The Pumpkin Man

by John Everson

  Travis Lupe read the headlines and closed his eyes, imagining the scene. He had seen it before. He didn’t want to live it again. The Pumpkin Man had haunted his youth.

  He’d been just a kid when the Pumpkin Man first came to town. He remembered riding his bike with his friends over to the Muldaurs’ pumpkin farm, seeing that patch of uncarved gourds and the special shelf of precarved pumpkins. Each day during the month leading up to Halloween there would be a new carved gourd on the special jack-o’-lantern display shelf. Every day, Travis and his friends returned to see the new face that appeared.

  The pumpkins had at first looked just like creepy carvings and then grown into more animated creatures. The faces were wild and manic, quiet and sinister. Some looked like feral animals, others like people screaming. All the kids wanted one for their front porch.

  The Pumpkin Man always seemed to be on the lot, though much of the time he was hidden somewhere behind the display cases or table with the cash register. Whenever they got close, though, the Pumpkin Man would know. He would appear from around the wooden display case and walk slowly between the boys and the pumpkins, and as he did, he would trail one long finger across the green stubs at the top of each gourd. That finger seemed white as a bone, its nail dark as mud.

  “See something you like?” he’d ask. “Ten dollars for any of my babies.”

  Travis could still remember his grin, teeth as brown as candied molasses. Nonetheless, the Pumpkin Man and his carvings became a tradition in River’s End. Every year in the fall he’d return to frighten and tantalize the town with his disturbing demeanor and garish gourds. Until the year Steve Traskle disappeared. Travis had seen the face of his friend peering back at him from a large pumpkin carved by the Pumpkin Man that year, and the search for the boy’s body had eventually produced just that: his body. Not his head.

  It took a long time for River’s End to recover from that murder, and from the discovery of others that had come before. At first they’d been called runaways or simple disappearances, but the Pumpkin Man soon took the blame, though no one ever proved anything. Certainly when the Pumpkin Man was found strung up one morning from a tree at the top of the hill overlooking the estuary, nobody in town mourned or looked for his killer. It was a case of justice served, most thought.

  His wife didn’t think so. She’d lived atop one of the hills overlooking the town and gazed down upon the roofs of her husband’s killers every night for months and eventually years, but at last her searches in the daylight exposed the key she needed to exact her punishment upon River’s End. She had gone to great lengths to avenge the vigilante execution of the Pumpkin Man. Great, dark, evil lengths.

  Oh, yes. Travis knew better than most.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  “Do you think they’ll find the house?” Jennica asked, washing a potato in the sink and then peeling it.

  Kirstin looked up from the copy of Cosmo she’d picked up in the city a few days before. “Well, we found it. In the dark. And we’re not even from the area,” she pointed out.

  “I guess,” Jenn agreed, tossing the spud in a pot and then picking up another. “Do you think they’ll come?”

  Her friend snorted and stood. “You worry too much.” She laughed. “They liked us. They saw us naked, how could they not? They’ll be here. Just don’t fuck up the food, okay?”

  Jenn rolled her eyes. “Could you find me something bigger?” She paused from peeling her current potato to point at the small pot already full past its brim. “This one’s just not going to work.”

  “So make fewer potatoes,” Kirstin complained.

  “Lazy-ass.”

  “I’m looking, I’m looking.”

  Kirstin opened the cabinet next to the stove and clanged a few pots together, but she didn’t pull anything out that was any bigger than the one Jenn already had. “Nothing here,” she announced, then pulled another cabinet open on the other side of the stove. Shrugging, she checked a deep-looking drawer at the end of the cabinetry, near the kitchen door that led to the backyard. It didn’t budge. Trying again, she noticed the black keyhole on the drawer’s upper lip.

  “This one’s locked,” she said.

  “Try one of the keys in that other drawer,” Jenn said, peeling another potato.

  Kirstin rattled around until she came up with the key that had opened the door to the basement in Jenn’s bedroom. She tried it on the drawer, and the key turned. She smiled in silent victory, set the key on the counter and opened the drawer. And screamed.

