The Pumpkin Man

by John Everson

  She felt the wood beneath her fingers move. The other three opened their eyes to stare at their fingers as well. The wooden hoop slipped in a halting glide across the board until it came to encircle one word: NO.

  “Is my father here?” she repeated.

  Nothing happened for a second, and Jenn began to wonder if the first answer had been a fluke—or if, more likely, one of her friends had been trying to “help.” But the planchette moved again, this time to the opposite side of the board.

  YES.

  “Can you . . . ?” Jenn began to say, but the planchette began to move again, and she stopped to read.

  The hoop stopped on the G before moving to E and then T. And then it moved with growing speed to spell the rest of a phrase:

  GET OUT NOW

  “Okay, who’s doing this shit?” Kirstin said through gritted teeth. “Because it’s not funny. Brian?”

  “I’m not doing anyth—”

  The planchette moved again. As Jenn watched, it zoomed across the board and she read the two words aloud:

  “‘Too late’?”

  The planchette suddenly shot across the board. Jenn felt her fingers lose touch with it just before it launched into space. The wooden hoop hit the side of the fireplace and clattered to the floor.

  Kirstin stood up, angry. “All right,” she demanded. “Which of you did that?”

  Brian laughed. “Oh, come on. What are you trying to pull? You’re saying we did it? I mean, if you wanted us to be the big strong men to hold you and protect you from the nasty spirits, there are easier ways to do that. We could have just watched a horror movie.”

  Kirstin bristled. “You know you moved the stupid thing and made it say those words, didn’t you? Just admit it.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Brian said. “I pushed the planchette and made it say ‘Get out now’ so that you girls would be scared and cling to us like we were in a horror movie. Okay, what if I did? Is that so wrong?”

  “You bastard,” Kirstin growled. “Jenn is in a bad place right now. Her father just died—no, let me rephrase that. He didn’t DIE, he was frickin’ murdered. And she was hoping that this would let her say good-bye. Now, one of you has turned it into a stupid—”

  Jenn felt tears welling up in her eyes, and she pushed back from the table. Stepping over to the couch, she couldn’t help herself from curling up on it.

  “Whoa!” Nick held up a hand. “I think you’re overreacting a little. Brian’s kidding. He didn’t do anything. I mean—”

  “Get out,” Kirstin said. She pointed to the door. “Both of you just leave. Please.”

  Brian looked stunned. “Really? I was just kidding. I really didn’t do anything.”

  Nick turned to Jenn. “You have to believe that I didn’t do anything to that board. That thing moved all by itself.”

  Jenn didn’t answer. Kirstin’s finger still motioned for them to go.

  “C’mon, man,” Brian said, and grabbed Nick’s arm. “Let them think what they want.”

  “Just go,” Kirstin said, and pointed to the door again.

  Brian dragged Nick with him as Kirstin knelt by the couch. Jenn’s sadness was audible now, as the reality of her dad’s death washed fully over her. She clenched her hands to her chest and curled in a ball, wishing over and over in her heart that she could go back, that she could see him just one more time. Hug him. Talk to him. The door slammed, but neither girl really noticed.

  “I want him back,” Jenn sobbed.

  “I know, baby,” Kirstin said. “I know.”

  Outside, a car engine rumbled to life. With an angry gunning sound and of churning gravel, it disappeared down the hill and into the night.

  Jenn got herself under control after a couple more minutes and forced herself to come out of her ball. She wiped tears from her reddened cheeks while Kirstin got her a tissue.

  “I don’t think they did it,” she said, after blowing her nose. Her eyes were still moist.

  “Of course they did,” Kirstin said. “They were screwing around.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jenn argued. “Nick isn’t that way.”

  “They’re all that way,” Kirstin said. “Guys are all assholes. They were playing with you.”

  “Something was here,” Jenn insisted. “I could feel it.”

  Kirstin raised an eyebrow. “Uh-huh.”

  “I want to try again.”

