The Pumpkin Man

what happened. The next day, you guys were back up here and I heard that your friend disappeared. I know I didn’t do that. And today I found out that Emmaline was killed. Well, I slept fine last night and didn’t wake up this morning feeling afraid. There were no bloody clothes to burn and no bloody knives to clean. For once I knew I had nothing to do with it.”

Travis’s eyes widened, and he leaned toward Jenn and Nick, clearly wanting to make an impression. “I think the spirit used me last week to deliver the knives to someone else. Someone he could ride better. Or easier.”

“Why did you kill my aunt?” Jenn asked. “The woman who helped you?”

Travis spat, “She didn’t help me. She used me, like I just said. Yeah, she tipped well, but that’s about all. Why did I kill her? Because I thought it would stop this insanity. I never wanted to kill anyone. She made me. Or, I guess, someone else made me. Someone she contacted. I didn’t kill anyone but her, which I only did because I wanted this to stop!”

Nick moved toward Travis, but Travis bolted across the room and around the edge of the dark L. But as he rounded the corner, he tripped and went down with a surprised “Oomph.”

Jenn moved to help before her boyfriend did something stupid. She registered something else, however. Something terrifying. Travis had fallen because there was a new pumpkin in the middle of the floor, just around the corner from the mummy. In tripping, Travis had knocked its top off, and as Jenn looked inside she saw a lock of salt-and-pepper hair and a bloodied patrician nose. She knew in a heartbeat whose head it was: Emmaline’s.

Just beyond was another pumpkin. This one Travis hadn’t knocked over, but Jenn could see through the eyeholes that there was another human head inside. A human head with blonde hair. Kirstin.

Before she could react, she noticed Nick. Rising from a crouch, he now had a knife in his hand and stepped toward her with a strange smile on his face, an expression she’d never seen outside of a horror movie. An expression of hate and hunger mixed together.

“Nick?” Jenn asked, stepping backward. Beside her, Travis scrambled to pull his clumsy self upright.

“Not right now,” Nick said in a voice that Jenn didn’t recognize. He lunged at Travis, who went down a second time, and Jenn jumped away, trying not to come in physical contact with either of them.

Travis cried out. “It’s you! He’s riding you. For God’s sake, wake up, Nick, don’t do this.”

Nick laughed. It didn’t sound quite like Nick, really. The voice was deeper, slower. It was the dark cackle of a Methuselah given one last chance at life and nothing was going to get in his way, and Jenn suddenly realized she’d spent last night making love to the man who’d killed her best friend. Who’d killed Emmaline. Travis was right.

Nick was larger than Travis. With one arm he slammed the man to the floor, and he had no problem holding the struggling clerk down. A long serrated knife popped out and pressed hard against the smaller man’s Adam’s apple.

“Nick!” Jenn screamed, and she reached out to grab his knife arm.

Nick’s strangely cold face turned to her, and he said one word with such finality that it rooted her in place. “Don’t.”

He turned back to Travis, then, ignoring her. But Jenn knew that if she did anything, it would only bring that knife down faster. She waited, uncertain of what to do. If Nick just moved the knife a little bit away from Travis’s throat . . .

“I helped you,” Travis gasped. His eyes twitched and widened, studied the face of the man who held him down. Nick’s eyes didn’t blink. His lips didn’t move. For a fleeting second, Travis wondered if the man still breathed.

“You never helped me,” Nick said. His smirk slowly widened in a shark’s grin. “I borrowed you, that’s all. You didn’t come here tonight to help me, and I don’t need to borrow you anymore. I like my current situation much better.”

He pressed the knife tighter to Travis’s throat, and Jenn saw a line of crimson begin to well up along its silver teeth. She stood frozen. Any movement might drive Nick to slit Travis’s throat. Then again, Jennica told herself, that was probably going to happen anyway.

She grimaced and tensed. She needed to try. She hoped this wasn’t the wrong move.

Gritting her teeth and praying, she kicked Nick as hard as she could in the stomach. He grunted and lifted off Travis, curling into a ball for a moment and letting out a moan of horrible pain.

Travis’s eyes widened as he realized he was free. The line of blood across his neck twisted and dripped as he pushed himself upright, and he rose to a crouch with the full intention of running for the door. But intentions don’t always play out. Nick recovered almost instantly. He came out of the fetal position and rolled to his feet. His fist shot out and caught Jenn on the cheek so hard she saw stars; she lost her balance and fell to the floor. Then Nick took three quick steps and kicked Travis’s feet out from under him.

“I have suffered you long enough,” the voice inside Nick said, and with one hand he slammed Travis back to the floor. With the other, he raised the long, thin serrated knife of the Pumpkin Man, and Jenn watched, paralyzed, still blinking back sparks in her vision, as he brought the blade down like a dagger.

The tip of the knife slipped through the top of Travis’s right eye socket without resistance. The clerk screamed, his agony a sound that brought tears to Jenn’s eyes, but the blade didn’t slow. Instead, Nick pulled the blade along the outline of Travis’s eyeball in a wet spray of crimson and pain. Then, as Jenn started to rise, Nick flipped the gory object to land with a wet splat on the floor between them. Jenn looked down and saw the pale blue iris staring up at her with vacant horror.

Nick’s arm stabbed the knife into the other side of Travis’s face, performing the exact same excision on the other eye. Travis thrashed and screamed beneath him, but he failed with his kicks and punches to dislodge his possessed assailant.

Jenn stopped moving to help Travis and instead began to back away. She knew that she couldn’t save the clerk, and her own instincts for self-preservation had kicked in. What did the Pumpkin Man have in store for her?

She didn’t wait to find out. As she watched the blade jab and slice with wicked precision into Travis’s face, she backed toward the door. She couldn’t save the dying man on the floor, but she might still be able to save herself.

From behind her, she heard the devil laugh. “You can run,” he said with Nick’s tongue as she turned and ran for the door back to the pantry and the kitchen, “but I will always find where you hide.”

She reached the faint light of the kitchen, and there Jenn turned and raced for the front door. But when she reached the front room, she slowed. Where was she going to go next? Was she going to outrun Nick in the darkness?

Travis gave a last shriek, which cut off abruptly as if someone had pulled the plug on a stereo. The house was silent.

Jenn took her hand off the doorknob and looked to the Book of Shadows, which was still sitting open where she’d left it on the end table near the couch. The thing that was in Nick was not going to go away just because she got in the car and drove a hundred miles. Or a thousand. It could live for a millennium and inhabit a hundred bodies to achieve its aim. It was going to follow her, and it was going to kill her. She could hear it laughing even now in the other room as it carved a hideous shape from the clay of Travis’s dying body.

Jennica picked up the Book of Shadows. Maybe, somehow, Meredith had left her a clue. Her aunt had started this; wouldn’t she have known how to end it? That was her only hope.

She flipped through the pages, not knowing what to even look for. Much of the text vacillated from French to Latin, and she could only make out a few words here and there. But then she found a clump of pages stuck together, and she slipped a finger between them to split them. It was obvious now why they were stuck together. The pages were glued with blood.

Emmaline’s? Hadn’t this book come from Emmaline?

Jenn’s eyes widened. Her aunt’s sister-in-law had probably been wounded by the Pumpkin Man as she read the words on this page. Emmaline would have known about this monster, would have known how to make it go away. Maybe. And, Jenn could make out some of these words herself. They were in French, and the top of the page said simply, Banishment. Beneath, a paragraph described something about destroying the home of a soul to banish it, the heart and bones—

The door to the pantry slammed.

Jenn started again toward the front door and then realized her car keys were in the bedroom. It would do