The Strange Harvest At Hollow Creek
Autumn in the small
town of Hollow Creek was a time of vibrant colors and crisp air. The leaves
turned brilliant shades of red, orange, and yellow, blanketing the ground in a
tapestry of nature’s final flourish before winter. Among the townsfolk, there
was a long-standing tradition of baking bread using the harvest from the local
wheat fields, a practice that filled the air with the comforting scent of
freshly baked loaves. It was a fall celebration with a carnival-like atmosphere
with various vendors selling their wares. However, this year, the harvest
brought something far more sinister.
Maggie Taylor, one of the
town’s beloved bakers, was preparing for the annual Autumn Festival. She had
always taken great pride in her bread, made with wheat grown in the fertile
fields surrounding Hollow Creek. She had been running her little shop for
fifteen years. Baking had become her passion, but the fantastic-tasting bread
made her reputation widespread. This year, the wheat had grown unusually faster
and fuller than ever before, promising a bumper crop. Maggie, like everyone
else in town, saw it as a blessing.
When the grain was delivered
to the mills for grinding, those operating the giant wheels paid little
attention to the discoloration on the massive stone rollers nor the chaff as it
was separated from the seeds being ground into a white powder. The mills emitted
a distinctly different odor, but it was not the responsibility of the operators
to question what they were given to grind into flour.
“That’s a peculiar
smell this year,” one worker said to the other. “Think we ought to say
something to the owner?”
“You slow down
production with crap like that, and he’ll fire your ass. Keep your mouth shut
and do your job.”
It delighted Maggie to
get her flour delivered in near record time. She guessed the mills were working
overtime because of the bountiful crop this year in Hollow Creek. Some years,
the weather didn’t cooperate—this year was obviously perfect.
Maggie noticed
something strange as she kneaded the dough with added water, eggs, yeast, and
other unique ingredients. The powdered wheat had a peculiar, almost oily
texture, leaving a faint, metallic scent on her hands. Brushing it off as her
imagination, she continued baking, carefully shaping the loaves and placing
them in the oven. Soon, the warm, familiar aroma of baking bread filled her
small shop, mingling with the crisp scent of autumn leaves.
She sat the first batch
of loaves on cooling racks and couldn’t resist taking a pinch off the warm,
soft loaf closest to her. It was delicious, as she expected—but different. She
couldn’t put her finger on precisely what it was, and it puzzled her. She asked
a neighbor and fellow baker if they noticed anything different.
“I do, Maggie, but it’s
only slight, and unless a person is a baker like ourselves, I doubt they’d
notice anything at all,” her friend said.
“Yeah. I guess,” Maggie
said with a sigh. “We’re all going to make a significant profit this year with
our gracious blessing from the Greek God Demeter, who has put her hand on our
lovely wheat to make it exceptional.”
The festival day
arrived, and the townspeople gathered in the square, the air buzzing with
excitement. As always, Maggie’s bread was a hit, with everyone marveling at its
rich flavor and unusual, almost addictive quality. The leaves swirled around
them, creating a picturesque scene straight out of a storybook.
The carnival-like
atmosphere with a band playing in the distance and vendors selling all sorts of
candies, popcorn, hot dogs, and Mexican foods. Children ran in every direction
with a scolding parent behind, yelling, “Not so fast, you’ll get lost in the
crowd.” All the festivities were the highlight of every fall in Hollow Creek.
The special breads were
always the big seller at the festival. Other bakers focused on cookies, cakes,
and pies made with the bounty crop this year. Some remarked that the fresh
bread tasted slightly different this year but no less delicious, and everyone
ate copious amounts. No one commented on the sweet baked goods, likely because
of the recipe’s other flavorings and generous amounts of sugar.
But as the day turned
to dusk, something unsettling began to unfold. Numerous men, women, and
children still in the market area complained of discomfort in their stomachs
and digestive systems.
“I feel something like
the stomach flu coming on, and at the same time, I feel dizzy, like too much
alcohol, although I’ve had none,” one woman said. “And worse, I have a strange
sense of dread of something—and I’m not sure—but it feels wicked.” Holding one
hand, her son rubbed his belly with the other and said, “Momma, I don’t feel so
good.”
More and more townsfolk
complained of the strange symptoms—nausea, dizziness, and a creeping sense of
dread. The once-festive atmosphere turned tense as more and more townsfolk fell
ill. Maggie also felt a gnawing pain in her stomach. A cold sweat broke out on
her forehead. She decided to close her shop so as not to give whatever she was
coming down with to her customers. She’d had all kinds of flu in her life and
figured she’d just have to let it run its course with aspirin and some local
remedies—but the foreboding she couldn’t understand.
That night, a storm
rolled in, bringing with it howling winds and torrential rain. Unable to sleep,
Maggie wandered downstairs into her shop, hoping to find solace in her work. The
air felt thick and muggy. But what she found she couldn’t have imagined in her
worst nightmare. She saw the bread—her beautiful, golden loaves—covered in a
thick, black mold. The sight sent a chill down her spine. A retching feeling
caused her stomach to twist upside-down, and she held her throat to prevent
having to dash to the sink and vomit. Bread mold had never grown this quickly
or looked like this either—it seemed to writhe and pulsate, almost alive.
