The Pumpkin Man

by John Everson

  Nick slid a fingernail beneath the wooden lid and pushed. The lid flipped easily back, and he gasped as he peered inside. A small blob of something organic rested there.

  It was dark, almost bloodless, but clearly flesh. Forgotten or abused, but nevertheless flesh. He reached in and gingerly lifted it out, cupped in the palms of his hands. Jenn stared at the hunk of withered flesh and didn’t question her intuition for an instant.

  “It looks like a heart,” she said.

  Nick nodded. “That’s what I thought.” His fingers shook, then steadied. “So . . . great. We have a mummy, a bunch of bones and a desiccated heart. Now what?”

  Jenn shook her head. “This is no regular heart,” she declared. “Someone hid it here, beneath the floor, on purpose. I think this is the key. But—”

  “If it’s the key, what exactly is the lock?” Nick finished. “Are we supposed to do something with it?”

  “Maybe,” Jenn offered. “Maybe something in the hidden room. Maybe this is the heart of the mummy.”

  “Oh, great,” Nick guessed. “And now we have to stitch it back in place.”

  “Maybe,” Jenn said. “I have no idea.”

  She noticed writing in the bottom of the box, beneath where the heart had rested. It was faint, but she could just make out the lettering. GIFFORD it read.

  “I know that name,” she said. “It was in one of the books I read.” She thought a minute. “Gifford was a British druid who performed all sorts of obscene rituals to try to bring back the soul of a dead guy. Do you think this could really be him? He had to have died, like, two hundred years ago.”

  “Let’s go back upstairs,” Nick suggested. “I can’t think straight down here.”

  He set the wooden box on the floor near the coffin and took Jenn’s hand to lead her away from the crypt. They alternated between a walk and a run back to the stairs.

  Up in her bedroom, Jenn pointed. “Sit,” she said.

  She walked over to the dresser as Nick stretched out on the bed with a heavy sigh. Digging out Meredith’s journal, she brought it back to the bed, laid down next to him and rested her head on his arm as she began turning the pages, searching for some entry that might relate to the secret places in the house.

  After a few minutes of skimming and shifting back and forth, Jenn stopped and pointed at a page in the book.

  “I think I found something,” she whispered, and Nick looked past her hand to read the words:

  I found a key in the back of the steak knife drawer today. I wasn’t sure what it might go to, and George wasn’t home to ask, so I poked around in the house on my own. I still feel like I’m living in someone else’s home, and I know I’ve got to stop asking him for everything. I need to make this house mine, so this seemed like a good first step.

  What’s the key for? I should know all of the locks in my own house, right? I looked in my closet and downstairs in the basement, and I looked in the spare room. In the end, it was right under my nose. Well, my nose when I’m in the kitchen. The key opened a lock at the back of the pantry, and that lock opens the door on a legacy that I’m not sure what to make of. George has always begged me to let it all alone. His family has a history, and it’s one he never wants to talk about. But I’m not sure he ever knew what was behind those pantry shelves. I’m not sure he understood the depth of what his family unlocked.

  To be honest, I’m not sure I do either. But I do know this. The dead live in that room behind the kitchen. They walk, and the floors creak beneath their feet. They speak in the spaces between the winds, and their bones bind them here. The Perenais family used those souls. I don’t know for what, or how, but I hope to learn. Because I’ve found their Book of Shadows!

  “What’s a Book of Shadows?” Nick asked, toying with a lock of Jennica’s hair.

  She smiled. As she did, it occurred to her that this pleasing attention was what made Kirstin addicted to boys. Her friend couldn’t live a day without. Jenn enjoyed the feeling, but she didn’t live for it.

  But the thought of Kirstin made her eyes mist over.

  “It’s like . . . a spell book, I think,” Jenn answered. “A place where you write down all of the stuff you’ve learned.”

  “Like, a witch’s recipe book? One hundred and one ways to use bats as aphrodisiacs?”

  Jenn snorted. “Something like that, I guess.”

