I was a buck-toothed eleven year old who just recently stopped believing in the Easter Bunny when I first heard the story of Melon Head. I was a first timer and not easily scared, I had pictures of horror movie psychos with distorted grins clutching twelve-inch butcher knives in their gloved hands plastered all over my walls. Gruesome photos from Wounds and Severed Limbs; dug up corpses, slit open stomachs, legs torn apart in farm equipment, hands crushed in packaging machines, bodies chomped in half by sharks and heads busted open in motorcycle accidents decorated the walls in my room! They made me feel safe in a perverted way. I fell asleep looking at them!

I never thought horrible things were going to happen to me, though. Death and disfigurement was only something taped to my wall and I thought I was invincible.

But horrible things did happen and they happened quickly.

* * *

After they found Wilber’s head smashed in and his body dumped in the woods it was like a boulder moved inside of my heart and the ground beneath it was now ready for a seed.

I hung newspaper clippings about the murder on my wall and stole the most wanted lists from post office corkboards. Classifieds, obituaries, diaries - anything I could get my hands on I read. Wanting my punishment to be a spectacle I locked myself in my room for hours and tried furiously to force my head, force my mind to relieve that day in the bathroom. When I did I saw a large, black mass like a sewer, the memory drying like a leaf in the sun.

The years rolled by me like marbles across a table and I lost track of time, lost my senses and nearly lost my mind. I was the editor of a small, prospering horror rag about real life murders and ghost stories called Real Terror Inc. I wondered as it grew would the magazine quickly replace those feelings of guilt that I had when my friend was murdered? Under my direction it flourished like a wild seedling and this was what I felt growing inside of me.

Pretty soon I found myself alone. My wife had perished in a car accident and flashbacks boiled in my mind of the summer camp and the strange pair of boots I saw in the bathroom stall on the day of my friend’s murder. I could not make the drive into work without barreling off the road and smashing into a pushcart or fire hydrant because of them.

On the anniversary of my wife’s car accident I saw nothing but the headlines printed in my mind’s eye in towering black, freshly printed, bold type like they had been laid out in front of me on the porch the morning after she died; Great Philanthropist Dies in Multiple Car Pile-up. .

At the magazine where my sanity was being deeply questioned I was demoted from editor to office gopher, I could care less, I would go hunt down special coffees and rare premium bond paper if it meant I could be alone for awhile - a seed was growing into a unique, disturbing, little plant inside of me and I had time to talk to it, prune its branches and water its soil. I couldn’t sleep. I hardly ate. I lost sixty-two pounds in three months. The folks at the press acted like I was a stranger and huddled around their steaming coffee mugs filled with express Cappuccinos or strange Romanian blends whispering about my swollen eyelids, uncombed hair, my unshaven face and inch long finger nails. The truth was that the stories I was reading for my magazine, even the distorted, badly written flotsam that washed up on my desk had begun talking to me and soothing the plant inside of me. It was embarrassing. I would be on the phone with a writer whose name I could not remember, (someone I had known for seven years or more!) I would fall deep into a trance while the pages in front of me talked! There would be a long pause on the other line then, "Terry… Terryyyy!!! Jesus…what are you smoking!" HHHHHHallucinations rambled inside of me like a foreign wind, a scepter for my soul. I hadn’t slept, I needed a stiff, stiff drink, a long stretch of sandy beach and some new flesh in front of me that was not about to be butchered.

It had been three years since my wife’s death. My kids were pushing me out the door every Saturday night but the faces at the bar and at clubs grew older and more desperate looking and I was not in any shape to meet somebody. I wanted nothing to do with the bar scene and never did. I needed proof that I had friends elsewhere, from a long time ago where people knew me not as the husband of Regina Shelton but as Terry Black, the horror geek. But there was something else I needed as well, my seedling had grown beyond my control and needed more than just water and soothing melodies, it sought catharsis.

Why then did I spend my vacation in Belleview among the looming pines walking on the pine needles in the shadowy forest near the summer camp where I saw those muddy boots? A cheap fling with a college girl with her breasts falling out of a bikini that was small enough to floss with might have been a better cure, but my wild seedling’s leaves were thirsting for a definitive answer and its thickening vines would soon strangle the life from me.

I packed up and drove the hundred and eighty miles of woodsy twisted roads an ended up in Belleview. Meanwhile the memories came flooding into my mind.

First it was that night at summer camp. I was eleven and we were all gathered in a small, dusty room smelling of mildew, rubber and Lysol. The backlit faces of the counselors described the disfigured, young Melon Head murdering seventeen small children with a rusted weed puller. The bodies were dipped in tar, dragged to the lakefront and hidden in the sand. The next morning as the sand was washed into the lake by the rain their foreheads were exposed, like little potatoes. No one dared look towards the blackness in the windows. The rain began to pelt the metal shingles on the roof, it sounded like the fingernails of Melon Head patiently tapping above, waiting for us to leave the safety of the dining hall.

