The Pumpkin Man

by John Everson

  “I think I need to visit Aunt Meredith’s library,” she said finally. “I need to do some more reading. I don’t think this is a doorway for rats. And I do think we need to find out what it is. Maybe before it’s too late.”

  Meredith Perenais’s Journal

  July 2, 2009

  George’s family were not nice people. They may have died, but they never left their home. Their influence still breathes inside these walls. I can feel them walking here at night. I have felt them since I first came here, I suppose, but now . . . they seem stronger. They will never go away either. Their power is tied to this place, to the things they did here. Just as I am now.

  I suppose none of us will ever leave.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  Scott Barkiewicz had always wanted to be a cop. Growing up, you could always find him staked out in front of the tube watching episodes of CSI and the reruns of T.J. Hooker, Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue.

  He’d been a thin, reedy kid, picked on by bullies and laughed at by the losers he refused to party with. He’d never seemed to fit in anywhere; he wasn’t a jock, he wasn’t a stoner, he wasn’t even a brain. Good grades came hard. The nerds didn’t like him; they thought he was just a little too tight. “Take that stick out of your ass” was a phrase he’d heard a lot more than once. But he’d had a natural affinity with the police, who seemed the force keeping every problematic social group from running amok. As a kid he’d frequently asked his mom why people couldn’t just leave one another alone. As an adult, he’d sworn to make sure they did.

  River’s End was his first assignment after the police academy, and while he liked the little town, he could see that things weren’t always run by the book here. The captain seemed just a little too laid-back. He looked the other way sometimes, usually when the crime had to do with people who’d lived here for a long time. Though Scott didn’t know why the captain was going easy on this Jennica Murphy. She wasn’t local. And truth be told, she reminded him a lot of one of those “too-pretty” girls who had broken his heart in high school and after. She might look sweet on the outside, but inside was where he worried something cruel lived. He’d been the brunt of many a pretty girl’s mean streak, so he didn’t trust her.

  That was no reason not to do your duty, however, and Scott knew he needed to try to protect Jennica, in case the captain was right and she was an innocent in all this. Scott just felt that in general that Captain Jones had lost his edge. If you stayed in one place too long, that’s what happened. You got too cozy. You risked getting too friendly with the people you were supposed to keep in line. That was why he thought that police personnel should rotate town to town periodically, kinda like they did with Catholic priests.

  The job of the police was to keep everyone from stepping all over the rights and lives of others. He was proud to have trained to be one of those enforcers, and he was determined to find out now just who the hell was slicing and dicing their way through the people of River’s End. The captain was investigating the murders, but somehow he seemed just a little too lackadaisical about the whole thing. As if he didn’t really believe they could catch the murderer, so he wasn’t going to kill himself trying. Scott knew there was a bunch of hocus-pocus urban legend shit surrounding a killer from a few years back, but he didn’t believe some boogeyman was walking out of the night from nowhere to knock people off. Scott was a realist: there was a physical being holding the knives and shedding the blood. And it was Scott’s sworn duty—and personal goal—to find and stop that person.

  To that end, Scott was now reviewing every murder connected with the Pumpkin Man. On his desk he had old discolored folders from twenty years ago, when the original bloodbath hit. Next to them was a growing stack of folders related to new killings, folders he had put together himself. The names on the folders were disturbingly similar: Hawkins, Smith, Wilbert, Foster, DeVries, Traskle.

  The original file folders all dealt with children. The new ones, two decades later, all dealt with the parents. One other difference Scott noticed was the care for secrecy the killer had taken.

  In the original six-year string of Pumpkin Man murders, the killer had taken a child from the town each Halloween, but he had never left any evidence behind. The first couple of kids were even thought to have simply run away or drowned. One was eventually discovered weeks after his death, lodged in the reeds of the estuary, headless. Until some of those heads had turned up in the crypt behind the Perenais house, all the heads of the victims were missing. Then came the eyewitness accusation of another child. That had led to George Perenais turning up dead, hung from a tree and poked full of holes like a ghastly piñata. While the timing of the event and the pitch of town’s hysteria led Scott to question the validity of the boy’s story, clearly it had been enough for some vigilante. That vigilante had never been found either.

