Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Evil Returns to a Small Town Near You -Laird Barron

  SUNSET ON MOTT ISLAND - Lucy A. Snyder

  A SONG LEFT BEHIND IN THE AZTAKEA HILLS - James Chambers

  THE LONGDOCK AIR - William Meikle

  A GLIMPSE OUTSIDE - Erinn L. Kemper

  1570 kHz - Damien Angelica Walters

  DRAWING GOD - Michael Wehunt

  DUCK HUNT - Joe R. Lansdale

  THE WATER SHED - Suzanne Madron

  DISINTEGRATION IS QUITE PAINLESS - Max Booth III

  THE BOY WITH THE GOLDEN ARM - C.W. LaSart

  SHINE, BLACKBERRY WINE - Eden Royce

  HOMEOWNER’S ASSOCIATION OF UNFATHOMABLE HORRORS BEYOND THE STARS - Jay Wilburn

  SHOO FLY PIE AND APPLE PAN DOWDY - Gary A. Braunbeck

  THE OMEN - Joyce Carol Oates

  SOMETHING IN THE WATER - Douglas Wynne

  SHUG - John F.D. Taff

  IT REALLY IS A BEAUTIFUL TOWN - Ronald Malfi

  About the Authors

  Shadows Over

  Main Street

  Volume 2

  Other Horror Anthologies From

  Cutting Block Books

  Horror Library Volume 4

  Horror Library Volume 5

  Horror Library Volume 6

  The Best of Horror Library

  Shadows Over Main Street Volume 1

  Single Slices Volume 1

  Cutting Block Books

  an imprint of Farolight Publishing,

  a division of Farolight Entertainment, LLC

  PO Box 1521

  Winchester, VA 22604

  www.cuttingblockbooks.com

  Shadows Over Main Street 2 contains works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Farolight Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  All stories and commentary are original to this volume, and are © 2017 by their respective authors, except the following:

  “The Omen,” by Joyce Carol Oates, © 1993 The Ontario Review Inc. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.

  “Duck Hunt,” © 1986 by Joe R. Lansdale, previously appeared in After Midnight, TOR Books, 1986.

  All material used by permission.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Cutting Block Books trade paperback edition: October 2017

  Inset Layout and Design by Bailey Hunter

  www.facebook.com/BaileyHunterDesign

  All artwork © 2017 by Luke Spooner

  www.carrionhouse.com

  Published in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949824

  ISBN 978-0-9961159-9-5 (trade paperback)

  Dedication

  For Phyllis. With love and understanding, you encouraged me to take my first steps down this dark and wondrous path.

  —Doug Murano

  For Mimi, in whose library I found a book of weird stories that had no business being there at all, but which set me on a path one lazy summer afternoon that has continued all my life. For the readers and writers and artists and creators of every kind who keep watch over the imperfect but inspiring legacy of Lovecraft’s mythos… this book is for you. I am proud to be counted among you in this little cult of ours. Now, turn the page and bring the lantern closer, that we might speak the words of the incantations true.

  —D. Alexander Ward

  —

  Acknowledgments

  The editors would like to acknowledge the immense contribution of all the authors featured here and the stories they have conjured. We’d also like to offer a very special and heartfelt thanks to Laird Barron for his time and attention in penning the foreword for this second volume. Many thanks as well to the folks at Farolight and Cutting Block Books for taking on both volumes in this series so near and dear to our hearts.

  Evil Returns to a Small Town Near You

  Laird Barron

  The stories on offer in Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2 cover a lot of ground while hewing faithfully to themes of cosmic horror and elemental weirdness. Two stories included in this volume, “The Boy with the Golden Arm” by C.W. LaSart, and “It Really Is a Beautiful Town” by Ronald Malfi, capture the essence of the project.

  One piece concerns baseball, a kid with a major-league arm, and the attendant social pressures he endures. Our young hero is presented with a rare opportunity which manifests in the form of an otherworldly entity that slumbers in the slimy mud of a local riverbed. The boy can choose to embrace evil (at the ultimate expense of civilization) and receive all the wealth and power that comes along with the Faustian bargain, or he can walk away, dooming himself to a life of ignominy. Meanwhile, the other story tackles the premise of a Stepford Town caught in the amber of mid-Twentieth Century America. Perfect lawns, perfect smiles, peach cobbler, and all. Our hero is seduced by a wholesome, familial veneer that camouflages a sinister truth.

  Both stories neatly demonstrate an unspoken thesis that has built over the course of decades: the small-town setting might well be the backbone of modern horror. Exorcism, serial killer, and undead tropes are ubiquitous. Historically, Judeo-Christian conservatism is the moral standard that Western horror fiction trespasses against. Yet, while the action has occurred in nearly every imaginable location, Main Street of a small-town-near-you remains the default; it’s where the kids with the glowing eyes congregate; a master vampire builds his flock; and where ancient evil (in the shape of every Universal Studios monster of record) broods beneath quiet streets. Time and again, a drowsy, provincial community beckons our prodigal hero home to combat deviltry in its multitude of forms.