  Kirstin rested a hand on her friend’s shoulder and squeezed. “No way. Jenn, you’ve gotta let him go. I know it’s hard, but that’s part of the reason we came out here. To leave all of that behind. If you just keep dredging it up, you’ll never heal.”

  Jenn blinked back another rush of tears. She nodded and swallowed hard. “I know,” she agreed. “But . . . maybe there’s a reason we ended up here in the middle of magic central. And we just happened to find a Ouija board. And it just happened to have contacted spirits the first time we tried it.”

  “It didn’t—”

  “Then humor me and try it once more,” Jenn said. “Because now I really need to know if this stuff works for real.”

  She got up from the couch and retrieved the planchette from where it landed near the fireplace. Dropping down, she sat Indian-style on the other side of the coffee table.

  “What, right now?” Kirstin asked.

  Jenn held out her hand.

  Kirstin sighed. Clearly, arguing wasn’t going to do any good. Perhaps the only thing that would satisfy her friend would be watching the wooden board as nothing happened. Perhaps then she would finally realize she’d been had. Or, considering Jenn’s stubbornness, she’d probably just find some other excuse for why it hadn’t worked this time.

  Her friend rested a finger on the planchette, and Kirstin reluctantly did the same.

  Jenn didn’t say anything for a couple minutes, just letting the silence of the room wash over her. “We are here again,” she said finally. “We call to the spirits of this place and ask for your help. We want to talk with Richard Murphy, my dad. Is he near?”

  The planchette did not move. Kirstin stifled a knowing smile and struggled to keep her eyes closed.

  “Please focus,” Jenn hissed. “If my aunt is near, perhaps she would help us. We are caring for your things now, Aunt Meredith. If you are here, I’m sorry I never got to know you better. Please help me reach my dad? Just for a moment.”

  The planchette seemed to shift. Jenn squinted down at the board, trying at the same time to keep her mind blank. The wooden ring now rested over the letter I.

  It moved again, very slowly. It rested for a bit on each letter before shifting to the next. The sequence spelled:

  I LOVE YOU

  Jenn couldn’t help but smile. But, who was saying it? She was about to ask when the planchette moved again, faster this time. Kirstin whispered the letters one by one, the hoop’s movements sharp and jagged across the board:

  BEWARE THE PUMPKIN MAN

  Behind them, the flames in the hearth flared up with a soft roar. The warmth that had crossed Jenn’s heart vanished.

  “The Pumpkin Man,” she read aloud. “Who is that?”

  The planchette did not move.

  Another ember popped, and Jenn was suddenly aware of the quiet, crackling fire. That was the only sound in the room.

  “Tell us what you mean,” she said. “Meredith? Dad?”

  The planchette remained still.

  She called out again and again, but Kirstin broke the link. “It’s over,” she said. “Whatever it was. I didn’t do that,” she admitted. She looked spooked.

  Jenn shook her head in agreement. “Neither did I.”

  Without another word, she picked up the wooden board and its eye and placed both back in the hole in the fireplace. Then she carefully replaced the stone.

  “I think I’m going to go to bed now,” she said abruptly. “We can clean up in the morning.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Teri Hawkins hadn’t thought about the Pum
pkin Man in years. Now, here he was again, encapsulated in a headline about a headless body.

  Teri read the article for the fifth time and shook her head. It couldn’t be the Pumpkin Man; she knew that for a fact. They had killed him. She had been there. And as she read those three horrible words, other words came flooding back.

  “We’ll meet you at Echo Hill at eleven o’clock.” That voice. It was Erik. “He’s down at the Tide’s Inn every night from nine to ten thirty or eleven. We’ll wait for him outside.”

  “I want to be there when you catch him.” That was her speaking, Teri. “I can help.”

  “If something goes wrong, I don’t want you hurt.”

  “I’ll wait in the car. But I want to be there when the bastard gets his.”

  “You will be.”

