Harvest Moon

by James A. Moore

  “Oh, God! Josh! Don’t let go! Please!” He had no intention of letting her get away.

  “What’s going on, Melissa! I can’t see!”

  “It’s got me!” Her voice was a shriek of panic, and he could feel her body bucking against his hand as she tried to pull away from whatever had a grip on her. He could also feel himself being dragged forward against his will, all his straining doing nothing at all.

  He decided to change tactics and let himself get pulled, using the strength of whatever had her to lift him off the ground and he yanked himself halfway into a fetal position, his legs bent at the knees and at the hips. The principle was basically the same one used on a swing set. He let his weight lift off the ground and then straightened his legs to launch himself forward, his entire body swinging low off the ground and then up. The pressure on his hand intensified, and he felt his wrist protest as his legs lifted higher into the air. The difference was rather significant. The closest thing he had to a chain to hold on to as he arced higher was the seat of Melissa’s jeans, and her body shifted with him, whether she wanted it to or not.

  Melissa twisted in an effort to get away and her motion sent him off course, so instead of having his feet to brace with as he moved forward and up, he slammed into something with his hip. The impact was jarring, to say the least, and he felt it run from his side up to his chest and down to his knees. His hand, still firmly trapped against her jeans—a place he never expected to find his hand in a million years—was pressed so tightly against her that he felt the bones creak in his wrist.

  Whatever he ran into grunted softly. The noise wasn’t that far off from what he imagined a bear would sound like. The feeling against his body, however, was nothing at all like what a bear would feel like. There was no fur, only something hard and slightly yielding.

  Melissa was hoisted high into the air again, and he was lifted with her, both of them screaming like banshees the entire time. Josh breathed in and caught a heavy scent of rancid meat, as bad as the dead otter he’d found behind his house last summer, after it had been sitting in the sun for at least a week. He felt his stomach try to rebel, but there was nothing inside for it to kick out, so he was stuck with a few rough dry heaves.

  A deep rattling roar tore through the night and something grabbed hold of Josh, pulling him away from Melissa. He felt his wrist creak even more as his hand was yanked out of her pants and he was thrown, hard, through the air. He thought he’d never hit the ground. It seemed like he had almost learned to fly, and then, just to remove any doubts, he crashed into the shrubs and vines creeping around the area.

  He rolled across the ground for all of a second before the rock met up with his head. He felt the skin on his scalp bust open and then felt the hot blood spill into his already dirty eyes. He only meant to close his eyes to protect them from the new intrusion. He didn’t mean to pass out, but he did just the same.

  The last thing he saw was a thick column of a leg, bulging with muscle and covered with what appeared to be rotting leather that fell in loose folds. It almost made him think of a rhinoceros’s leg. Several places on the leg looked to have been torn open.

  The last thing he heard was the deep, hollow voice that spoke softly to him as the leg moved closer. The voice said, “Sorry, kid. I need her for different reasons. I need you to make a few patches.”

  III

  Jeremy woke up to the sun in his eyes and groaned softly. His mom had opened the shades over his windows and let the daylight drive away his dreams. They were nice dreams, too. He’d been in the process of kissing his teacher, Miss Holly, full on the lips. He noticed that most of the time it seemed his mom woke him from the good dreams and wondered if that was because of crappy timing or because she somehow knew when he was having too good a time in his sleep.

  His window was opened just a crack, and he could smell autumn in the air. The light tang of wood smoke from a chimney, the soft aroma of decaying leaves and a little mold. Downstairs his mom was cooking breakfast, which made up for being forced into consciousness. Bacon and scrambled eggs, definitely Saturday fare. His stomach gave an eager rumble and he smiled.

  He climbed out of bed, his feet giving a little protest to the chill of the hardwood floors. Jeremy Koslowski liked mornings best of all when they came in the fall.

  Today’s the day.

  The thought came unbidden, but that was all right. It was the day, after all. It was finally time to carve his jack-o-lanterns. His and Josh’s. Well, really his. Josh was just going to be allowed to wear the special one.

  He moved over to the desk in his room that was, allegedly, supposed to be where he did his homework. The after-school assignments were done, but they were not the main purpose for the chaos that spilled over the top of the wooden desk that had been used by members of his family for the last seven generations. It was where he kept his special projects. For Jeremy that meant any little thing that his mind decided would be cool. Right now, front and center on the desk’s top, there was a stack of notebook pages that he’d torn out of his spiral pads. Each page had no less than ten different potential faces for the pumpkins waiting downstairs. It was hard work, but he didn’t mind. They had to look just right, or it wouldn’t seem like Halloween.

  He pulled on his sweatpants—emergency clothing for breakfast, he would eat and worry about looking good later—and grabbed his sketches. He could already hear the sounds of his little brother making noise downstairs. Bobby was three, a little later in the game than Jeremy, but he was all right despite the gross age difference.

  With papers in hand, sweats and clean socks on, as well as a plain white T-shirt, Jeremy made his way through the house and down to the breakfast table. His mom was playing goofy games with Bobby while she convinced him to eat. Bobby was going along with it. For now. Later, anything at all was possible. His little brother was not known for playing nicely with food.

