The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale

Praise for The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale

Prepare to be disturbed, grossed out, and laugh all at the same time. Joe R. Lansdale pulls you through the meat-grinder time after time with these stories, and his hand is always steady on that crank. I’m pretty sure he’s smiling with each turn, too.

—Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

Lansdale is a genre unto himself and has left an indelible mark on American literature. He has deservedly earned a place in the halls alongside Twain, Poe, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, King, and the other greats.

—Brian Keene, bestselling author and World Horror Society’s Grand Master Award winner

Lansdale is a legend, and this collection is proof positive of that.

—Chuck Wendig, bestselling author of The Staircase in the Woods

Joe R. Lansdale’s storytelling combines unflinching brutality, two-fisted weirdness, and sarcastic humor, while delivering it to the reader with a distinctly Texas twang.

—Nancy A. Collins, author of Sunglasses After Dark

If he’d only written a single horror story, Joe Lansdale would be remembered for it. Instead, he created a body of work almost unmatched in horror fiction, all in a voice so distinctive, you recognize it immediately.

—Derek Austin Johnson, author of The Faith

This collection of [Lansdale’s] most terrifying stories is a must-have for anyone who loves well-wrought nightmares. The tales range from the brutal to the surreal to the tragic. . . . Grab a copy, but leave the lights on when you’re finished.

—Richard Kadrey, author of the Sandman Slim series

Legendary storyteller Joe R. Lansdale showcases his relentless versatility, raw and fearless imagination, and signature craftsmanship in this quintessential gateway into the dark heart of Lansdale’s horror.

—Sadie Hartmann, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered

If you call yourself a horror fan but haven’t read Joe Lansdale’s short fiction, shame on you. But . . . fear not, you can now pick up this generous retrospective with sixteen of his greatest hits.

—Ellen Datlow, editor of The Best Horror of the Year series

When it comes to horror, nobody throws down harder, gets the joke more ferociously, or cares more deeply about the casualties of this long-suffering earth.

—John Skipp, author of This Is Splatterpunk

Joe Lansdale is a wholly unique and quintessential American author. No one better understands and communicates the horrors, the absurdities, and the tattered hopes of our everyday lives.

—Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World

Joe R. Lansdale is an American writer of the highest order, a Texas literary legend, and one of the best short story writers alive. And the horror tales contained in these pages are indeed essential. Every one of these stories is a stone-cold killer.

—Josh Rountree, author of The Unkillable Frank Lightning

Lansdale’s horror comes at you like a midnight train that shouldn’t be there but is. An effective blend of grounded and horrific, each story takes the reader into a nightmare reality close enough to our own to feel the chill of its breath down your neck.

—Laurel Hightower, author of The Day of the Door

Joe Lansdale is an indispensable—and, thank goodness, apparently inexhaustible—resource of thrilling fiction. The collection you hold in your hands is a brilliant assortment of terrors and entertainments.

—Owen King, author of The Curator

Selected works by Joe R. Lansdale

Hap and Leonard

Savage Season (1990)

Mucho Mojo (1994)

The Two-Bear Mambo (1995)

Bad Chili (1997)

Rumble Tumble (1998)

Veil’s Visit: A Taste of Hap and Leonard (with Andrew Vachss, 1999)

Captains Outrageous (2001)

Vanilla Ride (2009)

Hyenas (2011)

Devil Red (2011)

Dead Aim (2013)

Honky Tonk Samurai (2016)

Hap and Leonard (2016)

Rusty Puppy (2017)

Blood and Lemonade (2017)

The Big Book of Hap and Leonard (2018)

Jack Rabbit Smile (2018)

The Elephant of Surprise (2019)

Of Mice and Minestrone (2020)

Born for Trouble (2021)

Sugar in the Bones (2024)

Other novels

Act of Love (1981)

Dead in the West (1986)

The Magic Wagon (1986)

The Nightrunners (1987)

The Drive-In (1988)

Cold in July (1989)

Batman: Captured by the Engines (1991)

Tarzan: The Lost Adventure (with Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1995)

The Boar (1998)

Freezer Burn (1999)

Waltz of Shadows (1999)

The Big Blow (2000)

