The Pumpkin Man Read online

  He dipped his blade into the man’s bloodied, tongue-less mouth, and it returned a brilliant, vibrant red—both color and lubricant. Then he drew a long, thin slit on the side of the gourd and brought the blade around, like following the delicate spiral of a conch shell. He repeated the motions on the other side, providing the pumpkin head with the representation of ears. Then he held his palm over the man’s mouth, as if trying to stop the last breath of life from escaping.

  The carver chose a different knife; thinner, razor-sharp. He stared into his victim’s dying eyes, his other hand working seemingly without guidance, shaping and refining the features already roughed out on the pumpkin skin. The hand finished the mouth with a long flourish, slicing away a millimeter of orange pulp and casting it to the floor. It glimmered there in the half-light, the last viscera of the act of transference.

  His model choked on his own blood, eyes blinking frantically in the final moments of life. So the carver picked up a heavier, longer blade. He sat astride the man’s chest, held the butchering blade to his throat. Then, with one hand, he pressed his fingers to the new face he’d fostered on the pumpkin.

  It ended quickly. The man beneath him gave a short cough in sync with the pull of his knife. The carver pulled the knife through again. And again. At last the blade rebounded from the wood of the floor with a clink, and when it was finished, the carver lifted his model’s head from its body by the hair. He set it momentarily to the side and replaced it with the glistening pumpkin. The dead head looked deflated without its eyes, and with trails of blood from the thin tears in its cheeks. But the new head, next to it . . . now that was a work of artistry!

  He stood back to admire his work, sneezed again and rubbed his arm against his face in disgust. Then he gathered his knives and the man’s head and walked out of the house into the black of night. Nobody saw him come or go. But the next day the entire town knew one thing for sure:

  The Pumpkin Man was back.

  Meredith Perenais’s Journal

  April 23, 1981

  Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived most of my life under a rock. There are so many things that I’m learning here: How the world really works. The difference between a wish and a dream—and a curse and a hex. The library George’s family has amassed is fascinating and helping me understand. He won’t talk about any of it, though.

  Animal totems and their powers are one thing I’ve focused on. I have always hated snakes, but if you need the ability to slip into places unseen, theirs is the strength to court. And, who knew that bats are the true guardians of the dark way? A bat can open the door to the spirit world or keep it closed. With a bat as your familiar—ha, I can’t even believe I wrote that—you can gain so much protection . . . and entree.

  I wish that I could have known George’s family instead of trying to pick up their wisdom from the things they left behind. Still, this house is rich with history. Rich with the invisible. I know they’ve been here with me these past months and years, guiding me to this point. Opening the way.

  Today I nailed a bat to the doorway into the basement. I placed a warding spell on it that will protect whoever sleeps in this room. It’s a simple thing, a simple spell. But it will ease my mind as I try to sleep. I won’t have to worry about the things in the walls. I won’t have to worry about losing my George. In the end, it’s all about protecting those that you hold dear, isn’t it? In any way you can.

  I never thought that I would do anything like this . . . but there are some things that a woman has to do to protect what she loves. No matter what.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Midterms came and went in a blink. Jennica struggled to keep up, but the days passed in a blur. She still got calls from newspaper reporters following up on the mysterious murder of her father, but the story faded from front-page news to back-page updates. The police still said they had nothing, and Jenn was growing frustrated with their handling of the situation. Whenever she asked about the exact details surrounding the discovery of the body, the lieutenant grew taciturn, suggesting there were a couple clues that they were holding close to the vest.

  She’d given up asking, though. It didn’t matter. Her dad was dead, and the killer had walked away with his head. His head! What the fuck? How much more did she really want to know?

  The fourth-period bell interrupted her musings, and the class slapped shut chapter seventeen of their textbooks as one. In moments the room was empty except for a familiar figure in the doorway. Sister Beatrice again. Jennica groaned. The presence of the principal was never a good omen. The name sounded so sweet and unassuming and kind. The woman was anything but.

