Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  "I can't."

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, Lily let go of the bone. In that moment I saw her face drain of color, and an emotion ranging from surprise, to uncertainty, to terror wash behind the blue of her eyes. I have no doubt that this was a mirror-image of my own face.

  She fell.

  I looked down in amazement at my left hand, gripping the bone.

  In less than a second I saw the girl I had always loved fall down the steps of the Marlowe-Houston House just as Bart Kinter had done twelve years before.

  Falling down into that darkness. The sound of a body hitting the floor.

  I looked at my betraying hand; my reaction was slow because I was remembering that other winter, and I was waiting for the sound of the wet pop of bone as Bart Kinter's neck snapped.

  But what I heard instead as my gaze went from my hand to the shadowy cellar was an adenoidal male voice taunting me: "Coffeybutt, you finally came back to face me, didja?"

  Grasping that bone firmly in my left hand, I descended the stairs. Without being conscious of it, I slapped the bone into the palm of my right hand like a schoolteacher with a ruler, preparing to punish a bad student.

  2

  Prescott

  The woman apparently came from nowhere, as if she'd just sliced herself into the air; Prescott last remembered looking at the living room, and had been about to remark something to George Connally, but he couldn't remember exactly what it was he intended to say, something about the smell, something about that smell. But George had run too quickly up the stairs after his deputy. Prescott wanted to stop him, knew that they should not separate, but that smell.

  Not just the smell of gas, but the smell of his late wife.

  Oh, Cassie.

  "You wanted to see into the heart of the heart, isn't that how Worthy Houston put it?" Her voice was low and throaty. Sexually exciting. She was just as she'd appeared in the barn, a young, beautiful girl, while age had run its course with him. Her small eyes were filled with a lively playfulness Prescott could not recall from their life together. Her auburn hair had grown wild like a forest, and flowed down her back and along her shoulders. Her skin possessed a healthy glow. It was as if she were more alive now than she'd ever been.

  Prescott was not standing in the Marlowe-Houston House's hallway at all, but in an empty field, and it was summer. The yellow grass was high, the sky was clear and blue. He stood alongside the bank of a clear stream.

  Cassie threw her arms around him and hugged him tight, and he felt differently, as if something were missing something inside him, and then he knew. He was young again; he glanced at his clothes, his old man thrift shop suit was enormous on him. He felt his face, and it was smooth. Cassie drew back from his embrace and said, "Isn't it wonderful!"

  "What is it?" Prescott asked.

  Cassie grabbed hold of Prescott's hand and led him over to the edge of the stream. She pointed down into the stream. A small circle of stones had created a miniature bay, and in the still water Prescott saw his reflection.

  He was indeed a young man. His hair, which had been speckled with white for nearly thirty years, was restored to its original dark black. No crow's-feet around his eyes, no veins erupted on his nose. His teeth, when he smiled, were white and perfect.

  "You are a handsome devil," Cassie said, and he felt her hand as she slipped it beneath the thin material of his jacket, warm and alive as she touched where his sweat-soaked shirt clung to his ribs.

  "Am I dead?" he asked, and heard his own voice; it was the voice of a young man, light, uncertain, barely free of an adolescent tenor. "Is this heaven?"

  "Yes," she said, kissing him on the neck. "We're together in heaven now."

  "But the others," Prescott said, absently; he could still not direct his gaze away from the reflection of this young man in the water.

  "The natural order has been restored, Scotty. The others happily died, willingly sacrificed themselves to the ecstasy. Passage has been secured, Scotty, for the rebirth. Theodora Amory is the door, and your friend, Cup, the key. And with the key the door is opened, passage is secured, and the word is made flesh."

  "You mean God?"

  Cassie laughed. "Not your God who lives only in books and in feeble words, but a creature of such beauty and splendor."

  "The Eater of Souls," he said.

