Goosebumps

“Afalon!” A cold, snappish voice rang through the house. “Afalon!”

Loud stomping shook the rickety stairs as the hailer’s calls were answered. “Yes, mother?” Afalon stuck her head through the kitchen doorway, leaning down to pull up her ever-slipping socks. Her mother stood at the table with her back to her daughter, absorbed in the tedious process of making apple preserves. Afalon could see the way her mother’s hands were trembling.

“There’s a chill,” Eithne sniffed. “Put some more wood in the stove and fetch me my shawl before you go outside.”

“You should be in bed, resting,” Afalon said as she loped over to the pile of logs stacked next to the stove. She opened the creaky hatch and packed the stove full, pushing the glowing logs that had been in there for hours already around, making them spray sparks, burrowing the new logs into the embers. When she was finished she wiped the ash and wood bits from her hands onto her apron, and leaned over to place a kiss on her mother’s temple. Eithne tilted away from the affection with a disdainful grimace.

“There’s far too much to do,” her mother tutted. “No time to rest. No time to waste with daydreaming,” she gave her daughter a pointed look. Afalon sighed with a small, complaisant smile.

Autumn was settling fully in, and with the weather cooling, the time to begin harvesting their family’s apple orchard had just arrived. With just the two women on the farm, getting all the apples picked and prepped before they started to go bad was always a challenge, but this year, with Eithne’s health failing, she was too weak to help with the picking, so Afalon, still young and spry at only eighteen, would have to do it all, alone. Afalon understood the gravity of their situation, she understood it well, even though Eithne would never change her mind about her daughter being naive, foolish, or lazy.

“I know, mother,” Afalon said. “I’ll get my work today done and then some, I promise. I’ll chop some more firewood for you, too.”

“See that you do,” her mother said with her usual pinched expression. Seeing the dismissal for what it was, Afalon retreated from the kitchen. She took her coat down from its hook by the door and pulled it on, but left it unbuttoned knowing she would get hot later from working. It was just to stave off the chill for now. From the kitchen, she heard her mother start to cough, deep, rough hacks that Afalon could tell just from the sound were shaking her whole body. Afalon opened the door, letting the crisp morning in for a second before her mother barked in between coughs: "Afalon!"

Afalon jumped, letting go of the doorknob like it bit her, and ran all helter-skelter into the main room of the house. She almost toppled over from how far she reached to snatch her mother's shawl from where it was draped over the husband's fraying upholstery, then with the almost-forgotten knit in hand, teetered back the other way. She threw the shawl over her mother's shoulders with a yelped apology, and then finally dashed out the open door.

The breeze was cold and dry, the kind that made your eyes water and nose run the minute you went outside. It came in bursts, like the god of wind had to pause for breath every few moments before blowing the cold wind down again. Afalon shivered and hunched her shoulders, thinking she should have put on her warm hat as well. Instead of turning back into the house for it, she made her way straight for the apple trees, collecting the baskets she would fill on the way. The trees would shield her from the wind at least a little bit.

Hours passed as Afalon went from tree to tree, pulling seemingly endless apples down from their branches, checking them quickly for bugs before dropping them gently into the baskets. The sun moved across the sky, the sparse clouds above moving rapidly along the north winds that preceded winter. It was coming early this year, it looked like. She had a feeling they wouldn’t be the only ones struggling with their crops before the frost came to take it all away. It grew much warmer at midday, and at one point while lugging the heavy, full baskets of fruit to and fro, Afalon had to take her coat off and tie the arms around her waist, the pits and back of her linen shirt damp with large patches of sweat.

She was in the middle of separating the apples that would get made into cider from the rest when a harsh, violent chill raced up her back, like cold, sharp talons raking up her spine. Afalon jolted upright, her head whipping around as she looked for the source of the bad feeling. She rubbed her arms, where the dark hair was all standing straight up, her flesh covered in goosebumps. That wasn’t just the autumn wind, that was a chill one only gets when they’re being watched. She noticed a shadow in the corner of her eye, an unfamiliar blot, on a horizon that she knew so well. She did a double take, staring out at the empty, flat fields that surrounded the orchard. Despite the heat of the sun, what Afalon saw made her whole body turn cold as ice. Out there, in the browning grass, only just barely close enough to make out what it was: a scarecrow.

Afalon shuddered, her eyes locked on the straw-stuffed human mimic. The brim of its hat and the hem of its patchy coat fluttered in the breeze, standing out alone with its pole driven deep into the middle of the grass plain, nothing else around it. It was facing her, and even though Afalon knew it wasn’t really alive, in that moment she was no different from the very unwanted birds those things were made to keep away. She couldn’t help but feel it was looking right at her. That scarecrow was not there yesterday. It was not there that morning.

Forcing herself to turn away from the foreboding sight, Afalon’s brow furrowed, trying to swipe away the cold sweat that had engulfed her and the eerie chill that still prickled all along her skin. It must have been some neighbour’s kids pulling a dumb prank, she told herself. Scarecrows couldn’t move on their own. That was crazy. She ducked around the side of the house, leaning against the log wall and trying to catch her breath. Their neighbours to the south were grain farmers, they’d have a scarecrow, no doubt-- and they had kids. Two, right? Last she saw them she didn’t think they’d be big enough to move a scarecrow around just to spook people, but maybe she wasn’t remembering right, maybe they were older than she thought. Yes, that had to be it.

The same guilty twist wound up in her stomach that always did when Afalon told a lie. But she repeated in her mind that it was either that, or she just imagined it, daydreaming too hard like her mother was always scolding her for. There was no other explanation. Scarecrows couldn’t move on their own. That was crazy.

Right?

She waited until her shivers and pounding heartbeat had abated before looking back around the corner.

All Afalon could see were the empty plains stretching far over the horizon. There was no sign of the scarecrow.

As disturbing as its sudden appearance had been, its sudden vanishing was somehow even more ominous. Afalon knew for certain that that night, she would be hanging a horseshoe over the front door, and closing all the windows tight.