  “So, your aunt found a book of spells behind the pantry, and that’s what made her a witch?”

  “She probably used some of what she found in there, yeah. That’s what it looks like.”

  “So, let me guess. Now we have to find the book.”

  Jenn smiled. “Good guess, Nick. How else are we going to know what to do with the mummy and that heart?”

  He groaned. “Why do I feel like everything has just gone completely off the rails?”

  “Because they have. We’re way off the tracks.” Jenn sighed. “There are no tracks. I mean . . . we’ve got a fuckin’ mummy in the pantry!”

  “Well, it’s not really in the pantry,” he said.

  She elbowed him in the ribs. He responded by rolling atop her. The journal fell to the floor and Nick kissed her, playfully at first and then more urgently.

  For once, Jenn didn’t fight the need to be loved. She felt his excitement grow against the zipper of her jeans, and she encouraged it, grinding herself against him as her tongue wrestled his. Without words they both shed their clothes, quickly, as if somehow stripping off the horrors of the week. Then Jenn put her arms around Nick and held him close, enjoying the feel of his wiry chest hair crushed against the soft skin of her breasts. She never wanted to let him go.

  For a while, she didn’t.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-THREE

  Jennica woke to the light of the moon streaming in through the window across her naked hip, silently limning her skin with iridescence. She pulled a sheet up to cover herself but then realized the reason she’d awoken would force her out of bed. Snuggling back into the warm, snoring body of Nick was not an option. Not for long.

  She pushed back the sheets and slipped out of the bed as quietly as she could, trying not to wake him. The light of the moon made it easy to see her way to the bathroom, and she did her business as quickly as she could. But just as she was rising from the toilet and about to flush, she heard something thump deep within the house. Her stomach clenched, and she hunched back down for a minute to listen.

  The house remained still. The silence made the hair on her skin stand up. Jenn flushed the toilet and stood, softly padded back toward the bed.

  Thump. The noise sounded like it had come from the kitchen.

  Jenn looked at the bed where Nick lay snoring. She reached out toward his feet but stopped. Something glinted at the side of her vision. A light?

  She looked to her right, toward the bedroom door, but saw only the wall of the hallway. The edge of the hallway closet was a darker area carved into the shadows, though she could just make it out. The light of the moon was strong in the bedroom, but there was something else, too. Another light? Yes. A faint, glimmering mist between her and the hallway.

  Jenn turned and crept closer to the bedroom door. There was something about the way the light played. It twisted and twined, mistlike, looking for a second like a windblown fog and then coalescing into something else entirely: a cigarette smoke ghost, with spectral arms and a face that made Jenn gasp.

  The face. It was familiar! She could see the hall closet through those ghostly cheekbones, but still she knew these features. She’d seen them in a hundred pictures. She even had a vague memory of childhood meetings.

  “Aunt Meredith?”

  The mist contracted and moved toward her. Then, a second later, like a breath huffing out, it dissipated and blew away down the hall toward the family room.

  “Wait!” Jenn hissed. All of her questions might be answered by her aunt, but now her aunt was leaving. She couldn’t let that happen.

  She followed the luminous m
ist as it slipped out of the room. Into the hall she stepped, seeing the glowing tail disappear into the kitchen. Without thinking, she moved forward, anxious to catch up.

  In the kitchen, the light of the moon struck her face in a blinding white beam. The celestial orb was brilliant tonight, and it shone even stronger here than in her bedroom. The white light almost washed away the eerie fog she’d followed, but as Jenn’s eyes adjusted she caught that separate glow again.

  Meredith. The woman’s spirit hung before her in the air.

  It was her aunt; Jenn was sure of it now. The soft jaw, the thin nose so much like her dad’s. The shadowed, deep-socketed eyes. But as the specter of her aunt stared at Jenn, something within Jenn’s soul froze. The look in those dead eyes was not a look of love. It was the look of obsession.

  “Aunt Meredith?” Jenn whispered again.