One look at our bloodless, bleached-white faces as we clung to one another, our bony knees buckled in our arms and the counselors knew they were going to have an easy two weeks.

I remember Wilber, this was his second to last night on earth. The sweat beaded up on him like he had just stepped out of a carwash. He was yanking on my shirt, pleading for me to do something. His teeth were sticking out like they always did and he was gripping his crotch, sealing off his wiener in case of an emergency. "Why don’t you d-d-do som-som-something? It’s you’re f-f-fault," I heard him groan painfully. "You t-t-old them you d-d-didn’t b-b-believe in g-ghosts, na-na-na-now l-l-look!" To Wilber being at camp was like going to war. He was pampered, spoon-fed by rich parents and I hated that. I wasn’t going to embarrass myself by sticking up for him and he ended up running out of the dining hall screaming that Melon Head was coming to kill us leaving a wet streak behind him. He hid in the bell tower and they found him the next morning after his pants had dried. That was two days before he was murdered.

I saw a strange pair of steel toe boots the next day. They were large and caked with mud from the new soccer field. Small hairs were sliding against the linoleum and a piece of scalp squished against the concrete floor as the boots parked themselves in the next stall over from me.

I had only seen Mr. Jenson wearing steel toes, he was the maintenance man, no one else wore boots like that, none of the counselors, cooks, grounds crew or maintenance men. And none of them were that large.

I waited until the person in the boots flushed the toilet and then pulled up my pants, leaving my business half finished and bolted for the door smacking into Mr. Jenson’s fat stomach on my way out. He gave me a curious look as I wriggled past him and glimpsed down at his green tennis shoes.

One day later they lost Wilber again. This time when they found him he was buried in the sand on the waterfront. His skull was broken open like an eggshell and he had been mutilated by a small gardening tool. He was also dipped in tar.

The rest of my stay at Bellewoods was a blur of police and investigators, newspaper reporters and frantic calls from my parents. I slipped away and walked to Mr. Jenson’s cabin out of curiosity and saw him in handcuffs surrounded by dark blue uniforms. He was still wearing the same pair of green tennis shoes. It felt like my intestines were filling with turpentine, the blood drained from my face and I landed flat on my face in a puddle of mud. Who did I see in the bathroom? I soon repressed the whole episode and fueled an obsession with horror.

My parents brought me home and pulled their hair out, threatening to send me to military school after I caused a four-car pile up on the main road at the end of our neighborhood while I was filming my first horror movie, Crusty Joe. When my parents saw my friend Jeffery soaked from head to foot in fake blood holding their butcher knife in front of a four-car pile up it did nothing to help my situation. My father was wearing his nicest slacks when he sat me down and told me they were calling Dr. Shepherd.

The police had asked me questions and nearly cracked my fugue. They even had a specialist from the FBI who was trained in interrogation question me for four hours. They tried polygraphs, truth serums, even a hypnotist - when they finished they declared me "spooked and unreachable". That was the technical term used in the FBI files for witnesses. I kept my lips pinned shut about the strange boots and Mr. Jenson’s tennis shoes.

I joined the soccer team, read books, played with my friends and absorbed myself in horror to keep my mind occupied. It just didn’t add up, it was too spooky and every instinct told me it was Melon Head sitting next to me on the toilet, but who would believe me?

There were times at the camp when I heard unexplainable noises like shuffling sounds under the floorboards and scratching on the windowpanes in the middle of the night. I heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind me, and looking back would see nothing but an empty, dusty stairwell. At night from the woods if I listened close enough I could hear that distant moaning sound coming from far across the lake. I was sure it was him. Leaves scraping against the windows outside my bedroom, twigs breaking in the middle of the night, animals crawling around in the darkness, all these became the footsteps, the fingernails, and the heavy breathing of the watermelon baby coming to find me.

* * *

 I drove into the Belleview Public Library parking lot which was ten miles south of the camp at Bellewoods Lake. The leaves exploded in a glorious pallet of earthy color and stretched across the landscape. The clock tower loomed into the clouds high above and a brick façade found its way across my vision. I felt a little foolish in the shadow of it. I nearly walked right back into my car feeling hopeless and depraved. It might as well have been plastered across the façade - "Terry is a foolish Moron who can’t deal with the past!" in big letters.

