Why am I posting on Christmas? Well, because I have today off from work. And because, late last month, I needed a break from revising a middle grade manuscript. So I wrote a horror story.
Specifically, I wrote a story for a Christmas horror anthology–weird, I know–and it was rejected for not being cheesy or cute enough.
That suits me just fine. I don’t go in for cheesy or cute horror. =)
This story is niche and I don’t know where else I’d submit it, so have 3.2k of holiday horror. Cropsy, Indiana is a fake name for a real place. I have to assume they’re not actually cursed.
But I still wouldn’t visit during a pandemic.
STUBBLY CORN STALKS SPROUTED black and gray in the hard earth on either side of the interstate. Not sprouted, Jada corrected herself. This was winter. Those marching rows were dead. Refuse, shorn from the year’s harvest. Dull snow iced the ground between them.
The asphalt stretching ahead was a shiny, slick black ribbon. Slush and oil mixed with road salt, pooling in potholes. Winter road conditions always made Jada anxious. She’d been concentrating so hard on keeping the Mazda arrow-straight that she lost the thread of conversation.
“My mom said she doesn’t know how they got the money for the parade,” Christine prompted from shotgun.
“But who’d she ask?” Jada demanded, tightening her grip on the wheel.
“Maryanne Howell. She’s been Village Secretary and Treasurer for forty-odd years, hon. And she doesn’t know. And it wasn’t the church, either. Please promise me you’re not going to tell all the neighbors that you’re from the EPA. Nobody wants to worry about the well on Christmas.”
“I’m not from the EPA today,” Jada said pleasantly. “They’ll probably recognize me anyway. But this isn’t an official visit. It’s a state holiday, so I’m just here as your wife, to see your family. But I do wanna know what Cropsy, Indiana is doing, running a big Christmas parade down their one-horse main street. Especially this year, of all years.”
“Since the money’s not on their books, are they really running the thing?” Christine insisted.
They’d been having this argument all morning. Jada’s concern was that she knew for a fact Cropsy was flat broke, because they were years overdue to fix their failing infrastructure. Christine’s concern was that Jada would suck all the joy out of this impromptu Christmas visit. She wanted to settle on being pleased that they were seeing her parents after they’d agreed traveling was a bad idea.
Jada wasn’t an accountant, so the village’s finances were not her business, no matter how much money they owed in civil penalties over their contaminated well. But she was nosy as hell. Most days, her wife loved her despite that, so she continued: “According to their Facebook page, this is the Cropsy Christmas-Palooza, in celebration of Cropsy, Indiana, for Orange County.”
“That’s it, then. Orange County is running it.”
“No they sure aren’t. And it would be illegal, because there’s a pandemic on.”
“So it won’t be a real parade. We’ll get down there and it’ll be Farmer Dan on his tractor and two horses wearing hats. And then will you relax?”
“I swear to the lord Jesus,” Jada said dramatically, hand over her heart. “And Baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary and everyone else in the nativity scene. Glory be to Farmer Dan and his two horses, that would be a blessing. A best-case scenario.”
Christine laughed and patted her arm. “If you’re going to argue with Dad about the pandemic again, wait until after we give them the bourbon. He’ll never agree that you’re right, but he’s better company when he’s tipsy. And if there are a bunch of folks out having some fun—”
“Can you imagine getting infected because, of all the gatherings in the world, you had to see the Cropsy Christmas-Palooza?”
“God no. So if the neighbors are out there, we’re just avoiding them, alright? We don’t talk about the pandemic or the water. My parents will stay in if we ask. Did you remember to pack Yahtzee?”
Jada scrunched up her forehead and sighed deeply. “Yes, I packed the damn Yahtzee game.”
“I love you— This is your exit! Shit, sorry.”
Jada stamped the brakes. They squealed and juddered down the off-ramp, tires fighting for traction. Christine said, “Aren’t you glad I got those changed for you?” Jada’s lips pulled back in a grimace.
The first ill omen was the Sunoco at the highway intersection. Every pump was packed. Christine craned her neck, squinting to identify any neighbors she’d grown up with, as they shot past.
They came upon the second ill omen at the old railroad crossing. “That is one big-ass Santa,” Jada observed coolly.
Frigid air blew through the car as Christine cranked down the window to stick her head out. Her hair whipped wildly, streaming towards a bright red, polyurethane foot. This close to the float, she couldn’t get an angle to see much beyond Santa’s jolly beard, dimpled cheeks, and vacant black stare. Then he was in their rearview mirror, bobbling away on top of a pickup truck shrouded in snowy sheets of cotton.
