Norman Partridge - Dark Harvest

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.

Of course, the October Boy knows what stands between him and the church. Packs of teenagers roaming the street like armed villagers in some old Frankenstein movie. Loners clinging to the shadows, ready to take off his head with baseball bats and fire axes. Young men sitting on the scar-colored brick steps of the church, waiting for their hometown’s own personal Big Bad Wolf to come sniffing at the door.

The October Boy knows he can’t run that kind of gauntlet. There’s not enough luck in this bleak little town to see him through. And that’s part of the reason he lit the fire — to create a diversion that will draw those young men away from the church, and at the same time give himself a sliver of a chance to get inside that building alive.

That’s what the Boy’s thinking about as flames erase the words written on his bedroom wall. He slams the door of the house he used to call home, and he slips behind the wheel of Mitch Crenshaw’s Chrysler. As he keys the engine, he pictures himself kicking open the front doors of the church.

A fireball blooms in his old bedroom as he peels out. The black window explodes. Shards of broken glass stab the dead lawn. Flames sweep down the narrow hallway, spilling into the dining room, climbing the legs of the dinner table his father built, blistering wallpaper that bursts aflame.