The Pumpkin Man

shadowy hall. His hand easily found the smooth wood of the bat, and he brought it up into a swinger’s rest on his shoulder. Then he moved again toward the bath and the spare bedroom.

Screeeeep, scraaaaaape. Screeeeep, scraaaaaape. The noise continued.

Simon’s chest pounded. Moving his feet was like pushing a concrete boulder up a very steep hill; they did not want to go. A voice in the back of his head screamed, Duh! When you hear the killer in the house, you don’t go chase them, you get out! But the logical half of Simon’s brain insisted there was no killer in the spare bedroom. More likely, a squirrel or raccoon had somehow gotten in from the attic.

The hardest thing that Simon Tobler ever did was to round that corner at two a.m. to the spare room on the second floor of his tiny house in River’s End, California. It was also nearly the last.

He flipped the light switch on the wall, and the overhead fixture threw a blaze of light across the blue comforter-covered spare bed. It was what lay on the bed that puzzled Simon, however. His eyebrow rose, and he thought hard about exactly where or how he had come to acquire a large orange pumpkin.

The gourd weighed down the center of the bed. Simon stepped forward, bat ready. From somewhere nearby, the scraping sound still came, like a knife moving back and forth across a file. Screeeeep, scraaaaaape.

Frowning at the pumpkin, Simon stepped slowly around the bed toward the small door that led into the eaves. His thumb was on the handle when it moved of its own accord. The small door pulled inward, and a bone white hand appeared and gripped the door frame. A figure stepped out of the shadows.

Simon sprang back. He caught a flash of white teeth before his eyes focused on the figure’s long curved blade. Then Simon made the biggest mistake of his life. It’s not as if he wasn’t prepared. He had kept his bat at the ready for over twenty years beneath his bed in preparation for any stranger who broke into his private haven. He held the bat now.

Instead of using it, he looked at the figure and said, “You? How did you get—”

He never completed the sentence. Instead, a flash of silver cut the air and met Simon’s throat, and he fell to the ground gargling blood. Two snow-white hands reached past him and grasped the pumpkin, pulling it closer, positioning it near the edge of the bed near Simon’s still-twitching body. Without saying a word, the figure held his knife aloft for just a moment, as if the motion held some power, some solemn ceremony. Then it began to carve.

CHAPTER

THREE

“It’s Friday, girl, and you are NOT staying home again!”

Jennica stopped in the middle of the high school hallway, reached up and gently pried the fingers of her best friend, roommate and fellow teacher, Kirstin Rizzo, from her shoulders. “I have papers to grade,” she insisted. “I’ve gotten way behind with everything over the past couple weeks. I need this weekend to catch up.”

Kirstin dipped her head until long blonde strands fell and obscured her eyes—partly. You could still see the intensity of those ice blue irises, and the expression on her lips left no doubt of her humor. “No,” she corrected. “You need to relax and put the past behind you. You’re coming with me.”

“I’ll think about it,” Jenn promised, though anyone could tell from her tone that she would most likely be thinking about it from the comfort of her couch, her pen marking grades on papers.

Kirstin rolled her eyes. “The Tender Trap needs you. There are lonely boys there. You should come and pick out one to take care of. Boys make nice pets, you know.”

Jenn raised an eyebrow. “I’m sick of trying to housebreak one. It’s not worth the mess.”

“Well, you can always just go back to their kennel,” Kirstin suggested. “Sometimes they even try to cook breakfast!”

“‘Try’ is no doubt the operative word. The last thing I want the morning after is a plate of runny eggs.”

“You are soooo not open to fun,” Kirstin pouted. “Turn around a minute?”

“Why?” Jenn asked.

“Just do it.”

Reluctantly, Jennica turned.

“Uh-huh. I see it now.”

“See what?” Jenn asked.

“The stick up your ass.”

“I’m walking away,” Jenn answered, and she kept her word.

Kirstin’s voice followed. “Friday night. The Tender Trap. Boys older than sixteen. Be there!”

The sixth-period bell rang, and Jennica hurried to take her spot at the front of room 231. Her classroom. Filled with sixteen-year-olds. A smile touched the edge of her lips. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d been sitting at a desk like the thirty-five seats spread out before her. She’d doodled boys’ names in notebooks and gotten caught skimming sex passages in Judy Blume’s Wifey, which someone behind her had conveniently highlighted with yellow marker. Back then, she’d never thought for a moment that she’d be “Ms. Murphy” at the lectern of a similar room. She had been the mousey girl two seats from the back. The one that the teacher always called on when she didn’t know the answer. She’d been the one that the boys teased, but never kissed. Now, here she was standing at the head of the class. And she was still shaken by the sound of the bell when it rang and she was outside the classroom instead of in.

Sixth period was study hall, which meant she could catch up on paperwork. Maybe she would go out with Kirstin if she got far enough.

“Okay, take your seats,” she called. “Midterms are coming up, and I think a few of you might want to really use this time to study for once. Trust me, you need it!”

“Ms. Murphy?” called Rudy Rogers. The kid looked like a thirty-year-old linebacker with a bad case of acne. Inside, she cringed. The kid never gave her a break. He was always messing around.

“Yes, Rudy?”

“What I need is a hall pass. I gotta pee.”

She smiled sweetly. “No, you don’t.”

“Oh, but I really think I—Oh.” He gave a look of horrified surprise as something splashed onto the white tile floor near his desk. Behind him, kids started laughing. Beneath his chair, a yellow puddle spread near his beat-up gym shoes.

“Oh, grosssssss!” Natalie Sopher yelled from a seat behind him.

Rudy looked up with a mortified expression that kept threatening to break into hysterical laughter. “Too late,” he gasped.

Jenn stifled the urge to laugh herself, and instead scribbled a note on a small yellow pad. Then she ripped off the sheet and held it out. “It’s amazing how you could have an accident like that and not actually get your pants wet,” she said. “You want to go to the bathroom? Fine. Be back in five minutes with paper towels to clean that up.”

He grinned and started out of the room, but she stopped him.

“Rudy?”

“Yes, Ms. Murphy?”

“Take your trash with you, would you?” She pointed to the overturned lemonade can tucked behind the leg of his chair. “The rest of you hit the books,” she added, and settled down to grade the fourth-period geography tests.

It didn’t take long before she was shaking her head in frustration. How did you grow up in Illinois and not know that the capital was Springfield? And who would have guessed that Ontario was a country in South America? After a few more answers of the same caliber, Jennica pushed the tests aside and reached into her bag for the worn leather book she’d rescued from her dad’s.

She’d been reading through her aunt’s journal a couple pages at a time. It was strange to read the words of a dead woman, especially one who was related to her, one who had held her as a baby but whom she’d never really