Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  "Vicious. I'll bet it was some struggle for that bone, Cup."

  "Ha."

  All three dogs began licking the bourbon-soaked snow.

  "Hey." Cup reached over to take the Jack Daniels from Lily, but she was too quick. She pulled it behind her back. "I need some of that for later."

  "Come and get it," she told him playfully.

  He hesitated and looked into her translucent blue eyes. "Okay." He put his arms around her, pretending to reach for the bottle. Impulsively, he kissed her, and he tried to pry her lips apart with his tongue. No go. He pulled back. He brought his arms back from around her waist. "I should get back to the dorm. The guys are going to wonder it looks like the bourbon's mostly gone, but I still have—"

  Lily smiled, settling her left hand down upon his lap. "You still have that bone, don't you?"

  Now she played aggressor. Lily brought her face against his and kissed him, licking his lips with her tongue, lightly, before kissing his cheek, his chin, his neck. Cup did not move. She pressed her lips against his ear. Her face seemed sticky, as if from sweat or tears. He felt her breath inside his ear. She exhaled into him. She whispered, "Why couldn't it have been you?"

  He said nothing.

  She said, "Ask me now."

  The world went silent, no wind, no dogs thirstily lapping at the bourbon-stained snow, no strange crunch of branches that Cup might've heard if his senses had not been so totally focused on Lily. It was as if a needle had just been removed from a record. He didn't look at her when he asked.

  "What kind of smoke are you?"

  7

  She said, "I'll tell you what kind of monster I am."

  Then she told him.

  They held each other for what seemed like hours. Lily cried, and her breath was a mist surrounding them. He told her she was the most beautiful woman in the world. He swore undying love, he promised her he would slay all her dragons, now and forever.

  Even as he said these words and inhaled the cold night and her jasmine perfume, they were jumped.

  "I know what kind of monster I am!" came the high-pitched squeal.

  The Jack Daniels Hounds barked and howled all around them.

  This occurred one night, December 18, 1974, the night of Dr. Cammack's annual Christmas faculty party at the Marlowe-Houston House, and the night, two days before Christmas break, when certain so-called Indian Clubs held their initiation ceremonies. The boys called it Hell Night.

  Just before midnight, a nineteen-year-old boy named Bartholomew Andrew Kinter, Jr., born in nearby Cabelsville, but pretty much a hometown boy in Pontefract, Virginia, fell down the cellar of the Marlowe-Houston House, breaking his neck. An electrical fire also started in that cellar as a result of faulty wiring. The fire was easily extinguished by the Pontefract Fire Department. The fire did not spread beyond the cellar.

  The boy's body was burned beyond recognition.

  8

  Advertisement from the Westbridge County (Va.) Sentinel, September 18, 1985:

  Odessa Houston Amory announces her services as spiritual advisor, in tandem with her daughter Theodora Louise, Medium. Calling hours: 8-10 PM, M-F, noon to 8 PM Weekends. Bereaved? Contact loved ones, be comforted. Christian Household.

  9

  Portion of transcript of conversation recorded between Dr. Prescott Nagle of the Pontefract Historical Society and Teddy Amory, February 12, 1986:

  Prescott: Let me speak with Virginia now.

  Teddy: My, how you do require a lot from this little girl, Dr. Nagle.

  Prescott: Am I speaking with Virginia Houston?

  Teddy: Yes.

  Prescott: Virginia, may I ask you a few questions?

  Teddy: Yes.

  Prescott: Where are you?

  Teddy: In the belly, Dr. Nagle, of the beast. We are all here. Your wife, too. She perverted her calling, you see, just as mine was also perverted.

  Prescott: What was your calling?

  Teddy: I was the chosen vessel. I was the door. My brother shut the door, Dr. Nagle, and he locked it. And in so doing sealed his own doom, and that of our entire line. He had an unnatural love for me, Dr. Nagle, and that drove him to this desperate act.

  Prescott: What desperate act?

  Teddy: You know.