  "Beauty, Scotty, Death and Beauty in harmony, incomprehensible in our small human terms. Unspeakable beauty, Scotty. A man would be a fool not to yield himself up to It." She unbuckled his belt; his slacks were so loose on his thin frame that they almost slid off. He felt a moist heat there, where she stroked him, not entirely comfortable, as if he had no control over the feeling. He wanted to ask her why she was doing that to him; it was distracting him, because he was remembering other people, something about a little girl in a house. "It entered me once, too, I was to be the door. But I was foolish, Scotty, full of profane desires. I was unworthy of Its love."

  He looked up into her eyes. "How did I die?"

  She rolled her eyes, exasperated. "Is that so important now?"

  "Yes," he said, "it is important."

  She pointed down into the stream, and he looked, and did not see his youthful reflection at all. Instead he saw:

  Himself, an old, weary man, sitting at the bottom cellar steps of the Marlowe-Houston House, looking into the empty blackness. It is cold and he hugs himself, shivering. He reaches in his pocket and extracts a gun.

  "That's the gun George gave me," Prescott said.

  "Shhh " Cassie pressed a cold finger to his lips.

  He gazed at the reflection.

  The old Prescott lifts the gun, putting the barrel to his mouth.

  3

  Clare

  The skinless thing in her father's clothes pushed her down onto her stomach against the rough edges of the cellar steps. It slid like a gelatinous lizard over her hair and down her back. As soft and pliant as the creature seemed, it had incredible strength—or is it my weakness? The paralyzing fear overcame her. Moving farther along her wool skirt, it left a snail trail of warm gum as it rubbed its head against her ankles. She could feel the buttons on its seersucker jacket pressing against the back of her thighs as it slithered, the wet leather smell of her father's brown loafers as the thing-that-could-not-be-her-father dug his toes into her scalp. She swallowed the cold water that flowed beneath her face, now pressed into the stones. The water tasted like someone else's vomit. Clare gagged and groaned, parting her lips again to expel the foul water from her mouth; she felt worms crawling just under her chin.

  Please, don't let me die like this.

  "Big kiss, baby, big kiss for Daddy," the serpentine voice hissed, and she felt that wormlike tongue, hot and dripping, coil around her left calf. Involuntarily, her legs kicked out against the face and met with a quashing sound as her foot felt the oatmeal of the creature's cheek. The heel of her shoe seemed to sink into the face. To the hard bone of the skull.

  Clare's stomach lurched.

  But she had momentarily stopped the Thing. It's not Daddy, I know it's not Daddy. And she knew what the Thing intended to do to her. The gaping pink mouth with flashing silver teeth, the long tube of tongue winding like a copperhead up between her legs.

  "That's lovely, lovely," the Thing said, making smacking noises with its mouth. Clare felt the tongue wrap sloppily around her ankle. "Lovely, lovely," the voice began breaking like a country singer's, sliding up a scale and then down. Clare tried to press her legs together to keep that tongue away from her, but she was quickly losing all feeling in her legs from the ice cold water and the weight of the Thing that was pinning her to the steps. And yet, even going numb, she felt that tongue, like a warm-blooded creature twisting up her legs. The voice, changing, molting like a snake shedding its skin, becoming lower, deeper: "There's a saying that goes, I'll take a dip in the red river, but I won't take a drink from it, lovely, lovely, little blind Clare." As the freezing water ran across her face, her nose just p
ushed to the side so she could breathe, Clare realized that the Thing was going to bleed her down there, just as she had the last time she went to bed with Warren, just as she had when she'd dreamed in the bathtub, and then another memory tore itself out of her brain: just as Lily bled to death, down there, in the cellar, blood running from between her legs. And whatever lay on top of her. It wanted to drink her blood. That pink tongue. Breathing against her legs. Shoes digging into her hair. She felt the tongue, slithering up on the back of her thighs.

  Clare once again opened her mouth to scream, and water flooded, cold and sour, against the back of her throat

  "Clare," he said, "my baby, give Daddy a big kiss."

