Two Tales of Horror and the Paranormal

By Michael Hearing

"Two Tales of Horror and the Paranormal" is a two-story bundle of approximately 9,600 words. In it you'll see that things aren't always as they seem – that there's a lot more to some humdrum, everyday lives than the people living them ever dared to imagine. And the implications are, well, sometimes frightening . . .

"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."

This discovery sets off a chain of inexorable events that lead Leonard to rash action resulting in a terrible kind of justice. A balance must be restored and a lesson learned.

"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).

Despite all his efforts to live a routine, planned, and safely dull life, carefully shielded from anything out of the ordinary, Elmore now has to face the fact that there's a lot more to this life than he ever imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Hearing
• Release date: Dec 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310466045

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.

Book preview

Two Tales of Horror and the Paranormal

Michael Hearing

Spring Lake Books

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013

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 stories are works of horror and paranormal fiction with an admixture of psychological horror. 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

Elmore's Accident

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