Never Whistle at Night by Shane Hawk EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Shane Hawk
- Language: English
- Genre: Horror Short Stories
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 5.6 MB
- Price: Free
FOREWORD
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
I can’t deliver this as well as Joseph M. Marshall III did once upon a talk I
went to—he’s got that delivery that makes you listen—but I can rough it out,
anyway: someone’s driving an empty road…let’s say this is the Dakotas. The
Great Plains. All that grass, the land rolling up and down real slow. It’s night,
too—it’s always night in these kinds of stories.
I forget the setup, but not the final image: These four dudes on horses,
booking it from here to there. Say, blasting out of this copse of trees, diving
for a coulee or something a couple hundred yards across the way, their chests
to their horses’ backs because you’re less of a target that way. And this line
between here and there, it takes them right through the edge of this driver’s
headlights.
“What?” I imagine this driver saying—I think Marshall was relaying a
story he’d heard, not one he was in—and kind of letting their foot off the gas,
so they can coast a bit, maybe convince themselves they’re not seeing what
they’re pretty certainly seeing: four riders in traditional getup, on painted
horses, going somewhere urgent at late thirty at night.
I’d probably take my foot off the accelerator as well, and lean forward
shaking my head no, that this isn’t really happening, that this can’t be
happening, or if it is, this has to be a joke, or some Scooby-Doo situation, or
some kind of night shoot for a film.
The way Marshall told it, though, which I’m guessing is the way it was told
to him, was that it most definitely was happening.
These riders were booking through that darkness, looking to duck into
another.
Then, when it got to be time for them to cross the road this car was
making its way down—and this was the part I, leaned forward in my
auditorium seat to soak every bit of this in, was worried about, since
horseshoes on blacktop can be ice skates, especially at speed—instead of
thundering up and over, these horses, and their riders, they slipped through
the road, and then…
Okay, I don’t remember the rest.
My guess is that those riders got where they were going, blipped away,
and maybe the driver, or Marshall, for us, was able to cast them as players in
this or that thing that happened a century and more ago, and knit it back to
now.
Cool, great, wonderful.
What stories like this do for us is make the world just a smidge bigger,
yes? We now have to expand the borders of the real, to allow for, say, two
timelines to simultaneously exist. No, not just exist, but intersect.
To make that a horror story, though? To make it horror, then I think one
of those riders needs to look back at the driver in that car, which would mean
this is going a touch further than just “intersection.” There’s recognition, now.
You, the driver, have been seen, and, who knows, maybe that means you’re
officially an interloper now, and that’s when stories start to get complicated,
and good.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB