by Holly Black
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 disjointedly. 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 anytime!
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 among 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 only hear 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, and 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 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 run, 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 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 for that long. He suspected they had done the most kidlike thing, regardless of the consequences for them: 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 here, 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 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 pull through the corn anymore. The row was taking him in the direction he wanted to go, naturally. The row ended up ahead. Ended? No, 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 on to the sun’s heat and he became aware that he was plastered with sweat and chaff and thin spider strands of cornsilk. The bugs ought to be crawling all over him … but 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 midges or mosquitoes in here, no blackflies 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 poke 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, hadn’t he been being led to this place?
Dread in his belly, he went on down to the row and stood at the edge of the clearing. Th
ere was enough light left for him to see what was here. He couldn’t scream. There didn’t seem to be enough air left in his lungs. He tottered in on legs like slats of splintery wood. His eyes bulged from his sweaty 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 with 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 moonflax of cornsilk. Her jaws were wrenched open in a silent scream, her mouth filled with cornhusks.
On her left was a skeleton in a moldering surplice. The nude jawbone grinned. The eye sockets seemed to stare at Burt jocularly, as if the onetime minister of the Grace Baptist Church was 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 and 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 he had entered the clearing by was gone. Closed up. All the rows had closed up. It was coming closer now and he could hear it, pushing through the corn. 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 eyes the size of footballs.
Something that smelled like dried cornhusks 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 Malachi. Isaac was only nine, but he had been the Seer since the corn had taken David a year ago. David had been nineteen and he had walked into the corn on his birthday, just 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 a 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 Malachi 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 Malachi would say, Malachi who had led the hunt for Japheth, who evermore would be known as Ahaz, cursed of God. Malachi had cut the throat of Ahaz and thrown his body out of the corn so the foul body would not pollute it or blight it.
“I obey the word of God,” Malachi whispered.
The corn seemed to sigh its approval.
In the weeks to come the girls would make many corncob sacrifices to ward off further evil.
And that night all of those now 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, Malachi,” Ruth called. She waved disconsolately. Her belly was big with Malachi’s child and tears coursed silently down her cheeks. Malachi did not turn. His back was straight. 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.
Yellowjacket Summer
Robert R. McCammon
“Car’s comin’, Mase,” the boy at the window said. “Comin’ lickety-split.”
“Ain’t no car comin’,” Mase replied from the back of the gas station. “Ain’t never no cars comin’.”
“Yes there is! Come look! I can see the dust risin’ off the road!”
Mase made a nasty sound with his lips and stayed where he was, sitting in the old cane chair Miss Nancy had said she wouldn’t befoul her behind to sit on. Mase was kinda sweet on Miss Nancy, the boy knew, and he was always asking her to come over for a cold CoCola but she had a boyfriend in Waycross so that wouldn’t do. The boy felt a little sorry for Mase sometimes, because nobody in town liked being around him much. Maybe it was because Mase was mean when he got riled, and he drank too much on Saturday nights. He smelled of grease and gasoline too, and his clothes and cap were always dark with stains.
“Come look, Mase!” the boy urged, but Mase shook his head and just sat watching the Braves baseball game on the little portable TV.
Well, there was a car, after all, trailing plumes of dust from its tires. But not exactly a car, the boy saw; it was a van with wood trim on its sides. The van had been white before it had met up with four unpaved miles of Highway 241, but now it was reddened by Georgia clay and there were dead bugs spotting the windshield. The boy wondered if any of them were yellowjackets. It was a yellowjacket summer for sure, he thought. Them things were just everywhere!
“They’re slowin’ down, Mase,” the boy told him. “I think they’re gonna pull in here.”
“Lord A’mighty!” He smacked his knee with one hand. “There’s three men on base! You go out and see what they want, hear?”
“Okay,” he agreed, and he was almost out the screen door when Mase called, “All they want’s a roadmap! They gotta be lost to be in this neck o’ nowhere! And tell ’em the gas truck’s not due till tomorrow, Toby!”
The screen door slammed shut behind him, and Toby ran out into the steamy July heat as the van pulled up to the pumps.
“There’s somebody!” Carla Emerson said as she saw the boy emerged from the building. She released the breath she’d been holding for what seemed like the last five miles, since they’d passed a road sign pointing them to the town of Capshaw, Georgia. The ancient-looking gas station, its roof covered with kudzu and its bricks bleached yellow by a hundred summer suns, was a beautiful sight, especially since the Voyager’s tank was getting way too low for comfort. Trish had been driving Carla crazy by saying, “It’s on the E, Momma!” every minute or so, and Joe made her feel like a twerp with his doomy pronouncement of “Should’ve pulled over at the rest stop, Mom.”
In the back seat, Joe put aside the Fantastic Four comic he�
��d been reading. “I sure do hope they’ve got a bathroom,” he said. “If I can’t pee in about five seconds I’m gonna go out in a burst of glory.”
“Thanks for the warning,” she told him as she stopped the van next to the dusty pumps and cut the engine. “Go for it!”
He opened his door and scrambled out, trying to keep his bladder from bouncing around too much. He was twelve years old, skinny, and wore braces on his teeth, but he was as intelligent as he was gawky and he figured that someday God would give him a better chance with girls; right now, though, computer games and superhero comics took most of his attention.
He almost ran right into the boy who had hair the color of fire.
“Howdy,” Toby said, and grinned. “What can I do for you?”
“Bathroom,” Joe told him, and Toby motioned with a finger toward the back side of the gas station. Joe took off at a trot, and Toby called, “Ain’t too clean in there, though. Sorry!”
That was the least of Joe Emerson’s worries as he hurried around the small brick building, back to where kudzu and stickers erupted out of the thick pine forest. There was just one door, and it had no handle on it, but it was mercifully unlocked. He went in.
Carla had her window rolled down. “Could you fill us up, please? With unleaded?”
Toby kept grinning at her. She was a pretty woman, maybe older than Miss Nancy but not too old; her hair was light brown and curly, and she had steady gray eyes set in a high-cheekboned face. Perched in the seat next to her was a little brown-haired girl maybe six or seven. “No gas,” he told the woman. “Not a drop.”
“Oh.” The nervous clenching sensation returned to her stomach. “Oh, no! Well … is there another station around here?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He pointed in the direction the van was facing. “Halliday’s about eighteen or twenty miles. They’ve got a real nice gas station.”
“We’re on E!” Trish said.
“Shhhh, honey.” Carla touched the little girl’s arm. The boy with red, close-cropped hair was still smiling, waiting for Carla to speak again. Through the station’s screen door Carla could hear the noise of a crowd roaring on a TV set.