The Pumpkin Man Read online

  The Pumpkin Man

  John Everson

  When Jenn moved into the old cottage by the coast she inadvertently awakened a spirit of pure evil, the gruesome killer known as—The Pumpkin Man!

  PRAISE FOR JOHN EVERSON!

  THE PUMPKIN MAN

  “With The Pumpkin Man, John Everson carves his name into the list of great horror writers. This is a deliciously creepy novel!”

  —Jonathan Maberry, multiple Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Wolfman

  “John Everson’s The Pumpkin Man is a fresh look at one of my favorite subjects, urban legends. Fast-paced, gory fun that is perfect for a chilly autumn night.”

  —James A. Moore, author of Blood Red

  “Robert Bloch lives! John Everson’s The Pumpkin Man is a lean, mean, supernatural thriller in the best tradition of Bloch and Matheson. The story of a grieving daughter prying open the shriveled gourds of her past, Everson’s book yanks the reader along by the nape of the neck—and also, unexpectedly, by the heart—into a dark territory best traveled in a well-lighted room, with a guard on duty. Great stuff!”

  —Jay Bonansinga, National Bestselling Author of Perfect Victim

  “John Everson brings something new and edgy to the genre. It’s like reading a killer rock record.”

  —Paperback Horror

  “A creepy, sharply written grisly tale that will make you think twice about the jack-o-lanterns you see in your neighborhood this coming Halloween.”

  —Famous Monsters of Filmland

  “. . . One of the best horror writers that is out there.”

  —The Horror Review

  “Everson consistently offers creepy, gothic settings, disturbing kill scenes, plenty of thrills, and writing that’s more addictive than crack.”

  —Horror Fiction Review

  “John Everson has guts, and clearly likes to explore and tamper with boundaries. He is a good enough writer that he can get away with murder, as well as multitudes of morbid mayhem.”

  —Hellnotes

  SIREN

  “. . . A richly lyrical and melancholic meditation on loss and desperate yearning. Also a superbly effective exercise in soul-ripping terror. Modern horror doesn’t get much better than this.”

  —Bryan Smith, author of The Dark Ones

  “John Everson hits one out of the park and into deep water! Siren is as wicked a tale of intense sexual obsession as any you’re likely to read, and it’ll definitely make you afraid—very afraid—of the water.”

  —W. D. Gagliani, Author of Wolf’s Gambit

  “. . . A twisted fable of lust and obsession—with a very salty finish.”

  —Amber Benson, author of Death’s Daughter

  “John Everson went to the darkest part of the subconscious to create a tale of terror that will leave you haunted, days after the last page is read.”

  —Brian Yount, Doorways

  Scream Queens love Siren, too!

  “A thoroughly engaging tale . . . Everson’s excellent prose and vivid storytelling riff on the depths of obsession and sexual addiction.”

  —Brinke Stevens, horror movie actress

  “Tautly sensual, obsessively dangerous, this siren will get under your skin . . . with her teeth!”

  —Christa Campbell, actress

  “It was as if I was under a siren’s call myself. I had to read John Everson’s Siren in one sitting to get to the unexpected, chilling ending.”

  —Amy Lynn Best, director and star of Splatter Movie: The Director’s Cut

  THE FACE WITHIN

  The knives were relentless. Always the carver dipped his knife into the model, sampling the essence of the man with his blade, drawing something of him into his tool. Then he moved his fingers to the pumpkin and slid the wet blade into the hard shell, carving the image of the man into the gourd with the man’s blood as lubricant and his lost soul as the bridge between flesh and portrait. The carver cut first with a long, curved edge, outlining the form, marking the way. Then he set the opener to the side and refined the incision with a tiny wire-thin implement: a shaper. His hands moved back and forth from pumpkin to knife kit in a blur. Time was short.

  Some blades were hooked, with edges on both sides. Others stabbed. Still others shaved. But they all worked together to reveal the face beneath the surface. Piece by piece, the face of the victim took shape.

  Other books by John Everson:

  Covenant

  Sacrifice

  The 13th

  Siren

  THE PUMPKIN MAN

  John Everson

  For Shaun, who loves to help me carve the pumpkins.

  Copyright © 2011 by John Everson

  All rights reserved.

  Acknowledgments

  There’s something about those old urban legends that you hear in grammar school that stick with you for life—like the slumber party dare of repeating “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a dark mirror to tempt the evil Mary Worth to appear and scratch out your eyes. The Pumpkin Man began as an original short story of the same name about kids who come face-to-face with just such an urban legend. (Thanks to Mort Castle for publishing it in Doorways magazine!) The tale set the stage for a very different novel a few years later about events set a couple decades in the future. But both takes on The Pumpkin Man were inspired by those spooky stories that haunt your childhood dreams.

  The novel owes its setting to my continuing love affair with the Northern California coast. I was lucky enough to spend quite a few days there right at the start of writing it, thanks to a couple business trips I took to San Francisco. Some of the landscape behind The Pumpkin Man comes from a late 2009 drive I took up to Jenner and a brief stay at the Rio Villa Beach Resort in nearby Guerneville.

