Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  The lichen-kissed markers were like well-positioned dominoes that had frozen in mid-fall. Some of the older slabs leaned against a few of the newer ones that had been erected between the rows. I scanned the various tombstones. The names that were engraved upon them were all good old Pontefract names: Cavendar, Campbell, Mackenzie, Houston, McCormick, Connally.

  I will admit to a love of graveyards. Their quiet and calm, partial shading always reminding me of a charcoal sketch. Tall, dead grass around the gray and white tombstones, here a marker's legend washed out with too many rains, there, a sober angel whose face is turned eternally skyward, with the inscription, "Commend My Soul," with all else indecipherable.

  Then I came upon the McCammack family plots, some dating back as far as 1787. Gradually, as I moved up-to-date, the name became Cammack, and I found Lily's grave.

  The plain white marker didn't say anything else, beloved wife, beloved daughter, nothing but the dates:

  APRIL 2, 1953–JANUARY 8, 1986

  Then, in small Gothic lettering at the base of the marker next to hers, was the inscription:

  MALCOLM BRIAN WHALEN

  JANUARY 8, 1986

  "WHOSOEVER SHALL NOT RECEIVE THE KINGDOM OF GOD

  AS A LITTLE CHILD

  SHALL NOT ENTER THEREIN."

  The coolness of the day, the dull thudding in my head of caffeine and sleeplessness, my own confusion over this mystery, and the silence, the damn silence of people who die—it all conspired against me. I began crying.

  I was down on my hands and knees reading the fine print of Lily's baby's gravestone. I felt, as I never before had, the loss of a good friend, someone who I wished I had kept up with, someone who had not forgotten me.

  Someone who thought enough about me to have my name on her lips as she died; how many baby names had she and her husband fought over before deciding on "Malcolm"? My own name.

  I felt like I had lost my soul mate.

  I began talking to the grave as if it would hear me.

  "Lily," I said, "come back to me."

  As if to answer, someone standing behind me said, "You see, it's true."

  I turned around to see Dr. Nagle, dressed in a dark and somber suit, shoes caked with mud. He looked as if he hadn't slept all night: circles beneath his eyes, lips drawn tight in a thin string, his skin the color of dirty dishwater.

  5

  Prescott Gives Cup a Ride

  "I guess I knew it was true last night," Cup said.

  "But you still needed convincing seeing is believing, isn't it? Aren't you worried about the mud?" Prescott pointed to the puddles that surrounded the gravestones.

  "How did you know I'd be here?"

  "I told you last night, my old friend Arthur Abbott was being buried today. I saw you through the stained glass," Prescott turned and pointed to one of the arched windows of Christ Church. "But even if I hadn't, I knew you'd be coming out here sometime soon. And I probably would've stayed around, hoping to catch you."

  "Look, about last night "

  "I know what you're about to say, Coffey. Something rather polite, thank me for what information I've given you, and then mention that you have an appointment, or that you're just on your way to It's the way most young people treat people over sixty, and those of us who've hit seventy even worse, and it's a damn shame. You think I'm some kind of crackpot, but I assure you I am not."

  "I wouldn't say that."

  "I know, I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound so harsh—you've had a big shock and I'm just thinking about the time and how little there is left."

  "Until what?"

  Using his black umbrella as a pointer, Prescott tapped Lily's gravestone.

  "January 8th, Coffey, Founders Day."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The date your friend Lily died, Coffey, it's not some arbitrary date. There was some intent behind it. I would even be so bold as to say there's an intelligence. Something 'beyond our ken.'"

  "I'm not following you."

  "And that is precisely what I ask of you right now, Coffey. Follow me a little ways. Can I give you a ride back to Mrs. Campbell's?"

  6

  Prescott drove uptown, turning off onto the Old Carriage Road where it began just above the Main Street-Walnut Road intersection which headed out to the highway.

  "We're going the wrong way."

  "I've lived here all my life, you think I don't know where I'm going?"