  Prescott: No I don't, Virginia, please tell me.

  Teddy: What your wife did to herself. A perversion of nature. She was not a suitable passage. But this one, this child, shall be.

  Prescott: Who is the beast?

  Teddy: My brother calls it by the name Goatman.

  Prescott: And what do you call it, Virginia?

  Teddy: (word is indecipherable—a series of moans and growls) It is ecstasy, its name is unspeakable by human tongue.

  Prescott: What do you call it, Virginia?

  Teddy: The Eater of Souls.

  Chapter Three

  BONES, II

  December 2, 1986

  1

  Behind Teddy's eyes the world became translucent ice that shattered as she fell into a viscous blue darkness.

  Jake Amory watched his sister drop onto the carpet. She was going into one of her fits.

  She's a monster, the words buzzed around in his head, don't trust her for a minute, boy. She's laughing at you, too, boy, but on the inside. Just take your knife and open her up and you're gonna see for yourself. But don't cut deep, boy, 'cause you got to save something for the big day of the Pocket Lips, just skin her.

  Teddy was twisting, shaking, shivering like she was being hosed down with ice water, arching her back against the floor, slapping her hands up and down as if she were trying to swim. The irises of her eyes rolled up under the lids. She was swallowing air like it was liquid.

  Jake held his Boy Scout knife high, as if this were a ritual he was about to perform. "Kissy-kissy," he said between clenched teeth. He brought the knife down in a clean slice through the smoky air; the blade flashed in front of his sister's contorted face as she continued to struggle against herself.

  He heard the characteristic rumbling coming from Teddy's body, her muscles and bones fighting against the seizure. Now, get her now, give her the kiss, Jake, fast, she's a rattlesnake, she can be anything she wants, she ain't human, she's a monster—

  "I got it under control!" Jake shouted, trying to shut out all the damn noise in his mind. He knew what he was doing. He didn't need all that buzzing around his ears, all that static. His head seemed like a jungle, full of howling, screaming things. He thought he was going to explode. Drool gushed down his chin, and he wiped it away. "Shit!" His mouth curled downward, and he said, "Okay, monster baby, it's time for the Pocket Lips," and he swung his arm down again, the knife whistling in the air, to his sister's squirming body.

  But as he did this, and he was thinking of the sheer beauty of that one movement, his hand clutching the knife, his elbow bent, curving through the air, homing in on its destination—her left ankle, if he could keep her still long enough to peel that tender young skin away from the bone—just as the knife skimmed her foot, it flew out of his hand. It was as if someone had physically wrenched the knife from his fingers. He watched in angry disbelief as the knife sailed down the stairs, clattering to the floor below.

  Nervous, just nervous, that's all, you can do it, you can get that fucking door open.

  Jake clapped his hands together and laughed. "Under control, my man, still got it under control. Jake's your man, if he can't do it, nobody can! "

  He knew what he would do.

  He was going to set her on fire. Some vestige of the spirits of the dead he'd been rapping with down by the lake tickled his ear: no, no fire. Mustn't use But he cut that voice off. You didn't have to have gasoline for this monster, oh, no, you just use that long frizzy hair to get the inferno going.

  Now that voice was like a mosquito buzzing around his head: not the fire, not her, it's not—

  But he swatted at the voices, overriding them with his own thoughts: fire, fire, fire, fire.

  Teddy
was coming down from her fit. Her eyes were closed. Her pajamas were soaking wet; her bathrobe had flown open beneath her like clipped angel's wings as she lay there, still.

  Jake would have to act fast.

  He reached into his breast pocket for the Bic lighter he'd used to torch the rat in the bedroom.

  He flicked the thing on and a lovely, tiny spark erupted from its heart.

  Jake knew one golden moment when he smelled victory through the fire that still raged in the bedroom down the hall, and saw it there in his helpless sister as she came down from her dance.

