Long Chills

by Ronald Kelly

  Slowly, in a daze, I went to her now. She stood on the circular platform of the lighthouse, waiting for me.

  “Isn’t it beautiful here, sweetheart?” she asked with that infectious smile of hers.

  I looked over the railing at the vast blue expanse of the ocean. The waves crashed upon the gray rocks below and the gulls circled and soared overhead. I didn’t know what to make of it, being here at this place, when I should have been in a dark thicket in a stretch of Tennessee backwoods.

  “Is this heaven?” I asked her, not knowing what else to say.

  She beamed. “It can be if you want,” she told me. She opened her arms to me. “I’ve missed you so much, Robbie.”

  Tears bloomed in my eyes and I felt a joy unlike any I’d ever known. “Oh, Mom… I’ve missed you, too.”

  I went to her then and embraced the woman I’d lost when I was twelve. She wrapped her loving arms around me… and that was when I realized what a horrible mistake I had made.

  At first, I felt warmth and acceptance, exactly what I should have felt in the grasp of the woman who had given birth to me. But then that warmth swiftly gave way to a chilling sensation of displacement, as though something cold and alive had infected my life’s blood and was coursing throughout my veins. A feeling of being drained of strength and consciousness rushed in on me, threatening to overtake me.

  I don’t know how, but I tore myself from my mother’s grasp. Or the grasp of the thing that had presented itself as my long-dead mother.

  “Where are you going, Robbie?” she said forlornly. As I backed away, toward the head of the spiral staircase, I watched as her face began to wither into a parchment-covered skull, her hair falling away in dry, dead strands. “I’ve waited so long, my dear. So very long.”

  With a cry on my lips, I stumbled down the iron stairway. I felt as weak as water and nearly tumbled, head over heels, down the metal risers several times. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, I reached the entranceway of the lighthouse and plunged –

  – into the darkening woods once again. Sluggishly, I tore my way through the blackberry bramble and past the deadfall. I reached the jeep and, refusing to look back, started the engine and took off down the shadowy stretch of Tanglewood Road.

  What’s happening to me? I wondered as I drove, scarcely able to keep my eyes open. It was as though every ounce of strength had been leeched from my body. I felt as though I were on the verge of dying.

  A minute later, I had reached the highway. I was so intent on getting away from that wooded back road, that I failed to see the dump truck barreling toward me as I pulled out.

  I must have slipped from consciousness before the collision, because I can’t, for the life of me, remember the crushing impact that followed.

  I survived the crash with only a broken arm and a concussion. But what mostly ailed me were the aftereffects of my experience beyond the deadfall alongside the deserted stretch of Tanglewood Road.

  My doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I was terribly anemic and my white blood count was way off the scale. Tests for leukemia and a dozen other possible causes came up negative. In time, my immune system strengthened and rebuilt itself.

  I remember waking up in my bed at the hospital and seeing Karla sitting next to my bed. She smiled at me, but there was something in her eyes that shouldn’t have been there. An underlying expression of disappointment, instead of relief. But why?

  Then I looked toward the doorway of the hospital room and saw Phil Jenson standing at a comfortable distance… and I knew.

  “You had us scared to death,” she said. She played the faithful wife and took my hand in hers. “As soon as I got the call, Phil drove me back. What happened?”

  I shrugged, feeling as though a freight train had given me a full-body massage. “I can’t remember much about it. I was coming home from work and I had a wreck. I don’t even remember how it happened,” I lied.

  “Well, you ought to see the jeep,” she said, with a hint of disapproval. “The thing is totaled.” She absently brushed a strand of brown hair from her eyes. “But, hey, you’re the one that matters, aren’t you?”

  Am I? I wondered. I looked over at Phil. He avoided looking me in the eyes.

  It wasn’t long before he departed, leaving Karla there with me. We sat there in silence for a long time, not talking, watching some stupid show on the TV suspended on the opposite wall.

