by Simon Holt
The coach stalked across the mat and shoved Lindsay to the side. Then he lifted his foot and stomped on Eagan’s head, crushing it like a rotten watermelon. It splintered against the metal pikes, and more oily black fluid gushed across the mat. It wasn’t blood but neither was it the smoke Reggie found inside the children in Henry’s fearscape version of the carnival.
Perhaps over time, some layers solidified more than others? Reggie wondered.
Banner lifted his foot again to crush Lindsay, but Reggie gasped audibly, and the coach turned to the bleachers. To Reggie’s horror and disgust, the thing had no face. It looked like someone had taken a surgical scalpel and carved out the fullness of Banner’s visage, cut through flesh, muscle and bone, drained all blood and mucus, and then scooped out tissue and brain until nothing remained but a hollowed-out cove.
The only thing inside now was a bright, silver whistle clamped between a set of stained teeth molded to the pulpy back of his pinkish head.
“Sounds like we got a spy in here, boys!” The teeth opened and closed slightly as the monstrous gym teacher yelled and stomped toward the bleachers, puffs of unseen air tweeting the whistle a little with every step. “You best come out, dirty little spy.”
He kicked some of the wooden slats and listened. Reggie stayed deathly still.
“That crotchety, used-up Munson sent you over from Wennemack to scout out my team this year, right? Figures that old bastard would stoop to cheating. Couldn’t take a Banner crew any season, no matter how many spies he’s got! Boys! You ferret me out our spy and I’ll cut you loose on laps for the rest of the day!”
The boys murmured excitedly among themselves.
“Get a move on, boys, or I’ll stitch you into the medicine ball!”
The group of timid kids charged at the bleachers like a pack of wild dogs. Reggie bolted out from behind the stands toward the hallway, but the path she’d taken into the gym had disappeared. There was no exit, and the boys laughed as they surrounded her.
She darted across the center of the gym, and the spikes of the mat punctured her feet. A couple of the boys tried to follow her, but they tripped and landed on the spikes with dull, wet splatters.
“That girl is schooling you, Tolin! Get your ass in gear, boy! Don’t let her touch my medicine ball!”
Reggie reached the equipment closet and found it unlocked. She yanked the door closed behind her and wedged a hockey stick against the handle. The boys pounded on the door. She had only moments to find a way out before they’d be upon her.
Reggie desperately searched the closet for something useful. She clawed through the carts of basketballs, rows of orange cones, stacked floor-hockey nets, and grabbed hold of an aluminum bat. It felt solid and heavy in her hand.
The boys broke down the door and Reggie struck. Skulls broke open and filled the room with black ooze before bodies vanished in a poof of smoke. But the children kept coming at her, forcing her to retreat to the back of the closet, where she bumped into something warm and soft. And wet. It groaned.
Banner’s medicine ball.
The sphere was three feet in diameter, made from a leathery canvas sewn together from the hides of dozens of young boys once tortured students in Banner’s class. The same fresh black fluid dripped from the seams, and the morbid ball felt torturously alive.
The coach’s whistle blew so loud and shrill that the heads of the remaining boys exploded in smoke, and their bodies tumbled forward and dropped to the ground.
Banner stalked inside the closet, his meaty concave head throbbing with anger. He had Reggie trapped.
“You take your hands off that ball, little girl.”
He snatched a hockey puck from a shelf and hurled it at Reggie. The puck slammed into the back wall and cracked through the other side.
“Roll it to me now and I’ll kill you quick.”
A soft light poured through the rift in the wall behind Reggie. The other side was the way out. She pounded her fist against it as Banner grabbed a hockey stick with a glinting razor-edged blade.
“Disobey, and I’ll bleed you slow.”
Reggie placed both hands on the medicine ball. Dozens of pained faces, stitched together, stared up at her, and she felt the children’s skins pulsing hot beneath her fingertips.
She picked the ball up over her head.
“No! Put it down, you little bitch!”
