Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

THE HYSTERICAL SOCIETY

  1

  Thursday Morning

  2:00 A.M.

  Pontefract, Virginia:

  The sky was white with the snow that continued to fall, but the town itself had gone dark. The fact that it was two in the morning didn't matter; it could've been two in the afternoon, it could've been six at night. The town had gone dark, like a lightbulb that has been in that socket too long. It had just zapped itself out; it had been alive and now was dead. The snow was burying Pontefract in a white shroud, and the only people left to dig the hole in the frozen ground were a cop, an elderly prep school professor, and a young man who was beginning to wonder what kind of monster they were up against.

  The black-and-white police car was the only vehicle moving on the street; the last of the living, if you didn't count the three men in the car, had gotten the hell out of town by midnight. That was it, too: the hell out of town. The town out of hell. A hell of a town. It had been on everyone's lips like a contagious melody. Some of those living people did manage to escape from Pontefract—they smelled their long-dead relatives in the cold air, and before they saw them, they knew that something bad was happening. Betty Henderson, whose love letters had so inspired Howie McCormick in his last night of life, thought she saw Howie, in his pith helmet and blue mailman's suit, scratching at her window in the night. Betty knew something was wrong with Howie the way she knew when a guy was drunk or coming on to her. Maybe it was the way he licked the window when she screamed. Maybe it was the way his head fell back when he laughed, revealing a gash so deep that for a second Betty thought she was looking right down into his throat. Maybe it was the fact that the window was on the third story of Betty's house, and Howie was clinging to the sill, not for dear life, but as if he were trying to pull the thing out of the damn wall. And Irene Rowe, Dr. Cammack's sitter, thought it was the retired headmaster of Pontefract Prep himself standing over her bedside when she awoke in the purple darkness of night. Irene reached over to turn on the bedside lamp because she was sure it was not Dr. Cammack; after all, what would that dear old man be doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night? When the sixty-watt bulb light flooded her bedroom, Irene still didn't think it was Dr. Cammack, because the last time she'd seen him he'd had skin covering his body. Before Irene could reach for her glasses there by the cup of drinking water, the skinned man in the blue wool cap and seersucker jacket bent over and embraced her. But Irene and Betty had not been among the car caravans that skidded out of town on the boot tip of a snowstorm. Those who did make it to the cars had been worried by nightmares all week, they'd heard old friends talking out on the street, old friends who had caught the bus, bought the farm, pushed up daisies, slept with the fishes, all of them dead, buried, turned to dust. The worms go in, the worms go out, as the song went. So they packed up their troubles in their old kit bags and loaded up the kids and the dog, and drove the family wagon out onto the skidding highway, looking for the farthest Travelodge or Howard Johnson's where they'd pretend for at least one night that maybe there was just a power outage in Pontefract, or maybe it was just the phone lines being down, or maybe (heh-heh, as Lyle Holroyd would snigger) just maybe, it was that face pressed up against the picture window that looked, shit, it looked just like Evvie Cavendar, the little girl who died in that bicycle accident two years ago, or was that just yesterday? Because, hell, it looked just like she'd had that accident just yesterday, now son, eat your fried clams and then you can have your fudge sundae, we didn't come to Howard Johnson's so you would look so goddamn dee-pressed—

  But there were those that stayed, the three in the police car (and don't let's forget the fourth, Lyle Holroyd, but he pretty much stayed because he was handcuffed to a file cabinet, and he was laughing and foaming at the mouth and figuring out how to outwit the vampires and the ghouls). Those three men in that chilly car—the heater wasn't working properly—driving through the snow, down Main Street, didn't even see a corpse. They saw no one.

  What they did see:

  Christ Church with its scaffolding frosted with snow. Its display board, the one that usually announced the upcoming sermon, something along the lines of: COMMUNION SERVICES, 7:30, 9, AND 11 A.M., REV. WM. UPTON, "SIN IN OUR LIVES: WHAT CHARLIE BROWN CAN TEACH US." That display board was lit up with floodlights, and some joker had rearranged the plastic white letters against the dark fabric beneath the glass to read: VALLEY OF THE SHADOW.

  You could guess fairly correctly that come Sunday there would be no church services.