Christine slouched into her seat and slid the window shut. “What the heck is that doing all the way out here?”
“That is some Macy’s Day Parade shit,” Jada agreed.
“Oh, I can tell you’re mad. I couldn’t see whose it was, hon. Maybe the rates for renting stuff like that are really low right now, because— Well, you know.”
“They didn’t cancel the actual Macy’s Day Parade, though. Now, did I take a wrong turn somewhere?”
Jada knew she couldn’t have taken a wrong turn. East 4660 North Road, better known as “Main Street”, was the only way into Cropsy from the interstate. It was exactly as she remembered it: Boone Jon’s Bar, the sole establishment trying to pass itself off as a restaurant; Cropsy Living Water Methodist Church, two doors down; the Farmers Insurance in the failed laundromat, squatting between them.
But she could barely see the buildings through the crowd. Dozens, likely hundreds of people caroused between tents decked out for Christmas. Ornaments, knitwear, all flavors of holiday kitsch, and even fresh-cut trees were on full display. The Mazda’s vent sucked in air that smelled deliciously of fresh-popped kettle corn and mulled cider. Strings of Christmas lights soared above, leaping from one streetlight to another in constellations of bright crimson and icy blue. A haze of foggy breath and body heat rose from the crowd.
Street barricades blocked the way forward. Jada pulled something like a nine-point turn, squeezed by the lines of cars parallel parked on either curb. They pivoted down the one side street right before Santa rolled up to bar their escape from behind.
“They were wearing masks,” Christine said, as they bumped and jostled past country houses blazing with cheery lights. “At least they were all wearing masks.”
“‘They all’ being the entire town?” Jada said disbelievingly. She hadn’t expected this. Only four people had RSVP’d to the parade on Facebook. And then, of course, there was another set of road barricades blocking them in, taped up with paper signs that declared ‘Reindeer Xing’. “Unbelievable! Is there another route I can take?”
“I’m texting my parents,” Christine said, holding up one finger. “And then— Yes, I need you to pull another U-turn. See the yellow house? Get on their driveway, then you’ll have a right onto gravel, and that will go to the farm road.”
They pressed between dormant fields. From this close, the murk clinging to what was left of the corn stalks was apparent. Jada couldn’t wait for that all to be plowed under, to feed the green sprouts that would be seeded come springtime. Barren earth put her in the mind of dark things.
When she was here in the summer, she’d marveled at the forest of corn. What a sight, the sky cupped between verdant blades that rustled in the wind like an orchestra of wings. They shot by what looked like an abandoned log cabin, crouched low in a bald spot on the side of the road. “There’s ‘Town Hall’,” Jada joked. “Why didn’t they route the parade past there?”
“Hah-hah,” Christine intoned. “Mom hasn’t texted me back. You know, that color’s not normal?”
“What color?” asked Jada, distractedly steering around another tire-engulfing pothole. Those were getting harder to spot as the sun sank low into the horizon.
“Corn stover is normally yellow. Guess it’s been a wetter winter than I thought. Anyway, take this to the next intersection and hang another right. We’ll do a square. We are not going past the wellhouse, so you can stop thinking about work.”
Jada scoffed. Christine was right, she had been thinking about work. Though she didn’t need to see the wellhouse again. A full tour took all of five minutes, because it was one pump in a converted outbuilding, constructed circa ninety-fifty-five. Every year Cropsy enjoyed a Christmas miracle in the form of that thing still running.
Jada was mildly unpopular for telling them to shut it down. More than half a century ago, the Jacobson family had hand-dug the village well, but not deep enough—it just barely kissed the water table. All hundred-odd residents of Cropsy piped water contaminated with fertilizer run-off from that lush corn.
Too much nitrate in the blood caused a condition called methemoglobinemia, better known as blue baby syndrome. A body’s red blood cells would steadfastly cling to oxygen while the tissues starved. You’d suffocate from the inside out. So, for nitrate, the EPA allowed a maximum contaminant level of ten mils per liter. In Cropsy, wellwater hovered between eighteen and twenty. A phenomenal crisis.
No, boiling would not help, as Jada went on to frustratedly explain at that sparsely-attended summer meeting. Nitrate doesn’t boil off, it gets more concentrated—and this was the part of her speech where she realized that the aged village president had fallen asleep in his chair, propped back against the wall in that log cabin.
