The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories: Terrifying Tales Set on the Scariest Night of the Year!

by Stephen Jones

  I knew, of course, that what Momma had done was a Questionable Thing. I’m not sure it was even Questionable; it might even have been a proper unambiguous Crime. And I knew too that we were going to get caught. You can get away with a few Questionable Things here and there and everyone will turn a blind eye—Pastor Lewis had told me every time we’d met in his vestry. But no one was going to accept the disappearance of anything so precious as a Pumpkin Kid. They were going to hunt us down, and catch us, and then they’d be really mad.

  “We could just take him back,” I said. “No one would know. We could just leave him somewhere on the side of the road, what’s he going to say, he isn’t going to say anything.”

  And I think for a moment Momma may even have been considering it. We wouldn’t have to destroy our lives over this. We could just sink back into the quiet misery of before. But then, as if to call me a liar, the Pumpkin Kid began to open his mouth. We heard the lips pull apart, we heard the jaws creak as they stretched like taffy.

  “He’s going to speak!” Momma said, and she was so excited, because the words of Pumpkin Kids are rare blessings. And we put our ears close to listen.

  He didn’t speak. Instead out from his mouth rolled a ball of vegetable pulp. It was wet and it was warm, and it fell upon my mattress. And then the kid closed its mouth, and smiled at us for the first time, big and wide, as if he’d done something extraordinarily clever.

  “He’s mine,” said Momma. “And I’m not giving him back, not ever.” And she smiled too, which only made the kid smile wider still, as if his only possible purpose was to please her—and there they were for a while, the two of them, grinning at each other. And I saw that vein in her face give a satisfied bulge, and I knew nothing now could dissuade her.

  I’d lost my bedroom to the Pumpkin Kid, and so I tried to make the downstairs sofa as comfortable as could be.

  But it was hard to sleep, knowing there was another body in the house. For so long it had just been me and Momma, and now someone else was breathing our air, and it sounds stupid but I suddenly resented that, we only had so much air to go round and here was some stranger making free with it and sucking it into his body and wasting it—and then I thought I could hear him upstairs, a third heart in the house beating away and making the night that much louder—and I knew he couldn’t stay here, he didn’t belong—and I thought that if I opened my eyes I would see him, he’d be in the room, he’d be looking at me. And I didn’t want to open my eyes and find out it was true, I wanted to be asleep, why couldn’t I just be asleep? I wasn’t going to open my eyes, I refused to do it, and then I did it anyway, I opened them, and he was there, he was in the room, he was standing in the doorway and looking at me.

  He didn’t say anything. “What are you doing here?” I managed to get out—but no, nothing—and then as if in answer he took a step forward. And I could see his face more clearly in the moonlight. His head seemed more swollen than before, and in my terror I could see it was starting to crack, his face was splitting and juice was bubbling to the surface.

  And he was smiling in that strange vacant way he had, as if the smile wasn’t triggered by anything, it was just the shape into which his mouth had been carved. His teeth were jagged, his nose a cavity. And those eyes.

  I closed mine. I squeezed them tight, and lay back down on the bed, and turned my body toward the wall. And I promised myself I wouldn’t open them again until I had to, not until he touched me—when he touched me I would have no choice, I would have to do something, I would run or I would fight, I didn’t have to decide just yet. Not until he touched me. But right now I was safe, I was safe for just a few precious moments longer and I wasn’t going to spoil them by worrying. And I waited. I waited a long time. I began to feel impatient. I counted in my head, and when I reached one hundred I felt brave enough to turn around and see what the Pumpkin Kid was doing.

  He was gone.

  I got up from my bed. I went upstairs. I didn’t want to look.

  I went into my old bedroom. And there he was. Still tied up upon the mattress, face up towards the ceiling. Still nothing more frightening than an ordinary little boy. I tiptoed to his side, I didn’t want to wake him—and then I realized he wasn’t asleep. His eyes were wide. It made me jump—but he didn’t even flinch, he looked straight through me, he didn’t care, I was nothing to him.