  And then Jake Amory howled in pain as his entire hand burst into flame, while the thought shot through his head like a bullet:

  Asshole, you used the wrong hand, you used the hand with all that fucking gas on it—

  But even this thought did not seem to make any sense to him as he tumbled down the staircase, screaming, burning.

  2

  Teddy Amory was out of the burning house, not even sure how she'd managed to get down the staircase through the smoke, around her brother's screaming, writhing body (she wanted to help him but he looked at her like he was going to throw her back into the flames), around the tongues of fire that shot out at her from all directions. It was something she'd never imagined in her worst dreams.

  She ran out into the field that adjoined the house, as far as she could run, and then collapsed in the damp grass, sobbing. She closed her eyes tight, praying that when she opened them again the fire behind her would go away and the nightmare would fade.

  But when she raised her head from the ground, opened her eyes and glanced back at the house, fire still vomited from the windows. Her brother was screaming even louder.

  "Please God, let it be over, let it be over," she whimpered. Teddy rubbed her fists into her tear-filled eyes.

  Then she heard the front door slam.

  "Teddy! Teddy, get back here!" Jake yelled. "It's time for a bedtime kiss, it's the Pocket Lips comin' for ya!"

  She ducked down and then peered through the tall grass. She watched her brother stomp stiff-legged around the porch, backlit by the inferno. He was clutching one of his hands.

  Her first impulse was to run back home. Just to get it over with. It was Jake, and no matter how crazy he was acting, maybe that fall down the stairs had reawakened something human in him.

  Because she knew. She knew what had gotten into him.

  It was part of that gas station smell. She remembered it, how it snaked around her, pulling her back through the freezing water, trying to suck something out of her. But she had escaped it in the water. Her daddy had saved her.

  And the thing was mad she'd gotten away. It wanted her for something. Because of what had gotten inside her, whatever it was that was causing the fits, the thing that she'd brought on herself and on her family.

  But her daddy hadn't gotten away, and now her mother, too, was caught.

  And Jake.

  "You cunt, Teddy!" Jake boomed, his voice raking across the darkness of predawn hours. "I know you're out there! It's just a matter of time, baby sister! Come on back and maybe I'll treat you nice, yeah, real nice!" As he shouted obscenities, Teddy noticed something bright and silver flashing in his hand.

  A knife.

  Teddy stifled a scream. She hoped her fits wouldn't come on.

  3

  From The Diary of Worthy Houston, Winter, 1801:

  My sister, Virginia, grows weaker by the day and we pray for her recovery. But Father does not seem to notice her troubles. He bids me ignore her falling sickness, her depressions, her auguries of doom. He warns me that I must not mistake the door for the doorway, or the lock for the key. He is more concerned with his digging in the earth beneath our house.

  What madness must have possessed him to build this house upon their graves?

  We have heard him the whole evening long and into the dawn. In my dreams I can hear his shovel scraping against the rock and earth. He believes, I think, that he is planting them deeper as if in so doing he will allay his fears. As when he sows his fields, the farther down in the soil he plants the seed, so shall the grain not rise up against him.

  Chapter Four

  CLARE

  January 9, 1986

  1

  The Winter Before Jake Amory Torched His House

  FOUNDERS DAY

  Clare Cammack Terry knew these things about herself: she had wavy black hair that could not be tamed with hairstyles or conditioners, her younger sister, Lily, had shoulder-length blond hair that sparkled. She had an olive complexion that no one envied, whereas Lily had that creamy skin that Clare equated with a tubercular condition but which everyone else thought was a sign of grace and purity. Lily was a woman who in her early thirties could still wear dresses that might be described as "frocks" and still looked as gorgeous as she had at seventeen; Clare was more of a Banana Republic kind of girl, getting most of her wardrobe out of catalogs rather than from the local stores—and she always felt she looked out of place in Pontefract, like Annie Hall in John-Boy Walton territory. Clare had failed in marriage and career (failed marriage: to David Terry, Manhattan ad agency man, who thought Clare should concentrate on her femininity more, and who himself concentrated on other women and the occasional accommodating man—but her first roommate had warned her to not get serious with a man who wore bikini underwear. Failed career: nursing, although, ha-ha, as Lily would say, she was certainly nursing her own father now). Lily was a success in marriage and had no desire for a career. But Clare was doing her darnedest to put the screws to her sister's marriage, ha-ha.

