Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  "Patty." Joe's voice broke. He wasn't crying, but he could no longer speak.

  "Need a drink?" Hopfrog asked, reaching for his trusty bottle of whiskey.

  Joe nodded. After Hopfrog took a swig, he passed it to Joe. Joe looked at the bottle, then at his friend. He set the bottle down on the desk. After a minute he spoke, "I want to stay sober for this. So what does this mean? I mean, if it's really Patty Glass in a photo taken decades before her birth..."

  Hopfrog retrieved the bottle, drank again from it. "Well, you could look for the complex explanation. Maybe someone is playing an elaborate hoax on anyone who knew Patty and has managed to put a faked photo into the microfiche of the library. Or, the simpler one, in which somehow Patty Glass traveled backwards through time. And forward, too."

  "Forward?"

  "You haven't been in town long enough to hear the buzz, but this morning, I heard the kids at school talking about it. She showed up at her parents' door yesterday, good as new, and still about twelve years old."

  "I don't believe it."

  "And this." Hopfrog drew some papers out from a folder, passing them to Joe. "If you read through it, you'll see that in 1931, one of the mines imploded, killing sixteen miners, and trapping four. Of the four, only one survived, and he gave this account at State, where he ended up living for the rest of his days. He claimed there were ghosts haunting the shafts. He claimed that he saw what looked like a giant crab down there, too. He lived off the bodies of the dead for two months before they were able to locate him. When they did, he told the authorities about children with wings and that the entrance to hell was down in the mine. He may truly have been mad, but read this part." He pointed to the second page, resting in Joe's hand.

  Joe read it aloud, "James Woodard said, 'The devil told me he was looking for one of his children, that one of his babies had gotten trapped down here and he was looking through all of time for him. He said he wouldn't drink my blood if I brought others to him. I got to get him some blood, y'see, I got to.'" Joe let the pages drop from his lap to the floor. "I don't believe it. I don't."

  "Joe Gardner, you can sit here after what we've been through and say that... Jesus, Joe. You hearing voices, these disappearances, what we went through...The point isn't that this miner saw the devil, the point is that something's down there, only no one but maybe you, me, and maybe this James Woodard ever saw It and came back."

  Joe interrupted, "We didn't go down there."

  Hopfrog nodded. "Technically, no. But what we saw in that barn, It was this... devil, vampire, alien, whatever you want to call it. God, you don't know what a relief this is just to be able to sit and talk with you about it, Joe." He wiped his forehead and then his dry lips. "I've been holding this in for so long, slowly doing my research, slowly putting things together. Just take this for what it is: we know Patty vanished when we were kids. According to this photo, she appeared in 1904. According to current rumor, she appeared yesterday in town, and this is according to kids who weren't even around when she first vanished. Now, either Patty's some kind of god, or this thing, let's call it an angel, is living beneath this town, and it's somehow feeding off these children, let's say. Maybe the way we saw Melissa feed off the Fletchers' baby. Maybe it needs the blood to survive and empower it, just like an engine needs gasoline. Only this engine makes the machine go forward and backward in time. Maybe it's drawing blood from generations of residents of Colony. And why Colony? Why not somewhere else? I think I figured that out, too. Maybe the blood here is a little better because of something in the soil, something that gets in the water, hell, we have our own wells here. I'm not a geological genius, but I also am aware that certain cancers are higher in this region than even right over the hills, less than an hour away. I don't know what it is; maybe it's some mineral we haven't even classified yet. But this thing, this It, is down there, I know it is, milking us, milking our children, and for some unknown reason, it needs to travel backwards and forwards in time. It sounds insane, but after ten years of devoting my free hours to this, that's what I've come up with."

  Joe took a long breath. "Okay. Okay. I don't quite follow you. But, as far as I see it, if this It needs blood, why not just attack all at once?"

  Hopfrog half smiled, as if waiting for this question.

  "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Why kill the golden goose? It's been living here for centuries, maybe. Why screw up a good thing?"

  "Oh, jeez, Hop, you don't even see what you're doing. You're creating a pattern around all these incidents and making sure it all fits, when in reality each may be completely random and separate."

