Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  His eyes began to adjust to the darkness. He saw a light coming from one of the three entrances into the mine. He kept his eyes on that distant, tiny light, swatting at the dangling arms and legs and heads like they were flies. The side of the cave dripped freezing water. He slid his left hand along the rock edge; tiny insects scuttled across the back of his hand, but he ignored them. The light, he thought. Alison. He had to crouch down lower as he went, because this particular chamber of the cave became smaller and smaller until he was on his hands and knees and crawled over the rough stones, hoping there would be no snakes to stop him.

  “Alison?’ he asked as he crawled, and the light up ahead wavered.

  “Peter.” It was Than Campusky, his voice was high and weak.

  “Be careful.”

  “Than?”

  “I fell down, it’s a shaft, be careful, Jesus my leg hurts,” Than whined.

  Peter crawled on his elbows. Because of the light (which turned out to be Than’s flashlight), he could see where the tunnel dropped. He leaned over its edge and gazed down into the blinding light. “What are you doing down there?”

  “Hell if I know,” Than said, almost laughing. Then he was silent for a few seconds. “Those things scared me. All those dive-bombing bats. Something grabbed my ankles and I crawled away and it wouldn’t let go, so I kicked at it and moved back another inch and then, hey, here I am.”

  “Well, at least you held the flashlight.”

  “Yeah, my fat ass kept it from dropping,” Than said, and then Peter heard a big sigh come from him. Than moved the flashlight around the walls of the shaft—it was made of rock and stone, but man-made, set perfectly together. A well. Then he turned the flashlight on himself so Peter could see how far down he was. Not as far as Peter had figured—maybe a hundred feet. Than’s weight had actually saved him from falling the entire length of the shaft—he plugged it up.

  “Just underneath me, Peter,” Than said, and tears came to his eyes like he knew he was going to die any second, “water.”

  “You’re okay, Campusky, you’re okay,” Peter said.

  “My leg hurts,” Than whimpered, “the left one, it’s crossed under me. I can feel the wind.”

  Wind? Peter wondered.

  “It’s like there’s a bigger cavern down there,” Than said. “Peter, please, help me, help me get out. I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.” Than began bawling like a baby, and after all they’d been through, Peter didn’t blame him, not one bit.

  “Don’t,” Peter whispered like a prayer, “don’t cry, we’ll be all right, we’ve got this far.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Than continued bawling and it was the saddest sound in the world.

  “Look,” Peter said, “I’ll get some rope to pull you up.”

  “My leg,” Than whined. “Hurts.”

  And then, from another part of the cave, a high, keening scream. “Don’t leave me!” Than shouted.

  Echoing through the caves, LEAVE ME!

  “Alison,” Peter said, then leaned over the edge. “Look, Than, just stay put. You’re safe here. You’re not in danger of falling are you?” But Than continued his whine. “Peter, please, please, please, don’t you leave me here, I don’t want to die.”

  “You’re not gonna die, Campusky, you’re gonna sit tight and I’ll be back. Or—or try crawling up. Push your legs out and your elbows.”

  “It’s gonna hurt.”

  “Just do it.”

  “Don’t you leave me here,” Than moaned.

  Again, a girl’s cry from the darkness.

  Alison. Peter scraped his way back through the tunnel to the mouth of the cave.

  8

  Now

  “It’s my one thought: Alison,” Peter Chandler said to Diego as he drove the freeways of Southern California. They’d just passed Beaumont and Banning. The earth had begun turning from yellow-brown to white, and great empty mountains rose up. The desert.

  The traffic seemed to part before them. Diego attributed this to the speed at which Peter was going—eighty, although he barely kept up with some of the trucks.

  “And you left your friend there?” Diego asked.

  “Than?” Peter shrugged. “He was okay, he really was okay. Alison was screaming, it would’ve taken another twenty minutes maybe, if we were lucky, to get Than out of the well. I figured I’d just go get her. I mean, I had the gun. Sloan’s gun. I had it and I could use it.”

  “A gun against a demon. I imagine others in Palmetto had tried it and found it hadn’t worked.”

  “No,” Peter almost shouted, slamming his fist down on the horn to try and get the slowpoke in front of him to move out of the fast lane.

  “Please slow down, Peter,” Diego Correa chuckled. “I want to live long enough to help her, your wife.”

  Peter went back down to seventy-five. “There was this old man in town, Bonyface, and he had convinced Than about all the magic and shit. He even got him to believe...” Peter’s voice trailed off. “Okay. So you go to rescue Alison.”

  Peter nodded. “It’s like there’s three corridors to the old El Corazon Mine. The miners had really plowed through that cave. This area’s larger than where Than’s stuck, and it’s got lots of chambers to it, and in each chamber, hidden from the rest by piles of rocks, the dead. Lots of them. People I only barely recognized from town, some with limbs cut off—I guess they were hanging at the entrance, you know—some scraping their flesh with their fingernails and eating it, the light was dim there, only a phosphorescence from the rocks, so most in shadow, scraping their flesh, and each other, and some even burying themselves in the piles of rocks that lay along the chambers’ edges. I’m repeating the twenty-third Psalm over and over, you know.”