I approached the front desk and explained myself to the librarian who took one look at me and placed her hand on her chest as if suddenly relieved. "Finally the savior is here to rid the town of the dreaded Melon Head! I thought you’d never come!" She was smiling triumphantly, her teeth full of fillings. She pulled me closer with a discrete wave of her hand. "You just missed him, he was in here looking for the latest Susan Teller novel. He walked out that door there!" She pointed to a tall oak door at the far wall. I was about to pursue this issue further, when a taller much more distinguished looking women placed her hand on the women’s shoulder and told her to kindly sit back down in her chair, she would handle this. Linda was the town crazy and apparently the head librarian, Ms. Solders had left her "in charge" of the desk to keep her from flushing books down the toilet or scaring the elderly people by faking a seizure in the reading room. "Every now and then she needs to feel important," she said. "Of course after that its back to making tee pees in the bathroom out of our ceiling tiles." She waved at hand at me as if I should know what that was all about. When I told her why I had come a questioning gust of air flew out of her lungs and they were large lungs. "Huh! That is a good question." And she expelled another gust of breath through her teeth making her bangs stand straight up on top of her forehead. She mused for a moment then quickly pointed to a small black door, "There, over there," she hurried me, "Over in the Black Room. We keep all of our…" at this stage her lip trembled visibly, people began picking their heads up from magazines and newspapers to listen, "That’s where we keep all of our unsubstantiated, undocumented, town related things and things of personal interest we have collected. It is our room where everything else goes. It might be of use to you." Her eyes locked on mine. I tried to read into them and came away with nothing but a desire to go see what was in that room.

I opened the door and was hoping for an old newsletter, a scrapbook or some discarded town records. Instead I find a slew of old diaries written in 1954 by Belleview children. That was about the time I figured Melon Head did his killing. There were hundreds of them stuffed into a box. I wiped the film of dust from the first diary and opened it. I was scanning for a name of a stranger, a weird incident - anything to give life to my theory. I found my first clue in a little girl’s memoir. Her name was Abigail Redgrave, a baby brother had just been born.

Diary entry by Abigail Redgrave Sept. 1st, 1954

Tonight Momma said she found this baby in the watermelon patch. It's head looks like a gourd and it doesn't have any teeth. I guess that's what babies are always like but this one doesn't seem right. Its eyes are awkward and bulgy and there is a tumor or something on its head. I was scared when Daddy came home and smacked Mommy. He said there is no way a woman would leave her baby outside. Jesus wouldn't do that to a child either. But Momma said she wanted to keep the little boy, she said it was her guardian sent by an angel and she wanted to keep it. It looks like a squash and smells funny but I ain’t sayin’ anything.

I remembered the name from the pages of a tattered leather diary written by a young girl who was discovered with her throat slashed, her legs cut off and stuffed in her mother’s sink. Someone had sent it to me for Real Terror Inc. I ended up writing a small article about it and then publishing the whole thing in my magazine. I had brought the diary along and checked the names, they were the same. It was her! From what I gathered her baby brother was not expected or welcome in her family. His head was terribly deformed. In fact it looked like a giant watermelon.

I flipped to the end of the diary, the last entry was May 22nd 1964, the same day she was found dead in the sink. I flipped back a few pages and found a crumpled piece of paper with the date September 1^{st, 1954, "Berf Certifikit" was scrawled across it. The letters Lu and er were legible, but the rest were torn away. I could read the last name clearly though, Redgrave. The babies name must have been Luther.}

She hadn't told her husband that she was pregnant and was thinking of what to do now. Lester was not going to be pleased. He had come to think of all children as being "deviled". Lester was sterile, or "seedless" as Abigail put it and this deeply disturbed him. He became quite devout because of it and made specific demands on his new wife to hide his shameful problem. The first of which were that he and Christine sleep in separate beds. This was undoubtedly a strange situation but it was only mentioned once in the diary and Christine must have been driven to sleep with her brother, Christian Wright, because of it. Abigail mentions him a number of times in her diary. He used to "visit" once or twice a week late at night in the watermelon patch. I did not find any other records on him but an old microfiche slide turned up an article about a Lester Wanes who was murdered on May 22nd, 1964 - they found the same small, bloody handprints on a blood-soaked gardening tool laid carefully at his feet.

Throughout her pregnancy Margaret knew that if her fetus was discovered Lester would have it aborted. In the later months she spent most of her nights in the watermelon patch gardening until her husband had fallen asleep, then she would slip into her nightclothes and lay on her side in bed so Lester wouldn’t notice her. She kept a large basin kept under her bed for her sickness.

There was no way she could hide the baby any longer.

When her husband came home Abigail was huddled around the tiny bundle wrapped in clean towels. His mother was holding him on her bosom. "Say hello to your new Daddy." She said smiling. The watermelon baby squirmed, turned his head and started to cry. Margaret saw the expression on her husband's face turn to one of rage and disgust. "I-I found him... beneath the watermelons and the squash. I found it while I was gardening...someone lef' it there."

Lester was furious and slapped his wife across the face. A blood red mark in the shape of a hand formed on her cheek. He scolded her up and down repeatedly, waving his hands, exasperated. "Who was it?" he screamed, "Who knocked you up?" Margaret pursed her lips shut, it was her brother; he had come in the middle of the night while he was asleep and they made love in the garden. It was a beautiful thing, them two together. It felt right and she had wanted it so badly. She wanted this more than anything in the world. She wanted a son. What was she supposed to do?

