The Pumpkin Man

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

The knock came just after five p.m. Kirstin opened the door. Brian stood there, holding out a bottle of chardonnay.

“You want to try this again?”

Kirstin nodded. Her grin was sheepish but bright. “Yeah,” she said. “And this time, I think we’ll put a hold on the Ouija board.”

“Good idea,” Brian agreed. “Now, about that apology.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get down on my knees later. For now, come on in and say hi to Jenn. She’s cooking dinner. And she has other issues.”

“Other issues?” Nick echoed. He flanked Brian with another bottle of wine.

“Well, when she woke up this morning, there was a pile of bloody pumpkin by her bed. Aside from that, it’s been a pretty dull day,” Kirstin joked.

“Bloody pumpkin?” Nick repeated. “What the fuck?”

“We found out the door to the basement was unlocked,” Kirstin said. “We figure the psycho got in that way.”

“So,” Nick summarized, “there’s a psycho who has access to this house via the door from the basement that leads to Jenn’s room. That’s comforting.”

“Funny, that’s what she said.” Kirstin grinned. “I knew there was a reason she liked you. Anyway, we locked the door, but I don’t think it really matters. Jenn found pumpkin pieces in our apartment in Chicago, and they found them in her dad’s place, too, when they found his body a couple months ago. Oh, and apparently there’s an urban legend around these parts that Jenn’s uncle was a nutjob called the Pumpkin Man. He used to carve up people and pumpkins alike.”

Nick pushed past Kirstin into the kitchen.

Brian put his arm around her. “This doesn’t sound good,” he said. “Have you called the police?”

“What are they going to do?” she replied. “Jenn’s uncle has been dead for years, and whoever is leaving these pumpkin pieces . . . well, he’s apparently visited Jenn twice but hasn’t killed her. And he’s done it in two different places more than a thousand miles apart. To be honest, with that, the legend of Jenn’s uncle and the Ouija board message last night . . . well, I guess I have to agree with Jenn. I don’t think this is within the police’s domain.”

“Hmmm,” Brian, said, squeezing her shoulder. “Maybe I should take a look in the basement anyway.”

Kirstin nodded. “Jenn wouldn’t go down there, and I wasn’t going to go alone, but I’d sleep better.”

He eyed her. “You want to come? Aren’t you worried there’s a monster down there with a big knife just waiting for the sun to set?”

She shook her head. “No. I think it’s just another damp and musty basement. But I don’t particularly want to cross the bat.”

“The bat?”

“There’s a dead bat nailed to the wall above the stairs. That’s what stopped us from going down the first time.”

“Dead bat. Right,” Brian said. He didn’t have a follow-up.

“Hey,” Nick said as he walked into the kitchen. Jenn was cutting a long, thin loaf of Italian bread. Her face was slightly flushed from exertion, and a strand of dark hair stuck provocatively to her cheek. She wore a tight tank top below a loose white cotton tee, and Nick instantly wanted to put his arms around her to pull her close. She looked like an angel.

“Sorry about last night,” he said. “But honestly I didn’t do anything. And I know Brian didn’t either. He’s a crazy nut, I know, but he’s not mean like that. I don’t know what that shit was. Can I help you cook at least?”

Jenn smiled. “I know you didn’t do anything,” she said. “I’m sorry it all blew up.”

She leaned close and kissed him. His lips were warm, and she wanted more. When he put his arms around her, she felt as if she were melting. But if they were going to eat, this was not the time to melt. She looked up instead and said, “If you want to help, you can butter the garlic bread. I need to set up the beans, get the bread in the oven and we’re good to go.”

Kirstin and Brian walked in just as Nick was starting his assignment.

“Wow, she got that apron on you fast,” Brian commented.

Nick flipped him the bird. “Bite me.”

“Behave,” Jenn warned from the stove. “Or you get no dinner.”

“Well, I didn’t drive all this way to go home hungry,” Brian said. “So I guess I’ll behave.”

It wasn’t long before they were repeating the previous night’s ritual, eating and talking and, for a little while at least, forgetting what had happened just a few hours before. Nick was gloating and moaning about how amazing the Italian bread was.

“You’re a glutton for praise,” his friend muttered.