  The floor seemed to shake. She could feel the noise vibrating all around her, a movement that shook the room and the very air.

  Thump-thump.

  Thump-thump.

  Jenn’s teeth chattered with the sound, and she looked at the stern face of her ghostly aunt. “What’s going on?”

  The fog that was her aunt, or the ghost of her aunt, or simply a dream come real for a moment, faded away. Or, really, it slipped away. It suddenly blurred and shifted, the area that was brighter—just barely—than the light of the moon streaming in from the windows, and it moved to the corner of the kitchen. To the door of the pantry.

  She stepped forward, but it was already too late. The ghost of her aunt had gone, and she knew exactly where. Into the room with the mummy, the altar and the bones.

  Finally, Jenn did what she’d wanted to do five minutes before. She went back to her bedroom and reached out to shake Nick’s thigh.

  “Wake up!” she begged.

  He moaned and shifted beneath the sheets. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Meredith,” Jenn said. “We have to go into the room behind the pantry.”

  “Okay,” Nick mumbled, already falling back asleep. “We’ll do that tomorrow.”

  “No,” Jenn complained. “We have to go now. She’s waiting for us.”

  “What?” Nick’s eyes opened.

  “I just saw her, and she was leading me to the pantry. Come on,” Jenn insisted. “Or I’ll go by myself.”

  “What the hell,” Nick said, slowly rising. But by the time he blinked his eyes enough to really take in the room, Jenn was gone.

  “Damnitall,” he grumbled, and slapped his feet to the cold floor. Calling out for her to wait, he hurried to follow.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The ghost light sparkled like a fever dream, faint and slippery, moving through the night with a hint of intelligence and a flash of mystery.

  Jenn grabbed the key to the room behind the pantry from the kitchen counter where she’d left it and followed into the room beyond. Her heart pounded as she fumbled the key into the lock, because she’d caught just a glimpse of Meredith hovering near the back of the pantry. Then her aunt was gone.

  She pushed the key into the lock and turned it until she heard the metallic click deep within the wood. When she pushed the entry opened, she was suddenly inside that strange dark place.

  Death hung in the air like fog.

  Nick rushed down the dark hallway into the kitchen. The pantry door was open, and he saw the pale glint of Jenn’s legs through the back door and headed into the hidden room.

  “Jenn, wait!” he called. But she didn’t stop. She disappeared into the dark.

  Nick followed into the narrow entry. He didn’t feel good about it, but he couldn’t let her go into that place alone. There was something bad there, something impatient. He’d felt it this afternoon. A presence. And, that had been when the sun was shining, even if the roof kept it away. Now the sun was gone and she was walking right into the arms of whatever waited in the darkness.

  There she was.

  The specter of Jenn’s aunt shone in the dark like a beacon, her aura lighting the way. And then she swept off, down past the long end of the room and around, into the edge of the L. There she disappeared.

  Jenn stepped forward, but the light had gone out and she suddenly felt trapped. The dark closed in around her. A faint glow came from the doorway, but it wasn’t enough to see. It was a faint beacon back, but there was so much dark between here and there that she almost couldn’t move. She didn’t want to retreat, anyway. What she really wanted was to move forward.

  She turned to where Meredith disappeared, but there was nothing, nothing but the cold fingers of dark closing in all around her. Jenn felt her chest contract. She was trapped by the night; all around her were the invisible bones of the dead. And apparently spirits lurked close at hand, too, anchored to those bones.

  The mummified corpse was just a couple feet away. Jenn had a vision of that dead flesh shifting and moving, escaping its prison on the wall, slipping forward to corner her, pressing her backward until her feet stumbled on the bones of all those who had died here before. Other people had been lured into this place and never gotten out. Was it a boneyard or a torture chamber? She supposed it didn’t make a difference in the end; the dead were tied here by the past. And maybe they were hungry.

  Jenn struggled to step forward—no, to go back the way she’d come, to escape the room before it was too late. Panic suddenly gripped her, locked her body in place, unable to move. From the faintly visible bones beside her, she saw a glimmer of something, a smoky movement in the dark. It crept slowly.

