Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  So we drag Eugene with us, and he keeps telling us it's wrong, it's wrong, shaking his head, acting like a skunk. But we tell him about John Feely's stolen goods. Winston started that. He was always a better talker than me, and had read a lot of science fiction like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Winston convinced my brother that John Feely had stolen the old stone angel from Watch Hill, the one that used to be at the entrance. How that was sacrilegious and how it was only right that we go steal it back.

  I didn't know that Winston was telling the truth.

  Turns out, Winston had watched John Feely steal it one morning at five a.m. when Winston looked out his bedroom window and saw John walking down the street with it, plain as day.

  So, it's maybe ten minutes to midnight, and we're all three staring at that old farmhouse. Our folks'll all skin us alive if they know we're out so late.

  And then Winston looks at me and Eugene both and says something like, "I bet you're both too chicken to go in there."

  To tell you the God's honest truth, I was too scared. I don't know what it was, but there was something about the Feely place at night that unnerved me. They say that there are some places where it can look perfectly beautiful and peaceful, but the eye detects something's wrong. Even though our minds can't notice what it is, our eye sees something without completely recognizing it. It's called the sublime. That's what I think it was, back then, that I felt. Call it a heightened awareness, but I was convinced when I looked at that dark old farmhouse that it was somehow alive, somehow it had some energy to it.

  And it chilled my blood on one of the hottest nights of summer.

  But Eugene was not attuned to that, I suppose. He accepted the dare from Winston. He barely waited a minute before he bounded up to the front porch and tried the door.

  Unusual for us, the door was locked. Eugene went around to the windows and looked through each one. One window, a small one, was almost too bright with the lights on. I was about to call to him to come back, to forget it. But he saw something through that window. I don't know what.

  When I saw him again, a few minutes later, and when we had gotten inside our house in the light, I gasped at the sight of him. He asked me what was wrong. All I could say was, "Your hair."

  His hair, the bright red of fire, had turned completely white.

  "It's because of what I saw," he said, and I felt it then. I felt that somehow my brother Eugene had become a ghost even though he hadn't died.

  Now, I didn't believe him then. You won't believe me now when I tell you. He said that he saw something that looked very much like John Feely's old mother standing at the window on the inside, surrounded by candles. She was looking right at Eugene, although he was sure she couldn't see him because he was, after all, in the dark.

  And then she reached up, placing her thumbs on either side of her eyes, and began to draw the flesh off her bones just as if it were our mother pulling skin from a chicken.

  I didn't sleep that night, and I told him that we would never go back to the Feely place. But apparently, you can't see them without wanting to go to them. It's part of the power they have. They're like some kind of Gorgon. You are turned to stone before them, powerless. You offer yourself up to them without even realizing it.

  For the next morning, my brother Eugene had vanished.

  He was gone for five weeks before I confronted John Feely. I was certain that Eugene had fallen prey to some strange glamour of what he'd seen in the window. I had to shout at John just to get a small response from him. When he acknowledged me, he nodded, as if answering a question in his head.

  John Feely looked at me sadly, and took pity on me.

  He told me to meet him at his house before dawn, and I would see my brother.

  My fear of John's house was overcome by my desire to see my brother as well as my insane curiosity. I awoke before the sun was up and rode my bicycle out to that accursed house. John greeted me soberly. He led me to the room where my brother had seen his terrifying vision.

  There was a closet in the room, a closet that rose strangely from the floor, at an angle. This was surrounded with votive candles and every manner of religious symbol available, crosses of gold and brass and cornhusk, even a Star of David drawn on the wall in chalk; the Eastern yin-yang symbol, I think, also, and the Egyptian ankh. I was surprised a man of John Feely's limited education and interests would even know these, but he proved to be a self-educated man. His library was enormous and exotic. He told me a story about one of God's angels sent to this spot and chained by John's own great-great grandfather, a radical Mennonite preacher. The devil, John told me, still lived down in its tomb and had ravaged Colony more than once in the town's short history.

  I was impatient. I wanted to know about my brother.

  John Feely told me, "Something has happened to your brother, and I'm afraid it is my fault."

  It seems his mother, out of curiosity, had removed the crosses and had stepped down into that cavern the very night that Eugene saw her through the window.

  The devil had emerged in his mother's form and had seduced Eugene with what powers it had. Eugene had returned that night before John could make right the balance.

  And you want to know something? I believed every word as we stood there. I bought it all. I could tell John Feely believed it, and I could hear, in his words, his own suffering and regret at the loss of his mother.

  "How, if the creature is chained, could it escape?"

  Before John Feely could answer, I heard my brother on the other side of that locked closet door. I fought John to get to that door, remove the lock and throw off the crosses that hung from it, but something in me held me back. For as my brother shouted to me to open the door, I realized it could not be my brother Eugene at all.

  That my brother would not use language such as this creature did, nor could he make the sound that I heard.

  The sound was not human.

  John Feely told me that if I listened too long to the devil that I would become his vessel.

