The Pumpkin Man

by John Everson

  He got bowls, the milk and a box, and he returned to the table to serve. They ate in silence. Jenn hadn’t realized how hungry she was until the sound of flakes hitting the bowl elicited a growl from her stomach.

  “What do you want to do today?” Nick finally asked.

  Jennica shrugged. “I was about to ask you the same thing. I’m pretty open.”

  “Well, I should go to work,” Nick said. “But I think I’m going to call in sick.”

  “Won’t you get in trouble?”

  “My roommate was killed, I think they’ll cut me some slack,” he said. “I should go over to see Brian’s mom, speaking of that. But first I can show you and Kirstin the lay of the land. Might as well know where you’re at if you’re going to be here a couple days.”

  “Speaking of which,” Jenn said, pushing the kitchen chair back. “She’s a slugabed by nature, but I can’t believe she’s asleep. Not after yesterday. I’m gonna go check.”

  She walked down the hall. The door to Brian’s room was half-open, so she pushed it a little wider and poked her head inside. The sheets and blanket were twisted in a rumpled mess halfway down the mattress, but Kirstin was not in the bed.

  Jenn looked around the room to confirm. There was no adjoining bath, so she couldn’t be there. The hall bathroom was empty, too. She poked her head into Nick’s bedroom. The bed there was still made, unslept in.

  Panic began to gnaw at her as she walked back through the living room to the kitchen. Only Nick’s expectant face greeted her.

  “She’s gone,” she announced.

  “Gone?” Nick said. His brow rose in puzzlement.

  “Gone,” Jenn repeated. “As in, Kirstin is not in this apartment.”

  “You checked the bathroom?”

  She nodded, but he got up and repeated the walk she’d just taken.

  “She probably just went for a walk,” he suggested as they returned to the kitchen.

  “But we’ve been awake for more than an hour,” she said. Her voice trembled.

  “Maybe she couldn’t get back into the building,” Nick suggested. “The front door locks. C’mon, let’s see if she’s waiting outside.”

  “She would have hit the buzzer,” Jenn argued.

  Nick shrugged. “She probably doesn’t remember my last name, which is the only one listed. She wouldn’t know which button to push.”

  Going to the door, he noted, “The door’s unlocked.”

  Jenn blinked. “Was it that way all night?”

  He shook his head. “I remember locking it after we came in.”

  They walked down the single flight of stairs to the foyer. Nick moved ahead of Jenn, pushing open the front door to look outside. But Jenn slowed and bent down as she saw something on the floor of the lobby.

  “Nick?” she called.

  He heard the fear in her voice. Stepping quickly back inside he said, “Don’t see her out there. What’s wrong?”

  But he knew before he finished. His eyes followed the index finger of Jenn’s right hand, which pointed to the corner. A pile lay atop a phone book near the mailboxes, triangles and thin slivers of pale pumpkin flesh. They looked smeared with something dark.

  “Oh my God,” Jenn whispered. “Please, no.”

  Holding a hand to her mouth, she dropped to her knees and picked up a piece of pumpkin. It was cool to the touch but damp. Nick knelt with her.

  “Why?” Jenn whispered. “Why is he doing this to us?”

  “This is insane,” Nick agreed. They stared at the pumpkin pieces for a couple minutes as Jenn cried, but he finally took her arm and pulled her up. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back upstairs.”

  “And do what?” Jenn asked.

  “Wait for her? Maybe this is only a warning. We didn’t find her body. She may still be alive.”

  Jenn shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “At least there’s some hope,” he offered, pulling her to the stairs. “We need to call the police.”

  Jenn laughed. “And what are you going to tell them—that someone we didn’t see kidnapped a girl who doesn’t live here and left behind a pile of pumpkin pieces in the lobby?”

  “Well, we could call the police in River’s End. They would know what to make of it.”

