by Holly Black
Our front-page story, two days later, was headlined “Youth Squad.” I thought “The Chosen Few” was a bit tacky somehow. We cropped the image so the children weren’t so obviously small. The accompanying text was brief—it had to be, given the lack of information. A boxed-out paragraph:
This is the new generation of law enforcers. A radical initiative in North Birmingham to counter the horrific recent wave of juvenile crimes, the youth police squad are being trained to enforce the law in our schools and on our streets. Young offenders will have nowhere to hide. The Mercury supports the new squad and hopes it will do what needs to be done.
We expected a tidal wave of liberal condemnation, but the reaction was muted. We had more letters about the Blues squad (Birmingham City FC) than the youth police squad. But the story did seem to have an impact: the juvenile crime statistics fell almost at once, and reports of offences by pre-teens stopped entirely. It didn’t occur to me that the children I’d photographed might themselves have had a real impact, until another police story came to my attention. Across the city, but mostly in Newtown, a number of “problem” children had gone missing.
Needless to say, these were just the kind of scrotes who were likely to go on the run or get knocked off or sold by criminal associates or their own families (if the distinction was even valid). But there were so many in a few weeks that a parents’ group started in Ward End, asking why the police weren’t doing more. They too went quiet after a little while. Perhaps they found the answer, or it found them.
In early December, when the petrol-tinged rain gave way to a calming stillness, I walked home from the office. It was just after midnight; we’d put the morning edition of the Mercury to bed too late for our usual Friday night drink. The roads were coated with frost. Outside the city centre, traffic sped down the expressways and a few beggars poked at the litter bins. Otherwise, the streets were empty and silent. I had the sensation of being watched.
Two days later I got a call from Ian on my mobile, also shortly after midnight. He was very drunk. I didn’t catch most of what he said—only the phrase never thought of this and the final statement: There’s a choir practice tomorrow night, late, at St Francis’ Church in Bordesley. Then his voice broke up into hoarse wordless sounds, as if he was crying or in pain. When I asked him what was wrong, he rang off.
St Francis’ wasn’t in the phone book, but I found a reference to it at the Council House. It was part of an old street awaiting demolition, due to the subsidence common in that area. The church had been derelict for twenty years. I wasn’t sure what “late” meant, but doubted the bedtime of youngsters was a factor.
Shortly after ten, I parked my car on the main road in Bordesley and walked to the condemned backstreet. It was the kind of slum that had mostly been replaced by tower blocks in the sixties: terraced houses barely wider than their front doors, with a single window on the first floor. Every house was boarded or bricked up. The church itself had suffered storm damage, and seemed in addition to be slightly tilted—but the light was poor, and I couldn’t swear to it. However, it seemed clear that the door was securely locked. I walked up and down the ruined street a few times, sipping at my hip flask of Maker’s Mark. There was no sign of life anywhere in the street.
Eventually I went back to my car, but felt too wound up to leave. I flicked back and forth between local radio channels for over an hour, hoping to catch something about the Chosen Few. But all the conversations seemed artificially bright, like a game played under floodlights. My hunger for the story was mixed with a growing concern at what I might have helped to set in motion. There had to be an answer. Near midnight, I got out of my car and walked back to St Francis’. There was no sign of life.
The moon was higher now, and it was a clear night. I was able to make out something I’d missed before: a side door to the church whose lock had been smashed. It was held shut by a pile of bricks. As quietly as possible, I shifted the bricks aside and pushed open the rotting door. Inside, the dark was pregnant with a smell I could neither bear nor understand. It seemed to be a combined reek of ammonia, shit and decay, but with something else—some diseased animal, perhaps. I fished in my jacket pocket for my tiny pocket torch—probably not unlike the one used by the Rat Burglar months before—and switched it on.
