“Later, I heard that it was some test that had leaked out. Some underground nuclear testing. We were all exposed, those who survived. Never saw Skimp or Ralph again, and I was told they were transferred—back in those days, no one investigated anyone or anything. I knew they’d died, and I knew how they’d died. There were times I wished I’d died, too. Every day.
“That’s when I learned about my divinity. It was like Christ climbing the cross—he may or may not have been God before he climbed onto that cross, but you know for sure he was God once he was up there. I wasn’t God before that day, but afterward, I was.”
Hype was a terrific storyteller, and while I was in awe of that ability, I stared at him as if he were the most insane man on the face of the earth.
“So I found a way out,” he concluded.
“If that’s true, how come you don’t get out?”
“It’s my fate. Others can go through, but I must stay. It’s my duty. Trust me, you think God likes to be on Earth? It’s as much an asylum out there as it is in here.”
I was beginning to think that all of this talk about going through and getting out was an elaborate joke for which the only punch line would be my disappointment. I decided to hell with it all: The old man could not get me out no matter how terrific his stories were. I was going to spend the rest of my life with Joe pawing me.
I went to bed early, hoping to find some escape in dreams.
I awoke that night, a flashlight in my face.
10
Joe said, “Get up. This is what you want, right?”
His voice was calm, not the usual nocturnal passionate whisper of the Joe who caressed me. He hadn’t touched me at all. I was somewhat relieved.
“Huh?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“You want to get out? Let’s go. You’ve got to take a shower first.”
I felt his hand tug at my wrist.
“Get the hell up,” he said.
* * *
The shower was cold.
I spread Ivory soap across my skin, rubbing it briskly under my arms, around my healing wound, down my stomach, thighs, backs of legs, between my toes. Joe watched me the whole time. His expression was constant: a stone statue without emotion.
“It doesn’t have to end like this,” I said. “I’m going to miss you.”
“Shut up,” he said. “I don’t like liars.”
After I toweled off, he led me, naked, down the dimly lit hall.
The alarm was usually on at the double doors at the end of the hall, but its light was shut off.
Joe pushed the door open, guiding me along. The place seemed dead.
Hearing the sound of footsteps in the next ward, he covered my mouth with his hand and drew me quickly into an inmate’s room.
Then, a few minutes later, we continued on to the cafeteria.
He had a key to the kitchen; he unlocked its door.
I followed him through the dark kitchen, careful to avoid bumping into the great metal counters and shelves.
Finally, he unlocked another door at the rear of the kitchen.
This led to a narrow hallway.
At the end of the hallway, another door, which was open.
Hype stood there, frozen in the flashlight beam.
11
“Hey,” I said.
Hype put a finger to his lips. He wore a bathrobe that seemed shiny purple in the light.
He turned, going ahead of us, with Joe behind me. I followed the old man down the stone steps.
We entered the old Aurora, the one that stretched for miles beneath the above ground Aurora. We walked single file down more narrow corridors, the sound of dripping water all around.
At one point, I felt something brush my feet—a large insect, perhaps, or a mouse. The place smelled of wet moss, and carried its own humidity, stronger than what existed in the upper world.
For a while it did seem that Hype had been right:
This was the deepest ring of hell.
But I’m getting out, I thought. I’ll go through any sewer that man has invented to get out. To go through. To be done with all this.
Joe rested his hand on my shoulder for a brief moment. He whispered in my ear, “You don’t have to do this. I was wrong. I love you. Don’t get out.”
I stopped, feeling his sweet breath on my neck. Even though I had been in Aurora only a little over four months, I had begun getting used to it. If I stayed longer, I would become part of it, and the outside world would be alien and terrifying to me. I saw it in other men, including Joe. This was the only world of importance to them.
“Why the change?” I asked.
“You don’t want to go through. I want you here with me.”
“No, thanks.” I put all the venom I could into those two words. I added, “And by the way, Joe, if I had a gun I’d shoot your balls off for what you did to me.”
“You don’t understand.” He shook his head like a hurt little boy.
Hype was already several steps ahead. I caught up with him while Joe lagged behind.
