The Pumpkin Man

by John Everson

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  Jenn helped Kirstin get dressed and then dragged Nick out of the bedroom. She sat them both down in the front room and put on a pot of coffee. Then she called 911. The response was not what she’d expected.

  “River’s End Police Department,” said an old woman on the other end of the line.

  “Hello,” Jenn said. “There’s been a murder.”

  Instead of immediately asking the circumstance, the woman paused. “Another?” Then she recovered and asked for the details.

  Ten minutes later, two officers arrived. Kirstin hadn’t fully stopped crying. Jenn answered their knock.

  “Captain Harlan Jones,” the taller of the two men announced, extending a hand as she opened the door. He looked much older than his partner, his face lined by decades of salt breeze. His grip was strong. “We’re with Sonoma County, but we handle calls for River’s End, Jenner and a couple other towns near here.”

  “Officer Barkiewicz,” the younger officer said. He didn’t extend his hand but instead stepped past Jenn, tilting his head quickly from side to side, as if he intended to take in every detail of the house in a moment.

  Jenn introduced herself and then pointed to Kirstin, who wiped her eyes. “That’s my friend Kirstin. We just moved here from Chicago a couple weeks ago.”

  Nick stepped forward. “And I’m Nick Feldman. My friend Brian Tamarack and I were up here visiting for the weekend from San Francisco.”

  The younger officer nodded and looked toward the kitchen, as if expecting someone else. “And Mr. Tamarack is . . . ?”

  “Dead,” Nick finished.

  The younger cop blanched, clearly embarrassed. His captain took over. “Can you tell us what happened? From the beginning?”

  “There’s not much to tell,” Kirstin spoke up, sniffing. “We went to sleep together last night, and when I woke up . . .”

  “Were you fighting? Did you have any words before bed?” Officer Barkiewicz asked.

  “No,” Kirstin snapped. “If you must know, we were fucking like animals. And it was amazing.”

  The younger cop shut up.

  “Did you hear anything? Noises in the house during the night?” the captain asked. “Where was his body found?”

  Kirstin shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes again. “In the bedroom. And, no. We were wiped. Yesterday was a long day. After we had sex, we both pretty much crashed. At one point, I know he got up to go to the bathroom—”

  “Did you hear him come back?”

  Kirstin shook her head. “No. I didn’t. The next thing I knew, I was waking up and I felt something wet on my arm . . .”

  “His body was in bed with you?” The captain looked surprised as Kirstin nodded.

  “His body was,” Nick spoke up. “But not his head.”

  The captain sighed. “Let’s take a look.”

  Jenn led them down the short hall to the bedroom. At the doorway, Officer Barkiewicz held up a hand. “The fewer of us that walk through the scene, the better,” he announced.

  “We’ve all already been in there,” Jenn said.

  The captain entered, hunched down at the foot of the bed and picked up a pumpkin shard. “I don’t think they’re going to mess up the evidence, Scott. We’ve seen this before.”

  He stood up and walked around the side of the bed to get closer to the corpse. Silently gritting his teeth, he knelt and stared at the wounds of the neck. They were clean. The flesh had been cut by an extremely sharp knife. The spinal column was notched with fine shavings of bone; a knife had sawed wrong once or twice before finally biting deep.

  “He wasn’t killed here in bed with you,” Jones announced to Kirstin. He pointed to the walls and floor near the bed. “If he had, there would be a lot more mess.”

  “Then where?” she whispered. “And how did he end up back in bed?”

  The captain shrugged. “Maybe he was killed outside? Maybe somewhere else in the house. We’ll need to do a full search.” He looked at Barkiewicz. “Did Edie call the coroner?”

  The junior cop nodded.

  “All right,” said the captain. “Let’s clear the room.”

  They went back to the front. As they waited for the coroner, the captain asked for more details about who they all were and what they had done the previous day.

  “Well, for one, we found out that this place has a direct line to the cemetery,” Nick volunteered.

  “What do you mean?” Jones asked.

