Blood Moon Rising

Blood Moon Rising by Susan Buffum (copyrighted)

Ellora was flying down the rutted road, the twin beams from the headlights of her uncle’s old pickup truck jerking up and down like weak searchlights, occasionally catching the startled wide eye of a rabbit or the glowing orange eyes of a raccoon amid the dry corn stalks in the fields to either side of the farm lane. She was fifteen years old and had been left home alone for the entire weekend while her Uncle Joe and Aunt Alice had gone into the city to celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Ellora’s parents had divorced when she was three years old, her mother moving to the west coast, her father staying behind to help his brother on the farm. Johnny Grimshaw had died in a terrible accident on the farm five years ago. When her mother had refused to come and get her, Uncle Joe and Aunt Alice had petitioned for guardianship of her and she had remained on the farm. Her aunt and uncle had been unable to have children of their own, so she had always been treated as their own child, especially since Johnny’s death.

She knew how to drive. Her father had begun to teach her when she was eight years old, putting blocks on the pedals and clutch and then stacking several old chair cushions on the seat so she could see over the steering wheel. Uncle Joe had continued her driving lessons as she had grown. Aunt Alice really didn’t like it when he let her drive around the farm and fields, but she’d never run over any of the chickens or hit any fence posts like the hired man, Henry Jones, had done. She was now three months away from getting her learner’s permit and had been bored after dinner on this late October evening, so she had decided to practice her night driving.

Of course, being fifteen-years old and unsupervised behind the wheel of the old truck and alone on the farm, she was pressing the pedal harder than she would have if her uncle had been sitting on the passenger side of the bench seat. Therefore, when the figure lurched out of the field into the road just ahead of her, just on the far edge of the pale illuminated twin spheres of the headlights, she gave a shout of shock, her left foot slamming down on the clutch, her right foot moving to the brake and stomping on it as she yanked the stick shift out of gear, but it was too late. She hit the man, for it looked like a male figure to her, and felt the double jolt as first the front tires and then the rear tires ran over his prone form. “Oh, my God!” she cried as the truck came to a stop about fifteen or so additional feet down the rutted lane between the cornfields.

Ellora sat in the driver’s seat, her heart hammering, her hands vibrating on the wheel that she was now clutching hard. She’d just killed a vagrant or a tramp! She’d mowed him right down! There hadn’t been any time to come to a full stop. The thud of her hitting him still reverberated in the palms of her hands. Beads of perspiration due to a sudden nausea roiling in her stomach formed along her hairline. Her mouth felt cottony dry with shock as her brain tried to process what she should do next. Should she just go back to the farmhouse and lock the doors, turn out the lights, and pretend that nothing had happened? What if there was blood and tissue on the bumper or hood? What if there were bits of fabric and flesh adhering to the tires? Once the body was found, the police would naturally come to the house to ask questions.

As she sat there trying to focus the wild cyclone of thoughts spinning through her mind, she felt something strike the rear end of the truck. Her eyes darted to the rearview mirror and widened as she saw that an arm had come up across the tailgate. It looked spectral in the darkness because the truck lights didn’t illuminate what was behind her and her foot was off the brake, the truck idling in neutral still.

A second forearm hooked itself at the elbow over the tailgate, and then something began to emerge from the darkness between those crooked arms…a form…a head and shoulders. “I didn’t kill him,” she breathed, and that frightened her more than the thought of having killed a man had scared her. This man was still alive; alive to tell his tale of having been run over by a teenager who should not have been out driving, even on private property where he had obviously been trespassing. The figure was rising to its full height now, but seemed to be swaying unsteadily. Maybe she’d broken one of his legs? Maybe both? If so, then how could he be standing? She didn’t know if it was possibly to run someone over at a reduced speed and not break any of their bones or not. It wasn’t a subject that normally came up in conversation around the supper table.

