Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Peter, on tape, had said, “It’s a turning, don’t you get it? It’s not like he was himself one minute and the next minute this monster, it was like he turned, like it was not something from the outside, but from inside, like he was shedding skin, just like that, shedding skin, and he turned. But I knew it was him. It was him all along. Only turned. I know it’s crazy-sounding. He became what he really was, on the inside. Maybe just the bad part of him. Maybe there was a good part, too. But it was the bad that came to the surface. And the Awful Thing. Turning, not like what you said, but like when milk turns, or when a dog turns. It’s still the dog, right? It’s still the dog? Only, if the dog turns, you got to shoot it anyway, even though it’s still the dog...”

  From studies of a tribe in the rain forest, Diego had come across a concept different from the European idea of metamorphosis, of something changing into something else. This other version of change, what Peter called turning, was more closely akin to manifestation, the Bringing Forth—an infestation within the skin, rising to the surface. And it was what Diego had been up all night with, trying to figure out, trying to put together, listening to the tapes of the two boys, what was infesting them. And the girl, she’d had it worse than the boys, she was (it was then rumored) not going to make it, and her grandmother was of a religious conviction that precluded medical attention for the girl. The grandmother, as Diego remembered from repeated phone calls to her house in San Francisco in the spring of 1981, was a religious fundamentalist who believed her grandchild was a sinner of the darkest sort and in need of multiple baptisms to restore her soul to the Godly path. Alison had gone through hell back then. But now, he knew...

  He’d been wrong.

  Why did I not see? The fever, the trances, the words, he’d been bringing it to the surface himself, he was helping to bring it forth. I am the instrument of her turning. Peter was right to try and protect her from it.

  The demon needed fertility...

  Teenaged boys and a girl. A demon who wanted to become more than its own monstrosity. A demon who was held at bay. A nest on the high desert: a town called Palmetto. Boys just reaching adolescence, just coming into their sexual beings; and Alison, a girl who was both beautiful and pregnant.

  That was the sin her grandmother had been upset about. That was what these boys had hidden all these years.

  But she was not pregnant with an ordinary child.

  Whatever it was that had gotten into her was within her. A piece of it.

  Like a time bomb.

  In the flesh.

  9

  After Alison left her apartment, she drove south on the freeway and was almost to work, when she decided to take a sick day. She pulled over at a twenty-four-hour Mini-Mart and called in to the animal hospital. She felt the smallest ache in her head, but when she had some coffee (her fourth cup of the morning) it apparently vanished. A cute man in his early twenties was pumping gas and asked her directions, but she could tell he wasn’t really lost, only pretending to be so he could flirt. The coffee was good—in fact, it seemed like the best cup of coffee she’d ever had. Perhaps she was feeling better, after all. It had felt good to finally admit to Peter that she’d been seeing Diego. She slipped more change in the phone and dialed his office.

  “Dr. Correa? Diego?”

  “Reception,” the woman on the other end said. “Dr. Correa stepped out for just a minute. Would you like to leave a message?”

  Alison thought for a moment, then said, “I’m just returning his call. My name is Alison Chandler. Tell him...tell him I’ll call him back in a bit.”

  She glanced over at the young man who had flirted with her. He was getting into his car.

  The car itself made her shiver.

  10

  Peter went driving, and found himself by the park again, where he’d first seen the girl that looked like Wendy. He drove past the Sacrament of the Sacred Heart Church and turned the corner to see the bungalow, but it had been badly burned, and most of the first floor was gone. He could not even imagine, in the abstract, a house fitting down that small alley; the burnt hull seemed more real than the bungalow had been. An old man sat on his stoop nearby and called out to Peter, “It was a sight, I’ll tell you, a regular sight!” Peter parked the car, and got out. He walked over to the old-timer. The old man was wrinkled and small, and his face could not have contained smaller eyes or a more surly-looking mouth. “When did it burn?” Peter asked.

