Corrie went back to his work, laying the lid on the spread newspapers under the paint can and giving the paint a vigorous stirring with the wooden mixer Sears had provided.
When he turned around with his paint brush in his hand, someone was standing right in front of him.
“Jeez—” he exclaimed, his breath catching in his throat.
He stood up to face his visitor.
It was Kathy Marks.
“Jeez!” Corrie repeated, with different emphasis.
The librarian gave a weak, tentative smile. “Sorry I snuck up on you like that. I’ve spent the last hour trying to work up the courage to get out of my car.”
“I would have come to see you eventually …”
She studied his face, his eyes. “I believe you would have. It would have been a braver thing than me coming here.”
He gave his own tentative smile. “I would have visited you at the library, Kathy.”
She nodded. “I moved out of the house a long time ago. I live in an apartment now.”
“I hope the house burned down.”
Silence hung in the air between them at his sudden blurt of truth.
Corrie, as if snapping out of a trance, suddenly breathed deeply and put down his paintbrush. He checked his hands to see if they were soiled with paint, wiped them on his painter pants to be sure, and stuck out his hand. A genuine smile had replaced his experimental one.
“I’m glad to see you, Kathy.”
Her warm hand slipped into his, gripped lightly and let go. She nodded, her eyes never leaving his. “It’s good to see you, too, Corrie.”
Ten minutes later found them side by side in rockers on the finished part of the porch. Corrie had made lemonade and, to his surprise, Kathy Marks had followed him into the house and helped. A few low sounds — snorts and something that sounded like a shovel being dragged across gravel, came from the basement and second floor, but Corrie ignored them.
“Still have your companions?” Kathy remarked.
“Yes,” Corrie said simply, handing her the finished pitcher of lemonade, while he handled the two tall glasses.
On the porch, Kathy rocked gently for a while, studying the rushing river across the street. “I never realized how beautiful it is over here,” she finally said.
“It was a boy’s dream — until I hit seven years old.”
She turned in her chair to regard him. “You met me when you were nine years old.”
“And you were twelve. That’s not what I meant.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Well … that became another kind of boy’s dream …”
“And nightmare.” Her laugh was hollow, tired.
“Look, Kathy—”
“Maybe it was a mistake to come here. A big one.” She put her lemonade down and stared at him, unblinking. “But when I heard you were back I knew I had to see you.”
Corrie was about to answer when she went on, looking out at the rushing river again, rocking herself gently. “I never got over you, you know. For the last twelve years, whenever a relationship petered out after a few dates, I blamed it on you. But I wasn’t really being honest with myself. I should have blamed it on me.”
She stopped rocking and looked at him again. “The only thing you did wrong was not telling me you were leaving. I know how it must have been with your mother dying, but to pick up and leave like that, as soon as you got the all-clear, without telling me …”
“If I had told you, I wouldn’t have been able to leave.”
“Is it that simple?”
He gave a slight, wry smile. “Nothing between us was ever simple.”
She regarded the river again. “That’s true. In a lot of ways, it was a sick relationship.”
“Kathy—”
“No, let me finish. I’ve had twelve years to think about it. You know I didn’t have the courage to talk about it then — you told me so yourself. But it isn’t courage now, either. It’s just that I’m tired. Tired of everything …”
She closed her eyes, kept rocking gently.
“Do you know I almost did it again last Halloween? There were two more suicides, and a little girl named Annabeth Turner was supposed to be the third. She was eleven, just like I was that first time. And then that thing in my head came back. And when Annabeth wouldn’t go through with it I found myself standing on a chair with a rope around my neck again.” She looked at him blankly. “And this time I wanted to.”
Corrie was staring at her wide-eyed.
She nodded sadly, her head resting against the chair cushion. “I wanted to for a lot of reasons. You were only one of them. My … life was one of them. But most of all” — and a strange light came into her eyes — “I wanted to because this time I saw something. That voice promised me I’d see my mother and father, and this time something was there.”
“Your parents?” Corrie said in awe.
Still resting her head back on the cushion, she turned to smile at him and shook her head no. “No. But something was there. I know it.”
“But—”
She shook her head more vigorously, closing her eyes. “No ‘buts,’ Corrie. I told you I’ve had a lot of time to think. I’ve done a lot of it since that day last Halloween. There was something there, something after this world, and I caught a glimpse of it. It was real. And no one’s going to tell me otherwise.”
“But what if it was just an illusion, like the things in my room—”
“Ha!” It was a weak laugh. Her eyes were open again, and boring into him. “You think those are illusions? Do you know why I bonded with you so closely when we met? Because you were going through the same kind of thing. I thought you had part of the answer. I wanted so badly to know why I had been picked, why I had almost let it happen. It was only later, when you were sixteen and I was nineteen …”
A touch of color came to her cheeks.
“I did love you,” Corrie said.
“And I loved you, more than you can imagine. When you left, it was like having part of my flesh ripped away.”
“I had to go. If I hadn’t, this house would have killed me.”
“But you came back.”
“Yes. And now I’m sure it’s going to kill me.”
