My family lives beside a pumpkin patch. We’ve been here since the beginning of the summer, living in this little two bedroom house with a leaky roof and bad plumbing. My parents said it was a fixer-upper, but I haven’t seen either one of them fixing anything yet.
The pumpkin patch isn’t ours - it belongs to our neighbour, Mr. Ashworth. He’s the one who owns our house, so I guess he’s our landlord too. My parents always talk about him while whispering, as if he might be right outside the window, listening in on their conversation.
“That Mr. Ashworth is an odd fellow,” my mom will quietly say.
“You got that right,” my dad will reply, even more silently.
They think I can’t hear, but kids must have better ears than grownups, because they talk loud enough I can make it out from the basement.
That’s how I overheard them saying the other day that they were gonna be short on rent this month, and they would need to make it up to Mr. Ashworth in some other way.
“Why don’t we tell him that Jason will help him harvest pumpkins this year,” My mom offered. “He can work for him every day after school.”
“Hmm, I suppose that might cover it,” my dad said. “You’re gonna need to start looking for a new job soon, though. If they can’t give you full time hours they shouldn’t have told you they would…”
“Tell that to Sharon,” my mom retorted, in a tone that suggested there would be no further discussion on the matter.
And so I ended up out in the pumpkin patch, harvesting fat orange pumpkins and loading them onto a wagon, my back straining and sweat pouring down my face, despite the chill of the evening. Mr. Ashworth sat up high on his tractor, looking down at me condescendingly with his one good eye, sipping something from a brown bottle that looked cold and alcoholic.
“Alright, keep working. I’ll be right back,” he said, once the flatbed was stacked high with pumpkins.
The tractor started to chug and belch black smoke from the exhaust stack, as it lurched into gear with a jolt that sent several pumpkins teetering and tumbling from the back end. Mr. Ashworth seemed not to notice as they smashed and spilled seeds and guts everywhere on the grass.
“Hey! You dropped some! Mr. Ashworth!? When can I go home!? I’ve been out here since four o’clock!” I shouted after him, looking at my watch.
The sun had set hours ago. I hadn’t eaten dinner. It was past 9:30 PM and I had school in the morning. Not to mention the pile of homework in my backpack which had been nagging at me until I decided I didn’t care about it anymore.
Mr. Ashworth was gone up the hill, the steep slope sending a few more pumpkins wobbling and rolling off the back of the flatbed. I realized suddenly what a terrible conveyance it was for our purposes.
Something caught my attention as I was standing there, breathing heavily and waiting for him to come back. A scarecrow, about fifty feet to the left of me, was hidden between a few high corn stalks in the patchy field. For some reason, it began to draw me in, and I felt myself taking slow, tentative strides toward it.
Something was odd about the scarecrow, I realized as I ambled closer. Actually, there were several strange things about it that had drawn me in.
For one thing, it was covered in crows. And I’d always thought they were meant to keep those pesky birds away.
The scarecrow was guarding a small, hidden garden. I guessed it was Mr. Ashworth’s personal vegetable patch. There were a few sagging stalks of corn, a couple rotten pumpkins, a half dozen blackened and collapsing gourds and zucchini, swarming with flies, as well as a yellowed tomato plant covered in moldy, rotting fruit. Everything growing there was dead or dying.
As I drew closer, I saw that the scarecrow wasn’t alone. It was the outermost of a group of them, positioned in a low section of the field so that the vegetation disguised it and camouflaged it. I realized it was a perfect hiding place, completely indistinguishable from the road or the house. It was like a bunker in a golf course, minus the sand, hiding this little monument to decay from the rest of humanity.
Maybe that was why my legs were wobbly and my hands were a little shaky, as I thought about the fact that I probably wasn’t supposed to be exploring over here. But I couldn’t help it, and it felt like my feet were on a conveyor belt taking me inexorably closer to the group of scarecrow-people, swaying gently in the breeze, with broomsticks shoved up their-
“Jason! Get back over here! The day’s almost done, boy! One more load and I’ll be done with you for now!”
I shuddered at his phrasing and began walking over.
