Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Nessie nodded toward the campfire. “You stuck it in there and if you’d left it in there for more than a second, who knows what would be left.”

  “Wendy,” Charlie said, looking at the fire. “Alison. I heard Alison. I know it’s her. Oh God, Peter, what we did—she wants it back! Oh Christ, don’t you know what that means? Oh Jesus.”

  “Alison,” Peter said, his face impassive. He looked like a man who knew what must be done and had finally decided that now was the time to do it “We’ll be dead by morning if we don’t get going now. She won’t need to kill us, we’ll do it to ourselves.” He turned to Nessie. “Can we use your car?”

  “Nessie,” Stella said. “There’s no reason for you to be involved in this at all. None of us has a choice. None of us, that is, except you and Diego.”

  “No choice here.” Nessie nodded as if confirming something in her own mind. “Not after what you did for me. Owe you at least this much. All of you started eating your fears by just coming here.

  “I can eat a few fears myself. Besides, key’s in the car, and we can all fit.”

  “I’m in, too,” Diego said. “I’ve been searching for this all my life. Whatever Wendy is. Demon, spirit, hallucination.”

  None of them spoke again until they were halfway to the station wagon.

  Charlie brought a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and plucked one out. “I guess it won’t matter if I smoke a few more of these.”

  Nessie fixed him with a stern look. “Not in my car you don’t.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Flickering

  1

  Again, that light switch going on and off, faulty circuitry inside him. Peter slowed down as they walked toward the station wagon. Charlie kept talking but stepped a little ahead of him, and Peter allowed him to. Nessie and Stella, with the dog at their heels, were almost to the car. Diego kept up with the ladies, looking like a kid in a candy store.

  This must be the old man’s dream, to answer his questions, to hope for what he had called an illumination.

  Peter glanced up at the stars. They were also flickering in and out. Like me, he thought. What am I to them? In a thousand years, who’s going to care what we do now? A pain shot through his arms as if he’d banged his elbows against hard rock; his left hand twitched.

  He thought he saw a lightning bolt rip down through the sky, and its white-hot light cut into the darkness, ripping the night sky in two.

  Then it was gone. Then others hadn’t noticed it.

  Part of me.

  We’re like cattle, just like the ghost herd they used to talk about up here. We’re that herd and we’re being rounded up for the final slaughter.

  An old dream came back to him, one in which Wendy showed him skinned animals hanging upside down, their blood dripping into silver buckets, and now Peter knew what the dream meant. It’s us. We’re those animals.

  He saw them: Stella tied by her ankles, life not completely gone from her as wounds drained. Charlie, whose face had elongated into a rat’s muzzle, his gray, matted fur burst in sections where blood blisters erupted. And Sloan’s dog, Lammie, the midnight-black pit bull with its hindquarters drawn up by a meat hook, and it was not a dog but Peter himself hanging there. She had turned him and then sacrificed him.

  Wendy lifted her face to him; dried blood in a mask across her skin.

  Not Wendy.

  Alison.

  What was in Wendy, what Stella called the Lamia, the demon, the dark adversary of his youth, had taken Alison over.

  A voice inside him: And you, Peter, She will turn you and hang you there for what you did to Her.

  He slowed to a stop. Nessie was just opening the door to her car, dropping her dog in the backseat, helping Stella into the shotgun seat. Charlie was almost to the wagon, too; he had not looked back to see if Peter was keeping up.

  The distance between Peter and the car seemed like an enormous chasm.

  If I ran?

  They’d get in the car and come after me.

  But if I took the car. If I took the car away from them, they’d be here. At least they’d be safe for a while. Maybe in that time I could stop Her. Or maybe in that time I would turn and come after them.

  But, hell, it would be time.

  They’d have a chance, and maybe I’d have a chance, maybe Alison is still safe. The Big What If has to work my way sometime. There’s always the chance I can stop whatever turning She’s doing to Alison. Always the chance.

