Country Whispers

By Kate Hill

Country Whispers is a collection of short horror tales and poems set in rural New England.

Physical Therapy - Isabel is willing to relieve more than Jim’s back pain, but her price isn’t what he expects.

Pig Roast - Is it justice or revenge for a store employee who doesn’t agree that the customer is always right?

The Eyes Have It - An old farmer who isn’t quite what he seems stalks a young convenience store clerk.

Tomorrow Burns - Travis can’t remember how he got to this outdoor party, but that doesn’t stop him from joining in--at least until sunrise.

Tornado Warnings - Camille misses the city, especially when it’s storming outside and she’s trapped in her basement with a stranger who attacks her.

Blood Runners - Ethan dreams about living the exciting life with the Midnight Bikers. Unfortunately, dreams sometimes come true.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kate Hill
• Release date: Sep 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370029563

Kate Hill

Kate Hill is a vegetarian New Englander who started writing many years ago for pleasure. When she's not writing, she enjoys reading, watching horror and action movies, working out, and spending time with her family and pets. She also writes under the name Saloni Quinby.

Book preview

Country Whispers

by

Kate Hill

Country Whispers

Smashwords Edition

Second Edition Copyright 2021 Kate Hill

First Edition Copyright 2017 Kate Hill

Mankeeper was originally published in Scared Naked Magazine Issue 2, Volume II, March 2004

Crazy Antoinette was originally published in Darkness Within #2 Autumn, 1999

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, and events is purely coincidental.

Contents

Physical Therapy

Specter

Pig Roast

Mankeeper

The Eyes Have It

Watcher

Tomorrow Burns

We

Tornado Warnings

I Thought I Knew

Blood Runners

Crazy Antoinette

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Kate Hill

Excerpt from St. Augustine’s Silhouettes

Physical Therapy

If you've been a city dweller all your life, living in the country will probably surprise you. Even if you’ve vacationed there, it's not the same as day-to-day living.

For Jim the real difference between the two set in when he hurt his back in a car accident.

The injury wasn’t life threatening, but painful enough to make his job difficult. Sure, he sat behind a desk—selling insurance wasn’t exactly hard labor—but being positioned at a computer keyboard for hours aggravated the injury enough to warrant physical therapy.

He’d been to therapy before, but in the city it had been in a hospital or a modern medical building. Here in rural New England, the nearest PT facility was a thirty-minute drive to a refinished colonial home. The first floor contained the office and therapy rooms. A wooden staircase led to a second floor blocked by a door that always remained closed during Jim’s appointments. No sound came from the second floor, so Jim guessed it was used for storage.

His therapist, Isabel, was an attractive woman in her mid-forties. She had a pleasant Brazilian accent, and during sessions she kept him entertained with stories about her family. Her sister—a botanist—still lived in South America. She had developed the massage oil Isabel used on her patients from a rare species of plant she’d studied for most of her life. Not only did the oil smell fantastic, but it actually lessened Jim’s back pain, acting like an anesthetic for several hours after his therapeutic massage.

Too bad you can’t sell this stuff, Jim said one evening during his session. Isabel’s strong hands kneaded his lower back while the scent of massage oil lingered on