Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Oh, but he doesn’t need a hammer anymore.

  Oh, no.

  Now he feels the claws in his fingers.

  He feels the snarls in his throat.

  He smells the meat.

  The walls, coated with blood, look like the entrance to some red forest full of red birds, their red, red feathers flying.

  “Yes!” he shouts at the walls, and he thinks he will yell about how he feels so fucking good—at the top of his lungs—but all that comes up from his throat is a shriek that might be the howling of a wolf.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Summer Days and Nights

  1

  “Why the face?’ Than Campusky’s mother asked him. Gretel Campusky was overweight, but not uncomfortable-looking, with her hair up in pink foam curlers for the night, and her green sateen robe wrapped tight around her breasts and thighs. He looked down at her—he was now, at five-foot-three, taller than his mother. She seemed to be the only person shorter in all of Palmetto. He mumbled something about a glass of water.

  “I figured you were up for water, Thaniel, but why the face?”

  “I’m tired. Can’t seem to sleep.”

  “Poor baby,” his mother said in mock sympathy, and padded on down the hallway. It was nearly three A.M., and the baby would be crying for milk soon. He watched his mother turn left, back toward her bedroom. The baby started crying, and the coyotes began yipping out on the mesa.

  He went and poured some water, went and peed, and passed his mother again in the hallway. She had the baby up to her breast, but had covered it well with the robe. “So why don’t you tell me why you can’t sleep?”

  “Oh,” he sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t feel so great about things.”

  “You did fine in school last year. You do your chores. You have your friends. That’s life.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “Is it something about a girl?”

  “What?”

  “I have raised three teenaged boys before you, Thaniel, and I know what boys your age think about. Girls, girls, and more girls.”

  “It’s not about girls. It’s about me. I’m fat and I’m ugly. I hate myself.”

  “So when did this delightful mood come over you?”

  “I don’t know. I went around with Peter all day. And there’s this girl who’s sort of pretty, and she only looked at him. Girls never look at me. I don’t blame them, either. Peter’s gonna have a girlfriend soon, and I’ll be friendless forever. I’ll go live in some dark cave and eat bats and grow old alone and die and nobody will care.”

  “Let me play the world’s smallest violin and weep while you tell me your sad and pathetic fate.” His mother shook her head. “Well, you have an overactive imagination, Thaniel, and a lazy-butt brain. You’re not fat, you’re just growing. And you can’t be ugly. All my children are beautiful and smart, a genius each and every one.”

  “Yeah, Mom. Sure.”

  “And another thing, if you lose a friend because he got a girlfriend, you didn’t have a friend to begin with. You read me?”

  “Goodnight, Ma.”

  “Nighty,” she said, holding the baby close.

  He went back to the room he shared with two of his brothers, and climbed into the bottom bunk. His small bedside lamp was still switched on. His brother Greg, who had the top bonk, was snoring away; Les, in the bed across the room, was silent. Than opened up one of his MAD magazines, and munched on some graham crackers, wondering if he was going to get any sleep at all.

  2

  Than had left the light on, so, half-asleep, he reached up and switched it off.

  He glanced at the window because he’d caught some movement out of the corner of his eye.

  Whenever there was any shaking at all, earthquake or no, he always wondered if this were the Big One about to send California out to Hawaii. Would the upper bunk with Fat-Ass Greg sleeping in it protect him from being buried alive beneath the rubble, or would it smother him right away like the way the bed in the horror movie Thirteen Ghosts came down on Martin Milner in the end? Than had watched so many horror movies in his life, including Earthquake, that he looked upon very ordinary objects as potential instruments of death. His biggest fear in the event of the Big One was never instant death from the walls falling on him. It was living burial that bothered him. Having to claw at the unyielding walls of some makeshift tomb. Or starving to death and hearing people outside trying to rescue him, but knowing the situation was hopeless. If this is the Big One, he thought while the window rattled, will I be buried with Greg and Les, and will we end up drawing straws to see who eats who? Will Greg’s porky arm taste good, or will it taste as bad as he looks? Will I have to eat my toes one by one, like Vienna sausages?

  He thought this fear out extensively. He mapped it in his imagination, and as irrational and unlikely as it seemed, Than held the theory that human beings could only fear what was inevitable—that if the thought arrived in his brain it was only because it was bound to happen sooner or later.

  So, as he awoke, he sat upright. Then he felt paralyzed with the kind of fear one can only feel in the dark, at four A.M., before eyes can adjust to the darkness.

  He watched the rattling windowpane.

  A face burst across it just as if someone had shoved it against the glass.

  But the window didn’t shatter.

  Than felt his heart freeze.

  The glass began to mold itself around the shape of the face, stretching toward Than’s bed.

  Only a dream. Than was sure now.

  Than couldn’t find his tongue anywhere in his mouth; his blood became a frozen river; his heart no longer pumped.

