Burt ran. He was already out of breath, and the knife wound in his upper arm was beginning to hurt. And he was leaving a trail of blood. As he ran, he yanked his handkerchief from his back pocket and stuck it inside his shirt.
He ran. His loafers pounded the cracked cement of the sidewalk; his breath rasped in his throat with more and more heat. His arm began to throb in earnest. Some mordant part of his brain tried to ask if he thought he could run all the way to the next town, if he could run twenty miles of two-lane blacktop.
He ran. Behind him he could hear them, fifteen years younger and faster than he was, gaining. Their feet slapped on the pavement. They whooped and shouted back and forth to each other. They’re having more fun than a five-alarm fire, Burt thought. They’ll talk about it for years.
Burt ran.
He ran past the gas station marking the edge of town. His breath gasped and roared in his chest. The sidewalk ran out under his feet. And now there was only one thing to do, only one chance to beat them and escape with his life. The houses were gone; the town was gone. The corn had surged in a soft, green wave back to the edges of the road. The green, swordlike leaves rustled softly. It would be deep in there, deep and cool, shady in the rows of man-high corn.
He ran past a sign that said: “YOU ARE NOW LEAVING GATLIN, NICEST LITTLE TOWN IN NEBRASKA OR ANYWHERE ELSE! DROP IN ANY TIME!"
I’ll be sure to do that, Burt thought dimly.
He ran past the sign like a sprinter closing on the tape and then swerved left, crossing the road, and kicked his loafers away. Then he was in the corn, and it closed behind him and over him like the waves of a green sea, taking him in. Hiding him. He felt a sudden and wholly unexpected relief sweep him, and at the same moment he got his second wind. His lungs, which had been shallowing up, seemed to unlock and give him more breath.
He ran straight down the first row he had entered, head ducked, his broad shoulders swiping the leaves and making them tremble. Twenty yards in he turned right, parallel to the road again, and ran on, keeping low so they wouldn’t see his dark head of hair bobbing amid the yellow corn tassels. He doubled back toward the road for a few moments, crossed more rows, and then put his back to the road and hopped randomly from row to row, always delving deeper and deeper into the corn.
At last he collapsed onto his knees and put his forehead against the ground. He could hear only his own taxed breathing, and the thought that played over and over in his mind was: thank God, I gave up smoking; thank God, I gave up smoking, thank God—
Then he could hear them, yelling back and forth to each other, in some cases bumping into each other (“hey, this is my row!”), and the sound heartened him. They were well away to his left, and they sounded very poorly organized.
He took his handkerchief out of his shirt, folded it, and stuck it back in after looking at the wound. The bleeding seemed to have stopped in spite of the workout he had given it.
He rested a moment longer and was suddenly aware that he felt good, physically better than he had in years . . . excepting the throb of his arm. He felt well-exercised, suddenly grappling with a clear-cut (no matter how insane) problem after two years of trying to cope with the incubus gremlins that were sucking his marriage dry.
It wasn’t right that he should feel this way, he told himself. He was in deadly peril of his life, and his wife had been carried off. She might be dead now. He tried to summon up Vicky’s face and dispel some of the odd good feeling by doing so, but her face wouldn’t come. What came was the face of the red-haired boy with the knife in his throat.
He became aware of the corn fragrance in his nose now, all around him. The wind through the tops of the plants made a sound like voices. Soothing. Whatever had been done in the name of this corn, it was now his protector.
But they were getting closer.
Running hunched over, he hurried up the row he was in, crossed over, doubled back, and crossed over more rows. He tried to keep the voices always on his left, but as the afternoon progressed, that became harder and harder to do. The voices had grown faint, and often the rustling sound of the corn obscured them altogether. He would ran, listen, run again. The earth was hard packed, and his stockinged feet left little or no trace.