  "I didn't say that. Shouldn't we be going down to Lakeview Drive? "

  "Actually, Coffey, I am going to kidnap you for a bit, I hope you're amenable."

  "Well, I am kind of tired, sir, perhaps another time."

  "Let's stop that schoolboy routine, shall we? You may call me 'Prescott' or 'Pres,' but not 'sir.'"

  "Then maybe you should stop with the authoritarian-professor-who-keeps-his-students-at-bay-by-calling-them-by-their-last-names. I've heard that people do that as a sign of contempt. You may call me 'Cup.'"

  "Touch , Cup, and—oh, you're joking, well, I've certainly been hoisted by my own petard, as it were. But I'm quite serious about kidnapping you for the afternoon."

  "And I am very tired."

  "I've packed a lunch for myself in back, some of Maude Dunwoody's ham biscuits and a couple of Cokes. You know me, there's enough for two or three. Some food might revive your spirits. I guarantee, Coff—Cup, you will find what I have to tell you very interesting, especially with regards to the phone call from your friend, Lily."

  Prescott was driving his car along the stretch of Old Carriage Road that came down to the edge of Clear Lake. There was a sheen of ice on the water, and some boys were ice skating on the town side. "They should be careful," Prescott said. He pointed out a few local sites of morbid interest as they drove out of sight of the lake and into a tree-enshrouded section of the road. There was an old hanging tree which was known to have been used as late as 1926 for the impromptu lynching of a fellow accused of all kinds of horrible things. "I was about ten years old then," Prescott said, "but I remember the furor it caused. None of the authorities made an attempt to stop the lynching. The young man that was killed wasn't much over the age of seventeen, and he had been a source of pride in Westbridge County up until the alleged crimes. But I don't think he committed any crime at all. I think the people in this town saw something in that boy. He was beginning to make a name in the area as a tent revival preacher."

  Then they passed the remains of a house, with nothing but a blackened chimney and the foundation left. The ground around it was black. "A more recent tragedy," Prescott said, "someone set fire to it in early December. A rather disturbed family lived there " He hesitated, slowing the car.

  "But somehow it fits," Cup said.

  "How so?"

  "In this grove of trees, with a glimpse of the lake over there, it gives this area the feeling that people shouldn't live here. There's something quite beautiful in it—like a warning to keep out."

  "A haunt " Prescott said. "You're very perceptive, Cup. And look, over there." He pointed toward the lake. As they came around the Old Carriage Road, the lake was once again in full view like the moon coming out from behind a cloud, and there was the indomitable Marlowe-Houston House, looming like a giant over the campus buildings of Pontefract Prep. "People used to make pilgrimages from all of southern Virginia to this lake, even when I was a child."

  "What was it, a spa?"

  "Not quite a spa, but those who wanted to take the Cure, as it were, more often than not came here if the Hot Sulphur Springs over the hills didn't do the trick. Came here for everything from constipation to TB."

  "No one comes anymore?"

  Prescott shook his head. "It's just a lake, Cup, it couldn't compete with doctors and faith healers and mineral waters. More recently county health officials have discovered a problem with sewage, some of which goes right into the lake." Prescott said this almost sadly.

  "And that house."

  "Yes, that house. It does seem to dwarf even the fo
othills, doesn't it? "

  The Old Carriage Road ended abruptly about a quarter mile from the Marlowe-Houston House, which marked the beginning of the campus. There was the football field set off the left, with the two tennis courts just at the foot of the first rise. Before them was an overgrown field, dead grass tamped down by the previous night's rain; the sunlight glinted off this, revealing sparkling diamonds among the weeds and grass.

  "The Old Carriage Road continues, just on the other side of that hill, but was cut off here when the town was rerouted on the other side of the lake. This field before us has gone through several incarnations, Cup. Most recently, the school is turning it into a soccer field, thus," and Prescott pointed across the field where a big yellow bulldozer sat empty, "but it will never happen."

  "Not enough funds?"

