Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  But Clare could stand the pain no longer, and she turned around and was about to say something like, "Please, Tommy, my hand—" but she saw it wasn't Tommy holding her hand at all.

  2

  "You're still living, aren't you?" Prescott asked as Cup and George carried him out of the stable through the swirling snow. Cup bore most of Prescott's weight, for which he swore to his former teacher that he'd get even one day. They'd found him lying on the floor, barely able to move from his fall. When Prescott looked up to see what he had pitchforked, he looked away just as quickly. It was the body of Gower Lowry. His throat had been ripped out, and there was a deep gash running from the bloody opening just above his collarbone all the way down to his navel. The pitchfork stood up straight, its tines having sunk deep into the corpse's already open wound. A blood-stained scroll had fallen out of its vest pocket when the corpse had hit the cement.

  Cup picked this up. He unrolled part of it, then quickly tied the string binding. "The missing pages of Worthy's diary," he said. "Practically handed to us. Why is everything so easy? It's like whatever is at that house is playing with us."

  Prescott felt pain everywhere in his body as they lifted him; when they reached the cruiser, the two men propped Prescott temporarily against the front door. He saw the distant look upon George Connally's face and knew that the sheriff must have recently had his share of run-ins with the thing from the goat dance. "You know, there's a saying from antiquity "

  They loaded him into the backseat, and he lay down across the cold vinyl. Even with his back feeling like an army was marching across it, this felt good. Prescott heard the other two get in the front seat. The doors slammed. The motor started.

  "What was that saying, Prescott?" Cup's face peered over the seat at him as the car backed down the gravel drive.

  "Along the lines " Prescott felt as if someone were piling heavy stones upon his chest. His breathing was slow and heavy. He shut his eyes.

  "Are you sure you're—" Cup began. "Maybe we should take him to—"

  "Along the lines," and Prescott thought that the cold felt good, so good. "Do not despair, all men all men must die."

  "Prescott!" Cup shouted, reaching into the backseat, while George said, "Whoa, what now?"

  Prescott opened his eyes slowly. "Oh, Cup, I'm not dying, I'm very tired. I was thinking Gower, and seeing him even like I am too tired, now, please let me sleep no bleeding, just an old man fell down. Sore everywhere old men are and sleepy." Prescott closed his eyes and did not open them until he became aware that the police car had stopped, and they were parked outside the front steps of the courthouse.

  3

  It was Shelly Patterson squeezing Clare's hand, and Clare would not ordinarily have screamed so loud at seeing her friend (the oversized black sweater, the mountain of curly red hair, the pudgy, doll-like face, the jeans stretched like a tanning hide over her enormous thighs) were it not for the fact that Tommy Mackenzie was nowhere to be seen, and when she glanced at Shelly's face she realized it was not Shelly behind her, not really Shelly, just something wearing a Shelly mask, a skintight mask, but even so, Clare could see beneath it. The face that stared out at her from beneath the skintight mask was just a blackness, an empty dive into the abyss.

  There was a man at one of the red booths who said, "Clare, who loves ya," and his voice was a perfect imitation of Warren Whalen's. The man did not look up as the two women approached, but kept his head down contemplating the beer set before him. His hair was dark and shiny from grease; his white suit was comfortably rumpled.

  While Clare heard her own scream dry up in her throat, the thing that was not Shelly Patterson whispered, "Oh, we do love screamers."

  4

  "She what?" George Connally shouted more than asked when he ran into his office after parking the car.

  Lyle, giggling, jumping up and down, his handcuffs jangling against the file cabinet, repeated what he'd said: "They went to the Henchman, get it? The Henchman? Heh-heh, Georgie-Porgey, I told 'em not to go, I told 'em, I was gonna put them under arrest, heh-heh, Christ, George, am I smart or what? 'Cause those ghoulies can eat them, I bet they taste real good, a pretty woman and a boy, I bet their skin's real fresh and tender—"

  5

  "You look like you could use a drink, 'beam," Warren Whalen said when Clare caught her breath. His violet eyes were less intense than when he'd been alive; they seemed coated with a milky fluid. He held his beer bottle up for her inspection. "St. Pauli Girl. Do you remember your first girl? I remember my last one." He winked.

