Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  5

  She awoke an hour or two later. He watched her. He had intense blue eyes that both disturbed her and entranced her. He was beautiful and ugly at the same time, and for a moment she felt like he was enchanted, the way the Beast was in Beauty and the Beast. He was enchanted and cursed and wild...

  She was about to say something, but realized by the way his eyes moved that he was experiencing a waking dream. Damn and double damn, why didn’t I bring my tape recorder? His face had gone chalk-white, his eyes twitching rapidly. He rose up and stood over her, his hands in tight fists. Drool spattered across her face—it dribbled on her neck. She wiped it away.

  “Where are you, Charlie?” she asked. “What are you seeing?” Maybe I can get to my purse, I’ve got my notebook there; I can jot some of what he says down and then sit down with him later for more recall. She sat up, slipping her legs to the floor.

  He pushed her back onto the bed.

  “You bitch,” Charlie Urquart growled. “What do you want from me?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  That’s One

  1

  Charlie awoke suddenly, and found that he was behind the steering wheel of his cab. He slapped himself awake, and then downed a Coke to make sure he wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel again any time soon. It was four A.M., and he was driving on the Upper West Side without stopping for fares. Without destination. He just needed to clear his head. The early morning was good for that, not much traffic, at least down side streets, half the city was a graveyard of enormous buildings, hissing wind, the occasional hooker, and other cabs; streetlights so white they washed out the colors of the markets and apartments and bars they guarded. He would avoid the Village, which was the convenience store of town, open all night; he would drive around the park, through the park, enjoying the silent darkness, the sound of his wheels on the road, his engine muttering to itself, the voices of invisible drivers on the radio.

  He remembered Paula.

  Did I kill her?

  The thought of Paula, lying there on his bed. He winced, flashes of the night coming back to him. Why had he done it? What had possessed him? Why had she toyed with him like that? Hadn’t enough already happened? Wasn’t his torture complete?

  He patted the cigar box that doubled as his spare-change carrier. The sound of coins tinkling against metal comforted him. The best defense is a good offense, he thought, remembering a cheer from his high school football days.

  The dream had begun without too many bumps, even with Paula lying right there. Just like a damp skin spread out to dry over the world: his bedroom, the pictures on the wall, the lovely woman in his bed.

  All right, he had thought, I’m going to sit back and enjoy this. Got my trusty sleep researcher with me, got my human walls watching over us both, got the entire city of New York just a scream away—canyons made of concrete. Nothing’s going to get to me, nothing’s going to be too bizarre.

  He thought, stupidly and superstitiously, he could keep Wendy away from his dreams if he brought the dreams out into the open, if he made them known so he wouldn’t just sit and go crazy inside his own head. It was just something in his brain replaying pictures, spiced up with a few dreams of his own. It was like television. Just pictures. He hadn’t told Paula about the dreams that dealt exclusively with Wendy; he wasn’t able to, as if he didn’t know the right language for it. So he’d told Paula that on those days he had no waking dreams whatsoever.

  The clear blue eyes of a born liar, just like people used to say.

  When Wendy came to him, she was as beautiful as he remembered, and as tempting. She came in a dry wind, her hair blown back away from her forehead, her eyes intelligent and bright, her shoulders slung back in such a way that meant confidence, her chin thrust forward, her mouth set in a half-smile—she knew that she would get what she wanted.

  And each time Wendy came to him, he wanted her badly; he wanted to recapture something from his adolescence, a feeling of belonging, a connection with something big, as if—with her—he had been plugged into the wiring of eternity. He’d been running on low voltage ever since.

  He’d watched Paula fall asleep—so tenderly, with her hands cupped as if in prayer beside her cheek, her adult personality exhaled with each sleepy breath, and left behind was this little girl, innocent to the darker side of existence. She studied sleep patterns and dreams as if there were a cure for things like this, as if there were some chemical or some therapy that could reach inside him and kill the waking dreams and let him sleep normally again. To live in such a blissful state and to not see this skin stretching across the room, to not see an apartment full of papers and books and bottles and pictures suddenly peel back, and another landscape poking through: a country of yellow skies and brown hills. And she was there, she was laughing at him, she was telling him what she was going to do with these women with whom he slept.

  “Just bones inside a sack of shin, we will tear them, you and I, we will draw those bones out through their cunts.” Wendy sat there, near him. He tried to see through her, through the curtain she’d drawn over his apartment. But he could not. She sat there covered with crawling red ants, she was beautiful and she was terrifying, and the ants crawled inside her mouth when she laughed.

  “What do you want from me?”

  But before she could answer him, he pushed her backward so that she almost fell (and still she was laughing as fire ants poured from her mouth and nostrils), and then he hit her.

  As he hit her, she screamed, but her mouth was laughing at him, and he looked at his arm when he felt a stinging pain there: several fire ants had leapt onto him and the back of his hand was burning.

  “What are you doing to me?”

  “Charlie?” Wendy asked, but her mouth was laughing as the red ants began digging into her neck along the ring of small scars she had.

  “Charlie?”

