Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  10

  The purple hues of dawn were not long in coming. The two old women sat rocking in the twin chairs, chilled to the bone, but yapping away.

  “We’ve been up all night,” Stella said.

  “I feel pretty good. Not great, but pretty good.”

  “It’s just a healing, it’s not as much of a miracle as it seems. I seriously doubt Sister Agnes Joseph would approve of a thief and forger making miracles. I can’t control it. It just happens, between me and whoever needs it. But there’s a price. Always a price. When it’s stronger in me, that means she’s stronger, too. And we’ve both been weak for a long, long time.”

  “I won’t sign my will over to you, Queenie, but whatever’s mine is yours for the asking.”

  “You do believe.”

  “All I know’s the air’s sweeter and cooler than I can remember, and when I let out a big old sigh, it comes out in a whisper and not a growl. I don’t intend to run down to the dang hospital to get some X-ray to tell me I should or should not be suffering such delusions. I say, when the goose lays you a gold one don’t pass it around to your friends to tell you it’s crap, pardon my French.”

  The sky was turning yellow-pink with the approaching sun, the mountains becoming a hazy purple.

  “You must think me an awful woman.”

  “For what you did? Queenie, I think you’re blessed.”

  “Not the healing. That’s not me. I’m the one whose life has been a nightmare since it began.”

  “Maybe that’s the price for a gift like you’ve got. Anyway, it’s what’s going on now that counts, it’s what’s happening day after tomorrow. Hell, I don’t even remember half of what I did last week, and if you were to listen to half the stories in this house you’d think there’s no hope for any of us if you based it on the past. No hope t’all.” Nessie meant it, too, and in spite of Queenie’s awful past, she knew that as long as they were both breathing there was hope.

  “I...don’t think...there is. Hope? How can there be?” said Stella, who kept rocking faster and faster. To tell you that I wanted to cure you is a lie. I don’t care. I don’t care anymore. It is just another addiction of mine that, when the pull is strong enough, I give in to.”

  Nessie shook her head, chuckling. “What kind of adversary are you, then? You’re seventy if you’re a day, you look just strong enough to pick up your fork at suppertime, good God, Queenie, a Santa Ana could send you flying. If this girl of yours sits out the next few years, there’s a good chance you’ll be dust. What kind of vengeance is that? I’ll tell you what kind—the kind that life takes on every last one of us whether we go kicking and screaming or just taking it as it comes. It’s like waiting for the bus. I’ve seen people go from bus stop to bus stop, walking between ‘em as if that’s going to make the bus come any faster, and folks like me just sit at one stop and wait, and some folks curse and others read their paperbacks. But the dang bus is going to come anyway, and if you miss it now you’ll catch it later. So you live your life, and you can be afraid of your daughter or not, but death is going to come pick you up either way. What’s to lose? Real estate? A couple of pairs of shoes and a purse? Ha! Now, slow down that rocking or you’re liable to fly off the porch.”

  Stella stopped rocking. “I told you about my brother’s transformation, his change. She wants me to be alive, Nessie, she wants to let me see her work, her change, her metamorphosis. I saw how the dragon inside her tried to assert itself. I know her. I watched what she can do. I told you I’ve tried to kill myself. For years, in every conceivable way. And it can’t be done. She will not let me die. She wants me for herself.”

  “Well,” Nessie said. “My mother always told me, if you’re afraid of something, best to face it.”

  “I can never...face...that.”

  “Never,” Nessie said, “say never.”

  11

  Queenie Swan slept better that day than she had slept in years, and no dreams troubled her for once. Usually she would take one of her pills to keep the shadows off her bed, to put her out for a good ten hours, but it hadn’t even occurred to her to take a pill as she plopped down on the mattress. She would sleep until seven that evening, and awaken feeling better than she had in over twenty years.

  12

  Nessie Wilcox, however, did not even consider sleep an option. She was all fired up. She felt that she’d gotten some kind of reprieve from the Almighty; it reaffirmed everything she had faith in and had been just about to lose. She took Gretchen for her morning mile walk around nine, stopping along the way to enjoy the fresh autumn air of the desert. To the west were the mountains rising up to meet the sapphire-blue sky, and somewhere in the hills, above Yucca Valley, was the town Queenie had mentioned. Nessie remembered the headlines well, remembered the excitement and fear the entire population of the desert had felt rumble through it like an earthquake, the devastation, and the vast mystery that had surrounded that town.

  “Gretchen,” she told her dog, “we’re going to find out what’s up there, you know that? If Queenie can scratch out my black lungs and”—she remembered one of her favorite quotes from the Bible—“‘restoreth my soul,’ that’s what she’s done, she’s restored it to me, she’s given me my faith back, Gretchen, when I didn’t think it was missing. And somewhere up there in those hills, her soul is waiting to be restored, too. Two things,” she said. “First we try to get a hold of these other people she mentioned. If she’s too chicken to call this Peter whatever, then I’ll put my head on the chopping block for her. She’s got his address and everybody but everybody is in Information. And second”—she shaded her eyes from the sun with her right hand—“oh, the second thing’ll be more difficult, but the Lord doesn’t give us nothing we can’t bear, and if it means driving up there with Queenie, well, then, Gretchen, so be it. So be it.”

