An eBook Special Edition
"Underworld"
excerpted from Douglas Clegg's The Nightmare Chronicles
For more information about The Nightmare Chronicles, visit the
website at www.douglasclegg.com/cleggbooks.htm
Be sure and download the ebook of Purity, available at
http://www.douglasclegg.com/download.htm
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??Send it to friends (but email them first to make sure they want it)
??Send everyone you know the link to the site where they can
download the file. In this case, try
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All material contained in this eBook is
copyright Douglas Clegg as follows:
The Nightmare Chronicles and "Underworld" Copyright 1999
Douglas Clegg. "Underworld" originally appeared in the
magazine Phantasms.
All material in this excerpt is copyright 1999, 2000
Douglas Clegg. All rights reserved. You may pass this
.pdf file to friends online who ask for it, or simply direct
them to www.douglasclegg.com/download.htm for this
and other ebooks from Douglas Clegg. Do not alter this
file in any way, including the Adobe Acrobat format
itself. Thank you.
A complete short story from The Nightmare
Chronicles by Douglas Clegg
isbn: 084394580X
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Brief note from Doug:
This is just a bit of my collection, The Nightmare Chronicles. In
The Nightmare Chronicles, there are thirteen stories that to a lesser or
greater degree deal with horror and terror all wrapped within a story of
a kidnapping.
Parts of the collection can be brutal - some stories, I think, are
quite beautiful in a way, although horror always seems to come out of
them in one way or another. I'm not sure why that happens. I just take
them as they come to me.
I hope you have some fascinating nightmares from this reading.
Thanks for downloading this electronic file. Be sure and download
the ebook of Purity, which is also available (and free) at
http://www.douglasclegg.com/download.htm
All best,
Douglas Clegg
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The first story of the night began
"UNDERWORLD"
They say that love never dies. Sometimes, it goes somewhere
else, to a place from which it may return transformed.
We were subletting the place on Thirty-Third, just down from
Lexington Avenue--it was not terribly far from my job up at Matthew
Bender, across from Penn Station, where I was an ink-stained drudge
by day before transforming into a novelist by night. Jenny was getting
day work on the soap operas--nothing much, just the walk-on nurses
and cocktail waitresses that populate daytime television, never with
more than a word or two to say, so it was a long way to her Screen
Actor's Guild card. But she made just enough to cover the rent, and I
made just enough to cover everything else, plus the feeble beginnings
of a savings account which we affectionately named, The Son'll Come
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Out Tomorrow, because at about the time we opened the account,
Jenny discovered that she was pregnant. This worried the heck out of
me, not for the usual reasons, such as the mounting bills, and the
thought that I might not be able to pursue writing full-time, at least
not in this life, but because of a habit Jenny had of sleeping with other
men.
It will be hard to understand this, and I don't completely get it
myself, but I loved Jenny in a way that I didn't think possible. It
wasn't her beauty, although she certainly had that, but it was the fact
that in her company I always felt safe and comfortable. I did not want
to ever be with another woman as long as I lived; I suppose a good
therapist would go on and on about my self-image and self-esteem and
self-whatever, but I've got to tell you, it was simply that I loved her and
that I wanted her to be happy. I didn't worry if I was inadequate or
unsatisfying as a lover; and she never spoke openly about it with me. I
was just aware she'd had a few indiscretions early in our marriage, and
I assumed that she would gradually, over the years, calm down in that
respect. I felt lucky to have Jenny's company when I did, and when I
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didn't, I did not feel deprived. I suppose that until you have loved
someone in that way it is impossible to understand that point of view.
So I wondered about the paternity of our child, and this kept me
up several nights to the point that I would slip out of bed quietly (for
Jenny often had to be up and out the door by five a.m.), and go for
long walks down Third Avenue, or down a side street to Second,
sometimes until the first light came up over the city. During one of
these jaunts, in late January, I noticed a curious sort of building--it was
on a block of Kip's Bay that began in an alley, and was enclosed on all
sides by buildings. Yet, there were apartments, and a street name
(Pallan Row, the sign said), and two small restaurants, the kind with
only eight or nine tables, one of them a Szechwan place, the other
non-descript in its Americanized menu; also, a flower stand, boarded
up, and what looked like a bit of a warehouse. The place carried an
added layer of humidity, as if it had more of the swamp to it than the
city.
I am not normally a wanderer of alleys, but I could not help
myself--I had lived in this neighborhood about a year and a half, and
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in that time had felt I knew every block within about a mile and half
radius. But it was as if I had just found the most wonderful gift in the
world, a hidden grotto, a place in New York City that was as yet
undiscovered except by, perhaps, the oldest residents. I looked in the
windows of the warehouse, but could see nothing through the filthy
windows.
All day at work, I asked friends who lived in the general vicinity
if they knew about Pallan Row, but only one said that she did. "It
used to be where the sweatshops were--highly illegal, too, because
when I was a kid, they used to raid them all the time--it was more than
bad working conditions, it was white slavery and heroin, all those
things. But then," she added, "so much of this city has a history like
that. On the outside, carriage rides and Broadway shows, but
underneath, kind of slimy."
On Saturday, I convinced Jenny to talk a walk with me, but for
some reason I couldn't find the Row; we went to lunch. Afterwards, I
remembered where I'd led us astray, and we ended up going to have tea
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at the Chinese restaurant. The menu was ordinary, and the
decorations vintage and tacky.
