Field of Screams by Joel A. Sutherland

Author:Joel A. Sutherland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

A man burst into view, but it wasn’t the bad man. Just a weird old man.

Wight stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Ryan and me. His head bobbed up and down like a chicken pecking at bits of corn, and his wild eyes searched us up and down and then looked past us left and right. He seemed disappointed to see us, or maybe agitated. Probably both.

Baddest of them all, the boy had said before fleeing in terror.

“I heard a voice,” Wight said desperately, short of breath and full of nerves. “A voice! Who was here with you?”

“I don’t know what you’re—” I said but he cut me off.

“Don’t play dumb with me,” he said, his voice a low growl. “This is my property, and I demand to know who was with you just a moment ago.”

“Seriously, old man, back off!” Ryan said, stepping up beside me.

Something inside Wight seemed to snap. His upper lip curled back, revealing the top row of his yellowed, crooked teeth. His mental state appeared to be balanced precariously on a knife-edge. And then, just when I feared he was about to have another angry outburst, his chest heaved a little and he sucked air in quickly through his teeth, as if he’d been stung by a wasp.

“I’m sorry,” he said. And then, as if noticing us for the first time, he said, “You’re the two boys I spoke with earlier.”

I still didn’t trust him—not by a long shot—but I was beginning to understand part of the reason he was so weird. He’d been living for years on a haunted farm.

“Yeah, we spoke earlier,” I said. “The voice you heard was… Well, we found a boy in the maze, maybe nine or ten years old. He seemed lost. He was about this tall—” I held my hand up to my shoulder, “and he had reddish-blond hair.”

Wight removed his hat and twisted it in his fingers. His lower lip quivered and the wrinkles around his eyes deepened. He nodded, unbunched his hat, and set it back on top of his head with a deep sigh. “He’s not lost. He’s my cousin. His name was Clive. He…he’s dead.”

“What?” Ryan whispered.

“He’s dead?” I said, my brain taking a moment to process that information.

But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. That’s why he looked a little odd and moved without making a sound, and also how he could touch the bad man without it hurting the way it had hurt me.

Assuming Clive and Wight had been about the same age, Clive must’ve died fifty or sixty years ago.

“How did he die?” I asked quietly, hoping the question didn’t set the old man off. He was Jekyll right now—calm and more or less even-tempered. I had no desire to awaken Hyde—angry and quick to fly off the handle.

Wight opened his mouth to answer but then snapped it shut and looked around. He shivered, and his back made a series of sharp cracks and pops.

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