  There had been seven of them who met at the Tide’s Inn at ten o’clock that night, seven parents of children who over the past three years had gone missing or turned up dead, in pieces. Seven parents who were sure that the Pumpkin Man had killed their babies. The police had never been able to prove anything, but they knew. Knew! All of the kids had disappeared in the fall after visiting the pumpkin patch. Their bodies had been found later, lodged in the rocks and weeds at the mouth of the estuary. But only the bodies.

  “He took Billy’s head,” Teri whispered to herself for the thousandth time as she waited in the backseat of Erik’s Ford. She imagined her ten-year-old’s soft cheeks and freckled nose and stifled a tear. How could anyone do that to a child? How could anyone touch an innocent that way? And, what had he done to her boy before he cut off that sweet face?

  God, what had her Billy felt? She was haunted by visions of him crying out in terror and finally dying under the knife of his killer, all while feeling betrayed because, for the first time in his life, when he really needed her, his mommy wasn’t coming.

  The pain turned to ice in her belly and every second thought she’d had about Erik’s plan for vengeance disappeared. “What time is it?” she asked from the backseat.

  “Ten fifteen,” Erik said. “It’ll be another hour if he follows his usual pattern.”

  It was nearly the longest hour she ever waited. The longest was the hour after she realized Billy was never coming home again.

  The hour passed silently. Erik and Charlie Wilbert said nothing from the front seat, though Charlie cleared his throat every couple minutes. It was almost as if he were getting ready to speak but then never found the words. The three of them just sat and stared at the blue neon sign in front of the bar.

  There were eight other cars in the parking lot, one of which belonged to Hank DeVries and the rest of the lynching party. It was parked strategically on the other side of the bar’s front entrance. Four other sets of angry eyes waited inside, also trained on the bar’s weather-beaten old door.

  Casey Meriweather exited the place around 10:40; the shadows in both vigilante cars shifted and tensed but then relaxed without making a move. Teri then watched Casey’s taillights disappear up Route 1. The red glow dwindled to the size of fireflies and winked out, and she found herself staring at empty asphalt again. There was nothing quite as still as night in River’s End. You could hear the air move.

  The ember of a cigarette glowed in Hank’s car. Teri wondered if it was Hank or his wife Angel. They had lost their daughter a year ago, and she hadn’t seen either one of them without a smoke in hand since. She was surprised there weren’t two orange spots in the old Buick. She’d hate to be Dave and Simon in the backseat. Probably choking to death.

  The screen door opened on the front of Tide’s Inn, and a figure stepped out. A man. He held the door a minute, his face obscured as he answered someone back in the bar. Then he let the screen wobble closed, and Teri could see the stark, long face of the man she and the others had come here to kill.

  She shook off the memory and stood up. It was after eleven p.m., but she wasn’t tired. She hadn’t been able to get the thoughts of that long-ago night out of her head since she’d read the article this morning. But, no. The Pumpkin Man was dead. She had seen his body hanging from a tree, bleeding from everywhere.

  Picking up the newspaper, she went down the wood plank stairs to her basement. She wouldn’t throw it away; there was a place for things that dealt with the Pumpkin Man. It wasn’t quite a shrine, more the antithesis.

  She walked over to the shelving unit on the far side of the basement and set the newspaper on top of a pile of other yellowing issues of the River Times. On the shelf beneath those papers was a coil of rope. They had strung up the Pumpkin Man all those years ago with a piece cut from this coil. Teri had never used or disposed of the rest. It sat here, next to Billy’s old fireman’s hat. And his remote-controlled Corvette. The antenna of the car had begun to rust in the damp.

  Teri ran her fingers over the rough surface of the rope and remembered her feelings of hate and rage as she’d helped tie a piece of it around the struggling man’s neck. She remembered the fire in his eyes and his blood on her clothes. The very next day, in the fire pit out back, she’d burned everything she wore that night.

  The Pumpkin Man couldn’t be alive now, she repeated to herself. She had helped kill him.

  A stair creaked behind her. The basement light winked out.

  “Who’s there?” Teri called.

