The Killer's Game Read online

  The Shadows, Kith and Kin

  By Joe R. Lansdale

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2012 / Joe R. Lansdale

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Images provided by:

  http://joannastar-stock.deviantart.com/

  Obsidian Dawn

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  BIO: Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His work has appeared in national anthologies, magazines, and collections, as well as numerous foreign publications. He has written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites. His work has been collected in eighteen short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. His novella Bubba Hotep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. His story "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" was adapted to film for Showtime's "Masters of Horror." He is currently co-producing several films, among them The Bottoms, based on his Edgar Award-winning novel, with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman, and The Drive-In, with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer In Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan: Martial Science and its affiliate, Shen Chuan Family System. He is a member of both the United States and International Martial Arts Halls of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog, and two cats.

  Other Crossroad Press Books by Joe R. Lansdale:

  The Magic Wagon

  Written With a Razor

  Bumper Crop

  Joe Lansdale's Website

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

  Visit our online store

  Subscribe to our Newsletter

  Visit our DIGITAL and AUDIO book blogs for updates and news.

  Connect with us on Facebook

  Contents

  A Quick Author’s Note

  The Shadows, Kith and Kin

  Deadman’s Road

  The Long Dead Day

  White Mule, Spotted Pig

  Bill, the Little Steam Shovel

  Alone (With Melissa Mia Hall)

  The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance

  The Gentleman’s Hotel

  A Quick Author’s Note

  When I was a child, very early on, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Pretty much from the beginning, having paper and pencil in hand, I knew it was my calling. The more I read, the more the need to write was fueled. The more I saw stories on TV or in the movies, and especially in comic books, which at that time could do things movies couldn’t do—it’s a toss-up now—the more I wanted to make my living as a freelance writer.

  I didn’t know what a freelance writer was then, but I knew I wanted to make my living making up stories. So many things influenced me. DC Comics had a tremendous impact. The Iliad and The Odyssey. Fairy tales. Stories of King Arthur’s knights. Robin Hood. Folk tales.

  The Jungle Book by Kipling dropped on me like an anvil. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels bumped up against me so hard I’m still bruised. Robert E. Howard tossed a kind of gory glitter in my hair. Edgar Allen Poe creeped me. Bradbury astonished me. Robert Bloch made me wonderfully nervous, and Richard Matheson made me deliciously paranoid. Hemingway sounded neat. Steinbeck touched on things I knew about. He wrote about my people, my parents, their past. Fitzgerald painted beautiful pictures. So many writers. So many different kinds of magic. I also read stories from the Bible, which frankly I don’t take as a divine word from anyone, but it has lots of good tales full of horror and murder and rapes and incest and heroic deeds. In fact, it’s a lot like The Iliad, in that it is an adventure story mixed with history and legends and divine intervention. I’ve always thought it odd that people can’t see the connection between the two, or realize that if you can believe in God interacting with man in the Bible, then what makes The Iliad just an adventure story and the Bible divine? They found Troy didn’t they, but does that mean the rest of The Iliad is true? Does it mean Zeus and Hera are real, the other Greek gods? In the case of the Bible they can’t even prove the Hebrews were ever held captive in Egypt, let alone that they escaped by parting the Red Sea.

  The bottom line is this, telling stories, writing stories, is about telling convincing lies.

  Here are my lies. I hope they are convincing. Some of them contain elements of truth, just like The Iliad and the Bible. I owned mules and I plowed them instead of racing them, but it gave me affection for them, so it’s only natural that I would write about them. And I have. Twice. Once in a story called “The Mule Rustlers,” a best of the year pick for Otto Penzler’s Best Mystery Stories and part of the contents for my last collection Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories. And now there’s “White Mule, Spotted Pig,” one of the best stories I’ve ever written.

  “The Shadows, Kith and Kin,” which gives the book its title, is based on fact, but is not a factual story. It is about someone not too unlike Charles Whitman, who, when I

  was young, climbed up in The University of Texas tower in Austin and shot a large number of people with a high powered rifle. I went to school there some years later,

  and was surprised to find there were still places where the police officer’s return shots had chipped away at the tower. I stood where Whitman stood. Shortly thereafter, a young woman, despondent over a love affair or some such thing, jumped from the tower to her death, leaving on the railing her shoes. I came by from class, not knowing about the event, saw men hosing down the ground and hustling about in the bushes. I think they must have been cleaning up the aftermath of her jump. I never found out for sure, but when I got back to the apartment where I lived, I heard about her death, and had a kind of cold chill, and then came a photo in the newspaper of her shoes on the tower railing where she left them just before jumping. It was a startling image. That tower has stayed in my imagination ever since. Back to Charles Whitman. There’s a Kinky Friedman song about him that has this line: “There was a rumor of a tumor at the base of his brain.” People have been trying to explain these sorts of events for years, but no one has managed to do so convincingly. My story has its own theory.

