Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  "Don't ever do that again," Tommy said crossly.

  "Scare you, or make fun of the Crispy Critter? You weren't down at the arcade, so I figured something was up. Had a bitch of a time climbing up here—I started on the trash cans and almost broke my neck." Rick stood up and brushed himself off. As always, Rick was wearing his army surplus olive drab jacket over a Ratt T-shirt, and his jeans were torn and frayed around the knees. No matter how the temperature dropped outside. Rick always wore this uniform. Rick held up the palms of his hands for Tommy's inspection. They were covered with grime. "Tell your old man to wash down the wall sometime, will ya?"

  "Yeah, right."

  "Riddle me this. Batman, why for are you not at the arcade monopolizing Space Invaders?"

  Tommy went over to his bed, sat down and brought his knees up against his chest. Using his hand as an airplane, he buzzed it around and then crashed it into his left knee, accompanied by the appropriate sound effects. "Grounded."

  Rick shrugged. "In this life, Tommyhawk, sometimes you crash and sometimes you crash and burn. But you, you don't crash, you don't burn, you just quit. Your old man's running some two-hour movie and you're acting like you can't get away with murder."

  "I don't know—I guess I'm just not up for the arcade."

  "Well, as it turns out, me neither."

  "You want to listen to some tapes?"

  "Sure, you got any Ozzy Osbourne?"

  "Funny. No Iron Maiden, either. I've got Kate Bush."

  "You like those weird chicks, dontcha? No, Tombo, music just won't do it for me tonight. Not when I know what I know "

  "Yeah, like what do you know?"

  "Just because I go to public school and not some preppie institution for the criminally insane doesn't mean I am an ignoramus. You know about how one of your teachers bit the dust?"

  "Yeah—Hardass Whalen. I heard my mom talking to someone on the phone. It was an accident at the M-H or something." M-H was the cool abbreviation for Marlowe-Houston House.

  Rick smiled. "This, my friend," he said, pointing to his mouth, "is a shit-eating grin."

  "I always say you eat shit," Tommy laughed.

  "Because I know what happened."

  "Okay."

  "My mom gave me more information."

  "Your mom gives everyone more information."

  "Your teacher didn't just die in any old accident. He bit the big one over at the M-H, buckaroo, and they had a detective and everything. But the best part is that the place is supposed to be covered with blood and guts—all around the walls and everything. And they will have washed it away by tomorrow morning, so you know what that means?"

  Tommy put his hands out as if blocking a pass. "Whoa, buddy, no way."

  "Where's your sense of adventure? Did your old man cut off your balls, too? We got to go tonight—this is one of those things you wait your whole life to see!"

  "No."

  "What's it going to take to get your ass out of this house and over there?"

  "Nothing. I don't want to go."

  Rick leaned back on Tommy's desk. He picked up the sketch pad. "How about if I pissed on this."

  Tommy shook his head. "It'll just improve the colors. I've got too much blue, a little yellow piss might give it some green."

  Rick looked around the desk.

  His gaze stopped on one shiny item.

  Tommy saw this at the same time Rick did. "No, not my class ring."

  Rick grabbed the ring and slipped it on the middle finger of his right band. Then he flipped the bird at Tommy. "Your ring will not see the light of day unless you accompany me over to the M-H."

  "No, seriously, give it here." Tommy got up off his bed and started walking over to where Rick was.

  Rick leaned his head back, lifted his hand to his mouth as if he were about to swallow the ring. "I hear it's just like downing goldfish, only you'll have to dig through all my shit just to find it."

  "This isn't funny."

  "Look—all we're gonna do is go across the lake and look into that old museum. We're not doing anything illegal, and the place is probably all roped off anyway. Don't go into a hissy-fit. You'll get your ring back—you know your problem?"

  "No, Stets, what's my problem?"

  "YOU got no sense of adventure. Now, let's get a hanger from your closet and if you got a flashlight, that would be great, too."

  2

  "God, I knew this was a dumb idea," Tommy said. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt under his dad's old Navy pea jacket, and his Levi's, and he was still freezing.

