All American Horror of the 21st Century E-Book

Mort Castle

• Herausgeber: Independent Legions Publishing
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

All American Horror of the 21st Century is a compilation of the best short horror fiction published by magazines, anthologies, and websites between 2000 and 2010. These stories deal with “uniquely American” themes and subjects, and are written in an equally unique “American style.” Contributors include National Book Award-nominee Dan Chaon, rising horror star Jeff Jacobson, World-Fantasy award winner Andy Duncan, New York Times-bestselling authors Tom Monteleone, David Morrell, F. Paul Wilson, Nick Mamatas, Jay Bonansinga, Bram Stoker Awards winners Jack Ketchum, Steve Rasnic Tem, Paul Tremblay, Sarah Langan, and many others. This is the only book to offer wide-ranging but always modern, uniquely American horror stories. Introduction and new Afterword by Mort Castle.
Cover Art and Illustrations by Giampaolo Frizzi.

Leseprobe

ALL AMERICAN HORROR OF THE 21ST CENTURY:

THE FIRST DECADE, 2000-2010

Edited by Mort Castle

ISBN: 978-88-99569-33-4

Copyright (Edition) ©2016 Independent Legions Publishing

Copyright (Text) ©2012 Mort Castle, Editor

All rights reserved

1° Edition epub/mobipocket: 1.0 November 2016

Cover Art and illustrations: Giampaolo Frizzi

AA.VV.

ALL-AMERICAN HORROR OF THE 21ST CENTURY: THE FIRST DECADE, 2000-2010

Edited by Mort Castle

INTRODUCTION

by Mort Castle

Let’s talk about the unique, but often ignored, sub-genre of literature: American Horror.

It might be argued that American Horror begins with Ye Olde Master, Edgar Allan Poe, himself who wrote some of it, philosophized greatly about it, and lived way too much of it. Whatever the beginnings (which you can argue about in your next term paper), American Horror is distinguished by certain definitively American, rather than universal, themes, by a decided vigorousness of constantly evolving language in even the most cerebral of stories, and by tropes thought of as quintessentially American. It’s not wrong to say that American horror can be recognized as much for what it is not and does not as for what is.

The worldly Middle European count with a long history and longer fangs and the quaint ghost of the manor house are not likely to be found in the American horror story, which could more likely be peopled with inbred, chainsaw swinging morons.

There will be that “rose for Aramantha” on that silken pillow in our Southern Gothic crumbling mansion, next to Aramantha’s fetid corpse, but the cursed vase, necklace, rabbit’s foot will find its natural habitat in the haunted museum in Liverpool and not in Rd Gein’s combination garage-rumpus room-workshop-abattoir.

In the first decade of this century, new American voices in horror were heard and the older guard undertook horrifying (literary) experiments (many of them successful) to grow the horror genre. There were horrors in convenience stores and condominiums, monsters bred of steroid use and crack cocaine, and of course, there was 9/11, when horror invaded the security of the mundane and changed everything and every American.

Perhaps citing examples of American Horror scribes and their not so American counterparts might help to define the category, and thus, not implying anything about quality ...

American Horror: Stephen King, Jack Ketchum, Bentley Little, Weston Ochse, Joe R. Lansdale, Jeff Jacobson, Dean Koontz. Not American Horror (notice, I did not say “Un-American”): Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, usually, Anne Rice.

Sometimes American Horror: Wayne Allen Sallee, Tina L. Jens, David Niall Wilson,Tom Monteleone, Steve Rasnic Tem.

Brief Digression: Some of the American/Sometimes American writers can be found in this very volume, yessir, you betcha! But in selecting these stories, I’ve often tried to present gems of American horror fiction that might have been lost in Internet obscurity or the Arcane Archives of Small Press Magazinedom read mainly by people hoping to write for small press magazines.)

Back to Matters Lit’ry: American Horror: not just about setting, it’s about sensibility. It’s not what is filled in on “Country of Origin” on your official papers, it’s about your “World Perception.” It’s not subject matter alone that differentiates painters Gustave Caillebotte from Frederic Remington, nor the folk themes employed by composer Modest Mussorgsky (Russian, in case you couldn’t figure it out) from those of Red, White, and Blue Aaron Copeland. It’s an approach which can be contemplative but still has a degree of cowboy consciousness, it’s a fierce independence in tone and style which might well be seen as the prime motivation for both Daniel Boone and Chuck Palahniuk, or Teddy Roosevelt and Jackson Pollock.

