Harvest Time

by Tyler Palicia ‘23

“Hey, fuck off!” Charlie shouted, grasping the steering wheel with one hand while swatting his sister’s cupped hands away from his eyes with the other. The car swerved slightly, cutting into the gravel strip alongside the two lane blacktop.

“I’m just keeping you alert. You’ve been nodding off since we got off the interstate,” Jen said from the back seat of the Camry. 

“I haven’t been nodding off… Oh great, you woke her,” Charlie said, glancing over at the yawning brunette in the seat next to him. 

“What’s all the commotion about?” said Grace, Charlie’s girlfriend, who’d been snoozing with her cheek pressed flat against the window.  

“Nothing,” Charlie said, “Just my idiot sister trying to kill us. That’s all.”

“What state are we in?” Grace said, wiping the sleep off her eyes and pushing her long hair back behind her ears in one graceful motion.

“Still North Carolina. A bit over eight hours before we reach our destination,” Jen said, glancing down at the map on her phone. 

“Charlie, I’ll switch off with you, but first I need to stretch my legs,” Grace said.

“Okay, once I find a good place to pull off.” He scanned the acres of yellowed corn stalks and cows and forests and farmhouses that made up the scenery. He cracked his window and breathed in the sweet autumn air that brought with it waves of nostalgia for his childhood days of carving Jack-o’-lanterns and jumping into piles of leaves with his sister, who was now in the backseat scrolling through TikTok.

The trio was traveling home to Alabama for Thanksgiving break. Charlie and Grace were upperclassmen at the same small private college in Pennsylvania and along the way they had picked up Jen at Virginia Tech, where she was enrolled as freshman.

“There’s not a lot out here, is there?” Grace said. The comment was so plainly obvious that no one in the vehicle thought it merited a response. But Grace didn’t feel like talking anyway. A couple miles passed before anyone spoke again.

“You were really kicking in your sleep, like something was after you,” Jen said.

“Just a little nervous about meeting the parents, I guess.”

“What are you talking about!” Jen said, “They’re gonna be crazy about you. You’re pretty and funny, our mom will love your fashion, and our dad will like you because you’re probably the sole reason that Charlie isn’t an incel.”

Even Charlie laughed at that jab. 

“Don’t worry, honey, they’ll love you,” said Charlie, affectionately squeezing his girlfriend’s hand. “Probably more than their own daughter.”

He leaned over and kissed his girlfriend on the forehead. Jen pretended to gag.

“Hey, eyes on the road, mister,” Jen said.

Grace laughed again and smiled warmly, wiping little tears from the corners of her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse. “If the whole family’s as sweet as you two, then I can’t wait to meet them.”

Charlie spotted a place to pull off the unnamed road. It was a grassy spot with a picnic table shaded by an old oak tree. The surrounding acreage was covered in stumps of freshly harvested corn stalks that had been lopped off inches from the ground. 

“This’ll do,” Charlie said, turning off the road and parking his car next to the table. 

Jen hopped out immediately and did a cartwheel across the grass. She had been a gymnast from age seven up until high school, but she had been forced to give up the sport after tearing a hamstring her sophomore year. She never stopped running and jumping and flipping and climbing.

Charlie got out and walked over to the tree, removed a sketch pad from his back pocket and began to draw what he observed. It still held most of its leaves, which had turned a scarlet shade of red. He noticed that it must have been stunted in its early years. Its deformed limbs hung low like clawing arthritic fingers, and its trunk was thin and twisted like a badly broken leg that had been improperly set before going into the cast. Its exposed root system had spread across the ground like a vast gripping cobweb. Not a single songbird chirped amongst its branches, but Charlie did not notice. He mainly drew people and his ears weren’t attuned to the quiet hum of nature.

As Charlie sketched he felt two loving arms wrap around his stomach. Moments later the sketchbook and pencil were lying in the grass and a few feet away he rested on his back while Grace propped her head against his chest. The warm sunlight did the favor of closing his eyes for him as he drifted off to sleep. 

