Sunflowers In Hell

A Kansas paranormal horror story.

This paranormal horror story is part of Vanessa Perry’s Local Folklore collaboration project—specifically the infamous cemetery in Stull, Kansas. While I’ve never been to Stull, I’ve lived my whole life in Kansas. I wanted to tackle themes of decidedly Midwestern racism, classism, and unbelonging, plus some teenage crises I had before going into college. Make sure to check out the other stories!

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Warning: Child abuse (implied), racism.

Everyone said Kansas was made of sunflowers. Ben spent all eighteen years of his life in Kansas and didn’t see a proper sunflower field until he was ten, but that didn’t seem to count in the wider American hivemind. People probably thought a Kansan’s greatest wish was to die by a black-and-white tornado and be buried under a sunflower field with a mournful cow moo in place of a trumpet.

Carver liked to say appearances didn’t matter, but Carver was the one driving Ben’s shitty Ford Focus with the shitty Bel Aire sticker winking at Ben from the windowpane, which was probably more haunted by vengeful insect ghosts than the graveyard they were driving toward.

Nearly two and a half hours away from home: Stull Cemetery, Kansas. The Gateway To Hell.

It was Carver’s idea, because it was always Carver’s idea, because Carver announced all his grand plans loudly and fearlessly while Ben categorized his own in alphabetical order in his head.

“Dude,” Carver had said, slapping down a terrifyingly ancient map onto Ben’s empty desk. “There’s this stupid little town called Stull. They say these old church ruins are possessed. By Satan.”

Dutifully, Ben had searched it up. “Jesus, Carver. Google says it’s two hours and sixteen minutes away.”

“Only two hours,” Carver had said eagerly, like a carnival ringmaster, like he was born for this.

“And sixteen minutes.”

“Dude, that’s closer than KU.”

Ben had felt a pang of familiar anxiety─it was the summer after they graduated high school, and Carver worked at Hog Wild to earn money and Ben wasn’t doing anything at all except staring at the cardboard box towers that filled a too-large bedroom that still didn’t feel like his—so he agreed they absolutely had to drive to Stull that night and risk the $1000 fine if they were caught on the property.

It was worth it. Carver’s smile lit up the room all on its own.

A few hours later, Carver had shown up bleeding and pissed off, strangling the strap of his backpack. He didn’t have to say anything. Carver wanted to escape his life, and Ben wanted to escape the new neighbor stinking of expensive perfume and false concern, who eyed them both suspiciously as she calculated the likelihood of those strange boys belonging to a gang. Carver slammed the driver’s door, and the last remnants of cloying Bel Aire society Ben caught was Mrs. Hollis’ eyes blown wide in Oscar-winning outrage.

They set out on the road. No tornadoes. No sunflowers. Just progressively broader hills and the wet gleam of tarmac rolling like a black tongue into the night.

They’d spent the past hour without speaking, listening to 80s rock and the rattling whirr of the engine. Enough time for Ben to remember every awkward joke he’d failed at making that day. Enough time to wish he’d bought more than a bag of Lays and a Snickers bar for dinner. Enough time to watch Carver’s face, limned in amber and blue, and the slow, sinister drip of blood from his nose to his white tank top.

You’re bleeding, Ben wanted to say. Carver, stop, you’re bleeding.

But then Carver would get that tight, grim look on his face again, like he was thinking about something he shouldn’t. And that painful expression in this wheezing car made the whole thing feel less like a road trip and more like running away, and Ben didn’t want to know which one Carver wanted more.

Instead, Ben said, “I’m sorry. For my weird neighbor.”

Carver cracked a smile. He smeared the blood from his upper lip until it stained the back of his hand like a bruise. “Your new neighborhood is weird.”

“It’s nice,” Ben protested weakly, hating that it felt so much like a lie.

“It’s rich. And white. You know─as a white guy─I would fucking hate it there.”

Something eased in Ben’s chest, the coiled-up tension that had knotted into his ribs since his parents told him they were moving to Bel Aire. “You have no idea. When we got there, Mrs. Hollis couldn’t stop telling us how much she loves tacos.”

“Oh my god,” Carver snorted. “Makes sense, though. All the houses look the same.”

“All the people look the same.”

Mrs. Hollis would say she was putting him on the sour mood list. Her sadistic love of categorizing the kids in Wichita rivaled Santa Claus in mythic proportions, but instead of a jolly round elf man, Santa was a spray-tanned scarecrow with a bleached bob cut and designer jeans. She even shared her nice boys list with every person who could tolerate her long enough.