The walls and furnishings were smeared with black mould and laced with cobwebs. Water had pooled in the nave, where the swollen and torn remains of a few hymn-books were scattered on the floor. The altar bore an unusually large cross of twisted iron, slightly at an angle. My nose told me more than my eyes. The ammonia smell—rats, of course—was everywhere, and so was the smell of rotting wood and stone. But the strange, terrible disease smell, tinged with excrement, came from one place: the altar. I walked around it and saw that at the back, an area of cobweb had recently been cleared away. And standing there, I became aware of a sound: a faint, uneven chorus of high voices. They weren’t singing. They were screaming in pain and terror. Even in the chilly air, I began to sweat.
A light flickered in the corner of my eye. Suddenly the nave was filled with small figures clothed in white, some of them holding lit candles. Those with free hands rushed at me and smashed into my legs, knocking me to the cobwebbed floor. Two of them cuffed my hands behind my back, then tied my legs with wire. I tried to tell them I was only here as a reporter, but a child blocked my mouth with a small hand, pinching my nose until I almost blacked out. They dragged me to the side of the altar, so I could see what they did next.
The Chosen Few were no longer masked. Their small faces had the calm serenity of prayer. Silently, they pulled away the moth-eaten rug behind the altar and lifted the trapdoor they had exposed. The stench of disease became stronger, and so did the cries from below. A rat crawled up through the black space and ran beyond the light. Most of the children went down beneath the floor. A few minutes later, they returned with their prisoners.
The figures they dragged up from the vault were no bigger than themselves—but filthy, smeared with blood and excrement, their wrists and ankles chained, their hair bound in veils of cobweb, their faces bruised and grey. It was like a medieval painting of angels guiding the dead up to Heaven. At least they’d given up trying to scream.
When the prisoners were gathered in a heap, still chained, before the altar, the Chosen Few formed a semicircle around them. Threads of pale smoke rose from the candles, which didn’t seem to have made the church any warmer. Then the choir began to sing. Louder and harsher than before, the sound filled the nave and made every muscle in my trapped body tense. Their voices merged into a single note that rose until its pitch was unbearable. Then, all at once, they stopped.
The giant cross on the damp-stained altar crumpled as if its arms had been broken. Something began to take shape around it, like mould around a skeleton. A grey figure, bent over but with obvious vigour, jumped down to the floor. The long, yellow teeth that filled its face gleamed in the candlelight. Between its stumpy legs, something thickened and rose. Slowly, almost playfully, it reached out to the nearest of the prisoners and began to feed, while the Chosen Few—looking, for the first time, like the children they were—curled happily on the floor around its taloned feet.
Children of the Corn
Stephen King
Burt turned the radio on too loud and didn’t turn it down because they were on the verge of another argument and he didn’t want it to happen. He was desperate for it not to happen.
Vicky said something.
“What?” he shouted.
“Turn it down! Do you want to break my eardrums?”
He bit down hard on what might have come through his mouth and turned it down.
Vicky was fanning herself with her scarf even though the T-Bird was air-conditioned. “Where are we, anyway?”
“Nebraska.”
She gave him a cold, neutral look. “Yes, Burt. I know we’re in Nebraska, Burt. But where in hell are we?”
“You’ve got the road atlas. Look it up. O
r can’t you read?”
“Such wit. This is why we got off the turnpike. So we could look at three hundred miles of corn. And enjoy the wit and wisdom of Burt Robeson.”
He was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. He decided he was holding it that tightly because if he loosened up, why, one of those hands might just fly off and hit the ex-Prom Queen beside him right in the chops. We’re saving our marriage, he told himself. Yes. We’re doing it the same way us grunts went about saving villages in the war.
“Vicky,” he said carefully. “I have driven fifteen hundred miles on turnpikes since we left Boston. I did all that driving myself because you refused to drive. Then—”
“I did not refuse!” Vicky said hotly. “Just because I get migraines when I drive for a long time—”
“Then when I asked you if you’d navigate for me on some of the secondary roads, you said sure, Burt. Those were your exact words. Sure, Burt. Then—”
“Sometimes I wonder how I ever wound up married to you.”