And here was the other member of that meeting now. Nick Jacobson’s pickup sat on the shoulder, right-hand tires sinking into field mud. He flashed his lights, once, twice, three times, and threw his arm out the door to wave them down.
They could tell something was wrong with him before Christine finished opening the window. She cranked it back up, leaving only a slit. “Nick?” she called.
His forehead was shiny with sweat. His eyes, red and veiny, sunk deep into sagging skin. Jada had not thought him a young man at their first meeting, but this—this was something else. He clasped a pine-green fleece to his mouth, dragged it up to mop his cheeks. “Christine! Christine, Miss Jada, did you see that fuss in town?”
His voice was pocked. Gravelly and mucousy all at once. He coughed while Christine called back, “I did, I did see it. We’re trying to get to my parents’ before it gets much darker. They’re not on Main Street, are they?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see them.” Nick hacked into the fleece. “I’m real sick. Don’t come any closer, for your own sakes.”
“What’re you doing out in cold like this?” Christine chided. “You should go home to bed. Actually, have you thought about heading to urgent care? It’s Christmas, but… Do you know whether you have—?”
Nick shook his head. “I don’t, I don’t know. This caught me off my guard. I was fine when I woke up this morning. I need you to listen to me. I sent my oldest, Brian, over to the farm supply in Mitchell. That was two hours ago.”
“Two hours?” Christine frowned. “It’s a twenty minute drive. What did you send him for?”
“Bottled water. I’ve told them all. I swear, Miss Jada, when we couldn’t raise the money for that engineer to plan the interconnect— We’re still going to get the loan, I promise you— But I told them all, until the work is done and we have a new water source, not to drink from the tap.”
“We’ve got a few packs of bottled water in the trunk. Let me give you one, we can spare it.” Christine grabbed her mask and swung the car door open.
“No!” Nick shouted. She froze. “No, that’s not it. It’s not for me. Christine, it’s the parade. The pop-up festival. They’re drinking the water. The food trucks are cooking with it.”
“That is some country-ass shit,” Jada whispered under her breath. She turned the key in the Mazda, so they wouldn’t have to keep breathing the exhaust and shouting over the engine.
Christine shut the door and squeezed Jada’s knee in thanks as the farm road quieted. Just them, the wind, and barren fields under a sky like gray wool. Christine shivered. There was an awful lot of wind for the clouds to be standing so stagnant.
“Did you call Jerry?” Christine asked. Jada snorted. Christine didn’t actually think that the geriatric village president could do them any good now.
Nick bobbed his head. “He’s at the damn festival. I talked him out of buying a hot cocoa, but he didn’t seem to have a problem with the rest of it. Said it was good for the ‘business community’.”
Christine rolled her eyes. They had exactly one business in town. “And what did Jon say to that?”
“I don’t know,” Nick repeated. “Jon wasn’t there. I don’t think he’d be happy about all those folks camped outside his bar.”
“What is Jerry thinking, letting all this go on now? He just lost his wife, he should know better!”
“That’s just it!” Nick said, pounding his steering wheel. “He didn’t organize it! He didn’t know a thing about it! So I called around—Richard, Denny, Lisbeth, George, Becky, Heather, the Davies, Maryanne— Them, I got ahold of. And do you know what? They’re all at home.”
“I’m glad they’re staying in,” Christine started.
Jada piped up, “Hang on. For a town this size, that sounds like practically everybody. So, who’s at the festival?”
“Enough people,” Nick coughed. “I recognized some faces.”
“The rest could be from Mitchell.” Christine suggested dismissively. “Or Campbell, or Ritner, I imagine. The kind of idiots who don’t care that putting this on is an invitation to disaster. Honey, is there someone at the EPA you can call? Or public health? They need to shut the festival down.”
“I have literally never heard of anything like this situation,” Jada said. “Even if somebody was in the office to answer the phone on Christmas—which is not happening, trust me— I don’t think we’d have authority. It might be down to whoever is running the thing, and maybe the sheriff. Did you call nine-one-one?”
Nick fumbled for his phone. “I will.”
“Do it from home,” Christine ordered. “Go rest up.”
Nick left them at the crossroads. His headlights vanished in the distance as they looped between fields, driving west towards the far side of Cropsy.
That’s when the glow they took for the setting sun flashed dizzyingly and they realized they were headed straight towards a Rudolph that towered as tall as a combine harvester.