  “That place is always on fire. Might as well be Hell’s gate. Burned again last night, my friend, Halloween, buncha kids set fire to what was left of it. Somebody or other been tryin’ to burn that old place down for years and years, I’ll tell you, yes. Beautiful sight, fire like that almost went all the way up, I say almost, to the top of that palm tree. Big fire, but that place was ripe to burn, yes, I’ll tell you, yes, ripe to burn for a long time.”

  “I hope nobody was hurt.”

  The old man looked odd, like he didn’t know if he should tell anybody this part. “Well, I’ll tell you.” His voice became quieter. “Yes, didn’t nobody come outta there. Girls and boys just hollerin’ and whoopin’. You’da think they coulda jumped out with all the windows just off, but didn’t none of them, yes, not a one. Strange thing, that young folks’d burn than breathe. But”—and the old guy chuckled and wheezed—“I s’pose it’s a close call sometimes with some folks, a damn close call. Some a them’s better off.”

  11

  Alison surveyed the traffic. Normally, in non-rush hour it might only take her twenty minutes maximum to drive to Diego’s office, but there was some accident on the freeway, so it would be at least an hour.

  The freeway was packed and moving slowly, and her headache had begun pounding. Spasms of pain jabbed her in the groin, along her thighs, at the back of her ribs; she checked the mirror because her eyes hurt and she wondered if something was the matter with her contact lens. Killer headache. Her Honda sputtered and clunked along up the hillside, and she felt a pressure on her bladder and wondered which exit she could turn off at and find a rest room. The cars moved slowly, like a funeral procession. She was at the end of her rope; she wanted to scream at every single driver.

  At the Mini-Mart, with the man flirting with her, she’d remembered something, and had hit the wall again. It was the young man’s car: a Thunderbird, completely rundown, rusted out, but it brought back the sliver of a memory to her: she saw it parked on a desolate and empty road in the pre-dawn hours, packed with people, sitting upright, sitting still.

  Dead.

  A Thunderbird full of dead bodies.

  And then the car had begun moving.

  Driven by a woman who could not possibly have been turning the steering wheel.

  Bloodstain of a woman on a high yellow wall.

  But this time, when Alison smacked against the wall, she’d chipped at it, just a mote of light shooting from it. She looked through the small opening to the other side, and the Thunderbird was there, its cargo of the dead, its driver trying to grin even while the skin fell from her face. The driver backed the car up in the dirt and then, in drive, floored it for the wall, heading right to where Alison peered through.

  When the car hit the wall, it shattered into darkness.

  Alison’s head was bashing within itself full-throttle, like a tidal wave of blood crashing against her skull. Her nose dribbled with blood, and she even felt a sudden release of blood from between her legs. What the hell is my body doing to me?

  But I remembered it, she said, I remembered it. I broke the wall.

  What she remembered: she sat among the dead bodies of the Thunderbird and heard the whispering voices of the dead, “whatifwhatifwhatifwhatif,” and their reptilian wings beating against her face, and the sound of a dog panting above her in a dark cave.

  On the packed freeway, heading into the city, Alison glanced up in the rearview mirror to see if her nose had stopped bleeding. It hadn’t, but that’s not what made her almost smash into the car in front of her
,

  It was her eyes.

  She was shedding tears.

  Tears of blood.

  12

  While Alison, her body wracked with pain, had the sense to pull off the freeway and turn around to drive home and take the sick day in bed and just maybe finally call a doctor or get Peter to take her to an emergency room, her husband had found the office of Diego Correa.

  Diego had just returned from the bathroom down the hall when the new secretary said, “A man barged in here. Should I call security?”

  Diego went inside his office and recognized Peter immediately. “Mr. Chandler,” he said. “It’s been many years, but you don’t look substantially different. I’m glad you came by.”

  Peter was sitting at his desk, with the tape machine playing.

  The voice of the past on the tape said, “I didn’t say demon, I said it was someone who thought he was possessed.”

