Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  In his leaking brain, he shouted: ONE MIND!

  16

  Cup

  Cup looked above him, and the top edge of the pit seemed to be shrinking like the aperture of a camera when it is flooded with light. Maggots fell into his hair as the entrance began closing; he shook them off, holding Teddy closer to him. Water gurgled across the boggy floor.

  Shit! We're going to be buried alive with these things in this septic—

  Then Cup remembered. The taint of Clear Lake, what Dr. Nagle had guessed was "sepsis." A poisoning of the lake by the occasional emptying into it of human waste—Jesus, and here I am up to my neck in the shit. But it had a way

  A way out, there must be another way out. When Worthy Houston set his sister on fire, he escaped burning himself through the underground tunnel his own father had dug—the septic conduit, it was large enough for Worthy Houston, and if it hasn't collapsed over the years, maybe we can make it, maybe

  Cup heard a roar, as if a lion had been let loose upon the world above him, and he glanced back up at the now-tiny entrance to his fecal hell, and there was a bright blaze of yellow and searing white cutting through the opaque blue of the gas, and Cup knew:

  Fire.

  Holding Teddy Amory, who kept her face pressed in his shoulder, Cup hunched over, crawling along the slim trickle of water like Ariadne's thread down one of the tunnels of the underground. He began digging with his one free hand, carving his way through the yielding muck, and that trickle became a creek, and as he kept digging out the tunnel, the creek became a stream and Cup wondered if he wasn't digging his own grave.

  He heard a hissing sound behind him, like steam on a hot burning coal. He recognized that sound just as if it were a distinct voice. Cup had heard it before, when he was sixteen and dreamed of fire and watched a million suns burst across Bart Kinter's dancing electrical corpse. "I know what kind of monster you are!" that thing inside Bart had cried out, and then: "Do you know what it feels like to burn from the inside out? It's like maggots crawling under your skin, maggots with stingers and suckers boring through you, eating their way out, slow at first, real slow "

  Cup's hand came through to the other side, numbed by the water that poured across his fingers, washing them of the filth; he turned and looked back over his shoulder to the source of that menacing sound. If I could just get Teddy out there, on the other side of this, into the water, maybe she would be safe, maybe she'd find her way out, if I block this up so the Eater can't get to her.

  Cup knew in the instant before he glanced back that now, at last, he would meet the Mother of Nightmares, the Eater of Souls, what Worthy Houston had called the Goatman.

  The Evil that existed outside himself.

  Incarnate.

  It would probably kill him.

  And still, he turned to face It.

  17

  Clare

  The Marlowe-Houston House was melting back to its former shapes, as Tommy and Clare rushed out the back kitchen door, to the veranda, stumbling. In Clare's mind's eye (one mind, she thought) she saw the innocence that the Marlowe-Houston House had never possessed, that it never could possess wholly, because its foundations were on this field, this graveyard birthplace of the Eater of Souls. This goat dance, the empty field that was not realty empty. It was full of crawling evil things, of plagues waiting to be born.

  The Marlowe-Houston House was just an old house now, but it would be a house no more.

  As Tommy pushed her through the open back door, and Clare stumbled across the veranda, bumping her head against what she assumed was a wooden column, she heard an explosion and was suddenly and inexplicably flying through the air.

  Behind her, the Marlowe-Houston House exploded like a giant blood-engorged leech against the brilliant sunrise that had finally emerged.

  Epilogue

  WHAT KIND OF SMOKE ARE YOU?

  Survivors

  1

  They found Cup clutching the girl to him as if in his last moments he had cracked the ice and pushed her above the surface of the lake.

  Clare knew where he would come out before the others; she saw in her head and directed Tommy where to go to find Cup and Teddy. She clutched Tommy's hand, and although the boy had sprained his ankle when the house burst into flames and knocked them all across the snow-covered backyard, he limped along (clinging to Clare as much as she was to him) ignoring the pain. Later Clare would make the excuse that she had practically grown up in the Marlowe-Houston House and knew every inch of the grounds, but this didn't explain completely how she knew to step over the bricks and splintered wood that lay in the snow like the aftermath of some violent battle.

