Storytellersunplugged

Storytellers Unplugged

Mike Cahill Ran for all he was worth, his legs pumping furiously and his precious bundle held tight to his chest. Emily cried, her breaths washing over his neck and chin every time she gulped in enough breath to let out another wail of dismay.

The air was bitingly cold leaving plumes of mist to escape Mike’s mouth with every exhalation. His lungs felt rimed with frost, and every breath he took in seemed to sand the inside of his throat. There was little light, the night’s stars and moon hidden by thickening, pregnant clouds, but his eyes had adjusted enough to let him see the shapes of trees and bushes as they blurred past, and to let him catch most of the obstacles ahead of him.

He knew the area well enough from years of coming here when he was younger, before the stories started.

“Come on, come on, where the hell are you?” He shouldn’t have wasted his breath, but the words crept out of his mouth of their own volition. Jenny should have been back with the Jeep ten minutes ago and now everything that could go wrong had.

The sounds of something heavy charging through the brush to his left and from behind him, spurred him to run faster still. There was more than one of the damned things following him: it was almost enough to make him just give up.

They hadn’t believed the stories. None of them had. This was just supposed to be a little Halloween lark, a good time and maybe a scare or two. Now, half an hour after they’d reached Ford’s Mill and the allegedly haunted lake, three people were dead and whatever the hell had killed them was chasing after him and his daughter.

A branch snapped to his left and Mike saw a dark shape drop low, running on all fours again. They seemed to move faster that way, as if running on their hind legs wasn’t a natural thing for them to do. He couldn’t tell for sure. He hadn’t seen them very well.

He’d been too busy watching Larry and Megan and Victor getting torn apart as he grabbed Emily from her crib and moved toward the back door of the cabin. He could still hear their screams echoing through his head like bullets bouncing around a steel drum.

Whatever was behind him lashed out and caught the back of Mike’s heel. The heavy hiking boot saved his flesh, but the impact was enough to send him off course. The tree he should have slipped past with ease blasted into his right shoulder. He heard a soft, wet crunch coming from the afflicted area. Heat exploded down his arm and almost immediately was replaced with an electric tingle that died down to numbness. Mike let out a grunt as he spun around, trying desperately to stay upright.

Had he been alone, he might have managed to keep his footing, but there was Emily to consider. As soon as the numbness started spreading past his elbow, Mike shifted her weight to his left side. Protecting her was an automatic gesture that bordered on instinct. As he compensated for the shift, his left foot hooked an exposed root from the same tree and Mike went down hard.

The ground reached up and slammed into Mike’s face. The leaves and mulch of the forest shoved themselves into his open mouth, his nose and his eyes. The taste of decay and mildew covered his tongue and the same odors saturated his nostrils. His eyes stung from the debris and a new pain cut a bolt of lightning across his forehead as he slid and something sharp punched through flesh and scraped across bone.

Emily’s screams stopped, her body struggling, pinned under his weight. Mike tried to shift, but none of his muscles responded. He tried to breathe, but the impact had stolen his wind and nothing happened.

“Uh-Uhemily. Baby.” Fear pressed down on him, a weight as massive as a house and Mike finally managed to push himself up on his good arm as he looked down at his infant daughter.
For a second there was nothing but the shock to his system and then he felt the tickle of her breath across his neck and heard her tiny lungs bleat out a cry of confusion and outrage. So tiny, so delicate and somehow still alive.

His right arm was useless, a heavy burden of lifeless flesh and grinding bones. His sides ached from running and Emily looked up at him her eyes wide and confused.

They crept closer, the things in the woods, their breaths rancid and their bodies dark with blood-stained fur. The wind shifted enough to let him smell their bitter odor, a perfume of ash and dead things.

The first drops of nearly frozen rain fell from above as he looked down at his little girl, his life, and struck Mike across the back of his head and neck.

“Please…Please…Not this. Don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt me.”
The shape closest to him took another step forward and placed thick black claws on the ground only inches from where he trembled.

Okay. That’s it. Just a quick scene.

Want to review? Here ya go.

Mike carries his little girl as he runs from something in the woods. He trips and falls, and manages not to crush his daughter in the process.

Really, that’s all that happened. If I did any of my job the right way, I might have evoked a little empathy for poor Mike or even for Emily.

If I did it the wrong way, you don’t give a good damn about what happens next.

The idea in this particular exercise was to give you as much sensory information as I could without letting it overwhelm the scene. Mike’s eyes aren’t the best in the dark, so I tried to use his other senses more completely. He didn’t see them beasts coming, but he heard them. He couldn’t stop from hitting the tree, but he definitely felt it.

Just a reminder that there are different senses that can and should be used to describe actions, people and events.

Let’s call that our short lesson for the month. A story idea is easy enough to spill out, but to make it something more than a sentence or two, to get the reader involved, that’s the trick.
Do it right, and everyone gets a treat for your efforts. (Yeah, I know, crappy Halloween analogy. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

So, we also had the option of giving a story instead of an essay this time around. It’s a short essay, so, I’m going to give you three stories.

First up, follow the link to “Hathburn Avenue,” a new story done for HorrorWorld.org. The story is available until the end of the month, right here: http://horrorworld.org/fiction.htm

Second, another tale, linked to my novel released later this month. Both share the same name: HARVEST MOON.