  The recent murders were instantly obvious: the killer left behind a body and blatant evidence—evidence clearly intended to link the crime sprees. The head of each recent victim was removed and replaced with an intricately carved pumpkin.

  Scott sighed and shook his head. He could imagine the amount of trepidation that had overtaken the town after Perenais was hanged, watching Halloween steadily approach and wondering if at last the ghoulish holiday would pass without the loss of a child. And then he could imagine their joy when no more deaths happened. Some vigilante or vigilantes somewhere had seen their brutal actions justified. For the first time in months, the town slept soundly. But they’d been wrong. George Perenais couldn’t be the killer. Not if he was dead. Why had the real killer taken those kids? And why had he waited over twenty years to come back for their parents?

  Of course, the killer hadn’t taken all of the parents. Teri Hawkins had lived alone, as had Erik Smith, but Charlie Wilbert had been found by his wife. So had Dave Traskle. Those wives remained alive months after their husbands’ murders, though the DeVries couple had both been killed.

  Only one family remained untouched by the recent murders: Harry and Emmaline Foster. They had lost their son, Justin, in 1986. He was still officially listed as missing; no body had ever been found.

  Interesting. The Fosters were the only parents from the original string of murders who remained untouched by the recent rash of killings.

  Scott pulled open a drawer in his desk and fished out the local phone book. It covered a half a dozen towns but was still woefully thin. He quickly flipped to the Fs and found only three Fosters. Only one of them lived in River’s End. It had to be the same one.

  Quickly he scribbled down the address on a small notepad. Officer Scott Barkiewicz was about to take a little ride.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  Jennica had retreated to the family room to peruse the Perenais library.

  “Okay, there are, like, a dozen keys in here,” Nick called from the kitchen. They were both looking for clues to the mystery in the crypt. The sound followed of silverware crashing together.

  “We’ll try them all!” Jenn answered, not looking up from her book. Labeled simply The Veil, its cover was unadorned by author names or other design. The title was embossed in gold on a pale red fabric stitched into board. It was an old text; she could feel the pages separating from the binding as she turned them. The sound as she leafed carefully through gave her chills. It was as if she were breaking history.

  “Are there other locks around here you can’t open?” Nick called.

  “Not that I’ve found,” she said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  She stopped turning pages when she reached a chapter titled “The Crypt.” A small piece of faded blue paper marked the spot.

  So, Meredith had thought this was of interest, perhaps?

  Jenn began to read:

  The burial place is a seat of some power and must be approached with caution. The spirit is often drawn to linger here, even more so than the place of death. The veil at this location can be especially thin for the deceased, as the
spirit maintains a connection to its body’s physical remains. In ancient times, the crypt was frequently used as the point of ceremony to invoke the dead, to seek their counsel. There are myriad stories of druidic rites invoked in the underground burial chambers of Europe. These rituals could range from the simplistic—chanting the names of the dead repeatedly while standing in a power circle around the bones—to more elaborate exercises of invocation, frequently involving the shedding of blood.

  The Maldita sect, active in Britain in the late 1600s, sought to borrow arcane power from the dead to further their positions in business and political life. Once a month, during the high point of the full moon, they took torches into the catacombs beneath St. Smithwick’s in Brighton County and addressed the dead there in a particular fashion. They invoked the spirit of Peter Maldita, a man who in life held positions in parliament and whom many believed was the power behind the Duke of Pettigrew. They also believed him to have uncovered the darkest secrets of magic.

