Rushed (3 page)

She stood looking back at him for a moment, considering him.  Then she went back to her laundry.  “Ethan always knew you’d come.  Ethan’s my husband, by the way.  He always believed.”

“That’s impressive. 
I
didn’t even know I was coming until I got here.”

If the woman heard him, she made no attempt to acknowledge it.  “I can’t say for sure that I ever believed it.  Not until yesterday.  Not until I saw
him
.”

“Him?”

She didn’t look at him as she hung a man’s work shirt on the line.  “The other one,” she replied as if this made any more sense than “him.”  “I saw him with my own eyes, walking into the corn there.  Scariest damn thing I ever saw.  It was like he was only half there…all faded…like somebody standing in a thick fog…except there wasn’t any fog.  He just faded into the sunshine.  Damn scariest thing…” 

This conversation was only getting stranger.  Eric turned and looked out at the little road again, wondering what was waiting out there. 

When he looked back, the old woman was staring at the work shirt she’d just hung on the line.  “Ethan fell the other day.  Hurt his back.  His hip, too.  Doctor thinks he might not be able to walk so good anymore.  Probably need a cane.  I hate to see that.  Once you get as old as us, you have to keep moving.  When you stop moving, that’s when you die.  That’s what my daddy used to say.  He lived to ninety-eight.  Made sure he walked at least a mile every day while doing his chores.  Went out of his way if he had to.  Then he hurt his hip and he couldn’t walk anymore.  Pretty soon, just like he always said, he never walked again.” 

Cheerful.  He’d wager she was a laugh a minute at bingo night. 

“You said you were expecting me?” asked Eric, hoping she would give him some sort of answer as to why he was here…or at the very least not tell him how she lost her mother. 

“Oh yes.  Definitely.”  Then she fell silent again as she withdrew a flowered housedress from her basket and hung it on the line. 

“Okay.”  Apparently that was all he was going to get.  Again, he turned and stared off past the gate.  It was hard to look at the woman.  There was something terribly sad about her. 

“I gave him a red ribbon before he went in.  That’s good luck.  Did you know that?”

“No.  I didn’t.”

The old woman finished hanging her clothes and then picked up her empty basket and began walking toward the back door of the Victorian house.  Without looking back at him, she said, “You should get going.  I haven’t been to the cathedral in a lot of years, but I remember perfectly well that it was a real long walk.” 

“Cathedral?”

But the woman was apparently done with their conversation.  She entered the house and left him standing alone in her back yard.

Eric stared out into the cornfield for a moment.  This was beginning to get spooky.  He’d assumed that these urges to get in his car and drive were all in his head.  He thought this even as he found himself getting out of his car and walking along the riverbank.  But this woman had just told him that he was expected, as if he had been drawn here intentionally. 

She also told him about “the other one.”  The one who looked like he was shrouded in fog, but without the fog.  As if that made any kind of sense at all.

And she told him he was supposed to be looking for a cathedral. 

It was beyond crazy.  Either he just imagined this whole conversation, or she confirmed that he was here for a reason and not just because his brain was short-circuiting. 

Or maybe they were both completely crazy.

He could still feel that strange pull, as if the cornfield were calling out to him.  He did not want to go out there.  Something was terribly wrong about all this.  But he was fairly certain that he would find no peace by turning around and going home.  And he certainly didn’t want to converse any further with Mrs. Sunny Disposition.

Preparing himself for whatever weirdness awaited him on the other side, Eric lifted the latch on the gate and stepped through it to the other side.

Chapter Three

Eric walked through the tall grass between the sunken wheel ruts of the dirt road.  He didn’t like the feel of the tall corn on either side of him, the way it refused to let him see more than a few yards in either direction.  Having already turned the bend, he could not even see the old woman’s Victorian home anymore.  Even the tallest peaks of its roof were quickly lost behind the endless stalks. 

It was silly, but he found himself unwilling to stray past the ruts, as if something might reach out and snatch him away if he dared get too close.  It was that woman’s fault.  Her insane rambling about the “other one” and how he was somehow shrouded in an invisible fog.  It was a creepy thought, especially now that he was all alone out here, with nothing to be seen in every direction but corn. 

She had obviously been delusional. 

Yet, she had managed to make a strange sort of sense, too.  Or at least more sense than his irrational compulsion to drive here in the first place.

He pulled out his cell phone and checked his screen.  He was surprised to find that he still had good service out here.  There must be a tower somewhere nearby.  He wondered how far he was from the nearest sizable town. 

The road curved again and he turned with it, still keeping between the wheel ruts. 

According to the old woman, he was looking for a cathedral.  His immediate assumption was that he was looking for a large, ornately built church, but a cornfield didn’t seem to be a very likely place for such a structure and he certainly didn’t see any towering steeples rising over the corn.  But then again, the woman also said it was a long walk.  He wondered if this road would take him all the way there and if he would have to stare at the corn the whole way. 

