Children of the Corn
by Stephen King



Burt turned the radio on too loud and didn't turn it down because they were on 
the verge of another argument and he didn't want it to happen. He was desperate 
for it not to happen.
Vicky said something. 'What?' he shouted.
'Turn it down! Do you want to break my eardrums?'
He bit down hard on what might have come through his mouth and turned it down.
Vicky was fanning herself with her scarf even though the T-Bird was 
air-conditioned. 'Where are we, anyway?'
-'Nebraska.'
She gave him a cold, neutral look. 'Yes, Burt. I know we're in Nebraska, Burt. 
But where the hell are we?'
'You've got the road atlas. Look it up. Or can't you read?'
'Such wit. This is why we got off the turnpike. So we could look at three 
hundred miles of corn. And enjoy the wit and wisdom of Burt Robeson.'
He was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. He decided 
he was holding it that tightly because if he loosened up, why, one of those 
hands might just fly off and hit the ex-Prom Queen beside him right in the 
chops. We 're saving our marriage, he told himself. Yes. We're doing it the same 
way us grunts went about saving villages in the war.
'Vicky,' he said carefully. 'I have driven fifteen hundred miles on turnpikes 
since we left Boston. I did all that driving myself because you refused to 
drive. Then -'
'I did not refuse!' Vicky said hotly. 'Just because I get migraines when I drive 
for a long time -'Then when I asked you if you'd navigate for me on some of the 
secondary roads, you said sure, Burt. Those were your exact words. Sure, Burt. 
Then -'Sometimes I wonder how I ever wound up married to you.'
'By saying two little words.'
She stared at him for a moment, white-lipped, and then picked up the road atlas. 
She turned the pages savagely.
It had been a mistake leaving the turnpike, Burt thought morosely. It was a 
shame, too, because up until then they had been doing pretty well, treating each 
other almost like human beings. It had sometimes seemed that this trip to the 
coast, ostensibly to see Vicky's brother and his wife but actually a last-ditch 
attempt to patch up their own marriage, was going to work.
But since they left the pike, it had been bad again. How bad? Well, terrible, 
actually.
'We left the turnpike at Hamburg, right?'
'Right.'
'There's nothing more until Gatlin,' she said. 'Twenty miles. Wide place in the 
road. Do you suppose we could stop there and get something to eat? Or does your 
almighty schedule say we have to go until two o'clock like we did yesterday?'
He took his eyes off the road to look at her. 'I've about had it, Vicky. As far 
as I'm concerned, we can turn right here and go home and see that lawyer you 
wanted to talk to. Because this isn't working at -'
She had faced forward again, her expression stonily set. It suddenly turned to 
surprise and fear. 'Burt look out you're going to -'
He turned his attention back to the road just in time to see something vanish 
under the T-Bird's bumper. A moment later, while he was only beginning to switch 
from gas to brake, he felt something thump sickeningly under the front and then 
the back wheels. They were thrown forward as the car braked along the centre 
line, decelerating from fifty to zero along black skidmarks.
'A dog,' he said. 'Tell me it was a dog, Vicky.'
Her face was a pallid, cottage-cheese colour. 'A boy. A little boy. He just ran 
out of the corn and. . . congratulations, tiger.'
She fumbled the car door open, leaned out, threw up.
Burt sat straight behind the T-Bird's wheel, hands still gripping it loosely. He 
was aware of nothing for a long time but the rich, dark smell of fertilizer.
Then he saw that Vicky was gone and when he looked in the outside mirror he saw 
her stumbling clumsily back towards a heaped bundle that looked like a pile of 
rags. She was ordinarily a graceful woman but now her grace was gone, robbed.
It's manslaughter. That's what they call it. I took my eyes off the road.
He turned the ignition off and got out. The wind rustled softly through the 
growing man-high corn, making a weird sound like respiration. Vicky was standing 
over the bundle of rags now, and he could hear her sobbing.
He was halfway between the car and where she stood and something caught his eye 
on the left, a gaudy splash of red amid all the green, as bright as barn paint.
He stopped, looking directly into the corn. He found himself thinking (anything 
to untrack from those rags that were not rags) that it must have been a 
fantastically good growing season for corn. It grew close together, almost ready 
to bear. You could plunge into those neat, shaded rows and spend a day trying to 
find your way out again. But the neatness was broken here. Several tall 
cornstalks had been broken and leaned askew. And what was that further back in 
the shadows?
'Burt!' Vicky screamed at him. 'Don't you want to come see? So you can tell all 
your poker buddies what you bagged in Nebraska? Don't you -' But the rest was 
lost in fresh sobs. Her shadow was puddled starkly around her feet. It was 
almost noon.
Shade closed over him as he entered the corn. The red barn paint was blood. 
There was a low, somnolent buzz as flies lit, tasted, and buzzed off again . . . 
maybe to tell others. There was more blood on the leaves further in. Surely it 
couldn't have splattered this far? And then he was standing over the object he 
had seen from the road. He picked it up.
The neatness of the rows was disturbed here. Several stalks were canted 
drunkenly, two of them had been broken clean off. The earth had been gouged. 
There was blood. The corn rustled. With a little shiver, he walked back to the 
road.
Vicky was having hysterics, screaming unintelligible words at him, crying, 
laughing. Who would have thought it could end in such a melodramatic way? He 
looked at her and saw he wasn't having an identity crisis or a difficult life 
transition or any of those trendy things. He hated her. He gave her a hard slap 
across the face.
She stopped short and put a hand against the reddening impression of his 
fingers. 'You'll go to jail, Burt,' she said solemnly.
'I don't think so,' he said, and put the suitcase he had found in the corn at 
her feet.
'What -?'
'I don't know. I guess it belonged to him.' He pointed to the sprawled, 
face-down body that lay in the road. No more than thirteen, from the look of 
him.
The suitcase was old. The brown leather was battered and scuffed. Two hanks of 
clothesline had been wrapped around it and tied in large, clownish grannies. 
Vicky bent to undo one of them, saw, the blood greased into the knot, and 
withdrew.
Burt knelt and turned the body over gently.
'I don't want to look,' Vicky said, staring down helplessly anyway. And when the 
staring, sightless face flopped up to regard them, she screamed again. The boy's 
face was dirty, his expression a grimace of terror. His throat had been cut.
Burt got up and put his arms around Vicky as she began to sway. 'Don't faint,' 
he said very quietly. 'Do you hear me, Vicky? Don't faint.'
He repeated it over and over and at last she began to recover and held him 
tight. They might have been dancing, there on the noon-struck road with the 
boy's corpse at their feet.
'Vicky?'
'What?' Muffled against his shirt.
'Go back to the car and put the keys in your pocket. Get the blanket out of the 
back seat, and my rifle. Bring them here.'
'The rifle?'
'Someone cut his throat. Maybe whoever is watching us.' Her head jerked up and 
her wide eyes considered the corn. It marched away as far as the eye could see, 
undulating up and down small dips and rises of land.