When he stopped much later, the sun was hanging over the fields to his right, red and inflamed; and when he looked at his watch, he saw that it was a quarter past seven. The sun had stained the corn tops a reddish gold, but here the shadows were dark and deep. He cocked his head, listening. With the coming of sunset the wind had died entirely, and the corn stood still, exhaling its aroma of growth into the warm air. If they were still in the corn, they were either far away or just hunkered down and listening. But Burt didn’t think a bunch of kids, even crazy ones, could be quiet that long. He suspected they’d done the most kidlike thing, regardless of the consequences: they had given up and gone home.
He turned toward the setting sun, which had sunk between the raftered clouds on the horizon, and began to walk. If he cut on a diagonal through the rows, always keeping the setting sun ahead of him, he would be bound to strike Route 17 sooner or later.
The ache in his arm had settled into a dull throb that was nearly pleasant, and the good feeling was still with him. He decided that as long as he was there, he would let the good feeling exist in him without guilt. The guilt would return when he had to face the authorities and account for what had happened in Gatlin. But that could wait.
He pressed through the corn, thinking he had never felt so keenly aware. Fifteen minutes later the sun was only a hemisphere poking over the horizon, and he stopped again, his new awareness clicking into a pattern he didn’t like. It was vaguely . . . well, vaguely frightening.
He cocked his head. The corn was rustling.
Burt had been aware of that for some time, but he had just put it together with something else. The wind was still. How could that be?
He looked around warily, half expecting to see the smiling boys in their Quaker coats creeping out of the corn, their knives clutched in their hands. Nothing of the sort. There was still that rustling noise. Off to the left.
He began to walk in that direction, not having to bull his way through the corn anymore. The row was taking him in the direction he wanted to go, naturally. The row emptied out into some sort of clearing. The rustling was there.
He stopped, suddenly afraid.
The scent of the corn was strong enough to be cloying. The rows held onto the sun’s heat, and he became aware he was plastered with sweat and chaff and thin spider strands of corn silk. The bugs ought to be crawling all over him; they weren’t.
He stood still, staring toward that place where the corn opened out onto what looked like a large circle of bare earth.
There were no minges or mosquitoes here, no black flies or chiggers—what he and Vicky had called “drive-in bugs” when they had been courting—he thought with sudden and unexpectedly sad nostalgia. And he hadn’t seen a single crow. How was that for weird, a corn patch with no crows?
In the last of the daylight he swept his eyes closely over the row of corn to his left and saw that every leaf and stalk was perfect, which was just not possible. No yellow blight. No tattered leaves, no caterpillar eggs, no burrows, no—
His eyes widened.
My God, there aren’t any weeds!
Not a single one. Every foot and a half the corn plants rose from the earth. There was no witchgrass, jimson, pikeweed, whore’s hair, or polk salad. Nothing.
Burt stared up, eyes wide. The light in the West was fading. The raftered clouds had drawn back together. Below them the golden light had faded to pink and ocher. It would be dark soon enough.
It was time to go down to the clearing in the corn and see what was there; hadn’t that been the plan all along? All the time he had thought he was cutting back to the highway, wasn’t he being led to this place?
Dread in his belly, he went on down to the row and stood at the edge of the clearing. There was enough light left fo
r him to see what was here. He couldn’t scream. There didn’t seem to be enough air in his lungs. He tottered on legs like slats of splintery wood. His eyes bulged from his face.
“Vicky,” he whispered. “Oh, Vicky, my God—”
She had been mounted on a crossbar like a hideous trophy, her arms held at the wrists and her legs at the ankles by twists of common barbed wire, seventy cents a yard at any hardware store in Nebraska. Her eyes had been ripped out. The sockets were filled with the moon flax of corn silk. Her jaws were wrenched open in a silent scream, her mouth filled with corn husks.