“But it really is good, isn’t it?” Nick crammed another piece into his mouth.

Brian just looked at Jenn. “This lasagna is amazing.”

After the meal was done and the table cleared, Brian suggested they face what they were all avoiding.

“Let’s check out the basement,” he said. “I think if you’re going to stay here another damn night, someone needs to see what’s down there.”

“Uh-uh,” Jenn said. “I’m not going.”

“You’ll feel better if you do, I think.”

Nick agreed. “I know I’d feel better if I saw it. Let’s all check it out. Safety in numbers.”

Reluctantly, Jenn nodded. But as the key turned in the lock a couple minutes later she said, “I don’t believe we’re doing this.”

“Well, last week I wouldn’t have believed we’d hold a séance,” Kirstin pointed out.

Jenn opened the door. Under her breath she mumbled, “Don’t go in the basement.”

“Okay, yeah, that’s creepy,” Nick said, staring at the bat. “What do you think it means?”

“Means?” Brian repeated. “I’d say it means they killed a bat and nailed it to a wall. Just a guess.”

Kirstin laughed, squeezing him tighter. “Very literal of you.”

“If her aunt was a witch,” Nick said, ignoring his friend, “presumably this has some meaning. It’s a totem or some channeled natural power or ward.”

Brian laughed. “You been studying witchcraft yourself?”

“No, I just watch a lot of TV.”

“C’mon.” Jenn smiled and stepped forward, braving the first step. But when she felt around for a light switch, there was none on the stairway wall. “No lights,” she announced. Who didn’t have lights in their basement?

“Maybe there’s one at the bottom,” Brian suggested. “Do you have a flashlight here?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” Jenn replied. “But we could light a couple candles.”

Kirstin volunteered to get them and ran back to the front room. She returned a minute later with four tapered candles from the fireplace mantel and a book of matches. Jenn held hers out to be lit, then started down the stairs.

The four candles barely cut the darkness as they moved into the bowels of the house, the flickering flames reflecting off the narrow stairway walls just enough so that they could see the next step down. And then, without warning, there were no more steps. They were in the basement.

Nick held up his candle, and the beams of the unfinished ceiling were revealed. He pointed at a string hanging down just in front of them.

“There,” he said. “Classic basement lighting. The bare-bulb model.”

Brian pulled the string, and the basement grew brighter. “I can’t believe they didn’t put in a switch,” he complained.

“Actually . . .” Nick walked over to the slat of wood that served as a banister and pointed out the second string that hung from the light and then followed the wood most of the way up. It was tucked through small circular guides. “They did. We just didn’t see it.”

“Well, now we know for next time,” Kirstin said.

“Next time?” Jenn answered. “I’m not coming down here again.”

“What, you don’t want to make use of this amazing fruit cellar?” Nick had walked over to some shelves where a mess of mason jars were stacked, picked up one filled with red sauce and another with something green and solid. “Check it out,” he said with a laugh. “You’ve got homemade canned tomato sauce and . . . pickles or something. I think your dinner menu is really going to expand.”

“Yeah, how long have these been down here?” Jenn made a face. “They could be fifty years old.”

Kirstin spoke up. “I thought canned stuff lasts for, like, ever?”

Jenn shook her head. “They usually date them. They’re good for a couple years, I think, but not forever.”

Nick looked at the tomato sauce lid and his face screwed up. “Oh,” he said. He held the jar up to the light briefly before quickly setting it back. He did the same to the pickle jar, then reached out to look at another jar from a different shelf. The contents of this one were darker, brownish. Maybe mushrooms, Jenn thought, as she saw him look inside.

“Fuck,” Nick said finally.

“What’s the matter?” Jenn asked.

“I don’t think you’re going to be eating this shit.”

“What is it?” Kirstin asked.

He held out the jar and slowly rotated it.

Brian whistled. “Is that an . . . ?”

“Eyeball,” Nick said. “It’s a jar of eyeballs.”

One floated to touch the glass just right, and Kirstin shrieked as it seemed to look at her. “Ewwwwwww!”

Nick put the jar back.

“That wasn’t tomato sauce either, was it?” Jenn asked quietly.

Nick shook his head. “The label says blood.”

“And the pickles?”

