Fear Read online

  FEAR

  By Ronald Kelly

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2011 by Ronald Kelly

  Copy-edited by: Paulo Monteiro

  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

  The Sick Stuff

  Twilight Hankerings

  Unhinged

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

  Visit us online

  Check out our blog and

  Subscribe to our Newsletter for the latest Crossroad Press News

  Find and follow us on Facebook

  Join our group at Goodreads

  We hope you enjoyed this eBook and will seek out other books published by Crossroad Press. We strive to make our eBooks as free of errors as possible, but on occasion some make it into the final product. If you spot any errors, please contact us at [email protected] and notify us of what you found. We’ll make the necessary corrections and republish the book. We’ll also ensure you get the updated version of the eBook.

  If you’d like to be notified of new Crossroad Press titles when they are published, please send an email to [email protected] and ask to be added to our mailing list.

  If you have a moment, the author would appreciate you taking the time to leave a review for this book at your favorite online site that permits book reviews. These reviews help books to be more easily noticed.

  Thank you for your assistance and your support of the authors published by Crossroad Press.

  FEAR

  Prologue

  John Haskel awoke to the sound of his finest Holstein, Buttercup, screaming in the dead of night.

  It wasn’t a moo that she uttered; not even the long, mournful sort that cows bellow when something spooks them particularly bad. No, this was screaming, startlingly shrill and full of terror.

  John sat up in his bed. His fifty-year-old heart pounded in his lean chest as he listened to the milk cow shriek at the top of her lungs. Then the godawful sound stopped cold. The abruptness with which Buttercup’s horrified cry had been cut short caused John’s heart to beat even faster.

  The farmer sensed his wife, Doris, stir in the brass-framed bed next to him. “John,” she muttered sleepily. “What was all that commotion?”

  John started to answer, but found that his mouth was drier than cotton. He swallowed and tried again. “I don’t know, hon. Kinda sounded like Buttercup. Whatever it was, it came from out in the barn.”

  He kicked the covers aside and left his side of the bed. The hardwood boards of the bedroom floor felt cool against his bare feet, but that was the only comfort he experienced as he crossed to the open window. It was late June and even at that late hour—nearly half-past midnight—it was still warm and uncomfortably humid. By the time he reached the window, a sticky sweat slicked his armpits and the small of his back, causing the cotton material of his nightshirt to adhere to his body.

  John stared through the window screen, but he could see nothing. There was no moon that night, so, at first, all he could detect was pitch darkness. He stood there for a long moment, letting his vision grow accustomed to the gloom. He noticed the scattered winking of fireflies in the yard outside, then the dark structure of the big barn that stood a hundred feet or so from the two-story farmhouse that the Elaskel’s called their home.

  “See anything?” asked Doris from the bed. Her voice held a tone of groggy disinterest. John could tell that his wife was still half asleep.

  “Hell no,” grumbled the farmer. “Too damn dark.” He trained his ears, listening for noises, but none came from the vicinity of the barn. “Can’t hear a dadblamed thing, either. Reckon I’d better go down and check, just to make sure.”

  “Maybe that weasel is messing around in the henhouse gain,” offered Doris.

  John shook his head. “Weren’t no weasel that caused that sound. It was Buttercup. I’d swear to it.”

  He felt his way through the darkness to the closet next to a chest-of-drawers. John rummaged through the clothes that hung there until he found what he was looking for, leaning in the far corner. He took out the twelve-gauge shotgun and broke open the twin breeches. He recalled the cow’s terrified scream as well as its abrupt ending, and decided that rock salt might not be enough that night. He shucked the loads from the cham and replaced them with shells packed with double ought buck shot. John closed the scattergun with a snap, and then started back to the foot of the bed where his work boots were parked. It took him a moment of fumbling, but he finally got the boots and the laces tied.

  “You be careful,” mumbled Doris. She was back in her usual position, lying on her stomach with her face partially buried in her duck-feather pillow.

  John leaned down and kissed her on the left
ear. “Be back directly,” he told her. He was answered by the soft purr of his wife’s snoring.