  4

  Tommy

  "We need some light in here, son," Tom Mackenzie, Sr., said in the dark. His breath was hot and smelled like trash that hadn't been taken out for two weeks. Tommy gagged when his father spoke. He tried to see in the dark, but could make out nothing other than a dark shape looming over him. The spindly thing sliced across his throat like a long skinny finger. If Tommy, who was slowly going into shock, could've pictured that thing in his mind's eye he would've seen a detached spinal cord studded with tiny feathers and a thin serrated cutting edge caressing him just beneath his chin. It gave him the humiliating feeling of being slowly tickled to death with a fine razor and not being able to do anything about it. Once, when Tommy had just begun to shave, he cut a shallow red line down the side of his face and it had tickled and burned just like this thing seemed to be doing when it stroked him.

  "We need some light in here, son," the voice that sounded like his father repeated, as if waiting for the meaning of the words to sink into Tommy's brain.

  Which it did.

  "Dad, no, no light, I don't—" Tommy gasped, sputtering as if he were drowning. He wanted to say: I don't want to see. A pincerlike claw wiped across his mouth, stinging him, and something warm and sticky brushed his lips. He was wrapped in tight fabric that clung to his skin; he began shivering even though he did not feel particularly cold.

  "We need some more light in here, son. The Boy-Eating Spider wants you to believe in him like he believes in you."

  Light flooded the room, and Tommy screamed inside himself. He felt like he was imploding.

  Tommy was wrapped like a mummy in a spider's web, and the web was jiggling, not with his own struggles but with the thing that bounded across the web toward him. Not the Boy-Eating Spider, but his own father, his eyes wild with insanity, his tongue wagging from side to side, giggling and gibbering, chanting, "Naughty, naughty, naughty "

  5

  George

  "Lyle? You damn fool, get back down here." George tried to sound like this was nothing, that this misshapen house itself was nothing, that they had all gone off the deep end, but no reason to make a big thing of it. He ran up the staircase thinking he'd just get to that landing, find Lyle, and then turn back around. Just like Lyle Holroyd was sneaking a beer on the job, or had been riding a little too hard on a chronic violator of traffic rules, or was flirting too much with the teenage girls down at the Jump 'N' Save. This wasn't much more than that; hell, so what if my wife's been eating glass and is laying in a bed over at the Westbridge Medical Center, and so what if I've seen enough corpses in the past twenty-four hours to last me a—heh heh—lifetime, and so what if some of those corpses are moving around just like no one told 'em they were dead? Who am I to say that's not the way it should be? Why, shucks, ma'am, I'm just here to keep law 'n' order, keep the peace, I don't give a cat's asshole if this Eater of Souls goes about Its business in Its own special way in the privacy of Its own home. Up the staircase, as he passed the tall Venetian window that now seemed to stretch up to infinity before it reached the ceiling, George was momentarily blinded by the glare of the sun reflected off Clear Lake. See? The sun still gets up in the morning just like the rest of us, and somewhere, yeah, somewhere, somebody's eating his Wheaties, someone's just gotten laid, someone is singing in his shower. Oh! What a beautiful morning! George had not expected the sun; the light outside the window was still murky with the hangover of night, but that bright strip of light off the lake, like a brilliant fish flashing as it came to the surface, hit him hard with a fear he hadn't completely realized.

  I will not wake up from this nightmare.

  Dear God in heaven, I will not wake up from this nightmare.

  As he gripped the greasy banister that seemed to wriggle beneath his fingers, George glanced back down the stairs. The carpet rippled as if it were hanging on a clothesline in a strong wind, and the staircase, like the window, seemed to drop into an endless chasm, a staircase that twisted and turned and continued downward into a falling darkness.

  No turning back no, no-siree-bob, George laughed as he had been learning to laugh in the last few days, a laugh that started deep in his stomach and sounded like whimpering if you couldn't crawl inside George's mind and know that he really was laughing. Something is crawling inside my mind, I can feel it. George had once found a baby abandoned in the restroom of a coffee shop out by the overpass, and the baby was screaming mainly because a cockroach had crawled right into its ear. Those roaches aren't too good at just backing up, so here was this big old water bug with its skinny legs wiggling and swiping at the kid's peach-colored earlobe, trying to dig its way through all that wax, and this baby just screaming not knowing what was causing all that pain, and that's how George felt right at the moment, like a cockroach was digging in his brain. Cockroaches eat just about anything, and a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Oh, dear God, cut me a little slack, will you? I've always followed the rules, played fair, don't make me go like this.

