The Pumpkin Man

by John Everson

  Jenn stopped and shook her head. “Okay, there ya go. The Encyclopedia of Ouija! This entry goes on for another page!”

  Kirstin closed her own book and set it back on the shelf. “Your aunt was the real deal, Jenn.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, she was a witch. A real, honest-to-goodness witch, with séances and spells and potions and probably blood sacrifices in the backyard under a full moon! I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a bloody pentagram in the basement.”

  “C’mon,” Jenn said. “She was my aunt. She may have been into all sorts of weird shit, and I’m sure she tried witchcraft with all the books and stuff around here, but I don’t think she was into blood sacrifices. She wouldn’t kill people for crissakes!”

  “Did you see how those people looked at us today at the General Store?”

  Jenn shrugged. She thought about her own years as a wallflower and having to take the nasty comments and digs from socialites. Ironically, they had been girls kind of like Kirstin: blonde and blue-eyed, and pretty, and they knew it, too. She was always amazed that Kirstin was her friend.

  “People are mean like that,” she said. “She was probably just misunderstood.”

  Kirstin gave her a sidelong glance. “Have you noticed any particular theme about these books?”

  “So, she had interests that went beyond Sunday school.”

  “Uh-huh. Would you care to go into the basement and see what else we find there below that crucified bat?”

  “Pass.” Jennica closed the Encyclopedia and replaced it on the shelf. Then she picked up the Ouija board and set it in the fireplace opening, then set the rock back in place. “I just wish all this hocus pocus really meant something. Then maybe I could talk to my dad again.” She swept a tear from her eye and shook her head. “I’m wiped,” she announced. “See you in the morning?”

  “What about the fire?” Kirstin asked, pointing. The logs had burned down, but there were still glowing orange embers.

  “It’ll die on its own,” Jenn promised. A wave of depression rolled over her. “Just like everything.”

  Returning to her aunt’s bedroom, Jennica couldn’t help but look at the door to the basement. Just beyond the white-painted wood, she could see the mummified bat in her mind’s eye. And when she looked at the dark wood of her aunt’s dresser, she imagined Meredith there, brushing her hair in the evening, thinking whatever thoughts she’d had out here in the middle of nowhere, night after night. All alone for years.

  “Who were you?” she murmured. Then a shiver shook her spine. A part of her worried that her aunt might answer.

  She brushed her teeth and pulled on her oversize T-shirt, then turned out the light seconds before slipping under the covers of the bed. She’d changed the sheets, but still she could smell someone else on them, smell the alien nature of her surroundings. This was not her room. This was not her house. This was not where she belonged.

  Meredith Perenais’s Journal

  November 2, 1984

  The only true evil in this life is small-mindedness.

  That evil thrives, unchecked.

  If only it could be cut out, like eyes from a pumpkin.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Sometimes it was really hard to be Jennica Murphy’s best friend.

  Kirstin loved Jenn; she’d felt instantly close to her since the first day they met. It had been back at the student union in college. Kirstin was sitting in a big, cushy red-leather chair, surreptitiously spiking a paper cup of Mountain Dew with vodka, but just as she tipped her flask under the cup lid, a couple jocks ran through and banged into the back of the chair, nearly toppling her to the floor. She’d spilled the entire cup down her shirt.

  “Son of a motherfuckin’ bitch!”

  A dark-haired girl sat near her, feet tucked under her butt, oblivious to everyone else. The girl was actually studying—serious about it. Only then had she looked up. “What happened?”

  She’d had the meekest of voices, but Kirstin had answered with a bellow that everyone in the union—and probably out on the quad—could hear. “Those fuckwads just spilled pop all over me!”

  “Hang on a minute,” the girl had said, setting her book to the side and reaching into a gym bag. “I have a towel.”

  The next few minutes were spent patting down Kirstin’s shirt. But from the most awkward moments come amazing friendships.

