Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

“Lamia,” and even though the voice was still the boy’s, it sounded like a woman speaking from within him.

  “Why are you here?”

  “You called me.”

  “And why did you come?”

  “These children. They have stolen something from me. I will never leave them until I have it again.”

  “And what is it they have?”

  The silence began, and it was a silence that seemed to stretch across twenty years.

  NOW

  TWENTY YEARS LATER

  PART ONE

  OTHERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Alison, Los Angeles

  “I’m crazy,” the woman said, blinking. “Right?” She looked from her bandaged wrists to the doctor and then at the bookshelves. She was self-conscious. She would crawl out of her skin if she could.

  She had done something terrible once. This much he knew.

  She wore glasses, and her hair was long and light brown. She was obviously very pretty although she had worked to frump herself up by wearing a long shirt and a gold sweater that gave a pallid cast to her olive complexion as well as emphasizing her short waistline. Somewhere in her life she had taught herself to not be too pretty. Perhaps she rebelled against the pressure of living in the Los Angeles area, where beautiful was the golden mean. Perhaps it was something deeper. Something that made her not want to attract anyone. Made her want to try to disappear within baggy clothes, homely outfits...

  He knew from reading through her file that she had been in and out of institutions for many years, and now lived with her husband in the Los Feliz section of the city. “I used to be schizo, then just bipolar, and now, Doc, I got to tell you, I’m not so sure.” She had learned to be glib, in order to distance herself from the ordeal she had lived through. Continued to live through. He had seen patients of all types.

  This one was different.

  She was trying to get at the truth of her life.

  Dr. Diego Correa, sitting across from her, shook his head. “I think you’ve been misdiagnosed. Unfortunately, back when you first underwent psychiatric treatment that label was pretty much given out across the board.”

  “I don’t know, Doc,” she said, scanning the books on his shelf, “schizo seemed as good a word as any.” She giggled slightly, perhaps aware of her own madness. She shook her head, dismissing a question only she might know.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve been working with schizophrenics for years, and you don’t exactly conform to any of the known behaviors.”

  She did that thing with her eyes again—blinked twice before she spoke, as if she were still trying to control some inner rage—the clenched fists on the arms of the chair, the blinking eyes, the tight set to her lips. “I was in the Falmouth hospital for six years, Doctor. I know crazy. When I talked to them about demons, the other patients, they told me they’d had visits from demons too. So, what, you’re going to tell me that’s not a classic pattern? Delusions, demons, all that stuff. I had it in a big way.”

  “But you didn’t see demons at Falmouth, did you?”

  The woman shrugged. “I’ve seen them before, though.”

  “I think you saw something, too. Before.”

  She took a breath. “I don’t remember any of it.”

  “I believe you do. I believe that somewhere inside you is a key, and with that key, an opening into a mystery.”

  “Your colleagues told me you were a bit unorthodox.” She actually smiled, and for a moment he thought he saw just a brief image of the girl she must once have been. Before the fear had set in.

  The dread.

  “Actually, they laugh at me.” He grinned, finally. “But I have a reputation, so they laugh and then they send me the ones that don’t fit in their pigeonholes.”

  “Like me.”

  “Like you.”

  “Well, I’ve been through electroshock, and I almost OD’ed on Thorazine before I was twenty. Now I’m mid-thirties, and I’m tired of the meds. I don’t want any more drugs. I don’t want any more experimental treatments. So what else you got?”

  “It’s simpler than that,” he said. “Have you ever heard of regression therapy?”

  “No thank you. That sounds...well...nuts.”

  “Not as nuts as you think. I’m just going to hypnotize you. Nothing more. I’ll ask you questions about your childhood. About that time. I understand from Dr. Hart that you’ve been having some more problems.”

  She sighed, and in that one brief exhalation there was resignation, perhaps even acceptance of something she’d been fighting for years. “Call it what you want. I’ve been seeing it again.”

  “What?”

  She looked beyond him, through him, as if he were just another in a long line of doctors and psychiatrists and specialists she had seen and would continue to see into eternity—and yet not really see at all. It was as if she had told this story a million times and would have to tell it a million times more. “The wall. It’s a high, yellow wall—like a garden wall. And there’s this shadow on it, only it’s made of blood. It’s a woman. And it moves. And then my head starts pounding really hard. And I bleed.”

  “Nosebleeds?”

  “Nosebleeds, mouth bleeds, other, more private places.”

  “You menstruate?”

  She hesitated. Less glib about this aspect of her life. Then, almost in a whisper, she said, “Yes...not on schedule, either. Maybe it’s like Dr. Hart said, maybe it’s just stress.” Her voice changed, almost imperceptibly, from the wisecracking tone to this core of vulnerability. She was this beautiful child, untouched, somewhere inside the grown woman’s body, confused by the world now that she had to live by adult rules and beliefs. “I see this wall. And that’s it. I break out in a cold sweat. Something is coming over that wall, or I’m going over it. Something. Something terrible.”

  “Do you remember anything other than the wall?”

