At Home in the Dark Read online

  Table of Contents

  Foreword: It’s Getting Dark in Here

  by Lawrence Block

  Hot Pants

  by Elaine Kagan

  The Eve of Infamy

  by Jim Fusilli

  Night Rounds

  by James Reasoner

  The Flagellant

  by Joyce Carol Oates

  The Things I’d Do

  by Ed Park

  Favored to Death

  by N. J. Ayres

  Rough Mix

  by Warren Moore

  This Strange Bargain

  by Laura Benedict

  The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team

  by Joe R. Lansdale

  If Only You Would Leave Me

  by Nancy Pickard

  Giant’s Despair

  by Duane Swierczynski

  Whistling in the Dark

  by Richard Chizmar

  O, Swear Not By the Moon

  by Jill D. Block

  Nightbound

  by Wallace Stroby

  The Cucuzza Curse

  by Thomas Pluck

  Cold Comfort

  by Hilary Davidson

  Faun

  by Joe Hill

  About the Contributors

  At

  Home

  in the

  Dark

  Edited by

  Lawrence Block

  AT HOME IN THE DARK

  Copyright © 2019 by Lawrence Block.

  All rights reserved.

  “Hot Pants” Copyright © 2019 by Elaine Kagan. All rights reserved.

  “The Eve of Infamy” Copyright © 2019 by Jim Fusilli. All rights reserved.

  “Night Rounds” Copyright © 2019 by James Reasoner. All rights reserved.

  “The Flagellant” Copyright © 2019 by Joyce Carol Oates. All rights reserved.

  “The Things I’d Do” Copyright © 2019 by Ed Park. All rights reserved.

  “Favored to Death” Copyright © 2019 by N. J. Ayres. All rights reserved.

  “Rough Mix” Copyright © 2019 by Warren Moore. All rights reserved.

  “This Strange Bargain” Copyright © 2019 by Laura Benedict. All rights reserved.

  “The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team” Copyright © 2019 by Joe R. Lansdale. All rights reserved.

  “If Only You Would Leave Me” Copyright © 2019 by Nancy Pickard. All rights reserved.

  “Giant’s Despair” Copyright © 2019 by Duane Swierczynski. All rights reserved.

  “Whistling in the Dark” Copyright © 2019 by Richard Chizmar. All rights reserved.

  “O, Swear Not By the Moon” Copyright © 2019 by Jill D. Block. All rights reserved.

  “Nightbound” Copyright © 2019 by Wallace Stroby. All rights reserved.

  “The Cucuzza Curse” Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Pluck. All rights reserved.

  “Cold Comfort” Copyright © 2019 by Hilary Davidson. All rights reserved.

  “Faun” Copyright © 2019 by Joe Hill. All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2019 by Ken Laager.

  All rights reserved

  Ebook design QA Productions

  A Lawrence Block Production

  F O R E W O R D

  It’s Getting Dark in Here

  Lawrence Block

  Ages ago, Lucille Ball had this exchange on I Love Lucy with a snobbish character whose task it was to elevate her culturally:

  SNOB: “Now there are two words I never want to hear you say. One is Swell and the other is Lousy.”

  LUCY: “Okay. Let’s start with the lousy one.”

  Funny what lingers in the mind . . .

  • • •

  Every year or so, I stub my toe on a couple of buzzwords and decide I’d just as soon not encounter them again. There are two that I’ve found increasingly annoying of late, and if Lucy were here I’d tell her that one of them is Awesome and the other is Iconic.

  It is in the nature of the spoken language for words to come and go, and none are more cyclical than those we choose to indicate strong approval or disapproval. ’Swonderful, Cole Porter told us, that you should care for me. Indeed, ’Smarvelous, isn’t it? Wonderful, marvelous, terrific, sensational, excellent, brilliant—each takes its turn as a way of demonstrating great positive enthusiasm.

  For quite a few years now, le mot du jour has been awesome. Now it’s a perfectly reasonable word, and means simply that the noun thus modified is likely to inspire awe, even as that which is wonderful is clearly full of wonder. If everything thus described is truly awesome, one is left to contemplate a generation of wide-eyed and slack-jawed folk gaping at all that is arrayed in front of them.