  Shelly, standing behind Clare, was holding both of Clare's hands behind her back. Clare was silent.

  Warren continued speaking. "You're thinking this is another one of your crazy visions, aren't you, Moonbeam? One of your neurotic episodes."

  Clare could feel Shelly's putrid breath against her ear. "Gee, Clare, we're the real thing, you know? All that time you thought your daddy was out of his gourd, but he was all there, you know?"

  "What did you do with Tommy?" Clare finally asked.

  Shelly giggled. "Nothing we're not going to do with you."

  "Your pulse is quickening, sweetie, you're sweating, and you have a funny feeling, am I right?" Warren took a swig from the bottle and slammed it down on the table. The music in the jukebox stopped. The Henchman Lounge fell silent for a moment, and then the chattering and giggling among the patrons picked up again. "This is a swell spot, I've always had a fondness for it. Lily never liked it. You remember Lily, don't you? She never liked a lot of things, but she's changed. We all change when we go through the door."

  "It's just the Ultimate Diet, Clare, and it's great. I'm only hungry once in a blue moon. Like tonight," Shelly chimed in, and Clare felt the grip tighten on her wrists. Fingernails going into her flesh just as if she'd gotten tangled in barbed wire. "Dying isn't so bad. I mean, there're worse things, you know?"

  "Why, people die every day," Warren said. He grinned boyishly, revealing canine teeth.

  "They got me at the library. I went in to do some work just before dinner," Shelly said as if describing her first sexual encounter. "It was kind of scary at first, I mean, I've never been dead before, but once you get used to the idea "

  "The idea," Warren made a circling motion with the bottle, "of death, why, the pain isn't so bad. Especially when you think of how little life really means when you compare it with what our Eater of Souls has got to offer. Immortality, power, and love, love, Clare, the kind you probably have never known "

  Clare struggled against the razor-sharp fingers on her wrists. She spat at Warren. The wad of spit landed across his forehead. He wiped it off with his hand, licking his fingers lasciviously.

  "Why don't you scream some more?" Warren asked.

  "We all love a screamer." Shelly twisted Clare's hands, making her moan.

  "Hey," Warren said cheerfully, "look who's coming back from the men's room."

  Shelly, twisting Clare's right arm behind her back, dropped Clare's other hand. Clare felt pressure on her neck, and turned in the direction Shelly indicated.

  "Hello, Doc," Warren said, "we're over here."

  Dr. Cammack pushed his way through the crowd on the way over to the booth. He was wearing his seersucker jacket, his wool cap perched on his head.

  Lowering his voice so that Dr. Cammack would not hear as he approached them, Warren said, "What Doc doesn't know is that we're going to open the old guy up and see what's kept him ticking all these years. There are worse things than death, 'beam, and you are about to witness one of them. You ever see a guy get turned inside out?"

  6

  "How's our casualty in back?" George asked. He turned the key in the ignition.

  "Alive and well and I refuse to go to an Emergency Room," Prescott said, almost cheerfully. He still lay across the backseat, apparently content to stare up at the car roof.

  "The way this blizzard's coming down, I don't think we'd make it halfway to the medical center anyway."

&
nbsp; "This damn snow," Cup said. He pressed his hands across the dashboard. The windshield was entirely covered with melting snow.

  "Bear with me for a few minutes," George said as he steered the car into the street and made a U-turn. The windshield wipers struggled against the beating storm.

  On the way to the Henchman Lounge, a one-minute drive, none of the men spoke. Several cars passed the cruiser, on their way out of town, reckless and speeding through the icy streets with practically no visibility for driving, and George thought: rats off a sinking ship.

  He envied the rats.

