She didn’t look dead.
It had been two weeks now, with Jess’s corpse standing exposed to the elements – why wasn’t she withering or rotting yet?
“She looks bigger,” Mary Westprint announced, in a tone that conveyed how the very idea offended her. She folded her arms, waiting for the doctor to agree. “Do bodies swell with death gases or something? Inflate and release it before they shrivel up.”
“Like a balloon?” Doctor Ralder replied, not looking up from his examination. He didn’t sound impressed. Didn’t like having to come out here and perform another examination, with the last of the dusk sun dipping over the horizon of the cornfields.
The low light made the scene especially unpleasant, Mary appreciated, but they had to make sure the plan was going as intended. After all, the crops hadn’t shown especial growth yet, nor had the weather improved, suggesting something was wrong. Here Jess Crow stood, a criminal and fiend, arms pinioned out to her sides in a great cross, thorny vines binding her legs and shoulders to the post, the pumpkin mask hiding her lolling head. Day by day growing less a totem of hope and justice, and more a symbol of mocking defiance.
Maybe Mary was imagining it, how the human scarecrow looked larger than last time she’d been here. Maybe the dead woman was growing in her mind as she resisted her own doubts. But Jess had been a blight on the town. Never mind the year’s week, late crops – she had been a blight on her family, spreading lies about Dusty and making threats. Stealing from them. The situation had called for a return to the old ways. Hard as it might have been to endure Jess’s screams when they’d tied her here and closed her head in that wicked pumpkin mask, no one could say it wasn’t just. They would remember it, always, but they could not regret it. To do so would be disrespectful for the sacrifice Jess had made – willingly or not.
That respect that had brought Mary out here twice, maybe three times a day, as much as her desire to see results. Perhaps, also, a little uneasiness about how her husband, Earl, and their boys had relished the sacrifice a little too much – there’d been jeering and even dancing, celebrating the judgement. Righteous though it may have been, without the bounty the sacrifice had promised, Mary had to wonder if they might not have thrown Jess on the mercy of the court instead.
She had waited silently with Jess, unseen and unheard, watching the woman fade. Watching for some sign of her life returning to the land through the vines that held her. She studied every inch of the woman in those hours keeping her company, from her legs in torn jeans up to her loose and ragged white top, ripped from when Donny and Dusty and the others had dragged her out here, kicking all the way. Her bust was bound in place now, but the muscles of her arms, bare where the shirtsleeves had been torn off, still curved impressively. Jess had been slim and lithe, but strong, used to working the field. Striking with her raven-black her and sharp nose, now hidden in the macabre mask. All the men had lusted for her – Mary was no fool in thinking even Earl was distracted by her. This temptress had tried to corrupt her dear Dusty – who was to say what other trouble she might’ve caused, left unchecked…
But hadn’t those muscles grown? Wasn’t she taller?
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Dr Ralder grunted, retreating from the scarecrow, pushing his round glasses up his nose. He looked small next to Jess, on her raised cross. “There’s no heartbeat. No breath in her mouth.”
He didn’t sound as impatient as before. He had scolded Mary on the previous two visits, his tone condescending as he explained that even if they’d made some mistake before, there was no way someone could live two weeks without water. But he was frowning at the macabre spectacle of the woman-turned-scarecrow.
“It’s not right, is it?” Mary said. “The whole idea is the land takes her back. It should take her blood. If she’s not being reabsorbed into this soil, how can it restore the crops?”
Dr Ralder gave her a sideways glance, probably with a few choice things to say about that. He’d been one of the less supportive voices in the community when Mary and her husband had brought the old tradition to a town meeting. In the end, though, when the fervour had them all gunning for Jess, a mob demanding this objectionable troublemaker answer for her threats, Ralder had been as complicit as the rest of them. No one had stood in the boys’ way when they broke down Jess’s door.
“Can a body move after death?” Mary pressed, nodding towards Jess’s fingers.
Ralder went closer again to prod Jess’s dirty skin with the tip of a pen. “Of course, there could be any number of explanations for such a thing. Shifts in the flesh and bone as it decays. Parasites moving under the skin. Even” – he gave her another look – “the build-up of gases. But the case could as easily be that someone might see what they want to see out here. That is, the merest chance that this terrible thing we’ve done could be reversible.”
Mary stiffened at the look on the doctor’s hard-lined face. She tried not to let any discomfort show, and insisted, “This woman falsely accused my son of violence, Doctor. She took cash from my husband’s safe. I do not regret her passing. But I did not imagine it. Her finger moved in response to my touch.”
Ralder continued to stare at her, rather than the morbidly entwined, pumpkin-headed body looming behind him. Did he suspect Mary? She had told no one that she’d actually cut herself, and bled on Jess’s flesh. An accident, snagged on the thorny vines around the body, and she’d wiped it off quickly, but this wasn’t a science. Such things could have unusual effects and she feared ruining it.
When the doctor said nothing for what felt like a minute, Mary huffed. “You can’t tell me that she looks normal, at any rate. She hardly looks like someone who hasn’t eaten for a fortnight, let alone someone who’s died.”