"Amazing," Jenny said, "look, honey, the ceiling," and I glanced
up and beheld one of those lovely old tin ceilings with the chocolate
candy designs.
The waiter, who was an older Asian woman, noticed us and came
over with some almond cookies. "We usually are empty on weekends,"
she said, and then, also looking at the ceiling, "this was part of a
speak-easy in the twenties--the cafe next door, too. They say that a
mobster ran numbers out of the backroom. Before that, it was just an
ice house. My husband began renting it in 1954."
"That long ago?" Jenny said, taking a bite from a cookie, "it
seems like most restaurants come and go around here."
"Depends on the rent," the woman nodded, still looking at the
ceiling, "the owner hasn't raised it a penny in all those years." She
glanced at me, then at Jenny. "You're going to have a baby, aren't
you?"
Jenny grinned. "How did you know?"
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The woman said, "young couples like you, in love, eating my
almond cookies. Always brings babies. You will have a strong boy, I
think."
After she left the table, we laughed, finished the tea, and just sat
for awhile. The owner's wife occasionally peeped through the round
port-hole window of the kitchen door, and we smiled at her but shook
our heads to indicate that we weren't in need of service.
"When the baby comes," she said, "Mom said she'd loan us
money to get a larger place."
"Ah, family loans," I warned her.
"I know, but we won't have to pay her back for a few years. Can
you believe it, me, a mother?"
"And me, a father?" I leaned over and pressed my hand against
her stomach. "I wonder what he's thinking?"
"Or she. Probably, get me the hell out of here right now! is what
it's thinking."
"Baby's aren't 'its'."
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"Well, right now it is. It has a will of its own. It probably looks
like a little developing tadpole. Something like it's father," she gave
my hand a squeeze. I kissed her. When I drew my face back from
hers, she had tears in her eyes.
"What's the matter?"
"Oh," she wiped at her eyes with her napkin, "I'm going to
change."
"Into what?"
"No, you know what I mean. I've been living too recklessly."
"Oh," I said, and felt a little chill. "That's all in the past. I love
you like crazy, Jen."
"I know. I am so lucky," she said. "Our baby's lucky to have two
screw-ups like us for parents."
Now it could be that I'm just recalling that we said these words
because I want her memory to be sweeter for me than perhaps reality
will allow. But we walked back up Second Avenue that Saturday
feeling stronger as a couple; and I knew the baby was mine, I just knew
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it, regardless of the chances against it. We caught a movie, went home
and made love, sat up and watched Saturday Night Live . Sunday we
took the train out to her mother's in Stamford, and then as the week
was just getting under way, I walked through the doorway of our small
sublet, to find blood on the faux oriental rug.
Yet the door had been locked. That was my first thought. I
didn't see Jenny's body until I got to the bathroom, which is where her
murderer had dragged her, apparently while she was still alive, and
then had dropped her in the tub, closed the shower curtain around her.
It wasn't as gruesome as I expected it to be--there was a bullet in her
head, behind her left ear, but she was lying face up so I didn't see the
damage to the back of her scalp. She didn't even look like Jenny
anymore. She looked like a butcher shop meet with a human shape.
She looked like some dead woman with whom I had no acquaintance.
I was pretty numb, and was thinking of calling the police, when it
occurred to me that the killer might still be in the apartment. So I
went next-door to Helen Connally's and knocked on the door. Helen,
in her sweats, saw my panic, let me in, and made me some tea while
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we waited for the police. I hated leaving Jenny there, in the tub, for
the ten minutes, but if the murderer was still lurking, I had no way of
defending myself.
After the police and the neighbors and Jenny's mother had
picked my brain about the crime, it hit me.
I had not only lost my partner and lover, but also my only child.
I cried for days, or perhaps it was weeks--it was like living, for a time,
in a dark cave where there was no hour, no minute, no day, only
darkness.
When I emerged from my stupor and weeping, the police had
arrested a suspect in my wife's murder, and then the mystery
unraveled: we had been subletting an apartment from a man who had
several such places around the city, and each one was used,
occasionally, by the man's clients, as a place of business on certain
weekdays for drug dealing. The dealers' assumption had been that on
a given day of the week, no one was home. Best the detectives could
tell, Jenny had come home too early on the wrong Tuesday, a drug deal
was in progress, and one of the men had killed her as soon as she'd
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come in the door. I was devastated to think that strangers could be in
our apartment; but of course, it wasn't really ours. The renter of the
apartment was arrested; he pointed the finger at a few associates; and
within a year, the guilty were behind bars, and I was living in a place
off Houston and Sullivan Street, over in the SoHo area. I was seeing,
on a friendly basis, Helen Connally, my former neighbor--it was
almost as if the tragedy of my wife's death had given us a basis on
which to form a friendship. Helen was thirty two to my twenty eight,
and, while I knew I would never love her the way I loved Jenny, she
was a good friend to me through a most difficult time. We spent a
year being slightly good friends, and then, we became lovers.
I was taking some out-of-town friends of ours on an informal
sightseeing tour of the Big Apple, and brought them down to little
Pallan Row. I thought the Szechwan place would be good for lunch,
but when we entered the alley, both it and the cafe were closed;
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windows were boarded up. "Jesus," I said, "just a year ago, the woman
running it told me that they'd had it since the '50s."