Nick made a face. “Frogs.”

Brian laughed. “Blood, eyeballs, frogs? Proper little witches’ cupboard down here.”

Jenn nodded. “All ingredients for spells, I suppose.”

Kirstin’s voice held a tremor. “Does it say . . . what kind of eyes those are?”

Nick shook his head and picked up another jar. “Anyone for ‘Bone Powder, Ground at the Hour of the Solstice’?”

“Pass,” Brian answered.

Kirstin stepped forward and held up her candle to illuminate the jars better. Some held clear liquid, others the leaves of a single plant suspended in yellow liquid. Still others were dense with what she had to assume was blood. The rest held more macabre contents.

“Is that . . . ?” She pointed.

Brian stepped up next to her and lifted the jar. “Human finger, 1993,” he said. “Nice, that they dated it. I wonder what the expiration period is.”

“Gross!” Kirstin said. She backed away from the shelves.

“I have a better one,” Nick said, and he held up a different jar.

There was a small form inside. It was barely an inch long, and it floated in a clear broth. Jenn could see the sprouts of tiny arms and legs. A head was clearly visible, and she supposed the dark spots were eyes. A chill ran down her back as she considered how her aunt might have come into the possession of a tiny fetus.

“Put it back,” she said quietly and began to walk farther into the basement, away from the jars. “Let’s keep going.”

Kirstin joined her, and soon the guys did as well.

The rest of the basement seemed typical: boxes of forgotten storage were stacked against cement walls, an old yellow refrigerator stood in one corner, its door open to ensure it wouldn’t grow mold. A modern washer and dryer took up the wall next to the furnace, which looked to be of the same vintage as the kitchen appliances upstairs. Original.

Brian bent down to look at the rusted green main box of the furnace and asked, “Do you have to shovel coal into this or what?”

“We haven’t had it on yet,” Jenn said. “Maybe it doesn’t even work.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” he agreed.

They walked around the room, pulling the strings on two more bare-bulb lights and finding old furniture, a coat rack and more bric-a-brac before Kirstin discovered a hallway.

“Where do you think this goes?” she called, and the others stepped from various points in the basement to see what she was talking about. At the far end of the room, hidden by a clothesline still festooned with old laundry, Kirstin fronted a dark opening. It was lost to the shadows unless you stood right before it. Which, presently, the foursome did.

“Let’s find out,” Brian volunteered.

The cement walls changed to rough-hewn stone as they all stepped through the narrow arch. The cement of the floor also changed. Jenn relit Brian’s candle, as he had blown it out when they’d first found the lights. The passageway looked to have no electric illumination.

They moved several yards with the light of the basement growing fainter behind them. The tunnel got increasingly tight, and Jenn found her hips bumping Nick’s as they walked. He had to duck his head several times as the low carved ceiling grew lower.

“Where do you think this leads?” Kirstin asked.

Jenn considered where they were when they’d entered the tunnel and its spatial relation to her bedroom. “I think we’re walking underneath the backyard,” she said finally.

“Is there a hidden village back there?” Brian asked.

Jenn laughed. “I don’t know. If we knew about it, it wouldn’t be hidden, would it?”

Kirstin shrugged. “We really haven’t walked back there much. Who knows what’s behind this damn house.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing,” Nick said, huffing. “It’s uphill. Because we are definitely climbing.”

The light from the basement was long gone by the time the claustrophobic passage ended.

“We’re here,” Nick announced. A heavy wooden door blocked their passage. “Wherever here may be.” He tried the old tarnished knob, but it didn’t budge. “Well, that sucks.”

“Wait,” Jenn said, pulling from her jeans pocket the key that had opened the door above. She handed it to him. “Try this.”

Nick inserted the key into the dark lock and twisted. It didn’t budge. But it had inserted cleanly into the lock.

He tried again, turning the opposite way. Still the key didn’t move. Then he pulled it out just a hair and tried again. This time, the key turned and the lock clicked.

“Nice work,” Brian said.

“I’ve got lots of experience with old houses.”

Almost as one they stepped into an open room beyond the door, then stopped to hold up candles to illuminate their surroundings. Their lights revealed a room with five pillars spaced at equal intervals in a circle.