  Prescott began laughing. "No, the school never has that problem. Now, I have had my problems with funding, but not this school. No, this field will never become anything other than a field for the simple reason that it is intrinsically a field. Sounds rather Zen, doesn't it?"

  Cup found himself staring at the field.

  "Is something the matter, Cup?"

  "No, not really. But there's something "

  "Yes, it draws you, like you were saying about that wooded area with the burnt chimney back there—'it fits'?"

  "Not that. No. Just the opposite. What is it about an empty field?"

  "Perhaps like the concept of an abyss, there is really no such thing as an empty field. Nature is supposed to abhor a vacuum, after all, so no field is ever truly empty; the emptiness is in us. There, that sounds suitably pompous!" He shifted into neutral and turned the key off in the ignition. The car trembled to a complete stop. "What say we stretch our legs, Cup?"

  7

  "This was the site of an archaeological dig I managed to get some funding for. But it was only temporary funding, Cup, a grant from the state, which is the Fairy Godmother of our local chapter. So I set about researching and digging, using the slave labor of my students to get most of the dirty work done. Now, I'm not the popular voice in Pontefract, I'm an old man with no money who lives in a barn. That's how they see me here. But I wanted to give them history, Cup, history, which is everything to me. History as it really was. But they want it their own way.

  "Now, you and I know that Virginians take to history like a dog to a fire hydrant. But Pontefractors didn't want their cake—they wanted somebody else's. They want a past where Robert E. Lee waltzed with Aunt Bessie, or where Thomas Jefferson kept their great-great-grandmothers well stocked in diapers. They don't want their own history, that of the Scotch-Irish backwoodsman who made this part of the country great. The real pathfinders, the explorers, settlers. People in this town would like to bury all that. And I am afraid that some things just can't be buried."

  Prescott shook his head wearily. "Well, we may as well start lunch—the biscuits and sodas are in the white bag in the backseat. Would you mind getting them?"

  When Cup returned to the edge of the field with the lunch bag, Prescott led him across a thin path, strewn with Coke bottles, crushed beer cans, old condoms ("A popular spot," Cup said), and cigarette butts. There was a broad flat boulder near the bulldozer, which Prescott sat upon and, patting the portion of rock next to him, offered a seat to Cup.

  Cup set the bag between them as he sat down. Prescott opened the bag and pulled out a ham biscuit wrapped in wax paper. "Maude makes the most delicious ham biscuits," he said, "and I've packed enough for an army."

  "I'm not all that hungry."

  Prescott's voice became gentle. "It's been quite a trip for you so far, hasn't it?"

  Cup nodded. His eyes were dark encircled.

  "Are you cold?"

  "Not too."

  "Do you know what this area, from here all the way down to the Marlowe-Houston, used to be called?"

  Cup shook his head.

  "It was called a 'goat dance' and it has quite an interesting history."

  8

  From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

  As Dr. Nagle spoke, telling me the history of this place, I felt a million miles away from the rest of the world. What I didn't tell him when I looked at that field, that empty field, was that I thought I smelled perfume, that jasmine perfume that Lily wore. Even in the dead of winter, that scent of flowers, and I thought if I closed my eyes and opened them again, I would be pressing my lips against Lily's sweat-moistened neck.

  9

  When Prescott finished the first ham biscuit and took a swig from the Coca-Cola bottle, he began speaking again. He noticed that Cup seemed to be listening to him with one ear, and to, or for, something else with the other.

  "It all has to do with the original settlement, Cup. Where we are now. Back in the long ago, the lake would've been a bit farther away, and not so much a lake as two disconnected streams that crossed here and then forked off in opposite directions again. You know the town was built here? Yes, on the school side of the lake; of course, there was no school then 1748. This field was even then a field, but held in with a kind of stockade, a pen and grazing area for the livestock. The town, which properly began over where the football field is, and down to the colonnade, was inhabited by about a hundred people, not many more. And of those hundred, perhaps only a handful of names emerge: Mackenzie, Campbell, Connally, Cavendar, McCammack, Houston, McCormick, and Carson. A lot of 'C' names, interestingly enough. English, Scotch, and one German, although one of the Houston descendants, Mr. Lowry, would dispute my claim.