The Bottoms (2000)

A Fine Dark Line (2002)

Sunset and Sawdust (2004)

Lost Echoes (2007)

Leather Maiden (2008)

Flaming Zeppelins (2010)

All the Earth, Thrown to Sky (2011)

Edge of Dark Water (2012)

The Thicket (2013)

Paradise Sky (2015)

Fender Lizards (2015)

Bubba and the Cosmic Bloodsuckers (2017)

Jane Goes North (2020)

More Better Deals (2020)

Moon Lake (2021)

Donut Legion (2022)

Collections

By Bizarre Hands (1989)

Electric Gumbo (1994)

Writer of the Purple Rage (1994)

High Cotton (2000)

Bumper Crop (2004)

Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories (2004)

The Shadows, Kith and Kin (2007)

Sanctified and Chicken Fried (2009)

The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (2010)

Bleeding Shadows (2013)

Miracles Ain’t What They Used to Be (2016)

Terror Is Our Business (with Kasey Lansdale, 2018)

Driving to Geromino’s Grave and Other Stories (2018)

Things Get Ugly (2023)

The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team and Other Stories (2024)

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The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale

Copyright © 2025 by Bizarre Hands LLC

This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

Cover art by Dave McKean

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

Interior layout design by John Coulthart

Tachyon Publications

1459 18th Street #139

San Francisco, CA 94107

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Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

Editor: Richard Klaw

Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-446-7

Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-447-4

Printed in the United States by Versa Press, Inc.

First Edition: 2025

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Ice Water in Hell: An Introduction to the Best Horror Stories of Joe Lansdale copyright © 2025 by Joe Hill

Introduction copyright © 2025 by Bizarre Hands LLC

The Folding Man copyright © 2010 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas (New York: TOR Books).

The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train copyright © 2020 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Straight Outta Dodge City, edited by David Boop (Wake Forest, NC: Baen Books).

God of the Razor copyright © 1987 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Grue #5, edited by Peggy Nadramia, February 1987.

My Dead Dog Bobby copyright © 1987 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in The Horror Show Vol. 5 No. 3, edited by David B. Silva, Summer 1987.

Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back copyright © 1986 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Nukes, edited by John Maclay (Maclay & Assoc.).

By Bizarre Hands copyright © 1988 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Hardboiled #9, edited by Wayne D. Dundee, 1988.

On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks copyright © 1989 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Book of the Dead, edited by John M. Skipp and Craig Spector (Shingletown, CA: Ziesing).

Love Doll: A Fable copyright © 1991 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Borderlands 2, edited by Thomas F. Monteleone (Borderlands Press).

Mister Weed-Eater copyright © 1993 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Mister Weed-Eater (James Cahill Publishing).

The Bleeding Shadows copyright © 2011 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Down These Strange Streets, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (New York: Ace Books).

Not from Detroit copyright © 1988 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Midnight Graffiti #2, edited by Jessica Horsting and James Van Hise (New York: Grand Central Publishing).

The Hungry Snow copyright © 1991 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in The Hungry Snow (Death’s Head Press).

Dog, Cat, and Baby copyright © 1987 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Masques #2, edited by J. N. Williamson (Malay & Assoc.).

Bubba Ho-tep copyright © 1994 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in The King Is Dead: Tales of Elvis Post-Mortem, edited by Paul M. Sammon (New York: Delta).

Fish Night © 1982 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Specter!, edited by Bill Pronzini (Westminster, MD: Arbor House).

Night They Missed the Horror Show © 1988 by Bizarre Hands LLC. First appeared in Silver Scream, edited by David J. Schow (Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest).

Table of Contents

"Ice Water in Hell: An Introduction to the Best Horror Stories of Joe R. Lansdale" by Joe Hill

Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale

"The Folding Man"

"The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train"

"God of the Razor"

"My Dead Dog Bobby"

"Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back"

"By Bizarre Hands"

"On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks"

"Love Doll: A Fable"

"Mister Weed-Eater"

"The Bleeding Shadow"

"Not from Detroit"

"The Hungry Snow"

"Dog, Cat, and Baby"

"Bubba Ho-tep"

"Fish Night"

"Night They Missed the Horror Show"

Ice Water in Hell: An Introduction to the Best Horror Stories of Joe Lansdale

by Joe Hill

It is common enough, in these sorts of introductions, to begin with the comparisons, placing the subject among the ranks of other literary stars. Franklin F. Fring works in the bare-knuckled, sweaty-balled tradition of Mickey Spillane and Richard Prather. "With his latest goblin-packed epic, Sven R. R. Hørstbörg joins such legends of fantasy as George R. R. Martin and J. R. R. Tolkien in having far too many Rs in the middle of his name."

