Long Chills

by Ronald Kelly

  Roger nodded. “You do that. And, remember… everything’s going to be just fine.”

  Tyler offered a pitiful attempt at a smile. “Thanks, Dad.” Then he disappeared upstairs.

  Left alone in the living room, Roger Perry felt an unsettling sensation like none he had ever felt before. Had he just lied to his son? Would it be alright? Would he be able to keep his family safe from... what? God help him, exactly what was he dealing with here?

  He got up and went to the window that looked out onto the back yard. It was a bright, summer day. But nothing in that picturesque half-acre looked the least bit inviting. The shadows beneath the trees and around the swing set seemed ominously dark and the leaves of the peculiar tree at the end of the deck fluttered in a warm afternoon breeze, changing from green to blood red, over and over again.

  Roger’s fears came to a terrifying head the following Saturday.

  Trish wasn’t at home that afternoon. She was attending a baby shower in her honor, held by the ladies of their church. Roger and the kids had stayed home. Trish had tried to get Cindy to tag along, but the six-year-old got antsy when she was at all-adult functions. If there were no kids around to play with, she got bored and testy.

  Roger was in his study, catching up on some overdue office work, while the kids played Connect Four in the living room. Halfway through the game, Cindy looked out the side window.

  “I’ve got to go out to the playhouse,” she told her brother. “I left one of my Barbies out there.”

  “Cindy, you know we can’t,” Tyler told her. “Dad told us not to.”

  “But something bad could happen to it!” Cindy whined. “Bugs could get in its hair or some old cat could chew it up. Come on… it’ll only take a second. Then we’ll come right back in.”

  Her brother looked toward the window and sighed. “Okay, just a second. We’ll go out and get your ol’ doll and then back inside. Understand?”

  Cindy nodded. Together, they went through the kitchen and utility and stepped out onto the back deck. They left the house quietly, so as not to alert their father.

  They hopped off the deck into the yard. Tyler stood beneath the tree, while Cindy ran across the grass to the swing set and its playhouse tower.

  “Hurry up, will you?” called Tyler. He watched as she reached the wooden ladder and began to climb up to the one-room playhouse with its two windows and single exit with the curved slide spiraling downward.

  “I’m going as fast I can!” she snapped. Cindy pulled herself up, one rung at a time, until she disappeared through the trapdoor in the bottom.

  A breeze blew across the back yard, causing the leaves of the trees to rustle. Uncomfortably, Tyler looked up into the foliage over his head. Thankfully, he saw nothing. Nothing but leaves.

  A second later, Cindy appeared in the doorway at the top of the slide. “Look!” she called, holding up her Barbie. “I found…” Then, suddenly, his sister’s words faded and her mouth hung open, her lips trembling. Her eyes watched horrified… focused several feet above her brother’s head.

  “What’s the matter, Cindy?” Tyler demanded. “What…?”

  Then he looked up, just as something descended out of the tree. Something unthinkable and full of malice.

  “Tyler!” screamed Cindy. She flung her doll aside then raced down the channel of the slide toward the ground below…

  “Thanks for meeting us here so quickly,” Roger said. He felt strangely lightheaded, as if in a daze, as he carried the bloody body of his son into the doctor’s examination room.

  “Let’s just take a look at Tyler and see what’s going on,” Jack McCall said as his golfing buddy laid the boy on the table at the far side of the room. Tyler was in shock, his eyes wide, and his face pale and ashen.

  Dr. McCall began to examine the eight-year-old. Tyler’s clothes were ripped in several places, especially around his shoulders and chest, and beneath the tears were jagged lacerations. His face was swollen and bleeding, especially around his right eye. “What the hell happened to him?”

  “He… he went into the back yard,” Roger told him, his voice cracking with emotion. “Something attacked him.”

  “What about Cindy? Is she okay?”

  “Yes. It didn’t hurt her at all.”

  Jack looked up at him. “It? What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” mumbled his friend. “God help me, I don’t know.”

  The doctor reached out and grabbed Roger by the shoulder. “Don’t you go AWOL on me too. I need you here with me… for your son.”