  They were opposites: that was clear from the start. But Kirstin had been attracted by Jenn’s selfless streak, and Jenn was no doubt inspired by Kirstin’s wildness. They balanced, each admiring qualities in the other that were lacking in themselves. Jenn’s restrained nature reined in Kirstin’s party girl—at least enough for her to graduate. Which was why it was funny for Kirstin to find herself now in the position of being Jenn’s compass.

  Kirstin’s cure for bad feelings was to go out and talk to people. To drink a little. To laugh a lot. Okay, maybe drink a lot, too. Jenn could never keep up with her in either department, but it was the trying that counted. And right now, her friend was sitting in the front room of her dead aunt’s house, reading old musty books about magic spells and secret potions.

  Kirstin grinned and shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said to the empty bedroom. “This ends now. Tonight, we rock!”

  Strolling idly into the family room, she asked, “Whatcha doing?”

  Jenn looked almost like she had on the day Kirstin first met her: legs tucked up beneath her, curled up with a book. “What’s it look like?” she answered, stifling a yawn with a fist. “Trying to bone up for the How to Turn a Jilted Lover into a Toad test.”

  “Oh, that one’s easy.” Kirstin grinned. “Just set them up on a blind date with Bernice Kunz. She’ll give them warts just by looking at them.”

  “Ha ha.” Jenn smiled, closing the book. “What’s up?”

  “I was thinking maybe we could head downtown for dinner tonight,” Kirstin offered. “Maybe try that bar that the grocery guy mentioned. Casey’s?”

  Jenn shrugged. “Guess we could, but how do we know they even have a kitchen?”

  “Because I learned from my roommate a long time ago . . .” Kirstin answered, pulling her cell phone out of her pocket. “Phone first!”

  “Wow,” Jenn said. “I actually taught you something?”

  Kirstin nodded. “Yep. And they even have calamari.”

  “I’m not eating squid from a bar,” Jenn pronounced.

  “Even a bar near the ocean?”

  “No.”

  It was a neighborhood place: there was no more apt description. As they walked in an hour later, a hush fell over the room. The girls stood at the door, taking in the lay of the land. Tables with hunched and shadowy figures sat to the left, while a handful of other patrons leaned along a long, narrow wooden bar to the right, nursing tall glasses that glimmered amber even in the garish red and yellow light. The walls were cluttered with posters and plaques and neon beer lights of decades gone by. Kirstin grinned when she saw there was even a Hamm’s 3-D illuminated clock of a bear and the North Woods. It was like stepping back in time.

  After the door closed behind them, the conversations began to slowly build again.

  The girls staked out a tall round table and hiked their way up onto the bar stools. A gnarled, painfully thin and middle-aged waitress dropped two paper photocopies of a menu on the table as soon as they sat down.

  “Getcha something to drink?” she asked. “Bud’s on special, buck-fifty ’til ten.”

  “Great,” Kirstin said. “We’ll take two.”

  The woman picked up a handful of glasses on her way to the bar; then she disappeared through a set of saloon doors to the back and presumably the kitchen.

  “You know what?” Kirstin asked.

  “Hmmm?”

  “I think you’re probably smart not to order the calamari.”

  Jenn nodded. “Meat. Burned to sterility, if possible.”

  The waitress eventually returned with
their beer, delivering two open bottles to the small and sticky table with a slam. “You want something from the kitchen?”

  Jenn eschewed the squid and chose a cheeseburger.

  After they ordered, the woman looked at the two girls as if to be sure of something. “You just visiting?” she asked finally.

  “Might be staying,” Jenn answered. “Not sure. I just inherited my aunt’s place, so we came out to stay for the summer.”

  “Do tell,” the waitress said, raising an eyebrow. “Who was your aunt?”

  “Meredith Perenais.”

  The woman looked as if someone had punched her in the gut.

