Chapter 1 #2
Then the steel guitar came back, mid-phrase, as if it had never been gone at all.
“Did you hear that?” Katie whispered against his lips, pulling back slightly with her hand still on his chest.
“Hear what?” Josh murmured, his mouth following hers in the half-inch she had drawn away.
“The radio. It just—”
“Bad reception, babe,” Josh said softly, kissing the corner of her mouth. “It happens all the time out here. We’re probably picking up Emberwood off the bounce.”
“Right,” Katie agreed somewhat hesitantly. “Bad reception.”
“You sure you’re good?” Josh asked, his thumb finding the line of her jaw.
“I’m good,” Katie whispered, lifting her chin to kiss him before he could ask a third time. She was choosing this. She kissed him harder. “I—”
Something moved in the corn.
Not the wind. Not the chaotic whispers that had been there the whole time, but instead, a gradual movement of dry leaves giving way against something or someone. She was certain the sound had slowly passed through a place that had once been still.
It was a deer.
It had to be a deer.
There was wildlife in every field in this county.
There were nocturnal animals that showed up in her grandmother’s backyard almost every night.
Furry creatures that crossed the road in front of the school bus most mornings, too.
Yet something in the back of her mind warned her that she was wrong.
That whatever had made that noise had been larger than a deer.
Josh was now kissing the side of her neck.
“Josh,” Katie breathed, her hand still flat against his chest. He made a small sound against her throat, half a question, half a hum. “Josh.”
He pulled back.
“What now?” Josh muttered in frustration as he rested his forehead against hers.
She pulled far enough away for him to catch sight of her face, where she was lifting a finger to her lips. He tilted his head in confusion, but at least he had fallen silent long enough to listen with her.
“I don’t hear anything, Katie. Besides, there’s a million things that move through cornfields at night,” Josh offered after all he seemed to hear was the radio. His thumb caressed her cheek. “Deer, raccoons, possums—”
“It wasn’t a deer,” Katie insisted, cutting him off. “Just listen.”
For three seconds, they still heard nothing.
Then, finally, it came again.
The same long, drawn-out dry crackle of leaves giving way under some type of weight. The same wrong rhythm. Not a deer. Not a raccoon. And certainly not a possum. Someone was walking through the cornstalks at a very slow pace.
She sat up, pushing hard against Josh’s chest.
She wet her dry lips.
“Look out the window,” Katie murmured, her eyes locked past him on the cornfield she could only half make out from this angle.
It was then she spotted it.
Him.
The Threshing Man.
Her heart began to beat so hard that her chest began to hurt.
“Look.”
“What?” Josh asked, twisting to follow her gaze.
“Josh.” Katie was somehow able to keep her voice low and level in a way that surprised her. “Look out the window.”
The moon was not full. The harvest moon was still three weeks off.
But it was still high, bright enough to put silver along the tops of the cornfield and make the rows into long pale spines with deep dark gutters between them.
Every row was distinct. Every seam between the rows was a place for the dark to gather.
Except around thirty yards away.
Standing between two rows of corn was a figure, the stalks rising on either side of him like the walls of a narrow hallway. Except he wasn’t a man, because no man stood like that, and no man was that tall.
A sound escaped her throat. It was not a scream. It was small, weak, and barely there. Something instinctive inside of her had already decided that being too loud would make the figure move, and what came out of her was a breath gone wrong in her throat.
The tall silhouette was wearing a coat. Long, dark, the color of wet earth in moonlight, the kind of coat that reached almost to the ground.
The sleeves hung past where his hands should have been, and they stirred ever so slightly even though he was not moving, as though the arms inside them were too long.
He wore a wide hat, soft and worn down, probably by too many seasons.
The moonlight had caught the top of it, along with the front of his coat, but it had given up on his face.
There should have been something there even in the shadow.
The pale shape of features. The catch of an eye. Yet there was absolutely nothing.
“Josh,” Katie said, his name breaking on the way out. He could be so obtuse sometimes. “Look, damn it.”
“Babe,” Josh said, the careful gentleness in his voice the complete opposite of the harshness in hers. “I don’t—”
“Right there, Josh.”
She turned her head from him slowly, the way she had as a child when peering down the upstairs hallway in the dark. Josh’s gaze finally followed hers. He, too, made a small sound. The same one she had made earlier, to be exact.
The figure was still there.
He had not moved.
“Drive,” Katie breathed, afraid that anything louder would bring the dark silhouette closer. “Drive!”
Josh didn’t answer. He was already scrambling over the console, his head knocking the rearview mirror sideways, his knee catching on the gearshift before he half-fell into the driver’s seat.
Katie wasn’t staying in the back seat alone.
She climbed after him, half over the console herself, and dropped into the passenger seat right as he turned the key.
“The windows,” Katie called out, louder now, the whisper gone from her voice. A kind of frantic certainty had taken its place. “Josh, the windows. Roll up the windows.”
“I am, I am!”
The windows rose slowly, inch by agonizing inch. Slower than she could stand. The glass continued to climb until she was terrified their time had run out. The dark figure had moved closer to them than before.
“Drive, Josh! Drive! Drive!”
The car finally lurched forward, and Katie was too afraid to keep her eyes open. She closed them tight, and an image of her mother’s talisman appeared as if she were holding it. The same one her mother had braided the husks on that morning.
The older folks still hung their talismans every September and October. They had known the truth. Her parents, her grandparents, her grandparents’ parents.
The Threshing Man was real.
He had always been real.