  13

  The only thing that disturbed Stella’s sleep was a voice calling her from her lovely, empty dream.

  She awoke to her daughter’s call.

  “I was your beginning,” Stella whispered sleepily, “I will be your end.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Darkness

  1

  In the dark bowels of a cave, a creature felt the atmosphere change, felt the world turning, heard the whispers, whatifwhatifwhatif. Remembered from what pain it had been born.

  What howling pain.

  2

  From the tapes:

  “Why these children? What good are they?”

  “Oh, witch doctor, you want me to tell you stories about how evil I am and how I wanted innocence to corrupt? I’ve gone through this before, centuries ago. They tortured some poor child and to tease them, I told the priests and judges about my host of devils and worshippers. I’ve made up good stories before. They burned me once in a woman’s body and I gave them a show as they had never seen before.”

  “You’ve been alive how long?”

  Pause.

  “I am infinite.”

  “And yet, in 1980, you chose to—”

  “I chose nothing. I was delivered into that tomb of a village, I was born in flesh and tormented there. Why shouldn’t they serve as my nest? They deserved it.”

  “Your...nest?”

  “And my beautiful boys, how I loved watching their young, fresh bodies thrust into the prison of flesh that held me. Sex is a torture for you animals. That’s why they killed their families. They did it. Oh, yes, I gave them nudges, but it was all within them. But fertility and destruction are the same force. But you know that, don’t you? You’ve always known that.”

  “You wished to bear their young?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Is that what you were after?”

  The tape garbled as the creature occupying one of the teenagers began chanting Latin and Greek phrases over and over again. Later, the interviewer, Diego Correa, would translate two of them as: “It was in my mouth, sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter…” and, “Upo
n her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.”

  THEN

  THE LAST OF PALMETTO, 1980

  PART SEVEN

  THE LOST

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Peter and Wendy

  1

  Peter Chandler/Confessions

  Here’s how it was, as best as I remember it. She wanted all of us. I didn’t fully understand this when I was a teenager. She wanted both Charlie and me; others, too. She wanted all of us in a way that no woman—I should say, no creature—has wanted any of us since. I’ve often asked myself: Why me? Why not any number of others in town? Why even our town? What distinguished it for her darkness?

  I have no answer. All I know is I found myself in her embrace.

  Wendy’s embrace.

  It had seemed like a series of hallucinations in the night, both horrific and sublime. When dawn came, I was alone in the truck. She had gone. I hoped she was gone. I won’t try and second-guess the teenaged boy I once had been, but looking back, I felt fragmented into a waking life and a shadow life, and Wendy was the shadow. She was the drug, and I was an addict. I even experienced a joy in the feeling of the shadow-world. Lascivious and horny when I was in her presence, the feelings of lust died when I returned to my daily life at home in Palmetto.

  Have you ever had a dark secret? One that you could tell no one? A secret between you and Creation? That’s what this felt like—a secret between no one and me—a connection that was part of another life.

  Let me draw you back with me, back to Then, that time, that place. I call tell you more about the history of Palmetto, and of its dark twin, Nitro, but this would be no more than the history of desert towns across the southwestern United States in 1980—and it would reveal nothing. We lived, we loved, some of us died, some of us moved on. One day the town burned. Shall I tell you about the burning? It was fast, and spread from one house to another as if the fire had the wings of angels. Children called out for their mothers, and husbands wept as they clung to their wives and knew that they could not escape the inferno. Yes, I was there, but it’s not enough to say the town burned, and it’s not enough to say that Palmetto no longer exists. It’s still there, I suppose. It’s still off Highway 4, but no one lives there; as Shirley Jackson might’ve said, what walks there, walks alone.

  I live in the real world. I live in the world of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s and presidential sex scandals and privacy issues on the Internet and “What’s for dinner tonight?” and “Man, I really am tired of finding out that there’s something in my drinking water so now I need to start buying bottled water at one to two dollars a cup.” But even in that real world, places like Palmetto happen. I’ve read about them over the years, what little I could find. Magnificent. Galleons found empty in the Sargasso Sea, early American colonies empty of all traces of their inhabitants; lost cities, a civilization at its height, vanished; even the mystery of the Chicago fire with Mrs. O’Leary’s mythic cow. These things do happen. I just didn’t expect it to happen to me or to those I know. The media jumped on Palmetto, described it in several ways, as a madman’s revenge, as fire from the sky, as a teen arsonist’s wet dream, but no one knew but those of us who survived it. No one outside of us could explain where the bodies had gone. Not even a trace of human bone. Family members searched, investigators dug, but beyond the burnt cars and walls and foundations, it was as if everyone had just decided to move that day and then set the town aflame.

