Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road
Welcome to Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.
Copyright 2018 Crystal Lake Publishing
All Rights Reserved
Property of Crystal Lake Publishing
Cover Art:
Matthew Revert
Layout:
Lori Michelle—www.theauthorsalley.com
Proofread by:
Paula Limbaugh
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imaginations or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
All stories are original to this anthology, except the following, used with permission:
“Not From Detroit,” © Joe R. Lansdale. First published in Midnight Graffiti.
“The Widow,” © Rio Youers. First published in End of the Road.
Art:
Cover art and design by Matthew Revert.
“The Mag-Bat” © Wes Freed
“Witness” © Tyler Jenkins
“Some Day, Soon” © Luke Spooner
“Follow the Sign” © François Vaillancourt
“Never Walk Alone” © François Vaillancourt
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Brian Keene
FOLLOW THE SIGN
François Vaillancourt
CROSSROADS OF OPPORTUNITY
doungjai gam and Ed Kurtz
WHERE THE WILD WINDS BLOW
Matt Hayward
NOT FROM DETROIT
Joe R. Lansdale
A LIFE THAT IS NOT MINE
Kristi DeMeester
THE MAG-BAT
Wes Freed
MR. HUGSY
Robert Ford
SWAMP DOG
Lisa Kröger
NO EXIT
Orrin Grey
THE LONG WHITE LINE
Michael Bailey
SOME DAY, SOON
Luke Spooner
JIM’S MEATS
Kelli Owen
BACK SEAT
Bracken MacLeod
THE HEART STOPS AT THE END OF LAUREL LANE
Jess Landry
TITAN, TYGER
Jonathan Janz
WITNESS
Tyler Jenkins
YOUR POUND OF FLESH
Nick Kolakowski
REQUITAL
Richard Thomas
THAT PILGRIMS’ HANDS DO TOUCH
Damien Angelica Walters
OUTRUNNING THE END
Cullen Bunn
NEVER WALK ALONE
François Vaillancourt
MOTEL NINE
Christopher Buehlman
DEW UPON THE WING
Rachel Autumn Deering
ROOM 4 AT THE HAYMAKER
Josh Malerman
THE WIDOW
Rio Youers
PROUDLY BROUGHT TO YOU BY CRYSTAL LAKE PUBLISHING
For my friends and family with whom I’ve spent many hours in carriages of steel and rolling wheels: thank you. For the road trips and the stories, the laughter and the scares. The stolen kisses and the stolen street signs. For late night drives . . . to cold mountains and warm summer waters and spooky old houses. For making it home to plot new courses and tell the tales again.
For you, dear reader. Climb on in and get comfortable. Roll down the window for the night air if you like. The roads are legion, and we have such strange sights to see . . .
D. Alexander Ward
May, 2018
“The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.”
—William E. Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark”
INTRODUCTION
BRIAN KEENE
About two hours from my home, nestled deep in the heart of Pennsylvania’s mostly decimated coal belt, lies the ghost town of Centralia. When I say ghost town, I mean exactly that—an abandoned town, much like the ones that still dot America’s West, but this one is nestled in the valleys and mountains of a mid-Atlantic state.
Centralia was once a thriving community, and coal mining was its lifeblood. But decades ago, one of the veins that pump that lifeblood caught fire, resulting in one of the worst mining disasters in American history. That fire has raged beneath Centralia in all the years since and will still be burning long after all of us are gone, pumping deadly gases topside and caving in the earth with smoking sinkholes that swallow houses, businesses, and occasionally people.
Visit Centralia now, and most of the houses are gone. Only three remain, along with a church. But the streets are still there, and the cemeteries. The graveyards are heartbreaking. Many of the headstones have been swallowed into the earth, and the graves themselves are warped by sinkholes as the fire changes the topography beneath them. If you walk out into the forests and look down at your feet, you’ll be surprised to see that you’re stepping on the sidewalk—the cement and street curbs buried beneath fallen leaves and other woodland detritus. Nature is reclaiming this town, but the one area it can’t retake is the lost highway running through the center of the forest. Once part of Highway 61, the state closed it down when the mine fire reached beneath it, buckling the blacktop and creating cavernous pits and craters. They built a new highway on the outskirts of town, but the old highway—the lost highway—is still there. It is covered in graffiti—some of it obscene, some of it poignant, and a few messages that are cryptic or have definite occult leanings. People flock from around the world to see it and walk this road to nowhere. But that is nothing new.
