Keep Watch

Chapter 1: The East Field

Del Foster woke to the sound of cattle screaming.

Not bawling. Not the low, unhappy complaints they made when a coyote wandered too close to the fence or when the temperature dropped hard enough to freeze the water troughs. This was different. This was the sound cattle made when something had already gone wrong—when the damage was underway and the animals knew it and the only thing left in their throats was the raw noise of terror.

He lay still for three seconds, his body catching up to the fact that it was awake. The bedroom was dark. The digital clock on the nightstand read 4:07. February cold pressed against the windows like something leaning on the glass.

Del swung his legs off the mattress and stood. His knees cracked. His lower back seized for a moment, then released. Sixty-one years of farming had left him with a body that worked the way an old engine works—reliably, but with sounds no one wanted to investigate.

He crossed to the east window.

The floodlight mounted on the barn threw a flat white cone across the near edge of the soybean field. The soybeans were stubble now, harvested months ago, and the field was a patchwork of frozen mud and old stalk ends that caught the light like bristles on a giant's jaw. Beyond the floodlight's reach, the darkness was total. No moon. No stars. The overcast sky sat on the horizon like a lid.

The cattle were in the pen behind the house, invisible from this angle, but their screaming came through the walls as clearly as if they were in the next room. Something was wrong with the pitch. It wasn't rising and falling the way panic usually sounded. It was sustained—one continuous note from multiple throats, as though the animals had locked into the same frequency and couldn't stop.

Del looked at the field.

A figure stood among the soybean stubble.

His first thought was Pete. Pete Groll was his hired hand, had been for six years, and Pete sometimes came out early to check the irrigation lines or the fence. Pete was a big man, broad across the shoulders, the kind of person who looked like he'd been built to carry things.

But this was not Pete.

Del's second thought did not form properly. It started as recognition—the shape of a man, upright, two arms, two legs, a head—and then it collapsed, because the proportions were wrong in a way that made his eyes refuse to settle.

The figure was tall. Not tall the way a basketball player is tall, where the height makes sense within the architecture of the body. This was tall the way a shadow is tall when the sun is low—stretched, elongated, pulled upward by something that had no interest in structural integrity. Nine feet, maybe more. Del had spent his life estimating the height of grain in a bin and the depth of water in a ditch, and his eye told him nine feet before his mind could argue.

Its shoulders sloped downward at angles that suggested melting. Not broken. Not deformed. Melted. Like wax that had softened around a flame and then hardened again before it could finish collapsing. The arms hung past where the knees should have been, and the hands—if they were hands—disappeared into the stubble. The legs were too thin for the torso, and the torso was too narrow for the shoulders, and the head sat on the neck like something balanced there by accident.

It was black. Not the black of clothing or skin or shadow. A black that seemed to absorb the floodlight rather than reflect it. The light hit the figure and stopped, as though the surface was eating the photons before they could bounce back to Del's eyes.

And the surface moved.

Del pressed his face closer to the cold glass.

The figure's exterior was not still. It crawled. The word came to him before he could find a better one. The surface contracted and loosened in irregular patterns, like charred skin shifting over something underneath—something alive and segmented and restless. It reminded him of the time he'd lifted a dead raccoon from the drainage ditch and seen the mass of insects beneath it rearrange themselves in the sudden light.

Where the face should have been, there was nothing.

Not darkness. Not a blank surface. A hollow. A smooth, vertical concavity, like the inside of a spoon, where features should have existed but didn't. The hollow caught the floodlight and held it without reflecting anything back.

Del's hand found the window frame. He gripped it.

The cattle had stopped screaming.

The silence was worse.

He said Pete's name. He didn't shout it. He said it the way you'd say someone's name when you already knew they weren't going to answer—quietly, as a formality, as a way of confirming to yourself that language still worked.

"Pete?"

The figure did not react.

It stood in the field with the patience of something that had never needed to move and never intended to. The crawling surface continued its slow contractions. The hollow face pointed—if pointing was the right word for something without features—toward the house.

Del stared at it.

He did not look away.

He did not know why. Later, he would try to explain it to the others, and the best he could manage was that looking away felt like the wrong thing to do. Not dangerous—not yet, not consciously—but wrong, the way turning your back on a dog that's already growling feels wrong. Some part of his brain, older than language, older than farming, older than anything he could name, had locked his eyes onto the figure and was refusing to release them.

Minutes passed.

The figure did not move.

Del's eyes watered from the cold air leaking through the window seal. He blinked, one eye at a time, the way you do when you're trying to keep something in focus through tears. He didn't think about the blinking. It happened naturally.

The figure remained still.

Behind him, the bedroom door opened.

"Del?"

June's voice. His daughter-in-law. She'd been staying in the room down the hall since August, since the harvest started and the work became too much for one person and a hired hand. She was thirty-four, thin in a way that had gotten thinner lately, and she moved through the house with the quiet efficiency of someone who had decided that being useful was the only acceptable form of grief.

"Del, what's going on? I heard the cattle."

He didn't turn around. "Come here."

She crossed the room. He felt her arrive beside him, felt the warmth of her body against the cold air near the window.

"What am I looking at?" she asked.

Then she saw it.

Her breath stopped. Not a gasp. Not a sharp intake. Just a cessation, as though her lungs had decided that breathing was optional until further notice.

"Del."

"I see it."

"What is that?"

"I don't know."

They stood side by side at the window. The figure stood in the field. The floodlight held its shape against the darkness. The crawling surface continued its restless motion.

"Is that Pete?" June whispered.

"No."

"It's standing where Pete—"

"It's not Pete."

June's hand found his arm. Her fingers were cold. She gripped him the way she'd gripped his arm at the funeral eight months ago, when the pastor had said Michael's name and the word had landed in the church like something dropped from a height.

Michael. Del's son. June's husband. Dead at thirty-six from a cancer that had announced itself in October and finished its work by February. Eight months ago now. Eight months of Del and June pretending that the arrangement was temporary, that she'd leave after the harvest, that the farm was a waystation rather than the place where both of them had decided to stop running from the thing that had taken Michael away.

"Del, I need you to look at me."

"Don't."

"I need you to—"

"Don't look away from it."

His voice was flat and certain. He didn't know where the certainty came from. He just knew.

June's fingers tightened on his arm.

"Why?"

"Because I looked away when you came in."

June was quiet for a moment.

"And?"

"And it was over there." Del pointed with his free hand toward a spot in the field roughly twenty yards closer to the house. "By the third irrigation post. Now it's at the second."

June looked at the figure. She looked at the second irrigation post. She looked at the distance between them.

"Del, that's—"

"I know."

"You only looked away for a second."

"I know."

The figure stood at the second irrigation post. Its hollow face pointed at the house. The crawling surface shifted and contracted. It had not moved while they watched.

It had moved when they didn't.

Neither of them had seen it happen.

"Oh God," June said softly.

Del kept watching.

The cattle did not make another sound for the rest of the night.