Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  The pictures of her.

  Melissa Welles.

  A girl as bright and lovely as any which had existed. Shoulder-length hair, a sunny complexion, eyes that sparkled with some wicked delight. He could practically hear her: "No, Hopfrog," as he tried to kiss her that time, behind the bleachers at the football game, and then, when he hadn't taken "no" for an answer, she said it again, and pushed away from him. She had said to him, all fire, "You're supposed to be his best friend. I love him, Hop, that's not going to change for me."

  And he, at eighteen, all hormones and confidence and looks and killer cool (and legs—remember those? How they moved beneath you, how they carried you where you needed to go?), had responded, "I have always loved you, Melissa. Ever since the second grade."

  It had come out like that, quick, a gentle breeze of unrequited love, and then it had dissipated in the frosty winter air.

  She said, almost cruelly, "Don't even. I love Joe and that's all there is to it. Hopfrog, I am going to tell you something about yourself that you don't even seem to be aware of. You think that because you're handsome and wild and hip, that you can have anything you want. Well, let me tell you, there's one thing you're lacking, the one thing that you are going to have to spend the rest of your life trying to get, and that's emotional depth."

  At the time (what did I know? I was eighteen and hot) he laughed at this.

  She said, "Laugh if you want. But it's something Joe has, and when your looks dry up and your ego crawls under a rock, Joe will still have it, and more. The only reason that I'm your friend at this point in life is because you are best friends with the man I am engaged to marry. You have been trying to use me to put a notch on your bedpost for at least three years. It will never happen, Hop. Never. Maybe if you'd stop betraying friends, you'd have a few left. Let's at least pretend we get along, for Joe's sake."

  She had seemed all venom then. Looking back, now, he knew it had been himself who had been the snake, trying to hit on his best friend's girl, trying to get her in the sack. The worst thing was that he did love her, damn it. He loved her above everything and everyone else; he just didn't know what that meant. He thought you could simply tell a girl you loved her, and then you got her, because you were Hopfrog Petersen. Joe Gardner, now he would've had a hard time getting girls. He was no prince, just an ordinary Joe, still Baconhead to Hopfrog, a guy who would always take a backseat to other guys. (He remembered his thinking back then, that life was completely Darwinian, that the survival of the fittest meant that guys like Hopfrog got everything, and guys like Joe got whatever was left over. He wished he could go back and kick that old Hopfrog before the inevitable tragedy would occur, but what could you do with the past? Unless you had a time machine, you were stuck in the here and now gazing with futility upon the roads less taken, the narrow-minded path of least resistance, the way of all stupid teenagers who think they know everything.)

  As usual, just looking at her picture pressed tears from his eyes. His head felt like it was melting down. He covered his face with his hands. He took a deep breath. It was the whiskey, that was all. He wiped his eyes dry. He set the pictures down one by one. He had used his uncle's old Polaroid Swinger camera to take them. Melissa at fifteen on the cheerleading squad, Melissa riding a horse over on the House Mountain trail, Melissa giving him a dirty look while she sneaked a cigarette behind the cafeteria. And then, that day, Melissa and Joe standing beside the Volkswagen, looking more in love than he had ever seen any two people be. A golden moment, plucked out of time. "Forgive me," he said to the picture.

  3

  He knew what the "why" meant on the window. At least he thought he knew.

  The why was a question from the dead.

  The why really should've been: "Why did you do it?"

  Or, more specifically:

  "Why did you kill me?"

  4

  The books on his desk: The History of Paramount County, The Sightings, Aliens in Our Midst, Vampires Among Us, The Paranormal, Popular Delusions of the Twentieth Century, Depression and Its Effect on Family, Folklore of the South.

  These, and other similarly titled books, had been his extracurricular reading for the past decade or so. On the walls of his study, photographs from childhood, his and Tad's and his father's, too, as if childhood were the only thing worth remembering.

  In the book, Folklore of the South, he had marked page 173.

