Back home with the fearful kids, and the tormenting grandmother, there were endless golden fields that were home to a scarecrow. No one was really sure who put the scarecrow there, and there was that rumor that most little towns have, that it had always been there. It was on no real property, it protected no real crops, and the crows weren't afraid of it. The rumor went on that it was alive, that when you didn't look, it got up and moved. That it dragged people into the cornfield, took their skin, to replace his own since the crows pecked at him.

He had to pass this Scarecrow every day to get home, and it loomed over him, staring down at him, the sun silhouetting the figure, the sun acting like a halo. He knew stories were merely stories, he knew that they had been perpetuated only to cause fear, yet the figure stood tall and strong, through the rainy winters and the windy autumns, it was always there.

One day the others saw him and the girl having lunch, discussing Hamlet. This was a threat to the standing order of things, Jonathan Crane could not have a girlfriend, this was a rule of the way things were. Jonathan Crane was a creep, was a nerd, was a lonely little thing they hurt. So they talked to the girl, they told her nasty things about him, and she became too afraid to talk to John anymore. And then they planned an even more awful plan.

It was Halloween. The kids dressed up and went out for candy, the teenagers had their parties and ran around being generally destructive. By then she hadn't spoken to John in over two months, and he had accepted her as a loss. Because of his grandmother and her beliefs, John never celebrated Halloween. And on that night he was merely walking home late from a day at the library. It was on his way home that he noticed the scarecrow had moved. The night was silent and cold, and after a moment he kept walking, unaware of those who were following him. The kids jumped him, punched him, grabbed and started dragging him into the cornfield.

"Did you get the clothes?"

"Some of these are my dead grandpa's, be careful."

They stripped him to his boxers and he tried to crawl away when they were talking, but they stomped a foot on his back that crushed a few ribs. They dragged him further into the cornfield, where no on from the street would be able to hear him crying out. They dressed him up in new clothes, and he saw a big cross in the dirt waiting for him. By then he had stopped struggling and thought perhaps to let them go through with their prank, just so it'd be over. They sat him up and he saw her. The girl who spoke to him about Shakespeare, the only girl who had ever bothered to speak to him. She stared at him with fearful eyes, she knew what she was doing was wrong, but she was too afraid to not do it.

And then they tied him to the cross by his arms and waist and legs. He was stuck there on the cross, like a scarecrow. His glasses fell to the ground and they and the rest of the world became just a big blur. They were laughing as they put a hat to finish off everything. They waited below him, waiting for him to beg, to scream or cry, but he merely stared back at them. He thinks they got bored and walked away, leaving him there to be picked up in the morning.

Only when they were gone did he start moving. His arms were sticks and they uselessly fought against the rope. He tired himself out rather quickly trying to squirm his way out. It was in the following silence that he noticed the strange noises that the cornfield made. The corn brushed up against each other in the wind, forming images in the dark, dark blurs that moved, that were alive. The crows were crying out in the night and he remembered his grandmother's crows, and then he remembered his grandmother and how she was going to whip him when he got home. He started breathing faster. It was getting cold and he started to imagine himself a dead cold corpse just hanging there in the sun the next morning. Fear started to take a hold of him, and he thought that perhaps he was going to die there, and crows were going to be eating him the next morning. That the creatures in the dark, the monsters in the shadows of the corn were going to get him. That he'd be found and no one would care.

He started to shake his arm, trying to slip through the rope. He was scared, too scared to do nothing. He didn't want to die, not there, not because of them. It took him an hour, and by the end of it his shoulder blade was bruised, his shoulder was torn up, and his wrist was bleeding, but he got one arm free. Just then the stick he had been tied to broke in half and he fell to the ground. At least there he could grab his glasses and see what he was doing. He must've been a mile from the road, too far to crawl, and he could've gone in the wrong direction anyway.

Strangely enough, there was a little hand held scythe within reach that they had not seen or they had forgotten. With his free hand he was able to cut the rest of the rope. He ran through the cornfield, ran as he could, faster than the dark could go, faster than the wind could blow. He started to feel arms in the corn, started to feel the wind grabbing at his back, the dark dragging him back inside. He looked back having felt something brush up against him, and then he ran into the scarecrow.