  7

  Warren broke the bottom of the beer bottle on the edge of his table. The sound of the glass shattering distracted Clare from her screaming. She was out of breath and heaving. "Give yourself over to the fear, Clare, that's it." Warren wrinkled his nose. "Let's go through this together, shall we? Right now, it's dawning on you that maybe this isn't a dream. There's too much continuity. Am I right? You feel ice cold inside, and you're thinking maybe that's shock, or maybe, just maybe, you're dead. But you don't believe in life after death, do you? You think consciousness just stops, like a machine whose batteries have run out. But what if you could replace those batteries?" Amber liquid flowed out of the broken bottle onto Warren's vanilla suit. He held the jagged edge of the bottle up for Clare's inspection. "You don't know what to believe, do you? But they say seeing is believing, Clare."

  Dr. Cammack had made it through the crowd, and sat down at the table. He looked at Clare nervously. "So you found me, did you?"

  Tears were streaming down her face. "Daddy, you've got to—"

  "Seeing is believing, 'beam," Warren said, and reached across the table with the broken end of the bottle pointed toward Dr. Cammack's face.

  Dr. Cammack was glaring at his daughter. "Yes, listen to him, Clare. But how would you know? Little blind Clare, not like Lily, not at all like Lily. You will never see, will you?"

  8

  When George and Cup entered the Henchman Lounge, they beheld this scene:

  Francie Jarrett, the barmaid who gave George a free beer when he was off-duty, was digging her gold teeth into some guy's throat; his legs were kicking, his arms were at her throat trying to get her off him, but it did no good. Blood spurted sporadically from his neck and mouth, and his screams came out as watery choking sounds. Francie's blue beehive hairdo was speckled with blood. A man wearing a straw cowboy hat and a young girl were fighting like dogs over an unidentifiable person's body. It hardly even resembled a body; it looked more like a butcher shop's display case. George recognized a cluster of men as the boys who hung out at the drugstore, shooting the breeze, cheering the girl and the cowboy on. Three torn, disemboweled bodies lay sprawled across the blood-stained floor. Georgia Stetson was down on her hands and knees, pressing her face into the slit along one of the bodies, and then looking up to the ceiling, punctuating her feeding with howls and barks.

  George felt something inside him reach into his guts and hose down his stomach and chest with fire, hitting the back of his throat with a sour acidity, and then he sprayed vomit across his shirt. His entire body was racked with the effort. He broke out in a sweat.

  He felt someone's arms around his shoulders as he doubled over. George wriggled free of the arms, terrified of who they belonged to. He turned to the side and glanced back.

  It was Cup, who looked as terrified and as brave as any man George had ever known on the force or in life.

  Over the din of the feeding frenzy, Cup's voice was soothingly steady. "It's just a show, remember, like Patsy, a diversionary tactic. It's got to be for our benefit or we'd be dead by now. It would be easy for them to kill us." The corollary to what Cup was telling him slapped across George's face like cold water: they're just buying time, because they must be saving us for something special. Cup helped George to stand up straight. He squeezed the sheriff's arm which held the gun in a vote of confidence.

  George raised his Smith & Wesson, aimed for Francie Jarrett's blood-freckled forehead, and fired.

  9

  Clare struggled with all her might to free herself of Shelly's iron grip. Warren was leaning over the table, holding Dr. Cammack's head by the back of his neck. Dr. Cammack seemed very confused but did not offer any sign of protest.

  "We're going to try an old Indian trick, if my memory serves me correctly. Those Tenebro Indians used to do fun stuff like this; they knew how to have a good time," Warren said, raising the broken bottle over Dr. Cammack's head. "Or maybe it was a French trick, I forget who taught who what. It's called scalping. You ever hear of it, 'beam?"

  Shelly's fingernails dug into Clare's flesh; it felt like someone was hacking away at her wrists with a knife.

  If I close my eyes, they'll go away, if I close my eyes, they'll go away.

  Clare's head felt like it would explode with the pressure as she willed every part of her being to keep her eyes shut. She continued to writhe in Shelly's grip.