The link is here: http://www.horror-web.com/hall/harvestmoon.html

And lastly, a tale I’m putting up here. I hope you enjoy it if you take the time to read it.

Have a great Halloween, folks!

James A. Moore

Cody’s Pumpkin
James A. Moore

Just at the edge of Beldam Woods proper, in that place between the actual town and the woods for which it was named, there was a large field. Every year since she’d been ten, Allison saw the signs that advertised for the pumpkins that grew there. She had avoided the place with an almost religious zeal for as long as it had been around. This year was different. She parked her SUV at the edge of the place, in the dirty area set aside for parking, and made herself accept that the past was just something she had to deal with.

Allison walked her children under the sign that said THE PUNKIN PATCH and then into the pumpkin patch proper, and shivered a bit. The entire world seemed, for just that moment, to have become one of a thousand shades of orange: the leaves on the trees and the gourds themselves seemed to compete for the most perfect orange color. Even after twenty odd years, she could remember the incident like it had happened the night before.

Cody had his hand wrapped into hers and looked at her with his bright blue eyes, a puzzled from on his pudgy face.

“Is something wrong?” For a four-year-old, he was very perceptive.

“No, honey. I just got a little chill.” She made herself smile. Off in the distance beyond the field of pumpkins, she could see the age ruined remains of the old man’s house. It had changed for the worse in the last two decades. “Let’s find you the right pumpkin, okay?”

Cody nodded and smiled and his older sister Wendy beamed brightly, revealing a few gaps where new teeth had yet to grow in. If she kept dropping baby teeth at the current rate, she could make a house payment for the family with what the tooth fairy was going to shell out.

And in that moment she made herself forget the past and focused instead on her children. This was for them, and all the distant fears from her childhood could go screw themselves.

The man who was in charge of the pumpkin stand looked as ancient as any she had ever seen, and though he was old and withered, he still seemed to have a certain air about him. He scared her. Not a lot, but enough for her to notice. He reminded her of someone from the past, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it

{Mister Harper}

but she’d have sworn she knew him from somewhere.

{It’s just the place,} she told herself. {The place, and the things that happened here.} She almost made herself believe it, too.

Cody and Wendy broke away from her a few seconds later, each looking for the perfect gourd to make into a jack-o-lantern. She watched them move through the hundreds of pumpkins sitting in the small lot, and tried to force the chill from her body. It wasn’t even cold enough to wear a light sweater, but she felt like an arctic blast was breathing down her neck.
***

Ally stared at the old man’s house and felt a knot of ice twitch in her stomach. She knew he was in there, because the sound of his TV blaring escaped past the closed windows and filled the air with whispers and canned laughter.

The front porch light was off and no signs of a decoration could be found at the residence. Every other house in the neighborhood was decorated with jack-o-lanterns and in a few cases there were monsters in the front yard, but once you got to the place where they were hiding all of that went away. The same was true of Christmas and every other holiday throughout the year. The old man had long since made clear to the people around him that he wanted nothing to do with them. That was one of the reasons they’d decided to mess with him. In all the years they’d been trick or treating together, they’d never once dared approach his place.

Mister Harper was known for his pumpkin patch, which at this time of year was empty of everything but the lingering vines and their dying leaves. He grew the best pumpkins in the Beldam Woods Township, but he did so only as a way of making money. He had no love of the season or of children. If anything, he was known for his mistrust of the kids in the neighborhood.

“I don’t wanna do this.” She meant the words only for herself, but comments like that one always seemed to catch Bobby’s attention as easily as waving a flag at an irritated a bull.

“You ain’t gonna chicken out, are you?” It was as much a taunting challenge as a question. Bobby Fulver was one of her best friends, but sometimes he was a pain in her neck.

“I didn’t say I was chickening out, I said I didn’t want to do it.” Her voice came out harsher than she meant it to, but Bobby just smiled and nodded his head, encouraged by her attitude.

It was all Bobby’s idea, and she hated him right then. Old Man Harper was known throughout the neighborhood as a sort of bogeyman, and Bobby wanted to prove that he wasn’t afraid of him. So, of course, he dragged her along for the ride.

She’d only seen the man three times in her life that she could recall and on every occasion he wore a scowl on his narrow face, and glared pure venom from his dark eyes. He was creepy and he was mean and the notion of getting his attention did not set well for her.

Bobby had lived next door for years, and they were friends. The fact that their parents were also friends only compounded their closeness. Hell, last year both families had even gone on vacation together to Disney World. Half the time their friendship felt more like what she supposed having a brother would feel like if she wasn’t an only child.

Now she was starting to regret that closeness, because she had a bad feeling about what was going to happen in about five minutes.

“Are you sure about this?”

Bobby shook his head and looked at her with disgust clearly scrawled over his features. “I knew you’d chicken out.”

“I’m not chickening out, but he’s old. What if he has a heart attack or something?”

“Then we call 9-1-1, from a payphone.”

Ally nodded her head and thought about the old man. There were rumors about him all of the time. Ever since she’d become aware of his existence, the stories told about him got wilder and stranger. When she was in the first grade the stories involved him killing all the dogs that went through his yard. Later someone said he liked stealing kids from the street if they were out after dark—according to the rumors, the police were keeping an eye on him but couldn’t prove anything. The worst of the rumors claimed that he did things to little kids and then hid their bodies somewhere else, like in the Beldam Woods not far from town.

