Long Chills Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Midnight Grinding

  The Spawn of Arget Bethir

  Tanglewood

  Flesh-Welder

  Tyrophex-14

  The Seedling

  Devil’s Creek

  The Winds Within

  Of Crows & Pale Doves

  A Shiny Can of Whup-Ass

  Mojo Mama

  Potter’s Field

  Evolution Ridge

  LONG CHILLS

  A Collection of Long Fiction & Novellas

  By Ronald Kelly

  A Macabre Ink Book

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2013 / Ronald Kelly

  Cover background image courtesy of:

  Starflower Hunting

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook 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 the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Ronald Kelly was born November 20, 1959 in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was raised a Southern Baptist. He attended Pegram Elementary School and Cheatham County Central High School (both in Ashland City, Tennessee) before starting his writing career.

  Ronald Kelly began his writing career in 1986 and quickly sold his first short story, “Breakfast Serial,” to Terror Time Again magazine. His first novel, Hindsight, was released by Zebra Books in 1990. His audiobook collection, Dark Dixie: Tales of Southern Horror, was on the nominating ballot of the 1992 Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album. Zebra published seven of Ronald Kelly's novels from 1990 to 1996. Ronald's short fiction work has been published by Cemetery Dance, Borderlands 3, Deathrealm, Dark at Heart, Hot Blood: Seeds of Fear, and many more. After selling hundreds of thousands of books, the bottom dropped out of the horror market in 1996. So, when Zebra dropped their horror line in October 1996, Ronald Kelly stopped writing for almost ten years and worked various jobs including welder, factory worker, production manager, drugstore manager, and custodian.

  In 2006, Ronald Kelly started writing again. In early 2008, Croatoan Publishing released his work Flesh Welder as a standalone chapbook, and it quickly sold out. In early 2009 Cemetery Dance Publications released a limited edition hardcover of his fist short story collection, Midnight Grinding & Other Twilight Terrors. Also in 2010, Cemetery Dance is planning on releasing his first novel in over ten years called, Hell Hollow as a limited edition hardcover. Ronald's Zebra/Pinnacle horror novels are being released by Thunderstorm Books as The Essential Ronald Kelly series. Each book contains a new novella related to the novel's original storyline.

  Ronald Kelly currently lives in Brush Creek, Tennessee, with his wife, Joyce, and their three children.

  Book List

  Novels

  Blood Kin

  Father's Little Helper (to be re-released as Twelve Gauge)

  Fear

  Hell Hollow

  Hindsight

  Moon of the Werewolf (re-released as Undertaker's Moon)

  Pitfall

  Something Out There (re-released as The Dark'Un)

  The China Doll

  The Possession (to be re-released as Burnt Magnolia)

  Timber Gray

  Novellas

  Flesh Welder

  Collections

  After the Burn

  Cumberland Furnace and Other Fear Forged Fables

  Dark Dixie

  Dark Dixie II

  Long Chills

  The Sick Stuff

  Twilight Hankerings

  Unhinged

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  LONG CHILLS

  The following selections were previously published: “Midnight Grinding” in Borderlands 3, 1992; “The Spawn of Arget Bethir” in Essential Ronald Kelly Collection, Volume #1: Undertaker’s Moon, 2011; “Tanglewood” as a Cemetery Dance chapbook, 2008; “Flesh Welder” in Noctulpa #4; “Tyrophex-14” in The Earth Strikes Back, 1994; “The Seedling” in Essential Ronald Kelly, Volume #2: Fear, 2011; “Devil’s Creek” in Midnight Grinding & Other Twilight Terrors, 2008; “The Winds Within” in Cemetery Dance, 1990; “Of Crows & Pale Doves” in Essential Ronald Kelly Volume #3, The Dark’Un, 2012; “A Shiny Can of Whup-Ass” in After the Burn, 2011; “Mojo Mama” in The Sick Stuff, 2009; “Potter’s Field” in Essential Ronald Kelly Volume #4, Hindsight, 2012; “Evolution Ridge” in After the Burn ,2011.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Midnight Grinding

  The Spawn of Arget Bethir

  Tanglewood

  Flesh-Welder

  Tyrophex-14

  The Seedling

  Devil’s Creek

  The Winds Within

  Of Crows & Pale Doves

  A Shiny Can of Whup-Ass

  Mojo Mama

  Potter’s Field

  Evolution Ridge

  Introduction

  In the writing game, the four most important aspects of a piece of fiction are plot, characterization, narrative, and length. Of the four, length is probably the most crucial, because that is what determines exactly what you will be writing or reading. For the most part, authors divide their literary efforts into two categories: the short story or the novel. A short story is normally between 2,500 and 5,000 words, while a full-blown novel can be as much as 90,000 words or more. The idea of the storyline itself is what determines whether what comes about culminates into a short story or novella. Some plots can be tied up into a neat, effective package, while others require more character development and detailed setting and emotional impact. It’s like comparing a roller coaster ride to a road trip. Sometimes you depart from Point A and reach Point B swiftly, exhilarated, surprised and satisfied by the sudden turn of events. Other times, it takes longer, with many stops along the road, like traveling a lonesome highway from the East Coast to the West Coast, uncertain of what you will find waiting for you in-between.