Lester took one look at the deformed child and spit. The baby was not the lord's work, his features were skewed and his head ballooned out like a squash. Its skin felt like chickpeas, hard and curdled, the ballooning jaw and the bulbous head made him think of one word - gigantism. Lester ran his hands through his hair and muttered. He thought the Lord would never create such an ugly thing and he certainly wasn’t going to raise the devils handy work! He picked the child up with a potholder and threw it in the trashcan, proclaiming it the work of the devil.

But Margaret was not giving up on her only son. She wanted him no matter how ugly he was. So she scooped him out of the trashcan and kept him hidden in the oven until she figured out what to do. Lester would eventually come to accept him. Abigail was not fond but curious of her new brother. She stared at the tiny bundle and poked at his bulging temples.

As the years went on Luther only became more grotesque. Lester forbade Margaret to take him outside even though they lived in the woods, he thought if she was seen with him they would be cursed. Lester decided to take the boy with him only on hunting trips at night and he gave him his large hunting hat to conceal his deformed head.

When Lester was not sweeping floors, fixing the water heater at the barbershop or sawing wood to sell at the Agway he was out hunting. So Luther frequently saw first hand what death was like and this may have been where he learned how cruel it was and how distinct a change it made. With his deformity he must have felt helpless, death was something he could control and something that like his deformity was unwanted and unique. He would hunt every chance he could with his father and squat over their kills with a curious grin growing across his deformed face. Abigail writes that his father would become frightened watching him finger the animal, staring at the blood and stool, the hemorrhaging eyes and bright pink intestines. He would drag the dead animal home and scream at Luther to stop looking at it. Then Luther would watch his father gut the animal, the pink bowels spilling onto the earth and his eyes lighting up with pleasure the first he and only pleasure he would ever know.

Luther was no more than six but his sister writes that coming home from a hunting trip gave him a rejuvenating look in his eyes and put a spring back in his step, one that made her think he was "nearly normal". He was not thrilled to be bringing home food though; he was thrilled by the idea of death. She writes of him watching her father gut a deer; "his eyes never left the poor deer", where most boys would have run away or squirmed he stood watching a miracle. All the colorful organs, the heart, liver and intestines aroused his sensuality and the knowledge that life had a definite ending possibly made his deformity seem less daunting.

By the time Luther was old enough to go to school he was a full-blown horror show. The two large tumors made his head a bulging mass of bone and flesh the size of a giant melon. Furthermore he could not speak. He only squealed like a pig. His mother feared sending him into a classroom would be a disaster. The children would be too frightened to go near him, they would become physically sick at the sight of him and tease him endlessly. He would be laughed at, prodded with sticks and spit on like a circus freak. Lester laughed at this idea, he was so grotesquely disfigured he couldn’t even see straight let alone learn to read, why send him to school?

But Margaret sent him along anyway with a newly pressed blue shirt, bow tie and brand new buckle shoes. He wore his fathers hunting hat to conceal his deformed head. When he walked through the front gates the children stopped climbing on the jungle gyms, they got off of their swings, ended their hopscotch games in mid hop and ogled him curiously. One boy walked up to him nervously and pulled the hunting hat off his head. At the sight of the exposed tumors and bulging scalp he fainted and some children ran home screaming and would not go to school as long as he was there. The teacher was so horrified she didn’t know what to do.

When he drooled on himself in the middle of class the children were disgusted and his strange squeals disrupted the lessons. He quickly gained the nick name melonhead and the children did not want to be near him. They dared each other to touch his head and snickered behind his back until the teacher became sick of looking at him and locked him in the closet until Margaret came to take him home for good.

The next day she dressed him in his nicest clothes, combed the small lock of hair that hung from the middle of his head and took his hand. They walked down the road towards the schoolhouse and turned right at the fork. There was a deep well and she asked her son to make a wish. As he was bending over the side of the well she lifted his feet and dumped him into the well. She covered her ears before she heard the soft, echoing moans of her baby crying for help then adjusted her paisley bonnet and walked home feeling she had done the right thing.

Luther was never spoken of again.

That night in bed Margaret heard the moaning of her son from deep in the woods. Clouds gathered over the little, thinly, shingled roof and she heard a clash of thunder in the distance. She was certain now that her son was possessed and she was glad to have dumped him in the well. Lester was right, this child was the devil In the morning she would suggest to Lester that they move to a new town. Thinking she could forget about him. But Luther would not be forgotten that easily.

Diary entry by Abigail Redgrave Sept. 8th, 1964

I stumbled upon a newspaper article hidden inside a yearbook for Ethan High School at the bottom of the trunk. It was from 1964, Ethan High was just a few miles from Windmill. Chills ran up my spine and the hairs stood on end along the back of my neck as I read it. It was another solid lead.

From The Windmill Chronicle, Sept. 10th, 1964.

Terror gripped the small town of Windmill today. Two nuns and seven students were found murdered in their classrooms. The sisters, Ms. Annette Balen, and Ms. Judith Weans were found decapitated in the back of the classroom at Windmill Elementary School on Main St. The seven students were brutally butchered with what appeared to be a small garden tool.

Principle Andrews stated that they had no idea what happened or who was responsible and he was in a deep state of shock. Police are still looking for clues.