  And slumped in the chair by the bed, there was Momma. She was fast asleep, and she was smiling. I shook her gently by the shoulder; she stirred. “Come on,” I said. I helped her to her feet, and she let me lead her from the room, across the landing, into her own bedroom. I laid her down, and she folded into her pillow and began to snore gently. “Good night, Momma,” I said, and kissed her.

  I went back to the Pumpkin Kid. I stood in his doorway, I stared at him. Let him have the nightmares about me. Because I could do anything to him that I wanted. And I went up to him, close, closer than I thought I could dare. I lifted a finger. I put it on top of his forehead. Resting it there so it was just skimming the surface—and then pressing down, pressing down hard. I took my finger away. I had left a mark. Only a little indentation, but it was there. And was there a bit of juice bleeding from it? I think there was. I said, “Good night, Pumpkin Kid,” and went back downstairs to the sofa.

  I felt calmer than I had in a very long time, and I slept soundly.

  There are tales about the awful fates awaiting those that defy the Pumpkin Kids. We learned them at school. One of the best had been about a group of naughty little boys who had been jealous of a Pumpkin Kid and his special relationship with God and Death, and had vowed to do him harm. This would have been, I don’t know, hundreds of years ago—there were lots of versions of this particular tale, and you could read about it in pop-up picture books, or see it acted out in puppet shows or pantomimes; it had given me nightmares as a little boy, but rather delicious nightmares, because you knew you would never be in danger yourself, this would never happen to you, you would never do anything so stupid as to harm a miracle child that was under the protection of Christ! And in this tale the boys lured the Pumpkin Kid into the forest, and there they killed him. They kicked him, or they stoned him, or they trapped him in a deep pit and left him to starve. But God punished them all. He destroyed the naughty boys, one by one. He wiped them off the face of the Earth—and their parents, and their brothers and their sisters, and all of their friends, every single one of them, were turned into pillars of salt.

  And as those first weeks went by, it became clear—I wasn’t going to be turned into a pillar of salt, and nor was Momma. And neither did the police come by (which, I thought, seemed more likely.) I couldn’t work out why not. I thought at first that the disappearance of our Pumpkin Kid hadn’t been reported yet—maybe the chaperones were ashamed to come forward. (Because where had the chaperones been? Why hadn’t they been doing their Christ-witnessed jobs? Wasn’t their carelessness enough to turn them into pillars of salt?) Our town safeguarded its store of precious Pumpkin Kids to the very best of its ability; had the theft of one become public knowledge it would have caused widespread outrage, if not actual panic. But it could only be a matter of time. Soon, surely, the disappearance would be noticed, and then an investigation would begin, and someone would point the finger at Momma. And our lives would be over, and I guess at least then so would be all the waiting.

  But no one came. And as a new month began, and then another, and still no one came, I realized that somehow, incredibly, we must have gotten away with it. Every last Pumpkin in the town was accounted for. It was as if nothing had really happened, and there wasn’t a spare one, large as life, tied up in my bedroom after all.

  And some days that’s precisely how Momma acted. She pretended that there was nothing untoward, that life was just the same as it had always been. She wouldn’t so much as mention our special guest, let alone go to see him or ask how he was. She would go to her job at the supermarket and come back from her job at the supermarket and that was the fu
ll extent of all she was prepared to think about, thank you—her face was set as hard as stone and I knew there was no point in talking to her. But other days she was a different person. She would go to his bedside and spend all her time there, she would forget to eat or go into work. She’d stare at him in wonder, and maybe stroke his body, stroke his face. “He’s beautiful,” she’d say. And, “Why can’t you be this beautiful?” And, “I wasn’t sure I believed in God. But look at him! Now I know it’s all true.”

  Sometimes she’d close the door on me, and I had to put my ear to the keyhole to hear her whisper to him. “Are you in there, my poor dear Da?” she’d ask. “And Momma too? I love you both. I love you, and I miss you so very much!”

