Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  After a few minutes of finger tapping on the arm of the settee, he said, "This is the longest fucking five minutes Time to go exploring."

  4

  But exploring the upstairs rooms in the house brought nothing. "Well, gee, I like this," he said as he opened the upstairs bathroom door and saw the ornate tub with the four clawed feet, "how wonderfully creepy." He glanced in the bathroom mirror, wiping away the dust on its surface. "You look like death warmed over, Mr. Warren Whalen." He combed his fingers through his sticky, greasy hair. He spied a pimple on his chin, amongst the three-day-old whiskers. "Ah, the last vestiges of a misspent youth. And you thought you were too old a guy to get zits," he said as he reached up and popped it between his fingers. "Christ, you're a loser," he said to his reflection, "just another dissolute skirt-chaser gone sour. What the hell did Lily ever see in you?" He turned on the faucet, but the water that came out was a rusty brown. He waited for it to clear, but after a minute it apparently would not, so he splashed some of it on his face. He looked back in the mirror, feeling better with the ice cold water drying on his face. His violet eyes had dark circles beneath them and the lids were puny, he hadn't been shaving and most of his face appeared stained with the wiry stubble. "Once beauty," he said, pursing his lips in a kiss to his mirror-image, "now, the beast."

  That was when he heard the sounds of the piano from downstairs in the living room and he identified the tune as "I'll Be Around," which had been on one of the Billie Holiday records he and Lily used to dance to. She would put her feet on top of his, and he would lead her around the living room and jokingly groan about his "toe bones."

  Warren turned off the running water. He said to his tape recorder: "You hear that? A musician, yet. This guy's talented."

  He went downstairs.

  When Warren returned to the living room, he saw the woman seated at the piano.

  She struck a rather regal pose, in an emerald green silk dress, her auburn hair tucked neatly back with a comb, her skin pale white. She reminded him of a John Singer Sargent portrait, that quiet, authoritative beauty, poised, flattered by the light of the room—and then he noticed her muddy bare feet as she pressed them down on the pedals. She stopped playing suddenly, and turned to face him. "You're here for the party." She said this flatly, a statement of fact. Her eyes were small and sad, her lips thin and a dark carnelian shade that stood out in stark contrast to her paleness. Her nose all but vanished in the surrounding whiteness of her face; two dark nostrils were its only indication.

  "You part of all this, too?" Warren asked, and then remembered his tape recorder. He said, quietly, "I've never seen this chick before. Looks like we're involved in some elaborate setup."

  The woman swiveled around on the piano bench, and stood up, all of this girlishly flirtatious. As she stood, she gathered her dress up above her calves, revealing that not only her bare feet were splattered with mud, but so were her legs. "The rain last night," she said, offering no other explanation.

  "So, tell me, who the hell are you?" Warren asked, loudly, in hopes that this would bring her own voice up loud enough to be recorded on tape.

  But her voice remained soft and sweet, demure. "Let's just say I'm a friend of a friend. You are here for the party, but didn't you bring a guest? A special friend?" She stepped closer to him, and there was that smell that had first hit him when he entered the house, the one he'd just gotten used to, striking him again as she approached. It was an odor that reminded him of an incident from childhood, when he and a friend had opened an old refrigerator in a junkyard, and inside had been a dead possum that must've gotten stuck in there who knew how long. Just that: opening that refrigerator door and getting this whiff of rottenness, making his friend vomit there among the rubbish, and making Warren gag, his eyes tear up. It was a smell so strong and offensive that it made him imagine that he'd been eating that foul thing that had been dead for days.

  Warren groaned, and began breathing through his mouth. The woman was standing less than a foot away. He brought his hand up and covered his mouth. His eyes were filled with tears. "Jesus," he gasped, coughing.

