The Pumpkin Man

by John Everson

  “That wasn’t tomato sauce either, was it?” Jenn asked quietly.

  Nick shook his head. “The label says blood.”

  “And the pickles?”

  Nick made a face. “Frogs.”

  Brian laughed. “Blood, eyeballs, frogs? Proper little witches’ cupboard down here.”

  Jenn nodded. “All ingredients for spells, I suppose.”

  Kirstin’s voice held a tremor. “Does it say . . . what kind of eyes those are?”

  Nick shook his head and picked up another jar. “Anyone for ‘Bone Powder, Ground at the Hour of the Solstice’?”

  “Pass,” Brian answered.

  Kirstin stepped forward and held up her candle to illuminate the jars better. Some held clear liquid, others the leaves of a single plant suspended in yellow liquid. Still others were dense with what she had to assume was blood. The rest held more macabre contents.

  “Is that . . . ?” She pointed.

  Brian stepped up next to her and lifted the jar. “Human finger, 1993,” he said. “Nice, that they dated it. I wonder what the expiration period is.”

  “Gross!” Kirstin said. She backed away from the shelves.

  “I have a better one,” Nick said, and he held up a different jar.

  There was a small form inside. It was barely an inch long, and it floated in a clear broth. Jenn could see the sprouts of tiny arms and legs. A head was clearly visible, and she supposed the dark spots were eyes. A chill ran down her back as she considered how her aunt might have come into the possession of a tiny fetus.

  “Put it back,” she said quietly and began to walk farther into the basement, away from the jars. “Let’s keep going.”

  Kirstin joined her, and soon the guys did as well.

  The rest of the basement seemed typical: boxes of forgotten storage were stacked against cement walls, an old yellow refrigerator stood in one corner, its door open to ensure it wouldn’t grow mold. A modern washer and dryer took up the wall next to the furnace, which looked to be of the same vintage as the kitchen appliances upstairs. Original.

  Brian bent down to look at the rusted green main box of the furnace and asked, “Do you have to shovel coal into this or what?”

  “We haven’t had it on yet,” Jenn said. “Maybe it doesn’t even work.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” he agreed.

  They walked around the room, pulling the strings on two more bare-bulb lights and finding old furniture, a coat rack and more bric-a-brac before Kirstin discovered a hallway.

  “Where do you think this goes?” she called, and the others stepped from various points in the basement to see what she was talking about. At the far end of the room, hidden by a clothesline still festooned with old laundry, Kirstin fronted a dark opening. It was lost to the shadows unless you stood right before it. Which, presently, the foursome did.

  “Let’s find out,” Brian volunteered.

  The cement walls changed to rough-hewn stone as they all stepped through the narrow arch. The cement of the floor also changed. Jenn relit Brian’s candle, as he had blown it out when they’d first found the lights. The passageway looked to have no electric illumination.

  They moved several yards with the light of the basement growing fainter behind them. The tunnel got increasingly tight, and Jenn found her hips bumping Nick’s as they walked. He had to duck his head several times as the low carved ceiling grew lower.

  “Where do you think this leads?” Kirstin asked.

  Jenn considered where they were when they’d entered the tunnel and its spatial relation to her bedroom. “I think we’re walking underneath the backyard,” she said finally.

  “Is there a hidden village back there?” Brian asked.

  Jenn laughed. “I don’t know. If we knew about it, it wouldn’t be hidden, would it?”

  Kirstin shrugged. “We really haven’t walked back there much. Who knows what’s behind this damn house.”

  “Well, I can tell you one thing,” Nick said, huffing. “It’s uphill. Because we are definitely climbing.”

  The light from the basement was long gone by the time the claustrophobic passage ended.

  “We’re here,” Nick announced. A heavy wooden door blocked their passage. “Wherever here may be.” He tried the old tarnished knob, but it didn’t budge. “Well, that sucks.”

  “Wait,” Jenn said, pulling from her jeans pocket the key that had opened the door above. She handed it to him. “Try this.”

  Nick inserted the key into the dark lock and twisted. It didn’t budge. But it had inserted cleanly into the lock.

