Past The Patch

by Brian Fatah Steele

  “So he sets up office as a country abortionist—”

  “And the babies are supposed to come back to haunt anybody who trespasses—”

  “Stop! I’ve heard enough. He must be doing some farming now, otherwise, where’d all these pumpkins come from?”

  “I dunno, they must grow wild. Creepy stuff, eh?”

  “Just nightmares or rumors, made-up stories meant to scare kids from having sex, and in this case, ‘cause of the abortionist slant, getting pregnant and all that. Kind of a gruesome safe sex message, don’t you think? And isn’t that what all horror stories made primarily for kids are up to, anyway?

  Just like in the movies, if you’re a teenager and you have sex, the boogyman’s gonna get you—ooooOOOOOoooo, I’m soooo frightened.” With whiplash precision, she shifted her attitude from mockingly scared to salaciously seductive, easily distracting him. “Danny, oh, Danny, bab-eeeee...” She purred the last syllable, long and languid. She grabbed his crotch, squeezing hard, whispering something nasty and oh-so-enticing in his ear. As his penis turned to steel, his brain turned to mush.

  Having gotten his attention, she let go and backed away. “You gonna help me get a perfect pumpkin from this patch or not?”

  “What about my—”

  “Later, big boy, when we’re out of range of any sexually oppressed boogymen disguised as abortionist farmers.”

  Danny Cruise peered out at the fog-mottled field, wispy tendrils like plumes of thickening smoke eerily weaving through the pumpkins, looking like a congregation of ghosts…or a herd of monstrous beasts lashing the pumpkins with writhing tentacles; his imagination sprang back to life with a potency that unnerved him while coinciding with the deflation of his penis.

  Melinda Harner, his girlfriend, folded her arms across her burgeoning bosom, trying to fend off the October chill. She peered at him, obstinate in her quest to obtain the perfect pumpkin. Now that she had spotted what she claimed was the most perfect pumpkin for miles around, in which she would carve the winner in the school contest, something that brought a wee bit of fame in a small town like Bloomfield, she was dead set on obtaining this pumpkin, and only this pumpkin. No other pumpkin would suffice.

  Danny hopped over the barbed-wire fence, ragged metal tips ripping two fingers; he winced, put the stinging fingers in his mouth, and sprinted toward the fog-embraced pumpkin patch.

  “Which one did you want?” His voice seemed not to carry, trapped in the puffy white shroud of fog. But it did carry, and she responded

  “There,” Melinda harrumphed, pointing to his right at the perfect pumpkin, she thought, for her to carve a masterpiece. Her voice hit Danny with the force of a thunderclap; goosebumps tickled his flesh.

  After having heard about the fat, perfect pumpkins in this patch, as well as the sordid recent history of the farm via whispers in the hallways at Lincoln High, anxiously retold by Danny mere minutes ago, Melinda knew she had to check it out. Her nature was competitive and she was always looking for that special edge. If this patch actually had the perfect pumpkin she coveted, she knew the edge would be hers. No horror stories were going to stand in her way.

  “Here,” he said, pointing at one of the dozen or so seemingly perfect, unblemished pumpkins in the direction she had pointed. How could she even tell the difference?

  “No, there,” she bellowed, the volume almost knocking him over again. It was cold and he was tired and if he didn’t really love her, he’d already be anywhere but here with a space heater melting his icy flesh and thawing out his freezing blood.

  Without speaking, he pointed, and she shook her head, yes--thank God! He pulled out his switchblade and cut the coarse vine, trying to disengage the pumpkin. After a brief struggle, he was victorious, but noticed that he’d smeared blood all over the ragged stem. He assumed it was from his still bleeding fingers, not inclined to inspect it any further.

  He plucked it from its roost, amazed by its weight. It was about as big as a slightly super-sized basketball, not huge, but its heft made his arms ache. She better be really appreciative for this, he thought, and ran back to the fence. He handed the pumpkin to her so he could hop over the fence again.

  “Careful, it’s heavy,” he said, as he put it in her eager hands. She grunted and agreed.

  “Damn! For its size, that’s gotta be the heaviest pumpkin I’ve ever felt.”

  Danny braced himself and leaped, this time with even less grace, catching his foot and plopping down hard on his butt. Melinda laughed at his awkward predicament. He frowned at her.