A frisson of panic rocketed through her already adrenalin overdosed veins. Moving her hand from the steering wheel, she grabbed the stick shift and fought it into reverse, then stomped on the clutch and the gas pedal, popped the clutch and backed over the man who had been trying to pull himself upright. She felt the truck vibrate as she hit him and his arms flew up in the air and then disappeared behind the tailgate. Stomping on the brake, she shifted the truck into first gear and drove forward. And then she reversed again. Three times she did this before shoving the stick shift into first and stepping on the gas. She tapped the brakes lightly and saw by the red glow behind her a twisted body lying on the rutted road, arms and legs akimbo, torso at an unnatural angle to the hips. That’s all she needed to see before taking her foot off the brake, punching the clutch with her left foot and shoving the stick shift into second gear, the engine growling at her abrupt gear changes.

She skidded into the well-lit farmyard less than five minutes later. Her heartbeat still rapid and bounding, she nearly fell out of the truck as she raced toward the door of the barn, the door to Uncle Joe’s shop where she knew he had one of those powerful battery powered lanterns on his work bench.

Tugging open the door, she slapped the button on the post just inside the door to turn on the overhead light. Racing across the room, she grabbed the lantern, sliding the button with her thumb to light it as she ran back across the shop and out into the yard. The pale yellow beam of the lantern played crazily around the yard until she stopped running and shone it toward the hood of the truck. If she had struck him hard enough to cause damage, there would be blood on the hood.

Stepping closer, she peered at the hood. There was a very slight dent that might be new, but there were so many dents from its being a bang-around-the-farm vehicle that she doubted Uncle Joe would notice a slight new dent. Shining the beam directly on the dent, she saw no blood spatter or stains. There was some straw stuck in the grill that she absently yanked out. She’d probably picked that up practicing turns out in the fields. There was a little straw and some dried corn husk stuck in the right front wheel well. She pulled that free and tossed it aside in the yard that was littered with similar material from when Uncle Joe had brought the tractor in to secure in the main part of the barn before he and Aunt Alice had left.

She ran around to the back of the truck, took a steadying breath and then shone the light on the tailgate and rear bumper. The bumper was pretty battered, and just wired on. Again she found some straw and bits of dried corn husk and threads of brown corn silk. She tugged it all lose and dropped it onto the dirt yard. She really couldn’t see any new dents, but wasn’t absolutely sure. Nothing jumped out at her as being a fresh dent.

Behind her, from the cornfields there came an eerie ululating sound that raised goosebumps all up and down her arms and legs. The flesh at the back of her neck seemed to have come alive and was trying to crawl up her scalp which also seemed to be moving as if powered by beetles just beneath her flesh. She’d heard owls and coyotes before, but nothing quite like this!

She turned and ran toward the front porch, fumbling with the stubborn doorknob before it finally gave and allowed her to turn it and open the door. She stumbled awkwardly through the open door and then shoved it closed behind her. She turned the old fashioned dead bolt, slid the chain guard into place, and pushed the button lock on the door knob.

Bolting down the wide hallway, she skidded into the kitchen and then scrambled into the back hall to close and lock the door leading out onto the back porch. She turned on the back porch light so she could see if anyone approached the house from that direction, then returned to the kitchen, closing the inside door and securing that as well.

She glanced at the phone on the hallway wall, the only phone in the house, as she walked slowly back toward the front of the house. The case clock standing like a sentry outside the parlor door steadily tick-tocked the passage of seconds as its brass pendulum swung hypnotically back and forth behind the narrow window in the lower door. The clock had always fascinated her. She had sat on the staircase watching the clock when she was younger, watching the stiff black minute and hour hands slowly advance across the faces of the black numerals. There was a sun and a moon in a crescent cutout above the number twelve. The moon was showing and would be directly above the number twelve at midnight before beginning the downward arc toward the number one as the sun began to appear at the end closest to the number eleven.

Tonight, the clock sounded unusually loud in the quiet house. Normally, her uncle would be in the parlor listening to a radio program while her aunt would be in the kitchen, the dishes having been washed, dried, and put away after supper, but the next day’s baking needing to be done. On any other night, Ellora would be out there helping knead the dough and slice it into loaves that they’d lay in the tins and then line up on the front of the stove with dish towels draped over them to let the dough rise overnight. Aunt Alice would be up at four-thirty the following morning to slide the loaf pans into the heated oven so the bread would be hot and ready when Uncle Joe and the farmhands came in for breakfast at six o’clock. Ellora would have collected the eggs and fed the goats, the pair of horses, and the two cows by the time Aunt Alice clanged the iron triangle hanging outside on the back porch post to summon everyone in for fluffy scrambled eggs, homemade pork sausage from the pigs Uncle Joe raised and then butchered so they’d have meat all winter, and hot bread. As colder weather came upon them oatmeal was added to the menu, something that stuck to your ribs and kept you going until lunchtime.

