Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Brian Keene

FOLLOW THE SIGN

François Vaillancourt

CROSSROADS OF OPPORTUNITY

doungjai gam and Ed Kurtz

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

ABOUT THE EDITOR

THE AUTHORS AND ARTISTS OF LOST HIGHWAYS

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 held 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.

Her hand fell upon his, cool and papery, like onion skin. Henry pulled away from her, and Marianne’s hands emerged from the shadows of the Buick’s backseat, silvery-white in the moonlight, and curled their fingers around the frame of the open door. She clamped down and pulled herself forward, her tight, grinning face rising quickly from the car at him. Henry staggered backward with a gasp, and he watched as she unfurled herself, spider-like, to her full height on the side of the road before him. She had been a tallish woman in life and remained so in death, though so much thinner now, her face somehow longer and limbs spotty, rubbery. Her hair, sparse before, continued to thin and drop away, leaving broad patches of bare scalp that was beginning to peel and flake.

Christ Jesus, he muttered. He noticed her arm—the one he had grabbed moments earlier—had five new blemishes that were quickly purpling. He choked back a pained gasp.

Marianne canted her head to one side and widened her cloudy, dead eyes at him. He couldn’t fathom how she could see out of them, but none of this was supposed to be possible.

"Henreeeee, she said, her voice lilting into something approaching a song. It made his stomach flip. Where are we going, lover? That fucking cross? Tell me it’s not the fucking cross, Henry."

Shut up, he said.

All this way and that’s all you’ve come up with?

Her shoulders raised, rolled, and sagged again. She rolled those foggy eyes, too, and worked her jaw while her tongue probed at her teeth. Whatever was in there was finally getting a shot at trying out the body, or at least Henry figured as much. The first step she took was like a newborn calf or deer, the spindly legs trembling and unsure. He noticed how long and jagged her toenails looked now, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have put some shoes on her before he left Jersey. Even undertakers put shoes on the bodies they dumped in the ground. He shuddered, knowing that the Marianne he spent over a decade with would be horrified at the state of her post-mortem being.

She reached for him again and it was all he could to not recoil at her touch. She stopped just short, her fingers hovering over his forearm. They waggled ever so slightly, the fingernails grazing the hairs on his goose bump-ridden flesh. He backed away, not hiding his disgust this time.

You’re repulsed by me. Her outstretched arm fell back to her side as her grin faded.

He wasn’t sure how to answer.

Good, she said, reading his face in lieu of a response. "Good."

The grin returned.

Henry’s lungs deflated, and his shoulders sagged. He thought again of the enormous cross, and he silently admonished himself for having considered that for a solution. None of this was in his wheelhouse, though he shuddered to think whose wheelhouse it was in. All he knew was that his wife’s rapid descent into the world of herbs and crystals and other assorted hokum had made him more than a little uncomfortable, but since it wasn’t his sickness, his death, he resolved to keep his mouth shut and let her do whatever the hell she wanted to do. The stone, in retrospect, seemed among the least ridiculous items she’d acquired from the sundry humbug dealers she’d found online.

Five bucks, plus another three-fifty for shipping. When first he saw it, he was reminded of the smooth, flat stones he used to search for on the shore of Lake Hopatcong when he was a kid; long, lazy summer days spent skipping them over the surface of the water as he got better at it and the stones went farther and farther. A comforting memory triggered by her comforting hocus-pocus talisman. How bad could that be?

Of course, that was before he believed in things that weren’t at all possible. Black, rotted things that didn’t belong in his life or this place. Things that, apparently, one could procure for fewer than ten American dollars and a healthy dose of desperation.

Things one could not outrun.

The cross loomed in the distance bright and steady, beckoning. He turned his back to it—that was a foxhole he had no desire to jump into. But to walk back that way also meant finding a place to stay for the night and maybe an all-night diner. His stomach growled. It had been hours since he had polished off the beef jerky he bought when he last got gas. He couldn’t remember where that had been, just that the sun was still out at that point.

His mind wandered, and he thought of eggs, sunny side up. A mug of hot black coffee, no sugar. In the distance, a pair of eggs rose over the horizon—no, not eggs; they were headlights, blinding him as they closed in.

Beside him, Marianne fell to the ground, whacking her head against the open door on the way down.

Marianne! Henry rushed to her. As he bent over her, he nearly hit his head against the same door. He swore under his breath as he lifted her head and felt dampness. He pulled one hand away—it was dark but there was no mistaking what it was.

Is everything okay here?

He hadn’t realized the vehicle was already upon them, and he hadn’t heard the driver get out. But the headlights were blinding, and with one wet hand still holding Marianne’s head, he shielded his eyes as a figure emerged from the glare.

Oh, shit, the driver said.

