Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set
Page 30
Tad said, "No, you can't. It's polluted."
"Not right now. Not anymore."
They sat there a long time. Becky went and got a jacket from the Buick and wrapped it around Tad. Jenny and the kids came over and sat beside Joe. He clung to Hillary, kissing her forehead. It was so silent.
As the day grew long and the snow began to stick, Jenny said, "Let's go. We can head south and take the road up the Malabars. I saw some others taking that road."
"It'll be slick. The Buick won't make it. We can go steal someone's four-wheel drive, I guess."
Aaron piped up. "I know where a truck is."
Tad looked at Joe and whispered, "I know I shouldn't be scared, but I don't want to ever go back there."
"Oh," Joe said. "There's nothing back there anymore. Nothing like what happened. It's gone."
Tad said, "I don't know. I can hear my father, Joe. I can hear him."
Tad began shivering.
Joe hesitated before asking. "What's he saying?" He glanced at Becky. She had a concerned look on her face beyond the exhaustion.
Tad said, "My dad says we should wait here. He says we should watch the skies. He says it may come back."
"No," Joe said. "We need to go before the snow blocks the roads. Once we're out of the area, we can find somewhere to call someone—I don't know who yet, maybe the police—and try to tell our story."
Joe took him by the hand. They walked back to the car. Tad didn't object; if anything, he was overly compliant. Joe was shivering just as much as the boy. They all got back into the Buick, and drove to town, parking in front of the Gardners' house. Jenny, Aaron, and Joe went to the back, to the garage.
Joe slid open the old garage door, and as the light of day skimmed the place, he saw another miracle.
His old Ford truck, yellow and still shining, as if kept just for this moment.
His mother, all those years, had kept it clean, had made sure it was in good shape. Just waiting for him to come home again. He found a particle of joy in the midst of the tragedy of that week: that love survives even the wrecks and mangles of life. He loved them all, my mother, my wife, my two beautiful children (no, three, for my baby Paul had died a few years before). Melissa, Hopfrog, Patty Glass—a tremendous and profound love was born in him at that moment. He realized then that he would lose everything he ever loved in life, and yet love would not die in him because of it: I believe this. He hugged his son against his chest as if he could absorb and keep him safe in his bones; then, he let go. His mother was with him; he could feel her presence. Not in a garage with a bright and well-oiled machine, but in his heart, in the place she had never left.
He checked the tires, started it up after a bit of fooling around under the hood, and then they squeezed in, packed like sardines, children on laps, Jenny squeezed so close to him it almost felt as if they were one person. They drove up the side of House Mountain and took the route over the Malabar Hills, until they came to Stone Valley.
Joe got two connecting rooms at the local motel, all of them falling asleep, almost as soon as they touched the beds.
When Joe awoke, before dawn, he looked out at a white snow morning, a silent world, and laughed out loud when he saw a child on the icy street, rolling snow around to make a snowman, breaking the cut-crystal silence with a shout to his friend that there was no school today.
The light came up, and he went about the business of the living.
* * *
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BOOKS BY DOUGLAS CLEGG
Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.
STAND-ALONE NOVELS
Afterlife
Breeder
The Children’s Hour
Dark of the Eye
Goat Dance
The Halloween Man
The Hour Before Dark
Mordred, Bastard Son
Naomi
Neverland
You Come When I Call You
SHORT NOVELS & NOVELLAS
The Attraction
Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters
Isis
Purity
The Chateau of Devils
The Words
SERIES
THE HARROW SERIES
Nightmare House, Book 1
Mischief, Book 2
The Infinite, Book 3
The Abandoned, Book 4
The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)
Isis (Prequel Novella)
THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES
Bad Karma, Book 1
Red Angel, Book 2
Night Cage, Book 3
THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY
The Priest of Blood, Book 1
The Lady of Serpents, Book 2
The Queen of Wolves, Book 3
COLLECTIONS
Lights Out: Collected Stories
Night Asylum
The Nightmare Chronicles
Wild Things
BUNDLES & BOX SETS
Coming of Age
Criminally Insane: The Series
Halloween Chillers
Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)
The Vampyricon Trilogy
With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.
