The church bell started to ring, deafeningly loud inside the quiet room.
“Let him down, you bastard,” Lizzy yelled at the man she thought had died seven decades earlier. She took a swing at his head with the flashlight, trying to fight him off and save Rich, but he caught her hand easily and laughed in her face. Behind them Rich’s face was turning blue and his eyes were starting to bulge out a little from the pressure. “Stop! You’re killing him!” Lizzy screamed.
“That’s the idea,” Joshua said. “Here, have a closer look at the wages of your sin.”
He lifted Lizzy off her feet and held her up face-to-face with Rich, whose eyes were bleeding now, and he’d all but stopped struggling. For a moment, he recognized her, tried to move his lips to say something, but then he was gone, hanging limp on the end of the rope as his bowels and bladder let loose.
“Noooooo!”
Lizzy cried out, unable to believe the love of her life was dead.
She tried to lash out at the reverend, to kick and punch and smash and scratch, and pull out his long, greasy hair—anything that would inflict pain to this hulking man-monster holding her off the ground easily, as if she were a child. Nothing she did had much of an effect on him though, and her will to fight back was running out. Without Rich, what reason did she have to live? Murdering her would be a blessing.
The scarecrow drew her closer, smiling down at her misery, letting her get a good long look at his rotted black mouth. The flashlight slipped out of her quivering hand and dropped to the floor, breaking the bulb and snuffing out the only light in the room. Lizzy was shocked to realize that the reverend’s eyes somehow glowed in the dark, two small green fires in the gloom, but thankfully he closed them when he leaned in for the kill. Apparently he didn’t need to see the look of terror on her face anymore.
And his teeth could easily find their way to her throat in the darkness.
The tolling of the church bell startled both Kelly and Dan awake out of a sound sleep, but it wasn’t until it had rung several more times that they were lucid enough to realize the loud noise wasn’t part of their dreams and start to wonder what the heck was going on. Kelly sat up, reaching over to feel for Dan beside her in their joined sleeping bags. It was pitch-black inside the reception area and for a moment she panicked, thinking he, Lizzy, and Rich might be gone and she was left here all alone. Thankfully her hand touched his warm, familiar chest and he sat up next to her.
“What’s happening?” Dan asked.
“No idea,” Kelly answered. “I just woke up to this too. Rich? Lizzy?”
When neither of their friends responded, Dan felt around and finally found his flashlight. Clicking it on chased the darkness away and showed them that Rich and Lizzy were no longer sleeping in the room with them, but it still gave them no answer as to why someone would be making such a racket in the middle of the night or who was doing it.
“You dressed?” Dan asked.
“Yep. Fell asleep with my clothes on.”
“Me too. Come on then…let’s find out what’s going on.”
Together they walked into the front room, hearing some commotion going on above their heads, but it wasn’t until they were just about at the foot of the stairs leading up to the bell tower when they heard Lizzy start to scream. Kelly had never heard her best friend make a sound like that before but it was undeniably her voice, and it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Deep down she knew it hadn’t been simply a shout of surprise or even a cry of fear; it had been a soul-tearing scream of unbearable pain and suffering and Kelly skidded to a stop, not wanting to move another inch up the stairs to find out what had happened. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.
“Come on, Kel. Move your ass. Sounds like she’s in trouble.”
Dan dragged her up the stairs as quickly as he could, flashlight probing ahead with one hand and Kelly slowing him down in the other. As they neared the top of the stairs, Rich’s head and shoulders were what came into view in the circle of light first. He was staring right at them but there was blood on his face and his tongue was oddly sticking out of his mouth. Something was obviously wrong with him.
“Rich!” Dan shouted. “What the hell are you…?” he started to say, but the words trailed away as they crested the stairs and the flashlight beam traveled down his body and they saw Rich’s feet were hovering four inches off the ground. It was only then that they smelled Rich’s evacuated bowels and noticed the thin rope wrapped tightly around their friend’s neck.
Kelly screamed her throat sore but the real terror didn’t set in until Dan heard slurping noises off to their left and slowly swung the beam of light in that direction. In the corner of the room a huge man was pinning Lizzy
to the floor, with his head buried in her stomach, tearing huge chunks of flesh and muscle out of his way, trying to get into the sweet meat within her. Lizzy was already dead, a huge hole torn in her throat so deep they could see the bony coils of her spinal column glinting in the flashlight beam. When the light hit them, Lizzy’s killer lifted his head and smiled, his leathery face painted red from the eyes down.
