Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  He shivered.

  And shivered.

  The shivering became exquisite.

  The others, in the dark light, pressed their faces against his skin.

  13

  The sheriff's office had been typically quiet, until Cathy Zane made a bat-squeak noise, which woke Dale up—he hadn't planned on sleeping, but had just naturally drifted off just before three and had been asleep for only a few minutes.

  "Cathy?" he asked. He stood up, pushing his chair back. He went around the desk to his office door. He looked through the Venetian blinds that afforded him some privacy at work. Cathy looked pretty much as she always did: bored.

  She was sitting at the dispatch radio desk just staring at the machine.

  He opened the door. "Everything running smooth?"

  She didn't look up at him at first, but when she did, he thought there was a tear in her eye.

  "They found a girl."

  "You mean the Hoskins boy?"

  "A little girl."

  "Cathy? What's going on?"

  "Dale, 'member back when we were in school, how those kids were playing out at the Feely place, and that girl fell down the old well?"

  "Something 'bout it. It was Ginger Glass's little sister, wasn't it?"

  Cathy said, her voice cracking, "Jud, he found her. Same as if she just fell down that well yesterday. Only...

  "What the hell—that's the most cockamamie—"

  Cathy Zane said, "Jud found her, all bruised, all sliced up as if a wild animal had scraped the skin off her back. Bleeding all over, he said."

  "This I don't believe. It's got to be some other girl."

  "She was on her parents' front porch. Scraping at the door to come in."

  Dale shook his head. He wasn't buying it. Maybe he was still dreaming, asleep at his desk. He went over and put his hand gently on Cathy's shoulder.

  Her face had gone completely white. "They took her to Dr. Cobb's. I guess she's going over the hills to Stone Valley Medical next. She'll probably die." Then, she looked at him directly. "How could that be? How could a little girl from over twenty years ago still be a little girl? It ain't right, Dale, it ain't natural."

  CHAPTER TEN

  JOE SLEEPWALKS & PATTY GLASS BLEEDS

  1

  Joe was in the laundry room when he awoke.

  He was disoriented, standing over the washing machine, looking down into its depths. The light was on. His mother's laundry was slumped on shelves and lay across the floor like debris from an explosion. She was an unrepentant slob, though he sort of admired her for that.

  Joe didn't know why he was in the laundry room. He thought for a second that he'd been doing a wash or something, had suffered a spontaneous narcoleptic blackout. Then, he realized that not only was he in his mother's house, but that it was probably three in the morning, and moreover, he had been sleepwalking.

  A voice behind him made him jump.

  He turned around, leaning on the washing machine. "Aaron? What are you doing up so late, you scamp?"

  Aaron stood there in his Jockey briefs, his legs and torso all skinny and birdlike, his hair all mussed, the sand of sleep at the corners of his eyes. "Daddy? I heard a noise."

  "What kind of noise?"

  "A noise like you bumping into things. I came out and saw you going by the stairs. I got scared. I called you, but you didn't hear me. It scared me. You kept talking and shaking your hand. You walked real fast down the stairs. You were mad. You were talking real bad things."

  "How bad?"

  Aaron rolled his eyes. "Real bad, Dad, trust me. You okay?"

  Joe shrugged; nodded. "I guess. It's nothing to be scared of. People sleepwalk sometimes."

  "You did it before?"

  "I don't know. Maybe I have. Maybe this is the first time I've ever been caught. Hey," he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, "let's go see what Gramma has in her freezer, okay? I bet she's got ice cream."

  "Something I don't understand," Aaron said.

  "What's that?"

  "I thought you said Gramma rhymes with rich."

  "Well, maybe, just maybe I was wrong. That happens sometimes," Joe said, and put his arm around his son's shoulder as they went out of the laundry room and walked across the hall to the kitchen.

  They each had a scoop of Tin Roof Sundae ice cream, and as they went upstairs to bed, Aaron whispered to him, "Promise me not to act like that again, Dad. I don't think my ticker can take it."

