The Attraction Read online

  RAVE REVIEWS FOR

  DOUGLAS CLEGG!

  “One of horror’s brightest lights.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Douglas Clegg has become the new

  star in horror fiction.”

  —Peter Straub

  “Douglas Clegg is clearly and without any doubt

  one of the best horror writers in the business.”

  —Cinescape

  “Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale.”

  —Daily News (New York)

  “Douglas Clegg is one of

  horror’s most captivating voices.”

  —BookLovers

  “No one does lean, atmospheric, character-driven,

  and damned eerie horror like Clegg.”

  —Rue Morgue

  “Douglas Clegg’s short stories can chill

  the spine so effectively that the reader should

  keep paramedics on standby.”

  —Dean Koontz on The Nightmare Chronicles

  MORE HIGH PRAISE

  FOR DOUGLAS CLEGG!

  THE ABANDONED

  “A quantum page-turner.”

  —ReallyScary.com

  NIGHTMARE HOUSE

  “Clegg’s modern sensibility shows that tales

  in the classic horror tradition can still entertain.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE INFINITE

  “A cavalcade of nightmares.

  Memorable for its evocative, disturbing imagery

  and haunting emotional insights, this novel adds a new

  chapter to horror’s tradition of haunted house fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  MISCHIEF

  “[Clegg] draws eerily plausible parallels between the arcane

  rituals of academic institutions and esoteric occultists,

  and imbues Harrow with an atmosphere of menace

  thick enough to support further flights of dark fantasy.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE HOUR BEFORE DARK

  “I was compelled to keep turning the pages

  as fear gnawed a hollow in my stomach and raised my

  pulse to racing level from cover to cover.”

  —Cemetery Dance

  YOU COME WHEN I CALL YOU

  “This is horror at its finest.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Other books by Douglas Clegg:

  THE ABANDONED

  NIGHTMARE HOUSE

  FOUR DARK NIGHTS (Anthology)

  THE HOUR BEFORE DARK

  THE INFINITE

  NAOMI

  MISCHIEF

  YOU COME WHEN I CALL YOU

  THE NIGHTMARE CHRONICLES

  THE HALLOWEEN MAN

  Writing as Andrew Harper:

  NIGHT CAGE

  RED ANGEL

  Contents

  Chapter One

  PART ONE

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  PART TWO

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART THREE

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE NECROMANCER

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Visionary 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  PART TWO

  Visionary 2

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Visionary 3

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Visionary 4

  DORCHESTER PUBLISHING

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © 2004 by Douglas Clegg

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Trade ISBN: 978-1-4285-1754-7

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-4285-0126-3

  First Dorchester Publishing, Co., Inc. edition: April 2006

  The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Visit us online at www.dorchesterpub.com.

  For Edward Lee, and Lee Seymour.

  With thanks to Raul Silva, Don D’Auria,

  and to the readers of my novels, novellas, and stories.

  The author invites readers to get free screensavers,

  e-books and video trailers at www.DouglasClegg.com.

  THE

  ATTRACTION

  Chapter One

  1

  Out on an empty highway, it called.

  The Brakedown Palace was a junk gas station in the middle of a desert nowhere and looked—from the outside—as if coyotes guarded it. Tumbleweeds had grown like barbed wire where it edged the old highway, and rattlesnakes had dug tunnels beneath its garage bays. Had it ever thrived? Had the highway ever been so well traveled that the warped curio emporium had once been a popular stop? The jackalope statue—that perversity of taxidermy—an idea of rabbit hell that involved mounting a dead jackrabbit and thrusting the twin spears of antelope horns into its head as if this were some new yet alien creature. Had this attracted tourists? The scorpions in the individual killing jars, suspended in a thick clear liquid that made them glow green under fluorescent lights—was this a draw for the weary traveler at one time? The place even had a small statue of the Virgin Mary, stolen from some old churchyard, covered with the garlands of dried flowers in honor of those who had died in car crashes on the highway—those drunks and sleepers-at-the-wheel whose last moments were spent looking at this endless big empty, this wilderness of nothing, in the middle of the ass-crack of the universe. The cars—smashed or sometimes only slightly damaged, with broken windshields that still reflected death’s face—sat near the garages. I remember a red-and-white convertible T-bird, a classic, but inside the vehicle, rust and rot and that whiff of perfume and whiskey still staining its torn seats.

  This was the place, the dumping ground of all things ruined and useless, that held the greatest attraction I would ever come to know.

  The great unspeakable mystery! The dark wonder of the ancient world!

  You wouldn’t think it would have any attraction, that place. You might have thought it was a “bad place” from the look of it.