We’ll have to bypass that kind of thing here. It ain’t gonna work.

I was only thirteen when I read my first Lansdale. Was that too young? Maybe for some kids, but not for this kid. Nightmare on Elm Street was my idea of comfort viewing, and I had a vampire bat in a Lucite block on my desk (no one would sell a thing like that now, and no one would buy it either). I had already worked my way through all of Lovecraft and everything Clive Barker had published. One afternoon, my dad said, Check this one out, and tossed me a slim paperback copy of The Drive-In. I pounded it down in a single day, one sitting, something I have only done with three other books: Peter Benchley’s Jaws, John D. MacDonald’s A Nightmare in Pink, and Rex Miller’s Slob. When I was done, I couldn’t have told you what the fuck just hit me. The Drive-In was both shocking and ridiculous, like being run down by the clowns in their tiny neon-bright clown car: You’re laughing right up until the tires go over you. Then, when you’re screaming in the road, all the clowns pile out to finish the job by kicking you to death with their big silly clown shoes.

I had to read another one right away, and I did: The Nightrunners. That one got me even harder. No clowns here, but it still felt like a hit-and-run. The Nightrunners appalled and gripped in equal measure. It was as fascinating as watching a drop of blood slide down the edge of a mirror-bright straight razor.

What struck me then—and what is even clearer to me now—is that Lansdale’s stories were so radically unlike anything else anyone was doing in the genre, it was like he was a painter deploying an entirely new palette. Other painters were working with blues, with yellows, with reds. Joe was painting with leaded gasoline, shitty beer, ruptured organs, mothers’ tears. He was painting in shades of fury and scorn. The stories in this book here ring with laughter, but it’s a sickened, angry laughter, the disgusted laughter of the man who has watched someone from the Ku Klux Klan light his spotless white robes on fire with his own tiki torch.

In so many stories of terror, a Joe Normal of some sort—a bland everyman with a bland blond wife and bland blond children who say blandly adorable things—encounters a life-threatening species of derangement. His car breaks down, he walks to a nearby house to ask for help, and the man who answers the door is wearing a mask of human skin. The unnatural pierces the flesh of the everyday world like a needle full of rabies.

But in Joe Lansdale’s work, where the hero is just as likely to be a geriatric Elvis with a pus-filled lesion on his dick, derangement is the world’s natural state. The patient already has rabies and hardly cares if you inject him with more. A bland everyman isn’t driving the car—the man behind the wheel is a bounty hunter off to collect a bad man from a strip club where the naked ladies are moldering reanimated corpses. The bland blond wife is a horny evangelical about to leave her husband for a manipulative sociopath. The bland blond little kids are taking a dead dog for a walk (or is that a drag?). Joe Lansdale don’t do Joe Normal. Maybe he can’t. Maybe he’s never met Joe Normal and so lacks the capacity to write about him. I think probably Lansdale is on to something there—come to think of it, I’ve never met Joe Normal either. I’m not sure he exists. Which raises the question of why so many authors keep writing about him. Well, put it aside.

I am trying and failing to express something about the thrilling freshness of Joe Lansdale’s voice and the bracing, sometimes punishing intensity of feeling in these stories. And I have not even mentioned the way they seem to leap from zero to a hundred-and-twenty mph in just a couple of paragraphs, often right on the first page. Refreshments from Hell opens with a road race in The Folding Man, and the narrative is pedal-to-the-floor from the first line to the final sentence. When was the last time a short story moved so fast it made you feel short of breath?

