Dark Harvest

PART TWO Lies

Of course, the story told by Mitch Crenshaw’s amphibian friends is one the October Boy won’t hear. He’s already blown a couple miles down the black road, and he’s concentrating hard, because driving isn’t easy for him. His viny fingers cling too tightly to the steering wheel, and his severed-root feet are spongy on the gas and the brake. But he does all right, and in a few minutes he crosses the Line into town.

Kids are everywhere, running in packs with bows and arrows, and axe handles, and scythes sharpened for a single night’s work. They’re waiting for his grand arrival in the most obvious places, shadowing the city limits for the first sign of a thing that doesn’t move like a man. So he jams the Chrysler’s horn and guns through the first bunch of teenagers just as he hits Main Street, and they get out of his way double-quick because there’s not much more they can do when a couple tons of steel growls at them like a king-size tomcat that’s seriously pissed off.

Sure they move, but they don’t scare easy. The October Boy’s about fifty feet down Main when a rock hits the Chrysler’s trunk. “Screw you, Crenshaw!” some guy shouts. “Get your chickenshit ass out of that car and onto the street!” And the Boy’s carved grin stretches wide as he hears those words, because they mean things are going to work out better than he ever could have imagined. No way he could have crossed the Line this easily if he’d come into town on his own two legs. But no one recognizes him in Crenshaw’s car, and that means he’s got a chance of running his game all the way to the finish line.

How much of a chance, he’s not exactly sure. There’s a lot more to winning this game than just crossing the Line. And sure, his final destination is in sight — there’s the old brick church, dead ahead. That’s the place that spells ollie ollie oxen free for the October Boy, and if he gets there before midnight the game will end differently than it ever has before. But getting there won’t be easy, because this is definitely one case where the shortest distance between two points isn’t a straight line.

Seen in the bright light of an autumn afternoon, the brick church is the color of faded roses, but by moonlight those bricks are as ugly as old scars. Already, a few young men have gathered on the lawn beneath the narrow arched windows, and at least five guys are sitting on the steps leading up to the church door. They’re playing a different set of odds than the guys running the streets. They’re counting on the October Boy making it all the way to the church in one piece. After all, the church is the Boy’s only predictable destination.

And that bet makes one thing a sure deal — the October Boy won’t try to make it just yet. Right now, that would be suicide, and the Boy knows it… just as he knows he’s going to have to find a safe place to think things over and come up with a plan. So he hangs a left turn and heads down a side street, flicking his lights on to high beam so it’ll be tougher for anyone facing the Chrysler head-on to spot a pumpkin-headed driver sitting behind the wheel —

“Goddamn! It’s Mitch Crenshaw’s heap! Get outta the way!”

A dozen kids scatter as the Chrysler approaches. The guys in the first group wear dime-store monster masks. The ones in the second don’t need masks at all — their pale, washed-out faces are scary enough, five days of hunger etched in the hollow spaces along with just enough chiseled insanity to send a shiver up the October Boy’s gnarled spine.

Both gangs disappear into the shadows as the Chrysler blows by. It’s no surprise that this kid Crenshaw has a hell of a rep. So does his car. That’s just fine with the October Boy. If Crenshaw’s rod is the steel equivalent of his own personal monster mask, he’ll be happy to let it scare anyone who gets in his way.

He makes a couple more turns, working his way east, following back streets to the edge of the downtown section. Then he hangs a left on Oak Street and heads north, cruising by the market. The ham-fisted butcher stands guard out front, armed with a shotgun. That’s the way it is all over town, any place that has food. The diner, the truck stop, the liquor store out by the highway — they all have guards posted. The powers-that-be want that five-day hunger scrabbling around inside every young man who’s out for the Run. The only way anyone’s eating tonight is if they spill the candy locked up in the October Boy’s guts.

The Chrysler passes the market. There’s one last streetlight on the corner ahead. Then another turn, and the October Boy’s into the neighborhoods, where the streets are darker and oak branches climb high over the road, cutting off the moon and the stars.

No porch lights shine from the doorsteps of those houses. Not the electric kind, anyway. But light spills across some of those yards nonetheless — a bumper crop of carved pumpkins sit on those porches, their rough-hewn eyes trained on the streets as if watching the night’s action — somebody’s idea of a joke.

A lot of those Jack o’ Lanterns are mashed. Hey, you remember that. It’s a tradition — pass a house, bash a pumpkin. Get your blood pumping while you think about splattering the real deal. So it’s easy to understand why many of the homes are already cloaked in darkness — Jack o’ Lanterns splattered, candles out.

As he drives, the October Boy thinks about the people who live in those houses — the ones who’ve turned their children onto the streets. And he thinks about the houses themselves, and the quiet little rooms where nothing much ever happens, and the things that do happen that are never spoken of. But in the end it’s not the houses themselves that matter. It’s the people inside who count. So his thoughts return to those people, sitting boxed-up in their little rooms, and he thinks about the things they say and the things they keep locked up inside, and he wonders if you can still feel those people when their voices fall silent and their shadows disappear.

When those rooms are empty.

When those people are gone.

He clocks one block, and then another. A scream cuts through the night as he makes another turn. Just ahead there’s a clot of silhouette on someone’s front lawn, and a figure on the ground. There’s another scream from the prone figure — gotta be it’s a girl — and then one of those silhouettes rears back and kicks her, and laughter eclipses the sound of her pain.

The October Boy almost hits the brakes. Almost. Because girls don’t make the Run… and if one of them is on the street tonight, God knows what will happen to her.

But the Boy ignores the impulse. He doesn’t have time to be anyone’s hero. That’s not his role tonight.

So he forgets about the brakes.

He hits the gas instead.

Pete’s running down the street, following the sound of the girl’s screams when that same busted-up Chrysler speeds toward him, its front end cleaving the black ocean of night like the prow of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in that Disney movie.

This time Pete barely gives the car a second thought. Once he jukes to the sidewalk and gets out of its way, that is. His attention is focused elsewhere — on that scream, on the yard that it’s coming from, on two guys looming over a lone girl who’s flat-backed on a neatly manicured front lawn.