A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more; his book Purity was the first to go onto a mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.
He is married, and lives and writes in New England in a house called Villa Diodati.
DISCLAIMER
The Children's Hour is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PUBLICATION CREDITS
Copyright 1995, 2014 Douglas Clegg
Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.
Cover art provided by:
Damonza.com
Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction
“Clegg’s stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby.”
—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author.
“Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction.”
—Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story and, with Stephen King, The Talisman
“Douglas Clegg is the best horror novelist of the post-Stephen King generation.”
— Bentley Little, USA Today bestselling author of The Haunted.
“Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale…”
—The Daily News (New York)
YOU COME WHEN I CALL YOU
Douglas Clegg
ALKEMARA PRESS
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Click here to explore more fiction by Douglas Clegg.
PROLOGUE
1
The teenaged boy spoke into the tape machine:
“Here’s all I know. We did something terrible. It wasn’t us. But we let it in.”
His interrogator asked:
“How did you let it in?”
The boy said:
“If I tell you, you won’t believe me. If I tell you, you’re gonna say we’re insane. I’m not stupid. I know what you think. You think, Here’s this sixteen year old who probably killed all these people, and now he doesn’t want to have to take the blame so of course he blames it on demons. But here’s the thing: I was there. You weren’t. I saw them. I saw her.”
“Where?”
“Inside me. I saw her inside me. She’s inside all of us. It’s too late.”
“And where is she now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe sleeping. Maybe she’s waiting. Maybe…”
“Yes?”
“Maybe she wants all of this to be forgotten and then maybe she’ll come back, years from now, maybe she’ll come back because we hurt her, we wounded her in some way, and she doesn’t have as much power. Maybe when she’s all healed, she’ll come back.”
“What did you do to hurt her?”
“Not just me, all of us.”
“How did you hurt her?”
“There are rituals. One of us knew how. Maybe he didn’t know how. Maybe he lied. You got to understand it was crazy. It was crazy. Everything was burning. Everyone was dying or dead. It was like this little point of—I don’t know—craziness that made total sense. What we did. At the time. It seemed right. It seemed like the only thing. But now it sounds insane. It sounds like something evil. What we did.”
A pause on the tape.
The question was repeated.
“We stopped her,” the boy finally said.
“You stabbed her with this knife that you mentioned? The one that—”
“Sends people to Hell. That’s what it was supposed to do. But no. We didn’t. We should’ve, maybe. You weren’t there. It’s crazy. What we did.”
“What did you do?”
“All of us did it. We all did.”
“How can you stop a demon?” the man asked.
2
A girl said into the tape machine:
“I don’t remember what happened. You tell me.”
The man asked, “You mean you don’t remember what happened to your family?”
Silence on the tape for several minutes.
Then: “My grandmother gave me a Bible to read. In it, there are demons, but none seem very real. Do you believe in God?”
“Perhaps not the way some people would think of God, but yes.”
“I guess if you believe in God, you’d believe in demons, too, wouldn’t you?”
“Perhaps.”
“I don’t believe in demons. It’s stupid to believe in demons, isn’t it? It’s like fairytales or dreams. It makes no sense. I think it’s all a lie. I think one of them did it all. I saw him kill my mother. I saw him kill all of them.”
“Where are the bodies?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember. I told you.”
Then, after a moment’s pause, she added:
“I do remember one thing.”
“What?”
“I remember a wall. I remember a shadow on the wall. I remember...wings, like bats, in a cave, all around me...and seeing a light so blue that it was like a perfect sky and then I saw what looked like a wolf above me lean down and whisper something dreadful to me.”
“What did the wolf say?”