Grace remained awake, resting on her side and watching Jen pull herself up into the oak tree. She climbed effortlessly and soon disappeared amongst the branches. Then Grace’s eyes wandered across the pastoral landscape and settled upon a lone farmhouse across the road. It was two stories with double brick chimneys and its open porch wrapped around the house. The once decadent structure had stood for nearly two hundred years, but without extensive renovations, what remained probably wouldn’t survive for another half century. Most of the windows were either cracked or boarded up and the paint job was so faded that Grace could hardly tell that its original color was a light shade blue. The grass around it was yellow and overgrown, and little trees had even begun to shoot up in unintended places. A rust-encased 1972 Chevrolet Longhorn was rotting in the side yard next to a plywood-covered well. The only sign that anyone lived in the decaying domicile were the chickens cooped up next to the backyard woodshed. The roof of the woodshed was caving in and the structure leaned at what appeared to be an impossible angle.

Grace felt a clear presence of evil while looking upon the old plantation manor. Part of her wished she had never seen it or that it would simply disappear like an awful, sun-drenched mirage. But she of course did not feel any hatred for its current residents, whomever they were, because they likely had nothing to do with the place's long-festering evil. She decided she wanted to leave quickly.

Her concentration was broken by the sound of Jen’s voice.

“How do I get down from here?” 

“The same way you came up, but in reverse,” Grace said, stressing the sarcasm.

“No, I mean seriously. There’s too many branches and it's getting darker!”

Grace disregarded the statement. The sun had begun its gradual descension to the horizon line, but it was a cloudless afternoon and sundown was still hours away. Why did Jen feel the need to be so difficult?

“Someone fucking help me! I’m not kidding around!” This time she sounded almost overwrought with panic. Both Grace and Charlie sat up and faced the oak.

“I’m gonna go get her down,” Charlie said. But Grace placed a hand on his chest and said, “It’s okay, let me.”

“Can you guys still hear me? Please do something!” The tone of her voice had changed from anger to desperation.

“It’s okay, honey. I’m coming up to help you,” Grace said, grabbing hold of one of the lower branches and pulling herself up until she could sit on that branch and grab hold of the next branch and pull herself higher. 

“I don’t know why I can’t find my way down. I… I don’t know what’s happening. It’s so dark, and I swear… I swear the branches are getting closer together, and it's getting really hard to move!” Jen’s voice trembled as she choked back hot tears. “Fucking help me! Please!”

Charlie stood back to see if he could spot his sister in the tree, but he couldn’t. He could only see as she climbed higher and higher. And then he was struck by that dark awful feeling that originates in the gut and tingles its way up between the shoulder blades. His heart raced and his pores opened. He ran a lap around the tree but still couldn’t find his sister. She had disappeared completely, except for the sounds she made. She had begun to cry, and it wasn’t the type of crying Charlie had heard when no one asked her to homecoming her freshman year of high school or when the doctors told her she had to quit the gymnastics team a year later. This was more similar to the way she had cried when she fell through the ice one winter in the pond behind their childhood home in Massachusetts. After he dragged her hypothermic body onto the bank, he never forgot the look of stabbing terror in her eyes and he always associated that terror with the way she had wept that day. That’s how she was weeping now.

“For god’s sake, please help me!”

“We’re gonna get you down. Just tell us where you are,” Charlie said, in an attempt to sound calm and reasonable. His sister’s response nearly melted his sanity.

“I don’t know where I am! I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!” She sounded like a young child lost in the woods.

Grace, now standing on a branch midway up the oak, took control, speaking calmly, like an adult would speak to a toddler who’d awoken from a screaming nightmare. “Jen, we need you to breathe. Just breathe, honey. As long as you do that you’ll be okay. Understand?”

No response.

“Jen, can you hear us,” Grace said.

“Yes, I can.” She was beginning to hyperventilate.

“What is the one thing you need to be focusing on?”

“Huh huh huh…. breathing!” 

“Okay, we’ll take care of the rest. Just relax. I’ll wait one minute before I ask anything else of you.” Grace said. It was the longest minute of their lives. “Okay, now tell me. Can you see anything?”

“Ummm… yeah, I can see a house,” Jen said. She sounded much better. Like she was regaining control.

“Good. Is the house across the road?”

“I don’t know. It’s just there. There are holes in the roof, and it has a big ugly porch. And there’s an old man inside. Grace, I don’t like that man.”

“That’s okay, we’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt you,” Grace said. “It sounds like the right house. I want you to walk towards it.”

“Please don’t make me walk towards it. It’s an awful place. It’s infected!”