  Later on, she dozed off in the chair, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

  I laid there and stared at her, feeling sad and lost. What happened to us, Karla? I thought. What turned it all around? I remembered the day of our wedding. She had been so beautiful standing before me. Our love for one another had been so complete then, so very evident. And it had lasted… for a while.

  Then she had applied for the administrative assistant job and began working for Phil.

  My despair gave way to anger. What am I going to do with you, Karla? I wondered.

  Soon, the nurse came in and gave me something for pain and, before long, I too was asleep.

  Things got steadily worse for Karla and me following my release from the hospital.

  The emotional chasm between us seemed to widen and grow deeper and darker with each passing day. She spent more of her time at work or on business trips… with Phil.

  Also, her attitude grew more vindictive and loveless. I couldn’t count the amount of arguments we got into over one stupid thing or another. I tried my best to keep our marriage on course, but it seemed destined to go careening off a cliff, to crash and burn on the jagged rocks below.

  Then, one night in late October, the culmination of resentment and harsh feelings finally came to a head.

  We had decided to go out to eat and take in a movie. Secretly, I had hoped our date would help rekindle some of the feeling we had shared before. But Karla wouldn’t allow that to happen. She seemed snappy and preoccupied during our meal, as if she derived no enjoyment from us being together at all. Once, her cell phone had rung and she had hissed “I’ll call you back later,” before returning it to her purse and finishing her dessert.

  The movie had proven to be even more disheartening. We sat, side by side, but there was no closeness, no hand-holding. It was a romantic comedy, the type we once loved so very much, but that night neither of us laughed. We might as well have been sitting across the theatre from one another the entire time.

  The silence inside the car as we drove home was oppressive. Something was about to happen that night… to both of us. Something bad. I could feel it. Karla was about to spring something devastating on me… yet something I had expected for a very long time.

  Halfway home, I saw a dirt turnoff at the left-hand of the road. Without warning, I steered off the highway and onto the dark stretch of Tanglewood Road.

  “Where are you going?” snapped Karla irritably.

  “It’s a short cut,” I replied.

  We drove for a couple of minutes in pitch darkness. There were no streetlights and very little moonlight filtered from the treetops above.

  I slowed the Lexus down and made a sharp turn in the road. The headlights illuminated the mossy mass of the deadfall.

  “What the hell are you up to?” she demanded to know.

  I cut the engine and sat behind the steering wheel, leaving the headlights burning.

  “Let’s talk.”

  Karla stared at me for a long moment, then unleashed a harsh laugh. “Talk? You want to talk? Okay… let’s talk then.”

  I sat there, gripping the wheel firmly. Staring past the windshield into the woods beyond.

  “I don’t love you anymore,” she said with a cruel edge to her voice.

  “Really?” I continued to stare straight ahead. Watching.

  “I’m in love with Phil,” she told me. “I want a divorce.”

  “Uh-huh.” Watching. Searching.

  “Our marriage has been dead for a long time, Rob,” she continued. “I deserve to be happy, don
’t I?”

  A little smile crossed my face. “Karla?”

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Look.”

  She turned her attention from me and stared through the windshield, toward the dense forest awash in halogen light. “What the – ?” she muttered.

  There was a little girl standing near the deadfall. A girl wearing a white dress with tiny pink flowers embroidered across the neckline. Her hair was long and chestnut brown… the same hue as that of my wife.

  It was Karla’s twin sister, Kerrie.

  The one who had drowned in the family swimming pool at the age of five.

  Karla turned her eyes toward me. They were full of confusion… and fear.

  “Go ahead, Karla,” I told her. “It’s all right.”

  She placed her hand on the door handle. Hesitated.

  “She’s waiting for you,” I urged softly. “Go.”

  As if in a daze, Karla left the car. I watched as she made her way through the ankle-deep kudzu, toward the child who stood next to the deadfall.

  I rolled my window down a crack and listened.

