“Who did that?” says Mo.
The old farmer grins. This is not a real car, after all, is it? A car couldn’t run with all this straw inside. “You damned liars,” he mutters.
“We didn’t put that there,” argues Yvette. “It couldn’t have been like that before.”
Couldn’t have, could it? The voice in the back of the old farmer’s head prods him, but he pushes it away. It isn’t me, he thinks. It must have been the guardians, warning him or tricking him or testing him. Maybe that’s why they’ve been sent here, to this place where no one else goes.
He is beginning to sense they aren’t real at all.
He may seem to live a careless life but careless he is not. Careless are the ones who tread this world balanced on a thread, unconscious of the invisible barriers that keep them in and others out. But the old farmer knows. Oh, he knows.
They decide to follow him back to the house, the only shelter for miles, a thing that must seem so commonplace to them, for where they come from is filled with shelter, and here it must seem suddenly so necessary in this vast emptiness of land. They must wonder how there can be so much land here, so much empty space, when their world is so crowded.
Those who live on the coast and in the city have forgotten the country is still here, as it has always been.
The group of three—is it four or is it three?—make their way through the dark cornfield, preponderant stalks whispering as they pass, but otherwise still in the windless night that is growing colder by the minute as early fall nights do. The stars are out, winking against wisps of clouds that pass through the clear black sky.
They follow the sweep of light that glances off a wooden cross standing naked and baleful with a fraying role uncoiling from its arms, and there upon the unfamiliar fixture the light pauses.
“There was a scarecrow here before,” whispers Yvette, as if she is afraid her voice will travel. “I swear, you guys.” He can hear genuine fear in her voice and wonders if he is wrong, if they are truly lost strangers who have nothing to do with the guardians of the dark.
Didn’t there used to be seven?
No, old man. It is only your imagination. Numbers don’t change.
There have always been nine.
Dylan sweeps the light around, and yes, there are nine bare wooden crosses making an eerie religious monument of the corn. Nine bare, empty planks of wood with untwining strands of rope.
“Oh, hell no,” says Yvette.
“Hey,” says Dylan. “Where’s Mo?”
Indeed, there are now but three figures in the field: the girl, the boy, and the old farmer. Their calls echo forth but only the wind replies, and eventually they conclude he got ahead of them. They are bound once more for the house but find no one inside. Their footfalls creak on the rotting floorboards as they walk past protruding nails and dusty furniture, calling “Mo!” and “Mohammad!” in the hopes he will awaken from wherever he has drifted off.
The old farmer sits down and watches their panic with mild interest. It is like watching a movie, if he had a television set; he is engaged with the action but disconnected from it. Their concern has no meaning to him. He sits on the couch filling a pipe with tobacco and contemplating the meaning of their presence, wondering who brought them and what their purpose is. He suspects they do not know themselves. These are the kinds of youth who walk about life without a sense of their role, as ignorant as characters who do not know they are part of a movie, and in some ways he pities them.
Want to see what happens next, old man? Keep watching.
Now Yvette looks angry, a fire in her dark eyes. “What have you done with him?” Her anger manifests in hands clutching hips just to hold onto something and lips curled with righteous indignation. She reminds him suddenly of his daughter so many years ago, who would give him just such a look when life seemed unfair. He is startled by the remembering. Did he have a daughter, once?
Didn’t there used to be seven?
“Who took down the scarecrows?” demands Dylan, fixating on the one thing he cannot understand. “Who else is here with us?”
“Nobody.” The old man practices blowing rings of white smoke, the perfect shapes of which then dissolve and cloud the air around his face, creating an effect of obfuscation. “There’s only us to guard against the dark.”
Disgruntled and on edge, they head outside without closing the door behind them. He watches, as if from outside of himself, as they make their slow way through the rustling field, the flashlight switching back and forth with every sound that upsets the stillness. Something else is moving through the corn as well: shadows that creep just far enough away that one can never catch them in the light.
The old farmer smokes and tries to think of happier times, but the darkness outside has gotten under his skin.
Then the screams get under his skin.
Screams, and other sounds—running, snapping cornstalks, incoherent babbling—and he thinks, yes, just as I thought, and let it be over now, let it be done even before midnight is upon us.
Instead, the girl runs in through the front door, slams it shut, throws her back against it, and sinks to the floor shaking. She is soiled, a figure of dirt. She looks more real than she did before. She was too clean before. Now she is of the earth, as real people are. There is a bit of cornstalk tangled in her hair.
“What’s happening?” Her voice, a keening whine. “Why is this happening?”
“Come sit,” he says, for she is real enough, and he is glad to speak to a real human being again and not the voices of the corn. She is hesitant, so he gives her the couch and seats himself across from her on the wooden rocker. He passes her the pipe and she looks at it, dazed, confused, and smokes because it’s there, even the act of smoking turned into a question mark.
“You remind me of my daughter.”
He wonders why he said that. He never had a daughter, did he?
“Your what?” At last Yvette musters the breath to ask, “What are those—those things?”
“Oh, them,” he says easily, pleased to take the pipe from her smooth hard hand and put it in his mouth. “They scare things away.”
