The Harvest Festival was in full swing. Main Street was packed with people—gawking, eating, playing—not to mention dogs on leashes, vendors with wheels, and costumed hooligans wearing antler headdresses. Mel gleefully plunged into the ruckus snapping pictures of everything and anything. Stuart followed more sedately behind soaking up the festive atmosphere, words percolating in his head as he saw, heard, and smelled everything. It was going to be a doozy of an article, he thought. Mad Dog would love it—if by the time the assignment was finished, he awakened from his coma.
He nearly tripped over a line of little kids dressed in native costume, whooping and hollering as they made a beeline toward a vendor that sold candies and soft drinks. Plump people in aprons stood beside white tents hollering their wares. And as the farmer, Paul Grandbury, had mentioned to the journalists, there were squash soup stands in every conceivable nook and cranny of the street. Around noon, Mel decided to take a break and the two of them headed to the nearest food vendor to wait in line to order the festival’s specialty.
“There couldn’t be this many people living in this little town,” Mel remarked as they waited in line, gently being jostled by the passing crowd like kelp bobbing in ocean waves. “Most of this place is farm land, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so. I don’t remember reading the statistics for Gavot’s population, but I would guess it would be far fewer than this current crush,” Stuart replied. “Perhaps most of the visitors to the festival are out-of-towners like ourselves. The nearest large town is Callas. Perhaps the reporter from The Callas Post already wired a story to his editor and it got printed up. And now every who’s read it is visiting.”
“Maybe.” Mel found herself at the head of the line and quickly ordered the squash and pumpkin soup. Stuart gave the same order.
“Excellent choice!” exclaimed the rosy-cheeked woman who was giving the orders to the “cooks” who were merely ladling up the soup into thick white Styrofoam bowls from large industrial sized metal pots that were being heated by a portable stove. “Of course,” she added slyly. “Could I possibly suggest too that you try the squash all soup? It’s Bubba’s special recipe. It’s to die for.”
At the sound of his name, Bubba, a large man in the back of the vendor’s tent waved to the customers, the gap in his two front teeth evident as he grinned.
“Uh, no thanks,” Mel told her, remembering Paul Grandbury’s warning about the incendiary nature of the squash all soup. “Squash and pumpkin will be just fine.”
After they paid for their soup, the two of them ventured toward the center of the town with the roundabout and the large scaffold. No one was sitting atop the structure yet, after all the contestants for the crown of Horned King were supposedly gathered out at the back field of Gavot Academy participating in a foot race. That morning at breakfast, the Townsends had suggested to their guests that they also try out the foot race in order to experience the Harvest Festival. The newlyweds who were visiting immediately took up on the offer, as well as the old man who was visiting his friend, and strangely enough, Laurent the painter. Little Peter’s father declined citing the fact that he was out of shape. Stuart also decided not to go to the second race—he was fit enough, he supposed, and he could do fairly well, but not only did he not want to be swamped with the lecherous bingo ladies, he also had a magazine story to do. He could not very well do what he was paid to do if he was out running around.
Mel and Stuart walked around on the roundabout, which had been blocked off by plastic orange barricades to divert any traffic, to the gazebo which had been built on the town square. There was a sizeable crowd standing around it. They stood near the back of this crowd to eat the soup and to watch the local boys’ choir sing hymns. Even in the din of the festival goers, listeners could hear the soaring soprano of boys’ voices as they sang without any instrumental support. There were microphones rigged near the gazebo and amplifiers placed strategically around the scraggly trees growing on the square which helped the music reach.
“Too bad after a certain age, they would be kicked out and replaced,” said Mel after the choir finished one song.
“Hm.”
“Although I don’t see why they have to use boys. They could have used girls. Their voices don’t change too much.”
“Girls’ voices have a different quality than a boy’s voice,” said Stuart. “I don’t really know how to describe it, but a boy’s voice is—shall we say—smoother?”
“Or it isn’t that so much as the girl’s voice sounding too much like a squeal.”
He laughed. “A squeal? Yes, maybe you could be right.”
As the boys’ choir started another set of songs, the two journalists chucked their soup bowls in the nearest trash can and wandered off towards the crowded sidewalk of Main Street. Mel took out her camera again from her tote bag and looped the strap around her neck. All sorts of people milled around them. Teenagers roamed around in gangs wielding cell phones. Pregnant ladies in sweat suits waddled about chewing on their latest cravings. Families wandered in a haphazard and zigzag pattern—mostly with the parents yelling at their kids to stop horsing around. Couples strolled hand in hand, occasionally pointing and kissing.
Strangely enough, the people avoided one section of the road. As Mel and Stuart neared that section, they realized that people were avoiding that part of the sidewalk because someone was drawing on it. The artist, an older dark-skinned man with dreadlocks, a jaunty gray hat that matched the color of his sweatshirt, and chalk stained jeans, was sitting on the edge of the sidewalk drawing a large epic scene in dark mauves and browns. His box of chalk sat beside him, but the pastel colors were currently untouched. The scene was appropriate enough for the Harvest Festival—or at least to the origins of the festival as the journalists had heard about the night before.
The scene was that of a forest in the night. The background was a thicket of trees reaching out with their bare branches. Men danced around a dark red bonfire. Or what looked like men. In the picture, they were more like waving shadows. The main centerpiece of the whole work was a physical representation of a spirit with the horns of a stag. The Horned One. Bright red eyes, which the artist had already sketched out, stared out at all the passersby with a malicious intensity.
Mel fought down an involuntary shudder and took up her camera to take a picture.
“Well, that’ll fuel the stuff of nightmares for the next week,” remarked a bald man in a polo shirt who stood beside them to admire the artist’s work.
“An intense work isn’t it,” said Stuart.
“You can feel the power radiating out of it,” answered the man. “I’ve heard of the stories about the Horned King and about the origins of the Harvest Festival. It makes one glad that it’s just a bunch of boogieman tales to scare the kiddies into behaving, eh?”
“Just like fairy tales?” said Mel quietly.
The man chuckled. “Actually I would say it is more like folklore, or maybe more akin to a superstition. I’ve heard some people say that the town government likes to hire artists like him to come do drawings of the Horned One around the Harvest Festival. They’re usually out of town artists who don’t really know the significance of all the myths surrounding this. It is, of course, why the mayor and his cohorts would rather leave in the dark. Because all these pictures are part of the old superstition that if you have a likeness of the Horned One around, evil spirits would be drawn to the likenesses rather than the people themselves. I think it originated back to the natives who burned effigies to the Horned One.”
Mel nodded. “Yes, we heard of that one. The natives burned the effigies so they wouldn’t have such a harsh winter. And it’s to appease the Horned One, apparently.”
The bald man agreed and excused himself to see some of the other things around the festival. Stuart watched the artist continue sketching on the sidewalk. But how could the bald man be right? He wondered. How could the artist be in complete ignorance of what he was drawing? There must be some sort of knowledge if the figures in the sidewalk chalk drawing seemed so lifelike, especially the spirit of what was supposed to be the Horned One.
He heard Mel sigh beside him. “I think the picture I took would be enough. But if it turns out, I’m not even sure Mad Dog would want it printed up. It’s too…I don’t know. There’s just something unsettling about the entire thing, but I just can’t put a finger on it.”
