The captain nodded, as if he expected nothing less, and simply said, “Meredith.” He picked one off the shelf and twisted it so that its contents moved gently inside. He aimed his flashlight at the jar, and a handful of eyeballs looked back at him, swirling in the silent maelstrom he’d created. He set the jar back without a word.
Jenn led them quickly to the end of the basement and the passageway under the backyard. Captain Jones aimed his light at the stonework and nodded.
“This looks pretty old,” he said.
“But why was it built in the first place?” Nick asked.
The captain shrugged. He had no answer for anything that the Perenais family did. They had lived on this hill for as long as River’s End existed, and rumors of their strange activities were legend before Meredith ever came to town.
With Jones’s flashlight, they walked much quicker through the narrow passage than they had the day before with candles, and soon they arrived in the crypt. Jenn unlocked the door and they filed through. The captain immediately walked to the coffin that dominated the room. While light from outside streamed in through the outer door, he still used his flashlight to look closely at the coffin and the plaque in front. He knelt and nodded.
“This is Meredith’s husband,” he announced. “They used to call him the Pumpkin Man.”
“Your uncle,” Kirstin whispered to Jenn.
The captain reached out for one of the pumpkins and touched the greenish gray stub at its tip. The gourd was extremely large. “They look like someone picked them from a field,” he said. “But these aren’t real.”
He wrapped his hand around the stub and lifted the top of the pumpkin off, stumbled backward when he saw what was inside. A thick black tuft of hair. Human hair.
Jones gagged audibly for a second but then recovered. He took a deep breath and reached inside to grab the hair, which was attached to the blue-white skin of a forehead; foggy blue eyes forever open in death; a purpled and twisted nose and a slack mouth, yellowing teeth exposed in a silent scream. The ragged flesh of the severed neck looked almost black. The room filled with the reek of carrion.
Kirstin screamed and looked away. Jenn shook her head and stifled a cry.
Nick screwed up his nose and whispered, “What the fuck.”
“Who is that?” Jenn whispered.
“Erik Smith,” the captain said. “We found his body last month. Just not his head. I guess
Jones set the head back in the pumpkin and replaced the lid. Then he lifted the next lid and removed another grisly find. This one was female.
“Teri Hawkins,” he said. “She was found dead in her basement a couple days ago. Or at least, the rest of her was found.”
He lifted the last lid and pulled out a head topped with blond hair. The eyes looked frozen in fear. The nose was spotted with freckles of dried blood. The base of the neck still dripped fresh crimson.
“Jesus Christ,” Nick whispered. Jenn hugged him, but she couldn’t take her eyes from that ghastly, silently screaming face.
Kirstin screamed and fell to her knees.
Brian.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
“The killings began again late last year, just before your aunt Meredith died,” Captain Jones said. “But the original Pumpkin Man murders go back more than twenty years. Things have been pretty quiet around here since then. Until recently.”
He’d led the three of them back up from the basement and sent the coroner and the other two cops down to the crypt to take care of business. Jenn now sat between Kirstin and Nick, trying with gentle squeezes of her hands on their arms to comfort them both at the same time.
“Why do you think it all started up again?” she asked. “Did the original killer get out of jail or something?”
The captain shrugged. “I don’t know. The original Pumpkin Man killer was never officially tried and convicted . . . though a group of people here in town thought they had him taken care of.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asked.
“The original Pumpkin Man murders were a handful of kids back in the eighties,” Captain Jones said. “They disappeared over the course of four or five years, all around Halloween. Eventually, most of the bodies were found. They never did find the heads. What they did find were pumpkins.” His eyes took on a faraway look. “Pumpkins that were carved in the likenesses of those poor, sweet children. And those pumpkins were stained in blood.”
“So, what happened?” Nick asked.
“There was a man who used to set up a stand every year on a vacant lot in the middle of town,” Jones said. “He sold pumpkins there every October. For an extra charge, he’d carve them for you. And his carvings were like no other. I have never seen so much detail in a pumpkin face, before or since.”
“That was my uncle, wasn’t it?” Jenn asked.
The captain nodded.
“The guy down at the general store said that my aunt used to be married to the Pumpkin Man.”
Jones nodded again. “Yeah. They started calling him that pretty quickly. The first couple years he set up his stand, it was like a carnival. The kids couldn’t wait to go there after school to see the new face he’d created. He pretty much carved a new pumpkin every day throughout October and put it on display. Some of them were funny and others just . . . weird. I remember seeing pumpkins that looked like squirrels and dogs, and there was one that, somehow, he made look narrow and pointy enough that it actually resembled a bird. On Halloween, he’d unveil his ‘masterpiece’ of the year. That one was always scary—its long, slanty eyes lit by a candle inside and teeth that looked like they might just come alive to eat you.”
The police captain smiled faintly, then continued. “One year, a local boy was reported missing on Halloween. They searched and searched but never found him. Eventually it was assumed that he’d been playing down by the estuary and was washed out to sea. River’s End was hit hard by that. We’re a tight-knit community here, and there’s nothing worse than losing a child.
“The next year, another kid turned up missing. And the next year, another. And another.” Captain Jones eyed Jenn, Kirstin and Nick silently for a moment, his face clouded with sadness. “Then little Stevie Traskle disappeared.
“One of the local kids reported that he’d seen the Pumpkin Man carve Stevie up right there behind the pumpkin stands. The police at the time took your uncle in for questioning, but they could never find enough evidence to convict him. The bodies they’d found at that point were so badly decomposed and eaten by fish that they could barely be identified, let alone provide any evidence of what or who killed them.” The police captain fell silent.
“So, what happened to him?” Jennica asked.
“Some people took it upon themselves to dole out justice. They kidnapped your uncle one night after dark and strung him up on the hill just outside of town. Nobody ever admitted to doing it, of course, and nobody looked too hard to find the lynch mob. But after that night there were no more disappearances. Not until last year.”
“When exactly did it start up again?” Jenn asked.
“Halloween,” the captain said. He shook his head. “I’ll never forget that call. Charlie Wilbert’s wife just kept crying into the phone saying, ‘He’s back. He’s come back.’ We had to drive out there to find what she was talking about. And when we did, we found Charlie. He was just sitting there, beer bottle in hand on the front porch, like he sat every night. Only, this time, his shirt was covered in his own blood and his head had been replaced . . .”
Jones shook his head, his voice fading as if he couldn’t bear to say the words. Then: “The poor man’s head had been replaced by a pumpkin. And that pumpkin was carved in the likeness of his face. It was the best carving I’ve seen in twenty years. The best since the Pumpkin Man used to set up shop in that vacant lot. At Charlie’s feet was a pile of pieces gouged from the pumpkin. They were all stained in Charlie’s blood.”
Jenn’s heart was beating a mile a minute.
