Three Miles Past (22 page)

[“
The Coming of Night
”]
I started this one completely meaning to write a choose-your-own-adventure story. Except then I realized that, if this guy’s the killer he thinks he is, then there’s not really any choice, is there? Of course not. For other, weaker people, maybe. But not for him. For him there’s only ever one bright shining path, and he’s most definitely walking it, never needing to look to either side, or behind. I wrote this one very spur-of-the-moment, too, kind of as a test: I was teaching an on-line workshop for
LitReactor
, and figured the best way to show how to write a story is to just maybe write a story, let the class watch it happen scene-by-scene. Which is so much more difficult than I’d suspected, especially when people start chiming in after each new bit,
especially
this one student Derek Palmer, who’s a dangerously intuitive reader, the kind it’s hard to ever get ahead of. Those kinds of readers, though, they make you better. But still, that ‘test’-part: I figured if I was any kind of halfway real writer, then this was a thing I should be able to get done. And so I did. The only way to go into things is with nerve, right? But you can fake it, too. I always fake it. I opened my notebook pretty much at random and pointed to a story premise:
kill a guy, find leathery eggs in his gut. take those eggs home. incubate them?
That was all I had to go on, and that first public session, I probably crossed two-thousand words or so. Which isn’t much. But for me it was some distance, since it was largely in a bar, and I don’t know the first thing about bars. The real meat, for me, though, it was getting that first vic back to the hotel room, then getting down to the sharp-edged part of the night. I love writing that kind of stuff. Really, I’ve got this other novel, this way violent thing, that’s pretty much just that, over and over. Some days you want to see how far you can go, right? And maybe peer over into where you definitely shouldn’t go. And then sneak across anyway. But this guy, man, he’s one of my all-time favorite characters. I love his efficiency, his sense of purpose. And, those eggs, they about killed me. I had no idea what was going to be in them, where they were from, what they were for, and I wasn’t real sure I was going to have the nerve to figure it out. Even the fake nerve. This is one of those stories where I kept writing dead ends and having to backtrack (
publicly
). As for where they’re from, those eggs, it’s something I read in . . . maybe Harry Crews’
Childhood
? Or maybe some Dorothy Alison? Except those are all seeming halfway wrong—right part of the country, wrong writers. Anyway, somewhere I read that a turtle egg, no matter how long you boil it, the shell either will or won’t go soft. Or hard. It won’t go the opposite of whatever it is in the first place. And that just confuses me. I mean, I guess it means that turtle eggs, they don’t act like other eggs. And I can’t figure why. And I have no real idea how other eggs act, either, but still, turtle eggs, they’re not like those other, boring eggs. Which makes them so, so interesting to me. And, I think I wrote this story after seeing a bunch of turtle heads popping up in the ocean down off Baja California, right about sunset. I thought they were seals at first, but they were turtles, just periscoping up to see if this was a good place to come lay some eggs. I guess. Or maybe they were waiting for me to go to sleep, so they could come gnaw my throat open, I don’t know. Of all the animals, turtles are forever the most scary to me. My great-grandfather, when I was young he told me that, if a turtle ever bit me, then it wouldn’t let go until it thundered. So I grew up being absolutely terrified of turtles. I remember once finding one eating a rat head, and just knowing that rat head was what was left of me, that I was sneaking an accidental peek into the someday future. Another time I got hopelessly marooned out on a rock in a creek, because I thought I saw a turtle. So, anything that comes from a turtle, and possibly holds more turtles, for me that thing’s going to automatically have a high creep factor. Used to, as kind of a ward, I had this page I’d photocopied up from some architecture memoir anthology or something—it was this one architect’s childhood drawings of turtles. Just in margins, on envelopes, wherever. Like they were in him, and were always going to be leaking out through his pencil. But then one day one of his teachers told him turtles were stupid, he needed to stop drawing turtles, and—this is the horror part of this—
he listened to her
