The girl, Wendy’s daughter, stands off to the side, watching them. Sniffing them. Diego sleeps in the back of the car as old men must do when they’ve been through such ordeals, and Nessie’s dog stays near her mistress’s blanket-covered body at the car.
“Charlie,” Peter tells the rocks he has just set up to the entrance, “your daughter is wild and born out of nightmares. But she is beautiful.”
Alison looks at Peter, and she doesn’t even have to ask, because they now seem to communicate without words between each other. What are we going to do with her?
Peter does not even have to say it aloud, what he is thinking, and Alison nods, understanding.
“It’s going to be difficult,” Alison says. “What if she can’t live in our world?”
Peter watches the girl as she crouches down near a rock. Around her wrist she wears a watch. She holds the watch up to her ear, listening to the ticking. Time, Peter thinks. “Diego will help us, I think. And she’s mostly human, isn’t she?” But it is hard to believe—she looks so much like her mother—the red hair, the pale white skin, the way she stands. She clutches the tartan blanket they gave her around her shoulders.
But her eyes.
The truth of her, through those eyes.
Not the dark onyx beneath the outer eyes that Wendy had.
But her father’s eyes: blue and clear and human. I will try to be as good a father as you might’ve been, Charlie, Peter thinks, and I will not abandon her.
Alison turns to him, as if reading his thoughts, and even with the welts on her arms and her neck, and the swollen skin on her face and the cuts and bruises and burns, he thinks she is more beautiful than any creature on the face of the Earth and he feels a surge of joy within him even in the midst of this tragedy. Peter takes a deep breath and the air is cool and fresh, and he can feel the sun on his scalp. His hands and arms hurt from all the night and day’s labor. Peter Chandler takes Alison’s hands in his and he feels something he has never known before, although he doesn’t know a word for it: a sense of peace, of having come through the wasteland to the higher ground. Being alive, breathing, feeling her warmth in his hands, like a strong current going through him, getting stronger.
He draws her to him and holds her and she feels what he feels, and it is only the feeling of desert sun and light wind. And something entirely human, too, something that can only exist between flesh and blood and bone, something that has no name, although the closest word Peter can come up with is grace.
For a moment, the man and the woman forget their wounds from the past and turn toward the child, who is watching them with something approaching wonder.
3
The tapes, interview in 1980:
“You want to give birth.”
“I have given birth. I want more than that.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ll tell you now, old man. But one day, when we meet face to face, you’ll see for yourself. And we will meet. My will is strong. I will watch each of you suffer before me for what has been done. What they did to me. What they still do to me, even now. How I brought them into the world of the gods, and how they turned their backs on creation.”
“What more do you want from these boys and this girl?”
“I will never leave them,” the creature says, speaking through the mouth of the boy named Peter. “They believe they have performed some ritual to keep me in darkness. But I will grow in each of them, like a heart growing within their own hearts, until they will not be able to resist my call.”
“And then?”
“My children will walk in the sun. Why should I only live in darkness, or in others’ flesh?” the creature asks, and then the creature goes silent within the boy.
CONTACT DOUGLAS CLEGG
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BOOKS BY DOUGLAS CLEGG
Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.
STAND-ALONE NOVELS
Afterlife
Breeder
The Children’s Hour
Dark of the Eye
Goat Dance
The Halloween Man
The Hour Before Dark
Mordred, Bastard Son
Naomi
Neverland
You Come When I Call You
SHORT NOVELS & NOVELLAS
The Attraction
Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters
Isis
Purity
The Chateau of Devils
The Words
SERIES
THE HARROW SERIES
Nightmare House, Book 1
Mischief, Book 2
The Infinite, Book 3
The Abandoned, Book 4
The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)
Isis (Prequel Novella)
THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES
Bad Karma, Book 1
Red Angel, Book 2
Night Cage, Book 3
THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY
The Priest of Blood, Book 1
The Lady of Serpents, Book 2
The Queen of Wolves, Book 3
COLLECTIONS
Lights Out: Collected Stories
Night Asylum
The Nightmare Chronicles
Wild Things
OMNIBUS EDITIONS
Coming of Age
Criminally Insane: The Series
Halloween Chillers
Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)
The Vampyricon Trilogy
With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.