  Then he showed me what he had done to himself to keep from hearing the devil below.

  He had punctured both of his eardrums.

  I realized he had not heard anything I was saying.

  I could stay there no longer. I ran out into the dawn, home to my safe bed, and never told anyone this story except for Winston Alden.

  And now, you.

  7

  Virgil Cobb looked into Becky's eyes for signs of belief.

  She could not look at him. She sat on the floor, totally caught up in the world of that story.

  "And what was beneath the Feely house, what took over my brother's body also took over Patty Glass," he said. "For some reason, it is able to get out now. That means only one thing."

  "Old Man Feely's dead." Becky was totally drawn into the story he'd woven.

  "That's right."

  "But I don't see what it is. Is it a devil?"

  "Of a sort. It is what they called in the olden days, unspeakable."

  "Nothing's unspeakable."

  "You haven't seen its face."

  She caught her breath. "You did?"

  8

  Virgil's Story

  It was nearly a month later; the moon was full. I had watched my parents mourn the loss of their youngest, while I grew more guilty each day. Yet I had sworn to John Feely that I would not tell anyone. He told me that my brother was lost as soon as he gazed upon that creature, and I believed him.

  Then, one night, I heard a rapping at my bedroom window. My room was on the third floor of my folks' house. I figured Winston was down below throwing pebbles up.

  But instead, I looked out and saw something that looked exactly like my brother, in the big old oak tree just beyond my window, dressed in the overalls I'd last seen him in.

  He was sitting among its branches, I thought. But as I watched him in my frozen terror, I saw that he wasn't sitting at all. Eugene was standing on nothing. I thought that he was floating in air.

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nbsp; And then I saw them, in the moonlight that cast its beam between the shadows of leaves and branches: something coming out of his spine, holding him to the tree. They were like the thin, curved legs of horseshoe crabs, that was the closest I could come to determining what they were. Or feelers. Some kind of antennae sprouted from his spinal cord.

  I bit the inside of my cheek to make sure I wasn't dreaming.

  Eugene spoke to me through the open window. He said, "Why did you leave me there? Why didn't you protect me, Virg? Why did you let it get me?"

  And then, it dropped out of sight, into darkness.

  Only later did I find out about two children of the neighborhood, a boy and a girl, taken from their home. They were found down near the river, their bodies torn, drained of blood.

  I went to John Feely, and he took me up to Watch Hill and showed me how it could come up from some of the graves, how the ones without crosses on them could be used as doorways for it.

  I had snuck the Bram Stoker book, Dracula, from my uncle's house. It had been banned from the local library for twenty years. I knew about creatures that drained blood. I wrote down in the dirt in front of him, "Vampires?"

  And he crossed that word out.

  John Feely had never heard this term before. He looked at me and said, "No. Angel of the Pit. Abaddon."

  We went through Watch Hill that day, looking for where the creature may have come through.

  When we found a newly dug, but empty grave, John Feely dropped several crosses down into it and covered them with a thin layer of dirt.

  It wasn't until the winter, when another grave was dug up there, that I saw my brother again and pursued him at dawn across the snowy ground to try to catch him. Winston was with me, and he had gone ahead (believing it all, because he believed everything) and had drawn several crosses in the ground around the grave.

  I chased my brother, swinging a crucifix I'd been keeping under my bed—borrowed from St. Andrews'—as we ran.

  When my brother arrived at the grave, he saw the crosses and stopped dead in his tracks.

  He seemed to freeze. He stared at the crosses as the sun slowly rose to the east. Only a purple light. Faint light.

  Winston and I were able to walk up to him, then.

  We had our equipment ready. We knew now that this was a vampire we were up against.

  It was easy. He continued to stare at the crosses in the ground, like a bird hypnotized by a cobra. It was the strangest thing I've ever seen.

  Eugene continued to watch the ground as I brought the stake I'd carved up to his chest.

  And then, I couldn't do it. I began bawling like a baby. Suddenly, with the light coming up, I didn't believe that my brother would be a monster. I didn't believe.

  I started erasing the crosses with my feet. Something compelled me to it, and I remembered how much I loved my brother, how I protected him, how I was never going to hurt him in any way.

  And when I turned around, Winston was screaming.

  Eugene held my friend with one hand, clutching him as if Winston were a chicken whose neck was about to be wrung.

  Something was rippling beneath my brother's face, and remembering Eugene's own vision of Mrs. Feely tearing her face off, I watched something begin to emerge from Eugene's left eye.

  I didn't wait to see what Eugene would transform into.

  I took the stake and jumped him, jabbing him over and over in the vicinity of his heart until I was sure that it had stopped.

  I sat on top of his body in the bloody snow. Winston, rescued, helped me with the rest of the procedure.

  When we were done, when we had finished what we knew had to be done to vampires, we took him to the frozen river and broke the ice. We dumped his body into it. We waited for weeks for someone to come across it; the river ran low the following summer, but his body was never recovered.

  I never spoke to John Feely again, and I tell you it has been fifty-some years since that day, and it is as fresh in my memory as yesterday. You may wonder how I stayed sane after that.