  "The party's downstairs in the cellar. Shall we?" She held her arm out, her pale hand dangling, almost daintily, from the wrist. She barely touched his own hand with the tips of her fingers. He felt a crackling of static electricity in the air; the hair on the back of his hand stood on end. He drew his hand back from the shock and glanced down at the woman's hand. Small, feminine. Warren became spellbound, looking at that small hand of hers, dangling, dangling, hanging as if by a thread from her wrist. Thrust out for him to take hold of, to escort this woman downstairs to the cellar for this party. Dangling. A few tendons seemed to be its only support and connection to the woman's arm, and her arm ended in this bloody red meat stump with the hint of gray bone poking out, ragged, at the end.

  But when he blinked, it was just a normal small-wristed hand, with a silver and ruby bracelet where just seconds before he'd seen the red stump. "Who are you?"

  She smiled; her smile was dazzling, her lips all but eclipsed by brilliant white teeth and the border of pink gums. He noticed when she smiled her eyes seemed to flash from a cloudy gray to a pale green. "Like I said "

  Warren began breathing through his nostrils again; the rotten meat smell was no longer so smothering. It was almost becoming attractive, seductive. "Oh, right, a friend of a friend. Who is this friend?"

  "You know. She's downstairs, our hostess, and I think it's rude to keep her waiting for so long." The woman in the emerald green dress kept her arm extended.

  "Okay, it's your game, let's play ball," Warren said.

  He offered her his arm, and she took it.

  5

  Clare over that weekend: she didn't think much about Warren not returning that Saturday night—she hoped he just went home to his own house. She was getting sick and tired of his clobbering her with every paranoid scheme he could dream up. But Clare Terry was worried, that what went around had finally boomeranged back around, that what her father said was at least partially true. I will at least admit that to myself, that all these nightmares, these daymares, these episodes, add up to something, and either I am going crazy or there is something out there.

  When she hadn't heard from Warren by Sunday evening, she called his house repeatedly, and, on her way back from the Jump 'N' Save out by the highway, stopped at Warren's house on Howard Avenue. His Audi was not in the driveway. There were no lights on in the house, and she honked her horn a few times to see if he might look out one of the darkened windows, but there was no sign of him.

  She did not want to go over to the Marlowe-Houston House.

  Since Lily died last year, Clare had never ventured to that side of Clear Lake; all that was there were bad memories. She did not even like taking her father down to the town side of the lake for one of his cherished walks along the sidewalk on Lakeview Drive, the old house perched on the other side like some wild animal, waiting. When the Marlowe-Houston House had been the headmaster's house, she had spent her first nine years of life there, but her memories of the place were vague, and she felt an indifference to her childhood, those few years she considered "innocent," before the trouble had started; her "episodes" where she saw things that just weren't there. Like the time she was nine and in the cellar. Her mother was angry with her for pouting, but it seemed to Clare that her little sister got everything. Clare hugged her Ted E. Bear to her and cried. Her mother, impatient, told her to go down in the cellar and just sit until she decided to behave like a lady. And that is when the first episode had come; sitting in that cellar. Her father, but it could not have been her father (he had taken Lily into town with him that day), sitting down there in the dark. Touching her in places she didn't like being touched. She had plucked out the eyes of Ted E. Bear because he wasn't supposed to see that, what she saw, and what she knew wasn't real but just an "episode" like what was on television. None of those episodes were real "Big kiss, Clare, come give Daddy a big kiss " />
  No, that never happened, you imagined that just like you are imagining all this. And what would a psychiatrist say about a little girl who was scared that her daddy might touch her the wrong way? I know perfectly well—yuck.

  When Clare had driven around the block, slowly going by Warren's house three times, hoping to catch a light just switched on, she decided to go on home and see if he'd called while she was out.

  He had. When Clare came in the door, Irene Rowe, her father's sitter, was reading the headlines from the Sentinel to Dr. Cammack. "Mr. Whalen called," she said, indicating a message on the coffee table. Irene, her reading glasses propped uncertainly on her nose, continued reading the paper aloud: "'Storm Front Moving To Valley From East,' now, how do you like that, Brian? Who's going to shovel my walk when this blizzard comes?"

  Clare read the note silently:

  Mr. Whalen says that he is over at the old house and not to worry that they are all having a wonderful time.