She didn’t believe them, of course, but the stories were there and they played on her mind late at night. Just like they were playing now, as she and Bobby crouched at the side of the old man’s front yard and prepared to prove their bravery.

Ally sighed once more and Bobby looked at the door of the ranch house where the old man lived.

“You ready?” Bobby’s voice was tense with excitement.

Ally nodded and the two of them stood up. Bobby slipped his Halloween mask down over his face and Ally did the same. Anything to hide her identity, because the last thing she wanted was to get caught by the old man.

Bobby took the lead, and that was just fine with her. It was his stupid idea anyway. He ran up the three steps to the front porch and then leaned on the doorbell for several seconds. Even with the wolf man mask over his face, she could almost see the grin he’d be wearing.

She stopped moving, and reached for the bag Bobby had given her earlier. It held three water balloons, harmless, but fun. The idea was that as soon as the old man opened the door, she would start throwing. Bobby expected her to hit Mister Harper, but she already knew she’d never go through with it. She’d aim at the door, or the wall near his face, but she couldn’t bring herself to hit him. He was just an old man, and no number of rumors would make her decide to do anything but startle him.

From ten feet away from the door, she heard the sound of the old man cursing, his words bellowed at a much higher volume than the television set was managing on its own.

At first the words were unintelligible, but as he came closer, she could make out what he was saying. “…every goddamned year some little shit has to come over here and cause me trouble! Well, I’ve already called the police!”

The door opened abruptly, and Mister Harper glared out at the two of them, Bobby in his white ghostly outfit with the grinning skull mask, and Ally in her grease monkey clothes and bad William Shatner mask.

“You get off of my property!” The man’s voice was filled with hatred, his eyes seemed to blaze from the shadows of his prominent brow. “I don’t like Halloween and I don’t have any candy for you!”

Ally didn’t even think about it. Her hand just sort of lifted all by itself and the first of her water balloons went sailing directly for the old man’s angry face.

If she could have stopped it, she would have. She’d have gladly taken the balloon across her own face or even hit Bobby with it instead.

The shot was perfect, and the missile smashed itself against the old man’s long nose before breaking open and spewing water all over his features and down across his dingy white t-shirt.

Just as there had always been stories of the old man’s anger, there had also been tales woven of at least one to two incidents a year that were designed, it seemed, to increase his dislike of his neighbors. Barry Winslow had supposedly egged the man’s house a few years ago. She knew it was true, because her older brother Steve told her so and Steve never lied. She also knew it was true because the eggs had dried to the paint in the night and she’d seen the bare wood where he’d scraped the stuff off before having to apply a fresh coat. There had been stories about bags of burning dog crap and other things that had been done. All of which had lead her to the decision to deliberately miss the man before her traitorous hand made up her mind for her.

Her hand should have listened to her brain.

The old man staggered back as if he’d been hit by a rock instead of a pint of water, and his entire body shook with suppressed rage. He disappeared from the doorway and Bobby looked her way, his whole frame shaking with silent laughter.

Ally shook her head, wanting so desperately to tell Bobby to run, to get the hell off of the old man’s porch before he came back. That ice that had been in her stomach seemed to spread through the rest of her body, leaving her frozen where she stood. Her bad feeling was back and it was screaming now, not just giving off little warning buzzes.

Bobby finally let out a whooping sound and gasped in a breath of air, almost doubled over by his laughter. Ally shook her head and tried to speak, but her tongue seemed to have grown too thick for her mouth.

Old man Harper walked back out of the front door of his house and pointed the pistol at her. “Get away from my house!” His voice was a roar that seemed to shake the very ground beneath her feet and Ally finally felt her paralysis break. She held her hands out to ward off the bullets she knew must be coming her way any second, and let out a moan instead of the pleas she’d wanted to utter.

The gun waved in the air, bobbing up and down and Ally tracked it with her eyes, swallowing hard and practically mesmerized by the way the barrel lifted and fell.

Bobby wasn’t laughing anymore. He wasn’t making any sound at all as he watched the gun’s actions.

The old man pointed the pistol at her face, his mouth moving, saying words to her, but she couldn’t hear them over the ringing in her ears and the sound of her own pulse. Ally shook her head and trembled.

And Bobby, who was as much a brother to her as if he had been her own flesh, who had suffered through several crushes on her and endured the same in return, reached out his hands and grabbed at the old man’s pistol.

“Run, Ally!” His words were all she needed to get moving.

Ally ran as hard as she could, turning her back on Bobby and Mister Harper. She’d gone only ten or so paces before the pistol fired three times.

She didn’t look back. She was far too busy running.

Ally never saw Bobby alive again.

***
Cody’s hand tugging on her shirt tail drew Allison back to the present. She did her best to shake off the memories that she’d tried to suppress for as long as she could remember. Her success was minimal.

They’d never found Bobby’s body. No one ever learned the truth about what had happened and no one ever believed her about the old man. She’d admitted to throwing the water balloon and everything, but Mister Harper had merely shrugged and denied the whole thing. He’d even let the police look through his house and they claimed to have found no evidence of any wrongdoing. As far as they could tell, the old man didn’t even own a gun. Even the noises were described away by other neighbors, who said that they’d heard popping sounds, like fireworks. There was evidence of a few firecrackers going off in a neighbor’s yard, and that was all the explanation the police seemed to need.