  “What? I do this favor for you and you laugh at me now, ‘cause I’m cold and tired and--”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead as he brushed the weeds out of his hair and clothes.

  “Carry this, would’ya?” More insistent than requesting, already handing him the pumpkin.

  “I’m just your slave—”

  “Slave to my beguiling charms.” She put on the act, puppy dog eyes and pouting lips on full display.

  They started the two-mile trek back into town, their pace brisk, trying to keep warm.

  “It’s probably cursed, probably why I tripped up going over the fence.”

  “You’re just clumsy. There’s no curse for takin’ a pumpkin. No dead babies gonna haunt you. I’m just gonna carve a winner out of this one.”

  “That stuff is true. I mean, all that about Dr. Ranier doing abortions and stuff.” He put his fingers in his mouth again, balancing the pumpkin against his chest. Apparently the cuts were deeper than he’d thought, and continued to bleed profusely.

  They both fell silent for a handful of minutes, purposeful strides taking over as the night grew even colder. The overcast skies portended rain and they just wanted to make it home before it started.

  And then Danny stumbled, dropping the pumpkin. Not hard, catching it before it really hit the ground, but enough to have it land with a leaden thump on the dirt.

  “Damn it, klutz! Do you need walking lessons or what?” Melinda was beside herself with anger, squatting to inspect the pumpkin. All this for naught, she thought; all this for naught.

  “Shit, Melinda. It’s not like I meant to--”

  “You bleedin’ on it?”

  “Yeah, cut my finger on the fence, bled on the stem…” Melinda scooted away from the pumpkin, inexplicably alarmed.

  “How can that be? The pumpkin’s got blood comin’ from inside.” They both watched as a thin line of blood trickled from a miniscule crack towards the bottom, where it had hit the ground. The red liquid pooled in the dirt.

  “T-That’s impossible,” she said. “Can’t be any blood comin’ from inside a pumpkin, only pumpkin, seeds and all. You must have bled a lot more than you thought,” she said, forcing a smile, obviously in denial of what she was witnessing. More blood seeped from the crack.

  Danny pulled out his switchblade and approached the pumpkin. He knelt before it, not really sure what he was going to do, but feeling safer with the knife in his hand.

  “Danny?”

  With suddenness, curiosity took over, and he plunged the knife into the thick hide of the pumpkin. Blood gushed out, mixed with another unknown fluid that diluted the crimson tide, along with stringy pumpkin guts and pumpkin seeds, spattering the dirt and his shoes. He pried with the knife and his fingers, pulling the pumpkin apart.

  “Oh, Christ!” He moaned in revulsion at what he saw.

  Melinda squealed, “What is it, Danny? What is it? ” The pumpkin had split wide open like a cracked egg. Danny jumped to his feet, hands dripping wet. An intolerable stench was belched from within the split pumpkin, forcing him to cover his face with his sleeve, while Melinda openly retched, dry and empty. She was on her feet as well, fingers digging crescents into Danny’s arms. He didn’t feel a thing. They both just stared in horror and disgust.

  Within the womb of the pumpkin, entwined within a network of ripped veins, a ruptured clear sac, and pumpkin guts and seeds, two large yellow eyes, like jaun
diced moons and devoid of pupils, attempted to blindly seek out the source of intrusion. It probably did not see them, thought Danny, as his stomach roiled like a fist-sized hurricane, battering his insides.

  It was a fetus, a mutation of inconceivable ugliness borne of nightmares and rumors and curses made real.

  “Oh my God, Danny… Danny! ” Melinda cringed, teetering on hysterical.

  The obscenity, skin stained with blood but otherwise as orange as a healthy pumpkin, turned itself in the direction of Melinda’s voice, the tiny holes where ears should be steering it in her direction, their direction.

  Gurgling noises emanated from its throat, wet sounds and orange spittle passing by its lipless slit of a mouth.

  “We need to go-- now! ” Melinda, beside herself, doing a nervous dance of desperation: she wanted away from here posthaste…or sooner!

  “Wait,” Danny said. “I think it’s trying to…say something.” Melinda pulled harder on Danny’s arm, afraid to leave without him, the night and clouds and vast darkened landscape uninviting despite her urgency to run as far away from here as possible.