Don’t get too comfortable, old man. Never let your guard down. You are the guardian, after all.
“Things?”
No, he can feel the darkness again, it is creeping under his skin. His voice lowers as the fear engulfs him—of what lies beyond. This simple girl has never seen past reality; how could she? She may as well be made of straw. “Other Things,” he growls. “Things on the Outside.”
“The outside of what?”
“Of the universe.”
The pipe is now filled only with ash. They look at one another.
Her eyes are haunted. In the dark and even at the edges of the night she has seen things now that she never imagined could be seen. Sometimes the old farmer thinks he is the only man alive who has also seen such things and continued to live his life with the images inside of him, festering in his mind. He is lonely, he thinks, but he is not alone.
“Do you want to know the truth?” he asks.
She looks at him in a dreamy daze.
Are you sure you want to tell her, old man? What if you’re wrong? What if she isn’t real?
Oh, be quiet, already.
“You see, the guardians, they protect us. They scare away the Other Things so they can’t get through to the real world. And they’re always trying to get through. I have to make sure they don’t. I have to watch over the guardians and make sure they’re doing their job. But they need to eat, sometimes. You see?”
Her eyes are wide enough to drown in. She nods. “Yes,” she says carefully. “I see.”
“Nine,” he muses. “There are nine. I’m not sure it’s enough, though. To keep out the dark.”
No, old man. There are eleven.
What?
There are eleven.
Oh yes. There are eleven.
There have always been eleven.
“Like I
say,” he continues with the pipe in his mouth. “I’m not sure if eleven’s enough. But don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe. All you have to do is stay in here, out of the corn”
He wonders what might have happened if he had just kept his wife and daughter inside, out of the corn. Would they have been safe?
“Do you promise?” Yvette puts voice into the silence.
He throws a blanket over her, but she doesn’t sleep. She lies on her side with eyes as wide as the moon, hardly blinking. He lights a fire and it shimmers in her pupils strangely. She watches him, and he watches her. Outside there is the sound of the wind, and the swish of cornstalks, and a scratching against one of the windows, like something begging to be let in. There is a low, vocal breathing from the front door, and something trying to reach in from beneath the crack, but they cannot get in, he reminds himself, they cannot get in.
He rocks back and forth, back and forth,
and
he wakes, hardly aware he had been dozing. The uneasy quality of dark tells him it must be in those terrible early hours of morning, well after midnight but before dawn. He is cold.
What has awoken him?
It is the sound of the door creaking open, for now he can see, in the dim light of the fire that he had lit hours ago, and which is now burning itself into nothing, Yvette standing in the open doorway looking out.
“Where are you going?”
She startles, whirls around, fixes him with that stare of improbable magnitude. “I was . . . ”
“Don’t you know it isn’t safe out there?” he snaps angrily, rising to his feet. “Don’t you know what will happen if you go out there?”
Yes, he is angry now, for he has made the decision to keep the girl safe and still she dares to try and flee, to put herself in harm’s way—oh, she is very much like his unruly, obstinate daughter. Here he is, trying to help her live, so that someday perhaps with the help of psychiatry or liquor or drugs she will finally forget the things she saw or no longer believe in them, and someday perhaps she will stop sleeping with the lights on, and someday perhaps she will pass a quiet field without panic in her heart, and someday perhaps she will become like him, a guardian of the guardians of the night—and she wants to throw it away. She will live a long if troubled life, and trouble finds us all eventually, anyway.
And the old farmer wonders at his own trouble. He has gone to all this trouble for her. When he goes to her, she shrinks away from him like a skittish cat. Here he sees the truth of it all like a bandage ripped from the world, that this girl is the biggest deceiver yet, is only a pale imitation of flesh and blood after all—that she is two-dimensional indeed. Now he is seized by a different, a more profound and primal species of anger and betrayal.
“You are not real.”
You knew it, didn’t you, old man? You can always tell when we play these little games.
“You are not real. You made me think you were. You liar!”
“Please, just let me go,” she all but sobs while behind her, barely visible, is a soft orange glow at the horizon, a promise of dawn.
Yvette yanks herself free, turns and stumbles out into the faint predawn glow, and nearly trips at the foot of a scarecrow; as the sun approaches to steal away the mystery of night, they have returned to their sacred posts, solemn and still once more. For it is in the light that reality reasserts itself and our rituals may play out unconsciously, each one of us going about daily the same motions again and again, repeated ad nauseam, so easy to become mindless of whatever lies beneath the routine in the distracting light of day.
The girl is gagging with the smell that fills the field, the smell the old farmer barely notices anymore, an evil smell, the smell of them.
She looks up into the uncanny ersatz strawman in which the old farmer can almost recognize his daughter’s features, or would if he could draw back the sack which has sunken into the eye sockets and gaping mouth of whatever skull lies beneath.
The sun is still low, and long dark shadows cast themselves sharply against the rising daylight, lengthening shapes against the ground and making the scarecrow upon which she looks a dark silhouette, a creature not yet fully formed by the sun.