  Roger bent over, hands braced on knees, breathing deeply. After a moment, he stood back up, his eyes clearer, less distant. “I’m here, Jack.”

  “Good. So Cindy is okay. Where is she now?”

  “I left her at that little children’s table in your waiting room. Said she was going to draw us a picture… of the thing that did this to her brother. Cindy claims that she found a plastic ball bat lying in the yard and knocked it off of him, before it could do more damage.”

  McCall turned his attention back to the boy. “The cuts and abrasions seem superficial. Looks like a cat or something lit into him. It’s this eye I’m concerned about. Can you swing that magnifying glass around here for me?”

  Roger took a magnifier mounted on a metal arm and pivoted it toward the doctor. Jack turned on the built-in light and brought the lens close to the boy’s face. “Yeah… yeah, I see something there… right in the corner toward his nose. There’s a pair of tweezers in the drawer beside the sink. Fetch them, will you?”

  Again, Roger did as he asked. “What is it?”

  “It looks like a twig of some kind.” Carefully, he probed with the tines of the tweezers and finally caught hold of the foreign object at the corner of Tyler’s right eye. When he withdrew it, the doctor held it closer to the magnifying glass.

  Roger shook his head. “What is that, Jack? That can’t be…”

  “That’s what it looks like,” he said solemnly. “A finger. A tiny, little wooden finger.”

  Roger moved closer and examined it. The magnifying lens enlarged the object tenfold. It was a finger, scarcely an inch and a half in length. Slender, dark brown in color, and hinged in the middle with a knotty knuckle. At the tip was a curved barb that both men could only describe as a wicked claw.

  “Oh God!” moaned Roger. “Oh God!”

  Jack deposited the wooden finger into a metal tray and turned to Roger. “Snap out of it, buddy! Come on… I need you to focus and help me with this thing. I’m a helluva good doctor, but what we’re dealing with here goes way beyond my medical knowledge.”

  Roger nodded. “I’m here. I’m here.”

  “Okay… now tell me… exactly what attacked your son?”

  “This,” said a tiny voice from the open doorway.

  They turned to see Cindy standing there, extending a piece of construction paper toward them.

  Roger walked over to her. His hand trembled as he took the picture from her. Together, he and the physician stared at the image scrawled there in brown and red crayon.

  The doctor took the drawing and studied it. “Cindy, honey, this can’t be…”

  The girl’s eyes were dead serious. “I saw it. I drew it. That’s what hurt Tyler.”

  Roger dropped to his knees in front of his little girl. “Baby, are you sure this isn’t just one of your imaginary…”

  “This isn’t make-believe!” the six-year-old screamed at him. “I saw it with my own eyes! It jumped on Tyler… tried to kill him! It spoke to him!”

  “Spoke to him?” asked Jack. “What did it say?”

  Tears formed in the girl’s eyes. “It said ‘Hate brother! Kill brother!’”

  The doctor stood there for a long moment, as though in deep thought. Then he smiled gently at the little girl with the long brown hair. “Cindy, sweetheart, would you stay with your brother? I need to talk to your dad for a minute.”

  Cindy nodded. “Sure.” She crossed the room and sa
t on the doctor’s rolling stool, holding her big brother’s pale hand.

  “Come with me, Rog!” the doctor said. He pulled his friend to his feet and marched him down the hall to another examination room on the opposite side of the corridor. Once inside, he closed the door behind them.

  “What are you…?” Roger began to stammer.

  “Do you have any earthly idea what’s taking place here?” Jack asked him.

  “No,” he admitted, his voice full of defeat. “Do you?”

  “Lord God help me, but, yes, I believe I do.” The doctor leaned heavily against the door, looking bewildered. “Roger… what have you done?”

  “Me? I swear, Jack, I haven’t done anything to harm my children…”

  “Haven’t you? Maybe not directly, but… Rog, this thing that attacked Tyler… I think you had something to do with bringing it about.”

  “What do you mean ‘bringing it about’?”

  “Hell, I don’t know… conjuring it, creating it maybe.”

  Roger looked at his friend as if he were a stranger. “What are you getting at?”