  The man’s white hair flew long and wild behind his high forehead. His skin was darkened with dirt and scum. He looked as if he’d just crawled out of the earth. Small silver fishhooks pinned his eyelids back against his brow. Where his nose should’ve been was a gaping hole, a running sore beside it. The man grinned, for it could not be helped—his lips were peeled back with more tiny hooks. His entire face was studded with hooks connected to thin nylon lines that tugged at him, trying to hold him back in the darkness on the other side of the window. The man’s clenched teeth flew open, his lower jaw dislocating, dropping into the back of his throat, lodging farther down near his Adam’s apple. The man was trying to scream, the same way that Than was trying to scream: Than’s mouth opened wide, but nothing came out.

  He had no breath.

  Oh my God help me scream, you idiot, I can smell his breath, he smells…dead.

  The man behind the molten glass struggled to break through it, but like strands of a spider web, the more he pushed and pressed to break free, the more the glass clung to him. Then the nylon threads that held him became taut—something was pulling him. The hooks in his face tugged at the doughy skin, his scalp stretched backward. Still, the man pushed outward with his hand, pleading for Than to grasp it and pull him through. His fingernails were long and curled, and carved through the liquid glass.

  The glass shattered around his hand, shards of glass slicing into his wrist, digging down.

  Sawing.

  The hand was cut clean from the wrist.

  The wriggling hand flew toward Than just as whatever mad puppeteer controlling this phantom pulled hard on the fishing lines. The face, the body, the arms were gone, drawn back into the deep waters of night.

  As if it had only been a few seconds, Than reached for the bedside lamp and turned it on.

  The window was still. Unbroken.

  I was dreaming.

  No glass, no hand, no face out in the night. His brother Greg was snoring in the upper bunk, smelly feet hanging over the end; Les was in his bed, too, swaddled in sheets, lying on his stomach.

  Even though Than Campusky knew it was only a dream, he woke both of his brothers up a good two hours before they had to get out of bed, just so he wouldn’t be the only one watching the window at four thirty in the morning.

  He remembered Bonyf
ace’s words only after he’d calmed down.

  “It’s powerful, boyz, you get near it, it’s like fire, gives off heat, burns into your brains, into your dreams.”

  Than Campusky was a young man who believed in such things.

  3

  Alison Hunt woke up at six, just before her alarm was about to go off. She set the alarm, even in summer, because she wanted to try and remember her dreams. She had even bought a notebook just for the purpose of remembering dreams. She had read an entire book, Freud’s Dream Analysis, both because she wanted to maybe be a psychologist one day (or a veterinarian), and because she would try just about anything to inducing dreaming. She awoke staring at the ceiling, trying to put together the puzzle of whatever she’d just been dreaming.

  She wrote in her diary: “Parents are shadows. My mother is heavily involved in the chili cook-off celebration for Grubstake Days, and she keeps telling me that I should starve myself so that a nice boy will want me after my shame with Charlie U. Lighter notes. Peter C. said he’d call. Didn’t. Don’t know why high school boys think it’s their right to just do what they want and expect us to go along with it. I think, if he does end up calling, I’ll punish him by not being available for a few days. I hate Charlie, too, so maybe I should just apply that hatred to all men. I hate Charlie. Hate him. What he made me do. What I made myself do.”

  4

  Alison had kept a diary since she was eleven, although until this past year, her life had been recorded with such scrawls as: “Hate Rita Saunders. Had my first period, yuck.” Then, at thirteen, she’d begun writing as if she Harriet the Spy crossed with Nancy Drew, discovering the secrets of the human heart by eavesdropping on friends. Her diary had grown to several volumes, and she found that it became her obsession at times. The previous spring, she’d written twenty times:

  “I’M IN LOVE WITH CHARLIE URQUART.”

  Then, in September, all she wrote was: “oh shit.”

  She chronicled their breakup in excruciating detail, but there was the only major event that she could not bring herself to record in her diary, but she knew she didn’t have to, because it would be remembered until the day she died.

  The abortion.

  Charlie’s and hers.

  How did I ever let that happen? She had asked herself the same question a thousand times. She had no real answer, nothing that worked for her. The only thing she knew was she had to get away from home, and Charlie had done that trick for her while they were dating—she’d never been home.

  At least Charlie said he loved me, even if he doesn’t know what it really means to love someone.

  In her diary, she wrote:

  “Peter Chandler is asking me out to the movies. He says he’s going to, but I know boys. We’ll have to see about this. He seems okay. I don’t know. Who needs a boyfriend anyway? He’s nicer than Charlie, but once he gets to know me, he’ll probably dump me. Once Charlie has told all the stories about me he wants to, making me out to be a slut, then nobody’s going to want me.

  “Then I’ll never get out of this house.”

