by Hank Early
The part that piqued my anger and dismay the most was that I finally thought I had a grasp of what was happening, and now I was lost, wandering the woods, in no position to do anything about it.
Evil, it seemed, never stopped. It always came back. My father had been an evil, vile man whose sole purpose on this earth seemed to be making others hurt for not believing the same things he did. I finally overcame him, only for Jeb Walsh to show up, a man who seemed to be cut from the same cloth as my father, a ruthless fanatic whose rules applied to everyone except himself. Then there was Lane Jefferson—a seemingly normal man, who might or might not don a killer’s suit when the sun went down, to perpetuate some racist myth from the distant past. And how could I forget Taggart Monroe? A man willing to break every taboo for money and even a small piece of cult success.
But how to stop them? That was the question that was driving me insane. It was a question that might or might not be answered on the DVD I’d finally managed to wedge into my pocket (after ripping the corner just a little). Because if I didn’t have some kind of edge, I was doomed to fail inside that cornfield. I’d been inside it before, and it was the kind of place that warped reality and favored the mad.
But maybe I did have an advantage. The mirrors had shown me the spokes. And the spokes all led to the center. Surely it was something they wouldn’t expect me to know. Would it be enough to outsmart them, to stop Old Nathanial and the film?
Part of me wondered if it would even matter because this whole thing had become bigger than the individual players. Stopping some fool wearing an Old Nathaniel mask or some other fool holding a camera wouldn’t stop the evil, would it? No, maybe it would save Mary, but what about the rest of the people who would cross the paths of these vile men? Their violence was systemic, and I intuitively understood that it was also comprehensive. Exhaustive. And the weight of it was heavier than anything one man could ever hope to lift alone.
I knew this was right, yet I also knew that if you could stop the button man, you could stop the killing. That was all I had to cling to as I kept moving in what I hoped was the right direction.
The next time I looked at the sky, the light was fading, and an early moon had already made its appearance in the late afternoon sky.
It was pale and soft, and beautiful.
And completely full.
49
At some point, my brain shut down. I didn’t think so much as hallucinate. My body continued to plunge forward, but my mind drifted away to parts unknown. I was in church again, seated beside Mama, while Daddy stomped and raved and reached for another serpent. I was with Lester, sitting by Ghost Creek, drinking shine we’d swiped from Herschel Knott. I was with Mary, the last time we’d hiked in the mountains together, a thunderstorm fast approaching, her hand, small and urgent, in mine. She’d whispered in my ear that we should find a place to ride it out, and her tongue had curled and her breath had heaved on the word ride, and damned if I didn’t know exactly what she wanted. We found the cave, and we found a moment or two that would forever be a part of me, and I hoped a part of her.
These memories and a thousand more came and went like gnats, worrying me for a few moments before dying away only to be replaced by the next ones.
When I came to the train tracks, I stumbled across them and fell face down on the other side, skidding down the rocky embankment along the tracks. I wiped blood off my elbows and noted the rips in my pants before touching my pocket to make sure that the DVD was still there, intact, and then I rose and kept walking, a zombie whose brain had been reduced to a single goal.
Following the tracks across the river.
* * *
I reached the train trestle at dusk, when the river below me had turned to its blackest pitch. I saw the moon reflected in its glassy surface, and my body wavered as I approached the midpoint of the trestle. Lack of fluids had made me unsteady on my feet, and for a brief second I lost my footing and lurched out toward the side of the tracks just the way I’d dreamed. I saw the black water, rising, reaching out for me.
But I managed to regain my footing and step away from the edge, leaning my weight back, centering myself despite the shotgun blast of pain in my hip.
I’m halfway home, I thought. Even as I thought it, I realized it didn’t really make much sense. Home was in the mountains. Home was with Mary. I was only going to watch a DVD.
I nearly fell again but managed to only drop to one knee. I pulled myself back up and stumbled forward. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a train coming. The trestle began to vibrate.
When I made it to the other side, I went to the first trailer I could find and pounded on the door. An old man answered and held out his hands to steady me. “Deja,” I said.
* * *
“Mr. Earl,” she said, “drink some water.”
She was holding out a plastic cup, one of those extra-extra-large ones you can get at the gas station. She pressed it to my lips, and I drank in the cool liquid.
Nothing had ever tasted better.
A few sips later, I felt more like myself.
We were sitting in her trailer on the couch. Her mother stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the den, watching us.
“You were shot,” she said.
“I’m sorry.” For some reason that was the only thing I could think to say.
“I tried to call the sheriff, but apparently everything in Riley is shut down because of that idiot’s rally.”
I nodded. “Yeah, they planned it that way.”
“Deja said you’re looking for the woman who disappeared.”
“Yes.”
“That’s all I need to hear. We want to help however we can. Is your wound okay?”
“I think so. Please tell me you have a DVD player.”
“A what?” Deja said.
“God, you’re kidding me. A DVD player. It plays a DVD.”
She shook her head. “You mean one of those disc drive things?”