Ben figured it was an adulthood rite of passage to make your own nice boys list, categorizing who was safe for future generations and who would end up in jail. Wait, he thought with a crush of panic. Does that mean I need to make a nice boys list? He was eighteen now; he kept forgetting—that awkward, sticky in-between stage where you feel like an adult until you remember how utterly inept you are, and you hate when someone treats you like a kid until all you want is to be one again.

To him, nice boys were kind, creative, and honest. To everyone else in Bel Aire, nice boys mowed lawns and went to church and smiled like politicians.

(Carver was notably excluded from the nice boys. Ben was only included by his family and teachers who didn’t narrow their eyes at him and ask, for the fiftieth time, if everything was really all right at home and if he would tell them immediately when someone approached him about dealing drugs on campus. The kinder teachers countered, ‘When’ he’s approached? and the first teachers would squawk If! If! and inevitably flock to Ben with pinched faces and plastic smiles to prove they weren’t racist, just insensitive. In the dispassionate buzz of reassurances and gladhanding, Ben would catch Carver smearing aloe vera over a fresh bruise blooming on his arm and wonder why his home life was being interrogated instead of Carver’s.)

Ben jolted back to the present as Carver slammed down on the brakes. The car gave a valiant death throe, hard enough to produce a sharp ringing in Ben’s ears. Ben’s shoulder knocked against Carver’s, and he finally realized they’d reached a snarl of iron gates.

Carver was grinning again, the same reckless grin he wore when he snuck Ben into AMC to see the R-rated horror movie Ben had been too scared to ask his parents to go see. Carver said, in a voice like broken wind chimes, “Let’s go to hell.”

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Ben always pictured cemeteries teeming with graves, spindly white trees hanging low like skeletons swinging from the gallows, churches standing sentinel in the skyline. Instead, Stull Cemetery was─

“Boring,” Carver complained. “It’s so fucking boring.”

He sent a morose kick at a crumbling gravestone, which Ben thought was a horrible idea. Carver shoved his hands so deep into his pockets that his shoulders bunched and strained the fabric of his tank top. “It’s stupid and flat and stupid and boring.”

Ben shivered. Any good fictional cemetery was drowned in soupy silver fog, but so far Stull only had damp air and the slim, trembling white beam from Ben’s flashlight. “This was a bad idea. This was a really─”

Carver straightened abruptly. “It’s closed,” he said like an idea was dawning on him, though Ben couldn’t fathom what it was. “That’s it. Yeah.”

“We could go to jail, Carver.”

Carver sniffed casually, but his eyes were cold iron and the planes of his face were harsh and vampiric in the wavering light. “We’re probably getting there anyway.”

A dull chill radiated through Ben’s body, numbing his fingers and turning his heartbeat sluggish. He knew it wasn’t because of the weather.

He watched Carver swallow hard, throat working. “Hey,” Carver said finally. “Dude, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“Jesus,” Ben muttered, because he did. Of course he did. Carver meant everything he ever said.

Carver said nothing, so Ben turned away and squinted. The worsening nighttime mist turned Stull Cemetery slick and pewter gray, like old black-and-white film being developed. Glossy raindrops beaded in the grooves of tombstones like glass eyes.

His gaze snagged on a rough pile of rubble several feet ahead.

“Whoa.” Carver was behind him, much closer than he anticipated. “There it is. That’s the church.” He stepped forward; his arm brushed Ben’s and stayed there until the heat and proximity of him was nearly unbearable. Ben held his breath, burning with illogical shame and feeling a little ridiculous, both of them staring at an abandoned heap of old rocks in a tiny town that might shoot them for glancing the wrong way.

Then the world… wavered. Ben’s gut twisted, and he blinked back a dizzy wave of irrational fear. Like the universe shifted an inch to the side, and Ben was left to flounder in the wrongness.

When his senses returned, the old church ruins weren’t ruins anymore.

In their place stood a hexagonal stone structure with austere, grossly outstretched windows. Like someone had scooped it up from the 1900s and dumped it, rugged polish and all.

“What the hell,” Carver muttered. “What─you know what, that’s fine.”

Thunder boiled from the greasy black clouds overhead. Beneath that, Ben heard a second sound─the crunch of boots on dead grass.

“Wait,” Carver hissed, and Ben froze on instinct.

