Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  The scratch on the watch. Still ticking beneath that scratch. The realm of time. Someone had kept winding the watch, keeping it going, and it smelled to him like memory.

  But it’s a stupid, mean joke. She’s done this. Put this in this old car with his little pile of bones to show me up. Because she’s conquered time. The bones dry, and the clock ticks. She means to put me in this car, too, and the bees’ll fly right through the gaps in my ribs and collect pollen and the watch will keep perfect damn time. “Well, it ain’t gonna fly, sister!” Charlie yelled out into the clear sky. “Who the hell am I talking to? Hey, I’m here for the taking. Just cut through my brain and have yourself a good old sandwich.”

  Morning was ending, and a warmth spread across the land. For the first time in years, Charlie lay down among the roses and went to sleep. Just an hour at the outside, he thought wearily. He wasn’t even certain that he would fall asleep, only that he would close his eyes for a moment and then figure out what he was going to do. Besides, he thought, drifting into the warm, gray, fuzzy blanket of rest, I know you, Wendy, you’re a sundown kind o’ girl. And I’ll be up before nightfall.

  But he was wrong.

  When he awoke with a start, it was because someone was touching his face.

  He opened his eyes, and thought for a second he saw Wendy, and then it was just a darkening night. A shadow creature crouched down at his side, tugging at his closed fist. He opened his hand as he sat up, and the creature grabbed the watch from his hand, and then fled.

  Or so he thought.

  “Hey!” he said, but he only heard a rustling of plastic bags and a movement of the bushes.

  And then he scrambled over to his cab, got inside, slammed the door. Tried to start the car up, but it was no go. He checked to see if his cigar box was there, beneath the seat. It was. Just because of a nagging suspicion, he lifted the lid.

  What he thought he would see would be an ancient ceremonial knife. What he saw instead was a dead lizard, unusual in its lack of pigmentation. It looked like some throwback to some older species of lizard, and he knew it was, in a way. From the caverns. In No Man’s Land.

  And then, in the twilight, he saw the creature, rising up among the roses, and it was just a shadow, but Charlie had the unmistakable feeling that it was Wendy. He had seen her in so many of his waking dreams that this did not surprise him. It also did not surprise him that he didn’t act the way he had done in those dreams in the past. Normally, in the dream, he would attack her. Then he would awaken to find he was beating up an old man on the street, or sometimes even a lamppost. But he would not attack this shadow figure, because this time, she had it.

  The athame.

  It was the only weapon he knew that she was afraid of.

  It was the only weapon that he thought might subdue her.

  And now, it was in her hands.

  The creature didn’t seem to notice him, though. She had risen with the sound of squealing brakes out on the highway, and let out a keening howl to wake the dead.

  9

  “...and I think she can wake the dead, too,” Charlie said to Peter, telling of his arrival at the Garden of Eden. “I was scared shitless there for a while and stayed still. But she—or it—didn’t attack either one of us.”

  Peter hadn’t said anything for the brief duration of Charlie’s story. He’d been feeling shooting pains through his arms and legs and gut, and, somehow, Alison’s voice, like a pained whisper. All this was too much—the creature in shadows that had howled and run, the garden of roses, the sound of Alison’s voice, and Charlie Urquart, Charlie fucking Urquart, a kid he would be happy to see dead, grown into this man. And I don’t even hate your guts, Irk. “I guess,” he said finally, “I should say I’m glad to see you’re still alive. Last time I saw you—”

  “I know. I was crap,” Charlie laughed, getting out of his cab. “I was a blithering idiot with the police and the shrinks and juvenile hall and the funny farm and that professor who wanted to ask me all about the demons. Well, I figured out how to play the game their way. Guess you did, too.”

  “No, wasn’t thinking about then. I was thinking about after that day, when we...with that thing in your hands.”

  Charlie nodded, grimly. “The Awful Thing.”

  “That’s what Than called it.”

  Silence between them, as they both tried to block the memory from their minds.

  They heard the sound of the car, and the doors slamming, just beyond Eden’s wall. Charlie said, “Hey, looks like there’s more of us. I wonder...”

  Peter ignored the headlights that flashed across the garden. “I don’t think it was her. Wendy.” He nodded in the direction that the creature had run. “May be just some scavenger. This place must have lots of scavengers.”

  “Stole my—” Charlie was about to say watch and knife, but as he approached Peter to shake his hand, maybe even reminisce in some awkward way, Peter hauled off with his fist and tried to slug Charlie. Charlie stepped out of the way, and Peter fell to the ground. “Peter?”

  “Oh God,” Peter gasped, “isn’t it happening to you, too?” Charlie kneeled down and patted him on the shoulders. “You sick?”

  Peter shook his head. “Turning.”

  The itch of fever heat.

  Flickering.

  Peter clawed at his shirt, for it was hard to breathe. Her voice, Wendy’s, seemed so close, and then the headlights from the car. And his nausea. His limbs were heavy, weighted with an absurd gravity. His every movement seemed ponderous; when would he ever scrape his damn shirt off? So sick, so weak.