  “Morning, hon. Your eggs are ready and everything’s in the microwave.” Mom’s voice had that slightly-too-pleasant tone that warned him things were off-kilter again. He felt the hairs rise slightly on the back of his neck.

  “Hi, Mom.” He made himself smile. “Where’s Dad?”

  His mother looked away from Bobby and the spoon of oatmeal she’d been carefully convincing his brother to eat. “He’s gone out for a while. He had to go to work and take care of some things.”

  Jeremy had the good sense to nod his head. He knew she was lying, but there was no reason to make a big deal of it. That would only make things worse. He looked away, closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Is he gonna be back in time for carving pumpkins?” He tried to keep his voice light. He figured he was doing a pretty good job with it.

  “Probably, honey. But you know how it is when your daddy has to work on the weekends.”

  Oh yes, he knew. Sometimes the work involved coming home and having screaming fits. Sometimes it was just his father coming home late and going straight to bed. Almost always, it involved a fight between his parents and the smell of liquor on his father’s body. Not just his breath but every pore of his entire being exuding a faint, sweet odor.

  The worst times involved his father wanting to get physical. Jeremy tried not to think about those occasions.

  “Should we wait for him?”

  “We’ll wait for a while, honey. If he isn’t home by dinner time we’ll go ahead and carve ours without him, okay?”

  No, it definitely was not okay. He’d been waiting all through the last few days, waiting and praying that just this once, everything would turn out the way it was supposed to and it definitely was not okay! “Sure, mom.” He heated his breakfast and then sat down at the table. The bacon was perfect, the eggs just right. His mother had even made hash browns and he loved every bite of hash browns on the average day.

  He didn’t taste any of the food. He merely chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed.

  And in the back of his mind, he thought about the special pumpkin he
was going to carve for Josh. The image of how it would look was already cemented in his mind. He would carve the pumpkin tonight and hope he got it finished before his father came home. He would need to hide it away.

  Sometimes his dad got physical. Sometimes his mother cried and sometimes he cried. And sometimes, on really bad occasions, it was both of them.

  Sometimes it hurt a lot when his dad got physical, and if he tried to fight, his father was known to break things. The pumpkin had to be set in a safe place where his father couldn’t find it.

  Just in case.

  Just in case he decided to put a stop to his father’s physical needs.

  IV

  The last thing in the world Joshua Kinder expected was to wake up in his bed. He sort of hadn’t expected to wake up ever again, actually. He sat bolt upright, throwing bedclothes aside like they weren’t even there, and began patting himself down to make sure he was intact. He was, least as best he could figure. Oh, there were some sore spots, like where the thorns had scraped his legs and where he’d hit the tree when the thing had thrown him, but he was alive and mostly unscathed. That was a big plus.

  “Shit. Melissa.”

  He rolled out of bed and hit the floor on his hands and knees. His legs felt about as weak as well-cooked spaghetti noodles. He half crawled over to the phone and dialed her number. He hung up the phone before the first ring and instead looked out of his window toward her bedroom, the one she shared with her sister Heather, across the way from him.

  Though he couldn’t make out a face, he could see a feminine figure on a bed in the room, wearing pajamas and obscured by the flannel robe over them. On a good day he wouldn’t have been able to make out a face. The houses were separated by almost a hundred feet. He was fairly sure it was Melissa, so he let himself relax a bit.

  Downstairs the kids at the daycare were already running around and making kid noises. There were only a few of them here on a Saturday, but there was always someone who wanted to know if they could drop one of the local children off for a few hours to do something. His parents were too nice for their own good and were the first to admit it. In truth, they just loved kids.

  Josh could take them or leave them. He looked himself over in the bathroom mirror, walking across the hallway in only his underwear. The downstairs level of the house was a daycare; the upper two levels were off limits to everyone who was not a family member or an invited guest. Just to make sure it stayed that way, they all had house keys, because the doors locked automatically. So far there had been no incidents of little tykes seeing anything they weren’t supposed to. That suited him just fine. No reason to have the next generation of kids laughing at his skinny little butt. He got enough heckling from his older brother Brad whenever he was in town from college.

  Nature was taken care of quickly and then he was onto a scalding shower. It was while he was lathering up that he found the places where he was apparently healing from some serious injuries.

  Josh looked at the bright pink, fresh skin growing on his body and dropped the soap. He checked carefully and then rinsed off, looking in the bathroom mirror to see if he could understand what was going on.

  On his left bicep there was a nearly perfect square of flesh that was untanned, unblemished, and decidedly new. He’d had enough scrapes and cuts over the years to know what newly grown skin looked like. What he saw looked like it had just come out from under a scab.

  Josh tried to make his heartbeat slow down, but it didn’t care to listen. He also had to work at not hyperventilating; he had a little more success with that. The skin was still just a little too tender. It felt raw and abraded, almost like it had been sunburned, but only in that square…

  “Patch. Oh, shit. I’ve got a patch.” He turned his body and watched in the mirror as he examined the rest of his body. What he saw only made matters worse. His lower ribcage had a massive raw mark. It was almost triangular. His side, far enough back that he couldn’t see it clearly, had a similar marking.