American Horror: Well, this bubbling national cauldron, if not exactly a melting pot, gives us the abiding bedrock horror of our unique style of racism, gives us our “never say die – smile is my umbrella even when the mushroom clouds are blooming” attitude, gives us that mind control voodoo that Clyde Cult King can pull off in ways that would make Svengali scratch his head, gives us the non-British sound of a rocking rolling rapping exploding amplifier turned way the hell past 11.

I can say, just like that All American Supreme Court of the Nixon Era (Yes, an American horror and tragedy his own se’f ) rendering its ruling on pornography ...

“Heh, can’t quite define it, but I know it when I see it.”

So do you, right?

Guess so, pilgrim, looks like it amigo, seems as if, citizen.

Because you are holding in your very own hand this cultural testament and time capsule: All American Horror Of The 21st Century: The First Decade.

Let us go then, you and I ...

Nah.

That’s much too ivory tower high-minded, even with the grammar goof.

Hey-Ho, Let’s go ...

Nah!

Punk is world-view, not confined to national boundaries.

Whatever … WTF …

No, let’s begin with invitation most traditional, plucked from the working vocabulary of a gazillion hash-slinging honeys in those crossroads diners that no longer exist: I give you All American Horror of The 21st Century: The First Decade.

Enjoy!

Mort Castle

May 12, 2011

THE STATION

by Bentley Little

Derek looked impatiently at his watch, making a show of it, wanting Gina to know how annoyed he was getting. But she was focused on getting her shot and either did not see him or did not care. She crouched down in the sand, viewfinder to her eye, moving incrementally to her right as she tried to capture the sun shining through the thin crack between two boulders.

Why did her new hobby have to be photography? Why couldn’t she have gotten into sudoku or needlepoint, something that she could do in the car while they drove?

The bitch of it was, he knew she’d probably bum out on this before the end of the year, maybe before the end of the summer. It would go the way of all her other transitory passions: scrapbooking, flower arranging, sushi making, and of course that damned book club. But right now it was making his already too-short vacation a living hell, and he looked again at his watch and said loudly, “Hurry up! We have a long way to go, and if we don’t check in by six, they won’t hold the room for us!”

“Relax!” Gina called back. “That place has about a thousand rooms. And it’s the off season. We’ll be fine.”

She was right. Furnace Creek Inn was huge. And, other than themselves, who else was moronic enough to vacation in Death Valley in the middle of July? They could probably walk in without any reservation and get the finest room in the hotel. “Hurry up anyway!” he shouted at her.

“I’m trying!” she called.

Derek opened the car door, sat down in the passenger seat and consoled himself by looking at a map. Before Gina had gotten them off track chasing artistic landscapes down this side road, they’d been making pretty good time, and if they could get back to the highway within the next half hour or so, they should still be able to reach the national park by mid-afternoon. Although he’d done so a thousand times, he once again went over their itinerary, then flipped through the AAA book at random, looking for future vacation destinations. When he glanced up again several moments later, assuming she’d had plenty of time to take her photo and was walking back to the car, he saw that she hadn’t moved. She was in exactly the same position she’d been in ten minutes ago.

This was ridiculous.

Derek slammed shut the door of the glove compartment and strode across the sand, ready to give her hell. Gina stood at his approach. “I was just going to come and get you,” she enthused.

“There’s an old building out there. Look.” She pointed past the boulders and down the sloping plain.

Oh no, he thought.

“It would make a great photo.” She handed him her camera.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, but dutifully looked through the telephoto lens. It appeared from this vantage point to be an abandoned gas station (Esso, judging by the shape of the sign’s iron skeleton). He saw no indication of any cars or people. Derek handed back the camera. “Hurry up then and take a picture.”

“Not from here,” She hit his shoulder. “I want to go down there!”

“It’s already ...”

“I’ll make it quick,” she promised.

“You know,” he told her, “if Death Valley was good enough for Ansel Adams, it should be good enough for you.”

“That’s the point,” she said. “It’s overdone. Everyone who goes there takes pictures.

This is something new. I might be the only one to ever take photos of this.”

