Harvest Moon

by James A. Moore

  “What’s up, Jeremy?”

  “Time to get ready for Halloween, man.”

  “Yeah.” Josh’s face lit up. “What are you going out as?”

  Jeremy had to think about that. Like he did every year. He was always a last minute thinker. “Maybe a skeleton.”

  “Why don’t you go as Old Bones? I’m gonna be Mister Sticks.”

  Jeremy blinked, surprised. Was that an invitation to join him? “You mean, like go trick or treating together?”

  “Yeah! It’d be awesome! I bet we can find someone to do up as Patches, and there are always a couple of girls dressed as witches. We can pick the coolest one to be Hattie.”

  He looked at Josh’s face and saw no sign of duplicity. He knew the signs well enough, having dealt with them at home for a long, long while. “Cool. Yeah, I’d love it!” He ran his finger along the hide of one of the pumpkins, wanting to do something with his hands to avoid the sudden need to jump up and down.

  The only real catch was getting permission to trick or treat with friends, and maybe not have his parents along for the ride. But one obstacle at a time. His fingers tingled suddenly as they crossed from one pumpkin to the next. He looked down at the future jack-o-lantern under his hand and grinned. It was just about the weirdest looking gourd he’d ever seen. The shape was uneven, almost like a human head, from a jaw line all the way to a rounded bulge in the back that would have worked perfectly for the backside of a skull. His fingers ran over where a human face would have been on the pumpkin—which was almost exactly the right size for a human head—and felt slight depressions where eye sockets should be and even a minor ridge where the eyebrow would go. It felt just right. He pulled the thing close to him and held it to his chest, his fingers clutching the firm orange flesh with an eager grip.

  This would be his masterpiece; he was convinced of it.

  “Ohmigawd! Jeremy! Man, you gotta let me have that pumpkin!” Josh’s voice sounded like it was on the verge of tears, he was so excited, and Jeremy looked at him, surprised.

  “What? No way! I just found this.” He tried to make Josh understand without driving the other boy away. “Look at how much it looks like a skull!” His own voice sounded defensive and whiny, and he hated that sound. It reminded him too much of the sounds his mom made late at night when his parents thought he was asleep.

  “No, dude, listen! That would be perfect for the head of Mister Sticks!”

  Damn. No way around that. He was absolutely right. “Yeah, but man, this is the perfect pumpkin!” He waved his arms around, exasperated. “I need to carve this one!”

  Josh nodded; his face as serious and grave as only a young teenager could be on the subject of perfect pumpkins for carving. “Okay. Here’s the deal. I pay for it, you get to carve it, and I wear it on Halloween night.”

  Jeremy had to think about it, but after a few seconds he nodded. “But I want pictures. I need to have pictures before and after I carve it or no deal.”

  “Done, my man, good as done.” Josh grinned, his whole face lighting up. Jeremy handed him the pumpkin and almost instantly wanted to snatch it back. He could see how the thing would look when it was carved properly.

  Josh carried his new prize as they both continued looking for pumpkins for their houses. Eventually Jeremy found another one, much larger, and almost perfectly round, but even as he started planning the way he’d carve a face his mind was working over the details of the skull-like pumpkin in Josh’s hands.

  He couldn’t wait to get a knife into it and carve the design that almost seemed to want to come out. The pumpkin seemed to whisper to him, to want him to gut it and start carving. He was a little surprised to discover he was getting an erection, but even that seemed secondary to the face he would create when the time was right.

  IV

  Alan Treacher was not exactly a Rhodes Scholar, but he was the closest thing to an actual historian that the town of Beldam Woods possessed; especially when one considered the sudden and violent loss of Douglas Habersham. He knew every legend of the witch and every bit of dirty laundry that had ever been aired in the town. Or at least he liked to think he did. He learned otherwise when the police chief asked him to look over the papers found at the scene of the retired librarian’s violent murder.