  He looked down at his fingers—they tore at his own shirt, against his will. They had grown long, opaque—nope, they were definitely talons. He opened his mouth to scream and a strangled howl emerged from his throat as he felt the pain of his vocal cords shifting.

  Peter Chandler raked his newly formed nails across his bared chest leaving five thin trails of blood behind. The flickering lights came up stronger, not headlights, not lightning, but the flickering of his life.

  10

  And it was gone.

  The demon shifting in him had been part of a nightmare.

  It was all a nightmare.

  Peter Chandler awoke on the couch in the living room of the apartment he shared with his wife, Alison.

  Alison started to say something, bat he felt a curious emotion overwhelm him and it left him momentarily deaf. It was almost relief, and an incredible feeling of love, love of simple things like home, and family, and good health.

  Alison held up a square of white paper. “That crazy old woman again.”

  Peter wiped the sleep and tears from his eyes. God, she was beautiful with that thinly hidden smile beneath the smirk, the way her lips curved like that. “Stella?”

  Alison nodded, plopping herself down next to him as he curled his feet back to give her room. “This one says: ‘Peter, I need you.’ Kind of warped, huh?”

  He felt her hand tickling his bare feet. A vague thought crossed his mind: too good to be true.

  But he brushed it back into a corner of his brain. He could smell the clean, fresh smell of soap when he leaned nearer his wife, and chocolate-chip cookies, the crumbs still around her lips. “I hope you didn’t eat all of them.”

  She grinned. “Not all. There’s still some I’ve been saving. We can both eat them later. You think maybe you should call her?” Alison passed him the telegram. She had long, almost elegant fingers.

  He held the telegram up to the flickering bulb of the lamp. “I suspect she’s going to call us and then I guess I’ll have to tell her to leave us alone. She’s been through hell, you can’t blame her for being off her rocker.”

  He had trouble making out the words on the telegram.

  As he tried to read the words, he pulled Alison to him. He kissed her cheek, hugging her tight.

  She pushed him away, slightly. “Peter, it hurts, it’s hurting me, please...”

  His eyes, through the tears of happine
ss, finally focused on the words of the telegram. It said: “WELCOME HOME, PETER. LOVE DAD.”

  His brain began short-circuiting, and for a moment he felt like he had become a radio receiver picking up voices. “It’s Peter. Don’t shine it on his face. He looks—”

  “What’s the matter with him? Is it a seizure?”

  “She’s causing it, in a dream.”

  “Isn’t there anything we can do? Oh, dear Lord, he looks like he’s dying.”

  “...have to until he comes out of...”

  Static on the line, a party line in his head, and Wendy’s voice cut through the overheard conversations, “No matter where you are, you are always here, with me.”

  A moaning, weak voice responded, “Peter, oh, God help me, I hear them coming, they crawl, they crawl...”

  Alison?

  11

  Flickering, as if the source of his own light was going out. As if he were dying.

  The white-hot pain shot a lightning bolt down Peter’s spine; his ribs stuck him beneath the skin like knives trying to poke their way out; his knees seemed to have caved in. He crawled across the ground, trying to press himself down into the dirt—he barely felt the burs and spiny stalks of stiff grass scratching at his skin.

  A light pursued him, smaller than the headlights out on the road. But the physical hurt he felt overpowered him, and at last he sank completely down, unable to move.

  “Don’t come near me,” Peter gasped, finding it hard to breathe. His words had come out sounding like a cry for help. These people—why did they torture him with their light? It burned in his forehead. “Just get away.”

  “Peter? It’s you?”

  Stella? Stella?

  A numbing icicle thrust through his ear, spiking his brain, coming out the other side. He screeched with the sensation; the world went from black to white to a smoky yellow; Peter felt himself shoot out of his own body and stand outside it, looking at himself.

  What he saw was the same beast that Kevin Sloan had become years ago, the legacy that had been left him.

  The wild creature that was Peter looked down at itself, and began tearing into its own stomach with its talons. The feeling was like being tickled, and looking at his hands he saw they were hands, and then they were hairy with black nails, and then again just his hands, and he wasn’t turning. Hallucination. Bad acid flashback, he thought with a sick humor, only without the benefit of having ever dropped acid.

  As he came to, flickering on again like a light, a tremendous sense of loss chilled his bones. As if someone close to him had just died. He was covered with a blanket, bundled up against the old wall. Two old women, one scroungy-looking guy, a tattered-looking older one, and a small black dog were watching him as if at any moment they would have to kill him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The Fear-Eaters

  1

  Peter felt as if he were breathing through molasses. His reaction time was slow, the very air surrounding him seemed to press against him, smothering him. Between that last flickering inside him and this moment, some dark moon had eclipsed him, something had been posted aside just as surely as if he’d received a concussion from a fall.

  I’m still human, he thought, not like Sloan. Not yet. But in another couple of hours. Or, hey, maybe in the next twenty minutes.

  His eyes didn’t quite register the four people surrounding him; a sputtering campfire had sprung up before him, and now he only vaguely remembered lying there when the woman he recognized as Stella covered him in a blanket, and one of the others who now stood before him had gathered up some of the litter and started a fire. A man crouched down in front of the fire; he raised his eyebrows as if in a toast to Peter and said, “Glad you made it back, even if this ain’t exactly Heaven on Earth.”