  The house itself had exploded outward in its first convulsions of death; the gas from the decomposing bodies and the vermin in the dark pit beneath the house was spent quickly, and the fire seemed to die away after that initial blast. Billows of gray smoke steamed up, blocking the sun.

  When the Last of the Hysterical Society came around to the front yard facing the lake, Tommy saw the girl and the man he knew to be Teddy Amory and Cup Coffey, entwined like they were each halves of some design, trying to pull together. Neither of them moved.

  Tommy let go of Clare and ran along the shoreline to the bodies.

  Cup was lying face down, soaked to the skin with an icy glow of water, and when Tommy turned him over, he barely recognized his features; the young man had burns all over his face.

  The naked girl lay shivering in the snow beside him (alive, Tommy sighed, some of us are ALIVE), still hanging on to him with her arms. Her hair was stringy and filled with tiny ice particles that twinkled like diamonds. Tommy, his eyes blurry with tears, tried to pull her away from Cup, but she would not let him go.

  "Good," she gasped. "I can good it can bring make strong " She stuttered, her teeth chattering from the cold, "B-b-blue b-b-blue," and she found the blue that she was looking for in Tommy's eyes, and he felt as if he were being sucked out through those eyes as the little girl stared transfixed into them.

  Teddy Amory saw blue, dreamed blue water, dreamed a never-ending sky of clear blue, and she felt her dance coming on.

  2

  Clare knelt down in the melting snow, exhausted and shivering. She saw in her mind's eye what Teddy Amory herself was experiencing:

  Behind Teddy Amory's eyes, the world became blue, and she crashed back through the frozen ice, but not that of the lake tonight, but that lake before, when she'd almost drowned beneath that chilling water. Her mind flexed like an atrophied muscle, and she was no longer a little girl, but an entity, something outside herself, something good, invading her very being, through the pores of her skin, through her mouth and nostrils, she breathed in that Pure Good. The power that the bad thing in its jealous rage had tried to steal from her, had tried to turn into something bad. Because she had let it. But Torch had taught her: IT CAN B GOOD, IT CAN B GOOD. MAKE U STRONG.

  Teddy breathed better beneath the water than she ever had before.

  But she was there for a purpose.

  She'd done this for a rat her brother had killed.

  She'd done this for a dead cat that her friend Torch had brought home for her.

  And now she must, must do it for this man who awakened her from the endless night, who had brought her out of her living grave.

  She saw the man burning beneath the water. She sliced her hand through the heavy water and reached out to him.

  Burning, he began to split into two different men, each looking alike, each burning, and each man stretched an arm out to her.

  One of them was that Bad Thing, the thing that had gotten into Jake, the thing that had brought her to the house and buried her in that slimy place with the creepy-crawlies.

  She grabbed the hand of that man who seemed to be burning most, who seemed to not understand why she reached for his hand, who almost flinched. I AM A MONSTER! he cried.

  She hoped she was making the right choice.

  She did not want to deliver the Bad
Thing into the world of the living.

  As she touched the man, flames sprouted along her arms as though his burning were contagious. Teddy felt that Power inside her flow like water to him in exchange for his fire. The fire itself did not burn her, but extinguished itself in a blue aura surrounding her body.

  Clare screamed, falling into the snow as if she had just been struck down by this shared vision between her and Teddy.

  3

  Teddy was coming down from her seizure. Tommy wiped her forehead with his hand; he was sure she would die of pneumonia after coming out of that freezing lake. The girl no longer clung tenaciously to Cup. Tommy pulled off his sweatshirt and wrapped the girl in it. He lifted her up. She was very light.

  Then he heard the noise gurgling like boiling water from the dead man's throat.

