Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  George handed a gun back to the older man. "You just take this anyway, Prescott. Consider it insurance in case we can't get that little girl, or anyone else, out of there."

  Prescott accepted the gun reluctantly.

  10

  Cup was the first up the front steps; the others lagged behind.

  "Don't go in until we're all together!" Prescott shouted from his side of the car. "We must work as one unit, we can't separate—whatever is in that house can't get us alone!" He was having trouble getting out. "My joints aren't doing so well," he said.

  Cup turned and glanced back at them. Christ, what a crew: an old man, a cop, a certified lunatic deputy, and me. Helpless, defenseless, maybe marching right into our deaths.

  11

  From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

  Twelve years before, I walked up those very same brick steps. Standing before the paneled door, peering through the warped dark sidelight panes into the front hallway. The night of Dr. Cammack's Christmas fete, before the party. Before the Tenebro Initiation, when I had hopes of becoming a shaman with my offerings to the tribe of the bone and the bottle of bourbon Lily had promised to swipe for me. Lily was helping in the kitchen, and had seen me through the open kitchen door. She'd come to the front door and scolded me for being so obvious. "One of the guests will come early and see you. If anyone catches you here you've sealed your doom," she'd said.

  "I'm already getting canned, what else can they do to me?"

  But she told me to go around to the back entrance, to hang out in the shadows on the porch, and I did. It was dark. The cellar door had been open then, and I'd thought of going into the house from down there. But there had been something in that cellar, some wild animal lurking in its depths. I wondered if it was the janitor's dog that I'd stolen the bone from. It was so cold outside, and a warmth emanated from the cellar. I wanted to go down in that cellar, but I was afraid. And something spoke to me: If not now, later. That's all: If not now, later. It was just the wind from across campus, or it was just a ringing in my ears.

  If not now, later.

  And Founders Day, 1987, later had come for me.

  Payment for stealing that bone and substituting Bart Kinter as the sacrifice to the thing in the dark cellar. I closed my eyes, and wished that upon opening, none of this would be real. But I opened my eyes, and the white paneled front door of the Marlowe-Houston House was ajar.

  I glanced back down the steps, and it was as if the entire landscape had shifted, actually jolted from one image to another, just like a slide being superimposed over another until it entirely blocks the former image. Behind me: the snow-covered lawn, the low brick wall that marked the boundary of the house before the street, then West Campus Drive, and across that, Clear Lake. But there was no black-and-white police car, no Prescott, no George, no crazy Lyle Holroyd. It was dark, and across the lake, streetlamps flecked the shore and lit Lakeview Drive as it twisted alongside Pontefract. From inside the house, the Morse code tapping of footsteps toward the door.

  What was I thinking then? That it was my responsibility? That this Eater of Souls wanted me, and if I was all It wanted, well, hell, why waste an entire town, even of such dubious distinction as Pontefract, Home of My Nightmares, just for a cup of coffey?

  What terrified me at that moment as I stood on the threshold, hearing the sound of approaching footsteps, was not death, or pain, but having to make a stand against wrong in favor of what I believed to be right.

  I was terrified that I was not up to that.

  "Cup," Lily said, opening the door wide enough for me to see her creamy face rising from the collar of Gower Lowry's tweed jacket, "you shouldn't be here yet, it's not time. The house isn't even ready."

  12

  "Cup!" Prescott cried out. The older man was halfway out of the car; George, who was helping him out, looked up to see Cup stepping through the front door of the Marlowe-Houston House.

  "They got him!" Lyle, his tongue wagging along his lips, seemed to be cheering for the wrong side.

  "Jesus!" George shouted. "Nobody goes up those steps by themselves!"

  Prescott looked at the gun in his hand as if he wouldn't know what to do with it. He looked up to the front of the house and wondered why Worthy had not destroyed that house completely when he had the chance. "One mind," Prescott muttered, "we should be of one mind entering this house. We can't let it divide us."

  George dragged Lyle out of the shotgun seat. Lyle howled in pain, but George felt like he was beyond caring: thank God Rita just lost her tongue and not her whole brain like the rest of us. He went around to the trunk of the cruiser for the flares.