  Maldita rarely appeared in public, but when he did, he was always accompanied by three beautiful young women. They attempted to mask their beauty with long robes and shawls and veils, but there was no mistaking the glint of health in the women’s cheeks, the fire of lust in their eyes and their shapely forms. And while age-wise the women could have been his granddaughters, it was well-known that they did not behave as his progeny, for many reported seeing the old man engaged in unseemly acts with the three in his carriage just before he exited to address parliament. (In some circles, Maldita’s family crest—two sinuous serpents surrounding a triangle—was altered to appear as the head of a goat.) The women walked proudly—and possessively—at Maldita’s elbow until his death, which was well into his nineties. The three never appeared to pass twenty years of age, and many believed that Maldita had found the fountain of youth through some dark bond with the women. Or perhaps he’d bestowed youth upon them.

  Years after Maldita’s death, this sect grew up in secret, founded by P. Steven Gifford, an ambitious young man who had studied the dark arts himself and who believed that Maldita’s soul could be lured back to share its knowledge and power with supplicants through a dark ceremony involving the debauching of comely virgins. Gifford sought in vain to find the three mysterious young women who always accompanied the old man, but the trio had vanished; there were no clues about where they’d come from or where they’d gone.

  Gifford’s next option was to find equally seductive women to bring to Maldita’s tomb, presumably to seduce the dark lord from beyond the grave. He enlisted the help of a handful of other practitioners of the dark arts, and together in the midnight hours they devised a blasphemous ceremony of sex and magic held every month for more than seven years. They hypothesized that there was power in repetition, ceremony and numbers. And so their devilish ceremonies continued.

  While the full details of their final ceremony are unknown, the early days of the attempted invocations saw the group drug and blindfold a comely woman and keep her in one of their homes until nightfall. As the moon rose, they would lead her into the cold drafts of the underworld, stripping her naked upon the lid of Maldita’s tomb. When the victim awoke, she was made to engage in acts of extreme degradation with the druids, who called out Maldita’s name all the while promising to give the girl to him as his new dark bride.

  Early victims of this cult were kept blindfolded but ultimately set free with the admonition to tell nobody of what had occurred upon pain of death. The fear and embarrassment of the degraded women no doubt kept the secret for some time. Eventually, however, word did get out, and it became more difficult to access the catacombs where Maldita’s old bones lay. Guards were posted outside the burial grounds.

  The Maldita druids were not deterred. On the night of one full moon, the guards were overpowered by a group of dark, disguised figures. The following day it was discovered that the bones of Maldita had been stolen from the crypt, and after that the ceremonies of Maldita were reportedly performed by the druids atop the naked bones of the dead man himself. None of his new “brides” was set free afterward. It is assumed that each virgin was killed before her night was over.

  Many in occult circles believe that Gifford ultimately achieved his goal in raising the spirit of Maldita, though perhaps not in the fashion he anticipated because stories of this particular druidic sect simply ceased. Gifford himself was neither arrested nor ever heard from again, and a handful of other men believed to have been part of that cult also vanished at roughly the same time. Nobody was ever able to discover Maldita’s new final resting place or the nature of the final ceremonies.

  Some practitioners of the dark arts believe that Maldita accepted Gifford’s offerings and ultimately took the leader and his druids back with him to revel in the wicked pleasures of the other side. Others believe that Gifford and his men literally opened the doorway to hell and were sucked without succor into the everlasting fire. Regardless of Gifford’s final fate, his achievements are universally acknowledged and his tale is but one of the myriad stories of using the crypt as the focal point to contact the dead and break through the veil.

  In Italy, where the catacombs stretch on for—

  “Here’s what I got,” Nick said, interrupting her reading. He held up a black steel ring with four old-fashioned skeleton keys. In his other hand was a pile of alternatives, keys ranging from those with long black barrel shanks and thin bits extending from the end to more modern house keys of silver and gold. Lifting one of the shinier examples he suggested, “I’m guessing this is not what we’re looking for.”

  Jenn laughed. “No, I’m thinking this particular lock wasn’t put in by the guy at Ace Hardware.”