  Irene looked up from the paper. Her glasses fell off her nose with the sudden movement, but did not go far; the chain kept them conveniently around her neck. "Well, don't look so surprised, Brian, whatever storm is heading our way can't be worse than the storm of '41." Dr. Cammack's memories of the storm of '41 that knocked down all the power lines were among his most cherished, and the older people in town brought that storm up often; Irene, who was herself pushing sixty-six, mentioned to Clare once that her father seemed to remember things from forty years ago with greater clarity than what happened last week. "There's really no difference between his memory and mine," Irene had added, "it's just that he isn't as deceitful about forgetting as I am."

  "I remember the storm of '41," Dr. Cammack said now, raising his hand up as if to emphasize the veracity of his statement. "Men froze to death in that blizzard. They were up in the hills, the fools, anybody who goes hunting in five feet of snow deserves to die, I say. But there was a woman and her three babies who froze to death back in the woods, too, in a log cabin, and the pity of it was the phones were down, so no one knew she was trapped. When someone finally found her, she was holding her babies and they were all frozen solid. I think another woman froze up on Steeple Ridge—women always freeze in blizzards, don't they?"

  "Mrs. Rowe," Clare said; the hand that held the note was trembling so much she had to finally set the note back down on the coffee table.

  "Yes, dear?"

  "This message "

  "He seemed in very good spirits when he called."

  When Irene Rowe noticed how badly shaken Clare seemed, she volunteered to fix dinner for her father and made Clare a cup of herb tea, suggesting she go lie down. "Or I could run you a hot bath; you'd like that, wouldn't you?"

  "Oh, that's not necessary, really," Clare said, recovering somewhat. She lit a cigarette and began taking long drags on it as if she were inhaling pure oxygen.

  "I insist. There's nothing in this world better on a cold night like this than a steaming hot bubble bath," Irene said, and Dr. Cammack nodded in agreement.

  When the bath was prepared, Clare heard a soft tapping at her bedroom door. "Bath's ready," Irene said.

  Clare was just falling asleep on her bed when the woman's voice woke her. It's some kind of Murphy's Law that you can only sleep when you don't want to, and only stay awake when you'd like to sleep. "Thanks," she called out, groggily. The one-and-a-half Valiums she'd swallowed several minutes before were taking effect. She sat up and took her clothes off, letting her skirt remain where it fell next to the bed, tossing her blouse at the closet door. As she went out into the hall, only casually checking to see if Mrs. Rowe had gone back downstairs, she dropped her hose (gingerly stepping out of them), panties, and brassiere in a snaky trail behind her. By the time she reached the bathroom she was completely naked, and the slight chill felt good on her skin.

  The bathroom was steamed over, and it zapped her of all her energy and will as she walked through it. She tested the waters with her foot—boiling hot. Sat on the edge of the tub for a few minutes until she decided she would just have to lower herself in. Which she did, feeling awkward, like a lobster going into a bubbling pot.

  But once she was in the water a tremendous sigh escaped her lips. She relaxed, resting her head against the porcelain back of the tub, while she turned the cold water dial on with her toes to bring down the temperature a bit. Then she turned it off and felt comfortably drowsy. She put her hands behind her head and shut her eyes for a moment—the tension headache she'd had when she read Warren's confusing phone message had vanished with the double whammy of Valium and hot bath.

  And she dreamed, and knew she was dreaming. And dreaming, she remembered.

  She was standing in the cellar of the Marlowe-Houston, again, Founders Day, 1986. Clare realized her own mouth was open in a silent scream, and she was frozen to the spot as she watched her younger sister, Lily, collapse to the floor. Warren was there, too, but he had taken on a canine aspect, he seemed to be growling at her, as if he were guarding Lily. Lily, clutching her stomach, still calling out, "You bastards," mixed with "My baby, oh, God, help me, my little baby," kicking her legs out, blood streaming from between her legs. Clare felt the wind being sucked out of her throat as she watched helplessly.

  Lily began scratching at her stomach, which seemed to erupt as the head of the bloody child emerged from between her legs, tearing through the dress as if this baby were eating its way out of its mother. "God help me," Lily gasped, and then was lost in the pain that overtook her.