There’s not much light on that subject. Three carved pumpkins sit on a small porch that skirts the front of the house, their wild yellow leers rippling across clipped grass. It’s not exactly a spotlight, but it’s revealing enough for Pete to recognize Marty Weston and Riley Blake. They’re football players, beer-gut lineman, and they’ve both got brakeman’s clubs because their fathers are railroad men. Between them, they’ve also got about three hundred and fifty pounds on the busted-up redhead at their feet.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Riley asks. “No backtalk this time?”

The redhead barely manages a groan.

“Sounds like this skinny little hunk of nothing finally learned her lesson, Marty. Could be she’s finally ready to shut up and get her ass indoors, where she belongs.”

Weston nods in agreement. “The little bitch can scream some. I’ll give her that. She wails like a Siamese cat tossed in a deep fryer.”

“Uh-huh. It’s damn sure better than listening to her talk, though. At least I understand what she means when she screams.”

“You don’t understand anything, idiot.” The girl’s voice is shaky, but there’s some steel in it, too. “If you were smart, you wouldn’t even be on the streets tonight. You’d be safe out back of your little Hicksville homes, yanking your peckers in the outhouse.”

“Jesus… listen to that.”

“See what I mean? Happens every time she talks. That’s why I’d rather hear her scream.”

Riley hauls back with a booted foot. Pete watches it happen in slow motion. And then he’s all done watching. Without a word, he crosses the lawn, moving in on Riley fast, cracking the pistol butt against the bigger kid’s skull just as Riley’s foot digs into the girl’s ribs.

Riley drops his brakeman’s club and Pete whacks him again, and the football player nearly goes flat on his ass as he trips over the girl. But all those tire drills on the practice field have been good for something, and Riley catches his balance at the last second. He rips around, facing Pete now, shaking his big head like it’s a four-slice toaster some moron jammed with a fork.

“McCormick?” Riley says, because even in the dark he recognizes the guy who clubbed him. “Pete McCormick? Oh, you just picked one hell of a time to grow some guts, you little shit. I’m gonna bust you up but good.”

“Uh-uh.” Pete chambers a round and raises the.45. “I don’t think you’re gonna do that, Riley.”

Riley stumbles back a step. “Hey! This asshole’s got a gun!”

“Yeah,” Weston says. “I can see that.”

Weston’s standing off to the side, and his brakeman’s club is already in motion as the words exit his mouth. It’s whistling towards Pete’s head, and Weston’s stepping in behind it, following the club’s arc with his weight. As Pete ducks under it he sees Weston shifting his stance, already setting his feet and cocking the club for another swing while his idiot buddy’s standing there slack-jawed like he’s watching the whole thing on television, and Pete whirls to the side and points the gun at Weston just as the big lineman lets loose his second swing —

— and the brakeman’s club nails Weston hard, cracking the football player’s kneecap like a china plate. It’s not the club Weston’s holding, of course. It’s the club Riley dropped. The redhead has it now, and Weston screams as she cracks him a second time, and he drops his club and goes down so hard and so fast that it seems someone should have yelled timber.

The girl’s on her feet, at Pete’s side in a second, the brakeman’s club still in her grasp.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Thanks yourself. I owed you one.”

And Riley Blake’s still standing there with his mouth hanging open, all two hundred and thirty pounds of him. The skinny little chick has his club. His buddy’s on the ground, howling over a busted kneecap. Worse than that, a sawed-off misfit who never lets him copy the answers off algebra exams is staring straight at him with a fucking.45 in his hand, a gun he already used to dig a couple of divots in Riley’s oversize skull, and Riley has the clear impression that the little bastard is picturing a bull’s-eye right there on his oversize shirt.

“I don’t believe this shit,” Riley says, doubly stunned. “There ain’t supposed to be any girls on the Run. And I never heard of anybody hitting the streets with a gun — ”

“You’re talking like there are rules to this game,” Pete says, cutting him off. “There aren’t any rules, Riley. Tonight there are only winners and losers, and you can figure out which one you are.”

“But it’s not right. She’s a girl. And that’s a gun.”

“And this is a club.” The girl steps in and cracks Riley Blake upside the head, and he topples like beef on the hoof whacked with a slaughterhouse hammer.

“How about that, asshole?” the girl asks, looming over him. “Is that right enough for you?”

Riley looks up at her, but he knows better than to say another word. The girl’s bruises are painted with stark white moonlight. She’s just waiting for an excuse to give it to him again. The way Pete figures it, it wouldn’t take much. But Pete doesn’t want that to happen, though he can’t say exactly why. He grabs the girl by the shoulder and pulls her back. He’s ready to tell her to lay off. But she twists around, and their eyes meet, and his words don’t make it past his lips.

It’s no surprise that there are tears in her eyes, but in this unguarded moment Pete sees straight through them. There’s something behind those tears — something buried in the midnight black of her pupils that runs deep and strong — but Pete looks away from it, because it’s like catching a glimpse of some stranger’s naked heart, and his gut tells him it’s something he shouldn’t see until she wants him to.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says.

The girl doesn’t say a word.

But when Pete moves, she follows.

Of course, Pete recognizes the girl. There are no strangers in this town.

Her name is Kelly Haines, and she’s in Pete’s biology class. Pete knows that much, but it’s not like they’ve ever talked or anything. Like Pete, she mostly keeps to herself. As far as he knows, she’s the only new girl to hit town in his lifetime.

Kelly’s father was the only guy who ever managed to jump the Line. He was drafted during World War II, and — unlike every other G.I. from around here — he never returned to town when the fighting was over. Instead, he brought a war bride stateside and settled far from home. Probably never spoke a single word to his wife about the place where he was born. Probably never said a word to his daughter, either.

Kelly’s parents were killed in a car accident last summer. Social Services in her hometown backtracked her father’s war records and found her only living relatives smack-dab here. Just that fast she’s living with an uncle and an aunt she never met, in a place that’s got plenty of nothing unless you’re crazy about corn and quiet.

That’s Kelly’s story.

At least, that’s the way Pete heard it….

