“I have a replacement for it if you like.” He looked at her and gestured to show a size that was not quite but close to as large as the one she was used to. “I can get it right now if you want; it’s out in my van.”
“And you really need this one back?”
“Absolutely. There’s no way around it or I’d let you keep it forever.”
“Well, let’s go get that other one then, shall we?” She forced her voice to be bright and decided to make the best of the situation. She had, after all, known this day would come.
He nodded and moved toward his van out front. Allyson never knew, never even guessed that her decision not to argue was literally the difference between life and death.
III
Erika Carmichael, Shannon Whitechapel, Lauren Murphy, and Beth Chambers were all at Leonard’s Cinema, looking at the finished House of Horrors that Rick Leonard let them set up in his closed theater. It wasn’t half bad. That was the general consensus. With the lights off all the props would look properly intimidating. Officially they were being punished for their various and sundry crimes against the Watersford Academy. In reality, they’d been having more fun than they suspected.
Erika was quiet, far more subdued than usual, and Shannon and Lauren were puzzled by her silence. Beth was not. Beth understood what the others did not, because Beth was the one who’d arranged for what was going to happen tonight.
Tonight Erika was going to lose her virginity to Beth’s boyfriend. Not exactly the usual way things were supposed to be done, granted, but this was a special occasion. Beth was going to help out with something magical.
Beth had been having dreams for a while now, dreams that told her things that had to be done and how best to do them. She’d listened to the dreams and so far they had never done her wrong.
The dreams were powerful stuff, and not at all like her regular sleeping experiences. They were direct and they were signs of something spectacular. She knew that, felt it in her very soul.
And tonight was the night when everything was supposed to happen. What was that everything, exactly? She hadn’t the vaguest notion, but she knew it would be an event to see and a moment in her life when everything would change forever. Tonight, in the special room upstairs, where the odd, fleshy cocoon she thought of as a womb was sitting, Erika would lose her virginity to Troy Hammer, the star of the football team and one of the biggest boys she had ever seen.
Naturally, Beth intended to film the entire thing. Whatever was going to happen needed to be filmed, so that she could prove to the world that she had witnessed a miracle.
Everything was ready. Erika was ready. She didn’t know exactly what was going to happen tonight, but she’d told Beth earlier that she’d been having dreams too, and that she knew something big was going on, something life altering.
Erika said she was ready, that she’d had a sign just last night that everything would go well. That she had, in fact, met her guardian angel. Beth could barely keep herself from jumping up and down she was so excited. And words could not hope to express how eager Troy was. He intended to make Erika’s first time something she would never forget.
Beth intended to do the exact same thing. That was why she’d have the video camera set up and running when the time came. Beth idly picked at a plastic skull and grinned. It would definitely be a night to remember.
She had no idea.
IV
Josh and Jeremy got together at just after four in the afternoon and waited as patiently as they could for Derek Carmody and Melissa Partridge. Josh had barely spoken to Melissa at all since they’d gone into the woods and hoped she wasn’t going to bug out on them.
He wanted to see her, to know that she was all right. Mostly though, he wanted to spend time with her. She had become something of a growing obsession since they’d gone off into the darkness looking for her sister Heather. Well, maybe since he actually decided it was okay to notice her while they were in class. She’d even made him think twice about marrying Miss Holly, though he had to admit the honeymoon would still be fun. He wasn’t that obsessed. But he was maybe heading in that direction.
Melissa showed up in front of the Kinder’s Garden within a few minutes. Derek took longer and was carrying half of his costume, the rest of it already wrapped around his legs and carefully taped to his pants. He was going as Patches, and the first part of his costume was about a zillion Ace Bandages wrapped around his body as the first layer of skin. Several simple patches of leathery-looking plastic would do the rest of the job, and he’d modified a mask of the Mummy to help him out with the face part.
Jeremy was already set up in his skeleton outfit and had a skull mask that looked perfect, all rotted and cracked. He even had gloves he’d saved up for to finish the thing out. In the darkness he would look about as cool as he could without actually wearing someone else’s skeleton.
Josh’s own costume wasn’t much but a bunch of old clothes, and some black gloves he’d painted to look like bark. It was the jack-o-lantern that would make the biggest difference. He admired the pumpkin again, holding it in his hands and looking at the dark orange, warty flesh that almost looked like it was wrapped around a skull. That pumpkin was a find, unique and wonderful. Part of him was sad to know it wouldn’t stay fresh forever. He could have put it on a shelf and called it art and not been too far off the mark. There was a hat to wear over the top of the natural mask and his mom had made sure it would fit properly with a couple of pins and a little extra time widening it a bit. The brim was overly large and floppy; he liked it.
Then there was Melissa. He held his breath as he looked at her and let himself see what she had done. He could still see her pretty face under the makeup, but she had used grease makeup to paint herself green and dried Elmer’s Glue under that to make her skin wrinkled and nasty. She’d managed a nose that was long and hooked, and a chin that was pointed and warty. Still, despite everything she’d layered there, he could still see her face under the prosthetics and thick makeup. She finished it off with a massive black hat, pointed and deliberately made to look older, and a prefabricated tattered dress that did nothing at all to hide her figure.
