Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  I was perhaps the only one who did.

  Because it was my wife, Cassie, who would always be the object of his affections.

  Cassie was a beautiful woman. It was a shock to me when she accepted my proposal in 1938—I was still an undergraduate at Washington and Lee University over in Lexington. I had no real prospects for the future. She and I got married three weeks before my graduation, and Gower's father, Stone Lowry, gave me a job as an accountant with one of his businesses in Newton. So Cassie and I set up house in Pontefract, and I commuted. I respected her friendship with Gower—he had always behaved honorably. My own family was telling me I was some kind of fool for closing my eyes to what was going on, but I paid them no mind.

  I was in love, and I couldn't see what was coming.

  There was something else, too. About my wife.

  Something that none of us noticed at first. It occurred after a party at the Marlowe-Houston House—Gower's family still lived there, it wasn't turned over to the school until 1951—Dr. Cammack was the first and only headmaster to move into it. And it seems they moved out just as quickly, so it became the useless museum it is today.

  Back to this party—it was in the summer. The Lowrys were always throwing summer parties, and all the socially prominent of the county turned out. Because of my marriage, I was counted among these. Cassie could never hold her liquor, and she'd had too much to drink that night. She suggested that we three—her, Gower, and myself—take a stroll down by the lake. I can't speak for Gower, but for myself I can say I was flying three sheets to the wind, and was up for anything. Remember, I was about twenty-four when this happened, and Gower was eighteen, and Cassie had just turned twenty-two. In spite of what young people think, free spirits were not invented with their own generation.

  When Cassie started taking her dress off over her head, I wasn't all that shocked. We had gone skinny-dipping in one of the quarries outside town; she and Gower had grown up together practically like brother and sister. I was a bit of a free-thinker, I guess. And, I might add, it was very, very dark.

  Soon we were all three naked and in the water, swimming around; and drunk, I swam over to Cassie, and said, "Do you love me?" She didn't answer immediately, I saw the reason. Gower was dog paddling nearby, and I knew she didn't want to admit that she loved me more than she did him. So she responded, "I love you both in your own ways," and she was giggling and Gower was giggling and I was giggling, and I pushed her down under the water's surface. What I didn't know was, at that precise moment, Cassie got a cramp in her leg, and when she came up, went down again.

  I swam around, trying to find her, but I couldn't. Gower also was looking frantically for her, and it was he who pulled her out of the water and carried her to shore. As I came up on land, this was the scenario in the partial moonlight:

  A naked man kneeling next to a lovely naked woman, his mouth against hers in an effort to revive her. She came to rather quickly, and gave him a kiss on the cheek, and by then I was standing over them both. Jealousy had sobered me.

  Two things occurred this night. First, I forbade Cassie to ever see Gower Lowry again, and said we must sever all ties with the family. And second, the taint of Clear Lake had possessed her. She changed in her attitude toward me, but more importantly, she had acquired an ability. Yes, a psychic ability, but something that I chalked up to wishful thinking combined with a powerful woman's intuition.

  Cassie began to predict things that would come to pass. Little things, like the weather, or if someone was going to be taken ill that week. I began to kid her and called her "my witch." "What does my witch see in her crystal ball today?" I'd ask. After a bit of this ribbing, she became secretive. I started working longer hours at the accounting firm (I didn't fulfill my promise to sever every connection with the Lowry family), and when I was home, my wife and I didn't discuss things the way I thought young couples should.

  It was easy enough to find out why, but I was a young fool—I assumed that she had kept her word and did not see Gower Lowry at all.

  Cup, are you done with your french fries?

  14

  The reference to french fries had jolted Cup out of the trance he'd been in listening to Prescott's story. "Wha—oh, yeah, I guess." The two men were sitting in a booth with a cut out of Ronald McDonald staring at them from across the room; one of the girls from behind the counter had come out and was sweeping the floor.

  "Maybe we should be going back now; it's getting late."

  "So that's the connection with Teddy Amory? Your wife had caught the same thing from the lake that this Amory kid did?"

  Prescott said, "I'll tell you the rest on the way home."

  15

  The Rest of the Story, on the Way Home to Pontefract

  I didn't have an inkling that my marriage was in any kind of trouble. I took it upon myself—I assumed that she did not seem very open to me anymore because I had come between a childhood friendship she valued greatly. So I gave her the go-ahead that December, 1940. She could resume speaking with Gower Lowry. In fact, I inaugurated this renewal with a cozy dinner, just the three of us.

  And she and I did begin speaking more, what I assumed was fairly openly. And I became very afraid, Cup, for her sanity.

  She began talking about voices she was hearing. She said they'd begun that night in Clear Lake, like a ringing in her ears. And these voices told her things, some of which she had never mentioned to anyone. People who would die, women in town who would miscarry, words that would be said. And all, she assured me, had come to pass.

  I begged her to go to a doctor to make sure it wasn't some physical problem. She laughed and said, "I'd hardly call prophecy a problem." That Christmas I fell into a great depression—I was literally worrying myself sick. I kept to my bed with a psychosomatic flu from the twenty-sixth through the first of the year.

