The rain increased, pounding the grass and gravestones like falling glass. The wind blasted at an angle, driving the stinging droplets harder still.
The sky fired an identical stream of dark energy that hit Violina’s bowl. Some sinister circuit was completed. Violina screamed in pain, then laughed like mad, vibrating with the clash of opposing and complementary energies.
The surge ended, leaving Violina steaming from head to toe. The bowl’s contents burned with a white flame.
“Come now!” Violina spun fast, swinging the bowl like a discus to spread its flaming mixture into the air, just as a hurricane gust descended to spread it across the land like a malignant pollen.
Violina fell onto her back, and Dennis was glad to see that she hit her head. Yet the ground was little more than grass and slush at this point, hardly solid enough to hurt the witch, as evidenced by her grinning, naked delight. She spread her limbs as if to soak every inch of her flesh in the unrighteous rain and graveyard muck.
Dennis realized Violina had gained control of him only after forcing the odd whiskey down his throat. He remembered drinking a lot of water back when he was detoxing. He opened his mouth, letting the driving rain drizzle down his face and find its way inside.
Under the remnants of its raggedly flapping plastic cover, the sigil pulsed with a cold glow.
* * * *
Stopping off at the drugstore, McGlazer and Bernard ran in to pick up masks. Returning to the car, they tried for a quick jump scare, hunkering low to pop up at the windows with monster growls.
DeShaun and Stuart just looked at each other. “Our reflexes are officially dead.”
“Maybe it’s just the masks,” noted Stuart. McGlazer had selected a badly painted knockoff of the robot kaiju Jet Jaguar, while Bernard had a child-size mask of a graciously smiling beauty queen. Framed by his wide head, it looked ridiculous. He had bought if for Emera, after all.
“Maybe these are better?” McGlazer handed a plastic bag back to the boys with their masks—Spider-Man villains: the Green Goblin and the Lizard.
The boys fist-bumped and smiled at each other, but just placed the masks on the tops of their heads.
Ten minutes later, they dashed though the rain across the Community Center’s sparsely occupied parking lot, leaving Bernard and McGlazer in their splashy wake.
The muffled sound of Johnny Cash performing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” wafted out from the high windows, triggering wispy memories of Halloweens past—better Halloweens.
Low light, a sputtery, twenty-year-old fog machine and a spinning sphere projecting witches and ghosts across the rafters and bleachers was the closest to an enthusiastic greeting the quartet would receive. There was no deejay, just a portable stereo tuned to WICH with the center’s PA microphone propped against it, as hurriedly assembled by Timbo Linger, the center’s volunteer maintenance engineer and father to two of the dozen small children present. A dusty speaker bearing a cardboard cutout of an owl taped to the side completed the sound array’s sad circuit.
The only other adult present—Kyle Trainor, a recent divorcé desperate for human companionship of any kind—smiled at the arrivals, though he barely knew any of them.
The underwhelmed children, primary schoolers whose parents saw the event as an evening of free babysitting, peppered the mostly empty bleachers and folding chairs, their costumes and makeup little more than afterthoughts.
“Whoop-a-dee-doo,” deadpanned DeShaun.
The trio went to the office, and McGlazer opened the spiffy new door, which the boys expected would be the most exciting thing about the party.
“Let’s get some punch,” Stuart suggested, “and count yawns.”
The boys dropped off their backpacks and moped out.
Leaving the light off, the reverend went behind the desk, dropping his mask to the side.
“Still pondering your place in the universe?” Bernard asked, clearing out the other chair.
“That and much more,” answered the minister.
* * * *
“The settlers’ first autumn here was hard-core. Even worse than Bennington’s trapper buddy had said.” DeShaun drew an ovoid shape on his napkin with a pen.
Stuart took over the napkin, adding a spiraling stem to the top of the ovoid. “Somebody remembered about putting candles in turnips during the end of harvest back in Ye Merry Old Tea Town. Some enterprising genius tried it out on these spiffy new orange melons. Worked out pretty well, so everybody started carving jackos in the fall.”
“Stands to reason that this led to the town’s name and, eventually, the parade.” Stuart took the pen and started drawing curved lines from top to bottom to give the pumpkin depth.
“Don’t forget to leave room for the eyes, nose and mouth,” Stuart told him.
“Yeah.” DeShaun looked up at the witches. “You ladies don’t have an orange marker, do you?”
* * * *
Settlement era
Chloris knocked twice before entering the tiny guest room at the end of the corridor. She found its odd occupant much the same, pale and unmoving. She put her hand near his mouth. It was several seconds before she was sure he was still breathing.
“Would you rise for me, sir?” she whispered, taking away the napkin she had placed over the soup she had made. Pumpkin seeds, sprouts and bits of wild poultry made up the meal, designed to replenish the blood he’d lost.
She waved the soup steam toward him, hoping the strange man’s appetite would do the job of rousing him so she wouldn’t have to get closer. He gave little more than a whimper.
“Let’s help you, then,” she reluctantly offered. Chloris’s physical strength, from years of servitude starting when she was still a child, served her well enough, even in her late thirties. Though tall, this odd lodger was leaner and lighter than many of the settlement men, certainly more so than any of the livestock she wrangled.
