They escaped the cornfield only because Cropsy allowed it.Evan understood that now as he and Mara collapsed inside the abandoned farmhouse at the edge of the land. The doors were barricaded, the windows boarded, yet Evan felt no relief. The creature had let them go, like a cat releasing a wounded mouse. It wanted something more than their fear.
Mara sat trembling on the floor, clutching the old recorder they had taken from the asylum. “I listened to it,” she said weakly. “While you were outside checking the perimeter.”
Evan looked at her. “And?”
Her face was pale. “Cropsy wasn’t born a monster. He was made.”
The tape crackled as she pressed play. A doctor’s voice filled the room, calm and clinical, describing an experimental therapy meant to “cure violent impulses” in institutionalised patients. The subject’s name had been redacted, but the details were unmistakable: prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, chemical injections that caused extreme physical distortion.
“They kept him locked underground,” Mara said. “Beneath the fields. When the asylum burned down, everyone thought he died.”
Evan felt the farmhouse shudder slightly, as if something heavy had brushed against its outer wall.
“But he survived,” Mara continued. “He crawled out. And the land… the land changed with him.”
Outside, the soil began to shift. Through the cracks in the boards, Evan saw the ground bulge and split, hands pushing up from beneath the earth—broken, malformed hands that clawed at the surface before sinking back down.
Cropsy was part of the land now. The corn, the soil, the fog—they were extensions of him.
The recorder played its final line: “Subject shows signs of merging identity with environment. Termination recommended.”
A heavy knock struck the door.
Once. Twice.
Then Cropsy’s voice seeped through the wood. “They tried to bury me,” it said softly. “But you can’t bury a harvest.”
The door splintered inward. Cropsy forced its way inside, towering over them, eyes gleaming with something like triumph.
“You came looking for answers,” it said. “Now you’ll stay.”
Evan stood, despite the terror clawing at his chest. “It ends tonight.”
Cropsy tilted its head. “Nothing that’s rooted ever truly ends.”
But Evan had already seen the truth: Cropsy wasn’t immortal. He was bound.
And anything bound could be severed.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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