  Peter leaned back in the chair. “What is it you want?”

  The voice on tape said, “Do you believe in demons, Peter?”

  Diego walked over to his window and raised the blinds. The sun washed over the silver and gray landscape beyond. “I’ve been up all night, Peter. Your wife is in serious danger. I’m afraid I aided it, too.”

  The man’s voice on the tape repeated, “Do you believe in demons?”

  The boy’s voice on the tape said, “No.”

  “But you do believe,” Diego said. “You lied to me then, didn’t you?”

  Peter didn’t respond.

  “You lied to protect her.”

  Peter said nothing.

  The voice on the tape said, “Do you believe in the supernatural, Peter?”

  On tape, the boy said nothing.

  Peter, at the desk, shut the tape off. “I want you to leave her alone. That’s all.”

  “What was it that happened to her, Peter? The year after Palmetto. Something about her body; the breakdown of language and memory. It wasn’t just witnessing the murders, was it? It was something else.”

  “If I tell you, will you get out of our lives?”

  Diego turned away from the window. “Before I make any promises, did you know about her fevers? How severe they are? She’s lied to me about seeing doctors—I can tell. She’s not a very good liar. Why is she so scared of doctors? What is it about her body that she is so terrified of? Because it’s her life you need to protect, Peter, not her fears. If the fevers go any higher she could suffer brain damage. Is that how you want to protect her, by letting her go mad or killing every chance she has for a happy life?”

  Peter was silent. Diego could hear the ticking of the clock down the hall.

  Finally, Peter said, “If I tell you, you have to swear that you will not use it for a book or hurt her with it in any way. You will have to swear that if you stick your nose into this that you won’t go on some stupid talk show and yap about it just to hawk books.”

  “I am past doing that. I won’t hurt her, I promise. I swear.”

  “No,” Peter said, “I can’t—can’t trust you. She’d be dead if...”

  “I won’t hurt her,” Diego reaffirmed, “but it’s already begun.”

  Peter glanced up at him.

  “She’s turning, Peter, turning fast. The body inside her is rejecting her body. It’s like cancer, isn’t it? It takes over cell by cell. You’ve got it, too, don’t you? Peter, I do believe in demons, I do believe in what you told me when you were sixteen. I have driven up to that town on my own several times, and I saw what was left of it. Whatever force could do that to a town, do you think you could stop it by pretending it never happened? You , Alison and the other boy, Charlie, were all immune to it to some extent, weren’t you? You know why you’re here and the rest of that town is gone, don’t you?”

  “I thought this wouldn’t happen. It was supposed to stop it, what we did.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The awful thing,” Peter whispered. He sounded like a little boy. As if beneath his skin, there lurked that teenager, only so scared, he might as well have been four years old.

  “What was the awful thing?”

  Peter looked him in the eyes. “Than had told us about it. About what would happen if we didn’t. How it would keep going, and not just in Palmetto, but everywhere. Old Bonyface, he knew about demons, and the job wasn’t done until we took the Awful Thing from her.”

  “What was it?” Diego asked. “What did you do that was so terrible?”

  Peter bit the edge of his lower lip. He mumbled something.

  “You what?” Diego asked, leaning forward.

  13

  Alison had to sit in her car for half an hour on the off-ramp of the Ventura Freeway before she had worked up the strength to drive the surface streets the rest of the way home. She was alternately freezing and boiling up, and she was too scared to look in the rearview mirror again to see if her eyes had stopped bleeding. Her hands slid along the steering wheel with the sweat just pouring out of her skin. Finally, she parked alongside her apartment complex and, using what little strength she had, managed to get from the car and to her apartment without falling down. Her stomach hurt terribly, and her menstrual flow had not stopped. God, just let me die. She dropped her keys three times before finally holding them steady enough to unlock the door. She didn’t even have the energy to call out for Peter, although, in her out-of-focus vision, she thought he was standing there in the living room waiting for her. He was dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, which would’ve struck her as odd if she didn’t have the jabbing pains and the crunching headache. She was too dizzy—she needed to get to a chair quickly or she’d fall, she was sure, she’d faint, it was that bad—

  Peter approached her; she realized it wasn’t Peter at all, but someone else from beyond her wall, and the man in the sweatshirt said, “Where is it?” while she fell to the floor. She saw his face and tried to scream as loud as she could, but nothing came from her throat.