  Oh, and I know this, too. My episodes. Vertigo, dizziness, call it what you like, I see things. Just these neurotic little dreams while I'm awake. How very New York of me. Hallucinations.

  Like this one in front of me.

  Clare Terry didn't immediately recognize the woman who gazed at her from the second-story Venetian window of the Marlowe-Houston House. But the woman evidently knew Clare, because she waved and seemed to be trying to say something to her from behind the glass. Then Clare began to understand what the woman was saying. Clare couldn't really hear her, but suddenly the woman's voice was in her head.

  Clare felt her own blood turn to ice inside her.

  The woman was saying, "Big kiss, Clare, Daddy wants to give you a big kiss, he's right here, with me," and the woman was no longer unfamiliar, with her auburn hair and high cheekbones. It was Clare's mother, Rose Cammack. "Big kiss," her mother repeated from behind the window. "You didn't have to come home," her mother continued, "he would've been fine without you. Nobody wants you here. But since you're here, he has a Big Kiss just for you."

  Clare looked away from the window, tried to look away from the house, but she could not escape it. Every way she turned her head, there were its Greek Doric columns, there the white front steps, the molded brickwork, there the thick dead vines snaking about the trellis, all leading her like strands of a spider's web straight to the dark spider at its heart, her mother gazing at her from the window. And the words seemed to froth out of her mother's pincerlike mouth, "Big kiss, Clare, bigkiss—bigkiss—biggest "

  "I'm telling you," a more honeyed voice said.

  Clare was standing in front of her Volkswagen Rabbit, the back door still open. She was staring at the empty, dark Venetian window supported by a false railing, crowned with an arch. It was just like any of a number of windows on houses in Pontefract, nothing special. When she'd been a little girl, she even looked out this particular window, pressed her face right up against the pane, pushing the sash aside. Her mother was dead. This was just the Marlowe-Houston House. No one was staring back at her.

  Shelly Patterson, who leaned against the hood of the car, was saying, "The biggest tits yet. Miss Perky Boobs. I'm telling you, Clare, they get bigger every time I see her." Shelly had a round pudgy face that Clare found eternally pleasant, framed by those tight ringlets of carrot-red hair. Even if she was overweight, she looked supremely comfortable in that
body. Not like me, Clare thought, not like me.

  Shelly wore an oversized black sweater and had drenched herself with imitation gold jewelry because she thought it minimized her weight. It didn't; Clare thought Shelly looked even heavier than usual. Shelly held her hands out in front of her as if carrying enormous sacks of groceries. "And I am also here to inform you that Cappie's tits were not like that yesterday. Oh, sure, they were big, but they weren't galaxies unto themselves."

  Then Clare remembered. All right, this vision from that upper window, Mother, is just an episode. All is right with the world. Just another vision, and who are you to have visions, anyway? It's not like you're Joan of Arc; you're the most devout atheist on the face of this earth.

  Clare reached in her purse for her version of the double martini: a pack of Salems and a half-Valium, a habit she'd acquired in Manhattan before the divorce became final. She reoriented herself. She'd just gotten out of her car when Shelly Patterson came down the front steps to help carry the four jugs of wine she'd brought for the luncheon. Shelly had begun gossiping about other people who were already inside: the First Families of Pontefract with their little cliques of whomever was most closely related to the town fathers. Then the dizziness had hit her, and she had clutched the car door for support. Not exactly dizzy; she felt like she was on a different magnetic frequency from the Marlowe-Houston House and had hit its invisible field.

  Shelly hadn't noticed any of the signs of her episode.

  Clare was getting so used to them that she had learned to disguise the sweating and trembling fairly well. Basically, Clare had taught herself not to freak whenever one of these came on.