So Pete and Kelly leave a pair of busted-up football players behind them. They head toward the heart of town, where there are bound to be more kids roaming the streets. That means they’ve got to be careful. Handling Riley Blake and Marty Weston was dicey enough — Pete doesn’t want to replay that encounter with a larger roster of opposing idiots. Even with the.45, he wants to steer clear of trouble, and he knows he’ll get it with a capital T if anyone catches a girl outside on the night of the Run.

So Pete and Kelly bury themselves in the shadows whenever they spot a gang on the prowl. Or they duck into an alley, or hide behind an unlocked backyard gate. In spite of the detours, the two cover some ground. They pass the town market on Oak Street. The butcher is staked out by the front door with a sawed-off shotgun, and Pete nearly doubles over at the sight of all that food safe and secure behind those big glass windows. Just looking at it makes him feel like someone tied a knot around his middle and yanked it tight.

But he knows they’d better hustle along, same way he knows that he’s got nothing to complain about if he measures his misery against Kelly’s. And she’s not complaining at all. She’s limping a little bit, but it’s not like it’s her leg that’s hurt. The way she’s breathing tells Pete that it’s something else, probably her ribs. That’s no surprise — she took some pretty brutal kicks.

“You need to catch a breather?” Pete asks. “We can find a place and rest up.”

“I’m okay. I can make it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Kelly stops and looks at him. Dead straight in the eye, like she’s trying to see inside his skull, the same way he looked at her a few minutes ago.

Her eyes are green. He hadn’t noticed that before.

“It’s Pete McCormick, right?”

“Yeah. Right. I can tell I made a real impression on you in Bio.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Pete.” She smiles and lets it linger. “Maybe you did make an impression… and maybe you set it in cement tonight.”

Pete’s glad she smiled. Glad, too, that she said what she said.

“And maybe you’re right about catching a break,” she says. “My ribs are killing me. If we can find a place — ”

And then it’s like someone bashed a hammer straight through the night. A window shatters behind them. Pete whirls as a shotgun blast rocks the street, just in time to see a kid who’s holding a brick get blown out of his sneakers in the grocery store parking lot.

Kelly’s breath catches in her throat. Pete yanks the.45. The butcher, Mr. Jarrett, jacks another shell into his shotgun. The market’s burglar alarm is ringing like it’s the 3:15 bell and school just let out. Another kid charges Jarrett, and the sawed-off thunders and damn near cuts the guy in half, but there are three more kids waiting behind the two who are dead. Two of them wind up and fire bricks at the butcher. Jarrett dodges one of them but not the other. It belts him hard and he goes through a window, the busting glass cutting him in a dozen places, but he’s already rolling with that shotgun as the kids move forward. The barrel rises beneath Jarrett’s bloody face, and a couple more bricks hurtle in his direction, and the shotgun spits fire.

“We’d better move,” Pete says, and Kelly’s already doing it. Together, they run up Oak Street. Kelly’s not limping now, though if you listened to her breathe, you’d know she should be. Behind them, the burglar alarm’s banging in the night, and those boys are yelling like wild dogs, and Jarrett’s screaming, and it’s the most awful sound Pete has ever heard in his life. It’s a sound that should be buckled up in a straightjacket.

Then there’s another sound. A police siren. A block ahead, a black-and-white Dodge makes the corner. Pete freezes dead in his tracks. He’s standing there in the middle of the street with a stolen.45 in his hand, and there’s the worst kind of trouble he can think of behind him and a prowl car up ahead, maybe with the owner of that stolen pistol behind the wheel.

Headlights scorch Pete’s retinas. “This way!” Kelly shouts, grabbing his arm, and Pete starts to move. But he can’t escape those scorching headlights. They’re tracking him as he crosses the street, and so is the prowl car.

Tires scream in the night. The stink of burning rubber fills the air. The car door bangs open. Jerry Ricks’s voice chews Pete’s heels. “Freeze, you piece of shit!”

That’s the last thing in the world Pete’s going to do. He’s running along the railroad tracks, following Kelly down a raised strip of roadbed. Gunfire erupts behind them, and one of the slugs rings against the ribbon of steel just inches from Pete’s foot. He grabs Kelly, yanking her toward the far rail. Another shot whips past them as they dive into the darkness. They hit the ground hard and tumble down the gravel embankment on the far side of the tracks, but Pete comes up fast with the stolen.45 in his hand.

He stays low, sticking to the shadows, watching the headlight glow spilling over the raised roadbed, waiting. …

Ricks’s footsteps crunch gravel on the other side of the tracks. Backlit by the prowl car, the lawman’s shadow stretches across the roadbed, creeping over the building at Pete’s back. Pete swears under his breath. It’s already too late to make a run for it. Kelly’s still on the ground, and he won’t leave without her… so it looks like he’s going to have to stand his ground and —

In the distance, Jarrett’s shotgun thunders again. God knows who’s got the damn thing now, because the butcher’s screaming like a guy who’s been skinned alive, and the sound of laughing boys does the same job on the night.

Twenty feet away… maybe thirty… Jerry Ricks cusses a blue streak.

“You just got lucky, McCormick!” he yells. “That’s right! I saw you, asshole… and I saw your little girlfriend, too! Right now I’ve got other fish to fry, but I’ll settle up with the both of you before this night’s over!”

The cop’s footsteps set a brittle rhythm as he runs to the prowl car.

The door slams. The big Dodge peels out.

Pete jams the.45 under his belt and helps Kelly to her feet.

“Okay?” he asks.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

They follow the tracks about a quarter mile.

Pete can’t help looking over his shoulder, but no one’s behind them now.

Before long, a half dozen hard pops of pistol fire sound in the distance. Instantly, Pete pictures those last three kids going face down in the parking lot outside the market, and Jerry Ricks standing over them with a smoking pistol in his hand.

“That’s it for those guys,” Kelly says, as if she’s reading his mind.

She moves away from the tracks, cutting between a machine shop and a storage building owned by the railroad. Pete follows her into an alley that runs east-west. Without a word, they cut back toward Oak Street. The buildings are two-story here — square, brick and stone. Heavy cornices cut off the moonlight, but there are a few lights set above solid rear doors. Not one of those doors has a window, and most of them are marked with two stenciled words: DELIVERY ENTRANCE.