  PART FIVE

  WAKING DREAMS IN NEW YORK CITY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Deadrats

  1

  Dirty, filthy, said the thing with the red eyes, lurking there in the dark corner. Still here, my friend, still waiting, and I can wait a long, long time to be let out. And you will let me out, my boy, you will let me out because you’ve been very bad and you need to take your medicine. Look, look where I’ve gnawed a hole in your heart, in your brain, like cheese, just, nibble, nibble, nibble. Just us rats, you and me, just us rats.

  It was a dream, but it wasn’t, and the man who should’ve been sleeping had his eyes wide open.

  His name was Charlie Urquart.

  2

  “Just look at him,” Paula whispered as if the man lying on the mattress on the other side of the two-way mirror could hear her. There were wires running all along his hands and face and chest, but she was not even watching the EEG. Nothing to watch. What fascinated her were his eyes: open and staring blankly. He might’ve been dead. No alpha or beta activity, no nothing. She hadn’t believed it when she’d seen it before, and she still could not comprehend what it might mean. Not just to science or to mankind, but to her.

  Her associate, Megan Richmond, chuckled. “Every time I do look at him, I think of how big that grant’s getting.”

  “No jokes, come on, but have you ever seen this before? It defies everything I was ever taught in graduate school. It’s practically living proof of the Jett-Gerrish Hypothesis—and everybody thought that was off the wall.” Paula tried to keep the excitement out of her voice: she was twenty-six and didn’t figure on completing her graduate studies in sleep research for a few more years. This would be just the boost she needed. The Jett-Gerrish Hypothesis had been considered science fiction, or, at best, an imaginative outgrowth of the field of parapsychology. Jett-Gerrish had studied an entire group of survivors from the death camps of Germany who had apparently stopped sleeping for all intents and purposes for four years, but whose hallucinations took them
back into the camp even when they were free—so that they had never really escaped, at least not in their minds. Seven of the group committed suicide, and the rest gradually regained their abilities to sleep and dream normally. But Jett-Gerrish hypothesized that, given certain traumas from the past, a human being will go beyond waking life and live as if in a dream, with no need to use sleep as a bridge to get to that dream. It was a survival mechanism.

  But this one, this man.

  He was a one in a trillion find. Even if he couldn’t prove Jett-Gerrish, that hypothesis might be a jumping-off point into whole new areas of dream and sleep studies.

  She kept her face taut, professional, no goofy grin that longed to emerge. More than anything in the world, she wanted the money and the time for research on her own terms.

  This man lying on the table was going to give that to her without even being aware of it. “He doesn’t know it,” Paula said, “but he’s going to make history.”

  “Is that what you see in him?” Megan asked.

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Ph.D. awarded to the Nobel Prize winner Paula Quinn?”

  “Cheap shot,” Paula said, but it was partially true. How often would a graduate student come across this kind of case? She could’ve gone her whole life without coming across an individual who defied every rule in the book. It had been what Paula called her “spy network” that had helped her find this man. A friend from her undergrad years at Fordham, Griff Hornaby, had called her directly from court to tell her about this pro bono case that she might find interesting. The guy had assaulted and old man on the street, but had been in some kind of a psychotic seizure. The old man dropped the charges soon enough, and Paula had come across the most unique case of sleep deprivation she had ever encountered. She knew from that first meeting that this was her way of getting beyond years of dues-paying to the academic establishment. She would, at best, begin a career of fascinating research, and at worst, get a book out of the experience.