  The police cruiser skidded, and George cursed his deputy Lyle in absentia for not having put the snow tires on in November like he was supposed to, and then he cursed himself for not making sure the heater had been fixed, and then George Connally laughed. Things like snow tires and non-functioning car heaters must seem funny when you think about it, and George was probably just thinking about It too much.

  They passed two more churches, Gethsemane Baptist and St. Andrews Presbyterian. Both were dark, but on the Gethsemane Baptist marquee, where the words of comfort had read:

  REPENT YOU SINNERS,

  THE END IS AT HAND

  this was replaced with:

  SIN YOU REEPERS,

  THE HAND IS EATN

  The windows along Regency Row were all smashed in, and the awning at the Hotchkiss Market flapped in the howling winter wind like a flag of surrender. The Federal-style buildings, etched with snow, lined the street like giant tombstones.

  The police car pulled alongside another police car, and the three men in the car entertained a hope—although none of the three would call it that. They had momentarily forgotten about hope.

  But the town of Pontefract was still dark. The man inside the other police car was dead. Officer Dave Petty, just twenty-five years old. George didn't tell Cup or Prescott how Dave had been killed, because dead is dead, even if it took a lot of blood spritzed around the upholstery of a car before the actual moment of dying had come, even if whatever had gotten to this cop, Dave Petty, whose usual tour of duty meant stopping a drunken fight or handing out parking tickets, even if what had gotten to him had probably hopefully not begun devouring the man until after his heart had stopped beating.

  Yes, the whole town had gone dark, just as the burnt-out hull of the Key Theater had, with that one marquee in town that had curiously enough restored the movies that it had stopped showing a week ago: SLEEPING BEAUTY, and beneath that, DAWN OF THE DEAD.

  Pontefract, Virginia: 3:00 a.m., dark and white with snow, and who among the three in the police cruiser, now turned and heading back to the courthouse, knew if the sun would come up in a few hours?

  2

  From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

  We are all so fucking calm.

  Thank God George Connally retrieved this diary for me. Who else can I talk to about what the hell is going on here in Pontefract? Am I really finally losing my grip on sanity? Is the whole world becoming a reflection of all these nightmares boiling around inside me?

  It's 3:00 a.m.—so who can sleep? I keep going over things in my mind, ways of getting around going into that damn house across Clear Lake. I could just sneak out tonight and freeze to death. They say freezing has its advantages: you feel warm just before death comes on, and you fall asleep. Dying in your sleep seems like a good way to go—unless your dreams consist of mowing children's heads in gardens or having weed whackers come for you. I am probably more afraid of dreaming than anything right now. What if I pull that nightmare right out from behind my eyes and smear it across this town? What if that is what has been happening all along here?

  That house. The Marlowe-Houston, where my nightmares were born. Bart Kinter, that asshole, just had to fall down the stairs and die, didn't he? He couldn't have just gotten a concussion, or broken his legs. Or even become paralyzed. Nope. He had to die and make me feel guilty. I am not denying my participation in his death—I could've left well enough alone, and allowed him to run screaming into Dr. Cammack's party. But I w
as sixteen, what did I know? Everything seemed bigger than life then, I just didn't know how much bigger it could get, I didn't know about how guilt eats away at you when the absolute worst thing happens to you: your enemy dies, and maybe you killed him and maybe you didn't. Tell it to the judge. Or the Eater of Souls. And Lily—dead. Everything I loved and hated in this world, dead. As if something was out to get me, to pull me back to it. Hate and love and death.

  Eater of Souls, the mother of my nightmares.

  I am going fucking crazy. My ex-therapist would say I am turning against myself.

  And even Clare, Lily's sister. Barely spoke two words to her, and yet, maybe because of Lily, I feel connected to her. She is my remnant of Lily. All other Cammacks are dead: Lily, her mother, now her father. Maybe even Clare—but there's hope, isn't there? Goddamn hope. Hate, love, death, and hope. I will tear this Eater of Souls limb-from-limb with my bare hands if It has killed Clare, or that boy, Tommy. But what will I do if they've only been partially eaten?