A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more; his book Purity was the first to go onto a mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.
He is married, and lives and writes in New England in a house called Villa Diodati.
DISCLAIMER
You Come When I Call You is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PUBLICATION CREDITS
Copyright © 2000, 2014 Douglas Clegg
Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.
Cover art provided by:
Damonza.com
Editorial services provided by:
Ashley Davis
Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction
“Clegg’s stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby.”
—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author.
“Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction.”
—Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story and, with Stephen King, The Talisman
“Douglas Clegg is the best horror novelist of the post-Stephen King generation.”
— Bentley Little, USA Today bestselling author of The Haunted.
“Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale…”
—The Daily News (New York)
GOAT DANCE
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las Clegg
ALKEMARA PRESS
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Prologue
WHAT KIND OF SMOKE ARE YOU?
News item from the Westbridge County (Va.) Sentinel, January 3, 1985:
THE LITTLE GIRL WHO CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD
Her name is Theodora Amory, her friends call her Teddy, and the doctors at theWestbridge Medical Center are calling her a modern-day miracle.
Teddy, who is all of seven years old, was ice skating with her older brother, Jake, late yesterday afternoon on Clear Lake, when the ice gave way beneath her. Teddy went through the ice, while her brother struggled in vain to reach her. Several Pontefract Preparatory School students witnessed the accident from the football field and went out onto the ice, forming a human chain to try and aid in Jake Amory's rescue attempts of his sister. But it was Teddy's own father, Riland "Riley" Amory, who arrived shortly upon the scene and dove into the icy water to bring the little girl out of the freezing water just as an emergency unit arrived.
According to Mr. Amory, his daughter was beneath the water's surface for the better part of forty minutes. "But she's an Amory, and her mama's a Houston," he is reported to have told one of the paramedics, "and that means, she'll come through." Teddy was presumed dead by many of the witnesses, but after she'd been covered in warm towels and laid in the back of the ambulance, Mr. Amory administered some good old mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and within seconds, she was breathing again.
Upon Teddy Amory's arrival at Westbridge Medical, Dr. Walter Scott told Mr. Amory, "There's nothing wrong with this little girl. What's she doing in Emergency?"
Teddy, who will remain at the medical center for observation until Tuesday, told the Sentinel, "It was kind of scary and real cold. You know, the kind of scary that gets inside you? I guess I drank a lot of water, too, and my mommy says it's good for you. Lots of water. Maybe scary's good for you, too. Because I guess I knew it would be okay. My daddy says it's in my blood. And maybe it is."
Her father, Riley, Director of Buildings and Grounds at the Pontefract School, added, "My little baby's something else, ain't she?"
Obituary from the Westbridge County (Va.) Sentinel, August 27, 1986:
RILAND "RILEY" AMORY
PONTEFRACT - Riland "Riley" Amory died August 21 in Pontefract.
A lifetime resident of Westbridge County, Riley was Director of Buildings and Grounds at the Pontefract Preparatory School for Boys.
He is survived by his wife, Odessa Houston Amory, and two children, Jacob and Theodora.
But what the obituary didn't say:
A man by the name of Riley Amory, a family man, a man who loved his work, a man who once upon a time took his wife to the Gethsemane Baptist Annual Potluck Supper, took his son skeet shooting, in other words, a regular guy; this man found a clearing on a hillside a few miles outside his hometown. He put a shotgun into his mouth, stroking the barrel lightly against his tonsils, savoring mat rusty coldness as the last thing he would ever feel. He shut his eyes and sent out a prayer for his family and squeezed the trigger.
If you could've been there to ask him, before he did it, he might've told you about the funny smell he noticed in the air. A smell that meant for most folks sweat, lake water, dying fish, and the end of summer, but which for him was a terrible, sweet smell. One that he'd inhaled one winter with a couple of friends. It was a smell that had gotten him high that night, and he'd never felt that young or strong since. That night when all hell broke loose.