  On that page, it was written:

  Another story from the Night of Falling Stars, usually occurring on or about August twelfth, comes from the mountains of West Virginia. In the mid-seventeen hundreds, when a few dozen Mennonites settled on what was then part of the wilderness of the Virginia Colony, it was reported that God, in his wrath, tore the heavens apart and "cast the torches of the firmament down upon the earth," for there was popularly believed to be a war in heaven at the moment. One William Eaton wrote that a ragged band of angels was seen atop the mountains afterwards, and that the Godless Scots-Irish of the area took to hunting the last of the angels the way one might hunt deer. "The mother who suckled her babe was given to much lamentation at this, for if the Scots trapped God's own angels, what was to become of mankind?"

  On page 42 of the book titled Depression and Its Effect on Family:

  It is not uncommon for the person who intends to commit suicide to take with them those they are either most angry at, or feel the most love for, since love and hate, far from being contrary emotions, are, essentially, the same emotion. There are many cases of men who murder their wives and children, sometimes even the pet dog, before turning their weapons upon themselves; perhaps this is a way to stave off loneliness in whatever afterlife they imagine for themselves. More likely, given a depressed and irrational state of mind, it is because these men believe that whatever they look upon is owned by them, and so, by eliminating these others, they are ensuring that no one else will have them.

  On page 133 of the book called Aliens in Our Midst:

  A man named Fredericks who claims to have been abducted in 1982, has this to say about his captors. "They did not at first come to me in their real forms, but as familiar faces so as not to frighten me, I assume, although this certainly backfired, since the fact that I saw my long dead father was more terrifying than an alien could ever be. They showed me many things, most of which I have forgotten through some sort of induced-amnesia, but one thing stuck out in my mind, and that was that these beings did not think of our planet as any threat to their survival, but as a wastebasket of the cosmos, a place which had been used as both penal colony and trash heap since before the dawn of the human era."

  Hopfrog fell asleep that night, again downstairs, in his study, the photos of his youth in his lap, his much-highlighted books as a pillow.

  In his hand, which rested upon the desk, a small rock, a chip from some ancient lava, shiny and rough.

  5

  Usually the booze obliterated the dream, but sometimes it heightened it. It wasn't really a dream, anyway, not in the strictest sense, for it never changed. It came to him, first, like a long-forgotten odor, an odor of youth, sweat, champagne, the choking dust of an old car engine as it coughed to life.

  He was driving the Volkswagen across the Paramount Bridge. He could watch himself from above, as if he were God. He could see right through the top of the VW, all of them, Hopfrog, Melissa, and Joe, squeezed into that tiny car; the rain coming down across the windshield; the truck, an enormous Kenmore that took up the entire bridge, bearing down upon them.

  And the light in the sky, as if an explosion had already happened even before the truck hit them.

  And Hopfrog's hand, tight in a fist on the stick shift, a ball of power on the shift.

  Knowing that he could put the VW in reverse.

  Knowing that he could get them off the bridge and to the side of the road, to safety, in a split second.

  And in his head, like a worm in a rotten apple, the thought (heard aloud in the dream, for in the dream Hopfrog was God):r />
  "I want to die. I want them to go, too. With me. Life is shit. Life is meaningless. Nothing will ever be the same. If I can't have her, well, neither can Joe. Why should they be so happy when life is so shitty?"

  He didn't remember the words coming so quickly and lucidly, but he knew that those had been his thoughts.

  The accident had taken forever, but if you were God, looking down upon the truck as it smashed into the Volkswagen, you would not cry at this scene, but laugh at the shortsightedness of children who think that death is the answer to the problems of existence. You would watch, detached, as the smaller car went through the rail of the bridge, over the edge, dangling for a moment before plunging into the water.

  And being God, and a vengeful one, you decide that the teenager who made this decision would suffer until the end of his days for this foolish act. He will lose his legs, you decide, and the girl he loves, and then maybe you'll figure out a way for him to lose his best friend, too.

