Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  "Now you stop that, Clare," Rose repeated, "if you wrinkle your nose like that it will freeze that way and then won't you be sorry."

  Clare managed to sniff back a sob. "I'm already sorry, Mama."

  "'You're just being evil, Clare, doing that to your sister, saying those things. Just like that awful white trash Amory girl."

  "Please let me come back up, I hate this place."

  "You hate every place, don't you? And those evil stories you told Lily, trying to frighten her about this house—why, you'll give her nightmares! Is that what you want? To give a little five-year-old girl nightmares?"

  "But her baby," Clare said, "I saw it, cross my heart, and Lily, all that blood, and Warren "

  "I don't know who this imaginary friend of yours is, this Warren, but I can tell you I don't like this nonsense one bit, and those evil twisted things about your father " When her mother spoke, gusts of foul warm air blew across Clare's face. The smell was like a backed-up garbage disposal. Clare realized the odor was her mother's breath.

  "Please, I take it all back, let me up—"

  "Not until you start acting like a little lady, do you understand?"

  Clare began crawling on her elbows and knees up the steps while her mother spoke.

  "Why, how dare you say those things. I've known your father a sight longer than you have, let me tell you, and I don't think he plays funny little games with his daughters, I can tell you that. Why, he's a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, and he's an Odd Fellow, you don't find Odd Fellows doing that, and yes, he has a PhD in History from the University of Virginia, an institution, I can assure you, that does not turn out—" Clare's elbows hurt, but her hands were so numb they seemed absolutely useless, like mitted claws, as if there was some jellylike concoction spread over them. The icy water poured down the stone steps across her knees; her skirt was soaked through.

  "Please, Mama "

  "Don't you 'Please Mama' me, young lady, why if I had my way I would discipline you myself, but I am reserving that right for your father—"

  "Mama, please, I love you, I won't do it again, please don't, not Daddy—"

  Clare reached up with all her strength to the top step. Her face a bare inch away from her mother's ankle. She extended her arm into the smoky blue light to touch the hem of her mother's skirt. In the light, Clare saw for an instant what had gummed her fingers together.

  Across the back of her hand, intertwined with her fingers, were dark leeches sucking greedily at the soft white flesh.

  Clare screamed and slapped her hand down hard against the top step. "Please, Mama, no, not Daddy " She grasped her mother's skirt as the slimy worms hung like mucus from her wrist, and then she looked up into her mother's face.

  It was no longer Rose Cammack standing over her.

  It was no longer a skirt. The material shifted, became slightly fuzzy; Clare thought her own tears were distorting her vision.

  The creature that stood above her had no face.

  But Clare recognized the gray flannel slacks and the seersucker jacket and the blue wool cap on the creature's head. And beneath that blue wool cap was a bloody tangle that the creature kept rubbing at with its hands as if trying to scrub the blood and pulp off the skull.

  "Give Daddy a big kiss, little blind Clare, big kiss," the creature hissed. From between its pudgy, skinless fingers that were pressed against its mouth, something emerged. A pink tubular tongue shot out of its maw like a party favor, and then went flaccid as it drooled across its chin.

  5

  It had all been an awful nightmare for Tommy, but that's all it was. He lay in his bed, staring up at the moonlit shadow of the window that pressed against the far wall of his bedroom. He'd awakened because he'd heard his mother coming in the front door, and then his father crying in the hall; Tommy imagined that his mom and dad were embracing as his father said, "Please forgive me, sweetheart, I didn't mean to do that, it was the beer that hit you, not me, I love you honey, I love our family, I don't want to drive you away " And then Tommy, laying his head back into the familiar concave slump of his pillow, heard his mother's response, "I could never leave you and Tommy for very long, you know that " And the words all blended together the way Tommy knew words did when you were still half-asleep and eavesdropping on a hallway conversation.

