The Harvest (2 page)

“I want to be like you.”

“Do you?”

“I want to be Bl—I want to be gifted.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to understand Cael. I want to share this with him. I want to . . . feel him.” That last bit makes her blush, and she doesn’t mean it that way, so she corrects: “I want to feel
like
him.”

Esther nods.

“It won’t be easy.”

“I don’t care.”

“It may be painful.”

“I
don’t
care.”

“Good. Then I will accommodate this desire.”

The Maize Witch smiles.

PART ONE

OBLIGATED

SEEDLING

CAEL DREAMS NOT
OF
FALLING,
but of having fallen. He dreams of the corn cracking like gunshots. Leaves twirling, stretching, growing. Reaching up as he falls down and catching him. Same way a hand catches a thrown stone.

That dream lingers with him like a smell that won’t go away—whenever he had to deal with Nancy the goat, her smell always stuck to him, too, and this is like that. He staggers up onto the Maize Witch’s front porch in the middle of the night, but he keeps closing his eyes (tired, so tired), and whenever he does, the dream rises up again: falling, reaching, bleeding, being caught, breaking apart.

Falling, reaching, bleeding, being caught, breaking apart.

Again and again.

He enters through the front of the house. All of it has been repaired—loosely, clumsily, but with boards and not just with plant matter. No new paint, though—just bald, exposed boards, held there with crooked nails. Everything else looks the same: vines hanging down through holes in the ceiling, shoots growing up through cracks in the floorboards. Water stains on the walls. The heady stink in the air of mulch and compost and life unbidden.

In the middle of the room, a couch. Beyond that, a wall and a mantel and a—a mirror. Old, corroded, streaked with bands of dark stain, but a mirror just the same, and so Cael hurries over to it—

Lord and Lady, no.

The Blight.
The Blight
.

It’s taken over. It has
claimed
him.

He tries to cry out, but all he manages is a choked, truncated scream.

His teeth are rose-thorns. His lips, pink petals rolled up like Lane’s ditchweed cigarettes. As he weeps, a glossy leaf emerges from the dark hollow of his throat—his tongue, oh, Jeezum Crow,
it’s his damn tongue
. Half his face is scaled like tree bark, the other half smooth like the branches of a pricker bush. One eye is a fat, swollen cherry tomato, the other an opalescent seed-pod with little black motes swimming around inside. He reaches up with branch-tip fingers to touch his face, and one scrapes across an eye, poking it, and the cherry tomato splits and ruptures with an audible
pop
—seedy snot runs down his cheek, loosed from inside the eyeball, some of it spattering the mirror—

Cael screams.

“Cael.
Cael.
Cael!”

A hand shaking him. He gasps. The scream cut in half.

It’s Wanda.

He gasps again. Sees himself. He’s him. Just him. No ruined eye, no thorn-tine teeth, no tongue-of-a-leaf. Still the Blight-vine at the end of his arm, coiled back upon it, but that—and here he almost has to laugh at the absurdity of it—
that
is normal, that is who he was before he came here.

The rest was—what? Just a dream? A nightmare?

A promise of what’s to come?

The wind sucks right from his sails, and he almost falls—

But Wanda catches him, helps him over to the couch. She laughs the kind of desperate laugh that comes from somebody who thought it had all been lost, from someone pulled back from the edge—and she holds his hands in her own, and he can see her eyes glistening (though to her credit, she does not cry).

Then she kisses him.

He leans into it. Her lips feel good. Everything about it feels good—the way their faces fit together, the soft intake of breath through their noses, her hands reaching up to cup his jaw, his cheeks. She smells nice—like strawberries. Fresh ones, too.

Her mouth opens, just slightly. So does his. She moans into him.

And then he feels something. A tongue, he thinks—soft, wriggling, just a little bit rough to the touch.

This isn’t that.

It’s a leaf. Like the one from his . . . dream, promise, hallucination?