  And on the day after New Year's Day, 1941, my own brother came by the house and dropped a grenade right in my lap.

  He told me that I'd been the laughingstock of the whole town. That she had made me the laughingstock. Because everyone knew that, right under my nose, my wife was having an affair of the vilest sort with Gower Lowry.

  This information cured me of the lingering effects of my flu virus, and I went immediately to the stables where they were saddling up Lady Day, the mare that Cassie adored. I accused them of everything under the sun, adultery, lying, and that ultimate betrayal among us Southern Gentlemen: dishonor. Cassie went into hysterics—she began crying, telling me that I was wrong, that she and Gower were like brother and sister, that nothing of the sort occurred. She got on Lady Day and rode off down the trail; leaving me there, confused and angry.

  I pulled Gower back inside the stables. I was ready to kill him. Here was this teenaged rich boy who thought he could just steal my wife right out from under me.

  But he told me something, and it was the way he said it that made me believe him. "You've got every right to hit me," he said, "because if anything, I'm guilty. But Cassie is quite innocent."

  He told me that he had indeed been meeting secretly with my wife for the past year, and that their relationship was no longer platonic. If I'd had a gun just then I would've shot him full of lead. Lord, I was even eyeing a pitchfork in the stable as a potential weapon. But, Gower added, Cassie was innocent by reason of an instability of mind which Gower had taken advantage of in the past year. "You see," he said, "Cassie was never willing to consummate our relationship until fairly recently. And only then, when this other woman had taken hold." My blood was boiling, Cup, that word consummate had taken on a hideous meaning for me. But I promised myself as I stood there that I would not disfigure Lowry until after he'd had his say. I would be a gentleman about it.

  "What other woman?" I asked him.

  "Your wife calls her Virginia," Gower told me.

  You see, Cup, my wife believed that she was possessed by this spirit, this dead woman. And in playing on this belief, Gower took advantage of her.

&n
bsp; But, after reading bits of Worthy Houston's diary, you may recognize that name: Virginia. Virginia Houston, Worthy's sister. One of Gower's ancestors. In fact, an ancestor of several of us here in town.

  Well, suffice it to say I thought my wife was positively insane and that Gower Lowry was the vilest creature on the face of this earth. I took the riding crop right out of his hands and thrashed him soundly.

  Then I went off in search of my wife.

  I would not find her for another seven days.

  That winter, in fact that very day, January 2, the worst storm in the history of the Shenandoah Valley came through. The blizzard lasted from the second through the eighth. We formed a search party on the second day of the storm, but came up empty-handed. I kept hoping that after Cassie had ridden off that morning, she had hidden in a nearby shack, or that she'd managed to make it to one of the empty hunting cabins that are spread out throughout the hills before the snow came down.

  But on January 8, we found the horse, Lady Day, practically frozen into the ground on the hill they call Steeple Ridge. But not just frozen. Lady Day, one of the most beautiful mares you'd ever seen, had been mutilated; one of our search party said it looked like someone operated on the horse but forgot to put the vital organs back inside. It was a horrible sight, but gave us a strange kind of hope. We thought that the horse had died from cold and hunger, and Cassie had cut the animal open in order to eat. It was only a thin strand of hope, out of left field, but it was something.

  But before nightfall, we found Cassie's body. Not far from where Lady Day had fallen.

  One of the men in the search party had seen the scrap of red cloth—from Cassie's winter coat—caught on an ice-covered bush.

  And, behind the bush, was a cave. Very small. To call it a cave conjures an image of a large space. But it was barely of a size large enough to accommodate an adult human being.

  We we found her in that tiny crevice in the rocks. She was frozen to death, of course—I had prepared myself for that. The blizzard had taken many lives with it when it came through the valley—hunters stranded in cabins, caught unprepared and not so wilderness-ready as they believed themselves to be—a woman and her children died and were not found until two weeks after the storm ended.

  But it wasn't just that my wife had died.

  She was naked, Cup—had taken all her clothes off and pushed them up into the far end of the cave.

  She had a small pocketknife in one hand, its blade open and bloody. There was blood on the rocks.

  Cup, my wife had frozen to death. But before that had happened, she tried to skin herself alive.

  16

  They reached the exit to Pontefract, and both men wondered if they ought to just drive past it.

  But Dr. Nagle turned onto the overpass and headed home. Neither had spoken a word since Prescott finished telling his story.

  17

  Tommy Mackenzie spent that night in the empty sheriff's office of an equally empty courthouse. He huddled in the crawlspace beneath the sheriff's metal desk.

  He did not sleep.

  18

  Wednesday, January 7, 1987

  IN THE A.M.

  Cappie Hartstone, who decided she just hadn't been getting enough sleep lately, got up extra early to go jogging. Exercise always seemed to help with sleep at night. She'd been having one too many nightmares about Uncle Arthur, and the arguments with her husband, Bill, were on the rise. A bad winter all around with Arthur dying, that nice Mr. Whalen killing himself (although Georgia Stetson didn't think he did it by himself), then the news of the psychotic man over at Patsy Campbell's who she hoped the police had already picked up before he hurt anybody.

