Norman Partridge - Dark Harvest

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.