Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Nessie reached over and patted her arm, and then slipped her hand down to give Gretchen a scratch behind her ears. Gretchen practically purred her approval. “Well, it’s a good bet it’ll take an hour to get up there, so I guess you got yourself a captive audience here. So shoot.”

  If Nessie Wilcox had said any other word in the English language, she might not have reacted as strongly as she did. But when she said “shoot,” there was a violent explosion from somewhere around her station wagon, and she screamed at the top of her lungs, and Gretchen leapt up into her lap and started barking.

  4

  And Nessie would’ve had an accident right then and there if she hadn’t had the good sense to realize that it was only a blowout. “Pardon the hysterics,” Nessie said, signaling to get in the right lane, slowing down to fifty, then forty, and finally twenty-five and a full stop on the right shoulder. “The tires are all as bald as my ex, and I should know to expect this kind of thing. Every time I go out in this old jalopy I pray for no flats and I guess I just had my mind on other things this time. The road just reached up and got me for forgetting my prayers.”

  “I...I don’t know how to change a tire,” Stella said.

  Nessie laughed. “You make it sound like fixing O-rings on the space shuttle. You just take the old one off and put the spare on and fiddle with it a little. If there’s no spare, we just stick out our thumbs and hope some good Samaritan’s driving by.”

  “What if—what if some crazy person stops?”

  “Queenie, Queenie, Queenie.” Nessie shook her head. “If we meet up with some psycho out here I do believe between you and me he’ll have met his match.”

  5

  “Keep pumping, Queenie,” Nessie said as she rolled the spare tire around on the gravel.

  Stella glanced up, pausing in her labor. She was hunched over the jack, bringing all her weight down. It was the front right tire that had flattened, and was still warm from burning rubber. The car had only risen slightly since Nessie had shown her how to insert the jack. Her back was killing her, little electric shocks running up and down her spine and between her shoulder blades each time she pressed down on the metal bar.

  “I’ll bet you’ve never worked this hard in your life. Okay, I think it’s high enough, so now you just stand aside and watch the mistress of tire changing do her stuff, Queenie.”

  “I really don’t enjoy being called ‘Queenie.’”

  “I thought you liked it.”

  “Not anymore,” Stella said. “Not here. It feels fake to have any other name now.”

  It was cold and she wanted to get up into the mountains, she wanted to be there already, she had to prevent anything further. In her mind, she still saw Peter as a boy, just as she continued to think of Wendy as a young woman: all victims of some nameless evil.

  “Okay, okay, no more Queenie. From here on in it’ll be Stella, or perhaps I should call you ‘Star’?” And the woman who had moments before been Nessie Wilcox had melted like a smoldering wax figure into her brother Rudy, dressed as he had been when Stella had cut him with the knife.

  But now, he looked healthier than she’d ever seen him.

  From inside the car, Gretchen began barking frantically, scratching her front paws up against the glass of the window.

  6

  No longer on the freeway’s shoulder almost to the turnoff up to the high desert, just beyond Desert Hot Springs, Stella opened her eyes to nightmare. Stella wondered if she were in Hell itself.

  Torches had been set up along the dripping walls of a cavern; a shallow underground stream ran over Stella’s feet, now bare, the water sluicing between her toes. Red water, a river of blood. It ran the entire length of the cavern floor. Beneath her feet, soft, spongy mosses grew. The cavern walls rose up to a bat-encrusted ceiling. She would’ve been frightened by the bats, but her brother seemed the more terrifying prospect.

  Rudy approached her, and she found she couldn’t move. She smelled his breath: like sour milk on a dead baby’s lips. He ran his fingers over her breasts, and she felt something horrible stirring inside her, a sensation, a spark she tried to douse with her blood, but the feeling just became warmer and warmer the more she tried to kill it. He smiled at her torment: His lips were bright crimson, like clown lipstick. When they parted they revealed teeth that shimmered. As he spoke, she wondered at first why his teeth seemed to move, some of them uprooting themselves, dropping back in his throat. Crawling under his tongue.

