Mrs. Caldwell's Sunflower Field nosleep

Children have always had a habit of – disappearing – in my town.

My parents said it was the same way when they were children, but it was just something you worked around. I guess it’s like living by the sea, someone’s gonna drown eventually.

When I was about eleven, the disappearances had been going on for – shit, probably about forty or fifty years by that point. The story was always the same, too. Someone’s child just didn’t come home one night.

In the beginning, at least according to my parents, the police actually did pour everything they had into finding them. They searched all over, but the whole department was only seven cops for the town, and even with outside help, they were at a huge disadvantage. At first they thought the children were having accidents, breaking their leg playing in the creek or falling out of a tree. It was just hard for them to imagine anything more sinister was happening. By the time I came along, though, the police took the report, but everyone knew – when they disappeared, they didn’t come back.

See, I’m from a small town in Central Tennessee called Eagleville. Lot of land, not a lot of people, and full of rolling hills and fields. Imagine the Shire, just in Tennessee instead of New Zealand and with a psychopath stealing little Hobbit children. Strangely enough, though, I didn’t have a lot of rules growing up, not because people forgot about the kidnappings, but because they happened for so long that everyone normalized them. It was just something that happened – like cancer. The only real rule that I had was that I be in somewhere, anywhere, before nightfall. Apart from that, my friends and I rode our bikes everywhere and were left to do what we wanted for the most part – mostly because, in a town so small, there wasn’t much trouble we could actually get into.

I remember I was out with Jimmy Turnlin that day. It was that nice kind of late summer where it’s not hot enough to drive everyone inside, but still bright and warm.

“What are y’all up to today?” my mother asked him while she cleaned up from our breakfast. He was sitting at the kitchen table while I tied my converse on and the smell of pancakes and bacon was still thick.

“We’re goin’ to see the Jackson’s break their new horses in!” Jimmy said. See, Jimmy was what you might call my family’s “stray.” He never knocked when he came over, hugged my mom every time he saw her, Hell he even ate dinner with us three or four days out of the week. It wasn’t that his family mistreated him, they just both worked so much that they didn’t really have all that much time for him. My parents just tried to, ya know, pick up some slack – make sure he was cared for.

“Ooh, that sounds fun. You gonna do that one day? Break horses?” my mother asked him.

“God no! I ain’t big enough. Them horses are big, and they kick hard,” he said.

My mother laughed. “They do do that.”

Jimmy snickered at the mention of do-do.

“Okay, you ready?” I asked, finishing my shoelaces and putting on my Tony Hawk shirt.

“Waitin on you, Sam. Always waitin’ on you, Sam,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Okay, boys. You know the rules –” my mother started before we interrupted her.

“Be back before dark and if we aren’t back, ask someone we know if we can use their phone and you’ll pick us up,” we recited.

My mother rubbed our heads affectionately.

“I’ll be at the pharmacy all day if you want to stop by and grab a milkshake or some lunch,” she said.

“Yes mom.”

“Yes Ms. C.”

“Okay, go on. Get going! Go go go!” She shooed us out of the kitchen and we ran out the side door into the garage where our bikes were sitting. “

“Come on!” Jimmy shouted, knocking his kickstand up with a well-practiced swipe of his foot and racing off down the little hill that our house was on.

Jimmy wasn’t lying when he said he was always waiting on me. Everywhere we went, he was always first – mostly because he was a wiry kid with hardly an ounce of fat on him, but also because it was just who he was. The first time we’d go swimming during any given year, most of us would be dipping our toes in to see if the water was still cold when Jimmy would run past us and just jump in. He had exactly the personality you’d expect from a dirty little kid with badly-cut hair and sharpie tattoos.

I was a bit more – careful. Being the son of a doctor tends to do that to you, I guess – but we were fast friends, even with our differences.

The Jackson’s ranch was four miles away by road, but we always took a shortcut through Mrs. Caldwell’s place that cut a mile off. Still, that was two miles by bike and a mile of walking, which, to an eleven-year-old, is a lot.

“Why isn’t Sarah coming?” I asked as we pedaled, the sunlit road sliding by underneath us. The wind tugged at our clothes as we went down a small hill.

“Her mom’s being weird again after Molly disappeared last week,” he said, shrugging.

“Oh.”

Sarah’s mom was one of the few parents in town who still thought that keeping their kids confined to their homes and yards would keep them safe – despite the evidence to the contrary. Whenever anything happened, Sarah would be confined to the house for a week or two until her mom felt it was “safe” again – like an unearned grounding.

