Welcome to Doom Farms

by Karsten Knight

  Welcome to Doom Farms

  Bonegarden #1

  Karsten Knight

  Contents

  Prologue

  I. FOUR WEEKS EARLIER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  II. THE DAY OF THE JACK-O’-LANTERN FESTIVAL

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Karsten Knight

  WELCOME TO DOOM FARMS

  Bonegarden #1

  Copyright © 2018 by Karsten Knight

  www.karstenknightbooks.com

  First edition: September 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real events, people, and locales, past or present, are used fictitiously. All other elements are products of the author’s imagination.

  Prologue

  I raced my bike through the dark orchard, fleeing for my life.

  My whole body vibrated as the tires rumbled over the uneven ground. In the dense fog, it felt like the apple trees were closing in around me. One appeared through the mist right in my path, and I swerved sharply to avoid it.

  My front tire snagged on a gnarled root. Next thing I knew, I was somersaulting over the handlebars.

  I landed flat on my back, sending a cluster of rotting apples scattering around me like marbles. The air exploded out of my lungs. The bike flipped end over end beside me, nearly crushing my head in the process.

  Somehow, through the dull ache in my back, I sucked in a deep breath and mustered the will to stand up. I abandoned the bike to finish the journey to the waterfall on foot.

  There were only two choices now:

  Run or die.

  The creature would find me in less than a minute.

  By the time I reached the river, my lungs burned for air. I limped out onto the floating wooden platform, feeling it sway from the raging rapids below. The waterfall roared beneath me. One wrong step and the river would carry me right over the edge, to plummet a hundred feet to my death.

  But what was waiting for me back the way that I came was so much more terrifying.

  Before me, a giant jack-o’-lantern grinned menacingly. Flames danced in its eyes. Abandon all hope, it seemed to be saying to me. There is no escaping the beast.

  It was true. I had reached a dead end. I huddled in front of the pumpkin, shivering as the cold mist settled on my skin. I stared into the dark.

  Over the deafening rush of water, I heard something else, a noise that made my stomach knot with dread.

  The click-click-click of long, spindly legs, marching toward me.

  Through the dark fog, I watched the creature’s glowing sapphire eyes appear.

  As its razor-sharp tail glinted above me, preparing to strike, I had only one thought:

  I wish I could go back in time to stop myself from ever planting those seeds.

  I

  FOUR WEEKS EARLIER

  1

  It was official: my parents were trying to kill me.

  That was the only way I could explain why they made me, Kayla Dunn, pack up just three weeks into fifth grade and leave all my friends behind.

  I was a city kid, used to the bustle and excitement of living in downtown Boston. Back in the city, I could walk to the movie theater, catch a Red Sox game after school, or choose from a thousand different restaurants for dinner.

  Now here I was, in the back of our station wagon as it rattled through the countryside down a shady, tree-lined road. No malls, no baseball stadiums, none of my best friends. Instead of the skyscrapers I grew up around, there was only flat farmland as far as the eye could see.

  I had given up counting cows and horses miles ago. They outnumbered the humans here twenty to one.

  “We’re almost home!” Mom exclaimed from the front seat. “Didn’t I tell you that Orchard Falls would be beautiful, Kayla?”

  I couldn’t disagree with her there. It was late September and the foliage had begun to turn the colors of sunset. A billboard advertised Orchard Falls as “Home of the world-famous Jack-o’-Lantern Festival.” In fact, the town was so crazy about pumpkins that they had even painted their water tower orange to resemble one. Its wicked grin leered down at us as we passed it.

  As we drove over a creek through an old covered bridge, I realized that Orchard Falls really was like a town straight out of a movie.

  Maybe I could learn to enjoy living here after all.

  “The Jack-o’-Lantern Festival is one of the biggest country fairs in the state!” Dad explained from the driver’s seat. “In just a couple of weeks, you’ll be able to take a hay ride, and bob for apples, and compete in the pie-eating contest until you puke!”

  “Gross, Dad,” I said, but I smiled. This was my father’s hometown. He had dreamed of moving back here for a long time. I was still surprised when my parents sat me down and told me their plan: to give up their jobs in the city and buy a farm out here. The two of them had always struggled just to keep houseplants alive. I had no idea how they would manage an entire field of crops.

  The backseat of the car was littered with books about growing every fruit and vegetable imaginable—corn, watermelon, a small vineyard for grapes. Even now, my mom was rambling about how she wanted to launch her own line of homemade jams using recipes that had been passed down from my grandfather. For the hundredth time, she repeated her cheesy sales pitch: “Your toast isn’t Dunn until you spread it with Dunn Farms Jams!”

  “It’s un-Dunn-iably delicious!” Dad added.