  Just a nightmare—and what a nightmare! Tommy turned on his side, straining to hear the comforting sounds of his parents as they made up to each other and swore undying love in the hallway. There were no ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, nothing like a rotting corpse had grabbed him in the Henchman Lounge from behind Clare Terry, nothing had dragged him through the sewers to this dark cold place, it had all been a nightmare. And fire? There'd been no fire in the Key Theater—why, his dad must've just gotten off work an hour or so ago.

  In the hallway, his father said: "Why, honey, I must've gotten off work an hour or so ago."

  And Tommy's mom replied, passionately, "And there was no fire in the Key Theater, was there, dear? Just another night of Sleeping Beauty and Dawn of the Dead."

  Tommy was drifting off to sleep again, thinking how wonderful life was, after all, how you shouldn't let your nightmares scare you, they were just nightmares, like the Boy-Eating Spider—it wasn't real, it was just something dads tell their kids to keep them in line, to keep them out of dark alleys, and sewers, and old cellars in empty houses. "The Boy-Eating Spider only eats bad boys," Dad says.

  "Hey, Tommy," a voice whispered.

  Tommy's eyes fluttered closed and then open again. "Huh?" he asked the darkness. He turned over on his other side, his arms sprawling over his head. "Wha?"

  "Itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout," the darkness murmured.

  "Dad?" Tommy pushed himself up on his elbows. He shook the sleep groggily from his head.

  "Tommy?" His father's voice, reassuring in the now-total darkness of Tommy's bedroom.

  "Is everything all right now?" Tommy asked.

  "Itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout," his father repeated, and then again. The darkness around him became physical, stones pushing against Tommy's chest, pressing him into his mattress.

  Tommy heard the closet door creak and rattle; something that sounded like claws scuttled across the floor out of the closet. I don't believe in the Boy-Eating Spider. I don't believe in you. I don't believe.

  "All that matters," his father said, close enough for Tommy to feel his breath against his face, "is that I believe in you, you naughty, bad boy."

  Tommy felt something long and spiny and bumpy stroke his chin (Hey, Tommy), and then Tommy screamed, trying to wake himself up, hoping that there was something to wake up to beyond this nightmare.

  6

  In the dark pit:

  Teddy Amory, her face pushed up out of the cesspool she lay suspended in, slept. Her arms and legs kicked out like a swimmer trying to escape drowning, and her eyes rolled around in their sockets. Her body trembled with the freezing water that she felt inside herself.

  But still, she remained asleep.

  7

  A dream:

  Lily, I love you.

  What kind of monster are you?

  Breeding ground.

  What kind of monster are you?

  He says you killed him. Down in the cellar.

  Do you know what it feels like to burn from the inside?

  Like maggots eating away at you.

  Stingers.

  Suckers.

  You. You. You.

  8

  "No!" Cup cried out and was looking up into Prescott Nagle's face. He lay shivering, leaning against the older man's shoulder. Then Cup said, quietly: "You let me fall asleep." He sat up in the backseat of the police cruiser. George was in the front seat sipping a cup of steaming coffee from a Styrofoam cup. His sixth cup. He did not turn around.

  Lyle Holroyd, giggling, looked back over the front seat, resting his chin against the vinyl seat cover. "They're gonna have us for breakfast
."

  Prescott offered Cup his own cup of coffee. "You let yourself fall asleep. And anyway, it was just a couple of minutes."

  "We have to destroy It," Cup murmured, almost as an afterthought to whatever dream he'd been having. The memory of it had already begun to dissolve. They were parked on Lakeview Drive, almost directly across the lake from the Marlowe-Houston House. The moon's light was scattered by the cloud-cover as snow continued to fall. Clear Lake shone like a bright coin, and the house was like the gaunt, hungry face of a miser waiting for an old debt to be repaid. Watching the town. Waiting.

  Cup rubbed his eyes, but refused the coffee that Prescott offered. He yawned. "Why are we parked?"

  George did not answer; he was apparently lost in his own private world as he gazed across the lake to the Marlowe-Houston House.

  Prescott held up the dusty brown pages. "I've been reading this."