“I doubt that,” he said, but agreed to give her ten minutes at the building if they left right this second.

She beat him back to the car.

Derek drove quickly, stirring up a cloud of dust behind them. The road was not paved, and it was doubtful that it ever had been. Moreover, the barely extant trail ended at the gas station. Odd, he thought. Ordinarily, service stations were built alongside highways. They were generally not destinations in and of themselves. Something about that seemed wrong, but he told himself that since it had probably been the only gas station for hundreds of miles, travelers probably wouldn’t have minded driving a couple of extra miles down a side road.

He pulled to a stop between an empty island and a closed garage door that had been seriously battered by the elements but surprisingly boasted no graffiti. There were no pumps left, only metal foundations embedded in concrete from which protruded sections of pipe and tubing. The two of them stepped out of the car. “Oh, this is wonderful,” Gina said. “So many good angles and such high contrast with the light and shadow.”

“Ten minutes,” he reminded her. “Or I’m driving off without you.”

He didn’t like this place. That end-of-the-road thing bothered him, and there was something about the building itself that made him uneasy as well. He walked around the back of the car and looked at the closed garage door with its chipped paint and dents and inexplicable lack of graffiti. A small alluvial fan of sand had accumulated at the bottom of the garage door but the line of sand was too even, too perfect, and he didn’t like that either.

He moved on to the office. The broken window had long since been boarded up but the door was gone, and Derek peeked inside. It looked pretty much as he’d expected. Chair. Metal desk covered with dust, yellowed papers and an ashtray. Table with an empty cardboard fuse display and a single broken fan belt. Bulletin board with tire ads and tame cheesecake calendar from 1955.

There was nothing that should not have been there. Yet it seemed wrong, all of it, and he was about to back away and tell Gina that they should go, when she pushed past him and into the office.

“Whoo,” she said, fanning the air in front of her face. “Stale.” There was a closed door in the wall next to the desk, and before he could say a word, she had walked across the office, opened it and was peering into the darkened room beyond.

Derek braced himself for her reaction, because he knew somehow that there would be one.

And there was.

“Oh my God,” she said, staggering backward, eyes wide, face drained of color. “Oh my God.” Already he was moving beyond her to see for himself.

The room was dark and windowless, but enough light filtered in from the outer office for him to see that a single straight-backed chair sat in the center of the chamber, which, in contrast to the metal and glass of the rest of the building, had a floor, ceiling and walls made from rotting unpainted wood.

Slumped in the chair was the body of a dead man.

That would have been shocking enough, but it was who the man was that caused Derek’s legs to wobble.

It was the president of the United States—although the president was supposed to be on a tour of Asia and Derek had seen him on the news this morning giving a speech at a banquet in Tokyo. He was dressed just as he had been this morning, in modified tuxedo, but his face was gray and pasty, his eyes wide open and staring. It could have been an impersonator, someone made up to look like the president, but Derek knew somehow that that was not the case. There was a charisma to the man even in death, a tangible regality that made the authenticity of his body without question.

Maybe the impersonator had been the man in Japan, covering for the president who had been ... what? Meeting someone here in the middle of the desert? Visiting this abandoned gas station?

None of the scenarios he could imagine made any sense, and that was what bothered him the most. If there had been an understandable reason for this, if there was even the thinnest plausible explanation for finding the president’s corpse in the back room of this deserted desert building, then he would have not felt so utterly lost and so bonedeep chilled. But there was no hint of rationality here, and he was more frightened at this second than he had ever been in his life.

Derek turned, grabbed Gina’s arm, and the two of them ran through the office, out of the gas station and back to the car. He did not wait for her to put on her seatbelt but took off in a clatter of gravel and a cloud of dirt. They drove straight back to the highway, bumped back onto the asphalt and sped north as fast as the Toyota would carry them, not speaking at all until, two hours later, they reached the tollbooth at the entrance to Death Valley.

Death Valley.

Appropriate.

They checked in at Furnace Creek just before a busload of German tourists arrived, and after hauling their luggage to the suite, Gina immediately took a shower while Derek turned on the TV, not wanting to be alone in the room with silence.

