Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Peter nodded, not knowing what to say.

  “You’re looking for a girl,” the woman said, and Peter felt sweat break out along his neck. She swiftly and silently disentangled herself from her boyfriend and rose from the floor. She went over to Peter, walking as if she were stepping on hot coals, and grabbed him by the wrist. “Tammy,” she whispered in introduction. “It ain’t much of a house, but it’s paid for.”

  She took him back into what had once been the kitchen. It smelled of grease and something else—dead rats? The light was better; the window above the caved-in sink was only covered with plastic wrap. Tammy’s face was drawn and tight; her eyes rested upon blackened smudges. Her scalp was shaved on one side, and wild like twisting branches on the other. The word “eat” was tattooed into her scalp just above her right ear. She was bone-thin around the arms, which were studded with welts and bruises and tiny red dots. She wore a tight tee shirt, revealing ribs and collarbone; for shorts, she wore men’s boxers. “You got to be real quiet, dude. Hey, you here for Mace? He got the power, dude, he got the juice, but he ain’t been here yet, so we don’t want no trouble. You got bread on you?”

  Peter said, “The girl.”

  “You got her,” Tammy said, doing a clumsy spin around to show off her body, then slapping her hips. She smiled a horrible grin, her teeth yellowed and rotted up through swollen gums. “For the right price, I’m the right girl. You got bread?”

  He reached down into his pocket and found a few crumpled bills. He handed the wad to her.

  She looked disdainfully at the money. “Shit.”

  “A particular girl. I think she lives here.”

  “Dude, we got lotsa girls here, boys, too, you can take your pick, but my old man’s gonna want more’n this for even a feel. I’m special.”

  “The young girl. Seventeen. Red hair. I just want to know where she is. I want to see her.”

  Tammy wrinkled her nose as if smelling something awful. Her voice was husky and low, and it was obvious that she thought he was the vilest thing she had ever met in her life. “I know who you want,” she said.

  “She just came through here, I think.”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s her. You’re kinda sick, y’know? We don’t like that kinda trade here.”

  “What’s her name?”

  She shrugged. “Lives downstairs. Cellar. She got her old man, too. You look kinda straight—she in trouble or something?”

  “She reminds me of someone.” Peter swallowed hard.

  Tammy sighed. “We all do. Dude, I am beat. You want a smoke?” She reached into her shirt and brought out a crumbly cigarette and a pack of matches from between her breasts. “Hey, don’t look at me like that; you are straight, it’s Marlboro Light.”

  Peter glanced around, peering through the ruins of the hallway. There only seemed to be this one floor. Bungalows didn’t have basements. This was crazy. This was...unreal. “Are there stairs down?”

  “You gonna go down there?” She almost burned her fingers with the match. “Shit, dude, nobody goes down there and ever comes back. I mean, I seen my old man beat the shit outta one a his girls ‘til she was a goner, and I seen more ODs than highs, but what goes on down there ain’t nothin’ like you never saw.”

  He wanted to tell her, I’ve seen a lot in my time.

  She was tripping over her words, as if she were afraid she wouldn’t be able to get them all out of her mouth before someone shut her up. “Shit, he takes ‘em down there and they don’t never see the sun again, and it stinks down there, Jesus, they live off rats, and my old man says we gonna have to get rid of that geezer soon. Gives me the fuckin’ creeps.” She licked her lips.

  “What about the girl?”

  Tammy stepped closer to him.

  Peter felt something, not the sexual heat this woman wanted him to feel, but something more like hunger. What Sloan must’ve felt. Incubating. Inside. She looked at him with her hollow eyes, gazing seductively, like a death’s-head mask. Peter disgusted himself, repulsed by the image in his mind.

  The face like the inside of a furnace. The consuming fire.

  He wanted to shut her up, somehow. Rip out her heart—the thought came without his bidding. Didn’t she know how she smelled? Like meat. Fresh red meat. Marbled with fat. He broke out in a sweat, but Tammy didn’t notice. She smoked her cigarette and glanced out the window. In the thin shaft of daylight she hardly looked real: she looked like a sketch.

  But that smell of meat.

  Tammy said, “She does okay. He don’t hurt her, I guess. But I don’t like her. I told Mace he gotta burn those two outta there. We had to burn this other freak out once. We can do it. She got sumpin’ in her eyes, you know how you see people in the eyes? Well, she got nothin’ there but what’s good and rotten. I told Mace she look like a girl but she sumpin’ else. What they do down there”—and Peter saw a tear trickle down the side of her face—“to others...” Tammy stubbed her cigarette out against the wall; the trace of her tear glistened in the light. “It’s worse than anything I ever heard of. Awful. Just awful. A sin.”

  Peter found himself asking what he didn’t want to ask. “What do they do?” It was hardly a question; he wished he could suck it back into his throat like smoke so she wouldn’t hear it. He had lived with the memory of awfulness most of his life. He knew the worst. He remembered nightmares beyond imagining. You could just take Alison away again. Get as far as possible from what’s awful in the world. You’ve done it before, you’ve run before, and it found you, finally, it found you. “What do they do?” he repeated the question.

  Tammy barely parted her lips.