Humankind has always been fascinated with roads and trails, footpaths and highways, particularly lost ones. Ancient seafarers, explorers, and cartographers devoted their entire lives to answering that question posed by The Talking Heads, “Where does that highway go to?” If The Talking Heads had asked J.R.R. Tolkien, he would have told them that “The road goes ever on.” The Highwaymen—better known as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson,
agreed, singing that “the road goes on forever.”
But if the road has no ending, what is the point of traveling on it? Confucius said that roads were made for journeys, not destinations. And the English poet Richard Le Gallienne opined that roads “offer a more mystical destination.” Having walked Centralia’s lost highway many times, I can attest to the feeling one gets from that place. It does indeed seem almost like some supernatural journey, and one wonders what he or she will find at the end of that graffiti-covered road that terminates into nothing but deep, dark forest.
The road can lead to wondrous adventures, but it can also lead to unimaginable horrors. David Lynch knew this, with his supernatural neo-noir masterpiece Lost Highway. Bukowski and Kerouac knew it, as well. Hunter S. Thompson and Mark Twain and John Steinbeck and Stephen King have all outlined the dangers to be found out on those highways. And so have the authors of the stories in this book.
Buckle up now, dear reader. We’re riding off into the darkness together, you and I. doungjai gam and Ed Kurtz will be our drivers for the first part of this trip. Others will take over along the way. They will guide us along this sinister road, this damned highway, and yes, I believe we will be lost in the shadows.
Hold tight . . .
—Brian Keene
June, 2018
FOLLOW THE SIGN
François Vaillancourt
CROSSROADS OF OPPORTUNITY
DOUNGJAI GAM AND ED KURTZ
Though it took Marianne the better part of a year to die, she finally got around to it on a Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, Henry was on US I-78 heading west at a steady clip of 75 MPH. He drove a baby blue Buick with the radio stuck on one station, which sometimes wasn’t a station, depending on where he ended up. Country/Western in the morning, static in the afternoon, something a bit like reggae by sundown. That was after Henry passed the state line, though he wasn’t entirely sure which state he’d left and which he’d entered. He didn’t pay mind to much.
He just drove.
Sometime after midnight Henry’s eyelids grew heavy and his stomach growled in anger. A brightly lit billboard advertised all-night breakfast at a diner on the outskirts of Effinghamsome miles down the road and he figured that was as good a place as any to stop for a cup of weak coffee and runny eggs. It wasn’t until the billboard was out of sight that he realized he missed what exit he needed to take. There were a couple of signs that may have mentioned food or gas or lodging but he noticed them in the rearview mirror as accidental afterthoughts. What lulled him out of his state of semi-slumber was the exit sign for I-57 northbound to Chicago.
Illinois, then.
But Chicago was a definite no. Far too many people, too big a city. This Effingham? He’d never heard of it. A bump in the road to a Jersey City boy. And the logo emblazoned on the water tower, the one on the east side of town when he crossed into it, after the diner he’d missed and after he realized he was in Illinois: The Crossroads of Opportunity. Shades of old Robert Johnson, selling his soul at the crossroads to the devil so he could play the guitar. What in hell had Marianne done it for, then? Just to live a little longer in agony, Henry reckoned. And then, once she finally died, to get back up and laugh in his face.
“Chicago would’ve been nice,” Marianne rasped from the back seat, her voice heavy with a two-pack-a-day habit. A couple of rounds of chemo damn near destroyed what remained of her vocal cords. “I’ve never been to the Midwest.”
You’ve never been outside the Tri-State area.
Henry couldn’t bear to think of the thing back there, moldering under her blue wool blanket, as Marianne. As far as he could tell, the moment she went through the door, this motherfucker snuck right in from the other side. Talk about an opportunity, her death the crossroads.
He continued down I-70, which was now also I-57. 78 had ended two, three states back, he didn’t know. Didn’t care much, either. The key was to keep driving. The answer had to be out there.
His eyes were drawn to a light on the other side of the highway—a smallish blob on the horizon that grew larger and taller the closer he got.
“Holy shit,” he muttered. It was a cross, easily a couple of hundred feet tall. He figured most people saw it as a glowing white beacon of hope in the night; to Henry it was a monstrous eyesore. He and Marianne had never been more than casual churchgoers at best—Christmas and Easter with the occasional wedding and funeral thrown in for good measure. She had flirted with the idea of converting after the diagnosis but instead became enraptured by the homeopathic lifestyle, with its essential oils and strange cocktails of ginger and turmeric and whatever snake oil was trending at the moment.
He wished that had been the end of the madness, but it was merely the beginning.