I looked back over my shoulder at the group of scarecrows, and could have sworn I saw one move. Twitching ever so slightly. But that was surely just a trick of the light.
The one closest to me could just barely be made out in the dim glow of the moon. A burlap sack with a smiling face painted on it - and the bulge of something underneath the fabric that looked a bit like a nose. And that smell… it was like rotting vegetables. But also something else, sweet and pungent and unpleasant.
Birds were picking at the scarecrow’s arms with their sharp beaks, pecking and prodding at what was underneath the thick clothing. As if trying to get at something tasty hidden underneath.
“MOVE IT!” Mr. Ashworth shouted at me, and I began to run back towards him, my heart pounding in my chest.
Just a trick of the light, my mind said again. Nothing more.
I didn’t get home until 11pm that night, and fell into bed exhausted.
Still, despite my tiredness, I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing. Theories floating through my thoughts with no conclusions, only questions. Answers just out of reach, teasing me from underneath burlap sacks painted bright with smiling faces.
As I lay in bed, I thought about the scarecrow again. And I imagined those birds, pecking at the fabric of its arms, like a thick and troublesome sausage casing.
And as I fell asleep, I drifted into a fit of nightmares worse than any I’d had before. In them, my parents and I were pumpkins in Mr. Ashworth’s field, our bodies buried up to our necks in dirt.
Another version of me, with a horrifying, hollow-eyed pumpkin for a head, came along and surveyed us all, judging our ripeness. He stooped down with a knife in his hand, long and rusty, and began to hack at the exposed flesh of my neck, driving dirt and soil and worms into the wound with short, swift sawing motions. I tried to scream, but found my mouth was sealed shut like the uncarved face of a pumpkin. All I could do was watch as he hacked and cut and blood sprayed and splashed the doppelganger jack-o’-lantern me’s face, covering him in fine, misty red droplets.
Finally he was done, and the thing which looked like me but wasn’t picked me up in his arms and cradled me like a newborn. Then he took me over to that weird, hidden little garden, with its distended, misshapen scarecrows, and brought me over to one with no head. The stump-end of a broomstick could be seen sticking up from the farmer’s overalls and clothing, stuffed full of hay to look like a body. Pumpkin-me drove the bloody stump of my neck down on top of that pole and I could have sworn I felt real pain as he twisted and turned my skull to drive it deeper and deeper.
And then finally it was finished, and the pumpkinhead-me walked away, dusting off his hands and leaving me there.
I looked around to see the faces of my parents on the scarecrows all around me. But they were frozen in gap-mouthed poses, their gazes blank-white and rolled back, as the carrion birds began to swoop down and land upon us.
And the crows and ravens began to feast on our eyes.
I jolted awake with a terrified start, feeling my clothing and the sheets beneath me drenched with cold sweat. Sitting up in bed, I was panting and trying to catch my breath, as if I’d just been running a marathon. My hands were shaking and my legs were wobbly as I stood up, wanting to get as far away from that dream as possible, and never wanting to sleep again, despite my tiredness.
My legs brought me to the window and I found myself looking out into the field, at the pumpkin patch beside our house.
Somehow I wasn’t surprised to hear the sound of digging out there. A grunting, huffing sound as someone worked in the pumpkin field, despite the darkness.
And then the noise stopped suddenly.
Startled, I saw a glimpse of reflective eyes looking back at me from the darkness between corn stalks. Golden and mirrored, like a large cat’s stare.
But then they winked out of existence and disappeared, as if I had just imagined them.
But I knew I had not imagined them. And I knew who they belonged to, just as surely.
Mr. Ashworth.
*
I thought about telling my parents my outlandish theory the next morning, but they were already gone when I woke up for school. It was weird, but not totally unlike them. Half the time I was forgotten about, and the rest of the time they acted like I was a deliberate inconvenience to their lives. As if my existence were a gift they had bestowed upon me that I needed to be thankful for at all times.
The kids at school looked at me funny when I expressed this truth as a mundane fact of my existence. Their faces were sad and I eventually realized they were looking at me with pity.