“I’m going out through that hiding place you talked about,” I guessed.
“No,” he said. When he got to a cell, he led me through the open doorway.
A feeble light emanated within the room—a yellowish-green light, as if glow-worms had been swiped along the walls until their phosphorescence remained.
It was your basic large tank, looking as if it had been compromised by several earthquakes over the past few years.
Joe entered behind me. “This is where Hype and his friends lived. This is where it happened.”
He waved the flashlight beam across the green light.
I shivered, because for a moment I felt as if the ghosts of those men were still here, trapped in the old Aurora.
“Tell him, Hype. Tell him.”
Hype wandered the room, as if measuring the paces.
“Ralph had this area. He had his papers and books—he was always a big reader. Skimp was over there,” he pointed to the opposite side of the cell, “his submarine deck.”
“Tell him the whole thing,” Joe said.
In the green light of the room, as I glanced back at Joe, I saw that he had a revolver in his right hand.
“Tell him,” he repeated.
“Where the hell did you get that?” I pointed to the gun.
“You can’t ever go back,” Hype said. “Once you’re out, you can never go back. I won’t let you back. Understood?”
I nodded. As if I was ever going to want to return to Aurora.
“Tell him,” Joe said to Hype. This time he pointed the gun at Hype.
Then, to me, he said, “The gun was down here. I get all my weapons here. We get all kinds of things down here. Hype is God, remember? He creates all things.”
‘To hell with this,” I said, figuring this bad make believe had gone too far. “You can’t get me out, can you?”
Hype nodded. “Yes, I can. I am God, Joe. Those underground tests, they made me God. They were my cross. I’m the only survivor. The orderlies, the doctors, the patients, I’m the only one. That’s when I became God.”
“You want to get out, right?” Joe snarled at me. “Right?” He waved the gun for me to move over to the far wall.
Hype turned, dropping his robe.
Beneath it he was naked, the skin of his back like a long festering sore. The imprint of hundreds of stitches all along his spine, across the back of his rib cage. To the right of this, a fist-sized cavity just above his left thigh.
“Tell him,” Joe said.
The old man began speaking, as if he couldn’t confess this to my face.
“Inside me is the door. The tunnel, Joe. To get through, you’ve got to enter me.”
The must vulgar aspect of this hit me, and I groaned in revulsion.
Joe laughed. “Not what you think, Doer. Not like what you like to do to me. Or vice versa. His skin changed after the tests. Down here, it changes again. Look—it’s like a river
, look!”
At first I didn’t know what he was pointing at—his finger tapped against Hype’s wrinkled back.
Then, before I noticed any change, I felt something deep in my gut.
A tightening.
A terrible physical coiling within me, as if my body knew what was happening before my brain did.
I watched in horror as the old man’s skin rippled along the spine. A slit broke open from one of the ancient wounds. It widened, gaping.
Joe came closer, shining his flashlight into its crimson-spattered entry.
It was like a red velvet curtain, moist, undulating. A smell like a dead animal from within.
The scent, too, of fresh meat,
Joe pressed the gun against my head. “Go through.”
My first instinct was to resist.
Seconds later, Joe shot a bullet into the old man’s wound, and it expanded further like the mouth of a baby bird as it waits for its feeding.
Joe kissed my shoulder. “Goodbye, Doer.”
He pressed the gun to my head.
The old man’s back no longer seemed to be there; now it was a doorway, a tunnel toward some green light. Green light at the end of a long red road. His body had stretched its flesh out like a skinned animal, an animal-hide doorway.
With the gun against my head, Joe shoved me forward, into it.
I pushed my way through the slick red mass and followed the green light of atomic waste.
Once inside, the walls of crimson pushed me with a peristaltic motion deeper, against my will.
Tiny hooks of his bones caught the edge of my flesh, tugging backward while I was pressed into the opening.
12
We are all in here, all the others who got out through him.
Only, “out” didn’t mean out of Aurora, not officially. We’re out of our skins, drawn into that infested old man.
When I held the reins of him for an afternoon, I got him to go down and bribe the psych tech on duty.