  “The basement of this house,” Nick explained. “We went down to check it out and found an old passageway that leads under the backyard. It ends inside a mausoleum. When we went up another set of stairs to go out, we found ourselves in a private cemetery.”

  The captain nodded. “This is an old house,” he said. “A lot of the homes of the early settlers of this area had their own private cemeteries. When the first people came to live here, they were the only folks in the area, for miles sometimes. So they kept their families close.”

  “Do most of them have a direct passage from their master bedrooms? Or pumpkin scattered everywhere?” Nick asked.

  The captain shook his head. “No, I’d guess not.”

  There was a knock at the door, and Officer Barkiewicz got up to answer. He let in the county medical examiner and a special crime scene investigator who’d driven over from Santa Rosa. Both were older men, tall and thin. The examiner, who shook the captain’s hand, introduced himself to Jenn and her friends as Cody Dresner. He carried a black briefcase, presumably filled with the tools of his trade, but was in plainclothes: dark Dockers and a pale lemon polo. The cop from Santa Rosa, Officer Behrens, was in full uniform. Jenna wondered what some of the symbols stitched to his shirt actually meant.

  “Show them the scene,” the captain instructed Barkiewicz, and the three men disappeared down the hall. Then he turned back to Jenn. “I’d like to know more about the pumpkins you found.”

  Jenn shrugged. “We can show you. The whole reason we went down into the basement in the first place was because I woke up a couple days ago and found pieces of pumpkin there at the foot of my bed. That’s when I realized that the door in my room was unlocked. We were worried someone had come in through it.”

  “What did you do with the pumpkin?” the captain asked.

  Jenn shrugged. “I threw it out.”

  “Are they still in your garbage?”

  She thought a minute and nodded. “Yeah. We haven’t taken the trash out the past couple days.”

  “I’d like to get a sample before I leave,” the captain said. “But right now let’s take a look at the basement.”

  Jenn picked up a couple of candles from the fireplace mantel to light their way, but the captain shook his head. “Wait,” he said. “I have a flashlight in the car.”

  He returned with a long, black-tubed flashlight, and she led the way to her bedroom and retrieved the basement door key from her dresser. This time, she easily found the string tucked beneath the old banister and pulled it to light their way.

  When they reached the basement floor, Kirstin pointed at the jars filled with blood and frogs and fingers. “There’s a lot of gross stuff in those.”

  The captain nodded, as if he expected nothing less, and simply said, “Meredith.” He picked one off the shelf and twisted it so that its contents moved gently inside. He aimed his flashlight at the jar, and a handful of eyeballs looked back at him, swirling in the silent maelstrom he’d created. He set the jar back without a word.

  Jenn led them quickly to the end of the basement and the passageway under the backyard. Captain Jones aimed his light at the stonework and nodded.

  “This looks pretty old,” he said.

  “But why was it built in the first place?” Nick asked.

  The captain shrugged. He had no answer for anything that the Perenais family did. They had lived on this hill for as long as River’s End existed, and rumors of their strange activities were legend before Meredith ever c
ame to town.

  With Jones’s flashlight, they walked much quicker through the narrow passage than they had the day before with candles, and soon they arrived in the crypt. Jenn unlocked the door and they filed through. The captain immediately walked to the coffin that dominated the room. While light from outside streamed in through the outer door, he still used his flashlight to look closely at the coffin and the plaque in front. He knelt and nodded.

  “This is Meredith’s husband,” he announced. “They used to call him the Pumpkin Man.”

  “Your uncle,” Kirstin whispered to Jenn.

  The captain reached out for one of the pumpkins and touched the greenish gray stub at its tip. The gourd was extremely large. “They look like someone picked them from a field,” he said. “But these aren’t real.”

  He wrapped his hand around the stub and lifted the top of the pumpkin off, stumbled backward when he saw what was inside. A thick black tuft of hair. Human hair.

