Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  "Your mom?"

  "She took some pills and fell asleep. She claimed that she'd be fine if she got some rest. I feel a little guilty running out the door, but Jenny was okay with it." Then, turning to Tad, "I wish I'd dragged Aaron down to meet you, Tad."

  Tad, finishing his hamburger quickly, looked at his father and then at Joe, as if scrutinizing them. He said, "Mom says that whenever you two get together, it's all she can do to keep from jumping out a window."

  All three of them laughed. "Well, it's true," Joe said.

  Tad shook his head. "I like it. Dad doesn't have any friends, not really. Only me, and I don't count 'cause I'm blood. I'm really happy he has a best friend."

  Later, after a couple of beers and talk about family and work and places traveled, Hopfrog turned to Joe and said, "I have to ask this, even though I'm not sure I want to."

  "Shoot."

  "Did you come back because of what happened?"

  Joe looked a little confused. "I came back because of my mother."

  Hopfrog wasn't buying this. "No, you didn't. You came back because what's here—monster, it, thing, demon—wanted you to come back."

  "Hop? What are you talking about?"

  Now Hopfrog felt a little angry. He said, "Don't play games with me on this, Joe. Remember? That night? When you convinced me that we'd find it empty—remember?"

  Joe said, "I don't know what you're..." and then stopped himself. Joe glanced at Tad, who was watching him. "I don't know if we should talk about this right now."

  "It's okay, Joe. Tad saw her last night. I didn't really believe him, not 'til this morning when I found this." Hopfrog reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a shred of silk fabric. He passed it to Joe.

  Joe took it in his hand and turned it over. "Any number of women might wear this..."

  Hopfrog shook his head. "Don't even start. You know and I know. What, you move away and you forget everything?"

  Joe didn't answer for a minute or more. He seemed to forget where he was. He finally looked up at Hopfrog. "It's that I thought I was crazy for a little while back then. That's why I never came back 'til now. I thought I was crazy. Like people I know have been mentally ill. Like it runs-in-families kind of crazy. I didn't want to get crazy again, not like that. I didn't want to believe it had happened."

  "Believe it," Hopfrog said. "She's out again."

  Tad, who had been pretending to finish off his 7-Up, looked at each of the men, first his father, and then Joe Gardner, as if they were speaking a foreign language.

  "Are you talking about that ghost I saw?" Tad asked, looking at his father, then to Joe.

  And then, he told them. Not just about the girl he saw at his window, but about the newly dug grave at Watch Hill, when he thought he heard Billy Hoskins calling to him from underground. When he was through talking, Tad had worked up a sweat because it frightened him more just remembering than when it had happened.

  Both of them were staring at him in a way that made Tad aware that he hadn't just imagined any of this. That it was as if Halloween had never ended.

  Joe said, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God."

  "What is it?" Hopfrog asked.

  Joe said, "I can hear her again. She's talking to me."

  "Who?"

  Joe's face went completely white. "Melissa."

  7

  What might have been the voice of Melissa Welles, long dead, or what might have been a thread of insanity in Joe's head whispered,

  Welcome home, Joe, we've all been waiting for you for a long, long time.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FAMILY

  1

  At Anna Gardner's house, Jenny had just finished getting Hillary fed and to bed. Aaron was up watching television. Jenny was emotionally wrung out from the trip, and was half wishing that Joe had accepted her offer to turn around and go home. Not this place, but our real home, back in Baltimore. She had been aware when they'd planned this trip that it might be stressful, but she had had no idea how exhausting it would be. Jenny was used to carrying the brunt of the labor, after having practically raised her five siblings, so working at the Weekly, raising the kids, and keeping house were the norm, but when she had to coddle Joe, too, sometimes it drove her a little nuts. She had been hoping for a brief vacation, these four days, but given both the internal and external weather, it was beginning to look like this patching up of family bonds would be a whole new career.

