Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Occult & Supernatural; Horror

Synopsis

"Brilliant." —The New York Times

Mapping the Interior is a horrifying, inward-looking novella from Stephen Graham Jones that Paul Tremblay calls "emotionally raw, disturbing, creepy, and brilliant."

Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones brings readers a spine-tingling Native American horror novella.

Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew.

The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you'd rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at terrible cost.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: June 20, 2017

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 112

Sample

I was twelve the first time I saw my dead father cross from the kitchen doorway to the hall that led back to the utility room.

It was 2:49 in the morning, as near as I could reconstruct.

I was standing alongside the dusty curtain pulled across the front window of the living room. I wasn’t standing there on purpose. I was in only my underwear. No lights were on.

My best guess is that, moments before, I’d been looking out the front window, into all the scrub and nothing spread out in front of our house. The reason for thinking that was I had the taste of dust in the back of my throat, and the window had a fine coat of that dust on it. Probably. I’d breathed it in through my nose, because sleepwalkers are goal oriented, not concerned with details or consequences.

If sleepwalkers cared about that kind of stuff, I’d have at least had my gym shorts on, and, if I was in fact trying to see something outside, then my glasses, too.

To sleepwalk is to be inhabited, yes, but not by something else, so much. What you’re inhabited by, what’s kicking one foot in front of the other, it’s yourself. It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think it’s under any real compulsion to, finally. If anything, being inhabited by yourself like that, what it tells you is that there’s a real you squirming down inside you, trying all through the day to pull up to the surface, look out. But it can only get that done when your defenses are down. When you’re sleeping.

The following morning—this was my usual procedure, after a night of shuffling around dead to the world—would find me out in the sun, poring over the stunted grass and packed dirt for eighty or a hundred feet past the front window. Mom would be at work, and my little brother, Dino, would be glued to one of his cartoons, so there would be nobody there to call out from the porch, ask me what was I doing.

If I’d had to answer, I’d have said I was looking for whatever it was I’d been looking for last night. My hope was that my waking self had cued on some regularity to the packed dirt’s contour, or registered a dull old pull tab that was actually the lifting ring for a dry old plywood door that opened onto . . . what? I didn’t care. Just something. Anything. An old stash of fireworks, a buried body, a capped-off well; it didn’t matter.

The day I found something, that would mean that my nighttime ramblings, they had purpose.

Otherwise, I was just broken, right? Otherwise, I was just a toy waking up in the night, bumping into walls.

That next morning, though, my probing fingers turned up nothing of any consequence. Just the usual trash—little glass bottles, a few bolts with nuts and washers rusted to the thread, part of a dog collar, either the half-buried wheel of a car long gone or the still-attached wheel of a car now buried upside down.

I wanted the latter, of course, but, to allow that possibility, I had to resist digging around the edges of that wheel.

When I looked back to the front window of our modular house, I half-expected to see the shape of my dead father again, standing in the window. Watching me.

The window was just the window, the curtain drawn like Mom said, to keep the heat out.

Still, I watched it.

How I’d know it was him from a house length out, it wasn’t that I would recognize his face or his build. He’d died when I was four and nearly dying from pneumonia myself, when Dino was one and staying with an aunt so he couldn’t catch pneumonia, when Mom was still working just one shift. All I had to go on as far as how he looked, it was pretty much just snapshots and a blurry memory or two.

No, the way I’d recognized him the night before, when he was walking from the kitchen doorway back to the utility room, it was his silhouette. There were spikes coming out from his lower back, and the tops of his calves bulged out in an unnatural way, and his head was top-heavy and kind of undulating, so he was going to have to duck to make it into the utility room.

But—for all he was wearing, he was absolutely silent. Zero rustling, like you can usually hear with a fancydancer, when they’re all set to go, or have just finished.

Thing was? My father never danced. He didn’t go to the pow-wows to compete for cash. One of the few things I remember about him, it’s that he didn’t call the traditionals down at the town pump or the IGA “throwbacks,” like I’d heard. His words always got scrambled in his mouth—Dino’s got that too—so that what he came out with, it was “fallback.”

My father was neither a throwback nor a fallback. He didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the stories, and didn’t care that he didn’t. Once or twice a year, he’d sign on to fight whatever fire was happening, but it wasn’t to protect any ancestral land. It was because when you signed on, they issued you these green wool pants. He’d sell those to the hunters, come fall. Once a year, Mom told me, he’d usually walk home in his boxers, with a twenty folded small in his hand so none of the reservation dogs would nose it away.

That’s my dad, as I know him.

But in the year or two after he either drowned or was drowned—there’s stories both ways, ...