  A moment later, he was making his way down the stairway to the lower floor. Except for John and Doris, the farmhouse was unoccupied. Their five children had long since grown up and moved on to lives of their own. John had bought the farm in 1922 and made a meager living growing corn and taters ever since, even through the hard times brought on by the Depression. It was now 1946 and, even with the prosperity that had seemingly followed the Second World War, John and Doris still found it difficult to pay the mortgage and keep a decent meal on the table come suppertime.

  He reached the kitchen downstairs, then stepped into the pantry and found the lantern he kept on the top shelf just above his wife’s jars of canned preserves and green beans. John shook the lantern and heard the faint swish of kerosene in the base. There wasn’t very much left, but hopefully enough to shed some light on whatever had happened in the barn … or was still taking place, for all he knew.

  John set the lantern on the kitchen table, found a book of matches in a Tampa Nugget cigar box underneath the potbelly stove, then struck one. He raised the cloudy chimney of the lantern, lit the wick, and turned up the flame. It faltered weakly, due to the lack of coal oil in the lamp’s reservoir. He just hoped it would stay lit while he was exploring the barn.

  He unhooked the back door screen and stepped onto the rear porch. John stood there for a moment, feeling more than a little uneasy. The recollection of the screaming cow wasn’t all that preyed on his thoughts. Another thing that bothered him was the absence of sound in the grassy yard that stretched between the house and barn. Usually, the night was alive with the chirping of crickets, as well as the lonely call of a whippoorwill every now and then. But, at that moment, John Haskel heard nothing. The warm summer night was completely silent.

  Slowly, he started toward the dark structure of the barn. He passed the clothes line where Doris hung their laundry to dry, as well as the outhouse and the tool shed. As he approached the chicken coop, the unnatural silence of that night unsteadied his nerves once again. There was well over three dozen laying hens inside the coop, but they made no noise. He could imagine them burrowed into their nests, cowering in the darkness, afraid to make a sound.

  John paused next to the henhouse and took a moment to check his shotgun again, then continued on. He walked toward the single door that led into the barn and spotted something peculiar before he reached it. He lifted the lantern, casting its muted glow on the structure’s main entrance. “What the hell happened here?” he whispered to himself.

  The lower half of the door sported a jagged hole that was roughly two feet in diameter. As he crouched next to the opening and ran his fingers along its splintered edges, John found that the sturdy lumber of the barn door had not been kicked or battered in. Rather, it had been gnawed completely through. He pulled his fingers away from the opening and found them coated with wetness. The dampness that clung to his fingertips was slick and foamy, like the slobber from some kind of animal.

  He lowered his head to the hole in the door and listened. This time he heard something. It was an ugly combination of sounds; ripping and tearing, as well as the soft patter of liquid dripping onto the barn’s earthen floor. Two distinct smells also drifted from within the building. One was a scent that he recognized from years of hunting and field-dressing in the Tennessee woods. It was the rich, coppery odor of freshly let blood, and apparently quite a bit of it. The other was a musky, sour stench that was even more unnerving than the smell of blood. John had killed too many chicken snakes in the corn crib during his lifetime not to recognize the rancid odor that was common of a serpent.

  John leaned the shotgun against the weathered wall of the barn and fumbled with the latch of the barn door. After it was disengaged, he retrieved the twelve-gauge and pushed at the door with his foot. Lazily, it swung inward with a squeal of unoiled hinges. He expected the strange noises to stop at the sound of his entrance, but, strangely enough, they didn’t. The ripping and tearing continued, as well as a noise that John could only describe as the coarse grinding of something incredibly sharp against raw bone.

  The farmer said nothing. He didn’t call out in warning or attempt to scare the intruder away by making a lot of noise. No, he simply made his way as quietly as possible toward the rear of the barn and the place where the sickening sounds of feeding came from. It was the last stall near the back wall … the stall that Buttercup normally occupied.

  The closer John came to the stall, the stronger the scents of blood and snake grew. He stared down at the ground. The lantern light revealed dark rivulets trickling across the floor of earth and manure, seeping from underneath the gate of Buttercup’s stall. John balanced the shotgun in his right hand and curled his index finger through the trigger guard. As he neared the stall door, he saw that deep grooves had been gouged into the wood along the top, as if something with extremely sharp claws had scrambled over the hinged partition in its haste to get to the cow.