“You could have taken me with you!” Sudden tears formed. She covered her eyes with her hands. Then she was sobbing. “You could have taken me with you and we could have fought it together …”
Corrie said nothing, and then he said, “If I had taken you it would have started all over again, in California. All the … problems we had.”
She turned on him fiercely. “You don’t know that!”
“I do. Don’t you remember the last time we were together, Kathy? With detective Grant aiming a handgun at me?”
She pushed with her hands, as if warding off something. “Yes! Yes! I remember! Oh, God …”
“Can you tell me if we’d gone to California together that wouldn’t have happened again, and again, until finally we did it?”
She got up, knocked her lemonade glass over, sobbed and moved blindly for the porch steps. “Oh, God, I should never have come here, never …”
Corrie stared at the pool of spilled lemonade, the broken shards of glass; one of them formed a tiny prism, breaking light into the colors of the rainbow.
“Kathy …” he said half-heartedly as she reached the bottom of the steps, and stood heaving sobs into her hands.
He got up and went to her, hesitated, then put his arms around her.
“Kathy …” he whispered.
She pulled away, then suddenly turned in to him. “Oh, Corrie, why couldn’t we have made something out of it …”
“We did,” he whispered. “But it was something destructive. It was destroying both of us. That’s why I went away. To save me — and to save you, too.”
She held him tighter. “I just wanted to die. I just wanted …”
“I know,” he said. Then he added, “I didn’t.”
After a
moment she snuffled a halting, ironic laugh and pulled away from him enough to show him a halting smile. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes puffy.
“Want to hear something funny?” she said. The smile wavered. “Do you know who saved me when I was hanging from that oak tree last Halloween? It was Annabeth Turner, the eleven year old. She cut me down. She had the thing in her head, too, and she fought it off and cut me down. And I went there to save her …”
Sobbing again, she pushed away from Corrie and went quickly to her car. She opened the door, and before she got in she turned to look back at him.
“There is something there,” she said, and then she climbed quickly into the car and started it up, turned it around and drove away.
Corrie watched after her, then stood watching the spot where her car had been; then he remounted the steps and cleaned up the spilled lemonade and broken glass with one of his paint rags. He retrieved his paint brush and was about to resume work on the unpainted part of the porch when he heard another sound behind him.
He turned, expecting to find Kathy Marks returned, but it was a trim short woman in jeans and a tee-shirt that said, I SURVIVED MONDAY! She had short black hair in a cut that looked familiar.
Corrie had no doubt that she also had a similar tee-shirt for every other day of the week.
The woman stopped about five feet up the walk and shaded her eyes with her right hand. “Are you Corrie Phaeder?” she asked, in a demanding tone.
“Yes, I am. And you—”
“Stay the hell away from my daughter!” the woman said. The shading hand dropped into a fist from which an accusing index finger jabbed at him.
“I—”
She pointed to her left without letting him speak. “I’m Marcia Bright, Gina’s mother.”
“You mean Reggie?”
“Her name isn’t Reggie! It’s Gina!” She was trembling with anger or perhaps fear.
He took a step off the porch, and she backed up one step. “Stay the hell away from her! And me!”
“Mrs. Bright, I’m sorry, but Gina wandered over here one day while I was working outside and talked to me for a few minutes—”
“And then the trouble started! As soon as she came over to this …” —she jabbed angrily at the house— “goddamned haunted house, it all started!”
Corrie held his spread hands out. “I have no idea—”
“If you go near her again I’ll call the police! I’ve already called them! I don’t give a damn what you do in your own home, but leave mine alone! Now she has playmates, and sees all kinds of things in her room—”
Oh, God. Corrie thought of what John had told him.
Oh, God, it’s starting for her.
“Mrs. Bright, please—”
“My husband has a gun, and I know how to use it — stay away from all of us!”
She turned and stumbled away, her steps turning into a halting run.
Corrie stared after her.
The day, which had darkened, turned suddenly darker.
From within the house, he heard a chorus of loud bangs, and scrapes, and a whoosh like the close passing of a freight train.
Oh, God. Her too …
Chapter Sixteen
The Pumpkin Festival came to Orangefield.
Most of the pumpkins were picked, the fields growing bare, turning from bright orange to muddy brown. The orange ring around Orangefield contracted into the town itself, pumpkins everywhere, making it bright as the sun. Deformed Halloween fruit, kicked in by careless pickers or grown too grotesque to sell, sat in place, alone, forgotten. The cut vines withered from green to gray, became part of the soil from which they sprang.
The days became colder, the nights were crisp as cider.
The town of Orangefield went from bland to blinding. The color orange was everywhere. An orange stripe marking the coming parade route was painted down the middle of Main Street. Store fronts were filled with pumpkin goods and pumpkin cutouts, making them orange windows. Plywood painted pumpkins, four feet in width, were hoisted under every street light along the route where they would grin with reflected light every night until Halloween. The town became Halloween.