'I imagine he's gone. But why take chances? Go on. Do it.'
She walked stiltedly back to the car, her shadow following, a dark mascot who 
stuck close at this hour of the day. When she leaned into the back seat, Burt 
squatted beside the boy. White male, no distinguishing marks. Run over, yes, but 
the T-Bird hadn't cut the kid's throat. It had been cut raggedly and 
inefficiently - no army sergeant had shown the killer the finer points of 
hand-to-hand assassination -but the final effect had been deadly. He had either 
run or been pushed through the last thirty feet of corn, dead or mortally 
wounded. And Burt Robeson had run him down. If the boy had still been alive when 
the car hit him, his life had been cut short by thirty seconds at most.
Vicky tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped.
She was standing with the brown army blanket over her left arm, the cased pump 
shotgun in her right hand, her face averted. He took the blanket and spread it 
on the road. He rolled the body on to it. Vicky uttered a desperate little moan.
'You okay?' He looked up at her. 'Vicky?'
'Okay,' she said in a strangled voice.
He flipped the sides of the blanket over the body and scooped it up, hating the 
thick, dead weight of it. It tried to make a U in his arms and slither through 
his grasp. He clutched it tighter and they walked back to the T-Bird.
'Open the trunk,' he grunted.
The trunk was full of travel stuff, suitcases and souvenirs. Vicky shifted most 
of it into the back seat and Burt slipped the body into the made space and 
slammed the trunk lid down. A sigh of relief escaped him.
Vicky was standing by the driver's side door, still holding the cased rifle.
'Just put it in the back and get in.'
He looked at his watch and saw only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed like 
hours.
'What about the suitcase?' she asked.
He trotted back down the road to where it stood on the white line, like the 
focal point in an Impressionist painting. He picked it up by its tattered handle 
and paused for a moment. He had a strong sensation of being watched. It was a 
feeling he had read about in books, mostly cheap fiction, and he had always 
doubted its reality. Now he didn't. It was as if there were people in the corn, 
maybe a lot of them, coldly estimating whether the woman could get the gun out 
of the case and use it before they could grab him, drag him into the shady rows, 
cut his throat -Heart beating thickly, he ran back to the car, pulled the keys 
out of the trunk lock, and got in.
Vicky was crying again. Burt got them moving, and before a minute had passed, he 
could no longer pick out the spot where it had happened in the rear-view mirror.
'What did you say the next town was?' he asked.
'Oh.' She bent over the road atlas again. 'Gatlin. We should be there in ten 
minutes.'
'Does it look big enough to have a police station?'
'No. It's just a dot.'
'Maybe there's a constable.'
They drove in silence for a while. They passed a silo on the left. Nothing else 
but corn. Nothing passed them going the other way, not even a farm truck.
'Have we passed anything since we got off the turnpike, Vicky?'
She thought about it. 'A car and a tractor. At that intersection.'
'No, since we got on this road, Route 17.'
'No.I don't think we have.' Earlier this might have been the preface to some 
cutting remark. Now she only stared out of her half of the windshield at the 
unrolling road and the endless dotted line.
'Vicky? Could you open the suitcase?'
'Do you think it might matter?'
'Don't know. It might.'
While she picked at the knots (her face was set in a peculiar way - 
expressionless but tight-mouthed - that Burt remembered his mother wearing when 
she pulled the innards out of the Sunday chicken), Burt turned on the radio 
again.
The pop station they had been listening to was almost obliterated in static and 
Burt switched, running the red marker slowly down the dial. Farm reports. Buck 
Owens. Tammy Wynette. All distant, nearly distorted into babble. Then, near the 
end of the dial, one single word blared out of the speaker, so loud and clear 
that the lips which uttered it might have been directly beneath the grill of the 
dashboard speaker.
'ATONEMENT!' this voice bellowed.
Burt made a surprised grunting sound. Vicky jumped.
'ONLY BY THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB ARE WE SAVED' the voice roared, and Burt 
hurriedly turned the sound down. This station was close, all right. So close 
that yes, there it was. Poking out of the corn at the horizon, a spidery red 
tripod against the blue. The radio tower.
'Atonement is the word, brothers 'n' sisters,' the voice told them, dropping to 
a more conversational pitch. In the background, off-mike, voices murmured amen. 
'There's some that thinks it's okay to get out in the world, as if you could 
work and walk in the world without being smirched by the world. Now is that what 
the word of God teaches us?'
Off-mike but still loud: 'No!'
'HOLY JESUS!' the evangelist shouted, and now the words came in a powerful, 
pumping cadence, almost as compelling as a driving rock-and-roll beat: 'When 
they gonna know that way is death? When they gonna know that the wages of the 
world are paid on the other side? Huh? Huh? The Lord has said there's many 
mansions in His house. But there's no room for the fornicator. No room for the 
coveter. No room for the defiler of the corn. No room for the hommasexshul. No 
room -Vicky snapped it off. 'That drivel makes me sick.'
'What did he say?' Burt asked her. 'What did he say about corn?'
'I didn't hear it.' She was picking at the second clothesline knot.
'He said something about corn. I know he did.'
'I got it!' Vicky said, and the suitcase fell open in her lap. They were passing 
a sign that said: GATLIN 5 MI. DRIVE CAREFULLY PROTECT OUR CHILDREN. The sign 
had been put up by the Elks. There were .22 bullet holes in it.
'Socks,' Vicky said. 'Two pairs of pants. . . a shirt. . . a belt. . . a string 
tie with a -' She held it up, showing him the peeling gilt neck clasp. 'Who's 
that?'
Burt glanced at it. 'Hopalong Cassidy, I think.'
'Oh.' She put it back. She was crying again.
After a moment, Burt said: 'Did anything strike you funny about that radio 
sermon?'
'No.I heard enough of that stuff as a kid to last me for ever. I told you about 
it.'
'Didn't you think he sounded kind of young? That preacher?'
She uttered a mirthless laugh. 'A teenager, maybe, so what? That's what's so 
monstrous about that whole trip. They like to get hold of them when their minds 
are still rubber. They know how to put all the emotional checks and balances in. 
You should have been at some of the tent meetings my mother and father dragged 
me to. . . some of the ones I was "saved" at.
'Let's see. There was Baby Hortense, the Singing Marvel. She was eight. She'd 
come on and sing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" while her daddy passed the 
plate, telling everybody to "dig deep, now, let's not let this little child of 
God down." Then there was Norman Staunton. He used to preach hellfire and 
brimstone in this Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with short pants. He was only 
seven.'
She nodded at his look of unbelief.
'They weren't the only two, either. There were plenty of them on the circuit. 
They were good draws.' She spat the word. 'Ruby Stampnell. She was a 
ten-year-old faith healer. The Grace Sisters. They used to come out with little 
tin4oil haloes over their heads and - oh!'
'What is it?' He jerked around to look at her, and what she was holding in her 
hands. Vicky was staring at it raptly. Her slowly seining hands had snagged it 
on the bottom of the suitcase and had brought it up as she talked. Burt pulled 
over to take a better look. She gave it t6 him wordlessly.
