The Pumpkin Man

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

The pantry opened on an ancient world.

Jenn and Nick stepped into a narrow corridor that progressed about ten feet and then became a long L-shaped room. There were no windows. The tiny flame of Nick’s candle revealed hints of what lay within, showed a number of half-burned candles set on small tables and shelves. Nick bent his taper to touch those, one by one working his way around until the space was filled by a warm orange glow. Then they both stood and stared at the secret room, hidden from the rest of the house, its walls and ceiling painted black as if to cloak the very boundaries of the room in darkness.

A garland of bones was strung wall to wall. Jenn assumed they were human. Phalanges, tibiae, femurs and ribs hung like graveyard wind chimes from the ceiling on tiny bits of string or wire, stood out in sharp relief from the midnight pitch of the walls. Framed black-and-white portraits—photos and paintings—were spaced out on the walls below the bones, and some of the candles Nick had lit were clearly positioned to throw light on them. They were almost like . . . mini shrines.

On a thin wooden table near the exit was an old radio setup that looked to hail from the 1930s or ’40s. It was carved of dark wood, with thick wooden knobs and a gold tuning face where the AM and shortwave band numbers were inscribed. The needle inside pointed at a row of numbers set off in an upside-down U.

At the far end of the room was what appeared to be an altar, a church kneeler fronting a wall-mounted golden box. The thing that separated this altar from one you might see in a Catholic church was that, here, instead of a cross with a tortured visage of Jesus, a bare human skull glared out at the room from atop the lattice of a bone white skeleton. Unlike the bits of bone that ringed the room in grotesque garlands, this skull was just the start of a complete skeleton.

“What is this place?” Jenn whispered. “Where is this place?”

“Um, behind the pantry in your house!” Nick laughed uneasily.

“Yes, but . . . where?” Jenn looked back at the light from the kitchen and slowly turned, relating the space to the parts of the house she knew.

“I think it’s behind the bathroom,” Nick said.

She nodded and pointed at the entryway. “This is next to the hallway, then, and this”—she pointed at the main section of the room—“must be behind the bath.” The dark end of the L turned left. “That’s behind the wall of my bed.”

“You might want to think about sleeping someplace else,” Nick suggested as they stared at the wall. Bones were piled by the dozen against it.

Jenn walked over and looked down at a small skull leering up from within a cascade of arm, leg and rib cage bones. She saw other skulls hidden deeper, in piles that reached higher than her knees. But, the bones weren’t the worst of it. At the end of the short stub of the L, a pair of chains extended from the ceiling to the wrists of a man.

Jenn held up her candle, illuminating the body. The man’s skin looked dark as dry earth. His face was sunken and wrinkled, and the teeth behind his thin-stretched lips were yellow.

“Jesus,” Nick breathed.

The flicker of her light caught the reflection of the man’s eyes, and Jenn’s heart leaped. The pupils beneath the hood of his brows seemed to follow her. “Oh shit,” she said, and backed up. Her heart pounded double time. “His eyes moved.”

Nick squeezed her arm and stepped in the opposite direction, holding his flame up close to the chained man’s face. You could see a small mole on the right cheek and the dozens of tiny wrinkles furrowing the ancient weathered skin. And you could see the gleam of green that reflected back from deep in the petrified flesh of the body.

“No,” Nick said, shaking his head. “They’re not eyes at all. Marbles or something.”

He bent and slowly let his candle illuminate the rest of the man’s body. The corpse was clearly male. He was naked; the shriveled remains of his penis pointed the way to the floor, where his ankles were bound and also chained to the wall. But it wasn’t the nudity that kept Jenn’s eyes riveted to the dead man. It was the symbols. On every inch of his skin, tiny triangles and swirls and sickle moons and backward E’s and hundreds of other markings had been drawn in dark ink. The dead man’s flesh was a tapestry of runes.

“Well,” Nick said softly. “Not everyone can say they own a mummy.”

“He’s not a mummy,” Jenn argued. “He doesn’t have any coverings. Wraps, you know?”

“The rags? They don’t matter. At some point, probably a very long time ago from the look of things, he was gutted, filled with preservative, his eyes replaced, and set here like a statue,” Nick said. “He’s a mummy. Somebody did a taxidermy project on him the same as they would a deer’s head.”

