Acknowledgments
There’s something about those old urban legends that you hear in grammar school that stick with you for life—like the slumber party dare of repeating “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a dark mirror to tempt the evil Mary Worth to appear and scratch out your eyes.
The novel owes its setting to my continuing love affair with the Northern California coast. I was lucky enough to spend quite a few days there right at the start of writing it, thanks to a couple business trips I took to San Francisco. Some of the landscape behind
As always, music was my constant writing companion, and during this novel I leaned heavily on La Floa Maldita.
There are a thousand people I’d love to acknowledge for their support, and I can’t possibly list them all here, but I have to thank my wife, Geri, and my son, Shaun, for letting me disappear into dark places for hours on end, and my editors Shane Ryan Staley, Don D’Auria, Chris Keeslar, Dave Barnett, Roy Robbins and Mateusz Bandurski, who have all supported and issued editions of my novels.
Thanks also to my first readers: Paul Legerski, Martel Sardina, Erik Smith and Rhonda Wilson, for fixing so many of my fact and grammar gaffes in this manuscript. And a special thanks to some great people who have really gone beyond the call to support my work over the past couple years: Meli Denton, Colum McKnight, Jason R. Davis, P. S. Gifford, Lon Czarnecki, Dave Benton, W. D. Gagliani, Peter D. Schwotzer, Sarah Ham, Jamey Webb, Raymond Brown, Stephen McDornell, John Funderburg, Jonathan Maberry, Bryan Smith, Kresby, Jay Ford, Sheila Halterman, Deb Kuhn, Chris and Angie Fulbright, Damian Maffei, Mike Rankin, Lincoln Crisler, Peg Phillips and Sheila Mallec. You guys make all those long hours of trying to squeeze blood from a stone worth it.
THE PUMPKIN MAN
PROLOGUE
Meredith took the man’s hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. She’d worked a long time to bring him here. His palms were clammy; she could smell his fear. He had every reason to be afraid. But she needed him for this; she couldn’t afford for him to back out now. And he owed her too much to leave. Not when she was this close. Not on this night. She would
Candles flickered and smoked all around them; the room smelled of beeswax and sage. Before he arrived she had lit six candles and placed them in a line to the north, and then six more to the south, and then finally six more to the east: a perfect number in an imperfect shape. They formed a U around the small table in her living room. The opening pointed toward the door. An entry point. She did not intend for there to be an exit.
“Put your fingers on the wood,” she urged her unwilling accomplice. His eyes looked glossy and wet in the wavering orange light. He might have been about to cry, or it could have just been the thickness of his glasses that magnified the light. “Gently,” she said. “Just the tips. Next to mine.”
Together they touched the edges of the planchette, and Meredith looked at George’s clothes laid out next to the table inside the U. They were the last things her husband had worn, and the rents in the shirt were still stained with his blood. She looked at his carving knives, rusting now with disuse. She remembered the day she had given them to him, the joy that had sparked in his eyes, and then the guilt. How could they afford them? he’d wondered. Meredith smiled at the distant memory. She’d saved for months and secretly driven all the way to San Francisco to buy them. Then she had anointed them with dark words and the contents of one of the secret family jars tucked away in the basement. For a long time they had brought him happiness, before the magic turned dark.
“Don’t speak,” she cautioned. “Don’t take your fingers away from the wood. Just let it work through you.”
She closed her eyes to the mementos of George and remembered him as he’d been in life: broad and quiet, eyes shadowed, but always tender to her. Others had seen differently. They had persecuted him and called him evil.
Eyes shut and locked on the memory of her husband holding her close in the kitchen of their house, her fingers touching the planchette, Meredith called out to the room:
Outside, the wind howled, crashing the shutters hard against the windows of the small cottage. A storm was due by midnight. Appropriate, that on the night Meredith needed to reach beyond death, the skies boiled dark and angry. Inside, the candles flickered as the draughts blown in from the ocean slipped through cracks in the windows and doors.
“Are you with us?” Meredith asked. There was no answer but the wind.
“Spirits close and spirits far,” she called out again to the small room. Her voice echoed strangely.
The wood seemed to tremble beneath her fingers, and Meredith’s lips trembled in a faint smile.
“Are you with us?” she asked a second time.
The wooden ring moved beneath her fingers, and Meredith opened her eyes to see it stop at the upper left corner of the wooden board. It rested atop the word YES.
“I’ve found the way to bring you back,” she said.
The wood darted to the opposite side of the board. She almost lost her connection to it. Looking at her partner, she saw sweat bead on his forehead. His eyes bulged as they followed the seemingly independent movement of the planchette. But he did not take his fingers from their place next to hers.