  As always, music was my constant writing companion, and during this novel I leaned heavily on La Floa Maldita.

  There are a thousand people I’d love to acknowledge for their support, and I can’t possibly list them all here, but I have to thank my wife, Geri, and my son, Shaun, for letting me disappear into dark places for hours on end, and my editors Shane Ryan Staley, Don D’Auria, Chris Keeslar, Dave Barnett, Roy Robbins and Mateusz Bandurski, who have all supported and issued editions of my novels.

  Thanks also to my first readers: Paul Legerski, Martel Sardina, Erik Smith and Rhonda Wilson, for fixing so many of my fact and grammar gaffes in this manuscript. And a special thanks to some great people who have really gone beyond the call to support my work over the past couple years: Meli Denton, Colum McKnight, Jason R. Davis, P. S. Gifford, Lon Czarnecki, Dave Benton, W. D. Gagliani, Peter D. Schwotzer, Sarah Ham, Jamey Webb, Raymond Brown, Stephen McDornell, John Funderburg, Jonathan Maberry, Bryan Smith, Kresby, Jay Ford, Sheila Halterman, Deb Kuhn, Chris and Angie Fulbright, Damian Maffei, Mike Rankin, Lincoln Crisler, Peg Phillips and Sheila Mallec. You guys make all those long hours of trying to squeeze blood from a stone worth it.

  THE PUMPKIN MAN

  PROLOGUE

  Meredith took the man’s hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. She’d worked a long time to bring him here. His palms were clammy; she could smell his fear. He had every reason to be afraid. But she needed him for this; she couldn’t afford for him to back out now. And he owed her too much to leave. Not when she was this close. Not on this night. She would not wait another year until it came around again.

  Candles flickered and smoked all around them; the room smelled of beeswax and sage. Before he arrived she had lit six candles and placed them in a line to the north, and then six more to the south, and then finally six more to the east: a perfect number in an imperfect shape. They formed a U around the small table in her living room. The opening pointed toward the door. An entry point. She did not intend for ther
e to be an exit.

  “Put your fingers on the wood,” she urged her unwilling accomplice. His eyes looked glossy and wet in the wavering orange light. He might have been about to cry, or it could have just been the thickness of his glasses that magnified the light. “Gently,” she said. “Just the tips. Next to mine.”

  Together they touched the edges of the planchette, and Meredith looked at George’s clothes laid out next to the table inside the U. They were the last things her husband had worn, and the rents in the shirt were still stained with his blood. She looked at his carving knives, rusting now with disuse. She remembered the day she had given them to him, the joy that had sparked in his eyes, and then the guilt. How could they afford them? he’d wondered. Meredith smiled at the distant memory. She’d saved for months and secretly driven all the way to San Francisco to buy them. Then she had anointed them with dark words and the contents of one of the secret family jars tucked away in the basement. For a long time they had brought him happiness, before the magic turned dark.

  “Don’t speak,” she cautioned. “Don’t take your fingers away from the wood. Just let it work through you.”

  She closed her eyes to the mementos of George and remembered him as he’d been in life: broad and quiet, eyes shadowed, but always tender to her. Others had seen differently. They had persecuted him and called him evil.

  Eyes shut and locked on the memory of her husband holding her close in the kitchen of their house, her fingers touching the planchette, Meredith called out to the room:

  “Spirits close and spirits far,

  call for me to my beloved.

  Bring him here to where we are.

  Let us speak more from beyond the end.

  Bring to me my dearest friend.”

  Outside, the wind howled, crashing the shutters hard against the windows of the small cottage. A storm was due by midnight. Appropriate, that on the night Meredith needed to reach beyond death, the skies boiled dark and angry. Inside, the candles flickered as the draughts blown in from the ocean slipped through cracks in the windows and doors.

  “Are you with us?” Meredith asked. There was no answer but the wind.

  “Spirits close and spirits far,” she called out again to the small room. Her voice echoed strangely.

  “I have served you all my life.

  Bring my George to where we are.

  Let him speak to me, his wife.

  There is no end to love in death;

  we are one in two,

  separate only by breath.”

  The wood seemed to tremble beneath her fingers, and Meredith’s lips trembled in a faint smile.

  “Are you with us?” she asked a second time.

  The wooden ring moved beneath her fingers, and Meredith opened her eyes to see it stop at the upper left corner of the wooden board. It rested atop the word YES.

  “I’ve found the way to bring you back,” she said.

  The wood darted to the opposite side of the board. She almost lost her connection to it. Looking at her partner, she saw sweat bead on his forehead. His eyes bulged as they followed the seemingly independent movement of the planchette. But he did not take his fingers from their place next to hers.

  “We can be together again,” she promised. “And you can teach them all a lesson.”

  The wooden ring slipped from letter to letter across the board. Beneath the YES and NO, a full alphabet was painted. The ring stopped first on S and then on O. And then it spelled out M-U-C-H. It paused for a moment and then quickly moved through the letters B-L-O-O-D.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “But I need you. I’ve always needed you.”

  The wood slowly moved to the P and then the A, the I and the N.

  “Just a little,” she whispered. With one hand she lifted the candle at the edge of the U and dribbled its wax across the opening, closing the entrance, all the while keeping one finger to the planchette.