Riley might also tell you that one of those friends had come back. That friend was talking to him in his dreams, and recently, when he was awake, too. But always late at night.
That friend told Riley about his daughter.
The power she wielded.
What had crawled inside her underwater.
Riley's little girl.
Teddy.
Something inside her, the thing causing her epilepsy as well as her communion.
But on that lone hillside there was no one for Riley Amory to tell all this to. The blast from his gun was probably not even heard—there was no one within a three-mile radius to listen for it. The last thing Riley saw were some sparrows in the oak tree that he leaned against as he squeezed that trigger.
In the next second, the birds would fly out of the oak's branches into the fair morning air.
PART ONE: DISTURBANCES IN THE FIELD
Chapter One
BONES
December 2, 1986
1
Something snapped inside Jake Amory that morning. He felt his brain flexing, cracking like a whip. Driving him on. He knew that it was all building to this night, this one night. All the digging, all the bones, all the shit he'd been putting up with all his life.
He stepped up onto the front porch of his mother's house. It was three a.m., his usual hour of arrival. Jake might've joked that he still managed to get his eight hours sleep a night because he always slept straight until noon. But he didn't joke about too many things and he didn't talk to too many people. And lately he had not been getting more than three hours sleep a night.
Jake was swinging a gas can in his left hand. The weight of the can felt good to him, and he liked the way the gas sloshed around inside it, splashing him like a light rain. They'd told him no fire, but he figured that he could do it his way, and if it worked that would be all that mattered. The muscles in his left arm ached and even that felt good. He set the can down on the splintery gray boards of the porch and fumbled in his pockets for his house keys. As he pulled the key chain out of the back pocket of his jeans, he felt the heat rising in his hand. Like friction against blisters, the key chain burned and froze his palm at the same time.
And man, it hurts so good. Jake grinned.
It was his good luck charm that caused the weird glowing in his hand. He clutched his fist about it. The keys dangled out from the opening between his thumb and forefinger. It seemed to wriggle in his fist like a worm.
Jake relaxed his fist. He looked down at the thing in his hand.
The human-bone charm possessed a glowworm-like phosphorescence. Just as it had the day Teddy almost drowned two years before (did drown, my man, and something else crawled inside her and came back just like the Creature from the Black Lagoon). That day that Jake opened Teddy's fist while his father bent over her, and there was the bone. How it had shone then like a beacon in the darkness of his life. It was just a fragment of a bone, maybe a toe bone, Jake didn't know; but he did know that it gave him power. He was invincible. And he knew that he would always keep that bone with him. He drilled a small hole at its thickest edge and looped his key chain through it.
And he was never separated from it.
He jingled the keys in his hand.
Jake sought out the house key, but tried the doorknob first. If his mother had been drinking, she would have left the front door open. She was always doing stupid things like that when she hit the bottle. When he nudged the door with the back of his hand, it slid open as if it were greased. Inviting him in. Jake wanted to laugh out loud; this was turning into quite an amusing morning.
What's it matter? Ma's gonna say. No Manson family living in the woods. Them schoolboys got a hell of a lot more money and nice things than us. And if somebody wants to break in, well, God help 'em if they can find anything worth taking, and no lock's been invented's gonna keep 'em out. That's just what she's gonna say.
Why lock your door in a town like this?
Who was even going to hear you scream?
Jake rarely laughed these days, but standing on his front porch like this, gas can at his feet, door open, he wanted to break out in the biggest hyena cackle
he had in him. Instead, he blew an imaginary feather out from between the gap in his front teeth: got to stay in control, man, chill out. But he couldn't help thinking his ma shouldn't do that—shouldn't forget to lock her doors. It was downright dangerous. Anybody could just walk right in. Anybody. Murderer. Rapist. Thief.
Even her own son on a crazy winter morning after he'd spent the past three nights camping out in the field. Just doing some fieldwork, Ma, that's all. Talking with some old friends, if you know what I mean. Having heart-to-hearts with the dead. The dead, he considered, over and over, awestruck that he himself had been chosen by them, the beyond, the out there. The what-will-come. Picked me. Jake.
Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Page 72