  "I'm not going to say it again, Joe: fuck you. You saw what the corpse of Melissa Welles did, you helped dig up her grave, and what we found..."

  "I know, I know," Joe said, and covered his ears with his hands just like a four-year-old because he didn't want to hear this, it was screwing with his mind, it was making him go haywire inside, remembering... the voices, as he opened the coffin, and it was empty, but the bottom of it had been clawed at and opened, and something had gotten out of it, moved down through the earth, down through the root-encrusted ground, dug its way like a mole downward to some final destination.

  The voices of the dead had said to him, "Joe, come on down, boy, make yourself at home, we want you and Missy to be together for always, throughout eternity, together, just you and the love of your life."

  2

  After looking through Hopfrog's scrapbook, Joe looked up at him. "What does this—angel—want?"

  "What?"

  "Well, someone always wants something."

  "Maybe just blood. Maybe this mineral in the blood."

  Joe shook his head. "I just don't get it. You said something about an engine. About blood being like gasoline. If it needs blood, why? Is this thing going somewhere?"

  "I don't know. Back in time?"

  "Or maybe it's just stuck and is looking for a way out?"

  "I'm either drunk or you're making no sense whatsoever." Hopfrog laughed.

  Joe looked at the window and saw his own reflection against the dark, rain-spattered night. "And why now? Why didn't this thing, whatever it is, do this last year? Four years ago?"

  "Oh, I sort of figured that one out"—Hopfrog looked up at him and said, unhesitatingly—"it's because you've come back, Joe. I think—I believe it needs you."

  Joe turned to face Hopfrog again. "What?" he whispered.

  "I never wrote or called because I didn't want you here again," Hopfrog said, his voice barely a whisper. "You were like my brother, but I didn't want you here because when you were here, it happened. You heard the voices, Joe, you were the receiver."

  Joe closed his eyes, trying to wish the world away in a heartbeat. When he opened his eyes, the room and Hopfrog and the books were still there. He said, "I don't understand. Because of the accident?"

  "I've been trying to piece it all together ever since then," Hopfrog said. "I'm not sure why. Maybe it's 'cause this creature almost had you back then. Maybe because of what you did... to yourself."

  Joe went and took a drink. The whiskey went down his throat, burning. He glanced down at his wrists. The scars were healed years before, but the whitest of lines, like creases in the fabric of his skin, were still there, jagged and long from his wrists up to his forearms. Eighteen years old, crouching down in the mine shaft, the razor in his hand, waiting for death and for Melissa to come to him, to take him with her.

  "Maybe you got too close back then. I don't know, I don't know." Hopfrog pressed his hands up to his face and began weeping. It was the saddest sound Joe had ever heard. "I have been trying... so long... to understand why it happened... On one level, I might just be making it up, but on another, I know it's true; why Patty Glass is in a newspaper that was printed decades before her birth... and what we did the day she disappeared. What we did in that barn... as soon as I heard you... that you were here... I knew it was going to happen all over again."

  "B
ut Hop," Joe asked, "why me?"

  "I'm not smart enough to know. It's something from beyond... I have read every alien-abduction book from the past twenty years, and why do you think some moron from the backwoods gets abducted and not Einstein?" Hopfrog had gone from crying to barking. "Why does anything happen to anyone? Christ, Joe, I don't fucking know. I'm just an idiot carpenter in the land of Bumfuck. How the hell am I supposed to know everything? All I know is this exists, It's here, It's going back and forth in time. This alien angel fucked-up thing used children, and Patty Glass appears about the same time you do. You figure it out."

  Tad came and stood in the doorway. "Daddy, are you fighting?" He looked both sleepy and excited.

  Hopfrog wheeled over to his son and plopped him onto his lap. "Just debating. It's bedtime for you, kiddo—we promise to keep it down from here on."

  Tad looked at Joe. "My mom says you're a bad influence."

  Joe couldn't even smile. Mechanically, he said, "Does she? Well, she just may be right."

  3

  Ten minutes later, Hopfrog closed Tad's door and wheeled along the hall to where Joe sat at the staircase. "Let's go back in the study," he said. "I've got to tell you something."