  Clare tried to move, tried to change the course of things, but she did, in this dream, just what she'd done in real life: she stood still, trying to breathe, trying to make a move to help Lily. You were trained as a nurse, damn it, do some fucking thing. The others were coming down the stairs from the kitchen: Georgia Stetson, Cappie Hartstone, Maude Dunwoody, Howie McCormick, Prescott Nagle, others that Clare could not identify. Someone shook Clare, she couldn't see who. Clare felt like it was her blood coming out of her own body, that she was watching her own death, the red milky fluid gushing down from between her legs, the squirming, half-dead child, who, with his mother, Lily, would be dead in just a few seconds.

  In fact, it was all over in a few seconds, the screams, the pain, the blood that washed up against Clare's shoes.

  But in this dream (I am dreaming, I am dreaming, I am dreaming) those few seconds seemed to last for hours, the blood flowing from between Lily's legs, washing the dead child—Malcolm was the name they'd picked if it was a boy, and it was a boy—down a river of blood, emptying into an old toilet in the cellar, washing Warren, who had been crouching near Lily, down against that shelf, into that toilet, and now the red tide was pushing against Clare, also. Clare resisted, but she was feeling weak, and now the townspeople gathered around her were trying to pry her from her spot and drown her in that blood that was washing down that drain, a drain that began to gurgle and spit and hiss just like a garbage disposal turned on. They were forcing her toward it, the whole town, all the First Families of Pontefract, and the undertow from Lily's blood.

  Clare finally was able to scream when Lily's baby grabbed her around the ankles with his mitten hands, and licked at her with a wormy tongue. The baby was making sucking noises as he lapped up a trickle of blood that was sliding down Clare's leg.

  Clare was screaming underwater, when someone reached in and brought her up for air. Her eyes stung, and she clawed at the air. She felt a washcloth being wiped across her face, around her eyes.

  "Clare," Mrs. Rowe said, apparently as terrified as Clare. Clare was finally able to focus her eyes on the woman. She coughed water out of her mouth, sitting up in the tub.

  "I'm-I'm all right, thank—" Clare managed to sputter, bringing her knees up to her chest and hugging them with her arms.

  "I was afraid you'd fallen asleep, it's been nearly an hour." Irene dropped her gaze to the water in the tub, gasping, then turned away, embarrassed.

  Clare looked down at the water, also, and th
ere were droplets of red floating among the dissipating soap bubbles.

  6

  Clare took the sheet off her bed that night and slept naked, wrapped in a ragged comforter. She tucked an old white T-shirt of Warren's up between her legs; she was classically out of Tampax, and too sleepy to run out to the Jump 'N' Save again. Clare believed, always futilely, that if she didn't stock up ahead of time on Tampax, maybe her period wouldn't arrive so soon after the last one. She felt like she'd just finished with her cycle a couple of weeks before. One thing she had always envied about pregnant women was the blessed ability to go nine months without a period.

  Her lower back seemed rife with aches and sudden twinges. No amount of twisting and turning on the mattress lessened the frequent stabs of the cramps. At some point in the night, she'd managed to toss her two eiderdown pillows to the floor, and roll across her Ted E. Bear that had no eyes. ("Just like you, Clare," her father had said when she'd plucked the round plastic pieces out of the bear's sockets, "you're our little blind Clare, you have no 'i' like other Clares. You're C-L-A-R-E, not C-L-A-I-R-E." And Clare, crying, rubbing her eyes to make sure they really were there, not quite understanding what her father was saying, replied, "But Lily has an 'i.'" "Yes," her father said, "so the two of you have one eye between you.")

  What the hell does it take to get away from all those damn insecurities of childhood?

  Clare stared up at the canopy over her bed and when dawn came she did not think she'd gotten more than an hour of sleep. She was thinking about her nightmare in the bathtub, what it meant, if she had really spent the last year trying to kill herself: Valium, sleeping pills, thoughts while she was driving (if I just spin the wheel around at this turn), the terrible, overwhelming longing for endless sleep. Tonight in the tub.