  “There are also some things in those kitchen drawers that . . .” Nick paused. “Well, I’m no chef, but I just don’t think they’re meant for cooking.”

  “I don’t think Aunt Meredith restricted her kitchen activities to preparing food,” Jenn agreed.

  “No. Most people don’t keep a drawer full of human skulls next to their pots and pans.”

  “You don’t want to know all of the things she did in the kitchen.” Jenn grimaced. “Some of the, um, recipes in her journal do not sound at all edible.”

  Nick made a face, too. Holding up the keys again he said, “Where there are keys, there are locks. Any idea where these might lead?”

  Jenn shook her head. “The door in my room and that kitchen cabinet were the only locks I’ve seen. Of course, we haven’t exactly looked for any secret passageways.”

  “I think we’d better,” Nick said. He nodded at the book in her hand. “Find anything?”

  “Just some perverted ceremonies involving virgins and old bones that I think Meredith marked. I haven’t finished skimming the chapter yet, though.”

  “Ah,” Nick said. “I’ll keep looking and leave you to it.”

  As he disappeared back into the kitchen, Jenn leafed ahead a few pages and then settled back to read more.

  More so than a graveyard, where bones are usually encased in wood and covered by many feet of earth, a crypt offers the best place to contact the dead. The veil here is extremely thin, especially those crypts housing the mortal remains of many, and the bones of the one to be contacted are likely only shielded by a thin layer of wood or stone. Many practitioners over the ages have insisted that, at a minimum, the lid of the coffin be removed before invoking a spirit, while still others have insisted that only through the physical handling of bones can full contact be achieved. (The disturbing of the bones of the dead can have other consequences, however. As the mortal remains offer a spirit’s sole tie to this earth, if they are altered or damaged substantially, that tie is broken forever.)

  There are many ways to actually contact the dead, the most popular being the use of a spiritual medium, a person well versed in achieving trance states that allow temporary possession of the body by a spirit. This, however, can prove extremely dangerous. For, unless it is a ceremony involving a crypt and specific, segregate
d bones, a séance provides an open door for any spirit. Frequently the result is that a medium calls not the hoped-for entity but some other malevolent, willful force. Such possessions can involve demons.

  One way to ameliorate the danger of medium possession is the use of the spirit board or witchboard. The witchboard allows a group of people to pool their mental energies to open a small window to the spirit world. Generally, no one member of the group gives up their identity or control of their body; rather, the spirit uses the combined energy of the group to move a small piece called a planchette across a wooden board graven with characters. The group can ask this spirit questions. If it is a cooperative soul, those questions are answered via the movements of the planchette. Witchboards originated hundreds of years ago but grew in popularity in the 1800s. They were also frequently used by laypersons as a parlor game—a dangerous parlor game indeed.

  While they can be used in virtually any location, the witchboard can be especially helpful when used in proximity to the bones of the intended contact. As the earthly remains maintain a hold on the spirit, this relationship can be played upon to bring focus to a session. It’s for this reason that some witchboard practitioners in the late 1800s would steal into cemeteries at night, armed with gaslights and shovels, to dig up the bones of the deceased. Some would even carve a planchette out of the skull of the dead, in this way creating a sort of magnet for the spirit. However, the defiling of bones risks bringing forth an angry spirit, and once the veil is broken a soul can frequently maintain contact with the earthly realm and reappear outside of the bounds of the original calling . . .

  Jenn shivered and closed the book. Her mind was filled with images of people traipsing through cemeteries, digging up graves and handling skulls by candlelight. Jesus, had her aunt really done this stuff? She’d always thought Meredith was one of those hippies into lots of herbal stuff and “Peace, man,” or maybe even into the spirit-of-the-earth stuff, crystals and shit, but the woman kept skulls in her kitchen and had the secret entrance to a crypt in her bedroom. She bookmarked pages about digging up the dead. What had her aunt Meredith really been into? And how had a nice Catholic girl from the Midwest ended up that way?