It slides across his tongue. Smooth-surfaced and crisply edged.

He pulls away.

She gasps. For a moment, a small string of saliva connects them, and she laughs. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” she says.

“I-I . . . You’ve . . .” he stammers. Wanda clasps his hands. Two of her fingernails—leaves, also shiny—catch the electric light of the bare bulb overhead. “You’re Blighted.”

“I’m gifted,” she says, her smile small, hesitant. “Like you.”

He pulls away. “Wanda, oh no. Aw, King Hell.”

She stands suddenly. In another lifetime, he’d know what would happen: She’d cry and run off. But that’s not what happens this time. Here, now, all she does is stand, smile again, and nod.

“It’s okay” is her response. “You’ll understand soon. I’ll go get Mother.”

Esther sits across from him as he eats. Wanda stands behind her, arms crossed, watching him intently.
Wanda. Blighted. Lord and Lady, why?

He doesn’t want to eat, he wants to hold out and demand answers, but he’s famished. It wasn’t even something he was aware of until Esther asked him—“Are you hungry?”—and then everything inside him felt like a hungry, sucking bottomless hole that could never fill up no matter how many of these fruits and vegetables and leafy greens he shoves in his dang mouth.

And yet, he doesn’t stop.

Blackberry juices running down his chin. Green pepper crunching between molars. Tongue licking leafy bits from the fronts of his teeth.

He sometimes has to pause and grip the sides of the small table. Not even sure why. Just to hold on to something. To try to tamp it all down.

Finally, he stops. He knows he can’t eat anymore—even though, gods, he still wants to. He leans back, gasping.

“I want to know what’s going on,” he says.

Esther nods. “You’ve been . . . away from us for some time.”

“Away. What? For—what do you mean? Time? How much time?”

But they don’t answer. Esther and Wanda just share a look—a conspiratorial connection that, for now, fails to include him.
Shit.
Instead, Esther says, “We’ll get there, Cael.” Green tendrils curl and uncurl from the tips of her fingers splayed out on the table. Fiddleheads opening, closing.

“I want to know.”

“You should rest.”

“I don’t
want
to rest.”

“What do you want to do?” It’s like she can sense it.

He says it without thinking: “I want to run.”

“So,” she says, “go. Run.”

The dead corn is thick out here. Thick as the bristles on a boot brush. Cael growls and pushes through, stalks thwacking him across the head and neck and arms, leaves—still sharp, even dead—cutting into him. His feet pound on hard black earth, and somewhere he realizes—

The corn isn’t dead. Not really. He can feel something still there. Some mote of life swirling around. Hundreds of motes, thousands, each a fading firefly, each bound to a single stalk of corn—the light dying but not extinguished. He runs through it, feeling these tiny life sources as he passes them, aware of them in a way that goes beyond sight and sound. And still the corn continues to batter him. It pisses him off. A hot fire churns in his gut. A new thread of hunger unspools through him, and he roars and keeps on running—

He makes an ax-blade shape out of his hand, swipes across the corn—

And a wave of corn ahead of him flattens to the ground. Ten feet in a wide arc, crackling and hissing as it mashes to the dirt.

Corn he never touched.

He skids to a halt. It was like a sonic blast, invisible but real.

His own Blight-vine tightens around his arm. As if in anticipation.

As if it’s excited.

Is the Blight a life all its own?

Or is it just me?

Is the excitement mine and not the corn’s?

He growls, then sweeps his arm out again—and more corn splinter-snaps. Pushed down, matted together like a corn-leaf doormat. Cael does it again and again, roaring and screaming until he’s the center of a circular clearing, the corn pushed away from him in every direction.

And then he grits his teeth.

He can still feel it out there. The corn. Living, not dead.

He closes his eyes.

He concentrates, thinking so hard he’s afraid he’ll piss himself.

The sound greets him—the rustle-hiss of the corn. All around him. That sound rises in volume until it’s a deafening roar. . . .

Then it stops. All at once.