“By saying two little words.”
She stared at him for a moment, white-lipped, and then picked up the road atlas. She turned the pages savagely.
It had been a mistake leaving the turnpike, Burt thought morosely. It was a shame, too, because up until then they had been doing pretty well, treating each other almost like human beings. It had sometimes seemed that this trip to the coast, ostensibly to see Vicky’s brother and his wife but actually a last-ditch attempt to patch up their own marriage, was going to work.
But since they left the pike, it had been bad again. How bad? Well, terrible, actually.
“We left the turnpike at Hamburg, right?”
“Right.”
“There’s nothing more until Gatlin,” she said. “Twenty miles. Wide place in the road. Do you suppose we could stop there and get something to eat? Or does your almighty schedule say we have to go until two o’clock like we did yesterday?”
He took his eyes off the road to look at her. “I’ve about had it, Vicky. As far as I’m concerned, we can turn around right here and go home and see that lawyer you wanted to talk to. Because this isn’t working out—”
She had faced forward again, her expression stonily set. It suddenly turned to surprise and fear. “Burt, look out, you’re going to—”
He turned his attention back to the road just in time to see something vanish under the T-Bird’s bumper. A moment later, while he was only beginning to switch from gas to brake, he felt something thump sickeningly under the front and then the back wheels. They were thrown forward as the car braked along the centerline, decelerating from fifty to zero along black skidmarks.
“A dog,” he said. “Tell me it was a dog, Vicky.”
Her face was a pallid, cottage-cheese color. “A boy. A little boy. He just ran out of the corn and … congratulations, tiger.”
She fumbled the car door open, leaned out, threw up.
Burt sat straight behind the T-Bird’s wheel, hands still gripping it loosely. He was aware of nothing for a long time but the rich, dark smell of fertilizer.
Then he saw that Vicky was gone and when he looked in the outside mirror he saw her stumbling clumsily back toward a heaped bundle that looked like a pile of rags. She was ordinarily a graceful woman but now her grace was gone, robbed.
It’s manslaughter. That’s what they call it. I took my eyes off the road.
He turned the ignition off and got out. The wind rustled softly through the growing man-high corn, making a weird sound like respiration. Vicky was standing over the bundle of rags now, and he could hear her sobbing.
He was halfway between the car and where she stood and something caught his eye on the left, a gaudy splash of red amid all the green, as bright as barn paint.
He stopped, looking directly into the corn. He found himself thinking (anything to untrack from those rags that were not rags) that it must have been a fantastically good growing season for corn. It grew close together, almost ready to bear. You could plunge into those neat, shaded rows and spend a day trying to find your way out again. But the neatness was broken here. Several tall cornstalks had been broken and leaned askew. And what was that further back in the shadows?
“Burt?” Vicky screamed at him. “Don’t you want to come see? So you can tell all your poker buddies what you bagged in Nebraska? Don’t you—” But the rest was lost in fresh sobs. Her shadow was puddled starkly around her feet. It was almost noon.
Shade closed over him as he entered the corn. The red barn paint was blood. There was a low, somnolent buzz as flies lit, tasted, and buzzed off again … maybe to tell others. There was more blood on the leaves further in. Surely it couldn’t have splattered this far. And then he was standing over the object he had seen from the road. He picked it up.
The neatness of the rows was disturbed here. Several stalks were canted drunkenly, two of them had been broken clean off. The earth had been gouged. There was blood. The corn rustled. With a little shiver, he walked back to the road.
Vicky was having hysterics, screaming unintelligible words at him, crying, laughing. Who would have thought it could end in such a melodramatic way? He looked at her and saw he wasn’t having an identity crisis or a difficult life transition or any of those trendy things. He hated her. He gave her a hard slap across the face.
She stopped short and put a hand against the reddening impression of his fingers. “You’ll go to jail, Burt,” she said solemnly.
