Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  "I've got too much to deal with," he said, pushing himself away from the dining room table. Rita had set up the long red candles she had purchased on her recent trip to Williamsburg, and in the flickering candlelight, the lines on George's face were like intersecting canals. He looked like he had aged ten years in just one afternoon.

  As he stood up, George pushed his chair back into the table. Noticing his wife's disappointed expression, he went over to where she sat, chin in her hands, elbows on the edge of the mahogany table. George leaned over and wrapped his arms around Rita from behind. He pressed his face into her neck and kissed her. "There's just so much to figure out," he told her.

  "I thought you said some detective was taking care of that." She pulled away from him, and he also pulled back. Like boxers going to their separate corners of the ring, George went to the kitchen doorway, while Rita went into the veiled shadows of the living room, sat down, lit a cigarette.

  "There's something more to this case than I think Firestone is aware of," George said. "I don't quite get it myself."

  "Well, you don't really have to worry about it anyway, do you, George?" Rita lashed out unexpectedly. "Leave it to the state police if you think it's something bigger than suicide, it's what they're trained for. Let them figure it out."

  "But I'm sheriff, honey, don't you understand—"

  "What I understand is what everyone else in this town understands, George, but what you don't seem to get. When Cal Holroyd was sheriff, he understood. It's just you. You're the one who doesn't understand, George!" And then she said it, what was on her mind, had been on her mind for the past year, something that might never have come up had Warren Whalen not been found dead in the Marlowe-Houston House. "You're just a small-town cop, George, with a fat title. You don't have to let every damn thing that happens here get under your skin."

  "Rita. We're both upset, and I have to go back to work. We'll talk this out tomorrow morning."

  "You know what they say, George, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I talked to Lyle about your obsession," she said that word as if she were biting into it, "with the Gaston case, how you aren't sleeping nights, though God knows, maybe you're finding someone else you can sleep with—"

  "Damn it, Rita, but that tongue of yours is going to get you in trouble some day!"

  "Can't you just leave it alone, George? Can't you let the pros handle this—if there's anything to handle? Can't you just do your job, come home, and be a husband, for one damn night, just one damn night?" She wanted him to come to her, hug her, smother her with kisses, promise to make everything better. But George turned and went out through the kitchen. The back door slammed shut. Rita left the plates on the dining room table. She blew out the candles. She found a half-empty bag of Doritos in the pantry and finished it off.

  Lying in bed, listening to the wind outside, she only regretted having eaten all those tortilla chips. She was happy that she'd finally spoken her mind. He'd be mad for a while, he might even pout, but what she had said might finally sink in. George had been appointed sheriff because he was Mr. Nice Guy, and all anyone expected him to do was to keep the drunks off the street, enforce the speed limit, and keep the barroom brawls to a minimum. He didn't have to be the blue knight who concerned himself with everybody else and their problems—everyone except his own wife.

  In her dreams that night, Rita Connally was sitting up in bed. She heard a loud rattling that was distinct from the wind under the eaves, and she put her robe on and went over to the window. Snow covered the ground, and standing under the patio light was a woman in a dark woolen coat and a smart '40s-style pillbox hat with a veil covering her face. Rita wondered if this might not be one of the Altar Guild ladies, one of the elderly members. The woman just stood there on the patio, her face turned upward to the bedroom window.

  Then the woman lifted the veil from her face.

  Rita did not immediately recognize Louise Gaston because most of Louise's face was just not there. But it was the voice that was unmistakable. Rita heard the woman speak as if she were in the room with her. "Love did this," Louise said, "and love will do this to you."

  5

  Others in Town Who Could Not Have Been Dreaming Because They Were Not Asleep

  Dr. Brian Cammack tapped softly on his walk-in closet door.

  "Lily?" he asked. There was no response. He had dressed in his summer seersucker jacket and gray wool slacks. He opened the closet doors. Shoving aside several belts and ties that drooped across a coat hanger, he drew off a red and gray Scottish tartan bowtie. It had been a gift from his one good daughter. Lily loved seeing him in that tie, and the seersucker was Rose's favorite jacket of his. "My handsome cavalier," she would call him.