She got him to sit up, supporting his back with one arm while deftly raising the bowl to his lips with the other.
Stirring, he sipped a few drops. Chloris held him till she felt her arm would give out. As she eased him back, the strange-eyed young man sat up and rested against the headboard.
Chloris pulled a stool close and sat patiently while he moved his wobbly head around, trying to grasp where he was. His gaze fell on Chloris and remained fixed there. He raised his shaking arm halfway to horizontal, where it shook with effort. He pointed.
Chloris’s skin crawled. It was like he was pointing through her.
“Jacko?” he rasped.
Chloris realized with relief that he was pointing to the candle on the windowsill behind her. Using the spoon this time, she raised more soup to his lips. “Let’s have a bit more so we can feel better. Then we’ll have a look at that nasty stab, and you can tell me about your friend Jacko.”
Everett accepted the soup, smacking his lips as he stared at her with an intensity incongruous with his weakened state. “Treat?”
Chloris smiled. “Thank you, I suppose.”
He sipped more soup as he again raised his trembling finger. “Trick.”
“I don’t…”
Everett opened his hand. It resembled the taloned foot of an owl, outstretched to snatch a field mouse and take it away to kill. He leaned toward her, shaking as his strength quickly drained away.
“What is it, dear boy?”
Everett finally reached her. He placed his hand on her throat. His fingertips hooked into her esophagus.
Chloris pried and swatted at his wrist, but her vaunted strength failed. “Nnnnoooo!” she sought to say, but Everett choked harder.
Chloris tried to stand and back away from him, but he held her fast. The room, already dark, faded to a uniform gray.
Then she was falling—backward, onto her butt.
The man had fainted from his own
effort.
Chloris ran out of the room, anxious to tell her employer of the danger under his roof, praying he would get the man-demon far enough away from the settlement that it could never find its way back.
* * * *
Conal glanced up at his bed, as was long his habit, to see if Sibil was sleeping.
A year and a half hence, Sibil O’Herlihy, a light sleeper on the best of nights since coming to the new world, would have emitted another uneasy moan as she raised her wispy head to find Conal still at the table with the lamp burning too bright.
Now the bed only lay cold and empty.
It had been over a year since her passing, yet Conal still found himself searching for his wife in dark and quiet moments like this. It was often a brutish place, this so-called new world. Thus, her death the winter before last was not shocking. For someone like Conal, who thought of wives as little more than indentured servants, at best, it wasn’t even all that sorrowful.
Yet her company had been some comfort. Left to himself, Conal had no one to punish for his sins.
Conal had no patience for that piece of the past. For there was more significant history to be recalled.
Meeting with the wealthy Wilcott Bennington and a few others in the back room of a cavernous pub those years past, Conal was one of a few men privy to the Englishman’s explanation, concise yet meticulous, of his evolving beliefs about spirituality, society and destiny. At the time, Conal had neither agreed with nor cared about Bennington’s thoughts, which qualified as blasphemy to many. His interest was in a new beginning or, more accurately, an escape.
In his two short years as a sailor for hire during his adolescence, Conal had lived as carefree a life as there could be. Amassing gambling debts, achieving unwilling sexual conquests and committing theft kept him busier than any honest man. Not surprisingly, vindictive men eventually hired brutal men to find him.
Conal had little religious inclination. But he did have a taste for new experiences. When one of his shipmates, seeking closeness with God, acquired the very mushroom that Saint John the Revelator himself had ingested, Conal reasoned that he could take the fungus and convince God to save him from his past before it caught up with him.
Though reasonably literate, Conal was infected with the impulsiveness and impatience of youth and didn’t bother to read a single verse of the Book of Revelation before indulging. He could not have known that the visions experienced by the exiled scribe, John, did not always amount to blissful communion with Jehovah Himself, but more often resulted in incomprehensible and horrific visions of monsters, suffering and apocalypse.
These were the kind of visions that drove a man either to spiritual asceticism or unbridled hedonism. Only Conal O’Herlihy could find a rationale for both.
Several weeks removed from his first experience with the spotted mushroom, Conal O’Herlihy had become a man of purpose, with an eye toward serving both himself and the god of his visions—regardless of whether that truly was Jehovah, or some other deity—and thus reserving for himself a place at the right hand of…Whomever.
This god, via random followers, whispered to him word of the man organizing a mass exodus to the fabled new world of virgin milk and honey, where debt collectors and angry spouses had no cause to venture.
Bennington had his growing troop of followers, all ripe to be shaped and molded by a strong leader. While the wealthy entrepreneur Bennington would suffice for them in the short term, they would eventually need a man who carried the Wisdom of the Fungus.
This was the Irishman’s quandary. Each of the settler families had received or had read to them a copy of Bennington’s charter. Signing on was the same as acknowledging and accepting his beliefs.
And while Bennington had confided to Conal and other potential community leaders his conclusions that the Christ myth was derived from Saturn, he also made it clear he would not force this belief on any of the settlers. He only hoped he could share and discuss it openly, as everyone could their respective beliefs.