By the time, Gina had finished her shower, he’d gotten the whole story. She emerged from the bathroom redressed, hair combed, and stopped in her tracks, staring open mouthed at the image on the wall-mounted television. Death of a President, read the words at the bottom of the screen, while a small live shot of a Tokyo hospital crowded with reporters sat in the corner of a larger picture of CNN’s top pundits in Washington.

“He had a heart attack,” Derek said. “This morning at a banquet. He died instantly.”

She looked at him. “Is his body missing?”

“Not that I heard.”

Gina took a deep breath. “What did we see?” she asked. “What happened out there?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

There was a pause.

“I want to go back.”

“What?” He sat up straight in the bed.

“I want to take a picture of it,” Gina said. “I should have photographed it the first time.”

“No,” he told her, shaking his head. “No way.”

“No one’s taken a picture of that before. I’ll be the first. It’ll be a totally unique—”

“No. It’s not going to happen.”

“We’re the only ones who know about it, the only ones who’ve seen it.”

“We’re not going. We’re staying here. Take a picture of sand dunes. Or rocks.”

“We were there already and nothing happened to us. It’s not dangerous, it’s just weird.”

“It’s ...” He struggled to find the right word. Wrong? Evil? Neither of those were exact but either of them would do.

Her face hardened into obstinacy. “I’m going back. With you or without you.”

The argument continued for another 20 minutes, but in truth it ended right there. It was late afternoon, and he got her to agree to wait until tomorrow morning—neither of them wanted to be in that place at night—but at the crack of dawn, they were checking out and packing the car and driving back the way they’d come.

They reached the gas station mid-morning, and while the desert heat was scorching, Derek felt cold. Gina, too, was nervous, though she refused to admit it. She tried to act as though nothing was wrong, but her voice was quavery and her hands shook when she lifted the camera from the backseat.

They stood for a moment in front of the open door, looking into the office. The air was still, too still, and even in the bright midday sun, light spilled only into the front room, leaving that secret chamber in the rear, with its door that they’d left open in their hurry to escape, shadowed and dark.

He wished he’d brought a flashlight, but he hadn’t.

Gina stepped in first, camera before her like a protective talisman, and he followed, moving past the metal desk and dusty table into the back room.

The president was gone, but there was another man in the chair. He, too, was dead, only the cause of his demise was immediately obvious: blunt force trauma to the head. The entire back of his skull had been crushed, and white pieces of bone could be seen within the matted mass of red blood and brown hair. His eyes were closed but his mouth was open, lips frozen in a scream of shock and agony.

“Do you recognize him?” Gina whispered. Something about this place requested quiet.

Derek shook his head, afraid to speak. His brain was trying desperately to make sense of this, to find reason in the irrationality. Was this heaven? Or hell? Was it some sort of way station to the afterlife? That made the most sense, given the fact that the president’s body had disappeared and been replaced by the corpse of another, but if that were the case, bodies should have been appearing and disappearing every second. People were dying all the time.

On impulse, he stepped forward, reached out and touched the dead man’s arm. The form was solid. He’d half-expected it to be some sort of incorporeal figure, a ghost or shade—after all, the president’s body had been in full view of witnesses in Japan at the same time they’d seen it here and the tangible reality of its existence made everything that much more confusing.

The room flashed with light as Gina took a picture.

Derek jumped, startled.

There was another flash.

Was the expression different on the dead man’s face?

He couldn’t tell, but there seemed some slight change in the cast of the features, and he backed away from the chair, heart thumping crazily.

“I’m doing this as quickly as I can,” Gina said, as if reading his mind. “I want to get out of here. I don’t like this place.”

Derek beat her to it, ducking under her camera arm and returning to the office. She followed immediately, obviously afraid to be in the room by herself. “Let’s go.”

He hazarded one quick glance back. He could see only the legs of the dead man from this angle, but on the shadowed surface of the rotted wood wall was what appeared to be a face formed from the contours of the irregularly shaped boards, a disturbingly intense visage with eyes of mold, nose of shadow, and mouth of woodgrain. It could have meant nothing, could have been coincidence, but in this place under these circumstances, he found that hard to believe, and he instantly faced forward and hurried into the sunlight, not daring to look behind him as he ran around the side of the car and got in.

They sped away—for the last time, he promised himself—and as the car bounced along the rough dirt road, he let out a huge exhalation of air, unaware until that second that he’d been holding his breath. Gina, too, sighed with relief, although it sounded more like a moan than a sigh, and she clutched her camera in her lap as though afraid someone might try to steal it.