It was a crucifix that had been made from twists of corn husk, once green, now 
dry. Attached to this by woven cornsilk was a dwarf corncob. Most of the kernels 
had been carefully removed, probably dug out one at a time with a pocket-knife. 
Those kernels remaining formed a crude cruciform figure in yellowish bas-relief. 
Corn-kernel eyes, each slit longways to suggest pupils. Outstretched kernel 
arms, the legs together, terminating in a rough indication of
bare feet. Above, four letters also raised from the bonewhite cob: I N R I.
'That's a fantastic piece of workmanship,' he said.
'It's hideous,' she said in a flat, strained voice. 'Throw it out.'
'Vicky, the police might want to see it.'
'Why?'
'Well, I don't know why. Maybe -, 'Throw it out. Will you please do that for me? 
I don't want it in the car.'
'I'll put it in back. And as soon as we see the cops, we'll get rid of it one 
way or the other. I promise. Okay?'
'Oh, do whatever you want with it!' she shouted at him. 'You will anyway!'
Troubled, he threw the thing in back, where it landed on a pile of clothes. Its 
corn-kernel eyes stared raptly at the T-Bird's dome light. He pulled out again, 
gravel splurting from beneath the tyres.
'We'll give the body and everything that was in the suitcase to the cops,' he 
promised. 'Then we'll be shut of it.'
Vicky didn't answer. She was looking at her hands. A mile further on, the 
endless cornfields drew away from the road, showing farmhouses and outbuildings. 
In one yard they saw dirty chickens pecking listlessly at the soil. There were 
faded cola and chewing-gum ads on the roofs of barns. They passed a tall 
billboard that said: ONLY JESUS SAVEs. They passed a cafe with a Conoco gas 
island, but Burt decided to go on into the centre of town, if there was one. If 
not, they could come back to the cafe. It only occurred to him after they had 
passed it that the parking lot had been empty except for a dirty old pickup that 
had looked like it was sitting on two flat tyres.
Vicky suddenly began to laugh, a high, giggling sound that struck Burt as being 
dangerously close to hysteria.
'What's so funny?'
'The signs,' she said, gasping and hiccupping. 'Haven't you been reading them? 
When they called this the Bible Belt, they sure weren't kidding. Oh Lordy, 
there's another bunch.' Another burst of hysterical laughter escaped her, and 
she clapped both hands over her mouth.
Each sign had only one word. They were leaning on whitewashed sticks that had 
been implanted in the sandy shoulder, long ago by the looks; the whitewash was 
flaked and faded. They were coming up at eighty-foot intervals and Burt read:
A...CLOUD...BY...DAY ...A...PILLAR...OF FIRE.. BY. . NIGHT
'They only forgot one thing,' Vicky said, still giggling helplessly.
'What?' Burt asked, frowning.
'Burma Shave.' She held a knuckled fist against her open mouth to keep in the 
laughter, but her semi-hysterical giggles flowed around it like effervescent 
ginger-ale bubbles.
'Vicky, are you all right?'
'I will be. Just as soon as we're a thousand miles away from here, in sunny 
sinful California with the Rockies between us and Nebraska.'
Another group of signs came up and they read them silently.
TAKE. . . THIS. . . AND. . . EAT. . . SAITH. . . THE. LORD... GOD
Now why, Burt thought, should I immediately associate that indefinite pronoun 
with corn? Isn't that what they say when they give you communion? It had been so 
long since he had been to church that he really couldn't remember. He wouldn't 
be surprised if they used cornbread for holy wafer around these parts. He opened 
his mouth to tell Vicky that, and then thought better of it.
They breasted a gentle rise and there was Gatlin below them, all three blocks of 
it, looking like a set from a movie about the Depression.
'There'll be a constable,' Burt said, and wondered why
the sight of that hick one-timetable town dozing in the sun should have brought 
a lump of dread into his throat.
They passed a speed sign proclaiming that no more than thirty was now in order, 
and another sign, rust-flecked, which said: YOU ARE NOW ENTERNG GATLIN, NICEST 
LITTLE TOWN IN NEBRASKA - OR ANYWHERE ELSE! POP. 4531.
Dusty elms stood on both sides of the road, most of them diseased. They passed 
the Gatlin Lumberyard and a 76 gas station, where the price signs swung slowly 
in a hot noon breeze: REG 35.9 HI-TEST 38.9, and another which said: HI TRUCKERS 
DIESEL FUEL AROUND BACK.
They crossed Elm Street, then Birch Street, and came up on the town square. The 
houses lining the streets were plain wood with screened porches. Angular and 
functional. The lawns were yellow and dispirited. Up ahead a mongrel dog walked 
slowly out into the middle of Maple Street, stood looking at them for a moment, 
then lay down in the road with its nose on its paws.
'Stop,' Vicky said. 'Stop right here.
Burt pulled obediently to the curb.
'Turn around. Let's take the body to Grand Island. That's not too far, is it? 
Let's do that.'
'Vicky, what's wrong?'
'What do you mean, what's wrong?' she asked, her voice rising thinly. 'This town 
is empty, Burt. There's nobody here but us. Can't you feel that?'
He had felt something, and still felt it. But -'It just seems that way,' he 
said. 'But it sure is a one-hydrant town. Probably all up in the square, having 
a bake sale or a bingo game.'
'There's no one here.' She said the words with a queer, strained emphasis. 
'Didn't you see that 76 station back there?'
'Sure, by the lumberyard, so what?' His mind was elsewhere, listening to the 
dull buzz of a cicada burrowing into one of the nearby elms. He could smell 
corn, dusty roses, and fertilizer - of course. For the first time they were off 
the turnpike and in a town. A town in a state he had never been in before 
(although he had flown over it from time to time in United Airlines 747s) and 
somehow it felt all wrong but all right. Somewhere up ahead there would be a 
drugstore with a soda fountain, a movie house named the Bijou, a school named 
after JFK.
'Burt, the prices said thirty-five-nine for regular and thirty-eight-nine for 
high octane. Now how long has it been since anyone in this country paid those 
prices?'
'At least four years,' he admitted. 'But, Vicky -'
'We're right in town, Burt, and there's not a car! Not one car!
'Grand Island is seventy miles away. It would look funny if we took him there.'
'I don't care.'
'Look, let's just drive up to the courthouse and -, 'No!'
There, damn it, there. Why our marriage is falling apart, in a nutshell. No I 
won't. No sir. And furthermore, I'll hold my breath till I turn blue if you 
don't let me have my way.
'Vicky,' he said.
'I want to get out of here, Burt.'
'Vicky, listen to me.'
'Turn around. Let's go.'
'Vicky, will you stop a minute?'
'I'll stop when we're driving the other way. Now let's go.'
'We have a dead child in the trunk of our car!' he roared at her, and took a 
distinct pleasure at the way she flinched, the way her face crumbled. In a 
slightly lower voice he went on:
'His throat was cut and he was shoved out into the road and Iran him over. Now 
I'm going to drive up to the courthouse or whatever they have here, and I'm 
going to report it. If you want to start walking towards the pike, go to it. 
