Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  PART EIGHT

  THE SCORPION NEST

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Digging Up the Demon

  1

  Than dreamed awake.

  The hand covered his mouth, and he wasn’t afraid. He trusted the Hand of Glory. The hand was covering his mouth for a reason. The palm was like rough leather, with the smell of raw, drying meat. The hand wanted him to be quiet because it would show him something, something that would make him want to scream, but he should not scream.

  There, in front of him, was the girl.

  Wendy.

  Down on all fours.

  He noticed her breasts first, dangling, he noticed the white curve of her ass, he noticed her flared nostrils, and the wisps of hair caught in her lips, her lips like drooping petals.

  And then he saw the pulp of its white flesh, and what moved beneath it like some other living thing in an encasing of skin. There in the grave, she stretched and turned, and reached for him, buried with her.

  Her kiss was rape.

  The vision melted before his eyes. Than stood next to the Bone, who pulled the Hand of Glory back from the boy’s mouth.

  2

  “It’s gonna protect you,” the old man cackled. “It’s like fightin’ fire with fire. She can’t get in you if you build up your ’munity with the juice, boy. And tonight, boy, we go out there and dig her up and make sure we kill it before it gets out. Got to catch her while she’s shifting. And that’s just what she’s doin’ down there, right now.”

  “Shifting?”

  “Changing—you know, becomin’ a full-fledged demon like in the comical books.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know? How do I know. You know, dontcha? It’s the demon juice, you whelp, it puts you in touch with other demons. It draws you to them and them to you.”

  “Wait a minute. You told me before you thought she’s been dead for years ’til I told you different. So how come you couldn’t feel her before you heard from me she was still around?”

  “Didn’t get a signal from her since that Southey boy cast the demons outta her and into him so many years ago. Only, I felt it again, like in headaches, killer headaches, comin’ on this summer. It was returning to her then. She musta been like a vacuum for it, and it eventually come back. The demon, ya see, ain’t her, this Lamia thing, but it sure as shit’s drawn to her because in her it can survive, hell, it had this incarnation in her, it was reborn in her skin. Can’t survive long in bad flesh, and from what I reckon, that Juicer was getting more and more rotten for it, so it had to go home, back to the girl. You always return to your first love, boy, ain’t nobody ever told you that? So I lied if I told you I didn’t know it was back, ’cause I did. Could feel it. Smell it, too. But I didn’t know that girl was still kickin’ until you told me and then it all made sense. Now, we’re gonna go get that girl’s bones out of that grave and make sure she don’t shift no more. I got me my family Bible in the backseat along with a coupla shovels.”

  “A Bible? Are you gonna exorcise her or something?”

  The old man laughed and swatted his scalp. “No, boy, it’s the biggest damn Bible you ever saw, must weigh a ton, and we’re gonna need it to hit her with if she starts to rise up.”

  3

  It was almost midnight when Than and Bonyface arrived at the cemetery gate, a rusty shovel in the old man’s arms. The gate to the bone yard was open and bent, for until this particular night, July third, there had never been any vandalism or shenanigans in the graveyard beyond local kids occasionally kicking over the stones.

  The cemetery smelled like shit dust to Than. Old Bonyface was busy sniffing the wind. Than glanced about in the dark: the lights of town burned bright orange and yellow and white. “Wouldn’t it be smarter to wait till tomorrow?”

  “Eh? Boy?”

  “You said demons don’t come out in daylight.”

  “Tomorrow might be too late. You feel it?”

  Than listened to the night. Cars drove by on the highway, and somewhere, a dog howled. He felt a prickly heat along the soles of his feet, and a tingling down his back. But he said nothing.

  “You do feel it, son, and you ain’t tellin’ me on accounta you think it’s your imagination in overdrive, but it’s like fingers tickling you, ain’t it?”

  Than shrugged. I feel something. But it could be anything.”

  “It’s her. She’s turning, boy, and now’s the time to strike if there’s any time good. Here.” Bonyface waved both hands in a circle over an area that covered five or six graves.