On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folk is a mini-novel that plays like an insane mash-up of Escape from New York and 28 Days Later, and its gonzo reimagining of a certain theme park very much anticipates the work of George Saunders. The sprawling cast of characters includes an army of zombies dressed in black caps with big round mouse ears on them. It’s impossible not to see in that image a commentary about the American impulse to gorge ourselves on the canned, overpriced entertainments offered by our various destination adventure parks. (It makes me think of the bit in Dawn of the Dead when the two SWAT agents are looking down at the zombies roaming the shopping mall. Why do they come here? asks one. This place was important to them, the other tells him, ruefully.)

The best work here, by my lights, is Mister Weed-Eater, a story that should’ve won an O. Henry prize, and maybe would’ve, if it had been published in the right market—Harper’s or The New Yorker. A blind man has been hired to mow the lawn behind a church, and the guy living across the street is badgered into helping him, and it turns out that no good deed goes unpunished. The abuse heaped upon our narrator—one shovelful of shit after another—is a masterclass in piling comic incident atop comic incident.

Mister Weed-Eater is comedy so acidic, you could use it like lye to disintegrate a corpse. That sort of humor is a Lansdale specialty, which makes his occasional turn toward tenderness all the more unexpected and jolting. Not from Detroit would’ve made one hell of an Amazing Stories episode (and almost was one) and has a sorrow about it, and a sweetness, that brings to mind the melancholy of Depression-era big-band blues. And then there’s Fish Night, which is like nothing else Lansdale has ever written and feels so luminous, so lovely and surreal, it almost had to be animated—and was, for a memorable episode of Love, Death & Robots.

But don’t go expecting to find much gentleness here. The language is raw and rawer (the old diddlebopper was no longer a flesh cannon loaded for bare ass, Elvis reflects mournfully, looking under his hospital johnny at his ancient prick). Writers are often admonished to write what they know. What Joe Lansdale knew when he wrote these stories was a violent, clueless, reckless, racist Southwest. It was shocking to read about the people in these stories then and has become even more shocking to read about them now. (But people in East Texas and the Southern Bottoms really did talk this way. And, yes, here I am referring to the N-word. These stories are full of wild leaps into fantasy, but when Joe depicts the casual, nasty, commonplace bigotry of the West, I know that he is simply telling us the truth about what he saw and heard and grew up with. Is it better to know or not to know? It was so much worse than you might imagine, and that past was not very long ago at all. It was the violent racism, and it was the violent sexism too. I went to Fenway Park in the early 1980s, and in the late innings, they’d blow up a nudie doll out in the bleachers and bat it around. Sometimes, a man would snatch the doll out of the air and punch her in the face a bunch of times, and people would ROAR with approval. Because it was funny, see? Pretending to beat up a naked woman in front of a crowd of thirty thousand people? Hilarious, right? This is the country that was and maybe not-so-secretly still is, and Joe Lansdale has always depicted its spirit unflinchingly.)

The most unsparing of these stories have in them a darkness as deep as anything one will find in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but with none of McCarthy’s high-flying Faulknerian language to pretty it up for readers. I found myself actively distressed while reading the last tale, a story that offers no kindness or relief at all (it won the Bram Stoker Award for short fiction in 1988 and is the only story here that I almost can’t quite manage—and that’s not criticism or praise, just an acknowledgment that it goes as dark as a story can go). I will only circle back to where I began: Joe Lansdale wrote a lot of these stories in anger. He was angry that the country boys he knew didn’t want to see a movie where a Black man was a tragic hero. Lansdale seems to be saying that if they can’t find it in themselves to appreciate a Black man risking his skin for theirs, then they can hurry up and die right next him. It’s still a hard one for me.

Some writers of horror fiction will take you to the edge, but Joe Lansdale usually leaves the edge behind by page 2. He runs right over it, like the Roadrunner leaving Wile E. Coyote behind, and somehow sprints across thin air to the far side of the chasm. Here are his darkest, funniest, and most savage stories: his refreshments from hell. (When I hear that phrase, I think of that old aphorism, People in hell want ice water. Joe Lansdale opens the door on a variety of hells in this book, but he’s much better company than Old Scratch. There’s definitely beer where we’re going: Texas longnecks.)

