Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  The children who stood around him, all teenagers with their faces blistering, their skin peeling, continued staring at him until someone off the street came up and pulled him back, socking him in the gut—

  He saw that he had almost killed a man in his early seventies who had, perhaps, just wanted to get a cab, and the girl, and the voice of the bad thing in his head, were gone.

  He knew that it would be back, too.

  It wasn’t a girl or an old man or a swarm of bees, burning.

  It was the orgasm of damnation.

  It was the torn face of the past.

  Peter, he thought, is this happening to you, too? Is she calling all of us?

  PART TWO

  THE BUNGALOW

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Peter, Los Angeles

  1

  After the riots and earthquakes of the previous years, Los Angeles had transformed, not just physically, but as if the city had an emotional life that was no longer vibrant, a life with barely a pulse.

  Peter Chandler sought out the dead streets, the parks that looked more like graveyards than playgrounds, the places where the pulse was weakest.

  The buildings were empty shells down the two side streets alongside the park. He had watched them burn from the hillside back in the late spring a few years before. After the recent earthquake, there were cracks along the foundations, chain-link fences around the apartments and bungalows, red-tagged by the city as uninhabitable. He knew that this would be the place where he felt most comfortable, the blackened earth, the emptiness, the bits of paper, windblown, across this desolate stretch of the city. There was a beauty to torn brick and broken glass, to bungalows strung end to end like Christmas lights gone out, to the church at the corner of Fuego and Castor Street, the church called the Sacrament of the Sacred Heart, with its boarded windows, its bent and haggard face. It was only another mile to Little Tokyo, and he could go have lunch at Su Hiro for a few dollars, and then walk back up to the park across from the church. He would not have noticed the church except for the riots, when parts of the city were torched and palm trees had exploded as if with napalm on the boulevards. But it was a place, now, for him, which seemed to be the threshold to a memory.

  The previous May, the Times had run the story about Sacred Heart on Fuego, downtown, about how it had been shut down nearly ten years before, and had fallen into disrepair in a neighborhood that had never known repair. How there had been a murder, at the church, on its steps.

  Sacred Heart.

  No ordinary bullet-to-the-head murder, no knife-to-the-back, no drive-by shooting.

  It was a woman who was killed on the steps of the Sacrament of the Sacred Heart Church, and the police thought it might be the work of a religious group, perhaps a black magic offshoot of Santeria or maybe something even as simple as an ex-lover seeking revenge. In blood, the killers had written:

  “El Corazon.”

  The victim had been operated on, while she was still living, and her heart had been removed.

  The murdered girl was only seventeen, according to the newspaper clippings. Her face had been burnt beyond recognition, but the rest of her was unmarked.

  Except for the wound.

  Woman’s little wound.

  The place where her heart had been taken.

  Peter had been sitting at home, on a Friday afternoon, reading the paper, and when he had come to this item, in the Metro section, he had looked up at his wife. She was across the room from him, going to the kitchen for more coffee—in his mind, she froze, time froze, and he wished that he had not seen the paper that day.

  2

  Oh, yes, the memories came back in a rush like a flooding river; he couldn’t spend his life pretending he hadn’t done what he had done.

  But he could pretend for her.

  At least, for his wife, he could pretend that nothing was up, nothing was gnawing at him on such a fine day.

  He glanced back down at the newspaper, pushing a more painful memory out of his mind for the moment.

  The church.

  The dead body on its steps.

  Peter had a sudden feeling of displacement, as if all that was around him, the smell of coffee, the newspaper in his hands, the taste of a remembered kiss, all of it was a dream.

  3

  He went to find the Sacred Heart, and with it he found the park directly across from the church, and the young people who lived in the empty buildings.

  And he watched them.

  Weeks passed, and still he went, because he knew: this was the time.

  This would be the place.

  He wasn’t fired from his job until the middle of October, and this freed him to keep his vigil most of the time; he disliked lying to his wife about how he spent his days, but he knew that there was no choice. He was not going to reopen old wounds for her, not if he could protect her from them.

  At night, he wrote about his life—not because it interested him, but because he could no longer hold it inside.

  He called these writings his “confessions.”

  4

  Peter Chandler/Confessions

  I never thought I would write down what happened in Palmetto, California, the summer I turned sixteen. I figured it would just blow away like the town itself has, over the years. Maybe I just need to set the record straight after all the lies that were written and taken as truth. I guess I thought if we never spoke of it, it might lose some of its power. And then, perhaps, the lie would become more real. We were—all of us—afraid that someone would find out the true story and try to find her through us—and try to bring the pieces together again.

  I know it can happen.

  I feel it.

  I don’t think we really killed her, and I don’t think she’s given up, even after all these years.

  She’s always in my dreams.

  She never lets go.

  I dreamt of her last night. I was in a slaughterhouse, filled with the pathetic whimpering of half-dead animals, some just becoming conscious of the fate awaiting them. They screamed like human beings— they had, in the extremity of their tortures, passed the barrier that divided humans and beasts. Skinless creatures swayed in death throes from thick, silver hooks. Beneath them, on the turquoise mosaic floor, rows of buckets overflowed with clotting blood.