  “There’s a fresh one.” Than pointed toward a pile of dirt. Sure enough, the marker read “Wendy Swan” when Lucas shone his flashlight beam on it.

  The digging took forever. Than had never worked so hard in all his life. After the night went on without end, and the hole just got bigger and bigger, Than fully expected to hit the lid of a hard wood coffin, but, instead, the shovel went into something like mud, or perhaps even a lizard. It began vibrating in his hands, and Than dropped the shovel, scrambling out of the grave. He felt like he was going to have a heart attack from fear and overwork, and he wanted to shriek when he got up out of the hole, but was too winded to say much.

  Bonyface, who had been sitting there perusing his enormous Bible, glanced down at the shovel. “Hit her, I ‘xpect.”

  “It can’t be the coffin. It’s like...goo,” Than said when he had caught his breath.

  The Bone slid down into the small hole and popped the shovel out. Something shiny dripped from the tip. He wiped his finger across it, and then sniffed his fingers before licking them. “Yep, it’s demon, all right.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “Nathaniel?”

  “I want to go home.”

  “You don’t turn yeller on me, not now, not in a dang bone yard at the witchin’ hour with me one foot set in the open grave of the demon in the middle of her shift.” Bonyface wagged a finger in Than’s face.

  Lying there, beneath the dirt: Not a demon. But her body. Buried in the dirt. Whatever coffin that had been was gone, and there was a curious bed of gray ash beneath her.

  “Look at her, Jesus, why’s she like that?” Than asked. “I thought her head was shot off.”

  The beam from the flashlight illuminated the body. Wendy Swan lay there in the dirt and ash, skin white and healthy, hair red and thick, and a flush to her face as if she were more vital in death than in life.

  “Ain’t she bee-yootiful, son? She done got ‘juvenated, at least partway,” Bonyface said. “Musta caught herself some bugs, boy, some life, even the wood, boy, even the wood is part of life, and Lamia’s done taken the life and sewn herself back together, but she needs more life, boy, she needs the kinda blood we can give her, she’s like a skeeter a little bit, boy, she only needs it when she’s ready to lay, and she needs it bad, boy, c’mon, with me, help me do the deed before she wakes up and we get shifted into her just like we was folding eggs into batter.” Bonyface held his hand out for the knife he’d told Than to bring along. Than reached into his backpack and withdrew it. Than could’ve been mistaken, but the blade seemed to shine in the moonlight.

  He passed it to Bonyface, but as the man’s hand closed around its hilt, Than pulled it back. “You sure this’ll stop her? If we just cut this one thing—” He remembered what the old man had told him: Demons can’t be killed, boy, they can only be put somewhere safe ‘til some damn fool lets ‘em out again.

  But before Bonyface could answer, he gave out a shriek and fell to his knees into the grave, onto her body, sinking into her. He held on to Than’s wrist, and Than almost fell into the shallow grave, but managed to stay at its rim. A gasp escaped Bonyface’s lips. “She got me. Oh fuck,” he said. Later, Than thought these were his exact words. His last words. Oh fuck.

  Flesh fell in thick slabs off the sides of the old man’s thighs—Than heard the sound of humming like a thousand locusts in the air, and the vibrations from the earth—bef
ore he dropped the flashlight. As he stood there shivering, Than saw Bonyface’s skin along his face and neck and arms turn liquid and run like melting wax down his bones.

  4

  A hot, dry wind blew lightly across Than’s face. The wind was like exhaust from some profound energy source, some engine converting fuel into movement, and then releasing this warmth, its waste product.

  He tried to close his eyes, but fear seemed to be working against him. He had to watch. What was happening to Bonyface was fascinating, and even the terror Than felt gave him a warm feeling of being alive in a way he had never felt before. No, don’t look, don’t, it’s bad it’s evil. He tried to move away from the edge of the grave, but the old man’s hand still clutched his wrist, glued to his arm. Don’t look and it won’t be happening—no demon, no skin falling, no blood pouring.

  He would not look. He would not look because to look would give it power. Fear, fear would give the demon power, he would not give it that, it could kill him, yeah, it could rip him to shreds, but he would not give it fear to eat.

