Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Always, with Peter, she felt it wasn’t her he desired, but some other girl, and the blockade came not from within Alison’s body, but from Peter’s, as if he were holding something back when he entered her, keeping something for that other girl. He curled his mouth slightly when he was inside her, and she always expected him to call out for someone. For her. The girl of his dreams.

  When Peter entered her here, on the tub floor, her hands reached behind him, her fingers stroking the light hair on his back; pressing, she tried to bring him all the way into her so there was no difference between their bodies.

  But as she felt his thrusts become more rapid, as she pressed her head into his neck, her lips against his chin, as she felt something within herself spark like a live wire thrown into the tub with them, she was again with some teenaged boy whose mouth and tongue were everywhere across her pale skin, rough and dry and unrelenting.

  And he pressed her up against a stained wall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Day of Reckoning Is Upon Us

  1

  The Angel of the Desolation wanted her so badly, and she would not enter into him, he had not found her. He felt like he’d stepped into Hell without her.

  Wendy. Beloved.

  No sleep.

  The Angel of the Desolation turned his face upward. Sunlight like drops of whiskey sprayed over him. It stung and it tasted of old memories, he got drunk on the light, and his head throbbed. His neck felt swollen, and the sweatshirt was so tight against his skin.

  No sleep, no sleep, give me strength.

  It had been years since he’d seen the sun, since he’d been out where the light was. He’d sat on a hillside overlooking the San Fernando Valley while the fiery ball emerged from the mountains in the east, as if sent by Her to him as a message. The morning brought the shakes upon him, and he became nervous and afraid. He could now be seen. He pulled the hood down farther over his head. He sat in the stolen Buick, parked along the roadside and watched the light shower over the Valley, and then the sun moved to find him, to make him drunk and mad with the memory of the other life he’d led, before She had changed him.

  She had rescued him, and had taken him from one darkness into another darkness. It was as if he had died then, those years ago. Endless hours and minutes and days and weeks and seconds underground, pressed there with stones and bricks. Dirt and filth clogging his throat, his nostrils layered with dust, his mouth so filled with pebbles that he was afraid that if he screamed for help he would choke to death before he’d made a sound. How much time had gone by since they’d buried him there? And who was there left to come for him? In that eternity he’d felt the stinging of fire ants across his arms and legs; welts rose where the insects trespassed, and with them, fever, and he began praying for death, praying for release, praying to whomever might be out there to hear him.

  And it was her. She would answer his prayers.

  “You belong to me,” she said, bringing him forth from the tomb, hugging him while tears sprouted from his swollen eyelids.

  2

  He would waste no more time.

  They would pay for their great sin.

  Now.

  3

  This is what happened. These were the first four words of his confessional notebook. Later, too, Peter would think that. This is how it happened and I did nothing to stop it until it was all over. Like I wanted it to happen.

  But when the day was just beginning, and Peter woke up to the ringing phone, he didn’t think these things. He had even managed to put what he’d seen in the bungalow cellar out of his mind. He’d hallucinated before, why wouldn’t he again? Hadn’t he been convinced by enough medical “experts” that he had some kind of damage to his cerebral cortex so that he might have the equivalent of acid flashbacks and start seeing what his imagination was manufacturing? But it ain’t nothing, folks, why you follow a girl who looks like a girl you used to know down a ladder and then you see a woman’s face and underneath it, another, but you know it’s just a little teeny-tiny bit of brain damage, so you’re supposed to calm down and take a couple of aspirin when it happens and reassure yourself that nothing’s a-coming for to carry you home. Just a trick of the mind. Now you see it, now you don’t. You believe what you can’t see, boy? Not if you can’t believe what you do see, boy. Every now and then, over the years, you’ve thought you’ve seen her, too, in a crowd, just a face; but hers, and then gone. A face. A face peeled back from the skull. Her eyes like onyx. No iris or pupil or white, just onyx. Black translucent stone. Why don’t you tell Alison? Why can’t you tell her? Every time you are about to, you can’t. What kind of a monster doesn’t tell his wife the truth?

  These were currents in his river of thoughts, and he hadn’t slept at all that night, so the river had been running since he’d made love with Alison in the bathtub; the river had been running since he’d run from the bungalow the day before; the river ran time and space together, so that he never knew if he had imagined things or if they were real, and if they were in fact real, what did it matter, then? What did it matter if he was insane, and Alison was insane, and he had visions of things from Hell, and what did life matter?

  And then, before he knew it, it started that morning with a ringing phone.

  This is how it happened, he thought later, when he could wonder how the hell he had lain there in bed and not held her so tight that no one could possibly take her away from him ever.

