My great-grandmother died when I was six. About that same time a little girl, a neighbor I sometimes played with, got lost in the cornfield beside our house. I remember her vaguely. Her name was Sonia, and she was a friendly, talkative kid just a little older than me. My dad went out with some of the other neighbors to help look for her. When they finally found her, she was totally quiet – she wouldn’t say anything, not one word. My dad said later that she’d seemed petrified.
That night I got a long and serious talk on how I should never, ever wander into a cornfield, but I’d already come up with my own opinion on how good an idea that was.
(Sonia’s family moved away a couple of months after that incident and, come to think of it, I don’t know if they ever did get her to talk.)
I never saw the cornfield the same way after that. My hyperactive imagination had a good time with it, conjuring ghoulish voices in the wind rustling through the stalks and phantoms that would glide there, unseen, at night.
I was afraid of the farmer, which helped to fuel many of my fantasies of evil lurking just out of sight in the corn. My parents said he was just an odd character, but I was certain there was something sinister about him. He was big, and old, and had a tangled gray beard and small dark eyes set deep in the crags of his face. I had only seen him a few times, and each time was the same: I’d catch sight of him somewhere, standing perfectly still. He looked the way a dead tree looks when lightning flashes and illuminates it from behind. He was always far enough away that I could never tell what he was looking at, but I’d always get the creepy feeling that he was staring at me. If I looked away for a second, he would be gone when I looked back.
All this couldn’t have been farther from my mind on a beautiful summer day when I was nine.
I’d found the ancient, battered journal my great-grandmother had kept when she was a girl. She’d given it to me, and I picked it up and flipped the dusty-smelling pages reverently, slowly reading the unformed, childish handwriting. I was sure that this was a better treasure than the end table Great-Grandmother had given to my parents or that wooden trunk of hers in the attic that we could never get open.
Flipping a page, I discovered that one day in late summer, a day just like this day, Great-Grandmother had made corncob dolls, and I decided I wanted to try making one, even though I’d never played with dolls much. So outside into the bright sunlight I went, and walked over to the edge of the cornfield.
There was a light breeze. The cornstalks all seemed to be whispering to me. Lucy… come in… come in…
I don’t know what possessed me to do it, then. I knew quite well that what I was doing was stupid, and I did it anyway – plunged headlong into the field, the green plants swallowing me, waving high above my head.
All around me, in the corn and the ground and the wind and the sky, were the things I had though of being in the cornfield. I knew they were there, even though they were invisible.
Further, further… whispered the corn.
And then the slithery corn-voice stopped as the wind stopped, and I stopped, too. I pulled an ear of corn from a stalk in front of me – it was tough, I had to twist it off – and set about making a doll.
I didn’t know how to make a corncob doll, so improvisation was my technique. Husks were folded down to make a skirt, and another husk was a sash. Corn silk was the doll’s hair. Imagination supplied the face. As I looked at the straight-veined, tough green husk where a face would have been, I imagined that I could almost see features there. Yes – partly for real and partly in my mind’s eye, I could definitely see a face.
The sun went behind a cloud, and the wind started up, and the doll spoke directly into my mind.
Hello, Lucy.
“Hello,” I said.
There are many things I can share with you, the doll said, her almost-there mouth unmistakably grinning. The corn stalks around caught up her words and tossed them back and forth, echoing over and over in the wind.
“What are you?” I asked. “Are you a corn spirit?”
It laughed. Its features, I noticed, were unpleasant.
I am older than corn. I am much older than you. Whispers chanted in unison from all around me.
I can teach you things, Lucy.
“Hello, Lucy.”
Another voice from right behind me – it was somehow the same as the corn-rustle voice, except it was human.
I jumped and spun around. There stood the farmer in the middle of the cornfield. He was bigger than I’d remembered, and he was staring right down at me.
I panicked and ran. No longer careful, just trying to get away, I crashed ahead, breaking cornstalks, going in circles. Green pressed in all around me, smothering. Edges of leaves cut my arms and face, and the doll-voice laughed maliciously in my head. I don’t know how long I thrashed around in the field, but it felt like forever.
By sheer luck, I made it out close to where I’d gone in. I ran all the way into the house and up to my bedroom, and there I found that I was still clutching the corncob doll.
I wanted to drop it, throw it out the window, burn it, but I couldn’t. It remained in my hand. The face I’d thought was nasty before was now diabolical, grinning up at me with glowing eyes. And at the same time I could see plainly that it was just an ear of corn, and the place where I saw the face was a plain green husk.
I’ve been waiting for you, Lucy, since before you were born.
“No,” I said. “Stop it. Be quiet.” As much as I wanted to get rid of it, to throw it back into the cornfield and have it gone forever, another part of me, deeper and darker and more dreadful, wanted to listen to what it had to say.
It laughed, low and horrible in my head, and I wrenched myself into motion. I ran out of my room and up the attic steps, and found my great-grandmother’s chest, the one that we couldn’t open. Something small inside told me that it would open now, just once.
The voice in my head hissed angrily.
“Oh, yes,” I said, giving an almighty heave. The stuck lid of the trunk opened. Then I saw what was already inside.
A very old, withered corncob doll, its husks brown and brittle, its corn-silk hair turned to dust long ago.
I stared for a moment, and then I threw my doll in and slammed the lid and latched it shut.
For all I know both dolls are still there, untouched and waiting. I’m not going to look and find out. I’m not ever going to try to open that lid again.
The farmer vanished after that year, and the field was overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. Nobody bought the land for a long time. There was never another hint of anything sinister there – it had gone with the corn. Still, I didn’t venture near there again.
You may say that my great-grandmother was a crazy old lady and that I was just a kid whose imagination got the better of her, and you might be right. Some days that’s what I think. But there’s always a troubling little prickle in my mind – I can’t forget the farmer and that cornfield and the one time I ventured into it. I think about it at night sometimes, even when I don’t expect or want to. It comes back to me unbidden. It won’t leave me alone.
And sometimes I still hear that corn-rustle voice in the back of my mind.
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What do you think? I'd like feedback on a couple of things: Does it seem contrived? Does it flow well? Do you think it's worth someone's while to read?
Thank you in advance to anyone who critiques!
I agree with everything that Rubric said, but I have a few other things to say.
