After The Fog: Four Tales of Horror and Supernatural Suspense

By Michael Hearing

"After the Fog" – Four Tales of Horror and Supernatural Suspense

Sanity means seeing what is real . . . what is there. But that's not always as easy as it sounds.

Sometimes it takes a completely unexpected, violent, preternatural reversal to make us see beyond the fog. And that's exactly what you'll find in these four original, intriguing stories.

"A Helping Hand" – "It’s not every day you find a human hand while digging potatoes. But that's exactly what happened to Leonard Johnson on a Saturday morning not long ago." That's how this quirky little story begins. When you're a fast-failing organic farmer in New Hampshire, with a known termagant for a wife, an event like this can be devastating to your small profits when the news gets out – especially since that ancient hand has peculiar "qualities."

"Elmore's Accident" – "It was that most loathsome of all things: an uncanny, routine-disrupting inconvenience and anomaly." That's what, as the result of an unforeseen event, unexpectedly invades and upsets Elmore Wiggins' safely ordered life. For Elmore had never reckoned on the paranormal or the preternatural. But now that he's had his accident, he is "seeing" certain events in the near future – including his own (although he doesn't know it yet).

"Eve's Refusal" – Eve is a nobody – just a dirty, mentally challenged homeless woman who stands on a street corner in her rags and "prophesies." But she knows exactly what she possesses – what most of those who pity her don't have. Eve refuses to submit to the medical procedure and the progress monitoring, preferring instead to keep what she has. Eve has an important lesson to teach Andrew Thurston, Director of the Social Equity and Rehabilitation Department, who is determined to help her.
"The Thanatos solutions" – Just a few years down the road, the new health-care plan is firmly entrenched. A new bill, Ethical Assessment of End-of Life Care, has also been enacted into law. And the authorities are ruthlessly implementing it throughout the land – no more medical resources wasted on the defective and dying, equitable distribution of quality medical care, no more lingering half-lives sustained by expensive machinery. The "thanatos solution" has arrived. But there are, as always, unexpected ramifications, especially for those who wanted it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Hearing
• Release date: Jun 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301884117

Michael Hearing

Michael Hearing is a freelance writer/essayist/novelist living with his wife, dogs, cats, horses, and ferrets on a few acres with a small lake in northeastern Oklahoma. There, he tries to grow vegetables, catches quite a few fish, and does his writing.Having lived a fairly desultory life, Michael decided that it’s time for some order and method. So he is finishing up and publishing some books he’s had in the works for many years. But, still, he is likely to be all over the genre map. In most cases, though, he has lived what he writes about, and his works ring true.

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After the Fog

Four Tales of Horror and Supernatural Suspense

Michael Hearing

Smashwords Edition

Spring Lake Books

Copyright 2013

Cover Design by Karen Hearing

@ Spring Lake Photos

All rights reserved. This book may not be used or reproduced in any manner—by any means or in any medium whatsoever—in part or in whole without written permission of the author (except, of course, small excerpts in reviews). Please respect intellectual-property rights and help authors protect what they've created.

These four tales of horror and supernatural suspense are works of paranormal/supernatural fiction with an admixture of psychological thriller. The characters and situations presented here are nothing more than inventions of the author’s imagination. If anything in these stories resembles real persons, places, or institutions, it is purely the result of coincidence.

A Helping Hand

It’s not every day you find a human hand while digging potatoes. But that's exactly what happened to Leonard Johnson on a Saturday morning not long ago.

Leonard, a failing organic farmer in New Hampshire, was just trying to eke out a living on the diminishing land his parents had left him, the land his great-grandfather had settled. Leonard raised and sold common, non-niche vegetables such as potatoes, green beans, corn, and tomatoes—which, he now realized after five years at this endeavor, was a mistake. But he also had one good hay meadow that he cut and baled. This was the only part of his small farming operation that made much of a profit—when he could keep his ancient baler working, that is. It was always breaking down or getting the wire tangled up or locking up because he had picked up root or a rock.

Anyhow, Leonard was digging potatoes to take to the local farmer's market early that Saturday morning when dawn was just beginning to make itself known in the east. Over and over again, he drove his potato fork into the soft soil and brought it up loaded with well formed Red Pontiac potatoes. His back had begun to ache, and sweat stung his eyes. As he neared the end of the next-to-last row, the fork hit something more solid than earth.

Damn it! Leonard thought he had skewered some potatoes with the fork, which meant they wouldn't be fit for market thus damaged. Right after this involuntary ejaculation, just before he clapped a hand over his mouth, he also said, Oh, shit. Then he looked nervously behind him and to either side. Leonard's wife didn't approve of his cussing. And she sure didn't approve of the drinks he was given to sneaking from bottles he had stashed around the farm. That's why Leonard was always anxious, had a nervous tic in his right eye, and was constantly pivoting at odd moments to look behind him.

Felicity Johnson was a very large and very loud woman who usually wore lime-green stretch pants, a stained triple-X T-shirt, and often no bra. She didn't approve of most her husband's choices and was forever haranguing him about the fact that he had quit a good job at the mill to sink all their savings into this farm. And she did this chiefly because the never ending work interfered with her attendance at prayer meetings and revivals—to which she was always trying to drag Leonard as well. Besides that, they'd had to sell off chunks of the land to stay afloat. They were down to about fifty-five acres now, all mortgaged so Leonard could keep trying to farm. Felicity reminded him daily what a foolish move that was.

When Leonard raised the potato fork up out of the black earth that last time, he got the surprise of his life. For there on the end of the fork, stuck on two of the tines, was a hand. It was reddish-brown and shriveled and looked nearly mummified. Leonard dropped the fork and staggered back a few feet. He cast another quick glance behind him, drew his right hand across his mouth, and then wiped it on the bib of his overalls. Then, slowly, cautiously, he crept forward to peer a little closer at this oddity.

It didn't look like a modern Caucasian's hand. It seemed too large, the bones too long and knuckles too big around, and it had a reddish tint, but the color could have been the result of its having been in the ground so long. Leonard slipped on a glove and pulled the hand off the potato fork. A few desiccated fragments from the jagged wrist end broke off and fell to the ground. Unprepared for this, Leonard dropped it and jumped back. But, drawn inexorably back, he picked it up again in his gloved right hand and examined the scars on the palm.

A long-neglected memory then surfaced in Leonard's mind. This land had been passed