  Dr. Cammack went to his dresser mirror and fiddled with the tie, trying to remember the right combination of moves to make it bloom at his throat the way Lily could. "That girl can't keep me in this prison forever; why, I raised her from nothing, and now, she does this to me. Scares everyone away. She will be the death of me yet." Finally he gave up on getting the bowtie to bloom; he let it hang from the collar of his Oxford cloth shirt. "When I get to the party, Lily will make it bloom."

  He spent a few moments brushing his silver-gray hair neatly to the side. He squinted at the mirror. "Good enough," he said. He turned about and picked up his blue woolen walking cap, the one that still made him feel rather young and jaunty.

  Brian Cammack brought his gold watch out of his pocket. He held it up to his eyes: 11:45.

  "She'll be here soon."

  As he sat waiting for his one good daughter to come get him and escort him to the party at the old house, Dr. Cammack wondered if he was forgetting some rule of etiquette regarding guests at parties. Should he be bringing a bottle of wine? Some sort of gift? But then he felt relieved of this burden. "Rose will remember for me," he said and watched the closet.

  Prescott Nagle looked out his window at quarter to twelve and thought he could see the storm coming from far off over the hills. Like a broom, the clouds swept down into the valley, and the distant trees bent in submission. The snow continued to come down, less delicately than it had earlier, in a miniature cyclone motion.

  As the wind outside picked up, the barn house began its characteristic shuddering. He returned to his study. He sat in his overstuffed reading chair; the chair seemed to sigh as it accepted his weight. He lit his pipe, puffing on it steadily, and reached across the coffee table for the paperback copy of the Bible that lay upside down and open like a pup tent waiting for him to crawl inside. He set his spectacles on his nose.

  Prescott was not a Bible-reader. He considered himself a nominal Deist, believing that God had set the world up to spin and then abandoned it to its own devices. His late wife Cassie had read the Bible, was in fact buried with the Bible that was her confirmation gift at Christ Church.

  But that evening he'd picked up this paperback King James Version because he felt the need for some comfort, a voice somewhere to tell him that he was not losing his mind.

  Prescott read from Ezekiel, not knowing what he was looking for, hoping that somewhere there was a key to all this: the children of Nathaniel Carson, Giles, Olivia, Andrew, Thomas, Matthew, Anne, and Nathaniel. The anagram that Worthy Houston had made of their names: GOATMAN. Those bones he unearthed. The bones that, in Worthy Houston's words, "sang."

  And Teddy Amory, the girl who had come back from the dead, a girl who, damn her to hell, either did one killer imitation of Cassie Nagle, a woman who died years before that girl was even born, or had found an uneasy union with the taint that was upon Clear Lake and the goat dance. The way Virginia Houston, Worthy's sister, had in 1802 and had met with some end that remained a cloudy mystery along with the missing pages from that diary. The way a tent revival preacher had in 1926, and been hanged from a tree for it. The way the Kidd sisters, Sara and Christine, had in 1875, and paid for it with their sanity. Who could be sure of how many others there had been? Prescott suspected one other case, closer
to him; but if he thought about it he would fall apart just as he had in 1941. And now, how had this little girl paid for her gift: by burning to death in a house fire that the police investigators believed was set by her own brother?

  Prescott doubted it. Her remains had not been found; there was the evidence of her bathrobe found intact but singed a half-mile from the house. She had escaped.

  But to what?

  ***

  Ezekiel, Chapter 37, from which Odessa Amory read before each s ance with her daughter:

  The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones. And caused me to pass by them round about: and behold, there were very many in the open valley: and, lo, they were very dry.

  And lo, Prescott would've added, they were very restless, too, and angry as hell for being disturbed.

