Short stories by Mace Styx:

Of course he hadn’t, you would tell yourself. He was pinned in place, the same place, forever. Still you’d have to check. Perhaps, because for every second you tried not to look at him, you’d feel him looking at you. Then you’d look up, and it would be too late.

Mr. Adderly’s scarecrow, nicknamed "Black eyed Jack" was around the size of an average man, but was of a curiously lifelike composition. Rather than just a horizontal pole, stretched beneath its jacket. Mr. Adderly had taken the time to construct a wicker frame that resembled a human body far more closely than the average scarecrow. There were angles where the elbows should be, a gentle dip where one would expect the ribcage to bleed into the stomach. And a large sagging belly that mirrored those of the local souses so closely, you’d have been forgiven for believing it was one of them, standing in crucified disgrace in the center of that field.

More terrible than the shape, however, was the face. Legend had it that years ago, the scarecrow’s face was made of sacking, but nowadays, it was stretched together from patches of old leather. Weather beaten and of an off brown-beige, it looked for all the world like a churned mess of badly stitched flesh. The lips were split in the center so that the top lip rose in a strange upturned "v" in the middle, but twisted upwards into a cruel looking smile at the sides. The cheeks, stuffed from within and almost bursting with straw, fell in heavy, slack jowls, like palsied or melted features, dragging downwards the empty hollows of the eyes.

Once, hurrying past this horrific figurine alone at dusk, I had resisted my temptation to look away. And forced myself instead to look directly at the face, at that hideous, drooping visage that watched and observed every passerby. My stomach turned to ice water, when I saw a fat, swollen slug emerge from one of the eye sockets, and within seconds I was sprinting my way home. I did not sleep that night.

Every child, between the ages of 5 and 15 and possibly many older, were terrified of that scarecrow. It was a rite of passage in our village to hear the stories about how Black Eyed Jack’s head had turned to look, when a friend of a friend had walked past. Or how a boy nobody heard from anymore had spit upon his jacket only to then go missing. A trail of straw leading from his room and back to Adderly’s field. Of course we didn’t believe those stories, we knew they were just kid’s games. Or at least, that’s what we would say if asked. In reality, our belief was far more malleable, and in private, we had all, at least once, imagined that weather browned face standing at the end of our bed, watching, as he always did, from the dark.