But it didn’t leave the old man comfortable. He’d claimed he wanted to be left alone and after Bobby vanished, that was the last thing he got, if the rumors were true. Almost daily someone was knocking on his door or making phone calls and threatening him. He moved away less than three months later.

After that, she had no idea what had happened to him. All she knew was that Bobby had disappeared that night and Harper had been the one to take him.

She’d relived that Halloween a million times in her head, wishing that she’d never thrown the damned balloon, wishing that she’d talked Bobby out of the whole thing in the first place and wishing even harder that someone would have made the old bastard pay for whatever he did to Bobby.

“Mom! I found the right one! It’s perfect!” Four and the kid talked like he was in his teens half the time. She figured he must have gotten his smarts from his father’s side of the family, because Dan was the one with the genius IQ and the Harvard Law degree.

She barely had a chance to open her mouth before Cody was pulling her along by her hand, leading her to his prize. Allison shook her head as she looked at the pumpkin. The thing was as big as she was, or close enough that it didn’t matter. If it weighed less than a hundred pounds, she’d be shocked. It was nearly perfect; round and firm, without blemishes and the color of autumn leaves, so orange it was almost red.

The air was cool, but when she ran her hand over the gigantic thing, the flesh was warm and smelled sweet.

“Honey, there’s no way we could get that in the car.” She sighed as she said the words, knowing full well how he would respond.

“Mom you promised!” His voice held all the sorrow of the ages, and his little face was a mask of tragedy.

“Honey, we can’t take that pumpkin home. It won’t fit in the car.” She tired to explain it patiently, and once again was reminded that her son was only four years old. His vocabulary was really amazing and he could certainly put together a coherent sentence, but emotionally, there was no explaining things to him in a rational tone.

Cody kicked at the dusty ground and jutted his lower lip out.

“Cody, where would we even put it?”

The old man running the show looked over in their direction and rocked a little in his chair. “I could have it delivered.” His voice was drier and dustier than the ground beneath their feet.

Cody looked up at his mother, his eyes glittering with triumph. She wanted to thump the old man on the head. Something about him and about the place was still giving her the creeps.

She forced herself to smile pleasantly. “I appreciate that, but I doubt we could afford a pumpkin that size.

“Qualifies as a large pumpkin. That means it’s ten dollars.” He looked at her and rocked sedately in his chair. The old man’s voice was completely indifferent, as if whatever decision she made, it would have no real effect on him one way or the other.

Cody was making whining noises in his throat and while she often found it cute when he got that excited about anything, right now she wanted to shake him until he just shut up and let her think.

Allison heard Wendy calling excitedly from off in the distance. She wasn’t giving out screams of alarm, so Allison figured that her daughter too, had apparently found the perfect pumpkin.

Allison nodded. “Okay, let me get your sister and we’ll finalize this.”

“Does that mean you want it?” The old man nodded his head toward the pumpkin and Allison shrugged her shoulders as if to say she was at the mercy of her children’s whims. The arrangements were made a little later and Allison paid the old man his twenty dollars—delivery was free, but his boy might appreciate a tip—and they were on their way.

There was still shopping to do and they had to go by the Halloween store in town to look over costume choices for the kids. She forgot all about the pumpkin and the old man until the next morning.

Dan came home late from work, tired but happy. He’d won the case that had been on his desk for the last year and that meant a handsome bonus. Heather Partridge from down the street agreed to baby sit the little ones for them and after Dan’s obligatory five minutes of flirting with the girl—something he did with every female above the age of five—they went out for a celebratory dinner, where she got pleasantly buzzed and Dan talked almost endlessly about his victory in the courtroom. She honestly couldn’t have cared less about any of that, but it made him happy, so she nodded and smiled.

She loved her husband, but sometimes he bored the hell out of her. To make up for that, she started playing footsy under the table and made sure to drive him just a little crazy. He didn’t seem to mind.

Dan had taken Heather home and Allison had tucked the kids into bed and shortly after that they had a rousing bout of sex. When it was all said and done, she lay back in the bed and stared at the ceiling, thinking back on Bobby and how much she missed him.

He’d always been getting her in trouble and had spent almost as much time getting her back out of it. After he disappeared, she’d sort of lost interest in everything for a while. She certainly hadn’t bothered with Halloween again, not until she was in high school and going to parties.

She was still thinking about Bobby when she went to sleep.
***
The following morning started with proper chaos. Dan woke her up, smiling and sipping at his coffee; she’d managed to sleep right through the alarm and he’d made breakfast for the kids. Happily, it was Saturday, so she could get away with a little truant behavior. “You think you could have found a bigger pumpkin?”

Allison blinked her eyes and mumbled something vaguely rude before she sat up. “What are you talking about?”

“You have a package on the front porch.”

She climbed out of bed and quickly slipped her feet into her slippers, not willing to risk the cold hardwood floors so early on. Dan, saint of a man that he was, had her coffee in his free hand. She thanked him with a kiss and then yawned her way out to look at the pumpkins that had been delivered. Wendy’s was large enough and had potential. Cody’s was gigantic, even larger than she’d remembered, and she wondered how it was that the boards of the porch didn’t crack under the weight of the thing.

Both of the kids were outside, in their pajamas, oohing and aaahing over their prizes. Cody was doing his best to hug the pumpkin, which almost looked like a drunk trying to hold up a building, but he had such a gigantic smile on his face she Ally wished she had a camera.

