I could hear footsteps and Ted screaming as someone dragged him along the floor. I had a gun that Antoine had given me and enough Hustle to be able to use it.

I climbed out of the treehouse in what probably looked like a very clumsy crawl. I managed to land on my feet and point the gun in the direction of the open door, where I could see a mysterious figure standing.

He still held Ted's foot as he dragged him.

I took a shot.

And I missed.

I couldn't have missed. I had devoted so many points to Hustle that I should have been able to pick up a firearm and hit anything in a storyline, but somehow, I had missed. If I had hit and it had not been fatal, I could understand that, but missing... made no sense.

That either meant that the figure had higher Hustle than I did, or he had a trope that protected him from gunfire.

I shot again. All I saw were the sparks that flew in the distance as my bullet hit something other than my target.

"Let go of him!" I screamed.

The figure didn't care. I couldn't see his face; he was just a silhouette, but I could tell he was taller than me. At that moment, I was afraid to unfocus my eyes so I could look at him on the red wallpaper.

Luckily, for a reason that I didn't understand at the moment, the dark silhouette of his head turned, and in the blink of an eye, he was out the door, which he slammed behind him loudly.

He left Ted screaming and hollering on the floor.

Kimberly and Dina were down from the car lift treehouse.

"I need a flashlight," I said. "That was definitely the killer."

I had left mine up in the treehouse. Dina grabbed it for me.

I did the thing that I often saw in action movies where cops put a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other so that they could shine the light wherever their gun was pointed.

"We need to go outside," I said.

"With the killer?" Kimberly asked.

"It's where the story is going," I said, which, of course, was pretty much the only reason we ever did anything, but in this storyline, it was something my character would care about, too.

Kimberly prepared her gun and flashlight similarly to how I did.

"I didn't take all those self-defense and firearms training courses because I thought I was going to be running after killers," she said. "It was for when the killers ran after me."

Her Hustle jumped up two points, as did her Mettle and Grit. Her hand, which held her firearm, steadied.

"Let's go," she said.

"Ted, grab the camera and follow us," I added.

"He grabbed me," Ted said. "I thought he was going to kill me."

"Well, he didn't, so it's time to work," I replied. I had to have earned that promotion somehow; being a hardass was a good reason.

We crossed the garage toward the door we had entered in the direction the killer had gone, and as we did, we heard someone outside yelling. It wasn't a scared yell.

Kimberly started to say "Antoine" but disguised it as a gasp and then said, "It's Sheriff Stone."

Outside, he was yelling, "Hello, Miss Madison, are you here?"

If he was in character outside, that meant that he was On-Screen, and we were also On-Screen, which meant that something was about to happen that involved all of us.

Kimberly rushed out the door.

Dina and I were right behind her, and Ted had found the courage to get his camera and follow us lightning-quick.

Antoine stood at the edge of the field and continued screaming.

"Sheriff Stone!" Kimberly cried out.

Antoine turned to us, and that's when we saw the killer.

He stepped out of the shadows like he was coming out of thin air.

He stepped up behind Antoine.

"No!" Kimberly screamed, and we all ran in that direction.

"Get down!" I screamed and raised my gun.

Antoine had good reflexes and was already on edge, perhaps more so than might be expected. As we got closer, I could see in the moonlight that he was sweating and gaunt.

He rolled out of the way before the killer could get behind him.

And there, by the light of the night sky, I got my first look at Benny.

Not Benny the Haunted Scarecrow that I would know from the sequel, not a ghost or magical thing at first glance.

The red wallpaper just called him Benny.

Benny

Plot Armor: 28

__________

Tropes

Vigilante Justice

This villain is an anti-hero who seeks to dole out justice with their own hands.

Soft Magic is Confusing

The enemy’s lore is vague and broad and offers little insight into the specifics of how the enemy operates.

Convenient Spirituality

Does this enemy have powers beyond its physical body? It must, even if it doesn’t often show them.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Gun to a Knife Fight

In this story, bladed weapons will be made equal to firearms in terms of effectiveness in some manner.

Slasher Teleportation

The villain is able to disappear or reappear without the characters noticing during Chase and Fight Scenes.

The Immortal Mask

This villain cannot be defeated, captured, or unmasked until their identity and motive have been deduced.