  Not teeth, but maggots.

  “It’s too late, Star,” he said, and his hands squeezed her nipples through her blouse. He leaned forward to kiss her; she tried to draw back; his breath was again that sour milk on a baby’s lips—she remembered that moment, clutching Wendy when she was barely a year old, screaming at her to “BREATHE! DAMN YOU, BREATHE!” And her baby had answered her prayers then in the worst way, for she had begun breathing again, after her mother had tried to strangle her to death and had almost succeeded. Always remember that smell, baby’s breath, sour milk, and the tugging of life, whatever life force there was not wanting to let one so young die, and maybe something else, too, some other life inside the baby, sharing space like uncomfortable roommates, some other creature who was trying not to die, also, trying to bring oxygen into the baby’s lungs because as long as the baby lived, It would live, too. The baby was Its hope.

  Rudy kissed her, his lips wriggling into her mouth. Stella heard a ripping sound, and felt something slither into the back of her throat and, without wanting to, she swallowed.

  Rudy stepped back. She could not have known he was grinning except from his eyes. His mouth was torn away, dangling tendons of red muscle, pink, swollen gums going all the way to his chin. The jaws opened, and he said, “You have my lips, Star my love, and now you must take my heart,” and he tore his shirt open and grabbed her right hand in his left. He traced her fingers over his nipple, and as he pressed her palm to a place just below it, a place where his flesh was like a damp, full sponge, she began squeezing her fingers, searching for the thumping heart beneath.

  And then, another voice, from so far away she barely recognized it, said, “Queenie? Stella? Stella? You okay?”

  7

  Nessie caught her as she fell, and both women landed on the gravel.

  “I thought you were having a heart attack,” Nessie said. “The way you were clawing at your mouth and at your chest, I thought you were going into cardiac overdrive. And who knows what Gretchen thought was going on.” Nessie nodded toward the car. The Scottie sat up at the window, head turning from side to side in confusion, alternating between growling and wagging her tail. “It was like boom-boom-boom, you grabbed the car, you started hitting yourself or something, then you started to keel over. I was thinking, ‘Next stop, country morgue.’”

  Stella readjusted to her surroundings: a strong wind blew dust across the road, and in the distance came the call of a distant train. Every joint in her body ached. “I thought I saw something.”

  “Can’t have you hurting yourself. Look, just sit here said relax and I’ll finish this job off, although I’ll need a little help steadying the spare, I am just an old feeble lady,” Nessie said. She rose, dusting her jeans off, and then squatted over the spare tire, hugging it against her chest, lifting it up and over onto the can. “You gonna make it?”

  Stella nodded, drawing her knees up—her bones felt like breaking twigs, and even this simple action hurt. “It seems colder now.”

  Nessie shrugged. “Dropped a few degrees. I’ve got a blanket in the back, it stinks a little...”

  “No, thanks, I’ll be fine. Here, I can help with that—”

  “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “What’s another hurt added onto the heap?”

  “I’ll remember that line when I deal with my ex. Now, tell me again about this lamb thing. Take my mind off the pain I’m feeling in my hindquarters right about now.”

  “Lamia. It was in my body for several months, but I manag
ed to get rid of it, most of it, in my baby. But I didn’t understand, even then, that she was still my baby, she still was a part of me, even if she had the Lamia in her, too, she was still my child.”

  8

  “But your healing power.” Nessie had finished putting the spare on the wagon. She checked the lug nuts, tightening them.

  “Why couldn’t you stop its course? Just like my lungs…”

  “My healing power,” Stella laughed cynically, “didn’t come until some years later. Lex talionis, an eye for an eye. When you vacuum, the machine sucks dust in through the metal cylinder, and you watch that, that’s the part of the vacuum that seems important it gets the job done. But remember, remember that the other end of the machine is giving off exhaust, hot air, when you put something into another thing, that other thing then must lose something itself.”