  Inch by inch the ghost grew, its tendrils reaching toward her bare feet. Somewhere far away she heard her name, but she didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She watched the thing growing closer and closer, and all she could do was—

  When Jenn opened her mouth to scream, nothing came out. Her vocal cords were frozen as surely as her legs.

  Oh shit, she thought. Why did I follow her here after midnight? Why did she bring me?

  “Jenn!”

  Nick’s voice broke the silence, and suddenly a light appeared in the room. Only, this one wasn’t ghostly. It was definitely a candle. And it was moving toward her.

  “What are you doing?” Nick exclaimed, slipping an arm around her. “Why are you in here without me? Why didn’t you answer?”

  His touch broke the spell, and Jenn took a deep, broken breath. “I followed Aunt Meredith. Her ghost. Then she disappeared into the bones. Right over there.” She pointed. “I thought she was coming back a minute ago—her or something worse. But then you came.”

  “Come on,” he said, pulling her along behind him. “Come back to bed.”

  “But she was here,” Jenn insisted. “She was trying to show me something.”

  Nick nodded. Then he held up his candle. Faint orange light bled off the stacks of old bones to flicker on the dusty floor.

  “There’s nothing here now,” he said. “And I don’t think this is where we want to spend the night.”

  Jenn grudgingly followed him down the long stretch of room, glancing back as they left to see that mummy nailed to the wall like some dark martyr. Its green marble eyes were following them, and she could still feel that dead gaze on her back when Nick pulled the door of the pantry shut behind them.

  He pulled open the refrigerator door and poured two glasses of milk, handing one to her. The other he took a deep gulp of before setting it on the counter with a sigh.

  “Helps you sleep,” he explained.

  She shrugged. “We’ll see,” she said, and then drained her glass.

  They went back to bed, but sleep came slow for Jenn. Her feet felt hot, then cold. She shifted beneath the covers and tossed from one side to the other. For a long time she lay staring out at the empty hallway outside, expecting movement. Expecting another beckoning glimmer. But the ghost didn’t return.

  Nick’s deep breathing filled her ear, and Jennica finally closed her eyes and let the sound lull her to sleep. When she did, she dreamed of the bones
in the pantry. The bones shifted across the floor like snakes.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Scott Barkiewicz pulled off the broken, one-lane asphalt road and onto a sandy gravel driveway next to a beat-up brown van that saltwater air had not been kind to. The house beyond was typical of those halfway up the hill on the edge of town: a pale cerulean and white frame that looked as if it needed a new coat of paint ten years ago. But, Scott expected that the inside of the small home would likely defy the outside. Looks were deceiving. The ocean air aged everything here twice as fast as anywhere else, and most of the homes he’d been in since he started on the force here were modest but well kept.

  He stepped out of the squad car and walked across a string of pale pink paving blocks to a concrete step. The inner door was open beyond a screen door, and he could hear the doorbell echo inside when he touched the button.

  It only took a moment for a thickset Italian woman to emerge from the back of the house. She looked about fifty, he guessed, with shoulder-length dark hair and equally black eyes. Her blouse woke the eye with a kaleidoscopic pattern, and the chest and belly beneath jiggled as she walked. Mrs. Foster was no stranger to good eatin’.

  “Can I help you?” she asked through the screen.

  “Emmaline Foster?” he asked.

  She nodded. “That’s me.”

  “I was hoping I might be able to talk a bit with you and your husband.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That might prove a bit difficult.”

  “Why’s that?” Scott asked.

  “Well, he’s been dead these last twenty-plus years.” Her voice betrayed enjoyment that he’d not done his homework.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. But his stomach sank. If Harry had been dead all this time, he couldn’t be involved in the current mess. And it might also explain why the local victim list remained incomplete when it came to the parents of the children murdered in the original Pumpkin Man spree: Harry wasn’t here to be murdered.

  Of course, she still was.