Where I had expected some sort of supernatural flying creature, he was just a man. He held a sickle and wore the head of the scarecrow that had been hanging in the fields. He had gardening gloves on and heavy work boots. Of course, he wore Benny Harless' coveralls with the name tag that I recognized.

Antoine managed to run away over toward us. He had his gun drawn, and he was ready to fill the supposed Benny with lead. Benny was quick, however, and ran immediately into the cornfield, disappearing quickly.

"We have to get out of here," Kimberly said.

Something that I couldn't tell her because we were On-Screen was that this Benny did not have the same trope that had prevented the previous one from killing her and me. That had been called Judgment Call, and it was conspicuously absent from his loadout here.

We had always wondered whether or not we could die in this storyline. We wondered whether the Judgment Call made by Benny, the haunted scarecrow we knew, would apply to this story.

It appeared we were wrong. That trope would not protect us.

This Benny was not the mysterious god of the cornfield. This Benny was a slasher, and we could be next.

----------------------------------------

"Where is your car?" Antoine said.

"It's down the road at the trailhead," I said. "With him out here, we'll never make it."

"Then we make a stand," Antoine said.

As he said that, the wind started to blow and howl, and the sunflowers, corn, and wheat became dancers in the moonlight. Was Benny waiting to attack us from within them, or had he used his Slasher Teleportation, and was he waiting behind us right now?

"Over there!" Dina yelled. Her outsider's perspective was great for this; it allowed her to notice anything new or unusual immediately.

As soon as I could turn my head, he was gone.

"No, over there!" Dina said, pointing to the complete opposite side of the cornfield.

This time, he stuck around for a while. All I could see was the scarecrow's fabric head that he had used as a mask. I could see now that he had cut two slits where the eyes were so that he could see. Behind those slits were dark, button-like eyes I recognized.

Kimberly must have recognized them, too.

In an instant, he was back in the cornfield, and we were running back toward the garage. Despite our considerable hustle, he beat us there. He was impossibly quick.

He stood between us and the garage, menacing, his sickle poised to slice.

"Rustle?" Kimberly asked softly.

Benny the slasher took a step back and tilted his head in the way that Michael Myers always did.

"You don't want to kill us," Kimberly said. "We were not the ones who hurt Tamara or your dad. That's... that's who you're after, right? You know who did it, and you're getting revenge."

He had the Immortal Mask trope, which meant we needed to identify him and his motive. That was one of the primary reasons I could rule out him actually being a ghost. Surely, we wouldn't be asked to solve the mystery of who the killer was if his name really was Benny.

We had a theory. As the "detective" main character, Kimberly needed to solve the case.

We figured that Benny--the real Benny--had seen something when fixing a car. He had seen the bloody ponytail holder and called it into the police, only for Tommy Patcher to be the one to get the call. They had continued their coverup by killing the friendly car mechanic.

There had been dried, crystalized goo on the ponytail holder, too, which I assumed came from the stuff that had leaked out of the broken lift.

Benny, or should I say Rustle, just stood and stared. It took long enough for me to start wondering if we were actually correct or if we needed to elaborate, but as I stared into those eyes, I knew that they belonged to the child I had met before, now all grown up.

In a flash, Benny ran off into the cornfield again. The chase scene indicator turned off.

The story was far from over. We hadn't even seen Second Blood yet. We were about to find out where our decisions had led us.

We all started looking at each other, expecting to go Off-Screen any moment, but we didn't.

The scene wasn't over.

"Rustle!" a woman screamed from back in the direction of the garage. "Rustle, where are you, honey?"

It wasn't coming from the garage; it was coming from the building next to it, the farmhouse. Rose was wearing a nightgown and a quilted jacket as she ran out into the darkness holding a shotgun.

"Who are you?" she screamed at us, training the gun at us.

"Miss Harless," Kimberly said, raising her hand, "it's Kimberly Madison with Carousel News 9. Do you remember me?"

"Yes, I do," Rose said, keeping the gun trained on us. "Dina, is that you?"

"Yes, Rose, it's me," Dina said.

"Well, what are you doing out here in the middle of the night, bringing reporters?"

She finally lifted her shotgun.

Dina walked forward and said, "We were searching for a killer. We thought he might be connected to my daughter."