Eleven ancient sentinels stand guard. They are not yet sleeping.
He could warn her, but she’s had her chance to go, and she isn’t real anyway—that’s what he tells himself in the strange annals of his heart.
From behind the scarecrow’s back rise a multitude of thin black strands, like unraveling threads or fine corn silk hairs, stretching out in all directions. Yvette gasps and tries to back up, but she is standing in a field of uneven ground and she stumbles. The corn swallows her just before the black strands reach forward to wrap themselves around her, stitch over her, and while the old farmer cannot see what is happening through the stalks, he can hear her scream just the same.
He is watching again, as if from outside of himself. His thoughts are drifting away now, concerned with his solitary fate and thinking of the morning and of bluegill and of anything so he doesn’t notice what he is doing.
That’s it, old man: find a bottle of whiskey, sit yourself in the rocker, drink, and wait for the quiet to resume.
Not yet. He can hear them moving through the corn and the shadows that have not yet evaporated, scratching their way toward him, and he goes and finds his mask and pulls it over his head whereupon he acquires his tools and wooden beams in the shed, and begins constructing a new cross. He had only had two prepared, so he will have to build this one from scratch. The burlap scratches against his face, his second skin.
It may take him several hours as the sun rises to finish, but he will resume his routine tomorrow.
How he would like to climb upon the cross himself and become a true guardian. Sometimes, he thinks about doing just that. Of climbing up on a cross and nailing himself there, and making himself one of them. How very easy it would be to hang there. Why, he wouldn’t even need the whiskey.
You have another job to do, old man.
That’s right. They need someone to make sure they are in their place and that there are enough of them. Eleven, yes, always eleven, it has to be.
Now she will help them too, and the others, and the ones before them.
You have grown us so beautifully, old man, you have crafted us so lovingly. We are you.
I am all of us, yes, it is good. Now we will keep the world from opening up and letting in the Other Things that are waiting on the Outside to come in. There must be enough of us to frighten them away, to keep the world the way it is in its routine. We will have enough.
Eleven.
No, twelve.
We will have twelve by noon.
THE MONSTER TOLD ME TO
STEPHANIE M. WYTOVICH
Bria Martin used to live in a town drenched in whiskey with hidden screams, a town with a tattooed past and with clocks that didn’t work. Reedsville hated her, always had, always would. She could hear her murder song the second she stepped out of her car.
She didn’t want to be home, but here she was stuck on repeat, ever faithful, ever present.
Bria crouched down and ran her hand over the steaming asphalt. Vibrations in quick needle-like stabs shot through her palm. They were sharp, bristled, angry.
She smiled.
Something about the energy was different this time. She remembered everything. No holes, no question marks in the story. This time it would be different. In and out. Out this time, for good.
“You have to tell her. She has to understand,” said the monster.
It had been at least eighteen months since she’d stood on Reeds’ ground, but like most times, it felt as if she’d never left, but then again, she never did remember leaving. One moment she’d be sitting at home, and then everything would go black and she’d be on the road, somewhere far away, days away, with no idea of how she got there, where she was going, or when she’d be back.
But Reeds had a way of doing that. Drifting, disappearing. It’s
why the two of them got along. Why they couldn’t stay away from each other.
They were the same, both broken and abandoned.
Well, for the most part.
Everyone, and everything, had their differences.
Her and this town were no exception.
“We’re running out of time,” said the monster.
Bria checked her watch—like she always did when she got there—and the face broke into a swarm of ants that ran up her arms. 7:32. Right on schedule. She patted them off and cocked her head to look at the length of her shadow. She probably had an hour or two of sunlight left if she was lucky, which she usually wasn’t. But then again, nothing worked here: not her, not the clocks, not the rules, not the people. And that’s even if any people were left. The place was practically a ghost town now. A rundown haven of bad memories, spilled blood, and abandoned houses that were covered in graffiti and half-sunk into the ground.
A drop of blood rolled out her nose as she passed the un-welcome sign. She’d been swallowing the remnants of what should have been a full-on nose bleed since she got within a mile of the town, and she expected it to get worse from here on out. Bria tucked her oversized sunglasses into her back pocket, tilted her head back, and spit out a wad of rust-colored phlegm. It settled uneven on the black gravel, steaming in the leftover fire of the sun. Bria stood there, focused and attentive, watching, waiting. A slurping, suction filled the air, and then, just as always, the slimy glob was gone.
The ground moaned, and Bria’s jaw jerked to the left.
“Fuck!” she said as she put pressure on her chin. “Still holding on to grudges are we?”
She ran her tongue over her busted bottom lip. She tasted the iron and sting of pride, laughed at the familiar fleshy bulb.
She wiped the blood off her mouth with her shirt sleeve.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “You think I deserve that, and maybe I do.”
Bria hip-checked her car door, not bothering to lock it. It wasn’t hers anyways. Plus, nothing was going to fuck with her way out. Reeds always got rid of her eventually. When it was done with its mind games, it would spit her out like a tapped piece of tobacco and send her off to the road to wander free like the lost soul she was.
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