The Harvested Man: An Origin Story

October 31, 1873

Dr. Elias Whitmore had always been different. And in a small town like Field Park, where everyone knew everyone else's business, being different was dangerous.

He'd come to Wisconsin from the East Coast five years ago, carrying medical degrees from universities most folks had never heard of, some in different countries, and the knowledge that made the local pastor nervous. While other doctors relied on prayer and bloodletting, Elias understood anatomy, disease, the intricate workings of the human body in ways that seemed almost supernatural to the simple farming community.

At first, they'd been grateful. He'd saved lives that would have been lost to fever and infection. He'd delivered babies that other doctors said wouldn't survive. He'd even performed surgery—actual surgery, with instruments and precision that seemed like magic to people who'd never seen anything more complex than bone-setting. His emphasis on cleanliness, which felt like a condescending jab to the farmers, was, he claimed, the key to his success. 

But gratitude had a way of curdling into suspicion.

"He's not right," whispered Mrs. Henderson at the general store. "The way he knows things... it's like he can see right through you. It's like something is guiding his hand, and it ain't the lord."

"And that house of his," added Tom Morrison, the blacksmith. "All those books and bottles and... things. What kind of doctor needs all that? It's more like witchcraft, if you ask me."

The truth was, Elias had been conducting research. Not just treating the sick, but studying them. Learning how disease spread, how the body fought infection, how organs functioned in ways the medical textbooks barely understood. He'd been writing papers, corresponding with colleagues in Boston and Philadelphia, pushing the boundaries of what medicine could accomplish.

He also pushed the boundaries of the medical profession by extracting organs of the dead residents of Field Park to further his studies. Not exactly legal. He had a room in his basement in which he kept organs in jars, fermenting after his studies. That was the only secret he kept from even his colleagues. Other than that, he was an upstanding citizen and a caring physician. 

But to the people of Field Park, his laboratory—carefully organized with specimens and equipment—would look like a chamber of horrors. Those things were easily kept hidden, though, because while he operated out of his home, he had a separate room upstairs for healing.

Until poor little Jonathon Mills was brought to him.

Dr. Elias Whitmore stood over the frail form of Jonathan, a twelve-year-old boy with sunken cheeks and blue-tinged lips. The boy's heart had failed him, destroyed by a fever months before they brought him to the doctor. His breaths came ragged and shallow now, each one a struggle. Beside the bed, Jonathan's parents clutched each other, eyes red from crying.

"You said there was a chance." Mrs. Mills' voice cracked as she looked up at the doctor. "You said you had a way." She didn't want to come to the doctor after hearing rumors of strange satanic rituals taking place in his home, but they had no choice.

Elias nodded solemnly, holding up the small jar containing the organ that might save the boy's life—a freshly harvested pig's heart, cleaned and ready. "There is no promise. But if we do nothing, he will be gone before morning. This is the only hope I can give you."

"Will he become an animal?" Mr. Mills asked.

"No," Elias assured them. "It doesn't work that way. This is tissue, just like anything else. Your son needs a heart, and this is all I have to offer him. We can try it, or we can let him rest in peace."

"Do it," Mr. Mills said. "Jonathon is my only son. Save him." His expression was one of suspicion, but this was their only hope. They consented with shaking heads and trembling hands, desperate and hollowed out by grief.

And so Elias prepared. He scrubbed his hands clean, laid out his sharpened blades, and set to work beneath the flickering light of his oil lamps.

The surgery was quiet but intense, hours stretching long into the night as Elias cut and stitched, bled and prayed. During the surgery, Jonathon's little sister, Jane, wandered into the good doctor's basement and bumped into a jar, prompting her to run upstairs and tell her parents what she saw. They ignored her at first, because they were solely focused on their son. 

But Jonathan never woke. His body gave out as the final sutures were tied.

Sweat beaded upon the doctor's brow as he stepped back, hands trembling, covered in blood and failure."I'm… I'm sorry," he whispered. "He's gone."

The Millses wept, but grief is a shapeshifter—and in Field Park, it shifted quickly into suspicion.

By dawn, the whispers had spread like fire.

The doctor cut out the boy's heart and replaced it with a beast's.

He sewed a pig into our son.

He's been keeping other organs, too—bottled in jars like trophies. Jane saw them there. 

By mid-morning, the town had gathered at the edge of Elias's estate, which sat at the border of the cornfield the Archers had once owned, land now whispered to be "wrong" even before this night.

Elias heard the shouting before he saw the flames.

He didn't run. He opened his door and stood in his coat, blood still under his nails, and faced them.

"I tried to save him," he said, voice hoarse. "He would've died, anyway. His parents—"

"Liar!" Mr. Mills bellowed. "We saw what's in your house. The jars. The hearts. The children's bones. You're no doctor. You're a devil."

They rushed him.

Elias fought back at first, shouting for reason, for mercy—but they were too far gone. Their grief needed a monster, and they made him one.

They dragged him into the basement—into the very room where he had tried to defy death—and held him down on his own operating table. The blacksmith's knife gleamed.

"Let's see how you like it," someone snarled. "We know what you really are. Cutting up bodies, stealing organs, practicing your dark arts on innocent people."

"That's not... I'm a doctor. I study medicine. I'm trying to help—"

"Help?" Reverend McKenzie's voice cracked with emotion. "You're an abomination! A vessel for Satan himself!"

Elias felt his bowels turn to water as he understood their intention.

"You're making a mistake," he pleaded. "I'm a doctor. I've helped you. I've saved lives—"

"You've taken lives," Mr. Mills hissed. "Now we'll take yours. Piece by piece."

What followed was not medicine. It was butchery disguised as justice.

They took his organs while he still lived, each cut accompanied by accusations and curses. His heart, which had worked so hard to save others. His eyes, which had seen too much. His hands, which had healed and hurt in equal measure.

"This is for Jonathan," Mr. Mills whispered as he carved.

"This is for all the people you used," added Tom Morrison.

"This is for the unholy things you've done," finished Reverend McKenzie.

As his life ebbed away, Elias felt something darker than death settling into his bones. The injustice of it, the irony that these people—these ignorant, frightened people—were doing to him exactly what they accused him of doing to others.

"You... you're the monsters," he gasped with his dying breath. "Not me."

They buried the pieces of him in different locations around town, thinking it would prevent his spirit from finding rest. His heart went into the cornfield, his eyes into the cemetery, his hands into the foundations of the new church.

But they made a mistake.

They buried him on Halloween night, when the veil between worlds was thinnest. And they buried him with their hatred, their fear, their guilt at what they'd done.

The town prospered after that. The crops grew better. The children were healthier. The businesses thrived.

But every twenty-five years, when the harvest moon rose full and orange over Field Park, something stirred in the earth.

Something that remembered being cut apart by ignorant hands.

Something that wanted to return the favor.

The Harvested Man rose from the soil where his pieces had been scattered, his body reassembled by rage and supernatural will. He wore the burlap sack they'd used to hide his mutilated face, his flesh held together by hate and the need for revenge.

He would take the young and the perfect, just as they had taken the best parts of him. He would show them what it felt like to be harvested, to be reduced to nothing more than spare parts.

Check out my upcoming novel, Field of Frights, for the return of the Harvested Man.