Rose changed temperament at that. She was neither the hard, dangerous woman with a shotgun nor the kind, evasive woman we had first met.

She started to cry.

"Why would you be looking for a killer here?" she asked, sobbing.

"Ma'am," Antoine said, "I tracked the killer back here. He was a tall male wearing blue coveralls and a mask that looked like a scarecrow's head."

Rose continued to sob.

"I don't know anything about that," she said, not able to look us in the eye, just as she was never able to look us in the eye when she talked about her son.

"You know something, don't you?" I said.

She would not look at us, and she didn't respond.

I was willing to get a little greedy. I didn't feel like I was going too far out on a limb, but I wasn't sure about what can of worms I was about to open.

"There's something strange about him, something not of this world. I can feel it," I said. "I can feel it in the wind. I can feel it when I look at him. Now more than ever."

Rose turned her head and looked at me. She was about to speak; I could feel it.

Antoine's radio started to go off.

"Sheriff, are you hearing me? Sheriff, can you respond? Did you find anything over at Hidden Gorge?"

Antoine took out his radio, which was large and unwieldy.

"Yeah, I found something," Antoine said. "Gonna need you to send in all units."

Off-Screen. Finally.

"You found something?" I asked.

"Yeah, he killed two Patchers. They had shovels. I didn't get time to investigate because I pursued him over here."

Something in the way he said that was odd, like he was sick to his stomach or dizzy.

I decided to ignore it.

"Let's get there now," Kimberly said.

We practically ran two miles up the road to the trailhead where our car was. Rose came too. It made sense that she would be in the next scene, but it was odd for her to come running with us holding a shotgun in nothing but a coat and nightgown. In a movie, you would never question something like that. We all piled in and quickly made our way to the campgrounds at Hidden Gorge.

We were there before any of the other police.

"It's this way," Antoine said.

The campgrounds were very nice. They were well laid out, with an established trail between them. They all centered around a small area where the gorge was wide enough, and its water was still enough for a small swim beach to be made, though it was quite a climb down.

"It's over here," Antoine said, leading us past that place.

Luckily, we had our flashlights because the forest was thick. Antoine started to feel uneasy. Kimberly walked up ahead and grabbed his arm, and he didn't push her away.

It just dawned on me that we had sent Antoine into the woods alone. I had thought the campgrounds would be populated enough that he wouldn't have a problem. It would seem he had lost the benefits of his Play It Cool trope at some point in time. We needed to get to the end of the movie soon.

He led us through the forest along what was not an established trail but was clearly trodden before.

On-Screen.

"Over here," he said.

It took about half a mile of hiking into the woods before we found the small clearing filled with moonlight.

A headless Patcher lay on the ground. It was one I didn't recognize, but there were so many Patchers that it was possible I had already seen him.

But there was another Patcher, Woody Patcher, whom we definitely recognized as being the gas station attendant.

He was babbling to himself.

I could see his lips moving, and I could see blood coming out from his mouth, but I couldn't hear what he was saying, not until I got really close. And what he said made no sense.

"Couldn't finish. Send help."

That's all he said over and over again.

"Couldn't finish. Send help."

"Couldn't finish. Send help."

And then, finally, when his eyes acknowledged us for the first time, he said, "People here. Couldn't finish. Send help."

As Antoine had said, shovels lay on the ground, and they began digging a hole in the moonlight.

"Oh my God," Dina said.

I grabbed one of the shovels from the ground. The hole was not yet complete, but its size and shape made me fear I knew exactly what was in it.

Quickly, Kimberly and I began digging while Dina stayed at the edge and talked to her daughter as if she were there.

"It's you. I finally found you," she said. "I had a feeling... maybe now I can be at peace too."

Sure enough, a couple more feet down, I struck a trunk, like the kind people would pack their clothes into in the olden days when they traveled by train. It was just big enough for the remains of a young girl.

Antoine was incensed. He went to Woody Patcher, ignoring whatever wounds he might have had, grabbed him, and asked, "What were you doing here? What happened to her?"

Woody barely acknowledged what was going on, but he did answer more or less.

"Tugg might have talked. Need to move her again. People are here. Couldn't finish. Send help," was all he said in that same soulless rhythm.