  He tried again, turning the opposite way. Still the key didn’t move. Then he pulled it out just a hair and tried again. This time, the key turned and the lock clicked.

  “Nice work,” Brian said.

  “I’ve got lots of experience with old houses.”

  Almost as one they stepped into an open room beyond the door, then stopped to hold up candles to illuminate their surroundings. Their lights revealed a room with five pillars spaced at equal intervals in a circle.

  “What the fuck?” Kirstin said.

  “Yeah,” Brian echoed.

  The rough-hewn floor of the passageway had been replaced by a spiral pattern of white mosaic. The color of the tile changed from bone white to cream to sand before gradually cycling back to blazing white. It all converged and curved around a large flat stone in the center of the room that looked like amber, golden brown and reflective of depth.

  But, what dominated the group’s attention was not the floor or smooth limestone walls. A large white stone coffin rested on a stone pedestal just off the center. Behind the coffin, in the far wall, a half dozen golden handles protruded. Upon looking closer, lines of separation became evident. These lines etched out the hidden cracks of small doorways that would lead, no doubt, to more coffins.

  “My bedroom leads to a stairway that leads to a basement that leads to a coffin. We’re in a crypt,” Jenn said, stating the obvious.

  “Smells like it,” Kirstin said, pulling the sleeve of her shirt over her nose.

  “And like pumpkins,” Nick added, pointing at the ground.

  A half dozen pumpkins sat in a line at the base of the coffin. The eyes and mouths were carved to reflect macabre screams of agony.

  “That’s too fucked-up,” Kirstin said. “I mean, Jenn finds pumpkin pieces back in Chicago and also here, right by her bed, and here is—”

  “I’d really like to get out of here,” Jenn whispered. Her chest suddenly felt tight, and she began to shake. She could feel tears forming at the sides of her eyes and she had an uncontrollable urge to lie down. “Now,” she said.

  “This way,” Nick suggested, and pointed at a second doorway just on the other side of the coffin. “That’s gotta be the way out. Nobody would go into a house and through a basement to reach a grave.”

  He put his arm around Jenn to steady and comfort her, leading her past the pumpkins to the door. Once it was open, the light of their candles showed a series of steps that spiraled up and away from the tiny mausoleum.

  “Let’s go,” he urged.

  He held her arm as they ascended the narrow stone steps. Soon they could see light from above, and then they were standing in another tiny room. A steel door stood just in front of them, with grates in a window that let in the day’s fading light. Jenn turned and looked at the door they’d just walked through. In an archway above, one word was carved into the stone: PERENAIS.

  Kirstin followed her friend’s gaze. “Jenn, that was your aunt’s married name, wasn’t it?”

  Jenn nodded, unable to take her eyes off the etching of a name she’d seen on so many papers from her father’s lawyers. Papers related to the will and deeds of her aunt’s property. “Yeah,” she said.

  She turned away and reached out for the door that she hoped would let them out of the crypt and back into the realm of the living. This time, the handle turned easily. She stepped out onto a walkway of jagged limestone inte
rrupted by occasional sprouts of dry brown grass.

  Kirstin, Nick and Brian exited behind her, and the door slammed shut. They all stood outside what looked like a tiny stone shed. On the outer door, the inscription also read PERENAIS. Beneath was drawn something that had, of late, grown too familiar. To the side, in the weeds, glowed the rotting physical remains of the same oval shape: a pumpkin.

  Jennica looked away from the door. Tall stands of brown grass surrounded the mausoleum they’d just exited, and around that were several other gravestones. The markers revealed death dates ranging from the 1920s to the 1970s. Nearly all of the surnames remained the same.

  “It’s a family cemetery,” Jenn whispered.

  Kirstin grimaced. “Well, I guess we know where that drawer of skulls in the kitchen came from.”

  “Oh my god,” Jenn said. “I hope not! My aunt may have been a lot of things, most of them weird, but . . . a grave robber?”

  “Isn’t that better than the other way you’d get skulls?” Nick asked.

