by John Everson
“What are you doing?” Jenn asked.
Kirstin looked up and smiled. “I thought I’d use this library of the weird to see if there were any references to a Pumpkin Man.”
A chill ran up Jenn’s spine. “And?”
“No luck so far.”
“Hmmmph.” Jenn pushed Kirstin’s feet off the edge of the couch and sat down. “Something spoke to us last night,” she said. It was both a fact and a question.
“I didn’t move that thing around,” Kirstin replied. “So . . . yeah.”
“That’s fucked-up.”
“Yeah,” Kirstin agreed. “It was.”
Jenn sipped her coffee and thought about the night. “So . . . Nick and Brian didn’t mess with the Ouija board.”
“Probably not,” Kirstin said.
“But you threw them out. So, now what?”
“You can call them today and tell them your roommate’s a ditz, that they should come back up. And that they should ignore me.”
“I should do that?” Jenn said.
“Or I guess I could.”
Jenn nodded. “I am pretty sure that’s your call to make.”
Kirstin looked annoyed. “You going to help me research?” she asked, setting down The History of the Occult, Vol. 3 and reaching for a different book. She’d set a stack on the end table next to the couch.
“No,” Jenn said, finishing her coffee in a single gulp. “I’m going to go take a shower.”
She got up and deposited her cup in the kitchen before heading to the bedroom. Today was about getting out of the house, maybe hanging out and exploring River’s End. Jenn did not want to spend the morning poring over books of the dark arts.
As she stepped into her bedroom, she stopped as if she’d run into a brick wall. Her eyes grew wide. There, at the foot of her bed, lay a pile of pumpkin shards: orange-skinned triangles, their flesh bright and clearly still moist. Spattered with crimson. It couldn’t be what it looked like. Someone was messing with her.
Her chest tightened. “Shit. Shit. Shit,” she whispered. “Not again.”
Had they been here when she woke up? Jenn looked around the room and then back at the bits of pumpkin. The edge of her comforter hung partially over them, which meant they must have been. She’d been so drowsy she must have stepped right past them, her mind only focused on coffee.
“Kirstin?” she called, struggling to keep the tremors from her voice. “Could you come here?”
In a moment, her roommate rounded the corner.
Jenn pointed at the floor. “Did you leave me some pumpkin for breakfast?” she said, trying desperately to lighten her inner terror. “Maybe as a joke?”
Kirstin went pale. “Um, no.”
“Well, someone did.” Jenn stared her roommate in the eye. “Someone was in my room last night while I was sleeping.”
“Fuck. I didn’t hear anything.” Kirstin’s eyes were wide. “Do you think one of the guys came back and . . . ?”
Jenn shook her head. “How would they know?”
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
“I don’t think that’s going to help,” Jenn realized. “They found pumpkin shards in my dad’s apartment. I found pumpkin pieces last month in Chicago. Last night, some freakin’ spirit told us to beware the Pumpkin Man. Now there are pumpkin pieces here. Something is following me, Kirstin, and I think we need to find out what it is. Because hopping a plane didn’t seem to make any difference.”
Her friend looked pained. “I want to know how it got in.”
“I’d like to know why it left me pumpkin pieces with what looks to be blood on them!” Jenn replied.
Kirstin pursed her lips before murmuring, “Not to mention how it got pumpkins out of season. I haven’t noticed any specialty grocery stores around here.” Her eyes lit on the door to the basement, and on a whim she reached out and grabbed the knob. It turned with no resistance.
“We never locked the door,” Kirstin whispered.
“We sure the hell did,” Jenn replied. She saw the black wings of the bat nailed to the wall and with one hand pressed the door back closed. “Get the key,” she added. “Please.”
Kirstin disappeared into the kitchen. A minute later she returned with the key. After turning it in the lock, both of them tested the knob. The door would not open.
“Okay,” Jenn said. “I’m taking a shower, and then we’re getting out of here for a while.”