  Cup Coffey opened his eyes and looked up into Tommy's face, and before the pain of his burns, before he vomited up the water he had drowned in, he saw Teddy Amory's face and knew that she had brought him back.

  "Shit," Tommy said, his voice tinged with a weariness as if aware that some task was still not finished, "he's one of them now." Tommy lifted a brick from the rubble that had showered the area. He raised it, prepared to bring it down on the man's face. He wondered when it would end. When the evil that had drunk the lifeblood from this town would truly be destroyed. He saw brief flashes of the Boy-Eating Spider, his father whispering in the dark, saw Rick Stetson in the Key Theater, his face torn.

  Something in Tommy's mind snapped like a boot coming down on a dry twig in a silent wood. Enough!

  Teddy Amory cried out, "No!" She shivered beneath the sweatshirt Tommy had covered her with.

  Tommy looked back to Clare who was kneeling as if in prayer. She seemed to be looking directly at him with uncertainty.

  "But he's one of them now," Tommy whispered, not wanting to hit the man with the brick. But I have to, he was dead, and now he's alive. Beneath the shadow of the brick, Cup was trying to say something, trying to move, but he was too weak.

  Clare held her hand out in a halting gesture. "No, Tommy," she said. "I think—I know he's one of us."

  4

  March, 1987

  From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

  SPRING!

  So it is over.

  I've been in this hospital in Newton for what is it—nine weeks? But my strength is back, my skin seems to have healed quite a bit from the burns. Only my memory of this past winter continues to scrape back the scars inside me that have yet to fully heal. And all the pain of these treatments. Still, pain is never bad when it means you're healing. It passes more quickly than you'd think.

  The pieces of what happened in those last few moments beneath the burning Marlowe-Houston House have been drifting in and out of my mind like a dream that can only be remembered in fragments. Fragments of pieces; I remember very little of the feeling that accompanied it. Fear, outrage, terror, wonder, awe, repulsion? Any and all of those perhaps.

  I remember crawling along, holding the Amory girl as if she were my lifeline and I, hers. Trying to dig out through the muddy tunnel to the source of trickling water, and then hearing that noise behind me. And knowing that back there was the Eater of Souls.

  And turning. Turning around to face something I would rather not have faced, I would rather have left buried.

  When I turned around in that small dark tunnel, I pushed Teddy Amory ahead; if I was the key and she was the door, then what was most important was not whether I survive or whether she survive, but that one of us survive. If the Eater of Souls had both of us, I was positive It would be able to open the door wide and in Its own words, "Be closed no more forever."

  What I saw when I turned around in that well of human excrement was a young man of about twenty-eight, who had spent the last twelve years of his life underground, his hair matted with feces, his skin blanched worm-white, clothed only in the filth from which he came. His face running with sores, his mouth flapping dumbly.

  His brown eyes glowing with a feral intensity; a need for freedom from this sewer prison.

  I saw myself, my corrupted self, my brooding, nightmare cousin, what had been festering in the bowels of this miasmic earth since the night Bart Kinter had died. The evil I had disturbed then had taken hold of that part of me that was open to corruption and planted that seed into its fertile heart. Neither a ghost nor the worm of corruption, the Eater of Souls in its shape-shifting splendor had taken on the aspect of my own mirror-image.

  I don't remember my feelings then: horror, disgust, fear. But I knew that this thing must be destroyed once and for all. This thing that was not me but in its jealousy and anger had wanted to be the distorted mirror of my soul.

  Behind this creature, burning maggots crawled in feeble attempts to escape from the inferno that raged above us. They were Its own children, those worms, catching fire that brought destruction down upon the Eater of Souls, for they crawled to their master and surrounded him, surrounded us both, with a ring of fire.

  But Teddy Amory was out of that ring—she was pushing her way through the mud, to the cold stream, into the sewer that bled to Clear Lake.