  “Hi, sissy,” said the little girl. She extended a pale hand.

  “Hi,” returned Karla. She stared at her sibling for a long moment, then their fingers entwined.

  In the pale glow of the headlights, I watched as the two turned and started toward the forest. I could tell that the girl was already doing a number on her. Karla’s movements were jerky and unnatural. She turned once and smiled back at me. In the light, her face leered like that of a skull.

  I shifted into reverse and then started on down the road for home. I glanced back only once, but the darkness of the forest had already swallowed them completely.

  I don’t know why I ever went back. Out of curiosity maybe… or guilt.

  I received some flack over Karla’s disappearance. Her parents were sure that I had something to do with it, and the police had suspected me of foul play. I submitted to a polygraph to satisfy them. They asked me if I had killed my wife and, truthfully, I had said no. I passed the test and, eventually, their suspicions lagged and the case grew cold.

  A few days ago, I happened across Phil Jenson in a restaurant. He openly confronted me, accusing me of doing Karla in. I defused the situation before it could escalate into something violent. “She left us, Phil,” I’d told him. “Both of us.” And I hadn’t lied.

  Then, one afternoon in mid-February, I was out running some errands in town. On the way back, I spotted the turnoff up ahead. I didn’t hesitate. I took the shortcut home.

  It was cold that day, in the mid-30s. The greenery of the surrounding forest had withered and faded with winter, leaving mostly dead vegetation, but the pines and cedars still held their evergreen luster. The road was speckled with clumps of old snow, where sunlight had been unable to reach them.

  I slowed the Lexus as I approached the deadfall. I put the car in park and rolled down the window.

  Karla stood there, halfway between the deadfall and the road. She was tanned and trim, wearing that slinky sharkskin bikini she had worn during our honeymoon in the Fiji Islands. She even sported that diamond stud in her belly button, the one I’d bought for her birthday the month before we were engaged.

  She smiled at me brilliantly, teeth so perfectly white, eyes so clear and full of hope.

  My thoughts returned to that private bungalow where we had spent that glorious week in Fiji. The evening walk we had made, hand in hand, along the white sand beach and the wondrous love we had made beside the gentle surf. I remember peeling the bikini away, revealing her underlying beauty, reveling in the way she felt against me. I remember the hardness of the diamond stud on my tongue as I made that teasing journey downward.

  Then, as the brilliant pink and gold hues of the sunset had spilled across us, our passion built and spiraled to a pinnacle unlike any either of us had ever reached before. A pinnacle of mutual ecstasy that almost seemed to transcend both life and death.

  Now, standing before me, Karla’s eyes told me that it could be that way again.

  At least the death part.

  “I love you, Rob,” she said with more sincerity than I’d heard in years.

  I didn’t return the sentiment. Instead, I floored the gas and sped far away from that terrible thing that existed on the lonesome stretch of Tanglewood Road.

  I kept on driving.

  Running.

  And, in some awful way, I am running still.

  Flesh-Welder

  “Who is it?” asked Nurse Taylor. The woman in the drab white uniform jacked a shell into her sawed-off shotgun and stood beside the warehouse door.

  “It’s me… Owen,” came the voice of a child.

  “Let him in,” allowed the kindly doctor.

  After the rolling steel door had been hoisted, letting in the sweltering dragon’s breath of a high noon gust, a bizarre procession entered the cavernous building; a battered and rusty red wagon – an ancient Radio Flyer – pulled by two harnessed curs and the boy. The dogs, one a Doberman, the other a mutt of indeterminate parentage, were a sorry pair. Both were ravaged with mange and parasites, and the effects of malnutrition showed in their bloated bellies and sharp, serrated ribs.

  A small, black boy led the dog-drawn wagon. They knew him only as Owen, one of the doctor’s regular scavengers. The child was a seasoned survivor at the tender age of nine. His dark face bore the battle scars so common in that brutal day and time – horizontal slashes from a razor fight, as well as a bullet-punctured lower lip. But the most noticeable disfigurement appeared in the form of raw radiation burns which covered the right side of his face and neck like brilliant pink islands on an ebony sea. He was well-armed for a child, toting a .38 snubnose on one hip and a long-bladed butcher knife on the other.