I’ve given you sixteen hundred words, doing my damnedest to describe Joe Lansdale’s work to you—trying to capture the fierceness, the originality, and the blunt emotional force of these tales. But I didn’t really need sixteen hundred words to tell you about his work. One will do:

Incomparable.

Joe Hill

Exeter, New Hampshire

January 2025

Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale

This book, Refreshments in Hell, is focused on horror. And even then, certain stories might fit into a crime collection or a Southern Gothic collection, fantasy, science fiction, you name it. Fact is, a few have the furniture of horror, but not necessarily the same intent. Some have the furniture from many forms of storytelling, but in the end, I think of them as Lansdale stories. I really prefer that to pure genre labels. I work in all forms, but at the same time, they are all my stories and have my imprint on them.

But to simplify this, these are stories I’m proud of and eager to put in front of you. They vary, a lot. And that’s why I’m proud of them. One story is not necessarily supposed to remind you of another, though my tone of voice is present in all of them.

All I can really say is, come on in. The table is set. We have a chair with your name on it, and the table is all set with refreshments from hell.

Enjoy.

The Folding Man

(Based on the black car legend)

There was an old folk tale about the Dark Man who came around on certain nights of the year, Halloween being a prime one, and stole away children or teenagers. Sometimes, the Dark Man didn’t kidnap them, he killed them.

Considering where the Dark Man might be taking them, some lost place grim and beyond our understanding, maybe that was best.

I was asked by Ellen Datlow, an active anthologist and old friend, to contribute a story for her anthology Haunted Legends. The idea was to find some sort of legend, a piece of folklore, and turn it into a modern story.

This appealed to me in a big way. I grew up with storytellers, many of them like my grandmother, who had tales from way back. She was born in the late 1800s and was nearly a hundred years old when she died.

Unlike a lot of her grandchildren, I wanted to hear those stories. I was a kind of magpie when it came to collecting stories. She had actually seen Buffalo Bill in some form of his Wild West Show when she was a child, and had come to Texas in a covered wagon, and told of seeing Indians camped along creeks and rivers while traveling.

She also told me stories about mysterious miniature creatures that lived in the dark. Pesky little leprechauns, perhaps, or sprites. They stole things, and like the Dark Man, sometimes they stole children.

She told me a tale about a water witch that I barely remember, and she also told me a story that fit in with the Dark Man who came around on those certain spooky nights.

In her story, he rode in a black buggy, or sometimes he rode a black horse. Perhaps his buggy was in the shop.

As time went on, I heard this story from other sources, or read about it, and in some he was a walker, in others a horse rider, and in some he drove a black car. The thing was not to engage with him if he should drive up beside you and call your name.

I wanted to use that basic idea, but I wanted to take it in a new direction. I wanted a dark car full of nuns, although their religion was of a different nature than the nuns we are familiar with.

They ride the roads and backways on Halloween night, and it is certainly best to avoid them. They have a strange assistant that helps them do their evil deeds; its existence was inspired by my time working at a folding lawn chair company in my youth, as you will see.

This is in many ways a campfire story. It has the same feel as those kinds of stories about the Dark Man—though this time it isn’t a man, and it’s more than one, and they are Dark Side Nuns with a unique approach to terminal mischief.

A tip: Do not, I repeat, do not moon nuns on a dark Halloween Night. The humor you seek may turn sour on you.

They had come from a Halloween party, having long shed the masks they’d worn. No one but Harold had been drinking, and he wasn’t driving, and he wasn’t so drunk he was blind. Just drunk enough he couldn’t sit up straight and was lying on the backseat, trying, for some unknown reason, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which he didn’t accurately recall. He was mixing in verses from The Star-Spangled Banner and the Boy Scout oath, which he vaguely remembered from his time in the organization before they drove him out for setting fires.

Even though William, who was driving, and Jim, who was riding shotgun, were sober as Baptists claimed to be, they were fired up and happy and yelling and hooting, and Jim pulled down his pants and literally mooned a black bug of a car carrying a load of nuns.

The car wasn’t something that looked as if it had come off the lot. Didn’t have the look of any carmaker Jim could identify. It had a cobbled look. It reminded him of something in old movies, the ones with gangsters who were always squealing their tires around corners. Only it seemed bigger, with broader windows through which he could see the nuns, or at least glimpse them in their habits; it was a regular penguin convention inside that car.