On her left was a skeleton in a moldering surplice. The nude jawbone grinned. The eyesockets seemed to stare at Burt jocularly, as if the one-time minister of the Grace Baptist Church were saying: it’s not so bad; being sacrificed by pagan devil-children in the corn is not so bad; having your eyes ripped out of your skull according to the Laws of Moses is not so bad—
To the left of the skeleton in the surplice was a second skeleton, this one dressed in a rotting, blue uniform. A hat hung over the skull, shading the eyes, and on the peak of the cap was a greenish-tinged badge reading: “POLICE CHIEF.”
That was when Burt heard it coming: not the children but something much larger, moving through the corn toward the clearing. Not the children, no. The children wouldn’t venture into the corn at night. This was the holy place, the place of He Who Walks behind the Rows.
Jerkily, Burt turned to flee. The row by which he had entered the clearing was gone. Closed up. It was coming closer now, and he could hear it, pulsing through the corn. He could hear it breathing. An ecstasy of superstitious terror seized him. It was coming. The corn on the far side of the clearing had suddenly darkened, as if a gigantic shadow had blotted it out
Coming.
He Who Walks behind the Rows.
It began to come into the clearing. Burt saw something huge, bulking up to the sky . . . something green with terrible red eyes the size of footballs.
Something that smelled like dried corn husks, years in some dark barn.
He began to scream. But he did not scream long.
Some time later a bloated, orange harvest moon came up.
The children of the corn stood in the clearing at midday, looking at the two crucified skeletons and the two bodies . . . the bodies were not skeletons yet, but they would be. In time. And here, in the heartland of Nebraska, in the corn, there was nothing but time.
“Behold, a dream came to me in the night, and the Lord did shew all this to me.”
They all turned to look at Isaac with dread and wonder, even Malachai. Isaac was only nine, but he had been the seer since the corn had taken David a year ago. David had been nineteen and had walked into the corn on his birthday, as dusk had come drifting down the summer rows.
Now, small face grave under his round-crowned hat, Isaac continued:
“And in my dream the Lord was a shadow that walked behind the rows, and he spoke to me in the words he used to our older brothers years ago. He is much displeased with this sacrifice.”
They made a sighing, sobbing noise and looked at the surrounding walls of green.
“And the Lord did say: 'Have I not given you a place of killing, that you might make sacrifice there? And have I not shewn you favor? But this man has made blasphemy within me, and I have completed this sacrifice myself. Like the Blue Man and the false minister who escaped many years ago.’ ”
“The Blue Man . . . the false minister,” they whispered and looked at each other uneasily.
“So now is the Age of Favor lowered from nineteen plantings and harvestings to eighteen,” Isaac went on relentlessly. “Yet be fruitful and multiply as the corn multiplies, that my favor may be shewn you, and be upon you.”
Isaac ceased.
The eyes turned to Malachai and Joseph, the only two among this party who were eighteen. There were others back in town, perhaps twenty in all.
They waited to hear what Malachai would say, Malachai who had led the hunt for Japeth, who evermore would be known as Ahaz, cursed of God. Malachai had cut the throat of Ahaz and had thrown his body out of the corn so the foul body would not pollute it or blight it.
“I obey the word of God,” he whispered.
The corn seemed to sigh its approval.
In the weeks to come, the girls would make many corncob crucifixes to ward off further evil.
And that night those above the Age of Favor walked silently into the corn and went to the clearing, to gain the continued favor of He Who Walks behind the Rows.
“Goodbye, Malachai,” Ruth called. She waved disconsolately. Her belly was big with Malachai’s child, and tears coursed silently down her cheeks. Malachai did not turn. The corn swallowed him.
Ruth turned away, still crying. She had conceived a secret hatred for the corn and sometimes dreamed of walking into it with a torch in each hand when dry September came and the stalks were dead and explosively combustible. But she also feared it. Out there, in the night, something walked, and it saw everything . . . even the secrets kept in human hearts.
Dusk deepened into night. Around Gatlin the corn rustled and whispered secretly. It was well pleased.