  Stella was having some trouble getting in the car; she glanced back at Peter and turned to say something to Nessie, who also turned to look at Peter.

  Flickering.

  Charlie, as if in slow motion, crooked his neck around, his eyes growing wide.

  Flickering, Peter felt the fever and pain coming on and he knew what he must do before the beast in himself had complete control.

  Car—out into the Wash—out to Her—to Alison—to Lamia—to stop what—once it’s started it can’t be stopped—but there was a chance—buried her once—bury again—

  Peter, the muscles beneath his skin contracting in uncontrollable spasms, bounded to the wagon, and leapt in the driver’s side, swiftly turning the key in the ignition, slamming his foot down on the accelerator and as the car sprung to life, he sped over the side of the road, down into a cloud of dust that came up from the Rattlesnake Wash as he went.

  2

  Charlie ran down the edge of the Wash, but the station wagon was going too fast out into the desert.

  Up on the road, Nessie turned to Stella and whispered, “I hope to God Gretchen gets through this okay.”

  3

  Flickering as Peter drove, his eyes blurry, trying to keep his eyes on the trail, studded as it was with rocks and trash heaped up like sentries, and a phosphorescence that emanated from something he could not quite identify. He tried not to glance down at his hands (talons), trying to swallow the strangling feeling in his throat, trying not to run his tongue across his teeth, because they seemed sharper than usual.

  Without wanting to, he glanced in the rearview mirror. He saw the dust cloud his driving had raised, and the shadows of the others back on the ridge. “You’re safe?” he whispered as if it were a prayer for them. And then he saw himself in the mirror, and it didn’t look like an animal, it looked like Peter Chandler. He was human. It was a fight, a struggle, his blood against the invader, against the parasite that had invaded him years ago and had patiently waited for the moment when it would be activated by Her call.

  But if I can get to Her before I turn completely, maybe Nessie was right, maybe I can turn on Her. Got to be a way, got to be some way.

  Just having left them back on the road at the mouth of the Wash, he felt they’d already been saved, that if they didn’t try and follow him they might get out of this nightmare alive.

  When he heard the sound of barking in the car he slammed his foot down on the brake and the station wagon spun a three-sixty in the dirt, crashing over brush and cactus, finally resting against a newly smashed Joshua tree.

  “Shit!” Peter cried out, and saw that Nessie’s dog wagged her tail in the backseat, and continued barking until he reached back to pet her.

  His hands had not changed. He had not turned.

  But still, he felt that switch inside him, a finger on a trigger about to be pulled.

  4

  “It’s Wendy,” Stella said. “She made him do that, because of me. I can feel something here.”

  “Excuse me, but I think we all feel something here,” Charlie said.

  “I mean something different. When you take two magnets with the same charge, positive or negative, you can never put them together. There’ll be an overwhelming repulsion between the two of them. She and I are like that.”

  Nessie clucked her tongue. “But you’ve got the positive power, and she has the negative.”

  Stella shook her head. “I wish it were that easy. It’s the same power, only different uses, and I suppose that m
akes it bad whether or not it’s used to destroy or to heal. The only difference is my daughter has more of it than I do, or than any of us has.”

  Charlie shook his head. “So Peter and I just got radiation poisoning under our fingernails from working in the factory. She’s the nuclear reactor.”

  “Right,” Nessie said, “just like I been telling you, we got to go in there and fight fire with fire.”

  “We tried that once here already,” Charlie said, grimly. “Out here, you can’t fight fire with fire. It’s got fuel out here, it eats up the night.”

  Stella looked at her dark companions, and then out to the place where the station wagon had gone. “She doesn’t want me out there, but she wants me here, like she wants all of us here. It can’t just be for revenge. It must be because we may be the only living creatures who have in us what it will take to destroy her.”