“Sweet Mary, mother of God!” Dan said, unconsciously making the sign of the cross on his chest. “It’s…it’s him! Joshua Miller!”
“That’s
Reverend
Miller to you, heathen!” the scarecrow said. “Care for a taste?” He laughed and went back to his feast, burying his face into Lizzy’s belly again.
Kelly made a move to go after him, to somehow try and help her friend even though she knew they were too late to save her. Dan grabbed her arm though and pulled her in the opposite direction, dragging her back down the stairs. He had no idea where they could go but anywhere other than here seemed like a good place to start.
“Run, Kelly!” Dan shouted, taking the stairs two at a time and hoping his shocked girlfriend would be able to keep up.
“That’s it,” Reverend Miller shouted down the stairs after them, still enjoying his gruesome meal. “Go ahead and run, boy…but it won’t do you a lick of good. You hear me? Not a lick!”
Dan and Kelly heard him all right, but it wasn’t about to stop them from trying. The chase was on and giving up wasn’t one of their options. They planned on running hard and running fast, like the devil himself was on their tail.
And he was…
At the bottom of the tower stairs, Dan suddenly pulled to a stop. Kelly tried to continue on out the front door of the church, to get as far of a head start on the monstrosity upstairs as they could before it finished feeding, but her boyfriend still had a hold of her hand and brought her to a halt with him.
“Why are you stopping?” she asked. “We have to get the hell out of here!”
“Hold on a sec,” Dan whispered, trying to remain calm and think. “Running outside’s exactly what he’ll expect us to do. Come with me…and be quiet.” He shut off the flashlight to hide their movements.
It was incredibly hard not to run outside into the open air to hide in the cornfield or try making it all the way over to the woods, but Kelly trusted Dan to take care of her and as quietly as they could they stepped away from the doorway and silently slid inside the large coatroom and closed the door. It was hot and dark inside the walk-in closet but there was nothing they could do about that. They couldn’t open the door and there was no way they could risk turning on the flashlight. Not yet, anyway. Dan held Kelly in his arms and they silently waited to see if their ruse had worked.
Moments later, they heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs and for a few excruciatingly long seconds
Reverend Miller stopped in the doorway, probably trying to decide which way they’d gone. The longer he just stood there doing nothing, the surer Kelly was that he knew they were still inside the church. At any moment, she expected the coatroom door to be yanked open and the creature who had once been a man to charge inside and start ripping them limb from limb. She pictured poor sweet Lizzy lying upstairs covered in bite marks and nearly lost it, biting her cheek to hold in the screams that fought to get out.
Just when the tension hit unbearable levels, they heard the reverend curse and run outside. He stomped down the stairs and headed off into the night, finally allowing Dan and Kelly a chance to breathe. They were safe for the moment, but they both knew that wouldn’t last for long. If Joshua didn’t find signs of them outside soon, he’d backtrack and eventually realize they were still inside the church.
“What’s happening, Dan?” Kelly asked. “How is that awful thing alive? Joshua Miller had to have died seventy-four years ago. None of this is possible!”
“Shhh…Kel, quiet down. I don’t know what the fuck’s gong on here either but we can’t worry about all that right now. If we panic, we’re dead.”
“But what are we gonna do? We can’t stay in here. He’ll come back and find us…you know he will.”
“We’ll be gone before he gets here. We’re just gonna give him a minute to get into the fields or go over by our tents or whatever, then we’re going to sneak off in the opposite direction.”
“How are we gonna know which way he went? We might run right into his arms.”
“Hopefully we’ll see him out there. He’s not the one hiding, right, so he should be easy to spot. That’s why I
wanted to give him the slip like this. Our odds are far better if we’re behind him than out front…if we’re the hunters instead of the other way around.”
Kelly took a deep breath and tried to relax a little. If she had any hope of getting out of this field alive she knew she needed to stay as calm as possible and do exactly what Dan told her to. She backed up a step to lean against the wall, and when she did her hand brushed up against something soft. Confused, she felt around a little and traced her hand down a length of fabric until her fingers touched skin to skin with what she was sure were the fingers of someone’s cold hand.
Too
cold. Kelly was too frightened to even guess who this might be, but through her mounting fear she was coherent enough to realize there were only two possible choices.
Don’t scream…don’t scream…don’t scream,
Kelly thought.
“Dan?” she said softly, barely able to breathe.
“Just thirty more seconds, honey…promise.”
“Dan?” she tried again, frozen in fear on the spot.
“What?”
“Turn the light on please. I don’t think we’re alone in here.”