  I never expected to look into the face of Mystery and know where the journey led.

  And I’m telling you the end of things before you’ve begun to understand the beginning.

  Let me take you there. I was in Sloan’s truck, and an uncontrollable desire—a teen lust beyond all other teen lusts—had drawn me into Wendy’s body. Without having ever felt that Alison would care for me beyond friendship, I had already cheated on her and felt as if I had destroyed any future I had with her. Yet my body had wanted to be absorbed into Wendy’s, as if everything that I was at that age was for her, an offering. It was over. The physical bond broke between us like an invisible chain, clipped. My memory of sex with her is now only a memory of nightmare. Nightmare with pleasure. Nightmare without waking.

  When it was over I was not merely empty. I was bereft, vacant. I was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t even feel connected to my body.

  I felt a shame I had never known existed as I got out of that truck, slammed its door, and felt the prickly heat of daylight along my back. I had been a virgin before she had taken me, and yes, I will say now: she took me, although then I thought I was a willing and eager disciple for sexual experience. I knew on some level that I loved Alison, that in a moment of weakness and stupidity—the kind that only other teenaged boys seem to truly understand—I had let my body venture into a woman’s body without truly wanting that woman. Without truly wanting to ever connect with her, and yet, connect I did. The fears were foolish. That I would have to marry her now, that she would be pregnant, that I had destroyed any hope that Alison and I could ever be together. But the darker fears lurked: that there was something wrong with Wendy, that she was malignant, that my beer-induced hallucinations of her being some kind of oily, spindly creature, some subhuman species, was not as far off the mark as my sobered self believed.

  And now, she was gone—she had walked off somewhere, perhaps to get away from me. I was hungry. My shirt, torn, lay in the back of the truck. The rocky crags of No Man’s Land rose not five yards from the truck, whereas Palmetto and Nitro seemed miles behind me.

  I followed her footsteps in the dirt. She had gone into the cave of what had once been the entrance to the El Corazon Mine.

  I had to follow her. I had to understand what my shame meant. What last night had meant.

  What the unearthly visions I’d had meant

  I followed the daylight as far as it would go into the cave, and I called her name.

  That’s when I saw the flickering—that’s the only word I have for it. It was like candlelight within the cave, a blue wave of pale light and a “glowance”—another word that sounds foolish, but might be the best I can come up with. A flickering and a glow—like an aura flashing—like soft strobe lights within the darkness of the El Corazon.

  And then, I saw her.

  She was no monster, no creature.

  She was a girl just a few years older than me, lying there in a pool of her own blood.

  I stood in that cave, shivering.

  And then she called to me. I realized in the dark of the bowels of the desert earth that she was not dead, and that it was not her own blood.

  She was crouching over something, and when I saw the rabbit in her mouth, and the blood that flowed from her chin to her breasts—

  But it was dark, and even the flickering changed, an unearthly lightning danced within the cave—

  And she lay there, a girl again, a young woman, without blood, without a dead animal between her lips, without anything other than a look of longing and loneliness and now I know that just by having entered her body—partaking of her—I had stepped into the territory of demons.

  But then I went to her. She rose up, sleepily. “Was I dreaming?” she asked. “Was last night a dream?” I embraced her and dried her tears with kisses, and felt as if I were merely going insane. “I was born here,” she said, but I did not understand. I walked with her into the burning light of day and drove her home.

  Yes, this makes no sense. Yes, I know that I should’ve heeded the visions I’d had of her, of the light flickering around her in the cave, of the torn animal in her mouth, of the blood that was there but was not there in the next instant.

  But it was a part of the world that made no sense, and so I didn’t understand it. This is where the real world fails those of us who have stepped out of it. We can’t understand the other world with its nonsense, with its unboundedness. Belief is the key. Belief is not part of the real world.


  I thought it might have been all the beer from the previous night tormenting me with a hallucinatory hangover; or that it was family insanity within me, passed from my father into my blood. Or perhaps she was so inside me then that I accepted the momentary flashes of what her soul produced. I had spent my life pushing back the memories of a father who bullied and berated and beat me. Denial and quick burial of sights and sounds were nothing to me, then, when I was nearly sixteen.

  And so, to the flat light of the real world, I returned and put away childish things.

  I had become a man, after all.

  I walked tall and proud, for as pathetic as it may sound, getting laid was still one of the rituals of manhood, even in 1980, especially as a teenager. I felt shameful for it, too, for I had been raised to be a nice boy, not the wild kind who lays aggressive but comely lasses in trucks. I felt marked, as well, but it would be some days before I understood just how I’d been branded by that one act of nature that seemed, then, completely unnatural to me.

  I had opened myself to monstrosity. But then, that summer, I thought I had opened myself to the normal mistakes of the world of men and women.

  I saw Wendy every day after that.

  I had to. She called, and I went to her.