  “We’d call them for a crime in San Francisco?” Jenn asked. “Um, no. And the police here will just think we’re nuts. Or, worse, they’ll wonder if you’re cracking and confessing to killing your best friend. I think we’d spend the day being interrogated. Maybe they wouldn’t even let us go.”

  Nick led them back into his apartment. He made a point of carefully locking the door, but he didn’t say anything.

  “No, the police can’t help us,” Jenn continued. “We have to stop this ourselves.” She paused and shook her head. “Myself. This is my problem. It’s not yours.”

  “I’m going to help you, whatever you do,” Nick promised.

  “The best way you can help me is to take me back to River’s End. That’s where this all started, and I have a feeling that somehow, in my aunt’s house, is the way to make it end.”

  “We should at least look for Kirstin,” he suggested. “We should look around here. Be absolutely sure.”

  Jenn nodded, but she didn’t hold much hope. Her stomach boiled in a mix of horrible sadness and anger. The latter kept her going. For the moment, fury at whoever was taking all the people she loved trumped the emptiness of loss.

  “Let me take a quick shower and get dressed,” she announced. “Then we can take a look around. But I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”

  Nick nodded. “I’ll make a couple calls.”

  She turned to embrace him, squeezing him so tight he gasped. “You have to promise me one thing,” she begged.

  “What’s that?”

  “When we get to River’s End, you’ll drop me off, turn around and leave. Right away. I want you to stay away from me until this is all over. I couldn’t bear it if the Pumpkin Man took you, too.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I can’t believe you let them leave town,” Officer Barkiewicz complained. “They’re the only suspects we have!”

  It was Monday afternoon, the day after the murder of Brian Tamarack, and Scott Barkiewicz had parked himself in the captain’s office. He and the guys from County had gone over the house with a fine-tooth comb yesterday, and a special unit was in this morning going over it again. But he was clearly itching to get back to the house. And he apparently wanted some suspects to grill.

  The police captain sat back in his chair and smiled thinly. “I let them leave town because they didn’t do it.”

  “How do you know that?” Barkiewicz asked. “None of them are from here. They turn up suddenly in the center of a string of murders and end up smack-dab in the middle of one of them?”

  “With one of them as a victim?”

  “It could be a cover,” Barkiewicz retorted. “Maybe the circle is breaking. Maybe he was refusing to go along with things anymore and they had to get rid of him.”

  “What ‘things’?” Captain Jones asked. “Run some background checks on those four if you want, but I bet you’ll find they all have pretty ironclad alibis for the prior killings. They’re not who we’re looking for, Scott, trust me. And they’ll be back up here once we’ve finished with the house. I doubt those girls have any other place to go.”

  He fished a piece of paper from one of the piles that littered his desk and handed it over. “I’ll give you another ‘why, therefore.’ The tests on those skulls came back this afternoon. Positive IDs. It took more than twenty-five years, but we’ve finally got the missing heads from the Pumpkin Man murders—and a few unidentified heads to boot. I really doubt those kids have been hiding the evidence since before they were born. No, they didn’t make this situation, Scott. They got sucked into it.”

  Barkiewicz shook his head but didn’t say anything more. You only argued with your boss for so long. He wasn�
��t ready to cross the line yet.

  “I’ll do some background checking,” he agreed without enthusiasm; then he disappeared out of the captain’s office.

  Jones just smiled and nodded. A little research would keep the boy busy for a while.

  Scott Barkiewicz was green; a fresh export from Santa Rosa. While he’d lived just an hour away, he’d not grown up here. He hadn’t had the Pumpkin Man as a childhood boogeyman. He knew nothing of the long and shadowed history of the Perenais house. He hadn’t seen Meredith Perenais bring an officer back to life, and Jones wasn’t about to try to convince him that such a thing had happened . . . or even was possible. To Scott, the current string of murders would simply be the product of yet another twisted serial killer, a criminal the police could just stalk and hunt until he made a mistake and was captured.

