Cumberland Furnace & Other Fear Forged Fables Read online

  CUMBERLAND FURNACE &OTHER

  FEAR-FORGED FABLES

  By Ronald Kelly

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2010 by Ronald Kelly & Macabre Ink Digital

  Story Copyrights:

  Cumberland Furnace / Copyright by Ronald Kelly

  First Appeared in Shivers 5 (2009)

  Cover by Zach McCain (2010)

  Grandma’s Favorite Recipe / Copyright by Ronald Kelly

  First Appeared in Midnight Grinding & Other Twilight Terrors (2009)

  The Thing at the Side of the Road / Copyright by Ronald Kelly

  First Appeared in Harlan County Horrors (2009)

  The Final Feature / Copyright by Ronald Kelly

  First Appeared at Horror Drive-In (2009)

  Mister Mack & The Monster Mobile/ Copyright by Ronald Kelly

  First Appeared at Horror World (2008)

  The Peddler’s Journey / Copyright by Ronald Kelly

  First Appeared in Appalachian Winter Hauntings (2009)

  Tanglewood / Copyright by Ronald Kelly

  First Appeared as a chapbook released by Cemetery Dance Publications

  (2008)

  LICENSE NOTES

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your vendor of choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

  ALSO BY RONALD KELLY FROM CROSSROAD PRESS

  Novels & Novellas

  Hell Hollow

  Timber Gray

  Flesh Welder

  Collections

  Dark Dixie

  Dark Dixie II

  Cumberland Furnace & Other Fear Forged Fables

  The Sick Stuff

  Unabridged Audio

  Flesh Welder

  Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS – use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a one time 20% savings! We have a wide variety of eBook and Audiobook titles available. Find us at: http://store.crossroadpress.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Cumberland Furnace

  Grandma’s Favorite Recipe

  The Thing at the Side of the Road

  The Final Feature

  Mister Mack & the Monster Mobile

  The Peddler’s Journey

  Tanglewood

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  How would a writer feel if he came back to his chosen profession after being absent for ten long years? I mean, totally absent. No contact with fellow authors and publishers. No writing of any kind for the span of an entire decade.

  Scared shitless I would think.

  That’s about how I felt when I decided to return to the horror genre in the summer of 2006. After my own personal 9/11 in the fall of 1996, when Zebra Books closed their entire mid-list horror line without warning, I had grown bitter and discouraged. In turn, I completely distanced myself from anything concerning horror and the macabre. No horror reading, no horror movies, no horror writing for one hundred and twenty long months. I went as cold as cold turkey could get.

  Then in July of 2006, my good friend Mark Hickerson called me up and said “Hey, Ron. Folks are on the internet, ordering your old books on eBay and asking about you on the message boards… wondering if you’re dead or not.”

  Well, that got me to thinking. In a sense, I was dead. I had to admit that I missed the writing and I missed the darkness of the genre, too. The sudden interest in my work fanned the flame of horror-writing desire in me. I began to remember what had motivated me in the first place; those cherished childhood days when I was a monster freak watching “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” and “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, and putting together those cool Aurora glow-in-the-dark monster models. And I got the urge to get back into the game again… catch up where I’d left off all those years ago.

  But I had a problem. I was scared half out of my wits.

  You see, I didn’t even know if I could write any more.

  Sitting in front of that blank computer screen after such a long hiatus was like a drowning man regarding an empty ocean around him, with no sign of dry land. I was scared half to death. Here I’d committed to my fans, telling them I was coming back, and I wasn’t even sure that I could.

  As it turned out, writing horror was like riding a bike or having sex. I was a little rusty, but it all came back to me. And I seemed to have a polish and an edge to my fiction that hadn’t been there before. Perhaps those years away had done me some good after all; maybe recharged my batteries and given me a renewed appreciation for ghosts, goblins, and things that went bump in the night.

  The following seven stories are the first tales I sat down and wrote after coming back. “Cumberland Furnace” was one of the first of the bunch, thus the title of this collection. And “fear-forged” is right on the mark. Fearhad a lot to do with the writing of these fables… an emotion that goes hand-in-hand with stories that are intended to horrify and generally gross one out.

  So here they are… the first seven of the comeback stories. Got alot to choose from here. A couple of old-fashioned ghost stories, some monster tales, and even a bit of sick comedy thrown in for good measure.

  Ronald Kelly

  Brush Creek, Tennessee

  February 2010

  CUMBERLAND FURNACE

  I can see it from my back porch, towering above maple and sweet gum, standing in dark relief against the Tennessee sky. Half of the structure is covered in thick-leaved kudzu, the other half exposed; weathered limestone scrubbed smooth by the passage of time.

  There are nights when it blocks out the moon and a pale halo surrounds its upper peak. Other times there is no moon, but still it glows. Embers seem to rise from the open stack and the cracks of the walls gleam as if with an inner fire. Several years ago, someone called the Dickson County fire department and they sent out a truck to investigate. They found the stones December cold and the hollow of the structure as dark as a tomb.