  “Yeah, only we’re hunting Dracula here without a stake,” Charlie said. “Look, we can stand here talking all night but my cab gave up the ghost this afternoon and I seriously doubt anyone can resurrect it. So we can either start a twenty-mile hike or make bets as to whether or not Peter left his keys in his car. I lay my money on the keys. So I’m going up the highway and when I find the car I’ll be back.”

  Diego said, “I’ll go with you.”

  Charlie looked at Diego the way he had when he was a boy and the old man had interviewed him six months after he’d been put in juvenile hall. It was a look that carried equal parts suspicion and confusion, as if he were sorting something out in his head.

  5

  Charlie hadn’t wanted to tell them the real reason he needed to get away from them: he was beginning to feel the world slant and the color of the night go from indigo to a sulfurous yellow. Just when he blinked, and not completely, but he didn’t want to wake up again with his left arm burned up to the elbow this time. Or with his fingers around Stella’s neck.

  He felt like a tired soldier at the close of a long war. The cold night felt good because it made him shiver, and shivering, he knew he was just a regular guy. Even the guilt he’d been carrying practically from birth was good. He had spent just about half his life being a bully, an asshole, a juvenile delinquent, someone who other kids ran from, and then the other half of his life had been in repentance and introspection. Guilt just comes with the territory.

  He thought about what God was as he walked, but only a little— the idea of a God didn’t quite figure in this part of the world, there’d been some line of demarcation over which he’d crossed, and if there was a God, He was the God of people outside this circle. This was a Members Only club and even God hadn’t applied for membership. “Although,” Charlie said, looking up to the stars, “you could be my guest for the day, God, and I’d get you in for brunch on Sunday and a friendly game of golf if you wouldn’t mind coming early, like maybe tonight.”

  The stars were oddly square in their flickering light, and for a moment Charlie Urquart though he could see through them into a vast whiteness beyond, but it was just his eyes tearing up. “Always bringing God out whenever I need something badly, and then hiding from Him the rest of the time. All I ask is, you know, like an old Coke bottle, just redeem me. Even if it’s just for chump change.”

  Then he heard a voice, within him, like a divine fire in his loins, in his stomach, bubbling through his chest and he was racked with pain.

  The voice said, Charlie, I am your god, through me your soul will be redeemed, through me you will find your way to the place wherein I dwell. Come.

  It was the voice of Deadrats. The rusty bars of a cage slid open, and a gibbering creature crawled out from a dark corner of memory.

  He let Diego catch up to him.

  6

  An hour later, Peter slowed the station wagon, finally stopping it completely where two boulders stood like sentinels to the El Corazon Mine. Gretchen curled comfortably in his lap. He petted her, rubbing behind her ears. The fever was strong—the backs of his hands were soaked in sweat—but the flickering was less pronounced. And he wasn’t turning completely. Hey, I still got my sanity. A shred, anyway.

  He killed the headlights.

  Through the boulders he saw a thin shaft of yellow light.

  Demon fire. Toxic waste of the gods, right here, the lighthouse of hell shining its path my way.

  “Good-bye, pup.” He gave the Scottie one last pat on the head. There were a couple of flashlights on the backseat; he reached around and grabbed one, testing it. The light was strong. He got out of the car, shutting the dog inside, windows down. “They’ll come get you and you’ll be fine. Me, on the other hand...”

  He almost fell down when he stepped away from the car. His stomach twisted. Peter balanced his hands on his knees as he bent forward to vomit, but nothing came out. He wanted to open his guts and just pour out whatever had been polluting them for so long. But you don’t have the guts, he thought wryly.

  Last time you were here you were running like crazy to get away, and now look at you, you’re just aching to get in there.

  He straightened himself up, trying to ignore the pain in his joints and the fever on his skin.

  He walked up the path to the cave’s mouth.

  His one thought: Alison.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Sacrament of the Sacred Heart

  1

  Stella

  When Diego followed Charlie to revive Peter’s car, Stella pulled Nessie back. “You don’t have to go out there with us. Charlie said the athame was stolen; we don’t even have a real weapon anymore.”