  Imagine it: an old dump of a gas station at the edge of hell’s highway in the desert, the one with the half-torn billboards nearby that read, SEE THE UNSPEAKABLE WONDER OF THE ANCIENT WORLD! WHAT IS THE ATTRACTION? WHAT MYSTERY DOES IT HOLD?

  2

  Watch the desert. It is out there. This abomination. Watch along the ridge, over at that mesa, after sundown.

  You can hear it sometimes when it’s completely dark. So dark,
even the stars have died out.

  In the Southwest. In Arizona. Not among the cities and towns. Out where the scrub brush and ocotillo cactus take over the landscape. In those places where the tumbleweed blows through like a whisper of the past. The coyotes at twilight on the ridge of a mesa, their ki-yis sing of something sinister, something unnatural. The nest of rattlers in the shade of the overhanging rock has been driven out into the bare flat sunlight. And something there at sunset, scuttling along the dark lip of a cave—a crack in the wall of a cliff—some creature there.

  Strange things live on the desert.

  Strange people, too.

  I heard from an old man over in town that some dogs had gotten torn up bad out on the mesa, right near where the new housing development was going in. Maybe it was just coyotes, or maybe even a mountain lion from up in the hills, driven down from its home by hunger and thirst. But it didn’t sound like it.

  Someone said that they found a deep hole in the ground when they started to dig up an area for a new house and a swimming pool. They break up the earth, tear into it, and change it. They don’t think there’s anything in that desert earth, do they? They don’t think the something waits.

  They’re idiots to expand this town out there, out where nobody in his or her right mind should live.

  3

  What are the demons that drive us?

  For me, it’s the past. Memory is my demon. When we are young, we do stupid things. There’s no way around it. Perhaps we experiment with a drug that will hurt us. Perhaps we attach ourselves to the wrong people for us. Perhaps we take the one road off to the side of the main highway that may be the one road we should never have taken. Some of us die from our stupid things. Some of us survive and look back and regret our youths.

  Some of us have a feeling of being damned from our stupid choices when young.

  But I found out that every man can be redeemed. No matter how awful his demons are. No matter what he has done. Murder? Redeemed! Betrayal? Redeemed. Witness to slaughter? Redeemed.

  But sometimes redemption looks a lot like hell itself.

  And those demons are still there. We chase them down, whether we wish to do so or not.

  What makes us pursue those demons, even when they destroy us?

  It’s simply attraction. Once we get something in our eye, we want to see more of it. We want to own it.

  Let me tell you about attraction.

  Attraction makes us chase what, in the end, may chase us down. It is the shiny thing in the road that draws us, like crows, to our doom. Most times, the truck out of nowhere bears down on us and we end our lives in a flutter of dark feathers and scraped skin. Now and then, we nab the shiny thing and we fly with it. But there’s always one more shiny thing on some other road. Attraction is like that.

  I know about attraction. It led me to bad places, but also to good.

  Once, after a two-year love affair with the bottle, a failed suicide attempt, and a growing realization that my life was my own and didn’t belong to anyone else, I saw a woman walking down Main Street in Naga, Arizona, who looked like she kept two bobcats fighting under her dress. I followed her around town until she made it to her car, and then she turned around. I knew she was my redeemer the moment I saw her. It was more than attraction. It was something I didn’t think, then, could exist in the universe.

  It was grace.

  She had a face that made me forget everyone else I had ever met. I found her attractive, to say the least. I would have chased her to the ends of the earth if I had to, and given that Naga, Arizona, seemed like the end of the earth, I suppose I did. I was just twenty-three at the time, and living a crazy life. But she decided I was right for her. We ended up getting married, I became a better man, and after she died—too young—I went and built my home in a cavern out along a mesa, about ten miles off the new highway. I hated people, didn’t love the world, and preferred the company of jackrabbit and coyote to humankind. I had enough, and what I didn’t have, I scavenged and hunted and traded for. I wrote books, some of which have been published, but few have been read. Books with titles like, Abominations in the Ancient World, and The Lost Gospel of Hell. I know things that most men don’t, and I’ve tried to research all of it, to find out the truth of it. Sometimes, the visions themselves tell me the truth.

  Sometimes, they lie.

  I’ve seen a lot of strange things on the desert. I’ve seen a man who seemed to be turning into a dog. I’ve seen rains come out of nowhere, and from their pools, in the crater depressions of the mesa, strange fish generate from fossilized eggs. I’ve heard of a snake so large that it feeds on wild burros, and of a mountain lion that hunts only children.

  But the one thing that is undoubtedly the strangest in my existence was something called Scratch, something that lay within a stone box in a glass case inside a gas station’s roadside attraction.