  “They hurt people,” she said, slowly, deliciously. “It pleasures them.” Her eyes lit up as she spoke, the tears making them shine, as if she, too, somehow enjoyed hurting people, and there was a madness to her look—he’d seen this before, back in those days when he was a teenager—a madness that was like an animal cunning. “You should hear them sometimes, down there, you should smell what they do, you should hear it, the last sound they make, the last sound. It’s nothing, nothing like you ever heard before. Like dirty little children… Like…” She closed her eyes, remembering. “Like their hearts are being torn out.”

  5

  Peter left Tammy standing there, tears staining her cheeks, an insane half-smile across her face, and went in the direction of the cellar. The stairs down had been burned out but there was a ladder, and he took a step down. You believe what you can’t see, boy? The smell of animal came up stronger from below him. Urine, feces, rotting meat. At the bottom of the ladder, he stepped into a pile of leaves; as he balanced himself on the floor, he felt the icy chill of water along the soles of his feet. He moved away from the ladder, and the water streamed along his toes, soaking through his shoes. He heard water running as if from a faucet; the holes and cracks in the ceiling made jagged streaks of light through the darkness; the air was filled with motes of dust, floating in lazy spirals; something moved through the shallow water, toward him.

  He held his breath as the thing came into the light.

  A rat.

  But it was dead, drawn by some unseen drain in the middle of the cellar floor, its fur matted and soaked through, its jaws opened in a death rictus. Caught with it some leaves and twigs, and an old worn sock, as if this were the funerary raft to carry this rat to the halls of the dead.

  Something else, too.

  Floating slowly with the rat and its barge.

  It was only in the brown, dusty light for a moment. But it seemed to stop there, in the shaft of light, as if unwilling to be tugged toward where the water flowed down. If Peter had not had the extra second or two, he might’ve thought it was an upturned leaf. But it was a human hand, small and perfect. The hand of a young child.

  “What kind of son are you, anyway?” his father asked, the hand coming back like a whip, and down, and down, and down.

  And then it was gone, the child’s hand, pulled back into the oily, dark waters. />
  It’s not a dream. You’re not hallucinating. It’s too real. Get out of here, you idiot, he thought. Run up that ladder and burn rubber out of this hole and don’t ever look back. You don’t ever want to look back, remember? You promised that, you swore it. That night, when you got away, you made the deal, “Don’t ever look back.” But the calling. How the hell was I to know about the calling? That voice, over and over again through the dreams: “Peter! You got to get me out! Peter!” And how you repeated, “Don’t look back of it’ll get you, don’t look back,” until you didn’t hear the screaming anymore, and then you were miles away and you told yourself it was probably over quickly, you told yourself it wouldn’t even have hurt it was probably so quick, and what were you supposed to do, anyway? After all of it, what were you supposed to do? Don’t look back. It gets you when you look back. Nobody should’ve looked back, but they did, didn’t they? They looked back, and look what happened. It’s not your fault, so get the hell out of this rat nest and get back in your car and get home to Alison and make sure you never look back.

  But something else was moving. He smelled it: something human, something alive. It was near the source of the dripping faucet. It scraped against a wall.

  Peter moved away from the ladder, trying to adjust his eyesight to the darkness. Something brushed his ankles—another rat, but he held his breath to keep from giving himself away. He moved slowly backward, the chill of the water numbing his feet. He met some resistance as he went, trying to avoid the spears of light, staying to the shadows; but he didn’t want to find out what he was stepping on, or over, or by. He backed up to a wall. He thought he would try and make his way back to the ladder when he heard voices coming from the upstairs. “I don’t give a fuck,” a man said, and Tammy was whining and swearing, and Peter watched in horror as the ladder was pulled up from the cellar.

  “You go down there, you take your chances,” the man up in the house said.

  “We got to burn ‘em outta there, I tell you,” Tammy said, her voice nervous and crackling.

  Shout, damn it. Shout for help. Why can’t you shout? Peter felt frozen inside, helpless. Let out a scream, why don’t you scream? But he knew the answer. He was scared. He tried moving his lips, but only wind came through. No sound.

  Someone was splashing water over in a corner.

  Peter stood still. I will die here, he thought. I looked back, and now I’m going to die for it. Jesus, you moron, you didn’t even bring a weapon. How the hell do you expect to survive? You’re going to die here and nobody’s even going to know.

  Then it was quiet again. Just the dripping of water.

  Maybe she’s gone.

  After ten minutes had gone by, Peter moved along the wall, stepping over clumps of fur and leaves. He had noticed basement windows on the outside of the bungalow. Perhaps they were low enough that he could break the glass quickly and get out. Perhaps there was no glass and they were made of boards he could push aside. Got to try something, Chandler, or you’ll go down the drain with the rats. He stopped every few steps to look through the lighted areas for the girl. Who knows what she is? He felt along the walls until he thought he felt the edge of a window casing. He patted what he assumed would be the pane, but was merely cardboard. This won’t be hard. He pushed on the board, and it gave fairly easily. It was slimy with mildew. He stripped the edge off.