He was both happy and disappointed with the end result. Happy because she hadn’t tried for a sexy witch like so many girls did and disappointed for the exact same reason.
By unanimous decision, dinner would wait. The only hold-back was Jeremy, and he readily agreed when Josh offered to front him the cost of a burger and fries at the Haunted Hayride. Tonight wasn’t the same as other nights at the Harvest Festival. It didn’t just end at the prep school. Instead it ended at the haunted house in town and that, friends and neighbors, was going to kick ass.
By five-thirty the sun was setting and all of the kids had spoken about how cool everything was going to be until they were ready to explode. Finally, Josh’s dad had mercy on them and drove them out to the school and the Haunted Hayride waiting for them. Despite several mocking threats to go along with them on their trip, Josh’s dad dropped them off and warned them only to be home on time and to have fun. They were thirteen. They knew better than to be too stupid.
Walter Kinder figured they were still a year or more away from being stupid enough to get themselves killed. It normally took that long for pubescents to forget all of the rules they’d been taught by his reckoning.
The air was cold and dry; the leaves rattled themselves across the ground and skittered madly in the slight breezes that reminded every last one of them that winter was just around the corner. There was a long, long line for the hayride, but they wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
True to his word, Josh paid for Jeremy’s dinner and in a sudden fit of generosity paid for Melissa and Derek’s, too. With Melissa he could pretend it was a date. With Derek, it would have been rude not to offer. They ate while they waited for their carriage to arrive. Several people made comments about all of their costumes, and they even had their picture taken for the Town Crier newspaper.
Josh couldn’t remember when he’d had a better time.
Naturally, it couldn’t last.
They were finally on the hayride and his arm had somehow managed to get itself around Melissa’s shoulders when the pain lanced through his skull with all the intensity of a lightning strike.
He felt it happening, but could do nothing aside from sit perfectly still, paralyzed as the mask on his head suddenly constricted with enough force to make him whimper. Hot needles of pain ran into his neck and his scalp, an endless supply of wasp stings pushing deeper and deeper into his skin and beneath.
Melissa looked at him, her eyes wide, and said, “Josh, you’re hurting me.” Her face looked panicked, but her voice sounded far, far away and getting more distant by the moment. “Josh? Are you okay?”
He couldn’t answer. The pain was moving through his chest now, and he wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. He decided not. A heart attack probably didn’t slide still lower, pulling and twisting at the arms, legs, and groin, and everywhere in between.
He looked at his hand where it rested on Melissa’s shoulder and saw dark wooden talons punch through his gloves, saw the fabric of his cheap clothing actually changing, darkening as he watched. Still he could say nothing. The pain was too intense, the searing wild heat ripping through his bowels too much to resist.
His lungs felt like they were being scorched out of his chest and his hair, for the love of God, even his hair hurt. Josh tried to make out Melissa’s words as she suddenly pushed back from him. Her sweet heart-shaped face terrified, her makeup smearing against his arm as she pushed to escape the clutching talons that raked at soft, sweet flesh.
He heard a deep, thunderous explosion of laughter that sent chills through his soul and wondered where it had come from. It took him a minute to realize it had come from him.
V
Jeremy Koslowski was having a blast. It was amazing how cool it felt to just get away from home for a while and get out with people his own age who understood what having fun was. He was so very, very tired of always walking on eggshells and worrying about what his father’s mood would be that the night seemed as magical as Christmas to him.
And, so, okay, Josh, the cool kid, was sitting with his arm around Melissa, who was a little weird but also a lot of fun when you got to know her. So what? It wasn’t like he really even knew her. Not really. Not like before she’d moved to the new house, after her dad went crazy.
Besides, he’d never thought of her that way in the past and he didn’t see any reason to start now. Aside from the fact that he was noticing girls these days a lot more than he used to.
Derek was being a cut-up and that was cool. He’d mocked every single teacher as they rode along and he was kind of cool-looking in his costume when he wasn’t rearranging his bandages.
And then it all went bad. Josh started spasming in his seat, his hand clenching at Melissa hard enough that he scratched her through her witch’s outfit. And from there it all got weirder.
Josh changed. He physically changed right in front of them. His body got bigger, like grown-up size, and his hands didn’t look like they were wooden anymore, they were wooden. The sound of creaking branches snapped through the cold air when he flexed his fingers. But worst of all, his face changed. The mask he wore bulged in different ways and his eyes vanished deep into the sockets that Jeremy himself had carved into the jack-o-lantern. A moment later, the darkness where his eyes should have been blazed with a green flame that sent shivers down Jeremy’s back. Twin suns glared from within the withered, mummified-looking pumpkin head that seemed almost to bloom out of the fresher carving that Jeremy had made. The clothes on Josh’s body—a pair of overalls and a tattered-looking plaid shirt that was too big by far—vanished, replaced in a matter of seconds by clothes that looked like they belonged on a pilgrim from the old illustrations in the history books at school. The hat was too big, and a thick run of fine corn silk white hair trailed from under the cap, and a ripped, ruined cloak that seemed far too long to be worn sprouted like black wings from around his neck.
