After the People Lights Have Gone Off: Stories

by Stephen Graham Jones, Joe R. Lansdale

Genres: Horror; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

From the award-winning author, “the kind of collection that lodges in your brain like a malignant grain of an evil dream” (Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence).

Winner of the This Is Horror Award
Finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award
Finalist for the Bram Stoker Award

This is not your cookie-cutter horror collection. Stephen Graham Jones has taken nightmarish visions from his fevered imagination and crafted them into pieces of literary genius. If the absolute fear doesn’t sweep you away, his lyrical and haunting prose will. As Joe R. Lansdale states in the introduction, “You need this book. If you like anything close to horror, and also like your stories to have elements other than just standing in the darkness with a bloody knife, you have the right book. Enjoy.”

Does holding your breath for two minutes during the scariest part of a horror movie invite the terror in? Just ask the kids who go to the local theater in “Thirteen.” In “Doc’s Story,” even the most beloved family tales have teeth—that’s what happens when you’re born into a werewolf pack. And a father doesn’t have to think twice when he’s given one chance to make the ultimate sacrifice in “Snow Monsters.”

In these fifteen stories, Jones coaxes our greatest fears from the shadowy corners of our minds, and we can’t turn away.

“With razor-sharp prose . . . he pummels us in a full-court press of discomfort, paranoia, and a desire to keep the lights on.” —Pantheon Magazine

“Jones is a true master of the horror short story. Inventive, quirky, unexpected and masterful.” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times–bestselling author

 

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Release date: October 1, 2024

Publisher: Open Road Media

Print pages: 260

Sample

Thirteen

Here’s how you do it, if you’re brave enough.

First you go down to the Big Chief theater. That’s the old one behind the pizza place nobody goes to any more, the one my dad says he used to work at in high school, each of the ovens so deep, like a line of mouths to Hell.

The tops of his forearms have these smooth scars to prove it.

I’ve always wanted to write a word on that burned skin, then wait, see if it’s one of those prayers that makes it through, gets answered.

But this isn’t about him. This is about the Big Chief.

It’s just got two screens, and they’re right beside each other. If you’re in the first one and there’s a war movie in the second, you can hear the machine guns and dogfights and heroic last words bleeding through. It’s one big room, really, you can tell. They just hung a thick curtain right in the middle so they could show two movies, double their money.

My dream’s always been for them to roll that curtain up one night, show us the big picture.

Maybe someday.

It’s been there for forever, the Big Chief. According to Trino’s uncle, a kid got castrated there about fifteen years ago. In the last stall of the bathroom.

Maybe that’s why this trick works.

 

See, first you go there, get your ticket, your popcorn, and settle in. It doesn’t matter what row, or which theater, one or two. And if you’re watching a horror movie—it’s supposed to only work with horror movies—what you do is, right when it’s most scary, right when whoever’s with you is probably going to make fun of you for closing your eyes, you close your eyes. And hold your breath. And don’t let any sound in, kind of by humming all your thoughts into a dial tone.

And then you count to a hundred and twenty.

Two minutes, yeah.

That’s the real trick.

And if you’re getting scared, if you can feel it starting to work, you can breathe out all at once, even though you could have gone five or ten seconds longer.

It’s safest to do that, really.

Just breathe out, laugh, maybe hunch over into a coughing fit. Spilling your popcorn’s an especially good tactic, even—who would do that on purpose, right?

And then look back up to the screen through your tears. See that the movie’s still up there, right where it should be.

Your laugh’ll be kind of forced, but your smile, that’s a hundred percent true.

That’s where the movies should be, up on the screen.

If you make it to a hundred and twenty, though, then open your eyes?

The screen’ll look just exactly the same. And your friends’ll still be sitting there by you, waiting for you tell them what it was like. To see if it worked.

How it works is that, when you’re not looking, or listening, or breathing—it’s like how you’re supposed to hold your breath when your parents are driving by the cemetery. If you don’t, then you can accidentally breathe in a ghost.

 

That’s sort of how it works at the Big Chief.

With you not breathing, playing dead like you are, it makes like a road, or a door, and the movie seeps in. Way in the background, like at the edge of town, not everything changing all at once. Nothing that dramatic.

But the movie’s there. It’s there because you invited it. Because you left a crack it could come through, because you made a sound like a wish, and the darkness just washed that direction, to cover it up.

Ask Marcus Tider.

If you can talk to the dead, that is.