  Jones gagged audibly for a second but then recovered. He took a deep breath and reached inside to grab the hair, which was attached to the blue-white skin of a forehead; foggy blue eyes forever open in death; a purpled and twisted nose and a slack mouth, yellowing teeth exposed in a silent scream. The ragged flesh of the severed neck looked almost black. The room filled with the reek of carrion.

  Kirstin screamed and looked away. Jenn shook her head and stifled a cry.

  Nick screwed up his nose and whispered, “What the fuck.”

  “Who is that?” Jenn whispered.

  “Erik Smith,” the captain said. “We found his body last month. Just not his head. I guess that mystery’s solved. We didn’t expect to look here.”

  Jones set the head back in the pumpkin and replaced the lid. Then he lifted the next lid and removed another grisly find. This one was female.

  “Teri Hawkins,” he said. “She was found dead in her basement a couple days ago. Or at least, the rest of her was found.”

  He lifted the last lid and pulled out a head topped with blond hair. The eyes looked frozen in fear. The nose was spotted with freckles of dried blood. The base of the neck still dripped fresh crimson.

  “Jesus Christ,” Nick whispered. Jenn hugged him, but she couldn’t take her eyes from that ghastly, silently screaming face.

  Kirstin screamed and fell to her knees.

  Brian.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  “The killings began again late last year, just before your aunt Meredith died,” Captain Jones said. “But the original Pumpkin Man murders go back more than twenty years. Things have been pretty quiet around here since then. Until recently.”

  He’d led the three of them back up from the basement and sent the coroner and the other two cops down to the crypt to take care of business. Jenn now sat between Kirstin and Nick, trying with gentle squeezes of her hands on their arms to comfort them both at the same time.

  “Why do you think it all started up again?” she asked. “Did the original killer get out of jail or something?”

  The captain shrugged. “I don’t know. The original Pumpkin Man killer was never officially tried and convicted . . . though a group of people here in town thought they had him taken care of.”

  “What do you mean?” Nick asked.

  “The original Pumpkin Man murders were a handful of kids back in the eighties,” Captain Jones said. “They disappeared over the course of four or five years, all around Halloween. Eventually, most of the bodies were found. They never did find the heads. What they did find were pumpkins.” His eyes took on a faraway look. “Pumpkins that were carved in the likenesses of those poor, sweet children. And those pumpkins were stained in blood.”

  “So, what happened?” Nick asked.

  “There was a man who used to set up a stand every year on a vacant lot in the middle of town,” Jones said. “He sold pumpkins there every October. For an extra charge, he’d carve them for you. And his carvings were like no other. I have never seen so much detail in a pumpkin face, before or since.”

  “That was my uncle, wasn’t it?” Jenn asked.

  The captain nodded.

  “The guy down at the general store said that my aunt used to be married to the Pumpkin Man.”

  Jones nodded again. “Yeah. They started calling him that pretty quickly. The first couple years he set up his stand, it was like a carnival. The kids couldn’t wait to go there after school to see the new face he’d created. He pretty much carved a new pumpkin every day throughout October and put it on display. Some of them were funny and others just . . . weird. I remember seeing pumpkins that looked like squirrels and dogs, and there was one that, somehow, he made look narrow and pointy enough that it actually resembled a bird. On Halloween, he’d unveil his ‘masterpiece’ of the year. That one was always scary—its long, slanty eyes lit by a candle inside and teeth that looked like they might just come alive to eat you.”

  The police captain smiled faintly, then continued. “One year, a local boy was reported missing on Halloween. They searched and searched but never found him. Eventually it was assumed that he’d been playing down by the estuary and was washed out to sea. River’s End was hit hard by that. We’re a tight-knit community here, and there’s nothing worse than losing a child.

  “The next year, another kid turned up missing. And the next year, another. And another.” Captain Jones eyed Jenn, Kirstin and Nick silently for a moment, his face clouded with sadness. “Then little Stevie Traskle disappeared.

  “One of the local kids reported that he’d seen the Pumpkin Man carve Stevie up right there behind the pumpkin stands. The police at the time took your uncle in for questioning, but they could never find enough evidence to convict him. The bodies they’d found at that point were so badly decomposed and eaten by fish that they could barely be identified, let alone provide any evidence of what or who killed them.” The police captain fell silent.

