Cropsy - Chapter One: The Shape in the Fields

People in Alder Bend learned early not to walk the fields after sunset. Corn grew high and thick there, even when the rest of the county suffered drought, and the stalks whispered in ways that felt deliberate. The first reports spoke of a figure moving between the rows, taller than any man, bending without breaking the plants. At first it was a prank, then a rumour, and finally a name passed in frightened murmurs: Cropsy.

It began with old Martin Havelock, who claimed something followed him home from the edge of his property. He said it walked upright but wrong, its limbs too long, its head bowed as though it had learned the shape of a person without understanding why. When neighbours found his boots abandoned by the fence the next morning, they stopped laughing. His body was never recovered.

Sheriff Calder dismissed the stories as hysteria. People vanish, he said. Animals drag them off. Yet even he felt uneasy when he found deep impressions in the soil, footprints that showed five long toes spread wide like roots. The prints led into the corn and vanished, as though the earth itself had swallowed them.

Children started having the same dream. A figure standing at the edge of their bedrooms, smelling of soil and rot, its face hidden behind something like a burlap sack stitched directly to flesh. They woke screaming, convinced it had whispered their names. Parents blamed late-night films and stress, but the dreams continued even after televisions were unplugged.

On the third week, someone painted a warning on the grain silo: HE WALKS LIKE US. The words were smeared with something dark that wasn’t paint. By morning, the message was gone, scraped away as if by rough hands.

Cropsy did not roar or announce himself. He watched. People felt eyes on them in empty places, a pressure at the back of the skull. Those who turned around sometimes saw nothing at all, and sometimes saw a shape retreating into shadow, too thin and too patient to be human.

When the first child vanished, Alder Bend changed forever. Little Elsie Moore disappeared between her house and the school bus, a distance of no more than fifty steps. Her scarf was found tangled in cornstalks that shouldn’t have been anywhere near the road. The stalks were fresh, green, and growing.

That night, for the first time, Cropsy stepped out of the fields and into town.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model