“I should’ve brought the digital camera, too,” she said. “Then we could have looked at it right away.” She turned to face him. “What if the pictures don’t come out? What if it’s all dark or all light or that ... thing’s not there?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to answer. And they hit the highway and headed south toward home.

* * *

The photos did indeed turn out, and Derek looked closely at the prints Gina had made, his insides knotted into a tight ball of cold. There were only three shots of the dead man in the chair, and they were so clear and real that he was immediately brought back to that horrific chamber. He could almost smell the dust, could almost hear the silence. In the first photo, a side view, Gina had focused on the head and upper torso. He could see that bashed-in portion of skull, could even make out blood that had dripped onto the collar of his shirt. From this angle, the open mouth appeared not like a scream but a grotesque deformity. The next was a full body shot, and it had a “Whistler’s Mother” feel, only the portrait at the center of the composition was the corpse of a murdered man. Derek found himself studying the background, looking for that face on the wall, and wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disturbed that he was unable to spot it.

But it was the third picture that held his attention. For some reason, the flash had not worked on this one, and the scene was far too dark. The dead man in the chair was little more than a silhouette against a smudged and grainy background. Yet even in the gloom, Derek could see what looked like a dress over the man’s pants and slender feminine fingers pointing downward from the hanging arm on the side of the chair.

Gina had captured the corpse when it was changing from the bludgeoned man to a woman.

Maybe, Derek thought, the thing in the chair was some type of shapeshifting creature that absorbed the physical characteristics of the immediately departed, picking up the essence of the dead like an antenna.

No. He’d touched that last corpse. It had been human. And real.

It was the room and the gas station that was so wrong and evil, not the figures in the chair.

They were pawns ... or victims ... or something ...

The phone rang, and Gina picked it up. She didn’t call his name, so it obviously wasn’t for him, and he didn’t pay attention at first. He kept looking at the photos, including one shot of the gas station taken with a zoom lens from the boulder area. But gradually he began to realize that her tone of voice was too somber and she wasn’t saying much. He looked up just as she asked, “When did he die?”

Eavesdropping on the last part of her half of the conversation told him nothing, but finally she hung up the phone, stunned. “Sue’s husband died. Heart attack.”

His first reaction was shock—Jim was two years younger than he was—but fear beat out sadness for the emotion that immediately followed. He met Gina’s eyes. “Do you think he went ... there?”

She looked quickly away, but he knew she’d been wondering the same thing, and he glanced down at the prints in his hand, at that dark top photo where the man was changing into a woman, and he shivered.

* * *

That night, in bed, Gina turned to him just as he was about to roll over and go to sleep. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

He didn’t want to hear this.

“About the gas station.”

He remained silent, refusing to take the bait.

“Do you think everyone goes there when they die?”

“No.”

“But who does? And why?” She moved onto her side, finding a more comfortable position.

“There must be a way to find out, to test it. What if we knew someone was going to die?” she asked. “I mean imminently. One of us could wait with the person, and the other one could wait at the gas station, and we’d both have cell phones—”

Derek shook his head.

“Or, even better, we could take the person there! And when he died—or she—we could see what happens. Right at that moment.”

He didn’t like the direction in which this was headed, and he cut off the conversation then and there, saying that he was tired and needed to sleep. But in his dreams, Gina kidnapped a little boy, drove him out to the desert, strangled him in the back room of the gas station and watched with excitement as a carbon copy of the child appeared in the chair.

In the morning, when he awoke, Gina was gone. He gave her the benefit of the doubt, told himself that she was just exercising, walking around the neighborhood, maybe going over to Starbuck’s to grab a latte. But when he saw that she’d taken his Toyota instead of her old Dodge, and when she hadn’t returned after an hour, he knew what had happened, he knew where she was.

On her way to the gas station.

Derek had no idea if the Dodge would make it out of Orange County, let alone all the way out to the middle of the Mojave, but he had no choice but to follow his wife. He didn’t pretend to understand what was driving her, the impetus behind her pilgrimage. But if he was being completely honest with himself, didn’t he feel it too? The abandoned gas station terrified him, and if he had his druthers, he would never see or even think of the building ever again. Hell, he wished they’d never encountered it. But at the same time, deep down, there was an impulse to return, a barely acknowledged, almost subconscious desire to know what was happening in that back room, to see who was in the chair.