The alley runs parallel to Main Street, so Pete knows he’s looking at the rear entrances of the town’s largest businesses. He eyeballs each door as they pass, looking for a weak spot, but every one looks as solid as the last. Not that he’d trade the.45 for a million bucks with Jerry Ricks gunning for him, but right now he wishes he had a crowbar, something he could use to jimmy one of those doors.

It turns out Kelly’s got something a lot better than that.

She stops at a door marked THEATER EXIT ONLY.

She takes a key from her pocket and slips it into the lock.

In all the excitement, Pete forgot that Kelly’s uncle owns the movie theater. That’s where he first noticed her — working behind the concession stand during the summer. He even bought popcorn from her a couple of times, though he was too shy to say anything.

Pete’s pretty sure it won’t work that way tonight. They’re sitting in a couple of plush seats. Front row, balcony. The house lights are on, but awfully dim. Kelly’s already filled a plastic bag with ice from the snack bar, and she’s holding it against her ribs. She’s fixed up Pete pretty well, too. Brought him a couple candy bars that he gobbled like a hungry timber wolf. Now he’s working on a large Coke and a bucket of day-old popcorn. It’s taking the edge off that five-day hunger, but to tell the truth Pete’s thoughts aren’t focused on his belly anymore.

There’s only one thing he’s thinking about, really.

“That son of a bitch tried to kill us,” Pete says.

“Why do you seem surprised?” Kelly smiles. “After all, you broke into his house tonight and stole one of his guns.”

“He couldn’t know that yet.”

“Well, a guy like Ricks just has one gear. Maybe it doesn’t matter what you did.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Pete says, remembering the beating Ricks gave him with that nightstick. “I know all about Jerry Ricks.”

“Uh-uh. You might think you do, but you don’t.”

Pete’s brow wrinkles. As comments go, that one’s a blind-sider, and he remembers what the two football players said about the girl not making much sense. While Pete doesn’t want to put himself in the same IQ ballpark as Riley Blake and Marty Weston, he’s got to wonder if tonight’s events have his brain rattling around in his head a little more than usual.

“Maybe I’m a little thick,” he says. “If you’re trying to tell me something, I think you’ll have to spell it out.”

“Okay. Let’s try this — what do you know about me, Pete?”

“Well, I heard about your parents getting killed in a car accident — ”

“Uh-uh. That’s a lie.”

“What?”

“My parents were killed, all right, but not in any accident. One night last summer, three men showed up at our house. One of them was your buddy Jerry Ricks. The other two were Ralph Jarrett and some guy named Kirby… I think he works down at the grain elevator.

“They all had guns — they broke in on us right in the middle of Ed Sullivan. Kirby shot my mom, killed her before she even knew what was happening. Dad went after him, but he never even got close. Ricks got in his way. They fought, and my dad ended up on the ground, and then all three of them started in on him — ”

“Jesus.”

“I tried to run, but Jarrett caught me. I think I went a little crazy… I know he hit me with his pistol, and I passed out for a while.”

Kelly stops for a moment, swallowing hard. “When I came to, my dad was sitting in a chair. His face was a mess. Bruised, bloody… I could hardly make out what he was saying. Ricks and the other two were asking him questions about things I didn’t understand. I remember Jarrett asking my father if he really thought he’d get away with jumping the Line. My dad said, ‘Hell, I got away with it for nearly twenty years.’ They all just laughed at that, and Ricks told him that he’d have to pay the price now that they’d finally caught up with him.

“My dad asked them if they were from the Harvester’s Guild. I remember that. Ricks said, ‘Well, we’re not exactly from the 4-H.’ Then he said they were taking me with them to pay my father’s debt to the town. I remember what he said: ‘Blood will square the deal.’

“I was looking at my mom, there on the floor in a pool of her own blood, when Ricks said those words. And then he shot my father. Just like that. That bastard stuck a pistol in my father’s face, and he pulled the trigger, and — ”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Pete says.

“I can’t talk about it. In the end, they got what they wanted. They brought me back to town and left me at my uncle’s house. No one in the family told me anything. They wouldn’t even talk about what happened. I was terrified. It wasn’t the way you’d think it would be, even on days I managed to fight against it. It was like a sickness, the kind of feeling you’d never want inside you. And it kept crawling around in there. I couldn’t sleep at night. I couldn’t think straight during the day. If I wasn’t thinking about things that already happened, I’d be worrying about things that hadn’t happened yet. It was awful.

“I didn’t start thinking straight until school started. That’s when I heard about the Run for the first time. I figured that maybe I could get away. While everyone was hunting the October Boy, I could sneak out of town. It seemed like a really good idea… until tonight. Those two idiots cornered me, and it seemed like my whole plan was over before I even managed to make three blocks. And that’s when I understood that nothing had changed — things were exactly the same as they’d been in our living room last summer when Ricks and those other two men broke through the door. All I could think about was how funny the whole thing was.”

“Funny?”

“Yeah. First me, thinking I’d figured everything out. And then everyone else…”

Kelly stops, shaking her head.

“What?” Pete asks. “What about everyone else?”

“Every kid in this town, chasing after a boogeyman with a pumpkin for a head, scared to death of a walking scarecrow with a big sharp butcher knife. Every kid in this town, thinking that there’s a way out of a nightmare through a fairy tale, when there’s really no way out at all.”

“You’re telling me that the October Boy isn’t real?”

“Oh, he’s real, all right. Sawtooth Jack is out there. But I don’t think he’s the boogeyman, Pete. I think he’s something else entirely… something that’s not really that different from you or me.”

Pete sits there. He’s planted in a plush chair in a movie theater. He’s hanging on to every word Kelly says. He doesn’t even realize it, but he just grabbed another handful of popcorn, the way you do when things are getting really good. And now he’s staring straight ahead at those midnight blue curtains that hang across the stage, and it’s almost as if he’s expecting them to pull back and reveal that big-ticket plot twist that’s been hiding up there on the king-size CinemaScope screen all along —

“Who won the Run last year?” Kelly asks.

“A guy named Jim Shepard.”

“And what happened to him?”