Reggie heaved it into the wall behind her. The barrier bowed and warped before collapsing away. Reggie was bathed in a deep orange glow, and the equipment closet around her washed away. The screaming gym teacher split apart into strips of clayish flesh and black ooze, and then Reggie sensed herself falling, unable to see anything but the fog around her.
When the haze cleared, she stood on the edge of a quiet cornfield that extended in all directions for as far as she could see. Behind her was nothing but swirling gray mist. She stared at the innocent-looking terrain before her.
“So what fun secrets are you hiding?” she asked the stalks. “Killer creamed corn?” She walked into the amber field.
21
Unger watched with barely concealed glee as the television monitors began to beep and blip with electrical waves from Reggie’s and Quinn’s brains. Data streamed across the screens and the brain images lit up with color as blood flowed to both their amygdalas. Quinn moaned and twitched, but the movement was slight, and their hands stayed in contact.
Reggie’s neuron centers grew larger every second—Unger had never seen anything like it. Her emotional response to whatever she was facing in Quinn’s fearscape was off the charts, as were her serotonin levels. Furthermore, areas of her brain not usually functional in human beings were lighting up like Christmas trees as the neuro-pathways rearranged themselves. Unger was seeing activity he had never known could exist.
This girl was the catalyst, he felt sure of it. She was like a battery that could jump-start a car, only she’d be jump-starting other human brains, overloading their amygdalas with emotional energy that would blow them up and demolish the gate that stood between the Vour world and this one. Vours would be able to cross over anytime, any day.
“It is going to happen!” he shouted into the cavern. Vours of all ages, posing as men, women, boys, and girls, began to swarm into the room and stood among the prostrate human bodies. They smiled devilishly and applauded the doctor.
“You have done well by us,” said one.
“When will the rest come through?” asked another.
“Soon.” Unger strode to a switch coupled to the nexus of wires. “When I connect them, her power will ignite all the hosts.”
He flipped the switch, and a jolt of electricity surged through all the wires, which sparked and sizzled. The unconscious human victims spasmed as the current shot through them. On the television screens, their brain images began to show the same activity as Reggie’s, though the neuron firings were not as strong. Unger watched the screens carefully.
“It’s working. As she grows stronger in the fearscape, so do these hosts. The moment the fearscape implodes, the barrier will be eclipsed.” Unger laughed. “The girl’s power to defeat the Vours will be what liberates them!”
Suddenly an explosion shook the cavern, and an expanse of the dirt ceiling caved in on the gathered group. Balls of flame and dirt rained down from above, threatening to set the whole room ablaze. Shots rang out, and two Vours fell to the ground, dead. Black fumes gushed from their lips and eyes, mingling with the smoke from the fire.
Unger attempted to shield Reggie and Quinn with his body, watching the wires attached to their brains. He could not risk them going up in flames, not when Reggie was so close to conquering the fearscape.
A dagger flipped through the air and hit an orderly in the stomach. Unger jumped back as the Vour crumpled to the ground.
Flames sprouted all around the cavern. The Vours scattered, and some caught fire as they tried to flee. Billows of black smoke choked the room as earth and rock poured in from above. Still t
he red neuron hives on the television screens swelled.
“Almost there, almost there,” Unger chanted.
“Back away from the girl now.” Eben Bloch appeared through the smoke and ash, the gun raised and pointed at Unger. His face and clothes and hair were black with soot, and his broken arm rested in a sling, but he walked on his own. Aaron came running through beside him, holding out a blood-stained knife.
“You’re too late!” cried Unger.
Eben lunged at Unger before Aaron could stop him. The two elderly men tumbled to the ground, and the gun went off.
The smell of the corn and the feel of the stalks brushing against her skin were so real. Reggie knew she was still in the fearscape, but the sea of soft yellows, greens, and oranges was undeniably tranquil. With every step she took forward, the softness of the cornfield lowered her adrenaline. Her heartbeat, racing since the moment she slipped off the doorframe in the school hallway, slowed enough for her to breathe deep and calm. She could walk and walk amid the gentle cornstalks forever.