  5

  Time passed—that’s the best one can say about summer on the high desert. It passes slow, it passes hot, and sometime accidents happen. Teenagers went to their summer jobs at the stands and stores, while their parents planned trips or planned new air conditioners; a few people paid the exorbitant price for Betamaxes and VHS players so they could watch movies at home, only they had to drive all the way to Palm Springs for the nearest video store; some still went to the drive-in in Yucca Valley; others managed to forget that they lived on the desert and stayed inside most days and just watched network television, as cable TV was only for the big cities and had not yet snaked into Palmetto. A kid named Rory Wallace fell down one of the old mines out in No Man’s Land, but only broke his arm; when the fire marshal from over in Yucca brought him out of the hole, he laughed and told Rory’s mom that the kid was unbreakable; Alison Hunt, in her souped-up T-Bird almost got in a wreck with Ernie Alvarado, Pepe’s cousin, out on the highway, but she managed to bring her car off-road and avoid a collision; the Nevilles, a fairly new family to Palmetto who had moved to a small three-bedroom with a big three-baby family just after Peter’s family had moved to the area, began alienating their neighbors left and right because they wanted to put up a nine-foot-tall fence all around their property. Than began staying away from people, for his nightmares seemed too real, and Peter no longer hung out with him mid-week; Ginny and Boz Wimberger began a lawsuit with the County Water Authority over problems of pipes and lack of good drinking water on their property, but they knew they wouldn’t win; Pepe Alvarado decided there’d be no more pit bull fights for a good three weeks until the cops laid off him; Than sought out Bonyface to ask him questions about his dreams; people went to work just like anywhere else, some in town, and some far away, and some stayed home and collected disability and unemployment; neighbors began asking Charlie Urquart about his father’s trip, for Charlie had already begun a story that his dad and mom had flown off one night on a second honeymoon and would not be back until after the Fourth; the Daughters of the Western Star were all at home most nights working on their chili recipes because this year’s Grubstake Days—a desert variation on Founder’s Day—would no doubt be the toughest competition of all; the Grubman shot a coyote up in the Bills because he claimed some of them had been eating one too many cats lately; part of Highway 4 grew a big crack or two just as it always did over the course of the years, and yes, people like Vince Davis and Chase McQuail complained to no end about how the county needed to spend a little tax money on road repairs even if Palmetto was not as valued as Yucca Valley, and probably if Gib Urquart had not taken off on his impromptu vacation, he’d have gotten some road workers out there even if the temperature had risen above one hundred degrees; and then that pit bull, Laramie, felt the stirrings within her, and her master, Sloan, wanted to ask somebody if it was usual for a bitch to give birth just a week or two after being pregnant, but he was drowning in the cheapest whiskey he could find and pissed off because Wendy still hadn’t told him where she went at night, and something about her had changed, and he didn’t really have the balls to find out exactly what went on with her or with the damn dog; and then, something happened that became legendary for a good day or two in the boredom of summer heat, and it woke everyone up for a moment from their dreams of reality.

  A truck crashed at the Rattlesnake Wash.

  But there was more to it than that.

  6

  His name was Orson Ledbetter and he drove trucks for the Sunny Mountain Springs Company. He was not meant for Palmetto or Nitro, but in those days, you could cut across the mountains a little faster by going through Highway 4, particularly if you’d had a few beers at the Coyote Cantina in the late afternoon and maybe if you had a girl up there that your wife didn’t know about, a girl of thirty-three who lived at the trailers and still believed that married men left their wives when it felt like true love—but then, in her thirties, she still believed that she was a girl as new to love as any sixteen year old. Orson had two hours to get back down the hills and out to San Bernardino, and after a quickie and those brewskies, he wasn’t quite sure if he’d arrive in time to get water that amounted to the same thing as what came out of the tap to all those impatient and thirsty people in the valley. So he might’ve just hit his accelerator a little too hard, or he might’ve just lost control of the wheel when he hit one of the newer bulging cracks on the highway.

  That’s what they said later, mainly because Orson didn’t survive.

  What Orson knew in that millisecond before he also knew that he might not survive the crash was that something nightmarish had touched him.

  What he didn’t know was how it had gotten onto the hood of his truck.

  It didn’t quite look like a dog, and it didn’t quite look like a man, and it didn’t quite look like anything that he’d ever seen before, but when the second one burst through his open window, and
he saw what he knew to be a demon from Hell, but with a face very much like a face that had only recently been in the news—

  But he couldn’t quite remember the news story or why he knew that face—

  He screamed, and then swerved the truck. Before he knew it, the world burst with fire all around him.

  Orson Ledbetter didn’t die just yet, but hung upside down while a fire spread from his truck and covered all he saw, including the two animals that might’ve just been large puppies, and their human faces screamed, echoing his own, as they burned, too.

  The fire flashed, and Orson was no more.

  7

  It was a big to-do out at the Wash, what with a truck on fire.

  Everyone turned out to see it, and the fire trucks came over from Yucca Valley to make sure it was contained.

  This event brought the Beekeeper out of the Garden of Eden in full white uniform, netting over her face as she stood at her gate watching. Peter was there with Alison, and Wendy Swan, too, standing by herself, away from the crowd, with the late afternoon sun casting copper across her features. Charlie sat on the hood of his father’s Mustang, and his friends kept their distance from him.

  But the accident was forgotten in days.

  The heat picked up, and July was merciless as it arrived.

  Peter began to forget about friends, and even stopped calling Alison. Something had happened, that’s what Than thought, but Peter wasn’t talking.

  And no one asked Bonyface his opinion about any of this, although if they had, he would’ve told them the time of demons was upon them.