The Pumpkin Man (12 page)

“Let's just eat out here,” Kirstin suggested, and in minutes they were all licking slippery fingers.

Jenn picked up a morsel and bit through the deep-fried shell into the diced crabmeat within. She could barely finish chewing before she had to exclaim, “Wow. Now
that
is a crab cake!”

“See, I said you would like it here,” Kirstin said.

“I think I know something else you might like,” Nick offered, pointing at a large corrugated shed just beyond the seaside restaurants. A red banner hung from the metal face that read
MUSEE MECHANIQUE
.

“What is it?” Jennica asked.

Nick put his arm around her and began walking. “It's a
museum of old arcade machines. You know, kind of like Coney Island stuff. And it's free admission. Definitely worth a look since we're here.”

Inside was like stepping back a century. The room was filled with old wooden-framed machines to “Stretch a Penny” and “Tell your Fortune.” Many were simply machines that had monkeys and dolls moving through various settings, like circus or farm. You could put a quarter or two in to bring any of them to animated life.

Nick shot at moving tin squirrel squares with a BB gun. Clearly he'd spent some time in an arcade; he nailed virtually every target. Meanwhile Brian toyed with a machine that displayed a short animated dance sequence using a revolving wheel of pictures of a woman reflected in a mirror. Kirstin moved ahead and found a quarter machine that promised to “Show the Forbidden. Adults Only.”

She laughed and called, “C'mon, Brian, let's see what's so naughty.”

He produced a quarter, and they took turns at the viewfinder. A series of 3-D sepia photos of 1920s-era women showed bounteous breasts through see-through silks.

Jenn picked a tall, thin machine called The Executioner and put in a quarter. The lights went on in a model building, and then the front door opened to reveal a man doll hung from the neck by a rope. The trapdoor opened below him, and the tiny body fell through and disappeared.

“Eww,” she said just as the door closed again.

Someone started up an old player piano, and the hall was filled for a minute with classic ragtime. Jenn kept expecting to look up and find everything had turned to sepia tones, because it was just like they'd fallen into an old-time movie.

“Hey, Jenn—let's do your fortune!” Kirstin called. She stood before the kind of boardwalk device that Tom Hanks had run afoul of in the movie
Big
. The old wooden machine that had a
mannequin figure inside.
LET GRANDMA TELL YOUR FORTUNE
the sign above it said.

“These things are crap,” Nick laughed.

Jenn stared at the ivory jowls of the wooden figure behind the glass. “I think they're kind of creepy.”

“My treat,” Kirstin said, holding up a quarter. “Put your hands on the wood, like it says, so she can
feel
you.”

Jenn put her hands on the worn spots in the wood and stared up at the red-painted lips of the fortune-teller. The lights flashed behind the glass, and whirring machinery rattled the wood. Then, from the right-hand side of the machine, a slip of paper dropped into a wooden holder. She reached down and unfurled it.

“‘There is happiness afoot but darkness on the horizon. Beware the night and embrace the light.' Well, that's uplifting,” she said, showing the other three what she'd read.

They peered over her shoulder, and Nick announced, “I believe there's a misprint. ‘Light' should be ‘Nick.'”

Jenn smiled and reached out to hug him. “Okay, so I guess if you're wrong and it really meant ‘light,' I'm screwed?”

Nick winked. “Either way,” he said.

The foursome left the museum and walked back along the wharf to stare at the myriad white sails dotting the waves. The island of Alcatraz broke the horizon. Nick ultimately was the one to say, “I hate to end things, but do you all want to get on the road and out of the city before it starts getting too dark?”

Jenn's face dropped but she nodded. “Probably a good idea. We've had a great day, though.” It had ended too soon.

Kirstin shrugged and kissed Brian without warning. “I had a blast,” she announced. Her voice was even higher than usual.

“We'd love to get together with you girls again,” Nick offered.

“Hell, we'd even drive up if you wanted,” Brian said.

The girls were excited to hear that. By the time they'd walked back to their parked cars, they had made a date to cook dinner for the boys the next weekend up at the house in River's End. They traded cell phone numbers; then both couples were kissing, oblivious of the other.

“Can't wait to see you again,” Jenn whispered when Nick's lips briefly left hers.

He grinned and said, “Ditto,” before their mouths met again.

It took a while before they were back on the road.

February 12, 1985

I know that he still loves me; I can see it behind the stillness in his eyes. But something has changed in him. He's locked inside himself. With every carving, he goes further away from me. And yet, he can't stop. It's his passion. His secret heart.

The knives have stolen his soul. I gave him the gift that made him the Pumpkin Man, but in releasing those shapes, he loses himself. Sometimes the power goes in directions you can never imagine or control. My gift may not have been a gift at all, but a curse.

I can't reach him anymore. Maybe we're both lost.

The murder made the front page of the
River Times
. Hell, it was the only real news River's End had. The headline read
THE PUMPKIN MAN KILLER RETURNS
. Beneath that was the description of Simon Tobler's beheading and the pumpkin shards left behind. The story filled three columns. A subheading read,
Another in a series of murders that have haunted River's End this decade and last.

Travis Lupe read the headlines and closed his eyes, imagining the scene. He had seen it before. He didn't want to live it again. The Pumpkin Man had haunted his youth.

He'd been just a kid when the Pumpkin Man first came to town. He remembered riding his bike with his friends over to the Muldaurs' pumpkin farm, seeing that patch of uncarved gourds and the special shelf of precarved pumpkins. Each day during the month leading up to Halloween there would be a new carved gourd on the special jack-o'-lantern display shelf. Every day, Travis and his friends returned to see the new face that appeared.

