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| Free Story Friday: The Ones Who Watch |
A new original tale every week—twisted, terrifying, and inspired by the darkest legends you thought you knew.
The sun disappeared behind the trees, but the tall black figure didn't fade with the light. It stood there—dark as ink, waiting.
Jack Harper noticed it while stretching on the back porch after dinner, the same ritual he'd performed every evening for forty years. His back cracked as he straightened, and he squinted toward the soybean field that stretched beyond the property line. The cicadas buzzed their twilight song, and the sky bled orange and pink across the horizon.
That's when he saw it.
At the far edge of the field stood something impossibly tall and stick-thin, a black silhouette that didn't belong. No features, no movement—just a shape darker than the gathering dusk, absorbing light instead of reflecting it.
His eyes weren’t what they used to be—not at dusk, anyway.
When he opened them again, the figure seemed closer.
"Jack! Come help me with this," Maria called from inside, her voice muffled through the screen door.
He hesitated, the hairs on his arms rising despite the humid evening warmth. The shape remained perfectly still, watching. Or maybe it wasn't watching at all—maybe it was just a trick of the fading light, a shadow cast by the old oak at the property line.
"Jack?"
"Coming," he said, his voice rougher than intended.
He went inside, but glanced back once more before the door closed. The figure was still there, a vertical slash of darkness against the dimming sky.
Maria noticed the tension in his shoulders while they watched the evening news, her knitting needles clicking rhythmically in the lamplight. They'd been married thirty-five years—long enough to read each other's silences.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Thought I saw something in the field," Jack said. "But it just stood there too still to be a deer."
Maria raised an eyebrow. "It was probably just a shadow," she said, but she smiled. "Your imagination's getting as bad as mine."
Later that night, after Jack had fallen asleep, Maria walked to the kitchen for water. She paused at the window that overlooked the field, the one with the broken curtain rod that never closed quite right.
The field was empty. Moonlight silvered the soybeans, and nothing moved except the gentle sway of crops in the breeze.
But she locked the back door anyway.
The next evening, Jack found himself drawn to the porch before dusk, telling himself he was just checking the property. The field stretched out before him, rows of soybeans running in perfect parallel lines toward the horizon.
The figure was there again. Closer.
Definitely closer.
Jack's pulse quickened. He stepped off the porch and walked twenty paces into the field, eyes fixed on the black shape. It should have grown larger, but it remained the same impossible size, the distance between them feeling constant, as if the field had stretched to absorb his efforts.
"Jack?" Maria's voice came from the porch, uncertainty creeping into her tone. "What are you doing?"
He turned back, and the wrongness of the moment hit him. He'd walked twenty paces, but the house looked farther away than it should — as if the field had stretched behind him too.
"Coming," he said, and walked back faster than he'd intended.
Maria stood on the porch with her arms crossed. "What were you looking at?"
"Nothing," he lied. "Just checking the fence line."
But when they both looked toward the field, Maria's breath caught. Jack knew she'd seen it too.
On the third night, they went out together.
Two figures now stood at opposite edges of the field, angled toward the house like sentries. Both impossibly tall, both perfectly still, both darker than the gathering shadows around them.
"I was outside earlier," Maria whispered. "The field was empty."
Jack tried to photograph them with his phone, but when he checked the screen, the shapes blurred into nothing—or vanished entirely, leaving only an empty field.
They watched from the living room window as dusk deepened into night. The figures never moved, but the sensation of being observed was overwhelming. Maria found herself locking the back door without conscious thought, her hands moving on autopilot.
"Maybe we should call Zach," she said quietly.
Jack's jaw tightened. Their son had been pressuring them for months to sell the farm and move closer to town. This wasn't the ammunition he needed.
"And tell him what? That we're seeing shadows?"
"Jack—"
"I'm fine, Maria."
But his hand trembled slightly as he closed the blinds.
The next afternoon, Maria cornered him while he was fixing the fence.
"You need to go to that follow-up appointment," she said. "The dizzy spells, the shortness of breath—"
"It's just age," Jack cut her off. "I'm sixty-one, not twenty-one."
"Your father was sixty-three when—" She stopped, the unfinished sentence hanging between them like smoke.
Jack's father had died in this field. Heart attack while checking the irrigation lines, found face down in the dirt with his hand still gripping the fence post. The land takes back what it's owed, the old man used to say, usually after a few drinks. At the time, Jack thought it was just farmer philosophy. Now he wasn't so sure.
