The Pumpkin Man

by John Everson

  The first hour slipped by quickly, the high point being the setting sun. Out here, the sky seemed to slip from bright blue to black in a matter of minutes, but several of those minutes were beautiful.

  Scott saw the lights go on in the house, and then the yard became too dark to see much beyond the porch and front door. He was tired. Coffee or not, it had been a long, stressful week, and the hillside town of River’s End was nothing if not a perfect dose of natural Sominex. The fries diminished, and the remainder grew cold. The breeze whispered dreams of the moonlit ocean across his face.

  Scott leaned back and stared up the hill at the entrance to Jennica’s house. He had watched with some interest a few minutes before as Emmaline Foster got in a car and drove away. He’d ducked down as she passed, and he believed she hadn’t caught a glimpse of him. But why had she been here?

  The question kept him awake for the next couple hours, long after the lights in the house clicked off. But curiosity wasn’t enough. The faint rush of the waves told him to sleep, and presently he did.

  Not long after, a dark shape moved past his quiet car. A moonlit shadow dipped across the sleeping officer’s face, but instead of moving closer, it moved away, as if somehow satisfied by Scott’s unconscious state. Behind the figure bled a long trail of darkness, shadowy tentacles suggesting malformed legs and arms, and the round blob at the end of one long arm suggested the shadow of a pumpkin.

  Captain Jones tossed and turned in his bed across town. His dreams were filled with images of Meredith Perenais kissing a dead man back to life. He saw her dancing beneath a rain of blood, and laughing as she danced and stripped off her dark-stained clothes, dropping first her blouse and bra to the mud and then kicking off her skirt before disappearing into a grove filled with jack-o’-lantern scowls.

  Blood thunder cracked overhead and the wicked grins went on and on, thousands of pumpkin smiles. They were laughing and threatening to bite. Flames lit their orange pumpkin skin fangs like hellfire, and those mouths slowly opened and closed, laughing at him. Jones backed away from the flickering smiles, but those teeth only crept closer, floating dangerously through the dark like burning ghosts.

  Travis Lupe felt something. The hair on his arms stood on end, and inside . . . inside he could feel pain. Not his own, though. He felt the life of someone else being drained. It was like being a voyeur to a murder, only he couldn’t really see the act. He lay awake in the dark and felt his body react, and knew that something was happening somewhere near. Something bad. Something related to the Pumpkin Man.

  He stayed awake for a long time, staring at the tree branch shadows swaying across his ceiling. Eventually, the phantom burning faded in his brain and his eyes closed and acquiesced to a troubled sleep. But behind that he knew he had to take action. He just wasn’t sure how yet.

  Something woke Jennica. She had a sense of something moving in the house, a clattering, some kind of noise. Struggling her way up from a heavy sleep, she rolled over in bed and reached out instinctively for Nick, automatically expecting him to be there. How easily that had come.

  She found his shoulder, cold to the touch above the sheets. He responded, slipping his arm beneath the covers and around her waist.

  “I had a dream you were gone and I was all alone,” she murmured.

  His hand rubbed her lower back and he said, “Well, I’m here now.”

  “Is it going to be okay?” she whispered.

  “Everything will be fine,” he promised. “Just sleep.”

  Moments later she did.

  In her basement, far away from the others of the town, Emmaline Foster lay bloodless and cold, her newly carved pumpkin face staring up in toothless rapture at the mummified remains of her long-dead husband. The last of the Perenais family blood soaked into the earth around her. The air hummed with the power of her ancestors. Whether they laughed or cried was hard to tell.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SIX

  Scott woke to the sound of the police radio bleeping in his car. When he leaned forward to answer, the light of the sun blinded him. Instead of grasping the receiver, he batted it away and had to wipe tears from his eyes before he could open them again to find it.

  “Yeah,” he finally answered, thumbing the responder.

  “Didja get eight hours, or only six?” the captain’s voice asked.

  “Maybe three,” Scott admitted.

  Jones laughed tiredly. “Well, thank God you protected those kids. Can you see from there if they’re up and around?”

  Scott blinked away the last of his tears and stared at the Perenais house. Nothing moved.

  “Negative,” he answered.

  “Well, go on up and give them a morning check-in. Then get over to Emmaline Foster’s house as fast as you can. We just got a call that something’s up over there.”

  “‘Up’ how?” Scott asked.

  “Her neighbor was out walking the dog and said she saw a stack of pumpkin pieces piled on her stoop.”

  “Oh shit,” Scott breathed.

  “That’s what I said. Make sure those kids are all right and get down the hill. I’ll meet you over there in ten.”

  Scott opened the car door and levered himself out of the seat with an abundance of groans. He wiped a french fry from a fold of his shirt and stretched with his hands pressed against the hard-shell top of his car; then he walked up and knocked on the door of Jennica’s house.

  Nick answered, eyes still swollen with sleep.

  “Just wanted to make sure you guys were good,” Scott explained. “Going off watch.”

  Nick nodded slowly, looking more drunk than conscious, and closed the door without saying a word. It was always nice when people were grateful.