  "Don't make me, Christ! Don't make me!" Lyle screamed, but did not make a move to run away.

  Prescott stood, silently staring at the Marlowe-Houston House. The world was dim and quiet. There was no wind.

  "My God," Prescott finally said.

  George began swearing because there was only one damn flare in the trunk. "Lyle Holroyd!" he shouted. "There's always supposed to be more of these in here."

  "Dear lord," Prescott said. "I am afraid of death. I am an old man, all my old friends are gone, my wife is gone. And I am afraid to follow them." The Smith & Wesson burned in his hand.

  None of the three wanted to move from the cruiser.

  Finally, George came up behind Prescott and touched his shoulder briefly before moving away. "C'mon, Lyle," he whispered, and Lyle, whimpering, followed like a beaten dog too scared to go off on its own.

  George went in first, kicking the door open and pointing his gun directly at the portrait of Marjorie Houston-Lowry, who was Gower Lowry's mother, and the great-great-grandniece of Worthy Houston. She did not seem amused by the sheriff's presumption. The portrait had been slashed repeatedly, particularly across the woman's face. Prescott and Lyle stepped inside the open door.

  Lyle said, "Play, play, play."

  George didn't turn around when he said, "This is amazing."

  The Marlowe-Houston House was in the process of changing. Like a Daliesque landscape, it melted and shifted. The drapes in the living room flowed like a slow mucus down across the carpeting; the ceiling dripped with water, and stalactites had formed as in a cavern. The baby grand was lopsided. Two of its legs had shrunk in size, and the yellowed ivory keys were like melting ice cream across the keyboard. The display cases, full of documents, Indian arrowheads, Civil War and Revolutionary War buttons, and other memorabilia, were smashed and lay broken on the dark wood floor. The floor itself had experienced some upheaval as if there'd been a minor earthquake, for it had split in several places, boards jutting upwards, cutting through the already ragged and threadbare carpet.

  The whole geometry of the house had changed on the inside. The door jambs were pushed farther into the walls, and the wall itself had given in to the jabbing door frames like clay. The ceiling was bowed and met the wall with a curve rather than a straight line. The living room, the hallway to the kitchen, and the stairs to the second floor all seemed twisted, gnarled.

  As the Hysterical Society, minus Cup, trooped into the hallway, George said, "It's like it's alive." What he didn't add was: and it's in the process of digesting.

  Prescott sensed that, too, what George was saying; because the house seemed to be breathing, inhaling and exhaling.

  George turned around and grabbed Lyle by his arm. "Show me wherever the hell your ghouls are, Lyle." He shoved Lyle ahead of him, into the foyer.

  Lyle stumbled in, falling to his knees. He looked back up at George, his eyes wild, and whimpered, "G-G-George, don't you make me do that, I ain't going back down to that cellar, don't you—"

  George, feeling for his gun, whispered: "Lyle Holroyd, if you don't get off your goddamn knees right this second "

  Lyle did as he was told, glancing about the shifting room like an animal looking to break out of its cage.

  "Front door's blocked, so get moving," George said.

  "George—" Prescott was about to c
omment on something he'd just noticed, something he'd sensed. But before he could say anything, Lyle was bounding up the staircase to the house's second floor, crying out: "You ain't gettin' me down in that boneyard, they ain't eatin' me for breakfast!"

  "Damn you, Lyle!" George shouted, running up the stairs after him, and realizing too late, just a few steps up the stairs, that the Eater of Souls had already managed to divide them into their own private hells.

  Chapter Nineteen

  PRIVATE HELLS

  1

  Cup

  "I know you're dead," I told Lily. When I stepped inside the front door of the Marlowe-Houston House, everything was in order, and the whole house was set up for a party. There were already people milling around the party tables, the sound of clinking glasses, the gurgle of cocktails being poured. I even recognized a few faces: Patsy Campbell, stuffing her face with a MoonPie, but blood dripped from her mouth as she bit down into its moist hollows; Gower Lowry flirting with a young curvaceous blonde. My guess was they were all First Families.

