Norman Partridge - Dark Harvest

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

DARK HARVEST

Copyright 2006 by Norman Partridge

Originally published in 2006 by Cemetery Dance Publications

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-5871-4

First Tor Edition: September 2007

First Mass Market Edition: October 2010

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Ed Gorman

PART ONE

Stories

A Midwestern town. You know its name. You were born there.

Its Halloween, 1963... and getting on toward dark. Things are the same as theyve always been. Theres the main street, the old brick church in the town square, the movie theaterthis year with a Vincent Price double-bill. And past all that is the road that leads out of town. Its black as a licorice whip under an October sky, black as the night thats coming and the long winter nights that will follow, black as the little town it leaves behind.

The road grows narrow as it hits the outskirts. It does not meander. Like a planned path of escape, it cleaves a sea of quarter sections planted thick with summer corn.

But its not summer anymore. Like I said, its Halloween.

All that corn has been picked, shucked, eaten.

All those stalks are dead, withered, dried.

In most places, those stalks would have been plowed under long ago. Thats not the way it works around here. You remember. Corns harvested by hand in these parts. Boys who live in this town spend their summers doing the job under a blazing sun that barely bothers to go down. And once those boys are tanned straight through and that crops picked, those cornstalks die rooted in the ground. Theyre not plowed under until the first day of November. Until then the silent rows are home to things that dont mind living among the dead. Rats, snakes, frogs... creatures that will take flight before the first light of the coming morning or die beneath a circular blade that scores both earth and flesh without discrimination.

Yeah. Thats the way it works around here. There are things living in these fields tonight that will, by rights, be dead by tomorrow morning. One of them hangs on a splintery pole, its roots burrowing deep in rich black soil. Green vines climb through tattered clothes nailed to the pole and its crosspiece. They twist through the legs of worn jeans like tendons, twine like a cripples spine through a tattered denim jacket. Rounded leaves take succor from those vines like organs fed by blood vessels, and from the hearts of those leaves green tendrils sprout, and the leaves and the vines and the tendrils fill up that coat and the arms that come with it.

A thicker vine creeps through the neck of that jacket, following the last few inches of splintery pole like a backbone, widening into a rough stem that roots in the thing balanced on the poles flat crown.

That thing is heavy, and orange, and ripe.

That thing is a pumpkin.

The afternoon sun lingers on the pumpkins face, and then the afternoon sun is gone. Quiet hangs in the cornfield. No breeze rustles the dead stalks; no wind rustles the tattered clothes of the thing hanging from the pole. The licorice-whip road is empty, silent, still. No cars coming into town, no cars leaving.

Its that way for a long time. Then darkness falls.

A car comes. A door slams. Footsteps in the cornfieldthe sound of a man shouldering through brittle stalks. The butcher knife that fills his hand gleams beneath the rising moon, and then the blade goes black as the man bends low.

Twisted vines and young creepers root at the base of the pole. The mans sharp blade severs all. Next he goes to work with a claw hammer. Rusty nails grunt loose from old wood. A tattered leg slips free... then another... and then a tattered arm....

The thing they call the October Boy drops to the ground.

But you already know about him. After all, you grew up here. There arent any secrets left for you. You know the story as well as I do.

Pete McCormick knows the story, too... part of it, anyway. Pete just turned sixteen. Hes been in town his whole life, but hes never managed to fit in. And the last years been especially tough. His mom died of cancer last winter, and his dad drank away his job at the grain elevator the following spring. Theres enough rotten luck in that little sentence to bust anyones chops.