“Hell, everybody knows that. Shepard got a pocketful of money, and he got out of town. I heard he’s out west somewhere, and — ”

The words die in Pete’s mouth just that quick. It’s Kelly’s knowing smile that killed them. But that’s okay with Kelly. Pete’s silence means his brain’s finally kicking into gear.

Yeah. Pete’s starting to think. Maybe he’s thinking about Jim Shepard’s parents, who don’t seem very happy in spite of their brand-new house, and the free ride at the bank and the market, and that shiny black Cadillac parked in their driveway that doesn’t even have 1,000 miles on the odometer. Or maybe he’s thinking of Shepard himself, what kind of kid he was, what kind of trouble he might have caused in a town like this if he’d been bottled up here for another year and started to wise up to the way the wheels really spin.

Or maybe, just maybe, Pete’s thinking about a group of men called the Harvester’s Guild, and a thing that grows out in a cornfield. Maybe he’s wondering what kind of horror might sprout a misfit like that, wondering too if the seed was planted last Halloween night in dirt tamped down with a murdered kid’s blood —

That midnight blue curtain still covers the movie screen like a shroud, but Pete might as well be the Man with the X-Ray Eyes because he can sure enough see a movie running in his head. It’s called The October Boy, and that sucker has just kicked off the cinches.

You know how that works, even if we’re only talking revelations of the creepshow variety. You lay down your money, you get real comfortable in your chair, you eat your popcorn… and all of a sudden here comes twenty feet of cross-dressing Norman Bates heading your way with a knife in his hand, or Vincent Price pulling the strings of his killer skelo-puppet up there in the house on Haunted Hill, or that poor son of a bitch who discovered that first pod in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Those are the kinds of surprises that make you jump in the dark, but you can leave them right there if you want to. The credits roll, and you suck that last sip of Coke out of your wax-paper cup and shove that empty popcorn bag under your seat along with Normie and Vince and all those rubbery pods and the guy who found them, and you walk out of the theater and down the street and back into the world where you live.

But that’s not the way it works with the October Boy’s story. Darkness… light… it all lives here. Real is real, no matter where you’re sitting. Once you’ve ripped the Phantom’s mask off this sucker, you’re knuckle to door with the truth. You’ve dug a hole in that monster’s ugly skin, and it’s scabbed over the top of you and scarred over, and there’s no way out now that you’re living in the place where black blood flows.

Yeah. That’s where we are right now. Pete McCormick’s sitting in the movie theater, wheels turning in his head like they’ve never turned before. The October Boy’s behind the wheel of Mitch Crenshaw’s Chrysler, driving through a town he hasn’t seen in exactly one year. They’re a study in before and after, these two. This year’s best shot at winning the Run, and last year’s undisputed champ.

Because the October Boy has a name, and if you haven’t already figured it out that name is Jim Shepard. One year ago on a night just like this one, Jim brought down the ’62 version of Sawtooth Jack with a length of case-hardened chain. Shepard caught last year’s model trying to crawl down a manhole over on West Orchard Street, cut the goggle-headed sucker off at that particular pass, and got down to the business of a no-holds-barred, one-on-one rumble.

And that was okay with good ol’ ’62. He’d already killed seven on his way into town that night, and he pegged Shepard for an easy number eight. So the Boy came straight at Jim with his butcher knife, and it was touch-and-go for a while. With a single slash, Ol’ Hacksaw Face notched Jim’s wrist to the bone. He creased the meat between a couple of Shepard’s ribs with another, but that didn’t even slow Jim down. He came back hard, caving in the Boy’s serrated grin with a whip of the chain, turning those taut links on the follow-through and pulverizing half the thing’s head.

When Jim was done wailing away, all that remained of ’62 was a broken thing twitching on the ground. Yet the moment of victory wasn’t the way Jim thought it’d be. It was weird… unsettling in a way he could never anticipate… like winning the Indianapolis 500 but running over his own dog to do it.

In the heat of the moment, Jim couldn’t understand that feeling. But even in the heat of the moment he understood that there was no going back — once the thing was done, there was no undoing it. So he watched the October Boy twitch and die, and doing that made him go a little nuts. You understand. All those conflicting emotions slamming around inside Jim, and all at once. They had to go somewhere.

So Jim turned them loose. He raised his face to the moon and screamed. That’s what the whole town wanted him to do, anyway. This year’s winner was screaming in the streets, and everyone turned out to celebrate. First it was the other guys on the Run, because the dead thing in the middle of West Orchard attracted them like a raw steak draws flies. They came by the dozen, and they ripped the Boy apart and chowed down on those treats buried inside him, and they slapped Shepard on the back and raised him onto their shoulders.

And to the victor went the spoils. Someone shoved a handful of Bit-O-Honeys into Jim’s hands. The candy bars were tied up in a knot of Red Vines that gleamed like blood vessels, but Jim didn’t care. He peeled those Vines and gobbled them down as the guys carried him over to Main Street, not even realizing that the mass of honey-flavored candy clutched in his hand had pulsed like a human heart just a few minutes before.

The parade made its way up Oak Street, hung a right onto Main. You know the route… and you can see them there, even now. You see them in your mind’s eye. There they are… the town fathers wait for Jim over in the square, the mayor and the minister stand stiff and proud on the steps of the old brick church. People crowd the streets, driving up in family sedans, hurrying in on foot from nearby neighborhoods.

Jim’s dad pulls up in his old beater of a pickup truck while the mayor’s glad-handing his son. Jim’s mom smears tears all over her son’s cheek when she hugs him, and he can’t even figure out why she’s crying. He can barely keep track of everything that’s going on. The bell in the church tower is clanging away. Jim’s little brother stands at his side in a bathrobe, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The street’s alive with headlights, car doors slamming, and footsteps. Rock ’n’ roll’s blasting from dashboard radios. Everyone’s whooping and hollering. Caught up in the celebration, Mr. Haines opens up the movie theater lobby. He’s giving out free popcorn and Cokes and candy, but the real show is out in the street. No one really wants to be stuck inside when there’s a party like this going on.

But the party doesn’t last long. Not for Jim, anyway. Soon the crowd begins to thin. That hard-ass cop, Jerry Ricks, hustles Jim and his father into the church. The mayor’s inside now; so is the chief of police. The men circle the altar and tie themselves up in a little knot with the minister… and they trade a few words with Jim’s dad… and all of a sudden they’re leaving through the back door with Jim knotted tight in the middle of the pack, as if Houdini himself did the job and did it right.

