Harvest

First the elderly began to disappear from their homes. Nobody paid much mind, given the air was turning the colour of bruises and the cars had to manoeuvre through currents of melting tarmac. Who would care what a few dotards got up to as they staggered from their undermanned posts, gibbering for their pills or a fresh nappy? We had enough to worry about. Attempts to locate them were drawn up and swiftly abandoned. Some muttered darkly that we would find them in the village hall, that they would flock there as they had all those moons ago for their tea-dances in the boarded blackness, tap-tapping on the plastic planks.

I’m unsure who broke it to the constabulary. Mabel Squires, I’d bet. Her mother had gone missing from her room at the home in the dead of night. They found footprints cracked with mud and glass leading into the fields, where the ribbons of hornet-striped tape fluttered and whipped at us. We would not go further. Mabel knelt at the edge of the fields and shrieked and bayed but she too would not enter. For to enter the field was to smash the mirror that had been offered to you, to feel the shards in your hands and the multiplicity gazing back at you.

A pair of constables arrived at the village not long after. They performed a quick scan of the village green and collared passers-by for reports. It seemed they already knew who was missing, for they began to staple posters onto the telegraph poles, reaching ever higher until the very tips were plastered with faces. I asked if they needed help but they chittered at me as I approached and I quickly turned to resume my patrols. Some of the missing posters had been stamped VOID with drippy red.

For the missing old folks, they used images of the men and women as they had been, as young boys and girls beaming out at an uncertain but undeniably bright future.

For the missing children, they used images of shrunken, rotting corpses, eyes spilling over cheeks and onto lapels, lips shrivelling back to reveal white teeth, popping with the colours of corruption.

I felt the desire to pull these bills down, to render them into poisoned ash and deposit them in the letterboxes of all who remained. But my fingers scrabbled harmlessly off them. They had been plastered in place by the constable’s secretions and hardened into volcanic glass.

Mabel pulled me away from my futile efforts, whispering that it was a parish offence to deface artifacts of the constabulary. She didn’t seem angry that I was trying to remove the image of her mother, who was depicted as a flaxen-haired girl playing with a fake cooking set. I asked her what she knew and she told me to follow her. We traced a path through the allotments that grew heavy with weeping fruits to the sportsfield, which by dint of being an open space had been rightfully cocooned in tape. Squatting at the edge in a saucer of rubble was our village hall, sealed tight against the corruption. We would reopen it when the time was right. Which was now, according to Mabel, as her fingers fluttered up to the sill.

Before I could cajole her otherwise she had already pried off a corner of the metal plate covering a windowframe. It exhaled with a wheeze and she invited me to come closer. Inside I could see muffled shapes, grainy and cone-shaped until Mabel turned on her phone torch. The hall was full of children, some playing by themselves with tattered toys, others dancing in heptagon. Their faces were shiny with sweat and delirious happiness and they were clad in plastic wrapping. I recognised none of them from the posters, not the corpse-posters nor the child-posters. Once they saw us they pinwheeled around the flap of steel, reaching their pudgy little hands out to grab at us.

Mabel paused, her eyes flickering over each in turn. No, no, no, no, she said, before she ran for the field and was gone, totally gone, before I could even tell her what she already knew, that nothing would work out how she expected or even how she feared.

The next morning, very early, the constables returned to stamp the rest of the posters. I can see them now from my window, illuminated by the burning hall, scrambling up and down the poles, heads twitching like woodpeckers, a VOID rubber clutched in their mouthparts. Mabel is on there now, stuck firm. She looks exactly as she always did, neither a corpse nor a child, face twisted in rage, hands clawing at the dry earth.