  Jennica dropped the potato in the sink and rushed to her friend’s side. Kirstin’s eyes bugged out as she stared at the deep wooden drawer’s contents. Jenn’s own eyes bulged as she looked over Kirstin’s shoulder.

  “Whoa,” she whispered.

  “Those are right here next to the stove,” Kirstin said. “Where we cook.”

  “I’m pretty sure they’re dead,” Jennica answered. But that didn’t make either of them feel much better.

  The empty black sockets of a dozen human skulls stared up at them from the bottom of the drawer. They were piled one on top of another, jawbones open and full of yellowed teeth. They were stripped of flesh but clearly real, dusky white with mottled yellow and gray.

  “If you get them out of here, I’ll find you a bigger pot,” Kirstin promised.

  “I could probably cook a few less potatoes,” Jenn answered.

  Kirstin pushed the drawer shut, and they both stepped away. Her brow slanted as she looked at Jenn and asked, “Who keeps skulls in their kitchen?”

  “I guess . . . my aunt?” Jenn shrugged. She tried to lighten the mood by adding, “Maybe they make good seasoning for stew.”

  Kirstin punched her in the shoulder. “Gross!”

  “So I shouldn’t try it out tonight?”

  “No!” Kirstin yelled. “I don’t even want to eat anything that’s been cooked in here.”

  “Gimme a break.” Jenn laughed and reached to pull the entire drawer out. It squealed open, and loose bits of teeth or vertebrae rattled in the bottom. The skulls leered up at her, but she gave the drawer a good hard tug and the whole thing came free to rest in her hands. She stumbled at the sudden weight.

  “Get the door,” she said, and Kirstin quickly cleared the way to the backyard.

  Jennica walked the drawer outside and down the four steps of the back porch to the yard, where she set it down in a flower bed. Then she went back inside.

  “Um, what about the drawer?” Kirstin asked. “And should we call the police or something?”

  Something inside of Jenn’s chest clenched, and an invisible voice in her head hissed, “No.”

  She forced a laugh. “No, we’re not calling the police. I don’t think my aunt was murdering people and then boiling their heads. You can get real skulls through science catalogs. Maybe she ordered some that way. Don’t you remember? Matt Johnson in the science lab had a couple of them.”

  In her heart, Jenn wondered if she was doing the right thing, but a part of her felt it would be disastrous to involve anyone else in whatever had gone on here. And whatever it was, it was long over now. Meredith had been dead for months.

  “Anyway,” she said, “we’re not doing anything about the drawer right now. I’ve got dinner to finish. Eventually . . . well, I think we probably should bury them.” Yes. They were real skulls. She’d always thought it kind of sad, the ones on display in science lab. They deserved to be buried.

  Kirstin grimaced. “I hate bones,” she said. “Especially skulls. They creep me out.”

  “Well,” Jenn suggested sweetly, “why don’t you start cutting up some onions for the roast? That’ll take your mind off it.”

  “I hate onions almost as much as skulls,” Kirstin complained. “They make my eyes puffy! Plus, I need to get ready. I’m not wearing this tonight.” She fingered her gray Old Navy T-shirt and frowned.

  Jenn rolled her eyes and finished the dinner herself—as she had always known she would.r />
  The knock at the door came an hour later. Kirstin answered, now clad in a tight-fitting pink half shirt that complemented her tan and managed to reveal cleavage on top and a belly button ring below. Low-riding jeans accentuated the effect.

  Nick and Brian were waiting on the porch. Brian gave a whistle when he saw her.

  “It’s nice to see you again, too.” She laughed as they both stepped inside and held out bottles of wine.

  Jenn walked in. She’d not tried to compete with her roommate for tease appeal; she wore a loose orange T-shirt with the University of Illinois Chief Illiniwek Indian in a feathered headdress logo, and dark jeans. Where Kirstin wore thin-strapped leather sandals, Jenn wore white socks. Her philosophy was simple: take me as I am or move on!

  “We’ve got chardonnay from Napa and a zin from Sonoma,” Brian announced. “We weren’t sure what you were cooking, so . . . there are a couple more choices in the car!”