  Sheriff George Connally went home about two a.m. feeling he had accomplished nothing since finding Warren Whalen's corpse in the morning. The snow was blowing fiercely, and the windshield wipers of his black-and-white cruiser had a devil of a time keeping up with it. The streetlights were flashing yellow in town, and the streets were clean of people.

  This man scratching himself to death seems like such a wild card; where does it fit? How does someone go about doing that? As George drove with one hand, he reached up and scratched his neck. How the hell do you keep at it so that your blood spritzes out like soda water? Wouldn't you stop before you'd done that much damage? And Jesus, just what kind of allergic reaction would cause you to itch that badly?

  His cruiser skidded in a slush puddle as he turned off Main Street onto Lakeview Drive. The dirty water splashed up on his car, and it was as if someone had sprayed cold water on his face; he woke up. George had almost fallen asleep at the wheel.

  Shocked into a second wind, George parked the car in his driveway.

  The house was completely dark as he entered. He tried to be as quiet as possible. He took his shoes off as soon as he was inside. Carefully he edged the door shut, but a cord of Christmas jingle bells, a leftover from the holidays, dangled from the doorknob, sounding an alarm.

  George sucked in air, as if this would keep Rita from having heard the tinkling bells.

  When he got upstairs to their bedroom he felt a chilly draft. He turned on the light. The drapes were blowing into the room, and the window was shattered. Broken glass lay across the carpet.

  Rita was not in bed.

  When George walked across the room, the broken glass crunched beneath his shoes. With a clawing dread he had not felt since he'd opened that cabin door and found the Gastons' bodies, George followed a spotty trail of blood into the adjoining bathroom.

  He found Rita crouched like a frightened child beneath the sink; a thirty-eight-year-old woman curled up on herself, shivering in her nightgown on the tile floor. Her hair a sweat-soaked tangle. Her eyes bulging and twitching. Staring at him blankly. A weak moan escaping her lips. Her mouth, smeared with blood, chewing. And when she opened her mouth, more blood sluiced across her teeth. Her hands, lacerated from the broken glass, holding onto something. And when he bent down to lift her out from under the basin, the thing which she'd held so tight in her hand dropped to the floor. It hit the tile with a wet slap. George barely missed stepping on it.

  Her tongue.

  "Jesus," the sound barely escaped his lips as he hugged her close to him, carrying her through the bathroom doorway. "Who the hell did this to you?" He fought back tears as Rita, her face distorted in a frozen rictus of fear, stared at him, through him.

  Her chin quivered.

  Rita whimpered, "Oooweef, Oooweef "

  Clare Terry thought she was dreaming, but she was not. She heard the front door slam, and got up out of bed.

  She went to her window and watched her father, in his seersucker jacket and woolen cap, walk across the snow-covered front lawn.

  Clare waited at the window expectantly. She wondered when something was going to happen in this dream, and nothing ever did. Her father was brushing snow off his car, while more snow continued to fall. Finally, Clare returned to bed and closed her eyes.

  When she opened them a few seconds later, it was with the question: What's wrong with this dream?

  She knew the answer. It isn't a dream.

  Clare threw a robe on over her flannel nightshirt and ran out of her bedroom.

  Outside, she managed to stop her father from getting into the old black Cadillac that he never drove anymore. He was fumbling with the keys at the car door, and Clare ran up from behind him and grabbed the keys out of his hand.

  "You can't do this to me!" he shouted.

  Clare, who was freezing, pulled his arm, leading him back to the house. He resisted at first, and for a moment she thought, Well, just let him crash on some icy road and then you'll be done with him. "Look, Daddy, you're coming back in this house whether you like it or not!"

  "Little blind Clare," her father muttered contemptuously, but turned and began walking back to the house.

  6

  The residents of Pontefract, Virginia, awoke the next morning, weary from dreaming, to what Cappie Hartstone with characteristic enthusiasm would refer to as a "winter wonderland." As the day progressed, some would wonder if they had yet awakened from their sleep.

