The Day Bob Greeley Died

by Kimberly A Bettes

  After searching all plausible places in the yard, no one had any luck locating Bob. The group put their heads together to brainstorm ideas and form a plan to find him. Grace was growing more concerned with each passing minute, and Bruce was eager to ease her fears. She’d been through enough today.

  As they decided to break off into smaller groups and spread out their search area, Sue screamed.

  Everyone looked at her, and then immediately followed the direction of her gaze. More screams came, as well as gasps and sobs. Some of the men in the group cursed, others prayed.

  It seems they’d found Bob Greeley after all. With his hands still bound behind him, his lifeless body was draped across one of the highest branches of the mighty oak tree. The very tree that he’d stood under only moments earlier with a rope around his neck, pleading for his life.

  There were times in life when everything was clear. Everything was easy to interpret and understand. Other times, there was no sense to be made no matter how hard you looked. This was one of those times.

  Bob Greeley had been marked to die by a group of his peers, people he knew and worked with. Upon learning they were wrong and he was innocent, they decided to let him live. But sometimes, just sometimes, you couldn’t take a thing back. You couldn’t undo a curse, lift a death sentence, or remove a mark.

  Standing underneath the oak tree, faces turned to the sky, they looked at Bob Greeley and wished they could take it back.

  “My head hurts,” Emma said quietly, swaying on her feet.

  “I could use a drink,” said Henry solemnly.

  Sara agreed with a nod of her head.

  Gerald added, “I think we need to pray.”

  “All the praying in the world won’t do any good. It won’t make up for what happened today, for what we’ve done. Will it?” asked Miriam, wondering how she was ever going to live with herself now, knowing that this had all started with her.

  “Probably not. But we’ve got to try, don’t we?”

  Each member of the group was sure to spend years trying to make sense of the day, telling themselves that it was just his time, that they had nothing to do with his death. Not really. And they would spend just as much time reminding themselves that if they hadn’t called him out that day, he wouldn’t have been outside in the tornado, and he certainly wouldn’t have been bound and unable to save himself.

  As the reality of the situation sank in on her, Grace fell to her knees and cried. In that moment, on her knees in the mud beneath the tree that held her dead husband, she couldn’t remember what the blow of Bob’s hand to her face felt like. All she could remember was the warmth of his embrace.

  The End

  Afterword

  I was born in 1977, just in time to grow up alongside the likes of Jason Voorhies, Michael Meyer, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead and his Cenobite pals, and that loveable scamp Leatherface. If a horror movie was made in the ‘80s, I watched it. Usually more than once. I loved the adrenaline that made my heart pound, the nightmares that woke me up at night with a fresh burst of fear. It was a safe fear, and I thrived on it.

  What scared me more than any slasher film was a simple little show created long before my time called “The Twilight Zone”. Many people don’t see the horror in it, and I find that sad. It’s absolutely terrifying, especially for its time. A time before man had explored space, a time when everyone lived in fear of the drop of a bomb. The show’s creator, Rod Serling, did a fantastic job of delving into the unknown, exposing man’s fears and weaknesses.

  I learned long ago that nothing is more terrifying than real life. The greatest writer can only imagine so much, but the horrors that take place around us on a daily basis leave even the most imaginative writers in awe and fear. Serling understood that it was the everyday things that scare us most, and he used that to create the show that has always been and will always be my favorite.

  Undoubtedly, this is why I still prefer real-life horrors to those of the imagination. Sure, Jason Voorhies is scary. That’s why he’s my favorite slasher villain. But even when I was steeped in fear as a child at the thought that he was hiding under my bed, I knew he wasn’t real. It was the same for all the others. As terrifying as they were, they were fake. That’s why the fear I loved to experience while watching those movies was a safe fear. Because I knew that nothing could happen. Even if I did dare to hang my leg off the side of the bed, there would be no one to rip it from my torso and gnaw on it, or drag me into the depths of a nightmarish underworld. They were fake, figments of a writer’s imagination and a makeup artist’s talent. And that’s not nearly as scary as what is happening right now, perhaps in your neighbor’s basement.

  Serling instilled in me a love for exposing the fears that lie within us all, and for the ironic twists that you never saw coming. He also awakened in me a desire to explore the mind of man, to find out what makes a person behave as they do.

  This story, The Day Bob Greeley Died, is my homage to Rod Serling. It’s a story not unlike those I’ve seen on “The Twilight Zone”, a story that takes place between ‘the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.’

  To you, Rod.

  Kimberly

  February 24, 2013

  Excerpt from BEFORE THE HARVEST

  My eyes opened when I sensed that something was wrong. Maybe not wrong, but something was definitely different. I lifted my head from my shoulder, wincing at the stiffness in my neck from having fallen asleep in such an awkward position. My right leg was numb below the knee because it had been folded underneath me while I dozed. I slowly slid it from beneath my left leg, and placed my bare foot on the floor of the porch.