He wore a mesh ballcap and a red hunting vest over a plaid shirt. His face was indistinct, but Henry could make out the shaggy black beard that covered a good half of it. Behind the man, a late model Chevy pickup idled, something shrill warbling from the radio inside the cab.

She fell, Henry said.

I got a CB, the driver said. I’ll radio for help. He moved to return to the truck.

Henry barked, No!

The driver stopped, slowly turned back to Henry, who rose to his feet and fidgeted with the hem of his shirt.

I mean, I think she’s exhausted, maybe. It’s been a long day. A long drive.

Is that—is that blood on you?

Henry shot a glance down at himself, at his hands and shirt, where indeed there was something dark, wet, sticky.

No, he said, his voice starting to crack. No, no. Look, maybe just help me get her back into the car, huh? I don’t want to trouble anyone. She’s just tired, really. We’re both just so goddamned tired.

He wished to hell he could see the driver’s face, read his expression and maybe his thoughts. All he really wanted was for the nosy bastard to go away, but he needed to feel sure he went away comfortable enough with the situation that he didn’t get anyone else involved. Though part of him considered the wisdom of making her—it—somebody else’s problem, it wasn’t going to be easy explaining any of this, especially when she was doing such a bang-up job playing dead for their guest.

No, this was Henry’s problem.

Yeah, the driver said at some length. Yeah, okay. Sure.

He approached somewhat warily, and when he reached Marianne, he knelt down beside her. Henry crouched, too, and he didn’t like what he saw in the man’s face now that he was close up. The man touched her arm and squashed his eyebrows into a tight knit.

Mister, the driver said, swallowing hard. She doesn’t look . . .

Quickly, he retracted his hand and shot up, eyes wide and wild.

Jesus, he said. Jesus Christ. That lady’s dead.

He edged around Marianne and cleared the Buick’s open back door, and he began moving backward toward the idling truck.

No, no, Henry pleaded. Listen, she’s a little sick, maybe, not feeling all that great, but we’re just so tired, man. Come on, now. Hey, would you stop a minute, now?

Stay back, the man said. Stay right there.

Not dead, Henry said, shaking his head back and forth and advancing slowly toward the man. You got it wrong. She’s not dead. I can prove it. I can prove it to you.

As soon as he said it, he decided it wasn’t true. He couldn’t prove it, because she was dead. She’d died there on their bed, back in Jersey, and he knew it. One only had to look at her, to smell her, to feel the rubbery give of her cool skin, to see that. And she wasn’t budging—not as long as she kept up this charade.

Yet looking at her now, still and white on the gravel and lifeless grass, her eyes sunken into her skull and dry lips receding from her teeth, all Henry could see was the same thing the frightened stranger saw.

A corpse.

His dead wife.

He said, Oh my God.

Henry grabbed handfuls of his own hair and fought back the scream rising inside of him. Dead, his mind screamed back at him. Dead dead dead dead.

Grief welled in his chest, bleeding from his heart and spreading throughout the rest of him like the cancer that took Marianne. A grief he could not face, a grief that preferred madness to being left alone in this life.

What have I done? he asked, but there was no one to answer him. Marianne was dead, and the stranger was already back in the cab of his truck, holding the CB receiver to his face.

Henry fell into a stumbling gait, pinwheeling his arms as he rushed the Chevy. He was desperate to explain, to make the man see what this really was, that it was bad, but not nearly as bad as it looked. Please please please no no no.

. . . a big problem here on the westbound side of 57, over, he heard the driver say.

You don’t understand, please no, don’t, Henry’s mind babbled, but the words got stuck in his throat. It was just a mistake, not a murder. It was too much to take, but he had a grip on himself now. Why couldn’t this goddamned son of a bitch just settle down and listen?

He reached the truck and grasped the door by the open window, and just as the startled driver dropped the receiver and recoiled from Henry in fear, the passenger side door flew open and Marianne flew into the cab like a wraith.

"Marianne!"

The driver squealed like a hog being slaughtered when her teeth sank into his neck, her jagged, gray fingernails into his face and one eye. The man’s hands slapped blindly at her as he thrashed behind the wheel, but the earthly remains of Marianne didn’t loosen their grasp on him. She shook and snarled, whipped her head with her teeth still clamped down on him. Blood, black as the night, burbled out of him and sprayed the windshield. Another massive 18-wheeler rumbled past on the interstate and blew its deafening horn as it swerved to avoid taking the passenger side door off the truck, but it didn’t slow down.

And by the time the semi had vanished into the pitch, the driver was dead, his red throat opened and right eye ruined, his body blanketed with his own blood.

The CB crackled, then fell silent.

For the first time, Henry noticed the insects singing somewhere in the grass and brush behind him. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and listened to them.

"Henry . . . "

When again he opened his eyes, he found Marianne sitting calmly in