31: Giant Pumpkins And A Corn Maze
Jeraheim Farm had been around for years and years, but the city was starting to close it in. First the lower patch of land had been bought out to make room for a freeway -- which also, incidentally, cut the farm off from the little pond next door. That pond hadn’t technically been a part of the property, but it had always been an added benefit of living there. Then that developer had come by and asked to purchase some of the land that was being used as an orange grove and Alistair Jeraheim, patriarch of the family at the time, had naively said that would be a good idea in the long run. Condos had gone up not a year later, and then those condos had needed a parking lot, and that was another piece of the farm gone. The addition of the parking lot taught the Jeraheim family a lesson -- when someone wanted them to sell, it wasn’t really a question. A group of city lawyers wielding a few arcane pieces of legislation were going to get the land, one way or the other.
Eventually, the farm had shrunk so much that it was little more than a pit stop on the side of the road. They sold a few fresh tomatoes they had grown, and a few sprigs of basil and hothouse cucumbers that they hadn’t grown. They were a vegetable stand, a place for middle-classers to go when they wanted to feel marginally more knowledgeable about their food than the people who went to the grocery store. They also grew corn, which wasn’t considered good enough for people to eat since it wasn’t bloated with hormones and insecticides and whatever else. They sold the corn to a company that processed it into feed for pigs.
Abraham Jeraheim didn’t tell anyone, but the rumor started going around town anyway that the farm was going to close down after this season. You couldn’t fight progress. The sad history of his family had taught him that lesson well.
But when October rolled around, in celebration of Halloween and the harvest and all the traditional signposts of autumn, Jeraheim Farm extended its hours nonetheless and held their annual Harvest Festival. They stacked up bales of hay for children to climb on and carved a maze into the corn, just like they did every year. They rented a few ponies and port-a-potties, and opened their doors to the community.
“We’re going to do it bigger this year,” said Abraham to his family. “Really do it up.” And he went out into the field, setting up a few new attractions that he hoped would draw in greater numbers of curious city folk.
“I figure it’s about time we let them see what we’re all about,” he said.
Gabe and Zoe were supposed to meet with a group of their friends before heading out for Halloween, but they got a group text saying that Morgan’s parents had found a pipe in her room so she was grounded. That was bad news, because Morgan was the only one in the group who had regular access to a car.
“Did you ask Duke?” Zoe asked. She was already in her costume (“Bearly Legal”, she was calling it, though Gabe had suggested “Slutty Bear”). She was determined to make something fun happen.
Gabe had already asked Duke, but Duke’s older brother had the car for the night, so Duke wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to get out to them at all. He had asked if they could just take a train and meet him closer to the city.
Zoe cursed her parents for deciding it was a good idea to live in the Valley. “Throw mine in there with ‘em,” said Gabe. “I live on the block too, remember. It’s not like you’re the only family who has to deal with it.”
“Fine,” said Zoe. “Your parents are also assholes.”
“It’s not so bad. Look.” Gabe pulled up a window on the web browser on his iPad, and a garish little website popped up, displaying a parade of glittery graphics of skeletons and dancing scarecrows. “We could go here.”
Zoe grimaced as she looked at the ugly little pictures. “It looks like the home page for a kids’ sing-along. Or a juice party at a nursing home.”
“It’s Jeraheim Farms.” Zoe looked at him blankly. “That little farm stand a couple blocks from here? They do a Halloween festival every year. So we could...”
“Oh my God, you’re not serious.”
“Look, it says they have giant pumpkins and a corn maze. Who could turn that down?” Gabe shot a devilish grin at Zoe. “A corn maze on Halloween!”
Zoe was just about to tell Gabe where he could stick his corn maze when Gabe opened up one of the cardboard flaps on the halfhearted robot costume around his arm and pulled out a bottle of a clear liquid. He opened it up and the alcohol smell hit Zoe right between the eyes.
“See? We can make it fun.”
She grabbed the bottle and took a swig. Immediately she winced. “Ugh! Did you get this from a janitor’s closet?”
