by Stephen King
shoulders swiping the leaves and making them tremble. Twenty yards in' he turned
right, parallel to the road again, and ran on, keeping low so they wouldn't see
his dark head of hair bobbing amid the yellow corn tassels. He doubled back
towards the road for a few moments, crossed more rows, and then put his back to
the road and hopped randomly from row to row, always delving deeper and deeper
into the corn.
At last, he collapsed on to his knees and put his forehead against the ground.
He could only hear his own taxed breathing, and the thought that played over and
over in his mind was: Thank God I gave up smoking, thank God I gave up smoking,
thank God -Then he could hear them, yelling back and forth to each other, in
some cases bumping into each other ('Hey, this is my row!'), and the sound
heartened him. They were well away to his left and they sounded very poorly
organized.
He took his handkerchief out of his shirt, folded it, and stuck it back in after
looking at the wound. The bleeding seemed to have stopped in spite of the
workout he had given it.
He rested a moment longer, and was suddenly aware that he felt good, physically
better than he had in years excepting the throb of his arm. He felt well
exercised, and suddenly grappling with a clearcut (no matter how insane) problem
after two years of trying to cope with the incubotic gremlins that were sucking
his marriage dry.
It wasn't right that he should feel this way, he told himself. He was in deadly
peril of his life, and his wife had been carried off. She might be dead now. He
tried to summon up Vicky's face and dispel some of the odd good feeling by doing
so, but her face wouldn't come. What came was the red-haired boy with the knife
in his throat.
He became aware of the corn fragrance in his nose now, all around him. The wind
through the tops of the plants made a sound like voices. Soothing. Whatever had
been done in the name of this corn, it was now his protector.
But they were getting closer.
Running hunched over, he hurried up the row he was in, crossed over, doubled
back, and crossed over more rows. He tried to keep the voices always on his
left, but as the afternoon progressed, that became harder to do. The voices had
grown faint, and often the rustling sound of the corn obscured them altogether.
He would run, listen, run again. The earth was hard-packed, and his stockinged
feet left little or no trace.
When he stopped much later the sun was hanging over the fields to his right, red
and inflamed, and when he looked at his watch he saw that it was quarter past
seven. The sun had stained the corntops a reddish gold, but here the shadows
were dark and deep. He cocked his head, listening. With the coming of sunset the
wind had died entirely and the corn stood still, exhaling its aroma of growth
into the warm air. If they were still in the corn they were either far away or
just hunkered down and listening. But Burt didn't think a bunch of kids, even
crazy ones, could be quiet for that long. He suspected they had done the most
kidlike thing, regardless of the consequences for them; they had given up and
gone home.
He turned towards the setting sun, which had sunk between the raftered clouds on
the horizon, and began to walk. If he cut on a diagonal through the rows, always
keeping the setting sun ahead of him, he would be bound to strike Route 17
sooner or later.
The ache in his arm had settled into a dull throb that was nearly pleasant, and
the good feeling was still with him. He decided that as long as he was here, he
would let the good feeling exist in him without guilt. The guilt would return
when he had to face the authorities and account for what had happened in Gatlin.
But that could wait.
He pressed through the corn, thinking he had never felt so keenly aware. Fifteen
minutes later the sun was only a hemisphere poking over the horizon and he
stopped again, his new awareness clicking into a pattern he didn't like. It was
vaguely. . . well, vaguely frightening.
He cocked his head. The corn was rustling.
Burt had been aware of that for some time, but he had just put it together with
something else. The wind was still. How could that be?
He looked around warily, half expecting to see the smiling boys in their Quaker
coats creeping out of the corn, their knives clutched in their hands. Nothing of
the sort. There was still that rustling noise. Off to the left.
He began to walk in that direction, not having to bull through the corn any
more. The row was taking him in the direction he wanted to go, naturally. The
row ended up ahead. Ended? No, emptied out into some sort of clearing. The
rustling was there.
He stopped, suddenly afraid.
The scent of the corn was strong enough to be cloying. The rows held on to the
sun's heat and he became aware that he was plastered with sweat and chaff and
thin spider strands of cornsilk. The bugs ought to be crawling all over him. . .
but they weren't.
He stood still, staring towards that place where the corn opened out on to what
looked like a large circle of bare earth.
There were no minges or mosquitoes in here, no black-flies or chiggers - what he
and Vicky had called 'drive-in bugs' when they had been courting, he thought
with sudden and unexpectedly sad nostalgia. And he hadn't seen a single crow.
How was that for weird, a cornpatch with no crows?
In the last of the daylight he swept his eyes closely over the row of corn to
his left. And saw that every leaf and stalk was perfect, which was just not
possible. No yellow blight. No tattered leaves, no caterpillar eggs, no burrows,
no -His eyes widened.
My God, there aren't any weeds!
Not a single one. Every foot and a half the corn plants rose from the earth.
There was no witchgrass, jimson, pikeweed, whore's hair, or poke salad. Nothing.