  “C’mon! Let’s go! ”

  The sound that rose from the baby’s mouth unhinged the muscles in Danny’s legs. He slumped to the ground, transfixed by the fetal abomination squirming and convulsing and hideously alive within the pumpkin. Melinda tumbled with him, but not for long. He scrambled to his feet and dragged her to hers, his feet pounding the dirt like a chorus of hammers, matching the freight train rhythm of his heart; his swiftness almost lifted Melinda into the air as one would a kite. The utterance, repeated again and again, insistent, scarred the night with its cawing message, resonant and haunting, cursing both of their ears forever.

  One word, only one, but Danny and Melinda would remember it until the day they died.

  “Daddy,” it screeched, it begged.

  “Daddy!”

  THE WITCH OF MISTLETOE LANE

  Court Ellyn

  Court Ellyn began writing historical fiction when she was 14, but her interests gradually shifted toward the fantastical. Today, she primarily writes character-driven fantasy. Her fiction has appeared in Kaleidotrope, A Fly In Amber, Silver Blade, and the anthology Explorers: Beyond the Horizon (look for it Winter, 2011). Between dragon dens and battlefields strewn with otherworldly foes, she administrates the LegendFire Creative Writing Community at www.legendfire.com. This story is her first foray outside the fantasy genre.

  ***

  Every autumn, the clatter of leaves somersaulting along sidewalks reminds me of the October I met the witch. The small southern town of Saint Claire didn’t have a lot to boast about but the worst football team in the county, the annual watermelon festival, and Ag shows that brought the fattest pigs and beefiest steers to Main Street, where they showed their appreciation by crapping in front of the cafe, the antique store, and the True Value hardware that still sold hard candy from glass jars. Unbeknownst to the folks outside our insular world, Saint Claire had its very own witch, too.

  Mothers all over town scared the devil out of us kids every time they warned us to steer clear of the rickety old house that lurked on Mistletoe Lane. My own mother joined the hype. “Colton, you leave that place alone. I see you anywhere near it, I’ll bust your hide.” To which I inevitably replied, “But why, Mama?” She’d only respond with the look that meant, “You better do as I say.”

  The first time I found myself outside the witch’s gate was a complete accident. Jimmy Harden and I rode our bikes to the cow pond on his grandpa’s place, hoping the fish liked the taste of the grubs on our hooks.

  They did, as it turned out, so we kept tossing our lines in till almost dusk.

  Realizing the time, we tied our stringers full of half-grown bass to our handlebars and hustled back to town. We were in such a hurry to avoid a whooping for being late to dinner that we turned one street too soon. Jimmy hit his brakes; his back tire left a black streak that must’ve been a mile long before he came to a stop. Pulling up alongside him, I stared in horror at the crumbling gingerbread house. I’d only ever seen it from the corner, in passing, as Mom hit the gas to get through the intersection fast as she could.

  Now that I was getting a good look at the place, I decided she’d been right all those years. It was a wonder anyone could live there at all. The house was scary as hell, staring back at us in the manner of Hamlet’s skull, pondering our demise. Weeds grew thick as jungles inside the leaning picket fence, and a pair of arborvitaes hid the front façade like hands thrown over a face too hideous to endure. White paint scrolled from the eaves, the wood underneath dry and gray. A couple of upper story windows boasted holes big enough for birds to fly through. The whole place reeked of cat piss.

  To me, the creepiest part were the tattered Halloween decorations left over from years past. Though it was June, plastic jack o’ lanterns lined the walk to the front door. They used to be orange, but had faded in the southern sun to a whitish yellow, just like skulls of beheaded children. One of those ridiculous “crashed witches” was nailed to a giant catalpa tree near the rusted mailbox. Her broom had lost its broomcorn and was just a plastic stick that made a likely perch for blue jays. On the front gate hung a weather-beaten sign that read “The Witch Is In.”

  Scared the witch might be watching, I backhanded Jimmy in the shoulder. “Let’s get outta here.”

  Jimmy grinned in a way that said he was contemplating mischief and swept up a chunk of gravel from the ditch.

  “No, man!” I cried.

  He chunked it with his Little League arm; it sailed right through a window. Clink, clink, crash, went the glass.

  We hightailed it for home, scared out of our minds and exhilarated at the same time, but Jimmy soon came to regret chucking that rock. The next week, his dad fell off a roof and broke his spine. He’s been in a wheelchair ever since. Then Jimmy came down with appendicitis that nearly killed him before his mom got him to the hospital. We never openly blamed these things on the witch or told our parents about the rock he threw, but he and I knew. That was when we were nine or ten.