“You must!”

“Okay, I will.” 

Fifteen seconds passed that felt like a half hour. 

“Grace, I can see you! I can see you now!”

“Yes, I can see you too. Keep walking closer, reach out and touch my hand.”

“Okay! I can reach you, I think.” Grace said, after taking a few more steps. 

“I’ve got you, Jen!”

“ Oh my god, I don’t know what the fuck that was. It was like a terrible nightmare, but you came for me. Thank you!” 

“Shhhh shhhh, you’ll be okay. Cry if you have to, but let's start climbing down… wait, which way is down?” 

From the ground Charlie screamed as his sanity shattered like a dropped vase. Not only had his sister vanished but so had Grace. The leaves were nowhere near dense enough to hide two grown women. All that remained was their voices. Something impossible was happening, and he knew he couldn’t handle it alone. 

“I’ll be back with help!”

He ran to his car and drove off at full speed.

***

The red autumn leaves rattled as the cool west wind pushed against them. All was otherwise silent, until the two disembodied voices began to speak to each other. 

“I wonder when he’ll come back. It’s been hours… or days?” Grace said. But it wasn’t really Grace, because there was no mouth or tongue producing the sounds. It was merely her voice.

“I don’t really know anymore. I’m hungry, Grace. And I’m in pain. But I have no body, so how can that be?” She giggled at herself. 

“Wait, did you hear that?”

“Yeah, it sounded like a screen door slamming shut.”

“Wait, an old man is standing on the porch of that shabby farmhouse. He’s looking over here!”

“Help us!” Both women screamed in unison. 

The old man was dressed in a black frock coat and long straight white hair hung down to his shoulders. He smoked a pipe. They couldn’t make out any of his facial features, but he seemed to have a reddish beard. The old man did not acknowledge them. He walked to the backyard and disappeared into the collapsing woodshed. 

“He must not have heard us,” Grace said. She was wrong. “Sir! Please come help us! This tree must have some kind of curse on it because we can’t get down!” 

The old man reappeared. 

“He’s carrying something… it looks like a… oh, fuck.”

The old man dropped what he was holding and pointed at the tree and the voices trapped in it. He let out a deranged cackle as he did so. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, 

“It’s harvest time!”

He clapped his hands over his head and performed a jig before picking up the chainsaw.

***

The sun was just rising as Sheriff Wilson pulled his squad car off the road and parked next to the weathered picnic table. 

“You sure this is the place, kid? I don’t see any trees nearby.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “This is where we were… holy shit!”

Both men got out. There had been a sudden and unusual cold snap the night before and they could see their breaths, but it was supposed to warm up to the sixties by midafternoon. Charlie ran while the sheriff leaned against the car and watched. Charlie didn’t even bother to close the passenger side door. His head was bandaged and his arm rested in a sling. His face was badly bruised. The accident happened less than five minutes after he’d sped off in search of help the previous day. On his way to the nearest town, a place called Studley, population 472, he spun off a tight turn and totaled his car against a telephone pole. He regained consciousness soon after a local farmer discovered him and reported the accident to the volunteer EMS department. He hadn’t sustained any major injuries other than a fractured radius and a moderate concussion. Pretty good considering the vehicle was traveling at 62 miles per hour when he tried to take that infamous bend on Creighton road - the same bend that killed Jack Sumners, the county administrator, the previous winter when he was driving home drunk one night. The sole town doctor told Charlie that he'd never seen anyone get that lucky before, traveling at such a speed and walking away with such minimal injuries when the airbag didn’t even deploy. 

Sheriff Wilson’s eyes strayed across the road to the rundown farmhouse house where he knew a spooky old hermit lived. “Shame to let an historical place like that crumble,” he said to himself. Then he noticed smoke rising up from both chimneys. “I bet those ol’ fireplaces still pump out the heat.” He’d taken to talking to himself ever since the passing of his beloved wife five years earlier. But he figured it was okay as long as no one heard it. Sometimes he’d even pretend he was talking with her, and if he ever told anyone the god’s honest truth that every once and a while he heard a response, then he probably wouldn’t have been Studley’s sheriff for much longer.

Charlie dropped to his knees in front of the oak stump and filled his hands with sawdust as he read the two words freshly carved into it.

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