“How the hell did they get that up here without waking the neighborhood?” Dan was speaking mostly to himself, but she had to wonder the exact same thing.

They spent the day preparing for Halloween around the house. It was still a week off, and far too early to carve the pumpkins if they wanted them in decent shape on the night of the big event, but there were decorations to put up and the yard to make properly spooky.

Dan always reverted into a kid himself at Halloween. He ran spider webs of linen through the three oaks in the front yard and scattered a few black rubber tarantulas through them. Then for kicks he took a cheap rubber skeleton and wrapped it inside the webs that he attached to one of the trees. It was a creepy effect that disturbed Allison and made her kids giggle. Several tombstones were set up, all of them made from Styrofoam instead of marble, and a few spot lights were set strategically in the yard to highlight the creepiest things. Skulls and scarecrows lurked around corners—all of them designed to look funny rather than scary—and a string or orange lights ran up either side of the walkway from the street, to guide wayward children to the porch where Dan would be waiting on Halloween night.

Dan and the kids had a blast, and Allison did her best to keep a smile on her face, but the more they did to make the place up, the less she felt like participating. She’d been thinking too much about Bobby and that was ruining it for her. She wouldn’t let her own pathetic neurosis destroy the occasion for her kids, however. She refused to let anything take away their childhood memories the way hers had been stripped of pleasure.

Eventually the decorations were done and she and Dan sat on the porch, savoring the last of the warm temperatures, and sipped at a glass of wine. The kids were inside, just past the screen door, watching Disney’s rendition of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

“You okay, Ally?” Dan frowned slightly as he asked, worried for her as always. Not far behind him she could see the two pumpkins where they rested.

Dan knew all about her Halloween from when she was a kid. She nodded and put on her brave face. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about Bobby is all. I bought the pumpkins back where that old man’s house used to be.”

Dan nodded. Everyone in Beldam Woods knew the story behind the houses back there. They had been abandoned after a summer fire destroyed most of them. Old Man Harper’s house had been spared the worst of it and was still crouching in the same spot, looking far worse that it had when she was a little girl. Most of them had been leveled; the idea had been to rebuild, but somehow or another, the money never got where it was supposed to and the land developer who’d purchased all of the properties for a song had decided not to build after all. Mind you, that was the same man who’d shut down the theater in town without warning and left the building empty.

People were strange.

“Well, you handled it well with the kids, Ally.” Dan smiled at her and out his hand over hers. “Listen if you want, I’ll take the kids out this year and you can stay here and handle the candy traffic. Would that be better?”

“You know what? It might be. Just a chance to relax and unwind a bit.”

“So, it’s done. You hand out candy and I’ll walk the munchkins everywhere.”

“Well, thank you.”

Dan slipped over closer to her and put his arm around her shoulders. She wasn’t really cold, but she loved the gesture and the warmth it brought to her.

She woke up four times during the night, each time gasping and shivering in the relative warmth of the bedroom, and each time absolutely uncertain why she was so scared.

***
Halloween morning came and found Allison exhausted. She hadn’t slept well for the entire week, and even the occasional dose of over the counter sleeping pills didn’t seem to help very much.

Just after breakfast it was time to carve the pumpkins, and she found the very idea was enough to make her twitchy. She looked at the gigantic pumpkin of Cody’s with dread, knowing the flesh of the thing would be impossibly thick. She’d practically need a chainsaw to carve features into the damned thing.

Dan was already off and doing chores by the time she decided to ask him if he’d help with the jack-o-lanterns, so she knew it would have to be her. Neither Wendy nor Cody was going to be allowed anywhere near a knife yet. They each had ten fingers and she intended to keep it that way.

She worked on Wendy’s pumpkin first. Her daughter drew the design she wanted on the face with pencil and then Allison carved the opening at the top and her little ones scooped out the seeds. When they were done pulling out the wet guts and pulp—a process they loved and she found disgusting—the seeds were put into a strainer. Later they’d be salted and roasted. The face was traditionally creepy, triangles for eyes and nose and a grinning mouth full of fangs. Wendy was very pleased.

When it came time for Cody’s monster pumpkin, it took a little more effort. The damned thing was almost four feet tall and nearly as wide. She carved a small hole around the stem and pulled it free, literally cutting away the dry strands of pulp to lift it off. Then had Cody draw on his face—an attempt that would need improvement, because she knew what he wanted, and that his hands weren’t quite making it—and then slid the blade into the spot where the mouth would be., The kids would practically have to climb inside from the bottom in order to get the seeds out.

For just one second as the blade cut deeply, she expected the gourd to scream and to see blood flowing from it. Allison almost dropped the knife at the notion. Happily it only bled pumpkin juice.

She had to reassess her decisions on Cody’s pumpkin. Initially she’d thought his design was a mistake, but he corrected her several times as she started carving, and she listened to him, because it was his, after all. She was just there to make sure he didn’t mangle his little hands. What had seemed like a series of odd marks that were part of what she was supposed to use to cut large holes in the gourd were actually meant to be smaller, careful markings that she didn’t expect from a four-year-old’s imagination. When it was done, there was a face on the pumpkin that was far more detailed than she’d expected.