  But Lily drew me away from the gathering in the living room, down the hallway. "Please, Cup, don't—don't mention Death," Lily whispered this last word as if it were an obscenity. "You don't understand what they do to me here, Cup, it's like being in hell. They treat people like meat, Cup, living or We're all only food for them, Cup, we're their cattle, their sheep." She wore the royal blue dress under the tweed jacket, just as I remembered from the night of the Tenebro Initiation; her normally pale face burst with vibrant color like a brilliant leaf in autumn. Her eyes were that ethereal translucent blue I had always been so entranced with; her blond hair sparkled. But even behind this beauty was a terror-stricken creature, as if Lily, her soul, were being held in this nightmare world, beyond the boundaries of life or death, against her will. And I remembered the words that Bart Kinter had said to me beneath the footbridge: I fuck her every night, Coffeybutt. We do it in the cellar doggy style. She loves it. Your friend Lily's got the whitest ass I've ever seen. And on some level between my own terror and the crack that was now running through my body like lightning, splintering my mind into fragments, I believed her as she spoke. "I called you down here from Washington, Cup, because I do need help, and you might be the only person in the world who can help me. They're holding me here, in this house. But it's not just them."

  "Who are they?"

  "Does it matter? Worthy Houston called them Goatman for the blood of the children spilled in sacrifice to them, and the Tenebro Indians, before the white man came, feared them as the Eater of Souls. You yourself have called them the Mother of Nightmares. But all I know is they have power, ungodly power. My own son was sacrificed that they should rise and find their way."

  "And what about Teddy Amory?" I asked. Oh, have I mentioned that in the space of a few hours I could feel my sanity supping away? Have I mentioned that fact? An insane logic seemed to rule now; I no longer looked at this nightmare around me as alien. This was the world that I was born to live in.

  "She is the door through which they may pass and claim what is rightfully theirs." Even while Lily spoke, I detected me unnaturalness of her pronunciation, as if she were hypnotized, repeating rehearsed lines. I wanted to shake her awake. But there was that animal fear in her eyes, as if at any moment someone or something would crawl out of the shadows and tear her limb from limb. She said: "But now it's you I'm afraid for, Cup, because I was wrong to bring you here, dreadfully wrong. Cup, they get inside you, and it's like maggots—"

  Boring their way out, suckers, stingers—I could've finished the sentence. I thrust my hands into my pockets; the place was becoming very cold, and a cold blue light began throbbing around Lily's form.

  "I've been infested, too, and now I'm afraid " She was speaking haltingly now, as if on the edge of tears. Lily took a deep breath and averted her gaze from mine. For just a moment I saw:

  Her body bloated and naked, scalp ripped partially off to reveal a bony crust, her face white, her eyes sunken into brown empty caves beneath her forehead, her lips peeled back away from gray teeth. Her ribcage jutted out from her sides. A jagged rip like lightning running from her navel down to her vagina, and the scar throbbing, giving birth to something inside her, something that could feed on corpses, and when it erupted it was a vast yellow pit crawling with thick worms and blood-bursting leeches, turning the skin outward with their sucking.

  One of the maggots had grown enormous, five times the size of the others, as if it was their queen pushing its way out, its egg-sac full, wriggling out of Lily's lower abdomen, and it turned to stare at me.

  The maggot that emerged from Lily's open wound had Bart Kinter's face.

  I sucked air into the back of my throat in a feeble attempt to gasp, but I was looking at Lily again, beautiful young Lily.

  She knew I had seen, and I felt she was pretending that to see her dead like that was a gift that she and I shared, that she would never show her dead self to anyone other than me.

  When she spoke again, her voice was smooth. She had collected herself. There was no fear, only resignation. "You, Cup, are the key," and when she said "key," we were sitting in a dark movie theater, and the screen suddenly lit up with a blue light. A thin shaft of light shot over my head. A movie began projecting onto the screen.