  As the pins and needles pricked at the nerves in my legs, the blessed sign of renewed circulation, I realized what was wrong. The crickets were no longer chirping. Their loud symphony was half of what had lulled me to sleep, the glass of wine being the other half. The glass now stood empty on the table beside the rocking chair, and the night around me was eerily silent.

  I was no entomologist. I knew very little about bugs, other than they gave me the heebie-jeebies. It wasn’t a phobia, but it was getting there. What I knew about crickets boiled down to two things. One, only the males chirped. And two, they stopped chirping when there was movement nearby. Given that I had been dozing, I knew I hadn’t moved, but something had caused them to fall silent.

  I glanced out to the driveway, confirming that Tim’s truck was still gone. He hadn’t yet returned from town, where he was no doubt sitting at the bar, drinking a beer to calm his nerves. This hadn’t been the worst argument we’d ever had, but it had certainly been among the top ten. We didn’t argue often, but when we did, he always went out for three beers—no more, no less—and I opted for a single glass of red wine.

  Since Tim was still in town, it was obvious that he hadn’t startled the crickets. Yet something had, of that I was certain. The silence around me was spooky. In the five months we’d lived on the farm, I’d never heard it this quiet. There was always an animal or bug making some sort of noise; coyotes yipping, owls hooting, frogs croaking, and of course crickets chirping. But now the night was filled with silence, and it was unnerving.

  After rubbing the sleep from my eyes and the stiffness from my neck, I yawned and surveyed the yard in search of a small animal that could be blamed for the sudden stillness, but saw none. I sat up straighter in the rocking chair, making the pins and needles prick even harder at my leg. Wiggling my numb toes, I squinted, peering into the darkness that surrounded the farmhouse.

  I was looking to the left when I heard a rustle in the corn to my right. I quickly turned my head toward the sound and waited, breath caught in my lungs. The clouds slid across the sky, revealing the bright light of the full moon, and that’s when I saw movement from the cornfield.

  He emerged from between the rows, knife in hand. With a painfully tingling leg, I leaned forward in the rocking chair, trying to make out his face. I was unable to tell anything about him from thi
s distance, other than he wore all black. I didn’t make a sound, and he didn’t seem to notice me as he walked, almost stomping his way across the yard, toward the back of the house and the barn.

  The two-story farmhouse and barn, both built in the late 1800s but holding up very well, set on eight cleared acres of land in the middle of 1,200 acres of corn fields. A gravel driveway led from the house to the main road, which was nearly a mile away. All this was too far for a man to walk in the middle of the night, some would think. Yet one had. And at the moment, he was walking purposefully across the yard, toward the barn, as if he not only knew his way around this property, but had some business being on it. When we’d leased the property, the owners hadn’t mentioned that someone would appear in the middle of the night to traipse around the yard. That would’ve been a deal breaker.

  I wondered who he was and why he was on our property. I thought of the suddenly silent crickets, and thought that perhaps this was a neighbor who had lost an animal, a dog perhaps, and was out searching for it. The dog had probably run through the yard, scaring the crickets into silence, and had headed toward the barn. The man was just following his dog. That would explain everything. After all, we’d lived on this farm for only a few months. The man could’ve been a neighbor that we just hadn’t met yet. Of course that didn’t give him the right to wander around our property like he owned it, but I reminded myself that this was the country. We weren’t in St. Louis any more. Rules—and people—were much more relaxed here.

  I sat there for moment, trying to rationalize the situation. A gentle breeze blew my hair and I welcomed it. It was warm out, especially for the first of October, but not a sticky warm. I was in no danger of sweating, but the breeze felt good all the same.

  The night remained eerily silent around me, and soon my skin began to crawl. A feeling of wrongness was sinking in on me, making me feel more than just a little uneasy. Then suddenly, I got the feeling that I was being watched.

  That feeling grew more intense by the second until I was positive that someone was standing behind me. If the hairs on the back of my neck tingling wasn’t enough warning, the chill that ran down my spine was. On the verge of full-blown paranoia, I spun around in the rocking chair to face whoever was there, which turned out to be no one. I was thankful for that, but I was aware that something still wasn’t right. What had started as an uneasy feeling moments earlier was stronger and more intense now, bordering on panic.

  I’d seen more than my fair share of horror movies in my life so I was aware of my situation. A woman, alone at night in an isolated farmhouse, dressed only in a t-shirt and panties, with a sleeping child upstairs and a strange man wielding a knife that came from the corn field to roam the property. It seemed the only thing missing was a director’s call for action. These were the basic elements in every horror movie I’d ever seen, and each had elicited from me eye rolls and head shakes as I watched the victim make a string of mistakes. I always thought that I’d be smarter in a similar situation, and it was starting to feel as though I just may find out if I was right.