  I will tell you.

  I kept watch for them. Winston and I both. We had a hunch they came back at least once, but somehow John Feely kept it contained.

  But whenever a child goes missing, I get a chill, knowing that it might be that thing that has it. That thing that's living beneath the very ground we walk upon, trying to find a way out of its prison. I think it uses children mostly because it requires some belief. As we get older, we lose that, even, sometimes in God. But children believe in things, and this creature feeds on their beliefs as much as it does their bodies and souls.

  9

  Virgil Cobb finished his story. He no longer seemed to be a doctor to Becky, but a very weary, very old man who had come a long way in his life to end up here, frightened of ghosts and goblins. She had begun to believe parts of Virgil's story, at least insofar as he himself believed it, but she knew that this was not sane. What he was talking had no basis in the world. Becky was not a major believer in anything, although she held to her Protestant upbringing a bit—the part of it that didn't directly involve God. She held to the morals and codes and attitudes engendered by the church of her childhood; the supernatural element she didn't buy into at all. She firmly believed that man made his own errors, and that perhaps there was a karmic debt built up, but it had a swift and effective collection agency: you cheat on your husband, you end up divorced, you lie to a friend, you lose your friend. She sat there, understanding that Virgil Cobb was, perhaps, talking in metaphor about the loss of his brother. She thought that he truly believed that his brother had been turned into some kind of vampire. A more disturbing thought struck her as she sat there: if he isn't telling the truth, if he is experiencing delusions, then the little girl in the examination room isn't Patty Glass, of course you gullible idiot, she's some poor girl that Virgil dug up from some grave and mutilated. Or worse, she was alive when he performed his surgery.

  She wanted to believe him, because he had never broken trust with her. He had helped her as a teenager when her father had become too abusive in his drinking, and again when he was her employer. Finally, when the divorce came, he got her inexpensive counseling over in Stone Valley. She wanted to believe him. But she could not. Something within her rebelled.

  The desolate thought that remained was that she was listening to, at best, a ghoul; at worst, a murderer and sociopath.

  She still felt for him. She took his hand in hers. His hand was cold.

  It was just beginning to rain outside. She heard a wind come up, and then the clicking of the rain as it hit the shingles of the house.

  "You must be tired," she said. "Let's get you into bed first thing. We can figure the rest of this out in the morning."

  "I am very tired," Virgil replied. "More tired than you can imagine. Thank you for believing me."

  She could not look him in the eye.

  At least, not until they both heard the cry from the next room.

  The examining room.

  The cry of a young child, which, as the rain picked up, became a wail.

  Virgil said, "Whatever you do, you mustn't go back into that room. It is night now. It must hear its master, like its own heart, beating beneath the house, in the very ground upon which we live."

  He rolled his shirtsleeve down to cover the bite on his forearm. "I suppose I'm what it needs to harvest, Rebecca."

  As if it were the most important thing in the world (and knowing at the same time that it was totally ridiculous), she said, "Call me Becky, Virgil."

  "Becky"—his voice softening as the child's wailing ceased for a moment—"I called you because you're the only person smart enough and trustworthy enough to help me. I'm afraid my friend Winston was already taken. I'm afraid others, too. I don't know who. I just know it is loose in this town. You can run away from it if you want. It's too late for me. I imagine that before the sun is up tomorrow I'll be dead and then it will take me over. I want you to run, actually. I want you to be safe."
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  "I still don't want to believe this," she said, her words carefully measured. "Why would this be happening now? Why right now?"

  Virgil shook his head. "I don't know. When I was young, it was as if it leaked out. It was as if just by looking at it, we gave it some kind of power. Maybe someone else has given it power, too, whatever it is."

  "I just want things to be the way they were before you called me." She said these words as if she were already removed from the immediate problem which involved Virgil and the girl in the next room.

  "I understand. You go get your son and anyone you love, and you run, Becky. I understand completely." He nodded.

  "No"—she shook her head—"I can't, though. Someone killed my son's dog this morning. I don't know who. They pushed a spike right into the dog's skull. I thought then that it must've been some monstrous juvenile delinquent. But the footprints. Muddy footprints, so tiny, delicate. Like a little girl's. Do you think there are other children?"

  "I don't know. If John Feely was somehow stopped last night, there could be any number of people who have been taken by this thing."

  "Then I can't leave. I have to go get Tad, and then there's Homer—I won't leave him here. How can I leave any of them to this?" She brought her hands up to her face, covering her eyes. "I feel like we're already lost."

  The rain came faster and harder.

  Don't think of the body of that girl in the room. Don't think of what he had to do to her.

  Minutes passed.

  Becky felt rooted to the spot.

  Then, the door to the examination room creaked open, behind her, and before Becky could turn around, she saw it in Virgil Cobb's eyes as he watched what came through the door—it was not so much terror, as an expression of such absolute emptiness that for a second she thought Virgil was no longer in his body, but had already died and left a shell which continued to twitch.