Genre: Horror
SCARECROW
By Randy Romero
Ted Crawford was the first to
hear the unsettling din.
Somewhere, off in the distance,
beyond the dense birch trees, past the red painted barn, Ted heard the unmistakable
cry of a newborn baby.
“Did you hear that? Ted asked.
“Hear what?” Amy said. It was a
miracle she could hear anything over the sound of Grey’s Anatomy. It wasn’t
even a new episode. It was a replay. But nothing, and I mean nothing, came in
between Amy and Grey’s Anatomy. She even had her hair dyed to resemble the main
character, Meredith Grey.
“It sounded like a baby.”
“A what?”
He was about to shout over the television
when common sense prevailed, and Amy reached for the remote to lower the
volume.
“A baby,” he repeated. “It
sounded like a newborn baby. It sounded like it was crying.”
“Vagitus,” she said in such a
matter-of-fact way he felt slightly embarrassed for not being familiar with the
term. He had no clue what it meant, but it sounded dirty to him.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s the technical term for the
cry of a newborn baby.”
“You learn something new every
day,” he said.
I never should have bought her
that word-of-the-day calendar, he thought.
Ted’s ears pricked up as he
heard it again.
Amy heard it too this time.
It sounded like it was coming
from the adjacent cornfield. Being the oldest of four siblings, Ted was
accustomed to the shrill cry. There was a road just past the cornfield and he
wondered if there had been an accident.
It was a dreary night in
mid-October and there was a powerful chill in the air, so he grabbed his coat
off the mounted rack by the front door.
“Where are you going?” Amy
asked.
“To check it out. There might’ve
been an accident. Somebody could be hurt. The cornfield leads out to the road.
I’m going to take a look.”
“Daddy, don’t go,” Aiden
pleaded. Ted hadn’t even noticed him standing there at the bottom of the
stairs. “I have a bad feeling about this,” Aiden added.
“It’ll be fine, son. I’m just
going to check it out and make sure everything’s okay.”
“But what if it’s not a person,
or a baby?”
“What could it be then?”
“It could be a…Bubak.”
Aiden was a certified horror
fanatic. While other kids his age read comic books or Harry Potter, he was
reading up on urban legends and mythical creatures. Every culture, every region,
every country had their own variation of the boogeyman. In Slovakia and the Czech
Republic, their boogeyman was known as the Bubak.
“A what?” Ted said, wondering why
he let his eight-year-old watch horror movies and read up on all these fictional
monsters.
“A Bubak,” he repeated and
shuddered at the word. “It’s a creature that resembles a scarecrow. It cries
like a helpless, innocent baby to lure its victims. They say it comes out every
full moon to feed.”
“There’s no such thing as a
Babadook or whatever it’s called. It’s just a silly story, Aiden. You should
know that. It’s no different than those horror movies you watch. It’s all fake.
I’ll be fine. You two just stay here. I’ll take my cell phone with me just in
case.”
The wind whistled through the
dying leaves of autumn as Ted walked across the property. Mid-October and it
was already freezing. They were in for a rough winter and Ted was dreading it.
He couldn’t hear anything. No
sounds. No voices. No crying. The noise seemed to stop as soon as he stepped
foot outside.
He cut through the opening of the
cornfield and walked among the rows that towered over his head. The moon shined
bright, looming over his head like a bad omen.
A self-proclaimed classic rock
enthusiast, Ted immediately thought of that CCR song, Bad Moon Rising.
Don’t go around tonight. Well it’s
bound to take your life. There’s a bad moon on the rise.
His son’s words echoed through
his head.
It comes out every full moon to
feed.
Ted chortled. “Come on, don’t be
ridiculous,” he said aloud to nobody but himself. “Don’t let Aiden’s stories
get to you. There’s no such thing as a Bubak or whatever he called it.”
He heard it again, that high
pitched shriek, and started running towards the sound. He found himself in the
center of the field, where the noise stopped abruptly.
“I guess it’s just you and me,”
he said, acknowledging the scarecrow suspended on its post. “Hey, you’re not a
Bubak, are you?” he asked and chuckled, if only to ease his frayed nerves.
He started walking towards the road,
continuing his search, when something caught his eye. He looked back, but the
scarecrow was lifeless and still. For a split second, out of the corner of his
eye, he could’ve sworn he saw it move.
“I’m losing it,” he said,
shaking his head.
The scarecrow leapt from its
post, and Ted stumbled back, losing his balance. It wore the same torn, stained
overalls and straw hat that Ted had dressed his scarecrow in. But this was no
straw-filled scarecrow. This thing was flesh and blood. It lurched
forward; a creature with a skeletal frame, and eyes that glowed as bright as
the moon itself.
Ted whimpered, sounding like a
newborn baby that had led him to this predicament.
Then he screamed.
A brief, weak, muted scream that
could barely convey the pain inflicted upon him.
The last thing Ted saw as the Bubak
sunk its serrated teeth into his flesh was the moon shining brightly overhead.
It comes out every full moon to
feed.