  She was there.

  She was at work on one of the animals. She’d peeled its skin off with her fingernails. Her face dripped blood. She was unconscionably beautiful with the dark liquid trickling like tears across her cheeks, down her chin, along her slender neck.

  She gave the call.

  I felt it rising in my throat when I awoke in a cold sweat to a dark room—my own bedroom.

  “You’ll wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night,” she’d said in the dream, “and you won’t know where you are. And no matter where you think you are, you are here, always, with me. In here.”

  I got up and went into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror to see who this person could be.

  My face was still there—but inside my face, I saw her, staring out through my skin, a reflection within a reflection.

  I feel like she’s here, somewhere. The hallucinations, the dreams, the telegrams, even the riots.

  Even the Sacrament of the Sacred Heart.

  I’m going to go there again.

  I know she’s there.

  Waiting.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1

  One dawn, in Los Angeles, in late October, Peter Chandler was sitting with a cup of coffee on a bench in the park. He watched a teenaged girl through the chain-link fence that marked the boundary of Fuego Park downtown. The sky threatened rain, but one never knew with this sky; the ocean breeze could come down and blow the ash-gray clouds out to sea or across the hills to the valleys. He sniffed the air—the city smelled different, and perhaps it was the promise of rain.

  The girl caught his attention because she was alone.

  There were a few other people in the pads
: vagrants, and a strung-out-looking woman with two very young children in tow.

  But the girl—she was between fifteen and seventeen, and wore a blue tee shirt and black jeans. Her hair was reddish; she was pale, and appeared to be having some trouble moving. For a moment, he thought she wasn’t there at all, and that he had imagined her. But there she was, real. As she walked by him, he felt sure she had seen him. A fear thrummed against his heart, a dread he had forgotten about years ago. But then she went about her business—she was looking for something, as if she’d lost some money, or left a book, or a jacket, down near the bus stop on the corner. She glanced up and down the street—looking for the bus, or a friend? She wiped at the hair that fell down over her forehead.

  She must have sensed his watching, for she turned.

  It took his breath away for a moment.

  When she did that.

  Turned.

  Her face was less than beautiful. Scraggly. Eyes like pennies. Dark hollows beneath her eyes, and her lips were drawn tight as if someone had taken sewing needles and threaded them together.

  He could barely think the name, let alone say it. His tongue was dry in his throat when he called to her, and the worst thing that she could do, she did.

  She smiled because somebody knew her name.

  2

  Peter Chandler/Confessions

  I looked at a picture taken of us that summer. Alison, Nathaniel, Sloan, and me. The dog, too. Can’t forget the dog. I see in it that Charlie is there, too, way in the background, watching from the Rattlesnake Wash. Probably spying on us, because he was always in love with Alison. There are some people in the world who believe that the soul is captured in a photograph, and I wonder if it’s true.

  Because she had all of us.

  Alison, Nathaniel, Sloan, Peter, Lammie, Charlie.

  I got the telegrams this week, too. Some of them said:

  “something’s wrong, don’t come, don’t return, no matter what, none of you together.”

  All unsigned. But one of the telegrams sticks out in my mind.

  It says, simply, “you are what you eat.”

  3

  Peter, watching in the park across from the church, didn’t know what he would do with the girl, but he knew he had to stop her. He could not imagine hurting a teenager, but he might have to do something to keep her away from here.

  She may be a dream, he thought. She may be a flashback through memory. She may not exist.

  But part of him felt compelled, even if this was a phantom.

  Peter got up, forgetting the book on the bench, and walked in her direction. He thought it curious, this girl all by herself downtown, so assured in her walk, so determined.

  Why am I following her? he wondered hoping he’d come up with an answer. He couldn’t say the name again. The name he thought belonged to her, because he was afraid she would smile at him again, and he would have to swallow a scream.

  What if he were right?

  She turned left onto Castor Street, with its remaining bungalows. When he turned the corner, she was out of sight. He looked from house to house, but did not see her hiding in any of the yards, and he did not hear a single door shut.

  He was relieved that she had not gone up the church steps.

  He walked the block three or four times, but none of the houses seemed right for her.

  And then he stopped dead in his tracks.

  Down an alleyway, alongside one of the larger houses, was a small bungalow with a partially caved-in, fire-blackened roof. Plywood had been nailed sloppily over the large square windows. Trash had piled up in the yard. No one lives there, he thought. Something haunting about it, something that kept him gazing at the rotting house.

  It was the graffiti that was spray-painted across the chipped walls that caught his attention. Most of it was about gangs or Jesus, but clearly he saw the words “NO MAN’S LAND” sprayed in red, and he felt a jolt as if shaken by a brief and nearly imperceptible earthquake.

  Then the world was still.

