Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  "Gower," she said, and the flickering image Gower longed for came and went—the bloody inverted face of Saunders shimmered and became that of Cassie Nagle. Her auburn hair, the face smooth and lightly freckled, the small sad green eyes. Wearing the emerald green dress, just as she had that summer night long ago, the dress she shed like a constricting skin to dive in the dark waters of Clear Lake in the moonlight.

  "Saunders?" Gower asked, but Cassie threw back her head and laughed. "Cassie, how "

  "It was always you, Gower, you were my first and only love," she said. "I told you we would be joined forever one day. I told you that, didn't I?"

  The face flickered like a candle flame in the wind. For a moment he saw Saunders's bloodied face, but then it was Cassie again, beautiful as the day she died. Her eyes were like two fiery jewels. Gower felt himself being drawn into them.

  "Cassie, what do you want?" his voice rose to a boyish tenor.

  "I want you, Gower, all to myself, for eternity, just give yourself to me," Cassie said, her arms outstretched to him. She touched his hands, folded on the table, and it felt like icicles pressed against him. He wondered if this was the smell of the grave that he inhaled. Again, Cassie's face quivered, and he saw beneath it Saunders's mutilated features. The truth dawned on him then.

  "You're going to kill me," he said, more as a statement of fact than as a question.

  "Do you love me?" she asked, and as she brought her face closer to his he could smell the rotting skin of Saunders, and when she kissed him, slipping her tongue between his lips, he tasted death.

  Georgia Stetson's son Rick had come in around six in the evening, and Georgia, who was putting birdseed out in the feeder by the back-porch light, dusting snow off its edges, heard an argument developing between her son and his father.

  "Where have you been for the past twenty-four hours, young man? Your mother and I have been worried sick!" Ken Stetson yelled, and Georgia thought the windows would shatter with that booming voice of his. "What did you say, young man? What did you call me? I'll send you to Fork Union Military yet, and don't you go running to your mother! Come back here right this instant! Did you hear me?"

  Georgia dreaded going back in the house with her husband is such a state. She sprinkled sunflower seeds around in the snow, and then looked up at the sky. The clouds across the distant hills were moving swiftly westward toward town, and Georgia wondered how bad the snowfall would be. The thing she disliked most about living on their street was that the sanding truck never seemed to hit their hill, and in the winter she felt stuck in the house if the roads were icy.

  She went back inside when the yelling had stopped. The house was so silent Georgia assumed they were talking things out quietly in Rick's room.

  Georgia sat on one of the stools at the kitchen counter and reached for the telephone. She didn't understand why none of her friends had been calling her with the latest.

  She dialed Cappie Hartstone's number.

  5

  Cappie did not answer the telephone.

  She was just finishing up preparing dinner when her husband, Bill, arrived home from work. The kitchen fairly steamed with a heavy meaty aroma. Bill had always been a meat-and-potatoes man, and just that odor brought out a smile on his face. "Smells great, honeybunch," he said, taking his overcoat off and tossing it across one of the kitchen chairs.

  It had been a rough day down at the Savings and Loan, absenteeism was at an all-time high. "People fall apart in this town with the first snowfall," he told her as he hugged her; she pulled away from him.

  "William, please, I have to make the gravy now."

  He went to the refrigerator for a beer. "I had six customers pull out practically their life savings today, who the hell can figure? Marty Aiken said that Janet thought somebody was living under their house, and so he just decided to up and put the place on the market because he said he didn't feel too good, either, and they were going to spend a few weeks at her mother's in Roanoke—now doesn't that just sound like he's been on the juice again?"

  Cappie didn't respond. She kept checking under the lid of the frying pan.

  Bill continued, "It's like some folks are getting cabin fever and we're not even into February." He sucked the beer out of the bottle.

  Without turning around to face him, Cappie said, "You can either sit like a vulture and watch me cook this, Bill, or you can go relax in the living room, and when you're done with that beer I'll bring you a nice martini."

  "Sounds great." Bill hadn't been treated like this in quite a while. Maybe years. Cappie was really starting to shape up again after being such a slouch in the wife department for so long.

