Scarecrows

Another bedtime story, sweetling? Another tale of Archie Henderson, farmer and sorcerer. This is the story: by 1906, Archie was mad.

There is a longer story. ACCESSING…

Archie Henderson’s son died in an earthquake. His wife died by her own hand. His daughter was devoured, skin and clothes and bones, by a Wendigo. He had one daughter left and obsessed over her safety. So he turned to the dark tomes and grim grimoires in his possession and found a way to create guardians for his living child.

Henderson hunted the woods for human prey and cut out their hearts. The pain and horror charged these organs with vile necromantic power. He made scarecrows from enchanted materials. The hay was sprinkled with unguents and oils. The old clothes they wore were stitched with horrid runes. Then, into their soft bodies, Henderson placed the harvest of reanimated, beating hearts.

For a week, a week and no more, the scarecrows worked. They patrolled the Henderson farm and killed any other monsters or horrors that came near. A week after that, they began to kill any humans who approached the farm. Henderson had forgotten one fact about his brute creations – the pain and sorrow of their deaths stayed with them, radiating from the undead hearts and poisoning the rest of the construct with hatred for those lucky enough to truly live.

The first scarecrow quickly became known for its gruesome affectation — to keep the body parts of those it killed. Not intelligent so much as primitively cunning, the scarecrows showed a penchant for endless malice. Only the sharing of their pain eased their pain. And so it was that the first scarecrow, the Collector, took its revenge on its creator, by strangling the life out of Archie Henderson’s daughter and arranging her remains for her father to find. That night, Archie ended his life with a straight razor.

Without Archie Henderson’s will to keep them alive, the scarecrows went back to their perches and fell to a century of sleep. The following generations of Hendersons repaired their shells and kept them around to frighten birds, never suspecting the human hearts that no longer beat within them. Then the Fog came.

The sheer surge of supernatural energy jerked the scarecrows awake. They raged silently, vowing to continue killing. The will never stop. And so it goes in Kingsmouth, on the Henderson farm. Archie was not the only magi to create walking scarecrows. Other around the world have enacted the same dark rites. Others have given bloody valentines to make the inanimate animate.