  The autumn I met the witch in person, I was thirteen, suffering through the tortures of Junior High and wet dreams about Elizabeth McDuffy, the Freshman cheerleader with green eyes and hair the color of autumn itself. It was Saturday afternoon, and the week before Halloween. A handful of jocks led by our star running back, Trev Reynolds, were conducted the yearly cat round-up. It was an unspoken tradition. Though all of us Saint Claireans knew about it, we openly denied its existence. For the whole month of October, the town’s cat lovers locked their pets indoors to protect them from the annual purging. It was the vagrant alley cats and their unwanted litters that satisfied the grotesque human desire for destruction.

  Me and Jimmy, along with Adam Laughton and Tyrone Banks, weren’t invited to take part. The secret ritual belonged to the cool older guys, not green, virginal junior high boys. We could only stand back and watch Randy Tillman’s black pickup truck painted with orange flames roar past just like a dragon. Piled into the cab and in the bed, our heroes hollered and cussed and displayed their trophy: another plastic grocery sack writhing with an irate cat.

  All we had was our bikes, bigger and better ones now that we were older, but we were still unable to catch up. At Jimmy’s urging, we tried. We pumped those peddles as fast as our scrawny legs could go. Our war cries sounded less inspiring, because our voices were cracking and we kept choking on the dust kicked up in the pickup’s blazing wake.

  Out on county line road, Tyrone hit a pothole and flipped over his handlebars. We stopped to shovel him off the asphalt. “Ah, hell, Ty,” Adam complained. “We’ll never catch ‘em now.”

  Tyrone’s hands were bleeding, so was a gash on his leg where he’d caught the jagged edge of a peddle. He groaned and cussed, and Jimmy said,

  “Shut up. I hear something.”

  We listened. Rrreeeeow! A cat in distress!

  Up ahead, the road crossed Tallulah Creek. A dirt
trail, no more than twin lines of red earth veered off from the main road and plunged out of sight. We tossed our bikes off the road and followed it to the creek bank.

  Tyrone hobbled fast as he could, dragging his bleeding left leg. Randy’s black truck crouched at the end of the trail, silent and sleeping. The jocks clustered under the bridge, struggling with a manic beast. Rrreeeeow! it shrieked. The bridge amplified the protest. I imagined a creature the size of a panther, but when hunters tugged the rope and hoisted up the noose, all I saw was an ordinary alley cat, orange and white. Her teets were heavy. She had babies somewhere. Jimmy, Adam, and Tyrone cheered with the big guys as the cat kicked and scratched at the noose around her neck. I watched, mesmerized and feeling like I might throw up. The cat was so scared it dropped feces, and the big guys jumped back, squalling and cussing as if the cat had done it as a purposeful act of revenge.

  It was then that a couple of the jocks noticed us and chased us down.

  Trev Reynolds grabbed me and Tyrone by the scruff. Joey Osborn, the coach’s son, caught Adam by the shirttails. Jimmy stopped halfway up the trail and measured his options. Ditch his friends or help them out. He was a beefy kid by now, but nowhere near big enough to stand up to these guys.

  He crossed his arms. “We just wanna see!”

  The rest of the brave and bold hunters saw that they’d been caught, and some began to panic. “Ah, man, they’re gonna tell Coach!”

  “He’ll kick us off the team,” said Randy Tillman.

  Joey Osborn said, “You dumbnut, we are the team! What’s he gonna do?”

  “My dad’s the Baptist preacher! He’s gonna kill me.”

  “They won’t tell,” said Trev Reynolds. He had eyes like a snake, real cool and mean. They looked straight at me, then at Tyrone and Adam.

  “We’ll beat the shit out of ‘em if they do, and they know it.” He jabbed a finger at Jimmy, lingering a safe distance up the hill. “You! Get down here.” Jimmy craned his neck, likely hoping there was some kind of help coming along the road. No luck. He did as he was told and crept back down under the bridge. Trev Reynolds grabbed him by the shirtfront. “We’ll let you see, but you gotta get us another cat. All of ya! Go find us another cat and bring it to the dumpster behind Al’s shop. We’ll meet you there. If you don’t show, we’ll find you and hang y’all up instead.” Over the crowd of taller heads, I saw the cat. Her eyes were popping and her tongue stuck out of her mouth. She no longer struggled. Three others hung from rafters under the bridge.