  4

  “Hello.” Peter held the phone to his ear.

  “I’d like to speak with Mrs. Chandler,” a man said. Old man, Peter figured. Maybe someone from the vet’s office. Or a professor.

  “Mrs. Chandler,” he said, nudging Alison, who sleepily whispered back, “Just a few more minutes.”

  He kissed her on her neck. “It’s for you.”

  She murmured, “Message. Call back later. Too sleepy.”

  As she turned into her pillow, he looked over her shoulder to the alarm clock. It was only seven. Who the hell would call at seven in the morning?

  “She’s sleeping. If it’s an emergency I can get her up, otherwise...”

  “It’s an emergency,” the man said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Is this Peter Chandler?”

  “Yes, it is. Who is this?”

  “We’ve met before. Years ago. My name is Diego Correa.”

  The name cut through him like a hacksaw. The only thing he could think to say into the phone was, “You finally got to her, you son of a bitch, you finally got to her. Stay the hell out of our lives.” The man on the line said, “Tell her she—”

  Peter hung up the phone. He reached over to the phone cord and snapped it from the wall.

  “What was that all about?” Alison murmured, turning over and putting her arms around Peter’s waist. She smelled like vanilla and soap from last night’s bath. “Peter?”

  His entire body was tensed as if ready to spring. “Diego Correa.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her voice had dropped; he could tell she had awakened with the mention of that name. “What did he want?”

  For the longest time, Peter was silent. He lay there and listened to the sound of her breathing against his chest Then he whispered, barely able to get it out, “You didn’t tell me about him.”

  “I knew you’d get mad. I went to him for help. Peter.” She began sobbing uncontrollably, and he held her tightly against his body. “I...can’t...function...anymore. I need to know things about myself...you don’t understand.”

  He gently stroked her back. “I do. I love you. I just don’t want people like Correa to touch us.” But as the words left his mouth, he could practically hear Alison suppressing emotion. I promised you, Ali, I promised you I would never bring it back and I would never make you look back there, promised, and even if you hate me I won’t break that promise.

  She pushed away from him. “I’m just so tired...of all of it. I don’t know why it’s such a secret. I’ve read those book
s, I know what happened that summer. What else is there that’s so awful?”

  “Al, Ali, I love you. You don’t know what these people put me through, what they tried to do to you, how they were vultures, just feeding, feeding, feeding, never leaving me alone. It just pushes every button I have.”

  “I just want to know what happened.”

  “I told you,” he said. He turned away from her, burying his head in the pillow.

  “God. Peter, you’re not being fair. I know what you told me. But I want it from inside me. I want to remember it myself. I know you took care of me, I know you taught me how to speak again and how to read, but I want to remember. For myself.”

  His voice was muffled against the pillow. “What if it hurts you? What if, Alison?”

  He heard her voice, strange and wonderful, so much like it had been when she’d been a teenager, and he turned to face her. “Peter, don’t make me go back there. Peter, please, don’t ever make me go back there, promise me,” she said. Her eyes were open and he was afraid to touch her because it scared him when this happened; it made him think she would have to be institutionalized again, and this time he wouldn’t be able to get her out.

  He had heard it before, whenever he said those words without thinking, what if. Something about the words that cracked her for a certain period of time, put her in a trance. How many times had they called him from her job to tell him that she had zoned out again, and was she on any medication? She could hide it sometimes, but how much of her life would be spent dreading two words frequently used together?

  I only know that I have to keep protecting you. Even if it means with my life.

  5

  Just as if she were sucked into darkness, Alison was no longer in the room but in an endless corridor of night. The whispering voices batted the air around her. She struggled against the dark, but it held her.

  Something freezing-cold breathed against her face, and she heard the whispering voices: what if what if what if what if.

  6

  Peter wiped her forehead with a cool, damp washcloth. “You were burning up.”

  She opened her eyes to his voice. He was sitting up on the bed, with her head resting in his lap. “I’m worn out,” Alison said.

  “Maybe it is the flu. You should rest today.”

  “No,” she said resolutely and sat up quickly, then leaned back against him. “Work. I’ll be better when I take a shower.”

  “The North Hollywood Animal Clinic will run perfectly fine without you for one day. You can call them.” He reached across the bed and plugged the phone back into the wall. Then he handed her the receiver.

  “I’m going to work,” she said and pushed up off the bed. She held his hand while she steadied herself. “Little dizzy. Coffee?”

  “Ali.”

  “Peter, I am just a little under the weather. I’m going to work. If I feel sick, I’ll call you and you can come get me, deal?”

  “Are you going to talk to Correa?”