I pulled up both of their files, Joe’s and Hype’s.
Joe was a murderer who had a penchant for cutting wounds in people and screwing the wounds. This was no surprise to me. Joe was a sick fuck. I knew it. Everyone who’s ever been with him knows it.
Hype was a guy who had been exposed to large amounts of radiation in the fifties. He had a couple of problems, one physical and one mental. The physical one I am well aware of, for the little bag rests at the base of my stomach, to the side and back. Because of health problems as a result of the radiation, he’d had a colostomy about twenty years back.
The mental problems were also apparent to me once I got out, once I got through.
He suffered from a growing case of multiple personality disorder.
I pulled my file up, too, and it listed:
Escaped.
I had a good laugh with Joe over these files.
Then God took over, and I had to go back down into the moist tissues of heaven and wait until it was my turn again.
* * *
There are prisons within prisons, and skins within skins. You can’t always see who someone is just by looking in his eyes.
Sometimes, others are there.
Sometimes, God is there.
“I am infinite,” the old man said. “I contain multitudes.”
Want More?
Read Night Asylum, 18 Stories of Mystery & Horror.
Click here to learn more.
* * *
MEET THE INMATES
* * *
Mysterious children surrounded by houseflies; a strange woman in a small town stalked by a preacher; boys trying to survive a terrifying boot camp; fraternity brothers who find a deeper brotherhood during a wintry Hell Week; a boy named Charlie, who may have more up his sleeve than meets the eye; a cop named Paul who discovers a tenement that opens the door into a place of nightmares — or heaven; Nix — a patient in an asylum — who holds the key to the secret geometry of night itself…and more.
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Also by Douglas Clegg
Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.
* * *
STAND-ALONE NOVEL
* * *
Afterlife
Breeder
The Children’s Hour
Dark of the Eye
Goat Dance
The Halloween Man
The Hour Before Dark
Mr. Darkness
Naomi
Neverland
You Come When I Call You
* * *
NOVELLAS & SHORT NOVELS
* * *
The Attraction
The Dark Game (Two Novelettes)
Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters
Isis
The Necromancer
Purity
The Words
* * *
SERIES
* * *
THE HARROW SERIES
* * *
Nightmare House, Book 1
Mischief, Book 2
The Infinite, Book 3
The Abandoned, Book 4
The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)
Isis(Prequel Novella)
* * *
THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES
* * *
Bad Karma, Book 1
Red Angel, Book 2
Night Cage, Book 3
* * *
THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY
* * *
The Priest of Blood, Book 1
The Lady of Serpents, Book 2
The Queen of Wolves, Book 3
* * *
THE CHRONICLES OF MORDRED
Mordred, Bastard Son (Book 1)
Mordred, Dragon Prince (Book 2)
* * *
COLLECTIONS
* * *
Lights Out: Collected Stories
Night Asylum
The Nightmare Chronicles
Wild Things
* * *
BOX SET BUNDLES
* * *
Bad Places (3 Novels)
Coming of Age (3 Dark Novellas)
Dark Rooms (3 Novels)
Criminally Insane: The Series (3 Novels)
Halloween Chillers
Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)
Harrow: Four Novels (Books 1-4)
Haunts (8 Novel Box Set)
Lights Out (3 Collection Box Set)
Night Towns (3 Novels)
The Vampyricon Trilogy (3 Novels)
* * *
With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.
About the Author
Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.
A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more. His book Purity was the first to be published via mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.
He is married, and lives and writes along the coast of New England.
@DouglasClegg
DouglasClegg
www.DouglasClegg.com
Disclaimer
The Nightmare Chronicles is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and inci
dents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Publication Credits & Copyright
Copyright 1999 Douglas Clegg
This collection copyright 1999, but each of the previously published stories are copyright Douglas Clegg within the year in which they were first published.
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Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.
* * *
Cover art provided by:
Damonza.com
The Words
A Novella of Supernatural Horror
For Bentley Little
* * *
“What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being…”
– M.R. James, from “Casting the Runes.”
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 54
