Schneider let a long breath out.
Grant had finished his own scotch and was pouring a new one. He drained half of this past its ice, which had mostly melted from the natural heat of the liquor, then put the glass down. He coughed.
“Remember when I said there were worse things than a kid disappearing?”
Schneider’s anger was back in an instant, but Grant pushed immediately on:
“I know how callous that sounded. Believe me I do.” He stopped for Scotch. “But I think there are things going on in Orangefield much worse than anything you can imagine.”
“Like what?” Schneider replied, not hiding his mood.
“Samhain, for instance.”
Schneider almost spit Scotch, as he blurted a laugh. “Those kid’s stories? ‘Sam Sightings’ and all that crap? Are you kidding, Grant?”
“Never mind, then,” Grant said, his voice a near whisper.
Schneider was once again reminded of the vague, haunted man in the office the day he had taken this assignment, and knew it had something to do with the Kerlan case.
Grant looked straight at Schneider, who was working on his own Scotch. “I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff in this town over the years, most of it around Halloween, but I never believed there was anything to it until now.”
Schneider said nothing.
Grant leaned forward and said earnestly, “What do you believe in, Len? I mean: what do you really believe in? What would happen if something happened that made you believe not only that there might be an afterlife, but that there really was a creature that was Death itself, something you could actually fight?”
Grant’s question was so unlike him, so unlike his meticulous procedural ways and evidence building, and his manner so suddenly needy, as if some sort of damn had burst within him, letting out all the fears he’d tucked away, that Schneider said nothing. He looked at his scotch, then drank it. He started to get up.
“You know what I believe in, Bill? I believe in not fucking up a second time.”
Grant grabbed his arm and urged him back into the booth. His eyes pinned Schneider in place, like a butterfly to a board. When he spoke again his voice was level and harsh. “Take me seriously, Len. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about weird shit. I’ll do that for both of us. The bad news is I think you just might fuck up again, if you’re not careful. I think you should let me have this case, for that reason, and because I want it. It was a mistake for you to take it to begin with. You’ve got that mess in Milwaukee so tied up with this that you’re liable to screw up.”
It was Schneider’s turn to be level and harsh. He leaned forward in the booth. “That bastard Jerry Carlton sat there during his trial taking his watch apart and putting it back together. He never glanced at the jury, not once. At the end of the trial, he looked up from his watch and mouthed the word ‘Ted’ at me. That was the kid in Milwaukee’s name.” His voice was shaking. “I could have saved that kid.”
“Maybe,” Grant answered.
There was another two fingers of scotch in Schneider’s glass, and he drained it, poured again. Tears abruptly filled his eyes. “I could have saved him.”
“Like I said, maybe. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you still would have gotten there too late. Maybe Jerry Carlton would have killed him earlier if he saw you coming. Maybe—”
Schneider drained his glass and gripped it so hard he could feel it getting ready to break. He looked at Grant, who was studying him; Grant’s pallor had assumed it’s yellow, haunted tinge.
“Be careful, Len,” Grant almost whispered. “Do your job and don’t let things get out of hand.”
The anger was back and this time when Schneider stood up Grant didn’t try to stop him.
“This case is mine, Bill. Stay the hell away from it. I don’t need a goddamn mentor — especially not a burned out lush who thinks he’s seen the boogeyman.”
As Schnedier stalked off, Grant stared straight ahead, unconsciously pulling a cigarette from his pocket. He put it in his mouth, ready to light it as soon as he left the bar.
“Careful…” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Boring.
Here it was, almost time for the Pumpkin Days Festival, and Scotty Daniels was bored silly. He was sick to death of little kid stuff. In his kindergarten class, they’d already made their “special designs” for the school projects display during the festival. They had already taken their bus trip to Mr. Froelich’s farm to pick their own pumpkins (though the guy they called Frankenstein, who worked for Mr. Froelich, wasn’t there, darnit), and gone to the Orangefield Library to hear Ms. Marks tell ghost stories and do pumpkin cutouts for the library windows. He’d seen that creepy older kid, Annabeth Turner, staring at him from the library’s second floor balcony.
