Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Stella wiped her hands across her face as if she were washing herself. Then she looked at her hands. She did not look up. A smile stole across her face as if she’d just told herself the funniest joke she knew. “It’s because I’ve been there.”

  Nessie softened a bit, and wanted to reach out and at least pat the other woman on her hand for comfort. She sighed, and looked over the rooftops to the stars. “You’ve had cancer? You never told me that, Queenie.”

  “I mean I’ve attempted suicide. Several times.”

  “You seem like the type who would’ve succeeded by now”

  “Well, I have always had someone watching out for me.”

  “This Mr. Chandler?”

  “No. Not Mr. Chandler. In a way I have spent the past several years watching out for him.”

  “He’s not an old beau.”

  Stella let out a laugh that was so loud that Nessie was afraid it might wake up the entire neighborhood. “Lord, he’s young enough to be my grandchild. Well, perhaps a very young son. But he’s no relation. I really barely know him. But I think he’s got something very special, a weapon.”

  “Queenie, you talk in circles, you know that? Around and around she goes and where she stops, nobody knows.”

  “I live in circles,” Stella said thoughtfully.

  “So tell me. What’s the weapon for?”

  Stella Swan stopped rocking in her chair. Tears had formed in her eyes. Nessie almost wanted to retract the question because of the shame she felt—shame from Stella, as if shame were a physical thing, and this warm shame was being passed over to Nessie like a torch. “A weapon to send a demon to Hell.”

  Nessie decided she had to be patient. This might take all night. Nessie was not a great believer in demons, but she respected other people’s beliefs, and if Queenie was going to start talking sin and revivals, then that was okay with her if it helped whatever emotional pain was going on inside this woman. After a few minutes of silence, Nessie ventured, “Any demon in particular?”

  “If I told you you’d think me insane. If I were to tell you, you would probably call a doctor yourself and have him put me in a rubber room.”

  “I got to be honest with you, Queenie. Ever since you moved into my place, I’ve had the sneaking suspicion you weren’t playing with a full deck anyway.”

  “I admire honesty. Only someone like me who’s lived her whole life as a liar and a cheat could see what truth is really worth.”

  “You do live in circles, don’t you? So tell me about your demon, Queenie, I’ve had one or two myself—Cove over there was the last of them, and now he’s going to torture me to my last days, which might just take me to the end of this week. So who’s your demon?”

  “My daughter.”

  Stella Swan resumed rocking in her chair, beginning to unravel a thread she’d been stitching at for years on end.

  8

  “I was in my thirties when she was born, but what led up to her birth occurred when I was still a child, barely thirteen. I grew up in a little house near the ocean, and my mother and father were always away or, if at home, distant in their worlds of sophistication and glamour. I had no playmates—my family was thought odd in our community, and of course we were, although how do children know of such things? I created a half-dozen or more playmates. I pretended I was an orphan of European royalty whose current parents had kidnapped her from her rightful place on some foreign throne. I pretended to combat my loneliness. My older brother, Rudy, was one of the few people in the world outside of school who ever spoke kindly to me. My mother had been married before, and he was her only child from that marriage. He seemed wonderful and exotic to me. Girls flocked around him, starlets, girls really only a few years older than I was at the time. And I was a fat little thirteen year old who knew deep in her heart that she was hideously ugly, so when Rudy, as worldly as he was, paid attention to me, well, it made me forget who I was. He had some sort of magic, you see.

  “And when he raped me, the first time, I felt that I had encouraged him, that I had led him on. Yes, Nessie, rape, although we didn’t call it that then, we called it, of all things, seduction, but I can tell you, I was not seduced, I was raped. My mother taught me something about men, that men were evil and good, all mixed together, and if a man had the morals of an alley cat it was usually because some woman had tempted him. So I thought that of myself: that I had made him do what he did to me. And sex, no matter what approach a man took, always seemed like rape to me, always seemed to be against someone’s will. And Rudy loved me, I kept telling myself that, and I gradually began sinking into a fantasy world where Rudy and I weren’t really related at all. I didn’t really grow up, not the way other girls did. I mean, I grew, but inside I stayed a thirteen year old who had a twisted crush on her brother. I know you’re shocked, and I apologize. These aren’t the sorts of things I would normally discuss over tea.”