  Well, okay. Periodically a word of approval swims upstream into the Zeitgeist, resonates with enough of us to have an impact, and becomes the default term for us all—or at least those of us under forty. Before too long its original meaning has been entirely subsumed, and all it means to call something awesome is that one likes it.

  Deep down where it lives, awesome is essentially identical in meaning to awful. And there was a time when awful and wonderful were synonyms—full of awe, full of wonder. Now, as Lucy could tell you, one is swell and the other is lousy.

  If anything good is awesome, then anything memorable or distinctive is iconic. I shouldn’t complain, I don’t suppose, as several of my own books have had that label applied to them, and perhaps I ought to regard the whole business as awesome. But iconic? Really? No narcissist thinks more highly of his own work than I, but I have trouble picturing any of my books as a literal icon, displayed on the wall of a Russian Orthodox cathedral.

  Wait, let me rethink that. Maybe Eight Million Ways to Die might make the cut. I mean, dude, that book is awesome.

  • • •

  Never mind. I have the honor to present to you seventeen stories, any or all of which you might well describe as awesome or iconic or both. And I want to introduce them by pointing out another buzzword, of one of which I’ve tired at least as much as I have of the two of them combined.

  Noir.

  It’s a perfectly good word, and particularly useful if you’re in Paris and an ominous feline crosses your path. “Un chat noir!” you might say—or you might offer a Gallic shrug and pretend you hadn’t seen it. Whatever works.

  Noir is the French word for black. But when it makes its way across la mer, it manages to gain something in translation.

  Early on, it became attached to a certain type of motion picture. A French critic named Nino Frank coined the term Film Noir in 1946, but it took a couple of decades for the phrase to get any traction. I could tell you what does and doesn’t constitute classic film noir, and natter on about its visual style with roots in German Expressionist cinematography, but you can check out Wikipedia as well as I can. (That, after all, is what I did, and how I happen to know about Nino Frank.)

  Or you can read a recent novel of mine, The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes. The protagonist, an ex-NYPD cop turned Florida private eye, is addicted to the cinematic genre. When he’s not acting out a role in his own real-life Film Noir, he’s on the couch with his feet up, watching how Hollywood used to do it.

  That’s what the French word for black is doing in the English language. It’s modifying the word film, and describes a specific example thereof.

  Now though, it’s all over the place.

  The credit—or the blame, as you prefer—goes to Johnny Temple of Akashic Books. In 2004 Akashic published Brooklyn Noir, Tim McLoughlin’s anthology of original crime stories set in that borough. They did very well with it, well enough to prompt McLoughlin to compile and Akashic to publish a sequel, Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, consisting of reprint. It did well, too, and a lot of publishers would have l
et it go at that, but Akashic went on to launch a whole cottage industry of darkness.

  A look at the publisher’s website shows a total of 120 published and forthcoming Noir titles, but the number is sure to be higher by the time you read this. Akashic clearly subscribes to the notion that every city has a dark side, and deserves a chance to tell its own stories.

  It is, I must say, a wholly estimable enterprise. I could not begin to estimate the number of writers whose first appearance in print has come in an Akashic anthology. They owe Akashic a debt of gratitude, as does a whole world of readers.

  And as do I. I had the pleasure of editing Manhattan Noir and Manhattan Noir 2, and while neither brought me wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, each was a source of personal and artistic satisfaction. And, after I’d coaxed a couple friends into writing stories for my anthology, I could hardly demur when they turned the tables on me. I’d written one myself for Manhattan Noir, and wrote another for S. J. Rozan’s Bronx Noir, and a third for Sarah Cortez and Bootsie Martinez’s Indian Country Noir. All three were about the same cheerfully homicidal young woman, and although she didn’t yet have a name, she clearly had a purpose in life. I found more stories to write about her, realized they were chapters of a novel in progress, and in time Getting Off was published by Hard Case Crime.