Desperate to understand
what was happening, Maggie remembered how the wheat had seemed slightly ‘off’
and the peculiar aroma she’d noticed from the flour. On a hunch, she grabbed a
flashlight and made her way to the wheat and corn fields. The earlier storm had
transformed the landscape into a nightmarish tableau, with shadows dancing in
the flickering light and wet leaves plastered to every surface. As she reached
the edge of an unharvested cornfield, her flashlight beam caught something
moving among the stalks.
Steeling herself,
Maggie pushed through the tall corn, the wet leaves slapping against her. What
she found in the heart of the field made her blood turn to ice. There, amid the
swaying stalks, was a mass of writhing, tentacle-like vines, oozing the same
black substance she had seen on the bread. The wheat and the corn weren’t just
infected—it was transforming. The unknown horror clutched at her being like
crab claws on a piece of fish. An overwhelming desire to flee filled her
senses.
Suddenly, the ground
beneath her feet shifted before she could run, and Maggie stumbled, falling
into a shallow pit. She screamed as she realized the pit contained decomposing
bodies, the faces of her friends, neighbors, and children twisted in agony.
Their skin—mottled and decayed, as if something had drained the life from them.
The black mold covered them, growing thicker and more grotesque. It seemed to
devour the flesh, and some skulls were visible with empty eye sockets. Then,
filling in with more black horror.
She had to escape, and
the only way out was by stepping on the bodies on the shallow walled side.
Leaping over them and grasping the surface on the other side, her feet slipped,
trying to get traction in the wet dirt wall of the pit. Finding a few roots,
she stepped higher, with her waist about level with the ground. She was sure
the next heave with her hands would have her free of the grotesque mass of
humanity at the bottom of the pit.
Just as she was pulling
level with the surface, the vines from the wheat and corn field surged towards
her, wrapping around her legs and pulling her back into the pit. Maggie screamed
like someone being sawed in half at the waist. She struggled with every ounce
of strength, but the more she fought, the tighter they held. The mold crept up
her body, cold and slimy, burning her skin like acid. Her screams echoed
through the storm, but no one could hear them.
The writhing,
tentacle-like vines continued to spread toward the village and were met by the
same tentacles growing from all the loaves of uneaten bread from every shop and
home in the area. The rain was long over, and the clouds cleared, revealing a
full moon illuminating the monstrous scene below. It resembled thousands of
earthworms piled on the soil, writhing and churning to get back below the
earth. The difference was that some of these ‘vines’ were as thick as giant oak
tree trunks and could have been thousands of giant pythons scrambling to find a
morsel of uneaten flesh to devour.
In the days that
followed, Hollow Creek became a ghost town. The once-vibrant community was
reduced to a series of empty houses and abandoned shops, overrun by the
insidious black mold. The wheat fields continued to thrive, their stalks taller
and more robust than ever, swaying ominously in the autumn wind.
Mary-Jane Anderson,
Maggie Taylor’s married sister, had tried unsuccessfully to reach her. After
ten days, she traveled three hundred miles by car to find what was left of the
town. The horror scene of black gook and vines everywhere caused her to reverse
her course and drive away from a scene worse than hell and report it to anyone
who would listen to her. The government would later be tight-lipped about what
happened to the town, but she accepted that she’d never see her sister again.
A week later, a team of
government scientists arrived at the deserted town, responding to Mary-Jane and
other reports of the strange outbreak and people who had vanished. They wore
hazmat suits and carried sophisticated equipment, but nothing could have
prepared them for what they found. As they investigated, they discovered that
the mold was not of this earth. It was a sentient, parasitic organism, possibly
alien in origin, that thrived by draining the life force of other beings and
using the nutrients to enhance its host plants. The wheat looked like
cornstalks, and the corn like mature trees.
The scientists
documented the horrific scene, their faces pale behind their protective masks.
They took samples and deployed thousands of gallons of napalm gas to burn the
fields and all the building structures, hoping to contain the spread. When the
fires died down and there was nothing left but ashes, tanker trucks arrived,
spraying every plant killer from Agent Orange to lethal herbicides, fungicides,
and phenoxyalkanoic acids on the charred remains. Anything ever used to kill
plants of any type and mold was deployed in significant quantities. A chain-link
fence with barbed wire on top was built around a five-mile diameter area of what
once was the town of Hollow Creek. It had higher priority, more guarded off
limits than Chernobyl once did when the disaster happened in Russia.
But the mold had
already taken root deep in the soil. As time passed, rain washed the barren
topsoil away, and more rain got to the spores and carried them in rivers of
water far and wide.
Years passed, and the
story of Hollow Creek became a cautionary tale, a warning about the dangers
lurking in the most ordinary places. The once beautiful town no longer existed—a
macabre testament to the horror that had unfolded there.
And every fall in
surrounding parts of the country, as the leaves turned, and the air grew crisp,
the wind carried with it a faint, metallic scent—a reminder of the harvest of
shadows and the bread that brought doom.
MD Smith IV
M.D. Smith of Huntsville, AL, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewilderingstories.com and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. https://mdsmithiv.com/