  Then there is another category entirely: the long fiction piece and the novella. These are works that demand more time and development than short stories, but not as much as full-length novels. They usually clock in between 6,000 and 25,000 words. More of an investment of time and attention – to both writer and reader – but, for the most part, a worthwhile investment, if the work is brought to fruition correctly.

  The book you hold in your hands is a collection of my long fiction pieces and novellas. Most are stories that started out wanting to be short stories, but grew longer and more involved as the writing process drew on. Others were intended to be novels, but came up short, and for good reason. Sometimes the best of ideas just doesn’t warrant the length that a novel demands and that is where the novella falls into place.

  Some of these stories came from the small press magazines and anthologies that I cut my teeth on in the mid-80s to mid-90s, while others are fairly recent, such as the Cemetery Dance chapbook Tanglewood and Mojo Mama from the Thunderstorm edition of The Sick Stuff. Four of these are the newly-written novellas that accompanied the re-released material in the Essential Ronald Kelly Collection, Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4. Two are from my ultra-extreme collecti
on of post-apocalyptic horror, After the Burn.

  In any event, all are longer than the customary Ron Kelly tall-tale or shorter than the Zebra-published doorstoppers of old. All contain the twist and terror of my own brand of Southern-fried horror, but to a larger and more potent degree. Hopefully, they will entertain you and raise a few goosebumps in the process… perhaps even conjure a long chill within the marrow of your bones and keep it there for a good long spell.

  Ronald Kelly

  Brush Creek, Tennessee

  June 2013

  Midnight Grinding

  “Which one must I kill first? Oh, sweet Lord in heaven, please tell me… which one must I kill first?”

  The first time Rebecca heard the voice of Green Lee it came rasping through the lush leaves of the tobacco rows like the coarse hide of a snake rubbing against dried corn husks. She and her brother, Ben, had been performing the chore that Papa had given them that day: picking off the plump, green worms that nibbled on the summer tobacco and squashing them beneath the toes of their bare feet. But as they left one dense row and moved on to the next, the old man’s whispering plea echoed in the dusty afternoon air, curling through their youthful ears and stopping them dead in their tracks.

  Rebecca and Ben backed up a few steps, listening to the sinister words and watching for a sign of the one who uttered them. “Heavenly Father, Lord Almighty on high, please tell me… which one shall it be?”

  A rustling of tobacco leaves sounded from a few feet away, drawing the frightened eyes of the two children. And from within that dense patch of greenery crept a gnarled claw of stark white bone.

  The youngsters broke from their fearful paralysis. Screaming, they ran along the field rows, feet churning clouds of powdery clay dirt into the hot, still air of mid-July. They soon burst from the high tobacco, their cries rising shrilly as they crossed the barren road to the gathering of shabby tin and tarpaper shacks that made up the itinerant farm camp. They saw their mother sitting on the front porch of one such house, washing a few articles of clothing with a scrub board and a bucket of sudsy, gray water.

  “Lordy Mercy!” said Sarah Benton, looking as drab and threadbare as the clothing she washed. “What’s the matter with you young’uns?”

  It was a moment before they could summon the breath to tell her. “There’s a ghost in the tobacco field,” gasped eight-year-old Rebecca. “A ghost with a bony claw!”

  “Ya’ll hush up now,” said their mother. She cast a glance at the house next door and saw their neighbors sitting on the porch, snapping beans and eyeing the two children curiously. “I don’t wanna hear such foolishness from the two of you!” The Benton family had only joined the farm camp a few days ago in that sweltering summer of 1908 and it wouldn’t do to have the three neighboring families thinking that the Benton children were touched in the head or some such thing.

  “But it was there, Mama!” proclaimed little Ben, nearly in tears, “and it said it was gonna kill us!”

  Sarah was about to put her bucket and board aside and give the unruly pair a sound thrashing, when her husband, Will, emerged from the tobacco rows with a few of the other farmers. He approached the stone well that stood in the middle of the encampment, where a bucketful of cold water had been drawn and took a long drink from a gourd dipper.

  Rebecca and Ben left their mother and ran to the big, rawboned man. They frantically told their father the story of the voice in the rows and the bony claw that had poked out of the leaves.

  Will Benton laughed heartily and put comforting hands on their shoulders. “Aw, don’t go fretting yourselves about such. That was just old Green Lee over yonder. He ain’t gonna hurt you none.”

  The children looked to where their father pointed and saw a man standing in the speckled shade of a hickory tree several yards away. The fellow was gaunt and lanky, wearing faded overalls and filthy longhandles underneath. He leaned against the trunk of the tree and grinned at them, his teeth stained with tobacco juice and his eyes holding a disturbing shine of madness. He had a scraggly gray beard and what little hair he possessed laid lank and lifeless along his scalp like sun-shriveled cornsilk. The children looked to his crossed arms and saw that the right hand was strong and whole, hard with the calluses of daily work. But the left one was fleshless; a gnarled claw of stiffened bone, looking like the pale, dry husk of a spider that had curled in upon itself in death.