  Jack McCall swallowed and took a deep breath. He closed his eyes for a moment and then stared his friend fully in the face. “Roger, I sent that pod-thing and those hairs I took from your head to the state forensic lab. Their DNA matched. That thing, whatever it was… was a part of you.”

  “That’s crazy talk, Jack. Exactly what do you mean by that?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I can’t say for sure. It’s totally beyond my knowledge. But I know someone may know what’s going on. Someone who may be able to help you.”

  “Help me? Who?”

  “Hot Pappy.”

  Roger couldn’t help but laugh. “Hot Pappy? You mean Jeremiah Spangler? That old black man I’ve seen sweeping the church sidewalk and picking up aluminum cans by the side of the road?”

  “Yes, that’s him.”

  “What could he possibly know about this thing that attacked Tyler?”

  Jack shrugged his lean shoulders. “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Anyway, I think it would be in your best interest… and that of your family… if you would go and talk to him.”

  “You’re off your rocker, Jack,” Roger protested. “I’m not going to bare my soul to an old drunkard who doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. Why, he doesn’t look like he has a lick of sense in his head. Looks like he’s stoned out of his gourd half of the time!”

  “Yes, you’re right. Hot Pappy has his problems. But he has knowledge, too. Knowledge of things you and I don’t have an inkling about. Otherworldly things.”

  “Otherworldly things? What the devil are you talking about?”

  The doctor held up Cindy’s drawing. “This is what I’m talking about! Look at it! Look at its eyes, dammit!”

  Roger felt a cold stone of dread form in the pit of his gut as he stared at the eyes of the creature in the picture. The depiction was crude, but undeniable. They were hazel green eyes… hauntingly familiar eyes. “Shit. Jack, how could this…?”

  “Go to Hot Pappy,” he urged. “Talk to him.”

  “But…”

  “If you do, you have nothing to lose, Roger,” Jack McCall told him firmly. “But if you don’t… then maybe you’ll end up having everything to lose.”

  Trish Perry slept lightly that night.

  Butter Bean was kicking up a storm, just as restless as she was. It was almost as though her unborn baby was agitated for some reason.

  The baby’s nocturnal activity wasn’t the only thing that occupied the woman’s thoughts. There was Tyler and the frightening incident that had occurred that afternoon. She only knew what her husband had told her – that Tyler and Cindy had been playing in the back yard when a stray cat had jumped from a tree and attacked the boy. Considering the amount of scratches and cuts her son possessed, as well as his debilitating state of shock, she found the story difficult to believe. Tyler was still partially sedated and couldn’t tell her the details of what had happened. And Cindy was oddly tight-lipped about the whole thing. When Trish questioned her daughter and asked if the animal had been a cat, the six-year-old had nodded, but only after a second of hesitation.

  She found herself laying in the darkness of the bedroom, drifting in and out of sleep. The sound machine, which had been a comfort to her during her most recent pregnancy, seemed like a hindrance to her that night. Trish kept imagining that she heard noises echoing from somewhere in the house. Roger was dead to the world, apparently exhausted by that day’s events. She recalled how strangely her husband had acted all evening; quiet and introspective, as though he were wrestling with a particularly vexing decision. When she asked him about his behavior, he had been evasive about the subject. That, in itself, bothered her. She and Roger had shared everything during their twelve year marriage. But she was certain he was keeping something important from her; something concerning the attack on Tyler and what had actually happened to him in the back yard.

  Trish sighed and tried her best to relax. She felt alone and scared in the darkness. She considered getting up and investigating the phantom noises, but figured it was simply her imagination playing tricks on her.

  Around two in the morning, Trish was awakened by pangs of discomfort. At first, she feared that she was suffering contractions, but that wasn’t the case. The baby was twisting and turning frantically. If she hadn’t known any better, she would have swore that it was frightened of something.

  Trish attempted to sit up, but the violent motion in her abdomen caused her to lay flat again. What’s wrong with it? she wondered, terrified. Oh God, what’s happening? Am I losing it? Is it dying?

  It was at that moment that she realized that there something in the bedroom. A stench filled in the air – a wet, woodsy smell. The bed shuddered slightly and Trish felt the bedclothes beneath her grow suddenly taut as something pulled itself upward onto the bed.

