Foreword

There’s an old kind of warning you don’t get in cities.

In the city, danger keeps appointments. It has streetlights and paperwork. It arrives with a siren or a bill. In the hills, it’s different. Out there, the world can be quiet for so long you start mistaking silence for safety—and that’s when the land leans in close and reminds you it was here first.

“The land remembers. The well is not dry—but thirsty.”

That line isn’t just a hook. It’s the rulebook.

Chimney Hill: Beneath Cold Hill is the kind of story Appalachia tells best when nobody’s trying to impress anybody: a young couple, a fresh start, a patch of land that’s supposed to fix what life wore down. Daniel and Rachel Harker aren’t chasing some glossy fantasy of “simple living” the way people buy it on a mug. They’re chasing honest work, honest faith, and a home that belongs to them.

And then they find the chimney.

Not a house—just the leftover throat of one that burned. A landmark with rumors braided around it. And beneath the soil, a hunger nobody wants to name out loud, because naming things is how you invite them to the table.

If you’ve ever lived near old land—real old land—you already know the first truth this book understands: places have habits. They have memories. They have ways of being, the same way a person does. Some places welcome you. Some places tolerate you. Some places watch you the way a dog watches a stranger stepping onto the porch.

This is folk horror the traditional way—slow as weather, patient as rot, stubborn as roots. It doesn’t sprint at you with teeth in the first ten pages. It walks beside you. It lets you unpack boxes. It lets you hang curtains. It lets you believe your own optimism for a minute. Then it starts asking for payment.

And here’s what makes this story bite harder than a lot of modern horror: it isn’t only about fear. It’s about faith under pressure.

Daniel is a preacher. Rachel is a teacher. They’re builders, both of them—one trying to build a home, the other trying to build a future that feels clean and steady. But faith—the real kind—isn’t proved when the lights are on and the choir’s singing. Faith gets tested in the dark spaces: in the pause between one heartbeat and the next, in the moment you realize you’re alone in a place that doesn’t care about your plans.

You’ll see it in the way the locals hold their tongues. You’ll hear it in the warnings that come half-joking, half-serious—the way people do when they’re trying to keep you safe without becoming part of the story. You’ll feel it in the rumors of Sylas Thorne, the blind preacher, and the way his name moves through the book like a cold draft under a door.

A quick word before you step deeper in:

This isn’t a story that asks you to “believe” in one clean, simple explanation. It’s a story about what happens when human beings run into something they can’t measure—when imagination, fear, grief, guilt, and old legend start stacking like kindling. The hills don’t always need to send a monster to destroy you. Sometimes they just need to give you the right silence and let you do the rest.

And that’s why the chimney matters.

A chimney is what’s left when everything else is gone—wood turned to ash, roof collapsed, rooms erased. It’s proof there was once warmth there. A table. Supper. Laughing. Prayer. Then fire.

So when you see that lone, moss-covered chimney standing where a home used to be, you’re not just looking at a ruin. You’re looking at a message.

A lot of horror stories want to be clever. This one wants to be true in the way old warnings are true: blunt, weathered, and impossible to forget once you’ve heard them. It knows the oldest bargain people make when they move somewhere new:

We’ll pretend the past doesn’t matter, if the past will pretend we don’t exist.

That bargain never holds.

So read this the right way. Read it like you’re hearing it from someone who lived near a place like Chimney Hill and still won’t drive that road at night. Read it like you’re sitting at a kitchen table while the wind tests the windows. Read it slow, and let it do what slow stories do best: get under your fingernails.

Because the land remembers.

And if the well is thirsty… it isn’t asking politely.