  "Worthy Houston's famous missing diary pages." Cup nodded. "And ?"

  "Worthy found a way to temporarily destroy the Eater of Souls, and perhaps temporary destruction is enough. Even at the cost of our sanity."

  "Ha!" George laughed. He reached over and patted Lyle on the head, who responded like a loyal dog, licking George's hand. "Sanity? What the hell is that? Where do you get it, do you know, Lyle?"

  "Christ, I am so fucking smart, George," Lyle snarled, trying to bite George's hand. George slapped Lyle lightly across his stubbled face. Foam squirted out of Lyle's mouth onto the front seat of the car.

  "Sorry, Lyle," George said. Lyle whimpered and pressed the palm of his free hand against his face, rattling the handcuff that connected his left wrist to the car door handle. "Just trying to prove a point is all."

  "If we can stop this evil," Prescott said, "it will be worth our sanity."

  "I'm insane, you're insane." George grinned into the rearview mirror at Cup. "The Historical Society is now officially the Hysterical Society, isn't that right, Pres? So go ahead, read me the minutes of the last meeting. This Worthy Houston's last meeting, anyway."

  9

  Prescott Nagle Quotes Worthy Houston

  "Worthy Houston encountered this force at the goat dance in the early years of the nineteenth century. His diary, George, basically relates the tale of his father, Stephen, digging up bones in the field and burying them beneath their newly built home. Cup and I have both read most of the diary Worthy kept. But there were these missing pages, which as it turns out are rather crucial to our understanding of the events at the goat dance. Cup and I visited Gower Lowry to get these pages, but he pretended we were crackpots.

  "Only in death did Gower turn them over to us." Prescott said this last with a sigh. "Poor Gower."

  "He practically handed them to us," Cup said.

  "It seems like this Eater of Souls you keep mentioning is a damn nice adversary, 'cause he just helps y'all out an awful lot," George said, and then apologized for the flippancy in his voice. "I mean, it's just so fucking easy to keep these things from attacking us—like that one shot in the Henchman, and even old Hank Firestone " George sounded exhausted; he paused mid-sentence. " I mean, hell, it's like whatever's in that house likes us."

  "They like to play with their food," Lyle sniggered. His teeth were yellow and scummy from froth. "That's what Jake Amory told me, what was left of Jake, what they were still playing with. He told me they played with him, oh, yes, just like a little kitty with a mouse. Play, play, play."

  George, about to say something else, fell silent. He scratched the back of his head.

  Prescott continued over Lyle's chanting of play, play, play. "Gower must've carried these pages near his heart, for who knows how long. He must've been afraid, but perhaps more afraid for his own sanity"—("Yeah," George huffed)—"a fear he might not be willing to admit to someone like me.

  "But, George, this Eater of Souls isn't the brightest of adversaries, because sometimes it is frustrated, sometimes people like Worthy Houston slip through the cracks. And maybe it was Worthy's own insanity that saved him, maybe whatever is inside the Marlowe-Houston House can only wield its evil power over the sane or near-sane. Perhaps a touch of planned insanity would be useful. Because the Eater of Souls seems to be using the thing we fear most against us: the people we have loved and lost. My wife, Cassie, Cup's friend, Lily, and your friends, Frank and Louise. The images of love, to distract us, perhaps? To keep us in our individual cages of denial? Well, I am no good at psychoanalyzing my own self, let alone others. But let us turn now to Worthy, dear, crazy Worthy.

  "He ended his days a drunk, in debt, believing himself doomed to hell, a raving lunatic as many an observer remarked in his day.

  "And still he was able to shut the door on the Eater of Souls." Prescott leaned over so that he was directly under the car's interior light. He held the diary pages almost against his nose as he began reading in the manner of someone exhausted, reading over a recipe to make sure he wasn't leaving out any ingredients:

  "'I have done it and am damned. I have looked into the heart of the heart, to find what manner of hellish creature lay there beating, and it has been my own corrupted heart in a prison of thorns.

