The Pumpkin Man

sign cautioned them that the road allowed two-way traffic. Jenn turned and saw why that was a reason for caution: the asphalt was barely wide enough for one car.

They passed a half dozen houses that all seemed perched precariously on the hill. Old rusted cars were parked next to garbage cans alongside the narrow road on gravel insets instead of in garages. The dull glow of lights within showed that at least three of the homes were inhabited. Jennica guessed that some of them had to be getaway cottages.

The road ended as promised in a three-slat wooden farm gate, and Kirstin hopped out and used the key they’d been mailed to unlock it. She pulled the gate open and waited for Jenn to drive past before pulling it closed and refastening the padlock.

“I don’t know who they’re trying to keep out,” she said when she got back into the car. “There’s hardly anyone around.”

“Maybe they were trying to keep something in,” Jenn replied, followed by her deepest, “Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” It wasn’t very convincing.

They followed the rutted gravel road farther up the hill, winding around a gully before finally arriving at a turnaround in front of a stone house. A small light beat back the darkness just enough to illuminate a small wooden porch. The two women stepped out, and Jenn put both hands in the air and stretched. Kirstin let out a long groan and bent over to ease the kinks.

“Listen,” Jenn said.

“What? I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly.”

They stood without words and just listened to the almost imperceptible movement of the wind. From far away, at the edge of the night, the thrum of the ocean was calming and hypnotic. The sound was almost undetectable, but its steady motion was there, just under the stillness, if you paused.

Kirstin yawned, stifling the sound with a fist. “All right,” she said, breaking the silence. “Let’s see if this place has any decent beds. I’m wiped.”

Jennica walked up on the porch and found the gray-green gargoyle. She tilted the two-foot-tall statue slightly to the side and, as promised, found a house key on the wood beneath. She scooped it up.

The front door lock turned easily, and she pushed the heavy door open and searched with her hand for a switch on the wall. When she found it, the front room lit with a warm orange glow from a single table lamp near a couch. She and her friend stepped inside.

“Home sweet home,” Kirstin said.

“We’ll see.”

The front room looked cozy. Flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the northern wall was dominated by a stone fireplace. In the center of the stones above the mantel was a black spiral. When Jenn looked closer, she realized it was a carving of a snake. She saw the sliver of a tongue from the thick stub that ended in the center. Not your usual front-room decoration, but whatever.

A worn but comfortable-looking couch rested against the eastern wall; above it were two candle sconces and an ornate tapestry stitched in swirls of purple and green and blue. The room looked rustic but warm.

“I like it,” Kirstin observed.

“Smells like cloves,” Jenn said.

“Or candles.”

They unloaded their suitcases from the car into the family room and then went to explore the other rooms. The kitchen was small, with fixtures that looked as if they’d been installed in the 1950s.

“Yikes,” Jenn said. “I think we’ve entered the Museum of Culinary Anachronisms.”

Kirstin turned the black knob on a white stove front, and she was rewarded with a whoosh and a tower of blue flame through wrought-iron grates. “Guess it works!”

“Good thing,” Jenn answered. “’Cuz I don’t see a microwave.”

She pulled a long silver handle on the door of the refrigerator, and the door popped open with a clank, spilling cool air into the room. A single bulb lit the interior, and in the back of the top shelf was an Arm & Hammer box. Otherwise, the fridge was empty. She looked closer and found the thermostat and turned it from low to high before closing the door.

“I’ve never seen a refrigerator with an oval door,” Kirstin observed.

“Didn’t you ever watch I Love Lucy?” Jenn asked.

“Black and white? Are you kidding?”

Kirstin suddenly looked alarmed, and she started back toward the front room. A moment later her voice resonated with pure fear. “Hey, there’s no TV!”

Jenn yelled back. “Didn’t you ever hear of reading? Looks like there’s a great library.”

“Yeah, if you like witchcraft and the occult,” Kirstin muttered. “What kind of shit was your aunt into, anyway?”

When Jenn left the kitchen, Kirstin was on her knees in front of one of the bookcases. She was leafing through an old book near the fireplace and didn’t look up when Jenn knelt beside her.

“Fucked up,” she said.

“What?”

“There’s something here about a goat, and cleansing, and using stone knives to remove its guts.”

Jennica’s forehead wrinkled. She put her hands out. “What the hell are you looking at?”

Kirstin handed the book over. Jenn turned it to look at the spine.

“Maleficia,” she read. The words looked as if they’d been burned into the leather with a brand rather than printed.

She opened it to the first page, and underneath the title the inscription read: The Contents of which Endeavor to present to you the Secret Wisdom of the Night as it was given to Nathan Maldita at the Summer Solstice, 1793. Jennica leafed further, and on each yellowed page English melded with Latin to present a series of what appeared to be rituals and spells.

“Weird,” she agreed, placing the book back on the shelf and pulling out one next to it, labeled simply Deaths.

“Cheery,” Kirstin observed.

“Mmmmm.”

Jenn opened the red leather cover to reveal page after page of illustrated death. The art was beautiful and horrible at the same time. The face of each victim was rosy-colored; warm Norman Rockwell–esque cherubs met their final moments as intimate rendezvous with knives, acid, ropes, guillotines and various blunt instruments. After each painting of torture, a short text description followed.

Jenn digested a particularly gruesome drawing of a naked man whose head was half severed and whose back and legs were spotted with blood and jagged wounds. She read the accompanying text aloud:

“Raymond Brown had the misfortune of severing his femoral and carotid arteries when he ran full tilt into a barbed wire fence after dark. The incident occurred on a Saturday night of the full moon.

“Earlier, Mr. Brown had found himself accosted in his home by three persons of indeterminate gender. Each wore hoods and dark capes, and they urged Mr. Brown to leave his home at knifepoint. When he refused, his wife was brought before him by a previously unseen fourth person. She was forcibly disrobed, and as a knife was held to the throat of Mr. Brown, there before him on the floor of their cottage, his wife was taken in the biblical way by her captor. At this point, Mr. Brown was informed that he could either run as fast as possible through the west field or watch his wife be flayed alive.

“‘If I run, you’ll leave her alone?’ he asked, and the captor holding the knife to his throat had said, ‘Yes. But you must remove all of your clothes first.’

“The man stripped, and then, after being gouged by a knife to his buttock, he ran out the back door of the house. The three dark-hooded persons followed, poking at him with their blades whenever they could get close.

“‘Run to catch the moon,’ they implored him. They laughed and stabbed, and soon Mr. Brown was bleeding in many nether places.