— R. E. Smith

​

​

Contents

Copyright 4

Foreword. 5

Contents. 8

Chimney Hill 10

Chapter One: The Goodbye Table. 11

Chapter Two: The Long Ride and the Welcome. 13

Chapter Three: The Invitation. 17

Chapter Four: Tea and Warnings. 19

Chapter Five: Cupid on Cold Hill 21

Chapter Six: The First Night 24

Chapter Seven: Town Whispers. 28

Chapter Eight: The Road Narrows. 31

Chapter Nine: Marks and Dreams. 34

Chapter Ten: Hollow Stones. 37

Chapter Eleven: The Latch. 41

Chapter Twelve: Old Reports and Older Roads. 45

Chapter Thirteen: I Am the One. 48

Chapter Fourteen: The Language of Dreams. 52

Chapter Fifteen: Marked on the Map. 54

Chapter Sixteen: The Journal 57

Chapter Seventeen: Something Beneath. 59

Chapter Eighteen: Sunday Service. 63

Chapter Nineteen: The Visitor in the Fog. 66

Chapter Twenty: The Spiral Between Them.. 69

Chapter Twenty-One: The Opening. 71

Chapter Twenty-Two: Adelaide’s Warning. 74

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Law Remembers. 77

Chapter Twenty-Four: The First Path. 79

Chapter Twenty-Five: Roy Makes a Call 81

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Echo Chamber 83

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Lawman. 85

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Names in the Dark. 88

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The One. 92

Chapter Thirty: The One Who Fell 94

Chapter Thirty-One: The Hill Remembered. 96

Epilogue: The Legend. 98

About the Author 99

Other Works by the Author 100

​

Chimney Hill

Beneath Cold Hill

​

​

​

​

Chapter One: The Goodbye Table

Rochester, New York – August 2017

The window air conditioner rattled like an old hymn. Outside, the sun was sinking behind the brick facades of the city’s east side, casting long shadows over the one-bedroom apartment where Daniel Harker zipped the last suitcase shut with a prayer under his breath.

“Lord, please let this be the last time I pack with Tetris logic,” he muttered.

In the galley kitchen, Rachel—his wife, his high school sweetheart, the woman who’d agreed to follow him ten hours south into the mountains—was baking her mother’s apple crumble. Again.

They were both 25. Both full of ideals and debt and more love than sense.

Tomorrow, they’d leave Rochester behind. All of it—their little apartment over the laundromat, the concrete playgrounds of Brighton High School where they first held hands, the bitter winters and city steam pipes. Ahead lay the pine-choked hills of Kentucky, the promise of land, fresh starts, and mornings with mist hanging low like breath.

“Dinner’s ready!” Rachel called, wiping flour from her apron. She always baked when she was nervous.

At her parents’ house in Irondequoit, the table was set with too much food and not enough time. Her mother had gone full Italian grandmother mode—three meats, five sides, and two desserts “just in case.”

Daniel’s mother, Judith, arrived last with a box of lemon bars and a quilt folded under one arm. His father had died three years prior—sudden stroke, just 59. That loss still hung like fog over every family gathering. But tonight was about beginnings, not endings.

As they passed plates and shared stories, the couple was coaxed into telling their plans:

Three kids, eventually.

A homestead tucked in the holler with chickens, goats, and heirloom tomatoes.

Rachel teaching at Cold Hill Elementary.

Daniel preaching fire and comfort at High-top Baptist.

“And you bought the land sight unseen?” her father asked, suspicious. “Six acres? In the mountains?”

Daniel nodded, reaching for his sweet tea. “It’s a fixer-upper. Just a chimney left from the old place, maybe a foundation. But the soil looked good. We’ll build it right.”

Rachel squeezed his hand under the table.

“And how do you expect to get there with that little spaceship car of yours?” her uncle teased.

“We’re buying a truck as soon as we get there,” Daniel laughed. “Prius is just for the trip. Everything’s packed—what fit, anyway.”

Which was a story in itself. Their life had been reduced to a moving-day Jenga game. They left behind her antique hope chest, most of his theology books, and that heavy oak dining table. What made the cut: clothes, a laptop, two cast iron skillets, a dog-eared Bible, and the quilt his mother handed him that night.

“It’s your daddy’s,” she said, pressing it into his arms. “He wanted you to have it.”

They said goodbyes through misty eyes and long hugs that clung like roots to boots.

At sunrise, Daniel and Rachel strapped the last box to the Prius roof, kissed their mothers, and waved goodbye to the only skyline they’d ever known.

Then came the road—ten hours and 660 miles of highway, gas station coffee, and ever-thickening woods.

They didn’t know what waited on that quiet dirt road off Griffin Branch…
Didn’t know the chimney they’d seen in those internet pictures wasn’t just stone and moss.

Didn’t know the well buried behind it was once bricked over with blood and lye.

But Cold Hill did.

It was waiting.

​

​

Chapter Two: The Long Ride and the Welcome

The Prius whined up a long Appalachian incline like it was begging for mercy. A dozen cardboard boxes threatened to fly off the roof rack, strapped down with dollar-store bungee cords and good intentions.

Inside, Daniel Harker drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, tapping out a rhythm from an old gospel hymn. Rachel, barefoot with her legs curled under her, scrolled through her phone as the signal flickered in and out.