  While I am scribbling in this I hear Lyle giggling like a fourth-grader over some sick joke that he doesn't even understand. Although the sick joke Lyle just heard is not one of the better ones—it loses something in translation. Stop me if you've heard this one: a guy waits twelve years to return to the girl for whom he carried a torch, only to find she is dead. But something has crawled inside her skin, you see, so it walks, talks, looks, and acts like her. Happens to a lot of dead people these days. The handy-dandy reanimated corpse, it slices, it dices, it beats it, it eats it, you know it mistreats it Sort of like Orpheus, huh? I mean, maybe when Orpheus was coming out of hell, he looked back over his shoulder not because he wanted to make sure she was following him, but to make sure it really was her, his one true love, and not something foul and ancient dressed up in her skin, speaking with her voice. Heh-heh, as Lyle Holroyd would say—and is, in fact, muttering right now.

  We are back at the sheriff's office—as safe a place as any I guess. Except for the thing that he put in Lyle Holroyd's mouth, like a bit to keep him quiet. He being my best friend, ha-ha, Bart Kinter. "Lyle," George said, halfway between shivering and laughing, "you look the way I feel."

  Lyle's eyes were wide with terror when we came back to the office. George pulled the small square of paper out of his mouth. It was soaked with Lyle's spit. For the first time since I had seen him handcuffed to that file cabinet toward the back of the office, Lyle was silent. His teeth chattered like those joke plastic teeth that you wind up and then they hop across the tabletop.

  "In blood, oh, sweet Jesus," George said, shaking his head. When he turned to look back at Prescott and me, I saw his eyes were red with tears. His skin was a pasty gray color, and I guess we all look like that right about now, because he handed the piece of paper to Prescott and then to me.

  Written in blood, done in the haphazard way that a child finger-paints.

  HE SAYS YOU CHEAT.

  Of course, I recognized the message. I mean, the last time I saw it, it was scribbled in fluorescent blue chalk across a blackboard. Billy Bates—the little dickens! For a brief moment I entertained the notion that maybe Billy from Hardy Elementary School in Arlington was behind this elaborate charade, and at any moment he would jump out from behind something, the curtains, say, if there were any curtains, and everyone would say: SURPRISE!, and THIS IS YOUR LIFE would flash in neon above my head.

  Yeah, I am that far gone.

  The Eater of Souls has a wicked sense of humor.

  The equivalent, I suppose, of a sense of humor on the part of this Goatman. (God, I feel like there are a hundred names for It, but somehow they're all wrong—it's like the Mother of Nightmares more than anything because it seems to scare us with what we are already scared of—individually packaged nightmares.)

  Who—or what—is the Mother of Nightmares? The Eater of Souls? The Goatman?

  I got to tell you, I just don't believe in vampires like Lyle. And I don't know about the devil, because if there's a devil, what the fuck does he care about my worthless little soul? I'll hand it over to the devil if he'd just make me an offer. I've always been that way.

  I keep running the film reel in my head of my own nightmares, the worst being of the children, buried in the garden, all needing mowing. And Billy Bates at Hardy Elementary at the beginning of this waking nightmare—how had a fifth-grader been involved with this? He couldn't have been. Was it my imagination? But that kid had known to write in blue chalk: "He says you cheat," and of course, I had. When I was sixteen. During the chem test that finally got me booted from Pontefract Prep. Billy Bates believed that he spoke with Bart Kinter, and in that other cellar, that boiler room of Hardy Elementary, what did I see? Who was it speaking to me?

  To keep going on this train of thought: was there something in me that came out and got hold of Billy Bates, if briefly, maybe because he was already bad, and he could soak up all my badness? Like a movie projector—was I sending out that image of Bart Kinter, projecting it right over Billy Bates? Is that the disease that Clare has accused me of bringing into this town?

  And all these blood ties—Prescott says that in a town like Pontefract, the people that are still there (until tonight, that is) pretty much are all related to one another. But I am the foreigner among them. An outsider.

  Although, what if, in this weird witch's brew of extraneous information (blood ties, guilt, death, love), you need an Outsider to give the final ingredient?

  Why would anyone need an outsider when you have all these insiders from generations past, all linked to each other by blood?

  I'm almost scared to write it down.

  Scared, scared, scared. I wish I could just be scared to death and have this all done with.

