She was going home, so maybe it was natural to dream of the place where she had grown up, where the colors of fall were so beautiful that they belonged not in the real world of the unreal, but in a land of dreams.
Golds, oranges, crimsons, deeper reds, softer yellows, all dazzled from the trees stretching from the great granite rises to the windswept seas and calmer harbors, where the whitecaps of the waves warned that winter was on its way.
But before the ice and cold of a New England winter arrived, there was the fall. The glorious fall with its brilliant display. The gentle sweep of the breeze came first, a touch of sweet cool breath on the cheeks. And before that touch became the chilling grip of icicle fingers, there was the reaping, the bonfires of fall, the harvest brought home.
And so, in her dream, they stretched before her, rows and rows of cornfields, the stalks undulating mesmerizingly in the sweeping breeze. She had always loved the cornfields; she could remember racing through them as a child, her grandfather chasing her, her laughter filling the sky.
The crows were always there, too, their black wings shimmering, their wicked cawing carrying high in the air, but the farmers, with a wisdom carried down from generation to generation, knew how to manage the voracious thieves.
They fashioned scarecrows and set them above the fields, and those scarecrows had personalities of their own. Mrs. Abel’s scarecrow wore a wild garden hat sporting stick pins to stab the feet of any unwary crow that tried to land. Ethan Morrison’s wore a billowing cape and a hideous, toothed grin. Her grandfather’s scarecrow was dressed in denim overalls and a plaid shirt, and carried a shotgun; its hat was straw, and it had a mop of white hair.
Eric Rolfe’s creation was the most frightening—and the most remarkable. The most likely to come to life and speak, for he had created his scarecrow’s face from a plastic skull and Halloween makeup. Huge eyes stared out from the bony face, eyes that moved on battery power, and it wore a black frock coat, arms outstretched, barbed wire protruding from its head like a razor-sharp fright wig.
Some of the older residents had a problem with Eric’s creation—Puritanism was long gone from the area but never really dead. Regardless, Eric loved it, and so did the kids.
Sometimes, though, when she was running in the cornfields, her grandfather close behind, her laughter would die when she came to that scarecrow. The eyes would be looking at her from their sockets, and the wind would seem to rise, not howling, but breathing out a high-pitched whisper of mingled fear and seduction. She would stop and stare, the cornstalks rustling around her, and uneasiness would steal into her heart, a fear that if she opened her mind, she would see something ancient and terrible that had occurred here, would share the evil impulse of its creator and the horror of those it had touched.
She had grown up with the stories of the local witch trials, when men, in the service of their God, tortured and condemned their fellow men, when children wept and accused, and evil was done in the name of righteousness.
In such a blood-drenched land, how could an impressionable child not feel something of the anguish of those times?
Despite that, the cornfields had always entranced her, along with the spectacular color palette of fall.
And now she was going home to see those fields in truth, so it was only natural, in that strange twilight stage between sleep and wakefulness, to see them in her mind’s eye, to dream of running through them like the child she had once been. She heard her own laughter as she ran and knew she would soon come upon Eric’s gothic monster of a scarecrow, but she didn’t hesitate, for she was no longer a child but a woman grown, and the fears of the past could not haunt her now.
But she was wrong. The fear was there.
She saw it now, in the distance, and fingers of dread reached for her heart as she waited for it to see her, because she knew it would.
She didn’t want to go closer.
But she had to.
Then the scarecrow raised its head, and a scream froze in her throat. The eye sockets were empty, the head a skull covered in rotting, blackened flesh, and somehow she knew it could see her, though nothing remained of what had once been its eyes.
What was left of the mouth was open, as if in a final scream. A ragged coat hung from the rotting body, the white gleam of bone showing through, dried blood staining fabric and bone alike. And as she stood there, her scream still trapped inside, the skull began to turn toward her, as if whatever evil consciousness still lived within it was drawn to her.
A crow landed on the gruesome figure’s shoulder and plucked at the putrid flesh hanging from one cheek.
The skull began to laugh, as the wind rose and the sky was suddenly filled with the fluttering of brilliant fall leaves. And all the while, those eye sockets stared at her, and then red tears suddenly spilled from them, down the ravaged cheeks, as if the rotting corpse was locked in the field for all time, weeping blood.