  As I study it from a distance, it resembles some long-forgotten shrine. In some ways, you might regard it as such. For, over a century and a half ago, it was built as a monument of sorts. A monument to a time of hatred and the blatant disregard for a man’s right to own his own flesh and blood. A monument to a war that pitted brother against brother.

  Cumberland Furnace.

  * * * *

  I’d heard tales told about the Furnace since I was a small boy. Sometimes at Daniel’s Store down at the crossroads, other times at the county co-op. Mostly, though, the stories came from my grandmother, who had lived to a ripe old age of ninety-eight. Among other tales, the sordid history of Cumberland Furnace was one of them. When I was seven or eight, they just seemed like creepy ghost stories to me; tales that kept you up at night, but whose impact faded with the light of day. Now I am not so sure.

  The Furnace was built by a man named Sterling Petty in 1860. They said Petty was a cruel man who valued money over everything else, including those who lived and breathed around him. He had farmed cotton and corn on his plantation for many years, but had abandoned that livelihood for the fortune that the War Between the States might bring. In anticipation of the conflict to come, he herded his slaves from the fields and used them to build a huge limestone furnace on the south end of his property. This structure was intended for the smelting of iron ore and the
casting of products such as cannonballs and artillery pieces. The railroad tracks that ran adjacent to the Furnace gave an added advantage. The iron products could be loaded onto rail cars and shipped almost immediately after they were manufactured.

  They said Sterling Perry owned six hundred slaves and, in his eyes, each was merely an interchangeable cog in his money-making machine. During the duration of the War, they would labor twenty-four hours a day. Men would tote buckets of iron ore by hand up a steep ramp and dump it into the depository of the furnace. Others would constantly shovel coal to stoke the hellish fire that melted the ore. After the sluggish red iron flowed down huge limestone troughs, it was channeled into the molds that cast cannons and the projectiles they fired upon the battlefield. It is said that Perry was

  so intent on supplying the Confederacy its munitions that he forced women and children to carry cannonballs and stack them on the railway cars while they still glowed with heat. Many a hand was scarred or disfigured by the Master’s greed and impatience.

  The male workers were pushed to the limit of their endurance. If they showed reluctance or disobedience, they were treated severely. Iron shackles and whips flayed flesh and set up infection and blood poisoning. When one fell dead, another immediately stepped in to take his place. It was said that one of Perry’s favorite forms of punishment was to yank out the teeth of his disobedient workers with iron pliers fashioned for just such a task. If a slave had so many teeth pulled that he could no longer eat meat or bread, and grew

  too weak to work from malnutrition, he was taken into the woods and shot. It had happened more times than those poor folks could count.

  Then came the night when one of the slaves had finally had enough of Sterling Perry’s sadism. His name was Sway and he was a tall man, heavy with muscle, but prideful and stubborn. When Perry’s overseers had taken Sway’s brother to the woods and put a bullet through his head, he had been ordered to take his place. Sway had steadfastly refused. A whip had been laid across his back and, after a lifetime of similar punishment, the man had snapped. He ran up the ramp, then scaled the tall stack of the furnace, his

  fingers wedged into the cracks where mortar met stone.

  Production continued as Perry and his men watched. Several of the overseers yearned to take aim with their rifles and shoot him down, but Sterling Perry stayed their hand. A cruel grin split the man’s face as Sway reached the open mouth of the stack. The slave hesitated for a long moment, staring his tormentor square in the eye. Then he cast himselfinto the belly of the furnace. They waited to hear Sway’s terrified scream, but if it ever came, it was swallowed up by the deafening roar of the fire.

  Legend had it that they manned the channels and watched for a trace of Sway’s burnt body to appear amid the slag. But the only thing left of the

  slave that made it into the receiving trough was a single organ. They say Sway’s heart lay atop the stream of molten iron…. whole and completely unscorched.

  After Sterling Perry had died unexpectedly in 1865, his oldest daughter took over the operation. Since cannonballs and artillery pieces were no longer in demand, the Furnace began to do work for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, manufacturing rails, iron plating for locomotives, and cradle hitches for railway cars.

  The workforce that once powered the Furnace was gone now, having moved on to a better life, or at least one free of abuse and oppression. Their ranks were soon replaced by former Confederate soldiers who had lost their livelihood during the war and poor whites who were no stranger to hot, back-breaking labor.

  But there were many who refused to come near the ironworks, for the sole fact that it was believed to be haunted.

  Several strange incidents throughout the years seemed to justify those fears. In 1868, during a graveyard shift, the workers were distracted from their duties by a terrifying commotion. A sound came from the surrounding forest; a sound that didn’t seem to originate from any particular direction. It

  sounded as though a great iron wheel was rolling through the dense woods, crushing everything in its wake. They could hear the snap and pop of thicket flattening and the gunshot cracks of tree trunks giving way. Then, abruptly,

  the noise ended. The following day, several men roamed the woods,

  searching for signs of devastation, but none was ever found. Trees and bramble stood untouched.

