And so, I find you in the one place where you shouldn't be."

  "Oh." Tad grinned, knowing he would now have to charm his father out of his sour mood. "There's lotsa places where I shouldn't be. This is the one place where I should be. Maybe I'm just like you, Dad, and will be a world-class carpenter when I grow up. When are you ever gonna show me how to use the jigsaw?"

  "In a year or two. Don't change the subject. This is not a place where you should be playing."

  Tad cast his glance to his shoes. "I know, I know. It's just that when you and Mom start in, I want to be as far away as possible."

  His father sighed. "Well, as long as you watch out for stuff. And we don't mean to start in."

  "I know," Tad said. "It just happens."

  "Sometimes," his father said, a sheepish look on his face. "Sorry about that, Taddo. Hey, you've got mud on your windbreaker."

  And right then Tad wished that his parents had never gotten divorced, that they'd learn to get along for a while just so he wouldn't have to feel as if he were the Dad sometimes and that his mother and father were the kids.

  He wished he could go back in time so that they were all living together in the house again, because even with the arguments and stony cold moods, he felt safer and warmer when both of his parents were there all the time—

  And if he got his wish, and went back in time, he would force them to love each other the way a mom and dad were supposed to. He would make sure it was a happy family where everyone got along and no one fought, and if that happened... if that happened...

  Tad Petersen would probably go even more nuts, because he knew it wouldn't be his parents with him, but some robots or body-snatcher people. The thing he knew best about his mother and father was that they loved to disagree. "Dad?"

  "Yep?"

  "If you love Mom, and she says she loves you, why can't you both work things out?"

  "It's not that simple," his father said, and pretended to be distracted with some out-of-sequence tools; he arranged some screwdrivers and hammers on one of the mid-level shelves. "Sometimes it takes more than loving someone to be able to have a marriage."

  "It sounds simple to me. It's like being in school with kids I don't know or like much. I just decide that I'm going to get along with them, and then, if I try hard, it works out."

  "Marriage isn't like that."

  "Yeah," Tad huffed, "marriage should be easier, 'cause at one time you liked each other."

  "We still like each other. It's more complicated than you can imagine."

  Tad shut up. He knew when to shut up, because talking to his dad about these things was like talking to a wall. He watched his father fumble, trying to reach for the upper shelves where the drills hung. "Here, Dad," he said, "I can get it." He went over and stood, with one foot balanced on the second shelf up. He reached for the smallest of three Black & Decker drills, and grasped it. He passed it to his father, who suddenly, to Tad, looked small and weak and completely helpless.

  2

  When it was closer to suppertime, Tad went inside to wash up. His dad's version of supper tended towards the pizza delivery route, or the Quickie Burgers over on Main Street. Tad preferred those to his mother's almost exclusively vegetarian household. As he soaped his hands, in preparation for the soon-to-be-delivered pizza, he practically drooled, thinking of all that pepperoni and sausage slathered across the thick cheese.

  And then, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  The feeling seemed to freeze him; someone was watching him from the window.

  It was a stupid fear, and he knew it; he already had too many fears. Besides the Bonchance brothers, there was his fear of the dark, and his fear of getting bad grades, and his fear that he would never grow up and get married and be happy. Sometimes, Tad thought he could pick a fear for any moment of the day.

  Even though he knew better, he told himself not to look out the bathroom window. Whatever's there will go
away. Or maybe nothing's there. Maybe it's some leftover goblin from Halloween.

  Finally, he couldn't resist. He glanced at the bathroom window.

  Just the bare trees outside, and the house behind them.

  Tad, wiping his hands on a towel, walked over to the window. He looked out at the shadows.

  He thought he saw something over at the Feely farm, just four houses behind where he was.

  The field and orchard were dark, but there was an eerie light on at the house, and for just a second, Tad thought he saw a face in the light—

  But how can I? It's so far away.

  When he was younger, he had believed that he'd seen a witch fly across the moon at Halloween. But he'd been a baby then, maybe four or five.

  The face was like a jack-o'-lantern, its feral eyes and grin outlined in the light of what seemed an enormous red flame behind the glass of the window.

  How could it be? It was so far away, why did it seem so close?

  "I'm not a baby anymore," he said aloud, and moved away from the window, refusing to believe that there could be anything to see beyond the shadows and the trees and the normal lights of houses.

  3

  Downstairs, in front of the television (watching the video of Jurassic Park, which they'd both seen at least six times), in between pizza chomps, he asked his father, "Do you believe in ghosts and goblins, Dad?"

  "That's a weird question. How's the 'za?"

  "The 'za is excellent. You didn't answer my question."

  "Oh. The goblin question. Well, I don't believe in them."

  Tad thought about this a minute and then said, "Just because you don't believe in something, does that mean it isn't there?"

  His father looked across the sofa at him, but said nothing.

  On the TV screen, a Tyrannosaurus Rex was chasing a man down.