A thump on the porch startled her. She spun away from the clock, pressing herself against the wall close up against the far side of the case. Her heart, which had begun to settle back down into its normal rhythm, was once again racing. A second thump came and then a scuffling, clomping sound. She dared peek around the edge of the clock case, but she really couldn’t see anything outside because the door window was covered by white curtains and the hall light was on.

There was a scuffling sound, and then the sound of the doorknob being twisted and rattled. She caught her breath, turned her head, and looked toward the telephone on the wall back near the kitchen doorway. If she moved away from the clock it was possible that someone could see her through the curtains, or at least the shape of her, her shadowy form moving down the hallway. The material of the curtains was a lightweight cotton blend. “Go away,” she whispered. “Please go away. There’s nobody home!”

The door knob continued to twist and turn for a bit longer, and then there was a soft rapping on the window, as if the person on the porch had wrapped a cloth around their knuckles. It was muffled like that. Ellora had seen a man wrap a shirt around his fist before breaking a window in a movie once. She was fearful that the person on the porch would break the window, reach inside and unlock the deadbolt, the door knob lock, and remove the chain guard to gain entry. She tried to calculate whether or not she had time to ring the operator and beg her to send the police out to the farm as quickly as possible. But the town was miles and miles away! They’d never make it here in time to save her from the murderer trying to gain entry!

Then she thought that maybe it was only a burglar. Maybe someone in town had heard Aunt Alice talking about the anniversary weekend trip to one of her lady friends in the grocer’s while waiting her turn in line. Some men weren’t above breaking into another man’s house and stealing his valuables if an opportunity arose. There were men recently home from the war suffering from shell shock who were out of work and essentially living off the kindness of family or relatives, or living in the rest home across from the post office where nurses in white uniforms doled out medications as they sat in rocking chairs on the broad front porch with blankets or sweaters over their shoulders, their faces pale, haggard, and drawn, their eyes watchful and wary. If she could hide someplace then he might not find her. He’d be looking for small things that were easy to stuff into a flour sack and carry away. Aunt Alice had a stack of flour sacks on the counter in the pantry. He’d probably grab one of those, if he hadn’t brought one.

Fleetingly she wondered how he’d gotten out this far on his own, but then remembered that the railroad ran through the fields way toward the back of the property. Maybe he was a hobo who’d jumped off the train to make camp in the fields. There was a stream for water along the tracks. Stacks of dried corn stalks could be piled up to form some sort of crude shelter, and could be used to fuel a fire to cook a can of beans over. Maybe he was just hungry and wanted something to eat? Maybe he was timidly trying the door knob to see if the door was open? Would a man like that just walk into someone’s house though? It was possible, if he was hungry enough or not exactly in his right mind.

She suppressed a shudder. Andrew Spader had an older brother who was not in his right mind. Adam had fallen off a horse when he was eleven years old and fractured his skull in two places. They’d had to take him into the city for surgery. He had been gone for a long time. When they had brought him home he had not been the same boy that he had been. The Spaders kept him indoors, but occasionally he managed to get out and would wander around until Mrs. Spader began making frantic phone calls, begging all the farm wives in the area to ask their menfolk to keep an eye out for him. Perhaps this was Adam and he was cold and hungry, and maybe scared because he was really more childlike than any other young man his age, which had to be close to nineteen now. Andrew was a year older than she was, and Adam was a few years older than his brother.

There were more thumping sounds from the front porch. To my ears it sounded as if someone was clomping down the wooden stairs back to the yard. I breathed a little easier, but stayed where I was. Beside me the clock continued its rhythmic ticking, lulling me into a sense of false security for I jumped as if prodded by a live electric wire when I heard a rapping at the back hall door.