  Rebecca stared at the man, still uneasy in her mind. From the shadows of the big tree his eyes burned with a feverish light and his lips silently mouthed those awful words she had heard him utter in the close-grown rows of the hundred acre field. Then, with a big wink, the old man turned and walked to his own house no more than a stone’s throw from the place where Rebecca and her family lived.

  That night after supper, their father told them the story of Green Lee.

  He had once been a good man; a religious man who tilled the earth of the fields during the week and preached the word of God on Sunday morning. He had fought in the Spanish-American War as a young man and, after serving his country, had returned to his native Tennessee and worked as a farmer in the tobacco fields near the rural town of Coleman. He married a sturdy woman named Charlotte Springer, who a year later bore him twin sons. In all, Green Lee was a respected member of the community along Old Newsome Road… or he had been until his unfortunate accident in the spring of 1903.

  It had been a scorcher of a day and Green Lee was plowing a forty acre stretch, when something peculiar happened to him. His wife went out to call him to supper that evening and found him in the center of the half-plowed field, standing over the lifeless body of his finest work mule. When she walked out to see what had happened, she found her husband giggling wildly like a demented child. The mule had been stoned to death, obviously by the farmer himself.

  Large hunks of uncovered rock lay scattered around the poor animal and a particularly heavy chunk had been used to shatter the mule’s skull.

  By the time Charlotte could summon some of the neighboring farmers, Green Lee had collapsed in the evening shadows and laid trembling in a violent palsy of unknown origin. He was immediately put to bed and his body bathed with cool water. The local physician drove out that night in a horse and buggy, and examined the feverish man. The doctor soon came to the conclusion that Green Lee had suffered a heatstroke, due to plowing that hot day without the benefit of a hat to shade his head.

  After a month in bed, Green Lee escaped the prospect of immediate death and rose to resume his life, although never fully recovered. He was given to bouts of uncharacteristic behavior. For weeks at a time he would seem normal enough, tending to his crops and preaching the Lord’s gospel. Then, abruptly, his morals would become totally depraved and devoid of restraint. He would frequent a local roadhouse known as the Bloody Bucket and blow his earnings on whiskey, gambling, and whores. Soon, his behavior lost him the respect of his neighbors and the faith of his congregation. Gradually, the good and bad of Green Lee seemed to balance out and he grew more eccentric as the days went by, dividing his time equally between God and the Devil.

  Before his illness, the man had been stubborn and headstrong. But in the years afterward, Green Lee became increasingly weak in mind and incredibly gullible. This condition was best summed up by the incident that led to the ghastly crippling of his left hand. Among his other afflictions, Green Lee suffered a bad case of arthritis in his wrist and finger joints, and he was always on the alert for some new medicine or folk remedy that might cure him of the bothersome pain. One night a couple of drinking buddies pulled a cruel joke on the man and suggested a cure that he had never heard of before, but one they assured would rid him of his agony. That night, after his family had gone to bed, Green Lee fired up the woodstove in his kitchen and set an iron pot of cold water over the flame. He immersed his left hand in the water and – per his friends’ instructions – let the water come to a steady boil. Slowly, the nagging pain in his fingers and wrist disappeared until only numbness remained. Gr
een Lee was sure that he had miraculously been healed of his ailment… until he withdrew his hand from the scalding water and watched as the meat slipped free from the bones and fell like a fleshen glove, into the churning currents of the boiling pot.

  His unfortunate crippling made it impossible for Green Lee to sustain the rigors of tobacco farming. He began to make a meager living as a handyman and an errand boy, working for a man named Leman McSherry who owned a number of itinerant farm camps in Bedloe County. To that day, Green Lee helped out the farming families that plowed, planted, and harvested the fertile tobacco bases along Old Newsome Road. He harnessed mules, went into town for supplies, and helped chop and split tobacco when the crop was mature enough to be readied for sale.

  The old man’s behavior was endured with a grain of salt. Most farmers thought of him as nothing more than a harmless imbecile. But the women and children of the camp felt differently, especially the handyman’s own family. Sometimes he would approach the children, his bony hand outstretched and the menacing words of “Which one must I kill first?” quavering through his whiskered lips. As of yet, Green Lee had harmed no one, had not even lifted a hand to his own young’uns, but there was some talk that he was a man to be watched, especially when the menfolk were busy laboring in the far reaches of the tobacco field.

  The sweltering days of summer soon passed and with the cooling of autumn came the time of harvest. The ripened leaves were cut, lashed to long poles, and fire-cured in the tobacco barn of a local landowner, Harvey Brewer, whose structure was large enough to prepare four crops at one time. Toward the end of September, Rebecca’s father and some of the other men planned to load the cured tobacco into mule-drawn wagons and make the long trip to Nashville to the big auction house near the Union Station railroad tracks. During Will Benton’s two-day journey, his family was to stay the night with their next door neighbors.