He fell back to the ground and looked up to see it staring at him, he screamed and no one heard. No one but the scarecrow. The wind made it move, the wind gave it life and it reached out its hand to him. It fell over then, finally falling away from the stick that had held it up all these years. It fell limp, into his arms, dead, finally dead, as if it had waited all its life for him to be there. He threw it to the ground and saw its face. A burlap sac, sewn together from bits and pieces, it had eyes, and a mouth, a face.

He wasn't afraid anymore.

He knew what he was going to do.

He took the face and made it his own, and he went home and grabbed a large scythe, and ran away before his grandmother knew.

After they had put him on that stick the kids had left for a party at a friends. There they were getting drunk and trying to get their clothes off. They were laughing, laughing at him, what they had done to him. Then suddenly the lights went out, the music went away, the tv turned off, and they were all alone in the dark. He had broken the cable box, cutting off the electricity. He now understood them, understood what control them, understood how they had controlled him. It was fear, it all came down to fear, and he knew how to get back at them.

They stayed relatively calm, it was just the lights, someone would have to go check the cable box. They must've blown a fuse, nothing big. But the first person they sent out to the box never came back. That's when the worry started to settle in. He went to the windows and started hitting the scythe against the glass, people could hear the little bangs through out the house, it was nothing they told themselves. But then he scraped the blade on the glass, and someone screamed. He climbed to the second story window, which he saw was open. Someone was trying to have sex for the first time in the next bedroom, while the others downstairs were looking for the kid who had disappeared he snuck inside the bedroom. The couple inside didn't notice, for the guy was too busy holding the girl, telling her it was going to be okay, and the girl was too busy hiding under the covers. He walked with ease inside the closet, the girl jumped and looked around. What, the guy asked her. He started to slowly open the closet, and she saw his eyes glowing in the dark, and she screamed.

The downstairs heard her, and jumped. The guy ran out of the room, leaving the girl in the bed, too terrified to move herself. He ran downstairs in his underwear.

"It's the Scarecrow! It's the god damn Scarecrow!" He yelled at them.

They grabbed him, tried to calm him down, but he was trying to get to the front door, screaming that it was the scarecrow from the cornfield.

Meanwhile John stared at the girl in the bed too terrified to move, and he slowly lifted his scythe, and sliced it down on the bed in between her legs. She screamed, but she never came out of that bedroom.

"What was that!?" Someone was screaming from downstairs.

"It's the Scarecrow!" The guy was still yelling. "The Scarecrow!"

"That's ridiculous, stop it, the lights are out, and we --"

"LOOK!"

There he stood at the top of the stairs. The tall six foot scarecrow with a scythe and that awful mask. He stood unmoving like the one in the cornfield. Then the room erupted, people were screaming, jumping over couches and each other to get away. Only a couple, the bullies, the jocks who hated him had the courage to grab a baseball bat and go after him. That's when he started to laugh and turn away and run upstairs.

He jumped out of the window he had came up in, so they didn't find him upstairs. The girls ran to the front door, which he had blocked with a tree branch so they couldn't even open the door. He went inside through the back door, into the kitchen where a girl ran on her own. She screamed and everyone else grew silent. The bullies came back down.

"It's not up there!" They yelled.

"NO!" he yelled.

They turned to see he had the girl by the hair, she had fainted out of fear and he was dragging her along.

"I'M RIGHT HERE."

He screamed through his throat, his voice coming out deep and monstrous, disguised.

The room screamed, he raised his scythe and sliced down on the couch, cutting between two girls. The bullies chased after him and he ran to the back of the house where he hid into the dark and seemed to disappear. His scythe emerged from the dark, and stabbed one of them in the shoulder, ever so slightly. After that they ran out the back door, into the backyard, dragging their friend with him. He snuck back to the front where everyone was screaming.

"YOU DON'T GET IT." He told them. "YOU CAN'T HURT ME."

He sliced through the air.

"I AM FEAR."

Finally someone broke a window and everyone started running outside. Everyone was screaming, running. They'd get the neighbors, they'd get the police, but he'd be gone far before then. There he stood on the couch he had destroyed, where below him the girl, the girl who spoke to him sat beneath him. She looked up at him, tears in her eyes.

"…John?"

He grabbed her by the neck.

"No. Scarecrow."

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We'll return to our regularly scheduled story next time.