  "'I found my sister, sweet Virginia, in the crawling pit wherein our father laid the bones of the tormented Carson children. What could that madman have thought when he buried her amongst the foul water, her face barely risen from the filth as if she herself were come from the grave with the others? Oh, evil day that this house were built!

  "'She was in her fever and dying. Surrounded by the minions of hell. When I came to her, the filth departed from her heavenly form. Virginia was more beautiful then, even close to death, but closer she looked to the angel than to eternal damnation. I felt the stirrings of untethered nature in my loins. The voice of Satan rose up in me and bade me to go to her as man does to his wife. My sister! Oh, weak mortal vessel! Virginia shuddered with a gentle violence as if she and the molten earth were one.

  "'My body was possessed of a vicious animal nature, as if I had drunk wormwood and gall and now longed for the taste of blood. In my sister's eyes I saw the dark impetuous fury of carnal desire, and in her eyes, the reflection of my own.'

  "Suffice it to say," Prescott looked over the page, "Worthy proceeded to rape his unconscious sister. But he was repentant in the same hour. And he decided then that it was too late to save Virginia, so he must do something to end her torment. He used the only weapon available to him, and it was quite horrible although it does make for interesting reading, if you will indulge me:

  "'Born of the same Evil that led the savages to their winter blood feast, and so shall be snuffed out with a funeral pyre as were their demonic revels. I have buried her in kindling, like a bird in its overturned nest—AND STILL SHE BREATHES! I hear her beneath the dry wood, her soft moans and delicate sleeping motions betray her life. Oh, forgive me, Maker of All Things, Judge of All Men!

  "'I have put her living in the tomb!

  "'And now to seal that tomb, to drive out this evil plague from this house, from this abominable goat dance.

  "'I bring the torch to my sweet sister's tenebrous pyre.'"

  "Like the Key Theater," George chuckled absently. "Oh, fuck a duck, Lyle, I'm getting to sound just like you!"

  "Not just a fire, George," Prescott nodded, "a firebomb. Whatever energy is behind this evil, it is highly combustible. Something like—"

  "Gas," Cup said. "I knew that's what I smelled. With Hank Firestone, and even at the Henchman Lounge."

  "The gas," Prescott said, "that the dead give off."

  "But Worthy lived to tell the tale—"

  "Yes, Cup, he escaped his own fiery death by tunneling through the old sewage conduit, the same foul waters that have contaminated Clear Lake. He must've thought at first that the whole house would burn to the ground, and in his later diary, he expresses disappointment that it did not. Of course, some of it burned, but all was rebuilt, and Worthy never returned to the place of his birth."

  Cup shivered involun
tarily. "I hope we're as lucky as Worthy Houston."

  George turned the key in the ignition; the cruiser sputtered, shaking off ice and snow. "We've waited too long, already. Seems I'm as much of a coward as you, Lyle."

  "Heh-heh," Lyle said, because life itself had become a joke.

  "You both saw the note: he says you cheat," Cup said. "That was for me."

  But none of the others was listening. George put the car in drive, and proceeded on the slick icy road, turning left onto Campus Drive, ignoring the stoplight that had frozen into a red orb.

  George parked the car in front of the Marlowe-Houston House. "If it's just fire that'll do the trick here, I've got some flares in the back, and maybe a few bullets will slow this Eater of Souls down."

  "You got silver bullets, George? They gonna eat you and your bullets, heh-heh," Lyle slobbered.

  "Weapons?" Prescott asked. "You think we'll be able to defeat whatever is in that house with weapons? These reanimated corpses have just been puppets, George. Inside there," he pointed to the house, "is whatever is pulling the strings." But still, Prescott reached into his jacket pocket and felt for some object that he could not quite name.

  George raised his eyebrows in the rearview mirror for Prescott's benefit. "What, then? I thought you said fire "

  "We must get Teddy Amory—and any other survivors—out of there, first. Then we can burn the evil out. I'm afraid for the time being the only real weapon we have is already in that house. A door which must be shut."