  Josh Kinder let out a whimper, and blinked at his wide-eyed reflection. “Oh, this isn’t good. What the hell did I get into last night?” He was so distraught he didn’t even bite his tongue on the curse word. His parents weren’t overly patient with bad language; there were too many little kids around.

  He held on to the porcelain sink, his fingers clenching at the antique ceramic. And then he looked down. His belly was untouched. His legs seemed okay, though there was a red newness to the color of his knee.

  Tentatively, he reached down and touched himself at his privates. They felt tender in a way that part of his body had never felt tender before. His breath catching in his throat, Josh stepped back and climbed on the tips of his toes so he could see the part of his reflection that was normally hidden by the sink. He saw the redness there and the lack of the fine, downy pubic hairs he’d recently had start growing above his penis and lost all control.

  Josh broke the rules of the family as he bolted down the stairs and then down the second flight calling for his father the entire time. The three kids who were staying at the daycare got an eyeful, but were thankfully too young to really know what they were seeing. His parents, on the other hand, were quite aware that their naked son was running around the house and screaming in a panic. He probably would have continued to do so, too, but the minefield of toys on the floor were not designed with running adolescents in mind. He wound up on the ground, still screaming, long enough for his father to reach him and calm him down. Five minutes and one change of clothes later, they were on their way to see Doctor Wellings.

  Chapter Five

  I

  Craig Gallagher was in a fine mood, all things considered. He was capable of remaining professional through the frantic phone calls of six parents who wanted to know why he hadn’t found their children yet. He did not at any time, and despite the temptation, even once explain that if they kept their kids on tighter leashes he wouldn’t be the one that had to find them. But he wanted to, oh yes, he most certainly did. However he got a lead from Melissa Partridge, who said she thought she remembered something about Heather and her friends going to the Witch’s Hollow. She couldn’t seem to remember that the day before, when he could tell that she was hiding something from him as she fidgeted nervously, but at least she could remember it now. It was a start.

  He took the road out to the Hollow with the radio playing a classic song by Cream. Even when he was a kid, Clapton had a voice that was almost as magical as his ability to play a guitar. Now that he was older, nothing much had changed, except maybe the songs getting a little more blues accent to them.

  The day was gorgeous, and despite the bad situation—six kids missing would never be a good thing in his book—he let himself enjoy the weather and the sights. Almost Halloween and he was still able to enjoy the leaves on a few of the trees, though most had been reduced to wooden skeletons.

  When he was a kid, his father had taken him camping in these woods, shown him the Witch’s Hollow and told him the story of Hattie and her three sons. He’d been scared half to death, naturally enough. But when it was all said and done his father had told him that it was all make believe. Only, he was never really as sure as he felt he should have been. What else explained all the dangerous plants at the Hollow? He’d thought about that a lot over the years, and never really found a good answer. Even after all these years, the notion sent a pleasant shiver down his spine as Halloween came closer.

  Of course, he had other reasons to shiver right now, like the six teens that were missing. So he pushed aside childhood recollections and made himself focus on the here and now.

  The problem with the Hollow, he mused, is that there’s no damned reasonable path for getting there. Of course that’s also the good news. Because if everyone came out here there’d be even more idiots playing with the vegetation.

  He walked the long, thin trail that lead to the local site of legend and found the evidence that the teens had been there with remarkable ease. There were still
sleeping bags around, though it looked like someone had at least gotten violently ill on one of them.

  There were several beer bottles scattered around and multiple footprints had stomped on the poisonous mushrooms that grew in the area. Just what else a group of partying teens might have gotten into in the area was the stuff of nightmares. The mushrooms were not the only dangerous plants in the area by any stretch of the imagination. There was the quicksand, the rocks just beneath the surface of the water in several places and, of course, the serious risk from drinking too much.

  He would have probably kept going through a long list of potential hazards, but the ax that almost cleaved his head in two completely took his mind away from the subject of juvenile antics. Craig saw the glint coming from around the edge of one of the Victim Trees just in time to duck, and heard a grunt of surprise as well as a mumbled curse as the blade ripped through the air above him.

  “Fuck!” He’d have preferred a simple stop or I’ll shoot, but in his defense he was rather caught off guard. Craig dropped low and fell backwards, rolling himself down as softly as he could into a batch of the black toadstools and drawing his pistol at the same time.

  The axe blade lifted straight up into the air, the edge gleaming with bright light, and Craig centered the sights of his weapon directly at his assailant’s face. “Give me a reason!”

  Alan Treacher stared down at him, an almost comical expression on his lean, hound-dog face. “Craig?” His voice was a hoarse squeak: dry and ragged.

  Maybe it wasn’t professional, but Craig took great pleasure in driving the heel of his shoe into the man’s testicles as hard as he could. Treacher let out a yelp of pain and dropped the ax, which narrowly missed hacking into the police chief’s leg when it fell. The idiot dropped to his knees, both hands cupping his genitals, his face a dark red as he whined deep in his throat.