The pumpkins had at first looked just like creepy carvings and then grown into more animated creatures. The faces were wild and manic, quiet and sinister. Some looked like feral animals, others like people screaming. All the kids wanted one for their front porch.

The Pumpkin Man always seemed to be on the lot, though much of the time he was hidden somewhere behind the display cases or table with the cash register. Whenever they got close, though, the Pumpkin Man would know. He would appear from
around the wooden display case and walk slowly between the boys and the pumpkins, and as he did, he would trail one long finger across the green stubs at the top of each gourd. That finger seemed white as a bone, its nail dark as mud.

“See something you like?” he'd ask. “Ten dollars for any of my babies.”

Travis could still remember his grin, teeth as brown as candied molasses. Nonetheless, the Pumpkin Man and his carvings became a tradition in River's End. Every year in the fall he'd return to frighten and tantalize the town with his disturbing demeanor and garish gourds. Until the year Steve Traskle disappeared. Travis had seen the face of his friend peering back at him from a large pumpkin carved by the Pumpkin Man that year, and the search for the boy's body had eventually produced just that: his body. Not his head.

It took a long time for River's End to recover from that murder, and from the discovery of others that had come before. At first they'd been called runaways or simple disappearances, but the Pumpkin Man soon took the blame, though no one ever proved anything. Certainly when the Pumpkin Man was found strung up one morning from a tree at the top of the hill overlooking the estuary, nobody in town mourned or looked for his killer. It was a case of justice served, most thought.

His wife didn't think so. She'd lived atop one of the hills overlooking the town and gazed down upon the roofs of her husband's killers every night for months and eventually years, but at last her searches in the daylight exposed the key she needed to exact her punishment upon River's End. She had gone to great lengths to avenge the vigilante execution of the Pumpkin Man. Great, dark, evil lengths.

Oh, yes. Travis knew better than most.

“Do you think they'll find the house?” Jennica asked, washing a potato in the sink and then peeling it.

Kirstin looked up from the copy of
Cosmo
she'd picked up in the city a few days before. “Well, we found it. In the dark. And we're not even from the area,” she pointed out.

“I guess,” Jenn agreed, tossing the spud in a pot and then picking up another. “Do you think they'll come?”

Her friend snorted and stood. “You worry too much.” She laughed. “They liked us. They saw us naked, how could they not? They'll be here. Just don't fuck up the food, okay?”

Jenn rolled her eyes. “Could you find me something bigger?” She paused from peeling her current potato to point at the small pot already full past its brim. “This one's just not going to work.”

“So make fewer potatoes,” Kirstin complained.

“Lazy-ass.”

“I'm looking, I'm looking.”

Kirstin opened the cabinet next to the stove and clanged a few pots together, but she didn't pull anything out that was any bigger than the one Jenn already had. “Nothing here,” she announced, then pulled another cabinet open on the other side of the stove. Shrugging, she checked a deep-looking drawer at the end of the cabinetry, near the kitchen door that led to the backyard. It didn't budge. Trying again, she noticed the black keyhole on the drawer's upper lip.

“This one's locked,” she said.

“Try one of the keys in that other drawer,” Jenn said, peeling another potato.

Kirstin rattled around until she came up with the key that had opened the door to the basement in Jenn's bedroom. She tried it on the drawer, and the key turned. She smiled in silent victory, set the key on the counter and opened the drawer. And screamed.

Jennica dropped the potato in the sink and rushed to her friend's side. Kirstin's eyes bugged out as she stared at the deep wooden drawer's contents. Jenn's own eyes bulged as she looked over Kirstin's shoulder.

“Whoa,” she whispered.

“Those are right here next to the stove,” Kirstin said. “Where we
cook
.”

“I'm pretty sure they're dead,” Jennica answered. But that didn't make either of them feel much better.

The empty black sockets of a dozen human skulls stared up at them from the bottom of the drawer. They were piled one on top of another, jawbones open and full of yellowed teeth. They were stripped of flesh but clearly real, dusky white with mottled yellow and gray.

“If you get them out of here, I'll find you a bigger pot,” Kirstin promised.

“I could probably cook a few less potatoes,” Jenn answered.

Kirstin pushed the drawer shut, and they both stepped away. Her brow slanted as she looked at Jenn and asked, “Who keeps skulls in their kitchen?”

“I guess . . . my aunt?” Jenn shrugged. She tried to lighten the mood by adding, “Maybe they make good seasoning for stew.”

Kirstin punched her in the shoulder. “Gross!”

“So I shouldn't try it out tonight?”

“No!” Kirstin yelled. “I don't even want to eat anything that's been cooked in here.”

“Gimme a break.” Jenn laughed and reached to pull the entire drawer out. It squealed open, and loose bits of teeth or vertebrae rattled in the bottom. The skulls leered up at her, but she gave the drawer a good hard tug and the whole thing came free to rest in her hands. She stumbled at the sudden weight.

“Get the door,” she said, and Kirstin quickly cleared the way to the backyard.

Jennica walked the drawer outside and down the four steps of the back porch to the yard, where she set it down in a flower bed. Then she went back inside.

“Um, what about the drawer?” Kirstin asked. “And should we call the police or something?”

Something inside of Jenn's chest clenched, and an invisible voice in her head hissed, “No.”

She forced a laugh. “No, we're not calling the police. I don't think my aunt was murdering people and then boiling their heads. You can get real skulls through science catalogs. Maybe she ordered some that way. Don't you remember? Matt Johnson in the science lab had a couple of them.”