Suppressing a yelp, she whipped her head around staring down the hallway toward the kitchen. The sound of a pane of glass breaking reached her, then rattling and next the creaking of the door between the back porch and the back hall as it was being opened. The kitchen door wasn’t nearly as sturdy as the back hall door. She bolted for the stairs to the second floor and ran upstairs, her mind desperately playing through a visual list of hiding places—under the bed, in the closet, in the linen closet in the hallway, on the attic stairs, in the deep claw foot tub with the shower curtain pulled closed all around, behind the chair in Uncle Joe and Aunt Alice’s bedroom, beneath their bed which was larger than her narrow twin bed.

She didn’t have a lot of time to think because she heard the tinkle of glass hit the kitchen linoleum and then the inside door being thrown open rather recklessly. She heard the sound of glass crunching beneath boots. She was near the attic door and grabbed the knob, twisting it, tugging open the door, praying that it wouldn’t creak. It didn’t. She slipped around the door onto the steep wooden staircase leading up into the attic at the top of the house. There were spiders and mice up there, pieces of furniture draped with old bed sheets, Grandma Grimshaw’s dress form that had terrified her as a child when she’d first gone up into the attic to help Uncle Joe bring down some Christmas decorations and seen its ghostly form in the far corner. She’d nearly screamed the house down!

There was no lock on this door. Very slowly, she backed up the staircase, one riser at a time, being very careful not to hit the creaky places, but it was hard because she was going up the stairs backwards, watching the thin line of light between the door and the frame for any shadows passing by. She moaned softly as she ran into a huge cobweb, swinging her arms wildly, smacking her forearm against the rough hewn wall of the stairwell, scraping it badly. Cobwebs fluttered against the side of her neck and she pictured spiders dancing in her hair and down her back, biting back a cry of disgust and fright.

Then came the sound of footsteps climbing the staircase from the first floor to the second. She knew that sound, having heard it every night of her life since coming here to live; Uncle Joe coming up to bed at eight o’clock while she was in her room trying to fall asleep when she was younger, or doing her homework as she’d grown up. But this was not her Uncle’s familiar tread. This was similar, but not as heavy. It was slower, although not cautious in the least. Hopefully, this person assumed the house was unoccupied. Only the hall light was on downstairs, which was the source of faint light around the door and its frame now, and one small light was on in the kitchen. She had not turned on any second floor lights.

“El..lor..a,” came a masculine voice, raspy sounding, as if he was recovering from a cold. It made her heart jump and then pound. It was someone who knew she was home alone! For one horrifying moment she thought it might be one of the farmhands. They would know about the anniversary weekend. They would know she was here by herself. A couple of them would be here in the morning to help with the chores. She was supposed to be downstairs baking bread right now for their breakfast and lunch.  “Ellor…a!”

There was a shuffling in the hallway now, the thud of footfalls, the scrape of something along the hallway wall that sounded like the branches and leaves that rubbed against the walls of the barn during a windstorm. The person moved toward the front of the house, calling for her, and then came back along the hallway and moved toward the rear of the house where her bedroom was. Uncle Joe and Aunt Alice slept in the big room at the front of the house. She had a back corner bedroom over the kitchen. The other bedroom had been her father’s, but was now a spare room. Aunt Alice had her sewing machine in there. The bathroom was in the hallway, one of its walls abutting the stairwell wall leading up to the attic.

As the footsteps came back along the hallway, slowly now, she backed up another stair. She was near the top now, could feel the colder air of the attic pressing down on her head and shoulders like a shawl just brought in from the winter clothesline and thrown around her. Down at the bottom of the stairs, the door knob rattled. She used the sound of it to mask the scamper of her sneaker-clad feet reaching the wooden floor of the attic above. She tip-toed toward the left, toward the front of the house where there were old trunks and dressers suitable to duck down and hide behind.

The door at the bottom of the stairs slowly creaked open, hinges protesting. They had not been noisy when she had opened the door, but were protesting the stealthy manner in which the door was being opened now. Then, she jumped at the sound of the door being thrown open, the door knob crashing against the hallway wall. A slow, steady thud of booted feet climbing the wooden stairs reached her ears as she scuttled behind a dresser, lifted the dusty old sheet, and sidled beneath it, praying that she could squash herself small enough that she would not be noticed in the darkness.