They had tied yellow ribbons for Jody Wendt to one of the sycamore trees in the field behind the school, and Scotty himself, who had been one of Jody’s best friends, had picked out a special pumpkin at Froelich Farm which now sat on Jody’s empty desk. There was a bulletin board in the back of the room with cards and balloons remembering Jody thumb tacked to it.
And now, there was nothing to do but wait for the festival to begin.
Or:
Think about hunting the Pumpkin Boy.
Scotty had first heard about the hunt from his older brother Jim, but the story had traveled like wildfire through all of the schools in Orangefield. One of Jim’s friends, Mitchel Freed, claimed he had seen a boy made out of silver stilts with a pumpkin head walking through one of the fields at the edge of town; Mitchel’s older brother was a police officer and claimed that the Pumpkin Boy had visited Mrs. Wendt after Jody disappeared. Soon there were Pumpkin Boy sightings everywhere, so many that the Orangefield Herald had carried stories about it, which Jim read out loud to him.
But when he asked if he could go with Jim when he and his friends went looking for the Pumpkin Boy tonight, Jim had only laughed and ruffled his hair.
“No, way, little man! Mom would kill me if I took you.” He looked suddenly serious and said, “And anyway: Mitch and Paul and I might get killed!”
Then he laughed and walked away to use the phone.
Scotty could hear him using it now, arranging for Mitchell to come by in ten minutes and that they’d go in Jim’s car.
Bored.
Scotty wandered into the family room, where his younger sister Cyndi was watching the Cartoon Network. He sat down grumpily next to her on the couch and tried to wrestle the TV remote from her hands. She clutched it tightly and said, “Hey!” Finally he gave up and threw himself into the far end of the couch, among the sofa pillows, and folded his arms, feeling ornery.
He glanced out the window to the street, where a passing car’s headlights momentarily blinded him. He continued staring, and when his sight came back he was staring at Jim’s car at the curb.
The trunk was open.
A sudden idea formed in his mind.
At that moment he heard Jim get off the phone, yell down to the basement to tell his father that he’d be going out for a little while. After his father answered with a grunt, he heard Jim, loudly as always, go into the bathroom in the hallway, slamming the door behind him. In a moment there was water running, and the sound of Jim’s bad singing voice.
Scotty got up off the couch and walked past Cyndi, who didn’t even look his way, her eyes glued to the television screen.
Scotty went quickly to the hallway, removed his Jacket from its hook and put it on.
He eased open the front door and slipped out, closing the door with a quiet click behind him.
It was chilly out, and there was a breeze. Scotty zipped his Jacket all the way up to his chin, and ran to Jim’s car.
The trunk was indeed open. Inside were the bundled old newspapers that Jim was supposed to bring to the recycling center. There were three bundles, thrown in carelessly.
Scotty pushed two of them aside, snugged himself into the trunk, and then
worked the trunk lid partway down.
He hesitated.
From around the corner, someone appeared, walking briskly.
It was Jim’s friend, Mitch.
Scotty held his breath and snuggled down.
Whistling, Mitch bounded past the car and up the steps to the front door of the house.
Scotty peeked out.
At that moment the front door opened, swallowing Mitch.
Without further hesitation, Scotty closed the trunk all the way.
He heard the solid click of the latch, but immediately saw the glowing escape bar that Jim had showed him when he’d bought the new car. Of course Jim had showed him how it worked — then told him a few gruesome stories about older cars that didn’t have the device, and what had happened to the kids who had been trapped inside. One of them, which Scotty didn’t believe, involved a baby that had accidently been locked in the trunk of a car one summer day in 1960: “…and when they opened the trunk that night they found the baby cooked alive, looking just like a roasted pig!”