“That sucks. She would’ve loved this,” I said.

“I know. Hopefully she’ll be able to come next time or something.”

“Yeah. So do you think they’ll find her?” I asked him.

“Nope,” he said. We were pedaling up another small hill and he was standing up to get more leverage on his pedals.

“You don’t?” I asked through grunts.

“No. Dad said they don’t find ‘em. He said they’re gonna have her funeral next week.”

“Oh,” I said. My parents tended to shelter me much more than Jimmy’s parents did, so, more often than not, he was the person I got my news from.

Funerals for the missing kids were morbid affairs. There were never any bodies, so instead, there was a picture of the child at the front that would have flowers piled around it and everyone would gather around the picture like a casket. The parents would mourn and then, in another seven or so months another child would disappear, and those same parents would gather would gather around another portrait to welcome the newest initiates to their morbid little club.

Those same funerals were how we knew Mrs. Caldwell, who we called the sunflower woman because, get this, she grew sunflowers. Most of the community would bring flowers to the funerals of the children, but Mrs. Caldwell always brought these bright, vibrant sunflowers. Even in wintertime, she could be seen out in her field getting ready for the Spring when she would start planting. She was one of the oldest members of the community, with a shock of white hair she always kept pulled back in a bun so tight, I was always afraid one day her skin was just going to give way and the hair would just pull off the top of her head.

It wasn’t overly long before we reached her house, a two story, three-bedroom farmhouse with so much paint peeling off, it was hard to tell if it was originally a white house that had been painted a dark green or a dark green house that had been repainted as white.

She hobbled to the door when we knocked.

“Hello, boys,” she said, smiling tiredly. She was wearing an old tattered flannel overtop a pair of thick khakis with dirt on the kneecaps, like she’d been gardening.

“Hey Mrs. Caldwell!” we both said.

“Do you mind if we leave our bikes in your yard?” I asked.

“Going to the Jackson’s?” she asked, eyeing us with fake suspicion.

“Yep! They’re breaking horses today!” Jimmy said.

“I figured as much. Yeah! Go ahead, just leave ‘em there. They’ll be fine. You know to – “

“Be back before dark,” we finished.

She laughed and nodded.

“Come on, then. You can go out the back.” She stepped aside and ushered us inside her little living room, which was comfortable, if a bit sparse – but I guess that’s to be expected from an old woman living in such a large house. There was an old box television with a floral-pattern couch sitting underneath a reading lamp and the whole place smelled overwhelmingly of lavender, to the point where I had to hold my breath to keep from violently coughing. The living room faced the stairs leading up to the bedrooms and beside the living room a large doorway led to the kitchen and the dining room, which opened onto the back porch.

“Y’all be good now,” she called as we hopped down from her back porch and started into the rows of sunflowers.

Mrs. Caldwell’s sunflower patch was about a mile long and about two miles wide, which meant we were cutting through the short of it to get to the Jackson’s farm. Her patch was so close to their property, she had gotten into arguments with them over the years over their horses eating some of her flowers.

I stopped halfway through the patch.

“What is it?” Jimmy asked when he noticed I wasn’t coming.

“If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been,” I recited solemly.

He pushed me and we both started laughing.

“I can’t wait for the next movie to come out,” I said. “I can’t believe you didn’t like it.”

“You would, nerd,” said Jimmy.

It was slow going through the field because, even though there was a path running straight from Mrs. Caldwell’s porch to the edge of the Jacksons’ property, the flowers were so thickly planted that they grew right up to the edge of the path and we had to push them out of our way as we walked.

“It smells awful out here,” said Jimmy, holding two plants out of the way for me.

“You’re just smelling the horses next door,” I said.

“That ain’t horses. Smells like shit,” he said, wiggling his nose.

“Well I read that sometimes it’s used as fertilizer. It might be,” I said.

He looked down and checked the bottom of his dirty red converse to make sure there wasn’t any poop on it.

“They’re already dirty,” I said.

“Yeah, but I don’t want shit on ‘em!”

We made it to the Jackson’s farm right as they started their breaking for the day. Elijah Jackson saw us climb over the fence and brought us over to sit with everyone. The Jackson family was extremely large, with seven sons and one daughter, and all seven sons, their father, and their two uncles worked together when it was time to break the new horses. They were all extremely large men who constantly smelled like hay, with Elija being the middle child, but by far the biggest, with a bushy black beard and a stained denim jacket he always wore. He brought us over and sat us with them and one or another would take us through what they were doing, why they were doing it, and just generally let us help in any way we could. I think they were just happy to have someone interested in what they did – although, now I’m a little older, I wonder if maybe we reminded them of their youngest, who had disappeared when the both of us were still babies.