  “Not really. But it terrifies me. And I know that’s what it wants.”

  “It?”

  “The demon. Do you believe in demons?” She jutted her chin out like a willful child.

  He liked seeing this spirit in her, just when he’d been worried that her spirit had been broken on the psychoanalytical wheel. “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “Well, that’s something. They put me in Falmouth because of that. Because I told them I knew a demon. Those doctors were positive there were no demons.”

  “Do you remember how you met this demon?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to try a session now?”

  “Regress?” she asked, then nodded. “Sure. Why not.”

  “First,” he said, “close your eyes.”

  She said, “All right, but promise me something.”

  “Of course.”

  “Promise me you won’t do anything to make me afraid.”

  “I promise.”

  “It lives on that. Fear. That’s why it never died. Because we’re still afraid of it.”

  “Do you think it will come and get you? Is that what you’re afraid of?”

  “Oh,” she said, her smile trembling, “I know it will. As long as we’re all alive and safe and afraid, it’s going to find us.”

  “Close your eyes,” he said. “Now, tell me your name.”

  “Alison. Alison Chandler.”

  “What was your name when you were fifteen?”

  “Hunt.”

  “In the room in your mind, Alison, there’s a mirror. I want you to go to it, to look at yourself. I want you to see Alison Hunt when she as a girl. I want you to tell me what she looks like, and what she’s wearing. Can you do that for me?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “All right. Look in the mirror. Alison Hunt is fifteen or sixteen. Can you see her now?”

  “Yes,” she said, “clearly. I’m a teenager. I’m in love. I’m pretty, I guess. I look the way a girl would look, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”
/>
  “The blood. Oh Jesus, look at it, look at all of it.”

  “On your hands, Alison?”

  “No,” she whispered. “On my lips.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sacrament of the Sacred Heart Church

  In another part of the city, a man listened for the darkness as it approached.

  It moved in a fog of silence. He could feel it. He could hear it. He could smell it.

  Like a cold, dripping cave, the smell of dead animals, of warm, damp decay. What waited for him knew his real name, the name of the Beast, the Beast of his soul and heart and mind, for he had a name other than the one he went by. What waited for him would not call him the Face, although that was the name he had chosen to hide within. What waited for him knew his secret name. The Face knew about names, how they would betray you, how they would hold power over you...

  But he knew what he had been called before, and he knew that someone would come calling for him.

  He had hoped to die before it happened.

  The man who called himself The Face had been living in the old church for nearly eighteen years. It had once been called La Infantida, nearly a century before, and then it was Saint Matthew’s, and then, when World War Two broke out, it became known as the Sacrament of the Sacred Heart of the Blessed Virgin. It was a stone structure now, although the church had begun its existence as wood and adobe. It had been added on to until it looked cold and severe and unapproachable. Its dwindling congregation through the past two decades attested to this quality—as if the church, Roman Catholic by design, required abandonment in order to fulfill some architectural destiny. It was, this man thought, more cavern than cathedral, with its burrows beneath the nave, and the low-rent mausoleum below ground; behind it two small bungalows that had served as church offices and shelters for runaways and the destitute. That had been when there was still a congregation, when there was still a priest. When he had first come, the stern church had been sanctuary to him—he was not Roman Catholic, and he didn’t believe or accept the tenets of that faith, but he took comfort in a ritual that seemed to stave off the lonesomeness of his existence. He had performed menial tasks for the priest. He helped with the collection baskets on Sundays. He mopped the floor of the basement before a meeting or a prayer breakfast. He had watched the devout begin to attend services less and less, in favor of other churches, as if this one had acquired an invisible stain since his arrival.

  Because of the way he looked.

  His appearance was too frightening for anyone but the priest, so he wore a makeshift veil across his face, beneath a baseball cap. The parishioners only knew that he was deformed; they did not know in what way. Although certain children, mischievous, had torn the veil more than once to get a glimpse of the Dog Man, or as some in the neighborhood called him, el hombre del Diablo.

  The priest had been kind to The Face, but was a drinker, and a smoker, and succumbed within a few years to disease. Then, when the church had fallen on hard times and the clergy and congregation both had abandoned it, The Face slept in one of the old offices. When the rats and the vagrants became too difficult to fight off, he had moved into the church basement, which was small. He left candles around him all day to keep the rats back, and he stayed up every night waiting. Occasionally, as was the case this night, he had a companion—an old woman, who lived mainly on the street dying of something in her gut, came in and slept when the nights were too cold or the threat of harm from a harsh city were too much. She might moan with pain now and then, but she left him alone even when she sat near him. It was good to have some companionship, even if the two never spoke. The warmth of another human being was enough.

  His mind grew dim, but the sense of it had grown stronger with the years.

  He knew this was because She was growing stronger, like a radio signal increasing its wavelength.

  The fires were harbingers of her approach—the neighborhood had house fires periodically, and sometimes the dry grass in the old park caught fire, too. It all had meaning.

  And the dead girl, left on the steps, was a message.