  She went downstairs and plopped down on the sofa beside Aaron. A mindless comedy was on the tube about a family which had the kinds of problems you could solve in thirty minutes or less; it was relaxing. She fell asleep and then awoke again. The same show seemed to be on; she glanced at Aaron. He looked over, too, and smiled.

  She felt warm.

  "What time's it?" she asked.

  He shrugged. "How should I know?"

  "Where's your watch?"

  "Upstairs."

  "I think it's late."

  "It can't be. This show's over by nine thirty."

  "Okay," she said, and fell asleep again without wanting to. Her whole body seemed to fall down on feathers. She heard the voices from the television as if in a newly born dream.

  When she awoke again, the television was still on. The room was dark but for the blue and white flashes from the TV screen. Jenny rubbed her eyes. Aaron was no longer on the sofa with her. Where he'd been sitting, the crease from his body as if he'd only moments ago gotten up from the cushion. She yawned and stood up. Rain battered the windows; lightning sounded like bombs blasting over the river. She sleepily walked to the kitchen. Poured herself a glass of water and drank it. She looked out at the lit porch, the rain, the flashes of lightning.

  Something was moving outside, just beyond the porch light. Something like several men hunched together, forming one large shadow in the rain.

  It's the lightning.

  She checked the kitchen clock. It was only quarter to ten. Not all that late for Joe to be out with his friend. Again, she looked through the window. The shadow of something passed, fluttering, across the incandescent lightbulb on the porch.

  The light went out.

  My imagination, she thought. But Jenny was not given to wild imaginings or to seeing things that weren't there. She was sometimes too practical, too commonsense oriented, but not given to seeing specters where there weren't any.

  "You need to replace the bulb on the front porch," she would tell Joe in the morning, "It burned out last night in the storm." She would tell that to him, and then it would seem silly that she had ever been scared about some kind of shadow on the porch that had covered the lightbulb.

  The lightning flashed. It reflected out on the river and illuminated the night.

  And there, on the porch, stood a teenager, she thought, maybe a very young man, his hair white and snaking out from his scalp in a static wind, his naked torso tattooed with swirling designs. He was looking directly at her in the darkness of the kitchen, trying to shout over the crash of thunder.

  Jenny Gardner suddenly felt cold, as if her body temperature had dropped several degrees in just a few seconds.

  2

  Aaron couldn't sleep through the thunder, as much as he tried, pulling the pillow over his head. His usual solution to this was to go bother Hillary—in some respects he had never gotten over the idea that she was his own private toy, to tease and annoy to his heart's content. He slipped out of bed and padded over to the guest bed.

  He sat at the edge of the bed, staring at the shadowy form of his sister in the dark, the occasional flashes of lightning illuminating the room. "Hey, Pipsqueak."

  Hillary woke up, annoyed, making her snarfling noises.

  "I said hey, Pipsqueak."

  "What you want?" she asked in her authoritarian princess voice. "Leave me alone."

  He giggled. For a baby, she was so haughty when it came to him. "I can't sleep. You want to play some games?"

  She shook her head. "I tired."

  "We can play hide an
d go seek," he said.

  Then, a flash of lightning lit up the room, and Aaron thought he saw someone on the other side of the window, a boy just like him, with his eyes wide, his skin blue, his hair matted.

  3

  Anna Gardner slept soundly, until the lightning was so bright that it jolted her awake. She sat up, feeling her heart racing a mile a minute, and reached for the pills at her bedside table.

  As she reached, she felt a chill—someone had opened the window, rain was pouring in.

  Her pills were not there, and as she groped around the table in the dark, someone grabbed her hand.

  It was as if she'd stuck her hand into a hornet's nest.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BYRON

  He owned the night. He owned this house, too, this woman who looked out at him, he owned everything in it. He was not just Byron Cheever, oh, no, he was the lord of the dark—he had already taken others, women, men, children, taken them to the Radiant One, watched while their blood was drunk, tasted the warm liquid and rolled it between his tongue and cheek, the warm, shooting blood. He felt that surge of power that only a god could feel, the energy flowing through him—the electricity of life as it drained from the human body!

