When she does, I’ll stand with my naked back to her. The vines will whip out and cut me before she reaches me, but I can stand it. I’m used to pain. I’ll pretend the thorns are Mary’s needles. I’ll stand that way until she folds her dead arms around me and her body pushes up against the wound she made in my back, the wound that is our daughter Rae. She’ll hold me so the vines and the proboscis can do their work. And while she holds me, I’ll grab her fine hands and push them against my chest, and it will be we three again, standing against the world, and I’ll close my eyes and delight in her soft, soft hands one last time.
—
If you enjoyed Joe R. Lansdale's “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” we think you’ll like The Nightrunners too. It’s also by Lansdale, and is available as an e-book from Gere Donovan Press:
The Nightrunners
THE HOUSE, AS CLYDE called it, was just below Stoker Street, just past where it intersected King, not quite bookended between the two streets, but nearby, on a more narrow one. And there it waited.
Almost reverently, like a hearse that has arrived to pick up the dead, the black ’66 Chevy entered the drive, parked.
Clyde and Brian got out, stood looking up at the house for a moment, considering it as two monks would a shrine.
Brian felt a sensation of trembling excitement, and though he would not admit it, a tinge of fear.
The House was big, old, grey and ugly. It looked gothic, out of step with the rest of the block. Like something out of Poe or Hawthorne. It crouched like a falsely-obedient dog. Upstairs two windows showed light, seemed like cold, rectangular eyes considering prey.
The moon was bright enough that Brian could see the dead grass in the yard, the dead grass in all the yards, down the block. It was the time of year for dead grass; but to Brian’s way of thinking, this grass looked browner, deader. It was hard to imagine it ever being alive, ever standing up tall and bright and green.
The odd thing about The House was the way it seemed to command the entire block. It was not as large as it first appeared—though it was large—and the homes about it were newer and more attractive. They had been built when people still cared about the things they lived in, before the era of glass and plastic and builders who pocketed the money that should have been used on foundation and structure. Some of the houses stood a story above the gothic nightmare, but somehow they had taken on a run-down, anemic look, as if the old grey house was in fact some sort of alien vampire that could impersonate a house by day, but late at night it would turn its head with a woodgrain creak, look out of its cold, rectangle eyes and suddenly stand to reveal thick peasant-girl legs and feet beneath its firm wooden skirt, and then it would start to stalk slowly and crazily down the street, the front door opening to reveal long, hollow, woodscrew teeth, and it would pick a house and latch onto it, fold back its rubbery front porch lips and burrow its many fangs into its brick or wood and suck out the architectural grace and all the love its builders had put into it. Then, as it turned to leave, bloated, satiated, the grass would die beneath its steps and it would creep and creak back down the street to find its place, and it would sigh deeply, contentedly, as it settled once more, and the energy and grace of the newer houses, the loved houses, would bubble inside its chest. Then it would sleep, digest, and wait.
“Let’s go in,” Clyde said.
About the Author
With more than thirty books to his credit, Joe R. Lansdale is the Champion Mojo Storyteller. He’s been called “an immense talent” by Booklist; “a born storyteller” by Robert Bloch; and The New York Times Book Review declares he has “a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace.”
He’s won umpty-ump awards, including sixteen Bram Stoker Awards, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, the Horror Critics Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, the “Shot in the Dark” International Crime Writer’s Award, the Golden Lion Award, the Booklist Editor’s Award, the Critic’s Choice Award, and a New York Times Notable Book Award. He’s got the most decorated mantle in all of Nacogdoches!
Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen, writer and editor.
Find him online at www.JoeRLansdale.com.
Also by Joe R. Lansdale
“Hap Collins and Leonard Pine” mysteries
Savage Season (1990)
Mucho Mojo (1994)
Two-Bear Mambo (1995)
Bad Chili (1997)
Rumble Tumble (1998)
Veil’s Visit(1999)
Captains Outrageous (2001)
Vanilla Ride (2009)
Hyenas (a novella) (2011)
Devil Red (2011)
Blue to the Bone (???)
The “Drive-In” series
The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988)
The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels (1989)
The Drive-In: A Double-Feature (1997, omnibus)
The Drive-In: The Bus Tour (2005) (limited edition)
The “Ned the Seal” trilogy
Zeppelins West (2001)
Flaming London (2006)
Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal (2010)
The Sky Done Ripped (release date unknown)
Other novels
Act of Love (1980)
Texas Night Riders (1983) (published under the pseudonym Ray Slater)
Dead in the West (1986) (written in 1980)
Magic Wagon (1986)
The Nightrunners (1987)
Cold in July (1989)
Tarzan: the Lost Adventure (1995) (with Edgar Rice Burroughs)
The Boar (1998)
Freezer Burn (1999)
Waltz of Shadows (1999)
Something Lumber This Way Comes (1999) (Children's book)
The Big Blow (2000)
Blood Dance (2000)
The Bottoms (2000)
A Fine Dark Line (2002)
Sunset and Sawdust (2004)
Lost Echoes (2007)
Leather Maiden (2008)
Under the Warrior Sun (2010)
All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky (2011)
…And that's not counting the pseudonymous novels, the short stories, the chapbooks, anthologies, graphic novels, comic books and all the rest. Get the full story at www.JoeRLansdale.com.
Copyright
This story originally appeared in Nukes, edited by John MacLay, 1986.
This digital edition (v1.0) of “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back” was published by Gere Donovan Press in 2011.
Copyright 1986 by Joe R. Lansdale
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Errata
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