Then he saw it: A long, spindly silhouette lumbering between them and the church─

A warm hand landed hard on his shoulder. Ben clamped down on a shriek.

“Relax,” Carver said, with spectacular confidence in Ben’s ability to loosen up. “It’s just a security guard.”

The shape─or shadow─melted around the church corner. Ben tried to imagine what the security guard would see if he caught them: One boy with a broken nose and a smile like nicotine, another boy hunched and brown and gangly like a tree root that had grown up wrong and thought it was a human.

Carver held out a hand. For a terrified moment, Ben thought he wanted to grab Ben’s hand, but then he said “Give me that,” and snatched the flashlight from Ben’s weak, sweaty grip.

They slipped and slid to the church. Wet air condensed around them and the sparse gravestones, like they were in the mouth of some gigantic beast with bad teeth. When the church loomed above them, Carver lingered in the doorway, but Ben hurried past him, wanting to scrape the unreality from his skin.

The dry air inside was strange, muffled. Like they were underwater, or like someone was pressing a pillow to their faces and smothering their screams.

“People say the ghost stuff started when the mayor got murdered,” Carver said, “back in the 1850s.”

“The town’s unincorporated. So they don’t actually have a mayor.”

Carver jabbed a finger at him, his grin ghoulish in the flashlight’s beam. “Maybe that’s why he died.”

That made no sense, but Carver was already cackling, and, selfishly, Ben liked it when he laughed. His laugh belonged to a bird more than a human, a loud throaty sound that seemed to crack silences in half. It ricocheted around the stone walls, tumbling down the crooked staircase carved into the…

“Wait.” Ben rocked nervously on his toes. “Were those stairs there when we came in?”

“What?” Carver peered at the stairs, which had taken on a blue-tinged cast. “Oh, shit. Yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t notice.”

“They weren’t. It was just one room.”

“That’s part of the legend, you know. Stairs appearing out of nowhere.”

“Do you think it’s actually Hell?” Ben’s voice cracked on the last word, and he hoped desperately that Carver didn’t notice. “Like, from the Bible?”

Carver snatched a pebble from the ground, threw it, caught it, rolled it in his palm. Ben watched the deft movements of his fingers and tried not to feel so strange. “I thought you were an atheist,” Carver teased.

Ben was an atheist, but he was also spooked and hungry and a little lightheaded, and Carver was watching him with a secure smile like the two of them together was the easiest thing in the world.

Ben thought it would be the easiest thing in the world, if it weren’t also the most anxiety-inducing.

“Hey, Ben, look at this,” Carver said, and launched the pebble down the impossible stairs.

“Carver!” Ben yelped, rushing forward; but he was far too late, and the pebble was clattering loudly down every step, winking cheerfully out of sight. He whipped back to Carver, who seemed vaguely pleased until he saw Ben’s expression.

“Dude, what? I’m not ‘angering the devil.’ It’s not real. Probably.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s real!” Ben snapped. “Someone─that security guard could hear us and─”

Something was crawling up the stairs.

“Carver,” Ben said, or tried to say, and he couldn’t be sure because every part of his brain began screaming.

Whatever had dragged itself into the church was wrong. Ben’s gaze tracked the warped ladder of its spine, knifing up to the ceiling and wrapped in patchy blue fur the color of mold. Its knotted limbs jutted out from its body in unnatural bulges. It was a living tumor, contorting and shuddering, and when Ben looked at the stygian-black bullet holes of its eyes, it peeled open its hideous bruise-blue lips and smiled.

“What the fuck,” Carver breathed, and then Ben really started to panic, because Carver only spoke that softly when he’d passed anger and fear and instead plunged directly into numb horror.

The monster’s mouth stayed in that awful rictus smile, but its elongated throat moved until it groaned, in a voice like knives and rot, “You don’t belong here.”

Ben knew that voice. It was every parent who told him he was one of the good ones in a tone like they were waiting to be proven wrong.

“Carver,” Ben managed, and this time he was sure the name made it out past his throat because his voice shuddered against his tongue. “Do you hear that?”

“Yeah,” Carver said without inflection, without any emotion at all. “It sounds like my dad.”

The monster lunged. It was fast, impossibly fast, and it moved with such a sickening distortion of reality that Ben gasped, nearly doubled-over with the sensation of watching outside his body and being trapped inside at the same time. The monster closed in; its jaws bubbled with black froth that stung when it hit Ben’s skin─this is it, I’m going to die, I didn’t even finish unpacking—but he caught a flash of Carver’s disoriented expression and scrambled away.