I'll pick you up. But don't you tell me to turn around and drive seventy miles 
to Grand Island like we had nothing in the trunk but a bag of garbage. He 
happens to be some mother's son, and I'm going to report it before whoever 
killed him gets over the hills and far away.'
'You bastard,' she said, crying. 'What am I doing with you?'
'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't know any more. But the situation can be 
remedied, Vicky.'
He pulled away from the curb. The dog lifted its head at the brief squeal of the 
tyres and then lowered it to its paws again.
They drove the remaining block to the square. At the corner of Main and 
Pleasant, Main Street split in two. There actually was a town square, a grassy 
park with a bandstand in the middle. On the other end, where Main Street became 
one again, there were two official-looking buildings. Burt could make out the 
lettering on one: GATLIN
MUNICIPAL CENTER.
'That's it,' he said. Vicky said nothing.
Halfway up the square, Burt pulled over again. They were beside a lunch room, 
the Gatlin Bar and Grill.
'Where are you going?' Vicky asked with alarm as he opened his door.
'To find out where everyone is. Sign in the window there says "Open".'
'You're not going to leave me here alone.'
'So come. Who's stopping you?'
She unlocked her door and stepped out as he crossed in front of the car. He saw 
how pale her face was and felt an instant of pity. Hopeless pity.
'Do you hear it?' she asked as he joined her.
'Hear what?'
'The nothing. No cars. No people. No tractors. Nothing.' And then, from a block 
over, they heard the high and joyous laughter of children.
'I hear kids,' he said. 'Don't you?'
She looked at him, troubled.
He opened the lunchroom door and stepped into dry, antiseptic heat. The floor 
was dusty. The sheen on the chrome was dull. The wooden blades of the ceiling 
fans stood still. Empty tables. Empty counter stools. But the mirror behind the 
counter had been shattered and there was something else. . . in a moment he had 
it. All the beer taps had been broken off. They lay along the counter like 
bizarre party favours.
Vicky's voice was gay and near to breaking. 'Sure. Ask anybody. Pardon me, sir, 
but could you tell me -'
'Oh, shut up.' But his voice was dull and without force. They were standing in a 
bar of dusty sunlight that fell through the lunchroom's big plate-glass window 
and again he had that feeling of being watched and he thought of the boy they 
had in their trunk, and of the high laughter of children. A phrase came to him 
for no reason, a legal-sounding phrase, and it began to repeat mystically in his 
mind: Sight unseen. Sight unseen. Sight unseen.
His eyes travelled over the age-yellowed cards thumb-tacked up behind the 
counter: CHEESEBURG 35c WORLD'S BEST JOE 10c STRAWBERRY RHUBARB PIE 25c TODAY'S 
SPECIAL HAM & RED EYE GRAVY W/MASHED POT 80c.
How long since he had seen lunchroom prices like that?
Vicky had the answer. 'Look at this,' she said shrilly. She was pointing at the 
calendar on the wall. 'They've been at that bean supper for twelve years, I 
guess.' She uttered a grinding laugh.
He walked over. The picture showed two boys swimming in a pond while a cute 
little dog carried off their clothes. Below the picture was the legend: 
COMPLIMENTS OF GATLIN LUMBER & HARDWARE. You Breakum, We Fixum. The month on 
view was August 1964.
'I don't understand,' he faltered, 'but I'm sure -,
'You're sure!' she cried hysterically. 'Sure, you're sure! That's part of your 
trouble, Burt, you've spent your whole life being sure!'
He turned back to the door and she came after him.
'Where are you going?'
'To the Municipal Center.'
'Burt, why do you have to be so stubborn? You know something's wrong here. Can't 
you just admit it?'
'I'm not being stubborn. I just want to get shut of what's in that trunk.'
They stepped out on to the sidewalk, and Burt was struck afresh with the town's 
silence, and with the smell of fertilizer. Somehow you never thought of that 
smell when you buttered an ear and salted it and bit in. Compliments of sun, 
rain, all sorts of man-made phosphates, and a good healthy dose of cow shit. But 
somehow this smell was different from the one he had grown up with in rural 
upstate New York. You could say whatever you wanted to about organic fertilizer, 
but there was something almost fragrant about it when the spreader was laying it 
down in the fields. Not one of your great perfumes, God no, but when the 
late-afternoon spring breeze would pick up and waft it over the freshly turned 
fields, it was a smell with good associations. It meant winter was over for 
good. It meant that school doors were going to bang closed in six weeks or so 
and spill everyone out into summer. It was a smell tied irrevocably in his mind 
with other aromas that were perfume: timothy grass, clover, fresh earth, 
hollyhocks, dogwood.
But they must do something different out here, he thought. The smell was close 
but not the same. There was a sickish-sweet undertone. Almost a death smell. As 
a medical orderly in Vietnam, he had become well versed in that smell.
Vicky was sitting quietly in the car, holding the corn crucifix in her lap and 
staring at it in a rapt way Burt didn't like.
'Put that thing down,' he said.
'No,' she said without looking up. 'You play your games and I'll play mine.'
He put the car in gear and drove up to the corner. A dead stoplight hung 
overhead, swinging in a faint breeze. To the left was a neat white church. The 
grass was cut. Neatly kept flowers grew beside the flagged path up to the door. 
Burt pulled over.
'What are you doing?'
'I'm going to go in and take a look' Burt said. 'It's the only place in town 
that looks as if there isn't ten years' dust On it. And look at the sermon 
board.'
She looked. Neatly pegged white letters under glass read: THE POWER AND GRACE OF 
HE WHO WALKS BEHIND THE ROWS. The date was 27 July 1976 - the Sunday before.
'He Who Walks Behind the Rows,' Burt said, turning off the ignition. 'One of the 
nine thousand names of God only used in Nebraska, I guess. Coming?'
She didn't smile. 'I'm not going in with you.'
'Fine. Whatever you want.'
'I haven't been in a church since I left home and I don't want to be in this 
church and I don't want to be in this town, Burt. I'm scared Out of my mind, 
can't we just go?'
'I'll only be a minute.'
'I've got my keys, Burt. If you're not back in five minutes, I'll just drive 
away and leave you here.'
'Now just wait a minute, lady.'
'That's what I'm going to do. Unless you want to assault me like a common mugger 
and take my keys. I suppose you could do that.'
'But you don't think I will.'
'No.'
Her purse Was on the seat between them. He snatched it up. She screamed and 
grabbed for the shoulder strap. He pulled it out of her reach. Not bothering to 
dig, he simply turned the bag upside down and let everything fall out. Her 
key-ring glittered amid tissues, cosmetics, change, old shopping lists. She 
lunged for it but he beat her again and put the keys in his own pocket.
'You didn't have to do that,' she said, crying. 'Give them tome.'
'No,' he said, and gave her a hard, meaningless grin. 'No way.'