Helen took my elbow, "C'mon, we can go get sandwiches up at
Tivoli. Or," she turned to the couple we'd brought, "there's a great
deli on Third. You guys like pastrami?"
Their voices faded into the background, as I looked through the
section of the Chinese restaurant's window that was clear, and thought
I saw my dead wife's face back along the wall, through the round glass
window of the door to the kitchen.
"Oliver," Helen said, looking over my shoulder, "what's up?"
"Nothing," I said, still looking at Jenny, her dark hair grown
longer, obscuring all but her nose and mouth.
"It must be something."
"It's just an old place. It was once a speak-easy, back in the
twenties. Think of all that's gone on in there," I said. Jenny's face, in
that round window, staring at me.
"Cool," Helen said. She was originally from California, so
"cool" and "bummer" had not yet been erased from her vocabulary of
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irony. She stood back, and her friend Larry whispered something to
her.
I watched Jenny's face, and noticed that when her hair fell more
to the side of her face, there were no eyes in her eye sockets.
"Let's go," Helen whispered, "they want to take a ride on the
ferry before it gets dark."
"Okay, just a sec," I said.
Jenny moved away from the round window.
My heart was beating fast.
I assumed that I was hallucinating, but the thought of spending
the rest of the afternoon escorting this couple around town when I had
just seen my dead wife was absurd. I made an excuse about needing to
be by myself--Helen always took this well, and I caught an
understanding look from Anne, who nodded. I knew they would go
on to a late lunch and talk about how I still hadn't quite recovered
from Jenny's death; and I knew Helen would act the martyr a bit,
because it was so hard to play nurse to me over a woman who had
cheated constantly behind my back. I adored Helen for her care and
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caution around my feelings; I wished them a good afternoon, and
stood there, along the Row, watching them, until they had rounded
the corner and were out of sight.
After a few minutes, I took off my shoe and broke the
windowglass, and tugged at one of the boards until it gave. Within
half an hour, I stepped in through the broken window, and walked
across the dusty floor to the kitchen.
The kitchen was all long shiny metal shelves and drawers, pots
and pans still piled high. But it was dark, and I saw no one. I walked
across the floor, back to the walk-in freezer, and looked through its
frosty pane of glass. Although I could see nothing in there, I found
myself shivering, even my teeth began chattering, and I had the
sudden and uncomfortable feeling that if I did not get out of that
kitchen, out of that boarded-up restaurant right then, something
terrible would happen.
It didn't occur to me until I was on the street again that there
should've been no frost on the glass pane at the walk-in freezer, that, in
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fact, there was no electricity to the entire building, perhaps to the
entire block.
Helen noticed, over the next few days, that I was becoming
nervous. We sat across from each other in our favorite park, me with
the Times, and her with a paperback; I looked up and she was
watching me. Another day, we went to a coffee shop, and she
mentioned to me that my knees, under the table, were shaking slightly.
She said this with some seriousness, as if shaking knees were an
indicator of some deeper problem. But I doubted myself then, and I
did not want to talk about seeing my dead wife in the Chinese
restaurant kitchen on Pallan Row. Finally, my restlessness turned
nocturnal, and I tossed and turned in my sleep. Helen, sleeping over,
finally sat up in bed at four in the morning and flicked on the bedside
lamp. Her eyes were bloodshot.
"You have not slept a full night for two days," she said, "you tell
me what's going on."
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I spent about an hour dodging the issue, until finally, as she
pushed and pushed, I told her about seeing Jenny.
"She was blind," Helen said, speaking to me like a was a lying
twelve year old.
"Not blind. She had no eyes. I felt she could see me, anyway.
She was staring at me. She just had no eyes."
"And you went in there and no one was there..."
"But the freezer. Why would it be going?"
Helen shrugged. "I'm going to make a drink. You want
something?"
At five thirty a.m., she and I had vodka martinis, and went and
sat out on the fire escape as all of Manhattan awoke, as the sky turned
several shades of violet before becoming the blank light of day.
"I don't believe in ghosts," I said, sipping and feeling drunk very
quickly. "I don't believe that the dead can rise or any of that."
"What do you believe?"
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I watched a burly man lift crates out of the back of his truck
down in the street. "I believe in what I see. I saw her. I really saw
her."
"Assuming," she said, "that it was Jenny. Assuming that the
freezer was running on its own energy. Assuming you saw what you
saw. Assuming all those things as givens, what does it mean?"
"I have no idea. I thought at first maybe I was just crazy. If I
hadn't seen the frost on the freezer window, I don't think I would've
believed later on that it had been Jenny at all. Or anything but an
hallucination."
Helen was obstinate. "But it's got to mean something."
"Why?" I asked.
I slept through the next day fairly peacefully, and when I awoke,
Helen was gone. I watched television, and then called a few friends to
set up lunches and dinners for the following week.
Helen walked through the door at six thirty in the evening, and
said, "Well, I found that alley again. I pulled back one of the boards."
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When she said this, I felt impulsively defensive--it was my alley,
it was my boarded-up restaurant, I felt, it was my hallucination. "You
didn't have to," I told her.
She halted my speech with her hands. "Hang on, hang on.