  Daylight illuminated a triangular patch all around him. The light hit something at his feet. She lay curled in the fetal position, raised above the water level by bundled rags and leaves and clumps of what could only have been dead rats. Her face was upturned in the light, although her eyes remained closed, and the gentle sound of light snores came from her nostrils.

  Peter Chandler didn’t know what the sound was that came from his throat, but it was like a shiver and a scream and a whisper—and nothing at all.

  “Wendy,” he said her name, for he recognized the brilliant red of her hair, and the bone-whiteness of her skin, and the turn of her carnelian lips. And he reached down to touch the face, the way a child might reach to touch fire even after he knows it might burn him, because he felt a kind of reckless madness in his blood. How could she be?

  He heard the loud beating of his own heart.

  His fingers, as they grazed the sleeping face, came away with human skin.

  He stood over a sleeping girl whose face had come off in his hand like a mask, and beneath it, another face.

  A different face, rotting.

  We are those she has touched.

  “You’re here with me, in here, no matter where you are,” the face beneath the face said, “and when I call you, you come.”

  “You believe what you can’t see, boy?” That voice inside him, so familiar. “I know you,” it whispered, like a needle thrust through gray matter. “I know you, inside and out. All of you.”

  And then something shimmered across the face, like heat, something rippling beneath the skin.

  It was a face that had been torn at by rats, its eye sockets empty.

  Its jaw slowly opened, and roaches poured from its mouth as the light from the window fell across them.

  Peter backed away, and tore at the cardboard along the window. He heard liquid movement surrounding him, as if there were others in the darkness with him. He smelled something different—gasoline?

  “Burn those fuckers outta there!” a man upstairs shouted. As Peter looked up to the cellar door above him, he saw Tammy and a man with wild white hair and a ragged face dropping wads of burning newspaper down into a pile until there was a bonfire reaching almost up to them. The fire lit up most of the cellar, a fire that floated unnaturally on leaves and newspaper over dark water, and Peter now could see what he was surrounded by.

  It looked like a smokehouse.

  A slaughterhouse.

  Human torsos strung from the ceiling, and ribcages stacked knee-deep in the water. And the shadows of other body parts cast, flickering in the growing flames.

  And the smell.

  The smell of it.

  Fresh meat.

  But the greatest obscenity of all was up against the wall on the other side of the fire.

  Another man might’ve thought these were simply masks or dried paper lanterns, but Peter had seen too much in his life not to recognize these for what they were: faces of women and men and children that had been skinned and dried.

  They formed one great tapestry of human suffering and carnage.

  The fire caught there, too, and spread along the faces, flaring briefly before dying out.

  The smell was like a barbeque—

  a town on the desert, burning.

  And there was something there, with the shadows of the tortured, hiding its face.

  A movement.

  He ripped the rest of the window open and looked back.

  The light illuminated the cellar, and there, against the far wall, beyond the hanging bodies, was an old man with his arms spread wide apart at shoulder-height, his legs corded together.

  His face was long and twisted along the jaw line, and his skull seemed too narrow to be human. If Peter were to specify a creature that this human face most resembled, it would be that of a skinned dog.

  And yet, Peter recognized the face.

  Sloan. Kevin Sloan.

  Crucified.

  The man’s jaw worked silently.

  Peter moved, as if in slow motion around the burning refuse, through the muddy water, toward the man with his wrists spiked into the wall. The face was twisted and elongated, his eyes all but extinguished of life. He began bleating like a sheep about to be slaughtered.

  Peter reached him just as the fire burnt itself out, and only a square of light from the casement window shone through the room.

  “My God,” Peter said, and while he could no longer see the face of the man, he could feel his breath on his cheek as he got nearer to him. “My God.” Light from the window illuminated his torso.

  “Nah,” the man whispered, “nah.”<
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  Tattooed on the man’s chest was an image. It was a sketchy drawing of a heart rising off a thorned stem, as if the heart were a rose, and through the heart of the heart, several knives.

  Beneath this, in pale blue letters: “el Corazon.”

  Scars ran along his ribcage—healed bullet wounds.

  “You’re already dead,” Peter whispered. “I killed you. I know I did.”

  The crucified man whispered, his breath rank as if what was in his mouth and down in his gut was putrid and steamy, “Who can kill a nightmare?” Then he laughed, like a madman, only softly, and his eyes stared at nothing.

  And then Peter felt no breath at all.

  Instead, he felt a strong chill wind go through him, a blood memory.

  The skin of the crucified man’s face turned hard and crinkled like parchment, folding in on itself, as if he had been dead for months and only now allowed to decay.

  Peter was not sure if he was capable of movement. Then something animal in him took over, something beyond his thought process, beyond his logical mind. He raced for the open window, climbing out, scraping his sides on broken glass, just anything to get out of there, because he felt it, something else in there, moving through the shallow water and filth, something not quite human. His heart was beating so fast he could barely catch his breath when he stood up in the daylight world.

  Behind the bungalow, the back entrance to the dilapidated church.

  The house was on fire. He stood there, watching it as if he were still unsure whether or not this was a waking dream.

  6

  Yes, of course: sacrament of the sacred heart.

  That’s what it had been, some part of him whispered.

  A sacrament.

  What you did.