Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set by Douglas Clegg

Author:Douglas Clegg [Clegg, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: night towns, box set, bundle, three novels, The Children's Hour, You Come When I Call You, Goat Dance
Publisher: Alkemara Press
Published: 2015-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

13

Beneath the grave, liquid forming liquid, Wendy felt the pleasure of movement in the confined space and wriggled through the abandoned bones and the seared flesh, and then the effort was tiring and all movement ceased, but the rejuvenating cells formed around her, taking over the surrounding thin wood, infiltrating each splinter; each fragment, until the wood and she and the bones and ash and the microscopic insects crawling across all of it became her.

14

Peter Chandler opened his eyes and saw a white ceiling divided with thick, dark wooden beams.

The Garden of Eden. She’s brought me back.

Stella’s steel-gray hair and face were noticeably unmade-up, unbrushed, ungroomed—rumpled like the bed of a restless sleeper; Her eyes, as large and round as they were, seemed to recede into the skin around them.

“I know you want to leave,” she said, “but could you sit with me a bit?”

“I should get going.”

“Oh. I see. You’re feeling better?”

He nodded.

“Well, if you’re all right.”

“Tell me more about her.”

“My daughter? All right. Do you know that she possesses demons? Not possessed by them, but possesses. And you’ve been infected,” Stella said. She patted a cool hand towel across his forehead, and watched his eyelids flutter and close again.

“What time is it?” he asked, looking about the strange room. The light was dim, and he heard the beehive hum of an air conditioner. Stickiness of sweat around his neck and shoulders.

“Eight fifteen,” Stella said as she tipped his head up so he could drink some water. “She already has you. You walk in a dream. You don’t even remember coming through my garden? Riding in my car? No. You were somewhere else, weren’t you?”

“I need to get home.” He tried to rise, but needle-prick pain jabbed at him all along his spine, and he lay back down.

“I don’t keep much food in the house, but I think I’ve got something in the fridge—you must be very hungry.”

“No.” He bit his lower lip, and then nodded. “You said...I’m infected. By what?”

“Her. Wendy. I could feel it when I saw you there. I’ve seen it before, and to be honest, I’m surprised this town isn’t completely infested. I’m not sure what she’s waiting for. I only know so much about the turning, only what I’ve seen before. And I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to stop her.”

“But she’s dead,” Peter whispered. “I was there.”

“What she has,” Stella said as if she were alone in the room and talking to the walls, “cannot die.”

And then she began telling him as much as she knew about her daughter.

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