“It’s 151. It’s to put in shots when you want to set them on fire.”
“I can tell,” she said. “Okay. Maybe the corn maze could be fun if we do it this way.”
“And the giant pumpkins,” said Gabe with a grin. “You can’t forget about those.”
Abraham thought the night was going well. Halloween was the biggest day of the Harvest Festival, and he had made sure to pull out all the stops. He had told his family to wait in the house for the festival to start, and come outside himself to man the ticket booth. Two teenagers walked up to the window.
“Welcome to Jeraheim Farms!” he said. “It’s been a busy night and we’re glad you could make it.”
The boy, who was in some kind of terrible robot getup, glanced briefly at the prices posted on the board behind Abe. The girl was dressed like a whore.
“How much to do the corn maze?” the boy asked.
“Regular pass is fifteen dollars,” Abe said. “Course, if you wait around until ten, we’re doing the festival’s grand finale. That’s twenty dollars. You can hang out with the pumpkins and try some of our games until then.”
“We might as well do the grand finale if we’re here, right?” said the boy. The girl rolled her eyes at him but didn’t protest, and they handed over forty dollars.
“All right,” said Abraham. He gave what he thought was his most winning smile. “Good. The grand finale starts in about an hour, so you all just enjoy yourselves until then.”
“What do you think the grand finale is?” Zoe tossed a dried little gourd stem in front of them. She let out a gasp of sarcastic mock excitement. “Maybe they turn on a second smoke machine?”
“Come on, this place is charming.” Gabe sat next to one of the big, orange pumpkins that had been rolled out near the edges of the corn maze. A paper sign nearby invited people to guess the pumpkin’s weight. “Here, take my picture.”
Zoe snapped a shot with her phone. She looked at the photo and frowned.
“The color of the pumpkin is gross. It’s too red or something. It looks all bloated.”
“Wow,” said Gabe. “You’re really reaching now, Zoe.”
“Seriously, look at that thing. It’s like a tumor.”
Gabe stared at the giant pumpkin. It looked mostly like a giant pumpkin to him, he thought. But on the other hand, maybe there was something a little off-putting about it. It seemed almost sweaty, like a layer of sickly skin had been stretched across its surface. It almost seemed to throb, like the beat of a giant heart.
“Pumpkins are just gross, I guess. When I was a kid we would carve jack-o-lanterns and I’d be afraid to scoop out the insides because I didn’t like that people called them ‘guts’.”
“You pussy,” said Zoe. “Check it out, someone smashed that one.”
They walked a little ways across the hay-lined yard, passing scattered groups of excited children and bored parents and half-embarrassed teens, and arrived at one of the other giant pumpkins that had been set up for the display. It looked like it had been kicked in. A spray of pumpkin chunks formed a little corona around the destroyed shell.
“Who would do that?” Gabe actually looked sad, like he cared about this violation of the spirit of the holiday.
Zoe shot Gabe a sarcastic look. “Yeah, who’d disrespect a place as magical as this? It’s like going to Disneyland and crapping on Mickey.”
“I’m supposed to be at a party, Gabe.”
Gabe’s phone buzzed and he looked at it. “Well, maybe we can bring the party here. I just heard from Duke -- he’s got the car and he’s on his way.”
Ten o’clock came at last, and Abraham realized he had been staring mindlessly at the clock for almost a half hour. He’d been preparing for this for a long time. Now it was finally here. He checked that the maze was ready to go, paying special attention to the supply of fog juice in the fog machine. That machine sucked that juice down like nobody’s business, and was running on fumes more often than not.
He found himself wiping a tear away, and was surprised at this little pang of unexpected emotion. But then, this was more than just the grand finale of this year’s festival, after all. This was the culmination of years of family history and decline. Whatever Jeraheim Farms became after this, it would no longer be the child-friendly bulwark of the community that it had once been.
Abraham thought back to the time he had provided bales of hay for an event at the nearby elementary school. He’d driven his pickup truck and the children had all cheered to see him. He’d tossed out the hay onto the soccer field and had felt like a hero. But now the town had forgotten him and his family.