  It had taken them close to an hour to get from one side of town to the other. Rick had insisted they do nighttime maneuvers, "just like in the army," and so they had taken a roundabout route through town, down alleyways and over back fences. Rick would plaster himself up against a wall and whisper, "Douse your lights, men," and Tommy would mutter, "Jeez," but comply by turning his flashlight off.

  They stood on the front porch of the Marlowe-Houston House and tried the door. "Of course it's locked—what did you think, a guy dies here and the next day they have open house?" Tommy started clicking his flashlight on and off, aiming the beam in Rick's face. Rick swatted at the beam of light when it came on. "Just give me my ring, Stets."

  "Willya hold the light up a little?" Rick bent down and kept turning the doorknob. When Tommy came closer with the flashlight, Rick reached over and tilted Tommy's hand down so the light would hit across the keyhole. Rick noticed that Tommy's hand was trembling. "Cold or scared?"

  "Both. Will you hurry up?"

  Rick pulled the wire coat hanger out from under his arm and twisted it until it was all straightened out with a little curl at the end. He began jiggling this in and out of the keyhole. "I don't know what I'm doing wrong," he said, "this always works on cars."

  When they could not break in through the front door or the picture window, and when Rick almost broke his neck trying to scale the warped trelliswork, they went around back. "I thought for sure this place would be cordoned off," Rick said. There had been a single lawn spotlight in the front of the house, but in the back the only illumination was from the moon filtered through the cloud cover.

  Carefully, feeling their way as much as seeing it in the flashlight's thin beam, the boys went up the back porch stairs. Rick kept putting his hand on Tommy's shoulder, which made him jump. When they approached the back door, Rick began whispering ominously, "What was that? Did you hear that? Did you feel that? Something touched me someone—or something. Could it have been the Boy-Eating Spider?"

  "Cut it out," Tommy said. Rick was one of his few friends to whom he confided anything, and right now Tommy wished he'd never told him about the Boy-Eating Spider. It was one of those tricks his father had used when he'd been little. "You tell anybody where you got that shiner," his father would say when he was five years old, "and the Boy-Eating Spider's going to come out of your closet and eat you up. Boy-Eating Spiders go after bad boys, that's why only good boys grow up." Tommy had been terrified that the Boy-Eating Spider would come out of his closet at night just because it knew what he was thinking. Sometimes his father would leave the closet door slightly open on purpose just to scare him. By the time Tommy was nine, he knew that the Boy-Eating Spider had a lot in common with the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, but the image he'd had as a child stuck with him: a large daddy longlegs, with a man's face painted white, and a huge dripping maw for a mouth with mandibles shooting out from between its lips.

  "You must have given me a retarded hanger, Tombo," Rick muttered, after going through the same routine with the back door as he had with the front. He tossed the coat hanger down the steps. It seemed to clatter endlessly as it hit the slate walkway.

  The flashlight felt heavy in Tommy's hands. He switched it off and lowered it to hip-level. "Well, now what?"

  "We could always break a window."

  "No."

  "Just kidding. Let's try the cellar."

  "This was a dumb idea, and we're both lo
oney tunes to ever come out here." Tommy lifted the flashlight back up and clicked it on, blinding Rick with the light.

  "Shut that thing off."

  The light clicked off. "I've got to go back soon. My dad's probably already home—what time is it?"

  "Relax, relax, what's a couple of more minutes?"

  "We're not going down there," Tommy protested. How many times had he said a variation on that theme in the past twenty minutes, and still, here he was. His eyes were just beginning to adjust to the darkness again now that he'd left the flashlight off for a few seconds. He scanned the campus, along the colonnade and down to the chapel. The place was dead empty, and he thought of Mr. Whalen, the Disciplinary Counselor. Dead. Found somewhere in the M-H.

  The boxwood hedges surrounding the house seemed to be dark shadows crouching, waiting. It was so cold. Tommy wished he had just said to hell with this scheme and stayed home in his warm room. Even if he didn't get his ring back.

  "Yes," Rick said when he'd felt his way back down the veranda steps, "we are going down there. It might be fun. We might find something."

  "If we find something," Tommy whispered, more to himself than to Rick, "it will not be fun."

  They stumbled in the darkness. Rick almost emasculated himself on the useless old pump that sat square between the porch steps and the door to the cellar. The cellar entrance was slanted at a 45-degree angle against the house.