The intruder entered unnoticed and then began his killing as the students were having class. Sources say small bloody, handprints and sneaker marks were found in the hallway and in the tool shed. No suspects have been found but police continue to work around the clock on this matter.

Janis White, a teacher of second grade said, "This is just horrible... the families of these children will never get over this atrocity and who ever committed these murders is sure to burn in hell after a long rot in a prison cell."

The nine bodies are being autopsied and will be buried on Thursday. Funeral services will be held the same day.

Police are questioning whether or not the family found dead in their home the same evening is a related crime.

Ethan High was just down the road. It was a perfect chance for me to resurrect some old ghosts, battle with them as necessary and expel some questions that were still haunting my mind. I could hear a voice whispering a string of gibberish in the back of mind as I fired up my "leather coach" and kissed the library goodbye. I pulled out of the Belleview Library parking lot, the forty-foot banner with my name on it a distant memory.

When I arrived at Ethan High I saw a Ms. Charlotte in the parking lot. I recognized her from the yearbook and had matched her name to some town records, the newspaper article and one of the diaries. She was a teacher at the high school now and judging from her diary she would have attended Windmill Elementary at the time of the killings. Her first name was Sarah. I flagged her down and started rambling on about the murders. She twisted away from me like I was a psycho and acted as if she had no idea what I was talking about. I showed her the article. She said she had no memory of the incident and that was probably just a crazy journalist pumping hype into the town.

"But you would have been in school around that time, correct?" I asked.

"No. I moved here two years later." She looked at me squarely and I knew she was lying.

I flipped the article over and showed her the words cutting her off. She stared blankly at it. "Pure hype, big developers or something. My mother used to scare me with that story." She was flushing a little, embarrassed and almost frantic.

I asked pleasantly if she could show me some classrooms and the library. She pointed me inside and walked away.

I poked around the gym and the locker rooms. I walked into one of the class rooms, I didn’t know what I would find. There were a couple of chalkboards, erasers, and some chemistry equipment. I ran a hand along a desktop and then looked underneath it. A message was carved into the wood that read, "MELON HEAD KILLS". As I ran my hand over the rough, carved scratches the chemistry teacher was returning to the classroom and noticed what I was doing. He put his heavy hand on my shoulder and glared at me. "Night school?" he asked.

"No! I’m researching something."

"Researching what?" he asked.

"I'm a journalist," I said qualifying myself, "Melon head."

His eyes hardened. "Kids think its funny to deface school property." he explained, placing his books down on the desk.

"Melon Head Kills…" I mused. It sounded funny spoken aloud.

He burst into a sheer titter. "It's folk lore around here. Kids tell the story in the woods, drinking, smoking pot around a fire. Of course you get the occasional prank, kid runs around in a Melon Head costume, but its been done to death. A story that keeps the kids home at night."

"Do you think its true?" I asked.

His speech was broken and there was a hint of secrecy in his tone when he answered. "Just a way to escape." He said and moved closer to me. "You don’t believe it?"

I was getting a little freaked out.

"I have reason to believe it. I found some things." I offered and he lunged and seized my wrist, pinching my muscles against my bones.

"Have you?" His hands were thick and muscled as if he shucked corn for a living instead of teaching chemistry and a sharp pain bolted through my arm. "Its not wise to confuse what is real with what we have found." He scolded. Tears welled up in my eyes from the pain.

I was wondering if he was going to break my arm. Instead he let my hand go and hurriedly gathered some papers on his desk and walked out of the room. I was left alone with the chemistry sets wondering if I had stumbled onto something big and terrifying in this little hick of a town. I walked out of the room and headed quickly for the bathroom.

The floors had just been polished and the fluorescents glared on them. I opened the doors to the men's room and took a urinal by the far wall. I looked up towards the ceiling and written across the ceiling tiles were the words, "Melon Head Lives" in black spray paint. The kids at the school had heard of him.

I opened one of the bathroom stalls and took a seat on the cold porcelain. Just above the large industrial sized toilet paper holder was a little rhyme scratched into the paint with a ballpoint pen. "Melon head lives in a town by the river/ he'll kill you slow and then eat your liver/ If you want him to leave this town for awhile/ give him your girl and increase the pile!"

Increase the pile. I started to wonder how so much sex and gore passes through a high school kids brain when I felt a luke-warm drop of something splatter on the back of my neck. I wiped at it and my hand was covered in red fluid. I smelled it - it was blood. I looked up at the ceiling, a long throbbing vein was dripping red fluid onto me from the ceiling tiles.

Slowly, the door began to creak open and someone or something was walking towards my stall. I could see their boots underneath the stall door - they were leather steel toes and covered in mud. The figure stood in front of my stall and I could hear him breathing, slowly moving air in and out of his chest. I held my own breath, bit my tongue until blood trickled down my lip and clenched my fists together. Christ, why does this shit happen to me?