Jim shoulders into Ricks’s prowl car with the whole bunch of them. They drive across the Line. And you know how Jim feels. He can’t believe it’s all happening quite this fast. He’s really going to get away. He’s really going to get out of this nothing little town, just like that. No final speeches. No testimonial dinner. Not so much as a kiss my ass, really. Hell, Jim didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye to his mom or his little brother. The town doc didn’t even stitch up the gash in his side, or the one on his wrist. He’s still bleeding, now that you mention it.

It all seems crazy. And, of course, it is. Everything around here is crazy. Jim knows that from way back. There’s part of him that trusts that craziness, and it’s the part that tells him this particular brand of insanity is his ticket out of town.

But there’s another part — a smarter part — that tells Jim he shouldn’t trust anything.

Never. Ever. Not around here.

You know which part of Jim is right. And when he finds himself down on his knees in that cornfield with the business end of Jerry Ricks’s.38 pressed against his temple, Jim knows, too.

He’s figured it out, same way they all do.

He’s figured it out, just a little too late.

So there’s poor Jim. He’s finally got a clue. His knees dig divots in the dirt of that field where it always happens. The cold metal circle of a gun barrel presses hard against his gullible head. The men from the Harvester’s Guild form a half-circle in front of him, while a couple of the big ones standing close to Jim’s dad feed the old man that well-practiced line about the biggest sacrifice a man can make. And when Jim’s dad finally breaks down and tries to stop the whole thing it’s way too late, because those guys are built for something besides talking and they wrestle Dan Shepard to the ground and remind him that it’d be pretty easy to dig more than one grave out here tonight — with a little work, they can empty another hole… a smaller hole.

“Hey… you’ve got another son, don’t you, Dan? Richie’s ten, right? You want him to see eleven, don’t you, ol’ buddy?”

There’s not much left after that. The preacher drones on, drawing a diagram that Jim doesn’t even need anymore, getting in a few amens before Ricks pulls the trigger and those two big guys turn Jim’s father loose to cry and babble in the dirt while they get busy with the task of digging a hole.

But, hell, I’m wasting my breath telling you about this stuff. I’m preaching to the choir. After all, you know how it feels to go face down in that hole. You’ve known all along. Because you’re a winner, just like Jim. You’ve been for a ride in that prowl car. You’ve sat shoulder to shoulder with those men. You’ve had the cold barrel of Jerry Ricks’s pistol jammed against the side of your head, and you’ve felt that.38 slug slam through your brainpan and ricochet around in your skull.

You’ve been buried in that black dirt. And you came through the ground the next summer, first a green shoot and then a tendril. You climbed that pole and filled those old clothes, and when Halloween rolled around you were shorn like a winter wind. Someone put a butcher knife in your hand, and you made your way to town the best way you could, and you headed for that old brick church because that’s where they said you had to go.

But you didn’t make it… we never make it. You were brought down by a kid who was just like you. And they ripped you apart in the streets while that kid screamed at the moon, and they shoveled what was left of you into a bag while that kid took a ride in Jerry Ricks’s prowl car, and you rotted in a dumpster while flies circled above and the cold November sun shone down.

That’s the way it is for every winner in this town.

For you. For me. For all of us.

For keeps. For always.

Yeah. It’s always quiet when that first November morning dawns. Quiet through the winter, quiet through the spring. And then it starts up all over again. Summer rolls around, and the farmer who owns that black patch of earth starts watching the ground really closely, waiting for the tendril of a pumpkin plant to break through the rich soil. And when it does, he tends that sprout like a newborn babe until it takes root solidly and reaches for the sun.

He plants a heavy crosspiece in the ground. When the first vine starts to climb, he nails a set of old clothes to that crosspiece and sends the vine burrowing through them. And as the summer winds along, a thing with roots in a dead boy’s corpse grows into those clothes. A vine creeps out the neck and starts to grow a head, which the farmer places on the crown of the pole. And then Halloween night rolls around, and a pale man in a new black car drives out to that field where he shed tears just a year ago, only now he has no more tears to shed. Instead, he has a job to do. So he frees the thing that used to be his son from that pole, and he carves him a face, and he sets him walking on the black road that leads to town.

It happens every year.

It happened tonight.

And now the thing that used to be Jim Shepard is driving down West Orchard in a stolen car, heading for the place he used to call home. And his father is sitting in a darkened church with a shotgun, self-loathing churning in his gut as he waits for his shuffling misfit of a son to step through the creaking door and show its carved-up excuse for a face.

And all the rest of them are out there in the darkness. The other fathers, the other sons. On the wrong side of the tracks, there’s a drunk named McCormick who’s wishing he’d had the guts to stop his kid from walking out the door, because he knows how smart his boy is, and he knows that he’s just the kind of kid who could come out on top on a night like this one.

There’s a kid named Mitch Crenshaw on the other side of the Line in a ditch, crying like a baby because his pitchforked leg and foot are really screwed up and all he can do about it is lie in the mud and bleed and whimper. And over in the poor side of town there’s a kid named Weston lying on some stranger’s lawn, biting back the pain of a shattered kneecap he’s damn well sure won’t be tended until morning. And down that street and around the next corner there’s a kid named Riley who’s been busted in the face with a brakeman’s club, only Riley’s not as smart as Weston. He’s banging on his parents’ door, begging to be let in, but his old man tells him he’d better get back on the streets or else he’ll wind up with a couple of ounces of buckshot in his gutless belly.

And that’s how the lesson is learned around here. Kids in the neighborhoods, bashing Jack o’ Lanterns. Kids on the church steps, waiting with pitchforks and bowie knives. Kids in the streets, chasing shadows. And down at the market, there’s a cop named Jerry Ricks and a couple of other guys loading five dead teenagers into the coroner’s wagon, and a group of kids blow by the parking lot on bicycles, and they whisper, “I hear Sawtooth Jack slaughtered those guys in five seconds flat. He even killed old man Jarrett, and that dirty bastard had a shotgun that was loaded for bear….”