  2

  After he put his son to bed again and checked in on Hillary, sound asleep in the old crib—Joe's old crib, in fact, something which he hadn't even realized his mother had saved—Joe returned downstairs to the kitchen.

  He opened the freezer door. There was the faithful bottle of vodka, a family tradition with the Gardners since at least 1966. He had never enjoyed his mother's excessive bouts with the bottle, but at that moment, he was happy that she always kept something on hand for life's little emergencies. He took the bottle to the counter and brought down a highball glass. He filled it three-quarters full. Added some ice. Hunted down some Martini & Rossi vermouth and dripped a bit into his glass. He stood there, looking out at the darkness, and took a healthy sip.

  Don't need an olive.

  He sighed as the liquor crept down his throat. "Went down smooth," as my daddy would've said. "Smooth as cherry." He hadn't had a vodka martini in years. It seemed to take away the conflicting pains that shot around in his head. Something about his mother's house always made him want to drink; it made her want to drink, too. He finished the drink, feeling more than slightly buzzed. He had to walk carefully back up the stairs and was happy that he didn't have to drive anywhere anytime soon. He was equally happy that neither of the kids (nor Jenny) could see how Daddy took care of the throbbing in his head.

  He crept around to his side of the bed, and as he looked at his sleeping wife, she looked like something else. The moonlight through the window was doing something to her face. It frightened him for a second, and reminded him of childhood fears of the dark. How the moonlight transformed ordinary things and loved ones.

  But it was just the light and shadows, after all.

  He slipped beneath the comforter and pressed his head into the pillow.

  Joe fell asleep again. He dreamed some more about Melissa Welles, his first and truest love, and what she said to him, what she whispered in his ear as she bent down over him, with the smell of the grave on her white and shining body, was obscene beyond words.

  3

  Across town at the small medical office, Patty Glass lay on the examining table, mute, while Dr. Virgil Cobb, who had just gotten into bed after driving back from Winston's storefront office when he'd been awakened with the emergency, checked her pulse. Patty's father and mother, George and Aileen Glass, were sitting in chairs in the corner, both looking as if they might be going into shock. The sheriff's deputy was standing near them, a man who clearly did not believe that this was, indeed, Patty Glass at all, but some poor damaged girl who looked so much like the missing girl of years back that her parents wanted to believe in her.

  Virgil was used to being awakened with emergencies, the births, deaths, and everything in between of a small community, but he had not expected to see Patty Glass, as a twelve-year-old girl, still breathing.

  He was trying to stop the flow of blood from the little girl's cuts, but was having trouble. He knew that Patty Glass seemed to have more blood in her body than a girl her age and size would have.

  He was afraid he knew why.

  He did not want to believe the evidence of his senses, that the girl on the table had at least eight extra pints in her.

  As if her flesh were some kind of storage tank for blood.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  UNDERWORLD

  Byron Cheever lay face down on the cold wet stones.

  He could feel them crawling across his back, their thousand sand-dry tongues lapping at his skin. They'd torn the clothes from his back. He now kne
w ecstasy.

  He had been the one.

  Opened the door for them, for the Radiant One, the Light Bearer, the angel.

  He tasted salt in the back of his throat and coughed.

  They had drawn off the skin of his back with their tongues. They were lapping like kittens, millions of small and tiny kittens, at the blood and meat that he exposed to them willingly.

  It was beyond pleasure.

  The pain did not begin until their tongues stopped and his nerves began reacting, his muscles going into spasms, in response to their ministrations.

  It was only then that Byron regretted his actions.

  It was only then that Byron Cheever would wish he had hanged himself when he'd had the chance.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE RETURN OF HOPFROG

  1

  Homer Petersen didn't know what time it was, but it was late. He was up reading, taking the occasional swig from the Jack Daniel's bottle by his side, and scribbling in his notebooks. He wasn't exactly a polished writer; his notebook was barely decipherable even to him. In fact, he wasn't a writer at all and didn't pretend to be one. After an aborted attempt at college, he had been trained in carpentry by his father who had grown weary of his son's promises to strike out on his own. He had begun scribbling in his books with the optimistic thought that one day all the reading and thinking he'd done on the past would add up to something, some key for him, some way of understanding this small corner of the universe.