I was glad I was sitting on a toilet because other wise I would have shit my pants. He was far too much like the freak I had seen years before. The air felt this tight back then, my skin crawled the same, he even smelt the same and the wheezing sound was similar. I held my breath and waited, and the creature suddenly turned to leave sluggishly dragging the steel toes against the grid of linoleum.

But there were more footsteps coming down the hall, three or four of them coming at first. It seemed like they wanted a piece of me, wanted to get their hands on me. The door flung open and I heard voices, kids shouting and laughing at each other, high on some weed probably. Jesus Christ, I thought, get a hold of yourself, Terry. Just some dumb kids.

Then one of them walked over to my stall door. He was wearing a pair of steel toes covered in mud.

"He's a little freakin’ wuss." He taunted, sticking his face up to the crack. He was a pimply kid and I could see four or five large white-heads on his chin and nose through the crack of the door. A tuft of red hair hung over his eye and dropped down onto his lips. He was watching me. Then his friend punched him in the shoulder.

"So… are you gonna’ do what he said?" he demanded, and then the pimply kid kicked in my stall door.

I was sitting there dumbfounded. The door swung open and it split my lip wide open and knocked my bottom teeth out. Blood poured from my gums and lips and I keeled over onto the floor.

The jerky looking kid with the red hair was pacing nervously back and forth across the bathroom. "I think he’s a pussy." he said spitting. Then they grew silent and I realized they were looking at my face pressed against the toilet. It looked like a busted piñata. I began to sit up for an unknown reason, maybe I figured I could fight them. Then he kicked the door again as hard as he could and it caught me in the side of the jaw cracking it in half.

I screamed and all that came out sounded like, "Mutt da muck!" My face felt numb as putty and a piece of my jaw was just hanging.

"Pity," the pimply kid taunted. "We could have used you. He wanted you just as bad as you want to know who he is, but you just don’t have the right head for it." He raised his boot over my face and forced it down, busting open my nose.

They punched me in the gut, stuffed my head in the toilet and kicked me as I lay on the linoleum. I surged at them with all I had and managed to push the three of them out of the stall and jammed the lock tight with my penknife. The pimply kid left the room and returned with an axe in one hand. I could see the red blade at his feet resting on the floor under the stall door. What looked like fresh blood was dripping down the side of it and he picked it up over his head. He grunted madly and thrust the heavy blade through the stall door. The blade punched through the metal door like cardboard and hung in the stall like a bloody tooth in a metal gum. He twisted the axe and pulling the blade free thrust it into the door again. A large piece of the metal shot through the air and landed in the toilet. He put his face up to the gaping hole and stuck his tongue out at me. Then he reached through the hole and unlocked the door. I lunged with all of my remaining strength and he swung the axe and struck me in the ribs. That is when I passed out. I only remember waking up in the back of an ambulance with the chemistry teacher next to me. He was looking down at me and telling me to stay away from Ethan High.

I recovered quickly from my injuries, at least I told the doctors I did and they released me a day later. I don't think they were looking forward to having me stay in the hospital for very long. On the first night someone tried to break in through my window. I had to ring for the nurse several times before she entered. I kept pointing at the window and screaming. She walked over to it, saw a large man standing outside and said, "Why, there's nothing there. You are imagining things. Try and get yourself some sleep." She soothed me by stroking my head. Then she walked over to the window, unlocked it and opened it! "You need to get some air now." She said smiling. As soon as the nurse left I pulled out my IV, ran down the hall and bolted myself in one of the storage closets.

The next morning I took a bus to the high school. My car had been broken into, pissed on, spray painted and torched. It looked like a pterodactyl caught in a tar pit, its legs in the air, frozen in time. On the windshield was a sign that read "Welcome, the search begins."

Possibly the only bit of luck I had was catching an out of town cab driver lost on his way back to Portsmouth. He said he’d take me around until he found the on ramp for 93 then I’d have to get out. He was lonely, and wanted to talk until he got a look at the blood soaking through my shirt and the swollen jaw. The cab swerved and he kicked me out by a small diner.

Inside the waitress was pouring full cups of coffee; that much was good news so I went inside. The cook was watching me from behind his stainless metal counter top. His stare was brutal, one eyed and reminded me of a butcher’s. He came from behind his station and served me my breakfast, two eggs, home fries, sausage links, bacon and toast smothered in ketchup and syrup.

Then he slid his bulk onto the seat across from me and lit a cigarette.

"You got nerve." he said.

I looked at him sideways, "Who is he?"

He raised an eyebrow and slid his ashtray across the counter. "He ain't what’s eating you. I can tell you that much." Then he winked sardonically and placed a coin on the table.

It was a buffalo head, rusted and mildewed. "Several years ago I would have saved that for my children, not now. That was a long time ago, before he entered my life. Ask yourself why you don’t believe or why you do, then ask why that why coin is worth anything more than the metal it’s printed on."

For some reason I lost it. I slammed me fist on the table and threw my breakfast plate against the wall.