Marcus moved here last year, but he didn’t come to eighth grade with us in the fall. If all the girls’ collected hopes and dreams had anything to do with it, though, it would have been one of us in his place. Just so they could have him to take them on dates all through high school. Just so they could pin all their hopes and dreams on him, bat their eyes every time he passed, and then sigh into their lockers.

But Marcus—at his last school, it had been big, like 4A, and they’d been a rich district, the kind that has a pool. Meaning they had a swim team. And Marcus was too blond and too perfect not to have been captain.

He could hold his breath forever.

It was only a matter of time before he ended up at the Big Chief.

He wasn’t even scared of the movie, either, said horror was stupid, all make-believe. We were all there to watch, except for right at the end, when me and James ran out to the

parking lot, to see if we could catch the movie starting, off on the horizon. Just see a star dimming out, another winking on.

There was nothing.

Inside—we heard later, had forgot our ticket stubs, couldn’t talk our way back in—Marcus just opened his eyes, looked around at everybody waiting for him to say how scary it had been.

He’d just shrugged, looked back up to the movie, and, like he’d timed it all out, that was when the monster lunged close to the camera, its tentacles whipping all around.

Everybody but Marcus flinched back into their seats.

City kids always think they know stuff we don’t, all the way out here. And maybe they do.

But we know some other things as well.

Two weeks later, we all figured he’d cheated somehow. That he’d peeked, or sneaked a breath using some swimmer trick. Or that he hadn’t believed right.

The Big Chief doesn’t care if you believe or not, though.

For Valentine’s Day four months later, Marcus threw blood up into his construction-papered shoe box, already floating with secret admirers.

None of us said anything.

He had a tumor inside him. Mr. Baker explained it in Life Science right before spring break. He hauled out the movie to show us, finally got the projector going, and when we saw it, that tumor, it was what we were already expecting: a tentacled monster, lashing out for whatever it could grab onto, pulling that bit of meat towards its center. But it could never get enough.

By Memorial Day, he was dead.

We sat in our back yards and ate the hamburgers and hot dogs our parents had grilled for us, and they didn’t ask us about Marcus.

His parents moved away for July fourth, their rearview sparking with the fireworks we felt compelled to light.

Their house is still empty. And now that movie’s over.

This is a double-feature, though.

Marcus was just the example, the test case. Grace, though.

 

Everybody loved Grace, me most of all. You know how when you know you’re going to grow up and marry somebody? That’s who she’d always been for me, all the way since fourth grade. I would have stepped in front of a truck for her. And I wouldn’t have closed my eyes, either.

We were supposed to have gone to homecoming together, but I got sick, then ended up locking the door to my room, my Exacto knife hovering over my stomach, because I’d been too close to the Big Chief that night Marcus held his breath, I knew. I had a tentacle monster inside me too.

I never cut deeper than a scratch, though.

My parents went on to homecoming without me—it had been their first date, fifty-thousand years ago—then knocked on my door when they got home, so I could knock back on my wall, and the next morning I was fine. Mom drove me over to Grace’s to give her the mum corsage I’d been saving for since summer.

“There’ll be bumps in

the road,” my mom said, pulling us away from Grace’s house. “You’ve just got to keep going, right?”

I nodded, hated myself.

To make up for it, two weekends later I saved up enough to take us both to the movies, and get a medium popcorn.

This was going to be our story, I told myself. Not my parents. That’s why I’d gotten myself sick. Fifty-thousand years from now, Grace and me were going to come to the Big Chief, to remember. It was going to be better than any stupid football game.

Her mom dropped us off, slipped Grace a five for concessions, then went home to sit at her kitchen table some more. According to Grace, since her dad left five months before, all his money mounded in front of the television like that was going to make up for him being gone, that’s mostly what her mom did: sit there and stare, like she was trying to backtrack to where this part of her life had started.

My parents felt sorry for her, they said, and then would hold each other’s hands, like to show they were different, they were better.

I held the door of the Big Chief open for Grace, already had our tickets.

It wasn’t a horror movie, either.

After Marcus, none of us went to the horror movies any more, even though it was almost Halloween and there was always one playing. We were still watching them after lights out at home, of course, but on videotapes we’d smuggle from our big brothers’ rooms, handle with extreme caution, like, if we dropped them, if that plastic cracked, the blood was going to come out.

We were still getting our scares, I’m saying.

But, with Grace, it was a love movie, where the girl looks and looks like she’s not going to get the guy, then, surprise again, she does.

I could sit through it. For her.

Maybe it would give her some ideas, even.

The theater was just usual-full for a Friday showing. Maybe six or eight seats between everybody, some movie with screaming playing next door.

