Scarecrow

 The golden yellow straw of his body rustled like dry bone in the wind, topped with a battered straw hat that shadowed his featureless face. He wore a faded checkered shirt and red trousers held up by rotting lime green braces, his bare, frayed straw feet rooted to the damp earth. Through blazing sun, bitter rain, blinding snow, and howling gales, he sat motionless in the valley, fulfilling the grim covenant of his creation: keeping the ravenous critters from devouring the meager crops required for survival.

Scientists claimed crows possessed a brilliant, plutonian cunning, but the scarecrow knew a deeper, darker hunger. Watched over by his dead, button-sewn eyes, I had grown from a sickly child into a man, often wishing the twitching effigy would come to life so I might share a conversation, or a dance, with my silent, straw-filled friend.

Then came the heavy, scraping knock at my cottage door.

The valley of Blackwood was a place that God had seemingly abandoned during a mid-week inventory, leaving it as a grey pocket of stubborn survival. My father had built the cottage—or rather, he had dragged rotting timbers together until they formed a box that kept the worst of the weather out, though it never quite kept out the draft of the dead soil.

When I was six, I was nothing more than skin stretched thin over a lattice of fragile bones. My mother had coughed her last into a woolen rag before the winter snow had even finished settling, and my father, hollowed out by grief and the endless labor of scratching corn from stubborn dirt, fashioned the scarecrow. He didn't buy it from a market or stitch it together from fine linens. He took the clothes off my dead uncle’s back, stuffed them with rye straw harvested from the lower acre, and jammed a thick oak stake right through its center, burying the sharpened end six feet into the dark, writhing loam.

"He's watching, Arthur," my father would whisper, clutching a whiskey bottle like a crucifix while the autumn winds howled against the shutters. "He watches the birds. He watches the boundary. And he watches us, making sure we don't try to leave."

I didn't understand the last part then. I was too busy fighting off the hacking coughs that threatened to tear my lungs apart. Confined mostly to a cot near the hearth, my entire world was the small square of the windowpane, looking out over the pale acres of the valley. And always, dominating that view, was the scarecrow.

He sat upon his stake with a strange, unnatural posture. Most scarecrows are slouched, pitiful crosses of wood and rag. But ours sat erect, rigid as a judge. Over the decades, the seasons battered him. The sun bleached his checkered shirt until the blue checks faded into the color of dried scab. The rains swelled his straw and rotted the cuffs of his sleeves. The snow piled high upon his battered straw hat, turning him into a white, headless ghost until the spring thaws revealed him again, unchanging, unblinking, enduring.

When my father finally died—falling face-first into a furrow of newly turned mud with a heart as dry as the corn husks—I buried him beneath the shadow of the scarecrow. It felt right. The effigy had been more of a parent to me than the man who built it, standing sentinel while I learned to walk the rows, carrying baskets of stunted potatoes and grey wheat.

As I grew into a man—though "man" felt like too grand a word for someone so withered by the isolation—my relationship with the scarecrow shifted. The sickness in my chest never truly left; it settled into a permanent, dull ache, a rattling bellows in my ribs. Too weak to leave the valley, too stubborn to simply lie down and let the earth reclaim me like my father, I poured my loneliness into the silent guardian of the crop.

I would sit on the wooden porch at dusk, a cup of bitter chicory coffee in my hands, and talk to him.

"The crows didn't even bother the southern row today," I’d call out across the fifty yards of dusty earth. "They know you're watching, old friend. I wish you could talk. Just a word. Tell me what it’s like out there beyond the ridge."

The scarecrow never moved. Not a single blade of straw twitched, save for the rhythmic shudder of the gale. But sometimes, in the dead of night, when the moon was a greasy smear behind thick clouds, I could have sworn I heard a dry, sliding rustle—the sound of shifting stalks, like someone turning over in a bed of dry leaves.

I convinced myself it was the mice. Or the wind. I needed to believe it was the wind. Because in a valley where the only other living things were the murder of crows that circled the dead elms and the bloated ticks that lived in the sheep's wool, the scarecrow was my only company. I projected a soul into him because the alternative—living in a universe so profoundly empty that even the ghosts couldn't be bothered to haunt it—was unbearable.

The night the knocking came, the barometric pressure had plummeted so fast my ears popped. A sulfurous yellow fog had rolled off the marshlands, swallowing the lower acre and pressing its damp, cold fingers against the glass of my small, single-room home.

