by John Everson
Jenn slipped the book back into place on the shelf and stared again at the titles beside it. Medieval Magic. The Occult and the Mystery. Shamanism in the Old World. The Power of Earth. Aleister Crowley and the Hidden War. And then she saw another: The Amazing Gourd. It seemed incongruous amid the others. At least, it would have before recent events.
When she pulled it out, she was sure the book deserved a place on this shelf. The cover jacket was faded; she thought the book likely printed before she was born. But the yellowing, tattered sleeve featured a color photo of a veritable mountain of gourds of all shapes and sizes, from acorn squash to fist-size, warty old orbs, to yellow-and-green-striped tubelike zucchini squash, to butternuts. And at the center was their king: a giant, deep orange pumpkin that looked like it must weigh a couple hundred pounds.
The book wouldn’t have drawn Jenn’s notice a month or so ago, but to see it here, now, in this house? And a tiny slip of blue paper caught her eye amid the pages.
What? Had Meredith marked this page, too? What could she possibly have found here, and would it be important to this search?
She sat down, set the faded book on her lap and flipped to the marked page.
The Mythology of the Gourd
Being hard-shelled fruit with sweet soft flesh inside, gourds have long been seen by certain peoples and cultures as gifts from the gods, and by others as a temple. Many of these cultures used gourds in ceremonial rites. The Poblayen Indians felt that one gourd in particular represented fertility, which is why they held numerous ceremonies with it. Late every fall they held a betrothal ceremony for young couples, the unions each represented by a pumpkin. That gourd was to be taken home and prepared by the woman, with the seeds preserved and saved for eating by the new husband. It was said that eating these seeds would give him the power to sire a child on his wife that would be healthy and strong.
Of course, with every ritual of fertility comes a legend of the same power turned dark. One story recorded again and again is clearly intended as a cautionary tale. In it, a virile young man is “spending his seed” in the pumpkin patch after dark. His sacred, life-giving power, illicitly spent, brings to life a pumpkin queen whom he finds when he returns on a subsequent night. There in the pumpkin patch, instead of privacy and solace, he discovers a lovely young woman connected to a pumpkin vine. She begs him to cut the cord (again, another symbol of procreation) and seduces him there in the field. Alas, when he succumbs to temptation, she wraps her arms around him and metamorphoses back into a pumpkin, her arms and legs forming a wall around him from which he can never escape. Having made his choice, he is doomed to live inside her shell, fertilizing her seeds for the rest of his days—a chilling warning against the potential consequences of illicit passion.
On the other hand, other cultures celebrated the pumpkin as a soul cage. The gourd’s wealth of seeds was seen as a powerful lure to spirits, and so a shaman would carve out the top of a pumpkin, performing a ceremony to invoke the spirits of elders. When just such a spirit had entered the pumpkin, he would close the lid to trap it there. In this way, he would be able to hold a spirit for days or weeks, until the flesh of the pumpkin at last decomposed. During this period, the shaman could consult the gourd for wisdom.
Variants on this ceremony involve the entrapment of serpents (generally for darker rituals) or the use of a human skull, the latter being placed within the pumpkin in order to give flesh and voice once more to the dead. The pumpkin “head” could then be addressed, allowing possible communication with the owner of the bones.
Jenn closed the book. She would never look at a pumpkin in quite the same way again. She’d always associated them with pie and Halloween, but apparently there was another whole mythology—one that had clearly taken root here in River’s End. She wished she’d never learned of any of it.
“I found one!” Nick called from the kitchen. His voice was excited.
Jenn set her book on the couch and got up. When she reached him, Nick was on his knees in the pantry. He grinned at her. The contents of the walk-in storage space were strewn about the floor, boxes of breakfast cereal and bags of flour and soup cans pushed willy-nilly out of the way. Three white-painted shelves leaned against the stove.
“It fits,” he said, and motioned at the key protruding from the wall amid a thin, lighter stripe of paint where a shelf had been just moments before.
“How the hell did you know to look there?”
Nick shrugged. “I figured you’ve already seen all the obvious walls, so any other locks have to be hiding inside cabinets or closets or whatever. I looked in here and saw the top of this lock at the back of the top shelf. So . . . care to give it a turn and see where it goes?”
“No, you go ahead.”
Nick turned the key. The lock clicked easily. As it did, the slight crack that Jenn had noticed in the back wall suddenly grew larger; then the back wall simply swung outward, hidden hinges suddenly visible on the other side.
“Do we need a flashlight?” Jenn asked, noting the implacable darkness beyond.
Nick stepped forward and shook his head. “Your aunt was a boy scout,” he said. He reached out toward a small shelf and turned back holding a white candle and a book of matches.
“So, what’s back there?” Jenn asked.
He shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
Meredith Perenais’s Journal
August 15, 2009
At night, the cold here is palpable. They walk the halls now all the time, and they vanish into the secret room. But they won’t talk to me. Still, I feel like the newcomer, the outsider. I am nearly all that remains of the Perenais family, but I am not a Perenais, not really. Are they angry with me for opening the door? Will they take me through it? Is the Old One the door?
More important, will they take George back?
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
The pantry opened on an ancient world.
