Just After Sunset (52 page)

Mrs. Wilson was looking at him doubtfully. “Well…I guess.” She turned to go.

“Mrs. Wilson?”

She turned back.

“Would you quit me if I got another dog? A puppy?”

“Me, quit over a puppy? It’d take more than a pup to drive
me
out.”

“They tend to chew, you know. And they don’t always—” He broke off for a moment, seeing the dark and nasty landscape of the holding tank. The underworld.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Wilson was looking at him curiously.

“They don’t always use the bathroom,” he finished.

“Once you teach them, they usually go where they’re supposed to,” she said. “Especially in a warm climate like this one. And you need some companionship, Mr. Johnson. I’ve been…to tell the truth, I’ve been a little worried about you.”

He nodded. “Yes, I’ve kind of been in the shit.” He laughed, saw her looking at him strangely, and made himself stop. “Excuse me.”

She flapped her dishtowel at him to show he was excused.

“Not a purebred, this time. I was thinking maybe the Venice Animal Shelter. Someone’s little castoff. What they call a rescue dog.”

“That would be very nice,” she said. “I look forward to the patter of little feet.”

“Good.”

“Do you really think that was a backfire?”

Curtis sat back in his chair and pretended to consider. “Probably…but you know, Mr. Grunwald next door has been pretty sick.” He lowered his voice to a sympathetic whisper. “Cancer.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Wilson said.

Curtis nodded.

“You don’t think he’d…?”

The marching numbers on his computer screen melted into the screen saver: aerial photos and beach scenes, all featuring Turtle Island. Curtis stood up, walked to Mrs. Wilson, and took the dishtowel from her hand. “No, not really, but we could go next door and check. After all, what are neighbors for?”

Sunset Notes

According to one school of thought, notes such as these are unnecessary at best, and suspect at worst. The argument against is that stories which need explanation are probably not very good stories. I have some sympathy with the idea, which is one reason to put this little addendum at the back of the book (putting it here also avoids those tiresome cries of “spoiler,” which are most commonly uttered by spoiled people). The reason to include them is simply that many readers like them. They want to know what caused a story to be written, or what the author was thinking when he wrote it. This author doesn’t necessarily know either of those things, but he can offer some random thoughts that may or may not be of interest.

“
Willa
” This probably isn’t the best story in the book, but I love it very much, because it ushered in a new period of creativity for me—as regards the short story, at least. Most of the stories in
Just After Sunset
were written subsequent to “Willa,” and in fairly quick succession (over a period of not quite two years). As to the story itself…one of the great things about fantasy is that it gives writers a chance to explore what might (or might not) happen after we shuffle off this mortal coil. There are two tales of that sort in
Just After Sunset
(the other is “
The New York Times
at Special Bargain Rates”). I was raised as a perfectly conventional Methodist, and although I rejected organized religion and most of its hard and fast assertions long ago, I hold to the main idea, which is that we survive death in some fashion or other. It’s hard for me to believe that such complicated and occasionally wonderful beings are in the end simply wasted, tossed away like litter on the roadside. (Probably I just don’t want to believe it.) What that survival might be like, though…I’ll just have to wait and find out. My best guess is that we might be confused, and not very willing to accept our new state. My best hope is that love survives even death (I’m a romantic, so fucking sue me). If so, it might be a bewildered love…and a little bit sad. When love and sadness occur to my mind at the same time, I put on the country music: people like George Strait, BR549, Marty Stuart…and the Derailers. It’s the latter who are playing in this story, of course, and I think they’re going to have a
very
long engagement.

“
The Gingerbread Girl
” My wife and I live in Florida for part of the year now, near the barrier islands just off the Gulf of Mexico. There are a lot of very large estates there—some old and gracious, some of the bloated
nouveau
sort. I was walking with a friend on one of these islands a couple of years ago. He gestured at a line of these McMansions as we walked and said, “Most of these places stand empty six or even eight months of the year, can you imagine that?” I could…and I thought it would make a wonderful story. It grew out of a very simple premise: a bad guy chasing a girl along an empty beach. But, I thought, she’d have to be running away from something else to start with. A gingerbread girl, in other words. Only sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight. Also, I like suspense stories that turn on crucial little details. This one had a lot of them.