  I groaned. “I think I’m Dunn listening to both of your puns.”

  As we rounded the final curve in the road, Dad said, “I have a special surprise for the two of you. Before I left, I ordered a big new sign to advertise the farm. I think it’s really going to catch the eye of potential customers!” He squinted out the window and drummed his hands dramatically on the steering wheel. “It should be visible as soon as we pass this last line of apple trees, in 3 … 2 … 1 …”

  The station wagon popped out past the last tree. Sure enough, a big sign greeted anyone who drove past the property. All three of us frowned up at it.

  Someone had misspelled our last name.

  In big letters, the sign read:

  Welcome to Doom Farms.

  2

  I was the first to speak as we gawked up at the unfortunate billboard. “Well, you weren’t kidding when you said it would catch people’s attention,” I said.

  Dad scowled. “We’ve only been in town for five minutes, and already we have to deal with vandalism?”

  As I peered closer, I realized the sign had originally spelled Dunn correctly, but someone had spray painted over the last three letters.

  “Doom Farm Jams,” I pronounced in my best television commercial voice. “They’re so de
licious you’ll just die.”

  Mom tried to glare at me in the rearview mirror, but soon all three of us were laughing. “Oh well,” she said. “A little prank by some local kids isn’t going to ruin this great day.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Dad cried. He shifted the station wagon back into drive and continued past the sign. “Although I bet the culprit was my childhood nemesis, Ezekiel Slade. He still owns a farm down the street. I bet this was his ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ gift. We’ll see who gets the last laugh when our pumpkins win best in show at the Jack-o’-Lantern Festival.”

  “Yes, dear,” my mom replied sarcastically. “You’ll sure show him.” She winked at me and reached back for a high-five between the seats.

  The car approached our new house, a rustic red farm with white shutters. Half the paint had peeled and fallen away. The house was so old that I worried a strong breeze might make the whole building cave in.

  A rickety wooden barn loomed off to the side, along with a metal silo, which I had read was a structure that farmers use to store grain. It looked like a towering aluminum can that a giant had discarded in the field.

  Before Dad had even fully parked in the driveway, I jumped out of the moving station wagon and hit the ground running, grateful to be free after the endless ride. Most kids would have bee-lined straight inside to check out their new room, but I had a different destination:

  The pumpkin patch.

  Halloween is my favorite holiday. There is nothing I love more than carving jack-o’-lanterns—I actually won awards for it at my old school the past few years. Mom and Dad promised me that if we moved to the farm, they would let me take charge of the pumpkin patch. Ordinarily, I wasn’t crazy about doing chores, but this job actually sounded like fun.

  So when I rounded the corner of the house and stepped into the backyard, I was immediately horrified by what I saw.

  The patch lay at the edge of the cornfield, and it was a complete disaster!

  The pumpkin vines had all withered and died. Their leaves had turned an ugly shade of brown. Only a few scrawny pumpkins remained.

  I had to chase away a crow to stop it from tearing one of the pumpkins apart with its beak. Through the hole it had pecked, I could see a cluster of wriggling maggots eating away at the rotten insides.

  It was the grossest thing I had ever seen.

  I sighed and sat down on a nearby stump, already feeling defeated. Ahead of me, I noticed that a scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head perched at the edge of the cornfield. Hay poked out of its flannel shirt and jeans.

  “Thanks for nothing,” I muttered at it, kicking the pumpkin the bird had ripped apart. “Some scarecrow you are.”

  That’s when the scarecrow turned its head to stare at me.

  3

  I gasped and fell off the stump, landing directly on a rotting pumpkin. The scarecrow groaned. It freed itself from its wooden post and dropped heavily to the ground.

  I started to scramble backwards, but the scarecrow lumbered in my direction. One step. Two steps. Dried cornhusks crackled under its feet.

  Its jack-o’-lantern grin leered down at me. Its triangular eyes were menacing and cold, two pools of darkness staring out from holes in the orange rind.

  As it loomed over me, it lifted its gloved hands. It wrapped them around the pumpkin—and ripped its own head right off!

  I released a short-lived scream but stopped when I saw what was left on top of the scarecrow’s shoulders.

  A boy about my age laughed hysterically. Pumpkin pulp coated his hay-colored hair. “You should have seen the look on your face!” he said. “Priceless!”

  My heart thudded against my ribcage. “You jerk!” I snapped. “What was that for?”

  He shrugged. “That’s just how we greet people around here.” He extended his hand to help me up.

  Grudgingly, I let him pull me back to my feet. He burst into laughter all over again once he saw the seat of my pants. The pumpkin had exploded when I fell on it, smearing the butt of my jeans in rotten, gooey pulp. Sickening.