“Where’s Miss Sarah?” Elija asked at one point. “Figured she’d be with y’all.”

“Her mom wouldn’t let her,” I said.

“Ah.” He nodded and then spit on the ground in front of him. Sarah’s mother had a bit of a reputation around town as being overly strict, and when Bible Belt parents are telling you you’re being too strict, you might want to listen.

It was later than we expected when we left – mostly because Ms. Jackson insisted we stay for dinner after “helping” all day, so we were herded inside with the rest of the Jackson clan and sat down at their long oak table for a huge meal that left both of us stuffed near to bursting, that is until Ms. Jackson brought out peach cobbler from the trees on the other side of their property. We managed to find a little room for that.

When we stepped back outside, it was dark overhead, but streaks of purple were still grasping out of the western horizon.

“Why don’t y’all stay? We’ll call your mothers and they can pick ya up here.” Elijah spit Skoal on the ground by his boots.

“We’ll be fine. We can make it back to my house before it gets dark,” I said.

“Ya sure?” he asked skeptically, looking up as he did.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Our bikes are over at Mrs. Caldwell’s, so we ain’t gotta walk the whole way,” I said.

WhatI didn’t say was that, even though Mom and Dad would come pick us up – they certainly wouldn’t be happy about it, and I’d get a lecture about how I needed to be better about managing my time in the future.

“Yeah. It’s fine,” said Jimmy.

“Well you kids be careful, ya hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And we appreciate y’all’s help today. When you get a little older, you might be able to try breakin’ a couple yourself.”

Jimmy and I looked at each other fearfully in the dying light and Elijah laughed.

“It ain’t as bad as all that. It looks worse than it is.” He spit on the ground again.

“Go on, get goin’,” he said.

With that, we jumped the fence into the horse pen and raced across the open field until we hit the edge of the sunflower field, where we hopped over the other side.

Our feet had barely hit the ground on the other side of the fence when we felt the first droplets. What we had taken as a dark sky from the day ending was actually deep, black clouds overhead, filled to the brim with fat drops that started to beat down on our heads so rapidly that the dirt beneath our feet quickly turned into a sludgy, grimy mess as we slowly trudged through it and replacing the smell of shit with the smell of thick, humid earth.

The rain also caused the sunflowers to droop over the path in front of us, making the way back not only slower as we had to push more of the plants out of the way, but much creepier, since they seemed to all lean over the path like tall, faceless beings that were curious as to the little creatures making their way beneath them.

We were three-quarters of the way back to Mrs. Caldwell’s house when my foot snagged on something and I tumbled forward into the rain and the muck, covering myself in dirt and knocking over five or six sunflowers in the process.

“You okay?” asked Jimmy. He’d been five or six feet ahead originally but had come back when he heard me tumble to the ground.

“Yeah,” I said, sucking air in through my teeth. “Scraped my knee I think. Tripped on something.”

We both looked back and saw what looked to be a white, mud-covered rock just behind us.

“Stupid thing.” I kicked it, but when I did, it didn’t feel like a rock. It squished and moved like it was stuck in the ground somehow.

Jimmy and I looked at each other and he stepped over me to get a better look at it. The rain had matted his brown hair down over his freckled face and turned it nearly black and when he pulled it out of his eyes, he left behind a long smudge of mud.

He wiped off the layer of mud on the rock and then scrambled backward, falling on his butt as he tried to get away from it. The moment he moved, I saw why. The rock I had tripped over was the head of a young girl – and, in particular, a young girl I knew well, because I went to school with her.

“That’s – that’s – “

“Molly,” I finished.

She was buried with only her head sticking out of the ground and her neck disappearing into the ground. The longer I looked, though, the more horrified I became when I saw the roots crawling out of her mouth and eyes. A small bit of a sunflower stalk was sticking out of her head and I realized I must have snapped it off in my fall.

There was a sunflower growing straight out of the top of her head and the roots had grown and stretched her face into a constant, silent scream. Her eyes were gone as well, and the roots had grown just enough to creep out onto her cheeks, like some horrible mockery of tears.

The second after I saw all of this, Jimmy screamed and scrambled away the best he could, falling twice more in the mud before he managed to get back to his feet – and then he was gone, running as fast as he could through the sunflowers, barreling through the flowers and using both hands to push them out of his way as he went.

