What's For You Won't Pass You By by Simon Sylvester

What's for you won't pass you by MP3

Read by Cliff Chapman

Once I became aware of the scarecrow, I could think of nothing else. It was a few weeks after the harvest, approaching Hallowe’en, and one of the children had carved him a pumpkin for a head. I yelled at them for wasting good food, but they lied to my face and said they hadn’t done a thing, so I refused them supper. My wife argued, saying that they were good children, honest children. I replied that all people get the things that they deserve, and when she protested, I yelled at her, too, until she began to cry. I tried to comfort her, but she shrugged off my arm. I glanced up and glimpsed the pumpkin face at the edge of the field. The leering, jeering, moonface scarecrow watched me through the window. He’d seen it all. I marched outside, snatched the pumpkin from the pole, and tossed it into the corn stubble.

Next morning, the head was back on the stick. Some vermin had nibbled at the pumpkin overnight, so his smile was a little wider, his eyes withered in the corners. He was even more mocking than before. I simmered at the defiance, but — if it meant that much to the children — then so be it. I swallowed it down and set about my work in the fields.

When I came home that night, someone had moved the scarecrow out of the field and into the yard, even closer to the house. He was only twenty paces away, tilted at an angle, the head looking lopsidedly into the kitchen window. Again, my children insisted they had nothing to do with it. No one else had been to the farm that day, so I whipped them both as liars — one stroke of the belt across the palm of the hand — and sent them to bed. My wife begged me not to, but I shrugged her off, reminding her again that what’s for you, won’t pass you by.

As the children whimpered their way upstairs, some nonsense dragged my eyes to the window. That damned scarecrow. He was watching. I drew a finger across my throat. You’d have thought that was warning enough, but over the next days, the scarecrow shuffled himself closer to my house, further into my life, creeping by inches into my family. I shouted at the children. I threatened them with the belt. They sobbed and hid, and my wife begged me to leave them be. I cursed them all as wretches and ate my meals alone.

A week or so later, I woke in the night and glanced out of the bedroom window. The scarecrow stood barely ten feet from the house. The head was no longer lopsided. It was looking up at the bedroom. It was looking up at me.

My children had been locked in their rooms, and my wife was fast asleep. I understood, then, that they had been telling me the truth. I walked downstairs and outside, and the wind hissed through the corn stubble. I stood in front of the scarecrow and remembered things my grandmother had taught me. She taught me about the little folk. She taught me to leave crumbs on the hearth and on the doorstep. She taught me about due rewards. She taught me that what’s for you, won’t pass you by.

As I stood in thought, the head slipped round to stare at me.

I nodded once, very well then, and fetched my hatchet, and smashed the pumpkin into pieces.

The seeds sprayed out, and rancid liquids splashed at my ankles. I returned to bed and slept fitfully, dreaming of a cavernous pumpkin head with empty holes that watched without blinking, vast and empty sockets that had no eyes to see.

I woke late. Indeed, I’d slept all day through, for the sun had set and gloaming stirred the fields. I moved to curse my wife, but then understood that I was no longer in the house. I stood around ten feet from the kitchen window, looking in. I could not move. I was cold and stiff, as though a winter’s worth of bad backs had fallen on me all at once. My skull felt bulbous, split open to the sky. I tried to talk, and my tongue was glue in the roof of my mouth.

I looked up, then, and saw what the scarecrow had seen. My wife sat alone at the table, all the sadness of the world carved into her face. I wanted to shout to her, to let her know I was safe, to say that I was right here, right here, but my teeth were fused, and my voice was no more than the lisping of the wind in the corn.

Panic snipped at me — someone was approaching the house. He walked close by me, pausing for a heartbeat, then continued and stepped up to the front door. He raised a hand to knock, but then lowered it. He let himself in. His silhouette crossed into the hallway. I tried to shout, to warn my wife, and found I could not make any sound at all. The man stepped into the kitchen. His back was to the window, and I couldn’t see his face. He stood behind my wife. He laid a hand upon her shoulder, and slid it round to her neck. She started in alarm and looked up, but before she could react, he stooped low and kissed her on the mouth. It was a long kiss — a deep kiss — and when he stood upright, he’d left something on my wife’s face. I couldn’t remember when I’d seen it last. It was a smile. She was smiling.

I tried to clench my hand into a fist, but my fingers wouldn’t respond. I flexed them all I could, but they only creaked and stiffened into twigs, broomstick hands for a broomstick man. I tried to pull myself from the pole, and found that I was the pole. My feet were buried in the soil, in the cold and the wet, and the legion beasts of the earth set about my bones. Breezes whispered through the sockets of my head.

The man looked outside, and he looked at me. I saw his face. He looked like me, but he was not me. He was a better man than me. Looking in the window was looking in a mirror — but a better mirror. And I thought, as I looked at him, yes, it’s true what they say.

What’s for you won’t ever pass you by.

(c) Simon Sylvester, 2016


Simon Sylvester is a writer, teacher and filmmaker. His short stories have appeared in a host of magazines, journals and anthologies and his first novel, The Visitors, won The Guardian’s Not The Booker prize. He lives in Cumbria.

 

 

 

Cliff Chapman is an actor, writer, director and voiceover artist, and also teaches archery and interactive history workshops. He appears in audio dramas, Robin Hood: Knights of the Apocalypse and The Horus Heresy: The Heart of the Pharos. Engage him in political or geeky invective on Twitter: @cliffchapman or offer him audio or screen work via his website, cliff-chapman.com