  A side note. Interestingly enough, Kinky Friedman has gone on to run for Governor of Texas. Who would have thunk it? I hope he wins. (He didn’t.)

  Also included is “Alone” written with Melissa Mia Hall. I want to say right up front that this is more her story than mine. I wrote a few pages of a story that had lain around for ages, but, alas, I couldn’t get it to end. Melissa expressed interest in collaborating, and though I’m not a real fan of collaborating, I told her I had this unfinished story, plus another about a woman whose vagina played music, and she wisely chose this one. She did more with it than I could, and gave it a happier ending than I intended, but most likely it is the proper ending.

  “Deadman’s Road” and “The Gentleman’s Hotel” are both about the lead character in Dead in the West. “Deadman’s Road” is scheduled to appear in Weird Tales first. “
Gentleman’s Hotel” is an original about my cursed reverend, written expressly for this book.

  “The Long Dead Day” is a short-short, but I think it has impact, like an ice pick to the brain. It was written in a sudden flush of excitement.

  Also included is an oldie but a goodie. A Bram Stoker Award winner that first appeared in Bestsellers Guaranteed, a book with a ridiculous dragon cover that had nothing to do with any of the stories in the collection. “The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found In a Harlequin Romance” won a Bram Stoker and is a favorite of mine, but due to its length, isn’t a story that’s gotten a lot of replay. I’m proud to have it reprinted here where I hope new readers will discover it.

  Also contained here is “Bill, The Little Steam Shovel.” I adore this story, and it cooked around inside my head for years before I was able to write it. My son, Keith, is the inspiration. He liked a book about a steam shovel that did all manner of fine things for boys and girls. In fact, there were two books about steam shovels, or diggers, or Digger Dans, as my son called them, and they inspired my idea of a different sort of steam shovel story. I just couldn’t quite sit down and write it, though I had written an introduction to it some years before I finally was inspired by Al Sarrantonio’s anthology Flights to take a serious crack at it. The opening I had written stayed essentially the same, and the rest of it jumped out without problems, having built up its leaping muscles all those years inside my head. I don’t do many stories that way, most come at a rush and I discover them as I write. There were discoveries here, the ending for example, but the story was pretty much full blown by the time I sat down to do it, having had the opportunity to let it percolate for so long.

  Finally, I hope you like my lies and they give you good entertainment. Bless you all for putting down your hard earned Yankee dollars for this collection. I believe it to be one of my best.

  And finally, I dedicate this collection to my good friends Judy and Bill Crider. As fine a people who ever walked the earth, even if Bill did once scoop me on a buy of some very fine, old Gold Medal books. He looks like a mild-mannered professor. But don’t be fooled. He is a ruthless book buyer and he moves with the swiftness of an eagle.

  Bless you Judy and Bill. And especially bless you, Judy, as you have to put up with Bill.

  Joe R. Lansdale (his ownself)

  Nacogdoches, Texas

  The Shadows, Kith and Kin

  “…and the soul, resenting its lot, flies groaningly to the shades.”

  The Aeneid, by Virgil

  There are no leaves left on the trees, and the limbs are weighted with ice and bending low. Many of them have broken and fallen across the drive. Beyond the drive, down where it and the road meet, where the bar ditch is, there is a brown savage run of water.

  It is early afternoon, but already it is growing dark, and the fifth week of the storm raves on. I have never seen such a storm of wind and ice and rain, not here in the South, and only once before have I been in a cold storm bad enough to force me to lock myself tight in my home.

  So many things were different then, during that first storm.

  No better. But different.

  On this day while I sit by my window, looking out at what the great, white, wet storm has done to my world, I feel at first confused, and finally elated.

  The storm. The ice. The rain. All of it. It’s the sign I was waiting for.

  I thought for a moment of my wife, her hair so blonde it was almost white as the ice that hung in the trees, and I thought of her parents, white-headed too, but white with age, not dye, and of our little dog Constance, not white at all, but all brown and black with traces of tan; a rat terrier mixed with all other blends of dog you might imagine.

  I thought of all of them. I looked at my watch. There wasn’t really any reason to. I had no place to go, and no way to go if I did. Besides, the battery in my watch had been dead for almost a month.

  Once, when I was a boy, just before night fall, I was out hunting with my father, out where the bayou water gets deep and runs between the twisted trunks and low-hanging limbs of water-loving trees; out there where the frogs bleat and jump and the sun don’t hardly shine.