And the moment that thought penetrated her mind, Reggie wondered if that was what the Vour had wanted when it constructed this level of Quinn’s fearscape.
She did a slow turn inside the corn, and every degree of her surroundings looked identical. Seven ears of corn grew from each stalk, three on the left and four on the right. Each had the same number of green blades, reached the exact same height, and stood equidistant from one another. An anxious throb pulsed in her chest.
“Fight it, Reggie,” she said aloud. “It wants you to freak out. Don’t let it.”
She pushed forward.
“Walk straight. And keep going.”
Growing up in a rural community like Cutter’s Wedge, children learned certain things at an early age, and Reggie knew the drill. Don’t cross bridges when the wash gets high, don’t touch a farmer’s tractor without permission, and never panic if you’ve gotten turned around playing in a cornfield.
If you go too deep and lose your direction, walk a straight line until you come out on the other end. Even if you’re miles from where you started, you’ll never truly be lost.
She figured scared, little Quinn knew the drill, too.
The shadows in the corn grew darker and the air colder as she continued straight ahead. Surely, there was something menacing on the way, but what choice did she have? There was no turning back.
At last the patterns of some of the stalks changed, but just barely. However, Reggie had been inside long enough to pick up the subtle differences: four ears on the left, three on the right. The misfit stalks led her in a zigzag trail to a small clearing.
A crude scarecrow sagged upon a wooden pole, tufts of dried straw sticking out of a blue-black checkered flannel shirt and old, faded jeans. The thing did not move, but Reggie approached with caution, hunching over to look under the wide-brimmed sunhat and see the hidden face beneath.
For a brief moment, her thoughts retreated to the story of Jeremiah; it was one of the first she’d read in the old journal that introduced her to the Vours. The boy’s drunken father had strung him up on a cross in a cornfield as punishment decades ago. His terror out in the night had summoned a Vour on Sorry Night, and his little sister, Macie, could not save him. When Jeremiah grew old and sick from cancer, Macie, then an old woman herself, locked him in a cell in her basement and waited for him to die. When he finally did, the Vour was trapped.
Until Reggie let it out years later and destroyed it. She then devoured its remains herself and unleashed an inexplicable power inside her. It all seemed like a horrible nightmare, but it had happened. And now she stood in a cornfield not unlike the one where Jeremiah had been sacrificed to the dark.
Reggie pulled an ear off the closest stalk and threw it. The corn struck the scarecrow’s hat and knocked it off. The soft pumpkin head beneath toppled to the ground with a squishy thump.
But nothing else happened.
The head didn’t spew forth maggots that grew into raging demons; the cornstalks didn’t uproot and attack her. Just an eerie and dead silence hung all around.
Reggie picked up the head and stared through the carved eyes. Something was inside.
Reggie reached her hand into the opening on top of the pumpkin and pulled out a couple of wrinkled pumpkin seeds with a few strands of dried pulp.
And a homemade baseball card.
She examined it. The grainy photo of a little boy had been taped to construction paper, and a hand-drawn banner decorated the bottom. There was a name written with a royal blue marker.
3B—Kenny Cullens.
Why did the name sound familiar?
Reggie flipped the card over and found more handwritten information filled out inside carefully penciled boxes: batting average, home runs, slugging percentage, stolen bases, put-outs, fielding percentage.
At the bottom was a small section that said the one thing Reggie needed.
Best Friend: Quinn Waters.
A bread crumb.
He had been here. And she was getting closer. She knew that now. But he was hidden from her.
Reggie tucked the card into her pocket, placed the pumpkin head back on the scarecrow, and continued to follow the trail of odd stalks, hopeful that she’d soon find her way out.
Faster and faster she moved, now able to more easily distinguish the subtly different stalks. She saw the field open again and stepped into another clearing.