The eyes were smiling, but had pupils carved into them and were more like crescents than like wedges. The nose managed to come out looking like a silhouette of a real nose rather than like a skeletal mockery. And even the mouth that she had carved into the thing had details she had not expected him to want. Looking at it in the daylight she could see that it was an old man’s face. She was a little unsettled by it, but not to the point where it bothered her too much.

The seeds from Cody’s pumpkin were huge and she made a show of washing them off and setting the entire collection of fresh white treasures into water to soak.

When it was all done, her arms were aching and she was twice as glad that Dan was taking the kids out for the rounds. It would be much easier just waiting inside for the local children to knock on the door.

Dan barely made it home before they kids were ready. By the time he’d finished with his pet projects—buying wood for a tree fort and getting an oil change for his car—he looked as tired as she felt. He didn’t try to back out on taking the kids, however, and she didn’t offer.

She showed Dan what Cody had asked her to carve and he was as impressed as she was. The face was detailed and the two of them briefly discussed getting him some art supplies, because parental pride aside, at four years old he was doing some serious work and that sort of talent should be explored. She made sure to take a few pictures of the pumpkins as the day was growing shorter. She wanted to be able to show it to other people when the time came.

Cody was dressed as a cowboy, complete with cap guns, and Wendy was dressed as a witch, her pointy hat set jauntily on her scalp and her rubber nose almost as big as her whole face. Allison took several pictures and made appreciative noises before wishing them a good candy hunt.

The sun was drifting behind the Beldam Woods when she finally got around to lighting the jack-o-lanterns. Because she really did want her children to remember every holiday favorably, Allison carefully took more photos of the pumpkins with her camera and with the digital camera that Dan preferred as well.

She paused a few times as the early wave of toddles came to get candy. A ghost, a store bought Spiderman and two princesses showed up first. She made all the appropriate noises, but found herself drawn again and again to the ghost.

The dead were supposed to walk on Halloween, weren’t they?

The very notion made her shiver.

One of the parents out on the porch looked at her and smiled, then pointed to Cody’s pumpkin. “That’s a creepy effect. How did you manage it?”

Allison frowned and walked outside to look at the illuminated face and smiled. “My little boy came up with the design. I just did the carving.”

“He should be in special classes…Seriously. That’s amazing.”

Allison looked at the jack-o-lantern again and did a double take. In the growing darkness the lines she’d made were far more clearly defined by the light inside of the pumpkin and she felt her heart trip a few times. The face of Mister Harper looked out at her, his smile a sinister thing, and his eyes glinting coldly from the face of the pumpkin. He looked much as she remembered him. The only difference was the smile; it made him seem even more insane than she remembered.

Allison managed another weak smile and thanked the man for his compliment. She didn’t know what else to do.

An hour and a half later, most of the children that were coming were finished and she was expecting her own family back soon. During the entire time, she felt compelled to go out and look at the face on the Cody’s pumpkin a dozen times, trying hard to convince herself that she was imagining things.

Every time she looked, she saw exactly the same thing; Mister Harper—who she was sure she’d never seen smile even once in her encounters with him—smiling at her, his face a twisted mask of hatred and glee. The face almost seemed to taunt her, to say how much he’d enjoyed doing bad things to Bobby, and how much he wished he could have caught her as well.

She knew she was imagining it all, knew that she was being completely irrational, but she couldn’t stand to look at the grinning face and she kept going back to look anyway, drawn to it like a pedestrian is drawn to the sheet-covered body next to a car wreck.

“Enough, Allison, you’re being silly.” She spoke the words herself, but barely heard them. They were just a noise to stop her from being so alone.

The sun had gone fully down a while back and the night was getting a proper chill. Dan should have been home by now with the kids, but so far there was no sign of him.

Allison wrapped herself in a thick coat and slipped outside, ready to wait for her family to return. She took a mug of hot coffee with her and the bowl of candy for any latecomers. She slid the chair around, so she could face the stoop, and stared at nothing, the scent of roasting pumpkin and the pleasant heat from the jack-o-lanterns were her only company.

Somewhere along the way she closed her eyes, needing to rest them for just a moment, and drifted into sleep.

It was Bobby who woke her. He looked at her from behind his old skull mask and stared into her eyes. “Better wake up, Ally. It’s not gonna be pretty if you stay asleep.”

“Bobby? Why do you keep coming back?”

“I’ve been trying to warn you, trying to tell you to get rid of that pumpkin before it bears fruit.”

“It’s all carved up, Bobby.” Her voice was slurred with exhaustion and she shrugged her shoulders. “It can’t hurt anyone.”

“He buried me back there, Ally.” His voice was a desperate whisper. “He buried me in his pumpkin field and I wasn’t the only one. I had a lot of company, Ally, and we were all stuck there, stuck in the roots and used to feed his crop. He really was a bogeyman.”

Bobby stepped aside and let her look at Cody’s pumpkin. The flesh had blackened, rotting away in select spots so that the face carved into it was changed into something far more sinister, with drooping eyes and a mouth that sneered rather than smiled.

“He was just an old man, Bobby. And we scared him. We caused what happened. I just wish you hadn’t been caught by him.” She had so much more she wanted to say to him, but the words refused to come to her.

“I wasn’t the first, Ally. I won’t be the last. He’s a goblin, a monster and he only hunts on Halloween. It’s the only time he’s allowed to hunt anymore.”