  “Ms. Murphy,” the sister said, her mouth drawn in a thin line. “I need to see you in my office.”

  That was an even worse sign.

  Jennica scooped up her papers, grabbed her bag and followed the nun down the hallway. Sister Beatrice cut a path through a mob of young teens all scurrying to their lockers to stow books and grab lunches, but Jenn had a sinking feeling that she wasn’t going to be hungry for lunch after this meeting. And she was right.

  “Sit down,” Sister Beatrice instructed, taking her place behind a large desk whose blond wood was almost completely hidden by stacks of paper. “As you know, we’ve had to look very closely at the budget for the remainder of this year and next. We started the year with fewer students than we expected and have had several switch to public schools since. At the same time, expenses continue to climb. Last night, we approved a reduction in force.”

  Oh crap. RIF’ed in her first year? That meant she’d be without a check come summer if she didn’t move fast.

  “This impacts several of our staff,” Sister Beatrice continued, “and I’m sorry to tell you that you are one of them. Unfortunately, it is effective immediately. If you could turn in your grade books before you leave today, we’d appreciate it.”

  Jenn didn’t know what to say.

  The principal didn’t give her time to think of anything. She pushed a formal-looking letter forward and pointed to a line with her name at the bottom of the page. “Please sign.”

  The rest of the day passed in a blur. Jenn sat in a stall in the bathroom and cried for a few minutes, but that didn’t help. She finished up her classes, then opened and closed the drawers on her desk five times, looking for possessions she didn’t want to accidentally leave behind. On the sixth look, she pocketed a box of the school’s paperclips. She’d need them for résumé letters.

  She dropped off her grades at the front desk without a word, then fled to her car, just barely holding back another spate of tears. She’d thought that her dad’s death bled her dry, but from somewhere deep inside she found a new reserve of saltwater—and remorse. She tried to picture Rudy’s face and told herself that at least she wouldn’t have to deal with the Neanderthal any longer, but instead of cheering her up, the idea of never seeing Rudy “pee” on the floor again just made things worse. As angry as he’d made her, she still cared. That had always been her problem with boys, really. No matter how much they hurt her, she forgave them. They used her, and still she opened her arms. Usually to empty air.

  When she finally arrived home, Jennica walked into the foyer and checked the mail slot. Apparently Kirstin was still out, because the box was full. Typical. They rarely drove to work together because Kirstin was always traipsing off somewhere else afterward.

  She riffled through the envelopes as she walked up the stairs: Advertising coupons. An electric bill. A Visa bill. A “Have You Seen This Child?” flyer. An unstamped envelope, hand-addressed to her . . .

  Frowning, she opened the last and pulled out a single sheet of paper. It was from her landlord. Absently, she let herself into the apartment and kicked the door closed behind her. As she read the short but painfully clear letter, she sat on the couch and found yet another reserve of tears.

  Kirstin came home an hour later and dropped her bag on the floor. “They fuckin’ fired me,” she announced, hands on hips. �
��They didn’t even let me finish out the term. RIF’ed to the curb like, NOW, and don’t let the door hit you in your pretty little ass on your way out.”

  Jenn looked up from the arm of the couch, her eyes red. “You, too?” She’d been so upset, she hadn’t even thought to check. When something hurt her, she retreated into herself. Her friend was the opposite: she told the world.

  “Patrick and Darren took me out for a beer afterward. They couldn’t believe it,” Kirstin said. “I don’t know how the hell they’re going to cover my classrooms.”

  Jenn shook her head. She’d been wondering the same thing.

  “Sister Beatrice didn’t even give me a chance to ask—” Finally it dawned on Kirstin what Jennica had said, and she eyed her friend in shock. “Wait a minute, they canned you, too? Effective immediately?”

  Jenn nodded.

  “Oh, shit.” Kirstin’s mouth hung open in shock. “How the hell are we going to cover the rent?”

  Jenn laughed. “Oh, that’s easy. We won’t have to.”

