The Ones That Got Away Read online

  THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY

  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

  for Sulac and Detective Bruiseman

  Copyright © 2010 by Stephen Graham Jones.

  Cover design by Stephen H. Segal.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Laird Barron.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-321-1 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-235-1 (hardcover)

  Prime Books

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books.

  Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other

  civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth

  of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding

  what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

  —Stanislaw Lem

  It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark

  —Michael Jackson

  Table of Contents

  Introduction: No Escape, Laird Barron

  Father, Son, Holy Rabbit

  Till the Morning Comes

  The Sons of Billy Clay

  So Perfect

  Lonegan’s Luck

  Monsters

  Wolf Island

  Teeth

  Raphael

  Captain’s Lament

  The Meat Tree

  The Ones Who Got Away

  Crawlspace

  Story Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Introduction: No Escape

  by Laird Barron

  A finger bone vomited into park grass. A snake oil salesman traveling through the land of the dead. A primeval island where the human population of one is about to tick over to zero. A baby monitor that transmits on a damned frequency. Cannibalism. Black magic. Murder. Man’s best friend, until the end. First love. True love. Childhood. Machetes. The Dark.

  Brace yourself.

  The Ones That Got Away is a slippery collection; it resists and gnaws at the bonds of genre, yet may be the most pure horror book I’ve come across. The cumulative effect of these stories induces dislocation and dread—the manner of dread that arises from what is known by our soft, weak, civilized selves through rote and sedentary custom and symbolic exchange of cautionary fables, as well as a deeper, abiding fear of the ineffable that’s the province of the primordial swamp of our subconscious. The Ones That Got Away acts as a literary taproot intercepting the delta waves of humanity’s ancestral lizard slumbering in muck. The beast dreaming a future where it has shed scale, fang, and claw, and goes forth on two puny legs, an organism evolved and refined, albeit eternally fettered to its savage provenance via genetic memory and vestigial apparatuses.

  Homo sapiens haven’t come very far, not really. We are quick to anger, quick to draw blood; quick to breed, quicker to flee. From the slopes of our brows to the shelves of our breastbones humans are designed to withstand death from above. While our savage instincts have atrophied, the beast merely sleeps, its lusts and rages merely sublimated, its fears merely quieted. Our collective blissful ignorance of the awesome nature of the universe and our amoebic place therein, as Lovecraft opined, shields us from gibbering madness while leaving intact the basic intellectual curiosity that defines us, elevates us from the beasts. Driven by curiosity and greed, but protected in equal measure by cowardice and short memories, what a contradiction is man.

  Stephen Graham Jones is tuned into the phenomena of this duality—the fault line running through rationality, the divide between animal and man, and what we know and the actual truth. With this book he’s acquired a distress signal emanating from the prehistoric brain and committed it to paper, produced an artifact that satisfies the requirements of literature as entertainment while translating on the subliminal register. It is a crystal clear message: all is not well, nothing has ever been, nor will ever be, and that we begin this life covered in blood, screaming. Ultimately, we don’t, can’t, escape the circumstances of our origins.

  Childhood lost. Youth corrupted is the touchstone, the recurring theme in The Ones That Got Away. Everything, everything, begins and ends with childhood, for as children Jones’s protagonists dwell closest to the animal state that powers the overmind, are thus privy to, albeit powerless against, the terrible truth, have not developed a thick, insulating shell of incredulity, and are thus scarred, if not damned to be receivers and carriers of horror. Children, with their partially-formed consciousness and absent morality, their natural affinity for the inexplicable, their essential vulnerability, get it, the essence of horror, you see. The wounded ones get it double.

  Jones’s adult characters who remain forever those damaged children on the inside, yet devastatingly estranged from any shred of youthful innocence, get it too. These mature protagonists bear the formative wounds and are especially sensitive to the darkness that seeps between cracks, alive as a raw nerve to the intrusion of the supernatural. Cursed with perspective, that bitter fruit of age and wisdom, such men and women cannot help but apprehend the existence of something larger than themselves, its encroachment, how it stains and deforms the fabric of reality, stains and deforms their own flesh and spirit. They are forced to come to grips with the hideous realization that the inequities of childhood, its attendant suffering and imbalances of power, are relative, a socio-economic parallax that persists from birth to death. Good and evil are empty words against the inchoate energies that twist the material world, tears it to ribbons without notice. Like the song says, there ain’t no good guys, there ain’t no bad guys, there’s only you and me. Perhaps the darkest hour anyone will endure is that which succeeds the epiphany that the sublime and monstrous are equally inheritable traits. Behind the faces of good and evil, ruination and corruption, lies an insensate, inchoate vista of blind stars sprinkled across the maw of vast, lightless space.

