My Mother’s words always carried a frantic sense of urgency when she warned me not to wander past our small town, “you stay away from that evil field, you hear me? It preys the most on young minds.” Her cryptic demands only fed my young curiosity, though everyone else in the town seemed to share her reclusive fear, living together in ignorance to whatever knowledge they may have held.
But I was different. I feared that family of dry golden stalks, though my fear was forced into a constant push against the resistance of my curiosity. Only one other person in that town understood me and my thoughts; my closest friend, Benjamin. He was smarter and more sociable than I, but we both harbored this inner-conflict. In the carefree days of our childhood he was inseparable from a sense of youthful exuberance and seemed to suck the marrow from life, but even his foolhardy desire for truth flinched at the thought of that place. And so we would play just beyond its perimeter, our imaginations taking us far from this world, but never far enough to escape the field.
One day, we were knights clashing wooden swords and defending our castles from the evil of the other. My blade fell and locked upon his, and as he leaned back defensively, our eyes met for a moment before his head snapped to face away from me.
“Do you see that?” he asked, his expression drained by the hypnotic swaying of reeds in the wind.
“Nice try!” I said, dismissing his words as a red herring in an attempt to knock me off guard. I stepped forward, breaking our bind and he buckled beneath the weight of my sword before his body sprawled out in a cloud of dust.
“What the hell, man!”
“What?”
“That wasn’t fair!”
“Yeah it was!”
“No it wasn’t, there’s something in the field! I was trying to tell you!”
“Yeah right, stop trying to scare me.”
“Wait, you can’t see it?”
“See what?”
His eyes fell distantly and, even then, I could feel something begin to slowly drag him into the abyssal plain.
Our friendship carried into our adolescent and young adult years. We were brothers and, for a time, it felt as though it were us against the world. But he was plagued, corrupted by whatever prowled beyond the comfort of our town. No, by that god-forsaken field. In our teenage years, his screaming would shatter the still night air as the roots of those towering reeds burrowed into his sleeping mind, whispering esoteric knowledge that was better left forgotten.
We all tried to help him at first, but the townspeople grew negligent when his shrill screams persisted and rendered their efforts futile. Even his parents gave up on trying to help him. I vaguely remember his dad saying, “It marked him. There’s nothing we can do now.” in an attempt to console his mother.
We began to see less of each other at this time. He slowly walled himself off from the world, and with his growing reclusiveness came a growing unease in the townspeople who began to have trouble recognizing him.
I remember stumbling into him once, by chance, in our later teens right where we used to play as children. I stopped several feet away and watched that sitting figure stare blankly into the field. A sense of, almost, mourning overcame me as I stood there and debated whether or not I should greet him. Abruptly, shame intruded my mind for my reluctance, “the hell am I thinking? He’s my best friend.” and I approached him.
“Benjamin? How’ve you been?”
“Oh, hey man! It’s been a few months, huh?” he said, though his stare never broke.
I remained silent for a moment. I wanted to turn, I wanted to see what it was in those thin stalks that transfixed him, but a tinge of apprehension made me hesitate. Perhaps I feared meeting the same torment he was subjected to.
“Hey? You still there?” he asked.
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Hey, Benjamin. What’re you looking at over there?” I asked, my heart pounded a discordant song into the walls of my chest as I tentatively began to turn.
“Nothing, I suppose. Only shadows.” he replied in a monotone demeanor, as though he were fighting against a cavalcade of emotions. I remember how his smile dropped so seamlessly when he continued, “I feel for them. They look so lost.” But when I faced the field I saw nothing more than the familiar swaying of dead, golden reeds.
I’ll forever be ashamed of myself for this but I, like the others, had abandoned him. I truly made an effort to retain some relationship with Benjamin, but every passing year seemed to hollow him out more, and more, until there was nothing left of the man I had always known. So quickly we became strangers to one another, and I soon began to grow bitter at the blood curdling screams which once invoked my pity.
The last time I saw him was ten years ago to the day. I woke before the sun’s affection in the early hours of a nocturnal morning not to a bone-chilling scream, but to the frantic pounding of a fist upon my door. Old wood cried beneath my bare feet as I stumbled through the hallway and slid the iron deadbolt aside. As I swung the door open I felt my heart echo as it fell into the pit of my stomach. Before me stood a corpse-like being, bearing a grotesquely scrawny frame, which stared at me through sunken, lifeless eyes.
“Benjamin?” I asked, fearful of the creature’s answer.
“Yes. it’s been some time.”
“What are you doing here? Do you know how goddamn early it is?”
“I do. I’m sorry, Henry, you were always a good friend. I must be moving on now, though.”
“What? Where?”
The night fell quiet as a fetid smell faintly tickled my nostrils.
“Into the field.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I can’t keep fighting it.” he said, a tear rolling down his cheek.
“But it’s the one thing we’ve been warned against, Benjamin!”
“I don’t care anymore, Henry. What horrors lie beyond fear me less than the suffering I endure here.”
I was speechless as he embraced me.
“Take care, Henry. And try not to worry - maybe you’ll join me one day as well.” he said as his lips curled into a contorted grin. It looked as though this was his first time smiling in decades, and that his muscles had long forgotten how. The moon’s seductive breeze carried whispers through the golden stalks of rye, beckoning him into its depths, and I watched helplessly until I stared only into the piercing void.
When darkness swaddles the horizon, or when the sun sits at a specific point in my zenith, I gaze between the cloudy smears of dirt on my window to watch his shadow waver against the dead grass, eternally trapped there beneath the light. It stumbles about, confused and angry as its silent screams pierce the ears and heart of the world. A fleeting sense of that naivety we once shared comes back to me as I wonder if he, too, dances in the light somewhere. But as I watch the change in time swallow the figure, I remember how it did so to him all those years ago.