  This boy, Than Campusky, was often a coward in his lifetime, and he carried such epithets as “pig boy” and “thunder thighs” with some grace. However, this was a moment of truth, and he decided to be brave, after a few seconds, to stare the demon in the face and laugh.

  So he looked.

  The body in the grave pulsed a greenish-yellow glow. A network of tubes ran from beneath Bonyface’s fallen clothes and skin, wrapped around the long bones of his legs, but then Than realized they were fat and arteries, intertwined, interconnected to the liquid yellow neon of Wendy Swan’s own legs. Pumping life from the old man to the young, dead girl, Bonyface dripped and pooled.

  Bonyface’s jaws parted and what seemed like a series of gasps came forth—as if the pleasure of being absorbed by her body was so intense he could not find the words to describe it. The warm wind spraying across Than’s face was from the old man’s mouth, the exhaust of being absorbed as the skin on his chest turned, opening and falling off so that the blood could pour more freely down to the power source. Finally, the pure wind of burning life died. The old man’s face sucked in on itself, the eyes shriveled like raisins.

  A glowing yellow liquid bubbled around Wendy’s thighs as Bonyface’s skin fluttered down like a moth to cover the dead girl’s nakedness.

  His bones were the last to fall. They had been sucked clean. His skull fell first with its bit of tattered scalp, and then the ribcage with the spine, and then the rest.

  The hand that clutched Than’s wrist finally let go.

  Wendy’s body shimmered, wriggling almost imperceptibly.

  Like a face breaking the surface of water as a drowning man might for one last gasp of air, the old man’s face burst from her thighs, pulling at the skin of her belly as if trying to escape.

  The surface of her skin was calm again.

  From behind him, Than heard a dog growling.

  Before him, Wendy Swan moved as if in a dream.

  Above him, for a second, he thought he saw the beautiful stars, white and brilliant, and so far from his small corner of the world, and wondered why God wasn’t there to lift him up. Our Father who art in Heaven, he began, but was not able to continue.

  It’s ’cause I drank the demon juice. Damn it, damn it, you screwed up, Campusky, you went and drank it and now nobody’s gonna save you. Bonyface was wrong, it doesn’t make you immune, shit, it probably makes you taste better.

  “I am your life now.” Her voice came without movement from her lips. He felt something tickle the underside of his heart, as if she were stroking his chest from the inside, playing his veins like harp strings.

  The growling died. Kill me, just kill me now, do it quick, he prayed.

  The old man’s words: Ain’t she beautiful, son? She done got ’juvenated, at least partway.

  No, Than thought, she got rejuvenated all the way. With you, Bonyface. Just like you said, must’ve caught some bugs, some life, even the wood of the coffin. Whatever had life in it, and then you, Bonyface, with one foot in her grave, near her thighs, absorbed your life into hers. She drank you like a cool glass of water.

  Than didn’t even scream when Wendy rose from the grave, her arms open to embrace him. Nerve endings jangled, and he felt a paralysis set in: first his throat and then the rest of his body. For a moment he thought she had the head of some kind of dog he had never seen, almost reptilian, and her arms were snakes, even short antlers rose at her scalp, but then she was beautiful again, and he began an exquisite shivering, pee funning down his legs, and he knew that his life would be over soon—he prayed it would come fast and furious—but she moved slowly at first like a tarantula, and then so fast scurrying toward him, the way the tiny, dark scorpions would run into the shadows from the front porch light of his house.

  He waited for his fate to come to him.

  5

  But the landscape shifted, the sky blossomed with a streak of lightning that ripped apart the world within his vision.

  She was beautiful. She came to him. To Than Campusky: A beautiful woman, her cheeks flush with a peach glow, her eyes yearning, her hair sparkling in the white light of this dream reality that he had somehow entered. No shame in her nakedness as she drew herself to him.

  “Nathaniel,” she whispered as she pressed her lips to his neck. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t, my beloved, don’t be afraid.”

  6

  The night knew fear.

