On this month's Special Page:

Kasey Lansdale gives us an exerpt from her father Joe's upcoming new book, out this October!

Read free stories written by Joe R. Lansdale (stories changed out monthly) HERE

Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale has written novels and stories in many genres, including Western, horror, science fiction, mystery, and suspense. He has also written for comics as well as "Batman: The Animated Series." His stories have won ten Bram Stoker Awards, a British Fantasy Award, an Edgar Award, a World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, a Sugarprize, a Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, a Spur Award, and a Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been inducted into The Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and several of his novels have been adapted to film.

The Folding Man (Based on the Black Car Legend) excerpt

            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 kidnapthem, 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 Christ sake,” 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 acrack 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.

Read the rest of “The Folding Man” in The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale, coming October 2025 from Tachyon Publications