  There were no words for it—all those years of his education had been shit, piles of meaningless shit. His mind had been opened and lit with the fires of his master, and when the children had drunk some of his own blood and eaten half his flesh, tattooing onto him their stories, their histories and legends, he had known all about them, all about the evil which had been perpetrated against his master, all the evil these blood holders had done in the name of their vanity.

  The crosses, the hieroglyphs, the incantations, to keep his master down in the prison.

  But now. Now!

  He shouted against the thunder, "I will tear your flesh open and drink your holy wine, bitch!"

  The woman must've heard him, the woman at the kitchen window, for she wore an expression of terror.

  He danced across the porch, and when the others came up to him, he knew that this would be the night of blood, and all creatures of darkness would rejoice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HOPFROG'S RESEARCH

  1

  Joe and Hopfrog drove in their separate cars back to Hop's house after supper. Tad went into the den to play video games while the two men settled into the study.

  "I wasn't sure how much to say in front of your son," Joe said.

  Hopfrog shrugged. "I don't think he needs to know the gory details, but he is the one who saw her. I tried to make him think it was a nightmare, but I know differently. I don't believe it was actually her, either, Joe. I don't believe it was ever really her. I would call this an It, for lack of a better term."

  "We called it vampire back then," Joe said. "You know what she said to me at the pub? She told me that she was faithful all these years. Waiting for us. Not just me, but you, too."

  Hopfrog's mind seemed to be somewhere else for a moment. "Vampires. We were so influenced by horror movies. I have my own horror movies, made in the past ten years, Joe." Hopfrog wheeled over to the small television at the edge of his desk, and pushed a button on the VCR beneath it. The screen came up blue. The word "play" appeared and then disappeared on the screen. A static picture of what seemed darkness began to move, as bright lights trembled.

  Hopfrog's voice said, "All right, before I get put away by my wife, I decided to go down here a ways. Don't try this at home, kids, especially if your legs don't work."

  The camera was moving and it was apparent that Hopfrog, filming this cave, was sliding down the shaft, clutching the camera and shoving some kind of brilliant light along beside him.

  "I am going down into the mine. I've got my ropes on, and God willing, I'll make it. There," he said, and the camera and lights suddenly swung out to the wall of the cave.

  When the picture came into clear focus, it was a close-up of the rock wall. There were scratches and dark stains all over it. Hopfrog's hand came into the picture and touched the wall.

  "They were trying to get out. It's had others, too. Maybe the dragon still manages to get others."

  "The dragon," Joe whispered.

  As the camera got closer, as it zoomed in on the rock wall, and as the light brightened, something else was there, besides the scratches and the stain.

  It was the formation of the wall, like a bas-relief, the images of children's faces as if pressing from the other side of the wall, trying to move outward.

  Hopfrog pressed the freeze-frame button on the VCR. "It is something beyond what we thought, Joe. I don't think it's a vampire in the mythic way. I think it's some kind of other species living beneath this town. See those faces? Can you identify any of them?"

  Joe looked closely at the television, but the children's faces were so out of focus it had taken a leap of faith to even believe that these represented real children.

  "The one to the left." Hopfrog pointed to the screen. "Patty Glass. Remember? Look at the bridge of the nose."

  "So, what are you saying, Hop? That Patty Glass was embedded in rock? That she's a fossil?" Joe actually had to laugh. "That something is down there which makes imprints in rocks out of children's faces?"

  Hopfrog's face wrinkled in anger. "That the dead rise? That Melissa Welles came back and drank a baby dry and then came for me four and a half months after she was buried? That she and other dead people spoke through you when you were a teenager? Go to hell, Joe, if that's how you're going to deal with this."