  Wendy was laughing even as her head began to open up, tearing skin in that ring around her neck where the ants were busily working, prying up bits of flesh in their elongated mandibles, and as Wendy’s head fell completely backward, clinging to her body by a thin bridge of skin and several dozen red ants, something began emerging from the blood-gurgling stump of her neck.

  “Charlie?”

  “Paula?” he asked, and the animal’s head was emerging from inside Wendy’s neck. It had a long, square snout, its lips curled back in a snarl, its eyes milky red.

  Something behind it.

  “Charlie?”

  Charlie Urquart thought he saw Paula Quinn holding her hands up to defend herself from him, but he wasn’t sure it was her (where does the dream end?) and he had to make sure the thing that was slithering up from Wendy Swan’s innards was not what he thought it was going to be so he grabbed the headless corpse, ants and all, and began shaking it. When it started screaming he threw the woman’s body hard against the yellow sky and it struck against the Virgin Mary, who protected her baby from the blow. The baby she held in her hands began growling, and the Virgin Mary undid her robe and offered her five breasts so that her little one could nurse, and somewhere behind the Madonna, Paula Quinn lay very still.

  Charlie Urquart had been about to break through the waking dream; about to come back to his senses, back to his apartment; about to make sure he didn’t harm Paula the way he’d hurt the old man at Thirty-third and Third.

  And when Charlie called out to Paula through his dream, what came out of his mouth was halfway between a word and a howl.

  2

  Did I kill her? Charlie wondered as he pulled his cab over to the curb near Columbus Circle.

  The air outside was cold and biting. Two young people passed in front of the cab, clinging to each other, their faces bright and happy—they’d been to a party, or they were newly in love, or they were on their ways to meet friends. Charlie listened to the static on his radio, and the faraway-sounding voices of other drivers getting their assignments. His car smelled like a musty closet He lit a cigarette using t
he car lighter, watching its circular orange glow, remembering his father’s use for the car lighter (“That’s three”) and the subsequent burns on his arm above the elbow. “That’ll teach you to keep from resetting my radio,” his father said, his face a map of tiny, red blood vessels, his eyes blue like Charlie’s own, his mouth curled slightly in that eternal what have I done to deserve a kid like this look. And that long-suffering tone of voice, as if a father had to teach his son lessons like this one—as the car lighter engraved a circle in his flesh—if the son was ever going to amount to anything, Yeah, Pop, I’ve gone far in life, now I’m beating up on people. Charlie tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he sucked on the cigarette, enjoying the hot, tickling feeling of the smoke as it went down the back of his throat to his lungs. He thought of opening up the cigar box that lay on the seat beside him: it was his place for keeping valuables while he drove; there was never money in there for anyone to bother stealing.

  And if worse ever comes to worst...

  Why the hell does my mind always return to Wendy Swan?

  Then the dream came, like an extra set of eyelids coming down, and she was there.

  Wendy.

  Her body was clothed in skins.

  Human skins?

  Wrapped tight like a straitjacket at her shoulders, across her waist, barely covering her upper thighs; the skin of human hands hung down like tassels along her pubic area; faces torn off their skulls leered from her breasts. In her clenched fists she held writhing rattlesnakes, twisting backward to bite themselves.

  Her beauty was cruel and unforgiving.

  Then, as he gazed at the skins she wore, studying their patterns, he began discerning the images they held as if they were tattoos, and the images became the former possessors of the skins. Her body was drawn with their faces screaming, faces of people he knew, faces of all those sent to Hell by her.

  And there, along her ribs, was his face: Charlie Urquart at sixteen, young and handsome, like a young stallion before the race had begun. Charlie Urquart, his blue eyes bright, his jaws stretched so far apart they looked as if they would split through the skin.

  Screaming louder than the rest, the voice higher and more youthful than he remembered.

  And then Charlie moved toward her, as they all cried out in pain and remorse for what they had done, for the sin they had committed.

  Charlie’s teenaged image shouted obscenities at him, rattlesnakes struck at his arms as he reached up and began strangling her; he felt the deep punctures from the snakes; the faces she wore began biting him as he pressed his body to hers; the faces chewed his flesh; she was screaming too as his hands closed tighter around her neck, but her voice wasn’t what he expected, it was gruffer, deeper, and then her head elongated and shimmered.

  His own body was changing, too, it was all that chewing those faces were doing, and the snake bites, it was changing him, his skin was getting white and tough like leather, his shoulders began to hunch forward (his hands as they closed around her neck became curled and gnarled with a sudden arthritis, as his fingernails grew longer, slicing into her neck), he heard and felt the pain as his spinal cord cracked like a whip.

  The dream ended, and Charlie Urquart was still in New York. In a cab. Stopped at a light.

  But Paula.

  How could he do something like that to her? How could he knowingly let her get that close to him? Of course, Wendy would find a way to destroy him, and this had been it. She had sent his soul to Hell, that he was sure of, and his body and mind were now hers. How did I ever think I could get away from her?

  “You on call or something?”

  Charlie looked in his rearview mirror. An overweight middle-aged man in a business suit was scooting into the backseat. Charlie did a double take. Okay, the guy’s not a mugger. Nobody wearing a suit is gonna do anything other than maybe stab you in the back, as Pop used to say in his more lucid moments.