IF DAMON COMES by Charles L. Grant
Charles L. Grant appears to be able to write just about any sort of fiction, and to do it at a level of quality that can only amaze his colleagues. He is the author of a number of science fiction and fantasy novels (such as The Hour of the Oxrun Dead), editor of the horror anthology Shadows, and owns a Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for his short story, “A Crowd of Shadows.” He even writes such things as gothics and historical romances under pseudonyms. But Grant assures us that his first love is the horror story, and “If Damon Comes,” which appears here for the first time, admirably demonstrates that love.
Fog, nightbreath of the river, luring without whispering in the thick crown of an elm, huddling without creaking around the base of a chimney; it drifted past porch lights, and in passing blurred them, dropped over the street lights, and in dropping grayed them. It crept in with midnight to stay until dawn, and there was no wind to bring the light out of hiding.
Frank shivered and drew his raincoat’s collar closer around his neck, held it closed with one hand while the other wiped at the pricks of moisture that clung to his cheeks, his short dark hair. He whistled once, loudly, but in listening heard nothing, not even an echo. He stamped his feet against the November cold and moved to the nearest corner, squinted and saw nothing. He knew the cat was gone, had known it from the moment he had seen the saucer still brimming with milk on the back porch. Damon had been sitting beside it, hands folded, knees pressed tightly together, elbows tucked into his sides. He was cold, but refused to acknowledge it, and Frank had only tousled his son’s softly brown hair, squeezed his shoulder once and went inside to say good-bye to his wife.
And now . . . now he walked, through the streets of Oxrun Station, looking for an animal he had seen only once—a half-breed Siamese with a milk-white face—whistling like a fool afraid of the dark, searching for the note that would bring the animal running.
And in walking, he was unpleasantly reminded of a night the year before, when he had had one drink too many at someone’s party, made one amorous boast too many in someone’s ear, and had ended up on a street corner with a woman he knew only vaguely. They had kissed once and long, and once broken, he had turned around to see Damon staring up at him. The boy had turned, had fled, and Frank had stayed away most of the night, not knowing what Susan had heard, fearing more what Damon had thought.
It had been worse than horrid facing the boy again, but Damon had acted as though nothing had happened; and the guilt passed as the months passed, and the wondering why his son had been out in the first place.
He whistled. Crouched and snapped his fingers at the dark of some shrubbery. Then he straightened and blew out a deeply held breath. There was no cat, there were no cars, and he finally gave in to his aching feet and sore
back and headed for home. Quickly. Watching the fog tease the road before him, cut it sharply off behind.
It wasn’t fair, he thought, his hands shoved in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as though expecting a blow. Damon, in his short eight years had lost two dogs already to speeders, a canary to some disease he couldn’t even pronounce, and two brothers stillborn—it was getting to be a problem. He was getting to be a problem, fighting each day that he had to go to school, whining and weeping whenever vacations came around and trips were planned.
He’d asked Doc Simpson about it when Damon turned seven. Dependency, he was told; clinging to the only three things left in his life—his short, short life—that he still believed to be constant: his home, his mother . . . and Frank.
And Frank had kissed a woman on a corner and Damon had seen him.
Frank shuddered and shook his head quickly, remembering how the boy had come to the office at least once a day for the next three weeks, saying nothing, just standing on the sidewalk looking in through the window. Just for a moment. Long enough to be sure that his father was still there.
Once home, then, Frank shed his coat and hung it on the rack by the front door. A call, a muffled reply, and he took the stairs two at a time and trotted down the hall to Damon’s room set over the kitchen.
“Sorry, old pal,” he said with a shrug as he made himself a place on the edge of the mattress. “I guess he went home.”
Damon, small beneath the flowered quilt, innocent from behind long curling lashes, shook his head sharply. “No,” he said. “This is home. It is, Dad, it really is.”
Frank scratched at the back of his neck. “Well, I guess he didn’t think of it quite that way.”
“Maybe he got lost, huh? It’s awfully spooky out there. Maybe he’s afraid to come out of where he’s hiding.”
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