Jada slammed on the brakes. “Pull over!” Christine shouted. They fishtailed off the shoulder. The Mazda’s tires tore up soggy grass. Jada gassed it, desperate to not get mired in mud, and they crawled along the strip bordering the field as the parade floated past.
Rudolph’s shiny red nose led the spectacle. He heralded all of the other reindeer, their papier-mache forms frozen mid-leap. The hitch to Santa’s sleigh dragged along behind them, kicking up gravel. A man in a Santa suit stood proud on the seat. His face was a rictus of plastic, grinning through smudged paint, with red fever-blush crowning his nose and cheeks. He waved with one hand. Ropes coiled around his other, stretched taut to halters that bit into the reindeer. In places, the papier-mache had rubbed away, their hollow interiors exposed through black holes.
A band dressed as nutcrackers limped behind the sleigh. They marched in drunken staggers, their round heads nodding in synchrony, silent horns pressed between sharp lips. The brass buttons on their velvet uniforms flashed in the Mazda’s headlights. Five, six, seven rows passed, then Jada gasped as the truck carrying the next float, a roving confection of snowmen and pine trees, crashed into the eighth.
Three nutcracker musicians disappeared under the cottony snow. A retort cracked like a gunshot as one of their round heads popped under concealed tires.
The nutcrackers marched on. “This is wrong. I’m calling the police,” Christine said faintly. She pressed her phone hard into her cheek. A faint stench began seeping in along with hot air from the vents, something wet and filthy.
Jada floored it. The Mazda rocketed over uneven terrain. The parade passed just feet away. Figures writhed in the darkness—costumed elves and more dancers besides, all proceeding silently. Some of the shapes looming over the fields wouldn’t resolve in her mind. She made out a life-sized gingerbread house moldering atop a tractor trailer before pain stabbed between her eyes and her guts squeezed with nausea.
She focused on steering and counted off deep shadows as massive floats reared by— A white-masked audience crowded the opposite shoulder, arms waving in the air, a parody of celebration— Christine swore, bit out, “I’m still getting a busy signal, this is insane!”
The behemoth inflatable Santa eclipsed their view, and when they finally broke away, the crowd of spectators had vanished. Slush burbled under their tires. Jada tried to force the Mazda to straddle the shoulder, vying for solid ground.
Thick mud roiled under their headlights. Jada yanked the wheel to get them back onto the road. A body thudded off her door. They glimpsed a costume, sparkling green, before it was lost in the rearview mirror.
“Oh my god, oh my god, I hit someone—” Jada babbled.
Christine tugged at her elbow, pointing out the passenger window. “Do you see that?”
Jada risked taking her eyes off the road. The field to their right shone in the dark, slick black like oily asphalt. Like a mirror, like water. Not just melted snow now, but a rancid flood vomiting out of the dead earth. It lapped at their tires.
In the center of the road, a foul geyser sprayed from a pothole. A dancer gamboled into the fountain and was swallowed up. Jada desperately punched the button to turn the air to the cabin off before the stench made her wretch.
They careened back into town, scraping past parked cars. The parade crashed through Main Street like an avalanche. The festival tents had been swept aside. Red, green, and white canvas clung to the brownstone buildings like scabs, jumbled up with contorted frames and strings of lights.
Revelers still milled between the tents. Shoulder-to-shoulder, their white masks flashing like bared teeth as sludgy water gushed up their legs. A woman pulled her mask aside and sank to her knees. She lowered her face and the tide swelled to meet her. Her head disappeared beneath spume that flecked the masks of her fellows with greasy smears.
The stench was soaking through the Mazda’s floor. This wasn’t just the poison that the village had failed to purge from their homes. Christine knew in her gut that this was the same odious rot that choked the fields. She dropped her phone and pulled her feet up onto her seat.
Ice drenched Jada’s boots. The Mazda wouldn’t obey her. She spun the wheel hard, but the flood carried them off the road. The crowd sent up a cheer.
They smashed into the bar. The window spiderwebbed over with cracks. Jada screamed. The swelling flood retreated, churned, and returned in a wave. They hit the window like a hammer, again and again.
Something caught on the passenger door and yanked. Too late, Christine reached for the lock. A hand wrapped around her wrist. A wall of fetid water slammed into the door, tearing it off.
The last thing Jada saw before the cabin flooded was Christine, her mouth open in shock as corpse-pale hands dragged her out of her seat. Beyond her, a new river surged, the masked revelers standing rooted amidst the currents as black waters closed over their heads.