  “You got me confused.” Nessie brought the car down, disassembled the jack, and walked around to the back of the wagon.

  “I spent ten years cursing her, cursing myself. Rudy, in spite of his death, still came to me, still raped me, in my dreams. I kept his urn beneath my bed and in with his ashes I kept some jewels and the knife. If I heard a strange noise in the night, I reached for the athame. If Wendy tried to come for me, I was going to use the knife on her. And she was, you know, possessed, but not in the classical sense, not some little girl blaspheming and floating above her bed, but she was, other children knew it. I kept her away from the world. Away from other children. Away from everything.”

  ‘I’ve got hives, Quee—Stella. Cheese and crackers, I haven’t had hives since I don’t remember, goosebumps, and I don’t think it’s from the cold,” Nessie said as she went around to the driver’s side door. “You just get in and we’ll try and figure out something pleasant to talk about for the rest of the trip. I know you’ve been through hell most of your life, and I know I asked you to talk this out, but it’s making me think about how ugly the world is, and not just this world, but maybe the next, too, and I’ve just got to remember some of the good old days.”

  “Yes.” Stella opened the door and got in her side, nodding. “The good old days.”

  9

  The climb up into the hills was touch and go: the old station wagon was not good for much other than getting back and forth to the Mini-Mart and down to the Queen of Heaven Catholic Church. The engine made strange rumblings, and each time the car hit a pothole (which it did frequently), the entire frame of the car seemed to leap and dive. Gretchen, who had moved to the backseat, growled correspondingly. “Back when Cove and I were married, we used to come up here for the Joshua trees, in the spring, and all the yucca blossoming, it was beautiful, and practically nobody up here.” Nessie pointed to the suburban sprawl of the high desert, acres of houses where once there had been wild country. “Back then, only old families and crazies lived up here, now every commuter from San Berdoo and even Los Angeles stakes a claim. Wish the Santa Anas would just blow ‘em all over the hills.”

  “Like Palmetto.” Stella gazed out the window at the lights of Yucca Valley.

  “It was like that with Palmetto, wasn’t it? I drove up to see it, after that, think it was about ‘82, and I still couldn’t believe it, still couldn’t believe what happened to it, but in a secret way I was glad what happened because it was going to be uninhabitable for a while. Those kinds of things, stories like what happened there, all those news stories, well, they bring gawkers and crazies in with cameras and such, but they do tend to keep the populations to zero. Sometimes I think,” Nessie said, gesturing with her right hand to the houses and stores and gas stations and mini-malls of Yucca Valley, “I think, if only it had happened on a grander scale—not the deaths—but just that nature had been allowed to take this whole area over again, just let it be wilderness, let it be a patch of earth without damn real estate.”

  They drove in silence, with Gretchen’s occasional whines, and the squeal of the brakes whenever they came to a stoplight.

  At the stoplight, Nessie noticed the sign to Highway 4. It was spray-painted over. Local hooligans had gotten to the sign.

  “NARANJA CANYON—15 MILES”

  “PALMETTO—17 MILES”

  The spray paint, which ran the length of the sign, read:

  “PREPARE TO DIE”

  As if continuing a conversation that had stopped several miles back, Nessie said, “Okay, Stella Swan, give it to me straight. You cleaned up my lungs, but you can’t clean up your baby. So what’s it got to do with a vacuum cleaner?”

  When the light turned green, when Stella began talking again, Nessie turned up the road that used to be paved, that used to be a popular turnoff, almost a shortcut up to Twenty-nine Palms and Landers, but that was now torn by the elements over the last twenty years, a road used now only by teenagers on dares and by crazies with cameras, and by two elderly women who were headed for something that might just be the end of them.

  “PREPARE TO DIE”

  The small print beneath that had been unreadable to Nessie. Some joker had scribbled: “you dead already?”

  PART TEN

  THE CAVE-DWELLERS

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Gathering

  1

  Diego Correa and Peter Chandler arrived in Palmetto just as the sun was setting over the hills of No Man’s Land.

