The Pumpkin Man

Meredith Perenais’s Journal

October 17, 1984

They turned on him today. George was carving a child’s portrait into one of the pumpkins down near Postens’ Farm Stand when the boy’s mother turned up. He said she started yelling at him to leave her son alone, and slapped his hand.

“Molester,” she screamed at him. “What are you doing to our children? What did you do to Billy Hawkins?”

She called George a monster, and the little boy started to cry. Then she ripped her son away and dragged him from the pumpkin stand. But that wasn’t the end of it. After she left, Nick Postens came down from the barn and asked George to leave, too. Just like that. “You’re not welcome here anymore.” As if somehow carving faces into pumpkins was the devil’s work and his eyes had just been opened to it.

They’re scared is what it is. Scared of what happened to the missing Hawkins boy. Scared of what I’m doing up here. Not that it stops them from coming up the hill to ask me in secret if I can make a charm for this or a drink to cure that. But deep down they’re suspicious of my magic as much as they want it. And now they’re making George pay, since they don’t dare touch me. I’m the witch, right? But what they don’t understand is that if they hurt him, they ARE hurting me.

All I’ve ever tried to do was to draw healing from the natural forces. I tried to help. But maybe it’s time that I stopped helping. Maybe it’s time to use the power that is there for the taking to hurt them back.