  A family named Neville, who lived near the Wash—and had reported seeing a wild dog near their property for several nights—had gone to bed early. Lucy Neville sat up reading for a bit; her husband was already snoring by midnight. When she heard a noise in one of her children’s rooms, she got up to see if Stevie had knocked over his lamp again, only what she saw instead was a young man standing before her, his face scarred and elongated as if he’d been tortured, and then her life was over; if you were to walk through the Nevilles’ home a half-hour later, you would see blood-spattered walls and what looked like a very messy butcher shop as Kevin Sloan satisfied what felt to him to be an insatiable hunger.

  Deadrats—a.k.a. Charlie Urquart—raced across the mesas to the Ed and Inez Trailer Park, grabbing two girls he knew from school.

  He tore into them out on the edge of the Wash with mucho gusto—and as his heart beat rapidly, he howled and felt the changes in his body as she took him over. She was there—he knew she was. She was there for him. She was giving him the power.

  It was all he needed.

  Feeling her inside him.

  With him.

  She was back.

  He danced out on the desert, feeling like some primal man, fresh from the kill, worshipping the source of his strength.

  7

  Before the first light of morning, Peter Chandler heard a scratching at his window. He sat up and looked out into the darkness.

  He thought he saw Charlie Urquart, only he was naked and covered with blood. In his arms, a baby that was either sleeping or dead.

  And then Charlie grinned, nodding to him.

  Behind him, Wendy.

  It’s a dream, Peter told himself. It’s a dream.

  But something else whispered, she owns us now. We gave ourselves to her. She’s part of us.

  Peter Chandler felt something that he could only think of as a magnetic pull draw him outside the house, out to where Charlie stood—in a dream, it has to be a dream—

  The pavement and dirt were covered with small black scorpions and the sky lightened with the beginning of day.

  Peter stood by and watched as Wendy, her lips and chin drenched in red, reached for the offering in Charlie’s hands, as the baby woke up from its brief sleep.

  All the while, Wendy kept her eyes on Peter.

  He felt a fever growing within his body. When he woke up, he found himself lying on the cold concrete of the front porch. The night and its dreams were through.

  He shivered from fever, and went back to bed,
but the visions of Wendy and Charlie and Sloan and even Than would not leave his burning dreams.

  In his dreams, Than laughed at him and told him that it was all right, what he was going to do.

  It’s all right, Peter. We’re all in this dream together. You, me, Charlie, and Wendy. We’re hers now. We belong to her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The Last Day of Palmetto

  1

  Dawn broke like glass on the highway, all sharp and loud and ready to cut. July could get friggin’ hot, that’s what one cop thought as he got his day—and his ass—in gear, and wished. Friggin’ hot and friggin’ long and the damn celebration was tonight, he said to no one as he had a beer to cut off the bad taste in his mouth of the liquor from the night before. The coyote bite on his hand had gotten infected. He hated wild animals.

  2

  Women are like wild animals, the cop thought as he waited at the stoplight, watching the teenaged girl go by, wondering what color panties she was wearing. It was his hobby, for there was little else to do in this town beyond stopping dogfights (when the mood suited him and he didn’t have a bet going), and locking up town drunks (who sometimes happened to be married to the woman he was screwing on the side).

  Officer Grubb, Chip to some, the Grubman to others, was about as fat as a man could get and still fit behind the steering wheel of a black-and-white Ford Torino, and if you had known him as a kid you’d’ve said he’d never make it to adulthood—he’d been the kind of bully everyone expected to get the shit beat out of him at one time or another by someone bigger and smarter and quicker. But somehow the Grubman had eluded the predicted fate and had made it to adulthood, and although there were other cops who cruised the strip of highway through Nitro and Palmetto, none of them questioned the Grubman’s supreme authority in this territory. Not that a hell of a lot ever went on. Hell, a fire in the Wash brings ’em out like flies in this pisspot. Some trailer trash whore gets shot and the whole friggin’ town’s acting like a tragedy happened. Biggest thrill for the Grubman had been the television interview, shown on three LA stations, when The Juicer’s body had been found out on the highway. In that interview, the Grubman had made the profound remark that, “We run a pretty tight ship up in Palmetto.”