  It was like being outrageously drunk and having friends forcing coffee and cold showers on him. Just let me go back to sleep, he thought. Something was in the cold night air of the desert, something that was heavy and thick, weighting him down. We’ve all been drawn here, reeled in like fish caught and struggling to break free, but the line is strong. Her line is made of steel and Her hook is so far under our skins we can’t wrench free.

  But I’m still human, and with that thought came something that Peter Chandler didn’t know he even still possessed: hope.

  Thank God I haven’t turned yet. He was more ashamed than surprised that he was surrounded by this small and eccentric-looking band. He had known that others would be called besides himself. It was as inevitable as the tides: Wendy could draw them in with a magnetic force that was beyond imagining. He felt ashamed because he knew they must’ve heard him. Watched while he flickered in and out, while the demon nature with which She’d infected him tried to assert its control. It’s because I’m back. She’s stronger up here. It’s her territory—no wonder Palmetto’s remained a wasteland. She’s poisoned it.

  “The blanket’s from my wagon,” one of the old women said—her voice was like a knife slicing into stale bread. Peter was just happy to hear the human quality of it. He felt a warmth spread through him that had nothing to do with the tartan wool blanket they’d wrapped around his shoulders. Beneath the blanket, his shirt was in shreds, and he could feel the soreness in his chest and stomach where he’d scratched himself. “The name’s Nessie Wilcox, and I’m a friend of Stella, here, who I guess you already know, and the shy one—that’s her, some call her dog, but she’s named Gretchen, only she takes a bit of warming up to.”

  Peter didn’t glance at the small dog that was studying him carefully from a slight distance. He was stunned, and a dozen half-formed thoughts floated through his mind at once. “And then there’s—” Nessie turned to the man who was leaning against an old gas range that had been dumped right in the middle of Eden’s ruins.

  “Hey, Chandler,” the scraggly-looking guy said, and Peter needed no introduction. “Thought you were a goner for a second.”

  “Charlie Urquart,” he said with some wonder. “It’s really you. I was beginning to think I dreamed you.”

  “Your old worst nightmare.” Charlie grinned, although his smile was drawn downward as if he had trouble making his facial muscles pull up in a look of happiness. It was a grim smile, a weary look that told Peter that Charlie had been paying for his part in the events of 1980. So it doesn’t matter whether she’s called us back or whether we’ve come here out of the badness of our hearts. We’ve got to be here. It’s the intersection of our lives, and Wendy might just be our compass to show the way. Peter nodded to Stella, but an itchy silence overcame all of them, as if just acknowledging each other were enough, as if words were not just irrelevant but too painful because of the memories they might dredge up. Charlie, you’ve been a murderer. Stella, you’ve been one, too, and I guess I’ve got to join that club, too. He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. We’re just here for Judgment Day, and our god is a demon in a dark cave into whose hand we’ve played. Life’s a bitch and then you die.

  Diego Correa came over to Peter’s side of the campfire and squatted down next to him. The old man looked from one person to another, and Peter could practically read his thoughts: He must feel like he’s in heaven, here are three of the four people he’s been trying to get together for more than a decade to tell the whole story.

  Stella was the first to break the uncomfortable quiet. “As opposed to your new worst nightmare. All of us here together. We’re all practically strangers,” she said, mainly for Diego’s benefit. “And yet we’ve got something in common. We survived what was not supposed to be survived.”

  “Why do you think you survived?” Diego asked. “What kept you alive when others died?”

  “I know what it was that kept me alive. It was her.” Charlie nodded in Stella’s direction.

  And then he told them his story.

  2

  The death of Deadrats

  “I had been shoved aside, taken possession of, if you will, by a rage I’d been nursing from a young age. The
rage had a name and a face. It called itself Deadrats, and Wendy found a way to let it out of its cage and to keep me in it. It was like being a split personality because even though the rage had leaked out before, it had never stayed out and kept the real me locked up. So I did...some things which will, ha ha, put me in Hell in the afterlife. Sometimes I pray the atheists are right so I won’t have to worry about it. At the age of sixteen I helped murder some people. I still...can’t...talk...

  “Well, it was this part of me. This lunatic twin living inside my flesh. When it took over, it was like watching a horror movie in feely vision. Smells, tastes, the sounds of screaming. And then, on that last day, the Fourth, this Deadrats got to go hog-wild. I watched while he...”

  “It wasn’t you, Charlie,” Diego said. “It was the demon. It was beyond your control.”

  “If only I could believe that. So, anyway, I was doing what kids do, right? On the Fourth of July. I was setting off fireworks, sort of. I was running around town that night of the chili cook-off, after doing things...’’ Charlie remembered what Deadrats had done to Alison and her family. How he had watched Alison, in shock, walk calmly out to her Thunderbird and drive out to the Wash.

  Not knowing that Sloan waited, crouched, in the backseat of her car. Ready to take her out to the cave.

  “And so I had one more job, something Wendy wanted me to do especially for her.”