Page 36 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

They rode until the shadows stretched long around them. Velveteen was pleased to discover that the changes to her body—and her current lack of a skeletal system—didn’t interfere with her riding a bike. Some skills, it seemed, just crossed over.

Hailey pulled off to the side of the road and stopped her bike, prompting Velveteen to do the same. Then Hailey waved a hand grandly at the large cornfield in front of them. “Ta-da,” she said.

Velveteen frowned. “Congratulations,” she said, after a moment. “You’ve found corn. I don’t think that’s hard around here. Halloween seems to have a weird corn fetish, and to be honest, I find it all a little bit disturbing. Which hell, may be what you were going for in the first place. Who am I to judge?”

“We like corn because corn is a symbol, and also because corn is fucking delicious,” said Hailey. “Corn is awesome. But cornfields…there’s power in cornfields. They’re a whole different sort of symbol. Every cornfield we have means something else. There are cornfields people get wished into and cornfields that people run away in. There are cornfields haunted by slasher killers, and cornfields with bad infestations of children with hair like silk and eyes like a crime scene. This cornfield is one of the symbolic ones. Every ear of corn that grows here represents a good Halloween experience a child had the last time our holiday actually rolled around.”

“Huh,” said Velveteen. She gave the cornfield another, longer look. “That’s a lot of corn.”

“Halloween is important to a lot of people. Good adult experiences go into one of our apple orchards. They make the sweetest cider that you’ve ever tasted. But see, harvest happens after a year’s growth, regardless of age. Can’t have the really good memories of a holiday until that holiday comes around again. And we’ve got a problem.” Hailey’s expression hardened. “There are crows in the corn.”

“Crows.”

“Yes.”

“Crows in the corn.”

“Yes.”

“So you brought me, a woman made of fabric, to scare the crows that are eating your good memory corn. Wow. It’s like I’m some sort of…huh. There must be a word for something shaped like a human that you use to scare the crows.” Velveteen folded her arms and glared at Hailey.

Hailey rolled her eyes. “Oh no, you came to a world that flat-out refers to itself as a metaphor and somehow things have gotten all symbolic. How did that happen? I do not know. Look, I can be as sarcastic as you. Doesn’t change what we’re here to do, so maybe let’s stop, okay? I have shit to do. So do you.”

“Because you need me to fight the crows that are in your corn,” said Velveteen.

“Yup,” said Hailey. “See, bad Halloween memories have wings. They’re here to eat what they can’t become, and the more they eat, the more people forget what they love about Halloween. We need kids to keep loving Halloween when they’re young, because that’s what powers the less likely to murder everybody on sight aspects of our holiday. You’re really doing a public service.”

“By fighting the crows that are in your corn.”

“Precisely.” Hailey’s expression turned grave. “This is part of how the servants of this Season work to protect us all. I’d like to stay here and enjoy more of your pathetic attempts to make me feel bad about our metaphors, but I need to go chase the owls out of the orchard. The crows are your concern, at least for tonight.”

“But I don’t know how to fight crows,” said Velveteen helplessly. “What do you want me to do, shout ‘boo’ and hope they’ll scatter?”

“No,” said Hailey. “I want you to kill them.”

* * *

Velveteen looked at the corn. She had the distinct feeling that the corn was looking back, taking her measure even as she was taking its. Hailey was gone, off to protect the orchards: her parting words had been a muttered warning about being back on the road by midnight, since the corn had “other defenses” once the moon was high enough. Velveteen had no real idea of what those “other defenses” might be, and more importantly, she had no desire to learn. Being an animus had taught her that everything had teeth. Sometimes those teeth were hidden, but that didn’t change their reality. She had absolute faith that the cornfield was dangerous, and not to be trifled with.

She also hadn’t seen a single crow, standing on the road as she was, which made her suspect that the only way to protect the corn was to go into the corn.

“I hate this holiday,” she announced to no one in particular, and stepped into the green.

The change was immediate. There was no way the road should have dropped behind her so quickly, but it did: with a single step, she was lost in a sea of cornstalks, surrounded on all sides. They were all tall, stretching two to four feet above her head, but that was where the similarity ended. Some of the stalks were fresh and green, barely putting forth ears. Others were golden and dry, already harvested. Still more were fully mature, heavy with corn, ready for the picking.

“Okay, this is weird,” said Velveteen, turning slowly. Cornhusks crunched underfoot. Everything smelled like chlorophyll. And then, in the middle of her turn, she found her first crow.

She froze. So did the bird. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, exactly, but it wasn’t this…this thing, which bore a resemblance to the glossy black birds she sometimes saw back home in Portland only in the sense that it was large, black, and covered with feathers. Apart from that…

It had a jagged, tooth-filled beak, more like a small dinosaur than a normal bird. Its talons were abnormally long, almost tiny, scaled hands, and looked perfectly capable of husking an ear of corn without trouble. And it had a single red eye with a snake-slit pupil in the middle of its skull, which looked at her with an eerie intelligence.

“Um,” said Velveteen.

“Caw,” said the crow, and launched itself into the air, talons angled toward her face. Velveteen had time to see that it had a long, scaly tail, like some sort of lizard, before self-preservation took over and she hit the ground. When she lifted her face out of the cornhusks, she saw the crow flying off with an ear of corn clutched in its talons, crowing triumphantly. Before that moment, she wouldn’t have said that a bird could sound smug. This one did. Smug, and nasty, and maybe a little bit malicious. Maybe a lot malicious.

Then the sky turned black with beating wings, and the harsh caws of the crows drowned out everything else, and Velveteen realized that this job was considerably larger than she had expected.

“Fuck. Me,” she said, and turned and fled into the corn, looking for a place where she could hunker down and come up with a plan. Waving her arms and screaming wasn’t going to cut it, she could tell that for damn sure; these were not crows that gave a single fuck about being yelled at. They were out for blood, or at least for corn, and if she got in their way, they were going to rip her to pieces. Serving the Season was one thing—she had signed up for that—but dying for it? Oh, that was something else altogether, and if that was what Halloween wanted from her, Halloween was going to be deeply disappointed.