  “You are with us now and forevermore,” she said. “My love to blind you, my blood to bind you.”

  With those words, she lifted one of George’s knives and lightly drew its blade across the wrist of her hand that still touched the planchette. Blood dripped across the board, spotting the knives with crimson, and the wind outside gusted and cried. Meredith murmured a sentence in an ancient tongue, and then said it again, louder, fighting to be heard above the howls. Then she switched to her own tongue and said the words she’d longed to mouth for months.

  “Make them rue the day they hurt you.

  My strength yours as long as you can

  stay with me and make them regret

  the day they hurt the Pumpkin Man.”

  At last her partner made a sound. He screamed and pulled away from the witchboard. The front door burst open, and the wind finally found its way inside. All the candles blew out at once, leaving Meredith smiling in the darkness.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  Jennica Murphy’s hands trembled from both emotion and the cold as she pushed the key into the lock on the door of her father’s apartment. Rain slipped down the back of her neck, and she shivered as the metal shank wobbled, protested and got stuck in the keyhole. She blinked twice and pressed harder, worried that she might break the key if she forced it, but finally it slipped all the way in. Behind her, the gloomy February rain spattered the foyer windows with a quiet but persistent drum.

  Happy Valentine’s Day. She grimaced.

  It just didn’t feel right being here. Not like this. And the leather of the rectangular key holder felt odd against her palm. The device was like a wallet; it looked like nothing when you saw it but then folded out to reveal clips at its top, where inner hidden keys were attached. It was like a secret-pocketed chest, but for locksmiths.

  Her personal key ring was Spartan: a round loop of metal that held a car key, a mailbox key, an apartment key. Slim and portable, and ultimately hers. The thing she held in her hand? It was thick. Weighty. There were nine keys on it, and most of them she had no idea what locks they worked. But the one with the silver K emblazoned in the center was what the lawyer had told her to use. He’d said it with a tired smile, as if he assumed she already knew. But the sad fact was, she hadn’t. She’d never had a key to her dad’s place.

  She’d never wanted one. She still didn’t. And this wasn’t what she wanted to be doing on a rainy Saturday. This wasn’t what she wanted to be doing ever.

  Jennica twisted the key and felt the lock click before she pushed the door open. A rush of stale air passed her nose. It had been quite a few days since the police tape had X-ed over the door frame.

  She stepped inside and pressed the door shut behind her with a dull click. In the living room, the dark green couch beckoned like an old friend. From somewhere down the hall, probably the kitchen, the steady tick-tick-tick of a clock broke the silence. That was the only sound besides the patter of the storm on the windows. The building was deathly still. Just like her dad.

  She’d seen his framed photo atop the closed casket again at the wake, so still and . . . Even now she kept thinking to herself that this couldn’t be. It couldn’t end like this.

  They hadn’t always seen eye to eye. Hell, half of the time she’d been close to calling him an ass. But now, as Jennica stepped past a pile of catalogs on the hall floor and into the kitchen, where a coffee cup still sat half-full on the two-person Formica table, she realized he’d been all she really had, the only one who knew her history. The only one who’d known her from the first moment she came into this world. Maybe he hadn’t known her inside and out, but nobody else even understood where she’d come from. She’d relied on him to always be there. Now he was gone.

  She stepped through the dark apartment, flicking on lights as she went. They didn’t push away the shadow of her father. His sad smile was reflected in the Led Zeppelin poster framed in the corner above the ratty blue recliner; his quiet laughter echoed from the ashtray on the coffee table emblazoned with the simple catchphrase, “Light up, everybody.” Sh
e took down the Zep poster and leaned it against the wall. The unraveling time had come. Time to roll up and put away the remaining pieces of her father’s life.

  Sinking into the familiar cushion of the old couch, Jennica stared at the steer skull on the sand-colored wall behind the TV. Kinda summed it all up. A week ago her dad had been living here, within these walls, doing whatever he did when she wasn’t visiting. Then someone had come and sliced him up, leaving his insides on the out.

  She stifled a glimpse toward the hallway that led to the kitchen, where the police had gathered up the remains. She didn’t want to see the stains there, and she knew there probably were some. Was it right to see the shadow of your dad’s blood on the floor? Was it right to see anyone’s life as a stain? She leaned back and wished for a day not so long ago when she’d come here and he’d asked her about her latest boyfriend, then insisted that, whoever it was, he wasn’t good enough for her. Less than a week ago she would have brushed him off and turned the conversation to something less personal. Now she could only look at that faded blue recliner and wish he were in it, being nosy as only an old dad could.

  But, he wasn’t coming back.

  Jennica pushed herself out of the cushion and walked to the back of the apartment. His inner sanctum. It didn’t feel very private anymore, just held an old queen-size bed with a dark comforter, a cheap dresser littered with matchbooks and coins and receipts and a couple photographs tucked into the corner of the mirror. She looked at herself in the mirror, and saw a ghost she rarely admitted to. The stark lines of her cheekbones were absolutely her father’s. She remembered when she was a kid how her mom traced those lines and said, “Your father could never deny you.”