'Please, Burt! I'm scared!' She held her hand out, pleading now.
'You'd wait two minutes and decide that was long enough.'
'I wouldn't -'
'And then you'd drive off laughing and saying to yourself, "That'll teach Burt 
to cross me when I want something." Hasn't that pretty much been your motto 
during our married life? That'll teach Burt to cross me?'
He got out of the car.
'Please, Burt?' she screamed, sliding across the seat. 'Listen. . .I know. . . 
we'll drive out of town and call from a phone booth, okay? I've got all kinds of 
change. I just. we can . . . don't leave me alone, Burt, don't leave me out here 
alone!'
He slammed the door on her cry and then leaned against the side of the T-Bird 
for a moment, thumbs against his closed eyes. She was pounding on the driver's 
side window and calling his name. She was going to make a wonderful impression 
when he finally found someone in authority to take charge of the kid's body. Oh 
yes.
He turned and walked up the flagstone path to the church doors. Two or three 
minutes, just a look around, and he would be back out. Probably the door wasn't 
even unlocked.
But it pushed in easily on silent, well-oiled hinges (reverently oiled, he 
thought, and that seemed funny for no really good reason) and he stepped into a 
vestibule so cool it was almost chilly. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to 
the dimness.
The first thing he noticed was a pile of wooden letters in the far corner, dusty 
and jumbled indifferently together. He went to them, curious. They looked as old 
and forgotten a~ the calendar in the bar and grill, unlike the rest of the 
vestibule, which was dust-free and tidy. The letters were about two feet high, 
obviously part of a set. He spread them out on the carpet - there were eighteen 
of them - and shifted them around like anagrams. HURT BITE CRAG CHAP CS. Nope. 
CRAP TARGET CHIBS HUC. That wasn't much good either. Except for the CH in CHIBS. 
He quickly assembled the word CHURCH and was left looking at RAP TAGET CIBS. 
Foolish. He was squatting here playing idiot games with a bunch of letters while 
Vicky was going nuts out in the car. He started to get up, and then saw it. He 
formed BAPTIST, leaving RAG EC - and by changing two letters he had GRACE. GRACE 
BAPTIST CHURCH. The letters must have been out front. They had taken them down 
and had thrown them indifferently in the corner, and the church had been painted 
since then so that you couldn't even see where the letters had been.
Why?
It wasn't the Grace Baptist Church any more, that was why. So what kind of 
church was it? For some reason that question caused a trickle of fear and he 
stood up quickly, dusting his fingers. So they had taken down a bunch of 
letters, so what? Maybe they had changed the place into Flip Wilson's Church of 
What's Happening Now.
But what had happened then?
He shook it off impatiently and went through the inner doors. Now he was 
standing at the back of the church itself, and as he looked towards the nave, he 
felt fear close around his heart and squeeze tightly. His breath drew in, loud 
in the pregnant silence of this place.
The space behind the pulpit was dominated by a gigantic portrait of Christ, and 
Burt thought: If nothing else in this town gave Vicky the screaming meemies, 
this would.
The Christ was grinning, vulpine. His eyes were wide and staring, reminding Burt 
uneasily of Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera. In each of the wide black 
pupils someone (a sinner, presumably) was drowning in a lake of fire. But the 
oddest thing was that this Christ had green hair hair which on closer 
examination revealed itself to be a twining mass of early-summer corn. The 
picture was crudely done but effective. It looked like a comic-strip mural done 
by a gifted child - an Old Testament Christ, or a pagan Christ that might 
slaughter his sheep for sacrifice instead of leading them.
At the foot of the left-hand ranks of pews was a pipe Organ, and Burt could not 
at first tell what was wrong with it. He walked down the left-hand aisle and saw 
with slowly dawning horror that the keys had been ripped up, the stops had been 
pulled out . . and the pipes themselves filled with dry cornhusks. Over the 
organ was a carefully lettered plaque which read: MAKE NO MUSIC EXCEPT WITH 
HUMAN TONGUE SAITH THE LORD GOD.
Vicky was right. Something was terribly wrong here. He debated going back to 
Vicky without exploring any further, just getting into the car and leaving town 
as quickly as possible, never mind the Municipal Building. But it grated on him. 
Tell the truth, he thought. You want to give her Ban 5000 a workout before going 
back and admitting she was right to start with.
He would go back in a minute or so.
He walked towards the pulpit, thinking: People must go through Gatlin all the 
time. There must be people in the neighbouring towns who have friends and 
relatives here. The Nebraska SP must cruise through from time to time. And what 
about the power company? The stoplight had been dead. Surely they'd know if the 
power had been off for twelve long years. Conclusion: What seemed to have 
happened in Gatlin was impossible.
Still, he had the creeps.
He climbed the four carpeted steps to the pulpit and looked out over the 
deserted pews, glimmering in the half-shadows. He seemed to feel the weight of 
those eldritch and decidedly unchristian eyes boring into his back.
There was a large Bible on the lectern, opened to the thirty-eighth chapter of 
Job. Burt glanced down at it and read: 'Then the Lord answered Job out of the 
whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without 
knowledge? . . . Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? 
declare, if thou hast understanding.' The lord. He Who Walks Behind the Rows. 
Declare if thou hast understanding. And please pass the corn.
He fluttered the pages of the Bible, and they made a dry whispering sound in the 
quiet - the sound that ghosts might make if there really were such things. And 
in a place like this you could almost believe it. Sections of the Bible had been 
chopped out. Mostly from the New Testament, he saw. Someone had decided to take 
on the job of amending Good King James with a pair of scissors.
But the Old Testament was intact.
He was about to leave the pulpit when he saw another book on a lower shelf and 
took it out, thinking it might be a church record of weddings and confirmations 
and burials.
He grimaced at the words stamped on the cover, done inexpertly in gold leaf: 
THUS LET THE INIQUITOUS BE CUT DOWN SO THAT THE GROUND MAY BE FERTILE AGAIN 
SAITH THE LORD GOD OF HOSTS.
There seemed to be one train of thought around here, and Burt didn't care much 
for the track it seemed to ride on.
He opened the book to the first wide, lined sheet. A child had done the 
lettering, he saw immediately. In places an ink eraser had been carefully used, 
and while there were no misspellings, the letters were large and childishly 
made, drawn rather than written. The first column read:
Amos Deigan (Richard), b. Sept. 4, 1945 Sept. 4, 1964
Isaac Renfrew (William), b. Sept.19, 1945 Sept.19, 1964
Zepeniah Kirk (George), b. Oct.14, 1945 Oct.14, 1964
Mary Wells (Roberta), b. Nov.12, 1945 Nov.12, 1964
Yemen Hollis (Edward), b. Jan. 5, 1946 Jan. 5, 1965
Frowning, Burt continued to turn through the pages. Three-quarters of the way 
through, the double columns ended abruptly:
Rachel Stigman (Donna), b. June21, 1957 June 21, 1976
Moses Richardson (Henry), b. July 29, 1957
Malachi Boardman (Craig), b. August 15, 1957
The last entry in the book was for Ruth Clawson (Sandra), b. April 30, 1961. 