She had more than an hour’s head start. Maybe two, possibly three. Even if he drove at top speed and the car did not break down somewhere on the way, she would be at the gas station long before he was.

What would happen when she got there?

He didn’t know.

He was afraid to even think about it.

He drove as fast as the car would go, well over the speed limit, and it was only dumb luck that prevented him from getting a ticket. The trip seemed to take forever, despite his speed—wasn’t that one of Einstein’s theorems?—and it was nearly noon when he finally pulled off the highway onto the unmarked dirt road that led to the gas station. Shot shocks bouncing, he sped past the collection of boulders that had originally attracted Gina to this place, cursing both the site and the photography obsession that had led to her interest in it. Coming over the rise, he saw the forsaken gas station on the desert plain below.

And the red Toyota parked next to one of the empty islands, sunlight glinting off its windshield.

Derek’s heart was triphammering in his chest, and he was filled with a cold fear far greater than any he had previously experienced. He honked the horn as he approached, hoping the noise would draw Gina out, but he saw no movement through the broken window or open office door, and his hands were shaking as he pulled next to the Toyota and shut off the car.

He opened the driver’s door, got out. “Gina!” he called as loudly as he could. He was afraid to go inside the building, wanted her to come out and meet him, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. “Gina!” he called again, angrily this time.

Nothing.

The world was silent.

Derek slammed the car door, and the noise was flat, muffled by the oppressive heat and heavy air. He could still see no movement in the office, and the doorway to the back room was completely dark. He hurried in, wishing he’d thought this through more thoroughly and brought something with him. A flashlight. A weapon.

A weapon?

Yes, he thought as he sped past that by-now-familiar metal desk. Just in case.

He stopped in the doorway of the secret room. “Gina?”

He didn’t know why she’d come here, what she’d planned to do or what had actually happened, but her unmoving body lay sprawled on the dusty floor, one hand stretched out as though reaching for the digital camera that was just beyond her reach.

She was also in the chair.

With an involuntary cry of anguish, Derek fell to his knees and shoved his face next to Gina’s. The skin of her cheek was cold, and her eyelids were frozen halfway over her pupils, as though she’d died instantly in the middle of a blink. He reached for her hand, grabbed it, but it too was cold. Limp and heavy at the same time. She was dead, but he had no idea how she’d died, and he looked to the body in the chair for clues. Other than the fact that she was sitting up instead of lying on the floor, however, there was nothing that to his eyes indicated a cause of death.

He was too stunned to cry, though he was having a difficult time drawing breath and a low continuous moan was escaping from between his lips. He knew that he should have expected this, but somehow he hadn’t, and the shock seemed to have rendered him incapable of coherent thought.

He suddenly realized that the body in the chair could disappear at any time, replaced by the corpse of another, and he quickly grabbed this Gina around the waist and, with considerable difficulty lowered her to the floor. On impulse, he kicked over the chair and shoved it into a comer of the small room.

He turned to look at his wife. Both versions of her. Other than their postures, they were exactly the same, down to the half-mast eyelids and the partially open mouth. His gaze was drawn by the dull silver of the camera that lay just beyond the reach of what he considered Gina’s real body. It was her digital camera, not her 35mm, and it dawned on him that if she’d taken any photos, he would be able to look at them.

Did he really want to?

It was not a question Derek even considered. He picked up the camera and pressed the button to scroll back through the last pictures taken. He overshot his mark and had to scroll forward through a series of photos taken on Mother’s Day: Gina with her mom, unwrapping presents, eating at a salad buffet. The sadness was sharp and painful, bringing with it logistical and practical issues as well as memories. Then he was past the personal pictures and in the desert. The gas station. The front office. The back room. There was a child in the chair, a dark-skinned nearly naked boy who appeared to have died from malnutrition. And the last shot: the boy disappearing, Gina taking his place, both figures ethereal and nearly transparent.