  “Huh?”

  Jenn shoved forward the letter from the landlord. “The building’s going condo. We have sixty days to get out.”

  Meredith Perenais’s Journal

  October 17, 1984

  They turned on him today. George was carving a child’s portrait into one of the pumpkins down near Postens’ Farm Stand when the boy’s mother turned up. He said she started yelling at him to leave her son alone, and slapped his hand.

  “Molester,” she screamed at him. “What are you doing to our children? What did you do to Billy Hawkins?”

  She called George a monster, and the little boy started to cry. Then she ripped her son away and dragged him from the pumpkin stand. But that wasn’t the end of it. After she left, Nick Postens came down from the barn and asked George to leave, too. Just like that. “You’re not welcome here anymore.” As if somehow carving faces into pumpkins was the devil’s work and his eyes had just been opened to it.

  They’re scared is what it is. Scared of what happened to the missing Hawkins boy. Scared of what I’m doing up here. Not that it stops them from coming up the hill to ask me in secret if I can make a charm for this or a drink to cure that. But deep down they’re suspicious of my magic as much as they want it. And now they’re making George pay, since they don’t dare touch me. I’m the witch, right? But what they don’t understand is that if they hurt him, they ARE hurting me.

  All I’ve ever tried to do was to draw healing from the natural forces. I tried to help. But maybe it’s time that I stopped helping. Maybe it’s time to use the power that is there for the taking to hurt them back.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Jennica closed Meredith’s journal and shook her head. People were crazy all over—fickle, untrustworthy, always ready to kick you in the teeth as soon as they scented a hint of weakness. Her aunt’s journal entry was dated more than twenty-five years ago, but nothing ever really changed. Her aunt sounded more than a little crazy, but the problems she had faced were the same either way. People always sucked. Only the names changed. Jenn knew about trying to be nice to people and having them kick you in the face as thanks.

  She curled up in a ball on the couch and hugged her pillow. Reading Meredith’s journal wasn’t helping her mood. For the past few days she’d felt worse than she could ever remember.

  From the back of the apartment a sudden pounding beat rocked the picture frames on the wall, and a moment later Kirstin came dancing down the hall in gray sweats and a baggy white Hello Kitty T-shirt singing AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Jennica couldn’t help but laugh when her roommate held the phantom mic to her lips and then wriggled her hips like a rock star.

  “Off the couch, you moody bitch!” Kirstin demanded. She tried to drag her friend up by the hand, but Jennica waved her off. Kirstin didn’t stop, but instead danced her way around the living room, dancing with a lamp and then miming obscene things with a flashlight she pulled from the hall closet until the song ended. Finally she launched herself to land on the cushion next to Jennica, breathing hard.

  “Good workout,” she proclaimed. When she caught her breath, she said, “Look Jenn. I know it’s all gone to hell over the past month, but life has to go on. You can’t just keep sitting here.”

  “No,” Jenn agreed. “In about forty-five more days we’re going to be sitting in the street.”

  Kirstin shook her head. “No we’re not. We’re going to be sitting on the beach in California ogling surfers.”

  Jenn raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

  “C’mon,” Kirstin continued. “We’ve got no jobs, and in a month we’ve got no place to live. You just got handed the deed to an empty house near the ocean. We should at least go check it out. It’s not like we have anything better to do! You just don’t get opportunities like this very often. And usually, if you do, you’ve got too much going on to make use of the opportunity.” She grabbed her friend by the shoulders, blue eyes hypnotic and wide. “We have no responsibilities. We have nothing to lose. We are two hot chicks with the key to a house on the beach. Let’s go to California!”

  “Well, one of us is hot, anyway,” Jenn replied. Kirstin rolled her eyes. “And I don’t actually have the key to the house.”

  “Puh-leez. It’ll do us both good to get out of here. We can pack this place up over the next week, put our stuff in storage and go see what your aunt left you. If we like it, maybe we’ll stay. You’ve always said you wanted to live somewhere warmer, and I’ve always wanted to live near a beach.”