  “You hear me?” the man asked.

  “Yeah, I heard you. It’s kind of late is all. I didn’t expect a fare this time of night”

  “I need to get to Thirty-third and Third.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Thirty-third and Third, is there a problem?”

  “No.”

  Charlie started his cab up, making a U-tum. “No problem, that just seems to be a popular spot these days.”

  “Your meter running?”

  Charlie flipped the meter on. “Yeah.”

  “I’m glad I found you.”

  “This time of night, like I said, you’re lucky.”

  “No, I mean I’m glad I found you.”

  Charlie didn’t quite understand, and glanced again in the rearview mirror.

  His father sat there. Of course it was his father, the suit was one of his father’s sweat-stained gray suits that no one in their right mind would wear in the desert —except Charles “Gib” Urquart II.

  The head was bashed in, as if with a hammer.

  It was a hammer, Charlie remembered.

  Charlie kept driving.

  “So she can do this without even warning me.”

  “I don’t get you, son.”

  “She can make me dream without my even knowing it. How much of any of this is a dream?”

  “Life,” his father said, pulling a stogie out of his breast pocket, “is but a dream. Charles, would you mind reaching over and punching in the lighter? I need something to set the home fires burning.”

  3

  “Why don’t you pull over so we can talk?”

  “No fucking way, Pop, I’m going to keep driving. If I stop something’s going to happen, and it probably won’t be good.”

  “The years haven’t exactly brought wisdom, have they?”

  “Sure, Pop.” Charlie laughed as soon as he said this. “Christ, I’m talking to a dead man.”

  “Nothing dies, Charles, we’re living in the asshole of eternity, even as we speak. Big wheel just keep on toinin’. I guess you’re never going to punch that lighter in for me.”

  “I learned my lesson on that.”

  “I taught you well. But I think it’s time for one final lesson.”

  “Do dreams kill people?” Then Charlie, in the crazy logic of the moment, thought, Dreams don’t kill people. People kill people. “Maybe it would be more to the point to ask, is this a dream?”

  “Look, why don’t we just get to the point. She’s not going to leave me alone until I’m dead, right?”

  “You never listen.”

  “Pop?”

  “That’s one.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  That’s Two

  1

  “To answer an earlier question, Charles, you did kill her.”

  “Paula?”

  “None other. And rather messily, too. I suppose you weren’t used to your transformation, and rather than the clean kill, which would’ve been more sportsmanlike, you dragged it out for a good ten minutes. Ten minutes is nothing in terms of real time, but when we’re talking eternity...well, it goes on forever. The look in her eyes...” His father began chuckling as if over some minor embarrassment. Charlie did not look back.

  Charlie dropped his right hand from the steering wheel and patted the top of the cigar box, drawing it closer to his hip.

  His father continued jabbering. “A real man would’ve made it a clean kill—that business about popping her breasts as if they were pimples, not really the proper course of action. You should go for the heart first, it’s the kindest way, then they may only have a few seconds to experience it, always the heart, although ripping the throat out is good, too, but as you saw yourself, a woman can hang in there for a while even with a chunk missing from beneath her jaw. I suppose I should’ve taught you more of the manly art of butchering. But I did take you hunting, so I can’t blame myself. I did take you to your grandfather’s in Minnesota those times and showed you how to do it. Always remember: a clean kill is the only way to keep blood off yourself.”

  Cha
rlie looked down at his sweater; at his hands; he glanced at his own face in the mirror. “I don’t have any blood on me. You’re lying. I didn’t kill her.”

  “Oh, Charles, don’t you remember washing up? In that closet you call a shower, you were scrubbing at your skin for ages. You certainly still have a selective memory.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” Charlie repeated uncertainly.

  “That’s two,” his father said from the backseat.

  2

  Charlie Urquart pressed his lips against Paula’s neck, his tongue lapping the soft curve of her throat, pressing down on a vein, feeling her pulse. Sweet, she tasted sweet, and he would’ve continued lapping, faster and faster as if her throat were a bowl of cream, except he was hungry, too.

  He drove his teeth down into her warm skin.

  As he did this, his eyes went up to his walls. The Virgin watched him and blessed turn; the President of the United States nodded his approval, too; beautiful women smoking cigarettes, or wearing expensive furs, or holding up breakfast cereal in their hands, all blew him kisses; men wearing camel’s hair jackets, or Rolexes, or jogging in Nikes, all gave him the high sign. They watched him and murmured among themselves like an audience full of old friends, on hand only for him, for this moment.

  His teeth met with no resistance, sinking into her skin with an embarrassing sucking sound.

  Blood burst into his mouth as if he were eating a ripe tomato, sweet like a ripe cherry tomato bursting inside his mouth.

  He drew back from her, smacking his lips, his stomach growling just as he swallowed. Her eyes gazed up at him, twitching in their sockets.

  He reached down to her breasts.

  His hands were curled into mitts, and from each finger a long, black fingernail protruded. He pawed the air.