I was holding up my shirt exposing my damaged ribs and pointing at him. "This is real! Broken ribs!" He pushed me back into my seat.

"This ain’t no joke." he warned me harshly. Then he scribbled an address on a paper towel. "No one wanted him, not even his own mother." he was getting up from his seat. "We keep him because he’s rare. There aren’t many like him. Like this buffalo head. You think about that."

"And the mothers of those dead children?" I asked.

"You have a lot to learn." He said.

"I can see that!" I shouted over my shoulder heading for the door.

There was a brand new suburban sitting across from a donut shop and the keys were still in it. I hopped in and juiced the engine listening to the American pistons fire. The owner was buying donuts and some coffee and I could see him through the glass. He turned when he heard his engine fire up and ran after me as I peeled away a donut still stuck in his mouth.

I headed down Ridge Rd. to Kings Farm Crossing which was the name scribbled on the greasy piece of paper towel the cook had given me. I didn’t know what I would find but the air was fresh, the grass was green and the sun was warm on my arms through the open window. I thumped on the side of my new truck wincing as bolts of pain shot through my torso and jaw. The radio was playing, I popped some perks and waited for them to take effect. Outside you could see the birds falling in grand arcs above the cornfields and the brilliant fall colors that masked the skyline. Rows of corn stalks passed by like the blades of a circulating fan. I was doing an even seventy. Then I caught something out of the corner of my eye.

There was a small gap in the corn. And there was a man. His head was the size of two basketballs, lumpy on one side and a small tuft of hair hanging down in the middle. He had a scythe in one hand and was wearing a hunting cap. I slammed on the brakes, my heart pounding off the seconds.

THUMP!! THUMP, THUMP!!

I gripped the wheel for a second, my palms squeaking against the leather and the windshield beginning to fog with my perspiration. Then a loud thump. It sounded far away but that could just have been my state of mind at the time. I heard another thump and this time a corn stalk bounced off the roof of my car and rolled down the windshield in front of me. Jesus Christ… Thump, Thump. More corn stalks hit the roof of my car. My lips were moving uncontrollably and I could hear myself speaking but couldn’t stop, "Oh my god he’s coming now to get my life, my heart it wants my heart, my life, my arms my legs my spleen it’s over, Oh god, Oh god, Oh god. I watched as one of my shaking hands reached for the window handle and tried to roll it up. There was nothing but green stalks and yellow husks behind me. Then an arm reached out of the corn stalks and grabbed onto my side view mirror. He moaned and I caught a glimpse of the creature’s disfigured face. I slammed on the gas and took off down the road

Behind me I saw the figure standing in the center of the road in a cloud of dust. I snapped my head around and had to slam on the brakes bringing the Chevy to a halt in the middle of the dusty road. The cook from the diner was standing in the middle of the road holding out his hand. I screamed at him wildly and jerked my head back around. Melon head was walking down the road towards me. "You nearly gave me a heart attack!" I screamed.

The cook said nothing. He was stroking a long Siamese cat. His eyes were vacant, glassed over and trancelike. He started speaking, "We had it all figured out…"

"What do you mean, figured out?" I screamed, my jaw throbbing.

"I wanted you to be the first to know, Terry." His voice was oddly calm and familiar but it made me shudder. It was as if he was speaking to a child, very soothing and mono toned.

I became hysterical, unhinging in a stutter of laughs and spasms. "Know what for God Sakes!"

"I saw the potential in him, Terry. I nurtured him, grew him, pulled him up from the well and cherished him just as he was because I saw uniqueness, potential, Terry! We didn’t all see this at first but eventually we saw how beautiful he really was."

A delightful tingle rode the length of my spine, standing my fine hairs on end.

"He knows how hard it to be judged, Terry. It wasn’t his fault Terry… it was ours!" His eyes beamed with intensity. His hair was blowing to one side and his smile revealed a set of gleaming yellow teeth. I looked beyond him and saw fists of bluish purple thunderstorm clouds mesh together. The stalks were bending in undulating waves a few hundred yards away and faintness drained a pale sore inside my mind.

I tried to gather my courage but it felt my lungs had been sucked out of me. Beyond the fields a hell of a good electric storm was brewing. The cat in the cook’s arms, its fur was standing on end.

I glanced quickly into my rearview mirror and saw the figure getting closer. He was holding a scythe. His head was larger than a sewer cover and he was ugly as sin. A giant goiter hung in front of his chin and made it hard from him to look down. It was Melon Head. There was no doubt in my mind now. The small strand of cornhusk-like hair that hung down in front of his skewed eyes was the only thing that made him seem remotely human, the rest was pure monster.

"You understand us now?" The cook was asking me.

"No, you sick bastard!" I screamed. Melon Head was slowly walking down the road, his steel toe boots covered in mud, the red hunting hat perched on his deformed head.

Then the cook flashed an awful smile. Both rows of the yellow stained teeth curved into wicked fangs and glinted with saliva. The Melon Head was halfway to the car. "See, it's awful nice to make friends with the local people before you go snooping around." The cook offered.