Well, there were forty people in line for the corn maze. If everything went the way it was supposed to, they wouldn’t forget this night, at least.
He checked in with Edgar, his son. Edgar gave him a thumbs up and then disappeared into the corn. For an extra moment, the light glinting off his overalls made a little pair of dots between the plants. Then he was gone.
“You know, I think that guy came to our school once,” Zoe whispered as she watched the man from the ticket booth run around. “They were supposed to do some sort of farm demonstration and he showed up his truck and starting driving around, throwing hay bales all over the place like a maniac. I think the principal was pissed.”
“I must have been out that day,” said Gabe.
“It was really embarassing. We all felt bad for him.”
The scarecrow at the entrance to the corn maze lit up suddenly, and manufactured smoke poured out of the ground around it from a poorly-hidden fogger. The ticket booth guy shuffled up and addressed the line.
“The late hour has struck!” he said in a stagey, forced-deep voice. “Enter the maze... if you dare!” Most people dared, and the line started moving forward.
“Why isn’t Duke here yet?” asked Zoe.
“I’ll text him again,” said Gabe. “Maybe we can meet him inside.”
They lingered around the front of the maze entrance for a few minutes longer, but they quickly stood out as the only people left to go inside. “Are you afraid?” asked the ticket booth man with a narrowing of his eyes. “No refunds for chickens.”
Zoe said they weren’t afraid, and they headed inside. A few feet in, she grabbed Gabe and pulled him into the corn.
“Zoe, I had no idea!” Gabe gave a cartoonish arch of his eyebrows and made a kissy face. Zoe grimaced and shoved him away.
“I don’t want to go through without Duke. He’s going to be pissed if he drives all the way out here and finds out we didn’t even wait for him.”
Gabe said he’d text Duke again. They waited among the cornstalks for a bit, listening as a few shrieks and screams echoed from inside the maze. “Something scary is in there,” said Gabe. “Come on, they’re going to shut this down before we even get to go through.”
“I don’t want to go without Duke!” Zoe wasn’t going to budge on that, it seemed. Fortunately, Gabe’s phone vibrated right then. He glanced at it.
“It’s Duke. He says he’s going to meet us in the maze. He didn’t bring twenty dollars so he’s just going to sneak in.”
Zoe nodded. That seemed okay.
So finally, they stepped out of the corn and walked around the dark corner carved into the crop. A scarecrow was propped in the middle of the path, and Zoe grabbed Gabe’s arm in mock terror.
“You can ask if you want me to hold you tight,” said Gabe.
“Right back at you,” said Zoe.
They walked further a little way. A line of bats on a string hung overhead.
Zoe almost pouted. “Is this all it’s going to be?”
“It can’t be. We heard people yelling, right?” In punctuation, another set of screams rang out from somewhere deeper in the maze. “See? It must pick up later on. Let’s go.”
They turned another corner and came to a dead end, which turned out to be a good opportunity to draw another drink from Gabe’s hidden flask. After they had both had a drink, Gabe went to grab the bottle from Zoe, but she said she wanted to hold onto it and stuck it in the furry hip of the “bear” skirt that she was wearing. Then they turned to retrace their steps.
A hulking man in overalls stood in the middle of the path, surrounded by the red light of a lantern hidden somewhere inside the corn. Zoe screamed, and the man leaped to the side and disappeared between two stalks.
Gabe laughed. Zoe shook her head. “Shut up. That’s not fair.”
“They got you,” Gabe said with a smile.
“They just startled me. That’s not the same thing.”
They walked a little further into the maze, past a trail of plastic intestines, stomachs, and kidneys. Gabe tied them some of the guts around his neck like a noose and told Zoe to take a picture. She was holding out her camera when she felt a little puff of air on her neck. She turned, and the giant man was standing right beside her. She could see that he wore an almost-featureless mask, and little bits of straw stuck out of his overalls.