I sat between Grace and that scary movie—her word—and held the popcorn on my knee for us, and, I admit, I kind of got into our movie. The girl’s dad in this one was trying to find her the perfect husband. He felt he owed her or something, because her mom wasn’t around to help her. But he was overdoing it, was pulling in everybody from his office, where he was boss, and then his friends’ sons, and on and on, when the guy the girl really loved was the guy who fixed the copy machine at her dad’s office.

 

I mean, I got into it, but I was also tracking the movie next door, of course. Trying to time to the screams. Trying to imagine if we were over there, how tight Grace would be clinging to me. How her knee would probably be up on my thigh and she wouldn’t even be aware it was happening.

But this wasn’t bad, either.

She kept having to bat the tears from her eyes, and had pretty much forgotten the popcorn altogether. Not me. I never forget the popcorn.

With the Big Chief, too, if Willard’s working the counter, he’ll even slip you a free refill if you promise not to make a mess he’ll have to clean up later.

Right when the movie was winding up for its final pitch, I whispered to Grace about our empty box, slithered out to the lobby for more. Willard fixed me up, and even let me

 peek into the other theater.

It was mayhem in there. Chainsaws and werewolves, it looked like—no, werewolves with chainsaws. The chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath until my eyes started burning.

It was all older kids in there, though. If I’d taken Grace in there, there would have been a timer over my head, just counting down to when the first senior leaned forward, whispered advice to me that Grace would have to pretend not to hear. And then things would just get worse and worse, and it’s not like I could fight any of them and win, so it would be a coke-throwing thing, and I’d probably get banned for the month again.

No, the love movie was the better choice for us. Definitely.

I got back just in time for the end.

Instead of a marriage, it was back to the office. The dad had hired the copy guy into the office, and now, with everybody watching, was promoting him up and up and up, to next in line to run the place, the girl just standing there beaming, crying, her whole world coming together just the way it should.

Grace was crying right along with her.

From where I was I could see her cheeks, shiny and wet, her eyes closed to try to hold the rest of the happiness in.

When I brushed her arm, climbing back into my seat, she jumped, and started coughing like she was going to throw up.

She ran out hiding her face and I followed, and Willard fixed her up with water and she hid in the Ladies until just before the horror movie let out.

And that was it.

My dad was waiting for us at the curb like every time, the car filled with his menthol smoke, and I held the door for Grace again and she just kept batting her eyes.

“Good movie?” my dad asked back, meaning completely different things, and I nodded just to shut him up.

Two weeks later it was Halloween.

Because we were in eighth grade, none of us dressed up, of course. And because the Big Chief was the Big Chief, none of us went there either. Not yet. Soon we’d be high schoolers, though, we knew, and none of the high schoolers ever died from holding their breath.

The kid who got castrated, he was supposed to have been thirteen or fourteen. Maybe that was why they were safe. Why we weren’t.

Anyway, because of what happened at the last Halloween party for our class (my dad’s menthols, Lucas’s dad’s beer, some lights bulbs in the basement somehow unscrewed), this year the guys were going one way, the girls another. Most of the girls had signed up to chaperone the first- and second-graders trick-or-treating.

Where the guys went was the old graveyard behind the convent. Of course.

 

I called Grace before, to just mention it casually, where we were headed, so she could get how brave that made us, how we might not be making it back, all that, but she was already gone with her second-grader.

“Look for Bo Peep,” her mom said, instead of goodbye. Because she wanted us to be happy, I knew. Because she remembered how your heart can swell when you’re in eighth

grade.

I met up with everybody in the alley ten minutes later and we were gone, my dad’s menthols safe in my chest pocket. I’d sneaked one at a time all week.

The graveyard, as it turned out, was still the graveyard. Crooked headstones, weeds as tall as us, and, when we first got there, a couple of sophomores making out on the concrete bench. We ignored them, or pretended to pretty well, but I guess they could tell. Then it was just us and the grossest cigarettes ever invented. And the town, spread out before us.

Marcus was buried back wherever he’d lived before. Not here. And it wouldn’t have been in this graveyard, anyway. This was just for people who died a hundred years ago, before the convent got condemned and haunted.

According to the seniors, there was a zombie nun who still carried a candle around in there.

We didn’t believe them even a little bit. But we didn’t get any closer than the graveyard, either. The reason we knew the nun wasn’t in there was that she’d been in our dreams already for years, her candle going out right when she got close to us.

So we sat on the headstones like they were nothing, and we blew smoke up into the inky-purple sky, and, squinting like outlaws at the full moon, we held our cigarettes up to Marcus, wherever he was. Like we’d even really known him.