Burt looked at the shelf where he had found this book and came up with two more. 
The first had the same INIQUITOUS BE CUT DOWN logo, and it continued the same 
record, the single column tracing birth dates and names. In early September of 
1964 he found Job Gilman (Clayton), b. September 6, and the next entry was Eve 
Tobin, b. June 16, 1965. No second name in parentheses.
The third book was blank.
Standing behind the pulpit, Burt thought about it.
Something had happened in 1964. Something to do with religion, and corn. . . and 
children.
Dear God we beg thy blessing on the crop. For Jesus' sake, amen.
And the knife raised high to sacrifice the lamb - but had it been a lamb? 
Perhaps a religious mania had swept them. Alone, all alone, cut off from the 
outside world by hundreds of square miles of the rustling secret corn. Alone 
under seyenty million acres of blue sky. Alone under the watchful eye of God, 
now a strange green God, a God of corn, grown old and strange and hungry. He Who 
Walks Behind the Rows.
Burt felt a chill creep into his flesh.
Vicky, let me tell you a story. It's about Amos Deigan, who was born Richard 
Deigan On 4 September 1945. He took the name Amos in 1964, fine Old Testament 
name, Amos, one of the minor prophets. Well, Vicky, what happened - don't laugh 
- is that Dick Deigan and his friends - Billy Renfrew, George Kirk, Roberta 
Wells, and Eddie Hollis among others - they got religion and they killed off 
their parents. All of them. Isn't that a scream? Shot them in their beds, knifed 
them in their bathtubs, poisoned their suppers, hung them, or disembowelled 
them, for all I know.
Why? The corn. Maybe it was dying. Maybe they got the idea somehow that it was 
dying because there was too much sinning. Not enough sacrifice. They would have 
done it in the corn, in the rows.
And somehow, Vicky, I'm quite sure of this, somehow they decided that nineteen 
was as old as any of them could live. Richard 'Amos' Deigan, the hero of our 
little story, had his nineteenth birthday on 4 September 1964 - the date in the 
book. I think maybe they killed him. Sacrificed him in the corn. Isn't that a 
silly story?
But let's look at Rachel Stigman, who was Donna Stigman until 1964. She turned 
nineteen on 21 June, just about a month ago. Moses Richardson was born on 29 
July - just three days from today he'll be nineteen. Any idea what's going to 
happen to ole Mose on the twenty-ninth?
I can guess.
Burt licked his lips, which felt dry.
One other thing, Vicky. Look at this. We have Job Gilman (Clayton) born on 6 
September 1964. No other births until 16 June 1965. A gap of ten months. Know 
what I think? They killed all the parents, even the pregnant ones, that's what I 
think. And one of them got pregnant in October of 1964 and gave birth to Eve. 
Some sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl. Eve. The first woman.
He thumbed back through the book feverishly and found the Eve Tobin entry. Below 
it: 'Adam Greenlaw, b. July 11, 1965'.
They'd be just eleven now, he thought and his flesh began to crawl. And maybe 
they're out there. Someplace.
But how could such a thing be kept secret? How could it goon?
How unless the God in question approved?
'Oh Jesus,' Burt said into the silence, and that was when the T-Bird's horn 
began to- blare into the afternoon, one long continuous blast.
Burt jumped from the pulpit and ran down the centre aisle. He threw open the 
outer vestibule door, letting in hot sunshine, dazzling. Vicky was bold upright 
behind the
steering wheel, both hands plastered on the horn ring, her head swivelling 
wildly. From all around the children were coming. Some of them were laughing 
gaily. They held knives, hatchets, pipes, rocks, hammers. One girl, maybe eight, 
with beautiful long blonde hair, held a jackhandle. Rural weapons. Not a gun 
among them. Burt felt a wild urge to scream out: Which of you is Adam and Eve? 
Who are the mothers? Who are the daughters? Fathers? Sons?
Declare, if thou hast understanding.
They came from the side streets, from the town green, through the gate in the 
chain-link fence around the school playground a block further east. Some of them 
glanced indifferently at Burt, standing frozen on the church steps, and some 
nudged each other and pointed and smiled the sweet smiles of children.
The girls were dressed in long brown wool and faded sun-bonnets. The boys, like 
Quaker parsons, were all in black and wore round-crowned flat-brimmed hats. They 
streamed across the town square towards the car, across lawns, a few came across 
the front yard of what had been the Grace Baptist Church until 1964. One or two 
of them almost close enough to touch.
'The shotgun!' Burt yelled. 'Vicky, get the shotgun!'
But she was frozen in her panic, he could see that from the steps. He doubted if 
she could even hear him through the closed windows.
They converged on the Thunderbird. The axes and hatchets and chunks of pipe 
began to rise and fall. My God, am I seeing this? he thought frozenly. An arrow 
of chrome fell off the side of the car. The hood ornament went flying. Knives 
crawled spirals through the sidewalls of the tyres and the car settled. The horn 
blared on and on. The windshield and side windows -went opaque and cracked under 
the onslaught. . . and then the safety glass sprayed inwards and he could see 
again. Vicky was crouched back, only one hand on the horn ring now, the other 
thrown up to protect her face. Eager young hands reached in, fumbling for the 
lock/unlock button. She beat them away wildly. The horn became intermittent and 
then stopped altogether.
The beaten and dented driver's side door was hauled open. They were trying to 
drag her out but her hands were wrapped around the steering wheel. Then one of 
them leaned in, knife in hand, and -His paralysis broke and he plunged down the 
steps, almost falling, and ran down the flagstone walk, towards them. One of 
them, a boy about sixteen with long long red hair spilling out from beneath his 
hat, turned towards him, almost casually, and something flicked through the air. 
Burt's left arm jerked backwards, and for a moment he had the absurd thought 
that the had been punched at long distance, Then the pain came, so sharp and 
sudden that the world went grey.
He examined his arm with a stupid sort of wonder. A buck and half Pensy 
jack-knife was growing out of it like a strange tumour. The sleeve of his J. C. 
Penney sports shirt was turning red. He looked at it for what seemed like for 
ever, trying to understand how he could have grown a jack-knife. . . was it 
possible?
When he looked up, the boy with red hair was almost on top of him. He was 
grinning, confident.
'Hey, you bastard,' Burt said. His voice was creaking, shocked.
'Remand your soul to God, for you will stand before His throne momentarily,' the 
boy with the red hair said, and clawed for Burt's eyes.
Burt stepped back, pulled the Pensy out of his arm, and stuck it into the 
red-haired boy's throat. The gush of blood was immediate, gigantic. Burt was 
splashed with it. The red-haired boy began to gobble and walk in a large circle. 
He clawed at the knife, trying to pull it free, and was unable. Burt watched 
him, jaw hanging agape. None of this was happening. It was a dream. The 
red-haired boy gobbled and walked. Now his sound was the only one in the hot 
early afternoon. The others watched, stunned.