  “Maybe we can just drink them all,” Kirstin suggested.

  Jenn laughed. “We’re having my dad’s favorite sherry-and’shrooms pot roast with mashed potatoes and—”

  “Skulls!” Kirstin blurted.

  Jenn slapped her shoulder as the guys looked confused. She explained their macabre discovery.

  Brian grinned. “We should use one as our dinner table centerpiece.”

  “Um, no,” Kirstin said.

  They set the wine in the kitchen and took a quick tour of the house. Jenn let Kirstin lead and do most of the talking. She was focused on the warm feeling of Nick’s hand in hers. He hadn’t said much, but he’d given her a hug along with the bottle of wine, and she’d felt butterflies; she was oddly more nervous seeing him this way than she’d been standing naked in the water with him on the beach. Maybe that was because last weekend had been crazy and spur of the moment and this was a planned, adult date. What if he found on the second time around that he really didn’t like her that much?

  “And here’s Jenn’s room,” Kirstin was saying. “Notice the very stylish granny squares bedspread—”

  “That was my aunt’s!” Jenn protested, feeling her butterflies vanish.

  “—and the locked door to the basement Jenn won’t go down into.”

  “As if you would?” Jenn hissed.

  “A locked basement, huh?” Brian said. “Maybe the skeletons that match the skulls are down there.”

  “Nice,” Nick said under his breath. “Freak them out even more.”

  “Maybe we can check it out after dinner. That’ll make everyone feel better,” Brian suggested.

  A beeping noise began in the kitchen. Jenn excused herself, saying, “Well, dinner is just about ready!”

  Nick followed, wanting to help. She tasked him with lighting the centerpiece candles and setting out the potatoes, while she moved the roast to a platter and poured gravy into an antique-looking red gravy boat. They were soon all seated around the kitchen table draped in a red tablecloth Jenn had found in a closet and set with yellowing china edged in a red vine design.

  “Well, this looks very grown-up,” Brian commented.

  Jenn smiled. “We figured if you were driving all this way . . .”

  “That we’d be hungry?” Brian nodded. “Yup!” He slopped a heavy helping of meat on his plate and pronounced, “Let’s eat!”

  After the food was put away and the dinner dishes dropped in the sink, they brought the wine to the front room to sit and talk more comfortably on the couches. Brian knelt down in front of the fireplace and opened the blackened glass doors.

  “Let’s start a fire,” he said.

  “Is it safe?” Nick asked.

  “Seems to be,” said Jenn. “We tried it last week. There’s some wood stacked on the side of the house.”

  “Let’s give it a shot!” Brian said.

  He and Nick went outside and brought back twigs for kindling and a few large hunks of chopped wood, and they stacked some atop a wrought-iron stand on the hearth. They set the rest to the side of the mantel. Then Brian grabbed the stone on the edge of the opening and levered himself to duck his head and shoulders inside. He reached up with one hand, and there was an echoing rasp of metal on metal.

  “Flue’s open,” he pronounced. “Anyone got matches and some newspaper?”

  Orange flames soon began to flicker up from a bunch of balled newspaper and through the stacked wood, and Brian leaned back on his haunches to watch the blaze. After a couple minutes of shifting sticks, he closed the fire screen and grabbed the edge of the mantel to hoist himself up. The rock he grabbed, however, moved, just as it had previously for Jenn.

  “What the heck?” He put both hands on the rock. It shifted easily, and he pulled it out of its place.

  “Oh, that we know about,” Kirstin offered. “Check out what’s inside.”

  Brian set the stone down and reached a hand into the hole. He pulled out the Ouija board and gave his second whistle of the night. “Nice.”

  He turned the witchboard around and nodded. “I know you said your aunt was a witch,” he said to Jenn. “But this is pretty cool. Looks like the real deal! Have you tried it?”

  Kirstin shook her head. “Didn’t seem like a good idea. I mean . . . it’s a witch’s board, right? What if it really works?” She smirked, stifling a scoffing laugh.

