Read A Natural History of Hell: Stories for Free Online

free. The local doctor prescribed laudanum and told him if he didn’t stay put and let the break mend, he’d never make it back out into the field. So they kept him in a stupor for months. Meanwhile, that winter of 1883, a stranger was spotted by more than a few folks, usually off at a distance, limping across the stubbled, misty fields, carrying a sickle and wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat. They swore it was Evron, but on the few occasions someone got close to this mysterious figure, it proved to be that of a wasted and grisly old man.
    “One day Evron’s father saw the old man moving across the distant landscape, and he saddled a horse and rode out to meet him. In his diary he reports, ‘I confronted the grim old fellow and told him he trod upon my field. He wore no coat, though the wind was bitter, but only the summer clothes of a day laborer. I asked what it was he was looking for. He yelled at me in a harsh voice, “Work. I want work.” I reminded him it was the dead of winter. He stalked away, dragging his bad leg. By then a fierce snow had begun to fall and in a moment I lost sight of him.’”
    “You’ve got an incredible memory,” I told her.
    “I’ve been waiting to tell somebody all of this for forty years,” she said. “I’ll jump ahead. I know I’ve kept you too long already.”
    “Take your time.”
    “To make a long story shorter, the minister’s wife was found one afternoon, not but a few days later, hacked to pieces in a church pew. Nobody had a doubt but that it was the stranger. A posse was formed and the men went out into the fields on horseback searching for him. At night they carried torches. Always they would glimpse him in the distance across the vast acreage of a barren field, but when they arrived at that spot, he’d be gone. Still, he struck twice more. A fifteen-year-old girl, who lived two miles down the road from the Simms’ place. Her body was found in a horse trough, neck cut so bad that when they lifted her out of her frozen blood, her head fell off. Then a farmer slashed to ribbons, his body still upright in the seat of his buckboard, leaving a long trail of red in his wake as the horses stepped smartly through the snow.
    “The younger boys called the killer Mower Manc after Evron’s field friend. Everyone saw the connection, but it was impossible to blame the killings on the boy who was in a perpetual daze at home, fastened to his bed. All through the rest of that winter and into the spring, they chased the illusive figure. Sometimes he’d disappear for months and then there’d be a sighting of him. Once the crops were put in and the corn and wheat came up at the end of the spring, it got still more difficult to track him. Someone would see him cross the dirt road and then he’d plunge into a cornfield and vanish.
    “Harvest time finally came, and Evron was allowed to return to the fields to mow. His leg was still tender, and there was a slight but noticeable limp, but the boy, sickle in hand, went out into the fields to cut wheat. His father, his mother, his sister, the doctor, and a neighboring farmer watched Evron walk into the wind-rippled amber expanse, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him. All they found was that sickle.” Beverly clasped her hands, set them in her lap, and sighed.
    “He ran away,” I said.
    “I suppose,” she said. “But all through the end of the 19th century, through the 20th, and into the 21st up to today, folks have continued to farm this land. Geologists call it the Ohio Till Plain, one of the most fertile spots in the country. In all that time, every so often someone peering from a second-floor window of a farm house spots a strange figure in a distant field moving through the corn. A shadow with a hat. A loping scarecrow with a sickle. People nowadays refer to this phantom simply as The Mower . If you live here long enough, Mr. Ford, and you get to know the farmers well enough, you’ll hear someone speak of it. It’s