This part of it wasn't in the script, Burt thought numbly. Vicky and I, we were 
in the script. And the boy in the corn, who was trying to run away. But not one 
of their own. He stared at them savagely, wanting to scream, How do you like it?
The red-haired boy gave one last weak gobble, and sank to his knees. He stared 
up at Burt for a moment, and then his hands dropped away from the shaft of the 
knife, and he fell forward.
A soft sighing sound from the children gathered around the Thunderbird. They 
stared at Burt. Burt stared back at them, fascinated . . . and that was when he 
noticed that Vicky was gone.
'Where is she?' he asked. 'Where did you take her?'
One of the boys raised a blood-streaked hunting knife towards his throat and 
made a sawing motion there. He grinned. That was the only answer.
From somewhere in back, an older boy's voice, soft: 'Get him.'
The boys began to walk towards him. Burt backed up. They began to walk faster. 
Burt backed up faster. The shotgun, the god-damned shotgun! Out of reach. The 
sun cut their shadows darkly on the green church lawn. . . and then he was on 
the sidewalk. He turned and ran.
'Kill him!' someone roared, and they came after him.
He ran, but not quite blindly. He skirted the Municipal Building - no help 
there, they would corner him like a rat -and ran on up Main Street, which opened 
out and became the highway again two blocks further up. He and Vicky would have 
been on that road now and away, if he had only listened.
His loafers slapped against the sidewalk. Ahead of him he could see a few more 
business buildings, including the Gatlin Ice Cream Shoppe and - sure enough - 
the Bijou Theatre. The dust-clotted marquee letters read NOW HOWING L MITED EN 
AGEMEN ELI A TH TAYLOR CLEOPA RA. Beyond the next cross street was a gas station 
that marked the edge of town. And beyond that the corn, closing back in to the 
sides of the road. A green tide of corn.
Burt ran. He was already out of breath and the knife wound in his upper arm was 
beginning to hurt. And he was leaving a trail of blood. As he ran he yanked his 
handkerchief from his back pocket and stuck it inside his shirt.
He ran. His loafers pounded the cracked cement of the sidewalk, his breath 
rasped in his throat with more and more heat. His arm began to throb in earnest. 
Some mordant part of his brain tried to ask if he thought he could run all the 
way to the next town, if he could run twenty miles of two-lane blacktop.
He ran. Behind him he could hear them, fifteen years younger and faster than he 
was, gaining. Their feet slapped on the pavement. They whooped and shouted back 
and forth to each other. They're having more fun than a five-alarm fire, Burt 
thought disjointedly. They'll talk about it for years.
Burt ran.
He ran past the gas station marking the edge of town. His breath gasped and 
roared in his chest. The sidewalk ran out under his feet. And now there was only 
one thing to do, only one chance to beat them and escape with his life. The 
houses were gone, the town was gone. The corn had surged in a soft green wave 
back to the edges of the road. The green, swordlike leaves rustled softly. It 
would be deep in there, deep and cool, shady in the rows of man-high corn.
He ran past a sign that said: YOU ARE NOW LEAVING GATLIN, NICEST LITTLE TOWN IN 
NEBRASKA - OR ANYWHERE ELSE! DROP IN ANYTIME!
I'll be sure to do that, Burt thought dimly.
He ran past the sign like a sprinter closing on the tape and then swerved left, 
crossing the road, and kicked his loafers away. Then he was in the corn and it 
closed behind him and over him like the waves of a green sea, taking him in. 
Hiding him. He felt a sudden and wholly unexpected relief sweep him, and at the 
same moment he got his second wind. His lungs, which had been shallowing up, 
seemed to unlock and give him more breath.
He ran straight down the first row he had entered, head ducked, his broad 
shoulders swiping the leaves and making them tremble. Twenty yards in' he turned 
right, parallel to the road again, and ran on, keeping low so they wouldn't see 
his dark head of hair bobbing amid the yellow corn tassels. He doubled back 
towards the road for a few moments, crossed more rows, and then put his back to 
the road and hopped randomly from row to row, always delving deeper and deeper 
into the corn.
At last, he collapsed on to his knees and put his forehead against the ground. 
He could only hear his own taxed breathing, and the thought that played over and 
over in his mind was: Thank God I gave up smoking, thank God I gave up smoking, 
thank God -Then he could hear them, yelling back and forth to each other, in 
some cases bumping into each other ('Hey, this is my row!'), and the sound 
heartened him. They were well away to his left and they sounded very poorly 
organized.
He took his handkerchief out of his shirt, folded it, and stuck it back in after 
looking at the wound. The bleeding seemed to have stopped in spite of the 
workout he had given it.
He rested a moment longer, and was suddenly aware that he felt good, physically 
better than he had in years excepting the throb of his arm. He felt well 
exercised, and suddenly grappling with a clearcut (no matter how insane) problem 
after two years of trying to cope with the incubotic gremlins that were sucking 
his marriage dry.
It wasn't right that he should feel this way, he told himself. He was in deadly 
peril of his life, and his wife had been carried off. She might be dead now. He 
tried to summon up Vicky's face and dispel some of the odd good feeling by doing 
so, but her face wouldn't come. What came was the red-haired boy with the knife 
in his throat.
He became aware of the corn fragrance in his nose now, all around him. The wind 
through the tops of the plants made a sound like voices. Soothing. Whatever had 
been done in the name of this corn, it was now his protector.
But they were getting closer.
Running hunched over, he hurried up the row he was in, crossed over, doubled 
back, and crossed over more rows. He tried to keep the voices always on his 
left, but as the afternoon progressed, that became harder to do. The voices had 
grown faint, and often the rustling sound of the corn obscured them altogether. 
He would run, listen, run again. The earth was hard-packed, and his stockinged 
feet left little or no trace.
When he stopped much later the sun was hanging over the fields to his right, red 
and inflamed, and when he looked at his watch he saw that it was quarter past 
seven. The sun had stained the corntops a reddish gold, but here the shadows 
were dark and deep. He cocked his head, listening. With the coming of sunset the 
wind had died entirely and the corn stood still, exhaling its aroma of growth 
into the warm air. If they were still in the corn they were either far away or 
just hunkered down and listening. But Burt didn't think a bunch of kids, even 
crazy ones, could be quiet for that long. He suspected they had done the most 
kidlike thing, regardless of the consequences for them; they had given up and 
gone home.
He turned towards the setting sun, which had sunk between the raftered clouds on 
the horizon, and began to walk. If he cut on a diagonal through the rows, always 
keeping the setting sun ahead of him, he would be bound to strike Route 17 
sooner or later.
The ache in his arm had settled into a dull throb that was nearly pleasant, and 
the good feeling was still with him. He decided that as long as he was here, he 
would let the good feeling exist in him without guilt. The guilt would return 
when he had to face the authorities and account for what had happened in Gatlin. 
But that could wait.