He knew that he should probably call Karen and update her on his whereabouts.  But he also knew that she would just as likely be calling
him
any time to check up on him.  And since she was the one who loved to talk on the stupid phone, he tended to let her do the calling. 

He was trying to determine how he was going to explain to her why he left the PT Cruiser when he abruptly realized that something had changed. 

He stopped and looked around, but he couldn’t quite decide what was different.  It was as if the light had changed, but when he squinted up into the sky, he saw that no clouds were passing before the sun.  Yet everything suddenly felt colder and darker. 

He turned around and surveyed the corn.  The shadows seemed deeper somehow, the shade beneath the broad leaves darker, colder, more sinister.

That was ridiculous.  Corn could not look more sinister.  Broccoli, maybe.  But corn was just corn.  It was tasty.

Gazing forward, he saw that the plants were getting shorter as he went.  He found himself passing through a strange swath of sickly stalks.  It cut into the healthier, taller corn for about thirty yards to his right and curved out of sight to the left.  It was as if the soil in just this one, narrow strip lacked the proper nutrients to fully sustain the crop. 

As he passed through this odd area of the field, he checked his phone and saw that his signal had nearly vanished.  A single bar kept flickering in and out, the words “NO SIGNAL” flashed at him as the little phone struggled to maintain its suddenly tenuous connection to the rest of the world. 

He’d
always
hated cell phones.  He hated the way people were always attached to them like a bad addiction.  He’d met far too many people who were practically incapable of putting them down.  They were constantly tinkering with them, as if they couldn’t bear to be left unentertained for even a few minutes, constantly taking calls, sometimes in the middle of a conversation!  People even
drove
with the stupid things, as if the roads weren’t already dangerous enough.  And it especially pissed him off when he caught his students playing with them in his class.  He was notorious for his intolerance of cell phones in his classroom and still he had to confiscate the damn things at least once a week.  He despised them and had proclaimed on occasions far too numerous to count that if every device on the planet abruptly quit working and they never made another one for as long as he lived, he’d continue his life quite happily. 

But now that he was standing out here in this odd field, his signal cutting in and out, he felt a slow dread creep into him. 

A soft rustling noise made him snap his head up.  He scanned the area around him, but there was nothing to see but cornstalks. 

The hairs on the back of his neck were suddenly standing at full attention. 

He told himself it was probably nothing more than a crow.  Or perhaps a deer.  But that eerie chill persisted.  He began to walk faster, his eyes darting back and forth from the corn on his left to the corn on his right and back again, half expecting something to spring out at him, determined to drag him out into the sickly stalks. 

Past the middle of the stunted patch, the corn grew taller again, and soon his vision was reduced to only a few shadowy yards. 

Then, abruptly, everything felt different again. 

Eric paused and looked around.  The sky was still the same blue.  The corn was still the same green.  But everything suddenly appeared brighter somehow.  That odd chill was gone. 

He glanced back at the path behind him.  It looked perfectly normal, except for the stunted stalks.  Yet that feeling of uneasiness remained.  He continued walking and glanced down at his phone again.  The signal was strong and clear. 

He stuffed the phone back into his pocket as he tried to see through the corn, but he had barely withdrawn his hand when the phone buzzed to life against his leg. 

“Where are you?” Karen asked as soon as he answered. 

Shaking off that strange feeling of irrational dread that had been creeping into his gut, Eric dismissed the weirdness of the corn and forced himself to relax.  “I’m in a cornfield,” he replied.  “Where are you?  What are you wearing?  Are you naked?  I like it when you’re naked.” 

“Yes.  I’m naked.  I lounge around in my birthday suit all day when you’re gone.  Did you say
cornfield
?”

“I
did
say cornfield.  You’re never naked when I get home.”

“Why would I still be naked when you get home?  It wouldn’t be relaxing with you around.  What are you doing driving around in a cornfield?”

“I didn’t say I was driving.”

“Okay.  What are you doing
walking
around in a cornfield?”

“Checking things out.  Considering buying a farm.  What do you think?”

“I think I wouldn’t make a very good farm girl.”

“Why not?  Fresh air.  Sunshine.  Outdoors.  The chores.  ‘Green Acres is the place for me.’  The good life.”

“I get allergic smelling hay.”

“Well there go all my barn fetish fantasies.  Thanks for leaving me empty inside.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“I know I will.”  He scanned the field around him.  Now and then he thought he saw something moving, but could not be sure it wasn’t just the breeze churning through the leaves.

“So really, can we talk about you walking around in a cornfield?  Because that’s a little troubling.”