“Still don’t believe we’re really doing this,” she murmured, staring out the window at hills rolling like green waves. “We’re officially one of those couples on a homesteading blog now. All that’s missing is a goat named Carl.”

Daniel chuckled. “Don’t tempt me. I might preach on that—‘And the Lord gave Carl unto the people, and he was good in cheese.’”

Rachel rolled her eyes, but smiled.

The ride had been long—ten hours and change—but not quiet. Somewhere around Scranton, the memories started bubbling up.

“Remember senior prom?” Rachel asked. “That busted limo and my dress zipper broke?”

“You were convinced the world was ending,” Daniel said. “You made me climb out the back window at a red light to ‘fix the engine’ with a paperclip and a Chick-fil-A receipt.”

“And you did. That’s when I knew,” she added.

“Knew what?”

“That I was gonna marry a lunatic who thinks prayer and paperclips can fix anything.”

They laughed, and silence settled for a moment.

Daniel glanced at her. “You sure about all this?”

“Cold Hill?” she asked.

“No. Us. The future. The land. The church. Leaving behind everyone and everything.”

She looked at him, serious now. “Daniel, I’ve been sure since I was seventeen and you got up during senior chapel and preached about Jacob wrestling angels and then offered me half your lunch after. I said yes to you—Cold Hill’s just the address.”

Daniel swallowed hard and nodded. “Good. Because I don’t think God brought us this far to let us fall.”

Arrival in Cold Hill, Kentucky

They rolled into London, KY, around 5:15 p.m., dust trailing behind the Prius like a comet tail. The rental house they’d booked was small but tidy, a gray ranch-style tucked among trees with a creek gurgling nearby. It smelled like wet bark and honeysuckle.

After checking in, Daniel took a quick shower, changed into a collared shirt and slacks, and headed off to High-top Baptist Church to meet the deacons.

Rachel stood on the porch and waved him off, arms crossed in her worn cardigan. “Don’t get snakebit.”

“Not unless they’re in the pulpit,” he said with a wink.

The Church

High-top Baptist sat like a whitewashed barn on a ridge, gravel lot half full, a bell tower stained with time. Inside, it was humble—pine pews, hymnals with cracked spines, a pulpit scarred by decades of elbows.

Deacon Hobbs met him at the door. Big man. Beard like a civil war general. “You must be Harker.”

“I am.”

“Then come on in, son. Let’s see if you got enough fire to chase the dark outta these hills.”

The School

Rachel’s meeting was less intimidating. Cold Hill Elementary was a squat brick building nestled against a line of pines. Principal Darlene Miller greeted her with a smile and a Tupperware of blueberry muffins.

“You’re the Yankee, huh?” the woman teased. “Don’t worry, we’ll have you saying ‘y’all’ and ‘bless your heart’ by the end of the month.”

They walked the halls. Rachel’s classroom was modest but full of potential.

“I hear your husband’s the new preacher,” Miller said. “Cold Hill folks don’t warm up quick, but once you’re in, they’ll feed you till you burst.”

Rachel grinned. “That sounds like a threat.”

Supplies and a Warning

Later that evening, Rachel stopped by Harper’s General, a dusty little store with everything from seed packets to hunting knives. She gathered a few staples—canned goods, lantern oil, nails, and a big jug of sweet tea—and was waiting at the register when an elderly voice chirped behind her.

“You’re not from here.”

Rachel turned and met the pale blue eyes of a woman in a wide-brimmed hat and a faded apron that looked older than Rachel herself.

“No, ma’am,” Rachel said kindly. “We just moved in. My husband’s the new preacher at High-top.”

The woman narrowed her eyes. “Where’d y’all move to?”

“Off Griffin Branch Road. Dirt path, not even a street sign. Bought six acres… property with just a chimney left.”

The old woman’s face turned to stone.

“Chimney Hill,” she whispered.

Rachel blinked. “Pardon?”

“That place’s got old bones,” the woman said. “Too old. Used to be a preacher there too. Long, long time ago. Before my mother’s mother was born. Name was Sylas. Folks thought he heard God…”

She leaned closer. “But it weren’t God.”

Rachel felt a chill crawl down her spine.

“What was it then?”

The woman stared past her, voice soft as wind in a graveyard. “Something deeper. Something hungry.”

She placed a jar of molasses on the counter and added, “You ever see the ground breathe? You will, up there.”

Then she shuffled off, leaving Rachel staring at the register, her heart ticking just a little too fast.