  "Go on, I'll be out in a tad," Cappie chirped.

  Bill sat in the living room on the plastic-laminated couch. He realized he could stand up, walk over to the bar and make himself a drink, but he was looking forward to his wife doing that. Nobody would ever say William Hartstone was pussy-whipped.

  When Cappie walked barefoot across the yellow carpet to the bar, he wanted to run over and kiss her so hard on the lips they'd bleed. The lousy day at work had raised his libido, and he wanted to take her right there beside the coffee table. He restrained himself. Let her come to me.

  "I do love you, Cappie," he said enthusiastically, like a virgin about to get laid.

  She blew him a kiss. "Feeling's mutual, sugar buns," she purred. She filled a highball glass almost to the top with gin, and then added a splash of vermouth.

  "Oh," Bill said, "the kids." He was about to ask if they were upstairs or out playing in the snow.

  "Honey, I thought, since we've been so tense lately, that you and me, we could have a romantic evening alone. I hope you don't mind."

  Bill scratched his beard and kept grinning. He couldn't believe his good luck.

  Cappie brought the double martini over to him. "They're over at Mrs. Stanhope's down the street—you know that nice old lady? She's so sweet." Cappie sat down on his lap, wriggling her hips into his crotch. He held her with one arm, pulling her close to him, running his fingers up and down her stomach and breasts. "Roamin' hands and rushin' fingers," she said. Cappie was not wearing a bra for the first time in the twenty years he'd known her.

  Bill Hartstone didn't fulfill his fantasy of making love to his wife on the yellow living room carpet. Instead, he carried Cappie up to the bedroom. They made love in the usual way: fifteen minutes of her lying very still while he mounted her and "inserted Tab A in Slot B," as he liked to tease her. Afterwards, she pressed her index finger against his lips, sliding it in between his front teeth. He bit down gently. "Is that what you been practicing in your aerobic classes?"

  She kissed her way down from his lips to his toes, taking each toe in her mouth, nibbling like a fish on a line. He was in heaven. She popped her mouth off his big toe and said, "Well, we better get to dinner now, Billy Boy."

  "Baby, we don't need dinner," he moaned, hoping she would lick the fleshy ridge between his toes again.

  "I know," Cappie said, sitting up at the end of the bed, "you just stay like this, all stretched out on the bed with nothing on, you hear? Not a stitch. I'll bring your dinner up here."

  Bill waited upstairs for another ten minutes, drinking his second martini. Oh, wait 'til the boys at the bank hear about this! He shouted, "You been reading The Total Woman again, love bunny?" Then, thinking that the shiny black book on the nightstand might have been her inspiration for this evening of sexual pleasure, he opened up her Day Runner to that day's entry:

  1) Cook the kids!

  2) Scare Bill to death.

  3) Stick to diet!

  4) Hello, William, I know you're reading this, and I want to ask you while you're still alive how it feels to know you just did It to a dead woman? I hope it felt good, because now a dead woman is going to do It to you.

  Bill set the Day Runner down and roared with laughter. Cappie had a wicked sense of humor, she did. "Cook the kids!" he yapped gleefully.

  "Love me, swe
etie?" Cappie called up to him from the bottom of the stairs.

  Bill kept chuckling to himself. He scratched his balls, and when he did, his fingers came away with something thick and slimy which he knew hadn't come out of him, and which he hoped hadn't slipped down out of his wife. Whatever it was wriggled in the palm of his hand.

  Cappie came up the stairs with a tray of steaming, covered plates.

  6

  On the wire:

  Georgia Stetson to Maude Dunwoody:

  "Me, too, Maude, it must be the weather. Yes, they say electrical activity from a storm disrupts the mental flow and causes nightmares. Well, it looks like it's coming in fast—no, I hadn't heard. Patsy? I thought the police were taking care of that young man no, no good lord, dead I don't mean to be morbid, Maude, but somehow that doesn't surprise me. Not at all."