  But I was the one who had to look after him, who cleaned him and fed him. I would moisten a towel with water and rub it against his skin, and yet it never lost that shiny oily glow. “Where have you come from? Was it another town?” But the nearest town was a hundred miles away or more, I didn’t know quite how far, but it was impossible to believe a barefooted boy could have walked that distance on his own. “Why did you come here? Tell me that at least!” He wouldn’t chew his food, so I had to pour soup into his mouth, then hold my hands over his face so that it wouldn’t all run out—and sometimes I made the soup piping hot and I hoped that it would burn him. “Do you think you’re better than me?” And he’d never reply, he’d never so much as grunt a word, he’d stare up at me, and smirk that little smile. Of course he was better. He didn’t need to answer.

  The first time I cut into the Pumpkin Kid’s neck I was nervous. I did it just the way I’d been shown, two nicks in the sign of the cross. But it wasn’t as if I were blessed like Pastor Lewis was, I wasn’t a man of God—if anything, I know, I was a sick failure who had denied His blessing. Still, the Pumpkin Kid didn’t seem to mind—he actually nodded as I approached with the knife, and smiled a little wider, and stuck out his fat pulpy tongue in encouragement. I made the cuts, and I sipped at his blood. I don’t know what signs I was looking for—Pastor Lewis had always been frustratingly vague about what a ripening child should taste like—but it seemed to me a little sweeter than the Christ blood I drank in church. That first time I tested him was hard, but it got easier after that—after a while I wouldn’t even bother to bandage the gash, and I’d sip at the pumpkin juice until no more flowed out and I was full.

  One day I stayed behind after church, just like old times. Pastor Lewis looked surprised to see me, and a little nervous too. He licked his fat lips. “It’s been a while,” he said. “I didn’t think you liked me any more.” We went back into the vestry, and it still smelled of pipe-smoke, but I also detected a heavy tang of body odor. He cut into my neck, and I refused to flinch, I had seen how bravely a real Pumpkin could take it. He guzzled at my neck for a little while, and there was the familiar not-funny tickle from his stubble, and when he pulled away his face was flushed. “Yes,” he said. “Interesting. I mean, you’re not ripe quite yet, but there’s a little bit of pumpkin in there.”

  I kissed him on the lips then, and he was very surprised, and he responded, and I stuck my tongue into his mouth and felt around for a bit, but I didn’t know what he was talking about, I couldn’t taste any pumpkin there at all.

  We had to lie down for a while after that. I spoke to him, really just to make conversation, the silence was embarrassing. I asked him how the Halloween preparations were going.

  “Well, I think, yes, yes,” he said. “Couple of months to go yet, but I think we’re on track, some of this year’s batch are ripening nicely!”

  And I asked him what would happen if you had a Pumpkin Kid who was ripe and ready, and yet was somehow missed out of the ceremony. And he looked aghast, and said, “I have never missed out a child, not once.” But I persisted, what would actually happen? “It’s a ridiculous question,” he said. “It’d be like Jesus Christ turning up late for his own crucifixion. This is what Pumpkin Children are born for. This is their purpose.”

  He looked quite offended, and began to get up. “I love you,” I said. “I love you with all my heart, more than I have ever loved anybody.” It was fun to say it, fun to see how embarrassed it made him.

  “Look,” Pastor Lewis said. “I’m not sure we should meet any more. Obviously, you’re welcome to come to church, and take part in the Holy Sacrament. I’m not going to excommunicate you or anything, ha! But all this … this other stuff … You don’t taste of pumpkin. Let me be straight with you. You don’t taste of pumpkin, and you never have. I was just being kind. I didn’t mind being kind to you, when you were younger. I liked it, when you were younger.”

  I said I quite understood. I got up, and I went home. Momma was still in her Sunday best, and she was standing at our Pumpkin Kid’s bedside, and she was holding on to his hand, and her eyes were shining. She looked up as I came in to the room, and she smiled. She smiled, and she reached out to me, and I was too surprised to resist, I let her take me by the hand too. And we held that pose for a little while, as if someone was about to take a picture, but no one was going to take a picture—hand in hand in hand, like a human chain, and Momma in the middle of it all, and she looked at me, and she said, more gently than I had ever heard her, “We’re a proper family at last. This is perfect. Whatever else might happen, this is perfect, right here and now.”