  Jenn looked at him. “What would that be?”

  “Hmmm, well, for starters by boiling the heads of people you’d decapitated.”

  She shook her head in disgust. “Aunt Meredith wasn’t like that. I mean, I didn’t know her that well, but . . .”

  “Um, where are we?” Kirstin interrupted.

  The group looked up from the mausoleum entrance to absorb the surrounding landscape. The hill they stood atop sloped gently down on either side to a long brown valley. They could see the grass end far below at a narrow road and the row of homes that was the upper periphery of River’s End. Behind them the hill continued steadily upward, disappearing in a maze of brush and scrub trees. On the other side of the mausoleum, at the end of a faint winding path, glimmered the roof of Jenn’s aunt’s house. The grass had grown up to obscure some of the path, but there was no question that a path had been worn from Meredith Perenais’s home to here.

  The sun darkened to a deep red as it sank on the horizon, the top barely visible above the trees on the other side of the Russian River.

  “We should go back to the house,” Jenn said. “Before it gets dark.”

  “Jenn,” Nick said.

  She could tell he didn’t want to speak. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to. She raised an eyebrow but remained silent.

  “That pumpkin . . .” He pointed at the one sitting next to the crypt. “It’s not that old. It’s rotting, but . . . if it had been here more than three or four weeks, we wouldn’t have even seen it.”

  “Yeah, so?” Jenn asked.

  “I really think maybe we ought to call the police.”

  She shook her head. “And what am I going to tell them? That I found pumpkin pieces in the house of the guy that everyone in town assumes was the Pumpkin Man, a hideous killer? C’mon. Like they’re going to take that seriously. Someone has been here, yes. If we’re lucky, then yeah, somehow, someone got wind that we were here, in ‘that crazy woman’s old house,’ and decided to play a little joke. They got into the crypt from out here, got into my bedroom because we left the door unlocked, and then they left us a little present. I hope it’s not the work of my dead aunt or her dead husband. That’s ludicrous, right? Even with that Ouija board. So I’m going to go with the idea that we’ve got some kids in the area who like the legend of the Pumpkin Man.”

  She began to walk around the crypt. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t really want to be here in the graveyard after the sun goes down. And I don’t really feel like going back through the basement.”

  She walked around the mausoleum and down the faintly worn path she imagined her aunt once walked nearly every day. In a moment, the other three followed.

  Full night had come down outside, and Brian built a fire again, though this time he was careful not to disturb the stone that covered the Ouija.

  “Who wants dessert?” Kirstin asked. “I’ve got vanilla ice cream and pie,” she offered, standing up and flexing her hips.

  “Hey, that’s my dessert,” Brian complained, standing up to shield her with his body. “What are you offering them?”

  “You get cherry pie, silly.” Kirstin laughed, licking the edge of his lips with her tongue. “This is apple.”

  Jenn rolled her eyes and rose to help Kirstin. Minutes later they all were enjoying pie, coffee and ice cream in front of the fire. It was a very different vibe than it had been twenty-four hours before. But still Jenn couldn’t shake the images of that coffin and those pumpkins. The fire hadn’t yet burned out when she leaned on Nick’s shoulder and whispered, “I need to go to bed.”

  “Do you want company?” he asked. She nodded, and a moment later the two of them excused themselves. Kirstin and Brian hardly noticed; they were busy kissing.

  When they entered her room, Jenn pushed the bedroom door shut behind them. Nick was waiting, and when she turned, he took her into his arms.

  “I don’t want to push you into anything,” he whispered.

  His breath was warm in her ear, and Jenn felt better than she had most of the day. “Just be with me,” she answered.

  His arms drew her tight. His mouth moved to meet hers and their tongues touched, first in furtive exploration and then with more energy. He began to move her step by step backward toward the bed, but just before they both fell onto the mattress, she pushed him back a step, and took a deep breath.

  “Wait,” she said, and fished into her jeans pocket. At last she came out with a key and walked to the door to the basement. “I’d really like to be sure this is locked tonight,” she explained. Then she dropped the key on the dresser and with both hands stripped off her T-shirt.