“
Harvey’s Dream
” I can only tell you one thing about this story, because it’s the only thing I know (and probably the only thing that matters): it came to me in a dream. I wrote it in a single sitting, doing little more than transcribing the tale my subconscious had already told. There’s another dream-story in this book, but I know a little more about that one.

“
Rest Stop
” One night about six years ago, I did a reading at a college in St. Petersburg. I stayed late, and ended up driving home on the Florida Turnpike, after midnight. I stopped at a rest area to tap a kidney on the way back. You’ll know what it looked like if you’ve read this story: a cellblock in a medium-security prison. Anyway, I paused outside the men’s room, because a man and a woman were in the ladies’, having a bitter argument. They both sounded tight and on the verge of getting physical. I wondered what in the world I’d do if that happened, and thought:
I’ll have to summon my inner Richard Bachman, because he’s tougher than me
. They emerged without coming to blows—although the lady in the case was crying—and I drove home without further incident. Later that week I wrote this story.

“
Stationary Bike
” If you’ve ever ridden on one of those things, you know how bitterly boring they can be. And if you’ve ever tried to get yourself back into a daily exercise regimen, you know how difficult
that
can be (my motto: “Eating Is Easier”—but yes, I do work out). This story came out of my hate/hate relationship not just with stationary bikes but with every treadmill I ever trudged and every Stairmaster I ever climbed.

“
The Things They Left Behind
” Like almost everyone else in America, I was deeply and fundamentally affected by 9/11. Like a great many writers of fiction both literary and popular, I felt a reluctance to say
anything
about an event that has become as much an American touchstone as Pearl Harbor or the assassination of John Kennedy. But writing stories is what I
do,
and this story came to me about a month after the fall of the Twin Towers. I might still not have written it if I had not recalled a conversation I had with a Jewish editor over twenty-five years before. He was unhappy with me about a story called “Apt Pupil.” It was wrong for me to write about the concentration camps, he said, because I was not a Jew. I replied that made writing the story all the more important—because writing is an act of willed understanding. Like every other American who watched the New York skyline burning that morning, I wanted to understand both the event and the scars such an event must inevitably leave behind. This story was my effort to do so.

“
Graduation Afternoon
” For years following an accident in 1999, I took an anti-depressant drug called Doxepin—not because I was depressed (he said glumly) but because Doxepin was supposed to have a beneficial effect on chronic pain. It worked, but by November of 2006, when I went to London to promote my novel
Lisey’s Story,
I felt the time had come to give the stuff up. I didn’t consult the doctor who prescribed it; I just went cold turkey. The side-effects of this sudden stoppage were…interesting.
*
For about a week, when I closed my eyes at night, I saw vivid panning shots, as in a movie—woods, fields, ridges, rivers, fences, railroad tracks, men swinging picks and shovels on a stretch of road construction…and then the whole thing would start over again until I fell asleep. There was never any story attached; they were simply these brilliantly detailed panning shots. I was sort of sorry when they went away. I also experienced a series of vivid post-Doxepin dreams. One of them—a vast mushroom cloud blossoming over New York—became the subject of this story. I wrote it even knowing that the image has been used in countless movies (not to mention the TV series
Jericho
), because the dream had a documentary matter-of-factness to it; I woke with my heart pounding, thinking
This could happen. And sooner or later, it almost certainly
will
happen.
Like “Harvey’s Dream,” this story is more dictation than fiction.

