The Long Way by Ramsey Campbell (Amazon US, Amazon ES):Taken from DIVERSIFICATIONS, James Lovegrove's short story collection from PS Publishing.
This is horror novelette was originally published as a PS Holiday Hardcover Chapbook for subscribers to the award winning to Postscripts magazine.
A collection of four stories by Peter Crowther with individual introductions by Ian McDonald, Joe Hill, Elizabeth Hand and Lucius Shepard.
On a windswept corner of Manhattan, just a stone's throw from the weathered facade of the legendary Chelsea Hotel, there's a small two-flight walkdown bar called The Land At The End Of The Working Day. Stop in and rest awhile... you'll meet the most fascinating people.
There's Jack Fedogan, widowed these past few years and still carrying a torch for his beloved Phyllis while he plays smooth jazz on the barroom's battered PA system. And the wonderful triptych of regular imbibers... Edgar Nornhoevan, Jim Leafman and McCoy Brewer, meeting up to escape the world outside or to have a drink with like-minded souls or maybe just to share a few jokes.
And meet one-off visitors. Folks like Gandalph Cohen, the magical caretaker of the City's welfare; Front-Page McGuffin, who, it has to be said, has been in better health; Bernard Boyce Bennington, who carries a torch for a woman who loved him and left him (with a bizzarely magical memento); and Horatio Fortesque and Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat, scholars of the works of the great Jules Verne and hot on the trail to a doorway to another world... a doorway that could just be situated in a backroom of one of Manhattan's strangest watering holes.
So do come visit - you'll never want to leave!
Throughout most of their short, violent, disorganised and unrewarding
spree as Depression-era bank robbers, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow
were accompanied by W. D. Jones — drifter, driver, opportunist,
psychopath, fantasist and teenager. Towards the end of their time
together, having endured Clyde’s mockery and abuse, and despite his
obvious affection for Bonnie, Jones abandoned the duo and was swiftly
tracked down and arrested. Awaiting trial, and keen to save his own
young neck, Jones was visited by Captain Frank Hamer, ex-Texas Ranger
and the lawman tasked with bringing Parker and Barrow’s trail of bloody
and increasingly reckless and seamless violence to an end. Hamer and
Jones met on several occasions and, manipulative and contradictory as
ever, Jones became instrumental in Hamer’s eventual plan to destroy the
two killers. Promising an eager, clamouring press that he was keeping a
full and detailed record of everything that passed between himself and
Jones, Frank Hamer’s memoirs make only a single reference to his
captive’s lengthy confession and reveal nothing whatsoever of Jones’s
own endlessly-shifting, self-serving and desperate revelations.