We were pretending he’d been the best of us, that he was some tragedy.

 

We’d been the ones who paid for his ticket that night, though.

Soon enough, like always happened, I took a drag too deep, that green smoke filling my lungs, and I had to stagger off into the bushes, to throw up. Because it had to be some kind of bad luck to throw up on a hundred-years-dead person. It might be like giving them a little bit of life. Just enough.

I fell through the trees, finally got to the little cliff we’d used to drop our action figures from to test our bandanna parachutes, and I splashed my dinner all down that scar of white rock.

When my eyes could see again, what they saw was the east end of Saginaw Street, right before it hits St. Francis.

Five years ago, this was the best candy street of all. It was all old people, who only got to see kids on Halloween, pretty much. Better, they’d forget you almost as soon as you left, so you could go back to that same well again and again. Sometimes we’d trade masks, mix and match costumes, but I don’t think they’d have busted us anyway. Or cared.

Saginaw Street was still doing good business, too. Was still the place to be if you hated your teeth.

I stood up to go back to the graveyard, and, if I’d just done that half a second sooner, I’d have never seen the shepherd’s crook cresting over the Frankensteins and ghost heads. It was navigating through them, moving down the sidewalk.

Bo Peep.

Grace.

I smiled, nodded to myself, pinched the hateful menthol back up to my lips.

There she was, all right. Her second-grade robot holding her hand. Cars moving slow and heavy alongside her—all the parents who were driving their kids instead of walking

 them. That’s cheating, though. If you want the candy, you’ve got to earn it.

I waved my arms as big as I could then remembered one of them was glowing. I balanced my cigarette on a rock behind me then stood up again, waving bigger, and yelling.

By now Grace’s second-grader was moving up a sidewalk, his silver tubed arms and legs making him look like he was going to topple over with every step.

And she heard me, somehow.

Because of love, I think.

At first it was only her head angled over, like being sure, but then she turned around, her lungs filling with hope.

I jumped, jumped, but what she fixed on instead of me was one of the parents creeping past.

She leaned forward as if she hadn’t heard something all the way and the dad behind the wheel leaned out the open passenger window, holding out a white bow, the kind that goes on a good Bo Peep costume.

Grace looked back to her second-grade robot, still cued up for some grandparent candy, and the way she looked I could tell she was timing it. That she felt she had to, because what was this dad going to do with a Bo Peep bow, right?

Right.

She lifted the front of her big skirt, kind of ran out to the car, and, because I was a good almost-boyfriend, I kept my eye on her second-grade robot for her, watched him stiff-arm his plastic pumpkin up to Miss Massey, who used to teach English, and always tied verses of poetry to her candy.

Once upon a time the poem on my candy had told me the fields were white, the fields were long, the fields were waiting, and I’d always wanted to ask her for the rest of it, but never had the nerve.

 

By the time I looked back to Grace, she was in the passenger seat of the car, and it was pulling away slowly, no rush at all. Just melting back into the parade.

“No,” I said—what about the robot?—and started to step forward but my foot stabbed into open space and I had to balance back hard, my arms windmilling in space.

I fell back, ran along the cliff for the next break in the trees, the last piece of road before the highway opened up, and I got there just in time for the driver to look right through the bushes at me, and nod.

It was the dad from the movie, the one Grace had wished into our world.

He smiled his winning smile, his trustworthy smile, his smile with the sharp, sharp corners, and that was the last time anybody ever saw Grace Lynn Andrews, except as a photo on the news for two states in every direction, and it was the last cigarette I ever smoked, too, and it was the last year Halloween was the same for any of us.

It was also three months to the night before I crept out my window one Wednesday after lights out, and filled one of my mom’s good glasses with kerosene from the lamp her mom had given her, balanced it all the way downtown in the cold.

It wasn’t cold for long, though.

The Big Chief had just been waiting for somebody to burn it to the ground.

I stood there beside it and I held my breath as long as I could, the skin of my face drawing tight in the heat, my heart shaped exactly like two hands holding each other, and when I finally turned to go home, Lucas was there, and Thomas, and Trino, and they hid me, and they never told, and I’ll never leave this town, I know.

Not for the usual reasons, though.

 

In the flames that night before anybody got there, I saw a boy, the front of his pants wet with blood, and I saw Marcus, wearing his swim goggles, and I saw a pale white shepherd’s crook ahead of them, leading them through, leading them on.

Someday she’ll come for me too, I know.

I’ll be waiting. ...