  Nessie nodded, speaking solemnly. “Confession’s good for the soul, they say.”

  “If that were true…” Stella began, but changed her mind and returned to her story. “Well, during certain interludes of my life, Rudy surfaced and we resumed our sordid relationship. I had begun another love affair, this time with opium, which Rudy always had plenty of, and then progressed to other available drugs not worth mentioning. I married and divorced—men who did not love me, but men who would take care of me and leave me alone at the same time. I make no excuses. I was selfish and emotionally cold, and I did not ever help another living soul. I led the life I wanted. And then, one night, Rudy returned to me. I had not seen him in almost ten years—since before the war ended. He had changed—the war had done that to him, not in the way it did it to other men because of the death and the horror, although those were factors with Rudy—he had changed in a terrible way: he found he loved the death, he loved the maimed bodies. He had transformed himself into someone I barely recognized. He confided to me that when he was in a battle he would choose one of his own soldiers to kill and he would carry it out in such a way that it seemed the Germans had done it. He would do it so that the young soldier would know one of his most trusted buddies was going to kill him, slowly. ‘Only six of them,’ he told me. ‘I was cautious, but if I had known how easy it would be, well, Star, babydoll, I would’ve taken the entire infantry.’”

  “That,” Nessie Wilcox said with disgust, “is the ugliest thing I have ever heard, and yet when it comes to human beings, nothing surprises me. The human mind is capable of absolute obscenity.”

  “Rudy was not really human. I had never thought that of him. Another fantasy of mine, but he fueled that fantasy with his own tales. Rudy claimed to have been sired by the Devil himself, and spent his only studious moments collecting medieval texts on witchcraft and black magic. He told me he consorted with demons constantly and claimed to have learned how to raise twenty different spirits of Hell. I was fascinated by the sheer lunacy of it all—I was a liar at heart, and I was certain that everyone else in the world must be a liar, too. So where I had created a small fantasy world in which to live, Rudy had made an entire universe stretching as high as heaven and as low as hell.

  “But, as I said, the war changed him. For the worse. He had deserted in France, exchanging his identity for that of a young man he had just murdered so that no one would come looking for him, and traveled down into Italy, and it was there, in a castle in the Apennines, that he allowed himself to become possessed by a demon. He told me in detail how it had occurred, how the castle was run by a nobleman, a supporter of Il Duce, who had gathered together young men and women within his castle walls for his satanic experiments. Do you believe in the Devil, Mrs. W?”

  Nessie shook her head. “If there’s a devil who isn’t a man or a woman, he has yet to show himself to me.”

  “I believe that there can be...manifestations…perhaps not part of some religious cosmology, but beings, spirits, if you will, what might have once been considered gods, for lack of a better term. Demons. Entities that
exist in time and space and occasionally find their ways into our existence. I don’t think anything as noble or smart as the Devil, but demonic possession—a spirit of some power finding its way into a human body like a parasite, and then the human will become infected. Is it so different a concept than, say, cancer? If every cell of an organism is being eaten away at, who’s to say that a demon is not just another kind of cancer?”

  “But your brother...”

  “Rudy. Yes. He had invited this cancer, this demon, into his body. There was a young possessed girl that the Italian used for his pleasure—a girl who spoke with many tongues, who cursed all things holy, who performed bestial acts for the amusement of those around her. Rudy told me he took her to his bed and kept her there until he had drawn the demon into himself, he chained the girl to his bed for three months until she finally gave her own spirit up. But not before he had sent her soul to Hell.