  She let the garment fall to the floor and turned to hug him. His hands slipped up the smooth skin of her back, and he kissed her again. She felt strangely calm as his hands fumbled with the clasp of her bra. Usually when she was with a guy she grew icy cold with fear, worried that she wouldn’t be what he wanted, worried that he would be disappointed when he saw her for what she really was—when he realized her breasts weren’t as full as he liked, when he realized that her hips were too wide. With Nick, she didn’t feel that. She felt easy in a way she’d never been before.

  His knuckles slid inside the waistband of her jeans and then back out to pull the lip of her belt through its metal clasp. Jenn only smiled and whispered, “No locks here.”

  He finished unbuttoning her jeans and pushed them down to the floor. Then he slipped his palms into the back of her panties, cupped her body tight against his.

  “No,” he breathed between kisses. “The door is definitely open.”

  Meredith Perenais’s Journal

  January 1, 1986

  It’s a new year. A new chance to try to undo what I’ve done. To take back—

  No, you can never take back what you’ve given. I wish there was a time travel machine so I could go back and change things, but that’s unfortunately more of a fantasy than any stories of ghosts and ghouls. There are ghosts, and I hope to never meet a ghoul.

  George is lost to me. But I will bring him back. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll bring him back.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Morning light streamed across Nick’s bare shoulder, and Jenn smiled as she gazed at his skin.

  She pulled the sheets close and shifted her body just slightly, pressed herself against his hip. He looked to be deep asleep, his mouth slack against her pillow, and she didn’t want to wake him. But the memories of his touch, his gentle pressure against her in the darkness just a few hours before made her crave to feel his skin against hers again.

  As she slipped an arm across his shoulders, he stirred and one eye trembled open. It closed again, briefly, before opening wider. For a second he looked disoriented and surprised.

  “Hey,” he whispered.

  “Hey back.”

  “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Cherry pie?” she offered, snorting as she said it.

  Som
ething soft and yet hard pressed against her inner thigh, and she levered herself closer, pressing it tighter to her most secret flesh and—

  The morning was broken by a ghastly scream.

  “That was Kirstin,” Jenn gasped, rolling away.

  She tossed off the covers and bolted from bed, grabbing her robe from the back of the bedroom door on the way. Behind her, Nick leaped to his feet and pulled on his jeans, neglecting to even look for his underwear. The scream came again, but this time it sounded more like a cry of anguish than one of fear or pain.

  Jenn ran down the hall to Kirstin’s room and rapped once at the door with her fist, not waiting for an answer before turning the knob. She pushed the door open and stepped inside to see Kirstin in bed, holding a blood-spattered sheet over her naked chest. Tears streamed down her face and her mouth hung open, and she sucked in air with great hyperventilating gasps. Lying next to her was the body of her boyfriend.

  The body. Not the head. Jenn saw the ragged wound of Brian’s neck and the gore spattering the hair of his broad chest, but his head and face were gone. The sheets were stained a deep and still-wet red.

  Jenn stepped around the bed to hug her roommate from behind. Both girls stared helpless at the corpse.

  “Sweet fuckin’ Jesus,” Nick said as he entered the room. “Brian,” he whispered, and then looked hard at the sobbing Kirstin. “What the fuck happened?”

  Kirstin shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “We fell asleep together. . . . I know he got up at some point to go to the bathroom. When I woke up . . .”

  Jenn felt something cold and slimy against her toes. Looking down, she saw she’d stepped on the fleshy part of a carved triangle. A small jumble of other pumpkin pieces were piled just beyond at the foot of the bed. Their orange skins were again smeared darker. Blood.

  “Get out of the bed,” Jenn whispered.

  “But I’m not wearing—”

  “I don’t think that really matters right now.”

  She helped Kirstin up and took her to the bathroom. Nick stood silent by the bed, pulling back the sheet to view the full remains of his friend. He didn’t know whether to hate Kirstin and Jenn or be afraid for them; for the moment all he knew was that his best friend was gone. Deluged by memory, he had no problem with letting the tears flow.