The Ragged Watcher

The path across the barley field had always been the shortcut home, a sunlit ribbon where rising skylarks broke the silence. That afternoon, the air hung heavy, the clouds pressing down in a dull grey sheet. Jess reached the stile and turned. ‘Come on, slowcoach. It’s nearly teatime.’ Her brother grumbled. ‘You slow down. I’m hungry. O’course I know it’s teatime.’ A hollow feeling inside told him so.

‘Take the step, Topher.’ She stretched out her hand which he grasped reluctantly. He hated that nickname. All because his baby cousin, barely able to talk,  couldn’t say ‘CHRIS-topher’ properly. It might have been cute when he was a toddler but now he was seven he deserved to be addressed properly. Jessica had long abandoned her full name, adopting its boyish abbreviation.

Together they teetered on the step of the rickety stile. Stretching her leg over the top rail, Jess sat momentarily before dropping to the other side. ‘Pull me up,’ said Chris, whose shorter legs made him less agile. She heaved him over, dusted down her dungarees and turned towards the path over the field.

Her shriek curdled the air. Pointing, she whimpered ‘What’s that?’ and covered her face with her hands. Chris, alerted by her alarm, looked to see what perturbed her. A creature, misshaped, was lurching towards them. Chris admonished her. ‘Just a scarecrow’. Taking advantage of his older sister’s loss of composure, he took command. ‘C’mon, Jess. The path is over here’.

Just a scarecrow, she tried to tell herself, but her steps slowed warily. The figure was grotesque, its arms awry, not with hands but sprouting straw. A bulging misshapen body unable to support itself. A pallid face, eyeless, but somehow she knew that it could see her. Her hand tightened on the strap of her bag. She wished she hadn’t looked at its face at all. It was only straw and rags, but her heart thumped, fearing it might step onto the path and stop her.

Her mind darted to every story she’d overheard from her cousins, tales of old fields and the watchers left there to guard them. They said some scarecrows were more than straw, that they held the spirits of the lonely, or the angry, or the forgotten. She wanted to laugh it away, but the thought lodged itself inside her head, heavy and real. She could almost feel the scarecrow’s eyeless gaze, daring her to take another step.

She broke into a run, barley stems whipping her legs as she raced along the path to the stile at the other side of the field. Overtaking Chris who took it as a playful challenge and tried to keep up. ‘Slow down!’  She didn’t look back until she reached the stile, lungs burning, breathless. Chris caught up, flopping to the ground, the effort quickly wearying his legs. She turned to look back. The scarecrow still stood there, motionless in the distance. She could have sworn its head was tilted just a little more, turned to watch her as she ran.

She bundled Chris over the stile, squealing, thinking it part of the game. Jess only wanted to remove herself from the baleful gaze of the scarecrow. The path stretched downwards towards a welcoming gap in the hedge with houses beyond. Home beckoned. Chris grappled with her playfully but he was pushed away. The game had ended. They tidied themselves up the return home.

Jess wanted to forget the scarecrow but she needed to reassure herself that all was safe. Looking back across the field, the grey clouds had darkened and in the distance become turbulent. She could only just make out the figure in the distance. A crack of lightening split the gloom striking a distant tree, illuminating the scarecrow. Jess turned and ran as it stumbled towards her, waving its overstuffed arm.