  Let me tell you.

  PART ONE

  LET’S GO BACK TO THE 70S,

  SHALL WE?

  Chapter Two

  1

  1977. No cell phones. An old-fashioned, pre-tech world, if you will. An innocent world that seemed guilty. A year of death, pardon, disco, and, as the year wore on, gas lines. The death penalty was reinstated with the execution of Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed in the U.S. of A. since 1967. Gerald Ford, then-president, pardoned Tokyo Rose. Pardons were the order of the day. Jimmy Carter, from the peanut-farming family, arrived in the White House just about the time when the economy began taking a downturn. Soon enough, gas lines lengthened. It was a strange year of unrest and discontent, and nobody knew why.

  If you were in college at the time, and it was a little private middle-of-nowhere college in Virginia, in the mountains, you probably were a preppie, and you probably were in a fraternity, and you wanted to get the hell out of there except your folks were divorced, nobody really wanted you home for spring break, half your friends were heading to Virginia Beach, half to Florida, but the girl you wanted badly was going to make a fast trip to California and get back to campus within two weeks.

  You owned a car and wanted to drive her out there and back. Four days out, four days back, four days in L.A.

  Not bad.

  It was a crazy thing to do.

  But you were nineteen, hated your life, and crazy was something you needed.

  She was someone you needed.

  “Attraction can really fuck you up,” Josh said.

  He’d stretched out on the lawn because he drank too much that night and felt too awful and wished he were somewhere else and could be someone other than Josh, first to go to college on a scholarship, no less, and further from his dreams than he was from the stars above him.

  2

  Night descended, then grew luminous with the lights of the college and town. Jackson College, liberal arts, private, over-priced, party school.

  It was one of those genteel colleges, nestled in the Blue Ridge, with columns and Old South delusions and tradition fermenting in the overcrowded boxwoods and magnolia overhangs. The town was quaint and small enough to support a single movie theater called the Bijou, and after nine o’clock, all the traffic lights flashed yellow. Fraternity Row was on a street called Willow Avenue. The houses looked as if they were all built the same year, with colonial columns and balconies, and a grandness all mushed nearly side-by-side: Lambda Chi, Deltas, Pi Phi, Zeta Beta. The frat houses all lined up in perfect rows, and on this particular Friday night, all were lit up with parties and drunken students and dance music blasting out of the open windows.

  Josh, nineteen, lay back on the lawn in front of the Delta house, looking up at the stars.

  He tried to identify the constellations—the Pleiades, Orion, Scorpio—but he nearly flunked astronomy. To him, they just looked like pinpricks in the fabric of the world. The darkness, with the holes in it that hinted at another side—a bright paradise somewhere far away.

  He was drunk on the cheapest beer from a warm keg out back in
the driveway, and he’d stumbled to the front lawn, where girls stepped over him on the way into the party.

  The party roared—its music and screams spreading out into the night, but he heard it like the ocean in a seashell at his ear.

  It was both distant and close, and all he thought about was the girl he wished would be his.

  “Attraction can really fuck you up,” he said to no one. “It can mess you up good. You gotta choose the right person, because if you don’t, and you choose the wrong one, or you let nature take over so you always pick the wrong ones, it sends you to hell. Hell in a handbasket.”

  He thought of Bronwyn.

  3

  Bronwyn Shapiro: brown hair that was straight and long, five-foot-three, wore black too much, smoked too much, no breasts to speak of, but somehow was more skeletally advanced than other sophomores. She wore glasses but looked intellectual instead of geeky, didn’t put up with any crap from the guys at the frat, wrote poetry that she considered puerile but she took creative writing classes, anyway. That’s where Josh first saw her: freshman year, Expository and Creative Writing 101, Michael Framington—the short story writer—teaching. Bronwyn read a poem about setting fire to her roommate’s hair. Framington called it the worst case of overwrought emotional baggage with the sensibility of a disturbed eighteen-year-old that he’d heard in years.

  Josh wanted to hear it again.

  After that class, he went to her and asked her what she was reading. She glanced up at him from the tamped-down carpet of fresh grass. Then she shut the book, tucking it under her arm.

  “It’s called a book,” she said.

  “Now that’s a suitably bitchy thing to say,” he said.

  “You know, when I’ve noticed you in class, I’ve always thought you were a loser and now you’ve just confirmed it for me,” she said. “Please leave.”

  And that was the moment he felt that he had to have this woman in his life no matter what.

  A year later, lying on the grass, looking up at the stars, Josh wished she were with him.

  4

  Bronwyn sat on the stairs, nursing a beer, and wishing she were anywhere else but in a frat house the night after second-semester finals.