  A low, grating chuckle sounded above the noise of artificial rain.

  “Baby,” someone whispered.

  Trish craned her neck and peered over the swell of her belly. Something sat perched at the foot of the bed. Something thin and gangly and dark.

  Oh, dear God… what is it? But, then again, she didn’t even need to ask. She knew. It was the thing that had attacked Tyler. And it wasn’t a silly old cat.

  “Roger,” she hissed in a whisper. Her husband was sound asleep. She could hear him snoring in that nasally staccato way of his. Desperately, she felt to the side with her left hand, but he was too far away. She couldn’t locate him.

  Trish whimpered as the thing left its place and began to crawl slowly toward her. She felt it scramble across her swollen feet and legs, coldly dank and oily, as thin and hard as stick kindling. She felt the baby within her womb flinch violently… retreating, moving backward, toward her lower spine. It knows that it’s there! she thought to herself.

  Then the thing was upon her, straddling her upper thighs. Dark, spidery hands raked across the dome of Trish’s abdomen. At first, tenderly, almost lovingly.

  “Roger!” Trish hissed beneath her breath.

  “Baby,” the thing cooed softly. “Brother? Sister?”

  Oh God! Oh dear God, oh God!

  The creature’s touch began to grow coarser and less gentle. Soon the pressure of its caress grew uncomfortable, almost painful.

  “Come out, baby,” the thing in the dark beckoned. “Come out and play.”

  Trish felt the nail of a slender, twig-like finger bare downward. Her flesh resisted at first, then gave way. The tip of the claw punched through the tight skin of her belly and began to draw slowly to the side.

  She screamed in pain and terror. “ROGER!!”

  Her husband lurched out of his sleep, shocked out of his grogginess by Trish’s cry. He spotted the dark thing on top of his wife and kicked out. The sole of his foot collided with the invader, knocking it off the bed and onto the floor.

  “What is it, Roger?” Trish shrieked. “WHAT IS
IT?!”

  Roger jumped out of bed and headed around the footboard, his bare feet skidding on the hardwood floor. The thing crouched there, etched in the pale red glow of the digital alarm clock display. It snickered at him, then slowly lifted into the air with a insectile buzz that ruffled the hair of his head. As Roger lunged at it, the creature shot through the bedroom doorway and disappeared into the hallway.

  The kids! his mind screamed. It’s going for the kids!

  But once he entered the hallway, he discovered that that was not the case… at least, not at the moment. The dark silhouette of the thing shown against the moonlit window at the far end of the hallway. It was precisely as Cindy had rendered it in crayon – dark, angular, almost mosquito-like, with tattered, transparent wings. Then the glass of the window shattered and the invader had escaped.

  Roger rushed to the opening of the ruptured window. He felt shards of broken glass lacerate the soles of his feet, but that was the least of his worries. “Stay away from us!” he bellowed into the night. “Leave us alone!”

  Jack McCall’s words echoed in his mind… the urgent request that he visit Hot Pappy Spangler. “If you don’t… then maybe you’ll end up having everything to lose.”

  Somewhere in the darkness, the thing giggled. The laughter sounded hostile and mischievous, like the mirth of a spiteful child.

  Then it was gone.

  Roger Perry sat parked at the side of a rutted, dirt road, beyond the outskirts of New Middleton. He stared out the side window at a small, gray wood shack surrounded by hulks of rusty junk and a sea of empty beer and Crown Royal bottles.

  It was nine-thirty the following morning and he should have been utterly exhausted and on his last legs. His nerves were too wired to allow that to happen though.

  The past seven and a half hours had been a frantic procession of hasty plans and precautions. First, he had rushed his wife to the emergency room of Williamson Medical Center in nearby Franklin. Trish had been hysterical following the invasion of the thing from the backyard and he had been afraid that her anxiety would either throw her into contractions or cause her to miscarry. Thankfully, the wound in her belly was superficial. She was in a private room at that moment, sedated enough to calm her down, but not to harm the baby. Tyler and Cindy were staying with Jack McCall and his wife across town… a safe distance from Rolling Meadows and danger.