I had been asleep, tossing fitfully as the rattling in my chest grew louder, sounding like dried beans shaken in a tin.

Thud. Scrap. Thud.

It wasn't the tentative peck of a bird or the frantic scratching of a field mouse looking for shelter from the fog. It was heavy. Measured. Deliberate.

I hauled myself up from bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, consumed by a strange, childish curiosity. Who could possibly be calling at this ungodly hour? No travelers came through Blackwood. The old coach road had washed out forty years ago, and even the tax collectors stopped daring the descent before I was old enough to shave.

"Dad?" the word slipped out of my mouth before my brain could catch it, an old reflex dredged up from childhood terrors. But my father was bones beneath the corn.

The knock came again, shaking the lintel of the door. The wood groaned, shedding a cascade of ancient dust into the stillness of the room.

I pulled the heavy wooden bolt—it slid back with a dry, iron shriek—and swung the door wide.

Standing on the threshold was the scarecrow.

Except he was no longer bound to his wooden stake. The damp stench of rotting autumn leaves and sun-baked earth billowed off his burlap skin, thick and cloying like the smell of a newly opened mass grave.

My breath caught in my throat. My eyes tracked upward, past the faded checkered shirt, past the rotting lime green braces holding up the red trousers, to the battered hat shadowing his face.

The darkness beneath the brim wasn't empty anymore.

Two buttons—large, black, bone-shorn buttons—were sewn directly into the sagging, hairless weave of a face that had no business having features. And from beneath those buttons, thick, gelatinous crimson began to spill. It welled up like pus from an infected wound, tracking hot and dark down his featureless cheeks, glowing with a feral, manic fury.

My mind splintered. Rational thought shattered into a million jagged pieces, leaving only a primal, animal terror that rooted my feet to the floorboards just as his straw feet had been rooted to the valley floor for thirty years.

Why has he got a pitchfork in his straw arms?

That was the last terrified thought that flickered through my brain before the rusted iron tines parted the air, driving deep, wet, and relentlessly upward through my skull.

The pain was not an explosion; it was a sudden, cold tearing, like a frost splitting a dry branch.

I didn't fall immediately. The tines pinned me to the doorframe, lifting my feet inches off the floorboards. I could feel the cold, pitted iron scraping against the inside of my skull, tasting copper and old iron on the back of my tongue.

The scarecrow stepped closer.

Up near, the sound of him was deafening. It wasn't the rustle of a gentle breeze through summer grass. It was the frantic, grinding friction of a million dry husks rubbing together, a horrific symphony of desolation. His straw hands—long, fibrous fingers woven from coarse rye—grip-locked around the shaft of the pitchfork, steady and immovable.

The button eyes stared into mine. In the flickering candlelight from the hearth, I saw what was sewn behind those bone disks. Not thread. Tendrils. Black, thread-like roots that burrowed deep into the hollow darkness of his head, twitching with a wet, organic life.

“You… kept… the… crows… away,”

The voice didn't come from a mouth. There was no mouth, only a stitched seam of coarse twine. The words scraped against my mind like sandpaper on raw nerve endings, echoing in the hollow chambers of my skull. It was a chorus of a thousand dry voices—the combined whispers of every scarecrow, every effigy, every decoy ever planted in the cursed earth of a dying world to trick the things that fluttered in the dark.

“And… now… the… field… requires… new… seed.”

My vision began to tunnel. The edges of the room smeared into a greasy grey, the yellow fog pressing in through the open door, swirling around my dangling boots.

He didn't pull the pitchfork out. Instead, with a wrenching twist of his straw-stuffed wrists, he hoisted me higher, carrying me out across the threshold, back down the small wooden steps, and into the damp, embracing dark of the yard.

The fog was thick as wool, clinging to my torn flesh. Through the haze, I saw the empty wooden stake standing in the middle of the pale acre, its sharpened oak point gleaming wetly in the starlight, waiting.

The scarecrow dragged me toward it, his heavy, rhythmic tread sinking deep into the mud. The crows in the elms began to stir, a low, collective caw rolling across the valley, welcoming the master of the harvest home.

As the cold iron of the stake pressed against my spine, matching the metal buried in my brain, I finally understood the grim covenant of the valley.

The scarecrow hadn't been put there to keep the horrors out.

He had been planted there to tend the crop. And we were all just corn, waiting our turn to be harvested.