  “If it really worked, I’d talk to my father,” Jennica said quietly. “But you know better.”

  Brian grinned. “Well, then, we should try it. If it does work, Jenn can have some closure.”

  Kirstin frowned. “I don’t—”

  “What can it hurt?” Nick interrupted. “I don’t think this shit really works, but why not try? I mean, c’mon. These boards are parlor games.”

  “Jenn?” Kirstin asked, suddenly serious. “What do you think . . . ? Do you want to do this?”

  Jennica imagined being able to tell her dad good-bye—if not to his face, then at least remotely, knowing he really could hear her. She wanted to give him a last hug and kiss, though she knew that could never be. She’d never really believed in hocus-pocus stuff, but Meredith sure had. Maybe there was something to it.

  “It’s just bullshit,” she said. “So there’s no harm in trying.”

  They set the board down on the coffee table in front of the couch.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Brian said, and he disappeared into the kitchen. He returned with the three-candle holder that they’d used as the centerpiece at dinner. He set it on an end table next to the couch and turned off the lamp. “It’s a better atmosphere this way.”

  Nick reached out and turned off the other lamp. Everything now glowed with the reflection of the flames in the fireplace or from the three small candles.

  “So, how does this work?” he asked, kneeling on the floor next to Jennica. Brian and Kirstin knelt on the other side of the table, the Ouija board between them.

  “You do all know this is ridiculous?” Jenn said. “But based on every horror movie I’ve ever seen with séances and Ouija boards, and the little bit I read in one of these books the other day, basically we need to put our fingers on the planchette and focus our energies,” Jenn said. “I think it helps if you close your eyes and focus your mind on reaching out to the invisible. Try to blank out all the everyday thoughts and just be . . . open. The more you believe that there are spirits out there to talk to, the easier it is to reach them. That’s what they say, at least.”

  Nick laughed. “We’re doomed.”

  “Just try to empty your mind,” Jenn replied.

  “Won’t be hard for Nick,” Brian offered.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Just put your hand—or actually, a couple fingers—on the wooden planchette,” Jenn repeated. “Then we reach out with our minds and ask questions. If it works, the spirits will use our joint energy to move the planchette around the board to answer us.”

  “That, or we could have dessert,” Kirstin said.

  “Scared?” Brian asked.

  She shook her head but looked
serious. Leaning over, she whispered something into his ear. The smile slipped from his face and he nodded.

  “Let’s do this,” Nick said, taking Jenn’s hand. She pursed her lips and nodded, reaching out to take Brian’s hand, who in turn took Kirstin’s. They each put their index fingers on the wooden planchette.

  “I don’t really know how to start,” Jenn whispered. Suddenly she felt a hint of fear at trying this, but it was too late to back out now.

  “Just ask for your dad,” Kirstin suggested. “That’s what you want, right?”

  Jenn nodded.

  “Hello,” she called out. Her voice trembled. She felt foolishly formal as she added, “We are here to speak to my father, Richard Murphy. He passed through to the afterlife a few weeks ago. Please, any spirits who can hear me, tell him we would like to talk to him.”

  Jenn felt cold as she spoke the words. It was one thing to say you’d like to talk to your dad’s ghost; it was another to stage a séance and call out to him in a room with candles and a Ouija board. She felt her skin crawl as if something were creeping up the back of her neck.

  Nick gripped her hand tighter when her voice slowed and she stopped talking. His touch brought a smile to her face. He was giving her his strength.

  “Dad,” she called out. “Are you here?”

  The room went silent. Jenn opened her eyes for the first time since they’d begun and saw shadows writhing on the walls like spirits in anguish. She saw the slits of Brian’s eyes glimmering with the reflected fire. Kirstin still held hers shut.

  Jenn realized she held her breath. They probably all did.

  “Richard Murphy?” she called. “Dad, are you here?”

  An ember popped in the fireplace, and Jenn could feel everyone jump.

  “Spirits, if you can hear me, please answer,” she called. She was starting to feel silly. Just because her aunt had been into all this stuff didn’t mean—