Oliver, the windows are bricked up beneath the boards."
"No they're not."
"Yes," she said, "they are. You couldn't have gotten in there."
We argued this point; we were both terrific arguers. It struck me
that she hadn't found the right alley, or even the right Pallan Row.
Perhaps there were two Pallan Rows in the city, near each other,
perhaps even almost identical alleys. Perhaps there was the functional
Pallan Row and the dysfunctional Pallan Row.
This idea seemed to clutch at me, as if I had known it to be true
even before I thought it consciously.
The idea took hold, and that night, on the pretext of going to see
a movie which Helen had already seen twice with friends, I took a cab
over to Pallan Row.
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It was colder on Pallan Row than in the rest of the city. While
autumn was well upon us, and the weather had for weeks been fairly
chilly, down the alley it was positively freezing. My curiosity and
even fear took hold as I peeled back one of the window boards, the
very one I had pulled down on my last visit. Helen had been right: the
windows were bricked-up beneath the boards. But then, I had to
wonder, why the boards at all?
I touched the bricks; had to draw my fingers back quickly, for
they seemed like blocks of ice. I remembered the owner of the
Chinese restaurant telling Jenny and me that it used to be an ice house.
I touched the bricks again, and they were still bitingly cold--it hadn't
been my imagination.
I walked around the alley, but saw no way of getting into the
buildings again, for all were bricked up.
And then I heard it.
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A sound, a human sound, the sound of someone who was
trapped inside that old ice house, someone who had heard me pull the
board loose and who needed help.
I am no hero, and never will be. For all I knew, there were some
punks on the other side of that wall torturing one of their own, and if I
walked into the middle of it, I would not see the light of day again.
And yet I could not help myself.
I found that if I kicked at the bricks, they gave a little. The noise
from within had ceased, but I battered at the bricks until I managed to
knock one of them out. It seemed to be an old brick job, for the
cement between the blocks was cracked and powdery. After an hour, I
had managed to dislodge several.
To my surprise and amazement, there was light on within the old
restaurant. I looked through the sizable hole I'd made, and saw the
former proprietress of the Chinese restaurant standing behind the bar,
dressed in a jade-colored silk gown, talking with her bar-man. A few
people sat at the tables, eating, laughing. None of them had noticed
my activity at the window.
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As I put my face to the hole, I breathed in air so cold that it
seemed to stop my lungs up.
I moved back, and stood up. I was sure that this was a delusion;
perhaps I needed some medication still, for immediately after Jenny's
death, I had begun taking tranquilizers to help blot out the memory of
finding her dead. Perhaps I still needed some medical help and
psychological counseling.
I crouched down again to look through the opening, and noticed
that at one of the tables, facing the other way, was a woman who
looked from the back very much like Jenny.
I noticed the ice, too. It was a shiny glaze along the walls and
tables; icicles formed teat-like off the chocolate-patterned tin ceiling. I
watched the people inside there as if this were a television set; I lost my
fear entirely, all my shivering came from the arctic breezes that stirred
up occasionally from within.
I thought I heard someone out in the alley behind me, and
turned to look.
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Helen stood there in a sweatshirt and pants, my old windbreaker
around her shoulders; she held a sweater in her arms.
"I figured you'd be here. Look, it's getting chilly," she passed the
sweater down to where I sat on the pavement. She noticed the bricks
beside me, and the light from within the building. "I see you've been
doing construction. Or should I say, de-construction."
"Do you see the light?" I asked her.
She squatted down beside me. "What light?"
"I know you see it," I said, but when I glanced again through the
hole, the place within had gone dark.
"What is it about this place for you?" she asked. "Even if you
did see Jenny here, or her ghost, whatever--why here? You and she
only came here once. Why would she come here?"
"I think this is hell," I said. "I think this is one of those corners
of hell. I think Jenny's in hell. And she wants something from me.
Maybe a favor."
"Do you really believe that?"
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I nodded. "Don't ask me why. There is no why. I think this is a
corner of hell that maybe shows through sometimes to some people. I
don't even think maybe. I know that's what this is."
"You may be right," Helen said. She stood up, stretched, and
offered me her hand to help me get up. I took it. Her hand was
warm, and I felt a rush of blood in the palm of my hand as if she had
managed to transfer some warmth to me.
And then, the sound again.
A human voice, indistinct, from within the walls.
Helen looked at me.
"You heard it, too," I said.
"It's a cat," she said. "It's a cat inside there."
I shook my head. "You heard it. It's not just me. Maybe Jenny
can only show herself to me. Maybe hell can only show itself to me,
but you heard it."
"Wouldn't Jenny's ghost be in your old apartment where she
died?" Something like fear trembled in Helen's voice. She was
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beginning to believe something that might be dreadful. It made me
feel less alone.
"No. I don't think it's her ghost. A ghost is spiritual residue or
something. I think she is in here, it's really her, in the flesh, and I
think there are others in here. I need to go back in and find out what
exactly she wants from me."
The noise again, almost sounding like a woman weeping.
"Don't go in there," Helen said. "It may not be anything. It
may be something awful. It may be somebody waiting in there the
way somebody waited for Jenny."
I took her face in my hands and kissed her eyelids. When I drew
back from her face, I whispered, "I love you Helen. But I have to find
out if I'm crazy. I have to find out."