Allison woke up with a start and shivered violently. She didn’t know how long she’d been out, but the lights in the pumpkins had burned away and the air had a tinge of frost.

She sat up stiffly in her chair and reached for her mug of coffee. It was as cold as the evening air. Allison forced down the panic that wanted to grow inside of her, because she couldn’t imagine that Dan would have left her sleeping on the porch.

She walked into the living room and knew that her children had not come home. It was too tidy. Still she moved up the stairs and checked the bedrooms, dreading the idea of finding no one. She found just that. No one had been in the upstairs.

She moved through the rest of the house with an increasing sense of anxiety and made her way into the kitchen, pushing the swinging door open hard enough to slap it against the wall.

That was empty too, except for the sink, where the pumpkin seeds she’d been soaking still rested. Water spilled from the basin and ran across the counter and down to the floor. Allison could see wet footprints marring the ground. The prints were small and belonged to a person with bare feet.

Even as she stared at the marks on the linoleum floor, she heard sounds from the sink, odd rustling noises. She moved closer, half convinced that a rat had gotten in and was making a meal of the damned seeds.

The hand that lifted from the stainless steel pit told her otherwise. The withered fingers reached out and gripped the rim and lifted, pulling hard as if, somehow, an entire body had been forced into that sink. Wet, rustling sounds continued to come from inside and she stepped closer, looking down at the chaos brewing within as it grew. Literally in this case; the arm was forming from one of the massive pumpkin seeds and she could see it as it grew longer, like time lapse photography of a sprouting plant, the withered arm was erupting before her eyes.

Being a mostly sane woman at that point, Allison backed away, shaking her head. She knew who was growing in her sink, and try though she might, she couldn’t deny what she was seeing.

Allison stared as the arm extended into a shoulder and chest, frail looking and liver spotted. She let out a small gasp as the head blossomed out from the pumpkin seed, the face hidden by damp white hair that fell forward as the thing growing in her sink let out a gasp and sucked in air greedily.

Allison stopped trying to push through the wall around the same time that she recognized the features she’d been dreading. Mister Harper looked almost the same as she remembered, except for being naked.

His skin was wet and glistened with moisture, his hair flopped wetly across his scalp as he looked at her, his dark eyes burning with hatred.

“You just wait there, girly. You and me, we need to have us a talk.”

Allison did the only thing she could think of to do: She ran screaming from the room and bolted for the front door. The furniture that she usually had no problem getting around seemed determined to take her down and she managed to bark both of her shins well before she got to the porch.

Allison didn’t want to think, or to let emotions get in the way of escaping, which was just as well because at the moment rational thought wasn’t even a possibility. She just yanked the door open and fairly flew out onto the porch.

Bobby was standing there, still in his Halloween costume, and shaking his head. “Don’t come out this way, Allison. It’s not pretty.”

A long time ago, he’d been her best friend. Now, he was another obstacle. Allison dodged around him and moved for the steps down to the walkway, which was still illuminated by the glowing orange of the Halloween lights.

“Ally! You better come back and talk to me!” Bobby’s voice was threatening in a way she never would have thought possible. Despite that, she kept running. Dan was missing, Cody and Wendy were gone too, and should have been with him. Something obscene was growing in her kitchen sink and her best childhood friend, who had been dead for a long, long time was barking orders at her.

Not a chance in hell she was staying around to find out why.

Mister Harper stood in front of her, his skin now dried and his fine hair blowing in the mild October wind.

Allison stumbled to a halt and looked at him with wide, frightened eyes.

Bobby spoke behind her. “Ally, I tried to warn you.”

Harper walked closer, the expression on his face never changing from the sneer of hatred she remembered.

Allison backed up and bumped into Bobby, who should have been nothing but a ghost, a figment of her imagination.

“I-he was still coming out of the sink.”

“He’s a bogeyman, Ally. He’s not a real person at all. He never was.”

In all of her years living in Beldam Woods—a place that had a deep, rich history for local ghost stories, Allison had never once believed in monsters, at least not the kind that weren’t human. Feeling Bobby pressed against her back, seeing the old man who by all rights should have long since been in his grave, she was forced to accept that not everything could be explained away.

“I don’t believe in monsters.” She spoke the words without conviction.

“Ally, you should have never gone back to that place. It’s where he lives, where he’s always lived. You made him notice you, Ally. You made him remember you.”

Allison spun fast and grabbed the shoulders of the ghost faced boy in front of her, shaking him hard. “You’re DEAD! I saw you die!” Her voice cracked and tears fell from her eyes as she rocked his preadolescent body back and forth.

He did not struggle, did not disagree, but instead merely went limp in her hands and then collapsed to the ground. Allison looked down at him and saw the rotted flesh that showed underneath the edge of his stained, once white ghost outfit. Intermingled with the decayed skin and muscle, she could see thick green vines, the sort she knew all too well from the pumpkin patch where Harper’s house used to be.

Harper spoke to her, his voice as dusty as ever, and Allison shivered as she looked in his direction. “I always knew you’d come back, Allison. Every kid comes back, sooner or later.”

“What are you?” The shaking quality of her voice matched the tremors that ran through her body.

“I’m the thing that punishes naughty little children.” He smiled, a grin that perfectly matched the image on the pumpkin she’d carved for Cody. “I’m the bogeyman.”