. After that, he never drew another turtle, and finally drifted into a successful career in architecture. I kind of felt like, hanging that photocopy up, it told turtles that we were good, that it was all all right. That I understood. But I don’t. Also related to all this, I guess, is that I’ve never even once driven by a turtle in the road without circling back, carrying it to the ditch it’s pointing at in its slow, deliberate way. And sometimes I end up sitting there after, to be sure that was really the way that turtle meant to be going. I have no human feeling for those people who steer over, to clip turtles, flip them across the other lane like a tiddlywink. I’ve found those turtles, bloody and cracked, so confused that their one defense wasn’t enough, when it always had been. And I’ve walked those turtles to the fence, pulled the necessary dirt over them, and lowered my head in apology. Just for being human. And, those strange-nosed folk in this story, who I kind of saw as angels: they’re completely a graft from
Star Trek Next Generation
. The Traveler’s species. That guy always fascinates me. Whenever I have downtime, I often find myself thinking of him. The original title for this story was “Little Stealers,” too. I think it was ramping off that Bradbury story “Small Assassins.” But I can’t imagine why this story would ever have been called “Little Stealers.” That must have been some dead-end I ran down, backed out of. Also I should cite this one Charles Beaumont story, “The Howling Man,” from (for me) Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s
The Weird
. It’s kind of just a joke of a story, but the lightness of the delivery, this kind of over-constructed indirectness, this mid-twentieth-century casual ‘worldliness,’ it kept making me think it was on purpose, that it was told like that because it was trying to hide something far, far darker, something that was still going to be there after the punchline. Something Beaumont had
seen
, and been a part of. And this was as close as he could come to documenting it, as warning for the rest of us. It’s one of the main things stories are for, isn’t it? We shouldn’t let ourselves forget. And, the ending for this one, it took a lot of tries. About a week’s worth of them, hammering away every afternoon. Which is way unusual for me, as far as short stuff goes. But this one, I couldn’t let it go, I couldn’t throw it away. Most of my horror stories, they leave me kind of weirded out, like, I know this is one of those nights I’m not turning the light off. But this one, it hit me a lot deeper, in a much more vital place. Just reduced me to nothing, erased me. Hopefully it touches you a little bit wrong as well.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THREE MILES PAST
never would have happened if Mark Scioneaux hadn’t flagged me over to his table at World Horror in Salt Lake City in 2011. He showed me what Nightscape was about. By then I’d already been talking to Robert Shane Wilson for a while, about that excellent
Horror for Good
anthology, which I loserly never got around to actually sending a story across for. But what Mark wondered was if I had any novellas they could maybe run. My first thought was that I had no idea what a novella was, or how it worked. My next thought was that it’s just a long story, right? Just one not so long as a novel? I shot four across to him, finally. And, instead of taking one, he said maybe they could just take them all; the other’s “Sterling City,” coming out all by itself. So, yes, cons are where good things happen, sometimes. And, as for the cover, by Boden Steiner—I know Boden from around Denver, and have always dug his work. So, when we needed a cover, I was begging for Boden to work on it. And, as you can see, he did what he does, and it’s so cool. What he also did, though, was title the book. Since this wasn’t a collection until Mark and Robert suggested it, I hadn’t ever thought on what a title for it could be. As close as I could come was Gertrude Stein’s
Three Lives
. But what does Stein have to do with horror, right? I just shot all three stories to Boden as single files, told him I didn’t even have an order for them yet. And then he came back with that title—a lift from the first story. And it completely works. So, thanks for the art and the title, Boden, and thanks to Mark for flagging me down, and, thanks to Robert for cleaning the stories up for me so much. Other people to thank: Stephen King, for all his ‘haunted object’ stories (word processors, laundry presses, etc.), each of which always gets to me; this dog I saw just at the edge of my headlights one night lost in the mountains of New Mexico, a dog who was standing there holding what I’ll swear was a human forearm and hand in its mouth; John Langan, who, with his fiction, challenged me to write one of these; Nick Kimbro, for talking horror and horror and horror, always, and writing it, too; Matthew Treon, for not-on-purposely showing me a last-minute fix for the first story; Joe R. Lansdale, for always setting the standard for horror stories, and just for how to be a writer
and
a person; and, to my wife Nancy: the one dream I’ve ever had about being really and actually dead, I wasn’t, because you were there with me. We were nineteen again, holding hands, moving so fast down a blacktop road in Texas that we had to be ghosts. It didn’t matter, though. We were together. Thank you for that, and for all of this.

Barebones

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of eleven novels and, now, three collections.

He lives in Colorado.