  “For Rudy had a taste for certain unusual...practices. He enjoyed...dead bodies...laying with them. Fondling them. He told me in detail how he had gone into an Italian town after a firing squad had killed...it’s too horrible to tell...but the corpses, he would say, how beautiful, how still, how loving. And in his travels, he had come across one particularly beautiful corpse, which he kept in the castle with the possessed girl. He spoke of the corpse being full of the disease of passage, of a state of a damaged soul still held within the body. He wanted to own the soul of the deceased, and so, day by day, he devoured the body.

  “And when he had eaten all of it, he turned his full attention to the possessed girl. There was the blade. To him, not a weapon at all, but a path.

  “You see, he brought home a souvenir from this sojourn. A dagger, which he called an athame, a ceremonial knife. It was ancient, he told me. Sanctified in unholy debaucheries. He believed in it. I do, as well.

  “He told me that he cut her heart out as he raped her one final time. How he watched her eyes flutter as she realized what he was doing to her. Her body began burning even as he twisted the knife deeper into her. Her body blackened, flames licking at her from beneath her skin.

  “The blade, he told me, was older than its hilt. It was a gift from the god of darkness to his first mistress, Lamia. Lamia was the goddess Rudy worshipped. Lamia, the night, the corrupt, the eater of skin and drinker of blood, to whom countless human sacrifices were made centuries before her name was ever written.

  “Lamia, whose song is a demon howl, whose face is madness and suffering. He told me that when he...violated…the dead…that he was with her, with his demon lover. And so he would send her servants, handmaidens and slaves, as gifts. The soul he had eaten, the blood he had drunk, the girl he had set fire to with a twist of the knife. The dagger would be used in sacrifice, for men slaughtered with it would dwell eternally in the underworld. How he went on about Lamia, how he wrote her name across tiles with his own blood! The girl and the dead body had been part of his corruption. He said he had achieved ultimate union with his lover and her servants.

  “He didn’t return to find me until well after the war—I had prayed he’d died, but he turned up in 1961, and his life was darker. He’d eaten away at what little sanity was left him, and then had only one driving thought: to pass this madness into the world. But something about his experience had aged him well beyond his years. He was a man in his forties then, but looked as if he were eighty. Stooped and bowed, infirm and gray, wrinkled and half-blind. I barely recognized him. Had it been the drugs? I asked. Had it been the war? But no, his body, you see, died there in that castle. What I saw was decay. Not an eighty-year-old man, but a rotting corpse that had not been attended to. I didn’t believe a word he said at the time. I thought he was making it all up. All I cared about was myself. My problems. I took what drugs he’d brought me—I was lost in my own world. I feared him, yes, but in those days I feared everything.

  “Soon after this, one night, Rudy came to my bed as I knew he would, and lonely and feeble-minded woman that I was, I let him in.

  “And then Rudy kissed me and I knew where this would end, this would end, this would end with me, like that poor girl, chained to his bed, begging for death, begging for a needle in my arm, begging for release from the nightmare my life had become.

  “And suddenly, I didn’t want that I knew I didn’t want what he had to offer me. Call it a life will, or survival instinct, but something bubbled up from deep within my soul, and every cell in my being wanted to fight those invisible chains which had held me so long.

  “I took his knife. He kept it beneath his pillow. I knew, because I would ask him why he kept it there, as we slept in the same bed. And he would say, God, his eyes wet with such an exciting; thought, ‘To kill you with.’

  “I thought I would hurt him. When he came for me, I attacked him with his precious athame, slashing his right shoulder.

  “I will never forget his face.

  “It was barely a scratch on him, a small trickle of blood. Rudy screamed like I had murdered him. ‘But you’re already dead, you said so,’ I reminded him. ‘But my soul,’ he cried out.

  “The skin around the wound blackened, and the blackness spread out across his arm and chest and up to his neck. Sores began opening up like small volcanoes across his stomach—I thought for a moment I could see inside him, right to his soul. He began shaking violently, he tried to grab me, but I backed away. It was like watching someone step into their bath only to find a live wire there in the water. His skin crackled as it burned. From the inside. His blood, boiling. He was dripping with sweat as the blackness engulfed him.