“Why me? What did I do to you?” She crossed her arms over her chest and shivered, the cold of the night catching up with the chill that seemed to run through her mind and soul.

“Because you threw the balloon!” he roared, his mouth stretching into a snarl that didn’t seem possible. “You were a good girl until then, Ally, but you threw the balloon and signed your own death warrant!”

“It was just water!” Allison shook her head and stepped back from him, tripping over the rotting lump that had been Bobby Fulver only a few minutes earlier. “It was just a fucking water balloon!”

“It’s not the weapon, Ally; it’s the decision to throw it.” His voice sounded strange this time, worse than the usual sepulchral whisper. It only took her a second to understand why. The words came from two different directions at once.

Allison looked behind her and saw a damp version of the man leaving her house.

“How?”

“Every seed you scraped from Cody’s pumpkin is another chance for me to get to you, Allison. There is no escape. I will own you body and soul.”

Allison gave up trying for explanations, an idea forming in her head. She ran across the lawn toward her SUV and scampered inside, grateful for her laziness when it came to locking the doors. She was twice as happy when she found the car keys in her jeans pocket.

Not one but two Mister Harpers came at her, running hard for the vehicle even as she started it up. One of them ran behind her SUV and she gunned the engine, backing the gas guzzler over him even as he was heading for the passenger’s side. The impact rocked her in her seat and did it a second time as the wheels backed over the old man she knew could not be real.

Bobby had told her all she needed to know, if she was lucky. Allison slammed the automatic transmission into drive and rode over the man a second time. The headlights showed her what was left after the first impact and let her see very clearly that Harper wasn’t human. Most of what she saw inside his shattered remains looked gray, not red, and she could see the pulpy mass of seeds and guts that spilled from his abdominal cavity.

He was still moving, still trying to get to her, and she hit the gas as hard as she could, desperate to get away from her nightmare. The other version of her childhood terror ran after her, but was no competition for her Ford.

Beldam Woods is not a large place and likely never will be, but it was still a rough trip to the edge of the town. Allison managed to stay on the road despite her high speed and twists and bends that added to the challenge. She pulled into the empty parking lot of the Punkin Patch and killed the motor and the headlights as quickly as she could. For two full minutes she listened for the sounds of anyone or anything coming her way.

When she thought she was safe, Allison slipped out of her SUV and opened the rear hatch. There were a few things that Dan insisted she have with her whenever she was driving. Aside from her cell phone, a real spare tire and a couple of road flares, she had a first aid kit and two gallons of gasoline. She pulled off one fingernail and sprained all hell out of her back hauling the gas from the compartment where it was stored.

Allison grunted and strained as she carried the metal can into the remains of the pumpkin patch. She opened the canister as she walked and poured gas on the ground where ever she found a thick runner of vines. She used strategy in her efforts, and managed to surround the long abandoned house with regular unleaded.

When she was done, Allison pulled out one of her road flares, ignited it and threw it into the field where she now knew Bobby had been buried. The dried vines and wet gasoline went up with an explosive noise, bleeding fire into the cold night air. Allison watched as the vines blackened, and hissed like snakes, actually moving around as the heat cooked them.

Off in the distance, the house where Old Man Harper had lived glowed in the growing flames, and Allison saw the withered figure of the man who had sold her the pumpkins as he came out of the battered front door.

“You think you’re a smart one, don’cha!” He walked across the warped porch of the house and stopped almost exactly where she’s seen the old man struggling with Bobby so long ago.

“You leave me alone!” Her voice broke as she cried out, the heat from the blaze irritating her eyes and the smoke catching in her throat.

“I haven’t even started with you yet, missy.” His eyes narrowed in his pinched old face and she recognized him for what he was, a vile creature that had survived for far too long in a human guise.

He stood and stared at her, not even trying to reach her through the field of burning plants. The vines writhed actively now, and the smell that came off of them was as ripe and foul as rotting meat.

“Oh, I don’t have to touch you, little girl. I have other ways of taking care of you, don’t I?”

“What do you mean?” She spoke softly as dread crawled into her body. Not fear, not that crisp energizing emotion that let her act, but dread that seemed to suck every bit of willpower from her.

“Seen Cody lately?” The old man kept smiling, rocking back and forth on his heels, even as the flames caught up with him and set his pant legs ablaze.

Allison almost charged him. It took an effort not to run through the growing fires to get to the old bastard and beat his face in.

“What did you do to my son?”

He didn’t answer her. Instead, he lifted his head toward the sky and stood in place, as his skin began to smolder, letting off plumes of thick black smoke. The old man collapsed in the fire and was consumed by it.

Allison got into her Ford and drove away, not looking back even once. She was beyond rational thought, lost in worry about her children, her husband, everything that she valued in the world.

She was home only a few minutes later. The ground where Bobby’s body had been was scorched, as was the concrete of the driveway where Old Man Harper’s double had been smashed into it. There was no sign of the other old man and a quick check of the house confirmed that Dan, Wendy and Cody were still not back. As she stood on the porch waiting, she heard the sound of the fire engines leaving their station, the sirens calling out a warning that they had a blaze to contain.

The bell at the Lutheran church rang out twelve times with clear, lonesome notes. The sounds seemed to match perfectly with how she was feeling.

“They’ll come home. They have to. They just lost track of the time.”

She said the words again and again, whispered them to herself and to God, and waited.