Scotty began to think about that baby. His heart pounded, and he was just about to reach for the glow bar and sneak back into the house when he heard the front door of the house open. Almost immediately, the car rocked on its shocks as Jim and Mitch jumped into it.
In another second the car pulled away from the curb, the two older boys laughing.
Almost immediately, they started to talk about girls.
They made one other stop, and Scotty heard one other boy, who he guessed was Paul Henry, get into the car. The talk was still about girls, but then it eventually turned to the Pumpkin Boy.
“You think he’s real?” Paul Henry’s voice asked.
Mitch immediately answered, “It’s real, man. I told you what my brother said. It’s a fact that it went to Jody Wendt’s house, scared his old lady half crazy. Dragged her into the house after she fainted, then left. And my brother said a couple of tourists from Montreal were picking pumpkins out at Kranepool’s Farm and saw it walking through the woods. Just taking a stroll. My brother talked to them himself. He says there are at least ten other reports on file. One guy said he threw rocks at it, but he was drunk so the cops didn’t take him too seriously. The Pumpkin Boy’s real, all right.”
“What if we really find it?” Jim said. There was uncertainty in his voice.
“If we find it, we kill it!” Paul Henry said. “Then we get the reward money!”
“There isn’t any reward money,” Mitch replied immediately. “Use your head, Paul! If we bring it in in one piece, we’ll get in the papers. Then maybe somebody will write a book, and we’d be in that, too. If there’s a book we could probably get some money out of it.”
“I still say knock it to pieces!” Paul answered. “I ain’t letting that thing near me!”
“You bring the camera, Paul?” Jim asked idly.
There was silence for a moment, then Paul Henry’s dejected voice mumbled, “I forgot.”
Jim and Mitch roared with laughter.
Jim said, “That’s okay, Paul. I brought my kid brother’s camera. You’re covered. Here, take it. And don’t lose it.”
Scotty almost shouted out with annoyance, but kept his tongue.
“Good,” Paul said. “If we get a picture that would be almost as good as capturing him. I bet the Herald would pay us for that.”
Mitch laughed. “I heard they’ve already gotten a bunch of phoney pictures. One of them was a scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head.”
Jim chimed in. “There was a story in the paper today. Another photo they got was of some guy’s kid with a costume on, holding a pumpkin in front of his face!”
They all laughed. In the trunk, Scotty smiled. Jim had read him that story.
Suddenly the car moved from smooth road to a bumpier surface. It was harder to hear what the boys were saying with the added noise. One of them — it sounded like Paul — said, “How much farther?”
“Couple miles,” Jim answered. “I want to get as close to the site as we can. You sure the police won’t bother us, Mitch?”
“My brother said they packed up and moved out. Dug a bunch of holes but found nothing.”
“You really think this Pumpkin Boy snatched Jody Wendt?”
Mitch replied, “Who knows? Most of the places he’s been seen are around this spot. You got a better idea?”
Again there was silence.
“I still say we should kill him,” Paul Henry said.
“Maybe he’ll kill you!” Jim said, and then there was another, longer, silence.
Eventually the car came to a stop, after going into and then leaving a pothole.
“I think we ought to leave it here,” Jim said, his voice clearer.
“Sounds good to me,” Mitch said.
Car doors opened and then closed. There were sounds of fumbling and then Scotty heard them leaving the car.
The shuffling footsteps suddenly stopped.
“Hey, Paul, did you bring the camera?”
Amidst more laughter, Paul said, “Shit,” and Scotty heard a car door open and then close again.
“Yeah, I’ve got it.”
“And you brought a flashlight?”
Again the word: “Shit!”
Mitch laughed. “Stay with me, bozo. If we find the Pumpkin Boy, we’ll let him eat you.”
“Eat this,” came Paul Henry’s reply, and again there was laughter.
The voices, laughter, and shuffling steps receded.
In a few moments, Scotty was alone.
And, suddenly: he felt alone.
He realized he had not brought a flashlight, either.
And where was he going to go?
He had no idea where he was, or where to look.