  We can’t get enough of it—readers and writers, country mouse and city mouse alike. That’s why Cutting Block Books has returned to the scene of the uncanny crime to present Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2.

  Stephen King, Peter Straub, Dean R. Koontz, Shirley Jackson, and Ray Bradbury are masters of the “small town horror story” genre; these authors have done much to popularize the niche. It; Salem’s Lot; Ghost Story; Phantoms; The Lottery; The Summer People; and Something Wicked This Way Comes spring to mind. Of this particular subset of horror, Phantoms by Dean R. Koontz made a stark impression on my developing teenage mind. No surprise for a couple of reasons.

  Koontz’s novel of ancient evil bedeviling a small tourist community high in the California mountains has become a modern classic. Phantoms combines aspects of thriller, mystery, and horror fiction with a sense of deep geological time and a sequence of real-world disappearances that lend his narrative verisimilitude.

  Reason two? My provenance is such that I’m blessed, or cursed, by a lifelong fascination for cryptozoology, mysterious vanishings, and the infinite and unpleasant possibilities associated with rural isolation. I spent significant portions of my youth in a wilderness setting. That’s not quite where I started, however. Novels, such as Phantoms, and the stories between the covers of this book, tend to tick numerous boxes regarding what I look for in horror and weird fiction. When couched against a rustic backdrop, it strikes a primordial chord.

  I w
as born in Palmer, Alaska; a dusty little burg on the Matanuska River. The Talkeetna and Chugach Mountains rise to form the northern and eastern boundaries of the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Palmer was originally founded as a rail station around the time WWI shifted into full tilt. In my day (the mid-1970s into the latter 1980s), railroad tracks still cut through town and crews frequently oiled the hardpacked dirt roads to keep dust clouds under control.

  Alaska is a harsh, subarctic biome, but the Mat-Su Valley has always done a fair trade in dairies, potatoes, giant cabbages, and Mary Jane. Palmer is picturesque in the summer, what with all those green lawns and cheery faux 1880s gold rush boomtown facades, the decommissioned Alaska Railroad engine near town hall, and the whitewashed churches. August heralds the Alaska State Fair and an explosion of tourism drawn to third tier country acts, carnival rides, and the aforementioned giant cabbages. Palmer’s motor parks, restaurants, and taverns are awash in custom. It’s the Alaska iteration of small-town USA and not much different than any number of similar communities—Wasilla, Big Lake, Eagle River, or Seward—to name places where I’ve whiled away many a lazy summer afternoon.

  But consider this—despite the fact the overall crime rate remained relatively low in the Valley towns, especially compared to a good-sized city, such as Anchorage, there was, as the old television show warns, a dark side. Assaults, bar fights, burglaries, theft; and weirder, darker incidents that ranged from disappearances to bizarre murders (such as the time a man killed and stewed his victim in a pressure cooker and fed the remains to a kennel of sled dogs; or that baker who kidnapped women and hunted them in the woods near Eklutna and the Knik River like the villain from The Most Dangerous Game) against a frequent backdrop of occult ritual. Obviously, the vast majority of Satanic/occult vandalism (usually graffiti) was perpetrated by kids and assorted hoaxers. And yet, and yet…

  Here’s a creepy anecdote that might lend a keyhole insight into the darkness always bubbling beneath the surface of whatever bucolic locale you happen to inhabit. During the mid-1980s, I spent a couple of summers schlepping bags of grain at an animal feed store. One of our best customers owned prize-winning rabbits; she kept them in a hutch in the backyard of her family’s country home. The rabbit lady came in toward the end of my midweek shift, flour-pale and distraught. She explained that someone had crept into her yard the previous evening and slaughtered the rabbits in their hutches. None of the family members were awakened by the sound of presumably squealing rabbits; the dogs didn’t bark a frantic alarm, nothing.

  The police investigation came up empty. The lady regrouped and purchased more rabbits. She moved the hutches against the house beneath the bedroom window. At night, she and her husband nailed the roofs onto the enclosures. A few weeks passed, and it happened again: bunny slaughter part two.

  Rumors circulated that occult symbols and threats were drawn in blood against the side of the house. Other whispers claimed the police worried matters might escalate from animal butchery to something worse. As far as I know, that was the end of the lady’s rabbit project and the culprit, or culprits, never answered for the crime. Dig around the Mat-Su Valley, you’ll uncover plenty of similarly strange and occasionally chilling anecdotes.

  The authors of Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2 tap into this naturally-occurring strangeness and dial it to eleven. Allow me to give you a further taste of the horrors and ecstasies that await…

  “1570 kHz” by Damien Walters: Walters is one of the best new writers in the horror/weird fiction business and an expert regarding matters of physiological and psychological distress. Her entry deals with the aftermath of a father’s service in World War II and how he struggles with battle fatigue. Wonderfully light dialect from the perspective of a child who fears the unpleasant frequency corrupting Daddy’s radio. What if the Manchurian Candidate took marching orders from an enemy as old as fear itself?

  “Drawing God” by Michael Wehunt: Wehunt is another rising star. He transmits an elegant and wrenching tale wherein an old man returns to the sacred haunts of his childhood, a profane schoolhouse/temple embedded among the Appalachians. You can go home, but may not like what you find waiting in the pines.