In Ranier Park, the tents for the week-long festival were poled into place, aired out, made ready. In the huge exhibition tent, tables were lined into aisles, and were filled with everything pumpkin related imaginable: foods of all kinds, pumpkin goods (pumpkin colored slippers for Dad, pumpkin colored terry robes for Mom) and pumpkin services (THE BEST ROTO TILLER IN THE WORLD! one booth, perhaps fibbing, proclaimed). Bunting was orange and black, crepe paper everywhere, orange mostly, big fat pumpkin lamps overhead smiling down on the expected crowd, making the tent (orange and white striped itself) glow like the inside of a huge pumpkin.
The other huge tent, offering a week’s worth of music entertainment, also orange and white striped, went up nearby: one night of bluegrass, one of soft rock, one hard rock, one rap, one country, one classical, and one (heaven forbid) of talent night, anything goes.
There would be pumpkin rolling races, pumpkin carving contests, a pumpkin catapult shootout (Mr. Clark’s high school physics class inevitably took that prize), the pumpkin weigh-in, the beauty pageant which would crown Ms. Pumpkin Days, a pumpkin pie eating contest (which, one rueful year, had turned into a pumpkin pie throwing contest — again thanks to Mr. Clark’ physics class), pumpkin cook-offs, recipe swaps, a prize for The Most Unusual Use of a Pumpkin (shoes, the previous year), a hundred other celebrations public and private (sometimes too private: there was, for instance, the year when deputy sheriff Charlie Fredericks discovered one of the Lund boys deep in the recesses of Ranier Park doing something with the carved eye hole of a pumpkin — but never mind), of Orangefield’s most illustrious and profitable product. The Mayor would speak; a congressman would speak; there was, every year, the perpetual rumor, which proved to be just that, that a former president would speak.
The culmination of a year’s worth of work and commerce, the Pumpkin Days Festival would, for an entire week, turn Orangefield orange. It would, as always, prove to the world that Orangefield was, indeed, the world capital for pumpkins, that it was a very special place with a very special history.
For one week, Orangefield was the most wonderful place in the world.
And, during that week, something stirred.
Something stirred …
Chapter Seventeen
The black cape was back.
There was a man in it, Marvin Soames was pretty sure — but that fella sure as hell didn’t want to be seen. The cape kept swirling back and forth, and the man’s face, if it was a face, was pasty white and hardly there. The body was worse — a wisp of something inside the cape that looked as if it would break apart if you breathed on it.
Which was not something Marvin wanted to get close enough to do.
You awake, Marvin?
The voice, as always, was inside Marvin’s head, though it sounded as though it came from the face in the cape.
Marvin grunted a noncommittal sound.
You with me? Get up, Marvin.
Marvin grunted again, but rolled off his side onto his back and pulled himself into a sullen sitting position. Not wise to ignore The Voice. He’d done it once, and paid for it: the runs for three days, and a belly that felt like it was on fire. If he played ball, on the other hand, there was often something …
“Bring anything for your ol’ pal?” Marvin said, cocking one eye at the cape, which swirled closer to him. A smell there: empty and cold, like going into a dirt cellar in the heat of summer.
You’ll find it where you always do, Marvin. I do take care of you, don’t I?
Marvin snuffled. “’Cept for that time you burned my belly up—”
The Voice laughed. Nobody made you drink it, Marvin. And you do have a long memory.
“Goddam rotgut wood alcohol. I never forget nothin’ that’s been done to me.”
That’s good. Because I have a job for you, and I
want you to remember just such a thing.
Ignoring the cape, Marvin got up and shuffled to the tree behind The Voice. Sure enough, there was a bottle in a bag. He pulled it out — a pretty decent bottle of white wine.
“Need a corkscrew for this one,” he said sullenly, trying to hide his pleasure. If there was a job to do he might be able to get another bottle out of it.
In his hands there was a tug on the bottle; as he watched, the foil peeled away from the top and the cork slid up and, with a pop, was pulled free.
He looked at the cape, which had nearly fallen to the ground — a wisp of something left his side and then the cape was swirling and flapping again.
And another if you do what I ask.
“I’ll think about it,” he answered, already calculating that perhaps two more bottles could be negotiated.
Don’t get greedy, Marvin.
The bottle in his hands, just as he was bringing it to his mouth, turned broiling hot and he dropped it with a shout. The palms of his hands showed angry red welts.
“I—”
Here’s what I want you to do, Marvin. Now …
Riley Gates had discovered long ago that people were slobs. Even in a pick-your-own-pumpkin patch they managed to leave all kinds of trash — tissues and soda cans, even used baby diapers. Once Riley had found the leavings of a complete chicken dinner for four. And he’d also found that if he didn’t keep the place clean, the same slobs wouldn’t come back the next year.
His back ached from all the bending over, and his feet hurt, but after stowing the trash in the can he kept at the edge of the field he was able to sit in the lawn chair he had there next to his weighing station and cash box and relax. It was late in the day, almost time to close up, but there were still a few customers about — a family with five kids marching toward him now — each kid had a pumpkin relative to his size in reverse order. The biggest kid, who Riley estimated to be twelve — she had that bored, what am I doing here look on her face that would only get worse — held the smallest and the littlest kid, in the neighborhood of three, had both arms around a monster that he could hardly see over.
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