Pumpkin (2 page)
But she didn’t do it. When she got back to the house she had calmed down and her fears again seemed silly, childish. A telepathic pumpkin, for heaven’s sake! A telepathic evil pumpkin! She didn’t even tell Harley of the incident.
More days passed, most of October fell away like dry leaves, and the weekend before Halloween arrived – the weekend of the Pumpkin Festival. The crowds were thick on both Saturday and Sunday; Amanda, working the traditional Sutter Farm booth, sold dozens of pumpkins, mainly to families with children who wanted them for Halloween jack-o’-lanterns. She enjoyed herself the first day, but not the second. Harley’s new exhibition pumpkin weighed out at 348 pounds and he fully expected to win his long-awaited second blue ribbon, but he didn’t. Aaron Douglas, who owned a farm up near Princeton, won first prize with a 360-pound Connecticut Field giant.
Harley took the loss hard. He wouldn’t eat his supper Sunday night and moped around on Monday and Halloween Tuesday, spending most of both days at the stand they always set up near Highway One to catch any last-minute shoppers. There were several this year: everyone, it seemed, wanted a nice fat pumpkin for Halloween.
#
All Hallows Eve.
Amanda stood at the kitchen window, looking out toward the fields. It was just after five o’clock, darkness settling rapidly; a low wispy fog had drifted in off the Pacific and was curling around the outbuildings, hiding most of the land beyond. She could barely see the barn, where Harley had gone to his workshop. She wished he would come back, even if he was still broody over the results of the contest. It was quiet here in the house, a little too quiet to suit her, and she felt oddly restless.
Behind her on the stove, hard cider flavored with cinnamon bubbled in a big iron pot. Harley loved hot cider at this time of year; he’d had three cups before going out and it had flushed his face, put a faint slur in his voice – he never had been much of a drinking man. But she didn’t mind. Alcohol loosened him up a bit,
stripped away some of his reserve. Usually it made him laugh, too, but not on this
night.
The fog seemed to be thickening; the lights in the barn had been reduced to smeary yellow blobs on the gray backdrop. A fine night for Halloween, she thought. And she smiled a wistful smile as a pang of nostalgia seized her.
Halloween had been a special night when she was a child, a night of exciting ritual. First, the carving of the jack-o’-lantern – how she’d loved that! Her father always brought home the biggest, roundest pumpkin he could find, and they would scoop it out together, and cut out its eyes and nose and jagged gap-toothed grin, and light the candle inside, and then set it grinning and glowing on the porch for all the neighbors and trick-or-treaters to see. Then the dressing up in the costume her mother had made for her: a witch with a blacked-out front tooth and a tall-crowned hat, an old broom tucked under one arm; a ghost in a sewn white sheet, her face smeared with cold cream; a lady pirate in a crimson tunic and an eye patch, carrying a wooden sword covered in tinfoil.
Then the trick-or-treating, and the bags full of candy and gum and fruit and popcorn balls and caramel apples, and the harmless pranks like soaping old Mrs. Collier’s windows because she never answered her doorbell, or tying bells to the tail of Mr. Dawson’s cat. Then the party afterward, with all her friends from school – cake with orange icing and pumpkin pie, blindfold games and bobbing for apples, and afterward, with the lights turned out and the curtains open so they could see the jack-o’-lantern grinning and glowing on the porch, the ghost and goblin stories, and the delicious thrill of terror when her father described the fearful things that
prowled and hunted on Hallowmas Eve.
Amanda’s smile faded as she remembered that last part of the ritual. Her
father telling her that Halloween had originated among the ancient Druids, who believed that on this night, legions of evil spirits were called forth by the Lord of the Dead. Saying that the only way to ward them off was to light great fires, and even then…even then… Saying that on All Hallows’ Eve, according to the ancient beliefs, evil was at its strongest and most profound.
Evil like that pumpkin out there?
She shuddered involuntarily and found herself trying to peer past the shimmery outlines of the barn. But the east field was invisible, clamped inside the bony grasp of the fog. That damned pumpkin! she thought. I
should
have taken some gasoline out there and set fire to it. Exorcism by fire.
Then she thought: Come on, Mandy, that’s superstitious nonsense, just as Harley says. The pumpkin is only a pumpkin. Nothing is going to happen here tonight.
But it was so quiet…
Abruptly she turned from the window, went to the stove, picked up her spoon to stir the hot cider. If Harley didn’t come back pretty soon, she’d put on her coat and go out to the barn and fetch him. She just didn’t like being here alone, not tonight of all nights.
So
quiet
…
The back door burst open.
She had no warning; the door just flew inward, the knob thudding into the kitchen wall. “Harley!” she cried as he came in out of the foggy darkness. “For God’s
sake, you half scared me to death! What’s the idea of—”
Then she saw his face. And what he held dripping in his hand.
She screamed.
He rushed toward her, and she tried to run, and he caught her and threw her to the floor, pinned her there with his weight. His face loomed above her, stained with stringy pulp and seeds, and she knew what the cider and his brooding had led him to do tonight – knew what was about to happen even before the thing that had been her husband opened its goblin’s mouth and the words came out in a drooling litany of evil.
“You’re next…you’re next…you’re next…”
The handful of dripping pulp mashed against her mouth, forcing some of the bitter juice past her lips and stifling another scream. She gagged, fought wildly for a few seconds…and then stopped struggling, lay still.
She smiled up at him, a wet dark orange smile.
Now there were two of them, the first two – two to sow the seeds for next year’s Halloween harvest.
END
Cemetery Dance Publications
Be sure to visit CemeteryDance.com for more information about all of our great horror and suspense eBooks, along with our collectible signed Limited Edition hardcovers and our awarding magazine.
Our authors include Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury, Peter Straub, William Peter Blatty, Justin Cronin, Frank Darabont, Mick Garris, Joe R. Lansdale, Norman Partridge, Richard Laymon, Michael Slade, Graham Masterton, Douglas Clegg, Jack Ketchum, William F. Nolan, Nancy A. Collins, Al Sarrantonio, John Skipp, and many others.
DH Digital Editions
My name is Dan Hocker. I am a eBook designer for Cemetery Dance Publications. I work freelance for Cemetery Dance and am here to offer my services to you or your company. What do these services entail you ask? Well eBook design is the act of taking your manuscripts or pre-designed book files and turning them into an eBook. Pricing is pretty straight forward based on length and complexity of the publication. Prices range anywhere from $100 to $250.
I can not submit the final product to the retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple for you, but what I do is provide you with files formatted properly to pass their validation checks and live up to the standards that their customers come to expect. I will generate two different ebook files for each project undertaken. The first formatted for the Kindle store and the second a epub file which will work for a number of different eBook retailers, including Apple and Barnes & Noble.
For examples of my work please visit the Cemetery Dance eBook section of their website. http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/CTGY/ebooks
Please contact me with any question you might have or to get a quote for a project. Thanks!
Dan Hocker
Table of Contents