Once Cropsy started appearing in windows, denial collapsed. People woke to find condensation smeared on the glass, five-fingered prints pressed flat as if someone had been leaning in to watch them sleep. Dogs refused to go outside. Livestock panicked and broke fences, only to be found later standing perfectly still, eyes clouded, as though something had looked back out through them.Elaine set up cameras around her father’s house, hoping to gather proof. What she captured was worse than imagination. Cropsy moved in short, jerking bursts, stopping for long minutes at a time. When he paused, the camera image warped, the edges blurring as though the lens itself were afraid to focus on him.
In one recording, Cropsy tilted his head and looked directly into the camera. The image froze, then resumed with Cropsy closer than before. Elaine shut the system down after that.
Her father told her the truth he had kept buried. As a boy, he had helped his own father build a guardian for the fields after a bad harvest. They had followed the old instructions. Someone had to stay behind when the others fled the barn, someone to anchor the thing they were making. That someone had been Elaine’s uncle, whose name was never spoken again.
Cropsy wasn’t summoned, her father said. He was grown.
The town decided on one last act of defiance. They would burn the fields. Fire cleansed. Fire ended things. As night fell, they gathered with torches and fuel, fear turning into something like resolve.
When the first flames took hold, Cropsy screamed. It was the sound of splitting wood and tearing flesh, of wind howling through an empty house. He ran from the corn, faster than anyone expected, firelight revealing a body now unmistakably human in its outline.
He did not flee the town.
He ran toward it.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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