So the story spins on. The boys on those bicycles carry it through the night, and it rides over the tracks and down Main Street, chattering away like playing cards stuck in the spokes of their bicycles.

Yeah. That’s the way it works around here.

A story has to stick with those who tell it.

It belongs to them.

Just like the October Boy, it’s got nowhere else to go.

And there he is, just up ahead, getting out of Crenshaw’s rod, so let’s let him lead the story on.

The thing that used to be Jim Shepard scrapes across the yard on severed-root feet, kicking his way through tangles of weeds as he makes his way to one of those dark little houses. But this particular house is different than its neighbors. No Jack o’ Lanterns — busted or otherwise — wait on the porch. And no people wait inside.

Peeling paint scabs the front door. It isn’t even locked. After all, there’s nothing inside this house that anyone would want to steal. So you could say that the place is empty, but it’s a special kind of empty.

It’s as empty as the October Boy’s hollow head.

Some would say that there’s nothing in that space at all, and others would say that it’s only filled with flickering light and murderous intent, but memories fill up that orange gourd as the October Boy reaches for the doorknob. There’s a nasty creak as the door swings open. That’s a new sound for Jim, and different. So is the sound of his whiskbroom feet on the hardwood floor — just a scratching whisper through the dust, not the strong staccato of the polished motorcycle boots he wore a year ago on the night he won the Run.

Those boots are buried in a grave with what’s left of Jim’s corpse, but his memories are right here with him. They’re locked up in that hollow head of his, and they’re locked up in this empty house, too. He wanders through the rooms quietly, step by step, and the light from his triangular eyes strips them of shadows and paints them in bright autumnal light.

In the living room, there’s that heavy oak coffee table his father built by hand because he couldn’t afford the ones you’d buy at a department store in the city. Same goes for that big slab of a table in the dining room, and Jim knows that if he crawled underneath it and trained a triangle of light on the wood in just the right place, he’d see his father’s initials etched deeply in sanded oak, carved there by the same hand that carved the face Jim wears tonight.

Jim’s misshapen fingers scrape across the rough-hewn table. It’s not a good table. It sits kind of cockeyed, and dinner peas escaping a child’s fork have been known to roll off the side like ships sailing off the edge of a flat earth. That’s why nobody bothered to steal the thing when the house was abandoned, and Jim’s glad of that. Because this is the table where he sat with his mother and father and little brother as the days faded to evenings for years and years and years. And this is the table where he thought many things, and a few of them made the trip from brain to mouth and found the ears of those other people who shared the table, but many of them didn’t. For one reason or another, many of his thoughts never left him at all.

That’s the way it was for Jim.

That’s the way it was for his mother and father, too.

Jim never understood that before, but he understands it now, just as he understands that there’s no changing the past once it ticks on by. He takes his seat at the table, and the truth of his last thought is contained in that simple act as it would be in no other.

The darkness pulls close around him. He writes his last name in tabletop dust with a fingertip, and he thinks of his family in another house. It’s a new house, with a new table from one of those department stores in the city. His father sits at the head; his mother at the foot. His brother sits between them — a little older now, a little bigger. And Jim wonders what thoughts go through Richie’s head as he stares at the empty chair that sits across from his place at the table, and he wonders if those thoughts ever find their way out of his little brother’s mouth.

Jim thinks about that, but he doesn’t think about it long.

There isn’t much to think about, really.

He already understands that the past can’t be changed.

Now he’s beginning to understand how easily it can be repeated.

That is a hard truth — born of memory, cemented by experience. As the October Boy stares down at his name written in the dust, he feels its weight. And his gaze travels to the corded vine of a hand that wrote that name, casting a hard triangle of light on his gnarled excuse for a palm. He can feel the past there in his open hand. It’s so strange, really. Because his little brother is there, within that light, and so are his parents. He feels them, too, in the glow that burns within his carved skull… and in the dust that coats his fingertip… but he can’t feel himself there, not the way he was, because another thing sits in Jim Shepard’s chair tonight.

If the Boy were to look in any mirrors he’d find that thing trapped within the glass. He can’t escape it no matter how hard he stares, no matter what he remembers. Tonight he is a thing carved up in a cornfield, not a thing that would be welcome sitting at anyone’s dinner table, not a thing that belongs in anyone’s house.

He feels that as surely as he felt the knife his father drove into his face so many hours ago. But he also knows that he lived in this house. Before it became an empty shell, this place was his home. So surely he must have left some mark, some touchstone that can strengthen his resolve now. Perhaps that thing is hidden, like the initials his father carved on the bottom of the table. Perhaps it’s something he’ll have to look for, something that can’t be found in the light, something that remains in the shadows.

And so the October Boy goes looking for a sign.

He walks to Jim Shepard’s bedroom. His features are cast on the closed door like a shadow-show turned inside out — triangle eyes, arrowhead nose, sawtooth smile — and the yellow glow spills into the room as he opens the door.

Things have changed. Jim’s simple desk and dresser are gone. His Spartan single bed has vanished along with its cowboys and Indians spread. Instead, an old double mattress sprawls in the middle of the floor with a couple of moth-eaten blankets tumbled across it like a hobo’s nest.

The bedroom’s lone window is painted black. Half-melted candles crowd the sill. Dried rivulets of colored wax stretch in frozen streams from the wall to the hardwood floor. Teenagers have carved their initials on that floor, and cigarette burns scar the dusty oak, and the butts of those cigs swim in the grimy shallows of beer bottles set adrift on the wooden sea.

It’s awful, really. Horrible to come looking for yourself in a place once so familiar, and find it turned into something like this. And it isn’t the destruction that bothers you, and it isn’t the neglect. None of that can scrape a razor across your insides once you’ve endured the things Jim Shepard has endured. But there are other things here, things far worse than the stink of empty bottles and cigarettes dragged down to the filter.

Those things can’t be missed, or ignored.

They’re as plain as the handwriting up there on Jim’s bedroom wall.

Graffiti fills that space, scrawled in paint and pen and permanent marker. Just words, only words, but to the October Boy they are so much more, for the yellow glow that spills from his head reveals the moments that put those words on the wall and the hand behind each one of them.