While Jenn showered, Kirstin went back to the kitchen to get a plastic shopping bag, scooped the pumpkin bits in and took them to the trash. She did her best not to touch the pieces. She did her best not to think about how they got there. And, by the time she was done, she was more than anxious to leave the house. Because someone had come into their home in the middle of the night and stood over their beds. She didn’t know that making sure the basement door was locked would help.
“Damn,” she said as the pumpkin pieces fell to the bottom of the green garbage pail in the garage.
“Damn and fuck,” she added, closing the garage door.
“I called Brian,” Kirstin said. “I apologized.”
Jenn smiled. Her hair was still wet from her shower, but she’d pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. She didn’t plan on dolling up today.
“I asked if they’d come up again tonight. Said that we could make it up to them. He said yes.”
“They’re coming back?” Jenn asked. Her plan to dress casual went right out the window.
Kirstin nodded. “Yes. So, we need to pick up something good for you to cook for dinner. ’Cuz I promised them a good meal.”
“But you threw them out. Shouldn’t you cook dinner?” Jenn asked.
“I’ll drive you to the store and pay,” Kirstin promised.
They arrived at River’s End’s General Store an hour later with a list and an extremely disgruntled cook.
“I didn’t tell them to leave,” Jenn had pointed out several times.
“But I can’t cook,” was Kirstin’s rebuttal.
They stepped into the market, and Jenn shook her head and walked down the main aisle to grab ingredients. Kirstin, meanwhile, headed to the front of the store.
The same clerk was at the register. Travis Lupe, she remembered.
“Ever get out of this place?” she asked, catching his eye.
“Some,” he answered.
“Every time I see you, you’re here.”
“True,” he acknowledged, “but you don’t see me when I’m not.”
Kirstin blinked. She didn’t have an answer for that.
“Ever heard of the Pumpkin Man?” she asked. Not having an answer had never stopped her from talking.
The clerk glared at Kirstin now over the frames of his black glasses. His eyes were drilling holes into her. “Why do you ask?”
“Because someone told us to look out for him,” she answered. “I didn’t know if that was kind of a local boogeyman or what.”
“Well, the Pumpkin Man’s a boogeyman, all right,” the clerk answered.
“What do you mean?” Kirstin felt a bit of a nudge might do them some good.
“He’s a legend. The legend says that the Pumpkin Man comes to River’s End every Halloween and chooses a person. When he decides on his victim, he picks himself a pumpkin from the local patch and uses a knife and magic to carve that person’s soul into the gourd.”
Kirstin blinked. “What do you mean, ‘carves his soul’?”
Travis Lupe shrugged. “He draws the face of the victim on the pumpkin with his knife, and by the time he’s through, there’s an image of the person in the gourd and a headless body left behind.”
“Beautiful.”
“Not really.” The clerk shook his head. “Kids here are scared to death of meeting the Pumpkin Man. Parents sometimes tell their kids that he’ll come to their rooms to take them if they aren’t in bed by midnight on Halloween night. He’ll just leave a pumpkin in place of their head.”
Jenn stepped out of the aisle
with a soup can in her hand. “Does he leave behind pieces of pumpkin?”
Travis nodded. “That’s what the police have found every time,” he said. “Pumpkin pieces with stripes of blood. The victims surface eventually.”
“Wait a minute,” Kirstin said. “I thought you said he was a legend?”
“Every legend starts from something,” Travis said. “And a long time ago, there were a whole series of murders here. They said the Pumpkin Man killed them.”
“Well, crap,” Kirstin said. “Why the hell is he hanging out at our house?”
Travis looked at her and gave a nervous chuckle. “Well, that part’s easy.” His gaze rested squarely on Jennica. “The Pumpkin Man was your uncle. The Pumpkin Man was Meredith Perenais’s husband.”
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
The knock came just after five p.m. Kirstin opened the door. Brian stood there, holding out a bottle of chardonnay.
“You want to try this again?”
Kirstin nodded. Her grin was sheepish but bright. “Yeah,” she said. “And this time, I think we’ll put a hold on the Ouija board.”