  The pieces herein radiate the dark energy of fairy tales. The good kind, the kind with sex and cannibalism, occultism and murder, awe and wonder. Horror. That Jones appropriates this ancient mode, deconstructs and flenses it with his high-pressure stream of consciousness narratives, is grimly appropriate. In his hands, the fairy tale isn’t simply a trifle or diversion, nor at heart the sanitized parable so popular in public education, but a fragment of cosmic code, a warning and a promise, the mesmerist’s chime that snaps a mind from one plane to another. Fairy tales, the down and dirty ones courtesy Black Forest campfires of ages past, are frightful correspondence with the dark, nightmare communications from the primal wellspring.

  Indeed, the power of nightmares defines this collection. Jones’s stories are nightmarish for the clarity of their manifest terrors often hatched from scenarios we’ve envisioned in the wasteland hours between falling into bed and crawling from it. Jones’s stories are also nightmarish for their moral ambiguity and their juxtaposition of the seedy, grimy dirt-in-the mouth taste of reality with that of the supernatural, the diabolical and the numinous. Yet the experience of them rapidly escalates from reading accounts of discrete nightmares to actually participating in the grotesquerie, becoming entangled, infected, scarred. He’s fractured the big, black picture window that overlooks the benighted regions of the soul. Each story is a fragment of that glass, and some of the imagery is jagged as the hell it evokes.

  You can’t go home, can never go back where you started from, is what they say like it’s a tragedy, a curse. There are those who don’t get to leave in the first place. The ones caught in the ankle-hold traps of poverty and abuse, corrupted by the dark days of bad childho
ods, the ones who get lost in the haunted forests that surround suburb and city, backwoods shack and brownstone alike. All those kids—now grown into men and women—who dwell on the fringes of the mythical Great American dream carry on as shadows of themselves cast down through the long years. Predators and victims by turn. The ones who dream the ancient dream, who can’t quite shake it upon waking and thus remain ensnared, body and soul. The ones who almost got away, but didn’t.

  An animal will chew off its own leg to escape the trap, but there’s no escape from a following shadow. There’s your tragedy, there’s your curse. There’s the beating heart of The Ones That Got Away.

  —Laird Barron, author of Occultation

  30 April 2010, Olympia, Washington

  Father, Son, Holy Rabbit

  By the third day they were eating snow. Years later it would come to the boy again, rush up to him at a job interview: his father spitting out pieces of seed or pine needle into his hand. Whatever had been in the snow. The boy had looked at the brown flecks in his father’s palm, then up to his father, who finally nodded, put them back in his mouth, turned his face away to swallow.

  Instead of sleeping, they thumped each other in the face to stay awake.

  The place they’d found under the tree wasn’t out of the wind, but it was dry.

  They had no idea where the camp was, or how to find the truck from there, or the highway after that. They didn’t even have a gun, just the knife the boy’s father kept strapped to his right hip.

  The first two days, the father had shrugged and told the boy not to worry, that the storm couldn’t last.

  The whole third day, he’d sat watching the snow fall like ash.

  The boy didn’t say anything, not even inside, not even a prayer. One of the times he drifted off, though, waking not to the slap of his father’s fingernail on his cheek but the sound of it, there was a picture he brought up with him from sleep. A rabbit.

  He told his father about it and his father nodded, pulled his lower lip into his mouth, and smiled like the boy had just told a joke.

  That night they fell asleep.

  This time the boy woke to his father rubbing him all over, trying to make his blood flow. The boy’s father was crying, so the boy told him about the rabbit, how it wasn’t even white like it should be, but brown, lost like them.

  His father hugged his knees to his chest and bounced up and down, stared out at all the white past their tree.

  “A rabbit?” he said.

  The boy shrugged.

  Sometime later that day he woke again, wasn’t sure where he was at first. His father wasn’t there. The boy moved his mouth up and down, didn’t know what to say. Rounded off in the crust of the snow were the dragging holes his father had made, walking away. The boy put his hand in the first, then the second, then stood from the tree into the real cold. He followed the tracks until they became confused. He tried to follow them back to the tree but the light was different now. Finally he started running, falling down, getting up, his chest on fire.

  His father found him sometime that night, pulled him close.

  They lowered themselves under another tree.

  “Where were you?” the boy asked.

  “That rabbit,” the father said, stroking the boy’s hair down.

  “You saw it?”

  Instead of answering, the father just stared.

  This tree wasn’t as good as the last. The next morning they looked for another, and another, and stumbled onto their first one.

  “Home again home again,” the father said, guiding the boy under then gripping onto the back of his jacket, stopping him.

  There were tracks coming up out of the dirt, onto the snow. Double tracks, like the split hoof of an elk, except bigger.

  “Your rabbit,” the father said.

  The boy smiled.

  That night his father carved their initials into the trunk of the tree with his knife. Later he broke a dead branch off, tried sharpening it. The boy watched, fascinated, hungry.

  “Will it work?” he asked.

  His father thumped him in the face, woke him. He asked it again, with his mouth this time.

  The father shrugged. His lips were cracked, lined with blood, his beard pushing up through his skin.