  “He was dead within seconds, and there, on his right shoulder, where the cut from the knife was, a flicker of light, of fire coming through. And then, the skin flaked, the bones crackled like paper, and ashes, he was ashes, he was nothing but ashes.”

  9

  “Oh Lord,” Nessie Wilcox said. “You’ve got me believing it. I can practically smell him burning.”

  Stella sighed, huddling beneath her blanket on the rocker. “No one believes anything until it’s too late. I am not lying.”

  Nessie nodded. “I believe you believe it, but, Queenie, if you were addicted to drugs…”

  Stella considered this. “You’re right, of course, I lived most of my younger days in a haze, shut away from reality.”

  “What about your little girl? Not that I completely believe this rambling tale of yours, but hell, it’s the most you’ve said in eleven months. So your child…”

  “I thought you would’ve guessed.”

  “You mean, her father? I hesitate to say it.”

  “Why? It happened. Things like that can happen in the world. Unimaginable as it is.”

  “And of course, I guessed that. Horrible. You must’ve wanted to kill him – your brother. I don’t even like thinking about it. But it obviously didn’t end there. You had a daughter in what—‘62? Did you stop me from doing myself in, in the bathroom—did you do it because you believe my soul would go to Hell for committing such a sin?”

  Stella squinted her eyes and shook her head. “If I believed that, Nessie, I would’ve let you die. All the more company in the afterlife when I get there. No, I stopped you because I knew why you were doing it.”

  Nessie nodded. “Cancer. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Stella took a long breath, and was about to speak, but closed her mouth. When she opened it again, she seemed to have calmed down considerably from the old woman who had just sped through the story of her life. “Our universe, as mysterious as it is to me, seems to have its own logic, and there’s always a balance, a yin and yang, a dual nature. Good and evil, even within the same person. My baby, growing inside me was cursed, I knew that, just as I was myself cursed. But my body changed in the months I carried her, and even after she was born I knew what I had acquired. A certain talent. Even my child, before I murdered all that was good within her, before...with these very hands...” Stella took deep breaths, her hands clutching the upper corners of
the blanket wrapped around her. “Even my little Wendy had good in her. But she had destruction in her glance, in her voice. She was the daughter of obscenity. I saw it all coming and tried to stop it from happening, but that was how I killed the girl I should have learned to love. And when I destroyed that part of her, the evil was allowed to take hold. Completely. Absolutely. No barriers.”

  “So you had a yin for her yang?”

  “These elements. The evil she was capable of, it was like a power growing out of her, and she could cast it where she would, yet it would always come back to her. But I received something from her, something that she could not touch. A terrible good. I had—I still have—a certain gift for healing, limited, unpredictable. It comes in me, grows stronger, when she grows stronger. I had a vision of you in the bathtub, and the feeling inside me, my blood rushing like it hadn’t for over a decade, and I knew that I was answering some call that could not be denied. It seems to make me stronger when it happens.”

  “So you think you can cure me? Is that it? Clean out my lungs? What if I told you I don’t want to be cured?”

  Stella’s voice softened to a whisper. “Then I’m sorry. Terribly.”

  “You’re sorry, Queenie?”

  “Yes, because it’s too late.”

  “Too late to cure me? Well, somehow I figured that would be the end to this story. You’ve been pulling my leg for an hour or more, and right now I’m wishing I was still soaking upstairs. Just happy Gretchen’s still with me.” She leaned forward to pet the Scottie, who rolled over sleepily.

  “No, Nessie,” Stella sighed. “I mean, it’s too late for not wanting to be cured. That act is already done. Fait accompli.”

  And Nessie Wilcox stopped scratching Gretchen’s belly, realizing that since Queenie had brought her out of the bathtub, she hadn’t been wheezing or coughing, and her arthritis wasn’t half bad, either (although it was still there like wood splinters in her elbows and knees, so if Queenie were half the healer she claimed to be, she was as half-assed about that as she was about keeping her room tidy).