Without a word, Dan pulled Kelly toward him and turned on the flashlight. He kept it pointed to the back of the coatroom so as little of the light would seep under the closet door as possible but there was no doubt he was giving their position away if he left the light on for long. Turned out he only needed the light on for about three seconds, more than enough time for them to see their friend Pat’s body hanging upside down from one of the steel hooks on the wall normally used to hold parishioners’ jackets. Pat had been beaten to death, the exposed skin of his arms, neck, and face swollen and bruised black
and purple to the point it was difficult to recognize him anymore. His skull was deformed, violently crushed like a fragile eggshell beneath a great weight and there was a puddle of dried black blood pooled on the hardwood floor beneath where he hung.
Kelly screamed.
Long and loud.
She’d tried her very best not to, but ever since seeing what Joshua had been doing to Lizzy upstairs she’d been on the verge of losing her mind. Seeing Pat like this pushed her even closer to the brink, hovering right on the edge of the abyss. Dan clamped his hand over her mouth and she quickly regained her focus but the damage was likely already done. No matter where the beastly reverend was, unless he’d traveled far off into the field already, he’d have heard Kelly scream and knew where they were hiding.
Dan switched the light back off and they huddled together in the darkness.
“I’m sorry,” Kelly said, starting to cry. “I…I just…I couldn’t…”
“Shh…it’s okay. Maybe he didn’t hear you?”
Within seconds they heard the sound of someone running, of footsteps climbing the outside stairs and entering the church, of labored breathing just on the other side of the coatroom door. Even though it was too dark to see, Dan and Kelly could both hear the knob into the room start to turn and the door slowly start to open.
Dan used the only weapon he had—the flashlight—to defend them, standing up and swinging it as hard as he could a little over his own head, up where he believed the face and head of their would-be killer was. The metal-handled flashlight was fairly hefty and would put a decent-size dent in Joshua’s head if he was lucky enough to catch
him unprepared. Dan’s hand passed right by where he was sure Reverend Miller’s head would be and thudded hard against the wooden door frame, the impact accidently turning the flashlight back on, illuminating the room. There was someone standing there in the doorway all right, but it wasn’t who’d they’d been expecting. The demented scarecrow was nowhere in sight.
Shivering in the doorway was Malcolm Tucker.
Kelly’s grandfather was soaking wet and looked totally exhausted hunched over in the doorway, seemingly oblivious to the fact—or just not giving a damn—that he’d barely missed having his head taken off by Dan’s metal flashlight passing inches above his head a few seconds earlier.
“Gramps?” Kelly said, bewildered to see him standing there. She even went as far as to reach out to touch his arm just to convince herself he was actually there. She’d already witnessed a man dead for over seven decades come back to life tonight, so why not a ghostly visit from her grandfather as well? This was no apparition though; Kelly’s hands touched his wet raincoat and held his icy, trembling hands and knew that for whatever reason, Malcolm had come back to Miller’s Grove for real.
“What on earth are you—?”
“There’s no time for talk,” Malcolm interrupted. His journey today had been long and had nearly killed him, but he knew he’d arrived without a moment to spare and that time was of the essence. He tried his best to not look at the battered corpse hanging on a hook behind his granddaughter, choosing to focus only on her in the hopes she’d concentrate on what he had to say. “Listen, I’ve seen him…the reverend. Outside. He was halfway across the field, out behind your tents, and I just had time to lie down and he somehow ran right by without
noticing me. Transformed into God knows what, but I recognized him the moment I saw him. I let him run out of sight before I dared get back on my feet, and then I heard you scream. We don’t have much time, angel. If I heard you…chances are he heard you too. We gotta get out of here.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” Dan said, fiddling with the flashlight but having some sort of difficulty.
“What’s wrong?” Kelly asked.
“I can’t shut the light off. Banging it against the frame dented it and it’s stuck on. We can’t walk out there like this.”
“Leave it then,” Malcolm said. “Maybe it will draw Joshua to the church and give us a chance to slip past him.” Nodding to Pat’s dead body behind them, he asked, “Anyone else still alive?”
Both Dan and Kelly shook their heads no.
“Let’s go then. Follow me.”