Conal saw his opening when Bennington suggested that he take charge of designing the community’s worship center. In exchange for a claim to the high hill, Conal promised to build it there at the top “as a beacon to all the town.”
The charter simply touted religious freedom, an equal community, a commitment to a shining future of prosperity hewn by the hands of the brave and the daring. Not a word about Saturn worship or anything else that could cast doubt in the settlers’ minds or sway them to upend Bennington.
Bennington’s charter was frustratingly flawless. It promised liberty of religion—and therefrom, a completely unheard-of concept back in England. The document offered nothing that could be counted on to rouse the rabble.
For Conal, an appeal to fundamentalist fears was the only answer.
The corpse of poor Hezekiah Hardison might be the very miracle that would change the landscape for O’Herlihy. He needed only to compose the perfect time and place to reveal it, once a few seeds of doubt were planted.
Rolling up his copy of the document, Conal sat back at his table and searched the candle-smudged darkness for details to add to his plan.
Chapter 23
Pumpkin Faces in the Night
Modern day
Her visibility reduced to a few yards by the downpour, Doris drove the Audi at a snail’s pace.
When lightning crashed—every thirty seconds or so now—it had them all jumping.
“This isn’t any normal storm,” Doris remarked, looking along the side of the road for a pull-off. “Maybe we should stop for a few minutes.”
Though she was accustomed to Kerwin relying on body language for much of his communication, Doris was not prepared for his abrupt, scrambling recoil.
When she followed his gaze, her eyes went wide as silver dollars. She slammed on the brakes.
Brinke caught herself as she pitched forward. What she saw beyond the windshield was beyond even the realm of her strangest experiences.
Three pumpkins, big around as dinner tables, clambered across the road some twenty yards ahead, on viney spider-legs that sprouted from their crowns.
“Good God in heaven…” whispered Doris.
Brinke spun to check behind them. In the harsh red of the Audi’s taillights, raindrops veiled another of the horticultural horrors.
Then two more crawled out from behind it.
* * * *
Speeding up his windshield wipers, Hudson impulsively reached for his big orange travel mug, forgetting, for the fifth time, that it was already empty. Leticia only filled it half full these days.
“You worry enough,” she had said, as she stopped him from topping it off. “Ember Hollow doesn’t need a jittery sheriff.”
“Still just deputy, ’Teesh.”
“You heard me.”
Further micromanaging, she had gone by the sheriff’s offices and informed his coworkers of Hudson’s coffee-cutback protocol. No one dared defy her polite request to keep an eye on him.
Hudson tried to make do with the radio—tuned to WICH, of course—playing something by the Japanese band Balzac. He had to resort to cracking the window an inch, which was enough to allow in a few chilly, invigorating drops.
The weird lightning and loud thunder certainly helped, but they didn’t change the fact that he was going on very little sleep.
Patrolling the eastern part of the county as usual seemed unnecessary, given the storm. These pumpkin fields and cornfields were as quiet as ever. He would turn around at the next—
Hudson hit the brakes, as something rolled out into the road, casting a long shadow away from the headlights.
Luckily, he wasn’t going fast enough to slide. But after two Halloweens under the threat of a serial killer who wasn’t shy about performing decapitations, seeing a head-sized object tumble into his path was all the stimulant he would need
for a few hours.
It was just a pumpkin, but that offered little reassurance. Surely no Devil’s Night tricksters were dedicated enough to wait out here in the rainy woods on the outskirts of town just to toss a pumpkin in front of a county cruiser.
Still—Everett Geelens.
On this section of road, fields lay to the left, while woods lined the right side. The pumpkin had come from the right.
Putting his car in park, Hudson drew his revolver. After a moment’s thought, he reholstered it and took the shotgun from its bracket. Opening his door, he stood up and shone his spotlight all around the vehicle’s perimeter and into the woods from which the pumpkin had tumbled, then back to the squash. It was as far as the beam, diffused by fat raindrops and haze, would reach.
Hudson stepped out. “Sheriff’s Department! Who’s up there?”
Only the sound of rain answered.
“I’m armed!”
“Somebody’s gonna come up on this and brake too hard,” Hudson mumbled to himself. “Have themselves an accident.”
Hudson went to the pumpkin. Thinking again of Everett Geelens, he prayed it was not, say, hollowed out and filled with intestines.
Kicking it gently, Hudson was, despite his preparedness, shocked when it rolled over. He reflexively stepped back with a yelp, keeping his eyes on it to be sure he wasn’t imagining what he saw.
Human features—distorted and devious.
The pumpkin had a face. And it grinned at him, spreading lumpy lips to show ghost-white baby teeth.
Brown eyes, complete with sclera, iris and pupil, blinked.
Tendrils extended from its stem, working to move the abomination.
Hudson raised his shotgun and fired. The pellets sparked off the pavement as the pumpkin leaped out of the way, deft as a black widow.
“Dammit!” Hudson shouted.
There was no sign of the thing anywhere, yet his instincts told him it was just out of sight, in the dark beyond the headlight beam. He swiveled and took one step toward his cruiser, then realized the thing could have crawled underneath it, where it waited to ensnare him with those viney tentacles.
Demon Harvest Page 16
