A quick, hot shiver of fear shot up his back.
But then: in front of him, like the sound of the pied piper’s flute, there came the creaking sound of the Pumpkin Boy moving. The pumpkin head flashed through the trees, and Jody forgot his fear. His wonder renewed, he stood and ran after it.
~ * ~
The moon was partially hidden by a thick tangle of trees on the far bank of Martin’s Creek, which made shafts of gray-white light on the ground. Jody splashed into the water before he knew it was in front of him. His hurt foot slid down nearly to his shin into icy tumbling water and lodged between two rocks.
Jody cried out in pain. For a moment he couldn’t move, and panicked—but then, suddenly, one of the stones upended in the water and rolled over, and he was free.
Now, both sneakers were in the water, and the slight current tugged at his legs.
He tried to turn around, but the water hurried him out further.
He sank another half foot.
The current was trying to make him sit down, which would bring his head under water.
He gave a weak cry as he lost his struggle—and then there was water in his mouth and he could see nothing but the blur of moving wetness.
Almost immediately, his body pressed up against something long, dark and solid, and his forward progress stopped.
It was a half-submerged log.
Jody clung to it, and slowly pulled himself up.
To his surprise, the creek was only two feet or so deep here; the whooshing sound of water angrily churning around the log filled his ears.
He held onto the dry part of the log, and coughed water out.
He wiped his eyes with one hand, and had another surprise: not only was the water shallow, it was not half as wide as it had been just a few yards up-creek.
Holding the log, he pushed his way through the shallow water to the far bank.
He sat down, and his eyes filled with sudden tears.
He stared out at totally unfamiliar territory: the creek, he now saw, twisted and turned, and he could not make out the spot where he had descended the slope, which was nearly a hundred yards away, and impossibly wide. At the top of the ridge, reflected in moonlight, were the green-vined tops of a few elongated pumpkins.
He turned, and saw that the line of woods was close, and darker than it had looked from the other side of the creek.
The trees were nearly nude, a carpet of yellow and red fallen leaves at their bases looking light and dark gray in the moonlight.
A few late leaves pirouetted down as he watched.
Deep in the woods, he heard the Pumpkin Boy move.
Jody looked once again behind him, and then back at the woods.
He got painfully up and hobbled toward the trees.
~ * ~
It instantly became darker when he entered the woods, a grayer, more sporadic light.
Almost immediately, Jody lost his bearings.
There were many strange noises, which confused him. He thought he heard the Pumpkin Boy nearby, but the sound proved to be a partially broken oak branch, creaking on its artificial hinge. There were rustlings and stirrings. Something on four legs scuttled past him in the near distance, and stopped to stare at him—it looked like a red fox, bleached gray by the night.
Jody tried to retrace his steps, but only found himself deeper within the trees, which now all looked the same.
Jody’s ankle hurt, and he was beginning to shiver.
He stopped, even hushing his own frightened breathing, and listened for the Pumpkin Boy.
The sound of the Pumpkin Boy’s movement was completely gone.
A soft wind had arisen, and now leaves lifted from the forest floor, as if jerked alive by puppet strings.
It had turned colder—above, the moon was abruptly shielded by a gust of clouds.
The woods became very dark.
Jody sobbed again, stumbling forward, and stopped in a small clearing surrounded by tall oaks. Again he heard scurrying in front of him and felt something watching him.
The moon blinked out of the clouds, and Jody saw what was, indeed, a red fox, regarding him with wary interest.
The fox became suddenly alert. As the moon’s nightlight was stolen again by clouds, the animal bolted away, seeming to jump into the gray and then darkness.
Jody stood rooted to his spot, trying not to cry.
Something was out there.
Something large and dark.
The bed of leaves shifted with heavy, creaking steps.
Something ice cold and long and thin brushed along his face in the darkness.
“
The cold air was suddenly steamed with warmth.
Cold braces closed around Jody’s middle from behind.
He shrieked, and wrenched his body around.
He was blinded by something larger and brighter than the moon—a face staring down at him made out of a jack o’lantern, warm wet fog pushing from its triangular eyes and nose and impossibly wide, smiling mouth. A slight, mechanical
The slender mechanical steel arms tightened around Jody.
He shrieked again, a mournful sound swallowed by the trees and close night around him.
As he was carried away he saw, as the moon broke forth from the clouds again, on the forest floor, caught in gray light, the smashed leavings of a dropped pumpkin.
2
Len Schneider was beginning to work up a deep and real hatred for holidays in general, and this one especially. Halloween, he knew, meant nothing but trouble. He’d moved to Orangefield for lots of reasons—among them the fact that it had a real town with a genuine small-town feel—it was the only place he’d lived in the last twenty years that didn’t have a Walmart and wasn’t likely to get one. The people seemed friendly enough, but he’d found, as a police detective, that people were pretty much the same everywhere, from the inner city to Hometown, U.S.A. “People Are Funny,” Art Linkletter used to say, and one thing Len Schneider had learned after eighteen years in law enforcement was that they were anything but.
And now this
“When was the last time you had a missing kid case?” he’d asked Bill Grant, the other detective on Orangefield’s police force. Grant had been at it a long time, too, but all of it in this town. In the year and a half Schneider had been here, he’d found Grant polite but almost aloof. No, aloof wasn’t the right word—it was almost like he wasn’t completely there. The two packs of cigarettes a day he smoked didn’t seem to help, and the emphysemic cough that went along with them, along with the booze he drank, had turned him almost sallow.
Schneider thought he was haunted himself, by what had happened back in Milwaukee—but this guy looked like he was haunted by