The Cornfield Saint

My family moved to Cedar Hollow when I was five, into a development that had sprouted overnight from fields that had been fallow for decades. The houses were all alike, with vinyl siding in shades of beige and gray, and they stood in neat rows on streets named after trees that had been bulldozed to make room for them. The land had been a corn farm for as long as anyone could remember, and before that, it was the hunting grounds of the Lenni-Lenape. But we were kids; we didn’t care about history. We cared about the empty lot at the end of our cul-de-sac, where the corn still grew wild and tangled, and where we played hide-and-seek until the streetlights came on.

That winter, a strange cold settled over Cedar Hollow. The snow came early and stayed late, and the nights were so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat. I remember lying in bed on Christmas Eve, the glow of the plastic manger scene in the yard casting weird shadows on my ceiling. I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew, I was wide awake, my heart pounding for no reason. A sound, like the rustle of dry cornstalks, seemed to come from the hallway. I turned my head toward the door, and there it was: a shape, grayish-white, hovering just inside the frame. It had a head and shoulders, but the rest of it faded into nothing, like smoke from a fire that had gone out. Its eyes—if they were eyes—were hollow pits, and they were fixed on me.

I was too young to be truly frightened, so I whispered, ‘Santa?’ The thing tilted its head, as if considering the name, and then it drifted backward into the hall. I scrambled out of bed, my feet cold on the hardwood, and peeked around the doorframe. The hallway was darker than it should have been, the nightlight at the far end dead. The shape was at the end of the hall, near the back door, and it seemed to be waiting. I took a step, and it moved, not walking, but gliding, its lower half trailing off like wisps of fog. It paused at the door, and for a moment, I thought I saw something like a smile—a wet, glistening line—before it slipped through the wood and vanished. A wave of terror hit me, and I ran back to bed, pulling the covers over my head, my breath hot and quick.

I didn’t sleep the rest of that night. I heard things: a low hum, like a far-off engine, and a tapping on the window, though nothing was there. In the morning, I told my parents, but they laughed and said I’d seen the neighbor’s cat or a trick of the light. But I never forgot it. As I grew older, I tried to rationalize it, but every Christmas Eve, I would lie awake, watching the door, and it would appear again. Always the same: no legs, gray-white, hovering, waiting for me to call it by the wrong name.

When I was twelve, I learned about the Lenape tradition of the ‘Great Spirit’ and the ‘Corn Mother,’ and I wondered if that was what I had seen—a remnant of a harvest deity, angered by the desecration of its land. But my grandmother, who was part Lenape, told me a different story. She said that some spirits are not gods, but remnants of people who had died in a terrible way, and that this one might be a farmer who had been killed by his own machinery, and who now wandered the fields, searching for his lost hand. She warned me not to acknowledge it, not to give it a name, or it would attach itself to me.

But I had already named it. I had called it ‘Santa,’ and in a way, that had made it real. The next Christmas Eve, when I was sixteen, I woke to find it standing at the foot of my bed. This time, it had a face, and it was not the benign face of a jolly saint. It was gaunt and hollow, with eyes like black pits, and its mouth was open in a silent scream. It reached out a hand that ended in a stump, and it whispered, ‘You lied to me.’ I tried to scream, but no sound came out. It leaned in close, and I could smell the earth of the old cornfield, and the rot of a hundred harvests.

‘I gave you a gift,’ it said, its voice like the rustle of dead leaves. ‘And you threw it away.’ The gift, I understood, was the fear, the constant dread that had become my companion. It fed on my terror, and it had grown stronger with each year I felt it. I saw, then, what it truly was: a creature of the place, not a ghost, but a guardian of a lost world, and I was an intruder who had named it and claimed it. I felt a horrifying kinship with it, as if I had always known it, as if it were a part of me that I had tried to deny.

In the years since, I have never left Cedar Hollow. I live in the same house, now old and worn, and I have never married, never had children. Every Christmas Eve, I sit in the dark, waiting for it to appear, and I wonder if I am the last one who sees it, or if it will find others. Sometimes, when the wind blows through the field behind my house, I hear it calling my name, but I never answer. And sometimes, I catch a glimpse of a grayish-white shape in the corner of my eye, and I feel a terrible gratitude, because it has chosen me, and I am its keeper. The snow falls, and the houses spread, but the old land remembers, and so do I.