We went and sat in an all-night coffee shop talking about love
and belief and insanity. Because I was beginning to convince myself
that Pallan Row was a corner of hell, I waited until the sun came up to
investigate further within its walls. Helen returned with me, and
between the two of us, we managed to break enough bricks apart and
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away from the wall so that the hole grew to an almost-window-sized
entrance.
I asked her to wait outside for me, and if anything happened, to
go get help. I went in through the window, scraping my head a bit.
The room on the other side was empty and dark, but that unnatural
ice breath was still there, and, through the kitchen portal window,
there came a feeble and distant light.
Helen asked, every few seconds, "you okay, Oliver? I can't see
you."
"I'm fine," I reassured her as often as she asked.
I walked slowly to the kitchen door, looked through the round
window pane. The light emanated from the freezer at the other end of
the long kitchen. I pushed the door open (informing Helen that this
was my direction so that she wouldn't worry if I didn't respond to her
queries every few minutes), and walked more swiftly to the walk-in
freezer.
The freezer door was unlocked. I opened it, too, and stepped
inside.
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The light was blue and as cold as the air.
Through the arctic fog, I could make out the shapes of human
beings, hanging from meat hooks, their faces indistinct, their bodies
slowly turning as if they had but little energy left within them. I did
not look directly at any of these bodies, for my terror was becoming
stronger--and I knew that if I were to remain sane as I walked through
this ice-house of death, I would need to rein in my fear.
Finally, I found her.
Jenny.
Ice across her eyeless face, her hair, strands of thin, pearl-necklace
icicles.
She hung naked from a hook, her head, drooping, her arms
apparently lifeless at her side.
Her belly had been ripped open as if torn at with pincers, the
skin peeled back and frost-burnt.
I stopped breathing for a full minute, and was sure that I was
going to die right there.
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I was sure the door to that freezer, that butcher-shop of the
damned, would slide shut and trap me forever.
But it did not.
Instead, I heard that human sound again, closer, more distinct.
I heard my heart beating; my breathing resumed.
The sound came from beyond the whitest cloth of fog, and I
waved my hands across it to dissipate the mist.
There, lying on a metal shelf, wrapped in the clothes which
Jenny had been buried in, was our baby, his small fingers reaching for
me as he began to wail even louder.
I lifted him, held him in my arms, and wiped the chill from his
forehead.
Someone was there, among the hanging bodies, watching me. I
couldn't tell who, for the fog had not cleared, neither had the blue
light increased in intensity. I could not see to see. I felt someone's
presence though, and thanked that someone silently. I thanked
whoever or whatever had suckled my child, had warmed his blood, had
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met his needs. The place no longer frightened me. Whatever energy
the freezer ran on, whatever power inspired it, had kept my child safe.
I took my son out into the bright and shining morning.
"This was why I was haunted," I told Helen, upon emerging
from the open window. "This is what Jenny wanted to give me."
I can only describe Helen's expression, through her eyes, as one
approaching dread. She said, "I think you should put it back where it
belongs."
"Babies aren't 'its'," I said, and recalled saying this to Jenny
once, too, at this very place. Or had Jenny said it to me? We had been
so close that sometimes when she said things, I felt I'd said them, too.
I glanced down at my boy, so beautiful, as he watched the sky and his
father, breathing the vivid air.
Across his forehead, I saw a marking, a birthmark, a port-wine
stain, perhaps, which spread across his skin like fire until he became
something other than what might be called flesh.
THE END
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TWELVE MORE SHORT STORIES LIVE WITHIN
TH THE NIGHTMARE CHRONICLES
E * * * *
If you'd like to read the rest of The Nightmare Chronicles, be sure
and check with your local bookseller for the paperback. Or, if
you'd rather, you can order it online from the bookseller of your
choice. Just look up "Douglas Clegg" in a search engine on the
bookseller's site, and then check for The Nightmare Chronicles.
For more information about The Nightmare Chronicles, visit the
website at www.douglasclegg.com/cleggbooks.htm
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What to do with this ebook by Douglas
Clegg
??Send it to friends (but email them first to make sure they want it)
??Send everyone you know the link to the site where they can
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www.douglasclegg.com/download.htm
??Order the paperback of The Nightmare Chronicles from your
favorite bookseller.
??Read it - of course!
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AN EXCERPT FROM NAOMI by Douglas Clegg
What follows is an excerpt from my novel Naomi (which will be out in
hardcover in January 2001, and in paperback in late April 2001. All
author royalties from the first paperback edition of Naomi will go to
the National Down Syndrome Society - www.ndss.org. Please
encourage your favorite booksellers to stock a lot of this book.)
Here is the cover to the limited edition hardcover, available at
http://www.subterraneanpress.com/html/clegg.html
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NAOMI
By Douglas Clegg
Copyright 2000 Douglas Clegg
Chapter One: The City
1
Destiny lurks, but when the time is ripe, it devours.
New York City, this year, right now, the world seems new as a
century dawns, as winter surrounds the fingers of brick and marble.
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Don't imagine for a moment the silver towers of Manhattan,
shining in December with sweat and frost. Forget the postcard images
in your mind of the city. The looming skyscrapers. The brown and
gray apartment buildings obscuring any trace of morning sunlight.