  Rick directed Tommy to shine his flashlight over on the Yale lock that kept the doors closed together. Tommy heard the metallic rattle as Rick tried the lock.

  "Somebody's going to know if we break the lock."

  "Somebody," Rick said like a smart-ass, "already beat us to it." Tommy watched as Rick held the broken lock into the beam of light. It was so rusty it practically crumbled in his fingers. "They don't make 'em like they used to."

  Rick opened one of the double doors. Its hinges creaked. Both boys winced when they heard it. As he carefully laid the door back against the side of the house, Rick motioned for Tommy to come over to the doorway.

  "We should go home," Tommy said. The dread that had overcome him was almost palpable. He did not want to see bloody walls, guts across the floor.

  "You afraid?" Rick asked.

  There was a moment when Tommy felt like a five-year-old, and wanted to scream: Yes! I'm afraid! I'm afraid of the dark, I'm afraid of dead faculty members. I'm afraid my dad's going to throw a fit when he finds I'm not upstairs in my room, I'm afraid I'm going to freeze my balls off, I'm afraid we're going to be arrested for breaking and entering; but most of all, Stets, I'm afraid that the Boy-Eating Spider is hibernating down there.

  But he shone the flashlight in Rick's eyes. Rick didn't flinch this time. Tommy asked, "Are you?"

  But rather than answer this question, Rick stepped down into the darkness of the Marlowe-Houston House's cellar. "You coming?" was all the reply Tommy got.

  Tommy moved forward reluctantly.

  3

  "This is it," Rick said, grabbing the flashlight out of Tommy's hands and directing the beam to the chalk outline of a man in the middle of the concrete floor. "It must've been murder, 'cause I don't think they do that when somebody falls down the stairs or something."

  "Look, this place gives me the creeps," Tommy said. He was sitting on the bottom cellar step, his chin resting on his fist. They were surrounded by what Tommy felt was an unearthly silence. It seemed colder in the cellar than it had outside, if that was possible, and it stank.

  "What I don't get is, if this guy gets killed, why don't they have this place roped off or something?"

  "Stets, you watch too much TV."

  "No, really," Rick swung the light around the room, "and they've got to have a light in here someplace." He finally saw a dangling cord which ran up to a single light bulb. He went over, tugged on the cord, and an anemic light bled across the dusty gray cellar.

  Once his eyes adjusted to the light, Tommy stood up and stretched. He looked around the room: dusty shelves, broken bottles piled up in a corner, several cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other. Rick in his olive drab jacket standing over the chalk outline where Mr. Whalen must've fallen. But no blood, no guts, no bones.

  "A big fat zero," Tommy said, relieved. "Well, let's go."

  "No, wait—don't you think this is weird? This chalk drawing?"

  Tommy glanced down again at the outline.

  It was weird. Extremely weird. Tommy hadn't noticed the detail on the drawing. It wasn't just an outline, roughly approximating a man's body. Someone had drawn in eyes, and a nose and mouth, and as Rick pointed out with his foot, even a penis. "You think he really had such a teeny pecker?"

  "Cops wouldn't do that," Tommy said, moving over to where Rick stood. The man's eyes were cartoonishly evil, reminding Tommy of Wile E. Coyote's when he was scheming against the Road Runner. And his teeth were equally canine-sharp.

  "Speaking of peckers," Rick sighed, bored by the lack of gore-splattered walls, "I got to take a leak."

  Tommy made a move toward the steps.

  "No, I'm gonna use the can over here," Rick said. Tommy turned around to see what Rick meant. "In eighth grade we went on a tour of the M-H, and they showed us this shitter." Rick arrived at the long shelf, and dusting part of it off, lifted a square lid. "An old-fashioned can. Sort of a cross between a latrine and a wishing well for those Southern belles too delicate to walk across the field to the outhouse. I've always wanted to use it and now's my chance. P-U! It really stinks—must've built up a lot of methane in its time, all that ca-ca."

  "Just hurry up," Tommy said.

  "Relax, relax, if you talk I can't concentrate. Shy bladder, like my old man." Rick stood there and began humming. "I have to think of things like, you know, rain forests and waterfalls to get the old pump flowing."