No, not another clearing. The same one.
But one element had changed.
The scarecrow was gone.
Finding the baseball card, discovering the bread crumb—she had awakened yet another monster born of Quinn’s deepest fears. And the trail she’d followed, believing that she’d discovered the secret of the corn, had only led her back to where she’d been.
So this time Reggie closed her eyes and just walked. The corn, once soft and lush against her face, now felt rough and harsh like sandpaper. The blades grated her cheeks and poked at her throat, slicing shallowly into her skin. But she kept walking, and she kept her eyes shut. No false patterns, no rising or setting false sun in a false sky, no psychic pain would alter her step.
“Feel for him,” Reggie said aloud. “Reach. He’s out there.”
Straw crunched and the quiet brush of flannel seemed to whisper behind her.
“Look.”
A voice, thin and raspy.
“Look… at… me…”
The scarecrow.
She squeezed her eyes shut and walked.
“Wrong way.”
It was right behind her.
“Lost… so lost…”
Straight. Keeping going straight.
Reggie could sense the thing right over her shoulder. She smelled the straw and the scent of pumpkin. But she did not run and did not veer. Straight. If you walk straight through a cornfield, you will never truly be lost.
“You are mine.”
A single blade of straw touched the back of her bare neck and streaked slowly down between her shoulder blades.
“Never get out.”
The air grew warmer. Like sun on her face.
“No…”
The voice was louder now, bitter.
“Look at me!”
She was nearly out, but she did not dare look until her face and hands sensed no corn stalks around her. And then she slowly opened her eyes. She stood before a ladder on the side of a massive grain silo in the middle of a peaceful and deserted farm. She still sensed the scarecrow behind her, but now she heard something else—a distant sound in the sky coming closer.
The fluttering of many wings.
“You shouldn’t have followed me out here.” Reggie saw its horrific shadow stretched out across the side of the silo, large and jagged, but she did not turn around.
“Why is that?”
“Crows love pumpkin seeds.”
The birds descended.
Reggie gripped the ladder and scrambled up as feathers, beaks, and talons flew down aro
und her. She threw herself through the opening near the top of the silo, still refusing to look back, but she heard freakish squawks and the thrashing of straw below her.
Once inside, she was instantly buried in grain and dust. Some unseen valve had been opened, sucking her down through another portal, grain choking her and filling her lungs…
… she awoke upside-down, trapped between two crumpled bench seats at the rear of a flipped over, incinerated yellow school bus. The frame of the vehicle had been crushed, the windows had been blown out, the seats melted. Baseball caps and cleats littered the smoldering ceiling, now the floor. She smelled burnt hair and old bubble gum.
Reggie wriggled out of the seats and dropped to the roof of the bus with a painful thud. She gathered herself and climbed out of a window.
Spatters of dried blood marked the asphalt and dirt. Ash blew down the sidewalk, spiraling around piles of broken glass and smoldering mounds of rubber. This was the scene of a horrible traffic accident.
Reggie recognized the geography of old town Cutter’s Wedge, a section of town that only a decade ago bustled with factories and shops. When hard times had hit, many businesses went under or moved from town. It had become a haunted-looking place.
Her heart filled with dread. She found no bodies here, no survivors, nothing alive. Nothing about this place hinted that Quinn had been here or even lingered nearby.
It struck her that she knew nothing about the true Quinn, about who he was as a human being. Had she moved too hastily through this fearscape? Missed clues?
She’d recovered only a single token—the baseball card—from the layers of the fearscape, just one psychic bread crumb. Was she moving closer to the young boy imprisoned here?
The time she’d spent with the Vour Quinn had proved to be nothing but a great deception. She’d been a fool out there. So why not in here, too? She didn’t know Quinn. She knew only the monster.
And she’d allied herself with it. Trusted it.
And she’d let herself be tricked by it—again and again and again. She was lost. Sooty air burned her throat as she wandered into the center of the deserted street.