My parents had disappeared like this a couple times before, but not for a while. And they’d always apologized afterwards. I would just eat frozen pizza and cereal and wait for them to come to their senses, like I was living out a far less glamorous version of Home Alone, in a shittier house.
I figured when I got home from school they would be there and they’d buy me iced cream or something to make it up to me. But they weren’t there when I got home from school. Instead, Mr. Ashworth was waiting for me at my front door.
My heart sank immediately.
Feeling exhausted already from school and working the fields the day prior, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see him. But he reminded me that I had a job to do, and that my family would be evicted if I didn’t do it, and I agreed to head over to his place after changing out of my school clothes.
“Fancy boy, ain’tcha?” He said mockingly. “Just wear what you got on.”
“Have you seen my parents?” I asked, hurrying to follow after him. “They’ve been gone since this morning.”
He looked at me sadly.
“Your parents certainly take your maturity for granted,” he said cryptically.
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t they tell you? They said I should make sure to give you dinner for the next few days, since they were going out of town. I told them it’d be no problem. By the way, I hope you like mutton.”
I was flabbergasted, and felt a terrible sense of betrayal.
“For a FEW DAYS!? They went out of town!? That’s impossible! How could they do that and not tell me!?”
“Are you sure they didn’t? Young boys such as yourself don’t always have the best ears for listening. Especially if there isn’t candy and video games involved.”
I could feel my face getting hot with anger.
“No! They didn’t mention it! Did they leave a phone number? Anything!? I need to talk to them!”
“Nothing of the sort. Come on, let’s get to harvesting! Those pumpkins won’t pick themselves!”
Mr. Ashworth’s house was a lot busier today, I realized, as people were starting to show up to purchase pumpkins from his barn where he had them stacked high in a lineup like a class photograph, arranged from small to large going left to right. They were sorted on a set of long benches which appeared to be designed for that purpose.
I was surprised to see a dozen or more children were also working with Mr. Ashworth, taking cash from customers in exchange for pumpkins, and assisting people with carrying them to their vehicles. I hadn’t seen the kids in school, and didn’t recognize any of them, but I was new to town and figured they were in different grades or different classes than I was.
I tried to talk to one of the kids, but he just turned away, refusing to say anything to me. He looked a little frightened, and was dead set on tending to customers. He had no interest in speaking to me.
“What are you doing in here!?” Mr. Ashworth shouted when he saw me. “You’re supposed to be out in the fields, hacking pumpkins! Get back down there. Don’t make me get the whip.”
I expected a grownup to chastise Mr. Ashworth for saying something like that to a child, even if it was a joke, but nobody said anything, they just kept going about their shopping. A woman’s eyes strayed to look at me for a second, but then she looked away sharply, as if not wanting me to notice. She grabbed her young daughter’s hand and made a showy display of picking up a pumpkin and hefting its weight in her hands.
“Look, Sadie! This is a big one! Do you want to carve this one?”
The little girl smiled, looking shy. I could sense something was off about all of this. Something was left unspoken as a hushed tone carried throughout the barn. I felt like people were watching me intently, but when I turned to look at them they were quick to glance away.
I got that feeling you get when people are talking about you behind your back, saying unkind things.
“Move it!” Mr. Ashworth said, pushing me from behind. “The jack o’ lanterns don’t pick themselves!”
I walked down the hill towards the fields with a forlorn look over my shoulder. The families acting strange, picking out pumpkins while ignoring me, and the kids quietly working at Mr. Ashworth’s farm, they all had something to do with the creepy scarecrows in that hidden garden. I knew it. Like seeing the pieces of a puzzle and knowing it would make a picture, but not knowing quite what that picture was.
I resolved to sneak out to visit the hidden garden later that night, after Mr. Ashworth went to sleep.
Assuming he actually slept.
*
Later on, I lay awake in bed, the sounds of crickets outside my window the only noise in the world.
I was exhausted after another long night working in the pumpkin patch. All evening I had watched with jealous anger as happy families with smiling children streamed in one group after the next, laughing and picking out their pumpkins, talking about how they were going to carve them to look like clowns, witches, ghosts, and ghouls.