  When I could no longer ignore the nagging in my mind, that small voice that was screaming at me that something was wrong, I stood and walked across the porch. The last of the tingling in my leg was fading, and I was glad to see it go. I leaned against the railing at the far end of the porch, leaned as far out over it as I possibly could, and tried to see around the corner of the house, all the way across the dark yard, and into the barn. As if a glass of red wine gave me super vision.

  The door, large enough to accommodate all the farm machinery, stood ajar, but I couldn’t see inside. It was too dark. Any other night, Tim would’ve still been in the barn, lights on, working on the combine. In fact, that’s where he had been earlier. Then we argued about how much time he spent out there working on that old machinery, and he left for town and his three beers, while I poured my single glass of red wine and went to the porch.

  As I leaned out over the railing and tried to see into the darkness of the barn, I told myself there was nothing to worry about, but the little voice in my head was persistent in saying otherwise. That voice was annoying, causing me to wonder if that was what it was like to have a nagging wife. Finally giving in to the voice with the hope that action would silence it and prove that nothing was wrong, I turned and walked across the porch and down the steps.

  I stepped off the bottom step and avoided the gravel, stepping onto the grass, cool on my bare feet. I headed out across the yard toward the barn, fighting to keep my overactive imagination reigned in. That was more than a little difficult because scenes from horror movies kept flashing through my mind, none of which were the early scenes, where everyone was laughing, smoking dope, and naked. No, they were the ones from the end, where people may be naked, but it didn’t matter because they were maimed and bloody and decapitated. So naturally, by the time I’d made it halfway to the barn, I had chills. I hugged my arms across my chest and kept walking, keeping my eyes on the barn door, focusing only on finding the mysterious man.

  With each step, I became more frightened of what I would find when I stepped inside the barn. I also became more aware that I was wearing only an oversized t-shirt and panties. This worried me a little, because I couldn’t name a horror movie that didn’t have a woman running around half-naked. I considered going in the house and grabbing my pants, maybe a bra, and definitely some shoes, but decided against it. I was halfway to the barn already, and besides, it’s not like anyone could see anything. The shirt hung nearly to my knees, and my arms folded across my chest kept the girls in place. Surely it would be okay.

  I walked on, wondering if the man was even inside the barn. Maybe Tim had left the door ajar. He never did before, but we’d had an argument, so maybe in his anger he’d accidentally overlooked it this time.

  Then, I considered the stranger. What if he wasn’t a neighbor? What if he was a murderer? I shook my head to clear my mind of thoughts such as that. I wasn’t in St. Louis anymore. This was the country. Things like that just didn’t happen here, which was precisely why we’d moved. I ignored the fact that most horror movies took place in the country, in old isolated farmhouses.

  I told myself it was nothing sinister; just a neighbor who had lost an animal and wanted to know if we’d seen it. His animal had run through our yard, causing the crickets to stop chirping. There was a perfectly logical explanation for everything. At least that’s what I told myself. But it didn’t explain away the feeling I had. The feeling of horror and dread, mixed with doom and gloom.

  The sound of a creaking floorboard made me stop. The loud bang that followed made me jump. I spun around and faced the front of the house, which seemed to be where the sound originated. I knew of a board on the front porch that squeaked if you were heavy enough. Tim, standing six foot and three inches tall and weighing two hundred thirty pounds could make it squeak. I could not. And I couldn’t explain the bang.

  When my heart began to beat again, I headed back to the front of the house, causing the hair on my arms to stand

  BEFORE THE HARVEST is available here now.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  -NOVELS-

  Exodus

  The Criers Club

  Before the Harvest

  RAGE

  The Good Neighbor

  Annie’s Revenge

  -HELD SERIES-

  Held

  Pushed

  22918

  -NOVELLAS-

  In Her Skin

  Night Falls

  The Cabin on Calhoun Ridge

  Shiners

  -SHORT STORIES-

  Dead Man’s Chair

  Transference

  The Kindness of Strangers

  The Hunger

  His Ashes

  The Home

  -COLLECTIONS-

  Once Upon a Rhyme

  Twisted

  -MINUTES TO DEATH SERIES-

  The Loneliest Road

  Close to Home

  The Las
t Resort

  Shock Rock

  The French Quarter

  -ANTHOLOGIES-

  Carnage: After the End Volume 1

  Legends of Urban Horror: A Friend of a Friend Told Me

  -ESSAYS-

  Everybody Wants to Write a Book

  About the Author

  Kimberly A. Bettes is the author of several novels and short stories. She lives with her husband and son in the beautiful Ozark Mountains of southeast Missouri, where she terrorizes residents of a small town with her twisted tales. It’s there she likes to study serial killers and knit. Serial killers who knit are her favorites.

  Connect with Kimberly Online:

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  Copyright © 2013 Kimberly A. Bettes

  Cover Design Copyright © 2017 Kimberly A. Bettes

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the authors’ imaginations or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Kimberly A. Bettes.