  So I wish their series continued success. Although their stories have never had much to do with Hollywood’s 1940 vision of noir, neither are they happy little tales full of kitty cats and bunny rabbits. They are serious stories, taking in the main a hard line on reality, and any gray scale would show them on the dark end of the spectrum.

  Noir? Noirish? Okay, fine. I’m happy for them to go on using the word. In fact I’m all for letting them trademark it, just so the rest of the world could quit using it.

  That, Gentle Reader, is a rant. And you can relax now. I’m done with it.

  • • •

  So here we have seventeen stories, and you’ll note that they cover a lot of ground in terms of genre. Most are crime fiction to a greater or lesser degree, but James Reasoner’s is a period Western and Joe Hill’s is horror and Joe R. Lansdale’s is set in a dystopian future, and what they all have in common, besides their unquestionable excellence, is where they stand on that gray scale.

  They are, in a word, dark.

  And that, I must confess, is the modifier I greatly prefer to noir.

  It’s easy to see I’m partial to it. A few years ago I put together a collection of New York stories for Three Rooms Press, and the title I fastened upon was Dark City Lights. (While I was at it I fastened as well upon some of that book’s contributors; of the writers in At Home in the Dark, six of them—Ed Park, Jim Fusilli, Thomas Pluck, Jill D. Block, Elaine Kagan and Warren Moore—wrote stories for Dark City Lights.)

  The title came to me early on. Years ago I’d come across O. Henry’s last words, spoken on his deathbed, and in case you missed them in the epigraph, you needn’t flip pages. “Turn up the lights,” said the master of the surprise ending. “I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

  • • •

  I can but hope you enjoy At Home in the Dark. I find it’s inspired me, and there’s another anthology taking shape in my mind even now. I already have a title in mind, and it’s five words long (as my titles tend to be), and it has the word dark in it.

  Trust me. It’ll be awesome.

  Hot Pants

  Elaine Kagan

  “Dad?” Lucinda said.

  Her father was snoring, relaxed and long in a faded chintz wing chair, legs out in front of him, ankles crossed, size 13 feet in thick white socks on a matching faded chintz ottoman. The chair was permanently placed in front of a large TV screen that was permanently tuned to Turner Classic Movies. The movie playing that morning was something in black-and-white with Jimmy Cagney or maybe it was Mickey Rooney, she wasn’t sure which, tapping around a giant movie set that was supposed to look like a street in downtown Manhattan. The guy could really dance.

  People shuffled in and out of the long living room. The sound was turned way down on the TV and most of the people pushing their walkers across the ratty rug were silent and smiling. Some sat motionless, like kids playing dead—jaws dropped, heads thrown back, eyes closed—like zombies, Lucinda thought. Twelve white zombies being herded around a big rambling two-story house by two brown women, one brown man, one black woman and two black men rotating hours and days in blue scrubs in Newark, New Jersey.

  Mrs. Ventimillia sat at the piano, her hands folded and quiet in her lap. She never played and it wasn’t clear if she was looking at the sheet music on the piano table or out the window. Her daughter said she’d been a really terrific jazz pianist—very Bill Evans, her daughter said. Lucinda had to look up Bill Evans. Mrs. Ventimillia had also been a reporter for the New York Post and it was ironic that Mr. Santangelo, who spent most of his time on the cracked leather sofa across from the fireplace that had no logs, was reading a yellowed copy of the New York Post that he carried around in his pocket. It didn’t seem to matter that the news wasn’t current. Lucinda didn’t know if Mrs. Ventimillia and Mr. Santangelo had ever even spoken. Mr. Santangelo was in pretty good shape except for every now and then when he had a screaming fit and threw things. No one so far had figured out what set him off. “He’s nuts,” her father said.

  Lucinda leaned forward, her face closer to her father’s. “Daddy?”