When he opens his eyes—

All the corn has stood back up. Battered. Crooked. Shuddering like a shorn sheep in a cold wind. But standing tall once more.

What in King Hell have I become?

The morning sun is up now. And Cael can see how things have changed at Esther’s. The Maize Witch has been busy. Her little commune has grown. When Cael left for his run, he didn’t stop to look around—he just blasted into the bleak field, feet carrying him into the stalks with no intention but to run, maybe somewhere, maybe nowhere, definitely
away
.

And yet now he returns, and he sees how busy she’s been.

Other smaller houses are going up at the edges. Little huts and lean-tos. The garden has grown, too, upward and outward. Other Blighted mill about. A woman with hair like long, knotty tangles of moss. A man with tree-root feet. A pair of young children, not yet teenagers, running around, their fingers intertwined, handfasted with coils of vine and leaf.

As Cael passes, they all, without exception, stop to stare. Not as if he’s a freak, but as if he’s something special. The look on those faces: What is that?

They’re not scared of him.

They
love
him.

He shudders.

On the way back inside the house, he sees a familiar face—

Mole, from Boyland’s crew. He chews on a stick. The boy’s other arm hangs at his side, limp and crooked. “Hey, McAvoy.”

“Mole. I didn’t know you were here.”

“Well, I am.” The boy’s lip curls up in a sneer.

Cael struggles to find something to say.

Mole speaks instead. “They all think you’re real neat. But I remember you from Boxelder. You were a punk.” It’s now Cael hears the faint cracking in the boy’s voice—his time is almost on him, the time when he’ll move from being just a boy to being something close to a man. “And I’d bet all the ace notes that you’re still a punk. Wanda thinks you’re the rat’s right foot, but I know you ain’t. You mess with her, I’ll getcha.”

“All right.” Cael almost laughs. “Nice talkin’ to you, Mole.”

Mole nods and heads past, staring daggers as he does.

What in all the Heartland is going on?

Dinner.

Long table heaped with mounds of food.

And this time, not all fruits and vegetables, either.

Cael smells meat.

Edvard—one of Esther’s attendants, now out of his ratty patchwork coat and wearing instead a plain, rumpled white shirt with ivory buttons—pushes a ceramic crock toward him. “Rabbit,” he says. “Braised in its own juices. Broth a mirepoix—onion, carrot, celery. And that”—he points to an oval plate with a few chips in the glaze—“is a plate of crispy sweetbreads.”

The bald woman with the half-scale face must have seen the confused look that crossed Cael’s own, and she adds: “Not actual bread, Cael. Offal. Thymus gland of a fatted calf.”

It occurs to him that his lips are slick—Jeezum Crow, he’s about to start drooling like a mutt. He quick wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, but everyone must know what’s happening because they all laugh. Politely enough, but he still feels shame rising pink in his cheeks.

Wanda, sitting to his left, reaches out to him, her hand on his. He can feel her—not just the skin on skin, but something deeper. That same kind of firefly mote he felt inside the corn, except with her it’s not just a firefly, but a bonfire roaring. Not just a lightning bug, but a sky
filled
with lightning. A million points of light inside her. The Blight. And again he wonders:
Is the Blight separate from her, or a part of her?
Cael doesn’t know.

“It’s okay,” she whispers to him. “I can feel you, too.”

He pulls his hand back but tries to smile to cover it up. It feels fake. He knows that. Everything feels off-kilter. Like maybe he’s still in a dream. Except he’s sure—well,
pretty
sure—that’s not true.

He turns toward Esther, sitting at the far end of the long table. He can feel her, too, and if Wanda contains a bonfire, Esther contains ten times the heat and the light. She’s a house on fire, a whole cornfield—hell, she’s all the world, burning so bright that the dark never settles, that the night becomes a memory, a myth.

And then Esther speaks. When she does, his sense of her closes down, shuts off. The light doesn’t go out, but he stops seeing it.