Jenn’s skin crawled. She leaned closer to the figure and stared harder at the skin. Rough and yellowed, it was covered with symbols like parchment. But she could see the pores and even the faint down of body hair. She could see pocks and scars and moles on those legs and arms, and the chest was marred by the most obvious marks, perhaps fatal. Across its center, the flesh of the chest was puckered and stitched together by black thread in an angry Y.

Nick pointed. “That’s where they cut him open and removed his heart, kidneys, guts, you name it. They hollowed him out, preserved the skin and sewed him back together.”

“Why?” Jenn whispered.

He shrugged. “So they could talk to him for the rest of time?”

Jenn flashed back to the book chapter about having the bones of the dead nearby when using the Ouija board. Maybe Nick wasn’t too far from the truth. But then, what did all the symbols on his body mean? Did they signify a spell of some sort? And who had this man been that anyone went to such lengths to maintain his body?

“I wonder who he was,” she whispered, staring up at the rictus of the dead man’s shriveled lips.

“We could get the Ouija board and ask him,” Nick suggested, but his joke caused a frown as he realized Jenn might not recognize his meaning. He held his hand up and said, “Kidding!”

She nodded absently. “I certainly wouldn’t try to talk to him without knowing who he was.”

A chill shot through Nick’s heart as he realized she wasn’t ruling out trying to contact him.

“Um, do you think that’s wise under any circumstance?” he asked.

Jenn looked from the mummy’s marble eyes to Nick’s, and her face was as serious as death. “Do you think we have a lot of choices?” she asked. “We have to find a way to stop the Pumpkin Man before he kills again. Before he kills us. The police aren’t going to be of any use, because this isn’t about some psycho they can track down, cuff and lock up. This is about spirits and dark magic. It all began here, maybe in this room. And somewhere in this house has got to be the clue on how to stop it. If we don’t find that, I don’t think we’ll live to see Halloween. We may not even live to see next week.”

As she spoke, the candles in the room seemed to flicker. Jenn felt her skin grow cold.

“There’s someone here,” she whispered.

Something crashed to the floor across the room, and they both jumped. Nick put an arm around Jenn’s chest, pulling her close to him as they both scanned the shadows, trying to see what had fallen. He could feel her heart beating fast through her T-shirt. She squeezed his forearm and then lowered it. Slowly they began to walk across the room.

Near the altar, Nick knelt and picked up a wooden square about the size of a hardcover book. “I think this was on the wall,” he said, turning it over. One side was covered in a gold and red design in the shape of a medieval shield. A serpent curled up one side, while a twining, thorny branch of red roses decorated the other. Across the center, Perenais was sketched in ornate, antique lettering.

The hair on Jenn’s neck stood up. “Who did this?” she whispered. “What does it mean? Is that man over there a Perenais? Where’s the damn family history I need to find in order to stop all this?”

“Calm down. It was probably just a draft from the open door,” Nick suggested, but anybody listening could tell he didn’t believe that. He couldn’t make the tremor in his voice go away.

“No. This all relates to Aunt Meredith’s husband,” Jenn argued. “Captain Jones even said that. He said something was going on up here long before my aunt ever came to town, that my uncle’s whole family was into some dark, evil stuff. This only proves it.”

“Okay,” Nick said. He set the crest down on the kneeler. “I believe that they were into some dark, evil stuff. But what exactly does it have to do with the Pumpkin Man?”

Jennica turned slowly around the room, soaking in the candlelit bones and the portraits of men with dark, deep-set eyes. Presumably in-laws. She had a horrible creepy feeling that they were staring at her, watching her try to figure it all out.

“I don’t know,” she said at last, “but let’s go try those other keys in the crypt. There’s something hidden in that floor. Maybe when we find all the pieces, things will start to make sense.”

“Great,” Nick said. “I was hoping you’d say we could go back there. There just aren’t enough bones here.”

Jenn punched him and gave a feeble grin in response. “Yeah,” she said. “Right.”

Their candles seemed to flicker, and the crest slipped off the kneeler armrest and clattered to the floor. This time, Nick didn’t pick it up.

“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested.

They didn’t quite run down the narrow hall and out of the pantry into the bright light of the kitchen. Not quite.