Way it happened, when they came up on the nuns, Jim said to William at the wheel, Man, move over close, I’m gonna show them some butt.

They’re nuns, man.

That’s what makes it funny, Jim said.

William eased the wheel to the right, and Harold in the back said, Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon. Show them the Grand Canyon. . . . Oh, say can you see. . . .

Jim got his pants down, swiveled on his knees in the seat, twisted so that his ass was against the glass, and just as they passed the nuns, William hit the electric window switch and slid the glass down. Jim’s ass jumped out at the night, like a vibrating moon.

They lookin’? Jim asked.

Oh, yeah, William said, and they are not amused.

Jim jerked his pants up, shifted in the seat, and turned for a look, and sure enough, they were not amused. Then a funny thing happened, one of the nuns shot him the finger, and then others followed. Jim said, Man, those nuns are rowdy.

And now he got a good look at them, even though it was night, because there was enough light from the headlights as they passed for him to see faces hard as wardens and ugly as death warmed over. The driver was especially homely, face like that could stop a clock and run it backwards or make shit crawl uphill.

Did you see that, they shot me the finger? Jim said.

I did see it, William said.

Harold had finally gotten The Star-Spangled Banner straight, and he kept singing it over and over.

For chrissake, William said. Shut up, Harold.

You know what, Jim said, studying the rearview mirror, I think they’re speeding up. They’re trying to catch us. Oh, hell. What if they get the license plate? Maybe they already have. They call the law, my dad will have my mooning ass.

Well, if they haven’t got the plate, William said, they won’t. This baby can get on up and get on out.

He put his foot on the gas. The car hummed as if it had just had an orgasm, and seemed to leap. Harold was flung off the backseat, onto the floorboard. Hey, goddamnit, he said. Put on your seat belt, jackass, Jim said.

William’s car was eating up the road. It jumped over a hill and dove down the other side like a porpoise negotiating a wave, and Jim thought, Goodbye, penguins, and then he looked back. At the top of the hill were the lights from the nuns’ car, and the car was gaining speed and it moved in a jerky manner, as if it were stealing space between blinks of the eye.

Damn, William said. They got some juice in that thing, and the driver has her foot down.

What kind of car is that? Jim said.

Black, William said.

Ha! Mr. Detroit.

Then you name it.

Jim couldn’t. He turned to look back. The nuns’ car had already caught up; the big automotive beast was cruising in tight as a coat of varnish, the headlights making the interior of William’s machine bright as a Vegas act.

What the hell they got under the hood? William said. Hyperdrive?

These nuns, Jim said, they mean business.

I can’t believe it, they’re riding my bumper.

Slam on your brakes. That’ll show them.

Not this close, William said. Do that, what it’ll show them is the inside of our butts.

Do nuns do this?

These do.

Oh, Jim said. I get it. Halloween. They aren’t real nuns.

Then we give them hell, Harold said, and just as the nuns were passing on the right, he crawled out of the floorboard and onto his seat and rolled the window down. The back window of the nuns’ car went down and Jim turned to get a look, and the nun, well, she was ugly all right, but uglier than he had first imagined. She looked like something dead, and the nun’s outfit she wore was not actually black and white, but purple and white, or so it appeared in the light from head beams and moonlight. The nun’s lips pulled back from her teeth and the teeth were long and brown, as if tobacco-stained. One of her eyes looked like a spoiled meatball, and her nostrils flared like a pig’s.

Jim said, That ain’t no mask.

Harold leaned way out of the window and flailed his hands and said, You are so goddamn ugly you have to creep up on your underwear.

Harold kept on with this kind of thing, some of it almost making sense, and then one of the nuns in the back, one closest to the window, bent over in the seat and came up and leaned out of the window, a two-by-four in her hands. Jim noted that her arms, where the nun outfit had fallen back to the elbows, were as thin as sticks and white as the underbelly of a fish, and the elbows were knotty, and bent in the wrong direction.

Get back in, Jim said to Harold.

