The Pumpkin Man

soon.

Kirstin shrugged and kissed Brian without warning. “I had a blast,” she announced. Her voice was even higher than usual.

“We’d love to get together with you girls again,” Nick offered.

“Hell, we’d even drive up if you wanted,” Brian said.

The girls were excited to hear that. By the time they’d walked back to their parked cars, they had made a date to cook dinner for the boys the next weekend up at the house in River’s End. They traded cell phone numbers; then both couples were kissing, oblivious of the other.

“Can’t wait to see you again,” Jenn whispered when Nick’s lips briefly left hers.

He grinned and said, “Ditto,” before their mouths met again.

It took a while before they were back on the road.

Meredith Perenais’s Journal

February 12, 1985

I know that he still loves me; I can see it behind the stillness in his eyes. But something has changed in him. He’s locked inside himself. With every carving, he goes further away from me. And yet, he can’t stop. It’s his passion. His secret heart.

The knives have stolen his soul. I gave him the gift that made him the Pumpkin Man, but in releasing those shapes, he loses himself. Sometimes the power goes in directions you can never imagine or control. My gift may not have been a gift at all, but a curse.

I can’t reach him anymore. Maybe we’re both lost.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

The murder made the front page of the River Times. Hell, it was the only real news River’s End had. The headline read THE PUMPKIN MAN KILLER RETURNS. Beneath that was the description of Simon Tobler’s beheading and the pumpkin shards left behind. The story filled three columns. A subheading read, Another in a series of murders that have haunted River’s End this decade and last.

Travis Lupe read the headlines and closed his eyes, imagining the scene. He had seen it before. He didn’t want to live it again. The Pumpkin Man had haunted his youth.

He’d been just a kid when the Pumpkin Man first came to town. He remembered riding his bike with his friends over to the Muldaurs’ pumpkin farm, seeing that patch of uncarved gourds and the special shelf of precarved pumpkins. Each day during the month leading up to Halloween there would be a new carved gourd on the special jack-o’-lantern display shelf. Every day, Travis and his friends returned to see the new face that appeared.

The pumpkins had at first looked just like creepy carvings and then grown into more animated creatures. The faces were wild and manic, quiet and sinister. Some looked like feral animals, others like people screaming. All the kids wanted one for their front porch.

The Pumpkin Man always seemed to be on the lot, though much of the time he was hidden somewhere behind the display cases or table with the cash register. Whenever they got close, though, the Pumpkin Man would know. He would appear from around the wooden display case and walk slowly between the boys and the pumpkins, and as he did, he would trail one long finger across the green stubs at the top of each gourd. That finger seemed white as a bone, its nail dark as mud.

“See something you like?” he’d ask. “Ten dollars for any of my babies.”

Travis could still remember his grin, teeth as brown as candied molasses. Nonetheless, the Pumpkin Man and his carvings became a tradition in River’s End. Every year in the fall he’d return to frighten and tantalize the town with his disturbing demeanor and garish gourds. Until the year Steve Traskle disappeared. Travis had seen the face of his friend peering back at him from a large pumpkin carved by the Pumpkin Man that year, and the search for the boy’s body had eventually produced just that: his body. Not his head.

It took a long time for River’s End to recover from that murder, and from the discovery of others that had come before. At first they’d been called runaways or simple disappearances, but the Pumpkin Man soon took the blame, though no one ever proved anything. Certainly when the Pumpkin Man was found strung up one morning from a tree at the top of the hill overlooking the estuary, nobody in town mourned or looked for his killer. It was a case of justice served, most thought.

His wife didn’t think so. She’d lived atop one of the hills overlooking the town and gazed down upon the roofs of her husband’s killers every night for months and eventually years, but at last her searches in the daylight exposed the key she needed to exact her punishment upon River’s End. She had gone to great lengths to avenge the vigilante execution of the Pumpkin Man. Great, dark, evil lengths.

Oh, yes. Travis knew better than most.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

“Do you think they’ll find the house?” Jennica asked, washing a potato in the sink and then peeling it.

Kirstin looked up from the copy of Cosmo she’d picked up in the city a few days before. “Well, we found it. In the dark. And we’re not even from the area,” she pointed out.

“I guess,” Jenn agreed, tossing the spud in a pot and then picking up another. “Do you think they’ll come?”

Her friend snorted and stood. “You worry too much.” She laughed. “They liked us. They saw us naked, how could they not? They’ll be here. Just don’t fuck up the food, okay?”

Jenn rolled her eyes. “Could you find me something bigger?” She paused from peeling her current potato to point at the small pot already full past its brim. “This one’s just not going to work.”

“So make fewer potatoes,” Kirstin complained.

“Lazy-ass.”

“I’m looking, I’m looking.”

Kirstin opened the cabinet next to the stove and clanged a few pots together, but she didn’t pull anything out that was any bigger than the one Jenn already had. “Nothing here,” she announced, then pulled another cabinet open on the other side of the stove. Shrugging, she checked a deep-looking drawer at the end of the cabinetry, near the kitchen door that led to the backyard. It didn’t budge. Trying again, she noticed the black keyhole on the drawer’s upper lip.

“This one’s locked,” she said.

“Try one of the keys in that other drawer,” Jenn said, peeling another potato.

Kirstin rattled around until she came up with the key that had opened the door to the basement in Jenn’s bedroom. She tried it on the drawer, and the key turned. She smiled in silent victory, set the key on the counter and opened the drawer. And screamed.

Jennica dropped the potato in the sink and rushed to her friend’s side. Kirstin’s eyes bugged out as she stared at the deep wooden drawer’s contents. Jenn’s own eyes bulged as she looked over Kirstin’s shoulder.

“Whoa,” she whispered.

“Those are right here next to the stove,” Kirstin said. “Where we cook.”

“I’m pretty sure they’re dead,” Jennica answered. But that didn’t make either of them feel much better.