The man slunk back into the corn and Gabe laughed again. “Maybe they heard you whining about this place. They want you to admit this is scary.”
“That guy was too close.” Zoe called out, “You’re not allowed to touch in these things!” No one answered.
Off in the distance, they heard another scream. This one sounded like a boy. “Is that Duke?” Zoe looked in the direction of the scream, but that was pointless -- the stalks of corn blocked all vision except for a narrow path leading forward.
They got to the next turn, and Zoe grimaced as she stepped in a puddle of mud that sucked over her shoes and clung nastily to her stockings. She heard Gabe whistle softly and then looked down, and then she had to remind herself that this was just a haunted maze, because the puddle she had stepped in was dark red and warm, with a fringe of meaty pieces along its edges.
“Come on. Let’s keep going.”
“I hope this place pays for my dry cleaning.”
A plastic skeleton hung around the next corner, near a wooden sign that read “Boo!” They were really mixing up the quality of the scares, Zoe observed. Gabe said they must be getting a better version of the maze than normal, because this was the “grand finale”.
More people jumped out at them in the next corridor. Gabe was impressed by the way they moved. They didn’t jump out with their arms forward like cartoon vampires, only to sneak backwards once they were discovered. These people circled them, racing and darting through the corn in front of them and then behind, sometimes approaching, sometimes keeping their distance, but always moving as if they had planned it this way.
“We’re getting some special attention,” said Zoe as a woman crawled out of the corn in front of them, blood running over her face from a nasty-looking wound in her forehead. The woman whispered for help, and then was pulled back into the darkness to the sides of the maze. There was the sound of something cracking and a nasty little grunt. Gabe giggled.
They passed another pile of organs, this one accented with bones and severed limbs. Gabe got too close to it and reeled. “Wow, there’s a smell,” he said, cheerfully. “That’s awful!”
“Come on. I want to get out of here.”
Zoe grabbed Gabe’s hand and pulled him forward. She was starting to feel like something was wrong. The screams around them had gone silent. In fact, everything was silent now, except for the corn occasionally rustling as figures moved around them, hidden in the dark of the night. Zoe had been through haunted mazes before. They weren’t usually like this.
They came upon another dead end, and when they turned, another figure stood in front of them for a moment before running off to the side. “This is pretty intense,” said Gabe, trying to keep a brave smile on his face.
Zoe wondered why Duke hadn’t met up with them yet.
Then came around the corner and saw the heads impaled on metal spikes, their eyes bugged in surprise and terror. Some of them still dripped with a dark substance that didn’t look very plastic at all. Zoe stared at them for a second, and then started to scream.
Gabe saw what she was screaming about, and he stumbled backwards, nearly falling into the corn. One of the heads was familiar. He recognized the pale green eyes in the weird light of the corn maze. It was Duke.
He was about to say it was just a coincidence when he turned around and saw the people from the maze standing in a group now, and they were holding cleavers and bats and rusty chains. They wordlessly moved forward, their faces all masked by the strange wooden shells.
“Zoe,” Gabe whispered. “Run.”
Then one of the figures was on top of him, and the blade drove into his skull.
Abraham listened for the final scream from inside the maze, then nodded. That was it, then. It was over. It was time to reunite with his family.
He walked from the ticket booth and stepped across the abandoned sales area of the farm, toward the old house where he had grown up. It was the house where Alistair had given him the old secrets, the ones no one was ever supposed to use.
He stepped inside the house and slogged across the creaking floor toward the basement door, letting his fingers linger on the old family portraits. Then he pushed open the white door that led below, and stared down into the darkness. He began his descent.
Zoe brushed the dry, prickly stalks of corn out of her face, trying not to listen to the footsteps behind her as the monsters from the maze chased after her. The final sound that had come out of Gabe would stay with her, she knew. That little gasp of air and then sigh, and the way he had tried to bargain in the final moments -- the way he had said “No, please, wait,” even when he’d already been killed and was already sinking to the ground.