  She'd been jogging three miles by 6:30 a.m. Clothed head to toe in fluorescent pink sweats that were just the cutest thing and had been on sale over at the Sweataerobic Sports Shop in Newton, Cappie barely felt the cold air. She slid once or twice on a patch of ice as she turned right onto the Old Carriage Road, but other than that, the bad weather was not stopping her from getting a good workout. Another mile or so wouldn't hurt her fanny.

  The thing she absolutely loved about jogging was the way it allowed her to work off all her frustrations and anger. Cappie realized she had become an unpleasant person to be around lately.

  With every step she took, every time her New Balance running shoes came down on the road, she imagined her husband's face beneath the sole. Bill, with his rash-giving beard, his smug hamster brown eyes, those Dopey Dwarf ears; pound him under yaw heel, into the gravel, yes, Cappie, grind that man right into the dirt like a roach.

  She'd awakened at five a.m., unable to sleep, and wrote in her Day Runner Book:

  Bill yelled at me, and I thought he was going to hit me again, but he didn't. But I could see he wanted to. I know I haven't been the best wife for him, but do I deserve this?

  I really would just like to get away for a while—from him, from the kids, just some down time for ME. But I can't leave. And I don't really want to leave him, do I? I want to kill him.

  Pound! Her heel came down on the road, tearing open Bill's face, smushing his features until you could not tell that it had been a human being under there—the ripped treads from her running shoes left their imprint across his eyes.

  No, she thought as she jogged, I must not be so negative. You wrinkle faster when you are negative. Think positive. Think positive.

  She turned the volume up on her Sony Walkman. It was Olivia Newton-John singing "Physical," and Cappie felt cheery. The sun would be up soon, this was a new day, things always turned out for the best, didn't they?

  It was still fairly dark out, although a purple haze filtered from over the eastern hills. As she jogged forward she saw a man walking up the road toward her—he seemed to recognize her, he waved, and the thought went through her mind while Olivia Newton-John sang in her ears: why would a man in a tuxedo be walking along the Old Carriage Road before sunrise? Was he just coming from a party?

  But then Cappie recognized the man as he came closer, and he was opening something on his chest, it was like a medicine cabinet on his chest and he was opening the doors, pulling them back, but it was not a medicine cabinet, it was his skin, and Cappie stopped jogging, and Olivia Newton-John stopped singing.

  And something came up behind her as she watched her Uncle Arthur show her the inside of his chest just like the little plastic Visible Man she'd given Jason for his science project, but Uncle Arthur's insides were steaming; and whoever came up behind her pulled the Walkman's headphone cord tightly around her neck.

  Cappie Hartstone's throat was crushed ten minutes before the official sunrise. But she did not die. Yet. In another hour she would long for death while something in the pit of a dark cellar fed upon her.

  19

  Somebody was knocking like crazy at Patsy's front door and it wasn't even eight yet. Patsy was watching Good Morning, America and alternating between a cup of coffee (she had run out of RCs) and a MoonPie. Her only boarder, Cup Coffey, had not returned last night, thank God, although this might be him at the door now. Patsy hoped that the man had just fallen off the face of the earth or had been picked up by the police.

  The knocking continued.

  "Is that you, Mr. Coffey?" she shouted from the front hallway. If it was, she thought, she'd boil a gallon of Crisco and dump it on him. After what she'd read in that book of his, practically a horror story, she knew that man was crazy. A real sicko. All that evil stuff he'd written about her nephew Bart, poor, poor Bart who'd never meant anyone any harm.

  And me being so hospitable and all!

  If only she'd remembered that last name sooner: Coffey.

  She glanced cautiously out the front window, but whoever was knocking stood directly behind the door and she could not see him.

  That knocking—it just kept on like he was hammering something into the door.

  "Enough, enough, I'm coming!" Well, if this is the Coffey person I'll just call Sheriff Connally and have this pervert p
ut away.

  Patsy piffled over to the front door, touched the knob and hesitated.

  She took a deep breath, the aftertaste of chocolate MoonPie going sour in her mouth, and turned the knob, swinging the door wide.

  Before she got a clear look at the curious figure standing there grinning yellow teeth, Patsy noticed his handiwork: the screen door had melted down where the man's fingers touched it. She thought he was a black man at first (which put a double-dose of fear in her heart because she'd never had a black man at her door). She reached into the breast pocket of her robe and extracted her glasses. She held them up to her eyes.

  She saw immediately it wasn't any black man. This man seemed charred. As if he'd been barbecued. Exploded from the inside out, and his skin was blistered and falling onto the front porch floorboards even while he stood there.

  She tried to scream, but felt the air rushing out of her lungs with no sound attached, and that sickly sweet-and-sour MoonPie taste. Patsy was about to fall backwards in a genuine faint, but the burnt man reached through the melted screen door and grabbed the collar of her robe.

  "Aunt Patsy," he giggled. Foam spat out from his mouth.

  He wiped his free hand across his lips as if he were very, very hungry, and not for a MoonPie and an RC.