  “So, what happened to him?” Jennica asked.

  “Some people took it upon themselves to dole out justice. They kidnapped your uncle one night after dark and strung him up on the hill just outside of town. Nobody ever admitted to doing it, of course, and nobody looked too hard to find the lynch mob. But after that night there were no more disappearances. Not until last year.”

  “When exactly did it start up again?” Jenn asked.

  “Halloween,” the captain said. He shook his head. “I’ll never forget that call. Charlie Wilbert’s wife just kept crying into the phone saying, ‘He’s back. He’s come back.’ We had to drive out there to find what she was talking about. And when we did, we found Charlie. He was just sitting there, beer bottle in hand on the front porch, like he sat every night. Only, this time, his shirt was covered in his own blood and his head had been replaced . . .”

  Jones shook his head, his voice fading as if he couldn’t bear to say the words. Then: “The poor man’s head had been replaced by a pumpkin. And that pumpkin was carved in the likeness of his face. It was the best carving I’ve seen in twenty years. The best since the Pumpkin Man used to set up shop in that vacant lot. At Charlie’s feet was a pile of pieces gouged from the pumpkin. They were all stained in Charlie’s blood.”

  Jenn’s heart was beating a mile a minute.

  Captain Jones looked away from them for a minute before continuing. Then his voice began again. Quieter. “Not long after, we found Hank and Angel DeVries, both of them lying dead together in bed. I can’t tell you how disturbing it was to walk into that bedroom and see the two of them lying there, her in a nightshirt, him just in some boxers, both of them with a pumpkin on their pillows. Those pumpkins were smeared in blood and looked to be screaming.

  “I tried to convince myself it was a copycat killer,” he whispered. “There were a lot of differences from the original murders. For one thing, the original Pumpkin Man killer only killed children. For another, those kids’ bodies were disposed of, hidden. Though we found them eventually.”

  “Tried to convince yourse
lf?” Nick repeated. “So, you really believe deep down that this guy has come back from beyond the grave? Or do you think they killed the wrong guy?”

  The captain looked them each in the eye before he answered. “I think that the only man I’ve ever seen carve a pumpkin that realistically has been in his grave for more than twenty-five years. Still, the new murders continued. The third ‘new’ Pumpkin Man killing took place a month after the last. Also at night. Also an adult. This time it was Dave Traskle. Once again, the body was found without a head, with a pumpkin carved in such detail that it looked as if the face had been not so much cut into it as transferred.”

  “So the killer studied pumpkin carving,” Nick muttered.

  The captain’s lips pursed. “At the very least. And you might think this is simply some new nutjob with a twisted carving skill—except for one thing. The victims were parents of the kids killed twenty years ago.”

  “Them?” Jenn asked. “Why now, after so long?”

  “People have theories about the wait, but the why is easy,” Jones replied. “Revenge. Nobody looked too hard for the mob that hanged your uncle because they figured it was justice, maybe carried out the wrong way—or maybe exactly the right way. We always figured the people who killed the Pumpkin Man were the parents of the kids he’d murdered. So we all pretty much looked the other way.” His eyebrows hung low as he looked at them and shook his head in acceptance. “Yeah, I looked the other way, too. Mostly.”

  Jones pursed his lips and gathered his thoughts before continuing. “Well, somebody didn’t forget or look the other way. Somebody planned and schemed and worked for twenty years to bring your uncle back. And the bulk of that scheming probably happened right here in this room.”

  “What are you saying? You think my aunt raised him from the dead?” Jenn asked, incredulous.

  The captain’s face remained stoic. “I think she found some way to get revenge. I know you probably think that sounds ridiculous. But you haven’t lived in River’s End your whole life. You don’t know the things that have happened here. The things connected with this house, and your aunt’s husband’s family. People here avoided anyone named Perenais long before your aunt came to town.”