  I'm at the Key Theater; she said the word "key" and that triggered this image. The images are triggered by words, or thoughts. But whose thoughts? Didn't I think of the word "key" a split second before she'd said it? Standing at the door to the Marlowe-Houston House, what was I thinking? My hands deep in my pockets, clutching stray coins, stray coins and the spare key to Patsy Campbell's Boardinghouse, that was it, my fingers felt that key and identified it, and the word in my mind, "key," triggered her word, gave birth to this image: the Key Theater.

  "Watch the film," Lily said, resting her hand firmly on my wrist.

  The movie image flickered, sputtering like a candle flame. It was out-of-focus, but what I could make out was myself in the boys room at Hardy Elementary School, with Billy Bates crouched against the tile near the toilet, masturbating. "He says you cheat," Billy moaned as his small hand slid up and down on his penis, only, as the camera came in for a close-up, it wasn't a penis at all, but a shiny dark snout, like a lamprey's sucking maw, tiny sharp teeth along its edges.

  In the movie, I took a step backwards, pressing myself against the shut stall door. The dark thing coming out from between Billy Bates's rapidly moving fist stretched, elongated, brought itself up to my face. I reached out and grabbed its neck, trying to wrestle it away, and it became the handle of a lawn mower. I was in an empty field mowing over the heads of children, who were screaming, crying out, "Father! Father!"

  I watched with fascination, thinking: I was right, the Mother of Nightmares. If anyone's become infested with something it's me, it's all in me, these people are just players in my movie.

  As I thought this, I felt something crawling around.

  Inside me.

  Maggots.

  Stingers.

  Suckers.

  Under my skin.

  And I was no longer in a movie theater, but was standing in the rear of the Marlowe-Houston House with Lily. It was freezing cold and dark. She was wearing Gower Lowry's tweed jacket around her shoulders, and my eyes were fixed on the erect nipples which poked at the fabric of her dress. I found I had an erection straining against my trousers; Lily brought her face close to mine and kissed me. Her salty mouth stung my lips, and I brought my head back. Away from her face. She was too close, too out-of-focus. For a flickering second, I saw something other than the girl of my dreams licking Its lips as if It had just sucked something out of my mouth. I tasted blood on the rim of my lower lip. I did not want to see that thing again.

  "Mother of Nightmares, Eater of Souls, all one and the same, Cup. With them, there is no male or female, Cup, there is only the one love which calls itself " It was Lily again, happy, shining like a streak of sunlight through clouds. As she s
poke, I felt curiously aroused by her voice, and I longed—yes, longed–to kiss her again. My erection was painful and enormous as it pushed against the rough fabric of my trousers, and I felt the inside of the zipper slice against its thin skin. I reached down to adjust myself in my pants, and clutched something other than my crotch, something cold and hard and long that I had, twelve years ago, wrestled from one of the Jack Daniels Hounds.

  A long, thick bone.

  "Ask me," she said, and it was as if she'd read my thoughts, because accompanying the surge in my loins, the feeling that the graveyard bone belonged to me, my weapon, in a way that nothing made of flesh did, was that burning question.

  I asked. The last question in the game we played. The last question in "Smoke." Not the first, which is, "What kind of smoke are you?" Because this insanity was beginning to taste delicious to me, I was at the Goat Dance and I could've danced all night. I felt my blood steam inside; I have never felt more alive.

  Hell, no, I wanted to rip through that game to that last question, the one I had cowered from like a beaten dog.

  "What kind of monster are you?"

  She smiled and replied, "Only if you really want to know, Cup, only if you'll be my knight in shining armor. Then I'll show you. But if you lose at this game, Cup, if you lose—"

  Maggots.

  Under your skin.

  Tearing.

  Suckers.

  Breeding ground.

  Lily took my hand and led me to the cellar doors, which were flung open. "You have to come willingly, Cup." She grasped the bone that I now held in my hand; she tugged lightly on it. She glanced down into the dark entrance. "Down there, all your dreams will come true." She went gingerly to the edge of the top step; it was slick with a thin layer of ice, and she balanced herself both against me, clutching the edge of my jacket, and the bone for support. Again she tugged at the bone, taking another step down into the cellar—I noticed that she seemed to hesitate there, one foot still barely on the top step, waiting for me to follow her down.