“Good idea,” Brian agreed. “Now, about that apology.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get down on my knees later. For now, come on in and say hi to Jenn. She’s cooking dinner. And she has other issues.”
“Other issues?” Nick echoed. He flanked Brian with another bottle of wine.
“Well, when she woke up this morning, there was a pile of bloody pumpkin by her bed. Aside from that, it’s been a pretty dull day,” Kirstin joked.
“Bloody pumpkin?” Nick repeated. “What the fuck?”
“We found out the door to the basement was unlocked,” Kirstin said. “We figure the psycho got in that way.”
“So,” Nick summarized, “there’s a psycho who has access to this house via the door from the basement that leads to Jenn’s room. That’s comforting.”
“Funny, that’s what she said.” Kirstin grinned. “I knew there was a reason she liked you. Anyway, we locked the door, but I don’t think it really matters. Jenn found pumpkin pieces in our apartment in Chicago, and they found them in her dad’s place, too, when they found his body a couple months ago. Oh, and apparently there’s an urban legend around these parts that Jenn’s uncle was a nutjob called the Pumpkin Man. He used to carve up people and pumpkins alike.”
Nick pushed past Kirstin into the kitchen.
Brian put his arm around her. “This doesn’t sound good,” he said. “Have you called the police?”
“What are they going to do?” she replied. “Jenn’s uncle has been dead for years, and whoever is leaving these pumpkin pieces . . . well, he’s apparently visited Jenn twice but hasn’t killed her. And he’s done it in two different places more than a thousand miles apart. To be honest, with that, the legend of Jenn’s uncle and the Ouija board message last night . . . well, I guess I have to agree with Jenn. I don’t think this is within the police’s domain.”
“Hmmm,” Brian, said, squeezing her shoulder. “Maybe I should take a look in the basement anyway.”
Kirstin nodded. “Jenn wouldn’t go down there, and I wasn’t going to go alone, but I’d sleep better.”
He eyed her. “You want to come? Aren’t you worried there’s a monster down there with a big knife just waiting for the sun to set?”
She shook her head. “No. I think it’s just another damp and musty basement. But I don’t particularly want to cross the bat.”
“The bat?”
“There’s a dead bat nailed to the wall above the stairs. That’s what stopped us from going down the first time.”
“Dead bat. Right,” Brian said. He didn’t have a follow-up.
“Hey,” Nick said as he walked into the kitchen. Jenn was cutting a long, thin loaf of Italian bread. Her face was slightly flushed from exertion, and a strand of dark hair stuck provocatively to her cheek. She wore a tight tank top below a loose white cotton tee, and Nick instantly wanted to put his arms around her to pull her close. She looked like an angel.
“Sorry about last night,” he said. “But honestly I didn’t do anything. And I know Brian didn’t either. He’s a crazy nut, I know, but he’s not mean like that. I don’t know what that shit was. Can I help you cook at least?”
Jenn smiled. “I know you didn’t do anything,” she said. “I’m sorry it all blew up.”
She leaned close and kissed him. His lips were warm, and she wanted more. When he put his arms around her, she felt as if she were melting. But if they were going to eat, this was not the time to melt. She looked up instead and said, “If you want to help, you can butter the garlic bread. I need to set up the beans, get the bread in the oven and we’re good to go.”
Kirstin and Brian walked in just as Nick was starting his assignment.
“Wow, she got that apron on you fast,” Brian commented.
Nick flipped him the bird. “Bite me.”
“Behave,” Jenn warned from the stove. “Or you get no dinner.”
“Well, I didn’t drive all this way to go home hungry,” Brian said. “So I guess I’ll behave.”
It wasn’t long before they were repeating the previous night’s ritual, eating and talking and, for a little while at least, forgetting what had happened just a few hours before. Nick was gloating and moaning about how amazing the Italian bread was.
“You’re a glutton for praise,” his friend muttered.
“But it really is good, isn’t it?” Nick crammed another piece into his mouth.