  The land was dark where Palmetto had once risen. A few house-fronts still stood, a few chimneys, but the town dump had spread like a fungus from the valley in back of the Chandlers’ house all the way to the last standing walls of the Alhambra. Peter felt a sweat break out along his back, and he hoped it was only from exhaustion and fear. As if something were being revealed to him like a cloth coming off some toy from childhood, he said, “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “You had to,” Diego said.

  “Something about this place, the desert, she said it once, Wendy said it, the intersection of the past and the future, the idea of no man’s land.” Could Correa tell that he was breathing more rapidly, that he might hyperventilate at any moment as he felt fingers pumping his lungs, and the insects crawling up his back? “The turning’s happening. Right now, look.” Peter held up his arm and it was flaking dust from his wrist to his elbow like he’d been in the sun too long.

  Diego reached over to touch the skin, but Peter flinched and drew back, turning the wheel sharply to the left. He pressed his foot down on the brake, but his foot hit the accelerator instead, and the car spun out of control—

  And did not come to rest until it had skidded all the way over to the edge of the highway into the Rattlesnake Wash.

  2

  Peter dragged himself out from the car and limped across the Wash. He waited just beneath one of the few standing walls of the Garden of Eden, and watched to see if Correa would get out of the car alive.

  Can’t help you now, Correa. Thought I’d end up killing you as it was with the call getting so strong in me.

  Diego shouted after him, “Peter! Come back, it’s okay, I’m okay, come back!”

  He knew the old man would try and come for him, and Peter didn’t want that. Didn’t want the old man to get infested, either. Who knew the full power of the demon? When he finally came to one edge of a rise, he hid there. Thought he was going to vomit. Is my nose bleeding? Jesus, is my nose bleeding? He wiped at his face, afraid that he might pull his lips off, or his nose, or that his eyes might drool down across his cheeks. His hands were blackened with thick blood. Correa would be fine if he just stayed away. Shit, why did you bring him out here, anyway? A headache was coming on, hard, like a locomotive running in between the right and left hemispheres of his brain, and his thoughts jumbled. To reassert himself, to make sense again, he said, “My name is Peter Chandler, and I am going to protect Alison no matter what.” Down the Rattlesnake Wash, Diego Correa had stopped calling; Peter hoped the old man would just give up and leave him to his fate.

  3

  Diego’s right arm was banged up from being pushed against the dash
board when the car had gone down the embankment, but it had saved his head from smashing against the windshield. He felt exhilarated from the spin and crash. It had made him feel like a kid again. Most people felt the journey in life was toward meaning, but Diego believed it was for moments like this, the out-of-control spinning, of experiencing for a minute life and feeling every cell in your body act and react without thought, without pattern. Spontaneous propulsion into a mystery of existence. “Oh, Peter.” Diego sat on the hood of the car and looked out across the wasteland that had once been the intersection of desert and town. “You have it in your hand. In your hand.”

  Several minutes passed and he listened for the yipping of coyotes, or the sounds of night birds, but this acreage of the desert was silent. The night smelled of nothing. Diego saw headlights approaching from the other end of the highway, and was less startled by them than by what they revealed in their beams: objects strewn around the road, not carelessly, but in neat rows. He did not want to assume they were human skulls even though that was his first guess.

  4

  Nessie Wilcox turned her station wagon up Highway 4—the pavement seemed to have been eaten off, revealing stretches of dirt and gravel that shot up and hit the windshield as she floored it in an effort to just get up the damn hill. From the backseat came the occasional whine of Gretchen, who was used to smoother rides than this. Nessie tried to keep her eyes on the road, to avoid tumbleweed and fallen branches, the trash someone had dumped, even a tire that had been discarded for some odd reason in the center of the already-narrow road. Nessie tried to keep her eyes on the road, but as Stella began talking, unraveling yet another thread of her story, Nessie found her eyes glazing over, found her imagination clouding her vision, and at times she knew she was in her car driving up to Palmetto—