  "I'm sorry."

  "You should be."

  "Okay, so what does this mean?"

  "I'm not sure. What if this is something that takes victims and re-creates them? So that these formations in the rock are just the impressions it needs to mold the body? I've been reading"—Hopfrog waved his hand towards his stuffed bookshelves—"about everything from angels to aliens, and none of it makes any more sense than what you and I went through back then. But at least one alleged survivor of an encounter with aliens—assuming you buy into it—claimed that a cast was made from his body because the alien had no form itself beyond a sort of gaseous light. This was in France, in 1973. Several other reports have mentioned that the extraterrestrials appeared as a will-o'-the-wisp sort of light, too. Since this town has existed, in any form, there have been disappearances, and rumors of that damn angel that pointed this town out to the first settlers. All I know is what you and I went through when we saw Melissa leaving her grave. All I know is, that a kid just went missing the day before yesterday, and I suspect he's been taken by whatever is down there."

  "What, the bogeyman lives beneath Colony?"

  A look crossed Hopfrog's face, a look that wasn't anger or frustration, but disdain, as if he had been betrayed by Joe by that one question. "I believe that whatever is here in this town has been here for a thousand years, maybe more. I believe that it is from another world, either from up there"—he nodded towards the ceiling—"beyond our own solar system, or from some other consciousness, and that thing found a bridge between the world it inhabited and our world."

  "Well," Joe said, "I guess it doesn't sound any screwier than my undead theory."

  "Did you know that in 1865, the summer after the end of the Civil War, Watch Hill was set on fire? It was in the Stone Valley papers—some kid lit the grass and burned himself up with it. Nobody knew why, but there had been ghost stories about the dead soldiers haunting the area. And before that, during the war, twenty children were missing, mostly boys, but after the fire, their bodies turned up, stacked and bled dry in the Feely vault?" Hopfrog drew a loose-leaf notebook from one of his desk drawers. He opened it to a page, and passed it to Joe.

  It was a newspaper clipping from the Charleston paper, February 12, 1904. The article headline read: Fifth Child Vanishes In "Colony Mystery."

  "That clipping's about a rash of unexplained disappearances, and then"—he reached across and flipped the page for Joe—"see? Two weeks later, look."
>
  The clipping read: Grave Robbing In Colony.

  "They caught a man a few weeks later, digging up some fresh grave. He was arrested for grave robbing, and then they found the bodies of four children, decapitated and eviscerated in his basement. He claimed that he had put them to rest, that they weren't children, but the walking tools of Satan. None of these children could be identified, Joe, because none of them were from that time period. But, look, here's a picture of one of them."

  "So Colony had a serial killer," Joe said, as if it were old news. "Pick any town and I bet you find at least one if you go back far enough."

  Hopfrog turned the page again and ripped out the clipping.

  He held it close to Joe's face. Joe had to lean back in order to see the photograph clearly.

  "Oh, my God," Joe gasped. "When was this taken?"

  Hopfrog half grinned. "Thank God, I'm not insane, Joe. Without someone to share these with, I was beginning to think I was insane, that I was ready for the state hospital. I didn't trust anyone else to talk with about what this might mean." He wore an expression of equal parts relief and hope. "I missed you so much, Joe, all these years. You're the only one who would understand."

  Joe wiped his hands over his face. "When, Hop?"

  "This photo comes from the 1904 newspaper out of Stone Valley, what was then called the Press-Enterprise."

  "It can't be," Joe said.

  "It is. Remarkable."

  "Patty Glass," Joe whispered, looking at the girl in the picture. It felt as if he were saying something too blasphemous for human ears.

  "Patty Glass," Hopfrog confirmed. "Age twelve, not looking two minutes older than when she disappeared in Old Man Feely's barn. And this was one of the bodies that had not been hurt. She was still alive and, according to the paper, unable to speak. She vanished again. No one from that time period ever saw her."