  We were hunting for hogs. Then out of the brush came a man, running. He was dressed in striped clothes and he had on very thin shoes. He saw us and the dogs that were gathered about us, blue-ticks, long-eared and dripping spit from their jaws; he turned and broke and ran with a scream.

  A few minutes later, the Sheriff and three of his deputies came beating their way through the brush, their shirts stained with sweat, their faces red with heat.

  My father watched all of this with a kind of hard-edged cool, and the Sheriff, a man dad knew, said, “There’s a man escaped off the chain gang, Hirem. He run through here. Did you see him?”

  My father said that we had, and the Sheriff said, “Will those dogs track him?”

  “I want them to they will,” my father said, and he called the dogs over to where the convict had been, where his footprints in the mud were filling slowly with water, and he pushed the dog’s heads down toward these shoe prints one at a time, and said, “Sic him,” and away the hounds went.

  We ran after them then, me and my dad and all these fat cops who huffed and puffed out long before we did, and finally we came upon the man, tired, leaning against a tree with one hand, his other holding his business while he urinated on the bark. He had been defeated some time back, and now he was waiting for rescue, probably thinking it would have been best to have not run at all.

  But the dogs, they had decided by private conference that this man was as good as any hog, and they came down on him like heat-seeking missiles. Hit him hard, knocked him down. I turned to my father, who could call them up and make them stop, no matter what the situation, but he did not call.

  The dogs tore at the man, and I wanted to turn away, but did not. I looked at my father and his eyes were alight and his lips dripped spit; he reminded me of the hounds.

  The dogs ripped and growled and savaged, and then the fat sheriff and his fat deputies stumbled into view, and when one of the deputies saw what had been done to the man, he doubled over and let go of whatever grease-fried goodness he had poked into his mouth earlier that day.

  The Sheriff and the other deputy stopped and stared, and the Sheriff, said, “My God,” and turned away, and the deputy said, “Stop them, Hirem. Stop them. They done done it to him. Stop them.”

  My father called the dogs back, their muzzles dark and dripping. They sat in a row behind him, like sentries. The man, or what had been a man, the convict, lay all about the base of the tree, as did the rags that had once been his clothes.

  Later, we learned the convict had been on the chain gang for cashing hot checks.

  Time keeps on slipping, slipping…Wasn’t that a song?

  As day comes I sleep, then awake when night arrives. The sky has cleared and the moon has come out, and it is merely cold now. Pulling on my coat, I go out on the porch and sniff the air, and the air is like a meat slicer to the brain, so sharp it gives me a headache. I have never known cold like that.

  I can see the yard close up. Ice has sheened all over my world, all across the ground, up in the trees. The sky is like a black velvet back drop, the stars like sharp shards of blue ice clinging to it.

  I leave the porch light on, go inside, return to my chair by the window, burp. The air is filled with the aroma of my last meal, canned Ravioli, eaten cold.

  I take off my coat and hang it on the back of the chair.

  Has it happened yet, or is it yet to happen.

  Time, it just keep on slippin’, slippin’, yeah it do.

  I nod in the chair, and when I snap awake from a deep nod, there is snow blowing across the yard and the moon is gone and there is only the porch light to brighten it up.

  But, in spite of the cold, I know they are out there.

  The cold, the heat, nothing bothers them.

  They are out there.

  They came
to me first on a dark night several months back, with no snow and no rain and no cold, but a dark night without clouds and plenty of heat in the air, a real humid night, sticky like dirty undershorts. I awoke and sat up in bed and the yard light was shining thinly through our window. I turned to look at my wife lying there beside me, her very blonde hair silver in that light. I looked at her for a long time, then got up and went into the living room. Our little dog, who made his bed by the front door, came over and sniffed me, and I bent to pet him. He took to this for a minute, then found his spot by the door again, laid down.

  Finally I turned out the yard light and went out on the porch. In my underwear. No one could see me, not with all our trees, and if they could see me, I didn’t care.

  I sat in a deck chair and looked at the night, and thought about the job I didn’t have and how my wife had been talking of divorce, and how my in-laws resented our living with them, and I thought too of how every time I did a thing I failed, and dramatically at that. I felt strange and empty and lost.

  While I watched the night, the darkness split apart and some of it came up on the porch, walking. Heavy steps full of all the world’s shadow.

  I was frightened, but I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. The shadow, which looked like a tar-covered human-shape, trudged heavily across the porch until it stood over me, looking down. When I looked up, trembling, I saw there was no face, just darkness, thick as chocolate custard. It bent low and placed hand shapes on the sides of my chair and brought its faceless face close to mine, breathed on me; a hot, languid breath that made me ill.