  “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,’’’ Diego said.

  Peter continued, “It’s like a walk through hell, toxic hell ‘cause of the glowing, the demon shit was all shiny and gave off this weird light like a dimmed firefly or, I don’t know, something alien. The smell was pretty bad, too. It smelted—obviously—like the inside of someone. Something else, too. Something sweet, like melting chocolate or a pie sitting out on a windowsill to cool off. Disgusting and tempting at the same time. And I’m walking down this rock corridor and there’s Grubb, the deputy from town, his feet missing, just crawling on his hands and knees, and something coming through his skin, something other than bone and muscle, the demon thing, the way it comes through, the bad part, the bad thing.”

  “What does it look like?” Diego asked.

  Peter shook his head, shivering. “Unspeakable.”

  9

  Then

  The thing coming through Officer Chip Grubb’s skin began absorbing the discarded flesh and bones back into itself. Its ghostly yellow-green light flickered up like a lamp being turned on from a dimmer switch. Peter stood watching, fascinated and terrified. The glow of the rocks was strong all around it, and Peter could not take his eyes from the transformation. “It doesn’t hurt,” the thing rasped. “It’s turning, it’s further evolving, it’s beautiful, lovely, the next step, Peter, from the sea to the mud, boy, the churning clay of man to a higher form, you are moving backward, come forward with us, into the light.” The voice was not the cop’s voice, but a synthesis of all voices from the town that the demon in the cave had absorbed. “Do not fear, boy, for our cells are in you too, even now, we are all children of the same mother. Lamia, our mother of the caves. All hail our mother of the caves.”

  “Her name is Babylon,” someone whispered.

  “She is Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth,” another said.

  “Lamia, Mistress of the One Who Screams in the Night,” still another voice said.

  Peter stepped away from the rock chamber. The thing continued to move across the stones and sand of the floor slowly, absorbing even the pale insects that moved too slowly to escape its tread. As it went
, it left a trail of yellow phosphorescence, revealing the litter of cracked and battered skulls, like broken eggs with their yolks sucked clean. Yet nothing attacked him, and he didn’t understand why. Why she was waiting, why Wendy did not have these things destroy him?

  It was like the demon voice in him, saying, You are one of us.

  10

  Now

  As Peter took the old highway into the mountains, he said, “And so I kept asking myself then: Why hadn’t I turned? Why wasn’t I killed, too? Why did Wendy let me live? I’ve been pondering that question for years, trying to work it out in my head, in my notebooks. Why?”

  Diego looked out the window of the car, to the glorious sand-white mountains rising above the lower deserts and the cities and stretches of flatland below.

  “Perhaps it was the human part of Wendy,” Diego said. “Maybe you were the one she cared for. Maybe in her own way, she loved you. She chose you, after all.”

  Peter laughed. “I don’t think there was anything human about her.”

  “A monster?”

  Peter shook his head. “No, we were becoming the monsters, we were turning. Wendy controlled that, somewhere in her, the power of control. Like what was coming out of those dead bodies was a child’s crude self-portrait with crayons. Like they were trying to make themselves over, but dying tissue wasn’t good enough. Dying tissue only produced this liquid thing, this glow, this energy, it was only a waste product of what it could absorb, I guess. It couldn’t go beyond its energy source, and I guess it died trying each time. Demons have a hard time in this world.”

  “The French philosopher, Andre Wandigaux, said, ‘Our only will is to fertility, and in that we reflect the will of nature, and we recklessly pursue the means of propagation even if it leads to our own destruction.’ Even this demon will,” Diego said. “So you found Alison?”

  “I swore I would protect her from this…this...memory. But I guess it doesn’t matter. Maybe I protected her too well. I told you I passed the chambers, the dying voices, and I was careful in the cave, knowing that there might be holes and shafts. I kept near the wall and followed the light of the emerging bodies and those who were flickering out, like luminaria on the path through this long corridor of cavern. Then the light glowed brighter and brighter, and I heard the whispering.”

  “Whispering?” Diego asked.

  “The wings of some large bat—or should I even say demon? For there he was—not Wendy, but Sloan, a hellish creature with barely a human quality left, a pit bull jaw, and talons like an eagle, and the leathery wings of a bat. I saw the beast that Sloan had become, leaning over a girl who looked half-dead, her mouth gone slack. It was Alison. Sloan lapped at the side of her face, his body pressed down against hers. He was raping her. I reached for the gun. His gun. And you know what? He didn’t attack me. Sloan didn’t try to stop me. What was left of Sloan—what I could see in his eyes was still Sloan and not pit bull and not demon—just stood still, watching me. He said it was okay.”

  “To shoot him?”