Later, Zach called. "Dad, I found a buyer who's interested. Good price, you could both live comfortably in town—"
"I'm not selling," Jack said flatly.
"But you're not getting any younger—"
"Neither are you. Goodbye, Zach."
He hung up before his son could respond, guilt and resentment warring in his chest.
Maria touched his arm. "Please don't go out when the light starts falling."
"This is my land," he said. "I won't hide in my own house."
But even he could hear how hollow the words sounded.
On the fourth night, there were three of them.
They stood halfway across the field now, close enough that Jack could make out their unnatural proportions—arms too long, bodies too thin, heads that tilted at angles that made his stomach lurch.
As he stared through the window, one of them slowly cocked its head to the side, the movement mechanical and deliberate.
It was looking directly at him.
Maria grabbed his arm. "We're closing the blinds. All of them."
They moved through the house systematically, shutting out the dying light. But the kitchen curtain with the broken rod wouldn't fully close, leaving a gap of exposed glass.
Maria passed it on her way to the sink and froze.
A tall, thin silhouette stood right outside the window, even though the field was hundreds of yards away. It shouldn't be possible, but there it was—pressed against the glass like it had crossed the entire distance in an instant.
The lights flickered.
Jack grabbed the flashlight from the drawer and aimed the beam at the window. The figure vanished. When he turned off the light, it was back, closer than before.
"Jack." Maria's voice was barely a whisper. "They move when we're not looking."
By the fifth night, Maria had figured it out.
The figures appeared only at dusk. They moved closer each night. They always faced Jack, not her. And they appeared right outside whichever window Jack approached, as if drawn to him specifically.
"Jack," she said as the sun began its descent, "I think they're here for you."
He didn't deny it. The realization had been growing in him like a tumor—the dizzy spells, the shortness of breath, the way his father's old warning kept echoing in his mind. The land takes back what it's owed.
"I won't hide," he said, moving toward the back door.
"Jack, please—"
"This is my home."
The moment he stepped onto the porch, all three figures began to move.
Long, jerky steps like spiders, their limbs bending at wrong angles. They fanned out, forming a semicircle around the house, moving with horrible purpose. The shadows they cast stretched unnaturally, as if the light itself was bending away from them.
Maria yanked him back inside, and they slammed the door.
The figures appeared at every window—too close, too tall, their blank faces pressed against the glass.
One of them tapped rhythmically on the kitchen window. The sound was measured, deliberate.
Like counting.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
"What do they want?" Maria sobbed.
Jack pulled her close, feeling the rapid flutter of her heartbeat against his chest. "What the land is owed," he whispered.
The tapping continued. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Then something began turning the doorknob.
Maria screamed. Jack lunged forward to block the door, his hands pressing against the wood as the knob twisted slowly, inexorably.
A shadow slid under the door, flattening itself like ink spreading across water. It moved across the floorboards toward them with awful patience.
The lights went out.
In the darkness, Jack heard Maria's breathing, felt her fingers digging into his arm. And somewhere in the black, something was still counting.
The counting stopped only when the darkness touched their feet.
For a long time after his parents vanished — a year, then another — Zach kept the Harper farm exactly as they’d left it. He cleaned the gutters, fixed the porch rail, and walked the fields at dusk with a flashlight, calling their names even when he knew no one would answer. But grief has a way of settling into the bones, and eventually he understood they weren’t coming back.
When he finally listed the property for sale, it felt like burying them without a body.
Sometimes, if you drive past the Harper farm at dusk, you can see them—tall, stick-thin figures standing at the edge of the field. Three of them now, perfectly still.
Watching.
Waiting.
The land takes back what it's owed. Eventually, it always does.
Further Reading
If you enjoyed this story, you might like:
Free Story Friday: The Phantom Clown
A creeping urban legend about a figure that appears where children gather, smiling just a little too wide and watching from the edges of town.
Free Story Friday: Autumn Harvest – A Bubak Scarecrow Horror Story
Out in the fields, something far worse than crows is drawn to the sound of a crying child—and it wears a scarecrow’s skin.
Free Story Friday: The Crooked Man
A twisted figure steps out of an old nursery rhyme and into the real world, bringing bad luck and broken lives wherever his shadow falls.
Free Story Friday: The Road to Nowhere
A lonely backroad, a wrong turn, and a drive that never seems to end. Some roads don’t just lead somewhere—they lead to something.
Free Story Friday: Haint Blue
An old Southern house, fading haint-blue paint, and a presence that doesn’t take kindly to being forgotten… or ignored.
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved. This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog. Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission. This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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