  John hesitated for a moment. The sounds of ripping and tearing and grating ceased to let up, and the farmer found himself wondering just what sort of creature could possess such an insatiable hunger. There seemed to be no pause in the intruder’s appetite. The ugly noises failed to slow down for even a second, instead growing in their ravenous fury.

  The farmer took a deep breath, bracing himself for the worst. But, when he finally gathered the nerve to step up to the gate and illuminate the stall with the glow of the kerosene lantern, John Haskel was still not prepared for the horrible scene he laid witness to.

  Buttercup was no longer the healthy Holstein that had provided milk, butter, and calves for the Haskel family for the past seven years. Now she was only a torn and bloody carcass that had been ripped open and disemboweled. John glanced over at the cow’s head, which lay a good five feet from its mutilated body. Buttercup’s glassy eyes stared dumbly at him, bulging from one final moment of shock and agony, but blinded by death.

  John then turned his startled gaze to the horrid thing that had been responsible for the slaughter. At first, he was certain that it was some sort of monstrous dog, but the flickering light of the lantern dispelled that first impression. The creature was about as tall as a year-old calf, yet long and lean of body and limb, perhaps seven feet from snout to tail. Its neck was serpentine, as was its triangular head, which dove deeply into the cow’s open belly like a piston, pulling and tearing with powerful jaws. And there was one other point that John couldn’t ignore. The creature that had killed Buttercup was not covered with fur or hair, but with a gleaming coat of jet black scales. Looking at it, John Haskel was reminded of the sleek and fluid body of a black racer.

  The farmer swallowed dryly, feeling a little dizzy at the sight of so much blood. It was that insignificant sound that finally alerted the creature to his presence. With a cross between a snarl and hiss, the monster withdrew its head from the carcass and turned its .attention toward the man at the gate. It regarded him silently for a moment and that was when John saw the thing’s eyes clearly for the first time. They were greenish-gold in color and the pupils were narrow slits like those of a snake, rather than round like a warm-blooded animal. Contempt burned in those reptilian eyes—a contempt that was plainly evil in nature—and it snapped its jaws as it drew a ragged string of bloody tissue down its gullet. Something that looked like a mixture of saliva and snot dripped from its yellowed fangs, which were razor-sharp and a good three to four inches in length.

  John simply stood and stared at the creature, paralyzed for an instant by the dark malice that flared in its golden eyes. The double-barreled shotgun felt heavy in his hand and he considered putting it to use, but secretly knew that such an action would be in vain, as well as downright foolhardy. Just looking at that coat of black armor, John knew that a blast of buckshot would rattle right off it with about as much effect as spring rain on a tin roof. The load of double-aught would scarcely be out of the barrel before
the creature would react, leaping over the gate of the stall after him.

  Carefully, John stepped back a couple of paces. The monster continued to glare at him, its toothy jaws curling into a sinister grin. “You just go on back to your eating,” the farmer said softly. “Finish what you came to do and then git.” But, even as he said it, John knew that the creature would “git” when it was good and ready to, and not a moment before.

  The glow of the lantern began to falter, its supply of kerosene dwindling down to nothing. The light began to dim and, suddenly, John knew that he had to leave right then. He shuddered at the thought of being trapped inside the barn with only pitch darkness between him and the monster.

  John watched as it growled at him one last time, and then turned its attention back to the dead cow. Slowly, he backtracked to the barn door, his heart thundering in his chest. He reached the entrance just in time. The lantern’s flame winked out a moment before he ducked through and shut the door behind him.

  As if in a daze, John Haskel walked through the dewy grass, back toward the farmhouse. He strained his ears and, faintly, heard the sound of bones being cracked for the marrow.

  He reached the house and let himself inside. John closed the back door and locked it, but knew that it would be little security against the thing in the barn if it had a notion to come in. He just hoped that poor Buttercup would fill its belly and satisfy its hunger that night, and that it would go its way afterwards.

  John mounted the stairs, walked down the hallway, and returned to his bedroom. Doris was fast asleep and he was careful not to wake her. He leaned the shotgun against the bedpost, and then shucked the work boots from his feet. Gently, he climbed into bed and slid beneath the covers.