Burt stared up, eyes wide. The light in the west was fading. The raftered clouds
had drawn back together. Below them the golden light had faded to pink and
ochre. It would be dark soon enough.
It was time to go down to the clearing in the corn and see what was there -
hadn't that been the plan all along? All the time he had thought he was cutting
back to the highway, hadn't he been being led to this place?
Dread in his belly, he went on down to the row and stood at the edge of the
clearing. There was enough light for him to see what was here. He couldn't
scream. There didn't seem to be enough air left in his lungs. He tottered in on
legs like slats of splintery wood. His eyes bulged from his sweaty face.
'Vicky,' he whispered. 'Oh, Vicky, my God -'
She had been mounted on a crossbar like a hideous trophy, her arms held at the
wrists and her legs at the ankles with twists of common barbed wire, seventy
cents a yard at any hardware store in Nebraska. Her eyes had been ripped out.
The sockets were filled with the moonflax of cornsilk. Her jaws were wrenched
open in a silent scream, her mouth filled with cornhusks.
On her left was a skeleton in a mouldering surplice. The nude jawbone grinned.
Th
e eye sockets seemed to stare at Burt jocularly, as if the one-time minister
of the Grace Baptist Church was saying: It's not so bad, being sacrificed by
pagan devil-children in the corn is not so bad, having your eyes ripped out of
your skull according to the Laws of Moses is not so bad -To the left of the
skeleton in the surplice was a second skeleton, this one dressed in a rotting
blue uniform. A hat hung over the skull, shading the eyes, and on the peak of
the cap was a greenish-tinged badge reading police chief.
That was when Burt heard it coming: not the children but something much larger,
moving through the corn and towards the clearing. Not the children, no. The
children wouldn't venture into the corn at night. This was the holy place, the
place of He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
Jerkily Burt turned to flee. The row he had entered the clearing by was gone.
Closed up. All the rows had closed up. It was coming closer now and he could
hear it, pushing through the corn. He could hear it breathing. An ecstasy of
superstitious terror seized him. It was coming. The corn on the far side of the
clearing had suddenly darkened, as if a gigantic shadow had blotted it out.
Coming.
He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
It began to come into the clearing. Burt saw something huge, bulking up to the
sky . . . something green with terrible red eyes the size of footballs.
Something that smelled like dried cornhusks years in some dark barn.
He began to scream. But he did not scream long.
Some time later, a bloated orange harvest moon came up.
The children of the corn stood in the clearing at midday, looking at the two
crucified skeletons and the two bodies
the bodies were not skeletons yet, but they would be. In time. And here, in the
heartlands of Nebraska, in the corn, there was nothing but time.
'Behold, a dream came to me in the night, and the Lord did shew all this to me.'
They all turned to look at Isaac with dread and wonder, even Malachi. Isaac was
only nine, but he had been the Seer since the corn had taken David a year ago.
David had been nineteen and he had walked into the corn on his birthday, just as
dusk had come drifting down the summer rows.
Now, small face grave under his round-crowned hat, Isaac continued:
'And in my dream the Lord was a shadow that walked behind the rows, and he spoke
to me in the words he used to our older brothers years ago. He is much
displeased with this sacrifice.'
They made a sighing, sobbing noise and looked at the surrounding walls of green.
'And the Lord did say: Have I not given you a place of killing, that you might
make sacrifice there? And have I not shewn you favour? But this man has made a
blasphemy within me, and I have completed this sacrifice myself. Like the Blue
Man and the false minister who escaped many years ago.'
'The Blue Man . . . the false minister,' they whispered, and looked at each
other uneasily.
'SO now is the Age of Favour lowered from nineteen plantings and harvestings to
eighteen,' Isaac went on relentlessly. 'Yet be fruitful and multiply as the corn
multiplies, that my favour may be shewn you, and be upon you.'
Isaac ceased.
The eyes turned to Malachi and Joseph, the only two among this party who were
eighteen. There were others back in town, perhaps twenty in all.
They waited to hear what Malachi would say, Malachi who had led the hunt for
Japheth, who evermore would be known as Ahaz, cursed of God. Malachi had cut the
throat of Ahaz and had thrown his body out of the corn so the foul body would
not pollute it or blight it.
'I obey the word of God,' Malachi whispered.
The corn seemed to sigh its approval.
In the weeks to come the girls would make many corncob crucifixes to ward off
further evil.
And that night all of those now above the Age of Favour walked silently into the
corn and went to the clearing, to gain the continued favour of He Who Walks
Behind the Rows.
'Goodbye, Malachi,' Ruth called. She waved disconsolately. Her belly was big
with Malachi's child and tears coursed silently down her cheeks. Malachi did not
turn. His back was straight. The corn swallowed him.
Ruth turned away, still crying. She had conceived a secret hatred for the corn
and sometimes dreamed of walking into it with a torch in each hand when dry
September came and the stalks were dead and explosively combustible. But she
also feared it. Out there, in the night, something walked, and it saw everything
. . even the secrets kept in human hearts.
Dusk deepened into night. Around Gatlin the corn rustled and whispered secretly.
It was well pleased.