  ***

  Off the wire:

  When Georgia hung up the phone she was nearly in tears, but Rick was standing there in the kitchen in his old army surplus jacket and she tried not to let her emotions show. "You really shouldn't stay out so late, Ricky," she said, "with that fire last night, your father and I were worried. Funny things are happening around town, and it's just as well if we know where you are."

  Rick pouted, thrusting his hands into the pockets of the olive drab jacket. "Don't you trust me?"

  "Of course we do." Georgia, overcome with a feeling of relief that her son was, after all, safely home, reached her arms out toward him. He went to her, and they embraced. Tears from her eyes soaked into his shoulders. "It's just that we were scared."

  "And you're not scared now?"

  "No, Ricky, but you're our one and only and we love you, of course we're not scared now," she said, hugging him tighter.

  He drew back from her. "How about now?"

  Georgia saw her son for what he truly was, and she screamed and screamed and screamed as any mother would in a similar situation. Until her son ripped her vocal cords right out, and then Georgia Stetson gushed.

  7

  None of the good old boys in town stood on the front stoop at Fisher's Drugstore, and with the Key Theater empty, the Columns restaurant closed, Maude Dunwoody's closed, in fact, every store on Main Street shut completely up, Pontefract would've resembled a ghost town.

  Were it not for the green neon light flashing at the Henchman Lounge, which began filling up with regulars, past and present, by seven o'clock.

  And the party music that was coming from across Clear Lake. The water could carry sound better than anything, and Prescott, who had fallen asleep in front of his fireplace, was awakened by the music as much as he was by the sounds in the old stables outside.

  8

  "Shit!" George Connally yelled, lifting the large radio transmitter. "Damn your wife, Lyle, she tore the cables apart!" He set the machine back down and played around with a few wires. Since his arrival with Lyle and Cup in tow, the outer office had been a cacophony of questions battered around between Tommy, Clare, Cup, Lyle, and George. George finally said, "Enough!" and went over to the radio.

  Tommy was about to say something and then stopped himself. But Clare, waving her cigarette around, said, "If you want help, Sheriff, your detective was last seen in the men's room down the hall. That's what Bonnie told me, anyway, before she blew out of here."

  George looked up from the radio. "Firestone?"

  "As in the tires," Clare said.

  Upon hearing the name, Lyle, who George had handcuffed to the metal file cabinet, began rattling against it, crying out, "Don't let him come near me, George, don't let him—"

  "This Firestone's the one Lyle was talking about?" Cup asked, and Lyle continued moaning and whining, but with less volume.

  George nodded, opening the door. "This is police business, Coffey, I should go alone." He said this as if he didn't mean a word.

  "If Firestone's one of them"—Cup opened the door in an "after you" gesture—"then the worst thing you can do is go alone. It wants you to be alone."

  9

  "Toilets are interesting things," Firestone said, leaning against a stall door. "Don't you ever wonder where it all goes when you flush?"

  "Let's plow through the bullshit, buddy," George said. He pointed his gun at Hank Firestone's stoical face.

  "Very appropriate metaphor from a glorified meter maid, George." Firestone grinned. His mouth was black and toothless and seemed an endless chasm.

  "Just shoot it, George," Cup said, standing behind the sheriff.

  Hank laughed. "Not before the floor show. You wouldn't shoot the piano player before the floor show, would you? Don't you know the opera ain't over 'til the fat lady sings, Mr. Coffey? Of course, I don't suppose our resident fat lady, Patsy Campbell, could carry much of a tune. But she has had her uses, I should say. A diversionary tactic. Interference, Mr. Coffey, seems to be your bent, and we don't want you getting hurt just yet, not until we've weeded the garden." Hank Firestone began unknotting his tie. "Rather hot in here, don't you think?"

  "What are you doing here? Who are you?" George kept his hand steady, but his heart felt like it would burst through his ribs.

  "The Goatman," Cup said.

  "Hardly. You must picture witches dancing around their Horned Master. Gods and devils, are those dreams the limits of your feeble tongues and imaginations? We are the flesh within the flesh and the blood within the blood, Perhaps the good deputy who provided us with the means for our ends has come the closest to knowing our nature—the vampire, how wonderfully romantic—the ghoul, our fictional cousins, perhaps. Warped and perverted by your culture's myopic vision. We are not strangers, Mr. Coffey, and we can't be found in diaries."