  Barkiewicz probably dreamed of being the one to catch the Pumpkin Man, the cop who would no doubt uncover the psycho’s home populated with an array of deviant, macabre trophies even more disturbing than his leftover corpses, a home filled with heads used as planters or lamp stands or soup bowls. Or perhaps Scott imagined the killer creating horrid mobiles with the dangling features of his victims, gruesome toys of severed ears and noses, jaws and shriveled eyeballs. Every cop with a gut for catching the bad guys wanted to nail his Edward Gein to the wall, and they all would figure the Pumpkin Man was just another problem to be solved. The captain knew better.

  Jones had grown up in River’s End and lived here all his life. He knew that the stories about the Perenais house all had at least some degree of truth, and he had watched Meredith Murphy change after she moved here all those many years ago. The house did that to people—or at least the family in residence did. There was a darkness there that no sunlight could ever burn away, and it hadn’t taken very many years before that cheerfully naive Chicagoan gained a different reputation. And in his heart, Jones believed that Meredith had protected him over the years. After the incident with Patrick Donovan, Jones had run into plenty of other situations where life and death hung in the balance. And he’d always felt like something tipped the scale in his favor.

  He figured that something was Meredith.

  Over the years, Meredith Murphy had been acknowledged throughout the town as a true witch. She could help you in your life quests for a price, relying on rare herbs and other, more magical charms. Jones had watched her bring back life with her charms, but somewhere along the way, her magic grew darker, as things connected with the name Perenais always did. And there had been her husband.

  George Perenais had always been a quiet man, one of the last of his family line. People in River’s End treated him with deference because of his pedigree, but they’d considered him harmless. Even with his annual pumpkin display at Halloween he remained in the background, hidden behind the shelves until he needed to step up to the cash register. It was a mystery how he had ever connected with the likes of Meredith, a pretty, vivacious girl from Chicago, but after George married her, for a while the old women of the town began to speculate that perhaps the tides had finally turned, that the Perenais house had been washed clean by love.

  Then George’s pumpkin carvings began to grow more intricate.

  From the very first time he set up his stand, George had always created a few sample jack-o’-lanterns for display, carved throughout the month with sets of jagged teeth and slanted evil eyes. He’d always set them out on display with lit candles so that they flickered like distant bonfires. In October you could see at least a flicker of his work from almost every street in town, since River’s End was small and its homes staggered up a steep hill. Then, one year, it became apparent that George’s skill as a carver had drastically improved. His pumpkin faces looked more realistic than any creation of rind and blade should. And it wasn’t long after that when the disappearances began.

  That first year, it was a dog or cat; Jones couldn’t remember which. The pets were missed, but no one identified them carved into pumpkin flesh. But the next year, a child disappeared. Billy Hawkins. His body was never found. Some thought it creepy that one of Perenais’s screaming pumpkins seemed to bear a strange resemblance to the boy.

  If any had suspicions that year, they had more the next, as once again a child disappeared. And the next season saw another. And then another. For the remote town of River’s End, the creepy fun began to change to creepy fear. Should parents let their kids trick-or-treat? Curfews were enforced, and the streets grew quieter after seven p.m. than ever before. And then the Traskle boy disappeared. But this time, not without a witness.

  The phone rang and Jones picked it up.

  “Hi, Captain? This is Officer Priestly, up at the Perenais house. We were wondering if you might stop up here for a few minutes. We’ve got a bit of a situation.”

  Priestly elaborated, and the captain shook his head. “Already?” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

  Captain Harlan Jones pushed memory aside, hung up the phone and grabbed his keys.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Golden Gate Bridge loomed like a mechanical monster through a cloud bank that could have hidden an army. Jenn could barely see the orange steel arches stretching through the gray fog that obscured nearly all of San Francisco Bay and the north and west ends of the city. The mist had the effect of making you feel entombed, alone, abandoned. Not that Jenn needed help feeling those things.

  “Hopefully this will clear when we get up the coast a bit,” Nick said. “Nice thing about San Francisco is, if you drive a few miles in any direction, you’ll end up in a different season.”