  “I’m Charlie Slade,” he said after he finally composed himself. “I live on the farm next door.”

  The name Slade rang a bell. He must be the son of my father’s old rival, Ezekiel. “Kayla Dunn,” I replied. I tried my best to crush his hand in my grip as I shook it. “How long were you waiting up on that post?”

  Charlie stretched out his back until it cracked. “Over an hour. It was totally worth it, though.”

  I gazed across the sprawling field that was now my backyard. It had seen better days. The cornstalks had withered to dry brown husks, and the grapes in the vineyard had shriveled to raisins under the hot sun.

  I sighed. Some farm this turned out to be. “So what is there to do for fun around here when you’re not pretending to be a scarecrow or terrorizing your neighbors?” I asked.

  “Well, the big Jack-o’-Lantern Festival is coming up in just a few weeks,” Charlie said. “My family always wins the big prize for best pumpkin in show each year. That trophy has the Slade family name engraved all over it!” He smirked at the devastated ruins of my farm’s pumpkin patch. “But I’m real scared that you’re going to beat us this year. Too bad there’s no prize for the pumpkin with the most maggots.”

  I crossed my arms. “We’ll see about that. A lot can happen in a few weeks.”

  “Yeah, it’s plenty of time … for you to get a life!” Charlie cackled and ruffled my hair, then started wandering toward the edge of the farm. “Welcome to the neighborhood, Kayla Doom.”

  I scowled at him as he disappeared into the dark forest that surrounded our property. Between frightening me with the scarecrow prank and mocking me now, Charlie Slade had declared war.

  I picked up the jack-o’-lantern head he had discarded, a healthy, round pumpkin that had obviously come from the Slade farm, not ours. If I really wanted to show up Charlie and put him in his place, I had only one choice:

  I had to grow a pumpkin that could beat his at the country fair.

  4

  That evening, we had our first dinner at the new farm. Before we moved, my dad had talked a big game about eating food grown right on our land. Eggplant parmigiana, fresh watermelon salad, rhubarb pie—he had an entire binder of recipes he had collected before the move.

  Instead, we had to order a pizza, since the crops were too rotten to even toss a salad together. I was excited to start unpacking, so I wolfed down two slices and excused myself, taking a can of cola to go.

  My new room was on the second floor of the old farmhouse. It had a musty odor that clung to the antique wallpaper, and I kept sneezing from all the dust. The warped floorboards creaked loudly even if I tiptoed across them.

  Mom said that once we got a rug and some art to hang on the walls, it would feel more like home.

  I wasn’t so sure about that.

  Even though my room was old and weird, I did like one thing: it had a large picture window that overlooked the fields out back. I imagined a day soon when I could wake up each morning and gaze out over my pumpkin patch, deciding which gigantic gourd to enter into the festival. Maybe I would name each one.

  I fell asleep early that night, exhausted from the long day of driving and unpacking. I had weird, vivid nightmares in which the farmhouse itself came alive and tried to devour me. When I finally fled out into the cornfield, I found a whole army of scarecrows waiting for me—not one, but twenty of them. They surrounded me, reaching out for me with their hay-stuffed arms. One of them closed two gloved hands around my neck. “Welcome to Doom Farms, Kayla …” he growled.

  I woke up with a sharp gasp. Sweat had matted my hair against my forehead, and the damp sheets had become tangled around me.

  My room was still dark. The only light came from the alarm clock, which read just after 2 a.m. I thought at first that it had just been the bad dreams that woke me up in the dead of night.

  Then I heard something raking at my window.

  I crept toward the g
lass, afraid of what I might find. Who knew what kind of creatures came out of the forest at night! I had no idea what kind of animal could climb up to the second floor.

  I let out a sigh of relief—the noise had just been the shutters clattering against the window. A fierce wind howled outside, rustling the dry cornstalks out back. The whole field rippled as though it were alive.

  When I turned my gaze to the pumpkin patch, I saw a dark shape moving around. At first, I thought it was Charlie, back to play another prank on me or sabotage our crops.

  As my eyes adjusted to the low light, however, I realized the shadowy man was too tall to be Charlie. He wore a long black cloak and a wide-brimmed hat.

  Then he turned his head to stare right at my window.

  I gasped and ducked down. Had the stranger seen me? When I worked up the courage to peek back over the windowsill, I expected him to be slowly stalking toward the house.

  But the dark figure had not moved. I realized with relief that I wasn’t what had captured his attention. He was gazing up at the full moon, as if he were absorbing energy from the pale light. His cloak billowed around him in the wind.

  After a minute, he knelt down in the pumpkin patch. I couldn’t see what he was doing from this far away, so I grabbed my phone off the nightstand. I turned on the camera, zoomed in on the stranger, and squinted at the screen.