“No, indeed,” Ralder said. “I can’t explain this. Something does somehow seem to have preserved her. But you promised us magic, didn’t you? The good old ways of Lowvale, with the most bountiful harvests in all Middle America. And while she’s not rotting, she is most definitely dead. Perhaps when we asked nature for a boon, it just gave us what we deserved instead of what we wanted: a permanent reminder of our greed.”
“Oh, leave the preaching to Father Teal,” Mary snapped. “I asked you here for your professional expertise, and if you don’t want to offer it, maybe I’ll ask my husband to bring in someone who’s actually useful. Then, I’m quite sure you wouldn’t be talking to him this way.”
“I have given you my expertise,” Ralder sneered. “For what feels like the tenth time now, I have come out here and confirmed it – something unnatural may have occurred, but Miss Jess Crow remains resolutely dead. We cannot walk back what we’ve done, however much time you spend staring at her and wishing for it.”
“I have not –” Mary began to protest, but the doctor was wired up.
“Guilty or not, this young lady will not return. She will not breathe again.” The doctor’s voice rose as he turned to Jess and poked at her torso with his pen. “She will never feel again. She will not ever open her eyes and say she forgives us! She cannot even give us” – he stabbed the pen in, anger building – “any more of her blood! See, Mary? Do you see she does not react?”
He poked again, harder, leaving Mary too shocked to react.
“Dead. Dead. Dead!” With his final shrill pronouncement, he shoved the pen in so hard to Jess’s side the point broke flesh through the shirt, and the body finally convulsed in response. Vines ripped and Jess jerked forward as if startled from sleep, and Ralder stepped back with surprise. His foot hit a rut and he tripped – but as he fell a limb lashed out and caught him.
Mary gasped, covering her mouth with her hands as Ralder was lifted off the ground, Jess’s thick hand around his neck. The corpse was moving – had come free from the cross that bore it and stepped forward, one foot thudding heavily down, followed by the other. She lifted Ralder with an outstretched arm, so his feet kicked off the ground, and he gargled, unable to get a word out. Frozen with disbelief, Mary tried to comprehend what she was seeing, between the sight of the dead body moving – a battered, tatty woman with a pumpkin for a head, moving – and the clear proof that she was bigger now. Jess’s fingers wrapped all the way around Wallace’s neck and she held him up effortlessly, her arm muscles bulging. Her shoulders appeared twice his width and his frantic clawing could do nothing to release her grip. His eyes darted sideways, towards Mary, and the pumpkin head followed them.
Mary almost screamed, looking into the dark, jagged eyes of the monstrous creature: the face was viciously carved, a pumpkin two feet wide with an uneven slit of a mouth that stretched almost the full width, eyes slanted and wicked. She caught a glassy glint in the deep dark of those eye sockets, a hint of life. Then Jess tilted her pumpkin head back and opened her jaw, the mask itself gaping, alive. Wallace’s frantic struggles increased as Jess carried him towards a mouth wider than him, and Mary finally moved – to step hurriedly backwards.
Ralder bucked, trying to kick, again scratching at Jess’s forearm with no effect, and he threw another terrified look Mary’s way. She shook her head. Nothing she could do. She watched as Jess pushed his head into her mouth, and the pumpkin mouth closed over his shoulders. As her grip released on his neck, he let out a scream, a just audible, “Help me!”, before the monstrous corpse threw her head back, carrying his whole body up with it. He thrashed about, arms pinned to his side and legs flailing, as Jess swallowed him whole. A bulge swelled through her creaking neck and expanded into her stomach as Radler was dragged slowly in, feet spiralling in panic. Mary was transfixed, witnessing the impossible, until the legs slurped in and pumpkin mouth snapped shut, the doctor gone.
The walking corpse turned to face her, part woman, part scarecrow.
Jess stood at least eight feet tall, Mary was sure, with the thorny vines that had bound her entangled with her pale skin. Her stomach was hugely distended with a living man squirming inside – a handprint pressed through the flesh, and it looked like it might give. As if the doctor could burst out of this dead woman’s belly. But the swell deflated, the struggles and muffled screams dying, and Mary’s eyes widened at the sight of Ralder being absorbed into this horrific creature, right before her eyes. At the same time, Jess seemed to further expand, head rising, and the pumpkin grin stretched, curling with pleasure.
Mary found herself craning her neck back, looking up even higher to take in the monster. Twice the height of a man now, surely? And breathing heavily, hungrily, as the dark sockets of the pumpkin head focused on her.
Jess lifted a dirty hand and wrenched the pumpkin off, the vegetable splitting around her head to reveal a face very much alive underneath. Her eyes were ringed dark, veins showing and flesh dirty, the greyish colour of death, and her raven hair was flat and greasy hanging in long strands past her neck, but her black lips stretched in wicked delight. The eyes shone, almost completely black, telling of whatever evil power held the woman. Unmistakably malevolent in intent.
Finally, Mary Westprint screamed.