“El..lora!” came the rough voice. She heard an odd crackling and rustling sound that reminded her of camping one summer. They’d gone to a friend of her uncle’s cabin at a lake. The mattresses there had been firmly stuffed with straw. Every movement that she’d made tossing and turning on that uncomfortable mattress had caused the straw to shift and rustle beneath the sheet. That’s what this sounded like, and although she was terrified of being discovered, her brain was trying to figure out what was making that sound. “You can…not hide… from me!” The man had reached the top of the stairs and paused there, the rustling sound having stilled. “Ellora!”

Her nose twitched. Dust had gotten into her face as she’d ducked beneath the sheet. She moved her hand up slowly to pinch her nostrils, to prevent the sneeze that was forming at the back of her nose from exploding and betraying her. She was trying to breathe quietly, slowly, but it felt as if her heartbeat was audible in the quiet attic, that her breathing must sound like the horse’s breathing did after racing him hard down the rutted lanes between the cornfields; the old horse not used to that vigorous kind of exercise.

The rustling started again, and then the thump of boots on warped boards. She felt the vibration of each footfall through the dry floorboards. He was coming this way! He was drawing nearer. And suddenly, the sheet was whisked off the dresser. She heard it crumple limply to the floor on the far side, and then a gloved hand was reaching over the dresser, trying to grasp her. She was dodging it, scrunching herself up as small as she could, but it finally caught her by the shirt collar and hauled her half upright. She cried out with fright and tried to wrench herself free, however, the man was strong and he yanked her up onto her feet, and then right over the top of the dresser. She half fell at his feet, but he didn’t give her a chance to struggle free. He pulled her up onto her feet, the one hand still clutching her collar behind her neck, the other now firmly gripping her left elbow. She couldn’t bend that arm, but she balled up her right fist and tried battering him with it, but instead of solid flesh, she felt as if she was hitting a bale of hay. Confused, she raised her head and peered up into the gloom of the attic, only a faint light coming up the stairway. She saw a pale face, dark eyes. But the other features were also dark, nose and mouth. This gave her pause. Was he wearing a mask of some sort?

He wordlessly began dragging her toward the stairs. Her feet skittered and slid on the floor. She wasn’t a very big girl. She was a little less than average height and slim like her mother had been, almost boyish in figure. Rangy, coltish, Aunt Alice called her.  She weighed  about a hundred and five pounds soaking wet. The man was tall, a few inches over six feet, and strong.

He dragged her down the stairs, but lost his grip on her four stairs from the bottom. She went tumbling down those stairs and landed in a heap on the hallway floor at the bottom of them. It was jarring. Her ribs, hip, and scraped arm hurt, but she was already scrambling to her feet. He grabbed her again at the head of the staircase to the first floor. She wrenched herself around, hand raised to slap his face, but that hand froze as her eyes fell on his face. He was wearing a mask! She recognized that flour sack face! She had drawn it herself three years ago for one of the scarecrows her uncle and the field hands set up every spring after the corn had been planted. She’d done a good job giving him realistic oval eyes with pupils and irises, a conical shaped nose, a wide, somewhat grimacing mouth. She had intended to give him a wide grin, but the black marker she’d been using had bunched up the fabric so that the grin had become a grimace. But, she’d still been proud of the face she had given him.

He was stuffed full of straw and some cotton batting from an old quilt Aunt Alice had taken apart. He had straw hair that stuck out every which way from beneath a floppy-brimmed, old hat that had belonged to her grandfather. She’d found it hanging on a nail in the shop in the barn. His shirt was one of her father’s black and white buffalo plaid flannel work shirts with patched elbows and a missing button second down from the collar. Where the shirt gaped, straw poked out. He also wore a pair of her father’s old jeans and his scuffed up work boots. She’d pounded a nail into the heel to hold it on this past spring as damp weather had warped and loosened it. “No!” she cried. “Who are you? Why are you dressed like the scarecrow?”

“I am yours,” he said. “Yet, you ran me down! Why?” he demanded, shaking her. She stared wildly into his eyes, expecting them to blink, to narrow with anger and accusation, but they remained ridiculously benign although she could sense the anger in him. He had a hard grip on her. It was painful. He shook her again, her heels now teetering at the edge of the top stair.

“I don’t know! I was scared! I thought you were real! I was just…scared!”