  On another occasion, around 1887, the Furnace was shut down temporarily and a team of men was sent into the limestone stack to clean its walls of ash and clinging debris. They were halfway through the job, when a low thudding seemed to reverberate from the walls around them. As the noise grew in volume, they claimed that it was the thunderous beating of a heart. The sound became so loud and intense that the twelve workers

  fled the limestone structure, afraid that they might be deafened if they remained. But, by the time the last man left the stack, the noise subsided and there was only silence.

  A third incident took place at a building called the tower house. The tower house was a tall, narrow building with a single window at the top. During Sterling Perry’s day it had been used for an observation tower by the

  overseers. In 1893, the upper room was used as a small office. One night, one of the ironwork’s supervisors was tallying his logbooks, when an old black woman appeared at the window. She was bent over with age and her face was shriveled and lined. “Howdy,” she said. The supervisor simply nodded and continued his work. She continued walking to her right, as if circling the building. Soon, she appeared again, her small eyes twinkling. “Howdy,” she said a second time. This constant harassment angered the supervisor and he got up from his roll top desk. When he reached the window, the woman was gone… and he realized she could have never been there in the first place. There was no ledge along the upper story of the tower house for her to stand upon and the walls were so smooth that no one could have gotten a fingerhold. Shaken, he waited for her to come around a third time, but she never did.

  The most puzzling and terrifying event took place in 1904. Sand was used during the casting process and several large mounds of it stood at the western end of the ironworks, near the railroad tracks. At the stroke of midnight, during a late shift, the glow of the moon was blocked and a number of workers peered skyward to see a dark, winged form looming overhead. The descriptions that were given were varied. Some said the form

  was angelic in nature, while others said it had more to do with hell than heaven. With a mighty flapping of its vast wings, a howling wind was conjured. The men suddenly found themselves caught in the middle of a terrible duststorm. The sand from the mounds was lifted up and hurled forcefully at the workers, stinging the men’s flesh and blinding them. After the squall had died down, not a single grain of sand remained from those dunes beside the tracks.They say the wives of those workers picked the grit and sand from their husbands’ eyes for days afterward, and there were a couple of unfortunate souls who were blinded permanently by the unexplained incident.

  The Furnace was bought and sold by several different iron companies over the years. Finally, in 1942, the ironworks was dismantled and sold for scrap. All that remained standing was the ninety foot stack of limestone. It didn’t take long for underbrush and kudzu to overtake the old site, obscuring nearly all traces of the bustling business that once occupied that land.

  Even as a child, I was not one to believe in haunts and such. If I couldn’t see it with my eyes or touch it with my hands, it simply was not real. That was how I regarded my grandmother’s stories of Cumberland

  Furnace. They were spooky and fun to listen to, but held no substance. In my mind, they were silly ghost stories and nothing more.

  * * * * *

  Then came the day when I wandered much to close to the Furnace.

  I was a married man by then, with two children and another on the way. I’d bought a hundred acres of land on the eastern side of the old Perry property and made my living as a farmer, growing corn and tobacco, as well as raising a few
head of cattle and hogs for butchering.

  It was a cool autumn day when one of our cows got out. You could hear her out in the woods, bellowing to the top of her lungs. Me and my oldest son, James, went looking for her. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves standing in the shadow of what remained of Cumberland Furnace.

  James took off into the thicket, hoping to flush the stubborn cow out into the open. I stood there and studied the towering stack of hand-hewn limestone, realizing that I’d never been that close to it before. A quarter mile away, the county road crew was paving the two-lane stretch of Old Charlotte Highway. You could hear the roar and grind of the machinery and smell the thick odor of oil and hot asphalt in the air.

  I was waiting there, listening to my son thrash through the thicket, when I realized that I was not alone.

  I turned to find a man standing behind me, no more than twenty feet away. He was a black man; tall and strong in build.

  “Howdy,” I said with a nod of my head.

  He simply stood there and smiled.

  “Are you with the road crew up yonder?” I asked.

  He said nothing, just stared at me in a peculiar way.

  I felt foolish for asking such a question. It was obvious, from the way he was dressed, that he wasn’t a county worker. His shirt and trousers were worn and threadbare. They almost looked to be… hand sewn.

  I felt a cold sensation in my chest, as though someone was pouring ice water through the chambers of my heart. And, suddenly, I knew.

  “You ain’t really here, are you?” I asked. My voice was scarcely a whisper.

  The man’s lips split into a grin. Most of his teeth were missing.

  At that moment I felt as though I wanted my son next to me, although I knew that he didn’t need to be. I looked off toward the woods. “James!” I hollered. “Come here!” I turned my eyes back to the man.

  He was gone.