Lose your memory of the small grocery mart with its rows of oranges
and apples and cheap flowers. The great clock over the Persian rug
shop. The trattoria with ragged awning flapping, traces of soap on its
windows. The smell of the street, of the stone, of the people, of the
dogs, of the entity that can only be known as city, a thing both dead
and alive at the same time.
Imagine instead a vast cavern of overgrown brownstone and
gleaming pumice, frozen in spray up to the sky. Imagine the anthill
and its inhabitants. Imagine anything but the buildings along 8th
Avenue, the yellow taxicabs, the young man in sweatpants and hooded
jacket jogging, the gray-suited bald man with glasses, shivering, a
steaming Starbucks coffee cup in hand; the handsome and the ugly;
the elfin woman still drunk from the previous night, blown by an icy
gust as she walks her Boston terrier on a short leash; the masks and the
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faces they reveal; the two shiny men with gym bags; the piles of
trashbags; piles of kids as they wander with their Walkmans and cell
phones; the overcoats fluttering; the hat pulled down over ears.
Through it all, the serpent turns.
And it lurks.
And it will devour.
The message steams in the crisp cold air, the breaths of fog that
pour like smoke from the mouths of people wandering the chilly city
streets. It's written in smoke from the exhaust of buses. The
billboards, the walls, the wide boulevards, the narrow alleys, the
scaffolding along 14th Street, all of it is a warning to the one boy who
understands the omen.
The citadel of stone could stand for a hundred more years, and
still none will escape destiny as it waits, hungry.
Only you know it, because you are part of the Below. You are
close to the pulse of how this island kingdom runs. You are one of the
few who can journey from the Below to the Above and back. With
only the fear to keep you going.
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And you know that today, the serpent is loose.
Your destiny is tied up with the serpent, only you don't know
why or how. You know, because it has been foretold. You know
because destiny is a wicked thing.
But it is an ordinary winter's day. They call the city New York.
They live within the belief that all is well for now.
Somewhere across this island, there are construction workers'
jackhammers making the earth's crust tremble. Somewhere, between
the Above and the Below, what should've stayed chained has been set
free. They all dig down deep but never find the true Below, they never
know all the wormholes that the serpent has, but you know. You and
the others like you. You know the passages of the serpent. You always
have understood the serpent and the darkness. You know that no
matter how it looks in the Above, what has been loosed cannot be put
back.
But it's business as usual here, in the Above. Up where the sun
burns and the city steams even in its frozen glory. Christmas is
coming. The lights are up and dazzling, even early in the day. Shop
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windows are heavy with ornament and display. The snow from the
week before has all but melted in the city. The trash bags roll and shift
with wind, and rats scurry along the side streets as the Village bleeds
into Chelsea into the Meat-Packing District with its bones and the
smell of the dead.
And she is there.
The woman who seems so familiar, perhaps because she
resembles all the other women on the street, but she is their essence.
She is determined. She is in focus and still a blur of movement. She is
unstoppable in some way.
You watch her walk - no, you watch her stride towards her goal.
In her stride, her destiny.
She is the kind of woman that once seen, will never be forgotten.
Not because of some ideal of beauty, but because of her very nature.
She is the unmade bed. She is the lost unknown,. She is the woman
of whom other people speak but no one invites. She is unfathomable
mystery. She is purity-in-chaos. Something makes you watch her.
Something within you longs to follow her on her journey. Her eyes
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are brutally kind. Her face is pale without being sunless, a redness
around her eyes and nose, a vulnerability.
She has the look of having been in the storm, droplets glistening
on her skin, crystal snowflakes melting.
You read her thoughts in her hands as she gracelessly reaches in
her coat for keys or some Kleenex or a good luck charm or a memento
from the past.
You see the child-like way she smiles at nothing, perhaps at the
very air itself, perhaps at the folly of life.
She reminds you of the woman you'd want to meet someday;
but she has darkness within her.
She has spent her life searching for the serpent. Now, it will find
her.
She is dangerous.
2
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"Destiny lurks, it does, I tell you when your time's ripe, it
devours, it surely does, it's a devourer, it opens its jaws and unlocks
just to get you." That's what the teenaged boy on the corner of 14th
Street and 8th said to the woman who had passed up his offer to allow
her to give him change.
He shook the can that had once held Del Monte pineapple slices
and now clanged with a few quarters and several pennies, and perhaps
later on would carry water or soup if he could get some.
His stink was strong, a gust of foulness from the pit of some
unwashed arm. His name was long forgotten, but those who called
him friend also called him Romeo, for no other reason than the fact
that he roamed.
"Listen, you give me change, lady, and I give you salvation. Nice
bargain you was to ask me," he said, his voice like the squeal of brakes
over shattering glass bottles.
He was too old to be young and too young to be old, and his red
baseball cap had seen better gutters. He was probably no more than a
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teenager, but he still seemed ancient. His hair was yellow-brown straw
beneath the cap. His eyes were dull and milky as if he suffered from
some ailment a woman like this would never want to know about. His
grin was infectious in all the unfortunate ways. "All right, lady,
destiny lurks but it can devour any second, and just the price of a cup
of coffee'll get you some relief. It's a -- whoa -- a huge mother of a
snake -- and it gets out and it bites you where the sun don't shine. I
said it's got a sting and a bite and then it just chows down like you
don't even matter and I seen it. I know what it can do."
