"The Bleeding Shadow"

by Joe R. Lansdale
originally published in Down These Strange Streets, 2011

Texas, c. 1954.
Our narrator is a black, unlicensed (blacks couldn't get detective licenses in 1950's Texas) private eye.  One night Alma May, an ex-lover, engages his services.  She takes him back to her place, and plays a 78 her brother Tootie, a blues singer, has sent to her.

The sound isn't the blues, but something indescribable that affects and frightens both of them.  Alama May asks our narrator to find Tootie, who she's sure is in terrible trouble (nothing new) and bring him home.

The narrator sets off for Dallas, eventually tracing Tootie to an ultra-seedy hotel, where he lays around with the strange music playing, musical notes painted on the walls, and notebooks full of strange music notation.  When the narrator stops the music, a gateway to another dimension opens in the walls, and a strange monster starts to enter.  The music drives off the monster and closes the gateway.

The narrator takes Tootie back home, with the monster in pursuit.  There it catches and takes him.

I dug the first part of this tale, with its 50's Texas setting, racial issues, and the blues.  But in the second it becomes pretty mundane.  Yet another in the "Cthulhu Blues" genre which periodically raises its head.  This is one of the better examples, though.

"The Crawling Sky"

by Joe R. Lansdale
originally published Son Of Retro Pulp Tales, Subterranean Press, 2009

Rev. Jebediah Mercer rides into the remote East Texas semi-ghost town of Wood Tick.  There he finds the few townsfolk ugly, seeemingly inbred, and not-too-friendly.  He also finds Norville, an alleged "half-wit", locked in a cage they call their jail.  Norville hasn't actually committed a crime - he just pissed off the sheriff with his crazy talk about his wife being taken by a "haint".

The Rev arranges to take Norville with him and leave town.  But he's interested in Norville's story.

It seems Norville had hooked up with Mary, one of the few healthy, normal local girls.  And they had taken up residence in a cabin near the town.  It wasn't their cabin - actually, it had been abandoned several times in the past, for unsavory-sounding, mysterious reasons. 

Norville claims that, soon after they moved in, and drew up some rocks out of the rock-filled well, they were menaced by a strange, pale, humanoid creature that stalked outside the house, killing animals, and finally broke in and tore Mary's head off.

The Rev, who says he hunts evil in the world, believes him.  They head for the cabin, where things are exactly as Norville described them.   Finding symbols etched into the rocks from the well, and a strange book called "The Book of Doches" in a lock-box, the Rev deduces that someone summoned a Creature from Outside, tried to make a servant of it, and sealed it in the well using the rocks.  It was freed when Norville removed them.  He lays a trap for the monster...

This is a very good tale, highly reminiscent of Manly Wade Wellman, one of the best of the Weird Tales-era pulp fictioners, with the setting moved to East Texas vs The Ozarks, though its far more gory and gruesome than Wellman would have gone.  The setting is vividly drawn, the characters compelling (I'd like to read more about Reverend Jebediah Mercer - and apparently Lansdale has indeed written more) and the monster truly unsettling.  Equally unsettling, and spooky, are the scenes of the monster stalking outside the cabin, trying to get in.  This one's a winner.