The maze was a slaughterhouse. The people weren’t actors. They were really killing everybody inside. Zoe thought it wasn’t fair. She didn’t want to die in this roadside vegetable stand. She hadn’t even wanted to go to this roadside vegetable stand.
Then the corn parted in front of her, and it took her a moment to realize that she was out of the corn. She looked behind her -- bad idea. Dark shapes were rustling out of the stalks, coming toward her. She kept running.
The front door of the nearby house was open. The lights were on in the living room. Light. That was all she needed. She ran to the light, thinking about how she was supposed to be at Nancy’s party right now. The thought struck her as both funny and tragic.
Zoe tore into the house, screaming out for help. There was no response, but she heard a door swing closed down the hall. “Anybody, please!” she shrieked, even as her brain put a few coherent thoughts together and told her that maybe, just maybe, running into the house on the property of the murder maze might not have been the best idea.
Then the front door exploded open behind her and the figures from the maze burst in, and in the light from the other room she realized that she couldn’t see where their masks began and their flesh ended, or if they even had flesh. They were just faceless creatures, with the hint of eyebrows and an open mouth etched into the curves of the rough surface that passed for skin.
There wasn’t time to rethink this, then. Zoe ran to the back of the house as the creatures marched forward to her. She reached a white door in the center of a long hall decorated with ugly photos of a grim-looking family -- the Jeraheims, she supposed -- and pulled it open. A set of stairs led down into black pitch.
There was nowhere else to go, so even though she knew it was the second worst possible option right now, she went down those stairs.
Enough light came in from the hallway that she could see a few feet in front of her before the room slipped away into inky black. She hurried forward into the silent room and she scrambled into a corner, remembering the things that had come after her. They didn’t seem to have eyes. Did they need the light to see?
She sat with her eyes closed as footsteps creaked the steps. The creatures from the maze were in the room. She tried to lay still and not make a sound.
There was a dry little flick and a match sprung into life a few feet away. Zoe stifled a scream as she saw the matchlight move and merge with the wick of a candle. The flickering light cast insane shadows over the figure of the man from the ticket booth, who looked sick in the light’s yellow glow.
“There she is,” said the man. “Take her.”
His voice quavered as he spoke, and Zoe could see that he was leaning on some kind of support. It looked like it might have been a barrel. Maybe the candle was playing tricks on her eyes, but she thought the man looked significantly worse than he had been just a few minutes before, back in the crisp night air.
Regardless of how he looked, the creatures from the maze listened to him, and began shuffling down the stairs, one after the next.
“Why are you doing this?” she cried. “What are those things?”
“My family,” said the man, and then he coughed, and the candle tilted, and Zoe saw that he wasn’t standing over a barrel. It was some kind of podium, made of marble or granite or some other stone. The top had been hollowed out, creating a bowl, and Zoe thought of an old birdbath that had been in her grandmother’s front yard when she was a child. Except this bowl was filled with a dark liquid that must have been blood, and the blood was coming from the freshly-slashed wrists of the old man.
He’d cut himself open, and he was bleeding into the bowl, as if he was doing some kind of sacrifice. The candle flickered brightly for another second, and Zoe saw that little beads were floating in the blood.
Not beads. Seeds. Pumpkin seeds and kernels of corn bobbed gently in the thick, viscous, red mess.
Then the creatures were on top of her, and they grabbed her by the arms and lifted her up, dragging her toward the center of the room. She kicked and tried to struggle, but the monsters’ grip was strong, and she couldn’t get away.
“Jeraheim Farms opened in 1865. We’ve been here for almost a hundred and fifty years, and now you people want to take all that away,” said the man, and Zoe could hear the venom underneath his weakened voice.
“I don’t want to take anything away!” tried Zoe, knowing it wouldn’t matter.
“You’re part of the city. You people are all the same. We’ve been working this land, and you think you can just take it. But this land is in our blood and veins. We’ve grown in this land, and it will nurture us again.”
Zoe looked at the creatures holding her, and saw how their fingers were wrapped and ridged like vines around her arms. “What did you do?” she cried.