The front door doesn’t move an inch out there in the living room, but the Boy hears it swinging open as the lock is picked on a cold night last November. The laughter of drunken jocks echoes down the empty hallway, and a pack of shadows drifts through the bedroom door. The president of the Letterman’s Club pops a beer and raises it, toasting the baddest cat who’s blown the block. The jocks roar their approval, cracking bottles together as a spray-paint can swiped from Murphy’s Hardware hisses two huge black words across the center of the wall: SHEPARD RULES.

Beneath that sound, there’s the squeal of a heavy permanent marker on a summer’s night: JIM’S KING OF ’62! snakes across the wall in black letters, written by a loner who spent a solid week’s worth of corn-shucking money on a Levi’s jacket just like the one Shepard wore the night he won the Run. And there’s another kid standing next to him — he’s barebacked on an August night, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans. And he can’t believe he’s writing JUMP THE LINE!!!!! on this wall while his girlfriend lies naked on the mattress behind him, drifting in a half-dream as she thinks of the things she just did in the room where Jim Shepard used to sleep.

That girl can’t hide her feelings — her boyfriend might as well be a shadow as she dreams her dream… and pretty soon he is. A lush cornfield eclipses his face, the words WELCOME TO CORNCOB, NOWHERE threading like dark weeds through the green. Coming through that cornfield is a pumpkin-headed maniac with a knife, and if that naked girl got a look at him she’d scream her little head off. But she’s long gone by the time this particular September night rolls around — Sawtooth Jack’s razoring a path toward an artistic kid who’s so damned scared he can barely work up the courage to draw the demonic scene stirred up in his brain… a kid who’ll knuckle under in just a second and run into the night, leaving his art-class chalk there on the floor. And his pumpkin-headed creation will live up there on the wall as the calendar turns another page, but the chalk won’t last. It’ll grind to dust under a pair of heavy boots two weeks later as an angry boy with one hand in a cast cavemans a message on the wall, calling down the sadist who shattered his wrist with one crack of the nightstick. FUCK JERRY RICKS, the wall practically screams, AND THE HORSE HE RODE IN ON.

And finally there’s a quote, written as inspiration just a few nights ago. Eight words invented by a young man with too much imagination and too much faith:

AIN’T NO STOP SIGNSON THE BLACK ROAD. — JIM SHEPARD, ’62

Jim Shepard never spoke those words in the seventeen years he spent on earth, but the October Boy whispers them now. They cross his jagged teeth in a dizzy fury, and for a moment he staggers under their weight… but only for a moment.

He shakes off the weight of shadows, and the weight of those who cast them.

All those strangers are gone now, but their words still cling to the wall.

Jim reads them in the harsh yellow light, staring at his name, knowing quite suddenly that he doesn’t even own it anymore.

That’s right. It isn’t his. Jim Shepard doesn’t exist anymore. Sure, he’s buried out in a cornfield, and sure, he’s walking around on a pair of twisted-vine legs tonight, but nothing remains of the boy he was. What Jim had has been stolen, the same as everything else… stolen, and set to another purpose… until all that remains is a bunch of words scrawled across a wall, and those words spell out sentences that get kids drunk the same way those sweet poisons they find in bottles get them drunk.

And that’s the way it works. With words, with poison. You drink those sentences down, and they prop up the dreams you keep inside you, and they spark something up there in your brain, and when you’re done you’ve got a bellyful of the most dangerous liquor on earth.

When you’re done, you’ve got yourself a story… one you can really believe.

That’s what the October Boy finds in Jim Shepard’s bedroom.

A story… the story… only it doesn’t have anything to do with the real Jim Shepard, and it isn’t even the truth.

It’s a lie. Same as Jack and the Beanstalk, with his goose that lays the golden eggs. Same as the story about that hook-handed killer who haunts every lover’s lane in every little town you ever heard of. Same as that old yarn about George Washington hacking down a cherry tree, or the tales you hear about Davy Crockett, or Billy the Kid, or Mickey Mantle.

They’re all lies.

The October Boy laughs his sandpaper laugh. Take one look at him and you’d have to say that there’s not much left of Jim Shepard that anyone would call human. There’s only a weavework of unnatural growth topped off with a carved nightmare of a head. But rooted deep within all that is a piece of equipment that’s as human as it gets. It’s a gnarled collection of vines twined one ’round the other like a thing created to dull an angry fieldhand’s scythe. It’s a backbone, and right now it feels finer than any made out of bone and blood and muscle.

Right now it feels like case-hardened steel, like it could shatter any blade in the world.

And it will. The October Boy will stake everything he has on that. He breathes the raw stink of scorched cinnamon and gunpowder and melting wax boiled up in his own hollow head, and he tells himself it will be so. The butcher knife creeps slowly from his wrist like a demon tomcat’s claw, and his fingers strangle the hilt as it fills his hand, and he promises himself that he’ll slaughter that lie tonight; he’ll carve the truth straight out of the shadows. He’ll make it to that church before the steeple bell tolls midnight. He’ll scream his ollie ollie oxen free so loud that everyone in town will cringe at the sound of his nightmare voice, and he’ll ring that bell until the rusty clapper flies free, and God help any fool who gets in his way.

That’s the way it has to be. The cycle will be broken tonight. No other boys will write on this wall, and no other boys will read the lies written there. Richie Shepard will never dream a single dream in this dead room. He’ll remember his brother Jim the way he was. He’ll never be touched by the sour wishes that live here, and he’ll never be tempted to add one of his own to those that blacken this wall.

The October Boy will see to that. If he lives until the calendar turns a page, then the story can’t. If he makes it to that church before midnight, then there’ll be no winner to sacrifice, no new boy to bury out in that cornfield. If he wins, the only dead thing remaining to fill the undertaker’s shovel will be the story, and that won’t be enough to grow another October Boy next year.

The Boy turns his back on the lies written on his bedroom wall. It’s time to go to work. His eyes spotlight the windowsill. There’s a matchbook to one side of the melted candles. He snatches it up. Next come the blankets from the worn mattress, which he tumbles against the far wall.

It’s hard to light a match with twisted-vine fingers.

You have to be careful.

You have to take a chance.