  Because what if the Mother of Nightmares needs

  What if the Goatman needs

  What if the Eater of Souls needs

  New blood.

  Looking back over these few pages, I see the kinds of thoughts a sleepless mind conjures up. Some of this seems silly; it just leads me in circles. My mind can't seem to discriminate between a good or bad idea anymore. I try to remember what life was like before this week, and I find it difficult to recall a world existing too far beyond my nightmares.

  But I still don't understand my place in all of this, why there ever was that phone message from Lily Cammack, why Bart Kinter was there, even in the Washington suburbs. That night Bart Kinter died, when I dreamed of a monster that was and was-not Bart Kinter simultaneously, the anger in the voice as it burned in that cellar so confused, I don't know what has been a dream and what has not.

  I have been writing in this book for nearly an hour.

  It is time to stop writing.

  We've got to go over to that house.

  And if it's me that the Eater of Souls wants—

  3

  "Cup—" George said after his fifth cup of coffee.

  Cup set his pen down in mid-sentence. "Just writing out some thoughts. If I'm going to lose my mind, I want documentation." Neither Prescott nor George seemed to get the joke. Prescott was gazing out the window at the dark snowy landscape.

  George unlocked the handcuff that kept Lyle chained to the file cabinet. "Now, Lyle, I'm taking you with us."

  "Ain't gonna be your bait!" Lyle squealed in an almost female, high-pitched voice. He tugged at the cuffs while George connected his wrists behind his back.

  "Nobody said anything about 'bait,' Lyle. I just think you'd be happier with us than back here. In case they come back for you."

  "They wasn't gonna hurt me," Lyle drooled, and there was a snarl to his voice. "'Cause it's y'all they want. Yes, yes, oh Kee-rist, yes."

  George slapped him on the back, shoving him in the direction of the front door. "Well, then, you've got nothing to fear, Lyle, right?"

  "But first a smoke for me—soothes the nerves," Prescott said, pressing his pipe between his lips and then patting each of his pockets (vest, jacket, pants), "if only I could find my darn whatchacallit, oh
for goodness sake, I can never remember simple words like that, isn't that silly?" His voice caught, as if he'd snagged it on a lost memory. "I could tell you the maiden names of every married woman in this town, but not the simplest of objects, you know, a pipe thing—"

  "Lighter," Cup volunteered.

  "Quite right, Cup, good lord, my memory—" Prescott plucked the silver lighter from an inside pocket of his gray suit jacket. Then he said sadly, "You know, my wife gave this to me on my birthday, the year before she "

  "She's there, too," Lyle said from the doorway. His eyes seemed to have grown to the size of saucers, ready to burst from his head. His face had taken on a ratlike aspect, and Prescott found that he could not bring himself to look at the mad deputy beyond a quick glance. "In that house, and it's time for the feast, ain't it? Pull up a chair, folks," he growled, "plenty of room at the table, yassah, plenty to go around. The worms go in, the worms go out, heh-heh."

  George pulled Lyle backwards by the handcuffs into the hallway, and Prescott did not, after all, light his pipe.

  No one said a word again until all four men were in the police cruiser, and then it was Cup who said: "Anybody remember that golden oldie by Alice Cooper? 'Welcome to My Nightmare'? "

  4

  Clare had already crawled inside her own nightmare somewhere in the darkness of the Marlowe-Houston House.

  "Now, Clare, stop that crying," Rose Cammack said, and her voice was like a hole in the fabric of the darkness surrounding Clare. She clung to cold stones with the icy water running across her numb fingers. Through that hole came a shot of vivid blue light, and Clare realized that she was not thirty-six years old, but nine, and being punished in the cellar again because she'd taken her scissors to Lily's party dress.

  A thin slice of blue light grew from the hole her mother's voice made, and this grew larger to become a rectangle of light, until finally it was simply the cellar door being opened above her while she herself sat on the steps. Her mother appeared in the doorway, looking not quite like her mother: her hair was askew as if it had been put on Rose Cammack's head backwards, although perhaps it was her head that had been twisted on backwards, like a lightbulb not quite in the socket. Rose's head wobbled as it adjusted to the high collar of the dress. Then she was all Clare's mother again, prim, proper, vaguely Country Victorian, the perfect wife for the perfect headmaster.