  She looked away. “Probably.”

  “All right, then. If you want to see him, see him. But be careful. He told me he was helping me, too, and all he did back then was pick my brains for the things he was looking for. And he was after you, then, too. No matter what he says now, he knew that you’d had the worst of it, and he wanted to examine you. And if he had, Al, you might’ve never recovered. Once you went under medical and psychological testing, you would’ve been dead. They didn’t want you to get better. They only wanted to hook you up to machines and record your responses.”

  “That’s all in the past now. Peter, we were sixteen. You can’t say for sure that’s what would’ve happened. He’s not a bad man. He’s good. I can feel it from him.”

  “Just be careful, then. He broke promises to me. I don’t trust him. And it was you he wanted, and he’s waited all these years. As I recall, he made a lot of money on that book of his. All on the tragedy of kids and what happened. You would’ve been his prize. Now he’s found you.”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” she said as she went into the bathroom. “He didn’t find me. I found him.”

  7

  After she’d gone off to work, and after he lied and promised to follow up on a recent job interview, Peter Chandler rose and walked into the kitchen, flipping on the coffeemaker. He swung the refrigerator door open.

  This day, he would try and clean off his desk. He would be late getting out to look for work, but he would clean things up a bit. Hell, maybe I’ll clean out the fridge, too, he thought, peering into the dead, white light.

  The refrigerator had an old ham that needed to be tossed; some squash and bell peppers, chicken breasts on the top shelf, next to the skim milk, three Diet Cokes and a six-pack of Corona. Not exactly a hearty breakfast here. Behind the milk carton he found some packets of Quaker instant oatmeal. Leaning against the refrigerator door, reaching in to grasp one of the packets with his left hand, Peter felt something in his stomach as if his bowels were loosening, his intestines uncoiling beneath his stomach, his knees giving out, his lungs not finding breath, his spinal cord wavering.

  Jesus, this better not be the flu. Alison and me both getting sick right now’s lousy timing.

  And then Peter fell back into his body like he would hit the floor.

  As he caught himself against the refrigerator door, holding on for support, something came out of Peter’s mouth, a noise that he could not identify at first.

  As he regained feeling in his arms and legs, pinpricks beneath the skin, he knew what the sound was.

  A howl.

  The flu, yeah, dream on, Chandler.

  You know what this is.

  You’ve known this was coming for a long time.

  She’d been coming for him for a long time, and in his dreams. Her hair a tangle of rust-colored rattlesnakes, writhing across her scalp, her eyes shiny and black like beetle shells, her face a blood-streaked skull. And then it would all shimmer, the vision in his dream as if he were crying in his sleep, and she would be restored: beautiful and cruel and pale. The Lamia, that’s what she was, a she-devil, death’s mistress: all those names that required some kind of superstitious belief, and yet hadn’t he believed when he heard his blood singing with her voice? Stella knew—that’s why she was sending the telegrams and letters. But Peter had ignored it until it could no longer be ignored. The disease had been in the blood, and they had tasted the blood, and now it was Peter’s turn.

  They all had done the Awful Thing.

  What it had done to all of them.

  Oh God, Al, Ali, Alison, don’t look back there. Only demons. Only deathsmell. Only what you can’t see. Now, within his own body, he heard the call.

  She had been growing strong again, after all these years.

  She had been waiting for the right time.

  She had wanted it to grow within them.

  8

  Diego Correa tried calling Alison’s apartment again six times before he gave up.

  He’d been up all night, in his office, listening to the old tapes of interviews with two boys, because he’d wanted to catch every single thing they’d said, not just what he had used in his book. The tapes playing continually through, rewinding, playing, the voices of children spinning the unbelievable story, and the part they were leaving out was about her, Alison. The children weren’t lying about what had ravaged the town on the high desert, but they were lying about the girl.

  If only he’d understood. If only he’d had insight back in 1981 when he’d interviewed them.

  On the old tape:

  “What about your friend?”

  “She’s sick, but she’ll get better.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Is she badly hurt?’’

  “Cut it out. I’m tired. She’s just sick and she’s gonna get better. She doesn’t know any of this. She just got attacked is all. It wasn’t after her anyway, it just wanted to kill. She got in its way.”

  “
Why don’t you want me to speak with your friend? Are you trying to protect her?”

  “She’s sick. You already talked to her. Her grandmother won’t let you talk to her, anyway. Maybe when she’s better. I’m tired. Can I go now?”

  “Peter, do you love her?”

  The boy, on tape, didn’t respond.

  And Peter, as a teenager, had given him one key, and it was only now he knew how to use it. But it was only one key to a door with many locks.