  “I hope so,” Jenn said, shivering as he made the turn and drove onto the bridge. She hugged herself in the seat of his blue Dodge Challenger and tried to see out the window, but the gray was all around them. It made her claustrophobic, though a stream of cars whizzed by on the other side of the bridge and the steel suspension cables slipped by in an oscillating blur. There might not be any lonelier place in the world than the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog.

  Then they were across, passing a lookout station and entering a tunnel through the center of a small hill. And while the landscape seemed just as gray on the other side, Nick promised it would change.

  “We’re going inland on 101,” he said. “Just lie back and close your eyes. When you wake up, it’ll all be better.”

  She followed his instructions, but instead of sleeping she thought of Kirstin. They’d fought over boyfriends (Kirstin always won). They’d gotten hired (amazingly) at the same school, and laughed together at the administrators. And then they’d gotten fired and lost their apartment on the same day. They’d shared so much, and she’d told Kirstin everything. Kirstin was sister, confessor, protector and the devil on her shoulder. How could she ever replace her? How could she ever forget?

  Jenn opened her eyes and saw that some of the fog had lifted. The gray sky belched anemic light down on them and lent the surrounding hills a vague, disinterested glow.

  “Do you think he put Kirstin’s head in the crypt like the others?” she asked suddenly.

  Nick looked sideways at her. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “I suppose it would give us proof that she’s really gone if he did.”

  “That’s not the kind of proof I want to find,” Jenn whispered.

  “Of course not,” he said. Then he realized: “If she’s okay and wandering around San Francisco somewhere, she can’t get back into the apartment since she doesn’t have a key.”

  “She has my cell phone number,” Jenn said. “She’d call.”

  “She didn’t take her phone.”

  “She could find a phone,” Jenn said. “But face it: she’s not going to call because she’s not there anymore. Not among the living, anyway.”

  Nick didn’t answer. There just wasn’t anything else to say.

  The highway slowly changed, crawling first through populated urban sprawl, then curving through wide-open fields, the rocky outcrops of low hills rising i
n the distance. Nick left the 101 and took increasingly less populated roads, and at last Jenn saw the now-familiar signpost at the outskirts of her new hometown. River’s End.

  They wound up the steep incline, and she hopped out to open the gate at the bottom of the driveway of her aunt’s house. Correction: her house. Then they were driving up to it and staring at the two police cruisers out front.

  “End of the line,” Nick said, putting the car in park.

  “In more ways than one,” Jenn murmured.

  They exited the car and stretched, and then they walked up the short front path. She ducked an X of yellow police tape and stepped up to the door she’d already keyed open and shut enough times to feel like this was home. Feeling funny, she rang the doorbell. She didn’t want to get arrested for screwing up an investigation, even if she was just entering her own home.

  A tall, thin man opened the wooden door. Jenn explained who she was, and he looked a little stressed when he realized she intended to come inside. He pushed a pair of thin silver glasses up a long hook of a nose.

  “Can you just wait a minute? I need to check in,” he begged. Then he stepped back, pulled a cell phone from his pocket and talked in a low voice for a couple minutes before hanging up and forcing a smile. “The captain will be up in just a few minutes, if you could just wait out here . . .” And with that, he closed the door and disappeared. Off to search for more blood and gore, no doubt.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Nick suggested. He took Jenn’s hand, and they walked around toward the back of the house.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked. They were following the path to the cemetery.

  Nick shrugged. “I dunno. They’re all focused on the house and the basement, but there’s something about the cemetery that creeps me out. I have to think it’s a part of all this.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “The graveyard is definitely a part of this.”

  “It’s more than just the fact that it’s connected to that tunnel,” Nick continued. They stepped under a rusting black metal arch and entered a small plot of gravestones. “There’s just something especially weird about this place. It creeps me out. If we’re going to believe in things coming back from the dead . . .”