“I am real!” he rasped, bending his head so that his face was nearer to hers. She leaned back to try to get away from him, then grabbed wildly for the front of his shirt as she felt herself over balance backwards and begin to fall. He yanked her back up and she gripped the front of his shirt, the straw behind it crackling. “Not once, not twice, but four times!” he barked.

“I didn’t know it was you!” she cried, her mind whirling. He was a straw-stuffed figure. How could he possibly have come to life like this? How could he have followed her from the field and broken into the house and searched for her? How was this even possible? Yet, he was still gripping her, holding her at the top of the stairs. She had a bunch of flannel material grasped in her fist with straw behind it.

“I thought you loved me,” he rasped. “I thought you cared for me. You came and spoke to me in the field. You sat at my feet and told me so many things. You read to me from books. You brought picnics and ate with me. You’ve visited me so often, except for the past few weeks.”

“School’s started again. I have to go to school. I have chores when I get home, and homework. It gets darker out sooner,” she replied, feeling both foolish and astounded that he had been aware of her visits with him in the cornfield. Like a silly little girl, she had imagined that he was real, that he was her boyfriend. She felt color stain her cheeks at all the secrets she had revealed to him over the past three years! Had he always been listening to her? Did he actually have the ability to hear her? “I don’t know how this can be!” she cried.

“You gave me your heart, Ellora. You made me live!” Her eyes met his again as his right hand moved and he pressed it against her breast. “You gave me your heart and I have come to take it back.”

“But…” She felt his fingers pressing deeper into her flesh and cried out with pain, wrenching herself away from him. A button tore free from his shirt. She heard it ping as it hit the stair behind her and then roll down the stairs. A handful of straw fell onto the floor between them and an idea bloomed in her mind. She let go of his shirt and began tugging straw from the gap where the button had come off, hurling handfuls of straw onto the floor. She had stuffed that straw into the shirt to make him, so therefore, why couldn’t she pull the straw out and unmake him? It seemed to make sense to her in that moment.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Ellora, stop!” But she couldn’t stop. She was desperate now, frightened and desperate.

She screamed as he gave her a shove and she went flying backwards. Her arms and legs sought something solid to grasp, to connect with, and then she landed on the stairs with a sickening, jarring, wrenching sensation. Her head struck the edge of a stair and her panic and terror was instantly resolved by a darkness and stillness that swept her away from the nightmare unfolding in the farmhouse.

When Joe and Alice Grimshaw returned home late Sunday afternoon, they found the front door locked, the chain guard on. There was no answer to their knocking on the door or their calling for their niece. They looked at one another with concern and then made their way around to the back of the house where they found the broken windows in the two back doors. The doors also stood wide open. Joe made his wife remain on the back porch as he cautiously entered the house. A trail of blood droplets led to the foot of the stairs where there was a small, mostly dried pool of blood. He skirted the blood and ran upstairs, frowning as he came across scattered handfuls of straw at the top of the stairs. The attic door was ajar in the second floor hallway. He ran up those stairs calling for his niece, but all he found was a sheet on the floor in front of an old dresser. Nothing else appeared disturbed.

He checked the second floor bedrooms and the bathroom. There was no sign of Ellora. Returning to the first floor, he paused to use the telephone to summon the police. Alice was standing in the open porch doorway, hugging herself, her face etched with worry. “It looks like she fell down the stairs. She’s hurt. She’s got to be around here someplace. The police will help us find her,” he said as he joined her on the porch.

The police arrived and searched the house. They found a button near the front door, but neither Grimshaw recognized it. It was just an ordinary button possibly from a work shirt. The clumps of straw, however, puzzled them. They had no explanation for them.

Returning to the yard to look for the continuation of the blood trail, they found scattered spots of blood and bits and pieces of straw. The trail petered out as it reached a rutted lane leading between two cornfields. “What’s out there?” one officer asked.

“Just cornfields.”

“Would she wander out there if she was dazed and confused, hurt?”

“It’s possible.”

“We’ll need some help. It’s going to get dark soon.”

They radioed for assistance. Joe made some phone calls to neighbors. Soon the yard was full of vehicles and a crowd was milling about on the lane. They were quickly divided into pairs and sent into the fields with flashlights and torches made from stakes with rags soaked in kerosene tied to the ends. The torches guttered a deep orangey red. The flashlight beams were steadier, pale shafts of light.