  Nessie opened her purse and withdrew a small handgun. “It was my papa’s. It’s got a few bullets in it. I carry it with me everywhere.”

  “I wish bullets worked. She’s beyond death and life. But you’re not, and I wish you’d wait here. Who knows what’ll happen at those caves?” Nessie gently eased the gun back into her purse and covered it with Kleenex. They walked together through the rubble and the Garden of Eden, toward the old highway. They could hear Charlie cussing while he and Diego tried to start the car down the side of the Wash. “You saved my life, Queenie.”

  “Only to lose it here.”

  “Funny thing about that, I was all prepared ‘til this morning to die, either in some sad hospital bed or in my bathtub. But you cleaned out more than my lungs this morning, Queenie, you scrubbed something that’s been needing an overhaul for a long time. My soul. You know that line in the Bible? ‘He restored my soul.’ Well, you did that. I was all ready to die, but glad I got a change of plan—at least I didn’t want to die from anything as mindless as cancer, and now, maybe not even from old age. I don’t mind dying so long as it’s for something, not just because I was sitting someplace and time and biology finally kicked in.”

  Stella crossed her arms in front of her, almost wistfully. “I wish I was that brave.”

  “Or foolish,” Nessie added. “But I’m going under the assumption that none of us is going to die tonight. Because if this Lamia is what you say she is, dying’s not going to be like a twenty-four-hour labor with a baby at the end to make it all worthwhile. It’ll be a real pain in the keister. I guess the word ‘agony’ comes to mind. Don’t think I’m so brave when every ounce of me is yelling to jump off the edge of a cliff and roll back down to the civilized world where nobody believes in this stuff anymore. Only one thing I still don’t get, though.”

  “Only one?”

  “Yep. With that other fellow, Peter. If you can cure me, and you put Charlie’s bad side back somewhere, why can’t you cure Peter?” When Stella spoke again she sounded ashamed. “I can’t control it. It’s like a lightning bolt shoots through my fingers. But only sometimes. It’s not like I can direct it. It’s like this power surge.”

  “I figured as much. But there’s a little speck of hope, then. You told me that what’s in your daughter is like nuclear power. But nuclear power can get harnessed just like anything else. In fact, without people to make sure the nuclear reactor funct
ions, there’s no use for the power. It just sits and waits. So maybe we go out to that old mine and we jiggle with the machinery and just maybe we get it so it either works right or we just shut it off.”

  “Or,” Stella added, “we have a meltdown. Remember Three Mile Island? Chernobyl?”

  “Yes, Queenie, I do. But I also remember what life was like before nuclear power was in use. And I don’t care what any damn kids say, they weren’t there, they don’t know, but life seems a lot better now with a bit of energy behind us.”

  They fell silent as they watched the headlights move along the Rattlesnake Wash. Charlie and Diego had gotten the car going again.

  When they were all in the car, with Charlie driving, Nessie sat up front, trying to see through the darkness, but clouds had moved across the scant moonlight and the desert seemed like a vast crater in the dark of the moon.

  “Sure hope your friend Peter is nice to Gretchen,” Nessie said. Charlie turned to her and smiled, and for a second Stella thought he growled at her, but it wasn’t Charlie at all.

  It was Rudy. His eyes were torn out and in their place were shiny stones. “Star, my baby, you will join me soon, yes? We will enjoy the pleasure of each other’s company again, I hope. The feeling between your thighs, as old as they are, still sets my juices flowing, makes me thirsty, baby, for your blood. You still bleed, don’t you?” When the scream burst out of her throat, Stella realized that it was another hallucination. The others were staring at her. Charlie had pulled the car to the side of the road. Rudy is gone.

  She wiped the tears from her eyes and tried to calm the heart that beat rapidly within her. “Getting hysterical. I don’t know if I can really go out there. The things I did...”