  The chief had asked nicely and offered a stipend for the time involved. It wasn’t much money, but he accepted it eagerly and considered it a bonus. The real treat, as far as he was concerned, was the chance to look over the papers Doug Habersham had collected over the years. The old man was notorious for not sharing the work he’d spent years amassing. Oh, sure, there were plenty of papers to be found at the library, and Habersham had made copies of them when Alan requested, but a lot of what the old man had used for research had come from private homes and estate sales, and he had never been willing to make copies of his personal papers. Not once, not ever.

  Alan tried not to gloat. He wasn’t very successful, but he managed to stay mostly somber through the police chief’s visit. Five minutes later he was looking over the papers as carefully as he could, doing his best to treat them with the proper respect and not salivate on them. That was made a little easier by the fact that each and every sheet was in an evidence bag and clearly marked. There were rules he had to follow, like not taking them out of the bags and never, ever touching any of them. He could live with that.

  He didn’t need to touch the papers to read what was on them or to photocopy them. Besides, this way he didn’t have to touch the bloodstains. History or no, the idea of touching the bloodied pages was almost enough to make him squeamish.

  Almost.

  He’d been looking them over for a few hours and had already learned that what he knew about the local legends was mostly tripe. It was embarrassing, but when he considered how little he’d had to work with in comparison to what Habersham had hoarded, he managed not to feel too horrible. The old bastard had definitely hidden the best information for himself.

  There were a lot of facts he’d never known; for example, he’d always thought the old witch had been killed by drowning. That was what Habersham always told everyone, and that was the aspect of the old legend all of his papers agreed on. Not so, according to the papers. She was dismembered, her body drawn and quartered using four draft horses, and then her separate parts were burned in four separate locations. Only her head was actually thrown into the bog and even that was meant to be burned, but according to the records of Jeremiah Hawthorne, who kept remarkably concise personal notes on the whole affair, the head continued to speak and tried to curse them all, even after being removed. Her head was wrapped in a cloak that Hawthorne himself sacrificed to the cause and then thrown into the waters at the Witch’s Hollow after being weighted down with several large rocks.

  Hawthorne had a personal reason for making sure the witch was killed. According to his journals, he was one of the men she’d seduced. That was an entry he found enlightening to say the least. Almost made him wish the witch were still around.

  She presented herself as a fantasy made flesh, a vision of all that a man desires and craves when he is at his most bestial. I did try to resist the urges she brought out in me, being a man of God and married as well, but I was weak and made weaker by her caress and kiss. I have sinned against the vows I took when I married and I have sinned against the very Lord I have sworn to serve. My soul is in danger and I must make amends in any way I can, but I know this as surely as I know God is in His Heaven: I would risk all that I have risked to be with her again. I am weakened still by the memory of our carnal meeting. The witch’s hold on me is that strong.

  That pretty much summed it up. Hell, any woman that good in the sack had to be worth running across. He allowed himself a small, indulgent grin. It had been a long time since he’d been with any woman. The witch must have been something really, truly nasty for them to have decided to do her in. Twenty men stormed her house by surprise and dragged the old woman out into the small field where she grew herbs.
They tied her arms to two horses and her legs to two more and then had her torn apart by the strength of the animals. If there was a worse way to go, he couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  Still, it made for interesting reading.

  Alan blinked his eyes and then rubbed at the bridge of his nose, massaging the slight bags that had formed over the course of the last few hours. He had the start of a serious eyestrain headache going, but he didn’t really want to stop reading. There were hundreds of pages of writing in front of him and each and every page could, potentially, hold secrets that would give him a bigger glimpse into the past of the town and the secrets behind why they’d really killed the old woman. Witchcraft? No. Not very likely. What he wanted was the truth. Forget the legends and lore; he wanted to know what could possibly have driven seemingly sane men to literally tear a woman apart.