  But that won't be the worst thing in God's plan... But hell, Hop, you don't believe in God anymore, do you? Except as maybe some cosmic court jester, ringing his bells and giggling maniacally over creation. You believe in the idiot universe, don't you? You believe that we're all in the dark and nothing means anything—and there's only one thing that disturbs that deeply held belief in nonbelief—

  And it's what happened after.

  The worst thing.

  The thing that keeps you drinking at night and pathetic by daylight. The thing that keeps you reading quack books about devils and angels and aliens and vampires and werewolves, the thing that keeps you shivering when you see your old nickname scrawled across your son's window in dirty fingerprints.

  The memory of another moment.

  When you saw Melissa Welles alive, her face raw, her shredded lips pressed against the neck of the Fletcher's six-week-old baby, drinking as if it were the sweetest juice, making the piglike noises that only the very thirsty can make—you work up a mighty powerful thirst after a car wreck, heh-heh—on a moonlit night, three months after her funeral.

  The baby's sour breath in the air, and the brown stench, as Melissa grins, her teeth, berry-stained and shiny.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A DAY LIKE NO OTHER

  1

  Morning comes up slow in Colony in the autumn; slow and dark and then not dark at all—an easy birth. The sun was very much like the sun in other parts of the country, save for the fact that House Mountain and the Malabar Hills tended to keep the shade going to the west of town until nearly eight o'clock. On River Road there are a few joggers, fewer this year than in years previous, and several strollers, too, inhaling the deep aromatic chill of the Paramount River before going home to shower and change into their work clothes. The Colony Furniture Company, with half its employees since the layoffs in '91, has been operating since six fifteen in the November dark. The woods echo a gunshot, for a hunter is after his family's supper. Machinery turns. Objects come alive: the grind and groan of wood and steel and stone and flesh that is town, all its disparate parts, somehow begin working together again after a long night off. The garbage trucks go first, lumbering down the narrow streets, and then the school buses, yellow and dreaded, with black exhaust coughing behind them as they travel neck and neck with the egg man's long, rugged van and the pale milk truck. The early commuters drive their old beat-up VWs and Chevys over to Stone Valley, or cross the state line into Virginia to work in Westfield. They will spend their hours in labor and thought, and when they return, it will be dark again.

  Fourteen people did not show up for work at the Colony Furniture Company. Their spouses did not call in sick on their behalf. But then, absenteeism at the factory was at an all-time high since the layoffs; too many employees were taking sick days to head over the hills to find more secure work. Andrew Cross, the foreman at the factory, put the absent workers' names on a list and determined that he would make an example of them to the other workers so as not to allow morale to slip further.

  But things had happened in the dark, before the sun had vanquished the shadows.

  The landscape had subtly changed.

  ***

  Romeo Dancer did not return to the trailer which he shared with his wife. She knew he had been out with that Wilmot woman from Westfield, drinking and carousing. Still, this was the first time that Romeo had not returned from such a night. His wife was actually worried that her man had met a bad end.

  ***

  Tenley McWhorter, who had snuck into her bedroom window at two a.m. the night before, after being out with her boyfriend, Noah Cristman, slept late. When she eventually woke up, she was surprised that her parents, who were strict fundamentalists, had not gotten her up for school or yelled at her. She wandered around their small house, calling for them, but they were not home. She followed a strange and rotten smell into the fruit cellar, but when she got to the bottom step, she thought she heard someone there, in the dark.

  She was afraid to take a step forward or back.

  Tenley McWhorter, who had only recently turned sixteen, stood there for almost twenty minutes, terrified, as if she were only six. When she'd worked up her courage, she turned and ran up the cellar steps. After shutting the door behind her, she locked it. She had not seen anything, but the stench had become overpowering, and she was afraid, after having watched the Scarecrows movie the night before, that something like those evil scarecrows were in that cellar.