“We have one,” Deja’s mother said. “It’s on my laptop. Hold on and I’ll get it.”
“Thank you.” I turned to Deja. “Can I use your phone?”
She handed me her cell phone.
I thought for a moment, trying to decide who to call first. I started to dial 911 but stopped after pressing nine. What good would it do to alert Patterson, which would be exactly what the dispatch would do?
I deleted nine and started over, dialing Ronnie’s number.
Please, please, please answer.
“Hello,” Ronnie said. He didn’t sound drunk or high, just ornery, like a man thankful for a phone call just because he’d been too long without somebody to argue with.
“It’s Earl.”
“Earl? Are you shitting me? You okay? I been trying to call you all day. I even walked over to see if the blind bastard had heard from you, and—”
“Shut up and listen.”
“Okay.”
“I need you to do something for me.”
“Sure. Except…”
“Except what?”
“I’m in downtown Riley, and it’s a mess here. I hope you don’t need me to go nowhere.”
“That’s exactly what I need. Get in your truck and start driving toward the cornfield. Keep your phone on you. I’m going to call you again when I know more. If you get here and you haven’t heard from me yet, just keep coming. Head straight for the middle of the cornfield, and don’t stop no matter what. You got it?”
“What’s going on, Earl? Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I ain’t heard from you and … I don’t know. I thought you might be dead.”
“No, I’m okay. Just remember what I said. All the way to the middle of the cornfield. Drive hard and fast, Ronnie.”
I ended the call as Deja’s mother handed me the laptop. It was powered on, and all I had to do was slip the disc in the drive located on the side. I waited as it loaded.
The DVD started at the beginning, so I cl
icked the slider at the bottom and moved it ahead about a third of the way.
There he was—Old Nathaniel, or someone dressed like him—parting the dense stalks with a knife. The camera zoomed in on the knife. The reflection of the full moon was imprinted on the flat side of the silver blade. The corn opened up.
“Mr. Earl?”
“Hold on.”
“You need to eat something.”
I turned away from the screen and saw that Deja was holding a plate of ham and eggs. “Mama just made it.”
I nodded and took the plate, eating greedily as I watched Old Nathaniel weave through the cornstalks in a seemingly random pattern. When he exited the corn, he was in the trees. The camera followed him from behind. It was shaky, poorly executed, but there was a rawness about the moment, a tension that I couldn’t deny.
That tension reached a boiling point when the camera left Old Nathaniel and zoomed ahead through the woods. There were two people walking down a trail. One of them held a gun. The other one—
The other one was Mary.
They stopped, and Johnny Waters turned around, looking directly at the camera, but the light went out on the camera almost instantly, and the screen went dark. I heard jostling and then a scream.
The scream came from Johnny.
“Who are you?” Mary said.
“You can call me Nate,” a modulated voice said.
The camera came back on and the cameraman ran to catch up, pausing just long enough to run the camera over Johnny, lying near the stream.
Someone grunted, and the camera flew back up—too fast, for a second everything was blurry—but when it finally did come back into focus, it showed Mary punching Old Nathaniel in the stomach. He bent over, huffing with pain. She started to run, but the man holding the camera spoke.
“Stop,” he said.
Mary turned and looked directly at the camera. I didn’t believe I’d ever been more proud of an individual in my entire life. Her look was defiant and unafraid.
“You going to shoot me?” she said. “Go ahead.” Then she turned and started to walk away. She didn’t get far before Old Nathaniel grabbed her, lifted her up like she was a sack of groceries, and tossed her into the air. Mary—she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten soaking wet—landed hard against a tree trunk. She slid to the ground and lay there for a moment. Old Nathaniel walked over and said something I couldn’t hear, most likely because his mic had already come off in the earlier struggle. Then he kicked her.
He picked her up and slung her lifeless body over his shoulder.
I swallowed. She was still alive. She was just out, I told myself. She was tough. Tougher than anybody I’d ever known, thank God.
The camera followed them as Old Nathaniel carried her back toward the cornfield.
“Shit,” Deja said. “Was that real?”
“I’m afraid it was.”
“It’s your girlfriend.”
It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway. “Yeah, Mary Hawkins.”
“Where’s he taking her?”
“That’s what I’m hoping to find out.”
We watched, barely breathing as he moved deeper and deeper into the high stalks. Soon, he was dwarfed by them, and they seemed like cornstalks from a dream, instead of reality. I wondered if some special effect had been added to make them taller.
He came to a wall so thick with stalks that there appeared to be no seam, no way through. It was a dead end. He laid Mary down and pulled out his knife. He inserted it into the wall, creating a seam, using his other hand to separate the stalks.
He pulled them apart as wide as he could and turned back to Mary, taking her arm and dragging her through. The stalks closed, leaving the cameraman on the other side.
There was a cut, then the film resumed in a clearing, high stalks all around, a circular wall. Mary lay on the ground and Old Nathaniel stood beside a small metal hatch in the ground. The camera moved slowly closer until it was positioned directly over the hatch. Someone had painted the same symbol here as the one on the stickers—two axe handles and a skull. Old Nathaniel opened the hatch, and it groaned loudly.