  He sat at the desk in his downstairs study. Leaning back in the wheelchair, he caught his reflection in the front window. Round glasses, hair scruffy and badly in need of a cut, his lips thin and tight, his jaw set tensely. He needed another drink. After he'd put his son to bed, he decided that one drink wouldn't be bad. Becky still persecuted him about his drinking, now that she had gone AA whole hog. Tad mentioned it, too, sometimes, but Homer could not relieve tension any other way. He'd already consumed half a bottle.

  He looked at the glass, filled with the brown liquid. "A man works up a mighty thirst," his father used to say. "Women, they don't understand what we go through, boy, about the pain and struggle of being a man." Homer saw his father in the reflection, too, and realized that this was how he remembered his father: in his thirties, drinking hard liquor and bemoaning his fate.

  He pushed the glass away. "I'm drunk enough," he said, feeling incredibly coherent for someone who had put away that much whiskey.

  He rubbed his eyes and glanced down at the book.

  Aliens in Our Midst, by P. Courtney Seagrove. The book sucked, as did most books on this subject, and Homer flipped through the rest of the pages which he had not already highlighted, but found nothing of interest.

  And then he heard creaking on the floorboards behind him, near the door.

  He saw, in the window, the reflection of himself as a little boy, standing in the doorway to the study. After a second, he realized it was Tad.

  He wheeled his chair around. "Tad, what are you doing up?"

  "I had a bad dream," he said. He rubbed his eyes and padded across the floor. He stepped around his father, glancing across his desk. "You read too much, Dad."

  "I suppose."

  "You drink too much, too."

  Homer laughed. He was trying to hide his drunkenness. "You're right," he said. This was something his own father would never have said. (Something within him almost wanted to lie to Tad and tell him that it was okay to drink because it relieved the pain of being a man, but Homer knew his son was a little too smart to let that one get by him.)

  "Why do people drink bad stuff?" Tad asked. He was too damned innocent. Homer wished he could keep Tad at this point, bonsai him to never grow up, to never have to experience bad things—even though the divorce had been a doozy, even though Tad sometimes tried to manipulate things between Homer and Becky just to get his way.

  "I guess it may be that everyone is weak sometimes."

  "Are you weak, too?"

  "Sometimes."

  Tad seemed to accept this without question. "I'm weak sometimes, too," he said.

  "Like when?"

  "Well..." Tad hung his head, as if with shame. "You're not gonna like it."

  "What happened?"

  "It happened when I guess I was having a nightmare."

  "And?"

  Tad looked his father in the eyes; there were tears along his small pebble eyes. "I had an accident."

  "Oh"—Homer slapped the air in front of him—"we all have accidents."

  "It was when she looked at me," Tad said. "The girl in my nightmare."

  2

  Homer had adapted over the years to what he referred to as The Chair. It was not mechanized. He not only could not afford the kind of insurance that would've covered that, but he did not want it, for he preferred to think of himself as self-reliant. He had built up his upper body over the years so that when he climbed down from the chair in his son's room, he could sit in the regular chair by the bed and pull the sheet off, wad it up and toss it into the hamper, help Tad blot up the stain on the mattress pad before removing it, too.

  "Someday," Homer said, "you'll stop wetting the bed, Tad. I used to wet the bed when I was your age, and Grandpa did, too, and his father before him. You come from a long line of bed wetters."

  "That's good to know," Tad said, an almost perfect imitation of the way his mother would speak. "I just wish it would stop now."

  "How often does it happen?"

  Tad shrugged, "About every other week. I try not to drink any water or anything before bedtime, but it's like I store it up and don't know it. Can that happen?"

  Homer grinned. "Anything can happen."

  "When I get scared in a dream, it happens."

  "But it's only a dream."