“The land will let us live again,” he said. “If we give a sacrifice of blood.”
Then he slumped over, finally succumbing to the cuts that he had inflicted on himself. Zoe could still hear him breathing faintly, but when she called out to him, she got no answer. She was alone in the dark with the creatures from the maze.
She saw the figure of one of them walk up to the pedestal and grab a black knife, already stained with the blood of the man, and from God knew what else. The wooden men threw her forward, and she gasped as the rocky ritual bowl hit her stomach with a hollow clink.
Gabe’s bottle was still at her side. There wasn’t time to think about it, only to act. She remembered what Gabe had said -- it’s to put in shots when you want to set them on fire -- and then she was unscrewing the cap. As the creature with the knife came toward her, she shook the bottle out in front of her. It passed through the candle’s flame and landed on the figure.
It went up like a scarecrow. Flames danced from its arms and back. The other creatures staggered away, shielding themselves as the burning thing danced around the room, flailing its arms and shrieking from some unseen mouth. As it ran, boxes and timbers that had been stacked carelessly went up as well, and the entire room began to burn.
Zoe started to run for the stairs, but one of the creatures saw her. It reached out with its spindled green and brown fingers and wrapped itself around her wrist. The ritual -- whatever the ritual had been -- was interrupted. But Zoe wasn’t going to get out of here.
Then the flames spread, and the light got brighter, and even the darkest corner of the room could be seen. Piled in a corner, covered in flies, with maggots crawling over them, were the bodies of the Jeraheim family. Zoe recognized the mother and the two boys and the little girl from the ugly photos that had hung in the hall. They were grey and withered. It looked like they had been there for a while.
The creatures saw them too, and suddenly they weren’t holding Zoe any more. They stared at the bodies, and Zoe realized that there were four of them. Two of them were large and hulking, like strong young men. One of them was tall and thin and reedy, almost matronly. And one of them was shorter than the others, and had a figure that Zoe thought looked a bit like a little girl.
As the four things from the maze looked at the bodies that used to be them, they began to tremble -- whether with fear or rage or something else, Zoe couldn’t say. One of them threw back its head and with the sound of splintering wood, the lower half of its face parted, revealing a sort of jagged mouth filled with rows and rows of serrated teeth. The creature howled, and the sound was both sad and terrifying.
Zoe didn’t wait around to see what they would do. She bolted up the stairs and out of the house. She was outside, and she barely felt the cold ari as panic and despair flooded through her. She didn’t see the root coming out of the ground, and she tripped over it roughly as she ran. Her head hit the ground and everything went black.
A man grabbed her arm and she screamed again, trying to pull away. But as the world came back into focus, she looked up and saw that it was a police officer.
Behind her, the farmhouse was fully engulfed in flames.
“Please calm down, ma’am,” said the police officer. “Do you know what happened here?”
“They’re in the corn,” she said, and then she broke down sobbing.
Jeraheim Farms would be closed now, after years and years of disrespect, but the place hadn’t gone quietly. The Jeraheim family had taken an awful revenge in their final night.
Zoe sat with a blanket draped over her shoulders, resting against one of the giant pumpkins that decorated the little field. She watched the police officers run around in front of her, and she watched EMTs carry bodies out that were covered in plastic out of the maze. She wondered which of those bodies was Gabe, and then she tried not to wonder.
Those creatures in the maze had once been members of the family, but they had been slain and reborn as part of some dark ritual that mixed their blood with the earth. But now they were gone too. They had to be. They had all burned up in the basement of that awful house.
The pumpkin behind her pulsed for just a second and then exploded outwards, spraying Zoe with a mix of vegetable guts and red, rancid gore. She turned and saw a figure standing up in the center of the burst mass, naked and nearly featureless, masked by a face that might have been wood and had only slight indents where eyes and a mouth would be.
All around her, the giant pumpkins rippled and tore, wombs opening up in a violent spray of seed and flesh. And out of them, one by one, crawled monsters.
- Kevin Pedersen, October 31, 2013