I followed as best I could, but I couldn’t run as fast as Jimmy, even as terrified as I was, and by the time I made it the last quarter-mile out of the field, Jimmy was already on Mrs. Caldwell’s back porch, frantically trying to explain to the confused old lady what we had seen in her garden.

“M- Molly! In the garden! Your sunflowers! We came and then – Sam tripped and,” he broke down into a frantic sobbing as he wrapped his arms around Mrs. Caldwell’s leg.

“Whoa whoa whoa there,” she said, patting him on the back. “Sam, what happened?”

I blinked a few times, trying to remember exactly what did happen.

“There’s – there’s a dead girl in your garden,” I said. Even today, I can still remember how dead and foreign my voice sounded, even to myself. It was like my brain had overloaded.

She looked up skeptically at the sunflower field, now being whipped and tossed as the rain picked up.

“Come on. I’m calling your parents.” She pulled Jimmy inside, then put her hand on my back and gave me a little push inside too before turning around and locking the door. She led us back into the living room. “Sam, sit on the couch while I go get you some towels. Jimmy, you can come with me if you want.”

Jimmy nodded his head quickly and the two went up the steep, creaking staircase.

I sat on that old floral-print couch for what felt like an hour. I didn’t feel afraid so much as numb, but my heart was racing nevertheless, and my hands wouldn’t quit shaking. I kept waiting for the stairs to creak again to signal Jimmy and Mrs. Caldwell coming back down, but it never came – and the only sound I heard was a loud thud upstairs.

After I’m not sure how long, a voice whispered in the back of my head that something was wrong, and I slowly walked up the steep stairs one at a time to see where the two had went. The upstairs of the house was a simple hallway with two doors on the left, the bathroom on the right, and the third bedroom at the end of the hall.

The bathroom door was open and a harsh yellow light was shining on the old linoleum and cracked porcelain sink from the unshielded bulb overhead. At the end of the hall, the door to the third bedroom was slightly ajar and letting a thin finger of yellow light escape, grasping its way down the hallway. The two doors on the right were shut tight.

I’ve heard that instinct is just your brain interpreting things your conscious mind hasn’t put together yet, a more primal part of your mind meant to alert you to things you might not understand are dangers yet. I had no reason for trying to stay quiet as I crept down that hallway – but something in the back of my brain, some voice of strange reason, caused me to be as quiet as an eleven-year-old could be.

When I got halfway down the hallway, I could hear the high-pitched giggling, like a little girl – and after another few feet, I began to hear the voices, or maybe I should say voice.

“I know, I know. I’ll plant him tomorrow. The other one I’ll freeze. You’ll be fed through the fall. Healthy and strong. Such good girls,” came the voice, followed by another bout of high pitched giggling that was impossibly high in comparison to the voice I had just heard.

I peeked in through the crack in the door and saw Mrs. Caldwell, her flannel removed, pressing her bare chest and hands against the glass that looked down over the sunflower field.

Worse than that, though, in the floor behind her, I saw a pair of legs and feet – feet with the same red converse that Jimmy always wore. The left one twitched like the dying legs of an insect and I had to cover my mouth with my hand to keep from screaming. The shock from earlier had finally worn off and what had replaced it was a sheer, unbridled terror that made the small hallway spin beneath my feet.

I tried to step backward and inch away from the door, but the moment I moved, the floorboards beneath me let out an indignant squeak and Mrs. Caldwell swung away from the window to look directly at the door where I was standing.

I ran then. I ran as fast as I could, down those steep, steep stairs with the sound of her thumping down the hallway behind me with loud, heavy footsteps.

When I reached the bottom, I thought as fast as I could. I needed a place she couldn’t get me, a place I was safe. I didn’t think I would make it back through the cornfield, and the thought of going back through what I imagined was a field of bodies after what I had just seen upstairs terrified me almost as much as the thought that she might catch me.

I heard her coming down the stairs above me and I ran through a door on my right beneath the stairs, hoping it would be some closet or something where I could hide from her. Instead, when I opened the door, I found another set of stairs leading down into darkness, with a blue light near the end. I slid the chain into the door’s locking mechanism and ran down the stairs, hoping there might be any kind of exit or anything I could use.

As I ran down the stairs, I heard the door open an inch or two before the chain lock caught it.

“They’re hungry, Sam! You don’t understand, they’re just so HUNGRY!” she shrieked the last word as she threw herself against the door. The loud thuds were interspersed with loud giggling that couldn’t have come from only one person.