  "Oh-ho," Warren laughed, his voice insinuating itself like a worm digging into her brain, "little blind Clare with no eye, is that it? Is that what you thought when Daddy touched you all over in the cellar? You close your eyes and it goes away? But Daddy did touch you all over, we were there, Clare, we were watching down below, in that dark place, we used to wait for you there, Clare, for you " A growl came out of his throat. "Well, it's not going to happen this time, Clare, 'cause I'm just going to slice away at the old Doc like this," and Clare, pushing her eyelids down like a heavy blanket of darkness, heard her father scream.

  I will not open my eyes, this isn't happening, this isn't real, if I just keep my eyes closed, it's just an episode, a dream, I'm crazy, if I don't open my eyes

  Another scream, and it sounded less like her father this time than a bear caught in a trap.

  "Oh, the blood!" Shelly squealed.

  "You're really missing something by not looking, you know," Warren said, "but visuals aren't everything, are they?"

  Clare felt her breath giving out, as if she were willing herself to not breathe, and inside the dark cave of her head she was a little girl sitting on the cold stone steps of a dark cellar and her father was touching her legs, and she was holding her breath pretending it wasn't happening, not at all, let him do this to Lily, not her, not Clare not Clare, let it be happening to Lily, and if she just held her breath for a minute, she would be little blind Clare with no eye, no i, no eye, no-why, and just as she had done when she was a little girl on those cellar steps, Clare passed out at the Henchman Lounge. As Clare drifted off into a blissful unconsciousness, she heard what she thought was a cherry bomb exploding, or was that the last sound you hear before you die? It was the sound of George Connally's bullet ripping through a reanimated corpse called Francie Jarrett.

  10

  Francie Jarrett fell when the bullet burst through her swollen belly, her teeth still digging in for one last bite at a man's throat; she flopped about on the floor like a fish out of water, but within a few seconds lay motionless. The other torn and dismembered corpses, who were feeding on the few barely living-and-paying customers, also dropped to the floor as if imitating Francie in some new dance craze. The Henchman Lounge was littered with bodies, all in their last moments of animation. A hand, with a thread of life, slapping against the cigarette machine as if trying to get matches out of the damn machine; someone's head jerking; a girl, her body torn almost completely in two in a zigzag down her torso, seemed to be trying to put the two halves together. But then, complete motionlessness. As if the breath of life had just been sucked right out of the Henchman Lounge with that one intruding gunshot.

  In the back of the Lounge, a man in a rumpled and bloody vanilla suit was carrying a dark-haired woman out the Emergency Exit doors.

  George, who could not take his eyes off the bloody pulps of bodies, did not find the strength to move.

  But Cup, tripping over the corpse-littered floor, ran after the man and the woman.

  11

  "I know who y
ou are, heh-heh, yassah, I do, you gonna eat me now? I don't taste no good, you wait, George'll be here, and I know he's the one you want. Why'n't you saying nothing? That other one, Coffey and the old man, you get them, too? Heh-heh, you get that lady and the boy? I bet they taste dee-licious, yassah, Kee-rist, puh-leeze, no, don't put it in my mouth, no, puh-leez."

  12

  Cup ran out into the alley and was met with a luminous darkness; the darts of sleet jabbed against him as he ran out onto Main Street. The whole town shone with the white snow, and the slick streets echoed his desperate shouts of "Tommy! Clare!"

  And then a scratching sound, like a rat scuttling among the dumpsters and trash cans that lined the alley behind the Henchman Lounge. And a voice.

  "Coffeyshit, you know where they are. We're gonna eat 'em, Coffey, and eat 'em raw."

  And Cup, looking down beside the dumpster for the origin of this voice, of Bart Kinter, saw what he at first thought was a giant salamander, wriggling with a last moment of life pulsing through its jellylike skin, and then realized that he was looking at a man who had been turned around, inside out, so that his veins and organs were on the outside of his body—there was no skin at all. Beside this corpse was a blood-stained seersucker jacket and a blue wool cap.

  Chapter Eighteen