“I don’t think so,” he said, and put the suitcase he had found in the corn at her feet.
“What—?”
“I don’t know. I guess it belonged to him.” He pointed to the sprawled, face-down body that lay in the road. No more than thirteen, from the look of him.
The suitcase was old. The brown leather was bettered and scuffed. Two hanks of clothesline had been wrapped around it and tied in large, clownish grannies. Vicky bent to undo one of them, saw the blood greased into the knot, and withdrew.
Burt knelt and turned the body over gently.
“I don’t want to look,” Vicky said, staring down helplessly anyway. And when the staring, sightless face flopped up to regard them, she screamed again. The boy’s face was dirty, his expression a grimace of terror. His throat had been cut.
Burt got up and put his arms around Vicky as she began to sway. “Don’t faint,” he said very quietly. “Do you hear me, Vicky? Don’t faint.”
He repeated it over and over and at last she began to recover and held him tight. They might have been dancing, there on the noon-struck road with the boy’s corpse at their feet.
“Vicky?”
“What?” Muffled against his shirt.
“Go back to the car and put the keys in your pocket. Get the blanket out of the back seat, and my rifle. Bring them here.”
“The rifle?”
“Someone cut his throat. Maybe whoever is watching us.”
Her head jerked up and her wide eyes considered the corn. It marched away as far as the eye could see, undulating up and down small dips and rises of land.
“I imagine he’s gone. But why take chances? Go on. Do it.”
She walked stiltedly back to the car, her shadow following, a dark mascot who stuck close at this hour of the day. When she leaned into the back seat, Burt squatted beside the boy. White male, no distinguishing marks. Run over, yes, but the T-Bird hadn’t cut the kid’s throat. It had been cut raggedly and inefficiently—no army sergeant had shown the killer the finer points of hand-to-hand assassination—but the final effect had been deadly. He had either run or been pushed through the last thirty feet of corn, dead or mortally wounded. And Burt Robeson had run him down. If the boy had still been alive when the car hit him, his life had been cut short by thirty seconds at most.
Vicky tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped.
She was standing with the brown army blanket over her left arm, the cased pump shotgun in her right hand, her face averted. He took the blanket and s
pread it on the road. He rolled the body onto it. Vicky uttered a desperate little moan.
“You okay?” He looked up at her. “Vicky?”
“Okay,” she said in a strangled voice.
He flipped the sides of the blanket over the body and scooped it up, hating the thick, dead weight of it. It tried to make a U in his arms and slither through his grasp. He clutched it tighter and they walked back to the T-Bird.
“Open the trunk,” he grunted.
The trunk was full of travel stuff, suitcases and souvenirs. Vicky shifted most of it into the back seat and Burt slipped the body into the made space and slammed the trunklid down. A sigh of relief escaped him.
Vicky was standing by the driver’s side door, still holding the cased rifle.
“Just put it in the back and get in.”
He looked at his watch and saw only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed like hours.
“What about the suitcase?” she asked.
He trotted back down the road to where it stood on the white line, like the focal point in an Impressionist painting. He picked it up by its tattered handle and paused for a moment. He had a strong sensation of being watched. It was a feeling he had read about in books, mostly cheap fiction, and he had always doubted its reality. Now he didn’t. It was as if there were people in the corn, maybe a lot of them, coldly estimating whether the woman could get the gun out of the case and use it before they could grab him, drag him into the shady rows, cut his throat—
Heart beating thickly, he ran back to the car, pulled the keys out of the trunk lock, and got in.
Vicky was crying again. Burt got them moving, and before a minute had passed he could no longer pick out the spot where it had happened in the rearview mirror.
“What did you say the next town was?” he asked.
“Oh.” She bent over the road atlas again. “Gatlin. We should be there in ten minutes.”
“Does it look big enough to have a police station?”
“No. It’s just a dot.”
“Maybe there’s a constable.”