  His feet jumped a little and the snoring stopped with an abrupt intake of breath as if he’d stopped breathing altogether for maybe twenty seconds, and then started up again. Like a car engine. Not as loud, but still strong. He was still strong, her father. His mind was full of smoke, as he frequently pointed out with a wry laugh when he was “in”, as he put it, but his body betrayed his 68 years. He looked maybe 58 tops. He had a character actor face with dark red wavy hair and a solid muscular build. No gut above his belt. He had a splatter of freckles across ruddy cheeks, a thick neck and thick hands. He could probably still jump on and off a fire engine, pull a hose, climb a ladder, chainsaw through a roof, or run into flames looking like the picture poster of how a fire captain should look. Although he just might not be able to remember what a fire engine did—or a hose or a ladder or a chain saw. Or how to brush his teeth or cut his meat or recognize Chief Lang when he came to visit. “I know this guy, right?” he said to Lucinda, tilting his head towards the Fire Chief. Chief Archie Lang and her father had gone through the Academy together, had been best men at each other’s weddings and were godfather’s to each other’s kids. “I’m losing me,” her father said in a gruff whisper to Archie Lang, leaning in close and secret. “Don’t tell the kid. Okay?” “Okay,” Chief Lang said, giving a brave nod to Lucinda and an affectionate punch to her dad’s upper arm. Lucinda made a concerted effort to not die right there or throw up. He was “in and out” now, this stalwart father of hers, slipping down the ladder of dementia.

  “Hello.”

  Lucinda looked up. A tiny wiry woman wearing a print dress with pink socks stuffed into white open toed house slippers was standing right next to the arm of her chair. She had several strands of beads slung around her neck, hot pink lipstick with blush to match and she was pushing 90. “Hello, Mrs. Moskowitz.”

  “Hello, yourself.” She looked hard at Lucinda. “Do you know this man?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lucinda said, “he’s my father.”

  “Uh huh. Is he Jewish?”

  Lucinda smiled and shook her head. “He’s Italian, Mrs. Moskowitz.” They’d had this same conversation maybe four times that morning and maybe twenty-seven times in the last month.

  “He doesn’t look Italian.”

  “Right,” Lucinda said, studying her father, “he actually looks Irish.”

  Mrs. Moskowitz sighed. “I had an Italian man once,” she said, lowering her voice and giving Lucinda a woman-to-woman stare, “he was a no-goodnick, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, then,” she s
aid, pushing her walker forward, “I have to get home,” she said, “my mother will kill me. It’s a school night, you know.”

  “Okay,” Lucinda said.

  Jesus Mary and Joséph. She touched her father’s arm; kind of jossled him. “Dad, I have to go to work.”

  Nicholas John Conte coughed, cleared his throat and opened his eyes. Clear blue; nothing dimmed in the sight area. He stretched a giant’s stretch, folding his arms over his face and then extending them out to the sides, spreading his fingers, lifting his legs straight out in front of him, pointing his toes and flexing, and then down again with the appropriate sounds of a big man stretching.

  “Hey, Lucy,” he said, smiling at his daughter.

  “Well, you had a good nap.”

  “I wasn’t asleep.”

  She laughed. “You weren’t?”

  “Just checking the inside of my eyelids,” he said, and yawned. He’d been saying that since she could remember.

  He looked around the room. “Where’s your mother?”

  “Dad, mom hasn’t been here for years. You know that.”

  He took maybe a minute to ponder it. “Oh, right, the guy with the boat.”

  “Right.”

  “Who knew she liked boats?” he said and laughed. He looked around the room. “And here I am at the big house.”

  “Dad.”

  “When will my house be ready?”

  “Soon.”

  This was his new thing—fixing it in his head that his house was being worked on—plumbing, paint, new floors, etc. He’d tell you. It was Lucinda’s choice to let him believe it. The first few months had been endless battles about him getting out of there. “What the hell is going on here, Lucy!” he would shout, “am I a goddamn prisoner?” It came to a near brawl one night with Miguel and Reginald, two of the attendants at the home. It was Reverend Father King’s idea to tell him the house was under construction. “You want me to lie, Father?” “It’s not a lie if you paint the kitchen, Lucinda,” he said, leaning back in his chair. So much for being Catholic.

  “Damn construction guys,” Nick Conte muttered. “This always happens, you know. I told you. We’ll be done by February, we’ll be done by March . . . where’s the peanut?”