“My name. That’s all. He called me by name. He knew my name. But it was a dream. It was a nightmare. I’m awake now. It didn’t happen.”
3
A different boy laughed as the tape whined. “This is a big fucking contraption,” he said.
“I don’t like cassettes.”
“Yeah, I guess they suck. So I guess Peter probably told you that completely nuts story about demons and stuff, right? Yeah, I knew he would. He’s delusional. There’s no way that happened.”
“Alison told me that you did it.”
A pause.
“Is this for the cops?”
“No, it’s for my own research.”
“Okay. Well, I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me anyway, even though I guess my hands did some of it.” He laughed again. “All right, I’ll tell you the truth. It wasn’t demons, it was the Devil, I’m pretty sure, yeah. It was like the Big Bad Guy. Possession and all that bullshit—I mean, I’m not Catholic or anything, but I sort of believe in Hell at this point and I sort of believe in Heaven, and maybe I’m as messed up as all these docs say and maybe I really think I saw the Devil or maybe it was like a movie of the Devil or maybe I really did murder a bunch of people, but hell, find their bodies, okay? Find their flicking bodies. That’s what the lawyers said. Find their bodies, and then you can come execute me or whatever they do to kids who kill.”
“What did the Devil look like?”
“See, I can tell you don’t believe in this shit. That’s cool. Most jerk-offs in this world think there’s no such thing and that it’s all make-believe and stuff, but that’s because they never experienced it. They never got touched by it, like we did.”
“I’ve studied cases of demonic possession before.”
“Yeah, like The Exorcist, right? Shit, a kid in a bedroom spitting pea soup’s kind of sweet compared to what we went through.”
“Tell me about the Devil.”
“Okay. Well, it’s not just one thing, is it? It’s many. It’s a pile of nasty goo slipping out of someone’s brain and that someone still talking to you and maybe it’s got claws and maybe you’re just dreaming standing up—and maybe it crawls across your hands like ants and scorpions and then it just looks like maybe a pretty girl. A pretty girl who knows how to get boys. A pretty girl who has things inside her. Well, there was this girl—wait, she was more like a woman—and she was a demon, only not like you think of demons, and she could sort of change things, she could bend things, you know? Like a mirror—like a funhouse mirror—and she had this thing where once she had you, you were hers and she made all kinds of things happen...” He kept laughing as he spoke, giggling, sniggering. “Like, you know, people would...oh shit, I can’t even say it, you know, I saw all kinds of shit, stuff that you only dream about. It was all in us to begin with. I don’t think she could’ve done what happened without us. I think we were each part of her. But it was all the Devil, you know? It was all this other thing going on, I mean, I got this from the source, I got it from the person who knows. Shit, we’re still part of her. She’s in us. I tried to stop her. Hell, we all did. I even had this knife, this sort of ritual thing. It was called an athame. It could’ve sent her to Hell. I know it could’ve.”
“Are you possessed?”
“I don’t know, but even when I’m talking to you now, I can see her, over there, calling me. But that’s why I’m going into the loony bin, ain’t it?”
“Over here? By the window?”
“Yeah. Right there.”
“Describe her.”
“Well, Christ, she’s really pretty and she—wait...she’s...”
“What’s she saying to you? Right now?”
“If I were to tell you, she’d kill me. And maybe you, too. I can’t tell anyone. It’s something that’s between her and me. Until the end of time.”
4
The last tape played.
“Who are you?”
A sound like rushing wind on the tape.
“I am what I am.”
“Why are you inside him?”
“He has sacrificed to me. He has given his soul to me.”
“What do you mean to do with him?”
“What I mean to do with all of them. All of those I have touched. All of those who have partaken of me.”
And then, something that sounded like a screeching howl overlaid with another sound, like hundreds of people whispering secrets in an echoing cavern.
When the sound had finally stopped, the man asked: “Are you a demon?”
“I am the enemy of your kind.”
“And your name?”