The Pumpkin Man

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

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.