  George let go of the snaky banister and walked down the hallway. He glanced in the bathroom as he passed, and there was some man in there wearing a pith helmet and what would've been a blue uniform (except for all the blood that was haphazardly shot across it). George just saw this guy through a large crack in the bathroom door. He knew it was someone who used to be called Howie McCormick, my own goofy first cousin, but George was not about to admit this even to himself. Barely visible, behind the bloody man, was a woman lying dead in a bathtub full of blood, but a woman that George could not even in his wildest dreams have identified as Cappie Hartstone. Her face had been chewed off, and only a stubble of matted hair remained on her torn scalp. As if he were embarrassed to be caught in such an intimate act as chewing someone's face, Howie leaned over and nudged the bathroom door shut.

  Folks have got to have their privacy.

  George thought he heard someone call out his name from behind one of the bedroom doors. You're going to have to do better than that, he grinned. If I am insane, and you're insane, whoever or whatever you are, you're going to have to do a damn sight better than that. This is the sheriff you're talking to, the glorified meter maid, the man with the badge, the head honcho of Pontefract. You got my town, you got my marbles, but hell, you're not going to get my balls, too.

  George replied to the door, "Go play with yourself."

  But he thought he heard another voice, a child's. "Dad, no light, no I don't—"

  Tommy Mackenzie.

  Inside that bedroom.

  "Shit," George said, touching the gun in his shoulder holster for good luck. He walked toward the bedroom door.

  6

  Cup

  When I descended the steps, the only light in the cellar emanated from the wall to my left. It cast a bluish glow across the room, but most of what I could see was a torn shelf. I looked over the shadowy floor for any sign of Lily, expecting to see her twice-dead body in the same bent position as Bart Kinter's had been. Expecting to see Bart himself. I KNOW WHAT KIND OF MONSTER YOU ARE! My head throbbed with pain. I felt like something wanted to burst out of me. NEXT TIME! NEXT TIME IT WON'T BE SOME HORNY COUNTRY MORON!

  I slapped the bone in my left hand down into the cup of my right palm; it stung. STINGERS! SUCKERS! BURNING INSIDE YOU! BREEDING GROUND! My ears ached with the thudding sounds, the
whoosh of blood as it crashed against some inner shore.

  YOU. YOU. YOU.

  Slap! The bone hit the palm of my right hand, and I could no longer feel it. A wave of nausea overtook me as I moved toward that torn shelf. My eyes were not focusing; I saw insubstantial mosquitoes circling at the periphery of my vision. My tongue dried up in my mouth and felt withered and salty like a piece of dried meat hanging in a smokehouse too long.

  I am insane.

  I KNOW WHAT KIND OF MONSTER YOU ARE!

  Insanity's okay. We've got doctors for that. Good doctors. I've been to a therapist before, no big deal. I told him my dream about the lawn mower running over kids in a garden, and he told me it was my member.

  I did not even realize that I was smacking the bone into the palm of my right hand.

  MOW THEM DOWN, ALL FLESH IS GRASS!

  Now my teeth—I can't feel my teeth—oh, God, did I lose my teeth? I flicked my beef jerky tongue across the upper ridge of my teeth, and they all fell out—well, my vision was bad, but I saw them all fall, all my teeth just like an old man about to die, and when my teeth hit the mushy floor, they shimmered and wriggled like ghostly maggots. Oh, God, I'm dead, I'm already dead, my body, Jesus.

  MAGGOTS!

  The bone whistled in the air. I watched my hand move of its own accord. My left hand, gripping the bone, whacking it into my right hand which was swollen like it had been pumped with

  STINGERS! SUCKERS!

  The worms go in, the worms go out.

  All right! I know what kind of monster I am! Just leave me the fuck alone! Drive me insane, just drive me somewhere, somewhere else!