“Carver,” Ben gasped, “Carver, come on, we have to go, we─” The words clogged in his throat. Carver stared at him, unfocused, lips moving silently. Panicked, Ben grabbed his shoulder. “Come on─”

Ben’s knees hit the ground with a dull crunch. He staggered to his feet, pain radiating from everywhere all at once. The monster filled the room, bloated and giggling.

“Weak,” it grated joyfully. “Weaker than I thought.”

The monster was right. Ben was weak. He was only eighteen and the world was blinding, and he didn’t know how to explain that he was a little in love with a boy who wanted to stick a finger into Hell just to see what would bite back.

But now that boy was crouched, dazed, a statue carved from porcelain and egg shells, and whispering “It’s not real it’s not real it’s not—”

The storm raged. The shadows burned blue. The monster loomed larger.

And Ben was so fucking tired of feeling small.

Time slowed. He saw his hands first—the brown curl of his fists, knuckles paling, finger bones aching—then his bruised knees, then the clean-swept ground of the church. He took a faltering step forward, and the monster gave him an uncannily accurate impression of Mrs. Hollis’s hawklike disapproval.

Then he was running, shoes slapping stone, blood screaming in his ears, throat scraped raw─maybe he was screaming─

A burst of red and gold shot past him and imploded.

Ben’s first thought was that Carver had set off fireworks. His second thought was that he needed to tell Carver how he felt before he died of spontaneous combustion, and his third thought was that his fist was stuck inches deep into the chest of a monster corpse.

The universe blurred. Ben managed to get his eyesight under control right as a security guard strode through the doorway.

Memories of a $1000 fine and six months jailtime came rushing back. “We’re so sorry, sir, we were just…” The guard gave him a withering look; Ben’s gaze dropped to the smoking object in his hand, which looked like a cross between a gun and a plastic wand. Words failed him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” the guard growled. “Standing around the gate like that? Begging that monster to eat you?”

“The Gateway To Hell?” Ben asked, at the same time as Carver managed groggily, “Huh?”

The guard made a visible effort to reevaluate, as though switching to a different script. “That staircase doesn’t lead to Hell, but it is a gateway. A rift. A smudge in the thick charcoal line of this plane. Thing is, we don’t know what all is inside. We just know what comes out.”

“I knew it,” Carver muttered from the ground, somewhat nonsensically. “Suck it, Wikipedia. I knew it was real.”

Ben didn’t think that was true at all, but he was too tired and scared and in pain to prove it. “But Stull hates all the ghost stories. If the legends are real, why does everyone try so hard to pretend they aren’t?”

The guard’s gaze bore into his skull. “Where are you kids from?”

“Wichita,” Ben said weakly.

“You should know this. You’re in the Midwest. Folks don’t talk unless they’ve got no other option.”

“You’re a security guard,” Carver sniped, which was how Ben knew he was more-or-less okay. “Shouldn’t you be securing something?”

“Ha. I’m not a security guard. It’s easier to explain to tourists.” He nodded to Ben’s hand, still stuck in the monster’s chest. “I’d get that out quick, if I were you. Monster blood can be nasty.”

Hurriedly, Ben ripped his hand out of the corpse with an ugly squelch.

The not-a-security-guard checked his watch. “Get out of here, kids. Time gets screwy when the gate opens, and Stull doesn’t like outsiders staying too long.”

When they stepped out of the church, Carver cursed and threw up a hand to shield his eyes from the blinding midmorning sun. Ben hadn’t thought they were gone for long, but the storm was on its last legs and Stull Cemetery was overflowing with cheerful golden light. Ben immediately started sweating.

“God,” Carver muttered, “stupid Kansas weather.”

They walked to the car in silence. Finally, Ben risked a glance at Carver. “What do we do now?”

“I’m getting out,” Carver said instantly. His tone was still flat as beaten nails, but his gaze was bright, clear, grimly determined. “I’m not staying in that hellhole of a house anymore. I don’t…” A pause, then he said softly, achingly, “I don’t want to freeze again.”

“You could stay with me.” Ben fidgeted, aware of how fragile the words sounded. “If you want.”

When he looked up, Carver was smiling his easy, confident smile, the one Ben had only ever seen when they were alone together. “I’d like that.”

The stormclouds drifted higher. The sun blazed red and gold, and somewhere far away, sunflowers began growing again.