• “Shanty Falls” by Doug Crandelclass="underline" Dark and mesmerizing. Haunting.
• “Rhonda and Clyde” by John M. Floyd: With a setting in my home state of Wyoming, this is a mini-symphony of misdirection.
And those are just a few of the notes I made on the selections here. The rest are just as tantalizing.
Since you’re reading this introduction and holding this book in your hands, it means you don’t hate short stories. Good for you. It means you can live. It also means you have a special appreciation for this form. For that reason, I can safely say that authors, editors, and fellow short story readers hoist a toast in your honor.
Thank you.
C. J. Box
Pamela Blackwood
Justice
from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
He had not been able to sleep, as usual. Even after a day that had started before sunup and ended in the dark as well, a day that had pitted his muscles against five hundred tons of soil, or so it seemed. Judging from the dull ache in his lower back, the soil had won. He had twisted into every position imaginable in bed to ease the pain, curled in like a spider and straightened out flat like a board, and nothing had helped. He had even considered waking Callie and having her walk on his back like she did sometimes when it was knotting up on him, but it seemed a selfish thing to do, like recalling an angel from heaven to earth. In the long run, it would have made no difference anyway. It was the state of his bed, not his back, that kept him awake for hours each night. No matter how he twisted and turned and shifted, half of his bed was still empty.
He finally left it, pulled on clothes, and made his way to the door without even lighting a candle. The faint glow from the dying fire gave him enough light to find the heavy wooden bolt, and he lifted it and opened the cabin door without making a sound. Once outside, seated on the stone stoop and breathing in the night air, he felt better. He was in the outside world now, the world of infinity. Hannah’s new world.
He looked toward heaven, where the preacher said she was, and then looked east, where he knew for a fact she was, at least the part of her he had known on earth. If she were coming home, some evil voice whispered, this is where she would appear to him, stepping out of the forest just beyond the corncrib. Tonight, with his back throbbing, his muscles taut with exhaustion, and his brain unable to rest, William gave in to the wickedness, and his mind set to work. Hannah was coming home again.
She would find her way out of the grave somehow. That was not his concern. Once freed, she would shake off the soil (for his mind insisted on this grisly detail, proof of the evil in it) and start for home. She would walk the three miles from the cemetery, unaffected by the darkness and the cold, her bare feet treading on sticks, and soon she would reach the edge of the forest, where the senseless separation would end.
At this point in the fantasy, the details varied. Sometimes she was holding the baby boy who had died with her, cradling him to her chest against the chill of night and smiling because they’d been blessed with another child. Other times she was alone as she stepped from the forest, always pausing a moment beside the corncrib to catch William’s eye, always smiling at the joy of reunion. Then she would come quickly to him and the nightmare would be over.
Some nights William could see her there as clearly as the creamy moon above. He knew it was evil, twisted thinking to imagine her back in a body no longer fit to house a soul, but most nights he couldn’t help himself. Tonight he found, with some irritation, that he had the opposite problem. He could not lose himself in the fantasy due to a riot of barking dogs.
He had not given much thought to the racket at first. Since he’d taken to sitting on the stoop at night and thinking about Hannah, he had grown accustomed to hearing dogs barking all around him, at treed possums or the full moon or at some specter of their own creation. It was the lone barkers that he loved, the lonely call into the night of one creature facing the universe, alone. He thought to them across the pine forests and the freshly turned earth, Yes, you’re right, that’s exactly how it feels, and it seemed to him that at least in that, he had some company.
Tonight was different. The barking was closer, maybe a quarter mile down the road, and it was savage. He held his mind still for a moment and listened. This time it was no midnight loner but what sounded like several hounds working themselves into a frenzy. What made it queer was that’s how it had started, just a few moments after he’d seated himself on the stoop. Not with the usual traveling frenzy that either grew or diminished in volume according to the movements of some prey, but a sudden outburst, beginning and continuing in one spot. William thought he was catching voices mingled in with the barking when he heard a sound coming from inside the cabin. Pushing the door behind him open, he heard disembodied sobs, growing louder as Callie made her way down from the sleeping loft.
He pushed himself up from the stoop, brushed his hands together and then against his breeches. When he called Callie’s name, the sobbing grew louder and he could hear her bare feet, slapping on each step, hurrying to get to him. Fearful that she would stumble in the dark, he went inside and met her halfway up. Scooping her up into his arms, he returned to the stoop.
It was not a nightmare this time, although they had been common enough since her mother had died. This time he could see the problem right away. In one hand she was clutching a hair ribbon. One of the pigtails he had so inexpertly braided a few hours earlier had come undone.
After waiting through the necessary tears and drama, he took the pink ribbon from Callie, set her on her feet, and turned her around. Working more by feel than sight, he began the task of rebraiding.
His hands, rough and clumsy as a hound dog’s paws, were chilly, and the fine dark hair kept slipping from his fingers. When his handiwork dissolved for the third time, he gave up. No hands would work that were chilled such as his and no eyes in such poor light. Five minutes in front of the fire, after a bit of stoking, and the task would be done. Getting to his feet, he watched Callie sit on the stoop and cross her arms.
“Let’s go in,” he said, and held one hand down for her to grasp. “Papa’s hands won’t work in the cold.”
“No,” she said simply, and drew her knees up under her arms. It was her new way, since her mother had died. Not defiance so much as a courtesy, informing him of how things were going to be. William, who never would have tolerated such behavior six weeks earlier, sat back down and put his hands under his armpits.
Immediately Callie jumped up and ran to the well in the center of the yard. He called her name, knowing all the while that it was a useless exercise, then got up and followed her across the swept ground, keeping an eye that the white nightgown stayed on the outside of the circular rock wall that surrounded the well. When he caught up with her, she had hunkered down in front of it. He sat down beside her.
“Look,” she called, and one slender arm flew out from the huddle of nightgown and disordered hair and pointed to the sky. “There’s the dipper,” she shouted, and danced the shape of it in the air with her finger.
“That’s right,” William said, and deciding that he could at least keep her warm even if he couldn’t control her, he stretched out his legs and pulled her onto his lap.
“But there’s no water,” she said, as if her heart would break, and William sensed the beginning of a storm of vexation over this notion. He had discovered that the only way out of these dark fits of anger was a quick distraction.