After the People Lights Have Gone Off (33 page)

Uncle

Another story for Paula Guran, one I wouldn’t have written if she hadn’t asked me to. I always seem to get lucky when she asks, though. And that’s not always the case. Sometimes an editor hits me up for story X, and I have to write stories Y, Z, and another Z before I ever circle around to the X I need. But, for Paula, I always get lucky, it seems. Which is to say, this story, it creeps me right out. I got the idea for it walking around a house I was buying with an inspector. He had one of those pistol-grip thermometers. It was so cool. I knew immediately that I had to have one, but then I knew also that I would terrify myself to no end if I did, because each unexplainable variation in temperature, that would be proof I wasn’t alone. So I haven’t bought one yet. And I don’t plan to. Way too scared.

Solve for X

This story took a lot of drafts to get right. Initially, it had a spaceship taking off at the end. But that was a little bit stupid. The tape and the cutting and all that, though, it was in place from the get-go. And the math-questions; I think they’re indirectly from a
Discover
article about unsolvable problems. Or maybe it was
Wired
. Either way, I thought, man, that sucks, not being able to crack these problems. Why can’t we? What’s wrong with our loser selves? Then the obvious answer, it was that we were stuck using machines to do the calculating. And some things require a more direct approach, a more human touch. I figured, what if you just asked a
person
, but framed that question exactly right? So that’s all this story is: it’s trying to ask the question in a way that the person can answer without having to think about it. Which is to say, they can accidentally say the truth, which is always there, we just don’t know how to get at it. Which is both a rip of Douglas Adams and of Plato, I know. But I suppose there are worse people to steal from.

—Stephen Graham Jones

31 January 2014

Boulder, Colorado

All of the stories in this collection are reprinted with the permission of the author, except for “Second Chances” and “Spider Box,” which are original stories, and are appearing here for the first time. “Thirteen” originally appeared in
Halloween: Magic, Mystery and the Macabre
; “Brushdogs” originally appeared in
The Children of Old Leech
; “Welcome to the Reptile House” originally appeared in
Strange Aeons
(and was later reprinted in
Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2013
); “This is Love” originally appeared in
Icarus
(and was later reprinted in
Best Gay Stories of the Year
); “The Spindly Man” originally appeared in
Fearful Symmetries
; “The Black Sleeve of Destiny” originally appeared in
Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
; “Snow Monsters” originally appeared in
Juked
; “Doc’s Story” originally appeared in
Letters to H.P. Lovecraft
; “The Dead Are Not” originally appeared in
Bourbon Penn
; “Xebico” originally appeared in
Weird Fiction Review
; “After the People Lights Have Gone Off” originally appeared in
Phantasmagorium
; “Uncle” originally appeared in
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings
; and “Solve for X” originally appeared in
Mixer
.

Thanks to Richard Thomas, for asking if I had anything horror. Thanks to Nick Kimbro, for talking haunted houses with me enough that I finally wrote the title story. Thanks to Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer; peeling through this TOC, I see that I wrote a few of these stories kind of in response to their
The Weird
. Two others I owe to Paula Guran, who hit me up for a Halloween story, then a ghost story. Thanks to Ellen Datlow, for letting us include “The Spindly Man.” Thanks to Jesse Bullington, for inviting me to an anthology, for which I wrote the only werewolf story in this collection. Thanks to Steve Berman, for prompting me to write another of these. Thank to Zack Wentz, for making “Welcome to the Reptile House” better. Thanks to T.E. Grau and Cameron Pierce and Joe Pulver and Jack Wang and Erik Secker and Steven Owen for running some of these in their magazines and books and sites. I always write stuff, get to the end and come up wondering what just happened, and what am I supposed to do with this evidence now? Why would anybody even consider a story like this? So, editors, thanks for considering. Thanks to Paul Tremblay, who read one or two of these before they went out. Thanks to the fiction workshops I’m supposed to be teaching, for looking at some of the other stories, making them better. And thanks just to the horror crowd. You’re about the most real people I know. And thanks to my wife Nancy, for giving me the afternoons it took to get all these down on paper, sure, but for giving me all the mornings and evenings and nights and weekends and weeks and months and years—for this life I can’t get enough of, thank you, always. It’s been just shy of twenty years. Let’s triple that.

© GARY ISAACS

Stephen Graham Jones
 is the author of fifteen novels and five collections, and has some two hundred stories published. Stephen’s been an NEA Fellow and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural fiction. He’s forty-two, married with a couple of kids, and lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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30-SOMETHING EMILY COLLINS INHERITS HER RECENTLY MURDERED AUNT’S HOUSE, DECIDING TO MOVE TO HEARTSHORNE, OKLAHOMA, TO CLAIM IT AND CONFRONT HER FAMILY’S DARK PAST AFTER HER DEAD MOTHER BEGINS SPEAKING TO HER IN DREAMS, PROPELLING THIS GOTHIC, NEO-NOIR THRILLER TOWARD TERRIFYING REVELATIONS OF MURDEROUS SMALL-TOWN JUSTICE WHEN A HORRIBLE COMMUNITY SECRET IS REVEALED THROUGH THE SUPERNATURAL PULL OF ECHO LAK
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