He knew his words didn't sound as clear as he thought them in
his head, but he said them anyway. Language was different in the
Below. Words were used sparingly, there. Words could not be wasted
in darkness. (Scabber had told him once about speaking, and how
words were like magic. "Magic don't get spent free," she had told him.
"Gotta price. Like every damn thing. A big price. A great price.")
The woman with destiny glanced at him once. He was sure that
she looked right through him before moving on.
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She walked awkwardly towards the subway entrance, with her
tan coat, her faded jeans, the way her hair wasn't quite combed, nor
was it quite blond.
And something about the way she glanced back at him let him
know that she was not one of the Above People even if she hadn't
given him a quarter or the time of day.
She's one of us.
She had the darkness in her already. He could tell. Had she
somehow escaped the Below of life and lived in the Above for so many
years that she had forgotten the darkness? But the scent of it was still
on her. She was meant for shadows.
The street, so alive with suits and skirts and rags and vendors and
loafers, washed her image away like a sudden downpour.
Hunger wrestled with his fears. He kept shaking his cup and
hoping that he'd get enough change to take care of his great burden.
He didn't like the thought of the serpent or of the lady who wanted to
find it, but there was no coming between what was and what was
meant to be.
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Chapter Two: The Woman in the Subway
1
Don't think, just do.
The words were like mosquitoes humming around the woman
who stepped down into the urban underworld known as the subway.
Within her mind, the world itself was a mass of mosquitoes all swirling
in patterns around her. The past and present blurred into a mess in
her brain, and her head ached with all of the images from childhood
and from what she'd been hiding and what she'd been revealing - it
was a storm within her flesh that had no calm center.
Just do, she thought, wiping at her nose with a Kleenex.
Quit thinking so much. Thinking too much about it is what screws
everything up.
A cold, left over from Thanksgiving, lingered in her sinuses.
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She fumbled with the nasal spray bottle to get one last clear
breath . She laughed at herself, wondering why she was so worried
about her stupid cold, why she even cared anymore. Inhaling, she
smelled the dust and piss of the subway and street. Then her head
began pounding again. She'd had a Sudafed with a glass of wine at six
a.m., hoping it would allow her to fall asleep. Instead, it just seemed
to make the pain more intense.
She wanted to get the feeling out of her system. It manifested
itself in a throbbing at the edges of her scalp and a constant
hammering behind her eyes. Her head pounded with a thousand
words left unsaid, conversations she'd wanted to have, arguments she
wished she'd been brave enough to incite. But none of it added up to
much, and so little was clear she just wished all thinking would stop.
Don't think. Don't let the voices and the words and the darkness
come through. You know what must be done. What you must do. You
can't go back to what never was. You can't make something gentle from a
tangle of barbed wire. You can clean up what has already happened. .
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But one thought above all others pounded at her, the hammer of
one thought, up and down, again and again, behind her eyes. One
thought.
All she could think about as she went down the cold stone steps
was that Alan would never have let her leave the apartment had he
known that she intended to throw herself in front of the first train that
came down the tunnel.
2
But he'd gone out for an hour, and she had her chance.
In under a minute she laughed, wept, and smiled. Then, she
closed her eyes and tried to pray but there were no more prayers in her.
She glanced up at the sky before it disappeared from view as she went
down the stairway into the bowels of the city.
A last glimpse of sky. White with clouds. The bare trees of
winter.
She tried to picture the winter sky as she walked through the
passageway. The walls comforted her to some extent; this was a safe
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enclosure, an antidote to the open muddy fields and burnt ruins of her
childhood. The city was a cold but welcome embrace, and she never
felt it more strongly than down in the subway.
She knew what he would say.
The Alien. His name was Alan. She liked to think of him as
Alien because then it was easier to not let him touch her anymore, to
not let him get under her skin in any way.
But still, she knew what he would say if he'd been there to stop
her.
"Naomi," he'd say, "it's the winter blues, that's all. Have you been
off your prescriptions again? That's not good. That's not sticking with the
program."
Sticking with the program.
Learning to cope.
Making do.
Recovering.
All of them, Alien buzz words. "When you have all your ducks
in order, we can sit down and talk about the future," he'd say.
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Whenever he used this phrase, she wanted to get an Uzi and shoot all
those ducks and watch the blood and feathers fly. Just in her mind.
Just the imaginary ducks that the Alien talked about. She wanted to
squeeze his voice out of her head. His voice, his metaphors, the sound
of his footsteps.
She knew how he would suddenly be gentle with her. And how
she would lash out at him. He would sit there and be gentle and even
kind. Her thoughts would turn violent; his kindness would feel
violent to her. Sometimes kindness was the worst sort of treatment.
She wanted to tell him she'd been seeing another doctor who
suggested she'd been misdiagnosed. It was a lie, but she wanted to tell
him that. She knew that the Alien would really find a way to twist that
up so that she would begin to doubt her own sense of reality again.
She didn't even blame him.
It was her. It was completely her. "You need to pay for good
medical care. These therapists you know," he'd say, his head shaking
slowly, "bargain basement prices, and no real training..."
But none of that mattered.
