The Pumpkin Man

George’s family were not nice people. They may have died, but they never left their home. Their influence still breathes inside these walls. I can feel them walking here at night. I have felt them since I first came here, I suppose, but now . . . they seem stronger. They will never go away either. Their power is tied to this place, to the things they did here. Just as I am now.

I suppose none of us will ever leave.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

Scott Barkiewicz had always wanted to be a cop. Growing up, you could always find him staked out in front of the tube watching episodes of CSI and the reruns of T.J. Hooker, Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue.

He’d been a thin, reedy kid, picked on by bullies and laughed at by the losers he refused to party with. He’d never seemed to fit in anywhere; he wasn’t a jock, he wasn’t a stoner, he wasn’t even a brain. Good grades came hard. The nerds didn’t like him; they thought he was just a little too tight. “Take that stick out of your ass” was a phrase he’d heard a lot more than once. But he’d had a natural affinity with the police, who seemed the force keeping every problematic social group from running amok. As a kid he’d frequently asked his mom why people couldn’t just leave one another alone. As an adult, he’d sworn to make sure they did.

River’s End was his first assignment after the police academy, and while he liked the little town, he could see that things weren’t always run by the book here. The captain seemed just a little too laid-back. He looked the other way sometimes, usually when the crime had to do with people who’d lived here for a long time. Though Scott didn’t know why the captain was going easy on this Jennica Murphy. She wasn’t local. And truth be told, she reminded him a lot of one of those “too-pretty” girls who had broken his heart in high school and after. She might look sweet on the outside, but inside was where he worried something cruel lived. He’d been the brunt of many a pretty girl’s mean streak, so he didn’t trust her.

That was no reason not to do your duty, however, and Scott knew he needed to try to protect Jennica, in case the captain was right and she was an innocent in all this. Scott just felt that in general that Captain Jones had lost his edge. If you stayed in one place too long, that’s what happened. You got too cozy. You risked getting too friendly with the people you were supposed to keep in line. That was why he thought that police personnel should rotate town to town periodically, kinda like they did with Catholic priests.

The job of the police was to keep everyone from stepping all over the rights and lives of others. He was proud to have trained to be one of those enforcers, and he was determined to find out now just who the hell was slicing and dicing their way through the people of River’s End. The captain was investigating the murders, but somehow he seemed just a little too lackadaisical about the whole thing. As if he didn’t really believe they could catch the murderer, so he wasn’t going to kill himself trying. Scott knew there was a bunch of hocus-pocus urban legend shit surrounding a killer from a few years back, but he didn’t believe some boogeyman was walking out of the night from nowhere to knock people off. Scott was a realist: there was a physical being holding the knives and shedding the blood. And it was Scott’s sworn duty—and personal goal—to find and stop that person.

To that end, Scott was now reviewing every murder connected with the Pumpkin Man. On his desk he had old discolored folders from twenty years ago, when the original bloodbath hit. Next to them was a growing stack of folders related to new killings, folders he had put together himself. The names on the folders were disturbingly similar: Hawkins, Smith, Wilbert, Foster, DeVries, Traskle.

The original file folders all dealt with children. The new ones, two decades later, all dealt with the parents. One other difference Scott noticed was the care for secrecy the killer had taken.

In the original six-year string of Pumpkin Man murders, the killer had taken a child from the town each Halloween, but he had never left any evidence behind. The first couple of kids were even thought to have simply run away or drowned. One was eventually discovered weeks after his death, lodged in the reeds of the estuary, headless. Until some of those heads had turned up in the crypt behind the Perenais house, all the heads of the victims were missing. Then came the eyewitness accusation of another child. That had led to George Perenais turning up dead, hung from a tree and poked full of holes like a ghastly pinata. While the timing of the event and the pitch of town’s hysteria led Scott to question the validity of the boy’s story, clearly it had been enough for some vigilante. That vigilante had never been found either.

The recent murders were instantly obvious: the killer left behind a body and blatant evidence—evidence clearly intended to link the crime sprees. The head of each recent victim was removed and replaced with an intricately carved pumpkin.

Scott sighed and shook his head. He could imagine the amount of trepidation that had overtaken the town after Perenais was hanged, watching Halloween steadily approach and wondering if at last the ghoulish holiday would pass without the loss of a child. And then he could imagine their joy when no more deaths happened. Some vigilante or vigilantes somewhere had seen their brutal actions justified. For the first time in months, the town slept soundly. But they’d been wrong. George Perenais couldn’t be the killer. Not if he was dead. Why had the real killer taken those kids? And why had he waited over twenty years to come back for their parents?

Of course, the killer hadn’t taken all of the parents. Teri Hawkins had lived alone, as had Erik Smith, but Charlie Wilbert had been found by his wife. So had Dave Traskle. Those wives remained alive months after their husbands’ murders, though the DeVries couple had both been killed.

Only one family remained untouched by the recent murders: Harry and Emmaline Foster. They had lost their son, Justin, in 1986. He was still officially listed as missing; no body had ever been found.

Interesting. The Fosters were the only parents from the original string of murders who remained untouched by the recent rash of killings.

Scott pulled open a drawer in his desk and fished out the local phone book. It covered a half a dozen towns but was still woefully thin. He quickly flipped to the Fs and found only three Fosters. Only one of them lived in River’s End. It had to be the same one.

Quickly he scribbled down the address on a small notepad. Officer Scott Barkiewicz was about to take a little ride.

CHAPTER

THIRTY

Jennica had retreated to the family room to peruse the Perenais library.

“Okay, there are, like, a dozen keys in here,” Nick called from the kitchen. They were both looking for clues to the mystery in the crypt. The sound followed of silverware crashing together.

“We’ll try them all!” Jenn answered, not looking up from her book. Labeled simply The Veil, its cover was unadorned by author names or other design. The title was embossed in gold on a pale red fabric stitched into board. It was an old text; she could feel the pages separating from the binding as she turned them. The sound as she leafed carefully through gave her chills. It was as if she were breaking history.

“Are there other locks around here you can’t open?” Nick called.

“Not that I’ve found,” she said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

She stopped turning pages when she reached a chapter titled “The Crypt.” A small piece of faded blue paper marked the spot.

So, Meredith had thought this was of interest, perhaps?

Jenn began to read:

The burial place is a seat of some power and must be approached with caution. The spirit is often drawn to linger here, even more so than the place of death. The veil at this location can be especially thin for the deceased, as the spirit maintains a connection to its body’s physical remains. In ancient times, the crypt was