Melon Head was only a few feet from the car now. He was an awful sight. Grotesquely disfigured and more horrifying than I had imagined. He had removed the hunting hat and his head was filled with veins and bulged monstrously on both sides. His fingers were nothing but small globs of flesh. His ears were swollen, pointed and turned over, covered with a thick calloused layer of scar tissue, moles and insect bites. Tumor filled growths poked out his skull and neck. I choked back on a dry heave as he came nearer.

The cook hardly acknowledged his presence. He kept staring at me with those bloody, melancholy eyes. Melon Head walked up to him and placed his hand on his shoulder.

The cook took Melon Head’s hand in his and stroked in fondly. Then he looked at me, his face meaty and red. There were deep lines whittled from years of trusting his secret to the locals and creases around his mouth. A forced smile creased his face and he introduced me to Melon Head. "This is my son, Terry meet Lucifer." Melon Head held on to his scythe as he shook my hand and groaned wildly. The large bones and muscles undulated under his putty-like skin and when he opened his mouth his teeth fanned out like broken piano keys along his gum line.

The cook reached through my window and turned off the ignition. "Get out..." He opened the door and pulled me to the ground. He kicked me hard and I felt two or three of my ribs turning to powder under my flesh, fierce electric shots of pain rifled through me. It felt like someone had sliced into me with a sword. Melon Head moaned, pulled me to my feet and started dragging me into the cornfield.

The rhyme from the bathroom stall suddenly played in my head... give him your girl and increase the pile... I wished like a coward that I had someone to give because the scene before me was something that I could hardly negotiate with out losing my mind.

In the middle of the cornfield the bodies of several young women were thrown in a pile. Their cavernous abdomens were sliced open and you could see a pile of the organs in front of them. It was the most gruesome sight I ever saw and it made me vomit forcefully, sending another shrieking, white bolt of pain up my sides.

I started whimpering. Not for the dead girls with their insides scraped clean, I never knew them and didn’t care. I wanted my own ass out of there as shallow as that might seem but it was true. I had seen my search for an answer turn into a horror greater than any I could have known. I was a fool for wanting an answer, a fool for wanting the truth when anyone else would have just let it go. I could be home, in a warm dry house kissing my two children right now. But the truth was too tempting for me and it was dripping from my eyes now in my tears. This was reality now, the moment my ideas had created. I felt something lock into place inside of me. My question had been answered.

I was sorry that I asked it, or even searched for that matter. Had I not been in so much pain I think I would have been more concerned for the dead women in front of me. But all I knew was my own pain and the stench that rose from those corpses, like burnt rubber and boiled eggs. It was giving me the dry heaves.

I looked back at Melon Head. He was staring intently at me, almost in a loving way. The corpses began climbing off each other and rising to their feet one right after the other. The teacher I had been talking to yesterday rose out of the pile of dead and began walking around. She stared at me and smiled an evil grin. "You’ll finally know the end, Terry."

The lady from the convenience store, a waitress from the diner, and the librarian from the Belleview Public Library climbed out of the pile with that stoned look in their eyes. Each one wanting a piece of me.

I made it to the road. My car was a good two hundred yards away. I pressed my legs as hard as I could and Melon Head burst through the cornfield behind me. I ducked into my car and he struck the side of it shaking the entire vehicle. I fumbled for my keys as Melon Head walked around the side of the car. He thrust his fist through the window and I jammed my keys in the ignition and started the car. The engine caught then stalled.

Melon Head reached in the window. He had me by the collar of my shirt and thrust his scythe into the car. His friends were coming through the cornfield and surrounded the car. All of them were smiling at me like a bunch of stoned hippies, their eyes glassy, their teeth yellow and their arms reaching out to welcome me, cherishing the thought of me being with them. Melon Head pulled my head back and drew the scythe across my throat. I felt the blood pouring down my neck, over my chest and onto my legs. It was warm and smelled sweet and there was so much of it. I could do nothing but grope along the dashboard with my hands. I was pinned back against the seat, the hands of Melon Head pinning my neck. The smell of my own blood filled my nostrils, it was a catharsis, a drugged feeling of dependency had been ejected from my heart and in its wake, (though I had hardly known it was there) a glowing candle, its warmth so complete, lighted the dark crevices in my soul.

I touched the bloody puddle in my lap and rubbed the red liquid in between my fingers. It tasted like melted iron and silver slivers fell from my mind. Suddenly a memory ejected from my brain and it relaxed, like after a sudden nicotine craving a soft buzz ebbed the gray tissues. My body felt wonderful, it was like stepping from a hot shower into a soft, velvet robe. My mind drifted as if floating on a leaf down a mountain brook and was driven clean in a burning, white flash of light. I knew my destiny had been unchained and my sorrows, my twisted spirit, my haunted nights and dreams of terror were all coming to an end. That plant growing inside me sucked its leaves back into its stalk and shot back into the ground. I had succumbed to death.