  "I think I hear someone coming," Tommy lied.

  "That's my piss—it's kind of fizzling down there."

  "Hurry up, I think I hear somebody."

  "Okay, okay. I just got to tap it. They say if you tap more than twice you're playing with it. Just think, the shit of centuries down there," Rick said. He zipped up his fly and looked down through the dark opening. "Halloo, potatoes!"

  "Come on."

  "I wonder how far down that goes. I could barely hear my piss hitting."

  "Jesus, let's just get out of here."

  Rick picked up the flashlight from the shelf. He turned it on and waved it down into the opening.

  "Gimme that." Tommy went over and grabbed the light from Rick's hand.

  "Oops," Rick said.

  "What?"

  "Umm you'll never believe this, but guess what I accidentally dropped down there?"

  "No."

  "Yeah, your ring."

  "What the hell did you—Jesus, my dad's going to kill me—"

  "You can always reach down and get it."

  "No, fuck you, forget it, let's just get out of here."

  "Okay, look, I'll try and reach it."

  Rick made a show of pulling his sleeve up, wiggling his fingers, like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat. For a second it reminded Tommy of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show when the moose thrust his hand in the black top hat and came up with various wild animals instead of a rabbit, and Tommy could practically hear his heart thumping against his ribs, because that smell of gas was getting to him, and he was sure that he heard someone, not just his imagination, not some lie to hurry Rick along; but something, coming closer and closer. He couldn't tell from what direction.

  Rick stuck his hand down into the opening of the shelf. "Got it," he said, and even as he said it, thinking he'd really gotten hold of the ring by just plunging his arm down into that indoor latrine, he began screaming, and Tommy watched in horror as blood shot up from that opening in a thin stream as if from a water pistol, spraying Rick in the face.

  Before Tommy could even reach him, before another scream had escaped from his lips. Rick's entire body was pulled down through
the opening, his legs kicking like a swimmer drowning. Then, sucking and chewing noises, but no scream. No sound from Rick.

  4

  Tommy did not remember much of anything after that except running, running, running. He did not think, he did not contemplate what he should do, he did not find the nearest payphone and dial 911, he did not even scream. Because whatever was down there in that shithole had called out his name, "Tommy Mackenzie," even with its mouth full. "The Boy-Eating Spider eats bad boys."

  His throat felt dry and numb as he ran across the footbridge, back to town and home. He was panting like a dog, his hair flying wildly, the hood of his sweatshirt slapping against his shoulders as it dropped from his head, his pea jacket open, flapping with the cold wind.

  One thought burned in his mind: Get help, get help, get help.

  In his panic he brushed against a couple strolling arm in arm down Lakeview Drive, and almost got bit by a car that was turning off from Main Street; the driver honked the horn, the car's brakes squealing like frightened pigs, and almost took the vehicle up on the sidewalk to avoid the running boy.

  When Tommy arrived at the Key Theater, he ran straight up the stairs to the projection booth. His father turned, surprised, his plastic features melting to a look of anger and reproach. Tommy was aware that his dad was mad as hell, and was trying to find his own voice so he could explain. He felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. "Get help," was all Tommy could say at first, but the other words came later.

  Crying and gasping for breath, Tommy quickly told him that Rick was getting killed, was probably already dead and

  "Let me smell your breath, young man," his father said sternly. Tom, Sr., turned from the projector and marched over to his son. "If you've been drinking, by God, your ass is gonna be grass."

  "No, Dad, you don't understand." Tommy grabbed his father by the arm.

  Before Tommy could get another breath to speak with, his father whispered to him in his listen-up-and-listen-good tone of voice, "I don't know what you've been getting into when you're supposed to be in your room, but your friend Rick bought a ticket to the nine-thirty show and is down in that theater right now watching Nightmare on Elm Street." His father wrenched himself free of Tommy's grasp. Then he grabbed Tommy by his right hand and held it up. "And just where, may I ask is your one-hundred-fifty-dollar gold ring? You have got to take care of your things, how many times—" But before his father could finish, Tommy had shaken himself loose from his grip and was running again, out of the projection booth, down the stairs.