When I reached the bottom, the sight I saw broke me, and I finally began to cry from fear. The blue light I had seen from the top of the stairs were numerous U.V. growing lights hanging from the ceiling with pots underneath. In the pots, though, weren’t plants.

They were bodies, naked and buried up to their knees in fertilizer. Their arms were bound to their sides with large zip ties and each one of them was painted a bright green, like the stalk of a plant, except for their heads, which were painted brown, or maybe black. Around their faces were strips of stiff yellow cloth – like a sunflower. Almost all of them were facing away from the stairs, like Mrs. Caldwell didn’t want them looking at her, and behind each of them was a large stick to keep them secured and upright – an oversized bean pole. The smell of fertilizer and lavender, close to making me cough earlier, made me want to vomit now.

I crept down the last three stairs, looking for any kind of exit, or, at this point, a weapon, and as I got closer, I found that the strips of yellow cloth weren’t glued on, like I had originally thought, but physically sewn into the skin of the children’s faces. The skin had been pulled taught in every direction to thread the needle through.

The banging overhead got louder, and more violent.

“THEY’RE HUNGRY, SAM! MY GIRLS ARE HUNGRY! AND YOU WON’T STOP ME FROM FEEDING THEM!”

Between every exclamation, the door banged and I began to hear wood splintering beneath the sound of the banging door.

“Hungry, hungry, hungry!” echoed a chorus of voices above, a chorus that sounded like little toddler girls.

I looked around even more frantically and that’s when I finally found it, a sliver of window behind a large refrigerator. I pushed the window and it opened and I began to frantically squeeze myself through the tiny opening, hating that slice of cobbler I had eaten. The refrigerator blocked most of the already-small window, so I had to push myself through inch by agonizing inch, terrified that any second I was going to feel a cold hand wrap around my leg and pull be back down – but it didn’t, and when I finally disentangled myself from the window, I scrambled to my feet and ran out into the now pouring rain. A pair of headlights was driving slowly past as I ran toward the street and I tried my best to get them to stop, pleading as best I could above the roar of the wind and the rain and frantically waving my arms.

When the vehicle stopped, I saw it was a red truck – Elijah’s truck.

“What the hell happened!?” he said, stepping out and running over to me.

Terrified, filthy, and freezing despite how warm it was, I latched onto Elijah’s leg just as hard as Jimmy had done to Mrs. Caldwell’s leg earlier.

“Mrs. Caldwell,” I said, shivering.

“What about her?” he asked, getting down on one knee to be face to face with me.

I shook my head and – honestly, I think the look on my face must have told him all that he needed to know.

He loaded me into the passenger seat and drove me back to his family’s ranch. Once it had started to rain, he had gotten into his truck and drove the three miles around the sunflower field, expecting he’d find us biking home somewhere on the road. When he didn’t, he had driven back to Mrs. Caldwell’s, where he found me.

When we got back to his family’s ranch, he carried me inside and sat me with one of his younger brothers and called the police. Then, Elijah, his father, and two of the older brothers all left, loaded rifles in their hands.

I sat on the couch shivering – and waiting. I think Elijah’s mother and the rest of them understood something terrible had happened. They gave me a blanket, and we all sat in silence, apart from the television playing Nickelodeon in the background.

I learned later that she was dead before the police got there. Elijah and his brothers had gotten there before the police did, and they went through the house, hoping they could find Jimmy – hoping they could save Jimmy, but they saw no trace of her.

When the police arrived, they searched the entire property and that’s when they found her, facedown in the sunflower field, her shirt off and her throat slit from ear to ear. In the coroner report, it says she was entirely drained of blood, but it doesn’t seem the police found that as strange as I do. Maybe they were just distracted – or maybe they were just happy she was dead. They never found the knife she used to slit her throat, though, but the report notes how jagged and serrated it must have been and that it was the same one she had used to slit poor Jimmy’s throat.

They found fifty-seven bodies and/or partial bodies on and around the property, nearly all buried the same way we had found Molly in the field apart from the ones I saw in the basement. They cut down every single sunflower in that field to make sure they got every single body – then they piled the sunflowers up and burned them.

I won’t say I’m an entirely normal adult, but that’s part of why I’m writing this. It’s a therapy exercise partially, partially just so there’s a record of my account beyond the cut and dry police report that just – that just left so much out. I have a family and everything now, a wife that understands what happened, and kids I hope never have to understand. Even to this day, though, whenever I pass a field of sunflowers, I close my eyes and listen – just to see if I hear that giggling again.

Submitted October 29, 2017 at 05:08AM by BigbyWolf343 http://ift.tt/2zdL7nH nosleep