Harold waved his arms and made another crack, and then the nun swung the two-by-four, the oddness of her elbows causing it to arrive at a weird angle, and the board made a crack of its own, or rather Harold’s skull did, and he fell forward, the lower half of his body hanging from the window, bouncing against the door, his knuckles losing meat on the highway, his ass hanging inside, one foot on the floorboard, the other waggling in the air.

The nun hit him, Jim said. With a board.

What? William said.

You deaf, she hit him.

Jim snapped loose his seat belt and leaned over and grabbed Harold by the back of the shirt and yanked him inside. Harold’s head looked like it had been in a vise. There was blood everywhere. Jim said, Oh, man, I think he’s dead.

BLAM!

The noise made Jim jump. He slid back in his seat and looked toward the nuns. They were riding close enough to slam the two-by-four into William’s car; the driver was pressing that black monster toward them.

Another swing of the board and the side mirror shattered. William tried to gun forward, but the nuns’ car was even with him, pushing him to the left. They went across the highway and into a ditch and the car did an acrobatic twist and tumbled down an embankment and rolled into the woods, tossing up mud and leaves and pine straw.

Jim found himself outside the car, and when he moved, everything seemed to whirl for a moment, then gathered up slowly and became solid. He had been thrown free, and so had William, who was lying nearby. The car was a wreck, lying on its roof, spinning still, steam easing out from under the hood in little cotton-white clouds. Gradually, the car quit spinning, like an old-time watch that had wound down. The windshield was gone and three of the four doors lay scattered about.

The nuns were parked up on the road, and the car doors opened and the nuns got out. Four of them. They were unusually tall, and when they walked, like their elbows, their knees bent in the wrong direction. It was impossible to tell this for sure, because of the robes they wore, but it certainly looked that way, and considering the elbows, it fit. There in the moonlight, they were as white and pasty as potstickers, their jaws seeming to have grown longer than when Jim had last looked at them, their noses witchlike, except for those pig flared nostrils, their backs bent like longbows. One of them still held the two-by-four.

Jim slid over to William, who was trying to sit up. You okay? Jim asked.

I think so, William said, patting his fingers at a blood spot on his forehead. Just before they hit, I stupidly unsnapped my seat belt. I don’t know why. I just wanted out I guess. Brain not working right.

Look up there, Jim said.

They both looked up the hill. One of the nuns was moving down from the highway, toward the wrecked car.

If you can move, Jim said, I think we oughta.

William worked himself to his feet. Jim grabbed his arm and half pulled him into the woods, where they leaned against a tree. William said, Everything’s spinning.

It stops soon enough, Jim said.

I got to chill, I’m about to faint.

A moment, Jim said.

The nun who had gone down by herself bent down out of sight behind William’s car, then they saw her going back up the hill, dragging Harold by his ankle, his body flopping all over as if all the bones in his body had been broken.

My God, see that? William said. We got to help.

He’s dead, Jim said. They crushed his head with a board.

Oh, hell, man. That can’t be. They’re nuns.

I don’t think they are, Jim said. Least not the kind of nuns you’re thinking.

The nun dragged Harold up the hill and dropped his leg when she reached the big black car. Another of the nuns opened the trunk and reached in and got hold of something. It looked like some kind of folded-up lawn chair, only more awkward in shape. The nun jerked it out and dropped it on the ground and gave it a swift kick. The folded-up thing began to unfold with a clatter and a squeak. A perfectly round head rose up from it, and the head spun on what appeared to be a silver hinge. When it quit whirling, it was upright and in place, though cocked slightly to the left. The eyes and mouth and nostrils were merely holes. Moonlight could be seen through them. The head rose as coatrack-style shoulders pushed it up and a cage of a chest rose under that. The chest looked almost like an old frame on which dresses were placed to be sewn, or perhaps a cage designed to contain something you wouldn’t want to get out. With more squeaks and clatters, skeletal hips appeared, and beneath that, long, bony legs with bent-back knees and big metal-framed feet. Stick-like arms swung below its knees, clattering against its legs like tree limbs bumping against a windowpane. It stood at least seven feet tall. Like the nuns, its knees and elbows fit backward.

The nun by the car trunk reached inside