The Pumpkin Man

CHAPTER

TWO

Simon Tobler wasn’t afraid of the dark; he was afraid of the people who walked in the dark, twisting its cloak around them for their own ends. That’s why he kept a baseball bat under his bed. Not that there was a lot of crime in River’s End, California, population 452. There had been that double murder in 2004 that some people thought was a final reprise from the Zodiac Killer, but in general the loudest sound out of River’s End was the barking of the sea lions from the estuary at the end of the Russian River.

Dark was a part of River’s End, though. The night came down early on the edge of the ocean; the sound of the tide breaking against the black rocks of the shore was one of the few sounds you could hear after six p.m. That and the occasional rev of an engine passing on Route 1, most likely hurrying back toward shelter in Bodega Bay or the highway to San Francisco. There were no streetlights here. And at two a.m., it felt as if there were no human beings for miles, though Simon knew that the Perrys were just a few hundred meters down the road. Probably snoring comfortably in their beds. They had a really pretty daughter, Jeda, about fifteen, whom Simon liked to watch when she came down the gravel trail in the late afternoon after school. She’d take the junk mail from the mailbox and close the wooden tractor gate behind her before running up the rutted path to the old farmhouse on the top of the ridge. Simon wondered if she had a boyfriend, and if she was really as innocent as those thin, fast-moving legs looked.

These things all crossed Simon’s brain as he, on the way to the bathroom, creaked across the center floorboard of the hallway in the middle of the night. Usually that’s where such idle thoughts were left. But tonight, as Simon released the night’s recycled Anchor Steam into the toilet, he thought more about the Perrys. He wondered about the manner in which Erin, the thin little blonde mother, preferred her thick-hewn husband Clint to bed her. They seemed a physical mismatch, her so slight to her husband’s bulk. He wondered whether Jeda had ever been kissed by a boy, and if she had, if she’d liked it. He wondered what it would be like to walk through their house in the dark and look in their bedrooms—

That’s when he heard it: a scraping sound. He shook himself off, pulled up his boxers and tiptoed into the hall. The noise came from the spare bedroom; steady, fast and repetitive. As if someone was dragging a piece of metal across the floor again and again and again.

Simon backed into the master bedroom and reached down under the bed without taking his eyes off the shadowy hall. His hand easily found the smooth wood of the bat, and he brought it up into a swinger’s rest on his shoulder. Then he moved again toward the bath and the spare bedroom.

Screeeeep, scraaaaaape. Screeeeep, scraaaaaape. The noise continued.

Simon’s chest pounded. Moving his feet was like pushing a concrete boulder up a very steep hill; they did not want to go. A voice in the back of his head screamed, Duh! When you hear the killer in the house, you don’t go chase them, you get out! But the logical half of Simon’s brain insisted there was no killer in the spare bedroom. More likely, a squirrel or raccoon had somehow gotten in from the attic.

The hardest thing that Simon Tobler ever did was to round that corner at two a.m. to the spare room on the second floor of his tiny house in River’s End, California. It was also nearly the last.

He flipped the light switch on the wall, and the overhead fixture threw a blaze of light across the blue comforter-covered spare bed. It was what lay on the bed that puzzled Simon, however. His eyebrow rose, and he thought hard about exactly where or how he had come to acquire a large orange pumpkin.

The gourd weighed down the center of the bed. Simon stepped forward, bat ready. From somewhere nearby, the scraping sound still came, like a knife moving back and forth across a file. Screeeeep, scraaaaaape.

Frowning at the pumpkin, Simon stepped slowly around the bed toward the small door that led into the eaves. His thumb was on the handle when it moved of its own accord. The small door pulled inward, and a bone white hand appeared and gripped the door frame. A figure stepped out of the shadows.

Simon sprang back. He caught a flash of white teeth before his eyes focused on the figure’s long curved blade. Then Simon made the biggest mistake of his life. It’s not as if he wasn’t prepared. He had kept his bat at the ready for over twenty years beneath his bed in preparation for any stranger who broke into his private haven. He held the bat now.

Instead of using it, he looked at the figure and said, “You? How did you get—”

He never completed the sentence. Instead, a flash of silver cut the air and met Simon’s throat, and he fell to the ground gargling blood. Two snow-white hands reached past him and grasped the pumpkin, pulling it closer, positioning it near the edge of the bed near Simon’s still-twitching body. Without saying a word, the figure held his knife aloft for just a moment, as if the motion held some power, some solemn ceremony. Then it began to carve.