The Pumpkin Man

disappeared. “What time is it?” she asked from the backseat.

“Ten fifteen,” Erik said. “It’ll be another hour if he follows his usual pattern.”

It was nearly the longest hour she ever waited. The longest was the hour after she realized Billy was never coming home again.

The hour passed silently. Erik and Charlie Wilbert said nothing from the front seat, though Charlie cleared his throat every couple minutes. It was almost as if he were getting ready to speak but then never found the words. The three of them just sat and stared at the blue neon sign in front of the bar.

There were eight other cars in the parking lot, one of which belonged to Hank DeVries and the rest of the lynching party. It was parked strategically on the other side of the bar’s front entrance. Four other sets of angry eyes waited inside, also trained on the bar’s weather-beaten old door.

Casey Meriweather exited the place around 10:40; the shadows in both vigilante cars shifted and tensed but then relaxed without making a move. Teri then watched Casey’s taillights disappear up Route 1. The red glow dwindled to the size of fireflies and winked out, and she found herself staring at empty asphalt again. There was nothing quite as still as night in River’s End. You could hear the air move.

The ember of a cigarette glowed in Hank’s car. Teri wondered if it was Hank or his wife Angel. They had lost their daughter a year ago, and she hadn’t seen either one of them without a smoke in hand since. She was surprised there weren’t two orange spots in the old Buick. She’d hate to be Dave and Simon in the backseat. Probably choking to death.

The screen door opened on the front of Tide’s Inn, and a figure stepped out. A man. He held the door a minute, his face obscured as he answered someone back in the bar. Then he let the screen wobble closed, and Teri could see the stark, long face of the man she and the others had come here to kill.

She shook off the memory and stood up. It was after eleven p.m., but she wasn’t tired. She hadn’t been able to get the thoughts of that long-ago night out of her head since she’d read the article this morning. But, no. The Pumpkin Man was dead. She had seen his body hanging from a tree, bleeding from everywhere.

Picking up the newspaper, she went down the wood plank stairs to her basement. She wouldn’t throw it away; there was a place for things that dealt with the Pumpkin Man. It wasn’t quite a shrine, more the antithesis.

She walked over to the shelving unit on the far side of the basement and set the newspaper on top of a pile of other yellowing issues of the River Times. On the shelf beneath those papers was a coil of rope. They had strung up the Pumpkin Man all those years ago with a piece cut from this coil. Teri had never used or disposed of the rest. It sat here, next to Billy’s old fireman’s hat. And his remote-controlled Corvette. The antenna of the car had begun to rust in the damp.

Teri ran her fingers over the rough surface of the rope and remembered her feelings of hate and rage as she’d helped tie a piece of it around the struggling man’s neck. She remembered the fire in his eyes and his blood on her clothes. The very next day, in the fire pit out back, she’d burned everything she wore that night.

The Pumpkin Man couldn’t be alive now, she repeated to herself. She had helped kill him.

A stair creaked behind her. The basement light winked out.

“Who’s there?” Teri called.

Another stair creaked. Fear fully registered.

The darkness was total. There were no windows in the basement. It was night outside anyway. Another creak. Someone was definitely coming down the stairs.

“What the fuck,” Teri whispered, her memories of violence overwhelming her brain.

She felt her way along the shelving unit. She needed something to protect herself with, something sharp or heavy. Her son’s toys weren’t going to help.

Another creak.

Teri racked her brain. What was down here that she could use? And, how could he see in the dark if she was blind? What did he want?

The workbench was just behind the shelving, so she could find a screwdriver or the hammer if she could get there. Teri turned away from the shelving but her foot caught on something. She stumbled, tried to right herself, and then her other foot caught on a box and she lost the rest of her balance. Her hands slapped the cement of the basement floor.

Creak.

Again? How many creaks had that been? How many stairs were there from the kitchen to the basement? Why was he walking so slowly?

Teri crawled forward on her hands and knees until she found the base of her workbench. Reaching up for the lip of the wood, she used it to pull herself back to her feet. She didn’t hear anything now, but she felt a presence. Someone was in the room with her. Moving toward her.

She felt her way across the bench, seeking anything she could use to protect herself. By touch she identified the electric drill, a case of drill bits, a roll of string, a handful of pencils. A ruler. And then her fingers scrabbled over a Phillips-head screwdriver. She grabbed it and held tight, but at the same time, she kept running her other hand across the bench.

She knocked something over. It felt like a metal tube. Yes! The industrial-strength flashlight, it was heavy as a lead pipe. She picked it up and turned toward the stairs.

Teri knew that someone was there, probably just a few yards away. For a second she considered not turning the light on; after all, that would indicate to the intruder where she was. But she didn’t care. She had to know. She thumbed the ON button.

Her light found the face of a man with black irises staring hard at her. He was almost on top of her.

With one hand, he reached out and took her light. He didn’t say a word, and Teri was too shocked to scream. Her heart stopped as she whispered, “You!”

The man didn’t answer. Instead, he raised the flashlight and brought it down like a hammer. Teri crumpled to the floor.

The man set the flashlight back on the workbench, lifted Teri and laid her out there as well. He stepped away for a moment and returned with a pumpkin, which he also set on the bench, next to her head. A stream of blood oozed down between her eyes to drip off the tip of her nose.

The man removed a package from his belt; it was leather and unfolded to reveal knives of different shapes and lengths. He took out the longest, heaviest blade, stabbed it into the top of the pumpkin and sawed back and forth until he was able to remove the stem. Then he took a shorter, thinner knife and touched it to Teri’s left eyebrow, pressing down and gently drenching it in the woman’s essence. Turning the knife on the gourd, he carved out an eyehole, lubricated by the blood of Teri’s eye. Then, little by little, he touched his knife to Teri’s features, and with the strange magic of his special knives, stitched her blood and soul into the pumpkin, which slowly began to resemble her face, in an eerie, horrible, far-too-realistic way.

At one point Teri woke, but he quickly silenced her spate of screams. It was best if they were alive while he transferred their essence to the rind, but it was better if they were quiet. He carved unchecked through the rest of the night.

Meredith Perenais’s Journal

November 19, 1985

Found in a book printed over one hundred years ago:

The road to hell is paved with dreams and knives. First comes the desire to be more than a common man. Next comes bloodlust, and the fantasy of possibility. I can be more than the common man. Finally comes the doorway in the dark. A doorway with only one exit.

I brought George his doorway. I didn’t understand.