  "Of those eight families, Cup, one no longer exists. And through my research, and the dig I embarked upon, I discovered why. I also discovered why descendants of those early families seem lazily against my digging around down here, why they are so happy to let the school just smooth it over into a soccer field.

  "Do you understand the concept of a 'taint'?

  "Let me clarify: the lake, for instance, like I said, was once considered a place of miracle waters. Even at the turn of the century, there were country quacks filling bottles with the water and selling it for two bits. But the lake acquired a 'taint.' Not through any rational means; today we could mention the sewage trouble, but not so then. There are places that become tainted just through associations, and so the lake became associated with accidents, drownings. Never more than a body of water might normally have; there will always be someone to get drunk and drive a car on the ice, or get a cramp when they're swimming. But these stories about the lake stuck, until Clear Lake became connected to something that wasn't good in folks' minds.

  "So, also, this field has acquired a taint over the years. It is not a place to go digging around in, evidently.

  "I believe there is a good reason for this, and white men first encountered it just over two hundred years ago.

  "Imagine yourself in those first settlers' shoes. And some of them didn't have much in the way of shoes. They were poor. They came from families who had never had much, and suddenly they arrive in this area and are landowners with huge acreages, and the only things keeping them from more and more land is the labor and time it takes to clear the forests and the Indians.

  "All this meant possibilities for them, for their children, their grandchildren. They owned property. They lived on the edge of a vast wilderness. They could organize their own governing bodies with very little intervention from the Augusta County officials, miles away.

  "It was a life of struggle and hardship, but also of great hope. And these eight families came to this wilderness, cut trees, built homes, stockades, raised crops, animals, families.

  "In the first three winters, twenty children died from various ailments. If you lived to see eighteen years you were probably strong enough to last another forty. Twenty children, however, out of a hundred people is a sizable chunk. These people were tough, though, survivors, but to have all these children die in such a short period of time, it must've been sobering for the community. Don't forget, children weren't the economic liability they
are perceived as today; in the mid-eighteenth century, your sons would help run the farm, daughters helped in the house. But most important, in a population of eighty or so settlers, a fear existed which we can't appreciate today, the fear that your name might die out, that the work you've begun will not be continued into the next generation.

  "Which makes what happened in that fourth winter even more horrifying."

  10

  "I hope I'm not boring you, Cup," Prescott said, interrupting his story.

  Cup was finishing a ham biscuit, and Prescott was happy to see that the young man had found his appetite. "No, really, if I had known that history was so fascinating I wouldn't have skipped it so much."

  Prescott laughed. "If only our local residents shared your sentiments. But, again, it's not what they want to hear about. There's a diary, kept by one Worthy Houston; Gower Lowry donated it to the Historical Society, not realizing what subversive material it contained. That diary was a godsend as far as my research went. Worthy Houston lived on this side of the lake, in the Marlowe-Houston. He was writing in the early 1800s. His father had been brought up in the old settlement and told his son stories. Worthy's father called the stories 'visions' and in his sixtieth year, his father blinded himself to keep from seeing any more of these visions."

  "Getting kind of Gothic," Cup said.

  "Yes, rather. Worthy, bless his heart, recorded his father's stories as well as other eccentricities of the family. When I discussed the diary with the Society, which interestingly enough is composed of the descendants of those founding families, it was rejected as the 'wild imaginings of a mental defective,' and this from Worthy's own great-great-great-whatever grandson, the eminent Mr. Lowry who thought the diary such a grand contribution to begin with. And perhaps that was correct, perhaps Worthy Houston was mentally ill; he was certainly mentally depressed, any amateur psychologist could tell you that from reading the Edgar Allan Poe-ish sorts of things he jotted down. You see, Cup, when I first sat down to read his diary I thought he was making a crude attempt at some fantastical fiction. I thought he was a deluded teller of tales. What he wrote, frankly, was unbelievable."