The Grain Chute

Officer Mara Voss had been on the force for six years, but the midnight shift in the rural expanse of Cinder County always put her on edge. The call came in at 2:47 AM: a delayed burglary at a vacant farmhouse, with a note that the adjacent grain elevator had also been broken into. She rolled her cruiser to a stop beside her partner’s, the headlights cutting through the thick, humid dark. The farmhouse was a skeletal silhouette, and beyond it, the grain elevator loomed like a concrete monolith, its silos reaching into the starless sky.

Mara took the elevator, while her partner, Officer Dale Hendricks, covered the house. She pushed open the rusty front door, the smell of old grain and dust hitting her like a physical force. Her flashlight beam danced over empty conveyor belts and towering machinery. She was in full work mode, cataloging the scene for evidence of forced entry, when she heard it: a soft, sibilant ‘Pssst’ from the shadows near the loading pit. It was unmistakably a human sound, a deliberate attempt to get her attention. She spun, but the beam revealed nothing. A rat, maybe, or the building settling. She shook her head and moved on, checking the control room and the weighing station, finding nothing but decades of grime.

Minutes later, as she knelt to examine a footprint near the grain chute, the sound came again, sharper this time, right behind her. She whirled, heart pounding, but the only thing there was the open mouth of the chute, a dark throat leading down into the pit below. She radioed Dale to check on him. ‘All quiet,’ he said, but she heard a tremor in his voice. She chalked it up to the eerie quiet and continued, but the hair on her arms wouldn’t lie down.

She decided to check the upper level, climbing a metal ladder to a catwalk that ran above the silos. The beam of her flashlight swept across the rusted metal, and that’s when she saw it: a child’s hand, impossibly pale, disappearing into a gap between the silo and the wall. She froze. There was no way a kid could be out here at this hour. She called out, ‘Hey! Police! Come out slowly!’ But the only answer was a dripping sound, like liquid hitting concrete from high above.

She descended and followed the sound, which led her to the base of the largest silo. There, etched into the dust on the floor, were small footprints, child-sized, leading directly into the grain. She’d heard stories about feed store owners who lost kids in silos, never recovered until the grain was emptied. Her radio crackled, and Dale’s voice came through, strained: ‘Mara, get out of there. Something’s wrong.’

She ignored him. She had to see what was in the grain. She stepped closer, and the grain began to shift, a slow, deliberate moving as if something was pushing its way up. A small, grayish figure burst forth, covered in dust and chaff. It was a girl, no more than five, her eyes like black pits. She opened her mouth, and instead of a cry, a dry rasping ‘Pssst’ escaped, the same sound that had been following Mara. Then the girl reached out a hand, and Mara saw that her fingers were fused together, webbed like the feet of a swamp creature.

Mara stumbled back, but her foot caught on a chain. The girl took a step forward, and the grain around her began to stir, pulling her back down. ‘I’m not here,’ the girl said, her voice like the creak of old timbers. ‘I’m always here. He left me here.’ A tangle of hair fell away from her face, revealing a missing eye and a scar across her cheek. ‘You’ll stay too, now.’

Mara ran. She didn’t stop until she burst out the front door, gasping for air, the cool night air a shock after the stale atmosphere. Dale was running toward her from the farmhouse, his face pale. ‘Did you see her?’ she shouted, but he shook his head. ‘I saw nothing, but there was a photo in the house. A family. They lost a daughter in the elevator’s grain silo thirty years ago. They could never recover the body, so they sealed it up. They said she still calls to people, to play.’

Mara turned to look at the elevator, a squat monolith in the dark. She thought of the girl’s webbed fingers, the whisper of grain, and the impossible tiny footprints that had led to the silo. She knew she’d never enter that building again. But she also knew that the girl would be there, waiting, forever, in the dark, rustling like a secret, always just a ‘Pssst’ away.