  “We are those she touched,” someone whispered to him while he was fighting to stay awake, a whisper like a heartbeat, a whisper like wings moving in a dark cave. “She’s within us now.”

  The vestibule was lit with votive candles. Their light allowed him to read his books all night long, and when some poor soul came into the church, the candles somehow helped to calm and comfort them. Sometimes he burned incense, just to rid the place of the smell of vermin and mildew; the scent of the incense lingered from the previous night.

  The Face felt older than his years. As she grew stronger, he grew more enfeebled. He combed his hand through his white hair. It was night and he stood before the space where the old wooden cross had once hung, where his prayers at the altar had gone unanswered. How could there be a kind God when such creatures lived?

  The old woman, homeless and diseased, lifted her head from the front pew. She mouthed a word. He could not understand her.

  Passed through the blood like a virus, like a gene, like a throwback to the beginning of the world.

  He looked toward the sacristy door. He thought he heard a noise. The people who had set fire to the block two nights before had left the church alone. It would not be them. “Who’s there?”

  The old woman at the pew lifted her head again and glanced toward the door.

  “Perhaps we have a guest tonight,” he said, but did not go to open the dark wood door. He did not feel fear so much as the acceptance of what was inevitable.

  What he dreaded most would come to him.

  Would find him.

  Then, whatever was there, in that room, pressed the door open.

  As it swung wide, the Face whispered, “Is it you?”

  He smelled dry air, dust and meat, like a slaughterhouse.

  The old woman, seeing what approached, opened her mouth in a silent scream. A drop of blood slid from the corner of her lips.

  The candles extinguished all around, and the sounds of the dark grew deafening.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Deadrats in New York

  Dirty,filthy, said the thing with the red eyes, lurking there in the dark corner like a thief. Still here, my friend, still waiting, and I can wait a long, long time to be let out. And you will let me out, my boy, you will all let me out because you’ve been very bad and you need to take your medicine. Look, look where I’ve gnawed a hole in your heart, in your brain, like cheese, just nibble, nibble, nibble. Just us rats, you and me in here, just us rats.

  All of this was in his mind, and the man who should’ve been sleeping, for he hadn’t in days, kept his eyes wide open. He surveyed the street, and watched as several children stood gawking at him from the sidewalk.

  Okay, Deadrats, it’s time to drink their blood. You want to do that, don’tcha, huh, don’tcha? Remember how good it tastes to lap at the open sores and the wounds of the dead and the almost-dead? Fucking incredelicious, partner! Make you feel like a kid again. He kept his grip tight on the steering wheel of the taxicab, and brought it over to the curb at Third Avenue. The children just stared at him, and he noticed that their skin all seemed to be rotting, and the flies buzzed around their festering sores. Taste it don’t waste it, Deadrats, my boy.

  “Get out,” he told the thing in his head. “Get back in my braincave.”

  Don’t it just get that ol’ ticker beating hard and fast inside you, my boy, don’t it give you a hard-on just like in the olden days when you think of the blood across your mouth, of pulling one of them screaming right down on your face and taking a big ol’ chunk out of them right between their ribs?

  “Shut up,” he said.

  A young woman came out from the gathering of children. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, with sparkling hair and the creamiest skin, but her dress was made out of some kind of animal hide wrapped tight around her, and near her chest there was a gaping hole, as if someone had just stab
bed her; yet, she approached his taxicab as if she were just fine. She was not much out of her teenage years, and when she smiled, she looked like an absolute angel.

  There she is, the thing in the room in his mind said. Go to her, my boy, she is the love of your life.

  Something about her face, though, like it was melting wax in a burning sun, for the skin dripped across the eyes, obscuring them, and the lips blistered down her chin.

  He pushed the door of the cab open and stumbled out onto the street.

  For a second, it didn’t look like a woman at all, but something else.

  Not what she was underneath.

  Your eyes can play tricks on you, kiddo, ya never know in this life, maybe it’s a girl, and maybe it ain’t. Maybe it’s an old man wearing a threadbare gray suit and holding an umbrella in his left hand.

  Maybe it ain’t.

  Lightning struck somewhere above the skyscrapers. The landscape jolted. Manhattan melted down like ice cream, hardening into a sandy crust. He stood in a wasteland, in front of a small, brown tract house that was burning with no one around to stop the fire. He saw the great swarm of bees burst above the fire and the dead, empty, white sky explode with fireworks and bees and showers of blood like afternoon rain.

  And then Manhattan again, Thirty-third and Third. The smell of grease and rubber and trash and flowers.

  A woman with something in her hand, something she held out for him as she approached. It was a mass of twisted brown-red.

  “Excuse me, but can you take me?” she said.

  Dirty, filthy, it said in his head.

  He grabbed her by the neck.

  For a second her saw, in her place:

  An old man with a face full of surprise like he had just encountered a nightmare.

  She kept smiling even while he strangled her.

  She brought the thing in her hand up to his face and pressed it against his lips like an obscene kiss.