He pressed through the corn, thinking he had never felt so keenly aware. Fifteen 
minutes later the sun was only a hemisphere poking over the horizon and he 
stopped again, his new awareness clicking into a pattern he didn't like. It was 
vaguely. . . well, vaguely frightening.
He cocked his head. The corn was rustling.
Burt had been aware of that for some time, but he had just put it together with 
something else. The wind was still. How could that be?
He looked around warily, half expecting to see the smiling boys in their Quaker 
coats creeping out of the corn, their knives clutched in their hands. Nothing of 
the sort. There was still that rustling noise. Off to the left.
He began to walk in that direction, not having to bull through the corn any 
more. The row was taking him in the direction he wanted to go, naturally. The 
row ended up ahead. Ended? No, emptied out into some sort of clearing. The 
rustling was there.
He stopped, suddenly afraid.
The scent of the corn was strong enough to be cloying. The rows held on to the 
sun's heat and he became aware that he was plastered with sweat and chaff and 
thin spider strands of cornsilk. The bugs ought to be crawling all over him. . . 
but they weren't.
He stood still, staring towards that place where the corn opened out on to what 
looked like a large circle of bare earth.
There were no minges or mosquitoes in here, no black-flies or chiggers - what he 
and Vicky had called 'drive-in bugs' when they had been courting, he thought 
with sudden and unexpectedly sad nostalgia. And he hadn't seen a single crow. 
How was that for weird, a cornpatch with no crows?
In the last of the daylight he swept his eyes closely over the row of corn to 
his left. And saw that every leaf and stalk was perfect, which was just not 
possible. No yellow blight. No tattered leaves, no caterpillar eggs, no burrows, 
no -His eyes widened.
My God, there aren't any weeds!
Not a single one. Every foot and a half the corn plants rose from the earth. 
There was no witchgrass, jimson, pikeweed, whore's hair, or poke salad. Nothing.
Burt stared up, eyes wide. The light in the west was fading. The raftered clouds 
had drawn back together. Below them the golden light had faded to pink and 
ochre. It would be dark soon enough.
It was time to go down to the clearing in the corn and see what was there - 
hadn't that been the plan all along? All the time he had thought he was cutting 
back to the highway, hadn't he been being led to this place?
Dread in his belly, he went on down to the row and stood at the edge of the 
clearing. There was enough light for him to see what was here. He couldn't 
scream. There didn't seem to be enough air left in his lungs. He tottered in on 
legs like slats of splintery wood. His eyes bulged from his sweaty face.
'Vicky,' he whispered. 'Oh, Vicky, my God -'
She had been mounted on a crossbar like a hideous trophy, her arms held at the 
wrists and her legs at the ankles with twists of common barbed wire, seventy 
cents a yard at any hardware store in Nebraska. Her eyes had been ripped out. 
The sockets were filled with the moonflax of cornsilk. Her jaws were wrenched 
open in a silent scream, her mouth filled with cornhusks.
On her left was a skeleton in a mouldering surplice. The nude jawbone grinned. 
The eye sockets seemed to stare at Burt jocularly, as if the one-time minister 
of the Grace Baptist Church was saying: It's not so bad, being sacrificed by 
pagan devil-children in the corn is not so bad, having your eyes ripped out of 
your skull according to the Laws of Moses is not so bad -To the left of the 
skeleton in the surplice was a second skeleton, this one dressed in a rotting 
blue uniform. A hat hung over the skull, shading the eyes, and on the peak of 
the cap was a greenish-tinged badge reading police chief.
That was when Burt heard it coming: not the children but something much larger, 
moving through the corn and towards the clearing. Not the children, no. The 
children wouldn't venture into the corn at night. This was the holy place, the 
place of He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
Jerkily Burt turned to flee. The row he had entered the clearing by was gone. 
Closed up. All the rows had closed up. It was coming closer now and he could 
hear it, pushing through the corn. He could hear it breathing. An ecstasy of 
superstitious terror seized him. It was coming. The corn on the far side of the 
clearing had suddenly darkened, as if a gigantic shadow had blotted it out.
Coming.
He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
It began to come into the clearing. Burt saw something huge, bulking up to the 
sky . . . something green with terrible red eyes the size of footballs.
Something that smelled like dried cornhusks years in some dark barn.
He began to scream. But he did not scream long.
Some time later, a bloated orange harvest moon came up.
The children of the corn stood in the clearing at midday, looking at the two 
crucified skeletons and the two bodies
the bodies were not skeletons yet, but they would be. In time. And here, in the 
heartlands of Nebraska, in the corn, there was nothing but time.
'Behold, a dream came to me in the night, and the Lord did shew all this to me.'
They all turned to look at Isaac with dread and wonder, even Malachi. Isaac was 
only nine, but he had been the Seer since the corn had taken David a year ago. 
David had been nineteen and he had walked into the corn on his birthday, just as 
dusk had come drifting down the summer rows.
Now, small face grave under his round-crowned hat, Isaac continued:
'And in my dream the Lord was a shadow that walked behind the rows, and he spoke 
to me in the words he used to our older brothers years ago. He is much 
displeased with this sacrifice.'
They made a sighing, sobbing noise and looked at the surrounding walls of green.
'And the Lord did say: Have I not given you a place of killing, that you might 
make sacrifice there? And have I not shewn you favour? But this man has made a 
blasphemy within me, and I have completed this sacrifice myself. Like the Blue 
Man and the false minister who escaped many years ago.'
'The Blue Man . . . the false minister,' they whispered, and looked at each 
other uneasily.
'SO now is the Age of Favour lowered from nineteen plantings and harvestings to 
eighteen,' Isaac went on relentlessly. 'Yet be fruitful and multiply as the corn 
multiplies, that my favour may be shewn you, and be upon you.'
Isaac ceased.
The eyes turned to Malachi and Joseph, the only two among this party who were 
eighteen. There were others back in town, perhaps twenty in all.
They waited to hear what Malachi would say, Malachi who had led the hunt for 
Japheth, who evermore would be known as Ahaz, cursed of God. Malachi had cut the 
throat of Ahaz and had thrown his body out of the corn so the foul body would 
not pollute it or blight it.
'I obey the word of God,' Malachi whispered.
The corn seemed to sigh its approval.
In the weeks to come the girls would make many corncob crucifixes to ward off 
further evil.
And that night all of those now above the Age of Favour walked silently into the 
corn and went to the clearing, to gain the continued favour of He Who Walks 
Behind the Rows.
'Goodbye, Malachi,' Ruth called. She waved disconsolately. Her belly was big 
with Malachi's child and tears coursed silently down her cheeks. Malachi did not 
turn. His back was straight. The corn swallowed him.
Ruth turned away, still crying. She had conceived a secret hatred for the corn 
and sometimes dreamed of walking into it with a torch in each hand when dry 
September came and the stalks were dead and explosively combustible. But she 
also feared it. Out there, in the night, something walked, and it saw everything 
. . even the secrets kept in human hearts.
Dusk deepened into night. Around Gatlin the corn rustled and whispered secretly. 
It was well pleased.