  7

  From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

  Tuesday morning, January 6, 1987

  Of course I haven't slept a wink, and I see the sun is coming up which is a bit of a relief. I've spent the whole night poring over these articles and skimming bits and pieces of the diary. Fascinating, but I don't know where it all leads. How does it go from children who may have been killed in the eighteenth century to a little girl who may have been killed in a recent fire, and finally to Bart Kinter's hand which may or may not have gripped my ankle on that footbridge? I don't know any of this, it's all supposition. That is perhaps what frightens me the most.

  In spite of that hand on the bridge last night I still want to believe there's a nice tidy phenomenon involved, maybe a law of physics. But I know there's nothing that pleasant involved.

  And those missing pages from Worthy Houston's diary that Dr. Nagle mentioned.

  What is it he's looking for?

  Now that the sun is up, I don't feel quite as scared as I did in the night. Maybe there's an explanation, a reason. Outside, it's all covered with snow. Again, so normal. Snow. Don't feel tired at all; guess I'm still living on the adrenaline rush from last night.

  Chapter Thirteen

  WHENEVER IT SNOWS, THIS TOWN IS A GODDAMN ZOO

  1

  "Whenever it snows, this town is a goddamn zoo," Gower Lowry said to his housekeeper as he lifted the window shade. He scraped the thin skin of ice that had formed overnight on the window and tried to focus his vision on the two men standing at the doorstep. All he saw were the tops of their heads, one hidden by the hood of his coat, and the other, by a red stocking cap. "Damn," Gower said, recognizing Prescott Nagle beneath the red cap.

  2

  The white snow that had fallen the previous night became muddy by noon; the sanding truck had seen to that. Cars were dashed with a gray slush as drivers maneuvered the side streets during the lunch hour. Main Street was fairly clear of snow and ice because of the bulldozer and sander that had come through, the morning traffic, and the trucks that had passed through on their way to Route 64; but curbside Main Street resembled a traffic jam with no drivers. There was a Chevy Vega with one tire lifted as though it were about to urinate on the sidewalk. A red VW Rabbit kissed the back bumper of a Pinto, but gingerly. A Ford station wagon was double parked next to a blue van. The owner of the van was out at lunchtime shouting up and down the street: "Move your fuckin' car, man!"

  The external temperature remained at a cold twenty degrees, but internal temperatures seemed to be rising. You could hear bickering along the Main Street stores. If you were to take a walk through downtown Pontefract from West
Downtown to East Downtown (a stroll that might take anywhere from five to ten minutes) you might be witness to:

  A bag boy at the Hotchkiss Market telling his boss off. A bag of groceries had just split open, and an irate customer was waiting in her car trying to keep her kids quiet while the boy picked up the paper towels, peanut butter jars, Wonder Bread, Fruity Pebbles, Diet Dr. Pepper cans, plastic milk jug, and an apparently endless selection of cold cuts that were spread out on the sidewalk in the snow. Old Man Hotchkiss walked out to scold the boy for his negligence. "Who the hell do you think you are, talkin' to me like that?" the bag boy said. "I'm gonna own this store some day, Fat Ass, and when I do "

  But walking past this management-trainee problem, you'd come to the customer in her car trying to keep her own children quiet in the backseat. Cappie Hartstone said, "I don't care if you think aliens are coming from another planet, Jennifer, I will not have you doing that to your brother. Oh, don't give me that look, young lady—" and she reached back and whacked her daughter on the side of her head. Jennifer squealed, and in a moment they all began crying, even Cappie, who was moaning, "We just have to get out of here for a few days, that's all, that's all there is to it, I'll just have to tell him, we need to—"

  Fisher's Drugstore attracted the same crowd year 'round to its front stoop, good old boys, in their eternal uniforms of flannel shirts and mackinaw coats, baseball caps and plaid hunting hats with the floppy ear flaps. One of them pointed up at the clouds as if divining the future from their formations. "Just like '41," this guy said, and as if to emphasize his point, he stomped his Bean's Duck Hunting boots on the smoldering cigarette butt he'd just tossed from his lips.