The only ghoul I wanted to carve up was Mr. Ashworth. He had told me to come back bright and early in the morning, before school. I would need to help him for an hour or so before class.
There wasn’t much I could say to this. He was my impromptu guardian, it seemed, at least for the time being.
It would be another short night with no sleep, by the looks of things.
The lights in Mr. Ashworth’s house went out suddenly and it was still and dark. Was he finally going to sleep?
I imagined him climbing into a coffin in the basement, and closing the lid shut until morning, like some sort of reverse vampire.
I climbed out my bedroom window, afraid of the squeaky sounds of our rusty-hinged front door waking up the old man. My feet hit the ground with a muffled sound, the grass slightly damp with early morning dew that I could feel through the canvas-tipped toes of my shoes.
With a deliberate effort to remain stealthy and hidden, I made my way towards the rickety wooden fence which divided the two properties. I slipped between the rails and began to march out into the pumpkin patch, staying low to avoid detection.
The house stayed dim and quiet and I took that for a good sign that Mr. Ashworth was fast asleep.
I made my way out towards the secret garden and found an assortment of crows waiting for me, standing on the arms and heads of the scarecrows, their beady eyes watching me silently as I approached.
One bird let out a soft, mournful caw and took off, flying up into the night sky to disappear amidst the stars, and I imagined him as an undead scout going to report the enemy’s position to the necromancer general - The Dreadlord Ashworth.
This would need to be quick. A peek under the burlap hood, to see what was really underneath.
I began to take slow, tentative strides towards the closest scarecrow. The crows stayed where they were on it, watching me carefully. I approached even more cautiously as they refused to abandon their perch. They guarded it with jealousy, their eyes looking angry as I got closer.
Raising my hand to pull back the cuff of the scarecrow’s shirt, I began to expose the wrist.
Hoping I would only see straw beneath the plaid, I folded the fabric back.
All of the birds took off suddenly, their flapping wings and squawking cries startling me and causing my heart to skip a beat as it fluttered in my chest.
After recovering, I went back to it.
In the dim light it was difficult to see what was beneath the shirt. I stepped back to let the glow of the moon shine through.
It was spongy and strange to the touch, but then I realized why and fell stumbling backwards.
The arm…. It felt like flesh.
Just like my nightmare, the scarecrows were constructed from corpses - left out to rot and hang in the sun. The only support for their weight was a sharpened pike sent through their body from the rear, and up into their mouth, like a rotisserie chicken. When I pulled off the hood I saw the jagged end of a pike protruded from the man’s mouth, with entrails and organs dangling from it.
That smell…. No wonder the stench was so powerful over here.
My eyes were drawn to the other scarecrows. I couldn’t help myself as I began to take wobbly strides towards the next one a few paces ahead. As I got closer to it I saw that there were more of them. Far more scarecrows than I had seen the first time. There was a line of them extending into the distance. What I had thought was a little sand bunker-shaped divot in the field was actually a meandering ditch that turned and twisted away from me, its length hidden by a low hill.
And there were dozens of scarecrows planted within this narrow gulley.
I began to rip the rotting clothing off the one closest to me, and almost let out a scream of horror when I saw what was beneath.
A body ravaged by the birds and the sun, the rain and hail and all the other elements. The skin was sloughing and tearing in great long gashes. Pieces of rotten flesh came off with the clothing as I pulled the plaid shirt from the scarecrow. The head was still covered with a burlap sack with a dead-eyed smiling face drawn upon it, and I had to pull it off to be sure. The form beneath was almost unrecognizable as human, but I knew it wasn’t either one of my parents - and I began to move on to the next one.
Despite my terror, I had to know. I had to be certain.
The next scarecrow was the same as the other two. Straw hanging out the cuffs of a plaid shirt with sleeves too long. The entire form of it distended and drawn out, the limbs too stretched and lanky. But now I understood why - it was to conceal what was really inside.
