The Harvest Festival Tapes

The summer I turned eight, my family moved to a dried-up farming town called Pemberton, where the cornfields stretched like a yellow sea and the only sound at night was the wind rattling the stalks. I was a quiet kid, and the first week of school I spent recess alone, kicking gravel by the fence. Then one day, a girl with hair the color of autumn leaves walked up and said, ‘You look like you need a friend. I’m Marnie.’ We were inseparable after that. She lived in one of the four apartments in a squat brick building across from the school, which her parents owned. The top floor had two units: one for her family and one for the superintendent, Mr. Haskins, who I never saw but sometimes heard shuffling at night. Below, on the ground floor, there was an empty unit and her older sister’s apartment. Her sister was in her twenties and worked nights at the diner, so she was always asleep during the day.

One Friday, Marnie invited me to sleep over. My parents dropped me off in the early evening. The apartment smelled of burnt coffee and mothballs. Her parents, a chain-smoking woman with hair like straw and a silent man with thick glasses, were already dressed in their going-out clothes. ‘We’re heading to the Rusty Spur for a few hours,’ her mother said, handing Marnie a slip of paper with a phone number. ‘Call if you need anything. Your sister’s downstairs if there’s an emergency, but she’s got a shift later, so don’t bother her unless it’s a real problem. And stay away from Mr. Haskins. He’s a bit off.’ They locked the door behind them, the deadbolt clicking with a finality that made my stomach flutter.

We watched TV for a while, eating stale cookies and giggling at cartoons, but the light in the room seemed to dim with the evening. Around nine, Marnie suggested we play hide-and-seek. I counted to thirty in the hallway, and when I opened my eyes, the apartment was plunged in silence. I found her in the closet, but she whispered, ‘Shh, I heard something.’ We crept into the living room. The TV was off, though we hadn’t turned it off. The only light came from the crack under the front door, where a sliver of yellow from the hallway made shapes on the carpet. Then the phone rang—a shrill trill that made us jump. Marnie answered, her voice shaking. After a moment, she put the phone down and said, ‘Mom says they’ll be home in an hour, but there’s a storm coming. She said to keep the windows closed.’

We lay on the floor of her bedroom, listening to the wind pick up. The building creaked like an old ship. Marnie got this faraway look and said, ‘I want to show you something.’ She pulled a cardboard box from under her bed and lifted a stack of old VHS tapes. ‘My dad used to film everything when I was little. But there’s one tape he never showed anyone. He thought I didn’t know, but I found it.’ She slid a tape into the VCR. The screen flickered to life with a grainy image: a field of corn at dusk, shot from a distance. The camera was steady, like it was mounted on a tripod. In the center of the field stood a scarecrow, but its arms were too long, and its head was tilted at an unnatural angle. A static buzz filled the room. The tape cut to different scenes: the same field, but now with a circle of dead corn, flattened. Then a close-up of the scarecrow’s face—stitched burlap, but the eyes were buttons that seemed to gleam. And then, a voice, a child’s voice, whispering, ‘He sees you.’ The tape ended with static.

I looked at Marnie. Her face was pale. ‘That was made last year,’ she said. ‘But Dad never takes that camera out. And that voice—I don’t have a brother. He never made that.’ We rewound the tape to watch again, but this time, the screen was different. It showed the inside of a car, parked in front of our school. The door on the driver’s side was open. And then the angle shifted, like the camera was on a moving person, walking through the school hallway. The hallway was dim, and the walls were covered in children’s drawings. The camera passed a classroom door, and through the window, I saw a figure—a tall, thin shape in overalls, standing motionless in the center of the room. The camera kept moving. It stopped at the door to the boiler room. The door was ajar. A dark gap. Static hissed. Then the tape went black.

We sat in silence, the hum of the VCR filling the room. Marnie’s voice was a whisper: ‘That’s not my dad’s house. I’ve never seen those places.’ I wanted to leave, but the door was locked, and the phone line crackled with static whenever we tried to call out. We huddled on her bed, pulling the covers over our heads. At some point, I heard a heavy drag outside the apartment door, like something being pulled along the carpet. Then a low, wet breathing. I squeezed my eyes shut, praying for morning.

Hours later, the light of dawn crept in. The storm had passed, leaving a gray silence. We must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, the room was bright. The TV was off. The tape was still in the VCR, but its label had been peeled off, leaving only a smudge. Marnie’s parents came back with flushed faces, smelling of beer. ‘Did you have fun?’ her mother asked, not waiting for an answer. They didn’t ask about the tape. They didn’t ask about the noise.

A week later, I found out the truth. Mr. Haskins, the superintendent, had been found in his apartment, dead of a heart attack. But the police found something else: a camera on a tripod, pointed at the school. And in his closet, dozens of tapes, labeled with dates. The last one was dated the day before my sleepover. On it, he had filmed Marnie and me playing in her room, through a hole he’d drilled in the wall. The final frame was a close-up of his face, his eyes wide, his mouth open in a silent scream. The tape ended with his hand reaching for the lens, and the sound of his breathing, ragged and wrong.

The town hushed it up. They said he was just a lonely old man. But I knew better. I knew because when I looked at the photo the newspaper printed of his face, a face I’d never seen, I recognized it. It was the same face as the scarecrow in the field, the same button eyes, the same crooked tilt. And I knew that the thing we saw on the tape wasn’t him watching us—it was something using his eyes to watch. And it was still out there, in the endless fields, waiting for the next child to look too long.

To this day, I can’t pass a cornfield without feeling eyes on me. And every time I hear a VCR tape click into place, I think of Marnie and that night, and I wonder if she ever watched the rest of the tape—the part after the static, when the scarecrow turned and began to walk toward the camera.