  4

  "Remember at that well?" Hopfrog asked. "Over at the Feely barn."

  Joe nodded. "When Patty disappeared."

  "Yep. What you did, Joe, do you remember that?"

  Joe thought a minute, trying to conjure up a picture: inside the Feely barn, the golden light at the well, the crucifixes and Egyptian symbols, as if it were some ancient tomb. He couldn't remember exactly what had transpired. "I remember being there. Not much else."

  "It was what you did." Hopfrog grinned. He looked a little mad. Beads of sweat sprouted along the lines of his forehead and he had a glimmer in his eyes. "You did something really important back then, only you didn't know it. I don't know how you did it, but it protected us, you, me and Melissa, at least then. It only got Melissa later." Looking down at his useless legs, he whispered, "It only got part of me."

  "I just remember all that light. The golden light."

  "What about the boy? All covered with blood? Only it didn't always just look like a boy—it looked like a bug, too."

  Joe shut his eyes, trying to draw the picture-memory from his mind: The warm light, he bathed in it, practically, and touching the markings on the well—although now, as a grown-up, remembering, it seemed less a well than a metal tube, some kind of thick, shiny metal... Hopfrog was there, on two legs, and Melissa, close by, too... and then he saw him, the boy, the blood boy—

  But Joe saw through the boy, too, and it wasn't a boy at all, but some kind of insect, or machine, something with multiple eyes, something with shriveled vestigial wings in a row along its carapace... the Thing's lamprey mouth gasping as if for air ... it was some kind of dragon, and it must've taken Patty Glass—but Joe knew it wanted all of them...

  And then the memory became confused, as if Joe had superimposed another memory, one from his imagination—for he was no longer Joe in the memory, but King Joe Dragonheart, and he withdrew his flaming sword of valor and struck the dragon a blow to its heart...

  Joe opened his eyes. "I don't remember it clearly. I'm not even sure it really happened. Maybe it was mass hysteria, Hop, maybe we were so scared we made up a story about it."

  "I think maybe you killed something there in that barn. I don't know how." Hopfrog's grin slid into a tight-lipped line. "Or maybe you know how to protect yourself from It, Joe. Maybe the reason the monster's out now is because it wants you most of all because you're the only one who can stop it." Then Hopfrog drew something out from his pocket. "Look at this," he said. He passed what seemed to be a rock to Joe.

  Joe turned it over in his hand. "A fossil? What is this, maybe a trilobite or something?" The chip of volcanic rock was curved and shiny at the center, as if it were studded with bits of mica. The impression of an insect or some many-ribbed animal, about the size of a fist, was at its center.

  Hopfrog half smiled. "You'll never believe what it is."

  "I'm beginning to believe a hell of a lot."

  "What would you say if I told you that that rock is only about twenty years old?"

  Joe shrugged. "That's nuts. I'm no rock collector, but it's obviously some kind of lava with a fossil of an insect or crustacean in it. If it's twenty years old, it came from Hawaii or something."

  "It's not lava. It's from the mud in Old Man Feely's barn. After you killed that thing, Joe, I found it there. It's what attacked us. It's not what we saw, I know, but it's the thing behind what we saw. It's what you managed to kill. And it burned into the mud. I slipped it in my pocket afterwards and kept it. I kept it so I would never forget what happened then."

  Joe held the rock up to the light, but shook his head. "This thing is what we saw there?"

  "Not what we saw. We somehow created what we saw from this. This is the raw material of our nightmare, Joe."

  "Joe Dragonheart," Joe said.

  "Huh?"

  "King Joe Dragonheart. That's who I believed I was when I slew it. I believed it was a dragon. I really believed so hard, Hop, so hard... it seemed true."

  Several minutes passed before Joe noticed that someone was ringing the doorbell, and he dreaded finding out who or what might be on the other side of that door. It was as if the world had come to a stop just so he and his old friend could talk about something that seemed more forbidden than anything that had ever existed in the world before.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  JENNY

  Jenny tried the phone, thinking that she'd try to track down Joe at the Angel Wing Pub, but the line was down, and that weird kid was still standing on the front porch, staring at her.