  "Yeah, I know. But they seem real sometimes. Like when I opened my eyes, I saw the lady."

  "There's a funny word for that, it's called hypnogogia. Don't even try to say it. It took me years. But it's when you're half awake and half asleep and sometimes your dream carries over." Hopfrog tossed the fresh sheet to his son, who began tucking it in. "So, when you saw this lady in your dream, a picture of her stayed in your head even when you were just waking up. Sort of like when a flashbulb goes off in your face. You see it later on, only it's not there."

  Tad huffed. "You're treating me like a little kid. Of course, I know all about that kind of stuff. You're not the only one in the family who reads." He tucked the bottom sheet in haphazardly, then threw the quilt across it. "Hey, Dad."

  "Hey what?"

  "If the lady was only in my dream, then how the heck did that happen?" Tad pointed to the window.

  The orange-yellow glow of his lamp illuminated fingerprints across the glass. Not a small child's either. Homer maneuvered back into The Chair and moved over to look at the windowpane. He wiped at it with a Kleenex, but the fingerprints remained. "Is this some kind of trick you're playing on your old man?"

  "Uh uh. I didn't do it."

  And then, Homer noticed the bits of dirt, and perhaps even the dark berry stain of blood, in the prints.

  Someone had written with their filthy fingers on the glass:

  HOPFROG

  And beneath this:

  Why

  Homer looked at the scrawl. It was familiar, but his brain was taking a roundabout route towards comprehension. It finally dawned on him, and it seemed less unnatural than he had imagined.

  Tad said, "So, did I dream that?"

  His father said, "Not unless I did, too. You sure you've not just playing some trick on your dad?"

  Tad sighed.

  "I know you wouldn't do that. I wonder how this got here?"

  "Well," Tad said, "if the lady from my dreams did it, she wasn't scary or nothing. She seemed really nice. It was all the other stuff that was scary in my dreams. The stuff about you."

  Homer turned to his son, feeling a cold chill, and the small hairs on the back of his neck seemed to tickle. He felt his face go warm even while
the rest of him remained cold. "What stuff?"

  "Well, it's what really scared me," Tad said. "But you're gonna get angry if I tell you."

  As if hearing someone else speaking through his mouth while he was removed to a small portion of his own body, Homer Petersen said, "I promise I won't."

  "Okay," Tad said, but couldn't look his father in the eye. He glanced down at the quilt instead. "It was you and some other guy coming after me and there wasn't anywhere to run to. And you say to the other guy, 'He's one of them, he's one of them,' and I kept calling you so you'd know it was me, because you were acting all strange. You had something in your hand, a knife maybe, and you held it like this"—Tad held his arm in front of him as if he were about to cut an invisible person's throat—"and just when I thought you were gonna do it, she showed up. The lady. She's maybe in high school, and real pretty. And that's when I woke up, and I saw her for a second at the window. Whoever wrote that there was looking for you. You used to be called Hopfrog, Dad."

  His father wheeled his chair over to Tad. When he was beside him, he placed his hands on his son's shoulders. "Tad, I'm not angry. I know you wrote this word on the window."

  Tad drew back. "I did not. I told you, it was the lady from my dream." Tad seemed fairly calm. "She didn't scare me or anything. She may be my guardian angel, for all I know."

  Homer was shivering. He couldn't hide his fear from his son. I'm drunk, he figured, I'm drunk and my son is telling me something that might sober another man up very quickly, but not old Hopfrog. Not me. I am jumping in my skin. He continued to shiver even after he'd gotten Tad to settle down to sleep again (and how could that boy sleep after seeing that blood and dirt-stained finger painting on the window? How could a boy who had not even hit puberty have more nerves of steel than a man of thirty-six?); only another sip of whiskey slowed the shivering, and he just about polished off the rest of that bottle of Jack Daniel's down in his study. Homer rifled through his notebook. Where were they? Where were those damned pictures? He found them, tucked into an envelope in one of the more tattered notebooks, bound up with two rubber bands. His hands shook as he opened the envelope.