He knew his only chance to find the Pumpkin Boy was to trail along after his brother and his two friends.
Otherwise, he might as well stay in the trunk of the car.
He reached out and pushed the glow bar.
Instantly, the trunk popped open.
Scotty climbed out.
It was not as dark as he feared. There was a fat rising moon which peeked through the trees with yellow-gray light, and Scotty’s eyes were already used to being in the dark from being in the car trunk. The car was parked on the side of a rutted dirt road, with thick woods to either side.
He could still hear Jim and his friends, though barely; there was a blurt of laughter and he went that way, to the left of the car, into the woods.
To his relief, there was a narrow path, half-covered in leaves and pine needles.
The laughter came again, a little closer, but still far away.
And then, suddenly, there was real silence.
It was as if a stifling cloak had been thrown over the forest — nothing moved, or breathed.
Scotty became very afraid, to the point where he had no further interest in the Pumpkin Boy. All he wanted to do was go back to the car and wait for his brother to come back.
He turned around, but now was unsure which way he had come. The path had branched off and there were two paths in front of him, which split at a fork. He walked tentatively up one, looking for scuff marks of his own sneakers, but it was smooth and untouched.
He turned back to find the other path, and now couldn’t locate it.
The moon dipped into clouds, leaving darkness — then burst out with orange light like the light through venetian blinds, cut into slats.
Scotty had no idea where he was.
He heard a single sound, a loud thump, and then stifling silence again.
As if the forest was waiting.
Then: a faraway snort of laughter.
He wanted to head in that direction — but there was no path.
Then he saw a flash of light, close-by.
“Jim?” he called out, loudly.
The light flashed again, just ahead and to the left of the path he was on.
He walked in that direction.
A third glint and he broke through
a rank of bushes and found himself in a clearing.
The moon glared down, higher now, filling the leaf-scattered bare spot he was in with orange-gray light.
He took a step and fell into a depression filled with leaves. He sank almost to his knees, then waded to the lip and pulled himself out.
Now he saw that he was surrounded by holes and depressions. It was like being on the cratered Moon. He remembered what he brother and Mitch had talked about in the car: a place where the police had been, full of holes.
Now he became very afraid.
There were muted sounds all around him now: rustlings, the break of a twig, scampering sounds.
He felt like he was going to wet himself, and closed his eyes, beginning to whimper.
A rasping voice said: “Scccotty?”
He thought he knew the voice, and opened his eyes with hope —
But it wasn’t Jim.
Scotty yelped.
The Pumpkin Boy stood right in front of him, his huge orange Jack o’lantern head glinting in the sallow moonlight.
“Ohhh…”
Scotty wet himself.
The Pumpkin Boy cocked his head to one side; his smile, lit dimly from within, looked almost comical. When he spoke again a slight hiss of steam issued from his mouth and eyes and nose holes: “Sccccotty, it’s me. Jody Wennnndt.”
A portion of Scotty’s fear left him, but he was still trembling. The wet spot on the front of his jeans and down one leg began to feel cold.
With a series of little creaks, the Pumpkin Boy sat down on the leaves in front of Scotty. His thin metal limbs jutted out in all directions. “Sit down, Scccotty. Talk to mmme.”
Scotty felt himself almost collapse to sit in front of the mechanical man.
“Is… it really… you?” Scotty got out in a halting whisper.
“I… thinnnk so. I can see, and wwwwalk, and talk. It feels like I’m in a ddddream. And my hhhhead hurts all the ttttime.”
“I…” Scotty didn’t know what to say.
“And I nnnnever sleep, now. And my eyes are hhhhot.”
“You went to your house—?”
“Yes, I ccccan’t do that again. He won’t llllet me. He ccccontrols what I do.”
“Who—”
As if he had forgotten something, the Pumpkin Boy suddenly unfolded his limbs and stood up. The process seemed to take a long time. There was the faint odor of machine oil and heated air.
The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus Page 9