  “The Longdock Air” by veteran horror writer, William Meikle: a penniless drifter searches the small river town of Longdock for a lost song. A few bars of Manley Wade Wellman, Robert W. Chambers, and H.P. Lovecraft combine for a tune of dreaming madness.

  “A Song Left Behind in the Aztakea Hills” by James Chambers: The ghosts of Jack Kerouac, and a boozy artist lamenting upon love lost collide when a mathematician blows into town with a mind to recreate a very bad no good equation.

  “A Glimpse Outside” by Erinn L Kemper: Kemper’s story features a caregiver who falls under the spell of her astrophysicist patient’s mystical pendant. A striking non-linear doom narrative set deep inside Canadian farmland.

  As I said, this is a mere taste. There are weird visions to explore by Joe R. Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucy A. Snyder, and other worthies. Each of them turns the screw a notch tighter on the basic premise of Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2.

  Darkness bides wherever humans congregate; picket fences, church steeples, and orderly existences are no defense against evil. Indeed, from a literary standpoint, horror and weirdness are doubly potent when their intrinsic effect of destabilizing reality and mundane routine serves to warp and derange the nigh inflexible precincts of humdrum existence.

  So, move on from this preface and take a cruise through a procession of peculiar towns. Remember, Main Street runs where ancient trails and game paths twisted. Once upon a time, Main Street was a dirt byway that terminated at the borders of its thorpe, hamlet, village, or town. Beyond, stretched a frontier wilderness shrouded in shadows and mystery. Ghosts and devils and woodland spirits walked the earth. The stories in this anthology revive the notion of genius loci, that spirit of place which never dies, but slumbers beneath tilled fields, paved roads, and the impermanent habitats of humankind, dreaming and waiting.

  --Laird Barron

  Stone Ridge, NY

  4/11/17

  SUNSET ON MOTT ISLAND

  Lucy A. Snyder

  Mom had another bad night; she kept waking up and calling for my father, who’d died when I was only five. Sometimes, she called for her own father, and sometimes, she called out strange names in a language I didn’t recognize. For hours, she refused to take the sleeping medicine Dr. Olmstead had left us, but shortly before dawn I finally convinced her to swallow a pill with a sip of water. As the sun broke over the horizon, her mouth went slack, and she drifted into what I hoped would be a dreamless sleep.

  I climbed the creaking stairs to the rooftop deck to watch the sun rise over the ocean. It was gorgeous as it always was this time of year, the clouds lit in different shades of scarlet and orange. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

  Miles away, I could see a dark speck moving across the dune-covered southern causeway. Dr. Olmstead on his beat-up beach cruiser bike pedaling in for his weekly house calls. I knew he was a good man when I first met him, but that was before the world went insane. Lots of people could be good upstanding citizens when it didn’t cost them anything, and most pillars of the community abandoned the city the moment things got difficult. Dr. Olmstead stayed to do what he could for the people who needed it despite the toll it was taking on him. He had just three patients still alive out here on the island, my mother among them. He visited us every week. I didn’t know how many people he was still trying to help in the city.

  I gazed out at the city skyline beyond the causeway. Allstate Tower was still burning, but the smoke was much less than it had been even a day ago. When the panic started after the monsters came up from the sewers, Dr. Olmstead said practically every building downtown suffered some kind of arson. He’d been busy at the hospital and it took him three days to find out that his apartment building had burned to the ground.

  Fortunately, the looting and monsters never reached the island, an
d Dr. Olmstead found a safe place to stay with a friend who’d since fled. I watched the doctor’s progress up the road; I had maybe twenty minutes to shower and put on some fresh clothes. I knew Dr. Olmstead had seen far worse than a sweaty thirty-year-old woman with bed head, but I didn’t want him to see worse. I wanted him to be in a place where people were glad to see him and didn’t stink. A place with comfortable furniture and cold drinks and cookies. Well, I couldn’t offer much in twenty minutes besides boxed gingersnaps and lemonade, and my mother’s sofa was sagging pretty hard from all the nights I’d slept on it, but I’d do the best I could out of respect for his always doing the best he could. At least we had a working ice maker.

  I headed downstairs, pulled some fresh clothes off the rack I’d set up in my mom’s laundry room, and went into her cramped bathroom to bathe. We’d lost natural gas service when the city burned, but the weather had only just started to turn cool and the water wasn’t unbearably chilly yet. For now, I still had enough fuel for the generator; I knew the family that owned the Main Street gas station and they let me stock up when they abandoned it. The island’s power grid was flaky at the best of times, and I wanted to make sure that Mom always had ice when she needed it in the summer. I’d almost had a newer gas stove installed, but was glad I’d stuck with the old electric that came with the house. If Mom lasted into the winter, I could heat up water for her bath on the stove.

  I soaped up and started to give my breasts a once-over. It had been weeks, maybe months since I’d remembered to examine myself. When you’re busy watching your mother die, little things can fall by the wayside. I pressed my slick fingers into the side of my right breast and made a circle. My index finger found something that felt like a shard of pottery a half-inch beneath my skin.