  If she had known that his name was Byron Cheever and what he was currently capable of, she might've gone for a knife, but instead, she went to the door, and opened it a crack to ask the young man what he wanted.

  Before she could say anything, lightning struck a nearby tree, lighting up the sky so that she could see the children in the yard, all standing near the older boy. Seven or eight children, she thought, but the light was so brilliant as to be blinding, so there may have been more.

  Then, the electricity went out.

  The very darkness seemed to move towards her.

  PART THREE

  THE NIGHT COLONY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  SIEGE

  1

  Joe opened Hopfrog's front door.

  "Becky," he said, wearily.

  She was rain soaked and her face was shiny with exertion. "Where's Tad," she said, brushing past him, taking the stairs two at a time. "Is he in bed?"

  Virgil Cobb stood out on the porch. "Hello, Joe," he said. "Hello, Homer."

  Hopfrog wheeled over and extended his hand. "Dr. Cobb, good to see you."

  Lightning burst across the sky, like fireworks lighting up the whole neighborhood. The rain was thinning out. For a while, it turned to sleet.

  Virgil said, "It's back again. Tonight."

  Hopfrog nodded. It was as if they'd all stepped off the smooth world of sanity and had fallen into this pit of belief in anything and everything. "Yes."

  Incongruously, Virgil said to Joe, "How's your mother, Joe?"

  Joe felt as if he had just swallowed his heart. "Oh, Jesus, my family, Hop, we've got to get them, too."

  And that's when they all heard it: the scream, bloodcurdling, chilling, the kind of scream that could bring a grown man to his knees.

  It was Becky.

  2

  It was only the beginning of the screaming and wailing that would continue through the night, as households in the small town of Colony, the town which produced the world-renowned rocking chairs, found that their children were gone.

  Others found that their children had returned for them.

  Romeo Dancer returned from a night of boozing to find his wife Wilma's body drained of blood, and his four, normally hungry children
looking quite full and bloated; Tenley McWhorter and her boyfriend, Noah Cristman, had already begun bleeding his father, tied up to one of the famous Colony rockers, his veins torn and pulsing with the last of his life as he watched something that did not seem entirely human shoot from the back of Noah's mouth, something which reminded him of a bug's antennae; Elvis Bonchance had his baby brothers, both under two years old, in his pudgy fingers, their eyes open and pink, their bodies pure white, a large smear of black ran across the front of his overalls; and Davy, the little boy freshly back from the dead, who had begun sucking on Dale Chambers's bones as if they were sugarcane, sat on his haunches on the motel bed, as if waiting for a signal; house to house, there were less than twenty people still alive in town, and within minutes, this figure would be reduced to a handful.

  Night had descended upon this corner of God's earth, and it was a darkness which would not give in to the light.

  3

  Joe found Becky sobbing at the top of the stairs. He wrapped his arms around her. Peering into Tad's bedroom, he saw the window open, rain coming into the room, the flash of lightning outside.

  "Please," she said, "please let me go, I have to go find my baby!" She tugged away from him, but didn't move again. Instead, she shivered and wept and did not even seem to be conscious of her surroundings.

  Hopfrog had crawled up the stairs, using the special bars positioned beneath the banister. He knelt beside his wife, speaking soft words of comfort to her, flashing anger at Joe. "I have a gun in the top drawer of my desk. Get it for me now. I am going to go out and get my son."

  And then, it struck Joe. He was suddenly caught up in a nightmare which was not just personal, not just years built up of fears and fairy tales and the hyper-imagination of a young creative man—this was a nightmare which he had stumbled across years ago, which had remained dormant, like a volcano waiting to blow. He forgot about getting the gun for Hopfrog, forgot about the present tragedy of Hop's son Tad being missing, forgot anything and everything except for the picture of Jenny and Hillary and Aaron. It was as if a dam had burst within him, a dam that had been holding in fears and terrors and suspicions and beliefs—the muck of a childhood revisited in a moment. MY FAMILY OH GOD DON'T LET ANYTHING HAPPEN TO MY FAMILY, PLEASE GOD, PLEASE.