  One night the Pumpkin Kid came for me again.

  I was drifting off to sleep on the sofa when I saw his outline framed in the doorway. “Come closer,” I said.

  His face was fatter and pulpy, and the cracks in his skin were deep, and now sheer gobbets of juice were running down his cheeks and his chin. And his face was also that of a little boy and his cheeks were smooth like a baby’s and his eyes were wide with confusion and fear.

  I got up. And as I approached his boy face twisted nervously, and his pumpkin face broke into an ever-wider smile. “What do you want?” I asked.

  He went to the front door. He turned the handle, and the door fell open, though I was sure it had been locked. He stepped outside into the dark night. He didn’t even bother to turn his head to see if I would follow. I did.

  And I thought how funny he looked as he marched along—barefoot, and dressed only in that orange smock—and then I realized I was barefoot too and in silly striped pajamas, I guess I looked funny too.

  I expected to feel the cold, and that the hard pavement would cut my feet, but I felt nothing.

  I caught him up, and we walked side-by-side. And though we didn’t talk, and he never turned to look at me, I was proud that we were together, that I’d found a friend. That I belonged—and the town was deserted, and the lights in every house were dark, and it wasn’t just that everyone was asleep, it was as if they were all missing, or vanished, or dead. Gone for good, leaving everything for us to play with, just for us and no one else.

  We turned up a side street, and then another. And soon I was in uncharted territory, I had never been to this part of the town before. The houses looked colder and more forbidding, and that was silly, because they all looked just the same as my own house, the one I had just abandoned for no good reason in the middle of the night—the one I knew I would never be able to find again unless the Pumpkin Kid helped me back, I was lost, I was lost forever. All alone, and the houses getting more densely packed and crushing in on us. And then I realized with a sudden chill that we were not alone—that in the distance were more children in their orange smocks—and coming at us from the left—and now from the right, from all directions—and the orange looked brown and filthy in the moonlight. Dozens of them now, and some were older teenagers like me, and some were infants. A baby was doing its best to match his pumpkin-fellows stride for stride even though its legs were embarrassingly short.

  We all converged in front of one of those anonymous houses. My Pumpkin Kid gave no sign of welcome to the others, he stood still and waited until everyone was ready. And I stood with him, but now I felt out of place—and at any moment one of the chil
dren would challenge me for crashing a party to which I had clearly not been invited. I even thought then of running away, but where would I have gone? The streets would have drowned me, and I’d never be heard of again.

  All together now, all the Pumpkin Kids and me. And they turned toward the house—and I turned with them. Inside the house, as if on cue, a single downstairs light switched on.

  We marched up to the front door. We stepped inside.

  The sitting room was much the same as at my house; the carpet was a different sort of beige.

  A man sat on a hard chair, staring down at the floor. He looked up when all the children came in, maybe there was just a flicker of surprise?

  “We all die alone, destined to be forgotten,” he said. “Save those who choose to die, and die in good faith.” I wanted to say the “Amen” afterwards, but my throat was too dry, and when I opened my mouth I couldn’t speak. I thought I’d seen this man in church, but I couldn’t be sure, lots of people went to church.

  The man hung the rope from the ceiling. We waited. None of us tried to help. Then he climbed on to the chair, and put his head through the noose. “Well,” he said to us all, “I guess this is it.”

  He didn’t kill himself right away. I began to get bored. I think maybe some of the Pumpkin Kids did too, though their faces never changed expression; one of the Pumpkin Infants sat down on the floor, it was way past her bedtime. “I’ve changed my mind!” he said suddenly. “I can do that, can’t I? I don’t have enough faith!” Still, he kicked away the chair in the end, and he just hung there for a while, and he writhed, and his feet spun around like he thought he was riding a bicycle, and his eyes were wide and wild.

  He couldn’t speak, but he reached out towards us, it looked like he wanted some help. And so two of the Pumpkin Kids came forward, each took a leg, and gave one single yank downwards with all their might. There was a snap, and the man was still. It was beautiful, really.