Melissa cried out a second time as the wooden fingers carved into her skin and drew blood.
Jeremy moved toward her to pull her away from the thing that had been Josh, the thing that held her by her arm and squeezed her flesh with bruising force. Derek let out a yelp and skittered backward along with three other kids from out of town who were also on the ride.
The scent of cooking pumpkin and sulfur spread like a cloud from the thing that finally stood up, ignoring Melissa completely as it looked around. It laughed then, a sound that echoed through the trees of the academy and bounced back again and again in a cacophony that seemed not to fade but to get louder.
The thing looked at Jeremy and seemed almost familiar to him. Not just because of the face that he’d carved—no matter how suddenly ancient, he could identify the marks he’d made—but because of the tilt of the head, the small gestures and motions that each individual has.
And he felt another, deeper chill as he remembered the creepy old man he’d seen in the woods. If someone had wrapped a pumpkin around his head and freeze-dried it in place, it would look like what he was seeing now: the same high cheekbones and pointed, almost sharp, chin.
“Oh crap.” It was the best he could manage.
The thing looked at him again and then jumped from the edge of the hay wagon, kicking straw and debris across everyone left in the hayride as it fluttered its way over to a tree nearby.
With another roaring laugh, the thing leaped again, covering an impossible distance before it vanished behind a tree.
Behind him, Melissa let loose with a shriek. Jeremy turned and looked; he saw that where Josh had been—where the monster had been—a blaze had started. The hay was old and battered, dried to husks and barely even worthy of notice by a horse. It caught fire fast.
Jeremy and Melissa backed up and so did all of the people around them. The wagon threatened to teeter and the coachman looked around at last, having ignored the laughter, and paled.
Right about the same time, the horses noticed and did what horses do when they see a fire not far from their butts: they panicked and ran like hell. The jolt to the passengers was immense, and even those who thought they were properly braced promptly fell back on their sides or landed roughly on their asses.
The fire, encouraged by the sudden increase in wind around the edges, promptly grew larger, moving from small safety hazard to full-blown conflagration. Fingers of flame and thick tendrils of smoke whorled around the people in the carriage and Jeremy felt the first kiss of high intensity heat try to blister his skin, yanking himself back at the last moment.
His skin was red and blistered, but he didn’t have time to think about that, not really time to think about anything at all as the wagon rocked violently and the driver’s voice called out to the horses, whose front hooves reared high into the air and carved whistling chasms before them. To his credit, the coachman tried to calm the animals. Not so much to his credit, he failed. They ran harder and off the beaten path, anything to stop the flames that were blazing higher and higher behind them. The wagon started to teeter, and Jeremy grabbed hold of Melissa again, trying to decide the best way to safety.
There was nothing. The ground was moving by at dangerous speeds and any hope of a nice, soft landing in the grass was ruined when the horses ran into heavy bushes, undeterred by the shrubs that cut at their legs. The flames were everywhere now and the smoke managed to fill most of the area instead of merely whipping away in the wind. His eyes were burning and his lungs felt like they were being crushed in his chest.
Melissa screamed out in a high-pitched shriek and Jeremy looked at her just as the strange creature that had been Josh came down from above them. Hard, savage fingers dug into his costume and into Melissa’s as well. The voice that spilled from the demonic face was loud and hissed with frustration. “Not you two. We might need you yet.”
Jeremy let loose a scream t
o match Melissa’s as they were lifted from the ground and carried high into the air. Below them the hayride wagon fell on its side and Jeremy saw Derek’s bandaged body fall with it, pinned beneath the burning pyre as it skidded and finally slowed.
He looked at the face of the thing that held him, then to Melissa and toward the sky above. The night was perfectly clear and calm, as if mocking his dilemma. Next to him, Melissa moaned in pain, her arm held in a grip that drew blood from her forearm.
On the distant horizon he saw the moon as it rose, a massive, bloated thing that glowed a dark orange as it lifted toward the cold sky above. They soared higher into the air and Jeremy saw his town from a bird’s eye view before suddenly plummeting down toward the ground again. Were they flying? He hoped so. He couldn’t tell. If they were falling, his life was over and thirteen years simply hadn’t been enough.
A moment later the thing carrying them landed, the massive cape that had spread out behind it rustling like autumn’s dried leaves as it settled back around his shoulders. He threw Jeremy and Melissa unceremoniously to the ground, his eyes burning and the grin on his face highlighted by the flickering fires within his head.
“Stay here, children. Mind me and you might live through the night. Make me come looking for you and I will feed your bones to my mother.”
“You’re him, aren’t you? Mister Sticks, the Pumpkin Man.”
“You have to ask?” The thing leered down at him.
“What did you do to Josh?”
The creature lowered its face until the burning, hissing light from the sockets of its eyes were level with his own eyes. “Nothing yet. You can have him back when I’m done. I won’t need him anymore.”
Without another word it turned and stalked away, the long legs moving swiftly, the dark mantle around its shoulders rustling with the promise of the grave.
Melissa looked at Jeremy and he returned the favor, neither of them having any idea what to say or do. Finally, Melissa looked at him and shook her head. “I think I peed myself.”
Harvest Moon Page 24