  Peter felt a few tentative drops of water on his face, and he looked away from the bungalow and up to the sky. The smell and feel of rain was not clean at all, but dirty and warm like a child’s hands. He closed his eyes and tried not to remember the girl’s face. My imagination. Shrinks were all on target—hysteria, drugs, alcohol, trauma, imagination. No demons. No monsters.

  “You’re It!” someone shouted from the past, a child playing tag. “You’re It!”

  He opened his eyes upon the bungalow. He walked toward it without really wanting to. He made fake promises to himself: If I get there and don’t see her I will go home and forget this and never go to the park again. If I get there and the girl is there, I will come back another time with a gun to make sure she doesn’t hurt me. If I get there and everything is boarded up I will pretend that it’s too hard to get in and look around.

  He stepped over coiled barbed wire and leftover cartons from McDonalds and Burger King. The ground beneath all the yard trash was blackened from fire. Wadded papers rattled as something scuttled through the yard—he assumed rats or squirrels. He was not shocked to see a pile of wispy, blue pigeon’s wings, as if torn from dead birds and stocked up on the porch. This was a place of filth. From the porch he could smell the house. The stench assaulted his senses: human and animal feces, rotting food and garbage. Peter figured the place was full of drug addicts or was a gang hangout, or else nobody was in there at all and something worse than life existed within those walls.

  Or someone had died in there, behind that door, in one of those rooms, someone had died and it was the deathsmell.

  And then he thought of something: the murdered girl...on the steps of the church...

  What if she had been murdered around the corner from the church, and taken to the church steps as part of the sickest joke in the world?

  Sacrament of the sacred heart.

  He hadn’t noticed until now how much this bungalow resembled the house that he and his family had lived in when he was a boy. The chipping stucco walls, the yard, these dimensions, the family room window on his right, the door on his left. Even the trash in the yard—they had lived downwind of the town dump, and papers would sometimes drift into the yard when the winds picked up. Even the disrepair. The house on the desert, and this one in the city. Like a cyclone had lifted it from its foundation and brought it down this alley. What if she comes to the window? Pressing her nose up against the glass, her breath fogging it up? What if she knows I followed her here? What if she’s waiting?

  Just like the ruin of the house in Palmetto.

  Even the deathsmell.

  He could never describe it well—it was actually sweet and revolting at the same time.

  It was the smell of the valley of the shadow.

  Peter stood there, shoulders shaking. He managed to wipe the tears and the threat of memory from his eyes. He took several steps back down the alley, refusing to look back at the bungalow. No, he would just not go in there, he would go home. He had no doubt that this was the place where the girl had gone, but he would not go exploring.

  “You believe what you can’t see, boy?” his father asked from distant memory.

  Peter had no answer then. Still had no answer. He was halfway down the block, on his way back to the park, when he knew that he should go back to the bungalow. Perhaps he had seen wrong. Perhaps the girl was just part of his imagination. So many years ago, and here he was, still believing it. Believing what he couldn’t see, and perhaps had never seen.

  By the afternoon, Peter Chandler decided to break into the bungalow.

  4

  He had tried calling his wife, but she wasn’t home—if she had been, perhaps he wouldn’t have worked up sufficient nerve to go back there, down that alley, in the rain. I’ll just go in the front. Not like breaking in, anyway. The porch was rotted out; he had to step over and around holes and broken boards to get to the front entrance. Just as he got up to the door, nailed over with plywood, hi
s left foot broke through a weak spot of the porch floor. He had to grasp the doorframe for balance. Just as he drew his foot back up through the hole, something down below brushed his ankle.

  A rat, he thought with a shiver, and brought his foot up.

  The plywood on the door was easy to break off in chunks; it, like most of the house, was rotted to a cardboard thinness. Once he had cleared a space large enough to fit through, he tested the floor inside before placing all of his weight over the threshold. The coldness of the interior did not surprise him too much—the nights had been colder than normal lately, and houses like this would retain the temperature. The front hall was dark, and half of it was black and skeletal from a previous fire. It still smelled burnt. This is where rats come to die. He wanted to shout hello out of habit, but there didn’t seem to be any need. Something about the bungalow silenced him.

  It was as if something in the house would awaken if he spoke aloud. The area that had been the living room was shadowy—diffuse light came in from windows that were only half-shuttered with plywood.

  He took a step into the room.

  Shapes were huddled together in corners, and from them came snores. Runaways, he figured, and he was just about to back out of the house and forget the girl who looked like someone he had once known. Some other day, he promised, you’ll follow her again. She may not even be here.

  A woman’s voice came from the shadows: “Anywhere you like.”

  Peter glanced about in the gray light. His vision finally adjusted; he could distinguish between the walls and sparse furnishings and the sleeping figures. A young woman, as thin as he had ever seen a young woman be, lay next to a sleeping teenaged boy. The boy was moaning lightly in some dream. The woman raised herself up and leaned back on one elbow. She watched Peter. “Just don’t wake my old man,” she whispered.