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She had to smile as she bought a subway token -- a buck fifty. A
subway ride was still a bargain, one of the last of real bargains. A real
bargain basement. You could go anywhere on the subways in
Manhattan for a buck fifty. That was New York all over. Anywhere
that didn't matter, you could get there cheap. She could go the length
of the island and never get back to the place where she'd been
happiest.
A child stared up at her as she dropped the token in the turnstile.
Dark hair, dark eyes, a wan look as if he had no expectations.
His mother, a cool drink of water -- that's what Jake would've said.
(Don't think of Jake. You can't undo all of it. He would know. He would
find out. He would hate you.)
The boy's mother was in a bad mood. Her eyes were fixed on
the boy's hands, like a cat ready to pounce. "Where's your token?" the
mother asked and the boy's mouth dropped, drool on the edge of his
lips. "Where the hell is it?"
The child watched her even while his mother clutched his hands,
demanding his token.
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Two men, tall and stocky, hair on one like a rock star, nonexistent
on the other, businessmen in blue and gray uniforms, rushed
past her. The earthquake rumbling of the approaching train grew
louder. Catching a train was serious business. A crazy woman (she
thought as she watched herself being watched) slowly walking to the
platform was to be jostled and elbowed. A short redhead in a raincoat
practically shoved her. Then the rain of people followed in her wake.
From all corners they shoved and slipped between one another,
creating pockets of personal space. Black, white, a woman in furs, a
teen in a leather jacket with purple hair, humanity as if one big ball of
multicolored wax had melted together. They melted into one another
as they rushed forward, grabbing their places along the platform.
To her, it was not a platform on the subway, but a precipice.
It was the Edge.
3
The Edge was everywhere.
The Edge was life, and she was always on the verge of
discovering what lay beyond the Edge.
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Her eyesight was all messed up; tears? No, not tears. Tension.
The headaches. The memory that she could never dredge up, no
matter how hard she tried. All she could call it was the blank spot of
her life. The yowling in the darkness; the feeling of rocks; the sense of
what was there with her, hiding with her, breathing...But her vision
sucked -- she laughed thinking of it that way. The faces in the crowd,
she remembered the poem, the apparition of these faces in the crowd...
We're all ghosts, already. We reach adulthood and we're already
gone from the world that matters. We're just keeping things in order for
the next crop of people. We go about our business. And why? We're
ghosts. We repeat patterns without knowing that we have no effect. Our
lives are determined before we're twenty After that, we just repeat. It's
already the future. These people are already ghosts. I am a ghost.
The apparition of these faces in a crowd...
I am no one.
My time has come and gone.
I am ruined, she laughed to herself. It sounded so Victorian, so
ancient, so melodramatic. I am ruined. I will be no more.
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4
She stood there, her head throbbing.
Slowly, she walked to the edge of the platform, closing her eyes.
Her steps seemed completely silent to her. Was she invisible? She
could be. Maybe she had always been invisible. She barely noticed the
murmurs as those she passed spoke about the lives they were leading,
their victories that were really just defeats in disguise. Their eyes had
not been opened.
Images bled in her mind:
Her mother, lying in the coffin; the things in the dark, moving
like liquid; the Alien, his eyes flashing green, picking her up in the rain
outside of Lincoln Center, his car so warm, his manner so smooth, her
desperation so great; the blank spot, the blindness of moments in time,
moments that were cut from her and had turned to yowling darkness;
and Jake -- just his face, sixteen years' old, sweat shining like smoldering
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ashes under his skin...Jake, if only Jake were here...If only I had the
courage...
Now, the other voice within her whispered. It was the voice of
her highest self, she knew. The one who knew how to do things. The
one who knew where she was going.
Now.
The sound of the train grew louder, and the tunnel wind swept
her hair --
One foot ventured into the air beyond the platform. The
rumbling was loud.
She could feel the train's heat in the wind that gusted through
the tunnel.
She could do it. She knew she could. Another step forward.
Then she'd fall.
The train would reach her before she landed on the tracks.
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Be sure and read NAOMI by Douglas Clegg. In hardcover, January
2001 in a special autographed limited edition from Subterranean
Press.
http://www.subterraneanpress.com/html/clegg.html
In paperback from Leisure Books, April 2001.
Ask for it at bookstores everywhere.
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Other Novels Available:
You Come When I Call You by Douglas Clegg (in both paperback, Rocket eBook,
and hardcover limited edition)
buy the paperback book now
buy the Rocket eBook format
buy the signed, limited edition hardcover
Mischief by Douglas Clegg (in both paperback and hardcover limited edition)
Buy the paperback online now
Buy the limited edition hardcover online
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What to do with this ebook by Douglas
Clegg
??Send it to friends (but email them first to make sure they want it)
??Send everyone you know the link to the site where they can
download the file. In this case, try
www.douglasclegg.com/download.htm
??Order the paperback of The Nightmare Chronicles from your
favorite bookseller.
??Read it - of course!
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Thank you for reading this ebook and for
recommending it to OTHERs.
Here are some links you might find helpful,
InCLUDING PUBLISHERS OF CLEGG'S FICTION:
www.douglasclegg.com
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www.dorchesterpub.com
WWW.HORRORNET.COM
All text in this file is copyright 1999, 2000 Douglas Clegg. All rights reserved. You
have the permission of the author to pass this file to those who are interested in
reading it. It may not be altered in any form - including the Adobe Acrobat .pdf
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