  Captain Jones was waiting when Scott pulled up in front of Emmaline Foster’s bungalow. Before Scott put his car in park, the captain was out of his cruiser and on the porch. Scott got out and hurried up the walk.

  “She hasn’t answered the doorbell,” the captain announced. A pile of pumpkin fragments was strewn across the porch near his feet.

  “Give her a minute.”

  Jones shook his head. “I rang and went back to the car before you got here.”

  “Oh,” Scott said. “Maybe she went to the store.” He really didn’t want anyone else to be dead.

  Jones nodded at the side of the house. “Car’s in the garage,” he said. “I looked.”

  “Maybe . . . she went for a morning walk?”

  “We’re going in,” Jones said.

  “Without a warrant or an order?” Scott asked. “Are you crazy?”

  “If I’m right, nobody’s going to even think to question us.”

  “What if you’re not?”

  The captain sighed. “You know I am.”

  As Scott held the outer screen door off his superior’s back, Jones pulled out a skeleton key and began working on the front door. The lock gave easily, and Jones pushed the door open. The house was quiet and shadowed, but enough morning light filtered into the hallway that he could see the pumpkin piece that lay just a few feet away near the baseboard. He walked over and picked it up, and he rubbed his thumb across the warty orange skin. When he held it up, it was coated in red.

  “She’s dead,” he whispered.

  “You don’t know that,” Scott growled.

  “Yes,” Jones said. “Yes, I do.”

  They made their way down the hallway from the kitchen to the bedrooms and confirmed quickly that Emmaline’s bed had not been slept in. “The basement door’s open,” Scott pointed out as they walked back.

  The captain knelt down to stare at the white vinyl tile of the kitchen floor in front of it. “And there’s blood here,” he announced.

  They found Emmaline two minutes later, after gingerly navigating the basement steps. When Jones saw her abused body stretched out nude on the mud floor, head missing and replaced by a face carved in a pumpkin shell, he almost threw up. Nobody in town had ever seemed to care for Emmaline Perenais Foster, yet s
he was one of them. And she was a Perenais, which really made things confusing.

  “Who’s next?” was all he could think to say.

  Only a few seconds after that, he finally grasped that there was a man’s body hanging from the ceiling. Jones looked at the horrified expression of the man, and at the marbles that had replaced the dead man’s eyes. Still, there was no mistaking who he had been.

  “Holy shit,” he breathed.

  “What?”

  “This is Harry,” Jones explained. “Harry Foster. I’m sure he helped lynch the Pumpkin Man—er, Emmaline’s brother George—all those years ago. He was the first one of the mob to die, but not from murder. Someone dug him up and moved him here. Was it Emmaline? It must have been.”

  “That’s fucked-up,” Scott whispered.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Just do me a favor and call the coroner,” Jones muttered.

  After Scott ran up the stairs to comply, the captain stared at Emmaline’s body. He shook his head and whispered, “I can’t believe they took you, too.” He glanced at the ghastly expression of the mummified Harry and then at the blood that soaked like dark water into the earth around Emmaline’s neck. “What did you do with her head?” he whispered to no one in particular.

  When Scott’s feet clattered back down the stairs, Jones was leafing through the Book of Shadows on the small table near where Emmaline died. He couldn’t read any of it, but his fingers were drawn to shuffle through the pages, what with its strange words and symbols. As he did, he felt a tight spot clutch at his chest. The book frightened him to the core.

  “You sure Jennica Murphy and her boyfriend were okay?” he murmured.

  “Yeah,” Scott said. “Well, I talked to Nick, not Jenn. But he seemed fine.”

  “Go home and get some sleep.”

  “Huh?” Scott looked puzzled.

  Jones shook his head and grimaced. “You slept through last night. Tonight I want you up there and alert. You’re keeping an eye on them again, and this time I’d like you to actually stay awake.”

  The rookie scowled but didn’t have an answer for that. He skulked away to another corner of the basement, ostensibly looking for clues, but Jones knew he was just embarrassed.

  Jones didn’t waste the opportunity. He picked up the book and walked with it up the stairs. With a quick look behind to make sure that Scott wasn’t following, he walked to the squad car and opened the door, slipping the book into the empty glove compartment. He had a feeling that the book might be valuable, though not to the police. This was something outside of law and order. Scott could stake out the old Perenais place as much as he wanted; he wasn’t going to be of any use to the people inside. This was a matter of the spirit.

  He hoped that the book would be of use to Jennica Murphy. Because hers was the soul that was in danger.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SEVEN

  “Friday I’m in Love.”

  The notes sounded from where her cell phone was perched just around the corner, where it sat on a small table, plugged into the wall while she was in the shower. Jennica grinned as she wiped the soap from her forehead and hummed along. The song hadn’t reflected much about her personal life until recently, but it always made her smile. At the moment, though, she wondered who was calling. Nick was here. Kirstin was gone. And so was virtually everyone else in her life. Since she’d come to River’s End, her phone hadn’t exactly leaped out of its cradle with messages. Jenn had never had a large posse of friends.