Jenn and Nick stepped into a narrow corridor that progressed about ten feet and then became a long L-shaped room. There were no windows. The tiny flame of Nick’s candle revealed hints of what lay within, showed a number of half-burned candles set on small tables and shelves. Nick bent his taper to touch those, one by one working his way around until the space was filled by a warm orange glow. Then they both stood and stared at the secret room, hidden from the rest of the house, its walls and ceiling painted black as if to cloak the very boundaries of the room in darkness.
A garland of bones was strung wall to wall. Jenn assumed they were human. Phalanges, tibiae, femurs and ribs hung like graveyard wind chimes from the ceiling on tiny bits of string or wire, stood out in sharp relief from the midnight pitch of the walls. Framed black-and-white portraits—photos and paintings—were spaced out on the walls below the bones, and some of the candles Nick had lit were clearly positioned to throw light on them. They were almost like . . . mini shrines.
On a thin wooden table near the exit was an old radio setup that looked to hail from the 1930s or ’40s. It was carved of dark wood, with thick wooden knobs and a gold tuning face where the AM and shortwave band numbers were inscribed. The needle inside pointed at a row of numbers set off in an upside-down U.
At the far end of the room was what appeared to be an altar, a church kneeler fronting a wall-mounted golden box. The thing that separated this altar from one you might see in a Catholic church was that, here, instead of a cross with a tortured visage of Jesus, a bare human skull glared out at the room from atop the lattice of a bone white skeleton. Unlike the bits of bone that ringed the room in grotesque garlands, this skull was just the start of a complete skeleton.
“What is this place?” Jenn whispered. “Where is this place?”
“Um, behind the pantry in your house!” Nick laughed uneasily.
“Yes, but . . . where?” Jenn looked back at the light from the kitchen and slowly turned, relating the space to the parts of the house she knew.
“I think it’s behind the bathroom,�
� Nick said.
She nodded and pointed at the entryway. “This is next to the hallway, then, and this”—she pointed at the main section of the room—“must be behind the bath.” The dark end of the L turned left. “That’s behind the wall of my bed.”
“You might want to think about sleeping someplace else,” Nick suggested as they stared at the wall. Bones were piled by the dozen against it.
Jenn walked over and looked down at a small skull leering up from within a cascade of arm, leg and rib cage bones. She saw other skulls hidden deeper, in piles that reached higher than her knees. But, the bones weren’t the worst of it. At the end of the short stub of the L, a pair of chains extended from the ceiling to the wrists of a man.
Jenn held up her candle, illuminating the body. The man’s skin looked dark as dry earth. His face was sunken and wrinkled, and the teeth behind his thin-stretched lips were yellow.
“Jesus,” Nick breathed.
The flicker of her light caught the reflection of the man’s eyes, and Jenn’s heart leaped. The pupils beneath the hood of his brows seemed to follow her. “Oh shit,” she said, and backed up. Her heart pounded double time. “His eyes moved.”
Nick squeezed her arm and stepped in the opposite direction, holding his flame up close to the chained man’s face. You could see a small mole on the right cheek and the dozens of tiny wrinkles furrowing the ancient weathered skin. And you could see the gleam of green that reflected back from deep in the petrified flesh of the body.
“No,” Nick said, shaking his head. “They’re not eyes at all. Marbles or something.”
He bent and slowly let his candle illuminate the rest of the man’s body. The corpse was clearly male. He was naked; the shriveled remains of his penis pointed the way to the floor, where his ankles were bound and also chained to the wall. But it wasn’t the nudity that kept Jenn’s eyes riveted to the dead man. It was the symbols. On every inch of his skin, tiny triangles and swirls and sickle moons and backward E’s and hundreds of other markings had been drawn in dark ink. The dead man’s flesh was a tapestry of runes.
“Well,” Nick said softly. “Not everyone can say they own a mummy.”
“He’s not a mummy,” Jenn argued. “He doesn’t have any coverings. Wraps, you know?”
“The rags? They don’t matter. At some point, probably a very long time ago from the look of things, he was gutted, filled with preservative, his eyes replaced, and set here like a statue,” Nick said. “He’s a mummy. Somebody did a taxidermy project on him the same as they would a deer’s head.”
Jenn’s skin crawled. She leaned closer to the figure and stared harder at the skin. Rough and yellowed, it was covered with symbols like parchment. But she could see the pores and even the faint down of body hair. She could see pocks and scars and moles on those legs and arms, and the chest was marred by the most obvious marks, perhaps fatal. Across its center, the flesh of the chest was puckered and stitched together by black thread in an angry Y.
Nick pointed. “That’s where they cut him open and removed his heart, kidneys, guts, you name it. They hollowed him out, preserved the skin and sewed him back together.”
“Why?” Jenn whispered.
He shrugged. “So they could talk to him for the rest of time?”
Jenn flashed back to the book chapter about having the bones of the dead nearby when using the Ouija board. Maybe Nick wasn’t too far from the truth. But then, what did all the symbols on his body mean? Did they signify a spell of some sort? And who had this man been that anyone went to such lengths to maintain his body?