Brian just looked at Jenn. “This lasagna is amazing.”
After the meal was done and the table cleared, Brian suggested they face what they were all avoiding.
“Let’s check out the basement,” he said. “I think if you’re going to stay here another damn night, someone needs to see what’s down there.”
“Uh-uh,” Jenn said. “I’m not going.”
“You’ll feel better if you do, I think.”
Nick agreed. “I know I’d feel better if I saw it. Let’s all check it out. Safety in numbers.”
Reluctantly, Jenn nodded. But as the key turned in the lock a couple minutes later she said, “I don’t believe we’re doing this.”
“Well, last week I wouldn’t have believed we’d hold a séance,” Kirstin pointed out.
Jenn opened the door. Under her breath she mumbled, “Don’t go in the basement.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s creepy,” Nick said, staring at the bat. “What do you think it means?”
“Means?” Brian repeated. “I’d say it means they killed a bat and nailed it to a wall. Just a guess.”
Kirstin laughed, squeezing him tighter. “Very literal of you.”
“If her aunt was a witch,” Nick said, ignoring his friend, “presumably this has some meaning. It’s a totem or some channeled natural power or ward.”
Brian laughed. “You been studying witchcraft yourself?”
“No, I just watch a lot of TV.”
“C’mon.” Jenn smiled and stepped forward, braving the first step. But when she felt around for a light switch, there was none on the stairway wall. “No lights,” she announced. Who didn’t have lights in their basement?
“Maybe there’s one at the bottom,” Brian suggested. “Do you have a flashlight here?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” Jenn replied. “But we could light a couple candles.”
Kirstin volunteered to get them and ran back to the front room. She returned a minute later with four tapered candles from the fireplace mantel and a book of matches. Jenn held hers out to be lit, then started down the stairs.
The four candles barely cut the darkness as they moved into the bowels of the house, the flickering flames reflecting off the narrow stairway walls just enough so that they could see the next step down. And then, without warning, there were no more steps. They were in the basement.
Nick held up his candle, and the beams of the unfinished ceiling were revealed. He pointed at a string
hanging down just in front of them.
“There,” he said. “Classic basement lighting. The bare-bulb model.”
Brian pulled the string, and the basement grew brighter. “I can’t believe they didn’t put in a switch,” he complained.
“Actually . . .” Nick walked over to the slat of wood that served as a banister and pointed out the second string that hung from the light and then followed the wood most of the way up. It was tucked through small circular guides. “They did. We just didn’t see it.”
“Well, now we know for next time,” Kirstin said.
“Next time?” Jenn answered. “I’m not coming down here again.”
“What, you don’t want to make use of this amazing fruit cellar?” Nick had walked over to some shelves where a mess of mason jars were stacked, picked up one filled with red sauce and another with something green and solid. “Check it out,” he said with a laugh. “You’ve got homemade canned tomato sauce and . . . pickles or something. I think your dinner menu is really going to expand.”
“Yeah, how long have these been down here?” Jenn made a face. “They could be fifty years old.”
Kirstin spoke up. “I thought canned stuff lasts for, like, ever?”
Jenn shook her head. “They usually date them. They’re good for a couple years, I think, but not forever.”
Nick looked at the tomato sauce lid and his face screwed up. “Oh,” he said. He held the jar up to the light briefly before quickly setting it back. He did the same to the pickle jar, then reached out to look at another jar from a different shelf. The contents of this one were darker, brownish. Maybe mushrooms, Jenn thought, as she saw him look inside.
“Fuck,” Nick said finally.
“What’s the matter?” Jenn asked.
“I don’t think you’re going to be eating this shit.”
“What is it?” Kirstin asked.
He held out the jar and slowly rotated it.
Brian whistled. “Is that an . . . ?”
“Eyeball,” Nick said. “It’s a jar of eyeballs.”
One floated to touch the glass just right, and Kirstin shrieked as it seemed to look at her. “Ewwwwwww!”
Nick put the jar back.