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PROLOGUE
Gina didn’t want to go out there in the dark.
Ever since she’d moved to the farmstead, the nights had grown longer and longer as winter arrived. In those deeper, drawn out pockets of blackness, she had felt a strange unease building inside. There had been whispers across the farming community of strange figures walking the hills after sundown.
She would only leave the safety of the farmhouse at first light.
Staring through the kitchen window, she looked to the hills surrounding her piece of land. They were bleak shadows, looming and formless. But their shape soon changed as, finally, a ray of light glinted over their peaks.
The blue of twilight was still clinging to the dark clouds above, but now Gina was at least ready. The first rays of morning were enough to let her see her way.
Pulling on a thick, brown leather coat, she stepped into her boots and opened the door to the last remnants of night.
November had never seemed so somber before. But then, this was Gina’s first winter at the farm. She stared at the shadows and hoped that her fear of the outside was simply a product of her isolation from the world and the superstitious rumors swirling across the farmsteads of Kerry County, Kansas.
Grabbing a metal bucket from the side of the house, she walked across a dirt track to an old rickety shed. As she pulled at the door, trying to get it to budge in the coldness, Gina thought for a moment that someone was inside.
She stopped and listened. All that came was the sound of the cattle up at the main barn. They were waiting to be fed.
Stop torturing yourself, she thought and pulled the door open.
There was no one inside, and yet she still couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t alone. Grabbing a second bucket, Gina opened a large bag of feed for two of her cows. They had been sickly and unable to chew down on the hay that the others so gleefully wolfed down.
The feed was to help them as they recovered from an infection. Gina hoped that they would make it. She’d already lost several cows and was starting to think that she was out of her depth. All of her life, she’d worked to save just so she could buy a farmstead. Now, she wondered if she should ever have left New York in the first place. Kansas had always seemed like a dream, but if things didn’t look up, then that dream would soon wither into a nightmare.
After filling the buckets up with feed, Gina walked the winding trail up the hill to the old barn. The cows moved around and grunted inside the wooden walls of the red building.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Gina said wearily.
As she approached the barn, a few more glints of light caressed the tops of the hills around her. Looking to her side, she then saw something out of place. Up on the ridge was one of her tractors. It had seen better days and was already in a sorry state of affairs, but it wasn't the presence of the tractor that was out of place.
It was the shape sitting inside of it that sent a shiver up Gina’s spine.
The shape was black in the low light, sitting inside the cab and on the seat of the tractor, entombed by the Perspex glass around it.
Gina had the horrible feeling that the shape was looking at her. That it was considering her for some terrible purpose. But she couldn't see its eyes.
She took a deep breath and told herself the same thing she had told herself a thousand times over since she'd moved to the farm in the spring.
I will not let this place beat me ... or the weirdos who live nearby.
Gina, once of New York and now of a small farmstead in Kansas, was no shrinking violet. She had indeed worked herself to the bone to buy her home, and she wasn’t about to let herself get scared away by an unwelcome intruder.
Acting as though she hadn’t seen the shape, Gina entered the barn. The cows rushed around in their enclosures, desperate to be let out into the fields and fed, but all Gina was concerned with was a way to chase the person in the tractor off into the early morning. And to give them a good enough scare that they’d never come back.
Grabbing a large knife from a tool rack she kept on the wall of the barn, she left the buckets of food behind and stepped back outside.
The dark shape in the tractor was still there.
Come on, Gina. No one pushes you around.
She took a deep breath and then started up another small track towards where the tractor sat on the ridge. As she neared, the figure didn’t budge. Gina had hoped that simply approaching would have seen it off.
“Hey! This is private land! Beat it!” she shouted as she walked, making a point of showing the knife in her hand.
Again, the thing in the tractor didn’t respond.
A cold sweat washed over Gina as she neared, and the sun now began to truly illuminate the world around her. The hills revealed themselves to be tinged with the yellowed melancholy of fall into winter.