  He looked out the window of his office—which was, in fact, the window of the den in his family home that faced the boggy area where history had been made so long ago in the torture and murder of an old woman—and studied the shape of the trees through eyes that were unfocused. How long he stared he couldn’t have said, but he snapped out of his fugue of concentration when he saw movement from the corner of his eye.

  Alan looked at the trees and saw nothing amiss, at least not at first. There was a stiff breeze blowing and a few of the trees swayed with the gusts, rattling their long limbs and letting out faint, whistling moans as the air sliced past them. It was October and that was hardly unusual. But out amidst the trees, there looked to be something moving in the wrong direction. He couldn’t quite make out what it was, but Alan frowned as he tried to find it and failed. His head was pounding, the eyestrain having finally gotten the better of him, so he decided to allow himself a distraction and head outside.

  He grabbed his coat and slipped into his loafers, not bothering with socks. He wasn’t planning to be gone that long anyway. By the time he stepped outside the coat was firmly in place and he almost instantly regretted not taking a hat with him. The air was cold enough to make his skin tingle, and the scalp where his hair had receded almost felt sanded by the wind.

  But Alan was decidedly a stubborn man, and he saw no reason to admit the need to go back inside. He was, after all, just looking at the woods for a few moments. He had no intentions of being outside long enough for the cold to bother him. The air wasn’t even really that bad for most people, but the medications he took to keep his blood thin didn’t exactly let him stay warm with any ease, even in the summer. Congenital heart condition and high blood pressure: not a good combination.

  Alan shivered and looked to the woods, roughly in the direction of the Witch’s Hollow. The idea of what had really happened to the old lady didn’t exactly ease up the shiver factor. He thought about heading over that way, checking up on the site, but didn’t really need to. He’d been there a hundred times over the years, looking at the odd plant life and contemplating the stories he’d heard since he was a child about how wicked the old witch was. He was mentally toying with the idea that the odd fungi that grew there might have been ingested, might, in fact, have caused the woman’s unorthodox murder as a result of dementia, when he saw the movement again.

  Whatever it was, it seemed closer than before.

  He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise up and a deep chill crawl down his spine. “Oh, hell no…”

  That was pretty much enough for him. Alan had always been one to trust his instincts and even if there was nothing but a dog moving through the woods, he didn’t trust that the animal wouldn’t be rabid. Mama Treacher hadn’t raised a foolish lad. He stepped back into the house as calmly as he could, fighting the urge to run only with a serious effort. Weird stuff going on or not, he refused to surrender his dignity.

  Once inside the safety of his home, Alan shivered. Call it intuition, a sixth sense, whatever, something was out there and it wasn’t normal. Not in the least. He didn’t want to think about what might be out there, because that would mean thinking about the risk to his life and limbs. Not acceptable, nosiree. Alan was a coward by nature, and saw no reason to go and change something that had been working for him for years.

  He locked the back door and then made sure the windows were locked, too. There wasn’t a damned thing he could think of that he wanted less than to have a strange event in his life. Strange being the operative word; strange meant out of the ordinary and that, in turn, meant unsafe. Cowards don’t like unsafe things.

  Alan looked outside, back into the woods, and forced himself to breathe. He wanted to hold his breath, and that wasn’t very wise. You needed a good oxygen flow to run for dear life. He couldn’t see anything out there at first, but he waited, barely moving.

  There! Again! Whatever was moving out there was toying with him, he could sense it. Never giving him more than an instant to see it before it moved out of sight again. Trying to keep track of it was like chasing a will-o-wisp.

  “Screw it. I’ll just pretend I didn’t see anything.” He spoke in a whisper, his nerves feeling like they’d been stretched to the snapping point. He’d hoped that hearing a voice, any voice, would make him feel more comfortable, but it wasn’t working. “Just gonna get some lunch real quick and if there’s still shit going on out there when I get back, I’ll go ahead and call 911.” To make that possibility a little easier, he took the wireless phone with him into the kitchen.