“What the fuck?” Kirstin said.

“Yeah,” Brian echoed.

The rough-hewn floor of the passageway had been replaced by a spiral pattern of white mosaic. The color of the tile changed from bone white to cream to sand before gradually cycling back to blazing white. It all converged and curved around a large flat stone in the center of the room that looked like amber, golden brown and reflective of depth.

But, what dominated the group’s attention was not the floor or smooth limestone walls. A large white stone coffin rested on a stone pedestal just off the center. Behind the coffin, in the far wall, a half dozen golden handles protruded. Upon looking closer, lines of separation became evident. These lines etched out the hidden cracks of small doorways that would lead, no doubt, to more coffins.

“My bedroom leads to a stairway that leads to a basement that leads to a coffin. We’re in a crypt,” Jenn said, stating the obvious.

“Smells like it,” Kirstin said, pulling the sleeve of her shirt over her nose.

“And like pumpkins,” Nick added, pointing at the ground.

A half dozen pumpkins sat in a line at the base of the coffin. The eyes and mouths were carved to reflect macabre screams of agony.

“That’s too fucked-up,” Kirstin said. “I mean, Jenn finds pumpkin pieces back in Chicago and also here, right by her bed, and here is—”

“I’d really like to get out of here,” Jenn whispered. Her chest suddenly felt tight, and she began to shake. She could feel tears forming at the sides of her eyes and she had an uncontrollable urge to lie down. “Now,” she said.

“This way,” Nick suggested, and pointed at a second doorway just on the other side of the coffin. “That’s gotta be the way out. Nobody would go into a house and through a basement to reach a grave.”

He put his arm around Jenn to steady and comfort her, leading her past the pumpkins to the door. Once it was open, the light of their candles showed a series of steps that spiraled up and away from the tiny mausoleum.

“Let’s go,” he urged.

He held her arm as they ascended the narrow stone steps. Soon they could see light from above, and then they were standing in another tiny room. A steel door stood just in front of them, with grates in a window that let in the day’s fading light. Jenn turned and looked at the door they’d just walked through. In an archway above, one word was carved into the stone: PERENAIS.

Kirstin followed her friend’s gaze. “Jenn, that was your aunt’s married name, wasn’t it?”

Jenn nodded, unable to take her eyes off the etching of a name she’d seen on so many papers from her father’s lawyers. Papers related to the will and deeds of her aunt’s property. “Yeah,” she said.

She turned away and reached out for the door that she hoped would let them out of the crypt and back into the realm of the living. This time, the handle turned easily. She stepped out onto a walkway of jagged limestone interrupted by occasional sprouts of dry brown grass.

Kirstin, Nick and Brian exited behind her, and the door slammed shut. They all stood outside what looked like a tiny stone shed. On the outer door, the inscription also read PERENAIS. Beneath was drawn something that had, of late, grown too familiar. To the side, in the weeds, glowed the rotting physical remains of the same oval shape: a pumpkin.

Jennica looked away from the door. Tall stands of brown grass surrounded the mausoleum they’d just exited, and around that were several other gravestones. The markers revealed death dates ranging from the 1920s to the 1970s. Nearly all of the surnames remained the same.

“It’s a family cemetery,” Jenn whispered.

Kirstin grimaced. “Well, I guess we know where that drawer of skulls in the kitchen came from.”

“Oh my god,” Jenn said. “I hope not! My aunt may have been a lot of things, most of them weird, but . . . a grave robber?”

“Isn’t that better than the other way you’d get skulls?” Nick asked.

Jenn looked at him. “What would that be?”

“Hmmm, well, for starters by boiling the heads of people you’d decapitated.”

She shook her head in disgust. “Aunt Meredith wasn’t like that. I mean, I didn’t know her that well, but . . .”

“Um, where are we?” Kirstin interrupted.

The group looked up from the mausoleum entrance to absorb the surrounding landscape. The hill they stood atop sloped gently down on either side to a long brown valley. They could see the grass end far below at a narrow road and the row of homes that was the upper periphery of River’s End. Behind them the hill continued steadily upward, disappearing in a maze of brush and scrub trees. On the other side of the mausoleum, at the end of a faint winding path, glimmered the roof of Jenn’s aunt’s house. The grass had grown up to obscure some of the path, but there was no question that a path had been worn from Meredith Perenais’s home to here.

