Tales From the Crossroad Volume 1 Read online

  TALES FROM THE CROSSROAD

  Edited by David Niall Wilson & David Dodd

  Fiction from:

  Tom Piccirilli * Chet Williamson * Steve Rasnic Tem

  Gerard Houarner * & Al Sarrantonio

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Cover Design by David Dodd

  COPYRIGHT:

  All Souls Day & Simple Copyright 2011 Al Sarrantonio

  Jeaves and the Deteriorating Relations & "And So Will I Remember You" Copyright 2011 Chet Williamson

  The Unmasking & How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark Copyright 2011 Steve Rasnic Tem

  nok & Three Strangers Copyright 2011 by Gerard Houarner

  This, and That's the End of It & Woman in the Dark Copyright 2011 Tom Piccirilli

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  CONTENTS

  Al Sarrantonio

  Bio

  Simple

  All Souls Day

  Excerpt: Chapter 13 of The Boy With Penny Eyes

  Tom Piccirilli

  Bio

  This, and That's the End of It

  Woman in the Dark

  Excerpt: Chapter 1 of Nightjack

  Gerard Houarner

  Bio

  The Three Strangers

  NOK

  Excerpt: Part II Chapter One of The Beast Called Max

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  Bio

  The Unmasking

  How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark

  Excerpt: First Entry in the Book of Days

  Chet Williamson

  Bio

  Jeaves & The Deteriorating Relations

  "And So Will I Remember You"

  Preview from REIGN – Chapter One

  Al Sarrantonio

  BIO:

  Al Sarrantonio is the author of forty-five books. He is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Locus Award, the Audie Award, and the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award.

  His novels, spanning the horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery and western genres, include Moonbane, Skeletons, House Haunted, the Five Worlds trilogy, the Masters of Mars trilogy, West Texas, and the Orangefield Halloween trilogy.

  Hailed as "a master anthologist" by Booklist, he has edited numerous collections of new tales, including the highly acclaimed 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, Redshift : Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, Stories (with co-editor Neil Gaiman), Halloween: New Poems, and, most recently, Portents.

  His short stories have appeared in magazines such as Heavy Metal, Twilight Zone, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Analog, and Amazing, as well as in anthologies such as The Year's Best Horror Stories, Visions of Fantasy: Tales from the Masters, Great Ghost Stories, Best New Horror and The Best of Shadows. His stories have been collected in Toybox, Hornets and Others, and Halloween and Other Seasons. He has had numerous book club sales, and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and appeared in comic book form. He currently lives in New York's historic Hudson Valley region.

  Visit the author at his website: www.alsarrantonio.com

  Simple

  by Al Sarrantonio

  Two boys.

  Two girls.

  Dusk.

  Halloween.

  The rising moon hung sharp-edged and near-full behind a gauzy blanket of clouds. Sidewalks rose and sank, up one gentle hill, down another, their cracks sprouting brown, dry grass. The wind, picking up Winter-to-come’s chill, rattled the trees, making them shed – brown red yellow leaves which nestled against the gutters and rustled like there were living things beneath.

  Two girls.

  Two boys.

  The town of Orangefield.

  “I say he don’t exist!” insisted Excalibur, whose real name was Jim Gates. “I say it’s all hooey!” A night spent as an actual sword, made of stiff cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil with a face cut out of the center had made him cranky and bold.

  “Hell,” said his male companion, Gil, dressed like a simple cowboy, his brimming candy bag weighing him down, “you weren’t even born here! You just moved in! What do you know?” He frowned. “And your Great Uncle Riley was one of his victims!” The weight of the treasure bag finally became too much for him, and he put it down with an “Oooof!”

  The girls, twins named Marcey and Carsey, remained silent, wide-eyed. Their own bags were on the ground already – it had been a profitable evening.

  “I gotta be home--” Carsey said, as the silence lengthened, but Marcey gave her a dirty look, twitching her cat girl whiskers.

  “No we don’t,” Marcey countered, her whiskers twitching again, one side of them falling off.

  “Hey, we’re all ten years old, right?” Gil said, trying to stand tall, though he was the shortest of them, even with his cowboy hat on.

  Jim narrowed his eyes. “What did you have in mind?”

  Gil looked at the ground, but Marcey said, almost a shout, “Let’s go find ‘im!”

  Carsey’s eyes grew real wide, and she looked like she wanted to cry.

  Then Gil looked up, and suddenly he smiled, and the rest smiled too, even Carsey, in a sad way.

  And Excalibur, for a brief moment, shined with an almost blinding light as the Moon broke through the clouds and looked coldly down at the four of them.

  They hid their candy in Ranier Park, between two big rocks with another across the top that made a cave. Gil swore it would be safe there, and when Jim protested he said, “You’re new here. Trust me.”

