The Stalker in the Corn

My grandfather, Elias, was a man of few words and even fewer lies. At seventy-three, he had seen enough of life to know that the truth, no matter how strange, was always more comforting than a sweet falsehood. So when he told me about the summer of 1957, I listened with a chill that no August heat could warm.

Elias grew up in the flat, endless plains of Nebraska, on a farm that had been in his family for three generations. A mile down a dusty, unpaved road stood a small, weathered bar called The Rusty Nail. In those days, the owner didn’t care if teenagers came in to shoot pool, as long as they didn’t drink. So on a sweltering evening, Elias, fifteen, and his older brother, Benjamin, who was on crutches from a football injury, walked that familiar path. They played pool until the clock struck eleven-thirty, the only sounds the clack of balls and the murmur of old men.

As they stepped out into the humid darkness, the only light came from the bar’s flickering sign and the half-moon overhead. They started their slow walk home, Benjamin’s crutches thudding rhythmically on the packed earth. The cornfields on either side of the road stood tall and silent, a wall of green that seemed to breathe. About halfway, Benjamin stopped, his face pale in the moonlight. ‘Eli,’ he whispered, ‘don’t look, but there’s something in the corn, keeping pace with us.’

Elias felt a primal dread, but he couldn’t resist a glance. There, at the edge of the field, was a shape. It was tall, impossibly tall, at least eight feet, and completely black, like a cutout in the night. It had no discernible face or features, just a void that absorbed the moonlight. And it was moving, not walking, but gliding, parallel to them, and it stopped whenever they stopped. Elias’s heart hammered. He picked up a rock from the road and hurled it at the figure. The rock passed straight through it, as if it were a shadow made solid. He threw another, and another, but nothing happened.

Benjamin’s breath came in ragged gasps. ‘We need to run,’ he said, but his crutches made that impossible. So they quickened their pace as much as they could, the figure matching them step for step, a silent stalker. Elias felt a cold that had nothing to do with the night. He remembered his grandfather’s old tales of the ‘Harvest Man,’ a spirit that roamed the fields during the summer, waiting for the careless. He had never believed them, until now.

They reached the farmhouse, their lungs burning, and slammed the door behind them. Elias peered through the window, but the figure was gone. He thought it was over, but as he turned, he saw it. It was standing at the far edge of the corn, just a silhouette, but it was raising what looked like a long, thin arm, pointing directly at the house. Then it dissolved into the shadows.

The next morning, Elias told his father, who dismissed it as a trick of the light and too much imagination. But Benjamin refused to walk that road again, and they used the car for a week. Elias never forgot that night. He carried the memory like a stone in his chest. It was only years later, after Benjamin died in Vietnam, that Elias returned to that farm. He walked the same road at dusk, hoping to see the figure one last time, to ask it what it wanted. But the road was empty. The only thing that remained was a single, odd-shaped stone at the spot where Benjamin had first stopped. Elias picked it up, and it was warm to the touch, even in the cool evening. He put it in his pocket and never spoke of it again, until he told me.

Now, as I stand on that same road, the corn rustling in the wind, I understand the weight of his words. I look to the edge of the field, and I see a tall, black shape. It is motionless, waiting. I feel a pull, an invitation. And I know, with a certainty that chills me to the bone, that the Harvest Man has been waiting for me all along.