The Harvest

Its Time

A few weeks later, right before summer vacation, the story came up again. Not by Tommy this time, but another girl from my class. Scared of the things Tommy had talked about, she had asked her older brother about it. He had told her about his childhood best friend, who had vanished without a trace. Overnight, the boy had disappeared, had left not a single clue and was never found.

That was when I got scared too. One person making something up was not unusual, but I vaguely remembered the disappearance of the little boy, although I had been very young back then. But it had happened in summer, that much I knew.

I went home to my parents and told them about what I had heard, but they were quick to reassure me nothing about it was true. They told me there was not such thing as monsters, my classmates had just made up a spooky story to scare us and I shouldn't worry about it.

Of course I believed them.

On the first day of the last week of August that year, I was out late with the neighbour kid. He was two years younger than me, but we got along really well and he lived just across the road, so we hung out a lot. The sun was just setting, the streetlamps turned on the exact moment we reached his doorstep. A Rhododendron blossom lay there.

The family did not own a Rododendron.

My friend picked it up and rang the doorbell; his mother opened and stared wide-eyed at the flower her son held in his hands. "Where did you get that?", she asked, pale as a ghost.

He pointed at the floor.

She ushered him and and threw the door shut without a goodbye, eyes sparkling with tears.

I returned home, of course, and from that day on, I watched the house across the road every night. Asking my parents would have no use, so I simply stayed awake and watched, waiting for something to happen. I saw my friend during the day, but as I asked him, he didn't say anything. Only that his mother had been worried because we had come home a few minutes later than usual.

I knew something was wrong, although I couldn't name it at that point. There was no school anyways, so I stayed awake during the night and slept during the day. Nothing happened for four nights, my friend behaved as always, and yet I couldn't shake the sense of dread the Rhododendron and his mother's reaction had left in me.

In night five, it finally happened.