This was the latest he had ever been out, even counting Hallowe’en last year. But tonight he could feel there were no witches, the night was too still for that. It wasn’t frightening in that way, not with broomsticks and masked heads, animal faces. Not even Stork would be out as late as this, his two sticks pointed at the boys like guns, as he seemed to fly from the wall which ran alongside the road. No, it wasn’t that kind of fear. It was as if he didn’t . . . as if he wasn’t . . . as if the night had gone right through him, as if he wasn’t actually there, in that field, with cold knees and ghostly hands.
He imagined himself staying out there all night and the boys appearing to him in the morning, their faces red with the sun, shouting and screaming, like Red Indians. The sun was on their faces like war paint. They came out of their boxes pushing the lids up, and suddenly there they were among the stubble with their red knees and their red hands.
The stooks weren’t all at the same angle to the earth. As he listened in the quietness he seemed to hear them talking in strawy voices, speaking in a sort of sharp, strawy language. They were whispering to each other, deep and rough and sharp. Their language sounded very odd, not at all liquid and running, but like the voice of stones, thorns. The field was alive with their conversation. Perhaps they were discussing the scythe that had cut them down, the boys that played hide and seek among them. They were busy and hissing as if they had to speak as much as possible before the light strengthened around them.
Then they came closer together, and the boys seemed suddenly very far away. The stooks were pressed against each other, composing a thorny spiky wall. He screamed suddenly and stopped, for at the sound the stooks had resumed their original positions. They were like pieces on a board. He began to count them again, his heart beating irregularly. Thirteen, where there had been twelve before. Where had the thirteenth come from?
He couldn’t make out which was the alien one, and then counted them again and again. Then he saw it, the thirteenth. It was moving towards him, it had sharp teeth, it had thorny fingers. It was sighing inarticulately like an old woman, or an old man, its sigh was despairing and deep. Far beyond on the road he could sense that the boys were all gathered together, having got out of their boxes. They were sighing, everyone was sighing like the wind. Straw was peeling away from them as if on an invisible gale. And finally they were no longer there, but had returned to their boxes again and pulled the roofs over their heads.
He didn’t notice the lights of the house go out as he walked towards the thirteenth stook, laid his head on its breast and fell asleep among the thorns.