Derek stared at the small camera screen, trying to figure out what was happening in the picture. As far as he could tell, the dead Gina had started to appear in the chair even as the real Gina was alive and photographing the scene. He had no idea how that was possible or what it meant, but Gina had not taken another photo. Whatever had happened to her had happened then or immediately after. He looked down at the body lying on the ground, arm outstretched. She must have seen something, because after she’d been struck or smitten or however incapacitated, she’d still attempted to reach for her fallen camera. Her last act had been attempting to take a picture, and he was filled with guilt that he had ever belittled her passion.

His eyes went to the section of wall that resembled a face. The visage looked exactly as it had before, rotted wood and shadow and mold combining to create that disturbingly intense countenance. Only from this angle, the black eyes appeared to be looking straight at him with what could have been anger, could have been hunger.

He wanted to tear down this building, wanted to come back with a fucking bulldozer and raze it. He even considered running out to the cars, getting the tire irons out of each trunk and coming back to smash that chair and gouge out that face, whaling on the walls, ripping off those boards and destroying as much of the room as he could.

But he didn’t. Instead, he looked down at the bodies of his wife, trying to read the expression shared by both faces. She had died in mid-blink, he decided, and that partial hooding of her eyes made it difficult to ascribe an emotion to her death. Body language said more. The sitting Gina appeared rapt, as though viewing or hearing something absolutely fascinating. The Gina lying on the floor and reaching for the camera seemed desperate to record something of vital importance. Neither of them appeared to be in pain, but while his wife had not died in agony, she had died, and he would probably never know why or how.

He walked over to the face on the wall and spit on it.

This close, it did not even resemble a face. The individual components looked like what they were: rot and mold, shadow and grain. But nothing was what it seemed here.

He glanced toward the overturned chair in the comer, then walked over, picked it up and set it right again, in exactly the same spot it had been in before.

He should get out of here, drive back to civilization, call the police, make arrangements. But he looked at the two Ginas and knew he couldn’t leave. No matter how much he hated this place. No matter how scared he was.

Like her, he had to know.

Taking a deep breath, he sat in the chair.

And waited.

* * *

There was a time, back in the 1970s, when we were convinced that the abandoned gas station would be as much the symbol of the last part of the 20th century as a forsaken Oklahoma farm house fogged in black swirling dust was of the 1930s. But things didn’t work out that way. The ghost gas station now stands kitty corner to the Speedway, where you can get two slices of pizza for breakfast and gas at just under five bucks a gallon. So why shouldn’t Bentley Little’s old gas station serve as portal to who-knows-and-what-the-hell ... right?

SONNY WILSON’S LAST SHOW AND TELL

by Jeff Jacobson

When the cops interviewed me after everything that happened in Mr. Zewecki’s class that day, I could tell they didn’t believe anything I said. All they saw was this jumpy fifth grade kid with a brand spanking new bandage. There was still broken glass in my hair. They thought I was in shock.

“Can you tell us what happened this afternoon, Tom?”

I tried to tell ‘em. I really did.

But I guess it was easer to believe that Sonny just went crazy, instead of the truth.

It was Friday, Show and Tell day in Mr. Zewecki’s biology class. My buddy Mark Bower brought in a sample of poison oak, just to prove to everybody that he wasn’t afraid of the plant that most of us here in the fifth grade were smart enough to avoid. “Anybody here ever had poison oak? It itches like hell. Like hell,” Mark said, drawing it out and acting like he was being attacked by a thousand poison oak leaves that whizzed about like bees.

Mr. Zewecki said, “I think that’s just about enough language, Mr. Bower.”

“Like heeelllllllll,” Mark said, still twitching.

My other buddy, Aaron Wochowski, was next. Nervous, he stormed up front carrying his stepdad’s fifteen gallon ice chest, spilling water over desks. A carp lay sideways inside the ice chest, gills fluttering weakly in the surging water. He splashed the front row for a while and told the class about how he and his brothers would shoot carp with bows and razor tipped arrows.

Mr. Zewecki got Aaron and his carp back in their seat and eyed the class. There was over half an hour left and he’d run out of all the students he knew would have something halfway educational to show. He finally went with Gladys Peterson, the dullest girl in class. Gladys ran up and bored us all to death with her fascinating story about how she had tracked down the elusive , keeping it behind her back the whole time as she chattered away, and sure enough, it turned out to be some dumb weed thing she’d plucked up, roots and all, like I said, to bore everybody to death. Mark should have known; plants didn’t impress anybody.