  Jim looked back longingly at the small dark cave mouth as they walked away, but once again Gil repeated, “Trust me.”

  Ten minutes later found them in the empty pumpkin patches of Schwartz’s farm. The ground was rutted, filled with rows of twisting dead pumpkin vines, already waiting for the winter to freeze them stiff and turn the furrows to brown icy ditches.

  But here at the end of October the ground was still soft, the vines in the moonlight looked like twisting fingers.

  “This is creepy,” Carsey said.

  “This is where they first saw the Pumpkin Boy,” Gil countered. “It’s supposed to be creepy.”

  “We’re not looking for the Pumpkin Boy,” Marcey remarked.

  “I don’t believe that one, either,” Jim said, his jaw hurting from bumping against the lower cardboard cutout of his huge mask.

  Finally he made them stop while he yanked the top of the costume off, shredding aluminum foil and hitting the bottom of his jaw again as he pulled the massive mask off.

  “Ow!”

  “I’d say ‘ow’ too if I had a face like that,” Gil said, laughing.

  “I meant to tell you earlier how dumb your cowboy outfit was
,” Jim said, recovering.

  The two girls laughed, a simultaneous giggle, half an octave apart.

  Jim threw down the ruined sword, which settled into a furrow, in a nest of vines and they walked on.

  “And that’s the valley where the Pumpkin Boy snatched little Jody Wendt,” Gil announced, as they stood on the top of a steep slope which led down to a patch of woods near a thin, bubbling creek.

  “Now that one I know was hooey,” Jim snapped. “That Pumpkin Boy thing was just a machine some loony made.”

  Down below, in the middle of the thin spot of woods, something glowed, silver and orange.

  “You don’t think...” Marcey said.

  “They say you can still see him, some Halloweens,” Gil answered, his voice suddenly soft.

  “Good thing we’re not going that way,” Jim said, trying to sound tough, but he too was rooted to the spot as something peeked out of the woods and then was gone.

  “I thought I saw...” Carsey squeaked.

  “A pumpkin head?” Gil said, and there was no mockery in his voice.

  Carsey nodded, but then there was a hoot and a laugh from down below and three older children emerged from the woods, two wearing realistic animal masks, fox and hound, and the other with a pumpkin head, which he removed, laughing again.

  “So much for the Pumpkin Boy!” Jim hooted.

  Gil reminded him: “But that’s not who we’re looking for.”

  Carsey looked back as they left, and something else, more ethereal, glowed in the woods down below.

  They followed the line of the slope, until it gradually disappeared underfoot, leading them down gently to the level of the valley. Ahead of them was a deeper wood, darker, thick with trees. There were stout elms and stately oaks, and the forest floor was covered with fallen acorns.

  The moon had climbed above the thin clouds.

  The wind was sharper, colder.

  “When did we have to be home?” Marcey asked, suddenly hopeful. “What time is it? I think we should go now.”

  “You were the one said we didn’t have to be home,” Carsey replied.

  “You sure we hid that candy where the big kids won’t find it?” Jim said.

  “The candy’s fine,” Gil snapped. “And no one’s going home yet.”

  Carsey looked like she wanted to cry.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said.

  Gil shot her a look, and Marcey hissed, “Be quiet.”

  Carsey began, “But–”

  “Be quiet!”

  Jim looked at the three of them. “What’s wrong with you guys?”

  Gil smiled tightly. “Nothing.”

  “Are we going in or not?”

  The others stood still.

  “Why don’t you go in first?” Gil offered. He gave a weak smile. “Since it’s all hooey.”

  Jim shrugged. “Fine.”

  He took a step forward into the woods.

  The wind suddenly died, and it became very quiet. He could not see the path before him, only the darker edges of nearby trees.

  There came a rustling in the dark ahead of him, swallowed by an almost palpable silence, and then nothing.

  He turned around, expecting to find his new friends behind him, but they had stepped away from the woods.

  “Marcey? Carsey? Gil?” he called.

  “We’ve...decided to go home,” Gil said.

  “You can’t go home,” Jim answered.

  Gil’s smile was even weaker than his last one, and then he looked at the ground. “What are you going to do, threaten us with your sword?”

  “Go home, then,” Jim said.

  The three of them suddenly turned and ran.

  “See you!” Gil called back, and it sounded like a choked sob.

  Marcey and Carsey’s crying echoed and faded.

  Jim turned back toward the woods, and something just inside the dark, something that looked like a gently flapping cape topped with a white oval of a face cut by a thin red slash of mouth, said, “Come in.”

  Back in Ranier Park, at the mouth of the cave, four fat bags of trick-or-treat loot sat amidst three trick or treaters.

  No one said anything until Gil, fumbling with the handles of his own bag, looked up from the fourth bag and said, “I don’t want any of it.”