  I have heard that a scorpion, when encircled by fire, will sting itself to death. Watching this warped image of myself—this young man whose very existence seemed smudged with nightmares and vengeance—was like watching a scorpion's own stinger come down against itself.

  This Eater of Souls tore into Itself as fire from Its crawling minions burst across Its overgrown greasy hair. It swatted at leeches that attached themselves to Its feet.

  I watched my corrupted self die. Burning, Its jaws gaping in a soundless scream of fury and agony.

  I let It die, and that, I suppose, is what It did not expect. It had no power to re-create those images of love and hate (Lily Cammack and Bart Kinter) which had for so long haunted me, and so I watched this Eater of Souls scratch at Its fiery open wounds, even as I felt the first tickle of fire across my own hands and face.

  But I knew Teddy Amory would be safe; that whatever enormous evil power this cursed spirit wielded would not be fulfilled through any butchering of innocent children.

  The last thing I remember, other than that mindless demon devouring Its own skin in an effort to rejuvenate Itself, was the heat of fire and then the clean, cool wash of icy water across my back.

  And I knew: I am not afraid to die.

  Then, waking upon the shore of Clear Lake, a boy I barely recognized holding a brick over my head. But I knew something in my blood: that Teddy Amory had brought me out of that fiery underworld through the freezing water of the lake, and breathed life back into me.

  Through whatever "taint" that little girl possesses, my soul was restored.

  Did I ever see the true Eater of Souls? Did I ever tear the mask off the creature and see the nature of the Evil buried there at the Goat Dance?

  Where Evil is buried, one should not go digging.

  You may ask: What kind of smoke are you?

  And I will tell you: It is enough that there is smoke. Nobody needs to look into the hellish pit where the smoke comes from. Some doors are meant to remain closed. Forever.

  I see the others now, the survivors of what the newspapers are evidently calling an event of "Mass Hysteria" and "Spontaneous Combustion." The nurses here try to keep the papers and the reporters away. I suppose they are more interested in the story about the fictitious plague that was going around Pontefract—and I understand that some of the residents returned less than a week after they'd left, which I guess is okay. But not all the residents have returned. Some are missing, some are not even missed. People who live in towns like Pontefract become tied to the land; it is their lifeblood, and they live within a stone's throw of their great-grandfather's original homestead, they visit the graves of men and women who died before the Civil War. In a town like Pontefract, history is alive. And now the Dead only walk in dreams. Pontefract Prep is back in session, although it is advertising for a new headma
ster and a few teachers. I miss Prescott and George; I cannot begin to fathom those tragedies. I dreamed last night of them, and Prescott reminded me, "Do not despair, for all men must die."

  A nurse escorts Clare in here, and then leaves us alone for a while.

  Clare brought Teddy in a few times, although I guess I should say that Teddy brought Clare in. Clare is blind now, also suffered burns around her face, although not as bad as mine. All four of us—Teddy, Tommy, Clare, and I—know about that power Teddy has. But she will have to learn to be careful with it. The Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach has accepted her for a long-term study.

  Tommy doesn't visit much; maybe he has once or twice. I don't blame him. He and his mother live in Roanoke now, just over the hills, and the last time he called to ask how I was, he said: "I don't have the nightmares anymore, I just want you to know that. I'm not great, but I'm breathing. Do you know? Breathing." And I told him I did know, because I wasn't great, either, just breathing.

  That's better than the alternative.

  When Clare comes to the hospital we haven't been able to laugh too much together, but when we do, it is a good laugh and I am left with a glow for days from her visits. She is still staying in Pontefract, with Teddy, at Prescott's barn house—who knows for how long. I don't blame her for not wanting to return to her father's house. I asked her why she was even staying in Pontefract at all—why any of us would want to—and she replied, "Because there's really nowhere else now."

  Yesterday Teddy told me a joke, and although it was dumb and I'd heard it before, I laughed because of the way she told it.

  It feels good when I can laugh, it is like the pain of healing.