The Hollow Field

My first real memory is of the cornfield behind our house, and the boy who stood among the stalks, waving at me. He was dressed in clothes that looked old-fashioned, even then—a little white shirt with a round collar, short pants, and a tiny sailor hat. He never spoke, but he would point, and I would follow. I called him Jonny, because that’s what he told me in a whisper, though his lips never moved. I was four.

My mother always said I had ‘the gift,’ but she didn’t like it. She had visions too, dark ones that made her lock herself in her room for days. She never talked about what she saw, except to say that the world was full of hidden things, and most of them wished we didn’t exist. She wrapped our house in salt and iron, hung dried herbs over every door, and made me sleep with a knife under my pillow. I didn’t understand why until I met the man in the long black coat.

I was six when I first saw him. He came to our door on a night with no moon, and my mother’s face went pale as bone. She told me to hide in my room and not come out for anything. I listened, but I peeked through the crack in my door. He stood in the doorway, and the air turned heavy, like before a thunderstorm, but cold. He didn’t touch her, but she screamed and fell to her knees, clutching her head. When he left, she told me he was a bad dream, and I believed her, because I wanted to.

But he kept coming. Not just to the house, but in my dreams. He would stand at the foot of my bed, and I would feel his weight pressing down on my chest, making it hard to breathe. He never spoke either, but I knew he wanted something from me. He would point to the field, and I would see Jonny, but Jonny was afraid of him. Jonny would shake his head and plead with his eyes for me not to go.

I was eight when I learned Jonny’s story. He showed me a vision, not with words, but with feelings and images that flooded my mind like my own memories. I saw him running through the corn, laughing, then a man—his stepfather, I knew—grabbing his arm. I saw the man drag him into the woods, and I felt the pain of a blow to his head. Then I saw the shallow grave in the field, where the corn grew but never thrived. Jonny told me he had been buried there, and his spirit was tied to that ground, trapped between worlds.

I was ten when I saw the woman in the tub. Jonny showed her to me one night, lying in a bathroom, her eyes open and staring, water red and spilling over the edge. The next morning, I saw on the news that a woman had been murdered in a town three states away, and the details matched exactly—the bathroom, the tub, the way she was positioned. I didn’t tell anyone, because my mother had taught me to keep such things secret. But I knew then that my visions were not just dreams. They were warnings, or maybe echoes of things that had already happened.

The man in black grew stronger as I got older. He began to appear even when I was awake, slipping into the edges of my vision. He would be there in the school hallway, in the grocery store, standing in the road. And always, the weight, the oppression, the feeling that he was waiting for something. My mother started bleeding from her nose when he came, and she grew thinner, more hollow. She would wake up screaming, and I would find her on the floor, bruised, as if something had attacked her in her sleep.

When I turned twelve, I decided to find out what he was. I went into the field at dawn, carrying a shovel and a flashlight. Jonny appeared at the edge of the corn, pointing to a spot where the soil looked darker, more disturbed. I dug until my hands bled, and I found a small, rusted tin box, the kind people used to keep keepsakes. Inside was a photograph of a boy I didn’t recognize, and a torn piece of paper with a name and a date. The name was ‘Marcus Holt,’ and the date was sixty years ago.

I looked up Marcus Holt in the school library. He had gone missing as a child, and his stepfather had been questioned but never arrested. The stepfather had moved away, and a few years later, he had committed suicide. No one ever found Marcus’s body. I began to piece it together: the man in black was not an entity in the usual sense. He was a wraith, a thing that fed on pain and fear, and he had attached himself to my family because we could see him. He had been with my grandmother, then my mother, and now me. And he wanted to take me, like he had taken Marcus.

I didn’t tell my mother. I was afraid she would try to protect me by sending me away, and I couldn’t leave Jonny. He was the only friend I had, and I knew he was there to help me, to guide me toward the truth. The night before my thirteenth birthday, I woke to find the man in black standing in my room, so close I could see the emptiness inside his hood. He reached out a gray, withered hand, and I felt my chest constrict. Jonny appeared beside him, shaking his head, and then Jonny did something I had never seen him do. He spoke, his voice like dry leaves. ‘You have to give him what he wants,’ Jonny said. ‘He wants your fear. Feed it to him, and he will be forced away.’

I didn’t know what he meant. But as the man’s hand closed around my arm, I felt a surge of terror so pure it was almost white. I thought of my mother, of how she had always been afraid, of how she had let that fear consume her. And I realized that the man in black fed on fear, but he also needed a host to feed through. My mother had been his host for years, and now he wanted me. I took a breath, and I let go of the fear. I thought of Jonny, of the boy in the field, of the truth I had uncovered. I told myself that he was nothing but a dead thing, a parasite, and that I was stronger than him.

The hand stopped moving. The oppressive weight lifted, and the man in black seemed to flicker, like a candle in a draft. Jonny stepped forward and placed his hand over mine, and I felt a warmth, a sense of peace. The man in black let out a silent scream, and then he simply dissolved, leaving behind a cold spot and a lingering smell of rot. The next morning, I found my mother sitting in the kitchen, looking tired but clear-eyed. She told me she had dreamed of a boy in a sailor suit, and he had told her to let go of her fear. She said she finally felt free.

I never saw the man in black again. But I still see Jonny, and sometimes he shows me other things. I see a woman who is about to be harmed, and I call the police anonymously. I see a child who is lost, and I send help to the right place. I don’t know why I was chosen, but I’ve learned that the gift is a burden, and a responsibility. The hollow field is still there, but now I know its secret. I visit Jonny sometimes, and I leave him a small flower. He smiles, and then he fades into the corn. I know he’s at peace now, because I gave him a part of me, and he gave me his strength. The man in black is gone, but the world is still full of hidden things. I’m not afraid anymore, not of them. Because I’ve faced the worst of them, and I won.