  “Don’t say,” she answered. Then, with a curt nod, she took their stained menus and walked quickly back to the bar. Moments later Kirstin saw her talking animatedly into the ear of the brunette bartender, and by the time the woman went in the back to get their food, she’d made it a point to stop at five other tables, bend over and whisper, and not so secretly point at the girls.

  “I keep getting the feeling your aunt wasn’t the most popular person in River’s End,” Kirstin suggested, halfway through her Bud.

  When the waitress set down their plates, she didn’t say a word. She pulled a jug of ketchup from a holster on her apron and slapped it on the table, then was gone.

  “Make sure she didn’t spit on it,” Jenn suggested, lifting the bun of her burger to look at the blackened meat. “At least the chef understands his job. He’s working hard to prevent the health hazards of uncooked meat.”

  “I thought that’s what you wanted,” Kirstin said, dousing hers with ketchup before shoving it between her lips. “And I don’t care. I’m starved.”

  It took until their third beer before anyone besides the waitress talked to them. Then, it was only for a moment. One of the men from the bar slipped off his stool and away from his conversation to walk slowly to their table and tap a finger to the brim of his Giants cap. Kirstin noted that the bar talk diminished as he approached.

  “Evening, ladies,” he said. “My name’s Paul.”

  Jenn flashed a faint smile and introduced herself, and Kirstin did the same.

  “You’re thinking of staying here a bit,” he stated, clearly looking for a response. When the girls didn’t react, he raised a hand and sliced his finger through something in the air above the table. “You might want to think twice about that. People get cut up here. Like pumpkins,” he said. All the while his hand flicked back and forth, creating invisible triangles.

  “Are you the welcome wagon?” Kirstin asked.

  He ignored that, instead saying, “I hear you’re living up in the old Perenais place.”

  Jenn and Kirstin didn’t respond.

  “Are y’all Satan worshippers?”

  Kirstin couldn’t resist. “Nah, we worship Beelzebub. He’s got a cooler name.”

  Jenn joined in. “We can invite you to our demonic Tupperware parties if you’re interested.”

  The man’s brow creased, a lightning bolt of anger. But he only nodded with disgusted resignation. “You be careful about what you put your pretty fingers in up there,” he said. “Sometimes that stuff that looks like chocolate? Well, it’s really just shit.” And with that he turned and walked back to the bar.

  Jenn and Kirstin looked at each other, eyes wide, struggling not to laugh.

  The man whispered first to his friend, then to the waitress, then to two others sitting at the bar. Kirstin heard snickers coming from them, and for a short time the waitress disappeared into the back. When she returned, she strode straight to their table. She carried a serving platter, on top of it a plate covered by a pot lid. She set it down.

  “We didn’t order anything,” Jennica explained, but the waitress only grinned, showing a set of tobacco-browned lower teeth.

  “This one’s from the boys at the bar,” she said. “They said that you’d enjoy it.”

  She lifted the lid and smirked before turning quickly on her heel. On the plate lay the carcass of a long—very long—gray rat. Its lifeless tail curled pink and off the plate.

  The girls pushed back from the table in disgust.

  “We’d enjoy a dead rat?” Jenn whispered. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Kirstin quickly scanned the bar and noted that all eyes were on them. “The better question,” she said, “is how they got this so fast. I don’t think we want to eat here much.”

  “Make that ever,” Jenn agreed.

  “That’s on the house,” one of the men called from the bar. “But feel free to leave a tip. Just so long as it’s not some pumpkin pieces that your aunt left you. We don’t need any more gifts like that around here.”

  “I could be wrong,” Kirstin said. “But I think we ought to stop telling people you’re related to Meredith.”

  “Maybe,” Jenn said, forcing down a piece of burger that seemed intent on coming back up. “But it looks like she scored us a free dinner.”

  Kirstin snorted. “Like we’re really that desperate. Let’s get out of here.”

  They pushed away from their table and walked to the door. Everyone was silent. As the door closed behind them, though, laughter sounded. Kirstin didn’t think she’d ever felt so sick upon exiting a bar. And she’d barfed in plenty of parking lots.

