Page 19 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

Earl’s grip was dry, calloused, and firm. He held her hand for a beat longer than a strict handshake would have lasted. His parting words elicited a smile from her as she walked down the porch steps.

“Reckon Warren got one thing right after all…”

7

Roland Mercer

September 2026

Monday – 3:34 pm

The Yamamba lecture had gone well.

Roland Mercer walked through the empty hallway of the Humanities Building, pleased that most of his students hadn’t slept through the talk. The Japanese mountain witch had that way about her, though. She was reliable material. The students who had nodded off through the Russian Baba Yaga and the German Krampus the previous two weeks had been somewhat enamored with the Yamamba.

He understood their fascination.

Yamamba was older, lived in the high mountain forests of Honshu, and waited in the trees for travelers who had gotten lost on the path. She would feed on them when they came close enough. Some versions of the tale held that she could be appeased with offerings of rice. Others held that she could not be appeased at all.

A few versions, the ones Roland found most interesting, held that the Yamamba had once been a midwife in a mountain village, and that what she had become was a kind of spiritual side-effect of a profession the community no longer needed. The figure was, in his professional opinion, the most thematically rich female monster in the East Asian canon, and undergraduates who had been raised on Disney villains and television witches were generally surprised to discover that a mountain witch could carry the kind of psychological weight the Yamamba did.

He had ended the lecture five minutes early because he had wanted to grade the previous week’s response papers before he left campus for the day. There was a deli on Magnolia that did a country ham on rye, calling his name for dinner, too.

He turned the corner on the third-floor faculty hallway and unlocked his office door with the small bronze key he kept clipped to the inside pocket of his briefcase. He crossed the threshold, took two steps toward his desk to set the briefcase down, and stopped.

His laptop was closed, just the way he’d left it.

Yet something wasn’t right.

He remained still, his briefcase still in his right hand. He ran the morning through his mind, and the memory of him sliding the laptop a quarter inch forward so the edge sat flush with the lip of the desk pad came back clearly. It was instinctive for him, yet the laptop was angled so that the right side was an inch off.

Some would label him paranoid, but he deliberately aligned the laptop to that edge every time he closed it.

Every time.

And he’d done so at eleven forty-five this morning.

“Somebody has been here,” Roland whispered to himself as he lifted his briefcase to rest on the corner of his desk.

He focused on the wastebasket.

The small bin was half full. The muffin wrapper from this morning’s cafeteria stop was on top, still folded the way he had done so after polishing off the last bite. A paper coffee cup he had brought back from the cafeteria was also inside. Below those two items was an empty mint tin. The basket had not been emptied since last night, which meant the janitorial staff had not been in the office.

“Not the janitor,” Roland murmured with unease. “Who?”

Roland stepped carefully around the desk and lowered himself into his chair. He sat on the front three inches of the seat and ran his gaze across the surface of the desk without touching anything. The fountain pen he kept in the top-right corner was where he had left it. The framed photograph of his mother in the back-left corner was facing the same direction it had this morning. Nothing else had been disturbed.

Only his laptop.

He quickly stood up and made his way to the office door. He leaned over the threshold and scanned to the left, registering an empty corridor and the distant sound of a conversation drifting from Annette Belkin’s office three doors down. It sounded as if she were on the phone.

Given that his office was at the end of the corridor, all he had to do was gaze straight down the hallway. The main staircase was near the end, and the plastic tarp covering the renovation work being done on the banister was intact.

Everything appeared normal outside his private domain.

He slowly retreated and quietly closed his door, twisting the tiny knob to engage the lock. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t want anyone to sneak up on him while he searched his own office. He returned to the desk and sat down properly this time.

“What did you do to it?” Roland muttered while staring intently at his laptop. “What did you do?”