“
N.
” This is the newest story in the book, and published for the first time here. It was strongly influenced by Arthur Machen’s
The Great God Pan,
a story that (like Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
) surmounts its rather clumsy prose and works its way relentlessly into the reader’s terror-zone. How many sleepless nights has it caused? God knows, but a few of them were mine. I think “Pan” is as close as the horror genre comes to a great white whale, and that sooner or later every writer who takes the form seriously must try to tackle its theme: that reality is thin, and the
true
reality beyond is a limitless abyss filled with monsters. My idea was to try and wed Machen’s theme to the idea of obsessive-compulsive disorder…partly because I think everyone suffers OCD to one degree or another (haven’t we all turned around from at least one trip to make sure we turned off the oven or the stove burners?) and partly because obsession and compulsion are almost always unindicted coconspirators in the tale of horror. Can you think of a single successful scary tale that doesn’t contain the idea of going back to what we hate and loathe? The best overt example of that might be “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. If you ever read it in college, you were probably taught that it’s a feminist story. That is true, but it’s also a story of a mind crumbling under the weight of its own obsessive thought. That element is also present in “N.”

“
The Cat from Hell
” If
Just After Sunset
has the equivalent of a hidden track on a CD, I guess this would be it. And I have my long-time assistant, Marsha DeFilippo, to thank. When I told her I was going to do another collection, she asked me if I was finally going to include “The Cat from Hell,” a story from my men’s magazine days. I responded that I surely must have tucked that story—which was actually filmed as part of
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
in 1990—into one of the previous four collections. Marsha provided tables of contents to show that I had not. So here it is, finally between hardcovers, over thirty years after it was originally published in
Cavalier
. It came about in an amusing way. The fiction editor of
Cavalier
back then, a nice guy named Nye Willden, sent me a close-up photograph of a hissing cat. What made it unusual—other than the cat’s rage—was the way its face was split down the middle, the fur on one side white and glossy black on the other. Nye wanted to run a short story contest. He proposed that I write the first five hundred words of a story about the cat; they would then ask readers to finish it, and the best completion would be published. I agreed, but got interested enough in the story to write the entire thing. I can’t remember if my version was published in the same issue as the contest winner or later on, but it has since been anthologized a number of times.

“
The New York Times
at Special Bargain Rates
” In the summer of 2007, I went to Australia, leased a Harley-Davidson, and drove it from Brisbane to Perth (well…I stuck the bike in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser for part of the Great Australian Desert, where roads like The Gunbarrel Highway are what I imagine the highways look like in hell). It was a good trip; I had lots of adventures and ate a lot of dust. But getting over the jet-lag after twenty-one hours in the air is a bitch. And I don’t sleep on planes. Just can’t do it. If the stewardess shows up at my seat with those funky pajamas, I make the sign of the cross and tell her to go away. When I arrived in Oz after the San Francisco to Brisbane leg, I pulled the blinds, crashed out, slept for ten hours, and woke up bright-eyed and ready to go. The only problem was that it was two A.M. local time, nothing on TV, and I’d finished all my reading matter on the plane. Luckily, I had a notebook, and I wrote this story at my little hotel desk. By the time the sun came up, it was done and I was able to sleep for another couple of hours. A story should entertain the writer, too—that’s my opinion, we welcome yours.

“
Mute
” I read a story in my local newspaper about a high school secretary who embezzled over sixty-five thousand dollars in order to play the lottery. My first question was how her husband felt about that, and I wrote this story to find out. It reminds me of the poison bon-bons I used to sample weekly on
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

“
Ayana
” The subject of the afterlife, as I have said earlier in these notes, has always been fertile soil for writers who are comfortable with the fantastic. God—in any of His supposed forms—is another subject for which tales of the fantastic were made. And when we ask questions about God, one near the top of every list is why some people live and some die; why some get well and some do not. I asked it myself in the wake of the injuries I suffered in 1999, as the result of an accident that could have easily killed me if my position had been different by only inches (on the other hand, if my position had been different by other inches, I might have escaped completely). If a person lives, we say “It’s a miracle.” If he or she dies, we say “It was God’s will.” There is no rational response to miracles, and no way to understand the will of God—who, if He is there at all, may have no more interest in us than I do in the microbes now living on my skin. But miracles do happen, it seems to me; each breath is another one. Reality is thin but not always dark. I didn’t want to write about answers, I wanted to write about questions. And suggest that miracles may be a burden as well as a blessing. And maybe it’s all bullshit. I like the story, though.