Alice Grimshaw paced the front porch, hugging her heavy cardigan around her frame, her eyes on the field and the flickering torches, the flashing beams of light as they were turned this way and that as the men moved through the dried stalks. She could hear them calling to one another, reporting areas checked.

The moon, a huge orangey-red disc, a blood moon as farmers sometimes called it, had come out from behind the scuttling clouds. The weekend had been mostly cloudy. A few stars twinkled between the remaining clouds. An owl hooted from a tree at the far side of the barn. Paul Brown had tended to the neglected horses, cows, goats, and chickens. He had a bad leg from an injury suffered in the war. He had a peg leg and was unable to navigate the uneven surfaces of the cornfields. He had busied himself in the barn and chicken coop, for which Alice was grateful. She could not sit still, could not stop pacing and gnawing on her lower lip, could not stop staring into the rustling cornfields wondering where her niece had gotten to.

And then she heard a man shout, and then another man shout. She saw a torch raised and all the other scattered lights in the fields begin to migrate toward the raised torch. Gradually, the lights began to converge and she could make out numerous voices traveling back toward the house. She heard one voice repeatedly crying, “No! No! No!” and it made her shudder, made tears sting the backs of her eyes at the pain in that simple word. Behind her, Frances Walker stood up from one of the rockers and came to her, placing her hands on her shoulders, turning her, and drawing her into her arms, holding her as the tears let loose.

In the field, Joe Grimshaw stared in horror at the body of his niece hanging from the post where a scarecrow had hung all summer. The scarecrow lay in a heap at the base of the pole, straw spilling from a gap in the shirt’s placket where a button was missing. In the eerie torch light, it looked as if it had been eviscerated and now lay dead at the feet of the girl hanging from the back of her shirt from the post. There were splotches and spatters of blood on its shirt and jeans, smeared on the side of its muslin face.

Ellora Grimshaw was lifted down from the post by the tallest and strongest of the men. She was limp and they had to set her on the ground. One of the officers knelt down beside her, feeling for a pulse, and then gently brushing strands of blonde hair away from her blood-streaked face. He turned her head, his fingers exploring, and he found the wound on the back of her head where it had hit the edge of the stair. Her skull felt spongy in that place, her hair thick and stiff with dried blood. Slowly, he rose to his feet, shaking his head. “She’s gone,” he said, his voice cracking.

“But how did she get out here? Who hung her on the post like that? Like a scarecrow?” Joe cried. His heart was aching. They never should have left her here on her own. She was still so young! Not quite sixteen! Staring down at her body sprawled against that of the scarecrow she had replaced on the post, he knew he would regret the decision he had made to leave her on the farm by herself for the rest of his life.

“Come on, Joe. We’ll go up to the house now. A couple of the boys will come back out here and bring her body to the house. I’ll call Mac. He’ll have to come out here before Varney Brothers can come to take her to their place. That’s who you’ll be using, right? Same place that buried your brother?” Joe nodded distractedly, turning his head, glancing back over his shoulder toward his niece. Her small, pale hand was lying in the palm of the gloved hand of the scarecrow. The old glove on the scarecrow’s straw stuffed hand had curled and stiffened from exposure to the elements over the past few years. It almost looked as if it was trying to take her hand in its hand, a tender gesture arrested by death and the inanimate nature of a straw man.

“Yes,” Joe replied as he turned back toward the lane. “You’ll find who did this to her, won’t you?” he asked, his footsteps rustling and crunching through the dried stalks and husks.

“We’ll have some people out here first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, don’t touch anything in the house. Leave everything as it is. Maybe you and Alice should go to a friend’s house for the rest of the night. That might be best. If there’s any evidence at all, we don’t want it being disturbed.” Joe absently nodded. Their bags were on the front porch. He could easily put them back in the car. They could go down the road to Paul and Annie’s place. They had a spare room.

But he knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not tonight. Not for many nights to come. The image of his niece hanging limply from the scarecrow’s post among the withered and sere cornstalks was one that he would not be able to force from his memory. Nor would he be able to drive out of his mind his last view of Ellora lying against the scarecrow, their hands nearly joined. It was just too disturbing, too surreal an image to ever be forgotten.