  ***

  Athena Cobb awoke with a slight headache and turned over in bed, rubbing her friend, Melanie Dahlgren, on the shoulders. Melanie's skin was age-wrinkled, but felt right to the touch. "I need to go open shop," Athena said.

  Melanie smiled, and said, "Not while we have an extra fifteen minutes," and then leaned forward to kiss Athena.

  ***

  Gary Welles never slept, so waking was never an issue with him. He dried out overnight. He'd lain down in the azaleas that bordered the Miner's Lodge parking lot. He'd spent the night staring at the stars and sometimes watching people go by. He knew that it was only a matter of time until it happened again, how his daughter had been mutilated by that boy, and sure enough if he hadn't seen that boy back on Main Street again. Other people didn't recognize that Gardner bastard, but Gary knew him by his weasel eyes. Gary Welles knew that he was coming back to do bad things again and he had to be stopped. Had to be.

  Gary had pretty much replaced the last town drunk, Ernie Craven, when Ernie had gone straight and married an ox of a woman over in Bluefield. Gary begged most of the time, and then his old friends who remembered him when kept him in sandwiches and beer; but he knew it was the Almighty carrying him through. He had a reason to carry on: vengeance on what that boy had done to his daughter.

  It was not enough that Joe Gardner ran off and killed his daughter (no matter how many people called it an accident).

  It was what Joe did to her after she was dead.

  Gary had a gun, though, and he was going to use it. Use it on Joe Gardner, and now he was back.

  Gary brushed the dirt from his heavy coat as he got up from the bushes. He crowed at the freezing morning air, his breath hanging in a mist as if a breath of fire.

  Gary kept very little to himself these days, and so when Don Hoover asked him, in passing, what he was up to that day, Gary replied, "Gonna get me the boy who ruined my little girl."

  ***

  Virgil Cobb awoke in his bed. Alter being up most of the night trying to tend to Patty Glass, he wanted to sleep extremely late, but his habit of rising before nine could not easily be broken. He sat up suddenly, feeling a clutching pain in his chest. It was not his heart; he knew that. It was anxiety from the nightmare he'd been having. He'd been dreaming about his brother Eugene, eternally twelve, standing over him, watching him while he slept.

  He went to wash, then hurried over to his office, which took up one half of his house. When he found her, still there, still restrained as he had left her (telling her parents that she needed
to remain with him overnight to make sure she would not go into shock), he took one of his scalpels and thrust it into the little girl's heart. There was very little blood left in her; he had spent the hour of four a.m. draining most of the blood in her into gallon jugs. Only a very small amount of blood spat out from the slivered wound.

  It was then that she began to howl.

  Dr. Cobb worked quickly and severed her jugular. Then, using other, more effective tools with spinning and jagged edges, he separated the girl's head from her body.

  What he would tell the girl's parents he had no idea.

  He spent the rest of the morning cleaning up his examination room.

  Then he went to wake up Winston Alden, who had slept in his guest room that night, too terrified to go alone to his own house. Winston, who was lean despite all those years of drinking and smoking and stuffing his face to the point of gluttony, slept in his clothes and was yet unrumpled. He was very much the opposite of Virgil: terrified of his own shadow at times, addicted to horror magazines, and very much a child in an old man's body. Winston, barely awake, said, "I should check on John today." He noticed the blood on Virgil's work shirt. "You've taken care of it, then."

  Virgil nodded. "As much as possible."

  "Sometimes," Winston said, his voice almost boyish, "sometimes I've wished it never happened. That we never knew about it. What happened to Eugene. John Feely. All of it. Sometimes I wish I could just die in my sleep—that's how I've always wanted to go, Virg. Peaceful, in my sleep. Scatter my ashes to the four winds. All of that. But we won't, will we? Neither one of us. Since that day, we've just been marking time, like chickens in a coop, until the big guy with the ax comes by looking for Sunday dinner."