Some people say aliens landed there, and that’s why nothing will grow.

Sure thing.

Others say the field is cursed. I might go along with that. You might, too, after you know more about it.

The reason they call the place Janks Field isn’t because it belongs to anyone named Janks. It doesn’t, and never did. It’s called that because of Tommy Janks and what he did there in 1954.

I was just a little kid at the time, so nobody told me much. But I do remember people acting funny the summer it all happened. Dad, being chief of police, wasn’t home very often. Mom, usually cheerful, seemed oddly nervous. And sometimes I overheard scattered talk about missing girls. This went on for most of the summer. Then something big happened and everyone went crazy. All the grown-ups were pale and whispering and I caught bits and pieces like, “Some kind of monster…” and “Dear God…” and “their poor parents…” and “always knew there was something off about him.”

As it turns out, some Boy Scouts had hiked into the field and found Tommy Janks sitting by a campfire. He was a deaf mute, so he never heard them coming. They caught him with a gob of meat on the end of a stick. He was roasting it over the fire. It turned out to be the heart of one of the missing girls.

Must’ve been awful, walking into a scene like that.

Those Boy Scouts became instant heroes. We envied them, hated them, and longed to be their friends. Not because they captured Tommy Janks (my dad did that), but because they got to see him cooking that heart over the fire. Those scouts were legends in their own time.

One of them, years later, ended up committing suicide and another…

That’s another story. I’ll stick to this one.

After my dad busted Tommy, he led a crew out to the field and they found the remains of twenty-three bodies buried there. Six belonged to the girls who’d disappeared that summer. The rest… they’d been there longer. Some, for maybe five years. Others, for more like twenty or thirty. I’ve heard that several of them might’ve been in the ground for a hundred years.