The Pumpkin Man

CHAPTER

THIRTY-NINE

It was turning out to be quite the Wednesday, and Wednesday’s child was likely filled with woe. Lots and lots of woe, Emmaline Perenais Foster thought to herself. The thought filled her with great comfort. Other people’s woe would become her pleasure.

Pulling a fresh white blouse from her closet, she drew it over her shoulders, stretched her arms and then tugged on the bottom until it felt comfortable. She hadn’t worn it in a long while, and her old clothes just didn’t feel the same way on her body that they used to. She wasn’t invited to many social engagements these days, so her wardrobe was meager and dated. Not that this was strange. The Perenais family had never been embraced with open arms, even though they’d been among those families that founded this town.

She looked in the mirror and buttoned the first of four buttons that would close the blouse up to her neckline if she chose. She left the last buttons open, though, offering a glimpse of cleavage. Just for fun. Emmaline was fifty-seven years old and thrice her girlhood girth, but she still prided herself on her bosom. It had helped her get what she wanted on many occasions.

Leaning close to the mirror, she drew a smooth line of deepest red across her lips and then pursed those lips. Her deep brown eyes and cutely slanted nose still offered an attractiveness that would seduce the world, she believed, a world that would never know what wickedness lived beneath. Her painted lips split into a satisfied smile. The townsfolk may have shunned her as a Perenais, but they really would have choked had they known it all.

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” she murmured to herself. And it was. Most of the things the town believed of the Perenais family were simply fiction. Oh, they thought the Perenais clan was bad news. Generations upon generations of bad seeds. They had no idea.

Emmaline slipped a long tartan skirt over her tan hose and tucked in her blouse, then slipped on a pair of black flats; she’d outgrown the masochism of heels twenty-five years ago. She chose a small handbag, picked out a small key from her jewelry box and then walked out of her bedroom and down the hall. At the back stairs, she unlocked a door and flipped a light switch.

Down she went, one gray plank at a time, until she stood on the soft earth of the fruit cellar. Most of the homes in River’s End were without basements; when half a town is built into the side of a cliff, it’s difficult to excavate too far down without hitting solid stone. But Harry and a friend of his had worked like dogs one summer when she and he first married, and together they’d build this cellar she’d told him she’d always wanted. Little did he know he was digging his own grave.

The fruit cellar wasn’t as grandiose as the dark chapel beneath the Perenais family estate, but it served her purposes. Emmaline picked up the old, hand-bound book set reverently on a small table near the brick wall, and flipped to page sixty-nine. She knew the page by heart, because she turned to it almost every day when she descended the stairs and made her visitation. It contained words handwritten in the blood of a virgin drained and drunk by her ancestor three centuries before atop the bones of Maldita. The Perenais family had drunk the souls of virgins for centuries.

She looked up at the shriveled skin of the sallow nude body that leaned against the far corner of the cellar. In some ways, the years hadn’t aged him; his hair remained black, where hers was salted with gray. He’d always had a weakness for beer, and it showed in the rounded sag of his gut, though his paunch looked small compared to the panniculus she had nurtured over the years. She had always been one to indulge. Indulgence was something of a Perenais religion.

His face. She wished it had preserved better. The eyelids and surrounding skin were sunken in a strange way around the marbles she’d used to replace his eyes, which now hung suspended in a jar on the shelves behind her. And the rictus of his lips looked painfully drawn against yellowed teeth that jutted forward much more than they had in life. They looked crude, animalistic. Death did not become him, Emmaline decided. Perhaps he would have survived the years better if she’d been able to remove him from his burial plot sooner than she had all those years ago.

“I’m going out for the evening, Harry,” she said to her husband’s corpse. Then, before she left, she read the words she pronounced over his dead flesh every day. It still made her tingle inside.

“Dans l’enfer je te célèbre

dans le sang, je te vénère

et dans le sexe je te tue.”

To hell, I commend you.

In blood, I love you.

In sex, I kill you.

An evil prayer, the credo of Family Perenais.