The sun darkened to a deep red as it sank on the horizon, the top barely visible above the trees on the other side of the Russian River.

“We should go back to the house,” Jenn said. “Before it gets dark.”

“Jenn,” Nick said.

She could tell he didn’t want to speak. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to. She raised an eyebrow but remained silent.

“That pumpkin . . .” He pointed at the one sitting next to the crypt. “It’s not that old. It’s rotting, but . . . if it had been here more than three or four weeks, we wouldn’t have even seen it.”

“Yeah, so?” Jenn asked.

“I really think maybe we ought to call the police.”

She shook her head. “And what am I going to tell them? That I found pumpkin pieces in the house of the guy that everyone in town assumes was the Pumpkin Man, a hideous killer? C’mon. Like they’re going to take that seriously. Someone has been here, yes. If we’re lucky, then yeah, somehow, someone got wind that we were here, in ‘that crazy woman’s old house,’ and decided to play a little joke. They got into the crypt from out here, got into my bedroom because we left the door unlocked, and then they left us a little present. I hope it’s not the work of my dead aunt or her dead husband. That’s ludicrous, right? Even with that Ouija board. So I’m going to go with the idea that we’ve got some kids in the area who like the legend of the Pumpkin Man.”

She began to walk around the crypt. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t really want to be here in the graveyard after the sun goes down. And I don’t really feel like going back through the basement.”

She walked around the mausoleum and down the faintly worn path she imagined her aunt once walked nearly every day. In a moment, the other three followed.

Full night had come down outside, and Brian built a fire again, though this time he was careful not to disturb the stone that covered the Ouija.

“Who wants dessert?” Kirstin asked. “I’ve got vanilla ice cream and pie,” she offered, standing up and flexing her hips.

“Hey, that’s my dessert,” Brian complained, standing up to shield her with his body. “What are you offering them?”

“You get cherry pie, silly.” Kirstin laughed, licking the edge of his lips with her tongue. “This is apple.”

Jenn rolled her eyes and rose to help Kirstin. Minutes later they all were enjoying pie, coffee and ice cream in front of the fire. It was a very different vibe than it had been twenty-four hours before. But still Jenn couldn’t shake the images of that coffin and those pumpkins. The fire hadn’t yet burned out when she leaned on Nick’s shoulder and whispered, “I need to go to bed.”

“Do you want company?” he asked. She nodded, and a moment later the two of them excused themselves. Kirstin and Brian hardly noticed; they were busy kissing.

When they entered her room, Jenn pushed the bedroom door shut behind them. Nick was waiting, and when she turned, he took her into his arms.

“I don’t want to push you into anything,” he whispered.

His breath was warm in her ear, and Jenn felt better than she had most of the day. “Just be with me,” she answered.

His arms drew her tight. His mouth moved to meet hers and their tongues touched, first in furtive exploration and then with more energy. He began to move her step by step backward toward the bed, but just before they both fell onto the mattress, she pushed him back a step, and took a deep breath.

“Wait,” she said, and fished into her jeans pocket. At last she came out with a key and walked to the door to the basement. “I’d really like to be sure this is locked tonight,” she explained. Then she dropped the key on the dresser and with both hands stripped off her T-shirt.

She let the garment fall to the floor and turned to hug him. His hands slipped up the smooth skin of her back, and he kissed her again. She felt strangely calm as his hands fumbled with the clasp of her bra. Usually when she was with a guy she grew icy cold with fear, worried that she wouldn’t be what he wanted, worried that he would be disappointed when he saw her for what she really was—when he realized her breasts weren’t as full as he liked, when he realized that her hips were too wide. With Nick, she didn’t feel that. She felt easy in a way she’d never been before.

His knuckles slid inside the waistband of her jeans and then back out to pull the lip of her belt through its metal clasp. Jenn only smiled and whispered, “No locks here.”

He finished unbuttoning her jeans and pushed them down to the floor. Then he slipped his palms into the back of her panties, cupped her body tight against his.

“No,” he breathed between kisses. “The door is definitely open.”