  Doctor Rourke waited until the door had again been lowered and secured before he emerged from his darkened office and approached the child.

  “So, Owen, what have you brought me today?”

  “Lots of good junk, Doc.” Owen smiled up at the big man with the air of a true wheeler-dealer. “The fighting has been hot and heavy down on the southern limits this morning. Right after the SA’s began pulling back and our boys started mopping up, I snuck in with the wagon and took my pick of the casualties. Real fresh stuff today. No day-old crap like last time.”

  “Excellent,” said Rourke, crouching beside the bed of the wagon. “Let me see what you have.”

  With the flourish of a stage magician, Owen whipped back the olive drab tarp, revealing his store of merchandise. The doctor examined each item carefully, nodding his approval. “Yes,” he agreed, “yes, I do believe this is your best batch yet!”

  Owen beamed proudly. “It’s been a whole lot easier since you lent me the scalpel and bone saw, Doc. Now I can work faster, get what I need before the disposal crews come to clean up.”

  “Shall we retire to my office and conduct our business, my friend?” The bearded physician ushered the boy inside a partitioned room.

  Then came the bartering. Doctor Rourke brought out a crate of assorted post-war canned goods and firearm ammunition and set it on the desk beside the goods to be bargained for. Like two Indians trading over a campfire, boy and man swapped to and fro with courtesy and respect. The doctor examined each body part meticulously, checking for freshness, muscle tone, and size. Those that did not meet his standards, due to irreparable damage, disease, or rigor mortis, were discarded. The trading was done diplomatically: a box of .38 ammo for a man’s arm, a can of beans for the leg of a child. As each transaction was haggled over and completed, the food and ammo were placed in Owen’s wagon while the human limbs were stacked neatly like cord wood on a gurney to be carted into the warehouse deep-freeze for proper preservation.

  The last item was a healthy human heart floating in a quart Mason jar of fresh blood. The doctor was interested, as he already had a potential customer for the organ. “How about a couple of cans of halved peaches, along with a box o
f shells for your father’s twelve-gauge?” he offered, figuring it to be more than a fair trade.

  Owen’s face suddenly grew sad and angry. “I ain’t got no use for shotgun shells no more, Doc. My dad…. he’s dead.”

  The physician laid a sympathetic hand on the child’s shoulder. He had noticed that the boy had been somewhat nervous and preoccupied, especially during one period of bartering. Now he knew why. “I’m terribly sorry, Owen. When did this happen?”

  “Three days ago… before the big counterattack. The army came to Ruin Town looking for men to fight. Any man able to hold a gun they armed and herded into trucks headed for the front. They came for my dad, but he’d been awful sick with that new plague that’s going around. They dragged him out of bed and, when he wasn’t able to stand, they pushed him out into the street and put a bullet in the back of his head.”

  “Who was it, Owen? Do you know who was responsible?”

  The boy nodded, near tears now. “It was him, Doc. It was the General.”

  Rourke’s normally serene eyes now darkened into angry pits. Jeremiah Payne, also known as the General, was a ruthless looter and murderer who performed wholesale injustice and horrid atrocities under the protective guise of military authority. He and his band of roving mercenaries fought the enemy when a battle presented itself. But, when the hostility died down, they were back to their old tricks, descending upon the meager population like hungry wolves. Cowardly bushwhackers with automatic weapons, that’s what they were; sadistic thieves who preyed without conscience on the weak and helpless.

  “What about you and your mother?” Rourke asked.

  A single tear of rage trickled the length of Owen’s scarred face. “I was hidden… but, Mom, she tried to stop them. The General knocked her down and tore off her clothes. He hurt her real bad, Doc… down there.”