  “I keep telling you, I don’t think Meredith’s house is near the kind of beach where people actually swim,” Jennica protested.

  Kirstin put a finger to her lips. “Where there is ocean, there is swimming.”

  Jennica had to admit the idea held an attraction. She’d always hated Chicago winters. And what did they really have to lose? She had no more family, no job, and soon no place to live. But she’d always thought of herself as Aesop’s ant and Kirstin the grasshopper. Wasn’t it more prudent to stay and use the month they had left to make sure they had someplace to live and the money to pay for it?

  “What are we going to do when we come back?” she asked.

  “We could stay with my mom for a while if it came to that,” Kirstin said. “But maybe, if we’re lucky . . . we won’t be back.”

  Jennica shook her head but didn’t say no.

  Kirstin stood up and held out a hand. “C’mon, couch potato. We have a lot to pack. Know where we can get some boxes?”

  Meredith Perenais’s Journal

  October 23, 1984

  There is a pause in the air.

  “Make sense, Meredith,” you say. “Speak clearly, not in drama.” But I can say to you again, there is a pause in the air.

  It’s unlike any wind I’ve felt before in any other place. Maybe it’s the influence of this house, or maybe just this hill. The movement of the sea against the rocks must brook a special power here, where the freshwater flows into the salt, where the earth rises from beneath both seeking the clouds. The moments after dark are pregnant seconds, each clock tick an interruption of some thing driven by land and sea and air. If you walk out onto the grassy hills after nightfall, if you only still your own noise enough to take it in, you can feel it. You can feel how the earth has fallen silent, how the breath of the day has drawn in.

  Yes, there is a pause in the air here as the earth awaits the next movement, the next chance to give and take life, like a tide of animation. The brackish water is just an illusion before the maelstrom, for the power of that earthen pause may be the key to the magic hidden here. The pause in the air is a conductor, a promise and a threat.

  That pause, I believe, is worth the silence of a thousand souls.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  The plane ride was long. Really long. Kirstin had never been good at sitting still, and four and a half hours tied to a chair was pure torture.

  Sh
e shifted in her seat, crossing her legs left and then right, kicking Jenn in the shins as she did. Her friend occasionally glanced up from her book with a dark-eyed scowl to convey her indignation at being foot-butted, but mostly she stayed buried in her reading and headphones. Kirstin was plugged into her own iPod, but she couldn’t seem to settle on an album. She’d gotten bored with Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, moved to classic hair metal and jumped through Bon Jovi and Whitesnake, then tuned in to a saved podcast she had about relationships called Too Much Information (TMI). But when the hosts started talking about how to manage a successful one-night stand while on your period, she dialed away and settled for putting the iPod on shuffle.

  After they finally landed, picked up their luggage, and got their rental car—Jennica had rented a car at the San Francisco airport that they could keep for a few days—it was four p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday afternoon. It was sixty degrees, but the sky was gray as they merged onto the 101 to head north out of the city.

  “Maybe we should stay down here for the night,” Kirstin suggested, noting the restaurants and bars and shops that lined the streets.

  “With what money?” Jenn asked. “We’ll be in River’s End by dinner. Free room and board.”

  The sun dropped out of the sky like a rock. As they passed through Bodega Bay and drove the last few miles into River’s End, Kirstin felt as if they were entering Brigadoon. The night closed in like a blanket, quiet and dark both filtering down at the same time, until all that she knew was their car and a black ribbon of asphalt. Jagged branches stretched out over the road in either welcome or warning. She wasn’t sure which.

  The radio seemed to have lost all stations except for a canned Top 40 outlet and a talk radio station currently suggesting a conspiracy between the U.S. government and a South American dictatorship. Their headlights opened up a hazy path through the darkness but otherwise failed to reveal anything more than the stars above. Kirstin felt as if they’d left the planet and entered the Twilight Zone.