  Peter’s mind slipped into the past for a split second. Sloan growled, “Petey, I told you, I told you, but no, you wouldn’t stop me before, but now you have to because if you don’t, I’m gonna rip out her throat, I’m gonna eat her guts, oh, Petey, do it, just like I’m a tweetbird, just shoot, like into the trees, like I’m just a tweetbird in the trees, like I shot my dog, dear Jesus sweet savior, I want you to pull that trigger, please Petey, shoot me you son of a bitch before I eat her alive, you goddamn motherfucker, shoot me, I’m already dead, don’t you get it, they’re eating at me, can’t you hear the chewing? Like a fuckin’ leper, man, none of this skin’s mine, it’s all those things, Petey, ‘member the dog? It had ‘em in it, sweet baby dog of mine, she put them in Lammie, and She put them in me, and you got to kill me or I’m gonna eat your goddamn girlfriend before they eat me,” and then Sloan brought his left claw up in the air, and Peter could see what was in its path.

  Alison’s throat.

  And it was a dare, and before Peter pulled the trigger the first time, Sloan said, “Hey, tweet-tweet, hey, kinda funny, huh? Let’s all sing like the birdies sing.” And with the first and the second shot, Sloan continued laughing at his own joke.

  In the car again, in the Now, Peter asked Diego to open the glove compartment and search around for the aspirin. Diego pulled out a bottle and handed a couple to Peter. “Four please,” Peter said, and Diego complied. Then Peter swallowed them dry. “It took three shots at point-blank range, but finally he fell.”

  “And months later...” Diego said.

  “It wasn’t meant to be born,” Peter said.

  11

  They did not speak for a time after this.

  She’s always with us. Peter remembered that line from the book, the one Diego had written, mainly because it had been a lie. “I told you, back then, she’s always with us. Wendy. But that wasn’t quite true. It’s us always with her. In that place. In that time. Like I don’t dream of the past, I dream of now. It’s then. That’s the reality. This is just what she lets us dream from that cave. We are actors in her dream.”

  “No,” Diego said, his eyes scanning the terrain of the bumpy highway and the shapes of hills and shadows of mountains in the fading light. “I imagine even Wendy Swan is in the dream, too. I imagine that if she’s here, in any real sense, then she’s as much a victim as your wife, as you, as any of the other survivors.”

  They drove up the highway to the winding hills leading to Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, only another half-hour or so to Palmetto, only another thirty minutes and twenty years to go back.

  “I don’t know,” Peter said. “We must look like ants in her demon mind. We’re easy enough to step on and kick out of our nests. If we’re tied to her, why in God’s name is she so tied to us?” Strong gusts of wind sprayed dust across his windshield; his car rocked side to side, the steering wheel tugged at his hands; tumbleweed and litter scattered across the potholed road that snaked upward into the darkening hills.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Alison Wonderland

  1

  It hurts, Peter, help, it hurts, my neck, God, please... Alison Chandler thought for a second that it was her husband, Peter, who stood over her. Was she finally waking from this horrible dream? Were her eyelids fluttering open, would she be back in her bed this morning, Peter standing over her, asking her if she was ready for coffee?

  But it wasn’t Peter.

  And it didn’t feel like a dream.

  Feels too damn real.

  Cold, her back hurt—pebbles and jagged stones beneath her. She was lying in a shallow ditch, and it smelled like chalk. Her breathing was difficult. Neck was sore. Tried lifting her head up, but the effort sent darting pains into her head, and she was afraid she’d black out again. I think therefore I am. If only I could think clearly... Tried working her jaw, but again the pain stabbed at her; painful swallowing; easier to just lie still. It hurts every-fucking-where on my body. Dark—but light enough to see him, her abductor. His face like a hellish green-yellow mask; no mask at all, but him. She couldn’t even associate this man with the boy she had known, the boy she remembered. Standing above her, gazing down at her, his drool hitting her on her forehead.

  She’d been out for a while, she knew that much, all the pain she felt after he’d curled his fingers around her throat. She thought, before her mind faded: Let there be a God.

  But if she’d had the energy, she’d laugh at that thought now. For God, if He existed, had left her to this.

  The drooling creature held a shovel up for her to see.

  She blinked—a clod of dirt fell across her face.

  How long had it been since she’d last been conscious?

  How many hours? Days?

  This human monster had opened his own veins with a razor and smeared blood across her face, and she’d hit the wall so hard that she had no energy. Life seemed to pour out every time she breathed. His blood had been everywhere,
he’d written words across the walls, and she’d read the words first when she entered the apartment: “WHERE IS IT?” But it meant nothing; what could it mean? After his interrogation, the long ride out.

  Where are we going?

  Don’t you remember?

  Who are you?

  Don’t you remember?

  And then, after the memories had come back to her, not flooding back to her, but burning through her, burning out the wall she’d built up around her memory, especially the last memory when she saw the torn bodies of her brothers and her father and her mother burning across her eyes, and leaving the whole world a blackened field, and in the middle of the field, this man, this monster.

  She’d thought at first the monster was named Charlie Urquart. But she’d been mistaken.

  This monster in the jeans and hooded sweatshirt, this monster who was going to torture her and kill her, had the name of someone she thought was long dead.

  Nathaniel Campus.

  Than Campusky.

  His face, now gaunt and drawn, skin peeled back from his forehead, and on his fingers the cold stone smell of dripping death.

  “Than,” she whispered, using all her energy to spit the words out. “Your...friend...please.”