  “Where do you think it is right now?” he said to the boy.

  “The—the rabbit?”

  The father nodded.

  The boy closed his eyes, turned his head, then opened his eyes again, used them to point the way he was facing. The father used his sharp stick as a cane, stood with it, and walked in that direction, folded himself into the blowing snow.

  The boy knew this was going to work.

  In the hours his father was gone, he studied their names in the tree. While the boy had been asleep, his father had carved the boy’s mother’s name into the bark as well. The boy ran the pads of his fingers over the grooves, brought the taste to his tongue.

  The next thing he knew was ice. It was falling down on him in layers.

  His father had returned, had collapsed into the side of the tree.

  The boy rolled him in, rubbed his back and face and neck, and then saw what his father was balled around, what he’d been protecting for miles, maybe: the rabbit. It was brown at the tips of its coat, the rest white.

  With his knife, the father opened the rabbit in a line down the stomach, poured the meat out. It steamed.

  Over it, the father looked at the son, nodded.

  They scooped every bit of red out that the rabbit had, swallowed it in chunks because if they chewed they tasted what they were doing. All that was left was the skin. The father scraped it with the blade of his knife, gave those scrapings to the boy.

  “Glad your mom’s not here to see this,” he said.

  The boy smiled, wiped his mouth.

  Later, he threw up in his sleep, then looked at it soaking into the loose dirt, then turned to see if his father had seen what he’d done, how he’d betrayed him. His father was sleeping. The boy lay back down, forced the rabbit back into his mouth then angled his arm over his lips, so he wouldn’t lose his food again.

  The next day, no helicopters came for them, no men on horseback, following dogs, no skiers poling their way home. For a few hours around what should have been lunch, the sun shone down, but all that did was make their dry spot under the tree wet. Then the wind started again.

  “Where’s that stick?” the boy asked.

  The father narrowed his eyes as if he hadn’t thought of that. “Your rabbit,” he said after a few minutes.

  The boy nodded, said, almost to himself, “It’ll come back.”

  When he looked around to his father, his father was already looking at him. Studying him.

  The rabbit’s skin was out in the snow, just past the tree. Buried hours ago.

  The father nodded like this could maybe be true. That the rabbit would come back. Because they needed it to.

  The next day he went out again, with a new stick, and came back with his lips blue, one of his legs frozen wet from stepping through some ice into a creek. No rabbit. What he said about the creek was that it was a good sign. You could usually follow water one way or another, to people.

  The boy didn’t ask which way.

  “His name is Slaney,” he said.

  “The rabbit?”

  The boy nodded. Slaney. Things that had names were real.

  That night they slept, then woke somehow at the same time, the boy under his father’s heavy, jacketed arm. They were both looking the same direction, their faces even with the crust of snow past their tree. Twenty feet out, its nose tasting the air, was Slaney.

  The boy felt his father’s breath deepen.

  “Don’t . . . don’t . . . ” his father said, low, then exploded over the boy, crashed off into the day without his stick, even.

  He came back an hour later with nothing slung over his shoulder, nothing balled against his stomach. No blood on his hands.

  This time t
he son prayed, inside. Promised not to throw any of the meat up again. With the tip of his knife, his father carved a cartoon rabbit into the trunk of their tree. It looked like a frog with horse ears.

  “Slaney,” the boy said.

  The father carved that in a line under the rabbit’s feet, then circled the boy’s mother’s name over and over, until the boy thought that piece of the bark was going to come off like a plaque.

  The next time the boy woke, he was already sitting up.

  “What?” the father said.

  The boy nodded the direction he was facing.

  The father watched his eyes, nodded, then got his stick.

  This time he didn’t come back for nearly a day. The boy, afraid, climbed up into the tree, then higher, as high as he could, until the wind could reach him.

  His father reached up with his stick, tapped him awake.

  Like a football in the crook of his arm was the rabbit. It was bloody and wonderful, already cut open.

  “You ate the guts,” the boy said, his mouth full.

  His father reached into the rabbit, came out with a long sliver of meat. The muscle that runs along the spine, maybe.

  The boy ate and ate and then, when they were done, trying not to throw up, he placed the rabbit skin in the same spot he’d placed the last one. The coat was just the same—white underneath, brown at the tips.

  “It’ll come back,” he told his father.

  His father rubbed the side of his face. His hand was crusted with blood.

  The next day there were no walkie-talkies crackling through the woods, no four-wheelers or snowmobiles churning through the snow. And the rabbit skin was gone.

  “Hungry?” the boy’s father said, smiling, leaning on his stick just to stand, and the boy smiled with him.

  Four hours later, his father came back with the rabbit again. He was wet to the hips this time.

  “The creek?” the boy said.

  “It’s a good sign,” the father said back.

  Again, the father had fingered the guts into his mouth on the way back, left most of the stringy meat for the boy.

  “Slaney,” the father said, watching the boy eat.