Dan put Kelly between them and took up the rear, leaving their flashlight burning brightly in the coatroom just as Malcolm had suggested. At least the rain had stopped, but it was still a cold, miserable night outside. At the doorway, they paused only long enough for a quick peek, and once they saw no one standing in their way they made a run for it. If they could make it into the cornfield without being spotted they just might have a chance.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be. Joshua Miller silently stepped out of the tall stalks thirty feet to their right, holding in his clawed hands a wicked-looking scythe with a long wooden handle. Just the site of the dripping-wet seven-foot-tall scarecrow with smoldering green eyes carrying a deadly weapon froze them in their tracks, not sure whether they should head for the cover
of the corn or try to make it back into the church. Neither prospect seemed advantageous, both of them almost certainly leading to the same inevitable conclusion.
Reverend Miller just stood still. Daring them to make their choice.
“Run for the field, Dan,” Malcolm said. “Take Kelly and try to make it back to your quads. If you can get to them—”
“What quads?” Dan asked. “We came on foot. Let’s head back to—”
“No. Listen to me. I saw a pair of 4×4 ATVs on the trail just inside the woods, beside the big rock with the White Magic carving on it. Fifteen or twenty minutes from here. Did you come that way?”
“Yes,” Kelly said. “I know the clearing you mean, but we’re not leaving without you. We can all go.”
“We can’t. We’ll never make it, but you two might if I can hold him off for you.”
“No way, Gramps. I’m not leaving you here. Why would you even say that?”
“Because I’m the one with the gun.” Malcolm pulled the Smith & Wesson from the inside pocket of his jacket and showed it to them. Its blue steel barrel shone like black ice in the dim light of the moon trying to break through the clouds. “I’ll either kill him…or die trying. To be honest, I’m okay with either one. I’ve lived too damn long anyway. It’s you two that have a future together so get moving.”
“No. I…I can’t leave you here.”
“I love you too, angel, but please do this for me.” Malcolm hugged Kelly and kissed her on the forehead good-bye. “Get her out of here, Dan. Even if you have to drag her. This is the only chance we’ve got. Move!”
Dan nodded, tears in his eyes too, and took hold of
Kelly’s hand. “We’ll wait for you at the quads. Kill him and get your ass over there.”
Malcolm and Dan exchanged a glance, both of the men knowing it would never happen but trying to say something to get Kelly moving. “Okay, I will. If I’m not there in half an hour, leave without me…but I’ll be there.”
“You promise?” Kelly asked, reduced to a child again, her heart winning the battle over her head, hoping somehow the two men she loved more than any others in the world were telling the truth.
“I promise. Now get your ass moving.”
Dan started running for the field, at first having to pull Kelly behind him but she steeled her nerves and turned away, keeping up with her boyfriend as they made their escape.
Malcolm watched them disappear into the tall cornstalks and out of the corner of his eye he saw what had become of Reverend Miller start moving for the field himself.
“Wait, Joshua!” he cried out, seeing the hulking man-monster stop to look his way. “They’re only kids. It’s me that you want…not them.”
Joshua started to laugh, amused by the old man’s bravado. “And just why would I possibly want a broken-down old fool like you, pray tell?”
“Because my name’s Malcolm Tucker and I lived here in the Grove. It was my father who did this to you…and I’ve come back to finish what he started.”
The scarecrow’s laughter died away. He took a few steps in Malcolm’s direction, away from the field. For every minute Malcolm could keep him talking, Kelly’s odds of getting away from here went up.
“You’re the hell spawn of Angus Tucker?”
“If that’s what you want to call me, yes. He was my father and ten times the man you ever were.”
“He was a filthy backstabbing coward. Him and the rest of the elders. They destroyed the beautiful life we had here, everything we’d worked so damn hard to accomplish. If I ever see him again, I’ll tear him from—”
“He died forty-one years ago, back in 1969, surrounded by people who loved him. He’s in heaven now, a place you’ll never get to see, so you won’t be doing anything to him. Besides, it wasn’t he who destroyed the Grove…it was you and your evil greed. You brought this curse upon yourself. You and the Man in Black. Only the fires of hell wait for you now, Joshua. Eternal damnation.”
“Maybe so, Tucker…but I’ve got a feeling that might be a better future than what fate has in store for you.”
The scarecrow started walking toward Malcolm, finished talking and coming for blood now. Malcolm steadied his nerves, said a quick prayer, and aimed his father’s gun at Reverend Miller’s massive chest. His first shot went high and wide, grazing Joshua’s left shoulder, but all of the other five bullets found their mark, the rounds striking one after the other into the bloated gray stomach and chest of the abomination closing the distance between them.
Powerful bullets like that would have ripped a normal man’s flesh ragged, tearing through his internal organs and exiting out his back through holes the size of a fist. Joshua Miller was far from normal though.