  "You're a bunch of grave robbers," Cup said.

  "You always were a man of spirit." Hank began undoing the buttons on his starched white shirt. His voice faltered a moment, seeming to blend with another. The only way George could've described it would be to compare it to a song on the radio ending with the DJ smoothly segueing it into another. Hank's voice segued into that of a woman. Lily Cammack Whalen. "But love blinded you, didn't it? You live by a code, don't you, Cup? And when you break it, as you did at sixteen, that haunts you. It's your stain of guilt, Cup, your own taint that opened yourself up to us, Cup, and you have been a fine breeding ground. The question is not, who are we; the question is what kind of monster are you?"

  "That's a lie," Cup said. "Shoot it, George, there are two of us. It likes to get people alone. It must be scared when it's confronted by more than one."

  "You know what it feels like to burn from the inside out?" Lily's voice fell to a whisper. "It's like maggots crawling under your skin, maggots with stingers and suckers boring through you, eating their way out, real slow at first "

  "Shoot it," Cup repeated.

  But George felt so bewildered he wondered if it wouldn't be better to just turn the gun on himself. Then he thought of Rita at the Westbridge Medical Center, and he knew there was something to live for. There were pieces to pick up.

  Hank laughed, slipping out of his navy blazer and shirt. It was Lily laughing. "Only you, Cup, all to myself. You said you would love me forever, Cup, did you mean what you said?"

  "But you're not Lily Cammack. You're somebody who calls himself Firestone."

  Hank Firestone's own voice returned. "And there's the thing of it, who is Hank Firestone?" His chest was completely bare, white and hairless. He pressed his fingers into the middle of it over his sternum. George heard a rending sound like wet rubber being slit. He'd heard that sound many times before when he'd visited the county morgue and watched as the doctor's assistants cut into the dead bodies. It sounded like the man's chest was gasping. George began withdrawing into himself. He felt like he was shrinking into a dark corner of his own body, someplace where this Hank Firestone (who is, oh, God, sinking his fingers into his own chest, ripping himself down the middle, and the crimson cavity inside ) could not touch him. Someplace safe. George didn't even feel he was there on his own surface, but suspe
nded beneath the frozen water of a pond. Safe. But Hank Firestone's voice reached inside him and pulled him out, just as he was pulling out this other body beneath his skin. "George, I would've thought you'd figured me out by now, even checked with Roanoke to see if there ever was a Detective Hank Firestone. You were always a clever boy, but you never could get your facts straight, isn't that right? And you were never good at games—I doubt you'd even notice the anagram. Although to be fair—and we are always fair—it is a rather lopsided anagram. Oh, do I need to spell it out for you, George? Hank Firestone—what does it remind you of? Hank Firestone; think, boy, think—" The voice was dropping into a lower range, and out of the bloody mass of its torso, something else was emerging. "Think, boy, think, Hank Firestone, where have you heard that sound before—"

  Hank Firestone—Hank Firestone—what does he mean, anagram? Another name within that name, just like someone else beneath the skin that is falling off him in clumps? Then George knew. Hank Firestone, holy shit. "Frank Gaston."

  And Frank Gaston's voice, the thing within Hank Firestone's skin, said: "We did it for love, you know that, don't you? And we love you, too, George; why, you're just like a son to me and Louise, and we want you to come home—our home, George. Why, hell, boy, the whole dang town is in the house, just waiting for you Johnny-Come-Latelys to make it to the table in time for Founders Day " Wobbling as if he were drunk, his blood-dripping arms extended toward George in a good-old-boy embrace, the thing that now spoke with Frank Gaston's voice made a move toward the two men.

  Cup grabbed the Smith & Wesson from George's hand, but before he could fire a shot, whatever was shedding Hank Firestone's skin fell to the floor. When George looked down at the thing now lying on the bathroom tile, it was the body of Ken Stetson looking as if he'd been chewed up and spat out.