  Another stair creaked. Fear fully registered.

  The darkness was total. There were no windows in the basement. It was night outside anyway. Another creak. Someone was definitely coming down the stairs.

  “What the fuck,” Teri whispered, her memories of violence overwhelming her brain.

  She felt her way along the shelving unit. She needed something to protect herself with, something sharp or heavy. Her son’s toys weren’t going to help.

  Another creak.

  Teri racked her brain. What was down here that she could use? And, how could he see in the dark if she was blind? What did he want?

  The workbench was just behind the shelving, so she could find a screwdriver or the hammer if she could get there. Teri turned away from the shelving but her foot caught on something. She stumbled, tried to right herself, and then her other foot caught on a box and she lost the rest of her balance. Her hands slapped the cement of the basement floor.

  Creak.

  Again? How many creaks had that been? How many stairs were there from the kitchen to the basement? Why was he walking so slowly?

  Teri crawled forward on her hands and knees until she found the base of her workbench. Reaching up for the lip of the wood, she used it to pull herself back to her feet. She didn’t hear anything now, but she felt a presence. Someone was in the room with her. Moving toward her.

  She felt her way across the bench, seeking anything she could use to protect herself. By touch she identified the electric drill, a case of drill bits, a roll of string, a handful of pencils. A ruler. And then her fingers scrabbled over a Phillips-head screwdriver. She grabbed it and held tight, but at the same time, she kept running her other hand across the bench.

  She knocked something over. It felt like a metal tube. Yes! The industrial-strength flashlight, it was heavy as a lead pipe. She picked it up and turned toward the stairs.

  Teri knew that someone was there, probably just a few yards away. For a second she considered not turning the light on; after all, that would indicate to the intruder where she was. But she didn’t care. She had to know. She thumbed the ON button.

  Her light found the face of a man with black irises staring hard at her. He was almost on top of her.

  With one hand, he reached out and took her light. He didn’t say a word, and Teri was too shocked to scream. Her heart stopped as she whispered, “You!”

  The man didn’t answer. Instead, he raised the flashlight and brought it down like a hammer. Teri crumpled to the floor.

  The man set the flashlight back on the workbench, lifted Teri and laid her out there as well. He stepped away for a moment and returned with a pumpkin, which he also set on
the bench, next to her head. A stream of blood oozed down between her eyes to drip off the tip of her nose.

  The man removed a package from his belt; it was leather and unfolded to reveal knives of different shapes and lengths. He took out the longest, heaviest blade, stabbed it into the top of the pumpkin and sawed back and forth until he was able to remove the stem. Then he took a shorter, thinner knife and touched it to Teri’s left eyebrow, pressing down and gently drenching it in the woman’s essence. Turning the knife on the gourd, he carved out an eyehole, lubricated by the blood of Teri’s eye. Then, little by little, he touched his knife to Teri’s features, and with the strange magic of his special knives, stitched her blood and soul into the pumpkin, which slowly began to resemble her face, in an eerie, horrible, far-too-realistic way.

  At one point Teri woke, but he quickly silenced her spate of screams. It was best if they were alive while he transferred their essence to the rind, but it was better if they were quiet. He carved unchecked through the rest of the night.

  Meredith Perenais’s Journal

  November 19, 1985

  Found in a book printed over one hundred years ago:

  The road to hell is paved with dreams and knives. First comes the desire to be more than a common man. Next comes bloodlust, and the fantasy of possibility. I can be more than the common man. Finally comes the doorway in the dark. A doorway with only one exit.

  I brought George his doorway. I didn’t understand.

  But, I don’t believe that the door only goes one way. I can’t.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Sleep had not been easy or deep. Jenn plodded into the kitchen rubbing her eyes.

  Kirstin was not in evidence, but the coffeepot was full. Jenn poured herself a cup, then walked into the front room. Kirstin was there, flopped on the couch in gray sweatpants and a T-shirt, reading a book.

  A book? Decidedly unlike her.