“I wonder who he was,” she whispered, staring up at the rictus of the dead man’s shriveled lips.
“We could get the Ouija board and ask him,” Nick suggested, but his joke caused a frown as he realized Jenn might not recognize his meaning. He held his hand up and said, “Kidding!”
She nodded absently. “I certainly wouldn’t try to talk to him without knowing who he was.”
A chill shot through Nick’s heart as he realized she wasn’t ruling out trying to contact him.
“Um, do you think that’s wise under any circumstance?” he asked.
Jenn looked from the mummy’s marble eyes to Nick’s, and her face was as serious as death. “Do you think we have a lot of choices?” she asked. “We have to find a way to stop the Pumpkin Man before he kills again. Before he kills us. The police aren’t going to be of any use, because this isn’t about some psycho they can track down, cuff and lock up. This is about spirits and dark magic. It all began here, maybe in this room. And somewhere in this house has got to be the clue on how to stop it. If we don’t find that, I don’t think we’ll live to see Halloween. We may not even live to see next week.”
As she spoke, the candles in the room seemed to flicker. Jenn felt her skin grow cold.
“There’s someone here,” she whispered.
Something crashed to the floor across the room, and they both jumped. Nick put an arm around Jenn’s chest, pulling her close to him as they both scanned the shadows, trying to see what had fallen. He could feel her heart beating fast through her T-shirt. She squeezed his forearm and then lowered it. Slowly they began to walk across the room.
Near the altar, Nick knelt and picked up a wooden square about the size of a hardcover book. “I think this was on the wall,” he said, turning it over. One side was covered in a gold and red design in the shape of a medieval shield. A serpent curled up one side, while a twining, thorny branch of red roses decorated the other. Across the center, Perenais was sketched in ornate, antique lettering.
The hair on Jenn’s neck stood up. “Who did this?” she whispered. “What does it mean? Is that man over there a Perenais? Where’s the damn family history I need to find in order to stop all this?”
“Calm down. It was probably just a draft from the open door,” Nick suggested, but anybody listening could tell he didn’t believe that. He couldn’t make the tremor in his voice go away.
“No. This all relates to Aunt Meredith’s husband,” Jenn argued. “Captain Jones even said that. He said something was going on up here long before my aunt ever came to town, that my uncle’s whole family was into some dark, evil stuff. This only proves it.”
“Okay,” Nick said. He set the crest down on the kneeler. “I believe that they were into some dark, evil stuff. But what exactly does it have to do with the Pumpkin Man?”
Jennica turned slowly around the room, soaking in the candlelit bones and the portraits of men with dark, deep-set eyes. Presumably in-laws. She had a horrible creepy feeling that they were staring at her, watching her try to figure it all out.
“I don’t know,” she said at last, “but let’s go try those other keys in the crypt. There’s something hidden in that floor. Maybe when we find all the pieces, things will start to make sense.”
“Great,” Nick said. “I was hoping you’d say we could go back there. There just aren’t enough bones here.”
Jenn punched him and gave a feeble grin in response. “Yeah,” she said. “Right.”
Their candles seemed to flicker, and the crest slipped off the kneeler armrest and clattered to the floor. This time, Nick didn’t pick it up.
“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested.
They didn’t quite run down the narrow hall and out of the pantry into the bright light of the kitchen. Not quite.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
The basement was dank and cold as they descended the stairs, which caused visible shivers along with Jenn’s invisible fear.
“I can’t help but think that we should be using something from here,” she said, gesturing to the rows of mason jars. “Something here has to do some good.”
“I’m not sure I want to know a good use for a jar full of human eyeballs,” Nick answered. “Of course, I’m not sure how I feel about wanting to kiss a girl in a house filled with secret passages, rooms stacked with the bones of the dead, and a desiccated mummy.”
“Wait
a minute,” Jenn said. “Are you saying you want to kiss me?”
He shrugged and gave her a half smile. “Maybe.”
She turned and planted her lips on his. The act filled her with happiness, and she raised an eyebrow in question as she pulled back. “Like that?”
He nodded. “Just like that. I just wish you weren’t doing it in a house where my best friend was killed. A house filled with the bones of dead people. And I wish that there wasn’t a killer who wanted to add us to these bones, take our heads and replace them with pumpkins. Just sayin’.”
Jenn sighed. “So, let’s find out what’s behind the Pumpkin Man so I can grant your wish. I’m happy to kiss you anywhere you like”—she steeled herself for whatever was to come—“but first we need to see what’s in the floor beneath the crypt.”
They wasted no time walking through the basement and the passageway beneath the backyard. When they arrived in the room with the old coffin, Nick moved straight to the serpent on the floor, knelt down with his ring and began sticking various keys into the lock. Which one would it be?
On the third try the key fit. Nick twisted and pulled first one way and then the other, not entirely sure which motion would make the lock open. After a couple of twists, Nick smiled.
“Found it,” he announced.
“Great,” Jenn said, her heart pounding. “Now what’s inside?”
The panel of black tile opened down into a fairly small space. Nick reached in, carefully felt around and discovered a small wooden box. “I don’t know,” he said, lifting it up and showing the box to her.
“Open it,” Jenn said.