  After a few repeated croons from The Cure’s Robert Smith, the bedroom went quiet again. Jenn’s brow wrinkled as she pressed her face into the warm spray, rubbing her palms up and down her waist and thighs, speeding up what had begun as a lazy shower because now she was really curious. Who was calling her? And why?

  She was just in the process of rinsing the last conditioner out of her hair when the faint but unmistakable ringtone began again.

  “What the hell?” she said, and in three bars had turned around and killed the shower. But rather than just dashing out to answer, she grabbed a towel to soak up the worst of the water before she slipped across the floor.

  Even as she toweled her face and arms dry, the phone quit its jaunty anthem and was silent once again. Jenn made a face and finished drying herself off. Who needed to reach her so bad?

  She toweled off her legs and stepped into the bedroom to pick up the phone. As soon as she thumbed the thing on, the red message text glowed on the screen.

  Jenn clicked the button, dialing into her voicemail, and the message light went off. She keyed in her password and hit the pound key, and then her curious smile turned to worry as a familiar voice filled her ear.

  “Jennica,” the man said. “This is Captain Jones. I have some news for you that I’d really rather not tell you over the phone. Please call me.”

  He left a string of numbers, but she didn’t have a pen. However, Jenn knew the phone could dial him back automatically so she wasn’t worried. She saved his message so the next could begin.

  This one she had a hard time fathoming, though she recognized the voice immediately. Sister Beatrice from Holy Name.

  “Jennica,” the nun said. “We hope you’re having a good summer. We’d like to talk to you about coming back to school this fall. It looks like enrollment is up, and we need good teachers who care about their students. Teachers like you.”

  The sister offered a callback number, which Jennica still knew by heart. It was the switchboard number at the front office of Holy Name High.

  She thumbed the phone off and set it down. “What the fuck,” she said aloud. “You can stab me in the back for no reason, and then you think you can just call me up and have me come back no questions asked?”

  Ignoring Sister Beatrice’s message, she skipped back to the entry from Captain Jones and hit the callback command. A moment later, the heavy voice of River’s End’s top cop filled her ear.

  “Captain Jones,” he announced.

  “Jennica Murphy,” she responded, answering his formality with her own.

  His voice softened. “Hello, Jenn,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Okay,” she replied. “You called?”

  “Yeah,” he said. There was a pause. “I wanted to tell you about something. And . . . I have something for you. Something that I hope will be useful.”

  “Should I come down to the station?” Jenn asked.

  “No,” he answered. “I’ve got to make some stops first, so I’ll come up to you. Will you be home in twenty minutes?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Twenty minutes? Maybe she wouldn’t blow-dry her hair today.

  She got dressed and entered the living room. Nick was already there, sprawled back on the couch, reading an old book. She could see the flakes of yellowed paper falling like dandruff on his black T-shirt.

  “Did you know there used to be these crazy devil worshippers who would cut the hearts out of women while they were still beating and feed them to their lovers?” he asked, looking up in amazement.

  “Yeah, and they used to have sex on other people’s bones,” she said. “People are fucked-up.”

  “And apparently always have been,” he said. “Who called?”

  She told him about the messages.

  He nodded. “Are you going to go back to Chicago?”

  Jenn didn’t answer right away. She thought about growing up there and of winters sledding through the hills of the forest preserve over a hillside of brush-ridden ice. She thought of her acquaintances, the teachers she’d talked to in the lounge at Holy Name, and of the people she’d said hello to every day coming and going from her apartment. Most of all she thought about Kirstin, and about the things they’d done together; especially the things Kirstin had guilted her into doing—and that she’d grudgingly enjoyed.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  A knock came on the door a short while later. Jennica answered, and she wasn’t surprised to se
e the heavy face of Captain Jones on the other side.

  “Mind if I come in?” he asked.

  She opened the door wider and ushered him in. The captain paused when he saw Nick still seated on the couch, but she calmed his concerns.

  “It’s okay,” she said, picking up on his reaction. “He’s with me in all of this now. We’ve both lost someone.”

  Jones paused, nodding, as if assessing how he was going to address both of them. Finally he looked at Jennica and said, “Your uncle’s sister Emmaline was found this morning.”

  “Found?” Jenn repeated.

  “Yes. Someone called when they saw . . . when they saw a pile of pumpkin fragments on her porch as they left for work this morning. They called her house but no one answered. Knowing what’s been going on around here they called us. We found her in the basement.”

  “And Emmaline’s head . . . ?” Jenn prompted.

  Jones sighed. “Missing.” He offered up an old book he’d been holding. “This was in her basement, next to where her husband was hung from a rope.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nick offered from the couch as Jenn blanched but gingerly accepted the book. “Wasn’t her husband—?”

  Jones nodded. “Dead these past twenty years. You want to feel your skin crawl?” he asked. “Go into some woman’s basement some time to discover her headless corpse and find a naked, mummified body of a guy you last saw alive when your hair wasn’t gray.”

  The captain paused, realizing the deceased was Jennica’s relative, if only through marriage, and he quickly apologized.