“I’ve got to admit, I can see where you might think so.”

“Yeah.  Where’s our car?”

“Parked it next to a bridge.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry.  I locked it.”

“That’s good.  That makes everything all right.”

“I’m glad.  I was worried this was going to be an awkward conversation.”

“Why would you think that?  You just abandoned our car and decided to take a walk in a cornfield.  There’s no reason at all to doubt the soundness of your mind.”

“I have the most patient wife on the planet.”

“Yes you do.  Now please explain the cornfield to her.”

“That’s going to be tricky.”

“I was worried it would be.  What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.  Really.  I have no idea what’s going on.  All I know is the farther I drove, the more sure I was that I was doing what I needed to do.  And when I finally pulled off the road, I felt just as sure that I needed to get out and walk.  I followed the river to a little path in the woods and I found my way to this house…” 

In as much detail as he could recall, he described his encounter with the old woman and the enigmatic things she’d said to him. 

“That’s so weird,” Karen said when he’d finished.

“I know.”

The road curved to the right, winding ever deeper into the field, and again he was struck by that strange sensation of something changing.  It happened only briefly this time, for merely a second or two, but the cell phone crackled in his ear as if he’d passed quickly through a tunnel. 

“Do you think she really knew you were coming?”

“She couldn’t have. 
I
didn’t even know I was coming.”

Karen was quiet as she contemplated the idea. 

“I don’t think she was entirely there.  She probably thought I was somebody else.”

“Maybe…  That stuff about the half-there man…  That’s creepy.”

“I know.  Kind of gave me a chill.”

“I can believe she might’ve just been crazy, but it’s really weird that she said she expected you two days ago.”

“I know.  That was a spooky coincidence.”

“It was.”

Again, something changed.  At the same moment, the phone crackled.  He stopped and began to walk backward.  After a few steps, everything suddenly seemed normal again. 

This was interesting. 

He began to walk forward once more.  It seemed that he needed to walk almost twice as far as the first time, but that queer, shifting feeling came back as reliably as he could have hoped.  There was a definite chill to the air here.  And although the sky and the corn and the weeds and the earth remained unchanged, something about the underlying quality of it all seemed altered.  It wasn’t as if it had grown darker, exactly.  It was, as crazy as it sounded, as if everything had grown
deeper
. 

He couldn’t wrap his head around it. 

“Listen,” he said as he glanced ahead and saw that the corn was becoming shorter again.  “My phone’s been cutting out a little in this field.  I lost the signal completely just before you called.  So if you lose me, don’t freak out, okay?”

“I don’t ‘freak out.’”

Yes, she did.  She simply managed to do it with considerably more grace than most.  But he decided not to tell her this. 

“You just worry about yourself.  Don’t get rattlesnake bit or anything.”

“I’ll watch where I step,” he promised.

Karen’s next words were gnarled into a sputtering of disjointed sounds. 

“Karen?”

Another quick burst of noise crackled in his ears and then there was nothing.

“Karen…?  Hello…?”

He ended the call and glanced around.  Again, he had that uneasy feeling.  On either side of him the corn became shorter and shorter until it was little more than sickly sprigs jutting out of the cracked earth, most of them half wilted, some completely dead.  He found himself in an odd valley of pathetic stalks barely clinging to life and was unnerved by how silent it was here. 

What was killing the corn?  Was there something in the soil?  Pollution, maybe?  Or Radiation?

A hard shiver raced through his body as he imagined himself being slowly irradiated by something buried in the ground beneath him.  Was he being exposed to something?  Would it kill him if he remained here long enough? 

Countless old movies began to surface from his memory, gleefully filling his head with thoughts of crashed alien spacecrafts that oozed terrible chemicals into the ground and filled the air with strange fumes, transforming harmless wildlife into gruesome and violent freaks of nature. 

Why did it have to be a
cornfield
?  Aliens loved cornfields.  They were drawn to them like toddlers to coloring books. 

He stepped up his pace to a near jog and soon the corn began to grow taller again, but the queer
deepness
remained. 

Something rustled in the corn again.  Something big.  Something definitely not restrained to his imagination.  He turned to face it, ready to defend himself, but he could see nothing.  He was standing in an open strip of stunted stalks, completely exposed, searching the taller corn farther out. 

“Hello?  Is someone out there?”

Of course there wasn’t.  If there was, it would be someone with a chainsaw and a shirt made out of human faces.  Why would such a person reply to a stupid question like that?  It would spoil all the fun. 

Eric began to run. 

The corn grew taller and his visibility dwindled.  He thought he could hear things moving all around him.  An odd, chittering noise rose from somewhere nearby.

Then everything abruptly became normal again.  That strange depth was gone from his surroundings, the chill vanished and everything seemed once more to be perfectly fine.