I ripped the hood and hat off of this one as well, to see the face underneath. I nearly vomited, a puddle of bile sitting bitterly in my mouth afterwards. The faces of these scarecrows were rotten and I guessed they were months or years old by the looks of them. And the smell, worse than anything I’d ever experienced. It stuck with me and stayed in my nose as I walked further along the row of scarecrows.
Instead of going for the next one, I went further, towards the very back.
The last two scarecrows looked newer than the other ones. Their clothes were brighter, not yet faded by the rain and the sun. Even in the darkness I could tell the difference.
And the other strange thing was that these last two scarecrows were moving.
It was horrifying, seeing those two figures, squirming and writhing on their posts, their heads hidden by burlap sacks. The worst part was knowing, deep down in my gut, that those were my parents, impaled on pikes like victims of Vlad the Impaler. That story I had learned in school suddenly came to mind with a chilling clarity that made my blood run cold.
Who knew how long they’d been out here?
I had to help them. But I had to be sure first.
I began to run, my feet sinking into a muddy section and getting soaking wet and momentarily stuck, but I didn’t care. I left my shoes behind as the muck swallowed them up with a hungry GLURP sound and staggered on in my socks.
When I got to the scarecrows I began to blubber and cry and call out to them, no longer thinking about staying quiet. I could only think about helping them. My hands worked quickly, pulling the burlap sacks from their heads.
It was my parents.
To say they were still alive was a stretch. What that was could not be classified as living, but only an agonizing delay on the road towards death. They were in a purgatory of pain, impaled and balanced in the most horrifying way atop two pikes which were slowly and inexorably making their way through their vital organs, as their body weight caused them to slide downwards, the tips of sharpened pikes inching out from behind their tongues.
My mothers eyes drifted towards me and she looked at me with what I would have guessed to be remorse. Her lips quivered up and down, and I realized she was trying to say, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, mom,” I said, taking her hand and squeezing it. “You can let go.”
Her eyes closed and she let out a deep, shuddering breath and was gone. I looked to see my dad had done the same, as if they were both out there waiting for me to show up, to see me one last time and apologize.
Before I had even one second to grieve, I heard something behind me. A shuffling of feet, and movement through the brush. It felt like I was being surrounded.
“Lleh reven tel uoy og,” a kid’s voice said from the darkness. “Eruoy eno fo su won.”
What the hell?
As scared as I was, I was also confused. Was the boy speaking another language? Was this a Russian government spy project or something?
It didn’t sound like another language, I realized. It sounded familiar, though.
Like a record being played backwards.
Without another thought I began to run towards my house, bolting past the rotting tomato plants and sagging corn stalks. Kids were waiting for me just on the other side of those, and reached out to grab me, their fingernails raking across my skin and leaving long gashes in my flesh.
“Kcab emoc! Kcab emoc!” they called after me. “Eruoy eno fo su won!”
Come back. Come back. You’re one of us now.
I realized that after I got back inside the little squat house I once called home. I realized that they were speaking backwards. Why, I have no idea. Just like I don’t know why Mr. Ashworth has been kidnapping kids and killing their parents for years, maybe decades. Just like I don’t know why the town is protecting him.
When I dial 9-1-1 to try and report the murder of my parents, all I get is a recorded message with my address listed at the beginning, as if it is meant specifically for me.
“Submit to Mr. Ashworth,” the message says. “Mr. Ashworth knows what is right for us all. Mr. Ashworth is good. Mr. Ashworth is just. Do not question his authority. Open your door to him. Open your heart to him. Open your mind to him. Submit. Submit. Submit.”
I hung up the phone after that, when I felt my eyelids getting heavy and my head was feeling fuzzy, and I began walking to the front door with my hand outstretched.
Part of me feels like I need to go back over there. Like I owe him a debt. My parents did agree to his terms, after all.
And we did eat the delicious pumpkin pie he gave us when we moved in.
Submit.
The word flashes through my mind and with it is a wave of terror.
Because I know that eventually, whether I want to or not, I will be back working in Mr. Ashworth’s pumpkin patch tomorrow. And every day after that, for as long as I live.
Until one day, I too become a scarecrow in his fields.