  Peanut butter and grape jelly. Not his first choice, but it was easy to make. He slathered both pieces of rye bread—also not his first choice, but bachelors learn to adapt—with Jif and followed a few seconds later with a thick layer of Welch’s. It didn’t take much time, but he kept hoping it was enough for whatever was outside his house to get done with whatever it was doing. He’d worked himself into such a state that he’d call the cops at the first sign of a leaf dropping and he hated the idea of being rescued from a rabbit bouncing through the woods. Logic told him it couldn’t be anything much worse than that. He didn’t believe in monsters.

  Although embarrassed was still better than dead, or even beaten severely. Alan held his breath again as he moved back to the window. There was nothing to see, even after three minutes. He ate his sandwich, making a mental note to himself to buy some damned white bread, and waited. Nothing.

  He finally relaxed a bit, taking deep breaths of the stale air in his house and savoring the silence. His stomach now full, he allowed himself to feel a bit better. Asinine, really, to get that worked up over nothing.

  He put his plate in the sink and then walked back into his study, ready to get back down to the business of cataloguing everything. Douglas Habersham might have had everything in order once, but what was left after the police had cleaned up was little more than chaos. He’d spent most of his time getting lost in the documents and not nearly enough time actually getting anything accomplished. The documents were on loan, and if he was lucky, he might convince Craig Gallagher to let him hold on to them after the investigation was complete.

  Alan stopped just as he reached the doorway and stared, slack-jawed, at his desk.

  His heart stuttered in his chest, and the room threatened to fade away in a field of gray. The papers were gone. All of them.

  V

  There is the town of Beldam Woods and then there is the Witch’s Hollow, to the west of the town proper. The hollow is separated from the town by a small stream that fades into the swampy land that makes up the Hollow. Long before it merges with the soil, the water starts at Stillman’s Pond and where, exactly, that water comes from is anyone’s guess. The only way over the stream involved a fairly awkward drive over a rutted path and a trip over the covered bridge that just barely managed not to fall into complete disrepair every year. The Hollow had a long reputation for being a strange place, and that was a justified reputation, to be sure. It was that very history that brought teenagers out there every year as Halloween came closer.

  The Witch’s Hollow was silent as few places in the world ever are.
There were few bugs in the area and those that stayed around normally chose to do as little as possible. Upon occasion a bird would land in the shallow waters or the deep mud near the edges of the murky pond, but by and large the creatures of the woods had long since caught on that being near the place just wasn’t very healthy.

  Most of the locals around Beldam Woods had clued in on that fact a while ago, too, with the exception of an occasional thrill seeker who hoped to see a hint of where the witch had been killed so long ago.

  Books had been written about the flora and fauna in the area, but the books seldom did the location justice. Almost dead center in the stagnant pond there are five trees clustered together. These trees bear an odd resemblance to human forms, and have been confused for strangers in the woods on more than one occasion. Local legend claims that the trees were, in fact, once human beings. The story goes that the old witch transformed five of her attackers before they finally subdued her. Not even Douglas Habersham could ever say if there was any documentation on that little tidbit, but the trees are called Victim Trees in honor of the townsfolk who died in the effort to kill the witch.

  The only thing to grow on the Victim Trees was a fungus that was almost exactly the same color as the bark of the victims. The wood mushrooms grew only near the tops of the trees, and always on the western side. Most of the people who studied the unique vegetation in the area failed to notice the mushrooms, as they tended to turn white and crumble upon first contact with the sun. The sole exception, an amateur herbalist by the name of Jonathan Crowley, only noticed them because he foolishly walked through the deep waters to the west of the trees. Foolishly, because the last four people to try walking that way had been instantly mired in deep quicksand. Three of them were pulled out by friends who were along with them. The fourth was never found. In a footnote in his book on unusual flora, Crowley pointed out that the mushrooms gave off a pale light in the darkness.