At first, it looked like something electric inside. Whatever it was seemed to glow like starlight. But as the camera sharpened its focus, I could see that the glow came from gleaming white skulls. At least a half dozen of them, maybe more.
At the lip of the opening, I could make out the top of a metal ladder. Old Nathaniel climbed down until he was standing at the bottom among the skulls. Then he reached back up and found Mary’s arm. He dragged her headfirst into the hole.
When he emerged a few minutes later, he stood over the hole, looking down. The last shot before he closed the hatch was of Mary, lying among the skulls.
Then the scene went dark.
50
I was shaking when I handed Deja the laptop. She took it and said, “You shouldn’t go.”
But I was already standing up, heading toward the door. “I’ll be fine. At least until the police come.”
Deja’s mother came back in. “Do you have a gun?’
“Yeah,” I said.
“How about a flashlight?”
Shit. Was I really about to go out there without one? “No, and I’d be really thankful if you had one I could use.”
“I’ll go get it.”
I looked at Deja. “I hate to ask, but can I borrow your phone?”
She handed it to me without a word, but I could tell there was something she wanted to say, but hadn’t been able to think how to say it yet.
“You okay?” I asked her.
“Do you think,” she started, and then faltered. “Do you think one of those skulls is my brother’s?”
I hesitated. My first instinct was to tell her no, that her brother was surely safe somewhere now, but I remembered how badly I’d wanted to know what happened to Mary, how I wouldn’t let myself stop until I’d found the truth, even if it was bad. “I think it’s a strong possibility,” I said.
She nodded, a tear streaming down her cheek, and I found myself suddenly wanting to take it back, to tell her I was wrong, but that would have only made it worse. Once again, I was reminded that sometimes there were no right answers, much less easy ones.
“I’m going to try to make sure the men behind it are held responsible.”
“Okay,” she said. “I hope you do.”
Deja’s mother returned with the flashlight. I thanked them both and then left the trailer, walking quickly toward the bridge. I’d only gone a few steps when I began to run, hip and shoulder be damned.
I didn’t stop running until I was on the other side of the river, looking at what I hoped was the same wall of corn where Old Nathaniel had entered with Mary.
I stepped inside and the corn swallowed me up as it always did, and there was a part of me that felt as if the real evil resided inside these stalks, where the corn silk flew wild and the light of the moon glazed everything in a thick honey colored glow. How much blood had fertilized this field? I had counted at least a half dozen in the video, but who knew how wide that underground space was and how filled it might be with the remains of the dead?
It all felt like a dream, but I was determined to wake up, to wake Mary up and walk the hell out of this damned cornfield forever.
The full moon made the cornstalks stand out, each one a scarecrow, each one deadly. I tried to find something that looked familiar from the video or from my view from the mirrors, but the problem was that it all looked familiar. Each stalk looked like the last.
Holding the flashlight in one hand and my 9mm in the other, I made a complete turn, looking for anything that might guide me.
There was nothing. I was in one of the spaces between the spokes, where the corn seemed random and stifling and impossible. I needed to pick a direction and bull through until I found a clear path that would lead me to the circle in the middle.
I holstered my 9mm and slipped the flashlight in my pocket. Then, using
both hands, I began to swim through the stalks, pushing them aside and moving forward in small increments. It was a painstaking process, not only for my hip and tired arms, but also for my psyche. With each passing moment, I was more aware that I might not get to the bunker in time.
Sure, there was a possibility I’d arrive and not find her, that there would be one more skull among the others, but I was increasingly more convinced that they were keeping her inside until tonight. Until they could film the hunt.
The third and final climax.
When I broke free, it felt like I had been reborn, like I’d been underwater for a long time, and I’d finally found the surface and air that I could breathe again. I’d found a spoke. The straight row went on for a long, long time in both directions. The only problem was that in my long struggle to get here, I’d lost all sense of direction and didn’t know which direction would take me to the hub in the middle of the wheel.
I pulled out my flashlight and lifted the beam toward the sky, waving it around until I saw the reflection from the mirrors to my right. That meant I needed to go in the opposite direction to reach the middle.
I hoped.
Turning left, I began to jog again, and then, the pain in my hip manageable—at least for the time being—I broke into a sprint.
When I saw the dead end in front of me, I thought I’d missed it somehow. I backtracked, slowly, taking care to move the flashlight around so I wouldn’t miss the hatch. But I soon realized the hatch wasn’t there. I hadn’t passed it.
I turned back toward the dead end. I’d have to break through the wall. Surely it wouldn’t be as hard as the last one I’d fought through.
Then I remembered what I’d just seen on the video, Old Nathaniel parting the stalks like a curtain. He found the seam with his knife, and … I reached out with both hands, feeling around for a gap or space that was invisible. My hand found a break, and I parted the stalks with both hands. They bent away from each other, and I saw that there was a path leading through to the other side.