  “I’m sorry I brought you here,” she said.

  Jenn only shrugged. “People suck,” she answered. “They like to mind everybody’s business but their own. Let’s go home.”

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  The apartment was quiet and dark. Shadows clung to the walls like semitranslucent drapes or fog. Walking through the entryway felt as if she were entering a haunted house. The place was familiar, and yet, something in the air tasted dangerous. Metallic. Wrong.

  Jennica cringed as the door shut behind her with a snap. She stepped across the wooden hallway and silently urged her shoes to make less noise. The walls seemed to close in as she walked five paces to the front room. She wanted to call out a hello, and yet, somehow, as soon as she’d crossed the threshold, she felt prevented from speaking.

  Her shoe slipped. Skidded, really. She held her hands out for balance.

  “Daddy?” she called, teetering on the brink of falling.

  Her father didn’t answer.

  She couldn’t recover her balance and went down hard. Her elbow met wood and she cried out in pain. The sound of her voice was swallowed up by dark. Her cheek met the hard surface of the floor, and she rolled, pulling her face up and slapping her hands to the wood. Something wet and sticky clung to her cheek. She could feel something slick beneath her fingers. Something cold and thick.

  She sat upright and waited for the stars to clear from her vision. The blackness eventually separated into gray shadows, and she could see the faint outline of a man lying before her. At least, she thought it was a man. The figure wore jeans and a polo shirt.

  She pulled herself a little closer and then stopped. The man had no head.

  But the hands and the shirt looked familiar. Horribly, achingly familiar.

  “Dad?” she asked the darkness, bending closer to see if it was indeed her father who lay there headless on the hallway floor of his apartment.

  From behind her, she heard a creak. Jenn opened her mouth to call out for her dad, then remembered he was there, beneath her hands.

  Something cold and sharp touched the back of her exposed neck.

  “Jennica,” spoke a whisper. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Jennica screamed and woke in a sweat. The sheets stuck to her skin, but she was loath to push them aside after the dream. She wanted to hide.

  But, wasn’t that what she was doing here—hiding? She’d come out here and left her old life behind to live in the shadows of her aunt’s. To live in this shell of a home her aunt once kept.

  Jenn stifled the urge to cry. She couldn’t turn back. She had nothing but this, the remains of the life of a woman she’d never known. She had no money, no friends, no future. She was
here in this strange room, needing to sort it all out.

  “I want to go home,” she whispered. But how could she go home when she had no home left to go to? How could she make this place her own? How would she make it her own?

  The dark had no answer.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  “Let’s go to San Francisco tonight,” Kirstin suggested. She looked as if she expected an argument, but Jenn didn’t offer one.

  “Okay.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Why not? We’re in California, we’re not that far from the city, and we need to take the rental car back.”

  “I should have known you’d find a practical reason.”

  “Are you complaining?”

  She wasn’t, and three hours later they were in the city. Jenn drove Meredith’s old Toyota, following Kirstin. After returning the rental, they walked through the crazy color of Chinatown, marveling at the stores and window fronts filled with intricately carved ivory dragons, racks upon racks of colorful silk kimonos, and whole chickens hung from spits. They ate dim sum and then drove down to the Bottom of the Hill club. Kirstin had spotted a band playing there in the San Francisco Chronicle: The Colorful Mission.

  The club really was at the bottom of a hill.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Jenn asked as they got out of the Toyota. It was quiet all around but for the giant neon sign above the building, which buzzed in the darkness.

  “It’ll be fine,” Kirstin said. “We’ll find us some nice boys. Just not too nice!”

  Inside, they’d just gotten two Sprite and raspberry vodkas when Kirstin caught Jenn’s eye and winked. She raised an eyebrow and tilted her head. Jenn looked, and she saw a guy at a table staring in their direction.

  “He’s kinda cute,” Kirstin murmured. “And he’s looking at you.”