  “Me either,” echoed Carsey. “Maybe we can give it to charity or something.”

  “Maybe there’s a hospital that could use it,” Marcey offered. “For the kids who couldn’t go trick or treating this year.”

  “Maybe we could put it in a box and send it to India, to poor kids there.”

  Gil shook his head. “I don’t think they have Halloween in India.”

  “Maybe we could–” Marcey began, but her sister cut her off.

  “He should have known better.”

  The three of them nodded.

  Gil added, “He should have especially known, being Riley Gate’s kin and all.”

  Again all three of them nodded their heads.

  Marcey said, “Too bad he was the new kid in school. I kind of liked him. Too bad it couldn’t have been Larry Jarvis. I can’t stand him.”

  “Me neither,” Gil said. “But Larry Jarvis knows.”

  “Of course he does,” Carsey said. “We all know. The only ones who don’t know are the new ones.”

  Again there was a silence, this one longer.

  “I wish it hadn’t been our turn,” Gil whispered, looking at the floor.

  Marcey said, “Everybody gets a turn. That’s just the way it is. When you’re nine, or ten, or eleven, it gets to be your turn. You don’t have a choice.”

  Carsey began to sniffle. “I liked him.”

  “Me too.”

  “And me too.”

  “Too bad.”

  The three of them nodded.

  Gil sounded like he was talking to himself, justifying. “And that’s just the way we keep things...simple.”

  “Simple,” Marcey parroted.

  Carsey nodded, drying her sniffles.

  “And you don’t mess with Samhain,” Gil added.

  “No you don’t.”

  “Everybody knows that.”

  “It’s all he asks for. One a year. To keep things...simple.”

  They all nodded.

  The longest silence of the evening. Marcey sat staring at the extra bursting bag of candy.

  “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt if we just took a little.”

  She reached out, scooped some Double Bubble from the very apex of the bulging bag.

  Carsey nodded, plucking a Mars bar whose end peeked above the upper level.

  “It would be a shame to let it go to waste.”

  “A sin, even,” Gil said, shoving his palm into the brimming horde and removing a handful, which he stuffed in a jacket pocket.

  “After all, we don’t have a big box. And I don’t even know where India is.”

  Soon the bag was empty.

  All Souls Day

  by Al Sarrantonio

  Originally appeared online at Horror Drive-In copyright 2009 by Al Sarrantonio

  Orangefield seen from the air by the hawk:

  A thin ribbon of highway to the East, a shivering long snake now seen, now lost between tall stands of tight pine trees and conifers and oaks. The trees were colorful now, dressed like costumers in red, yellow, brown. To the West were mountains, a string of high hills like low jagged teeth against the landscape. The tops were dusted bare white. And then there was the town directly below.

  The hawk made a wide lazy gyre, looking down, and dropped lower. The spire of a church, white-crossed, and next to it a parking lot. Something small moved on the tarmac, and for a moment the hawk was distracted. A rodent? No, only a piece of balled-up paper, pushed by the wind. The hawk resumed his inventory. Another tall building, with a dirty flat roof but stately-looking brick on the sides. Steps leading up to it. The town hall, flanked by a long block of shops broken by side streets. The hawk knew those side stre
ets – good hunting, there, mice and the occasional rat or treeless squirrel. A gas station across the road, next to it a small motel, its L shape squaring off its small asphalt parking lot.

  Farther down, the Orangefield Hotel, nearly as old as the town, its flat roof old and cracked, but its red-bricked façade, recently restored, as beautiful as the day it opened.

  The hawk flew on, its wing tips barely fluttering as it soared on the westerly breeze.

  More shops – a coffee shop, a toy store, a fairly new wine shop where a furniture refinisher used to be.

  A single-level Borders bookstore on the corner, butted up against a flower shop and then a women’s dress shop.

  Directly across the street, an outdoor clothier, one of many pubs, a shop featuring gewgaws and glass pieces.

  A swoop to the right again, and then the new construction, a row of old warehouses turned into condominiums, the new clean square windows glinting in the sun.

  And then Ranier Park.

  The hawk circled, dropped even lower. What it sought was here, though it was neither rodent nor bird. The trees thickened, then spread out again to a flat expanse of fairground where even now the Pumpkin Days festival tents were being erected: new colors this year, a huge green-and-white striper flanked by two red-and-white striped tents. Gone were the orange-and-white tents of other years.

  The hawk had no opinion, but caught at the moment a slight updraft, drifting upward as the workers below stopped to look up at his passage.

  The trees thickened again, a stand of pines giving way to sturdy oaks.

  The hawk dropped suddenly, folding his wings sleekly against his body as if in attack.

  The ground, he noted with disinterest, was covered in this spot with fallen acorns.