In a brief moment of desperation, Henry wondered if it was worth getting off the highway and bringing her to the cross. But what could be done—it wasn’t like he could drop her off there and expect a miracle. Maybe there was a priest nearby who could perform an exorcism on whatever entity it was that had taken over her body.
He snorted at the notion. Even if he was more than half serious about bringing them both back into a religious environment, there didn’t seem to be an exit to get there. He’d passed the last one at least a mile back and the road signs indicated that 57 and 70 were going to be splitting back into two separate highways in less than a few miles.
South to Memphis or west to St. Louis—neither appealed to him. But west was the way he had started this trip, and west he would continue. He moved into the right lane to continue on 70. The streetlamps on this stretch were unlit for some reason; he reckoned the situation would not improve once they were outside the city, same with the billboards.
“Stop for a pack of Winstons for me, will you, love?”
“No.”
“Can’t hurt me anymore.”
“Shut up.”
“That’s not niiiiice,” she hissed.
Henry shuddered. And then, as if mimicking him, so did the Buick.
Not now. You piece of shit, not now.
Marianne snickered. Henry shot a glance at the gas gauge, the needle at just above the halfway point. The car shuddered again, and his mind bounced around random diagnoses, though Henry knew next to nothing about cars. They were barely out of Effingham, back on a dark, empty stretch to anywhere, when the dash lights blinked off, and then on again, and finally died.
The Buick trembled violently and the steering wheel wrenched itself free from Henry’s grip, spinning left and sending the car careening across two lanes. His ears filled with the loudness of the rumble strip as they hurtled onto the low ribbon of yellow grass and dirt in the median. Henry’s heart pounded against his ribs and Marianne cackled the whole way.
“Shit!” Henry pounded the steering wheel. The Buick now faced eastbound, dead in the grass, dead as Marianne should have been.
“Pity,” Marianne said.
A semi rocketed past, shaking the car and its occupants. Once it was gone, all was still again. Still, and pitch black. Henry’s temples throbbed. Marianne was beginning to stink. Instinctively, he jabbed at the button on the armrest to his left to lower the window. It took him a second to piece together why it wasn’t doing anything.
He felt like crying. His wet eyes shot up to the rearview mirror, where he saw the shape of her rising up behind him. A dark, formless shape bubbling up from the seat and the blanket, more terror than reality, for he couldn’t really see much of anything at all. It was the most she’d moved since he’d thrown her back there, and this was disconcerting. The idea was that the farther they got from the source of it all, that ugly business that started this whole mess, the more likely Henry would be able to put an end to it. The stone she’d died clutching, that goddamned talisman, a thousand miles away and two and a half feet underground, but did it matter? He wondered.
“Too late,” came the voice behind him, the shape trembling as it spoke. “Too late.”
Henry squeezed his eyes shut and he
ld his breath. Didn’t want to see, to smell, to think. It hadn’t been much of a plan to begin with, all he could think to do was drive and hope the rest came together along the way, but it hadn’t. When he opened his eyes again, blinking away the sticky exhaustion and nascent tears that filmed them over, the only thing he could see clearly was the clean, white glow in the distance ahead of him.
The cross.
Talisman for a talisman, he thought. And this one was bigger. A lot bigger.
He opened the door and heaved himself out of the car. The air was cool, crisp. It felt good on his face and in his lungs—each deep inhalation brought on a coughing fit but he didn’t care; it was better than the smell of decay in the car that had slowly grown stronger over the course of the evening.
Inside the car, Marianne turned her head to look up at him from the back seat. Henry wasn’t sure, but she seemed to be grinning at him. Fighting back the gorge rising in his gullet, he opened the back door and said, “Come on. We’re going for a walk, you and me.”
The outpouring of stink from the car overwhelmed him and he dry heaved a couple of times before reaching in. He grabbed her arm and quickly let go, disgusted at the feel of his fingers sinking into her cold flesh. She had dropped dozens of pounds over the course of the last year and had taken on a frighteningly skeletal form—loose skin, hair loss, sunken eyes. In those last months she didn’t want anyone to see her and he did his best to dissuade even her closest friends from coming by to say goodbye. Like anyone else, she’d have preferred to go quickly, but this way it was a kind of living death before the actual end.
But not like this. Marianne really was dead now, had been for close to forty-eight hours. She’d been quiet, at least, for the first four or five hours, still and silent with her eyes closed while Henry wept beside her. He’d fallen asleep eventually, clutching her body to him as though afraid it would crumble to dust right then and there. Instead, she screamed until he jolted awake and screamed back at her. Her screams turned to laughter, his back to blubbering. One seemed to feed the other. Little had changed since.